On Tue, Mar 24, 2009 at 11:27 AM, Rick Wolff
<rdwolff@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
With some deft repartee, the film was criticized on this list for
the alternative it offers. Something having to do with Hawaiian shirts. The
film actually critiques the now mainstream solutions of more or less
Keynesian vintage, the reregulation nostrums now also fast becoming
mainstream, etc. It makes the following simple two points: (1) that these
mainstream solutions (like those of their predecessors in the New Deal) all
leave in tact corporate structures with their decision-making boards of
directors responsible to the tiny numbers of major shareholders, and (2)
that such boards have the incentives to evade, weaken, or undo those
solutions when and where they constrain profits and also the resources
(corporate profits) to realize those incentives. Perhaps, the film aims to
suggest, the failure to control let alone prevent capitalism's instability
as expressed in crises large and small (and the immense social costs
thereof) has something to do with exempting that structure of enterprise
from question, let alone radical transformation. The film offers a brief
sketch of an alternative structure of enterprise and reasons why it would
not have made key decisions leading to this latest capitalist crash.
Granted, there is not much about Hawaiian
Shirts, but then again, the film has something to say.
Rick Wolff