Unregulated Monopoly Capitalism Discredited

Unregulated Monopoly Capitalism Discredited
By Gil Villagrán, MSW

With Wall Street stock exchanges, banks and financial markets in free fall from their Olympian perches in skyscraper offices, it is clear that the ‘invisible hand’ of Unregulated Monopoly Capitalism is finally discredited. The claim that free market capitalism, an unregulated everything-and-everyone-is for-sale economic system will deliver the greatest wealth has shown itself to be a hollow claim based upon marketed propaganda and self-delusion. Indeed, the soaring stock market peaked and fell into a frightening chasm with no bottom in sight. Now there is nowhere to go but a return to the economic reality that things are only worth what they are worth to the average consumer. When the market fell, it hit the stubborn reality that even a small ‘tall’ cup of coffee is worth only a dollar in spite of the $1.70 Starbuck’s price.

To understand the big fall, we must exam the big lie twenty-nine years earlier. During the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan, called “the Great Communicator” by his GOP handlers the “trickle-down theory” demonstrated on a cocktail napkin by Arthur Laffer to Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, promised that reducing taxes for the super wealthy would free entrepreneurs to create ever greater wealth for themselves, and in the process the economy would whirl like a perpetual motion machine. That is, the wealth provided by lower taxes, government subsidies, sweetheart contracts and corporate bonuses to the super rich would make these financial superheroes eager for more wealth and make capitalism work! By living large with mansions, yachts, private jets, luxury cars, diamond-encrusted wristwatches—wealth eventually trickles down to the working class. Yet at the same time, the lower tax rates would produce more jobs, more sales, and thus more revenues to the treasury. It was Orwellian logic: reducing taxes creates more revenue! Similar to the Bush Doctrine: pre-emptive war to prevent war!


One little problem: it didn’t work. In one famous example, the wealthy got a tax break of about $75,000, enough to buy a Japanese made Lexus; the middle class received a $3,000 reduction on their income tax, enough to send one child to one semester at a local college; while the lower class worker got a break of $300, enough to buy a muffler for their well used ten year old car. No appreciable increase in jobs or taxes resulted from the lower taxes that promised to increase tax revenues, but there was an increase in luxury auto sales—you may recall the explosion of foreign made Mercedes, Lexus, Jaguars, and SUVs on our highways during this era.

So now the chickens have come home to roost, or better stated, our chickens have been cooked and eaten while were still at work. The working class has been robbed by the superheroes of capitalism—those who manipulate financial ledgers to benefit corporate bosses that are in fact corporate raiders. These financial manipulators are the dishonest parasites who do not labor to make things humans need: homes, appliances, vehicles, medicines, harvest food, or build the infrastructure of a civilization: roads, electricity, water systems, hospitals, schools; or provide for basic human needs: health care, child care and education, local government. These parasites were once called “those who use of a pen to rob the people instead of a gun.” But now they use the computer, the stock exchange, the bank, and their partners in crime: the U.S. Congress, the Treasury Department, and the very President of the United States.

Anyone who decries the economic state of our nation is accused of preaching “class warfare,” so few will call it for what it is: theft by one class against another. But class warfare is what it is: and it already happened, WE LOST!!! If you don’t believe it, look at your 401(k) if you still have one, look at your paycheck, if you still have one, look at the red ink in the federal, state, county and city budgets. Look at your local school with bigger classes, dilapidated buildings, and teacher layoffs. Look at the closed hospitals, and seriously ill Americans begging for healthcare without health insurance. “We were robbed of our American Dream, and certainly robbed of an honest government of the people, by the people for the people.