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From Al Jazeera:  http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/10/20121016134832922797.html

Paul Rosenberg
21 Oct 2012

America’s billionaires are up in arms! Sure, they’ve made out like bandits, while tens of millions of Americans are still suffering – out of work, in bankruptcy, or owing more on their mortgages than their houses are worth. Along with the rest of the 1 per cent, they’ve captured 93 per cent of income gains in the US in the first year of lopsided economic recovery. But that’s not the point! The point is: They’re the most oppressed people in the history of the world! What’s happening to them in America today is reminiscent of Nazi Germany under Hitler!

Believe it or not, that’s the message coming from a veritable parade of self-portrayed victims at the pinnacle of the 1 per cent of the 1 per cent, who are very angry at President Obama supposedly saying mean things about them. These men are so spectacularly wealthy that it’s literally impossible to understand them in the context of other people’s economic lives, to make sense of what they’re saying. They’re like elephants in the midst of a leper colony, complaining about a gnat bite in a dream they just remembered.

They’ve also been treated so well by Obama that it’s likewise impossible to grasp. He could have gone after them immediately after taking office, breaking up the big banks and pursuing criminal charges against those responsible for destroying the economy based on multiple interlocking forms of fraud. Obama did none of that. There’s simply no understanding their hatred of him in purely objective terms.

But their self-pitying portrayal as victims is another thing altogether. It’s not just commonplace, it’s virtually mandatory among the ranks of American conservatives today – particularly when there’s little or no basis in fact. Indeed, it’s sometimes even quantifiable, as I explained in a column occasioned by Herman Cain’s slow, self-pitying exit from the presidential race.

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For example, there’s a widespread belief in certain evangelical Christian circles that 146,000 Christians a year are martyred worldwide, when the real figure is almost certainly less than five a year (possibly even zero) – which would yield what I dubbed a “conservative victimology ratio” of 28,600 to one. Likewise, voter fraud cases are similarly scarce, but conservatives imagine they number into the millions – and voter suppression in various forms actually does keep millions from voting. Using a variety of different approaches and examples, I came up with victimology ratios ranging from 30.4 million to one down to 22,010 to one.

Continue reading at:  http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/10/20121016134832922797.html

From Huffington Post:   http://www.huffingtonpost.com/klaus-schwab/end-of-capitalism—-_b_1423311.html

Klaus Schwab
04/13/2012

This year’s World Economic Forum in Davos saw intense debate about the future of capitalism. Many participants were asking whether capitalism, with all of its excesses, still has a place in today’s world. The media, meanwhile, speculated that if even managers and bankers were raising doubts about the system’s future, then perhaps capitalism had already been laid to rest in Davos.

The reports about capitalism’s imminent demise may be somewhat exaggerated, as the ideology of a free but socially committed and fairly regulated market economy was never questioned in Davos. However, there was some discussion as to whether capitalism in its present form serves or undermines the free market economy. A clear distinction needs to be made in this regard between the ideology of a social market economy based on individual responsibility on the one hand, and the term capitalism as such on the other. Over the course of the past 200 years a range of different interpretations of capitalism have emerged as a reaction to industrialization. In historical terms, the transition from manual trades to machines required an ever increasing degree of investment, and therefore the provision of capital. In this sense, capitalism is not an ideology as such, but an applied theory of the creation and efficient deployment of capital as a factor of production. In its genuine sense, capitalism is therefore the component of an economic system that relates to the capital market, enshrined in the principles of a free market and guaranteed ownership. However, these principles are part of a more comprehensive ideology.

Unfortunately, in today’s parlance this free market ideology has been equated with “capitalism” as a technical component. As a result, it is easy to gain the impression that the free market economic system founded on individual freedom and, at the same time, social responsibility, is to blame for the excesses of a capitalism that has lost its equilibrium. This is clearly incorrect. The subject of intense debate in Davos was not, therefore, the end of capitalism as an ideology, but the issue of how capitalism’s technical components — which have come off the rails — can be reformed.

One of the criticisms of capitalism centers on the widening gap between winners and losers due to the so-called turbocapitalism that is a result of global competition. In this context, the so-called Nordic model demonstrates that a high degree of labor market flexibility and social welfare systems do not have to be mutually exclusive — indeed, they can actually be combined to very good effect. This type of economic policy also enables countries to invest in innovation, childcare, education and training. The Scandinavian countries, which underwent a similar banking crisis in the 1990s to that which we are now experiencing in other Western economies, have shown that by reforming regulation and social welfare systems, flexible labor and capital markets really are compatible with social responsibility. So it is no coincidence that these countries are now among the most competitive economies in the world.

Continue reading at:   http://www.huffingtonpost.com/klaus-schwab/end-of-capitalism—-_b_1423311.html