posted
1. Wealth should not be distributed except by those who create it.
If I choose to give a beggar a dollar it is my choice. But to steal my wealth at the point of a gun and give it to the undeserving is a crime.
2. If harm is based on percentage, then why harm the rich more as we do now?
The answer, of course, is that they are the minority. There are more moochers than producers, and so individual rights get trampled.
"But they still have a good absolute-number-of-dollars", you say. But didn't you just suggest that the absolute value didn't matter?
Further, there are issues of context. Stealing a dollar from a homeless guy hurts one. Stealing a dollar from an industrialist hurts many. A wisely invested dollar may double in a short while, and double again soon after, and so on down the line.
3. Jason, the word "holocaust" is not some Republican invention this year only. It was ridiculous for you to even say so.
4A. The 400 wealthiest paid a lot more than 2%.
4B. Corporations would have no reason to be overseas if it weren't for our ridiculously high tax rates and burdensome regulations (a fact so obvious even Obama is paying lip service to it).
America will only regain former glory if the slow leftward stumble is finally righted.
5. Liberalism is not defined as being "for social justice or elevating poor people" . . . not that liberals even do such things to begin with. Though I appreciate your desperate attempt to move the goalposts.
In any case, liberals and other left-wing types like socialists and communists are indeed pretty staunchly anti-capitalist. It goes with the territory. The fact that you can rail against the rich and rail against corporations and demand excessive taxation of them while claiming not to subscribe to leftist economic theories is truly astounding.
I suppose in your warped little noggin, a pot-smoking hippie in a band driving a little foreign car covered with bumper stickers like "Buck Fush" and "Make Love Not War" and so on is a card-carrying conservative Republican. But as we've seen well-established in this thread, you and reality aren't really on speaking terms.
6. By the way, did you hear the news that the Tucson shooter really hated Bush?
Seems like that Bush Derangement Syndrome that you liberals suffer from even to this day is really bringing out your violent streaks even more than usual. Maybe if you guys were more civil with your violence-laced vitriol, none of this would have happened. Indeed, the blood of Tucson is on your wretched little hands. Yours, personally, Jason, even though you didn't know the guy and he never heard you speak.
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Annoying to be falsely accused of inciting violence, idnit?
That said, though, leftist violence is on the rise, even as the media ignores it or tries to pretend that it's right-wingers.
Borrowing a list from elsewhere:
* It was not the fear of conservative violence that caused Ann Coulter's speech to be cancelled this week. * It was a liberal who bit the finger off a man who disagreed with him on healthcare. * It was Obama-loving Amy Bishop who took a gun to work and murdered co-workers. * Joseph Stack flew his plane into the IRS building after writing an anti-conservative manifesto. * It was liberals who destroyed AM radio towers outside of Seattle. * It's liberals who burn down Hummer dealerships. * It was progressive SEIU union thugs who beat a black conservative man who spoke his mind. * It's doubtful that a conservative fired shots into a GOP campaign headquarters. * In fact, Democrats have no monopoly on having their offices vandalized. * Don't forget it was Obama's friend Bill Ayers who used terrorism as a tool for political change. SDS is still radical, with arrests in 2007 and the storming of the CATO Institute in July 2008. * It was a liberal who was sentenced to two years for bringing bombs and riot shields to the Republican National Convention in 2008. * It was a liberal who threatened to kill a government informant who infiltrated her Austin-based group that planned to bomb the RNC. * It was liberals who assaulted police in Berkeley. * It was liberals who intimidated and threw rocks through the windows of researchers. * The two Black Panthers who stood outside polls intimidating people with nightsticks were probably not right-wingers. * Every time the G20 gets together, it's not conservatives who destroy property and cause chaos.
Teh PW
Self Impossed Exile (This Space for rent)
Member # 1203
posted
the problem, Guardian, is if we let the Right (and also the rich) have their way with rule, law & what not, you invite side-stepping & short-cutting to get that double-your-buck faster.
Had what i say, that simple reality, NOT been true, then (1) ENRON wouldn't happen (because TPTB at ran ENRON wouldn't allow the fanancial FUCK-UPS by screwing the shareholders while the CEO's rape the quick buck),
(2) all the bank's woo's wouldn't have happened (because they would have been honest, said no to all the very-likely-to-fail loan askers & told them why; wouldn't agree to so many credit cards & credit card scams) and
(3), heavy industry wouldnt have such a shitty or shifty safety record (because when the site foreman in the powers of a Safety Quality Assurance Rep, if he downed a machine that was critical to production, then the higher-ups would SUPPORT HIS DECISION, and cut any red tape to get that machine in a RFU statis.)
instead, we do have a corperate POV that is VERY $ over anything else, thus rather going overseas, taking US jobs away because they care more for the cash than their integrity to the job or their nation; that would rather be dishonest than honest.
instead, we have bank institutions making billions on shitty loads, doing legal magic to confund & deceive, giving loans to anyone & everyone without ryhme or reason, credits cards for your FUCKING cat. you name it, in the past 4 years, they pulled it off. how many bank CEO's fled with the cash instead of falling on their swords?
instead, we have mines that go boom, we have oilrigs that go boom. all because the rush to produce overides everything. If the foreman SQAR at the that WVA mine site said something (I dont know if he did or not), he'd probably lose his job because he would have been viewed as non-company. the problem, in many cases of disaster that could have been prevented. Fear of being the whisle blower. fear of being reviewed badly because of his actions, production was down instead of even or up.
this is why i have a distrust for anyone with more money than they know what to do with. If you got enough in the bank to survive short term (like me), that should be the best you get. anything else is waste. do you REALLY FUCKING need a 1-mil+ home? why? because you dont want to hang around the poor? the middle class? because YOU THINK YOUR better than the poor, middle class, ME?
this is why we cheer when the famous fall. Comeupance instead of humility & honesty. Greed instead of integrity & ethics.
Guardian, until your right acts with morals, ethics, humility (Ask Not what your country Can do for you...), then i dont think things will ever get fixed.
There's the Right side (Conservative), The Left side (liberalsism), The Middle ground (made of both sides) and Anarchists. Attena's being dropped? Bombs being planned at holiday parades? are you certain that anything in your POV as Liberal also voted Demacrat? or something else...
posted
I don't want the rule of law abrogated. However, I also think that flagrant abuses of the law (e.g. Enron) are a symptom of the problem, and not the problem itself.
The more squeeze you put on businesses large and small, the more desperate their ploys to make money. Hence the gambling game that was a contributing factor to the financial crisis, and hence business-owners who have no ethics whatsoever.
Imagine an America with a more proper tax system, where a small business owner doesn't feel the need to be a quick-buck sleaze-bucket to make enough to pay for all the taxes and regulation-required costs of doing business.
Oh, and regarding the oil rig, were you not aware of the federal regulators (your guys, ostensibly) who weren't doing their jobs? And what of that boom system that the government claimed to have ready from the 90s on but failed to deploy? I think BP got more screwed on that deal than most care to admit. And I live here.
-------------------- . . . ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.
posted
I think BP got screwed more than their two accomplices, but only time will tell if they got screwed enough- there's a lot of oil still down there and no one has a clue what the environmental damage reallly is.
The government regulators had been in bed 9sometimes literally) with oil lobbiests for years- it was a failure all around, in every way....but consider the 700 plus safety violations BP had that year alone and comapre that record with Exxon's ONE violation.
Hopefully, BP will clean up it's safety standards like Exxon did.
As to Enron and ethics, do you agree with the Supreme Court's striking down the Honest Servies law? That move is going to get a lot of Enron's executives (and shady politicians) out of jail (or at least a new trial).
Registered: Aug 2002
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Yep. She's trying to make this guy's rampage the fault of women being able to choose to have an abortion.
Fuck's sake....talk about a stretch. She might as well have blamed universal healthcare or any other policy the GOP disagrees with.
Maybe next she'll blame it on universal healthcare...yeah! That's the ticket!
-------------------- Justice inclines her scales so that wisdom comes at the price of suffering. -Aeschylus, Agamemnon
Registered: Aug 2002
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