It was a surreal week, bursting with surreal news generated by the surreal idiot who sits in the White House, but maybe the most surreal headline of all was the one I saw Thursday morning telling me that Costco was rationing motor oil. The limit they’ve set is very likely more than your average motorist needs, but still. Rationing! Am I in England in the 1950s? And on top of that, the price has nearly doubled since April, to $58 for a 10-quart pack.
Or maybe it was the news that diesel had topped $6 a gallon. Before the war in Iran, it was about $3.60 a gallon. Some stations, in fact, are out of diesel. That’s right, on the signs that normally list the price per gallon of diesel fuel, it just says “Out.” Diesel powers trucks and delivery vans and tractors and other farm equipment. (Harvest season is around the corner, by the way.) Also freight trains. And buses and ships and barges and tugboats. And bulldozers and backhoes and cranes, and I guess that also means forklifts—you know, the kind seen this week crashing repeatedly into the Kennedy Center. The nation’s, and the world’s, commerce, in other words, runs on diesel gasoline.
For years, we’ve wondered whether American democracy would survive Donald Trump. We still do, of course, and by the way, if you haven’t read Judge Michael Luttig’s terrifying piece on that subject that we posted last week, do so immediately (well, after you finish this). But now, we need to fret that capitalism may not survive Trump, and that between now and January 2029, assuming the GOP doesn’t go Twenty-Fifth Amendment on him, he’ll single-handedly bring not only the American but the global economy to its knees.
America is finally coming to terms with just what an ignoramus Trump is. In his first term, he inherited a steady economy with a record 75 consecutive months of job growth. Until the pandemic hit, he didn’t do anything to screw it up. He inflicted horror after horror on the nation in other realms, but until March 2020, his economy was fine to good.
…
To paraphrase one of my old poli-sci professors:
You can have capitalism without democracy, but you can’t have democracy without capitalism.
By this they mean any form of capitalism - be it the hyper-individualistic style in America, the Scandinavian style that is a lot more more accommodating to the welfare state, or various other strains of it.
Sorry about your education.
Lemmy hates that stuff.
I’m not. It was a good education. Just because an interpretation does match with your biases doesn’t mean it’s bad.
No, but it leading to vast social and economic inequality does.
To quote one of my comp-sci profs, “women can’t code, they should stay at home and bear children”.
My point is that you don’t need to be smart or empathetic to become a professor, all you need to do is put in the work, accumulate “tenure” and get published once in a while.
Capitalism isnt whats propping those up, they are whats keeping capitalism in check. It just happens to be failing spectacularly in places like the US.
… And everywhere else. Europe is not the grandstanding bastion of social safety it’s made out to be. It’s just lagging behind the US. But we’re starting to get there.
Media consolidation in the hands of hyperconservative billionaires, demonization of the left…
And the existing social safety nets are getting slashed all around; we’re inching closer and closer to the US model of having everything privatized, from pensions to healthcare.
The US’ failure isn’t unique, its societal decay is just a few steps ahead of other capitalist economies
Suffering from success, as it were.
Your poli-sci professor was a fucking idiot.
In a democracy, people will vote for an economic system that benefits the majority, and in capitalism the rich will exert influence over the government to subvert the popular will and stop that from happening. So it seems more like you can’t have capitalism and democracy.
Democratic socialism is impossible?
Maybe you weren’t paying attention in class? I mean, we could say that capital accumulation and power consolidation, inherent in capitalism, corrupts Democratic systems in government, as we’ve seen. But really capitalist systems are, practically, by definition undemocratic. We don’t have voting power inside our workplaces. We don’t get a say in how things are run, who gets hired or fired, what to do with excess profits, who to do business with, where to do business. Nothing really. We’re beholden to the owners of capital and the rules they set. What’s democratic about that?