The Billion Dollar Gram
etiko high tops
My Chuck Taylors are falling apart at the seams and since Converse were bought out by Nike a few years ago (which makes them evil), I wanted to make sure I bought some shoes that are made by a Fair Trade manufacturer and that are also eco-friendly. Morgs at Urban Grind recommended Etiko and that’s good enough for me. So I picked up some Etiko high tops today. From Etiko’s site:
Produced in Pakistan by the same licensed Fairtrade manufacturer who produces our Certified Fairtrade Etiko sports balls, these sneakers are based on a classic design. They also feature a rubber sole which has been certified sustainable by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) …..making the sneakers ethically and environmentally sound. A fair trade premium ensures that the workers who actually produced the sneakers are paid a living wage and are entitled to benefits and conditions which are a rarity in the footwear and garment industries in most developing nations. A trust account that we contribute to helps fund a health care program for the workers and their families as well as a micro credit program for any one that wants to set up their own small business.
I originally went to Bliss Ecowear in Paddington to get them but they ended up being almost TWICE as expensive as they were at Happy High Herbs in New Farm. What’s that, the Paddo yuppy tax?
Former Big Pharma PR Exec Apologizes
Wendell Potter sez: “…the higher up the corporate ladder I climbed, the more I could see how insurance companies confuse their customers and dump the sick – all so they can satisfy those Wall Street masters.”
via Wendell Potter: Rally Against Wall Street’s Health Care Takeover | Center for Media and Democracy.
It’s Official: The World’s Finances Are In The Hands Of The Few
I wonder how closely the names on this report map to the Bilderberg Group?
A recent analysis of the 2007 financial markets of 48 countries has revealed that the world’s finances are in the hands of just a few mutual funds, banks, and corporations. This is the first clear picture of the global concentration of financial power, and point out the worldwide financial system’s vulnerability as it stood on the brink of the current economic crisis.
A pair of physicists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich did a physics-based analysis of the world economy as it looked in early 2007. Stefano Battiston and James Glattfelder extracted the information from the tangled yarn that links 24,877 stocks and 106,141 shareholding entities in 48 countries, revealing what they called the “backbone” of each country’s financial market. These backbones represented the owners of 80 percent of a country’s market capital, yet consisted of remarkably few shareholders.
The most pared-down backbones exist in Anglo-Saxon countries, including the U.S., Australia, and the U.K. Paradoxically; these same countries are considered by economists to have the most widely-held stocks in the world, with ownership of companies tending to be spread out among many investors. But while each American company may link to many owners, Glattfelder and Battiston’s analysis found that the owners varied little from stock to stock, meaning that comparatively few hands are holding the reins of the entire market.
via Research – ISNS.
Nine US Banks Paid Out $33 BILLION in Bonuses
Following on from yesterday’s story about Goldman Sachs as the root of all evil, today we get the information that:
Nine banks that received government aid money paid out bonuses of nearly $33 billion last year — including more than $1 million apiece to nearly 5,000 employees — despite huge losses that plunged the U.S. into economic turmoil. … The nine firms in the report had combined 2008 losses of nearly $100 billion.
And if you think things are going to change, don’t be deluded. Here’s what the Obama White House had to say:
"The president continues to believe that the American people don’t begrudge people making money for what they do as long as…we’re not basically incentivizing wild risk-taking that somebody else picks up the tab for," said White House Spokesman Robert Gibbs.
What happened to Obama’s feigned outrage last year before the election? It’s all gone, baby. It disappeared to the same place as his promises about Gitmo, prison camps, climate change and health care.
If the NBA has a salary cap, why can’t American corporations? One of the key problems with capitalism is the open-ended nature of the upside. It breeds unlimited greed. Surely we can combine the good aspects of capitalism – eg incentives for creativity and effort – but restrict the upsides? I know we have tiered taxation, which effectively acts as a way of channeling some of that upside back into the system, but it doesn’t stop companies and individuals trying to bleed the economy for as much money as they can get their hands on, despite the negative consequences.
It still seems to me that we need another system, one that limits the greed but retains the incentives.
The Great American Bubble Machine
Rolling Stone magazine has a Hunteresque story about Goldman Sachs:
The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it’s everywhere. The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money. In fact, the history of the recent financial crisis, which doubles as a history of the rapid decline and fall of the suddenly swindled dry American empire, reads like a Who’s Who of Goldman Sachs graduates.