Lucas Diaz Molaro: End Neoliberalism, Tax and Regulate the One Percent. Part 1

Some people here claim they don't know what neoliberalism is, or they say it doesn't exist. But neoliberalism is imperialism which is rule by the One Percent. Lucas Diaz Molaro has written three ebooks which have the clearest definition of neoliberalism I have ever read, and they are all available for free from his site: Endneoliberalism.org. I have put out the links below. It seems the site have not been kept updated since 2014, but it is still active.

Neoliberalism is not capitalism, but is totalitarian. It uses a false a market system (down the barrel of a gun and corruption) to drive wages and cost of materials to rock bottom while maximizing profits (at expense to the economy) for the few, the One Percent. Despite labor saving machinery and state-of-the-art modern technology people today are working harder than before and for much longer hours.

Free trade should be between countries who have products and materials spare for sale, it shouldn't be where the One Percent can come in and buy up everything at distressed prices because they have installed a dictator or put in a puppet corrupt government.  

I'm sure Andrew Anderson will love these books because Lucas Diaz Molaro believes that a real free market will produce better paying jobs with shorter working hours, and develop more useful, efficient, and environmentally products. But Lucas Diaz Molaro also believes that essential services and natural monopolies should be highly regulated to produce a more effective competitive market, and that the right amount of taxes on the super rich will produce much better outcomes for society as a whole.

Lucas Diaz Molaro describes the world as it should have been, but a viscous, criminal syndicate rules over us instead. The world should have had a gentle, but effective, capitalism producing products and services that are safe, environmentally friendly, and useful, while creating very good jobs that are rewarding, without excessive forced long hours, where very clever people get rewarded for their hard work and innovation. All countries would be wealthier, and all would be capitalist-socialist (as opposed to communist-socialist). This is the ideal state which would maximize freedom and happiness. Freedom from being terrorized by your boss or your company - where people get forced to work for next to nothing, or for too longer hours. The freedom from fear because you know that you will always get good hospital treatment for you and your family without needing to find the money. And freedom to just enjoy the gift life and to be care-free, but we have been so brainwashed that this sounds radical, a state that is Utopian rather than everyday.

Such a society will have better education for its children, where school is fun, which means a healthier, happier society where crime is low because our genes are programmable (epigenetics) and our brains our neuroplastic (change according to our environment and upbringing) meaning that most people can turn out well adjusted. And more intelligent people means better companies with superior products and so a higher standard of living is achieved - a virtuous circle occurs. This is what has been robbed from us. Instead we have a planet where the environment is being ruined and where there is unnecessary suffering and poverty. All so a few can live in imaginable opulence, riches, and luxury.

Calibre:

Calibri is a great program for converting PDF files, and other files, to kindle, or vice versa. It's entirely free and safe to download.

 http://calibre-ebook.com/


EndNeoliberalism.org 

http://www.endneoliberalism.org/

Free eBooks: http://www.endneoliberalism.org/books/


The first chapter from the book, End Neoliberalism: (there might be some bits missing)

Taxes and regulations scare the hell out of the extreme right. In attempting to justify they fears, they claim that government intervention leads not only to economic inefficiencies and poverty, but it ultimately to totalitarianism. Upon closer inspection, however, it becomes evident that nothing has proved more inefficient and totalitarian than the economic equilibrium attained through decades of Neoliberal policies. Progressive governance is the only way to decentralize the global economy owned by the One Percent.

A thorough understanding of the origins of corporate globalization and the significance of the current market equilibrium for efficiency and freedom is paramount to remedy our present and catastrophic economic, environmental, and sociopolitical reality. To tax and regulate the One Percent under the pretense that they are earning a lot of money does not suffice as a sound solution to the problems. Taxation and regulation cannot be implemented and justified dogmatically, in the form of a fundamentalist ideology. There are times when certain economic activities need to be liberated, times when they need to be regulated and taxed, and times when they need to be supported. We must understand how the current economic equilibrium allows the One Percent to profit while imposing vast externalities on the planet, people, and economies in order to determine the real value of their activities to overall economic progress and how taxing and regulating certain industries translates to greater sustainability, justice and freedom.  

The current market equilibrium benefits a selected few while crippling the multitudinous remainder, due to the fact that Globalization has not followed a natural capitalist process, nor a peaceful one at that. With the use of military interventions and IMF bailouts to international banks responsible for financing dictators worldwide, Neoliberal policies enabled the manipulation of supply and demand so as to facilitate an unencumbered access to vast natural resources and cheap labour, for the benefit of, and to promote absolute market domination by, a small group of multinational corporations.  

As End Neoliberalism exposes on Neoliberalism on Trial, all of Latin America and Africa plunged into a serious depression in the 1980’ s, which resulted in their inability to pay off the large debts that US-backed dictators had incurred. IMF Structural Adjustment programs bailed out international banks and refinanced the debt of poor countries in exchange for market liberalization policies that would provide the multinationals with legal access to cheap commodities and new markets. By the mid 1990’ s, Structural Adjustment Programs were also failing the East Asian Tigers and Russia.  

During this 20-year period of global deindustrialization, the One Percent increased their fortunes considerably as multinational corporations picked what governments and small businesses had left. With a wave of mergers and acquisitions, the global economy became centralized to great extents. Today, the sales of the top 200 corporations in the world exceed those of the entire world’s economies combined, with the exception of the largest 9 countries. Over half of their sales belong to just 5 economic sectors, all of in which corporate concentration is very high.

David C. Corten argues in When Corporations Rule the World that “when five firms control more than half of the global market, that market is considered to be highly monopolistic.” Kurten draws particular attention to an article in the Economist, which elaborates on the concentration of the world’s top five firms in twelve industries: in consumer durables, the top five firms control nearly 70 percent of the entire world market in their industry. Five firms control more than 50 percent of the global market in automotive, airline, aerospace, electronic components, electrical and electronics, and steel industries. Lastly, five firms control more than 40 percent of sales in the oil, personal computers, and media industries. 

Market concentration is also high in the agricultural sector. As Anil Netto exposes “Syngenta, Bayer, Monsanto, BASF, Dow and DuPont together control 85 percent of the annual pesticide market valued at 30 billion US dollars. Three companies (Cargill, Archer Daniels and Bunge) control nearly 90 per cent of global grain trade while DuPont and Monsanto dominate the global seed market.”

The article in question was published in 1993, before the world experienced the second big wave of mergers and acquisitions, characterized by cross-border mergers and acquisitions that “accelerated after 1996 and reached a peak of $ 828 billion in 2000.”In 2011, a study released by the University of Zurich study, which involved the creation of a web of ownership and integration encompassing all 43,060 transnational corporations, found that 1,318 companies were at the heart of the global economy, 147 of which comprises a ‘super entity’ that controls 40 per cent of   the world’s wealth. 6 A prime example of this ‘super entity’ is the relationship between WalMart, Procter & Gamble’s biggest costumer: following the merger between P&G and Gillette, Walmart and P&G have become the most prominent distributors of the vast majority of our goods.

In an attempt to voice the efficiencies of specialization and economies of scale, several economists tend to refer to David Ricardo’s comparative advantage theory; however, the size of current corporations and their total control of the global market is far from what Ricardo envisioned. Trade between businesses in different nations is inexistent in a world where nations are forced to specialize in areas that serve the interests of a few multinational corporations. In many instances, it is not even multinational corporations specializing and controlling a specific market (eg: automobiles, cosmetics, energy, or media); rather, it is a case of a few conglomerates controlling a portfolio of entire industries. For example, Unilever owns more than 1,000 brand names worldwide in foods, beverages, cleaning agents, and personal care. Its main competitor, Procter Gamble, owns 50 Leadership Brands that represent 90% of P&g sales in pet foods, cleaning agents and personal care, while Nestle owns approximately 6000 brands in beverages, food, pet products, and pharmaceuticals. Other examples include Siemens, 3M, Hitachi, Mitsubishi, and General Electric. These latter two of which stand as the perfect definition of a mega-conglomerate. The Japanese conglomerate participates in mining, shipbuilding, telecom, financial services, insurance, electronics, automotive, construction, heavy industries, oil and gas, real estate, foods and beverages, chemicals, and aviation among others. GE participates in water, energy (oil, gas, nuclear, and solar), financial services, healthcare, electric, aviation, rail, and software and lighting. GE even owns one of the largest media company in the world, NBCUniversal Media, which the company recently divested into a partnership with Comcast, now owner of 51% of NBC Universal, with GE in ownership of the remaining 49%.

An industrial monopoly that is heavily integrated with the media monopoly, the government, and the military industrial complex is keen of the inefficient and totalitarian Soviet Empire that Neoliberal hawks promised to abolish. In Impeach The President, The Case Against Bush and Cheney, the question is raised of how the media transmitted the lies of the Bush administration that led the country into the illegal invasion of Iraq, and this in total absence of even the most basic journalistic criticism and scrutiny. One of their key findings involves a Sonoma State University study, which reveals that only 118 people comprise the entire membership of the 10 major media corporations - which people, in turn, sit on the corporate boards of 288 national and international corporations-. The study also reveals that four of the top ten media corporations in the U.S. have Global Dominance Group and Department of Defense contractors on their boards of directors; namely, William Kennard from New York Times and Carlyle Group, Douglas Warner III from GE (NBC) and Bechtel, John Bryson from Disney (ABC) and Boeing, Alwyn Lewis from Disney (ABC) and Halliburton, and Douglas McCorkindale from Gannett and Lockheed Martin. 10 As we will see in Chapter 7, the revolving door between government and the business conglomerates is also very high.

The fanciful right-wing pundit claim that Neoliberalism provides choice is absurd and laughable. The largest 200 multinational corporations constitute the sole economic players and the monopoly they have artificially erected allows them to abuse natural and human resources at a alarming rates, depleting these resources en masse throughout the world, shipping them to sweatshop in Free-Trade Zones, transporting the final products to the shelves of big superstores, and finally discarding them in impressionably short periods of time. Neoliberalism, at the far right, and Communism, at the far left, are as totalitarian as they are economically inefficient. They both constitute centralized systems of production that subject resources and people to the interests of the One Percent by means of force. The richest 200 corporations could not exist as they do today without the use of dictatorial repression and IMF programs.

Economic growth is also a delusion. Global GDP skyrocketed from $ 1.34 trillion to $ 60.6 trillion in only four decades; GDP, however, accounts for each and every economic transaction, whether it be diabetes treatment, cleaning oil spills, or even war. Paul Hawken exposes in Natural Capitalism that “$ 2 trillion of the $ 9 trillion spent in the US annually is wasted, meaning that money spent does not give value, while half of the entire GDP is attributed to some form of waste”. 11 The US economy experienced greater diminishing returns since 1999 and Hawken’s estimate is outdated as it had not accounted for the trillions of dollars wasted on illegal wars and bailouts.

Inefficiency is an inherit characteristic of a monopoly, whether it is a private or public monopoly. In just half a century, we have depleted the world’s oil, water, rain-forests, fisheries and every kind of resource that sustains the mediocre consumerist life. The richest 1% has snatched 40% of global wealth, leaving 80% of humanity on less than $ 10 a day and 22,000 children to die each day from poverty related causes12. Eight million children dying every year from policies that had been religiously imposed during the Neoliberal era sadly put the Holocaust second by far.

Neoliberalism is not so much an emanation of the American empire as it is of the corporate one. For half of Americans who are currently living below the poverty line13, Neoliberalism exposed them to the same living conditions as in most of the world. The answer to why Neoliberalism destroyed the US economy can be explained using simple economic theory: a larger supply of cheap labour, energy, and resources, made artificially possible through corporate friendly dictators and decades of bailouts to international banks allowed corporations to move their factories abroad. Americans were made to believe that their country needs profitable corporations, and that the greater the profits of these corporations, the better it is for the economy, even if it means outsourcing jobs, destroying pristine lands, and killing innocent people in other countries. The heavily subsidized corporate monopoly is now experiencing increasing diminishing returns and wealth never trickled down.

The US economy and the world will not overcome the current economic and environmental crises with further implementation of Neoliberal policies, characterized by deregulation and tax incentives for rich corporations, and whose primary objective is to protect the rich few while turning a blind eye to the misery they produce for the affected many.  

The world needs a decentralized economy and greater competition at the local level for resources to be used efficiently. Decentralization will not occur on its own so long as an economic equilibrium that allows for the multinationals that run the world to exploit and move resources at a fraction of their true cost remains in place. Even if a good-hearted CEO wanted to do good, the legal framework would require putting profits first, hence bringing the economic equilibrium to a value-proposition using progressive taxation, regulations, and spending seems like a no-brainer. The problem is the extremist and cunning rhetoric employed by those who wage war on ‘Change’ and the billions of dollars that the One Percent dedicates to disseminating invalid arguments through their media organizations.

Given that Neoliberalism was born and bred in the United States of America, the following chapters will use this country as a case study for refuting the many invalid arguments posed by this extremist ideology. The world needs governments that are untainted by ideological inclination and corruption, governments that promote progress using honest critical thinking, and governments that are held accountable for their failures and crimes. End Neoliberalism, Tax & regulate the One Percent provides a solid foundation for progressive governments that need to counter-attack the invalid arguments of the extreme right in matters of regulation, taxation, and spending. The same progressive foundation prevents governments from sliding too far into the left, as has recently occurred in countries like Argentina and Venezuela.