Here is a dose of bad attitude for a Sunday afternoon. I was thinking about going back and finding all the Slashdot articles about the space shuttle returning to flight over the last 2+ years. If you recall after the crash NASA was saying they would be flying again in a year. Well its going to basicly be 2 and half years IF they launch in July and that is a big IF. I hate to break it to you but the Shuttle really isn't any closer to launch today after this new finding, than its been for most of this year. Any one of a about 100 people in about a dozen committees can get cold feet over one of about a thousand safety issues, all of which are totally valid, and its all called off again.
How about we stop posting articles about the Shuttle launch schedule and just wait until they actully launch the f**king thing.
Bottomline is the shuttle program team has. after two catastrophic failures, reached a state of near paralysis obsessing over safety issues most of which have been there for ALL of the last 25 years. Either they are sometime soon gonna say F**k it, fly, or they are going to say "but what if this went wrong" and the launch date will just keep slipping indefintiely. At least maybe they have an administrator now who will make them launch someday and do something worthwhile for a change. As nearly as I can tell the Columbia crash totally messed up Sean O'Keefe's head and he was so paralyzed ny the DANGER of manned space flight I doubt the shuttle would have ever flown again with him in charge.
The cruel reality is that most of the people who work on the Shuttle get paid the same whether it flies or not up until someone finally says enough and pulls the plug on it and I doubt any politician has the guts to actually do that. Even when that does happen all those people will quickly jump to one of the two CRV teams and politicans will be obliged to move all the money there since the jobs program that is the manned space program MUST BE PRESERVED AT ALL COSTS, even if they never launch another man in to space. The CRV is especially cool because there are about 10 years of paychecks waiting there before they have to actually risk launching anyone in to space.
"The majority of the shuttle program has been a public relations campaign and politics."
You left out, giant welfare/jobs program. They are cool high paying tech jobs for the most part... well... and lots of people pushing giant piles of paper from point A to point B, but it is still basicly just a jobs program. The jobs program includes:
- All the NASA civil servants in the manned space program, civil servants being hard to fire once you hire them you pretty much have to make work for them and their number almost never gones down but instead creeps up.
- All the people working for the prime contractor which as I recall is a consortium made up of a partnership between Boeing and Lockheed. (Note Boeing and Lockheed should be vitter rivals and competing with each other but since they formed a consortium for the Shuttle and just announced a parternship for expendable boosters they successfully eliminated all pretense of competition and are now a defacto space flight monopoly and the DOD and NASA have to pay whatever they feel like charging. Those two companies are really formidable lobbyiest so they can almost single handedly arm twist a bunch of Congressmen in to keeping the funds flowing to Shuttle and the ISS most of which goes in to their pockets, and interestingly they make just about as much with the shuttle grounded as if its flying. Most of the people in the manned space program probably don't actually care if it flies because their paychecks keep coming anyway and its less nerve wracking if they don't fly. Maybe their paychecks should be contingent on successful launches with all their salaries for a period being revoked in the event of catastrophic failure, then maybe they would get serious about spaceflight.
- All the people working in all the NASA centers and facilities, all the prime contractor plants, and a vast army of small contractors. Interestingly they are intentionally spread through nearly every congressional district and there are big centers in politically powerful states like Texas, Florida and California. The work was spread all over just so Congressmen had to back the space program no matter how screwed up or wasteful it got because it meant jobs someplace in their district. Sen. Bill Nelson in particular is a huge supported because he is of course from Florida.
Maybe all this is what you meant by "political" but I'm inclined to say the manned space program was pretty much doomed when LBJ put Johnson in Houston. He did it purely to heap prestige, jobs and dollars on to his home state of Texas. It also insured the Texas congressional delegation would back manned space flight from that point on. Practicly though its insane that everything done at Johnson isn't done at Kennedy. Much of the bad communication leading to both Challenger and Columbia could be traced to the fact half the people team was at Kennedy and half was at Johnson and the communications between the two warring centers is inevitably bad not to mention the bills they must run up constantly traveling between the two places.
If you want to restore your faith in people who are in aerospace for the love of it, the Discovery channels runs Black Sky; The Race for Space" once in a while. Someone with a camera roamed around Scaled Composites as they worked on SpaceShipOne, the first private launch of a man in to space to win the Ansari X prize. Its great stuff for geeks and engineers. The head aero engineer is a new hero of mine. He really knew his job and they have footage of him spotting a trim problem that would have lead to a fatal crash if he hadn't caught it in realtime. He has a great, dry sense of humor too, and looked to be a great role model for young people who want to go in aerospace or engineering. Towards the end he had a great comment I can only paraphase. He pointed that we've reached the point that people feel like they can't do anything amaz
"This still doesn't necessarily make them "bad" in terms of Capitalism. Just let's not act all starry eyed about succussful businessmen."
On the flip side I dont think you can dismiss all successful businessmen as greedy, worthless bastards and crooks. I think its really important to give some deference to people who start from zero, using their personal capital, and create successful companies. Without them we would have no companies, no jobs, no nothing unless you want to live under Socialism where government creates all the jobs.
That said, Sam is dead now, and I don't even know who took his place at Walmart's helm. I have very little respect for the stuffed shirts that step in to companies that are already successful and run them. Some of them are probably great but it proves nothing to me if all you do is refrain from screwing up a succesful company someone else built, especially the ones who succeed by just outsourcing and slashing labor costs, or playing the merger and acquisition game.
"and the fact that more than 40 per cent of their employees can't afford the cheapest health insurance program they offer to their employees."
I really don't think you can blame Walmart for this one either. Most companies can't afford full health insurance for their employees anymore either. The ones that are providing it are taking a huge and exploding hit to their bottomline, and they are at a competitive disadvantage to companies in the U.S. or abroad who dont pay those costs. If you recall GM's unions are probably going to voluntarily give up health benefits to try to minimize massive layoffs because health insurance costs are spiraling out of control.
Rather than blame Walmart for not providing gold plated and expensive health insurance maye we should study why insurance costs are spiraling out of control in the U.S. Not sure anyone knows but I'm willing to bet some factors are:
- Health care and drug companies are on one of the few industries left in the U.S. where you can make a killing in the U.S. and I suspect they have drawn every greedy businessman left in the country. Drug companies consistently carry some of the biggest profit margins in the economy. Why? Because American's have to pay whatever prices they feel like charging for their products and services. They have defacto monopolies especially when the collude with each other to inflate prices.
- Drug and health care companies are among the best and most astute lobbiest and campaign contributors and use every other trick in the book to completely exploit government corruption, so they have a government that is giving them a blank check to inflate prices unchecked. The so called "Medicare Reform" bill and drug benefit was in fact a case of our government being totally corrupted by big corporations and handing them billion and billions of tax dollars for a worthless sham.
- America is doing a great job of buying really neat technology like MRI and cat scans but they are also exorbinantly expensive. End result if you are wealthy or insured you can get really good health care in this country. If you are not you cant get any or if you do it will bankrupt you.
- The healthcare and drug system is really corrupt. Fraud reigns supreme and it costs everyone a lot. There was a heart surgeon in David CA who was a superstar until everyone realized he was performing open heart surgery on people with no heart disease to improve his profitability, and there are people like Scrushy and Healthsouth, also financial superstars but apparently a complete fraud.
- Incompetent doctors result in lots of malpractice suits and people who want to commit fraud lead to lots of malpractice, comp and disability suits that drive up costs for everyone.
- I have step grandmother who is 80. She is old and not in very good shape. Nearly as we can tell there isn't really anything wrong with here but she goes to the doctor on a weekly basis and demands the run and rerun test in a vain attempt to find whats wrong with here. She is on Medicare with supplemental so it costs here next to nothing. She can therefor bleed the system white looking for a cause that is really simply that she is old and her body isn't in great shape but its not something you are going to find and cure. Listen to a police scanner sometime and listen to all the ambulance calls and emergency room calls for seniors who are just sick. It doesn't cost them anything, it costs society a fortune when mostly they just need a doctor that will take walkins and someone to drive them there. Instead everyone goes to the emergency room at thousands of dollars a pop.
If you are refering to my post, I don't think I was saying the rules of the game are "wrong". I'm just saying with the rules we have you are going to get some results that some people aren't going to like. With the rules we have Sam Walton is going to be able to create Walmart from a five and dime in Arkansas, and he can bankrupt pretty much every other mom and pop five and dime near one of his stores. He will also most probably put under every supermarket with unionized workers and drive down wages and benefits for retail workers.
You could change to another system but I doubt you are going to find one that is "right". Maybe you can find one you like better, but chances are its going to make winners and losers too, different winners and losers but there will still be people getting screwed and bad things happening. Unfortunately economical and political systems create winners and losers. The only constant is the people who are best at playing the game the given system creates are more likely to be winners. The people who pretend the rules don't matter and can be ignored are likely to be losers.
Not sure you actually read that review but a lot of it is a kind of glowing statement about how great a company Wal-mart is which is why they are so successful. Most of the compliments are backhanded and reulctant but the author/reviewer apparently couldn't deny even to themselves that Walmart is a really well run company, if they weren't they wouldn't be so successful.
Crucifying Wal-mart based on "gender discrimination" is pretty weak. In a company that big are there local managers discriminating against women, almost inevitably and I doubt Walmart headquarters can stop it, no company can. Is Walmart discriminating as a matter of policy, I doubt it and its hard to prove without smoking gun tapes or memos.
Any big company people want to target can be accussed of gender discrimination unless they are introducing quotas to insure precisely 51% of their management are women and that all women's salaries are identical to their male counterparts. Or maybe if their workforce is %70 women maybe they have to have 70% of their management women, and all CEO's must be women because they are the majority of the population?
Fact is women make an average of 76% of what men make in this country, therefor the entire country is guilty of gender discrimination. Only way you are going to change it is to institute quota systems and wage regulation. Then instead of gender discrimination your discriminating against people who are more qualified but are of the wrong gender to get a quota slot.
Fact is Walmart hires pretty vast pools of unskilled women to run cash registers and stock shelves. I'm pretty sure they hire a lote more unskilled women than men. Most are probably not management material. I wager, though I don't know for sure it would totally mess up their company if they were compelled to promote women who are unqualified in order to avoid being labeled gender biased.
Dude you completely misread or misinterpreted what I said. For example, I didn't say all Indians and Chinese are employed and all Americans and Europens are unemployed. I said "if the current inevitable march continues". Sorry you missed it before you lept in to your tirade, it was in the first sentance.
They key point here is in the new globalized labor market there is an inevitable force in play where all the jobs that can migrate, are going to migrate to the cheapest labor market. No free market economist is going to dispute this fact unless they are stupid or lieing.
The fact that there are a few billion people in India and China, many of whom are unemployed means they are going to be a cheap labor market for a LONG time. Americans will no doubt have lots of service jobs because they can't migrate. Most IT, call center and manufacturing jobs can and are.
"Shareholders bet, with their money, in the success of a company. That money is what allows people to take a wage back home. Without shareholders there would not be jobs. It is that simple."
In an era where people bought and held stock for long periods, to collect dividends and officers of the company were big shareholders that might have been true.
Today, in the era of day traders and brokers with computerized trading algorithms, stock really isn't really a means for financing business growth. It is for the 1 time IPO or the not very common addtional stock offering.
Stock today is almost universally just a vehicle for shareholders to gamble and cash in. For execs its purely a greed motivator, that motivates people to create startups. It will be interesting to see how the recent move to clamp down on handing out options like candy, will result in the exodus of the people who are only in the game to make a killing on stock options.
Unfortunately when you get to big established companies, stock valuation has become a malevolent influence. There isn't anything positive about it any more. All it does is compell execs to focus on each quarters results, to set and meet quarterly expectations, so the stock goes up not down. The key point is they can, and in many cases are, completely destroying the long term health and viability of their companies chasing quarterly results. Why bother with long term R&D, if you cut it you improve your margins. Enron was a case study in a company destroying itself in a misguided attempt to make their numbers and prop up their stock valuation. Worldcom, same, same.
Bottomline does stock doesn't really fund jobs, not really, its mostly just a greed motivator for people to create companies, and the execs get a lot more stock than workers do, usually for basicly free. Thats why, if you need to improve your margin the first thing you will do is fire or outsource your workforce.
Its also a fact that the demand to maintain your quarterly results almost DEMANDS you outsource your jobs to the cheapest labor market you can, so in most respects stock valuation is creating jobs in India and China now, not the U.S. Haven't seent the stats lately but most of the job creation in the U.S. is:
- service jobs that can't be outsourced - hiring of legal and illegal aliens for dirt cheap jobs - jobs created by the governmnt and its vast deficit spending
"After seeing the results of other economic experiments last century you better come with something very original, otherwise you and your marxist (ingorant marxist mind you) ilk will be sent back to where they belong: the scrapheap of failed ideas."
Uh, dude, China's "economic experiments last century" are going like gang busters in case you didn't notice. Its not even remotely free market Capitalism. Its a Socialist dictatorship exploiting free market Capitalism. Its not a good sign for the world if its prove to be the winning economic model, bets are that it will be, because I don't wont be an oppressed worker living in a socialist dictatorship with sham fr
" That's why you see small businesses closing left and right, while Starbucks and Wal-Mart open yet another store in your area."
I wont win any mod points for this but ya know bashing Wal-Mart is easy but the fact is that company is successful because they play by the rules of the game and they play really well.
You should watch the bio on Sam Walton on Biography channel. I despise rock star CEO's that walk in to multibillion dollar companies and run them in to the ground. That is not Sam or the Walton family. He and his family started with next to nothing and a tiny five and dime retail store in a small town in Arkansas. They succeeded because:
- They worked really hard, and I mean really worked as in they all stocked shelves and drove around finding products to sell at good prices - They gambled everything they had on their business multiple times and they could have easily lost it all numerous times - They were ruthlessly efficient, it can be cruel especially to workers and suppliers but if you are not you dont succeed in retail. - They gave people what they want, they sold the products people wanted at the best price in town. That is the classic definition of competition in retail. They did't win through bombing their competitors, or cheating or anything else. They competed, the competed well and they won.
Yea it sucks that they stock their shelves with Chinese goods but the fact is if they didn't someone else would and they would go under. Fact is Chinese goods are way cheaper than American made goods and you can't change that now unless we start restoring trade barriers or push American worker's wages down to 30 cents an hour.
Yea it sucks that they dont pay their employees very well. But you know what, running a cash register and stocking shelves are some of the lowest skill jobs around, especially in the era of bar codes and RFID. Fact is if I dont go to Wal-Mart I go to a grocery story with do it yourself checkout. You see even I can scan bar codes, feed money in to a cash register and put my groceries in to a sack, so I dont see the value in subsidizing a unionized grocery worker to do something that requires no skill. You do have to kind of wonder about the sanity of unionized grocery store workers commanding some of the best wages and benefits in many small towns. They are people with no actual skills and in free markets people are supposed to get paid based on what their worth. Grocery store workers are not worth a lot.
The other thing you need to appreciate about Wal-Mart is they have probably the most sophisticated and efficient computerized supply chain on the planet. They have giant computers in Arkansas that track every transaction in every store and make sure the right goods arrive at the right place at the right time. Your mom and pop store cant compete against that, in retail, inventory management determines the winners and losers, not sentimentality. Wal-Mart now has economy of scale almost no one else can match but the fact is they Walton's still beat their competition when they were in one five and dime in Arkansas because they worked really hard and they played to win.
All in all the Walton family are an American success story. If you are going to ridicule and crucify them for succeeding you are basicly ridiculing every aspect of Capitalism. Its is a deeply flawed system in a lot of ways, but so are all the others. The Walton's are just grand masters of the system they live under.
"Want to be the one who collects the money at the top? Easy. Start your own company and create some jobs of your own."
You glossed over a key point. IBM's CEO Sam Palmisano like many CxO's, had absolutely zip to do with founding IBM though to his credit he worked at IBM or a subsidiary most of his life. since 1973. But I wager he's invested very little of his personal wealth in IBM equity other than maybe through the employee stock purchase plan, which is more of a benefit than a case of gambling your personal wealth on the success of the company.
One bit from his IBM bio:
"Mr. Palmisano has served as senior vice president and group executive for IBM's Personal Systems Group; led IBM's strategic outsourcing business;"
Apparently outsourcing is a key feather in his resume cap.
Ya know, I have no problem with CxO's who put all their personal assets on the line, and risk everything, to start a company and invest most of their waking hours for years in making it a success. God damn they deserve to reap huge rewards if and when they succeed.
On the other end of the scale I do have a big problem with the the rock start CEO's like Carly Fiorina, who invest absolutely none of their own wealth in an equity stake when they take the helm of a company. Instead they demand and are handed huge cash and equity stakes for just walking in the door and for being adept at social networking, crafting their image, political manuevering and climbing over the top of their teammates to get to the top.
When you have CxO's who have no real stake in the company they run is it any wonder many of them crater the company. Even if they fail completely their signing package up front and their golden parachute at the end insure they will have more wealth then most of us can dream off, even if they are a complete screw up.
They rock star CEO's also seem real short on investing in R&D and developing innovative products. More often than not their stewardship of the company consists of laying off or outsourcing enough people each year to maintain the companies profitability, and their grand plan is merger and acquisition which is a lot easier than invention and product development.
"unalienable rights are not "culture inflicted" on the world."
There is no such thing as unalienable rights, and just because the founding fathers said there was doesn't change that fact. I think they just used the term to exert a little extra pressure on their successors to not take away they rights they wanted the people in their new nation to have. They were spouting about unalienable rights at the same time many of them owned slaves who had none of these rights. Maybe you should try using the term "unalienable ideals" it would be less hypocritcal.
Freedom of press and freedom of speech are things a culture can decide are valuable and try to maintain. If they were unalienable rights than our government couldn't take them away. Wordnet defines unalienable as " incapable of being repudiated". Our government has routinely repudiated all of our so called "unalienable rights". During World War II our freedom of speech and press were dismantled and are being so again. American citizens of Japanese descent were locked in camps for the duration, and all thei rproperty was tolen, with no due process, in defiance of their supposedly "inalienable" rights.
"you can't control bits over networks"
Nice Libretarian gushing. Let me harken back to something you said earlier, child porn is bad. So obviously after all this gushing idealism you are advocating that child porn be freely and abundantly available, and you are going to do your part to make sure that its readily available to all because you simply can't try to control the bits on the Internet. Let freedom ring....
"approval or interference. it may not have the infrastructure or resources but it is making a difference."
Hooray for it, but I think you really exaggerate its power and influence. 99% of the worlds people dont see non mainstream media. 99% of people don't have a clue what the Downing Street Memo said, or if they do they don't care. The mainstream media in the U.S. and Britain were instrumental in whipping up the pro war sentiment that allowed the Iraq war to happen.
The Downing Street Memo comes out now and it makes zero difference other than retierating something most people with a clue already knew, the case for the war was fabricated, whopee, I knew that before the bombing started. Will any one land in jail for what it says. no. Will it bring the war in Iraq to a quick and orderly conclusion, no, will it turn back the clock, no. Will it tittilate wonks for few days yes. Big deal.
"The winners are the consumer who gets to pay lower prices for the products and services."
Excepting of course that if the current inevitable march continues, the consumers in the U.S. and Western Europe will be unemployed, bankrupt and wont be buying products and services. Oh, I guess you were refereing to all the consumers in China and India, who still have jobs, getting lower prices for products and services?
As someone else said its open to debate if IBM is cutting their prices as a result of this. Outsourcing is usually a tool CxO's use to improved their profit margins, to goose their stock price, and to justify jacking up compensation packages. In case you were unaware the CxO's make an average of like 400X what their workers make now. Twenty years ago it was more like 40X. If you want to maximize your shareholder value why dont you try also advocating reigning in CxO's who've been looting their companies equity to line their pockets.
All in all you did hit the nail on the head here, "the other winners are the stockholders..." though I think you meant the "only" real winners are the stockholders(and CxO's). Well there are temporary winners, the ones who get the outsourced jobs, until they get to be to expensive and their jobs move to the next cheapest labor pool.
One of the ironies of capitalism, shareholders can make a shit load of money investing in a ruthlessly managed company. Do the shareholders actually produce anything of value, do they invent, do they design, do they manufacture, do they do any work, do they provide services? No they are people who have acquired money, and they place bets much as you would in a casino and if they place a winning bet they get money for nothin' and chicks for free.
You are kind of advocating screwing everyone who works for a living to maximize shareholder profits. We all know this is the grand plan of Capitalism, though let's try to not advertise it as blatantly as you are because it ticks off the little peons.
Just be warned that when you start the concerted campaign to screw over the vast majority of people who aren't rich and work for a living, and you seek to drive them in to poverty, chances are high that they will be eventually driven to either peaceful or violent revolution and will overthrow the politicans and the wealthy elite who were bent on acquiring vast power and wealth on the broken backs of working people. Working people do outnumber the rich so if they ever got a clue they could vote for people who are on their side, instead of choosing between a Democrat from the ruling eite(Kerry) or a Republican from the ruling elite(Bush). They can also storm the seats of government and power and hang any culprits who are particularly blatant and abusive.
The U.S. has already seen at least one cycle like this. The robber barons in the late 1800's were maximizing their shareholder value with great success, they got staggeringly, filthy rich often by exploiting monpolies. The concentration of wealth in their hands was enormous and the plight of working people was really, really bleak. It spawned the mostly peaceful progressive movement which was the last time a grass roots populist movement really fought back against the ruling elite, and it lead to things like basic labor law so workers and children weren't working every waking hour for poverty wages, and it brought us progressive taxation to put a brake on wealth concentration in the hands of the few, and it brought us antitrust legislation to break up monopolists. Sadly America hasn't really seen a similar grass roots populist movement since and it shows, wealth is once again concentraing in the hands of few, and real wages and standard of living are in a steep decline for most.
You really missed the key enabler that lead to outsourcing. I'll grant you the U.S. is an economic, educational and social disaster but trying to blame it only on big government is cliche and simplistic. American free markets and corporations are just as much to blame as government is.
In particular I take real exception to your suggestion that China is some kind of free market paradise now. They are still massively socialist. The government still manages vast sectors of their economy. Many of their leading corporations are government owned or are controlled by the upper ranks of the Communits party. Much of their success is because have a central government planning their economic plan of attack on the West. Its a plan of attack with a very long view, versus America where we cant plan past this quuarters results or a 4 year presidential term.
Its also a simple fact of life that decades of affluence and inflation have priced American and Western Europen workers out of the new global labor market and that would have happened almost inevitably. Only way you might have prevented it would have been to have NO labor law, no benefits, no unions and poverty wages so you kept Western workers at the level they were at around 1900, working 7 day weeks, 12 hours a day for basicly nothing. The choice is either you have well payed workers or you dont. In the globalized world it appears workers are now officially screwed and capitalist can rejoice at their new pool of cheap labor and bigger profits. Marxism is a dirty word in the west but Marx did nail the inevitable result of capitalism. A tiny wealthy elite control all the wealth and there is a vast pool of workers who are screwed.
Some other key factors that have changed. 40 years ago:
- The U.S. was still riding a tide of wealth and power it garnered from World War II. It was the only major world power that wasn't flattened in World War II. Lets not pretend it was the supriority of "the greatest generation" or the American system that pushed America to the top so much as it was an accident of geography.
- there was no fiber optic telecomm and no internet. International telecommunications was slow, difficult and expensive. You couldn't put a call center on the other side of the planet because the phone bills would have killed the labor cost savings. Now the telecom costs are next to nothing and the web makes it trivial for people to communicate and interact regardless of where their offices are. Call centers and information jobs can no go to the cheapest labor market with workers with a minimal education to do it. To be honest call center worker and grinding out code to spec aren't the biggest skill jobs in the world.
- container ships were just barely in existence. If you wanted to ship goods between countries there were really expensive and often corrupt longshoremen in the loop loading and unloading ships by hand. It took a long time and it cost a fortune. I heard one estimate that shipping a VCR from asia dropped from $40 to around $1.40 thanks to container shipping. Plummeting shipping costs enabled outsourcing manufacturing
- there were an abundance of trade barriers between countries and the U.S. used them as much as anyone. You can have disparity in wages and standard of living if you maintain trade barriers. You cant if you have true free trade. Thanks to things like WTO and NAFTA the U.S. has largely dismantled its trade barriers, while places like Japan and China still quite gleefully use them to block US goods from their markets. A key reason IBM sold their PC division to Lenovo in China is that was the price of admission the Chinese government charges America companies to enter their markets. They have to have a Chinese partner and transfer lots of IP, wealth and markets to them to gain admission.
- India was still pulling itself together after years of British colonial rule and religious civil war. Its economy was in collpase. Also since thenthey have invested heavily in spotti
The problem is a relatively small number of voters are injured by the action in New London. The only danger to the politicians involved is if people, other than those that were actually screwed, start to feel threatened as well, if they start doing it every year, to a new group of homeowners for example, they might be in trouble. City councilmen aren't the most long lived of politicians anyway. They can get in office, screw a bunch of homeowners, and rake in enough graft from the developer to make it well worth their while and leave office if the furor gets to bad and not give a damn.
This ruling opens the doors wide open to corruption. If a developer can buy off a few city councilmen they can get all the land they need for their development for a song and without the hassle of negotiating with the property owners.
As long councilmen only do it once in a while they can get away with it. If they screw a few home owners but the community gets a shiny new shopping mall chances are it will be a net win for the politicians. The mall developers can be counted on to fill their campaign coffers or their pockets with graft too. Politics is all about picking the right voters and and the right number of voters to screw over, and to insure the lost votes are canceled out by the people they please. Unfortunately in most communities the rich, white and powerful are most likely to do the screwing and the poor and minorities are the first on the list to get screwed. Wealth tends to make one set of voters a lot more valuable than another, thanks to campaign contributions, graft and country club social networks.
Its just another sad day for America and there have been a lot of them especially since 2000 and 9/11. In some respects the Supreme Court has just authorized a mild form of the same thing you've seen in Zimbabwe in recent weeks. The government can decide which of its citizens are valued and will protect thier property rights, and can burn out anyone they consider undesirable, and can give their land to wealthy developers who now apparently have more rights than ordinary citizens when it comes to property.
Never thought I'd say it but you have to wonder if maybe getting more true conservatives on the court might not be a bad thing. I'm generally view Scalia and Thomas complete nut jobs but they were totally in the right in dissenting in this case. This is a blank check for government at all levels to run rough shod over peoples basic civil liberties, in favor of corporations and the wealthy. The problem is getting real conservatives and not right wing nut jobs who are conservative on some issues and complete nut jobs on others, like social and morality issues.
More government power is almost always bad because once they acquire they almost never give it back, they slowly acquire it all and citizens are left with none.
"If a draft was in place (prior to the start of this war) then going into Iraq on a half-baked case of WMDs would have not happened. With a draftee Army the Executive actually needs to make a case for going to war. And Congress would have the backbone to oppose the Executive if that case wasn't made."
I REALLY doubt there is any correlation. Post 9/11, with a press corp turned incompetent, the Democrats in collapse, the Bush adminstration could have bulldogged the U.S in to the war draft or no draft as long as they were willing to use inflamatory and deceiptful rhetoric about WMD's and nonexistent links to 9/11 which they obviously were.
Only prayer your arguement might have is the rich, white and powerful might have pushed back harder if their children were at risk of combat but chances are instead there would have already created guard service and college deferments for all the rich, white youngins to duck it, and long as only the middle to lower case, and minorities are drafted the powers that be could care less if they get fed to a meat grinder as long as they can see profit and power in it for them
"If we had a draft do you really think we'd be going into Syria or Iran? I highly doubt it."
Probably not but only because Iraq went south on them. If Iraqi's had welcomed them with roses like they said, and they had a happy pro American poodle there in a few months chances are high they would have trumped up WMD cases and terrorism cases against Syria and Iran and kept the tanks a rollin'. They were floating the rhetoric for it back then, they just had to be realists when Iraq got looted and the insurgents started fighting back.
Iran might still happen because they are going to try to bring a Russian built nuclear reactor on line this year and either the U.S. or Israel is going to bomb it and then its a question of whether Russia and Iran will take it with a whimper or strike back. Personally I think they will massively expand support for the insurgents in Iraq to retaliate and it will slowly spiral out of control.
" As far as Afghanistan is concerned if we had a competent President"
Exactly right. Instead he invaded Iraq and made recruiting posters for AL Qaeda to continue to grow their movement. "Look infidels invading a Muslim nation again, because they hate Muslims, want all our oil, and because Isreal told them to."
"It's obvious that you don't have a whole lot of respect for any politician"
Come on, be fair to them, they've worked really hard to earn the contempt and disrespect of anyone who has a clue how corrupt and or incompetent they all are.
"I only hope you aren't so cynical that you've stopped bothering to vote."
Hell yea I voted, its largely a complete waste of time but I still do it, God only knows why. The Presidential vote was a complete waste the second the Dems nominated Kerry. At that point both viable choices were complete incompetents, Yale Skull and Bonesmen to boot, and there was no real choice which is the way the powers that be like it. My measly vote did back a Dem senator and congressmen who won, they both suck, as Dems are want to do, but it was a desperate act to try to keep the Republicans from having the stranglehold on power they got anyway thanks to a buch of clueless right wing bible thumpers.
You might be right. I remember the subject did come up about once during the whole campaign and I dont recall if Kerry was outright claiming to be Irish or it was his campaign and not him. Needless to say making an issue of his Jewishness would be so politicly incorrect in this day an age that the press probably really didn't even want to report the story, though it was one of many indicators that Kerry is a major phony.
You really have to doubt that he wouldn't know the ancestry of his grandparents. I think it was his paternal grandparents that emigrated to the U.S and changed the family name from a very Jewish one to Kerry. Its a little hazy but I think his paternal grandfather was also a suicide so there is a heavy dose of skeletons in the family closet. For a family with intense political and upwardly mobile social ambitions maybe they brushed all this under the rug early and Kerry didn't know the truth but I really doubt it. Abandoning the Jewish religion and surname was no doubt desirable and politically expedient considering the extent of discrimination against Jews in most of early 20th century America.
"Did you bother to read my fucking post before you jumped all over it in self-righteous indignation? As I pointed out if we had a draftee army then we wouldn't be in an unpopular war to begin with."
Your assertion is self contradictory and nonsensical. If I understand the assertion once we start a draft all of a sudden the unpopular wars end, at which point we dont need a draft? Or maybe you are saying since we are in an unpopular war now we can't have or don't need a draft, though the Army and Marines soon wont be able to maintain their force in Iraq without a draft.
The scenario is the U.S. is already stuck, indefinitely, in an unpopular war in Iraq and it may have to institute a draft to maintain the current force structure there because NO ONE WANTS TO VOLUNTEER to walk or drive around Iraq and risk getting blown up. If the U.S. leaves Iraq because it can't maintain its forces there without a draft, then the current puppet government probably eventually falls and the U.S. has another lost war on its record, a really expensive lost war, and a middle east in flames with a government in Iraq potentially worse, more dangerous and unpredictable than Saddam.
Only way I can make sense of your arguement is you lept off on a tangent about how great it would be if we had a peace time draft and mandatory national service, to build character and skills among young people. Well that isn't the issue here because we aren't in peace time and the draft wont be to teach kids skills, it will be to put boots on the ground in Iraq, Afghanistan and maybe someday Iran or Syria.
Some of those 18 year old draftees no doubt will learn valuable skills in electornics, and as mechanics or truck drivers, many of them are going to be packing M-16's around Iraq and aren't going to learn a damn thing except how to stay alive. In case you were unaware many of the Army's skill job are being contracted out to companies like Halliburton/KBR. In the perfect Rumsfeld/Cheney world, the Army and Marines are for combat, they don't learn job skills, and we pay contractors to do all the skill jobs.
"and that (obviously) politicians are drawn from that same pool?"
Really not sure what point you are trying to make. You seem to be denying there is any chance that politicians have ever volunteered for combat duty to further their future political careers. Well its a simple fact some did and John Kerry is the most blatantly obvious and undeniable case, because he was trying to reproduce JFK's PT boat resume. Not sure there is really anything wrong with it, it sure beats being a Chicken Hawk so I'm not really sure what the arguement is.
"Watch the videotapes of him from back then -- he had a lot more passion about his opinions then I would have expected from your average politician."
Yea and it also happened to catapult him on to the national stage. No one knew who he was before he started his antiwar gig. It happens at the time being antiwar was more popular than being prowar and he is ALWAYS on the most popular side of every issue, that is the only consistent thing about him.
I mostly fault him for volunteering for combat duty when it was already well known what kind of a screwed up mess Vietnam was, and then when he got there and found out it was, duh, he took this quickest out he could get, parlaying 3 flesh wounds in to 3 purple hearts and a quick out before his tour was up though he was never seriously injured. He then preceeded to grab every mic he could find and rant about the war. I'm inclined to say that if he volunteered for combat duty he should have finished his tour and spent another six months regretting his mistake for volunteering for combat.
Forgot to mention the U.S. has and is trying the same thing on Iraqi's. They handed out buckets of cash to Saddam's loyalist to try to keep them out of the insurgency. When a suspected insurgent joins the Iraqi police or army and is then thrown out they also pay them off.
The Iraqi army and police are really just the U.S. trying to buy Iraqi mercenaries to fight the war and its failing miserably. Their ranks are full of insurgents there to spy and sabotage, they are badly motivated, and most are taking these very dangerous jobs only because there are no other jobs to be had. It doesn't help that the U.S. is increasingly hiding its forces in its heavily defended bases and are letting the Iraqi army and police absorb the wrath of the insurgents.
I could be wrong but I think the U.S. should have left Iraq alone in the first place, Saddam was bad but at least there was order, versus civil ware. Chances are high its going to be nothing but a perpetual quagmire, with no exit strategy, and the U.S. will have to stay in force or the government will collapse or be overthrown.
The ethnic mix in Iraq doomed the war before it started. The Sunni's used to have all the power and money and used it to ruthlessly oppress the Kurds and Shias. In a democracy the , a small minority versus the Shia's, have no power, no wealth and no jobs and they are going to be a well spring for an insurgency for generations.
The French did basicly just that in Algeria and Vietnam, Part 1. It was called the French Foreign Legion. They still lost both wars.
The U.S. is for all intents and purposes already doing it too, though they are using mercenaries under the misnomer of contractor. Blackwater is one company in particular which is supplying thousands of highly paid mercenaries, most of whom are ex special forces, trained by Uncle Sam at great expense, and at the first opportunity quit the Army to command 6 figure salaries as mercenaries... errr... contractors. I wager Blackwater takes plenty of foreign mercenaries too though I dont know for sure, and I'm sure they cost U.S. tax payers a small fortune to pay.
Halliburton/KBR is for all intents the same thing though not in a combat sense. They are basicly offered large sums of money to do all the jobs that used to be done by enlisted soldiers, cooking, cleaning and driving trucks in particular. Its a win because they dont cost the government the lifetime benefits package a soldier does, but the contracts are ripe for fraud and you cant count on contractors in a combat zone.
The French experience in Algeria is a really good case study for how Iraq might go. It was a dirty guerilla war in an arid Muslim country. The population absolutely and uniformly hated the French. Everything the French did to try to suppress the insurgency made the Algerians hate them more, and made the insurgency stronger. The Algerians tried org charts for the insurgency leadership like the U.S. does, and kidded themselves that as the crossed off the leaders they were crushing the insurgency. The fact is when everyone hates you, everytime you kill an insurgent 3 more spring up to take his or her place. You simply can't defeat an insurgency that is supported by a significant percentage of the population.
" to put down the service of John Kerry and George H.W. Bush though."
Doh, I did miss the opportunity to point out there was an ulterior motive for George H.W. Bush enlisting when he did, and pulling strings to get a fighter in the Pacfic though he was way under age for it.
Right before he enlisted the Bush family, in particular his dad, George W.'s grandad, Prescott Bush was embroiled in a scandal. Prescott was a leading officer of Union Banking in New York, and most think he actually ran it day to day for the Harriman family. Soon after Pearl Harbor, Union Banking's assets were seized under the Trading with the Enemy Act. In particular Union Banking was the American investment arm forthe Thyssen family, one Germany's richest industrial dynasties. In fact Fritz Thyssen played a key role in bringing Hitler to power, by uniting the industrial magnates of Germany behind the National Socialists and in fact bankrolling them early in their rise to power (something Thyssen later came to regret). He wrote a rather dull book on his role in creating the 20th century's worst nightmare called "I Paid Hitler".
George H.W. Bush somewhat rushed in to the service not long after the scandal broke in the New York papers, and there is conjecture it may have been to salvage the future political fortunes of the family, and to deflect the impression that they were in bed with the enemy. The Bush's did pull strings due to his age, and may also may have pulled strings to get him to the Pacific theater and as far away from Nazi Germany as possible. The Bush family like a lot of wealthy American's (Henry Ford for example) gleefully invested in and did business with Nazi Germany in the 30's, and were more than a little sympathetic to Fascism especially in the face of the threat of Communism and the U.S.S.R. Doing business with the Thyssens in particullar did in many ways make the Bush family complicit in Hitler's rise to power.
"while teaching those that were drafted valuable skills and trades that would apply to the real world"
God damn thats straight out of an Army recruiting ad. I'm sure some draftee's learned valuable skills and trades in the military during Vietnam, but I'm pretty sure most combat veterans didn't learn much beyond how to shoot an M-16, take orders, frag their incompetent officers, stay alive, and to deal with post traumatic stress disorder when it was over.
Teaching valuable skills is something that mostly happens in a volunteer army in peace time. Draftee infantrymen mostly learn how to kill and avoid being killed and those skills dont have a lot of civilian applications outside of maybe S.W.A.T teams.
"my knowledge John Kerry didn't have any political ambitions at the time he decided to enlist."
Well that shows your knowledge of the issue is nonexistent. Kerry was famous or infamous for his political ambitions when he was at Yale which was where he was before he enlisted. His initials are JFK and everyone at Yale was well aware he had a massive Kennedy fetish and political amitions to follow in JFK's footsteps, exactly in his footsteps. One odd twist, everyone thinks he is Irish Catholic from Boston which is what he needed people to think for his Kennedy track, though in fact there isn't an Irish bone in his body. Kerry was a name his Jewish grandparents chose somewhat at random when the emigrated to America from Austria/Hungary, to hide the fact they were Jewish. Kerry doesn't claim to be Irish but he is really glad to not correct the mistaken impression most people have, and he never advertises the fact that he is half Jewish, because being Jewish used to be poltiical suicide though today its almost a plus.
In case you missed the parallel, chances are high Kerry volunteered for Swift boats because they were the closest match to the PT boats Kennedy served on in World War II. He very much wanted to be a hero in Vietnam, get medals, and use it as a springboard for his political career. Being in the Navy the only two good choices for combat hero were fighter pilot or swift boats.
"so I won't assume the worst until it's actually proven"
Not sure what you are getting at. Its not exactly a slam at Kerry and H.W. that they served in combat, really dangerous combat, and it was a future coup for their political careers. Only knock against Kerry was he was gung ho going in and immediately flip flopped to anti war, flip flopping being the story of his life not just a Republican attack ad.
Especially among the World War II generations, military service, especially combat service, and especially with decorations WAS a major coup for a future political career, and it was a motivator for future politicans to volunteer for combat. Its just a fact, its not an accusation or a slam.
Its not as much of prerequisite as it used to be partially thanks to a string of bad wars with bad outcomes(Korea and Vietnam). I don't think Clinton can be faulted for ducking service, because he made it clear he opposed the war in Vietnam and he stayed consistent on that throughout.
Really the only flaming hypocrite among the 4 is George W. Bush because he is a classic chicken hawk. He is way to eager to launch military action, and get other people killed in wars, but when it was his turn he pulled strings, ducked and spent the time partying, partying hard, in Texas and Alabama, and ducking even his minimal guard duties. Dick Cheney's record is only marginally better, he used college deferments and marriage to duck the draft. Now there specialty is cataloging high school students to send off to die in their screwed up mess of a war, a war they suckered American' in to with one lie after another.
I really hate chicken hawks, they are among the worst form of hypocrites.
"this is called addiction, and just like drug addiction or other addictions it is best resolved through treatment and rehabilitation. not incarceration, not prohibition, none of that works well and often causes more harm than good."
That is just silly. You are never going to identify them, and you have no legal basis to compel them in to treatment. Fact is if a guy want to spend every free moment searching for and staring at porn they can and will. Fact is most guys have brains wired to enjoy looking at naked women. You thinking you are going to start a gigantic treatment program for suggests a lack of grip on reality. Prohibiting probably wont work, but I think its worth noting having an unlimited supply of it on the net probably isn't exactly a positive thing.
"i would very much like to see certain aspects of american freedom homogenized across the world, like womens rights, freedom of speech and the press, etc."
Thank you for proving my point. Bottomline is you do want to inflict your culture and your values on the rest of the world, and you want to be the one who decides what is good and bad.
If you are a big fan of freedom of speech maybe you should start by defending it at home. Fact is the Bush administration and Republican's are launching a full frontal assault on it, just reference "free speech zones" which prevent people from expressing themselves where the president might see them, or people being dragged out of campaign events and in some cases arrested for exposing a t shirt that silently expresses dissatisfaction with the president, or because a Republican zealot saw a Kerry sticker on them.
As for "freedom of the press" the fact is the press in the U.S. has turned completely pathetic. No they aren't censored by the government, instead they are censored by advertisers, and their corprate head office and their ratings. The end result is the same, they seldom question or challenge the government or the status quo when its in the wrong. The war in Iraq proved beyond a shadow of a doubt our press is more government cheerleader than anything and there is virtually no watchdog left in it.
Yet dictatorships with overt suppression of speech and freedom are bad, but I think you are really kidding yourself to think there is really free speech or free press in this country either, the means for controlling it are just somewhat more subtle than a jack boot and a billy club.
Maybe the parent was referring to safe officer slots like the ones in the Texas Air National Gaurd during Vietnam. You got to be an officer, learn to fly jets, and had zero chance of getting sent to Vietnam because the jets you were trained in were obsolete. Thats why all the rich and powerful in Texas used it with abandon to keep their sons from getting killed in Vietnam, i.e. George W. Bush.
Whats different today, well we have a volunteer army so the sons and daughters of the rich and powerful aren't at risk. So today the gaurd and reserve, rather than being a tool for avoiding combat duty for the rich and powerful are now a quick ticket to Iraq. If the draft is reinstituted I assure you the guard will be brought home and all the rich kids will flock to it to duck combat duty.
If you want to restore my faith in the Bush family I'd really like to see George W's two daughter enlist in the Army or Marines and end up in the streets of Iraq, or hey maybe even take a job at Halliburton/KBR driving fuel trucks in Iraq. Chances of it happening, zero, because the sons and daughters of the rich and powerful dont volunteer for combat duty anymore unless they want to pad their resume for a future political run(i.e John Kerry and Geroge H.W. Bush) and that isn't even required or that common any more (i.e. Bill Clinton and George W. Bush).
"With all the technology like stealth bombers, smart bombs, predator drones, surveilance devices and some very skilled special forces, the US can cause a fair amount of damage with a fraction of the force that we used in bigger wars like Vietnam & WWII."
Uh....all those high tech weapons are completely useless in an urban guerilla war like the one being fought in Iraq, and that is the war they can't get people to volunteer to fight. In case you don't watch the news that war consists of manning check points to try to stop car bombers, patrolling streets on foot or in Humvess as people snipe at you or set off bombs next to you. You usally never see who is trying to kill you, or if they do they suicide, so you can't point your high tech weapons at them.
This war also means breaking down doors at night and rounding up "suspects", and occassionally it means flattening urban areas like Fallujah which you can do with all the high tech weapons as long as you don't mind killing lots of innocent people.
Oh and you need lots of people, who don't value their lives to much, to drive trucks to move supplys from point A to point B. Truck convoys are especially tempting and easy targets for snipers and roadside bombs. You can use airlift to move supplies around but it costs a bloody fortune and quickly wears out all your airplanes, helicopters and pilots and at that point you are basicly admitting you don't control a place you are telling everyone you control.
All in all you are thinking wars means "Shock and Awe", "Desert Storm" and tanks racing across the desert to a glorious victory in a week, because the DOD and the press told you thats what it was, and show you pretty pictures to proce it. Well that is one form of war and America and its weapons are great at it.
Unfortunately once the "Shock and Awe" part is over if there are enough people, who really hate you, to start a flourishing insurgency they can tie up the U.S. military in knots, indefinitely and all the high tech weapons are next to useless. At that point you need a whole lot of grunts patrolling streets and kicking down doors and even then they still probably wont win. Its pretty rare to defeat an entrenched insurgency with military force. Only way you win is figure out a way to make the people of the country not hate you and get them to stop supporting and fueling the insurgents, and the U.S. is REALLY bad at doing that.
"The military doesn't want the draft. They want more volunteers."
YEA. WHAT HE SAID. And if there aren't enough volunteers, we need to figure out how to "motivate" people to volunteer event if they dont want to:) Is a person a volunteer if they are coerced or tricked in to volunteering.
There is already a well documented trend of the DOD using fine print, trickery and out right coercion to prevent people already in the military and reserves from escaping when their contracted enlistment period is up. For all practical purposes many people already in the military and reserves ARE being drafted because they can't get out when they were supposed to.
Fact is the Army and Marines, their reserves and gaurds ARE missing their recruitment goals by a big margin and are now missing them every month and the popularity of the war in Iraq is plummeting. Eventually the DOD is going to run out of meat for the grinder. The Army and Marines the two services where the bulk of the sitting ducks being sent to Iraq come from. The Navy and Air Force are doing OK mostly because people who want to join the military know thats the best place to be to avoid ending up on the streets in Iraq.
Believe it or not most kids are smart enough to not want to end up in in an ugly urban guerilla war with no end in sight. A war where they would seldom see who is trying to kill them, where most of the natives hate them, and where lots of their peers are coming home in body bags, with burns or without limbs.
The all volunteer army is GREAT as long as you are never in a protracted shooting war, especially one based on lies and with no clear goal or end game. It simply wont work if Iraq turns in to another Vietnam. You simply wont get the volunteers needed to fight a dirty, messy war with no glory. You can get volunteers to race in on the tanks and declare victory in a week. You wont get volunteers to patrol Iraqi streets filled with an enemy you seldom see who are sniping at you and using IED's to blow your legs off.
Dont think it really matters if the military is structured for "volunteers" now. If people stop "volunteering" the DOD is screwed. Its either a full up draft with the political consequence to the people responsible(i.e. the Bush adminstration and the Republicans), back door drafts where you coerce and trick people in to the military and dont let them out which is basicly what we have now(the histroical term is Shanghai'ing people), or you cut and run on places like Iraq, and it probably collapses in to more of a smoldering hole in the ground than it already is and you just wasted half a trillion dollars and tens of thousands of dead and wounded on a failure.
Lucky for little George that he is a lame duck, because at this point it doesn't much matter how bad a job he does, we are stuck with him until 2008 unless someone acquires the balls to impeach him, which he most certainly deserves.
"to me this read: western culture debases women more than Islam does through pornography. if that was not your intent then forgive my comments."
Maybe you should read it as Islamic culture treats women differently than Western culture, and its a subject for debate whether it is better or worse, in its extreme maybe it is worse but extremes exist in both cultures. Increasingly, especially since 9/11, the Western stereotype is that the fundemental tenents of Islamic culture are bad whether it be chopping off peoples heads for selling heroin or the constraints that are placed on women. From that predisposition its been established by the powers that be that Islamic cultures must be westernized to be acceptable and in the process they seek to make them no longer Islamic.
"so are you saying all porn is bad again? perhaps just certain types of porn, like child / rape porn? (i'd agree with you there)"
No as I said I'm not interestrf in debating with you whether porn is "good" or "bad". I'm saying some cultures consider all porn "bad" and there is a legitimate basis for that opinion. You are obviously fond of your porn and are going to fight to a bitter end anyone who points out that its not without its problems. To get back on topic porn sites are the leading purveyor of spyware and cracker attacks because a lot of guys will throw caution to the window in their never ending obsession to find more and better porn to squander their life staring at instead of doing something productive and worthwhile. Lord know I've surfed my share of porn but if you step back and look at it, its kind of a goofy thing to do, and I'm not sure life and society wouldn't be better off it weren't so readily available.
"morality has everything to do with personal responsibility and ethical sense and very little to do with religious affiliation or lack thereof."
I can't argue with you there. After having lived in America for a while I guess maybe I've reached the point that I'm not sure there are many people left here who do have an "ethical sense" whether they be religious or not. I imagine greed is a nearly universal trait, but someone how America in particular has turned it in to a cultural priority. I suspect that most American's faced with the chance to make a quick $100K and not get caught will abandon their ethical sense in a heartbeat. From unchecked greed flows a lot of the harm America and Britain in particular inflict on the world, though greed is unfortunately probably universal.
Bottomline I'm just really not sure I want to see the whole planet homogenized in to an American culture and that seems to be the way its going with India and China increasingly signing up. Not sure it wont ultimately lay waste to the whole planet.
Slashdot Mirror
Here is a dose of bad attitude for a Sunday afternoon. I was thinking about going back and finding all the Slashdot articles about the space shuttle returning to flight over the last 2+ years. If you recall after the crash NASA was saying they would be flying again in a year. Well its going to basicly be 2 and half years IF they launch in July and that is a big IF. I hate to break it to you but the Shuttle really isn't any closer to launch today after this new finding, than its been for most of this year. Any one of a about 100 people in about a dozen committees can get cold feet over one of about a thousand safety issues, all of which are totally valid, and its all called off again.
How about we stop posting articles about the Shuttle launch schedule and just wait until they actully launch the f**king thing.
Bottomline is the shuttle program team has. after two catastrophic failures, reached a state of near paralysis obsessing over safety issues most of which have been there for ALL of the last 25 years. Either they are sometime soon gonna say F**k it, fly, or they are going to say "but what if this went wrong" and the launch date will just keep slipping indefintiely. At least maybe they have an administrator now who will make them launch someday and do something worthwhile for a change. As nearly as I can tell the Columbia crash totally messed up Sean O'Keefe's head and he was so paralyzed ny the DANGER of manned space flight I doubt the shuttle would have ever flown again with him in charge.
The cruel reality is that most of the people who work on the Shuttle get paid the same whether it flies or not up until someone finally says enough and pulls the plug on it and I doubt any politician has the guts to actually do that. Even when that does happen all those people will quickly jump to one of the two CRV teams and politicans will be obliged to move all the money there since the jobs program that is the manned space program MUST BE PRESERVED AT ALL COSTS, even if they never launch another man in to space. The CRV is especially cool because there are about 10 years of paychecks waiting there before they have to actually risk launching anyone in to space.
"The majority of the shuttle program has been a public relations campaign and politics."
... well ... and lots of people pushing giant piles of paper from point A to point B, but it is still basicly just a jobs program. The jobs program includes:
You left out, giant welfare/jobs program. They are cool high paying tech jobs for the most part
- All the NASA civil servants in the manned space program, civil servants being hard to fire once you hire them you pretty much have to make work for them and their number almost never gones down but instead creeps up.
- All the people working for the prime contractor which as I recall is a consortium made up of a partnership between Boeing and Lockheed. (Note Boeing and Lockheed should be vitter rivals and competing with each other but since they formed a consortium for the Shuttle and just announced a parternship for expendable boosters they successfully eliminated all pretense of competition and are now a defacto space flight monopoly and the DOD and NASA have to pay whatever they feel like charging. Those two companies are really formidable lobbyiest so they can almost single handedly arm twist a bunch of Congressmen in to keeping the funds flowing to Shuttle and the ISS most of which goes in to their pockets, and interestingly they make just about as much with the shuttle grounded as if its flying. Most of the people in the manned space program probably don't actually care if it flies because their paychecks keep coming anyway and its less nerve wracking if they don't fly. Maybe their paychecks should be contingent on successful launches with all their salaries for a period being revoked in the event of catastrophic failure, then maybe they would get serious about spaceflight.
- All the people working in all the NASA centers and facilities, all the prime contractor plants, and a vast army of small contractors. Interestingly they are intentionally spread through nearly every congressional district and there are big centers in politically powerful states like Texas, Florida and California. The work was spread all over just so Congressmen had to back the space program no matter how screwed up or wasteful it got because it meant jobs someplace in their district. Sen. Bill Nelson in particular is a huge supported because he is of course from Florida.
Maybe all this is what you meant by "political" but I'm inclined to say the manned space program was pretty much doomed when LBJ put Johnson in Houston. He did it purely to heap prestige, jobs and dollars on to his home state of Texas. It also insured the Texas congressional delegation would back manned space flight from that point on. Practicly though its insane that everything done at Johnson isn't done at Kennedy. Much of the bad communication leading to both Challenger and Columbia could be traced to the fact half the people team was at Kennedy and half was at Johnson and the communications between the two warring centers is inevitably bad not to mention the bills they must run up constantly traveling between the two places.
If you want to restore your faith in people who are in aerospace for the love of it, the Discovery channels runs Black Sky; The Race for Space" once in a while. Someone with a camera roamed around Scaled Composites as they worked on SpaceShipOne, the first private launch of a man in to space to win the Ansari X prize. Its great stuff for geeks and engineers. The head aero engineer is a new hero of mine. He really knew his job and they have footage of him spotting a trim problem that would have lead to a fatal crash if he hadn't caught it in realtime. He has a great, dry sense of humor too, and looked to be a great role model for young people who want to go in aerospace or engineering. Towards the end he had a great comment I can only paraphase. He pointed that we've reached the point that people feel like they can't do anything amaz
"This still doesn't necessarily make them "bad" in terms of Capitalism. Just let's not act all starry eyed about succussful businessmen."
On the flip side I dont think you can dismiss all successful businessmen as greedy, worthless bastards and crooks. I think its really important to give some deference to people who start from zero, using their personal capital, and create successful companies. Without them we would have no companies, no jobs, no nothing unless you want to live under Socialism where government creates all the jobs.
That said, Sam is dead now, and I don't even know who took his place at Walmart's helm. I have very little respect for the stuffed shirts that step in to companies that are already successful and run them. Some of them are probably great but it proves nothing to me if all you do is refrain from screwing up a succesful company someone else built, especially the ones who succeed by just outsourcing and slashing labor costs, or playing the merger and acquisition game.
Oops, forgot to hit this one:
"and the fact that more than 40 per cent of their employees can't afford the cheapest health insurance program they offer to their employees."
I really don't think you can blame Walmart for this one either. Most companies can't afford full health insurance for their employees anymore either. The ones that are providing it are taking a huge and exploding hit to their bottomline, and they are at a competitive disadvantage to companies in the U.S. or abroad who dont pay those costs. If you recall GM's unions are probably going to voluntarily give up health benefits to try to minimize massive layoffs because health insurance costs are spiraling out of control.
Rather than blame Walmart for not providing gold plated and expensive health insurance maye we should study why insurance costs are spiraling out of control in the U.S. Not sure anyone knows but I'm willing to bet some factors are:
- Health care and drug companies are on one of the few industries left in the U.S. where you can make a killing in the U.S. and I suspect they have drawn every greedy businessman left in the country. Drug companies consistently carry some of the biggest profit margins in the economy. Why? Because American's have to pay whatever prices they feel like charging for their products and services. They have defacto monopolies especially when the collude with each other to inflate prices.
- Drug and health care companies are among the best and most astute lobbiest and campaign contributors and use every other trick in the book to completely exploit government corruption, so they have a government that is giving them a blank check to inflate prices unchecked. The so called "Medicare Reform" bill and drug benefit was in fact a case of our government being totally corrupted by big corporations and handing them billion and billions of tax dollars for a worthless sham.
- America is doing a great job of buying really neat technology like MRI and cat scans but they are also exorbinantly expensive. End result if you are wealthy or insured you can get really good health care in this country. If you are not you cant get any or if you do it will bankrupt you.
- The healthcare and drug system is really corrupt. Fraud reigns supreme and it costs everyone a lot. There was a heart surgeon in David CA who was a superstar until everyone realized he was performing open heart surgery on people with no heart disease to improve his profitability, and there are people like Scrushy and Healthsouth, also financial superstars but apparently a complete fraud.
- Incompetent doctors result in lots of malpractice suits and people who want to commit fraud lead to lots of malpractice, comp and disability suits that drive up costs for everyone.
- I have step grandmother who is 80. She is old and not in very good shape. Nearly as we can tell there isn't really anything wrong with here but she goes to the doctor on a weekly basis and demands the run and rerun test in a vain attempt to find whats wrong with here. She is on Medicare with supplemental so it costs here next to nothing. She can therefor bleed the system white looking for a cause that is really simply that she is old and her body isn't in great shape but its not something you are going to find and cure. Listen to a police scanner sometime and listen to all the ambulance calls and emergency room calls for seniors who are just sick. It doesn't cost them anything, it costs society a fortune when mostly they just need a doctor that will take walkins and someone to drive them there. Instead everyone goes to the emergency room at thousands of dollars a pop.
If you are refering to my post, I don't think I was saying the rules of the game are "wrong". I'm just saying with the rules we have you are going to get some results that some people aren't going to like. With the rules we have Sam Walton is going to be able to create Walmart from a five and dime in Arkansas, and he can bankrupt pretty much every other mom and pop five and dime near one of his stores. He will also most probably put under every supermarket with unionized workers and drive down wages and benefits for retail workers.
You could change to another system but I doubt you are going to find one that is "right". Maybe you can find one you like better, but chances are its going to make winners and losers too, different winners and losers but there will still be people getting screwed and bad things happening. Unfortunately economical and political systems create winners and losers. The only constant is the people who are best at playing the game the given system creates are more likely to be winners. The people who pretend the rules don't matter and can be ignored are likely to be losers.
Not sure you actually read that review but a lot of it is a kind of glowing statement about how great a company Wal-mart is which is why they are so successful. Most of the compliments are backhanded and reulctant but the author/reviewer apparently couldn't deny even to themselves that Walmart is a really well run company, if they weren't they wouldn't be so successful.
Crucifying Wal-mart based on "gender discrimination" is pretty weak. In a company that big are there local managers discriminating against women, almost inevitably and I doubt Walmart headquarters can stop it, no company can. Is Walmart discriminating as a matter of policy, I doubt it and its hard to prove without smoking gun tapes or memos.
Any big company people want to target can be accussed of gender discrimination unless they are introducing quotas to insure precisely 51% of their management are women and that all women's salaries are identical to their male counterparts. Or maybe if their workforce is %70 women maybe they have to have 70% of their management women, and all CEO's must be women because they are the majority of the population?
Fact is women make an average of 76% of what men make in this country, therefor the entire country is guilty of gender discrimination. Only way you are going to change it is to institute quota systems and wage regulation. Then instead of gender discrimination your discriminating against people who are more qualified but are of the wrong gender to get a quota slot.
Fact is Walmart hires pretty vast pools of unskilled women to run cash registers and stock shelves. I'm pretty sure they hire a lote more unskilled women than men. Most are probably not management material. I wager, though I don't know for sure it would totally mess up their company if they were compelled to promote women who are unqualified in order to avoid being labeled gender biased.
"What a load of tosh."
Dude you completely misread or misinterpreted what I said. For example, I didn't say all Indians and Chinese are employed and all Americans and Europens are unemployed. I said "if the current inevitable march continues". Sorry you missed it before you lept in to your tirade, it was in the first sentance.
They key point here is in the new globalized labor market there is an inevitable force in play where all the jobs that can migrate, are going to migrate to the cheapest labor market. No free market economist is going to dispute this fact unless they are stupid or lieing.
The fact that there are a few billion people in India and China, many of whom are unemployed means they are going to be a cheap labor market for a LONG time. Americans will no doubt have lots of service jobs because they can't migrate. Most IT, call center and manufacturing jobs can and are.
"Shareholders bet, with their money, in the success of a company. That money is what allows people to take a wage back home. Without shareholders there would not be jobs. It is that simple."
In an era where people bought and held stock for long periods, to collect dividends and officers of the company were big shareholders that might have been true.
Today, in the era of day traders and brokers with computerized trading algorithms, stock really isn't really a means for financing business growth. It is for the 1 time IPO or the not very common addtional stock offering.
Stock today is almost universally just a vehicle for shareholders to gamble and cash in. For execs its purely a greed motivator, that motivates people to create startups. It will be interesting to see how the recent move to clamp down on handing out options like candy, will result in the exodus of the people who are only in the game to make a killing on stock options.
Unfortunately when you get to big established companies, stock valuation has become a malevolent influence. There isn't anything positive about it any more. All it does is compell execs to focus on each quarters results, to set and meet quarterly expectations, so the stock goes up not down. The key point is they can, and in many cases are, completely destroying the long term health and viability of their companies chasing quarterly results. Why bother with long term R&D, if you cut it you improve your margins. Enron was a case study in a company destroying itself in a misguided attempt to make their numbers and prop up their stock valuation. Worldcom, same, same.
Bottomline does stock doesn't really fund jobs, not really, its mostly just a greed motivator for people to create companies, and the execs get a lot more stock than workers do, usually for basicly free. Thats why, if you need to improve your margin the first thing you will do is fire or outsource your workforce.
Its also a fact that the demand to maintain your quarterly results almost DEMANDS you outsource your jobs to the cheapest labor market you can, so in most respects stock valuation is creating jobs in India and China now, not the U.S. Haven't seent the stats lately but most of the job creation in the U.S. is:
- service jobs that can't be outsourced
- hiring of legal and illegal aliens for dirt cheap jobs
- jobs created by the governmnt and its vast deficit spending
"After seeing the results of other economic experiments last century you better come with something very original, otherwise you and your marxist (ingorant marxist mind you) ilk will be sent back to where they belong: the scrapheap of failed ideas."
Uh, dude, China's "economic experiments last century" are going like gang busters in case you didn't notice. Its not even remotely free market Capitalism. Its a Socialist dictatorship exploiting free market Capitalism. Its not a good sign for the world if its prove to be the winning economic model, bets are that it will be, because I don't wont be an oppressed worker living in a socialist dictatorship with sham fr
" That's why you see small businesses closing left and right, while Starbucks and Wal-Mart open yet another store in your area."
I wont win any mod points for this but ya know bashing Wal-Mart is easy but the fact is that company is successful because they play by the rules of the game and they play really well.
You should watch the bio on Sam Walton on Biography channel. I despise rock star CEO's that walk in to multibillion dollar companies and run them in to the ground. That is not Sam or the Walton family. He and his family started with next to nothing and a tiny five and dime retail store in a small town in Arkansas. They succeeded because:
- They worked really hard, and I mean really worked as in they all stocked shelves and drove around finding products to sell at good prices
- They gambled everything they had on their business multiple times and they could have easily lost it all numerous times
- They were ruthlessly efficient, it can be cruel especially to workers and suppliers but if you are not you dont succeed in retail.
- They gave people what they want, they sold the products people wanted at the best price in town. That is the classic definition of competition in retail. They did't win through bombing their competitors, or cheating or anything else. They competed, the competed well and they won.
Yea it sucks that they stock their shelves with Chinese goods but the fact is if they didn't someone else would and they would go under. Fact is Chinese goods are way cheaper than American made goods and you can't change that now unless we start restoring trade barriers or push American worker's wages down to 30 cents an hour.
Yea it sucks that they dont pay their employees very well. But you know what, running a cash register and stocking shelves are some of the lowest skill jobs around, especially in the era of bar codes and RFID. Fact is if I dont go to Wal-Mart I go to a grocery story with do it yourself checkout. You see even I can scan bar codes, feed money in to a cash register and put my groceries in to a sack, so I dont see the value in subsidizing a unionized grocery worker to do something that requires no skill. You do have to kind of wonder about the sanity of unionized grocery store workers commanding some of the best wages and benefits in many small towns. They are people with no actual skills and in free markets people are supposed to get paid based on what their worth. Grocery store workers are not worth a lot.
The other thing you need to appreciate about Wal-Mart is they have probably the most sophisticated and efficient computerized supply chain on the planet. They have giant computers in Arkansas that track every transaction in every store and make sure the right goods arrive at the right place at the right time. Your mom and pop store cant compete against that, in retail, inventory management determines the winners and losers, not sentimentality. Wal-Mart now has economy of scale almost no one else can match but the fact is they Walton's still beat their competition when they were in one five and dime in Arkansas because they worked really hard and they played to win.
All in all the Walton family are an American success story. If you are going to ridicule and crucify them for succeeding you are basicly ridiculing every aspect of Capitalism. Its is a deeply flawed system in a lot of ways, but so are all the others. The Walton's are just grand masters of the system they live under.
"Want to be the one who collects the money at the top? Easy. Start your own company and create some jobs of your own."
You glossed over a key point. IBM's CEO Sam Palmisano like many CxO's, had absolutely zip to do with founding IBM though to his credit he worked at IBM or a subsidiary most of his life. since 1973. But I wager he's invested very little of his personal wealth in IBM equity other than maybe through the employee stock purchase plan, which is more of a benefit than a case of gambling your personal wealth on the success of the company.
One bit from his IBM bio:
"Mr. Palmisano has served as senior vice president and group executive for IBM's Personal Systems Group; led IBM's strategic outsourcing business;"
Apparently outsourcing is a key feather in his resume cap.
Ya know, I have no problem with CxO's who put all their personal assets on the line, and risk everything, to start a company and invest most of their waking hours for years in making it a success. God damn they deserve to reap huge rewards if and when they succeed.
On the other end of the scale I do have a big problem with the the rock start CEO's like Carly Fiorina, who invest absolutely none of their own wealth in an equity stake when they take the helm of a company. Instead they demand and are handed huge cash and equity stakes for just walking in the door and for being adept at social networking, crafting their image, political manuevering and climbing over the top of their teammates to get to the top.
When you have CxO's who have no real stake in the company they run is it any wonder many of them crater the company. Even if they fail completely their signing package up front and their golden parachute at the end insure they will have more wealth then most of us can dream off, even if they are a complete screw up.
They rock star CEO's also seem real short on investing in R&D and developing innovative products. More often than not their stewardship of the company consists of laying off or outsourcing enough people each year to maintain the companies profitability, and their grand plan is merger and acquisition which is a lot easier than invention and product development.
"unalienable rights are not "culture inflicted" on the world."
There is no such thing as unalienable rights, and just because the founding fathers said there was doesn't change that fact. I think they just used the term to exert a little extra pressure on their successors to not take away they rights they wanted the people in their new nation to have. They were spouting about unalienable rights at the same time many of them owned slaves who had none of these rights. Maybe you should try using the term "unalienable ideals" it would be less hypocritcal.
Freedom of press and freedom of speech are things a culture can decide are valuable and try to maintain. If they were unalienable rights than our government couldn't take them away. Wordnet defines unalienable as " incapable of being repudiated". Our government has routinely repudiated all of our so called "unalienable rights". During World War II our freedom of speech and press were dismantled and are being so again. American citizens of Japanese descent were locked in camps for the duration, and all thei rproperty was tolen, with no due process, in defiance of their supposedly "inalienable" rights.
"you can't control bits over networks"
Nice Libretarian gushing. Let me harken back to something you said earlier, child porn is bad. So obviously after all this gushing idealism you are advocating that child porn be freely and abundantly available, and you are going to do your part to make sure that its readily available to all because you simply can't try to control the bits on the Internet. Let freedom ring....
"approval or interference. it may not have the infrastructure or resources but it is making a difference."
Hooray for it, but I think you really exaggerate its power and influence. 99% of the worlds people dont see non mainstream media. 99% of people don't have a clue what the Downing Street Memo said, or if they do they don't care. The mainstream media in the U.S. and Britain were instrumental in whipping up the pro war sentiment that allowed the Iraq war to happen.
The Downing Street Memo comes out now and it makes zero difference other than retierating something most people with a clue already knew, the case for the war was fabricated, whopee, I knew that before the bombing started. Will any one land in jail for what it says. no. Will it bring the war in Iraq to a quick and orderly conclusion, no, will it turn back the clock, no. Will it tittilate wonks for few days yes. Big deal.
"The winners are the consumer who gets to pay lower prices for the products and services."
Excepting of course that if the current inevitable march continues, the consumers in the U.S. and Western Europe will be unemployed, bankrupt and wont be buying products and services. Oh, I guess you were refereing to all the consumers in China and India, who still have jobs, getting lower prices for products and services?
As someone else said its open to debate if IBM is cutting their prices as a result of this. Outsourcing is usually a tool CxO's use to improved their profit margins, to goose their stock price, and to justify jacking up compensation packages. In case you were unaware the CxO's make an average of like 400X what their workers make now. Twenty years ago it was more like 40X. If you want to maximize your shareholder value why dont you try also advocating reigning in CxO's who've been looting their companies equity to line their pockets.
All in all you did hit the nail on the head here, "the other winners are the stockholders..." though I think you meant the "only" real winners are the stockholders(and CxO's). Well there are temporary winners, the ones who get the outsourced jobs, until they get to be to expensive and their jobs move to the next cheapest labor pool.
One of the ironies of capitalism, shareholders can make a shit load of money investing in a ruthlessly managed company. Do the shareholders actually produce anything of value, do they invent, do they design, do they manufacture, do they do any work, do they provide services? No they are people who have acquired money, and they place bets much as you would in a casino and if they place a winning bet they get money for nothin' and chicks for free.
You are kind of advocating screwing everyone who works for a living to maximize shareholder profits. We all know this is the grand plan of Capitalism, though let's try to not advertise it as blatantly as you are because it ticks off the little peons.
Just be warned that when you start the concerted campaign to screw over the vast majority of people who aren't rich and work for a living, and you seek to drive them in to poverty, chances are high that they will be eventually driven to either peaceful or violent revolution and will overthrow the politicans and the wealthy elite who were bent on acquiring vast power and wealth on the broken backs of working people. Working people do outnumber the rich so if they ever got a clue they could vote for people who are on their side, instead of choosing between a Democrat from the ruling eite(Kerry) or a Republican from the ruling elite(Bush). They can also storm the seats of government and power and hang any culprits who are particularly blatant and abusive.
The U.S. has already seen at least one cycle like this. The robber barons in the late 1800's were maximizing their shareholder value with great success, they got staggeringly, filthy rich often by exploiting monpolies. The concentration of wealth in their hands was enormous and the plight of working people was really, really bleak. It spawned the mostly peaceful progressive movement which was the last time a grass roots populist movement really fought back against the ruling elite, and it lead to things like basic labor law so workers and children weren't working every waking hour for poverty wages, and it brought us progressive taxation to put a brake on wealth concentration in the hands of the few, and it brought us antitrust legislation to break up monopolists. Sadly America hasn't really seen a similar grass roots populist movement since and it shows, wealth is once again concentraing in the hands of few, and real wages and standard of living are in a steep decline for most.
You really missed the key enabler that lead to outsourcing. I'll grant you the U.S. is an economic, educational and social disaster but trying to blame it only on big government is cliche and simplistic. American free markets and corporations are just as much to blame as government is.
In particular I take real exception to your suggestion that China is some kind of free market paradise now. They are still massively socialist. The government still manages vast sectors of their economy. Many of their leading corporations are government owned or are controlled by the upper ranks of the Communits party. Much of their success is because have a central government planning their economic plan of attack on the West. Its a plan of attack with a very long view, versus America where we cant plan past this quuarters results or a 4 year presidential term.
Its also a simple fact of life that decades of affluence and inflation have priced American and Western Europen workers out of the new global labor market and that would have happened almost inevitably. Only way you might have prevented it would have been to have NO labor law, no benefits, no unions and poverty wages so you kept Western workers at the level they were at around 1900, working 7 day weeks, 12 hours a day for basicly nothing. The choice is either you have well payed workers or you dont. In the globalized world it appears workers are now officially screwed and capitalist can rejoice at their new pool of cheap labor and bigger profits. Marxism is a dirty word in the west but Marx did nail the inevitable result of capitalism. A tiny wealthy elite control all the wealth and there is a vast pool of workers who are screwed.
Some other key factors that have changed. 40 years ago:
- The U.S. was still riding a tide of wealth and power it garnered from World War II. It was the only major world power that wasn't flattened in World War II. Lets not pretend it was the supriority of "the greatest generation" or the American system that pushed America to the top so much as it was an accident of geography.
- there was no fiber optic telecomm and no internet. International telecommunications was slow, difficult and expensive. You couldn't put a call center on the other side of the planet because the phone bills would have killed the labor cost savings. Now the telecom costs are next to nothing and the web makes it trivial for people to communicate and interact regardless of where their offices are. Call centers and information jobs can no go to the cheapest labor market with workers with a minimal education to do it. To be honest call center worker and grinding out code to spec aren't the biggest skill jobs in the world.
- container ships were just barely in existence. If you wanted to ship goods between countries there were really expensive and often corrupt longshoremen in the loop loading and unloading ships by hand. It took a long time and it cost a fortune. I heard one estimate that shipping a VCR from asia dropped from $40 to around $1.40 thanks to container shipping. Plummeting shipping costs enabled outsourcing manufacturing
- there were an abundance of trade barriers between countries and the U.S. used them as much as anyone. You can have disparity in wages and standard of living if you maintain trade barriers. You cant if you have true free trade. Thanks to things like WTO and NAFTA the U.S. has largely dismantled its trade barriers, while places like Japan and China still quite gleefully use them to block US goods from their markets. A key reason IBM sold their PC division to Lenovo in China is that was the price of admission the Chinese government charges America companies to enter their markets. They have to have a Chinese partner and transfer lots of IP, wealth and markets to them to gain admission.
- India was still pulling itself together after years of British colonial rule and religious civil war. Its economy was in collpase. Also since thenthey have invested heavily in spotti
The problem is a relatively small number of voters are injured by the action in New London. The only danger to the politicians involved is if people, other than those that were actually screwed, start to feel threatened as well, if they start doing it every year, to a new group of homeowners for example, they might be in trouble. City councilmen aren't the most long lived of politicians anyway. They can get in office, screw a bunch of homeowners, and rake in enough graft from the developer to make it well worth their while and leave office if the furor gets to bad and not give a damn.
This ruling opens the doors wide open to corruption. If a developer can buy off a few city councilmen they can get all the land they need for their development for a song and without the hassle of negotiating with the property owners.
As long councilmen only do it once in a while they can get away with it. If they screw a few home owners but the community gets a shiny new shopping mall chances are it will be a net win for the politicians. The mall developers can be counted on to fill their campaign coffers or their pockets with graft too. Politics is all about picking the right voters and and the right number of voters to screw over, and to insure the lost votes are canceled out by the people they please. Unfortunately in most communities the rich, white and powerful are most likely to do the screwing and the poor and minorities are the first on the list to get screwed. Wealth tends to make one set of voters a lot more valuable than another, thanks to campaign contributions, graft and country club social networks.
Its just another sad day for America and there have been a lot of them especially since 2000 and 9/11. In some respects the Supreme Court has just authorized a mild form of the same thing you've seen in Zimbabwe in recent weeks. The government can decide which of its citizens are valued and will protect thier property rights, and can burn out anyone they consider undesirable, and can give their land to wealthy developers who now apparently have more rights than ordinary citizens when it comes to property.
Never thought I'd say it but you have to wonder if maybe getting more true conservatives on the court might not be a bad thing. I'm generally view Scalia and Thomas complete nut jobs but they were totally in the right in dissenting in this case. This is a blank check for government at all levels to run rough shod over peoples basic civil liberties, in favor of corporations and the wealthy. The problem is getting real conservatives and not right wing nut jobs who are conservative on some issues and complete nut jobs on others, like social and morality issues.
More government power is almost always bad because once they acquire they almost never give it back, they slowly acquire it all and citizens are left with none.
"If a draft was in place (prior to the start of this war) then going into Iraq on a half-baked case of WMDs would have not happened. With a draftee Army the Executive actually needs to make a case for going to war. And Congress would have the backbone to oppose the Executive if that case wasn't made."
I REALLY doubt there is any correlation. Post 9/11, with a press corp turned incompetent, the Democrats in collapse, the Bush adminstration could have bulldogged the U.S in to the war draft or no draft as long as they were willing to use inflamatory and deceiptful rhetoric about WMD's and nonexistent links to 9/11 which they obviously were.
Only prayer your arguement might have is the rich, white and powerful might have pushed back harder if their children were at risk of combat but chances are instead there would have already created guard service and college deferments for all the rich, white youngins to duck it, and long as only the middle to lower case, and minorities are drafted the powers that be could care less if they get fed to a meat grinder as long as they can see profit and power in it for them
"If we had a draft do you really think we'd be going into Syria or Iran? I highly doubt it."
Probably not but only because Iraq went south on them. If Iraqi's had welcomed them with roses like they said, and they had a happy pro American poodle there in a few months chances are high they would have trumped up WMD cases and terrorism cases against Syria and Iran and kept the tanks a rollin'. They were floating the rhetoric for it back then, they just had to be realists when Iraq got looted and the insurgents started fighting back.
Iran might still happen because they are going to try to bring a Russian built nuclear reactor on line this year and either the U.S. or Israel is going to bomb it and then its a question of whether Russia and Iran will take it with a whimper or strike back. Personally I think they will massively expand support for the insurgents in Iraq to retaliate and it will slowly spiral out of control.
" As far as Afghanistan is concerned if we had a competent President"
Exactly right. Instead he invaded Iraq and made recruiting posters for AL Qaeda to continue to grow their movement. "Look infidels invading a Muslim nation again, because they hate Muslims, want all our oil, and because Isreal told them to."
"It's obvious that you don't have a whole lot of respect for any politician"
Come on, be fair to them, they've worked really hard to earn the contempt and disrespect of anyone who has a clue how corrupt and or incompetent they all are.
"I only hope you aren't so cynical that you've stopped bothering to vote."
Hell yea I voted, its largely a complete waste of time but I still do it, God only knows why. The Presidential vote was a complete waste the second the Dems nominated Kerry. At that point both viable choices were complete incompetents, Yale Skull and Bonesmen to boot, and there was no real choice which is the way the powers that be like it. My measly vote did back a Dem senator and congressmen who won, they both suck, as Dems are want to do, but it was a desperate act to try to keep the Republicans from having the stranglehold on power they got anyway thanks to a buch of clueless right wing bible thumpers.
You might be right. I remember the subject did come up about once during the whole campaign and I dont recall if Kerry was outright claiming to be Irish or it was his campaign and not him. Needless to say making an issue of his Jewishness would be so politicly incorrect in this day an age that the press probably really didn't even want to report the story, though it was one of many indicators that Kerry is a major phony.
You really have to doubt that he wouldn't know the ancestry of his grandparents. I think it was his paternal grandparents that emigrated to the U.S and changed the family name from a very Jewish one to Kerry. Its a little hazy but I think his paternal grandfather was also a suicide so there is a heavy dose of skeletons in the family closet. For a family with intense political and upwardly mobile social ambitions maybe they brushed all this under the rug early and Kerry didn't know the truth but I really doubt it. Abandoning the Jewish religion and surname was no doubt desirable and politically expedient considering the extent of discrimination against Jews in most of early 20th century America.
"Did you bother to read my fucking post before you jumped all over it in self-righteous indignation? As I pointed out if we had a draftee army then we wouldn't be in an unpopular war to begin with."
Your assertion is self contradictory and nonsensical. If I understand the assertion once we start a draft all of a sudden the unpopular wars end, at which point we dont need a draft? Or maybe you are saying since we are in an unpopular war now we can't have or don't need a draft, though the Army and Marines soon wont be able to maintain their force in Iraq without a draft.
The scenario is the U.S. is already stuck, indefinitely, in an unpopular war in Iraq and it may have to institute a draft to maintain the current force structure there because NO ONE WANTS TO VOLUNTEER to walk or drive around Iraq and risk getting blown up. If the U.S. leaves Iraq because it can't maintain its forces there without a draft, then the current puppet government probably eventually falls and the U.S. has another lost war on its record, a really expensive lost war, and a middle east in flames with a government in Iraq potentially worse, more dangerous and unpredictable than Saddam.
Only way I can make sense of your arguement is you lept off on a tangent about how great it would be if we had a peace time draft and mandatory national service, to build character and skills among young people. Well that isn't the issue here because we aren't in peace time and the draft wont be to teach kids skills, it will be to put boots on the ground in Iraq, Afghanistan and maybe someday Iran or Syria.
Some of those 18 year old draftees no doubt will learn valuable skills in electornics, and as mechanics or truck drivers, many of them are going to be packing M-16's around Iraq and aren't going to learn a damn thing except how to stay alive. In case you were unaware many of the Army's skill job are being contracted out to companies like Halliburton/KBR. In the perfect Rumsfeld/Cheney world, the Army and Marines are for combat, they don't learn job skills, and we pay contractors to do all the skill jobs.
"and that (obviously) politicians are drawn from that same pool?"
Really not sure what point you are trying to make. You seem to be denying there is any chance that politicians have ever volunteered for combat duty to further their future political careers. Well its a simple fact some did and John Kerry is the most blatantly obvious and undeniable case, because he was trying to reproduce JFK's PT boat resume. Not sure there is really anything wrong with it, it sure beats being a Chicken Hawk so I'm not really sure what the arguement is.
"Watch the videotapes of him from back then -- he had a lot more passion about his opinions then I would have expected from your average politician."
Yea and it also happened to catapult him on to the national stage. No one knew who he was before he started his antiwar gig. It happens at the time being antiwar was more popular than being prowar and he is ALWAYS on the most popular side of every issue, that is the only consistent thing about him.
I mostly fault him for volunteering for combat duty when it was already well known what kind of a screwed up mess Vietnam was, and then when he got there and found out it was, duh, he took this quickest out he could get, parlaying 3 flesh wounds in to 3 purple hearts and a quick out before his tour was up though he was never seriously injured. He then preceeded to grab every mic he could find and rant about the war. I'm inclined to say that if he volunteered for combat duty he should have finished his tour and spent another six months regretting his mistake for volunteering for combat.
Forgot to mention the U.S. has and is trying the same thing on Iraqi's. They handed out buckets of cash to Saddam's loyalist to try to keep them out of the insurgency. When a suspected insurgent joins the Iraqi police or army and is then thrown out they also pay them off.
The Iraqi army and police are really just the U.S. trying to buy Iraqi mercenaries to fight the war and its failing miserably. Their ranks are full of insurgents there to spy and sabotage, they are badly motivated, and most are taking these very dangerous jobs only because there are no other jobs to be had. It doesn't help that the U.S. is increasingly hiding its forces in its heavily defended bases and are letting the Iraqi army and police absorb the wrath of the insurgents.
I could be wrong but I think the U.S. should have left Iraq alone in the first place, Saddam was bad but at least there was order, versus civil ware. Chances are high its going to be nothing but a perpetual quagmire, with no exit strategy, and the U.S. will have to stay in force or the government will collapse or be overthrown.
The ethnic mix in Iraq doomed the war before it started. The Sunni's used to have all the power and money and used it to ruthlessly oppress the Kurds and Shias. In a democracy the , a small minority versus the Shia's, have no power, no wealth and no jobs and they are going to be a well spring for an insurgency for generations.
The French did basicly just that in Algeria and Vietnam, Part 1. It was called the French Foreign Legion. They still lost both wars.
... errr ... contractors. I wager Blackwater takes plenty of foreign mercenaries too though I dont know for sure, and I'm sure they cost U.S. tax payers a small fortune to pay.
The U.S. is for all intents and purposes already doing it too, though they are using mercenaries under the misnomer of contractor. Blackwater is one company in particular which is supplying thousands of highly paid mercenaries, most of whom are ex special forces, trained by Uncle Sam at great expense, and at the first opportunity quit the Army to command 6 figure salaries as mercenaries
Halliburton/KBR is for all intents the same thing though not in a combat sense. They are basicly offered large sums of money to do all the jobs that used to be done by enlisted soldiers, cooking, cleaning and driving trucks in particular. Its a win because they dont cost the government the lifetime benefits package a soldier does, but the contracts are ripe for fraud and you cant count on contractors in a combat zone.
The French experience in Algeria is a really good case study for how Iraq might go. It was a dirty guerilla war in an arid Muslim country. The population absolutely and uniformly hated the French. Everything the French did to try to suppress the insurgency made the Algerians hate them more, and made the insurgency stronger. The Algerians tried org charts for the insurgency leadership like the U.S. does, and kidded themselves that as the crossed off the leaders they were crushing the insurgency. The fact is when everyone hates you, everytime you kill an insurgent 3 more spring up to take his or her place. You simply can't defeat an insurgency that is supported by a significant percentage of the population.
" to put down the service of John Kerry and George H.W. Bush though."
Doh, I did miss the opportunity to point out there was an ulterior motive for George H.W. Bush enlisting when he did, and pulling strings to get a fighter in the Pacfic though he was way under age for it.
Right before he enlisted the Bush family, in particular his dad, George W.'s grandad, Prescott Bush was embroiled in a scandal. Prescott was a leading officer of Union Banking in New York, and most think he actually ran it day to day for the Harriman family. Soon after Pearl Harbor, Union Banking's assets were seized under the Trading with the Enemy Act. In particular Union Banking was the American investment arm forthe Thyssen family, one Germany's richest industrial dynasties. In fact Fritz Thyssen played a key role in bringing Hitler to power, by uniting the industrial magnates of Germany behind the National Socialists and in fact bankrolling them early in their rise to power (something Thyssen later came to regret). He wrote a rather dull book on his role in creating the 20th century's worst nightmare called "I Paid Hitler".
George H.W. Bush somewhat rushed in to the service not long after the scandal broke in the New York papers, and there is conjecture it may have been to salvage the future political fortunes of the family, and to deflect the impression that they were in bed with the enemy. The Bush's did pull strings due to his age, and may also may have pulled strings to get him to the Pacific theater and as far away from Nazi Germany as possible. The Bush family like a lot of wealthy American's (Henry Ford for example) gleefully invested in and did business with Nazi Germany in the 30's, and were more than a little sympathetic to Fascism especially in the face of the threat of Communism and the U.S.S.R. Doing business with the Thyssens in particullar did in many ways make the Bush family complicit in Hitler's rise to power.
"while teaching those that were drafted valuable skills and trades that would apply to the real world"
God damn thats straight out of an Army recruiting ad. I'm sure some draftee's learned valuable skills and trades in the military during Vietnam, but I'm pretty sure most combat veterans didn't learn much beyond how to shoot an M-16, take orders, frag their incompetent officers, stay alive, and to deal with post traumatic stress disorder when it was over.
Teaching valuable skills is something that mostly happens in a volunteer army in peace time. Draftee infantrymen mostly learn how to kill and avoid being killed and those skills dont have a lot of civilian applications outside of maybe S.W.A.T teams.
"my knowledge John Kerry didn't have any political ambitions at the time he decided to enlist."
Well that shows your knowledge of the issue is nonexistent. Kerry was famous or infamous for his political ambitions when he was at Yale which was where he was before he enlisted. His initials are JFK and everyone at Yale was well aware he had a massive Kennedy fetish and political amitions to follow in JFK's footsteps, exactly in his footsteps. One odd twist, everyone thinks he is Irish Catholic from Boston which is what he needed people to think for his Kennedy track, though in fact there isn't an Irish bone in his body. Kerry was a name his Jewish grandparents chose somewhat at random when the emigrated to America from Austria/Hungary, to hide the fact they were Jewish. Kerry doesn't claim to be Irish but he is really glad to not correct the mistaken impression most people have, and he never advertises the fact that he is half Jewish, because being Jewish used to be poltiical suicide though today its almost a plus.
In case you missed the parallel, chances are high Kerry volunteered for Swift boats because they were the closest match to the PT boats Kennedy served on in World War II. He very much wanted to be a hero in Vietnam, get medals, and use it as a springboard for his political career. Being in the Navy the only two good choices for combat hero were fighter pilot or swift boats.
"so I won't assume the worst until it's actually proven"
Not sure what you are getting at. Its not exactly a slam at Kerry and H.W. that they served in combat, really dangerous combat, and it was a future coup for their political careers. Only knock against Kerry was he was gung ho going in and immediately flip flopped to anti war, flip flopping being the story of his life not just a Republican attack ad.
Especially among the World War II generations, military service, especially combat service, and especially with decorations WAS a major coup for a future political career, and it was a motivator for future politicans to volunteer for combat. Its just a fact, its not an accusation or a slam.
Its not as much of prerequisite as it used to be partially thanks to a string of bad wars with bad outcomes(Korea and Vietnam). I don't think Clinton can be faulted for ducking service, because he made it clear he opposed the war in Vietnam and he stayed consistent on that throughout.
Really the only flaming hypocrite among the 4 is George W. Bush because he is a classic chicken hawk. He is way to eager to launch military action, and get other people killed in wars, but when it was his turn he pulled strings, ducked and spent the time partying, partying hard, in Texas and Alabama, and ducking even his minimal guard duties. Dick Cheney's record is only marginally better, he used college deferments and marriage to duck the draft. Now there specialty is cataloging high school students to send off to die in their screwed up mess of a war, a war they suckered American' in to with one lie after another.
I really hate chicken hawks, they are among the worst form of hypocrites.
"this is called addiction, and just like drug addiction or other addictions it is best resolved through treatment and rehabilitation. not incarceration, not prohibition, none of that works well and often causes more harm than good."
That is just silly. You are never going to identify them, and you have no legal basis to compel them in to treatment. Fact is if a guy want to spend every free moment searching for and staring at porn they can and will. Fact is most guys have brains wired to enjoy looking at naked women. You thinking you are going to start a gigantic treatment program for suggests a lack of grip on reality. Prohibiting probably wont work, but I think its worth noting having an unlimited supply of it on the net probably isn't exactly a positive thing.
"i would very much like to see certain aspects of american freedom homogenized across the world, like womens rights, freedom of speech and the press, etc."
Thank you for proving my point. Bottomline is you do want to inflict your culture and your values on the rest of the world, and you want to be the one who decides what is good and bad.
If you are a big fan of freedom of speech maybe you should start by defending it at home. Fact is the Bush administration and Republican's are launching a full frontal assault on it, just reference "free speech zones" which prevent people from expressing themselves where the president might see them, or people being dragged out of campaign events and in some cases arrested for exposing a t shirt that silently expresses dissatisfaction with the president, or because a Republican zealot saw a Kerry sticker on them.
As for "freedom of the press" the fact is the press in the U.S. has turned completely pathetic. No they aren't censored by the government, instead they are censored by advertisers, and their corprate head office and their ratings. The end result is the same, they seldom question or challenge the government or the status quo when its in the wrong. The war in Iraq proved beyond a shadow of a doubt our press is more government cheerleader than anything and there is virtually no watchdog left in it.
Yet dictatorships with overt suppression of speech and freedom are bad, but I think you are really kidding yourself to think there is really free speech or free press in this country either, the means for controlling it are just somewhat more subtle than a jack boot and a billy club.
"Safe officer slots?"
Maybe the parent was referring to safe officer slots like the ones in the Texas Air National Gaurd during Vietnam. You got to be an officer, learn to fly jets, and had zero chance of getting sent to Vietnam because the jets you were trained in were obsolete. Thats why all the rich and powerful in Texas used it with abandon to keep their sons from getting killed in Vietnam, i.e. George W. Bush.
Whats different today, well we have a volunteer army so the sons and daughters of the rich and powerful aren't at risk. So today the gaurd and reserve, rather than being a tool for avoiding combat duty for the rich and powerful are now a quick ticket to Iraq. If the draft is reinstituted I assure you the guard will be brought home and all the rich kids will flock to it to duck combat duty.
If you want to restore my faith in the Bush family I'd really like to see George W's two daughter enlist in the Army or Marines and end up in the streets of Iraq, or hey maybe even take a job at Halliburton/KBR driving fuel trucks in Iraq. Chances of it happening, zero, because the sons and daughters of the rich and powerful dont volunteer for combat duty anymore unless they want to pad their resume for a future political run(i.e John Kerry and Geroge H.W. Bush) and that isn't even required or that common any more (i.e. Bill Clinton and George W. Bush).
"With all the technology like stealth bombers, smart bombs, predator drones, surveilance devices and some very skilled special forces, the US can cause a fair amount of damage with a fraction of the force that we used in bigger wars like Vietnam & WWII."
Uh....all those high tech weapons are completely useless in an urban guerilla war like the one being fought in Iraq, and that is the war they can't get people to volunteer to fight. In case you don't watch the news that war consists of manning check points to try to stop car bombers, patrolling streets on foot or in Humvess as people snipe at you or set off bombs next to you. You usally never see who is trying to kill you, or if they do they suicide, so you can't point your high tech weapons at them.
This war also means breaking down doors at night and rounding up "suspects", and occassionally it means flattening urban areas like Fallujah which you can do with all the high tech weapons as long as you don't mind killing lots of innocent people.
Oh and you need lots of people, who don't value their lives to much, to drive trucks to move supplys from point A to point B. Truck convoys are especially tempting and easy targets for snipers and roadside bombs. You can use airlift to move supplies around but it costs a bloody fortune and quickly wears out all your airplanes, helicopters and pilots and at that point you are basicly admitting you don't control a place you are telling everyone you control.
All in all you are thinking wars means "Shock and Awe", "Desert Storm" and tanks racing across the desert to a glorious victory in a week, because the DOD and the press told you thats what it was, and show you pretty pictures to proce it. Well that is one form of war and America and its weapons are great at it.
Unfortunately once the "Shock and Awe" part is over if there are enough people, who really hate you, to start a flourishing insurgency they can tie up the U.S. military in knots, indefinitely and all the high tech weapons are next to useless. At that point you need a whole lot of grunts patrolling streets and kicking down doors and even then they still probably wont win. Its pretty rare to defeat an entrenched insurgency with military force. Only way you win is figure out a way to make the people of the country not hate you and get them to stop supporting and fueling the insurgents, and the U.S. is REALLY bad at doing that.
"The military doesn't want the draft. They want more volunteers."
:) Is a person a volunteer if they are coerced or tricked in to volunteering.
YEA. WHAT HE SAID. And if there aren't enough volunteers, we need to figure out how to "motivate" people to volunteer event if they dont want to
There is already a well documented trend of the DOD using fine print, trickery and out right coercion to prevent people already in the military and reserves from escaping when their contracted enlistment period is up. For all practical purposes many people already in the military and reserves ARE being drafted because they can't get out when they were supposed to.
Fact is the Army and Marines, their reserves and gaurds ARE missing their recruitment goals by a big margin and are now missing them every month and the popularity of the war in Iraq is plummeting. Eventually the DOD is going to run out of meat for the grinder. The Army and Marines the two services where the bulk of the sitting ducks being sent to Iraq come from. The Navy and Air Force are doing OK mostly because people who want to join the military know thats the best place to be to avoid ending up on the streets in Iraq.
Believe it or not most kids are smart enough to not want to end up in in an ugly urban guerilla war with no end in sight. A war where they would seldom see who is trying to kill them, where most of the natives hate them, and where lots of their peers are coming home in body bags, with burns or without limbs.
The all volunteer army is GREAT as long as you are never in a protracted shooting war, especially one based on lies and with no clear goal or end game. It simply wont work if Iraq turns in to another Vietnam. You simply wont get the volunteers needed to fight a dirty, messy war with no glory. You can get volunteers to race in on the tanks and declare victory in a week. You wont get volunteers to patrol Iraqi streets filled with an enemy you seldom see who are sniping at you and using IED's to blow your legs off.
Dont think it really matters if the military is structured for "volunteers" now. If people stop "volunteering" the DOD is screwed. Its either a full up draft with the political consequence to the people responsible(i.e. the Bush adminstration and the Republicans), back door drafts where you coerce and trick people in to the military and dont let them out which is basicly what we have now(the histroical term is Shanghai'ing people), or you cut and run on places like Iraq, and it probably collapses in to more of a smoldering hole in the ground than it already is and you just wasted half a trillion dollars and tens of thousands of dead and wounded on a failure.
Lucky for little George that he is a lame duck, because at this point it doesn't much matter how bad a job he does, we are stuck with him until 2008 unless someone acquires the balls to impeach him, which he most certainly deserves.
"to me this read: western culture debases women more than Islam does through pornography. if that was not your intent then forgive my comments."
Maybe you should read it as Islamic culture treats women differently than Western culture, and its a subject for debate whether it is better or worse, in its extreme maybe it is worse but extremes exist in both cultures. Increasingly, especially since 9/11, the Western stereotype is that the fundemental tenents of Islamic culture are bad whether it be chopping off peoples heads for selling heroin or the constraints that are placed on women. From that predisposition its been established by the powers that be that Islamic cultures must be westernized to be acceptable and in the process they seek to make them no longer Islamic.
"so are you saying all porn is bad again? perhaps just certain types of porn, like child / rape porn? (i'd agree with you there)"
No as I said I'm not interestrf in debating with you whether porn is "good" or "bad". I'm saying some cultures consider all porn "bad" and there is a legitimate basis for that opinion. You are obviously fond of your porn and are going to fight to a bitter end anyone who points out that its not without its problems. To get back on topic porn sites are the leading purveyor of spyware and cracker attacks because a lot of guys will throw caution to the window in their never ending obsession to find more and better porn to squander their life staring at instead of doing something productive and worthwhile. Lord know I've surfed my share of porn but if you step back and look at it, its kind of a goofy thing to do, and I'm not sure life and society wouldn't be better off it weren't so readily available.
"morality has everything to do with personal responsibility and ethical sense and very little to do with religious affiliation or lack thereof."
I can't argue with you there. After having lived in America for a while I guess maybe I've reached the point that I'm not sure there are many people left here who do have an "ethical sense" whether they be religious or not. I imagine greed is a nearly universal trait, but someone how America in particular has turned it in to a cultural priority. I suspect that most American's faced with the chance to make a quick $100K and not get caught will abandon their ethical sense in a heartbeat. From unchecked greed flows a lot of the harm America and Britain in particular inflict on the world, though greed is unfortunately probably universal.
Bottomline I'm just really not sure I want to see the whole planet homogenized in to an American culture and that seems to be the way its going with India and China increasingly signing up. Not sure it wont ultimately lay waste to the whole planet.