A Few Brave Capitalists Try To Salvage The Wreck That Is Capitalism Today...

Why American capitalism doesn't work

... and Robert Reich explains to those few that the primary task is, unavoidably, to make changes to American capitalism so that it benefits a much broader segment of the American people. That means raising the minimum wage significantly and making useful jobs (e.g., infrastructure maintenance) available to far more people, both by government action at least in the short term. And even with the best-managed government, we have to raise taxes on the 1 percent, back to where they were in, say, Eisenhower's day. If we don't have lower- and middle-class consumers as customers, we don't have the slightest chance of running a free-market economy, and if we don't pay the middle and lower classes a living wage, we don't have consumers... and that's not even considering the consequent human suffering.

You'd think that simple truth would be enlightened self-interest for every small business owner, large company CEO, etc. But at present it's not. Most of them seem to want to emulate the Kochs or Adelson or Trump or some other obscenely wealthy and socially useless (bleep!). I don't have a lot of hope for Reich's success, but it is somewhat heartening that at least some very wealthy Americans see that our current path... I've read that 95 percent of the gains in the so-called "recovery" have gone straight to the top 1 percent... leads to a dead end.