"Whatever the Issue, the Rich Guys Win"

[snjmom]

"When both parties are aligned with corporate power, who will stand up for the people"? Corporations ARE the people. Anyone can incorporate. Every pension in America is invested in corporations. Corporations R us. A better question is "when both parties are aligned with federal power, who will stand up for the people"? Did you Stalinist dummies know that the Constitution was created to limit federal power and not expand it?

Corporations are not the people. They are the property of the people. They have none of the responsibilities of a human, only the duty to their shareholders to return a profit. When the financial sector absolves their fiduciary duty to their clients in order to profit themselves, they should be disincorporated. In China, they would be hanged.

 

[georgephillip]

Every once in a while those Chinese seem to get one right.

Noam Chomsky gets it right more often (imho) and this is his answer to a question about where corporations get their power:

"Q: Could you tell us in detail how the corporation became so powerful?

"How it became so powerful? Well, we know it very well. There were enormous market failures, market disasters in the late 19th century.

"There was a brief experiment, a very brief experiment, with something more or less like capitalism, not really but partially, really free markets, and it was such a total catastrophe that business called it off because it couldn't survive, and there were moves in the late 19th century to overcome these radical market failures and they led to various forms of concentration of capital: trusts, cartels, and others, and the one that emerged was the corporation in its modern form.

"And the corporations were granted rights by the courts.

"I mean, I know the Anglo-American history fairly well - but I think it's pretty much the same elsewhere, so I'll keep to that one - in the Anglo-American system the courts, not the legislators, gave the corporate entities extraordinary rights.

"They gave them the rights of persons, meaning they have the right of freedom of speech, they can propagandize freely, advertise, they run elections and so on, and they have the protection from inspection by the state authorities which means that just as the police technically can't go into your apartment and read your papers, the public can't find out what's going on inside these totalitarian entities.

"They're mostly unaccountable to the public.

"Of course they are not real persons, they are immortal, they are collectivist legal entities.

"In fact they are very similar to other organizational forms we know and are one of the forms of totalitarianism that developed in the 20th century.

"The others were destroyed, these still exist, and later they were required by law to be what we would call pathological in the case of real human beings."

 

[Ropey]

If you complain about capitalists, you are branded a communist

If you complain about corporations, people tell you that anybody can incorporate.

If you complain about the rich, people ask you who is rich? and why do you have class envy?

Then quit complaining and make your own little world in the best way you can rather than whine and complain about the reality that is occurring. It is what it is. You are who you are. You have no power to change what you complain against, so you waste the effort.

I spend that effort in generating income. I've done quite well.

Enjoy life, or continue to see yourself as a victim in a grand conspiracy against your own personal enjoyment.

I mean this is the country of personal choice.

Complain that the Rich get too much?

Then learn to generate more income.

D'oh...

 

[georgephillip]

Here's the thing, Geroge.

You fight an uphill battle because we ALL lack the language to describe the true nature of the shamocracy.

If you complain about capitalists, you are branded a communist

If you complain about corporations, people tell you that anybody can incorporate.

If you complain about the rich, people ask you who is rich? and why do you have class envy?

You see you (we) lack the words needed to DESCRIBE THE PROBLEM that doesn't come with a propaganda designed counter EPITHET with which you can be branded and therefore dismissed from consideration (by fool and knaves) .

You've no doubt noted that when you try to get into specifics, the topic very quickly turns from your point to YOUR FLAWS.

You become the issue at hand.

That is basically because the people you are seeking to engage in discussion do not have the gravitas to understand what you are asking them to consider, or in some very rare cases, they know perfectly well what you're saying and they will either avoid the issue or set out on their character assassination routines to shut you down.

Those few here that disagree with you and CAN and WIL engage you in the TOPIC?

Cherish those people.

An adherent to the musings of people like Ayn Rand who is also not given to taking the low road when debating these issues is rarer than hens' teeth.

There's some right wing reality based players here worthy of praise. That's in large part why I come here.

Most of the folks here that disagree by being disagreeable? Well sport I suspect the 30 point rule is in effect, and that you or I will never reach them because what reaches them is not facts or logic but emotionalism.

And the value system that drives you to arrive at you POV is exactly the opposite of the value system drives them to have theirs.

In February of 2009 Michael Hudson wrote about the Wall Street values of the nascent Obama Administration:

"While the Obama administration’s financial planners wring their hands in public and say 'We feel your pain' to debtors at large, they also recognize that the past ten years have been a golden age for the banking system and Wall Street.

"The wealthiest 1 per cent of the population has raised its share of the returns to wealth – dividends, interest, rent and capital gains – from 37 per cent of the total ten years ago to 57 per cent five years ago, and an estimated 70 per cent today.

"Over two-thirds of the returns to wealth now go to the wealthiest 1 per cent of the population.

"This is the highest on record.

"We are approaching Russian kleptocratic levels..."

Hudson also reveals how this concentration of wealth occurred:

"I learned the reality a few years ago in London, talking to a commercial bank strategist there. 'We’ve had an intellectual breakthrough,' he said. 'It’s changed our credit philosophy.'

“What is it?” I asked, imagining that he was about to come out with yet a new junk mathematics formula?

“The poor are honest,” he said, accompanying his words with his jaw dropping open as if to say, 'Who could have guessed?'

"The meaning was clear enough.

"The poor pay their debts as a matter of honor, even at great personal expense.

"Unlike Donald Trump, the poor are less likely to walk away from their homes when market prices sink below the mortgage level.

"In today’s neoliberal Chicago School language, the poor behave 'uneconomically.'

"That is, they make choices that do not make economic sense, but rather reflect a group morality".

I'm left wondering what values a group morality will embrace in a continental superpower with more private guns than humans when the economic gap between rich and poor widens enough to produce a social vacuum?