Thoughts about capitalism

I didn’t say that. I said they could donate to the advocacy group of their choice. That is not the same as “no restrictions”.


>1) Guarantee fair access to the ballot box, no more election shenanigans, no taxing parents because their children exercised their right to vote, no illegal voter roll purges, no misinformation campaigns about polling times and places, no more voter intimidation campaigns, no more interference in the vote counting, etc. – Joepistole

Unfortunately these practices are not uncommon or illegal in many states. Republicans have made and are in the process of making others standard operating procedures in states they control.


Additionally, there is nothing “messy” about illegal voter purges. Citizens are entitled to vote arbitrarily removing people from voting rolls, effectively disenfranchising them is clearly illegal.

Oh, how so? First I suggest you show me where I said “you have no restrictions on what people can do with their money”. You cannot, because I never said that. You are either being intellectually lazy are or are deliberately creating a straw man.


I have consistently stated that the wealthy should not be entitled to more representation than the poorest of our poor. I have repeatedly and consistently said that our government should not be auctioned to the highest bidder. Legislation and special interests perks should not be auctioned off to the highest bidder. Elected officials should be beholden to those they are supposed to represent and not the people stuffing their campaign coffers or offering them special “fact finding trips”, post office jobs or any other perks.

NO, show me where I made such a claim? I haven’t. This is you being silly yet again. “No gerrymandered districts”, is not the same as “no more congressional districts”. I suggest you go back and reread what I wrote. It really shouldn’t be that difficult. Muster a few brain cells for the task.

The US civil service has a very distinguished record for integrity. The employees of most large American corporations are held to some pretty high standards as well. As a former employee of a few Fortune 500 companies, I had to sign annual conflict of interest statements. Our civil employees and most corporate employee are held to some very high ethical standards. The problem is not with our civil employees or our private sector employees; it is with our congressmen and women. Congress should be held to the same standards.

Our civil servants, less congress, and our private enterprise employees are forbidden to accept things of value from folks which could create an appearance of a conflict of interest. Congress should be held to that same standard. Do you really believe that Sheldon Adelson donated 100 million dollars to Republicans last year because he wanted nothing from them? Are you that naïve? You don’t suppose that his largess to Republican causes had something to do with the Justice Department’s criminal investigation of both he and his enterprises?

Yes dialing for dollars is a solicitation for campaign contributions. How does it create a problem? I take it you didn’t read the article, “Special Interest Money Breeds Corruption in New York” from the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York Law School. I referenced it for a reason.

So . . . is there a point?

You really don’t think poor people care about voting rights? I guess you missed the whole civil rights movement of the 60’s. If your claim is true, why do you suppose the Koch brothers and those like them are spending hundreds of millions of dollars every year to influence the poor and middle classes? Poor and middle class people do care about pollution, about the quality of their air, their schools, their healthcare, their, roads, and the wars they are asked to bleed for and for the taxes they pay. I think you are either extraordinarily naïve or deluding yourself.

That is hogwash. You think the public doesn’t want what is best for the “public good”? You don’t think the public cares about their disposable income? You don’t think the public cares about jobs or of any of the previously mentioned things…really?

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

OK. Then what would the restrictions be?

So what's a legal purge? Must you keep voters on the voting roll even if they were born in 1850, or have been living overseas for 30 years? When is it legal to purge such names?

"they could donate to the advocacy group of their choice." That means that the rich will have more influence - more 'voice' if you will - over politics than the poor.

So you propose to divide them fairly rather than unfairly? Who decides? If shifting borders back to "fair" from "unfair" guarantees a GOP majority victory in an area that is primarily democratic - is that fair? Would you then "re-gerrymander" to make it fair?

Details please.

Enron? Exxon? Halliburton? Blackwater? Madoff? Standard Oil? Union Carbide? The Triangle Shirtwaist Company?

A great many US corporations - generally the majority - are quite upstanding and tend to do the right thing. However, holding politicians to the same standards we hold private corporations to isn't a good idea, since there is no one standard - and what standards there are are quite often violated.

Of course they care about voting rights. In general, though, they don't care about the same things the Koch Brothers care about, just as the Koch Brothers don't care about the same things that poor people care about. That's not a flaw, that's a feature.

It's not my claim.

If you really want to effect change, then calling people names will not help you. You'll be seen as an elitist snob who thinks that anyone who disagrees with you is an idiot, naive, lazy, deluded etc.

No, they want what is best FOR THEM. Most poor people don't care much about capital gains taxation. Most rich people don't care much about public school classroom crowding. And almost all people want "their" programs funded, someone else's programs cut and their taxes decreased.

Sure they do. Which is why public funding of campaigns is going to be opposed. Because while many people can afford it, some people can't afford that extra $50 (or whatever percentage you want to raise taxes by to cover it.)

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

True, but without Congressional districts, there would be no Gerrymandering. Abolishing Congressional districts* is a good idea, for that and 8 other reasons. Doing it is very feasible too, but to get current Congress to vote for it, one needs to make "no Congresional districts"be in their own self interest for existing Congressreps. In poll thread I statred, called:
"Should House of Representatives be replace by Internet direct representation?" at: http://www.sciforums.com/showthread...presentation&p=2770368&viewfull=1#post2770368

I now re-list the nine benefits stated here: http://www.sciforums.com/showthread...presentation&p=2770752&viewfull=1#post2770752 Note the Senate continues as is, and initiates all legislation, but the most expensve bills (determined by the CBO, which still lives) need to get Internet House of Represntives, IHoR, approval.

1) 96.3% reduction in election costs (a result calculated at start of the OP.)
2) Automatic end to Gerrymandering making secure seat so the election funds can be concentrated in other districts.
3) End to bribes to Representatives
4) End to negative TV campaign ads, with TV time focused on the pros and cons of the pending vote on major bills instead
5) Side effect of better public education (Rich don't support it now as send their kids to private schools, but if population is voting on bills, they will want smarter votes - Propaganda harder to push to the well educated.)
6) End to corporate jet taking Rep's family and friends to Bermuda etc.
7) Greater public participation in government on "hot button" issues, like abortion, military budgets, etc.
8) End to costly waste of tax payers money on "Bridges to Nowhere" as the "horse trading of votes" by Representatives for each other's support of local benefits would be impossible.
9) Reduction of census costs by sampling instead of complete survey (or total elimination of census cost?) - With no Representatives, there is no need of Congressional districts re-sized every 10 years to insure equal representation of voters.)

I think #5 alone should show how great a benefit a "yes decision" is as IMHO poorly funded local schools are the root of US´s debt probelms. Voters want goodies now and to send the bill to the yet unborn, and politicans, noting the "yet unborn" don´t vote, give the voters what they want. In Scandinavia ALL schools are very good. The population understand how self destructive democracy with ill-educated voters can be and they care about others, both living and the yet unborn Scandinavians, so they vote for high taxes to pay for the nearly free health care FOR ALL, and the high quality education FOR ALL.

* In the era when a rider on house back took weeks to get to DC from Florida, direct voting by the people was impossible - We need not be stuck in that era now. They have had direct voting in Switerland for a long time - it works well if population is well educated, and nothing does, in the long run if they are not. (US deep in debt, low scores on math and sciences, jobs exported, high welfare costs, food stamp user at ~50 million, etc.)


Note the poll is still open - you can vote if you have not, unless Sciforms "power mods" have decide to close it.

Electricfetus suggested a different (and slower to take effect) implimentations plan. Read post 36 also then vote.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

Someone on this thread stated that fascism is a political vision and not an economic one. This is clearly not the case if one looks further than the definitions found in dictionaries.

Fascism is BOTH political and economic...there is always some overlap.
'
Fascism as founded in 1920s Italy embraced what is called the 'Third Position'...in opposition to both capitalism and communism.

Italian Fascist leader Benito Mussolini publicly advocated such a "Third Alternative" in 1940 at the entry of Italy into World War II, saying:

"This conflict must not be allowed to cancel out all our achievements of the past eighteen years, nor, more importantly, extinguish the hope of a Third Alternative held out by Fascism to mankind fettered between the pillar of capitalist slavery and the post of Marxist chaos."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_position

That third position is called corporatism...in which all professions, trades and employers are organized into guilds who work out a consensus of relations among themselves in co-operation with government.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporatism#Fascist_corporatism

 

What, you cannot read a dictionary? The facts are you claimed fascism is an economic system and clearly it is not. I refer you to the dictionary yet again. I have a degree from a good university. I studied economics; you know how many times we studied fascism my economics classes – not a single time. I studied fascism in history classes.

The unpleasant fact for you is you are yet again wrong. Nothing in the diatribe above supports your contention that fascism is an economic system, because it isn’t. Read the dictionary instead of digging yourself in deeper.

 

Your education has clearly served you well; spending an hour a day arguing with random strangers on the internet. In fact, there seems to be shocking times between economic control and fascists. Case closed.

 

A cap on donations is one example of a restriction.

When a registered voter shows up at the election poll to vote and is denied his right to vote because he/she has been purged, that is clearly illegal. If you are going to purge voter rolls to weed out bad data, you should do it to everyone, not just those living in Democratic districts. Two, you shouldn’t do it without notifying the people you are purging and without giving them adequate recourse.

Sure they could. But if we move to a system of publically funded elections, the influence of advocacy groups are greatly diminished. And I refer you to my previous comments on caps.

Fair Majority Voting/ Biproportional voting.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biproportional_apportionment

http://www.math.cornell.edu/~billera/misc/cornell3X.pdf

Is there a point or have you lost your mind?

Well what do you mean by right thing? Repeal of Glass-Stegall and the Commodities Futures Modernization Act advocated by private industry and the cause of The Great Recession of 2007-2009 was not very responsible.

You have made a claim, but offered no proof. Where is your proof? Your assertion doesn’t even pass the common sense test. First, I am not proposing to hold politicians to the same standards we hold corporations. I proposed holding our elected officials to the same ethical standards we demand of our Civil Service servants and corporations demand of their employees. There is no good reason why elected officials should be exempted from those ethical standards. They should always be acting in the interests of the nation.

The poor and the middle classes are not the mindless automatons you think they are nor do they live in a vacuum separate and apart from each other and everyone else as I have pointed out to you many times before. Middle class and poor people are affected when people like the Koch brother steal their oil or pollute their air, land and water or change tax policies shifting taxes from the wealthy to the middle class and poor as they have done and continue to do.

So, is there a point? It doesn’t change the fact that decisions which affect one group also affect the other. We do not live in a vacuum.

Of course public funding of campaigns is going to be opposed, slavery was opposed. It doesn’t follow that it is a bad idea. How much has our current system of private campaign funding cost the nation? How much has special interest legislation cost the public? How much has the pork riddle Medicare Part D legislation cost the nation? How much did repeal of Glass-Stegall and the passage of The Commodities Modernization Act cost the nation? If we can spend billions building airplanes, we can spend a few million on our elections. Given how much money is spent and received in Washington a few million dollars spent funding our elections is an infinitesimally small portion of total tax receipts.

 

My education has served me well. I am 57 and retired. I have worked for Fortune 500 companies, started companies, run them and sold them and done well enough to retire early and do whatever I want whenever I want. And what the Hell does "there seems to be shocking times between economic control and fascists” mean?

 

OK. What kind of a cap? A hard limit like $100?

OK agreed there.

Some good ideas there.

Meeting the ethical standards of Enron hardly seems to be a good goal. That was a short list of companies that have not acted ethically, so I would hesitate to use such a standard for politicians.

Sorry you can't discuss this rationally. Have a good day.

 

Does it matter?

Why is it so hard for you to understand that no one is advocating holding elected officials to the same ethical standards of an Enron or any of the other companies you referenced? What has been repeatedly argued and made explicit in this conversation is that our elected officials should be held to the same ethical standards we apply to our Civil Service employees and corporations expect of their employees.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict_of_interest

 

The Webster's definition there does not distinguish either Mussolini's or Hitler's governing ideology and administration from, say, feudalism. Nor does it distinguish the stereotypically fascistic governments of Chile under Pinochet, Argentina under the Generals, etc, from any other strongman rule, including such disparate ideologies as Stalinism and monarchy. So it's hard to see how one could call it "correct". It's like defining a bird as a warmblooded oxygen breathing animal.

No, it isn't. And there's a specific reason for that - Webster's the publisher decided as a formal policy, years ago, to be absolutely "descriptive" rather than even partly "prescriptive". Among other problems with that idiotic approach (to quote David Foster Wallace: "That's so stupid it drools") this put them under the influence of dedicated propaganda interests capable of influencing mass media and transient popular misuse. So almost every Webster definition of a controversial and purposefully misused term is screwed up - sold out to the propagandists who can influence mass media usage. This corruption has been amplified in the net version - it's not widely recognized how separate the online and print versions of major dictionaries are, in many cases completely different editors etc sharing little besides the backfiles and the name, and the name "Webster's" is among those most often and severely compromised.

The problem faced by the propaganda interests involved is that fascism incorporates corporate capitalism centrally - fascism is an inherently and fundamentally corporate capitalist ideology. It's not the only one, of course (others do not involve the militarization, authoritarianism, violence, justification by myth, etc). But the obvious association of capitalism with fascism is far too intimate and characteristic for the comfort of America's ruling class. So there has been a concerted and at times seemingly conscious and purposeful effort to obscure the meaning of the term, ideally confusing things enough so that people will come to take it as an otherwise meaningless synonym for "bad" - for example, recently we saw published a corporate capitalist think tank financed book asserting that Hitler's fascism was a left wing ideology more or less identical with Stalinist ideology during the Cold War; that bizarre book and its silly author were given mass media exposure and wide publicity in advance of any respectable praise or large sales figures. If you consider for a moment how that could possibly happen, you will see what's going on with Webster's and its increasingly nonsensical "definitions" of politically loaded terms.

Concerted and deliberate ideological influence on dictionaries is nothing new. A friend of mine owns a very large old parochial school dictionary (another one of the pile with the word "Webster" on its cover) that was financed by the Catholic Church, sitting on a stand in her living room - it's one of the funniest books I've ever read. The little pictures are especially memorable - look up the illustrations for words like "Buddhism" or "ascension" and you can get the giggles for several minutes.

Meanwhile, if we try to discuss capitalism without getting past such muddles as Webster's provides we'll get nowhere.

 

"Our public officials should be held to the same standard of ethics we would expect of any other public or private enterprise employee." Most people would expect very little of a Halliburton employee.

 

Well, "IF" that is so most people would be wrong. You may not like Halliburton management, but Halliburton is a very well-run company. Additionally, I think you are not drawing a line between corporate expectations of their employees and corporate leadership. Halliburton or any public corporation wants and demands their employees to be loyal to the corporation and always act in the best interest of the corporation (i.e. ethically) and not be conflicted. We should have similar expectations of our elected officials.

 

Yeah, why bother with little things like reality and dictionaries when you can just make stuff up! It is so much easier than being burdened with truth, reason and reality.

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

 

If you can show me how that obviously goofy definition of fascism you quoted from Webster's separates the standard fascist governments - Hitler's, Mussolini's, Pinochet's, Franco's, the Argentine Generals's, - from monarchies, feudal lordships, theocratic dictatorships, Stalinist Russia, Maoist China, Mayan chiefdoms, strongman rule in general, or even authoritarian government in general, I will take your assertion of "reality" and your unwarranted deference to a really quite obviously lousy dictionary more seriously.

Until then, the person overlooking reality here is yourself. Say, for example, Mussolini's one sentence description of the ideology he more than any other single person invented: (translated):

http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/b/benito_mussolini.html

So was the Chicago Mob under Capone.

I don't like them because they are an ethical sewer, a corrupting and malign operation that does damage to things I value for profit to themselves. I would hope to apprehend and jail any public official who betrayed the public trust in Halliburton fashion.

 

I'd rather that our politicians be loyal to the people, rather than their employer (the government.) The goal of profit is not the same as the goal of public good.

 

Well that is the whole point of ethics reform, to ensure e our elected officials loyal to the people who elected them and not the special interests who fund their campaigns and treat them to dinners and junkets. So basically you agree.

 

LOL, I am not the one who is trying to rewrite the dictionary in order to support a notion. You are. Just because you don’t like the definition used by economists and dictionaries and everyone else, it does not follow that the definition is wrong. If just means you are a little off.

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

 

There is no "the dictionary". There are several bad dictionaries, and reasons for their existence. If you want to discuss things like capitalism, you have to give up your allegiance to inadequate and intellectually corrupt dictionaries, and indeed any one dictionary at all.

And you are wrong about the universal use of that odd and completely inadequate definition by "everyone else" - no serious scholar or intellectual would mistake simple authoritarian government for the special brand of totalitarian State that is fascism's product.

I have not only asserted your definition there is bogus, I have stated specifically how it is wrong and proposed a reason for it being so obviously and bizarrely lousy. And in particular that deficit or inadequacy in your definition there is directly relevant to this thread - you cannot usefully discuss capitalism in general ("thoughts on capitalism") without noticing that it lends itself easily and directly and in practice to fascistic governance.

 

Yes you often demonstrate just how poor that education was...or poorly absorbed. Probably the latter considering you tend to see all ideas through the murky lens of fanatical partisanism.

If I was your professor and you offered a dictionary definition of Fascism on an exam I would have stamped a big red F on your forehead and sent you back home to your parents.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporatism#Fascist_corporatism

Study the link I already provided and try to learn something about how Fascism developed in Italy as a 'corporvative state' inspired by the Charter of Carnaro.

"Fascism is therefore opposed to Socialism to which unity within the State (which amalgamates classes into a single economic and ethical reality) is unknown, and which sees in history nothing but the class struggle. Fascism is likewise opposed to trade unionism as a class weapon, but when brought within the orbit of the State, Fascism recognises the real needs which gave rise to socialism and trade-unionism, giving them due weight in the guild or corporative system in which divergent interests are coordinated and harmonised in the unity of the State." -Giovanni Gentile 1932 (The Doctrine of Fascism).