Occupy Banksters & Crony Capitalism & GREED

How Billionaires Like the Koch Brothers, Sheldon Adelson and Sam Walton Are Destroying America
AlterNet | Steve Fraser | 09/11/14

George Baer was a railroad and coal mining magnate at the turn of the twentieth century. Amid a violent and protracted strike that shut down much of the country's anthracite coal industry, Baer defied President Teddy Roosevelt's appeal to arbitrate the issues at stake, saying, "The rights and interests of the laboring man will be protected and cared for... not by the labor agitators, but by the Christian men of property to whom God has given control of the property rights of the country." To the Anthracite Coal Commission investigating the uproar, Baer insisted, "These men don't suffer. Why hell, half of them don't even speak English."

We might call that adopting the imperial position. Titans of industry and finance back then often assumed that they had the right to supersede the law and tutor the rest of America on how best to order its affairs. They liked to play God. It's a habit that's returned with a vengeance in our own time.

The Koch brothers are only the most conspicuous among a whole tribe of "self-made" billionaires who imagine themselves architects or master builders of a revamped, rehabilitated America. The resurgence of what might be called dynastic or family capitalism, as opposed to the more impersonal managerial capitalism many of us grew up with, is changing the nation's political chemistry. ... Read more

How to Build a Green Economy Without Sacrificing Jobs
Bill Moyers & Boston Review | Robert Pollin | 09/11/14

Here is the fundamental challenge we confront with climate change. As of 2010, total annual greenhouse gas emissions were at 45 billion metric tons of mostly carbon dioxide (CO2), along with smaller amounts of methane, nitrous oxide and other gases. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimates that to stabilize the global average temperature at its current level of around 60.3° Fahrenheit, which is 3.6° above the pre-industrial average of 56.7°, total emissions will need to fall by 40 percent by 2030, to 27 billion metric tons annually, and by 80 percent in 2050, to about 9 billion metric tons.

We are not on track to meet these goals. As long as global economic growth proceeds along roughly the trajectory it has taken over the past century, and especially the past fifty years, global emissions will not fall at all, but rather will rise over time as more and more fossil fuels -- oil, coal and natural gas -- are burned to meet increasing demands for energy. The greenhouse gas emissions generated by burning fossil fuels account for nearly 80 percent of all emissions. ... Read more

How Hillary Clinton's State Department Sold Fracking to the World
MotherJones | Mariah Blake | Oct 2014

One icy morning in February 2012, Hillary Clinton's plane touched down in the Bulgarian capital, Sofia, which was just digging out from a fierce blizzard. Wrapped in a thick coat, the secretary of state descended the stairs to the snow-covered tarmac, where she and her aides piled into a motorcade bound for the presidential palace. That afternoon, they huddled with Bulgarian leaders, including Prime Minister Boyko Borissov, discussing everything from Syria's bloody civil war to their joint search for loose nukes. But the focus of the talks was fracking. The previous year, Bulgaria had signed a five-year, $68 million deal, granting US oil giant Chevron millions of acres in shale gas concessions. Bulgarians were outraged. Shortly before Clinton arrived, tens of thousands of protesters poured into the streets carrying placards that read "Stop fracking with our water" and "Chevron go home." Bulgaria's parliament responded by voting overwhelmingly for a fracking moratorium. Clinton urged Bulgarian officials to give fracking another chance. ... Read more

Transnational Corporations (TNCs) , capitalist network that runs the world
newscientist.com | author | 10/24/11

AS PROTESTS against financial power sweep the world this week, science may have confirmed the protesters' worst fears. An analysis of the relationships between 43,000 transnational corporations has identified a relatively small group of companies, mainly banks, with disproportionate power over the global economy. ...

... The idea that a few bankers control a large chunk of the global economy might not seem like news to New York's Occupy Wall Street movement and protesters elsewhere (see photo). But the study, by a trio of complex systems theorists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, is the first to go beyond ideology to empirically identify such a network of power. It combines the mathematics long used to model natural systems with comprehensive corporate data to map ownership among the world's transnational corporations (TNCs). ... Read more