For Address History, let's say your job applicant's resume says he went to Harvard from 1995-1999.
The solution to this is kind of obvious. Call Harvard and get information from them directly. Why bother getting his credit report for this?
Ditto, if he says he worked for Google in Palo Alto, but during that time he really lived in Arkansas. Better call that former employer.
Why not just call his former employer and bypass the BS? You can also request the last 7 years of work history for free from Uncle Sam.
this guy has been sued and lost a bunch of times, do you really want him in your office stealing computers, sexually harassing your HR department, and saying "the wrong things" to your clients? You might want to figure out what is going on there before you invite this walking liability to represent your company.
If he's able to steal computers from my employer's data center I've got a lot worse problems than him to deal with. What you need there is actual onsite security. Onsite security covers all angles, including the ones with no judgements against them who could still steal your stuff.
Sexual harassment gets people fired. That shows up in an employment history check. There's no need for an invasive credit check.
As for "saying the wrong things to clients" - once again, employment history checks will discover that. How will a credit check discover any "wrong things" said by an applicant? That's where you call up coworkers and ask employers. Again, there's no need for an invasive credit check: a credit check wouldn't even deliver the relevant information here.
As for me, I just want to see the "story".
You've shown no examples of the "story" that actually justifies you peeking into their personal lives away from the workplace. All the examples you put before me, I have shown you how to get that information using standard existing workplace and coworker query protocols.
Work history is for employment queries. Credit history is for credit queries. All this b.s. about credit queries is employers using their "employers market" standing to voyeuristically peek into people's lives when a detailed (and less invasive) work history/coworker inquiry will yield all the same information.
Would you as an employer be willing to submit to inquiries by employees upon your personal life as an employer? How about renters being allowed to make inquiries upon the landlord's personal life? How do we know the employer or landlord isn't a convicted crook, hmmm? It's like pulling teeth from a tiger to get inquiries about the employer's company itself: imagine if you had to post your credit report for all prospective employees to view, WTF OMFG SOMEONE SET US UP TEH BOMB!
You are falling for your own propaganda. The world is simply repeating what they hear coming out of the DNC talking points. Socialist Europe was already attempting to counteract our superpower status with the EU and corrupt UN. Al Qaeda, Iran, North Korea, Cuba, and Venezuela simply repeat what they hear the Democrats say and try to use it against us. Who needs Tokyo Rose? We have the Democrats!
LOL!!! The world is listening to Democrats and not you, boo hoo hoo. Somebody call the whaaaaaaaaambulance! You're now stuck blaming the Democrats for the fact that you've utterly failed to win the hearts of the world.
And you neo cons, who feed the Islamofascist war machine with oil dollars, gut the Constitution and reduce America to a police state, strand our troops in Iraq with no body armor, and cut veterans' benefits over the vociferous objections of veterans and Democrats alike, have no business bringing up Tokyo Rose. You're the worst traitors of all, and in November we will begin putting your kind on trial.
Then your whining will really begin!
Now. Let's get to your Rush Limbaugh Show cut 'n pastes:
1. You named _one_ lone News channel that had to be started by an outsider, an Australian, because the left had infiltrated all of our own media outlets. You see, the left does not believe in an opposing viewpoint. They are Stalinists. They act like they are for free speech, but only when it supports their twisted world view. The reaction to the 'path to 9/11' movie is just one example.
And right wing bastion Fox "fair and balanced" News argued in court for the right to lie and distort facts. Next?
2. Social security is going to fail. In the end, we will have either privatized social security or none at all.
What's going to fail is the endless borrowing against Social Security. And if people switch to private social security, either the banking industry will eat them alive, or the stock market will when it crashes or has a major correction. Ask all those people in Enron if you don't believe me.
3. Socialism is doomed to fail. Any economic system that does not allow supply and demand to set value is doomed to fail.
Any system that puts greed as God, is doomed to fail because of its inherent unrighteousness. Jesus was a socialist. OMFG!!! Rush Limbaugh wept!!!
Socialism also uses coercion and dependency
Unrestrained Capitalism leads to utter depletion of the system, and the destruction of the middle class when the rich are done feeding on everyone.
Unrestrained capitalism leads to Somalia. It has died a miserable death wherever it has been practiced. You are thus defending a concept that has been proven unworkable in the wild.
Good luck with riding that dinosaur into extiction row.
Democratic socialism - the current state of America - has outlasted Communism and unrestrained Capitalism alike. We're the enduring reality. Learn to live with it or move over to a desert island and create your own capitalist paradise.
Now, New Stan Prince, I have a question for you.
Are you going to continue to a) continue to whine about how SOCIALIST AMERICA IS GOING DOWN!!!
or are you going to
b) move to a desert island and create your own capitalist paradise and show us commies how it's really done?
So much for you responding to this. Your cowardice and empty platitudes have been exposed for the b.s. that it is. Have a nice day, oh and your Ann Coulter poster is wrinkled, I suggest you fix that.
to control people and to socially engineer, which will eventually lead to revolt. Most of the unrest will be the result of unemployment, lack of innovation, and stagnation though.
In case you haven't noticed, capitalism has also led to all of the above. Right down to patent abuse stifling innovation.
BTW: I am a former dittohead. I know all your lame tactics.
You can mod PC games with user-made content and basically make the game live forever through free add-ons.
Console games are incapable of having mods of any sort, much less user-made. Consoles are banana republics which put your machine under the absolute control of someone else, not you.
Many, many gaming careers are launched by average gamers who make mods for PC games (see: Counterstrike) and then who move on to getting jobs making games for the PC and for the console. But for the software devel kits (SDK's) released for PC games for the purpose of modding, we wouldn't be where we are today - console or PC wise - with regards to gaming.
PC gaming, through the liberal-minded SDK concept, enables end users to innovate and produce new gaming content within hours.
What opportunity does the console scene give you, console gamers, to make good on your innovation skills and creativity?
True. Putting them in a foster home would put more burden on the Government. Evil, evil, evil. Shipping 'em off to Iraq would be the patriotic thing to do. Well said.
Yes, and Republicans are now losing in America. From their convicted Republican pedophiles to their doomed social security overhaul to fresh batches of Republican jailbirds to Bush admitting we had secret prisons, the Republicans have been drowning in an utter credibility bloodbath.
In 2 years you've managed to alienate the population of the world's "lone superpower". How did that happen?
Oh wait, I know, it was the liberal media. Ayup. Despite Fox News being the most popular media of all, the liberal media still won.
Survival of the fittest must conclude that the liberal media is stronger, and of course the strong get all the spoils.:)
I find your argument dismissive and biased. While I can't definitively promote credit-check based employee selection, your argument provides almost no argument against the option.
I made my arguments against it quite clear. But here, let me clarify.
a) It does precious little to catch real criminals who might gank you.
b) It makes it impossible for people with poor credit histories to recover from it; therefore, those who are economically down in the dumps, are forced to remain there.
The first reason is a personal (to the company one). It's a net with really large holes. Credit checks stop the piranhas but let in the sharks. The second reason is a societal one. If this policy is left unchecked, it will create a more severe nationwide underemployment situation where many college degreed people will be left flipping burgets while their real skills languish and the real work force they were trained for, leaves them behind. This results in a severely inefficient economy, and inevitably, diminished consumer buying power. That last one is disastrous for the economy because diminished consumer buying power means less profits which means a recession, layoffs, and inevitably an economic collapse (okay, ostrich brigade, you can now ram your heads into the ground and tell yourselves such a thing is impossible). If McDonald's is, as you suggest, also justified in running credit checks, then the economy's collapse is not only possible in the current reality scenario, but it is also imminent.
c) Angry employees with no credit problems gank you, too. Why? Because they're angry. You're not even coming anywhere close to addressing that problem with credit checks. Your best bet here is to conjure up a more advanced psychological profile test because that would be a better predictor of what they'll do when they're ticked off, than a credit score.
That being said, I am in favor of a Federal law forbidding employment oriented credit checks totally. I wouldn't even let them exempt banking companies from that law; the neo cons would have to spend that last shred of public good will they have left, to make that compromise happen.
What if they ran up student loans and got laid off due to offshoring? That put a lot of people out of work for as long as 5 years, with their next employment being McDonald's!
Let me clue you in, pal... if everyone abstained from credit cards whose income was highly vulnerable, the economy would tank and your comfortable, pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps universe would collapse anyway. Our economy lives and dies by consumer credit card spending: it is that huge a factor.
Medical bills, well that's even more fun. Every day I stare right at medical insurance policies as high as $800 a month for someone with pre-existing conditions. Now you tack on a student loan with that for someone who is getting a MBA (since all other degrees are unimportant in the corporate state), and you have someone who is ripe for another round of mass unemployment when MBA jobs start going offshore in 5 years (and they will, mark my words). Loans. High medical insurance. Oops.
BTW I have a FICO score of 803, with no bankruptcies and a bunch of empty balances. I used to pay rent on credit cards when I had no job, and I pulled myself out without missing a payment. So yeah, I'm probably better at this than you, and I still know what it's like for the working class.
I manage a data center (Level II, Grade B) but designed to for a financial company and by God I see a buttload of suspect accounts here. 99% of the truly fraudulent activity we catch, inevitably comes down to someone who is a career criminal. This career criminal may also be a person who's in dire financial straits now and then but hardly any more often than among law abiding citizens.
The fact that someone in dire straits is applying for a job here says they're trying to turn their lives around; the amount of security we have (even down to everyone wearing pocket-less monkey suits for anyone walking into the server area) is obvious. People with criminal records aren't allowed to work here, but I inherited enough good white hat security people (2 who jumped ship from current employment at Tier-1 providers) to take care of potential threats from the rest. We're not perfect, but our insurer thinks we are!
If you can't get a job, you can't make the payments.
This effectively relegates the poor to a permanent poor status.
I already told my HR department 3 months ago to never even think about this bullshit tactic or they'll be fired out of here like a friggin cannon ball.
We don't need credit checks for jack squat. We need criminal state & FBI background checks and that's it.
There is probably no such thing as a cheap and effective bulk eraser. We have an agreement with Maxtor (now Seagate) that allows us to send in the chassis for a replacement, minus the platters. The replacement contract is expensive, though, but we need it since we have a LOT of banking data.
Yes, and I'm sure that if YOU were somehow elected it would not happen. Yet everyone else is a crook. You do realize that even if one congressman is "paid for," the bill still has to pass, and it still has to *not* be vetoed. I assume you think that all of our lawmakers are paid off, including our president or governors, and that there are not struggling powers who want opposite things "paying off" politicians?
Are you done taking spacewalks without a helmet? Good. Now listen closely. I'm talking about passing a Constitutional amendment barring contributions over $1000 (adjusted every decade for, say, 1/10th the rate of inflation). That pretty much makes all the other b.s. irrelevant.
Personhood is apparently constitutional. If you don't like it, then lobby against it. Oh, I forgot, you think lobbying is the same as bribing. Well, then form your own corporation and do it. Nothing stops you from forming your own corporation.
Lobbying is just fine when it doesn't include bribing.
Corporate personhood was deemed constitutional by the Supreme Court in 1886 or so, well before your neo-conservatism "boogeyman." You don't even know what a neo-conservative is.
The Supreme Court also passed the Dred Scott decision, did that make it automatically valid? And the corporate state was worse back then. Remember the company towns? Union busting? Strikers being shot? That's what the corporate statists of the day (the neo cons of today) did to America.
Before you respond, answer this... ever wonder why you Republicans aren't well liked anymore? Ever wonder why Libertarians are so unpopular? Just ask yourself that.
"Wealthy lobbyists lobby representatives (people who represent their district). If citizens don't like the bills that are voted for by that representative, they can vote that person out of office."
What does that matter? The next politician will get bought and paid for on the spot. Look at what happened when California booted Gray "bought and paid for" Davis and elected Ahhhnuld: he was even more bought and paid for than Davis!
"I would agree with you, except to say that even institutions require some representation. This is no different than a political activist group lobbying government, or the NEA, or the NAACP, or the ACLU, or labor Unions."
Then they can make their case publicly like the rest of us.
There's no difference between lobbyists and bribes. And corporations don't need personhood; personhood is designed to shield corporate leaders from liabilities. That's bullshit. You and I can't be shielded from liability like people who run corporations can.
Are you really this ignorant or are you just parodying neo conservatism???
"What? I never stated that. I simply stated that we made it difficult for a majority to impose their will. No system is perfect. Besides, now you are arguing against yourself!"
No, you are arguing that if a majority of people elect a President, Congress and Senate, that their will should be counteracted by a handful of wealthy lobbyists.
"Some corporations have legitimate needs in order to successfully compete in the marketplace, and therefore their needs should be heard just like any citizen's needs. Are you not for that? "
I am not for that. Because they're not actual citizens.
"How are those companies going to pass the cost on to the guy they're monitoring?"
They don't, and they shouldn't be allowed to. The people they're monitoring should be the ones being compensated financially. As for the customers grabbing the data, they should be hit with higher fees until they're forced out of the business.
Or perhaps jailed. Or perhaps have their own personal information posted on the 10pm news?:D
I'm anti corporate personhood. Corporations should not be "legal persons" if unborn babies can't be. "Legal personhood" for corporations is legal fiction.
And now you're saying super majorities can't be tyrannical? What then was Prohibition?
"We do this by requiring 'super majorities' in a number of cases, and also by having a Constitution that guarantees certain rights and liberties."
But going by your oligarchical logic, the super majority is just a tyranny of a larger majority.
You just don't want any limits placed on your corporate masters. You don't even realize that corporations would not even exist without Government interference in the marketplace - as in, Government mandated "corporate personhood".
"So you are for the poor, but not for the poor in China or India?"
Nope. Fuck them. I am beholden to my nation, not theirs. The people of America are not obligated to transfer their wealth to other nations. Do they pay our taxes? Nope. If they want to become rich then they can do it the same way we did: by making their own industries. I care about my own nation before others just the same as I care about my own family before I give to others. If you care so much about other nations then be my guest and give them your job, don't force America's engineers out of work to do it. By the way, one example of your gaping ignorance about economics is demonstrated in the fact that very few countries buy from America. We're running a monstrous trade deficit with the world. That is impossible to change unless we become a third world nation.
And as for the rich, well, like I said, good luck with your oligarchy fantasies. I definitely don't need some 1939 right winger coercing me to the will of the minority, invading my privacy and passing my personal information around without my consent. Republic or not, the majority can still impose their will if they vote. That will never be contradicted except in a dictatorship.
Now go ahead and donate your wealth to India if you feel so bad about them.
"Let me guess, you feel that communism or socialism would be much better for the poor, right?"
Wow, ignorance of that magnitude must have its own gravitational field.
I feel that a man should work; modern "neo con" right wingers want to send as many jobs as possible to China and India.
I don't envy the rich; I just don't think they have a right to rule this country and piss all over the majority of people who want things to go a different way. You, on the other hand, are a bona fide stooge. You'll lick the feet of your corporate masters for a bone. I have enough money that I can tell them to kiss my ass.
I boycott RIAA/MPAA made products. I'm a Reaganite.
And you're still trying to sell me an oligarchy, and I ain't buyin' it. You either have a Democratic process which allows you to amend the Constitution (the ultimate statement of imposing a majority will), or you don't, and the whole stack of democratic cards come falling down.
Slashdot Mirror
That'll prevent black holes from appearing, at least in the US.
The solution to this is kind of obvious. Call Harvard and get information from them directly. Why bother getting his credit report for this?
Why not just call his former employer and bypass the BS? You can also request the last 7 years of work history for free from Uncle Sam.
If he's able to steal computers from my employer's data center I've got a lot worse problems than him to deal with. What you need there is actual onsite security. Onsite security covers all angles, including the ones with no judgements against them who could still steal your stuff.
Sexual harassment gets people fired. That shows up in an employment history check. There's no need for an invasive credit check.
As for "saying the wrong things to clients" - once again, employment history checks will discover that. How will a credit check discover any "wrong things" said by an applicant? That's where you call up coworkers and ask employers. Again, there's no need for an invasive credit check: a credit check wouldn't even deliver the relevant information here.
You've shown no examples of the "story" that actually justifies you peeking into their personal lives away from the workplace. All the examples you put before me, I have shown you how to get that information using standard existing workplace and coworker query protocols.
Work history is for employment queries. Credit history is for credit queries. All this b.s. about credit queries is employers using their "employers market" standing to voyeuristically peek into people's lives when a detailed (and less invasive) work history/coworker inquiry will yield all the same information.
Would you as an employer be willing to submit to inquiries by employees upon your personal life as an employer? How about renters being allowed to make inquiries upon the landlord's personal life? How do we know the employer or landlord isn't a convicted crook, hmmm? It's like pulling teeth from a tiger to get inquiries about the employer's company itself: imagine if you had to post your credit report for all prospective employees to view, WTF OMFG SOMEONE SET US UP TEH BOMB!
LOL!!! The world is listening to Democrats and not you, boo hoo hoo. Somebody call the whaaaaaaaaambulance! You're now stuck blaming the Democrats for the fact that you've utterly failed to win the hearts of the world.
And you neo cons, who feed the Islamofascist war machine with oil dollars, gut the Constitution and reduce America to a police state, strand our troops in Iraq with no body armor, and cut veterans' benefits over the vociferous objections of veterans and Democrats alike, have no business bringing up Tokyo Rose. You're the worst traitors of all, and in November we will begin putting your kind on trial.
Then your whining will really begin!
Now. Let's get to your Rush Limbaugh Show cut 'n pastes:
And right wing bastion Fox "fair and balanced" News argued in court for the right to lie and distort facts. Next?
What's going to fail is the endless borrowing against Social Security. And if people switch to private social security, either the banking industry will eat them alive, or the stock market will when it crashes or has a major correction. Ask all those people in Enron if you don't believe me.
Any system that puts greed as God, is doomed to fail because of its inherent unrighteousness. Jesus was a socialist. OMFG!!! Rush Limbaugh wept!!!
Unrestrained Capitalism leads to utter depletion of the system, and the destruction of the middle class when the rich are done feeding on everyone.
Unrestrained capitalism leads to Somalia. It has died a miserable death wherever it has been practiced. You are thus defending a concept that has been proven unworkable in the wild.
Good luck with riding that dinosaur into extiction row.
Democratic socialism - the current state of America - has outlasted Communism and unrestrained Capitalism alike. We're the enduring reality. Learn to live with it or move over to a desert island and create your own capitalist paradise.
Now, New Stan Prince, I have a question for you.
Are you going to continue to
a) continue to whine about how SOCIALIST AMERICA IS GOING DOWN!!!
or are you going to
b) move to a desert island and create your own capitalist paradise and show us commies how it's really done?
So much for you responding to this. Your cowardice and empty platitudes have been exposed for the b.s. that it is. Have a nice day, oh and your Ann Coulter poster is wrinkled, I suggest you fix that.
In case you haven't noticed, capitalism has also led to all of the above. Right down to patent abuse stifling innovation.
BTW: I am a former dittohead. I know all your lame tactics.
Mods.
You can mod PC games with user-made content and basically make the game live forever through free add-ons.
Console games are incapable of having mods of any sort, much less user-made. Consoles are banana republics which put your machine under the absolute control of someone else, not you.
Many, many gaming careers are launched by average gamers who make mods for PC games (see: Counterstrike) and then who move on to getting jobs making games for the PC and for the console. But for the software devel kits (SDK's) released for PC games for the purpose of modding, we wouldn't be where we are today - console or PC wise - with regards to gaming.
PC gaming, through the liberal-minded SDK concept, enables end users to innovate and produce new gaming content within hours.
What opportunity does the console scene give you, console gamers, to make good on your innovation skills and creativity?
True. Putting them in a foster home would put more burden on the Government. Evil, evil, evil. Shipping 'em off to Iraq would be the patriotic thing to do. Well said.
[jonathan swift mode off]
Yes, and Republicans are now losing in America. From their convicted Republican pedophiles to their doomed social security overhaul to fresh batches of Republican jailbirds to Bush admitting we had secret prisons, the Republicans have been drowning in an utter credibility bloodbath.
:)
In 2 years you've managed to alienate the population of the world's "lone superpower". How did that happen?
Oh wait, I know, it was the liberal media. Ayup. Despite Fox News being the most popular media of all, the liberal media still won.
Survival of the fittest must conclude that the liberal media is stronger, and of course the strong get all the spoils.
to punish the guilty?
Wow. I'm glad people don't apply your logic to running the country.
Oh wait a minute........
Kids are a simple issue.
Put them in a foster home.
[neo con parody off]
It's amazing how many people willingly lick the boots of the corporate elite until the boot knocks out their front teeth anyway.
Yeah, and the military gets ganked a lot by people with great credit histories.
Make your argument. Spell it out.
But I'll ask anyway: how long does (student loan) hardship forebearance typically last?
I made my arguments against it quite clear. But here, let me clarify.
a) It does precious little to catch real criminals who might gank you.
b) It makes it impossible for people with poor credit histories to recover from it; therefore, those who are economically down in the dumps, are forced to remain there.
The first reason is a personal (to the company one). It's a net with really large holes. Credit checks stop the piranhas but let in the sharks. The second reason is a societal one. If this policy is left unchecked, it will create a more severe nationwide underemployment situation where many college degreed people will be left flipping burgets while their real skills languish and the real work force they were trained for, leaves them behind. This results in a severely inefficient economy, and inevitably, diminished consumer buying power. That last one is disastrous for the economy because diminished consumer buying power means less profits which means a recession, layoffs, and inevitably an economic collapse (okay, ostrich brigade, you can now ram your heads into the ground and tell yourselves such a thing is impossible). If McDonald's is, as you suggest, also justified in running credit checks, then the economy's collapse is not only possible in the current reality scenario, but it is also imminent.
c) Angry employees with no credit problems gank you, too. Why? Because they're angry. You're not even coming anywhere close to addressing that problem with credit checks. Your best bet here is to conjure up a more advanced psychological profile test because that would be a better predictor of what they'll do when they're ticked off, than a credit score.
That being said, I am in favor of a Federal law forbidding employment oriented credit checks totally. I wouldn't even let them exempt banking companies from that law; the neo cons would have to spend that last shred of public good will they have left, to make that compromise happen.
What if they ran up student loans and got laid off due to offshoring? That put a lot of people out of work for as long as 5 years, with their next employment being McDonald's!
Let me clue you in, pal... if everyone abstained from credit cards whose income was highly vulnerable, the economy would tank and your comfortable, pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps universe would collapse anyway. Our economy lives and dies by consumer credit card spending: it is that huge a factor.
Medical bills, well that's even more fun. Every day I stare right at medical insurance policies as high as $800 a month for someone with pre-existing conditions. Now you tack on a student loan with that for someone who is getting a MBA (since all other degrees are unimportant in the corporate state), and you have someone who is ripe for another round of mass unemployment when MBA jobs start going offshore in 5 years (and they will, mark my words). Loans. High medical insurance. Oops.
BTW I have a FICO score of 803, with no bankruptcies and a bunch of empty balances. I used to pay rent on credit cards when I had no job, and I pulled myself out without missing a payment. So yeah, I'm probably better at this than you, and I still know what it's like for the working class.
I manage a data center (Level II, Grade B) but designed to for a financial company and by God I see a buttload of suspect accounts here. 99% of the truly fraudulent activity we catch, inevitably comes down to someone who is a career criminal. This career criminal may also be a person who's in dire financial straits now and then but hardly any more often than among law abiding citizens.
The fact that someone in dire straits is applying for a job here says they're trying to turn their lives around; the amount of security we have (even down to everyone wearing pocket-less monkey suits for anyone walking into the server area) is obvious. People with criminal records aren't allowed to work here, but I inherited enough good white hat security people (2 who jumped ship from current employment at Tier-1 providers) to take care of potential threats from the rest. We're not perfect, but our insurer thinks we are!
If you can't get a job, you can't make the payments.
This effectively relegates the poor to a permanent poor status.
I already told my HR department 3 months ago to never even think about this bullshit tactic or they'll be fired out of here like a friggin cannon ball.
We don't need credit checks for jack squat. We need criminal state & FBI background checks and that's it.
to the pertinent question.
There is probably no such thing as a cheap and effective bulk eraser. We have an agreement with Maxtor (now Seagate) that allows us to send in the chassis for a replacement, minus the platters. The replacement contract is expensive, though, but we need it since we have a LOT of banking data.
Are you done taking spacewalks without a helmet? Good. Now listen closely. I'm talking about passing a Constitutional amendment barring contributions over $1000 (adjusted every decade for, say, 1/10th the rate of inflation). That pretty much makes all the other b.s. irrelevant.
Lobbying is just fine when it doesn't include bribing.
The Supreme Court also passed the Dred Scott decision, did that make it automatically valid? And the corporate state was worse back then. Remember the company towns? Union busting? Strikers being shot? That's what the corporate statists of the day (the neo cons of today) did to America.
Before you respond, answer this... ever wonder why you Republicans aren't well liked anymore? Ever wonder why Libertarians are so unpopular? Just ask yourself that.
"Wealthy lobbyists lobby representatives (people who represent their district). If citizens don't like the bills that are voted for by that representative, they can vote that person out of office."
What does that matter? The next politician will get bought and paid for on the spot. Look at what happened when California booted Gray "bought and paid for" Davis and elected Ahhhnuld: he was even more bought and paid for than Davis!
"I would agree with you, except to say that even institutions require some representation. This is no different than a political activist group lobbying government, or the NEA, or the NAACP, or the ACLU, or labor Unions."
Then they can make their case publicly like the rest of us.
There's no difference between lobbyists and bribes. And corporations don't need personhood; personhood is designed to shield corporate leaders from liabilities. That's bullshit. You and I can't be shielded from liability like people who run corporations can.
Are you really this ignorant or are you just parodying neo conservatism???
"What? I never stated that. I simply stated that we made it difficult for a majority to impose their will. No system is perfect. Besides, now you are arguing against yourself!"
No, you are arguing that if a majority of people elect a President, Congress and Senate, that their will should be counteracted by a handful of wealthy lobbyists.
"Some corporations have legitimate needs in order to successfully compete in the marketplace, and therefore their needs should be heard just like any citizen's needs. Are you not for that? "
I am not for that. Because they're not actual citizens.
"How are those companies going to pass the cost on to the guy they're monitoring?"
:D
They don't, and they shouldn't be allowed to. The people they're monitoring should be the ones being compensated financially. As for the customers grabbing the data, they should be hit with higher fees until they're forced out of the business.
Or perhaps jailed.
Or perhaps have their own personal information posted on the 10pm news?
I'm anti corporate personhood. Corporations should not be "legal persons" if unborn babies can't be. "Legal personhood" for corporations is legal fiction.
And now you're saying super majorities can't be tyrannical? What then was Prohibition?
"We do this by requiring 'super majorities' in a number of cases, and also by having a Constitution that guarantees certain rights and liberties."
But going by your oligarchical logic, the super majority is just a tyranny of a larger majority.
You just don't want any limits placed on your corporate masters. You don't even realize that corporations would not even exist without Government interference in the marketplace - as in, Government mandated "corporate personhood".
Oops, you slept through that class didn't ya?
"So you are for the poor, but not for the poor in China or India?"
Nope. Fuck them. I am beholden to my nation, not theirs. The people of America are not obligated to transfer their wealth to other nations. Do they pay our taxes? Nope. If they want to become rich then they can do it the same way we did: by making their own industries. I care about my own nation before others just the same as I care about my own family before I give to others. If you care so much about other nations then be my guest and give them your job, don't force America's engineers out of work to do it. By the way, one example of your gaping ignorance about economics is demonstrated in the fact that very few countries buy from America. We're running a monstrous trade deficit with the world. That is impossible to change unless we become a third world nation.
And as for the rich, well, like I said, good luck with your oligarchy fantasies. I definitely don't need some 1939 right winger coercing me to the will of the minority, invading my privacy and passing my personal information around without my consent. Republic or not, the majority can still impose their will if they vote. That will never be contradicted except in a dictatorship.
Now go ahead and donate your wealth to India if you feel so bad about them.
"Let me guess, you feel that communism or socialism would be much better for the poor, right?"
Wow, ignorance of that magnitude must have its own gravitational field.
I feel that a man should work; modern "neo con" right wingers want to send as many jobs as possible to China and India.
I don't envy the rich; I just don't think they have a right to rule this country and piss all over the majority of people who want things to go a different way. You, on the other hand, are a bona fide stooge. You'll lick the feet of your corporate masters for a bone. I have enough money that I can tell them to kiss my ass.
I boycott RIAA/MPAA made products. I'm a Reaganite.
And you're still trying to sell me an oligarchy, and I ain't buyin' it. You either have a Democratic process which allows you to amend the Constitution (the ultimate statement of imposing a majority will), or you don't, and the whole stack of democratic cards come falling down.
You can't have it both ways.