A Whole Lotta Moolah

The state that people escape to for its sun and prosperity has lost a little of its glean. For the first time in 70 years personal income for Californians fell. It fell significantly too. The average family lost $6,000 over their 2008 incomes. That's a lot of money to lose.

In an unrelated (yet closely related) story US capitalism’s profits for the last quarter of the same year, 2009, have been revised up. Saturday’s Wall Street Journal cited the figure of $1.5 trillion for corporate profits, revised up from the earlier estimate of $1.2 trillion.

What’s a trillion? Most of us have a concept of a million dollars. Five houses. Fifty new cars. A trillion is a million million. If you spent a dollar every second for every hour and every day, it would take you a little over 12 days to get to $1 million. If you spent a dollar for every second of every hour of everyday it would take you 35,000 years to get up to $1 trillion.

These profits if socially and democratically owned and controlled could hire 1.5 million teachers for 30 years. Mmmm. But capitalism will not be doing this. That’s why they call it CAPITALism not SOCIALism. Their gain is our loss. Our loss is their gain. Their economic system's overthrow is our gain.

(below) A mere One Million Dollars in $1 bills. The lady in the picture is not a millionaire.