johnbyronkuhner.com

cheap prednisone for dogs From Andrew Sullivan’s superb piece on Occupy Wall Street:

http://thevintry.com.au/product/moet-chandon-imperial-750-ml/?add-to-cart=83 There is simply a limit beyond which economic inequality threatens democratic life, when the majority suspect that a tiny minority has fixed the system beyond repair through the existing institutions, and when the powerful minority begins to think of its own interests as distinct from the interests of its compatriots. That moment is one of real danger, especially when those elites can move themselves and their money more easily across the planet than ever before, and it is a sign of responsibility, not irresponsibility, to focus on it. Among the oldest authorities insisting on just such an issue was Aristotle, whose emphasis on the middle classes as the core strength of a viable democracy remains as true today as it was thousands of years ago. And Aristotle was not a hippie. Nor were Disraeli or Bismarck, two 19th-century conservatives who deployed government to prevent their countries from splitting into alienated haves and have-nots, and fearful of real radicals who could come along to exploit the gap.

Sullivan’s piece, which absolutely should be read in full, explains the Occupy Wall Street phenomenon and the tremendous support it has received all around the world, including mine.

It is easy enough to say that the real grievance on display here is one for which there is no solution: because of global trade, money and jobs are going to move where labor is cheapest, until there is equality throughout the world and eventually the American lower quintiles have no more or less money than the lower quintiles in India or China.  In other words, things will get a great deal worse here.  Innovators like Steve Jobs have no need of American workers: he can put his ideas into practice with Indian or Chinese ones, and if they start having a decent standard of living and command a good wage, Apple can take their factories to Chad instead.

But the above way of looking at things is based on a great number of assumptions, which do not have all have to be accepted.  We can start with small things, like the idea that labor is, under our current system of taxation, “punished” (taxed, disincentivized) more than capital gains or consumption of finite resources via mechanization.  A simple alteration like this would greatly affect labor patterns in this country.  Second, exporting countries do need markets – importing countries – which gives us power to dictate terms on our imports.  Poisonous competitive practices are as bad as poisonous Barbie dolls, and should be banned as well.

And the larger argument is that there is money in our society – our economy is growing, not shrinking, despite the fact that China’s is growing as well – and wealth is entirely a social phenomenon. We can say that people like Steve Jobs are necessary and special, whereas the rest of us are replaceable and valueless, but still if you put Steve Jobs on an island all by himself he cannot make any wealth at all.  Any thinking person must see our astonishing indebtedness to one another, how we cannot do almost anything without the vast inventory of tools invented by others, and which for the most part we use without any payment to their inventors or the inventors’ heirs.  If you were to tally up the debt Jobs had to others – to his parents, teachers, the people who built his homes, made his food, transmitted his messages, and so forth, not to mention the thousands of years of human technological progress which he took simply as a given – you would not necessarily arrive at the conclusion that his contribution was that much more valuable than that of the people around him.  The greatest innovators in the world cannot make any money at all without the legal protection of their patents, which is a power derived from the very voters and societies which the worshippers of the barons of industry treat as so much replaceable human filler.

As for the possibilities of enacting real change – how are we going to manage macroeconomic global shifts? – we have one great one in our hands in a democracy.  All of those who are interested in wealth consider it useful to form corporations which legally limit their liability.  The CEO of Lehman Brothers never had to worry, when running the company into the ground, that his own bank account would be affected by the failure: he had used the law to insulate himself from risk. The purpose for limited liability corporations is that we believe they are socially useful.  If they are not socially useful, we can withdraw their protection, so that failure means financial catastrophe for the people who run them.  But the best mode of action is to have further legal requirements for corporations, such as the elimination of severance packages, or pegging top compensation in a ratio with the minimum wage (reforms like this are certainly long overdue for “nonprofits”).  There are so many examples of failure being highly profitable for executives that the notion that this is a meritocratic, socially useful system is risible.  And anyway, the big money should, by strict capitalist standards, be outside the corporate systems and in the world of real risk – your own business, which you own.

I have heard some people complain about the protests, because the 1% are employing the 99%.  This shows clearly enough the path we are treading – toward feudalism – but in general, the point is not “death to corporations”.  The point is reform and improvement.  The compensation systems in place in Japan would not be out of line here in America – indeed, Japan has some of the world’s most effective corporations.  And a further point: I have heard it said that “corporations” make the computers, cell phones, cameras, clothes, and food being used by the occupiers – this is an important bit of factual blindness.  All those things are made by people, and the general point is that the actual makers of things are becoming more and more faceless, less and less empowered, while there is more and more wealth generated in the world.