Give it a rest.. at least ridicule him for something real, like Tipper's holier-than-thou views on music and art. Dont think that his are going to be too different
Pot kettle black, holmes. That PMRC stuff and related junk was just the maneuvering of a power couple with their eyes on the White House. I think even Uncle Frank (RIP) understands. Unfortunately that power couple still insists on mentioning it on their campaign homepage, in their continuing bid to grab a piece of the lucrative "family values" market. Their actual views are far more sane, I guarantee you.
Tipper has a bit of a rock'n'roll background, y'know -- she could have been a Mo Tucker. She shouldn't be ridiculed for the PMRC; that's just the business of politics and marketing. Set your fangs instead on the bastards the PMRC enabled, like Wal-Mart and the censors at MTV.
I don't vote, I don't want to hear the crap about how my vote counts, I know it does, but guess what, I find that most of the people that are on the ballot are not worthy of being in any office.
Your vote counts! Less and less. It used to be that your leaders were chosen for you in smoke-filled rooms (i.e. by Fat Cats with big stogies hashing out the spoils of power). Now they're chosen for you in smoke-free rooms.
It's really funny to see all these threads whenever/. articles mention politics. You'd think that there was some sort of American college football game going on -- this is what politics and political discourse has been reduced to. Go State! Go Tech! Fsck you! Fsck you!
But that's a pretty fair description of what goes on in the larger world. The Vince Lombardi ethos (Winning isn't everything, it's the only thing) has taken over in a big way. So all these candidates are out there, trying to cash in some chips to raise money and attract more Fat Cats; I saw John McCain kiss major ass a while back, speaking at a South Carolina GOP gathering. That sort of spoils his appeal, doesn't it? He's supposed to be a think-for-himself non-kisser of asses, even GOP ones.
People like Gore, Elizabeth Dole, and George W Bush (the current frontrunners) have been preparing this run for years and years. When I first heard Bush utter the words "compassionate conservative" a year ago, I knew he'd already been reading his focus group data.
Politics is a business these days. No more, no less. The goal is to gain and keep power at all costs. Fight fight fight! Win win win! Go State! Lie if you have to, especially on TV; it isn't really a lie if you can get a lot of people to believe it. Bend the law if you must. These people aren't real leaders or public servants; the only people our elected representatives really represent are their major campaign donors and the party bosses (the groups are pretty much interchangeable these days). There are still a few exceptions, but none of them are running for president.
Your vote counts, but you have to do a lot of time-consuming homework. And a lot of time-consuming watchdogging -- people in power live their power trips 24/7. Who has the time to keep up with that? Most Americans choose not to. They get the government they deserve.
This is Perl-induced madness! Rob has obviously gone drunk with power, thanks to the infinite possibilities of Perl. What next? A "pingouin, you've got mail" Slashbox? SlashICQ? An animated paperclip? How about simultaneous translation to Tagalog, Joual, and Esperanto?
I believe in zero subsidies. Subsidies are inherently corrupt because there is a broken feedback loop from the producer (of money) and the spender. A stable system requires strong feedback.
Social Darwinism. I'll trust you to be fair and consistent and also advocate zero subsidies for failed savings and loans, failed derivatives trades, and failed Third World loans -- often the result of an irresponsibility far worse than that of any ghetto-dwelling caricature. In practice, that sort of fairness hasn't happened; while there have been scattered cases of babies dying as a result of reduced subsidies for "welfare mothers" (I promise you that I'm not being hysterical when I say that; the combination of cuts and increased red tape has made it hard to get proper nutrition and medical care in some locales), there's still the mantra of "too big to fail" when it comes to derivatives snafus and bad Eastern European and Third World debt.
We would NOT "certainly have implosions in third world countries" without IMF bailouts.
I think places like Jamaica would have gone nuts; however horrible the IMF "cure" was, it more or less worked in those days. Paraguay isn't looking so good these days; maybe they're "too small to count". But I wasn't referring to the IMF -- I meant the taxpayer-funded bailouts of banks that invested (and lost) in the Third World. I think those are two separate issues, though I could be wrong.
I'm blaming the US gov't for supplying handouts paid with OPM (other people's money) and then clamping down on the borders to prevent "outsiders" from getting it. No handouts, no problem, open up those borders. Attract the immigrants who are excited by the notion of earning an honest living and nothing more.
But OPM pays for roads and schools and such -- things that profit the few or the many, depending on context. Surely you see the benefit -- beyond profit and loss -- of an educated populace or a sane commute to work. "Handouts" also flow through the economy by paying rents and buying goods (things like food and clothing, for instance) that otherwise wouldn't be bought. I find the notion of "good" subsidies and "bad" ones to be often in the eye of the beholder; unfortunately, the richer recipients usually get off scott-free (due to voter apathy), while the poorer ones get demonized. A culture that is willfully God-less still seems to want to finger a Satan and a legion of devils.
But my original point was about the free flow of immigration, as with the capital that leaves the West and goes to Third World factories. If immigration were that free, we'd have millions of Central Americans crossing the border within a year, plus Boat People from the Caribbean -- one of the consequences of letting people really seek a decent wage. In that scenario, you and I don't get to decide who is a "worthy" immigrant, just as we don't get to decide whether or not the movement of that capital is a net gain for our communities. And the government has to pay for such consequences as the vast majority of these hypothetical immigrants not being able to find immediate work. You didn't get that part of my question. In the real world, we allow anarchy and chaos in one direction and not the other.
That's one of the invisible things we pay for in the free lunch of cheap labor. Bailouts of foreign economies that never really seem to benefit anyone but the banks, foreign pols, and bondholders -- though OPM is used for those that. If not for those handouts, we might have had a domestic bank failure or two; we'd certainly have implosions in Third World economies, with a long-term loss in exports. There's a lot more, but I gotta go back and ruin^H^H^H^Hedit some code:)
Just keep in mind that we're dealing with an ecosystem here, not the Wild Wild West fantasy of those who would equate most taxation with theft. It's a corrupt ecosystem these days, but the poor people in Mexicali, Moscow, Malaysia, and Minneapolis are the last ones we should tee off on; they're often the ones who take the biggest beating. In a global economy, we all live in the same neighborhood, and Americans will eventually find that out when Brazil and Korea sneeze and Peoria gets a belated and persistent cold. We'll blame the usual devils for it, but we'll be the real culprits.
I agree that Apple is an accomplice in the slavery initiated by the Mexican government (something I almost pointed out in my last posting).
It's not just Apple, it's other corporations. It's also the US government, which doesn't raise a fuss. It's also you and me, since the US government is comprised of our elected representatives, and because we tend to see places like Mexico as "investment opportunities" rather than as nations with people, people with the same dreams and desires as you or me. Our hands are dirty too, with every purchase and with every vote and with every letter we fail to send to our elected officials and every piece of legislation that serves to enhance or reinforce this state of affairs. It's also the media, since they tend to report consumer news, business news, or financial news, but no real economic news of substance other than what relates to consumer/business/financial matters; that ignores some weighty issues -- though it ensures that advertisers like Nike, Apple, and GM will keep those ad dollars coming. It's a shame that more mainstream-media coverage of Nike's labor practices has come from sportswriters than from "serious" mainstream journalists.
My original posting was meant to oppose the idea that people should be paid more than market value merely because they have less than others. Clearly, there are other issues, and the fact that Apple (and any other company) takes part in employing people who are partly enslaved is a serious problem.
It's more than a problem. It's literally a sin, from the standpoint of my religious tradition, and sin (especially on a mass scale like this) has its consequences. (I don't mean to go into bible-thumping mode here; I'm just stating the origins of my ranting -- this isn't a plea for you to go to church or to vote for this or that political party).
I'm all for opening up the borders. Let the immigrants come here for the honest living, not the handouts.
Here we go again. Back to blaming the victim. It's not the "handouts". Everyone comes here for an honest living, but there aren't enough jobs to go around, partly because some of those jobs are farmed off to the Third World -- it's a vicious cycle. I don't begrudge them taking those "handouts" as a consolation prize -- it's a much sweeter deal than they would have gotten back home, though people like you seem to think it's a mountain of money. I've never met a Mexican or Central American immigrant (or illegal) who wasn't a work-your-ass-off sort of person. For that matter, I've only met a handful of American-born "handout" recipients who weren't equally as industrious, and I don't think their bad attitudes grew in some sort of ghetto vacuum; society at large has helped add some fertilizer over the generations.
They should have the right to pursue a quality of life, but no one has the right to HAVE a quality of life.
I think the fact that they get paid a hell of a lot less for doing the same work as their US/EU counterparts has nothing to do with their "rights" to anything. I'm not arguing for their rights, I'm just arguing about our complicity in their "less than human" status. They, in practice, don't have a right to pursue a quality of life on the scale of people in El Norte. And if they tried, via collective bargaining or petitioning their political leaders, they'd be slapped down faster than a CPU cycle.
Slavery is not the same as cheap labor. Slavery is forced employment. People who work for cheap wages do so because they have no other employment alternative, usually because they either don't have the skills, or they live under the heavy hand of an oppressive gov't (the latter often contributing to the former).
Of course, in this case the "oppressive gov't" (i.e. de Mexico) has a hand in making LG an attractive proposition to Apple, by offering policies (or, rather, non-policies) that would be the envy of those who find the US government "oppressive". Your defense essentially just blames the victim. The people at the LG plant have skills, the very same ones utilized at the plants in Cork and Sacramento. Yet they're paid a small fraction of the wage. They're hemmed in as surely as any old-style slave, though they won't be hunted down or shot for leaving -- they would only receive punishment if they tried to assert themselves on the "plantation".
And there's no quick fix (e.g., minimum wage) to the problem.
I'm not asking for a quick fix. I'm just asking for the same "fix" that you or I would get.
Basically, we're all getting a free lunch out of this. But we pay in other ways. Blow it off if you want to. I don't want, henceforth, to see your name attached to whining about "gov't this" and "gov't that" when the problem at hand can probably be traced to the guy staring at you in the mirror. Can we also safely assume your defense of the rights of Mexican workers to come to the US by any means necessary in order to seek an "employment alternative"? If manufacturing capital is free to roam across borders in search of a free lunch, why shouldn't its victims be able to freely cross borders in search of a decent wage? Shall we petition the INS to bring down the fences and call off the dogs, then?
It's amazing that this "Christian nation" that puts "In God We Trust" on its currency and inserts "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance and has a chaplain begin each Senate session would conveniently ignore Matthew 7:12 just to make or save a couple of bucks.
irrelevant. ever hear of `cost of living?' mexicans can support families on `cents an hour.' just because it costs you $1000/mo to rent an apartment and $5 for a cardboard meal at mcdeez doesn't mean it costs everyone the same.
That's bullshit, too. You go see what kind of housing you can get on what they make. Then try to live in it. You go see what culinary delights are on offer with the money you have left for food. Then tell me how great it is. Cost of living arguments are bullshit -- do those workers in Mexicali do the same work as the iMac workers in Ireland and California? Shouldn't they be able to enjoy the same material benefits that those Irish and Californian workers do?
Stop trying to rationalize slavery. Just because slaves in the US got room and board, it doesn't mean they were all that pleased with it. I seriously doubt your "cost of living" arguments were used in the 18th and 19th century.
Yeah, who wants low wages when you can have even lower ones, or none at all. Damn Apple for employing cheap labor!
It's not like they're the only ones doing it.
And damn that Mexican gov't for not forcing the people to protect themselves!
It's more like corporations doing the forcing. The Mexican government wants low wages and weak unions and minimal regulation, so they can keep the likes of GM and LG happy. How would you like it if corporations were able to dictate policy in your country?
Seriously, don't be so protectionist and paternalistic.
Protectionist? It's not like I live in Cork -- or Ireland, for that matter. Paternalistic? Since when is it paternalistic to give a damn about people? Where I come from that's called compassion. If you worked for cents an hour, would you be happy about it? Would you piss on "paternalistic" do-gooders?
Call all the little names you want, but what we have here is rent-a-slave, and we've both got a piece of that timeshare. We benefit from it, but when it comes time to acknowledge it, we drag out the old FUD. If the workers in Mexico have such a good thing going, why do so many of them end up in the US?
This means Apple might not do the heavy laying-off it had planned to do at its Cork facility.
Layoffs? Plant closings? Have iMac sales tanked or something? Or would this have to do with the (I presume) enticing cheap wages they pay at the LG Electronics plant in Mexicali? And what was the cause of that fire, anyway? Substandard wiring? Shoddily-constructed factory?
Spelling gremlins. But the fact remains, a rabid ex-communist should be able to spell the names of Khrushchev (any common transliteration is acceptable) and Marcuse.
...it's just that there was a "redistribution of wealth" that's no different than the kind that (Merkin) "conservatives" complain about when they spread FUD about some "socialistic liberal" policy ideas. It works both ways; any transaction is a redistribution of wealth - it need not involve any Marx, or any liberals. It can come from institutions like banks and the State Department, too.
My complaint wasn't about the Marshall Plan, but about who foot (footed?) the bill. Had there not been a drain of capital from Europe to the United States (I hope I'm not misrepresenting Chomsky's argument here -- it was part of an essay that has little to do with the Cold War), there would not have been a need for the American taxpayers to fork over as much cash as they did. It's a minor complaint, one that doesn't equate to the lies and treachery that was done elsewhere in the name of "fighting communism". The Marshall Plan itself was legit.
You'll have to explain to me the logic that went into that "socialismo == muerte" jive. A site that includes links to The Times of London, Robert Fripp, Lydia Lunch, Clarissa Dickson Wright, CmdrTaco, Société Radio-Canada, Noam Chomsky, jwz, and the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League doesn't strike me as socialist or communist.
I wonder if you are not just arguing for the hell of it, because you are acting like you are.
No. I'm just not a big fan of mindless anti-communism.
You make a lame assertion with no backup, I supply facts which deny your assertion, you slander and make new lame assertion.
Your scattershot "facts" have little to do with the argument. Yes, there were -- and are -- spies afoot. No, I don't think McCarthy was being honest; like many politicians these days, he demagogued the surfaces of a popular issue without wasting time with relevant facts. It was extremely successful until enough people from both parties called him on the pointlessness of his "quest".
Sen. McCarthy wanted to know why there were communist agents working at the State Department. He was stonewalled. His personality didn't help matters, but he understood the brevity of the situation. He understood that communism seeks the violent enslavement of productive people. He understood that communism kills. He understood that communism lies. He understood that communism was (and still is) the single greatest threat to life and liberty.
Communists, real or imagined, have some sort of monopoly on lies? You make it sound like some sort of alien virus. If Communism is so uniquely a threat, then why is life and liberty threatened all around the world today without the help of communists? There haven't been riots in Paraguay and Indonesia because of communist oppression -- it was good old "democratically elected" governments that were at fault. American governments have enslaved and "ethnic cleansed" their own populace without the help of some sort of "Agenda from Moscow". It's not about ideology; it's about people. An anti-communist like Hitler did as much damage as a "communist" like Stalin. An anti-communist like Chiang was every bit the toxic despot that Mao was. Do you get it now? They all summoned their boogie men as a means of getting or holding onto power, but it would be ludicrous to take their words seriously.
There were communists in the State Department. There were communists in the Defense Department. There were even communists in the White House staff. Are we to believe your assertion that they were simply doing their jobs and minding their own business? Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs proved that they weren't. KGB documents proved that they weren't. The HUAC proved that they weren't.
I'm sure there were "communists" in those places before, during, and after this era. It's just name-calling in your hands and in McCarthy's. You even labeled me a communist just because I point out McCarthy's making use of the era's hysteria to advance his career.
To the communists, every little bit helped. Every communist government employee, every communist labor leader, every communist school teacher, and every communist film director meant as much to the cause of communism as any pair of scientists or any Undersecretary of State, because a twisted mind means with influence over others means as much a tidbit of information.
The United States and Western Europe was in serious danger in the 40s and 50s from a communist insurgency, and it took the Red Scare and the help of the Kruchschev report for that danger to subside.
For that Joe McCarthy was a hero.
Geez! You're sounding like Frank Burns and J Edgar. To equate the popularity of a Communist Party in Western Europe with some sort of impending Soviet takeover is just paranoid; in a sane person, that popularity might be cause to be wary, but it's not the same thing as actual guerrillas like there must have been in Greece or Turkey. This silly line of thought led to all those corrupt Italian governments, among many other things, like the "redistribution of wealth" that was the Marshall Plan, the rape of East Timor, the murderous governments of Pinochet and Videla, and the utter sham known as the "Vietnam War".
Give it a rest, Major Burns. Joe McCarthy is a dead two-bit politician, not a martyr.
All modern socialism sprang from Saint-Simon. He was the first to coalesce (sp?) all the fragments of envy and hatred under one philosophical roof. He even coined the term "Socialism." Understand this, and understand history better.
This is also very stupid. If you're going to reduce socialism to "envy" and "anger", then there's a hell of a lot of stuff that you need to understand.
It is very common these days for socialists to marginalize Saint Simon, since he openly endorsed the horror that socialism would eventually spring upon the earth. In this, he was not only the father of socialism, but it's greatest adversary, since he flamed other socialists for their dishonesty.
Dishonesty comes in all political flavors. I would refer Saint-Simon to Matthew 7:3-5. I'm sure there's many reasons for people to marginalize Saint-Simon. Your post does nothing to change what I wrote in the previous post; the guy who coined the word "television" would probably not be the best person to manage the hardware at an HDTV station.
To quote someone else: "Signs are signs, and some of them are lies."
I would encourage you to read the works of the Comte de Saint Simon. His frankness about the realities of socialism (in all its forms) will turn your hair white. His explanation of his plan and the variants of his socialism is extraordinarily prophetic.
It's crap, just like your posts (I've read all of the above). Where was Saint-Simon in '33? Where was he during Peron's heyday? Until he writes his accounts of the reigns of Hitler, Peron, Pinochet, Suharto, Franco, and Franjo, your parrotings are no better than those of a Nostradamus freak. "Socialism" the word and "socialism" the 20th Century reality are two different things, especially in the hands of someone so virulently and irrationally anti-"socialist" like you. Given that Saint-Simon was dead long before Marx published a single word and long before Keynes, Lenin, and Harrington were born, maybe you shouldn't drag him into this without his permission. Learn to do your own thinking and learn to write in your own words, not half-assed misappropriations of vaguely tangentially-relevant dead Frenchmen.
Well here are some of the things they accomplished...
Alger Hiss
That's a person, not an accomplishment.
The Bomb
I don't see what Stalin's German scientists have to do with a bunch of ordinary State Department employees (they wouldn't have known a Klaus Fuchs from a Klaus Flouride). You're confusing the issue of a list of people (the "Wheeling List") with the very real activities of a bunch of very real spies. McCarthy's "commies" had as much to do with the bomb as they did with Truman's German scientists.
12hr notice of the invasion of Korea at Inchon
See previous riposte.
notice of the Berlin Airlift
See previous paragraph.
The knowledge that Marshall told Chang Kai-Shek we weren't going to intervene militarily in China
See previous. Chiang was a bastard, but he was our bastard, eh?
Pre-knowledge of the creation of West Germany
Like that one was a big surprise. East and West Germany were essentially created from day one, just like the Koreas and the Vietnams. It was a secret only in the sense that Double-U Bush's presidential candidacy is. The Berlin Wall was a surprise; the Federal Republic was not.
Notice that none of the witch hunts did anything to eliminate spying. That's probably because the "witches" by and large weren't the spies. The "they" that achieved this list of "accomplishments" are not the "they" that McCarthy were after. Only paranoiacs (and, at the time, cheap publicity-starved opportunists) will take the time to connect the dubious dots.
... and lots of other fun little tidbits.
I know how stubborn pride can make you stand by your incorrect assertions. I was a communist once, too.
I was always a conservative, and I've never much liked being lumped in with morally and ethically challenged "conservatives" like McCarthy, Reagan, and Gingrich -- that's why this is a big issue to me. And I stubbornly stand by my correct assertions. We were off topic to begin with, and now you're saying a bunch of cowed deer-in-the-headlights government employees were the master spies of the age. I don't think so.
It's just a name. The National Socialist German Workers Party -- the actual German name will give you the letters that form its more famous nickname. They were fascists and capitalists; they didn't give two shits about workers or socialists, other than the fact that they imprisoned/killed several of the latter, along with Jews, communists, gypsies, and homosexuals.
"Kinder, Kirche, Küche" was, IIRC, a big slogan of theirs (though my German sucks nowadays -- someone can correct me). If anything, the slogan isn't far removed from all those "family values" and "God-and-Country" US pols. Socialists? Come on.
And what exactly did those "Russkie agents" accomplish while they were ensconced at State? I'm sure there's plenty of names that match the KGB docs; it still means nothing (plenty of 30's/WWII-era communists were in touch with Moscow, either literally or figuratively; they weren't spies -- they just looked there for their ideological "marching orders", often with agonizing results, like the aftermath of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact). I'm sure the KGB also has John Lennon, Fat Billy Blythe, Lucille Ball, Paul Robeson, Clark Clifford, and Marina Oswald in their files as well; it means nothing. Why don't we go after FDR and Churchill as well? They were in cahoots with Stalin up to their asses, certainly to a much higher extent than the poor schlubs who got politically gang-raped by McCarthy and all the other opportunists of the day. I won't even bring up the subtle anti-semitism that comprised part of the "Get the Commies!" hysteria of the 40's and 50's.
I still stand by every single word I've uploaded. Including the admonition that you should take the time to study the era (circa 1930-1955).
It's opening night for baseball. You go hunting witches if you want; I'll just sit and watch some stud paint the corners. You'll have to wait 'til tomorrow to catch some Reds.
What may have been partially true in '47 (many of those people were as dangerous as the people on the entertainment industry blacklist -- i.e. not a danger or threat at all, and probably not commies either) was out-and-out falsehood by '51 or so -- McCarthy reached the point of self-parody pretty quickly. I'm not out to convince some YAF wacko; I just felt the need to challenge your unusual assertions, so our readers outside the US wouldn't be confused. If it'll make you feel any better, I believe Alger Hiss was a communist. OK? I stand by my previous post. Every word.
These "communist subversives, infiltrators, and fellow travelers" were just human beings. They may have been socialists or communists during the Great Depression, or had friends and relatives who were -- it was not all that uncommon back then. And the name-calling of the day was only a hair's breadth away from the taunts of "liberal" and "socialist" today, to put it in a more modern context; what was different then was the widely-held belief that these people were somehow agents of Stalin (99.9% of them were, in fact, not). Even the flouridation of the water supply was thought by some to be a Soviet plot; take Joe's opportunist hype with a grain of salt, keeping in mind the political and cultural climate.
How old are you? I'm old enough to have had neighbors and babysitters who had first-hand stories to tell. Grow the fsck up, and get your history from books, not pamphlets. Hell, at least grab some of Herblock's books that touch upon that era -- lots of nice pictures for you to look at, if the text is a bit too much for you.
I assume you're talking about Tail-Gunner Joe, and not Clean Gene. McCarthy was in over his head, having shot to prominence via hyping a very trendy meme (The Commies are tryin' to take over!). It got to the point where he was faking some of his evidence, e.g., theatrically holding up a list of random names and saying that these were the people who blah blah blah. That kind of dishonesty may have exacerbated his drinking problem and shortened his life. A true pity.
It is a lesson to be learned. If the mainstream press hadn't kow-tow'd to the meme-hypers of the day, but instead had challenged their various inane assertions, we wouldn't have gone through those dark days. The lesson has yet to be learned.
Slashdot Mirror
Pot kettle black, holmes. That PMRC stuff and related junk was just the maneuvering of a power couple with their eyes on the White House. I think even Uncle Frank (RIP) understands. Unfortunately that power couple still insists on mentioning it on their campaign homepage, in their continuing bid to grab a piece of the lucrative "family values" market. Their actual views are far more sane, I guarantee you.
Tipper has a bit of a rock'n'roll background, y'know -- she could have been a Mo Tucker. She shouldn't be ridiculed for the PMRC; that's just the business of politics and marketing. Set your fangs instead on the bastards the PMRC enabled, like Wal-Mart and the censors at MTV.
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Your vote counts! Less and less. It used to be that your leaders were chosen for you in smoke-filled rooms (i.e. by Fat Cats with big stogies hashing out the spoils of power). Now they're chosen for you in smoke-free rooms.
It's really funny to see all these threads whenever /. articles mention politics. You'd think that there was some sort of American college football game going on -- this is what politics and political discourse has been reduced to. Go State! Go Tech! Fsck you! Fsck you!
But that's a pretty fair description of what goes on in the larger world. The Vince Lombardi ethos (Winning isn't everything, it's the only thing) has taken over in a big way. So all these candidates are out there, trying to cash in some chips to raise money and attract more Fat Cats; I saw John McCain kiss major ass a while back, speaking at a South Carolina GOP gathering. That sort of spoils his appeal, doesn't it? He's supposed to be a think-for-himself non-kisser of asses, even GOP ones.
People like Gore, Elizabeth Dole, and George W Bush (the current frontrunners) have been preparing this run for years and years. When I first heard Bush utter the words "compassionate conservative" a year ago, I knew he'd already been reading his focus group data.
Politics is a business these days. No more, no less. The goal is to gain and keep power at all costs. Fight fight fight! Win win win! Go State! Lie if you have to, especially on TV; it isn't really a lie if you can get a lot of people to believe it. Bend the law if you must. These people aren't real leaders or public servants; the only people our elected representatives really represent are their major campaign donors and the party bosses (the groups are pretty much interchangeable these days). There are still a few exceptions, but none of them are running for president.
Your vote counts, but you have to do a lot of time-consuming homework. And a lot of time-consuming watchdogging -- people in power live their power trips 24/7. Who has the time to keep up with that? Most Americans choose not to. They get the government they deserve.
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Social Darwinism. I'll trust you to be fair and consistent and also advocate zero subsidies for failed savings and loans, failed derivatives trades, and failed Third World loans -- often the result of an irresponsibility far worse than that of any ghetto-dwelling caricature. In practice, that sort of fairness hasn't happened; while there have been scattered cases of babies dying as a result of reduced subsidies for "welfare mothers" (I promise you that I'm not being hysterical when I say that; the combination of cuts and increased red tape has made it hard to get proper nutrition and medical care in some locales), there's still the mantra of "too big to fail" when it comes to derivatives snafus and bad Eastern European and Third World debt.
We would NOT "certainly have implosions in third world countries" without IMF bailouts.
I think places like Jamaica would have gone nuts; however horrible the IMF "cure" was, it more or less worked in those days. Paraguay isn't looking so good these days; maybe they're "too small to count". But I wasn't referring to the IMF -- I meant the taxpayer-funded bailouts of banks that invested (and lost) in the Third World. I think those are two separate issues, though I could be wrong.
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But OPM pays for roads and schools and such -- things that profit the few or the many, depending on context. Surely you see the benefit -- beyond profit and loss -- of an educated populace or a sane commute to work. "Handouts" also flow through the economy by paying rents and buying goods (things like food and clothing, for instance) that otherwise wouldn't be bought. I find the notion of "good" subsidies and "bad" ones to be often in the eye of the beholder; unfortunately, the richer recipients usually get off scott-free (due to voter apathy), while the poorer ones get demonized. A culture that is willfully God-less still seems to want to finger a Satan and a legion of devils.
But my original point was about the free flow of immigration, as with the capital that leaves the West and goes to Third World factories. If immigration were that free, we'd have millions of Central Americans crossing the border within a year, plus Boat People from the Caribbean -- one of the consequences of letting people really seek a decent wage. In that scenario, you and I don't get to decide who is a "worthy" immigrant, just as we don't get to decide whether or not the movement of that capital is a net gain for our communities. And the government has to pay for such consequences as the vast majority of these hypothetical immigrants not being able to find immediate work. You didn't get that part of my question. In the real world, we allow anarchy and chaos in one direction and not the other.
That's one of the invisible things we pay for in the free lunch of cheap labor. Bailouts of foreign economies that never really seem to benefit anyone but the banks, foreign pols, and bondholders -- though OPM is used for those that. If not for those handouts, we might have had a domestic bank failure or two; we'd certainly have implosions in Third World economies, with a long-term loss in exports. There's a lot more, but I gotta go back and ruin^H^H^H^Hedit some code :)
Just keep in mind that we're dealing with an ecosystem here, not the Wild Wild West fantasy of those who would equate most taxation with theft. It's a corrupt ecosystem these days, but the poor people in Mexicali, Moscow, Malaysia, and Minneapolis are the last ones we should tee off on; they're often the ones who take the biggest beating. In a global economy, we all live in the same neighborhood, and Americans will eventually find that out when Brazil and Korea sneeze and Peoria gets a belated and persistent cold. We'll blame the usual devils for it, but we'll be the real culprits.
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It's not just Apple, it's other corporations. It's also the US government, which doesn't raise a fuss. It's also you and me, since the US government is comprised of our elected representatives, and because we tend to see places like Mexico as "investment opportunities" rather than as nations with people, people with the same dreams and desires as you or me. Our hands are dirty too, with every purchase and with every vote and with every letter we fail to send to our elected officials and every piece of legislation that serves to enhance or reinforce this state of affairs. It's also the media, since they tend to report consumer news, business news, or financial news, but no real economic news of substance other than what relates to consumer/business/financial matters; that ignores some weighty issues -- though it ensures that advertisers like Nike, Apple, and GM will keep those ad dollars coming. It's a shame that more mainstream-media coverage of Nike's labor practices has come from sportswriters than from "serious" mainstream journalists.
My original posting was meant to oppose the idea that people should be paid more than market value merely because they have less than others. Clearly, there are other issues, and the fact that Apple (and any other company) takes part in employing people who are partly enslaved is a serious problem.
It's more than a problem. It's literally a sin, from the standpoint of my religious tradition, and sin (especially on a mass scale like this) has its consequences. (I don't mean to go into bible-thumping mode here; I'm just stating the origins of my ranting -- this isn't a plea for you to go to church or to vote for this or that political party).
I'm all for opening up the borders. Let the immigrants come here for the honest living, not the handouts.
Here we go again. Back to blaming the victim. It's not the "handouts". Everyone comes here for an honest living, but there aren't enough jobs to go around, partly because some of those jobs are farmed off to the Third World -- it's a vicious cycle. I don't begrudge them taking those "handouts" as a consolation prize -- it's a much sweeter deal than they would have gotten back home, though people like you seem to think it's a mountain of money. I've never met a Mexican or Central American immigrant (or illegal) who wasn't a work-your-ass-off sort of person. For that matter, I've only met a handful of American-born "handout" recipients who weren't equally as industrious, and I don't think their bad attitudes grew in some sort of ghetto vacuum; society at large has helped add some fertilizer over the generations.
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I think the fact that they get paid a hell of a lot less for doing the same work as their US/EU counterparts has nothing to do with their "rights" to anything. I'm not arguing for their rights, I'm just arguing about our complicity in their "less than human" status. They, in practice, don't have a right to pursue a quality of life on the scale of people in El Norte. And if they tried, via collective bargaining or petitioning their political leaders, they'd be slapped down faster than a CPU cycle.
Slavery is not the same as cheap labor. Slavery is forced employment. People who work for cheap wages do so because they have no other employment alternative, usually because they either don't have the skills, or they live under the heavy hand of an oppressive gov't (the latter often contributing to the former).
Of course, in this case the "oppressive gov't" (i.e. de Mexico) has a hand in making LG an attractive proposition to Apple, by offering policies (or, rather, non-policies) that would be the envy of those who find the US government "oppressive". Your defense essentially just blames the victim. The people at the LG plant have skills, the very same ones utilized at the plants in Cork and Sacramento. Yet they're paid a small fraction of the wage. They're hemmed in as surely as any old-style slave, though they won't be hunted down or shot for leaving -- they would only receive punishment if they tried to assert themselves on the "plantation".
And there's no quick fix (e.g., minimum wage) to the problem.
I'm not asking for a quick fix. I'm just asking for the same "fix" that you or I would get.
Basically, we're all getting a free lunch out of this. But we pay in other ways. Blow it off if you want to. I don't want, henceforth, to see your name attached to whining about "gov't this" and "gov't that" when the problem at hand can probably be traced to the guy staring at you in the mirror. Can we also safely assume your defense of the rights of Mexican workers to come to the US by any means necessary in order to seek an "employment alternative"? If manufacturing capital is free to roam across borders in search of a free lunch, why shouldn't its victims be able to freely cross borders in search of a decent wage? Shall we petition the INS to bring down the fences and call off the dogs, then?
It's amazing that this "Christian nation" that puts "In God We Trust" on its currency and inserts "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance and has a chaplain begin each Senate session would conveniently ignore Matthew 7:12 just to make or save a couple of bucks.
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That's bullshit, too. You go see what kind of housing you can get on what they make. Then try to live in it. You go see what culinary delights are on offer with the money you have left for food. Then tell me how great it is. Cost of living arguments are bullshit -- do those workers in Mexicali do the same work as the iMac workers in Ireland and California? Shouldn't they be able to enjoy the same material benefits that those Irish and Californian workers do?
Stop trying to rationalize slavery. Just because slaves in the US got room and board, it doesn't mean they were all that pleased with it. I seriously doubt your "cost of living" arguments were used in the 18th and 19th century.
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It's not like they're the only ones doing it.
And damn that Mexican gov't for not forcing the people to protect themselves!
It's more like corporations doing the forcing. The Mexican government wants low wages and weak unions and minimal regulation, so they can keep the likes of GM and LG happy. How would you like it if corporations were able to dictate policy in your country?
Seriously, don't be so protectionist and paternalistic.
Protectionist? It's not like I live in Cork -- or Ireland, for that matter. Paternalistic? Since when is it paternalistic to give a damn about people? Where I come from that's called compassion. If you worked for cents an hour, would you be happy about it? Would you piss on "paternalistic" do-gooders?
Call all the little names you want, but what we have here is rent-a-slave, and we've both got a piece of that timeshare. We benefit from it, but when it comes time to acknowledge it, we drag out the old FUD. If the workers in Mexico have such a good thing going, why do so many of them end up in the US?
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Layoffs? Plant closings? Have iMac sales tanked or something? Or would this have to do with the (I presume) enticing cheap wages they pay at the LG Electronics plant in Mexicali? And what was the cause of that fire, anyway? Substandard wiring? Shoddily-constructed factory?
Inquiring minds want to know :)
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Then why can you spell Marcuse? Or Khrushchev, for that matter?
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No. I'm just not a big fan of mindless anti-communism.
You make a lame assertion with no backup, I supply facts which deny your assertion, you slander and make new lame assertion.
Your scattershot "facts" have little to do with the argument. Yes, there were -- and are -- spies afoot. No, I don't think McCarthy was being honest; like many politicians these days, he demagogued the surfaces of a popular issue without wasting time with relevant facts. It was extremely successful until enough people from both parties called him on the pointlessness of his "quest".
Sen. McCarthy wanted to know why there were communist agents working at the State Department. He was stonewalled. His personality didn't help matters, but he understood the brevity of the situation. He understood that communism seeks the violent enslavement of productive people. He understood that communism kills. He understood that communism lies. He understood that communism was (and still is) the single greatest threat to life and liberty.
Communists, real or imagined, have some sort of monopoly on lies? You make it sound like some sort of alien virus. If Communism is so uniquely a threat, then why is life and liberty threatened all around the world today without the help of communists? There haven't been riots in Paraguay and Indonesia because of communist oppression -- it was good old "democratically elected" governments that were at fault. American governments have enslaved and "ethnic cleansed" their own populace without the help of some sort of "Agenda from Moscow". It's not about ideology; it's about people. An anti-communist like Hitler did as much damage as a "communist" like Stalin. An anti-communist like Chiang was every bit the toxic despot that Mao was. Do you get it now? They all summoned their boogie men as a means of getting or holding onto power, but it would be ludicrous to take their words seriously.
There were communists in the State Department. There were communists in the Defense Department. There were even communists in the White House staff. Are we to believe your assertion that they were simply doing their jobs and minding their own business? Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs proved that they weren't. KGB documents proved that they weren't. The HUAC proved that they weren't.
I'm sure there were "communists" in those places before, during, and after this era. It's just name-calling in your hands and in McCarthy's. You even labeled me a communist just because I point out McCarthy's making use of the era's hysteria to advance his career.
To the communists, every little bit helped. Every communist government employee, every communist labor leader, every communist school teacher, and every communist film director meant as much to the cause of communism as any pair of scientists or any Undersecretary of State, because a twisted mind means with influence over others means as much a tidbit of information.
The United States and Western Europe was in serious danger in the 40s and 50s from a communist insurgency, and it took the Red Scare and the help of the Kruchschev report for that danger to subside.
For that Joe McCarthy was a hero.
Geez! You're sounding like Frank Burns and J Edgar. To equate the popularity of a Communist Party in Western Europe with some sort of impending Soviet takeover is just paranoid; in a sane person, that popularity might be cause to be wary, but it's not the same thing as actual guerrillas like there must have been in Greece or Turkey. This silly line of thought led to all those corrupt Italian governments, among many other things, like the "redistribution of wealth" that was the Marshall Plan, the rape of East Timor, the murderous governments of Pinochet and Videla, and the utter sham known as the "Vietnam War".
Give it a rest, Major Burns. Joe McCarthy is a dead two-bit politician, not a martyr.
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No it isn't. This is very stupid.
All modern socialism sprang from Saint-Simon. He was the first to coalesce (sp?) all the fragments of envy and hatred under one philosophical roof. He even coined the term "Socialism." Understand this, and understand history better.
This is also very stupid. If you're going to reduce socialism to "envy" and "anger", then there's a hell of a lot of stuff that you need to understand.
It is very common these days for socialists to marginalize Saint Simon, since he openly endorsed the horror that socialism would eventually spring upon the earth. In this, he was not only the father of socialism, but it's greatest adversary, since he flamed other socialists for their dishonesty.
Dishonesty comes in all political flavors. I would refer Saint-Simon to Matthew 7:3-5. I'm sure there's many reasons for people to marginalize Saint-Simon. Your post does nothing to change what I wrote in the previous post; the guy who coined the word "television" would probably not be the best person to manage the hardware at an HDTV station.
To quote someone else: "Signs are signs, and some of them are lies."
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It's crap, just like your posts (I've read all of the above). Where was Saint-Simon in '33? Where was he during Peron's heyday? Until he writes his accounts of the reigns of Hitler, Peron, Pinochet, Suharto, Franco, and Franjo, your parrotings are no better than those of a Nostradamus freak. "Socialism" the word and "socialism" the 20th Century reality are two different things, especially in the hands of someone so virulently and irrationally anti-"socialist" like you. Given that Saint-Simon was dead long before Marx published a single word and long before Keynes, Lenin, and Harrington were born, maybe you shouldn't drag him into this without his permission. Learn to do your own thinking and learn to write in your own words, not half-assed misappropriations of vaguely tangentially-relevant dead Frenchmen.
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Alger Hiss
That's a person, not an accomplishment.
The Bomb
I don't see what Stalin's German scientists have to do with a bunch of ordinary State Department employees (they wouldn't have known a Klaus Fuchs from a Klaus Flouride). You're confusing the issue of a list of people (the "Wheeling List") with the very real activities of a bunch of very real spies. McCarthy's "commies" had as much to do with the bomb as they did with Truman's German scientists.
12hr notice of the invasion of Korea at Inchon
See previous riposte.
notice of the Berlin Airlift
See previous paragraph.
The knowledge that Marshall told Chang Kai-Shek we weren't going to intervene militarily in China
See previous. Chiang was a bastard, but he was our bastard, eh?
Pre-knowledge of the creation of West Germany
Like that one was a big surprise. East and West Germany were essentially created from day one, just like the Koreas and the Vietnams. It was a secret only in the sense that Double-U Bush's presidential candidacy is. The Berlin Wall was a surprise; the Federal Republic was not.
Notice that none of the witch hunts did anything to eliminate spying. That's probably because the "witches" by and large weren't the spies. The "they" that achieved this list of "accomplishments" are not the "they" that McCarthy were after. Only paranoiacs (and, at the time, cheap publicity-starved opportunists) will take the time to connect the dubious dots.
I know how stubborn pride can make you stand by your incorrect assertions. I was a communist once, too.
I was always a conservative, and I've never much liked being lumped in with morally and ethically challenged "conservatives" like McCarthy, Reagan, and Gingrich -- that's why this is a big issue to me. And I stubbornly stand by my correct assertions. We were off topic to begin with, and now you're saying a bunch of cowed deer-in-the-headlights government employees were the master spies of the age. I don't think so.
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"Kinder, Kirche, Küche" was, IIRC, a big slogan of theirs (though my German sucks nowadays -- someone can correct me). If anything, the slogan isn't far removed from all those "family values" and "God-and-Country" US pols. Socialists? Come on.
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I still stand by every single word I've uploaded. Including the admonition that you should take the time to study the era (circa 1930-1955).
It's opening night for baseball. You go hunting witches if you want; I'll just sit and watch some stud paint the corners. You'll have to wait 'til tomorrow to catch some Reds.
Say "good night", Gracie.
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These "communist subversives, infiltrators, and fellow travelers" were just human beings. They may have been socialists or communists during the Great Depression, or had friends and relatives who were -- it was not all that uncommon back then. And the name-calling of the day was only a hair's breadth away from the taunts of "liberal" and "socialist" today, to put it in a more modern context; what was different then was the widely-held belief that these people were somehow agents of Stalin (99.9% of them were, in fact, not). Even the flouridation of the water supply was thought by some to be a Soviet plot; take Joe's opportunist hype with a grain of salt, keeping in mind the political and cultural climate.
How old are you? I'm old enough to have had neighbors and babysitters who had first-hand stories to tell. Grow the fsck up, and get your history from books, not pamphlets. Hell, at least grab some of Herblock's books that touch upon that era -- lots of nice pictures for you to look at, if the text is a bit too much for you.
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It is a lesson to be learned. If the mainstream press hadn't kow-tow'd to the meme-hypers of the day, but instead had challenged their various inane assertions, we wouldn't have gone through those dark days. The lesson has yet to be learned.
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