Conformists! I'm a cheese Hipster... I buy processed slicey 'cheese', squish it into an iphone shape and grate it over organic free-trade gluten free pasta.

I lose interest the moment someone says greedy bankers. Bankers are no more greedy than any corporate entity. Like any element of a capitalist economy they provide a benefit for someone and derive a benefit themselves. The term greedy gets lumped on them for two main reasons:

1: Because their benefit is hard to concteputalise: that they're effectively redistributing capital into lucrative investments and taking a slither out of the borrowing and lending rate spread, thereby creating jobs and growing the economy. Everyone is impacted by this, but indirectly enough that they don't realise it. As far as investment banking goes, and the argument that they're gambling, again it's unwarranted. In every derivative transaction that involves say a farm producer wanting to transfer their risk away, there has to be a speculative counterparty to take this on. The risk doesn't disappear after all. Without speculators, this would be impossible. As far as endangering the entire economy, see point 2.

2: They make arguably excessive profits and have grown to a tremendous size relative to other aspects of the economy. You could make various arguments for why this is case. For one, you can say they have been exploiting moral hazard, the expectation by themselves and their investors that they will be bailed out if they were to collapse en-masse, thus allowing them more favourable borrowing rates and to take larger risks than otherwise and thereby earn higher returns as a result. The finance reform bill in the US and revisions to the Basel standards are expected to considerably address this and demonstrate that is a failure of regulation and not some inherent and idiosyncratic greediness. Any industry or firm given potential loopholes, or monopolistic market power exploits it, it has and always will be the job of regulators to prevent this just as with bank moral hazard.

Not to mention he completely goes off the rails when he starts contrasting rising finance with falling manufacturing. Two entirely different industries, where the latter was heavily impacted by free trade and automation advances and the prior wasn't. Pity, I thought the first half of the talk was altogether well done.

TL;DR

Kidding. That comment was for NetRunner who is always lurking in the shadows of VS, waiting to say I never read anything these days. He gets a thought in his bean and there's no tearing him away from it.

By the way, I'm not avoiding your question, DFT. I'm just not a monkey here to work for the grinder whenever he beckons. Your question "what does 'people have direct control of the market' mean, and how does it specifically translate into either 'stopping a corporate dictatorship' or achieving meaningful change?"

In a free market there would be no corporations. There's a great string of videos from an author that does a great job of explaining the corporations and how they came to power during the Renaissance when monarchs centralized money and created cooperatives for employment. This was contrary to what came before, which was free trade and local competing currencies, which was making the rich poorer and the poor richer. I'll post it in a bit and send you the link.

It's this individual competition within markets that helps people compete, and ultimately makes the rich less rich. This is what I mean by direct control of the market. But it's a complicated issue. First you have to allow pure freedom of currency, trade should be anything desired by both parties trading, and then the market must be unregulated. Government's role is to protect the rights of people, and the courts should serve as an unbiased third party for grievances in a free market.

When I say "it's a complicated issue", you'll undoubtedly come back with "it's always 'if', 'ands' and 'butts' in the Libertarian free market." If I point out the simplicity of it once it's allowed to work, you'll undoubtedly come back with "such a simplistic, naive and nearly supernatural occurrence this free market." It's as if I cannot win for losing with you. Your fallacies are abundant, and very unfair.

Love, your butt buddy, blankfist the impaler.

The NAFTA Superhighway thing always struck me as the weirdest rightwing conspiracy theory ever. Let's set aside for a moment whether or not it's real. Why is it something they oppose?

I mean, NAFTA is the North American Free Trade Agreement. Free trade is part of what you need for a free market. Business people love it, liberals kinda hate it.

Mexico and Canada are physically adjacent to the US, but to ship goods to and from them, it makes most sense for us to use road and railways as the primary cargo carriers. Since we're opening up trade, we expect the volume of goods transported between the countries to increase, putting additional load on our state-run road and rail systems. So they need to be enhanced, to deal with the added load.

Now yes, building highways is technically a big socialist public works project funded by tax dollars, but I've never met a Republican who thought roads weren't something government should build, and I've never met a crackpot Ron Paul-style "constitutionalist" who thought building roads weren't something the Federal government had the power to do.

That said, the talk about Spain controlling it actually comes from this (no, World Net Daily isn't reliable in the usual sense, but it is usually the source of most right-wing crazy these days). Basically, Ed Rendell (PA-Gov, and a DEMONCRAT) auctioned off the contract for managing the Pennsylvania Turnpike, possibly the most well-known toll road in America, to private companies. Who had the winning bid? A private corporation based in Spain called Abertis Infraestructuras that manages toll roads all over Europe.

So, basically, I'm left wondering...why the hell this is supposed to be scary?

Now, I can think of a few good reasons why liberals would be opposed to such a thing. Specifically, it makes it easier for companies to move manufacturing to Mexico to take advantage of their cheap labor, low taxes, and low regulation, plus it makes it so they can use non-union ports to unload goods coming in from Asia, and then truck them into the US. But those should all sound like positives to your average right-winger.

I get that this is lumped in with a fear of some sort of EU-style North American Union, but I honestly don't get why that is supposed to be scary either.

Are all conservatives so xenophobic that they see any signs of long-term collaboration between the US and its closest neighbors as a threat of some sort?

Anyways, for those who are curious, this is the most thorough debunking of this nonsense I've seen.

Tarrifs? Smoot–Hawley all over again? The issue is not the size of government but the embed corporate interests. An efficient and truly representative government would be flexible enough to grow and diminish to reflect economic dynamics. As it stands different corporate interests represent each party and there isn't so much as a legislative deliberation but stubborn grandstanding for conflicting interests and a back and forth with electoral cycles.

I'm not saying anything new here of course, but my point is, ideology in the grand scheme of things is irrelevant. The Democrats are firmly behind free market policies over any kind of long term nationalization, or anti-free trade policies. They will be rid of their corporate ownership of the automobile and financial services industries as fast as they can, and they will be forced or at least pressured into spending cuts, tax rises, raising the pension age and what have you to combat the deficit whether they like it or not.

The best thing in the short term is effective education reform. As much as anyone would like to say otherwise, the biggest factor that has led average middle income wages stagnate or fall in real terms over the last few decades has been technological innovation and automation replacing manual jobs. Competing at this level in trades that haven't been automated is obviously a fool's errand, emerging countries will easily out compete on wages. Educating people into higher skilled jobs should be the priority.

Effective campaign finance reform is the only way this and any meaningful reform will be possible though. When Massa went on his talk show tour, the focus shouldn't have been on his playful tickling or innuendo it shouldn't have been him saying on Beck's show: (a comment that is in a video in my PQ by the way!)

“Congressmen spend between five and seven hours a day on the phone begging for money ..."

If this isn't dealt with, the US will simply become Japan if it has not already. Growth will stagnate, but living standards will remain high though so no one will really notice. Rather than bureaucrats becoming more embedded with the government as in Japan it will be the corporate interests. Meanwhile problems will accumulate. As the government becomes less and less effective, voter apathy will takeover and feed the process.

As with Japan's current debt of 200% of GDP, the US's current 80% level will continue to rise until breaking point. Japan is lucky being a creditor nation and having plenty of domestic lenders willing to provide low yield rates, but even that will not last. Meanwhile the US's stupendous absolute debt in relative terms and being a debtor nation will probably not allow it to reach that level, with perhaps the saving grace being that the US dollar is still the world's reserve currency.

But anyway, tl;dr version: ideology is irrelevant, campaign financing and genuine representation is everything.

Oh perhaps I should make clear that this isn't really all directed at you, more a general response to the topic.
>> ^dystopianfuturetoday:

We need to rethink our economy. The population is getting bigger, while at the same time employment is being lost to automation, 3rd world labor exploitation and corporate consolidation. It seems to me that this is a problem that can't be solved by a booming economy alone.
I'm not sure what could be done to halt this process, perhaps huge tariffs on corporations that use non-American labor, or limits on the size and power of corporations. I don't know. I'd love to hear ideas on this.

Double standards galore.

You can't talk about nuclear energy incurring taxpayer liabilities, giving preferential treatment and distorting capital markets without conceding the fact that when you're funding other green energy jobs like wind power, geothermal and tide you're doing the exact same thing.

If what's needed are tighter emission standards among other regulations, then say that, rather than blanketly dismissing it as a possible alternative.

Part of the reason that nuclear energy has had patchy financing in the past is that governmental positions have constantly changed at the whims of those in power. The threat of tighter regulations and a general lack of consistency has created uncertainty.

To me, this stance on energy, and the left's positions on free trade stand out as the two most hypocritical positions of the left.

There's some elements of truth in this, of course governments use opportune times to push through unpopular policies for example, but it's mostly propaganda so I'm down voting.

Freeing up trade has obvious economic benefits. Deregulation and privatisation of certain industries are also beneficial to an extent. It is the fringes of these topics that are debatable. How drastically should free trade be promoted? How much job protection should be offered to businesses that can't compete with foreign firms? Can or should monopolistic industries be privatised? There are certainly arguments back and forth, but to connect these ideas directly with waves of unemployment, and rising prices, is nonsense. Particularly free trade. Go over to any Asian country where living standards have risen dramatically in the last couple of decades and tell them free trade causes unemployment. You'll get laughed at.

It gets worse. How has public spending being cut by 50% in Chile, an economic policy, have ANYTHING to do with torture and imprisonment. Yes, this was under Pinochet who took power in a coup, but his social repression have nothing to do with his free market policies. To flash them on the screen and associate them is completely disingenuous and misleading.

Suggesting that Friedman was part of some kind of right wing government conspiracy is equally ridiculous. He was merely an influential academic who served as an advisor to several governmental leaders, most notably the US and held particularly uniform economic views. The fact that his policies were adopted in so many different places speaks less about his views than the lack of effective contrarian arguments being made. Yes, arguably some of his views such as that the market itself can clear up any imperfections and that government intervention serves almost no useful purpose were extreme, but that glosses over the fact that many of his views were progressive in themselves and highly beneficial to economic wellbeing if applied in moderation. The analogy that comes to mind here is blaming Darwin for not knowing about DNA when he came up with his Origin of Species.

The irony is the video is doing the very thing it's supposedly speaking out against. It's using jarring imagery or torture, to ram through its own agenda against free market policies.

Alright, people. One of my best friends goes to the University of Pittsburgh and he was in the middle of the whole thing. Most of the "protesters" were just students curious about what was going on. He wrote this about it all:

"This note is for my friends who are not in Pittsburgh and have not yet been given a fairly comprehensive version of what has been going on here. If you have been seeing my wall posts, you'll know that something bad happened in Pittsburgh, but if you want my story, here it is...

On Thursday and Friday September 24-25, the G-20 World Leader's Summit occurred in Pittsburgh. The summit involved the leaders of the United States, Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, Russia, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Spain, Turkey, and the United Kingdom. The purpose of the summit is to have a forum for the major world leaders about the global economic crisis. Pittsburgh was chosen to be the location for the summit in order to highlight its economic recovery after the city's manufacturing industry collapsed about 40 years ago.

The G-20 is always met with protesters for various causes, including global warming awareness, socialism, peoples' rights in other countries, anti-free-trade, and anti-war, and anarchy. The city of Pittsburgh was required to bring in police forces from all regions of the state of Pennsylvania and other nearby states.

On the evening of the 24th, the summit began with a dinner in the Phipps Conservatory, a plant exhibition hall (really quite a nice place) just under a mile from my dorm in the borough of Oakland. The University cancelled classes after 4:00 PM that day in order to ensure that students did not have to be outside if they did not wish to. During the day of the 24th, several protests had been broken up by riot police. At about 7:00 PM a small protest began at the Schenley Plaza. (from this point on, I will be referring to locations on campus, please refer to the map I posted at:< http://photos-b.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-snc1/hs209.snc1/7620_178174626232_559501232_4081545_8066324_n.jpg>)

I went there to investigate myself at about 8:00 PM. The protest itself was fairly small, only about a hundred or so people total, with only a handful of protesters. There was some live music and dancing, courtesy of the Hare Krishna. Despite the fact that the protest was fairly small and peaceful, there were several hundred police forming a perimeter around the plaza, which is under a quarter-mile from the Conservatory. All of the Police were in riot gear, which covered any form of identification they may have had; they were also all armed with lethal and non-lethal weapons.

Around 9:00, I decided to return to my dorm. At 10:15, I overheard someone saying that they saw fire on Forbes Avenue. I decided to go out and investigate. At this point, the street had been flooded by curious students, and would remain that way until the police removed them. Several dumpsters had been pushed into the intersection of Forbes and Atwood by anarchist protesters. The next intersection had a overturned dumpster with flaming garbage spilled on the street. Several shop windows had been broken by a protester from California, however the media initially implicated that it had been students who were responsible.

I reached the lawn of the Pitt Union, and at about 10:45 the police began to multiply rapidly. They also brought in several scary-looking trucks with large dish-shaped things on them. This turned out to be a Long-Range Acoustic Device (LRAD), which emits a loud, scary noise which is physically disabling within a certain radius. At 11:00 PM, the trucks began playing a pre-recorded message declaring that the people in the streets had become an "illegal gathering" and that the crowd was to disperse, or they could be subject to arrest or attack with "less lethal" weaponry (does that mean you're less dead when you get hit?)

At this, I decided to retreat to Forbes Hall. Other people were not fortunate enough to get out of there as quickly as I did, and became exposed to a hail of "OC" gas, rubber bullets, mace, LRAD blasts, and nightsticks. The University unfortunately decided to lock down the residence halls as the police approached, giving the retreating students nowhere to go to escape from the police. One of my friends was arrested while holding open the doors to the Litchfield Towers residence hall lobby so that escaping students had somewhere to go. She was dragged outside of the doorway, beaten to the ground, not given any rights, held for five hours, and released without any charge as of yet.

At the time, I was unaware of this, but I watched the police advance through the lower campus (residential area, mainly between Forbes and Fifth avenues) via the live feed on the local news. When I noticed that they were three blocks away from Forbes Hall, I went to the patio on the second floor of the hall (out of reach of anyone who didn't live there or have a friend there). At about midnight, the cops were in front of the hall, still chasing a small group of protesters despite being nearly a mile from the original protest ground and being practically at the end of the campus. Without any real warning, they threw several canisters of "OC" gas onto the patio. Unknown to me at the time, several also entered the lobby and threatened to mace several students who were unable to enter the hall due to the lockdown.

OC gas is for all intents and purposes the same as tear gas. When you inhale it, your lungs and throat itch and you can't do anything but cough. If it gets in your eyes, you become partially blind and it feels like your eyes are melting. I was several feet away from a grenade and was directly exposed to it for several seconds as my fellow students and I tried to escape. I ran to my bathroom on the sixth floor and flushed my eyes and choked for five minutes. The third floor had window open out of which the students had been looking, it was filled with gas, and the students living on the third floor became refugees for several hours while it cleared.

Shortly after passing Forbes hall, the police attack ended. They left Oakland with 42 arrests (most were let go that morning), and a large number of unfairly treated, assaulted, and pissed students. The university itself has yet to make any statement regarding Thursday night, but the Mayor of Pittsburgh and Chief of Police have stated that they are "proud of how well the police handled the situation". They are apparently not fans of students either.

I will save my personal commentary and descriptions of the aftermath for another note. However, here are a few links that you will find interesting.
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mNeD4rHUF4A> a compilation of student-made videos from 9/24.
The videos are of varying quality and contain some harsh language and violence. These will give you an idea of what the students here experienced (I know the person being dragged away at 2:35)
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6aRrQz7224> This video was not taken by me, but it was taken from my vantage point when Forbes Hall was attacked
<http://www.pittnews.com/> Pitt's student newspaper, featuring independent coverage of the G-20 (and some rather good photography, the ones I took came out terribly)
<http://www.pittbriefly.com/> A blog on which many videos of the G-20 'riot' have been posted. Some of these cannot be found on Youtube.

Thank you for reading this,
......."

The US should honestly stop mucking about and fully become the services and R&D center its always meant to be.

But that would necessitate the true application of comparative advantage and opening of free trade.

Not going to happen with sectors like agriculture and so on seeking ever increasing protectionist measures through congress.

>> ^gtjwkq:
^ I'm not sure what the exact laws are, but AFAIK it's illegal to have a currency other than the dollar circulating inside the US. If you or I try to create our own type of currency not denominated in dollars, the Secret Service will soon be knocking on our doors.


I thought this was a misunderstanding about the free trade of currency in open markets but ..
No, you can't start printing gtwkqbucks and circulate them as cash. Obviously.
You could, of course, establish your own nation and then issue currency for that.
Good luck.

^ Or, possibly Rockefeller was thinking something like this^*, i.e. that a world that's tied together with global trade is likely to be more peaceful.

What scares the bejeebus out of libertarians is that it also means they're likely to want other things that come with real-world markets, like a common regulatory environment, central banks, some sort of international court and law enforcement, etc.

* Not that I endorse Bullshit's smears against liberal peace activism, or general unjustified sense of moral superiority, but the central point he's making here is valid.

This is a really serious issue. ..and as sad as the human story is, the problem is bigger than that. 60-70% of the primary forest in the Peruvian Amazon is under threat. Alan Garcia, the president of Peru, has suspended constitutional protection of this area to open it up to foreign timber, mining, oil, and agricultural use. He is responding to obligations in the free trade agreement with the US; so this is not just a Peruvian issue.

http://news.mongabay.com/2009/0606-oil_or_death_in_the_amazon.html
http://rabble.ca/blogs/bloggers/ben-powless/2009/06/peru-battle-lines-drawn-over-amazon
Petition:
http://www.avaaz.org/en/peru_stop_violence/?cl=250341655&v=3461

>> ^GuyIncognito:
Tough to do that lv_hunter. If you shop at Walmart, you've helped hollow out America's manufacturing sector, benefiting China. And typing that post on the Sift, chances are that the majority of the components in your computer were manufactured in China as well. Capitalism at its finest.


Pretty sure most computer manufacturing goes in more developed Asian countries like Taiwan and South Korea. China generally sticks more to basic manufacturing.

Not to attack your comment or anything, but you have to admit the futility of arguing against free trade. If in the long term all countries were to focus on what they specialise because of a cost advantage (such as China in basic manufacturing, and the US in several more specialised service industries) then all would benefit from lower prices, and better standards of living from greater efficiency.

As for the whole topic. Well duh, China have lower safety and crash standards than the US or most other developed countries. How else do you think they're going to make automobiles affordable to their growing but still relatively poor middle class in comparison to highly developed countries? Lower domestic equilibrium wage levels will only go so far. That should not reflect on the quality of Chinese goods as a whole, just the state of their current market. Odds are, even if you were to sell a pricier car with a better crumble zone in China, it just wouldn't sell anywhere near as well.

>> ^quantumushroom:

Would you prefer the term illegal invaders? They're sure aren't dehumanized as much as the American taxpayer, who has to pay to reward criminality.
Illegals have no right to be here and certainly no right to any kind of welfare or "rights". They're not American citizens, they deserve nothing except our goodwill and trade when they stay on their side of the fence.
If you want to explore real brutality, research how Mexico deals with invaders sneaking across its southern border.


I prefer 'illegal immigrants', it's the term everyone else uses and is clearly the most accurate. I don't pretend to condone it, but the way you talk about it, or frankly any politician or media figure is counter productive. None of these people, who go on and on emphatically about illegals stealing US jobs while infering tacitly xenophobic dialect have any practical solutions. Politicians want to be seen as rallying against it, but they typically accomplish nothing other than scoring political points. Little can be done to stop the free flow of people especially over such a large borderline. A fence that is difficult to or completely insurmountable, especially over that kind of landmass is not feasible, neither is surveillance. Any funding used purely on border enforcement would be much better used rooting out cross-border crime rings.

The fact is, the only thing that will eliminate illegal immigration in the long run is working to equalising economic conditions on both sides of the border, and that means keeping and encouraging freer trade, and granting more temporary work visas for Mexicans. And yes that means accepting the fact that Mexicans will 'steal our jobs', because when it comes down to it free trade has the exact same effect, and if you did happen to miraculously reduce the tide of illegal immigrants looking for employment substantially in the US, the multinationals that currently rely on their cheaper labour will pack up and move, typically to Mexico or another country with lower real wage levels, as has already been the case in the past. Now of course worker protection should be extended to older workers in lower skilled industries who are incapable of retraining into new jobs, and government services to temporary workers should be limited as I'd imagine is already the case. It's a completely unavoidable conclusion though, railing against illegal immigrants blindly is equally as counter-productive as continuing the drug war.

haha! Silly Fox.

It's the New World Order that wants the global currency - it helps centralise power in the hands of a few rather than the many.

It's is distinctly in the interests of globalization and capitalism... not socialism.

Remember when America was all about Free trade and Globalization? and anyone else was socialist for protecting their local workers and industries... Silly fox - Pick a side!