Month: March 2018

Working Poor ruined by world financial system


Working Poor ruined by world financial system

Every day we are bombarded with assertions from many of the world’s governments that taxes for multinational corporations and very rich people should be lowered. “It’s good for the economy,” they say “and everybody will benefit.” When the costs of lowering such taxes are pointed out, the argument runs that since other countries are doing it we must also do it to remain competitive. Donald Trump grants huge tax concessions to the wealthy and so the other countries must follow suit.

Working poor

In the somewhat optimistic decades of the 60’s and 70’s the vast majority of people wanted to raise the wages and living standards of those in third world and other poor countries. Mind you, they also believed that technology would allow shorter working hours and higher wages! Neither of those things happened. In both the third world and in the OECD countries working hours either stayed the same or increased and wages gradually declined against the relevant cost of living. The top 2% or so of the world, in terms of wealth, massively increased their standing while everybody else went backwards.

Without a voluntary surrendering of excess wealth nothing would ever improve. The exception proves the rule. Philanthropists like Bill Gates and Warren Buffet make a very small proportion of the mega wealthy. It is likely that the rich getting richer and the poor becoming poorer will continue until the world’s entire financial system collapses.

Such economic collapse would surely be accompanied by social collapse. We haven’t yet even mentioned global warming, overpopulation and the aging of the population. Scary isn’t it?

The Founding Fathers and the Second Amendment


george-washington-38      Andrew Jackson

George Washington                                                Andrew Jackson

When the founding fathers of the U.S. constitution framed the second amendment they certainly couldn’t possibly have even imagined the massacres of innocent people and children by lunatics with high powered, rapid fire weapons. Obviously they didn’t foresee heavily armed people massacring innocents, including children in their schools. So what could they have been thinking in instituting the second amendment, the right to bear arms.

In an age of flintlock muskets and pistols and with the Revolutionary war against the British fresh in their minds, the founding fathers wanted to be easily able to establish militia groups. That was most likely their immediate objective. Perhaps a longer term objective was to enable an armed citizenry to resist any attempts at the establishment of a dictatorship.

We currently see quite a few dictatorships in the world, and many quasi dictatorships such as those of the Russian Federation, Turkey and the People’s Republic of China. However, given the overarching power of most modern nations and their highly armed military forces the chances of an armed citizenry successfully resisting rotten governments are virtually zero. Military coups are quite a different matter.

It is more than obvious that the U.S.A. needs to either abolish the second amendment or drastically modify it. No amount of AR-15s and other assault rifles in the hands of civilians will be able to resist the US military. As we have seen, their only function is to enable ghastly massacre after ghastly massacre. Perhaps the National Rifle Association romantically envisages armed citizens defending the freedoms of the U.S.A. The grubby reality however is the needless and tragic number of deaths attributed to gun violence.