Friday, November 18, 2016

Corporate Consolidation



Economist Michael Hudson explains how economic terms like capital gains are deployed to mislead the public about who is benefiting from economic policy and where wealth is going.

2 comments:

Brother Jonah said...

All money is a reflection of available resources, whether in "our" jurisdiction or foreign. To take the resources in other jurisdictions usually requires war either threatened or actual.

The Indian Nations in the US have within their territorial boundaries what has been described as The Most Resources (water, timber, minerals--- fuels, metals, alkaloids needed for making concrete, brick, glass, --precious stones, etc. and grazing land to supply "our" addiction to way too much animal protein and fats. Thank you McDonalds and the rest of the Fat Food Economic Sector. How important is that? Whenever you have a protest demonstration or march the hecklers say "Get a job! McDonalds is hiring! (or MallWart"

But when the rich folk describe these resources as "our" national heritage and "our" resources they're ignoring (because we ain't allowing them to forget) that the only "We" use the editorial pronouns "we, us, our" the only it could be accurate is if "we" happen to be Tribal. The times America as in the US and their direct colonial European forebears actually paid Natives for land it's small increments like a local treaty, Manhattan Island and the Dutch for instance.

The bigger payments for large tracts of land went to Other European Colonial Entities like France and Russia. Even those were negotiated at gunpoint. Jefferson was every bit as guilty as the King of Spain selling large tracts of land (like Texas,Louisiana,just anyplace west of the Missouri-Missippi river system) then bought it back from: The King of France. Neither king actually ever set foot in America. They sold the people already on the land too. This is the exact "national heritage" the US claims as it's justification for actually existing. The English Crown sold what is now the entire state of Maine to 6 aristocrats and their descendants in perpetuity. What kind of shit is that?

The kind that set up the standoff at Standing Rock. Now is the time for the Tribes to make a stand, this time with full communication with the other Tribes. People of other "races" but with a common conscience, sure will be welcomed. Those who live downstream meaning "everybody" of the watersheds on Native Lands, it's their-our conscientious duty to stand with with the Lakota. And other Indian Nations. The lives and freedom of your grandchildren depend on these actions.

Literally.

Brother Jonah said...

Trump has vowed "energy independence" and an end to "foreign oil" including Fracking.

Maybe he'll be shocked to realize that the American Indian Nations are, to his perspective and congress' perception, just as "foreign" as Iran or Nigeria or China. It's not theirs to govern.

There's allegedly a shale oil deposit in Texas NEAR THE OKLAHOMA BORDER which the MotherFrackers want to develop with the full blessing of Trump. That's watersheds which go to the aquifer which supplies the western two thirds of Texas, most of New Mexico, part of Colorado, most of Oklahoma and part of Kansas with water. When I was in middle school my geology teachers told us that the huge deposit of water was so pure because the water filtered through a couple of miles of limestone and took ten thousand years from time of rain to time of arrival in the aquifer.

After just over a century of oil exploitation, deep water walls and less than a century of antibiotics, the aquifer has dwindled to about a third of it's original size, and has traces of petrochemicals AND antibiotics from cattle and chicken and hog manure. Leaving alone that cattle, chickens and hogs were very recent additions to the American scene, the antibiotics weren't used for them before the 1940s. That's the smoking gun as to which subsets of the U.S. exploitation of the lands and waters caused this catastrophe. The cattle and oil industries strangely believe that the resources will last forever. Wall Street is celebrating this new victory over the Peasants who will literally be eating and drinking their shit. It's a classic maneuver to make We The Peasants pay for the luxury of the Rich.

With the blessings of Trump.