n/t

Over simplified and the situation itself is complex and the solution has to be multifaceted.

Doesn't pay to destroy Wall Street if there is nothing to replace it with just to watch it die.

Concrete action, like rolling back Citizens United or getting real campaign finance reform in there are helpful suggestions.

Whining like a spoiled rethug that this "Isn't change you can believe in" is not helpful. You sound like one of "their" bumper stickers.

Capitalism used to mean that people willing to work hard could succeed and move up the ladder to more challenges and more success. It doesn't have to be portrayed as this huge evil, just because it's been misused by those in power.

Capitalism has definitely been misused, and cannot be discarded.

but if left unchecked that what it becomes. Problem is the tiger is out of his cage and does not want to go back!

It's time for all of us to stop letting the wealthy treat us like a domestic abuser treats those he abuses.

If we have minds, hearts, souls and determination, we can run life on our own terms, and do so without throwing ANYONE under the bus.

What the problem has been is the willful manipulation of the commodities and speculation that blows people's profits away and the constant demand for higher and higher profit margins quarter after quarter in order to have a positive stock price for companies.

Maybe we SHOULD replace it with an "Investment Market" where the goal is to build solid companies and get consistent return on the investment and once paid out with a profit, then it's done. Instead of this constant up and down bit.

Kind of like the micro loan concept but on a larger scale.

I'm Voting FOR Presdient Obama with Enthusiasm!!

I hate this meme and it's so totally wrong.

Obama isn't perfect but he is what he is and he's done some good under very trying circumstances.

I just don't see him being "owned" by big money the way Romney is. After all, he's got a lot of big money people agreeing that those who make above $250,000 should pitch in their fair share.

It's a completely different mind set.

We need more Pom Poms

Always easy to tell who sticks to it exclusively...so easy to demoralize our own side when you have zero effort invested.

But yeah, they're both the same!1! One's just a bit less the same!1!

Puh-thetic.

Julie

They can be enthusiastically for Obama without having to deal with any negative personal consequences like splitting what little family they have left apart.

He's got no skin in the game.

Except for, you know, the fact that Romney could collapse the global economy and still have time to start World War III before teatime.

My reply was to the poster who wanted everyone to be enthusiastically for Obama, that was written like someone who doesn't have to worry about their car getting vandalized or blowing their personal relationships apart.

I got in a major intra-family squabble a month or two ago because I made the mistake of voicing my view that Food Stamp recipients shouldn't be drug tested as a matter of course. I have a rather oblique OP up on GD about the incident.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/1002989233

I live in a red county of Michigan, try again.

Julie

I am voting more against Romney
than for Obama.

I am a liberal ...

Obama has made mistakes. He TRUSTED the people across the isle and they camped out on NO NO NO.

He didn't follow through on key issues and he didn't lead the DEMs in the Senate and House because he was trying to get bi-partisan deals thru.

I'm pretty sure he knows how dumb that was and we gotta keep reminding him that trusting those folks isn't in our best interests.

An essential part of being President is running capitalism. It is part of the job and would be regardless of who is elected. The question is more how well a candidate would run it and who they would be seeking to benefit.

Mitt would not run it well and would seek to benefit the owners. Barack would run it better and seek to benefit the workers more.

The last person you would want in that job is someone who does not think this is part of the job. What we saw in 2008 was just a vague foretaste of what the true and sudden failure of capitalism would be like. To some small extent GWB thought it was not fully his job and he could let others run it through deregulation.

I am pretty sure it is not the fun or pretty part of the job, but it needs doing and doing it will always anger someone. It is clear that markets behave irrationally. They do so all the time which is why you need rules to limit the damage.

As Michael Moore said upon the fall of the Soviet Union, "One evil empire down, one to go."

And it WILL happen as Americans are tired of seeing the rest of the world live better.

Of course it could just be that most Americans have no idea how life is outside our work-camp culture.

....and the idea that we can't have that because we have to create people like Mitt who says we don't even deserve food...

Well, let's just say he's making people wake up.

Noblesse oblige.

than how we organize our economy internally. The most peaceful and non-interventionist foriegn policy one could imagine would still be coming from largest economy in the world, and as long as that is capitalist, it will exert influence. When we buy stuff, we buy alot of it. Whatever we buy and where ever it comes from is transformed by the experience, most often not for the better.

Were we not gluttons for middle east oil, many of the abusive regimes there would not have the cash to buy the weapons to maintain control. We have transformed China by purchasing cheap t-shirts and electronics. Think of what our hunger for bananas and coffee have done to central america (big plantations instead of small family plots).

Occasionally we have used gun boats to make it work, but even if we hadn't the influence would still be pervasive.

....showcased the quality of life here as an example to the world of the benefits of Capitalism. Lots of middle class people in nice clean homes raising families and having lots of leisure time for vacations and having weekends off. We used to brag about how much Americans had in savings. The message to the world was this utopia could be yours too if you chose Capitalism instead of Communism.

Meanwhile, the Soviet Union had shortages and a crumbling infrastructure due to sanctions. There were major bridges that dated back before the revolution and they were still running steam trains long after America was zipping along in streamliners and flying in jets. In addition, the Russian people lived in poverty,...the classic image of the doughy housewife with no makeup bundled up and trudging through the snow pushing a hand cart to buy the only bread available as opposed to our happy housewives driving the family car to supermarkets filled with a wide variety to chose from.

This middle class lifestyle served its purpose and after the fall of the Soviet Union the Powers That Be decided it wasn't needed anymore and since then they have been trying to return to a time before it existed. Back to the time of a single individual cornering the market and being known for a single product. The time of Tycoons in the Gilded Age. American Royalty where money equals power.

That ties into a theory I am developing about why younger people supposedly have a weak work ethic, but I'm not ready to shoot my wad on that one yet.

....a typical factory worker back in the 70s could afford a speedboat to take the family out waterskiing on the weekends.

Now that same job doesn't even pay for your own apartment.

The "Honeymooners" (Art Carney / Jackie Gleason) is a wondeful example of the 1950s. A comedy about a bus driver and sewer worker living a tight existence but OK with their wives at home all day. Today, even couples with professional level educations, do not live, even cheaply without both of them working. Very few if any bus drivers and sewer workers have a wife who stays at home, if she has another choice.

I grew up in a neighborhood full of defense and space industry engineers, not executives just workers. All of their wives stayed at home, and any that wanted one had a house, a speed boat, and two shiny cars in the garage. Beyond that they had real defined benefit pensions and substantial savings. Many became +/- millionaires by the time they retired, and bought a second house in the NC Mountains to enjoy cooler summer days.

The interesting bit when you look at it is just how small the slice of overall economic productivity is required to change today back to something more like that. Turn just 10% of current corporate profits into wages and benefits in most industries (leaving 90% of profits alone), and the culture would transform massively.

Here is another one. The Soviets failed partly because they engaged with us in an unending arms race. But there is another part, they attempted a centrally planned economy back in the day when people were still doing that sort of thing with paper ledger books.

Today we have Wal Mart and Amazon. Wal Mart, for all its many faults has something the Soviets never had, a truly automated "just in time" inventory system. If the state stores in the Soviet Union knew on any particular day where the demand for toilet paper was high, they could have had it there the next morning, just like Wal Mart. They would have had detailed data on daily consumer demand across the economy. They could and would have used the real market demand data to organize production. Instead they made guesses about what consumption would be and where supplies would be needed with dated and incomplete data, and usually got it wrong to some extent, thus there were chronic shortages leaving the people feeling like they did not know what they were doing.

Being short on bread or toilet paper, or worse Vodka, would lose you an election, if you were in charge of supplies.

It is important to remember that Wal Mart, for all its many faults, runs a business that is larger than many national economies with automation. Wal Mart and Amazon are proof that central planning can work and work quite efficiently with current technology.

You and your boss called each other "comrade" as if the two of you were equals. As if your boss lived the same life you did. Everyone KNEW there was a privileged class despite the denials. Also the "plans" they offered that never came through. Like the five year plan to make sure everyone had a refrigerator. It wasn't a distribution problem, it was a supply problem because they had to produce everything internally. While it's true they put way too much effort into their military you have to remember they justified it by the fact that they had been invaded in the past and people like Patton fed into the notion that we wanted to invade them. What's funny is the leaders actually believed they could keep their population in the dark about how the rest of the world was advancing as they stayed stagnant. The space race was an attempt to prove they were more advanced and losing it was a major blow.

Neither side never got that once they could deliver 100+ thermonuclear weapons on their enemies, they were as safe as they were ever going to get with that tool, and building more of them was a massive waste of resources. Neither we nor them ever read Machiavelli seriously and came to understand that projecting military power to maintain empire was predictably unsustainable over the long haul.

The Soviets never had the natural resource and industrial base to project cold war power for very long. The US had a huge advantage having not been massively bombed in WWII and having become the allies industrial base when Europe was destroyed.

We still suffer with the illusion of control, or that we could be in control if we spent just a bit more on defense. Rmoney has used such language in his stump speech, at least when he isn't "clarifying" his latest gaffe. If we do not back away from it, the illusion will break us just the way it did the Soviets.

We have plenty of corruption and hubris here, and in the absence of a competitive somewhat egalitarian ideology have allowed our country to slip back into the gilded age for income distribution. The problem with this is that real democracy was born from the rise of a middle merchant class 300+ years ago, and it was strongest when that prosperity was even more broadly shared among the workers.

WE are rapidly heading to a place where we have hollowed out society to the point of a new feudalism. A place where there are the wealthy and those who serve them. Real democracy was not born of and will not be sustained in that sort of wealth distribution. This is not theory or speculation, there is no real democracy on the planet that has ever sustained this. There are places that have "elections" that on rare occasion change the specific group of owners running the place, but most actually exchange governments by coup. Between the coups they have rigged elections for entertainment where the owners magically get 99% of the vote.

...it's a good thing America has had money to burn because our screw ups would have sunk most countries.

fantastic. I love them.

It's the type of insight that is worthy of much more exploration and exposure, imho.

Thanks for finding.

K&R

I can give you a hundred reasons why I'm voting for Obama.

I didn't even pay attention to the Obama part; I thought the reference to taxation/no representation and Citizens United was really interesting.

Thanks for the thread, XemaSab.

Much as he would like that.

We can beat Mitt heavily by calling him out on this.