Richard Wolff on China, BRICS, and the US economy's immediate future:

"That's the way capitalism is set up.
Okay?

They long ago understood the
people at the top what they have to do
because we have a political system that
is a little odd to go with a top-down
economic system.

In our political system, we have universal suffrage.
Everybody gets one vote. Well, the vast
majority of people, 97%
are not employers. 3% are.

It would be
easy to mobilize a majority of the 97%
to limit the wealth of the 3%.

In fact,
you would expect that to happen because
the 3% are the ones with all the money
and the 97% are the ones who control the
majority in the voting.

The ruling class
of 3% do in America. They bought the
government, of course. That's how they
protect their situation in a world of
universal suffrage.

And how did they do
it? They did it with two political
parties.

Each of them depends on the 3%
for their money, the donor class, if you
like, the 3%. And now they divide.

Half
of them go to the right and mobilize and
mass support, you know, for things like
guns and white supremacy and against
abortion and all of that. and the other
ones they go for more liberal
progressive social welfare all of that
and minorities and women and so we have
two parties both of whom control the
mass of the vote.

Now, the punchline,
what the system does is it goes to the
rich people, says, "You're the donors.
We won't tax you."

Then it goes each
party to its mass base. We'll take care
of you. We'll give you this. We'll give
you that.

Here's the problem. You can't
buy the mass of people unless you tax
where the wealth is.

But there is a way
out. In the craziness of capitalism, you
don't tax the wealthy. You do provide
for the mass of people.

And the way you
do it is you go to the wealthy and you
say, "Since we didn't tax you, you have
all this money. Please lend it to us.

We'll give it back to you after a few
years, plus pay you interest while you
wait." That's called the deficit.

And
the reason we have a deficit is a
deference to those at the top to not tax
them to pay for the masses.

I'll give
you one simple example. Elon Musk, the
last I looked, has $350 billion or more
of personal wealth.

If you taxed away,
because we, the majority, voted for it.

If you taxed away half his money, he'd
still be the richest person on Earth,
but the government would have $250
billion with which to solve social
problems.

(the last few minutes of the above link)

#7

The link analysis is mostly about the failing US and the rising BRIC+ coalitions... sounds like you might have seen and understood the whole thing before.

I still need to listen to people like Wolff to make heads or tails of world economics; I pretty well understand ours.

#9
One of the channels I sub did a tour of the newest Disney, the one in Shanghai; they are an Australian family with little kids, and were in China for a couple of months.