Socialist Progressives
Related: About this forumThere Are Alternatives To The Neoliberal Blind Alley!
In its Working for the Few briefing paper, Oxfam has called attention to a worrying trend: the wealth of 1% of the worlds richest people is equivalent to a total of US$ 110 trillion 65 times the total wealth of the poorer half of the worlds population. In the last 25 years, wealth has been increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few; leading to a tiny elite owning 46% of the worlds wealth. An aggravating factor in this situation is that this wealth is mostly from profits derived from capital, property and assets, rather than from wages, as French economist Thomas Piketty recently showed in his outstanding book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century. A large number of highly profitable businesses are often under-taxed an unacceptable trend across stock markets around the world. Ultimately, this contributes to economic inequality and creates a new Belle Époque, in which the social mobility of the working class is severely limited by the system of patrimonial capitalism.
The Price Of Inequality
http://www.social-europe.eu/2014/06/neoliberal-blind-alley/
yallerdawg
(16,104 posts)From the IWW preamble:
"The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of the working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life.
Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the means of production, abolish the wage system, and live in harmony with the Earth."
Isn't this 'truth' in a nutshell?
Maybe we can wake up a few more while 'Dancing with the Stars' and 'American Idol' are ramping up for another season of distraction?
Trust Buster
(7,299 posts)....that the Right only wants to exclude labor from unionizing and representing their own interests.
abelenkpe
(9,933 posts)How else can they expect any influence or justice in world where corporations are global?
socialist_n_TN
(11,481 posts)"WORKERS OF THE WORLD, UNITE!"
A worldwide union of the working class is what IS needed. That's internationalism.
Jackpine Radical
(45,274 posts)No government can stand it its way. The most powerful government on Earth--ours--is a tool of the corporations, and does their bidding, from wars in the Middle East to Keystone to TPP.
And yet there is one force greater than the combined mass of the corporations, but that force is not apparent because it stands divided and neutralizes itself.
Imagine a gigantic lump of iron with all the polarized little atoms pointing in every which direction. The lump is inert and exerts no force other than that which gravity gives it.
Now imagine the same huge lump of iron with one difference: All of the little atoms are arranged so that their "north" poles all point in the same direction and their and "south" poles point in the opposite direction. Now you have the world's most powerful magnet, capable of lifting a locomotive.
If all the workers of the world got their heads pointed in the same direction, there is nothing they could not accomplish.
littlemissmartypants
(22,600 posts)patrimonial capitalism nuff said.
Scuba
(53,475 posts)Dustlawyer
(10,494 posts)then you have the unchallenged party get everything they want. In the U.S. they throw so many hurdles in the way of unionization as to make it almost impossible to form and maintain a union. It doesn't help that they brainwash the workers through the use of propaganda media into voting against their own interests.
The first thing I would want to happen after we force Complete Campaign Finance Reform (CCFR) and Publicly Funded Elections would be to bust up the media and banking monopolies. The media uses our airwaves under license and we can require truth in the news. Fox won an appeal years ago in Florida that allows them to lie because they are "Entertainment." They can LEGALLY LIE to us while we (Americans in general) don't know that their news is not news. Since that time other news organizations have followed Fox's lead and spread the Plutocrats bull shit on thick!