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In a significant shift, business groups gave more money to Republican candidates than to Democrats in seven of the most competitive Senate races in recent months, in some cases taking the unusual step of betting against sitting senators.The Journal found that corporate PACs gave most of their donations to Democrats in the early part of the campaign. That fits with a longstanding pattern: big-business interests shower incumbents with money to encourage special treatment, both during the election year and in the upcoming term.
How do we define the sizes of economies? In dollars? Nope. These systems should be measured in terms of a transcendent, invariant unit. Currencies are, by definition, variant, because they are constantly changing relative to one another. This includes the dollar, which is itself measured against a BASKET of other currencies. I propose that GDP should be measured in the unit of MAN HOURS or MAN YEARS. $20 per hour average wage. 2000 hour average work year. Because the buying power of an average man hour or man year shouldn't change much at all. Think about it.
So, if we take the latest bee-ess GDP for the former US of $16.8 trillion, and if we use an average wage of $20 per hour, or $40,000 per year, we get an economy of 840 billion man hours, or 420 million man years.u really want your mind blown? Do that same calculation with the debt (now $18 trillion). Now do it with the unfunded liabilities of the FEDGOV (conservatively $250 trillion).
450 million man years, and 6.25 billion man years respectively.
Source: Notes for Apres la Guerre Part 2: Banking and Financial Market TheorySo, when we talk about trillions of tax dollars being spent on banks or infused into shadow investment houses around the globe, we're actually not just talking about money being stolen from one group of people that's being distributed to another. What we're talking about is the literal theft of our lives - our time and energy.
Debt is actually future time.
- Franco "Bifo" Berardi
Franco "Bifo" Berardi writes of humanity being sacrificed at the altar of metaphysical debt. This is another way of saying that we're accumulating debts that can't be paid. At least not with money. So we're paying in other ways. We're paying with our time. We're paying with our jobs. In Berardi's terms, we're sacrificing "[l]ife, intelligence, joy, breathing." Temporally speaking, debt is something accrued in the past, to be paid down over time. We usually lose sight of these future limitations and think of a loan as pure windfall: an influx of cash for nothing but the abstract possibility of repayment. Berardi asks us in our original consideration to think of debt as future time. When you get a loan, you aren't just getting cash. You are giving up your future.
Fiery anti-Americanism!Making clear that the Kremlin has no intention of backing down from the worst Russia/Western crisis since the Cold War, Russian President Vladimir Putin accused the United States on Friday of trying to "reshape the whole world" for its benefit, in a fiery speech that was one of the most anti-American of his 15 years as Russia's paramount leader.
unsmiling, straightforward worldview that blasted the United States as taking advantage of its powerful post-Cold War position to dictate misguided terms to the rest of the world. Putin faulted the United States for a rise in global terrorism, a resumption of a global arms race and a general worsening of global security.OK, so fiery anti-Americanism is the belief that the United States desires a unipolar world where it calls the shots. Does anyone doubt US elites think otherwise?
"It never ceases to amaze me how our partners have been guilty of making the same mistakes time and again," Putin said, accusing the United States of breeding terrorists by upsetting the established order in Syria, Libya, Iraq and Afghanistan.
Comment: While USA wages wars (or coups) in other countries like Syria and Ukraine in the name of democracy, its own democracy is being strangled by the corporation-controlled government. The casualty of this is the "common man", who buys the commodities these corporations manufacture with the money they don't have and live in perpetual servitude.