Silk Road forums
Discussion => Off topic => Topic started by: OccupySR on December 08, 2011, 07:55 am
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EDIT: IF YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND THE PURPOSE OF THE MOVEMENT:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/nov/25/shocking-truth-about-crackdown-occupy?fb=native&CMP=FBCNETTXT9038
^ There's a good article that highlights the purpose of the movement for anyone unaware. The generalized media in regards to the entire movement is not reporting on the truth, but here you have it. There is purpose behind the occupy movement. Granted, not everybody there is intelligent enough to know that they're fighting for a purpose, (dumbass people thinking they're just sitting there "fighting the power" with no idea what the purpose is makes everyone else look bad) there is a point behind the movement. And the points highlighted by that article are extremely, extremely important.
I just realized I didn't see an Occupy thread anywhere here. I'm getting a hell of a lot more involved recently after reading all the shit that's going on (blatant disregard for human rights, congressional investments into Delaware corporations, etc) and I've gotten to the point where I'm fucking fuming about everything that's going on. There's very obviously going to be a huge-scale political clash very soon, it's just a matter of time.
Where do you stand on the movement?
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I've been involved in political protest for a long time.
It always feels like there is gonna be a huge scale political clash very soon, if you're in the thick of it.
I think the best chance for this movement is for it to be as fluid as possible. Be prepared to morph and change whenever a barrier is met.
For example, this recent development about occupying foreclosed properties. I didn't see that one coming at all, and I was literally discussing the idea with friends when I first heard of it.
One of the main criticisms of the occupy movement is it's apparent lack of focus, it's lack of coherency.
Personally I think it can be turned around to become its strength.
Everyone involved knows what they are fighting for, even if the media cannot pigeonhole it.
Morph with the times and the issues. Point out the injustice in whatever the current issue of the day happens to be.
Make sure that the movement has a voice, whatever is politik of the day.
Then I think we have the opportunity to see some real influence.
Be a thorn in the side of whoever tries to turn politics to their own material advantage.
This, I think, is the destiny of the occupy movement.
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I don't understand the goal. I have not researched the subject at all, so my position doesn't really matter, but I would like to know why the hell they're occupying everything!
Are they doing it just because they can? From what I understand they're just exercising their right to petition, which in all honesty makes no sense to me. Why piss everyone off for no reason? I think if I had to wade through a crowd of smelly hippies every time I had to cross town to get to work, I would be breaking out the pepper spray too. Lol!
No, but seriously, if they're petitioning for some reason unbeknownst to me please inform me.
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Where I am from they are doing it wrong and it's turned into a personal bitter fight with the cops. Numbers have declined and the message has been lost due to the same old political group having it out with the cops. So people can see this and have distanced themselves and the message, albeit a needed one, is being lost.
It's nothing more than a battle with the police and the cops are winning tbh.
The other day i walked past one of the sites. I asked why don't they go occupy the main building of the banks or major corporations that they are against. I was met by a young guy in a very aggressive which made me agitated.
Another thing is that there are little groups camping out with their macs and iphones updating facebook. It just doesn't seem right..ya know what i mean?
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Have you had to wade through a group of hippies? at any point? ever?
Or are you just spouting crap?
Don't you see how pretty much every aspect of your life has people profiting from it? To your detriment?
I don't care if you are left or right, you gotta see this, surely?
Do you know anyone who lost their home in the recent credit crunch? What is happening to their house right now? Chances are it is sitting empty with a for sale sign outside
if you don't understand what the occupy movement is about, then it probably isn't affecting you.....ok fair enough.
But the moment you find your own life and livelihood being threatened by unseen hands, you will get it, fast.
right wing libertarians say they want less government, less interference, more freedom, etc
left wing socialists say they want more social responsibility, more rights for everyone, less opportunities for people to get ripped off.....err....more freedom.......
If you see it for what it is, these things are not so diametrically opposed. The people who wield the true power in this world love it that we are so divided on this issue and wii do whatever it takes to keep us divided.
What we have is that more and more, whole countries are getting screwed by organizations that have more power than governments,
look at what is happening in Europe - entire nation states have to fall in line to satisfy the whims of an investment banking system that is unregulated by anyone.
A banking system that can take $100 of money deposited and use it as collateral to loan out $2000
Demcracy has been brushed aside in several sovereign nations in order to satiate these "markets" Greece and Italy now have wholly undemocratically elected governments run by former executives of Goldman Sachs.
If you think the US is gonna be immune to this system then think again. The US is no longer the super power when it comes to these markets.
China, Russia, Iran, etc now rule the markets. Hell even US citizens could single handedly bring on the collapse of the US - If Warren Buffet moved all his money tomorrow he could bring down the entire US economy. Thankfully Buffet is a true patriot, but he isnt even the richest man in the world - that honor belongs to a mexican.
This goes further than right and left. George Soros, famous for being the richest "lefty" in the world, is known as the man who broke the bank of England. This is no small feat - the UK has dominated world trade for the last several hundred years.
He didnt even use his own money!
The world is full of enough suckers who say I don't care what or who uses my money as long as I get a return on my investment. Take a look at your own investments - are you one of them?
You made a profit on your stocks and shares? great!!! but you realize that you will pay for it in other ways, don't you? taxes, cutbacks...oh you didnt get that? never mind.......hey I have a great opportunity for you invest your savings, pm me for full details!
It is time for left and right to come together and realize that none of these people give a flying fuck about your liberty, your justice or your "for all"
There are people who, right now, are betting on your life and hoping that you will become homeless and fail to meet your insurance payments. They will profit greatly from that scenario.
Who are these "markets" that are putting so much pressure on the Euro? Who are these people who WANT Europe to fall? It's your banks, hedge funds and investment vehicles!
Who's money are they using to do it? YOURS! The money you owe on your credit cards and mortgages and car loans!
Where will they turn once they have milked Europe for all it is worth? On the US, that's where.
Time for left and right to come together and stop this bullshit.
You might not see it and it might not effect you directly, but it will affect you in the years to come, when you try to buy a home, start a business or pay for your parents cancer treatment.
This is what the occupy movement is all about......
The localized battles between cops and protesters is sad and predictable. You cannot win a battle against local LE with more power than they know what to do with. Even if you win they will come back with more weapons, and beat you into submission.
You need to be smarter than that and take this movement to every level of the political system.
The USA is, sadly one of the most corrupt political systems on earth that claims to call itself a democracy. Challenge it! whether a tea party member or a occupy activist or anything in between!
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Added a good link to the purposes behind the occupy movement in the OP, for anyone interested.
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Has anyone over in the U.S ever heard of the occupy Dame street movement on the news? Its in Dublin. where I am from.
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I think some of their ideas are misguided, but the general (and original) idea of removing money from politics is one that I think every single person in America can support, except the ones that actually make the laws.
Repeat: EXCEPT the ones that actually make the laws.
Thus, the outrage.
I also believe alot of the anger comes from the fact that Obama was voted in (and I voted for the man happily) on a platform of one thing: CHANGE. And we have yet to see much, if any. Yes, his opponents have stalled him, but still... I don't think overall this is what we voted for.
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I support the movement because its one of the reasons people in this country are FINALLY starting to wake up to what's really going on with the power structure set up in our planet. It's refreshing to see that others are willing to peacefully assemble and protest against the insane amount of influence CORPORATIONS have on government. The corporations do not give HALF A SHIT about regular people, all they want is to make that $$$$$ for their shareholders. The upper echelons of government and publicly traded corporations party together, hang out together, attend the same orgy parties together, etc. At the top, they are all fucking homies and are just looking out for what's best for THEM! they really don't care about anything other than MONEY and POWER! It's time for people to realize the picture that has been painted in front of their face by the government is a farce.. You all should know that, come on, how many lies has the government told people about DRUGS?? its all bullshit, because the government KNOWS drugs unlock minds, allowing people to see beyond what they want you to see and THEY CAN'T HAVE THAT!!!!
I'm happy that people are finally waking up to this bullshit corruption, and the occupy movement is doing amazing things in WAKING PEOPLE UP! Everyone will eventually see the light, it is inevitable. The government can't win, more people are seeing the truth everyday. Keep up the good work occupy WS.
/ rant, and I won't reply to anything on this tread again.
peace out peeps <3
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^ See, what people understand is that private businesses can only make money by serving their customers. In a completely voluntary market, he who serves his fellow man most makes the most money. Making money as a business owner means you are doing something that is a net benefit to society. Every single transaction that takes place voluntarily MUST increase the wealth of BOTH parties, or else it wouldn't take place at all.
If I walk into a clothing store, and the owner has a tie that I like for sale for $10, I may choose to buy it. If I do choose to buy it, that means that I obviously find the tie more valuable to me than the $10 I am giving away to take ownership of it. For the store owner, he finds the $10 he would get in exchange for his merchandise to be more valuable than the merchandise, or else he wouldn't sell it for that price. Private, voluntary businesses SLAVE to serve their customers. I have friends who built companies from the ground up now selling millions, and most of them started off as a one or two man operation working 12 hours a day 6 days a week until they could make enough money to hire someone to help with the workload.
It is wrong to initiate violence against anyone else. Period. the only morally sound excuse for violence is to use it in defense of violence. The state is an apparatus that functions ENTIRELY on coercion, threats of violence, or actual violence. Any time the state imposes a mandate, it is not a voluntary-participation "suggestion" or a "request". If you go down the line far enough, disobeying this mandate eventually ends up in violent kidnapping and/or imprisonment and/or theft of your property. Even rolling a stop-sign and not paying a ticket for long enough can land you in jail - even if nobody but you and cop parked down the side street was at that intersection at 2:00am. All state mandates are enforced at the point of a gun.
To hold up a business as evil while allowing this institution to escape essentially unscathed is intellectually bankrupt at best. "We need to reform our government" is the cry of OWS. What they don't understand is you can't reform human nature - human beings always act in their own self-interest on a tangible or intangible level. Why are these OWS people protesting? It is in their own self-interest if they can get wealth redistributed to them tangibly, and for the intangible cause of "social justice" (one of the most truly fucked up principles to ever be mass-adopted).
I like to put it this way: If you toss a dead body in the desert, do you blame the vultures for showing up? Of course not. Do you shoo away the vultures and hope that gets rid of the problem? If you want to get rid of the vultures, to stop feeding them, you have to get rid of the fucking body. We need to eliminate the one istitution that can use guns and violence to enforce its mandates and replace that with voluntary society whose most convincing enticement is "you really need this thing - it will make your life so much better. Oh, you don't want it? Okay. That's fine, too, I guess." Because some corporation can get legislators to write legislation that harms their competitors or exclusively gives them a market (as in cross-state health-care insurance prohibitions in the US, or the existence of patents), you don't blame the corporations. They are just looking out for their own self-interest, just as any individual human being does. It's just more appalling because the scale is magnified. What you need to ask yourself is "how the fuck is this even possible. How is it that if I see an insurance provider that will save me 20% on healthcare costs AND get me better service, I GO TO JAIL if I try to do business with them and they get a massive fine if they try to do business with me? how is it that a virtually zero-cost replication, using my own resources and property, of an intangible item can get me sent to jail. How is it that I need $600 million dollars to bring a single drug to market? How is it that if I want to make up some gold and silver coins and use them as money I am labeled a "domestic terrorist" and thrown in jail for decades? How is it that if I'm a doctor and I want to set up a cash-based practice in Canada I get thrown in prison?
It is not because some "evil corporations" are doing whatever it is you are accusing them of doing. That is the stupid-person answer. That is pulling a fucking leaf off of a redwood tree. And yet that is what OWS is all about. flicking little leaves in the trees. The "evil" in evil corporations is VIOLENCE. and the legal monopoly on violence and the initiation of force only comes from the state. Not Walmart. Not McDonald's. Not Lowes. not Bank of America. You can decline them your money if you want, even still. Try not paying your taxes and funding 600,000 dead Iraqi's in the last 10 years, or 34 million abortions since 1970, or the biggest laundry list of rotten, festering corruption and sadism in the history of mankind.
The poverty rate in North America was NINETY FIVE percent in 1900. By 1960 it had dropped down to 15%. This was the largest increase in overall human prosperity, measured by any metric including health, longevity, overall happiness, birth rates, career choice and longevity, happiness with work, travel opportunities and cost, cost of living period, discretionary income, etc etc etc. Since all of the programs OWS stands behind were instituted, poverty has stagnated at this rate. We may well have had poverty at 1-2% by this point. People who espouse the views of the OWS mission statements and "demands" are one of the reasons our standards of living have stagnated, and even fallen, in so many regards.
Fuck OWS. We are in a car heading over a cliff. They want to put the gas all the way to the floor.
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/nov/25/shocking-truth-about-crackdown-occupy?fb=native&CMP=FBCNETTXT9038
- level the lot, the whole banking system, go back to cash-in-hand / paying with hard currency till an alternative second best/worse 'Building society' model replaces the citibank, barclays, morgan stanley ....etc etc i really don't care if its impractical as i would gladly like to be paid in cash as pay packet.
- the above mentioned staff who work at our banks who still provide a service and interact with the public could easily go back to doing the job they had before, the transition isn't backwards nor forwards, the balance of the hardcore bankers can go fuck themselves even if it has taken themselves 5 yrs of study of financial and economic there should be openings down at the local docks -go work for yourself instead of working off the backs of the common people.
- removal of the banking system is like pulling the carpet from under the worlds elite, who in turn finance the corrupt governments.
- your choice of career is part and parcel of defining who you are, where you fit-in in society, your principals and morals. we have all made mistakes in life but
living a contradiction working in the banking / oil industry and then taking out a direct debit donation to support greenpeace to me is two-faced.
working in I.T. your goal should be to enrich peoples lives and ask the question where do my efforts go from day to day, what am I helping to build?
what are you a part of?
what are the consequences of your actions? As someone who buys drugs i am at least helping a poor s/american farmer feed his family.
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anarcho47 - I agree with you about the role of government in all this, though your view is very US centric. The US government is a joke beyond belief, from the white house all the way down to the local town mayor. It doesn't matter which party is in power.
But you seem somewhat naive about the realities of corporate business.
Nobody is gonna have a problem with your tie dude making himself rich selling those glorious strips of silk (real, tangible goods) to a stream of happy customers.
Bu if he starts up a sweatshop full of kids in a third world country to increase profits, then he is immoral.
If he cuts his employees pay and benefits to increase profits, then he is also immoral.
"a July 11 edition of Eyes On The Market, a JP Morgan investor report, finds that S&P 500 corporate profit margins increased by about 1.3 percent from 2000 to 2007, with profit margins reaching levels “not seen in decades.”
The JP Morgan analysis concludes that “reductions in wages and benefits explain the majority of the net improvement in margins.”
Here is the report:
http://www.investorvillage.com/uploads/44821/files/07-11-11_-_EOTM_-_Twilight_of_the_Gods__PWM_.pdf
Now....the financial services industry.....there is very little in the way of real, tangible anything. People are making billions out of fresh air. Loaning out money that doesn't exist, and getting the general public to underwrite the risk. It's a scam.
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anarcho47 - I agree with you about the role of government in all this, though your view is very US centric. The US government is a joke beyond belief, from the white house all the way down to the local town mayor. It doesn't matter which party is in power.
But you seem somewhat naive about the realities of corporate business.
Nobody is gonna have a problem with your tie dude making himself rich selling those glorious strips of silk (real, tangible goods) to a stream of happy customers.
Bu if he starts up a sweatshop full of kids in a third world country to increase profits, then he is immoral.
If he cuts his employees pay and benefits to increase profits, then he is also immoral.
"a July 11 edition of Eyes On The Market, a JP Morgan investor report, finds that S&P 500 corporate profit margins increased by about 1.3 percent from 2000 to 2007, with profit margins reaching levels “not seen in decades.”
The JP Morgan analysis concludes that “reductions in wages and benefits explain the majority of the net improvement in margins.”
Here is the report:
http://www.investorvillage.com/uploads/44821/files/07-11-11_-_EOTM_-_Twilight_of_the_Gods__PWM_.pdf
Now....the financial services industry.....there is very little in the way of real, tangible anything. People are making billions out of fresh air. Loaning out money that doesn't exist, and getting the general public to underwrite the risk. It's a scam.
And that entire industry depends upon state violence. it uses legal entitlement to not disclose any current portfolio losses to depositors or shareholders, is legally allowed to treat demand deposits as time deposits, is legally allowed to literally create "money" from nothing via the magic of Fractional Reserve Banking, is cartelized in that nobody is allowed to compete with the USD as a market-based unit of account and exchange (lest they are labeled a domestic terrorist and jailed or killed), and of course depends upon the magic of the federal reserve, which again only exists and holds is legal monopoly on legal tender as the result of the state.
not to mention the literally hundreds of thousands of pages that make it nearly impossible for an innovative competitor to come along and actually change the business or draw customers away. Banks have a very important role in the free market. They bring people with excess capital togethere with people who need capital, negotiate a safe means of loaning that capital and in turn the saver gets a yield on the excess of his personal production. They facilitate transfers across the world which would be impossible on a personal level, which bolsters the division of labor - a keystone to continued human progress.
They are a force for good in a free market. In a fascist/corporatist nation-state they are the closest hand in the circle jerk with the state and its violence.
As for MORALITY, it is NOT immoral to open a factory anywhere. If you own the property, you haven't stolen the resources to do it from anyone else, etc, you are 100% morally right to open your own factory. You, as the owner of a business and having full control of its assets and capital, have the right to OFFER any wage you want. Even .01/hour. If you offer too little, people aren't going to want to work for you, or the employees you do get are going to be the lowest quality imaginable. This is why wages go up in free markets - as labour becomes more specialized and capital makes it possible for a single man or woman to produce more, they get paid more. Think of it as the difference between 50 guys with shovels and one guy with a back-hoe - who is going to get paid way more?
The problem with the absolute bullshit of this anti-"sweatshop" movement, is you are forgetting something incredible: The owners of these factories are not going out with police and soldiers in the morning and rounding up the workers at gunpoint. They are not holding the guy's daughter for ransom if he doesn't work. These people all show up of their own accord, knowing full well where they are working and how much they are getting paid to do it. It is a voluntary transaction. If you ACTUALLY research "sweat-shops" you will find that there are few alternatives to them in most of the countries that they exist, save back-breaking agrarian work like chopping and gathering wood all day or plowing fields by hand or mule. Also, funny enough, "Sweat shop" workers usually make about DOUBLE what most workers in those countries make. Their standards of living are actually increased and we here have the gall to call them evil.
Same thing with child labour. Again, the moralists end up fucking things up ten times worse than they already are. Thailand is the best recent example of this. People heard about the 10 year olds sewing pants seams and such for 10 hours a day. They heard about it here, they got enraged because none of OUR kids work like that. They wanted it made illegal.
What they forget is our history. In North America and Europe, the whole family worked every day up until about 100 years ago. For pretty much all of human history this was the case. Kids worked as soon as they were able, parents worked, etc. It was necessary, because it took an entire family to produce enough to maintain a passable standard of living (again, 95% poverty rate in 1900). But, because capital expansion and the market grows at an exponential rate (also effected by increases in population, which is also a good thing for standards of living), it was soon possible for ONE MAN to produce what it took an entire family to produce mere decades before. He could get a job in a factory and his labour produced enough to feed, clothe, and house he entire family - in fact, it became so excessive that average joe's could starting taking their family on vacations, enroll them in recreational activities and teach them hobbies. They could have time to study and learn about the world.
Not so in Thailand. They are still young from a brutally oppressive state that choked the life out of the economy. It still takes a whole family of average people to keep alive a whole family of average people.
But our cries from western civilization and the insane excess we take for granted were so loud, including threats of tarriffs and sanctions from nation-states that would severely cripple trade (actually crushing the living standards of the people there, but nobody here even considered that), that the government over there finally caved and put a minimum age cap of (if memory serves right) 12 years old to be able to work.
Unfortunately, the ongoing myth that legislating a solution as opposed to letting humans collectively cooperate to overcome an obstacle is still a fantasy too many like to cling to. in the real world, these kids still needed food, and the work of the parents alone was not enough to ensure all of the basic necessities.
Long story short: Child prostitution rates have skyrocketed over FOUR HUNDRED PERCENT since that legislation was passed. It is almost an epidemic at this point. Kids have to sell their bodies off just to have enough to eat, or they starve. This is what the idea of imposing artificial morality "gains" the world. The fantasy of legislated solutions, or progress by mandate, or state violence as solving ANYTHING other than defending against the initiated violence of another (this can be disputed as well, but I'll stick with minarchism for the sake of this conversation).
This is one reason that I hate OWS. HATE OWS. They are the kind of people that inadvertantly put kids on the street prostituting themselves, or send people who had a hope of saving something for their future back to the field and tree-cutting. They are the ones that want to grind the gears of human progress to a halt for the sake of some amoralistic, esoteric, and sickening distortion of human existence called "social justice" and "fairness" (violence by subjectivity). OWS has done nothing but disgust me up to this point.
Anarcho47
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Anarcho47, I agree with you completely and wish everybody was as educated in economics as you are. I don't really have any thing to add to your argument haha.
Edballs, I believe you are getting a little off topic talking about sweat shops in third world countries however I would like to point out that sweat shops are not slave institutions but rather places of employment which provide jobs better than most of its workers could probably realistically get where they live. If it wasn't, they would quit. Not arguing that sweat shops are enjoyable places to work, just that there is a reason people work at them. Additionally, I do not believe it is wise to force business away from outsourced labor as this would also end a flow of foreign money in their local economies and likely leave the workers in similar working conditions but with less pay.
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Hahaha man you said that much better than I did.
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good post, dont disagree with much.....
If he cuts his employees pay and benefits to increase profits, then he is also immoral.
- = quick fix / employee is the scapegoat
- by the same token we don't want to go back to the 100% union or any model that basis their entire employment policy / "socialist" ...on head count...use 2 heads to fill a position that obviously is a 1 person job
- the route to take if its seen that more margin needs to be made are but not limited to: goal to make the (worker/machine) / time that it takes to produce the goods more efficient; increase throughput; remove / reduce products that don't sell (as well); the problem is usually management or micro-managing or wooly procedures/processes; management perpetuating ideas of not putting anything in but expecting more to be produced (within reason); reuse/retrain workers to be doing some other more important process; hiring and firing is supposed to be the last resort.
as seen from how the (UK?) public sector work, hiring and firing are quick fixes to balancing the books, the alternative requires a business mind and brain power (or making themselves redundant.....) and public sector workers simply don't have these skills.
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Bu if he starts up a sweatshop full of kids in a third world country to increase profits, then he is immoral.
- yes, don't disagree with this point, however
- in principal moving certain types of industry to the far east or whever to nations that have an apt to or are able to do ...for arguments sake...mass produce clothing or have a knack for / intelligence to produce electronics etc :
- in principal is supposed to employ, be of benefit to and in some cases brings wealth & experience to and make use a workforce that would otherwise be sitting in the sun....in poverty (for eg)
- unfortunately the way the model is carried out and mismanaged is the problem.
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See, this is something that bugs the shit out of me about north american politics, this inherent polemic from both sides. The left and right dismiss each other as freaks without even listening to the arguments being presented. There is a lot more common ground than anyone ever notices, but the population remains divided and conquered.
Dissent is good. So I approve of OWS. I am not gonna split hairs about which is worst - The government, the banks and the joint stock corporate world are all as culpable as each other.
States do not have a monopoly in violence, real or structural. Corporations have been pioneering that shit going back to The East India Company and even further to the "companies of adventure" of the middle ages. Nowadays it is facilitated by the world bank, the IMF and similar bodies, on behalf of corporations, forcing entire nations to toe the line or get wiped out.
As for whether sweatshops and outsourcing is relevant or not....
The problem with sourcing labour in the cheapest possible markets is a cyclical one. It will come back to bite us on the ass eventually.
Asian tiger economies like Thailand, and the economies of other developing countries are not free markets, any more than our own. There is no such thing as a global free market, never has been, and there never will be.
We are not making things better in developing countries by providing them with these oh so wonderful manufacturing jobs. We are creating the same kind of income disparity and economic boom/bust cycles that we have created in our own countries. When these economies start to slow, investors will look for high gains elsewhere and short sell them in the back.
Thailand knows this and is trying to implement a dual track economy so when the shit hits the fan they have enough domestic trade going on to keep them afloat.
Your tie seller knows well that if he floods the market with cheap ties, he will do himself out of a job. He understands that a solid business needs to be sustainable. multinational joint stock corporations do not have this worry. They can slash and burn and move onto the next thing. sell the whole farm at a loss and move onto whatever they like. The investors aren't paying attention, so who gives a shit, right?
Investors don't even know it's themselves that are financing these problems most of the time - they just follow the pied pipers of the financial services industry who don't give two shits where they skim their money from.
I agree with you 100% that it is not right to legislate downwards on other people's lives. But if communities want to legislate upwards then that's their perogative. In the current situation, this is not possible.
Until there is a global revolution, then the only way to apply pressure on any of this shit is through dissent.
As for the inexplcable certainty of human nature - well , I have lived in many places around the world, and there are many variations of that nature, it is not so cut and dried as you think.
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The poverty rate in North America was NINETY FIVE percent in 1900. By 1960 it had dropped down to 15%. This was the largest increase in overall human prosperity, measured by any metric including health, longevity, overall happiness, birth rates, career choice and longevity, happiness with work, travel opportunities and cost, cost of living period, discretionary income, etc etc etc. Since all of the programs OWS stands behind were instituted, poverty has stagnated at this rate. We may well have had poverty at 1-2% by this point.
As usual, right-wing libertarians can only sustain their view on the basis of almost complete ignorance of history. You are right about the changes in relative poverty levels during the periods to which you refer. But you seem to know nothing whatsoever about what was actually happening during those periods to cause those changes.
Firstly - we HAD the unregulated capitalism that you espouse for most of the 19th century. That was exactly WHY the poverty rate in North America was NINETY FIVE percent in 1900.
Where do you think that poverty came from? From the evil socialist state that dominated America in the 19th century? Oh no wait - the nineteenth century was the great era of unregulated liberal capitalism, so...
Secondly - the period you refer to, during which prosperity rose for all, was dominated by the politics and programs of the New Deal. It was the strongest period in history for the labor unions. The 'programs' that you denounce were mainly initiated and implemented 1930-70, during the exact period that you acknowledge saw the greatest rise in living standards for most people. This rise in living standards coincided precisely with a lowering of social inequality as a direct result of state action. This same pattern was repeated around the world to different degrees.
The failure of living standards to rise at the same rate subsequently has coincided precisely with the DECLINE of welfare provision and labor organization around the world, and the return to aggressive free-market capitalism in much of it, and the consequent rise in inequality.
You simply cannot base an argument for right-wing libertarianism on the criterion of what produces prosperity for most people - if you try to do that you are always going to come up against the bare fact that the highest average standard of living in the world is enjoyed by the citizens of Norway and Sweden (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Development_Index). If you want to base it on the abstract principle of a belief in the irreducible value of individual freedom then that's fine - but you have to accept that the price of that freedom will be inequality and resultant poverty for the majority. Rigorous right libertarians accept this and believe that that is simply a price worth paying. But the argument that it produces prosperity for all or even most people is demonstrable nonsense.
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yall are making this a referendum on capitalism, and we all already know that capitalism is the absolute worst economic system on earth, well except for all others ;) really this is about taking money out of politics, unfortunately a lot of mainstream america, hell a lot of the OWS protesters themselves dont realize this.
if you look at the basic tenants of the OWS movement, they are very reasonable, and i dont see really how anyone could disagree. who really thinks the credit for default swap catastrophe was good, or who really thinks politicians should be able to vote themselves raises, stay in office forever, and sell out to the highest bidder.
We are lucky we live in such interesting times. let the revolution come :)