The Global Power Elite: A Transnational Class 

I live in boston and you got it all wrong buddy. 2.50 hourly. But because of the tipping system we hav in place, a waiter/waitress in a decent establishment makes good money. You selective left out tips in their total income? Strange.

@@hbeefk11379 She said they have to rely on tips to survive and none the less the company doesn't want to pay you and expects the consumers to make it up! Why can't they get paid a living wage and keep their tips!? Because when you put profits over people...shit happens!

2,50 an hour??? I cant believe that. I hope that was an exageration if not why are the streets not burning??? Maybe I´m missing something...

@@goldbluetears The GOP have fought hard to keep it at that rate for 20 years! Propaganda, poverty,poor health, religion and a brain dead culture and a militarized police force keep the masses from rioting and don't forget everyone has a gun!

@@discodirk48 yeah but 2.50 an hour is joke.Thats like 20 Euro for a full 8 hour shift, I still dont believe that. This would be worst than slavery. At least a slave does not have to pay bills!

Michael, Capitalism is the biggest con ever inflicted upon humanity.

@Swae Ocean , and what do you think made that level of corruption possible? It was capitalism. What do you think the goal of capitalism is? It's the maximization of capital accumulation. As it is the richest 1% of the population owns 83% of world stocks. These people get to decide what is produced, how things are produced, where things are produced, how much workers get paid, Etc. It's a type of feudalism. Capitalism is extremely undemocratic. Anytime you have such a hierarchical, top down, undemocratic system, you're going to run into inequality, poverty, environmental devastation and Corruption. I'm sure you've played the Monopoly board game. What happens when one person owns most of the property and start setting up hotels? Even if it were possible to eliminate all the corruption, you would still see the same concentrations of wealth and power that we have today. And of course it would be matched by extreme inequality and poverty. Under the capitalist system workers are basically reduced to cattle. Why do you think we haven't seen a reduction in working hours in over a hundred years? It's because any increases in productivity go to the owner. And who are the owners and decision-makers? It's the 1%. Let's say you take a cow and you give a bovine growth hormone to double milk production. That milk goes to the farmer, not the cow. And you don't think capitalism is responsible? Conversely, let's say workers on a TV Factory and they were able to free up 500 positions with automation. In a worker-owned environment you see something very different happen. Now you have 500 workers to share in the remaining workload. But under the capitalist system those workers would most likely be fired, where they would end up competing with one another on the other on the unemployment line. That competition drives down the value of Labor. The less workers get paid, the less purchasing power they have. Since one person's expenditure is another person's paycheck, we see an erosion and contraction in the economy. That's another reason why late-stage capitalism is dependent upon debt and fractional Reserve banking. And to make matters worse, you have people such as Bill Gates buying up railroads, parking lots at hospitals, and even Labs were people get their blood tested. So not only are workers making less thanks the capitalism, their purchasing power is reduced even further because they have to pay rent and usage fees to non producers such as Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg. So yeah, corruption is not the root cause of the problem. It should be pretty obvious what the root cause the problem is. You can't have a system where most of the wealth ends up going to the non producers while those who do most of the work get the least amount of money. That doesn't make any sense. But that's how capitalism functions. And on top of all that, you have the fact that capitalism doesn't account for externalities. And that's why we see so much environmental devastation. "It is reliably estimated that species extinctions now proceed at 1000 times their normal rate, and that up to 99% of the materials used in the US production process end up as waste within 6 weeks. For every ton of garbage, in turn, there are 5 tons of materials to produce it, and 25 tons extracted from nature to yield these materials." ~ the Global Change Programme (Royal Society of Canada) Vol. 7: No. 3 (1996), 3; and Ernst Weizzsacker, Factor Four. London: Earthscan Books, 1997 "The essence of capitalism, its raison d'être, is not to build democracy, or help working people, or save the environment, or build homes for the homeless. Its goal is to convert nature into commodities and commodities into capital, to invest and accumulate, transmuting every part of the world into its own image for its own realization." ~ Michael Parenti There's no such thing as crony capitalism. What we have now is late-stage capitalism, where most of the resources have been privatized. Most of the workers paycheck now goes toward paying rent and usage fees. You know, just like when you play Monopoly.

@Swae Ocean , sorry, but your position is both a-historical an empirically false. You say that it's the government's fault? All you have to do is look at the countries that have the least amount of regulations and the least amount of government intervention. Just consider what life was like in the United States back in the 1800s when government involvement was minimal. All you have to do is check the public record. "In fact, we did practice something close to a pure capitalism in 1893. The result was economic depression and widespread unemployment, nine-year-old children working fourteen-hour days, typhoid and cholera epidemics in Philadelphia and other eastern cities, malnutrition and tuberculosis, and contaminated water and food supplies for the poor. We had uninhibited environmental devastation and horrible work conditions, no pension programs or minimum wage, no occupational or consumer safety regulations, no prohibitions against child labor, and no Social Security, collective bargaining, or industrial unionism. We had unrestrained monopolies and trusts - and enormously high profits. Conditions in the United States in 1893 were not unlike what they are today through much of the Third World. But for the capitalists of that era, these dismal conditions were not seen as evidence of the system's failure. For them, capitalism in the good old days was working quite well. Success was measured not by the quality of food, drinking water, housing, schools, transportation, and health care, but by the rate of capital accumulation. The function of capitalism then and now has been to invest capital in order to accumulate more capital, and in that sense the system has performed superbly, for those who own and control it. Today, the conservative goal is the Third Worldization of America, to reduce the U.S. working populace to a Third World condition, having people work harder and harder for less and less. This includes a return to the "free market,” free of environmental regulations, free of consumer protections, minimum wages, occupational safety, and labor unions, a market crowded with underemployed labor, so better to depress wages and widen profit margins." Like I said, the goal of capitalism is the maximization of capital accumulation. Someone such as Mark Zuckerberg becomes one of the richest people in the world and then use his money to accumulate capital. The consequence is a transfer of wealth from the working class to the investor class. for example, not too long ago Bill Gates bought up a big chunk of Canadian rail. His wealth went from 80 to 90 billion dollars as a result. That's 10 billion dollars that's no longer going into the Canadian economy and to workers. When you reduce the purchasing power of workers, they have less money to to buy goods and services which are produced by other fellow workers. This shouldn't be too hard for you to understand. What is the consequence? ▪ The two richest people-Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates-possess almost the same amount of wealth as the poorest half of the population. ▪ The richest 5% of the population owns 67% of the wealth. The poorest 60% of the population owns 1% of the wealth. ▪ The wealthiest Americans live on average 20 years longer than the poorest Americans. ▪ 70 % of Americans have less than $1,000 in savings. ▪ Banks have foreclosed on over 7 million homes since 2004. ▪ There are 554,000 homeless people on a given night. ▪ Indigenous people who first inhabited the country remain the most impoverished and exploited section of the population. ▪ The United States, the wealthiest nation in the history of the world, has a larger percentage of low-income workers than any other developed nation. ▪ 3% of American adults-6.8 million people-are either in jail or prison or on parole or probation. Jeff Bezos has a hundred & 30 billion dollars. At 5% interest, he makes: ▪5 billion dollars a year. ▪a hundred million dollars a week. ▪15 million dollars a day ▪ $625,000 an hour, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week! In order to make that in an 8 hour work day a person would have to make almost 2 million dollars an hour! ▪ 10.5 thousand dollars a minute. Do you really think that the working class can afford to pay non producers such as Jeff Bezos 2 million dollars per hour for doing nothing? we're talking about trillions of dollars being removed from the economy, being removed from workers who buy the very goods and services that they themselves produce. The consequence is Extreme poverty and Corruption. Capitalism • Total output produced by workers is immediately and automatically the property of the employers. • Does not supply demand, only what people can afford. (E.g. Million poor people without money that need food VS a few rich people that want sports cars.) • Has no means of separating the universal needs of human beings from junk commodities for the masses, or gold toilet-seats for the rich. • Those without money to buy what they need do not have the right to live. • production and money are for profit, not for utility! • Anti-Worker and pro Corporation. • "competition -> winners -> competition between winners -> stronger winners -> .. -> big corporations -> state is corrupted by concentrated economic power -> etc. Capitalism is a hierarchical, top down system. It's a plutocratic system. That is, the more money you have the more shares you can buy. The more shares you have, the more votes you get. those with the most shares get to choose the board of directors, and therefore get to decide what is produced, how things are produced where things are produced, Etc. It's anti Democratic and extremely dictatorial. That's why workers are forced to form unions in order to protect themselves. however, unions have no power when it comes to stopping the board of directors from moving production offshore. That kind of power enables the board of directors to blackmail and manipulate workers into accepting lower rates of pay and usually working in unsafe and unhealthy work environments. Consider what happened in Flint, Michigan. There are two key features that make an economy capitalist: 1. most production of goods and services is undertaken by privately owned companies, which produce and sell their output in hopes of making a profit. This is called production for profit. 2. Most work in the economy is performed by people who do not own their company or their output, but are hired by someone else to work in return for a money wage or salary. This is called wage labor. An economy in which private, profit-seeking companies undertake most production, and in which wage earning employees do most of the work, is a capitalist economy. These twins features - profit-driven production and wage labor - create particular patterns and relationships, which in turn shaped the overall functioning of capitalism as a system. Any economy driven by these two features - production for profit and wage labor - tends to replicate the following trends and patterns, over and over again: - fierce competition between private companies for markets, sales, and profit. - innovation, as companies constantly experiment with new technologies, new products, and new forms of organisation - in order to succeed in that competition. - An inherent tendency to growth, resulting from the desire of each individual company to make more profit. - Deep inequality between those who own successful companies, and the rest of society who do not own companies. - A general conflict of interest between those who work for wages, and the employers who hire them. - Economic cycles or roller coasters, with periods of strong growth followed by periods of stagnation or depression : sometimes these cycles even produce dramatic economic and social crisis.

@Swae Ocean , now, do you actually have an argument, or not?

@Swae Ocean , so you don't think one of the main functions of capitalism is the accumulation of capital? :-) yes or no?

socialist been pointing at the problems for more than a century bro. only now are they started to get listened to now that their ideas and observations are not blacklisted from a restricted few means of information, because of the internet.

@@krymz1 says: "socialist been pointing at the problems for more than a century bro." == During that century, US had the biggest economic boom in the history. Did you know this?

@@allgoo1964 are you asking me if i knew the american empire was boosting it's economy by outfinancing every country in the world in military might to literally keep the world under it's thumb and make sure the USSR had no choice but to try to do the same thing to not get invaded, wasting valuable ressources because they did not have access to the same easy/free loans from international capitalism... yeah, i did know.

@@krymz1 says: "@allgoo19 are you asking me if i knew the american empire was boosting it's ....." == True or false? "During the last century, US had the biggest economic boom in the history." If your answer is false, you name another economic boom(by year).

@@allgoo1964 what?

@Dark of the knight Bring the bankers under control?

YES, MORE PLEASE!

ThrashManPoint - not enough! you want a savior, instead buy a yellow vest are taking action

Bernie's just one part of a much larger movement. It starts at the local level, we all have to do our part.

@@thrashmanpoint Bernie would be called a centrist in Europe and he doesn't go far enough! Capitalism needs to go and cannot be fixed

@@discodirk48 That's true but he's gone further than anyone else in the states so far. Crony Capitalist propaganda is all most Americans know, they own every mainstream media platform. Try typing socialism into youtube or google and I bet the first thing you see is right-wing video's/articles... Progressives have made decent progress so far. We have to get the neo-liberals out of the democratic party and remind liberal voters of what real progressive policies are if were going to have any chance at beating the neo-cons. The Republican's aren't passing these draconian laws themselves.

@@thrashmanpoint You will get no progress with the two party duopoly! The only way you're going to get change in America is through revolution! But after the largest transfer of wealth from the bottom to the top in US history doesn't get people off their asses I don't know what will! Too much propaganda, too many distractions, too many tribes,too many militarized police forces.I thinks its nearly over

Because lizard people!! It always bothered me that David Icke connected the dots and then had to have some esoteric reason besides greed,selfishness and cruelty for the rich consolidating and hoarding power. Also the "satanic panic" bullshit as some sort of secret evil reason for sexual abuse beyond rich folk forever being able to tape whomever they chose without consequence, as if the church, patriarchy and abuse of power wasnt reason enough.

@@screaminmeani Well I agree with the satanic panic nonsense BUT if you look objectively at the evidence of UFO´s and extraterrestrial life-forms there is clearly something going on there. Why would every major nation have a semi-secret military program that has something to do with extraterestrial life forms and if they are real then clearly they would be interested in the elite of the planet, or the elite would be interested in them in terms of technology and all sorts of other knowledge. But yeah in dont think those elites are some mythological evil, or for that matter more evil than the average human. They just have more power, so more opportunity to do act as egomaniacs, but I would say a large percentage of people would do the same thing!

". We cannot accept anymore the role of subjection as a rule and a mindset. " make me think of a parallel situation in history, after/during the industrial revolution, when people started thinking "we are all equals, there is no divine right from god to rule others". took millenias to figure that out, and now we are pushing that concept one step further.

​@@krymz1 Excuse me for the delay in response. Yes, I agree. And all the right-wing backlash is a conservative attempt to stop that advance which is achieving a higher point with the climate crisis and catastrophe. Actually, when I said about the mindset was because, if you look at the world, what could explain our condescendence with the injustice in a "so rich and developed" state of human civilization? Why people are so afraid of talking about the absolute failure of that industrial revolution, in terms of humane development? Why talking against the banking extortion system is such a tabu? Why are we so slaves to money and to the consumerist way of life and death? The climate crisis and catastrophe is a chance to put another fuel in the right-wing/left-wing dispute as a different project to design the future, it is not anymore a moral or economic question being left-winger or right-winger, the real challenge to capitalism as a societal organization form is its total disregard for the essence of life in all forms, Nature's laws and limits are the checkmates to the capitalism and its final phase, the neoliberal craze. Let's break the capitalist system and rely on Nature, and I think there is a revolution underway to do it. Human beings are very proud of the development of the civilization but forget that they - we - are not the only ones doing it, that the paradigms were changed almost against the will and the trend things were going, and not always explainable, or trackable, by the mindset of each time. So it is the same now, politicians and capitalists thinking they are in control of the human and natural fate but they, and we, are not, and Nature laughs at us for doing so. This time won't take millennia to do it, Nature cannot wait. It's now or never, sang Elvis, and he was right, lol. Sampa/SP, Brasil, 08/01/2019 - 14:40

James Murcxphy

This is to be expected? It's not the number of people on Earth that caused this.

So it's not us causing global warming,it's volcanos? You need to get your facts straight. Just go look at Exxon Mobil's own research and reports on manmade global warming,that should tell you all you need to know and hopefully you'll stop spreading disinformation like blaming it all in volcanoes..

@@jeffsartadventure3634 exxon mobile? A report from them..please find a reputable source if you want to argue.

@Dark of the knight i think we would do well to clean up the chemical pollution sites before disasters strike these areas..we also need to fortify our farm soil..hemp is now legal..they grow with little water can be put up for little cost and after three months can grow to six feet tall..although can be made into a cash crop for clothes paper..can also be used to create a mulch if spread in a farm acre and tilled by the next season the soil will be reinvigorated..our soil is so overused many farmers have given up and moved on..need to bring farming into the professional realm so its a desirable profession..as well as encouraging half of food grown to be indoors and sold locally..save money on transportation..of course that wont work for all crops but surely staples we have lost a great deal in 2018..pecans ..orange crops..olives..grapes..and it doesnt seem anyones paying enough attention..so this is great to see it change from just factories to main street to at least keep up with these changes..of course alot due to the magnetic pole shift of two degrees so far and still slipping will move whole growing areas we can project whete to plant next season so those dont get ruined because of the shh factor by secret socities that people are enamored with while they plot against their fans truly bad stewards leading us straight to starvation and hell but i think they are realizing these painfull truths and react properly. Peace