The Commerce Clause allows the government to do thinks like the Glass-Steagall Act of 1935 which created the FDIC, which regulated interstate commerce, which was entirely supported by the founding fathers, since the union of the states on a commercial level allowed the US to compete with Europe.
By the way, the Glass-Steagall Act was repealed in 1999, to the dismay of many people who claimed it would lead to another Great Depression. Whoops. Canada kept their rules in place, and they have the most sound banking system in the Western world at the moment.
What GM official bribed a government official? While the crisis is proof of how America operates on an institutional level, bribery was not a factor in the takeover of GM.
Strengthen our democracy: How, by making people sit around their bong every night discussing the problems of the world? Like.. "Man... link um.. why do they fold those papers around those little sticks of gum? Can't they see we need to save some trees? Besides they taste terrible when folding a joint, their just disgusting."
Democracy as in, the population can decide what it wants to do with it's own country. Which may be hitting a bong and watching Pineapple Express. But perhaps they should be drinking Bud and killing families in their Ford pickups - a true American's Saturday night.
Promote efficiency: Get real, Marijuana and efficiency in the same sentence? Last I knew all my childhood friends were doing nothing with their lives. Just sitting around getting high with no aspirations in life. Several are dead from accidents, suicide, some perpetually in rehab clinics, and all living life day-t-day. Efficiency is not the first word on my mind.
Officers are no longer arresting people who aren't committing a crime. Carrying a joint in your pocket denies the freedom of no one. Then they can get to real crime, like rape, murder, theft, and so on. If you're more afraid of a guy in a Bonnaroo t-shirt playing the bongos than you are of a sociopath slitting your throat, well, you're probably a Baptist.
Making government more transparent: Ok, Marijuana is hallucinogenic for some people, but I doubt that the Government is going to get any more transparent that way.
The war on drugs has been used in the past to fund the CIA. They will be forced to get their money through official channels. Resulting in greater transparency. Maybe.
Collaborative: Ok, lets get this one definition straight. We are talking about the Government being more collaborative, not people sitting around talking about fantasies while smoking joints. How is legalizing Marijuana going to get the Government to improve on their collaboration skills?
I'm not sure either. Maybe they wrote that after they switched to hash that evening.
I know I'll get flamed, and I'm not trying to argue that it should or should not be legalized, but what the study is for and the conclusions being stated about Marijuana are just not related from my viewpoint. But as I remember back to 'hanging out' with my childhood friends, they usually were not thinking all so coherently about much of anything, and no doubt they were the ones 'brainstorming' here. So why would I think this study would be any different? Go figure.
Give me a pothead over an alcoholic any day. Bill Hicks said it best:
"They lie about marijuana. Tell you pot-smoking makes you unmotivated. Lie! When you're high, you can do everything you normally do, just as well. You just realize that it's not worth the fucking effort. There is a difference.... Let's see, do I want to go to a job I hate to work for a life I don't want to live, or stay home and learn how to play the sitar?"
The centerpiece of your argument is that people are not capable of governing themselves. If you take a smaller sample and put them in charge, why are they more capable of governing the others? Won't the smaller group just write the rules for themselves?
Republicanism is basically saying, "Look - you can't trust people, they might vote for their own interests. It's better to be oppressed by 10% of the population who know what's good for you, than 51% of the population who doesn't know what's good for themselves."
Republicanism is also inherently incompatible with the free market, since that is also a system of people governing themselves. You guys should pick one and stick with it.
The CIA has no constitutional basis, and the lack of accounting in the Pentagon is also unconstitutional. The fact that these are not part of your argument is revealing.
Federal control and federal funding are two different things, though often funding is used to "persuade" states into compliance.
The government is supposed to step in when the market breaks down - which it does often - and restore confidence in the economy. The methods they used could be argued, but I don't think anyone believes that the failure of Bank of America, Citi Financial, Wachovia, and all the rest would have helped the situation at all. The extra loss in confidence would have turned the whole country into people desperately holding on to their money, worsening the spiral.
The government is also good at providing infrastructure, and many countries consider health care and education part of their infrastructure - that is, the assets which make their country valuable. The countries that have nationalized pay less and are happier with their care.
I think the right is going to suffer from their arguments from the standpoint of morality. More and more people are returning to the idea that greed is immoral, especially income derived from interest, and if we're going to keep pot illegal, why not be truly conservative and legislate the rest?
If the status of a person isn't known, there is to be a tribunal. No tribunals were held to establish the status of persons before they were tortured or sent to Guantanamo. You can read the army field manual and see if that's the procedure that was followed.
As for Obama, I agree, he should have released everyone we have no evidence against. The problem being that we have radicalized each of the detainees, so if they were simple tribesmen before, now they may be a little pissed that they've lost years of their life and family members because of the colossal stupidity and cowardice of the Bush Administration. If you read any competent book on the subject, you'll discover that the legal black hole was foreseen as soon as the torture memos started circulating, but instead of listening to experienced army and FBI interrogators, the Bush Administration fired or excluded anyone who didn't agree with their flimsy legal contortions.
But let's ask a better question. If a group of Canadians bombed a building in China from training camps in Minnesota, would you accept a Chinese invasion? Would you demand that they provide evidence for the act, or allow them to attack Minneapolis with drones? Would you accept them rounding up any Canadian citizens and sending them to a base in Vietnam for "detainment" without due process, while secretly sending some of them to North Korea to be tortured - the same way we sent people to Syria and Egypt?
If you have no problem with the second scenario, then you have some moral ground to stand on. If you do have a problem and you still support what we did, you just a hypocrite.
Is America bound by any international treaty concerning warfare and the treatment of prisoners, which according to the constitution, must be followed? You should probably read the Geneva Conventions, Common Article 3. And then the Constitution.
If we want out of a treaty, I'm pretty sure that a memo sent between cabinet members and other appointed officials isn't quite kosher. I'll Godwin myself a little here: every totalitarian state provides legal pretext for it's actions, no matter how outlandishly conceived. To everyone but a small subset of dedicated partisans, people were tortured, sometimes to death, and not given due process. Whether that fact is important to you is something you have to decide.
We're spending about $30,000 a second for warfare. That's probably a little too much.
Let's put it another way - every time you hear about a missile strike in Afghanistan or Pakistan, they are using Hellfire missiles, which are $70,000 a piece. We've lost 70 of the drones in action in the last decade or so, which are 9 million each, not including the ammunition that went down with them. They require a team of 55 people to operate, according to Wikipedia, and I can't even guess how much they cost each minute to operate.
Why people defend these wars for reasons of economy is beyond me. Spending that much money to kill the possibly terrorist and possibly terrorist adjacent -- and radicalize the survivors -- seems like a losing strategy.
No, they were turned in by people who claimed they had weapons or who claimed that they were terrorists. If you started handing out cash in South Central L.A. for "known criminals," and you had no way to check their record, what do you think is going to happen?
Tribes turn in other tribes, just as in the slave trade days. It's one of the reasons a nation cannot dominate that region of the mideast - because they are not nationalists. Tribe and religion will always trump whatever flag is planted in the capital.
Now when do you think Chevron and Exxon will start licensing the patents the own on electric vehicle technology? Looking at their oil profits these days, I'd say after half of the Caribbean is under water.
The society I want to live in is one where everyone is empowered to accomplish great things. When everyone is powerful, then there can be no robber baron types that take advantage of the weak. There will be enough other powerful ones to keep them in check... Let me amplify on that. I've spent a lot of time working, living, and talking with poor people in this country and in other countries. They are not stupid, they are not weak, they are not incapable. The limiting factor keeping them from achieving is their lack of belief that they can achieve.
The real problem I have with that sort of sentiment is that it carries the same connotations as organized religion. If an entire portion of society suffers from the same affliction, is that a problem with the society or the individuals affected? Personal responsibility is important, but so is recognizing that societies that organize their government to help people are happier and healthier according to every source that I've looked at. There's no reason Americans shouldn't make the same choice.
I'm questioning this statistic of yours.....why do you think this? I would guess about an equal percentage of poor people and rich people are coldhearted thieves.
Look at how the poor are demonized for tricking people out of money, and the rich are exalted for it. Is this representative of some moral principle I'm unaware of?
Sure, but once again, this is not limited to rich powerful people. People from all classes are willing to work in the war industry.
Do you want your children to starve or are you going to show up to make landmines tomorrow? That's a tough question that should never be asked, and is only asked because of the tyrannical nature of corporations. Only a heavily propagandized group of people would prefer to build weapons instead of something else.
Yes, which is why it's not good that the poor not pay taxes. It helps keep them out of the political loop.
I see your point here, and perhaps it's an ingenious scheme to keep them apathetic. But blaming poor people for their plight isn't very different from blaming native Americans for not fighting back. You blame the people most responsible - the people with the most power. In that group I include myself.
While I agree that mass transit in the US is generally horrible, there is enough opportunity for people who are willing to work for it. Even in societies that are true monarchies like Prussia in the 1700s had enough opportunity for someone like Moses Mendelssohn... If he could do it in those days, what is stopping someone from doing it now? I'm not saying there aren't obstacles: but none of them are insurmountable.
That's a ridiculous position. Is that what society you want to live in? Hey kid, it's not impossible to overcome all the obstacles we have left in your way, but statistically speaking, there's a 35% chance we will have put you in jail by the time you are 25. Also, good luck working a job at McDonalds and trying to get an education at the same time.
However, I would point out that roughly 40% of Americans pay no federal income tax.
I would point out that the top one percent of the country own over 50% of it's assets.
Woah, do you really think every businessman is an unnatural man, with machine minds and machine hearts? That's a bit over the top......
No, but the most powerful usually are. And anyone in the war industry.
Yeah, that's what happens when you don't pay taxes anymore. You start not caring where they get spent as much. Which is why the tax code should be simplified and everyone should be required to pay some taxes. When your money is on the line, it gets you more involved. Of course the poor should not have to pay as much, but they should still contribute at least a little.
Slaves didn't pay taxes. They didn't have to, because their masters were the ones enriched by the work they performed.
Corporations have the same institutional structure as tyrannies. Notice that there is a big difference between a company and a corporation. The power they wield over their employees and the populace is radically different.
What Chomsky was saying, I think, is that the power structures in the world fear and despise anything that could dislodge them from their positions of prominence. Therefore, they had to abandon the aristocracy of monarchy and attached themselves to the aristocracy of corporate power.
So, when Wal-Mart wants to build a store in a small community that doesn't want the store, do they respect the will of the local populace, or through the power of legislation and bribery, do they muscle their way in? Is this the behavior of a tyrannical entity or a democratic institution that respects liberty? When RJ Reynolds discovered that their products were causing cancer, did they close down their factories and notify their customers, or hide the facts and continue lying to protect their profits?
Again, whatever the institution is supposed to be is irrelevant. The question is, to external entities, how does it act?
Well, I'm afraid I have to disagree with you. If by average, you mean well educated white person, I could agree - there's nothing you couldn't do. However, on the whole, and providing for rare exceptions, most people have little chance of success. Let me illustrate with a concrete example, and that is of transportation.
In the vast majority of American cities, without a car you are stuck with terrible and nearly unfunded mass transit. With a vehicle, your average commute is 20 minutes. Relying on local mass transit usually triples your commute time. So, assuming an 8 hour workday and 6 hours of sleep, you lose 10% of your free time to not having the car, assuming that you only leave the house to go to work. Add in trips to the grocery store and the bank, and you're talking about hundreds of hours lost each year.
Lots of little things add up over time. For instance, my grandfather bought me my first computer when I was 12. My grandmother gave me my first car when I was 16. A year later a friend of my fathers needed someone to type things up for him, and knew I was good with computers, and I had reliable transportation. So, I got my first job, where I learned valuable business skills, almost entirely because of the generosity of my relatives and the people I knew.
Someone with my same IQ and innate work ethic may not be so lucky. Maybe their entire family is poor, maybe their parents are dead or their sister is dying from some treatable disease but can't get insurance. I say this because I have known people similar to myself, who were never given the same chance. Some made it, but most did not. And if it comes down to giving a millionaire a bigger tax bill or giving every person the same opportunities, I choose the disadvantaged, because frankly, they are more valuable.
Also, I understand that the only thing worse than debutantes and their trust funds are the brilliantly successful and ethically challenged multi-millionaires who are willing to do anything for power. The people who believe the fact that they have power justifies whatever action they take, who actually complain when there are rules that prevent them from destroying the environment to take a profit, or from kicking out tenants before they have time to find a new place to live.
These are the people who sell cigarettes, who deny valid insurance claims, who sell landmines, who calculate the lawsuits from wrongful death versus the cost of a product recall. Chaplin called them "...unnatural men, machine men, with machine minds and machine hearts."
Or as they are known in America, great businessmen.
The choice is ours. But first we have to recognize what the reality is before we can determine whether we want to choose the same path or start a new one. How do you want to spend a quarter of a million dollars? Is it one day's worth of ammunition in a predator drone, or is it enough to feed a hundred thousand starving children for a month? Should the tax break give the millionaire another statue in his garden, or the tax increase provide a year's education for a child? There is a balance to these questions, but I am terrified that they aren't even being asked anymore.
But it still makes sense. A democracy will not be as efficient as a dictatorship in some cases, but it is still better if you believe in certain principles. Similarly, local and democratically controlled resources will not be efficient as a corporation in some cases, but it is still better if you believe in certain principles.
And in our society, where dollars are more important than votes, those with the most dollars have their own needs "most peculiarly attended to" in the words of Adam Smith. If immigration were bad for big business, they would close the border. Just as if the free market were good for big business, they wouldn't demand trade protections while trying to deny the same rights to their foreign competitors.
I've run several small companies, grossing from 500k to 6 million. I know about the red tape. I've also worked in larger corporations, and I know about their internal red tape.
What I've come to realize is that large corporations are inherently tyrannical. Further down another poster makes a salient point about China - it's very business friendly because it totally empathizes with the way they operate. Orders come from above and are not to be questioned. Conformity to this tyranny is a prerequisite to be invited to the party, and if you have a problem with the top rung management, good luck getting an audience with them.
Conversely, small businesses like the ones I prefer are far more democratic. The lowest paid employee often has direct contact with the owner. This makes his impact radically different than serving the function of something that has not yet been automated or outsourced. He has room for creativity, room to make a difference in how the business is run. He is a person instead of a process.
Your sig asks how the powerful became powerful in our country. Since we have moved so far away from the democratic ideal, of the rule of law and men being equals in front of it, to celebrating personalities and the new aristocracy of corporate power, the answer is that money has become more important than values. Those who are powerful in today's America accept that early, and exploit as many people as they can to achieve their wealth. The wealthy pass on the spoils of their exploits to their children, who dutifully try to replicate what their ancestors accomplished.
The problem with this system is that it is totally against free market principles. There is no merit or true value from making money from money. That's why usury laws are so important, and also why they vanished from our country early in the 20th century. That's why taxes were always raised when we went to war, to make sure the powerful weren't so quick to send our children off to die. When money is the only vote, what kind of society do you think you will end up with? Does Bill Gates or Steve Jobs really deserve billions of votes compared to the tens of thousands given to a school teacher? A person given these parameters should not be surprised at what the result is - a society that worships wealth and power, and engages in destroying the only check to that power, which is a democratic government.
But the cruellest of our revenue laws, I will venture to affirm, are mild and gentle in comparison of some of those which the clamour of our merchants and manufacturers has extorted from the legislature for the support of their own absurd and oppressive monopolies. Like the laws of Draco, these laws may be said to be all written in blood. --Adam Smith
How many of these war millionaires shouldered a rifle? How many of them dug a trench? How many of them knew what it meant to go hungry in a rat-infested dug-out? How many of them spent sleepless, frightened nights, ducking shells and shrapnel and machine gun bullets? How many of them parried a bayonet thrust of an enemy? How many of them were wounded or killed in battle? --Major General Butler, USMC Retired "War is a Racket"
If a corporation is hurt by a policy, something will be done. If average workers are hurt by a policy, nothing will be done, until the problem can no longer be ignored. It's one of the downplayed societal ills, since illegal immigration has been supported by Republican and Democrat administrations.
Large companies love a huge illegal immigrant population. The state picks up their health and education bills, and the illegal workers accept lower wages that can be used to threaten other workers with.
Yeah. If you read about all of the shit the military keeps secret for decades, something tells me that information week wasn't able to pull something the military didn't want to give.
So, what would you do if you wanted to learn the technical capabilities of the enemy? Try to hack into their location, or set up some seemingly vulnerable services and watch what they do? Double bonus: "leak" the break-in (wink wink) to Information Week and see what kind of celebration activity you can see on the lines. Hell, I'd be setting up false gold mines all over the place, and some with false information you know have been leaked through double agents already.
It's better for the military to see an attack vector earlier rather than later.
President Bush received a striking 78% of the votes of white evangelicals in 2004, up 10 percentage points from 2000 and by far his highest level of support from any demographic group in the population. As he began his second term in office, the president had an approval rating of 72% among evangelicals, compared with 50% in the public as a whole.
I read a little bit of your site. Your total lack of knowledge of Latin American history is quite impressive. The next time you wonder why the entire region is so poor, you should read the documented and declassified accounts of the CIA training terrorists to kill civilians in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Chile, Brazil, and many other places. Or look back at our wholesale invasions of Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Grenada, Cuba... I could go on.
The point about political power doesn't mean I like one or the other. But Obama is going to hire people who fit a well educated liberal's idea of qualified, and McCain would have picked someone who graduated from Jerry Fallwell's Liberty University. You can look back over the last 8 years and see how well that worked out.
Oddly enough, I just read that "Liberty" University closed down it's Campus Democrats chapter. At least they know where their funding comes from.
I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country. --Thomas Jefferson
This is consistent with what you have said as well, but however minimal he wanted the government, he obviously wanted corporations to be far less powerful.
A free market means no corporations, or some that are assembled temporarily for large contracted projects. Liberty from the monied aristocracy is far more important than liberty from government, since you are free to change government through a vote - which a person only has one of. Trying to dislodge a monied aristocracy when dollars are votes is nearly impossible.
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The Commerce Clause allows the government to do thinks like the Glass-Steagall Act of 1935 which created the FDIC, which regulated interstate commerce, which was entirely supported by the founding fathers, since the union of the states on a commercial level allowed the US to compete with Europe.
By the way, the Glass-Steagall Act was repealed in 1999, to the dismay of many people who claimed it would lead to another Great Depression. Whoops. Canada kept their rules in place, and they have the most sound banking system in the Western world at the moment.
What GM official bribed a government official? While the crisis is proof of how America operates on an institutional level, bribery was not a factor in the takeover of GM.
Strengthen our democracy: How, by making people sit around their bong every night discussing the problems of the world? Like.. "Man... link um.. why do they fold those papers around those little sticks of gum? Can't they see we need to save some trees? Besides they taste terrible when folding a joint, their just disgusting."
Democracy as in, the population can decide what it wants to do with it's own country. Which may be hitting a bong and watching Pineapple Express. But perhaps they should be drinking Bud and killing families in their Ford pickups - a true American's Saturday night.
Promote efficiency: Get real, Marijuana and efficiency in the same sentence? Last I knew all my childhood friends were doing nothing with their lives. Just sitting around getting high with no aspirations in life. Several are dead from accidents, suicide, some perpetually in rehab clinics, and all living life day-t-day. Efficiency is not the first word on my mind.
Officers are no longer arresting people who aren't committing a crime. Carrying a joint in your pocket denies the freedom of no one. Then they can get to real crime, like rape, murder, theft, and so on. If you're more afraid of a guy in a Bonnaroo t-shirt playing the bongos than you are of a sociopath slitting your throat, well, you're probably a Baptist.
Making government more transparent: Ok, Marijuana is hallucinogenic for some people, but I doubt that the Government is going to get any more transparent that way.
The war on drugs has been used in the past to fund the CIA. They will be forced to get their money through official channels. Resulting in greater transparency. Maybe.
Collaborative: Ok, lets get this one definition straight. We are talking about the Government being more collaborative, not people sitting around talking about fantasies while smoking joints. How is legalizing Marijuana going to get the Government to improve on their collaboration skills?
I'm not sure either. Maybe they wrote that after they switched to hash that evening.
I know I'll get flamed, and I'm not trying to argue that it should or should not be legalized, but what the study is for and the conclusions being stated about Marijuana are just not related from my viewpoint. But as I remember back to 'hanging out' with my childhood friends, they usually were not thinking all so coherently about much of anything, and no doubt they were the ones 'brainstorming' here. So why would I think this study would be any different? Go figure.
Give me a pothead over an alcoholic any day. Bill Hicks said it best:
"They lie about marijuana. Tell you pot-smoking makes you unmotivated. Lie! When you're high, you can do everything you normally do, just as well. You just realize that it's not worth the fucking effort. There is a difference.... Let's see, do I want to go to a job I hate to work for a life I don't want to live, or stay home and learn how to play the sitar?"
Or something like that.
The centerpiece of your argument is that people are not capable of governing themselves. If you take a smaller sample and put them in charge, why are they more capable of governing the others? Won't the smaller group just write the rules for themselves?
Republicanism is basically saying, "Look - you can't trust people, they might vote for their own interests. It's better to be oppressed by 10% of the population who know what's good for you, than 51% of the population who doesn't know what's good for themselves."
Republicanism is also inherently incompatible with the free market, since that is also a system of people governing themselves. You guys should pick one and stick with it.
If the government is helping to arrest or kill people, it is good.
If the government is helping people, it is bad.
The CIA has no constitutional basis, and the lack of accounting in the Pentagon is also unconstitutional. The fact that these are not part of your argument is revealing.
Federal control and federal funding are two different things, though often funding is used to "persuade" states into compliance.
The government is supposed to step in when the market breaks down - which it does often - and restore confidence in the economy. The methods they used could be argued, but I don't think anyone believes that the failure of Bank of America, Citi Financial, Wachovia, and all the rest would have helped the situation at all. The extra loss in confidence would have turned the whole country into people desperately holding on to their money, worsening the spiral.
The government is also good at providing infrastructure, and many countries consider health care and education part of their infrastructure - that is, the assets which make their country valuable. The countries that have nationalized pay less and are happier with their care.
I think the right is going to suffer from their arguments from the standpoint of morality. More and more people are returning to the idea that greed is immoral, especially income derived from interest, and if we're going to keep pot illegal, why not be truly conservative and legislate the rest?
If the status of a person isn't known, there is to be a tribunal. No tribunals were held to establish the status of persons before they were tortured or sent to Guantanamo. You can read the army field manual and see if that's the procedure that was followed.
As for Obama, I agree, he should have released everyone we have no evidence against. The problem being that we have radicalized each of the detainees, so if they were simple tribesmen before, now they may be a little pissed that they've lost years of their life and family members because of the colossal stupidity and cowardice of the Bush Administration. If you read any competent book on the subject, you'll discover that the legal black hole was foreseen as soon as the torture memos started circulating, but instead of listening to experienced army and FBI interrogators, the Bush Administration fired or excluded anyone who didn't agree with their flimsy legal contortions.
But let's ask a better question. If a group of Canadians bombed a building in China from training camps in Minnesota, would you accept a Chinese invasion? Would you demand that they provide evidence for the act, or allow them to attack Minneapolis with drones? Would you accept them rounding up any Canadian citizens and sending them to a base in Vietnam for "detainment" without due process, while secretly sending some of them to North Korea to be tortured - the same way we sent people to Syria and Egypt?
If you have no problem with the second scenario, then you have some moral ground to stand on. If you do have a problem and you still support what we did, you just a hypocrite.
Is America bound by any international treaty concerning warfare and the treatment of prisoners, which according to the constitution, must be followed? You should probably read the Geneva Conventions, Common Article 3. And then the Constitution.
If we want out of a treaty, I'm pretty sure that a memo sent between cabinet members and other appointed officials isn't quite kosher. I'll Godwin myself a little here: every totalitarian state provides legal pretext for it's actions, no matter how outlandishly conceived. To everyone but a small subset of dedicated partisans, people were tortured, sometimes to death, and not given due process. Whether that fact is important to you is something you have to decide.
We're spending about $30,000 a second for warfare. That's probably a little too much.
Let's put it another way - every time you hear about a missile strike in Afghanistan or Pakistan, they are using Hellfire missiles, which are $70,000 a piece. We've lost 70 of the drones in action in the last decade or so, which are 9 million each, not including the ammunition that went down with them. They require a team of 55 people to operate, according to Wikipedia, and I can't even guess how much they cost each minute to operate.
Why people defend these wars for reasons of economy is beyond me. Spending that much money to kill the possibly terrorist and possibly terrorist adjacent -- and radicalize the survivors -- seems like a losing strategy.
No, they were turned in by people who claimed they had weapons or who claimed that they were terrorists. If you started handing out cash in South Central L.A. for "known criminals," and you had no way to check their record, what do you think is going to happen?
Tribes turn in other tribes, just as in the slave trade days. It's one of the reasons a nation cannot dominate that region of the mideast - because they are not nationalists. Tribe and religion will always trump whatever flag is planted in the capital.
There's no profit in peacetime for friends of friends of the Pentagon.
Now when do you think Chevron and Exxon will start licensing the patents the own on electric vehicle technology? Looking at their oil profits these days, I'd say after half of the Caribbean is under water.
The society I want to live in is one where everyone is empowered to accomplish great things. When everyone is powerful, then there can be no robber baron types that take advantage of the weak. There will be enough other powerful ones to keep them in check... Let me amplify on that. I've spent a lot of time working, living, and talking with poor people in this country and in other countries. They are not stupid, they are not weak, they are not incapable. The limiting factor keeping them from achieving is their lack of belief that they can achieve.
The real problem I have with that sort of sentiment is that it carries the same connotations as organized religion. If an entire portion of society suffers from the same affliction, is that a problem with the society or the individuals affected? Personal responsibility is important, but so is recognizing that societies that organize their government to help people are happier and healthier according to every source that I've looked at. There's no reason Americans shouldn't make the same choice.
I'm questioning this statistic of yours.....why do you think this? I would guess about an equal percentage of poor people and rich people are coldhearted thieves.
Look at how the poor are demonized for tricking people out of money, and the rich are exalted for it. Is this representative of some moral principle I'm unaware of?
Sure, but once again, this is not limited to rich powerful people. People from all classes are willing to work in the war industry.
Do you want your children to starve or are you going to show up to make landmines tomorrow? That's a tough question that should never be asked, and is only asked because of the tyrannical nature of corporations. Only a heavily propagandized group of people would prefer to build weapons instead of something else.
Yes, which is why it's not good that the poor not pay taxes. It helps keep them out of the political loop.
I see your point here, and perhaps it's an ingenious scheme to keep them apathetic. But blaming poor people for their plight isn't very different from blaming native Americans for not fighting back. You blame the people most responsible - the people with the most power. In that group I include myself.
While I agree that mass transit in the US is generally horrible, there is enough opportunity for people who are willing to work for it. Even in societies that are true monarchies like Prussia in the 1700s had enough opportunity for someone like Moses Mendelssohn... If he could do it in those days, what is stopping someone from doing it now? I'm not saying there aren't obstacles: but none of them are insurmountable.
That's a ridiculous position. Is that what society you want to live in? Hey kid, it's not impossible to overcome all the obstacles we have left in your way, but statistically speaking, there's a 35% chance we will have put you in jail by the time you are 25. Also, good luck working a job at McDonalds and trying to get an education at the same time.
However, I would point out that roughly 40% of Americans pay no federal income tax.
I would point out that the top one percent of the country own over 50% of it's assets.
Woah, do you really think every businessman is an unnatural man, with machine minds and machine hearts? That's a bit over the top......
No, but the most powerful usually are. And anyone in the war industry.
Yeah, that's what happens when you don't pay taxes anymore. You start not caring where they get spent as much. Which is why the tax code should be simplified and everyone should be required to pay some taxes. When your money is on the line, it gets you more involved. Of course the poor should not have to pay as much, but they should still contribute at least a little.
Slaves didn't pay taxes. They didn't have to, because their masters were the ones enriched by the work they performed.
If you think the democrat party is democratic, you are someone who gets too much of their information from conservative rags.
Corporations have the same institutional structure as tyrannies. Notice that there is a big difference between a company and a corporation. The power they wield over their employees and the populace is radically different.
What Chomsky was saying, I think, is that the power structures in the world fear and despise anything that could dislodge them from their positions of prominence. Therefore, they had to abandon the aristocracy of monarchy and attached themselves to the aristocracy of corporate power.
So, when Wal-Mart wants to build a store in a small community that doesn't want the store, do they respect the will of the local populace, or through the power of legislation and bribery, do they muscle their way in? Is this the behavior of a tyrannical entity or a democratic institution that respects liberty? When RJ Reynolds discovered that their products were causing cancer, did they close down their factories and notify their customers, or hide the facts and continue lying to protect their profits?
Again, whatever the institution is supposed to be is irrelevant. The question is, to external entities, how does it act?
Well, I'm afraid I have to disagree with you. If by average, you mean well educated white person, I could agree - there's nothing you couldn't do. However, on the whole, and providing for rare exceptions, most people have little chance of success. Let me illustrate with a concrete example, and that is of transportation.
In the vast majority of American cities, without a car you are stuck with terrible and nearly unfunded mass transit. With a vehicle, your average commute is 20 minutes. Relying on local mass transit usually triples your commute time. So, assuming an 8 hour workday and 6 hours of sleep, you lose 10% of your free time to not having the car, assuming that you only leave the house to go to work. Add in trips to the grocery store and the bank, and you're talking about hundreds of hours lost each year.
Lots of little things add up over time. For instance, my grandfather bought me my first computer when I was 12. My grandmother gave me my first car when I was 16. A year later a friend of my fathers needed someone to type things up for him, and knew I was good with computers, and I had reliable transportation. So, I got my first job, where I learned valuable business skills, almost entirely because of the generosity of my relatives and the people I knew.
Someone with my same IQ and innate work ethic may not be so lucky. Maybe their entire family is poor, maybe their parents are dead or their sister is dying from some treatable disease but can't get insurance. I say this because I have known people similar to myself, who were never given the same chance. Some made it, but most did not. And if it comes down to giving a millionaire a bigger tax bill or giving every person the same opportunities, I choose the disadvantaged, because frankly, they are more valuable.
Also, I understand that the only thing worse than debutantes and their trust funds are the brilliantly successful and ethically challenged multi-millionaires who are willing to do anything for power. The people who believe the fact that they have power justifies whatever action they take, who actually complain when there are rules that prevent them from destroying the environment to take a profit, or from kicking out tenants before they have time to find a new place to live.
These are the people who sell cigarettes, who deny valid insurance claims, who sell landmines, who calculate the lawsuits from wrongful death versus the cost of a product recall. Chaplin called them "...unnatural men, machine men, with machine minds and machine hearts."
Or as they are known in America, great businessmen.
The choice is ours. But first we have to recognize what the reality is before we can determine whether we want to choose the same path or start a new one. How do you want to spend a quarter of a million dollars? Is it one day's worth of ammunition in a predator drone, or is it enough to feed a hundred thousand starving children for a month? Should the tax break give the millionaire another statue in his garden, or the tax increase provide a year's education for a child? There is a balance to these questions, but I am terrified that they aren't even being asked anymore.
But it still makes sense. A democracy will not be as efficient as a dictatorship in some cases, but it is still better if you believe in certain principles. Similarly, local and democratically controlled resources will not be efficient as a corporation in some cases, but it is still better if you believe in certain principles.
And in our society, where dollars are more important than votes, those with the most dollars have their own needs "most peculiarly attended to" in the words of Adam Smith. If immigration were bad for big business, they would close the border. Just as if the free market were good for big business, they wouldn't demand trade protections while trying to deny the same rights to their foreign competitors.
I've run several small companies, grossing from 500k to 6 million. I know about the red tape. I've also worked in larger corporations, and I know about their internal red tape.
What I've come to realize is that large corporations are inherently tyrannical. Further down another poster makes a salient point about China - it's very business friendly because it totally empathizes with the way they operate. Orders come from above and are not to be questioned. Conformity to this tyranny is a prerequisite to be invited to the party, and if you have a problem with the top rung management, good luck getting an audience with them.
Conversely, small businesses like the ones I prefer are far more democratic. The lowest paid employee often has direct contact with the owner. This makes his impact radically different than serving the function of something that has not yet been automated or outsourced. He has room for creativity, room to make a difference in how the business is run. He is a person instead of a process.
Your sig asks how the powerful became powerful in our country. Since we have moved so far away from the democratic ideal, of the rule of law and men being equals in front of it, to celebrating personalities and the new aristocracy of corporate power, the answer is that money has become more important than values. Those who are powerful in today's America accept that early, and exploit as many people as they can to achieve their wealth. The wealthy pass on the spoils of their exploits to their children, who dutifully try to replicate what their ancestors accomplished.
The problem with this system is that it is totally against free market principles. There is no merit or true value from making money from money. That's why usury laws are so important, and also why they vanished from our country early in the 20th century. That's why taxes were always raised when we went to war, to make sure the powerful weren't so quick to send our children off to die. When money is the only vote, what kind of society do you think you will end up with? Does Bill Gates or Steve Jobs really deserve billions of votes compared to the tens of thousands given to a school teacher? A person given these parameters should not be surprised at what the result is - a society that worships wealth and power, and engages in destroying the only check to that power, which is a democratic government.
But the cruellest of our revenue laws, I will venture to affirm, are mild and gentle in comparison of some of those which the clamour of our merchants and manufacturers has extorted from the legislature for the support of their own absurd and oppressive monopolies. Like the laws of Draco, these laws may be said to be all written in blood.
--Adam Smith
How many of these war millionaires shouldered a rifle? How many of them dug a trench? How many of them knew what it meant to go hungry in a rat-infested dug-out? How many of them spent sleepless, frightened nights, ducking shells and shrapnel and machine gun bullets? How many of them parried a bayonet thrust of an enemy? How many of them were wounded or killed in battle?
--Major General Butler, USMC Retired
"War is a Racket"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rs-nHQYY6Fg&feature=related
http://www.irs.gov/businesses/small/international/article/0,,id=97245,00.html
To leave the country, you have to pay taxes for all of your assets, and renounce your US citizenship if you'd like to stop paying the IRS.
I'm actually in favor of regulations against capital flight, but this is probably going a little too far...
If a corporation is hurt by a policy, something will be done. If average workers are hurt by a policy, nothing will be done, until the problem can no longer be ignored. It's one of the downplayed societal ills, since illegal immigration has been supported by Republican and Democrat administrations.
Large companies love a huge illegal immigrant population. The state picks up their health and education bills, and the illegal workers accept lower wages that can be used to threaten other workers with.
Yeah. If you read about all of the shit the military keeps secret for decades, something tells me that information week wasn't able to pull something the military didn't want to give.
So, what would you do if you wanted to learn the technical capabilities of the enemy? Try to hack into their location, or set up some seemingly vulnerable services and watch what they do? Double bonus: "leak" the break-in (wink wink) to Information Week and see what kind of celebration activity you can see on the lines. Hell, I'd be setting up false gold mines all over the place, and some with false information you know have been leaked through double agents already.
It's better for the military to see an attack vector earlier rather than later.
Sorry buddy.
President Bush received a striking 78% of the votes of white evangelicals in 2004, up 10 percentage points from 2000 and by far his highest level of support from any demographic group in the population. As he began his second term in office, the president had an approval rating of 72% among evangelicals, compared with 50% in the public as a whole.
http://pewresearch.org/pubs/78/evangelicals-and-the-gop-an-update
I read a little bit of your site. Your total lack of knowledge of Latin American history is quite impressive. The next time you wonder why the entire region is so poor, you should read the documented and declassified accounts of the CIA training terrorists to kill civilians in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Chile, Brazil, and many other places. Or look back at our wholesale invasions of Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Grenada, Cuba... I could go on.
The point about political power doesn't mean I like one or the other. But Obama is going to hire people who fit a well educated liberal's idea of qualified, and McCain would have picked someone who graduated from Jerry Fallwell's Liberty University. You can look back over the last 8 years and see how well that worked out.
Oddly enough, I just read that "Liberty" University closed down it's Campus Democrats chapter. At least they know where their funding comes from.
I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country. --Thomas Jefferson
This is consistent with what you have said as well, but however minimal he wanted the government, he obviously wanted corporations to be far less powerful.
A free market means no corporations, or some that are assembled temporarily for large contracted projects. Liberty from the monied aristocracy is far more important than liberty from government, since you are free to change government through a vote - which a person only has one of. Trying to dislodge a monied aristocracy when dollars are votes is nearly impossible.
The democrats owe their political power to people who believe in science. The republicans owe their political power to people who believe in God.