Author Archives: sombranegra79

Clinton 2016: Endless War Guaranteed

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CLINTONFLICKRRONAPROUDFOOTVisits from high-profile public figures are somewhat of a rarity at Hamilton College in upstate New York, so it wasn’t a surprise many students snatched up tickets to see Hillary Clinton last October. And after a talk which may have cost the school up to $300,000 (at her “discounted” student rate), the presidential endorsements quickly echoed across campus.

Her speech at Hamilton was just one of many stops on her lucrative nationwide speaking tour, a relentless self-promoting campaign aimed at earning her a head start in the 2016 presidential race. Across small towns and college campuses, with an acquiescent media fawning over her new book, Clinton hailed the United States as “the greatest force for peace and progress the world has ever known”.

Inserting herself in the collegiate demographic conveniently allows Clinton to rewrite history, absolving her role in some of the nation’s most criminal foreign policy initiatives – from the invasion of Iraq to the overthrow of Gaddafi in Libya. In fact, Clinton is widely known to be even more of a war-hawk than Sen. John McCain within Obama’s national security circles.

Her war mongering has paid off with heavy backing of the military industrial complex, exemplified by her relationship with Boeing, the world’s second largest defense contractor. In one instance, she set aside ethics guidelines in order to secure a multi-billion dollar deal with the company.

A few of the venues on her tour are particularly revealing. Aside from the usual events open to the public, she’s been paid hefty sums of money to give private speeches to investors at Goldman Sachs and the Carlyle Group – the former of which has since been revealed as her second largest political donor. Modern-day presidential campaigns can’t be run on a shoestring – the 2012 race exceeded $1 billion in campaign spending and in 2008, Goldman Sachs exceeded every other corporation in spending for Obama.

Hillary Clinton’s list of donor buddies stretches far beyond the 1200 yards of Wall Street, and considering how banks and war are leading the pack, the damage wrought by them does too. If she wins the 2016 election, America is guaranteed four more disastrous years of neoliberalism and war.

Ming Chun Tang

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Abby Martin talks about Clinton’s horrible track record on foreign policy and war mongering on Breaking the Set.

 

Hillary Clinton 2016: Recipe for Endless War

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Follow @AbbyMartin

Photo by FLICKR user Rona Proudfoot

Walmart’s Predatory Profit Model: Low Prices With a Heavy Cost

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Stop Walmart by Flickr Lone PrimateAs the saying goes, there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Nowhere does that ring more loudly true than in the aisles of every Walmart store. Always low prices, yes – but at what cost?

There are, unfortunately, two inconvenient truths about the dollars you’ve supposedly saving from having elected the world’s largest retailer over Joe’s little store just down the street. First off, what you don’t pay, someone else is paying for. And secondly, the actual price you pay is much higher than what your receipt tells you.

I’m aware that the slogan I mentioned earlier is outdated. The irony was not lost when, in 2007, the company swapped it for the rather idealistically sounding “Save Money, Live Better” – a far cry from the everyday reality facing the average Walmart employee in the United States. Making an average hourly wage of $8.81 an hour, or about $18,300 a year working full-time, is hardly the way to live better. It’s only slightly over a third of a living wage for an adult with one child. 

That’s why Walmart isn’t quite as cheap as you’d think – because much of what you’re not paying at the cashier ends up getting paid for through your taxes. It’s estimated that every Walmart store in America costs citizens $1.7 million in welfare benefits such as food stamps. Taxpayers are effectively subsidizing the retailer for its failure to pay employees a living wage.

Abby Martin outlines Walmart’s horrible treatment of employees and destruction of the planet on Breaking the Set:

Why Walmart is an Economic Death Star

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Amazingly, Walmart could afford to give all of its employees a 50 percent raise without even touching its bottom line – but it chooses not to. And why does it choose to perpetrate the countless other assaults on its outsourced workforce, female employees and the environment? The answer’s simple: profit maximization.

We’ve all heard of corporate social responsibility. Be it sincere or mere corporate whitewashing, the “triple bottom line” of economic, social and environmental sustainability surely fares better than the single-minded focus on profit that prevails under the current global economic order.

The existing objective, profit maximization, is exactly what it sounds like: putting profits above all else, be it workers’ right to “live better”, the planet’s capacity to sustain human activity, worker and consumer health and safety, economic stability, or human lives. This reckless pursuit of profit is why taxpayers are propping up large corporations that make obscene profits in the meantime.

It’s why 1100 Bangladeshi workers, many of them making garments sold at Walmart, lost their lives when the Rana Plaza factory collapsed due to blatant disregard for building safety on the part of the companies it supplied (Walmart still refuses to sign an international agreement that would ensure worker safety in its sweatshops).

It’s why General Electric, Toshiba and Hitachi did nothing about the flaws in their nuclear reactors at Fukushima that caused them to melt down in 2011, despite knowing for decades that they were unsafe.

It’s why there is still no vaccine for ebola despite over 2000 deaths at the time of writing – because there’s no money to be made out of it. Or why corporate tax evasion through loopholes and tax havens costs the United States some $300 billion every year.

It’s why governments, on behalf of their grossly bloated financial sectors, are negotiating a secretive international financial treaty that further deregulates global finance known as the Trade in Services Agreement (TISA). 

And so on. What these failures of the capitalist system, or what neoliberal economists term “market failure”, share is a common root in the unwillingness on the part of businesses to fully account for their costs. Taxpayers pay the price for Walmart’s refusal to adequately pay its own workers. The manufacturers of the Fukushima nuclear plants, unwilling to dish out the money to fix their inherent design flaws, unleashed a public health disaster that threatens to get worse. Global finance triggered the Great Recession through their own risky but rewarding behaviour and want to do it all over again.

The very nature of business needs to change if humanity is to avoid yet more Rana Plazas, Fukushimas and Great Recessions, and if it is to ever overcome ebola, tax evasion and corporate welfare. We need to move away from the predatory capitalist “I want it all” ethos and towards new business models that account for all costs rather than leaving them for others to pay. This is not financially impossible, and there’s no reason why such a model can’t be financially self-sustaining. But it’s only when business owners and executives start to acknowledge their responsibility to really help the rest of society to “live better” rather than taking more and more for themselves will that model be possible.

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Top Five Worst Corporations for US Workers

Abby Martin calls out the corporations that refuse to pay their workers a living wage, despite posting record profits and generously compensating their CEOs.

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Written by Ming Chun Tang; image by Flickr user Jim

How the American Dream Died

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DetroitFlickrMemories_by_MikeThey told us all we had to do to get rich was work hard. They said we had a world of opportunities to achieve all the success we wanted. Yet an uncomfortable truth is dawning over America: the American Dream was simply never meant for everyone. Anyone could get rich – but not everyone at the same time. It’s only a dream for a privileged few, and a nightmare for everyone else.

Let’s take the “Dream” apart so we can take a closer look of what it’s made of. I can reap the fruits of my own hard work. I can forge the career of my dreams, and through that career, I can make good money and live the good life. I can free myself from the oppressive chains of government and oligarchy. Me, myself and I. If there’s a single underlying issue with the American Dream, a single virus behind the symptoms of sick lady America, it’s the individualistic mentality that has it locked in a futile battle against none other than itself. It is this mentality that has academics at the country’s most elite institutions concluding that the United States is not a democracy but an oligarchy.

So how did a country that once provided asylum to refugees of Europe’s aristocracy come to be ruled by a modern-day aristocracy? Part of the problem is the inability to realize that certain freedoms and liberties inherently conflict with each other. My freedom as an executive to make as much money as I want conflicts with your freedom as an employee to be able to make a living and afford basic human rights such as food, shelter, education and health care. I could show you some compassion – but not in hyper-individualistic America. Instead, my power as an executive allows my freedom to prevail, whereas your lack of power as a mere worker leaves you deprived of yours.

That is why Detroit, once the embodiment of the American Dream, now epitomizes its sad end: the unleashing of international trade anarchy opened the door to outsourcing, which in turn wiped out the Motor City’s economy. Wall Street finished it off. Neoliberal economists, feigning scientific-ness in order to legitimize the world’s plundering by the corporate elite, preach free trade in the name of maximizing “efficiency”. Poverty, unemployment and thousands of abandoned buildings aren’t exactly a perfect illustration of efficiency.

Hyper-individualism is unsustainable, and until people find meaning beyond the dollar, the American nightmare will continue to be a harsh reality for many.

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How America’s Work Obsession is Killing Our Quality of Life

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How the American Dream Died

Abby Martin comments on a recent poll showing that a growing number of Americans believe the ‘American Dream’ is impossible to achieve; and urges US citizens to rethink what the dream should truly be.

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Written by Ming Chun Tang; image by Flickr user Memories_by_Mike