I just looked at the YHOO numbers and noticed there is no dividend. Watching some prophetic videos of Peter Schiff, he seems to be saying that every American stock is basically a speculative gamble, and that there is no place to invest in a company with a real balance sheet in the states.
Can anyone "in the business" comment on what he's saying? Is there a possibility of returning to the more formal method of investing as a stake/stockholder and receiving a share of real profits?
Russia did not invade Vietnam. The United States invaded Vietnam because it is an historically paranoid state, and feared that communism would takeover east Asia were the grass roots movements of communists not exterminated. Similarly today, we're fighting them "over there" instead of "over here." It's just the manufacture of an enemy image that every government uses to maintain power.
Hell, when it comes down to it, why not let the Cubans take over Florida. After all if you stop them there's a risk of nuclear war.
Are you really afraid of the Cuban army? Really?
The Russians placed those missiles in Cuba because we placed missiles very close to their own borders. They made the mistake of thinking that it was okay to follow our lead.
And people in Florida would much rather live in peace under communism than die in a war.
What if you were right? Would you let any democratic principles get in the way of your own abject idealism?
Once the commies take over there will be peace.
Oh no! The commies! The reds, pinkos, the socialists! Run for your lives! Seriously. Only an insane person can turn cowardice into a call to arms.
After all, absolutely no one died in Russia or China or Cambodia after the Communist victory when they decided to get rid of their enemies.
And how many slaves and Native Americans did we kill in the last 200 years when we wanted to get rid of them? How many Vietnamese died before 1975 and after? How many dictatorships have we sponsored with our money and military technology?
You may not think there is blood on our hands, but we have plenty. I know you desperately want to get to the death toll numbers in your rebuttal, but imperialism and colonialism still take the cake for human misery. And if you don't think that America is an imperial empire... well. We have 700 military bases in almost every country of the world, and outspend the rest of the world in military expenditures. What else could I say.
Believe it or not, everything someone says, just because they are affiliated with NSA, isn't always all propaganda or misinformation.
Correct. It is also always what they want you to hear. The chief enemy of every state is it's own people, because that's the most likely entity that will end their rule.
As far as intelligence agencies and "nuanced" truth, you only have to look at Operation AJAX. We quite simply overthrew a democratic government so we could have better access to oil. If you think any modern conflict is any different, I can only ascribe it to purposeful ignorance.
Even from an intelligence standpoint, the NSA and CIA are nearly useless. They didn't predict the collapse of the Soviet Union. They missed 9/11 by a mile. When they were trying to discover whether Ho Chi Minh was taking orders from Russia or China, the most they found was a single Russian newspaper at a Vietnamese Embassy. Their end analysis? The Vietcong were so loyal they didn't even need to receive orders, they "just knew" what their communist masters wanted. I think they call it "groupthink," though political malice seems like a much easier explanation.
They are just unaccountable agencies with no oversight that serve the interests of the ruling party, and as a side benefit inject technology into private industry for the benefit of the same power center. Everything they touch is propaganda, and they have no constitutional authority to exist. So, they shouldn't. One thing has not changed since the dawn of time: concentration of power in a centralized fashion leads to corruption and misery, whether it's in a government, corporation, or your local PTA. If you cover that up with secret budgets and unaccountable violence, you shouldn't be surprised that the results are so bad.
It seems that you want to have your cake and eat it too.
That of course, depends on your definition of cake. I'd prefer some organic fair trade bread in lieu of a Little Debbie sugar pile. Well, most of the time.
The "other nations", unless intimidated by the US military or other political forces, already do have freedom to choose what they want to produce.
Can you name a small country not intimidated by China, the US, or Russia?
Again, in theory, they have freedom. In practice, the dictatorships and governments supported by the United States always seem to have the same trait of serving US business interests, just like the countries supported by China and Russia are serving their interests. I single out America as an American, because it's the only place I have real influence.
Unless you believe people of other nations are idiots, they naturally chose the most profitable goods to produce, and your Fortune 500 companies buy them.
That's not the way it works. That would be trade that I believe in. Let's just take a random working paper from IZA which looks like a reasonably balanced third party. (Caveat - I gave their website a once-over. Consider it a "Palin" pick.)
In the paper concerning globalization and El Salvador, it plainly states that GDP has gone way up since the economic reforms of the 90s. That's often the statistic that's touted as progress. However, it also states that real wages for most workers have declined. It also states that almost 20% of the GDP is from workers who have fled to other countries and are sending money back home.
How does this happen? Well, it starts by giving corporate welfare precedence over indigenous rights by establishing Free Trade Zones. FTZs allow already rich corporations to build manufacturing centers that have almost no regulation - more commonly known as sweatshops. They don't have the same regulatory hurdles as local companies, they often corrupt local governments through huge infusions of cash (but not tax to benefit the rest of the population), and they don't pay tariffs. After a few years of operation, when the tax free period expires, the foreign investors threaten to leave if they don't retain huge tax breaks - there's certainly somewhere else in the world that has a more desperate and corrupt government. The local government usually concedes, the workers continue to be exploited (work for basically nothing or starve - what dishonest economists call "freedom" in the free market.)
Now, why would these people work for less money? Often at the same time as the establishment of the FTZs, another foreign investor buys up lots of farm land for agribusiness. Now there are tens of thousands of usually indigenous farmers thrown off of their land, who have no modern job skills and no home. Again, foreign investors profit, a small portion of local businessmen profit, corrupt governments profit, GDP goes up, trade goes up, and the rest of the population suffers. These are not accidents - they are done deliberately, since westerners can no longer depose local governments with brute force as they did in the decades following WWII.
The only way living standards for Americans will rise is when your Fortune 500 companies can buy labor from developing countries at dirt cheap prices, without that supply the prices of commodities will soar sky high, and you'll have to do the grunt work that the developing countries have been doing for decades.
Ahh. So if the developing countries have been doing that for decades, why have real wages declined in the US during those decades, and the top half percent of earners experienced a thousand percent increase in the same period?
Commodities are more effected by fuel prices than anything else (at least currently.) You are already paying for higher food costs because the real
Another magic trick of modern totalitarianism, passing as democracy through massive propaganda, is that you believe in things that simply don't exist - like the Invisible Hand of Adam Smith's imagining meaning something it does not. Here's the quote:
By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry, he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for the society that it was not part of it. By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good. It is an affectation, indeed, not very common among merchants, and very few words need be employed in dissuading them from it.
So the invisible hand was Adam Smith's belief that an Englishman would buy English products produced in England, or start a manufacturing company in England for English consumers.
However, this loyalty to one's country simply isn't implicit anymore, if it was, ever. Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel economist, states:
Whenever there are "externalities" - where the actions of an individual have impacts on others for which they do not pay or for which they are not compensated - markets will not work well. Some of the important instances have been long understood - environmental externalities. Markets, by themselves, will produce too much pollution. Markets, by themselves, will also produce too little basic research. (Remember, the government was responsible for financing most of the important scientific breakthroughs, including the internet and the first telegraph line, and most of the advances in bio-tech.)
But recent research has shown that these externalities are pervasive, whenever there is imperfect information or imperfect risk markets - that is always.
So, if you believe in a free market, globalization is very, very bad. GM is not failing because of the UAW (though they have many, many problems due to the UAW). GM is failing because it's being forced to compete with subsidized Japanese auto industry, and not receiving investment because of the inevitability of competing with Chinese automakers, which are a lot cheaper. Why? They can wreck their environment, exploit workers, and make unsafe products because China in many ways has a freer market than the US, if not a freer government. Why people are surprised that competition with third world countries wipes out entire manufacturing industries here at home, I'll never understand.
Repeat after me: I do not want a free market. I want a well regulated and competitive market that gives me the benefits of capitalist elements without wrecking the world in the process. I believe in liberty and equality and raising living standards for Americans, and trading with other nations so that they have the freedom to choose what they want to produce, not the "freedom" to sign up for another round of exploitation by Fortune 500 companies.
Anyway. There's good information on the Invisible Hand at the quite decent Wikipedia article, where I got my quotes from.
But in either case, you're dealing with totally different problems, and completely different challenges for elevations. You defended a river delta, not an archipelago.
Netherlands lowest point: Zuidplaspolder -7 m highest point: Vaalserberg 322 m
Maldives lowest point: Indian Ocean 0 m highest point: unnamed location on Wilingili island in the Addu Atoll 2.4 m
(CIA world fact book)
But if blinding patriotism helps you sleep at night, we've got an old politician who's about to retire, and isn't welcome in many places besides Crawford, Texas. You should give him a call.
I almost lost my coffee on that "mindshare" bit. Apple is pretty much at the forefront of yuppy technology "mindshare," and the SSD isn't standard - even on the Macbook Air. Not much of a chance the unwashed masses are looking at SSD any time soon, unless they're buying a workstation laptop replacement.
The tech is not at all price per gig competitive, and only Intel has an SSD that outperforms traditional hard drives on speed and battery life by any significant margin.
The coolest thing SSD could provide is a RAID-like array (with a REAL controller) in the size of a 2.5" hard drive, splitting up the memory banks for stripe, mirror, or combinations of the two, since the platters seem like they have reached a horizon for getting smaller. Some intelligent file systems could be laid on top of that, and could simply prompt when you first set up your computer for your chosen arrangement, and even switch later on if your storage needs change.
If you'd like some sources to any fact I've stated, I'll be happy to provide it. Stating that companies desire to secure profits is something that's acceptable. Stating that the same companies, if they are unable to survive without government sponsorship, shouldn't exist seems self-explanatory, yet doesn't remove the need for education, health care, or a common defense.
Also, stating the fact that western Europe outperforms the United States in health care and education, by virtue of results and per capita expenditures, isn't even debatable, it's just a simple fact. Just google and see for yourself. And if you think socialism isn't working, look at their national debt levels per GDP compared to ours and think again.
We actually have a pretense of a free market in the US, or at least we did until recently. Lead weights are good for diving but not hot air balloons.
S&L scandal? Lockheed? The nationalization of nearly every industry in WWII (because it was more efficient... but that wouldn't be suitable to your original argument, eh?) No bid contracts throughout the Iraq War? Not even counting the countries we've run over in order to better benefit US business, or the tariffs we've been giving agribusiness for years because they don't want to compete and suffer the same fate as the rest of our manufacturing industries. We believe in the free market when it suits the particular interest of the top tier of businessmen who, through their influence, help formulate policy. (Please deny that major players from the energy market helped formulate Bush policies. I beg you.)
K-12 public school education costs twice as much as private schools per pupil in the US, and private schools do a lot better.
From what I gather from this DoE study, private schools do out perform government schools, but not evangelical schools - mostly Catholic and Lutheran. I haven't studied in detail their performance metrics, but I imagine the fact that parents are invested in their child's education if they're paying for it. Not to mention I don't think there are too many private schools in urban ghettos, so the numbers are probably similar if it's restricted to similar population demographics. And please provide your source on private school costs.
We have the best mortality rates for cancer and heart disease. UK has among the worst
Source? From this source, the Journal of American Medical Association: "The US population in late middle age is less healthy than the equivalent British population for diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, myocardial infarction, stroke, lung disease, and cancer."
I never said free markets did solve all problems, but they solve most better than government does.
Such as? If that were the case, why in cases of national emergency are the resources of the country taken over by government? (WWI, WWII, Korea...)
Last time I checked, the US has the most college graduates of any country. Our worst college-educated state, West Virginia, has more college graduates than any country in Western Europe.
That's obviously false.
I laugh at a 100% gas tax. In America, we have this thing called freedom, and we like freedom in our daily lives, which includes driving. Freedom, economic, political, and personal, has allowed us in roughly 200 years to build an economy that dwarfs any other.
Nope. A strong state that has protected resources for US business interests has led to our wealth.
In fact, if California were a country, it would be the fifth biggest economy by some measures. Americans simply want a free lifestyle, not one dictated by central bureaucrats. Our oil dependence has not been utopian, but I don't believe in utopia. You certainly have your own problems in Europe, and most Americans wouldn't trade yours for ours.
I live in the southeast. And yes, a majority of Americans have been asking for socialized medicine, more education spending, more UN involvement in world affairs... pick any poll you like. Freedom and liberty have nothing to do with doing exactly what you want all the time.
Frankly, anyone who would quote a nut like Chomsky is hard to appeal to.
Provide one factual counter example to anything he's ever said, if in fact you've read more than quotes.
But I would submit to you that America did not quickly become the largest economy in the world by employing
That would explain why college education is less expensive per capita, and of comparable quality, and free across much of Europe. Oh, wait...
Any economist worth his salt will also tell you that giving out government loans to private institutions that exist purely to make a profit will always lead to price increases, while service industries like education, health care, local utilities, etc, are almost always better served by a single entity, regionally operated, that has no profit motive.
The only problem is when the false idea - that free markets solve all problems efficiently - is run up the flag pole, again and again, despite evidence to the contrary.
It's much easier to have an open government institution providing common necessities than it is to try and regulate private institutions that have no public interest, yet receive massive public funds. If you're serious about finding a solution, all you have to do is look around, and see what other countries have been doing successfully for years.
Everyone here laughed and laughed that the European governments charged a 100% tax on fuel, until about a year ago. Since those countries foresaw the inevitable, that tax reduced consumption, funded mass transit construction, and made them less dependent on countries like Saudi Arabia for their daily transportation needs. Here it would be called socialism; elsewhere, it's just common sense.
Sorry I missed this... wage slavery is constantly getting in the way of brain time.
...nay, a government that takes people's money and gives it to other people...
Taxes are one of the two undeniable realities of modern life.
and those same people who have freely and voluntarily entered into a community wherein they lovingly and willingly give of their possessions/wealth to help one another? Really? You don't see a difference? It ain't charity if I go to jail for not participating (by paying taxes). This sort of help is vastly different from welfare.
There is a difference, but local governments have to have two things: police power and money to operate. You're not going to get around it, unless you believe in some kind of unrealistic utopia. It's up to that locally operated community as to how far they would like to take social services, and I wouldn't even mind a "free" community existing that didn't pay into the government, as long as they were not allowed to use a single government provided resource.
God has specifically abrogated the Old Testament laws regarding food prohibitions (among other things). Read Acts 10:9-16 (read the rest of the chapter if you want to know the much greater application of this change).
Yes... I've read the New Testament, and I understand why the Roman Empire included certain books and excluded others in order to try and unify their empire. Which Bible do you read? Catholic? Mormon? Protestant? Gnostic? Which translation? Depending on which of these you've picked, Mary was a young girl or a virgin, and Judas was either a wicked betrayer or the only person who received the truth of Jesus' teachings... the devil is in the details, so to speak.
From where do you get this information? Are you adding in all the money that states and cities/townships spend on education? Are you aware that the vast majority of spending on public education is local and not from the federal government? If you are just looking at the federal government's budget, you would have a point. That is an inaccurate picture, though.
890 Billion is spent on warfare - federal budget only, including discretionary funds, not including tax breaks for Boeing, Lockheed, Blackwater, Halliburton... and education spending including municipal, state and federal budget and discretionary funds is 795 billion for FY 2007. Had the links somewhere, but lost over the past few days. (One of them was http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/index.php#usgs302)
There are many who want pastors who will tell them for whom to vote and never dig into the Scriptures to find out what God wants. I don't do this and get angry when I hear of other pastors who do.
And yet you both have made the same mistake, which is assuming that the Bible is the word of God in the first place.
That's really the foundational fault of American thought: an inability to engage in a critical analysis that goes beyond scraping the surface of accepted dogma. You may argue how to interpret the Bible as the word of God, but you are unable to consider the possibility that it may be the Qu'ran, or the Bhagavad Gita, or the oral traditions of the Iroquois...
This is what pisses me off the most about american politics. Where is the outrage over military spending? Why can't we cut investment in warfare to save taxes? How is it that the hawks are allowed to say, "We have the best military in the world!" and clap each other on the backs, and then in the next moment say, "But government schools are broken!"
All you have to do is look at the numbers, which make it obvious. If we spend ten times more on the military than on education, what else do we expect besides a paranoid (and frankly dumb) society that's always looking for some country to blow up?
I responded to you specifically because you are a Christian, or at least you felt the need to defend an imaginary difference between a democracy voting for what they want and a community participating in the way they see fit. (I do not support a powerful centralized federal government, but I don't believe that there is functional difference between a participatory county government and a commune - they both require compromise). So let me ask you directly, why don't the same people who spend millions trying to defeat gay marriage spend the same amount on stopping people from eating shellfish, since both are abominations? And how can you possibly justify spending more money on war than on education, welfare, and social services combined?
I'm seriously asking your opinion. I can't seem to get my head around it, except for this scripture: "For the time will come when men will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear."
I've been looking at China and southeast Asia in general, and it seems to me from what I've read that the rising cancer epidemic there is very good evidence.
According to even their own government, the rate is up due to pollution of the soil working it's way into their crops. There's also the factors of longer life span; new, awful, and Western eating habits; and more statistics becoming available, but I can't think of a single country that goes through industrialization where cancer rates stay low. It may be that everyone lives longer, but like you, I just have this hunch that covering everything in petrochemicals is a bad idea.
Ironically, it seems that countries like Cuba have the best chance of making the swing into the twenty second century. If global warming doesn't wreck their environment, they have already made it past peak oil, they have a thriving biogenetic industry, and no fundamentalist religious elements are stopping research. They still have no freedoms, and are being strangled by the US, but Castro's death should finally give us an excuse to stop looking like paranoid assholes. I wouldn't move there... yet.
One of the few ways to solve extremely complicated engineering problems is to pour billions upon billions of dollars into researching the problem. The only entity with enough money to do this is the government, and that's the same with nearly all technology. You may recall that computers were developed to solve military equations at huge expense to taxpayers.
The point is that the advantage of a free market isn't an advantage without huge welfare payments from the government. Why bother with corporations when we could simply continue directing our money towards technology that we want, doing things like building schools and colleges and hospitals that actually benefit taxpayers, instead of investing our money in destroying other humans.
Oh... you mean airplanes built with advanced technology which was developed with public money, under the banner of national defense?
Lockheed Martin, year 2007, received 33 billion dollars in contracts from the US government. (FYI, we spend 90 billion on the entire Department of Education. So there's an indication of priorities...) Every other private corporation that has developed radically new technology is pretty much the same - follow the money, and you end up at the DoD, or a public university, or some grant by the Department of Energy. But I understand if you don't... it would shatter your preconceived and anecdotal belief system that has nothing to do with reality.
Let's say you had a group of tool wielding apes who had advanced to such a high level of technology that their activities changed the environment, and upset millions of years of evolution and balance. Despite detecting this early on, they failed to adapt the way the transport themselves, the amount of natural resources they needlessly consume, and did nothing to change course.
Let's say those apes did not survive the correction that the environment made to re-establish equilibrium. Wouldn't that be a tragedy.
You can make all the excuses you want for yourself, but your children don't exist on rhetoric, they exist on planet earth. If you're even willing to take a chance on continuing the path that has led to the decline of every single system of life on earth since the industrial revolution, you're mad, or a fool, or both.
The epidemic of cancer is certainly proof that something that we are doing to the planet it making it and us very ill, let alone the undeniable evidence, built up over the last fifty years, that wherever industrial developments are, vibrant ecosystems are not.
"Now if the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms comes to disarm you and they are bearing arms, resist them with arms. Go for a head shot; they're going to be wearing bulletproof vests.... Kill the sons of bitches." -G Gordon Liddy, 1994, on his radio show
"It's always a pleasure for me to come on your program, Gordon, and congratulations on your continued success and adherence to the principles and philosophies that keep our nation great." -McCain, 2007, on Gordon's radio show
Your head is either in the clouds, or in the sand. If you think Bush pushed an Iraq invasion for any purpose but the acquisition of their oil resources, you're doing a great job of ignoring nearly one hundred years of history. This is the fifth time the US and/or Britain have invaded Iraq since oil became the most necessary component of the modern military. You may think it's a coincidence, but I urge you to read something besides opinion pieces.
The Bush White House may be saving him face for the moment, but I haven't seen any compelling argument against the dozen or so books that provide good evidence that he not only ordered the manufacture of the famed letter about Nigerian yellowcake, but went out of his way to have the CIA discredit all evidence - and there was a lot - to the contrary. Defending the president because he's the president is the sincerest imitation of soviet era politics, but so is destroying human rights for the sake of security.
James Kirchick is the former Ralph Nader supporter who couldn't land any writing jobs until he unabashedly began parroting neoconservative talking points, right? Who graduated Yale barely two years ago? What are you, part of the McCain campaign?
And your other source, Norman Podhoretz, is a member of the PNAC. The bias is so deep and obvious I can't even come up with a witty analogy for these two. Bravo.
Isn't the greatest trick the devil ever pulled convincing the world that he didn't exist?
He helped steal an election, out an undercover CIA agent, formulated lies that led our nation to war, may not see one day of jail for it, and can continue to deny that he was involved (of course, not on record). He can now join G. Gordon Liddy, Oliver North, and many others of the faithful party who have broken US and international law, and yet are somehow immune to the legal system.
Oh no! Virtual children in video games are dying! There are fake people taking fake drugs in a fake reality! Let's commence with worldwide outrage!
The Washington Post - isn't that the same newspaper that supported the Iraq war, which has killed and displaced tens of thousand of real children, and is still forcing young girls to sell their bodies so their families can eat?
I swear to God. The entire world lives in a fantasy land of anecdotes and paranoia. How about some news stories about things that actually matter, especially the ones that exist in reality...
(not directed at video game media, but the Post? Christ almighty)
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I just looked at the YHOO numbers and noticed there is no dividend. Watching some prophetic videos of Peter Schiff, he seems to be saying that every American stock is basically a speculative gamble, and that there is no place to invest in a company with a real balance sheet in the states.
Can anyone "in the business" comment on what he's saying? Is there a possibility of returning to the more formal method of investing as a stake/stockholder and receiving a share of real profits?
Russia did not invade Vietnam. The United States invaded Vietnam because it is an historically paranoid state, and feared that communism would takeover east Asia were the grass roots movements of communists not exterminated. Similarly today, we're fighting them "over there" instead of "over here." It's just the manufacture of an enemy image that every government uses to maintain power.
Hell, when it comes down to it, why not let the Cubans take over Florida. After all if you stop them there's a risk of nuclear war.
Are you really afraid of the Cuban army? Really?
The Russians placed those missiles in Cuba because we placed missiles very close to their own borders. They made the mistake of thinking that it was okay to follow our lead.
And people in Florida would much rather live in peace under communism than die in a war.
What if you were right? Would you let any democratic principles get in the way of your own abject idealism?
Once the commies take over there will be peace.
Oh no! The commies! The reds, pinkos, the socialists! Run for your lives! Seriously. Only an insane person can turn cowardice into a call to arms.
After all, absolutely no one died in Russia or China or Cambodia after the Communist victory when they decided to get rid of their enemies.
And how many slaves and Native Americans did we kill in the last 200 years when we wanted to get rid of them? How many Vietnamese died before 1975 and after? How many dictatorships have we sponsored with our money and military technology?
You may not think there is blood on our hands, but we have plenty. I know you desperately want to get to the death toll numbers in your rebuttal, but imperialism and colonialism still take the cake for human misery. And if you don't think that America is an imperial empire... well. We have 700 military bases in almost every country of the world, and outspend the rest of the world in military expenditures. What else could I say.
Believe it or not, everything someone says, just because they are affiliated with NSA, isn't always all propaganda or misinformation.
Correct. It is also always what they want you to hear. The chief enemy of every state is it's own people, because that's the most likely entity that will end their rule.
As far as intelligence agencies and "nuanced" truth, you only have to look at Operation AJAX. We quite simply overthrew a democratic government so we could have better access to oil. If you think any modern conflict is any different, I can only ascribe it to purposeful ignorance.
Even from an intelligence standpoint, the NSA and CIA are nearly useless. They didn't predict the collapse of the Soviet Union. They missed 9/11 by a mile. When they were trying to discover whether Ho Chi Minh was taking orders from Russia or China, the most they found was a single Russian newspaper at a Vietnamese Embassy. Their end analysis? The Vietcong were so loyal they didn't even need to receive orders, they "just knew" what their communist masters wanted. I think they call it "groupthink," though political malice seems like a much easier explanation.
They are just unaccountable agencies with no oversight that serve the interests of the ruling party, and as a side benefit inject technology into private industry for the benefit of the same power center. Everything they touch is propaganda, and they have no constitutional authority to exist. So, they shouldn't. One thing has not changed since the dawn of time: concentration of power in a centralized fashion leads to corruption and misery, whether it's in a government, corporation, or your local PTA. If you cover that up with secret budgets and unaccountable violence, you shouldn't be surprised that the results are so bad.
It seems that you want to have your cake and eat it too.
That of course, depends on your definition of cake. I'd prefer some organic fair trade bread in lieu of a Little Debbie sugar pile. Well, most of the time.
The "other nations", unless intimidated by the US military or other political forces, already do have freedom to choose what they want to produce.
Can you name a small country not intimidated by China, the US, or Russia?
Again, in theory, they have freedom. In practice, the dictatorships and governments supported by the United States always seem to have the same trait of serving US business interests, just like the countries supported by China and Russia are serving their interests. I single out America as an American, because it's the only place I have real influence.
Unless you believe people of other nations are idiots, they naturally chose the most profitable goods to produce, and your Fortune 500 companies buy them.
That's not the way it works. That would be trade that I believe in. Let's just take a random working paper from IZA which looks like a reasonably balanced third party. (Caveat - I gave their website a once-over. Consider it a "Palin" pick.)
In the paper concerning globalization and El Salvador, it plainly states that GDP has gone way up since the economic reforms of the 90s. That's often the statistic that's touted as progress. However, it also states that real wages for most workers have declined. It also states that almost 20% of the GDP is from workers who have fled to other countries and are sending money back home.
How does this happen? Well, it starts by giving corporate welfare precedence over indigenous rights by establishing Free Trade Zones. FTZs allow already rich corporations to build manufacturing centers that have almost no regulation - more commonly known as sweatshops. They don't have the same regulatory hurdles as local companies, they often corrupt local governments through huge infusions of cash (but not tax to benefit the rest of the population), and they don't pay tariffs. After a few years of operation, when the tax free period expires, the foreign investors threaten to leave if they don't retain huge tax breaks - there's certainly somewhere else in the world that has a more desperate and corrupt government. The local government usually concedes, the workers continue to be exploited (work for basically nothing or starve - what dishonest economists call "freedom" in the free market.)
Now, why would these people work for less money? Often at the same time as the establishment of the FTZs, another foreign investor buys up lots of farm land for agribusiness. Now there are tens of thousands of usually indigenous farmers thrown off of their land, who have no modern job skills and no home. Again, foreign investors profit, a small portion of local businessmen profit, corrupt governments profit, GDP goes up, trade goes up, and the rest of the population suffers. These are not accidents - they are done deliberately, since westerners can no longer depose local governments with brute force as they did in the decades following WWII.
The only way living standards for Americans will rise is when your Fortune 500 companies can buy labor from developing countries at dirt cheap prices, without that supply the prices of commodities will soar sky high, and you'll have to do the grunt work that the developing countries have been doing for decades.
Ahh. So if the developing countries have been doing that for decades, why have real wages declined in the US during those decades, and the top half percent of earners experienced a thousand percent increase in the same period?
Commodities are more effected by fuel prices than anything else (at least currently.) You are already paying for higher food costs because the real
Another magic trick of modern totalitarianism, passing as democracy through massive propaganda, is that you believe in things that simply don't exist - like the Invisible Hand of Adam Smith's imagining meaning something it does not. Here's the quote:
By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry, he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for the society that it was not part of it. By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good. It is an affectation, indeed, not very common among merchants, and very few words need be employed in dissuading them from it.
So the invisible hand was Adam Smith's belief that an Englishman would buy English products produced in England, or start a manufacturing company in England for English consumers.
However, this loyalty to one's country simply isn't implicit anymore, if it was, ever. Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel economist, states:
Whenever there are "externalities" - where the actions of an individual have impacts on others for which they do not pay or for which they are not compensated - markets will not work well. Some of the important instances have been long understood - environmental externalities. Markets, by themselves, will produce too much pollution. Markets, by themselves, will also produce too little basic research. (Remember, the government was responsible for financing most of the important scientific breakthroughs, including the internet and the first telegraph line, and most of the advances in bio-tech.)
But recent research has shown that these externalities are pervasive, whenever there is imperfect information or imperfect risk markets - that is always.
So, if you believe in a free market, globalization is very, very bad. GM is not failing because of the UAW (though they have many, many problems due to the UAW). GM is failing because it's being forced to compete with subsidized Japanese auto industry, and not receiving investment because of the inevitability of competing with Chinese automakers, which are a lot cheaper. Why? They can wreck their environment, exploit workers, and make unsafe products because China in many ways has a freer market than the US, if not a freer government. Why people are surprised that competition with third world countries wipes out entire manufacturing industries here at home, I'll never understand.
Repeat after me: I do not want a free market. I want a well regulated and competitive market that gives me the benefits of capitalist elements without wrecking the world in the process. I believe in liberty and equality and raising living standards for Americans, and trading with other nations so that they have the freedom to choose what they want to produce, not the "freedom" to sign up for another round of exploitation by Fortune 500 companies.
Anyway. There's good information on the Invisible Hand at the quite decent Wikipedia article, where I got my quotes from.
Sorry about that. I tell a lot of bad jokes.
But in either case, you're dealing with totally different problems, and completely different challenges for elevations. You defended a river delta, not an archipelago.
Netherlands
lowest point: Zuidplaspolder -7 m
highest point: Vaalserberg 322 m
Maldives
lowest point: Indian Ocean 0 m
highest point: unnamed location on Wilingili island in the Addu Atoll 2.4 m
(CIA world fact book)
But if blinding patriotism helps you sleep at night, we've got an old politician who's about to retire, and isn't welcome in many places besides Crawford, Texas. You should give him a call.
If Denmark was a series of extremely tiny islands, you'd have a point. But it's not, so you don't.
I almost lost my coffee on that "mindshare" bit. Apple is pretty much at the forefront of yuppy technology "mindshare," and the SSD isn't standard - even on the Macbook Air. Not much of a chance the unwashed masses are looking at SSD any time soon, unless they're buying a workstation laptop replacement.
The tech is not at all price per gig competitive, and only Intel has an SSD that outperforms traditional hard drives on speed and battery life by any significant margin.
The coolest thing SSD could provide is a RAID-like array (with a REAL controller) in the size of a 2.5" hard drive, splitting up the memory banks for stripe, mirror, or combinations of the two, since the platters seem like they have reached a horizon for getting smaller. Some intelligent file systems could be laid on top of that, and could simply prompt when you first set up your computer for your chosen arrangement, and even switch later on if your storage needs change.
Source?
If you'd like some sources to any fact I've stated, I'll be happy to provide it. Stating that companies desire to secure profits is something that's acceptable. Stating that the same companies, if they are unable to survive without government sponsorship, shouldn't exist seems self-explanatory, yet doesn't remove the need for education, health care, or a common defense.
Also, stating the fact that western Europe outperforms the United States in health care and education, by virtue of results and per capita expenditures, isn't even debatable, it's just a simple fact. Just google and see for yourself. And if you think socialism isn't working, look at their national debt levels per GDP compared to ours and think again.
We actually have a pretense of a free market in the US, or at least we did until recently. Lead weights are good for diving but not hot air balloons.
S&L scandal? Lockheed? The nationalization of nearly every industry in WWII (because it was more efficient... but that wouldn't be suitable to your original argument, eh?) No bid contracts throughout the Iraq War? Not even counting the countries we've run over in order to better benefit US business, or the tariffs we've been giving agribusiness for years because they don't want to compete and suffer the same fate as the rest of our manufacturing industries. We believe in the free market when it suits the particular interest of the top tier of businessmen who, through their influence, help formulate policy. (Please deny that major players from the energy market helped formulate Bush policies. I beg you.)
K-12 public school education costs twice as much as private schools per pupil in the US, and private schools do a lot better.
From what I gather from this DoE study, private schools do out perform government schools, but not evangelical schools - mostly Catholic and Lutheran. I haven't studied in detail their performance metrics, but I imagine the fact that parents are invested in their child's education if they're paying for it. Not to mention I don't think there are too many private schools in urban ghettos, so the numbers are probably similar if it's restricted to similar population demographics. And please provide your source on private school costs.
We have the best mortality rates for cancer and heart disease. UK has among the worst
Source? From this source, the Journal of American Medical Association: "The US population in late middle age is less healthy than the equivalent British population for diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, myocardial infarction, stroke, lung disease, and cancer."
I never said free markets did solve all problems, but they solve most better than government does.
Such as? If that were the case, why in cases of national emergency are the resources of the country taken over by government? (WWI, WWII, Korea...)
Last time I checked, the US has the most college graduates of any country. Our worst college-educated state, West Virginia, has more college graduates than any country in Western Europe.
That's obviously false.
I laugh at a 100% gas tax. In America, we have this thing called freedom, and we like freedom in our daily lives, which includes driving. Freedom, economic, political, and personal, has allowed us in roughly 200 years to build an economy that dwarfs any other.
Nope. A strong state that has protected resources for US business interests has led to our wealth.
In fact, if California were a country, it would be the fifth biggest economy by some measures. Americans simply want a free lifestyle, not one dictated by central bureaucrats. Our oil dependence has not been utopian, but I don't believe in utopia. You certainly have your own problems in Europe, and most Americans wouldn't trade yours for ours.
I live in the southeast. And yes, a majority of Americans have been asking for socialized medicine, more education spending, more UN involvement in world affairs... pick any poll you like. Freedom and liberty have nothing to do with doing exactly what you want all the time.
Frankly, anyone who would quote a nut like Chomsky is hard to appeal to.
Provide one factual counter example to anything he's ever said, if in fact you've read more than quotes.
But I would submit to you that America did not quickly become the largest economy in the world by employing
That would explain why college education is less expensive per capita, and of comparable quality, and free across much of Europe. Oh, wait...
Any economist worth his salt will also tell you that giving out government loans to private institutions that exist purely to make a profit will always lead to price increases, while service industries like education, health care, local utilities, etc, are almost always better served by a single entity, regionally operated, that has no profit motive.
The only problem is when the false idea - that free markets solve all problems efficiently - is run up the flag pole, again and again, despite evidence to the contrary.
It's much easier to have an open government institution providing common necessities than it is to try and regulate private institutions that have no public interest, yet receive massive public funds. If you're serious about finding a solution, all you have to do is look around, and see what other countries have been doing successfully for years.
Everyone here laughed and laughed that the European governments charged a 100% tax on fuel, until about a year ago. Since those countries foresaw the inevitable, that tax reduced consumption, funded mass transit construction, and made them less dependent on countries like Saudi Arabia for their daily transportation needs. Here it would be called socialism; elsewhere, it's just common sense.
Che "Che Guavara" Guavara
Chief Council
Association of Socialists Defending Life, Freedom, Justice, Knowledge, Alcohol, and Saxophones
(We really like jazz)
Sorry I missed this... wage slavery is constantly getting in the way of brain time.
...nay, a government that takes people's money and gives it to other people...
Taxes are one of the two undeniable realities of modern life.
and those same people who have freely and voluntarily entered into a community wherein they lovingly and willingly give of their possessions/wealth to help one another? Really? You don't see a difference? It ain't charity if I go to jail for not participating (by paying taxes). This sort of help is vastly different from welfare.
There is a difference, but local governments have to have two things: police power and money to operate. You're not going to get around it, unless you believe in some kind of unrealistic utopia. It's up to that locally operated community as to how far they would like to take social services, and I wouldn't even mind a "free" community existing that didn't pay into the government, as long as they were not allowed to use a single government provided resource.
God has specifically abrogated the Old Testament laws regarding food prohibitions (among other things). Read Acts 10:9-16 (read the rest of the chapter if you want to know the much greater application of this change).
Yes... I've read the New Testament, and I understand why the Roman Empire included certain books and excluded others in order to try and unify their empire. Which Bible do you read? Catholic? Mormon? Protestant? Gnostic? Which translation? Depending on which of these you've picked, Mary was a young girl or a virgin, and Judas was either a wicked betrayer or the only person who received the truth of Jesus' teachings... the devil is in the details, so to speak.
From where do you get this information? Are you adding in all the money that states and cities/townships spend on education? Are you aware that the vast majority of spending on public education is local and not from the federal government? If you are just looking at the federal government's budget, you would have a point. That is an inaccurate picture, though.
890 Billion is spent on warfare - federal budget only, including discretionary funds, not including tax breaks for Boeing, Lockheed, Blackwater, Halliburton... and education spending including municipal, state and federal budget and discretionary funds is 795 billion for FY 2007. Had the links somewhere, but lost over the past few days. (One of them was http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/index.php#usgs302)
There are many who want pastors who will tell them for whom to vote and never dig into the Scriptures to find out what God wants. I don't do this and get angry when I hear of other pastors who do.
And yet you both have made the same mistake, which is assuming that the Bible is the word of God in the first place.
That's really the foundational fault of American thought: an inability to engage in a critical analysis that goes beyond scraping the surface of accepted dogma. You may argue how to interpret the Bible as the word of God, but you are unable to consider the possibility that it may be the Qu'ran, or the Bhagavad Gita, or the oral traditions of the Iroquois...
They guy (a professor) explains that you can have a democracy or a Jewish state, but not both. Seemed pretty self-explanatory. Oh well.
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=a4f_1218414290
This is what pisses me off the most about american politics. Where is the outrage over military spending? Why can't we cut investment in warfare to save taxes? How is it that the hawks are allowed to say, "We have the best military in the world!" and clap each other on the backs, and then in the next moment say, "But government schools are broken!"
All you have to do is look at the numbers, which make it obvious. If we spend ten times more on the military than on education, what else do we expect besides a paranoid (and frankly dumb) society that's always looking for some country to blow up?
I responded to you specifically because you are a Christian, or at least you felt the need to defend an imaginary difference between a democracy voting for what they want and a community participating in the way they see fit. (I do not support a powerful centralized federal government, but I don't believe that there is functional difference between a participatory county government and a commune - they both require compromise). So let me ask you directly, why don't the same people who spend millions trying to defeat gay marriage spend the same amount on stopping people from eating shellfish, since both are abominations? And how can you possibly justify spending more money on war than on education, welfare, and social services combined?
I'm seriously asking your opinion. I can't seem to get my head around it, except for this scripture: "For the time will come when men will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear."
I've been looking at China and southeast Asia in general, and it seems to me from what I've read that the rising cancer epidemic there is very good evidence.
According to even their own government, the rate is up due to pollution of the soil working it's way into their crops. There's also the factors of longer life span; new, awful, and Western eating habits; and more statistics becoming available, but I can't think of a single country that goes through industrialization where cancer rates stay low. It may be that everyone lives longer, but like you, I just have this hunch that covering everything in petrochemicals is a bad idea.
Ironically, it seems that countries like Cuba have the best chance of making the swing into the twenty second century. If global warming doesn't wreck their environment, they have already made it past peak oil, they have a thriving biogenetic industry, and no fundamentalist religious elements are stopping research. They still have no freedoms, and are being strangled by the US, but Castro's death should finally give us an excuse to stop looking like paranoid assholes. I wouldn't move there... yet.
One of the few ways to solve extremely complicated engineering problems is to pour billions upon billions of dollars into researching the problem. The only entity with enough money to do this is the government, and that's the same with nearly all technology. You may recall that computers were developed to solve military equations at huge expense to taxpayers.
The point is that the advantage of a free market isn't an advantage without huge welfare payments from the government. Why bother with corporations when we could simply continue directing our money towards technology that we want, doing things like building schools and colleges and hospitals that actually benefit taxpayers, instead of investing our money in destroying other humans.
I'd be interested to read the study that has some statistical evidence to back your claim up.
Oh... you mean airplanes built with advanced technology which was developed with public money, under the banner of national defense?
Lockheed Martin, year 2007, received 33 billion dollars in contracts from the US government. (FYI, we spend 90 billion on the entire Department of Education. So there's an indication of priorities...) Every other private corporation that has developed radically new technology is pretty much the same - follow the money, and you end up at the DoD, or a public university, or some grant by the Department of Energy. But I understand if you don't... it would shatter your preconceived and anecdotal belief system that has nothing to do with reality.
Let's say you had a group of tool wielding apes who had advanced to such a high level of technology that their activities changed the environment, and upset millions of years of evolution and balance. Despite detecting this early on, they failed to adapt the way the transport themselves, the amount of natural resources they needlessly consume, and did nothing to change course.
Let's say those apes did not survive the correction that the environment made to re-establish equilibrium. Wouldn't that be a tragedy.
You can make all the excuses you want for yourself, but your children don't exist on rhetoric, they exist on planet earth. If you're even willing to take a chance on continuing the path that has led to the decline of every single system of life on earth since the industrial revolution, you're mad, or a fool, or both.
The epidemic of cancer is certainly proof that something that we are doing to the planet it making it and us very ill, let alone the undeniable evidence, built up over the last fifty years, that wherever industrial developments are, vibrant ecosystems are not.
"Now if the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms comes to disarm you and they are bearing arms, resist them with arms. Go for a head shot; they're going to be wearing bulletproof vests. ... Kill the sons of bitches." -G Gordon Liddy, 1994, on his radio show
"It's always a pleasure for me to come on your program, Gordon, and congratulations on your continued success and adherence to the principles and philosophies that keep our nation great." -McCain, 2007, on Gordon's radio show
Oh, hypocrisy! Does your comedy know no bounds?
Your head is either in the clouds, or in the sand. If you think Bush pushed an Iraq invasion for any purpose but the acquisition of their oil resources, you're doing a great job of ignoring nearly one hundred years of history. This is the fifth time the US and/or Britain have invaded Iraq since oil became the most necessary component of the modern military. You may think it's a coincidence, but I urge you to read something besides opinion pieces.
The Bush White House may be saving him face for the moment, but I haven't seen any compelling argument against the dozen or so books that provide good evidence that he not only ordered the manufacture of the famed letter about Nigerian yellowcake, but went out of his way to have the CIA discredit all evidence - and there was a lot - to the contrary. Defending the president because he's the president is the sincerest imitation of soviet era politics, but so is destroying human rights for the sake of security.
James Kirchick is the former Ralph Nader supporter who couldn't land any writing jobs until he unabashedly began parroting neoconservative talking points, right? Who graduated Yale barely two years ago? What are you, part of the McCain campaign?
And your other source, Norman Podhoretz, is a member of the PNAC. The bias is so deep and obvious I can't even come up with a witty analogy for these two. Bravo.
Isn't the greatest trick the devil ever pulled convincing the world that he didn't exist?
He helped steal an election, out an undercover CIA agent, formulated lies that led our nation to war, may not see one day of jail for it, and can continue to deny that he was involved (of course, not on record). He can now join G. Gordon Liddy, Oliver North, and many others of the faithful party who have broken US and international law, and yet are somehow immune to the legal system.
Oh no! Virtual children in video games are dying! There are fake people taking fake drugs in a fake reality! Let's commence with worldwide outrage!
The Washington Post - isn't that the same newspaper that supported the Iraq war, which has killed and displaced tens of thousand of real children, and is still forcing young girls to sell their bodies so their families can eat?
I swear to God. The entire world lives in a fantasy land of anecdotes and paranoia. How about some news stories about things that actually matter, especially the ones that exist in reality...
(not directed at video game media, but the Post? Christ almighty)