A Time Capsule from the 1930s: What’s Different Now

A Time Capsule from the 1930s: What's Different NowCharles Hugh Smith – We’re taking care of my 92-year old mother-in-law here at home. She has the usual aches and pains and infirmities of advanced age but her mind and memory are still sharp. Her memories of her childhood are like a time capsule from the 1930s.

My mom-in-law has always lived in the same general community here in Hawaii. She’s never lived more than about 10 miles from the house where she was born (long since torn down) in 1931.

Listening to her memories (and asking for more details) is to be transported back to the 1930s, an era of widespread poverty unrelated to the Great Depression. Many people were poor before the Depression. They were working hard but their incomes were low. Continue reading

Swiss Government Study Confirms 147 Corporations ‘Run The World’

companiesSean Adl-Tabatabai – A study by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich has found that a mere 147 corporations control the world – orchestrating events and controlling governments.

The analysis, which looked at the relationships between 43,000 transnational corporations, identified that only a tiny handful of mega-corporations, mostly banks, had a disproportionate amount of power over world events.

Newscientist.com reports: “Reality is so complex, we must move away from dogma, whether it’s conspiracy theories or free-market,” says James Glattfelder. “Our analysis is reality-based.”

Previous studies have found that a few TNCs [Trans-National Corporations] own large chunks of the world’s economy, but they included only a limited number of companies and omitted indirect ownerships, so could not say how this affected the global economy – whether it made it more or less stable, for instance. Continue reading