Take a look at the profit shares of the US and Japanese ruling classes, for instance -- they have not suffered at all from the military adventures of Washington-Riyadh-Tel-Aviv-Tokyo axis since 2001. The US ruling class are in fact doing better than any other time since the 1960s!
<blockquote> <http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/28/business/28wages.html> <http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2006/08/28/business/ 28wages_chart.jpg>
August 28, 2006 Real Wages Fail to Match a Rise in Productivity By STEVEN GREENHOUSE and DAVID LEONHARDT
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The median hourly wage for American workers has declined 2 percent since 2003, after factoring in inflation. The drop has been especially notable, economists say, because productivity — the amount that an average worker produces in an hour and the basic wellspring of a nation's living standards — has risen steadily over the same period.
As a result, wages and salaries now make up the lowest share of the nation's gross domestic product since the government began recording the data in 1947, while corporate profits have climbed to their highest share since the 1960's. UBS, the investment bank, recently described the current period as "the golden era of profitability."
Until the last year, stagnating wages were somewhat offset by the rising value of benefits, especially health insurance, which caused overall compensation for most Americans to continue increasing. Since last summer, however, the value of workers' benefits has also failed to keep pace with inflation, according to government data.
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Trade unions are much weaker than they once were, while the buying power of the minimum wage is at a 50-year low. And health care is far more expensive than it was a decade ago, causing companies to spend more on benefits at the expense of wages.
Together, these forces have caused a growing share of the economy to go to companies instead of workers' paychecks. In the first quarter of 2006, wages and salaries represented 45 percent of gross domestic product, down from almost 50 percent in the first quarter of 2001 and a record 53.6 percent in the first quarter of 1970, according to the Commerce Department. Each percentage point now equals about $132 billion.
Total employee compensation — wages plus benefits — has fared a little better. Its share was briefly lower than its current level of 56.1 percent in the mid-1990's and otherwise has not been so low since 1966.
Over the last year, the value of employee benefits has risen only 3.4 percent, while inflation has exceeded 4 percent, according to the Labor Department.
In Europe and Japan, the profit share of economic output is also at or near record levels, noted Larry Hatheway, chief economist for UBS Investment Bank, who said that this highlighted the pressures of globalization on wages. . . .
In another recent report on the boom in profits, economists at Goldman Sachs wrote, "The most important contributor to higher profit margins over the past five years has been a decline in labor's share of national income." . . .
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But in recent years, the productivity gains have continued while the pay increases have not kept up. Worker productivity rose 16.6 percent from 2000 to 2005, while total compensation for the median worker rose 7.2 percent, according to Labor Department statistics analyzed by the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal research group. Benefits accounted for most of the increase.
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In 2004, the top 1 percent of earners — a group that includes many chief executives — received 11.2 percent of all wage income, up from 8.7 percent a decade earlier and less than 6 percent three decades ago, according to Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty, economists who analyzed the tax data. </blockquote>
> > that will also improve the
> > balance of social forces inside each axis country.
>
> But significantly damage the potential for
> emancipatory forces in non-axis countries, by feeding
> dangerous illusions about the EU.
>
> Rifondazione Communista already votes to sustain
> Italian troops in Afghanistan. Imagine if Red-Green
> were still in power in Berlin. Or if Gysi and
> Lafontaine manage to form a government with the SPD in
> a few years time. The Linkspartei.PDS already made it
> clear a few years ago during debates about Kosovo that
> it is not opposed to military interventions in
> principle.
A majority of workers have always had the same illusion about the electoral center-left without an Iran-Venezuela-Russia alliance that has an ability to draw China and the EU to itself, away from the Washington-Riyadh-Tel-Aviv-Tokyo axis. So, that illusion has to be combated in its own right, regardless of the presence or absence of an Iran-Venezuela-Russia alliance.
-- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>