• Elizabeth Warren has a plan to save capitalism
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Elizabeth Warren’s Accountable Capitalism Act, explained Elizabeth Warren has a big idea that challenges how the Democratic Party thinks about solving the problem of inequality. Instead of advocating for expensive new social programs like free college or health care, she’s introducing a bill Wednesday, the Accountable Capitalism Act, that would redistribute trillions of dollars from rich executives and shareholders to the middle class — without costing a dime. Warren’s plan starts from the premise that corporations that claim the legal rights of personhood should be legally required to accept the moral obligations of personhood. Traditionally, she writes in a companion op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, “corporations sought to succeed in the marketplace, but they also recognized their obligations to employees, customers and the community.” In recent decades they stopped, in favor of a singular devotion to enriching shareholders. And that’s what Warren wants to change. The new energy on the left is all about making government bigger and bolder, an ideal driven by a burgeoning movement toward democratic socialism. It’s inspired likely 2020 Democratic contenders to draw battle lines around how far they’d go to change the role of government in American life. Warren supports expanding many of the programs in play, and she’s voted to do so. But the rollout of her bill suggests that as she weighs whether to get into the presidential race, she’ll focus on how to prioritize workers in the American economic system while leaving businesses as the primary driver of it. Warren wants to eliminate the huge financial incentives that entice CEOs to flush cash out to shareholders rather than reinvest in businesses. She wants to curb corporations’ political activities. And for the biggest corporations, she’s proposing a dramatic step that would ensure workers and not just shareholders get a voice on big strategic decisions. Warren hopes this will spur a return to greater corporate responsibility, and bring back some other aspects of the more egalitarian era of American capitalism post-World War II — more business investment, more meaningful career ladders for workers, more financial stability, and higher pay. As much as Warren’s proposal is about ending inequality, it’s also about saving capitalism. Headline: bill that proposes 40% of corporate boards will have to be workers, not executives. It also talks about how stocks have grown faster than companies have grown.
>Instead of advocating for expensive new social programs like free college or health care, she’s introducing a bill Wednesday, the Accountable Capitalism Act, that would redistribute trillions of dollars from rich executives and shareholders to the middle class — without costing a dime. why not... both? >...it’s also about saving capitalism. oh lol
As anti-capitalism as we're getting, it's important to remember capitalism isn't a force for good or evil. It's just a mechanism of the market, and I would hate to see it be removed entirely as we rely on it quite heavily. It just needs to be better maintained.
We need a new new deal.
From some of the details, she's taking some inspiration from German Labor Unions having positions in shareholder chairs.
Honestly, I don't think "anti-capitalism" is as widespread as polls have shown in the youth. People don't fully understand how drastically their lives would change without capitalism. Anti-capitalist sentiment in American youth, in my view, is more of a rejection of the wildly corrupt, unregulated crony capitalism that's taken over this country since the 1970s and the Reagan Revolution. The GOP can't even pretend to be the party that supports the free market - it's enabled rabid monopolization, destroyed small businesses across the nation, and now actively engages in anti-free-trade tariffs that harm our own industries. Friedman and Ayn Rand and the like embraced the individualism of capitalism to an unsustainable degree, changing our society's understanding of the role of the economy fundamentally. This article does a great job addressing that. Businesses no longer feel any sense of obligation to society. They dodge taxes on their profits and get fined a thousandth of what they saved. They cut benefits and hours for their workers to deliver greater profits. Every single thing that modern corporations do is centered on maximizing profit, regardless of the damage it causes to society. The solution is regulation and drastic increases in law enforcement. Adjust laws to penalize tax-dodging companies more than they can save by dodging taxes. Create a carbon tax to eliminate the "negative externalities" that businesses rarely pay a cent for. Trust-bust the near-monopolies that dominate our communications industries. Start imprisoning executives. Pass legislation to cap executive salaries to a percentage of their lowest-paid salary. Drag these companies to the fucking dirt, beat them into submission, crack them into pieces, and force them to act in the interests of society at large. The government has at least some degree of accountability - we can vote fuckers out. Corporations... what? Are we supposed to strike, when they've lobbied away strikes? Are we supposed to boycott them, when they've monopolized entire industries? The only solution is drastic changes in government to drag these cocksuckers to the dirt and retake the giant pile of gold they've collectively been looting from the workers who allow them to exist in the first place.
Fuck Capitalism. People like to say Communism/Socialism are inherently flawed or doomed because of human nature, and that there will always be somebody out to get more than their fair share; but Capitalism is flawed for the exact same reason, except it rewards those types of people.
Capitalism ain't perfect, but it's a hell of a lot better than socialism. I agree with @isak about regulations to fix the system (and also that the young people who supposedly dislike capitalism probably don't understand the alternative).
Tbh whats stopping them from being selective with that 40% and then paying them off
Also what constitutes a "worker"? And will this stifle investment from 3rd parties?
Hey man, that's great and all but everything you take for granted to even post this message is thanks to capitalism Capitalism can't be unregulated but we can't live without it and you really need to recognize that a lot of the issues we have in our capitalist society is from in-efficient, and poorly designed regulations that help the companies they're supposed to regulate.
Believe me, I can go without half the shit "I take for granted", so long as it means a healthier global society. The very same thing that made Capitalism so powerful, the pursuit of money/success, is the very same thing that has absolutely sapped any sense of community and empathy from modern society(or at least North American society anyhow). Obviously this doesn't apply to everyone living under capitalism, but to "succeed" in our societies, you have virtually no choice but to fuck people over along the way, or be cursed to remain staunchly middle class at best(a class that is rapidly merging into lower class).
A society in which farmers and the rural community is smashed down upon by the boot of state ownership i take it?
I don't think it's poor design. It's inevitable that, when the state cooperates with the heights of the market, it does so in a nepotist, crony fashion that always hurts smaller actors. Governments really only act in two ways: ethnocentrically or nepotistically. That's exactly what Warren does, by the way. Her rallying the progressives in opposition to Dodd-Frank rollbacks hurt smaller and local banks. The left's attempts to create a regulated capitalism with a human face are doomed to fail, and greatly exacerbate a cultural divide since the right is disproportionately controlling of areas struggling with a centralized, uneven recovery. They will continue to fight things like single-payer healthcare because of that economic imbalance, it comes with cultural imbalance which will only be exacerbated by changing demographics and uneven/concentrated population growth. It's one reason we cannot replicate Europe here. Regulation is also just a wild goose chase, it's part of a pendulum swing. It's a temporary fix that cartelizes parts of the economy and makes us inflexible come an economic downturn. That's why we changed so much in the 1970s and became "neoliberal". I don't think free markets work either, since crony, manipulative state capitalist actors on the world market have an edge in that environment. We can never fully liberalize because of that. Marx was right about the growth of the state under capitalism. We will only move away from the Jeffersonian, middle class dream.
Every political/economic ideology is inherently flawed, because every human on Earth is inherently flawed. This is where I really fundamentally disagreed with Marx. He thought that class division arose from capitalism, not vice versa. He thought class as the primary social cleavage, through which came racial/ethnic division, religious division, and so on. I think that's a whitewashing of the history of human nature rooted in the noble savage mythology of Marx's own time. The core problem with socialist/communist revolution is that it presupposes that human nature (social cleavages) depends on historical systems (the development of capitalism), and not vice versa. In my view, the human tendency towards factionalism or tribalism explains the development of capitalism. Inequality arose because humans prioritized the needs of their in-group, attacking other groups for resources. Those who got footholds earlier in history, and faced fewer setbacks (mostly luck gg plague), dominated. Their faction, initially just the family unit or the tribe and eventually the settlement, city-state, nation-state, religion, race, social background, whatever - dominated. Revolutionary socialism/communism argues that if we just press the delete button on the historical realities that channeled the development of every society on the planet, we can fix factionalism and tribalism. But revolution necessarily entails undermining the institutions that have developed to defend ourselves from the worst parts of our nature. Capitalism is a historical happenstance, and it might get replaced in the future, but revolution is not the way to move towards that future. The history of Communism is itself riddled with faction - Bolsheviks, Leninists, Trotskyists, Stalinists killing the Trotskyists, and so on. Even before Communism existed, the French Revolution devolved into a giant fucking list of factions - revolutionaries battling other revolutionaries who disagreed on certain ideas, the Jacobins collapsing into the Montagnards and fighting the Girondins, etc. Hell, look at the French Revolution - sure, they tossed out the monarchy, and then they got... oh, Napoleon. An imperialist dictator. Russia did the same, threw out the institution of capitalism, and got... Stalin. Nice. Capitalism is flawed, yes, and so is socialism, and so is communism - but just swapping an entire economic ideology through revolution has historically caused even more suffering. Reforming and controlling our existing institutions, instead of tearing them down to the ground, is the only reasonable way to keep society functioning except in cases of total collapse. Tribalism is a part of our nature, and we won't be able to eliminate it outright. Instead, we should be twisting the worse aspects of our nature to benefit all. Tribalism can be twisted into communal behavior. Greed can be twisted into productive behavior. The lust for power/fame/notoriety can be twisted into honorable behavior. We'll never get rid of that shit, like Marx thought we could, but we can try to control it. The problem isn't capitalism, the problem is that the guy we've put in the driver's seat just wants to go as fast as possible to show off to a bunch of passengers who are scared for their fucking lives.
The crimes of those that hijacked Socialism in the past should not be compared to the economic system at its core. Stalin spit on pretty much everything Lenin and the old Soviets had dreamed of in a bid to force stability within the Soviet Union, as well as selfishly grab all the power for himself. Mao's China was much of the same, in that they had a largely rural and non-industrialized nation that was fragmented extremely heavily, and as such they felt the need to enforce stability and grab power for solely the Chairman himself. I will admit that one could make that same argument for Capitalism however, but in the case of Capitalism, the only way to succeed is unfortunately to undercut the opposition in whatever way necessary. I suppose reforms and better enforced laws could curb these issues to some extent, but as we've seen with all the tax avoiders(Panama/Paradise Papers), and in issues such as the current emission cheating in many car manufacturers; these aren't fool-proof fixes, and the companies do tend to find a workaround no matter what. It's a lot harder for a citizen to hold a company responsible for their terrible actions, than it is to hold the government they elect. In a modern, stable nation, these would almost certainly be non-issues, and as we can see in Europe, the slow march towards legitimate Socialism is going very well for many of those nations, and even here in Canada, we are at least trying to adopt some of those changes ourselves(pretty hard to do with the States right below us though).
So the medicines that keep the sick from dying? You assume they'd be created, researched, and designed when people have no incentive to do so but "feel good" about their actions. It's naiveity in the absolute extreme. Yes we should search for a better way to do things. You know what isn't a better way to do things? act like burning down the whole damn thing is going to result in a better future. It won't. We really need careful, thoughtful, well planned out methods to go forward. Everything you're repeating is literally knee jerk rhetoric.
Socialism is not a healthier society; it's a society in which everyone is mutually fucked by the state with little to no hope for upward mobility, no choice in consumer goods, no regard for wants (only needs), and a society of scarcity. Good luck getting approved for a car in a socialist society if you don't NEED it. Good luck getting a house instead of an apartment. Good luck getting an expensive gaming rig if you're not doing research for the state. Not to mention that handing over the absolute power to coerce EVERYONE financially to the state, while theoretically possible to achieve without gulags, has never resulted in there NOT being gulags
Even as recently as the 50's-60's, we saw a very strong sense of community in the post war world. Unfortunately due to racism, it tended to be Whites helping Whites(with exceptions since some Whites weren't seen as equals, such as the Irish), but there was still a sense of community among people. That has pretty much entirely evaporated in just 60 or so years, with pretty much everyone at each others throats nowadays, be it over politics, minor inconveniences in retail outlets, driving in fucking traffic, so on so forth. Capitalism has sapped everyone's time and energy, and as such everyone is on edge at all times. Capitalism has pitted citizen against citizen over issues such as Socialized Medicine, and social assistance such as welfare; with the true crime being that these citizens all deem themselves to be of a higher class than those they hate, and yet, more often than not, they're all of the same class. The greatest trick ever pulled was by the Rich, and it came in the form of redirecting the working class from criticizing the rich, to criticizing themselves. I do find that people my age are rather prone to generosity and kindness in general, which is at least a little encouraging, but it's still far too rare a sight.
Agreed. A free-market economy is simply an optimization engine. The second most powerful optimization engine known to man, after genetic evolution. When directed at a cost-optimization problem, it works wonders. But when given no direction, it tends to optimize for concentration of wealth. The role of government ought to be to aim the free-market at problems it can solve, and keep it away from problems it cannot.
I'm not going to defend the excesses of capitalism. I will however state that you are relying on a facetious and naive understanding of that time period if you genuinely believe the only thing at fault is captialism. Please, I can't educate you, for you. Look into the history of policy, of legislation and change. A common theme is that poorly designed, poorly implemented and noble legislation empowered corporations again, and again, and again over the people they were designed to help. Acting like we can just fix the world by revoking capitalism is naive. Capitalism is one of the most efficient ways to raise a nation out of poverty.
This post is absolutely true. The historical expansion and development of the market has really come at a lot of social costs.
A socialist society tends to be one that is taxed much higher than a Capitalist one. Sure medicine within capitalist societies has led to many advances due to the amount of potential money involved, but it's not like medicine would suddenly have zero funding in a socialist society. Canada does quite well on the front of medicine, Cuba is a leader in the field of medicine; meanwhile, the US has citizens dying or going bankrupt due to absolutely preventable things due to the lack of socialised medicine. We just saw a CEO, Martin Shkreli, go to prison due to corporate greed in the form of his massive increase in the price of Daraprim, an increase that was completely done out of greed, not necessity. Shkreli did that far too blatantly, and under the wrong administration, and as such he faced actual consequences, but every single day, pharma companies pull his shit and somehow the US is a utopia of medicine? I haven't see too many new breakthroughs in medicine coming from the US, despite the price of drugs increasing astronomically in recent years. Weird.
I'm just going to say right now, your ignorance about those changes and developments means very little. There's a lot of incredible progress. It's very slow, but it's incredible. Please dismiss it more.
I'd argue that the version of socialism that most people want is simply a well regulated capitalist system, where government regulations are influenced by expert knowledge and restrictions are put in place to protect the welfare of the people as well as to minimize the potential for monopolization to take hold (vague idealistic statements I know, but it would be nice if government regulations weren't written by lobbyists, and if the protections in place had actual teeth and weren't just for show) Possibly with government funded optional public services to supplement private service and provide for the needs of those without enough to afford private service.
Fine by me, save capitalism like the English Bill of Rights saved British feudalism.
how do you actually get rid of capitalism without reverting to a totally planned economy? even a highly taxed extremely restrictive economy is still capitalist. China is as much a capitalist state as the US.
I was thinking about this idea of arguing for "Capitalism" or "Socialism" recently and it just seems very political and not very likely to help voters much. In reality we don't vote yes/no on an entire system and implement all of it, we pick and choose based on individual issues (or at least we should) so I don't know why you wouldn't just start there. It bothers me that some young people have this attitude like "capitalism is the problem, let's try socialism" like it's just this thing that you swap out, and also that some politicians feel like they need to sell the idea of "socialism" when it's pretty obvious that a lot of Americans will support social programs if you just explain what they do and don't call them one thing or another. One of Bernie's big successes in my opinion was when he went to red state town halls and was like "how about we do this thing for this issue, does that make sense?" and everybody was like "yeah sure."
Capitalism is killing the Earth, y'know the planet?
My computer is amazing, it was built in china where they had to build suicide nets on the factories to prevent their workers from killing themselves while building it, the raw materials come from slave labour in areas in the world torn by conflict that the international monetary fund keeps indebted so that we can exploit them forever. This system is wholly unethical and is one big human rights violation. It was located on the shelves and posted to me by someone who's on welfare, is replaceable at a moment's notice and has to pee in a bottle to avoid being fired. The system that you say produced the computer in the first place isn't even responsible for the idea of the computer, something that we could have come up both with and without monetary incentives and which has been held back a lot by capitalism. An example of capitalism holding back computers is the magnetic charger on this computer, no other company can make one because of copyright because capitalism needed a way to remove competition so that innovation could happen under it. Other examples of capitalism harming computers: closed source programs where you only get compiled versions because people are afraid of someone pirating it or making their own version so we get shitty security, tons of early patents.... Neither of you know what you're talking about. Socialism is a category like animal, plant, fungus containing many species, you can't just say that there's going to be big government. There might not even be a government. The wikipedia page for socialism shows a few examples: Decentralized planning Participatory economics Market socialism Lange model Mutualism Planned economy Soviet-type OGAS Project Cybersyn Socialist market economy Socialist-oriented market You're not forced or doomed to recreate the soviet union yknow. There was an article posted in this section and you didn't read it, here it is again: https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/07/3-arguments-against-socialism-and-why-they-fail Additionally and more specifically to proboards good luck doing the following: bringing the unemployment rate down to near 0, upholding human rights(housing, food, water), getting a permanent but unprofitable cure for certain diseases, surviving climate change under capitalism.
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