global financial crisis

The current economic crisis in Europe can be compared to a couple in a street building a three storey mansion in a street made up of one storey dwellings and then forcing the residents of the one storey dwellings to stop paying their electricity and gas bills to meet the mortgage repayments of the couple who built the three storey mansion.

Article by Joe Toscano

The scramble by members of the European Union to appoint technocrats as leaders of Greece and Italy highlights how little input electors have on government policy in the 21st century. Unfortunately they have forgotten what is good for the markets isn’t as most governments believe, good for the people they rule.

The current economic crisis in Europe can be compared to a couple in a street building a three storey mansion in a street made up of one storey dwellings and then forcing the residents of the one storey dwellings to stop paying their electricity and gas bills to meet the mortgage repayments of the couple who built the three storey mansion.

The people of Italy and Greece are seething with uncontrolled anger at seeing governments that theoretically represent their interests squandering their taxes to bolster the fortunes of banks and corporations who found themselves at the pointy end of the Global Financial Crisis because of their greed and unconscionable behaviour.

Irrespective of how many technocrats are appointed to European parliaments, irrespective of how many austerity measures are introduced by parliaments that dance to the tune of the corporate parliamentary puppet masters, irrespective of how many governments of national unity are formed to save corporate capitalism’s bacon the people in the streets will ultimately determine government policy.

The parliamentary puppet masters seem to have forgotten that ultimate political authority in a democracy rests in the hands of the people, not the state, the corporate sector, the bureaucracy or the government of the day. When working up the right channels fails, when the ballot box does not reflect the will of the people, when parliament is hijacked by unaccountable corporations and societies institutions are subverted by that small section of society that owns the means of production, distribution, exchange and communication to maximise their profits, the people are left with no other option but to use direct action to put ultimate political authority back into the hands of the people.

Original Source, Issue No.957 of the Anarchist Age Weekly Review which covers the two week period 21st November - 4th December. Latest issue here.

Amid a European and global economic crisis, governments are still letting markets get away with little regulation, big bonuses and dubious financial instruments that are distorting financial stability for short-term gain and putting enormous pressure on people to pick up the manufactured debts

Much of Britain’s press is relentlessly euro-sceptic, to the extent that the euro’s survival is being talked down and political supporters of Europe no longer speak up. For a change, think of some of the benefits.

Once again financial markets which were prime movers in causing the economic crash in 2008 are gambling on destabilising currencies. Back in the 1990s the pound bounced around wildly in the hands of speculators and it is again weak against the euro, despite the euro’s problems. The euro brought new stability to currency markets, challenging the supremacy of a US dollar, exposed by America’s massive budget deficit.

Several countries, like Montenegro in former Yugoslavia, have the euro as the official currency without being a formal member of the euro zone, because their own economies are not viable enough. Ecuador's economy hit the rocks and the country now uses the US dollar as its national currency to inject more stability.

Currency devaluation is a mixed benefit for getting out of trouble. It doesn’t tackle underlying structural problems. Nor does it help businesses in a balanced way. The last time the UK devalued its currency, economists realised that while exports may be helped, major importing economies like the UK see price inflation linked to currency devaluation in important sectors like cars, food, energy and raw materials.

As UK North Sea oil and gas reserves decline the country will be reliant on more expensive imports paid in dollars. A study for the Government’s Department of Business Enterprise: UK Continental Shelf Oil and Gas Production and the UK Economy, predicts that in a few years the UK could run up a cumulative deficit in oil and gas imports of over $500 billion – to add to our economic troubles.

Governments are still letting the markets get away with little regulation, big bonuses and dubious financial instruments that are distorting financial stability for short-term gain and putting enormous pressure on people to pick up the manufactured debts.

Financiers are now leveraging unsustainable interest rates on loans to Greece and Italy at levels similar to states on permanent aid like Pakistan and Egypt, forcing Italy to pay a 20 per cent addition to its debt in interest. Imagine a house-buyer saying they were in difficulty and being told: “Okay, we’ll triple your interest rate on the loan.” Something is wrong. The tail is wagging the dog and politicians need to get a grip.

Members of the European Union enjoy the historic integration of a continent so recently divided by wars. People can live and work across the Union with reciprocal health benefits. Yes, there are things about Europe we can improve, but countries don’t lose their identity by being better connected. They are enriched and learn from each other.

Brian McGavin Nov 2011

Author John Ralston Saul is in town for the Sydney Writers Festival and will be speaking at the Sydney Town Hall this evening at 6pm. Bookings can be made through the Sydney Writers' Festival 2010 website.

Ralston Saul has updated his book 'The Collapse of Globalism and the Reinvention of the World.'

'For more than a decade, Saul has been arguing that it is high time to completely rethink the primacy of economic fundamentalism, to discard what he sees as the flawed, 1970s ideology of unfettered free-market globalisation. "The recent European bailout adds fuel to his argument", he says. "This is the outcome of globalism? That we're more in debt than we were in 1973? We're not having a conversation about what worked and what didn't [in globalisation], and we have to have that conversation." [SMH 17th May 2010, p6]

Ralston Saul says we had the chance to reform the system - but that was before the global financial crisis.

"Nevertheless, I think democracies are capable of reforming the system, and there's a long list of things that need to be done. One of them, shut down the business schools, they're at the core of the problem... for the last thirty years there's been a sort of intellectual cleansing in economics department, so there's only one way of thinking." [ABC, 18th May, 2010, by Adam Spencer].

Read More about Democracy and Globalisation

Saul also in his most recent book, 'The Fair Country', analyses what he sees as the parallel between Canada and Australia in respect to geography, the extreme climate, and the essential importance of Aboriginal people.

GoTo his website

Saturday 31 October 2009

by Ellen Hodgson Brown J.D.
Originally published on truthout.

Pouring money into the private banking system has only fixed the economy for bankers and the wealthy; it has not done much to address either the fundamental problem of unemployment or the debt trap so many Americans find themselves in.

President Obama's $787 billion stimulus plan has so far failed to halt the growth of unemployment: 2.7 million jobs have been lost since the stimulus plan began. California has lost 336,400 jobs. Arizona has lost 77,300. Michigan has lost 137,300. A total of 49 states and the District of Columbia have all reported net job losses.

In this dark firmament, however, one bright star shines. The sole state to actually gain jobs is an unlikely candidate for the distinction: North Dakota. North Dakota is also one of only two states expected to meet their budgets in 2010. (The other is Montana.) North Dakota is a sparsely populated state of less than 700,000 people, largely located in cold and isolated farming communities. Yet, since 2000, the state's GNP has grown 56 percent, personal income has grown 43 percent and wages have grown 34 percent. The state not only has no funding problems, but this year it has a budget surplus of $1.3 billion, the largest it has ever had.

Why is North Dakota doing so well, when other states are suffering the ravages of a deepening credit crisis? Its secret may be that it has its own credit machine. North Dakota is the only state in the Union to own its own bank. The Bank of North Dakota (BND) was established by the state legislature in 1919, specifically to free farmers and small businessmen from the clutches of out-of-state bankers and railroad men. The bank's stated mission is to deliver sound financial services that promote agriculture, commerce and industry in North Dakota.

The Advantages of Owning Your Own Bank

So, how does owning a bank solve the state's funding problems? Isn't the state still limited to the money it has? The answer is no. Chartered banks are allowed to do something nobody else can do: They can create credit on their books simply with accounting entries, using the magic of "fractional reserve" lending. As the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas explains on its web site:

"Banks actually create money when they lend it. Here's how it works: Most of a bank's loans are made to its own customers and are deposited in their checking accounts. Because the loan becomes a new deposit, just like a paycheck does, the bank ... holds a small percentage of that new amount in reserve and again lends the remainder to someone else, repeating the money-creation process many times."

How many times? President Obama puts this "multiplier effect" at eight to ten. In a speech on April 14, he said:

"[A]lthough there are a lot of Americans who understandably think that government money would be better spent going directly to families and businesses instead of banks - 'where's our bailout?,' they ask - the truth is that a dollar of capital in a bank can actually result in eight or ten dollars of loans to families and businesses, a multiplier effect that can ultimately lead to a faster pace of economic growth."

It can, but it hasn't recently, because private banks are limited by bank capital requirements and by their for-profit business models. And that is where a state-owned bank has enormous advantages: States own huge amounts of capital, and they can think farther ahead that their quarterly profit statements, allowing them to take long-term risks. Their asset bases are not marred by oversized salaries and bonuses; they have no shareholders expecting a sizable cut, and they have not marred their books with bad derivatives bets, unmarketable collateralized debt obligations and mark-to-market accounting problems.

The Bank of North Dakota (BND) is set up as a dba: "the State of North Dakota doing business as the Bank of North Dakota." Technically, that makes the capital of the state the capital of the bank. Projecting the possibilities of this arrangement to California, the State of California owns about $200 billion in real estate, has $62 billion in various investments and has $128 billion in projected 2009 revenues. Leveraged by a factor of eight, that capital base could support nearly $4 trillion in loans.

To get a bank charter, specific investments would probably need to be earmarked by the state as startup capital; but the startup capital required for a typical California bank is only about $20 million. This is small potatoes for the world's eighth largest economy, and the money would not actually be "spent." It would just become bank equity, transmuting from one form of investment into another - and a lucrative investment at that. In the case of the BND, the bank's return on equity (Link broken. Am following this up. - JS) is about 25 percent. It pays a hefty dividend to the state, which is expected to exceed $60 million this year. In the last decade, the BND has turned back a third of a billion dollars to the state's general fund, offsetting taxes. California could do substantially better than that. California pays $5 billion annually just in interest on its debt. If it had its own bank, the bank could refinance its debt and return that $5 billion to the state's coffers; and it would make substantially more on money lent out.

Besides capital, a bank needs "reserves," which it gets from deposits. For the BND, this too is no problem, since it has a captive deposit base. By law, the state and all its agencies must deposit their funds in the bank, which pays a competitive interest rate to the state treasurer. The bank also accepts deposits from other entities. These copious deposits can then be plowed back into the state in the form of loans.

Public Banking on the Central Bank Model

The BND's populist organizers originally conceived of the bank as a credit union-like institution that would free farmers from predatory lenders, but conservative interests later took control and suppressed these commercial lending functions. The BND is now chiefly a "bankers' bank." It acts like a central bank, with functions similar to those of a branch of the Federal Reserve. It avoids rivalry with private banks by partnering with them. Most lending is originated by a local bank. The BND then comes in to participate in the loan, share risk and buy down the interest rate.

One of the BND's functions is to provide a secondary market for real estate loans, which it buys from local banks. Its residential loan portfolio is now $500 billion to $600 billion. This function has helped the state to avoid the credit crisis that afflicted Wall Street when the secondary market for loans collapsed in late 2007. Before that, investors routinely bought securitized loans (CDOs) from the banks, making room on the banks' books for more loans. But these "shadow lenders" disappeared when they realized that the derivatives called "credit default swaps" supposedly protecting their CDOs were a highly unreliable form of insurance. In North Dakota, this secondary real estate market is provided by the BND, which has invested conservatively, avoiding the speculative derivatives debacle.

Other services the BND provides include guarantees for entrepreneurial startups and student loans, the purchase of municipal bonds from public institutions and a well-funded disaster loan program. When the city of Fargo was struck by a massive flood recently, the disaster fund helped the city avoid the devastation suffered by New Orleans in similar circumstances; and when North Dakota failed to meet its state budget a few years ago, the BND met the shortfall. The BND has an account with the Federal Reserve Bank, but its deposits are not insured by the FDIC. Rather, they are guaranteed by the State of North Dakota itself - a prudent move today, when the FDIC is verging on bankruptcy.

The Commercial Banking Model: The Commonwealth Bank of Australia

The BND studiously avoids competition with private banks, but a publicly-owned bank could profitably engage in commercial lending. A successful model for that approach was the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, which served both central bank and commercial bank functions. For nearly a century, the publicly-owned Commonwealth Bank provided financing for housing, small business, and other enterprise, affording effective public competition that "kept the banks honest" and kept interest rates low. Commonwealth Bank put the needs of borrowers ahead of profits, ensuring that sound investment flows were maintained to farming and other essential areas; yet, the bank was always profitable, from 1911 until nearly the end of the century.

Indeed, it seems to have been too profitable, making it a takeover target. It was simply "too good not to be privatized." The bank was sold in the 1990s for a good deal of money, but it's proponents consider it's loss as a social and economic institution to be incalculable.

A State Bank of Florida?

Could the sort of commercial model tested by Commonwealth Bank work today in the United States? Economist Farid Khavari thinks so. A Democratic candidate for governor of Florida, he proposes a Bank of the State of Florida (BSF) that would make loans to Floridians at much lower interest rates than they are getting now, using the magic of fractional reserve lending. He explains:

"For $100 in deposits, a bank can create $900 in new money by making loans. So, the BSF can pay 6 percent for CDs, and make mortgage loans at 2 percent. For $6 per year in interest paid out, the BSF can earn $18 by lending $900 at 2 percent for mortgages."

The state would earn $15,000 per $100,000 of mortgage, at a cost of about $1,700, while the homeowner would save $88,000 in interest and pay for the home 15 years sooner. "Our bank will save people about seven years of their pay over the course of 30 years, just on interest costs," says Dr. Khavari. He also proposes 6 percent credit cards and 6 percent certificates of deposit.

The state could earn billions yearly on these loans, while saving hefty sums for consumers. It could also refinance its own debts and those of its municipal governments at very low interest rates. According to a German study, interest composes 30 percent to 50 percent of everything we buy. Slashing interest costs can make projects such as low-cost housing, alternative energy development, and infrastructure construction not only sustainable, but profitable for the state, while at the same time creating much-needed jobs.

    --------

    Ellen Brown developed her research skills as an attorney practicing civil litigation in Los Angeles. In "Web of Debt," her latest book, she turns those skills to an analysis of the Federal Reserve and "the money trust." She shows how this private cartel has usurped the power to create money from the people themselves, and how we the people can get it back. Her earlier books focused on the pharmaceutical cartel that gets its power from "the money trust." Her eleven books include "Forbidden Medicine, Nature's Pharmacy" (co-authored with Dr. Lynne Walker) and "The Key to Ultimate Health" (co-authored with Dr. Richard Hansen). Her web sites are www.webofdebt.com and www.ellenbrown.com.

#StevenKeen" id="StevenKeen">Appendix: Steven Keen on bankers

The following is an excerpt from the story "This Keen professor overlooked by MSM" by David Hirst in the Business Day section of the Sydney Morning Herald of 10 Sep 09 :

Then Keen told what must have been a startled TV audience that bankers long ago ceased being humble lubricants of commerce, and had instead become parasites. They lend us money to play in a Ponzi scheme, launder the loot through stock and housing markets - where prices are driven up using the money they lent us - and then take a slice of the rising prices and call it a performance bonus.

Far from deserving their salaries, let alone their bonuses, Keen told six o'clock Sunday viewers, bankers deserved to be paid no more than plumbers, and to be given less respect. After all, plumbers fix leaks; if bankers did anywhere near as well, we'd be having a financial ball, not a financial crisis.

US citizens deserve better than the third-world US health-‘care’ system

The French News reports that in the United States more and more people are out of work. A sign of this is the number of people who cannot access medical and hospital treatment.

When North Americans lose their work, they usually lose their health insurance.

Some clinics have been willing to treat people for free, but now they are overwhelmed by the numbers of people seeking help.

Apparently some clinics are now running lotteries to choose who to treat in parts of the USA.

The report showed a line of 75 people without work or health insurance, presenting to be part of a lottery for free treatment, in Darlington, Virginia. Among those lining up was a diabetic, a woman with a thyroid deficiency problem and an out of work teacher with cardiac insufficiency. Apparently some in the queue had cancer.

We saw one woman ‘winning’ the right to treatment on this occasion.

Apparently those who did not win would be able to try in another lottery after 15 days!

Clinic spokespeople say that they are trying to manage the best they can.

What a failure in a country with the pretension to being the most powerful in the world, and whose banking CEOs have recently netted even bigger bonuses than they did prior to the Global Financial Crash.

Just at the moment the USA is debating about its system of health care.

Source: 8pm France2 News October 21, 2009
See also Wikipedia on Michael Moore’s film, Sicko, and for more about the United States health care ‘system’. There are excerpts on you-tube if you cannot get hold of the video.

And to think that the United States pretends to bring ‘democracy’ to other countries. Don’t tell me that US style capitalism is democracy. More like corporate feudalism.

Now in Southern California, soon in place near you

The link http://www.brasschecktv.com/page/702.html provides two short videos that starkly illustrate the ultimate results of unsustainable growth, as it is unfolding right now in Southern California, and as it is likely to unravel anywhere that continues too far with an economy based predominantly upon land speculation, urban construction and retail.

Extensive areas riddled with debt and without productive function or options

This growth model produces extensive areas that are riddled with debt and have no genuinely productive function or options by which to repay that debt. The extremity of circumstance shown in these videos also presents a new, terribly real, but currently unreported wave of refugees - the repossessed homeless.

The same situation developing and compounding in Australia

It can happen anywhere in Australia, but I will talk about a situation near my area, Rainbow Beach in Queensland. A world heritage area, and the last small town on the coast, it has been subjected to waves of developer proposals and attempts to massage opinion now for several years.

Bringing the issue closer to home in Cooloola (an obsolete term since Council amalgamation but how else do you quickly describe the region around Gympie, Queensland, Australia), what will happen to the many local families whose debt makes up the rapidly escalating amount of unpaid Council rates? Just prior to the recent rate rise this figure was $3m, up after last year's rate rise from $1.8m only two years ago. The new rate rise of 15-25% plus levies, a 30% increase in electricity costs, fuel on the rise, etc. will all combine to make this situation even harder. Yet local jobs, and all plans to 'increase' them, are focussed on land development and the retail that spins off of it.

Councils have no business getting their constituents into debt

How is Council prepared to deal with these contingencies? It couldn't happen here? That's exactly what they thought in California only two years ago. Denying physical reality didn't help them avoid it. Fringe and regional suburban areas in Australia are structurally very similar to the depicted Californian situation.

The last thing Rainbow Beach (or any other small town) needs is to become a regional suburb. That is not development. In the light of current knowledge, it is socio-economic suicide.

The second last thing we need is for our Council to continue taking the region down this doomed urban development pathway to increasing debt, under-employment and overall infrastructure deficiency.

It's all a hard message to grapple with for some of us but we ignore it at our peril.

This article comes from the background research for the Freewaves Feminist Magazine Show on 3RPP Radio Port Phillip, Victoria, Thursday, 20 August 2009. On the show with me was Catherine Manning, who wrote “Would you like porn with that?” for Candobetter, who has started up an internet site focused on removing porn from children’s eye level in stores.

Before we did the show together, I did a bit of research into the nature of pornography and why it might be good, or bad. I had difficulty coming to grips with the subject at all for some strange reason. I think that, like a lot of people, I have learned to tune out from the skin-marketing all around me, so focusing on the subject and related issues required an effort. I found a lot of very interesting writing and some very funny blogs.

This is what I came up with.

What is pornography anyhow?

Pornography is not just about getting naked, or having sex, or even recording, depicting or describing it.

The word pornography is made up of the Greek word for ‘prostitute’or ‘sex slave’ – porne- and the word for ‘writing’ graphein. The word pornographos designated a person who writes about prostitutes. Women in Ancient Greek society did not have the status of citizens and slaves had no status at all.

Pornography as we know it today still contains the ingredients of body sale and slavery. Slavery, in many instances these days, is commuted to objectification rather than frank chattel status.

‘Commuted’ in the sense of being paid for. Now you are not owned as a performing slave, but you rent yourself out. The person giving their body to pornography is assumed to be doing so from freedom of choice in order to make money.

Initially the pay for pornography, as in prostitution, may be higher than for other jobs available. Or the pornography may carry, falsely or really, some acting or modelling component and may be seen as an opportunity to get into something more skilled.

Pornography offers the vendors profits where none might otherwise exist. The ability to turn the girl next door, the schoolgirls on the bus-stop, your wife, daughter or girlfriend into cash may be very hard to knock back.

In the absence of women taking more control of their own incomes, including ownership of land and assets, the only thing stopping third parties from making a living this way would be a moral code to resist assisting the exploitation of women and their public exhibition of their bodies, which is generally deemed to be demeaning and damaging, unless it is artistic, which is to say, not titillating.

Some women would say that pornographic work is only damaging because women are seen to be objects owned by men and renting their bodies out for any purpose lowers the value of the object.

Can a woman enjoy displaying her body in a provocative pose to an unknown range of anonymous magazine browsers? The associated notoriety has become more and more apparently acceptable in public mores, possibly due to the expansion of visual media and the associated expansion of profit opportunities.

Who makes the money out of pornography?

So, why don’t men do it with their bodies too? Or is their main role as agents, salesmen and owners?

Who makes the most money out of pornography – the women who pose or the men who sell it? Obviously the employer has to stand to make more than the subject of the picture or there would be no profit in it.

It is said that one of the richest men in the world, Rupert Murdoch, made a lot of his money out of his famous ‘Page 3’ girlie photos at a time when the print media were constantly expanding.

The divisions and oppositions by gender in our species are political and economic

Steve Biddulpf writes that:

“Boys have many positive impulses around sexuality. Deep down most teenage boys are deeply romantic, capable of quite spiritual feelings towards women and girls.” (Steve Biddupf, “How we turn boys into creeps.”)

But the domination driven culture of capitalism undoes them.

A man with a big car and a couple of semi-naked young women sitting on it looks rich and successful to other men, according to Ape and marketing logic.

A woman surrounded by young naked men would also look rich and successful, as if accompanied by slaves, but we don’t see this so much. This is probably because our society is dominated by men who reject the popularization of women with male slaves. Why? Because we are against male slavery and its portrayal. But not that of women.

Catherine Manning’s concern that young girls will early identify as inevitable the public sexualisation of their gender as objects has deeper significance than ‘mere’ psychological trauma. With the huge expansion in volume and exposure of pornography, the risk is of the perpetuation and exacerbation of the attitudes that underlay the slave societies of Ancient Greece and England and her colonies before the 20th century, where women had no rights to property or citizenship and could not even have custody of their children in the event of a divorce.

Does it seem too way out to imagine our society being prepared for such a future? Think of how Russia has become a source of prostitution for the world with the simultaneous arrival of the capitalist press and economic decline. And South East Asia.

Mr Murdoch as a porn hustler; more than just an industry

Consider the influence that Mr Murdoch, the man who designed the Page 3 girls to become our social norm, now has on the production of political parties and leaders in Australia and throughout the English-speaking world, and even, more and more, in Europe.

Consider his influence on our dogma of economic and population growth, commodification and privatization, his impact on food habits and acquired cultures and values.

Could this kindly old man, solid patriarch and deliverer of Boyer Lectures really be the same man who brought the English-speaking world the Page 3 soft porn? Well, if that’s the worst he can do, is it any big deal?

I wonder if, however, in his vast network empire, Murdoch ever thought about investing in something a little more sophisticated?
Well, as it happens, Newshounds Are Us at www.newshounds.us/ (an online news-site which arose with the original researchers for the film Outfoxed about Fox TV) report in 2009 that Rupert Murdoch,

“… the born-again Christian who chairs media giant News Corporation, has been secretly building a stable of wholly-owned pornographic channels for his BSkyB subsidiary. The Business has learnt that BSkyB now owns and operates its own pornographic channels – the 18+ Movies selection – after years of hosting third-party content only. The company has also been entering into partnerships with companies that broadcast pornographic television channels on BSkyB, such as Sport XXX Babes, XXX Housewive and Playboy. BSkYB has agreed retail distribution agreements with these companies. With Playboy, for instance, BSkyB now not only hosts the channel but sells its service, and collects and shares in the revenues from Playboy customers.”

They further inform us of another old man who owns newspapers and made a fortune from pornography, saying that,

“For years the Murdoch press has labelled rival newspaper baron Richard Desmond a pornographer in articles charting his business which has included pornographic magazines and TV channels.” http://www.newshounds.us/2006/02/12/rupert_murdochs_pornography_profiteering.php

Desmond owns the Daily Express and OK magazine.
Silvio Berlusconi’s personal control over Italy’s ideas is even more direct. He is the Prime Minister of Italy, in the first place, but has been estimated to have personally

[…]The hallmarks of Mediaset television are blizzards of commercials, interspersed with AC Milan soccer matches – Berlusconi is the team's owner – game shows, "reality TV" serials and vaudeville extravaganzas featuring leggy troupes of scantily-clad young women.”

Berlusconi also

“controls more than a third of all book and magazine publishing and a leading national newspaper.”
Source: Frank Viviano, CBS5, “The Resurrection Of Silvio Berlusconi.”

But wait, there’s more: A report called, “The Porn Standard, Children and Pornography on the internet”, found that the “large and lucrative internet pornography industry is flooding the Web and seeking mainstream acceptance.”

It also found that

“The online pornography industry generates $12 billion in annual revenue roughly equal to the annual revenue of ABC, NBC, and CBS combined”[…], and, that “The two largest purchasers of [internet] bandwidth [space] are companies in the adult entertainment industry.

Household names in manufacturing own these global investments in Porn:

“The report found that, already in the year 2000, “General Motors Corporation (through its subsidiary DirecTV®) was selling more pornographic films each year than Larry Flynt of Hustler®. EchoStar Communications, which is heavily backed by Rupert Murdoch, now generates more revenue from pornography than Playboy®.

Other major players in the pornography business today include AT&T®, Hilton®, Marriott International. [Source: Sean Barney, “The Porn Standard: Children and pornography on the internet,” http://www.thirdway.org/products/14]

Maybe we looking at a porn-led international economic recovery?

So is this where the banks and big corporations are investing our funds now? Are they aiming for a porn-led global financial recovery?

If this phenomenon is so pervasive, so irrestistible, and it relies so much on women’s bodies, how come we are still letting a bunch of old men run our show?

If there is so much money in pornography, shouldn’t the women and children who wear the costs at least get control of the profits – not to mention the industry? Go here for the Celebrity Bestiality report on making money out of porn. That report concludes that only the big investors get anything out of the business.

Corporations and governments in the old-fashioned role of pimps

This is where we came in: Female gender slavery and prostitution make money for the masters, not for the individuals who perform the work.

Pimps tend to be men who are able to attract a few women by fair or foul means, but who are not too fussed about renting them out for sex. Perhaps this is one of the ways in which capitalism began.

Did the case ever happen where women were able to attract men and then were not too fussed about renting them out for sex? To whom? In capitalist societies women generally did not own anything, whereas men were able to own them. It therefore seems that the tendency for many more women to be prostitutes than men probably resulted from women’s marginalization and then further marginalized them.

But are women’s bodies the only ones objectified like this? No, pornographic objectification happens to men and to children of both sexes, although in the latter case it is not yet deemed acceptable.

Male gender slavery and objectification in war

And there is another way in which men are objectified by the same kinds of commercially organized forces which is just as demeaning and destructive – and that is in war. In war young men are convinced or forced to risk their bodies, minds and lives for the sake of profits, yet told that what they are doing is honorable.

And women and children suffer in war of course as well, often in pornographic ways that are beyond ordinary imagination.

Porn and war seem to be human issues of economic and political disenfranchisement in contexts of removal of power to distant locations and persons who do not have to face the people who wear the consequences.

Another argument in favour of relocalisation.
.

That’s not the end of it, but here’s a good song to pause on – “JPEG Baby”. It's sung by the writer of the Celebrity Bestiality report.

Send us your thoughts in a comment.
And maybe take a look at http://www.sayno4kids.com/blog/ - Catherine Manning’s page proposing simply moving pornographic magazine displays to above children’s eye-level.