Tag Archives: Exploitation

The Beady takes a look at getting Rich Quick.

07 Tuesday Jul 2015

Posted by in Education

≈ Comments Off on The Beady takes a look at getting Rich Quick.

Tags

, , , , , ,

We have all done it.

Dream boated that we have won the Lotto.  Dreams of Easy Money.Pretty Eye

And why not, most people have a strong fascination with easy money.

If you look at history money is a comparatively recent invention. It seems that most people who got rich by creating wealth did it by developing new technology.

Making wealth is not the only way to get rich. Until a few centuries ago, the main sources of wealth were mines, slaves and serfs, land, and cattle, and the only ways to acquire these rapidly were by inheritance, marriage, conquest, or confiscation.

These days people who pursue happiness through material possessions are liked less by their peers than people who pursue happiness through life experiences.

We all know that there are many senses of the word “wealth,” not all of them material. Here I am talking not about what people will give you money for (materialism), but the quick wealth fix, winning a vast amount of cash.

If You Do Win: There is the painful proposition of managing sudden, Unearned Wealth. The argument that people always use when talking about lottery tickets is “What if I win?”

Well, what if you do win?

People you’ve known all your life suddenly start viewing you as their meal ticket. You’re now a target to criminals, a meal ticket and/or a lender to the people who used to form your close inner circle, and the source of angst not only in virtually every relationship you have with others, but often in the relationship between people you care about.

Anyway just in case your dreams have not come true here are a couple of other ways to get Rich:

Rob A Bank.

Inherit a fortune.

Bet on the right horse, with free money.

Get a hole-in-one for $1 million.

Buy and hold Long-term stock that clicks.

Find treasure.

Get lucky at a car booth sale and buy a Picasso.

Marry rich- with strings attached.

Divorce a Beatle or Rolling Stone- with strings attached.

Be born rich.

Sue.

Unearth gold with a metal detector.

Register a generic domain name.

Have a “non-affair” with a bigwig.

Live on a lake of oil.

Or crack the algorithm that produced the numbers. You will be able to plunder the lottery.10 Million Dollars

Most of us chase success by working hard, sacrificing our personal lives and even our health in an all-out pursuit of Mammon. But it doesn’t always have to be that way. For a fortunate few, it doesn’t mean a Harvard MBA or years spent perfecting a new drug. It just means doing as little as possible and still making more money than you ever dreamed of.

As much as industrious overachievers hate to admit it, sometimes all you need to get rich is dumb luck.

So what are the odds of winning the Lotto.

A 1 in 80,089,128 chance, or roughly 1 in 80 million.

Matching four of five normal numbers plus the “power ball” is a 1 in 1,668,523 chance.

Matching all five white numbers is a 1 in 1,906,884 chance.

You have a better chance of being struck by lightning than you do of winning either the grand prize or a top secondary prize.

If buying 1,906,884 tickets it could guarantee you that you would win $200,000, which is the prize (in Florida, at least) for matching all five white numbers, you’d still be spending $1,906,884 to win $200,000 – a roughly 90% loss on your investment.

If you were to play the “Power Play” version, you’d spend $3.8 million to win $1 million – a roughly 72% loss on your investment.

The Beady eye does not question your right to buy a ticket or for you to have dreams on whether you sue, marry, divorce, or buy or whatever.

It’s concerned is whether our TVs, our Governments should be promoting wealth.

Are Government Lotteries a regressive tax. They suck billions out of the economy.

Most people buy tickets and win little or nothing.

This is taking more money from the poor, working and lower middle-classes than from those most able to pay taxes. These billions also are diverted away from local businesses.

In other words, why is the government in the lottery business at all?

Government-run lotteries generated more than $70 billion in gross sales in North America during the fiscal year ended June 2010, up $1 billion year on year.

In North America every Canadian province, 43 U.S. states, the District of Columbia, Mexico, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands all offer government-operated lotteries.

Elsewhere in the world publicly-operated lotteries exist in at least 100 countries on every inhabited continent. In some cases they are operated by national governments, in other cases by state or provincial governments, and in still others by cities.

Lottery proceeds benefit different programs.

In many cases lottery profits are combined with tax and other revenues in a government’s general fund. In other cases lottery proceeds are dedicated to a wide range of causes, including education, economic development, the environment, programs for senior citizens, health care, sports facilities, capital construction projects, cultural activities, tax relief, and others. Lottery beneficiaries.

Therefore the lottery is not a tax. Webster defines a tax as “a compulsory payment … for the support of government.” No one is coerced to play the lottery. The purchase of a lottery ticket is completely voluntary.

Some say its the poor who are targeted to play. The poor are allowed to vote, get married, and sign contracts. Economic status is not a measure of intelligence.

But make no mistake. Profit is what the state is after.

In other words, governments are raising revenue by tempting the worst off of their citizens to hand over their hard-earned money by playing a game with a ridiculously low return.

So are our Governments teaching our young people who Gambling that it is cool.

Scratch Cards; Online betting: TV Game Shows, all feast on Greed.

If you take Scratch cards.

The tickets are clearly mass-produced, which means there must be some computer program that lays down the numbers. Of course, it would be really nice if the computer could just spit out random digits. But that’s not possible, since the lottery corporation needs to control the number of winning tickets. The game can’t be truly random. Instead, it has to generate the illusion of randomness while actually being carefully determined.”

Money is Not Wealth.

Money is a way of moving wealth.

They are usually interchangeable. People think that what a business does is make money. But money is just the intermediate stage– just a shorthand– for whatever people want.

In fact; ants have wealth. 

When you hear someone talking about how x percent of the population have y percent of the wealth. This is a fallacy.

There is not a fixed amount of wealth in the world. You can make more wealth.

A programmer can sit down in front of a computer and create wealth. A good piece of software is, in itself, a valuable thing. A great programmer, on a roll, could create a million dollars worth of wealth in a couple of weeks. A mediocre programmer over the same period will generate zero or even negative wealth.

Wealth can be created without being sold. We are all richer for knowing about penicillin. The same recipe that makes individuals rich makes countries powerful.

So let the Lions DEN nerds keep their lunch money, for you and I rule the world.

(The Lion DEN by the way is a BBC program where five millionaires sit with large bundles of money in front of them. Young and old Hopeful’s present their innovations or business in the hope of securing an offer of cash for a percentage of their invention or business. If an offer is made the millionaires then squabble with each other offering more or less cash for a percentage share in the victims dream’s of making it Rich.)

Ask yourselves:  Is this family entertainment or Capitalist rape.

The same goes for;

The Briefcase: Millionaire Misers: Rich As Finns: Still Pretty Rich: Money For Nothing: Job Creators In Action: Undercover Employee:

The Undateables:  Exploiting people with disabilities for entertainment

The Hunger Games: New CBS reality show exploits poor families by making them grovel for $101,000.

There are plenty of others.

Screen-Shot-2015-05-30-at-6.57.09-AM

What leads people astray here in all cases is the abstraction of money.

Both Worldstar videos and these television programs dehumanize the people they show and will continue to do so unless we, as viewers, choose to stop watching.

Go back

Your message has been sent

The exploitation of human beings for profit is everyone’s business.

17 Friday Apr 2015

Posted by in Uncategorized

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

, , , ,

This is one of the many problems in the world that we as humans should be ashamed of.  We turn a blind eye to it because it reminds us what kind of inhumane treatment we are capable of as human beings.

The 6th Dec this year marked the 150 years since the ratification of the 13th Amendment formally abolishing slavery in the US.

But almost 150 years after the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery and involuntary servitude, there are still men, women and children enslaved into labor and commercial sexual exploitation in the U.S.

There are more people in slavery today than at any time in history.

It is now the third – largest and fastest – growing crime worldwide. The average cost of a modern-day slave is a mere $90. This is a fraction of the average cost of a slave in 1850, which was $40,000( in current dollar value)

person behind bars

Each and every one are a living, breathing reminders that the war against slavery remains unfinished.

Unfortunately, for many of the world’s workers, exploitation is a reality that must be factored into the path towards a better life.

Its roots are in the three greatest problems facing a shared world : Inequality of opportunity, Exploitation for excessive profits, and Sustainability.

The International Labor Organization (ILO) estimates profits (PDF) from this forced labor are $150 billion a year.

The presence of forced labour in the supply chains of major manufacturers has been repeatedly documented. Human exploitation has built our world and continues to drive global economic growth.

https://youtu.be/3LhHXlsoqV0

Cheap labour, cheap sex and cheap goods are woven into the fabric of our individual lives.

It is easy to be horrified about slavery while absolving ourselves of direct responsibility.

“[Human trafficking] ought to concern every person because it is a debasement of our common humanity. It ought to concern every community because it tears at our social fabric. It ought to concern every business because it distorts markets. It ought to concern every nation because it endangers public health and fuels violence and organized crime.” —President Barack Obama.

Here are some hard facts:

Hopefully they might make you think twice.

Some 35.8 million people are currently trapped in modern-day slavery, forced to pick cotton, grow cannabis and prostitute themselves among other things. 167 countries, said modern slavery contributed to the production of at least 122 goods from 58 countries.

India comes top, with more than 14.29 m people reckoned to be equivalent to slaves, followed by China, Pakistan, Uzbekistan and Russia.

Uzbekistan is the second offender on the list because every autumn, the government forces over one million people, including children, to harvest cotton.

Mauritania has anti-slavery legislation but it is rarely enforced and a special tribunal set up in March has yet to prosecute any cases. Mauritania abolished slavery in 1981, though without passing legislation to punish slave-owners. To day there are around 150,000 people out of Mauritania’s total population of 3.8m who are still enslaved.

Countries like Qatar in the Middle East were a major destination for men and women from Africa and Asia who are lured with promises of well-paid jobs only to find themselves exploited as domestic workers or in the construction industry.

Africa faces some of the biggest challenges, with armed forces and rebel groups from Somalia to the Central African Republic using child soldiers to mineral-rich Zambia, Angola, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo forcing children and adults to “labor in dangerous mines.” Estimated to be one million.

Ivory Coast, 60% of chocolate is produced by an estimated 500,000 child labour.

South Africa, where private hospitals harvest the organs of deceived Brazilians for commercial transplant operations. 70,000 kidneys come annually from the black market.

West Africa the practice of forced servitude called Trokosi.

Australian sex industry.

Afghanistan Young boys sold through a practice call Bacha Bazi.

Senegal. 50,000 homeless children forced to beg.

Brothels of Bali.

Indoor Cannabis Farm in the UK.

Camel Jockeys Persian Gulf.

Singapore and Kuala Lumpur, domestic workers in private homes.

Cocoa farms of Ivory Coast, made profitable through the almost-zero cost labour of child workers from Mali.

Fishing boats throughout Asia and the Pacific. Demand for cheap seafood drives modern-day slavery.

Houston is a major labor and sex trafficking hub in the United States.

In the houses and apartments of wealthy Americans, where Guatemalan maids sleep on the floor and are not paid or allowed outside.

Florida is one of the top three states for human trafficking in the U.S.

It is estimated that there are around 60,000 people in modern-day slavery in the USA

There were at least 5,000 trafficking victims in the UK last year 2014.

Although every government in the world has declared slavery an illegal enterprise, it flourishes. Every year Globally some 60,000 to 80,000 people are trafficked across international borders each year.

The bitter truth is that despite growing awareness of the issue there are still more than 36 million slaves in the world today, trapped in forced labor, sexual exploitation, domestic servitude, military service, and child labor.

Trafficking in persons is modern-day slavery and it exists in virtually every country in the world.

Now we all know no matter what we do there will always be people exploited by others.

People are forced into working and poverty at the same time by government legislation, or the lack thereof.

But is it not time to give Immigrants proper legal citizenship’s if earned.

Even if victims identify themselves as such and are aware of their rights, they still might hesitate to report their victimization out of fear of reprisal from the trafficker, lack of trust in law enforcement or fear of deportation.

Is it not time for western rich countries to open proper border crossings for Refugees, and for each to give temporary humanitarian shelter to people fleeing war stricken parts of the world. Let,s say five years temporary residential visa with realistic quotes for each and every country.

Is it not time that we should be abolishing Domestic workers visa.

Is it not time that Slavery and human trafficking should carry a world-wide life sentence for those who are apprehended dealing in human suffering.

(The very nature of human trafficking helps keep modern-day slavery a crime hidden.)

Are governments helping corporations break collective bargaining agreements to lower wages and increase profits?

If the result of working leads to the continued poverty you are trying to get out of, why work at all.

What we see is negative stereotypes about the people commonly found to be victims of human trafficking, especially those involved with prostitution and those with drug addictions.

  • The under reporting of sex trafficking victims who are minors
  • The role that gangs play in sex trafficking
  • Effective counter-trafficking legislation, law enforcement processes and demand-reduction strategies
  • Strategies to stabilize and integrate adult survivors of human trafficking.

Human trafficking is believed to be a growing crime, fueled by low risk and the potential for high monetary gain.

 

Trade in human misery ... women sit in fishbowl-type rooms, guarded by 'bouncers' in the narrow street known as 'Dolly' in the red-light district of Surabaya, Indonesia.

 

Today’s slaves are held through debt bondage, indentured servitude or other forms of control. The exploitation of human beings for profit is everyone’s business. We might not be able to end it, but now we know what’s going on, feeling bad is just not good enough.

Technology has changed the way it’s done.

So why not use technology to attack every link in the exploitation network.

Of course there is no realistic solution while we are all slaves of Consumerism. But we do have a weapon to hurt those that use exploitation.  It is in your pocket called spending power.  

The world chocolate market is expected to reach $98.3 billion in 2016. A World day of only buying fair trade chocolate would hurt those that use exploited cheap labor. 

It is sobering to wonder just how big our individual “slavery footprint” might be.  Also it is both foolish and patronising to treat the people caught up in this trade as naive and helpless victims.

Go back

Your message has been sent

What can you do in thirteen-thousandths of a second?

08 Tuesday Jul 2014

Posted by in Uncategorized

≈ Comments Off on What can you do in thirteen-thousandths of a second?

Tags

, , , , , , , , ,

A few days ago I posted a blog describing Dark Pools in which High-Frequency traders exploit the stock markets.

If you have read any of my blogs you will see that I have bleated on about Capping Greed as the only solution to tackle our world problems.

It is this type of exploitation of making money out of money without contributing a farthing to making the world a better place that has to be undone, not just greed.

I advocate that this can be done within our Capitalist System with little or no cost without causing any major ripples in World trade or World Markets and the like. Sixty five people become $ millionaires each day.

This can be done without trying to change the system for better, or worse.

How?  By applying A World Aid Commission of 0.05% at source on all Foreign Exchange Transactions of over $20,000, on all Sovereign Wealth funds Acquisitions and on all High-Frequency traders on the stock markets.

The result would be a Perpetual World Aid Fund of billions to address all our current day problems of Poverty, Inequality, Education, Health, Aid, Development, Climate change, Drug research, to name just a few.

Since capitalism is inherently a system of exploitation, theft, and since capitalists, as a class, do regularly and systematically resort to lying, brutality, torture, oppression, murder, and war to defend their scam, capitalists are not merely greedy, they are in a lot of our minds outright criminals, especially when looking at sweatshops, unsafe mines, and toxic workplaces.

We should not limit our criticisms to the cruelty and greed of capitalists, but direct it to the system itself (although obviously such capitalists have to be able to at least stomach what they are doing, which is already a strong indictment of their characters). Being able to externalize (fob off onto the public) many of the costs of production is almost a definition of capitalism, as a system of competing, profit-based, corporations, supported by nation-states.

You could say that Capitalism is condemned because it is based on the exploitation of one class by another, so that the exploiting class can enrich itself, or simply remain in power. A few get rich, while most remain poor. In fact, the few are rich precisely because the many are poor, because the wealth of the few is stolen wealth, taken from the labors of the many. It is not just that someone is getting rich, it is their getting rich at the expense of others that is the problem.

There is no way of stopping exploitation other than exposing it in all it’s forms. We are yet to have a conscience at all about the exploitation of human cultures. If it is, in reality, capitalism that is the motor force behind the destructive forms of globalization, then it must be in their capacity to neutralize or transform this particular mode of exploitation that one can best test these various forms of resistance to the problems.

A common danger tends to concord.

Communism is no better as it the exploitation of the strong by the weak. In Communism, inequality comes from placing mediocrity on a level with excellence.

It is only by portraying and exposing capitalists as the criminals they are that we can begin to break through their ideological defenses and destroy their credibility. If we were all getting rich together, and if this were accomplished without destroying the earth, it would be another thing entirely. It would either be paradise or hell on earth.

Under capitalism, just as under all previous social orders based on hierarchy and class, everyone does not get rich. The normal way is profit-making, by exploiting wage-slaves, and defending all the institutions needed to perpetuate this exploitation, through murder and war if need be.

I come now to a case that I finally have to admit is nothing but pure, unadulterated greed — the salaries of today’s crop of corporate executives. The millions they are raking in is preposterous when you look at Food banks, people sleeping on the streets, charities begging, people struggling left right and center, while politicians bend and privatize or lives.

Globally the Greens have arisen like a spontaneous combustion, a reaction to the narrow-minded state-backed exploitation of resources and wealth for a few at the expense of the many.

So what can we achieve in a blink of an eye. Remembering that we share  one-third of our DNA with lettuce we can only hope that the other two-thirds can see the light.

We can unite into one voice to demand a 0. 05% World Aid Commission by Sponsoring a world Peoples mandate to be passed by the United nations on behalf of all of us and the earth we all live on of put in place such a Commission.