US Presidential Debate and what is really important to people

[Marblehead]

Stoat, ferret, weasel we are all brothers under the fur.

And you look lovely on the ladies during the winter time.

[Apech]

And you look lovely on the ladies during the winter time.

 

The ladies don't complain.

[ralis]

edit

Edited November 11, 2012 by ralis

[GrandmasterP]

Poor weasels. The only thing that looks good in animal skin is the animal that said skin was designed for.

You'd also need a heck of a lot of weasels, they are very small. Now your mink or fox, those are chunky beggars and a couple of fat badgers should see you nicely towards the making of a natty bolero jacket if you were so inclined.

Dalmatians too, I seem to remember a filmic documentary some years ago about a lady who wanted a Dalmatian-fur coat and her ultimately unsuccessful efforts towards securing said garment.

[Apech]

I think we might start to annoy the yanks if we keep on this theme ... maybe a new thread on animal coats?

[ralis]

edit

Edited November 11, 2012 by ralis

[Enishi]

One interesting thing about the reforms mentioned here is that besides persecuting and jailing the bankers, the other steps Iceland took such as initially nationalizing their banks and then instituting Glass-Steagall type regulations is something that a fair number of Austrian Economists/Libertarians are against. Their opposition to the broken system has been a great contribution, but when it comes to proposing solutions, they operate too much on an a priori abstract ideology, which can blind a person.

 

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-08-03/post-crisis-iceland-is-test-site-for-too-big-to-fail-prevention.html

 

 

Iceland was brought to the brink of bankruptcy when its biggest banks failed four years ago. Now, the site of the world’s most spectacular financial collapse is becoming a pioneer in banking reform.

“We’ve been burned by this and that’s why we have to look very closely at what we need to do to prevent it happening again,” Economy MinisterSteingrimur J. Sigfusson said in an interview. “Icelanders are more interested in taking greater steps than small steps when it comes to regulating banking.”

 

 

 

Enlarge image

Residential housing and rooftops are seen in Reykjavik, Iceland. Photographer: Paul Taggart/Bloomberg

 

Enlarge image

The law would force Arion Bank hf, Landsbankinn hf and Islandsbanki hf - state-engineered successors to the banks that failed - to break up their business. Photographer: Arnaldur Halldorsson/Bloomberg

His party, the junior member in Prime Minister Johanna Sigurdardottir’s coalition, has submitted a motion to parliament to stop banks using state-backed deposits to finance risky investments. The move puts Iceland on course to become the first western nation since the global financial crisis hit five years ago to force banking conglomerates to split their business.

It’s a proposal that’s gaining traction elsewhere. Even Sanford “Sandy” Weill, whose 1998 creation of New York-based Citigroup Inc. © triggered the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act that paved the way for financial behemoths, now says investment banks should be separated from deposit-taking banks. Opponents including JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM) Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon say diverse businesses are needed to spread risk across divisions and stay competitive.

The Icelandic lawmaker who presented the motion, Alfheidur Ingadottir, says the best way to stop banks creating asset bubbles is to pass laws akin to the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act, which separated commercial and investment banking in the U.S. for more than six decades.

[GrandmasterP]

Point taken.

On topic I read in the Times that 47% of US voters relied in some way or other on the state for a part or all of their income which would put them on a par with our well subsidised Caledonian cousins north of the border here.

Maybe that's why Mr Obama won again. Turkeys don't vote for Christmas and if you are sucking deep on the welfare pap no way are you going to vote for some chap whose main platform seemed to have been putting a stop to that happening as much as it apparently does.

Either way it went they have a politician in charge, much as we do here. Plus ca change.

[Aetherous]

Number of Americans using the food stamp program: 46,670,373

Percent of population on food stamp program: 14 %

 

You cant really assert that this or that isnt welfare - it is government assistance. There's tons of different programs and one can be eligible for a few at a time.

 

So back to what Ron Paul (and other Republicans have been trying to convince us of)...14% of America gets food stamps (and not other forms of assistance)...that's hardly a majority. And not it isn't "welfare"...it is government assistance. America is not a welfare-state, and most of us don't have entitlement issues. 86% of us apparently.

 

Not saying that many people getting food stamps is necessary or a good thing.

 

Side note: do you realize that the Libertarian party wants all taxes abolished? Yeah. For real. There goes our plans for balancing the budget. Sounds good in theory...disaster in reality.

 

Funny story...I tried to apply for food benefits in Michigan, during my last year of college. I wasn't able to work, because my major required me to work about 30 hrs/week without pay, in addition to classes. Weird thing was...the state required me to have a paying job before being able to collect. ...if I had a paying job I wouldn't have needed help! Had to get that help from my dad.

[Aetherous]

On topic I read in the Times that 47% of US voters relied in some way or other on the state for a part or all of their income which would put them on a par with our well subsidised Caledonian cousins north of the border here.

Maybe that's why Mr Obama won again.

 

I don't know if you were just doing that British sarcasm thing, but to be clear...no, as I've pointed out, not anywhere close to 47% of US voters rely on the government for their income. Mr Obama won because he was the lesser of two evils, and thankfully, the majority of Americans recognized that.

 

Doesn't mean it was the best outcome...

[Marblehead]

I think we might start to annoy the yanks if we keep on this theme ... maybe a new thread on animal coats?

I could go for a discussion of animal crackers.

[joeblast]

One interesting thing about the reforms mentioned here is that besides persecuting and jailing the bankers, the other steps Iceland took such as initially nationalizing their banks and then instituting Glass-Steagall type regulations is something that a fair number of Austrian Economists/Libertarians are against. Their opposition to the broken system has been a great contribution, but when it comes to proposing solutions, they operate too much on an a priori abstract ideology, which can blind a person.

 

http://www.bloomberg...prevention.html

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2012-11-11/guest-post-why-chicago-plan-flawed-reasoning-and-would-fail

[joeblast]

@ joeblast: Dan, in post #370773 you replied to Turtle Shell:

That's not correct. Rhode Island has a voter ID law. Obama won Rhode Island.

 

AugustLeo

It was an unnaturally narrow context in which the statement was true, some states its you have to have a photo ID at the poll no matter what, no exceptions, Obama lost those states, but I think there's only like 4 of them with such rigorous photo requirement. But if its an electronic machine getting hacked via another method then it simply doesnt matter. I fully believe that Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Florida had their vote counts screwed with after the fact. 90% turnout with 99.3% going to Obama in 13 wards of what, philly...140% of the vote in *scratches head* port st lucie...when you're dealing with folks who appear to display that the ends justifies any means, I wouldnt put anything past them. Its the same reason we have a democratic governor in CT right now, blowin up the vote in bridgeport in '10...its how Al Franken got his seat and Obamacare became possible...

 

besides, there was ostensibly a bankster friendly candidate highly vested in keeping the market afloat for either choice...

 

If the citizenry cannot replace a dysfunctional government and/or limit the power of the financial Aristocracy at the ballot box, the nation is a democracy in name only.

 

Like I said before, the important things about this election were mainly the freedomstuffz - complete disintegration and removal of Obamacare, discontinuation and prosecution of those (to however high the level went) involved and responsible to projects like Fast & Furious, arming syrian & libyan rebels (is war no longer a problem since there's no republican in office?), stopping the EPA's crusade against energy development, and some general interest in cutting back the amount of government spending.

It'd really help if we started prosecuting other bank fraud also, like why isnt Jon Corzine in an orange jumpsuit right now?

 

Now we're left with a government that wants to spend even more sharply, make it harder for new businesses to start up, make energy more expensive hurting the little guy most of all, all kinds of new taxes, half of which are already mathematically a drop in the bucket. Oh, and somehow a carbon tax is going to help reduce the deficit also. I think all of them need to go retake 16 years of math classes.

[joeblast]

http://www.zerohedge...corrupt-society

 

Submitted by Charles Hugh-Smith of OfTwoMinds blog,

Democracy is for PR purposes only in corrupt neofeudal nations.

 

Correspondent Chris rightly critiqued me for not mentioning democracy (or the lack thereof) in my recent entry on China: Do We Have What It Takes To Get From Here To There? Part 2: China. It is indeed vital to include democracy in any discussion of corruption, for it raises this question: is democracy possible in a corrupt society?

 

We can phrase the question as a corollary: in honor of my new book Why Things Are Falling Apart and What We Can Do About It (print $24) (Kindle $7.95), let's call it WTAFA Corollary #1:

If the citizenry cannot replace a dysfunctional government and/or limit the power of the financial Aristocracy at the ballot box, the nation is a democracy in name only.

 

In other words, if the citizenry cannot dislodge a parasitic, predatory financial Aristocracy via elections, then "democracy" is merely a public-relations facade, a simulacra designed to create the illusion that the citizenry "have a voice" when in fact they are debt-serfs in a neofeudal State.

 

When the Status Quo remains the same no matter who gets elected, democracy is a sham. We might profitably look to Japan as an example of a nation which replaced its dysfunctional dominant party via elections to little effect (Do We Have What It Takes To Get From Here To There? Part 1: Japan).

 

We can ask this question of Greece: in a pervasively corrupt neofeudal society, is democracy even possible?

 

Neofeudalism is characterized by a carefully nurtured facade of social mobility and democracy while the actual machinery of governance is corrupted at every level.

 

This corruption may manifest as first-order daily-life corruption such as buying entry to college, bribing officials for licenses, and so on, but the truly serious corruption is the second-order variety that functions behind the closed doors of central banks and financial/political Elites.

 

Here in the U.S., the people elected Barack Obama in 2008 on the implicit promise that the politically dominant financial sector would be limited in some meaningful fashion. Instead, President Obama immediately nixed any meaningful reform.

 

The progressive case against Obama: The president is complicit in creating an increasingly unequal and unjust society.

 

Many will claim that Obama was stymied by a Republican Congress. But the primary policy framework Obama put in place -- the bailouts --took place during the transition and the immediate months after the election, when Obama had enormous leverage over the Bush administration and then a dominant Democratic Party in Congress.In fact, during the transition itself, Bush’s Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson offered a deal to Barney Frank, to force banks to write down mortgages and stem foreclosures if Barney would speed up the release of TARP money. Paulson demanded, as a condition of the deal, that Obama sign off on it. Barney said fine, but to his surprise, the incoming president vetoed the deal.

 

Yup, you heard that right-- the Bush administration was willing to write down mortgages in response to Democratic pressure, but it was Obama who said no, we want a foreclosure crisis. And with Neil Barofsky’s book

Bailout: An Inside Account of How Washington Abandoned Main Street While Rescuing Wall Street

, we see why.

 

Tim Geithner said, in private meetings, that the foreclosure mitigation programs were not meant to mitigate foreclosures, but to spread out pain for the banks, the famous “foam the runway” comment.

 

Here's how a sham democracy works: candidates are duly paraded in front of credulous voters in a "which is better, Bud or Bud Lite?" false-choice marketing blitz, while all the meaningful codifying of Aristocratic rule is directed or purchased by the financial and political Aristocracy (two sides of the same coin).

 

Consider the actions of the Federal Reserve, the dominant financial force in the nation. Though the Fed is nominally under the control of Congress, it is actually like an iceberg: its public pronouncements are the visible 10% above water. The real mass of the Fed’s actions lie beneath the surface, invisible to us mere debt-serf citizens.

 

The Fed’s public mandate, to “promote stable prices, maximum sustainable output and employment,” is solid public relations, of course (we're selflessly focused on the good of the nation, blah blah blah) but it’s also deeply disingenuous, as the Fed’s less PR-pretty agenda is rather transparently to preserve the banking sector’s profits and power at all costs.

We can find clues to the Fed’s real goals in its behind-closed-doors actions--the 90% of the iceberg that’s out of public view.

 

On the surface, the Fed increased its balance sheet by about $2 trillion since the 2008 global financial crisis. This electronically created money purchased about $1.1 trillion in mortgage-backed securities (MBS) to support the housing market and $1 trillion in Treasury bonds to keep interest rates low. These two goals--super-low interest rates, a.k.a. zero-interest policy (ZIRP), and supporting assets such as housing and stocks--are the core strategies the Fed is publicly deploying to boost growth and employment.

 

Supporting the banks is not mentioned, for obvious PR reasons. Yet a Government Accountability Office (GAO) audit found the Fed provided $16.1 trillion in “emergency program” loans to global banks from 2007 to 2010, and a Levy Institute study uncovered a total of $29 trillion in Fed support--roughly ten times larger than the Fed’s public programs. (For context, the annual U.S. gross domestic product is about $15 trillion.)

 

This suggests we should take the Fed’s assurances that its policies are all for the public good with a grain of salt roughly the size of the Fed’s headquarters at 20th and Constitution Avenue.

 

Did bailing out the banks truly serve the public good, or did it stymie a much-needed capitalist “creative destruction” of failed financial institutions that have grown so powerful that they are now “too big to fail”? How exactly did enabling the banks to draw upon trillions of dollars of Fed support, safe from public scrutiny, serve the public good?

 

The U.S. Status Quo is also like an iceberg: the visible 10% is what we're reassured "we" control, but the 90% that is completely out of our control is what matters.

 

There is another dynamic in a facsimile democracy: the Tyranny of the Majority. When the Central State issues enough promises to enough people, the majority concludes that supporting the Status Quo, no matter how corrupt, venal, parasitic, unsustainable and dysfunctional it might be, is in their personal interests.

 

Tyranny of the Majority, Corporate Welfare and Complicity (April 9, 2010): Please read this brief excerpt by James Madison to get a flavor for the Tyranny of the Majority:

 

"A pure democracy can admit no cure for the mischiefs of faction. A common passion or interest will be felt by a majority, and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party. Hence it is, that democracies have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have, in general, been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths."

 

The Tyranny of the Majority is the primary topic of the Federalist Number 10, in which Madison tackles the Achilles Heel of democracy: undesirable passions can very easily spread to a majority of the people, which can then enact its will through the nominally democratic government.

 

Put another way: the Power Elites of a nominal democracy can buy the complicity of the majority by showering them with government benefits and entitlements.

This document from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) displays the Effective Tax Rates (CBO) for American households.

 

After including earned-income tax credits, the bottom 60% of households paid less than 1% of all Federal income taxes, and the households between 60% and 80% paid 13%.

 

The top 20% paid 68.7% of all Federal taxes: Income taxes, Social Security and Medicare, excise and corporate taxes. The top 10% of households paid fully 72.7% of all Federal income tax, the top 5% paid 60.7%, and the top 1% paid 38.8%.

 

In essence, this is a vote-buying scheme by the Status Quo: the top 1% control the policies of the State in alliance with the State's own Elites, and together they buy the complicity of the bottom 60% majority.

 

This is the worst of all possible simulacra of democracy. In the Wikipedia entry linked above, Mancur Olson is cited as arguing in The Logic of Collective Action that narrow, well-organized minorities are more likely to assert their interests over those of the majority.

 

In other words, the Financial Aristocracy asserts its interests over the 99% and then buys the complicity of the bottom 60% with largesse paid for by the top 19% of earners.

In Who Rules America?, Sociologist G. William Dumhoff draws an important distinction between the net worth held by households in "marketable assets" such as homes and vehicles and "financial wealth." Homes and other tangible assets are, in Dumhoff's words, "not as readily converted into cash and are more valuable to their owners for use purposes than they are for resale."

 

Financial wealth such as stocks, bonds and other securities are liquid and therefore easily converted to cash; these assets are what Dumhoff describes as "non-home wealth" on his website "Wealth, Income, and Power in America."

 

As of 2007, the bottom 80% of American households held a mere 7% of these financial assets, while the top 1% held 42.7% and the top 20% held fully 93%.

 

In a classic "divide and conquer" tactic, the State's Power Elites have sold a slew of new taxes to fund the guaranteed-to-implode "healthcare reform" (a.k.a. increased funding of sickcare cartels) on those earning $250,000 or more.

 

Everyone earning 25% of that sum loudly applauds "sticking it to the rich" (the Tyranny of the Majority in full flower) while failing to note that the truly wealthy--the ones who don't have any earned income because they don't work in salaried jobs, the ones who own roughly half the nation's productive assets--pay nothing but a slice of their unearned income, much of which is protected by various tax breaks.

 

The State is effectively operated as a fiefdom of the Financial Power Elites--and by that I mean the people earning not $300,000, but those earning $30 million or more annually-- that buys the complicity of the lower 60% with enough largesse to keep them supportive of the Status Quo.

 

In this facsimile democracy, citizenship has devolved to advocacy for a larger share of Federal government swag. The U.S. Status Quo rules via the second-order corruption of financial Aristocracy and Tyranny of the Majority.

 

Is Democracy Possible in a Corrupt Society? No, it is not. Our democracy is a PR sham.

---text came out small

Edited November 12, 2012 by joeblast

[Brian]

Uncle Joe would be very pleased to see the extent to which the "useful idiot" phenomenon has blossomed in the US (on both sides of the aisle), and Alinsky would be thrilled to see his rules put to use so successfully.

 

<sigh>

 

FWIW, we weren't supposed to be a democracy. I think it is interesting to reflect on the change in language from US leaders over time from advocating "freedom" and "liberty" to calling for "democracy." "Democracy" is either a nice idea that unfortunately leads to tyranny or it is a code word for the launch of neo-feudalism, depending on the naivety of the person using the term.

[Brian]

 

I could go for a discussion of animal crackers.

 

I like animal crackers! And Animal Crackers (if you follow me...)

 

[Marblehead]

I like animal crackers! And Animal Crackers (if you follow me...)

 

Yep, I'm with you.

[joeblast]

www.ObamaVoterFraud.com

 

Edited November 12, 2012 by joeblast

[Aetherous]

Good luck with that.

[GrandmasterP]

 

 

I don't know if you were just doing that British sarcasm thing, but to be clear...no, as I've pointed out, not anywhere close to 47% of US voters rely on the government for their income. Mr Obama won because he was the lesser of two evils, and thankfully, the majority of Americans recognized that.

 

Doesn't mean it was the best outcome...

.......

No, seriously 47% was the figure quoted in the Times.

It did specify "for all or part...."

Not "all ".

 

I've no knowledge either way about the USA welfare stats but the Times is pretty careful as a rule.

[Apech]

What does that map mean? The link doesn't work for me.

[Aetherous]

No, seriously 47% was the figure quoted in the Times.

 

Trust me, that's inaccurate even for part of their income. You may have misunderstood what the article was about, rather than the Times being wrong.

 

This 47% number was something Romney came up with, in a controversial video that was leaked to the press from a private $50k plate dinner and talk. He was speaking to the rich and perpetuating the lie that the lower classes are just trying to get their "hard earned" money. That video is probably the main reason why he lost the election.

[joeblast]

What does that map mean? The link doesn't work for me.

vote distribution by county

[joeblast]

Trust me, that's inaccurate even for part of their income. You may have misunderstood what the article was about, rather than the Times being wrong.

 

This 47% number was something Romney came up with, in a controversial video that was leaked to the press from a private $50k plate dinner and talk. He was speaking to the rich and perpetuating the lie that the lower classes are just trying to get their "hard earned" money. That video is probably the main reason why he lost the election.

Just over 46% had no income tax liability in 2011. What a boon having the press behind you to make all kinds of hay for you - as if Obama didnt have a ton of 5 figure per plate dinners...

[Aetherous]

Lets be clear: that doesn't mean they get any of their income from the government.