2. As is market fundamentalism.
3. The CIA is probably the mother of all terrorist organizations.
4. The world's "most powerful democracy" is not a democracy. It is an oligarchy. The US is run by a surprisingly small number of power brokers who revolve through the doors of the White House, Big Oil, Defence, Security, Trade, Embassies, the World Bank and numerous blue chip boardrooms.
6. Those who screw up, attract unwanted attention, or are caught with hands in the till, are often promoted out of the way.
7. A handful of boardroom tycoons own and control the mainstream media.
8. Anyone who aspires to high office in a Western democracy must cultivate the media and accept that boardroom power is today's major driver of global affairs.
9. The high players embedded in these institutions - corporations, banks, media, government, IMF, WTO, etc - the "corporatocracy" - are united by a core credo: THERE IS NO GOD HIGHER THAN PROFIT.
10. This is the mindset that fuels endless growth, even as fossil fuels choke the planet.
11. Such a mindset imperils the future.
12. It is this mindset that says its okay to Wallmart the world, because the consumer gets more choice, even although the choice is largely illusory. What's the point of offering 30 brands of toasters at the cost of "one-quarter of all plant and animal species" being doomed to extinction, because of global warming? (Nature magazine).
13. The greed-is-good philosophy is justified on the grounds that it spreads the wealth around. True, it spreads the wealth around the boardrooms. The income gap between the rich and the poor keeps widening. The richest 1% of Americans own more assets than the other 99% combined. Is this fair? Both within countries and between countries, such wealth gap keeps expanding, but few Western politicians will talk about it for fear that Rupert Murdoch's media will call them Communists.
14. The top 5% of the world's pop has an income 200 times greater than the bottom 5%. (In 1980, the ratio was only 6 to 1). Worldwide, downward mobility is more common than upward mobility.
15. A future of dramatic wealth redistribution is inevitable.
16. And is gathering momentum in Latin America.
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