Look at What Happens to Peaceful Protesters in the States

Discussion in 'All Things Boats & Boating' started by CatBuilder, Sep 24, 2011.

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  1. Dave Gudeman
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    Dave Gudeman Senior Member

    Almost every political organization is a corporation, so that would take away the political expression of tens of millions of Americans and leave all of the power in the hands of the political parties. Newpapers are corporations so they could no longer print editorials about politics or endorse candidates. It would leave the unions as pretty much the only big organizations that can be politically active --which is probably the point behind this very stupid idea.

    I agree 100%. We should have the same sort of separation between corporation and state as we have between church and state: namely, that churches and corporations are free to campaign to influence the government, but the government is not allowed to favor one over the other, or give money to them or tell them how to run things. (one note though: churches that engage in politics currently lose their tax-exempt status unless they are supporting Democrats).

    The corporate economy is what created the middle class and is what sustains the middle class. Corporations create many of the best middle-class jobs, produce many of the products that the middle class buys at prices the middle class can afford, and through stock have provided a way for the middle class to invest in the same interests that the rich people invest in.

    What is not working out well for the middle class is government, which is sucking huge amounts of money out of the economy. The worst thing is the unsustainable retirement and medical programs that the government runs. Thousands or tens of thousands of dollars per year are taken out of the salary of each middle-class worker and given to someone else. Imagine how much better off they would be if they could spend that money themselves. The lie is that they are buying some sort of retirement insurance, but they aren't. Their money is being taken from them today upon the promise that if the economy allows it and the political demographics don't change too much, that in the future the government will take money away from other people and give it to them.

    The problem with this model is that it is all political and the amount of money that the old people get depends on how many there are. The more old people there are, the more political influence they have, and the more they get. When a smaller group like the current working generation is young, they have huge burdens. But when they get old, their generation has less power and they will almost certainly get stiffed on the benefits.

    And there is all of the corruption that transfers taxpayer money to rich people, the absurdly high salaries for government workers, and the absurdly high numbers of government workers doing useless or actually harmful tasks. All of that obvious, blatant stealing from the middle class --which takes money from them at gun point, by the way to give it to other people-- but the only problem you see is "corporations" which have to persuade people to give them money by offering a better value than other corporations offer them.

    And yet Obama wants to increase taxes on small businesses. His plan to raise taxes on anyone making more than $250,000 would raise taxes on most small businesses with that level of income or more.

    As to taxing multinationals, all that does is hide the taxes from the people who are really paying them. When you tax a corporation, that means you are really taxing the shareholders, the employees, and the customers, but you are hiding the taxes from them and making the taxes appear to them to be poorer profits, lower wages, and higher prices. That in turn lets dishonest political hacks blame the corporations for economic problems that are really caused by the government. Which pretty much explains why dishonest political hacks always want to tax corporations.

    Did you know that income inequality grew faster under Clinton and Obama than under Bush? That's hard to explain with your theories of the economy, but it make perfect sense with mine. My theory is that the Democrats are more corrupt than Republicans, or at least better at finding ways to put tax dollars into the hands of rich people who support them.

    Well, that's an exaggeration, but things are certainly going that way. And if you really opposed this, you would be a Tea Partier rather than an Occupier. The Tea Partiers are fighting to break system where government and corporations cooperate to share power and money. The Occupiers support the system and want to expand it.

    That's what is behind their demonizing of corporations --that they want more government control of corporations. But that is exactly what leads to fascism. Government controls the corporations, meaning that government administrators can find ways to direct corporate profits into the pockets of their cronies so they have a strong incentive to increase the power of the corporations and give tax money to the corporations, because that money and power ends up with their family, friends, and political supporters.

    That's fascism. That's the model of the Democratic party. That's the goal of the Occupy movement.
     
  2. troy2000
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    troy2000 Senior Member

    I just caught the tail end of Dave's post, where he claims fascism is the model of the Democratic party, and the goal of the Occupy movement. But a couple of days ago he was calling the Occupy movement 'socialist/communist/anarchistic.'

    It's not possible to have a rational political discussion with someone who's so clueless about basic terms and definitions that he thinks the words fascism, socialism, anarchism and communism are interchangeable.
     
  3. Boston

    Boston Previous Member

    Thanks Kach

    Dear Dave
    where do you come up with this crap. :D

    A) Political organizations are not supposed to be corporations, they are supposed to represent there constituency, a constituency is not a group of high rolling elite board members with the power to financially influence any and all aspects of the legal and political playing field to there exclusive benefit and generally to the detriment of all others. Specially the competition.

    B) Actually we don't agree 100%, there should be no interaction of any kind between the corporation and the state. A church IMHO is a group of people who speak together, no different than a union, as such I believe they meet the criteria for speaking for there constituency

    C) actually unions, small business gubment created the middle class

    D) Obama is every bit as incopetant as Reorge was

    E) I couldn't stomach being a republican or a democrat for the time it would take to even throw up at a tea party.

    we seem to agree on exactly nothing Dave but its always interesting anyway
    have a great evening
    B
     
  4. david@boatsmith
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    david@boatsmith Senior Member

    IT is difficult for me to believe that anybody with enough sense to put three words together could believe any of this. If you do maybe you could share with us the scource of your goodies. They must be of higher grade than what the pot stores in SF are selling. You might relly have something. I am not really pro-union. I have a difficult time with more pay for being in longer. I have always been a go-getter and have wanted to be payed for my contribution. But I would be obtuse to not agknowledge that working conditions in my life have been very much influenced for the better by the victories that unions have won in the past. Now corporations are only concerned with short term profits and don't care about any kind of sustainability. As long as they make the big bucks now they relly don't care. It is totally wrong that our government is bought and payed for lock stock and barrel. And as Jackson Brown sang years ago our military exploits seem to be very closely tied to our business interests. I heard that 11% of the 1% are members of congress. I also heard that while many of the current congressmen werenot wealthy when they started the perks of being a congressmen helped them to become so. I would bepretty happy with their pension and health care plans.
     
  5. Dave Gudeman
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    Dave Gudeman Senior Member

    Hm. Yesterday you were criticizing me for not going to the trouble of trying to google what someone was talking about before responding to their post. Now you respond to mine without even bothering to read the whole thing?

    Of course I don't think the words are interchangeable. However, the four ideologies are closely related both historically and in content.
     
  6. bntii
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    bntii Senior Member

    David how are the builds going?
    I spoke with you at the Annapolis boat show a couple of years back.

    I remain impressed with how nice the boat was- it instilled that simple ideal to GO SAILING.

    Something I have had scant time to do for a couple of years...
     
  7. Dave Gudeman
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    Dave Gudeman Senior Member

    And yet they are. Here are a few examples: Sierra Club, Greenpeace, and more.

    The constituency of a for-profit corporation is the share-holders. This usually includes many middle-class people who want the corporation to succeed just as much as the rich people do.

    This isn't consistent because before you said that you want corporations to be taxed, which is an interaction between state and corporation. I'll also bet that you want corporations to be regulated. I'll bet you want the government to control, in at least some cases, what they can sell, how much they can charge, who they can hire, how much they have to pay, what safety precautions they have to take, and who they can do business with among other things. That isn't "no interaction of any kind". In fact, it is the kind of interaction that lets government bureaucrats extract money and power from corporations for themselves and their cronies.

    Unions must have used those faster-than-light neutrinos to create the middle class, because the middle class predates the unions. And the places in this country where the middle class has been most hard hit over the last few decades have all been union strongholds. You are right about small business and government, though. They both had a hand in creating the middle class, but so did corporations.

    Corporations are not mysterious demonic entities, you know. All they are is groups of people who organize together under laws that let them limit the risk they have in the organization by saying that they can't be held individually liable for what the corporation does. If you organize without a corporation, the head of the group can borrow a billion dollars in the name of the group, steal it, and flee the country, then all of the group members are individually liable for the loan. You are going to have to explain how limited liability makes a group evil, because I don't see it.
     
  8. Dave Gudeman
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    Dave Gudeman Senior Member

    Unions, unlike profit-making organizations are pretty much a zero-sum game. That means that whatever the union workers gain, someone else loses. So, yes, unions made union workers a lot better off at first, but the cost was a lot of people who couldn't get jobs because the companies just couldn't afford to hire anyone else at union wages. In fact you see this if you read about union contract negotiations. Unions are usually willing to let the ones with less seniority be fired rather than giving up pay raises for the more senior people.

    And in the long term, even the union workers are harmed by unions as they price themselves out of the market and drive their companies to other places where the pay is lower.

    That's a generalization. It may be largely true, but it's definitely not universal.

    That paragraph makes you sound like a Tea Partier except for the part about the wars which is an odd thing to say. The US had no significant business interests in Korea, Vietnam, Grenada, Somalia, Yugoslavia, or Afghanistan. That leaves Iraq as the only war we had a significant commercial interest in. Furthermore, that interest, oil, is vital to all Americans, not just the rich ones.
     
  9. troy2000
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    troy2000 Senior Member

    No. They most definitely are not.
     
  10. hoytedow
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    hoytedow Carbon Based Life Form

    Oh, yes they are.
     
  11. Boston

    Boston Previous Member

    most of that Dave was a tad bellow par so I'll leave off any response but one statement did actually make sense

    which aught to tell you something about the very organized destruction of our middle class. I'm not really a union man, but you can't argue that they didn't improve worker safety, set the time frame of the work week. Insist on a livable wage, demand at least some benefits, or all in all fight the corporate interest tooth and nail. What makes you think they wouldn't be hit hardest or first. Of course they were the #1 target. Still are if your paying any attention to the republicans, democrats on the other hand want to pay for there political incompetence by borrowing more money, not that Reorge didn't have anything to do with that either but still, unions got shafted only other question to ask yourself is by who?
     
  12. Dave Gudeman
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    Dave Gudeman Senior Member

    It's OK, if you want to just drop the parts of the conversation where I showed that you were wrong, but if you want me to politely move on without mentioning it then you should try to resist the temptation of throwing in the snotty insult.

    Yes, and they fought just as hard against the interests of their unemployed neighbors and other people who weren't in the unions.

    How exactly did corporations "target" the union areas? By making good business decisions and relocating to areas without unions? That's like saying the neighborhood businesses who were victimized by extortion gangs "targeted" the gangs by moving to another neighborhood where they could do their business in peace. Oh, those poor gangs lost money. You can't deny that those extortion gangs fought against the interests of the neighborhood businesses and made their members a lot better off. How could those neighborhood businesses be so cruel?
     
  13. troy2000
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    troy2000 Senior Member

    From Merriam Webster:

    Definition of ANARCHY
    1
    a : absence of government b : a state of lawlessness or political disorder due to the absence of governmental authority c : a utopian society of individuals who enjoy complete freedom without government
    2
    a : absence or denial of any authority or established order


    Definition of FASCISM
    1
    often capitalized : a political philosophy, movement, or regime (as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition
    2
    : a tendency toward or actual exercise of strong autocratic or dictatorial control

    The modern conservative movement in this country has lost track of the fact that words have actual meanings. But in spite of what inanely ignorant talking heads have been telling you, a dictatorship (fascism) is the exact opposite of no government (anarchy).

    And socialism is an economic system, not a political system. It can exist under a dictatorship, a monarchy, a theocracy or a democratic republic. Socialism simply means that the government owns or controls the production and distribution of major goods and services -- whatever type of government it may be.
     
  14. Dave Gudeman
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    Dave Gudeman Senior Member

    Mussolini was a famous socialist revolutionary before he came up with fascism. Fascism starts with the idea of socialism but throws out the internationalism and other features. It retains the state capture of the means of production (which is the essential feature of a socialist economy) as well as the essential anti-democratic and anti-liberal aspects (liberal in the old sense, meaning a respect for the dignity and liberty of individuals). From the point of view of someone who believes in democracy, liberty, and free enterprise, the differences between socialism and fascism are of little importance.
     
    Last edited: Nov 23, 2011

  15. CatBuilder

    CatBuilder Previous Member

    Wow, at least Troy has injected some facts and actual reality with those correct definitions.
     
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