Actually he’s right.
Our money is created from debt, and it is taken back with interest. Therefore the amount of money we put back into the system will never be enough to cover the money we created.
Learn about our money creation process and the federal reserve. Read some articles or watch a documentary. I believe that “Money Masters” is a good documentary on this, and the first part of “Zeitgeist Addendum” covers this topic well too. Both of which are available on youtube.
Watched the video along with other “what really happened” videos on youtube. What kind of training did these cops receive that they allowed themselves to get surrounded by a group of people over many minutes? If you’re outmanned, you maintain a safe distance until backup arrives. By allowing themselves to get surrounded by motherfucking college kids, they backed themselves in a corner. Terrible, terrible procedure.
EDIT: Btw, I think both parties were fucking retarded, but for an agency that is supposed to be trained and essentially experts on these very situations, good to know that the police will willingly let themselves get completely outnumbered and surrounded over the course of a 30 minute protest.
EDIT2: Also good to know that sitting down on the ground > years and thousands of dollars of taxpayer funded police training. It’s like the cops were completely dumbfounded as to what to do about a couple dozen people sitting down in front of them (note: although there were hundreds of protesters, only a small amount of them were actually seated).
If the free market doesn’t exist I suggest moving toward it like Ron Paul would suggest. I don’t know about Guatemala but before WWI many countries were more free market, less regulations and a lot less SOCIALISM (like the bail outs you mentioned in your post, yes that is text book socialism - redistributing the wealth of the middle class to Wall Street). Countries that have less socialism tend to do better economically. Japan comes to mind, recently Sweden has moved away from socialism and more toward capitalism and it’s paying off.
Greed is a meaningless term. I can say I’m greedy for owning more than 2 pairs of shoes or filling my fridge to the brim because I can. The real issue is socialism or redistributing wealth from the middle class’s taxes to…failed institutions because owwwww those poor banks fucked up and need to be bailed out. Fuck them, let them go bankrupt. If I started a business and went bankrupt I wouldn’t get hand outs from the tax payers and neither should these banks. But a lot of people can’t stomach this because it means we would have to get rid of other socialistic practices like welfare and social security. You say capitalism doesn’t work and we NEED some socialism then okay stop complaining about the bail outs and accept it because that’s textbook socialism - look it up.
Social Security is a Ponsie scheme. The only reason it is still working is because more people are paying in than taking out. That is going to change in a couple of years. Bottom line the government is heading toward bankruptcy and I wouldn’t trust anything they are putting out right now.
Right now the WW2 generation is dying off while the Baby Booms are still working. For a short time you will probably see SS increase for a little. That is till the Baby Boomers start retiring.
No I don’t expect Government to make sense although it would be nice if it did.And I don’t expect Government to be run for a profit, I expect it to not spend 20 times more than it actually brings in too.
You have a serious problem of near sightedness.You are looking at today and today only. That is how we get into economic problems is because people can’t see disasters coming. If they ever decide to not use the dollar (Which with the drop in the US credit rating that is looking more and more true) we will instantly be screwed. We have more debt than we can pay off and the government is still spending. Right now China has bought up a lot of our debt, but even they are getting worried.
Greece, Iceland, Spain, Portugal, and Italy are all in massive debt troubles for much the same reason. They outspent their income and they may very well cause massive problems for the Euro.
The only reason we haven’t imploded on ourselves is that people still want the dollar, but I will almost guarantee that isn’t going to last. If another currency ever becomes more viable the dollar will plummet.
Solar is a pile of crap right now and isn’t going to be better anytime soon. Even if we had a viable solar option it would take 5 years to actually make enough of them to be even able to handle 10% of the US energy consumption. Wind power doesn’t produce on the scale we need. Inherently those energy sources are weaker than chemical and nuclear energies just by nature. Solar is limited by how fast light can fall on the earth and wind is a finicky power source. You can’t run a country off of it with our current level of understanding. Anyone who says it close to being ready is not living in reality.
Now let’s look at the flip side. We haven’t built a new oil refinery in forever, we aren’t exploring for new oil, we continue to import oil from volatile regions of the world, we keep implementing more and more taxes for energy use, we keep tearing down hydro electric, we keep shutting now nuclear power plants, and overall we keep doing dumb things.
The whole world knows we are running out of cheap oil (notice I didn’t say running out of oil). Yet the US is the only country trying to commit energy suicide.
Just like no one saw all the current problems coming…oh wait they did. The public is always looking in the rear view mirror to determine the future. I remember telling someone in 2002 Silver was going to go above $20 and they looked at me like I was crazy…anyone look at the price of silver lately? Oh yea it’s over $30. Another sign that the dollar is dying.
Just an aside, but personally? If only one person’s life during the course of history is saved as a result of these regulations, then I feel it’s worth it. And I’m willing to bet there are more than a few dudes who didn’t survive straight razor shaves in the past couple of centuries, but that’s just a guess and I can’t back that up or anything. I probably use disposables a max of 3 or 4 times before I switch out due to those concerns anyway, so I wouldn’t mind paying a few extra bucks for a shave with a haircut.
Of course. I am under no illusion that an elected official wouldn’t put the interests of corporate lobbyists and campaign contributors far above those of the voter base (though they may align). Sure, I’m not going to get a meeting with my senator or representative and won’t be able to tell him why I think passing Act X is a bad idea. However, it’s still within the realm of possibility that I can organize an effort to recall that official, or (in states where labor hasn’t been defanged yet) organize labor strikes, or gather thousands of like-minded citizens and protest and disrupt day-to-day business (until the mayor and police figure out some trumped up bullshit to arrest and evict me. Remind you of anything?). These actions, critical of the government, are possibly successful - just not likely and incredibly difficult to pull off. There is absolutely no recourse I can take against a corporation, outside of not buying their shit and organizing others to not buy their shit.
I see what you’re saying and where you’re getting at; our system is a rigged game and there’s almost nothing we can do about it. But what do you want the most desperate people to do? Lie there and take it until we just die? Or become politicians or corporations and then do the same to others? Being a member of the middle class is the middle road: go to school, get a degree, get a career where you can afford to have a home and 2.5 kids, live out your life in comfort without bothering anyone. But more and more, that’s proving to just not be feasible anymore. The degrees are worthless. Finance is sucking up all the careers. And kids? Seriously, now?
Again, I know this is all just unsubstantial generalized ideology I’m kind of just spouting out right now. However, if the game’s fucked, but there’s an exploit that we as a people can abuse, then any effort into investigating that, whether it’s a policy defining lawsuit headed to the Supreme Court, or an enraged tirade at a rich dude in Zucotti Park, is not a wasted one.
Iceland did a complete deregulation of its banks under the guise of making a free market. Guess what, they where the first to go down.
I like how you referring to pre WW1. Like seriously, monopolies, insider trading, manipulation, forced labor, child labor, unregulated dumping of arsenic/mercury. Yeah those where better times. People making obscene amounts of money is meaningless to an economy if these rich people don’t do their part.
Its also obvious how you still haven’t made the connection that when capitalism first starts off it looks all jazzy and great, but over time capitalism will fail. Raw capitalism always fail, will continue to fail, and isn’t the solution to anything. Saying that capatilism is the only solution is as dumb as 74% tax increase on the rich is the solution
The whole point of the greed thing is because your regan economics function on the idea the rich will inject money into the state. but they don’t, greed is the issue and its why im using it. Seriously start connecting the dots. These Freudian? economic principles are absolute failure.
BTW, i must have missed the memo where regulation of industry is socialism.
So you agree that the bail out is BAD, you just don’t think it’s a redistribution of wealth from the middle class to wall street but because of greed? The tax payer money doesn’t just go from the government to Wall street because of some ghost. It’s government giving away your parents’ hard earned money to other people that ‘need’ it.
It’s called socialising the loss, the same way we socialise poor destitute bums on the street with welfare. For some reason, it okay when you give tax payer money to a jobless person but when it’s a group of rich people that went broke you aren’t okay with the idea anymore? Be consistent.
And I don’t see why you think I suscribe to reagonomics or that other trickle down stuff. I don’t, I just think that taxing the rich and corporations will ultimately not work because they are more powerful than the rest of us and they are smart enough to pretty much option select against anything. We have to rethink and reengineer the civilisation we know of and I’m sure we won’t start to do that until the US is a completely trashed 3rd world nation where I can trade bread on the street for sex. That shit’s going to be so free.
“Reagonomics”/“Trickle-Down”/Friedman-ism = don’t tax the rich
Taxing the rich will not solve the problems, but at least it will be more fair if we close up tax loopholes and raise their taxes at least above what it is now, if not to how it was before the Reagan era.
And we DO have to re-think and re-engineer civilization. We need to get out of fuedalism, and stop worrying about petty shit when we have real problems going on. And we need to be responsible to the planet we live on, and have respect (and love…) for one another.
Kind of unrelated but I heard/read somewhere that it would take $200 billion dollars to build the facilities necessary to end world hunger. The TARP bailout alone was $700 billion dollars…
Sigh.
Right now about 1 billion people in the world are starving.
You are talking like these cops have military training and the students were the enemy. I’m pretty sure the police don’t have much, if any, experience dealing with a situation like this. What are they supposed to do? They tell people to go, the people don’t go, what is the correct step at that point? If you are telling me that they should have acted like a military unit and treated the protesters like enemies, I think that would be a horrible decision. Of course, this is civil disobedience, so you expect this kind of stuff. I don’t know what kind of action is correct when there are protesters that want to start shit, but treating protesters like an enemy and attacking them with extreme prejudice isn’t what police should be doing.
You mean to tell me that police aren’t trained on crowd control? Are you fucking kidding me?
No, but in this situation, what is the acceptable escalation of force? With things like civil disobedience it’s morally difficult to determine the amount of force to use. You can’t just go in there beating them all like Rodney King, but then you can’t just leave them there because you are ordered to clear them out and restore the peace. It’s extremely difficult to train for situations like this.
You mean to tell me that a group of people seated peacefully on the ground presents some sort of extremely difficult situation that police are ill-equipped to handle? Right… because non use of force by the protesters warrants use of force by the police, because according to you, this was some complex, incredibly difficult situation that had no clear endgame. Gotcha, seated citizens > years of police training on crowd control.
Tomorrow, I’m going to gather 5 of my friends, and we are going have a peaceful, non violent protest of the speed limit being too slow by parking our cars sideways on the street. The cops better not use force to remove us because it is within our rights to protest peacefully.
Per Hague v. C.I.O., 307 U.S. 496 (1939), streets are okay to use. Now, once you involve vehicles and the like, I’m not sure if that negates your protection as pretty much everything I’ve read states “individuals” assembling.
For people who are still harping solar as a viable replacement
I was doing some calculations. Let’s take the average solar energy in Watts per meter square of sunlight in the US (somewhere around 166 W/m^2 depending on your location. At best it is about 375 W/m^2 in the Southwest US) and let’s assume we have a solar panel which has 100% efficiency (An unrealistic assumption since the current ones are closer to 6-13%) and we aren’t restricted on how big of a solar panel we can make (infinite resources and money isn’t an issue). Let’s figure out how big of a solar panel we would need to replace the US’s current fuel consumption of 9.12 million barrels of gasoline per day
Average Solar energy = 166 W/m^2
W = J/s
Since it is averaged to be 166 W for the whole day that means in a single day there is an average of 14.5 MJ/m^2. To put this in terms the average person can understand this is the equivalent of 0.00268 barrels of gasoline per square meter. This is found using the conversion factors
Density of Gasoline = 719.7 g/L
Energy per gram of Gas = 47.39 kJ/g
1 barrel = 42 gallons
The US consumes 9.12 million barrels. So in order to generate enough solar energy to fill that requirement we would need a solar panel the size of 1329 square miles. To put that in perspective that is a quarter of the size of Connecticut
Ok not bad right? Let’s figure out how big we would need for the US’s total energy consumption of 1.29*10^18 J (1.29 exa joules)
(1.29 EJ)/(14.5 MJ/m^2) = 3.47972*10^4 square miles
Or just about 20% of California.
Even if you take the best the US can do (375 W/m^2) it is still about 1.54*10^4 square miles. How big is this? 5% of the size of the state of Texas or 10% of California. That is a massive solar panel! And this is all under massively unrealistic expectations. This is with 100% efficiency when the current panels are closer to 6-13%.
Basically Solar will never be anything more than a supplement power source. It might get good enough to generate power for cars, but past that it isn’t viable as anything besides a supplemental power source. The only way to increase the efficiency is to put a power plant on the moon where the atmosphere doesn’t absorb all the energy.
I have more hope for Geothermal and other types of power than I do for solar.
That first vid is embarrassing. Those kids should go get a job
so yea, how can anyone argue against this.
http://chomsky.info/articles/20111101.htm
article in spoiler
[details=Spoiler](This article is adapted from Noam Chomsky’s talk at the Occupy Boston encampment on Dewey Square on Oct. 22. He spoke as part of the Howard Zinn Memorial Lecture Series held by Occupy Boston’s on-site Free University. Zinn was a historian, activist and author of A People’s History of the United States.)
Delivering a Howard Zinn lecture is a bittersweet experience for me. I regret that he’s not here to take part in and invigorate a movement that would have been the dream of his life. Indeed, he laid a lot of the groundwork for it.
If the bonds and associations being established in these remarkable events can be sustained through a long, hard period ahead – victories don’t come quickly – the Occupy protests could mark a significant moment in American history.
I’ve never seen anything quite like the Occupy movement in scale and character, here and worldwide. The Occupy outposts are trying to create cooperative communities that just might be the basis for the kinds of lasting organizations necessary to overcome the barriers ahead and the backlash that’s already coming.
That the Occupy movement is unprecedented seems appropriate because this is an unprecedented era, not just at this moment but since the 1970s.
The 1970s marked a turning point for the United States. Since the country began, it had been a developing society, not always in very pretty ways, but with general progress toward industrialization and wealth.
Even in dark times, the expectation was that the progress would continue. I’m just old enough to remember the Great Depression. By the mid-1930s, even though the situation was objectively much harsher than today, the spirit was quite different.
A militant labor movement was organizing – the CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations) and others – and workers were staging sit-down strikes, just one step from taking over the factories and running them themselves.
Under popular pressure, New Deal legislation was passed. The prevailing sense was that we would get out of the hard times.
Now there’s a sense of hopelessness, sometimes despair. This is quite new in our history. During the 1930s, working people could anticipate that the jobs would come back. Today, if you’re a worker in manufacturing, with unemployment practically at Depression levels, you know that those jobs may be gone forever if current policies persist.
That change in the American outlook has evolved since the 1970s. In a reversal, several centuries of industrialization turned to de-industrialization. Of course manufacturing continued, but overseas – very profitable, though harmful to the workforce.
The economy shifted to financialization. Financial institutions expanded enormously. A vicious cycle between finance and politics accelerated. Increasingly, wealth concentrated in the financial sector. Politicians, faced with the rising cost of campaigns, were driven ever deeper into the pockets of wealthy backers.
And the politicians rewarded them with policies favorable to Wall Street: deregulation, tax changes, relaxation of rules of corporate governance, which intensified the vicious cycle. Collapse was inevitable. In 2008, the government once again came to the rescue of Wall Street firms presumably too big to fail, with leaders too big to jail.
Today, for the one-tenth of 1 percent of the population who benefited most from these decades of greed and deceit, everything is fine.
In 2005, Citigroup – which, by the way, has repeatedly been saved by government bailouts – saw the wealthy as a growth opportunity. The bank released a brochure for investors that urged them to put their money into something called the Plutonomy Index, which identified stocks in companies that cater to the luxury market.
“The world is dividing into two blocs – the plutonomy and the rest,” Citigroup summarized. "The U.S., U.K. and Canada are the key plutonomies – economies powered by the wealthy."
As for the non-rich, they’re sometimes called the precariat – people who live a precarious existence at the periphery of society. The “periphery,” however, has become a substantial proportion of the population in the U.S. and elsewhere.
So we have the plutonomy and the precariat: the 1 percent and the 99 percent, as Occupy sees it – not literal numbers, but the right picture.
The historic reversal in people’s confidence about the future is a reflection of tendencies that could become irreversible. The Occupy protests are the first major popular reaction that could change the dynamic.
I’ve kept to domestic issues. But two dangerous developments in the international arena overshadow everything else.
For the first time in human history, there are real threats to the survival of the human species. Since 1945 we have had nuclear weapons, and it seems a miracle we have survived them. But policies of the Obama administration and its allies are encouraging escalation.
The other threat, of course, is environmental catastrophe. Practically every country in the world is taking at least halting steps to do something about it. The United States is taking steps backward. A propaganda system, openly acknowledged by the business community, declares that climate change is all a liberal hoax: Why pay attention to these scientists?
If this intransigence continues in the richest, most powerful country in the world, the catastrophe won’t be averted.
Something must be done in a disciplined, sustained way, and soon. It won’t be easy to proceed. There will be hardships and failures – it’s inevitable. But unless the process that’s taking place here and elsewhere in the country and around the world continues to grow and becomes a major force in society and politics, the chances for a decent future are bleak.
You can’t achieve significant initiatives without a large, active, popular base. It’s necessary to get out into the country and help people understand what the Occupy movement is about – what they themselves can do, and what the consequences are of not doing anything.
Organizing such a base involves education and activism. Education doesn’t mean telling people what to believe – it means learning from them and with them.
Karl Marx said, “The task is not just to understand the world but to change it.” A variant to keep in mind is that if you want to change the world you’d better try to understand it. That doesn’t mean listening to a talk or reading a book, though that’s helpful sometimes. You learn from participating. You learn from others. You learn from the people you’re trying to organize. We all have to gain the understanding and the experience to formulate and implement ideas.
The most exciting aspect of the Occupy movement is the construction of the linkages that are taking place all over. If they can be sustained and expanded, Occupy can lead to dedicated efforts to set society on a more humane course.
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The real issue with letting the “people” have a direct say (instead of representatives), is that the common person doesn’t have enough information. Just look at this thread, there are people talking about economics and the economy, but there is MAYBE a couple of people who have any idea of what is going on. Before you can really understand the economy and how we got here, you need to understand the basics of economics.
So please guys, go study the math, learn the assumptions, educate yourself before you continue talking. Don’t take other people’s words for granted. It is not something that you’re going to be able to learn in a night from a couple of essays.
This thread is informative, its smart, I like reading it even though I don’t have much to say but there is this one minor detail I can’t quite get over: why is there one guy with that terrorist dude as his avatar?
The problem is that the peoples’ representatives don’t know shit either. If they did, the country wouldn’t be in this mess. I honestly don’t see the difference between a well-intentioned if under-informed citizen and some Senator that doesn’t have any fucking clue what the real world is.