[Peace-discuss] groucho and john

[John W.]

I like Roberts.  He has integrity and credibily, in large part because he's
a Reagan Republican who is critical of the free-market system of capitalism
as it currently operates.

But Wayne...if you keep spreading notions like this, you might get bounced
out of the Tea Party, and become a pariah to good libertarians everywhere!



On Thu, Aug 12, 2010 at 2:19 PM, E.Wayne Johnson <ewj at pigs.ag> wrote:



>  Conservatives and especially libertarians romanticize "free market
> unregulated capitalism." They regard it as the best of all economic orders.
> However, with deregulated capitalism, every decision is a bottom-line
> decision that screws everyone except the shareholders and management.
>
> In America today there is no longer a connection between profits and the
> welfare of the people. Unregulated greed has destroyed the capitalist
> system, which now distributes excessive rewards to the few at the expense of
> the many.
>
> If Marx and Lenin were alive today, the extraordinary greed with which Wall
> Street has infected capitalism would provide Marx and Lenin with a better
> case than they had in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
>
>
> An interesting article on unintended consequences by ex Reagan Treasury
> man....
>
> *The Little Things That Annoy *
> *The Big Things That Matter*
> By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
>
> I write about major problems:  the collapsing US economy, wars based on
> lies and deception, the police state based on "the war on terror" and other
> fabrications such as those orchestrated by corrupt police and prosecutors,
> who boost their performance reports by convicting the innocent, and so on.
>  America is a very distressing place. The fact that so many Americans are
> taken in by the lies told by "their" government makes America all the more
> depressing.
>
> Often, however, it is small annoyances that waste Americans' time and drive
> up blood pressures. One of the worst things that ever happened to Americans
> was the breakup of the AT&T telephone monopoly. As Assistant Secretary of
> the US Treasury in 1981, if 150 per cent of my time and energy had not been
> required to cure stagflation in the face of opposition from Wall Street and
> Fed Chairman Paul Volcker, I might have been able to prevent the destruction
> of the best communications service in the world, and one that was very
> inexpensive to customers.
>
> The assistant attorney general in charge of the "anti-trust case" against
> AT&T called me to ask if Treasury had an interest in how the case was
> resolved.  I went to Treasury Secretary Don Regan and told him that although
> my conservative and libertarian friends thought that the breakup of At&T was
> a great idea, their opinion was based entirely in ideology and that the
> practical effect would not be good for widows and orphans who had a blue
> chip stock to see them through life or for communications customers as
> deregulated communications would give the multiple communications
> corporations different interests than those of the customers. Under the
> regulated regime, AT&T was allowed a reasonable rate of return on its
> investment, and to stay out of trouble with regulators AT&T provided
> excellent and inexpensive service.
>
> Secretary Regan reminded me of my memo to him detailing that Treasury was
> going to have a hard time getting President Reagan's economic program,
> directed at curing the stagflation that had wrecked President Carter's
> presidency, out of the Reagan administration.  The budget director, David
> Stockman, and his chief economist, Larry Kudlow, had lined up against it
> following the wishes of Wall Street, and the White House Chief of Staff
> James Baker and his deputy Richard Darman were representatives of VP George
> H.W. Bush and did not want  substantial Reagan success that would again
> threaten the Republican Establishment's hold over the party. Baker and
> Darman wanted to be sure that George H. W. Bush, and not Jack Kemp,
> succeeded Ronald Reagan, and that required a muted Reagan success that they
> could claim as theirs for moderating an "extremist" program.
>
> I told Secretary Regan that if I had another deputy assistant secretary, I
> could reach a reasonable conclusion whether the breakup of AT&T was
> sensible. He replied that he was sure that was the case, but that once I had
> three deputies the headlines in the Washington Post and New York Times,
> Business Week, Newsweek, and so on, would be: "Supply-sider builds empire at
> Treasury."  He said it would sink me
> and that without me he could not get the President's economic program out
> of the President's administration. "Which do you want to do," he asked,
> "save AT&T or cure stagflation?"
>
> Curing stagflation gave America twenty more years. Ironically, the good
> times started to erode when Reagan's other goal was accomplished and the
> Soviet Union dissolved in 1990. "The end of history" resulted in India and
> China opening their labor markets to American capitalists, who began
> producing offshore with foreign labor the products that they sold to
> Americans. The labor costs savings pushed up corporate profits,
> shareholders' returns, and managerial bonuses. But it deprived Americans of
> middle class incomes and wrecked the balance of trade. The US income
> distribution and the trade deficit worsened.
>
> Many progressives blame the worsening income distribution on the Reagan tax
> rate reductions, but the real cause is the offshoring of manufacturing,
> industrial, and professional service jobs, such as software engineering.
>
> None of us in the Reagan administration foresaw jobs offshoring as the
> consequence of Soviet collapse. We had no idea that by bringing down the
> Soviet Union we would be bringing down America. During the Reagan years
> India was socialist and would not allow foreign corporations, had they been
> interested, to touch their labor force. China was communist and no foreign
> capital could enter the country.
>
> However, once the Soviet Union was gone from the earth, the remaining
> socialist and communist regimes decided to go with the winners. They opened
> to Western corporations and sucked jobs out of the developed West.
>
> But this is a different story. To get back to deregulation, nothing has
> worked for the consumer since deregulation. Deregulation permitted
> corporations to impose their costs of operation on customers without having
> to send them a bill. For example, corporations use voice recognition
> technology to keep customers from salaried customer representatives. I
> remember when a customer with a problem could call a utility company or bank
> and have the problem immediately corrected.
>
> No more. There was an error in my phone bill today, which I had corrected
> without result on two previous occasions. As everyone knows by now, it takes
> 10-15 minutes, usually, to get a live person who can actually fix the
> problem.  After listening to sales pitches for 12 minutes, I got a live
> person. Once the problem was understood, it was pronounced to be an upper
> level problem out of his hands. I waited another 10 minutes while he tried
> to reach a superior who had the code to fix the problem that the phone
> company had produced in my account. The entire time I listened to product
> advertisements.
>
> How many times has this happened to you?
>
> Whoever invented these artificial voice capabilities is the enemy of
> mankind. Whomever a customer calls--utilities, credit card companies, banks,
> whatever, the customer gets a voice machine. Some voice machines never tell
> the customer how to get a live person who can, on occasion, actually fix the
> problem.
>
> In my opinion, the strategy behind the endless delays is to cause the
> customers to give up, slam the telephone down and play the higher incorrect
> bill as it is cheaper in time and frustration to correcting the problem and
> being billed in the correct amount. These ripoffs of the customer are
> produced by Wall Street pressures for higher earnings.
>
> The frustrations, of course, multiply when one reaches an offshored service
> somewhere in the Third World. The incentive is to hang up and to pay the
> excessive bill so that phone, internet, or credit card services are not cut
> off
>
> Had Don Regan and I known that the high speed Internet was in our future
> and that American corporations would use it to destroy the jobs
> traditionally filled by US university graduates, possibly we would have
> decided to save the regulated telephone monopoly and to deliver the economy
> over to stagflation.
>
> The reason is that sooner or later something would have been done about
> stagflation, but nothing whatsoever has been done about offshoring. Saving
> the economy from offshoring would have been a greater achievement than
> saving the economy from stagflation. However, in my time stagflation, not
> offshoring, was the problem.
>
> I regret that I did not have a crystal ball.
>
> Deregulation proponents will say that the breakup of AT&T gave us cell
> phones and broadband, as if foreign regulated communication companies and
> state monopolies do not provide cell phone service or high speed Internet
> connections. I can remember attending corporate board meetings years ago at
> which the European members had digital cell phones with which they could
> call most anywhere on earth, while we Americans with our analogue cell
> phones could hardly connect down the street.
>
> What deregulation did was to permit Wall Street to push the deregulated
> industries-- phone service, airlines, trucking, and later Wall Street
> itself-- to focus on profits and not on service. Profits were increased by
> curtailing service, by pushing up prices and by  Wall Street creating
> fraudulent financial instruments, which the banksters used America's
> reputation to market to the gullible at home and abroad.
>
> Consider air travel. Admit it, if you are my age you hate it. The
> deterioration in service over my lifetime is phenomenal. Studies in favor of
> airline deregulation focused on short flights between A and B and concluded
> that small airlines serving high density areas were more efficient because
> they were not regulated. What was left out of the analysis is that regulated
> airlines served low density areas and permitted free stopovers. For example,
> if one was flying from the US to Athens, Greece, the traveler could stopover
> in London, Paris, and Rome without additional charges. Moreover, passengers
> were fed hot meals even in tourist class. In those halcyon days, it was even
> possible to travel more comfortably in tourist class than in first class,
> because flights were not scheduled in keeping with full capacity. Several
> rows of seats might be unoccupied. It was possible to push up the arm rests
> on three or four center aisle seats, lay down and go to sleep.
>
> Perhaps the best benefit of regulated air travel for passengers was that
> airlines had spare airliners. If one airplane had mechanical problems that
> could not be fixed within a reasonable time, a standby airliner was rolled
> out to enable passengers to meet their connections and designations. With
> deregulation, customer service is not important. The bottom line has
> eliminated spare airliners.
>
> With deregulated airlines, Wall Street calls the tune. If your flight has a
> mechanical problem, you are stuck where you are unless you have some sort of
> privileged status that can bump passengers from later fully booked flights.
> "Studies" that focus only on discounted ticket price omit major costs of
> deregulation and thereby wrongly conclude that deregulation has benefited
> the consumer.
>
> When trucking was regulated, truckers would stop to provide roadside
> assistant to stranded travelers. Today, with deregulated trucking, every
> minute counts toward the
> bottom line. Not only do truckers no longer stop to aid stranded travelers,
> they travel at excessive speeds that endanger automobile drivers. Trucks
> have expanded in size, weight and speed. Trucks raise the stress level on
> interstate highway drivers and destroy, at taxpayers expense, the roads on
> which they travel.
>
> Conservatives and especially libertarians romanticize "free market
> unregulated capitalism." They regard it as the best of all economic orders.
> However, with deregulated capitalism, every decision is a bottom-line
> decision that screws everyone except the shareholders and management.
>
> In America today there is no longer a connection between profits and the
> welfare of the people. Unregulated greed has destroyed the capitalist
> system, which now distributes excessive rewards to the few at the expense of
> the many.
>
> If Marx and Lenin were alive today, the extraordinary greed with which Wall
> Street has infected capitalism would provide Marx and Lenin with a better
> case than they had in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
>
> *Paul Craig Roberts* was an editor of the Wall Street Journal and an
> Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury.  His latest book, HOW THE
> ECONOMY WAS LOST<http://www.easycartsecure.com/CounterPunch/CounterPunch_Books.html>,
> has just been published by CounterPunch/AK Press.
>
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