I learn so much about what I believe when I talk with you. And here I thought I wanted to reform our election system so that corporations could not so easily subvert the democratic process. And here I thought I wanted to reform our economic system so that corporations were held responsible for their actions and not allowed to siphon and hoard societal wealth. Who knew that I was such a fan of the global corporate empire? And who knew that removing all barriers to corporate wealth and power would result in liberty? It sounds so unintuitive and absurd on it's face that I would not have believed it had I not learned it from someone in possession of such formidable mental prowess. Your advanced wisdom is truly indistinguishable from magic. Expecto Patronum Mano Invisablo!>> ^marbles:

>> ^dystopianfuturetoday:
^The more we deregulate, privatize, cut taxes for the wealthy and cut services for the rest, the worse things get. Unregulated capitalism has become its own worse enemy. If we want to save capitalism from itself, we need regulate it, so that it can not be used as a weapon to subjugate the working poor, the middle class and labor. The economic reforms you call for are the same reforms called for by corporatists and plutomists like the Kochs, The Scaifes, Luntz, Norquist among other corporate elites. How is it that you can rail against crony capitalists and regurgitate their propaganda in the same sentence? In my opinion, it is be you are being manipulated to put for an agenda that appeals to your base nature by people who could not care less about you.
Unregulated capitalism has brought us:
-Vast Income Inequality
-High Unemployment
-Wage Cuts while productivity continues to rise
-Endless War for profit, oil
-Massive political corruption at every level of government
The 'free market' you dream of is a pie in the sky, no different from St. Peter and the Pearly Gates or 72 Virgins. "Free" Market ideology has been at work in American Government for over 30 years, and it has resulted in the creation of a global corporate state that is anything but free. Stop making excuses for failure. It's OK to admit you were wrong. Being wrong only becomes problem when your foolish pride hinders you from assessment. Pull your head out of the sand. @marbles

Good Job. I link an essay that specifically identifies the problems and you respond with hollow partisan talking points that ignore the problems. Nationalizing risk by the big banks and privatizing profits is not free market capitalism, no matter how much you claim it to be.
Free market ideology didn't create a global corporate state. Putting our economy in the hands of a select few did. The Federal Reserve is an above the law private banking cartel. And whether you believe in a free market or not is irrelevant. Believing that Wall Street politicians are going to solve the problems that they help create is the real delusion.
Banks have taking over the government. Your solution: Support Wall Street puppets and regurgitate their talking points.
Banks have taking over the regulatory agencies. Your solution: Pass more Wall Street written regulations.
Government uses our tax money to bailout corporations and wage war around the world. Your solution: Give them more money to funnel to the top and fund more death and destruction.
So who's really being manipulated here? The corporate shadow government is erecting bars around your glass house and you're busy parroting their talking points. Good job pal.

>> ^dystopianfuturetoday:

^The more we deregulate, privatize, cut taxes for the wealthy and cut services for the rest, the worse things get. Unregulated capitalism has become its own worse enemy. If we want to save capitalism from itself, we need regulate it, so that it can not be used as a weapon to subjugate the working poor, the middle class and labor. The economic reforms you call for are the same reforms called for by corporatists and plutomists like the Kochs, The Scaifes, Luntz, Norquist among other corporate elites. How is it that you can rail against crony capitalists and regurgitate their propaganda in the same sentence? In my opinion, it is be you are being manipulated to put for an agenda that appeals to your base nature by people who could not care less about you.
Unregulated capitalism has brought us:
-Vast Income Inequality
-High Unemployment
-Wage Cuts while productivity continues to rise
-Endless War for profit, oil
-Massive political corruption at every level of government
The 'free market' you dream of is a pie in the sky, no different from St. Peter and the Pearly Gates or 72 Virgins. "Free" Market ideology has been at work in American Government for over 30 years, and it has resulted in the creation of a global corporate state that is anything but free. Stop making excuses for failure. It's OK to admit you were wrong. Being wrong only becomes problem when your foolish pride hinders you from assessment. Pull your head out of the sand. @marbles


Good Job. I link an essay that specifically identifies the problems and you respond with hollow partisan talking points that ignore the problems. Nationalizing risk by the big banks and privatizing profits is not free market capitalism, no matter how much you claim it to be.

Free market ideology didn't create a global corporate state. Putting our economy in the hands of a select few did. The Federal Reserve is an above the law private banking cartel. And whether you believe in a free market or not is irrelevant. Believing that Wall Street politicians are going to solve the problems that they help create is the real delusion.

Banks have taking over the government. Your solution: Support Wall Street puppets and regurgitate their talking points.

Banks have taking over the regulatory agencies. Your solution: Pass more Wall Street written regulations.

Government uses our tax money to bailout corporations and wage war around the world. Your solution: Give them more money to funnel to the top and fund more death and destruction.

So who's really being manipulated here? The corporate shadow government is erecting bars around your glass house and you're busy parroting their talking points. Good job pal.

^The more we deregulate, privatize, cut taxes for the wealthy and cut services for the rest, the worse things get. Unregulated capitalism has become its own worse enemy. If we want to save capitalism from itself, we need regulate it, so that it can not be used as a weapon to subjugate the working poor, the middle class and labor. The economic reforms you call for are the same reforms called for by corporatists and plutomists like the Kochs, The Scaifes, Luntz, Norquist among other corporate elites. How is it that you can rail against crony capitalists and regurgitate their propaganda in the same sentence? In my opinion, it is be you are being manipulated to put for an agenda that appeals to your base nature by people who could not care less about you.

Unregulated capitalism has brought us:
-Vast Income Inequality
-High Unemployment
-Wage Cuts while productivity continues to rise
-Endless War for profit, oil
-Massive political corruption at every level of government

The 'free market' you dream of is a pie in the sky, no different from St. Peter and the Pearly Gates or 72 Virgins. "Free" Market ideology has been at work in American Government for over 30 years, and it has resulted in the creation of a global corporate state that is anything but free. Stop making excuses for failure. It's OK to admit you were wrong. Being wrong only becomes problem when your foolish pride hinders you from assessment. Pull your head out of the sand. @marbles

He's unlikable because of his palpable disdain for anyone who earns less than $50k a year. He's unlikable because he insists income inequality exists because we don't let the poor send their kids to work. He's unlikable because he blames some of the lowest paid people doing some of the least desirable jobs for creating poverty. If Newt was sailing around the middle of the ocean in his yacht and came across someone barely treading water he'd throw them a brick and tell them to swim their lazy asses to shore.

This has nothing to do with encouraging students to take an interest in their school, its about blaming the poor for being poor because they don't work hard enough.

>> ^tyrellmojohnston:

HOW is it a bad thing to come up with ideas that can potentially teach our youth the value of an honest day's work by giving them ways to (legally) invest in and add value to the very schools in which they attend?
There's a pretty good chance you've completely missed his point. Disguising a use-case as a general rule is just a cover for what's obviously a disdain for Gingrich the man. Hate him or not, he's smart enough to devastate Obama in any debate with his words. (It's Gingrich's unlikability that would eventually be his undoing, imo. He's nowhere NEAR as "cool" as Obama and voters totally love "cool". Not as handsome as Romney, either. People seem to dig that too.)
And as a side note, there's a pretty damn good chance that giving this video the title "Newt Gingrich wants child janitors?" is hopelessly mired in bias.
No one's marching children into factories here.
>> ^Crosswords:
Creating wage equality and promoting class mobility by firing those fat cat school janitors and replacing them with children. Why that's so brilliant its retarded!!

@GeeSussFreeK I think most of us on the left aren't really looking to end capitalism, so much as file down its sharp edges.

Mostly we're pushing back against this sort of deification of "free markets" as an answer to every problem our culture faces. This is especially perverse, since it's actually at the root of almost every large-scale issue facing our society today.

That said, we don't really want to throw the market baby out with the bathwater either. We just want to put markets in their proper place in people's minds. Markets are just one of many ways to do things. It doesn't have to be all-or-nothing either. We can have a market for produce, even if we decide markets for medicine just don't bring us the results we need.

We also need to stop pretending that capitalism is sorting people into some sort of moral hierarchy. By and large people don't get what they "deserve" in capitalism. I doubt anyone who's poor has done something so awful that they deserve to be punished with poverty, just like the rich haven't done something so wonderful that they deserve to be lavished with riches.

Once you put markets into the proper perspective, then you can really start talking about what to do with the areas of our society where markets aren't delivering us the results we need. That's where the entire raft of liberal causes come in like environmental protection, universal healthcare, income inequality, labor rights, health and safety regulation, etc.

None of those are aimed at ending markets and capitalism, so much as trying to get people to accept non-market solutions to the problems the markets aren't solving.

And yes, the favorite response to that line of thinking is usually some form of "we still have laws, so everything that's wrong must be the government's fault because it's not really a free market until it's total economic anarchy!" But that's exactly what I mean when I talk about deification of markets. There are a lot of people who are not being objective or rational in examining the cause of the problems. For them, it's simply an article of faith now that "free" markets would fix everything in life, despite all evidence to the contrary.

That's what we're fighting against!

I think part of the problem is that there's a whole lot of people out there who can't quantify how much wealthier the people feeding them the "Creating Jobs" stuff are. See: http://videosift.com/video/Most-Americans-Unaware-of-Growing-Concentration-of-Wealth at the 1:40 mark. Everyone thinks they are middle class that's a 29k avg neighborhood and 140k neighborhood, 3:30 repeats it again....they think the majority of Americans are middle class.

I'd venture to say that many people in that crowd are there, not because they understand that the people working on wall street dwarf their salary probably by a factor of 4 or 5 in the lower paid white collar jobs and up into the 100+ factors when they get into the upper positions. They are there because they want what they had back, and they can now see that Wall Street or at least the mentality of Wall Street has in a very short period of time affected many aspects of their lives.

If they could still afford a place to live, food, and have a decent job, they probably would have never noticed the long term erosion of the system by those with the money and power...twisting it so they took more of the pie and left the middle and lower class to figure out how they will afford their house (debt which in turn shifts more money up the ladder).

I mean most people who have jobs right now, the only information they care about on unemployment is when it comes from someone they know who they consider to be a "useful employee" and not their stoner brother, etc. And even then it's probably "These things happen, you'll find another job." until they are still unemployed 6 months later....maybe they were just lazy. 12 months rolls around and they are still unemployed? Now it starts to scare the living shit out of people, especially when another friend or family lost their job a month or two back. When it looks like it might affect them personally is when they care, and by that time it's been 1-2 years of people they know going unemployed at various times...working at McDs or Walmart because there's nothing out there.

http://videosift.com/video/Food-Speculation-Explained

Showing another way the Wall Street mentality is just giving us all a good screwing. Instead of these folks taking their talents to create something, they leech off of the people doing the work and drive up costs while creating massive uncertainty for everyone involved.

http://videosift.com/video/Elizabeth-Warren-The-Coming-Collapse-of-the-Middle-Class

Shows that people were experiencing bankruptcy more often that you would assume, but were able to hide it. Plus the general fixed costs being increasingly higher over the years with no overall salary gains to offset them.

http://videosift.com/video/Paul-Krugman-Income-Inequality-and-the-Middle-Class

Showing that they have been on the union bust kick for 30 years now at least, and it's something unique to the US because Canada in a similar global economy still has the level of unionized work force as the US had 30 years ago. Education has nothing to do with the income disparity. And the income disparity was fixed by policies put in place during the 1930s and early 40s. Which have been removed layer by layer since then, with increasing frequency in more recent history. And he points out in the video that the highest paid hedge fund manager makes more in a single year than 88000 NY teachers do in 3 years, my recounting of it might be off a little it's near the end of the video.


http://videosift.com/video/Multi-Millionaire-Rep-Says-He-Can-8482-t-Afford-A-Tax-Hike

Then you have this knucklehead talking about 200k to feed his family and how he can't afford a tax hike because it will prevent him from investing in store improvements and openings (that make him MORE money, so yeah..). Jon Stewart covered this in a much more funny way and how stupid the argument being made is. I'll re-iterate my take on this though. If they can't create jobs with the money they have coming in now after all the other tax deductions over the years, and all the opportunities before this day to do.....they will not do so. It's a fool's bet to depend on some guy who can't demonstrate how he has created jobs in the last 2-4 years in some meaningful way and how those low taxes make it possible to do so. Taxes would pretty much force him to reinvest in his business because if he tried to take it in profit he'd be paying a chunk of it out in taxes.




I think the most profane thing about this country right now is that people who want to work can't find work. And those who are working, especially blue collar jobs have a bunch of white collar guys speculating on their production....every thing that blue collar guy makes/produces probably has 10 or more white collar guys trying to make a buck off of it. It's like a house of cards, except the support structures are the very few people who still put out useable materials. It's crazy how something like that was let run wild, with more and more of the regulation taken away so they could stack even more cards onto the mess. The money isn't to be had in production, it's made in speculating/futures/etc...and it's just massively crazy to realize that all the middlemen are allowed to drive up the costs of oil/food/etc instead of cutting that shit out through regulation.

>> ^bobknight33:

His thinking is very bad logic and will doom any society. HE praises unions but just about all companies that have unions are on the edge of failure. Auto, Airline, Teachers.


obviously someone drinks the Kool-aid

please, expand on how the unions are crippling these industries, and elaborate on how these very same industries (infact same companies in alot on instances) are doing just fine outside of the US with unionization

pensions in the North American auto industry is the only thing I think you may have stumbled upon

but I'd like you to hear your argument as to how the wages/benefits these industries pay out (ESPECIALLY the airline and teachers in particular) are crippling these industries

because I mean, you definitely seem to be equating these industries being unionized with their failure

and not things like lack of funding (education) or business strategies (North American automotive industry) or innovation

perhaps if unionization isn't as big a hinderance outside of the US as it is in the US, maybe the problem really lays somewhere else

also expand on the "very bad logic" statement... which points in particular he made you disagree with and why

@ShakaUVM: "There's a certain point after which incremental gains in money does not buy any more happiness, and the point is around $60k-$75k."

I agree there - certainly income inequality is a much smaller pain when the "low end" is higher. Overall I think our positions are probably closer than I thought they were - certainly I'd grant that income inequality is being overhyped as a current problem (in the US).

I do think, though, that the economy and general strategy for wealth distribution will have to change in the next 30-50 years. I think there's a decent chance we'll see high, stable unemployment as humans are replaced in manufacturing, manual labor, and repetitive knowledge and service industries (optometrists, etc..). Now certainly there's growing job sectors (elder care, etc..) that will absorb many of these displaced workers, but eventually if unemployment stays very high (25 or 30%) I think Western countries will need a new plan (or else we'll end up with a significant divide that will cause problems).

>> ^bobknight33:

His thinking is very bad logic and will doom any society. HE praises unions but just about all companies that have unions are on the edge of failure. Auto, Airline, Teachers.


It's like you didn't even watch the video. The entire thing is just him recounting statistics about equality.

@jmzero: "Imagine a situation where nobody can afford food"

Precisely. The absolute amount of wealth/resources/whatever is much more important than the percentages involved. We're currently living in a society that has more income inequality than ever before, and yet lower hunger than ever before - from what I heard, America isn't tracking death by starvation any more since it so rarely happens - 120 deaths in 2004. (http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_many_people_die_from_starvation_each_year_in_America) This is absolutely amazing in a country with 300 million souls in it, and unprecedented in human history.

>>"Most people won't get mad if one person is richer than them and can have golden toilets and they have "whatever else they want" (which is ridiculous - we're imagining a place where people have all they want?)"

I meant that somewhat flippantly, and somewhat seriously. There's a certain point after which incremental gains in money does not buy any more happiness, and the point is around $60k-$75k. This the point where you can afford food, a house, a car, health care, take the occasional vacation, and so forth. I'm not saying they're buying golden toilets, but the point is, people that achieve that relatively modest level of wealth no longer have to worry about all the really shitty parts about being poor (and I've been there - it sucks) and can instead be happy or sad based on whatever else in life is going to make them happy or sad.

If our poor hit this level of affluence, then there won't be a single person, outside of the anarcho-communists that seem so popular on forums like these, advocating for the overthrow of the social order.

Hell, look at China as an example of how rising affluence lets people overlook (actual, real) problems with their society, instead of pretend problems like income inequality.

@raverman: "The inequality of distribution of wealth has to be fixed INSIDE the corporations remuneration for effort."

If I found a corporation, and never go public, why should you have any right to the profits of the corporation, other than the normal payment of taxes?

What, will you forcefully nationalize my corporation and take it away from me, to give it to the workers? There's a name for that.

@jmzero: "As such, it's perfectly possible to think of the "poor getting poorer" if their relative income isn't growing as fast as others' incomes... the gap in income can still have social consequences."

How? If all the poor suddenly earned $60k a year in constant dollars and could afford all the health care, food, and whatever else they wanted, do you think there's going to be "social consequences" because Warren Buffet and his friends made an extra billion that year?

No, there wouldn't be.

You have to both look at the percentage of the pie each income quintile is taking, but also the size of the pie. Economics is not a zero-sum game, which is a mistake most of the people make when talking about income inequality.

Anyone who uses the phrase "income inequality" automatically gets labelled an idiot, as is anyone who uses the phrase "The Rich Get Richer, the Poor Get Poorer" without actually looking at the numbers.

Income Inequality is a meaningless statistic. What percentage of the pie each quintile of income earners earned is MEANINGLESS without looking at the size of the overall pie. It is quite possible for the rich to earn three times as much, and the poor to earn twice as much, and still have "income inequality" increasing.

While there are some numbskulls that would not want the poor to do better if it meant the rich would do even better still - and I refuse to grant this notion any credence, as it is anti-poor - by and large the metric we should be looking at is median household income.

It is up, across the board (rich and poor alike) quite strongly since the 1940s, even after adjusting for inflation:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:United_States_Income_Distribution_1947-2007.svg

As much as we like to pretend that the 40s-60s were the "high point" for the middle class, the reality is that the middle class and the poor are making about twice as much now (inflation adjusted) as they did back then.

>> ^Winstonfield_Pennypacker:

I said neolib, not neo liberal. I invented the word. It is a catchall word to denigratingly refer to anyone who holds any sort of leftist philosophy. It is to be used the same way as liberals use the word neocon to refer to denigratingly to anyone that is conservative, even though the actual definition of a neocon is a democrat who supports the military.


You're such a pluricratist.

>> ^Winstonfield_Pennypacker:

Video needs to be renamed, "Two neolibs circle-jerking over one out of dozens of economic statistics."
I.E. Nothing to see here.


You don't deserve a downvote because you don't really understand what a "neolib" is. A Neo Liberal would be very much in support of what is happening right now and would be in favor of destroying the middle class, as much as possible.