Socialist Progressives
Related: About this forumThe forgotten business support for the New Deal and Bretton Woods
Excerpted from "The Rise of the Right in the U.S." by Chris Wright.
This bloc was a small part of the business community in the 1930s, but it was immensely powerful. It included many of the largest and fastest-growing corporations in the country, including General Electric, IBM, Pan Am, oil companies like Shell, Standard Oil of New Jersey and Standard Oil of California, and banks like Chase National Bank, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, and Lehman Brothers. The controlling interests in these businesses also dominated leading American foundations,and so could exercise major influence on political opinion and public policy. Once this bloc had come together and allied with Roosevelt, it dominated policy for a generation. The administration embarked on a historic program of trade liberalization and efforts at currency stabilization, which after World War II took the form of the famous Bretton Woods system that lasted until the early 1970s. As you may know, Bretton Woods established the dollar as the vehicle currency to be used in the conduct and financing of international trade, and brought order to foreign-exchange markets by establishing a system of fixed exchange rates among the worlds currencies, tied to the dollar; the dollar, in turn, was convertible to gold. The various institutional innovations of Bretton Woods helped make possible the incredible growth of the American and world economy in the postwar period.
http://media.wix.com/ugd/9b146c_743baaa4bc944411b3539c57c24eefb5.pdf
(p. 6-7.)
HassleCat
(6,409 posts)Capitalism is its pure form is totalitarian, which makes me laugh at the so-called free market advocates. The interesting feature of capitalism is that it seems to sense various ways to discourage people from rising up against the system. In wealthy countries, such as the US, this is easy. Just support a welfare state that does not levy onerous taxes, but still provides enough of a safety net to prevent large scale starvation, disease outbreaks, etc. It doesn't hurt to promote such nuggets of conventional wisdom as, "Our poor are the envy of most of the world." The only problem for capitalists, and it's a small problem, is making sure the government doesn't tax and regulate to the point of hurting profits. In other words, greed is good, just as Ronald Reagan said, but excessive greed is... well... just excessive. It's not a fair system. It's not the best system. But it's a system very capable of looking out for its own survival.