"The largest corporations and richest citizens long ago learned if you want to sustain an extremely unequal distribution of wealth and income, you need an equally unequal distribution of political power. Those corporations use their profits to pay huge salaries and bonuses to executives, to pay big dividends to major shareholders, and to “contribute” to politics. The corporations, top executives, and the major shareholders whom they enrich all regularly finance the political campaigns and politicians who perform that sustaining function. An increasingly unequal capitalist economy pays for the increasingly undemocratic politics it needs.
Any serious effort to change the basic situation, functions and direction of government policy must change the answer our society now gives to this basic question: who gets and disposes of the profits of producing goods and services in the US economy?
So long as the answer remains corporations’ boards of directors and major shareholders (the status quo), current trends will continue until bigger economic collapses bring the system to self-destruction. Then we will have graduated from a crisis with banks “too big to fail” to a crisis that is itself “too big to overcome.”
Does our economic system, capitalism, serve our needs sufficiently; does it need basic changes; or might a change to another economic system be best? Instead of a debate over alternative answers to such questions, we permitted little beyond self-congratulatory cheer-leading for capitalism. Seriously questioning capitalism (let alone challenging it) remain taboo, an activity to keep repressed. That repression encourages an unquestioned and unchecked US capitalism to become ever more unequal, delivering more “bads” than “goods” to ever larger majorities of people.
This unsustainable situation is being strained toward the breaking point by the crisis that now enters Year Five."
The Crisis Enters Year Five
