The Chart That Scares The "1%" The Most

[Huey P. Long]

The Chart That Scares The "1%" The Most
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 06/20/2012 19:15 -0400

Capitalists have been gripped by 'systemic fear' making them worry not about the day-to-day movements of growth, employment, and profit, but about 'losing their grip'. An interesting recent article by the Real-World Economics Review on the Asymptotes of Power focuses on the fact that the capitalists are forced to realize that their system may not be eternal, and that it may not survive in its current form. The authors fear that, peering into the future, the '1%' realize that in order to maintain (or further increase) their distributional power (their net profit share of national income - which hovers at record highs) they will have to unleash even greater doses of social 'violence' on the lower classes. The high level of force already being applied makes them increasingly fearful of the backlash they are about to receive (think Europe to a lesser extent) and nowhere is this relationship between the wealthy capitalists and social upheaval more evident than in the incredible correlation between the Top 10% share of wealth and the percent of the labor force in prison. In order to have reached the peak level of power it currently enjoys, the ruling class has had to inflict growing threats, sabotage and pain on the underlying population.



During the 1930s and 1940s, this level proved to be the asymptote of capitalist power: it triggered a systemic crisis, the complete reordering of the U.S. political economy, and a sharp decline in capitalist power, as indicated by the large drop in inequality.

As we can see, since the 1940s this ratio has been tightly and positively correlated with the distributional power of the ruling class: the greater the power indicated by the income share of the top 10 per cent of the population, the larger the dose of violence proxied by the correctional population. Presently, the number of ‘corrected’ adults is equivalent to nearly 5 per cent of the U.S. labour force. This is the largest proportion in the world, as well as in the history of the United States. Nowadays, the notions of systemic fear and systemic crisis are no longer farfetched. In fact, they seem to have become commonplace. Public figures – from dominant capitalists and corporate executives, to Nobel laureates and finance ministers, to journalists and TV hosts – know to warn us that the ‘system is at risk’, and that if we fail to do something about it, we may face the ‘end of the world as we know it’.
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As a consequence of these common foundations, all existing explanations, regardless of their orientation, seem to agree on the following three points:

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http://www.zerohedge.com/news/chart-scares-1-most

[Cooley Hurd]

1. Go Kingfish!!! Rec!

[Huey P. Long]

2. Thank you sir/ma'am. You go too! -eom

[Huey P. Long]

3. this should be read. I will look for the PDF as well.

asymptote of capitalist power

[Selatius]

4. That's why Franklin Roosevelt was called a traitor to his class.

He started the New Deal, and he partially subsidized it by hiking taxes on the rich and using some of that revenue to put workers back on the line. Rather than subsidizing the banks on Wall Street when they crashed, he let them burn, while mitigating the damage by pushing through jobs programs designed to keep the workers going, and he instituted anti-trust laws to prevent the sort of consolidation that was seen between commercial and investment banks that had occurred in the 1920s.

[Huey P. Long]

5. Larger essay referenced-

real-world economics review, issue no. 60

The asymptotes of power
Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan1 [Israel and York University, Canada]


http://bnarchives.yorku.ca/336/02/20120600_bn_the_asymptotes_of_power_rwer.pdf

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Introduction
This is the latest in a series of articles we have been writing on the current crisis. The purpose of our previous papers was to characterize the crisis. We claimed that it was a ‘systemic crisis’, and that capitalists were gripped by ‘systemic fear’. In this article, we seek to explain why.
Begin with systemic fear. This fear, we argue, concerns the very existence of capitalism. It causes capitalists to shift their attention from the day-to-day movements of capitalism to its very foundations. It makes them worry not about the short-term ups and downs of growth, employment and profit, but about ‘losing their grip’. It forces on them the realization that their system is not eternal, and that it may not survive – at least not in its current form.
When we first articulated this argument in 2009 and 2010, the response was largely dismissive. Capitalism was obviously in trouble, went the counterargument. But the crisis, though deep, was by no means systemic. It threatened neither the existence of capitalism nor the confidence of capitalists in their power to rule it. To argue that capitalists were losing their grip was frivolous.
But over the past year, the attitude has changed, decisively.