Oprah Winfrey &

The Dumbing Down of America

As millions of Americans struggle to hold on to their homes, Wall Street has found a way to make money from the mortgage mess. Investment funds are buying billions of dollars? worth of home loans, discounted from the loans? original value.

With the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Agency, they'll finally have a watchdog to oversee financial products, giving Americans confidence that there is a system in place that works for them – not just big banks on Wall Street.

We've been hoodwinked into believing that unfettered capitalism espoused by Milton Friedman, promoted by Reagan and the rest is acceptable. I know that if we "stay the course" it will be ugly. The current economic meltdown is a harbinger.

Bernanke’s frank assessment of the “jobless recovery” [mass unemployment] will be used as a bludgeon to extract wage cuts and increased productivity from workers, From America’s ruling class point of view, that's not the problem but the solution.

The dirty little secret: both America and China are capable of producing far more than their own consumers are capable of buying. The real problem is inequality. How can the majority shop when they wallow in poverty? Debt is no longer an option.

It's an asset-based recovery, not a Main Street one. The economy is growing again, but the surge in productivity is a mirage. Worker output per hour is skyrocketing because companies generate as much output with fewer workers and fewer hours.

There was a sharp rise both in what is called “food insecurity” and “very low food security,” i.e., outright hunger. The rates recorded last year in both categories were the highest since the Agriculture Department began its annual surveys in 1995.

Nicholas Sarkozy has spent the past year hammering away at the excesses of American-style capitalism. In September, European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso declared that worker's rights and "social cohesion" were top priorities in Europe.

The film is about common people confronting and defeating capitalist exploitation and violent oppression: The Scarecrow represented farmers, the Tin Man stood for the factory workers, and the Munchkins of the "Lollipop Guild" were the union members.

We have lived through the regime of low-wage capitalism. It sweats the last ounce of profit from the hides of the worker. But has this exploitation brought capitalist overproduction to a point where it can no longer recover from this recession?

Our dominant, false ideology tells us that every function of government must be privatized. We are not told that the real reason for privatizing is to give capitalists yet another opportunity for making short term profit. We have been brainwashed.

The figure of 17.5% includes the officially unemployed, who have looked for work in the last month. It also includes discouraged workers, who have looked in the past year, as well as millions of part-time workers who want to be working full time.

The media display the official schizophrenia about the current crisis. On the one hand, recovery beckons; it’s about to start, it’s already started, the crisis is over. People in charge - Bernanke, Geithner, Obama himself - are quoted to this effect.

Describing interest rates as the biggest and most fundamental problem of the capitalist system, the Iranian leader said through a translator: "The world system based on usury [moneylending at high rates] has collapsed, proving its failure."

Unification brought freedom to travel and, for some, more material wealth. But it also brought social breakdown, widespread unemployment, blacklisting, a crass materialism and an "elbow society" as well as a propaganda demonisation of East Germany.

When the East collapsed, the disillusioned former Communists were ruthlessly suited to accommodate themselves to the new capitalist rules and the new cruel world of market efficiency, inclusive of all the new and old dirty tricks and corruption.

The success of capitalism depends on this grim account of "reality". "You can't change human nature" is the first article in the credo of capitalism; a mildly sorrowful recognition that human beings are "essentially" selfish, irremediably "fallen."

Not just another meltdown, another bear-market recession like the one recently triggered by Wall Street's too-greedy-to-fail banks. The entire system of capitalism will collapse. Get it? It will be a total disaster and we'll only ourselves to blame.

Success becomes confused with market values. Success in all domains becomes defined by the ideology of the marketplace. Only a few turned up to your party, so it wasn't a success. You only have a few friends on Facebook, so you aren't a success.

As an essential component of capitalist ideology, the idea of competition has been exaggerated and planted in the popular consciousness, its influence spreading beyond purely economic relations. To compete appears to be a natural thing to do.

We have the illusion of individual freedom. Capitalism fears the consequences of individualism - greater self-awareness and challenging the system. Capitalism is more than happy to give us the freedom to consume but not the freedom to question.

According to Retirement USA, set up by various advocacy groups, for workers ages 55-64, the average 401(k) account—on which millions now solely rely for their retirement—was $40,000. One-third of US households have no retirement savings at all.

Bankers have invoked Christianity to defend a banking system that has created wealth and inequality in capitalist societies. And this justification for greed: “The injunction of Jesus to love others as ourselves is an endorsement of self-interes.,”

When the Berlin Wall came crashing down 20 years ago, the cold war ended with triumph for the west. Instead of two superpowers, there was one. Instead of competing ideologies, there was capitalism. and a particularly brash form of capitalism at that.

Success becomes confused with market values. Success in all domains becomes defined by the ideology of the marketplace. Only a few turned up to your party, so it wasn't a success. You only have a few friends on Facebook, so you aren't a success.