Carrol
-----------
(I'll try to deal with the problem of agency in a post on agency.)
I guess you haven't been paying much attention to the news for the last few years or seem to notice the various executive branch agencies and regulatory systems have been turned into extraordinary instruments of corporate interest, rather than even a pretense of governing bodies for the public interest. One of the most famous examples was Henry Paulson. Here's the wiki:
Henry Merritt "Hank" Paulson, Jr. (born March 28, 1946) served as the 74th United States Treasury Secretary. He previously served as the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Goldman Sachs...''
Another is his successor Timothy Geithner:
``Timothy Franz Geithner (pronounced /'ga?tn?r/; born August 18, 1961) is an American economist, banker, and civil servant. He is the 75th and current United States Secretary of the Treasury...''
I grant there may have been no legally prosecutable collusion, simply because Paulson and Geithner knew what their colleagues from the same capitalist class wanted and didn't have to confer. However, I suspect they did confer over the question of how much money the banks wanted. It would have helped to find out if DoJ hadn't adopted a Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy. If you don't look for collusion, you will certainly not find any.
I think these sample biographies embody a system and pretty much characterize what is otherwise known as the capitalist class. Here is the wiki on capitalist class:
``The American upper class describes the sociological concept pertaining to the "top layer" of society in the United States. This social class is most commonly described as consisting of those with great wealth and power and may also be referred to as the Capitalist Class[1] or simply as The Rich.[2] Persons of this class commonly have immense influence in the nation's political and economic institutions as well as public opinion.[3][4]''
Here is the wiki on Capital:
``In classical political economy and Marxian economics, capital is money which is used to buy something only in order to sell it again, and thus capital only exists within the process of economic exchange - it is wealth that grows out of the process of circulation itself and forms the basis of the economic system of capitalism.''
I think the latter is wrong in the detail about capital growing out of the process of circulation. It grows in value and quantity by accumulation (and production) of surplus value. If you are just trading value for value, you get nowhere. I think somewhere in this flawed description is the central argument between Marx and the classical economists. I like David Harvey's seminars, but I ain't taking them for a grade so informed corrections welcome.
Now it is impossible to buy and sell anything without consumers and producers, or buyers and sellers, in other words people, agents embedded in a social system based on these exchange systems. This system exists both in abstract theory and in concrete reality. Both are full of theoretical and real agents with wills, intentions, power or lack of power, and class as well as individual interests in how these flows work.
Is my objection to the way this system works a moral objection? Well, yeah, since USA-Corp has killed I don't know how many people, impoverished how many others, while laying waste the biosphere of the planet.
I have personal reasons for loathing it too. I have a long time friend with brain damage I can go visit to refresh my memory. Actually I have two, but one was a car accident and the other was work related, although technically he doesn't qualify for workmen's compensation. Because of an intensification of work load and the personal animosity of a manager, he didn't go home sick and stay there. He went from working with the flu to pneumonia to coma, several months in ICU, all of which resulted in brain damage. In other words he was worked near to death by capitalism. Such cases are much more common in other times and places, but they still exist here and now
The other personal reason is I worked in small businesses at low wages for something near thirty years. (The other ten were in public institutions.) Over those years I studied how bankers, aka capitalists, operate.* They will loan operating money to businesses, but the interest rate is mostly tied to profit rates, and a general account of assets. If profits fall, the rate goes up. If profits are flat, the rate is threatened to increase or is increased a little. On the other hand the bank can just increase rates as they wish for whatever reason. The direct effect of this relationship was to keep wages as low as possible while intensifying the work process. Lay-offs were ever present facts of life when other disciplinarian measures failed.
Over the years I got to know one much hated boss very well. When he was having trouble with his bank, we employees were in for a few rounds of whoop ass. The above mentioned friend got caught during the last one of these rounds.
The really nice thing about these meetings with the banks was they occurred in and around the end the business quarters. Now the concrete translation was that this quarter system ruined everybody's Christmas holiday doing inventory and a bunch of boss angst over end of the year profits. It ruined summer vacations because profits were seasonally down during the summer.
Now, on some rational level, the boss knew that the real determinants of his bottom line were the government policies that control private and public insurance systems. Their delay and denied payment system was directly responsible for his borrowing money from the banks to cover operations as well as his own declining profits.
With a much longer post, I could flesh out this business and present it a model of how the collection of policies called neoliberalism produces an economic crisis and results in working class debt bondage and peonage.
After almost thirty years of brutalizing his employees, with countless injustices, arbitrary firings, random wage changes, various personal health disasters, and creating a nightmare environment, he escaped bankruptcy by selling out to an even worse tyrant, moulded in the dark depths of Thai-Chinese sweatshops---her heritage and finishing school.
Before he left, I asked him how much. He said something over 300k. I went home laughing and had a drink. That price, adjusted for inflated housing prices was about what he put in to start the business. His in-laws had financed a house in Berkeley for him and his new wife. They sold the place a few years later getting a bigger newer house in Orinda and setting up the business.
I met him again a few weeks ago at a memorial service for one of the former employees and asked how he was doing in Oregon. He said he had a job doing Medicare billing. I went home for more drinks and laughs. You silly bastard. You wasted and ruined literally dozens of lives and you didn't even get rich?
*Here is part of the wiki on Capitalism:
``Capitalism is an economic system in which the means of production are privately owned and operated for a private profit; decisions regarding supply, demand, price, distribution, and investments are made by private actors in the free market;...''
I would propose that a capitalist (pig, bastard) is a private actor who can make and control ``decisions regarding supply, demand, price, distribution, and investments ...''
And the kings of this bastard class, are the bankers. Why? Because they control the money, and the government positions that are supposed to control the money, and lately they are one and same people.
CG