[ExI] anti-capitalist propaganda

[Michael LaTorra]

Right, Damien. Excessive concentration of wealth weakens the entire society.
The situation is only made worse when we discover how much of that
concentrated wealth was garnered through fraud.

Regards,
Mike LaTorra

On Sat, May 9, 2009 at 11:49 AM, Damien Broderick <thespike at satx.rr.com>wrote:

> At 09:23 AM 5/9/2009 -0700, spike wrote:
>
>>
>> It sets off alarm bells in my head when he
>> utters comments like "We all benefit when we spread THE wealth around."
>>  THE
>> wealth?  Define THE, sir.
>>
>
> I always assumed this is an incredible beat-up (as Aussies say of
> journalistic hysteria where a statement is taken out of context and inflated
> absurdly).
>
> THE wealth is the wealth created by all the productive forces of the
> community. As everyone knows, in recent years an increasing proportion of
> this wealth has been funneled into the richest segments of (so-called)
> capitalist nations. Some of this upward drainage is due to unmitigated theft
> and scams on a colossal scale, pyramid schemes and other depredations. Some
> might be deserved, as brilliant and risky entrepreneurship increased wealth
> and convenience and lifespan etc for the entire community, and Atlas
> deserves his payment. Nevertheless, it can be argued that a disproportionate
> cut has been scooped up by the richest, and that this is not only morally
> dubious *but damages future wealth-making processes*--by, for example, as we
> are seeing, leading to a clusterfuck of such enormous dimension that 539,000
> jobs disappeared last month in the US, and nearly 6 million in less than a
> year and a half.
>
> I'd have thought that good capitalists would *want* to see as many citizens
> as possible creating and sharing in the wealth of their community. If
> shunting more and more into the pockets of the wealthiest plutocrats
> actually *despoils* the productivity of the community, throwing millions out
> of work, it might be rather a good idea to find ways to have the
> communally-produced wealth spread around again. Hostile rhetoric about
> "welfare queens" can deafen us to this call to a return to real functioning
> capitalism. Yes, there are spongers and petty criminals, but it seems to me
> extremely unlikely that Obama was appealing to them in his invocation of
> traditional American values of fairness and community.
>
> Damien Broderick
> [a stranger in a strange land--so hey, maybe I've got the ethos wrong, and
> Americans always *have* wanted the very richest to own almost all the
> nation's wealth and to hell with the rest]
>
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