Capitalism

IMF Study: Inequality Hurts Growth, Calls For Wealth Redistribution

June 17, 2015 Aditya Tejas, www.ibtimes.com Educate! Capitalism, IMF, wealth inequality

By Aditya Tejas in International Business Times - The International Monetary Fund (IMF) said in a new report that income inequality is harming economies around the world, calling it the “defining challenge of our time.” The Monday study, which was the result of research from five IMF economists, drew attention to the issue of global inequality, dismissed “trickle-down” economics and urged governments to target policies toward the bottom 20 percent of their citizens. The study surveyed advanced, emerging and developing economies from 1980 to 2012, and found that inequality was exacerbated by technological progress, weakened labor groups, globalization and regressive tax policies. Weakened labor market laws were found to be associated with a boost in the income of the richest 10 percent.

Fast Track Hands Money Monopoly To Private Banks, Permanently

June 16, 2015 Ellen Brown, www.flushthetpp.org Educate! Capitalism, Free Trade, Money, TPP

By Ellen Brown in Flush The TPP! - In March 2014, the Bank of England let the cat out of the bag: money is just an IOU, and the banks are rolling in it. So wrote David Graeber in The Guardian the same month, referring to a BOE paper called “Money Creation in the Modern Economy.” The paper stated outright that most common assumptions of how banking works are simply wrong. The result, said Graeber, was to throw the entire theoretical basis for austerity out of the window. The revelation may have done more than that. The entire basis for maintaining our private extractive banking monopoly may have been thrown out the window.

Mass Protests In Nicaragua, Canal Will ‘Sell Country To Chinese’

June 15, 2015 Alexander Ward, www.independent.co.uk Resist! Canal, Capitalism, China, Farmworkers, Land Rights, Nicaragua, Water

By Alexander Ward in The Independent - Thousands of locals in Nicaragua have demonstrated against plans to construct a canal linking the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Mass protests in Nicaragua as farmers claim planned canal will 'sell country to the Chinese' The project, billed as longer and deeper than the Panama canal, will cost $50bn (£32bn) and is to be built by Chinese contractors. While the Nicaraguan government have said that the canal will bring vital investment to the country, demonstrators are concerned that it will have a dramatic effect on the environment. Protestors have also accused the Nicaraguan president, Daniel Ortega, of “selling the country to the Chinese,” although this has been refuted by authorities. According to various sources, the number of protestors gathered in Juigalpa is between 15,000 and 30,000. They believe that up to 120,000 people could be displaced by the project.

Secret Sheldon Adelson Summit Raises ~$50M For Anti-BDS Push

June 15, 2015 Nathan Guttman, www.forward.com Resist! BDS, Capitalism, Israel, Palestine

By Nathan Guttman in Forward - Pro-Israel activists headed home from Las Vegas last weekend resting easy that raising money to fight boycott and sanction campaigns on campus just got a lot easier. Although checks have yet to be written, deep-pocketed donors like summit organizer Sheldon Adelson and Haim Saban pledged tens of millions to their cause. “You work together and we will raise you the money,” promised Israeli-American businessman Adam Milstein following the conference for Israel activists that took place there over the weekend. “You no longer have to worry about financing and fundraising. You just need to be united.”

Billionaire Fears The Poor Rising Up Against The Rich

June 12, 2015 Stephen D. Foster Jr., www.reverbpress.com Educate! Capitalism, Fear, wealth inequality

By Stephen D. Foster Jr. in ReverbPress - A billionaire finally had a epiphany and told all his wealthy friends about it. Johann Rupert is the filthy rich owner of Richemont, a luxury goods company that serves as parent company to jeweler Cartier. His net worth tops out at nearly $8 billion making him part of the 1% of wealthy people who are greedily taking control of most of the world’s wealth to the detriment of poor people and the middle class. According to Oxfam, an organization that fights poverty, the richest one percent are on pace to control more global wealth than the rest of the 99 percent combined by 2016. And it doesn’t show any signs of stopping. Unsurprisingly, most of the billionaires in the world live in the United States, where they hire armies of lobbyists to influence the passage of government policies that help them keep their vast wealth and keep it growing.

“Yes Men Are Revolting”: Anti-Capitalist Pranksters Face Crisis, Hope

June 10, 2015 Andrew O'Hehir, www.salon.com Resist! Art, Capitalism, culture, Humor

By Andrew O'Hehir in Salon - I have nothing but love – well, let’s say almost nothing – for the Yes Men, the pair of activists, performance artists and culture-jammers who have repeatedly proved that it’s impossible to go too far in making fun of capitalist greed. These are the guys who have staged several of the most epic attention-getting pranks in recent political history, including driving down Dow Chemical’s stock price by staging a press conference to announce that Dow was taking full responsibility for the 1984 disaster that killed nearly 4,000 people in Bhopal, India, and would spend up to $12 billion on medical care, environmental cleanup and related research. As with the Yes Men’s other most effective actions, the key to the Dow ventriloquism lay in stretching plausibility not quite to the breaking point – is it dimly conceivable that a multinational chemical corporation might actually behave like a responsible global citizen?

Flipping The Script: Rethinking Working-Class Resistance

June 9, 2015 Henry A. Giroux, www.truth-out.org Strategize! Capitalism, Patriarchy, Racism, Sexism

By Henry A. Giroux in Truthout - I then realized that I had to flip the script to survive and became acutely aware that the alleged strengths of ruling-class types, such as their, cold, hypermasculine modes of embodiment, along with their ruthless sense of competitiveness, their suffocating narcissism, their view of unbridled self-interest as the highest virtue, their ponderous and empty elaborated code, and their often savage and insensitive modes of interaction, were actually poisonous deficits. That was a turning point in my being able to narrate and free myself from one of the most sinister forms of ideological domination, "those unexamined prejudices that keep us from thinking." For me, this involved a slow process of unlearning the poisonous, sedimented histories working-class youth often have to internalize and embody in order to survive.

CNN To Be Paid By Corporations To Create News

June 9, 2015 FAIR, www.fair.org Educate! Capitalism, Corporatism, Media

By FAIR - CNN has announced the formation of a new unit that will not report the news. Instead, it will take money from corporations to produce content that resembles news but is actually PR designed to burnish its clients’ images. The name CNN gives to this mercenary enterprise? “Courageous.” Perhaps CNN anticipates courageously withstanding ethical criticism. As theJournal‘s Steven Perlberg notes, “These undertakings often raise church-and-state questions about the divide between the editorial and business sides of a company”–understandably, since the point of so-called native advertising is to create advertising vehicles “that feel like editorial work.” So advertisers will come to Courageous because CNN‘s “trustworthiness” and unwillingness to “blur the lines” will be transfered by viewers to advertising content that is “similar” to CNN‘s news.

Green Economies Need Alliances B/W Labour & Indigenous People

June 5, 2015 Harsha Walia, www.ricochet.media Strategize! Capitalism, Environment, Imperialism, Indigenous People, Labor Unions, Land Rights, Public Health

By Harsha Walia in Ricochet.Media - The bold leadership of unions that revive principles of social unionism ensures that unions are not simply advocating mobility within capitalism and state structures, but are primary allies in the struggle against capitalism and imperialism. As Herman Rosenfeld, a former GM worker, writes, “Job security is key, but what kind of jobs? Is the job security strategy one that works against the interests of the rest of the working-class and First Nations peoples, or in partnership with them? Moving away from the narrow focus on the short-term sectoral interests of a relatively small group of workers, whose jobs are currently defined by their employers, is a critical way of building unions as fighters for the class as a whole, and for a different, sustainable, and hopefully anti-capitalist future.” Simply put, workers shouldn’t have to extract toxic sludge. Workers want and need clean air, clean water, and a more equitable future.

85% Of Americans Favor Systemic Changes In US Elections

June 3, 2015 Nicholas Confessore and Megan Thee-Brenan, www.nytimes.com Resist! Campaign Finance, Capitalism, Reform

By Nicholas Confessore and Megan Thee-Brenan in New York Times - Americans of both parties fundamentally reject the regime of untrammeled money in elections made possible by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling and other court decisions and now favor a sweeping overhaul of how political campaigns are financed, according to a New York Times/CBS News poll. The findings reveal deep support among Republicans and Democrats alike for new measures to restrict the influence of wealthy givers, including limiting the amount of money that can be spent by “super PACs” and forcing more public disclosure on organizations now permitted to intervene in elections without disclosing the names of their donors. And by a significant margin, they reject the argument that underpins close to four decades of Supreme Court jurisprudence on campaign finance: that political money is a form of speech protected by the First Amendment.

TPP Reduces Human Trafficking & Child Labor To Misdemeanors

June 3, 2015 Stan Sorscher, www.huffingtonpost.com Resist! Capitalism, Human Trafficking, Slavery, TPP, Worker Rights and Jobs

By Stan Sorscher in Huffington Post - The most recent US Department of Labor report shows that Malaysia uses forced labor in its electronics and garment industry, and child labor to produce palm oil. Mass graves were recently discovered with 139 bodies of men women and children showing signs of torture. Many of the victims in Malaysia are Rohingya Muslims who are exploited by human traffickers, held for ransom, and traded among other smugglers. In Malaysia, investigations, prosecutions and convictions are down. This deterioration in enforcement occurred while Malaysia was helping negotiate the labor provisions in TPP. On May 19, in an abrupt about-face, Senator Menendez tried to soften the language that he had originally proposed to the Finance Committee, excluding Tier 3 countries from the TPP.

These Guys Want To Help Pay Your Medical Bills

June 3, 2015 Wendy Joan Biddlecombe, www.metro.us Create! Capitalism, Debt, Health Care, Public Health

By Wendy Joan Biddlecombe in Metro - Last year 64 million Americans had difficulty paying their medical debt, according to a report by the Commonwealth Fund, down from 75 million in 2012 and 73 million in 2010. Jerry Ashton and Craig Antico think they can put a dent in America’s medical debt crisis, and want to help those who really need to pay their bills, no strings attached. At face value, Ashton and Antico are perhaps unlikely advocates for those who owe medical bills. They have decades of experience as medical debt collectors. They recently launched RIP Medical Debt, a nonprofit, and accompanying initial crowdfunding campaign to raise $74,500 to purchase and absolve strangers’ medical debt. The goal for the first year is to raise $14 million, purchase $1 billion of medical debt and abolish it.

Karl Marx Was Right

June 2, 2015 Chris Hedges, www.truthdig.com Educate! Capitalism, Marxism, Socialism

By Chris Hedges in Truthdig - Karl Marx exposed the peculiar dynamics of capitalism, or what he called “the bourgeois mode of production.” He foresaw that capitalism had built within it the seeds of its own destruction. He knew that reigning ideologies—think neoliberalism—were created to serve the interests of the elites and in particular the economic elites, since “the class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production” and “the ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships … the relationships which make one class the ruling one.” He saw that there would come a day when capitalism would exhaust its potential and collapse.

How Education Became A Business And Forgot The Students

June 1, 2015 Devon Douglas-Bowers, www.occupy.com Educate! Business, Capitalism, Education, Privatization

Devon Douglas-Bowers in Occupy - Students attend college to pursue their interests, broaden their intellectual horizons and make headway toward a career. While this is made difficult due to the amount of debt that many must saddle in order to earn a degree, there is also another, much stealthier problem as well: the college bureaucracy. University bureaucracies absorb large amounts of funding and undermine the alleged goal of college, which is to provide an education. But they also signal something more sinister: the neo-liberalization of education, now viewed as a business. The rise in college bureaucracy is nothing new, and has been noted for quite some time.

Is Blue Cross Blue Shield An Illegal Cartel?

May 30, 2015 Anna Wilde Mathews, www.pnhp.org Educate! Capitalism, Cartel, Corporatism, Health Care, Public Health

Blue Cross and Blue Shield health insurers cover about a third of Americans, through a national network that dates back decades. Now, antitrust lawsuits advancing in a federal court in Alabama allege that the 37 independently owned companies are functioning as an illegal cartel. A federal judicial panel has consolidated the claims against the insurers into two lawsuits that represent plaintiffs from around the country. One is on behalf of health-care providers and the other is for individual and small-employer customers. The antitrust suits allege that the insurers are conspiring to divvy up markets and avoid competing against one another, driving up customers’ prices and pushing down the amounts paid to doctors and other health-care providers.

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