The New Capitalist Pyramid
A cartoon from the early part of the 20th Century by an IWW artist gives a power analysis in graphic form. It also underlines the slogan “We are the many, and they are the few!”
It is a graphic some of you may have seen before, but how many of you knew it was a IWW original?
A short history of the US branch of the most revolutionary mass organisation in American history, the Industrial Workers of the World union, the IWW.
The IWW changed American trade unionism forever, being the first big union to organise black and white across entire industries, and calling for the abolition of the wage system and industrial democracy. It was largely defeated by a massive campaign of repression launched by bosses and the government
A ‘Wobbly’ 20th Century ......and a much worse 21st.....
.......“The name for our profits is democracy” –
"I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. . . . corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed."- Lincoln, Nov 21, 1864
"War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small 'inside' group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes." - Smedley Butler, "War Is a Racket" (1935)
This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence — economic, political, even spiritual — is felt in every city, every statehouse, every office of the federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society. Dwight Eisenhower, Jan 17, 1961
"The high office of the President has been used to foment a plot to destroy the American people's freedom, and before I leave office, I must inform the citizens of this plight." JFK, Nov 12, 1963
“The name for our profits is democracy” –.......
Historian Edmund S. Morgan pointed out, “For those with eyes to see, there was an obvious lesson in the rebellion. Resentment of an alien race might be more powerful than resentment of an upper class.”[5]
Edward Bernays, the grand master of propaganda stated: “We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized.”[6]
The government and their compliant corporate press mold and manage our perceptions and prefer that we focus our anger and attention on numerous distractions – the illegal aliens, illusive terrorists, same-sex marriages, welfare recipients, North Korean testing, whether the CIA lied or was it Pelosi, Islamic fundamentalism, whether torture photos should be released or the current Supreme Court nominee, as if one court appointment can change the political landscape. The fact is that the government Elite set up this entire environment of contention to divert our attention from their treacherous unconstitutional, criminal activities – in both parties. This is all part of America’s drive into a One World Order, now hyper accelerated under the current administration.
You might ask – how did government Elites create the current environment. Decades ago the government abandoned the constitutional principles of non entanglement with foreign countries. Government officials are no longer public servants but private servants to deep-pocketed multinational corporations whose money keeps ego-driven politicians in power. Those same multinational corporations control the media flow of information in order to keep the people in an ignorant trance. Character-challenged politicians, mesmerized by power and money, cater to the insatiable greed of the privileged Elite under the pretext of spreading democracy, ousting cruel dictators, restricting the spread of Communism, Nazism, Fascism or terrorism.
The CIA created al Qaeda, the database and instigated Islamic fundamentalism by training 100,000 fundamentalist Muslim Mujahadeen. The CIA-friendly Zbigniew Brzezinski revealed that, unbeknownst to the American public and Congress, that Trilateralist Jimmy Carter authorized $500 million on July 3, 1979 to create an international terrorist movement that would spread Islamic fundamentalism throughout Central Asia in order to destabilize the Soviet Union, another made-in-America enemy that had served the purpose of its creation and now had to be dismantled. The CIA called this Operation Cyclone and functioned from 1979 to 1989 at a cost of $20-30 million per year beginning in 1980 which rose to $630 million per year in 1987. The U.S. poured another $4 billion into setting up Islamic training schools in Pakistan (Taliban means student). Young zealots were recruited and sent to the CIA's spy training camp in Virginia, where future members of al Qaeda were taught sabotage skills – terrorism. Young Afghans, Egyptian and Jordanian Arabs and some African American Muslims were instructed in the latest sabotage skills.[7]
Taxpayer funds financed the I-hate-America textbooks for Muslim students. Prior to 1967, Islamic fundamentalism was a relatively small movement. In the early 1980’s, the U.S. Agency for International Development (AID) gave a taxpayer funded grant to the University of Nebraska-Omaha and it’s Center for Afghanistan Studies to develop specialized textbooks. For more than twenty years the U.S. spent millions of dollars producing fanatical Islamic schoolbooks for distribution in Afghanistan, a country now known for its terrorist training camps. The schoolbooks, used throughout the 1990s for the country’s core curriculum, included illustrations of guns, bullets, soldiers, and mines to indoctrinate young minds towards violent destruction. Who authorized this hateful instruction for young impressionable minds?[8]
For $190,000 a year, Donald Rumsfeld sat on the board and “attended nearly all of the board meetings” of the Swiss-based ABB Company between 1990 and February 2001.[9] In 2000 (based on a Clinton era contract) ABB sold $200 million worth of components to North Korea to allow construction of two nuclear reactors. Currently, there are concerns about their activities. In December 1983 and again in March 1984, Ronald Reagan sent his personal emissary, Donald Rumsfeld, a former Secretary of Defense, to meet with Saddam Hussein along with Reagan’s handwritten note. This first meeting, on December 20, 1983, was for the reestablishment of diplomatic relations between Iraq and the United States, the first since the 1967 war. We formally restored diplomatic relations with Iraq in November 1984. Then, Rumsfeld and his corporate cronies secretly supplied Saddam's military with the components to build chemical and biological weapons. Rumsfeld is just one example from dozens of Elites who repeatedly shift from boardroom to government office while stuffing their pockets from both positions.
David Rockefeller admitted in his relatively-recent book: “For more than a century, ideological extremists at either end of the political spectrum have seized upon well-publicized incidents such as my encounter with Castro to attack the Rockefeller family for the inordinate influence they claim we wield over American political and economic institutions. Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as 'internationalists' and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure - one world, if you will. If that is the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it.”[10] What further proof do we need of a pervasive conspiracy – just look at the mounting evidence and forget the mesmerizing, feel-good political jargon emanating from Washington.....
Now, Universa Investments L.P - a hedge fund affiliated with Nassim Nicholas Taleb - is making a big bet that we'll get hyperinflation.
Are they right, or are the jumping the gun in calling for runaway inflation?
I'm not sure, partly because it is impossible to know how many of the trillions of dollars in various bailout programs are being spent by the financial giants. If they are sitting on them as reserves - to weather the upcoming alt-a mortgage and commercial real estate meltdowns, credit default swap pay outs, and other financial hits - then the bailout dollars are not actually being put back in the economy, the money velocity is not increasing (i.e. dollars are not changing hands quickly), and inflation is still a ways off.
On the other hand, if those dollars are being spent anywhere in the economy, then the magnitude of dollars doled out by the government (and other governments) could quickly ignite runaway inflation.
Mish is my favorite writer continuing to argue for deflation . I think that Mish will be about a month late in calling inflation (since he was ahead of almost everyone in seeing deflation coming, and will probably not comment on inflation until it is a fait accompli). So if Mish even hints that we may start to see inflation, I'll make an immediate call for imminent hyperinflation.....
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