Category Archives: Economics

The American Stinker Lays Another Pooper

Hard at work for the corporate agenda.

Stephen McCann a classic plutocrat and contributor to the site American Stinker and the site linked to the magazine, American Spectator, sits on the Stinker pot and performs the rectal birth of a tract so full of lies even the lowest of parasites might have to bring out the lie detector.  Compensated at a rate of a mere 4.5m a year, Mr. McCann gets passive into that very narrow canal of American mogul-lovin’.  Sitting firmly within the top 1%, possibly the top .01% of wealth holders globally, the Australian McCann we’re sure gets a big BFF ranking from the plutocrat class here in the states.

So onto his scribbles from the war room water closet and why we should really give a damn what he says anyway. First off, its worth pointing out that although McCann sits in his house on the near bottom of the globe where our winter is his summer, he seems awfully disturbed by certain sectors of the American population known commonly as the “left”.

Yeah you all you pro-choice, tree hugging, union thug, anti-racist, anti-war leftists, this fine gentleman is fed up with your anti-austerity politics you hear? He’s had it with your desires for justice and equality and wants you to grow up and practice some good old austerity.  Concerned as he is with the deficit in the United States  … er… his portfolio.   He’s sick and tired of “The Childishness of the American Left” and he’s going to tell you why.

The American left is the most self-indulgent, arrogant, and spoiled group of people on the face of the earth.  They live in a nation facing national bankruptcy and societal upheaval — a country presently subsisting on the residue of past economic achievements.  Yet the only things that matter to them are their lifestyles and imposing their self-determined superiority on rest of the American people.

Social upheaval?  Could it be the social upheaval of a population sick and tired of the 1% wealthiest “imposing their self-determined superiority on the rest of the American people”?  Seems to many of us here in the US that once an economic system existed wherein at least there was some hope that a rising tide would raise all boats.  That with the work of the left through government regulation and correction,  social inequities would soon begin to disappear and anyone, a person of color, a woman, a disabled person, could as the old saying goes, capture the American Dream by working on a finally leveled playing field.

But as we all know now, the job of straightening out 300 years of socialized inequality takes some sacrifice from everyone and we’ve had our share of resistance.  Us lefties always do after a while tend to get all misty-eyed and go on about hard to quantify issues such as racial justice, gender equality and LGBT rights, worker’s rights and a clean and healthy planet.   We on the left have known for quite some time that the existing system favors a certain group of people and we have tirelessly pointed this fact out.  Basically many of us figured out after about 5th grade that the Land of the Free we learned about ain’t exactly free for a large portion of the population.

Unlike the minority who upon their birth are cloistered among nannies, private schools, Ivy League colleges and a nice inheritance, the majority of people in this country live quite modest lives.  We on the left selfishly have worked tirelessly for little money (because where do you think money comes from?), to champion causes not particularly popular with the ownership class.

We have repeatedly marched down streets, sat in halls, picketed and boycotted businesses to protest the sending of our young people to die for the myriad wars that benefit only the 1%, protested and worked toward changing injustices from gay rights to women’s rights, from working against racism, to saving the planet from industrial destruction, all in the name of that selfish idea; justice.

Do we have a superiority complex? Possibly, if one equates having a sense of fervent duty to the social contract of humanity; yes possibly if one takes seriously the precept of the prophet of our Christian based culture; “Do Unto Others As You Would Have Done Unto You” All this while swarmed by a capitalist campaign of mass consumption, exploitation and greed.  We on the left have worked tirelessly to draw attention to how global capitalism exploitation kills humans and the planet.

But let’s take our lesson from Mr. McCann and hear about his concerns about the debt and the GDP; essentially his global balance sheet shall we?  First McCann draws our attention to an NPR interview:

The true indebtedness of the United States now exceeds $222 trillion.  Appearing on National Public Radio in August of 2011 Professor Laurence J. Kotlikoff of Boston University said:

If you add up all the promises that have been made for spending obligations, and subtract all the taxes we expect to collect, the difference is $211 Trillion.  This is the fiscal gap.  That is our true indebtedness.

Since that interview, the indebtedness has increased by another $11 trillion.

Well it seems the kind professor was making an effort to point out that with falling revenues from tax cuts, funding wars will drain the treasury.  Tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans became all the fashion when Ronald Reagan proved just how easy it is to fleece the American people as long as you lie to them enough.  So easy that H.W. Bush and Bush the Younger have pushed the envelope further not only cutting taxes for their buddies but also borrowing to finance some major military adventures.  So again the professor points out that when the boss cuts your pay, going to Disneyland may not be such a good idea.

But let’s take the boss analogy a step further.  When your boss learns that you’ll  work just as hard on $7.25/hour as you would on $15/hour, especially if he promises you get a ticket to Disneyland, do you think he’ll go back to $15?.  Nope, you’ve just got suckered.  Boss got just as much work out of you for less and what’s more he didn’t bother to tell you he borrowed from your pension fund to pay for those tickets to Disney, what a deal!

Not rocket science, nor a big secret.

Then further down, McCann rails about the GDP versus expenditures.  The fact is, just looking at the GDP fails to consider so many other factors that have caused the largest economic slump since the Depression.  As is detailed on a page here a bit back, McCann doesn’t bother to tell his dear readers that while the GDP has failed miserably, corporate earnings  have multiplied upward for the last three generations, while earnings growth for those who work for a wage has stagnated since about 1979.  Also McCann fails to mention that those who possess high wealth have enjoyed as much as a 200% or more increase in their portfolio value at the same time.

So in summary, tax cuts sent the money into the hands of the plutocrats, cuts in services such as housing, poverty programs, cuts in agency funding, cuts in education funding also sent more money to the plutocrats which for some reason never came back home.  All the while corporations learned that lay-offs reward richly (and thus rewarded their CEO’s thusly), temp labor is a pip and people will work for dogs on mere promises. Add to that the people’s gullibility for tall tales about scary hordes that must be brought down by fancy artillery and young Americans’ lives and you’ve got one heck of a mess.

Now Mr. McCann, being only human can’t help but look a gift horse in the mouth.  As if fleecing the American and global population hasn’t made him rich enough, he’s now concerned about the possible collision of the health of his portfolio with the health of our nation.

Yet these estimates do not include the full impact of ObamaCare, which could add another $17+ trillion.

Now taking away the fact that McCann seems to think that Americans don’t need affordable healthcare like Australians enjoy, let’s just focus on his concern about our fiscal health shall we?  Wait what’s this? All over the internet sites figures keep quoting the CBO and its research that purport that in fact, the ACA will reduce the deficit by $210 billion, not increase it.  So in other words, McCann is either very poorly informed or just telling lies because he doesn’t think we should have public healthcare like his homeland does.  We’d suggest that McCann follow the old rule; those who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.  Oh, Australia doesn’t fund healthcare for rich guys, oh well.

On the other side of the ledger: the annual Gross Domestic Product (the value of all economic activity in the U.S.) is $15.6 trillion.  The indebtedness to GDP ratio is a staggering 14.2 to 1 and guaranteed to further accelerate if Barack Obama is re-elected.

See Disneyland borrowed on your pension fund. We explained that already.  Mr. McCann hopes to impress and bamboozle his readers with statistics and figures that really say the same damn thing no matter how you turn them around; the rich guys spent all our money and borrowed to the hilt for whatever our paychecks couldn’t cover.  Pretty simple; you spend more than you making, you going to end up bankrupt.

The United States is not facing bankruptcy, it is bankrupt.  The primary factor that has kept the nation afloat over the past four years is that the dollar, albeit temporarily, remains the world’s reserve currency, thus allowing the Federal Reserve to print enormous sums of money to cover the Obama budget deficits and flood the global market with near worthless cash.  Today it requires $100.00 to purchase the same goods $10.00 purchased in 1950.

Firstly, the Federal Reserve does not print money! Contrary to popular belief, the Fed is not some super-secret club full of special presses stamping out benjis to add to the “money supply” as they please.  So we can dispense with this quickly and move on, please see the following comic made up by the Fed in an attempt to dispel ignorance.

Comparing the value of the dollar today to its value in 1950 is much like picking up

Oh do we need to go back what was good in 1950 compared to today? Like the fact that nearly 50% of American workers were union members? That save for the social inequities that still existed, many people enjoyed a prosperity most young Americans cannot even imagine today.  Taxation was progressive and effective with the top tiers paying as much as 90% of their income, so revenues were high, wages were healthy and what’dya get? A healthy economy!  Infrastructure expenditures were up, employment rose and the standard of living in the US rose for a large majority of Americans above nearly the entire world.

Increased indebtedness due to wars funded on borrowing, money policy that shifted wealth from the commoners to the elites and the resulting bust in GDP growth among the population that depressed revenues and consumption seems an indication of selfishness, but of the leftie kind.

As a further comparison, the total annual GDP of all the countries on earth is $70 trillion.  The American indebtedness alone exceeds that amount by a factor of 3 — which contributes mightily to a world drowning in debt and facing an inevitable debt crisis and financial collapse, which will trigger a massive global depression.

Thanks again in large part of levering of the American economy by the elites on the backs of the working people who have seen their share of the pie steadily decrease even though their production has rivaled other first world countries for decades.

Currently, just 58.4% of the civilian population is employed, as compared to 64.3% twelve years ago.  Factoring in the growth of the population during that period, this drop represents over 22 million Americans unable to find work.  Since January 2009, 74% of all new jobs created in the U.S. were in the lowest-paying sectors of the economy, thereby stifling any chance of upward mobility and growth in median income which has fallen by 9% since January 2009, and average household wealth that has declined by nearly 40% over this same period.  This failure is a byproduct of a tsunami of government regulations, mandates, and taxes which has nearly destroyed the innovation and business and job-creation that made the American economy so vibrant over the latter part of the 20th century.  That innovation has now moved overseas, along with over 7.5 million high-paying goods-producing jobs since 2000.

Another patent lie, since the 1980’s government sectors on all levels have suffered massive cuts and laws that regulated finance, commerce and trade have been modified to favor corporate growth over national growth.  Couple that also with the outsourcing of the white color and blue collar sectors then mix in outflows of investment dollars to those offshore operations and you have decreased consumption within the US market as workers’ buying power decreases,  increased outflows of revenue from the what production remains (as it flows upward and not into worker’s pockets)  into the coffers of tax-free havens, off-shore trusts, third world sweat-shop factories and overall global manipulation of labor, finance and government regulation. Whew and McCann calls us selfish for bitching about it?

The reaction of the self-described progressives to this dire scenario?  Sweep the facts under the rug or ignore them completely, as it appears that the most important things in their lives are the legalization of gay marriage, free contraceptives and abortifacients, worshiping at the altar of extreme and discredited environmentalism, mocking and undermining all organized religion (except Islam), and telling the American people what they can eat, where they can live, what may be taught in their schools, how they must operate their businesses, and what health care they can access.

Au contraire Mr. McCann, while the left has beat the drum of reigning in the cowboy plutocrats, ending the wars, regulating off-shoring, stopping the trade treaties that favor global corporatism and bringing back a truly progressive taxation strategy, the right wing has gone on an endless campaign of distraction by fighting gay marriage and rolling back women’s rights to bodily sovereignty.  We didn’t choose to put these issues front and center, the Republicans did and we have been forced 24-7 to fight these battles on basic human rights, while the economy suffers global moguls continue to rake in the money.

Yes, Mr. McCann we bleat on and on about the importance of an educated and healthy population.  We voice and express concerns about how exploitative capitalism, on which your portfolio and business model relies, has caused irreparable harm the planet we call home.  But we know, worrying about an endangered planet and humanity causes your portfolio to wilt like you probably do when you’ve run out of Viagra in the middle of the deep blue on your shiny yacht after your escort has finished dictating for you.

To the true believers on the left, re-electing Barack Obama is not a matter of what is or is not good for the country; rather, for the majority on the left, the primary motivation is geared solely toward defeating their sworn enemy: conservatives and Republicans, whom many falsely believe are a right-wing horde determined to create a theocracy and impose old-fashioned morality.  But what they fear most from the right is a determination to reinstitute unfettered individual freedom and concomitant economic growth, which would relegate the American left to the back bench of American society.

Yeah we got it.  Apparently McCann seems to have a misunderstanding of American history? We’re not going to the back of the bus as much as the GOP, Tea Partiers and others wish.  In fact, its pretty clear the country is changing and electing a black president only constituted the beginning.

Thus, to them, what the policies of Barack Obama and his radical minions are doing to the long-term fate of nation is immaterial as long as Obama regurgitates his support for the various causes that are near and dear to the coalition that makes up the left.  There are two common threads to the belief system of American progressives: 1) an omnipotent central government controlled by them, and 2) an assumption that there is a bottomless pit of money to be siphoned from an equally bottomless pit of wealth.  But this is not the same nation that experienced unprecedented prosperity from 1946 to 2007.  It is not the same nation in which these narcissists on the left grew up, never knowing national adversity or trauma.

1. Yes, we do in fact represent every single portion of humanity not represented by the guests on your yacht Mr. McCann, yes we do in fact believe that the government’s role is to put selfish pricks like you where you belong — in the palm of our sweaty, hard working hands.

2. We do indeed see a bottomless pit of money — our money that we worked damn hard for that you stole from us through your wrangling and perverting our government to allow you to extract every penny from our efforts and give as little back to us as possible.

And we also know that the national prosperity has been in decline for us ever since your patron saint, Ronnie Reagan took office here and began to strip every single protection from greedy, self centered, hypocritical plutocrats like yourself.   We’ve suffered enough trauma under the reign of the greedy and we’ve had it.

The manner in which these progressives, and their titular leader Barack Obama, are conducting themselves in the current campaign season is indicative of their arrogant and immature mindset.  To the vast majority on the left, this campaign is merely a game played out on the playground of American politics, wherein they childishly engage in name-calling and temper tantrums reminiscent of spoiled brats determined to get their way, regardless of the consequences.

Well, to the vast majority of Americans this playground is ours and its our damn business how we play it out and we’d like it if global moguls like yourself keep your filthy paws out of our political and electoral business.  We are indeed determined to get our way but it seems last we knew, the bamboozled foot soldiers of the plutocracy were the ones throwing the biggest temper tantrums about having a Kenyan born Islamic black man chosen as the president of their whites-only fiefdom.  But like most spoiled brats, you people just refuse to take your marbles and go home to cry to mama, nope, instead you have to put millions into SuperPACS and keep trying to play petty games with our political system to feed your own selfish desires.

It is time to grow up and understand that the America that could absorb all the excessive spending, promises, and left-wing fun and games is no more.  This nation cannot survive on its present course, and if that course is not dramatically reversed, those on the left will suffer as much as if not more than the bulk of the American people they are trying to rule.  History has shown repeatedly that when an overwhelming political and social catastrophe strikes a nation, the people turn against the ruling class, often with a vengeance.  In the United States, that ruling class is presently dominated by the American left.

You’re absolutely right Mr. McCann, the country can no longer continue on this course.  Scientists say if we don’t make radical life style and consumption changes we may not have a planet worth living on in another twenty or thirty years.  History has indeed shown repeatedly that when aristocrats and their inbred offspring are allowed to run things, they tend to make a big damn mess of the house and leave the adults to come and clean it up.  The clean up time has begun and we’re ready to evict you and your lying friends.  Thanks for playing Mr. McCann, there’s a spot in the back of the bus for you.

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Save Public Education – The Core of Democracy!

Save Our Schools! Rally – September 22, 2012

Veteran’s Park, Manchester New Hampshire

4 – 6pm

For more info: See Facebook

The Corporate Education Reform Agenda

by Tom Crean for Socialist Alternative

It is becoming increasingly clear that the future for working class and poor youth in the United States is bleak. Three years into the most severe economic and social crisis of the capitalist system since the Great Depression, the unemployment rate for teenagers 16-19 years old is 26 percent. A recent study by Northeastern University’s Center for Labor Market Studies points out that the employment-population ratio-the ratio of the number of people employed to the total working-age population- which is a broader measure of labor market health than the unemployment rate, has fallen by about 20 percentage points over the past decade to 25.6 percent for teenagers. This is a record low in the post World War II period.

The picture is even worse when looking at the situation for poor black and Latino youth. The employment-population ratio for African Americans ages 16 to 19 was 14.4 percent in July. Since middle class youth will still go to college and one way or another find their way into jobs, albeit perhaps jobs that pay less than the ones they would have expected to get in the past, the picture is not as grim for them. But a whole generation of poor youth now essentially has no experience of paid employment. This is truly a lost generation.

Why begin a discussion of the state of education with unemployment statistics? This is the right place to start because most people would agree that a key aim of education should be to prepare young people for a better life than their parents had. The corporate elite that dominates our society also looks at education in relation to the future, but from the more narrow perspective of training the next generation of workers.

Continue reading: Save Our Schools!

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Screw the Troika!

Europe is awakening to resist the efforts of the German-led bankers to use the Euro to squash public services and safety nets in order to increase profits for the global elites.  Mirroring in many ways the strategies imposed upon Americans here at home by capitalist elites, the global capitalists have started the slaughter of the people’s rights on European soil as well.

Here, the site Igualistarista puts out the call from Portuguese resistance activists to stand up and protest against the austerity measures pressuring Portugal, Greece, Italy and Spain in an effort to get them to succumb to secondary status to as laborer-serf countries for European capitalist interests.  So without further delay:

Screw the Troika, We Want Our Lives!

This is a call to protest made in the last few days by Portuguese activists for a new day of protest against what is known as the Troika (the International Monetary Fund, the European Commission, and the European Central Bank). You can find the protest and the original call in Portuguese here:

Que se Lixe a Troika! Queremos as nossas Vidas – Screw the Troika,  We Want Our Lives!

It is necessary to do something extraordinary. It is necessary to take to the streets and squares in both our cities and our countryside. To join voices and hands. This silence is killing us. The noise of the mainstream media fills the silence, reproduces the silence, spreads the network of lies that puts us to sleep and annihilates our desire. It is necessary to do something to reverse the submission and resignation, to do something against the filtering of ideas and against the death of the collective will. It is necessary to once again call upon our voices, arms and legs, of everyone who knows it is in the streets that the present and the future is decided. It is necessary to overcome the fear that is constantly spread and, once and for all, see that we no longer have much to lose, and that the day will come when everything has been lost because of our silence and our surrender.

Read the rest of this excellent post Igualistarista

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What a Damn Mess Indeed…

Excellent article (#130, November 2010) on the Left Business Observer Journal site:

What a damn mess

You were under the impression
That when you were walking forward
You’d end up further onward
But things ain’t quite that simple.
—The Who, “I’ve Had Enough” (1973)

The time seemed ripe for a comprehensive look at the state of the U.S. economy—not the usual a little of this, a little of that approach, but some measure of how it all fits together. It will come as no surprise to most readers that the state is dismal. Not only are the masses doing rather poorly, but even the most orthodox measure of all, GDP growth, is in the tank. But this is not perceived as an emergency in some circles, because the elite is doing very, very well. [more here].

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Ayn Rand Acolytes Have Finally Struck Pay Dirt

Certainly a part of Ryan and Mitt’s undeserving.

After all these years, the debunked pseudo philosopher has finally gotten herself a road to the White House.  Although long dead, her spirit has thrived in the hearts and minds of 15 year old males and selfish plutocrats looking for a way to justify their refusal to clean their rooms or their burning desire to keep their interest and dividends earnings/trust fund/insider trading windfall all to themselves.

Meet Paul Ryan, the newly minted Republican Vice Presidential candidate. Strapped onto Romney’s side like a Rugar onto an aging New Hampshire Libertarian, Ryan is posited as the one who will make Romney human.  Yes, Ryan, the self proclaimed student of the archetypical anti-human, Ayn Rand, will give the public the illusion that someone among the two of them gives a damn about someone besides themselves.

Already the Romney camp has had to decide to stuff down the press’ anxious inquiries into the details of the famous Ryan plan — you know, the plan that Newt Gingrich himself thought was going a little too far? Yeah, that Newt Gingrich, he of the “make mothers drop their babies where-ever to work at McDonald’s” Contract on America Gingrich, no shining Samaritan he. But that little glimmer of empathy made the GOP panic enough to furiously remind Newt that the Big Daddy GOP ain’t having any of that middling concern for old people, children and poor folks.   Ryan’s plan must succeed! Old folks wheel your chairs to the gallows! The time has come for the great sacrifice for Capital!

Can we imagine a world ruled by Romney and Ryan?  A world where insider trading becomes a right, where the sitting president’s offspring will run to hold the highest office in the land year after year? Where Congress won’t have to bother to have session because everyone knows the outcome already — what’s to argue? Where the television shows will blast sitcoms of happy rich people day and night and news casts will consist of lost puppy dogs and the weekly roll-call of prisoners condemned to death?

Can we imagine a world where housing subsidies are cut and a half million people will find themselves instantly homeless? Where the disease stricken or the mobility disabled will be left to hobble or crawl home to die because they can’t buy a hospital voucher? Will apartment buildings that once the landlords received subsidies for become abandoned as they can’t make the mortgage payments for lack of tenants that can pay rent on a Wal-Mart salary?  Will municipal welfare departments shutter their doors, lacking the resources to serve? Food pantries run dry, soup kitchens become over run, having to turn out before the line outside is exhausted?  Will entire neighborhoods turn black at night as power prices soar without subsidies to control them?

Will children who slept in parks, cars, alley ways, abandoned buildings, with no heat, no running water, filthy from the day before, shy away from school? Living with no place to study, with no cooked food to eat, living among a world of prosperity, what message will those children absorb?

Will murders rise as people in the cities fight over scarce resources? Will an armed suburban guerilla warfare begin as the inner city poor turn to the suburbs where once soccer moms plant homemade mines around their pristine three acre plot? Where angry and hungry inner city residents crouch behind mulberry bushes and stinkweed in the summer humidity to wait for the right moment to fire and overtake the house that has a water well and a churning diesel generator keeping the well stocked freezer going?  Will the police state expand, will martial law be called?

Paranoid some? Talk to your neighbors.  Talk to some “preppers”, one underground group among many convinced that the scenario described in the last paragraph isn’t too far off.  Unfortunately, what’s lost is the trajectory of how the nation could get there.  Its in our control, we don’t have to give up and allow defeat to define our future.

Often pundits and other observers remark on the poor memory of the American electorate.  While the poor recall of a politician’s remark or slip of judgment is one thing; to forget our entire human history is quite another.  Only within the last half of the last century did a huge portion of the human population get a chance to know what its like to have a place out of the rain and cold; to know when or where our next meal is coming from — or what it will be; a rat? a discarded piece of bread? a donation from the back of a UN truck?  A lot of that had to do with capital prosperity, but that, unlike the story repeated erroneously among the American public, did not happen naturally by the accumulation of capital alone.  It seems that people assume that the accumulation of wealth and capital assets automatically results in general popular prosperity, as if a natural occurrence as regular and reliable as the sun following the moon.

But the social contract did not fall out of the sky, it is not written in the bark of trees.  What is written in the bark of trees is the struggle of nature, of the universally understood vulgarity of nature that many like to not think about; the live and let live, the kill or be killed.  Paul Ryan’s mentor in spirit Ayn Rand celebrated the brute violence of survival and believed that all humans had attained their highest actualization when they begin to act as if they had no more self awareness than a snarling dog in a pack.

We have the capacity to become dogs; to emulate the most vile and base behavior and return to our mammalian roots.  But with our larger brains that developed the awareness we call “self”; the “I”, also came the awareness that without the ‘you’ — our mother, our father, our brother, our neighbor, that “I” becomes merely a weak, hungry mass of flesh whose worth can only be redeemed by the contribution made to the other — the community who can hear us cry out.  If Romney and Ryan get in the white house and do what they wish, we’ll need more than just a god to help us, we’ll each other and our memory.

Depression Era Daydream – http://seaheff.com/pages/comics.html

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How Trickle-Down Theory is Ruining Our Schools and Closing Our Libraries: Thank You Ronald Reagan

While You Were Working to Make Ends Meet…

Great analysis by Lisa Longo on her blog:

Economic theory is complex. My macroeconomics professor loved to use the “guns vs. butter” analogy. Does a country build its economy by helping the citizenry (supply butter) or by protecting itself (supply guns)? The current argument over whether to raise the debt ceiling and deficit has the same feel to me.

Take the pithy patter that falls from Sarah Palin’s mouth, “To have a balanced trade arrangement with other countries across the world so Americans can have our jobs, our industries, our manufacturing again. And exploiting responsibly our natural resources. We can do that again if we make good decisions.” (emphasis added)

Do you really think she understands the environment, let alone economics? Is there any way to exploit something responsibly?  Here is the definition of the word exploit:”

(click here to go to Lisa’s blog and read the rest)

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Social Democracy vs. Democratic Socialism vs. National Socialism (Observations at a distance of the French and American experience)

French exuberance over Hollande victory, via democraticunderground.com

Though I have been living in France again for these few weeks during the summer, I feel that I have experienced and seen enough to make some comments that may be more insightful than pedestrian when it comes to a comparison of our two countries and the systems that support us)

First of all, during my stay, I have paid little by way of taxes here and have no financial investment in this system.  In all candor, this must be how the 1% must feel in the US living there paying less than the middle classes do, yet enjoying the same privileges and advantages afforded to them in our republic.

That being said, the food is great and bountiful here.  I did not have to think about GMOs or preservatives here. There is good cheese and great quality very, very cheap regional wines for sale and the beef grass fed.  The bread is fresh and fortifying and places to buy it fresh plentiful.  I pay no taxes to use my car, or support the schools or museums.  I am a parasite  who takes full advantage of the roads, educated citizenry, even of the workers who plant the roadside flowers that make this place so beautiful.  I financially support none of it through taxes.  I use a high speed rail system and local trains and trams paying less to ride them than the cost to run them.  It is all someone else’s taxes who go to pay for the quality and benefit of my existence.  If I were to live here for more than a few weeks a year, I would feel bad about taking advantage of all this without giving something back, for, though I may be a parasite, and generally loathe taxes and bureaucracies,  I am one with a conscience here and back at home.

So why is it that the upper 1% in the states seem to have no such conscience?  What is it about their self-absorbed lives that doesn’t allow their sense of altruism to tick, even in the least collective degree?  I believe that it is one of Entitlement.  The “E” word.  Yes, it takes one to point out one.  How else could the wealthy in the US laser focus on a word and turn it into an epithet aimed at everyone else who is on the cusp of surviving and who might be a recipient of what is left of state noblesse-oblige, now defamed as a “welfare state”.  Sure, there are abuses.  Any system has them.  But with proper pruning, policing and punishment,  the “three Ps” the abuses are guaranteed to be small and few and far between.  But again, it takes hubris for one who has no real investment or financial connection with a society to enjoy all of its benefits to ask for the crucifixion of those who are less fortunate for doing the same just to stay alive.   Is it not hypocrisy for any of the 1% to shop at Walmart, for example, where cheap prices are afforded greatly by hiring part time workers and having those same employees there apply for food stamps as part of their hiring?  Are we not again socializing our most efficient means of production in this way?  If the system continues to grow and makes Sam Walton’s family and shareholders richer, it must be good right?  Isn’t this pure capitalism?

No, this is National Socialism.  Just as the rich won’t have it philosophically, they still need it to maintain the the illusion of a purely capitalist corporate model.  It is not. We as a society are keeping Sam’s workers’ and dependent families fed.  This is the socialized cost of lower prices at the register.  It is also how private insurers of state workers compensation systems have increased their profits by offsetting disability payments to injured workers by deducting from the indemnity paid to injured workers the amounts they receive from the Social Security Disability system, thereby privatizing gains and socializing losses.  It is the basis of “tort Reform”.  It is a reallocation of wealth by the protection of laws to the benefit of the wealthy.   Most recently we saw most blatantly it with TARP and the bank bailouts.

So, now what is the problem with keeping the Walton’s family workers healthy other than socializing gains and losses?  Absolutely nothing other than  the fact that one has to call it a form of socialism.   Privatizing gain and socializing losses is a form of “National Socialism” a/k/a “Corporatism” or for the less squeamish fascism.  If one is a fascist, if corporations fail, and failure can be avoided by socializing losses by putting it on the backs of taxpayers, then that is not a bad thing because the oligarchs win out.  Anything when the corporations win is good for the oligarchs and plutocrats in a fascist state.  If losses are “socialized”, even if it is cost effective and pays for itself, to them it is bad.  Anything else, other than the institution of communism (admittedly an abject failure) would be better.  So we call our successful social programs in our democracy, something else.   The term “Social Security” is watered down medically into a name like ” “Medicare”.

In this country we even socialize the human cost of our wars, by providing our injured veterans with a lifetime of federally funded workers compensation benefits known variously as “Veterans’ Benefits” and “Veterans’ Medical Benefits”.   For those destitute veterans, we as Americans also provide for the destitute vet, “Veterans Retirement”.  We do all this including the payment of vested retirement benefits to Service personnel, the Congress and our federal employees.  We need to begin seeing our system, it’s successes and it’s excesses for what they are and calling them by their proper names whether it be “fascist”, “socialist” or “socially democratic” or “progressive”  terms or memes that would function to limit the excesses and maximize the combined benefits of both capital and labor while maintaining the natural tension between the two through the use of good reason and common sense.

So why are we so opposed to socializing our democracy?  Besides actually using the word “social”, a term anathema to most of America’s trained ears, the fear of the unknown or the new are perhaps the other reasons.  Additionally, as a nation of international xenophobes, rarely do travel globally to places where we can see first hand how social democracies work elsewhere and how they by necessity, relate to one another in the world at large.  Perhaps if we did observe more and blindly condemn less would we see that there are other ways of doing things as both a local and national community.  But perhaps this is too much because it would require a community of historically rugged individualists to realize that the frontiers are now closed and the recognition of what it means to be an American community.  This is going to take cooperation and a recognition of commonly beneficial goals and values that will sustain us and help us grow as a society and as a civilization as we meet the demands that will try our communality over time.

My observation of the French both up close now and from a distance is that this is a book that the French have been writing for themselves as a society of common sanguination for over a thousand years now. The vision here is clear and the population generally well cared for, hard working and happy.  We on the other side of the Atlantic have yet to complete the preface to our own tome or even to agree on the words that best describe who we are and what we want to become.

Mike Murburg

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