One of the many causes of this rift is this awful idea of FREE TRADE and GLOBALIZATION.

Free enterprise combined with greed in its ever persistent quest to extract more profits from their investments and more work from those who provide the labor have gone way overboard in tilting the scales in favor of wealth. It is no longer a valid argument that the poor are envious, lazy, pampered, spoiled and uncooperative. The reality is that the poor working stiff is now poorer and those abroad who are now performing his job are also poorer…but the corporations and the super wealthy like it that way.

Once more we call upon Dave Johnson to make it clear in this article he wrote:

What "Free Trade" Has Cost The World

March 14, 2011 -

“If you take a job away from someone who is paid a reasonable wage because they enjoy the protections and prosperity of democratic government, move it across a border, and give it to someone living under a thugocracy, forced to work for pennies with no protections whatsoever, it should be just plain obvious that the worker on our side of the border and the worker on the other side of the border are not going to be better off. And when you do this on a massive scale it just stands to reason that most people on both sides of the border are going to be worse off.

But propaganda being what it is we were somehow convinced to try a worldwide experiment in taking good jobs from democracies and turning them into bad jobs in thugocracies. Now, of course, the experiment has run its course and we can see the results.

Worker Against Worker

Setting worker against worker enabled a few people to get really, really really wealthy and powerful and use that wealth to become even more wealthy and powerful. Our country is in decline, burdened by massive trade deficits because the ones with vested interests in cheap labor won't let us won't take on the mercantilists, burdened by budget deficits because those vested interests have bought low taxes and government subsidies, our infrastructure crumbles because multinational business leaders refuse to invest here, with no more need of us as workers, and the resulting hollowed-out middle class can't consume anymore. Other countries also suffer from similar stresses.

Out of this situation a new global elite has emerged, contemptuous of democracy and government and any power but the power of their own money. In country after country, these top few won't share the proceeds with their own, either, while they keep the world from approaching solutions.

In January's post, Establishment Realizing: When You Close The Factory We Can’t Make A Living, I wrote about how "the establishment," or as bloggers call it, "The Village" or "Versailles," are starting to realize that our trade policies just might not be working for us. Of course, they come to this realization only after our trade deficits approach the trillion mark, after we have lost millions of manufacturing jobs, after we have closed tens of thousands of factories, after we have lost the tech manufacturing industry, and after we have abandoned hopes of leading in green manufacturing as well...

(We're still waiting for them to realize that tax cuts do not increase revenue, that spending more on military than all other countries combined might contribute to deficits, that our too-big-to-fail financial sector is capable of causing problems, that the climate really is changing, that allowing corporations to pump money into politics means the end of democracy... but hey, a dollar spent by a vested interest on a politician apparently is a dollar very, very well spent.)

In the Washington Post, Steven Pearlstein recently reviewed Dani Rodrik’s “The Globalization Paradox,”

It is dogma among economists and right-thinking members of the political and business elite that globalization is good and more of it is even better. That is why they invariably view anyone who dissents from this orthodoxy as either ignorant of the logic of comparative advantage or selfishly protectionist.

But what if it turns out that globalization is more of a boon to the members of the global elite than it is to the average Jose?

Right, what if?

In “The Globalization Paradox,” Dani Rodrik demonstrates that those questions are more than hypothetical — that they describe the world as it really is rather than as it exists in economic theory or in the imagination of free trade fundamentalists.

. . . The starting point of Rodrik’s argument is that open markets succeed only when embedded within social, legal and political institutions that provide them legitimacy by ensuring that the benefits of capitalism are broadly shared.

And a unicorn. And a rainbow.

The paradox, as Rodrik sees it, is that globalization will work for everyone only if all countries abide by the same set of rules, hammered out and enforced by some form of technocratic global government. The reality is, however, that most countries are unwilling to give up their sovereignty, their distinctive institutions and their freedom to manage their economies in their own best interests. Not China. Not India. Not the members of the European Union, as they are now discovering. Not even the United States.

In the real world, argues Rodrik, there is a fundamental incompatibility between hyper-globalization on the one hand, and democracy and national sovereignty on the other.

Clyde Prestowitz threw a one-two punch at free trade after Senator John McCain claimed that the iPhone and iPad are Made in America. In Why isn't the iPhone made in America? at Foreign Policy magazine, Prestowitz wrote,

John McCain provided some good laughs and made himself look stupid on a recent ABC news interview by telling Diane Sawyer that the iPhone and iPad are great examples of products that are made in America.

They're not. And given the amount of high technology production in his state, McCain should certainly have known better. The fact that he didn't does make you wonder about what, if anything, they know in the U.S. Senate.

Prestowitz goes on to explain that while the iPhone is manufactured in China, parts, software, design and other components are made all around the world, not necessarily for low wages. He concludes,

So if America actually did produce the stuff it says it is good at producing, it wouldn't have a trade deficit with Asia for which China is the proxy at all. It would have a trade surplus and 20-40,000 more jobs than it has.

Prestowitz looks at a smaller picture here of the back-and-forth of trade with the US and China. Design, software and other capital and technology intensive components are not made in China. But the bulk of the jobs are in China. This could work for everyone if people there were paid enough -- and allowed by their government -- to buy things made here. That would be trade and everyone would be better off. But trade isn't really the point of "free trade."

Then, in It's not just the iPhone that America doesn't make, Prestowitz conitinues,

Okay, so yesterday I explained not only that John McCain was wrong to say the iPhone is made in America (as you already knew), but also that most of you were wrong to think it is made in China. I went on to show that the phone is only assembled in China from high-tech parts that are mostly made in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. I further explained that production of these parts is not labor intensive, but capital and technology intensive.

In other words, these parts are just the kinds of products American economists, Silicon Valley venture capitalists and entrepreneurs, and Washington political leaders always say America is the best in the world at making. ... Then I left you with the question of why, if America is so good at making this stuff, it doesn't.

[. . .] it was believed that unilateral free trade (keeping one's markets open, even in the face of protectionism by one's trading partners) was a winning proposition. Thus, there was no need to be concerned about things like subsidization of key foreign industries or loss of capability in these fields, and hence no need for trade measures that might upset delicate geopolitical relationships.

This economic doctrine has been based upon the assumption of Anglo/American economics that economies of scale either don't exist in most traded products and industries or are relatively unimportant. That this assumption is dramatically and demonstrably wrong and not accepted by most of the non-Anglo world has not deterred its application to the making of much American and global trade policy.

In other words, it doesn't work. But we already knew that. We can see it all around us. And it is us who have to live with the results.”

SOURCE: http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/2011031114/what-globalization-has-cost-world

People are human beings and should have rights, corporations aren’t and shouldn’t have more rights than people.

The way I see it, Republican-Teahadists have less than two years to close the gap, to put the finishing touches on the elimination of Democracy and turning this country into a Plutocracy…one where the corporations have all the rights and the general population has none.

Corporations are entities without brains or conscience. The ultimate goal for these and the motivator is profit; profit for the stock holders, a lofty position, and lucrative remuneration for management. We all know that this results in all kinds of inequities that hurt society and eventually will come back to bite us in the ass.

The Blacks are an inconvenience, the educated are a stumbling block, the women are a nuisense, the college students are idealistic and irresponsible, the old are burden, the young a challenge because they have to be indoctrinated fully to accept the new American Order.

Of course, all of this has consequences…all has its roots and it spells REAGAN. The long process that has taken us to this point began during the dear quasi-god Reagan. The seeds were sown and it took a few decades to bear fruit. But now we are seeing the reaping of the benefits for the super wealthy and the complete dominance of Corporations over the rest of the population.

Globalization is a term used to justify some of the excesses of crossing over to exploit less fortunate people. President Reagan set us on a path that has proven to be destructive and self-defeating. He encouraged businesses to relocate overseas and gave them all kinds of incentives. There were subsidies, tax breaks, and a general consensus that this was the answer to all the woes for capitalists. Of course, it has had some catastrophic effects on our economy and our people. Places that once thrived as manufacturing centers are now wastelands. People who used to work in manufacturing found themselves out of jobs with dignity and benefits to be employed now in meaningless, low paying service positions.

At first we bitched and complained that lobbyists were dominating the political process. We complained that Fox news was biased and only served the interests of the Republican Party. We were alarmed when Republicans began to make gains and pass totally insane legislation that solidified their power. We were more than indignant when George W. Bush expanded the powers of the Executive.

Enter the special interests-fabricated Tea Party with proven ties and funding to Koch brothers money and other super rich folks. They were aided by a series of divisive initiatives meant to pin American against American. The fear mongering was intensified and so was xenophobia and homophobia…the old adage of “divide and conquer” was executed.

INTERESTING TABLE ON INCOME; SEE HOW THE RICH HAVE GOTTEN RICHER…LIKE I SAY: REDISTRIBUTION OF WEALTH HAS ALREADY TAKEN PLACE; IT HAS GONE FROM THE POOR AND THE MIDDLE CLASS TO THE VERY RICH.

SHARE OF ALL US PERSONAL INCOME

	TOP	TOP	BOTTOM
	1%	10%	50%
	OF INC	OF INC	OF INC
1980	8.46%	32.13%	17.68%
1981	8.30%	31.98%	17.75%
1982	8.91%	32.26%	17.71%
1983	9.29%	32.78%	17.48%
1984	9.66%	33.25%	17.44%
1985	10.03%	33.77%	17.26%
1986	11.30%	35.12%	16.66%
1987	12.32%	36.90%	15.63%
1988	15.16%	39.45%	14.93%
1989	14.19%	39.27%	14.96%
1990	14.00%	38.77%	15.03%
1991	12.99%	38.20%	15.13%
1992	14.23%	39.23%	14.92%
1993	13.79%	39.05%	14.92%
1994	13.80%	39.19%	14.89%
1995	14.60%	40.16%	14.54%
1996	16.04%	41.59%	14.08%
1997	17.38%	42.83%	13.84%
1998	18.47%	43.77%	13.67%
1999	19.51%	44.89%	13.25%
2000	20.81%	46.01%	12.99%
2001	17.58%	43.11%	13.81%
2002	16.12%	41.77%	14.23%
2003	16.77%	42.36%	13.99%
2004	19.00%	44.35%	13.42%
2005	21.20%	46.44%	12.83%
AVG	15.90%	40.97%	14.50%
% CHGE	+251%	+145%	-28%

What seems clear to me is that REDISTRIBUTION OF WEALTH has already taken place. After looking at these statistics, do you still love “Trickle Down” Economics? Do you really want to relinquish your right to vote? Do you want to turn over your future to the CEOs of corporations? Do you want to be a working bee, forever toiling to bring wealth and comfort to the very wealthy?

If you answer yeas to any of this then you deserve to have Republicans close the gap and destroy our democracy, our country and eventually US AMERICANS as human beings and turn us into the slaves of a very small number of privileged individuals.

MadisonWorld: A Future Where Corporations Have Human Rights ... And Humans Don't

I think that Richard (RJ) Eskow expresses it very eloquently in this article:

Today we saw state troopers in Madison tearing peaceful protestors out of their own capitol after the Senate voted to deprive them of their rights. Video footage of that event should come with a label: Brought to you by the State of Wisconsin, a wholly owned subsidiary of Koch Industries.

RIght now Wisconsin is serving as the prototype for United States 2.0, a newly reconstituted nation where corporations have all the rights of personhood without any of the responsibilities - and people have all the duties of personhood without any of the rights.

Welcome to your future. They're preparing it for you right now in America's heartland.

The Madison Experiment

Think of Madison as a laboratory where the nation's billionaires are field-testing the roll-out of their latest product: a quasi-democratic state where government exists exclusively to execute decisions made by corporate interests. The purpose of any field test is to find the bugs in any product before it goes into wider distribution. Maybe the team was a little surprised at the level of pushback they got. But hey,that's what tests are for.

Whenever human rights are being revoked, the fail-safe mechanism is always the use of excessive force. Madison's no exception. As you watch the video of demonstrators below, listen as the onlookers ask the troopers why peaceful citizens are being removed if they haven't committed a crime. Nobody answers.

The First Amendment of the United States Constitution provides "the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations in 1948, states that "Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association." But human rights are incompatible with the self-interests of the corporate state. That's why we're seeing these steps to strip people of their rights to assemble and negotiate on their own behalf.

It's also why Gov. Walker is violating the state's own open government law by refusing to release his Administration's emails. One of the tests being conducted in Madison is this one: How far can a government go in stripping people of their rights? The citizens of Wisconsin are part of the experiment.

So are you.

But do I really believe that there's an experiment underway? Do I think of Madison as if it were a scene from a science-fiction movie, where hidden forces are guiding events and studying the outcomes? No ... and yes. There's no secret control room beneath a mountain or in orbit around the planet, of course ... at least I don't think there is ... but Wisconsin's legislation was drafted in corporate (and especially Koch) funded groups where legislators were indoctrinated into the corporate mode of governance, and the sales pitch behind it was honed by paid consultants and advisors. And although that "control room' may not exist, a lot of people are very, very interested in the outcome. You should be, too.

My friends at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies[1] like to have stimulating debates about questions like "Will artificial intelligences be treated as 'persons' in the future?" Right now the question seems to be, will people?

I, Corporation

Corporations, on the other hand, don't need to worry.

Wisconsin's Republican government owes a deep debt of gratitude to its corporate benefactors. Those corporate interests, in turn, can thank the Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling for giving them the ability to inject unlimited capital into an election. That decision was based on a radical expansion of a legal theory called "corporate personhood."

United States law has recognized that corporations can hold limited "personal" rights, especially the right to enter into contracts, for nearly two hundred years. But Citizens United,which was crafted in right-wing think tanks, radically extended the "personhood" concept by casting two new ideas in stone: First, that corporations have the right of "free speech," and second, that money is a form of speech.

Environmental advocates tried to grant limited personhood to animals and even plants a while back, in an attempt to protect the environment. There was even a legal essay called "Should Trees Have Standing?" The idea never went anywhere. Let's face it: Trees can't throw around the kind of money the Koch Brothers have at their disposal.

Corporations now hold one of the dearest human rights a citizen possesses - that of free speech - with none of the responsibilities. No corporation has even been "jailed" for manslaughter, or felony theft, or reckless endangerment. The Wall Street crime wave that wrecked the economy led to no criminal indictments for bankers or banks - just minor financial penalties that were borne by corporate stockholders.

America's leading financial executives - prominent figures like JPMorgan Chase's Jamie Dimon and GE's Jeffrey Immelt - have presided over corporations that are serial lawbreakers, with rap sheets so long they couldn't get bonded to mop floors. But there's no "three strikes and you're out" law for corporations.

If there were, Koch Industries would have been disbanded long ago. It's been on a multi-year crime spree that would have resulted in a prison sentence if it had been committed by a human. The list is impressive: A "guilty" plea to charges that it illegally dumped aviation fuel into Mississippi River wetlands and dumped a million gallons of wastewater laced with ammonia into the Mississippi River A half-million-dollar fine after a jury found it guilty of stealing oil from Native American lands and repeatedly lying about it. A fine for pipeline spills in Texas that leaked more than three million gallons of oil. A $20 million settlement for covering up violations of environmental regulations. A $25 million fine for improperly taking too much oil from Federal and Native American land. A $200,000 penalty for selling crude oil to a foreign country without the proper authorization http:. A $1.7 million penalty from the EPA.

Human felons can't even vote, but felonious companies can buy elections - no matter how many crimes they've committed.

Funny, isn't it? As soon as the Democrats gained power a case is filed that makes it to the Supreme Court, overturning campaign finance limits. Maybe that was a happy accident for corporate America, a lucky break at just the right time. But billionaires become billionaires by making their own luck, not by waiting for fortune to smile upon them.

We now know that the Koch brothers like to host meetings with fellow right-wingers to "review strategies for combating the mutltitude of public policies that threaten to destroy America as we know it." And we know a couple of Supreme Court justices attended the Kochs' latest meeting. ("CitizensUnited" was a 5-4 victory for the corporations.)

Of course, it could just be coincidence.

America Inc: The Org Chart

Next week Republican politicians from Wisconsin will be attending a lobbyist fundraiser in Washington where they'll collect fat checks and no doubt receive their marching orders. This gala event is being organized by BGR Group, the lobbying outfit set up by Haley Barbour before he accepted a demotion to the field - it's called "taking one for the team" - and became the Republican Governor of Mississippi. Once in office he was surprisingly receptive to Federal aid after the BP oil spill, even though studiously avoided blaming corporate criminal BP for the damage it caused to his state.

BGR Group has represented big banks and energy companies, and has helped make life easier for a host of corporate clients. In true Beltway fashion, it proudly boasts that it's "bipartisan."

Father of the Koch brothers pictured here with John Birch Society luminaries

Meanwhile the Koch Brothers have "quietly" opened a government relations/lobbying office in Madison. And why not? It's important to keep a close eye on your investments. The Koch Brothers insist they're just good citizens worried about "policies that could destroy America as we know it." But then, one of their http://www.kochfertilizer.com/ ">corporate websites

tells us that the Koch empire is "one of the world's largest producers and marketers of ... fertilizers."

No disagreement here.

The Corporations and special interests have at their disposal an entire cable channel that has a very large audience of misinformed, uneducated, racist and ignorant viewers. It is their base and it is how they get their power.

One Dollar, One Vote

The reclusive oil billionaire H. L. Hunt reportedly thought that every American's right to vote should be weighted based on how much money he had. Hunt's dream is about to become a reality.

Unions are one of the few bulwarks against corporate corruption in politics. They can sit at the table with politicians and use their leverage to counteract the corporations' influence, serving as a voice for that vast majority of Americans who are employees and not wealthy business owners. That's the real reason the corporate oligarchy is targeting the unions. They've been pretty blatant about their real goals in Wisconsin, with Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald saying things like this:

"(If) the money is not there under the auspices of the unions, certainly what you're going to find is President Obama is going to have a much difficult, much more difficult time getting elected and winning the state of Wisconsin."

They want the money that drives political power to flow from one source, and one source only: America's corporations. And Madison is the proving ground for destroying any organized opposition to their corporatist agenda.

The Wisconsin state motto is "Forward," and the rest of the nation may very well follow. But which way are they going? Their state is being used as the proving ground for United States 2.0. What kind of future are the Governor and his fellow Republicans leading us all toward? The answer can be found in what someone said a long, long time ago:

Follow the money.

Lady Liberty no longer resides at the entrance of New York Harbor...she is now a homeless bag lady

_____________________

[1] I'm a "Affiliated Scholar" at the IEET. That's a vague, unpaid affiliation that basically says we're friends and respect one another. (At least that's my interpretation.)

SOURCE: http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/2011031010/draft

Dwight D. Eisenhower, Republican President who today would be considered too liberal for the tastes of the Teahadist-Republican ultra right wing.

Score one for the rich, 0 for the rest of us.

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. - President Dwight Eisenhower.

Eisenhower also warned us about “The Military Industrial Complex” and how pervasive and hurtful it could grow and destroy our country. The CLASS WARFARE is real and so far the rich, the corporations have won.

I would like to post parts of this article written by David Mizner this past January 24^th titled The Bloody Front in the Class War

“It seems that more and more progressives are focusing on the class war. That's the good news. The bad news: it seems that fewer and fewer progressives are focusing on class war's partner in crime, militarism. Make no mistake: Actual War = Class War. A good way to prevent war would be to win, or at least hold our own, in the class war, but we need to go at it from the other end as well: oppose the militarism that's gobbling up our resources, killing people from the unlucky classes, and helping to entrench the oligarchy.

The Budget Connection. This is the probably the most obvious link. More money for war and the machinery of war means less money for jobs, education, and everything else that constitutes a decent society. The military accounts for 54% of the country's discretionary spending, 19% of all spending, and 47% of all military spending worldwide. That's right: the U.S. spends almost as much on its military as the rest of the world combined.

Much of that money goes not directly to wars but to weapons and to the maintenance of the American military empire. But the cost of our wars is staggering. Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes put out a book arguing that the cost of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq would be three trillion dollars. Turns out, they were way off. It was too low. The new estimate is 4 to 6 trillion. (Wars are funded mostly through supplemental spending bills, which aren't included in the defense budget, and they also drain from the Department of Veterans Affairs and a range of other government sources.)

Four to six trillion for war while around the country states are unpaving roads, shutting off street lights, and shortening school years. It's hardly hyperbolic to say that the United States is destroying itself by maintaining its obscene military might. This is how powerful nations crumble.

The U.S. clearly has reached the point of imperial overreach. Military spending and debt-servicing are cannibalizing the U.S. economy, the real basis of its world power. Besides the late U.S.S.R., the U.S. also increasingly resembles the dying British Empire in 1945, crushed by immense debts incurred to wage the Second World War, unable to continue financing or defending the imperia, yet still imbued with imperial pretensions.

It is increasingly clear the President is not in control of America’s runaway military juggernaut. Sixty years ago, the great President Dwight Eisenhower, whose portrait I keep by my desk, warned Americans to beware of the military-industrial complex. Six decades later, partisans of permanent war and world domination have joined Wall Street’s money lenders to put America into thrall.”

The Corporate Connection. But where do all those dollars go? Many, if not most, go to contractors; oil companies benefit as well and then there is The Human Connection, Which is to say that people without much money are fighting and getting maimed and killing and dying and doing who knows what kind of damage to their psyches in wars that benefit rich people. And all this while we give the super rich and corporations obscene tax cuts.

And let’s not even talk about the oil interests. It has been abundantly clear that wars are good for oil companies. Unrest in the Middle East gives them just another excuse to jack up the price of oil…rather than doing so arbitrarily and without reason as they have done in the past. Oil companies are the main reason we will not be able to realize our dreams of becoming energy independent. Many really believe that we don’t have the technology or that it would take many years to accomplish; yet, a country like Brazil, third world-poor and backwards back in the 70s did just that when they converted all their vehicles to run on Ethanol and built the largest hydroelectric dam in the world. If Brazil could do it more than 30 years ago, why then couldn’t America do half of that?

The War on Drugs, the War on Terror, have become cottage industries that maintain an infrastructure of parasites that benefit from the jobs they do in these endeavors. “The Terror War is not an event, or a campaign, or even a crusade; it is a system. Its purpose is not to eliminate "terrorism" (however this infinitely elastic term is defined) but to perpetuate itself, to do what it does: make war. This system can be immensely rewarding, in many different ways, for those who operate or assist it, whether in government, media, academia, or business. This too is a self-sustaining dynamic, a feedback loop that gives money, power and attention to those who serve the system; this elevated position then allows them to accrue even more money, power and attention, until in the end -- as we can plainly see today -- any alternative voices and viewpoints are relegated to the margins. They are "unserious." They are unimportant. They are not allowed to penetrate or alter the operations of the system.”

The article further points out: “The rich must be overjoyed with the War on Terror, which has locked the country into a permanent state of war, a self-perpetuating upward redistribution of wealth. The rich make war to make money, and the war makes more war, which makes the rich more money.

PHOTO SOURCE: http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.visitingdc.com/images/dwight-eisenhower-picture.