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

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.
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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

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

 

 

 

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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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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.