Reified and Refined

oldtobegin:

rubyvroom:

socialismartnature:

BBC Reporter Speechless As Trader Tells The Truth: “The Collapse Is Coming…And Goldman-Sachs Rules The World”

“Governments don’t rule the world, Goldman Sachs does.” Here it is in black-and-white, folks. The capitalists of the world are prepared to idly play their golden fiddles as the economy burns and millions of lives turn to shit.

The political economy of the past few years becomes a lot more intelligible if you assume that this asshole knows what he’s talking about, and that fuckos like him are more or less running shit for their own benefit with little interference from the nominally-in-charge political class. It’s almost satisfying to find one of them who is brazen / dumb enough to come out and say it this candidly and clearly.

My question is, do these people only have as much power as we give them? Or can they destroy us if they want to? That’s kind of what’s playing out with the Greece thing right now. Like, what if Greece called their bluff, and just told Goldman Sachs and the big Euro banks to fuck the hell off, and meant it? What if big finance had to take the haircut, instead of the Greek people (and by extension, the Italian, Spanish, Irish, etc. people)?

Are they really just bluffing? Or, for them, is looting the remnants of the 20th century state and the middle class really the only way to keep getting theirs, and so any threat to that model is seen as a grave threat to their way of life, and thus worth blowing everything up over?  Is the real economy or the nation state relevant to them at all going forward? And how could we possibly have gotten to a place where it isn’t? How can the capitalist system as currently conceived carry on at all sustainably if this is the case?

Democratic polities are more or less being destroyed economically by all of this as it is, but can it only happen with the collusion or coercion of the political class? Can democratic polities still control global finance at all? We need to find out, and soon, because as this bozo demonstrates, global finance has no interest whatsoever in human welfare or flourishing. For these maniacs, you either short society, or you’re dumb money and deserve what you get.

(Man, this decade has turned me into some kind of radical Marxist so gradually, I didn’t even notice.)