The Media: Railroading the Electorate

The Guardian correspondent, Jonathan Steele, continues to plug the insane Guardian line of opposing the UK referendum decision to leave the EU. He goes so far as to say the Labour Party manifesto should declare that an incoming Labour government would abort the negotiations immediately. There will be no Brexit and no talks about how to achieve one!

Steele and his paymaster, the Guardian, seem to think it makes sense to defy a democratic decision, taken by 52% of the electorate, to pander to the 48% who did not get the result to remain in the EU that they wanted. He backs this up by saying over 60% of Labour supporters voted to remain, and are now "in despair", he claims. That is, of course, utter rubbish. Even if it were originally true, many of those Labour remainers are now pig sick of the LibDems and Greens harping on in defiance of a decision we have already taken--TO LEAVE!

Moreover the "two thirds of labour supporters" actually includes mostly urban liberals tempted to Labour by the Liberal Labour focus-group mentality of the Blairite years when winning the election was more important than having socialist policies. Traditional Labour Party members were already asking, "what is the point of winning then implementing Tory policies?". Quite! And the result was an erosion of faith in Labour and consequently loss of support in successive elections until we were conned into the unelected ConDem coalition of 2010 that led to our present sorry state (and the deserved collapse of the Liberal Democrats!).

Steele and the Guardian will be glad to see the present continuous false emphasis on Brexit and the perpetual attacks on Corbyn confusing the electorate to the extent that they achieve a similar collapse of Labour. We need to remember that most of the traditional Labour areas outside the metropolitan zone are the very areas (and some LibDem areas) that voted to leave, and the reason is plain--it is because the neoliberal policies of all the main parties for more than 50 years neglected the concerns of the voters in those deprived places--the "rust belt" of the UK--abandoned since Thatcher to decay with no prospects for their futures.

Labour must campaign vigourously for the votes of those neglected working people, and to persuade them that the Party is not backward looking, as the media are trying to persuade the young, but has a policy of "back to the future" to restore all that was good that Labour brought in after WWII and that successive right wing governments have been eroding ever since, and especially in the last 7 years.

The media and the present government in power are doing their utmost to persuade people that Corbyn is an ineffective leader, but that is not true. He has put forward a prospective programme that would benefit us all (except the over rich!), none more than the young! What is true is that the media are refusing to cover what Labour is offering, so the policies that everyone agrees are what are needed are not being associated with the Labour leader and his party in the minds of the electorate. Instead only negative associations are being propagated.

It is quite deliberate. One lesson that is always difficult to get over is that the media are not, and never have been fair. They offer biased views constantly, one of which is, of course, that they are actually fair, and it would be undemocratic to change the situation. The hacking scandal and the Leveson enquiry prove otherwise. An important question we should always ask when considering potential bias is, "who benefits from this opinion being accepted as true?" (Cui Bono? in Latin). In other words, in this case is the beneficiary of the view or the policy the rich or the poor? If it is not beneficial to poor people, or if it is vastly more beneficial to the rich, then there is cause for doubting it as a fair viewpoint. Why? Because the newspapers are owned by a handful of very rich people who run them for the benefit of their own kind--the very rich! Note, the VERY rich, not the slightly richer than the rest!

The Morning Star is the only daily paper in the UK to be biased toward the ordinary people, and the Peoples World is the equivalent in the USA. Yes, they are biased too, but they are biased against the rich. But an unbalance can only be corrected by an opposite force. If you must read media like the Guardian, then the opposite pan in the scales should be equally weighted by reading the Morning Star (or Peoples World) to get a balance.

The media are trying to railroad the electorate into a dead end by bad mouthing the Labour Party and its leader, Jeremy Corbyn, though the failures of Labour are the failures of Corbyn's predecessors like Tony Blair (who always has a platform in the anti-Corbyn media). Corbyn, like the late Tony Benn, does not engage in slagging matches. That is not a sign of weakness but of strength. Anyone dismayed by Corbyn's fairness and politeness has the answer, as did Benn, in his policies, in the issues. Corbyn's policies address the issues important to working people, May and the Tories aggravate them because they aim to benefit the rich, and that they do at the expense of the poor!

How It Will Be Done! The Struggle for Socialism

• A United Response
• Who Overspent?
• Leading the People
• Building Socialist Unity
• Democratic Choice

A United Response

The ferocious and intensifying attack by the rich men’s party on the people who actually do the work needs an united response—by us! Yet we remain in a deplorable state of hesitation, disunity and confusion. Plenty of organizations and people online on various lists, forums and Facebook grumble away together discontentedly, but with no sound, agreed analysis of what is going on, though that is what is needed. The difficulty is that it is hard to get unity when the government is supported by the millions of issues of propaganda printed daily by the capitalist media, and the almost identical, selective “news” presented by the TV channels.

Yet we have one daily newspaper in the UK that is consistently in favor of the interests of ordinary people, the Morning Star. This paper is not run by capitalists, but millions who are discontent with the mass media still choose capitalist newspapers with their anti-worker agenda instead of a newspaper that suits us in our struggle against bank induced austerity, and for decent jobs, pay, conditions and benefits when we are ill or have fallen into unemployment, situations that are far from unusual but can be disastrous for families in starkly capitalist countries like the USA, the model for Cameron’s party here in the UK.

The satisfaction of these demands is impossible in the present dire capitalist crisis, which will only be settled within the system when wages are forced down by mass unemployment and enforced suffering. That is the nature of the capitalist system.

We can be sure that as soon as people start reading the progressive daily paper, and thereby begin to co-ordinate their opinions and efforts that the police will find excuses for arresting those leading and co-ordinated the protests. Protesters will be described in the capitalist media as “rentacrowd”, “anarchists”, “conspirators”, “rioters” and “hooligans”, with the aim of painting the leading protestors as extremists or louts, and magistrates will issue them with punitive fines or terms of penal servitude, the basis for all this having been set by the heavy punishments imposed on youths even for trivial misdemeanors following the riots of August 2011. That when a government minister, Stephen Laws, who stole £40,000 in false expenses was let off then taken back into government!

Such happenings must anger us all the more, and stir us to greater protest until it becomes a mass protest that simply cannot be handled by the authorities in that unjust and bullying manner, and the ones incarcerated have to be released. Not being willing to act will yield the ground to the capitalist agents posing as a democratically elected government—the ConDems, the Conservative and Liberal Democratic coalition.

Who Overspent?

But although being that determined can beat back ConDem assaults against our persons, we need an alternative programme, and so far the Parliamentary opposition has not been adequately opposing the ConDems because New Labour has essentially the same outlook and motivation as the Tories and the Liberals. New Labour under its leader Ed Miliband remains the New Labour of Tony Blair, an alternative capitalist party. There is nothing socialist in the principle that only the private sector can run the economy, and that is the core of New Labour.

It was the Labour party when in power, that gave away to the bankers and their rich owners the contents of the British Treasury—money that the government took from us ostensibly to provide us with common services. Now the Treasury is empty because we have overspent. The TV stations are good at finding worthy but ignorant people, often pensioners and the unemployed with no means of overspending anything, to say on camera, no doubt for a modest incentive, "we have overspent, so we have to tighten our belts". We did not overspend, as the media propaganda has it, but it illustrates the power the capitalist media have over us, the confusion it generates, and the reason we need to read our own newspaper. That alone would help to get rid of the learned helplessness, apathy and inertia workers currently feel.

The government we elected to manage the country on our behalf gave to the rich the money we had put into the exchequer to give us health benefits, work and a pleasant environment to live in. The rich had gambled on junk stocks consisting of mortgage debt packaged for resale to permit the spreading among many buyers of the risk of lending money on inadequate security. So long as the housing boom continued, the value of a house would increase and eventually would equal and exceed the mortgage, leaving the debt secured and the bonds safe and yielding riches from mortgage repayments for decades into the future. The housing boom did not continue!

The banks that had devised the bonds and the greedy rich who had bought them were left broke, holding a load of nigh on worthless junk, and many banks were technically bankrupt. A run on any of them in that condition would have ended them. That is why national governments had to fill the void in the banks’ vaults by emptying the national treasuries. The greedy gamble of the rich was so bad and the banks so involved by their laying off individual risks with each other, just like bookies, that £trillions had to be given to banks in every western country to secure the ruling rich class from going bust! It was none of our business to bail them out. Governments elected to look after the interests of all of the people essentially protected the sole interest of the super rich one per cent, at the cost of the middle class and the poor worker.

With treasuries virtually empty, the national governments had to cut the services they were meant to supply via taxation, so civil servants and other public servants had to be cut. Ordinary people therefore were sold the lie that we had been overspending and a period of austerity—job losses especially from public services, and wage and benefit reductions—was needed to get us back on track. Meanwhile the rich are not even asked to pay back in taxes any of the £trillions they have ungratefully received from the taxpayer as a gift.

Leading the People

The economic leadership of working people in capitalism has always been the ones willing to step forward and lead the trades unions—activists and shop stewards. But these trades unionists realized they needed a political branch and set up the Labour Party, which remains to this day the party for most working people. Regrettably, though, the trades unions did not use the financial power they had over the Labour Party as the source of its funds to make it stick to its principles, particularly the important one of the socialization of the means of production, distribution and exchange, or Clause 4 as it was called.

The Labour Party has been controlled hitherto by trades unionists closest in ideology to the ruling class, those who were careeristic and opportunistic in outlook and willing to compromise with capital to maintain what they perceived as an advantageous position in the social hierarchy. Ultimately, the Labour party abandoned any pretense of socialism, but despite that, being able still to rely on the support of leading trades unionists who had grown indifferent to the question of socialism. Yet a concerted movement and campaign within the trades unions for a firm line on the Labour Party would be immensely beneficial to the effectiveness of working people in countering the pressing powers of wealth and the undemocratic European Community.

Now New Labour is all things to all men, including many working people who mistakenly believe it is still what it was. So long as that is the case, activists ought to do their utmost to bring it back into the fold, via trades union pressure and demands from the membership.

Here we have to convince substantial numbers of workers who believe themselves to be middle class and natural Tory voters—white collar workers like office workers, technicians, scientists, foremen and charge hands, or lower management generally, and small business people like small sole proprietorships! They wrongly identify themselves with the capitalist class even though they do not have enough capital to live off without working—they must work to live, yet deny that they are working class. Their interests are those of workers, not those of monopolists and financiers, yet they wilfully support the parties and policies of their class enemy, thereby giving their enemies the rope to hang them.

Of course, the capitalist media try to encourage readers and viewers to support the free-and-easy Labour Party of unprincipled political opportunists. With a capitalist Labour Party as well as a capitalist party, the UK has got closer to the American system of two alternating rich man’s parties, and no alternative policies. It is a system that holds no fears for the ruling rich class. What the rich do not want is the Labour Party to respond to trades union pressure and adopt anew the socialist principles it once has, at least in name.

So the media keep up their pressure for the Labour Party to stay in the “political center” of a scale that is constantly redefined as excluding the “extreme left”, meaning anyone on the left, socialist, communists, anarchist, or any other leftist view, eventually even liberal! So the political center creeps continuously to the right. The assumption of the media seems to be that voters have fixed political views, and parties have to change their policies to attract a greater spread of voters. So they all go for a broad enough spread to encompass the center, and end up overlapping substantially leaving little choice in practice.

Building Socialist Unity

1. Political Struggle. The working class must not be diverted from the political struggle and instead be persuaded to settle for an endless economic war against the employers and their governments which leaves the employers wealth and power intact. To do so simply leaves working people at the capitalist’s mercy. The capitalist class simply regroup for another bash at the people—to restrict their conditions and freedom at a later date. That is not to say that an economic battle does not accomplish the political war. It does! After all, peoples’ immediate concerns are their economic welfare, but the political angle comes with the realization and acceptance that the capitalists and capitalism must be replaced by socialism if the class war is to end with the victory of the general good. For exploitation to be ended, capitalism must be ended. That is the object of the political struggle.

2. Eschewing Capitalist Media. Given that the capitalists control the mass media, the mass of the working class is too confused to be relied upon to spontaneously find the correct reply to the attacks made upon it by the government of the rich. It is too easy for the mass media to pick on easy scapegoats in society and direct reactionary elements among the workers who are seeking easy targets, to put the blame onto them rather than the class enemy. Easy scapegoats must be easily recognized, so racialism is the first preferred distraction used by the media, currently black and Moslem immigrants. Events will not spontaneously take the right course. It is too easy to blame an accessible scapegoat when the real enemy is well hidden and protected by the state.

   People need principled leadership, and a principled party to do it, and the practical leadership of that party will be publicized and explained through the socialist newspaper. Wealth can always be converted into weapons for use against the workers whether by hand or by brain—the rich have the advantage in the age of capital. But the working people have the power through their co-ordinated ability to stop working and bring the economy to a halt, hitting the rich where they feel it most—in their wallets. Whatever the rich try to do, with the working people sufficiently determined and united, synchronized rolling strikes or a steadfast general strike can stop it. Building that degree of unity in the face of the capitalist media is essential, and is the reason why every socialist should eschew financing capitalist propaganda while the socialist news organ is undersubscribed and underfunded… and therefore of limited effect.

3. Socialist consciousness. Equally, spontaneity implies and requires a widespread socialist consciousness and politico-economic understanding that takes a lot of practical experience and considerable devotion to Marxist study to gain. As most people will not have that sort of understanding without a proper journal to provide it, to imagine ordinary people will spontaneously do the right thing is likely to be a serious error, denigrating also the efforts of those who have tried to decipher the political signs. Moreover, it yields to those elements who will use any local crisis as an opportunity to get the reputation as a leader without adequate preparation, or to police agents provocateurs who use such situations to lead people astray and into traps.

   Marxism offers the proper framework for interpreting the crises and opportunities that arise in the struggle against capitalist exploitation. No two situations are alike, so Marxism is no crystal ball, at least in the sense of giving high definition answers, but it suggests the conditions and limits for successful action, and so is an essential guide to it. The active working class leader needs both theory and practice—often called praxis—understanding of both Marxist theory and practical experience in class struggle.

4. Marxism. Those who press for a purely spontaneous rising against the oppression of the ruling class base their stance on the importance within capitalism of the economic struggle for fair wages and, decent conditions, and jobs. One might call these people “economicists” because they restrict the class struggle to one bounded by capitalist economics and social conditions. The “economicists” assume the capitalist system and cannot transcend it.

   Many active workers in trades unions, including too many of their leaders, are “economicists”, but more than economics is needed if the class struggle is to go further and have some prospects of ending in an ultimate victory for the class of working people. Indeed, some do go further, seek to inform themselves of Marxism despite the widespread disdain for it propagated by capitalist politicians, academics and media, and especially since the collapse of the Soviet Union. So they prepared themselves better for the full scale assault we are now experiencing.

   Marxism preceded the Soviet Union and cannot rationally be rubbished by reference to the failings of its leaders. Marx’s analysis of capitalism remains sound, as the events of the financial collapse since 2007 prove, and capitalism’s reason for demeaning Marxism is not that the capitalists want to relieve simple people of a mistaken attitude, but because they know it remains sound and so is dangerous for them. By wrecking the belief workers’ leaders had in Marxism, capitalist agents are seeking to assist capitalism, not to educate the people.

   A worker conscious of economic unfairness and injustice under capitalism has two choices, a capitalist or a socialist ideology. To belittle socialist ideology—Marxism—is to strengthen capitalism. It explains why our society spends so much money and effort on mocking trades unions, working people’s practical workplace organizations, and socialism and communism, and their theoretical outlook, Marxism.

5. New Labour. For the same reason the Labour party, which began as an umbrella organization for left wing groups some of which were Marxist, by degrees expelled the Marxists until, under the leadership of Tony Blair, it got rid of all pretense of socialism and established itself as another capitalist party—New Labour, though “Not Labour” would have been more appropriate. This party, however, still has the loyalty of many workers, despite its record, and still has the loyalty and uncritical financial support of significant leaders of large trades unions. It is, though, the party of the “economicists”, having ditched “Clause 4” as an objective, as we saw, this being the clause which required the socialization of the means of production, distribution and exchange. So now New Labour, at best, stands for modest social reforms within an eternally present capitalism, thereby necessarily helping capitalism to remain stable and profitable. Reform, needless to say, leaves the economic system itself unaltered, so New Labour is never going to change society for the better.

   It is not socialist, but it remains the focus of working class aspirations because working class understanding is moulded by the capitalist media. Moreover, it still has good socialists in its ranks, and conceivably, if the trades unions that fund New Labour used their financial power to change the rules and the selection of parliamentary candidates, the Labour party could be reborn as a class party capable of fighting back against the ConDem assault on us. Class conscious workers therefore must use their influence in the trades unions to move Labour towards the left.

   

   Fortunately, besides the Labour Party, a variety of smaller left wing parties and campaign groups exist, but unfortunately they tend to be sectarian and particular, and so resistant to campaigning in unison. The natural principled party of the left is the Communist Party, but over a long period of time in the 1970s and 1980s, the party was infiltrated and destroyed from within, disbanding itself in 1991. Its successor, the CPB, remains small but with the important role of supporting and expanding the newspaper of the working people, the Morning Star, and promoting a socialist stand in the trades unions. It recognizes the centrality in the history of British socialism and working class thinking of the Labour Party, which it wishes also to return to its foundational principles and away from class collaboration and delusions of managing capitalism for the capitalists.

   The main point about the CPB is that it is guided by Marxism—it has principles and a method of applying them. The New Labour Party now has none, having abandoned them to fulfil the ambitions of careerists like Kinnock, Blair and Brown whose only principle was winning elections at any price, even abandoning socialism and selling the UK to Rupert Murdoch.

6. The Working Class. Emphatically “economicism” is a result of capitalist media spreading confusion and negative propaganda about socialism among the working people. It is a tactic that has succeeded remarkably well. It has turned the working class against its own interests at a time when exploitation by an egregiously greedy capitalist class was hurting more than for eighty years. As noted, working people even blame themselves for overspending when it was the bankers and their rich clients who had done it. The perpetual money making machine they thought they had inevitably failed, proving their greed and stupidity, but still nothing has been done to curtail it.

   Offered inadequately secured loans by the banks, people accepted them in all innocence, believing the propaganda from co-conspirator with Tony Blair to destroy the Labour party, Gordon Brown, that “boom and bust” had ended, and that bankers knew what they were doing. They did not, and Gordon Brown gave away the contents of the national exchequer to save the greedy rich and their bankers from suffering catastrophic losses. The governments of most major capitalists countries followed Brown’s lead.

   We suffer today because the national treasuries are empty, and services we need, provided traditionally by public and civil servants cannot be provided, unless the government cuts staff to cut costs, and borrows money to pay the wages of those who remain in post, and the benefits of those cast out of work. Who does the government borrow from? Who else but the banks! They have been given all our taxation money, and they are now lending it back at interest! We are having to pay interest to borrow our own money. Meanwhile, the beneficiaries are not even taxed, but the workers and middle class have to economize, “tighten their belts” and suffer unemployment not seen in a lifetime. We are most definitely not “all in it together”.

Democratic Choice

Democracy is meant to be a system where candidates have principles to let voters choose a representative whom they consider represents them. They have clear choices. The same should apply even in a party system. Parties should be formed to offer a set of policies implementing principles that the voters can choose from. When party leaders change their policies to make their candidates more electable, they are abandoning some of their principles, so that others who voted for those very principles are now being tricked or have no party to represent them.

An example is what happened at the end of the 18 years of Tory rule under Thatcher and Major. People were sick of Thatcherite Toryism, and wanted the distinct change they thought Labour would offer. But under Blair Labour had become New Labour, the face of which was the cloying charm of the sociopathic Blair himself, and his compact with the media devil, Murdoch. The ultra right wing media baron, Murdoch would never have entered into any compact with a socialist, and many of the leading Labour party activists knew Blair had changed his spots. He was the first Labour Prime Minister to “sell out” even before he took power. Blair was voted in only to apply with his co-conspirators, Brown and Mandelson, another thirteen years of Thatcherism, made possible by his pact with the devil, and the demoralization of the Tories and their own disunity.

It demonstrates how important it is to have an alternative socialist newspaper, and how it ought to be used to clear the confusion spread among voters by the capitalist media. Working people need not be helpless in the face of the austerity assault of the government. Otherwise we have little alternative to the incessant beat of capitalist propaganda, and no prospect of rebutting by socialist principles what is presented as unarguable norms of capitalist economics.

Nor will there be much prospect of moving people from their apathy into the consistent activity needed to bring down the system we live under of lies, injustice and unfairness. Only when a significant portion of the employed public and those left unemployed to keep wages down get their information from a daily newspaper committed to the interests of ordinary people and the poor will there be any chance of them acting sufficiently coherently to make a difference. Then people will be able to organize their efforts in unison, to unite their thinking ideologically, rather than being distracted one way and another by divisive issues like the intolerance and racism spread by the capitalist media. And whereas the capitalist media deliberately ignore or misrepresent working class protests, the socialist newspaper reports them and publicizes them to maximize awareness and response.

In the UK, the Morning Star is that newspaper—in the USA, the People’s World. There are many single issue organizations with news sheets, albeit not daily, and perhaps websites, and they help in raising awareness, but it is piecemeal. A political theory to unite the single issues and offer a consistent explanation is vital. That is Marxism, and the vehicle for presenting that view is the revolutionary newspaper, allowing people to see how single issues have a common explanation in the class struggle.

Tax the Rich Every Last Penny Until the Money Banks Stole is Replaced

Too many people believe the political and media propaganda that we have overspent and we must cut back.

Keep reminding them that the banks overspent, thinking mortgage collateral—houses—would rise in value to cover it—in fact, on the assumption that housing prices would rise indefinitely. They spent money they didn’t have, giving themselves massive bonuses for doing it, then, when the housing market collapsed, they told governments, governments!, they were too big to fail, and told governments, supposedly our governments, they had to give them £$trillions from national treasuries—our money collected as taxes—to replace the money the inept bankers had lost on junk mortgages and junk bonds. What did we have to do with it?

We have already paid the banks—the money they were given was not the government’s money, it was our money, entrusted by us to governments for nation wide social use—yet these governments, supposedly our governments are making us pay again, through enforced austerity measures that have nothing to do with us overspending. Tell them to stuff their austerity measures that hit everyone except the super rich, and to get every penny back from the rich leeches who do nothing and deserve nothing of ours.

The Ultra-rich—Intelligent? Talented? No, Lucky and Brutal

The ultra-rich 1% claim that they have unique qualities that explains why they are where they are—among the ultra rich. They credit themselves with success for which they were not responsible. Many got certain richly rewarded jobs by a ruthless greed or by being born to the right parents, talents that they would rather not boast about, so they claim it is intelligence, creativity, hard work, enterprise or acumen, much more acceptable talents.

In findings that have been widely replicated, psychologist, Daniel Kahneman, winner of a Nobel economics prize, studied for eight years the results of 25 wealth advisers. Their average performance was zero, but, when their results were above average, they got bonuses. Traders and fund managers across Wall Street had their massive compensation for success hardly or no better than random. Doubtless they got bonuses even when they did badly because everyone is allowed to have a bit of bad luck! Surprise, surprise, the city slickers did not want to hear Kahneman's findings.

So much for the financial sector and its super-educated analysts. As for other kinds of business, you tell me. Is your boss possessed of judgement, vision and management skills superior to those of anyone else in the firm, or did he or she get there through bluff, bullshit and bullying?

In another study “Crime and Law”, Belinda Board and Katarina Fritzon psychologically tested 39 senior managers and CEOs of leading British businesses, then performed the same tests on patients at Broadmoor hospital, a mental hospital for convicted criminals too insane for prison. On certain criteria, the manager’s scores matched or exceeded those of the criminally insane patients, beating even some psychopathic patients. These criteria are just those which closely resemble the characteristics that companies look for in managers. Some are:

• their skill in flattering powerful people to manipulate them
• egocentricity
• a strong sense of entitlement
• a readiness to exploit others
• a lack of empathy and conscience.

Paul Babiak and Robert Hare also point out in their book Snakes in Suits, that psychopathic traits are more likely to be selected and rewarded in modern management. So, while those with psychopathic tendencies born to a poor family are likely to go to prison, those with psychopathic tendencies born to a rich family are likely to end up as top managers. CEOs now take from their businesses “rewards” disproportionate to the work they do or the value they generate. Business has been rewarding the wrong skills.

The über-rich are called the wealth creators, but they have preyed upon the earth’s natural wealth and workers’ labour and creativity, impoverishing both people and planet. Now they have almost bankrupted us. The wealth creators of neoliberal mythology are actually wealth destroyers. In the US:

• between 1947 and 1979, productivity rose by 119%, while the income of the bottom fifth of the population rose by 122%
• between 1979 and 2009, productivity rose by 80% , while the income of the bottom fifth fell by 4%
• in roughly the same period, the income of the top 1% rose by 270%.

In the UK:

• the money earned by the poorest tenth fell by 12% between 1999 and 2009, while the money made by the richest 10th rose by 37%
• The Gini coefficient, which measures income inequality, climbed in this country from 26 in 1979 to 40 in 2009

The undeserving rich are now in the frame, and the rest of us want our money back.

George Monbiot

George Monbiot writes, usually excellently penetrative articles, in The Guardian and on his own website. In the article above, his latest (8 November) essay is summarized in slightly edited form. See the originals at the link given here, or at The Guardian.

The Best Protest Sign

This protest sign says it all. Society is grossly unfair. The top 1% get more than anyone can need, while the rest get the American Dream.

The 30 Year War Against The American Dream: Henry Schoenberger

Henry Schoenberger, the author of How We Got Swindled By Wall Street Godfathers, Greed and Financial Darwinism, subtitled The 30 Year War Against The American Dream, points out that the OWS protests simply display the plethora of anger around in the USA. The level of poverty is now at its highest level ever—the poor are angry. The successful elderly planning on retirement after a lifetime of hard work are being hit—elderly retirers are angry. Young entrepreneurs, the foundation of our future economy, and those in their prime, whose enterprise should be creating new jobs to give a living to ordinary folk and a first step to the young—even many of those are angry.

Capitalism, as an economic philosophy, is only 200 years old, based as it is on the book by Adam Smith (1723-1790), the title of which is always given now as The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776. The United States declared its independence that same year.

Since then, the abuse and misuse of Capitalism has paralleled the use and abuse of Democracy.

Henry Schoenberger

Smith is often presented by right wing libertarians, Republicans, neoliberals, and assorted conservatives as the model entrepreneurial hero. Yet, he first held the chair of logic at Glasgow University, and then in 1752 became its chair of moral philosophy. So he was really one of those timeserving wasters lolling around a university with students and living off someone else's hard earned income! That, at least is how the right wing regard university teachers and research workers.

In 1759, he wrote the Theory of Moral Sentiments about the standards of conduct that hold society together, explaining how benevolent human motives and activities lead to a society beneficial for all, and thereafter a virtuous circle. Adam Smith had a lifelong interest in the value of morality for the public good. In his book, The Wealth of Nations, he expressed a belief that allowing the entrepreneur to pursue his own interest essentially unfettered would lead to the betterment of all because it would lead to the better use of resources, including time. He never imagined that his theories could be so distorted by the ultra rich cornering one particular resource to the detriment of most of the rest of us—money!

Darwin published his book on the Origin of Species 85 years after The Wealth of Nations, and, although most Protestant pastors in the USA and their theologians who run the Republican Party cannot now abide the thought of evolution, for the first century of so they loved it. The survival of the fittest was a perfect expression of capitalism. So Darwin's theory applied even within human society. It was not restricted only to the wild.

This extension of Darwinism into society was dubbed “Social Darwinism”. It even made it respectable for the protestant churches to abandon Christianity—Christ blessed the poor and damned the rich—but now Social Darwinism made it clear, they thought, that God meant the rich were blessed and the poor were damned! It was a creed that was soon attacked by social scientists, and began to fall into disrepute. Reaganomics and deregulation revived it.

We all need to know a little about economic theories to understand the fallacious arguments advanced today for unfettered greed. For thirty years after WWII, the rate of growth of the incomes of rich and poor were broadly the same. John Maynard Keynes, before the War had shown how economies can be controlled by regulation, such as using taxation to slow down growth when the economy was overheating, and feeding back into feeble economies some of the tax take to boost spending during recessions. It worked wonderfully well.

Controlling self interest worked for decades in the aftermath of the Great Depression. The top tax bracket went up to 90% and still the ultra rich survived, but so did our middle class and our society was not demoralized. There was enough concern on both sides of the aisle to pass Civil Rights legislation and CEOs did not earn more than 40 times the average wage in their industry.

Henry Schoenberger

Interestingly, it was a closer match to Adam Smith's teaching than libertarian capitalists like to admit. Smith knew that regulation was sometimes necessary, and did not pretend otherwise. He believed that once the boundaries were suitably set, and the operators accepted them, then they would work to better themselves and society as a whole through the so called “invisible hand”. The trouble is, when things work well, smug, greedy people always want to try their luck at extending the conditions to their advantage.

That is what Reagan in the USA and Thatcher in the UK tried in the 1980s. In what was imagined as an economic “Big Bang”, a bonfire of the regulations was arranged on both sides of the Atlantic, neoliberalism became the watchword, and Social Darwinism was born again. Survival of the fittest became survival of the richest. In the last thirty years, the workers and even some middle class have lost income, the better off middle classes have maintained theirs, and the rich have multiplied their riches several fold!

In 1776, Adam Smith could not have seen that unregulated Wall Street financiers enjoying tariff free transfer of money anywhere in the world could manipulate markets and the rewards they had from them to the advantage of themselves as a new Brahman class in the supposedly classless western societies. Greed became endemic. Like the living dead they sucked the economic life blood—money—from the middle and working classes. The insatiable greed and selfishness of the rich has killed millions and millions of jobs, people's savings, their livelihoods and increasingly their lives, quite contrary to the ideas of the capitalists' holy book, The Wealth of Nations, by their innocent prophet, Adam Smith. Henry Schoenberger sums up:

Wall Street is a problem because for 30 years it has practiced innovative financial investment at the expense of our economy. Wall Street has turned away from real investment based on innovation for capital formation to create jobs to benefit our economy. Wall Street Trojan megabanks are a major part of the problem.

Government ought not to be the problem because it is the role of government to regulate, to ensure that the balance of society and its economy are right. Our governments neither guard the public good nor the public. The politicians lack all morality themselves, themselves infected with the zombie infection endemic among the rich and aspirants to riches, with the taste for more and more blood, salivating at the thought of more victims, us, and more dollars, ours.

Schoenberger points out that Goldman has inveigled the government at the highest level for three decades. The OWS movement should demand the removal of any Wall Street executive from any important government post, and equally that government servants should be banned from transferring their allegiance to Wall Street until 10 years after leaving government. Consulting and “Atlantic Bridge” style “charities” and think tanks should be illegal as soon as they get near to government in any direct way, or even indirectly, if the influence can amount to bribery, or any similar illegal approach. That applies too to lobbying, nothing more than approved bribery.

High Street deposit banks must be severed from the high risk investment banks. Bonuses should be illegal. As compensation they must be treated as pay and seriously taxed. Taxes must reflect the reality that 1 percent has 40 percent, so that taxation is at least fair by percentage, and preferably progressive, so that richer people should pay a higher percentage. If a rich man faced with a 60% tax rate gets a rise of $1 million, are we seriously to believe he would refuse to work rather than receive $400,000 after tax.

Schoenberger concludes it “is the time for a movement to kick out all members of congress who vote against jobs! And stop wall street godfathers from taking advantage of the 99% who do not practice unbridled greed!”

A Systemic Concentration of Power and Wealth

In 1906, an Economist named Vilfredo Pareto discovered that around 20 per cent of the population in his native Italy controlled around 80 per cent of the land. This observation has come to be known as Pareto’s Principle. He also found that, while ratios of wealth and control varied in detail from country to country, the broad distribution is always the same—wealth, regardless of human effort, tends to accumulate. That accumulation is also called wealth condensation, by analogy with the condensation of a gas. The popular expression is “money makes money”.

Now the New Scientist reports on a study of 43,000 transnational corporations and the share ownership which connected them. The Swiss Institute of Technology in Zurich used for the study a 2007 Orbis database of 37 million companies and investors spanning the globe.

A core of companies, mostly banks, has excessive power over the global economy. 1,318 companies with intertwined ownership structures, representing 20 per cent of global operating revenues, were on average connected to 20 other companies. This group of 1,318 controls most of the largest blue chip and manufacturing firms—the real economy—taking in 60 per cent of global revenues from goods and services. This group included a “super entity” of 147 companies that controls 40 per cent of the network’s wealth, several of the top 25 of which have familiar names:

1. Bank of America Corporation
2. Morgan Stanley
3. Goldman Sachs Group Inc
4. Merrill Lynch & Co Inc
5. JP Morgan Chase & Co…

The 147 of the surveyed companies controlling 40 per cent of the network have condensed—concentrated—a vast level of wealth into their coffers, just as Pareto would have predicted.

Arab Spring? Bring on a Bleak Winter for Rich Kleptomaniacs

The western media portray the political uprisings in the Middle East as motivated and led by technology savvy young people. Glen Rangwala, a lecturer in the Department of Politics and International Studies (POLIS), says that people in Arab countries have different reasons for supporting it.

POLIS has conducted surveys with pollsters, YouGov, of popular opinion across 18 Arab countries throughout 2011. The poll uses a mix of internet polling and “door to door” questioning. Political priorities ranged widely across the region:

1. the aspiration for civic equality—Bahrain
2. the freedoms of speech and of association—Syria—but barely at all in other Arab countries
3. personal security—Tunisia and Egypt
4. declining personal incomes—Yemen
5. anticipated increases in personal incomes—most Arab countries
6. concern over unemployment—countries still free of protests.

What is interesting about this list is that it applies to us Westerners just as much as it does to the Arabs. All of them will be of concern to someone or another of the OWS protesters, and some of them to Tea Partiers in the USA. If anything this rather gash survey serves to show that we are all interested in the same things—social justice.

Rangwala says the uprisings were not unified in their aims, being caused by different grievances and involving different types of people with distinct political aspirations:

What appears to unite them is the very idea of the Arab Spring, within which supporters, activists and even opponents of political reform contextualise the protests they see in their own countries. If people identify their national protest movements with the broader region wide phenomenon of the Arab Spring, the perceived success of a civic uprising in one country will reinforce the estimations of the likelihood of similar achievements at home.

The same thing seems true of the remarkable spread of the protests beginning with OWS. What is needed now is a Western Winter in which we shall freeze the nuts off the one percent of über rich fat cats with all our assets, crush and scatter them to the winds, leaving them impoverished, squealing and wishing they’d had more compassion when they had control. Of course, it is not just the assets we want returning, the control of our destiny is much more important.

Frances Fox Piven at OWS

Should the Poor be allowed to Die, or the Rich?

Al Dahler, a retired Air Force veteran highlights in the Virginia Newsleader the latest propaganda of Republican bloodsuckers. According to Robert J Samuelson writing in the Washington Post, America’s budget deficit is the fault of elderly Americans, people who are too greedy—they depend on social security and medicare to keep themselves alive. The Wall Street bailout had nothing to do with it. Irresponsible tax cuts for the 1 percent of Americans, who are already so well off they haven’t a clue what to do with their money, are also innocent of blame. The US permanent war economy, that has gotten worse since Bush and Cheney held the reins of power, naturally has no role at all in wasting the country’s wealth. The fault, according to the unspeakably selfish US right wing, rests with the poor and old folk, who should recognize they taking up some of the wealth that the rich could salivate over counting it again.

The poor have always been at fault. The conservative gospel is that the poor, the unemployed, the people unable to afford health insurance and the handicapped are scroungers, refusing to work to better themselves as all Americans should. Did they, the greedy rich? Some may have done but most have inherited wealth left to them by their enterprising fathers, grandfathers and even more distant ancestors. Far from money trickling down, the rich employ clever managers, not being clever enough themselves, to accumulate more money in exchange for a share of it called bonuses.

These rich billionaires have nothing in common with any of the remaining 99 percent of the population, but they fool those with aspirations to riches, many of the middle classes, and those unable to see that they are dupes of the rich, encouraged in their American Dreams, but with zero chance of ever realizing them. The Republican lie is that everyone is responsible for themself only and their immediate family, having no responsibility for anyone unable to work because they are elderly, sick or simply unable to get a job in the face of millions of unemployed better able and qualified than themselves.

These conservatives, so fond of boasting of their godliness, would have joined the crowds demanding the crucifixion of their “Lord” Jesus Christ, had they been there at the time. After all, this Jesus wandered around with a gang of ex-workers, ex-fishermen, ex-tax collectors and even ex-prostitutes, and, although described as the son of a carpenter, he never seemed to have built anything of wood himself. Moreover, he repeatedly backed the poor against the rich, so was obviously in the opposite camp from the parasites who drain us of our our fair share of the national product.

They have just enough religion to make them hate, but not enough to make them love others.

Jonathan Swift, paraphrased

If the Christian God were incarnated today, he would be organizing and addressing the OWS demonstrations, and once the state decides to clamp down on the occupiers of Wall Street, he as a leader would have had his death sentence again.

Veteran Dahler noticed that the sentiments of president F D Roosevelt were closer to those of Jesus than the odious hypocrites calling themselves Republicans. He said:

The test of progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much. It is whether we provide enough for those who have little?

It is as plain as day that for the last thirty years the US has ceased to progress, and has instead slid backwards. Republican candidates, trapped by the hypocritical piety of the religious right, have to deny the validity of the theory of evolution, because these so-called Christians have decided that their God is so feeble He cannot bear it. Yet despite it they do believe in evolution applied to society. It is wrong that the cleverest and most ruthless ape should eventually have human brains, but it is right that the cleverest and most ruthless entrepreneurs should have all the wealth—give or take a percent or two. They call this application of “nature red in tooth and claw” to society “Social Darwinism”.

Society exists to protect each of us from the hazards of living separately in the wild. Being together allowed us to use our intelligence and our new found ability to respect each other and cooperate together to do remarkable things like building civilization. It required us to be concerned with others in our society even when they were not coping too well. Without assistance from us, they would have seen no sense in remaining with us, and our ur-band of mutuality would have soon fallen apart.

That is what these Republicans are advocating now. They have no concern for the poor and those unable to cope with pressures that most of the wealthy 1 percent could never imagine experiencing day in and day out. Jesus Christ ordered Christians to help the poor or be damned. But now Republicans cry in outrage that elderly people should have medical care as a reward for having contributed to society all their lives. They say they owe them nothing. Their idea of society owes them nothing. They have outlived their welcome and should do the decent thing and die! If they do not, then they will be charged large premiums to cover their health insurance, and as they will not be able to afford such expenditure, they will die in any case through being deprived of care. Limited health care leads to shorter lifespans, relieving the pressure on the social security system, and leaving more money for the rich to stash away.

President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton are fond of encouraging people in countries whose regimes they do not like, mainly because they assert their right to what is their own, to riot and even rebel, as in the case of Libya, to establish their basic human rights. Well, we have human rights too, and if Arabs have a right to rebel and kill their former leaders, H G Wells must have been correct to say that we have the same right. Wells, author of War of the Worlds, was a mild mannered man but wrote in despair, towards the end of his life, that we shall get nowhere in bringing about a fairer world until the rich were swinging from the lamp posts. Indeed, if it is a necessity in Libya, then why should it not be a necessity in the US? The fact is that revolution is one way societies end when they become too unjust. The greedy 1 percent of the USA are inviting their own destruction.

They could pay off much of the national debt themselves if they wanted to avoid it!

Americans Get More Antisocial as the Meanness of Capitalism Registers

Sociality is essential to humanity. It is the feeling of care and concern that people have towards each other, and is a deep instinct within us from the time when we lived for several hundred thousand years in small groups which gave us the advantage over fiercer animals that eventually made us king of the jungle and of the world. The instinct to work in small groups is still with us, but is getting weaker:

There is a lot of evidence that our democracy is based on having citizens connected with one another. When we connect with one another in associations we learn that our self interest is actually connected to the interests of others. That gives us a conception of the public good, common identity, and sense of common responsibility as a nation and as citizens. Any decline in that scholars see as potentially detrimental to democracy.

Pamela Paxton

Pamela Paxton is a sociology professor and Population Research Center affiliate from The University of Texas at Austin. She and Matthew A Painter II, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Wyoming, used the Iowa Community Survey and the General Social Survey to explore the changing nature of voluntary association membership between 1994 and 2004, using responses from approximately 10,000 citizens in 99 small towns in Iowa, as well as a national sample of the United States population. They compared active members, who regularly attend local meetings, to checkbook members who do not attend any meetings and whose only requirement for membership was likely just to write a check.

Small town Iowans on average actively participated in about a quarter fewer associations in 2004 than they did in 1994. Active participation in recreational groups declined the most at 6 percent. The smallest declines in participation occurred for church and political/civic associations. Church participation declined by 3.5 percent, and active memberships in political and job related groups declined by 2 percent, the latter decline being less because 2004 was a presidential election year.

Overall, the evidence from Iowa suggests not only declining membership in general, but also a shift in how members participate in voluntary organizations. All categories show small but significant checkbook membership of all categories, except one which remained level, increased 1 to 1.6 percent. Paxton said:

Even if we thought these checkbook memberships were equivalent to being actively involved in an organization, the decline in the active associations is greater than any increase we are getting in checkbook memberships.

Paxton said scholars are still trying to understand the decline, but if it is happening in small towns in Iowa, the heartland of America, she expects the declines may be even more drastic elsewhere in country. Potential explanations for the shift from active to passive participation include:

• communities have less neighborhood interaction
• commutes are longer
• television and computer gaming inhibit interaction
• generational differences.

Academics have to think of the sources of their funding and therefore are often timid in expressing conclusions that funding bodies do not like. The fact is that capitalism is based on the ruthless exploitation of your neighbor, everyone wants to join the rich man’s club, and capitalism is supposed to be the way to the American dream, trust disappears, neighborliness and sociality seem old fashioned in the increasingly harsh America. People withdraw to their tellies and computers. Turn to any political forum and you find the defenders of the system, people who are doing all right out of it, and many, like these, who are plainly exasperated by unemployment, hardship, uncertainty, unfriendliness:

1. interactions between people now always have the motive of profit
2. the reality of commercial competition is that anything goes, to win
3. a monetarist system always breeds distrust
4. employers always have some angle or con going even against their own employees—I’m sick of it
5. the system of government and economics is designed for people to screw one another
6. I don’t trush anybody any more—I haven’t found one person worth trusting
7. poor people are disposable, there are so many of them they don’t individually matter
8. societies with large impoverished classes soon acquire repressive means of state control of those populations—the USofA used terrorist threats to set up more repressive mechanisms
9. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who isn’t some sort of con artist or predator or something—to hell with them
10. our country became great is because we wanted it to help the poor and the elderly
11. it is unfairness that is ruining the country—how does a corporation making billions in profits not pay taxes and get government disbursements every year?
12. tax dollars should help our communities not fund foreign wars and corporation bribes—decent government gives us back the tax we pay in better community services, benefits for our people out of work, community projects that create jobs, and community education, then interaction will grow
13. it is a sick society that keeps a huge prison population and pays most people peanuts for doing menial jobs like flipping burgers, but an immensely rich minority who takes everything to spend abroad—what’s fair?
14. society needs a social contract—without it, a society has no stake in its people, and is ripe for revolution.

Americans have been conditioned for decades to hate socialism, yet it simply means building a society that everyone wants to live in. It does not mean collecting tax dollars from the poor and middle classes to give to the megarich.

The six broad categories of organizations in the study were service and fraternal organizations, recreational groups, political and civic groups, job-related organizations, church-related groups, and all other groups and organizations.

America Stops Laughing to Correct Apoplectic Republican Comic, Rush Limbaugh

Alternet has a plethora of interesting articles and often more interesting and informative comments. This link is to a comment thread to a short article about the right wing propagandist Rush Limbaugh, who is no repecter of the truth or even of facts. A comment by passnthru2 noted:

1. The richest 1 percent has 43 percent of the nation’s wealth—6 times that of the bottom 80 percent, which has just 7 percent
2. the richest 5 percent has 72 percent of the nation’s wealth—10 times that of the bottom 80 percent
3. the top 20 percent has 93 percent of the nation’s wealth—23 times that of the bottom 80 percent
4. the top 50 percent has 97.5 percent of the nation’s wealth—39 times that of the bottom 50 percent which has 2.5 percent

44 percent of Americans couldn’t get $2000 together if their lives depended on it, while the richest 400 families:

1. have $1.4 trillion, and yet,
2. pay under 14% income tax

These rich people and the big corporations they own are sitting on piles of cash, yet they refuse to pay decent wages, and do everything in their power to lower the workers wages, for example using professional bigots like Rush Limbaugh whose splenetic rants impress a substantial section of the redneck population. It explains why there is a recession, and illustrates the huge fault in capitalism.

The rich always want more, and have to drive up profits to get more. They can do it by charging more and by paying their workers proportionally or absolutely less. They can even move their businesses abroad and pay the domestic worker nothing at all! But when people have less to spend whether it is absolutely less through wage cuts or relatively less by price inflation, they cannot afford to buy as much as they could previously. The retail trade goes into recession, and manufacturing businesses follow.

RustyCannon observed that if they were to pay people better, retail and therefore industry would be stimulated. Poor workers necessarily spend what they receive in earnings. They do not earn enough to save it. So the economy would be stimulated if the rich would just realize that they are starving the economy of liquidity by their greed. If the rich will not do it then the government must. President Carter created jobs, then Reagan came in, cut taxes for the rich, and drove unemployment through the roof.

The theory was “trickle down”. Give the rich more tax breaks and less regulations and they will spend more readily, employing people to expand their businesses. It doesn’t work. Republican President, George W Bush did not create as many jobs in the two terms of his presidency as did Carter in the single term he had. The rich just begin to expect more tax breaks to accumulate more risk free wealth—it is easier than taking the risks of trading. 30 years of this has just lead to manufacturers closing factories and destroying lives at home to move maufacture abroad to low labor cost countries. 50,000 manufacturing companies went in the Bush administration alone.

The large and enterprising middle class that was the economic engine of the USA is being impoverished by the stranglehold the rich have on the nation’s ready money—the top 400 wealthiest own more than the bottom 150 million. The economy is starved of demand. Middle class wages have been flat for 3 decades, yet the cost of living has continued to climb. Two income homes are now needed just to get by. The middle class no longer has as much disposable income, and what it has is falling, leaving its demand for products and services lower, with knock-ons to other small businesses dependent on them.

When people, encouraged by the sleepwalking bankers, began using the equity in their homes, they created a false demand bubble, and a false sense of prosperity. Disastrous greed among bankers who thought our money was theirs, led them to gamble with those unsound derivatives. Trading them backwards and forwards each day yielded immense bionuses for doing nothing in the least bit useful. That bubble burst, leaving us in the mess we are in, yet with no will to regulate the banksters and the rentiers, and sustained “head in the sand” insanity among Republicans determined to tie down Obama, and bring him down, if at all possible.

Further cuts as demanded by the Republicans can only make the situation worse, and that is the fault of the Republicans themselves who ought to have accummulated in the good years to spend in the bleak ones. They spent through the good years and now, when spending is the only way out of depression, they want to cut. Strong financial regulation and a New Deal like FDR’s will be necessary to reinvigorate the economy—measures that Republican bigots like Limbaugh call socialism for the sake of their indoctrinated disciples.

What Goes Around Comes Around—90 Years Later!

Why is it that our industrialists, who are responsible for the welfare of industry, have allowed a financial policy to be pursued which has been so damaging to it, and not only damaging to the working people involved in the industry, but to the industrialists themselves?

They all of them put their money on the side of Conservatism politically, and voted with the big battalions of Conservatism, while Conservative Governments were putting through quite steadily, from 1922 onwards till last year, a monetary policy which was hitting industry and the industrialists all the time, though they did not seem to see it. They complained, of course, from time to time.

Even Mr Churchill claims now that he was all in favour of a monetary policy which would take into consideration the welfare of industry and not look only at the position from the point of view of high finance and the City. But it was Mr Churchill who put through the return to the Gold Standard all the same. One might say of Mr Churchill what Frederick the Great said of the Empress Maria Theresa, when she took part in the partition of Poland: “He wept, but he took.”

What did he take? Maynard Keynes states that the primary consequence of the return to the Gold Standard was to place £1,000,000,000 into the pockets of the rentier interest, a purely debt holding interest, out of our pockets…

A L Rowse, Fabian Society Lecture (1932)

What is different? Only some of the jargon. Periodically, the über rich simply rob us of the odd $trillion or so at current values. Why do we put up with it?

GBS—Just What is the Point of the Rich?

Taxation of the poor and cuts in public spending by cutting government expenditure causes personal suffering among those who have to live off smaller take home pay, or who lose their jobs. The unearned income from returns on stocks, profits, bonuses and commissions—the ways the rich maintain their wealth—is treated “as so sacred that we must all tighten our belts sooner than touch it” (GBS). The media pundits and tame academics employed by the wealthy class explain to us that we need the investments of these rich people to replace and accumulate capital, without which we would have no industry at all. So we have to let this narrow class of super rich have so much money that it is quite impossible to consume, leaving them with no alternative but to invest it:

After stuffing themselves with every luxury that can be imagined on the face of the earth, they still have millions which save themselves because they cannot be spent. That is the argument for having an enormously rich class amongst you. What have we to say to that?

In the first place, it is an enormous waste to overfeed a handful of idle people and their millions of hangers on before you can save money when no money need pass through their hands at all. No sane nation, which could accumulate its capital in any other way, would chose that way. Well, what on earth is to prevent us from accumulating our capital in another way? Why not take its sources out of the hands of these gentlemen and accumulate it ourselves? They would then have to work for a living, but we would all be the richer and they all the happier.

G B Shaw, In Praise of Guy Fawkes, 1932

After all, they are always telling us that work is good for us, so they must be all the happier to be able to join with us in doing it, those of us, that is, who have jobs in the first place. But we will be able to sensibly organize employment by looking to rebuilding our decayed cities and providing better public amenities, thereby employing many who at present have no jobs and live in derelict inner cities despairing for the future of their kids who know nothing but the local drug baron.

Then again, what guarantee have we that these people will invest their surplus cash for the good of the nation? As a rule they send it wherever labor is cheapest, anywhere in the world except the USA.

Here we are with our cities rotted out with slums, and with the most urgent need for capital to do away with those slums and to improve the condition of our people, to give them better food, better clothing, better housing, and better education, for bringing our obsolete machinery up to date, organizing agriculture collectively, and introducing all the new scientific methods. We need capital for those things, but if there is a penny more in the way of dividend to be got by our capitalist class by sending money to the Argentine or anywhere else, they send it there.

G B Shaw, In Praise of Guy Fawkes, 1932

In the present day, China has vast amounts of US dollars. By controlling the release of these dollars on to the market, the Chinese can control the US economy, making exports expensive and imports cheap, perhaps, with disastrous consequences for home industries. What do the super rich class care? They bother only about their investments which make their money abroad anyway, so the US economy scarcely matters to them.

So you see the one defense you can set up for the conspiracy of silence about unearned income is nothing but a silly excuse for shirking the great enterprise of Socialism. It is not true that wages must be cut, public enterprises much be starved and stopped in order that more hundreds of millions can be added to those that are being wasted at present on idleness, extravagance and corruption of labor which are ruining us.

G B Shaw, In Praise of Guy Fawkes, 1932

As to innovation, it is true that private corporations have developed wonderful technological advances, but very much of the original scientific priming behind it is financed by the state not by the idle rich who too often consider it far too chancey to finance research, and then government contracts often under the auspices of the military are often necessary to encourage the private corporations to do anything towards technological development. In short, risk avoidance actually holds back progress when investment is in private hands. The rich look for security nowadays not enterprise. It is the small independent businessman, rising from the working and middle classes, who is often the entrepreneur, and they frequently have problems raising funds for start ups and growth.

Warren Buffet Says Squeeze the Mega Rich

We have noted elsewhere in this Blog that professor Greg Philo found some rich people—the intelligent ones—were willing, even glad, to pay additional tax if it meant greater economic and social stability in the nation and the world. Now, Warren Buffet, whose net wealth is valued at around $50 billion, in The New York Times has lashed out at Congress, saying that they were not handling tax breaks in a way that is best for the country. He called for higher taxes for the super rich of America, himself included.

While the poor and middle class fight for us in Afghanistan, and while most Americans struggle to make ends meet, we megarich continue to get our extraordinary tax breaks. These and other blessings are showered upon us by legislators in Washington who feel compelled to protect us, much as if we were spotted owls or some other endangered species.

While he paid nearly $7 million in taxes last year, he should have forked over much more to the federal government but tax breaks kept him from doing so, he wrote. “It's nice to have friends in high places”, but Congress need not “coddle” the super rich any longer.

GBS—What Obama Should Have Done in the Face of Congressional Budget Opposition

…the existing system is in essense nothing but a gigantic robbery of the poor. what is the matter with society is that the legal owners of the country and its capital are getting for nothing whatsoever an enormous share of the wealth produced from day to day in this country… balancing the Budget or forming a Budget was simply this: how much money can we get out of the people?

G B Shaw, In Praise of Guy Fawkes, 1932

Of course, when all the measures directed at the poor are insufficient, a capitalist President and Congress have to consider taxation of the rich, who will never consent until the politicians have convinced them that every last dime has been screwed from the people. Today, they are even greedier and more unreasonable than they were in the 1930s, and we know how they ended!

If Obama were a socialist, having no socialist majority in Congress, according to Shaw, he ought to have resigned in the face of the idiotic Congressional Republican opposition. He should have said:

Very well, I resign, so you Republicans take this budget in hand yourselves. I know perfectly well that you will do everything you can to get the money without coming down on the rich. You will cut services and amenities, and tax every dime of earned wages and nothing or as little as possible on unearned incomes. You will pretend that the US of America will be communistic if a dime of the vast wealth of the rich is conscripted on behalf of the country, and will continue in the face of the dire situation to leave the rich all their tax breaks and bacon lard.

You will not mention what sum of money those tax breaks mean to the treasury, and therefore to the people, nor what the treasury could raise if the rich were obliged to pay tax even at the same rate as the poor, let alone the higher rates that are justified. The poor will spend their money here in the US, creating jobs for others, and demanding goods and services boosting our economy. The rich spend and invest much of their money abroad, depriving the US of jobs, goods and services, and breaking communities in the process.

Very well, serve the rich according to your traditions, and take the plaudits of success or the consequences of failure. I am not in on this deal. My conscience is clear.

LA Dodgers a Microcosm of American Society

The LA Dodgers are bankrupt. They do not have the cash to pay their employees’ wages. We are talking about a community here. The Dodgers are a baseball team much loved by its many patrons, as sports teams usually are, whether big or small. And the Dodgers are bankrupt despite recent success—they made the play offs as recently as 2008 and 2009. Why then has this catastrophe engulfed the team? Andrew Gumbel of the UK Observer has explained it.

The fact is that the owner of the team has sucked them dry for his own aggrandisement. It should be a lesson for Americans, especially those who persistently defend the mega rich, people whom they do not know and never will, and people who are richer than they can ever imagine—America’s plutocrats, the corrupt and greedy rich.

Frank McCourt, not the deceased Irish novelist but a car lot magnate, bought the team and bled it dry to support a life of luxury for himself and his family. McCourt bought the Dodgers from News Corp, who had used it to build up a regional sports network. To do it, McCourt borrowed $150m from Bank of America, $75m from Major League Baseball and $196m from Fox, so he had not spent a penny of his own money.

McCourt then sliced off what was most profitable, the stadium car park and the ticket office as his own operations, which charged the Dodgers rent, and, in turn, giving McCourt security to borrow more dollars. He paid himself $5m a year, his wife, Jamie, $2m pa as chief executive, and their two children $600,000 each—one was a student at Stanford University and Goldman Sachs employed the other. McCourt also enjoyed a private jet and four luxurious houses in Hollywood and Malibu. In typical robbing financier style, the money and debt were spread among, and constantly moved between McCourt’s shell companies and subsidiaries to hide what was going on.

And what was going on was that the assets of the team were being stripped and moved into the personal accounts of a single family and a few hangers on.

Yes, it ought to be a lesson for the average American, whether poor and unemployed or middle class and imagining that they are well off. You just do not have a clue, especially you Tea Partiers taken in by rich men’s stunts to keep you on side. The invisible über rich of the USA are taking you all for the same sort of ride as McCourt took the community that supported the LA Dodgers. They are robbing you silly, and too many of you are defending them!

You cheer because they are sending your boys to distant lands to get maimed and killed, and they make money out of armaments and the vast support industry of the military-industrial complex that supports it. Often you don’t even get a badly paid job out of it. They manufacture more and more abroad in low cost countries. You lose your jobs, or the threat is used to keep wages down or to get concessions from the city and the state treasury, and all of it goes into pockets just as McCourt’s did. You don’t know what is going on because they are like McCourt experts in hiding it, and have a gigantic publicity service called the media to feed you anything to keep you confused and divided.

Get real! You Yankees are like the Dodgers fans—being conned!

Is the US Ambassador in Kabul a Liar or an Idiot?

Karl Eikenberry, the US ambassador in Kabul, was quoted in the UK Guardian by Jonathan Steele (The Taliban’s wishlist, 21 June, 2011) as solemnly pronouncing:

America has never sought to occupy any nation in the world. We are a good people.

This is staggering. Americans incessantly complain that the rest of the world hates them, and always want to do them harm, even though they are “good people”. Are these Americans, blind, or deluded, or are these just neocon lies to feed the self righteous ignorance of the US public?

Eikenberry is a diplomat and sits in the center of a ten year long war against the present occupation of Afghanistan by the US and its sycophantic allies. Nor can he be unaware that the US just fought a terrible war for no obvious moral cause in Iraq, dividing and devastating the country, and still occupy it with tens of thousands of soldiers. They have just joined with France and the UK via NATO in an unjustified attack on Libya, which has again divided the country and will require another occupying force to prevent a civil war if Gaddafi is ousted.

Richard Carter, replying to Eikenberry in the Guardian adds the following historical synopsis of significant US occupations, omitting minor ones:

There’s Honduras (seven times between 1903 and 1989), Nicaragua (seven times between 1894 and 1933, not to mention the support for the Contra terrorists in 1981-90), China (six times between 1894 and 1949), Cuba (five times between 1912 and 1933), Haiti (five times between 1891 and 2005), the Dominican Republic (four times between 1914 and 1966), El Salvador (twice: 1932, 1981-92), Mexico (twice: 1913, 1914-18) and Vietnam (once, but for 15 years)….

Isn’t it about time that the US public caught on—they have a problem with their leaders, and that means with their much vaunted democracy. These wars do not and cannot help the ordinary US citizen whether poor or middle class. Only the rich profit out of them, and the US has been ruled on behalf of this rich minority for the whole of the time R Carter surveyed.

Loans Give Hard Up Students a Buzz Until Pay Back Time Looms

Debt can be a good thing for young people—it can help them achieve goals that they couldn’t otherwise, like a college education…Young people seem to view debt mostly in just positive terms rather than as a potential burden.

Rachel Dwyer, assistant professor of sociology, Ohio State University

Professor Dwyer seems to be encouraging young people to take on more debt to feel empowered! A nationwide study she conducted with Randy Hodson, professor of sociology at Ohio State, and Laura McCloud, an Ohio State graduate now at Pacific Lutheran University, found many young adults actually feel empowered by their credit card and education debts rather than feeling stressed by them. Ms Dwyer did add that the results offer some worrying signs about how many young people view debt:

Debt can be a positive resource for young adults, but it comes with some significant dangers.

The more credit card and college loan debt held by young adults aged 18 to 27, the higher their self-esteem and the more they felt like they were in control of their lives. The effect was strongest among those in the lowest economic class. Only the oldest of those studied—those aged 28 to 34—began showing signs of stress about the money they owed.

Researchers examined data on two types of debt:

1. loans taken out to pay for college
2. total credit-card debt.

They looked at how both forms of debt were related to people’s self-esteem and sense of mastery—their belief that they were in control of their life, and that they had the ability to achieve their goals. Dwyer said:

We thought educational debt might be seen as a positive because it is an investment in their future, while credit card debt could be viewed more negatively

How debt affected young people depended on what other financial resources they had available:

• Those in the bottom 25 percent in total family income got the largest boost from holding debt—the more debt they held, both education and credit card, the bigger the positive impact on their self-esteem and mastery
• Those in the middle class didn’t see any impact on their self-esteem and mastery by holding educational debt, perhaps because it is so common among their peers that it is seen as normal, but they did see boosts from holding credit-card debt—the more debt, the more positive effects
• Those who came from the most affluent families received no boost at all from holding debt. Debt is not an issue for them. They have the most resources and options available to them.
• The oldest people in the study, those over age 28, were just starting to feel the stress of their debt.

Having education debt is still associated with higher self-esteem and mastery, compared to those who don’t have any such debt. That suggests they still see some benefits to investing in a college degree. But the amount of education debt mattered—having higher levels of debt actually reduced their sense of self-esteem and mastery. Dwyer said:

By age 28, they may be realizing that they overestimated how much money they were going to earn in their jobs. When they took out the loans, they may have thought they would pay off their debts easily, and it is turning out that it is not as easy as they had hoped. We found that the positive effects may wear off over time, but they still have to pay the bills. The question is whether they will be able to.

The study involved 3,079 young adults who participated in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979—Young Adults sample. The NLSY interviews the same nationally representative group of Americans every two years. It is conducted by Ohio State’s Center for Human Resource Research on behalf of the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The results suggest that debt can be an important resource for young adults that allows them to make investments that improve their self-concept. But the results may also have troubling implications for the future of young people. Dwyer summed up:

Debt may make young people feel better about themselves in the short-term, but that doesn’t mean it won’t have negative consequences in the long term.

Some young people from all social classes see education as important enough to get into debt for, but those from poorer backgrounds get the biggest buzz from borrowing money, and the rich kids get little or none. It seems hardly surprising. Just being able to get the money will make many such kids feel that their education is already bringing benefits. As the debt mounts and the benefits begin to seem less clear and further off, their enthusiasm wears thin.

Poorer students must stay realistic about their future. They will have to pay back their loans and borrowings, so they should not take on excessive debt, and must not try to compete with middle class and rich kids at university. Rich kids have no worries whatever happens. They are assured of a substantial allowance and nepotistic job opportunities from daddy and mummy so can get no buzz from borrowing a the odd few thousand dollars.