I think its the worst kind of irony that this shared currency, this symbol of a unified Europe, has really only served to bring cultural and economic disparity into the light. Already I hear people saying, "the Greeks had it coming". "They're lazy.". "They don't work." etc etc as if a whole country could be so completely full of moochers and layabouts that it is on the verge of collapse. So we'll go back to eating each other like cannibals. Wonderful.

Yep. What about if the cop had been Hispanic or black? It's no mystery that the inordinate amount of prisoners in the US are in the system due to profiling just as it's no mystery that by design, a socio-economic disparity and fear of incarceration has been institutionalized in our culture.

What, 50 years after Brown vs. BOE the violence and ignorance bred into our culture has neighborhoods, schools once again either 95% white, black, or Hispanic???

This is all by design....funny thing is you couldn't have said this about 25 years ago but it's glaringly obvious now isn't it??

America is so fucked and the goddamned media and public education is the mechanism of our downfall. We are breeding some of the most socially functionally retarded humans on the planet....

This is so sleazy, and it's the exact same schtick the Republicans used against Clinton.

1. Manufacture a bunch of half baked scandals.
2. Link them all to the President, whether he was involved or not.
3. Launch them all at the same time so they are hard to respond to.
4. Describe them with minimum detail and maximum hyperbole.
5..Cross your fingers that the public won't scrutinize your claims.
6. Use manufactured outrage to try and boost your corrupt, floundering, obstructionist party in the upcoming elections.

Most of these manufactured scandals have been debunked, or are a lot more nuanced than portrayed by this GOPer, but many will just watch this video and leave it at that.

Meanwhile, unemployment remains high, the infrastructure crumbles, gridlock keeps the congress from fixing the economy,, anonymous corporate cash floods our elections, economic disparity grows, there is still no accountability on Wall Street, the drone program continues to kill innocents and Bradley Manning sits on trial.

You know that recently in China a man walked into a school and stabbed 22 kids? Guess what, they all survived. (See this UK Guardian article for more info). You're right, taking away the guns won't stop people from being violent but it will drastically reduce their capabilities for committing mass fatalities on the scale of Sandy Hook.

About banning assault rifles--since nearly all gun deaths in the U.S. occur because of handguns, not rifles, making handguns illegal would actually make far more logical sense--not that it would ever happen in the U.S., mind you.

About the "mentally disturbed" comment: less than 4% of violent crimes in the U.S. are committed by those with a mental illness. Identifying those "mentally disturbed" as you called them that will actually commit a violent act is not nearly as easy as it sounds; you might want to read this NY Times piece on the subject. Alcohol and drug use is actually a much better predictor of violent acts than mental illness is.

Back on topic to this clip--I'm saddened that Jon Stewart has fallen into the trap of thinking of this as a "gun control" issue. It isn't. There are already millions of guns in circulation, many of which are unregistered and would be impossible to confiscate in the case of a ban. The horse is out of the barn already, and it's far too late to start talking about shutting the doors. We need instead to be addressing the issue of why people are using the guns to commit crimes in the first place: economic disparity, the war on drugs, a culture that glorifies violence and "getting back" at the other guy, a mental health system that has difficulty both identifying and treating those with violent tendencies, etc.

People want the quick fix, the easy solution--there isn't one. The sooner Stewart, Obama, the NRA, and the rest of the U.S. figures that out, the sooner we can start having a real discussion about how to make our society a better and safer place.

Valid my ass.

The brand of free market bullshit that this guy pedals has fucked our entire system, led us to endless corporate war, created vast economic disparity, corrupted our politics beyond imagination, and wrought havok on the underclasses.

We should have national healthcare like the rest of the civilized world. Until we get that, I see no problem whatsoever in asking insurance companies to hand out contraceptives free of charge. Contraceptives are a lot fucking cheaper than the medical costs involved in both pregnancy and treating venereal disease, so this is a gift to the insurance industry. One wonders why they didn't think of it themselves.

Yes, I do hate this clown and his ideology that has failed time and time and time and time and time and time again. If he even once took some responsibility for his miserable career of failure, I might be more sympathetic. If he hadn't gone down to OWS to talk shit, I might be more sympathetic. I'm sick of these assholes. I think Schiff should be called out and reprimanded, and that's precisely what I did. I should remind you that my comments and downvotes are dissent as well, and that Mr. Schiff has a much bigger megaphone than my measly single downvote. Deal with it.

And why is it that I should not be permitted to dissent against Peter Schiff in your mind? Why should I not have the right to rail against this guy with my comments and downvotes? If you don't want your sacred cows charbroiled, then keep them in the fucking barn. Otherwise, you are going to have to learn to live in a world where people might disagree with you.

The womb of an American woman is the most dangerous place for an unborn baby to be! Oh, that's so rich that conservatives would bring up economic disparity after how they shat upon the Occupy demonstrations. ROTFLMFAO

^JesusFreak

Reagan made drastic budget cuts to education. I'd call that austerity. Do you have some specific bit of policy you believe to be the culprit instead?

Sounds like your teacher friend is confusing his role as a teacher with his role as an employee. If he feels he is being mistreated by his district, he is allowed to stand up for himself. If teachers allow themselves to be bullied into pay cuts or poor working conditions, the profession becomes less competitive and thus less effective. This might explain why Texas is dead last in high school graduates? His students are less likely to graduate, but at least they don't have to worry about him going on strike. Well done! To hell with union states and all their uppity diploma earners!

Further reading:
http://www.texastribune.org/texas-education/public-education/why-does-texas-rank-last-in-high-school-diplomas/

The problem with education is funding. More funding = better education. Period. The government has been plenty 'creative' by allowing private charter schools into the educational system. In a study done at Stanford, they found that 37% of charter schools underperformed their public counterparts, 46% were comparable and 17% were better. Among the charter schools that did outperform public schools were schools like the Harlem Children's Zone, which get much higher funding. The take away here is that you get what you pay for. If we want better schools, we need to fund them.

Further reading on this topic:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/nov/11/myth-charter-schools/?pagination=false

As far as I know, RP doesn't have any kind of realistic jobs plan, other than to further deregulate big business, cut their taxes and then pray for some hot trickle down watersports action. And, as you say, I guess he also has no problem with vast economic disparity. These two points are a great illustration of how out of touch he is with the world around him. He seems like a nice guy, and I like his liberal views on foreign policy, but if he is going to willingly kowtow to wall street, then he is the wrong guy for the job.

Is one's political philosophy an inner "moral code" or is it a function of where you sit on the economic ladder? Is it coincidence that the wealthy are conservative and largely Republican and the poor are largely liberal and Democratic? If you reversed the economic standing of a group of one versus the other, would that change their political view? Do the poor who win lotteries usually go a spending spree or immediately set about philanthropy and working for social justice? How far down the economic ladder does entitlement stop? If we are a truly a world community, should the US citizen living at the poverty level give up their cell phone so that a child can eat in Rwanda? After all, isn't that person at the US poverty level still earning in the top 10% of world income earners? Isn't that person uber-rich to the child in Rwanda? The group on the bottom will always look up at the next class above and think they're "greedy" for their excesses, however modest they may be. In the end, the world economy is driven by individuals pursuing their personal and separate interests. To paraphrase historian Will Durant on what lessons we learn from history, concerning economics, "freedom and equality are sworn enemies.......the greater the freedom, the greater the economic disparity in the classes, until it creates such tension that wealth is redistributed by legislation, or poverty is redistributed by revolution."

Very rarely does someone fit squarely into an ism.

*Wanting corporations to pay taxes is not conservative. Not liking having to pay taxes is human. I'd feel much better about paying taxes if they weren't being dumped into corporate coffers through bailouts, subsidies and no-bid contracts.

*Social welfare is an attempt to limit the damage caused by our economic system. Our particularly ugly American version of capitalism (whose destruction cuts across all ideological lines) creates unemployment, low wages, inflation, and dramatic economic disparity. No amount of self determination and bootstrapping will end these systemic problems. You can argue the merits and effectiveness of individual social welfare programs, but at the end of the day, the problems they were created to remedy will still exist. If we restructured the system to be more beneficial to labor, there would less need for these kinds of band-aids.

*Small government and efficient government are two different things. "Small" is a purposely vague and arbitrary term. Powerful interests like "small" inefficient, ineffective governments, because they are easy to control. I'd like our government to be as big as it needs to be in order to be efficient. No bigger, no smaller.

*There are other lefties that support nuclear power.

*Everyone loves the constructive, creative side of the free market. It's the economic class war that results from unregulated markets that causes all the problems. In order for Trump to have his billions, other people are going to have to live in poverty to support his lifestyle. The free market is a system of winners and losers, opulence and suffering. You can't have one without the other.

*Optimism and pessimism are present on all sides of the spectrum. I am pessimistic about the times we live in, but optimistic about the future, because things have steadily become better for us since the dawn of humanity. As MLK said, "Let us realize the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice."

*Conservatism doesn't have a lock on theism. Liberalism doesn't have a lock on atheism. While Protestants, Evangelists, Mormons and Muslims are usually socially conservative, Catholics, Jews, Buddhists and Unitarians are usually liberal. Conversely, Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman and the neo-conservative movement they inspired are atheist in nature (although their dogmatic, pie-in-the-sky economic views are a faith of sorts).

The most ironic thing is that this clip is describing a former colony (India) acting as a neocolonial power. That's progress, I suppose.

@GeeSussFreeK, more of a problem with economic disparity, and studiously following property rights, I'd say. The already-rich have the property rights to the land, and they're using it to enrich themselves further. The poverty-stricken citizens of Ethiopia don't get any of the wealth, because they didn't have the skills to provide the labor, and didn't have any capital to invest or land to lease. That's capitalism.

Are you suggesting they deserved some sort of hand out?

Communist.

@dystopianfuturetoday agreed on all of the above. I'm definitely not one of those people who thinks the entire fix for education is coming up with inventive pay schemes for teachers, I'm just trying to point out that even if you are one of those people, the kinds of things you see bandied about aren't designed very well. Well, unless the design was to look like it's meant to make education better across the board, while really having the effect of making sure that only wealthy people have the ability to provide a good education for their children...

My gut feeling is that a lot of our educational problems are actually general economic disparity problems, coupled with the usual conservative brain damage keeping our schools persistently underfunded, and in many cases systematically sabotaged by ideological nuts on the school boards (see Texas).

There's probably something we could learn from other countries in terms of how to do it better (since pretty much all of them do), but mostly our issue is that generally we've let that conservative brain damage really infect our social psyche to the point where every discussion of public policy is always, without any exception at all, being a nasty debate between "do something" and "do nothing", rather than people coming up with competing solutions to a problem that we all agree needs to be addressed.

Are you frustrated at the loss of a free-ride and sense of entitlement in America, while the growth of government involvement and distribution of wealth stalls?

Yes. The economic disparities in America are awful.

Do you want to live in communities where your right to three meals a day and universal healthcare are respected?

Yes. Don't you?

Do you want others to fund welfare by forcing them to redistribute, by force if necessary, the earnings they have worked hard for?

Yes and no. Yes, I want wealth redistributed. No, I don't only want others to do it - I'm more than happy to chip in my fair share.

Are you looking for freedom without responsibility?

Nope - that would be idiotic. IMHO the responsible thing to do is to lend a hand when necessary.

@blankfist I will pose a list of my own questions.

Is it annoying when you are reminded that there are those less fortunate than you?
How angry do you get when you are taxed (at much lower rates than the rest of the western world) to help people who would otherwise starve to death, or who would die of treatable diseases and ailments?
How do you feel about using the internet - a system that was initially funded by U.S. Government money? Highways? Airports? Driver's licenses?
What country/state/nation/society (historical or modern) comes closest to the ideal vision of a libertarian society?

Looking forward to your responses.

Republicans are/were all angry at the amount of money being spent for Health Care costing just under $1 trillion over 10 years

The health care bill passed by the House costs 1.3 trillion a year - not less than 1 trillion over 10 years. To compare the first 6 years of the Iraq War you would have to say that Health Care costs 7.8 trillion versus the Iraq War costing $3 trillion. IE Health Care (as envisioned by Democrats) costs 2.6 times the Iraq War.

The rich few are laughing all the way to our graves while we stand idly by letting them do as they please

Economic disparity exists in all systems - U.S. or anywhere else. I'm not sure I take your meaning though. What do you mean by 'idly letting them do as they please'? Are you suggesting the forcible alteration of their behavior merely because they have wealth? I have never seen a single government who followed such a path that resulted in the PEOPLE being better off. In all cases, government force as a means of income redistribution results only in an enhanced GOVERNMENT. The people do not benefit. Quite to the contrary.

I think CD is over. The point in history in which it was effective in the US has passed. First world governments don't generally abuse their citizens, they abuse people in other lands, and it is profitable and easy to do.

The externalization of misery and death which our government/economic system create are no longer dumped in our back yards, they are dumped over seas, where we can have little effect. We still have some holdovers from the old way, racial socio-economic disparity is still a problem, but our gov/economy does not really care if it is solved. Racism isn't the lynch-pin of economic oppression any more, it's just a tool for political pandering.

If lots of people are not willing to be beaten unconscious trying to stop something, then CD does not work. Add to that the fact that here is very little we can actually stop, since very little actually happens here any more, and you have a perfect recipe for inefficacy. Apathy is only a rational response to inefficacy.

Some observations after watching the video.

-He doesn't say anything resembling the comment you've quoted above.

-His use of 'we' is inclusive of society as a whole, not limited to himself or any race.

-He speaks of the growing economic disparity, but does not limit it to African Americans, and does not personalize it.

-Anorexia is an eating disorder, and probably isn't the best comparison to race or social class.

-I imagine even Mike Huckabee said some kind words about MLK today.

Correct me if I'm wrong on any of these.