HA! miss you ya goober.

i dont subscribe to everything this video pontificates on.i thought it was an interesting point of view from a christian perspective.

ya know what i find even MORE interesting?
that during the bush years all my liberal/progressive friends needed medication for the rage and offense they took to the :illegal wars,wiretapping,torture etc etc.

even here on the sift the politics channel was busting with video after video of the malfeasance and outright destruction of civil liberties perpetrated by the bush administration.

and rightly so i might add.

go look at the politics channel now.
notice anything?
its dead jim.
empty and devoid of any real substantive discussion concerning obama.(or anything for that matter,its a ghost town)
who..lets be honest..is on his way to surpassing bush jr on:destruction of civil liberties,assasinations,expansion of more illegal wars.

now why is that?
when bush did it everybodies panties got knotted up but when obama not only expands executive powers but starts killing amreican citizens abroad.no trial.no jury..executes them.
and not a peep.
not even a slight foot note.(i may have just made that up but i havent seen much,and thats the truth)

so here we have a former constitutional lawyer.smart and photogenic pushing through some of the most heinous legislation and my liberal friends are silent.

so lets be clear here.obama is a product.
just like the pilsbury dough boy or the MGM lion.
and he has OWNERS.
they tell him what to do and what is in THEIR best interest.

our government has been purchased and is now a owned subsidiary of the multi-nationals and the financial industry.
and obama is the face of that subsidiary.

do i think a "new world order" is the goal?
well..naw....i think it is a select few who wish to perpetuate their own dominance and the rest of the world be damned.
they are only interested in governments in order to get what they want and what they want is to commodify everything.
they want to own it and sell it as they see fit.
water,air,food,energy...the whole kaboodle.

so if they have to purchase a government to make stealing legal or pay off a commitee in order to be able to sell poison as medicine or make GMO foods secret and non-litigious.
thats what they will do.

some right wing folks call it oligarchy.
i find that to be inaccurate.

the correct term is plutocracy.

so if you think the government under obama has become some benevolent uncle who just wishes to pass out smiles and hugs.
well....i dont think you have been paying attention.

obama is smarter and his administration far more clever but this government has EXPANDED on what bush did years ago.

so where the FUCK are my liberal friends????
has our society become so polemic that we root for "our" team like slacked jawed zombies?
look at how those teams are voting!
they are practically indistinguishable from each other!
republican..democrat..pffft..same fucking cookie.

are we so enamored with the IDEA of american politics that we cant see the reality?
its broken kids.
busted and banged up and rotten to its core.

i just dont get the silence..i really dont...
because i think thats what bothers me the most.
the silence.

/rant off

That's not what progressive means, in this context. A progressive tax system is one where you pay a (progressively) higher rate when you have more income. What you have is a regressive tax system.

Do you happen to know what percentage of U.S. companies actually pay tax at the stated high rate? How does that compare to other countries? I know that quite a few of your companies weasel their way out of paying any tax at all, but I don't know how many overall manage this.

The ancient Roman empire also had social welfare, of a sort, increased after 122 B.C. See http://www.roman-empire.net/society/society.html for an overview. Then, as now, it was expensive to run.

The comparison is actually quite fair, except that in ancient Rome it was expected that wealthy citizens would give back to society and the idea of unbounded avarice as a virtue would have been quite foreign to them... so in a sense it's back to front.
>> ^Winstonfield_Pennypacker:

Not quite sure how comparing that to the US economy makes any sense. The US has the highest corporate tax rate on Planet Earth now. We have very high capital gains taxes (compared to global averages). Our income tax is so "Progressive" right now that the bottom 50% of taxpayers only pay 5% of the taxes. Over 75% of the Federal Government's 1.6 trillion dollar budget is dedicated to social programs for the poor.
Only way comparing it to the vid makes sense if if you contextualize it by stating that it is the GOVERNMENT that is deciding the screw the poor by the process of its own incredible incompetence, malfeasence, and mismanagement. Since only about 20 cents on the dollar comes 'out' of government versus what goes in, then yes - the U.S. Federal Government is entirely oriented around screwing the poor.
But of course, that's not what Prog-Lib-Dytes mean. To a leftist, the video means "tax breaks for the rich" ... (insert liberal talking point) et al.

Not quite sure how comparing that to the US economy makes any sense. The US has the highest corporate tax rate on Planet Earth now. We have very high capital gains taxes (compared to global averages). Our income tax is so "Progressive" right now that the bottom 50% of taxpayers only pay 5% of the taxes. Over 75% of the Federal Government's 1.6 trillion dollar budget is dedicated to social programs for the poor.

Only way comparing it to the vid makes sense if if you contextualize it by stating that it is the GOVERNMENT that is deciding the screw the poor by the process of its own incredible incompetence, malfeasence, and mismanagement. Since only about 20 cents on the dollar comes 'out' of government versus what goes in, then yes - the U.S. Federal Government is entirely oriented around screwing the poor.

But of course, that's not what Prog-Lib-Dytes mean. To a leftist, the video means "tax breaks for the rich" ... (insert liberal talking point) et al.

I guess on the one hand, I agree with part of his rant -- elections don't matter enough, and there's too much continuity in policy from President to President, from Congress to Congress.

On the other, I think it's largely spun in a self-serving way from a right-wing ideologue. His big complaint is that the parties are too similar, but then largely misidentifies this as somehow inherently a liberal confluence of policy, when the real issue is that we haven't had a liberal shift in America's policies since before I was born.

A lot of the problem, IMO, is that conservatives like to sell people on the idea of "divided government" and the whole idea that adding opportunities for the minority to stop things from happening (like the filibuster) are the essence of "limited" government.

They've been on a decades-long crusade to stop or sabotage the government from acting effectively on any topic, and now they're complaining that their success means they were right that the government is some unresponsive, ineffectual, cold-hearted leviathan that must be destroyed...even though they had a lot to do with it getting that way, and have worked tirelessly to keep it that way, regardless of whether people vote for them or not.

I don't really know how we're going to get out of this situation, but the solution has got to start with people getting fed up with this blame-shifting excuse coming from the right. Government is not some alien creature acting on its own whims, it's a human institution, populated with human beings, acting in accordance to laws that are voted into existence by people.

People who think "government" is the problem, are letting the actual people responsible for the problem off the hook, because they're too apathetic to figure out who's really to blame. And assholes like Judge Napolitano want to help encourage them to keep blaming "the government" by trying to make it seem like it's some all-encompassing conspiracy that no mere mortal could penetrate, rather than it being the direct result of decades of Republican malfeasance left unchecked by anyone, including Democrats.

And forgive the rant, especially if you're not normally into politics.

In reply to this comment by eric3579:
http://videosift.com/video/Unprecedented-wisdom-coming-out-of-Fox
I dont do politics but this got to me a bit fired up. I know this is something you might be interested in and was curious what you and @<a rel="nofollow" href="http://netrunner.videosift.com" title="member since August 5th, 2006" class="profilelink"><strong style="color:#0000CD">NetRunner thought.

It's really not envy. It's people tired of having a small portion of people suck up more and more wealth each year while they themselves can't even get a cost of living raise yearly.

It's been shown time and time again, on the whole the majority of people make less now than they did 20 years ago because they haven't gotten cost of living increases.

They marginalize your job by whatever means they can, and glorify for their positions so much so that not only does their salary not compensate them for DOING THEIR JOB but they also need yearly bonuses that exceed your 10 year income.

And then when times are tough, they continue to take those bonuses and salaries and cut out the jobs that haven't gotten a wage increase in years maybe even decades. Certainly not enough to keep up with inflation 99/100 times.

It's a silly way to operate, but they are backed by both politicians and the major money holders in the nation to enforce this weird dichotomy we have. Where even though they will tell you your job is worthless to the company...it never completely disappears...they just move it as close to poverty as they can and still get someone "satisfactory" in the position. Then move onto the next position and repeat it. After they've made their rounds, then they have to offshore as much as possible to continue the downward spiral that allows them to bring in higher and higher profits and pay out increasing bonuses.

And soon you'll see they have to outsource and offshore to other countries (from the ones they are in now) because people eventually figure out that it's fucking nuts to let these guys put a stranglehold on them like they are. Slowly tightening and tightening until it becomes more sustainable to not work versus the cost of clothing, commute, extended hours, health detriment, etc.

If they didn't have everything locked up for 50-100 years via patents and monopolistic deals, we could have small businesses spring up in our country to compete that might actually force them to pay competitive wages if they want to keep customers by providing quality service and quick repairs. But they continue to run "satisfactory"...and satisfactory standards get lowered each year. People get paid less, less people work there.....they pull in more money per employee by providing less service. And never grow or maintain their operations to stay modern (look specifically at cell phones and ISPs for this), but charge increasingly more each year for less service.

How can you envy that kind of behavior? The money they gain is coming from directly fucking over their employees and customers. The "more successful" ones are just better (more ruthless) at fucking people over.

Neither party wants this kind of behavior to end, that's why none of them actually bring all this bullshit to the forefront and call out specific businesses (especially the TOO BIG outfits) for their behavior. FCC blocking AT&T + T-Mobile merger is what they exist to do, and they are getting slapped on the back for doing it after months and months of information gathering on it, when the layperson on the street could tell you one less provider equals more being fucked as a consumer like they aren't getting fucked enough as is.

I wish they would start revoking the charters of corporations for negligence and malfeasance. They are like parasites feeding on the population at this point, and not mutualists that are good for the human body and in turn the population. And they are parasitic in more than one way, services rendered with their rising costs, and workforce shrinkage with it's decreasing wages and total amount of jobs.

Um, there are three branches of government. None reports to the other two.

A judge can be impeached for malfeasance. Period. Justifying their actions? No way, Jose.

Unless my grasp of the Constitution is flawed?


>> ^GeeSussFreeK:

I dunno exactly about this, but Judicial Review and Judge activism actually isn't in the constitution. That isn't the say that it isn't a good idea, but technically, Congress arguably has the power to pass laws to reprimand judges that willingly violate the spirit of the law. That doesn't take away from the HUGE dickness that is Newt. He seems to have gone full asshole in years gone by. He was never a nice person, persay, but he really has a hard on for himself now.

I understand the "one voice won't make a difference" philosophy, but isn't that, in the same breath, admitting that a protest is futile? >> ^NetRunner:

@rottenseed, my read of that declaration is that it isn't so much about trying to win a war against consumerism and greed, so much as a call for the restoration of the rule of law and democracy.
And spare me the BS about boycotts being the proper way to deal with every issue of corporate malfeasance.
Is my refusal to buy Apple products making them take steps to improve the working conditions at Foxconn? You tell me, am I winning?
If I start riding my bike to work from now on, will that make oil companies improve their safety on offshore oil wells?
If I move my checking account from Bank of America to a local credit union, am I really going to make Wall Street stop defrauding people?
Boycotts just won't get the job done. People can shop at farmer's markets, and spuriously boycott this company or that company, but has any boycott ever really resulted in an entire industry changing how they behave?
Maybe the protests won't go anywhere either, but they might wind up bringing real change too. It's happened before, it could happen again.

@rottenseed, my read of that declaration is that it isn't so much about trying to win a war against consumerism and greed, so much as a call for the restoration of the rule of law and democracy.

And spare me the BS about boycotts being the proper way to deal with every issue of corporate malfeasance.

Is my refusal to buy Apple products making them take steps to improve the working conditions at Foxconn? You tell me, am I winning?

If I start riding my bike to work from now on, will that make oil companies improve their safety on offshore oil wells?

If I move my checking account from Bank of America to a local credit union, am I really going to make Wall Street stop defrauding people?

Boycotts just won't get the job done. People can shop at farmer's markets, and spuriously boycott this company or that company, but has any boycott ever really resulted in an entire industry changing how they behave?

Maybe the protests won't go anywhere either, but they might wind up bringing real change too. It's happened before, it could happen again.

Methinks, that some people 'methink' too hard about a video. We and you know why it got upvotes.

If you have the inside scoop to save-the-Universe™ then you should: get a job as a librarian and start shooshing the hell out of people even if they whisper (it says NO NOISE; except the loud shooshing of course), and then destroy some kids mp3 player while they're playing b-ball that was playing vulgar rap, and then pull out a ghetto blaster and pop in some Mozart. That's the way it should be.

This video to me needs no "I'm sorry I didn't immediately come to the conclusion that it could be meant for something else!" or "Jeez, I just thought it was a straightforward media screw up. I'm sorry I didn't notice in time, send me to the Gulag...".

Perception "preceptions".

Remember: Clowns see a balloon and think of ways to tie it into knots for children. Scientists see a balloon and wonder how it can blow up without popping, and then why and how it does pop.

Why is this "perception injunction" getting more popular on Videosift? Then people feel a need (or inclined) to apologize? It's one thing to point it out, it's another to demand (nearly) that all that made no such distinction, on a video from the Internet with no pre-context found to be amusing out of context, demands a "morale force brigade" to harangue anyone involved in this obvious malfeasance by the "Sifties" of the Videosift upvoting public.

Shame on us. Shame on us !

(*goes back to watching "Whose Line Is It" clips...*)

I'm more inclined to believe this narrow view of politics that anything else.

People do vote on narrow issues. When their union is saying that party X will prevent their job from being outsourced, the choice is clear. When party Y offers generous handouts to a particular constituency they lap it up. Last election here in Australia, a coworker told me she voted singlehandedly for a particular party because they provided more generous maternity benefits. When it comes down to it, people have neither the time, effort or often the desire to analyse and determine the utilitarian option. Cynical sure, but just about everything from my experiences has supported this view.

Capitalism as a system, is built on incentives. Correctly calibrated with the right regulatory adjustments to prevent malfeasants like pollution, moral hazard and other negative externalities, it works incredibly well.

I think the same thing should apply to politics. For all intents and purposes that's what (a representational) democracy is grounded in anyway. Elected officials act in the interest of their constituents because that's what gets them elected. When, as in the US, campaign contributions (as a result of the almost limitless campaign financing rules) play such an important role, incentives are skewed. Curtis seems to draw the distorted view that adapting politics to a more capitalist based system implies surrendering its authority wholly to private companies when this is simply not a fair representation of game theory which on its pure theory alone implies or suggests nothing of the sort.

I really like Curtis's work, it often provides a very well thought out philosophy grounded in reason but I think he tends to oversimplify and draw swathes in describing complex issues.

>> ^gorillaman:

Here we are with our downvotes and promote powers, an elite of an elite, privileged members of the internet class, which is itself already practically superhuman, talking about our democratic website? LOL.

I'm noticing that you aren't really responding to my argument, but instead are trying to declare Videosift...what? An oligarchy? An Aristocracy? Totally devoid of any wisdom of crowds?

I've never really seen downvotes make a difference when it comes to getting on the Top 15. Hell, I can't even remember the last time I saw a video get more than 3 downvotes.

All promote and quality do is increase exposure. They can make a difference between a video "sifting" instead of going to pqueue, and it can pad the number of votes it gets after it hits the Top 15, but I doubt you could get, say, a video of silent blackness into the top 15 purely with quality and promote.

>> ^gorillaman:
The misconception I see in your posts is this arbitrary distinction between the oppressors and the oppressed. The average man on the street is as guilty today as the plutocrat with his snout in the trough, because if their positions were reversed they'd each behave in the same way.

It's not a misconception, it's that I disagree with your assertion. I doubt reversal would make no difference. In any case, my aim isn't to "reverse" their positions, but to equalize them.

>> ^gorillaman:
Accountability to 'the people' is hardly a check on corruption if the people themselves are corrupt.

The theory is, if people vote for politician A, and A does things that fuck them over, they can vote for another politician next time. To use the favorite conservative example, you can't raise taxes with impunity, because if people don't think it's justified, they'll vote you out. Get rid of the vote, and those eeevil government bureaucrats can raise taxes, and spend all of it on palaces for themselves instead of healthcare. The only "accountability" valve then comes in terms of an armed rebellion.

You're vaguely alluding to a tyranny of the majority issue, but in practice every tyranny I can think of has been a "tyranny of the elite".

>> ^gorillaman:
There's a linguistic issue here as well. Over time 'democracy' has become perversely synonymous with 'freedom'. There's an essential difference between taking power away and taking freedom away. Power here means the power to enforce ones will over others, freedom is the freedom from the power of others. Removing power from the majority will actually increase their freedom.

Again, it's not a linguistic issue, it's that you disagree with other people's feelings about democracy. Maybe that's justified, maybe it's not, but it's not that people don't understand what the words mean.

As for freedom vs. power, it's a slippery thing. I'd say they're synonymous in this context in a lot of ways.

Do I have the ability to own a house because I'm "free" to do so, or because I have the power that comes from having the talents to build a decent career for myself? Or am I "free" to have land like this because the government is ensuring that my property rights will be respected? Or am I somehow a slave to the majority because I pay taxes to a democratic government?

>> ^gorillaman:
Look at the progress of this thread. I don't see much ideological territory left to the democrats, squeezed as you are from both sides. While dft lectures blanarchist on the need for a government to protect free men from one another, you want to turn around and give those same men a stake in that same government with all its might and authority. Even on the site of your last stand - the desperate, impossible compromise of constitution, you admit to massive deception and malfeasance and even in the strongest and best designed democratic state an apparently irredeemable collapse. With all this you still believe democracy is moral? It amounts to a kind of political stockholm syndrome.


For all the proclamations of victory, I notice that the vast majority of that paragraph refers to things people other than me have said. I haven't used the word "constitution" until just now, for example.

I do think the US's implementation of democracy is headed for a collapse. Not because people left to their own devices slit their own throats (which you seem to think is inevitable), but instead because a wealthy elite has effectively subverted the mechanics of democracy.

So you say to me, as the elite stands over our wounded democracy, choking the last life out of it, that this is proof that the corruption and stupidity of the people has finally led to democracy's demise, and demand that we empower the elite to rule over us.

That's Stockholm syndrome.

Hell, you have yet to even try to explain what it is you're really suggesting, beyond that you want Superman and the Justice League to come and save us from ourselves. Not only that, you want them to totally ignore what we might say about their edicts, lest our filthy corruptness infect them.

@NetRunner

Here we are with our downvotes and promote powers, an elite of an elite, privileged members of the internet class, which is itself already practically superhuman, talking about our democratic website? LOL.

The misconception I see in your posts is this arbitrary distinction between the oppressors and the oppressed. The average man on the street is as guilty today as the plutocrat with his snout in the trough, because if their positions were reversed they'd each behave in the same way. Where everybody's only responsibility is to their own interest, which it is in a democratic 'believe whatever you want, vote however you want' anarcho-relativist system; the difference is one of chance only.

Accountability to 'the people' is hardly a check on corruption if the people themselves are corrupt. Our goal shouldn't be to defend unsuccessful criminals from their more effective rivals. The great value of government is that it tears power out of the hands of the people, so they can't do as much damage with it.

There's a linguistic issue here as well. Over time 'democracy' has become perversely synonymous with 'freedom'. There's an essential difference between taking power away and taking freedom away. Power here means the power to enforce ones will over others, freedom is the freedom from the power of others. Removing power from the majority will actually increase their freedom.

Look at the progress of this thread. I don't see much ideological territory left to the democrats, squeezed as you are from both sides. While dft lectures blanarchist on the need for a government to protect free men from one another, you want to turn around and give those same men a stake in that same government with all its might and authority. Even on the site of your last stand - the desperate, impossible compromise of constitution, you admit to massive deception and malfeasance and even in the strongest and best designed democratic state an apparently irredeemable collapse. With all this you still believe democracy is moral? It amounts to a kind of political stockholm syndrome.

That's simply because many of the people, even the average joes, idolise the all mighty dollar. The next time you see a manager take credit for one of their staff's work, or a colleague screw over another workmate to get ahead, convert that mentality to huge corporations. If anything, it would be easier as a corporate bigwig because they are insulated against the retribution they should rightly receive for their malfeasance (well, until they kill 11 people and create one of the biggest environmental disasters in history, I guess we'll see what happens).

You can't change the corporate macro culture if many citizens (particularly the ones that actually bother to vote or lobby their representatives) subscribe to the same values and ethics, that being making a buck first, everything else secondary.
>> ^blankfist:

quality idea. But I really think we could do without corporations period. They have proven government regulations and restrictions on business are simply shams to embolden and strengthen the corporations by giving special privileges to the rich and shrinking the small business sector.
But we can start with revoking their charter. But before we do that, I'd like to see those fisherman and other business owners personally affected by this sue for damages. Oh silly me, like they'll ever receive what they're owed. The politicians will make sure of that.
It's also hilarious that she links to this guy. If you remember him, he's the guy who said FUCK NOAM CHOMSKY. Just had to point that out. Ahem. Quietly exiting room now.

[redacted]

proof?
ok..lets use the same anecdotal evidence you used from the very SAME interview.
http://videosift.com/video/60-Minutes-Deepwater-Horizon-s-Blowout-Part-1
part 2.
http://videosift.com/video/60-Minutes-Deepwater-Horizon-s-Blowout-Part-2
notice anything that may ADD to what you posted?
would you like me to post the senate hearings from c-span while those companies involved all try to pass the buck?
would you like me to also post the comparisons of regulations comparing the countries in the north atlantic with the USA?
or the fines over the past ten years levied against haliburton for similar malfeasance?
would you like me to spoon feed this to you?


listen man.
you want to believe this was all just a small random quirky accident that nothing or nobody could have stopped..well,that is your choice.
but dont come to the table with that flimsy flaccid thing you call an argument,because it is small,wimpy and weak.
the next time you want to spout off do a bit of leg work so you dont get tagged in the nose.
you have a right to your opinion but not to your own facts.
and the fact is:BP used political influence to avoid having to keep safety standards by having regulations thrown out the window.the result of this was 11 dead and whole communities and eco-systems wasted.
so you call this a random freak accident.
well..sure.you are correct..
BUT if BP had been forced to be inspected every month and haliburton had to keep strict production values.
FOUR failsafes would have never failed.
at least not all of them at the same time.
and then...using your anecdotal premise...look at how the BP manager dealt with the destroyed rubber.
so you are right about the freakishness of the events but EACH one was due to malfeasance on BP's part.
why?
greed and profit.