"Whatever the Issue, the Rich Guys Win"

[georgephillip]

What's wrong with being broke? I've been there and back several times.

I climbed out of that shit without government.

I don't need anyone standing up for me.

And now? I donate to food pantries, homeless shelters, even St. Jude's Children's Hospital.

And if tomorrow I'm once again broke, I could care less. Nothing scares me, nothing impresses me.

Money and power? You can have it.

If you were the victim of a mugging or car jacking would you call on government?

Goldman Sachs is a much bigger threat to your health and future.

My brother was beaten to within an inch of his life by an N-gentleman. Why? He cut off his pedestrian homies in traffic. My brother subseqently pulled up his socks and moved on.
Simple as that.
What's with the Goldman Sachs shit anyway. You are so fucking far removed from reality it's pathetic.

Had your brother been beaten one inch further, would you have brushed it off or called on government?

 

[Revere]

If you were the victim of a mugging or car jacking would you call on government?

Goldman Sachs is a much bigger threat to your health and future.

My brother was beaten to within an inch of his life by an N-gentleman. Why? He cut off his pedestrian homies in traffic. My brother subseqently pulled up his socks and moved on.
Simple as that.
What's with the Goldman Sachs shit anyway. You are so fucking far removed from reality it's pathetic.

Had your brother been beaten one inch further, would you have brushed it off or called on government?

What would government do? The damage was already done.

 

[Revere]

Government probably let the perp back on the street over and over and over again after similar crimes.

 

[Revere]

Goldman isn't a "threat."

When they destroy your currency, they are a threat. When they destroy your economy, they are a threat. When they own your government, they are a threat. When they have supplanted your military, they are a threat.

Guns and butter.

Barack Obama and the Fed are destroying the currency by printing by the hundreds of billions it and loaning it interest free to banks to create the appearance of a recovery.

Obama rescued some Wall Street firms, and let others fail. He let some auto dealers fail. He let American companies that sell and service oil equipment fail. He has said he intends to let the coal energy industry fail.

So it's not about Wall Street. It's about government.

 

[Mr. H.]

Dreadful prospects my ass. I'm a capitalist and I could be a pauper tomorrow because of it. No risk, no balls, no glory. Take the shit that's heaped upon you, brush it off, and move on.

Goddamn bunch of pussy have-nots.

If your solution to the shit being heaped on you is to take it, you're the pussy.

And what's your solution? To post some idiotic blathering on a message board? Profess a tangential hypothesis by pointing your shit-stained finger at an entity that may or may not be responsible for society's ills in some small fashion?

You're grabbing at make-believe straws. Go out and do some work and better yourself and your family instead of sitting behind a keyboard playing armchair patriarch to the masses.

 

[georgephillip]

Goldman isn't a "threat."

When they destroy your currency, they are a threat. When they destroy your economy, they are a threat. When they own your government, they are a threat. When they have supplanted your military, they are a threat.

Guns and butter.

The combination of big government and big business is destroying the US currency and economy. Those at the very top of our economic food chain are taking the money they save in taxes and investing it outside the US.

Eventually the Federal Reserve will fully monetize the US debt, possibly turning every $10 bill in the land into a $5.

Or worse.

Private defense contractors are busy privatizing all support functions of the US military, and will probably serve in the US State Department's occupation of Iraq, for starters.

It's hard to see how voting for a Republican OR a Democrat changes any of this since both parties are wholly owned subsidiaries of the Wall Street/Pentagon/KStreet complex.

 

[uscitizen]

From William Greider's "The End of New Deal Liberalism":

"Society faces dreadful prospects and profound transformation. When both parties are aligned with corporate power, who will stand up for the people?

"Who will protect them from the insatiable appetites of capitalist enterprise and help them get through the hard passage ahead?

"One thing we know for sure from history: there is no natural limit to what capitalism will seek in terms of power and profit.

"If government does not stand up and apply the brakes, society is defenseless.

"Strangely enough, this new reality brings us back to the future, posing fundamental questions about the relationship between capitalism and democracy that citizens and reformers asked 100 years ago.

"Only this time, the nation is no longer an ascendant economic power.

"It faces hard adjustments as general prosperity recedes and the broad middle class that labor and liberalism helped create is breaking apart...

"One key dynamic of the twentieth century was the long- running contest for dominance between democracy and capitalism.

"The balance of power shifted back and forth several times, driven by two basic forces that neither corporate lobbyists nor timid politicians could control: the calamitous events that disrupted the social order, such as war and depression, and the power of citizens mobilized in reaction to those events.

"In those terms, both political parties are still highly vulnerable-as twentieth-century history repeatedly demonstrated, society cannot survive the burdens of an unfettered corporate order."

ZCommunications...

Why do you think the corporate minions want to get rid of PBS/NPR?

 

[Mr. H.]

If you were the victim of a mugging or car jacking would you call on government?

Goldman Sachs is a much bigger threat to your health and future.

My brother was beaten to within an inch of his life by an N-gentleman. Why? He cut off his pedestrian homies in traffic. My brother subseqently pulled up his socks and moved on.
Simple as that.
What's with the Goldman Sachs shit anyway. You are so fucking far removed from reality it's pathetic.

Had your brother been beaten one inch further, would you have brushed it off or called on government?

I was the one that picked my brother up from the hospital. And before I left the house I stuck a .38 in my belt. His face was swollen black and blue and in bandages.

He sought due process on his own. And when he didn't receive justice and when the courts offered none, he chalked it up and.... moved on.

Move on folks. Better your own lives and stop chasing scapegoats.

 

[georgephillip]

Goldman isn't a "threat."

When they destroy your currency, they are a threat. When they destroy your economy, they are a threat. When they own your government, they are a threat. When they have supplanted your military, they are a threat.

Guns and butter.

Who is they? Goldman Sachs?

Goldman Sach is the latest version of Fannie and Freddie, i.e., Government Sponsored Entities floating on a bubble called moral hazard.

From The Baseline Scenario:

"Goldman Sachs is undoubtedly too big to fail – in the sense that if it were on the brink of failure now or in the near future, it would receive extraordinary government support and its creditors (at the very least) would be fully protected.

"In all likelihood, under the current administration and its foreseeable successors, shareholders, executives, and traders would also receive generous help at the moment of duress. No one wants to experience another 'Lehman moment.'

"This means that cost of funding to Goldman Sachs is cheaper than it would be otherwise – because creditors feel that they have substantial 'downside protection' from the government.

" How much cheaper is a matter of some controversy, but estimates made by my co-author James Kwak (in a paper presented at a Fordham Law School conference last February) put this at around 50 basis points (0.5 percentage points), for banks with over $100 billion in total assets."

Goldman and its ilk can't stop stealing for the same reason sharks can't stop swimming.

They will die, and they know it.

 

[Mr. H.]

Scapegoats- those animals upon which you can heap your every ill.

Dump your bullshit on someone/something else. It's much easier than grabbing your bootstraps and brushing off the dust from your poor sad asses.

You pathetic downtrodden underpriveledged brow-beaten classless bastards.

You need a good bitch slappin', george.

 

[georgephillip]

Goldman isn't a "threat."

When they destroy your currency, they are a threat. When they destroy your economy, they are a threat. When they own your government, they are a threat. When they have supplanted your military, they are a threat.

Guns and butter.

Barack Obama and the Fed are destroying the currency by printing by the hundreds of billions it and loaning it interest free to banks to create the appearance of a recovery.

Obama rescued some Wall Street firms, and let others fail. He let some auto dealers fail. He let American companies that sell and service oil equipment fail. He has said he intends to let the coal energy industry fail.

So it's not about Wall Street. It's about government.

The Fed's a good example of how a "public/private partnership" enable big government/business to socialize cost and privatize profit. The author of the article I'm basing this thread on, William Greider, has been writing for decades. His most important work so far has been Secrets of the Temple which looks closely at where the Federal Reserve came from.

In July of 2009 he had this to say about the Fed's response to the Financial Crisis:

"During the past year, the Fed has flooded the streets with money--distributing trillions of dollars to banks, financial markets and commercial interests--in an attempt to revive the credit system and get the economy growing again.

"As a result, the awesome authority of this cloistered institution is visible to many ordinary Americans for the first time.

"People and politicians are shocked and confused, and also angered, by what they see. They are beginning to ask some hard questions for which Federal Reserve governors do not have satisfactory answers.

"Where did the central bank get all the money it is handing out? Basically, the Fed printed it, out of thin air. That is what central banks do. Who told the Fed governors they could do this?

"Nobody, really--not Congress or the president.

"The Federal Reserve Board, alone among government agencies, does not submit its budgets to Congress for authorization and appropriation.

"It raises its own money, sets its own priorities.

"Representative Wright Patman, the Texas populist who was a scourge of central bankers, once described the Federal Reserve as 'a pretty queer duck.'

"Congress created the Fed in 1913 with the presumption that it would be 'independent' from the rest of government, aloof from regular politics and deliberately shielded from the hot breath of voters or the grasping appetites of private interests--with one powerful exception: the bankers."

The Fed exists to grease the tracks for Wall Street bankers.

And Wall Street serves the richest 1% of Americans first.

 

[Ropey]

and poor George, who hasn't a pot to....

Your pain is clear George. Seek intervention before you eat yourself up. You can not release it in this way.

This only increases it.

 

[georgephillip]

Dreadful prospects my ass. I'm a capitalist and I could be a pauper tomorrow because of it. No risk, no balls, no glory. Take the shit that's heaped upon you, brush it off, and move on.

Goddamn bunch of pussy have-nots.

If your solution to the shit being heaped on you is to take it, you're the pussy.

And what's your solution? To post some idiotic blathering on a message board? Profess a tangential hypothesis by pointing your shit-stained finger at an entity that may or may not be responsible for society's ills in some small fashion?

You're grabbing at make-believe straws. Go out and do some work and better yourself and your family instead of sitting behind a keyboard playing armchair patriarch to the masses.

What's tangential about the war between capitalism and democracy? It was going on for hundreds of years before either one of us was born.

"What the capitalist system wants is more-more wealth, more freedom to do whatever it wishes.

"This has always been its instinct, unless government intervened to stop it.

"The objective now is to destroy any remaining forms of government interference, except of course for business subsidies and protections.

"Many elected representatives are implicitly enlisted in the cause."

ZCommunications

 

[georgephillip]

and poor George, who hasn't a pot to....

Your pain is clear George. Seek intervention before you eat yourself up. You can not release it in this way.

This only increases it.

Two years ago this minute when I was living under a bridge, I didn't possess that proverbial pot.

Two years from now, should the Fed reduce our debt by turning every $10 bill into a $5 I could well find myself back under that damn bridge.

But if that happens, I won't be alone and the living won't be nearly as peaceful as it was in 2008-09.

 

[Londoner]

During the postwar era there was a very powerful compact between government and labor, which itself was part of a broader compact between government and the middle class. Out of this compact grew a myriad of programs designed to promote broadly shared prosperity, e.g., middle class compensation was tied to productivity gains: when business did well, so too did the workers. The government also tried to give the middle class an affordable cost of living, which included access to great public universities; access to affordable health care, as well as controlling the price of necessary staples, e.g., speculators were not allowed to drive up the cost of oil; housing bubbles were prevented; Wall Street was not allowed to expose our savings to excessive risk.

And... the middle class had plenty o' spendin' money. Remember: the New Deal gave them higher wages, a low cost of living, social safety nets, and retirement security. This translated into economic security > massive consumer demand. Guess what happens when demand goes up? The capitalist must innovate and add more jobs to capture all dat extra money.

Point is: during the postwar years, the American government invested in the middle class and it paid off, leading to the golden era of mass consumption. Henry Ford's dream was finally realized: the workers could afford to buy what they produced. Leave It To Beaver nation was born -- suburban expansion exploded: new homes, televisions, ski trips, refrigerators, shopping malls, patio furniture, and space-age gadgets trickled down like mana from heaven. Going to college was no longer a luxury. Everybody, it seemed, was in the middle class.

Which is why the 50s & 60s represented the most sustained economic growth in American history. Best of all, America's highly regulated postwar economy was a blessing to conservatism: the family could be sustained on 1 income, leaving the mother to tend to the children, i.e., the nuclear family was king (unlike today, where the mother must work and the children are raised by MTV).

But there was a catch to our postwar prosperity. High taxes. In order to fulfill the social contract with the middle class -- in order to pay for all the infrastructure projects and the high wages & benefits -- business and the wealthy paid higher taxes. And it worked: we put a man on the moon and built the most impressive tapestry of highways, public works, and suburbs known to man. More importantly, the tenuous compromise between capital and labor held steady because there was still a lot of money coming: America, unscathed by the two great wars, was manufacturer to the world.

Enter 1973. Japan and Germany re-industrialized, China and India were growing into industrial powers, OPEC choked energy supplies, and stagflation ended the postwar boom: less money was coming in.

What did capital do when their profit rates began to plummet? They went in search of a political party. Business took over the New Right quicker than Germany took over France. [The left was still too beholden to labor to enjoy the immense advantage of Lockheed] The new federation between the GOP and business resulted in a machine which seamlessly funneled money into politics. The machine also poured money into think tanks, publishing groups, PACs, and every manner of mass media. They would spend the next 30 years remaking government (destroying regulatory agencies, lowering taxes, gutting laws that benefited the middle class, and making it easier for business to craft their own legislation). On the media front, their plan was brilliant: use conservative social issues -- mostly centered around religion, tradition, and patriotism -- to recapture the south and heartland. Divide the country into two groups: good Americans (conservatives) versus evil anti-Americans (liberals). [This "divide and conquer" strategy by business was a brilliant way of balkanizing the cross-party coalitions that united under the New Deal] By the 90s, with the birth of talk radio, the GOP was in charge of an army of "identity Republicans" -- who were strategically agitated by wedge issues from abortion & gay marriage, to gun control & hollywood indecency. Men like Reagan successfully shifted populist ire from the cigar smoking fat cat to the incompetent bureaucrat. To top it off: the old Red Scare was reborn, only this time it was the liberals who had supposedly infiltrated American institutionally to the core.

The new Republican voter was now part of an epic holy war to save America from evil.

Having successfully branded half the country, the machine now began to reformat public opinion with ruthless efficiency. In short, business (aka capital) finally had the power to repeal all the gains given to labor during the postwar years. Everything done for the middle class would now be called socialism. Everything done for business would be called freedom. Profit would finally be unhinged from any obligation to the public good. It would buy all elections and, through a series of mass mergers made possible by Reagan's destruction of the Sherman Act, consolidate control over mass media.

Welcome to it.. Corporations are richer than ever and the country is bankrupt. This is the final phase of neoliberal capitalism: the pure concentration of wealth. Capital's victory over labor is complete. When money is made in this country, it goes overwhelmingly into fewer and fewer hands. Game over.

 

[Mr. H.]

And just what do you want for yourself, georgie-boy?

Do you want what the "capitalists" have? Or will you consign yourslef, remoursefully, to a world of "I ain't got this, I want that."? The war exists in your mind. Have you no war of your own to fight? Have you no will to better your own life and that of your loved ones?

And tell me about subsidies and protections. I deal with "subsidies" on a daily basis. Am I protected?

Not by a longshot. In my business, I'm hunted. Hunted by the likes of you.

Why? Because I'm in that place where you apparently refuse to go- a place full of risk. The risk of failure. But you don't want that variable in your life do you? You want some cozy environment that's protected not by democracy or capitalism but by the government tit. The tit that you can suckle to your life's content, without risk- without the fear of failure.

The capitalist system wants one thing- to be left the fuck alone. Alone to do what it does best- create the wealth that feeds you tit-sucking motherfuckers who have nothing better to do than bitch and moan about what you don't have and to complain about what others DO have.

My favorite line from Scarface - "Don't fuck me, Tony."

 

[R.C. Christian]

If you look at the people on Obama's so called "economic team" then much can be said about the fact that wall street really does own america to a degree. Pure scumbags.

 

[Londoner]

The capitalist system does not want to be left alone, save when it comes to taxes and uncaptured regulations. It craves big government subsidies and bailouts. It craves Pentagon services. It craves a publicly funded system of transportation and communication. It thrives on government research: where do you think the computer came from? Where do you think the technology for the 80s consumer electronics boom came from? The Cold War Pentagon. It thrives on economic protections and powerful publicly funded law enforcement. It thrives on a dynamic state sector which protects its interests.

Small business people want to be left alone. They are the true patriots -- The heart and soul of this country; a dying breed. Big Business, on the other hand, needs and craves big government.

 

[jgarden]

Government is an abject failure at making people equal.

But no corporation is as wealthy or powerful as government.

Corporations want a government strong enough protect their private interests - but not strong enough to protect the public from their "excesses!"

 

[editec]

Mr. H.

GEorge is talking about the economic system.

Your inspiring stories about how heroically you might or might not have done are entirely irrelevant to this discussion.

And your ad hominen attacks on George are likewise unwarranted and pointless.

Maybe you ought to limit your thoughts to addressing the issues, rather than taking it upon yourself to insult people.

Let me try try to sum the above up for you.

GROW THE FUCK UP.

Thank you in advance for sticking to the topic.