– This is for my U.S. readers. It just isn’t right that a small country like New Zealand (and many others that are not so small) can do this and the U.S. cannot. Why? – –
– Corporate greed – plain and simple. They’ve got you in their grips and they are not going to let go.
My last prescription bill
– Oh, and the three dollars is only for the initial prescription for each. Refills are free.
I’ve been reflecting on the Occupy Wall Street Movement.
First, Bravo to them for understanding what’s happening to the world and for standing up and pointing it out so well. I hope the movement continues to ‘grow legs’ and I also hope that, like the ‘Arab Spring’, it results in real and fundamental changes.
But, my hopes and my projections of likely outcomes live in separate boxes in my head. And while I am deeply pleased at the OWS movement, I don’t think it will result in more than superficial change.
The problem, as I just wrote to a friend in a private E-Mail, is
“The people with power and money like, Dick Cheney for instance, are not going to give up their perks because the demonstrators make them feel guilty. Rather, if they begin to feel the heat, they will direct that a series of measures be taken by their political handmaidens to make it look like changes are being effected when, in fact, the changes will be mostly form and very little substance.
They will institute ‘a dazzle the bozos campaign'”.
A great strength of the new movements like the Arab Spring and OWS are their decentralized natures; they have no single head to cut off to stifle them. But, it their weakness as well as their ‘intelligence and perceptive depth’ is limited to the average of the group since they are all independent actors.
Those who control the Multinationals and who direct our politicians like sheep with their money are far far brighter than that average and they will obfuscate the issues and make great shows of doing something through the media they control while, in fact, doing very little to disadvantage themselves.
Those are my thoughts. Only time will tell and I, like so many, am deeply interested to see how it all plays out.
-dennis
Conventional wisdom says a few sticky, fat fingers control a disproportionate slice of the world economy’s pie. A new analysis suggests that the conventional wisdom is right on the money.
Diagramming the relationships between more than 43,000 corporations reveals a tightly connected core of top economic actors. In 2007, a mere 147 companies controlled nearly 40 percent of the monetary value of all transnational corporations, researchers report in a paper published online July 28 at arXiv.org.
“This is empirical evidence of what’s been understood anecdotally for years,” says information theorist Brandy Aven of the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh.
The analysis is a first effort to document the international web of relationships among companies and to examine who owns shares — and how many — in whom. Tapping into the financial information database Orbis, scientists from ETH Zurich in Switzerland examined transnational companies, which they defined as having at least 10 percent of their holdings in more than one country. Then the team looked at upstream and downstream connections, yielding a network of 600,508 economic actors connected through more than a million ownership ties.
– More… ➡
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