Is the wealth the 1% made from destroying our jobs and moving them offshore rightfully theirs?

[RainDog]

38. It's a quote from this link

http://www.thebaffler.com/past/practical_utopians_guide

...which is already an OP here: http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=3182592

here are a few more words from that article -

The ironies are endless. While the new free market ideology has framed itself above all as a rejection of bureaucracy, it has, in fact, been responsible for the first administrative system that has operated on a planetary scale, with its endless layering of public and private bureaucracies: the IMF, World Bank, WTO, trade organizations, financial institutions, transnational corporations, NGOs. This is precisely the system that has imposed free market orthodoxy, and opened the world to financial pillage, under the watchful aegis of American arms. It only made sense that the first attempt to recreate a global revolutionary movement, the Global Justice Movement that peaked between 1998 and 2003, was effectively a rebellion against the rule of that very planetary bureaucracy.

Future Stop
In retrospect, though, I think that later historians will conclude that the legacy of the sixties revolution was deeper than we now imagine, and that the triumph of capitalist markets and their various planetary administrators and enforcers—which seemed so epochal and permanent in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991—was, in fact, far shallower.

Have you ever read Marjorie Kelly's book, The Divine Right of Capital? Really great read from a business person's perspective.

more good quotes here - http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Divine_Right_of_Capital

Democracy

Major public corporations have evolved into something new in civilization, structures more massive, more dominant in the world than our democratic forefathers dreamed possible. They left us little guidance on governing these institutions - the word "corporation" appears nowhere in the Constitution - because only a handful of American corporations existed when that seminal document was written. Washington and Jefferson governed a nation of farmers, in which most nonagricultural businesses were indeed "private," run out of the parlor, or in the barn, as part of the private household.

Profits

In the current narrative of the corporation, it works like this: A corporation exists to generate profit. Profit belongs to stockholders, but they leave part of it in the corporation to fund growth. So a portion (about a third) is paid out as dividends, and the rest is kept as retained earnings. Those earnings are generated by the income statement, and retained on the balance sheet, where they are added to shareholder equity. Equity is what stockholders initially contributed when they purchased shares from the company. And by the magical closed loop of accounting, equity grows, year after year, while stockholders never contribute another cent out of their pocket.

Ergo- Stockholders "create wealth" without lifting a finger.

We call this "return on equity," or ROE. It is designed to continue into infinity.