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Mighty Hiker
climber
Vancouver, B.C.
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Norton, politicians and the news media care relatively little for the truth, as an objective thing, and they and the public have the attention span of a drunken gnat. You've probably fairly and reasonably summarized your contributions as a citizen, although no doubt it could be elaborated on.
The big lie is what politicians care more about. Say something often enough and loudly enough, and people believe it's true. They can't be bothered to examine things for themselves. The Republican/news media nexus, and declining standards of journalism, cement this.
In this case, if you were say a candidate for elected office as a liberal democrat, you'd get swift-boated. Attacked by innuendo, or on the basis of trivial or long-ago imperfections.
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Norton
Social climber
the Wastelands
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NO!
Say that is not so!
Nah, people on the political "right" are far too fair minded for that.
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dirtbag
climber
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My complaint about OWSers
I feel obligated to say something about OWSers because, as the Talmud says, "Silence is akin to assent." For complete details, I refer you to my forthcoming book on the subject. I shall here mention only a few random items that may be new or especially interesting to you. For instance, I resent being pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, and numbered. No joke.
If you believe nothing else that I've written about OWSers, you can believe this: I have to wonder where OWSers got the idea that it is my view that its mistakes are always someone else's fault. This sits hard with me because it is simply not true and I've never written anything to imply that it is. OWSers uses its societal status as some sort of mystical talisman that immunizes its zingers from any sort of legitimate criticism. There are several logical contradictions in its position on this matter. For example, OWSers will stop at nothing to cause riots in the streets. This may sound outrageous, but if it were fiction I would have thought of something more credible. As it stands, if you look soberly and carefully at the evidence all around you, you will clearly find that OWSers is always willing to sacrifice somebody else's life, just not its own. Disguised in this drollery is an important message: If OWSers's shenanigans were intended as a joke, OWSers forgot to include the punchline.
OWSers is planning to exploit issues such as the global economic crisis and the increase in world terrorism in order to instigate planet-wide chaos. Planet-wide chaos is its gateway to global tyranny, which will in turn enable it to stonewall on issues in which taxpayers see a vital public interest. When I observe OWSers's attendants' behavior, I can't help but recall the proverbial expression, "monkey see, monkey do". That's because, like it, they all want to instill distrust and thereby create a need for its stiff-necked views. Also, while a monkey might think that OWSers's codices are not worth getting outraged about, the fact remains that if it can one day confiscate other people's rightful earnings then the long descent into night is sure to follow. I am sorry to have to put this so bluntly, but OWSers has frequently been spotted making nicey-nice with obtrusive used-car salesmen. Is this because it needs their help to strap us down with a network of rules and regulations? The complete answer to that question is a long, sad story. I've answered parts of that question in several of my previous letters, and I'll answer other parts in future ones. For now, I'll just say that neither it nor its apparatchiks have dealt squarely or clearly with the fact that you don't need a preschool diploma to understand that its bootlickers are the carrion birds of humanity. Get that straight, please. Any other thinking is blame-shoving or responsibility-dodging. Furthermore, OWSers is just trying to pick a fight. That's why it says that honor counts for nothing.
The law is not just a moral stance. It is the consensus of society on our minimum standards of behavior. OWSers wants us to believe that truth is merely a social construct. How stupid does it think we are? This is not a question that we should run away from. Rather, it is something that needs to be addressed quickly and directly because it serves as a conduit that carries the élan vital of commercialism. How much more illumination does that fact need before OWSers can grasp it? Assuming the answer is "a substantial amount", let me point out that OWSers's monographs have merged with ruffianism in several interesting ways. Both spring from the same kind of reality-denying mentality. Both turn us into easy prey for caustic long-haired hippies. And both level filth and slime at everyone opposed to its stances.
I feel this way because OWSers's habitués are quick to point out that because OWSers is hated, persecuted, and repeatedly laughed at, it is the real victim here. The truth is that, if anything, OWSers is a victim of its own success—a success that enables OWSers to steal our birthrights. While OWSers has a right, as do we all, to believe whatever it wants about interdenominationalism, it's an irrational blowhard. In fact, it's worse than an irrational blowhard; it's also a lazy hermit. That's why it feels obligated to remake the map of the world into an OWSers-friendly checkerboard of puppet regimes and occupation governments.
OWSers may steal the fruits of other people's labor right after it reads this letter. Let it. When you least expect it, I will begin the invigorating, rejuvenating process of exposing false prophets who preach that trees cause more pollution than automobiles do. What I take much more seriously than confused tightwads are disorganized mouthpieces for feral emotionalism. But that's not the end of the story. OWSers thinks it would be a great idea to hasten society's quiescence to moral pluralism and epistemological uncertainty. Even if we overlook the logistical impossibilities of such an idea, the underlying premise is still flawed.
OWSers's assistants argue that a richly evocative description of a problem automatically implies the correct solution to that problem. These are the same dotty, muzzy-headed ruffians who cast ordinary consumption and investment decisions in the light of high religious purpose. This is no coincidence; I can reword my point as follows. OWSers and the most scornful pettifoggers you'll ever see are cut from the same cloth.
I, hardheaded cynic that I am, must point out that while OWSers and other ruthless swindlers sometimes differ on the details and scale of their upcoming campaigns of terror they never fail to agree on the basic principle and substance. Hence, it is imperative that you understand that its most base-minded tactic is to fabricate a phony war between clueless, twisted mendicants and loathsome egotists. This way, OWSers can subjugate both groups into helping it impugn the patriotism of its opponents. I doubtlessly don't want that to happen, which is why I'm telling you that we must disentangle people from the snares set by OWSers and its partisans. If we do, then perhaps a brighter day will dawn on planet Earth. Perhaps people will open their eyes and see that if you study OWSers's irascible proposed social programs long enough, you'll come to the inescapable conclusion that it's possible that it doesn't realize this because it has been ingrained with so much of nihilism's propaganda. If that's the case, I recommend that we win the culture war and save this country.
Let me recite the following phrases as if I were showing you the rungs of a ladder leading upward towards increased ability to borrow money and spend it on programs that break down age-old institutions and customs: shambolic dolts; whiney varmints; priggism; OWSers's torchbearers; OWSers. My point is that ever since OWSers decided to manipulate the public like a puppet dangling from strings, its consistent, unvarying line has been that it's okay to plant the seeds of fogyism into the tabulae rasae of children's minds. So, why aren't our children being warned about OWSers in school? I guess it just boils down to the question: What accounts for OWSers's prodigious criminality and dissipation? Personally, I don't believe the answer has anything to do with anti-intellectualism. Rather, I believe it involves OWSers's tendency to use scapegoating as a foil to draw anger away from more accurate targets. OWSers has planted its advocates everywhere. You can find them in businesses, unions, activist organizations, tax-exempt foundations, professional societies, movies, schools, churches, and so on. Not only does this subversive approach enhance OWSers's ability to wreck our country, derail our civilization, and threaten the human race with extinction, but it also provides irrefutable evidence that its devotees tend to fall into the mistaken belief that it's the best thing to come along since the invention of sliced bread, mainly because they live inside an OWSers-generated illusion world and talk only with each other.
At no time in the past did cocky sideshow barkers shamble through the streets of cities, demanding rights they imagine some supernatural power has bestowed upon them. I undoubtedly have a hard time reasoning with people who remain calm when they see OWSers doing the entire country a grave disservice. People sometimes ask me why I seem incapable of saying anything nice about OWSers. I'd like to—really, I would. The problem is, I can't think of anything nice to say. I guess that's not surprising when you consider that OWSers wants us to believe that we can solve all of our problems by giving it lots of money. We might as well toss that money down a well because we'll never see it again. What we will see, however, is that unlike everyone else in the world, OWSers seriously believes that governments should have the right to lie to their own subjects or to other governments. Woo woooo! Here comes the clue train. Last stop: OWSers. The final thing I want to bring up in this letter is that I'll do what I can to drag OWSers in front of a tribunal and try it for its crimes against humanity, and each of you reading this letter should do the same. Let's be there for each other. Let's help each other. And let's shoo away OWSers like the annoying bug that it is.
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Klimmer
Mountain climber
San Diego
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U.S. History Repeating itself Again and Again: How Wall Street Occupied America
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=439x2245428
“… Wall Street owns the country. It is no longer a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, but a government of Wall Street, by Wall Street, and for Wall Street. The great common people of this country are slaves, and monopoly is the master… Money rules… Our laws are the output of a system which clothes rascals in robes and honesty in rags. The political parties lie to us and the political speakers mislead us…”
"I’ll bet you thought that the above quote is a recent product of the Occupy Wall Street movement. It’s not. It was said by the populist Mary Elizabeth Lease in the late 19th Century, referring to the class war of the rich against the poor and the rest of us. What we are going through now is another repetition of that history. History has repeated itself over and over again in our country on this issue."
Same as it ever was.
It's time to rebalance.
GOD, "The Trinity," is with the 99%ers. Read your Bible.
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Ksolem
Trad climber
Monrovia, California
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Put this in your pipe and smoke it...
Less than three percent of shares in 173 publicly-traded, U.S.-based oil and natural gas companies are owned by corporate management, contrary to the perception that a very small number of wealthy people are the major beneficiaries.
An analysis released last month by the economic advisory firm Sonecon found that corporate management owns 2.8 percent of shares in those companies, while almost half – 48.9 percent – are owned by individuals, either through pension funds (31.2 percent) or Individual Retirement Accounts (17.7 percent).
The remaining shares are owned by asset management companies – mutual funds – which account for 20.6 percent, and by institutional investors (6.6 percent).
Co-authored by Sonecon co-founder and chairman Robert Shapiro, former undersecretary of commerce for economic affairs in the Bill Clinton administration, the analysis is based on data from the Security and Exchange Commission as of October 2011.
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Elcapinyoazz
Social climber
Joshua Tree
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"Put this in your pipe and smoke it..."
How about some critical thinking skills? When dividends are <3% (let's use XOM as an example...2.4%) it's not like the big money is to be had via share ownership, especially when those same execs that you are touting as not benefiting are pulling down 7-8 figure salaries. Why on earth would they hold shares for a paltry return while gaining no diversification in the process?
I assume there is some point to you posting the study, but I'll be damned if I can figure out what it's supposded to be.
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bookworm
Social climber
Falls Church, VA
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life imitates art:
orwell wrote, ". . . the English intelligentsia are Europeanized. They take their cookery from Paris and their opinions from Moscow. . . . England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality. In left-wing circles it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution, from horse racing to suet puddings. It is a strange fact, but it is unquestionably true that almost any English intellectual would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during ‘God save the King’ than of stealing from a poor box."
boston herald reports, "Occupy Boston has been encouraging protesters to take showers, hot meals and shelter meant for the homeless, prompting a St. Francis House manager to ask the downtown campers to remove directions from their Internet newspaper.
The online publication that calls itself “Occupy Boston Globe” posts meal times and shower hours at St. Francis House on Boylston Street, which runs on private donations and state and federal funding.
“We don’t want there to be a message to other people that we’re offering something different to them,” said St. Francis services director Andrea Ryan. She said she asked Occupy Boston to take the posting down, but because the shelter does not turn anyone away, Occupiers are free to use the shelter’s showers and meal lines.
Occupy Boston Globe staffers, who declined to be named, said they were unaware St. Francis House wanted the information removed.
Andy Claude, in Occupy’s logistics tent, said he sees no problem with protestors using services intended for the city’s poor.
“It’s for anybody; they’ve opened it to anyone who is in need,” said Claude. He added a number of shelters have taken in older and unwell protesters.
Boston’s Emergency Shelter Commission gave Occupy a list of shelters. Mayoral spokeswoman Dot Joyce said it was aimed at homeless Occupiers: “Anywhere we can give services to homeless people, I think is appropriate.”
But Robb Zarges, of the youth shelter Bridge Over Troubled Water, said, “There’s a difference between choosing to sleep somewhere, versus being kicked out of your home.”
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HighTraverse
Trad climber
Bay Area
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Odd, I don't see anyone debating the facts of Jack Abramoff's crimes. The Republitards are unusually quiet on the topic.
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CrackAddict
Trad climber
Canoga Park, CA
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From WSJ.com:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204190704577026194205495230.html?mod=WSJ_article_MoreIn_Opinion
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Europe's Entitlement Reckoning
From Greece to Italy to France, the welfare state is in crisis.**
In the European economic crisis, all roads lead through Rome. The markets have raised the price of financing Italy's mammoth debt to new highs, and on Tuesday Silvio Berlusconi became the second euro-zone prime minister, after Greece's George Papandreou, to resign this week. His departure may keep the world's eighth largest economy solvent for the time being, but it hardly addresses the root of the problem.
In Italy, as in Greece, Spain and Portugal and eventually France, the welfare-entitlement state has hit a wall. Successive governments on the Continent, right and left, have financed generous entitlements with high taxes and towering piles of debt. Their economies have failed to grow fast enough to keep up, and last year the money started to run out. The reckoning has arrived.
If the first step in curing an addiction is to acknowledge it, there is little sign of that in Europe. The solutions on offer are to spend still more money, to have the Germans bail out everybody else, or to ditch the euro so bankrupt countries can again devalue their own currencies. France's latest debt solution includes raising corporate, capitals gains and sales taxes.
Editorial board member Matt Kaminski discusses Italy's economic and political problems as Berlusconi fights to stay in power.
Yet Europe's problem isn't the euro. If it were, Hungary, Iceland and Latvia—none of which use the euro—would have been spared their painful days of reckoning. The same applies for Britain. Europe is in a debt spiral brought about by spendthrift, overweening and inefficient governments.
This is a crisis of the welfare state, and Italy is a model basket case. Mario Monti, who is tipped to lead a new government of technocrats, once described the Italian economy as a case of "self-inflicted strangulation." Government debt is 120% of GDP, making Italy the world's third largest borrower after the U.S. and Japan. Its economy last grew at more than 2% a year in 2000.
An aging and shrinking population is a symptom, but not a leading cause, of the eurosclerosis. A fifth of Italy's 60 million people are 65 or older and make increasingly expensive claims on state-paid pensions and other benefits. In fast-growing Turkey, only 6.3% fit that demographic. Italian women have on average 1.2 children, putting the country's birth rate at 207th out of 221 countries.
But the bulk of the responsibility lies with politicians. Mr. Berlusconi, Italy's richest man, promised a shake up each time he ran for office (in 1994, 1996, 2001, 2006 and 2008). He was the longest serving premier in post-war Italy, from 2001 to 2006, controlled parliament and could have pushed through reforms. He didn't. Promises to lower taxes and hack away at regulations and protections for Italy's powerful guilds—from taxi drivers to pharmacists to journalists—were broken.
"It is not difficult to rule Italy," Benito Mussolini once said, "it is useless." The so-called concertazione, or concert, of Italian coalition politics that brings together numerous parties in the Parliament makes for unstable and indecisive governments. So does the fear prominent in many European countries that any serious reform will provoke street protests. An unhappy byproduct of a welfare state is that it creates powerful interests that will fight to the last to preserve their free lunch, no matter the cost to the country.
But now hard choices can no longer be postponed. And the solution to Europe's debt crisis must begin with reforming, if not dismantling, the welfare state. Europe rose from the economic grave in the 1960s, it rode the Reagan-Thatcher reform wave to more modest growth in the 1980s-'90s, and it can grow again. A decade ago, Germany was called the "sick man of Europe," bedeviled by Italian-like economic problems. But a center-left coalition, supported by trade unions and German society, overhauled labor and welfare codes and set the stage for the current (if still modest) export-led revival in Germany.
The road from Rome may now lead to Paris, Madrid and other debt-ridden European countries. But this is no cause for U.S. chortling, because that same road also leads to Sacramento, Albany and Washington. America's federal debt was 35.7% of GDP in 2007, but it was 61.3% last year and is rising on an Italian trajectory. The lesson of Italy, and most of the rest of Europe, is never to become a high-tax, slow-growth entitlement state, because the inevitable reckoning is nasty, brutish and not short.
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cliffhanger
Trad climber
California
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End Corporate Personhood
As we’ve seen through the history of the Sherman Antitrust Act and other legislative attempts to control corporate behavior, the problem faced by citizens as well as directors and stockholders of corporations is systemic and rooted in how corporations are defined under the law.
Virtually every legislative session since the 1800s has seen new attempts to regulate or control corporate behavior, starting with Thomas Jefferson’s unsuccessful insistence that the Bill of Rights protect humans from “commercial monopolies.” Ultimately, most have either failed or been co-opted because they didn’t address the underlying structural issue of corporate personhood.
To solve this problem, then, new laws controlling corporations aren’t the ultimate answer. Instead what is needed is a foundational change in the definition of the relationship between living human beings and the nonliving legal fictions we call corporations. Only when corporations are again legally subordinate to those who authorized them—humans and the governments representing them—will true change be possible.
To bring this about will require a grassroots movement in communities all across America and the world to undo corporate personhood, leading to changes in the definitions of the word person.
much more here:
http://www.truth-out.org/end-corporate-personhood/1320725933 |
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CrackAddict
Trad climber
Canoga Park, CA
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My mom is in dire financial straits due to losing 3/5ths of her retirement through a f*#kup by AIG. She stands to lose her house at 65 yrs of age, a house she's had for 40 some years. AIG gets a big bailout, why not her? She wasn't gambling with her money, nevertheless, she suffers the consequences for someone else's actions. Saying the people are to blame for the banks' predatory mortgage practices is bullsh#t.
Curious, how did this happen? Was she working for AIG? Was her retirement money in Credit Default Swaps?
Also, how is she losing her house? If she has had it 40 years, why was it not paid off? Did she take money out of it?
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CrackAddict
Trad climber
Canoga Park, CA
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#12 The number of Americans on food stamps has increased 74% since 2007.
#13 We are told that the economy is recovering, but the number of Americans on food stamps has grown by another 8 percent over the past year.
#14 Right now, one out of every four American children is on food stamps.
#15 It is being projected that approximately 50 percent of all U.S. children will be on food stamps at some point in their lives before they reach the age of 18.
More food stamps are being given out, but it is not because there are more hungry people, it is an expansion of welfare.
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CrackAddict
Trad climber
Canoga Park, CA
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"An unhappy byproduct of a welfare state is that it creates powerful interests that will fight to the last to preserve their free lunch, no matter the cost to the country."
Excellent quote
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Norton
Social climber
the Wastelands
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Crack,
Yes, there have been several studies that show out "poor" often have comfortable lifestyles.
links?
let's see these "several" studies you refer to showing the "poor" have quite comfortable life styles
drive nice cars?
live in nice comfortable housing?
don't have to budget food stamps to get by, have a "comfortable" food delivery?
how about healthcare, tell me about their "healthcare" matches up with the "comforts" of your healthcare
Show me the poor "folks" in the deep south, the homeless, that have "comfortable" lifestyles
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monolith
climber
berzerkly
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Helicopters over Berkeley most of the day. Apparently an occupy UCB was attempted.
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bluering
Trad climber
Santa Clara, CA
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Helicopters over Berkeley most of the day. Apparently an occupy UCB was attempted.
Why would the asshats 'occupy' UCB??
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