SCHUMPETER: CAPITALISM, SOCIALISM, DEMOCRACY by John Kilcullen of Australia's Macquarie University 1996 * * * "Capitalism is a schema of motives that is unsurpassed in simplicity and force. The promises of wealth and the threats of destitution that it holds out, it redeems with ruthless promptitude . . ." ________________________________________ | 
In 1961 Garry Davis wrote The World is my Country: the adventures of a world citizen. Born 1921 in the USA, he served in the US Air Force during WWII as a B-17 bomber pilot but renounced his citizenship in 1948. He then travelled widely on a self-created world passport. He offers one and all to become a world citizen as well by applying for such a passport at World Government. Who Owns the World? he asks today. | |
". . . economists visualize a world consisting of differently-colored Hitlerish patches of territories from within which each man is thinking hard economically so as to defeat his neighbor:" Nataraja Guru. "The new formula then for economic democracy and freedom for one and all becomes," writes Davis,": "World Citizen = World Owner. Either nations are sovereign or humanity is." "As the Emperor Antonius, Rome is my city and my country; but as a man I am a citizen of the world." ~ Antonius Meditations ________________________________________ populations concentrated in vast urban 'asphalt jungles' that are little more than high-tech re-education camps to be inculcated in the the values of capitalist democracy that have produced an irrational and troubled society
under constant bombardment of 'shop til you drop' inducements for: ~ automobiles on the cuff ~ medicinal preparations to alienate the human body ~ 'fast' food, liquor and beer ~ diets! ~ movies, video games, internet and electronic doodads for an earbudded generation ~ financial institutions which 'craft' investments ~ and governments bragging and nagging to compensate for lack of societal ethics |
~ direct effort to a better purpose than consumption ~
compassion, happiness (inner peace), world peace ________________________________________
Dilbert ________________________________________
Extortionate profiteering is rife; Food shortages plague the world. And everything in the cap-dem is going to shit. It is difficult not to suspect a conspiracy. Naomi Klein's latest book, The Shock Doctrine, exposes the myth that the global free market triumphed democratically. Exposing the thinking of "Disaster Capitalism", the money trail and the puppet strings behind the world-changing crises and wars of the last four decades, it is the story of how “free market” policies have come to dominate the world ~ through the exploitation of disaster-shocked people and countries.
NAFTA Canadian Secretariat Who and what is the Council on Foreign Relations? Global Research Canada
Building the World State. How to Create Chaos and Revolution: The OECD, the IMF and the World Bank ~ in a Danish blog from the English blog of Quaker Tony Gosling [not really the] Bilderberg organization ~ masses of info and links, and strong opinions: The present world system, led mostly by English speaking Western NATO nations, is occupied by a clandestine web of secularists, atheists and occultists. People in political power who are ostensibly Christians or Jews are essential to deflect criticism by the church and they often hold high rank whilst secretly holding both Old and New Testament in contempt. The two main bonds of slavery which the occultists have over the years used to enslave us are land and money. Once land was stolen from under out feet using the lie of 'agricultural improvement' or enclosure all evicted people became dependent on money for food and shelter, ie. to survive. People have somehow been convinced that there is 'not enough land to go round' when the earth is a free gift to mankind and Britain's population of 60 million have about 60 million acres in total on which to live, roughly an acre each. Once the right to somewhere to live had been stripped from us the subsequent manipulation of the money system by private goldsmiths and bankers for private profit, including the modern manifestations of the world bank IMF etc. has led most of the world's population to a situation of economic slavery. Money has become not a convenient means of exchange but a means of control and ownership by which the world's resources are slowly being stolen from ordinary people, and individuals in general, and owned by faceless corporations run by accountants which, whilst classed in company law as having the rights of a person, are immune in law for suffering resulting from corporate decisions. ________________________________________
ethical demand:
in a money economy price equals costs of production and delivery plus a reasonable margin of profit ~ no market of supply and demand
capitalist economy does not recognize societal ownership of the land, nor any cost for the dross of its factories
________________________________________ ~ read it ~today, january 27, 2009, is budget day the feds will post an $83 BILLION deficit every man, woman, and child will contribute to the erstwhile capitalists who pissed it away while the bosses raked in millions ~ . . . and weep! ~Easing social inequality, not tax cuts and credit, the key to recovery
by TREVOR W. HARRISON Finance Minister Jim Flaherty is said to be contemplating a mix of infrastructure spending and tax cuts in his upcoming budget, while also pressuring banks to loosen their purses. Irrespective of the pros and cons of each approaches, the fact is all three fail to recognize the role social inequality has played in the current economic crisis. Now, I can hear you saying, "What?" To connect the dots, we have to go on a time travel. Our first stop is the late 1970s. It's the launch of globalization. Margaret 'Thatcher and Ronald Reagan are waving the good ship out to sea, proclaiming a new age of freedom ~ freedom, that is, for finance capital to roam wherever its owners want, to do whatever they please. Left stranded at every dock, however, are workers whose bargaining power has eroded and who find themselves pitted against each other, both within countries and across borders. A few numbers illustrate the point. In 1975, the ratio of CEO pay to that of workers in the United States' largest publicly traded companies was 41 to 1. In 1990, the ratio was 85 to 1; in 1995, 197 to 1; in 2000, 365 to 1; and by 2004, 431 to 1. Keep in mind, however, that these ratios refer to mainly unionized jobs. Union jobs are generally better paid, with non-union wages carried along in the tide, but under globalization the reverse happened. As union wages fell, non-union wages also declined. By 2005, the average CEO in the U.S. earned $11.8 million per year, compared with the average wage of American workers (union and non-union) of $27,460. But it didn't stop there. As workers' wages dropped, so also did social allowance payments to the non-working poor. Today, the top five per cent of Amencans possess roughly 40 per cent of all America's wealth. The same has occurred in Canada and elsewhere. A recent report by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives shows that CEO salaries in Canada rose from 104 times the average income of Canadians in 1995 to almost 400 times today; or, in concrete figures, over $10 million per CEO compared with $40,000 per average Canadian working full time. A 2006 report of the World Institute for Development Economics Research showed that the richest two per cent of adults in the world own more than half of global household wealth, while the bottom 50 per cent owned only one per cent of global wealth. In short, the rich got richer, and the very rich got very richer, while the poor got poorer, and the middle classes strugled. What does this have to do with the current economic crisis? The second stop on our time travel is Henry Ford's auto asssembly plant. The year is 1914. Ford has just announced he is raising his workers wages to a then unimaginable $5 per day (minimum). His competitors are angry and declare him "mad," but Ford remarks that he has to pay his workers well so that they can buy his cars. Ford was no friend of labour, but he understood something that many others missed ~ that a virtuous relationship a was emerging between production and consumption; that, in order to clear the shelves of all the wonderful things that a modern had to have money. Still, there was a problem. Ford's assembly line was intended to increase production while laying off workers, what is known as "efficiency." But laid-off workers cannot buy the products ~ a lesson proven during the 1930s' Great Depression, our next time stop . Looking at the human wreckage, economist John Maynard Keynes arrived at his own solution, one designed as he admitted to save capitalism from itself: the welfare state. Thus were created a vast array of programs that put money in the hands of people ~ things like unemployment insurance, pensions, public works, retraining programs, social assistance, etc. Keynesianism took a hit after the 1970s, however, replaced by Milton Friedman and his acolytes. The age of globalization had begun. Today, we are back where Ford and Keynes knew we must end up if we did not deal with the problem of overproduction. Until recently, banks, money managers, and New Right politicians (including most liberals) thought they had the answer. So what if people had less money to spend? Offer them easy, and even easier, credit. Happy millions of people soon entered into debt servitude. There's an old saying, now adjusted to inflation, that if someone owes the bank a thousand dollars, it's their problem; but if they owe the bank a million dollars, it's the bank's problem. The banks have now handed the problem off to governments, who ultimately must carry the blame for having allowed capitalist markets to run wild. So, what's the solution? Certainly not going back to unregulated credit or giving tax cuts to those who already have money. A better solution is to increase the real wages of average Canadians. But for this to happen, governments must start representing the interests of workers, not just banks, shareholders, and CEOs. Likewise, governments need to work for the least of those in society ~ the unemployed, the damaged, and the old ~ through a reinvestment in social programs. It's time, in short, to put money in the hands of those who need it and, because they need it, will spend it.
Trevor W. Harrison is a political sociologist at the University of Lethbridge and southern Alberta research co-ordinator for Parkland Institute trevor.harrison@uleth.ca ________________________________________ debt is the modern form of slavery, wrote Richard Greaves, in what may be the most widely web-circulated analysis of the problem of a debt-based money supply system, from prosperity ~ a Scotland journal
"The economic anarchy of capitalist society as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of evil." [Why socialism?] by Albert Einstein ________________________________________
historical perspective:sure, bail 'em out spend trillions on the rich guys (what do they do with the money?) it's more benign
Europe ~ some centuries past spent trillions on potentates who used it up in war
contemporaniously: sure, bail 'em out keep the money out of iraq and afghanistan |
________________________________________ mission accomplished: wages down unemployment up government finance in deficit funds acquired resources obtained control demonstrated business as usual ~ greed and corruption still reign
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" . . . any gain in employment since march 2009 was among low-paying jobs while . . . high paying jobs . . . declined . . . " _________________________________________
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  ________________________________________ USA deficit projected at 9-trillion over next ten years
"a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money" TRADING STOCK ~ LAUGHING STOCK ~ CRYING STOCK taking billions in bailout money, paying brokers billions in bonuses, raking in billions of profit in the fake trade of shares that are owned for mere minutes or seconds 
Goldman Sacks Financiers a name worthy of Robert Heinlein 
Lamphier 2009 12 31: "That's not capitalism, or the free market. That's a market that's rigged, for the benefit of the few, at the expense of many. "In moral terms. or democratic terms, it . . . amounts to: a big fat zero." glamphier@thejournal.canwest.com . . . and the rich get richer
Striking it Richer: the evolution of top incomes in the United States by Emmanuel Saez (updated august 2009) finds 15 000 families earning more than $11-million per year gobble up six percent of the total income in that country; and the top 10 percent earn half of all income. Saez (b 1972) is a professor at the University of California, where he teaches public economics. He was the recipient of the 2009 John Bates Clark Medal, awarded to "that American economist under the age of forty who is judged to have made the most significant contribution to economic thought and knowledge." ~ get the full public and scholarly texts in pdf downloads at Berkeley University Associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, Sam Pizzigati, editor of the online magazine Too Much (a commentary on excess and inequality since 1995) has condensed Saez' work for the lay person as follows [further abbreviated by albert]: America’s most affluent have never grabbed a greater share of the nation’s income than they did in 2007. The nation’s top .01 percent of income-earners in 2007 — taxpayers who made over $11.5 million — pulled in 6.04 percent of all income, the highest top .01 percent share of the nation’s income since 1913. The year 2007, a rather awestruck Saez noted earlier this month, “was an incredibly good year for the super rich.” The 14,588 families who made up 2007’s top .01 percent averaged $35,042,705 in income, 1,080 times the $32,421 average income of America’s bottom 90 percent. The gap between the top .01 percent and the bottom 90 percent, before 2007, had never stretched over 1,000 times. In 1928, the last full year before the Great Depression, America’s most affluent 1 percent took in 23.94 percent of the nation’s income. The comparable figure for 2007's top 1 percent: 23.5 percent. Those 1928 wealthy would see their share of the nation’s income drop sharply as the Depression deepened. Economic shocks to the system, as Saez notes, almost always cost the rich income share, since profits from businesses and stock market wheeling and dealing tend to “fall faster than average income” during economic downturns. But what happens next can vary enormously. After the Great Depression, the super rich share of America’s income stayed down — for over a generation. The quarter of the nation’s income that the top 1 percent collected in 1928 actually shrank all the way down to 10 percent in the early 1950s and didn’t start rising appreciably again until after Ronald Reagan’s 1980 election. After the recession early in the 1990s and the downturn in the early 2000s, a totally different story. The super rich income share did dip after each of these recessions, but only momentarily. Why did the super rich share of the nation's income go down and stay down after the Great Depression and come right back up after the recessions of recent years? No mystery here. During the 1930s and early 1940s, as Saez points out, the New Deal put in place financial regulations and progressive tax rates that prevented “income concentration from bouncing back.” In the 1990s, by contrast, Congress and the White House deregulated financial markets. In the 2000s, the two joined to cut taxes on the rich. So what will happen after our current Great Recession ends? In the 1980s, we let market fundamentalists dismantle a huge chunk of the New Deal legacy. The institutions that had kept America's super rich less than super — most notably, progressive taxation and strong trade unions — begin to go by the wayside. In their place came the record inequality that the new Saez figures so dramatically document — and, over the last year, the worst economic times that Americans under 70 have ever seen. “We need to decide as a society whether this increase in income inequality is efficient and acceptable,” says Emmanuel Saez, in his customary eminently sober academic tone, “and, if not, what mix of institutional reforms should be developed to counter it.” The rest of us can’t afford to be so understated. Those reforms, starting with higher progressive tax rates on high incomes, can’t begin too soon. |
    by lunchtime on the first day of work, a top 100 ceo 'earns' the average canadian annual wage
 __________________________________________________________ "From production to well-being"?attacking the marketplace from within? Commission on the measurement of economic performance and social progress was created 2008 on French government initiative. "Its aim is to identify the limits of GDP as an indicator of economic performance and social progress. Members of the Commission are renowned experts from universities, governmental and intergovernmental organisations, in several countries (USA, France, United Kingdom, India). "Joseph Stiglitz, Amartya Sen and Jean-Paul Fitoussi, in charge of the commission, have considered it useful to leave their personal reflections. It draws extensively on the work of the commission. This is the purpose of the document: The Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress Revisited - Reflections and Overview" ~ September, 16, 2009
download the 292-page report in pdf format here
A "key message," according to the authors is "to shift emphasis from measuring economic production to measuring peoples' well-being." Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is the economists' measure of activity, but here it is recommended that when evaluating material well-being, look at income and consumption rather than production, emphasize the household perspective, the distribution of income and wealth, and broaden income measures to non-market activities. The quality of life depends on objective conditions but also subjectively as experienced by people, and inequalities should be assessed. "A long philosophical tradition views individuals as the best judges of their own condition," state these 'reflections', and "in many streams of ancient and modern culture worldwide . . . making people happy and satisfied with their lives is a universal goal of human existence." Obviously nothing new here then, but a marked heresy in the GDP system of the capital democracy. In fact, it is suggested that this measurement be replaced with the Human Development Index (HDI). Noted is that "some poor countries (Egypt, Tunisia, and Bangladesh) have recorded significant improvement in their HDI with only moderate economic growth, while others have experienced significant economic growth and seen their HDI drop."  __________________________________________________________
World Money Fund is said to allow Haiti a five-year moratorium on payments how big the poorest nations pay rent to the capitalist democry
 __________________________________________________________ they're poisoning our children with [polluted toys] and we have been [poisoned for profit] by, among other things [sour gas] and [asbestos] and [aspartame] [electromagnetic] radiation and fields from wired and wireless technologies cause biological change ~ loss of well-being, disease and even death
[obamarama democrazies] also check [court] [security] [terror] [statement] |