As the New York Times has noted:
The Federal Aviation Administration ... on Friday halted nearly all departures and stranded thousands of passengers at airports across the country.
Hundreds of flights were diverted to other airports and more were canceled, even as some internationally bound flights managed to secure permission to take off.
Many passengers were taken off flights or told to go home. Chaos spread at airports as travelers sought answers from airline and airport employees.
This morning's video in the Understanding Economics series is on capital. Monday's will be on the need for capital maintenance. And this failure in the USA is because, in the neoliberal era, no one is maintaining capital, especially that linked to the critical infrastructure that keeps countries going.
We are bad at this in the UK.
The USA is no better.
One reason for protests and riots in France has been failing education infrastructure.
In the interests of cost saving, and in pursuit of austerity - which is both the politics of neglect as well as of cruelty - we have been consuming our capital, with the result that we have been living well beyond our means.
Unless we re-engage with capital and its significance, we are in deep trouble, but nowhere more so than when we consider ecological capital, where the failure to engage with the issue will eventually cost billions their lives and cause turmoil at a level none of us can currently really imagine.
Capital, and capital maintenance. are relatively straightforward economic concepts. Our refusal to recognise them as issues, except for financial capital, has had a very heavy price tag attached.
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Is it just me or is it that our societies are now like the water reservoirs we see around us – they are becoming lower and more dry because of lack of rain?
We’ve had what – nearly 50 plus years of Neo-liberalism. Neo-liberalism is the epitome of Frederic Bastiat’s observation of organised plunder (theft) and how a minority can benefit from it. Capital has stolen so much and rewarded so narrowly that some of our most basic provisions are now coming apart at the seams. To the point where even a bad idea like mass air travel will unravel.
And a lot of this is because Neo-liberalism has fundamentally perverted the nature of ‘investment’ which is now nothing but an entry fee to enable exploitation and rents – squeezing the value out and siphoning it off leaving a husk of the asset behind.
But another thought occurs to me as well. This theft is absolutely huge. There is a huge case to answer. It’s no wonder that finance is so extreme in how it operates in that is has to become more extreme in order to ensure it never becomes accountable for the stealing that has taken place.
We can see this in how finance has captured democracy and corrupts politicians. But it still worth considering that if and when a day of reckoning ever comes, how we will deal with this. There has to be some sort of reparation.
That would be good