Capitalism

Eight Things Money Can’t Buy You This Black Friday

November 24, 2017 Staff, medium.com Create! Black Friday, Capitalism, Consumerism, Propaganda

By Staff of The Rules - While the US holiday of Thanksgiving indisputably stems from a celebration of the massacre of hundreds of Pequot Indian men, women and children, the origins of ‘Black Friday’ are much less clear. What is agreed is that retailers sought to take advantage of the Thursday holiday and draw people into shops for what, in a consumerist culture, is considered a civic duty: shopping. After weeks of advertising beforehand, on the Friday following the food, family and football, hundreds of thousands of people are expected to descend on the shops, often risking life and limb for a bargain. In a globalised world, this once uniquely American phenomenon has now been exported. Today, from Russia to Ireland and Pakistan, we’re told that the answer to any problem is to buy stuff and what better day to do so than on Black Friday? You may agree that you can’t consume your way to happiness but it’s worth acknowledging that the lure of Black Friday and Cyber Monday (created to allow online retailers to get in on the action) is hard to resist. So to help you, here is a list of things money can’t buy. Read it every time you feel the impulse to “add to basket”. A sense of wonder: From trees to a smile, and even a gush of wind, so much around us can provide us with the feeling of the numinous; that we are in deep communion with life around us.

Let’s Just Admit It: Capitalism Doesn’t Work

November 20, 2017 John Atcheson, commondreams.org Educate! Capitalism, Class Struggle, History

By John Atcheson for Common Dreams - A recent report by UBS reveals that the global march of economic inequality is accelerating. The report found that the billionaire’s share of wealth grew by nearly 20 percent last year, reaching a level of disparity not seen since 1905, the gilded age. Interestingly, the first gilded age followed decades of uber-free market laissez-faire policies, just as today’s gilded age has. Not surprising, really. Empirical evidence shows that without constraint, markets will proceed toward a winner-take-all status. In short, monopolies and oligopolies. For example, the United States has had three periods of prolonged laissez-faire economic policies, and each was followed by extreme wealth inequality and the three biggest economic crises in US history, such inequality causes. Oh, but the magic of competition makes companies compete for our dollar, so they can’t afford to exploit us, right? Not so much. The magic elixir of competition doesn’t work—for the simple reason that there isn’t much competition anymore. Having convinced folks that regulation is bad, the Oligarchy is in the midst of a frenzy of mergers that is giving a few large conglomerates control of many of the major market sectors. Derrick Thompson, in a recent article in the Atlantic, lays out some of the grim statistics that illustrate the trend.

Amazon’s Last Mile: Unprotected Workers

November 19, 2017 Bryan Menegus, www.gizmodo.com Educate! Amazon, Capitalism, Worker Rights

By Bryan Menegus for Gizmodo. In terms of size, efficiency, and ruthlessness, Amazon has few equals. The least publicly accountable of the big tech companies—Google, Apple, and Facebook face considerably greater scrutiny—Amazon’s stock is one of the most valuable on the market, it’s among the fastest-growing companies in the United States. Atop its vast empire, CEO Jeff Bezos commands the single largest personal fortune on the planet. Estimates place Amazon as the recipient of approximately one third of all dollars spent online. Control over the manufacture, storage, sales, and shipping of an extraordinarily diverse set of products has led the company to expand into film and TV production, web hosting, publishing, groceries, fashion, space travel, wind farms, and soon, pharmaceuticals, to name just a few.

TPP Now ‘Comprehensive & Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership’

November 18, 2017 Staff, otherwords.org Educate! Capitalism, Reform, TPP, Trade

By Staff of Flush The TPP - On November 11th, the TPP-11 countries announced reaching an agreement on reforms that have been negotiated since the United States exited the deal. The most evident one is its new name which is meant to appease world-wide criticism as one of the worst trade deals for the people ever negotiated. They now want to call it the ‘Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership’ or CPTPP. We are well aware of how world leaders are intentionally trying to avoid easy to remember acronyms due to the brand-busting campaigns that have caused the global opposition to corporate trade deals. Re-branding it as a progressive deal cannot hide what remains behind the deal, such as the ISDS. An official announcement declared that “Ministers are pleased to announce that they have agreed on the core elements of the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership.” This reformed deal eliminated 20 sections of the original TPP text, including provisions related to pharmaceutical products, patent protection, copyright and intellectual property. However, the agreement is still far from progressive and far from being signed as Canada is insisting it will not be pressured into a deal that is not good for Canadians. An analysis of the deal by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) welcomes the suspension of the Intellectual Property provisions, which were amongst the most dangerous of the provisions in the original TPP deal.

Biocapitalism, Corporate Colonialism And Education Policy

November 14, 2017 Staff, educationalchemy.com Educate! Capitalism, Colonialism, Education, Policy

By Staff of Education Alchemy - In the last few years a lot of debate has been had over promise and perils of ESSA. Many education advocates argued we must embrace ESSA because it promised to reduce federal choke hold of high stakes standardized testing that was wielded starting with NCLB and ramped up further under Race to the Top. The promise of EESA seemed too good to be true. Why would the same people who devoted decades to dismantling public schools, creating avenues for defacto segregation, and privatizing a public system suddenly want to turn around and “do the right thing?” ESSA authors (Lamar Alexander) claimed that testing would take a “back seat” And it has. The argument in support of ESSA was “to restore responsibility to state and local leaders what to do about educational decisions. If a state decides to move away from Common Core, they don’t have to call Washington and ask permission—they can just do it.” And so many supporters of democratic public education “bought in” to the hype. Exactly what ARE states deciding to do instead? Those are the details we need to examine, and it’s vital (if we are really to reclaim public spaces and democracy) that we understand that there is a global paradigmatic shift occurring beyond the scope of what we already think we know or can anticipate. We must broaden our understanding of the end-game.

Fight The Disease, Not The Symptoms

November 13, 2017 Chris Hedges, truthdig.com Educate! Banking and Finance, Capitalism, Inequality

By Chris Hedges for Truth Dig - The disease of globalized corporate capitalism has the same effects across the planet. It weakens or destroys democratic institutions, making them subservient to corporate and oligarchic power. It forces domestic governments to give up control over their economies, which operate under policies dictated by global corporations, banks, the World Trade Organizationand the International Monetary Fund. It casts aside hundreds of millions of workers now classified as “redundant” or “surplus” labor. It disempowers underpaid and unprotected workers, many toiling in global sweatshops, keeping them cowed, anxious and compliant. It financializes the economy, creating predatory global institutions that extract money from individuals, institutions and states through punishing forms of debt peonage. It shuts down genuine debate on corporate-owned media platforms, especially in regard to vast income disparities and social inequality. And the destruction empowers proto-fascist movements and governments. These proto-fascist forces discredit verifiable fact and history and replace them with myth. They peddle nostalgia for lost glory. They attack the spiritual bankruptcy of the modern, technocratic world. They are xenophobic. They champion the “virtues” of a hyper-masculinity and the warrior cult. They preach regeneration through violence.

Sears Crash Shows Capitalism Is Morally Bankrupt

November 12, 2017 Matt Stannard, www.occupy.com Educate! Capitalism, Goldman Sachs, Public Banking, Worker Rights and Jobs

By Matt Stannard for Occupy.com. One of my closest friends in town recently lost his job managing a Sears automobile department, when the store was closed for financial reasons. My friend was surprised to be laid off because he says he’d been told the store was doing well, and his auto shop customers were happy, giving the department complimentary reviews and keeping the staff busy. He was doing everything right and so, apparently, were his fellow workers. But the success of individual Sears stores was irrelevant. In a pretty amazing body of work, Business Insider’s Hailey Peterson has documented the slow death of Sears at the hands of CEO Eddie Lampert.

Trouble In The Offshore Paradise

November 7, 2017 Chuck Collins, inequality.org Educate! Capitalism, Ruling Class, Tax Evasion, Tax havens, Wealth

By Chuck Collins for Inequality - Just as Congress begins debate on the Republicans’ “Tax Cut and Jobs Act,” new revelations have emerged about how wealthy elites around the world hide their wealth. The “Paradise Papers” — the result of a leak from the Bermuda-based law firm Appleby — shines additional light onto the shadowy world of hidden wealth and tax dodging. Efforts to reform the U.S. tax system are fundamentally undermined by a global tax-avoidance system that allows individuals and corporations to shift trillions to offshore havens to escape taxation, accountability, and publicity. The Paradise Papers, alongside the “Panama Papers” released in April 2016, provide another set of disclosures into a system full of titillating details about how high-ranking global officials have created their own system of rules. The Bermuda leaks disclose the role of high-ranking Trump administration members, including Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and White House economic advisor Gary Cohn, in using offshore tax havens. National groups and political leaders, including Democratic House Leader Nancy Pelosi, are calling for a slowdown of Republican efforts to push through their tax bill to address these abuses. Oxfam America and the Financial Accountability and Corporate Transparency (FACT) Coalition have called on Congress to hold hearings on the findings and a debate over how to best remedy them. Tax Justice Network international has called on the United Nations to convene a global summit to address tax haven abuse.

America’s Secretive Private Prison Industry To Become Much Less Secret

November 6, 2017 Brad Poling, occupy.com Educate! Capitalism, Prison Industrial Complex, Private Prisons

By Brad Poling for Occupy - Seventy-five miles southwest of San Antonio, Texas, in the expanse of desert between the U.S./Mexico border and nestled between oil boomtowns of yesteryear, is Dilley, the epicenter of a new battle over immigrants' rights. The remote town of 4,000 people has enjoyed a hot local economy thanks to its most controversial feature: its private prison. Dilley houses the nation’s largest family detention center, a 50-acre complex that holds 2,400 detainees every night. The center has become a symbol of the resurgent private prison industry and a reminder of why the Justice Department abandoned these facilities in the first place. The private prison industry, which briefly went into free fall after President Obama's Justice Department announced the government would end its use of private prisons in August 2016, has found new allies in President Donald Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions – and is making fast dividends on the new deal. Giants like GEO Group and Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) have received billions in taxpayer dollars for renewed government contracts, and have leveraged their private status to closely guard the details of each deal.

Radical Municipalism: The Only Solution To Amazon’s Extortion Of Cities

November 6, 2017 James Wilt, canadiandimension.com Create! Amazon, Capitalism, Cities, Municipal

By James Wilt for Canadian Dimension - Last week saw a flurry of humiliating pitches by North American cities for Amazon to pick them as the location of the corporation’s second headquarters. New Jersey committed a phenomenal $7 billion in tax breaks if picked. Stonecrest, Georgia, pledged to annex 345 acres to create an entire city called Amazon and make CEO Jeff Bezos unelected mayor. Tucson sent a 21-foot cactus to Amazon, which the company rejected. Meanwhile in Canada, Calgary released a deeply cringey video, bought a massive billboard in Seattle claiming that it would “fight a bear” for Amazon and paid for sidewalk graffiti that joked about how it would also change its name for it. NHL teams in Calgary and Ottawa led arena-wide chants pleading for the company to pick them. Winnipeg bragged in its application that it was the inspiration for Winnie the Pooh’s name. In total, more 100 cities submitted applications, including Vancouver, Edmonton, Montreal, Sault Ste. Marie, Halifax, Hamilton and Toronto. This is the near-dystopian endpoint of the neoliberal city: gargantuan corporations forcing cash-strapped cities to publicly bid against each other with tax breaks, subsidies and crass public relations campaigns. In the excellently titled “Amazon’s New Headquarters Should Be In Hell,” author Hamilton Nolan argued: “This is what the extortion of public resources looks like.”

New Tool For Preventing Workplace Deaths

October 31, 2017 Russell Mokhiber, corporatecrimereporter.com Organize! Capitalism, Corporate crime, Corporations

By Russell Mokhiber of Corporate Crime Report - The database catalogues state criminal prosecutions against companies and individuals whose actions caused a worker’s death or serious injury. The database contains information on 75 incidents in 16 states that have led to criminal charges and provides additional related materials. “Every state has laws on the books that allow for criminal prosecution of employers who cause a worker’s death or serious injury,” said the Center’s Katie Tracy. “But it’s common for district attorneys to leave anything that happens in the workplace up to OSHA, even if prosecution is clearly warranted, and even though OSHA’s penalties are severely limited. It’s time for prosecutors to take workplace cases more seriously.” “Our database highlights instances in which states have pursued such cases over the past several decades to seek justice for workers and their families and to hold employers responsible for their actions,” Tracy said. “Until now, such information has been scattered across the Internet and not terribly useful to advocates and researchers.” The Crimes Against Workers database includes data on past and current cases, as well as a range of other materials, such as case files, court decisions, media clips, and advocacy resources. The database also contains information about advocacy campaigns in pursuit of criminal charges, some of which have resulted in an indictment and some of which have not.

World’s Billionaires Own A Staggering $6 Trillion

October 30, 2017 Jake Johnson, www.truth-out.org Educate! Capitalism, Economic inequality, New Economy, Ruling Class

By Jake Johnson for Common Dreams - In an analysis (pdf) published Thursday that throws into stark relief the "unjust and unsustainable" nature of what economists have termed the New Gilded Age, the Swiss financial firm UBS found that the wealth of the world's billionaires grew by 17 percent in 2016, bringing their combined fortune to a record $6 trillion -- more than double the gross domestic product of the United Kingdom. The report also found that there are 1,542 billionaires in the world and more than 563 in the United States alone, more than any other country. Josef Stadler, lead author of the UBS analysis, told the Guardian that the firm's findings demonstrate that the world is "now two years into the peak of the second Gilded Age." The extent of the world's wealth concentration -- just eight men now own as much wealth as half of the global population -- raises a number of questions, one of which is whether the world's population will continue to tolerate such vast inequities, Stadler said. "We're at an inflection point," Stadler argued. "Wealth concentration is as high as in 1905, this is something billionaires are concerned about. The problem is the power of interest on interest -- that makes big money bigger and, the question is to what extent is that sustainable and at what point will society intervene and strike back?"

New Zealand’s New Prime Minister Calls Capitalism A ‘Blatant Failure’

October 23, 2017 Chris Baynes, www.independent.co.uk Educate! Capitalism, Electoral Politics, New Zealand

By Chris Baynes for Independent - New Zealand's new prime minister called capitalism a "blatant failure", before citing levels of homelessness and low wages as evidence that "the market has failed" her country's poor. Jacinda Ardern, who is to become the nation's youngest leader since 1856, said measures used to gauge economic success "have to change" to take into account "people's ability to actually have a meaningful life". The 37-year-old will take office next month after the populist New Zealand First party agreed to form a centre-left coalition with her Labour Party. They will be supported by the liberal Greens. New Zealanders had been waiting since 23 September to find out who would govern their country after national elections ended without a clear winner. Ms Ardern has pledged her government will increase the minimum wage, write child poverty reduction targets into law, and build thousands of affordable homes. In her first full interview since becoming prime minister-elect, she told current affairs programme The Nation that capitalism had "failed our people". "If you have hundreds of thousands of children living in homes without enough to survive, that's a blatant failure," she said. "What else could you describe it as?" Incumbent prime minister Bill English, whose National Party has held power for nine years, has said his party grew the economy and produced increasing budget surpluses which benefited the nation.

Social Emotional Data. New Cash Cow In Corporate Assessment

October 23, 2017 Staff, www.pegwithpen.com Educate! Capitalism, Profit

By Staff of Peg with Pen - Recently I was asked to allow my son to participate in a survey at school. The "opt in" survey form specifically stated, "the questions on the survey relate to peer relationships, how safe students feel at school, and the quality of student-teacher relationships." It went on to say that the questions might make my son feel uncomfortable and that this was all voluntary, with the ultimate goal being to "inform a more effective bullying prevention program and help improve the safety, social and emotional skills, and well-being for all students." There it was. Social Emotional. The new cash cow in corporate assessment building. ESSA created an additional data point which schools must use to report their progress. Each year schools must report back on school quality in some shape or form; in other words, how is the school climate? Is there bullying? Is it safe? How well are students or teachers engaged and are they feeling confident, successful? More or less, it's about feelings. How we feel and interact as humans, is complex and incredibly difficult to confine to a data point. Confining learning to a data point is not new. They've managed to confine academic learning to data points by defining finite standards which must be measured in small bites in order to create the ability to control teaching and learning (therefore humans) and profit off of public schools.

Chocolate Barons Devastate National Parks In West Africa

October 23, 2017 Davis Harper, www.ecowatch.com Create! Africa, Capitalism, Farming, Food and Agriculture, Ghana

By Davis Harper for Eco Watch - For several years, chocolate barons have devastated forests to make room to plant cocoa, a crop that naturally grows in shade. Now, a report from Mighty Earth—a nonprofit that works to conserve threatened landscapes—shows new evidence that illegal deforestation is occurring in protected areas; specifically, in the national parks of West Africa. The Ivory Coast and Ghana produce a combined 2.6 million tons of chocolate—60 percent of the world's supply. It's no wonder so many of these nations' protected lands are at risk. According to Mighty Earth's report, 10 percent of Ghana's tree cover has been replaced by cocoa monocultures. The Ivory Coast, once heavily forested and extremely biodiverse, has lost seven of its 23 protected areas to cocoa. Due to habitat loss, its chimpanzees are now endangered, and its elephants are nearly extinct. This means that companies like Mars, Nestlé, Hersey's and Godiva are on the hot seat for making products using cocoa grown by uncertified sources. "Chocolate companies have taken advantage of corrupt governance in Ghana and the Ivory Coast to deforest parklands," saic Glenn Horowitz, CEO of Mighty Earth. With a rising demand for the world's guiltiest pleasure, chocolate companies are also taking advantage of farmers—on average, these growers are paid less than 80 cents a day.

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