"Working Class Hero"

[georgephillip]

Maybe the first thing we have to decide is how much of their income do the richest 1% earn? A small business owner working 70 to 90 hours a week to earn $340,000 a year or more earns every penny.

Now consider the other extreme of the richest 1%. Hedge fund honchos "earning" billion$ every year by helping destroy middle class manufacturing jobs and betting on the results of Wall Street flooding pension funds with defective derivatives.

The politicians are one-third of the problem, imho, along with Wall Street bankers and the richest Americans they serve. Finally, I don't think there's any non-violent solution to this problem if you limit your "choice" at the polls to Republican OR Democrat. They are both wholly owned by Wall Street.

 

[georgephillip]

If all you aspire to be is a working class slob, I pity you.

It isn't dying as a working class slob that keeps me awake some nights, it's dying as a wage slave.

Abraham Lincoln apparently saw little difference between chattel slavery and wage slaves. Certainly working conditions are better in this country today than in Abe's, however you don't have to endorse the Labor Theory of Value to suspect workers in a corporate controlled marketplace are not being paid the full value of their labor.

Yes you do. Only a Marxist thinks there is some objective way to measure the value of labor other than the price set by supply and demand.

Face it: you're a Marxist.

Surely you've noticed how adept monopoly capital is at regulating prices? What role have financial speculators played in the 3% to 5% increases in food prices in each of the last three months? How much of the speculators' money has come from the US taxpayer via the Federal Reserve?

Marx got much of it wrong,imho.

One thing he got right was how capital becomes a revolutionary force after it emasculates government.

We're there.

Face it.

 

[georgephillip]

No.

I believe taxing high earners at the same rates they paid thirty years ago will save Pell Grants and Heartstart, for example. for many of America's neediest citizens.

That's because you're a leftwingnitwit who thinks the rich will continue to work and invest even if they are taxed at 100% of their income.

I also believe taxing the super rich could initiate a formal debate on issues like bringing Universal Basic Income to all Americans.

We've already had that debate. Socialism has never worked and it never will. the last thing we need is having the government decide how much people earn.

Who is talking about taxing 100% of anyone's income? 30 yrs ago was Ronnie's era, certainly we can live with the rates he imposed?

Certainly no one is talking about the gov eliminating the shareholder and nationalizing industries either. Certain wealth transfers aide in the stabilization of a society, country, culture. Top heavy doesn't work in engineering and it doesn't work in societies.


Unless you want to see the political equivalent of the business cycle, with regular destruction of countries and their re-forming. That is not a pretty path to take.

Markets seem to be better at factoring in direct costs like drilling and shipping oil to consumers than they are at indirect costs like maintaining the 5th Fleet and treating victims of lung cancer.

It may require an environment "new pearl harbor" before enough Americans' eyes open to the realization of impending global food and water shortages.

Imagine if our banker China faced a shortage of domestic wheat production and staked a claim based on their $1trillion Treasury holdings to US grown crops slated for local markets.

Food riots and water riots might be where the class war becomes impossible for Americans to ignore.

 

[georgephillip]

WEll OF COURSE workers do not received the FULL measure of their productivity.

One fundamental principle of CAPITALISM is that workers must be paid LESS THAN the full measure of theur production to insure that CAPITAL formation is possible.

There is nothing WRONG with that so long as the CAPTIAL is then reinvested back into the society of workers who created that capital formation to begin with.

And that is what is no longer happening.

The capital formations that this nation created are often now invested in production elsewhere.

And worse, that output of that production is now competeing with production that happens here.

So the capital that our fathers formed is now creating products that today's American workers must compete AGAINST.

REad ATLAS Shrugged again..

Clearly most of you who think this is a wonderful book with a great plan of how society must work STILL don't quite GET IT.

ATLAS (John Galt) is taking the CAPITAL formation and investing it ELSEWHERE.

In other words, tGalt is advising people to STEAL the CAPITAL FORMATIONS that was put into their hands and reinvest it elsewhere.

ATLAS SHRUGGED is the Rand's call for the rich to break the SOCIAL CONTRACT of capitalism.

And that, folks, is exactly what is happening, too.

AS is not a homage to capitalism, it is a treasonous rant AGAINST the social contract that capitalism represents.

Rand is a fascist, not a patriot.

Today's capitalist is also confronted with the paradox of accumulation. There are fewer and fewer productive ends for capital, hence the rise of financialization.

From October 2009:

"Capacity utilization in industry in the United States is at its lowest level since the 1930s.

"Investment in new plant and equipment has faltered. The financial system is a shadow of what it was only a year ago. The recovery stage of the business cycle is widely expected to be sluggish.

"Indeed, what economists most fear at this point is protracted economic stagnation or a long period of slow growth. 'Though the economy may stabilize,' Thomas Palley has written for the New America Foundation, 'it will likely be unable to escape the pull of stagnation. That is because stagnation is the logical next stage of the existing [economic] paradigm.'2

"Judging by the actions of the economic authorities themselves, there seems to be no way out of the present economic malaise that is acceptable to the vested interests, but to restart the financialization process, i.e., the shift in the center of gravity of the economy from production to finance—meaning further financial bubbles.

"Yet, rather than overcoming the stagnation problem, this renewed financialization will only serve at best to put off the problem, while piling on further contradictions, setting the stage for even bigger shocks in the future."

Monopoly-Finance Capital and the Paradox of Accumulation :: Monthly Review

 

[bripat9643]

Who is talking about taxing 100% of anyone's income? 30 yrs ago was Ronnie's era, certainly we can live with the rates he imposed?

At the end of his administration, Ronnie's top tax rate was 28.5%. I'd be happy to return to that.

Certainly no one is talking about the gov eliminating the shareholder and nationalizing industries either.

I've seen plenty of people discussing it right here in this forum.

Certain wealth transfers aide in the stabilization of a society, country, culture.

Bunk. Exactly the opposite is the case. Organized plunder destabilizes society.

Top heavy doesn't work in engineering and it doesn't work in societies.

The term "top heavy" is meaningless. Other than pure envy, what rule is used to determine whether a society is "top heavy?"

Unless you want to see the political equivalent of the business cycle, with regular destruction of countries and their re-forming. That is not a pretty path to take.

Destroying countries is what people of your ilk are trying to do. Redistribution is the destruction of a country.

 

[georgephillip]

If "redistribution is the destruction of a country", what do you call the nearly $13 trillion bailout of Wall Street recently supported by virtually all elected Republicans AND Democrats?

While the bailout kept the debt in place for 98% of Americans, the richest 2% increased their "fair" share of returns to wealth (rent, interest, dividends and capital gains) by nearly a 100% compared to a generation ago.

Does that redistribution qualify as plunder or destruction?

Michael Hudson: Obama's Greatest Betrayal

 

[Skull Pilot]

The only answer is to allow everyone to keep more of what they earn and to reign in government spending to a reasonable 20% of GDP.

 

[editec]

We just saw Bush II and Obama redistribute the greatest amount of wealth in human history.

The wealth was redistributed from the American working classes to the wealthiest people in the world.

And still these right wing know-nothings in this baord are whining about welfare and socialism.

It take impenetrable ignorance to miss something THAT obvious

 

[georgephillip]

The only answer is to allow everyone to keep more of what they earn and to reign in government spending to a reasonable 20% of GDP.

I don't think 90% of elected Republicans AND Democrats can satisfy the demands of those who fund their campaigns if they allow everyone to keep more of what they earn and confine government spending to a percentage of GDP.

The sort of changes you are demanding can NOT be granted by either major party. They would simply be too expensive to Wall Street and those Wall Street serves.

There are third-party candidates on the left and right who could afford to listen to you; however, millions of voters who think like you do would have to consider FLUSHING Republicans AND Democrats from DC by the hundreds.

 

[Skull Pilot]

The only answer is to allow everyone to keep more of what they earn and to reign in government spending to a reasonable 20% of GDP.

I don't think 90% of elected Republicans AND Democrats can satisfy the demands of those who fund their campaigns if they allow everyone to keep more of what they earn and confine government spending to a percentage of GDP.

The sort of changes you are demanding can NOT be granted by either major party. They would simply be too expensive to Wall Street and those Wall Street serves.

There are third-party candidates on the left and right who could afford to listen to you; however, millions of voters who think like you do would have to consider FLUSHING Republicans AND Democrats from DC by the hundreds.

Flush away.

 

[georgephillip]

We just saw Bush II and Obama redistribute the greatest amount of wealth in human history.

The wealth was redistributed from the American working classes to the wealthiest people in the world.

And still these right wing know-nothings in this baord are whining about welfare and socialism.

It take impenetrable ignorance to miss something THAT obvious

Chris Hedges has been using the figure $17 trillion in wages, retirement benefits and savings that has been stolen from working class Americans during the latest Wall Street Looting.

The corporate press is NOT interested in examining that figure in any detail.

Those of us on the left side of cyberspace have to do a better job of framing this most recent redistribution of wealth as a theft from not only today's middle class Americans but also as a theft from the children of today's workers.

And we have to hammer the point that elected Republicans AND Democrats really could not care less about American workers or their children.

 

[georgephillip]

The only answer is to allow everyone to keep more of what they earn and to reign in government spending to a reasonable 20% of GDP.

I don't think 90% of elected Republicans AND Democrats can satisfy the demands of those who fund their campaigns if they allow everyone to keep more of what they earn and confine government spending to a percentage of GDP.

The sort of changes you are demanding can NOT be granted by either major party. They would simply be too expensive to Wall Street and those Wall Street serves.

There are third-party candidates on the left and right who could afford to listen to you; however, millions of voters who think like you do would have to consider FLUSHING Republicans AND Democrats from DC by the hundreds.

Flush away.

If hundred of incumbents are FLUSHED from DC in 2012, it won't likely come as a surprise to the DNC/RNC.

Their most likely response would be to flood the polls on Election Day, from Chicago to south Florida, with honest-to-god voter fraud, then use the "legitimate" voter fraud to overturn the will of the voters.

What comes next?