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FBI Wiretapped Hemingway
Hugh Pickens writes "On the fiftieth anniversary of the death by suicide of author Ernest Hemingway, his friend and biographer A. E. Hotchner writes in the NY Times that the man who 'had stood his ground against charging water buffaloes, who had flown missions over Germany, who had refused to accept the prevailing style of writing but, enduring rejection and poverty, had insisted on writing in his own unique way, this man, my deepest friend, was afraid — afraid that the FBI was after him, that his body was disintegrating, that his friends had turned on him, that living was no longer an option.' In the midst of depression and under treatment at St. Mary's Hospital in Rochester, Minnesota, Hemingway was convinced that his room was bugged, his phone was tapped, and suspected that one of the interns was a fed. Decades later, in response to a Freedom of Information petition, the FBI released its Hemingway file. It revealed that beginning in the 1940s J. Edgar Hoover had placed Hemingway under surveillance because he was suspicious of Ernest's activities in Cuba. The surveillance continued all through his confinement at St. Mary's Hospital, making it likely that the phone outside his room was tapped after all. 'In the years since, I have tried to reconcile Ernest's fear of the FBI, which I regretfully misjudged, with the reality of the FBI file,' writes Hotchner, author of Papa Hemingway and Hemingway and His World. 'I now believe he truly sensed the surveillance, and that it substantially contributed to his anguish and his suicide.'"
The immunity to telecoms that accepted requests to wiretap without warrants, the revenge taken on Qwest for not doing so, the new rules that pretty much allow warrantless wiretapping at will...those powers would never be abused by today's FBI. They are all staunch and true. There's no chance of this happening now. No way are they going to snoop on friends-of-relatives-of suspected possible terrorists. Zero chance that people who impress a girlfriend by going to a march to support that Gaza blockade ship (which helps Gaza, which helps Hamas, who are terrorists, who no-doubt support other terrorists that might attack us some day) will find themselves on a list.
Don't be paranoid. We don't need a government of laws when we have a government of such good men who only want to protect us.
From terrorists.
And communists.
I'll refrain from calling you names, as you've characterized LutzSed, but just point out the fact that it the FBI that's the problem. They've been violating the rights of Americans, and spying on us all, for their own reasons, not because they were trying to protect us, since they were formed. There's no hope of curtailing their activities, especially now that we have the big Radical Muslem scare, and a congress full of right wing reactionaries and cowards.
LutzSec isn't bringing on anything, it's already here.
Not to worry. The hope and change we voted for will be here any moment to take us to Candy Mountain.
Worth pointing out is that there is a competing school of thought, which regards his suicide as likely having been an accident.
you're not paranoid if they're really out to get you.
The fact that he was wiretapped does not exclude he may have been a paranoiac.
Léa Gris
Q: What do you call it when the government, rather than protecting the people, sets out to protect itself from the people?
Most of Hemingway's paragraphs didn't contain that many different thoughts.
but, when the conspiracy is shown to be real, i have nothing but venom and hate for the power abusing assholes who think they can get away with it
hoover was a cross-dressing pinhead (not that there's anything wrong with cross-dressing, but there's plenty wrong with hypocrisy). the fbi under him was an extension of mccarthy era hysteria and witch hunts. so fuck you hoover, thanks for contributing to the destruction of the composure of a great man and a great writer
those who seek to protect us, in the name of hypocritical assumptions about what we need protection from, are the real enemies of the usa
down with them all
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I'm very grateful for lulzsec revealing to the world that all it takes is a group of greedy CEOs and corrupt government officials to cause billions of dollars worth of damage, destroy the credibility and security of world governments and established institutions and reveal the private information for millions of individuals.
FTFY
Mr. Green: Why is J. Edgar Hoover on your phone?
Wadsworth: He's on everybody else's! Why shouldn't he be on mine?
Even if you're paranoid, that doesn't mean nobody is out there to get you.
*Sigh*
The government and CEOs didn't do those things. A bunch of sociopathic man-children did. The governments and CEOs should have had better security, but blaming them for the damage is like blaming a girl for getting raped while drunk at a party.
LulzSec isn't a group of working class heroes, no matter how much you may wish them to be. They're just thugs, hurting people for their own amusement. They'd do the same to you, if they thought it would be so much as a half-hearted chuckle to their friends' lips.
6) Question Jon Katz' sexual preference.
Christ, that's a blast from the past (assuming the reason I don't see his articles anymore is because he isn't contributing them, rather than just because I'm blocking them).
Seriously, I was about to write that I doubt highly that CEOs and corrupt government officials are the ones coding the firewalls and preventing SQL injections.
My kingdom for a donkey!
With just a touch of exaggeration, I'll say that any public intellectual in that era who didn't have an FBI file probably was lacking a conscience. Einstein had a 1500-page FBI file, having aroused Hoover's suspicion with his involvement in "communist front" organizations like the American Crusade Against Lynching. America had been through the worst era of unrestrained robber-baron capitalism, followed by the Great Depression. It was the height of Jim Crow. If you were engaged in the intellectual life of the country, it was very likely that you were either going to become a socialist or some other kind of radical. Just to pick two more random examples: Margaret Sanger and Helen Keller were both leftists, and both had FBI files. American leftists were the only ones who spoke up against Fascism in Spain and tried to do anything about it -- at a time when right-wingers were often huge fans of Mussolini. For a lot of folks on the left, the big disillusionment came in 1939 with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.
Find free books.
Most of Hemingway's paragraphs didn't contain that many different thoughts.
That's because Hemingway actually knew how to write.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
I've dealt with these fuckers, and believe me, they are not about doing what is honest or what is right. They are a tool of the government, and they have been used for plenty of evil and will continue to be used in that manner. Just because that sick bastard J. Edgar Hoover is gone, don't believe for one second that the FBI is suddenly kind and gentle, because that would be very far off the mark.
They never were kind and gentle, nor do I particularly care if they're not. What I want them to do is follow the law.. Unfortunately for us, nowadays they generally are, and that's the problem. After Hoover, Congress reined in the FBI and put a lot of restrictions on their behavior. Most of those were removed (and new powers granted) in the wake of 9/11 by the ill-named Patriot Act and others like it. It's not the FBI you have to blame for this, but a power-hungry and fundamentally irrational Congress.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
...doesn't mean there isn't one. I am quite sure a large percentage of the paranoid notions out there are not true, but then there are the facts that surface much later that prove to have been true.
it's exactly this kinda crap that keeps the seeds of doubt sewn in my mind each and every time the government tells the people something.
Put it this way: every single time some government official, from the President of the United States on down says, "we need new power 'x' in order to make you safe from 'y'", We the People need to reply with a resounding "Prove it!" Make these bastards fight for every new power they try to assume. Sometimes they're right ... but I want to hear more than fear-mongering and manufactured statistics.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
This was also the era were the activities of the American clandestine agencies became so egregious that even congress took a look and grew something resembling teeth.
They have been given authority by several Congressional Laws throughout several decades. Stop thinking this is June 21, 1788 and we just ratified the US Constitution. Protections have been slowly disintegrating shortly after the last remnant of the Founding Fathers were in power and had pull to protect them. Stop voting in Evangelical Fundamentalists and you'll see how much push back Congress will actually do to keep a checks n' balance with the FBI. Stop sitting around ignoring all the Militia nut jobs around and take them more seriously because the FBI certainly does and must to keep even your ass from being threatened. The blade cuts both ways.
Might make you depressed if you thought your were going to be exposed.
Might even convince you it was time to kill yourself.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/jul/09/hemingway-failed-kgb-spy
This is the kind of mindset that fear mongers capitalize on. Hoover had the Red Scare to keep in power. This terrorist stuff is a fear mongers wet dream. Interesting how we have so many ways to keep people "informed", aka in fear. This kind of reptile brained actions are too global in reach. We haven't evolved out of it and we don't look like we will until we destroy ourselves or nature does it for us. Serioiusly, we are wasting time and resources we should be spending on space. Let's try to be ready to avoid a planet destroying event instead of fighting each other? How many asteroids need to wiz by our planet before we realize we need to tend to them?
Take the Red Pill.
To compare LulzSec with rapists or thugs is rediculous; comparing the CEOs to victims is so outrageous it's almost funny. There are plenty of serious "cyber" criminals who are hacking into people's systems for real money and causing real damage to people like you and me; the consumers who have their data being stored by these corporates. What makes LulzSec different is that, instead of just putting some charges on your credit card and never telling anyone where they got the data they published what they did. That's just bringing to the surface an issue which was already happening before LulzSec got involved.
LulzSec caused public nuisiance and annoyance but that makes them more stupid teenage vandals than thugs. The main bad thing they have done is embarassing the powerful and pointing out publicly what data was already available to the real black hats. It's not just that the corporates should have had better security, it's that:
For now I think there's quite a bit more value in pursuing the CEOs than the
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
While hunting one day with director Howard Hawks and William Faulkner, the acclaimed actor Clark Gable asked Faulkner to enumerate the five best authors of the day. "Ernest Hemingway, Willa Cather, Thomas Mann, John Dos Passos," Faulkner replied, "and myself." "Oh," Gable maliciously replied, "do you write for a living?" "Yes," Faulkner retorted, "and what do you do?"
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
But Hemingway also was, by most accounts, not a particularly happy individual. I am not meaning to absolve the FBI from blame for its misbehavior; but his dad commited suicide, his mom mailed him the gun his father used for that, he couldn't stay in a relationship, and he had a drinking problem - he already had 2.9 strikes against him. His semi-autobiographical Nick Adams stories all seemed to show a poor sense of self worth too.
It seems odd that the FBI would worry about his activities in Cuba, though, given how his writing sure seemed (to me) to be pretty pro-Batista.
#DeleteChrome
You would have a hard time finding anyone that J. Edger Hoover was NOT spying on during that time. The guy was a zealot and first rate blackmailer that could not be removed from the FBI because he had information on most of the politicians and government officials who could have pushed for his removal.
Don't blame LulzSec, blame the people who will be putting such laws in place. That is like blaming flaming homosexuals for making gay marriage illegal, or blaming rape victims for the high number of rapists in prison. This kind of douchebaggery attitude is what will lead to improved tolerance of such government policies. Fight the government policies.
Where is the mod rating for "scary"? Also,
So mr. anarchist, you don't think large companies and corporations are capable of significantly worse effects of oppression on our lives? I know it is an assumption, but judging by what you said I assume you are totally against all government regulations of the corporate world. Using barriers to entry, monopolistic and monopsonistic actions, most US companies have managed to drive prices through the roof while driving wages through the floor, despite the fact that in the past 40 years GDP went from .5 T to 17T, a 34 fold increase. If that isn't oppression, nothing short of China's internet censorship, Soviet Russia, or Hitlers Germany qualifies. When you let corporations exploit people to an unlimited extent, they will. Regulations ARE necessary, if they weren't, we wouldn't be in this shithole situation right now, it would be a lot better as the deregulation of the past 10 years goes into effect, instead of even worsening quality of life. But don't let the facts affect your anarchism.
Governments are the only thing in the world that is by, for, and of the people. Corporations are for profit, by profit, and of profit. Profit isn't a moral imperative, people are. Governments can become too powerful, too strong, and too evil, but they do not have to be inherently, and can and have been controlled by the people for periods of time. This is not true of large businesses, who have amassed so much power that voting with your dollars is either ineffectual or impossible.
Where is the mod rating for "scary"? Also,
the damage done to the usa by communist infiltrators was less than that by the hystertical overreacting nitwits
This statement is not true. Joseph McCarthy was actually correct. The Venona decrypts, declassified in 1999-2002, identified a lot of the Communist Party CPUSA members and revealed them to be Soviet agents. And the Mitrokhin Archive, an internal KGB record of their own history, smuggled out of Russia in 1992 by their former senior archivist Vasily Mitrokhin, shows quite clearly the depths of penetration of the Soviet agents, as well as their strategies of spreading disinformation. These documents are readily available, go check them out at your local bookstore or library.
Now McCarthy was indeed a zealot, and used improper means of "persuasion" instead of following legal channels, but his claims were fairly accurate. Much of Hollywood was infiltrated, as well as the U.S. State Department, and even Congress. But McCarthy was unable to publicly back his claims with the data because the Venona project itself and all its data was classified top secret, and was not to be revealed in case they gave away the secret that we were reading Soviet "one-time pads". (Hint: they used their pads two times, which broke their security.) This was an operational mistake that happened from 1946-1948, and so they could have safely used the data then as the Soviets had corrected the mistake before he went public, but the FBI had no way of knowing that. Among other interesting tidbits, the Venona decrypts proved conclusively that the Rosenbergs were indeed the traitors that gave the secret of the bomb to the Soviets. The campaign to cloud their guilt with doubt was just one of the many Soviet disinformation campaigns. (These campaigns included such crap as "AIDS was created by the U.S. Army as a bioweapon", which even the Russians now regret having spread.)
the damage done to the usa by terorrism today is less than that by the hystertical overreacting nitwits
I agree with you and believe this statement is true. Many of our rights have been stripped by the misnamed USA PATRIOT act, and our government has gone apeshit crazy, all even better than the results UBL hoped for when he attacked. I'd much rather have the occasional terrorist attempt than the current form of the DHS. At least an idiot on a plane today is going to be jumped by a hundred very pissed off travelers. Nobody's ever going to fly another plane into a building on our soil again, not while there are solid cockpit doors and a few real Americans on board.
However, there is quite a bit of difference between the two. McCarthy acted alone, from secret knowledge. The DHS is acting as the face of the U.S. government. The politicians are bringing war to all kinds of new places in the name of terrorism. They've completely soiled this country and her reputation, and they should be stopped.
John
John Lennon once said on a TV talk show he had reason to think his phone was bugged. Sure enough, it turned out it was, as later-released files proved.
Table-ized A.I.
Somebody asked me this:
Why does a government must be an evil?
and I replied:
- well, because in history of humanity there was never a government that didn't become evil or wasn't evil from the start? Because government provides people with ability to gather power over people, businesses and resources without too much effort? Because a place that provides such an ability is a magnet for people who want the power over people, businesses and resources? Because government power is used to control people's lives, tax people's work, mis-allocate resources? Because over time regardless of the government structure it eventually leads to huge government apparatus living in itself for itself, feeding off the productive part of the economy?
Because government even though 'non-profit' is highly profitable for politicians and others, who get near the cake.
Because government has the power to set winners and losers in the economy by taxes and subsidies and regulations and laws.
Because anything that government does is an expression of government force, based on its ability to hurt you, rather than expression of market forces, which require 2 parties to come to an agreement.
Because government corrupts the very society by offering all sorts of impossible in the long run 'solutions', which cannot be supported economically in the long run, but look very lucrative to the majority of voters in the short run.
Because government punishes the productive part of the economy, by sacrificing it to its desire for power, since it basically directs the desires of the majority of the society to get things for free, things they didn't work for and to get those things, somebody must pay, and those are the people, who are in fact producers in the economy.
Because eventually governments spending and power grows beyond ability of the host society to maintain it, and then, government being what it is and corrupting the voters the way it does, destroys not only the economic ability to maintain this spending, but the very fabric of the economic stability - currency itself, by monetizing the insatiable thirst for debt, which is then used to 'pay' for all of the spending, which the voters are corrupted into believing is absolutely necessary and even indeed are their right.
--
The point is that government is a force outside of the rest of the market, and while the rest of the market is basically about 2 parties coming to an agreement over costs or value, etc., government does not have such silly limitations - it can impose its will upon the society, upon the economy, etc., regardless of any real economic outcomes and only based on the expedient desires to get more power and to stay in power further and indeed, to increase the power into infinity.
So yes, I cannot view the government in any other light but as the ultimate evil, and this conflicts with my understanding that the power vacuum will be filled with something, and this something better be set on purpose and be controlled than be something random.
The US Constitution was trying to impose the control upon the power of the government, but obviously there is perfect way to control it, and that's why governments always reset once they reach certain level of 'evil', and new governments are established.
It would be better if people understood these simple realities sooner rather than later.
You can't handle the truth.
Franco kept Spain stable for decades, dealt with old-school Communists in the most effective way, and was a reasonably good steward of his country, which he kept out of WWII.
By which you mean he supported the Nazis and offered them assistance whilst not fighting in WWII himself, summarily executed his political opponents and sent hundreds of thousands more to forced labour camps, totally rolled back women's rights and religious freedoms, and was a least as bad as the Communist states - but that's OK because he wasn't red.
There's a reason the US isn't very popular.
There is one major problem that makes everything you just said dead wrong
- good start, with a nice general, overall blanket statement.
By amassing large amounts of capital, corporations have far more power over your life than any business possibly could.
- you likely mean to say 'government' there, not business, right?
Here is why the above statement is false: no business can force me to pay them and no business has the ultimate authority to end my freedoms and to end my life, thus that statement is ridiculous on its face.
As to corporations amassing capital - in government regulated world you do have that happening, as government prefers certain monopolies and makes sure they amass more than they ever could in the free market, where any business, that could be that profitable, would immediately face various levels of competition, with start ups doing their own things to get a cut of that nice juicy pie.
The point is that in free market without government regulations, anybody is free to start their own competing business without having to face government, which works for the largest monopolies, protecting them from competition and giving them the unfair advantages, from special tax breaks, which then do not apply to startups, to simply subsidies - money and regulations, that strongly enforce that monopoly in that industry.
Any business that reaches even ten or twenty percent of a market share, or a market is dominated by a few large businesses with no serious competition
- you are pulling various numbers out of your rear.
Suffices it to say that even in todays world, where the government involvement is minimal, we see severe competition, driving costs down and quality and offerings up.
and barriers to entry are high (which they always are, just on the need for physical capital to produce goods and services),
- of-course barriers to entry are high in today's world, which has governments completely destroying people's ability to save capital to start their own business, by taxing them, by destroying the currency via printing (inflation), by subsidizing large monopolies, because governments prefer monopolies, they have all that extra cash to kick around and kick back to the politicians.
In absence of government destroying the market, there would be plenty of credit available for good ideas, not for consumer credit, which government promotes, but for producer credit, which government destroys. Also with government not being as huge as it is, it could be paid by minimum sales taxes on vices and excise taxes, and gov't wouldn't have to be getting into all this debt, which is stealing credit from production and putting it into government bonds.
the corporations and companies can employ monopolistic and monopsonistic policies to control every aspect of your life.
- this is the case today, when companies do enjoy various monopoly statuses, provided and protected for them by governments. This is not the case when government stays out of business and does not destroy the competition.
. Maybe not as directly as some communist countries do, but they can force you to spend 20 hours a day working for jack shit, in fact, at EVERY SINGLE POINT
- more weird numbers pulled out of your rear.
Here is a bunch of REAL numbers:
In USA the federal income tax is 35%.
State income taxes vary from 0 to maybe 7%
Then there is SS tax, which applies to the first 100K or so.
Then there is Medicare tax, which is near 3% on all earnings.
Then there are payroll taxes
Then there are various sales taxes
Then there are property taxes
Then there are transaction taxes
There are taxes on things you gift to others, there are taxes on your entire wealth when you die.
There are municipal taxes, all sorts of things.
These taxes easily go over
You can't handle the truth.
Be careful here Anonymous Coward. There are at least two groups from the US religious right who are pumping out stories about how Sanger was a racist who wanted forced sterilizations. I have not read EVERYTHING she wrote, but I've read a lot, and here's all I've ever seen: She was indeed a Malthusian and she believed in reducing the "unfit" by allowing the poor access to birth control. She believed that voluntary birth control would reduce the number of unfit in the population. Yes, she did, like many do-gooders of her day, support sterilization of the developmentally-disabled or emotionally disturbed who had been placed in public custody. However, it was clear that she thought this had little to do with eugenics but was to "protect" such persons from the burden of parenthood. My take on it so far is that Sanger is not as bad as she's being painted by people who currently want to attack reproductive rights, family planning, birth control, whatever you want to call it. Given the circumstances, I think she comes out with karma on the plus side. (If you want to read about the circumstances from someone else, the Autobiography of William Carlos Williams has some passages about mid-way through discussing what it was like for him working as a doctor to women and children in Hell's Kitchen. And you might check out the websites "exposing" Sanger; most of them I've seen eventually get around to "ZOMG she also approves of pre-marital sex," which reveals a strong anti-sex bias at work.)
Once upon a time, years ago, I was living far out into the countryside. I was trying to tune my radio to something to listen to and came across a religious channel. I sat down for a listen and all I could hear was "money...blah blah blah...money...send us money...blah blah...more money....commericial...money...send us money...if you want to know more buy this book and send us money...blah blah money...money, more money, give us your money please...money". I was disgusted and turned the channel and what was playing?
War Pigs by Black Sabbath. "Generals gather in their masses, just like witches at black masses....etc" I listened to the lyrics and it was more spiritually enlightening than anything I heard on the "religion" channel. God must have been grooving on War Pigs too, I could feel the connection. And the song seems so appropriate these days as the war machine we have built seems hungry enough to devour the world.
Speaking of crooks in government, I wonder if there is any truth to the rumor of DSK being here for the IMF to verify that we still had gold left in Ft Knox after it being rumored that its all gone. Wouldn't that be a hoot? Our crooked government having spent all of our gold on God only knows, now leaves us holding the bag and the IMF foreclosing on the entire country. It doesn't help this rumor when this country has went insane over owning gold recently.
Internet rumor mills, got to love them.
Take the Red Pill.
Obama has 6 espionage act prosecutions going against people for talking to journalists. thats more than we have had since circa 1919 when the Sedition Act was part of the espionage act.
You have to realize that several of these cases also involve the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, specifically subparagraph (a)(1), the "Comptuer Espionage" law.
When they came down on manning for the Collateral Murder video, this was one of the laws they used.
When Thomas Drake plead guilty to a misdemeanor, for simply accessing UNCLASSIFIED documents on an NSA network, the misdemeanor he plead guilty to was under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
If you read that act, it is a back-door way to trash the first amendment, by simply putting "on a computer" after a whole bunch of innocuous stuff that wouldn't otherwise ever have been illegal.
Governments do not have to favor certain monopolies over others, in fact they can be used to destroy monopolies wherever they form, and for a short period of time after the sherman anti-trust act, it actually was used in such a way.
- a laugh. Anti-trust laws were used to destroy trusts not for any reason, other than the trusts were becoming more powerful than the politicians and didn't want to share their wealth with the politicians.
Standard Oil wasn't a monopoly by the time it was broken up and Alcoa Aluminum was an exceedingly efficient business, so nobody could compete on price, which means the market didn't need it to be broken, to give rise to less efficient businesses. However the less efficient businesses got their act together and got the politicians to attack Alcoa, so that less efficient businesses could enter that market using government support. The end result was as always - rising prices on aluminum, which is all government is good for - pushing prices higher.
Business can absolutely and positively be used to remove ALL of your freedoms and reduce you to a slave and you have no choice in the matter. The fact that you do not believe that makes you incredibly niave of the workings of the world, so I'm going to assume you are some sheltered kid who has had life handed to him on a silver platter.
- or maybe I had to participate in taking down a government at one point in time, a kind of government that oppressed its people. But this is /., where assumptions are the basis of all knowledge.
----
Good luck talking to yourself there, by the way.
So that you don't bother replying to me in a pointless back and forth, here are other comments I made on similar topics, whatever you want to say and all rebuttals to whatever you want to say are definitely there.
So that you don't bother replying to me in a pointless back and forth, here are other comments I made on similar topics, so whatever you
You can't handle the truth.
I didn't.
oh?
so I'm going to assume you are some sheltered kid who has had life handed to him on a silver platter. Or at least a copper one.
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I have dealt with people like you hundreds of times before, and you all rely on the same fallacious depictions of reality in the creepiest way possible
---
Sincerely, whenever somebody starts using arguments of the personal nature, they lose my interest.
you be a deer and do something to help society instead of your mongering to exacerbate t
- I am doing something useful. I build my own businesses and add to the wealth of the society by offering services and products that didn't exist until I built them.
So there will be no 'making wages fair' support from me - the only fair wage is a wage that is set by free market.
So if you truly care about fair wages, you'd support free market and not government destroying the free market.
Oh, and free market does work every time, as opposed to government, with millions of examples, from lasic eye surgery, to computers and cell phones, to TVs, to the first flying airplane (as opposed to a government sponsored version by Langley, that ended as an abysmal failure), to medical care and insurance and education, which worked in US very well and was very affordable, even cheap, before government got its hands all over it, to the very foundation of the economy - money, which government has destroyed.
Governments fails every time, that's why I moved my business to a place, where government does very little because people here care more about success of economy, than about some government supported idea of 'fairness', which always ends up in a disaster.
You can't handle the truth.
See, the problem with all of that is that you are ignoring the facts. You say that working for literal slavery is not a possibility in a free market, yet you ignore the reality of the old north when factory workers in the north worked more hours than those in the south and had a significantly lower life expectancy and quality of life. There was HUGE demand for labor, and low unemployment, and yet people like Pullman were still able to force wages so low that employees could no longer afford to eat and rebelled, and they hired mercenaries to put down the rebellion. This was before there was any government regulation on US markets. You ignored everything I said by dismissing it as ridiculous, and yet the facts, history itself, reflects what I am saying as true and what you are saying as false.
In addition to those problems, in the past 40 years labor regulations have relaxed, and in the past decade tons of regulations were scaled back by the disgusting, fascist, anti-American republicans, and at the same time wages fell, and working conditions worsened, despite falling costs and massively increasing profits. From what you said, in these conditions, scaled back regulations, increased profits, prices should fall and wages should rise. But the EXACT OPPOSITE has happened, for exactly the reasons I gave. You talk a lot of smack, but reality simply disagrees with what you have to say.
I never said anything about sharing gains. I said it is about value. If each worker has a production capacity of 150k worth of merchandise a year, and that bring that much revenue into the company, after costs and taxes, they should get at least 60% of it. If the top brass of a company makes a bad decision which causes the company to take losses, then they are responsible for the negative value they have to the company. It is that simple. But apparently the simple processes I have described here by which reality works and reality in which we live is perfectly explained are something that you can not even hope to grasp.
Also, right now, billionaires have a top marginal tax rate below 30%, and the less you make the smaller the tax. Apparently you don't even know what fucking taxes are here, yet you insult them anyways. It is amazing how ignorant people like you have so much weight in the economy. And that is not an ad hominem, that is an observation.
lol, you didn't make a salary for years? You must really suck. I've known a lot of small business owners in my old community, franchise owners, people who started up their own businesses, and NEVER did I meet somebody who had trouble turning a profit in more than a couple months. In fact, most of them are doing VERY well right now. You really must suck at everything, hell you can't even grasp basic economic ideas, and you failed to run a business even in the great conditions for business in America, and you can say they are bad all you want, but the effective tax rates are literally non-existent, and regulations are so easy to avoid a blind deaf monkey could do it.
I know what you are talking about, I have heard these theories before, but the fact of the matter is you are wrong in every respect. The great depression was caused for a very straightforward and causal reason, unlike the meaningless metaphors that lack an actual causal reason why the great depression happened. Basically, yes, the twenties were roaring, but the majority of Americans were actually seeing lower wages and the rich were getting rich at an accelerating pace. Businesses and people took out enormous investment loans that would only pay off if the price of goods continued to rise, but as the American people got increasingly poor they had less and less buying power in the markets and could no longer afford even to take out loans to purchase goods, and the bubble collapsed on itself. The same thing happened with home prices in 2008, everybody bet that prices would continue rising because banks had successfully kept prices artificially running away by holding stock off the market, but as construction cau
Where is the mod rating for "scary"? Also,