The Pillaging 1%

Charles Monbiot's incisive analysis:

...If you have psychopathic tendencies and are born to a rich family, you're likely to go to business school.

This is not to suggest that all executives are psychopaths. It is to suggest that the economy has been rewarding the wrong skills. As the bosses have shaken off the trade unions and captured both regulators and tax authorities, the distinction between the productive and rentier upper classes has broken down. Chief executives now behave like dukes, extracting from their financial estates sums out of all proportion to the work they do or the value they generate, sums that sometimes exhaust the businesses they parasitise. They are no more deserving of the share of wealth they've captured than oil sheikhs.

The rest of us are invited, by governments and by fawning interviews in the press, to subscribe to their myth of election: the belief that they are possessed of superhuman talents. The very rich are often described as wealth creators. But they have preyed on the earth's natural wealth and their workers' labour and creativity, impoverishing both people and planet. Now they have almost bankrupted us. The wealth creators of neoliberal mythology are some of the most effective wealth destroyers the world has ever seen...

- The 1% are the very best destroyers of wealth the world has ever seen | George Monbiot | Comment is free | The Guardian

Telling it like it is! -

http://youtu.be/M1lJd2eLG0M

Meanwhile, poor women are being incarcarated wholesale for profit -
http://www.nationofchange.org/dispatches-field-women-prison-american-growth-industry-1321720274

And a possible solution, 'time banking'? -
http://www.truth-out.org/time-banking-idea-whose-time-has-come/1322059802