More goodies from the great and mighty USA...

[marx2k]

What I find pretty funny is that companies always tell employees how important 'each and every one of them' are to the survival and profit of the company, yet they typically only show the monetary token of gratitude to upper management, when it's everyone BUT the upper management that keeps the company above water.

 

[trumie04]

Sorry if I seem kinda harsh, I normally take a pretty liberal stance on most topics. But I DO agree with you that no one needs to making $260 million a year, no matter what they do. They really could pay everyone a little more and the top guys quite a bit less. It's just that so many people talk trash about capitalism when they finance/support/rely/create it themselves. Its the same problem I have about organized religion. People preach all sorts of controlling, biased opinions on others, while they do the stuff that they detest. It's the hypocracy of it all. I'm not bashing you or anyone else in particular, but I don't know.....I'm pretty high right now and it's late. Sorry for any hostility. Peace!!!

 

[Harry Gypsna]

fucked up....simply fucked up...im too tired to even start on it....
but my standard curse of erupting anal warts and pustules on these fuckers wont do any harm,,......

 

[Rosy Cheeks]

And while we're on the subject of rich countries getting richer and poor countries getting poorer, here's some statistics on solidarity between countries:
http://www.poverty.com/internationalaid.html
In case some of you don't know what the Official Development Assistance is, it's the development aid industrialized countries (members of the OECD - Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) have agreed to contribute to underdeveloped countries.
One could believe that the richest countries in the world are the ones that could easily attain the 0.7% goal (in relation to their GDP), but no, not at all.
If you use the USA as an example (not the only villain), they're up to this date unwilling to contribute even a fraction of the 0.7% (of their National Income) in international aid. USA is nevertheless quite capable of spending $ 532.8 Billion on their military budget (eight times more than China, the second biggest military spender, or approximately two-thirds of all military spending on Earth), which represents about 3.7% of the GDP.

 

[genkisan]

In the example of Terry S Semel the CEO of Yahoo, most of the $230.6 million was from stock options. This means that Mr. Semel had to raise the price of Yahoo's stock to make that money. While Mr. Semel did make quite a large sum of money for himself, only 6% of the stock is owned by insiders. The remaining 94% is owned by individuals and instutional investors. Yahoo's earnings per share was $1.35 x 1.35 billion shares= $1.84 billion. That leaves almost $1.61 billion for everyone else.

I don't understand why people care about how much someone else pays their CEO. If a sports team wants to pay millions for a player, who cares? It's not like its your money. If I want to pay someone $1000 to cut my lawn, its no one's business but my own. In America, we have the freedom to decide how much to pay our employees. The shareholders of Yahoo don't seem to think that $230 million is too much, why should anyone else?

Drug companies plead that the outrageous mark-ups they charge on drug are for "research", yet they spend on average 12% of their income on research and 30% on "administrative costs", which include the exhorbitant salaries and stock options of their CEOs. This leads directly to millions of people being over-charged for or totally deprived of medicine, often in the Third World.

Our biosphere is in danger of irrepairable damage, the human race is teetering on the brink of extinction, and these parasitic scumbags siphon HUGE percentages of the worlds wealth into their own pockets to boost their diseased egos.....and that goes for over-paid, over-valued athletes too.


You don't see anything wrong with megolomanical ego-monsters burning the future of the human race for the sake of squeezing the most out of next quarters profits, so they can add another zero to a bank account already WAY too big for any normal person to need??

I sure as fuck do........I have kids, and don't particularlly like the prospect of them inheriting a barren wasteland because a group of immoral, exploitative patriarchal misogynist Corpo-Nazi shitsuckers need obscene amounts of wealth to feel gratified right now.

 

[PazVerdeRadical]

...Example: Take one 17 year old female, remove the cell phone, remove the Grand Am/Eclipse/Whatever-car-girls-get-on-their-birthdays-these-days, remove the television and have her spend a week without money.

if you do that you'll need to medicate that 17 year old girl so that the withdrawals she'll experience do not push her to loose her mind no cell? no mall? no money? phew, you may have better chance getting someone off opiates...

paz

 

[Chamba]

capitalism and human nature work well together.

 

[marx2k]

capitalism and human nature work well together.

hahaha I need that on a bumper sticker

 

[J0sh1]

I have a copy framed in my living room just to be reminded daily what this bullshit a lot of you defend so much really is. Take a look at it and learn from it, and dare say its not the truth.

 

[genkisan]

Let's not forget who owns all of the "evil" corporations. Individual Americans, among others are the owners of corporations. To hear people talk about corporations like they are making heaps of money just for the CEO or President is ignorant. When corporations make a profit, so do millions of Americans. If you have a 401(k) plan from work, chances are pretty damn good that you are one of the partial owners of the "evil corporations".

Capitalism isn't perfect, but its as close as we can get to perfection right now. Unless someone can point to another type of economy that runs as well, I think capitalism is the way to go.

The way to go towards what??

The problem is not the economic system, the problem is the entire driving paradigm of humanity. As long as resource-hoarding and short-term personal gain are the main things governing human behavior and the structure of our societies, we are fucked. The misogynistic, patriarchal system of power-weilding thru resource control and manipulation is a malignant and parasitic philosophy of life, and has to chage totally if humans are to survive in the long-term.


No matter what the economic mechanism, until humans learn to live non-entropically and put into the system instead of depleating it, we will continue to hurtle down the superhighway to extinction, Big Mac in hand......

 

[Verite]

Kinda funny considering Zambia was 6 billion in foreign debt already [ from 2000 ].. do people really think their going to get 40 million from that? Cant squeeze crap from a rock.

 

[trumie04]

The way to go towards what??

The problem is not the economic system, the problem is the entire driving paradigm of humanity. As long as resource-hoarding and short-term personal gain are the main things governing human behavior and the structure of our societies, we are fucked. The misogynistic, patriarchal system of power-weilding thru resource control and manipulation is a malignant and parasitic philosophy of life, and has to chage totally if humans are to survive in the long-term.

Exactly, it's not capitalism that is the problem, its humanity. Let's not blame capitalism for our problems. Scarcity of resources is what has made this world what it is.

 

[marx2k]

Exactly, it's not capitalism that is the problem, its humanity. Let's not blame capitalism for our problems. Scarcity of resources is what has made this world what it is.

JOHN BELLAMY FOSTER is co-editor of Monthly Review and author of The Vulnerable Planet, Marx’s Ecology and Ecology against Capitalism. He spoke to Socialist Worker at the Socialism 2002 conference in June.

"I think that one reason capitalism is so destructive is just the force of accumulation and growth and the fact that it’s such an expansive system economically.

The way it expands is by increasing the throughput from resources into the economy--and then out, in the form of waste, into the environment. The throughput keeps on increasing along with the economy.

It’s so expansive that if you have a 3 percent rate of economic growth, that means that in a century, the economy will increase to 16 times its present size. And in two centuries to 250 times its present size, and in three centuries to 4,000 times its present size. You’re dealing with an environment that is, in some ways, limited. So it’s this massive growth within a limited form.

Of course, we all believe in economic growth to some extent. But under capitalism, it’s also growth without the right priorities. It leaves people behind in poverty, rather than advancing everyone. It involves the production of all sorts of wasteful and toxic products so that the level of toxicity keeps going up because they’re incorporating more and more chemicals and relying on nuclear power and so on.

But beyond that, there’s a problem because capitalism involves the alienation of nature. It involves the separation of human beings from nature. Capitalism creates an antagonistic relationship between town and country and between economy and nature. And it divides nature in extreme ways, just as it divides labor among human beings. It’s what Marx called a "metabolic rift."

It’s a very unsustainable form of development. We have to get beyond this alienation of nature in order to be able to solve the problem. And capitalism can’t do it."

 

[trumie04]

I agree with you 100%. I think that socialism works great, in theory. But unfortunatly, it suffers from the same problems like greed and coruption. There isn't really a good working socialist nation, nor has there been in my opinion. My point is that of course capitalism has its downfalls, many of them in fact. But I think that no other nation has done a better job of managing the economy than the U.S. We're far from perfect, but considering the rest of the world, I don't know anyone else who has an economy as efficient as ours.

 

[marx2k]

I would imagine any country that has a large portion of its' people in poverty or slavery would have a pretty efficient economy.

 

[southpaw]

I would imagine any country that has a large portion of its' people in poverty or slavery would have a pretty efficient economy.

Agreed, but only in the ironic sense I assume you're implying. We all know that in comparison to slave-based economies of the past, modern economies are wildly efficient and much less wasteful. The key has been to tie progress to technology, make chains out of ideas, and extend people enough credit and creature comfort to numb their relative poverty. These people then compare themselves to the global poor, which they desperately fear becoming, and return Boxer-like to the grindstone with dreams of becoming a corporate prince. There's your American efficiency in a nutshell.

As for America "getting it right", give colonists from the most technologically advanced corner of the globe three centuries to run amok with the resources of an entire hemisphere (not even bringing Africa into the equation), then step back to consider if this was an improbable achievement.

As for this "patriarchal, misogynistic" system leading our children to doom, let's not forget how many Western and Western educated women have bought into it wholeheartedly. Women have directly and indirectly driven American consumerism since the 1920's at the latest, and are only recently beginning to reappraise the careerist impulse feminism launched during the 1970's. Maybe this is proof that I haven't successfully weaned myself from the "telescreen", but almost every car ad you see today has a woman touring you through car features, a woman driving, or my personal favorites, a woman being mistaken for a man because her car is so impressive. I also love jewelry ads touting the "originality" of pieces mass produced in god-knows-where.

But to return to the topic, these so-called vulture funds are truly reprehensible. Its just great that we can invade nations whenever we want, take out contracts to rebuild what we destroy, then sue for debts our corporations aren't actually owed. Wonderful.