“Their Assets, Our Debts” A look at how the American worker is exploited through history to keep our industry expanding

I am reading an interesting article from CounterPunch newsletter on the America history of restoring a crisis.

In this article, the author explains how our economic system manages to remain afloat even when it seems like there are more “assets” (debt) for the government to buy up than there are actual profits turning.  She explains that these huge failing financial institutions are saved by simple redistribution.  In the authors words:

today we hear about the federal government buying up “assets” of the failing banks and other financial institutions.  These “assets” are, of course, also debts, and very bad debts that can’t be repaid.

Essentially, the president acts as Robin Hood, but instead of taking money from the rich and dispersing it to the poor, he takes the money of the labor workers and tax payers and fills the deep pockets of corporations.  You may be wondering how exactly the president does this.  It is more complex than simply raising taxes and then creating a budget that only funds bailouts.  One way is to create inflation:

Significant injection of government spending into industrial production, rather than into the production of “consumer goods,” results in inflation.  The price of daily necessities goes up due to shortages or rationing, and the real value of workers’ wages goes down.

Inflation is basically the same thing as cutting a workers wage without actually doing so.  The price of goods go up because of the change of government funding. The worker is now able to afford less goods.  This way he is still putting in the same labor, sometimes even more, but using less of the production, basically consuming less.  This leaves more resources and more of his income for expanding industry.  War is another good way to boost the economy.

“911” resulted in an enormous increase in presidential powers, and that both private military contractors and the oil industry profited tremendously from the US invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq. At the same time, cuts in wages, lay-offs, unemployment, increases in hours and worker productivity without increases in pay or jobs, have continued to insure that working peoples’ real incomes decline.

During a war, Marxism critique of Capitalism goes into full throttle.  With the powers of the bourgeoisie or president expanding, he takes full advantage of the proletariat, exploiting him fully for his labor all in the name of industry (PR for making CEOs, his fellow bourgeoisie members, richer instead of holding them accountable for their failed business decisions).  Sometimes exploiting the workers is not enough to salvage  failing industry.  At this point outsourcing becomes the redistribution of choice.

When this usual method of economic competition is not sufficient to turn around a deep economic crisis, taking the resources of another country by military force, while reducing its population to beggars willing to work for starvation wages, is another way to reallocate or “redistribute” economic wealth and resources.

The article wraps up with a question:

how long will working people, consumers and taxpayers stand for paying the costs of larger, deeper, more wide-spread economic busts that lower our standard of living, destroy social programs, and bankrupt our pubic institutions and infrastructure…We need to decide for ourselves which road we want to take in creating a system of production and distribution that truly provides for us all.

I’m personally not sure what the real answer is.  It is clear that our system is flawed, but it is unclear if there is another system that is ideal.  Is her Utopia possible in our American reality?