Comments by "Tony Wilson" (@tonywilson4713) on "Meet The Avatar For The Worst Of Corporate Capitalism | David Gelles | TMR" video.

  1. I'm an engineer who's been informally studying economics for a couple of years and YOU'RE RIGHT. The economics we are living with right now isn't capitalism as its been described or what people think its supposed to be. Clepto-Capitalism is a great description. Look at the very title of Adam Smiths book. Its "Wealth of Nations" NOT Wealth of the few and screw the rest. The interesting thing is that the work of Smith, Ricard, Marx and others were all in the vein of how do we (humanity) not go backwards into feudalism or mercantilism and yet what we have right now is a weird hybrid of feudalistic mercantilism. I've listened to a lot of the book talks Mark Blyth (Brown U.) has done. One was with a Eric Helleiner who's described what he calls neo-mercantilism and he's given the best explanation of what China is up to. At its core mercantilism is not simply about controlling wealth but also about political control at the nation versus nation level. What we now have are people who have no allegiance towards any nation or even society itself but their means of control is through economics. I recently watched a series of 4 talks by Damon Silvers for the UCL IIPP that Mariana Mazucatto runs and yeah I watched all 6 hours. The first of those talks is titled "Understanding Neoliberalism as a System of Power" Another great thing I saw recently was a video by Simon Clark titled "Global Warming: The Decade We Lost Earth" and he highlights that the whole denial campaigns that started in the first Bush Whitehouse had NOTHING to do with fossil fuels or solar or wind. Its was a political move by American Libertarians who are 100% of the mindset that NO Government should ever do anything except leave them to do whatever they like. What you call Clepto-Capitalism (which is an awesome label) is all about this small group of people getting what they want without any consideration of the rest of society, humanity or the planet. Their ideology is basically "We demand the liberty to strip the rest of you of your liberty!"
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  2.  @ResurgentVoice  no probs The other super person to listen to on economics is Gary Stevenson who's not a college professor, but was Citibank's top trader in the world by his mid 20s. He's what I call a rebel economist and has a great YouTube channel Garys Economics. He's also done a number of podcasts with Peter Komolafe which are pretty good.
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  3.  @ResurgentVoice  Best to ya. Take your time processing and its not a crime to back over stuff and check what was said.
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  4.  @8088I  thanks
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