thegreatdivide wrote on Jan 29
th, 2023 at 12:45pm:
US style free-market market capitalism is killing 45,000 Americans every year because they can't afford health insurance, in the richest nation on the planet.
Deepening poverty has multiple causes, but the capitalist economic system is major among them. First, capitalism's periodic crises always increase poverty. More precisely, how capitalist corporations operate, in or out of crisis, regularly reproduces poverty. At the top of every corporation, its major shareholders (15-20 or fewer) own controlling blocs of shares. They select a board of directors - usually 15-20 individuals - who run the corporation. These two tiny groups make all the key decisions: what, how, and where to produce and what to do with the profits.
Poverty is one result of this capitalist type of enterprise organization. For example, corporate decisions generally aim to lower the number of workers or their wages or both. They automate, export (outsource) jobs, and replace higher-paid workers by recruiting domestic and foreign substitutes willing to work for less. These normal corporate actions generate rising poverty as the other side of rising profits. When poverty and its miseries 'remain always with us,' workers tend to accept what employers dish out to avoid losing jobs and falling into poverty.
Another major corporate goal is to control politics. Wherever all citizens can vote, workers' interests might prevail over those of directors and shareholders in elections. To prevent that, corporations devote portions of their revenues to finance politicians, parties, mass media, and 'think tanks.' Their goal is to 'shape public opinion' and control what government does. They do not want crisis-driven budget deficits and national debts to be overcome by big tax increases on corporations and the rich. Instead public discussion and politicians' actions are kept focused chiefly on cutting social programs for the majority.
Corporate goals include providing high and rising salaries, stock options, and bonuses to top executives and rising dividends and share prices to shareholders. The less paid to the workers who actually produce what corporations sell, the more corporate revenue goes to satisfy directors, top managers, and major shareholders.
Corporations also raise profits regularly by increasing prices and/or cutting production costs (often by compromising output quality). Higher priced and poorer-quality goods are sold mostly to working people. This too pushes them toward poverty just like lower wages and benefits and government service cuts.
Over the years, government interventions like Social Security, Medicare, minimum wage laws, regulations, etc. never sufficed to eradicate poverty. They often helped the poor, but they never ended poverty. The same applies to charities aiding the poor. Poverty always remained. Something more than government interventions or charity is required to end poverty.
Capitalism and Poverty - Richard D. Wolff, Professor Emeritus, University of Massachusetts and Visiting Professor at the Graduate Program in International Affairs of the New School University, New York.
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