I copied these words from the comment section of my previous post. They were written by Michel Petit.
YES YOU CAN
. learn
. work better
. take care of your health
. share your knowledge
. provide tools to those in need
. think and innovate
. diversify your skills
. treat every individual with dignity
. contribute to create a better world
Yes You Can.... take responsibility for your own life and do all of the above without the permission or assistance of any government. Being a good person is the ultimate political statement.
Thank you, Michel. Great stuff!
13 comments:
Good grief ...
You conservatives/Republican/Libertarians are all the same ... do everything possible to make the top 1/10th of 1% even richer, and everyone else can spend their days chanting "ohmmmm" to the tree gods in the forest trying to improve themselves. One big, happy, bottom 99.9% commune.
The pooling of wealth amongst the top 1% has increased under the Democrats reign Bur. Apparently you just need to make sure to keep money invested in military industrial complex/private contracting companies to ensure that Dems/Reps will rubber stamp continued excessive spending. Plus private contracting allows Dems to pretend to be 'cutting back' on their warmongering.
The Dems didn't push for any real change like Public healthcare--medicare for all etc, beyond Dennis Kucinich. They just bowed down to the "Managed" care industry/big Pharma. The differences are mostly in rhetoric and minimal beyond that. Rep's had their Prescription drug bene's to help secure Senior Citizen votes last decade.
When push comes to shove the great majority of these folks are Status quo you can believe in--re-arrange the deckchairs and since the bulk of the iceburg is beneath waters, or less popular than dancing with the stars--people can pretend the US Titanic is fine and dandy, ensuring a bigger fall in the future. Planned contraction sounds good, the wheels coming off as people desperately attempt to maintain the status quo is not. The poor and the formerly working poor/middle class that can't compete with the low cost of labor in foreign countries get to suffer the most. Knee-jerk reactions will abound, Tyranny and loss of liberty seems to be the way most countries go, be they socialistic or "free market" dictatorships.
-Meiyo
Let's see what really makes the top 1% richer.
Open trade type legislation allowing off shoring of jobs and industry. My bet would be everyone benefits from the cheap goods and that as many Liberal company owners profit from it as Conservative.
Open border/progressive/affirmative action type immigration policies that refuse to close the border and require off balance immigration from poor undeveloped countries. Lowers overall pay but lines the pockets of the remaining employers. Doesn't sound much like any conservative I know these days is for this. I guess the liberals think it's ok to line the rich pockets if it means more forced diversity for all.
Community re-investment legislation requiring financial institutions to give out risky loans which are then paid off by the government. The financial institution gets the money for more bonus pay and the tax payer gets the bill. I haven't seen one current conservative screaming for more of this but there are alot of videos out there of ACORN and others crying for it. As long as the poor libs get their house it's ok to give the top 1% the profits I guess.
Defense spending? I wonder how many dems and repubs get money from this spending. My bet is it's even. At least before this election day.
Educational Spending and government pensions? Hmmmmm not alot of conservatives in these groups. Not alot of 1%'rs either but overall thats a huge chunk of money going somewhere other than conservative pockets. Again it's ok to let the rich professors get richer as long as the poor libs get their edu-ma-cation for the affirmative action job they have waiting.
Of course who mostly pays the taxes for these entitlements? The vanishing middle class which is mostly made up of conservatives. The money taken from these guys isn't going to the rich it's going to the entitlement classes while the rich use charity tax loop holes or whatever. Thats OK though because that charity money goes... well you guessed it.
For myself I would gladly let the top 1% get richer if it keeps the poor 20 - 30% out of my pocket.
PP:
Look, you gotta stop making sense. If you keep that up, it might catch on and f**k everything up.
.
Let us continue shall we?
Obamacare. Now who does this really benefit? Certainly not the middle class. It will benefit the lower class with the tax paying middle class footing the bill for higher medical costs which go to whom? Oh ya the top medical companies and pharma. OH NOES more money to the top 1% again but benefits for the underclass so it's all good you see.
I could examine the other legislation like cap and tax, various domestic violence stuff, child support etc but I bet most of that money doesn't go to a traditional 1%. Nope this kinda stuff benefits the liberal minorities with services and then lines the pockets of yet more liberal minorities. Remember NASA has the lowest percentage of minority employees and they are sitting at 65% over mandated quotas. Some offices and departments are above 350%. Yet still I wonder just how wealthy are the union bosses and such that huge amounts of the dues collected will go to? Million and a half salaries ala Bell Kalifornia anyone?
Reality check time folks. IMO, we are simply partially replacing the officers of the Titanic tonight.
Tom Brokaw nailed it in 2008, when he said that the winner of the presidential election should demand an immediate recount.
Globalization will not survive the depression, global wage arbitrage ends well before parity. Whether that arrests the decline in wages is another matter.
Also, The ideal that we continue to dominate the knowledge economy is bunk. I am currently retraining in geology at a large university where the most popular major is journalism. How to operate a frigging camera should not even be a vo-tech course; forget university major. While the school has a sizeable contingent of foreign students, they are not here studying journalism or the humanities. The list of graduate TAs in the science and math departments could easily be mistaken for a membership roster at a Pan-Asian club, and most of them get some form of US govt. assistance. Ergo, not only do I have to pay for me and mine, but I also get taxed to subsidize training for our competition. Cui bono? The illustrious, tax dodging, bonus scarfing, bailout queens of course.
Pioneer,
“Cheap goods?” maybe, for a while but then what? Whom do we trade with when emerging markets don’t need us anymore? Will their emerging middle class buy from us or their own factories? Even now we export more to tiny Belgium than nationalistic China. Moreover, will not their own emerging middle class drive up prices of finished goods, as well as commodity prices? It’s already happening in China. How does that benefit us if they refuse to buy anything but debt from us?
They get to industrialize with trade secrets we developed over generation sand build a middle class. Meanwhile we get maybe a thousand dollars a year off cheap junk at Wal-Mart. Faustian bargain if you ask me.
Don’t get me wrong I am not against trade; however the capitalistic assumption is that each party will look after their own interests. Clearly that ain’t happening. Sort of like free trade resting on a gold standard to force discipline and prevent gross imbalances. Take that key bit away and it is a farce.
Pioneer,
Also keep in mind that top 1% is getting richer primarily by government handouts/ bailouts that you will be expected to pay for.
Here straight from the horse’s mouth:
Begin Quote
“You should thank God” for bank bailouts, Munger said in a discussion at the University of Michigan on Sept. 14, according to a video posted on the Internet. “Now, if you talk about bailouts for everybody else, there comes a place where if you just start bailing out all the individuals instead of telling them to adapt, the culture dies.”
End Quote
I suppose he is half right.
Dan
Although I could make a decent argument that the liberal/progressives supported NAFTA type agreements just as much if not more so than Repubs. My point with globalization and cheap goods was that regardless of who benefits most in dollars in this country it was supported by just about everyone BUT true conservatives. RINO's don't count.
Also embracing UN and global trade agreements which only seem to benefit the top 1% of the US and foreign powers seems to be a big deal for President O if not your everyday joe blow liberal.
Also most of the financial bail out that "we should be thankful for" was needed to cover the losses due to the community re-investment debacle with all those loans going bad that had been sold. That is of course not all of it and put pretty simply but regardless it is not something conservatives support(ed).
Ultimately all the above should show that it is the liberal/progressives that transfer more wealth to the top 1% as long as they get "theirs" they are fine with it.
Chuck is back:
Just had a nice trip to Israel. Wow what an incredible place. What a pressure cooker though. I think it would literally make you crazy if you lived there. Reinforced the concept of the importance of liquids in our lives (water, oil, blood). Lets not forget that.
Now, on to the upcoming fed decision (with liberal quoting from Zero Hedge (love that blog!))
Like most organizations whose main aim is to accumulate power in the hands of the government, the Fed has always relied on what is described as “optimism”. Another word for this is ignorance. Ignorance is not a pejorative term, it simply means a lack of knowledge in a given field of human endeavor. No human being has ever lived who is not totally ignorant about many vitally important areas of knowledge. But no VALID field of human knowledge has ever relied upon ignorance as its prime justification. This is what the Fed now proposes to do.
Once (not if but when) they will announce the second round of Quantitative Easing to stimulate the economy they would have admitted that the first round of easing failed. That they have in fact already failed once but that they will try to do it again. They will not succeed the second time either. I am not prophesying. There is just no mathematical way for them to succeed. They can only delay the inevitable. For how long? I don't know. They have kept it together longer then I thought it possible. But every year, every month it becomes exponentially more difficult. So if the first QE was about 700billion then this QE must be around 2+ trillion and the next 7-10 trillion if there is a next. After a while everyone realizes that there is no 40 trillion QE possible and they give up all pretense at trying to control this thing. Then the unwind happens very rapidly, almost overnight, just like Argentina or Zimbabwe or Russia in 1917, 1924 or the 90's. Timing is always the problem of course, but hey, oil is at 84 dollars and rising. Danger territory is over 90 dollars. Can the global economy handle the oil spike to $147 again? How about $200? NAFC, its held with spit and bailing wire already. There is a good case to be made that once the energy becomes more than 4% of US economy it has gone into recession EVERY time. That oil is seven times more expensive then at the beginning of the last decade and during the worst recession since the Great Depression tells you that something they are telling you doesn't pass the sniff test.
I would say that US has never really left the recession and is about to go into depression. What will it look like? I hate to see it but it is more comfortable from the distance then up close and personal like. Well I am sure that people will adjust, they always do - to anything (car accidents, cancer, holes in the head, divorce). But they will not like it, not one bit. The only way to do this right is to prepare for it before the fact. It is too late to cure one self after a heart attack happens, especially when there is no outside help to be had. Once a friend of mine said that US is too big to fail and so will not be allowed to fail. I asked him if it is too big to fail or too big to save when it does? I will let you decide.
Greetings from Beautiful Nelson. The pool is at 30 deg Celsius. That's bath water for all 'merkuns. Signing off now.
Love the work you are doing Greg. Keep up the sanity.
Chuck H.
John Boehner as speaker of the HOuse?Watch the deficit triple just to pay for his hair spray
Bur,
The rich are richer because the rest of us went into debt. We can take the wealth back by SAVING. That is the ONLY way we can take it back. Redistribution of income has absolutely NO EFFECT on distribution of wealth if those on the receiving end don't save.
Regards,
Coal Guy
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