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Hatred towards Wall Street
- Thread starter Blln
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Karl Marx was right, after all- history is largely the story of class warfare. Today's economic "crisis" is really just the latest in a long history of proletariat-inflaming events. Keep you eye out for the Soviet States of America.
Of course, we all know what happens to the bourguesie... Think Czar Nicholas II.
The metagame is shifting; capitalism isn't as effective as it once was. I think it's time for a Communist resurgence. Didn't Iceland Edit: have a riot because of the economy?
And Cuba doesn't count.
Of course, we all know what happens to the bourguesie... Think Czar Nicholas II.
The metagame is shifting; capitalism isn't as effective as it once was. I think it's time for a Communist resurgence. Didn't Iceland Edit: have a riot because of the economy?
And Cuba doesn't count.
The "richhunt" is the classic tool of the statist.
Forget Wall Street, Barack Obama and every single hack with a (D) next to their name should be beefing up their security in a world where people targeted who is actually to blame rather than who the President pretends is the problem.
But alas, no. Too many people believe more government is the solution to government caused, government sponsored, government funded, and government run crises.
To those of you who might say, "but Wall Street sold them the bad stuff!" Yes. But then instead of letting them fail like what is supposed to happen when the shit hits the fan on a private company's malfeasance, instead they get a big fat subsidy from the government. We need more TR and less FDR (The trust-buster vs. the subsidizer).
"I don't want to be in charge of car companies" ~Barack Obama.
Sounds stupid coming from the guy who nationalized one of his own free accord, doesn't it?
Karl Marx was right only insofar as proles are easily led to their own slaughter by statists who say one thing and do the exact opposite, knowing that every mental midgit will buy their spiel until they obtain absolute power. As long as Barack Obama and the other statists have your mother to point at as the evil, exploitative borgeoisie, they can do whatever they like.
Tell your mother Thank You and God Bless You for being one of the few actual producers left in America. If you want a greedy monopoly to oppose, look no futher than the Capitol Building and 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Oh by the way: Know who approved the AIG bonuses people got so angry about? President Barack Obama himself.
Forget Wall Street, Barack Obama and every single hack with a (D) next to their name should be beefing up their security in a world where people targeted who is actually to blame rather than who the President pretends is the problem.
But alas, no. Too many people believe more government is the solution to government caused, government sponsored, government funded, and government run crises.
To those of you who might say, "but Wall Street sold them the bad stuff!" Yes. But then instead of letting them fail like what is supposed to happen when the shit hits the fan on a private company's malfeasance, instead they get a big fat subsidy from the government. We need more TR and less FDR (The trust-buster vs. the subsidizer).
"I don't want to be in charge of car companies" ~Barack Obama.
Sounds stupid coming from the guy who nationalized one of his own free accord, doesn't it?
Karl Marx was right only insofar as proles are easily led to their own slaughter by statists who say one thing and do the exact opposite, knowing that every mental midgit will buy their spiel until they obtain absolute power. As long as Barack Obama and the other statists have your mother to point at as the evil, exploitative borgeoisie, they can do whatever they like.
Tell your mother Thank You and God Bless You for being one of the few actual producers left in America. If you want a greedy monopoly to oppose, look no futher than the Capitol Building and 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Oh by the way: Know who approved the AIG bonuses people got so angry about? President Barack Obama himself.
Letting those companies fail would only accelerate the crisis. Putting a lot of people unemployed, without salary, those people would stop to consume a lot of things and many other companies would have a big fall in their sales. Without the profit from the sales those companies would start dismissing their workers and the cycle starts again.
That's one of the capitalism's contradictions: while in stable times the companies argue that the State should not interfere in the economy, in times of crisis they need the help of State to survive.
Bankruptcy does not mean that the companies completely fail; in fact, bankruptcy for GM would probably be the best thing for them. In that case, they can reorder their company, especially with work things out with the unions. What's not helping them right now (besides people not buying their sub par cars) is the fact that they have to pay forklift operators $100,000 a year due to the unions, and that they can't fire bad employees without having to run it through the unions, who promptly say no.
Failure =/= true failure of the company.
Right, because after years of buildup, the man who has been in office for less than 200 days is clearly to blame. The years of (R) deregulation had absolutely nothing to do with this.
And yeah, it is pretty much bullshit that people would attack those who are not directly responsible for cheating people out of billions.
No, Capitalism says if you fall on your ass, you fall on your ass. That is one of the statists pretend contradictions of capitalism. At best you are describing a capitalist economy infected by statist protectionism.
The debt created from Obama's massive funding of failed companies is a debt vacuum that is going to prolong any damage that could possibly be done by a single company of any size failing.
When unemployment rates are low it is not because there are any fewer people losing their jobs. People lose and pick up jobs all the time even when unemployment is at record lows.
Obama has funnelled all this money into these failed companies, propped up their unions, and squandered trillions of dollars. His newest act of incompetence was sending out social security checks to dead people. This is the contradiction of fiscal liberalism: That with inifinite money you can solve all problems by spending your way out of them, yet with each new dollar you create you essentially make each one of your infinite dollars less valuable, because the hard truth is that money is in finite demand.
If AIG, Chrysler, Ford, GM, and Bear Stearms all failed simultaneously, a lot of people would lose their jobs. Guess what, thats just more market share for their competitors to pick up. People would have sought other employment and known their company was going bankrupt rather than hoping, praying for the statist salvation subsidy. Subsidizing only prolongs the agony and instead of wasting the private capital that was located in the business, it wastes taxpayer dollars as well. The problem is statists believe the taxpayer to be an unending resource and spend it with that assumption in mind.
Yeha jrrrr, banking was a pretty damn unregulated industry. Not. Banking is probably one of the most regulated industries in existence. If anything, overregulation is what did them in by demanding they give to unqualified minority buyers who statistically had no chance of paying back.
This is a government created crisis caused by government regulations.
And yes, Obama is to blame for HIS budget of 4.3 trillion dolars. It is now HIS problem because HE is now president and he has HIS party in control of the purse strings. Thus all spending since the day HIS budget passed falls entirely on HIS shoulders. HE dedcided to bail out General Motors. HE approved the AIG bonuses personally, and HE is the one who regularly makes statements like "I am the only one between you and the pitchforks." HE is the one who pushed for sending social security and stimulus checks without basic verification of whether the recipients still drew breath, among other mistakes which fall squarely on his shoulders. Accountability in government is a valuable thing.
Obama is entirely to blame for all actions stemming from his budget. His actions as a Senator did not help the matter any.
Well to be fair, Bush did have a number of non-Conservative fiscal policies that he implemented, and the banking industry was forced to give out loans to almost everyone who asked for one.
That doesn't make sense. If all those companies fail the number of unemployed people would be so big that would affect the consume rate in U.S. How these people would consume other companies' products without a job or salary? Also, those remaining companies could'nt absorb this massive number of unemployed people.
Also, your logic about unemployement doesn't make sense.
People pick and lose jobs according the avaliability of them. How do you suppose to employ 1.000 people when there is space for only 100 in the job market? The 900 remaining would continue unemployed.
Too bad every communist country known turned either to capitalism or a totalitarian government. Communism doesn't work. Works well on paper.
@OP: I have no problem with people earning lots of money. In my limited knowledge, that company used money improperly from the money from the bailout which pisses me off to no extent. Even with the bailout, 25 people have already been indicted in using the bailout improperly. Also, the bonuses they companies treated themselves, while everyone else is getting fucked, is just not justified. As long as your mom as the executive didn't give herself lavish bonuses, then I have nothing against you.
Right, which is why we should cut taxes and then start wars overseas.
http://www.bizjournals.com/phoenix/stories/2008/09/15/daily81.html
Most people that study the economy tend to disagree with you.
This started during the end of the Clinton era and had been slowly building up during the Bush years. Because Bush failed to act, the crisis got worse. It's amazing how much government fails when you live by the policy that government fails. Conservatism is a self-fulfilling prophecy: they get elected on the platform that government sucks and should be reduced, then they do so poorly in office that everyone thinks that the government sucks and should be gotten rid of.
Obama's budget for 2010 is $3.5 trillion, so I don't know where you're getting your number from. Bush's last budget was well over that, and it didn't even include costs for his Iraq and Afghanistan debacles. His budget is aiming to halve the deficit by the end of his 4th year in office. Bush's last budget increased spending by 3.8%, at the expense of you and I.
I'm not saying that Obama is doing everything right, I am just saying that it is absolutely asinine and false to put the blame for this anywhere near President Obama. It's his problem now, but that doesn't mean he created it, which was what I was saying originally. The dude hasnt even been in office for 200 days and you're putting the blame of the last 8 years on him? No wonder why Republicans are the laughing stock of America right now....
Yeah, communism might not work...but those "socialist" European countries like France and England sure are loving it. They are happier than Americans, they live longer than we do, they are born healthier than we are, they have lower unemployment rates, they have better educational systems for the most part...there's a huge difference between Communist Russia and the people who are crying "socialist!" in America today.
A wonderful untested theory, but one which inherently doesn't work in practice. Just like Marxism. We have been hemmoraghing jobs left and right even with the massive public waste Obama has managed to generate, losing 500,000, nay, 600,000+ jobs a month for months on end. Clearly the statist answer neither saves nor creates jobs, nor stems the tide of unemployment. FDR never even got the unemployment rate below digits and all he did was try statist experiments in massive debt generation.
As it stands all those companies are losing the vast bulk of jobs anyway. The only thing your favored solution did was make it cost billions, perhaps trillions, more of other people's money.
By growing the economy through smaller taxation and less intrusive regulation allowing people to keep and spend their own wealth on their own pursuits, thus producing wealth, thus creating jobs, also known as the exact opposite of confiscatory taxes combined with inefficent government spending. If people are allowed to prosper then more jobs will be created. If, like statists, you care more about some arbitrary income gap than you do about enhanced prosperity for everyone, you will fail to understand this basic principle. Statism requires economics to be a zero sum game. Capitalism is a positive-sum economic theory.
Statists will instead hate people like Danyul's mother because they make "too much money" and work for "evil" corporations. All because the statist cares more about the income cap: a number on a sheet of paper, than they do overall economic well-being. I'd rather have some people making a million dollars and some making $30,000 and have every single person eat and live comfortably indoors then have everyone make $50,000 and live in degraded shacks with no electricty, water, or reliable food source.
Yeah except none of the things you mentioned would actually happen in an unregulated market. We have regulations currently and we still can't stop people from stealing billions of dollars at a time. Ahhh, the wonders of capitalism. There is no incentive to play fair in a free market, since chances are you'll be too big of a company before people catch on anyways (Microsoft). People being rich isn't the problem, its the fact that they get rich directly because they made other people poor. When the 400 richest people own more than the entire bottom 50% of the population, something isn't working as planned. We aren't dealing with some people making a million dollars and some making 30k and living comfortably, we're dealing with some people making billions and some people living off of 10k and not being able to feed themselves without having to resort to government handouts. The people living in degraded shacks with no electricity, water or reliable food source is happening RIGHT NOW under your godly capitalism. "Trickle down" is such an appropriate term- the rich get anything they want, and if the poor are lucky, they will get enough of a trickle to hold them over for the night.
The reason why people hate investment bankers so much is that they earn their money by moving money around instead of contributing something tangible to society.
The problem with cutting taxes to make government small is that nobody wants to cut spending. Cutting taxes is politically popular, and so is raising spending, and nobody wants to do either. That is why the government so often runs up large debts like the current one: politicians don't do things to raise money as much as use it. I hope that sometime soon we'll have someone in charge with the courage to raise taxes and reduce spending, because the country will be in for an economic disaster if the debt keeps growing.
P.S. Have you noticed how Deck Knight turns every debate he touches into one about the size of government?
The problem with cutting taxes to make government small is that nobody wants to cut spending. Cutting taxes is politically popular, and so is raising spending, and nobody wants to do either. That is why the government so often runs up large debts like the current one: politicians don't do things to raise money as much as use it. I hope that sometime soon we'll have someone in charge with the courage to raise taxes and reduce spending, because the country will be in for an economic disaster if the debt keeps growing.
P.S. Have you noticed how Deck Knight turns every debate he touches into one about the size of government?
Cutting taxes increases overall tax revenue. It's called dynamic tax analysis. A brilliant insight jrrrr, you're finally catching on.
Also jrrrr what would your response to 9/11 be? Get executed by Muslim terrorists so as not to offend them by your very existence?
Or perhaps you will note Obama has squandered more money in two months than the Iraq war in its entirety. I do know how much you hate expensive wars. You much prefer money to be spent on things like union payoffs and nationalizing industries than silly things like global security, freedom for places not named America, and key startegic allies in the Middle East for example.
Link: Obama, McCain camps point fingers.
Either that was a very sloppy link jrrr, or you think posting a random hyperlink about campaign political sniping is proof enough that something is regulated or deregulated, as if regulation is entirely binary.
Bush tried to privatize social security but the Democrats blocked him. Bush tried multiple times to address the crisis, but year in and year out Democrats like Barney Frank (D-MA) [my district, no less.] were saying to roll the dice and that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were financially sound. All while getting hundreds of thousands of dollars from the governmental agencies.
No, Conservatism works every time it is actually tried. Liberals live by a self-fulfilling prophecy: the get elected on a platform that only big government can fix big government, and then they expand government so greatly while in office that they think they need more government to solve the newer, bigger government, ad infinitum, until nobody can afford their grand promises any more. Bush is a great example of fiscal liberalism in action. Conservatism needs no qualifiers, least of all compassionaite. There is no system of governance crueler than liberalism, which promises something for nothing then delivers nothing for a great amount of something. Fiscal liberalism is why GPA in public schools has an inverse relationship to government spending on them.
Obama's budget for 2010? You do realize its 2009, right jrrr? And his spending now? That's the 2009 budget.
The Washington Post sums this up nicely: [Deficit in billions (Bush actual, Obama projected)]
Obama may cut the deficit in half, but only from his newer, bloated 2009 number. In other words he will increase the deficit by 50%.
In fact, that graph is old news from March.
Obama's deficit will be even larger than indicated.
Bush is small time. He measured his deficits in mere hundred billions.
Obama is feeding it and thus it becomes his problem. Top cabinet officials Rahm Emmanuel and Hillary Clinton have been quoted saying "never waste a good crisis." Obama has done nothing but spend irresponsibly and make this crisis even worse. I'm sorry but if you're careening down the highway at 70 miles per hour and your friend passes out at the wheel, and then when you take over you push the car to 95 mph on the same trajectory you can't claim you inherited the mess you're in. That is a lame excuse, and you should expect better form the President of The United States. I didn't vote for him because I knew he was this clueless, backward and naive. You however likely did vote for the moron.
Who made you poor jrrr? Did Danyul's mum steal from your piggy bank? Where are these phantom people stealing your money? (Hint: Check out the federal, state, and FICA taxes, then call your representative_
The Top 10% pay 73 cents of every dollar the bottom 50% leech off of welfare. You're right, something isn't working out as planned. The bottom 50% don't have any skin in the game.
@Staraptor Call:
1.The ostensible purpose of an investment banker is to provide a service that allows your money to grow more quickly, safely, and effectively depending on your desires. The people who hate them tend not to have enough money to invest and thus don't use their services. It's easy to hate something you don't use. This hatred feeds off of jealousy, a destructive emotion that liberalism and socialism exploit for power. If only people talked about their investment banker friends as often as they did their gay or minority friends.
2.Ever notice how the size and function of government effects fiscal policy, the topic of this discussion?
The top 1% pays between 45% to 50% of all taxes in the US each year.
I don't know where do you see so many jobs around. Many big companies are mass-dismissing their employees.
Expading economy doesn't meas the creation of new jobs. The growing of most companies results in tecnological improvments and a bigger automatization of the industry. With automatization, less workers are required. The marxists are not agaisnt automatization, but the point is that under the capitalist system, this process leave millions of people unemployed where the employed ones have their surplus value exctrated by the company.
Also, you don't need to have a Cold-War-Paranoid idea of what Marxism is.
The marxist theory is more than the idealization of a socialist society it is the scientific analysis of capitalism based on dialectial materialism. For Marx, the problem with capitalism is not the "evil" companies or rich people, they are mere consequences of an economic system that is fated to die due to his contradictions. Capitalism is a part of human history that we are living now, it's not eternal, like the feudal system, the slave system, etc. There's no "End of history" like Fukuyama says, the History of men are in constant movement and the Capitalism is just one part of this movement.
Stalin and Mao only distorted Marx and Lenin theories and made something much far from what they planned.
Well, I would start by finding the people who were actually responsible. And maybe your action might be part of the reason why these "Muslim terrorists" are mad at us? It's been proven time and time again that you can't defeat terrorism with military muscle. We're losing these wars on an ideological front. If you were a poor Pakistani farmer, and a militant group showed you pictures of Americans forcefully sodomizing your countrymen with objects while they are helpless in a prison cell, telling you stories about how Americans are literally torturing muslims to death, wouldn't that piss you off just a little bit? Wouldn't al-Qaeda be a more appealing option if you just witnessed your entire town get leveled by an unmanned American plane? What if another country was doing the same things to Americans that Americans in our glorious Army are doing to other people right now? These wars aren't working, but obviously you wouldn't care since you are only pro-life until its time for that baby to grow up to die for its country!
And liberalism has worked better when it has been tried =\
You can't really blame him, its the only debate where his side actually has logical backing. After his embarrassing posts about gay marriage, torture, etc, at least he's using legitimate arguments this time instead of "THEYRE EVIL, KILL EM ALL"
It's rather hypocritical to rant against "statism" whilst simultaneously defending torture, the Patriot Act, discriminatory marriage benefits, non-porous borders, and interventionist foreign policy in general. At least strive for some basic ideological consistency.
Or they will defend them as part of the symbiotic corporate/state relationship.
I missed these gems:
How about actually trying to find those responsible and asking "why" they did it (hint: it is more political than religious!), rather than immediately invading countries and declaring a "crusade"?
Deck Knight said:
Or they will defend them as part of the symbiotic corporate/state relationship.
A "communist country" is an oxymoron.Eraddd said:
I missed these gems:
Deck Knight said:
How about actually trying to find those responsible and asking "why" they did it (hint: it is more political than religious!), rather than immediately invading countries and declaring a "crusade"?
Oh, please. If we were really interested in "spreading democracy", we would have begun years ago in the dozens of oppressive nations in which we have significant military installations and diplomatic relations. Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Oman, UAE, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Iraq, etc, etc. And we would not have supported the same régimes we are now "liberating" people from, or looked the other way while our allies commit atrocities.
Deck, that graph you posted of the budget is horribly misleading. Bush used accounting tricks to hide expenditures from the budget. If you don't believe me, go look up what the budget's total cut for the War in Iraq was. Zero dollars. He hid that massive waste of money in emergency spending bills. There are other examples too :(
Obama's spending a ton of money in 2009. Why are you so outraged? That's what the theory of Keynesian economics says you should do. That's what FDR did.
Obama's spending a ton of money in 2009. Why are you so outraged? That's what the theory of Keynesian economics says you should do. That's what FDR did.
Then in socialistic systems you have people living in hovels performing manual labor. Capitalism allows people to ascend past menial physical tasks and affords them more leisure time. It leads to a more skilled and therefore more intelligent society by neccessity. Your argument might hold some weight if this were 1860 and the industrial revolution was just starting, but the fact is we've automized just about every single thing that can possibly be automized, and we need humans to oversee and troubleshoot the increasingly technical nature of society.
Furthermore about every company in existence is a counterpoint to your assertion economic expansion does not create jobs. That huge conglomorate Microsoft started in Bill Gates' garage. Don't tell me economic expansion doesn't create jobs, your very Operating System proves otherwise. (Unless you have a Mac. Then replace Bill Gates with Steve Jobs.)
Furthermore, someone has to be employed doing the automizing. Once everything is automized people have more leisure time, and thus want to get bigger and better things. Thus retail shops, who will always need a human cashier and a human manager, and a human police officer to stop criminals. When they go to purchase or build a home someone will need to build it. They will always need an architect and tradesman for initial buildup and repair.
Quite frankly automization merely moves jobs from the manufacturing sector to the services, trades, and technology sectors. Prosperous people will pay good money to "automize" their lawn care by hiring a landscaping company.
Yes, and they stepped right on Marx's back about the end of "flawed" capitalism based on the "exploitation" of the proletariat by the borgeiosie. Marx was a class warrior first and his ignorant tracts and naivite caused nearly all the suffering in the 20th century. Marx's greatest contradiction was his assumption that anyone who wraps themselves in proletarian garb was incapable of the greed and avarice he found endemic in capitalism. His was a fatal misunderstanding of human nature, and millions of people have paid the price for his nonsensical ramblings.
Capitalism's greatest flaw is that it works only too well in creating prosperity, and is thus marked by periods of boom and bust by people who use their new prosperity inefficiently.
Capitalism is here to stay forever, assuming a few crazy Marxists who want a new Dark Age do not succeed in their attempts to destroy it from within. The very existence of the United States of America and the Fall of the Soviet Union is proof of that. Marx's theory is for idealists, academics, and other non-producers. Capitalism is for real people. Real people act in their own self-interest, and spread their prosperity on the basis it will be returned to them. Capitalism is the perfect system for a moral people because only a moral people can curb its excesses. America excels at creating moral people, or at least that is how it was founded and convceived.
Did you really read what I wrote?
"the marxists are not agaisnt automatization, but the point is that under the capitalist system, this process leave millions of people unemployed where the employed ones have their surplus value exctrated by the company."
The capitalism system cannot use automatization for freeing people from work, as it should be used.
The demand on service sectors will never absorb all people in the world. I ask you again where do you see so many jobs around. How many workers does Microsof and Apple have? I bet that it isn't neither 0,1% of U.S population.
You are rigth when you say that Capitalism creates prosperity, even Marx assumed that in Das Kapital, the problem is that this prosperity is a privilege of few people. Most part of the population doesn't have acess of all properity that Capitalism generate, and under the Capitalism system this will always remain, a massive number of poor people and only few enjoying properity. Even the ones that are employed cannot have all this prosperity since they have their surplus value extracted.
You cannot argue that Marx was wrong just saying that he was "naive", "immoral" or "ignorant". You may not agree with his theories, but at least try to read Das Kapital or you'll be only a Cold War paranoid.