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What Do They Want? Justice
How can anyone possessed of the faintest sense of social justice not thrill to the Occupy Wall Street movement now spreading throughout the country? One need not be religiously doctrinaire to recognize this as a “come to Jesus moment” when the money-changers stand exposed and the victims of their avarice are at long last offered succor.
Not that any of the protesters have gone so far as to overturn the tables of stockbrokers or whip them with cords in imitation of the cleansing of the temple, but the rhetoric of accountability is compelling. “I think a good deal of the bankers should be in jail,” one protester told New York Times columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin. That prospect has evidently aroused concern in an industry that has largely managed to escape judicial opprobrium.
“Is this Occupy Wall Street thing a big deal?” the CEO of a major bank asked Sorkin. “We’re trying to figure out how much we should be worried about all this. Is this going to turn into a personal safety problem?”
It should pose a threat, not because peaceful demonstrators will suddenly morph into vigilantes fatally damaging their cause with violent action, but rather because government prosecutors should fulfill their obligation to pursue justice and incarcerate some of the obvious perps. As Sorkin conceded, in one of the rare instances of the business press attempting to understand the protesters: “the message was clear: the demonstrators are seeking accountability for Wall Street and corporate America for the financial crisis and the growing economic inequality gap.”
Sorkin ended his account with snarky comments about the protesters using ATM machines and about the ever-admirable Code Pink founder Jodie Evans having flown a commercial airline to get across the country to the demonstration. He also offered the predictable dismissal that could be made about any genuinely spontaneous movement, that “the protesters have a myriad of grievances with no particular agenda.”
But ignore the mass media’s nitpicking and mostly derisive coverage and wonder instead why it took so long for this grass-roots movement to emerge as an alternative to the tea party, which exonerates the thieves of Wall Street. With 25 million Americans unsuccessfully looking for full-time work, 50 million experiencing mortgage foreclosure and an all-time high of 46.2 percent living in poverty, including 22 percent of all children, isn’t it logical that the faux populism of the tea party be confronted with a progressive alternative?
The Republican narrative, which the media have treated with considerable respect, blames “big government” for our ills, not when Washington bails out the banks, or feeds the maws of the military-industrial complex, but only when it might go to the aid of the victims of the financial conglomerates.
It was the Wall Street lobbyists, with the complicity of Democrats and Republicans in Congress, who caused the Great Recession by destroying a sensible regulatory system—one that had kept U.S. banking reliable since the Great Depression—and by legalizing the securitization of homes. But the Wall Street titans escaped being held accountable for the excesses of their greed: They got their lackeys in government to throw them a lifeline bailout while their victims among the unemployed and foreclosed were abandoned.
“We bailed out the banks with an understanding that there would be a restoration of lending. All there was was a restoration of bonuses” is the way Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz described it in speaking to the protesters on Wall Street.
It was a thought echoed by George Soros in expressing his support for the demonstrators: “The decision not to inject capital into the banks, but to effectively relieve them of their bad assets and then allow them to earn their way out of a hole leaves the banks bumper profits and then allows them to pay bumper bonuses.”
Those bonuses are part of a practice throughout the corporate world that has far less to do with corporate performance than with the power spoils of CEOs. As The Washington Post points out, “The gap between what workers and top executives make helps explain why income inequality in the United States is reaching levels unseen since the Great Depression.” While the median pay for top corporate executives has quadrupled since the 1970s, the pay of non-supervisory workers has declined by more than 10 percent.
“Ultimately this is about power and greed, unchecked,” Jodie Evans told the Times’ Sorkin, and it is a protest that the columnist’s newspaper, along with the rest of a mainstream media that editorially enthused over the radical deregulation that unfettered Wall Street greed, should now honestly cover.
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Show AllWhen they occupy the corrupt congress they will get far more attention than they are getting now. The cowardly politicians from both parties must feel threatened before anything will change.
The reason none of the banksters are in jail is because they and the politicians they own decriminalized (euphemistically called deregulation) financial fraud by overturning FDR's New Deal financial industry regulations that Scheer refers to.
Whereas more than 1,000 bankers were jailed for their roles in the 1980s savings and loan scandal that negatively impacted less than 10% of the world's population, no bankers have been jailed for the 2008 meltdown that negatively impacted more than 90% of the world's population.
Removing all private money from political campaigns and restoring New Deal financial industry regulations is the only solution.
You have put your finger on the crux of the matter: political corruption. Nothing will change until the political system is effectively reformed and bribery (lobbying etc.) is no longer legal. In a way the banksters are a side-show - there are those who have broken the law, there are many who are immoral perhaps, but mostly the people who profited from the system are like Monopoly players who won by playing by the rules. The Rules of the Game constitute the real problem and those rules can only be changed by Washington politicians. And the politicians can only be changed by political reform.
We should attempt to make the politics of the next election a one issue debate over corruption. Start by focusing on the Primaries in each state: perhaps a movement to dissuade voting unless the candidates commit to effective political reform and the end to corruption. "Don't vote, it only encourages them."
The appropriate target is finance. The government matters little. Those working in the government take their directions from those in finance, insurance, the military gravy train, big pharma, and the like. The government has the instruments of power, but no power. Power belongs to money in the present system, and the appropriate target is where the power is.
No, the problem has always been the government. A republic must be governed by people who love the truth and find the courage to live with integrity. Government has authorized The FDIC, the Federal Reserve, the World Bank, Freddie and Fannie, and the list goes on. Now we rescue Obama's favorite bankers (Goldman Sachs) and populate the government with Geitner and other tax cheats. TARP allows these folks to take home the million dollar bonuses, while we tax our grandchildren.
Obviously, government cannot control these agencies. So what is the progressive answer: CREATE MORE AGENCIES of course.
Free Enterprise (i.e. capitalism), will never, never, never go away. The human nature is too creative and evil to ever be fully controlled by govenment.
The founding fathers understood full well the nature of totalitarian government. Checks and balances that will stimulate competition is the only human way of turning the greed on itself and creating options for the poor.
Characterizing bankers as villains for political rhetoric is not any more honest than what some of the bankers are doing.
This is a cheap political hit piece, and contains nothing honest or useful. The Wall-Street demonstration is populated by folks, who benefit from government grants, loans, assistance, medical care, and other taxpayer funded perks. You have met the enemy and it is you.
I hope that is the direction we are moving.
This is what we want:
.
http://www.gpln.com/whatwewant.htm
>>“The gap between what workers and top executives
make helps explain why income inequality in the
United States is reaching levels unseen since the
Great Depression.”<<
Translated: The gap explains the gap.
Sorry, but the gap doesn’t explain the gap. The fact
that wages have remained where they were 30 years ago
(or fallen) despite worker productivity having
increased dramatically goes a long way toward
explaining the gap, a fact which the WaPo, Scheer,
and other equally clueless pundits and corporate
media outlets seem obstinately oblivious to.
"Corporate America is intent on eliminating taxes on
all capital incomes. They do not care if record
budget deficits are the result. Many of their more
right-wing friends, including those in Congress,
actually want larger deficits. They see chronic,
record deficits as producing the budget crisis
necessary to use as an excuse to privatize Social
Security and dismantle what remains of the Roosevelt
New Deal programs of the 1930s.”
(Jack Rasmus)
“The principal power in Washington is no longer the
government or the people it represents. It is the
Money Power. Under the deceptive cloak of campaign
contributions, access and influence, votes and
amendments are bought and sold. Money establishes
priorities of action, holds down federal revenues,
revises federal legislation, shifts income from the
middle class to the very rich. Money restrains the
enforcement of laws written to protect the country
from abuses of wealth-laws that mandate environmental
protection, antitrust laws, laws to protect the
consumer against fraud, laws that safeguard the
securities markets, and many more.”
(Richard N. Goodwin, former speechwriter for John F.
Kennedy)
“The boys of capital, they ... chortle in their
martinis about the death of socialism. The word has
been banned from polite conversation. And they hope
that no one will notice that every socialist
experiment of any significance in the twentieth
century-without exception-has either been crushed,
overthrown, or invaded, or corrupted, perverted,
subverted, or destabilized, or otherwise had life
made impossible for it, by the United States. Not one
socialist government or movement-from the Russian
Revolution to the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, from
Communist China to the FMLN in [El] Salvador-not one
was permitted to rise or fall solely on its own
merits; not one was left secure enough to drop its
guard against the all-powerful enemy abroad and
freely and fully relax control at home.”
(William Blum)
“Political will is the ultimate determinant of
spending priorities. There’s always money available
for war and corporate bailouts; there’s rarely money
available for social programs.”
(Adolph L. Reed, Jr.)
“[The ruling elites] know who their enemies are, and
their enemies are the people, the people at home and
the people abroad. Their enemies are anybody who
wants more social justice, anybody who wants to use
the surplus value of society for social needs rather
than for individual class greed, that’s their enemy.”
(Michael Parenti)
FRT: Great post. I've sought to make similar points in this forum on previous occasions. You tied a great deal together. Thank you for taking the time to do so.
Thank you for saying so.
Respect.
Sioux Rose, Your posts on this issue have been excellent, vibrant and clear, "Let the Good Times Roll". "Occupy vs Protest" is much more profound. Now the opportunity exists to move from word to action, the train is coming!!!
What this tells me is that socialism is inevitable. The irrational aversion and fear on the part of capitalists shows their awareness that on a level playing field, their methods will be time and time again revealed not as 'better competition', or 'better gamesmanship', i.e. better products and services... but as 'better rule fixing', 'better reffing', 'better betting', i.e. monopolies, hollow profits, recessions, depressions, collapses.
Socialism may 'slow down the game', reduce 'advertising revenues', or end the crazy obsession with stronger, faster, harder, but it produces a better end result —for the people—. That is, if it doesn't succumb to the same pitfalls and dangers that capitalism is prone to succumb to: Authoritarianism, elitism, forced consent, loss of options, paranoia, indoctrination etc. etc.
At one point my cautionary attitude towards socialism was misconstrued as a denigration, but it was not. As I said, I believe a socialist future is inevitable. Government works either for high society, or all of society, but it is still only an instrument of social implementation — a socialist body.
I just hope that when it arises, it arises the way it should this time, (I am in favor of decentralized, ecologically and locally based models) otherwise all that we fight for now will just bring us back to an inevitable replay of the same, or perhaps even worse problems we are facing today.
Cheers... Great post!
Finally, someone is calling the spades spades. Wish there were more comments like this.
My list of demands for OWS.
Get rid of the Federal Reserve. Currency should serve the public interests not the private bankers.
Stop these insane wars.
Stop this insane war on terror.
End the Military Industrial Complex and the war profiteers.
End NATO.
Stop letting Israel write our foreign policy.
End the war on drugs. Drug abuse is a health problem. Treat it as such.
End government and corporate surveillance of the population. Restore our rights under the constitution.
Stop these insane trade deals like NAFTA, CAFTA, GATT etc.
End corporations. Return incorporations back to serving a public function and limit the time they can exist.
Impeach the Supreme Court Justices that serve corporate interests over public interest.
End corporate lobbying of politicians and government employees.
End political parties. Limit campaign times for elections. Mandate free campaign coverage by the media. We own the air waves. Give time off for election days. Every election should include rank voting.
Stop allowing off shoring of assets by the wealthy.
Stop off shoring of jobs. Any company that off shores should be taxed more than domestic companies when they try to import back into this country.
Stop intra corporate trade.
End commodity speculation. If the wealthy want to gamble, go to a casino.
End subsidies to corporate agriculture. End corporate agriculture period.
Re instate the progressive taxation system. Remove the cap on social security.
Guaranteed minimum income for all. No one should go homeless, without health care or food and heat.
Medicare for all.
Free education at any age. End corporate controll over the education system from elementary to higher education.
End the Prison Industrial Complex.
End corporate control of the telephone system including the internet, cellular system, and the media system (radio and television and print).
Stop nuclear and coal power. Give ample resources to develop publicly owned green power systems. Nuclear and coal is not green.
End limits of liability to companies that harm the environment. Make them responsible for the damage done. You fuck up the gulf. You fix it.
A small list but a good start. Remember if we control our currency rather than the private banks we could do all of the above and more. Feel free to add.
U sum sort of communust, or sometin?
Great list ! Every single point right on target. But sadly the stupidly greedy sociopaths (the 1%) currently running this country & planet into the toilet will blow the planet up b4 allowing anything of the above list come to pass. Greedy bastards.
What will you replace the Federal reserve with? A sovereign country can't have a currency without a central bank of some sort.
Why?
"It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning."
-Henry Ford
The US has had, in its history, colonial banks, State Banks and central banks under the control of the Congress, as the US Constitution stipulates. There was the Bank of North America, the First Bank of the United States, and the Second Bank of the United States. The US Treasury has also acted as a Central Bank at other times in our history, issuing US Treasury Notes. The Federal Reserve is a private, un-Constitutional organization. You would do well to go beyond what little you were taught in school about these things, and you will find that one of the primary, if not THE primary reason for the colonialists' desire for independence from Great Britain was to get out from under the Bank of England, another private central bank.
The FED was a creation of private, for-profit bankers (see the book "The Creature From Jekyll Island") in an effort to bring to the US the kind of control the Bank of England had over Great Britain ("Give me control of a nation's money and I care not who makes her laws." - Mayer Amschel Rothschild). It was created in the wake of a manufactured crisis and panic, and was brought forward with the (false) assurance that it would put an end to inflation and depressions, and compensate for the periodic (and largely manufactured) boom-and-bust cycles. Even a cursory look at the economic history of the US since the Federal Reserve Act was pushed through (as it was, when most of Congress had left for the Christmas recess) will show that we have had several boom-and-bust cycles, with plenty of bank failures along the way. A Central Bank under private control is a danger to the Nation, as Thomas Jefferson warned ("I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies.").
A good list. However, to accomplish those goals we would have to replace capitalism. Corporations are playing by the rules of the game and if one puts on the blinkers of a capitalist firm, then one must admit they are doing a good job of accumulating profit. The fact that the interests of corporate America and the working people are now at odds is incidental to boardroom discussions. Only if the government were to take over control of large corporations and their corporate money and start rebuilding factories in the United States might we start getting somewhere. Likewise for most of the goals you outline, the goal is antithetical to capitalism -- particularly crony capitalism where the polticians are in on the game. So we need radical political reform.
Ultimately, we need an alternative to right wing politcs in the U.S. That is not the Democratic Party, which even at the best of times is only centrist -- we need a socialist party, or a labor party, or a communist party -- or whatever one wants to name it, as long as it has the interests of the working people and the common good central to its values.
Malcolm:
You've nailed it: "...replace capitalism". Not many in the media are prepared to state that clearly, although Harold Meyerson at WaPo has talked about 'stake holder capitalism'.
However, as you imply, that will be a long haul. The starting point is to gut the power of Wall Street and all other such streets. Until that happens, there will be no fundamental change to the system.
Hello Malcolm Smith,
No they are not playing by the rules. They have skewed the rules so that "heads they win, tails we loose". The solution is a combined attack on both the political and financial fronts simultaneously.
Consider the quoted CEO's question: " ... how much we should be
worried about all this?"
How much should "they" be worried? Consider what "they" have done.
Consider one category of wrongs cited by Scheer: " ... legalizing the
securitization of homes," [really, securitizing home loans]. By how much
did, e.g., a $100,000 mortgage loan on a residence get leveraged in
the selling, buying and securitization of a bundle of such loans? Was
it five-to-one, or ten-to-one, or more? [Effectively creating "paper wealth"
as the result of the processes of financing]. None of that paper wealth
was of any substance in terms of ACTUAL assets. Consider now the
situation in which the interest payments due on the variable rate mortgage
loans were, e.g., doubled, and the former homeowners defaulted. What
then was real about the "securities" that had been created? At a leverage
of ten-to-one, the original $100,000 mortgage loan was made to have the
appearance of $1,000,000 of wealth. When the mortgage loan came into
default and the home was foreclosed, the investors had no more than the
original $100,000 to claim. That left $900,000 not secured in any way.
[Those who created this scheme SAID they'd purchased insurance
policies against "credit default" from insurance corporations, e.g., AIG.]
However in 2008, the insurance corporations were overwhelmed by
many claims, and were essentially broke. In the example I've pressented
the $900,000 still was unsecured: pure loss to those entities that had
"invested" that amount.
I'd say the level of worry -- of those who authorized and perpetrated such
deceptive dealing -- SHOULD be severe.
Of course, they have the excuse that it was all legal; the people in power
in Washington DC authorized it. AND SO IT GOES.
My little description, as above, is of course only a portion of the deception
that has been -- and I reckon still is -- being practiced. What about the
wars in Iraq and Afganistan? How much money was awarded, in excess
of true value of services provided, and paid to holders of no-bid contracts?
It has been said that Occupy Wall Street doesn't present demands, and
that it should. If the old rules [say, pre-1998] had not been discarded in
deregulation, I'd say that one good demand would be that some of those
who perpetrated fraud should go to jail. As it is now, I reckon that the
people will have to be content with voting out of office those who protected
fraud by way of deregulation.
The responsibility for the damage done by the few to the millions can be spread widely. Legal action against a few of the few is underway. What they hoped to do turned out badly for them and for millions around the world. Did they do anything illegal? Only the legal outcomes will tell.
In the meantime, plenty of people are hurting. What is the status of common sense actions that are offered to redress their grievances (see recent articles in 'The Nation')? The economic losses suffered by the many need to be shifted to those who perpetrated the crisis. Who will act to make this happen? If the OWS movement can raise the pressure, someone somewhere (the Congress perhaps!!) will be made to act on behalf of the many whose financial lives are in ruin.
MODERATUS: You're pretty cavalier about this idea of what is LEGAL. Let's visit that point, shall we?
The U.S. set up false pretexts for war, thus violating the Geneva Conventions given that war of aggression is recognized as THE supreme crime against humanity. It violated international law, thus its acts of aggression WERE illegal, but who is in a position to enforce the law?
The idea of using words to turn torture into enthusiatic methods of interrogation is another instance where what is taken for law or legal, in fact is not.
Last night I watched the film, "A Time To Kill" where a Black citizen guns down the two white hustlers who raped his daughter. The states' attorney wanted the crime tried in a community that would ensure a 100% Caucasian jury. Thus the idea of being "Tried by a jury of one's peers" becomes arguable. Is any jury composition the substantial equivalent of the law?
There was a time when slavery was legal. A time when women could not leave their own homes without the permission of their fathers or husbands. A time when any given minority was treated with massive abuse. All of this was construed as legal.
Law is malleable, and too often reflects the whims and imperfections of human beings positioned to interpret it. There IS a higher law; and in my view, when any society departs drastically from Universal Law (represented by that which has been taught by many Masters), it incurs karma's boomerang. It also ceases to function in any truly lawful manner; and the U.S. as terrorist to the world qualifies.
Given that the U.S. is actively engaged in massive ecocide, that its whorish leaders and deep pocket lobbyists are vying to build that Keystone Pipeline when climate scientists have gone on record to state that it will mean "game over" for humanity, is clear indication of a crime against humanity. That some congress people will render this type of decision "legal" has NOTHING to do with Law in any meaningful sense. Just as the Prez arrogating to himsef the "007" license to kill (or send armed gun-men onto missions of assassination) is against the law... words used to make this latest bit of totalitarian hell appear "lawful" do not qualify as the Real Thing.
Absolutely spot on!
"We live in a nation hated abroad and frightened at home. A place in which we can reasonably refer to the American Republic in the past tense. A country that has moved into a post-constitutional era, no longer a nation of laws but an autotocracy run by law breakers, law evaders and law ignorers. A nation governed by a culture of impunity ... a culture in which corruption is no longer a form of deviance but the norm. We all live in a Mafia neighborhood now."
(Sam Smith)
Perhaps my moniker prohibits the drip of sarcasm in my comments from being clearly heard. I'll try to be clearer next time.
I don't want to be angry because anger destroys the one who is angry more often than those who are the cause of the anger.
I also don't like violence. In another time and place, I fled from the violent track the anti-war movement took, the fires that burned in the ghettos across the country, the assassinations of those to whom we looked to with hope for a better tomorrow.
Maybe now the time has come where anger and violence are required to destroy a system which has been twisted beyond recognition.
I want to believe that the advances made by progressives in the 20th century can be salvaged, reinstalled, and advanced within the system if the people so move.
Also, I do agree with you that our government has done many things in the last decade that are "lawfully" awful.
ONE THING the OWS movement is highlighting very clearly is the fact that the vast majority of commentators in the Main Stream ME-dia do not, in fact, possess the faintest sense of social justice
"It was the Wall Street lobbyists, with the complicity of Democrats and Republicans in Congress, who caused the Great Recession by destroying a sensible regulatory system" And the idiot American people has elected and continues to re-elect the corporate shills in Congress.
"We have met the enemy, and it is us." Po Go
This analogy should help you to recognize an important flaw in your argument. If you were (or happen to be) a healthy male with a normal libido and you were locked in a room with two women, neither of which you were particularly attracted to, over time, you just might succumb to nature and indulge in what the Latins call "chinga." In my view, that's a fair analogy of US elections. For they hold up to us two characters, and essentially lock us into rules that demand we vote for either.
There are some attempts at 3rd parties... and these are generally locked out of the process, their candidates kept off media, restrained from entering the Republican or Democratic national conventions, belittled by the "experts" and their media echo chamber. All to manufacture consent, or as Alan MacDonald puts it, offer the citizenry up a Vichy election.
So... you could go celibate, which by analogy would be the equivalent of not voting,... lest you screw around with #1 or #2. NEITHER having been chosen or preferred by you...
I am tired of some in the forum blaming voters when what's offered up for the great presidential "Miss America" style vote contest. After all, it's the political equivalent of Grand larceny.
New and clever analogy.
New and clever indeed but that is our Siouxrose.....
Thank you Sioux..
Thomas Gilbert-
You found the only reason to vote for Elizabeth Warren.
A Tea Party gathering of 25 will be addressed and encouraged by 50 Republicans.
Occupy Wall Street has been addressed by how many Democrats? Zero.
"... since the 1970s, the pay of non-supervisory workers has declined by more than 10 percent."
Well, if the Democrats had had control of congress anytime over the last four decades this would not have happened. Democrats are the party of the workers!
The Death Penalty needs to be applied without exception for financial crimes. Confiscation of assets must be mandatory and trying to pass illgotten gains to family must be prevented and these families must suffer. So sorry but it seems to me that the assets of lesser mortals have these terms applied to them.
I look at Barbara Bush, George Jr. Bush, Paris Hilton, Etc. and I see sociopaths and strange stupid people. They are not superior. They must be relegated to the norms of society and not treated special. Enough is enough.
Was thinking the other day that the transgressions of the wealthy sometimes draw a fine. But the problem with that is that the wealthy are willing to pay the paltry fines when they are making a killing doing that for which they are fined. The solution to that is to make the fine NOT a certain amount, but to make it a percentage (like 95%) of the offender's gross value! :)
Whaddaya think?
MEL
Errata--- 46.2 million live in poverty not 46.2 percent. If it were 46.2% Wall St would not be ocuppied it would be burnt.
Still good article.
They can make some arrests to pacify the masses but it won't matter. The only citizen in America that is protected by the Constitution is the young man that the Supreme Court gave birth to. The Constitution will be his to use as he sees. He will become "the good German" for globalization.
Hoa binh
The logic of Occupy is this:
In the 1980s, there were protests against the nuclear defense policies of the Reagan Administration. These were among the largest protests ever amassed in Washington and they succeeded in closing down the Pentagon temporarily. Asked about this inconvenience, Defense Secretary Casper Weinberger said that today the protestors were obstructing the defense establishment, but tomorrow those protestors would be gone and he could get back to his desk.
This then is the weakness of protesting -- and the strength of Occupy. It needs persistence and commitment for this strategy to work.
This is truly about power and greed. Corporations were bailed out because of the power they exercised due to the greed of the electorate. Simple economic justice decreed that irresponsible corporations must meet the market test or fail but the electorate through their representatives would not hear of it. Corporations were obviously too big to fail if that failure would dispense justice to the real power in a democracy: the greedy electorate. And I doubt that many politicians will lose office due to honoring the wishes of the source of all power: their constituents.
Here's one narrow but significant element of the justice we are seeking: Those of us who design/build things actually care about the value of those things to the society. More "bang for the buck", the better. Imagine a contest where the blue ribbon is rewarded to the product that does the most while CONSUMING THE LEAST. This is a normal human tendency. Humans with healthy minds/spirits pursue such an agenda. Everything's great, everything makes sense, everything works here. We even have standards bodies to lay out technical standards so the blue ribbon ideas can prevail. Because it's common sense. Everyone agrees. Everything's kosher.
Until das kapitalism arrives in town. The USA is the world's hotspot for das kapitalist extremism. In the USA, standards bodies are treated with contempt. In the USA, common sense is treated with contempt. Take for example the internet. It is built on standards. These standards are not private property. They are public property. This is why kapitalist extremists hate them. They depend on them, but they hate them all the same. The standards were implemented without and despite das kapitalist lovepuppy Micro$oft. Ask any web developer what the bane of web development is: Micro$oft Internet Explorrer. Because it defies the technical standards. Because das kapitalist extremist profit imperative requires that Micro$soft diabolically exploit the property lawz and attempt to displace the public standard with a private, 'proprietary' standard. Das kapitalist imperative is to inject massive chaos into the web-building community for the sake of 'profitz', control, domination.
Another example is the Vontage voip telephone. People are attracted to voip because it promises communication with less hardware, and less expense. Das kapitalist extremism in the USA hatches ideas not to deliver the promise, but to exploit the promise for profit. Vontage twists the promise of less hardware into... you guessed it - MORE hardware. And Vontage twists the promise of less expense into... you guessed it - MORE expense. It's puzzling how Merkans accept this, but they do. It's the same as Merkans accepting 2.5x greater healthcare bills over what other pay. Take a look and you'll see that das kapital is exhibiting mind-boggling stupidity in most Merkan industrial/service sectors. 3/4 of Merkan production deserves to be shuttered, and its proponents in Washing-town deserve to be dumped in the Potomac, because their agenda is fundamentally stupid/evil. Das kapitalism CAN work for the people, but only with strict limits on asset ownership and enterprise size, at something like ten man-powers. In other words, crammed into a small cage (1). This is just the way it is. This is the path to economic/social justice. The truth will set you free. Study human nature and enjoy the learning experience.
(1) Even the least dysfunctional industrial societies can benefit from the caging of das kapital. Take for example Germany, one of the least dysfunctional industrial societies. It's wildly dysfunctional, actually. Germany exports mind-boggling volumes of stuff, albeit higher quality stuff. But quality does not forgive the 'externalized' costs - the resource plunder behind it, the wage-slavery of German workers, the lost opportunities for small local enterprises worldwide, etc, etc, etc.
If corporations are people, people have the right to claim they are corporations which means, in the case of any and all crimes committed, only token fines so as not to harm their long term future, no imprisonment, and certainly no death sentences no matter how grizzly the murder(s) committed
36 comments, plus the article, and not one word yet in whispering the word 'empire'.
Best luck,
Alan
Liberty & democracy
over
violent/Vichy
empire
Let's not talk about the anti-war libertarian right not being smart.
They have the brains to finger 'the Empire' as the seminal causal cancer behind all the 'symptom problems' and 'identity issues', while the progressive left is still only arguing about which 'identity issue' should be their primary goal/"Demand".
http://www.fff.org/blog/jghblog2011-10-04.asp
Someone may be missing the boat, eh
Best luck,
Alan MacDonald
Liberty & democracy
over
violent/Vichy
empire
Everyones' debts should be canceled. And everyone with more than a billion in personal wealth be required to give the overage back to the state where it would be distributed to the people who actually did the work to make all the billions and use it for "free" education, health care, sewage treatment and water systems and decent public housing...and hot lunches in every school and.....free transit!!!!!!!! ;)
TODAY'S " VICTIMS"
I have considerable difficulty seeing these squirming twentiesh (white) girls
in bare midriff (what did that cost?) or the lovely young woman, top being
ripped down, (she is quite attractive and perhaps will find more appropriate
employment as..a.model for an all-white slick magazine some day) as
VICTIMS
I tend to harbor serious doubts that these poor folk would spend an
hour researching our economic political system.
I wonder how "victimized" they really are.
Do they go to college? Where? Are they planning a wild trip to Cancun
with their partners when the revolutionary "fun" has ended?
Or is it left-leaning pundits and politicians who need these kids as a front
for actions they themselves would never take? Would these liberals/
progressives encourage these young "revolutionaries" to withdraw from
the two-party sytem?
In 2008 similar "victimized" youth waited in long lines to hear their savior,
Barack Obama. "This is your defining moment!" he shouted. Of course THOSE
youth aren't the same as these ones. The victimized youth of 2008 have
moved on . Perhaps they are working by now if they have been
fortunate.
And what of the results? How exactly do these "victimized youth" see
the "revolutionary" changes in our banking system? In our financial
system domestic and global?
But more than the "victimized youth", I perceive a cynicism among liberals
and progressives who will continue supporting Zionist ethnic cleansing in
Palestine, who will continue to say little about the President's
new trade agreement (trans-pacific, this time) which will continue
to increase profits for trans national corporations, terror,death and
oppression in foreign nations.
By that time, these "victimized youth" will no longer be either victimized
nor youth.
I don't think I will be going out on a limb to predict that the trans national
corporations, the banks and financial organizations will survive quite
well as they have for decades.
......And accountability. It is time for our Versailles to go.
Sioux rose
If that last post was an attempt to excuse " Lesser Of Two Evils" voters , could you please expand on any justification for it other than they can only vote for what's offered to them.
perhaps the best opinions...
aren’t those directed solely at others...
as if viewpoints are mainly reserved for spectators...
filling the stands and telling protestors how to go about things...
but rather determinations steered head-on at our own selves instead...
showing each of us the hypocrisy of what we’re doing...
when we’re not really doing anything!...
http://citizenvoices.us