PEELING THE LIES BEHIND NEO-LIBERAL ECONOMICS - THE MINIMUM WAGE ISSUE

The last few decades have been called the age of neo-liberal economics. Following the 'Powell memorandum', these policies have been implemented with a progressive takeover by big business and the super rich who own them, of public institutions - political parties, the media, the academy, major chunks of the judiciary, and so on, at the cost of decimated unions whose power was stripped away with technological changes that enabled off-shoring of manufacturing to places where labour cost 'peanuts'. The so-called 'free trade agreements' progressively (or rather regressively) turned corporations into Masters, nation-states into Servants begging for investment, and liquidating their natural resources at bargain-basement prices. Kevin Taft (former Alberta politician) has written on how this process unfolded in Alberta (as one example), with the Peter Lougheed government being the last one to successfully negotiate reasonably fair terms for the province and its people. Key elements of the fraud that has been neo-liberalism have included tax cuts for the super-rich with promises of 'trickle-down' jobs and benefits, but as Arundhati Roy has put it, all that happened was a massive Gush-Up; by a recent estimate of some $30 trillion to the super-rich in the West, at the cost of a rapidly disappeared middle-class, transformed from what was once the 'proletariat' into what is now the 'precariat'. Other massive cons were privatization - trillion-dollar thefts creating billionaire oligarchies everywhere (because 'public' enterprises were simply 'inefficient'), and the 'deregulation' tsunami that produced the multi-trillion dollar subprime fraud which nearly wrecked the world's economy, but resulted in Zero CONSEQUENCES for the perpetrators in Wall Street, who remain TOO BIG TO JAIL. Thus Wall Street followed up the junk mortgage fraud of the early 2000s, with an even more brazen mortgage foreclosure fraud in 2010, with banks foreclosing on thousands of American homes with fraudulent documents filed in courts. Soldiers returning to the US from service in Iraq found their homes had been seized by banks.... One of the neo-liberal frauds is that higher wages destroy jobs. Well Big business... at least some representatives of it - 100 CEOs who include at least some big corporations - Facebook, Tesla - are finally clueing on that robbing the worker blind does not make for a sustainable economy. That's what the Ford company which made the Model T a century ago understood well - that paying its own workers well improved the market for its own products. Michael Hudson's book 'Killing the Host' talks about how decimating labour wages was the parasite (virus) killing its own host. During the 1950s and 60s, US labor enjoyed its highest prosperity, executive wages were only 10-15 times the worker's wage, and tax rates were incomparably higher for the rich. The US economy remained the dominant one, but prosperity was shared. Neo-liberal fraud has changed all that. But at least some businessmen are getting what Ontario Premier Doug Ford does not - that there are 2 sides to the minimum wage issue. Ostensibly, higher wages make it harder for business to pay for workers.... in the short run. But in the long run, higher wages mean more money spent by wage-earners on the products such businesses make or sell... Duh! 'Ontario is open for business again', says Doug. What he means is he wants Ontario to join the likes of states in the US South, where 'Right-to-Work' means to work for next to nothing, with no labor unions fighting for the workers' rights. Profits and executive compensation then can go sky-high. As Michael Moore shows in Fahrenheit 11/9, a young man working in construction rages about how he makes $7.30/hour in a Southern state; and gets 17 hours of work a week. This is what the US has done throughout Central and South America, destroying labour movements, arming and financing death squads to topple 'left-wing' governments that want to create a better life for their populations; assassinating labour, political, even Church leaders (priests) so that American transnational corporations can make higher profits, squeezing the life out of overseas economies, labour and nation-states. Well that ideology is now operating in the West, starting with the US. The parable of the frog and the scorpion is instructive here - even though the scorpion needs the frog to cross a stream, it stings the frog anyway, because that is its 'nature'. Those increasingly lower-paid workers in the US pay for the massive costs of the Pentagon, CIA, private mercenary/security armies like the former Blackwater, the 70,000 strong 'Special Operations' forces, etc which enforce the wishes of the gangsters of capitalism, in anywhere between 130 and 150 countries around the world at any given time, according to recent reports, naturally unpublicized in the major corporate-controlled media. The 99% who pay taxes (which the top 1% are more or less exempt from) carry the burden of the racketeers for the capitalists that make up the 0.01% who have benefited from decades of neo-liberal theft. Before the Powell memorandum the 0.01% were the principal beneficiaries of the international racketeering; now the racketeering has turned to the domestic populations of the West, through neo-liberal frauds. So at home (within the West) the frog is slowly being cooked so it doesn't realize what is happening. That minimum-wages destroy jobs is a lie; that tax-cuts for the rich create jobs is a lie; and that 'austerity' programs for countries which end up being 'loan-sharked' by the biggest sharks on the planet - the IMF, World Bank etc., are needed is also a lie. Bankers create loans from thin air.... then charge interest... then break bones of countries which cannot pay... usually because the money loaned went not to the country's population, but to crooked elites (the 1%) who lost it and the burden then fell, as is also usual - on the 99%. The 'greatest nation in history', also the richest on the planet and in history, has unlimited funds to pay for wars, weapons of mass murder, terror, torture and mass destruction, but is being driven bankrupt by socialist programs like medicare and Social Security. So the brainwashing goes. And as it goes in the US, so it slowly goes in other Western countries, through an inevitable process of osmosis, pushed through the international financial system. In short, Capitalism (the rule of the 1%) is Democracy, and Democracy (the wishes of the 99% or a majority of the 'un-brainwashed') is Communism.

The Kavanaugh mess; and why the 99% should watch Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 11/9

Aftermath of Kavanaugh 'victory'. A sickening mess. And why Michael Moore's latest film 'Fahrenheit 11/9' should be seen by all who care about democracy, the planet, human rights and justice. I realize I posted against allowing CBF's unsubstantiated and largely uncross-examined testimony to be allowed to derail the Kavanaugh nomination. But this has not led to a good result either. And this 'victory' is going to lead to a more intense fight in the upcoming mid-term elections. Both Republicans and Democrats will find reasons to fight harder in those elections; the R side to capitalize on their 'victory', and the D side to capture sufficient seats in Congress to be able to initiate impeachment proceedings against the new judge. So if that scenario plays out, women like CBF may find another chance to go after their target. So long as due process is followed, I have no problem. For me a Republican majority on the US Supreme Court is an obscenity. On this score I highly recommend Michael Moore's 'Fahrenheit 11/9', which I saw last night. This provides a frightening and good overview of the diseased system which produced Trump, and which long-experienced writers like Noam Chomsky predicted would produce a 'strong-man' figure like Trump. Moore asks the question 'HTF did this happen?' and then gives his own answer to it. Sometimes the answer produced queasiness in me, as it looked like bias, but once I saw the film to the end, Moore makes a compelling case. He covers a lot of bases: - aside from the distortions and lies and 'narcissism' that led to Trump's victory in 2016, he covers how decades of Democratic sell-out to the neo-liberal (big money) takeover of US politics starting with Bill Clinton made an 'outsider' like Trump possible. It was Bill Clinton who massively accelerated deregulation (like destroying the regulatory protections put in place after the Great Depression separating investment and commercial banking, which led inexorably to the multi-trillion dollar sub-prime mortgage fraud which nearly destroyed the world economy in 2008). - After Billy Boy Clinton came the W Bush administration, which Moore suggests caused 9/11 and the war-crimes that followed. David Ray Griffin's many books provide mountains of evidence to support this charge. - he shows unsettling videos of the Trump rallies at which African-Americans were insulted and kicked out from - at one Trump himself yells to one black man 'go home and get a job'. And of course those infamous comments about Mexican rapists and 'build a wall'. - he also covers the Flint poisoned water supply problem. Shows how racist, corrupt Michigan governor Rick Snyder ordered the building of an unnecessary pipeline (because a functioning one already existed) to supply Lake Michigan water to Flint, thus benefiting rich corporations. While the new one was being built, the old pipeline was shut down, and Flint's water-supply sourced from a lead-polluted Flint river. Thousands of black kids became poisoned for life ('irreversibly') with the Snyder administration doing nothing but deny and coverup. - when that poisoned water began to damage the parts produced in the sole GM plant in Flint, however, Snyder acted to re-route the pure Lake Michigan water, TO ONLY THE GM PLANT. Flint residents continued to drink poison. This led St. Obama to visit Flint, with tens of thousands of black residents overjoyed. - But all Obama did is at public meetings, to ask for 'a glass of water'; when people yelled out 'ask for a bottle of water', he insisted on a glass. Then he pretended to drink from it and asked for calm. The Flint residents, who wanted Obama to call in FEMA, Army engineers etc., to deal with this massive crisis, could only watch in disbelief as he betrayed them and later ordered a US army training exercise in that city, using the many abandoned buildings. Helicopters shot missiles into those buildings as Flint residents watched in fear, also having received no warning. Could there be a more revealing image of the cynical fraud that Obama was? Moore reveals that Goldman Sachs was the biggest contributor to St. Obama's campaigns; and of course overseas Obama murdered tens of thousands with drone strikes. - he discusses the only positive things that arose in response to this blatant neo-liberal destruction of the environment and democracy in the US. Teacher unions in Virginia successfully arising in revolt, and the students who organized huge rallies after the mass shooting in Florida. As he puts it - time is running out. With Trump in charge, only the worst can happen as climate catastrophe and corporate greed threaten the US and the planet. Of course, the corpo-Rats and the politicians, judges and media people in their pockets, make sure we stay ignorant - drunk or opiod addicted, or busy with sports, sitcoms, movies and such 'shit' so we barely have time to think, let alone act.