Tea Party protesters are civil, bathed and decent.
POSTED BY: AURaptor
UPDATED: Sunday, April 26, 2009 16:18
VIEWED: 14086
PAGE 14 of 16
Except Blue Sun Company Man beat me to explaining it first. 
But good thread, people. I admire the tea party movement and the meaning behind it, and I wish we could figure out some way to take it back from the corporations and government.
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Give it ten days.
-F
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Quote:I think government debt is categorically different, but because of that it might follow different rules.
You are trying to compare apples and oranges. The debt of the government is the supreme debt. There is no power higher to rely upon when a failure occurs. This is macroeconomics at it's most fundemental.
Quote:And what about the fact that health insurance companies are bleeding us and the rest of the economy dry, and actually killing peeps while they're at it? You're only addressing government because it's EASY. It's MEANT to be responsive to the people... it's a democracy for chrissake!
The point is that the governments debt belongs to We The People. That's why the tea parties were held.
TEA PARTIES?? Cute, but shooting yourself in the foot. The REAL targets for change are far harder. They leave you NO ROOM to disagree or escape. When I see a demonstration against AIG, Blue Cross, GM, or Shitibank, THEN we'll have gotten somewhere!
more later
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It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine.
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I think issues of health care, education, you know, the social programs based on compassion... I think that they won't be fixed until the power of decision making and sovereignty is returned to a local level. Once you have the community working right, THEN you can start trying to work on coalitions at a larger level.
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"I think issues of health care, education, you know, the social programs based on compassion... I think that they won't be fixed until the power of decision making and sovereignty is returned to a local level."
Maybe not even then. In looking up the value of 'charities' v government programs, I found an interesting statistic - voluntary charities would have to increase over 10X their current level to provide the same benefits as government programs. Furthermore, people tend to donate locally, which means that wealthy communities would have generous funding for people who are relatively well off, while poorer communities would have meager resources for those who really need them.
What would be the result of such a system ? Britain was there, did that. Did we learn nothing ? Did we not learn that a system DESIGNED to make some people extremely rich at the expense of the many will inevitably generate masses of the poor, who can neither help each other, nor who will be helped by the rich ?
Would this example be more telling ?
Quote:
Published on Wednesday, April 15, 2009 by the Belfast Telegraph (UK)
1,500 Farmers Commit Mass Suicide in India
Over 1,500 farmers in an Indian state committed suicide after being driven to debt by crop failure, it was reported today.
The agricultural state of Chattisgarh was hit by falling water levels.
"The water level has gone down below 250 feet here. It used to be at 40 feet a few years ago," Shatrughan Sahu, a villager in one of the districts, told Down To Earth magazine
"Most of the farmers here are indebted and only God can save the ones who do not have a bore well."
Mr Sahu lives in a district that recorded 206 farmer suicides last year. Police records for the district add that many deaths occur due to debt and economic distress.
BTW - for those who really are in love with the current system - wait till China really gets going. If you never wondered what life was like when someone else was running the place for THEIR benefit at YOUR expense, you will have a wonderful opportunity to find out.
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Silence is consent.
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To get back to tea parties and taxes....
Taxes are NOT our biggest problem. It's how those taxes were used: to make the world safe for capitalism, so we could get screwed down to the lowest wage possible. To bail out the mega- wealthy. To prop up monopolies and gigantic profits everywhere. To turn everyone into slaves, who look up and only dimly perceive that "the system" which benefits 0.00001% of the population is an artificial construct, a CHOICE, not a force of nature!
The answer isn't to get rid of taxes. The answer is to take back YOUR government, because government is the only entity large enough to take on the even bigger entities.
Do you think that by bringing the house down around yourself that you'll reset the game and go back to a state of equality, so we can all start over again? If you want to see a great example of how that worked, one which was already pointed out, look at Russia: Their government's collapse didn't equalize wealth or create freedom. While most peeps economically failed (even tho they were distilling vodka on their own!) and died young, SOME peeps got very very rich. If you think you're going to achieve freedom by creating a failed state, dropping down to the primitive level of distilling vodka in your back yard, or getting rid of the one entity that can take on the OTHER big oppressor... then you've just been beaten. You've let the real PTB go on their merry way- skating lightly over the sea of misery that they created, using their unimaginable (and yes, I mean unimaginable,.. most peeps can't even IMAGINE that level of wealth) to pluck from the miserable world all the fruits which their wealth entitles them.
Is THAT the future you aspire to?
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It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine.
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Quote:During his presidency, Teddy Roosevelt stated that he wanted the United States to become the primary world power in the 20th Century. To that end he oversaw an expansion of our navy to levels we'd never seen before. Before he left office he ordered that the new battle fleet sail around the world as a show of strength. This event is now looked back upon by historians as america's "coming out" as they stepped onto the 1st world stage for the very first time. Soon afterwards the American Dollar replaced the Pound Stirling as the World's Reserve Currency.
Originally posted by rue:"for those who really are in love with the current system - wait till China really gets going.
We all witnessed a stunning display in China last August. The opening ceremonies for the 2008 summer games were astonishing to say the least. China was conveying two messages in the imagery. They nodded to their rich ancient history in the 1st part of the show before ending with a loud pronouncement of 21st century power in the latter half. Like Teddy Roosevelt, China was telling the world that they were now a 1st world power, and growing. The days of masses of lower class humanity riding bikes everywhere in the 2nd world city of Bejing were over.
When the US fleet sailed the world, the global English empire was in it's decline. Colonies in Africa were declaring independence. India was trending that way. (recall the british trying to hold on to India in Indiana Jones: The Temple of Doom) Slowly the English star was setting to be replaced by the American. Now we see a rising Chinese beacon taking it's place in the center of the world stage of debt ownership power. And what is their primary debt ownership? Why that would be US Treasuries! How strange that just one month after the opening ceremonies, the american banking crisis began. Sept 2008 will be regarded by historians, I think, as the beginning of the american decline. The crisis led to TARP, which led to bailouts, which led to stimilus packages year-after-year, which piled debt higher and higher in unsustainable fashions, until the dollar lost it's value as the World's Reserve currency. When america is finally in a position where the intrest alone on the debt will be more than the peoples ablility to pay in taxes, america's star will set. China, the owner of the debt, will be the worlds power.
Ancient hebrews knew what they were writting when they said in the Torah "The Borrower is Slave to the Lender". It's a human truth, as ugly as it is.
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The value of a currency depends on the productivity of the economy behind it, relative to other economies.
That's why American post-WWII debt didn't mean much: relative to the bombed-out husks of Europe, Japan, and Russia, and the underdeveloped state of China, the USA was the ONLY industrial power, and therefore the only currency which would buy ... well, anything. That's why national debt, by itself, doesn't mean much if your economy can make good on all that currency floating around.
NOT ALL DEBT IS CREATED EQUAL. If debt is used to increase productivity or reduce balance of trade deficits (for example, investing in wind turbines to reduce oil imports) it will not cause inflation. That is a legitimate reason for debt.
However, I would like you to think ahead on the whole drive to maximize productivity. You can only maximize productivity by automation or by driving wages down. If all nations strive to maximize productivity with a goal of making their currency No 1, they will have gone a long way to impoverishing their own populace. And for what? At this point, 70,000 people can make a million cars. One farmer can feed 100 people. What does everyone else do for a living? There is NO REAL NEED to improve productivity. We are well past the point of unending, backbreaking labor. Increased productivity is only beneficial to capitalists because it maximizes profit by minimizing costs. So, if an unending increase in productivity is not sustainable and should not be a goal in-and-of-itself, what is??? How do we stabilize our economic role in the world without turning into a third-world country?
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It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine.
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Quote:
Sept 2008 will be regarded by historians, I think, as the beginning of the american decline.
BSCM, I find myself in general agreement with most of your post above, but I have to take issue with this statement. Those would have to be VERY naive historians to believe such a thing. September 2008 might be seen by the great unwashed as the tipping point, but anyone with an inkling of understanding knew this was coming and saw the dominoes starting to lean, if not outright fall, at least two to three years prior to that date. And in reality, it was pretty self-evident immediately after 9/11, when the President told us as a nation that our patriotic duty was to "go shopping". Not to sacrifice, not to pitch in with rubber drives or victory gardens, but to go shopping - that was to be our role in the coming war. If nothing else ever shocked you or opened your eyes, that should have told you that we were feebly and futilely trying to hold up a house of (credit) cards with nothing more substantial than a wish, a hope, and a decent credit rating.
September 2008 wasn't when it started - it was when it could no longer be ignored!
But to digress for a moment, I also wanted to take this opportunity to say "thank you" for engaging in a REAL, SUBSTANTIVE discussion on these issues. You've resisted the name-calling, you've refused to get into the mode of "if you're not in 100% agreement with me, you must be in 100% opposition to me!" In short, you've proven yourself both a worthy adversary AND a worthwhile ally.
This is what Frem speaks of when he talks about using our differences to forge alliances.
Mike
Build a man a fire and he'll be warm for a day...
Set a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
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China's been undervaluing their own money for years, not only to attract US business manufacturing on the cheap, but also just waiting for the chance to take advantage when America's dollar really stumbles.
China setting their currency to its actual value, at the moment the US dollar is at it's lowest... China could very well cause that to become a point of no return. In the very least, America could become to China what economically Britain is now to America.
Maybe that's not such a bad thing, because the US as The Super Power and Morality Champion of the entire world gets a little pricey on the casualty side. On the other hand, China as The Super Power, with its human rights record... *shiver*
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