Comment of the day: "We have to stop thinking globally and start thinking locally"

Comment of the day by swani

This is exactly the problem with the global agenda. What this agenda means for most people, on a local level, is a diminished standard of living.

On a macro level, the multinational companies see the world as one world, one market. They move their corporation structures to places like Ireland where corporate taxes are 12%.

They influence the politicians to enact 'Free' trade agreements like NAFTA that only benefit multinationals at the expense of workers and local economies.

The corporate press help them to promote this agenda as being 'good for America', reporting only propaganda derived from the press releases of the multinational corporations or the PR machines of politicians and the 'economists' that answer to them both.

Manufacturing jobs were moved en masse to where wages are lowest and work conditions can be set by the multinationals. This makes cost of goods decrease and profits increase.

Over time, countries like the USA changed from being a manufacturing base for the multinationals, to being a service provider, but even those service jobs will eventually be moved overseas. We are seeing this right now when we speak to people in India when we call Capital One.

Real wages have stagnated, while tens of millions of higher paying jobs have been lost. Glass Steagal was repealed 5 years after NAFTA, easing the collateral rules for infinite credit creation, and credit replaced real earnings.

During the last decade, interest rates have been kept at 0% for investment banks, allowing the housing bubble to be blown while savers were forced into the stock market to make any return on their savings.

People started depending on credit and the price of their homes going up, to supplement their ever decreasing incomes that have never been properly adjusted to real inflation.

This worked politically for a while, as people didn't realize that had been sold out to the multinationals and banking conglomerates by their politicians.

They only woke up when the investment banks that borrow at 0% from the Fed making and made giving credit to anyone with a heartbeat, got the tax payers to pay when these loans went bad.

If people were to look at the history and study the fundamentals of how we got here, instead of listening to 'economists', politicians and other pundits continuing to market the above agenda on the corporate media, it would be pretty clear what has been going wrong with this country for 20+ years.

If we want to fix our country, we have to stop thinking globally and start thinking locally. We have to start to produce what we consume. In a country like the USA, this would be easy. It just takes the will of the people to organize in their own communities and from the bottom up.

The politicians work for the multinationals, not the people. The monopolists don't want to pay workers wages that allow them to have a good quality of life. Why should they? This cuts into their profit margins.

They don't want competition. They want to become Too Big To Fail, Too Big Too Jail and for the people to guarantee their bad investments while not sharing the profits.

They want to price fix and give consumers little choice, look at the credit card companies, health insurance, Big Pharma. Of course they don't want things things to change. The politicians on both sides have to do their bidding and so have to sell it to us these abuses, dressed up as something else.

We have to stop listening to the corporate press, to the politicians and have to start listening to ourselves. They have power, but so do we. 

Buy local, support local businesses, put your money in a credit union. Stop supporting a media that lies to you. Stop buying from corporations that starve local economies.

I cancelled my subscription to the New York Times when they didn't report that Baxter sent 73 kilos of live avian flu mixed into human flu vaccine to 18 distributors all over the world, including the USA.