Exploitation

"We know that the system which privatizes its profits, and wholeheartedly socializes its losses, trying to convince us at the same time that that is philantropy, will live seven lives."

- Eduardo Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America

Credit

"Credit is the economic judgement on the morality of a man. In credit, man himself, instead of metal or paper, has become the mediator of exchange but not as a man, but as the existence of capital and interest. Human individuality, human morality, has itself become both an article of commerce and the form in which money exists. Instead of money, paper is my own personal being, my flesh and blood, my social value and status, the material body of the spirit of money."

- Karl Marx: Paris Manuscripts
as quoted by David McLellan in "Karl Marx, his life and thought" p.113

Marketing

1. You see a gorgeous girl in a party, you approach her and say: "I'm rich, marry me."
That's direct marketing.
2. Your friend goes to a girl, points at you and says: "He is very rich, marry him."
That's advertising.
3. Girl walks up to you and says: "You are rich, will you marry me?"
That's brand recognition.
4. You say: "I'm rich, marry me." and she slaps you.
That's customer feedback.
5. You say: "I'm rich, marry me." and she introduces you to her husband.
That's demand and supply gap.
6. Before anybody says anything your wife arrives.
That's restriction from entering new market.

Money

"The use of money is all the advantage there is in having money."

- Benjamin Franklin: Autobiography

Tempurpedic

The biggest scam in the home furnishings history. The most expensive mattress made from the least expensive components (or at least the least expensive manufacturing process).

- MG

I.M.F.

When you really look just a bit deeper into it, the International Monetary Fund is nothing else but the worlds biggest loan shark. But, to be fair, the IMF is different from your typical loan shark who gives you the money with the expectation that you pay it back with enormous interest attached to it. This one has somewhat different attachment: a set of conditions that will make the borrower become subservient to it. It is not good, it is not necessary for your existence, but when you (and your country) are down on your financial luck and have greedy and unscrupulous people in charge of your country's future, you can be rest assured you will be even further down on your luck. And not only the financial kind.

Poverty

"The poverty of our century is unlike that of any other. It is not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich. Consequently, the modern poor are not pitied, but written off as trash."

 - John Berger

Advertising

"The art of convincing people to spend money they don't have on something they don't need."

- Will Rogers

Financial Analysts

Their title speaks for itself.
If they were any good at predicting, they would be called fortune tellers. Until then they are just analysts: people who analyze things that already happened.
So, why is it that this same bunch ventures into telling us what is going to happen next and where are we suppose to invest our life savings? 
More so, accepting the above statement as true, why do we trust them?

U.S. Economy

Our economy is like an athlete on steroids: in order to continue achieving results we chose to get doped, consequently making the whole thing so artificial that we do not even know what is right from what is wrong.

Economy is an exact science, where every action is known to produce exact reaction, and does not allow for any artificial or foreign elements to enhance it's performance.

The real question at this point in time is how do we take ourselves off of performance enhancing stimulants. And the answer can be found in real life, observing any athlete that is making an attempt to clean himself, and the result is: he will neither be a successful athlete anymore nor will he cleanse his body to the point of being able to get back to normal life. He is ruined.

So, we have two choices: keep taking steroids and in order to sustain the profit race keep blowing the bubble (that will eventually explode), or go cold turkey and quit doping ourselves, which will take us a couple of decades back and will make the bubble look shriveled and parched. The latter one can not be done peacefully. The first one will result in loss of peace.

I'm sure every athlete that was ever taking steroids is asking himself that same stupid question: "Why in the hell did I do that?" All too late.

Dead Peasant Insurance

Can human race sink any lower? (If those guys are members of human race at all). And who's to say that one day those companies will not contract some thugs to start slowly eliminating us only for the sake of their own profit. And our own representatives in Washington will not even blink. If this had happened elsewhere in the world they would all cry genocide. What do they considered it here?

Healthcare

Whether we in America do end up paying extra or not, whether Obama is honest or just another crooked politician, is irrelevant at this point in the development of our health care system. We are too deep into the business of healing.

How do we solve this? We can't, short of wiping out the present system of health insurance, and all insurance companies with it. When are we going to learn that business of insuring is just what those two words mean: the business for their owners and insurance (or gamble, betting against your own health) for the rest of us. Simply put, nobody should profit from someone's misfortune.

p.s.: Does anyone still remember the doctors from yesteryear making routine house calls not charging for them but taking whatever the patient was able to pay? Is 'Hyppocratic Oath' a long forgotten statement of moral conduct of the people we entrust our lives to?

Crisis

"Todays world's crisis is showing that balance in the distribution of wealth is not only a question of social justice or ethics, but a basic condition of economic stability and sustainable progress, in other words it is in mutual, long lasting interest of all levels of society. Despite enormous prosperity achieved in many fields, what rules the world today is really poverty."
- Stipe Mesić

Economists

"If all the economists were laid end to end, they'd never reach a conclusion."

- George Bernard Shaw

Consumerism

Basing an economy on domestic consumption versus production is the equivalent to basing the economy on spending the money instead of making money.

- A family being the smallest economic unit within a society needs a source of income to sustain itself. To get the income they have to create some goods or services and sell them on the market or some family members will have to get out and find a job for which they will get paid. That money is then used to pay household bills and provide for schooling, health care and leisure expenses. So, these family members in actuality 'produce' or earn money needed to support the economic growth of their household. If they were jobless or did not make any products they can sell, they would have to depend on some form of help from wider family, friends or society in order to survive. Otherwise, they are out on the street, broke.

- A country, being the biggest economic unit in todays world needs that same source of income to sustain itself. It's citizens (the same family members from previous example) will provide goods and services, to a degree, and will constitute country's work force, but if the government does not provide the market for them, they will be jobless and their goods will remain unsold. Consequently, their standard of living will erode. The government of the country is the only body that regulates the size and availability of those markets. But if the government keeps allowing companies to move abroad in search of cheaper labor, and allowing more goods to be imported because they are cheaper then domestic ones, that same government is cutting it's country's own resources and ability to compete on the global market. If the country does not produce anything or if the country's goods and services are not competitive on the global market, than we will not be able to make any money to pay our bills, provide for our citizens education, health care, infrastructure etc. So, if we do not have any money coming in, how do we support our lifestyle? By spending? Spending something that we do not have? You borrow. And you borrow some more. And you keep borrowing until lenders stop loaning to you, because you are not credit-worthy anymore because you do not have any collateral to put against your loans. And then what? Well, it already happened to a number of places throughout history: Egiptian, Persian, Greek, Roman, Mongol, British, French, Russian, Spanish, Austrian empire..., none an empire anymore.

- If we want our economy to be dependent on spending money, then we have to have that money earned somehow. But, instead of earning it we are actually begging the rest of the world to support us in being who we would like to be. We live our little American dreams today based on a hope that someday someone will repay loans we took. The same applies to both a single family and a country as a whole. The only problem is that when a little guy runs out of money, his 'big brother' will force him into bankruptcy, repossessing his house, car, everything. On a global scale, what guaranty do we have that the rest of the world will not do the same to our country?

Bernard Madoff's Case

Somehow I have this funny feeling that if bunch of little guys like you and I were majority of losers here, "poor old Bernie" would still be a free and honorable man and he might even ask for bailout money. It's the big guns who lost that brought him down, and no one knows who they really are.

To Bail Out Or Not

The basic principle of capitalism is the survival of the fittest. Therefore, no bailing out should be performed regardless of how big and important the company. It is much better for the economy of a country as a whole to let the rotten apple fall down than to pour billions in keeping it alive and still having an uncertain future.

And the bigger the company the harder it is to manage. Let's not forget Standard Oil and AT&T (to name only these two), who at their peaks were dismantled by our government simply because they were too big to be effectively managed and of course to dangerously big to control their appetites. It is a fair question weather some of these companies that are demanding help now are really too big of a bite for us to deal with at this moment. Are we getting ourselves into the same predicament we had to deal with at the beginning of the 20th century passing the Antitrust laws and curbing monopoly?

If anything, some sort of help involving manufacturing sector would be better of the two evils. Perhaps, restructuring and cutting off dead weight, will give an example to the rest of potential bail seekers. On the other hand, the infamous $700bn hat trick (helping the sole creators of the present mess) will go down in history as the quickest theft of our national wealth ever. That should not have happened and if it happens again we might kiss our future as a nation of the free good bye.

Business

Business is a perpetual struggle in obtaining, maintaining and expanding one's share of the market and control thereof. It is a constant war, based on simple greed, in which rules and norms are often neglected and broken. All in the name of getting return on investment, irrelevant of means and consequences. It is no wonder that the biggest reason for all wars in history of human kind, second only to religion, was business interest of some kind.

Citizens, Inc.

The term socialism has been played out and twisted around in this country to the point of becoming one of the poster words for being politically incorrect and almost a dirty word in a way.

In it's core, socialism should describe a state of welfare and a level of unity and determination of society (or at least the majority of the population) to benefit itself. Now, there is nothing wrong with any society to want to prosper and to benefit from thoughts and actions that come from within. One would think that this is an ideal way for a society that prides itself on being democratic and prosperous and where we all are created and treated equally, with same opportunities and consequences. In an attempt to further analyze this statement, one has to ask oneself a question: "Are we all the same?". And, I do not intend to compare different segments of our society and their levels of involvement in being equal to one another. That's a subject of a very different discussion altogether. Here, I want to talk about another phenomenon that is possibly unique to America: a relationship (or coexistence) between two very different parts of our economy, the population and the corporation.

The first part of this relationship is obvious in the fact that we all work somewhere (those of us that have jobs) and we never think of our employer as a real person. Yes, all the companies have all the characteristics of any one of us: need to be organized, prosperous, to grow, to be competitive, to plan it's future etc. But, that's only because we work there and we are the ones who want all those good things, not the company; companies are not people. They are fictional creations, nothing but vehicles to make profits for their owners and share holders. But guess what, that same employer of yours does not see you as a person (with all the needs and wants that you come with) either. It's almost like a “love-hate” relationship: everything is cool as long as it's cool, but at first sight of trouble you are the one to reconsider his future.

This next part of the relationship has nothing to do with you necessarily being employed by a company. It has to do with you actually owning part of it through your stock, mutual fund or your 401k portfolios. You or your stock broker (or fund manager) will buy or sell company stock based on their performance relative to the overall market trends. Well, of course, you with your 100 shares of stock will not even be noticed but think of those powerful mutual funds managers who can move hundreds of thousands of shares at a time. Those guys can definitely make a difference in the blood count of any company out there. Well, this is the kind of relationship where corporations will actually get to like you and even do as you say as long as you keep buying or holding their shares.

Now, let's put these two relationships together for a moment. As an employee your only vested interest with the company is your labor and only vested interest that your employer has is a profit as a result of your work. As an investor your vested interest is in your portfolio and company's is in, you guessed it, in profit, again. If you look at it from this perspective people are actually both the work force and the investors; companies are neither, they only serve people's need to have jobs and to create progress through profit. Very interesting.

There is also a third party to this relationship: the government. Their role in the rest of developed world out there is to balance out relationships between citizens and corporations keeping in mind that the country is ultimately about the well being and prosperity of it's citizens. American government (“...of the people, by the people, for the people...”) and the whole economy with the underlying social structure of this country has gone in different direction: what ultimately matters is the well being of a corporation. One would say: “why not, if we are both the work force and the capital owners, our government should protect our jobs and our investments”. For an answer go back to the first paragraph and think about socialism for a second. The only reason our government does not like that word is because socialism is suppose to take care of the people who are the only ones that have the know-how and the ability to create goods, services, profits and losses, not the fictional entities whose only purpose is to serve as channels for accomplishing those goals.

So, what we have here is the situation where people own companies through invested labor and money and, after those companies get mismanaged, people will first of all loose their money invested in shares of stock. The next thing that will happen is people will loose their jobs and consequently their ability to make the living. And if our government decides to bail out some of those mismanaged companies, guess who's paying for it: yes, the people. And the cycle continues. Socialism does exist in America, only in it's reversed form: it is socialism for employers but it's capitalism for employees. In short: socialism = fiction and capitalism = reality.

Now, go back to work (if you still have your job).