We all know they won’t though. Not when it goes against their masters. My friend, Nick from Catch 22 Conservatives has drafted such a letter. If the editors at the Grope & Fail suddenly get a touch of consciousness, they’ll probably cut away and tweak it beyond recognition to suit their whims and those of the Harpercon masters they serve. So, I will publish his letter, as is.
Economist Michael Veall and the Globe and Mail seem to struggle when trying to indetify the reasons behind why there has been such a massive increase in the super-wealthy in Canada over three decades. (Getting a handle on happiness. Dec 1.)
Over 30 years the richest .01 per cent of Canadians almost tripled their income share and and richest .001 per cent increased their share fivefold. At the same time, the incomes of average Canadians have been stagnant.
How is this accounted for in the story? The super rich are not that different from ordinary Canadians because both groups obtain most of their income from working for their money as wage earners, says the story. Prof. Veall, exploring “theories” to account for the huge gap, says that corporate governors have allowed CEO salaries to jump because they were climbing elsewhere. He says another reason may be because CEO’s are known to be excellent communicators and in the digital age they are more effective and more valuable because email and the mass media facilitate contact with employees and the public.
Hogwash! “It’s (mostly) the tax system, stupid.” Over 40 years the powerful and their allies in both Liberal and Conservative governments have demolished many of the “fair” components of the Canadian tax system. Ottawa quietly cancelled estate taxes, resulting in a huge ongoing windfall for the rich. Capital gains taxes have been reduced, benefitting mainly the rich. Tax lawyers have manipulated tax laws to lower taxes on “bonuses”, “fees” and “contract payments.” Governments look the other way while billions flow to offshore tax havens.
And the greatest bonanza for the aspiring super-rich: In 1949, personal income tax rates in Canada ranged from 15 to 84 percent and there were 17 brackets. In 2009, there were four federal brackets:15 percent, 22 percent, 26 percent, and 29 percent on an income over $126,264.
Nick Fillmore
Toronto
Note to Editors:
What in heaven’s name is going on with you guys? At best, you are not thinking through many of your stories. At worst, you are terribly biased and/or dishonest when it comes to areas such as discussing the possibility of tax increases to cover the deficit; the possible dangers of genetically modified foods; global warming, etc., etc.
Instead of firing Salutin and apparently Jim Stanford, Peggy Wente should be ushered out of the building.
Yeah, perhaps the Grope and Fail would prefer to stick to more contemporary, less controversial stories of the day like Harpercon cheerleaders advocating the Pinochet-esque assasination and/or disappearance of dissidents like Wikileaks’ Julian Assange.
![[small-web-version_harperfree_poster.jpg]](https://1.bp.blogspot.com/_WGczmWu7Wwc/SdCJyy2LN1I/AAAAAAAABWE/ABYCkbJaKaQ/s1600/small-web-version_harperfree_poster.jpg)
Look to Paul Martin of Canadian Steamship Lines. Proud owner of a fleet of ships flying flags of convenience to avoid Canadian Labour and Tax law. The same company that busted the long suffering Merchant Marines.
[Reply]
These two British academics argue that almost every social problem, from crime to obesity, stems from one root cause: inequality.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2009/mar/12/equality-british-society
And, they say, it’s not just the deprived underclass that loses out in an unequal society: everyone does, even the better off.
Because it’s not absolute levels of poverty that create the social problems, but the differentials in income between rich and poor.
The US is wealthier and spends more on health care than any other country, yet a baby born in Greece, where average income levels are about half that of the US, has a lower risk of infant mortality and longer life expectancy than an American baby.
“It became clear,” Wilkinson says, “that countries such as the US, the UK and Portugal, where the top 20% earn seven, eight or nine times more than the lowest 20%, scored noticeably higher on all social problems at every level of society than in countries such as Sweden and Japan, where the differential is only two or three times higher at the top.”
What is it about unequal societies that causes the damage? Wilkinson believes the answer lies in the psycho-social areas of hierarchy and status. The greater the differential between the haves and have-nots, the greater importance everyone places on the material aspects of consumption; what brand of car you drive carries far more meaning in a more hierarchical society than in a flatter one. It’s the knock-on effects of this status anxiety that finds socially corrosive expression in crime, ill-health and mistrust.
Reducing inequality fits in with the environmental agenda; it benefits the developing world, as more equal societies give more in overseas aid; and most significantly, everyone is fed up with the corporate greed and bonus culture that have caused the current financial crisis, so if ever a government had the electorate’s goodwill to act, it’s now.”
[Reply]
“America is now a land of socialism for the rich — and brutal capitalism for the poor.”
~ Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
[Reply]
Thoughts on the rampant greed of the rich: Robber bee behavior is rare “if colonies are equal in strength and healthy and undisturbed (by pests or beekeepers),” she said.
“If colonies are stressed, crowded, diseased or fighting pests, the other bees – -as well as other pests — sense this ‘weakness’ or ‘opportunity’ and go for it. It’s survival of the strongest. Mother Nature isn’t always nice.”
http://news.ucanr.org/newsstorymain.cfm?story=1147
[Reply]
You would think the rich might care, if not from empathy, then from reading history. Ultimately gross inequality can be fatal to civilization. In his book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, the Pulitzer Prize-winning anthropologist Jared Diamond writes about how governing elites throughout history isolate and delude themselves until it is too late.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse:_How_Societies_Choose_to_Fail_or_Succeed
http://www.truth-out.org/bill-moyers-money-fights-hard-and-it-fights-dirty64766
http://books.google.ca/books?id=QyzHKSCYSmsC&printsec=frontcover&dq=collapse+how+societies+choose+to+fail+or+succeed&hl=en&ei=3fzRTMKbHMHHnAfGldioDA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CCcQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false
[Reply]
Canada could really use an inheritance tax. Almost 40 years ago, Ottawa quietly cancelled Canada’s estate tax.
http://www.rabble.ca/columnists/2010/10/tax-cuts-wealthy-increase-inequality
U of T economist John Bossons calculated that ending the tax amounted to a windfall of about $12 billion ($62 billion in today’s dollars) for Canada’s wealthiest families.
[Reply]
In other words, all of the income and wealth gains for middle Americans from the “golden years” between 1945 and 1975 have now been wiped out. Or more accurately, have now been transferred to the very rich. The top 1% holds 34% of the nation’s wealth while the bottom 50% holds just 2.5%. The bottom 40% owns absolutely nothing.
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/11/14-1
In these and a thousand other ways, the rich have conspired with the government they largely control to shift more and still more of the nation’s wealth away from the working and middle classes, to themselves. It amounts to the most insidious class warfare and the most rapacious looting of public and private resources in the history of the world.
.
.
.
[Reply]
Dacher Keltner: Born to Be Good
Berkeley Arts and Letters
Do you have any explanation for greedy guys in government. They’re already so rich. Why do they need more money? What are they going to do with it?
Go to: 59:44 point in below video
http://fora.tv/2009/01/21/Dacher_Keltner_Born_to_Be_Good
.
.
.
.
[Reply]
Opportunity Cost of Defense Spending
One of the greatest tragedies in human history:
“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement.
We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This is, I repeat, the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
~Eisenhower
[Reply]
1% of the population owns 90% of the wealth.
People might actually pursue the things they enjoy if they didnt feel the need to be the richest people in the universe.
http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread573281/pg1
The game CEO’s can’t believe they get away with.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tfosSjWLMEE
Bill Maher – New Rules – Greed
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-oPdoT0H1A
Consider the sheer magnitude of a billion.
If you were lucky enough to have $1 billion in $1,000 bills, stacking them would require 10,000 piles of 100 each.
[Reply]
When your salary is determined by people who are beholden to you, as is the case of CEO’s, then there’s no…there are no brakes. The sky is the limit.
Laissez-faire– let the market be free, and those who deserve to, will get their just rewards. That’s become the standard explanation for why CEO pay has shot up in their lifetimes, from 40 times the average worker’s pay in 1970 to more than 100 times in 1990 to some 500 times today.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/business/july-dec02/ceo2_12-03.html
Laissez-faire is even used to justify lavish retirement packages, like Jack Welch’s from GE. Lifetime tickets to New York’s Yankee stadium and Boston’s Fenway Park, a Manhattan penthouse, and numerous other perks that came to light in his divorce case, and that critics like Graef Crystal now mock.
.
.
.
[Reply]
THE CORPORATION [1/23] What is a Corporation?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pin8fbdGV9Y
The Corporation is a 2003 Canadian documentary film written by Joel Bakan, and directed by Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott. The documentary is critical of the modern-day corporation, considering its legal status as a class of person and evaluating its behaviour towards society and the world at large as a psychiatrist might evaluate an ordinary person.
[Reply]
As an EHM, Johns job was to convince Third World countries to accept enormous loans for infrastructure development—loans that were much larger than needed—and to guarantee that the development projects were contracted to U.S. corporations like Halliburton and Bechtel.
http://www.johnperkins.org/
Once these countries were saddled with huge debts, the U.S. government and the international aid agencies allied with it were able to control these economies and to ensure that oil and other resources were channeled to serve the interests of building a global empire.
.
.
.
[Reply]
snip snip: Right-wing politicians have a default option for balancing budgets without increasing taxes. The recipe for fiscal success is simple: sell off public assets while reducing and privatizing public services. Just don’t ask how many of those politicians apply the same logic to their personal finances.
In the short term, the quickest way to pay off your debts is to sell the house and work longer hours. Yet the long-term consequences — in terms of shelter, financial security and a legacy for your children — can be severe. Wise individuals plan for the future, taking on debt to acquire and develop property, improving themselves through training and education and maintaining their health through exercise and vacations.
Tragic consequences
Michael Byers, Vancouver Sun, September 8, 2007
http://www.naomiklein.org/shock-doctrine/reviews/tragic-consequences
http://www.naomiklein.org/shock-doctrine/the-book
The Meaning of “Austerity”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUmQbf1AyA8
[Reply]
starve the beast
“Starving the beast” is a fiscal-political strategy of some American conservatives to use budget deficits via tax cuts to force future reductions in the size of government. The term “beast” refers to government and the programs it funds, particularly social programs such as welfare, Social Security, and Medicare.
A well-known proponent of the strategy is activist Grover Norquist who famously said “My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.”
Some empirical evidence shows that such a strategy may be counterproductive, with lower taxes corresponding to higher spending.
An October 2007 study by Christina D. Romer and David H. Romer of the National Bureau of Economic Research found: “[...] no support for the hypothesis that tax cuts restrain government spending; indeed, [the findings] suggest that tax cuts may actually increase spending. The results also indicate that the main effect of tax cuts on the government budget is to induce subsequent legislated tax increases.”[10]
http://www.dominionpaper.ca/weblogs/geordie/2339
.
.
.
[Reply]
THE TROUBLE WITH BILLIONAIRES: Why too much money at the top is bad for everyone
The glittering lives of billionaires may seem like a harmless source of entertainment. But such concentrated economic power reverberates throughout society, threatening the quality of life and the very functioning of democracy.
http://www.lindamcquaig.com/TheTroubleWithBillionaires/index.cfm
It’s no accident that the United States claims the most billionaires – but suffers among the highest rates of infant mortality and crime, the shortest life expectancy, as well as the lowest rates of social mobility and electoral political participation in the developed world.
Our society tends to regard large fortunes as evidence of great talent or accomplishment. Yet the vast new wealth isn’t due to an increase in talent or effort at the top, but rather to changing social attitudes legitimizing greed and government policy changes that favour the new elite. Authoritative and eye-opening, The Trouble with Billionaires will spark debate about the kind of society we want.
.
.
.
[Reply]