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Class War Is Here Forever
May 12, 2012 - 2:23pm
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Update on the class war: 1% winning, 99% regroupinghttp://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/second-reading/gerald-capla...
What’s particularly noteworthy here is that despite the success of the Occupy movement in putting inequality on the international agenda, it can safely be reported that just about everywhere, the 1 per cent are still laughing all the way to the bank. In fact they own the bank. Just a little south of here, the Bank of America was bailed out by American taxpayers to the tune of $45-billion. It claimed a pre-tax loss of $5.4-billion and so paid no taxes for the past two years. In one of those years, it dished out executive bonuses and compensation worth $35-billion. Could I make this stuff up?
The bargain between the 1 per cent and the governments of the 1 per cent is clear: huge tax breaks for the big boys, austerity for the 99 per cent. Can you handle more figures? Since the geniuses on Wall Street gave us the great crash of 2008, American banks received $7.7-trillion in bailout money and British banks $1.3-trillion. Yes, trillion, in both cases. To offset those losses to the public purse, the United States will cut public spending by $2.4-trillion in the next decade and Britain $128-billion. In Britain this will include almost half-a-million lost public sector jobs.
It’s time to resurrect the biting formula given us years ago by John Kenneth Galbraith, an earlier generation’s Paul Krugman: private affluence, public squalor.
Canada merely proves the rule. Despite our ever-receding kinder/gentler reputation, Canada is actually becoming more unequal faster than most other countries. There’s an elephant in the room here (as elsewhere) that’s almost always ignored. As economists Sam Gindin and Paul Kahnert report in the April CCPA Monitor, there’s far more wealth in Canada today than ever before. Per capita GDP is 50 per cent higher (adjusting for inflation) than 30 years ago. Yet most of that wealth has been transferred to the richest Canadians through tax cuts and government subsidies.
Since 1980, the ultra-rich have increased their share of the national income from 8.1 per cent to 13 per cent, a shift of $67-billion. Here’s a strange coincidence. The combined federal and provincial deficits now run at about $65-billion annually. So let’s see now. If taxes on the super-rich had stayed at their 1980 level – when no well-heeled Canadian was exactly suffering from cruel and unusual tax torture – there’d be no federal or provincial deficits today. Interesting.
Sounds like a plan - we'll see.
François Hollande will strike fear into the hearts of the rich
He has admitted that he 'does not like the rich' and declared: 'my real enemy is the world of finance'
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/nabila-ramdani-franois...
This austerity backlash across Europe could transform BritainThe truth is that the real world has paid the high priests of austerity an unwelcome visit
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/owen-jones-this-auster...
Thanks for finding these, NR!
Unionist, one thing I have always appreciated about Europe is the divergent political views expressed in the their msp
Imagine what it would be like to have this kind of msp reporting on a daily basis here in North America?
Although he and his minions try to give off the opposite impression, Rupert Murdoch is no fool, and knows full well the impact of 24/7 right wing msp propoganda. He didn't buy or set up Fox News for nothing! These fuckers are on a mission, and will stop at literally nothing, if we let them, to achieve it.
What baffles me though is how Labourites could have let someone like Blair anywhere near the leadership of their party.
And it is time for some serious quotas such as no one who went to what we consider a private school here in Canada be allowed to hold any position within the UK Labour party. And perhaps no lawyers allowed either.
Actually it is time for some new political parties, here and abroad, which can represent the current scene and actually make the rich pay which has never seriously been tried.
I'm positive with all the tax loopholes cut out for these tax-free rich, there would be plenty of resources around so that we all could have healthcare, food, clothing, housing, dental, education, retirement, and death looked after
Although a bit dated now probably a good beginning.
Repair of Taxation by Tom Kent
http://caledoninst.dreamhosters.com/Publications/PDF/553820789.pdf
http://caledoninst.dreamhosters.com/openpdf.php?pdfurl=Publications/PDF/...
Chickens usually come home to roost!
A generation hobbled by the soaring cost of education
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/13/business/student-loans-weighing-down-a...
The federal government has won its appeal of a 2009 court decision ordering it to allow RCMP officers to unionize.
The Ontario Court of Appeal rejected the lower court's finding that RCMP officers' rights under the Charter are violated by regulations forbidding a union.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/story/2012/06/01/pol-rcmp-union-court-ap...They already enjoy rights that no other worker in Canada gets. My concern is getting proper civilian over site of our police forces not better terms and conditions for the state's pawns in the class war.
Lets not forget that these misogynist pigs are the people training military and police forces for NATO. I think that as a priority group in society to have the wrongs against them righted they are at the bottom of my list.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/story/2012/05/23/bc-disci...
I support all workers right to organize.
When does a worker become an overseer? In the Antebellum Era the rights of the blacks overseers, who I am sure also had it bad compared to any white person, would still have been on the bottom of my priority list. Its not that they didn't deserve to be free but seeking their rights in isolation is hardly a progressive idea.
Besides the ruling elite would not allow that because if the police went on strike who would they have left to give the orders to beat them up to?
Caissa may I ask why you chose to post this piece in a thread about Class Warfare? It seems incongruous to me.
We'll see how the Supreme Court rules on it Kropotkin. I posted it here because there is not a large enough critical mass at Babble these days to sustain thred proliferation.
Glad to see you side with a decision taking away the right to organize.
if you want to get personal at least try to be accurate. I didn't say any such thing. Please quote my words were I "sided" with the decision. Please don't interpret my posts because you seem to have trouble reading carefully for content.
in a thread on CLASS WARFARE you'll have to excuse me if I have little time for worrying about the terms and conditions of employment for the people tasked with shooting rubber bullets at me and other citizens. And I really don't give a flying fuck if they are getting screwed out of overtime for the long hours they must put in infiltrating peaceful groups trying to organize demonstrations.
If you want to make unionizing the RCMP your focus for progressive change well that is your choice. As I said above they are my lowest priority.
Poor and fat: The real class war
http://www.cnn.com/2012/06/05/opinion/granderson-poverty-health/index.ht...
Idle Pleasures: Rousing the Age-Old Dream of the Heavy Laden - by Chris Floyd
http://chris-floyd.com/component/content/article/1-latest-news/2260-idle...
"When I was growing up, the 'four day work-week' was considered a viable political and social goal: the next logical step after the long and bloody struggle to win a five-day week for most working people. Like 'full employment' this idea was sometimes actually built into the public platform of serious, broad-based parties and political movements..
All this is long gone now, of course. As Owen Hatheby notes in the Guardian, both Right and Left have combined, for many decades, to advance the idea that pointless labour is our lot, and that we should be happy with it..."
The RCMP are at it again ;
http://news.sympatico.ca/oped/coffee-talk/rcmp_officers_caught_having_on...
I don't know what to add to this....What an embarrassing 'Canadian Institution'
And they have the nerve to enforce 'morality'?
The Western Welfare State: Its Rise and Demise and the Soviet Bloc - by James Petras
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=31753
"...The 'anti-Stalinist' Left intellectuals have never engaged in any serious reflection regarding their own role in bringing down the collective welfare state nor have they assumed any responsibility for the devastating socio-economic consequences in both the East and West. Furthermore the same intellectuals have had no reservations in this 'Post Soviet era' in supporting ('critically' of course) the British Labor Party, the French Socialist Party, the Clinton-Obama Democratic Party and other 'lesser evils' which practice neo-liberalism.
They supported the utter destruction of Yugoslavia and US-led colonial wars in the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia. Not a few 'anti-Stalinist' intellectuals in England and France will have clinked champagne glasses with the generals, bankers and oil elites after NATO's bloody invasion and devastation of Libya - Africa's only welfare state..."
Does union-busting literally lead to less power for working people?
China committed $126 billion to new hospitals and clinics. Although health care levels vary widely in China, they are striving to improve. It could be that China achieves universal/socialized health care before the USA ever does. China made remarkable strides toward national health and education until 1976, the year of Mao's death.
"Anti-Stalinist" mentioned 21 times. Good essay by Petras. The western world has certainly lost a lot of social democracy and hard fought-for social rights since the end of the cold war.
It is only until situations like this are completely eliminated, will we have some sense of equality in our societies.
Wealthy hiding $21 trillion in tax havens, report says 'Debtor countries' are actually wealthy when hidden money is accounted forhttp://www.cbc.ca/news/world/story/2012/07/22/tax-havens.html
I think various babblers have written about how today's capitalists pay lip service to "classical liberal economists" and what they actually wrote in the past. Linda McQuaig wrote about how today's capitalism basically does everything Smith, Mill, Ricardo and especially Marx warned us against.
I believe neoliberalism is basically the opposite of "classical liberalism." They've managed to undo in 30 or 35 years what took three centuries to achieve in setting up modern industrial economies and legal systems that increasingly granted certain rights to debtors over those of creditors. Many of those rights have been lost since the beginning of the "new" liberal capitalism.
This is not the class war spoken of 100 years ago. It is no longer a class war between workers and industrialists - industrial capitalists are overthrown by financial capitalists since the 1980's. Very many of the owners of the means aren't even based in Canada anymore and jobs are "offshored". Labour's power is diminished as a result.
Today it's a war of finance capitalism against entire economies.
Redistributing wealth upward
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/harold-meyerson-the-party-that-tr...
The less widely understood way that Republicans have helped redistribute wealth to the already wealthy is by changing the rules. Markets don’t function without rules, and the rules that Republican policymakers have made since Ronald Reagan became president have consistently depressed the share of the nation’s income that the middle class can claim.
Part of the intellectual sleight-of-hand that Republicans employ in discussions of redistribution is to reserve that term solely for government intervention in the market that redistributes income downward. But markets redistribute wealth continuously. In recent decades, markets have redistributed wealth from manufacturing to finance, from Main Street to Wall Street, from workers to shareholders. Rules made by “pro-market” governments (including those of “pro-market” Democrats) have enabled these epochal shifts. Free trade with China helped hollow out manufacturing; the failure to regulate finance enabled Wall Street to swell; the opposition to labor’s efforts to reestablish an even playing field during organizing campaigns has all but eliminated collective bargaining in the private sector.
That's a must read article-- thanks for posting it North Report.
It is important that people recognize that the so-called invisible hand is actually attached to a body. That body has interests and wields a lot of power.
And I thought that Invisible Hand was just another term for a pickpocket.
Kropotkin-- pickpockets have bodies as well. But you are quite right: the invisible hand is attached to a thief.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/30/opinion/krugman-class-wars-of-2012.htm...
The important thing to understand now is that while the election is over, the class war isn’t. The same people who bet big on Mr. Romney, and lost, are now trying to win by stealth — in the name of fiscal responsibility — the ground they failed to gain in an open election.
Before I get there, a word about the actual vote. Obviously, narrow economic self-interest doesn’t explain everything about how individuals, or even broad demographic groups, cast their ballots. Asian-Americans are a relatively affluent group, yet they went for President Obama by 3 to 1. Whites in Mississippi, on the other hand, aren’t especially well off, yet Mr. Obama received only 10 perce
World's 100 Richest Earned Enough in 2012 To End Global Poverty 4 Times Over
http://rt.com/news/oxfam-report-global-inequality-357/
"The world's 100 richest people earned a stunning total of $240 million in 2012 - enough money to end extreme poverty worldwide four times over, Oxfam has revealed, adding that the global economic crisis is further enriching the super-rich. 'The richest 1% has increased its income by 60 percent in the last 20 years,' while the income of the top 0.01 percent has seen even greater growth, a new Oxfam report says..."