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Old June 11th, 2006 #21
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Durban
Capitalist profit is usually less than 5% on a product.

How in the fuck is that exploitation?

I want you to answer that.
You need to look at the profit margins of the various stages, i.e. the producers profit margin, the WHOLESALERS profit margin, and the retailers profit margin. Do this and you will see the exploitation for yourself.
 
Old June 11th, 2006 #22
Stronza
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Enkidu
I'm not going to go to extremes to blast H. Ford, but he did create a method of manufacturing that was so mind-numbingly-boring that even though he paid twice the going wage, many men quite rather than work the assembly line. (I saw a PBS show on this.) He also prescribed behavior for his employees in their personal lives that was patronizing to the extreme. He told them what to wear in their off time. He also required them to go to company dances and dance little Ford Co. dances, kinda like a dememted old woman dresses her cats up and makes them dance.

Enkidu
Not just Henry Ford. I remember a pathetic account of how the shoeless employees of Bata Shoe Company's mfg plant in some poor African country had to sing the company's official song every morning.

Is it any wonder those people hate "us".
 
Old June 11th, 2006 #23
odin
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Enkidu
He also required them to go to company dances and dance little Ford Co. dances, kinda like a dememted old woman dresses her cats up and makes them dance.
Or, like Wal-Mart requires it's "associates" to start the day with the Walmart cheer.
 
Old June 11th, 2006 #24
Mike in Denver
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Quote:
Originally Posted by odin
Or, like Wal-Mart requires it's "associates" to start the day with the Walmart cheer.
Google is my friend:

give me a W,
give me a A,
give me a L,
give me a M,
give me a A,
give me a R,
give me a T.

What do you have?
Walmart!
Can't hear you.
WALMART!!!


Who is number one?
The customers!!
Who's walmart is it?
My walmart!!

Enkidu

Can't hear you.

ENKIDU
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Old June 12th, 2006 #25
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I've always felt that Communism and Capitalism were 2 sides of the same jew coin.
 
Old June 12th, 2006 #26
FranzJoseph
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Quote:
Originally Posted by New Order
I've always felt that Communism and Capitalism were 2 sides of the same jew coin.
Sounds right. Ever since Communism (officially) dried up, capitalism is more and more coming to resemble what Comrade Stalin had in mind. It just proves that when certain people run things, it always comes out the same way.
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Old June 16th, 2006 #27
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Default The Second Revolution

Enkido

Quote:
Re.
"Like many in the N.S.D.A.P. said, after they took over, they thought the real revolution would be the second one, that cleared out all of these parasites stealing the work of the people."
I understand that just before their surrender (provisionally!) the National-Socialists swore in the second revolution. Does anyone know the date for this declaration? Any links?

I know a few so-called nationalists who constantly deride Hitler for betraying the cause! So a link for the second revolution would be most useful in dealing with idiots in our midst.
 
Old June 17th, 2006 #28
Mike in Denver
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If you ever had a doubt that Capitalism stinks, this article should persuade you. Yes indeed, Fuck Capitalism!!

Enkidu

---------

Drugs firm blocks cheap blindness cure

Company will only seek licence for medicine that costs 100 times more

Sarah Boseley, health editor
Saturday June 17, 2006
The Guardian

A major drug company is blocking access to a medicine that is cheaply and effectively saving thousands of people from going blind because it wants to launch a more expensive product on the market.

Ophthalmologists around the world, on their own initiative, are injecting tiny quantities of a colon cancer drug called Avastin into the eyes of patients with wet macular degeneration, a common condition of older age that can lead to severely impaired eyesight and blindness. They report remarkable success at very low cost because one phial can be split and used for dozens of patients.

But Genentech, the company that invented Avastin, does not want it used in this way. Instead it is applying to license a fragment of Avastin, called Lucentis, which is packaged in the tiny quantities suitable for eyes at a higher cost. Speculation in the US suggests it could cost £1,000 per dose instead of less than £10. The company says Lucentis is specifically designed for eyes, with modifications over Avastin, and has been through 10 years of testing to prove it is safe.

Unless Avastin is approved in the UK by the National Institute for Clinical Excellence (Nice) it will not be universally available within the NHS. But because Genentech declines to apply for a licence for this use of Avastin, Nice cannot consider it. In spite of the growing drugs bill of the NHS, it will appraise, and probably approve, Lucentis next year.

Although Nice's role is to look at cost-effectiveness, it says it cannot appraise a drug and pass it for use in the NHS unless the drug is referred to it by the Department of Health. The department says its hands are tied.

"The drug company hasn't applied for it to be licensed for this use. It wouldn't be referred to Nice until they have made the first move," said a Department of Health spokeswoman. "They need to step up and get a licence. If they are not getting it licensed, why aren't they?"

New drugs for the condition are badly needed: those we have now only slow the progression to blindness. With Avastin, many patients get their sight back with just one or two injections.

Avastin was first used on human eyes by Philip Rosenfeld, an ophthalmologist in the US, who was aware of animal studies carried out by Genentech that showed potential in eye conditions. This unlicensed use of Avastin has spread across continents entirely by word of mouth from one doctor to another. It has now been injected into 7,000 eyes, with considerable success.

Professor Rosenfeld has published his results and a website has been launched in the US to collate the experiences of doctors from around the world. But although the evidence is good, regulators require randomised controlled trials before they grant licences, which generally only the drug companies can afford to carry out.

Prof Rosenfeld said the real issue was drug company profits. "This truly is a wonder drug," he said. "This shows both how good they [the drug companies] are and on the flip side, how greedy they are." He would like to see governments fund clinical trials of drugs such as Avastin in the public interest.

Rising drug bills are a big problem on both sides of the Atlantic. In the UK, said David Wong, chairman of the scientific committee of the Royal College of Ophthalmologists, doctors are fighting battles to persuade primary care trusts to pay for drugs to stop their patients going blind while they wait for Nice to decide on Lucentis and another expensive drug called Macugen. That decision is not expected before the end of next year.

About 20,000 people are diagnosed with age-related macular degeneration in the UK each year. "From the patient's point of view, if they have an eye condition that deteriorates very quickly, there is no question of waiting," said Professor Wong. "We're talking about days and weeks, rather than months. The question is should we do nothing and say there is no randomised controlled trial to prove Avastin is of value?" He called for primary care trusts to agree to pay for the planned phasing-in of new drugs for the condition.

Last night Genentech said its main concern over the use of Avastin to treat eye conditions was patient safety. "While there are some small, single-centre, uncontrolled studies of Avastin being performed, safety data on patients who are treated with Avastin off-label is not being collected in a standard or organised fashion," said a spokeswoman for the company.

Pharmaceutical firms say they need to launch drugs at high prices because of the hundreds of millions of pounds spent on developing them. Critics point out that the company's calculations also include the marketing budget.
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Old June 17th, 2006 #29
FranzJoseph
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Default Big Lie

Quote:
Originally Posted by Enkidu
Pharmaceutical firms say they need to launch drugs at high prices because of the hundreds of millions of pounds spent on developing them. Critics point out that the company's calculations also include the marketing budget.
Bullshit. This fraud has been exposed for at least a decade ago. Drug companies spend squat on developing new drugs. They spend a fortune on litigation, patent lawyers, lobbying and marketing.

The wife gets migraines pretty bad sometimes. The shit the doc gives her is the most toxic crap imaginable, something called Imitrex (sp?) that might as well be plutonium, the shit's poison. I was told by a local NORML fellow that a far, far better cure for her type of migraine is weed. A few hits of marijuana is effective and hundreds of times less physically harmful than the expensive perscription medicines they sell for it.

Fact is, marijuana was used for cramps, headaches and nausea before we had a fucking DEA. Queen Victoria used it when she menstruated. Drug companies know grass would replace at least six of their billion dollar drugs and that's why we have a "war on drugs."

They hate us because we're free, oh yeah.
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Old June 17th, 2006 #30
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Default From "Counterpunch"

Even the Bigboys say we're screwed... what's happening is what honorable bankers were warning against in the 80s. Had deregulation not happened, things would move slower but there would be accountability, and we wouldn't be in this mess.

For any human institution to work, it must be controlled. Unrestricted capitalism is like unrestricted cell growth, and capitalism has been compared to a type of cancer before. -- FJ.


http://www.counterpunch.org/kolko06152006.html

Quote:

Global Economic Deluge Looms



People who know the most about the world financial system are increasingly worried, and for very good reasons. Dire warnings are coming from the most "respectable" sources. Reality has gotten out of hand. The demons of greed are loose.

What is that reality? It includes a number of factors. Alone they would be exceedingly serious; combined, they are very likely to be lethal.

First of all, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has been undergoing both a structural and intellectual crisis. Structurally, its outstanding credit and loans have declined dramatically since 2003, from over $70 billion to a little over $20 billion today, leaving it with far less leverage over the economic policies of developing nations--and even less income than its expensive operations require. It is now in deficit.1

A large part of the IMF's problems are due to the doubling in world prices for all commodities since 2003 -- especially petroleum, copper, silver, zinc, nickel, and the like -- that the developing nations traditionally export. While there will be fluctuations in this upsurge, there is also reason to think it may endure because rapid economic growth in China, India, and elsewhere has created a burgeoning demand that did not exist before, when the balance-of-trade systematically favored the rich nations.

The U.S. has seen its net foreign asset position fall as Japan, emerging Asia, and oil exporting nations have become far more powerful over the past decade, and have increasingly become creditors to the U.S.2 As the U.S. deficits mount, with its imports being far greater than its exports, the value of the dollar has been declining -- 28 per cent against the euro from 2001 to 2005 alone.

Equally important, the IMF and World Bank were severely chastened by the 1997-2000 financial meltdowns in East Asia, Russia, and elsewhere, and many of the two institutions' key leaders lost faith in the anarchic premises, descended from classical laisser-faire economic thought, which guided policy advice until then. "{O]ur knowledge of economic growth is extremely incomplete," many in the IMF now admit, and "more humility" on its part is now warranted.3

Worse yet, the whole nature of the global financial system has changed radically in ways that have nothing whatsoever to do with "virtuous" national economic policies that follow IMF advic. These are ways the IMF cannot control. The investment managers of private equity funds and major banks have displaced national banks and international bodies such as the IMF, moving well beyond the existing regulatory structures and they have "reintermediated" themselves between the traditional borrowers, both national and individual, and markets. They have deregulated the world financial structure, making it far more unpredictable and susceptible to crises. They seek to generate high investment returns, which is the key to their compensation, and they take mounting risks to do so.

A "brave new world" has emerged in the global financial structure, one that is far less transparent because there are fewer reporting demands imposed on those who operate in it. Financial adventurers are constantly creating new "products" that defy both states and international banks. The IMF's managing director, Rodrigo de Rato, at the end of May, 2005, deplored these new risks -- risks the weakness of the U.S. dollar and its mounting trade deficits have magnified greatly.4

In March of this year the IMF released Garry J. Schinasi's book, Safeguarding Financial Stability, giving it unusual prominence then and thereafter. In essence, Schinasi's book is alarmist, and it both reveals and documents in great and disturbing detail the IMF's deep anxieties. Essentially, "deregulation and liberalization", which the IMF and proponents of the "Washington consensus" advocated for decades, have become a nightmare, creating "tremendous private and social benefits" but also holding "the potential (although not necessarily a high likelihood) for fragility, instability, systemic risk, and adverse economic consequences."

Anyone who reads the data in Schinasi's superbly documented book will share his real conclusion that the irrational development of global finance, combined with deregulation and liberalization, has "created scope for financial innovation and enhanced the mobility of risks". Schinasi and the IMF advocate a radical new framework to monitor and prevent the problems now able to emerge, but success "may have as much to do with good luck" as policy design and market surveillance.5 Leaving the future to luck is not what economics originally promised. The IMF is desperate, and not alone.

As the Argentina financial meltdown proved, countries that do not succumb to IMF and banker pressures can play on divisions within the IMF membership, particularly the U.S., comprising bankers and others to avoid many, although scarcely all, foreign demands. About $140 billion in sovereign bonds to private creditors and the IMF were at stake, terminating at the end of 2001 as the largest national default in history. Banks in the 1990s were eager to loan Argentina money and they ultimately paid for it. Since then, however, commodity prices have soared and the growth rate of developing nations in 2004 and 2005 was over double that of high income nation, a pattern projected to continue through 2008.

As early as 2003 developing countries were already the source of 37 percent of the foreign direct investment in other developing nations. China accounts for a great part of this growth, but it also means that the IMF and rich bankers of New York, Tokyo, and London have far less leverage than ever. Growing complexity is the order of the world economy that has emerged in the past decade, and with it has come the potential for far greater instability, and dangers for the rich.

High-speed Global Economics

The global financial problem that is emerging is entwined with an American fiscal and trade deficit that is rising quickly. Since Bush entered office in 2001 he had added over $3 trillion to federal borrowing limits, which are now almost $9 trillion. So long as there is a continued devaluation of the U.S. dollar, banks and financiers will seek to protect their money and risky financial adventures will appear increasingly worthwhile. This is the context, but Washington advocated greater financial liberalization well before the dollar weakened. The world now has a conjunction of factors that have created a far greater risk than the proponents of the "Washington consensus" ever believed possible.

There are now many hedge funds, with which we are familiar, but they now deal in credit derivatives and numerous other financial instruments. Markets for credit derivative futures are in the offing. The credit derivative market was almost nonexistent in 2001, grew fairly slowly until 2004 and then went into the stratosphere, reaching $17.3 trillion by the end of 2005.

What are credit derivatives? The Financial Times' chief capital markets writer, Gillian Tett, tried to find out. She failed. About ten years ago some J. P. Morgan bankers were in Boca Raton, Florida, drinking, throwing each other into the swimming pool, and the like, and they came up with a notion of a new financial instrument that was too complex to be easily copied (financial ideas cannot be copyrighted) and which was sure to make them money. But she was highly critical of its potential for causing a chain reaction of losses that will engulf the hedge funds that have leaped into this market.6 It for reasons such as these, as well as others, even more opaque, such as split capital trusts, collateralized debt obligations, and market credit default swaps, that the IMF and financial authorities are so worried.

Banks simply do not understand the chain of exposure and who owns what. Senior financial regulators and bankers now admit as much. The Long-Term Capital Management hedge fund meltdown in 1998, which involved only about $5 billion in equity, revealed this. The financial structure is now infinitely more complex and far larger. The top ten hedge funds alone in March 2006 had $157 billion in assets. Hedge funds claim to be honest but those who guide them are compensated for the profits they make, which means taking risks. But there are thousands of hedge funds and many collect inside information, which is technically illegal but it occurs anyway. The system is fraught with dangers, starting with the compensation structure, but it also assumes a constantly rising stock market and much, much else. Many fund managers are incompetent. But the 26 leading hedge fund managers earned an average of $363 million each in 2005; James Simons of Renaissance Technologies earned $1.5 billion.

There is now a consensus that all this, and much else, has created growing dangers. We can put aside the persistence of imbalanced budgets based on spending increases or tax cuts for the wealthy, much less the world's volatile stock and commodity markets which caused hedge funds in May to show far lower returns than they have in at least a year. It is anyone's guess which way the markets will go, and some will gain while others lose. Hedge funds still make lots of profits, and by the spring of 2006 they were worth about $1.2 trillion worldwide, but they are increasingly dangerous.

A great deal of money went from investors in rich nations into emerging market stocks, which have been especially hard-hit in the past weeks, and if they leave them the financial shock will be great. The dangers of a meltdown exist there too.

Problems are structural, such as the greatly increasing ratio of corporate debt loads to core earnings, which have grown substantially from four to six times over the past year because there are fewer legal clauses to protect investors from loss, and to keep companies from going bankrupt when they should. So long as interest rates have been low, leveraged loans have been the solution. With hedge funds and other financial instruments, there is now a market for incompetent, debt-ridden firms. The rules some once erroneously associated with capitalism -- probity and the like--no longer hold even on paper.

Problems are also inherent in speed and complexity, and these are very diverse and almost surreal. Credit derivatives are precarious enough, but at the end of May the International Swaps and Derivatives Association revealed that one in every five deals, many of them involving billions of dollars, involved major errors. As the volume of trade increased so did errors. They doubled in the period after 2004. Many deals were scribbled on scraps of paper and not properly recorded. "Unconscionable" was outgoing Fed chairman, Alan Greenspan's, description. He was "frankly shocked." Other trading, however, is determined by mathematical algorithm ("volume-weighted average price" it is called) for which PhDs trained in quantitative methods are hired.7 Efforts to remedy this mess only began in June of this year and they are very far from resolving a major and accumulated problem that involves stupendous sums.

Stephen Roach, Morgan Stanley's chief economist, on April 24 of this year wrote that a major financial crisis was in the offing and that the ability of global institutions to forestall it -- ranging from the IMF and World Bank to other mechanisms of the international financial architecture ­ are utterly inadequate. Hong Kong's chief secretary in early June deplored the hedge funds' risks and dangers. The IMF's iconoclastic chief economist, Raghuram Rajan, at the same time warned that the hedge funds' compensation structure encouraged those in charge of them to increasingly take risks, thereby endangering the whole financial system.

* * *

The entire global financial structure is becoming uncontrollable in crucial ways its nominal leaders never expected. Instability is increasingly its hallmark. Financial liberalization has produced a monster, and resolving the many problems that have emerged is scarcely possible for those who deplore controls on those who seek to make money, whatever means it takes to do so. Contradictions now wrack the world's financial system, and if we are to believe the institutions and personalities who have been in the forefront of the defense of capitalism, it may very well be on the verge of serious crises.
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Old June 17th, 2006 #31
Mike in Denver
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Stronza
Putting cancer drugs into your eyes? I think not. We have to look at diseases of all body parts, including the eyes, as having their roots in overall body health deficiencies. If the eyes have diseases, it is because there is something going wrong somewhere else, i.e. the major organs. Even wet macular degeneration should be seen as something that's not inevitable.
Actually, I agree with you, Stronza. I avoid doctors and pharmaceuticals completely. The point of the article, however, is that even if they came up with a useful drug, they would keep it off the market, rather than put profits at risk.

Enkidu
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Old June 18th, 2006 #32
alex
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Actually Stronza the solution to the problem you state should be obvious.

But first some basics.

As Adolf Hitler wrote in "mein Kampf" the state should exist so to serve the people (with people i dont mean individual persons but the entity,the Volk),not the other way around as it is practiced today when the people serve the state.

Taxes and other incomes of the state serve only one purpose: namely to be redistributed by the state among the people.And to those productive and needy members of our society more than to the rest.For example: white working class,big white families etc.

Now to the solution of your stated problem,which suprisingly noone else mentioned:

Nationalization!

All the capital belongs to the hands of the state.

Which means that all banks and credit institutes have to be nationalized by the National Socialist state.The individual wanting some capital will have to pay interest rates (which will be according his material status, for example poorer whites will pay lower rates than those who are materially speaking better off) to the state instead of to private hands as it is today.

This state income again will in turn be spend for the Volk.
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