- Big contracts for administering Food Stamps (benefits payments via ebt)
- Making money off the unemployed (benefits payments via ebt)
- Sweet campus deals to prey on students while distributing Federal Student Aid (ID cards, fees)
- Cashing in on tax refunds (refunds on prepaid debit cards)
- Refinancing homes means big money for banks (government subsidies)
- Profiting off the very idea of another TARP-style bailout. (speculation)
From the Socialist Workers Party Paper The Militant Vol.76/no.19 May 14th 2012
Don’t let liberal 99% rhetoric fool you, Capitalists are more than their income!
A criminal is a person with predatory instincts without sufficient capital to form a corporation.
“It is impossible for capitalism to survive, primarily because the system of capitalism needs some blood to suck. Capitalism used to be like an eagle, but now it’s more like a vulture. It used to be strong enough to go and suck anybody’s blood whether they were strong or not. But now it has become more cowardly, like the vulture, and it can only suck the blood of the helpless. As the nations of the world free themselves, capitalism has less victims, less to suck, and it becomes weaker and weaker. It’s only a matter of time in my opinion before it will collapse completely .” ~ Malcolm X
States and municipalities, for instance, have toughened criminal penalties and immigration laws at the behest of the private prison industry; empowered Wall Street banks to not only collect taxes but levy additional tax penalties; and allowed energy companies to exploit so-called forced pooling statutes, thereby creating what one Republican governor calls a new power of “private eminent domain.” One state is now even considering making it a criminal act to share your Netflix password with friends and family, because that is cutting into Netflix revenues.
In Washington, D.C., the federal government just enacted a healthcare bill whose individual mandate forces citizens to purchase private insurance, and the Pentagon has developed a reliable pattern of using military power to occupy resource-rich countries — and then to privatize those resources at the barrel of a gun.
This same government, which has granted corporations the rights of “personhood,” has also used its power to let corporations avoid the responsibilities of personhood — effectively using state power to create a new privileged status that is above the law. For instance, federal statutes have trampled the concept of “equal protection” by deliberately exempting corporate interests from the laws the rest of us live under — laws like the Safe Drinking Water Act (which doesn’t apply to natural gas drillers) and antitrust statutes (which still don’t apply to private health insurers). Federal courts have used judicial power to limit corporations’ legal and financial liability for fraud and lawbreaking.
This modern Corporate Police State differs from what we call “corporatism” in that it is not merely about funneling public dollars to private interests à la the Wall Street bailout. Indeed, this new monster has bigger goals than the occasional bailout. It is all about using the government’s position as society’s supreme rule maker and law enforcer to create a fully- functioning corporate state — one that doesn’t just channel police power into crushing the occasional protest, but constructs an entire legal and military framework around preserving and expanding private profit. And, as we’re now seeing, that includes a radical reimagining of the U.S. Constitution.
Capitalism has always been a failure for the lower classes. It is now beginning to fail for the middle classes.
The whole gospel of Karl Marx can be summed up in a single sentence: Hate the man who is better off than you are, never under any circumstances admit that his success may be due to his own efforts, to the productive contribution he has made to the whole community.
Henry Hazlitt (via littlerrepublican)
Uh, no, it’s more along the lines of “no one achieve fulfillment because the capitalist system inevitably divides people by turning them into oppressors or the oppressed, and the oppressors game the system so that it is very difficult for the oppressed to become oppressors or understand the system well enough to want or be able to fight it, and so his solution is to create a system where everyone contributes a little time and labor towards meeting everyone’s basic needs so that we as individuals have the resources and the time to pursue what we find truly fulfilling.” Not, you know, hate rich people.
I can’t even with that “success may be due to his own efforts” bullshit. If you don’t think that straight white middle- to upper-class men (the demographic which makes up the vast majority of what Americans call “successful” people) have an unfair advantage in almost every possible social and economic situation imaginable you have not been paying attention. That’s not to say that they don’t work hard, but that’s saying that people from different demographics who work just as hard do not see the same payoff - by a VERY LONG SHOT - that straight white men do. But that’s beside the point.
You (OP) may or may not agree with Marx’s solution but his criticisms of the flaws of capitalism are pretty spot on. Which you’d know if you’d actually read any in-depth studies of Marx (or, you know, anything written by Marx himself), which I am willing to bet good money you haven’t bothered to do.
(via alyshabee)
(Source: moralanarchism)
