Posts tagged corporatism
(via political-cartoons)
On Winner-Take-All Politics
MOYERS & COMPANYAir Date: January 13, 2012Bill Moyers explores how America’s vast inequality didn’t just happen, it’s been politically engineered.
How Washington made the rich richer at the expense of the middle class. Bill talks with Winner-Take-All Politics authors Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson and comments on the value of Occupy Wall Street.
More Bill Moyers videos here »
January 15, 2012By Troy Oxford and Lauren Feeney
In recent years, the rich have seen their wealth grow dramatically while the poor and middle class have basically flatlined. It’s no accident, argue Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson in their book Winner-Take-All Politics. [The book] explains how our politicians — on both sides of the isle — fell under the spell of corporate dollars and re-engineered our economic system to favor the wealthy.
Who are the 99%? All of us who were told that if we worked hard and saved money we could retire with few financial worries. They forgot to tell us about the tech bubble, followed by the housing bubble, followed by recession and anthropocentric global climate change.
They told us technology and medicine would save us. They forgot to mention the CO2 issue and environmental degradation; the cost of healthcare and the deadly side effects of pharmaceuticals.
They talked us into believing that our homes would appreciate enough to buy retirement and that putting money in the stock market was better than a savings account. They forgot to mention that only insiders, brokers, players, and the already wealthy get rich from the stock market. For the rest of us it is more like carnie midway games—there’s no way to win.
Our 401Ks, pension funds, IRAs, and Roths are built on a house of cards, but it is too late: we’re trapped in the game. We hope the market will go up even though we despise the thought of corporate rule. We are at the mercy of the 55 wall $treeters who peer over the balconies and laugh at our angst. The corporations and the banks are sitting on piles of our money. They withhold jobs, pad their pockets, and offer us pink slips and .03% interest.
And what are we told to do about this financial crisis? Go shopping!! Spend money! What money? We don’t have jobs! We can barely afford groceries. Capitalism has failed democracy. Let’s prove we can rebuild this nation with a new ethic, an economic prosperity based on creativity and progress not greed and development. Let’s create an inclusive vision of the future where education and social justice are better choices than war and wall $treet.
“We’re citizens not consumers.” I read that on the Global Revolution live feed chat. It’s my new motto. I am the 99%.
(via girtabaix)
The Wealth Pyramid
(Source: anti-propaganda)
by Mantoe Phakathi Published on Wednesday, October 26, 2011 by Inter Press Service
CHANGWON, South Korea - Civil society organisations are calling on governments in developing countries to stop leasing and selling out land to transnational corporations because it leads to land degradation and food insecurity.
Smallholder farms are disappearing across Africa because of large-scale foreign investment. (EPA)
Africa is one of the continents where corporations are flocking to lease or buy land for different projects such as mining, growing bio-fuel crops or construction – pushing rural poor communities off of their land.
“You find that the land is repossessed from poor people who are using it for farming to give way to bio-fuel crops or other projects that lead to land degradation,” said Khadija-Catherine Razavi, executive director of the Centre for Sustainable Development (CENESTA), a non-profit organisation dedicated to promoting sustainable community- and culture-based development that mainly works in Iran and Southwest Asia.
The NGOs representing ordinary people across the globe added their voices at the tenth session of the Conference of the Parties (COP 10) to the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), which drew more than 6,000 delegates from around the world to Changwon, South Korea from Oct. 10 to 21.
They unsuccessfully called for a pronouncement in the Changwon Declaration against the continued grabbing of land throughout Africa and Asia. According to Razavi, over 200 million square metres of land in these regions is already in the hands of multinational corporations.
“It’s not capitalism when the system is plagued with incomprehensible rules regarding mergers, acquisitions, and stock sales, along with wage controls, price controls, protectionism, corporate subsidies, international management of trade, complex and punishing corporate…
(Source: haereticum)
Note the important distinction Ron Paul makes between capitalism and corporatism. The enemy is not the (justifiably) wealthy but the illegitimately wealthy.
