The Death Spiral of Modern Capitalism

Toshiba is testing the genetics of its Japanese employees. I suppose this kind of monetization was inevitable. Toshiba has left the semi-conductor business and needs a new form of endeavor. They believe that by focusing on just the Japanese, they can make a simpler, cheaper form of testing.

Of course, that is an incredible taking. Literally the genetic existence of tens of thousands mapped. This needs to be stored so that it cannot be used but its effects will trickle down to all descendants and is subject to misuse in countless ways.

Make no mistake. Something of real and tangible value is being taken here.
Monetizing the genetic information of one’s employees is a logical step if you’ve been educated in exploitation. I suppose and suspect that blood and internal organs will be next. Employees will simply become sources of value to be shorn like sheep on perhaps a semi-annual basis.

I mean, why not? The banks went from storing your money and giving you interest for it to a fee charging service. A world of retail was converted into immediate value by “investors.”

We live in a period of monetization, the death spiral of capitalism.
Once you get past early capitalism’s focus on producing goods and services, you move toward maximizing profit for as a little effort as possible. Let me give you a simple example, Enron’s purchase of the water rights in Bolivia. Enron literally bought the rights to the rain! The government attempted to stop its own people from collecting rain water. Enron, of course, collapsed before its fantasy of worldwide control of water resources could be realized. But it was a precurser to much of what is happening now.

This is a hardcore modern capitalism. Get a hold of a resource people have to have and charge a fee that they must bear. Be it insulin, water, a transportation hub, the grasping hand of modern ruthless ethicless capitalism is clearly visible.

Get a hold of David Halberstam’s book, “The Reckoning,” and watch the struggle between the desire to make good cars and just to make money – and the suffer the pain of watching those who want to make a good product defeated time and again.

It’s important for a society to be creative and to make things. Cars, boats, refrigerators, toys, etc. because they are real things with real value. Our culture mainly moves money in the form of magnetic impulses. Do you have any concept of how hard this is going to be for future societies to understand? It’s as if we are all involved in a giant value destroying conspiracy where we take real items of real value and our most important cultural ideas like religion and convert them into money. Churches become mega-churches where you can also buy insurance and day care while factories lie empty and rusting because the money freely moved overseas or just migrated to some offshore isle.

Our system is near the end of its time. Our pampered ignorant elites live a no fault existence of summer homes and calculated investments while ignoring their obligations to live lives of some relevance and toying with the concept of eternal life perhaps as those self/same computer impulses by which they exchange money. Huge tracts of the United States are barren of government and private investment. Only small enclaves on the coasts have booming economies while the rest of us are forgotten and the rage of this is changing all of our politics for the worse.

There are three ways this can end. We can have war. The government can collapse. Or they can be renewal as in the Green New Deal where we find our way as a great people again and cast the ghastly philosophy of Libertarianism into the depths where it can reside along with other useless and counterproductive philosophies like the divine right of kings.

James Pilant