The Sickness is the System: When Capitalism Fails to Save Us from Pandemics or Itself

by Richard D. Wolff

Whether it’s the Fed making money available, cheap loans on a scale we’ve never seen before (counted in the trillions), or it’s the passing of a stimulus law that, again, sends trillions into the economy, it’s mostly going into the hands of businesses. This means that in a typical corporation, the people at the top, the average 12-15-person board of directors is making the decision of what to do with whatever the government gives to “stimulate the economy.” That’s not a democratic mechanism. This is allowing a tiny group of people inside each enterprise, who are committed to its profit as their bottom line, to make all the basic enterprise decisions (like how exactly to use Fed money or stimulus funds given to the enterprise). That’s a terrible mistake, which we should recognize after what happened the last time the American capitalist system crashed in 2008. Again, trillions were thrown at the business community by, again, the Fed and by the U.S. Treasury. Again, the people at the top took the money. And what did they do? Did they rebuild the economy the way it was before? Not at all. Did they put billions of people back to work in the jobs they once had? Not at all. After the subprime mortgage crash, bailed-out businesses and banks raised the salaries of top executives and bought back their own stock in the stock market, which drove up the prices of those stocks which were owned by the shareholders of the company. That’s right. Corporate executives and shareholders did w...