free market

The standard ‘trickle-down’ argument against redistribution (through progressive taxation etc) is that instead of making the poor richer, it makes the rich poorer. However, this apparently anti-interventionist attitude actually contains an argument for the current state intervention: although we all want the poor to get better, it is counter-productive to help them directly, since they are not the dynamic and productive element; the only intervention needed is to help the rich get richer, and then the profits will automatically spread down to the poor. Throw enough money at Wall Street, and it will eventually trickle down to Main Street. If you want people to have money to build, don’t give it to them directly, help those who are lending it to them.

Brussels sprouts grown in Norfolk are harvested by machines with incredible wastage and efficiency, taken by lorry to a packing department in the Midlands, sent to a factory where they are washed, cleaned, sorted by size, packaged or frozen and finally sent back again to Norfolk to appear in the supermarkets, wrapped in cellophane or a dinky little net bag... A study conducted by the SAFE alliance in 1995 showed that food was travelling 50% further before it reached the supermarket than it did in the late 1970s.

Washington fought to get and keep Aristide out of Haiti, []wikileaks cables make clear. “A premature departure of MINUSTAH would leave the [Haitian] government...vulnerable to...resurgent populist and anti-market economy political forces—reversing gains of the last two years,” wrote US Ambassador Janet Sanderson in an October 1, 2008, cable. MINUSTAH “is an indispensable tool in realizing core USG [US government] policy interests in Haiti.”

At a high-level meeting five years ago, top US and UN officials discussed how the “Aristide Movement Must Be Stopped,” according to an August 2, 2006, cable. It described how former Guatemalan diplomat Edmond Mulet, then chief of MINUSTAH, “urged US legal action against Aristide to prevent the former president from gaining more traction with the Haitian population and returning to Haiti.”

At Mulet’s request, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan urged South Africa’s President Thabo Mbeki “to ensure that Aristide remained in South Africa.”

Capital throughout its history has long sought to evade certain costs, to treat them as "externalities" as the economists like to say. Environmental costs and the costs of social reproduction (everything from who takes care of grandmother and the disabled to child rearing) are the two most important categories that capital prefers to ignore. Two hundred years of political struggle in the advanced capitalist world forced corporations to internalise some of these costs either through regulation and taxation or through the organisation of private and public welfare systems...

Since the 1970s, there has been a concerted effort on the part of businesses to divest themselves of the financial and political burdens of dealing with these costs. This was what Reaganism was all about. Simultaneously, the high mobility of capital (encouraged by the deregulation of finance and capital flows) permitted capital to move to parts of the world (Asia in particular) where such costs had never been internalised and where the regulatory environment was minimalist.

Meanwhile, the preferred means for seeking solutions to the key problems of environmental degradation and global poverty – the liberalised markets, free trade and rapid growth and capital accumulation favoured by the IMF, the World Bank and leading politicians in the most powerful countries – are precisely those which produce such problems in the first place. The problem of global poverty cannot be attacked without attacking the global accumulation of wealth. Environmental issues cannot be solved by a turn to green capitalism without confronting the corporate interests and the lifestyles that perpetuate the status quo.

The results of the Gallup Organisation’s most recent poll on wellbeing placed Venezuela in sixth place out of 124 countries. The poll, which was published on Thursday, is the result of a series of telephone and face-to-face surveys conducted between February and December 2010.

Using the Cantril Self-Anchoring Striving Scale, whereby respondents are asked to rate their current and future lives based on a scale of 1-10—with 10 being the best life possible—the poll found that 64% of Venezuelans considered themselves to be ‘thriving’, i.e., those who rated their current lives at 7 or above and those who rated their future lives at 8 or above...

Beaten only by Denmark (79%), Canada (69%), Sweden (69%) and Australia (66%) and scoring the same levels of “thriving” as Finland (64%), Venezuela occupied the highest position of those countries considered to be in the “developing world” and came first out of all the Latin American nations. In keeping with Gallup’s results from 2009, the Americas had the highest rate of “thriving”, with a median of 39%. The study highlighted that out of the populations in 124 countries, only 19 (all in Europe and America) classified themselves as being prosperous, with the list of countries where ‘the majority saw themselves as thriving’ including predominantly richer and more developed countries. Despite this, some countries with larger economies, such as the United States (59%) and the UK (54%), conversely ranked lower in the poll and came in at 12th and 17th respectively.

Amy Goodman: ...when we say tens of billions of dollars has been given to the regime, one of the highest recipients of foreign aid in the world, behind Israel, actually that money doesn’t necessarily go to Egypt, right? It goes to U.S. military contractors.

WILLIAM HARTUNG: It’s a form of corporate welfare for companies like Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics, because it goes to Egypt, then it comes back for F-16 aircraft, for M1 tanks, for aircraft engines, for all kinds of missiles, for guns, for tear gas canisters, as was discussed, a company called Combined Systems International, which actually has its name on the side of the canisters that have been found on the streets there. So these companies—for example, Lockheed Martin has been the leader in deals worth $3.8 billion over that period of the last 10 years; General Dynamics, $2.5 billion for tanks; Boeing, $1.7 billion for missiles, for helicopters; Raytheon for all manner of missiles for the armed forces. So, basically, this is a key element in propping up the regime, but a lot of the money, as you said and Juan Cole mentioned on this program, is basically recycled. Taxpayers could just as easily be giving it directly to Lockheed Martin or General Dynamics.