Took me time to read all the comments, but I really enjoyed the article. It proved to be Very helpful to me and I am sure to all the commenters here! It’s always nice when you can not only be informed, but also entertained! china magic

Republican leaders in Congress are not at all interested in factual information. When the facts do not suit them they make up stories. These Republicans do not represent all billionaires or millionaires, just those who are greedy and stupid. Even a rich man can be stupid.

Thom, Louis, or someone in their staff quoting Nick Hanauer, one of our nation's richest billionaires in testimony at The Senate Banking Committee said:

Quote Nick Hanauer:“In the same way that it's a fact that the sun, not earth, is the center of the solar system, it's also a fact that the middle class, not rich business people like me, are the center of America's economy.”

Well, it sure is nice to know that somewhere out there is a billionaire with a brain. So much for greed. It is my belief that people don't get rich by greed alone. Greed is an impediment to success. Unfortunately, only the useless heirs of the rich demonstrate greed because they want to protect what they have because they have nothing to offer in return to sustain it. Therefore the owners of our government are greedy, useless brats who need to be removed from our system of lawmaking ASAP. The longer they hold the reigns of power the more corrupted and perverted our system will become. Campaign Finance Reform, and Move to Amend Now!!!

The government collecting information about our communications goes back further than even George W. Look into the Carnivore program, cited in EPIC alerts as early as 2000. It looks at content, not just who, where and when.

What should we do about those who can't work, due to health or circumstances, and those for whom there are no jobs? How do you get a job when you no longer have a home address, phone, bus fare?

The reality is that the wealthy are undertaxed, and are NOT job creators. Nick Hanauer makes a good case that, more money in the hands of consumers is what creates jobs, not an undertaxed 1 percent.

The focus needs to be on generating income for the masses. They need the same income source to tap as Hanauer, which is generated from the dividend income related to the ownership of wealth-creating productive capital assets.

While Hanauer, a 1 percenter, states the obvious that full employment is not an objective of businesses, he fails to connected with the idea that the masses need to become individual owners of FUTURE wealth-creating productive capital assets. Nor does Thom Hartmann address the ownership issue and the need to create new capitalist owners who would be the FUTURE investors in a growth economy.

The reality is that companies strive to keep labor input and other costs at a minimum. In order for an economy to grow, the consumer populous must have income in order to create demand for products and services. While the rich minority systematically concentrates more and more capital ownership in their stationary 1 percent ranks, the 1 percent are not the people who do the overwhelming consuming. The result is the consumer populous is not able to get the money to buy the products and services produced as a result of substituting machines for people. And yet you can’t have mass production without mass human consumption. It is the exponential disassociation of production and consumption that is the problem in the United States economy, and the reason that ordinary citizens must gain access to productive capital ownership to improve their economic well-being.

As a result the exponential growth of the job-displacing and job-destroying non-human factor of producing and delivering products and services , the trend has been to diminish the importance of employment with productive capital ownership concentrating faster than ever, while technological change makes productive capital ever more productive. But because this is not well understood, what we as a society have been doing is to continually shift the work burden from people labor to real capital while distributing the earning capacity of capital workers (via capital ownership of stock in corporations) to non-owners through jobs and welfare. Such policies do not function effectively.

In a democratic growth economy, based on Louis Kelso’s binary economics, the ownership of productive capital would be spread more broadly as the economy grows, without taking anything away from the 1 to 10 percent who now own 50 to 90 percent of the corporate wealth. Instead, the ownership pie would desirably get much bigger and their percentage of the total ownership would decrease, as ownership gets broader and broader, also benefiting the traditionally disenfranchised poor and working and middle class. Thus, productive capital income would be distributed more broadly and the demand for products and services would be distributed more broadly from the earnings of capital and result in the sustentation of consumer demand, which will promote economic growth, which will benefit the already rich as well. That also means that society can profitably employ unused productive capacity and invest in more productive capacity to service the demands of a growth economy.

Norman Kurland of the Center for Economic and Social Justice (CESJ.org) comments:

This highly articulate businessman points out the absurdity of those conservatives advocating lower tax rates for property-based consumption incomes for the rich. Hanauer shatters the capitalist argument that the monopolistic holdings of the rich will "create jobs," their shallow justification for thousands of tax deductions, tax credits, tax loopholes and "tax expenditures" from politicians that achieve monopolistic access for the rich to future growth assets, future capital incomes, etc., perpetuating and increasing the ownership, power and income gaps between the top 1 percent and the poorest 99 percent of citizens.

The video makes the same case against monopoly capitalism as Karl Marx, Lord John Maynard Keynes and those who turn to government redistribution for creating jobs and redistributive taxation for supplying consumption incomes of the unemployed, underemployed and those who have left the workforce. On the other hand, Keynes and those following Marxist solutions offer non-productive income redistribution schemes that led to continuing increases in the costs of production and prices, plus a continuing transfer of power and income independence from the poor and middle class to the State, society's only legitimate monopoly. The monopolistic power of the State, whose power is has been shifted from increasingly powerless and manipulated voters to an elite of politicians, their rich contributors for new laws to perpetuate monopoly capitalism, and an elite of government bureaucrats to "regulate" the unjust "wage slave, welfare slave, debt slave, and charity slave system" supported by Wall Street speculators, the tiny ownership class whose power and capital incomes increases at the expense of the 99 percent, especially the poorest of the poor who are the most powerless, economically dependent and hopeless victims of the modern culture.

Conservatives not only would continue the current thousands of "tax expenditures" that concentrate capital ownership for the rich but would eliminate all income and inheritance taxes on the rich based on the false premise that this "creates jobs." Conservative policymakers would also cut government spending for the poor without offering systemic changes to "the system" that would grow the economy in ways that return economic power and provide truly equal economic opportunity to all citizens from the bottom-up through market forces, radically reduce the economic power of government, and do so without violating private property rights of current owners during their lives.

What the TED video misses is that both the left and the right have been miseducated by the "Labor Theory of Value," which the gurus of economics, including Nobel Prize winning economists like Milton Friedman and Paul Samuelson, took for granted, whether they belong to the various socialist schools of economics, or the Austrian School of Hayek and von Mises, or the Chicago Monetarist School of economics, or the Keynesian school that dominates the economic policies of the United States and other democratic developed nations. This false theory assumes that "Labor" (all human contributions to the production of marketable goods and services) is the sole source of all production, thereby totally ignoring the growing role of all non-human physical, organizational, marketing and intangible productive assets that combine with Labor to the production and and delivery of all marketable goods and services in all market economies. By ignoring "Capital" the Labor Theory of Value ignores the fact the labor-destroying technologies and other ever-advancing forms of productive capital produce enormous capital incomes for Wall Street speculators and the capitalist elite for beyond their ability to consume what they earn as capital owners. And this false Labor Theory of Value ignores the possibility that the annual multi-trillion dollar growth of new capital assets and transfers of existing capital assets could by changes in the tax system and Federal Reserve system and policies could legitimately become owned by every citizen, from the poorest to the richest, as a new right of citizenship, comparable to universal access to the political ballot.

Louis Kelso, (1) seeing the flaw in the Labor Theory of Value, (2) conceiving of a simple overall theory based on a more realistic understanding of the dynamic nature of a true economic system and (3) offering universal principles of "Economic Justice" for limiting the greed and corruption inherent in monopoly capitalism, provided the world with a "solution" that would automatically balance the two sides of the economic equation: "Production" (or "aggregate supply" for economists) with "Consumption" (or "aggregate demand" or "mass purchasing power" for economists). Thus the "Binary Theory of Economics" challenges and transcends the theories of all other schools of economics. Kelso's innovations in financing new capital assets and new capital incomes for consumption and retirement incomes for all citizens on "future savings" rather than current incomes also removes these costs from the costs of producing future goods and services. As pointed out by the late Walter Reuther, the legendary head of the United Auto Workers, in his February 20, 1967 testimony before the Joint Economic Committee of Congress, in favoring widespread democratization of capital ownership and profit sharing, profits do not add to costs. They are determined from the bottom-line, only after marketable goods and services are sold. Therefore, adoption of Kelso's Capital Homestead Act across the board for all Americans would tend to eliminate production costs and stabilize prices, while increasing not only higher consumption incomes for all Americans, but also lower prices for the goods and services they consume.

I agree with Michiel Bijkerk's's comments on how the Nick Hanauer's PET video can contribute to widespread public understanding of Kelso's theory and the Capital Homestead Act for a radical overhaul and simplification of the Federal tax system, Federal Reserve policy and role in favoring future money and credit for ownership-expanding asset-backed productive capital loans and discouraging future ownership-concentrating non-productive loans for government deficits, the need for consumer loans and other loans that create added consumption incomes backed by past, not added, marketable goods and services. Creating new dollars not backed by added goods and services is the equivalent of counterfeiting and inherently inflationary:

However, I suggest we all start by sending to each person in our personal Facebook, LinkedIn and other social media networks the Summary of the Capital Homesteading Act at http://www.cesj.org/homestead/summary-cha.htm. The most immediate emphasis should be on promoting discussions on our specific reforms to the current Internal Revenue Act, which would result in existing and new enterprises being encouraged to create new full dividend payout shares for financing their trillions of dollars of new productive assets through Capital Homesteading Accounts established by all citizens at their local commercial bank members of the Federal Reserve System. Our tax reforms would tax all consumption incomes from Labor or Capital at the same rate above individual exemption levels, eliminate payroll taxes and change inheritance laws to encourage more democratic spread of past monopolistic accumulations of capital assets. Given the failure of the Obama team and Romney team to resolve the economic fears of most voters, I believe that opening their minds to systemic change that would advance economic justice through ownership should begin with proposed tax system, followed by our Federal Reserve and other reforms to the basic institutions that today support monopoly capitalism.

You need to stop shouting.

Republicans remain the "Job Cremators"!

...just had my 77 v dub po' man restored. fresh paint and wHAt not. i wanted to "shit" when the new windshield i noticed was made in? CHINA!!!! so as i toiled toiling this weekend putsing about it seemed that every label i read said, "MADE IN FREEKIN' CHINA!!!" the rake, the weed wacker, the phillips screw driver, the razor knife, the epoxy, the pot i planted flowers in, the garden hose! the only thing i used this weekend that was made in America was the spray nozel! So then i got to thinkin' 'bout Leroy and how back in the day he worked from floor sweeper up to line supervisor at Kellog's cereal (which by the way is now made in mexico?)in my home town, "Battle Crack House" Michigan. His wife never had to work his kids had anything they wanted, they had a second home down flordy way and lived what on the outside looked like a pretty darn good working class life. Investors? Job creators? hu. wha? The tragedy of it all is that Americans have been so dumbed down to what is real that the only job creating they've done is in? CHINA!!! Tell ya what the only way America will ever be free again will be the day the pigs of industry the coporate elite and the wall street swill reinvest in America and quit holding everybody prisoner of the stock markets and the banks! IT REALLY IS THAT SIMPLE PEOPLE!! Oh and it couldn't hurt to tax the crap out of cap gains and like vegas? if you gamble in the market and you lose? tough shit! no cap loss carryover, i didn't get any on my 401k when it lost a mountain of $$$,$$$....ARGH!!!!!!! and just what our piggy politicians donig for us?

Actually, prosperity comes from both the bottom steps of the economic pyramid. The poor HAVE to spend their money. This was amply proven by the CBO about the food stamps programs; which, of course, has been cut in the sequester.

And, of ocurse people gainfully employed paying taxes

I can sure say that austerity seems to be losing it's glamour around the world.....unless all this is, and has been from the start, just a way to send all the money to top and to hell with anyone else.

And now we find out they're spying on us to add injury to injury. I guess they figure us good Americans are going to get sick of eating dirt one day. Really creepy stuff going on and the worst, I think, is the blase` attiude of so many that this is happening to this degree and has bee ramping up since the passage of the (unread by congress) "Patriot Act"

If our latest whistleblower were not well intended he would have taken his pile of documents to Hong Kong secretly and gotten a couple of million dollars from the Chinese government rather than offer same to the media free of charge. To require a court order based on probable cause to tap one phone and not require the same to tap 300,000,000 is beyond absurd. Prism IS the machinery for a police state apparatus that would give the Stasi a big case of jealousy. It is just waiting for President Ted Cruz to pull the trigger, metaphorically of course.

A breaking story on The Ticket: Yahoo News, says that Daniel Ellsberg, who 40 years ago leaked the Pentagon Papers to the public disclosing the secret history about the Vietnam War, has come out to publicly praise the recent NSA leak by Edward Snowden:

Quote The Ticket: Yahoo News by Dylan Stableford who:Daniel Ellsberg, whose leak of the so-called Pentagon Papers to The New York Times in 1971 exposed the secret history of the war in Vietnam, thinks Edward Snowden's leak of the National Security Agency's surveillance programs was more important than his.

"In my estimation, there has not been in American history a more important leak than Edward Snowden's release of NSA material, and that definitely includes the Pentagon Papers 40 years ago," Ellsberg wrote in an op-ed published by the Guardian on Monday. "Snowden's whistleblowing gives us the possibility to roll back a key part of what has amounted to an 'executive coup' against the U.S. constitution."

The article then continues:

Quote The Ticket: Yahoo News by Dylan Stableford who:Ellsberg added on CNN Sunday night that “it can’t be overestimated to this democracy. It gives us a chance, I think, from drawing back from the total surveillance state that we could say we’re in process of becoming, I’m afraid we have become. That’s what he’s revealed.”

On Friday, President Barack Obama defended the programs that predated his administration, saying Americans must tolerate "modest encroachments on privacy" in the name of security, Congress had been fully briefed, and that his White House "actually expanded some of the oversight, increased some of the safeguards."

In response to President Obamas defense of NSA spying Ellsberg says:

Quote The Ticket: Yahoo News by Dylan Stableford who:For the president then to say that there is judicial oversight is nonsense—as is the alleged oversight function of the intelligence committees in Congress. Not for the first time—as with issues of torture, kidnapping, detention, assassination by drones and death squads—they have shown themselves to be thoroughly co-opted by the agencies they supposedly monitor. They are also black holes for information that the public needs to know.

The fact that congressional leaders were "briefed" on this and went along with it, without any open debate, hearings, staff analysis, or any real chance for effective dissent, only shows how broken the system of checks and balances is in this country.

The article then goes on to describe the history between the Ellsberg case and the current state of affairs:

Quote The Ticket: Yahoo News by Dylan Stableford who:It's not the first time Ellberg has butted heads with Obama.

In 2011, Ellsberg was among a group of noted whistle-blowers that penned an open letter asking that a "transparency award" given to Obama earlier that year be rescinded. They called the Obama administration's record on secrecy and surveillance "a disgrace."

In 1971, Ellsberg became the first person to be prosecuted under the 1917 Espionage Act for releasing classified information to the public. The case was later dismissed when it was revealed during trial that the government had engaged in illegal wiretapping to gather evidence against him.

The Pentagon Papers were formally declassified in 2011.

Last week, Ellsberg told The Washington Post that the U.S. government would have gone after him the same way they've gone after Bradley Manning, the former U.S. soldier who is currently on trial accused of providing thousands of classified documents to WikiLeaks.

"I'm sure that President Obama would have sought a life sentence in my case," Ellsberg said.

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/ticket/ellsberg-snowden-nsa-leak-pentagon-papers-142811185.html

In a related article, Snowden states

Quote The Ticket: Yahoo News by Dylan Stableford who:Snowden, a Hawaii resident who was interviewed by the U.K. newspaper in his hotel room in Hong Kong where he is hiding, said he has no regrets about going public—even if he never sees his family again.

"I don't want to live in a society that does these sort of things," Snowden said. "I do not want to live in a world where everything I do and say is recorded. That is not something I am willing to support or live under. ... I can't in good conscience allow the U.S. government to destroy privacy, Internet freedom and basic liberties for people around the world with this massive surveillance machine they're secretly building."

The article goes on to state,

Quote The Ticket: Yahoo News by Dylan Stableford who:Snowden said he decided to leave his family, girlfriend and a comfortable, $200,000-a-year salary behind, and flew to Hong Kong on May 20. He said he chose China because "they have a spirited commitment to free speech and the right of political dissent."

The newspaper said it revealed Snowden's identity at his request, but that he is concerned it will become a distraction. "I don't want public attention because I don't want the story to be about me," Snowden said. "I want it to be about what the U.S. government is doing."

Snowden says this about President Obama,

Quote The Ticket: Yahoo News by Dylan Stableford who:Snowden said he thought about disclosing the program sooner but was hopeful the election of President Barack Obama would change things. But "[Obama] continued with the policies of his predecessor," Snowden said.

Senator Rand Paul has vowed to fight the NSA spying program:

Quote The Ticket: Yahoo News by Dylan Stableford who:On "Fox News Sunday," Sen. Rand Paul said he would seek a Supreme Court challenge to the surveillance program.

"I’m going to be asking all the Internet providers and all of the phone companies: Ask your customers to join me in a class-action lawsuit," Paul said. "If we get 10 million Americans saying we don’t want our phone records looked at, then maybe someone will wake up and something will change in Washington."

Finally, there is a way we can help Edward Snowden avoid legal tangles for his efforts to defend our Constitution,

Quote The Ticket: Yahoo News by Dylan Stableford who:Meanwhile, a petition urging the Obama administration to pardon Snowden was posted to the White House website on Sunday afternoon.

"Edward Snowden is a national hero and should be immediately issued a full, free, and absolute pardon for any crimes he has committed or may have committed related to blowing the whistle on secret NSA surveillance programs," the petition read.

By Sunday night, the Twitter hashtag "#IStandWithEdwardSnowden" was trending in the United States.

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/ticket/snowden-nsa-leak-whistleblower-cia-204241311.html