But it isn't for his money making prowess that we reference him, as to make REAL MONEY now days you have to have REAL MONEY to start with. Alas we can dream. We reference him because he appears to be one of the few people with REAL MONEY that understands how current governmental/corporate policies will insure that those of us who do not have REAL MONEY never will!
Now as a person who has lived in poverty and like many others, keeps looking over his shoulder for when it might bite him in the ass again, we understand how MONEY=FREEDOM.
I really don't want to define poverty in America here, as the statistics are usually behind, can be easily skewed by poor reporting and in regards to poverty, are relative. As oxymoronic as it may sound there are poor rich people. Go here for a good discussion on poverty definitions.
We do know that when ones every action or thought is directed towards how one will feed the kids or
keep a roof over thier heads they are not FREE. We would also argue vehemently with those who have never had that experience who exclaim if they worked harder they wouldn't be that way.
In his recent postNew Billionaires Are Doing Great, How About You?
We believe Phillip Davis makes some points that bear out our contention.
Thanks to an unprecedented concentration of wealth, the World’s supply of Billionaires jumped 27% in 2009 and the 1,011 people in the club accumulated an AVERAGE of $500M more Dollars EACH! Isn’t that great? That’s $505Bn, or 65% of America’s TARP spending handed over to 1,011 people who are, according to Forbes (The Capitalist’s Tool), clearly better than us.
A lot of positive economic statistics are skewed by our top 1%, but even the top 1% is blown away by the top 450 (0.00014%) who are sitting on $3.6Tn of our nation’s total household wealth - 8% or 27M times more than the average citizen. Wow, I guess they are better than you - better in fact than 307,000,000 of you!
So when the Government is reporting that we are entering an economic recovery. Keep in mind that they are including the wealth increase of Americas wealthiest in their "averaging".
America has become a real wealth-building machine that funnels every last cent off the bottom of the pyramid and sends it straight to the top.What we call "trickle up" economics. Which may in fact be a more accurate term for Reagan era "trickle down" theories.
Presidents under whom the national debt was actually lower when they left office:
Truman Dem. -23.9%
Eisenhower Rep. -10.4%
second term 7.9%
Kennedy/Johnson Dem. -6.7%
Johnson Dem. -6.8%
Nixon Rep. -5.4%
Nixon/Ford Rep. -0.9%
Carter Dem -2.8%
Ronald Reagan Rep +7.3%
Term 2 +11.2%
Bush 1 Rep +12.2%
Clinton Dem +3.0%
term 2 -9.8%
Bush 2 Rep +5.6
term 2 +6.3%
We will leave you to study a bit on the above.
From Davis:
So congratulations to the Forbes winners, especially from the 462,000 of us that got pink slips last week as the primary driver of wealth in 2009 was corporate cost cutting and increased productivity (and government hand-outs), which allowed those at the top to make more while giving back less than at any point since the roaring 20’s
And there in lies a very scary statement. "was corporate cost cutting and increased productivity (and government hand-outs), which allowed those at the top to make more while giving back less than at any point since the roaring 20’s"
Which of course means despite high unemployment which equals a smaller "American" workforce corporations have not only been able to increase productivity, but profit as well.
Of course they have only been able to do this reducing employment and/or by shipping more jobs overseas at reduced cost of labor, import through Visa's more foreign workers at reduced costs of labor, and squeezing more blood out of whats left of the American labor force as those who still have jobs are deathly afraid of losing them.
The current situation having being the final nail in the coffin of the American workers only mouthpiece, i.e. Unions, which of course Ronald Reagan hammered the first nail into. The Unions however did themselves no favors by remaining silent as the corporations engaged in these job killing actions leaving one to conclude that maybe the Unions had been bought off just as our government has.
Davis goes on to say:
25% of Americans feel this country is heading in the right direction according to the latest Rasmussen Report, and that’s a poll of people who still have homes - and phone service. 71% believe this nation is on the wrong track despite the 70% jump in the markets, and I know that comes as a surprise to many of you who had a great year, but a lot of people aren’t in the markets and all this wealth building of the past 12 months has sadly passed them by.Which validates one of our above references that working oneself out of poverty is only a dream for some folk. And that was before the crises. Not all are as blind as Texas Republican and crook Tom Delay who believes many people are out of work because they want to be. See: Tom Delay (R,tx), Needs to be unemployed and gagged
only 48% of the people surveyed believe it is possible for a person to work his or her way out of poverty, and again, don’t forget they are polling more people like you and me than they are people who are actually impoverished.
Perhaps they are concerned because unemployment was up in 30 states in January with California (12.5%), South Carolina (12.6%), Florida (11.9%), North Carolina (11.1%) and Georgia (10.4%) posting new post-Depression records. Michigan’s unemployment rate is still the nation’s highest, at 14.3%, followed by Nevada, with 13% and Rhode Island at 12.7%. When one out of 10 people you know can’t find work - it’s hard to get all excited for survey questions, isn’t it?
Anthony Scaramucci of Skybridge Capital has a different theory: "I don’t think inflation will hit the nation without real wage growth, and we’re not seeing wage growth. Also we’ve got excess global capacity in manufacturing."Translation: Low wage growth, excess global capacity = longer high rates of unemployment and more poverty. Keep in mind the impoverished working class is counted as part of a "recovery"!
Do not think the government is not aware of this gigantic shell game. Davis writes:
like Americans, the Chinese still aren’t working, and increased productivity over there shows up as a plus to our GDP, not theirs.When American companies report a profit the government trumpets such reports as signs of of a recovery. And a recovery it is, for the American corporation, but not for the American worker.
That’s right, US productivity is a measure of how many dollars worth of GDP we create per US job, so firing US workers and outsourcing the labor is a FABULOUS way for companies (and the top 1%) to fatten their wallets while giving the government exciting productivity numbers to point to. Remember when 60 Minutes used to be outraged by this kind of stuff? Oh yeah, they are now owned by Billionare Sumner Redstone. Ah Capitalism, ultimately you muzzle all dissent…
As the labors of the outsourced worker flow to the American Corporations bottom line improving the governments ability to brag about recovery.
What is extremely concerning is the government protects the corporate profit even if it means higher prices at the grocery store for you. Take for example "sugar". The government guarantees producers a fixed price for domestic sugar and sets strict quotas and tariffs for foreign sugar. The result is during sugar shortages, such as we are currently experiencing, because American corporations are not allowed to import only so much foreign produced sugar you will pay a higher price for anything containing sugar. And that is a lot of stuff.
Ironic isn't it that there are limits on the the sugar we can import but no limits on the jobs we can export?
Men like Phillip Davis and others who are able to take a step back and take an objective look at the macro situation can see the connectedness of these things. Unfortunately we have a populace so intuned to micro-bursts of information, e.g. two minute sound bytes, "HEADLINE" news, FWD, FWD, FWD's and tweets, and that engage in knee jerk assumptions based on emotions that re-enforce
the misinformation they choose to reinterpret as facts.
In conclusion we will engage in an admittedly perverse interpretation of Newtons "Laws of Motion:"
First Law: An object in motion will stay in motion, unless an outside force acts upon it.
The operative words here are "an outside force." Governments and Corporations (including banks) will continue in the direction in which they are heading unless an "Outside Force" impacts it.
As long as Governments and Corporations have a vested interest in their trajectory their will not be sufficient "inside force" to force change. Their will be much talk of change but talk is not "FORCE".
Second Law: A body will accelerate with acceleration proportional to the force and inversely proportional to the mass.
The entity of Governments/corporations are not static in their mass. Without constraints they will grow larger as they grow larger and consume more energy there exist two potentials:
1. they will become like black holes consuming all that comes within there reach.
2. they will accelerate beyond the ability of there mass to resist destruction.
Third Law: Every action has a reaction equal in magnitude and opposite in direction
at some point in time the people will destroy the government or the government will destroy the people. And the cycle will begin anew as the scraps of what was becomes what is.Add to Technorati Favorites
