=By=
Chris Hedges

Corporate colonization proceeding as planned.

A decade ago left-wing governments, defying Washington and global corporations, took power in Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, Venezuela, Uruguay, Bolivia and Ecuador. It seemed as if the tide in Latin America was turning. The interference by Washington and exploitation by international corporations might finally be defeated. Latin American governments, headed by charismatic leaders such as Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Brazil, Evo Morales in Bolivia and Rafael Correa in Ecuador, won huge electoral victories. They instituted socialist reforms that benefited the poor and the working class. They refused to be puppets of the United States. They took control of their nations’ own resources and destinies. They mounted the first successful revolt against neoliberalism and corporate domination. It was a revolt many in the United States hoped to emulate here.

But the movements and governments in Latin America have fallen prey to the dark forces of U.S. imperialism and the wrath of corporate power. The tricks long practiced by Washington and its corporate allies have returned—the black propaganda; the manipulation of the media; the bribery and corruption of politicians, generals, police, labor leaders and journalists; the legislative coups d’état; the economic strangulation; the discrediting of democratically elected leaders; the criminalization of the left; and the use of death squads to silence and disappear those fighting on behalf of the poor. It is an old, dirty game.

President Correa, who earned enmity from Washington for granting political asylum to Julian Assange four years ago and for closing the United States’ Manta military air base in 2009, warned recently that a new version of Operation Condor is underway in Latin America. Operation Condor, which operated in the 1970s and ’80s, saw thousands of labor union organizers, community leaders, students, activists, politicians, diplomats, religious leaders, journalists and artists tortured, assassinated and disappeared. The intelligence chiefs from right-wing regimes in Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay, Uruguay and, later, Brazil had overseen the campaigns of terror. They received funds from the United States and logistical support and training from the Central Intelligence Agency. Press freedom, union organizing, all forms of artistic dissent and political opposition were abolished. In a coordinated effort these regimes brutally dismembered radical and leftist movements across Latin America. In Argentina alone 30,000 people disappeared.

Photo by daniel.julia

Latin America looks set to be plunged once again into a period of dictatorial control and naked corporate exploitation. The governments of Ecuador, Bolivia and Venezuela, which is on the brink of collapse, have had to fight off right-wing coup attempts and are enduring economic sabotage. The Brazilian Senate impeached the democratically elected President Dilma Rousseff. Argentina’s new right-wing president, Mauricio Macri, bankrolled by U.S. hedge funds, promptly repaid his benefactors by handing $4.65 billion to four hedge funds, including Elliott Management, run by billionaire Paul Singer. The payout to hedge funds that had bought Argentine debt for pennies on the dollar meant that Singer’s firm made $2.4 billion, an amount that was 10 to 15 times the original investment. The previous Argentine government, under Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, had refused to pay the debt acquired by the hedge funds and acidly referred to them as “vulture funds.”

I interviewed Guillaume Long, Ecuador’s minister of foreign affairs and human mobility, for my show “On Contact” last week. Long, who earned a doctorate from the Institute for the Study of the Americas at the University of London, called at the United Nations for the creation of a global tax regulatory agency. He said such an agency should force tax-dodging corporations, which the International Monetary Fund estimates costs developing countries more than $200 billion a year in lost revenue, to pay the countries for the natural resources they extract and for national losses stemming from often secret corporate deals. He has also demanded an abolition of overseas tax havens.

Long said the neoliberal economic policies of the 1980s and ’90s were profoundly destructive in Latin America. Already weak economic controls were abandoned in the name of free trade and deregulation. International corporations and banks were given a license to exploit. “This deregulation in an already deregulated environment” resulted in anarchy, Long said. “The powerful people had even less checks and balances on their powers,” he said.

“Neoliberalism is bad in most contexts,” Long said when we spoke in New York. “It’s been bad in Europe. It’s been bad in other parts of the world. It has dismantled the welfare state. In the context where we already have a weak state, where institutions are not consolidated, where there are strong feudal remnants, such as in Latin America, where you don’t really have a strong social contract with institutions, with modernity, neoliberalism just shatters any kind of social pact. It meant more poverty, more inequality, huge waves of instability.”

Countries saw basic services, many already inadequate, curtailed or eliminated in the name of austerity. The elites amassed fortunes while almost everyone else fell into economic misery. The political and economic landscape became unstable. Ecuador had seven presidents between 1996 and 2006, the year in which Correa was elected. It suffered a massive banking crisis in 1999. It switched the country’s currency to the U.S. dollar in desperation. The chaos in Ecuador was mirrored in countries such as Bolivia and Argentina. Argentina fell into a depression in 1998 that saw the economy shrink by 28 percent. Over 50 percent of Argentines were thrust into poverty.

“Latin America,” Long said, “hit rock bottom.”

It was out of this neoliberal morass that the left regrouped and took power.

“People came to terms with that moment of their history,” Long said. “They decided to rebuild their societies and fight foreign interventionism and I’d even say imperialism. To this day in Latin America, the main issue is inequality. Latin America is not necessarily the poorest continent in the world. But it’s certainly the most unequal continent in the world.”

“Ecuador is an oil producer,” Long said. “We produce about 530,000 barrels of oil a day. We were getting 20 percent royalties on multinationals extracting oil. Now it’s the other way around. We pay multinationals a fee for extractions. We had to renegotiate all of our oil contracts in 2008 and 2009. Some multinationals refused to abide by the new rules of the game and left the country. So our state oil company moved in and occupied the wells. But most multinationals said OK, we’ll do it, it’s still profitable. So now it’s the other way around. We pay private companies to extract the oil, but the oil is ours.”

[dropcap]L[/dropcap]ong admitted that there have been serious setbacks, but he insisted that the left is not broken.

“It depends on how you measure success,” he said. “If you’re going to measure it in terms of longevity, and how long these governments were in power—in our case we’re still in power, of course, and we’re going to win in February next year—then you’re looking at, more or less in Venezuela 17 years [that leftist governments have been in power], in Ecuador now 10, and in Argentina and Brazil it’s 13.”

“One of the critiques aimed at the left is they’re well-meaning, great people with good ideas but don’t let them govern because the country will go bust,” he said. “But in Ecuador we had really healthy growth rates, 5 to 10 percent a year. We had lots of good economics. We diversified our economy. We moved away from importing 80 percent of energy to [being] net exporters of electricity. We’ve had big reforms in education, in higher education. Lots of things that are economically successful. Whereas neoliberal, orthodox economics was not successful in the previous decade.”

Long conceded that his government had made powerful enemies, not only by granting political asylum to Assange in its embassy in London but by taking Chevron Texaco to court to try to make it pay for the ecological damage its massive oil spills caused in the Amazon, where the company drilled from the early 1960s until it pulled out in 1992. It left behind some 1,000 toxic waste pits. The oil spills collectively were 85 times the size of the British Petroleum spill in the Gulf of Mexico and 18 times the size of the spill from the Exxon Valdez. An Ecuadorean court ordered Chevron Texaco to pay $18.2 billion in damages, an amount later reduced to $9.5 billion. The oil giant, however, has refused to pay. Ecuador has turned to international courts in an attempt to extract the money from the company.

Long said that the different between the massive oil spills elsewhere and the Ecuadorean spills was that the latter were not accidental. “[They were done] on purpose in order to cut costs. They were in the middle of the Amazon. Normally what you’d do is extract the oil and you’d have these membranes so that it doesn’t filter through into the ground. They didn’t put in these membranes. The oil filtered into the water systems. It polluted all of the Amazon River system. It created a huge sanitary and public health issue. There were lots of cancers detected.”

Long said his government was acutely aware that Chevron Texaco has “a lot of lobbying power in the United States, in Wall Street, in Washington.”

“There are a lot of things we don’t see,” he said of the campaign to destabilize his government and other left-wing governments. “Benefits we could reap, investments we don’t get because we’ve been sovereign. In the case of [Ecuador’s closing of the U.S.] Manta air base, we’d like to think the American government understood and it was fine. But it was a bold move. We said ‘no more.’ We declared it in our constitution. We had a new constitution in 2008. It was a very vibrant moment of our history. We created new rules of the game. It’s one of the most progressive constitutions in the world. It actually declares the rights of nature. It’s the only constitution that declares the rights of nature, not just the rights of man. We made Ecuadorean territory free of foreign military bases. There was no other way. But there are consequences to your actions.”

One of those consequences was an abortive coup in September 2010 by members of the Ecuadorean National Police. It was put down by force. Long charged that many of the Western NGO’s in Ecuador and throughout the region are conduits for money to right-wing parties. Military and police officials, along with some politicians, have long been on the CIA’s payroll in Latin America. President Correa in 2008 dismissed his defense minister, army chief of intelligence, commanders of the army and air force, and the military joint chiefs, saying that Ecuador’s intelligence systems were “totally infiltrated and subjugated to the CIA.”

“There is an international conspiracy right now, certainly against progressive governments,” he said. “There’s been a few electoral setbacks in Argentina, and Venezuela is in a difficult situation. The media frames it in a certain way, but, yes, sure, Venezuela is facing serious trouble. There’s an attempt to make the most of the fall of prices of certain commodities and overthrow [governments]. We just saw a parliamentary coup in Brazil. [President Rousseff had been] elected with 54 million votes. The Labor Party in Brazil [had] been in power for 13 years. The only way they [the rightists] managed to get rid of it was through a coup. They couldn’t do it through universal suffrage.”

Long said that even with the political reverses suffered by the left it will be difficult for the rightists to reinstate strict neoliberal policies.

“You have a strong, disputed political ground between a traditional right and a radical left,” he said. “A radical left, which has proved it can reduce poverty, it can reduce inequality, it can run the economy, well, it’s got young cadres that have been [government] ministers and so on. I reckon that sooner or later it will be back in power.”

Corporate leviathans and the imperialist agencies that work on their behalf are once again reshaping Latin America into havens for corporate exploitation. It is the eternal story of the struggle by the weak against the strong, the poor against the rich, the powerless against the powerful, and those who would be free against the forces of imperialism.

“There are no boundaries in this struggle to the death,” Ernesto “Che” Guevara said. “We cannot be indifferent to what happens anywhere in the world, for a victory by any country over imperialism is our victory; just as any country’s defeat is a defeat for all of us.”

Note to Commenters
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Nauseated by the
vile corporate media?
Had enough of their lies, escapism,
omissions and relentless manipulation?

=By=
Gary Corseri

(A review of Peace Plays by Johan Galtung, Vitahl Rajan, and S. P. Udayakumar; Kolofon Press, 2010. 95 pages. Available in bookstores or at www.kolofon.com and at www.transcend.org/tup.)

“But where can wisdom be found? And where is the place of understanding?”
–The Book of Job

“… with the finding of the language the feelings begin to change again.”
–Phyllis Rose

Part One

These are ideational works. They are clever and literate, but rather unusual, and even the judicious reader might like a little “framing.” The authors, and/or publisher, seem aware of that need with this blurb on the book’s back cover:

“Peace studies are usually presented as essays, in social science, political or philosophical-ethical discourses. This book is an experiment with drama as peace discourse, by authors versed in the other three. Drama is multi-angle and dialogical; it can be argued that so is the road to peace. The authors know something about peace, whether they can write drama is another matter. But those who do usually know very little about peace.”

I suspect that little disclosure was written by Johan Galtung, about whom I know a little from my recent discovery of the TMS website (TMS (Transcend Media Service). That site, edited by Antonio C. S. Rosa, is a compilation of some of the finest work—original postings and re-postings–appearing weekly on the worldwide Web, “in social science, political or philosophical-ethical discourses.” It also presents works of art—poetry and art criticism. Works that are “multi-angle and dialogical.” The challenge at the website and in Peace Plays is to maintain focus. “Those who do [know about writng drama] usually know very little about peace,” we are informed. Is this an apologia?

If it is, it is unnecessary. Each of these plays has merit, and Galtung’s, while not the most producible, may find its place among the great dialogical pieces of world literature.

Those “dialogical pieces” would include, of course, the Book of Job, which has been called the world’s first, great play. I used to think of it that way, too, but, after reading Galtung’s “The Cardplayers,” I now conclude that Job is not so much a “play” as a serries of dialogues between Job and his “tormentors,” Job and his wife, Job and God. Archibald MacLeish thought he could employ his formidable poetic skills, update the text, transform Job into “J.B.” and he made a clever go of dramatizing it, but I suspect his modern version is much more often read than performed. The thorny question–“what, exactly, is drama?”—persists.

Aristotle, who liked to think about everything, put the matter simply: Drama is the “imitation” of an action. We need not actually see Iphegenia sacrificed by her brutish father (eager to ensure smooth sailing towards war!); the “imitation” (or, intimation, suggestion, description) of the act should be sufficient to effect “catharsis”—a purging, and renewal; a revisioning.

In those terms, it would be difficult to apprise Galtung’s “The Cardplayers” as successful drama. There simply is not enough “action”—imitated or actual; not enough “stage business.”

Of course, we need not transgress as far as Seneca and the Romans, with their buckets of fake blood on stage, or their real gore in their “circus maximus,” nor should we descend to the lowest common denominator of the contemporary American theater-scene, most American TV fare, etc. But, we do have to answer that challenging question on the back cover of this book–whether the authors can write drama.

In the case of Galtung’s “The Cardplayers,” I am not so certain. On the other hand, I am certain that it is splendid writing that should be read and pondered, debated and discussed in university classrooms and elsewhere around the world!

Generally, I am less generous with my praise! In Galtung’s case, that and more, is well deserved. By 2010, this Norwegian-born octogenarian had published “about 150 books and 1500 articles on peace….” One need only Google his name or check out Wikipedia to learn of his seminal contributions to “Peace Studies” at universities around the world. The book cover informs the reader: “He founded TRANSCEND: A Peace, Development and Environment Network, in 1993 and was founding rector of Transcend Peace University.” There is no sign of his tiring or retiring any time soon….

What we have in “The Cardplayers” is not so much drama as a Platonic dialogue. We have a presentation of parallel lives: The President of the USA and the Secretary General of the Soviet Union. (This was undoubtedly first written some time back, but it remains painfully pertinent!) There is “The Ambassador,” representing the U.S. President, and the Foreign Minister of the S.U.. And there are “shadowy mafia types” in both countries. In an ironic, Jobian, but contemporary, twist, there is also “God, a middle-aged woman,” and “History, a middle-aged woman.” And various subordinates.

The “action” consists of these “leaders”—i.e., political and military hacks–planning a “peace conference,” which, in fact, will be no peace conference at all, merely a bit of cosmetic surgery to make their side look better to the part of the world that each side dominates: the world that invokes “God” and religion and righteousness to justify its violence and barbarism, and the parallel world that invokes “History,” social dynamics, etc. to justify its comparable suzerainty. The dialogue is always clever, often elevated and profound. Here’s a bit of tasty irony, the “Ambassador,” speaking to the “Foreign Minister of a US client country”:

AMBASSADOR: “I love a frank debate, that is the nature of free societies, isn’t it—that our country could never contemplate an attack, we who have never done so in our entire history of more than 200 years….”

Of course, anyone with a prehensile grasp of US history would dispute that, but the client state’s rep lets it go. (That’s what client states do!)

The wrangling over where, exactly, to position a new missile system, sounds ominously analogous to NATO’s expansionism to Russia’s borders in 2016:

FM: “… that is about as close to the Soviet Union that you can come and very remote from any population center you, I mean we, might like to protect—”

AMBASSADOR: “But you have unemployment in those districts, don’t you? Be frank, I know something about the votes in those parts of your country. Your party is seriously threatened. A little unemployment assistance… might be handy…. These are naïve country folks, they know nothing of politics. And, of course, we choose places far away from the big cities, and…far away from universities, with students who seem to have nothing better to do but demonstrating for one thing or the other the whole year long.”

(If this has echoes of the 2016 US presidential campaign, it is a sign, I think, of Galtung being “plugged in” to repetitive political, social, psychological, even psychic, currents!)

The FM must next meet with various “representatives” from his own country in order to “sell” the US position. He encounters some opposition, but out-maneuvers those dissenting voices.

In Act 2, Scene 2, “we are in the Kremlin, Moscow, a huge Soviet flag instead of the huge US one; the same world map. The Secretary General is new; otherwise, the same people for the same positions, the same dark clothes, the same male society, the same shadowy types. As light comes on they are all listening to the tape-recording of the White House meeting.”

And, on the tape they hear:

PRESIDENT’S VOICE: “–in short, cosmic secret, not a word leaked, the usual game plan, I say!”

(Echoes to 2016 again? The Snowden/Greenwald/Assange/Manning expose that “not a word [must be] leaked” was an absurd idea back then, and much more so in our age of instant communications, hacking, etc.)

Back in the good old days of the Cold War, of course, “spying” had much more to do with beautiful, Russian women! The S.U. Foreign Minister declares: “We trained her the usual way, as a dissident, peacenik type, down with nuclear arms in the West and East, that type of objectivist stuff… got her on prime time US television. She is a hero over there!…. [When] actually they catch her she has a couple of stories to tell about their sex life…the gist…is what lousy lovers Americans are, watching TV instead!”

What we see on both sides of “The Cardplayers” is a level of ignorance and self-serving delusions about “our side vs. their side” as might make the gods weep and advanced humans take to the forest to become wandering sadhus!

It is no wonder then that in Act 3, Scene 1, Galtung presents us with a 7-page, interwoven dialogue between God and History!

GOD: “… they never grow up!! They are…children, always looking for somebody to punish them so they won’t have to be…responsible….I never chose any people above others, never took it seriously whether they believe in me or not….All I wanted was that they should be responsible, face the consequences of their action!”

And the reply is sad, and all-too fitting:

HISTORY: “You gave them free will, I protected that gift. Sometimes I wonder whether they simply want to commit suicide! And this idea that I should have chosen one people above all the others for that ride on a single track through history! Morbid….They do not have the courage to take on real…responsibility, to make choices! There can be no revolution without a revolution from the inside….”

GOD: “We both are in them, and in nature, not above….”

There is no real ending. It’s a dialogue that each of us must continue with those we encounter and with ourselves. “The Cardplayers” is a dialogical work in the manner of Job, or Plato’s SocraticDialogues; in the manner of Augustine’s Soliloquies; Peter Abelard’s Dialogue between a Philosopher, a Jew and a Christian.” It is Jefferson confronting himself in “My Head and My Heart.” It is Descartes working towards a vision of a univied science in Discourse and Meditations. And, it is singular.

Part 2

The last play in this trio (I’ll get to the second one shortly) is fun to deal with, and there’s no qualms about assigning it to its genre. It’s a one-act play of some 20 pages, lively, intelligent, easy to visualize and “hear” in the imagination. It’s called “Sh…it Happens.”

S.P. Udayakumar’s play is off-beat “theater of the absurd,” but the message is as downright, level-headed serious as the fact that we are facing mass extinction on our planet and we are bringing it on oursevles with our wasteful ways!

In fact, our waste is killing us!

Yeah, that kind of waste, too!

So, what’s a good, capitalist solution?

Why, make it profitable! Collect it, and use it as fuel!

Udayakumar sets the stage and tone in Scene 1:

“[ACME Corporation Head Office at Wall Street, New York City. The R&D Committee meeting is taking place on the 105^th floor, far away from the Earth and the common people. The participants are all sitting around an oval table in formal business attire.]”

The R&D Manager, straightens his tie, “with both hands,” and stresses the gravity of “getting down to business.” He “stiffens his neck” and declares: “The globalized world throws tough challenges to remain in business today. We need to come up with a…novel product…to diversify…and stay in business.”

First, an “Academic Consultant” delivers wearisome academic gibberish: “As a Professor of Economics, I must put things in perspective. The Law of the Returns states very unambiguously that for the combination of economic goods of the highest order there exists an optimum….”

And, blah, blah, blah!

Other consultants offer ideas like “making a killing to neutralize outer space threats” (like nukes and missiles and ICBMs). Such “reasonable” peaceful “deterrents” to war are “shot down” because they will “take a lot of resources” and will have to have “political sanction,” too.

Then, the Academic Consultant muses again: “Waste is a waste only when it is wasted. In other words, there is nothing called waste. When we do not waste waste, waste is no longer waste but a profit-making non-waste.”

Hearing which, “two ACME staff… roll their eyes….One of them…mutters…’Shit!”

And the R&D Manager has a revelation! Make the recycling of human waste profitable! “We will design a biodegradable plastic bag and distribute to all the households in a participating community. The ‘fuel suppliers’ use the bag as a single-use toilet, collect the ‘fuel’ in it and bring it to the collection point in a larger duffle bag.”

Well, of course, “things fall apart,” as Yeats wrote, and what looks good on paper, or sounds good in a committee meeting, doesn’t work out so well in a single-use plastic-bag toilet! The fact that ACME is depending on poor countries like “Mansoniapur” [one assumes, India] to supply the “fuel” rubs Hindus, Christians, Muslims and Communists into perfect disharmony and acrimony!

In the last scene, a young woman climbs a banyan tree and tries to set the world straight: “Listen to me, you old men,” she cries. “You are the reason for all this stinking mess. You did not know how to rule yourselves…you…sold your souls to these mercenaries.”

It’s a clear indictment of our capitalist-consumerist-profligate modern world. The play is just the right size to deliver a sharp bite and make us think.

Regrettably, I do not have such a sanguine feeling about the 2^nd play, Vithal Rajan’s 25-page 1-Act, “The Spartan Conspiracy.” The work begins with a 2-page preface about similarities between Homer’s “Iliad” and the Hindu “Ramayana” epic. Well, I’m all for universal themes! (One of my supreme memories is from my 29^th year–watching a perfomance of the “Ramayana Ballet” in an open-air theater, on a beach in Bali, mesmerized by the dancers and the sound of gamelons!) And, this also works for me: “The dismal economic reasons for war, to control the means of production and reproduction, to control land, slaves and women…these days, when everyone recognizes the importance of economic concerns, war is never ever portrayed as a grab for the goodies.”

A stimulating preface, but the roll-out is not. “This play,” the author tells us, “written half in jest, attempts to highlight what might have been the real economic factors that led the Greeks into a long and protracted war.”

A bit too much “hedging” here: “written half in jest”; “attempts”; “what might have been.” I admit to losing interest when Menelaus started calling Agamemnon “Aggy,” and Odysseus called Menelaus “Loosey” and Achilles is transformed into “Asch”! It’s kind of a joke that’s too long getting to the punch-line.

All in all, taken as a whole, Peace Plays is a splendid book: a lens with which to contemplate our modern world of foibles, follies, self-and-mass destruction. It’s a book to read, and re-read, and savor. It is whimsical and sobering; grating in a positive way; uplifting and transformative.

(This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on October 3, 2016.  Anticopyright: Editorials and articles originated on TMS may be freely reprinted, disseminated, translated and used as background material, provided an acknowledgement and link to the source, TMS: How Do We ‘Package’ Peace? Can We Make It Palatable?, is included.)

Gary Corseri has published and posted articles, fiction and poems at hundreds of venues, including, The Greanville Post, Cyrano’s Journal Online, Uncommon Thought Journal, The New York Times, Village Voice and Redbook Magazine. He has published 2 novels and 2 collections of poetry, and his dramas have been produced on PBS-Atlanta and elsewhere. He has performed his poems at the Carter Presidential Library and Museum, and he has taught in universities in the US and Japan, and in US public schools and prisons. Contact: Gary_Corseri@comcast.net.

Note to Commenters
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We apologize for this inconvenience.

=BY=
Peter Dolack

Wendy’s strike in NYC.

You are working harder while not making more. It isn’t your imagination. The latest research demonstrating this comes, interestingly, from the St. Louis branch of the United States Federal Reserve.

Perhaps the researchers examining the relation between wages and productivity hoped this work wouldn’t be noticed by the public, as it was published in an obscure publication, Economic Synopses, produced by the St. Louis Fed. Regardless, it is of interest. The two authors, B. Ravikumar and Lin Shao, not only found a divergence between rising productivity and stagnant wages in the current “recovery” from last decade’s economic collapse, but that this has been a consistent pattern.

The Economic Synopses paper found that labor productivity for U.S. workers has increased six percent since 2009, while wages have declined 0.5 percent. (The authors measure labor productivity as real total output divided by total hours worked and labor compensation as real total labor compensation divided by total hours worked.)

Looking back to the previous officially designated recession in the U.S., declared to have ended in 2001, the authors found that over the following five years productivity increased about 13 percent, while wages increased by about five percent. Overall, the authors summarize by demonstrating that wages have lagged productivity by a wide margin since 1950, with the gap beginning to widen in the 1970s. Productivity in 2016 is 3.8 times higher than it was in 1950, while wages are only 2.7 times greater.

Wages and productivity in the United States since 1950 (Graphic by the St. Louis Fed, based on Bureau of Labor Statistics data)

We are talking about the Federal Reserve here, so Dr. Ravikumar and Mr. Shao are not offering any analysis. In about a tepid a conclusion as possible, they write:

“In conclusion, labor compensation failed to catch up with labor productivity after the 2007-09 recession. However, the driving force behind it is not unique to the recent recession but is part of a long-term trend of a widening productivity-compensation gap.”

Ideology in the service of inequality

Hmm, something mysterious? Or as natural as the tides of the ocean? Well, no, if we think for even a moment about the asymmetric class warfare that has raged for decades. Yet neoclassic economic ideology (and not only its extreme Chicago School variant) continues to insist that we get what we deserve and that labor is compensated for what it produces.

Neoclassical economics is an ideologically driven belief system based on mathematical formulae, divorced from the conditions of the actual, physical world, and which seeks to put human beings at the service of markets rather than using markets to provide for human needs. Economic activity is treated as a simple exchange of freely acting, mutually benefitting, equal firms and households in a market that automatically, through an “invisible hand,” self-adjusts and self-regulates to equilibrium.

Households and firms are considered only as market agents, never as part of a social system, and because the system is assumed to consistently revert to equilibrium, there is no conflict. Production is alleged to be independent of all social factors, the employees who do the work of production are in their jobs due to personal choice, and wages are based only on individual achievement independent of race, gender and other differences.

The real world does not actually work this way — the executives and financiers who reap fortunes from the huge multi-national corporations they control and who can bend governments to their will have rather more power than you do. Neoclassical economics does not adjust to the real world because it is, at bottom, an ideological construct to justify massive inequality, which is why two other Federal Reserve researchers declared that the reason for economic difficulty in recent years is that wages have not fallen enough!

Productivity gains outstrip wages around the world

Stagnant or declining wages, however, are quite noticeable in the real world. Independent studies have found that the lag of wages as compared to productivity costs the average U.S. and Canadian employee hundreds of dollars per week. That is by no means a trend limited to North America — employees in Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Japan have experienced differentials between wages and productivity, albeit not as severe as what is endured by U.S. workers.

Where is the extra money taken out of employees’ pockets going? Not necessarily to the bosses at the point of production — financiers are taking an increasingly large share of profits. Financialization is a response to declining rates of profits and that the one percent have more money flowing into their bank accounts than they can find useful outlets for investment. During periods of bubbles, financial speculation becomes more profitable than production, drawing still more money and thus increasing the already bloated size of the financial industry.

In turn, ultra-low interest rates help inflate stock-market bubbles, in effect acting as a subsidy for financial profits. The world’s central banks have flooded financial markets with more than US$6.5 trillion (€6 trillion) in “quantitative easing” programs, and all that has been accomplished is the inflation of a stock-market bubble because speculators have poured money into stock markets in the wake of low bond returns resulting from the quantitative easing. Concomitantly, corporate executives have borrowed money at low interest to fuel a binge of buying back stocks, adding to speculative fevers.

In an interesting article in the July-August 2016 issue of Monthly Review, “The Profits of Financialization,” Costas Lapavitsas and Ivan Mendieta-Muñoz calculate that the profits earned by the financial industry as a percentage of overall U.S. corporate profits increased steadily throughout the second half of the 20th century, more than tripling from 1950 to the early 2000s. Although now below the early 2000s peak, financial profits remain at historically high levels.

U.S. financial profits as percentage of corporate profits of domestic industries, 1955–2015 (Graphic by Monthly Review, based on U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis data)

Because central banks have kept interest rates at extraordinarily low levels for years, the authors argue that high financial profits represent a “vast public subsidy to the financial system” and thus an “expropriation” that is “a hallmark of financialization.”

Federal Reserve researchers may have just discovered what has long been apparent to working people and “heterodox” economists, but aren’t going to offer any solutions, must less formulate critiques of the system that produces such results.

The harder you work, the richer the executives and bankers get. What if, instead, those who did the work reaped the rewards? That, however, will require a different system.

Pete Dolack  is an activist, writer, poet and photographer with a degree in journalism. He pens the site Systemic Disorder. Systemic Disorder presents essays on the ongoing economic crisis of capitalism and the environmental  issues connected to it, the political and ideological disinformation that holds the global system in place, thoughts on the creation of a better world. He is also the author of the author of the book It’s Not Over: Learning from the Socialist Experiment, 

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Nauseated by the
vile corporate media?
Had enough of their lies, escapism,
omissions and relentless manipulation?

=By=
Simon Wood

Despite the horrendous costs and the formidable forces arrayed against them, the defenders of Syria’s sovereignty do not falter. The image depicts a Hezbollah and Syrian rally.

The Gatekeepers’, The 99.99998271%, April 7th 2015 [Source]

“I listened to my colleague from Russia — and I sort of felt [we’re] in a parallel universe here” – US Secretary of State John Kerry on Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov [Source]

As corporate media rhetoric against the current priority targets – Russia and Syria – is ramped up to extreme levels, a battle is raging within the only remaining global space for freedom of thought and expression: the internet – social media.  Two warring, diametrically opposed realities vie for supremacy over the perceptions of the world’s people.  In one reality, the US and its NATO allies are benevolent forces fighting the good fight against an evil regime (that of Syria’s President Assad) and its powerful backer, (the ‘aggressive’ Russia) led by the ‘enigmatic’ Vladimir Putin.  In the other, the legitimate government of Syria is fighting a US-led proxy war of aggression against Western-backed rebels with the aid of its ally, Russia.

This information war is characterised by intractability – a natural state of affairs given that both sides – backed with reams of ‘evidence’ from the sources they trust – are convinced that they are in the right and that the other side has been deceived by propaganda.  Disputes between proponents of these opposing views spiral rapidly into mutual contempt, ad hominem attacks and blocking – also unsurprising given that the two realities permit no middle ground or compromise.

ISIS and al-Qaeda rebels in Aleppo: the “moderate” rebels Washington and its accomplices have tried so hard to protect.

The NATO-supporting side generally feels it has the moral and intellectual advantage, in that it is backed by traditional media organs that are brand names in themselves – names that have been trusted by millions of readers for generations.  After all, their view is being challenged – wholly rejected as bogus – by an unknowable band of small independent media sites and unpaid bloggers: amateurs or worse in the minds of those who read only mainstream news.  This view is strongly encouraged by many high-profile corporate media journalists – also no surprise, given that they and the narratives they sustain are being challenged directly.

Imagine a friend – or at least someone you basically trusted – lied to you to obtain something they really wanted, something they went on to materially profit from to a huge degree.  Imagine that you later discovered that they had lied, and – on asking for an explanation – were given one that may or may not have been plausible.  Imagine then that you discovered that this same friend had lied to others in pursuit of the same goal.  Asking once more for an explanation, you were given excuses and even changed criteria from the original lie.

Pres. Assad in Moscow. Russia is a loyal ally, but she also has its own geopolitical reasons to back an independent Syria, free of the takfari vermin.

Would you trust them again?  Possibly, if you have a long history with the person in question.  But what if they then lied to you again to get something else that they wanted?  And what if they lied to others just as before?  Surely this repeated lie would be the end of any trust.  Indeed, no sane person would ever listen to the liar again…and would probably warn others to keep well away.

What if someone had been killed in the acquisition of the goal?  What if several people had?  What if over a million completely innocent people had died?  Would you trust that person then?  The question of trust is reduced to absurdity.

Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction.
Dick Cheney
August 26, 2002

Right now, Iraq is expanding and improving facilities that were used for the production of biological weapons.
George W. Bush
September 12, 2002

If he declares he has none, then we will know that Saddam Hussein is once again misleading the world.
Ari Fleischer
December 2, 2002

The president of the United States and the secretary of defense would not assert as plainly and bluntly as they have that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction if it was not true, and if they did not have a solid basis for saying it.
Ari Fleischer
December 6, 2002

We know for a fact that there are weapons there.
Ari Fleischer
January 9, 2003

Our intelligence officials estimate that Saddam Hussein had the materials to produce as much as 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent.
George W. Bush
January 28, 2003

We know that Saddam Hussein is determined to keep his weapons of mass destruction, is determined to make more.
Colin Powell
February 5, 2003

For bureaucratic reasons, we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction [as justification for invading Iraq] because it was the one reason everyone could agree on.
Paul Wolfowitz
May 28, 2003

[dropcap]A[/dropcap] 2008 study by the (2014) Pulitzer Prize-winning Center for Public Integrity found 935 false statements about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq issued by senior Bush administration officials (including Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleeza Rice and George W Bush himself) that were reported with no (or virtually no) verification by major news outlets. This orchestrated campaign of lies designed to build public support for a military invasion was reported uncritically not only in the US but also around the world.

The editors of the New York Times even issued a public apology for its dereliction in 2004:

But we have found a number of instances of coverage that was not as rigorous as it should have been. In some cases, information that was controversial then, and seems questionable now, was insufficiently qualified or allowed to stand unchallenged. Looking back, we wish we had been more aggressive in re-examining the claims as new evidence emerged — or failed to emerge.

More:

Do you still believe your vaunted mainstream media sources?  Many readers even at this point would accept this apology and take it on faith that it was all an honest mistake, pledging inwardly to keep a close eye on future conduct and/or later revelations…

Like a new report [re-posted at the Daily Beast] from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (in conjunction with the Sunday Times) [Source (behind paywall)]:

There were three types of media operations commonly used in Iraq at the time, said a military contractor familiar with Bell Pottinger’s work there.

[Note: The article is lengthy and only excerpts have been included here (above) with my emphasis in bold]

This is proof in black and white that part of the work paid for by the Pentagon and then disseminated throughout the corporate media to achieve US strategic aims includes the production of fake films intended to deceive you – the trusting, unwitting reader – into further supporting Western military actions, giving you the impression that you are on the right side, destroying an evil, implacable enemy.  It also motivates those taken in by these lies to (often viciously) attack anyone questioning the official line.

The obvious question that should arise even to the most rabid supporter of Western military interventions is this: If they’ve deceived you before, what would stop them trying to do it again now with similar fake videos and fake stories, all created to support and sustain a narrative that evokes enormous outrage and keeps public opposition at bay.

The answer is absolutely nothing at all would stop them.  In fact, there is plenty of evidence that what happened in Iraq is precisely what has also been occurring with regard to Syria for a decade.

Firstly, it is an established fact that the US and its allies had a plan for regime change in Syria.  An internal email dated 7th December 2011 of the Stratfor ‘global intelligence’ company published by WikiLeaks makes it clear that US-aligned forces have long been covertly operating in Syria. It is a remarkable email, in that it clearly demonstrates the intent of the US to intervene in the affairs of Syria, and strongly implies that – among many other things – agents from the US, France, Jordan, Turkey, and the UK were already on the ground carrying out reconnaissance and the training of opposition forces.

Secondly, there is motive – within the Murdoch press at least – to publish articles that paint Assad’s government as evil and in need of ‘intervention’ in that Murdoch is on the board of New Jersey-based Genie Energy. Journalist Nafeez Ahmed explains:

A US oil company is preparing to drill for oil in the Golan Heights. Granted the license in February 2013 by Israel, Afek Oil and Gas is a subsidiary of Genie Energy Ltd, whose equity-holding board members include former US Vice President Dick Cheney, controversial media mogul Rupert Murdoch and financier Lord Jacob Rothschild.

[Note: article dated January 28th 2015. Murdoch remains on the board]

Aside from personal financial interest for Murdoch, a post-Assad, US-friendly Syrian government would mean one less major Russia-Iran-axis power in the Middle East to worry about, a turn of events also greatly desired by Israel, while economically Syria would be opened up to all manner of ‘opportunities’ for Western corporations.

Julian Assange, interviewed in the Ecuadorean embassy in London – where he is forced to stay out of fear of US reprisals against him for the secret documents published by WikiLeaks that detail vast webs of criminality – explains how a book – The WikiLeaks Files – details US Assad overthrow plans from as far back as 2006.  And watch here the US Peace Council condemn the whole US Syria narrative as a lie.

Beeley

Readers of mainstream Western media reporting on Syria will be familiar with oft-cited groups like the White Helmets and the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights etc.  Journalist Vanessa Beeley travelled to Syria and wrote a detailed report that raises serious questions about the credibility and true motives of these groups:

Excerpts:

The use of chemical weapons against civilians in western Aleppo by the terrorist groups, particularly the Nusra Front, is anathema to Western media. Instead, the media picks up spurious reports issued by “activist” groups and “citizen journalists” which claim to be working inside Aleppo. As in the case of a Sept. 7 report from Al-Jazeera on the Syrian Arab Army launching chemical attacks on civilians, this information is disseminated with alarming alacrity by journalists based in Washington, London or elsewhere, who have limited ability to verify this information or assess what’s really happening on the ground prior to publishing. The fact that the Nusra Front took over the only chemical factory in Aleppo in 2012 is swept under the carpet of inconvenient truths. And while the mainstream media doesn’t report it, former U.N. weapons inspectors and MIT rocket scientists have also confirmed that the Nusra Front has powerful chemical weapons capabilities.

Media pundits outside Syria rely on “activist groups” and “citizen journalists,” who are invariably embedded in areas occupied by groups such as the Nusra Front, Ahrar al-Sham, assorted Free Syrian Army brigades, and even Daesh (an Arabic acronym for the terrorist group known in the West as ISIS or ISIL). Whether they are individual activists or groups like the White Helmets or Aleppo Media Center, it is hard to define them as independent or objective when they are known to receive funding from the United States, NATO member states, and state-funded institutions like USAID–all of which have a vested interest in the “regime change” road map in Syria. The “evidence” these sources produce rarely deviates from the official U.S. narrative and reinforces the propaganda that drives the train of lies that justifies intervention.

Beeley exposes the White Helmets here:

Did I hear a pin drop?  The real Syria Civil Defence? Are the west’s iconized ‘White Helmets’ not the only emergency first-responders inside Syria?

For the REAL Syria Civil Defence you call 113 inside Syria.  There is no public number for the White Helmets.  Why not? Why does this multi-million dollar US & NATO state-funded first responder ‘NGO,’ with state of the art equipment supplied by the US and the EU via Turkey, have no central number for civilians to call when the “bombs fall”?

Before we introduce the real Syria Civil Defence, who are Syria’s real ICDO certified civil fire and rescue organisation, let’s first take a closer look at the imposters; terrorists in white hats, and agents of war – NATO’s pseudo ‘NGO’ construct, embedded exclusively in terrorist-held parts of Syria…

White Helmets: the women. Wearing the rancid aroma of US-style propaganda, from start to finish. Make’em glamorous, boys!

We’re told that the White Helmets routinely scale the walls of collapsed buildings and scrambling over smouldering rubble of bombed out buildings to dig a child out with their bare hands. Of course, never without a sizeable camera crew and mobile phone carrying entourage in tow.

UK media watchdog Media Lens mentioned the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights in a 2012article on the Houla Massacre:

Curiously, the Guardian has published numerous second hand accounts from Syrian ‘opposition activists’ based in the UK. For example, on June 7, the Guardian’s Ian Black reported the al-Qubair massacre under the title, ‘Syria accused of massacring 100’:

‘The British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) said the massacre was carried out at a farm by pro-regime shabiha militiamen armed with guns and knives after regular troops had shelled the area.’

The Guardian has quoted the Syrian Observatory dozens of times. And yet, according to Reuters, the organisation consists of a single individual, Rami Abdulrahman, the owner of a clothes shop, who works from his ‘two bedroom terraced home in Coventry’.

This analysis has established beyond doubt that the corporate media acts as an uncritical echo chamber for information that originates from PR firms and dubious sources that practice deliberate deception.  It has established that the US had planned regime change in Syria at least a decade ago, as proved by its own secret communications written by a US ambassador (see the Assange interview).  It raises extremely serious questions about the credibility of the sources that the media use habitually and unquestioningly – behaviour that even the NYT publicly apologised for after its last journalistic debacle.

Yet you still believe the MSM narrative?

If this is not enough to persuade, consider the selective outrage expressed in the media about dictators around the world.  If the US and its allies along with the corporate media are such warriors for human rights and justice, why did we almost never hear anything about – say – the recently deceased President of Uzbekistan, Islam Karimov?

Former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray gave an interview to the Guardian in 2004:

Murray has plenty of first-hand evidence of the Uzbekistani’s “routine methods”. Sitting in the plush living room of his ambassadorial residence, he tells me: “People come to me very often after being tortured. Normally this includes homosexual and heterosexual rape of close relatives in front of the victim; rape with objects such as broken bottles; asphyxiation; pulling out of fingernails; smashing of limbs with blunt objects; and use of boiling liquids including complete immersion of the body. This is not uncommon. Thousands of people a year suffer from this torture at the hands of the authorities.”

As Murray saw apparently innocent Muslims being sentenced to death after confessions extracted by torture and show trials, he became furious at the “conspiracy of silence” practised by his fellow diplomats. “I tried to find out whether anyone had made a policy decision to [say nothing]”, he says. “But certainly within the British government no minister had ever said such a thing. I was determined to blow the lid on [the conspiracy of silence].”

In October 2002, Murray made a speech to his fellow diplomats and Uzbekistani officials at a human rights conference in Tashkent in which he became the first western official for four years to state publicly that “Uzbekistan is not a functioning democracy”, and to highlight the “prevalence of torture in Uzbekistani prisons” in a system where “brutality is inherent”. Highlighting a case in which two men were boiled to death, he added: “All of us know that this is not an isolated incident.”

Uzbekistan, a nation of strategic importance to the US and its allies, somehow escaped the front-page exposes, the live-update feeds, and the outraged hand-wringing from liberal Western journalists demanding that something be done. Meanwhile, in a series of incredible coincidences, the nations targeted by the West (as stated by US General Wesley Clark) all got the blanket ‘evil dictator’ treatment prior to their ‘intervention’ (devastation).

Indoctrinated Western journalists, unwilling to risk their status and privilege (and paychecks) are wilfully blind to this deception – an unforgivable failing for a professional journalist.  Given that this failure to even attempt to expose this deception – and in fact, in most cases, vocally support it – has resulted in the deaths of countless innocent people, not to mention the worst refugee crisis since WWII, these newspaper and cable-news employees can more accurately be described as collaborators with an imperial power that is operating illegally in Syria: funding, training and supplying openly terrorist groups in order to achieve their strategic goals (as this US arms shopping list for ‘rebels’ demonstrates).

The corporate media, exposed here as an active tool of disinformation and misinformation, must be boycotted completely, starved of the funding and clicks for ad revenue needed for survival.  Why – after all – would anyone spend time or money reading analyses proven to be intentionally misleading?  Look instead and open your mind to credible non-corporate organizations that deal in source material like WikiLeaks, and to independent writers and analysts that have proved their credibility, accuracy and honesty through their work over time, not from riding the now-dead reputation of the brand of their employer.  Treat them with the same skepticism as any mainstream source.

The purveyors of lies are trying to pull the same scam they did with Iraq, Libya and anywhere else one cares to name going back through history.  They do it because it works – time and time again – and that’s because we let them.  For the sake of the refugees and innocent victims of this criminal empire and its paid media sycophants, stand up, draw the line and refuse to be led around by the nose like cattle ever again.

Written by Simon Wood

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Note to Commenters
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We apologize for this inconvenience.

Nauseated by the
vile corporate media?
Had enough of their lies, escapism,
omissions and relentless manipulation?

Rowan Wolf, PhD
Voice of Conscience

There are many in the country who are so vehemently opposed to Hillary Clinton that they are hitching their wagons to Trump, who however awful is seen as a “change agent.” Generally overlooked in presidential politics is the issue of the “running mate.”  Even with recent experience of the power of Cheney in the Bush administration, and the power of Palin in the failed McCain run. The assumption of the “errand boy” VP, may be a fatal one. Trump could end up a figurehead of state (not to imply in any way that he would lose the power of the Presidency) the hand behind the throne could be significant. Unfortunately, it is highly possible to the point of  likely that the real power will be delegated to the second in command – Mike Pence.

This is a scenario that people would do well to consider. Would they feel better voting for Pence for vice PRESIDENT? For as Trump has no elected political vita, Pence certainly does, and it is hard to find anyone who is much deeper into the fake grassroots Tea Party camp than Michael Pence – nor many more closely linked to the Koch brothers.

This from AM Joy on 10/2/2016

Rowan Wolf, PhD

Is Managing Editor of The Greanville Post and Director of The Russian Desk. She is a sociologist, writer and activist with life long engagement in social justice, peace, environmental, and animal rights movements. Her research and writing includes issues of imperialism, oppression, global capitalism, peak resources, global warming, and environmental degradation. Rowan taught sociology for twenty-two years, was a member of the City of Portland’s Peak Oil Task Force, and maintains her own site Uncommon Thought Journal. She may be reached by email at rowanwolf@greanvillepost.com

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