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It's also the time when people were cracking on the subgugation of the tribal peoples of America and their assimilation in to our society; an aspect of the country which does not reflect democracy at all. It is the stuff of Empire.
How much of your business is built on the resources of the commons and with the people's money?
You should pay that back . . .
What a juvenile cop out! <D
Jason you've got quite the nerve. =I o_0
Mark,
You forgot to mention all the hard working slaves in the south before the civil war.
As much as Sarah "Nailin" Palin is the fool, she inject truly damaging jingoistic fodder into the debate. Medicare-for-All and the Pubic Option are still being sacrificed on the pyre of Death-Panels.
Still back on hour one explicitly (and all the other hours implicitly).
I wish Thom would give Ravi a homework assignment to determine the cause and effect relation of Larry Beinhart's empiracal correlation between higher taxes (greater than 50% after loopholes) on those making more than 2 million and the positive effects on the GDP, the DOW, number of jobs and the average wage (for wages I think the median and the average are close to the same) of those jobs. Larry's work empirically shows a correlation. I would like Ravi, an economist, to show the causation.
Everytime I mention this study by Larry Beinhart, a novelist, they say it must be some cause other than tax increases.
Sarah "Nailin" Palin is a modern day Father Charles Coughlin.
I don't think they are useless, but I do think that liberals, as Thom says, should join revolutionary movements. "Revolutionary" in the original sense of creating change for the Good of We The People.
Thanks Quark for copying my comment over.
A little checking up about Provigil after my phone call Thom. Provigil might be available in Generic by 2012, maybe.
Wanted to convey over the phone but skipped it in favor of time but I feel we have a lot in commom. In that we grew up in the upper midwest, the Toledo area for me, I was raised in a 3 bedroom, 1 bath house with 3 siblings. My father worked his job on the railroad for many years, bought a new car every few years, we took a nice vacation every year, sometimes twice. I see that opportunity slipping away for my kids.
He was describing tribalism, where, in making your own living within a group, you give support to the tribe and the tribe gives support to you. It is the purest essense of democracy.
Anybody else see this? (sigh)
Share16 The Psychological Implosion of Our Soldiers
Monday 07 December 2009
by: Dahr Jamail, t r u t h o u t | Report
http://www.truthout.org/1207092
oops...s.b. Jode
Thomas Jobe,
Thank YOU for the heads up. (I hope my cutting and pasting isn't too confusing.)
Thank You! =)
From chuckle8:
chuckle8 December 7th, 2009, 10:01 am
I wish Thom could get Ravi Batra to agree with him about rolling back the Reagan tax cuts.
When Thom did mention to Ravi that increasing taxes would help the economy, Ravi replied that in the current economic situation it would have a negative effect.
I wish Thom would have replied that he agrees that a general tax increase would not be appropriate at this time. Then, I wish he would have asked, how a tax increase to 78% on incomes over 3.2 million would have a negative effect.
I found the conversation Thom had with a guy named “Bob” a bit interesting, especially since the middle class is in fact shrinking, and workers who still have jobs are more likely to shrink before the commands of the “ruling class” in order to keep their jobs. I heard some “Con” on the radio recently equate success with hard work. That question may be debated, particularly if being “clever” in the financial markets is “hard work.” A more pertinent question is whether hard work equates with success. A queen ant does nothing but lay eggs, all its needs provided by the labor of other ants. A queen that lazes about doing nothing but laying a great many eggs is regarded as a “success,” but does it “work hard?” A CEO may receive a compensation package worth $20 million; is this because he is a success—or has the illusion of “success?” Does what he performs to “earn” that compensation qualify as “hard work?” The right seems to believe that “success” means making lots of money, and making lots of money means that you must have worked hard—like buying and selling real estate, or companies, or gambling with someone else’s money.
On the other hand, there is worker ant which can carry a morsel of food many times its own weight into a colony, and continues to carry on so for a few weeks, and then dies of exhaustion. This ant can be said to work hard, exceedingly so in support of the queen and colony. But is it personally a “success?” Laborers whose toil for the success that the CEO “earns” may not benefit themselves materially in the success; they may even be forced to work their entire lives until they die of hard work. Vincent Van Gogh painted hundreds of paintings (most of them in the last four years of his life), many of them masterpieces; his hard work would eventually completely exhaust his mind and body. Was he a success? Certainly not in his lifetime, which was spent in poverty, artistically ignored or panned, and the last wretched years spent in a sanitarium.
Hard work thus does not necessarily lead to “success,” at least not in the terms that the right understands. In these hard economic times, “success” may merely mean keeping your job instead of losing it. Nor is “hard work” necessary for “success,” if all you do is be clever with other people’s money. Where I work, you can tell the difference between “success” and hard work; those blessed with the former are provided with free coffee, and have time to mount and admire holiday decorations in their AO; those mired in the latter don’t have time for any of that.
This country’s economy would quickly evaporate if that was all the “work” people did was the kind the right admires. Someone else has to do the real hard work, and generally it is someone else who decides how “successful” they will be. “Success” is also parceled out by social or “good old boy (or girl)” networks that generally exclude minorities, and by access to higher education, limited by “standards” designed to keep people out, not to provide opportunity.
Quark,
I’m very comfortable with 60’s terms.
I’m a vintage ‘57, if I were a guitar I might be worth something…
Thom IS talking about a tipping point. ‘Worth pursuing, I think.
Zero G.,
Exactly! You’re right on (forgive the 60’s term…)
From Zero G:
Zero G. December 7th, 2009, 9:08 am
Hoping for Chevron, Wal-Mart & Coca-Cola to save us?
Isn’t Chevron still in bed with the Burmese junta?
Isn’t Mal-Wart still destroying local commerce?
And saved by high fructose corn syrup?
I may have posted this in the past, but it is worth repeating: TED talk (video):
“Jared Diamond on why societies collapse”
http://www.ted.com/talks/jared_diamond_on_why_societies_collapse.html
P.S.
Re: Jared Diamond a Sell-out?
I feel wishy-washy when I say this, but I DO believe that the world is not black & white, but shades of gray.
Quark December 7th, 2009, 8:07 am
Jared Diamond a Sell-out?
Jared Diamond, scientist and author of Collapse and other best-sellers about reasons for the success or failure of human societies, had an interesting opinion piece in yesterday’s “Week in Review” section of the NY Times:
“Will Big Business Save the Earth?”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/06/opinion/06diamond.html?_r=1&ref=opinion
I guess, if you think you can’t criticize the issue of the existence of uber-size corporations, you find something redeeming to say about some of them. (It puts bread on the table…)