ANTI-CORPORATISM

ERIC ZUESSE—As-of 2014, the top 0.1% of Americans owned almost as much wealth as the bottom 90% did. The top 0.1% owned more than the entire bottom 80% did. Furthermore, America’s billionaires now have an absolute veto-power against any candidate in both Parties’ Presidential primaries, such as Bernie Sanders, whom no billionaire wants to become President. Only candidates who are backed by at least a few billionaires have any realistic chance at all. A candidate whom no billionaire backs is not liable to win the nomination of either of the major Parties.

An interactive discussion on wealth inequality and the “Great Game” on the control of natural resources. In this webinar organized jointly by the Henry George School and the International Union for Land Value Taxation, Michael Hudson and Pepe Escobar will unpack one of the most destructive features of our economic system and the many different ways it drives wealth inequality. They will also focus on China – US relations and their understanding of the “Great Game” regarding control of the world’s resources.

DAN GLAZEBROOK—Firstly, the UK is an imperial entity. The relinquishing of formal political rule over most of its colonies between the 1940s and 1970s (with the crucial exception of a string of strategically-positioned island territories such as Diego Garcia, the Caymans, the Falklands, the Virgin islands and around a dozen others) has not changed this simple reality. The basic contours of the world economy created by colonialism – a system of wealth transference from Asia, Africa and Latin America to North America and Western Europe – remain intact, and have indeed been strengthened and perfected in the era of neo-colonialism, to the extent that net resource transfers from the global South to the North today amount to roughly $3trillion per year – triple the value of goods and services flowing the other way, and twenty-four times the total value of North-South foreign aid. Much of this uncompensated wealth transfer is via ‘capital flight’, often illicit, and mostly facilitated through the network of tax havens located in Britain’s remaining island colonies.

CALEB MAUPIN—A super important chat wherein Caleb discusses what ails the US at its core, and where this widespread malaise afflicting the nation—this increasing chaos—originates, and how out of this chaos  a new systemic order will be born.  Nietsche was right, of course, but the question is whether the dialectics he spoke of, “out of chaos order cometh”, will give us an outcome to celebrate or decry. 

CHUCK CHURCHILL—Marx underscores the conditions that capitalism has imposed on the working class by its control of state power and institutions, including all major means of disseminating “information,” which includes imposing the dominance of ruling class ideology. The rulers also have a monopoly on the use of force and violence used both to fight rivals and to keep the working class subjugated. Marx recognizes this as one class’ dictatorship over another.

The capitalists control all means of getting a living; if they have not quite achieved this everywhere in 1875, Marx recognizes that they are on the way to doing so. Land and machinery are privately owned, and increasingly monopolized by a relative handful of the population; so are all the products of labor. If you do not own means of production, or income-generating land as rentier landlords, and you want to live, you must sell your labor to these capitalist bosses.