Welcome to Capitalism

It's exciting!

You too can be a player!

(You have no choice.)

Get your share

Of what?

Your share?

Then & NowJohn Steinbeck

Behold Capitalism...

Questions

1.Where did it come form?

Questions

2.How deep will it go?

Questions

3.How far will it spread?

Questions

4.Can it be stopped?

Questions

5.What's our response?

The bailout

$700 billion

“Welfare for the rich. ...Broke people are about to bail

out rich people”-Wanda Sykes

Why is it that the wealth of a capitalist country is never shared but the debt is? -Karl Marx

$700 Billion is a lot of money● $750 billion : cost of the war on Iraq and Afghanistan

850 million human beings are starving2.6 billion lack sewage services800 million are illiterate640 million children lack adequate housing...

And so it goes...

In your dreams...

(Sigh) More dreaming...

So where did this crisis come from?

Confused?

Topics for discussion:

FACT:The post war boom ended in 1974

FACT: The “real” economy is in trouble

Work Harder!

Work Longer!

For Less!

FACT: It took the destruction and armaments build up of the Second World War to pull the world's economies out of the last Great Depression (1929/33)

FACT: The sub prime mortgage collapse while a symptom is not a main cause of the crisis

The sub prime myth

Where is the US debt at?

FACT: Governments have always intervened in the economy...but always on the side of the capitalists.

The free market is a neo liberal myth.

FACT: When you drive down incomes you also drive down consumption.

We borrow to survive

because real wages have fallen

In 1980, world financial assets (bank deposits, government and private securities, and shareholdings)

amounted to 119%of global production;

by 2007 that ratio hadrisen to 356%.

Invest in claims on new value and profit

Let's call that

Fictitious Capital

FACT: This is not just a “Financial” Crisis

...but a crisis of the whole system

Rudd to the rescue....

"This strategy is designed to help pensioners, carers and families, and first home buyers."

$10.4 billion

Do your true blue Aussie duty

and

CONSUME

RESPONSE:

1. Stop bailing out the capitalist system.

RESPONSE:

2. Nationalise the banks and run them in the community interest.

Start by re-nationalising the Commonwealth Bank.

RESPONSE:

3.Give pensioners and the unemployed a living wage now.

4.Put the entire surplus (and borrow at least the equivalent) and invest immediately in

renewable energy conversion, public transport, public health, public education & public housing.

RESPONSE:

Those questions again:

1.Where did it come form?

2.How deep will it go?

3.How far will it spread?

4.Can it be stopped?

5.What's our response?