Tear Down the Ghetto: The Price is Wrong

[Joanne98]

by BAR executive editor Glen Ford

The global capitalist system is way past recession, beyond old definitions of depression; it has lost all cohesion and is, essentially, beyond salvaging. Unable to produce anything but horrific and perfectly predictable bubbles, incapable of tallying up its collective assets to within any order of magnitude, the defeated organism turns on itself. The latest scheme to redeem the system would bulldoze overpriced bubble housing - destroy much of the inventory - in order to produce scarcity and eventual price stability. Capitalist health through amputation - a solution that can only be attempted a few times.

Tear Down the Ghetto: The Price is Wrong

If these ghetto houses cannot be financed at the bubble prices demanded, then they must be torn down."



The final crisis of capitalism is no longer looming: it has arrived with all the mad presence of a six-foot-seven transvestite at the head of the parade at the stroke of midnight in Greenwich Village on Halloween.

Here's the latest criminal enterprise hatched by the ruling sectors of U.S. society: tear down all that overpriced housing, the stuff that was only recently built but can no longer be financed for sale. No, don't convert it to useful purposes as rental units or reasonably-priced family homes to satisfy the desperate needs of millions of families - and of people who wish they could successfully constitute themselves as households in this jungle-like environment. Just make it all go away, with the federal government paying the bill for the massive destruction.

It is now proposed that the "excess" housing stock of the United States be knocked down, bulldozed until a renewed shortage of shelter will render the housing that survives worth something close to the prices advertised before the bubble burst.

It has come to this: The U.S. economy can only heal itself by destroying those few products it can still manage to create. This is what happens when pure capitalists rule society, the people with no connection to actual production of goods and services, but only to the uses of money, or the recently coined phrase "moneyness" - stuff that can be made to act for a while as if it were money. Like the $516 trillion in "derivatives" that big banks have to hold on to because nobody knows what's in these strange "instruments" - which were just as good as money as long as financial institutions pretended they really were money-like.

"The U.S. economy can only heal itself by destroying those few products it can still manage to create."

At some point, the derivatives will have to be disposed of, but there's a problem. The yearly gross product of the United States is only about $17 trillion, and the entire planet only produces about $50 trillion in goods and services a year. Therefore, nobody can possibly bail out ten times the Earth's worth in derivatives.

But the capitalist fools can start tearing down some houses.

Continued>>>
http://www.blackagendareport.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=577&Itemid=1

[Karenina]

1. :SIGH:

[flashl]

2. I would rec, sorry I didn't see this earlier.

Is it OK to XPost to poverty?

[Hannah Bell]

3. This process, of destroying some of the capital accumulated in

previous expansions, is precisely how capitalism maintains its "value".

Here it is:

Boom: expand production through credit: profits up, capacity up = overproduction = declining profits

Bust: withdraw credit, business failure, unemployment.

Interim: consolidation of productive capacity in the hands of the biggest players, destruction or mothballing of excess capacity to restore profits & prices.

Rinse & repeat.