The Chris Hedges Report Podcast speaks with the economist Richard Wolff about inflation, growing income inequality and the looming disasters built into the U.S. economic system
The Chris Hedges Report Podcast speaks with the economist Richard Wolff about inflation, growing income inequality and the looming disasters built into the U.S. economic system
When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it”. Frederic Bastiat
The people have been turned into "hosts" (a food source - rent payers) for the 1% parasites (leeches - rent collectors) by the re-establishment of the "West Virginia Coal Mine Experience"™ (circa 1900). See Earned Vs. Unearned income
by incrementally monopolizing (privatizing)necessities (food, water, shelter, utilities, even information), by debt expansion, and by wage suppression: we now work in their company "mines" (cube farms, whatever), live in their company housing (mortgage, rent) shop in their company store (credit card debt), and pay MONOPOLY prices for basic necessities.
Literally, cradle to grave slavery to a small collection of "Nanny" Transnational Corporations (all owned at the top by a handful of the Davos jetting World Economic Forum, transnational investor class.)
And yes......America's abandonment of the working class is an international crime. But that America intends to bring that corporate rape and pillage system to the entire world, should tell us who leads the movement against acknowledging that climate is the real catastrophe coming for all of us.
A belief in the lack of any limits is a sign of insanity...Amerika's wealthy class invests in space travel and research into immortality. What could be more delusional.
From everything I learn from reading and listening to sites like this....it seems that America is practising a form of high end, expensive suit Fascism. There's only one class they serve and that is the few wealthy folks at the top. Life becoming too expensive for the majority doesn't matter a wit, because inflation plucks the many and pads the off shore tax havens of the obscenely rich. Poverty is never a problem for the wealthy..........'the poor we have always with us' is their attitude. They depend on poverty to pad their profits.
Where else would they get the cheap labour and the docility that keeps them playing their casino games? And let's not forget....the most elaborate game of Corporate fascists is war. It makes them money coming and going.......when they sell the weapons of mass destruction, and when they send in their 'developers' to rebuild what has been destroyed.
Too bad climate change is going to eradicate all of us....except perhaps a few of these f....ks holed up in elaborate underground bunkers.
Surprised that Richard Wolff did not mention the destruction of the Nord Stream pipeline, and the effect that has had on energy prices (and everything else) in Europe. Did he not mention it because it's suspected the U.S. was responsible for the destruction? Did he not mention it because, in a determination to demonize Putin, the U.S. has caused the suffering of what, supposedly, are its European 'allies' (with a friend like that, who needs enemies?).
What a wonderful interview! For me especially the comparison with the situation in Germany between the World Wars is thrilling - do we never learn anything? I guess not ... I love Prof. Wolff and his rich knowledge about this terrible time in Germany and Austria (my parents born 1914 and 1922 went through all this and told me many stories about the miseries, which we pampered children never really could understand - but our society is heading there, because our politicians are sociopaths and preparing the ground for another 'Fuehrer'!! No empathy, only bottomless greed of people who have already more 'riches' than they ever can use (as my father always said: you cannot take it with you!!). I sincerely hope that the railroad workers stand strong and STRIKE (at least it could be a beginning!!)!
“Accumulation of wealth at one pole is therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole, i.e., on the side of the class that produces its product in the form of capital.”
----- Karl Marx
''The mine owners did not find the gold, they did not mine the gold, they did not mill the gold, but by some weird alchemy - all the gold belonged to them! If the workers are organized, all they have to do is to put their hands in their pockets and they have got the capitalist class whipped.''
~ Big Bill Haywood, Miner, founding member & leader of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).
This is what Technocracy looks like! - Frightening!! - and yet, coming to a country near you has always been the plan.....
from the comments section:
"As some have been saying for many years - if you want to know where they are taking us - look at China. That's the template. I fear many of us, still sleeping, who have digested the conflicting lies and hang on to irrational narratives, will still go along.
You are so right. We are nothing but actuarial tables for the power elite.
Take a look at this. Most know nothing about it and it is ongoing.
"Are you worth more dead than alive to your employer?
Dead peasant insurance is a slang term for a life insurance policy that a company takes out on its employees. When the employee dies, the company collects the death benefits. The worker does not have to die while at the job or even be a current employee for the company to collect this insurance money. He or she just has to die. It is sometimes called dead janitor insurance or by its legal name: corporate owned life insurance, or COLI.
Dead Peasant Insurance-Where did the term ‘dead peasant’ come from?
According to the website www.deadpeasantinsurance.com, the term dead peasant was first used by an insurance company that wrote life insurance policies on Winn Dixie employees.
Winn Dixie took out life insurance policies on nearly 36,000 of its employees without their consent and named itself as the beneficiary. As the story got leaked to the press, so did the use of the term dead peasant to describe the Winn Dixie employees."
"As gruesome as it may sound, dead peasant insurance policies are legal.
Although a 2006 federal law requires employers to get a worker’s permission before taking out a dead peasant life insurance policy, Michael Myers, who runs www.deadpeasantinsurance.com, says many companies are ignoring that law.
Chicago Public Radio recently reported that Congressman Luis Gutierrez (D-IL) has introduced legislation that would ban corporate owned life insurance polices on workers making less than $1 million dollars a year."
Until 201, this corporate practice of insuring low-level workers for life insurance, without them or their families knowing it, was legal WITHOUT TELLING THE WORKER.
Now it is said the worker must be told by law.
And see the liberal response of trying to reform what can only be said to be necrophilia by the corporations.
Grave robbers.
Under capitalism every bone in our body, every cell in our system is privatized.
The result is:
“Not only is an object produced for the subject, but a type of subject is created for that object.”
The answer is to organize and this is very hard for many who have grown up under Reaganomics.
Many have learned that up is down, unions are bad, libertarian good, go it alone capitalism, I got mine you get yours al of thus is psychic trauma.
Morality needs to play a huge part in our struggle. And it needs to be emphasized.
We need to understand the hegemony of capitalism and its culture and as Havel noted, set up parallel structures and slowly withdraw from this silent scream of madness.
When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it”. Frederic Bastiat
The people have been turned into "hosts" (a food source - rent payers) for the 1% parasites (leeches - rent collectors) by the re-establishment of the "West Virginia Coal Mine Experience"™ (circa 1900). See Earned Vs. Unearned income
by incrementally monopolizing (privatizing)necessities (food, water, shelter, utilities, even information), by debt expansion, and by wage suppression: we now work in their company "mines" (cube farms, whatever), live in their company housing (mortgage, rent) shop in their company store (credit card debt), and pay MONOPOLY prices for basic necessities.
Literally, cradle to grave slavery to a small collection of "Nanny" Transnational Corporations (all owned at the top by a handful of the Davos jetting World Economic Forum, transnational investor class.)
And yes......America's abandonment of the working class is an international crime. But that America intends to bring that corporate rape and pillage system to the entire world, should tell us who leads the movement against acknowledging that climate is the real catastrophe coming for all of us.
A belief in the lack of any limits is a sign of insanity...Amerika's wealthy class invests in space travel and research into immortality. What could be more delusional.
From everything I learn from reading and listening to sites like this....it seems that America is practising a form of high end, expensive suit Fascism. There's only one class they serve and that is the few wealthy folks at the top. Life becoming too expensive for the majority doesn't matter a wit, because inflation plucks the many and pads the off shore tax havens of the obscenely rich. Poverty is never a problem for the wealthy..........'the poor we have always with us' is their attitude. They depend on poverty to pad their profits.
Where else would they get the cheap labour and the docility that keeps them playing their casino games? And let's not forget....the most elaborate game of Corporate fascists is war. It makes them money coming and going.......when they sell the weapons of mass destruction, and when they send in their 'developers' to rebuild what has been destroyed.
Too bad climate change is going to eradicate all of us....except perhaps a few of these f....ks holed up in elaborate underground bunkers.
Surprised that Richard Wolff did not mention the destruction of the Nord Stream pipeline, and the effect that has had on energy prices (and everything else) in Europe. Did he not mention it because it's suspected the U.S. was responsible for the destruction? Did he not mention it because, in a determination to demonize Putin, the U.S. has caused the suffering of what, supposedly, are its European 'allies' (with a friend like that, who needs enemies?).
What a wonderful interview! For me especially the comparison with the situation in Germany between the World Wars is thrilling - do we never learn anything? I guess not ... I love Prof. Wolff and his rich knowledge about this terrible time in Germany and Austria (my parents born 1914 and 1922 went through all this and told me many stories about the miseries, which we pampered children never really could understand - but our society is heading there, because our politicians are sociopaths and preparing the ground for another 'Fuehrer'!! No empathy, only bottomless greed of people who have already more 'riches' than they ever can use (as my father always said: you cannot take it with you!!). I sincerely hope that the railroad workers stand strong and STRIKE (at least it could be a beginning!!)!
Any ration system will and would just turn into a black market.
There is only one way to live: kill the system
“Accumulation of wealth at one pole is therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole, i.e., on the side of the class that produces its product in the form of capital.”
----- Karl Marx
''The mine owners did not find the gold, they did not mine the gold, they did not mill the gold, but by some weird alchemy - all the gold belonged to them! If the workers are organized, all they have to do is to put their hands in their pockets and they have got the capitalist class whipped.''
~ Big Bill Haywood, Miner, founding member & leader of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).
Is everyone seeing this?!
This is what Technocracy looks like! - Frightening!! - and yet, coming to a country near you has always been the plan.....
from the comments section:
"As some have been saying for many years - if you want to know where they are taking us - look at China. That's the template. I fear many of us, still sleeping, who have digested the conflicting lies and hang on to irrational narratives, will still go along.
More than ever, Do Not Comply."
https://www.2ndsmartestguyintheworld.com/p/china-in-five-tweets?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=400535&post_id=88563445&isFreemail=true&utm_medium=email&fbclid=IwAR1uVUpDsCrAXrzpLMy3gHNbNl61hmnLBMXpI5aRBWW7RU1MIJbqIUBAVz8
You are so right. We are nothing but actuarial tables for the power elite.
Take a look at this. Most know nothing about it and it is ongoing.
"Are you worth more dead than alive to your employer?
Dead peasant insurance is a slang term for a life insurance policy that a company takes out on its employees. When the employee dies, the company collects the death benefits. The worker does not have to die while at the job or even be a current employee for the company to collect this insurance money. He or she just has to die. It is sometimes called dead janitor insurance or by its legal name: corporate owned life insurance, or COLI.
Dead Peasant Insurance-Where did the term ‘dead peasant’ come from?
According to the website www.deadpeasantinsurance.com, the term dead peasant was first used by an insurance company that wrote life insurance policies on Winn Dixie employees.
Winn Dixie took out life insurance policies on nearly 36,000 of its employees without their consent and named itself as the beneficiary. As the story got leaked to the press, so did the use of the term dead peasant to describe the Winn Dixie employees."
"As gruesome as it may sound, dead peasant insurance policies are legal.
Although a 2006 federal law requires employers to get a worker’s permission before taking out a dead peasant life insurance policy, Michael Myers, who runs www.deadpeasantinsurance.com, says many companies are ignoring that law.
Chicago Public Radio recently reported that Congressman Luis Gutierrez (D-IL) has introduced legislation that would ban corporate owned life insurance polices on workers making less than $1 million dollars a year."
https://iowalum.com/what-is-dead-peasant-insurance/
Until 201, this corporate practice of insuring low-level workers for life insurance, without them or their families knowing it, was legal WITHOUT TELLING THE WORKER.
Now it is said the worker must be told by law.
And see the liberal response of trying to reform what can only be said to be necrophilia by the corporations.
Grave robbers.
Under capitalism every bone in our body, every cell in our system is privatized.
The result is:
“Not only is an object produced for the subject, but a type of subject is created for that object.”
---- Karl Marx
Cc
The answer is to organize and this is very hard for many who have grown up under Reaganomics.
Many have learned that up is down, unions are bad, libertarian good, go it alone capitalism, I got mine you get yours al of thus is psychic trauma.
Morality needs to play a huge part in our struggle. And it needs to be emphasized.
We need to understand the hegemony of capitalism and its culture and as Havel noted, set up parallel structures and slowly withdraw from this silent scream of madness.
If you means is it time to roll out the guillotines. Yes, but subjectively the people are still laboriing under false consciousness.