There is no need for cuts. Society is awash with cash.

Source: Zero Hedge

Richard Mellor

Afscme Local 444, retired

2-17-20

The Virginia Company was an English investment company given a charter by the state. The investors of the Virginia Company financed the expeditions to the “New World” and the first permanent English settlement in Jamestown in 1607. The capitalists and members of the English ruling classes that led these expeditions had a hard time of it, but not as hard as the English, Irish, German, Scots, Africans and poor of the world that were pressed, dragged, coerced and violently brought along to do the work.

Tobacco played such an important role in the economy of the colony. Fines could be paid in it and it was the major export. The colonial project was a mono-culture, life and death depended on this crop. For the few it made them very rich. When the investors did not receive the returns agreed to for financing the project, they were given land as compensation. We are talking about the early 16^th century here so the theft of the land on this continent by a colonial power started real early. It was not stolen from other individual owners of course, as the land, was owned collectively it was part of the natural world like the people on it.

The capitalist system of production cannot exist without free labor. In other words, those that own no capital but lived off the land and owned their own instruments of labor had to be set free from these encumbrances, or more accurately liberated from them. A human being that could produce their own food, their own clothes, their daily needs, would have no need to work for a capitalist. The British peasants were driven from their common land for the same reason. It was the inability of the new system to absorb all this labor power in its early stages that led to the horrors of the work houses and the introduction of capital punishment for vagrancy, begging or poaching for food. Marx talked of the Dutch introducing capitalist relations in to Java and the terrible decline in the population that resulted, “Sweet Commerce” wrote Marx sarcastically.

The English capitalists control of the slave trade in the coming decades brought more riches until slavery was abolished forcing English capitalism to enter the African continent and plunder more directly. The Treaty of Berlin between the European colonial powers was an attempt to temper the war among thieves for Africa’s riches.

If the capitalist class that arose from the womb of feudal society thought investing in tobacco 3,000 miles from home was a great deal it was because back then they couldn’t imagine the riches that time and plunder would bring.

As the image shows, last year there were five hedge fund managers that made more than one billion dollars each in 2019.  Hedge funds are pools of money that are managed by firms and are open only to what they call sophisticated or accredited investors and cannot be offered or sold to the general public. These are a very exclusive and private gang, finance houses banks and so forth. You won’t hear Trump attack this gang like he does the MS-13 or desperate economic refugees who he calls gangsters, criminals and murderers. What difference are these financial parasites, coupon clippers, to the Mexican drug cartels other than they are legal.

And we should not lose sight of the fact that the hedge fund manager is merely the guy that manages the investments of this pool of capital. We will never be told, willingly anyway, who the owners of this capital are and how much they collectively rake in over time.

Perhaps they are investors in mining in Bolivia or East Timor. Apparel companies in Cambodia, Bangladesh or Vietnam. They are the leading parasites of the world. Trump will not ask these people to pay for his wall because they would soon put a stop to such nonsense. The US taxpayer shouldn't either.

Maybe some of them invest in moneylending outfits that suck the lifeblood out of working people after they have already been ripped off through the labor process.

They never pass an opportunity to make money without working for it. Productive labor is alien to them. The moneylender is having a good time so far so investing in their vehicles. The credit card industry is a particularly good deal. Outstanding credit card debt hit a record high of $880 billion last September as interest rates on balances also hit a two decade high which was good for the credit card companies earning $179 billion in revenue from interest and fees. Bloomberg claims card companies will earn the highest returns in banking this year as credit card debt is rising faster than any other consumer debt (Housing, auto, etc.) Isn’t money lending frowned upon in the Bible?

Marx pointed out one of the main contradictions of the capitalist system, in that it produces too much, its productive power so great so that it reaches a point where it threatens the system itself. Workers as consumers are unable to buy back the goods that capitalist society produces and the system hits its limits as a functioning economic system. The problem is that the source of the capitalist’s wealth is contained in the commodity that must be sold, it contains within it, labor power that the capitalist paid for and labor power he didn’t. That’s the goose that laid the golden egg.  One way it overcomes this is debt, debt allows capitalism to go beyond its limits but like any sort of debt, at some point it has to be paid and the system goes in to crisis. It has been described as like an elastic band that stretches in order to function but at some point snaps back to it original length. That’s what happens with the capitalist system, workers are throw on the dole pile, value in the form of bricks and mortar and machinery are destroyed or idled.

Perhaps the best quote of the first quarter is from the credit card company, Capital One that states that “Acting in the best interest of our customers is our paramount consideration” when it comes to credit lines.

Yes, Capital One is a corporation that be quoted because a corporation is classified as a person with the rights thereof.