Bogle: Capitalism has suffered 'pathological mutation'

[NeoConsSuck]

When John Bogle, a 50-year veteran in financial services, says capitalism is in trouble, there is only one proper reaction: You listen.

First, Bogle's qualifications: He founded the first index fund in 1975 (Vanguard 500 Index Fund). In 1999, Fortune named him one of the four investment "Giants of the 20th Century," and in 2004, Time magazine called him one of the world's 100 most influential and powerful people. A lifelong businessman (and Republican, he likes to add), Bogle is nothing if not the champion of idealistic capitalism.

<snip>

With power moving away from owners of securities, this new system has been led afoul by "grossly excessive executive compensation and stock options, part of an enormous transfer of wealth from public investors to the hands of business leaders, corporate insiders and financial intermediaries."

"In 1980, the compensation of the average chief executive officer was forty-two times that of the average worker; by 2004, the ratio had soared to 280 times that of the average worker (down from an astonishing 531 times at the peak in 2000)."

And in the matter of corporate scandal and fraud, it's not a case of a few "bad apples," Bogle writes, but of "a corporate barrel that itself is in need of considerable repair."

http://www.usatoday.com/money/books/reviews/2005-12-11-bogle-book_x.htm

[HysteryDiagnosis]

1. Won't it be grand when we export this system to all the nations we

free and democrafrize?? Won't they be lucky when they too find out that their pensions and retirements are pffffffft?

[patrice]

5. Democrafrize!!!

:rofl:

[HysteryDiagnosis]

6. I'm sorry.... I was having a shrubberific moment..... it shows. nt. :)

[Warpy]

2. Ah, yes, the law of unintended consequences

Part of altering ANY system has got to be thinking, "OK, what is the worst that a bunch of greedy, selfish sons of bitches can do with this?" and altering your plans accordingly.

Mr. Bogle is just a bit late. The time for him to start speaking out was 20 years ago when the process was just beginning. I guess he's already made his billion, and now he's realized the embezzlers are getting in the way of his second billion.

That's what it is, Mr. Bogle, embezzlement. Once you begin calling it by its proper name, you begin to see the solution, and it involves sweeping the GOP and DLC out of Congress and getting these bastards investigated and most of them jailed.

Of course, some of the shit is going to get on you. You started part of the process.

[xchrom]

4. gasp -- you critisized the dlc!?!?!

the dlc moderates here are gonna get all over you -- aren't you scared?

:yoiks:

[patrice]

3. Thanks, I'm going to use that!

[newswolf56]

7. The irredeemable flaw of capitalism is that...

capitalism's entire purpose is the elevation of greed into a virtue. Once greed is so defined, the methods of greed -- theft, robbery, mayhem, murder, tyranny in general -- are themselves elevated to the stature of good works. Thus not only capitalism's compulsion to corrupt every system in which it is allowed to operate, but also to become ever more savagely oppressive in the interest of profits; thus too capitalism's instinctive preference for fascism (demonstrated first in Europe and now in the United States itself) -- all of which is unequivocally proven by history.

What Bogle describes is in truth not "mutation" but merely capitalism's normal process of development. The basic problem is that capitalism is intrinsically evil -- another fact established beyond doubt by history, one that is increasingly evident now that the Bush Administration is resurrecting capitalism's most tyrannosauric elements.

As for Bogle himself, he is merely another apologist who would obscure the core malevolence of capitalism by arguing that its evil can be remedied by "repair."

The paradox of course is that history also proves capitalism is vital (at least at this sorry stage of human development) for protection against an infinity of problems most often created by humanity itself, i.e., "progress." The solution is really quite simple: to acknowledge capitalism's innate evil, and to cage and harness it accordingly -- precisely the conceptual foundation of the New Deal, and the cornerstone of its infinite genius.

[Peace Patriot]

8. And when the bars of that cage are ripped off and thrown away, and the

banshees of predatory capitalism are let loose, the result is....the Great Crash 1929 and ten years of starvation, death, homelessness, joblessnes and the starkest of sufferings for billions of people. That's what the Bush Cartel has done--at the moment in history when the planet's natural resources are nearing their end. Our corporate overlords have stripped it of forests. They've killed ocean fisheries. They've used up almost all of the petroleum, and dirtied the air with it, and have furthermore polluted the atomosphere to the point of holes in the protective ozone layer, and vast and disruptive climate changes that will make "the Dust Bowl" seem gentle by comparison. Tend your gardens, friends. Get solar panels. Hunker down. And...

Throw Diebold and ES&S election theft machines into 'Boston Harbor' NOW!

[Vidar]

9. Eloquent , succinct & right on target.