Aliceinwonderland ~ Don't get too wound up my friend. He probably just read the last Hightower lowdown and wants to push some buttons. Let us deny him, no? We are so better then that.

Mark I think we are saying the same thing. For example. My company buys my gas, lunches, diners, my car, my insurance, and basically everything So I don't have to pay myself as much. So I take very little personally exspecially here in Canada where our personal tax is high and our business taxes are low. But if you count what I pay in my business I pay at hell of lot more then 17%. Yes the loopholes help me personally but I pay one way or the other. The big savings is when my company buys something for me I am really paying for it with pre taxed personal dollars.

Ya Mark I have to agree most poeple here would do much better at a hippie commune then the Omish One. Peace and love. Peace and love. But the hippies sooner or later ran out of money. Kinda like most liberal governments.

With all due respect, I don't think you're evaluating the situation accurately. Today's left, under the influence of Clinton, has done much to "divide and conquer the masses," effectively pitting the middle against the poor -- and that was a big mistake. This generation did take a wrong turn with the Clinton admin, which pulled much of the left to the right, esp. on socioeconomic issues (which define the overall quality of life in the US). We need only look at our past to understand our current economic mess. We looked at the policies and programs that were implemented from FDR to Reagan, which took the US to its height of wealth and productivity, and chose to reverse course. Look at the results. The US has fallen well behind every modern nation in virtually every respect as a result of an agenda to which we still cling. Two sets of policies have been phasing out the middle class, increasing hopeless poverty. One set involves the use of taxpayer money to ship our jobs out of the country/"free trade", creating enough pressure to slash wages and wipe out a century of labor progress. We simply don't have jobs for all who desperately need one. Clinton wiped out the welfare system; modern nations have welfare systems not only out of human decency, but because they play a vital role in protecting middle class jobs/wages while growing the economy. The left was bullied out of examining our socioeconomic agenda, merely reciting the call for job creation (as we've been doing for over 30 years now...) We need the courage to honestly, openly discuss the roles that our economic and social policies have played in our downfall.

It's fun to watch people do good business and succeed with lots of mutual profit. It's painful to watch people cut off their own nose to spite their face. That is what is happening with austerity. Nothing more, nothing less. Back in the Eisenhower era when high income earners paid their fair share and our infrastructure was expanded to meet the demand of a booming economy everyone prospered. Now at the whim of a few arrogant--and unwise--industrialists we are running our infrastructure--and our population--into the ground to squeeze every drop of vital monetary blood they can without any concern for the consequences of their actions, or the long term effect of their agenda.

You cannot get blood from a rock. This paradigm cannot be sustained. In that respect it is the same gameplay as our collective environmental agenda. It is only a matter of time till this house of cards comes crashing down upon itself.

HisLowness, we have to build a movement and that's just what lefties don't do. Lefties only talk to other lefties and turn their nose up at or self righteously reject everyone that doesn't already agree with them.

Often times lefty movements, always small and marginal, are just composed of a few students and their professors giving an intellectually elitist quality to it all. They make little or no effort to reach the blue collar American and are thus rightly called "elitist" and spurned by them. Then a Bill O'Reilly type who speaks the blue collar worker's language comes along and they join the Republican Party.

The righties know just how to build a movement, fraudulent astroturf that it may ultimately be, they have the best PR and marketing experts.

I think we just have to do the oftimes hard, tedious and unglammorous leg work of reaching people. What would be best would be to make a very public, perhaps theatrical, gesture toward an issue or problem that everybody can get with. That was what was Occupy's initial power. It had everybody's support because it spoke for everybody. Then the lefty intellectuals couldn't help but try to make it their wet dream come true so, of course, they ended up alone, in the corner, wankering again. They got academic, self important and irrelevant to anything the blue collar worker was concerned about or, at least, they weren't trying to speak to the worker just at them.

The intellectuals shouldn't be leading a workers' movement, anyway, it should be leaderless - which means it will be lead by the concerns most actual to most people - or should be led by the blue collar workers themselves.

Leighmf: Now those were the good old days where money was real money...coins made of gold...malleable to the tooth but certainly not as malleable in value as is printing up funny money whenever someone is so inclined. And, for sure, gold is a lot harder to steal, by banks or hackers, than are more ephemeral forms of wealth. It's kind of funny that all those bitcoins got ripped off by hackers and that some guy threw away a hard drive with millions of dollars worth of bitcoin. Wanna see a bit coin?

dkd8334$%@nehw'aK!kk`1fekdk;sk_kdkels'"'5kd838dn8wrfjd98haherfhifdvr98u98re4uuea#&$05827#&#$95rghhnzdfhh4+~!arhhvn"?zlhfgh67$&$*$#&(^(

There, now wasn't that fun? Bite into that, if you can, here today, poof!, gone tomorrow!

By the way, anyone hear about the girl scouts getting ripped off by counterfeiters? Someone went around buying a box of girl scout cookies and passed counterfeit $50 bills getting legitimate change in return. And now the girl scouts are out by several thousand dollars.

I thought about that just today as I handed a $50 bill to the restaurant cashier who stared at it for some awkwardly lengthy time...then took it to the back to consult with another person. I guess they determined it was legit because they finally came back and gave me change. It better not be counterfeit!...I just got it from the bank! But then nothing surprises me much about the banks anymore. Maybe I'll switch to gold so I can watch them bite down on a chunk.

Yes, It's time to put an end to Republican austerity measures, and start investing in our nation.

Anyone have ideas as to how we do that?

Kend, doing your impersonation of a dimskill again.

That's sure the problem alright, we don't make anything anymore. Manufacturing is gone from here but not from quasi socialist societies like France and Germany.

The debt was run up by the previous Republican administration in a willful attempt to bankrupt government to force austerity and privatization, because when democratic government recedes into the vaccum steps big business which then becomes the government, for all intents and purposes. They, then, control and dominate society with no accountability to the public.

Hutterites and Omish (and the Amish too) are weird religious cults that not only want equality of entitlement but also sameness and uniformity for their own sakes - or, because to distinguish oneself in any way is considered, by them, immodesty or "hochmut". Our libertinism and creativity couldn't handle that. We prefer the hippy commune.

Business and government are two completely different animals.

I once thought someone like Lee Iacocco would have made a good politician, I read his book while he singlehandedly brought Chrysler out of the abyss in 1985. He did have his heart in the right place by taking a one dollar salary and giving ownership of the company to its workers, however, at the end of the day any business in the world is here for one thing... to make a profit.

Nothing wrong with that and it is the profit factor that motivtes business.

Government, on the other hand, is a non-profit organization.

To have someone effectively run the governement they need to have good fiscal sensabililties and general welfare of the population as their primary goals. When republicans say they want to privatize to save the taxpayers money, what they really mean is the want to privatize so their friends can make a profit off the American taxpayer. Bush and Cheney did a fabulous job of helping their friends, at the expense of the taxpayer and the lives of our military. Even Obama screwed up when he privatized the solar power initiative, He should created a governmental department to handle such an important undertaking, something like the Tennesee Valley Authority.

All we have to do, to see the proper way to run govrnment is to look back at the New Deal.

Kend, your comments are laughable. You wear your ignorance on your sleeve. Progressive tax system? Buffett pays about17%, his secretary makes 35,000 and pays 33%. His comments about the tax system - 'There's something wrong here.'. Wake up, Kend.