Economic opportunity?-DRAFT

The American economy is built on a system of risk and reward. Many people take risks (gambles, really, I will explore this more later) with their money (ie: in the stock market) and most of those risks do not pay off.

Corporations take these risks too.

The greater the risk taken, the greater the promise of reward and the greater the potential downfall if not successful. This is one of the ways in which the economic system of capitalism as we have created it unfairly favors those who already have money to continue to make more money and create the division of wealth.

By bailing out corporations we are essentially saying that if you take great risk, if you either make a mistake or circumstances outside of your control conspire to keep you from succeeding, at some point you are so integral to the system of our society that you should not have to fail. This a) establishes and institutionalizes the superior role of these companies and b) alters the roles of those companies within the theoretically capitalist system. Capitalism and the following theories of capitalist economics should be reevaluated in light of this institutionalized, government-issued superiority.

Instead, I propose an alternative solution: revolution. If we want drastic changes in our social structure, a well-timed economic coup is essential. And the only way to shift money (and thus power) from the hands of those whose grasp is maintained by the self-perpetuating control of the government and legal system is to take advantage of this brief downfall of those in power. We must resist economic bailouts for giant corporations, including companies such as GM. Yes, the economy will be bad without the bailouts, yes people will suffer, and the poor and people of color and women and immigrants will suffer the worst, but I say that we will suffer as much or more (certainly for longer) with the bailout as without it. To put up with enhanced short-term suffering to throw down those economic giants means the opportunity for new organization, new companies to emerge. Regardless of my sentiments about capitalism, it is an embedded system. At least we can begin by using it to our advantage. At the same time, those new and rising companies must be in the hands of the oppressed; the poor, the people of color, the women, and other oppressed groups that I do not take the time to identify here. And some should be working to help that economic power get into the hands of those oppressed groups.

But this is not a solution, only a step. Once this power transfer has happened it is only one step towards altering the institutionalized power structures that maintain oppressive systems in the United States. But a useful one.