h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Enron was a great pioneer in all this commodity manipulation, financial derivatives, credit default swaps, off - shoring, share price manipulation. According to wiki, Fortune named Enron "America's Most Innovative Company" for six consecutive years.

Well, yes. But the concept of (jargon alert) The Alienation of Wealth is not new.

Well it is all very well for "us" in the "developed world" to take the high ground and complain about the end of our subsidised living that evolved with the twentieth century drift to socialised states where there is redistibution of wealth which has created a feeling of entitlement to an affluent lifestyle according to global and historical norms..


Investment bankers could argue that the investments that are going into former Communist and Socialist lands in order to make "lands of opportunity" there and begin to raise the material standards of living are at least equal in moral terms to continuing to fund a selfish and self-centred "Western world".

And one of the major features on investment theory, that applied to the UK in the later Nineteenth Century, is that investment quite naturally is attracted first to those schemes that offer the greatest return. And that as an economy develops the investment possibilities go down.


Thus things like Marshall Aid used in the European Recovery Programme helped to produce staggering rates of economic growth in Europe that was re-building more or less from the rubble. But the UK economy and its infrastructure had not been reduced to effective zero in the same way, so British politics was often plagued by inappropriate concern over % growth in GDP and a blame game- was it the fault of the managers or the workers or the politicians.

At the same time the USA had been rescued from the Depression of the Thirties and turned into "The Workshop of the Free World" by the Second World War. The ERP was one way of giving Europe the wherewithal to carry on buying goods and materials from the USA.

But now that Europe (Western) has finished "playing catch up", things like the massive investment funds necessary to provide for its increasing populations of Old Age Pensioners must look for the financial returns that will keep us in the manner to which we have become accustomed to expect in this "From the Cradle to the Grave" socialised state tradition.

Cass

News from Occupy:

http://www.yesmagazine.org/blogs/brooke-jarvis/occupy-takes-on-alec

Occupy Takes On ALEC

"Remember Wisconsin’s union-busting Budget Repair Bill, the one that brought hundreds of thousands of people into the streets of Madison—and was then partially reproduced in Ohio and other states? What about Arizona’s SB-1070, the “show-me-your-papers” bill that prompted national boycotts of the state, but was quickly copied by Alabama, Georgia, and Utah?

"It’s no accident that these bills—as well as a wave of state-level legislation to target reproductive rights, to privatize schools, or to create barriers to vote—spread as widely or as quickly as they did. They were all helped along by the American Legislative Exchange Council, better known as ALEC."

Also, today is March 5, stay tuned for news of student protests.

Occupyh2g2

What is sad is that American History seems to keep repeating itself.

The American Dream really began with people going to the New World in order to escape from the problems of the Old World and find space where everyone could "do their own thing" within their own homestead or "tribal" community. It created a ready made "divide and rule" situation and made the USA such a ready-made victim for the worst excesses of "pure" and unrestrained Capitalism.

It was the reason why the Quakers enlisted William Wilberforce to campaign against the Slave Trade in its new deregulated "pile them high sell them cheap" manifestation. They feared the whole USA being turned into one huge slave-plantation economy.

And then there was the immigration and oil boom of the end of the Nineteenth Century when the USA already had to fight a struggle, led by campaigning "muck-raking" journalists, to expose the excesses of corporatism, chronyism and the dictatorship of "dollar-millionaires".

But then the New World started with a rejection of all but conveniently selected bits of Western Civilization. The error is to bother to look to the USA as any indication of "the way ahead" for humanity. Americans chose to get lost in the wilderness prefering God's savagery to that of Europe at the dawn of the modern age. They are a "warning from history".

Cass

What is sad is that American History seems to keep repeating itself.

The American Dream really began with people going to the New World in order to escape from the problems of the Old World and find space where everyone could "do their own thing" within their own homestead or "tribal" community. It created a ready made "divide and rule" situation and made the USA such a ready-made victim for the worst excesses of "pure" and unrestrained Capitalism.

It was the reason why the Quakers enlisted William Wilberforce to campaign against the Slave Trade in its new deregulated "pile them high sell them cheap" manifestation. They feared the whole USA being turned into one huge slave-plantation economy.

And then there was the immigration and oil boom of the end of the Nineteenth Century when the USA already had to fight a struggle, led by campaigning "muck-raking" journalists, to expose the excesses of corporatism, chronyism and the dictatorship of "dollar-millionaires".

But then the New World started with a rejection of all but conveniently selected bits of Western Civilization. The error is to bother to look to the USA as any indication of "the way ahead" for humanity. Americans chose to get lost in the wilderness prefering God's savagery to that of Europe at the dawn of the modern age. They are a "warning from history".

Cass

Sorry I am repeating myself.. I must be pressing Post instead of Preview.

Cass

Live streaming from OccupySF:

http://www.ustream.tv/jeffkloy#utm_campaign=ss-post-backlink

ran across an interesting article that said in part
Occupy Wall Street and its working groups, including Occupy the SEC, were supposed to be dead, in case you missed the obituaries. Now the protesters are messing with detractors’ heads with the emergence of a media-savvy collection of legal, banking and activist members who come off as sane and authoritative. This is not the way the Occupy bashers’ “welfare-bum hippies” propaganda script was supposed to play out.

On Feb. 13, seven writers who described themselves as “concerned citizens, activists and financial professionals” filed a 325-page comment letter to financial regulators, outlining their concerns about loopholes in the “Let’s Try to Avoid the Next Financial Crisis” proposal known as the Volcker rule.

It was among the longest and most detailed of 16,000 letters sent to the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Reserve Board, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency during the public-comment period.

yay

hack the planet! (Hackers)
fire everything! (Star Trek)

occupy!
occupy!
Oc U Pi!

Meanwhile in NYC the cdops say no you don't.
http://usnews.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/03/18/10739470-theyre-back-dozens-of-occupy-wall-street-protesters-arrested-at-6-month-mark

A general strike in the US on May Day (tomorrow). Does anyone know what is going on? Are the unions involved? Is it getting coverage in the MSM?

http://occupywallst.org/article/may-day/

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/social/kernalsan/may-day-denver-occupy-den_n_1458863_150942832.html

There's been no coverage that I've seen or heard about it.

I'll also note that there has been little to no coverage of the student protests in Montreal this side of the border as well.