Editorial: Don’t forget the BP assault on the Gulf
Archives—
The note below was sent to our subscribers 3 May 2010 (about a month after the Deepwater rig explosion), as a comment on the Gulf oil spill catastrophe, an event whose political and ecological implications have scarcely been addressed, even if the media have moved on to other topics. Obviously I was pretty mad when I wrote these lines. I still am. Another disaster could happen tomorrow. One wonders what the response would be today with OWS on the march. Indeed, this is the type of outrage that created OWS.—Patrice Greanville
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A word from the editor— THERE ARE SIMPLY NO WORDS TO DESCRIBE MY FEELINGS OF ANGER AND FRUSTRATION IN CONNECTION WITH THE BP GULF COAST DISASTER. Appalled might come close. Outraged even closer. For this man-made calamity was long foretold, it was long announced, and any person of average education and intelligence could have acquired the facts about the situation and arrived at the obvious conclusions. And done something. But little was done, because lacking organizations to mobilize political action, lacking real representation, most Americans are essentially helpless in these situations. Perennially blindsided by a system that automatically engenders such tragedies. So now we witness an event that marks a turning point in the degree of lethality triggered by human action on this helpless planet, the ultimate mother and home we and other creatures will ever have. Please do not confuse my words with what some enemies of environmental protection deride as “tree-hugging” sentimentality. Those are the simple facts, and they’re impeccably argued in Joel Kovel’s must-read THE ENEMY OF NATURE, an indispensable tool for anyone seeking answers to the ecological crisis and the path toward ecosocialism. A callous neglect of criminal magnitude BP’s oil blowout in the Gulf Coast is a tragedy of truly incalculable dimensions, in all likelihood a far more severe reminder than the Exxon Valdez of humanity’s malignant connection with oil. The global corporate class –which has effectively blocked and coopted humanity’s advance toward a more democratic and probably “ecofriendlier” world for many decades–had ample warning about the high probability and ecological cost of its short-term profit policies. Mostly unreported or downplayed by the corporate media, which every day that passes lengthens its record of complicity in its masters’ crimes (and I’m not even thinking here of Fox News, which is by design a criminal enterprise), the oil industry has seen thousands of accidents injurious to the environment just in the last quarter century. Many of these in the Gulf Coast (there have been offshore rigs in salt water since 1896, see footnote below), on platforms similar to BP’s Deepwater Horizon, which now threatens to wipe out a huge and critical ecosystem in a single blow. How could anything so despicable, affecting at least four states, the health of the world’s oceans, countless animals, and precious swamplands, happen so easily? The short answer that few want to hear is that with this incident the Gulf Coast was at last predictably sacrificed to capitalism on the scaffolding of political chicanery it has erected over many decades to hide its pestilential control of all political institutions in America. It was bound to happen. As far as the Earth is concerned, a business firm operating in the merry Reaganesque/Thatcherite universe of unregulated capitalism is an insidious cancer engaged in obsessive expansion till its host collapses. And harbor no illusions: regulated capitalism can only delay the inevitable, for even under “best behaviour” a capitalist entity that indulges its central defining obsession to grow continually at all costs in a very finite and increasingly fragile planet is clearly on a collision course with nature. Corruption and imbecility in the saddle In this context, Sarah Palin’s idiotic and jarring chant, “Drill, Baby, Drill” attains a new level of imbecility: criminal imbecility. But revolting as Palin is, she’s only a symptom, a front, for an antisocial system of governance which, given the undeniable interconnections, must include the media establishment. The rhetoric may occasionally diverge, but the congruency of purpose speaks for itself. Only recently Barack Obama, using basically the same spurious arguments as Palin and her cohorts (“energy independence,” “national security”, “jobs that can’t be outsourced”) gave the green light to further offshore drilling in several areas of the US continental shelf, including extremely fragile areas in Northern Alaska. While many Americans saw this as an outrage, another instance in Obama’s lengthening list of betrayals (duly wrapped in excellent demagogy, of course), it was to be expected. Meanwhile, little protest was seen or heard on the media, in part due to the “free press” abject subservience to power, and, also as a result of the environmental movement’s alarming co-optation and bureaucratization at the hands of the same corporate class. Thus, by the same unwritten process of exclusion by which true critics of the American “way of governing” have been silenced for generations, what voices were mustered to speak “for the movement” were those sure to represent the most mainstream and least confrontational viewpoints, and not the radical critics, precisely the ones the public desperately needs to hear. Being the most rabidly capitalistic, the Anglo-American business class and its political allies bears the most responsibility for this tragedy. Domestically, and for generations now, administration after administration has dragged its feet in terms of decisive environmental protection and restoration, when not actively behaving as a pimp handing over the nation’s natural assets to the busines suits for what amounts in most cases to a pittance. (An unremarqued aspect of mainstream political life in these United States is how cheap American politicians really are. Firms with untold billions in their coffers can often buy Congressional and White House influence for a few thousand dollars, the services of a call girl or a trinket, or sums that are cigarette money around their boardrooms. When it comes to buying whores—and I mean no disrespect to real working girls who ply a risky and underappreciated trade— the American political system offers the world’s best bargains). The wages of non-leadership So, unlike Katrina, an event clearly well outside our ability to control, the truly outrageous part of the Gulf Coast disaster is that, as mentioned earlier, it was caused by deliberate political choices, from Reagan and Bush’s complete abandonment of the environment to the tender mercies of the corporate class, to the limp-wrist protections advanced by the likes of Clinton. At the end of the day we need to admit to ourselves that the technology was or could have been there, if the nation had committed itself to a non-hydrocarbon regime. Surely if we could put a man on the moon, we could muster the resources and know-how to make the necessary breakthroughs in energy design, conversion and implementation for a new energy protocol, including the development of a spanking new infrastructure for alternative fuels distribution. (This alone would have energized the economy through the creation of millions of non-exportable jobs.) In addition, a vigorous government program to develop and adopt strong energy efficiency standards (the CAFE standards continue to be ludicrous in their timidity and overall ineffectiveness, logical when you allow industry to set up the goals) would have spared the biosphere enormous punishment in all areas of public and private use. All the above are pretty obvious proposals, requiring little specialized expertise, only honesty and seriousness of purpose. But, as it so often happens when a government cannot implement the most natural solutions (remember the healthcare “reform” imbroglio) and must bend over backward to accommodate the toxic interests of a puny segment of the population, little was done, and the crisis is upon us. An eviscerated democracy The highjacking of the American government by the plutocracy and its myriad agents prevents at this point any meaningful redress of grievances via the prescribed rules of democracy. The fix is in and no real solutions are to be contemplated in earnest (again the specter of the scandalously flawed healthcare “reform” and Cop-15 come to mind; see, for example “Confidential document reveals Obama’s hardline climate talk strategy”). With a lot of deliberate help from the Right, which has funded the greatest and smoothest propaganda machine in the history of modern times, a battle of communications they have largely won (see SUICIDE BY REGRESSIVISM, for example) the US has finally become a formal democracy. And, like layers of a rotting mask, the true face of the system is emerging. Katrina showed the racist underpinnings of the highest echelons of power. The recent mining disasters gave us further proof that corporations continue to play with the workers’ lives with virtual impunity. And the Exxon Valdez and now the BP oil disaster reminds us of the criminal indifference in which the environment is held by the same interests. Clearly action is required, but action is NOT going to come from the formal quarters, for they are not the cure, they’re the disease. Born if nothing else of sheer revulsion, a citizens’ movement has to take off in this nation, a movement capable of generating instruments of class and environmental self-defense, like a new party, and new electoral and non-electoral strategies. A movement capable of seeing clearly who is a friend and who is not, and fully capable of discerning who’s the real enemy. This takes serious dedication to seeking mind-liberating information, and then figuring out viable courses of action. Whatever you do, make your effort count. Only deepening your knowledge of Americal political reality can facilitate fruitful work. In that spirit, I do hope these essays on TGP help to empower you. Patrice Greanville ¶ ADVERT PRO NOBIS IF YOU THINK THE LAMESTREAM MEDIA ARE A DISGRACE AND A HUGE OBSTACLE 
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Conning the public: People’s CapitalismFROM OUR ARCHIVES—
Patrice Greanville As the American public grows increasingly impatient with corporate performance and “way of life,” the system’s apologists have been busy cranking out new stratagems to parry the blows. In recent years, as if to shore up that old standby, the old myth of “consumer sovereignty,” the mind managers have been forced to fabricate new theories about popular enfranchisement in the nation’s economy. These pseudo-explanations–enthusiastically disseminated and amplified through corporate channels, paid propaganda, the media’s habitual economic illiteracy, and the federal government itself–deserve serious critical attention. They revolve around two patently dishonest concepts: “people’s capitalism” (what an oxymoron that is!) , and Peter Drucker’s brainchild, “pension-fund socialism.” The first concept defends capitalism by “proving” that everyone–well, almost everyone in America–has a piece of the action an hence stands to lose by changing the system. The second goes even further; by proclaiming to all comers that socialism has already arrived, it seeks to stymie progress toward real transformation. Does capitalism promote popular economic rule? Does it really allow for an economy by and for the people? To quote from What’s Wrong with the American Economy?:
Doesn’t this kind of broad-based stock-ownership ensure an economy of the people? Won’t this kind of people’s capitalism guarantee corporate restraint? Some elementary facts raise serious doubts about this notion of people’s capitalism. [First] the vast majority of U.S. households don’t own any stock at all. In 1972, the wealthiest 1% of households controlled a solid majority –56.5%–of corporate stock all by itself. [Second] even among the wealthy, relatively few own enough stock to secure real control. Most corporate economists agree that ’20 or 30 percent of the shares’ in any company means, as a notorious pro-capitalist booklet puts it modestly, that their owners can ‘feel pretty easy to get along with.’ How many people own 30% of all the corporate stock in this country? About 100,000 families control that much stock just by themselves. That doesn’t leave much room for the rest of us. [Further] capitalist apologists argue that stock ownership is much more widely distributed than it used to be. Take the largest 200 corporations. In 1929, for example, more than half of those corporations had fewer than 20,000 shareholders apiece. By 1974, less than 5% of the 200 largest corporations were owned by only 20,000 or fewer shareholders. Doesn’t that suggest a dramatic erosion of stock control by the wealthy few? Those numbers must be taken with blocks of salt. In fact, they don’t indicate much increase in effective popular rule of corporations at all. Many corporations now have scores of thousands of shareholders but their voices are too weak and scattered to command attention in the board rooms. In contrast, the twenty biggest shareholders control at least 10% voting strength in more than 70% of the largest U.S. corporations. Company by company, several handfuls of owners swing enough weight to be able to call the shots.” “Pension-fund socialism”[dropcap]S[/dropcap]o much for the simple view that the “people” of the United States own the U.S. economy. But what of the “pension-fund socialism,” supposedly the silent overthrow of the wealthy by worker financial power? “The recent growth in pension fund assets and investments is certainly dramatic. Before World War II, employees’ pension funds hardly existed. By 1978, the total value of public and private employee pension funds had snowballed to $350 billion–more than the total gross national product of the United Kingdom.* And much of this wealth had been invested in stocks: available data suggest that pension funds and employee stock savings or profit sharing plans (ESPs) own nearly one-quarter of all corporate stock outstanding. Does this mean that workers are beginning to create their own modern version of ‘people’s capitalism’–a pensioners’ capitalism–in the United States? The first problem with this notion is that workers with wealth in pension funds aren’t treated like ordinary stockholders by the law. The Supreme Court ruled in 1979 that an employee’s holding in a pension fund was not an ‘investment contract’ like a title to a stock certificate. This means that workers are not covered by the anti-fraud provisions of the Federal securities laws. And this means that workers have no ultimate legal guarantee that their pension fund ‘holdings’ in corporations will be honored, protected, or ultimately redeemed. The second problem is that the banks or investment trust companies actually control about half of pension fund and ESP holdings. The workers put up the money and the big moneylenders get the voting power and indirect influence which this money provides. Not a promising extension. The final problem is that the stocks which the workers do control are widely scattered among hundreds of companies. This means that pension funds and ESPs rarely own enough stock in any individual company to be able to wield effective control–to be able, at the most basic level, to influence corporate decisions. As an official of the American Banking Association recently concluded: “The beneficiaries of pension funds do not own American industry. When you define ownership as controlling–which is, as far as I’m concerned, the only real instance of ownership–then certainly the workers don’t own industry.'” What’s behind the drive to sell us “people’s capitalism”? Simply put, all these ruses and elaborate campaigns are designed to bury the notion of a class struggle, which implies that capitalism is deeply flawed if not criminal and that it should be replaced. Remember the great debate about “the end of ideology” first detonated by social democrat apostate Daniel Bell in the 1960s? In his book The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties, Bell suggested that the older humanistic ideologies derived from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—his chief target was Marxism, of course— (and concerned with the search for and transitioning to a better, post-capitalist society) were exhausted. With all the finesse and cynicism of a now secure Harvard academic, the erstwhile “leftist” now argued that “political ideology had become irrelevant among ‘sensible’ people, and that the polity of the future would be driven by piecemeal technological adjustments of the extant system.” In other words, more and “better” capitalism forever in a world dominated by an unholy alliance of politicians, the military, the media whores and the technocrats. The book’s thesis was quickly disproven by the return of radical discontentment in politics, marked by the 1960s and 1970s youth agitations in the West and the rise of radical politics in the Third World. The anxiety about working class agitation is certainly not new (some could argue it goes all the way back to the foundation of the new republic) and the owning class has done masterful and nonstop work to defang it. Art Preis, writing for the International Socialist Review points out how the earliest moves were directed at repressing or co-opting the union movement. It deserves to be quoted in extenso:
Believe at your own risk. And remember that as long as capitalism is around, you will be living with a sociopath in your home. Cyrano’s Journal. NOTES [1] From International Socialist Review, Vol.23 No.1, Winter 1962, pp.3-9. ¶ ADVERT PRO NOBIS IF YOU THINK THE LAMESTREAM MEDIA ARE A DISGRACE AND A HUGE OBSTACLE 
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Obama and Geithner: Government, Enron-Style
21 December 11 Strongly recommend this piece at the Huffington Post by Jeff Connaughton, a former aide to Senator Ted Kaufman. Jeff has long been one of the smartest guys on the Hill and is particularly strong on issues surrounding Wall Street and the regulatory system. In this piece, he takes apart the oft-stated mantra that what Wall Street firms did during and after the crisis was maybe unethical, but not illegal. He takes particular aim at Barack Obama, who tossed that line out on 60 Minutes in what I thought was one of the real low moments of his presidency. Here’s Jeff’s take: Speaking in Kansas on December 6, [Obama] said, “Too often, we’ve seen Wall Street firms violating major anti-fraud laws because the penalties are too weak and there’s no price for being a repeat offender.” Just five days later on 60 Minutes, he said, “Some of the least ethical behavior on Wall Street wasn’t illegal.” Which is it? Have there been no prosecutions because Wall Street acted legally (albeit unethically)? Or did Wall Street repeatedly violate major anti-fraud laws (and should thus find itself in the dock)? The President is confusing “legal” with “difficult to prosecute successfully.” The notion that what Wall Street firms did was merely unethical and not illegal is not just mistaken but preposterous: most everyone who works in the financial services industry understands that fraud right now is not just pervasive but epidemic, with many of the biggest banks committing entire departments to the routine commission of fraud and perjury – every single one of the major banks, for instance, devotes significant manpower to robosigning affidavits for foreclosures and credit card judgments, acts which are openly and inarguably criminal. Banks and hedge funds routinely withhold derogatory information about the instruments they sell, they routinely trade on insider information or ahead of their own clients’ orders, and corrupt accounting is so rampant now that industry analysts have begun to figure in estimated levels of fraud in their examinations of the public disclosures of major financial companies. Beyond that, as Jeff points out, Obama is simply not telling the truth about the insufficient penalties available to regulators. Employing the famous “mistakes were made” use of the passive tense, Obama copped out in his December 6 speech by saying that “penalties are too weak.” As Jeff points out, what Obama should have said is that “the penalties my own regulators chose to dish out were too weak”: Moreover, the President is misleading us when he says that Wall Street firms violate anti-fraud law because the penalties are too weak. Repeat financial fraudsters don’t pay relatively paltry – and therefore painless – penalties because of statutory caps on such penalties. Rather, regulatory officials, appointed by Obama, negotiated these comparatively trifling fines. This week, the F.D.I.C. settled a suit against Washington Mutual officials for just $64 million, an amount that will be covered mostly by insurance policies WaMu took out on behalf of executives, who themselves will pay just $400,000. And recently a federal judge rejected the S.E.C.’s latest settlement with Citigroup, an action even the Wall Street Journal called “a rebuke of the cozy relationship between regulators and the regulated that too often leaves justice as an orphan.” What makes Obama’s statements so dangerous is that they suggest an ongoing strategy of covering up the Wall Street crimewave. There is ample evidence out there that the Obama administration has eased up on prosecutions of Wall Street as part of a conscious strategy to prevent a collapse of confidence in our financial system, with the expected 50-state foreclosure settlement being the landmark effort in the cover-up, intended mainly to bury a generation of fraud. Here’s how Jeff puts it: In Ron Suskind’s book, Confidence Men, he quotes Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner as saying, “The confidence in the system is so fragile still… a disclosure of a fraud… could result in a run, just like Lehman.” The Obama Administration is pushing hard for a 50-state settlement with the major banks for their fraudulent foreclosure practices, even though several state attorneys general have rejected this approach because, in their view, it would shield too much wrongdoing. Regrettably, Obama’s top officials and lawyers seem more eager to restore the financial sector to health than establish criminal accountability among the executives who were in charge. In other words, Geithner and Obama are behaving like Lehman executives before the crash of Lehman, not disclosing the full extent of the internal problem in order to keep investors from fleeing and creditors from calling in their chits. It’s worth noting that this kind of behavior – knowingly hiding the derogatory truth from the outside world in order to prevent a run on the bank – is, itself, fraud! This is exactly the mindset that led Lehman to the abuses of the “Repo 105” accounting trick, in which loans were disguised as revenues in order to prevent the outside world from knowing the dire state of the bank’s balance sheet. Now Obama and Geithner are engaged in the same sort of activity, only they’re trying to prevent a run not on an individual bank, but the entire American financial services sector. Geithner seems really to believe that if fraud were aggressively policed, and the world was made aware of the incredible extent of the illegality in our markets, that international confidence in the American financial sector would plummet and our economy would suffer – and suffer, incidentally, on Barack Obama’s watch. Better, apparently, the Band-Aid the problem now, and let the real mess happen later on, on someone else’s watch, or at least in a second term, when there’s no need to worry about re-election. Of course, this is exactly the wrong way to go about things. If Geithner and Obama really wanted to convince the world that America’s markets weren’t broken, they would effectively police fraud, and by extension prove to everybody that at the very least, our regulatory system is not broken. By taking a dive on fraud, and orchestrating mass cover-ups like the coming foreclosure settlement fiasco, what they’re doing instead is signaling to the world that not only are our financial markets corrupt, but our government is broken as well. The problem with companies like Lehman and Enron is that their executives always think they can paper over illegalities by committing more crimes, when in fact all they’re usually doing is snowballing the problem so completely out of control that there’s no longer any chance of fixing things, thereby killing the only chance for survival they ever had. This is exactly what Obama and Geithner are doing now. By continually lying about the extent of the country’s corruption problems, they’re adding fraud to fraud and raising such a great bonfire of lies that they won’t ever be able to fix the underlying mess. If they looked at the world like public servants, and not like corporate executives, they’d understand that the only way out is to come clean. That they don’t look at things that way should tell people quite a lot. MATT TAIBBI writes a political column for Rolling Stone. He also appears regularly on left-liberal shows, such as Keith Olbermann’s. Comments (Selects from original thread) # Tippitc 2011-12-21 17:37 Isn’t this the same guy who campaigned on transparency in government?? Well, now would be a good time. And some truth and even a little justice would be a good thing also!! And if Obama wants to change his story maybe he should make sure the stories have a few elements in common!! +98 # Richard Raznikov 2011-12-21 20:08 Obama’s failure to pursue criminal penalties against the bankers and other Wall Street fixers is deeply offensive and morally reprehensible. The argument that prosecuting these people would jeopardize a ‘fragile’ public confidence in the system is a perversion of the actual truth: failure to prosecute is what has destroyed public confidence. Here we have a President who periodically expresses his dismay at the damage these people have caused while raking in millions in campaign contributions from the same people and surrounding himself with Geithner, Bernanke, Summers, and that ilk. It’s a disgrace. Obama has been an utter failure as President. It is pathetic that we seem thus far to have no better choices because he has forfeited the support of many people. I can’t wait to see his 2012 campaign swing into action. What will the new slogan be? “This time I really mean it”? # Erdajean 2011-12-22 19:00 Well, it’s the same as when Obama decided — once in office — to “let bygones be bygones” with whatever criminal acts the Bush Administration had done. Those atrocities ruined us at home — where those with conscience still suffer about our “part” in them — and they ruined us around the world, where we can certainly no longer strut about as “the GOOD guys” — everybody now knows better. This guy reminds me of too many modern parents — who choose not to see the unbearable behavior of their children — which I suspect some of them actually secretly enjoy as vandalism against society. Purely sicko! When NOTHING is ever corrected, what can we expect? +19 # Michael_K 2011-12-21 21:47 “Here we have a President who periodically expresses his dismay at the damage these people have caused while raking in millions in campaign contributions from the same people and surrounding himself with Geithner, Bernanke, Summers, and that ilk.” The latter named miscreants being un-indicted co-conspirators. Let’s DEMAND that O’Bama be challenged in a primary, so that we can present a proper candidate for the presidency. +18 # Dave45 2011-12-21 22:13 Connaughton and Taibbi indirectly call into question another social weakness in America, namely, the state of the legal profession. The goal of the legal profession seems hardly to be to bring about just solutions to social problems but, rather, to manipulate the law for clients (and, more especially, to manipulate the law for rich clients). It is not hard to understand why Obama, himself a recognized professor of constitutional law, seems to have such little interest in the law. Indeed, to express such an interest would be in open conflict with his deeper lust for plutocratic relationships that will further his political career.
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The lamentations of the richAlex Lantier and David North
Steven Schwarzman, just $4.7 Billion net worth Recent months have seen the eruption of popular anger throughout the United States at the staggering levels of social inequality, with the Occupy Wall Street protests gathering broad popular sympathy and support. This development, unforeseen and unscripted by the media, has left Wall Street’s “masters of the universe” wallowing not only in money, but also in self-pity. What have they done, complain these tender-hearted architects of hedge funds, collateralized debt obligations and countless other forms of financial swindling, to merit such popular disdain? The Financial Times web site reported in an article posted Wednesday that the rich are “indignant,” resentful of the “class war” rhetoric that is being heard in public protests. The protesters, they argue, have been misled into believing that higher taxes and the imposition of limits on the accumulation of personal wealth would have any significant impact on the national debt. The attention being given to their multi-million- and even billion-dollar annual winnings, the indignant rich maintain, is without the slightest economic justification. According to Steven Schwarzman (CEO of private equity/corporate raider firm Blackstone Group), whose net worth is estimated by Forbes at $4.7 billion, “Just raising taxes on the wealthiest two percent, for example, will not reduce a $1.3 trillion annual deficit enough to restore fiscal balance.” Given the billions that he has raked in on Wall Street, Mr. Schwarzman seems strangely deficient in arithmetic. Prior to the Wall Street crash of 2008, the richest one percent of the population owned approximately $19 trillion in US financial assets. A moderate surcharge of, let’s say, 30 percent would have a rather significant impact on not only US deficits, but global deficits as well. More radical—and, given the circumstances, fully justified—measures, such as the confiscation of the personal wealth of the richest 0.1 percent of Americans, would release immense resources to deal not only with deficits, but with the massive social crisis in the United States and throughout the world. The obscene level of wealth concentration in the United States is the malignant expression of the protracted decay of American capitalism. The super-rich investment bankers, Wall Street traders, and hedge fund operators are nothing more than the personification of the rampant economic parasitism that arose out of this decay. The essence of this parasitism is the ever-greater separation of personal wealth accumulation from the process of production and the creation of real value. In the era of the explosive development of American capitalism, which began in the aftermath of the Civil War, the great fortunes accumulated by the “robber barons” were associated with a massive growth in the industrial and social infrastructure of the United States. Rockefeller, Carnegie, Morgan and others were rapacious and ruthless; but they could at least claim that there was some progressive social purpose connected to their pursuit of private wealth. That age is long past. The wealth of today’s super-rich is bound up with the destruction, not the development, of the productive forces. The riches of these few depend on the impoverishment of hundreds of millions. In fact, the Financial Times reported last week that “the share of US national income that goes to workers as wages rather than to investors as profits and interest” has fallen to its lowest level since the end of World War II. The precipitous fall of the workers’ share of the national income below the post-war average translates into an annual collective wage loss in 2011 of $740 billion—approximately $5,000 per worker. That staggering amount has been funneled into the salaries and investment accounts of the super-rich. Despite this fact, the indignant rich argue that it would make no economic sense to disturb their wealth. But every day, in the United States and throughout the world, the media they own and the politicians they bribe demand and implement cuts in wages and the slashing of budgets that fund essential social services. The economic and social crisis in the United States and throughout the world cannot be addressed by reforms, such as a change in tax rates, which seek within the framework of capitalism a less irrational distribution of the national income. However justified such a measure would be, if only as an initial step toward more fundamental change, the lords of Wall Street and the corporate conglomerates will not accept any reform that threatens their domination of economic life and pursuit of limitless personal riches. Like all ruling classes whose interests are antagonistic to the needs of society as a whole, they will defend what they perceive to be their interests without restraint and without mercy. This is the social instinct that underlies the lowering of workers’ living standards, the systematic erosion of democratic rights, and the ever-more reckless resort to war as a means of securing the ruling elite’s global economic interests. In the course of the past year, ever-growing numbers of youth and older workers have begun to realize that there is a burning need for a profound change in society. The popularity of the call for social equality testifies to the basically socialistic impulse that motivates the growing social movement. Of course, this impulse has not yet assumed the form of a conscious movement for socialism. But as the scale and scope of the social movement expands, the impulse will become a program of action: for the nationalization of the banks and major corporations, the expropriation of economically irrational and socially-destructive personal fortunes, the establishment of workers’ power, the ending of capitalism and the creation of a global socialist society. The super-rich complain that they are confronted with class war? They haven’t seen anything yet. Alex Lantier and David North are political analysts with WSWS.ORG, a socialist organization ¶ ADVERT PRO NOBIS IF YOU THINK THE LAMESTREAM MEDIA ARE A DISGRACE AND A HUGE OBSTACLE 
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The few, the proud, the very richBy Sylvia Allegretto, The Berkeley Blog Much of the current political and popular discourse has focused on inequalities that exist in the U.S. In particular the Occupy movement has brought the huge disparities in wealth to the forefront. There are a few questions floating around about wealth. First, how skewed is the distribution? Second, it is true that the rich have gotten much richer over time? —a statement I often heard my Grandma make. Well, there is a plethora of statistics (e.g. here, here, & here) out there but here are two. The share of wealth held by the top fifth is about 87.2 percent while the bottom four-fifths share the remaining 12.8 percent of wealth—so the Occupiers are correct in their assessment. And, the riches of those in the top 1 percent are about 225 times greater than that held by the typical family—it was 125 times in 1962—so, Grandma was correct too. But, let’s look a bit further. The triennial Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) is one of the best sources for data on wealth in the U.S. And, of course the Forbes 400 estimates the worth of the wealthiest amongst us—all 400 wouldn’t be captured in the SCF. If we look at both the SCF and the Forbes 400 we can glean some interesting insights. In 2007 (the most recent SCF) the cumulative wealth of the Forbes 400 was $1.54 trillion or roughly the same amount of wealth held by the entire bottom fifty percent of American families. This is a stunning statistic to be sure. Upon closer inspection, the Forbes list reveals that six Waltons—all children (one daughter-in-law) of Sam or James “Bud” Walton the founders of Wal-Mart—were on the list. The combined worth of the Walton six was $69.7 billion in 2007—which equated to the total wealth of the entire bottom thirty percent! BTW the new 2011 Forbes 400 has the inherited worth of these six Waltons at $93 billion. The 2010 SCF data that is slated for release spring of 2012 will almost certainly show a further widening of the wealth gap given that corporate profits, stocks and CEO pay have all recovered while housing values & equity (the lion’s share of wealth for average American’s), wages and family incomes have yet to turn around. These revelations renewed my interest in the inheritance and estate tax debates. Also, didn’t I just read somewhere that Wal-Mart is substantially rolling back health care coverage for part-time workers and significantly raising premiums for many full-time staff? We’ve got to get serious about reversing the long term trend of the ever increasing concentration of income and wealth into the hands of a few at the expense of the many. At stake is nothing less than our economy and our democracy. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Sylvia Allegretto is a labor economist and deputy chair of the Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics, which is housed at UC Berkeley’s Institute for Research on Labor and Employment. She received her Ph.D. in economics from the University of Colorado, Boulder, and is also a research associate at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, DC. Allegretto has co-authored several editions of The State of Working America and most recently authored The State of Working America’s Wealth, 2011. __________ Select Comments to “The few, the proud, the very rich”:
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