by Marc Batko
1. The market is self-healing and bourgeois society is preserved from tragedy, failure, and collapse. Nothing needs to be learned from FDR and his New Deal since humility, compromise and correction are signs of weakness.
2. Financial markets return to equilibrium and are not kept alive in the emergency ward by billions of dollars injected monthly by the Federal Reserve.
3. Money is a private matter, not a public necessity. Billions could be thrown into the ocean instead of awarded to the Internal Revenue Service for investigating and combating any possible fraud of corporations and the super-rich.
4. Problems ignored solve themselves. The US of amnesia (Gore Vidal) or the US of denial (Richard Wolff) becomes stronger when data is repressed and information and news is filtered and censored so contradictions are obscured. The future can be extrapolated from the present and doesn’t need to be anticipated and protected in the present. Through repetition and corruption, people can be manipulated by lies, myths, fairy-tales and false narratives.
5. Speculation is an economic necessity and has no alternative. Speculative investment is more profitable than our once productive investment. GE Capital is more lucrative than GE refrigerators. Don’t look behind the curtain!
6. Extreme wealth inequality does not make society insecure and unsustainable. Security is only a military problem and may require a policeman on every intersection.
7. Land, labor, and money are real commodities, not fictitious commodities (cf. Karl Polanyi).
8. Profit-maximizing is the same as profit-making (cf. Ulrich Thielemann).
9. The neoliberal model leads to investments rather than profits (cf. Nikolaus Kowall).
10 CEOs are job creators and workers are only cost-factors.
11 More jobs are created than are abolished. Corrupt presidents who scapegoat and spend their lives in bed or on the golf course don’t make the country unsustainable and a laughing-stock.
12. Politics doesn’t need to guide and restrain the economy since affordable apartments will arise according to the unerring law of supply and demand and beneficent capitalism.
13. If the richest three men in the US have more wealth than 160 million, this doesn’t cause a distribution problem or make the US into an undemocratic oligarchy since money is infinite and can be created at will.
14. Government should only protect private property and ensure that the market executes its laws.
15. Tax havens, stock buybacks, insider trading and micro-second betting (casino economy) are not unfair and don’t cause revenue shortfalls for states, cities and regions. The wealthy are more equal than others and must be treated with awe like sensitive deer lest they flee to another country.
16. For the first time, the US is paying $1 trillion a year as interest on its $33 trillion debt. Since 2000, the US has had an average annual trade deficit of $600 billion. Imports have almost exactly doubled exports. Wasteful nonstop luxury enables poverty and starvation to grow like the ciders of Lebanon.
17. The US economy of indebtedness and enrichment is not a sleight-of-hand economy when the poor and homeless are made invisible and financial markets are kept alive by FED injections of hundreds of billions.
18. Allowing stock buybacks in the trillions, extolling CEOs as job creators, awarding a Nobel Prize to the former FED chairman Ben Bernanke and waging endless wars keep the population distracted and fighting one another or scapegoats.
19. Come-of-age existence does not require world responsibility (cf. Dietrich Bonhoeffer). Participating in the market is eo ipso ethical and frees participants from any questions or liability.
20. The state doesn’t need to invest massively in affordable apartments since SUVs are equivalent to SROs according to our anointed snake-oil salesman/false messiah Ronald Reagan whose teachings are based on the scriptures of popcorn and propaganda.
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