Global corporations, world poverty, and the downsides of inequality

[bigmacbear]

blackwingbear posted the following link in his journal. This article, and the website of which it is a part, I have found to be fascinating.

While I've often been tempted to dismiss many of the sources he quotes as being well-meaning but misguided conspiracy theorists, I've always found them interesting enough to go on reading his journal despite the occasional crackpot. This is clearly not one of those.

It is remarkable that it is basically run by an intelligent individual (on his own, without the backing of any organization) who nevertheless is neither an expert in this field nor someone with (necessarily) a political ax to grind. It's just someone synthesizing the news and theories from his own unique perspective.

One thing that has been lurking in the back of my mind is that if globalization is sending the world's jobs away from the established economies to the developing world, that clearly there is not enough global demand for labor, i.e. not enough jobs to go around. This is borne out in the site as listed. But what this site says is that if all productive jobs were distributed equally around the world (which would require equalization of pay for equal work, worldwide), then instead of people starving due to lack of demand for their labor while others are overworked to exhaustion, we could all work a lot less and still earn a decent living.

This seems a simple task, but multinational corporations and the governments that are beholden to them clearly have a vested interest in maintaining the inequality of income, opportunity, and capital around the world -- by force of arms if necessary. And perhaps because of that threat the author of this site does not propose any specific action to work toward a solution to these issues. He leaves that to the experts.

So what can be done? If corporations are allowed to continue to run roughshod over the peoples of the world as they have done, the consequences for human society and the planet itself can be dire. But it almost seems as though the game is rigged to the benefit of multinational corporations and the detriment of all else.

Perhaps our best hope is to take advantage of the new mouthpieces of the Left in talk radio and on the Internet, and find a few folks who are experts in harnessing the latent outrage of millions of people around the world, to bring about a real choice in the next US election cycle from which We the People can finally bring the corporate barons to the realization that we're on to their game. It worked in the New Deal, can't we make it work again?