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Living within a living, loving planet
Obscene Wealth
Capitalism Just Isn’t Working
Aug 25th
The Evidence Keeps Pouring In: Capitalism Just Isn’t Working
Global Failures
“Capitalism hasn’t been able to control runaway global inequality. For every $1.00 owned by the world’s richest 1% in 2011, they now own $1.27. They own almost half the world’s wealth. Just 70 of them own as much as 3.5 billion people.”
“Nor has capitalism been able to control global environmental degradation, with trillions in subsidies going to polluters that don’t even pay their taxes, and with corporations ignoring any semblance of social responsibility as they seek ways to profit from global warming.”
http://www.nationofchange.org/2015/08/24/the-evidence-keeps-pouring-in-capitalism-just-isnt-working/
‘Shocking’ revelation finds $5.3tn subsidy
May 23rd
Well, of course, this is shocking but nothing new to capitalism. Most of our major industries leave billions of Pounds/Dollars, whichever currency, of pollution and waste for governments to clean up and finance from taxes. Then, to heap insult onto injury, over the last century especially, western legislatures have granted favourable tax breaks for corporations and the wealthy who in turn own the companies being subsidised. Nice work if you can get it. Is it any wonder that: “The total wealth of the richest 1,000 individuals and families in Britain has more than doubled in the last 10 years to £547bn, the survey reported.
There are now 117 billionaires on the list, up from 104 in 2014, with 80 of them living in London.”
With Wealth comes Power
Nov 3rd
With wealth comes power
“When I started to look at what we are doing—the numbers were so boggling. I did some long division to make it more understandable. It came down to every four to four-and-a-half days, there’s a million more of us on the planet. That just doesn’t seem like a sustainable figure, and that’s pretty much where we are unless we start to do something about it.”
A CONVERSATION WITH ALAN WEISMAN http://littlebrown.com/countdown.html
John Kerry: “The future… will be defined by the combination of stability and economic growth”
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-24793814
(Sky:) Economic growth for whom? Every four-and-a-half days, there’s 990,000 more of us who will see poverty in their lifetimes.
“The remaining 91.6 percent of humanity splits around 17 percent of the wealth.”
“The planet overall minted around 2 million new millionaires last year.”
http://www.alternet.org/economy/point-seveners-new-name-millionaires-club
“Taken together, the bottom half of the global population own less than 1 percent of total wealth. In sharp contrast, the richest 10 percent hold 86 percent of the world’s wealth, and the top 1 percent alone account for 46 percent of global assets.”
Ten Numbers the Rich would like Fudged
Nov 21st
4. Corporations stopped paying HALF OF THEIR TAXES after the recession.
Ten Numbers the Rich would like Fudged
Nation of Change
http://www.nationofchange.org/ten-numbers-rich-would-fudged-1353335225
“After paying an average of 22.5% from 1987 to 2008, corporations have paid an annual rate of 10% since. This represents a sudden $250 billion annual loss in taxes.
U.S. corporations have shown a pattern of tax reluctance for more than 50 years, despite building their businesses with American research and infrastructure. They’ve passed the responsibility on to their workers. For every dollar of workers’ payroll tax paid in the 1950s, corporations paid three dollars. Now it’s 22 cents.”
http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxfacts/displayafact.cfm?Docid=203
Leave Social Security alone. Social Security is not the problem. If you are not aware of Ronnie’s blog, you may well find it interesting. Time Goes By.
“Our commitment as Democrats is that we believe Social Security and Medicare are pillars of economic and health security for America’s seniors. They should not have cuts made to them in order to give tax cuts to the rich. Any adjustments we would make in them would be to make them stronger, as we did in the Affordable Care Act.”
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi
Both myself and my employers have contributed to Social Security since I was 16 years old.
If that money, along with hundred’s of thousands of similar payments had been invested: even just a bit of it, think what a huge sum would be available. I’m tired of being accused of causing a money problem. Casting MY money as revenue rather than investment source was not my decision.
24 Policies to End the Earth Emergency
Jun 10th
By Stephen Leahy
http://www.nationofchange.org/24-policies-end-earth-emergency-1338903766
“Ecologically ignorant policies are largely responsible for the interlinked crises that are unraveling the planet’s life support system.”
Sounds like something I can agree with and further:
“On the other hand bad government policies allow 3,000 of the world’s biggest corporations to escape more than 2.2 trillion dollars in annual costs through their impacts on the natural environment, according to the U.N. Environment Programme.”
Plus and to the point:
“If those companies had to account for those costs as they should, few would be profitable,” von Uexkull said. WFC (World Future Council) Founder Jakob von Uexkull
It is not so much that many, many people are not aware of the problems, it is more that Multi-nationals put profit before care of Gaia and profit before concern for public welfare. Most of us are powerless to effectively oppose their policies no matter how harmful they are to Gaia. We are governed by an oligarchy: “government by the few, especially despotic power exercised by a small and privileged group for corrupt or selfish purposes.” www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/427558/oligarchy
Austerity programmes
Feb 28th
Portugal to face bailout review
27 February 2012
BBC News
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-17183345
“Portugal’s austerity programme has sparked major protests.
Portugal will find out on Tuesday whether it has passed the latest test of its main international backers… Last month, it reached an agreement with unions and employers to cut holidays and the compensation paid when workers are laid-off. Under the deal, it was also made easier to hire and fire staff. There have been deep cost cuts that are hitting public sector workers particularly hard. Many will see their income cut by a quarter this year compared to 2010.”
The “well to do”, many “one percenters”, who work for and manage the lending institutions, banks and corporations are responsible for the irresponsible “deals” that resulted in the great crisis of 2008. Yet, these same organisations ply their management with huge bonuses, have mostly more than recovered – many boosted their net worth with “bailout” money – and have emerged better off than before.
Sadly, we see here, as in other countries such as Greece, that it is the relatively poor – workers they are referred as – who bear the cost. With 25.4 millionaires around the globe, just think about what a mere 1% tax increase, which they wouldn’t miss, would mean to “the workers.”
Tax Fairness
Feb 14th
President Obama: “Asking a billionaire to pay at least as much tax as his secretary… that’s just common sense”
Sky: It is difficult to disagree on this point isn’t it?
He also said: “In theUnited States of America, a teacher, a nurse, or a construction worker who earns $50,000 a year should not pay taxes at a higher rate than somebody making $50 million. That is wrong.”
Republican leaders, who portray Mr Obama as a tax-and-spend liberal stoking class warfare, have pronounced the budget dead on arrival.
Sky: Let’s not forget the 25.4 million millionaires. What a different world if they paid the same percentage tax as a secretary.
Restoring European Growth
Dec 29th
Restoring European Growth
http://www.nationofchange.org/restoring-european-growth-1325085064
“Despite the new agreement reached at the European Union’s summit in December, strengthening financial markets’ confidence in the eurozone remains an elusive goal. In the aftermath of the summit, the euro’s exchange rate sank to its lowest level of the year (around $1.30), while yields on Italian five-year bonds hit a new high (almost 6.5%). InFrance, Socialist presidential candidate François Hollande flatly declared that the latest agreement ‘is not the right answer,” because “without economic growth we will achieve none of the targets on deficit reduction.’”
I get very confused with the financial opinions I read. For instance, unlimited economic growth is an oxymoron, an apparition, a concept with no physical reality or one might say impossible when the necessary materials are finite. Don’t I have this right? If so, then how can economic growth be the answer to being broke? On a more personal level, in the past when I have been broke, I had to stop spending on everything but the essentials to maintain a roof over my head, food and taxes. It seems to me that with so many people in so many countries, gain with no pain has become a kind of birthright. Again, getting personal here, I, along with my employers, contributed for all my working life; this is thousands of American dollars, to a pension fund. Gainfully invested, this fund would have become immense. But no, the American government spent it as fast as I contributed it. Now, I am looked at as THE problem. Hold on, I didn’t spend it and wasn’t given a choice as to where to invest it.
When a business borrows more than it can pay back, it goes out of business; the investors lose their investment and the managers lose their jobs. But actually, what we have seen in the last two or three years [perhaps since the dawn of civilization] is a rich upper management letting their greed get ridiculously out of hand and forcing governments to pass the costs down to the poor who have no power to refuse. They talk of losses, well the money went somewhere and it certainly was not distributed to the middle and lower economic classes was it? How about Forbes list of billionaires. (2011) There are 1,210 names in this year’s list.
“Mega bank Credit Suisse uses a different definition, however, denoting anyone whose net assets exceed $1 million a millionaire. In those terms, there are 24.2 million millionaires on the planet – about 0.5% of the world’s adult population, or more than the entire population ofAustralia. [22,328,800 – 2010] 41% of them live in the U.S., 10% in Japan and 3% inChina.”
Let’s see now, there are 1,000 millions in an American billion. So that means the number of billionaires [1,200] is equivalent to 1,200,000 more millionaires in the world. So we have then, 25.4 million millionaires in the world.
Here in Hartland, Devon, where I live, the Torridge District Council has decided that instead of supplying a portable tip 4 times a year, we all have to drive 50 miles round trip to the tip or pay out a steep fee to hire somebody else if we don’t run a car. They say they are saving money. Who’s money? Who’s pollution? Who’s petrol costs?
Who’s lost their mind here?
Additional Facts:
“Inequality, in all its repugnance, has become deeper and more entrenched. Today the richest 2% of adult individuals own more than half of global wealth, with the richest 1% accounting for 40% of total global assets. Although the gap in per capita income between the richest and poorest regions of the world fell from 15:1 to 13:1during the golden age of Keynesianism, it increased by 19:1 by 2002. And from 1970 to 2009 the per capita GDP of developing countries (excludingChina) averaged a mere 6.3% of the per capita GDP of the G8 countries (theUnited States,Japan,Germany,France, theUnited Kingdom,Italy,Canada, andRussia).”
This article was published at NationofChange at: http://www.nationofchange.org/wal-mart-larger-norway-exposing-myth-capital-competition-1322835390