Wow. Way to start it off with arrogant contempt, there, ideologue.
Stock. Stockholder.
Only applies to publicly traded corporations, and stockholders still don't get to read meeting minutes.
Top secret. CIA. FBI. Patriot Act.
These are the extremes of government. The vast majority of what government does is, by law, open to the people's scrutiny. In addition, the functions you mentioned have been corrupted by corporate influence. We can take that power back if we choose.
Arthur Anderson. Fraud. Shredded documents. Misstated earnings.
1 person, 1 vote.
What's wrong with that?
citizen. employee.
Citizenship is a job. You get exactly what you put into it. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance. You don't expect freedom to be handed to you on a silver platter, do you?
I choose your third option, which unfortunately you do not even see: the people.
Yes, excellent! The people! Why didn't I think of that? Now let's get busy. Oh, wait. We need some way to organize or we'll all just be running around in a kind of anarchy or something. I've got it! We'll form some kind of organization of the people, by the people, and for the people. Hmmm. What could we call that?
"We the people" are not the government. "We the people... establish" the government. You are confusing our government with communism, and we aren't quite there yet.
Wow, what an extremist you are. You've very selectively edited the Constitution, then equated rule by the people with communism. That's just ideological hyperbole that doesn't have any place in an honest debate.
Now look up the words "consumer" and "taxpayer", and tell me which one has more freedom.
Again, very selective in your word choice. I notice that you didn't use "citizen" in your false dichotomy. Look that one up.
Do you understand that big government is as bad, if not worse than, big corporations?
Absolutely not. Government is chartered to act in the interest of the people. Corporations are chartered to act in the interest of their profit. Which one do you think is more likely to act in your interest?
Do you understand that the big corporations you hate are controlling the big government you love?
Duh! What do you think I'm bitching about? That's the whole problem. If we could pry the corporate hands off of government and put it back in the hands of the people then things would be much better for us. It wouldn't be perfect but we could choose our destiny instead of having it forced on us by greedy corporations who just want to strip-mine us for our labor.
I freely admit that government is the only thing that can control a monopolistic corporations.
Excellent. A point of agreement. This is where progress is made.
I also realize that nothing can control a despotic government (without bloodshed),...
Another point of agreement. Good, good.
...and we getting very, very close with the trend of presidential orders pioneered by Clinton and exploited by Bush.
You guys just can't get over Clinton, can you? Why are you so obsessed with him? You give him way too much credit as a pioneer. You'll certainly never get me to defend Clinton, but the despotism was pioneered much earlier in US history. Harding was a good one, and, more recently, Nixon and especially Reagan really set the bar for secrecy and power mongering. But Bush has taken it to a whole new level.
The worst evil of all: a government-sponsored monopoly!
Hmmm. I don't know, I think I'd give the nod to a monopoly-sponsored government as being worse.
Government does not give you power over your life. It gives you power over my life.
That's hyperbole. How can you think that government by the people means that I get the right to tell you what to do? It means nothing of the sort. You have as much right to influence the policies of an uncorrupted government as I do. One man, one vote. That doesn't even come close to equating to me having power over you. That's just flat-out paranoia. I can assure you that I (and everyone I know for that matter) have no intention of telling you what to do on your property as long as what you do stays on your property. If, however, you're mixing chemicals on your property and dumping waste on the ground and that waste is migrating into the groundwater or a nearby stream, then you are messing with public resources and you are affecting other people. In that situation, hell yes, the people (as a whole, not just me) have a right to tell you to cut it out and to pay for any damage you've done to a public resource.
The rich and powerful are usually there because government mandated they be there.
That's just about the stupidest thing I've heard. There may be some cases where government has created a monopoly that benefited an individual or corporation (most likely due to corruption, a la Halliburton) but, by far, most wealth in this country is concentrated in the hands of aristocrats whose money has been passed from generation to generation who have furthered their wealth many times by reinvesting it in private corporations. And to that I say, "good for them." I have no resentment toward them for that. But if they use that money to unfairly influence my government's policies then I'll do whatever I can to stop them.
I'm not saying get rid of government, I'm saying get rid of 90% of the federal government.
Then you're advocating that we just give 90% of our power away to corporations, then, right? Well, that's different, then.
I believe I can offer a better cable TV service, but I am not allowed to offer it in my neighborhood. I _KNOW_ of companies that can offer better water service to my town, but my city doesn't allow it.
You might "believe" that you can offer a better cable system, but the reality of doing so is a whole lot more harsh than you're letting on. The capital investment required is huge and the incumbent carrier would squash your business like a bug because a lot of it's capital investment has already been depreciated and amortized. Also, if you somehow managed to squeeze into a niche, the incumbent would cut you off at the knees by using the same trick they used against C-Band satellite dishes. They just go to the content provider and politely put them on notice that they will stop carrying their programming unless they cut you off. The program provider will think about it for about a nanosecond before zapping off a letter to you to let you know that there is some [insert fake reason here] that they can no longer provide you with their program material. Come back down to reality, here, and get off that limb of ideology. Cable is clearly an area in need of regulation. Once an incumbent is in place, no one else can realistically penetrate the market without a new, disruptive technology (as cable itself once was). As far as water service, you're telling me that you have two separate water systems in your community? Two purifying plants with two sets of distribution pipes? That's a highly unusual situation but it would be the only way to truly have competition. Otherwise, water service is one commodity that should definitely be owned by the people rather than a corporation. Water service is too important for our livelihood to be owned by an entity chartered to bring profit to its shareholders. Those two things just shouldn't mix. Capitalism is insoluble in water.
Competition is all you need to throw out the bad companise. Regulation only works to create new monopolies at the expense of everyone.
Yes, yes, yes. We can all see that you wear your ideology on your sleeve. You seek purity. Purity is an unattainable goal. The harder you try to enforce it, the more extreme and totalitarian your position becomes.
How much control do you have over corporations? Hell, you aren't even allowed to see their internal documents, let alone know what they are doing and exercise any influence over them. Now, how much control does the constitution give us over government? That's not even the right question because government is us -- We, the people. One of us will be in charge. Corporations or government(the people). Which do you want it to be? You can't really be that foolish.
The difference is subtle. Democrats are working for their corporate sponsors but they're kind of hamstrung because they still have to pretend to be working for the people. Repuglicans have this really nasty in-your-face, what-are-you-going-to-do-about-it arrogance about them while they ram this crap down our throats and put industry hacks in charge of government. And are you really that threatened by blow jobs? I, personally, think spending our tax dollars and our soldiers' lives to kill thousands of civilians in a sovereign country is much more of a threat to our country.
Republicans are good at using words like "freedom" and "liberty" when they mean entirely opposite things to different constituancies. To the rich and powerful, including corporations, freedom means the freedom to do what you want without restrictions. To the common citizen, freedom means the freedom from having things done to you. These two concepts are at odds with one another. The big money interests know what they mean when the Repuglicans start spouting "feedom." Of course, the Democrats are on the same bandwagon. They just have to pretend to be on our side.
The only monopoly here is big government. It is time to downsize, downsize, downsize.
Yes, that's right. Let's get rid of the people's only chance of having power over their own lives. Let's eliminate government, altogether, why don't we. Then we'd be free, right? Free to be preyed upon by the rich and powerful who would swoop in to grab all that power we just tossed out with the garbage. Yep, that's good thinking.
Downsizing DC is equivalent to upsizing corporate power. Power will be grabbed by someone. The only way we, the people have to grab the power is via government. The power is there for us to grab if we choose to. I'm not really anxious to throw that power away and let corporations come in and take over.
Going...going...
You can argue till you're blue in the face about what happened in 1914, but corporations are taking over this country now and your only response is to bash government. Government is the only tool we have to solve this problem. If you want to throw that tool away and let the corporations run everything then you must be rich already. Do you think corporations will suddenly back off and let us be free once the regulations are gone? That's the height of naivete.
Great works of classical music, drama, and literature were written, ultimately, to make money...
No, the ones you eventually heard may have been created that way, but the ones that moved the people and created the culture that those works grew out of were created from the heart and the soul. A lot of them are lost to history. No record was made of them because no money was involved and recording them on paper and maintaining the record were, historically, things only the rich had the power to do. Cave men, sitting around the fire, singing and banging on hand-made instruments didn't do it for the money. They did it to create and maintain their culture. It's the human spirit that motivates these things, not money.
A rare and significant example of the real tide of culture was recorded by John Lomax who traveled the country, funded by the Smithsonian (thank you government) to record musicians where they lived. That's real stuff, not manufactured pablum and it would have been lost to history had he not been there to record it. In fact, there was a man born in Tupelo, Mississippi with a certain swivel in his hip and a voice that made women swoon. But that man never made a nickel because he was black. Then a couple of years later, Elvis came along and the rest is history. Record makers believed they couldn't make money on black artists so they picked white ones who emulated their black peers.
Britney Spears isn't popular because her music is culturally significant. She's popular because she's the tip of huge marketing machine. It just sounds like the ka-ching of a cash register to me or the beep of a truck backing up -- just the sound of money being made. The real culture is hidden and if anyone is guilty of myopia, it the person who can only see and hear what our corporate media presents to them. You are being manipulated and controlled so that someone else can make a buck. Some real artists can still be heard, though. Check out Mountain Stage.
The whole reason we elect government officials is to protect us from the government itself.
No, the reason we elect government officials is in order to:
...form a more perfect union, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity...
Read the constitution sometime. Public ignorance is what allows corporate power to control your government.
Notice that more and more of our rights are taken away as the government gains more power?
Notice that government is just a tool that is being wielded by corporations to control us? Notice that we need to grab the tool for ourselves rather than smash it? Notice that without government we have no power to chart the course of our society? Notice that someone will always grab power and, without a democratic government, that will most definitely not be the people?
Fortunately, you prove yourself wrong in forgetting that the only one with ultimate power is the government, not big business.
Government is not a power in and of itself. Government is the cumulative power of the society itself. If you have a corrupt society, then it begets a corrupt government. Corporations currently own the government and control its actions. So blaming things on the government is childish and ignores the real culprits behind the scenes.
America was to be different from communists such as yourself...
Nice ad hominem. Abusiveness doesn't advance an argument.
What we have today is more socialist than it is capitalist.
No, it's more fascist than either capitalist or socialist. Fascism is corporate control of government combined with bellicose patriotism and nationalism. That's pretty much what we have now.
But I can understand how those with smaller brains would rather blame it on big business rather than on a Congress that has bordered treason for not upholding their oath to the Constitution that should keep them from passing laws that are clearly not within their powers.
Oooo, another ad hominem. You're on a roll. That indicates that your argument is weak. Look, congress is a wholly-owned subsidiary of corporate power. You're blaming the puppet for the puppeteer's crimes. The reason they can keep passing laws that are beyond the powers granted to them in the constitution is because the also corporately-owned executive branch is packing the courts with corporate-friendly judges who allow those laws to stand. Bashing government is a juvenile exercise equivalent to ragging on your mom because she won't let you go to a concert. The solution isn't to knock down government, it's to take it back for the people. Government by the people is the only way we can have things our way. Power, like nature, abhors a vacuum. If government power is reduced, corporate power will take its place.
The reason you think that is because big corporations have paid PR firms a buttload of money to make you think that. The lawsuit crisis is a fiction perpetrated by corporations to get legislation passed to protect them in court. They want carte blanche to be able to commit whatever crime is profitable and then escape justice.
Great. This is what we need. More power to those who hold the purse strings. Give more power to big business and less to consumers.
Stop thinking of yourself as a "consumer." That's exactly how they want you to see yourself. Start thinking of yourself as a citizen with all the power the constitution gives you. The consumer is at the bottom of a food chain. The citizen is at the top in a democracy.
The scale of the problem is completely lost on you. Who determines the constitutionality of a law? The courts. Who is packing the courts with corporate-friendly judges? The executive branch (with advice and consent of the Senate). Who is mounting massive campaign efforts to replace citizen-friendly Attorneys General with corporate-friendly ones? Corporations. Who is pushing so-called "tort reform" legislation through state and federal legislatures to protect corporations from responsibility for their crimes? Corporate-owned legislators, governors, and the president. It's a massive attack against the citizens of this country and the world. Get on the clue train.
Perhaps if people in America actually bothered to vote you would see the politicians taking more notice of the people than the corporates.
Voting only works on the back-end of the election process. Corporations have already roped off the front end (the campaign process)with campaign cash, PR machinery, and market research. Without access to the front end of elections and with the information they're given being filtered by corporate media and PR firms, the people have no chance against the corporations.
It's even more important than freedom of music. It's our freedom of culture that's at stake. Our true culture has been stolen from us and replaced with manufactured culture. By monopolizing our culture they're taking away who we are and replacing it with a world of culturally ignorant "consumers". It's good for their profit but absolutely horrendous for our heritage, our freedom, our inspiration, our creativity, and our happiness. It's short term thinking that is rotting society from the inside.
We don't have GM make the road...then insist you...only drive GM cars on it.
If you really are a bus driver, you might be interested in this. Most cities used to have a privately-owned trolley system that was an excellent means of transportation for the people (I live in quite a small city and it did). GM (along with Standard Oil and Firestone) didn't really care for people to have access to quality mass transportation so they formed a holding company called National City Lines to buy up the trolley companies and shut them down. Of course, a lot of people still didn't own personal transportation (yet) so NCL was quick to supply GM busses rolling on Firestone tires and burning Standard Oil. So, in a way, GM is responsible for the way our transportation system is organized.
Well, the way other markets work (e.g. the stock market) you don't know WHY people buy up a stock, just that they did. So you can't tell whether "President X will die" went up because someone plans to do it himself or simply suspects that someone else will do so, but since people's money is on the line, in aggregate they make good predictions.
I believe that this kind of market can provide accurate predictions when used in regulated environments, but my point was that it also has a fatal flaw when applied in this context and that, despite market forces, bad actors have too much opportunity to rig the system. That's a point that capitalism's "true believers" miss time and time again. They just seem to believe that everyone will behave as a good little cog in in the wheels of the bright, shiny market machine. But we know that they won't. Some people (especially people obsessed with money) will rig, lie, cheat, steal, kill, etc., etc., to gain an advantage over the next guy. When you lay that fabric over the natural affairs of the world, you're asking for big, big trouble.
In your example above, for instance, it doesn't matter whether the market has accurately predicted President X's fate or not. The market's very existance begins providing incentives for bad actors to start causing long shots to come true. That would eventually either errode the viability of the market because investors would lose faith in it, or start causing wild speculation on long shots because investors would flock to the less likely events expecting the odd miscreant's interference (which would, ironically, both flip the predictions on their heads and make the interference less likely.) So, eventually, it wouldn't matter whether a contract was up or down. Bad actors (unrestrained in the real world and beyond the reach of regulators) would undermine the predictability of the events being marketed. The market would eventually fail while having instigated havoc in the real world.
Your scenario is plausible, but it is only one possible way that things might play out. If that was the only track things could take then the futures market would be feasible. Unfortunately, it's just as plausible that someone would buy futures contracts on some event (say, a "loss of a leader's power" *wink*wink*) with no intention of causing that event but with an expectation that the event would happen. Then, when the event didn't come to fruition and it looked like he was going to loose his shirt in the deal, he would have a large incentive to make that event happen in order to protect his investment. He could even profit from it. That scenario wouldn't create the advanced warning you envision but would, instead, bring about an unfortunate incident that wouldn't have happened had there not been a futures market. In fact the less likely the market says an event is to happen, the greater is the incentive to cause it to happen because the price of the contracts are cheaper for less likely events. It's like betting on a long shot in a horse race when you have uncontrolled access to the stables...too much opportunity for mischief.
In a purely free market, the use of force as a means to an end would not be tolerated.
You people who talk about purity really scare me. Purity can rarely be achieved and, even then, only through extreme measures. It's a very totalitarian concept. But, be that as it may, do you remember the strike breakers from your history books? (I'm assuming that hasn't been purged from the history books for the sake of purtiy.) When labor (the source of all capital) would organize for more equitable distribution of corporate profits, the company being struck would hire some goons (Pinkertons is a famous example) to go to the picket line and bash thier brains in. That sounds like corporate use of force to me. If you want an example of how corporations can co-opt government to apply force on their behalf, here's a good one: In 1921, coal miners attempted to organize labor in West Virginia's southern coalfields. The mining company goons weren't enough to put them down so they called in the US Army. The Battle of Blair Mountain is one you probably won't find in your history books (it's been purified) but it marks an infamous occasion -- it's the only time that the US military has dropped aerial bombs on US citizens. The use of force is not exclusive to governments alone.
The root of the problem is not the corporations who are only playing the hand they've been dealt.
You're kidding, right? Only playing the hand they're dealt?!! What corporation ever sat around waiting to play the hand they're dealt? Corporations actively seek to rig the deck in their favor. Greed will always drive them to do this. Corporations will never play by any rules unless the citizens constantly stand guard over them -- hence the need for a regulatory regime.
The problem is the overly complex, ambiguous, exploitable, corrput system of law...
I can't argue with your description of the laws, but those problems mostly arise from hoards of individual corporations bending their representives' ears (usually with campaign cash, an arena where most citizens can't compete) to carve out very specific loopholes for some activity that's profitable to them.
...and guess who makes the laws? It wasn't the corporations. It wasn't the citizens. Those groups my influence the law, but in the end, government holds the key.
You're fundamentally misunderstanding what a democratic government is. A government doesn't want anything. It doesn't do anything on it's own. It's a representation of the society that it arises from. A corrupt government arises from a corrupt society. A just government arises from a just society. It's entirely up to us. Government is not inherently good or bad. It's simply a way for a society to organize to achieve things that hoards of individual actors, each persuing their own agenda, could not achieve.
- how can you hold them accountable? In the marketplace?
- Yes, absolutely. But that isn't possible unless every individual and corporation abides by the same rules of voluntary association, and holds the same rights as the next. As you pointed out, that's not the case.
Rules and rights imply the existance of regulation. It sounds like you're making a case for a kind of citizen's regulation of corporations -- a government, perhaps? Or do you believe that corporations will simply abide by a set of rules out of the goodness of their cold, corporate hearts? Or, maybe, you think there is some "invisible hand" that will keep them on the straight-and-narrow. Faith in the free market won't make it happen, bro. There's a reason that hand is invisible. Adam Smith made it up, because it's the only way he could make capitalism work as an ideology. It's equivalent to the scientist in that cartoon writing the equation on the board with the term, "then a miracle happens" in it. Stop praying to the invisible hand. It doesn't exist.
Corporations have no more or less power than the individual: they may interact and trade with other groups and individuals SO LONG AS they interact on a voluntary basis.
The RIAA (a corporation) may issue subpoenas for your internet access records. Is there any individual citizen who has the power to subpoena anything from anybody? No. Citizens must request a judge to issue the subpoena on their behalf. That makes corporations "super-citizens." They can draft their own subpoenas and throw them at anyone they wish with the full backing of the legal system and without oversight.
How exactly did you conclude that corporations are unaccountable to "the people"?
Can you access corporate business records to see what they're up to? Is there any transparency toward the management's activities? Does the public get to choose the management or vote on its policies? (And don't give me that board-of-directors crap -- they're a layer removed from the actual workings of the corporation.) If you can't know these things, then how can you hold them accountable? In the marketplace? People buy products based on price not the policies or behavior of the management which they usually have no way of knowing, anyway.
Compare that to government, where we have sunshine laws and the Freedom of Information Act. Most meetings have to be open to the public. Most records are accessible to the public. The current administration doesn't understand that, however, and tries to run the government like a business (which is failing). If we know what's going on then we can go to the polls on election day and make choices based on that information. In those ways, government is accountable, corporations are not.
Any other questions from Civics 101? Why do you fight battles for your oppressors? Do you have Stockholm Syndrome?
Another example of bitter young men growing up to be bitter old men. Oh, and no solutions are provided in the article either, other than to replace the current swag of corrupt politicians with a new swag of corrupt politicians.
Ah, the arrogant swagger of those in control. This tired old saw of counter-criticizing the critics by complaining that they aren't providing any solutions is getting tiresome. It's as if they crumpled a car into a heap against a brick wall and when you crawl out of the passenger seat and tell them what a shitty driver they are, they turn to you and say, "Well let's see you drive it." Umm, too late dumbass. You just totaled it.
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Words to look up in your dictionary:
Wow. Way to start it off with arrogant contempt, there, ideologue.
Stock. Stockholder.
Only applies to publicly traded corporations, and stockholders still don't get to read meeting minutes.
Top secret. CIA. FBI. Patriot Act.
These are the extremes of government. The vast majority of what government does is, by law, open to the people's scrutiny. In addition, the functions you mentioned have been corrupted by corporate influence. We can take that power back if we choose.
Audit. Corporate earnings statement. Stockholder voting.
Arthur Anderson. Fraud. Shredded documents. Misstated earnings.
1 person, 1 vote.
What's wrong with that?
citizen. employee.
Citizenship is a job. You get exactly what you put into it. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance. You don't expect freedom to be handed to you on a silver platter, do you?
I choose your third option, which unfortunately you do not even see: the people.
Yes, excellent! The people! Why didn't I think of that? Now let's get busy. Oh, wait. We need some way to organize or we'll all just be running around in a kind of anarchy or something. I've got it! We'll form some kind of organization of the people, by the people, and for the people. Hmmm. What could we call that?
"We the people" are not the government. "We the people
Wow, what an extremist you are. You've very selectively edited the Constitution, then equated rule by the people with communism. That's just ideological hyperbole that doesn't have any place in an honest debate.
Now look up the words "consumer" and "taxpayer", and tell me which one has more freedom.
Again, very selective in your word choice. I notice that you didn't use "citizen" in your false dichotomy. Look that one up.
Do you understand that big government is as bad, if not worse than, big corporations?
Absolutely not. Government is chartered to act in the interest of the people. Corporations are chartered to act in the interest of their profit. Which one do you think is more likely to act in your interest?
Do you understand that the big corporations you hate are controlling the big government you love?
Duh! What do you think I'm bitching about? That's the whole problem. If we could pry the corporate hands off of government and put it back in the hands of the people then things would be much better for us. It wouldn't be perfect but we could choose our destiny instead of having it forced on us by greedy corporations who just want to strip-mine us for our labor.
I freely admit that government is the only thing that can control a monopolistic corporations.
Excellent. A point of agreement. This is where progress is made.
I also realize that nothing can control a despotic government (without bloodshed),...
Another point of agreement. Good, good.
You guys just can't get over Clinton, can you? Why are you so obsessed with him? You give him way too much credit as a pioneer. You'll certainly never get me to defend Clinton, but the despotism was pioneered much earlier in US history. Harding was a good one, and, more recently, Nixon and especially Reagan really set the bar for secrecy and power mongering. But Bush has taken it to a whole new level.
The worst evil of all: a government-sponsored monopoly!
Hmmm. I don't know, I think I'd give the nod to a monopoly-sponsored government as being worse.
Government does not give you power over your life. It gives you power over my life.
That's hyperbole. How can you think that government by the people means that I get the right to tell you what to do? It means nothing of the sort. You have as much right to influence the policies of an uncorrupted government as I do. One man, one vote. That doesn't even come close to equating to me having power over you. That's just flat-out paranoia. I can assure you that I (and everyone I know for that matter) have no intention of telling you what to do on your property as long as what you do stays on your property. If, however, you're mixing chemicals on your property and dumping waste on the ground and that waste is migrating into the groundwater or a nearby stream, then you are messing with public resources and you are affecting other people. In that situation, hell yes, the people (as a whole, not just me) have a right to tell you to cut it out and to pay for any damage you've done to a public resource.
The rich and powerful are usually there because government mandated they be there.
That's just about the stupidest thing I've heard. There may be some cases where government has created a monopoly that benefited an individual or corporation (most likely due to corruption, a la Halliburton) but, by far, most wealth in this country is concentrated in the hands of aristocrats whose money has been passed from generation to generation who have furthered their wealth many times by reinvesting it in private corporations. And to that I say, "good for them." I have no resentment toward them for that. But if they use that money to unfairly influence my government's policies then I'll do whatever I can to stop them.
I'm not saying get rid of government, I'm saying get rid of 90% of the federal government.
Then you're advocating that we just give 90% of our power away to corporations, then, right? Well, that's different, then.
I believe I can offer a better cable TV service, but I am not allowed to offer it in my neighborhood. I _KNOW_ of companies that can offer better water service to my town, but my city doesn't allow it.
You might "believe" that you can offer a better cable system, but the reality of doing so is a whole lot more harsh than you're letting on. The capital investment required is huge and the incumbent carrier would squash your business like a bug because a lot of it's capital investment has already been depreciated and amortized. Also, if you somehow managed to squeeze into a niche, the incumbent would cut you off at the knees by using the same trick they used against C-Band satellite dishes. They just go to the content provider and politely put them on notice that they will stop carrying their programming unless they cut you off. The program provider will think about it for about a nanosecond before zapping off a letter to you to let you know that there is some [insert fake reason here] that they can no longer provide you with their program material. Come back down to reality, here, and get off that limb of ideology. Cable is clearly an area in need of regulation. Once an incumbent is in place, no one else can realistically penetrate the market without a new, disruptive technology (as cable itself once was). As far as water service, you're telling me that you have two separate water systems in your community? Two purifying plants with two sets of distribution pipes? That's a highly unusual situation but it would be the only way to truly have competition. Otherwise, water service is one commodity that should definitely be owned by the people rather than a corporation. Water service is too important for our livelihood to be owned by an entity chartered to bring profit to its shareholders. Those two things just shouldn't mix. Capitalism is insoluble in water.
Competition is all you need to throw out the bad companise. Regulation only works to create new monopolies at the expense of everyone.
Yes, yes, yes. We can all see that you wear your ideology on your sleeve. You seek purity. Purity is an unattainable goal. The harder you try to enforce it, the more extreme and totalitarian your position becomes.
How much control do you have over corporations? Hell, you aren't even allowed to see their internal documents, let alone know what they are doing and exercise any influence over them. Now, how much control does the constitution give us over government? That's not even the right question because government is us -- We, the people. One of us will be in charge. Corporations or government(the people). Which do you want it to be? You can't really be that foolish.
Both parties are crap.
The difference is subtle. Democrats are working for their corporate sponsors but they're kind of hamstrung because they still have to pretend to be working for the people.
Repuglicans have this really nasty in-your-face, what-are-you-going-to-do-about-it arrogance about them while they ram this crap down our throats and put industry hacks in charge of government.
And are you really that threatened by blow jobs? I, personally, think spending our tax dollars and our soldiers' lives to kill thousands of civilians in a sovereign country is much more of a threat to our country.
Republicans are good at using words like "freedom" and "liberty" when they mean entirely opposite things to different constituancies. To the rich and powerful, including corporations, freedom means the freedom to do what you want without restrictions. To the common citizen, freedom means the freedom from having things done to you. These two concepts are at odds with one another. The big money interests know what they mean when the Repuglicans start spouting "feedom." Of course, the Democrats are on the same bandwagon. They just have to pretend to be on our side.
The only monopoly here is big government. It is time to downsize, downsize, downsize.
Yes, that's right. Let's get rid of the people's only chance of having power over their own lives. Let's eliminate government, altogether, why don't we. Then we'd be free, right? Free to be preyed upon by the rich and powerful who would swoop in to grab all that power we just tossed out with the garbage. Yep, that's good thinking.
Downsizing DC is equivalent to upsizing corporate power. Power will be grabbed by someone. The only way we, the people have to grab the power is via government. The power is there for us to grab if we choose to. I'm not really anxious to throw that power away and let corporations come in and take over.
Going...going...
You can argue till you're blue in the face about what happened in 1914, but corporations are taking over this country now and your only response is to bash government. Government is the only tool we have to solve this problem. If you want to throw that tool away and let the corporations run everything then you must be rich already. Do you think corporations will suddenly back off and let us be free once the regulations are gone? That's the height of naivete.
Great works of classical music, drama, and literature were written, ultimately, to make money...
No, the ones you eventually heard may have been created that way, but the ones that moved the people and created the culture that those works grew out of were created from the heart and the soul. A lot of them are lost to history. No record was made of them because no money was involved and recording them on paper and maintaining the record were, historically, things only the rich had the power to do. Cave men, sitting around the fire, singing and banging on hand-made instruments didn't do it for the money. They did it to create and maintain their culture. It's the human spirit that motivates these things, not money.
A rare and significant example of the real tide of culture was recorded by John Lomax who traveled the country, funded by the Smithsonian (thank you government) to record musicians where they lived. That's real stuff, not manufactured pablum and it would have been lost to history had he not been there to record it. In fact, there was a man born in Tupelo, Mississippi with a certain swivel in his hip and a voice that made women swoon. But that man never made a nickel because he was black. Then a couple of years later, Elvis came along and the rest is history. Record makers believed they couldn't make money on black artists so they picked white ones who emulated their black peers.
Britney Spears isn't popular because her music is culturally significant. She's popular because she's the tip of huge marketing machine. It just sounds like the ka-ching of a cash register to me or the beep of a truck backing up -- just the sound of money being made. The real culture is hidden and if anyone is guilty of myopia, it the person who can only see and hear what our corporate media presents to them. You are being manipulated and controlled so that someone else can make a buck. Some real artists can still be heard, though. Check out Mountain Stage.
The whole reason we elect government officials is to protect us from the government itself.
No, the reason we elect government officials is in order to:
Read the constitution sometime. Public ignorance is what allows corporate power to control your government.
Notice that more and more of our rights are taken away as the government gains more power?
Notice that government is just a tool that is being wielded by corporations to control us? Notice that we need to grab the tool for ourselves rather than smash it? Notice that without government we have no power to chart the course of our society? Notice that someone will always grab power and, without a democratic government, that will most definitely not be the people?
Fortunately, you prove yourself wrong in forgetting that the only one with ultimate power is the government, not big business.
Government is not a power in and of itself. Government is the cumulative power of the society itself. If you have a corrupt society, then it begets a corrupt government. Corporations currently own the government and control its actions. So blaming things on the government is childish and ignores the real culprits behind the scenes.
America was to be different from communists such as yourself...
Nice ad hominem. Abusiveness doesn't advance an argument.
What we have today is more socialist than it is capitalist.
No, it's more fascist than either capitalist or socialist. Fascism is corporate control of government combined with bellicose patriotism and nationalism. That's pretty much what we have now.
But I can understand how those with smaller brains would rather blame it on big business rather than on a Congress that has bordered treason for not upholding their oath to the Constitution that should keep them from passing laws that are clearly not within their powers.
Oooo, another ad hominem. You're on a roll. That indicates that your argument is weak. Look, congress is a wholly-owned subsidiary of corporate power. You're blaming the puppet for the puppeteer's crimes. The reason they can keep passing laws that are beyond the powers granted to them in the constitution is because the also corporately-owned executive branch is packing the courts with corporate-friendly judges who allow those laws to stand. Bashing government is a juvenile exercise equivalent to ragging on your mom because she won't let you go to a concert. The solution isn't to knock down government, it's to take it back for the people. Government by the people is the only way we can have things our way. Power, like nature, abhors a vacuum. If government power is reduced, corporate power will take its place.
While I already think people sue to often...
The reason you think that is because big corporations have paid PR firms a buttload of money to make you think that. The lawsuit crisis is a fiction perpetrated by corporations to get legislation passed to protect them in court. They want carte blanche to be able to commit whatever crime is profitable and then escape justice.
Great. This is what we need. More power to those who hold the purse strings. Give more power to big business and less to consumers.
Stop thinking of yourself as a "consumer." That's exactly how they want you to see yourself. Start thinking of yourself as a citizen with all the power the constitution gives you. The consumer is at the bottom of a food chain. The citizen is at the top in a democracy.
The scale of the problem is completely lost on you. Who determines the constitutionality of a law? The courts. Who is packing the courts with corporate-friendly judges? The executive branch (with advice and consent of the Senate). Who is mounting massive campaign efforts to replace citizen-friendly Attorneys General with corporate-friendly ones? Corporations. Who is pushing so-called "tort reform" legislation through state and federal legislatures to protect corporations from responsibility for their crimes? Corporate-owned legislators, governors, and the president. It's a massive attack against the citizens of this country and the world. Get on the clue train.
What the hell are you talking about? Rush attacks him on a daily basis. Your viewpoint is seriously skewed.
Perhaps if people in America actually bothered to vote you would see the politicians taking more notice of the people than the corporates.
Voting only works on the back-end of the election process. Corporations have already roped off the front end (the campaign process)with campaign cash, PR machinery, and market research. Without access to the front end of elections and with the information they're given being filtered by corporate media and PR firms, the people have no chance against the corporations.
Support freedom of music people.
It's even more important than freedom of music. It's our freedom of culture that's at stake. Our true culture has been stolen from us and replaced with manufactured culture. By monopolizing our culture they're taking away who we are and replacing it with a world of culturally ignorant "consumers". It's good for their profit but absolutely horrendous for our heritage, our freedom, our inspiration, our creativity, and our happiness. It's short term thinking that is rotting society from the inside.
SCO has claimed copyright on the wrong and will sue anyone who unlawfully distributes it.
We don't have GM make the road...then insist you
If you really are a bus driver, you might be interested in this. Most cities used to have a privately-owned trolley system that was an excellent means of transportation for the people (I live in quite a small city and it did). GM (along with Standard Oil and Firestone) didn't really care for people to have access to quality mass transportation so they formed a holding company called National City Lines to buy up the trolley companies and shut them down. Of course, a lot of people still didn't own personal transportation (yet) so NCL was quick to supply GM busses rolling on Firestone tires and burning Standard Oil. So, in a way, GM is responsible for the way our transportation system is organized.
More detail here and here.
Well, the way other markets work (e.g. the stock market) you don't know WHY people buy up a stock, just that they did. So you can't tell whether "President X will die" went up because someone plans to do it himself or simply suspects that someone else will do so, but since people's money is on the line, in aggregate they make good predictions.
I believe that this kind of market can provide accurate predictions when used in regulated environments, but my point was that it also has a fatal flaw when applied in this context and that, despite market forces, bad actors have too much opportunity to rig the system. That's a point that capitalism's "true believers" miss time and time again. They just seem to believe that everyone will behave as a good little cog in in the wheels of the bright, shiny market machine. But we know that they won't. Some people (especially people obsessed with money) will rig, lie, cheat, steal, kill, etc., etc., to gain an advantage over the next guy. When you lay that fabric over the natural affairs of the world, you're asking for big, big trouble.
In your example above, for instance, it doesn't matter whether the market has accurately predicted President X's fate or not. The market's very existance begins providing incentives for bad actors to start causing long shots to come true. That would eventually either errode the viability of the market because investors would lose faith in it, or start causing wild speculation on long shots because investors would flock to the less likely events expecting the odd miscreant's interference (which would, ironically, both flip the predictions on their heads and make the interference less likely.) So, eventually, it wouldn't matter whether a contract was up or down. Bad actors (unrestrained in the real world and beyond the reach of regulators) would undermine the predictability of the events being marketed. The market would eventually fail while having instigated havoc in the real world.
Your scenario is plausible, but it is only one possible way that things might play out. If that was the only track things could take then the futures market would be feasible. Unfortunately, it's just as plausible that someone would buy futures contracts on some event (say, a "loss of a leader's power" *wink*wink*) with no intention of causing that event but with an expectation that the event would happen. Then, when the event didn't come to fruition and it looked like he was going to loose his shirt in the deal, he would have a large incentive to make that event happen in order to protect his investment. He could even profit from it. That scenario wouldn't create the advanced warning you envision but would, instead, bring about an unfortunate incident that wouldn't have happened had there not been a futures market. In fact the less likely the market says an event is to happen, the greater is the incentive to cause it to happen because the price of the contracts are cheaper for less likely events. It's like betting on a long shot in a horse race when you have uncontrolled access to the stables...too much opportunity for mischief.
In a purely free market, the use of force as a means to an end would not be tolerated.
You people who talk about purity really scare me. Purity can rarely be achieved and, even then, only through extreme measures. It's a very totalitarian concept. But, be that as it may, do you remember the strike breakers from your history books? (I'm assuming that hasn't been purged from the history books for the sake of purtiy.) When labor (the source of all capital) would organize for more equitable distribution of corporate profits, the company being struck would hire some goons (Pinkertons is a famous example) to go to the picket line and bash thier brains in. That sounds like corporate use of force to me. If you want an example of how corporations can co-opt government to apply force on their behalf, here's a good one: In 1921, coal miners attempted to organize labor in West Virginia's southern coalfields. The mining company goons weren't enough to put them down so they called in the US Army. The Battle of Blair Mountain is one you probably won't find in your history books (it's been purified) but it marks an infamous occasion -- it's the only time that the US military has dropped aerial bombs on US citizens. The use of force is not exclusive to governments alone.
The root of the problem is not the corporations who are only playing the hand they've been dealt.
You're kidding, right? Only playing the hand they're dealt?!! What corporation ever sat around waiting to play the hand they're dealt? Corporations actively seek to rig the deck in their favor. Greed will always drive them to do this. Corporations will never play by any rules unless the citizens constantly stand guard over them -- hence the need for a regulatory regime.
The problem is the overly complex, ambiguous, exploitable, corrput system of law...
I can't argue with your description of the laws, but those problems mostly arise from hoards of individual corporations bending their representives' ears (usually with campaign cash, an arena where most citizens can't compete) to carve out very specific loopholes for some activity that's profitable to them.
You're fundamentally misunderstanding what a democratic government is. A government doesn't want anything. It doesn't do anything on it's own. It's a representation of the society that it arises from. A corrupt government arises from a corrupt society. A just government arises from a just society. It's entirely up to us. Government is not inherently good or bad. It's simply a way for a society to organize to achieve things that hoards of individual actors, each persuing their own agenda, could not achieve.
- how can you hold them accountable? In the marketplace?
- Yes, absolutely. But that isn't possible unless every individual and corporation abides by the same rules of voluntary association, and holds the same rights as the next. As you pointed out, that's not the case.
Rules and rights imply the existance of regulation. It sounds like you're making a case for a kind of citizen's regulation of corporations -- a government, perhaps? Or do you believe that corporations will simply abide by a set of rules out of the goodness of their cold, corporate hearts? Or, maybe, you think there is some "invisible hand" that will keep them on the straight-and-narrow. Faith in the free market won't make it happen, bro. There's a reason that hand is invisible. Adam Smith made it up, because it's the only way he could make capitalism work as an ideology. It's equivalent to the scientist in that cartoon writing the equation on the board with the term, "then a miracle happens" in it. Stop praying to the invisible hand. It doesn't exist.
Remember Enron? The US governme
Corporations have no more or less power than the individual: they may interact and trade with other groups and individuals SO LONG AS they interact on a voluntary basis.
The RIAA (a corporation) may issue subpoenas for your internet access records. Is there any individual citizen who has the power to subpoena anything from anybody? No. Citizens must request a judge to issue the subpoena on their behalf. That makes corporations "super-citizens." They can draft their own subpoenas and throw them at anyone they wish with the full backing of the legal system and without oversight.
How exactly did you conclude that corporations are unaccountable to "the people"?
Can you access corporate business records to see what they're up to? Is there any transparency toward the management's activities? Does the public get to choose the management or vote on its policies? (And don't give me that board-of-directors crap -- they're a layer removed from the actual workings of the corporation.) If you can't know these things, then how can you hold them accountable? In the marketplace? People buy products based on price not the policies or behavior of the management which they usually have no way of knowing, anyway.
Compare that to government, where we have sunshine laws and the Freedom of Information Act. Most meetings have to be open to the public. Most records are accessible to the public. The current administration doesn't understand that, however, and tries to run the government like a business (which is failing). If we know what's going on then we can go to the polls on election day and make choices based on that information. In those ways, government is accountable, corporations are not.
Any other questions from Civics 101? Why do you fight battles for your oppressors? Do you have Stockholm Syndrome?
Another example of bitter young men growing up to be bitter old men.
Oh, and no solutions are provided in the article either, other than to replace the current swag of corrupt politicians with a new swag of corrupt politicians.
Ah, the arrogant swagger of those in control. This tired old saw of counter-criticizing the critics by complaining that they aren't providing any solutions is getting tiresome. It's as if they crumpled a car into a heap against a brick wall and when you crawl out of the passenger seat and tell them what a shitty driver they are, they turn to you and say, "Well let's see you drive it." Umm, too late dumbass. You just totaled it.