Wednesday, April 21, 2010

Its Socialism! No, its Fascism! No, its Kleptocracy!

Socialism is state ownership in the name of the people. Fascism is state ownership in the name of a small oligarchy or dictatorship.

Kleptocracy is corporate looting aided and abetted by a corporate corrupted state. Kleptocracy is what we have.
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/04/21-1
Here is a quote from William Astore illustrating the kleptocratic nature of our system from Common Dreams:

"Wealth concentration is only one aspect of our increasingly kleptocratic system. War profiteering by corporations (however well disguised as heartfelt support for our heroic warfighters) is another. Meanwhile, retired senior military officers typically line up to cash in on the kleptocratic equivalent of welfare, peddling their "expertise" in return for impressive corporate and Pentagon payouts that supplement their six-figure pensions. Even that putative champion of the Carhartt-wearing common folk, Sarah Palin, pocketed a cool $12 million last year without putting the slightest dent in her populist bona fides..."

Citing Tony Judt's article at the New York Review of Books, Astore describes the concentration of wealth:
"In 2005, 21.2 percent of U.S. national income accrued to just 1 percent of earners. Contrast 1968, when the CEO of General Motors took home, in pay and benefits, about sixty-six times the amount paid to a typical GM worker. Today the CEO of Wal-Mart earns nine hundred times the wages of his average employee. Indeed, the wealth of the Wal-Mart founder's family in 2005 was estimated at about the same ($90 billion) as that of the bottom 40 percent of the U.S. population: 120 million people..."

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