Found this video produced by unions in 1948. Interesting how the issues are the same and how the media distorts the facts against the working class. The movie talks about exactly what is happening in our economy today: illicit manipulation and rigging of the markets for profiteering. We are not operating in a free market system.
Union recruitment film criticizing monopoly control of the U.S. economy and advocating union membership as a defense against corporate power.
Union Activism: The Great Swindle - Part 2
http://vimeo.com/...
Creative Commons license: Public Domain
This movie is part of the collection: Prelinger Archives
http://www.archive.org/
Listening to the wing-nuts pitting workers against each other is disturbing. What we are talking about is class warfare except that the targets have been directed at each other rather than the individuals and corporations that are profiteering from this economic chaos by creating a lumpin class. The more division and animosity there is, the more the poor and working class will be exploited by the ruling class with fear tactics, prisons, racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, anti-union animus and a host of other hate fueled character traits thereby creating conflict and confrontation.
Parasitic Growth
Judging a country’s economic performance with reference to aggregates like Gross Domestic Product can be misleading, Melman observed, particularly when those quantitative measures conceal or obscure qualitative problems.[7] Measurements of “economic growth” are meaningless if they do not differentiate between what he called productive growth and parasitic growth. Productive growth improves people’s standard of living and/or contributes to future production, while parasitic growth merely depletes manpower and existing stocks of goods without accomplishing either of these ends.[8] In Melman’s view, productive growth involves both the production of consumer goods as well as the production of capital goods that increase the economy’s capacity to produce consumer goods in the future. Both are aimed at satisfying human needs.
Beyond a certain limit, military spending constitutes the classic example of what Melman considered parasitic growth. (p. 4)
[7]Murray N. Rothbard made a similar point when suggested that GNP be replaced by Private Product Remaining, which excludes government expenditures altogether and measures only the size of the private economy. Murray N. Rothbard, America’s Great Depression, 4th ed. New York: Richardson & Snyder, 1983, 296-97.
[8]Melman, Our Depleted Society, 5.
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References
Klein, Naomi. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt, 2007. Print.
Woods, Jr., Thomas E. "The Neglected Costs of the Warfare State: An Austrian Tribute to Seymour Melman." Ludwig Von Mises Institute: Working Papers, 2006. http://mises.org/...
Von, Mises L. Planned Chaos. Irvington-on-Hudson, N.Y: Foundation for Economic Education, 1947. Print.