Category Archives: Inequality

Uncle Sam, the Human Rights Hypocrite

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By Paul Street

Source: TruthDig

This year marks the 70th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Signed by the United States and adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on Dec. 10, 1948, the document was a great and shining step forward in the articulation of how human beings might organize their social and political systems in accord with democratic and civilized ideals.

The U.S. has long wielded the Universal Declaration (UD) as a weapon to brandish selectively against officially designated enemies. But seven decades after its signing (and trumpeting) the document, American society stands in rarely noted gross violation of the declaration’s key principles.

Take the UD’s first’s article: “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.”

The United States falls far short here. Someone born into one of the 57 percent of U.S. households with less than $1,000 in savings will not enjoy remotely the same amount of “dignity and rights” as those enjoyed by someone born into the top 1 percent of households, which together possess as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent of U.S. citizens. Access to basic means of comfort, dignity and freedom—like quality housing, quality education, strong legal representation, leisure, travel, health care, quality food and recreation—is filtered by the militantly disparate distribution of wealth and income in the U.S., the most savagely unequal nation among all Western “capitalist democracies.” Like the polarized and nasty political culture to which it is merged, the nation’s extreme socioeconomic imbalance is inconsistent with calls for conscience and brotherhood.

Article 2 of the UD proclaims, among other things, that everyone is entitled to human rights and freedoms without distinctions of “race, color” and “national or social origin.” Here again, the U.S. stands in stark contravention.

Median white wealth is 12 times higher than median black wealth in the U.S.—a reflection of persistent anti-black discrimination and segregation built into the nation’s social structures and institutions. Reflecting stark racial disparities in arrest, prosecution, legal representation and sentencing, black and Latinos make up 56 percent of the nation’s 2.2 million incarcerated people though they comprise roughly 32 percent of the U.S. population. One in three adult black males is saddled with the crippling lifelong mark of a felony record—a critical barrier to opportunity and full citizenship (even the right to vote in many U.S. states) on numerous levels. Thanks to the racially disparate waging of the so-called war on drugs, one of every 10 U.S. black men in their 30s is in jail or prison on any given day. African-Americans and whites use drugs at similar rates, but the imprisonment rate of African-Americans for drug charges is almost six times that of whites.

Millions of undocumented immigrant workers and residents are unwilling to fight for their “universal human rights” in the U.S. because they reasonably fear arrest and deportation.

The UD’s fourth article declares, “No one shall be held in slavery or servitude.” Hundreds of thousands of U.S. prisoners—the modern-day and very disproportionately nonwhite human chattel that provides the essential raw material for the self-declared “Land of Freedom’s” curiously gigantic prison-industrial complex—perform labor tasks for tiny levels of compensation and often for no payment at all. The Global Slavery Index estimates that 57,000 people are victims of human trafficking, the modern form of slavery, with illegal smuggling and trading of people, for forced labor or sexual exploitation, in the United States.

Hundreds of millions of nominally free Americans are de facto slaves and servants to employers (upon whom a shocking number of Americans absurdly depend for health coverage), financial institutions, insurance corporations, retail corporations, credit agencies, property associations, government tax collectors, gambling agencies (including state lottery systems), health care providers, lawyers and drug dealers.

The UD’s fifth article says, “No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.” Torture and such treatment is endemic across the United States’ vast prison system, the largest in world history. One particularly widespread and egregious form of cruel and inhuman treatment inside that system is solitary confinement—a punishment well known to cause grave damage to its victims’ mental and physical health. The American Civil Liberties Union reports that:

Over the last two decades, the use of solitary confinement in U.S. correctional facilities has surged … 44 states and the federal government have supermax units, where prisoners are held in extreme isolation, often for years or even decades. On any given day in this country, it’s estimated that over 80,000 prisoners are held in isolated confinement. This massive increase in the use of solitary has happened despite criticism from legal and medical professionals, who have deemed the practice unconstitutional and inhumane.

Other forms of torture and cruel and inhumane treatment that are common in the nation’s vast archipelago of racially disparate mass incarceration include widespread beatings, rape, ignoring cries for help, overcrowding, underfunding, forcing inmates to fight, dehydration, starvation, denial of medical care, executions (including botched executions) and forced scalding showers.

Article 7 of the UD proclaims, “All are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law.”

This principle, too, is brazenly violated in the purported homeland and headquarters of global freedom and democracy. Many Americans are familiar with the old working-class aphorism that “money talks and bullshit walks”—meaning that the wealthy few hire high-priced lawyers to enhance their chances and power in the courts while everyday people do far less well with fewer resources to pay for legal representation. It’s no joke. As the Georgia gubernatorial candidate and former Georgia House Minority Leader Stacey Abrams noted last February, people with money “artfully navigate the criminal justice system and maybe even avoid it altogether,” but those who are poor are overwhelmed.

Wall Street chieftains who threw millions of Americans out of work and destroyed billions of dollars in lost savings through their reckless and often criminal practices have escaped prosecution while the nation’s jails and prisons are loaded with disproportionately black, Latino and poor people serving long terms for comparative small-time drug offenses. Hundreds of thousands of Americans rot in jail prior to conviction for the simple reason that they lack the financial resources to “make bail.” Abrams reports, “The majority of Georgians incarcerated in local jails have never been convicted of crime. They are simply too poor to pay their bail.”

The UD’s ninth and 10th articles say that “[n]o one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile” and “Everyone is entitled in full equality to a fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal, in the determination of his rights and obligations and of any criminal charge against him.”

The 11th article says, “Everyone charged with a penal offence has the right to be presumed innocent until proved guilty according to law in a public trial at which he has had all the guarantees necessary for his defence.”

The “land of freedom” contravenes these core civil-libertarian principles without the slightest hint of embarrassment. The U.S. National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) authorizes the indefinite military detention, without charge or trial, of any person labeled a “belligerent”—including an American citizen. The legislation overrides habeas corpus, the critical legal procedure that prevents the government from detaining you indefinitely without showing just cause.

In addition, the federal government has used the post 9/11 Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) law to justify the direct killing (without a trial or verdict) of anyone proclaimed an “enemy combatant” in the global war on terrorism. The AUMF is unbound by geographic or time limitations. U.S. citizens are not exempted, nor is U.S. territory.

Meanwhile, The Washington Post reported last January, “For the third year in a row, [U.S. local and state] police nationwide shot and killed nearly 1,000 people. …” Police killings, disproportionately inflicted against poor people and people of color, amount to executions, without trial or verdict.

The presumption of innocence does not prevent hundreds of thousands of American from experiencing the torture of incarceration simply because they cannot pay bail while awaiting trial.

The UD’s 12th article proclaims, “No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence.” So what? Americans are subject to a vast private and public surveillance apparatus that has essentially abolished privacy in the name of “national security.” As the ACLU reports:

Numerous government agencies—including the National Security Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Department of Homeland Security, and state and local law enforcement agencies—intrude upon the private communications of innocent citizens, amass vast databases of who we call and when, and catalog “suspicious activities” based on the vaguest standards. … Innocuous data is fed into bloated watchlists, with severe consequences—innocent individuals have found themselves unable to board planes, barred from certain types of jobs, shut out of their bank accounts, and repeatedly questioned by authorities. Once information is in the government’s hands, it can be shared widely and retained for years, and the rules about access and use can be changed entirely in secret without the public ever knowing.

Article 15 of the UD says, “Everyone has the right to a nationality” and “No one shall be deprived of the right to change his nationality.” Millions of “illegal” immigrants in flight from impoverished and repressive regimes supported by the United States are stateless people, too afraid of deportation to declare their foreign citizenship or to fight for decent conditions inside the U.S. They are not free to change their nationality by becoming U.S. citizens.

The UD’s 19th article declares, “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference.” That’s nice. Millions of U.S. citizen-subjects know very well that they cannot write or say (or sing or post or march on behalf of) what they believe without putting their livelihoods at risk by offending or otherwise concerning their employers and other authorities. And in the United States, where health insurance is strongly and absurdly tied to place of employment, putting one’s job at risk also endangers a person’s and his or her family’s access to health care.

Freedom of expression is strictly qualified, to say the least, in the hidden and despotic abode of the capitalist workplace, where most working-age Americans spend most of their waking hours under managerial supervision.

Even tenured academics can be fired for expressing their opinions. The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign fired tenured professor Steven Salaita over his personal tweets criticizing Israel’s mass-murderous 2014 assault on Gaza. The prolific radical Native American author Ward Churchill was stripped of his tenured professorship on trumped-up grounds because of political comments he made on the 9/11 terror attacks.

Article 20 of the UD says, “Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association.”

These rights are strictly qualified in the U.S., where public assembly is controlled by onerous permitting processes and fees and peaceful protest gatherings commonly face militarized police forces that make random arrests, infiltrate marches and meetings, target organizers, give protesters petty charges (and deadly criminal records) and rough-up protesters. Numerous Republican-controlled states have passed bills that increase penalties for public protest in the wake of the many protests that accompanied Donald Trump’s election and inauguration.

Workers are fired for trying to organize unions in the U.S., where once union-friendly labor laws have been eviscerated.

The UD’s 21st article proclaims that “Everyone has the right to take part in the government of his country, directly or through freely chosen representatives. The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government; this shall be expressed in periodic and genuine elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage and shall be held by secret vote or by equivalent free voting procedures.”

The reality of U.S. politics and policy stands in brazen defiance of this universal human right. As the distinguished liberal political scientists Benjamin Page (Northwestern) and Marin Gilens (Princeton) showed in their expertly researched book, “Democracy in America?” last year:

[T]he best evidence indicates that the wishes of ordinary Americans actually have little or no impact on the making of federal government policy. Wealthy individuals and organized interest groups—especially business corporations—have had much more political clout. When they are taken into account, it becomes apparent that the general public has been virtually powerless. … The will of majorities is often thwarted by the affluent and the well-organized, who block popular policy proposals and enact special favors for themselves. … Majorities of Americans favor … programs to help provide jobs, increase wages, help the unemployed, provide universal medical insurance, ensure decent retirement pensions, and pay for such programs with progressive taxes. Most Americans also want to cut “corporate welfare.” Yet the wealthy, business groups, and structural gridlock have mostly blocked such new policies [and programs].

“Elections alone,” Page and Gilens note, “do not guarantee democracy.” Majority U.S. opinion is regularly trumped by a deadly complex of forces in the nation’s politics, including:

    • The campaign finance, candidate-selection, lobbying and policy agenda-setting power of wealthy individuals, corporations and interest groups
    • The special primary election influence of full-time party activists
    • The disproportionately affluent, white and older composition of the active (voting) electorate
    • The manipulation and restriction of voter turnout
    • The widespread dissemination of distracting, confusing, misleading and just plain false information
    • Absurdly and explicitly unrepresentative political institutions like the Electoral College, the unelected Supreme Court, the over-representation of the predominantly white rural population in the U.S. Senate and the one-party rule in the House of “Representatives”
    • The fragmentation of authority in government
    • Corporate ownership of the reigning media, which frames current events in accord with the wishes and world view of the nation’s real owners—its “unelected dictatorship or money”
    • Americans get to vote but mammon reigns nonetheless in the United States, where, Page and Gilens find, “government policy … reflects the wishes of those with money, not the wishes of the millions of ordinary citizens who turn out every two years to choose among the preapproved, money-vetted candidates for federal office.

You wouldn’t know a thing about these and other brazen violations of the UD (you can find supplemental text on U.S. “homeland” violations of UD articles 22, 23, 24, 25, 27 and 28 on my website) by reading the U.S. State Department’s recently released annual “Country Reports on Human Rights Abuses.” Beyond two disturbing novelties—the deletion of most prior reporting on women’s rights and reproductive rights and the redaction of the term “Occupied Territories” from the report’s description of Israel and its, well, occupied territories—the Trump-era rendering of the annual State Department document (this year’s is the first put together entirely by the Trump State Department) runs in four familiar grooves. Consistent with previous versions, it fails to acknowledge the United States’ longstanding political, economic and military backing of governments whose human rights abuses it mentions—as if Washington had nothing to do with them.

We learn, for example, that Saudi Arabia kills civilians in Yemen and carries out “unlawful killings, including execution for other than the most serious offenses and without requisite due process; torture; arbitrary arrest and detention, including of lawyers” in its own territory. The report says nothing about how Washington considers the Saudi regime one of its most prized allies. Or that it equips the absolutist Saudi state (whose crown prince was recently hosted by Donald Trump, who boasted during the royal’s visit of U.S. arms sales to Saudi Arabia) with tens of billions worth of lethal military equipment. Nor does it say anything about the United States’ own direct egregious abrogation of human rights through things like its horrific torture camp at Guantanamo Bay and its ongoing arch-criminal drone war program of “targeted assassination” (execution without trial) Noam Chomsky has called “the most extensive global terrorism campaign the world has yet seen.”

The world has every reason to respond to the State Department’s report with another old maxim: “Don’t piss on my boots and tell me it’s raining.”

The Country Reports document continues the United States’ longstanding practice of selective criticism, playing up violations in rival and enemy nations over those in allied nations. Relying on just the document’s country-level write-ups, one would think that human rights are no better in Iran and Cuba than they are in Saudi Arabia and Honduras. You’d never know that the Saudis make Iran look like a bastion of civil liberties, women’s rights and democracy by comparison. Or that ordinary Cubans enjoy remarkable guaranteed incomes and access to educational resources and health care services that are unrivaled across Latin America and especially in right-wing Latin American states like Honduras, where a vicious right-wing regime was installed with no small help from the U.S. nine years ago.

The State Department report vastly understates the scale of the Saudis’ U.S.-backed and U.S.-equipped crimes in Yemen. It gives no sense that the U.S.-Saudi war on that small nation has created there one of the worst humanitarian catastrophes (replete with a mass outbreak of deadly cholera) in recent history.

In rolling out the report, John Sullivan, Trump’s then-acting secretary of state, singled out Russia and China as leading “threats to global stability,” claiming that their poor human rights records put them in the same dastardly club as evil Iran and North Korea. Where, one might well ask, should we rank U.S. allies like Saudi Arabia, Honduras, Egypt and Israel? The last country has recently and openly slaughtered unarmed Palestinians who were peacefully protesting along its border with Gaza, which is essentially an open-air Palestinian prison subjected to a vicious blockade by Israel and Egypt since 2007. What about other U.S.-allied states like the Philippines, whose strongman president Rodrigo Duterte has ordered the death-squad killings of drug dealers and drug users and been praised by Trump for doing “an unbelievable job on the drug problem”?

It has not been lost on properly critical observers that that the Trump administration has curiously designated the American Empire’s top strategic rivals—China, Russia, Iran and North Korea—as the world’s worst human rights violators.

As per usual, the latest State Department global human rights report ignores positive human rights accomplishments of states on the wrong side of Uncle Sam’s division of the world into friend and enemy. It has nothing to say, for example, about Cuba’s remarkable achievements in reducing poverty, providing health care, educating its citizens and developing its economy and society with a low-carbon footprint that reduces its contribution to the greatest problem of our times, one whose advance is being led by the United States: anthropogenic climate change.

Last, but not least, this year’s version of the report has, as usual, absolutely nothing to say against or about egregious and endemic human rights abuses carried out by (both at home and abroad) and inside the United States—the supposed “beacon to the world of the way life should be,” to quote former U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchinson (currently Trump’s permanent representative to NATO) in a fall 2002 speech in support of Congress authorizing George W. Bush to criminally invade Iraq if he wanted to (he did). The State Department’s “Country Reports on Human Rights Abuses” covers every country on the planet but one: The most powerful nation on earth, the headquarters of a historically unparalleled global empire that most of the world’s politically cognizant populace has long and with good reason identified as the leading threat to peace and stability on earth. Fully 194 countries are covered in the reports, just not the world’s only superpower, itself home to 4.4 percent of the world’s population but 22 percent of the world’s prisoners—quite an accomplishment for the self-declared homeland and headquarters of global freedom and democracy.

As far as the State Department, Washington and the nation’s reigning corporate, financial, and imperial power elite is concerned, the violations of the UD outlined at the outset of this article (and in my linked supplemental text) belong down George Orwell’s memory hole, consistent with the principle that history is written by and for the winners and Big Bother’s maxim: “He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.”

It’s nothing remotely new or distinctive to the Trump era. The United States sees itself as an inherently splendid and humanitarian City on a Hill, fit to judge other nations, particularly those it deems as rivals and enemies, while giving itself an “exceptionalist” free pass because, as Bill Clinton’s Secretary State Madeleine Albright once explained, “The United States is good.” That’s no way to get its human rights reports taken seriously by world citizens familiar with the timeworn adage that “people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.”

THE MONOPOLIZATION OF AMERICA: The biggest economic problem you’re hearing almost nothing about

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By Robert Reich

Source: Nation of Change

Not long ago I visited some farmers in Missouri whose profits are disappearing. Why? Monsanto alone owns the key genetic traits to more than 90 percent of the soybeans planted by farmers in the United States, and 80 percent of the corn. Which means Monsanto can charge farmers much higher prices.

Farmers are getting squeezed from the other side, too, because the food processors they sell their produce to are also consolidating into mega companies that have so much market power they can cut the prices they pay to farmers.

This doesn’t mean lower food prices to you. It means more profits to the monopolists.

Monopolies all around

America used to have antitrust laws that stopped corporations from monopolizing markets, and often broke up the biggest culprits. No longer. It’s a hidden upward redistribution of money and power from the majority of Americans to corporate executives and wealthy shareholders.

You may think you have lots of choices, but take a closer look:

1. The four largest food companies control 82 percent of beef packing, 85 percent of soybean processing, 63 percent of pork packing, and 53 percent of chicken processing.

2. There are many brands of toothpaste, but 70 percent of all of it comes from just two companies.

3. You may think you have your choice of sunglasses, but they’re almost all from one company: Luxottica – which also owns nearly all the eyeglass retail outlets.

4. Practically every plastic hanger in America is now made by one company, Mainetti.

5. What brand of cat food should you buy? Looks like lots of brands but behind them are basically just two companies.

6. What about your pharmaceuticals? Yes, you can get low-cost generic versions. But drug companies are in effect paying the makers of generic drugs to delay cheaper versions. Such “pay for delay” agreements are illegal in other advanced economies, but antitrust enforcement hasn’t laid a finger on them in America. They cost you and me an estimated $3.5 billion a year.

7. You think your health insurance will cover the costs? Health insurers are consolidating, too. Which is one reason your health insurance premiums, copayments, and deductibles are soaring.

8. You think you have a lot of options for booking discount airline tickets and hotels online? Think again. You have only two. Expedia merged with Orbitz, so that’s one company. And then there’s Priceline.

9. How about your cable and Internet service? Basically just four companies (and two of them just announced they’re going to merge).

Why the monopolization of America is a huge problem

The problem with all this consolidation into a handful of giant firms is they don’t have to compete. Which means they can – and do – jack up your prices.

Such consolidation keeps down wages. Workers with less choice of whom to work for have a harder time getting a raise. When local labor markets are dominated by one major big box retailer, or one grocery chain, for example, those firms essentially set wage rates for the area.

These massive corporations also have a lot of political clout. That’s one reason they’re consolidating: Power.

Antitrust laws were supposed to stop what’s been going on. But today, they’re almost a dead letter. This hurts you.

We’ve forgotten history

The first antitrust law came in 1890 when Senator John Sherman responded to public anger about the economic and political power of the huge railroad, steel, telegraph, and oil cartels – then called “trusts” – that were essentially running America.

A handful of corporate chieftains known as “robber barons” presided over all this – collecting great riches at the expense of workers who toiled long hours often in dangerous conditions for little pay. Corporations gouged consumers and corrupted politics.

Then in 1901, progressive reformer Teddy Roosevelt became president. By this time, the American public was demanding action.

In his first message to Congress in December 1901, only two months after assuming the presidency, Roosevelt warned, “There is a widespread conviction in the minds of the American people that the great corporations known as the trusts are in certain of their features and tendencies hurtful to the general welfare.”

Roosevelt used the Sherman Antitrust Act to go after the Northern Securities Company, a giant railroad trust run by J. P. Morgan, the nation’s most powerful businessman. The U.S. Supreme Court backed Roosevelt and ordered the company dismantled.

In 1911, John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Trust was broken up, too. But in its decision, the Supreme Court effectively altered the Sherman Act, saying that monopolistic restraints of trade were objectionable if they were “unreasonable” – and that determination was to be made by the courts. What was an unreasonable restraint of trade?

In the presidential election of 1912, Roosevelt, running again for president but this time as a third party candidate, said he would allow some concentration of industries where there were economic efficiencies due to large scale. He’d then he’d have experts regulate these large corporations for the public benefit.

Woodrow Wilson, who ended up winning the election, and his adviser Louis Brandeis, took a different view. They didn’t think regulation would work, and thought all monopolies should be broken up.

For the next 65 years, both views dominated. We had strong antitrust enforcement along with regulations that held big corporations in check.

Most big mergers were prohibited. Even large size was thought to be a problem. In 1945, in the case of United States v. Alcoa (1945), the Supreme Court ruled that even though Alcoa hadn’t pursued a monopoly, it had become one by becoming so large that it was guilty of violating the Sherman Act.

What happened to antitrust?

All this changed in the 1980s, after Robert Bork – who, incidentally, I studied antitrust law with at Yale Law School, and then worked for when he became Solicitor General under President Ford – wrote an influential book called The Antitrust Paradox, which argued that the sole purpose of the Sherman Act is consumer welfare.

Bork argued that mergers and large size almost always create efficiencies that bring down prices, and therefore should be legal. Bork’s ideas were consistent with the conservative Chicago School of Economics, and found a ready audience in the Reagan White House.

Bork was wrong. But since then, even under Democratic administrations, antitrust has all but disappeared.

The monopolization of high tech

We’re seeing declining competition even in cutting-edge, high-tech industries.

In the new economy, information and ideas are the most valuable forms of property. This is where the money is.

We haven’t seen concentration on this scale ever before.

Google and Facebook are now the first stops for many Americans seeking news. Meanwhile, Amazon is now the first stop for more than a half of American consumers seeking to buy anything. Talk about power.

Contrary to the conventional view of an American economy bubbling with innovative small companies, the reality is quite different. The rate at which new businesses have formed in the United States has slowed markedly since the late 1970s.

Big Tech’s sweeping patents, standard platforms, fleets of lawyers to litigate against potential rivals, and armies of lobbyists have created formidable barriers to new entrants. Google’s search engine is so dominant, “Google” has become a verb.

The European Union filed formal antitrust charges against Google, accusing it of forcing search engine users into its own shopping platforms. And last June, it fined Google a record $2.7 billion.

But not in America.

It’s time to revive antitrust

Economic and political power cannot be separated because dominant corporations gain political influence over how markets are organized, maintained, and enforced – which enlarges their economic power further.

One of the original goals of the antitrust laws was to prevent this.

Big Tech – along with the drug, insurance, agriculture, and financial giants – is coming to dominate both our economy and our politics.

There’s only one answer: It is time to revive antitrust.

How Interlinked Corporations Rule The World

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By Kris Kanthan

Source: Activist Post

Globalism is just like the mafia, but with lot more complexity and respectability. If you have watched mob films such as The Godfather, you can understand how the world works. For example, in Godfather II, a bunch of mobsters get together in Havana, Cuba, to celebrate Hyman Roth’s birthday. As the birthday cake is symbolically cut into pieces and distributed, Roth tells the group how Cuba will be split up amongst the guests. Extrapolate this scene to the world, you can visualize how the world works.

Corporations to Central Banks

The power structure of global elites is like nested Russian dolls made up of corporations. How many people realize that KFC, Taco Bell and Pizza Hut are owned by the same corporation? Or that HBO, CNN, TBS, TNT, Cartoon Network all report to the same boss? Or that whether you drink Budweiser, Corona, Stella, Busch or Michelob (and dozens of others), you end up paying one giant corporation?

Who controls these corporations? It’s not the CEO, as most people believe. The real control lies in the hands of the largest shareholders and/or the Board of Directors. The Board of Directors of all giant corporations are linked to each other by one or two degrees of separation. Some elites even sit on multiple boards at the same time. For example, Rochelle Lazarus sits on the boards of Merck, GE and Blackstone; Jon Huntsman sits on the boards of Hilton, Ford, Caterpillar and Chevron; and Timothy P. Flynn is a director at JP Morgan Chase, Wal-Mart, Alcoa and United Healthcare. Think for a moment how all these corporations would seem totally unrelated to a regular person.

Below is an image that show how the Boards at Netflix and Procter & Gamble are linked to some other popular corporations. (Note: this is a partial list of connections).

The Board of Directors report to the next level of bosses, the financial overlords. All the public corporations in the West – and much of the world now – are controlled by large shareholders, who are giant financial corporations. Thus a study in 2011 showed that fewer than 150 mega corporations pretty much control all the corporations in the world! Some of these have recognizable names such as Barclays or JP Morgan; other names such as State Street or AXA are hardly known outside the financial circles, yet they have incredible influence and wealth.

For these people, it doesn’t matter if you buy Pepsi or Coke; cars from GM or Ford or Toyota; or produce from Walmart or Safeway. It also doesn’t matter to them if you watch ABC or NBC or Fox. Your money goes to the same place.

There are also a few individuals like Carl Icahn or Paul Singer who can borrow billions of dollars at 0%, buy tons of shares of a corporation, change its policies (say, the dividends given out), and make a killing few months later. This is how the financial mafia’s shakedown works.

On the top of the food chain are the central banks who have the amazing ability to create money out of thin air. As Rothschild once said, “Give me control of a nation’s money supply, and I don’t care who makes the laws.” These people are the ultimate Godfathers of globalism. They determine the winners and the losers in capitalism, and thus control all the corporations (including the media), politicians, militaries, and the Deep States around the world.

How to use Corporations

All these corporations are but tools to be used for a higher purpose – controlling people. The financial system is the primary tool used to control nations. Any nation’s debt, wealth, credit rating, stock market, etc. can be manipulated by Wall Street, which is the financial weapon of mass destruction.

There are other corporations that wield power in less obvious ways. GMOs are effective weapons in controlling nations (if a country has to buy seeds and pesticides from foreign corporations every year, that country will stay submissive). Big Pharma and medicines also create dependencies in people and nations.

Above all, globalists strive for the ability to control what people think. This is where media, entertainment and the Internet come into play. Fortunately, all are corporatized, so that Facebook, Twitter, Google, mainstream media, and Hollywood can all work together to form the Ministry of Truth and control what people all over the world feel, think and believe.

The Internet is also a great tool to spy on people and leaders of nations all over the world. This comes in handy when uncooperative leaders have to be blackmailed or overthrown (example: anti-US Brazilian president, Rousseff, was removed by a leaked phone call. The NSA had spied on her and tapped her phone).

When Corporations Need Some Help…

Corporatocracy needs a lot of help in a “free market,” and that’s where military and politics come into play. Globalism demands that all the natural resources around the world be privatized, people of all nations be ready to work for the globalists, and all the economies be open for the corporations to sell their products. When nations resist this trend, they will suddenly face extraordinary problems. (Those who are familiar with John Perkins and his work as an “Economic Hit Man” understand this process.)

An ideal nation will be a vassal nation which will generously share and privatize its natural resources, provide cheap labor, open its markets to multi-national corporations, borrow excessive amounts from the World Bank and IMF, buy a lot of US treasury bonds, host US/NATO military bases, purchase US/EU weapons, and vote in the UN as instructed.

In the mafia movies, people who need to be persuaded may receive a dead fish wrapped in a newspaper or may wake up next to a horse’s head on their beds. In geopolitics, the warnings come in the form of color revolutions (Georgia, Ukraine), attacks by Islamic terrorists (Libya, Syria, Philippines), rise of separatist movements (Kurdistan, Balochistan), hostile attitudes from neighboring countries (Qatar, Iran), etc. If those don’t work, there will be sanctions (Venezuela) and eventually a shock and awe invasion. Unlike the mobster world who can simply carry out a helicopter attack(Godfather II), globalists put in a lot of efforts to justify their overt violence. This task of selling a war is carried out by press, pundits and politicians.

In my book, “Syria – War of Deception,” I explain the geopolitics of proxy wars, Islamic terrorism, and the struggle for global hegemony.

Politicians are also key stakeholders in globalism, and they sell to the public treaties such as NAFTA, WTO and TPP that give corporations power over individual nations. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said in a speech (exposed by WikiLeaks) that the plan is to create a “hemispheric common market” that would be a union of North, Central and South Americas. There are also political unions that go beyond trade treaties – the creation of EU being an excellent example.

The Beginning of the end? 

People who’re not caught up in the daily drama can see enormous problems with the current system. Globalists have used fake, fiat money to push the U.S. and most nations around the world into colossal debt. The entire global economy is sustained by artificial interest rates, real estate bubbles, stock market bubbles, and fictitious assets such as $500 trillion of derivatives (when the global GDP is only $75 trillion). We live in a real world that’s dependent on a Ponzi system fueled by virtual assets. While globalists keep assuring us how wonderful things are, the uber rich now have more wealth than ever before – just one-fifth of one percent of the world have a net worth of $63 trillion!

Most leaders of countries around the world have bought into this globalist system, either willingly or grudgingly. However, there are a few who are still resisting it to various degrees – North Korea does it belligerently; Syria, Iran, Venezuela and Russia do it defensively; and some such as China, Myanmar and the Philippines do it in more nuanced ways.

There’s also resistance to globalism from the left and the right of the political spectrum, albeit for different reasons.

The next twenty years may be the most significant in modern human history. Entire nations, societies and our way of life may change irrevocably. Will there be a challenge to the current world order either from sovereign nations or grassroots level organizations? Or will we say, “fuggedaboutit” and meekly go along, hoping for the best?

 

Chris Kanthan is the author of a new book, Syria – War of Deception. It’s available in a condensed as well as a longer version. Chris lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, has traveled to 35 countries, and writes about world affairs, politics, economy and health. His other book is Deconstructing Monsanto.

America’s Dystopian Future

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By Robert Hunziker

Source: CounterPunch

Imagine a privatized America where rugged individualism reigns supreme within a vast network of corporate America, Inc., similar to 19th century wild west lifestyle, no social security, no Medicare, no Medicaid, no public law enforcement as individuals stand their own ground. Read all about it in Scott Erickson’s History of the Decline and Fall of America (Azaria Press, 2018).

Erickson’s newly released semi-fictional satire of American history and subsequent decline into deepening pits of despair is a sure-fire treasure trove of Americana, at its best. It’s a page-turner par excellence, rich in accurate textured American history and jam-packed with imagery of a dystopian future that is simply unavoidable based upon America’s character and development over the past two centuries. The dye was cast long before onset of dystopian existence.

The History of the Decline and Fall of America highlights and exposes inherent limitations of democratic capitalism whilst explaining in full living color a future American dystopia that is fully expected based upon America’s beginnings from the time of Captain John Smith at historic Jamestown (1607). The history lesson therein is superb, not missing a beat of what shaped America up to the final tipping point of neoliberal dogma and beyond into a deep dark world order.

This beautifully written and conceived historical fiction is a witty tour de force of America past, present, and future, weaving together all of the historical elements into one coherent story from the widely accepted version of American “business success ” of the early period, but over time wistfully morphing into abject failure!

That process of failure, the root causes, is what intrigues, for example, “Americans were not only inventing a country but inventing what it meant to be an American.” Indeed, America came into being as a brand new experiment in capitalistic democracy. Within that quest for a new way forward, inclusive of equality and fraternity amongst equals, Erickson discovers and reveals unique American traits that belie that mission, leading to a neoliberal/privatization hellhole that goes horribly wrong.

That fascinating pathway is explained via enchanting quips, for example, de Tocqueville’s remarkably astute comment: “ I know of no country, indeed, where the move of money has taken a stronger hold on the affections of men.” This one isolated statement from the 1830s tells a tale of American character molded by artificiality of wealth creation simply for the sake of possessing it. America’s pursuit of happiness was the “pursuit of affluence” and remained its dominant trait for the “remaining 200-plus years of American history.”

Indeed, those predominant American character traits are flushed-out and analyzed in the context of eventual failure, of a dystopian world order emanating out of America’s clumsy experimentation with empire-building and constantly striving for the pot at the end of the rainbow, meaning economic growth above all else. It was a frontier spirit that fed into elusive goals of preeminence: “The frontier resulted in Americans being doers rather than thinkers….”

Real scenes of real American cocksuredness, as well as the clumsiness associated with raw ignorance, come to life, e.g., during the presidential race between Ike and Adlai Stevenson in 1954: “A revealing incident occurred while Stevenson was campaigning for president. A citizen shouted to Stevenson that he ‘had the vote of every thinking person.’Stevenson replied, ‘That’s not enough. We need a majority!”
This is excellent history, comparable to a textbook, as well as a peek into the future shaped via trends rooted throughout Americana. Erickson’s lessons in American history are genuine and accurate, which gives the book depth and a powerful sense of significance well beyond similar treatises that try to lay the challenging groundwork leading to how a nation turns sour into a dystopian society.

He weaves the path of Manifest Destiny all the way from 1840s to the planting of the American flag on the surface of the moon. Until the 1970s when American pre-eminence tipped downward, humiliated in Vietnam in what future generations came to know as The Vietnam Syndrome,” the psychological attempt to live with the unacceptable reality that it was possible for America to not win.

Not only was America no longer a winner in war, its “unparalleled level of affluence… began to decline.” The 1970s marked the high point, forever downward into a bottomless septic tank, a cloaca of messy foul shit earmarking America’s final destiny, third world status within a realm of excessive, pretense of wealth glistening behind spiked electronic gates.

The signs of decline were easy to spot by the early-mid 2000s: “… the situation had declined dramatically. According to statistics from 2015, among industrialized nations, America was notable for having the highest poverty rate, the lowest score on the UN index of ‘material well-being of children,’ the highest health care expenditures, the highest infant mortality rate, the highest prevalence of mental health problems, the highest obesity rate, the highest consumption of antidepressants per capita, the highest homicide rate, and the largest prison population per capita. By international standards, the rural counties of southern West Virginia and eastern Kentucky qualified as developing countries, as did large sections of American cities such as Detroit, Cleveland, Gary, and many others.” (Pg. 112)

Thereafter, America’s youth no longer embraced the long-standing belief that they would have more than their parents. No, they knew it would be less and less. America entered a “permanent recession” cycle.
By the late 2030s American experienced a series of extreme crises. A number of cities declared bankruptcy. Houston, America’s 4th largest city goes bankrupt. Cleveland goes bankrupt. The head of the Federal Reserve quits and becomes a banjo player in a bluegrass group. America’s banking system collapses under the weight of fishy loans and massive crazed derivatives all permitted by increasingly hands-off regulations. The brutal hand of libertarianism smears a once proud republic.

Regular citizens, entire families carry torches surrounding Wall Street in protest of loss savings, ATMs not functioning, banks closed. An economic death spiral unleashed. The Save America Act followed, consisting of pure right wing neoliberal fix-its to save corporate America, to save Wall Street, turning to America, Inc. as the only answer to all that ails.

And, as the financial markets unravel in the face of nationwide bankruptcies, the government convincingly informs the public: “We need to defy the Constitution in order to preserve it… Americans were so thoroughly confused about the relationship between government and economics that most of them thought that the terms democracy, free-enterprise, and capitalism were the same thing.” (Pg. 165)

As time progresses, America’s Labor Day is changed to Management Day, and the Catholic Church is permitted to re-name the Statue of Liberty as “Our Lady of Perpetual Economic Growth.” America the nation turns into America, Inc. It is the only way the establishment knows to drive the country out of its doldrums. As such, The Star Spangled Banner is changed to The Free Market Ramble.

Privatization of the entire country in harmony with massive tax cuts alongside elimination of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, public education, law enforcement, postal service, and maintenance of roads and infrastructure, thereafter, people take care of themselves from birth to the death, alone with family backing. Self-directed medical care becomes a beacon of survival of the fittest of the fittest. Those that participated as y0ungsters in Boy/Girl Scouts have a leg up in a society that increasingly places emphasis on rugged individualism. However, the many, many weaklings stumble in rows after rows of slimy gutters.

In the end, and similar to America’s 2008-09 financial collapse, which was only a warm up for much bigger things to come: “The decisive trigger, the one that pushed America beyond the point of no return, was the total collapse of the economy. It had been something of a miracle that the doomed economy had not collapsed long before. Toward the end it had been sustained by little more than momentum, since according to all economic indicators it should not have been functioning at all. The economic system based on infinite growth had reached the point where it could grow no more. American banks could not pay off previous debt by making further loans to generate more money. The pyramid scheme was over… An eerie calm descended upon all those involved in economics and finance.”

America is Disneyland

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By Chris Kanthan

Source: Activist Post

Disneyland is the Happiest Place on Earth! Millions of families visit the theme park every year to enjoy the magical place of rides, spectacular shows and cheerful cartoon figures. Everything is clean, perfect and joyful. Unless … you realize that Cinderella might actually be homeless. That’s right, 10% of Disneyland’s employees are actually homeless, many more are on food stamps, and 75% struggle to make ends meet.

Does this ring familiar? Think of America. Behind the façade of being the greatest country on Earth with the largest GDP and the wealthiest billionaires, there are tens of millions of Americans who are left behind just like Disney’s employees.

This neo-feudalistic model isn’t isolated to Disney or Walmart, it’s systemic. For example, the bus driver at Apple – which has $280 billion in cash – is forced to sleep in a van because he can’t afford the Silicon Valley rent; Facebook’s cafeteria workers live in a garage; and thousands of American Airlines’ employees are forced to depend on food stamps.

America is being eaten alive by corporate greed; and Disneyland has been taken over by Scrooge.

Let’s look at some Disney Inc. statistics.

Total profit per year: $9 billion

Total employees: 200,000

Notice that the profit reflects what’s left after all the expenses, including the salaries, have been paid. So, in a utopian world, the Disney management will do the math ($9 billion / 200,000 = $45,000) and send a check for $45K to every employee, Mickey included. That kind of profit-sharing would really make Disneyland the happiest place on Earth. Does that happen? No way!

Does Cinderella get a check for perhaps $20K, $10K, $5K or even $1K? Nope, nope, nope, nope. Cinderella gets nada, zero, zilch. She should be content with the $12/hour salary and must smile happily for the kids.

In Disneyland, Cinderella never gets to meet her prince.

Disney’s CEO gets paid $46 million a year, which translates to $23,000 an hour. Imagine Disney’s CEO coming to work on Jan 2nd. He wishes a few people “happy new year,” orders coffee, sits on his desk, makes a few phone calls … and he has already made more money than what Ariel would make during the rest of the year.

Of course, the CEO should get paid more, but does he deserve a salary that’s equivalent to 2,000 Disney employees? If the CEO doesn’t show up for work for a day, Disneyland will continue running. If 2,000 employees take a day off, the park would be shut down.

In the 1960s, the CEO-to-worker salary ratio was 25. Today it’s often 600 or more, sometimes even more than 1000 (for example, at Walmart). Much of the executive compensation comes in the form of stock options and bonuses based on stock performance. In a rational and unrigged world, the CEOs would increase their revenues and profits to get bonuses. Not anymore.

Now, the CEOs simply use a no-brainer solution to boost the stock prices – it’s called stock buybacks or share repurchases. This involves a firm using corporate profits (or even borrowed money) to buy its own stocks. BTW, this used to be illegal until the 1980s.

Since 2007, US corporations have spent trillions of dollars on stock buybacks. In 2018 alone, they will spend $800 billion on this financial engineering tool (which has also led to a massive stock market bubble). They won’t use the billions to hire Americans, boost wages or innovate new products. Instead, the CEOs will buy yachts and tell you that Chinese or Mexicans stole your jobs.

Do the low-wage employees of Disneyland get any shares or stock options? A silly question, indeed.

Thus we have a situation where American employers ruthlessly exploit American workers. This isn’t a good model for a country. China and Mexico don’t make us poor; predatory capitalism does.

Paying good wages to hardworking employees is not socialism or communism. Henry Ford understood this when he more than doubled the wages of his workers in 1914.

However, hundred years later, maximizing profit has become a fundamentalist dogma. You can imagine a conversation among the factory-farming executives:

Guy #1: Why the heck are these chickens roaming out in the farms? We would save so much money if we lock them up in cages.

Guy #2: Brilliant idea! Let’s lock up five chickens in a cage. We will save more. More is always better.

Guy #3: I really don’t understand why we feed them expensive salads and healthy stuff. Let’s feed them cheap GMO corn and GMO soy from my friends at Monsanto.

Guy #4: Experts tell me that if we give them caffeine and anti-depressants, the chickens will stay awake longer, eat more, and get fatter.

Guy #5: And when they get sick, load them up with antibiotics and steroids.

Guy #5: These stupid chickens are also so small. Let’s drug them with some growth hormones. I am getting a lot of pressure from the private equity funds about profits per chicken.

Apart from being inhumane and psychopathic, this system forgets or ignores the fact that we have to eat these chickens. Sick chicken = sick people. Call it Karma or “revenge of the chickens.”

Similarly, poor workers = poor country. And you can imagine a similar conversation among corporate executives regarding workers – “cut their wages and benefits”, “make them work overtime”, “hire part-time employees rather than full-time” and so on.

You can’t grow the economy if American workers don’t get paid enough, especially by profitable multi-billion dollar corporations. 2/3rd of our GDP is based on consumer spending. It’s no wonder that in the last ten years, the US economy cumulatively grew only by a dismal 35%. Compare that to China, which grew by an astounding 200% during that same period.

And it’s not a coincidence that China’s average wages have more than doubled in the same period:

The solution for low wages primarily lies in the hands of corporate elites. Labor unions are almost non-existent in the private sector these days; and the government doesn’t have much control over corporate America – in fact, corporations control the U.S. political system. Free market doesn’t have to translate to cancerous greed and extreme exploitation. Free market also means that corporations are free to share their profits with their employees. Finally, free market can and must also incorporate patriotism, responsibility to the society and strategies for sustainable prosperity.

 

Chris Kanthan is the author of a new book, Deconstructing the Syrian War. Chris lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, has traveled to 35 countries, and writes about world affairs, politics, economy and health. His other book is Deconstructing Monsanto. Follow him on Twitter: @GMOChannel

 

 

Convenient Tales About Riches Within Reach

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By Sam Pizzigati

Source: OpEdNews.com

The world at large knew virtually nada about Sylvia Bloom for 96 years. Then she died in 2016. Now, just a little too late, Sylvia Bloom is getting her belated — yet richly deserved — 15 minutes of worldwide fame.

The New York Times has just published a heart-warming story of the caring, upright life Sylvia Bloom lived, and the remarkable — and hidden — fortune she quietly accumulated over the course of her 67-year career as a Manhattan legal secretary.

That fortune totaled, in the end, over $9 million. The bulk of that wealth, the Times account reveals, is going — per Bloom’s wishes — to help students from poor families advance their educations.

None of Bloom’s surviving relatives or law firm colleagues or fellow volunteers at the Henry Street Settlement, the social services agency set to get $6.24 million from her bequest, had any idea that their unassuming loved one and friend had saved anything remotely close to multiple millions.

Counting Pennies

Bloom lived frugally all her life in Brooklyn and commuted, by subway, to her job. The “high life” never interested her in the least. She led a simple existence. She counted her pennies. In the end, she put them all to good use.

Stories like Bloom’s have been popping up regularly over recent years. Leonard Gigowski, a Wisconsin shopkeeper, died three years ago at age 90, and left behind a “secret $13 million fortune” that’s currently funding scholarships. Grace Groner passed away in 2010 at age 100. She spent most of her life in a one-bedroom Illinois home, shopped at thrift stores, and left $9 million for her alma mater.

Convenient Tales

Our popular culture can’t seem to get enough of these life-affirming tales of modest multi-millionaire seniors. These stories make us feel good. They also, unfortunately, reinforce a message that our society’s richest — and their cheerleaders — find enormously convenient.

You don’t have to be money-hungry, commit vile acts or have remarkable talents to become wealthy, the tellers of all these stories of hidden millions suggest. You just have to be frugal; almost anybody, in other words, can become rich.

And if you don’t happen to become rich, the media coverage of these stories not so subtly hints, just look in the mirror for the reason why. You, too, could have resisted temptation and counted your pennies.

You, too, could have built a huge personal fortune. Shame on you. You chose not to.

The Millionaire Next Door

A couple of decades ago, two academic researchers — Thomas Stanley and William Danko — made themselves not insignificant personal fortunes by wrapping up that same theme in reams of statistics. Their 1996 book, The Millionaire Next Door, has so far sold over 4 million copies.

That thrifty fellow down the block with a six-year-old Ford, The Millionaire Next Door related, could well be worth millions. And those millions, the book stressed, all begin with frugality.

Conservative pundits have always loved this basic frugality-pays thesis. Stanley and Danko, the argument goes, have served up the ultimate secret to getting rich. “Hardly any” of the self-made rich the pair profiled in The Millionaire Next Door, as one commentator noted a few years ago, “had expensive tastes.” Instead, these millionaires avoided “new homes and expensive clothes” and “often invested 15 to 20 percent of their net income.”

Any of us could follow that lead, this analyst would add, so long as we understand “that building wealth takes discipline, sacrifice, and hard work.”

Reaping Rewards

But if “discipline, sacrifice, and hard work” build wealth, why do so many millions of disciplined, sacrificing, and hard-working Americans today have so little of it? Why is the “millionaire next door” — especially for our millennial generation — becoming a vanishing species?

Sylvia Bloom’s life offers some clues. Yes, Bloom lived frugally, sacrificed, and worked hard. But she also matured in a society — mid-20th century America — that endeavored to help disciplined, sacrificing, and hard-working people.

That help came in many different forms. Sylvia Bloom attended Hunter College, part of a system of free public higher education in New York City. She and her husband, a firefighter and later teacher, lived in a rent-controlled apartment. She commuted, for just a few dimes per day, on the world’s most extensive public transit system.

Sylvia Bloom’s young adult counterparts today? They confront a totally different reality. The sky-high costs of attending college have turned 21st-century young adults into life-long debtors. To find an affordable place to live, they squeeze into tiny apartments close to their jobs or plop themselves in distant exurbs, fighting traffic jams all the way to work — if not paying big bucks daily for scarce transit options.

Austerity Trumps Frugality

These millennials aren’t living the frugal life. They’re living the austere life — and not by choice. Our elected leaders have thrust this austerity upon them, with decades of public policies that have rewarded the rich with tax cuts at every turn and whittled away public services at every opportunity.

If Sylvia Bloom had been born a millennial, she’d be pinching pennies today to pay off her college debts. She’d be looking forward to years of hard work and sacrifice, with no hope of ever saving up enough to become a significant invester.

In her actual life, Sylvia Bloom had the good fortune to live her early adult years in a society much more caring than ours. She cared back — and chose to devote her own financial good fortune to helping others to the same support that so helped her.

Sylvia Bloom’s life does indeed offer up inspiration. Let’s not let our rich turn that life into a rationalization for their riches.

The ‘Values,’ ‘Vision,’ and ‘Democracy’ of an Inauthentic Opposition

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Average Americans, whose economic survival is threatened, have no political party to represent them, including deceptive Democrats who claim to be their champions and blame others when their deception fails, says Paul Street.

By Paul Street

Source: Consortium News

Never underestimate the capacity of the United States’ Inauthentic Opposition Party, the corporate Democrats, for self-congratulatory delusion and the externalization of blame.

Look, for example, at the Democratic National Committee’s (DNC) recently filed 66-page lawsuit against Russia, WikiLeaks, and the 2016 Donald Trump campaign. The document accuses Russia of “mount[ing] a brazen attack on the American democracy,” “destabilize[ing] the U.S. political environment” on Trump’s (and Russia’s) behalf, and “interfering with our democracy….”

“The [RussiaGate] conspiracy,” the DNC Complaint says, “undermined and distorted the DNC’s ability to communicate the [Democratic] party’s values and vision to the American electorate” and “sowed discord within the Democratic Party at a time when party unity was essential…”

Yes, Russia, like numerous other nations living under the global shadow of the American Superpower, may well have tried to have some surreptitious say in 2016 U.S. presidential election. (Why wouldn’t the Kremlin have done that, given the very real and grave threats Washington and its Western NATO allies have posed for many years to post-Soviet-era Russian security and peace in Eastern Europe?)

Still, charging Russia with interfering with US-“American democracy” is like me accusing the Washington Capital’s star left winger Alex Ovechkin of interfering with my potential career as a National Hockey League player (I’m middle aged and can’t skate backwards). The U.S. doesn’t have a functioning democracy to undermine, as numerous careful studies (see this,this,this,this,this,this,this,this, and this) have shown.

We have, rather, a corporate and financial oligarchy, an open plutocracy. U.S.-Americans get to vote, yes, but the nation’s “unelected dictatorship of money” reigns nonetheless in the United States, where, as leading liberal political scientists Benjamin Page (Northwestern) and Marin Gilens (Princeton) find, “government policy…reflects the wishes of those with money, not the wishes of the millions of ordinary citizens who turn out every two years to choose among the preapproved, money-vetted candidates for federal office.”

Our Own Oligarchs

Russia and WikiLeaks “destabilized the U.S. political environment”? Gee, how about the 20 top oligarchic U.S. mega-donors who invested more than $500 million combined in disclosed campaign contributions (we can only guess at how much “dark,” that is undisclosed, money they gave) to candidates and political organizations in the 2016 election cycle? The 20 largest organizational donors also gave a total of more than $500 million. The foremost plutocratic election investors included hard right-wing billionaires like casino owner Sheldon Adelson ($83 million disclosed to Republicans and right-wing groups), hedge-fund manager Paul Singer ($26 million to Republicans and the right), hedge fund manager Robert Mercer ($26 million) and packaging mogul Richard Uihlein ($24 million).

How about the multi-billionaire Trump’s own real estate fortune, which combined with the remarkable free attention the corporate media oligopoly granted him to help catapult the orange-tinted fake-populist beast past his more traditional Republican primary opponents? And what about the savagely unequal distribution of wealth and income in Barack Obama’s America, so extreme in the wake of the Great Recession that Hillary’s primary campaign rival Bernie Sanders could credibly report that the top tenth of the upper U.S.1% possessed nearly as much wealth as the nation’s bottom 90%? Such extreme disparity helped doom establishment, Wall Street- and Goldman Sachs-embroiled candidates like Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, and Mrs. Clinton in 2016. Russia and WikiLeaks did not create that deep, politically- and neoliberal-policy-generated socioeconomic imbalance.

Double Vision

And just what were the Democratic Party “values and vision” that Russia, Trump, and WikiLeaks supposedly prevented the DNC and the Clinton team from articulating in 2016? As the distinguished political scientist and money-politics expert Thomas Ferguson and his colleagues Paul Jorgensen and Jie Chen noted in an important study released three months ago, the Clinton campaign “emphasized candidate and personal issues and avoided policy discussions to a degree without precedent in any previous election for which measurements exist….it deliberately deemphasized issues in favor of concentrating on what the campaign regarded as [Donald] Trump’s obvious personal weaknesses as a candidate.” Strangely enough, the Twitter-addicted reality television star Trump had a lot more to say about policy than the former First Lady, U.S. Senator, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, a wonkish Yale Law graduate.

The Democrats “values and vision” in 2016 amounted pretty much to the accurate but hardly inspiring or mass-mobilizing notion that Donald Trump was an awful person who was unqualified for the White House. Clinton ran almost completely on candidate character and quality. This was a blunder of historic proportions, given Clinton’s own highly problematic character brand. Any campaign needs a reasonably strong policy platform to stand on in case of candidate difficulties.

By Ferguson, Jorgenson, and Chen’s account, Hillary’s peculiar policy silence was about U.S. oligarchs’ campaign money. Thanks to candidate Trump’s bizarre nature and his declared isolationism and nationalism, Clinton achieved remarkable campaign finance success with normally Republican-affiliated capitalist sectors less disposed to abide the standard, progressive-sounding policy rhetoric of Democratic Party candidates than their more liberal counterparts.

One ironic but “fateful consequence” of her curious connection to conservative business interests was her “strategic silence about most important matters of public policy. … Misgivings of major contributors who worried that the Clinton campaign message lacked real attractions for ordinary Americans were rebuffed. The campaign,” Ferguson, Jorgenson, and Chen wrote, “sought to capitalize on the angst within business by vigorously courting the doubtful and undecideds there, not in the electorate.”

Other Clinton mistakes included failing to purchase television ads in Michigan, failing to set foot in Wisconsin after the Democratic National Convention, and getting caught telling wealthy New York City campaign donors that Trump’s white supporters were “a basket of” racist, sexist, nativist, and homophobic “deplorables.” This last misstep was a Freudian slip of the neoliberal variety. It reflected and advanced the corporate Democrats’ longstanding alienation of and from the nation’s rural and industrial and ex-industrial “heartland.”

Fake Progressives

As left historian Nancy Fraser noted after Trump was elected, the Democrats, since at least the Bill Clinton administration, had joined outwardly progressive forces like feminism, antiracism, multiculturalism, and LGBTQ rights to “financial capitalism.” This imparted liberal “charisma” and “gloss” to “policies that …devastated…what were once middle-class lives” by wiping out manufacturing, weakening unions, slashing wages, and increasing the “precarity of work.”

To make matters worse, Fraser rightly added, the “progressive neoliberal” blue-and digital-zone Democrats “compounded” the “injury of deindustrialization” with “the insult of progressive moralism,” which rips red-and analog-zone whites as culturally retrograde (recall candidate Obama’s problematic 2008 reflection on how rural and small-town whites “cling to religion and guns”) and yet privileged by the simple color of their skin.

Such insults from elite, uber-professional class neo-liberals like Obama (Harvard Law) and the Clintons (Yale Law) would sting less in the nation’s “flyover zones” if the those uttering them had not spent their sixteen years in the White House governing blatantly in accord with the wishes of Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and the leading multinational corporations. Like Bill Clinton’s two terms, the Obama years were richly consistent with Sheldon Wolin’s early 2008 description of the Democrats as an “inauthentic opposition” whose dutiful embrace of “centrist precepts” meant they would do nothing to “substantially revers[e] the drift rightwards” or “significantly alter the direction of society.”

The fake-“progressive” Obama presidency opened with the expansion of Washington’s epic bailout of the very parasitic financial elites who recklessly sparked the Great Recession (this with no remotely concomitant expansion of federal assistance to the majority middle- and working-class victims), the abandonment of campaign pledges to restore workers’ right to organize (through the immediately forgotten Employee Free Choice Act), and the kicking of Single Payer health care advocates to the curb as Obama worked with the big drug and insurance syndicates to craft a corporatist, profit-friendly health insurance reform. Obama’s second term ended with him doggedly (if unsuccessfully) championing the arch-authoritarian global-corporatist Trans Pacific Partnership.

This Goldman Sachs and Citigroup-directed policy record was no small part of what demobilized the Democrats’ mass electoral base in ways that “destabilized the U.S. political environment” to the benefit of the reactionary populist Trump, whose Mercer family-backed proto-fascistic strategist and Svengali Steve Bannon was smartly attuned to the Democrats’ elitist class problem.

There was a major 2016 presidential candidate who ran with genuinely progressive “values and vision” – Bernie Sanders. The most remarkable finding in Ferguson, Jorgenson, and Chen’s study is that the self-declared “democratic socialist” Sanders came tantalizingly close to winning the Democratic presidential nomination with no support from Big Business. The small-donor Sanders campaign was “without precedent in American politics not just since the New Deal, but across virtually the whole of American history … a major presidential candidate waging a strong, highly competitive campaign whose support from big business was essentially zero.”

Sanders was foiled by the big-money candidate Clinton’s advance control of the Democratic National Committee and convention delegates. Under a formal funding arrangement it worked up with the Democratic National Committee (DNC) in late September of 2015, the depressing “lying neoliberal warmonger” Hillary’s campaign was granted advance control of all the DNC’s “strategic decisions.” The Democratic Party’s presidential caucuses and primaries were rigged against Sanders in ugly ways that provoked a different lawsuit last year – a class-action suit against the DNC on behalf of Sanders’ supporters. The complaint was dismissed by a federal judge who ruled on the side of DNC lawyers by agreeing that the DNC was within its rights to violate their party’s charter and bylaws by selecting its candidate in advance of the primaries.

How was that for the noble “values and vision” that “American democracy” inspires atop the not-so leftmost of the nation’s two major and electorally viable political parties?

Under Cover of Russia-gate

That’s what “sowed discord within the Democratic Party at a time when party unity was essential…” Russia didn’t do it. Neither did WikiLeaks or the Trump campaign. The Clinton campaign and the Democratic Party establishment – themselves funded by major U.S. oligarchs like San Francisco hedge-fund billionaire Tom Steyer– did that on their own.

Could Sanders – the most popular politician in the U.S. (something rarely reported in a “mainstream” corporate media that could barely cover his giant campaign rallies even as it obsessed over Trump’s every bizarre Tweet) – have defeated the orange-tinted beast in the general election? Perhaps, though much of the oligarchic funding Hillary got would have gone to Trump if “socialist” Bernie had been the Democratic nominee. It is unlikely that Sanders could have accomplished much as president in a nation long controlled by the capitalist oligarchy in numerous ways that go far beyond campaign finance alone.

Meanwhile, under the cover of RussiaGate, the still-dismal and dollar-drenched corporate-imperial Democrats seem content to continue tilting to the center-right, purging Sanders-style progressives from the party’s leadership and citing the party’s special election victories (Doug Jones and Conor Lamb) against deeply flawed and Trump-backed Republicans in two bright-red voting districts (the state of Alabama and a fading Pennsylvania canton) as proof that tepid neoliberal centrism is still (even after Hillary’s stunning defeat) the way to go.

Along the way, the Inauthentic Opposition’s candidate roster for the upcoming Congressional mid-term election is loaded with an extraordinary number of contenders with U.S. military and intelligence backgrounds, consistent with Congressional Democrats repeated votes to give massive military and surveillance-state funds and power to a president they consider (accurately enough) unbalanced and dangerous.

The trick, the neoliberal “CIA Democrats” think, is to run conservative, Wall Street-backed imperial and National Security State veterans who pretend (see Eric Draitser’s recent piece on “How Clintonites Are Manufacturing Faux Progressive Congressional Campaigns”) to be aligned with majority-progressive left-of-center policy sentiments and values. It’s still very much their party.

Whatever happens during the next biennial electoral extravaganza, “the crucial fact” remains, in Wolin’s words nine years ago, “that for the poor, minorities, the working class and anti-corporatists there is no opposition party working on their behalf” in the United States – the self-declared homeland and headquarters of global democracy.

 

Paul Street is an independent radical-democratic policy researcher, journalist, historian, author and speaker based in Iowa City, Iowa, and Chicago, Illinois.  He is the author of seven books. His latest is They Rule: The 1% v. Democracy (Paradigm, 2014). 

Big Pharma, Big Oil and Big Banks Meet the Definition of Terrorists

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Common threads persist throughout definitions of terrorism: violence, injury or death, intimidation, intentionality, multiple targets and political motivation. Big pharma, big oil and big banks meet them all.

By Paul Buchheit

Source: Mint Press News

Various definitions of terrorism have been proposed in recent years, by organizations such as the FBI, the State Department, Homeland Security, and the ACLU. Some common threads persist throughout the definitions: violence, injury or death, intimidation, intentionality, multiple targets, political motivation. All the criteria are met by pharmaceutical and oil and financial companies. They have all injured and intimidated the American public, and caused people to die, with intentionality shown by their refusal to acknowledge evidence of their misdeeds, and political motives clear in their lobbying efforts, where among all U.S. industries Big Pharma is #1, Big Oil is #5, and Securities/Investment #8.

The terror inflicted on Americans is real, and is documented by the facts to follow.

Big Pharma: Qualifying for Trump’s Call for Capital Punishment for Drug Dealers

In a Time Magazine article a young man named Chad Colwell says “I got prescribed painkillers, Percocet and Oxycontin, and then it just kind of took off from there.” Time adds: “Prescriptions gave way to cheaper, stronger alternatives. Why scrounge for a $50 pill of Percocet when a tab of heroin can be had for $5?” About 75% of heroin addicts used prescription opioids before turning to heroin.

Any questions about Big Pharma’s role in violence and death in America have been answered by the Centers for Disease Control and the American Journal of Public Health. Any doubts about Big Pharma’s intentions to intimidate the public have been put to rest by the many occasions of outrageous price gouging. And any uncertainty about political pressure is removed by its #1 lobbying ranking.

As for malicious intentions, Bernie Sanders noted, “We know that pharmaceutical companies lied about the addictive impacts of opioids they manufactured.” Purdue Pharma knew all about the devastating addictive effects of its painkiller Oxycontin, and even pleaded guilty in 2007 to misleading regulators, doctors, and patients about the drug’s risk. Now Purdue and other drug companies are facing a lawsuitfor “deceptively marketing opioids” and ignoring the misuse of their drugs.

No jail for the opioid pushers, though, just slap-on-the-wrist fines that can be made up with a few price increases. But partly as a result of Pharma-related violence, Americans are suffering “deaths of despair”— death by drugs, alcohol and suicide. Suicide is at its highest level in 30 years.

Big Oil: Decades of Terror

Any doubts about the ecological terror caused by fossil fuel companies have been dispelled by the World Health Organization, the American Lung Association, the United Nations, the Pentagon, cooperating governments, and independent research groups, all of whom agree that human-induced climate change is killing people.

The oil industry’s intentionality and political motives have been demonstrated by their refusal to admit the known truth, starting with Exxon, which has covered up its own climate research for 40 years, and continuing through multi-million dollar lobbying efforts by Amoco, the US Chamber of Commerce, General Motors, Koch Industries, and other corporations in their effort to dismantle the Kyoto Protocol against global warming.

Big Banks: Leaving Suicidal Former Homeowners Behind

Any doubts about the violence stemming from the 2008 mortgage crisis have been resolved by studies of recession-caused suicides. Both the British Journal of Psychiatry and the National Institutes of Healthfound definite links between the recession and the rate of suicides.

As with Big Pharma and Big Oil, intentionality and political motives are evident in the banking industry’s lobbying efforts on behalf of deregulation — leading to the same conditions that threatened American homeowners in 2008. There has also been a surge in the number of non-bank lenders, who are less subject to regulation.

Making it all worse are private developers, who make most of their profits by building fancy homes for the rich. And by avoiding affordable housing. Since the recession, Blackstone and other private equity firms — with government subsidies — have been buying up foreclosed houses, holding them till prices appreciate, and in the interim renting them back at exorbitant prices.

This is leaving more and more Americans out in the cold — literally. A head of household in the U.S. needs to make $21.21 an hour to afford a two-bedroom apartment at HUD standards, much more than the $16.38 they actually earn. Since the recession, the situation has continually worsened. From 2010 to 2016 the number of housing units priced for very low-income families plummeted 60 percent.

Here’s the big picture: Since the 1980s there’s been a massive redistribution of wealth from middle-class housing to the investment portfolios of people with an average net worth of $75 million. It’s not hard to understand the “deaths of despair” caused by the terror inflicted on people losing their homes.