Plutocrats

[tiltbillings]

http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript ... =162799512

[Ben]

Thanks Tilt.
That article looks interesting.
Actually, I was just listening to someone on the radio giving an analysis of the second Obama v Romney debate.

[tiltbillings]

Thanks Tilt.
That article looks interesting.
Actually, I was just listening to someone on the radio giving an analysis of the second Obama v Romney debate.

There is a chance that the Plutocrat Romney could win. He is a man without a moral center.

[Khalil Bodhi]

Thanks Tilt, I may actually have to read the book.

[Kim OHara]

http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=162799512

Thanks, Tilt. I don't think I need to read the book because it's theme is one we have noticed (to put it mildly) in Australia in the last few years: the rich are getting *much* richer and are losing any sense of connection or community with the 99%. The most outrageous recent example is one Gina Rinehart - see http://www.smh.com.au/business/worlds-media-pan-rineharts-2-a-day-african-miner-comments-20120906-25fpq.html - but there are several others in (especially) mining and the media.



Kim

[tiltbillings]

We got a lot of this going on here:

[gavesako]

Compare:


Greed is Good

Giveaway. Getaway. Got away. All is well in Thailand. The rich get richer. The poor get tips. The middle class click "like".

In the immortal words of Gordon Gecko (Oliver Stone’s 1987 film, Wall Street), "Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit."

The capitalist elite's stranglehold on the Thai economy tightens, courtesy of government agencies that give the biggest bang for their baht. Forget feudal Thailand, the capitalists are on their Ferrari horses, yelping, ‘’Tally-ho, boys! Charge! Charge! But watch out for the tanks!’’

And since the middle class works for the capitalist elite anyway, we can expect bonuses and pay raises from this super mini boom, oh joy. We can also log-on easier to click like, upload instagram and update location and stuff, oh double joy.

Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) can feast on the leftover crumbs and be proud of practicing sufficiency economy, rather than greedy capitalism. It’s the noble Thai way.

You see, it is all a matter of perspective. If we choose to be positive, then we can see that everybody wins.


The lord gives tips to the poor in populist policies and riches to the rich in strengthening the oligarchy on the cheap. Meanwhile, the middle class will consume anyway and can always hope for bonuses and pay raises. It’s the circle of capitalistic life.

We should be proud that in a poor, peasant, agricultural, developing country, we can boast so many in Forbes magazine’s richest in the world. Yes, we should be proud of our social betters. We are Thais. We respect the hierarchy.



http://www.bangkokpost.com/opinion/opin ... ddle-class

[Kim OHara]

The Selfish Capitalist: origins of Affluenza
Oliver James
Vermilion, 2008

In this sequel to his Affluenza (2007), Oliver James argues that capitalism as practised recently in the richer English-speaking countries – that’s us – is making us miserable. ‘Affluenza’, a term coined in the late 1970s, is the pattern of chronic over-work, debt, anxiety and waste generated by our obsession with goods and income, and James traces its cause to economic policies.
He defines Selfish Capitalism as the neo-liberal Thatcherism adopted in the 1990s and finds that, depite the ‘trickle-down’ rhetoric, those policies made the rich very much richer while leaving the rest of us no better off financially and significantly worse off in other ways. Labour market deregulation undermined job security and held down real wages, the media joined business in successfully promoting perceptions of relative poverty even as real levels of consumption reached new highs, and debt increased enormously (in Australia, mortgages rose from 2.8 to 4.2 times average annual income between 1994 and 2004 while other personal debt tripled).
James is a clinical psychologist and he focuses on levels of ‘distress’ - basically unhappiness and mental illness. Others have presented similar arguments blaming unrestrained capitalism for social inequality, family breakdown, declining moral standards, teenage crime and many related problems. They may all be right. Convincingly untangling the causes and effects might be impossible – there are just too many factors to consider – but Oliver James does a good job, supporting clear arguments with good evidence.

Kim