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the capitalist network that runs the world - physics-math - 19 October 2011 AS PROTESTS against financial power sweep the world this week, science may have confirmed the protesters' worst fears. An analysis of the relationships between 43,000 transnational corporations has identified a relatively small group of companies, mainly banks, with disproportionate power over the global economy. The study's assumptions have attracted some criticism, but complex systems analysts contacted by New Scientist say it is a unique effort to untangle control in the global economy. The idea that a few bankers control a large chunk of the global economy might not seem like news to New York's Occupy Wall Street movement and protesters elsewhere (see photo). "Reality is so complex, we must move away from dogma, whether it's conspiracy theories or free-market," says James Glattfelder. The Zurich team can. The work, to be published in PLoS One, revealed a core of 1318 companies with interlocking ownerships (see image). So, the super-entity may not result from conspiracy. 1.
free-market-has-turned-us-into-matrix-drones-2064799 Dr Chang's 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism is one of a spate of tomes published in recent weeks that question the future of the current system, including Capitalism 4.0 by Anatole Kaletsky, and Ian Bremmer's The End of the Free Market. Economists are keen to tap into the market for popular books on seemingly impenetrable subjects – highlighted by the runaway success of Freakonomics, which has sold more than four million copies since it was published in 2005 and is about to be made into a film. South-Korean born Dr Chang aims to disprove what he sees as economic myths, including the idea that people are paid what they are worth, that the "trickle down" effect of increasing wealth among the rich helps the poor, and that education makes countries more prosperous. One of the modern idols Dr Chang seeks to bring down is the internet. "If you had everything, then I'm in favour of it. What his peers say... Dr Ruth Lea, Economic advisor to Arbuthnot Banking Group
£13tn: hoard hidden from taxman by global elite | Business | The Observer A global super-rich elite has exploited gaps in cross-border tax rules to hide an extraordinary £13 trillion ($21tn) of wealth offshore – as much as the American and Japanese GDPs put together – according to research commissioned by the campaign group Tax Justice Network. James Henry, former chief economist at consultancy McKinsey and an expert on tax havens, has compiled the most detailed estimates yet of the size of the offshore economy in a new report, The Price of Offshore Revisited, released exclusively to the Observer. He shows that at least £13tn – perhaps up to £20tn – has leaked out of scores of countries into secretive jurisdictions such as Switzerland and the Cayman Islands with the help of private banks, which vie to attract the assets of so-called high net-worth individuals. Oil-rich states with an internationally mobile elite have been especially prone to watching their wealth disappear into offshore bank accounts instead of being invested at home, the research suggests.
Data Mining Reveals a Global Link Between Corruption and Wealth One question that social scientists and economists have long puzzled over is how corruption arises in different cultures and why it is more prevalent in some countries than others. But it has always been difficult to find correlations between corruption and other measures of economic or social activity. Michal Paulus and Ladislav Kristoufek at Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic, have for the first time found a correlation between the perception of corruption in different countries and their economic development. The data they use comes from Transparency International, a nonprofit campaigning organisation based in Berlin, Germany, and which defines corruption as the misuse of public power for private benefit. Instead, it gathers information from a wide range of sources such as the African Development Bank and the Economist Intelligence Unit. The result is the Corruption Perceptions Index ranking countries between 0 (highly corrupt) to 100 (very clean).
The Financial Crisis Was Foreseeable … Thousands of Years Ago Economists, Military Strategists and Others Warned Us … Long Ago We’ve known for 4,000 years that debts need to be periodically written down, or the entire economy will collapse. And see this. We’ve known for 2,500 years that prolonged war bankrupts an economy. We’ve known for 1,900 years that rampant inequality destroys societies. We’ve known for thousands of years that debasing currencies leads to economic collapse. We’ve known for hundreds of years that the failure to punish financial fraud destroys economies, as it destroys all trust in the financial system. We’ve known for hundreds of years that monopolies and the political influence which accompanies too much power in too few hands is dangerous for free markets. We’ve known for centuries that companies will try to pawn their debts off on governments, and that it is a huge mistake for governments to allow corporate debt to be backstopped by government. We’ve known for 80 years that inflation is a hidden tax.
We Have Forgotten What the Ancient Sumerians and Babylonians, the Early Jews and Christians, the Founding Fathers and Even Napoleon Bonaparte Knew About Money Mike “Mish” Shedlock has repeatedly pointed out that we have reached “peak credit” – and there will not in our lifetimes be as much credit as we saw from 2000-2008. I noted last year: Michael Hudson is a highly-regarded economist. Mesopotamian economic thought c. 2000 BC rested on a more realistic mathematical foundation than does today’s orthodoxy. And Hudson wrote last year: Every economist who has looked at the mathematics of compound interest has pointed out that in the end, debts cannot be paid. No economy ever has been able to keep on doubling on a steady basis. Hudson calls for a debt jubilee, and points out that periodic debt jubilees were a normal part of the Sumerian, Babylonian and ancient Jewish [and Christian] cultures. That is what our money system is. The modern banking system is therefore really a debt-creation system. One thing is for sure. I also pointed out: It seems ridiculous to point this out, but sovereign debt implies sovereignty. Wisdom of the Ages - Thomas Edison
The New Totalitarianism: How American Corporations Have Made America Like the Soviet Union Photo Credit: Viajar24h.com July 15, 2012 | Like this article? Join our email list: Stay up to date with the latest headlines via email. The great power struggle of the 20th century was the competition between Soviet-style communism and "free-market" corporatism for domination of the world's resources. There's a small problem with this, though. It's not just that the corporations have taken control over our government (though that's awful enough). With tongue only somewhat in cheek, here are a few ways in which Americans are now becoming a new lumpenproletariat, subject to the whims and diktats of our new Soviet-style corporate overlords. Reduced Choice and Big-Box Censorship We see it most evidently when we go to the store. Now, every Macy's in America carries the same dozen or so lines of bland, middle-of-the-road women's clothing.
Wages aren’t stagnating, they’re plummeting Many economists have expressed concern that median wages have stagnated since the 1970s, as illustrated in the following chart from the Economic Policy Institute. Source: Economic Policy Institute. For workers in the 10th, 20th and 50th percentiles, median hourly wages haven't grown much at all since the early 1970s. The first thing to say here is that even if the story Conard is telling is true, it's true because women and non-white workers make a whole let less than white male workers, which is not exactly a heartening economic datum. The first problem is that, as Lane Kenworthy notes, racial minorities and women were being integrated into the work force well before median wages started to stagnate in the 1970s. The second and bigger problem is that Conard's central contention - that wages have increased for each gender and racial group - is simply false. But it's actually worse than that. Source: Michael Greenstone and Adam Looney, Hamilton Project Source: Hamilton Project.
Capitalism’s Brave New World There is a certain view of economics that regards Amazon’s Mechanical Turk as both a utopian scheme and a vision of the future. Free-marketers and libertarians will be awed by the spectacle of an untrammeled labor market: A cavalcade of employers make available a wide variety of work. The jobs and compensation are exhaustively defined. The only people who aren’t down with the Turk are the kind of bleeding-hearts who think that 16-cent jobs are a violation of human rights and that nonunionized workforces are herds of cattle marching across the grated steel floor of the corporate rendering plant—the complaints typically following the Occupy Wall Street line about serfdom and income inequality. The hippies are wrong in the particulars. It’s worth appreciating the breadth of the change microtasking represents. Microtasking also obliterates geography—you can work from a bar in midtown Manhattan, a basement in Montana, or a brothel in Manila. It’s that last clause that should give us pause.
Thinking outside the 1930s box 7 October 2011Last updated at 14:38 There are two kinds of people at present: those who know in a vague way that the 1930s was a bad time, and those who have studied the detail and understand the economics of why it went bad. The latter are now getting publicly terrified because they can see, very clearly, the danger of doing it all again. They include Sir Mervyn King on Sky last night: "This is the most serious financial crisis at least since the 1930s, if not ever." But even as people dig out their old books about that concatenation of accident, stupidity and miscommunication that caused the Great Depression, I want to throw in another thought: it could be worse than the 1930s if we let it happen. I suspect this is what was in the back of Mervyn King's mind when he added that "if not ever" comment. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. You may ask how it could possibly get worse than this. Secondly because of globalisation. Third: there are no coherent alternatives. Social unrest is different this time.
World now has 'more people dying from obesity than malnutrition' More people in the world are now dying from obesity than malnutrition, anti-poverty campaigners say. There were 1.5billion dangerously overweight people worldwide last year, while 925million were underfed, according to the Red Cross. The figures were denounced as a âshockingâ demonstration that the world produces enough food but people still go hungry. The Red Cross called it a âdouble-edgedâ scandal that fewer people died of starvation than were being killed by âexcess nutritionâ. The organisationâs Bekele Geleta said: âIf the free interplay of market forces has produced an outcome where 15 per cent of humanity are hungry while 20 per cent are overweight, something has gone wrong somewhere.â The problem is highlighted in the organisationâs annual World Disasters Report, which says the world is facing a growing food crisis. Food prices have spiked globally this year because of speculative commodity trading and climate change, it added.