Breaking Apart An iPhone’s Cost
It’s still shocking to see just how little of the profits from an item go towards those who made it. From a piece on the power of transnational corporations, via Reports from the Economic Front:
The production of the iPhone offers one of the best examples of the logic and operation of these transnational corporate controlled cross border production networks.
Not surprisingly, the division of profits, as shown below, reflects the overall hierarchy that structures this and other cross border production networks.
Occupy Wukan? or A Chinese Spring
The village of Wukan in Guangdong province has staged a massive protest over local officials seizing land without compensation for development projects. This type of issue has been sticky in China for quite some time, similar to eminent domain in the U.S. but without much recourse or a court to appeal to. Here is a video posted on YouTube, its in Mandarin but the images are worth it:
The Financial Times also has a decent article and video.
147 Companies ‘Own Everything’
Source: New Scientist
New Scientist reveals the capitalist network that runs the world:
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. Pushing the analysis further, they say, could help to identify ways of making global capitalism more stable.
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). But the study, by a trio of complex systems theorists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, is the first to go beyond ideology to empirically identify such a…
You Are Still Being Lied To: Howard Zinn’s “Columbus and Western Civilization”
The following is an excerpt of “Columbus and Western Civilization” written by Howard Zinn that appears in the Disinformation anthology You Are Still Being Lied To edited by Russ Kick.
Author’s Note: In the year 1992, the celebration of Columbus Day was different from previous ones in two ways. First, this was the quincentennial, 500 years after Columbus’ landing in this hemisphere. Second, it was a celebration challenged all over the country by people—many of them native Americans but also others—who had “discovered” a Columbus not worth celebrating, and who were rethinking the traditional glorification of “Western civilization.” I gave this talk at the University of Wisconsin in Madison in October 1991. It was published the following year by the Open Magazine Pamphlet Series with the title “Christopher Columbus & the Myth of Human Progress.”
George Orwell, who was a very wise man, wrote: “Who controls the past controls the future. And who controls the present controls the past.” In other words, those who dominate our society are in a position to write our histories. And if they can do that, they can decide our futures. That is why the telling of the Columbus story is important.
Let me make a confession. I knew very little about Columbus until about twelve years ago, when I began writing my book A People’s History of the United States. I had a Ph.D. in history from Columbia University—that is, I had the proper training of a historian, and what I knew about Columbus was pretty much what I had learned in elementary school.
The Problem with Social Democracy
An interesting article that highlights some inconsistencies Center-Left parties have in implementing a social-democratic platform while effectively maintaining and strengthening capitalism … Via Socialist Worker:
With the electoral breakthrough of the NDP in the federal election, attention to the nature of social democracy has returned to the political agenda. What do socialists say about the NDP and social democracy today?
There are two main views about parliamentary — or electoral — democracy in the history of the socialist movement. The social democratic view sees the liberal democratic state as a neutral body that can be peopled by delegates of the right or the left. Marxists, however, have stressed the limitations of the liberal democratic state. This view dates back to Marx’s analysis stated simply in the Communist Manifesto.
Contemporary social democratic parties, like the NDP or the Labour Party in the UK, keep a close eye on every aspect of parliamentary practice. Social…
The New Religion of Shaolin
Photo: Robin Chen (CC)
Chinese capitalism has something uniquely in common with historical Maoism: atheism. Vast economic growth met with a huge demand for traditional culture has meant Chinese cultural institutions are increasingly trading in their social values for growth-based business plans. Via the Independent:
Young men spring through the air, performing elegant punches and kicks; others bound across the dirt, swords flashing through the misty air. An ancient tree has dozens of small dents, made by “finger punches” of warrior monks over the centuries.
This is the Shaolin temple complex, in the mountains of central China, where kung fu was born 1,500 years ago. Now a place of pilgrimage for martial arts enthusiasts and Zen Buddhists, thousands of young people come to study kung fu, or wushu as it is known in China, in schools around the temple.
The commercial success of the temple is obvious, even if some of the sights are…
So Who Really Runs The World? A Network Analysis Reveals ‘Super Entity’ of Global Corporate Control …
An outline of the adversary emerges from Michael Ricciardi on PlanetSave:
In the first such analysis ever conducted, Swiss economic researchers have conducted a global network analysis of the most powerful transnational corporations (TNCs). Their results have revealed a core of 787 firms with control of 80% of this network, and a “super entity” comprised of 147 corporations that have a controlling interest in 40% of the network’s TNCs.
When we hear conspiracy theorist talk about this or that powerful group (or alliance of said groups) “pulling strings” behind the scenes, we tend to dismiss or minimize such claims, even though, deep down, we may suspect that there’s some degree of truth to it, however distorted by the theorists’ slightly paranoid perception of the world. But perhaps our tendency to dismiss such claims as exaggerations (at best) comes from our inability to get even a slight grip on the complexity of global…
Gibson Guitars Vs. the U.S. Government
Via Brooklyn Vegan and Gibson.com:
The Federal Department of Justice in Washington, D.C. has suggested that the use of wood from India that is not finished by Indian workers is illegal, not because of U.S. law, but because it is the Justice Department’s interpretation of a law in India. (If the same wood from the same tree was finished by Indian workers, the material would be legal.) This action was taken without the support and consent of the government in India.
On August 24, 2011, around 8:45 a.m. CDT, agents for the federal government executed four search warrants on Gibson’s facilities in Nashville and Memphis and seized several pallets of wood, electronic files and guitars. Gibson had to cease its manufacturing operations and send workers home for the day, while armed agents executed the search warrants. Gibson has fully cooperated with the execution of the search warrants.
Americanization Training At An Indian Call Center
The most marketable skill in India today is the ability to abandon your identity and slip into someone else’s.
An American spends his summer at an Indian call center, including a boot camp in which new employees try to change their nationality in three weeks by shedding their accents, gazing at photos of Walmart, watching Seinfeld, and eating pepperoni. Via Mother Jones:
I am waiting for a company cab, now an hour and a half late, to drive me across town to a call center, where an Indian “culture trainer” will teach me how to act Australian. For three weeks, a culture trainer will teach us conversational skills, Australian pop culture, and the terms of the mobile-phone contracts we’ll be peddling.
Bright recent college grads pore over flashcards and accent tapes, intoning the shibboleths of English pronunciation—”wherever” and “pleasure” and “socialization”—that recruiters use to distinguish the employable candidates from those still suffering from…
Chris Hedges’s Endgame Strategy: Why The Revolution Must Start In America
Synopsis via The Raw Story:
Pulitzer-winning author and former New York Times reporter Chris Hedges has a revolutionary worldview. In the video below, his recent “Endgame Strategy” piece for AdBusters is read aloud by George Atherton. His conclusions are chilling, but not entirely hopeless. “We will have to take care of ourselves,” he wrote. “We will have to rapidly create small, monastic communities where we can sustain and feed ourselves. It will be up to us to keep alive the intellectual, moral and cultural values the corporate state has attempted to snuff out. It is either that or become drones and serfs in a global corporate dystopia. It is not much of a choice. But at least we still have one.
Paranormal Investigator Richard Thomas on Alex Jones and the New World Order (Interview)
An interview with Richard Thomas, author of the excellent book, PARA-NEWS — UFOs, Ghosts, Conspiracy Cryptids, and More — a collection of essays and interviews (with Nick Redfern, Nick Pope, and others) that first appeared on Binnall of America, UFO Mystic, Sci-Fi Worlds, and other venues. Interviewed by Henry Baum, author of the conspiracy novel, The American Book of the Dead.
Henry Baum: In your book, you frequently raise the specter of Alex Jones and his ideas on eugenics, the New World Order, and so on. Personally, I take some issue with Alex Jones for a few reasons, and I wonder if you could address them. The main thing that leaps out about Alex Jones is that he never raises the UFO issue — you actually interview someone at Infowars who seems pretty disinterested in the whole subject. This seems like a fairly impossible assertion to make — it’s pretty clear that…
Why The World Isn’t As ‘Flat’ As Thomas Friedman Says…
Rana Foroohar writes in TIME:
Tis the season to be selfish. Right after the global financial crisis exploded in 2008, many economists fretted that countries looking to hold on to their share of a shrinking pie would become more self-interested and protectionist, plunging the planet into an even sharper downturn, just as happened in the 1930s after the Great Depression. Thanks to panic-fueled crisis management by policymakers, it didn’t happen. But after three years of pain and very little economic gain, it may be happening now.
The signs are everywhere. Europeans are in the middle of a potentially calamitous debt crisis, one that threatens not only the survival of the euro zone but the idea of the European Union itself: politicians are starting to talk about rolling back visa-free travel between countries. Meanwhile, OPEC is falling apart as the Saudis and the Iranians bicker over how to control the world’s energy spigots.…
Alex Jones On WWIII (Video)
Apply as many grains of salt as you see fit (personally I think he makes many good points, but WWIII? I’d be surprised), but here is Alex’s predictions on the impending WWIII:
Aerotropolis: Will The Cities Of The Future Be Giant Airports?
The Utopianist discusses one (slightly hellish) idea of what the city of the future may look like — the ‘aerotropolis’, in which the airport is at the city’s geographic and economic core, and daily life increasingly resembles being inside an endlessly sprawling airport:
It’s a city that’s built around an airport, the bigger the better, with factories and/or traders, both dependent on air freight, close by, followed by a ring of malls and hotels, followed by a ring of residential neighborhoods. The airport isn’t an annoyance, located as far out of the way as possible, but the city’s heart, its raison d’être.
While the vision of a city based around an airport may seem novel, there are such aerotropolises already in existence, like Ecuador’s capital, Quito. We already have a few cities in the United States that roughly adhere to this model — Memphis, our nation’s major FedEx hub, and Seattle, the home…
United States Becomes Sweden’s Third-World Outsourcing Destination
“It’s ironic that IKEA looks on the U.S. and Danville the way that most people in the U.S. look at Mexico,” Street said.
When a large multinational corporation is looking to cut costs, what does it do? Send jobs overseas to a less modernized country — one where salaries are a fraction of those at home and the law provides few rights or protections for workers — and watch the profits roll in. We are speaking, of course, of Sweden’s IKEA, and Virginia, USA. Is this our economic future? Current reports:
Here we are, folks. Sweden’s third-world sweatshop. IKEA takes advantage of the destruction to our economy caused by outsourcing jobs by outsourcing their own jobs to the U.S. — and paying less than the workers in Sweden get ($8 in the U.S., $19 + better benefits in Sweden, for making the same products), about 50% of what the median income is in…
The Last Free People On Earth
Joanna Eede writes for National Geographic:
Deep in one of the remotest parts of the Brazilian Amazon, in a clearing at the headwaters of the Envira River, an Indian man looks up at an aeroplane.
He is surrounded by kapok trees and banana plants, and by the necessities of his life: a thatched hut, its roof made from palm fronds; a plant-fiber basket brimming with ripe pawpaw; a pile of peeled manioc, lying bright-white against the rain forest earth.
The man’s body is painted red from crushed seeds of the annatto shrub, and in his hand…
The Economics Of Happiness (Video)
I recently had a chance to attend a showing of the documentary The Economics of Happiness. It has a very strong message about the fiscal and social problems of globalization, especially its impact beyond the western world. As a solution, the film suggests a movement towards focusing on communities and localization. Here’s the trailer and a plot synopsis:
Economic globalization has led to a massive expansion in the scale and power of big business and banking. It has also worsened nearly every problem we face: fundamentalism and ethnic conflict; climate chaos and species extinction; financial instability and unemployment. There are personal costs too. For the majority of people on the planet, life is becoming increasingly stressful. We have less time for friends and family and we face mounting pressures at work.
75-Year-Old Woman Single-Handedly Cuts Off Internet for Two Countries
Helena Bedwell writes on Bloomberg:
Georgian authorities detained a scrap-metal hunter for cutting a main Internet cable near Tbilisi, the Interior Ministry said. The break in the cable left tens of thousands of residents and businesses without Internet access in Georgia and all of Armenia on March 28, the ministry said.
A 75-year-old woman was arrested on evidence given by several witnesses and was “temporarily released due to her old age,” ministry spokesman Zurab Gvenetadze said today in a phone interview in Tblisi. She will be questioned again and may face charges, Gvenetadze said.
The incident cut Armenia’s Internet access for more than 12 hours, Gvenetadze said. An unidentified spokeswoman for Caucasus Online, one of the largest Georgina Internet service providers, said customers lost access to the World Wide Web for almost five hours.
Georgian Railway Telecom LLC spokesman Giorgi Ionatamishvili said the cable belonged to the company and customers suffered “massive and catastrophic”…
