“The Bear Market Economics Phenomenon” is an observation of Political Economics. Wall Street Admits: ‘We Got Rich Off the Backs of Workers’ thus creating the Bear Market. The Bear Market is America's default war.
The ethic of Wall Street is the ethic of celebrity. It is fused into one bizarre, perverted belief system and it has banished the possibility of the country returning to a reality-based world or avoiding internal collapse. A society that cannot distinguish reality from illusion dies.
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To followers of Ayn Rand and Ronald Reagan, and to all the business people who despise government, 'community' is a form of 'communism.' Even taking the train is too communal for them. Americans have been led to believe that only individuals matter, that every person should fend for him/herself, that "winner-take-all" is the ultimate goal, and that the winners have no responsibility to others.
To the capitalist, everything is a potential market. Education, health care, even the right to water. But with every market failure it becomes more clear that basic human rights can't be bought and sold like cars and cell phones. The pursuit of profit, when essential needs are part of the product, means that not everyone will be able to pay the price. Some will be denied those essential needs.
Global Failures
Capitalism hasn't been able to control runaway global inequality. For every $1.00 owned by the world's richest 1% in 2011, they now own $1.27. They own almost half the world's wealth. Just 70 of them own as much as 3.5 billion people.
Capitalism has not been able -- or willing -- to control the "race to the bottom" caused by"free trade," as mid-level jobs continue to be transferred to low-wage countries.
Nor has capitalism been able to control global environmental degradation, with trillions insubsidies going to polluters that don't even pay their taxes, and with corporations ignoring any semblance of social responsibility as they seek ways to profit from global warming.
Job Creation Failures I
With or without globalization, middle-class jobs are disappearing, even higher-endpositions in financial analysis, medical diagnosis, legal assistance, and journalism. Artificial intelligence is making this happen. Millions of Americans have had a role in the great American productivity behind this technological takeover, but capitalism allows only an elite few of us to reap the disproportional profits.
Reports of job recovery are based on low-income jobs, many of them part-time. Layoffs are cutting into the military and technology. Gallup discounted Wall Street's job-creating ability. As noted by former Wall Street Journal Associate Editor Paul Craig Roberts, the US rate of unemployment is 23 percent when long-term discouraged job-seekers are included. That's close to the unemployment rate of the Great Depression.
Job Creation Failures II
Closely related to employment woes is the collapse of corporate investment in new product R&D, from 40 cents per dollar in the 1970s to 10 cents now. CEOs are choosing instead tospendalmost all of their profits on buybacks and dividends to enrich investors.
Health Care Failures
The capitalist profit motive allows the cost of a hepatitis pill that costs $10 in Egypt to sell for $1,000 in the United States, and the cost of a blood test to range from $10 to $10,000 in two California hospitals (a 100,000% markup at the second hospital).
Patent abuse is one of the factors making this possible. Pharmaceutical companies cantweak a drug with a minor change to create a "brand new" drug with a new patent.
Another health-related scam that affects most of us is bottled water. According to Food & Water Watch, about half of it is filtered tap water with fancy names, as evidenced in one case by an actual "tap water" label on a company's product. Yet with the demise of community water fountains, and the barrage of advertising for "safe and pure" drinking water, unsuspecting Americans pay dearly: for the price we pay for a bottle of water we would be able to fill up that bottle a thousand times with tap water.
Housing Failures
Because of the "invisible hand" of the free market, in just 35 years the investment wealth of the super-rich has gone from 15% of middle-class housing to almost 200% of middle-class housing.
Education Failures
A remarkable story of privatization failure is told in the story of charter schools in Florida, where Jeb Bush still holds dear to his delusions of free-market educational success.
That's just one example. In general, charters are riddled with fraud and identified with alack of transparency that leads to even more fraud. Since 2001 nearly 2,500 charter schools have been forced to close their doors, leaving over a quarter-million schoolchildren between one bad business decision and the next. A report from PR Watch summarizes the billions of dollars spent on charters without accountability to the public.
Disposable Americans
Chris Hedges wrote: "Human life is of no concern to corporate capitalists. The suffering of the Greeks, like the suffering of ordinary Americans, is very good for the profit margins of financial institutions such as Goldman Sachs."
People become meaningless in a successful capitalist system.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License
Paul Buchheit is a college teacher, an active member of US Uncut Chicago, founder and developer of social justice and educational websites (UsAgainstGreed.org, PayUpNow.org, RappingHistory.org), and the editor and main author of "American Wars: Illusions and Realities" (Clarity Press). He can be reached at paul@UsAgainstGreed.org.
Capitalism is both primarily economic theory but can also function as a social theory that effects its inhabitants in many facets of their lives. Much of the way it achieves those effects is through the motivating mechanisms imbeded within its structure; functioning as a rewards system that has an effect both within the economic system and externally in the social sphere. How you might ask? By emphasizing profit as a powerful stimulant that effects behavior (Suciu,2009). And one of the many expressions of that powerful stimulant is in the indiscriminate buying and selling of products(by an individual or corporation) regardless of their ethical consequences–whether the repercussions be in the form of medical, mental, spiritual, or emotional disarray of those around them. All in the name of the characteristic and reinforcing profit motive central to capitalism. The bigger ethical problem, however, is when the economic system effects and transfers over to social values. As Titus Suciu (2009) of Transylvania University of Brasov, in the economic sciences department, says:
“Ethical [problem] results from the confrontation between the economic performances of the organization (measured by costs and profits) and the social performance, determined in terms of obligations towards the persons and social categories from inside and outside of the organization” (p. 241:5)
Because many of these “economic agents” (whether corporate or individual) do not have awareness of the deleterious effects might have on the population(when you consider profit as a powerful stimulant within the system), many of these agents become accustomed to the apathy and callousness that is required to make the economic system work. These lifestyles and economic-values-turned-cultural-values, train the rest of society to value these characteristics, as they are the traits that allow you to prosper and succeed.
As Suciu goes on to say:
“As an example, let’s consider the case of alcohol and tobacco; even if the distribution of these commercial items is considered legal after the distributors inscribed on the labels the necessary specifications, still, the economic agents do not think about the profound moral problems that arise following the consumption, the harmful and noxious problems of the alcoholism, the dramatic effects of driving under the influence or the health issues, such as cirrhosis or pulmonary cancer”(p. 241:5)
The callousness and apathy to make an economic system like this succeed are attributes most often associated with sociopathic individuals. So it should be no surprise that production within these corporations abandon an ethical dimension because it impedes on the profit motive that acts as a powerful stimulant within the capitalist system. Looked at behavioristically, profit, acting as a rewards system, positively reinforces sociopathic characteristics, as they are a means to an end that results in a future reward(profit or capital). Throughout a period of time, these behavior patterns become normative and transfer over, inevitably, to culture. A problem that has already occured.
What On Earth Is Sociopathy?
For some of you reading this and do not know, sociopathy, or psychopathy, (often interchangeably used by clinicians) is a condition that shares many traits with antisocial personality disorder; in the form of a disregard for right and wrong, callousness or apathy, manipulativeness, superficial charm, impulsivity, and pathological lying (Kosson, 2013a). Anyone that suffers from any of these characteristic symptoms generally has a hard time with interpersonal relationships and have a more than likely potential to cause the people around them to suffer–including themselves–when these symptoms are persistently engaged with.
A great article on sociopathy is one written by Dr Seth Meyers, a blogger on Psychology Today, who writes about the sociopathy in an effort to better understand the condition that seems so illusive. He makes the distinction that sociopaths are not inherently bad or immoral people, rather that they are incapable at all of feelings toward others, or generating any emotion in that respect (Meyers, 2013b). Though the effects of some of their behaviors can be seen as evil, Dr Meyers does point out a caveat:
“Are sociopaths bad people? It’s easy to utter a full-throated “Yes!” for so many reasons, but the reality is that sociopaths don’t necessarily have malicious feelings toward others. The problem is that they have very little true feeling at all for others, which allows them to treat others as objects. The effect of their behavior is undoubtedly malicious, though the intention is not necessarily the same thing”(par 2)
So it is paramount not to confuse sociopathy with something as serious as antisocial personality disorder–which does require a more comprehensive psychiatric intervention. For those that would like to know, one of the differences between sociopathy and antisocial personality disorder is that antisocial personality disorder is associated with a history of child abuse or early-in-life criminal behavior. Sociopathy that critieria is not needed or relevant. Nevertheless, the ethical dilemma is still present insofar as the acts of a sociopath produces some sort of harm or destruction to their surroundings and environment.
For any lingering clarifications you might need about sociopathy(or psychopathy as it is used in this video) and antisocial personality disorder, refer here:
The video is informative if you would like to know more about the origins and genealogy sociopathy(psychopathy) and antisocial personality disorder.
Nevertheless, to shed further light on the issue, psychologist Martha Stout, who’s a clinical instructor at Harvard Medical School, mentions in her book ‘The Sociopath Nextdoor‘ that over 4% of the American population suffer from sociopathy. A 4% which translates to about 12 million Americans. And one of the main characteristics she seems to emphasize throughout the book is “conscienceless” and “apathy”; two characteristics which are hallmark indicators of sociopathy. There are many cases individuals might point out that where someone they know are emotionally unresponsive or have a difficulty in showing compassion to others. So naturally when one hears that over 4% of Americans are suffering from sociopathic symptoms, one begins to wonder what might be the cause of such a growing epidemic.
What is causing such a rise in sociopathy? Can it be economic and marketing systems that are transferring the values we seem to think are cultural alone? Is the cause of the rising tide of sociopathy a result of something more mundane as our life style? Well, the answer to that is something fundamental in capitalism: consumerism and buying patterns.
Where Does Sociopathy and Capitalism Meet?
Because capitalism requires a high degree of callousness, apathy, and an insensitivity to ethics in order to prosper on the part of the seller(i.e. either corporations or individuals), much of the required behavior it produces requires the same degree as those characteristics in the seller as it does in the buyer; that required behavior is known as consumerism and our buying patterns, as mentioned before. Capitalism cannot succeed without consumerist behavior. And so this sociopathic epidemic can be traced to the economic-value-turned-cultural-value brought to you by capitalism and its buying and selling trends. Buyers (i.e the customer/consumer) enable the prolongation of this activity and so pass it onto future generations. The resultant cultural transference becomes the gold standard in how to function in the socio-economic culture we reside in. As evolutionary psychologist Geoffery Miller puts it,
“[…]marketing is not just one of the most important ideas in business. It has become the most dominant force in human culture”(par 2)
Behavior over a long period of time becomes unnoticed and individuals, as a result, are unable to see the consequences of their actions because of the culturally transferred sociopathic-like traits. For example, the normalization of sociopathic traits is most evident when one buys cigarettes, knowing the effects that it will have on their health, those around them, and ultimately the environment, still purchase them. Despite the fact that the negative effects of cigarettes are well-known throughout the common lay person. There is even a warning symbol on the cigarette carton itself! Tobacco companies still push production and even fund lobbyists to protect their capital. And yet customers, in spite of numerous forewarnings and dangers, buy the product enabling these companies to not only produce profit but produce vast amounts of it. Both sides should be considered guilty of the sociopathic disconnect.
Even more so, when the consumer buys of a variety of products that are well-documented to be bad for your health (e.g. fastfoods), and on a consistent basis consume these products knowing they are detrimental for your health which eventually lead to life-threatening consequences. The progressive blunting to sense of self and regard for your own wellbeing could just be another example of the development of callousness and inconstientiousness seen in sociopaths. If one does not have regard for him/herself, what would make anyone think they would have any regard to those around him/her? These mundane practices and patterns are most likely contributors in the development of sociopathic traits and could go unnoticed for a long time because we are so used to them. Then, as a result of the implicit nature of sociopathy in our daily practises, many of the future CEOs are conditioned with these values that work well with corporation or businesses, and would be perfect candidates to function in these type of markets with the disastrous criterium. Our consumerist culture, for some, produces sociopaths. So the conundrum goes; you have the future CEO (the seller) and the customer/consumer (the buyer)–both conditioned with these implicit sociopathic values; creating a vicious self-sustaining cycle of automatons reeking havoc on the ecology of our environment and personal wellbeing of individuals. It is a tragic love story.
It should be nothing novel that then consumerism has become a value planted in our culture, and more than likely any culture that is industrialized and takes part in the world economy. As cultural anthropologist Dr Peter Stromberg(2012) would agree;
“If we want to have a genuine discussion about consumption, first we must understand it. And as I have said, that means we have to understand that consumption is about values, it is about people’s moral convictions. We have to start from the realization that people consume in an attempt to lead a life that is meaningful according to their values”(par 9)
Anyone probably reading this can pull up several more examples of consumerist behavior that is detrimental in someway to the self or to those around them. Whether it is the corporations selling cigarettes and alcohol or the consumer buying these products that are detrimental to health and taking them anyway. Every little action weaves itself into the fabric of our normal lives which become passed on to future generations to inherit. Whether unwittingly or wittingly, these patterns become, what we believe, to be essential aspects of our lives.
Conclusion
Lifestyles and cultural values have a conditioning effect on our behavior, and after an extended period of time, they become inherited forms of behavior for our offspring–if not inherited, there is at least an environment that has all the right variables to transform an individual toward those lifestyles and cultural values. Whether they become CEOs of corporations producing deleterious production or consumers enabling that deleterious production as buyers, it becomes apparent that such activity would require a repertoire in the personality that is similar to a sociopath’s. Apathy, callousness, a disregard for a morality are all hallmark signs of sociopathy. Although, there are few who make an earnest effort not to participate in these harmful practices, there is a majority that do not. The solution to this is in the buyer, first. Wether he/she chooses not to purchase these products as a progressive step forward does make a positive change. Not only in their lifestyle, but in the collective movement that is slowly building toward a conscientious effort to make the world a better place. The buyer is in the all important “enabler”. These progressive steps can build a better environment that does not produce sociopaths. Much of it is a result of how our economic and social system function. I believe a change is in order.
Sociopath – A person with antisocial personality disorder. Probably the most widely recognized personality disorder. A sociopath is often well liked because of their charm and high charisma, but they do not usually care about other people. They think mainly of themselves and often blame others for the things that they do. They have a complete disregard for rules and lie constantly. They seldom feel guilt or learn from punishments. Though some sociopaths have become murders, most reveal their sociopathy through less deadly and sensational means. (http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Sociopath).
Trickle Down
The idea behind trickle-down economics was that the wealthy were job creators, and that by reducing taxes on the affluent, more jobs would be created, resulting in prosperity for all. Trickle-down economics was christened with an official name, supply side economics, and sold to the American people with a slogan; a rising tide lifts all boats. However, you can’t put lipstick on a pig: the system is called capitalism and it is killing people and the environment.
We now know trickle-down economics was a lie, a fraudulent scheme to redistribute money from the many to a few, and a theft of the nation’s wealth. Rather than a rising tide, thirty plus years of trickle-down economics has brought us the loss of tens of millions of jobs through outsourcing, the devastation of entire cities, the financial collapse of 2008 and an ever widening income disparity and inequality between the so called job creators and the other 99% of the population.
Rather than use tax breaks to create jobs and spread prosperity, the so called job creators have used tax breaks to horde money and then use this ill-gotten wealth to corrupt the government, wage imperialist wars, gain more tax benefits and spend their ill-gotten gain abroad. These so called job creators make their money through various predatory schemes such as for profit colleges, for profit prisons and the privatization of public resources, inflicting misery on millions in the process. This is the financial capitalism.
They have used their illicit wealth to wage war upon the low income by influencing government and public policy to promote cuts to social security, unemployment benefits, food stamps, education and public pensions. They have decimated the public commons. They do this using the government, which they own while at the same time frothing at the lips while claiming government is bad!
Trickle-down economics has resulted in the creation of new class economic predators that have used their wealth to wreak havoc on nations and inflict suffering on millions. Each time they get caught breaking the law, they buy their way out of prosecution. Their behavior by definition is sociopathic.
The New Sociopathic Class
While the mainstream media lauds the mega wealthy as celebrities, their wealth is not the result of being smarter or working harder, it is a result of conduct that is often malevolent, unethical and criminal.
The net result of trickle-down economics has not been a rising tide which has lifted all boats. It has been the creation of a new class of sociopaths emboldened by massive amounts of money they use to wreak misery and destruction. A few examples include:
Paul Singer– is known as a vulture capitalist. Singer buys the debt of foreign nations for pennies on the dollar and then holds them hostage till they pay the debt at full face value.
Pete Peterson – billionaire Obama donor has been promoting a campaign to cut social security, which may explain Obama’s willingness to consider such an idea with is anathema to Democratic Party ideals, or was until the corporate democrats took over the party.
Lloyd Blankenfien – After receiving billions in government bailout money, Goldman Sachs CEO told Americans they need to tighten their belts and accept social security cuts.
John Arnold – has been running a campaign to cut public pensions. Recently exposed for covertly funding a PBS series attacking public pensions.
Jamie Dimond – JP Morgan head has overseen so many deferred prosecution agreements, it is hard to keep count. Morgan has paid out billions to avoid prosecution related to mortgage fraud, fixing utility prices, and laundering Maddoff money.
Art Pope – made millions off of variety stores in low income African American communities in North Carolina. While he promotes cutting education spending and racist policies. Got himself appointed budget director for the State after funding Republican takeover of State legislature.
Tom Perkins – compared attacks on the 1% to Nazi persecution of Jews. He claims millionaires should get a million votes. His public statements reveal paranoia, psychopathic behavior and delusional thinking.
And not one bankster or fraudster has gone to jail as a result of the economic crash of 2008.
Trickle up misery
The premise of trickle-down economics is a fraud, which is why it has been derisively labeled voodoo economics. Consumer spending comprises 70% of the US economy. Therefore the only way to stimulate growth is through (demand) increased consumer spending.
‘Demand’ has now been created through debt. For with wages falling, jobs disappearing due to outsourcing, insourcing and robotics there simply is no work. No work, no play. So, the American people bask in debt servitude and it will trickle-down to new generations. One trillion in student loan debt, one trillion in credit card debt and the new economic bubble: auto loan debt. All this debt is traded on Wall St. making the one percent richer and richer while throwing the rest of us into misery. Of all the economic gains and wealth made in the last 20 years 53% has gone to the one percent. This leaves over 6 billion people scrambling for 47% of the wealth.
The only real way to increase consumer spending is to implement economic policies which favors the bottom 90% of the population: such as raising the minimum wage, raising taxes on the rich, lowering the eligibility age for social security, extending unemployment benefits, reducing the tax burden on the bottom 90% and creating public sector jobs to repair America’s infrastructure, provide universal public education and public health, to name a few items.
All of this could be readily paid for by returning income tax rates to Nixon era levels, lifting the cap on social security taxes and increasing the capital gains taxes on dividend payouts. Not only would this be good economic policy, it would be good social policy by culling the numbers of this new plutocratic sociopathic class of the craven one percent.
It has been reported: “Taxes are being used as a weapon against the nation’s wealthiest 1 percent, and could force their “economic extinction,” according to outspoken venture capitalist Tom Perkins.
Because the so called job creators have not used tax breaks bestowed upon them to create jobs or increase prosperity as promised, there is no legitimate reason to continue these tax breaks. Perhaps the time has come to use taxation to force the extinction of the one percent, as Perkins fears, for it is the one percent who have created the material and subjective conditions that are literally driving people mad.
Take away people’s hope and their chance for a livelihood for themselves and their families and what we see is the rise of the psychopathic mind and authoritarian personality. One need to only witness the horrific weekly shootings: be they at Malls, schools, military bases, post offices, the streets or within families. This and rising suicide rates are all a result of a sociopathic system and a tiny psychotic minority who rule like corporate monarchs.
The American people are literally going mad due to the labyrinth of despair they are forced to trek. Time to wake up America and expropriate the expropriators before they create civil war and fascism.
According to Pew Research, most Americans believe the economic system unfairly favors the wealthy, but 60% believe that most people can make it if they’re willing to work hard. Credit: Allan Danahar via Thinkstock
In a candid conversation with Frank Rich last fall, Chris Rock said, "Oh, people don’t even know. If poor people knew how rich rich people are, there would be riots in the streets." The findings of three studies, published over the last several years in Perspectives on Psychological Science, suggest that Rock is right. We have no idea how unequal our society has become.
In their 2011 paper, Michael Norton and Dan Ariely analyzed beliefs about wealth inequality. They asked more than 5,000 Americans to guess the percentage of wealth (i.e., savings, property, stocks, etc., minus debts) owned by each fifth of the population. Next, they asked people to construct their ideal distributions. Imagine a pizza of all the wealth in the United States. What percentage of that pizza belongs to the top 20% of Americans? How big of a slice does the bottom 40% have? In an ideal world, how much should they have?
The average American believes that the richest fifth own 59% of the wealth and that the bottom 40% own 9%. The reality is strikingly different. The top 20% of US households own more than 84% of the wealth, and the bottom 40% combine for a paltry 0.3%. The Walton family, for example, has more wealth than 42% of American families combined.
We don’t want to live like this. In our ideal distribution, the top quintile owns 32% and the bottom two quintiles own 25%. As the journalist Chrystia Freeland put it, “Americans actually live in Russia, although they think they live in Sweden. And they would like to live on a kibbutz.”Norton and Ariely found a surprising level of consensus: everyone — even Republicans and the wealthy—wants a more equal distribution of wealth than the status quo.
This all might ring a bell. An infographic video of the study went viral and has been watched more than 16 million times.
In a study published last year, Norton and Sorapop Kiatpongsan used a similar approach to assess perceptions of income inequality. They asked about 55,000 people from 40 countries to estimate how much corporate CEOs and unskilled workers earned. Then they asked people how much CEOs and workers should earn. The median American estimated that the CEO-to-worker pay-ratio was 30-to-1, and that ideally, it’d be 7-to-1. The reality? 354-to-1. Fifty years ago, it was 20-to-1. Again, the patterns were the same for all subgroups, regardless of age, education, political affiliation, or opinion on inequality and pay. “In sum,” the researchers concluded, “respondents underestimate actual pay gaps, and their ideal pay gaps are even further from reality than those underestimates.”
These two studies imply that our apathy about inequality is due to rose-colored misperceptions. To be fair, though, we do know that something is up. After all, President Obama called economic inequality “the defining challenge of our time.” But while Americansacknowledge that the gap between the rich and poor has widened over the last decade, very few see it as a serious issue. Just five percent of Americans think that inequality is a major problem in need of attention. While the occupy movement may have a tangible legacy, Americans aren’t rioting in the streets.
One likely reason for this is identified by a third study, published earlier this year by Shai Davidai and Thomas Gilovich that suggests that our indifference lies in a distinctly American cultural optimism. At the core of the American Dream is the belief that anyone who works hard can move up economically regardless of his or her social circumstances. Davidai and Gilovich wanted to know whether people had a realistic sense of economic mobility.
The researchers found Americans overestimate the amount of upward social mobility that exists in society. They asked some 3,000 people to guess the chance that someone born to a family in the poorest 20% ends up as an adult in the richer quintiles. Sure enough, people think that moving up is significantly more likely than it is in reality. Interestingly, poorer and politically conservative participants thought that there is more mobility than richer and liberal participants.
According to Pew Research, most Americans believe the economic system unfairly favors the wealthy, but 60% believe that most people can make it if they’re willing to work hard. Senator Marco Rubio says that America has “never been a nation of haves and have-nots. We are a nation of haves and soon-to-haves, of people who have made it and people who will make it.” Sure, we love a good rags-to-riches story, but perhaps we tolerate such inequality because we think these stories happen more than they actually do.
As the sociologists Stephen McNamee and Robert Miller Jr. point out in their book, “The Meritocracy Myth,” Americans widely believe that success is due to individual talent and effort. Ironically, when the term "meritocracy” was first used by Michael Young (in his 1958book “The Rise of the Meritocracy”) it was meant to criticize a society ruled by the talent elite. “It is good sense to appoint individual people to jobs on their merit,” wrote Young in a 2001essay for the Guardian. “It is the opposite when those who are judged to have merit of a particular kind harden into a new social class without room in it for others.” The creator of the phrase wishes we would stop using it because it underwrites the myth that those who have money and power must deserve it (and the more sinister belief that the less fortunate don’t deserve better).
By overemphasizing individual mobility, we ignore important social determinants of success like family inheritance, social connections, and structural discrimination. The three papers in Perspectives on Psychological Science indicate not only that economic inequality is much worse than we think, but also that social mobility is less than you’d imagine. Our unique brand of optimism prevents us from making any real changes.
George Carlin joked that, “the reason they call it the American Dream is because you have to be asleep to believe it.” How do we wake up?
