Labor

When your organic growth is over, your revenue just missed consensus expectations once again ($7.74Bn vs $7.77BN expected), your stock is trading near 4 years lows and and you are stuck in the imploding energy sector, what do you do? Why you announce a $10 billion stock buyback, but since you will have to fund it with more debt (whose cost in recent weeks has soared) you have to get rid of "overhead." How do you do that? Simple: you announce you are firing 10,000 workers.

Senior Tories claim that British Chancellor, George Osborne, will face a fiery backbench revolt if he persists with plans to raid the pensions of high-income tax payers in his bid to slash the deficit. Under proposals being drawn up by senior civil servants in the Treasury, ahead of the Budget in March, all workers paying into a pension would receive a flat rate of tax relief of between 20 and 30 per cent. As higher-rate taxpayers tend to allocate more of their annual income into retirement pensions,  the proposed changes would create a multibillion-pound tax windfall for the Treasury.

Apple, Sony and Samsung have been accused of employing child labor slaves as young a seven years old by human rights organisation Amnesty.  Amnesty have accused the tech giants of failing to do basic checks to ensure minerals used in their products were not mined by children. A report into cobalt mining, a component of lithium-ion batteries, found young children being forced to mine for the mineral in the Democratic Republic of the Congo on behalf of these firms. BBC News reports: The firms said that they had a zero tolerance policy towards child labour.

The FBI have released new information that implicate themselves and the Memphis Police Department in the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., on the 50th anniversary of the civil rights leaders’ death.  The admission by both agencies suggests that the agencies themselves or members of the agencies facilitated and directly caused Dr King’s death. Thefreethoughtproject.com reports: During a rainstorm on February 1, 1968, two black sanitation workers in Memphis lost their lives when the truck’s compactor accidentally triggered.

Submitted by Charles Hugh-Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

This erosion of a self-employed, independent middle class was an important pre-condition for the collapse of Rome and the French Revolution.

I have devoted many blog posts to the erosion of the middle class, for the specific reason that when the middle class--the layers of the economy between the Power Elites and landless laborers/state dependents--erodes away, the nation/empire is destabilized and descends into crisis.