BRICS vs OECD or Corporations vs The People?

Photo: BRICS leaders gather at the “2013 BRICS Summit” in Durban South Africa

“The BRICS just became impossible to ignore. At the close of the Fifth annual BRICS Summit in Durban, South Africa last week, there was little question that this group of five fast-growing economies was underwriting an overhaul of the global economic and political order.” – The BRICS Post

This following Post is In Reply to:

BRICS Summit draws clear red lines on Syria & Iran

http://thebricspost.com/brics-summit-draws-clear-red-lines-on-syria-iran/

"BRICS Summit draws clear red lines..." was a very interesting post but it leaves out some extremely important details to the reader such as what this New World Banking Order is and what it really means. What are they really talking about?

In my opinion, what I see emerging with the BRICS is a duplicate Rothschild banking system with the exact same economic model that is based on exponential growth…and while we the people are realing from this growth model at home, the leading Western nations are plugging the worlds largest economy (China) into the energy they need to continue the destruction of the Western economies. Two clear examples of this are in Iraq and most recently, Canada’s Tar Sands…in fact the approved sale of NEXEN came from Washington and London before it could pass in the Canadian Parliament…not that Canada had any say anyways.

 

Photo: Canadian PM Stephen Harper Toasting FIPPA Deal with China’s Premier Wen Jiabao

Video: China Oil Firm Cuts Deal in Iraq

However the Harper government then went out of its way to give China free access without prosecution for damages they may inflict on our country with FIPPA. Then Harper removed the protection on 99.999% of all the lakes and rivers with Bill C-45 so that corporations like the ones from China could do what they want, anyway they want, without fear of prosecution…and to keep the crimes and pollution from being exposed they muzzled the scientists and declared environmental activists terrorists…(See links Below)

BRICS stand on Syria:

As for Syria…talk is cheap. Russia is under the Israeli influence, and Israel desires the destruction of Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine…and what has Russia done to protect them? Absolutely nothing. Syria has been economically destroyed already. All I see is inaction and empty words on the part of Russia and China on Syria as was the case in Libya. Who stopped the western OECD nations from destroying Libya, or the wests friends in Israel, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, and Jordan from destroying Syria? No one! What I see, is an emerging New World Order via a single currency that will enslave the entire world to the banks and their system of exponential growth.

Video: The Truth About Libya

The status quo, of the OECD & BRICS economic model does not work in the favour of the people. It works in the favour of the wealthy few that control the currency…nothing will change with the BRICS system but I can see that the BRICS will grow simply because no one likes the war like behavior of the Western Nations, and as a result of a crashing OECD economic system, every bankrupt nation will turn to the BRICS and be assimilated into the New World Order emerging from the BRICS new deal.

The BRICS economic model is exactly the same as the OECD model, the only difference is the name of the business plan…the real reason the west is going down is because the banks want control of every country under their single global currency and to do this they must destroy the one that is currently in place…this has been their goal all along.

If we are to see a change in this world of ours we must change our priorities and not allow a corporate model to run the planet. The corporate structure is one of total dictatorship as everyone must see by now as multi national mega conglomerates gobble up everything in sight. Their influence on the Media and government are clearly obvious especially when they become too big to fail, have legislation passed in their favour, or are supported without investigation by the mainstream media. These multi conglomerates are driven by their largest shareholders with a growth model that is exponential and ruthless.

When you have the same share holders controlling the operations of multiple industries with decision making that is best described as, cold, unempathic, and without common sense or moral regard for society, then you have an Armageddon monster out of control and in process of destroying the planet.

 

Photo: Standard Oil Cartoon

Lead by Example:

The only solution that the people have if they want to survive is to stop this “thing” by ending the economic model that feeds it before it completely destroys the planet and everything on it.

I try not to be driven by greed and instead am driven by my empathy for all life and for the future generations that will inherit the earth after I’m gone. What will we leave the future generations? In reality, our needs are meagre compared to what now exists as an economic model…where will we be in 100 years if this economic model is allowed to continue?

Video Source: The Elders Speak (Part 3)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9piIziXU9RE

I Don’t want to leave future generations with this economic monster in place so that it can destroy the planet and all life on it. Let’s be the change together and end this madness. The transition will begin when the OECD economies fall. The transition will be in your hands, either we begin the change by removing the private banks, corporate influence, and its political structure, or we succumb to our greed and wipe out the planet…it’s up to all of us, think very hard on this and discuss it with your neighbours, friends, and family…but do it soon because time has run out.

Stewart Brennan

World United News

This Opinion post is In Reply to:

BRICS Summit draws clear red lines on Syria & Iran
http://thebricspost.com/brics-summit-draws-clear-red-lines-on-syria-iran/

Information Links:

China Oil Firm cuts Deal in Iraq

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4gskxEbPYw
Activists Labelled “Terrorists” by Canadian Government
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gg124WQthPM
Harper Government Muzzles Scientists
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZmo-sU0bIw
Canadian Scientists “Muzzeling” Probed by Information Commissioner
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NuLUrQpixY4
Canada Under Siege – (Part 1) – The Tar Sands, Free Trade, & The Government
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpfOsf1f26I
Canada Under Siege – (Part 2) – The Economy
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2K3x-Ci8O8
The Truth About Libya – The Road to Endless War – (Part 2) - Libya
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCgcbB29bmw
The Global Economy – The Truth and a Warning
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHTpRDM96YQ

 

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What is behind the global stock market rally?

 

By: Andre Damon

Source: Global Research

http://www.globalresearch.ca/what-is-behind-the-global-stock-market-rally/

Despite a string of disastrous economic figures, stock markets throughout the world are surging.

In the past year, the US Dow Jones Industrial Average and the British FTSE 250 have each risen by 20 percent, while the German DAX has shot up by 39 percent. The NASDAQ, consisting mainly of US-based technology companies, has already eclipsed its previous record, set in November 2007, while the Dow is within 600 points of its previous high.

The continued rise on stock exchanges comes as manufacturing activity in Europe, China and the United States slumps to its lowest level in three years. The European economy as a whole is contracting. In the latest raft of dire economic data, released Thursday, US durable goods orders recorded their sharpest fall since 2009. US economic growth for the second quarter was revised downward from an already anemic 1.7 percent to 1.3 percent.

How is one to explain the meteoric rise in stock values even as the global economy is sliding into a deeper slump?

The boom in stock prices is an expression of a global redistribution of wealth from the bottom to the top. The social conditions of the working class have been driven relentlessly downwards, while trillions of dollars have been turned over to the banks, mainly for the purpose of financial speculation.

This process is particularly evident in the United States, the center of world capitalism and the center of the global economic crisis.

The three major stock indexes have nearly doubled in value since 2009, and the fortunes of the super-rich have risen accordingly. The richest 400 billionaires in the US had a net worth of $1.27 trillion in 2009. This already obscene figure shot up to $1.7 trillion in this year’s list, an increase of 33 percent in just three years.

CEO pay has followed a similar course. The average CEO of one of the 350 largest US companies took home $12.14 million in 2011, up from $12.04 million in 2010 and $10.36 million in 2009, according to the Economic Policy Institute.

But for the working population, the situation is exactly the opposite. Between 2009 and 2011, the most recent year for which figures are available, the number of people in poverty in the United States grew by 2.6 million, to 49 million. Mass unemployment has been utilized as a lever to impose wage cuts in every sector of the economy.

Since the official end of the recession, in June of 2009, the average duration of unemployment has nearly doubled from 23 weeks to 38 weeks. The percentage of the working-age population that is employed has fallen, as anemic job growth barely keeps pace with the increase in the population and hundreds of thousands of laid-off people give up looking for work.

For those workers who still have a job, real hourly wages have fallen by about 1.0 percent. The earnings of a typical household fell by 1.7 percent in 2010 alone.

The increase in the rate of exploitation of workers has translated into huge cost savings for corporations and record profits in every year since 2009, further swelling the incomes of the super-rich.

In addition to the direct impoverishment of the work force, stock markets have been buoyed by the influx of cash from the world’s central banks.

Within the last month, the US Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank and the Bank of Japan have all taken new measures to pump hundreds of billions of dollars into the financial markets. The US Fed took the most dramatic step of the three, initiating an open-ended program to buy $40 billion in mortgage-backed securities every month, taking these toxic assets off of the banks’ balance sheets.

The ostensible purpose of these moves is to lower interest rates, revive the housing market, and increase the amount of money available for corporations to expand and hire new workers. But instead of productively investing the money, the corporations and banks are either hoarding it or pouring it into the stock market and other forms of speculation.

The total amount of cash held by major US corporations stood at $1.7 trillion in the second quarter of this year. Apple, the technology giant, is a case in point. It held $98 billion in the first quarter of this year, $110 billion in the second, and $117 billion in the third. Meanwhile, its market valuation keeps expanding and there is already talk that the company, which is currently valued at over $600 billion, will become the world’s first $1 trillion corporation.

The enormous sums of money being pumped into the financial system are inflating asset values and bankrolling record payouts for executives, whose compensation is often tied to share prices.

The inflation of asset values cannot continue indefinitely amid the deepening economic slump. The growth of share values and other financial assets, based mainly on a near-zero interest-rate policy and virtually free money from the central banks, is inflating a new and even more gigantic speculative bubble than the one that burst in September of 2008.

The upsurge in stock values does not reflect a healthy economy, but one that is deeply diseased, in which the intractable contradictions of the capitalist system are exacerbated by a ruthless and avaricious financial aristocracy that dictates policy in the United States and internationally.

The US ruling class, first under Bush and then under Obama, responded to the crash of 2008, which was the inevitable outcome of the financialization of American capitalism, by handing over trillions of dollars in public funds to the banks. The aim was to reflate the values of financial assets in order to maintain and increase the wealth of the financial aristocracy.

World governments have followed suit, with each bailout of the banks accompanied by an ever more ferocious attack on workers. Everything must be cut: wages, pensions, health care, education—everything, that is, but the wealth of those responsible for the crisis.

The financial vultures who control the main investment houses send stock markets soaring with each new assault on jobs and social programs—as they did Friday after the Spanish government, presiding over a country in deep recession, unveiled a draft budget that slashes spending by $51 billion next year.

The key to the “success” of finance capital to this point has been its ability to isolate and quash outbreaks of working class resistance, relying on the services of the trade union apparatuses and their allies among the various pseudo-left organizations (the New Anti-capitalist Party in France, the Socialist Workers Party in the UK, the Left Party in Germany, SYRIZA in Greece, the International Socialist Organization in the US).

However, the actions of the central banks and governments have resolved nothing. The euphoria on the stock exchanges rests on rotten foundations. The rising markets are one expression of an unprecedented intensification of social tensions that are already beginning to erupt in the form of explosive class struggles on a world scale. A new, revolutionary leadership must be built in every country to unite these struggles and arm them with a socialist and internationalist program.

 

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As Popular Opposition Grows Austerity Budgets imposed across Europe

By: Alex Lantier

Source: Global Research

http://www.globalresearch.ca/as-popular-opposition-ggrows-austerity-budgets-imposed-across-europe/

The French, Spanish and Greek governments all announced multibillion-euro austerity plans yesterday in the face of massive popular opposition.

The French budget presented by the Socialist Party (PS) government of President François Hollande is the harshest since the austerity budgets of the early 1980s under PS President François Mitterrand. It calls for €30 billion (US$38.6 billion) in deficit cuts, including €20 billion in tax increases and €10 billion in spending cuts.

The Spanish budget calls for €13.4 billion in spending cuts in the fourth major package of austerity measures passed this year following the election of the conservative Popular Party (PP) last November. The ministries whose budgets will be most severely cut include Agriculture, Industry and Education.

Greece’s coalition government—which includes the right-wing New Democracy (ND), the social democratic PASOK, and the Democratic Left (DIMAR)—announced that it will unveil a plan Monday for €11.5 billion in spending cuts. Plans for these cuts were first announced in July, but the government initially failed to reach an agreement on how to distribute them.

In each country, the new austerity measures are being pushed through in defiance of public opinion. On Wednesday, millions of workers throughout Greece walked off the job and hundreds of thousands protested in a one-day national strike. On Tuesday, tens of thousands of protesters opposed to the cuts marched to the parliament in Madrid and were brutally attacked by riot police.

In France, Hollande’s popularity ratings have fallen to 43 percent as job losses and austerity measures antagonize voters who elected him in May.

These events demonstrate the impossibility of fighting social austerity in Europe by supporting the bourgeois “left” parties, the European Union (EU), or European capitalism. In a matter of months, the promises made by the official parties have proven worthless.

Hollande cynically promised that “austerity is not an unavoidable destiny.” The Greek coalition government received the tacit support of the bourgeois “left” SYRIZA party, which ran against it ostensibly on an anti-austerity platform, but then pledged to be a “responsible” opposition that would not call strikes and would continue to support the European Union.

As for the PP—elected on the basis of mass hostility to the austerity policies of the previous social democratic Spanish Socialist Workers Party (PSOE) government—its pretense that it would not pursue Greek-style austerity in exchange for an EU bailout of its banks is fast evaporating.

The PP’s cuts to pensions and social spending and its attacks on labor rights are the most severe since the collapse of the fascist Franco dictatorship. Reductions in national state spending of €16.5 billion, €27 billion and €65 billion passed in January, April and July—combined with deep cuts in regional government spending—are sinking Spain’s economy.

One quarter of Spanish workers and 52.9 percent of Spanish youth are unemployed, and despite pledges for bank bailouts the economy is contracting. The International Monetary Fund anticipates a 1.2 percent contraction of Spain’s economy, though the government’s cuts are based on apparently overoptimistic projections of a 0.5 percent contraction.

Spain now pays more to service its debt than it spends on unemployment benefits or the budgets of its national ministries. Since the global economic crisis began in 2008, its public debt has more than doubled, jumping from 35.5 percent to 75.9 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), and the interest rate it pays on its debt has surged as a result of speculation against Spanish bonds by the banks and finance houses.

Spain’s banks are poised to request another €60 billion bailout as the Spanish real estate collapse continues to undermine their balance sheets.

The effect of such policies is most clearly seen in Greece, whose economy is now projected to plunge by 7 percent this year, instead of the previously projected 4.7 percent. Since the Greek debt crisis began in 2009, its economy has contracted by roughly one quarter.

Der Spiegel reported that, due to this continuing collapse, EU authorities expect Greece’s budget shortfall to reach €20 billion. They will then demand more cuts in Greece beyond the €11.5 billion Athens is currently proposing. As laid out in July, these include €5 billion in cuts to the Labor Ministry budget (mainly to pensions) and attacks on Greece’s devastated public hospitals.

These massive cuts—the corresponding amounts would be $802 billion in the United States, £82 billion in Britain and €136 billion in Germany—will ravage a society in which those workers who have managed to keep their jobs have already seen wage cuts of 30-50 percent.

The negotiation of the cuts will place take amid deepening conflict within Greece’s political elite. There is speculation that DIMAR might collapse, as at least three of its 17 parliamentarians have declared they plan to vote against the cuts.

Greece’s Financial Crimes Squad (SDOE) recently released a list of thirty politicians, including former ministers and top parliamentarians of ND, PASOK and SYRIZA, who are suspected of tax evasion or other forms of fraud.

France’s austerity package cuts €10 billion from the national budget of €376 billion by imposing a wage and hiring freeze on public sector workers, imposing a 5 percent across-the-board cut in the ministries’ projected budgets, and cutting €2.7 billion in health care spending. The Defense, Finance and Ecology ministries are reportedly particularly hard hit, with losses respectively of 7,234, 2,353 and 1,276 jobs.

As for the €20 billion in tax increases, half are to be achieved by closing certain corporate loopholes, and half by increasing taxes on individual households.

The PS government and the media have trumpeted the fact that roughly half of the individual tax increases will be borne by “affluent” households. This is an attempt to obscure the anti-working class character of the Socialist Party’s policies. The tax rate for the top income tax bracket is to be raised to 45 percent, and yearly wage income over €1 million is to be taxed at 75 percent.

To seriously examine these measures, one must briefly enter the realm of French tax policy—which means confronting what Karl Marx, in The Class Struggle in France, called the “sheer swindling” that characterizes France’s financial affairs.

In 2010, the top 1 and 10 percent of the French population took in €181 billion and €515 billion, respectively. Nonetheless, the increase in the top tax bracket and the tax on wage income over €1 million combined will raise only €530 million nationwide. The total of €6 billion raised by increasing taxes on the affluent, including by closing some corporate loopholes, does not amount to a substantial portion of their income.

In part, this is because of a complex system of tax exemptions that Hollande’s measures do not seriously touch. These exemptions allowed billionaire Liliane Bettencourt to pay a 9 percent effective tax rate in 2010 on the hundreds of millions of euros she earned on her $24 billion fortune.

In part, also, it is because most income in the ruling class is interest income on capital holdings, not wages—which means that Hollande’s “75 percent tax” does not seriously impact most members of the financial aristocracy.

Nonetheless, the austerity budget was denounced by sections of the press, with Figaro Magazine titling its lead article “Enough is Enough.”

Sections of the bourgeoisie supporting the PS are arguing that the current austerity budget is only a down payment on deeper attacks on the working class being prepared by the PS government. These include proposals for labor market “reforms” to facilitate hiring, firing and forcing workers into short-time work, as well as for €30-50 billion in cuts to corporate funding of social security.

An editorial in Le Monde stressed the need for a “true ‘competitiveness shock’ in our country.” It stated: “The 2013 budget does not really contribute to it. Promised cuts in the labor market and the financing of social spending will be decisive in this regard. Today’s budget shock will only be meaningful if it is rapidly complemented by a powerful competitiveness shock to give France the electroshock therapy it needs.”

 

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