I feel like I made the point succinctly, but it's worth restating. If Saudi Arabia formed a democracy and demanded the nationalization of it's oil industry, they would no longer be an ally of the United States. It happened in Iran in 1953, Iraq, and even in this century, when we helped to try and overthrow Venezuela in 2002. Here's a list, with the year and the country, of the countries we've attempted to overthrow, attack, or prop up against popular indigenous movements, in order to maintain control and control resources:
1953 Iran 1954 Guatemala 1955 Vietnam 1956 Hungary 1957 Laos 1959 Haiti 1961 Cuba, Congo, Ecuador Dominican Republic 1963 Dominican Republic, Ecuador 1964 Brazil 1965 Greece, Congo, Dominican Republic, Indonesia 1967 Greece 1970 Cambodia 1971 Bolivia 1973 Chile 1975 Angola 1980 El Salvador 1986 Haiti 1988 Columbia 1989 Panama 1990 Haiti 1993 Haiti 2002 Venuezuela 2003 Iraq
If you have any historical evidence to the contrary, I'd love to read about it.
In 1953, Iran made the mistake of kicking out Anglo-Persian oil, and forming a democracy. Up until that point, they had been treated as Saudi Arabia has up until now. As soon as they decided that they wanted more - not even all - of the oil revenues from under their own feet, we responded by forming a covert operation with British Intelligence, in Operation Ajax, which destroyed their democratic government simply because it hurt the profits and interests of America and Britain. Please note that these facts are not contested by anyone - they are simply a matter of public record.
Hugo Chavez is an enemy of the United States because he has followed in the foot steps of Fidel Castro and declared independence from the west. Also, he has publicly railed against their policy on terrorism. Obviously anything from a president is usually state propaganda, but just watch for a few scenes from minute 15:30 from The Revolution Will Not Be Televised. I disagree with a lot of his policies, and I'm disappointed that he's been shutting news outlets, but at least I understand the reason why it's happening.
Again, what you think you know is through the filter of corporate mentality, if you get your news from the United States. The suppression is built in - no journalist who disagrees with the bosses ideas are hired. The boss is the CEO of a huge corporation.
You put it succinctly yourself, and that's the real problem:
Saudi Arabia is treated well by the US and the West because they have a policy of friendship and cooperation with us.
Despite the fact that Saudi Arabia supports beheadings and the severing of limbs, they have a court system where non-Muslims are not allowed to testify, and women aren't allowed either because:
Women are much more emotional than men and will, as a result of their emotions, distort their testimony.
Women do not participate in public life, so they will not be capable of understanding what they observe.
Women are dominated completely by men, who by the grace of God are deemed superior; therefore, women will give testimony according to what the last man told them.
Women are forgetful, and their testimony cannot be considered reliable.
(from wikipedia)
So, does anyone suggest that we invade Saudi Arabia to bring freedom and democracy there?
I don't. But I would, as a conscientious person, like to avoid making it easier for their government to continue unabated. You may have a different opinion. Look at what we have done in the past, and decide for yourself if our policies need change.
The US created the mess, now they got to clean it up. Do you really want Iraq to be the next Korea or Vietnam, where decades later the mess is still making the US look bad?
Who had more democratic freedoms: Vietnam or Saudi Arabia? And how does that make the US look bad?
The war in Iraq has happened, you can now not just say "well, we don't want it anymore, bye bye." and pull out.
But you could say, "Here you go, Iraq: run your own country." But then they could do something unacceptable, like support Palestine with their oil revenues, or form friendly relations with Iran. True Iraqi sovereignty is the real disaster. Killing Arabs is just something the West seems to do for sport.
A really good future leader of the US would two things. A: accept that the situation MUST be resolved and stop playing the blame game or making promises to do things that you can't do because the enemy might not let you and B: turn the blame game into a seperate issue and truly investigate what the hell happened and if there was any wrong doing and take it to court.
Even Obama will be unable to bring any US politician to justice. We are still illegally supporting too many war crimes, so it would just set a precedent to have himself thrown in jail. He's already publicly supported the illegal occupation in Palestine.
A: must be done because if you don't Iraq will be mess and that might easily spill over. And B: must be done because else these things will just happen over and over, just like Vietnam, just like Korea, just like Somalie and countless other conflicts were the US screwed up and ran.
The correct option is not listed, which is not to get involved in the affairs of sovereign nations in the first place, unless at the direction of the only governing body with legal treaties with virtually all nations: the UN.
In the meantime, the rest of the world really needs to start shaping up. Stop relying on the US. Europe is richer then the US but doesn't have any real military power. Don't blame the US for being a poor police men if you just sit at home not doing anything.
Europe is not run by public relations companies who are dedicated to creating a perpetual state of unfounded paranoia. They have given up their colonial days, and are far better for it. This is the same reason Mexico doesn't arm itself against Cuba. There simply isn't any threat.
The rest of the world after all has a intrest to in a peaceful world. Look what happened in africa after the US ran, piracy in that corner of the world is now a serious issue. What will happen in Iraq in 10-20 years if the west withdraws now?
You're forgetting half a millennia of history for no good reason. Africa was purposefully suppressed by the West for centuries, and continued even into the eighties, when America was the only nation left materially supporting the South African regime that was brutalizing their nation with apartheid. If the west leaves, the same thing that happened in China or India or Brazil could happen: They could elect their own government, do as they wished, and choose to co-operate with the west or not without repercussions.
No, the war has happenend, deal with the why and how in the courts, but you can't ignore it and say you are going to withdraw by date X because that doesn't solve anything and give your enemy a clear goal, if only we hold out till date X we have won.
We lost the war on terrorism the moment the first Afghani was held without charges. It proved that Al Qaeda was right: the west cares about human rights only for itself. The rest of the world simply doesn't matter.
One of the more scary ideas I've heard is that the deficit spending is popular because they know Republicans won't be in the white house forever. They jack up the national debt so any new social projects can't receive enough funding to be effective, thus "proving" that government doesn't work, thus giving them another round of starting wars, cutting their own taxes, and profiteering.
Suppose that every day, ten men were asked to contribute their nation in return for the social services and infrastructure it provided.
The first four men (the poorest) could pay nothing. They made $4 or less that day, and couldn't afford it. The fifth would pay $1. He made $8 that day, and he could chip in. The sixth would pay $3. He made $16 that day, and could pay more. The seventh would pay $7. He made $32 that day, and he could pay more. The eighth would pay $12. He made $50 that day, and he could pay more. The ninth would pay $18. He made $75 that day, and he could pay more. The tenth man (the richest) would pay $59. He made $350 that day, so he could pay more.
Then, this terrorist liberal bedwetting man became president. He told the richest people that they would pay more in taxes, and that the vast majority of people would pay less in taxes. He did this based on the wisdom of a man named "Adam Smith," whom everyone had heard of and been taught to worship, though they were not encouraged to actually read the Wealth of Nations.
The richest man got upset, and said, how much more will I pay for the infrastructure that allows me to be in business in the first place? Then he miraculously realized that the money spent on education, infrastructure, market regulation, and all social services are the things that separate industrial nations from the third world. That stronger economy would have less crime, poverty, and spend less money on health care because it would cut out the bureaucracy and greed of the privatized system.
Ahh well. This is a fantasy scenario, isn't it?
PS: New political support for socialized medicine, which has been the wish of the vast majority of americans for two decades, has nothing to do with recent complaints by GM.
First, implicit in your statement, is the idea that America has some sort of right to be the only country involved in invading other sovereign nations, regardless of the reason.
Second, US allies can be assured that they will be abandoned the moment they are no longer useful to the US. That's why we left South Vietnam after killing millions of people. We were done making money and rattling sabers at China and Russia. They can also be assured that they will not have our support the moment they stop doing exactly as we say. Do you honestly think that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia would be treated the same if they overthrew their monarchy and nationalized their oil industry? For more insight on that, read the histories of Venezuela and Iran and Iraq.
Furthermore, there is already a legal governing body that has signed treaties with most of the countries in the world, which has the authority to intervene in the case of invasion. The problem is that this organization, the UN, doesn't always do as we want. So they are irrelevant.
Let's go back to the geographical problem of leaving Iraq. Saddam Hussein had our explicit support for years because he played ball. We sold him weapons to gas the kurds. We took his country off of the terrorist to do so, sold him weapons to kill Iranians, after they dared to form their own government and kick our corporations out.
It made no difference to America how many Kurds he killed, though we knew about it. It made no difference to America how many were mowed down by his helicopters after we left. It makes no difference now that Turkey, one of our allies, is busy exterminating Kurds in their country and even attacking positions in the territory of Iraq. Just as it makes no difference to us that dissidents and blasphemers of Islam are beheaded in Saudi Arabia, or that our trading partner China executes people without proper trials, or that Indonesia is committing genocide with American made weapons in East Timor, or that Israel is slowly destroying the Palestinian people, just as our former long-term ally South Africa did during apartheid.
Any time America declares some moral cause for war, remember these things. It's always bullshit: a pretext for power, resources, or strategic advantage.
How naive are you to believe that we're in Iraq for any other purpose than oil? They have one hundred trillion dollars under their feet. Otherwise Saddam, as long as he was doing as the King of Saudi Arabia and following orders, would still be murdering whoever he wanted, whenever he wanted, without any comment from the United States, besides material support and weapons to complete the job.
The bungling Bush Administration, whose long term vision of the Middle East is so delusional it's almost incomprehensible, has done Iran a huge favor by destroying the only two countries besides Russia with any power in that region. The real threat is that the Shia majority, who happens to sit on all the oil that "belongs to us," has the right to vote in Iran. And since Iran does have a military that hasn't been decimated by years of embargo, we can't play the same game as we did in Iraq.
If we stay in Iraq, it will bankrupt us. If we leave, and allow Iraq to have true democracy, they will form a strong relationship with Iran, and even more terrifying to the Pentagon, may inspire Saudi Arabia to have the same democratic freedoms.
We're staying to protect our investment, which is oil. Not freedom, democracy, or all of the others things that we ridiculously claim to believe in.
1. Not sure what that has to do with anything. Sure, he grew up on welfare. He lives in a $1M+ house now. According to the logic of people that like to play the class warfare game, you don't get to that place in life without screwing people. So, what makes him better than the other multimillionaire running just because he USED to be poor.
He doesn't make enough money to be a puppet master... he's in the lower echelon of millionaires. He may qualify somewhat with harvard, but he didn't attend the correct secret society in college.
It's funny that class warfare has gained such a negative connotation, almost as if it couldn't possibly exist. If you read about 18th Century France, they explain in detail how the very top foments division in the ranks below to ensure that their power isn't threatened. The myths passed along in American class rooms don't tell you that the same thing happened here. Super wealthy landowners, concerned about the threat of Indians and slaves and white peasants joining forces, came up with the plan of giving poor whites free land in the frontier. Not only would they act as a buffer for the properly wealthy, but they would learn to hate Indians, pay taxes for wars against them, just as those same whites would divide their slaves into "field" hands and "house" slaves.
Today, most people who are millionaires, or who aspire to be, are fed enormous amount of propaganda in order to properly fear blacks, mexicans, or anyone who dares to desire what everyone else in the western world considers a right - the right to health, the right to an education, and the right to unionize.
Just as Germany does not spend it's time in panic about the rise of Putin's Russia, since they have been on the receiving end of wars and want no part of them, people who have been broke also have a very different worldview, for the most part. Obama's not my ideal candidate, but McCain and Palin are war mongers who aren't afraid to admit it.
2. He's only talking about attacking a symptom. "Income inequality" is not the core problem of our culture. It comes from a lack of opportunity. That lack of opportunity exists in the form of a third rate government monopoly (remember Slashdotters... monopolies are bad... not just with corporations) on education. That problem is even worse in poorer rural and urban areas.
The education system is broken, but it's a lack of funding, and the odd success of right wing efforts to make it appear that government schooling just can't work, and it will always be awful. Well, the reason it is awful is because we spend less public money on education than anyone else in the western world. My assumption is that all the hawks see that America is continuing to trend towards European-style democracy, which would be disastrous for them. If kids aren't attending evangelical schools, learning that America is the land of Jesus and that foreigners are evil, while receiving an education that tests worse than public schools, I might add, they may end up like Europe, where silly myths like Creationism are dismissed without comment, and church attendance is down to 10 or 20%.
The top of the food chain likes being super wealthy. They believe that the masses are too stupid to govern themselves, so you have to do everything you can to convince them that they are powerless, and that participating in their government wouldn't do any good. This allows them to spend 90 billion a year on the Department of Education, and one trillion dollars a year on war, without any comments in the media about that simple truth: we have the best military in the world because it receives the most government funding. We have the worst education in the world because it receives the least government funding.
Add to that the social influences that teach people that if you're successful you must have cheated because no one can get ahead without being corrupt. So, young children who need a p
It is a crime for someone with enough knowledge to help you by giving legal advice - can't allow competition you know.
No, it isn't, unless you claim you are a lawyer.
Basically, the lawyers write the laws to make themselves richer. And you are going to elect another one to the highest office now.
A lawyer who has 1) grown up on welfare, 2) has shown at least some interest in returning balance to income inequality which threatens our entire culture, and 3) will replace the Bush Administration with a cabinet full of something besides the Bush Administration.
If the ABA were under government oversight, you could pressure your congressperson to change the way it runs, or cut their funding. Since it has no governmental oversight, all you can do is bitch. That's the "freedom" of unregulated but necessary industry - they're free to extort money, you're free to waste your breath complaining about it.
If corporations don't pay taxes, then they shouldn't have the rights of entities that do pay taxes.
Your attack on government bureaucracy is actually funny. Consider that we spend twice as much on health care as any other industrialized nation, because we are the only industrialized nation with a private health care system. Despite all the anecdotes to the contrary, according to things called "polls," which have a well known reality bias, Americans are the least satisfied with their health care.
So why would the establishment be against social medicine? Because it's repulsively profitable for pharmaceutical industries, and all the layers of corporate mess designed not to heal anyone, but to extend their suffering in order to make more profit.
This is of course plainly obvious to any person who wishes to think rationally: corporations have no incentive to deliver a product efficiently when it's something that every human requires. They have the choice of a guaranteed sale at a decent profit, or a guaranteed sale at a huge profit. Which one would you choose? That's why all utilities are heavily regulated, and water is always a public utility. Health care should be no different, and there is zero evidence that shows that private medical systems are more effective than socialized ones.
Officially, the Pentagon has requested and received 3.2 trillion dollars worth of funding, from 2001-2008. You can look at any official federal budget.
This does not include discretionary funds for the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars or nuclear weapons development. When you add in the interest we pay to borrow money to sink into war (as it's portion of the budget deficit), the figure is even higher.
Most of the assets you speak of have been gained in wars deemed illegal by international law. In truth, they're supposed to belong to the people indigenous to that country. That opinion, however, is not held by many Americans, since we are holding the rifles, and not in the sights of someone else.
If America spent what the rest of the world does per capita, it would be less than 200 billion per year, including wars. Why are we spending five times that? Because it is very difficult, very costly, and very dangerous to rule the world with threats of violence and war.
I've always been a believer in opt-in economy. Just mark huge swaths of land as "government-free" counties. No government means: no roads, bridges, water treatment, fire stations, EMTs, hospitals, or regulated utilities. You buy the land, you move there, you're on your own.
Then, all of the libertarians declaring that government is intrinsically evil can negotiate with utility companies to run power lines, open restaurants without any health inspections, and do their work without OSHA or fire regulations. After a few decades you would find that they had done something remarkable, and that is formed their own government with exactly the same rules.
A kid dies from salmonella poisoning from the burger joint - now health inspections are mandatory. Four men die in a fire in a building that had no fire suppression system, and now that's a requirement. The company firehouse is done away with because they bungled their badging system, and let someone's business burn to the ground who was actually a member. A local court system developed after blood feuds threatened to throw the whole county into chaos, and it's now illegal to conceal firearms after a judge was assassinated. Voting regulations have been established after the banker buys four consecutive elections, which resulted in all road construction projects benefitting his new housing development... I could elaborate, but you probably get the point.
Government is a necessary evil, but not all governments are evil. The only thing that turns a state into a negative entity is when concentrated power, economic chaos, or external military invasion takes the power away from the population, which does occur much of the time. The solution is not to take the resources of the nation place it outside the grasp of it's population, but exactly the opposite. In my experience, I've had much better relationships with local (albeit small) government utilities than I have with AT&T or any other large corporation, mainly because the top of the chain ends within a few miles of my business - I can go talk to (or berate) the person in charge. The top of the chain of any large corporation is simply unreachable, and the AT&T rep doesn't really care if my phone service is reliable or not - where else am I going to go? And if we have four phone companies running lines, how long before three are swallowed by the one with the most money? And if you regulate the monopolies, what's the difference between local governmental control (notice I didn't say federal) besides greasing the pockets of useless executive boards?
People like Joe the Plumber don't understand that part of the infrastructure of the united states is the working population. If those workers have a safe neighborhood, reasonable pay, and voluntarily pay extra taxes to socialize industries that perform poorly under free markets, the whole economy is better for it. Not only because the basics of the western world will be less expensive, but because entrepreneurs will be incentivized to tackle new ideas, instead of swindling money out of decades old problems that have already been solved. If corporations weren't busy creating inefficient markets for the sake of making more money, we'd still have many things that europe has kept - functioning mass transit systems, lots of investment in education, low poverty rates, more equal distribution of wealth -- that is a measure of the health of an economy, by the way -- and the right to organize in unions.
Or, you can be concerned by paying an extra 4% of tax, only on money earned over 250,000 per year.
By the way, where is Fred the Accountant, asking McCain why he supported Roe v. Wade in 2000? Or why he wants the Federal Government to legislate what marriage is? Or why Falwell was no longer an agent of intolerance? Or why he said in 04 that taxing the wealthy a bit more was okay? The truth is, Joe the Plumber wouldn't be able to get close enough to ask McCain or Palin a question. Anyone perceived as someone other than a die hard supporter is turned away, or threatened with arrest for carrying signs that say: "McCain = Bush."
The value lost by the economy as a whole has been great, but you don't think an American produced electric automobile industry would have helped at all? Or the effect of fully backed government programs to keep people employed with infrastructure improvements during the economic downturn?
Just a decrease of 20% in oil usage could have saved over a trillion, not counting the likelihood of lower oil prices due to decreased demand. And the war spending has been trillions, not billions. It's low historically, but only if you ignore discretionary spending and sections of the Dept of Energy developing nuclear weapons.
Coincidentally, the same administration responsible for liberating the credit derivatives market, which postponed the internet bubble, are the same ones spending money we don't have on projects that have ZERO return on investment. Once you explode a million dollar piece of ordnance, it pays with a different kind of interest twenty years down the road.
I can't place the name or even the time period, but there's a quote floating around in my head about the dangers of seeking "perfect" safety. The analogy goes something like this: you could build a perfectly safe transportation system that carried zero risk, but by the time you were done building it, you couldn't afford the fuel to go where you wanted.
The exploitation of paranoia in our society has led us to spending over 5 trillion dollars on military and wartime budgets since 9/11. Are we any safer? The answer is, no; even the most hard line hawk must admit that there is no way to protect America from all future terrorist attacks. Even if it's preventing terrorist attacks now, it's only delaying them. Instead of a gang of Saudis, next time it will be a gang of Iraqis, pissed off for the same reason: infidel influence in their home country. So, we can continue meddling in Arab affairs -- you can see how well that has gone -- or we can remove our resources from the middle east, spend them on complete energy independence, and continue our far more effective foreign intelligence services. And then we could do something amazing: actually listen to what they are saying.
The best litmus test for me is to take press releases and news items from my own government, and imagine it was instead a Soviet-era communique from the state news agency. If it even passes the laugh test, I give it some thought, but most of the time, the thought experiment reveals the propaganda for what it is: completely transparent bullshit.
You prove his point. If the company did as every other company does, and just released "new" products, they wouldn't be doing what makes them successful, which is releasing innovative products. They even make better mousetraps - search engines, webmail, mapping, application hosting...
In a way, Google does something far more sinister, and pays people for ideas that they may have. When you've got a crapload of perks, a steady paycheck, and you still get to do what you want, it makes it a lot less appetizing to start your own company with your own new idea. You don't have to pay hundreds of millions for smaller companies who have the best ideas - you've already hired the brains that will produce them, and they already belong to you.
So, your definition of accountability is that hundreds of people make off with millions of dollars and serve no jail time? Everyone who "indulged in that binge" is on a beach somewhere in the Caribbean, trying to figure out where they can spend the hundreds of millions of dollars they just swindled. If that's your definition of justice, you can keep it.
If the government allowed those companies to fail, you'd just have more people out of work. The criminals are free in either of your scenarios. You may stop one generation of people from investing in the stock market again, but that's the only lesson that would be learned.
It's so easy to understand. Low credit and the push for home ownership at any cost led to insane price increases and speculation that it wasn't hard to see had to come to a crash stop.
That seems to be an oversimplification. The most reasonable thing I've seen is that we deregulated the credit derivatives market, and told the crooks to "regulate themselves." When the government advocates more people to have homes, and ties that to a banks ability to expand, that's not necessarily a bad thing, unless the originating lender can hand off hot potatoes, rake in cash, and not face consequences. If full disclosure was part of that market by law, then we simply wouldn't be where we are today. Originating lenders would be unable to sell bad loans, and when they started suffering the consequences, the game would have ended early and not been nearly as bad.
Exacerbating the situation is the removal of important firewalls between investment houses, banks, and insurance companies that happened at the same time. Companies that had been only banks or only insurance providers are now in deep trouble, though their original departments weren't involved. So, I agree with you about "diversification models." One of the downsides of free markets is the inevitability of boom and bust cycles, which is why every successful economy has a powerful governing authority to regulate a relatively open market. It helps calm the highs and the lows, which restricts growth but also prevents everyone from losing their shirt at the same time.
Accountability is what's missing from capitalism. In my opinion, everyone who was aware of the risks they were handing off to others should be stripped of every penny they made off of those transactions, and if found breaking any laws, should be serving as much time as petty thieves who steal thousands instead of millions. Similarly, any company that intentionally and illegally pollutes should have to pay clean up costs and matching punitive damages that fund land trusts.
The difference in treatment of those two types of criminals is indicative of another problem at the foundations of modern western capitalism: privatized profit and socialized risk.
Last I checked, the law of supply and demand affected the value of currency. Since America has the most money floating around the world, and there's little investor confidence in it's economy, and it has the highest debt among first world nations (perhaps except for Iceland), the dollars are cheaper.
Viewing nations as you might view a person's bank statement, America has more debt than it can pay off, is even having trouble paying the interest, it has no savings, and it's biggest investment (military) has little chance of providing a return.
In my opinion, this is a reflection of it's policies and not random combinations of economic data. If you have data or a study proving otherwise, I'd be interested to read it.
Comparing the whole of Germany isn't quite the same. West Germany has comparable, and even lower unemployment rates than the United States, but the leftovers of East German policies are still affecting the economy as a whole. Government subsidies are still flowing East, just as the Northeast and West coast pay for the infrastructure of the rest of our country.
Even with a former communist bloc attached to it, Germany has lower poverty levels, better education, and equal access to health care. Oh, and when polled, the Germans are far more satisfied with their health care than Americans are with their own, despite paying less than half of what we pay.
What would die would be the GM/Ford brand names along with the pension plans and other UAW union benefits. Which frankly is a good thing for the US auto industry in the long run.
Yes, because the wage declines experienced in America due to competition for low paying jobs with no benefits leads to more low paying jobs with no benefits.
Germany still manages to have strong unions, competitive products, and they actually pay their pensions, because they're required to by law. The only people that benefit from union busting are the CEOs that make 300 times their average worker's salary, versus European CEOs who make about 35 times more than their average worker.
If you want to know which policy is more valuable, take a look at the Euro and the Pound versus the Dollar. This anti-Socialism nonsense is based in a fantasy world where facts are non-existent, and anecdotes trump reality.
So, that would put Bush and Obama and McCain in the same lot? Last I checked, the "experts" are the ones that are benefiting from billions of dollars in bailout money, because apparently, they weren't so intelligent. The same thing happens when war is waged - the "labor force" fights and dies, while the chickenhawks and their associates collect money from the safety of their offices.
I agree that there needs to be personal responsibility, but the main recipients of federal dollars are not poor people. For more information, look at any federal budget since 1950.
You want real change? Remove the corporate veil of protection for all companies, so the next time they declare bankruptcy, they lose everything. Oh, but that might force them to follow the same rules they demand for their workers...
1) Neither alternative energy or biodiversity is in Nasa's purview. we can debate whether it should be the business of the Federal Government at all, but NASA's not the place for it.
Right. Let the free market do for the environment what it's done for the banking industry.
I would be in favor of temporarily suspending the NASA program, utilizing those resources to come up with new energy technology, and then licensing that technology to help fund the resurrected space program.
2) Per Larry Niven, "The dinosaurs went extinct because they didn't have a space program". If one views the survival of the human species as important, rather than the survival of the ecosystem per se, then having an escape plan is ALWAYS good policy.
Strange. I thought the dinosaurs died because they were unable to adapt to a changing environment. Is the sensible solution spending a huge amount of resources trying to invent an environment has an extremely low probability of success, and and even lower probability of long term viability, or preserving our existing environment that has supported life for hundreds of millions of years?
Slashdot Mirror
For real.
I feel like I made the point succinctly, but it's worth restating. If Saudi Arabia formed a democracy and demanded the nationalization of it's oil industry, they would no longer be an ally of the United States. It happened in Iran in 1953, Iraq, and even in this century, when we helped to try and overthrow Venezuela in 2002. Here's a list, with the year and the country, of the countries we've attempted to overthrow, attack, or prop up against popular indigenous movements, in order to maintain control and control resources:
1953 Iran
1954 Guatemala
1955 Vietnam
1956 Hungary
1957 Laos
1959 Haiti
1961 Cuba, Congo, Ecuador Dominican Republic
1963 Dominican Republic, Ecuador
1964 Brazil
1965 Greece, Congo, Dominican Republic, Indonesia
1967 Greece
1970 Cambodia
1971 Bolivia
1973 Chile
1975 Angola
1980 El Salvador
1986 Haiti
1988 Columbia
1989 Panama
1990 Haiti
1993 Haiti
2002 Venuezuela
2003 Iraq
If you have any historical evidence to the contrary, I'd love to read about it.
In 1953, Iran made the mistake of kicking out Anglo-Persian oil, and forming a democracy. Up until that point, they had been treated as Saudi Arabia has up until now. As soon as they decided that they wanted more - not even all - of the oil revenues from under their own feet, we responded by forming a covert operation with British Intelligence, in Operation Ajax, which destroyed their democratic government simply because it hurt the profits and interests of America and Britain. Please note that these facts are not contested by anyone - they are simply a matter of public record.
Hugo Chavez is an enemy of the United States because he has followed in the foot steps of Fidel Castro and declared independence from the west. Also, he has publicly railed against their policy on terrorism. Obviously anything from a president is usually state propaganda, but just watch for a few scenes from minute 15:30 from The Revolution Will Not Be Televised. I disagree with a lot of his policies, and I'm disappointed that he's been shutting news outlets, but at least I understand the reason why it's happening.
Again, what you think you know is through the filter of corporate mentality, if you get your news from the United States. The suppression is built in - no journalist who disagrees with the bosses ideas are hired. The boss is the CEO of a huge corporation.
You put it succinctly yourself, and that's the real problem:
Saudi Arabia is treated well by the US and the West because they have a policy of friendship and cooperation with us.
Despite the fact that Saudi Arabia supports beheadings and the severing of limbs, they have a court system where non-Muslims are not allowed to testify, and women aren't allowed either because:
Women are much more emotional than men and will, as a result of their emotions, distort their testimony.
Women do not participate in public life, so they will not be capable of understanding what they observe.
Women are dominated completely by men, who by the grace of God are deemed superior; therefore, women will give testimony according to what the last man told them.
Women are forgetful, and their testimony cannot be considered reliable.
(from wikipedia)
So, does anyone suggest that we invade Saudi Arabia to bring freedom and democracy there?
I don't. But I would, as a conscientious person, like to avoid making it easier for their government to continue unabated. You may have a different opinion. Look at what we have done in the past, and decide for yourself if our policies need change.
Can you provide counter examples? Not even one?
The US created the mess, now they got to clean it up. Do you really want Iraq to be the next Korea or Vietnam, where decades later the mess is still making the US look bad?
Who had more democratic freedoms: Vietnam or Saudi Arabia? And how does that make the US look bad?
The war in Iraq has happened, you can now not just say "well, we don't want it anymore, bye bye." and pull out.
But you could say, "Here you go, Iraq: run your own country." But then they could do something unacceptable, like support Palestine with their oil revenues, or form friendly relations with Iran. True Iraqi sovereignty is the real disaster. Killing Arabs is just something the West seems to do for sport.
A really good future leader of the US would two things. A: accept that the situation MUST be resolved and stop playing the blame game or making promises to do things that you can't do because the enemy might not let you and B: turn the blame game into a seperate issue and truly investigate what the hell happened and if there was any wrong doing and take it to court.
Even Obama will be unable to bring any US politician to justice. We are still illegally supporting too many war crimes, so it would just set a precedent to have himself thrown in jail. He's already publicly supported the illegal occupation in Palestine.
A: must be done because if you don't Iraq will be mess and that might easily spill over. And B: must be done because else these things will just happen over and over, just like Vietnam, just like Korea, just like Somalie and countless other conflicts were the US screwed up and ran.
The correct option is not listed, which is not to get involved in the affairs of sovereign nations in the first place, unless at the direction of the only governing body with legal treaties with virtually all nations: the UN.
In the meantime, the rest of the world really needs to start shaping up. Stop relying on the US. Europe is richer then the US but doesn't have any real military power. Don't blame the US for being a poor police men if you just sit at home not doing anything.
Europe is not run by public relations companies who are dedicated to creating a perpetual state of unfounded paranoia. They have given up their colonial days, and are far better for it. This is the same reason Mexico doesn't arm itself against Cuba. There simply isn't any threat.
The rest of the world after all has a intrest to in a peaceful world. Look what happened in africa after the US ran, piracy in that corner of the world is now a serious issue. What will happen in Iraq in 10-20 years if the west withdraws now?
You're forgetting half a millennia of history for no good reason. Africa was purposefully suppressed by the West for centuries, and continued even into the eighties, when America was the only nation left materially supporting the South African regime that was brutalizing their nation with apartheid. If the west leaves, the same thing that happened in China or India or Brazil could happen: They could elect their own government, do as they wished, and choose to co-operate with the west or not without repercussions.
No, the war has happenend, deal with the why and how in the courts, but you can't ignore it and say you are going to withdraw by date X because that doesn't solve anything and give your enemy a clear goal, if only we hold out till date X we have won.
We lost the war on terrorism the moment the first Afghani was held without charges. It proved that Al Qaeda was right: the west cares about human rights only for itself. The rest of the world simply doesn't matter.
One of the more scary ideas I've heard is that the deficit spending is popular because they know Republicans won't be in the white house forever. They jack up the national debt so any new social projects can't receive enough funding to be effective, thus "proving" that government doesn't work, thus giving them another round of starting wars, cutting their own taxes, and profiteering.
Suppose that every day, ten men were asked to contribute their nation in return for the social services and infrastructure it provided.
The first four men (the poorest) could pay nothing. They made $4 or less that day, and couldn't afford it.
The fifth would pay $1. He made $8 that day, and he could chip in.
The sixth would pay $3. He made $16 that day, and could pay more.
The seventh would pay $7. He made $32 that day, and he could pay more.
The eighth would pay $12. He made $50 that day, and he could pay more.
The ninth would pay $18. He made $75 that day, and he could pay more.
The tenth man (the richest) would pay $59. He made $350 that day, so he could pay more.
Then, this terrorist liberal bedwetting man became president. He told the richest people that they would pay more in taxes, and that the vast majority of people would pay less in taxes. He did this based on the wisdom of a man named "Adam Smith," whom everyone had heard of and been taught to worship, though they were not encouraged to actually read the Wealth of Nations.
The richest man got upset, and said, how much more will I pay for the infrastructure that allows me to be in business in the first place? Then he miraculously realized that the money spent on education, infrastructure, market regulation, and all social services are the things that separate industrial nations from the third world. That stronger economy would have less crime, poverty, and spend less money on health care because it would cut out the bureaucracy and greed of the privatized system.
Ahh well. This is a fantasy scenario, isn't it?
PS: New political support for socialized medicine, which has been the wish of the vast majority of americans for two decades, has nothing to do with recent complaints by GM.
First, implicit in your statement, is the idea that America has some sort of right to be the only country involved in invading other sovereign nations, regardless of the reason.
Second, US allies can be assured that they will be abandoned the moment they are no longer useful to the US. That's why we left South Vietnam after killing millions of people. We were done making money and rattling sabers at China and Russia. They can also be assured that they will not have our support the moment they stop doing exactly as we say. Do you honestly think that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia would be treated the same if they overthrew their monarchy and nationalized their oil industry? For more insight on that, read the histories of Venezuela and Iran and Iraq.
Furthermore, there is already a legal governing body that has signed treaties with most of the countries in the world, which has the authority to intervene in the case of invasion. The problem is that this organization, the UN, doesn't always do as we want. So they are irrelevant.
Let's go back to the geographical problem of leaving Iraq. Saddam Hussein had our explicit support for years because he played ball. We sold him weapons to gas the kurds. We took his country off of the terrorist to do so, sold him weapons to kill Iranians, after they dared to form their own government and kick our corporations out.
It made no difference to America how many Kurds he killed, though we knew about it. It made no difference to America how many were mowed down by his helicopters after we left. It makes no difference now that Turkey, one of our allies, is busy exterminating Kurds in their country and even attacking positions in the territory of Iraq. Just as it makes no difference to us that dissidents and blasphemers of Islam are beheaded in Saudi Arabia, or that our trading partner China executes people without proper trials, or that Indonesia is committing genocide with American made weapons in East Timor, or that Israel is slowly destroying the Palestinian people, just as our former long-term ally South Africa did during apartheid.
Any time America declares some moral cause for war, remember these things. It's always bullshit: a pretext for power, resources, or strategic advantage.
How naive are you to believe that we're in Iraq for any other purpose than oil? They have one hundred trillion dollars under their feet. Otherwise Saddam, as long as he was doing as the King of Saudi Arabia and following orders, would still be murdering whoever he wanted, whenever he wanted, without any comment from the United States, besides material support and weapons to complete the job.
The bungling Bush Administration, whose long term vision of the Middle East is so delusional it's almost incomprehensible, has done Iran a huge favor by destroying the only two countries besides Russia with any power in that region. The real threat is that the Shia majority, who happens to sit on all the oil that "belongs to us," has the right to vote in Iran. And since Iran does have a military that hasn't been decimated by years of embargo, we can't play the same game as we did in Iraq.
If we stay in Iraq, it will bankrupt us. If we leave, and allow Iraq to have true democracy, they will form a strong relationship with Iran, and even more terrifying to the Pentagon, may inspire Saudi Arabia to have the same democratic freedoms.
We're staying to protect our investment, which is oil. Not freedom, democracy, or all of the others things that we ridiculously claim to believe in.
Ok... I'll bite...
1. Not sure what that has to do with anything. Sure, he grew up on welfare. He lives in a $1M+ house now. According to the logic of people that like to play the class warfare game, you don't get to that place in life without screwing people. So, what makes him better than the other multimillionaire running just because he USED to be poor.
He doesn't make enough money to be a puppet master... he's in the lower echelon of millionaires. He may qualify somewhat with harvard, but he didn't attend the correct secret society in college.
It's funny that class warfare has gained such a negative connotation, almost as if it couldn't possibly exist. If you read about 18th Century France, they explain in detail how the very top foments division in the ranks below to ensure that their power isn't threatened. The myths passed along in American class rooms don't tell you that the same thing happened here. Super wealthy landowners, concerned about the threat of Indians and slaves and white peasants joining forces, came up with the plan of giving poor whites free land in the frontier. Not only would they act as a buffer for the properly wealthy, but they would learn to hate Indians, pay taxes for wars against them, just as those same whites would divide their slaves into "field" hands and "house" slaves.
Today, most people who are millionaires, or who aspire to be, are fed enormous amount of propaganda in order to properly fear blacks, mexicans, or anyone who dares to desire what everyone else in the western world considers a right - the right to health, the right to an education, and the right to unionize.
Just as Germany does not spend it's time in panic about the rise of Putin's Russia, since they have been on the receiving end of wars and want no part of them, people who have been broke also have a very different worldview, for the most part. Obama's not my ideal candidate, but McCain and Palin are war mongers who aren't afraid to admit it.
2. He's only talking about attacking a symptom. "Income inequality" is not the core problem of our culture. It comes from a lack of opportunity. That lack of opportunity exists in the form of a third rate government monopoly (remember Slashdotters... monopolies are bad... not just with corporations) on education. That problem is even worse in poorer rural and urban areas.
The education system is broken, but it's a lack of funding, and the odd success of right wing efforts to make it appear that government schooling just can't work, and it will always be awful. Well, the reason it is awful is because we spend less public money on education than anyone else in the western world. My assumption is that all the hawks see that America is continuing to trend towards European-style democracy, which would be disastrous for them. If kids aren't attending evangelical schools, learning that America is the land of Jesus and that foreigners are evil, while receiving an education that tests worse than public schools, I might add, they may end up like Europe, where silly myths like Creationism are dismissed without comment, and church attendance is down to 10 or 20%.
The top of the food chain likes being super wealthy. They believe that the masses are too stupid to govern themselves, so you have to do everything you can to convince them that they are powerless, and that participating in their government wouldn't do any good. This allows them to spend 90 billion a year on the Department of Education, and one trillion dollars a year on war, without any comments in the media about that simple truth: we have the best military in the world because it receives the most government funding. We have the worst education in the world because it receives the least government funding.
Add to that the social influences that teach people that if you're successful you must have cheated because no one can get ahead without being corrupt. So, young children who need a p
It is a crime for someone with enough knowledge to help you by giving legal advice - can't allow competition you know.
No, it isn't, unless you claim you are a lawyer.
Basically, the lawyers write the laws to make themselves richer. And you are going to elect another one to the highest office now.
A lawyer who has 1) grown up on welfare, 2) has shown at least some interest in returning balance to income inequality which threatens our entire culture, and 3) will replace the Bush Administration with a cabinet full of something besides the Bush Administration.
If the ABA were under government oversight, you could pressure your congressperson to change the way it runs, or cut their funding. Since it has no governmental oversight, all you can do is bitch. That's the "freedom" of unregulated but necessary industry - they're free to extort money, you're free to waste your breath complaining about it.
If corporations don't pay taxes, then they shouldn't have the rights of entities that do pay taxes.
Your attack on government bureaucracy is actually funny. Consider that we spend twice as much on health care as any other industrialized nation, because we are the only industrialized nation with a private health care system. Despite all the anecdotes to the contrary, according to things called "polls," which have a well known reality bias, Americans are the least satisfied with their health care.
So why would the establishment be against social medicine? Because it's repulsively profitable for pharmaceutical industries, and all the layers of corporate mess designed not to heal anyone, but to extend their suffering in order to make more profit.
This is of course plainly obvious to any person who wishes to think rationally: corporations have no incentive to deliver a product efficiently when it's something that every human requires. They have the choice of a guaranteed sale at a decent profit, or a guaranteed sale at a huge profit. Which one would you choose? That's why all utilities are heavily regulated, and water is always a public utility. Health care should be no different, and there is zero evidence that shows that private medical systems are more effective than socialized ones.
Officially, the Pentagon has requested and received 3.2 trillion dollars worth of funding, from 2001-2008. You can look at any official federal budget.
This does not include discretionary funds for the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars or nuclear weapons development. When you add in the interest we pay to borrow money to sink into war (as it's portion of the budget deficit), the figure is even higher.
Most of the assets you speak of have been gained in wars deemed illegal by international law. In truth, they're supposed to belong to the people indigenous to that country. That opinion, however, is not held by many Americans, since we are holding the rifles, and not in the sights of someone else.
If America spent what the rest of the world does per capita, it would be less than 200 billion per year, including wars. Why are we spending five times that? Because it is very difficult, very costly, and very dangerous to rule the world with threats of violence and war.
I've always been a believer in opt-in economy. Just mark huge swaths of land as "government-free" counties. No government means: no roads, bridges, water treatment, fire stations, EMTs, hospitals, or regulated utilities. You buy the land, you move there, you're on your own.
Then, all of the libertarians declaring that government is intrinsically evil can negotiate with utility companies to run power lines, open restaurants without any health inspections, and do their work without OSHA or fire regulations. After a few decades you would find that they had done something remarkable, and that is formed their own government with exactly the same rules.
A kid dies from salmonella poisoning from the burger joint - now health inspections are mandatory. Four men die in a fire in a building that had no fire suppression system, and now that's a requirement. The company firehouse is done away with because they bungled their badging system, and let someone's business burn to the ground who was actually a member. A local court system developed after blood feuds threatened to throw the whole county into chaos, and it's now illegal to conceal firearms after a judge was assassinated. Voting regulations have been established after the banker buys four consecutive elections, which resulted in all road construction projects benefitting his new housing development... I could elaborate, but you probably get the point.
Government is a necessary evil, but not all governments are evil. The only thing that turns a state into a negative entity is when concentrated power, economic chaos, or external military invasion takes the power away from the population, which does occur much of the time. The solution is not to take the resources of the nation place it outside the grasp of it's population, but exactly the opposite. In my experience, I've had much better relationships with local (albeit small) government utilities than I have with AT&T or any other large corporation, mainly because the top of the chain ends within a few miles of my business - I can go talk to (or berate) the person in charge. The top of the chain of any large corporation is simply unreachable, and the AT&T rep doesn't really care if my phone service is reliable or not - where else am I going to go? And if we have four phone companies running lines, how long before three are swallowed by the one with the most money? And if you regulate the monopolies, what's the difference between local governmental control (notice I didn't say federal) besides greasing the pockets of useless executive boards?
People like Joe the Plumber don't understand that part of the infrastructure of the united states is the working population. If those workers have a safe neighborhood, reasonable pay, and voluntarily pay extra taxes to socialize industries that perform poorly under free markets, the whole economy is better for it. Not only because the basics of the western world will be less expensive, but because entrepreneurs will be incentivized to tackle new ideas, instead of swindling money out of decades old problems that have already been solved. If corporations weren't busy creating inefficient markets for the sake of making more money, we'd still have many things that europe has kept - functioning mass transit systems, lots of investment in education, low poverty rates, more equal distribution of wealth -- that is a measure of the health of an economy, by the way -- and the right to organize in unions.
Or, you can be concerned by paying an extra 4% of tax, only on money earned over 250,000 per year.
By the way, where is Fred the Accountant, asking McCain why he supported Roe v. Wade in 2000? Or why he wants the Federal Government to legislate what marriage is? Or why Falwell was no longer an agent of intolerance? Or why he said in 04 that taxing the wealthy a bit more was okay? The truth is, Joe the Plumber wouldn't be able to get close enough to ask McCain or Palin a question. Anyone perceived as someone other than a die hard supporter is turned away, or threatened with arrest for carrying signs that say: "McCain = Bush."
The value lost by the economy as a whole has been great, but you don't think an American produced electric automobile industry would have helped at all? Or the effect of fully backed government programs to keep people employed with infrastructure improvements during the economic downturn?
Just a decrease of 20% in oil usage could have saved over a trillion, not counting the likelihood of lower oil prices due to decreased demand. And the war spending has been trillions, not billions. It's low historically, but only if you ignore discretionary spending and sections of the Dept of Energy developing nuclear weapons.
Coincidentally, the same administration responsible for liberating the credit derivatives market, which postponed the internet bubble, are the same ones spending money we don't have on projects that have ZERO return on investment. Once you explode a million dollar piece of ordnance, it pays with a different kind of interest twenty years down the road.
I can't place the name or even the time period, but there's a quote floating around in my head about the dangers of seeking "perfect" safety. The analogy goes something like this: you could build a perfectly safe transportation system that carried zero risk, but by the time you were done building it, you couldn't afford the fuel to go where you wanted.
The exploitation of paranoia in our society has led us to spending over 5 trillion dollars on military and wartime budgets since 9/11. Are we any safer? The answer is, no; even the most hard line hawk must admit that there is no way to protect America from all future terrorist attacks. Even if it's preventing terrorist attacks now, it's only delaying them. Instead of a gang of Saudis, next time it will be a gang of Iraqis, pissed off for the same reason: infidel influence in their home country. So, we can continue meddling in Arab affairs -- you can see how well that has gone -- or we can remove our resources from the middle east, spend them on complete energy independence, and continue our far more effective foreign intelligence services. And then we could do something amazing: actually listen to what they are saying.
The best litmus test for me is to take press releases and news items from my own government, and imagine it was instead a Soviet-era communique from the state news agency. If it even passes the laugh test, I give it some thought, but most of the time, the thought experiment reveals the propaganda for what it is: completely transparent bullshit.
You prove his point. If the company did as every other company does, and just released "new" products, they wouldn't be doing what makes them successful, which is releasing innovative products. They even make better mousetraps - search engines, webmail, mapping, application hosting...
In a way, Google does something far more sinister, and pays people for ideas that they may have. When you've got a crapload of perks, a steady paycheck, and you still get to do what you want, it makes it a lot less appetizing to start your own company with your own new idea. You don't have to pay hundreds of millions for smaller companies who have the best ideas - you've already hired the brains that will produce them, and they already belong to you.
So, your definition of accountability is that hundreds of people make off with millions of dollars and serve no jail time? Everyone who "indulged in that binge" is on a beach somewhere in the Caribbean, trying to figure out where they can spend the hundreds of millions of dollars they just swindled. If that's your definition of justice, you can keep it.
If the government allowed those companies to fail, you'd just have more people out of work. The criminals are free in either of your scenarios. You may stop one generation of people from investing in the stock market again, but that's the only lesson that would be learned.
It's so easy to understand. Low credit and the push for home ownership at any cost led to insane price increases and speculation that it wasn't hard to see had to come to a crash stop.
That seems to be an oversimplification. The most reasonable thing I've seen is that we deregulated the credit derivatives market, and told the crooks to "regulate themselves." When the government advocates more people to have homes, and ties that to a banks ability to expand, that's not necessarily a bad thing, unless the originating lender can hand off hot potatoes, rake in cash, and not face consequences. If full disclosure was part of that market by law, then we simply wouldn't be where we are today. Originating lenders would be unable to sell bad loans, and when they started suffering the consequences, the game would have ended early and not been nearly as bad.
Exacerbating the situation is the removal of important firewalls between investment houses, banks, and insurance companies that happened at the same time. Companies that had been only banks or only insurance providers are now in deep trouble, though their original departments weren't involved. So, I agree with you about "diversification models." One of the downsides of free markets is the inevitability of boom and bust cycles, which is why every successful economy has a powerful governing authority to regulate a relatively open market. It helps calm the highs and the lows, which restricts growth but also prevents everyone from losing their shirt at the same time.
Accountability is what's missing from capitalism. In my opinion, everyone who was aware of the risks they were handing off to others should be stripped of every penny they made off of those transactions, and if found breaking any laws, should be serving as much time as petty thieves who steal thousands instead of millions. Similarly, any company that intentionally and illegally pollutes should have to pay clean up costs and matching punitive damages that fund land trusts.
The difference in treatment of those two types of criminals is indicative of another problem at the foundations of modern western capitalism: privatized profit and socialized risk.
Do I offend the ones who can draw pretty pictures or the ones who can root my computer and steal my credit information...
That being said, the iPhone app store definitely sucks more, and so does the iPhone!
http://www.eatliver.com/img/2008/3509.jpg
Last I checked, the law of supply and demand affected the value of currency. Since America has the most money floating around the world, and there's little investor confidence in it's economy, and it has the highest debt among first world nations (perhaps except for Iceland), the dollars are cheaper.
Viewing nations as you might view a person's bank statement, America has more debt than it can pay off, is even having trouble paying the interest, it has no savings, and it's biggest investment (military) has little chance of providing a return.
In my opinion, this is a reflection of it's policies and not random combinations of economic data. If you have data or a study proving otherwise, I'd be interested to read it.
Comparing the whole of Germany isn't quite the same. West Germany has comparable, and even lower unemployment rates than the United States, but the leftovers of East German policies are still affecting the economy as a whole. Government subsidies are still flowing East, just as the Northeast and West coast pay for the infrastructure of the rest of our country.
Even with a former communist bloc attached to it, Germany has lower poverty levels, better education, and equal access to health care. Oh, and when polled, the Germans are far more satisfied with their health care than Americans are with their own, despite paying less than half of what we pay.
What would die would be the GM/Ford brand names along with the pension plans and other UAW union benefits. Which frankly is a good thing for the US auto industry in the long run.
Yes, because the wage declines experienced in America due to competition for low paying jobs with no benefits leads to more low paying jobs with no benefits.
Germany still manages to have strong unions, competitive products, and they actually pay their pensions, because they're required to by law. The only people that benefit from union busting are the CEOs that make 300 times their average worker's salary, versus European CEOs who make about 35 times more than their average worker.
If you want to know which policy is more valuable, take a look at the Euro and the Pound versus the Dollar. This anti-Socialism nonsense is based in a fantasy world where facts are non-existent, and anecdotes trump reality.
So, that would put Bush and Obama and McCain in the same lot? Last I checked, the "experts" are the ones that are benefiting from billions of dollars in bailout money, because apparently, they weren't so intelligent. The same thing happens when war is waged - the "labor force" fights and dies, while the chickenhawks and their associates collect money from the safety of their offices.
I agree that there needs to be personal responsibility, but the main recipients of federal dollars are not poor people. For more information, look at any federal budget since 1950.
You want real change? Remove the corporate veil of protection for all companies, so the next time they declare bankruptcy, they lose everything. Oh, but that might force them to follow the same rules they demand for their workers...
But does it run on Ubuntu?
1) Neither alternative energy or biodiversity is in Nasa's purview. we can debate whether it should be the business of the Federal Government at all, but NASA's not the place for it.
Right. Let the free market do for the environment what it's done for the banking industry.
I would be in favor of temporarily suspending the NASA program, utilizing those resources to come up with new energy technology, and then licensing that technology to help fund the resurrected space program.
2) Per Larry Niven, "The dinosaurs went extinct because they didn't have a space program". If one views the survival of the human species as important, rather than the survival of the ecosystem per se, then having an escape plan is ALWAYS good policy.
Strange. I thought the dinosaurs died because they were unable to adapt to a changing environment. Is the sensible solution spending a huge amount of resources trying to invent an environment has an extremely low probability of success, and and even lower probability of long term viability, or preserving our existing environment that has supported life for hundreds of millions of years?