De der styrer den, - Bilderberg, Trilateral Commission, WTO, IMF, World Bank, m. fl. - glemmer, at selvom virksomhederne efterhånden kan klare sig stort set uden arbejdere, så kan de ikke klare sig uden forbrugere !
ILO siger, 230104, at 186 millioner er arbejdsløse, og at hundreder af millioner tjener en løn, de ikke kan leve af ! Og i 2003 blev der ekstra 500000 arbejdsløse. Ialt registrerer ILO en verdensarbejdsløshed på 6.2 %.
Karl Vicktor Olsson skriver, 140205, i Skånska Dagbladet: "Imperiet styr -och Sverige är med", der bygger på et interview med finsk-amerikaneren Tomas Ries, der netop er blevet chef for Utrikespolitiska Institutet i Stockholm. Ries viser en figur med toppen, Imperiet, 1 %, de helt transnationale foretagender, dernæst 14 % de globaliserede lande, USA, Sverige, de vestlige lande etc., så lande på vej (5%, Thailand, Sydkorea, dele af Indien og Kina), den moderne verden (15 %) og i bunden 65 % den førmoderne verden.
Ries synes at være tilfreds med at imperiet findes og mener at Sverige skal være med. Han synes heller ikke at tage afstand fra 80:20 samfundet, som han konstaterer er på vej.
Den rimelige reaktion, at sige at NU KAN DET VÆRE NOK - kender han slet ikke. Det kan da ikke være rimeligt, at Sverige skal blande sig i om der skal ske en jordfordeling i Venezuela !!!
Twenty questions: Social Justice Quiz. (answers below)
Robert Bell: The invisible hand (of the US government), 030405.
I den rekonstruerede udgave af historien, som siden er blevet den godkendte doktrin, fremstilles medierne som havende indtaget en »oppositionel holdning« til staten i denne periode [Vietnamkrigen], måske i en sådan grad, at det var undergravende for de demokratiske institutioner. Man møder denne påstand ikke bare på højrefløjen, men også i den liberale opinion. Det er en anklage, der for eksempel rejses i et betydningsfuldt værk, The Crisis of Democracy (Demokratiets krise), udgivet af den Trilaterale Kommission, en overvejende liberalt indstillet elitegruppe (som støttede Jimmy Carter og besatte så godt som alle poster i regering og administration, mens han var præsident) sammensat af David Rockefeller i 1973 med deltagelse fra det industrialiserede kapitalistiske demokratis tre centre - USA, Europa og Japan.....Mediernes påståede »oppositionelle holdning« til staten var et af de farligste træk ved denne »demokratiets krise«, hævder den Triterale Kommission i sin bog, og denne fare måtte overvindes. Chomsky, p 73
170207, ICH, Michael Parenti, Mystery: How Wealth Creates Poverty in the World. "There is a "mystery" we must explain: How is it that as corporate investments and foreign aid and international loans to poor countries have increased dramatically throughout the world over the last half century, so has poverty? The number of people living in poverty is growing at a faster rate than the world's population. What do we make of this?...The transnationals are attracted by the rich natural resources, the high return that comes from low-paid labor, and the nearly complete absence of taxes, environmental regulations, worker benefits, and occupational safety costs....The transnationals push out local businesses in the Third World and preempt their markets. American agribusiness cartels, heavily subsidized by U.S. taxpayers, dump surplus products in other countries at below cost and undersell local farmers.... leaving less and less acreage for the hundreds of varieties of organically grown foods that feed the local populations....U.S. foreign aid usually works hand in hand with transnational investment. It subsidizes construction of the infrastructure needed by corporations in the Third World: ports, highways, and refineries...The IMF operates in secrecy with a select group of bankers and finance ministry staffs drawn mostly from the rich nations....But the IMF imposes a "structural adjustment program" (SAP), requiring debtor countries to grant tax breaks to the transnational corporations, reduct wages, and make no attempt to protect local enterprises from foreign imports and foreign takeovers....So it is that throughout the Third World, real wages have declined, and national debts have soared to the point where debt payments absorb almost all of the poorer countries' export earnings...There is no trickle down, only a siphoning up from the toiling many to the moneyed few...The purpose behind their investments, loans and aid programs is not to uplift the masses in other countries. That is certainly not the business they are in. The purpose is to serve the interests of global capital accumulation to take over the lands and local economies of Third World peoples, monopolize their markets, depress their wages, indenture their labor with enormous debts, privatize their public service sector, and prevent these nations from emerging as trade competitors by not allowing them a normal development. [N.B. USA prøver at gennemfør den samme politik, bare i lidt mildere udgave, også i Europa o.s.v. OJ]...Why do some people find such an analysis to be so improbable, a "conspiratorial" imagining? These rulers are pursuing much the same policies right here in our own country!"
070707, Global Research, Richard C. Cook, The Crashing U.S. Economy Held Hostage. Our Economy is on an Artificial Life-support System. "These bubbles are symptoms. They are created because our wage and salary earners lack purchasing power due to stagnant incomes and various structural causes."
280807, The Guardian, George Monbiot, How the neoliberals stitched up the wealth of nations for themselves. "A cabal of intellectuals and elitists hijacked the economic debate, and now we are dealing with the catastrophic effects...These problems [gælden, 77000 dårlige broer i USA, 120.000 Katrina-ofre i skurvogne...] appear unrelated, but they all have something in common. They arise in large part from a meeting that took place 60 years ago in a Swiss spa resort. It laid the foundations for a philosophy of government that is responsible for many, perhaps most, of our contemporary crises. When the Mont Pelerin Society first met, in 1947, its political project did not have a name. But it knew where it was going. The society's founder, Friedrich von Hayek, remarked that the battle for ideas would take at least a generation to win, but he knew that his intellectual army would attract powerful backers...Neoliberalism claims that we are best served by maximum market freedom and minimum intervention by the state....But as David Harvey proposes in his book A Brief History of Neoliberalism, wherever the neoliberal programme has been implemented, it has caused a massive shift of wealth not just to the top 1%, but to the top tenth of the top 1%. In the US, for instance, the upper 0.1% has already regained the position it held at the beginning of the 1920s....minimal taxes, the dismantling of public services and social security, deregulation, the breaking of the unions -just happen to be the conditions required to make the elite even richer, while leaving everyone else to sink or swim. In practice the philosophy developed at Mont Pelerin is little but an elaborate disguise for a wealth grab...The first great advantage the neoliberals possessed was an unceasing fountain of money. US oligarchs and their foundations - Coors, Olin, Scaife, Pew and others - have poured hundreds of millions into setting up thinktanks, founding business schools and transforming university economics departments into bastions of almost totalitarian neoliberal thinking. The Heritage Foundation, the Hoover Institute, the American Enterprise Institute and many others in the US, the Institute of Economic Affairs, the Centre for Policy Studies and the Adam Smith Institute in the UK, were all established to promote this project. Their purpose was to develop the ideas and the language which would mask the real intent of the programme - the restoration of the power of the elite - and package it as a proposal for the betterment of humankind.... The first neoliberal programme of all was implemented in Chile following Pinochet's coup, with the backing of the US government and economists taught by Milton Friedman, one ot the founding members of the Mont Pelerin Society... But the most powerful promoter of this programme was the media. Most of it is owned by multimillionaires who use it to project the ideas that support their interests."
Se også 310807, ICH, Stephen Lendman, The War on Working Americans og 290807, Stephen Lendman, The War On Working Americans."
310807, ICH, Stephen Lendman, The War on Working Americans, "The WTO is well-seasoned with a corporate-friendly alphabet soup of Uruguay-negotiated agreements like the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), Agreement on Agriculture (AoA), Agreement on Teclnical Barriers to Trade (TBT), and others all designed for one purpose. It's to override member states' national sovereignty so they're now governed under a uniform set of global market trading rules favoring capital. They're designed for the Gobal North, giant corporations and the rich at the expense of Global South, developing nations, ordinary people everywhere, concern for environmental standards as well as sanity and public safety....The UN's International Labour Organization's (ILO) commission on the social dimensions of globalization is comprised of representatives from labor, govemment and business. In 2004, it issued a damning appraisal of world trade rules harm and the subsequent distress caused by unfair practices. It ranges from how TRIPS prevents affordable generic lifesaving drugs being sold in developing countries to the shifting tax burden from business and the rich to workers, and much more.... Today, all types of financial services comprise the largest economic sector. Much of it is in trillions of dollars of high stakes speculation annually producing wads of cash for elite insiders (when things go as planned) and nothing for the welfare of most others and the good of the country...This all lappened by design to crush worker rights and commoditize them like all other production inputs...The top one-tenth of 1% (about 300,000 people) did best of all, to no surprise. It got as much income in total as the bottom 150 million Americans combined...Recent US Commerce Department data is also disturbing. It shows the share of national income going to wages and salaries the lowest on record with their data going back to 1929....The Bush education agenda also promotes school vouchers disguising a broader goal to privatize public education and aid the white supremacist parochial part of it. Christian Right zealots support these schools because ot their brand of hard right extremism dangerous to everyone outside the faithful. In most areas where vouchers are used, 80% of them are for these type schools. They renounce proved science like evolution and teach creationism instead, repackaged as "intelligent design."...These schools also threaten the survival of public education. They divert funding from them and violate the constitutional separation of church and state which is why the Bush administration supports them."
Septembre 2007, Le Monde diplomatique, Frédéric Lordon, Spéculation immobilière, ralentissement économique. Quand la finance prend le monde en otage. Henviser til en långivning på stadig løsere basis. Der opfindes hele tiden nye metoder til at kamuflere risikoen (derivater). Det, at man ikke længere kan vurdere den reelle risiko ved et nyt lån gør markedet meget følsomt og mistænksomt. Dem der ramme heraf er først og fremmest håndværkere og mindre erhvervsdrivende, der ikke længere kan få lån til deres opgaver. På den måde går det også ud over beskæftigelsen. [Dette så meget mere som, det kun er håndværks o.l. opgaver, der giver beskæftigelse i Vesten - resten købes jo fra Kina, OJ].
Septembre 2007, LeMonde diplomatique, Ibrahim Warde, Des enquêtes très politiques. Contes et légendes de l'argent du terrorisme. Rapporten om 9/11 viser, at terroristangreb, selv i stor skala, ikke er dyre. Men den store ståhej om at standse pengene dertil, har givet USA bedre mulighed for at kontrollere verdens kapitalbevægelser !
200907, AlterNet, John F. Ince, America's Addiction to Debt Finally Crashes the System. "The national debt last week topped $9 trillion, up from approximately $5 trillion when George Bush took office. To put this in perspective, the government of Bush & Co. has borrowed almost as much as the governments of all the other presidents of the United States combined....Central banks worldwide have reacted to the crisis by injecting over $700 billion into he global financial system....By pumping so much liquidity into the system, it ultimately inflates the currency. [Der er nemlig købt amerikanske statsobligationer for pengene, hvorved der bliver flere USD, OJ]...And this is where things really start to get dicey, because the stability of the entire financial system is at risk. In other words, the downward spiral of real estate assets puts the solvency of major financial institutions in jeopardy..... It used to be that banks could assess their portfolio and fairly easily identify the trouble spots. But now, we don't really know how far into the layered labyrinth of leverage the trouble goes....In other words, our economic system as it is has exacerbated inequalities. The stability of the overall economy is threatened by imbalances when increasing numbers of people are marginalized economically. The conventional wisdom holds that in an ideal society the imbalances can be mitigated either by governmental intervention or by the activities of the social sector. But the conventional wisdom breaks down when the private sector becomes so powerful that the public sector becomes captive of private interests."
200907, TheNation, William Greider, Alan Greenspan: The Fraud. Som Greider udtrykker det, Greenspan kom tilbage fra graven for at rette på historien. Han begik ingen fejl som formand for Federal Reserve, godkendte ikke Bush' skattenedsættelse, overså ikke aktieballonen, er uden skyld i husballonen. Men han sagde: ""taking out Saddam was essential" for "oil security" and the global economy." Det er det udsagn, der betyder, at Saddam truer dollaren (the global economy) ved at handle olie i andre valutaer !!!
210907, Bloomberg, Gulf Counters M&A Slowdown With $25 Billion of Deals. "Abu Dhabi agreed yesterday to pay $1.35 billion for 7.5 percent of Carlyle Group, the world's second-biggest private equity firm. Dubai and Qatar took competing stakes in Nasdaq Stock Market Inc., London Stock Exchange Group Plc and Nordic bourse OMX-AB. Qatar also won approval to examine the financial records of J Sainsbury Plc, the second-largest U.K. supermarket chain." Besynderligt, at der skulle være fordele ved at lade den nordiske børs styre fra den persiske golf.
210907, ICH, Mike Whitney, The Era of Global Financial Instability. "Wall Street loves cheap money. That's why traders vere celebrating on Tuesday when Fed chief Ben Bemanke announced that he'd drop interest rates from 5.25% to 4.75%....The bottom line is that the investor class has been bailed out at the expense of everyone else who trades in dollars....Despite the merriment on Wall Street, there is a downside to Bernanke's actions. The Fed chief has shown foreign investors that he WILL NOT DEFEND THE DOLLAR....Last month, foreign central banks and investors dumped $9.4 billion of US Treasuries and bonds compared to net purchases in June of $24.7 billion....Most likely, it will be accompanied by the hissing sound of gas escaping from a punctured equity bubble followed quickly by a painful round of deflation, massive unemployment and the gnashing of teeth...Also, we now know that Alan Greenspan supported the plan to invade Iraq. He even shamelessly admitted that the war was really about oil which suggests that he was attempting to preserve the dollar's link to petroleum. That linkage is what maintains the dollar's position as the vorld's "reserve currency"..."Too much liquidity" is the problem not the solution....The Fed's cuts coincide with the dismal earnings reports from Wall Street's investment giants; Lehman Brothers, Morgan Stanley, Bear Stearns and Goldman Sachs. The four banks have taken a combined 22% haircut in the last quarter and are expected to sustain heavy losses from the billions of dollars of subprime CDOs they'll have to either downgrade or write-off....Jim Rogers, the chairman of Beeland Interests Inc. summed up the rate cuts like this: "Every time the Fed turns around to save its friends on Wall Street, it makes the situation worse. The dollar's going to collapse, the bond market's going to collapse. There's going to be a lot of problems in the U.S."... It's rare when we are in agreement with the far-right viewpoints of the WSJ's Editorial page, but in this case, Lucas nailed it. The banks have obligations that are far in excess of the reserves to which they have immediate access."
250907, Telegraph, London, Misery may be just beginning. "The message from the latest of these risk assessments is that this crisis is no flash in the pan. The likelihood of further market crunches has increased significantly, it said. Even if these do not occur, there will still be major knock-on effects on the economy." Der er behov for større gennemskuelighed og globaliseringen betyder, at kriser spredes hurtigere !
280907, Yahoo (uk.biz) refererer, at OECD har opfordret Bank of England til at nedsætte renten. Samtidig advares mod større statsunderskud. Goldman Sachs advarer om, at det amerikanske husprisfald smitter til Europa.
031109, En smule ironisk, at det netop er i Blairs England, styret af hans parti, at man siger så, så til bankernes ønsker om skattepenge. British banks set for sell-offs. Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) og Lloyds har fået besked på at sælge dele af virksomheden. Der er også stillet krav om at provenuet skal bidrage til reserverne. Og der skal ske en reduktion i bonus-udbetalingerne.
241011, Totally Corrupt America: Paul Craig Roberts. Information Clearing House.Trhe fmancial crisis, which is very much still with us, did not result from accident or miscalculation; neither did it result because of a flaw in Alan Greenspan's theory, as he told Congress when a feeble effort was made to hold him accountable. ... As Reckless Endangerment [bog af Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner] shows, fraud characterized every stage of the process from the fraudulent borrower incomes and credit scores that mortgage issuers gave to unqualified buyers, through the securitization of the mortgages and their triple-A investment grade ratings by the rating agencies (Standard & Poor's especially, but also Moody's and Fitch) to the investment banks that sold what the banks knew was junk to investors around the world as investment grade securities. Indeed, Goldman Sachs was simultaneously betting against the mortgage derivatives that it was selling to clients. Investment banks, such as Goldman Sachs, which once considered it a matter of honor to represent the interests of customers, took advantage of the trust that had been built up in the past to commit fraud against customers in order to advance the banks' short-term profits and the out-sized multi-million dollar managerial bonuses that these fraudulent profits produced. Morgenson and Rosner provide a number of unique accounts of how those benefitting from fraud were able to defeat laws that were passed that would have held them to account. For example, the state of Georgia passed perfect legislation that held predatory lending to account. William J. Brennan Jr. and Georgia Govemor Roy E. Barnes got the Georgia Fair Lending Act hrough the state legislature. It was a model for other states. As the federal regulators had thrown in the towel, the state laws would have prevent[ed] the worst part of the financial crisis, it [if] not prevented the crisis altogether. The Georgia law only lasted a few months, because the rating agencies saw that their enormous profits from issuing fraudulent investment grade ratings were threatened by the law. The corrupt rating agencies mischaracterized the consumer protection act as a jihad by regulators. Standard & Poor's declared that it would no longer allow Georgia mortgages to be placed in mortgage securities that it rated. ... These kind of mafia strong-armed tactics in order to protect at all costs the short-term mega-bonuses that drove the totally fraudulent system have never been held accountable or punished. Totally innocent people are held indefinitely and tortured by the US govemment for no other reason than to convince the gullible public that they are endangered by terrorists, but those who wiped out the home ownership and retirement pensions of millions of Americans now hold high and honorable positions on corporate boards and US regulatory agencies. ... Regulators turned a blind eye to obvious criminal fraud, and were rewarded with lucrative positions in the financial community. The same for the US senators and representatives who repealed Glass-Steagal and other financial regulations. For example former US senator Phil Gramm who spearheaded the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act. which separated commercial from investment banking, the repeal of which set up the financial crisis, was rewarded by being made vice chairman of the mega-bank UBS, a Swiss global financial services company. What Taibbi, Morgenson and Rosner make clear is that while monster criminals continue to collect their multi-million dollar annual incomes, depressed single mothers, deserted by the men who fathered their child, are sent to prison for having small quantities of illegal drugs to boost their depressed spirits, and their children are put out to adoption. This is "justice" in America where there is "freedom and democracy.'
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