[lbo-talk] Krugman :There Will Be Blood

Mark Wain wtkh at comcast.net
Tue Nov 23 03:15:33 PST 2010


There Will Be Blood

By PAUL KRUGMAN

November 22, 2010

One of our parties has made it clear that it has no interest in making America governable, unless it’s doing the governing.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/22/opinion/22krugman.html

(Mark: )

Why is “our nation in much worse shape, much closer to a political breakdown, than most people realize?”

We are about to see an impasse because the DP’s solutions to the economic crisis are just as bad as the RP’s. None of them can really use economic policies, whether fiscal or monetary, to rescue the economy from the Great Stagnation without resorting to the fundamental transformation of the politico-economic structure, i.e., from capitalism to an advanced system. Monetary policies like the previously practiced low interest rate and quantitative easing I have proven ineffective and they should be, because they did not touch upon the problem of system transformation. The QE II and its inflationary approach will fail as miserably as before. In short, the RP will force a political breakdown since they knew the DP would have no way rescuing the nation from its worse shape just as they would fail to do the same themselves. RP’s political maneuvers to shutdown the government by refusing to extend the debt limit are blackmailing efforts for gaining political advantages over the feckless DP. As soon as their Wall Street masters yell to them, “halt” they will let go the underdog.

“It’s hard to see how this situation is resolved without a major crisis of some kind. Mr. Simpson may or may not get the blood bath he craves this April, but there will be blood sooner or later. And we can only hope that the nation that emerges from that blood bath is still one we recognize.”

The above is a witty point, most appropriately addressed to the die-hard right-wingers. So far, the unemployed have not taken up the weapon of showing force in streets because they have obtained some unemployment benefits. As soon as the government terminates an extension of the benefits and not restoring in time, there is no way they would still tolerate the abject treatment by capital, especially when they suffer from the inflation brought about by the QEII. An anti-capital struggle by the 22-25 million unemployed and under-employed and their families will certainly start soon after the termination. The anticipated Obama compromise on and, worse, capitulation to the permanency of income tax cut for the wealthy will not help the already explosive situation. Capitalists such as the Kock brothers, Murdoch, Gates and Buffett and their ilk will lose more in the bloodbath than the struggling people do, because the capitalists will watch helplessly their income, assets, wealth, reputation, social status and political power all go down the drain, whereas the working, unemployed people and the poor have nothing to lose but their chains.

Capitalism has drained the resources of the world for 600 years. Incessant financial, economic and stagnation crises due to over production of commodity and over accumulation of capital, income inequality between the bourgeois and proletariat, poverty and unemployment among the majority of populations and ecological calamity have proven the capitalism as a world system to be a failed system. As China’s economy enters into a hyper-inflationary stage and Germany’s economic growth slows down and dwindles to a trickle, a worldwide anti-capital struggle and mass movement will be unavoidable.

“If capitalism could adapt production not to the obtaining of the utmost profit but to the systematic improvement of the material conditions of the masses of the people, and if it could turn profits not to the satisfaction of the whims of the parasitic classes, not to perfecting the methods of exploitation, not to the export of capital, but to the systematic improvement of the material conditions of the workers and peasants, then there would be no crises. Then capitalism would not be capitalism. To abolish crises it is necessary to abolish capitalism.” – J. V. Stalin (1930)



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