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--- Begin Message --- -Caveat Lector- Click here: Standard Schaefer: Who Benefited from the Tech Bubble? an Interview with Michael Hudson
http://www.counterpunch.org/schaefer08302003.html
"The 1990s were not so much a decade of technological innovation as financial innovation, including the political deregulation of companies being financialized.
"This financial innovation has not spurred technology and industry but has instead worked to strip capital formation, research and development. 'Economic research' consists largely of looking over balance sheets to engineer corporate takeovers rather than improve production techniques.
"The [objectification] of labor and production has consisted mainly of working labor harder and burning it out earlier, while stripping away the responsibility for employers to pay [employees benefits]. [Employers can avoid paying for employees'] medical and retirement insurance by out-sourcing labor, moving it off the balance sheet. The result intensifies the [enslavement] of labor rather than freeing labor.
"Let's look at the August 2003 blackout. Neither the power generation companies nor the distribution companies had a 'market' motivation to supply sufficient power. Just the opposite.
"The power companies realized that they could make more by not investing, leading to shortages that would enable them to charge crisis prices, Enron-style, than by investing to keep up with the growth of demand -- in this case, peak demand.
"Distribution companies for their part had little 'market' incentive to build more transmission capacity that would only be used at peak hours.
"In this sense, the power crash was created by the deregulation philosophy pursued since the Market Fundamentalists gained control of public policy in the 1980s. Their philosophy in turn was sponsored by the financial sector, in order to gain rent-yielding resources and manipulate balance sheets so as to avoid paying taxes.
"Many engineers have been warning that the present crash was bound to occur. Here again the cause was not technology as such, but [the] economic ideology [manipulating it]."
[On the "privatized" healthcare system:] "The 'human capital' that represents the cost of graduate medical education finds its counterpart in education loans, also at interest. It takes most doctors many years just to work their way out of debt and get to the 'zero' mark.
"In this sense they are comparable to other professions. Modern men and women are born into debt and spend their working lives trying to extricate themselves. The more capital-intensive and patent-intensive (that is, rent-yielding) the technology is, the harder it is for its practitioners and consumers to work their way out of debt.
"It's as if debt has become the post-modern version of Original Sin."
"In most cases, technology has simply been a vehicle to induce its users (and the companies supplying it) to run into debt.
"In this respect its major consequence has been financial, and this has been largely left out of account. The economic surplus is being absorbed by interest charges on the loans that have financed the capital investment that doctors make, telecom companies make, and that the big information technology companies have made, without generating the profits needed to pay off this debt.
"Most people are now coming to see the costs that are left in the wake of this kind of financialized technology. Attorney General Eliot Spitzer's prosecutions depict Wall Street as using technology as an opportunity to charge heavy fees for underwriting and promoting stocks, and seizing the opportunity to make quick trading gains. These gains have accrued to finance capital, not physical capital. The result --and in many cases even the aim-- of technology has not been to benefit society, but to create management fees, consulting fees and lending opportunities for the financial sector.
"The supposed beneficiaries you asked about earlier --the consumers-- are being squeezed. The employees in these new high-tech industries are being squeezed, and as employees they are being squeezed even more by being overworked, and then laid off. Many have defaulted on their home mortgages and other debts.
"Small investors who put their savings into these companies are likely to find themselves wiped out by the insider dealing and financial maneuverings that have been engineered -- and without any serious criminal prosecutions to date!
"It is an ominous sign of our times that the term 'engineering' is now being used more in reference to corporate balance sheets than to physical research and development.
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