Left News and Views

A letter to the editor the Cumberland Times-News published eight years ago from Jan D. Tuckley.

The economy of the corporate capitalists is like a bicyclist who has ridden over a cliff.

Unaware that they are in free-fall, they pedal madly and are thrilled with their speed.

In 1971, 90% of international financial transactions were related to the real economy (trade or long-term investment) and 10% were speculative. By 1990 these percentages were reversed, and by 1995 about 95% of the vastly greater sums were based upon nothing more than pure speculation.

Money now moves around the world at a speed that defies and baffles government regulators. Policies to “liberalize” investment, combined with advancements in information technology now allow about $1.5 trillion a day to travel across borders as foreign- exchange transactions. Only one to two percent of these transactions are related to trade or foreign direct investment. The remainder is for speculation or short-term investments that are subject to rapid flight when investors’ perceptions change.

After Mexico suffered a rapid exodus of capital in late 1994, the International Monetary Fund and other global agencies claimed that they had set in place new safeguards to prevent a repeat.

Yet, over these same years, the IMF and the U.S. Treasury Department were pressuring nations to remove remaining restrictions on inflows and outflows of finance and investment.

The rapid flight of short-term capital from Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, and South Korea in late 1997, and from Russia and Brazil in 1998, revealed that dozens of other countries are Mexico-style crises waiting to happen as nervous investors
move their money elsewhere at the touch of a computer key.

The focus at this point is on using money to make money by expanding bank lending, creating real-estate bubbles, and speculating on fluctuations in prices of currencies and other financial instruments. The financial excesses we are now witnessing on a global scale are much like those that preceded the Great Depression of the 1930’s.

The mechanisms employed by finance capitalism to make money from money, without the intervening necessity of engaging in productive activity, allow those with money to increase their claims against society’s stock of real wealth without contributing to its production.

Meanwhile, by 1999, the wealth of the world’s 475 billionaires was greater than the combined income of the poorest half of humanity.

In the U.S., Microsoft chairman Bill Gates’ net worth is equal to that of the poorest 120 million Americans combined. The average CEO of a U.S. based multinational corporation now pays himself some 425 times the amount of his company’s entry-level employees.

These same capitalists also own the major media, which are constantly bragging about about how great the economy is doing. Actually, in terms of real purchasing power, the income of the average American worker is 13 percent les than it was in 1972.

The average American household now holds some $6000 in credit-card debt alone. Millions of Americans are fighting to keep up while finding themselves in an ever-downward financial spiral.

There are really two separate economies in place. There is that of the corporate elite and that of the rest of humanity. The top one percent of the American population now have more wealth than the entire bottom 95% combined, and this gap is continuing to grow.

The corporate elite, their “Public Relations” spin-doctors and purchased politicians would have us believe that “A rising tide lifts all boats.” In fact, it lifts only the yachts. A tidal wave is on the way.

Jan D. Tuckley
Ridgeley, WV
July 14, 2000

Eight years ago, and Jan nailed it perfectly. The housing bubble bursting and the economy racing towards a second Great Depression are indeed what corporate greed has brought us. People like Jan have been trying to warn us all for years and thanks to mass media and their corporate masters the general public never heard them. Thanks.

“I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country.”

— Thomas Jefferson
1812

“The world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes.”

— Benjamin Disraeli
Prime Minister of England
1844

Eat the Rich