Undecided
08-02-04, 07:43 PM
The United States is the world’s largest economy but since the 70’s the US’ economic power has been actually waning. With the raise of the third world which now comprises of half the world economy and with the collapse of the Bretton Woods agreement the power of the US to manipulate the international economy has depreciated. What confuses people is the idea that the US government is the one who holds the power of the world’s economy, but in reality much of the world’s economic power today rests in the hands of a powerful new Bourgeoisie class that is called the TCC. Transnationalization is the new name of the game internationally in which capital moves freely among states. The economic policies of Keynes and the economic model put forward by Ford have long gone. What is the result well the result is that the American worker, frankly the world’s workforce has significantly less power to negotiate vis-à-vis the new Transnational classes. Capital now can move almost instanteously leaving the home country and setting up somewhere new and cheap. I don’t hold much doubt in my mind that living standards in the west will begin to slip, and we as workers are now merely a commodity. Wealth in the US is spread very unequally, when Kerry says he is going to raise taxes for the top 2% it’s not an empty threat. This inequality of wealth in the US is not foreign to US history:
On the eve of the American Revolution, the United States-to-be had been a relatively egalitarian society. The richest one percent of households owned perhaps fifteen percent of the total wealth in the economy-a very low value for such an inequality statistic. Even by the immediae aftermath of the Civil War wealth was still not that concentrated: the top one percent of households appear to have had a little more than a quarter of the wealth of the country.
By 1900, however, the U.S. had become the Gilded Age country of industrial princes and immigrants living in tenements of our political memory. On the one hand, Andrew Carnegie building the largest mansion in Newport, Rhode Island with gold water faucets. On the other hand, 146 largely-immigrant workers dying in the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in Manhattan because the exits had been locked to keep workers from taking fabric out of the building for their own clothes.
Surveys suggest that in 1929 the richest one percent of U.S. households held something like 45 percent of national wealth, and that the concentration of wealth had been sharply rising in the 1920s. We strongly suspect that World War I had seen substantial deconcentration, as infiation eroded the value of bondholders' wealth and as high demand for labor boosted workers' earnings. It is my guess that the second was stronger than the first; that the concentration of wealth was eroded more during World War I than it was boosted in the 1920s, and that the concentration of wealth in the United States peaked sometime in the twenty years before World War I, with the richest one percent of households owning some 50% or so of total national wealth.
Attempts to count the wealth of the merchant princes themselves reinforce the suspicion that the pre-World War I U.S. was more unequal than at any time before or since. John D. Rockefeller was some eight times richer relative to the wages of the average American of his day than William H. Gates is today. (And Rockefeller was some twenty times richer relative to the total size of the U.S. economy
A country of immigrants and plutocrats is very different from the country of yeoman farmers that the United States had been in its Founding Fathers' imagination, and in large part in reality, in the late eighteenth century. Alexis de Tocqueville, a keen-eyed commentator on American society in the first half of the nineteenth century, had feared the growth of such a class of plutocrats, such an "aristocracy of manufacturers"
- Brad Delong
Today instead we have a “aristocracy of the TCC”, a class whose wealth no longer depends on one nations wealth. Real wages of Americans have fallen, while the amount of wealth in the hands of the upper crust has raised much faster then the working class. Here is why wages in the US and the West rose in the period btwn 1900-1980:
…the “double movement” that took place late in the nineteenth century was possible because capital, facing territorial, institutional, and other limits bound up with the nation-state system, faced a series of constraints, that forced it to reach a historic compromise with the working and popular classes”. (Robinson, 41)
Such a situation no longer exists, as we have seen with outsourcing, M&A’s and the expanding wealth of the third world, the first world’s working classes have much to lose. What many still talk about is a Keynesian economic model that no longer exists. If you are a proletariat which many of you are, if not all of you. We are now nothing more then a replaceable commodity; we are living in a new world a new of expanding markets. With limited resources, with capitalism ever increasing need for growth a growth that the west can longer offer we are looking at a very uncertain future. A future in which wealth in nations becomes even more polarized.
On the eve of the American Revolution, the United States-to-be had been a relatively egalitarian society. The richest one percent of households owned perhaps fifteen percent of the total wealth in the economy-a very low value for such an inequality statistic. Even by the immediae aftermath of the Civil War wealth was still not that concentrated: the top one percent of households appear to have had a little more than a quarter of the wealth of the country.
By 1900, however, the U.S. had become the Gilded Age country of industrial princes and immigrants living in tenements of our political memory. On the one hand, Andrew Carnegie building the largest mansion in Newport, Rhode Island with gold water faucets. On the other hand, 146 largely-immigrant workers dying in the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in Manhattan because the exits had been locked to keep workers from taking fabric out of the building for their own clothes.
Surveys suggest that in 1929 the richest one percent of U.S. households held something like 45 percent of national wealth, and that the concentration of wealth had been sharply rising in the 1920s. We strongly suspect that World War I had seen substantial deconcentration, as infiation eroded the value of bondholders' wealth and as high demand for labor boosted workers' earnings. It is my guess that the second was stronger than the first; that the concentration of wealth was eroded more during World War I than it was boosted in the 1920s, and that the concentration of wealth in the United States peaked sometime in the twenty years before World War I, with the richest one percent of households owning some 50% or so of total national wealth.
Attempts to count the wealth of the merchant princes themselves reinforce the suspicion that the pre-World War I U.S. was more unequal than at any time before or since. John D. Rockefeller was some eight times richer relative to the wages of the average American of his day than William H. Gates is today. (And Rockefeller was some twenty times richer relative to the total size of the U.S. economy
A country of immigrants and plutocrats is very different from the country of yeoman farmers that the United States had been in its Founding Fathers' imagination, and in large part in reality, in the late eighteenth century. Alexis de Tocqueville, a keen-eyed commentator on American society in the first half of the nineteenth century, had feared the growth of such a class of plutocrats, such an "aristocracy of manufacturers"
- Brad Delong
Today instead we have a “aristocracy of the TCC”, a class whose wealth no longer depends on one nations wealth. Real wages of Americans have fallen, while the amount of wealth in the hands of the upper crust has raised much faster then the working class. Here is why wages in the US and the West rose in the period btwn 1900-1980:
…the “double movement” that took place late in the nineteenth century was possible because capital, facing territorial, institutional, and other limits bound up with the nation-state system, faced a series of constraints, that forced it to reach a historic compromise with the working and popular classes”. (Robinson, 41)
Such a situation no longer exists, as we have seen with outsourcing, M&A’s and the expanding wealth of the third world, the first world’s working classes have much to lose. What many still talk about is a Keynesian economic model that no longer exists. If you are a proletariat which many of you are, if not all of you. We are now nothing more then a replaceable commodity; we are living in a new world a new of expanding markets. With limited resources, with capitalism ever increasing need for growth a growth that the west can longer offer we are looking at a very uncertain future. A future in which wealth in nations becomes even more polarized.