There are places in the world where the majority of people are doomed to live no better than their parents and grandparents did, places like Burma, Kenya and the United States

another cry for a return to the concept of the common good...

from truthout...

According to data from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the United States has some of the lowest rates of entrepreneurship in the world. Even at the top of the boom in 2005-2007, only two countries (Belgium and Norway) had lower levels of new business formation than the United States. The other 22 countries studied by the OECD all had higher rates of new business formation than the United States.

In fact, over 50 percent of Americans work for large companies of 250 employees or more. Only two other countries in the world have economies that are so dominated by large firms: Slovakia and Luxembourg.

We are not a nation of entrepreneurs. We are a nation of workers. And over the past forty years the American worker has gone from riches to rags, not the other way around.

[...]

Government can and should promote greater social mobility. Inevitably, however, greater mobility for the poor and working classes comes at the cost of higher taxes and fewer privileges for the middle and upper classes. Economic opportunity is incompatible with an economy dominated by $8-an-hour service jobs.

We can return to an America of boundless upward mobility only if we return to an America of well-funded schools, good union jobs and top-quality government services supported by progressive taxes on those who can most afford to pay. Like all good things, mobility comes at a price. Those who have achieved the American dream have to be willing to share it with everybody else. Sadly, it seems they no longer are.

"...it seems they no longer are."

i take issue with that statement... i don't think "they" have EVER been willing to share their good fortune with everybody else... yes, there have been and still are exceptions... yes, there have been heart-warming examples of philanthropy and overwhelming generosity... but the general trend has consistently been one of "i've got mine cuz i'm smarter and more motivated and if you ain't rich it's probably because you're lazy and ignorant"...


i'm just like everyone else in my age group... from early childhood, i was steeped in the american exceptionalism mythology and like most of my peers, i bought it... it's been a hard road over the past decades to realize that the american dream is just that, a myth... perhaps at one time, there was at least a tad bit substance to it but the past 20 years have seen the leaching out of whatever substance might have been there...

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The "crisis of capitalism" has consolidated its dominance and exploitation over the rest of society

james petras talks about why we might want to consider socialism in light of the unending rape and pillage of world resources by our super-rich elites...

Finance capital, the principle detonator of the crash and crises, recovered, the capitalist class as a whole was strengthened, and most important of all, it utilized the political, social, ideological conditions created as a result of “the crises” to further consolidate their dominance and exploitation over the rest of society.

In other words, the ‘crises of capital’ has been converted into a strategic advantage for furthering the most fundamental interests of capital: the enlargement of profits, the consolidation of capitalist rule, the greater concentration of ownership, the deepening of inequalities between capital and labor and the creation of huge reserves of labor to further augment their profits.

[...]

A recent study reports “US corporate profits are higher as a share of gross domestic product than at any time since 1950” (FT 1/30/12). US companies cash balances have never been greater, thanks to intensified exploitation of workers, and a multi-tiered wage systems in which new hires work for a fraction of what older workers receive (thanks to agreements signed by ‘door mat’ labor bosses).

The “crises of capitalism” ideologues have ignored the financial reports of the major US corporations.According to General Motors 2011 report to its stockholders,they celebrated the greatest profit ever,turning a profit of $7.6 billion, surpassing the previous record of $6.7 billion in 1997.A large part of these profits results from the freezing of its underfunded US pension funds and extracting greater productivity from fewer workers-in other words intensified exploitation-and cutting hourly wages of new hires by half.(Earthlink News 2/16/12)

Moreover the increased importance of imperialist exploitation is evident as the share of US corporate profits extracted overseas keeps rising at the expense of employee income growth.

[...]

A real capitalist crisis would adversely affect profit margins, gross earnings and the accumulation of “cash piles”. Rising profits are being horded because as capitalists profit from intense exploitation , mass consumption stagnates.

Crises theorists confuse what is clearly the degrading of labor, the savaging of living and working conditions and even the stagnation of the economy, with a ‘crises’ of capital: when the capitalist class increases its profit margins, hoards trillions, it is not in crises. The key point is that the ‘crises of labor’ is a major stimulus for the recovery of capitalist profits. We cannot generalize from one to the other. No doubt there was a moment of capitalist crises (2008-2009) but thanks to the capitalist state’s unprecedented massive transfer of wealth from the public treasury to the capitalist class – Wall Street banks in the first instance – the corporate sector recovered, while the workers and the rest of the economy remained in crises, went bankrupt and out of work.

[...]

Socialism is no longer the scare word of the past. Socialism involves the large-scale reorganization of the economy, the transfer of trillions from the coffers of predator classes’ of no social utility to the public welfare. This change can finance a productive and innovative economy based on work and leisure, study and sport. Socialism replaces the everyday terror of dismissal with the security that brings confidence, assurance and respect to the workplace. Workplace democracy is at the heart of the vision of 21st century socialism. We begin by nationalizing the banks and eliminating Wall Street. Financial institutions are redesigned to create productive employment, to serve social welfare and to preserve the environment. Socialism would begin the transition, from a capitalist economy directed by predators and swindlers and a state at their command, toward an economy of public ownership under democratic control.

we need to start taking a hard look at reality... capitalism is a profoundly broken system and we need to face the fact that it has also become a ideological doctrine, no more or less than any other religion...

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Max Keiser: Paul Craig Roberts, Goldman Sachs, austerity, fraud, punish the innocent & reward the guilty

and, here's the real irony... this is an excerpt from press tv, a news service from iran... you'd certainly never see this in u.s. media... you can call it iranian propaganda, you can call it anything you want, but do yourself a favor, at least watch and listen...

Global financial crisis-On the Edge with Max Keiser-05-20-2011-(Part1)




Global financial crisis-On the Edge with Max Keiser-05-20-2011-(Part2)

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11% - 18.4M to be exact - of U.S. homes are vacant

damn...! that's a LOT of empty houses...!

Of the nearly 131 million housing units in this country, 112.5 million are occupied. 74.8 million are owned, and that's only dropped by about 30 thousand in the past year. 38 million are rented, but that's up by over a million year over year. That means more new households are choosing to rent.

Now to vacancies. There were 18.4 million vacant homes in the U.S. in Q4 '10 (11 percent of all housing units vacant all year round), which is actually an improvement of 427,000 from a year ago, but not for the reasons you'd think.

The number of vacant homes for rent fell by 493 thousand, as rental demand rose. 471,000 homes are listed as "Held off Market" about half for temporary use, but the other half are likely foreclosures. And no, the shadow inventory isn't just 200,000, it's far higher than that.

So think about it. Eleven percent of the houses in America are empty. This as builders start to get more bullish, and renting apartments becomes ever more popular. Vacancies in the apartment sector have been falling steadily and dramatically, why? Because we're still recovering emotionally from the toll of the housing crash.

Younger Americans have seen what home ownership has done to their friends and families, and many want no part of it. Credit has become very nearly elitist. Home prices, whatever your particular data provider preference might be, are still falling.

i've owned three houses in my life and i can say with absolute certainty that i would never do it again... for one thing, i have no desire to be burdened by a place that i have to maintain, i have no desire to be anchored to one place, particularly one that would sit vacant for half the year at least, and i have zero desire to take on debt of any sort, particularly the long-term mortgage variety... what's more, i've seen that, in most places in the world outside the u.s., owning a home is simply not de rigueur... plus, on top of all that, now that i'm reaping the wisdom of age, i'm seeing just how much mortgage debt is used as a tool of economic enslavement...

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