Bruce Gagnon is coordinator of the Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space.
He offers his own reflections on organizing and the state of America's declining empire....
Warren Buffett's op-ed is a thoughtful treatise on the advantages the super-wealthy currently enjoy at the hands of the tax code, or to put it another way, "class warfare."
The source of this segment, for folks that want to pull out specific graphs is here, from the Business Insider article: "15 Mind Blowing Graphs on Wealth and Inequality in America":
http://read.bi/9Gcvyn
Bernie Sanders pointed out that the top 400 FAMILIES control 50% of the wealth ($1.27 Trillion), the same as the bottom 50% of Americans back in July.
"The absence of effective state, and, especially, national restraint upon unfair money-getting has tended to create a small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men, whose chief object is to hold and increase their power. The prime need is to change the conditions which enable these men to accumulate power which is not for the general welfare that they should hold or exercise.…
This was picked up in today's (Sunday, Aug. 21) Doonesbury cartoon http://www.doonesbury.com/strip/archive/2011/08/21
This control of US economic, political, military, judicial, and media life by these 400 families is the major problem facing ordinary citizens in the US today.
”None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free” - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The way a minimum wage job is paid out, like for instance the one where my feet and legs got screwed up, is that the employer makes far more from the labor of each employee than the employee gets.
In my case, they got 5 times what I got for MY labor, not theirs. It's called a Labor Contractor, Unions are forbidden in Right To Work states from providing such a service, with a percentage of your wage going to Union dues. To put it one way, Industrial Labor Services charged me an unofficial tax amounting to 82% of the total the customer paid for my labor.
Or another way, since Union dues are considered "organized crime" in Texas, I paid 500% of what I personally took home in "dues" or "fees" to the Labor Contractor. Rather than the 5% or so that Union dues would have worked out to be.
I got so little pay relative to what the customer paid for my labor that it was literally paying I.L.S. for the privilege of working for them.
But, according to "The Law" it's not theft to make many times what you pay "your" workforce. It's only theft if your highly subsidized Corporate Welfare operation has to pay taxes on the money it gets, just about always a direct or derivative result of tax-funded government activity. Railroads, utilities, real estate, anything involving transportation, had to be secured through military intervention.
As the Marine Corps Hymn states, "to the shores of Tripoli", the first foreign military engagement for the U.S. Navy was to try to secure shipping lanes against piracy.
They lost but cherish the delusion of victory, but that's beside the point, the shipping companies had their business directly subsidized by Taxpayers.
It works that way for EVERY enterprise, they could not possibly have built their businesses on their own without massive government intervention, and they cry like babies if they are required to pay part of it back, to maintain the government services which enable their businesses.
Got my flash player to work without crashing the computer. Big Deal? Why, yes, it is. But the thought that 58% of poor people have cable or satellite TV? heh... The Corporates made the decision that unless we have a cable or satellite connection we get NOTHING on TV. Except FOX news of course.
I've even heard a rumor that some of us actually have food in the refrigerator. OMG, the poor folks are actually able to eat every now and then. Mustn't allow that to happen.
Of course, somebody has to point this out and it might as well be me, the "makers" are those of us who actually do the work. And the Takers would be the ones who get all the money from it. Like the fewer than ten percent who own more than 85% (by conservative estimates) of the wealth. That, by the way, was from before the "Reagan Revolution" when the Wall Street Journal wanted to debunk the "socialist myth" by lowering the statistic to their estimate, which was 10% owning 85% instead of 5% owning 90%. Which apparently was something they pulled from Reagan's Rectal Orifice because even the most rabid Reds weren't claiming the numbers WSJ tried so desperately to debunk. The income gap became more severe over the past 3 decades though.
3 decades of giving the corporation "persons" and individual wealthy Real Persons everything they demanded and they still crashed the economy.
Here's something else related, in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia, according to the BBC, not exactly raging Reds mind you, the 20 years since the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of Capital,
...has seen the real wealth of the Republic decrease to 60% of what it was under "Commie Slavery".
The source of this segment, for folks that want to pull out specific graphs is here, from the Business Insider article: "15 Mind Blowing Graphs on Wealth and Inequality in America":
ReplyDeletehttp://read.bi/9Gcvyn
Bernie Sanders pointed out that the top 400 FAMILIES control 50% of the wealth ($1.27 Trillion), the same as the bottom 50% of Americans back in July.
http://www.thenation.com/print/article/37889/no-oligarchy
He quotes Teddy Roosevelt:
"The absence of effective state, and, especially, national restraint upon unfair money-getting has tended to create a small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men, whose chief object is to hold and increase their power. The prime need is to change the conditions which enable these men to accumulate power which is not for the general welfare that they should hold or exercise.…
This was picked up in today's (Sunday, Aug. 21) Doonesbury
cartoon http://www.doonesbury.com/strip/archive/2011/08/21
This control of US economic, political, military, judicial, and media life by these 400 families is the major problem facing ordinary citizens in the US today.
”None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free” - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The way a minimum wage job is paid out, like for instance the one where my feet and legs got screwed up, is that the employer makes far more from the labor of each employee than the employee gets.
ReplyDeleteIn my case, they got 5 times what I got for MY labor, not theirs. It's called a Labor Contractor, Unions are forbidden in Right To Work states from providing such a service, with a percentage of your wage going to Union dues.
To put it one way, Industrial Labor Services charged me an unofficial tax amounting to 82% of the total the customer paid for my labor.
Or another way, since Union dues are considered "organized crime" in Texas, I paid 500% of what I personally took home in "dues" or "fees" to the Labor Contractor. Rather than the 5% or so that Union dues would have worked out to be.
I got so little pay relative to what the customer paid for my labor that it was literally paying I.L.S. for the privilege of working for them.
But, according to "The Law" it's not theft to make many times what you pay "your" workforce. It's only theft if your highly subsidized Corporate Welfare operation has to pay taxes on the money it gets, just about always a direct or derivative result of tax-funded government activity. Railroads, utilities, real estate, anything involving transportation, had to be secured through military intervention.
As the Marine Corps Hymn states, "to the shores of Tripoli", the first foreign military engagement for the U.S. Navy was to try to secure shipping lanes against piracy.
They lost but cherish the delusion of victory, but that's beside the point, the shipping companies had their business directly subsidized by Taxpayers.
It works that way for EVERY enterprise, they could not possibly have built their businesses on their own without massive government intervention, and they cry like babies if they are required to pay part of it back, to maintain the government services which enable their businesses.
Got my flash player to work without crashing the computer. Big Deal? Why, yes, it is. But the thought that 58% of poor people have cable or satellite TV? heh... The Corporates made the decision that unless we have a cable or satellite connection we get NOTHING on TV.
ReplyDeleteExcept FOX news of course.
I've even heard a rumor that some of us actually have food in the refrigerator. OMG, the poor folks are actually able to eat every now and then. Mustn't allow that to happen.
Of course, somebody has to point this out and it might as well be me, the "makers" are those of us who actually do the work. And the Takers would be the ones who get all the money from it. Like the fewer than ten percent who own more than 85% (by conservative estimates) of the wealth.
That, by the way, was from before the "Reagan Revolution" when the Wall Street Journal wanted to debunk the "socialist myth" by lowering the statistic to their estimate, which was 10% owning 85% instead of 5% owning 90%. Which apparently was something they pulled from Reagan's Rectal Orifice because even the most rabid Reds weren't claiming the numbers WSJ tried so desperately to debunk. The income gap became more severe over the past 3 decades though.
3 decades of giving the corporation "persons" and individual wealthy Real Persons everything they demanded and they still crashed the economy.
Here's something else related, in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia, according to the BBC, not exactly raging Reds mind you, the 20 years since the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of Capital,
...has seen the real wealth of the Republic decrease to 60% of what it was under "Commie Slavery".