Maximum Wage for Greedy People like Bankers? Bring it on!

Saturday, 22 August 2009 Compass High Pay Commission Campaign Compass are running a campaign for a High Pay Commission to balance the Low Pay Commission that led to the minimum wage. They have a statement that anyone in support of it can sign. This is the web address where you can read the statement and sign it in support, if you wish:

http://www.compassonline.org.uk/…ign.asp?n=5246

The greed of the bankers has shown a maximum wage is needed. Let us support it. It’s fair.

Source: askwhyblogger.blogspot.com

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Tags: Culture | United States | World | BANKERS | United Kingdom | US Politics | compass | UK Politics | maximum wage

Obama the Commie?

Entering his rallies to the tune of Rocky, John McCain was telling the US electorate that his rival and now President elect, Barack Obama, would bring socialism into the White House. McCain, a peculiarly amiable man for a Republican presidential candidate, seems to think the whole US electorate are as pea brained as his keenest supporters.

Socialism requires the commanding heights of the economy, like the banks, to be publicly owned, not just publicly subsidized. The disastrous Bush-Cheney policies of the last eight years almost brought the administration to the point of taking over the commanding heights, but, though falling short, came closer to bringing in socialism than any liberal administration dare! And if the Republicans can find a use for socialism, then shouldn’t Americans begin to think it is not as gruesome as it is portrayed.

Republican supporters are so empty headed and closed minded that they still, despite the Bush years of economic negligence, indulgence, and crookery, cannot see that capitalism needs regulating, and properly regulating capitalism is not socialism but correct governance—it is just that fat cat Republicans do not want regulating. They want to do just as they like, and that is not necessarily, or even likely, to be the best for the nation as a whole.

Shouting, “Obama’s a commie!” can only cheer up the rip off crowd of gangsters, banksters and arms dealers that own America. The denigration of socialists and communists is a tactic meant to keep Joe the plumber and other ordinary Joes hating each other instead of regulating the mega rich. Anyone who wants fairness or progress are labeled commies and socialists and thus discredited, when they are the people America needs to resolve the problems the Political Right has brought over many decades.

You need not be a Marxist to benefit from reading Marx, any more than you need to be a Christian to benefit from reading the gospels. Marxism is often called a Christian heresy, heretical not because it rejects the practical teaching of Christ, but because it has been diluted in miracles and supernaturalism. Like it or not, on practical matters, both are concerned that human society continues to neglect and abandon the poor and the meek. Republicans are fond of identifying themselves with Christianity, but they have no compassion for the poor, only contempt, whereas Christ had deep sympathy for them, and remained poor himself, not even having a place to rest his head.

Obama seems as indoctrinated by the modern evangelical distortions of Christianity as the McCain supporter, but, if he has read some Marx, he will understand the causes of poverty today, and that does not make him wicked. There is nothing unChristian about the redistribution of wealth. The apostles did it themselves as a condition of being a follower of Christ, holding all things common. Later Christians were encouraged to help the poor by giving them alms, because the poor, as “The Blessed”, were received immediately into heaven, and would put in a good word for the rich who had helped them in life. The modern rich have obscene wealth while, even in the US, people like the poor of New Orleans, after Katrina, are left destitute and uncared for.

The typical Republican does not understand the fundamentals of capitalism itself, let alone a more caring social system. Capitalism requires money to be circulated not hoarded by a few disgustingly wealthy men and their families. The rich do not need to spend any new dollar they get, but the poor have no choice. Extra money given to the poor therefore circulates. They spend their extra dollar in small shops and local supermarkets, so the local suppliers and small businesses benefit. Money doled out is never wasted. It always lifts the small supplier and they source their businesses in the bigger supplier. In the end the rich also get better off! In economics, it is called the multiplier. Every dollar given to the poor in a recession is the equivalent of five or ten dollars to the economy. If the rich spend their dollar, it will be on villas abroad, foreign fashion houses, costly jewels, or yachts, and Joe will see nothing of it, unless he’s particularly lucky.

A CEO said in the election:

The worst thing for the markets would be Obama getting assassinated. The second worst think would be McCain getting elected.

Well, Obama got elected, and he and his advisors face the worst imaginable economic conditions. The US federal deficit has gone from modest after the prudence of the last Democratic administration to catastrophic after eight Republican years—one $trillion guestimated for 2009, and the banks have already been propped up to the tune of $trillions. Republicans bail out rich banksters with public money while accusing Democrats of being socialists!

The country needs a fraction of that money made available to the poor, enterprise organizations in poor districts, and small businesses everywhere to put money in at the roots and get the poor working. A tax on obscene wealth would pay for it, so the average American can only benefit. Instead of being insulated from downturns, the wealthy will get a vested interest in avoiding them, because they will have to pay for the recovery. When businesses start to recover, when they start to do well, the shareholders do well too, and so the wealthy get repaid by the success of the lower levels of the economy! This is not communism! It is a New Deal!

New Deal worked! New Deal is Obama’s promise—tax cuts to couples earning below $25000. McCain would have given them nothing! Couples on $500,000 pay $6000 a year to help the nation—just over 1% of their income. The mega rich on £5,000,000 and above pay only 5%, hardly a crippling amount for them, now is it? And they get it all back in the upturn. What is sinful about that? Christ almighty would have thought it too timid. McCain promised a tax cut of $125000 a year for the top 1% of dollar earners. Obama wants to tax them an extra $20,000 dollars. “Give all ye have to the poor”, Christ said, so the wealthy are getting off very lightly, indeed.

An even better way to pay for the recovery and to lower the deficit would be by cutting the military budget. The present war has allegedly cost $3 trillion! How can the country afford trillions for banksters and $trillions more for weapons manufacturers when it claims it has no money for poor families in a crisis? If helping them economically to help the nation is Marxist, then pray that Obama is one!

US Christian Party Robs the Poor to Save the Rich

The Great Society of capitalism and scourge of socialism, the USA Republican government, has suddenly found itself nationalizing the commanding heights of the economy! It is handing out trillions of dollars to the backers of the Republican party, the USA treasury itself being backed by trillions of dollars from Communist China. Is the US elector likely to get a tad suspicious that they have been taken for a ride for decades? It is not a bit likely. McCain-Palin are still taken seriously by the US electorate, who seem immune to economic sense as well as common sense. Both McCain and Palin boast they believe in Genesis, an account of the creation of the world written in Syria almost 3000 years ago. With leaders like that, can anyone be surprised when the Republican administration demonstrates that it knows only how to bail out crooked billionaires?

Michael Hudson, Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City and author of Super-Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire and of The Myth of Aid, wrote online at Global Researcher that economic theory used to explain that profits and interest were a return for calculated risk. The new Republican economics is based on “computerized gambling on the direction of interest rates, foreign currencies and stock prices”. Except that no gambling is involved because, when gigantic losses on bad bets have to be paid, the Republican administration suddenly finds bottomless coffers of dollar as bailouts to the gamblers—many of them Republican campaign contributors!

On Friday, 19 September 2008, the White House promised an alleged $700 billion, in addition to the trillions of dollars—a doubling of America’s national debt—already committed on 7 September in the nationalization of Fanny Mae and Freddie Mac, “to support junk mortgages fraudulently issued beyond the ability of debtors to pay, and above the market price of the collateral pledged”. Yet Bush spoke as if the Martians had landed, not that his best pals had suddenly realized they had lost their mortgage repayments in the local Christian owned casino:

We must act now to protect our nation’s economic health from serious risk… There will be ample opportunity to debate the origins of this problem. Now is the time to solve it… In our nation’s history there have been moments that require us to come together across party lines to address major challenges. This is such a moment.

The Republicans do not want anyone, Republican or Democrat, to think about the origins of the problem before Congress has committed the bailout money. “There is no time to make the biggest bailout in election history an election issue”, not immediately before the presidential election. Secretary to the Treasury, Paulson, echoed more of the same half-witted propaganda, the very guff that the US electorate can be relied upon to soak up:

Our economic health requires that we work together for prompt, bipartisan action.

The Paulson-Bernanke plan will underwrite the banks selling off the homes of five million home mortgage debtors faced with default or foreclosure. The fraudsters in the finance corporations lose nothing, but the poor who were sold unrealistic mortgages will lose everything. The Federal Reserve will let the lending agencies refinance the junk mortgages by effectively writing off the difference between the mortgage and the collateral property. Then the gambling swings and roundabouts can continue for awhile, Republicans will get campaign gratitude money, and, with a bit of temporary electoral relief and gullibility, they might even win the Presidential race.

The Republicans are treating this handout of free public money like they treated the lead up to the Iraq war, with myths, lies and desperate urgency thrown in to panic a quick and ill-thought through decision, and the same people that warned the country about weapons of mass destruction are behind the operation. The solution has little relation to the underlying cause of the problem, what Warren Buffett called “weapons of mass financial destruction”.

Irresponsible, or fraudulent companies have paid out revenue to their financial managers, insiders, stockholders and political candidates on committees deciding the nation’s financial regulation, instead of putting it in reserves. Now, they are to be rewarded for their enterprise, either from the Freddies, Fannies and AIGs, or from their Federal Treasury—ok! From the Treasury!

Why should these gamblers be bailed out, if they had enough to lose without having to become public wards by going on welfare? Hedge fund trading was limited to the very rich, for investment banks and other institutional investors. But it became one of the easiest ways to make money, loaning funds at interest for people to pay out of their computer-driven cross-trades. And almost as fast as it was made, this revenue was paid out in commissions, salaries and annual bonuses.

The recipients of these speculative profits did not even have to pay normal income tax on it. Speculating with other people’s money should not even be legal, but at least speculative profits should be taxed at a higher rate than legitimate profits. These profits are tagged as “capital gains”, and the tax rate is therefore much more favourable. Voters will be told why it is in the public interest to bail out these gamblers.

Good rhetoric is needed to explain why the government should let them go into a casino and let them keep all their winnings while using public funds to make good on the losses of their counterparties.

Hudson says the US Treasury and Federal Reserve have changed American capitalism overnight and irreversibly—“if they can get away with it”. The class FDR called “banksters” have orchestrated a coup d’Etat. It is:

the largest and most inequitable transfer of wealth since the land giveaways to the railroad barons during the Civil War era.

So what do the Christian Right have to say about all this? Presumably nothing, because their God, made in their own image, is just as crooked as the campaign financiers of their God-sent party. Christians always beef about personal pecadillos they do not approve of, but they never have anything to say about serious crime. They must approve of that!