I managed to read this article while having coffee today in a exquisite café in front of the Palace Museum in Weimar. It was very hard to try understanding the author’s ideas while he refuses to accept that the value of a product is the result of an objective theory of valuation done by the consumers and sellers in specific contexts. He gives for granted that labor force is the one deterministic condition behind production and trying to get his point seems quite difficult at points. Nonetheless, this is a great opportunity to understand the mainstream ideas of Karl Marx theories in regard to Globalization and what some of them call “Global Capitalism / New Imperialism”. Here’s the intro and then a link to the article via EbscoHost,
The article discusses the ways in which the growth of the global capitalist labor force has altered the imperialistic nature of global capitalism, as represented by powerful multinational corporations, by negatively affecting wages in both developing and wealthy countries. The authors rely heavily on philosopher Karl Marx’s theories on the industrial reserve army and capital accumulation, which posit that wealth accumulation will invariably lead to increased suffering for the working masses. They go on to explain the exploitative nature of global labor arbitrage, which essentially means a corporation’s benefiting from low wages in developing countries. The process of arbitrage is related to the development of massive global supply chains.
Right now, there is a lot of talk about the evils of “capitalism”. But it is not really accurate to say that we live in a capitalist system. Rather, what we have in the United States today, and what most of the world is living under, is much more accurately described as “corporatism”. Under corporatism, most wealth and power is concentrated in the hands of giant corporations and big government is used as a tool by these corporations to consolidate wealth and power even further. In a corporatist system, the wealth and power of individuals and small businesses is dwarfed by the overwhelming dominance of the corporations. Eventually, the corporations end up owning almost everything and they end up dominating nearly every aspect of society. As you will see below, this very accurately describes the United States of America today. Corporatism is killing this country, and it is not what our founding fathers intended.
the organization of a society into industrial and professional corporations serving as organs of political representation and exercising control over persons and activities within their jurisdiction
Corporatism is actually not too different from socialism or communism. They are all “collectivist” economic systems. Under corporatism, wealth and power are even more highly concentrated than they are under socialism or communism, and the truth is that none of them are “egalitarian” economic systems. Under all collectivist systems, a small elite almost always enjoys most of the benefits while most of the rest of the population suffers.
The Occupy Wall Street protesters realize that our economic system is fundamentally unjust in many ways, but the problem is that most of them want to trade one form of collectivism for another.
But our founding fathers never intended for us to have a collectivist system.
Instead, they intended for us to enjoy a capitalist system where true competition and the free enterprise system would allow individuals and small businesses to thrive.
In an article that was posted earlier this year on Addicting Info, Stephen D. Foster Jr. detailed how our founding fathers actually felt about corporations….
The East India Company was the largest corporation of its day and its dominance of trade angered the colonists so much, that they dumped the tea products it had on a ship into Boston Harbor which today is universally known as the Boston Tea Party. At the time, in Britain, large corporations funded elections generously and its stock was owned by nearly everyone in parliament. The founding fathers did not think much of these corporations that had great wealth and great influence in government. And that is precisely why they put restrictions upon them after the government was organized under the Constitution.
After the nation’s founding, corporations were granted charters by the state as they are today. Unlike today, however, corporations were only permitted to exist 20 or 30 years and could only deal in one commodity, could not hold stock in other companies, and their property holdings were limited to what they needed to accomplish their business goals. And perhaps the most important facet of all this is that most states in the early days of the nation had laws on the books that made any political contribution by corporations a criminal offense.
Our founding fathers would have never approved of any form of collectivism. They understood that all great concentrations of wealth and power represent a significant threat to the freedoms and liberties of average citizens.
Are you not convinced that we live in a corporatist system?
Well, keep reading.
The following are 7 things about the monolithic predator corporations that dominate our economy that every American should know….
#1 Corporations not only completely dominate the U.S. economy, they also completely dominate the global economy as well. A newly released University of Zurich study examined more than 43,000 major multinational corporations. The study discovered a vast web of interlocking ownerships that is controlled by a “core” of 1,318 giant corporations.
But that “core” itself is controlled by a “super-entity” of 147 monolithic corporations that are very, very tightly knit. As a recent article in NewScientist noted, these 147 corporations control approximately 40 percent of all the wealth in the entire network….
When the team further untangled the web of ownership, it found much of it tracked back to a “super-entity” of 147 even more tightly knit companies – all of their ownership was held by other members of the super-entity – that controlled 40 percent of the total wealth in the network. “In effect, less than 1 percent of the companies were able to control 40 percent of the entire network,” says Glattfelder. Most were financial institutions. The top 20 included Barclays Bank, JPMorgan Chase & Co, and The Goldman Sachs Group.
Unsurprisingly, the “super-entity” of 147 corporations is dominated by international banks and large financial institutions. For example, JP Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Bank of America are all in the top 25.
#2 This dominance of the global economy by corporations has allowed global wealth to become concentrated to a very frightening degree.
According to Credit Suisse, those with a household net worth of a million dollars or more control 38.5% of all the wealth in the world. Last year, that figure was at 35.6%. As you can see, it is rapidly moving in the wrong direction.
For a group of people that represents less than 0.5% of the global population to control almost 40 percent of all the wealth is insane.
The dominance of corporations is also one of the primary reasons why we are witnessing income inequality grow so rapidly in the United States. The following comes from a recent article in the Los Angeles Times….
An economic snapshot from the Economic Policy Institute shows that inflation-adjusted incomes of the top 1% of households increased 224% from 1979 to 2007, while incomes for the bottom 90% grew just 5% in the same time period. Those in the top 0.1% of income fared even better, with incomes growing 390% over that time period.
You can see a chart that displays these shocking numbers right here.
#3 Since wealth has become concentrated in very few hands, that means that there are a whole lot of poor people out there.
At a time when technology should be making it possible to lift standards of living all over the globe, poverty just continues to spread. According to the same Credit Suisse study referenced above, the bottom two-thirds of the global population controls just 3.3% of all the wealth.
While the ultra-wealthy live the high life, unimaginable tragedies play out all over the globe every single day. Every 3.6 seconds someone starves to death and three-quarters of them are children under the age of 5.
#4 Giant corporations have become so dominant that it has become very hard for small businesses to compete and survive in the United States.
Today, even though our population is increasing, the number of small businesses continues to decrease.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 16.6 million Americans were self-employed back in December 2006. Today, that number has shrunk to 14.5 million.
This is the exact opposite of what should be happening under a capitalist system.
#5 Big corporations completely dominate the media. Almost all of the news that you get and almost all of the entertainment that you enjoy is fed to you by giant corporations.
Back in 1983, somewhere around 50 corporations controlled the vast majority of all news media in the United States.
Today, control of the news media is concentrated in the hands of just six incredibly powerful media corporations.
#6 Big corporations completely dominate our financial system. Yes, there are hundreds of choices in the financial world, but just a handful control the vast majority of the assets.
Back in 2002, the top 10 banks controlled 55 percent of all U.S. banking assets. Today, the top 10 banks control 77 percent of all U.S. banking assets.
#7 Big corporations completely dominate our political system. Because they have so much wealth and power, corporations can exert an overwhelming amount of influence over our elections. Studies have shown that in federal elections the candidate that raises the most money wins about 90 percent of the time.
Politics in America is not about winning over hearts and minds.
It is about who can raise the most cash.
Sometimes this truth leaks out a bit in the mainstream media. For example, during a recent show on MSNBC, Dylan Ratigan made the following statement….
“The biggest contributor to Barack Obama’s presidential campaign is Goldman Sachs. The primary activities of this president relative to banking have been to protect the most lucrative aspect of that business, which is the dark market for credit default swaps and the like. That has been the explicit agenda of his Treasury Secretary. This president is advocating trade agreements that allow enhanced bank secrecy in Panama, enhanced murdering of union members in Colombia, and the refunding of North Korean slaves.”
“But I guess where I take issue is, this president is working for the bad guys. The Democrats are working for the bad guys. So are the Republicans. The Democrats get away with it by saying, ‘Look at how crazy the Republicans are; at the Democrats pretend to care about people.’ BUT THE FACT IS THE 2-PARTY POLITICAL SYSTEM IS UTTERLY BOGUS.”
Wow – nobody is actually supposed to say that on television.
Today, most of our politicians are bought, and most of them actively help the monolithic predator corporations accumulate even more wealth and even more power.
In fact, as I wrote about recently, the big Wall Street banks are already trying to buy the election in 2012.
Fortunately, it looks like the American people are starting to wake up. According to one recent survey, only 23 percent of all Americans now trust the financial system, and 60 percent of all Americans are either “angry” or “very angry” about the economy.
Unfortunately, many of them are joining protest movements such as Occupy Wall Street which are calling for one form of collectivism to replace another.
The American people are being given a false choice.
We don’t have to choose between corporatism and socialism.
We don’t have to choose between big corporations and big government.
Our founding fathers actually intended for corporations and government to both be greatly limited.
The following is a famous quote from Thomas Jefferson….
“I hope that we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.”
Unfortunately, things did not turn out how Jefferson wanted. Instead of us controlling the corporations, they now control us.
This next quote is from John Adams….
“Banks have done more injury to the religion, morality, tranquility, prosperity, and even wealth of the nation than they can have done or ever will do good.”
But who dominates our economy today?
The big banks.
Perhaps we should have listened to founding fathers such as John Adams.
Lastly, here is another quote from Thomas Jefferson….
“If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their money, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them (around the banks), will deprive the people of their property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.”
How prescient was that quote?
Last year, over a million American families were booted out of their homes by the big banks. The financial institutions actually now have more total equity in our homes than we do.
Unemployment is rampant, but corporate profits are soaring. The number of Americans on food stamps has increased by more than 70 percent since 2007, and yet the incomes of those at the top of the food chain continue to increase.
We need a system that allows all Americans to start small businesses, compete fairly and have a chance at success.
Instead, what we have is a corporatist system where the big corporations have most of the wealth, most of the power and most of the advantages.
We need to get the American people to understand that corporatism is not capitalism.
Corporatism is a collectivist system that allows the elite to accumulate gigantic amounts of wealth and power.
The answer to such a system is not to go to a different collectivist system.
Rather, we need to return as much power as possible to individuals and small businesses.
Our founding fathers intended for us to live in a country where power was highly decentralized.
Con su salida “Atlas se encogió de hombros” y muchos de nosotros junto con ella. Espero que la decisión de la Señora Sylvia Gereda sea comprendida e imitada por muchos guatemaltecos que diariamente deben de decidir si sacrifican sus valores y principios; o deciden luchar por sus propias armas sin nunca sacrificar los valores que con tanto amor protegen.
Esta es la carta que escribí para la Sra. Gereda y los encomio a reproducir sus muestras de apoyo de todas las formas que estén a su alcance (cartas al lector, publicaciones en medios, calco-manías en sus autos, y cuantas otras formas puedan crear).
Estimada Sra. Gereda,
Le deseo muchísimos éxitos en su carrera empresarial y la felicito por tomar una decisión tan importante basándose en principios morales.
Gracias por no claudicar y sacrificar el amor que siente por su familia, por Guatemala y por Sus valores. Porque, tal y como dijo el héroe de la novela “La rebelión de Atlas” en esta época de crisis moral,
“Todo lo que es apropiado para la vida de un ser racional
es lo bueno; todo lo que la destruye es lo malo.
La vida del hombre, como requiere su naturaleza, no es la
vida de un salvaje insensato, de un rufián saqueador o de
un místico gorrón, sino la vida de un ser pensante – no la
vida por medio de fuerza o fraude, sino la vida por medio
de logros – no la supervivencia a cualquier precio, pues
sólo hay un precio que paga por la supervivencia del
hombre: la razón.
La vida del hombre es el criterio de moralidad, pero tu
propia vida es tu objetivo. Si la existencia en la tierra es tu
objetivo, debes elegir tus acciones y valores de acuerdo
con el criterio de lo que es apropiado para el hombre –
con el fin de preservar, enriquecer y disfrutar el
irreemplazable valor que es tu vida.”
Con su partida de ElPeriódico toda Guatemala hizo como Atlas y se encogió de hombros. Pero tengo la certeza de que muchos otros héroes como usted seguirán luchando por construir un mejor mundo para los seres a los que tanto amamos.
I just returned after spending a wonderful evening with a German Socialist Activist. It was a wonderful evening because I got to understand many of his arguments and we started discussing them openly; without never aiming at a consensus. I just got back home and saw the following video: Stephen Colbert Takes on Occupy Wall Street
Now, I just can’t stop laughing! “Ethically” Colbert is just Great!
Comedy Central’s Stephen Colbert takes on Occupy Wall Street in a hilarious yet actual segment with protest representatives of “the consensus within the press group” Justin (“a male-bodied person”) and “Ketchup” (“a female-bodied person”) in a “Co-Optportunity” with what Colbert calls a cult, oh sorry, I mean “movement”. via David Theroux | Tuesday November 1, 2011 at 11:59 PM PDT
Original Audio: On Halloween eve in 1938, the power of radio was on full display when a dramatization of the science-fiction novel “The War of the Worlds” scared the daylights out of many of CBS radio’s nighttime listeners.
Ladies and gentlemen, I have a grave announcement to make. Incredible as it may seem … those strange beings who landed in the Jersey farmlands tonight are the vanguard of an invading army from the planet Mars!
The broadcast news that Sunday night, Oct. 30, 1938, sounded real enough to the young man in Plainsboro. Up and down his block he banged on doors, shrieking: “The Martians have landed in Grovers Mill! It’s on the radio!”
Panic struck the youth choir rehearsing within the Plainsboro Presbyterian Church when they heard his message of doom. Grovers Mill was only a few miles south, and, if you believed the bulletins, the Martians with their death rays had already incinerated the place, killed thousands of humans and begun advancing north at a spectacular clip.
But Mabel “Lolly” Dey, a 16-year-old girl playing the piano, kept calm.
“I bowed my head and prayed and thought to myself, ‘If it has to be the end of the world, I couldn’t be in a better place,” Dey, now 76, recalled. “I’m in the house of the Lord.”
Like young Lolly Dey, as many as 2 million other people from coast to coast thought they were under attack from outer space.
If only they had checked carefully against their Sunday paper’s radio section.
“War of the Worlds” was a pure Halloween spoof, and the destruction of Grovers Mill was as fake as the alien beings with drooling faces and slimy tentacles. How the radio hoax got believed was largely due to the creative mischief of a single showman: Orson Welles.
At age 23, he was a bad boy of Broadway, prodigious in his drinking, eating and sleeping around. But he was also a “Boy Genius,” a director hailed for innovative stagings: “Macbeth” starring an all-black cast, “Julius Caesar” in modern dress.
His talent for radio drama was in demand, too, as the sinister voice of “The Shadow” on radio, and as the mastermind of CBS’ “Mercury Theater,” a Sunday night show featuring adaptations of classic plays and books.
Welles was fascinated with radio as a powerfully direct medium for entertainment and news. When Hitler threatened war in September 1938, Americans tuned in to hear the chilling news of English schoolchildren donning gas masks for war drills. Then the British prime minister declared he had achieved “peace in our time,” and everyone breathed easier. At least for a time.
By the fall of ’38, Mercury Theater was getting trounced in the ratings. Its competition at 8 p.m. Sunday was NBC’s ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and his smart-aleck dummy, Charlie McCarthy. Welles needed an attention-grabber. He found it in “War of the Worlds.”
“War of the Worlds” was an H.G. Wells science fiction novel written 40 years earlier about a Martian invasion of England. It was exciting stuff, but Orson Welles wanted more urgency, more immediacy. He ordered his scriptwriters to update the setting to modern-day America and present it in a novel form — as a news broadcast.
Screenplay writer Howard Koch had only a week, and a $75 paycheck, to write the scenario. For realism, he placed the cosmic battle in what he thought of as the very prosaic state of New Jersey. On a road map, he dropped a pencil to determine the precise landing site: it fell on Grovers Mill, a hamlet in West Windsor Township.
At 7:58 p.m., Oct. 30, Welles slugged down a bottle of pineapple juice, mounted a podium in the center of his New York studio, clamped on a set of headphones, and gave his announcer the signal to start the show.
Maisy Curtis was just settling into the couch of her living room in Merchantville. She had kissed her fiance goodnight about 7:45 and saw him off as he drove back to his home in Hightstown, where he taught school. Now she, her mom and two sisters tuned into the radio and stopped the dial when they heard some breezy Spanish-style dance music.
Breaking into the music, an authoritative voice announced:
Ladies and gentlemen, we interrupt our program of dance music to bring you a special bulletin … several explosions of incandescent gas, occurring in regular intervals on the planet Mars … moving towards the earth with tremendous velocity.
What did it mean? Well, here was “Professor Richard Pierson, famous Princeton astronomer,” a man with a voice very similar to Orson Welles, to explain it. Nothing to worry about, he said, since there’s no life on Mars.
But another bulletin crackled through, something about a meteorite landing with the force of an earthquake 20 miles north of Trenton. Live from the Wilmuth farm, there was reporter “Carl Phillips.”
The object doesn’t look very much like a meteor … It looks more like a huge cylinder … the metal casing is definitely extraterrestrial … Ladies and gentlemen, this is the most terrifying thing I have ever witnessed! Someone’s crawling out of the hollow top!
In her living room, Maisy Curtis’ father stirred uneasily. Someone mentioned something about Maisy’s boyfriend passing near Grovers Mill. Would this delay his trip home?
Driving with his girlfriend near Newark, a gas-station operator named Archie Burbank pulled over to listen, uncertain what it meant. And at Princeton, where there was no such person as a Prof. Pierson on the faculty, a group of geology students thought it sounded like the adventure of the lifetime — so they drove off for Grovers Mill, two miles away.
Something’s wriggling out of the shadow like a grey snake! Now it’s another one, and another. They look like tentacles to me … The eyes are black and gleam like a serpent. The mouth is V-shaped with saliva dripping from its rimless lips … There’s a jet of flame! It’s coming this way!
For an excruciating few seconds, silence. Then, another bulletin: 40 people dead! All of Mercer and Middlesex counties under martial law!
Desperate phone calls poured into Trenton police. Overwhelmed dispatchers tried to calm the men and women on the other line, telling them there was no sign of emergency. One woman in Grovers Mill was inconsolable. “You can’t imagine the horror of it!” she shrieked. “It’s hell!”
The Associated Press flashed a bulletin to all member papers: Reports of an emergency in New Jersey are false.
Ladies and gentleman, I have a grave announcement to make. The battle which took place at Grovers Mill has ended in one of the most startling defeats ever suffered by an army in modern times.
One hundred and twenty known survivors. The rest strewn over the battle area from Grovers Mill to Plainsboro crushed and trampled to death under the metal feet of the monster, or burned to death by its heat ray.
The young geology students from Princeton arrived at Grovers Mill to see dark sky, twinkling stars and dead silence — in short, no sign of cosmic warfare.
But already, a makeshift posse of farmers with squirrel guns and shotguns were forming around the mill pond off Cranbury Road. One legend has them blasting away at what they thought was a craft from Mars, only to discover in daylight they had been shooting at a water tower.
“I was crying,” recalled Maisy Curtis. “I was frantic for my fiancee and I was hearing all about these strange invaders destroying everything. My father disappeared into the bedroom and came back with some rosary beads. We just knelt and prayed.”
In her church in Plainsboro, Lolly Dey was praying too, and pondering what was causing this great catastrophe. “I had been learning in high school about Hitler and his plans to take over the world,” she said. “And it just made sense that maybe these Martians were Hitler’s allies.”
The enemy now turns east, crossing Passaic River into the Jersey marshes. … Their apparent objective is to crush resistance, paralyze communication, and disorganize human society.
Warning! Poisonous black smoke pouring in from Jersey marshes!
Gas! Radio listeners who had followed the European crisis knew what to do: filter the air with a wet fabric. All over New York, damp towels hung from tenement windows. A woman in Pittsburgh tried to swallow poison and was stopped by her husband. “I’d rather die this way!” she screamed.
Near Newark, Archie Burbank and his girlfriend ran to a man’s house, asking to be let into his cellar. “I don’t have any cellar! Get away!” he yelled back. They drove to a gas station to fill up the tank and drive off as far as they could … then realized they might want to call the Newark Evening News for information. The man at the newspaper told them it was a radio play.
Welles was still directing from his center podium, furiously cueing actors and sound effects and trying to ignore the cops banging on the studio’s front door. CBS executive Taylor Davidson demanded he break into the program to calm down all the scared listeners.
“They’re scared?” Welles shot back. “Good! They’re supposed to be scared!”
No more defenses! Our army wiped out! This is the end now.
Seeing no sign of the apocalypse outside her church window, Lolly Dey walked the six houses back home. “I told my mom about the Martians,” Dey recalled. “But by then, she had the radio on too and we figured out it was all a show.”
Orson Welles and his crew sneaked out the back of their studio to avoid the crush of reporters and lawmen who wanted a word with them. The next day, however, he put on as ingenuous a face as possible and apologized. “We are deeply shocked and deeply regretful,” he said. Hadn’t he known about the panic he was creating? “Oh, no, no, no, no.”
The notoriety of “War of the Worlds” gave the boy genius the capital he needed to make his debut movie, “Citizen Kane” — an epic that was named the greatest American film of all time last year in an American Film Institute poll. Scriptwriter Howard Koch would write “Casablanca,” the No. 2 movie on the list.
For a long time, the people of Grovers Mill grumbled about “War of the Worlds” as a mean-spirited joke. With time, however, the legend of the Martian invasion grew more remote, humorous, and worthy of commemoration. For the 50th anniversary of the infamous broadcast in 1988, West Windsor erected a bronze plaque at Van Nest Park depicting Welles, his fictional aliens and a frightened family huddled around a radio set.
The guest speaker was Koch, who was hailed not as a hoaxer but as a sci-fi pioneer. Koch, in turn, gracefully said he did the men from Mars “an injustice” by depicting them as earth-destroyers.
“I believe,” he said, “if ever living beings arrive at Grovers Mill from another planet, they will have the wisdom to come in peace and friendship.”
Globalization & Capitalism 