Wall Street's Fears On Lehman Batter Markets

No, it's not a failing of the free market. Firstly, the market is far from 'free'. Second, a company deserves to go under, if it's been making shady investments based on speculative risk. Investors see that the stock price has been artificially propped up by lies and creative accounting, now Lehman Brothers is paying for their poor foresight.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/di ... 02x3484444

"Funny" thing about FM & FM though.....Harper's magazine said the directors were fired. Last I read from other sources said they were kept on to help "straighten" things out......I guess what it is, is the old boys like to take care of themselves.

You're right, doc. There is no free market. Thst would scare the bejeebers out of all those free enterprise advocates

The reality is, capitalism is not hostile to state interventions in the economy, as right wing "market economists" would have us believe. So long as said state intervention serves overall ruling class interests, and mitigates in their favour against the inevitable greed driven crises typical of capitalism.

It is only interventions and state largess that serve the interests of the working class and its poor that they are against. The logic that really drives the ruling class is that,they, poor chaps, in times of market crises, are more usefully encouraged and motivated by corporatist state welfare handouts and "rescues", whilst the lower class "wage slave" elements are better motivated to behave and perform by big stick economic policy (cuts in welfare and UI, and a wage race to the bottom), and the threat of impending poverty if they do not take that minimum wage Ronald McDonald job.

Dr Caleb is right. The overarching reality is that there is no "free market", anymore than the electoral system is a real "democracy", other than in the most formalistic context. Both are equally rigged in favour of the corporate ruling class, overtly and covertly, and directed against the wage slave and underclass strata that are the flip side inevitability of capitalist practice. (The upper classes enrich themselves by the private accumulation theft of what is in fact a socially produced "profit" share, and by taking the economic share that would otherwise be distributed to the wage slave and underclasses.)

It is the central bullshit thread that runs throughout the so-called "free-market system."

And periodically, across what has been described as the "long wave" or Kondratieff Cycle, as the destruction of labour organization and the theft of lower class share becomes so onerous, that it begins to impoverish a precipitously large swath of "the majority consuming working class". Upon the heels of which process, it reaches such a crises point where these in fact "rigged markets" begin to collapse-, such as we are now beginning to witness.

Time for the rightist "free marketeer's" bullshit period of ascendancy to end, and to be superseded by a powerful "democracy of the streets." Keep it up you right wingnuts, we can't transform society without you and your ideological and policy excesses. You are, to this limited but not unimportant extent, the essential evil we must live with-, for awhile.

See, on the long wave or Kondratieff Cycle.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kondratiev_waves

French Revolution, anyone? I particularly like the bit about the guillotine......

Isn't it interesting that the "free market" proponents of the banking industry, namely the banking industry, take the profits with their investment gambles pay off, and cry for bailouts when they don't.

http://web.me.com/kontrol.ca/Site/Econo ... omics.html

Time to withdraw our savings and keep them in a sock......? Oh, that's right -- Canadians don't HAVE savings. The banks have successfully convinced us that actual savings are detrimental to the economy.

Now (it is said) the average Canuck is but two paycheques away from bankruptcy.......

It has been extremely interesting to watch this evolve over the years, beginning with the first major "restraint" government budgets of the early 80s ( for the working class that is, but more accurately the liberation of the corporations from regulation and elevating them to the status of legal individual entities, as a separate class), arriving really by logical extension at the current period of increasing impoverishment of the "wage slave consumer" and interconnected with that, growing so-called "free market" instability. Indeed, the signs of its impending collapse are all around us. (One should always hesitate to make absolute predictions, especially about economics. Too many variables. )

All of this, of course, growing out of the end of the postwar "prosperity period" and the succeeding decades that have come to be characterized by the ascendancy of the neocon (neo-liberal??) extreme right rule over capitalist economic policy and state governance, certainly near everywhere in the so-called western "free world". The overwhelmingly obvious reality is however, when one stands the two periods side by side for comparison, and examines both the "state regulated" postwar "socialized capitalism" prosperity period and the current neoconazi deregulated "corporatist capitalism" period, it is quickly clear, certainly to those of us "wage slaves" who have lived through both, that capitalism never did before nor has since, functioned so well and/or equitably as it did with "State regulation" during the "socialized capitalism" period of the postwar. Absolutely no contest.

Which is not to suggest that I think we can or even should go back to that period of state regulated capitalism, save as a short term measure to mitigate against the most extreme excesses of capitalism. (Sooner or later the power of the ruling class always manages to reverse the changes, bringing society again back to this same state of things. It is one of the lessons of history about capitalism that we need to learn.) It was in any case, a period created by a quite unique set of postwar circumstances, wherein the west, and especially North America was favourably positioned globally, and yet had within it all the fundamental class inequalities that always have and still characterize what we call capitalism. The sharp edges were just a tad softer.

First, the deterioration of class economic and political relations currently underway are unlikely to be able to be called back now. It has all gone on too far for too long. Secondly , it is becoming increasingly clear that capitalism and the well being of the planet and its essential life-giving systems are dangerously incompatible, especially with the need for endless growth in production, markets and population that are so integral to "the system". As well I think, the working class and other broad social strata of society are finally coming to understand that there must be a fundamental realignment of power relations between the classes in society; the creation of a truly democratic system within and over the economy and its corporate enterprises especially, and flowing out of that a fundamental change in the "democratic character" and arrangement of power relationships at the level of the State, or within "politics" itself. (To which I suggest "parties" are a detriment-, currently mostly a distraction, but especially becoming increasingly problematic over an unspecified evolutionary time, as the class issues come to be gradually better understood and "sorted out".)

Forward, not backward like the extreme right of capitalism always chooses, is the only real option available to society and its "masses" now-, as it has ever really been.

Capitalism is nothing more than socialism for sociopaths!

Extreme good one, brother.

There's your free market for you, as Washington passes the buck, in more ways than one. DC politicians refuse to regulate the corporations, because that will eliminate the need for the suits to "grease the machine," which continues to run like a jalopy. Kind of looks like this whole thing was planned to grab what little the slave class has left.