Simple Counterpoints for Simple Minds:
http://www.uspoliticsonline.com/economic-issues/54539-heres-great-quote-you-cannot-legislate-poor-into-prosperity.html
*You cannot legislate the poor into prosperity by legislating the wealthy out of prosperity".
You can, however, legislate the poor into prosperity by legislating the wealthy out of wretched excess. The wealthy have been legislating us out of prosperity since reagan was elected.
No, you can't. Listen to yourself. You really think you can systematically redistribute wealth as a policy and expect continued productivity from the "wealthy"?
I think that the idea that the wealthy are the source of productivity is a myth. I think you have no problem with redistribution of wealth as long as it happens upwards instead of downward, which is, frankly, disgusting.
*What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving.
We have been working our asses off so corporate welfare cheats like helliburton can receive while doing as little as possible to earn.
*The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else.
See may last response. The politicians take out loans with our future earnings as collateral. You and I and many generations to come will pay back the principle and interest of the loans that our politicians took out to buy weapons and support services to fight wars on behalf of compound interest and natural resources.
*When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that my dear friend, is the beginning of the end of any nation.
1% control most of the wealth. They acquired it through very subtle methods of thievery that you idiots do not recognize; War for profit, tort reform (lawsuit abuse is not at crisis levels. Though common in retail it is virtually non-existent in manufacturing, refining and natural resource extraction.), union busting, subsidies for large companies that don't need them. There are probably millions of other ways. I will add them as they come to mind or are discovered.
*You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it.
Multiplication is not the objective. You republicans think that to "work" something has to turn a profit. FEMA, for example, works very well in providing assistance to those who have been victims of disasters but it doesn't turn a profit. It just redistributes wealth to those in need. A noble cause in my opinion. If you disagree then you go to hell.
Thursday, October 20, 2011
Monday, October 3, 2011
OpEdNews - Article: Free Marketers Going After Occupy Wall Street --Danny Schechter
OpEdNews - Article: Free Marketers Going After Occupy Wall Street --Danny Schechter
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Free-Marketers-Going-After-by-Danny-Schechter-111003-235.html
--The right wing puts words in the mouths of protesters:
"It's all Wall Street's fault. Government needs
to write the wrongs of capitalism."
--Then offers this condescending take on the situation:
"Despite their honest intentions, many of the Occupy Wall Street protesters are being suckered into a trap and calling for the very "solutions" that are part of the financial elite's agenda to torpedo the American middle class – higher taxes and more big government. – Prison Planet lede via Drudge Report.
--Now they admit that Wall Street is PART of the problem but that there is a hidden hand above them.
"Of course," The Daily Bell whines, "Wall Street is PART of the problem, but it's a much larger problem, and Wall Street is ultimately, for the most part, a transactional mechanism. The issues of failing Western regulatory democracies and their eroding money stuff cannot simply be laid at the feet of the securities business, no matter how powerful it seems. The real controllers are to be seen elsewhere.
In the past these controllers have been able to effectively disguise their presence and influence. They do it by misdirection and by using money power to blame the private sector for the depredations of the West's central banking economy. The mainstream media is extremely important to this effort ..."
--Accuse the Protesters of being "CONTROLLED OPPOSITION"
"Now Occupy Wall Street evidently and obviously a dialectical enterprise funded by these same elites (at least in part) is giving them a moment of hope... "
--Again they emphasize the HIDDEN HAND behind it
"It is not bankers who have immense power, but central bankers and their controllers, the elite Anglosphere families that run central banking and distribute its tens of trillions of "money created from nothing."
http://plunderthecrimeofourtime.com/
Noam Chomsky - Deterring Democracy: Parenti explains CLASS perfectly
Noam Chomsky - Deterring Democracy: Parenti explains CLASS perfectly
Read more: http://chomsky-must-read.blogspot.com/2011/10/parenti-explains-class-perfectly.html#ixzz1ZjqK9yeS
MONDAY, OCTOBER 3, 2011
Parenti explains CLASS perfectly
Class Warfare Indeed
By Michael Parenti Monday, October 03, 2011
Over the last two decades or more, Republicans have been denouncing as "class warfare" any attempt at criticizing and restraining their mean one-sided system of capitalist financial expropriation.
The moneyed class in this country has been doing class warfare on our heads and on those who came before us for more than two centuries. But when we point that out, when we use terms like class warfare, class conflict, and class struggle to describe the system of exploitation we live under—our indictments are dismissed out of hand and denounced as Marxist ideological ranting, foul and divisive.
Amanda Gilson put it perfectly in a posting on my Facebook page: "[T]he concept of 'class warfare' has been hi-jacked by the wrong class (the ruling class). The wealthy have been waging war silently and inconspicuously against the middle and the poor classes for decades! Now that the middle and poor classes have begun to fight back, it is like, the rich want to try to call foul---the game was fine when they were the only ones playing it."
The reactionary rich always denied that they themselves were involved in class warfare. Indeed, they insisted no such thing existed in our harmonious prosperous society. Those of us who kept talking about the realities of class inequality and class exploitation were readily denounced. Such concepts were not tolerated and were readily dismissed as ideologically inspired.
In fact, class itself is something of a verboten word. In the mainstream media, in political life, and in academia, the use of the term "class" has long been frowned upon. You make your listeners uneasy ("Is the speaker a Marxist?"). If you talk about class exploitation and class inequity, you will likely not get far in your journalism career or in political life or in academia (especially in fields like political science and economics).
So instead of working class, we hear of "working families" or "blue collar" and "white collar employees". Instead of lower class we hear of "inner city poor" and "low-income elderly." Instead of the capitalist owning class, we hear of the "more affluent" or the "upper quintile." Don't take my word for it, just listen to any Obama speech. (Often Obama settles for an even more cozy and muted term: folks, as in "Folks are strugglin' along.")
"Class" is used with impunity and approval only when it has that magic neutralizing adjective "middle" attached to it. The middle class is an acceptable mainstream concept because it usually does not sharpen our sense of class struggle; it dilutes and muffles critical consciousness. If everyone in America is middle class (except for a few superrich and a minor stratum of very poor), there is little room for any awareness of class conflict.
That may be changing with the Great Recession and the sharp decline of the middle class (and decline of the more solvent elements of the working class). The concept of middle class no longer serves as a neutralizer when it itself becomes an undeniable victim.
"Class" is also allowed to be used with limited application when it is part of the holy trinity of race, gender, and class. Used in that way, it is reduced to a demographic trait related to life style, education level, and income level. In forty years of what was called "identity politics" and "culture wars," class as a concept was reduced to something of secondary importance. All sorts of "leftists" told us how we needed to think anew, how we had to realize that class was not as important as race or gender or culture.
I was one of those who thought these various concepts should not be treated as being mutually exclusive of each other. In fact, they are interactive. Thus racism and sexism have always proved functional for class oppression. Furthermore, I pointed out (and continue to point out), that in the social sciences and among those who see class as just another component of "identity politics," the concept of class is treated as nothing more than a set of demographic traits. But there is another definition of class that has been overlooked.
Class should also be seen as a social relationship relating to wealth and social power, involving a conflict of material interests between those who own and those who work for those who own. Without benefit of reason or research, this latter usage of class is often dismissed out of hand as "Marxist." The narrow reductionist mainstream view of class keeps us from seeing the extent of economic inequality and the severity of class exploitation in society, allowing many researchers and political commentators to mistakenly assume that U.S. society has no deep class divisions or class conflicts of interest.
We should think of class not primarily as a demographic trait but as a relationship to the means of production, as a relationship to power and wealth. Class as in slaveholder and slave, lord and serf, capitalist and worker. Class as in class conflict and class warfare.
And who knows, once we learn to talk about the realities of class power, we are on our way to talking critically about capitalism, another verboten word in the public realm. And once we start a critical discourse about capitalism, we will be vastly better prepared to act against it and defend our own democratic and communal interests.
Michael Parenti is an internationally known, award winning author and scholar. Included among his recent books are The Face of Imperialism (2011), Democracy for the Few 9th ed. (2011), and God and His Demons (2009).
By Michael Parenti Monday, October 03, 2011
Over the last two decades or more, Republicans have been denouncing as "class warfare" any attempt at criticizing and restraining their mean one-sided system of capitalist financial expropriation.
The moneyed class in this country has been doing class warfare on our heads and on those who came before us for more than two centuries. But when we point that out, when we use terms like class warfare, class conflict, and class struggle to describe the system of exploitation we live under—our indictments are dismissed out of hand and denounced as Marxist ideological ranting, foul and divisive.
Amanda Gilson put it perfectly in a posting on my Facebook page: "[T]he concept of 'class warfare' has been hi-jacked by the wrong class (the ruling class). The wealthy have been waging war silently and inconspicuously against the middle and the poor classes for decades! Now that the middle and poor classes have begun to fight back, it is like, the rich want to try to call foul---the game was fine when they were the only ones playing it."
The reactionary rich always denied that they themselves were involved in class warfare. Indeed, they insisted no such thing existed in our harmonious prosperous society. Those of us who kept talking about the realities of class inequality and class exploitation were readily denounced. Such concepts were not tolerated and were readily dismissed as ideologically inspired.
In fact, class itself is something of a verboten word. In the mainstream media, in political life, and in academia, the use of the term "class" has long been frowned upon. You make your listeners uneasy ("Is the speaker a Marxist?"). If you talk about class exploitation and class inequity, you will likely not get far in your journalism career or in political life or in academia (especially in fields like political science and economics).
So instead of working class, we hear of "working families" or "blue collar" and "white collar employees". Instead of lower class we hear of "inner city poor" and "low-income elderly." Instead of the capitalist owning class, we hear of the "more affluent" or the "upper quintile." Don't take my word for it, just listen to any Obama speech. (Often Obama settles for an even more cozy and muted term: folks, as in "Folks are strugglin' along.")
"Class" is used with impunity and approval only when it has that magic neutralizing adjective "middle" attached to it. The middle class is an acceptable mainstream concept because it usually does not sharpen our sense of class struggle; it dilutes and muffles critical consciousness. If everyone in America is middle class (except for a few superrich and a minor stratum of very poor), there is little room for any awareness of class conflict.
That may be changing with the Great Recession and the sharp decline of the middle class (and decline of the more solvent elements of the working class). The concept of middle class no longer serves as a neutralizer when it itself becomes an undeniable victim.
"Class" is also allowed to be used with limited application when it is part of the holy trinity of race, gender, and class. Used in that way, it is reduced to a demographic trait related to life style, education level, and income level. In forty years of what was called "identity politics" and "culture wars," class as a concept was reduced to something of secondary importance. All sorts of "leftists" told us how we needed to think anew, how we had to realize that class was not as important as race or gender or culture.
I was one of those who thought these various concepts should not be treated as being mutually exclusive of each other. In fact, they are interactive. Thus racism and sexism have always proved functional for class oppression. Furthermore, I pointed out (and continue to point out), that in the social sciences and among those who see class as just another component of "identity politics," the concept of class is treated as nothing more than a set of demographic traits. But there is another definition of class that has been overlooked.
Class should also be seen as a social relationship relating to wealth and social power, involving a conflict of material interests between those who own and those who work for those who own. Without benefit of reason or research, this latter usage of class is often dismissed out of hand as "Marxist." The narrow reductionist mainstream view of class keeps us from seeing the extent of economic inequality and the severity of class exploitation in society, allowing many researchers and political commentators to mistakenly assume that U.S. society has no deep class divisions or class conflicts of interest.
We should think of class not primarily as a demographic trait but as a relationship to the means of production, as a relationship to power and wealth. Class as in slaveholder and slave, lord and serf, capitalist and worker. Class as in class conflict and class warfare.
And who knows, once we learn to talk about the realities of class power, we are on our way to talking critically about capitalism, another verboten word in the public realm. And once we start a critical discourse about capitalism, we will be vastly better prepared to act against it and defend our own democratic and communal interests.
Michael Parenti is an internationally known, award winning author and scholar. Included among his recent books are The Face of Imperialism (2011), Democracy for the Few 9th ed. (2011), and God and His Demons (2009).
Read more: http://chomsky-must-read.blogspot.com/2011/10/parenti-explains-class-perfectly.html#ixzz1ZjqK9yeS
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