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Just so you know who's in charge

Posted: Fri Jul 22, 2011 12:44 am
by Goober McTuber
Ruth Coniff wrote:Sometimes it only takes a handful of brave people to stand up to the most powerful forces and change society.

Think of the young Ralph Nader taking on General Motors, remaking consumer protection laws and inspiring a generation of activists.

Think of Daniel Ellsberg leaking the Pentagon Papers, provoking the wrath of the U.S. military and eventually helping bring down the Nixon administration.

Think of Lisa Graves, executive director of Madison's own Center for Media and Democracy, which last week unleashed ALEC Exposed, a website that uncovers, in detail, the blueprint for the corporate takeover of our democracy.

What Graves, Mary Bottari, their colleagues, and the whistleblower who leaked thousands of documents to them have done is as significant — and as potentially world-changing — as those historic examples of citizens standing up to immense corporate and government power.

It's also damn courageous.

For many years, the biggest corporations in America, including Kraft, Pfizer, WalMart and AT&T, have been paying hefty dues to belong to the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, which gives them access to state legislators. The legislators, for a much smaller fee, attend conferences, receive briefings from ALEC, and get the honor of putting their names on boilerplate legislation the group drafts.

ALEC has been in the news before, but much of the nuts and bolts of how the group works was a secret. Until now.

`When Graves received a leak of thousands of pages of never-before-seen documents from someone inside ALEC, she knew she had something big.

"The importance of it was its sheer magnitude," she says. "It was the breadth and depth and duration of this extreme, reactionary and shadowy corporate effort to wrench away people's rights and extract from taxpayers profit from public institutions."

One of the many new pieces of information to emerge from the leak: Corporate members of ALEC vote on bills before they are ever taken up by state legislatures.

It's bad enough that the U.S. Supreme Court has allowed corporations to spend unlimited sums to influence elections. The revelation that corporate heads actually vote on legislation is the icing on the cake.

"The fact that politicians would go along with the notion that corporations should be voting on anything is outrageous," Graves says. "Voting is a sacred right of free people — human beings, not corporations."

Here in Wisconsin, the results of this corporate takeover of our democracy are all too evident.

ALEC legislation — privatizing the public schools, taking away collective bargaining rights, loosening environmental regulation, even suppressing the vote — got a huge boost when ALEC foot soldiers Scott Walker and the Fitzgerald brothers took power. ALEC Exposed makes clear the origins of the head-spinning, all-fronts attack on ordinary citizens we are currently enduring.

On ALEC Exposed, which posts and analyzes more than 800 bills produced by ALEC, the center provides text of the actual ALEC bills, information about the corporate membership of ALEC's task forces on particular issues, the names of ALEC's state chairmen, and the effects of the bills: on working people, schools, the environment, consumer rights and our democracy.

Reporters and citizens can look at bills that were introduced in their states under the names of their elected officials and trace the actual, corporate origins of these efforts.

"We know, for example, that Kraft has been the head of the task force for ALEC responsible for anti-union bills," Graves said.

It also turns out that Connections Academy, the company that runs Wisconsin's virtual charter schools and is poised to displace bricks-and-mortar public schools throughout the rural parts of the state under a new law, is the head of ALEC's task force on education.

"Some of these bills, when you look at them in isolation, maybe there's a sympathetic angle to it," Graves says. "But when you see the whole, you see that this is an effort to privatize our public institutions, block by block."

Graves took over as head of the Center for Media and Democracy in 2009. Leaving a 14-year career at the Justice Department and as chief counsel for nominations for the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, the UW-La Crosse grad arrived just in time to see Wisconsin become ground zero in the battle between corporations and the public interest.

She immediately took to the battlefield. As Wall Street melted down, Graves' colleague Bottari began a comprehensive website on the crimes that sank the economy: BanksterUSA. When Walker seized power, the center organized a team of reporters and analysts to cover every aspect of the crisis in Wisconsin. Center fellows like health insurance industry whistleblower Wendell Potter filled in context.

"We are seeing this winner-take-all, corporate mentality — if you win you loot," Graves says. "You take over a company and do what you want to it. That's not a legislative point of view — you have to negotiate with people. If you're in power today, they may be in power tomorrow."

Graves attributes the extreme brazenness in politics to ALEC alumni — not just Walker, but, at the federal level, John Boehner and Eric Cantor.

"This is an emboldened, extreme group that thinks they'll never lose power," she says.

Thanks to the leadership of citizens like Graves and the hardworking staff at the Center for Media and Democracy, they may have a new think coming.

Ruth Conniff is the political editor of The Progressive.

Re: Just so you know who's in charge

Posted: Fri Jul 22, 2011 12:50 am
by Goober McTuber
Mary Bottari wrote:In the 2010 elections, Republicans emerged with seven more governor’s mansions. They also won control of 26 state legislatures, up from 14. In many trifecta states, where a new Republican majority won control of both houses and the governorship, an odd thing happened. A steady stream of almost identical bills — bills to defund unions, require photo IDs that make it harder for democratic constituencies to vote, bills to privatize schools and public assets, bills to enshrine corporate tax loopholes while crippling the government’s ability to raise revenue, bills to round up immigrants — were introduced and passed. An almost identical set of corporations benefited from these measures.

It is almost as if a pipeline in the basement of these state capitols ruptured simultaneously, and a flood of special-interest legislation poured out. The blowout preventer — political power-sharing — was disabled. The source of the contamination? The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).

Last week, the Center for Media and Democracy unveiled its ALEC Exposed website to display an archive of over 800 ALEC “model bills.” This archive will allow reporters and citizen journalists to identify the ALEC bills moving in their states.

For a partial list of Wisconsin’s ALEC members and much more detail about ALEC-designed legislation, go here http://www.prwatch.org/news/2011/07/108 ... -wisconsin
• • • •

Decades ago, ALEC targeted Wisconsin as a test case for its agenda. Tommy Thompson, who served as a state legislator from 1966-1986 and then as governor for a record 14 years, was an early ALEC member and supporter. “Myself, I always loved going to these meetings because I always found new ideas. Then I’d take them back to Wisconsin, disguise them a little bit, and declare that ‘It’s mine,’ ” he told an ALEC conference in 2002.

It is now apparent that Thompson was the enthusiastic frontman for a slew of ALEC ideas and legislation — most famously “welfare to work” and “school choice.” In 1990, Milwaukee’s school voucher program for low-income children was the first in the nation, the camel’s nose under the tent for a long-term agenda with the ultimate goal being the privatization of public schools.

Wisconsin’s new governor, Scott Walker, has decided to follow in Thompson’s footsteps, pushing a half-dozen ALEC-inspired bills in his first weeks and months in office, yet remaining silent about the roots of these public policy “innovations.”

More than anyone else, three men have dominated the radical, transformative agenda in the state of Wisconsin. All three have long been ALEC members and active participants. The three are Walker, Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald and Assembly Speaker Jeff Fitzgerald.

Scott Walker was an active member of ALEC when he was a state legislator in the years from 1993-2002, even listing his ALEC membership in his Wisconsin Blue Book profile. As a young legislator in the 1990s, Walker worked with then-Gov. Thompson in a successful effort to pass ALEC’s “Truth in Sentencing” bill. The bill would benefit the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), which housed overflow Wisconsin inmates out of state for many years. At the time the bill passed, CCA was the corporate co-chair of ALEC’s Criminal Justice Task Force.

Former Wisconsin Corrections administrator Walter Dickey, however, says he paid close attention to the debate over truth in sentencing in Madison. “There was never any mention that ALEC or anybody else had any involvement” in the crafting of the bill, Dickey says. The authors of the bill, their goals and interests were never disclosed to the public. Instead, their agenda was presented as in the best interests of the Wisconsin criminal justice system and taxpayers.

In 2011, Walker is drawing on his experiences as a loyal ALEC foot soldier to introduce many ALEC priority measures “by request of the governor.”

• • • •

After running on a platform of jobs and economic development, Scott Fitzgerald started opening up about his big plans for the state shortly after the election in 2010. He announced to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that his first effort would be a voter ID bill, seen by critics as disenfranchising traditional Democratic constituencies, like the poor, black and elderly, who are less likely to have official photo identification. Model voter ID legislation was produced by ALEC in the summer of 2009 after Barack Obama became president.

Fitzergald’s second strike? Only reporters paying close attention might have noticed a December 2010 interview in which Fitzgerald was asked about making Wisconsin a “right to work” state, or a hostile work environment for private sector unions. “I just attended an American Legislative Exchange Council meeting and I was surprised about how much momentum there was in and around that discussion, nothing like I have seen before,” Fitzgerald said enthusiastically at a WisPolitics luncheon.

This was the first, but not the last time the name of ALEC would surface in the lexicon of Wisconsin’s new world order that Democratic legislator Mark Pocan dubbed “Fitzwalkerstan.” We now know that Scott Fitzgerald has long been a member of ALEC, and served as the Wisconsin state chairman for many years. Economic interest statements show that in 2010 and 2011 he received almost $3,000 from ALEC to attend its conferences. In 2011, Rep. Jeff Fitzgerald received $1,329. The legislators loaded up on a huge variety of ALEC model bills and brought them home to Wisconsin.

Together with other ALEC members, such as powerful Joint Finance Committee Chair Robin Vos (current ALEC state chairman for Wisconsin) and Sen. Leah Vukmir, chair of the Senate Health Committee (who also serves as chair of ALEC’s Health and Human Services Task Force), the Fitzgerald brothers are rushing dozens of ALEC specials through the Legislature and onto the governor’s desk in anticipation of August recall elections for nine state senators that might turn the Senate from Republican to Democratic control. Here is a sample:

• Voter Photo Identification Legislation (AB 7): On May 19, Wisconsin passed a voter ID law introduced by Republican Rep. Jeff Stone and Sen. Joe Leibham. Stone is an ALEC member who received ALEC travel reimbursements in 2009. The legislation, a more detailed version of the ALEC Voter ID Act of 2009, would allow a narrow list of IDs for voting, including a driver’s license and state-issued ID card. According to a University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee study, about 177,000 Wisconsinites age 65 and older do not have state-issued IDs. Wisconsin Department of Motor Vehicle offices are not in every county and keep irregular hours, creating more barriers to voter participation. The bill makes it particularly burdensome for college students to vote, a group who overwhelmingly supported Obama in 2008. Student IDs have to be issued from an accredited public or private college, include a student’s signature and have a two-year expiration date. The 182,000 students in the University of Wisconsin System and 300,000 in state technical colleges currently do not meet this requirement.

• Budget repair bill: Walker took a cue from the ALEC corporate wish list and introduced a radical bill in February to cripple public employee unions. Wisconsin Act 10 inspired months of protests and has been subjected to a series of legal challenges.

While there is no ALEC bill that mirrors Wisconsin Act 10, the bill does comport with ALEC’s sweeping anti-union agenda, which includes decades of support for “right to work” and “paycheck protection” legislation, and other measures to disempower and defund unions. On collective bargaining, ALEC’s “Public Employee Freedom Act” declares that “an employee should be able to contract on their own terms” and “mandatory collective bargaining laws violate this freedom.” This ALEC bill and the “Public Employer Payroll Deduction Policy Act” prohibit automatic payroll deductions for union dues, a key aspect of the Walker bill.

Where is the bottom in ALEC’s race to the bottom? The “Living Wage Mandate Preemption Act” would repeal any local “living wage” ordinance like the ones in Madison and Milwaukee, and prohibit political subdivisions from enacting them in the future. The ALEC “Prevailing Wage Repeal Act” would get rid of all state prevailing wage laws that give workers engaged in public works for highways, street bridges, buildings and the like a higher salary.

• Privatizing public schools

For 20 years, a top priority item for ALEC has been the privatization of public schools through a school voucher system. ALEC has dozens of bills related to this topic, along with books, analysis and legal opinions.

Wisconsin was the first state in the nation to implement a voucher program, using public funds to send children to private schools in 1990. Then-Gov. Thompson was seen as an innovator, and the role of ALEC was never discussed. The voucher “experiment” was limited to low-income students in the Milwaukee School District.

Ideological proponents of school privatization are now pushing to expand the Milwaukee program to other areas of the state, as well as to families of greater income.

In his budget bill proposal, Walker first proposed repealing the school voucher enrollment cap for Milwaukee and eliminating income eligibility requirements, while slashing revenue for the Milwaukee Public School system by $8.7 million. The final bill included devastating cuts, and expanded voucher schools throughout Milwaukee County and to the Racine school district, while lifting the cap on participation and the income eligibility to 300 percent of the federal poverty level.

• Special Needs Scholarship Program Act (AB 11): This bill, introduced by Republican Sen. Leah Vukmir and Rep. Michelle Litjens, would create a voucher system to enable disabled children to use public funds for private schools. There would be no limitation on parental income, however, as there is for the Milwaukee program.

Some educational experts suspect the proposal would lead to segregated voucher schools especially for special-needs children — a proposal that would fly in the face of decades of research and experience that suggests that these children are better off in regular schools, educated with their peers while receiving additional support services. The bill mirrors the ALEC bill of the same name, the “Special Needs Scholarship Program Act.” The Wisconsin Department of Public Education has objected to the bill in the strongest terms: “It strips special education students of due process rights and rights to services. It allows for the segregation of students based on disability. It will devastate funding for public education in select districts.”

• Telecommunications Modernization Act: On May 23, Walker signed into law one of the bills he requested, a radical deregulation of the telecommunications industry in Wisconsin. Under the bill, the Wisconsin Public Service Commission (PSC) could no longer set telecommunication rates to keep prices low for consumers, perform audits of providers, or investigate consumer complaints. It is prohibited from regulating data services such as high-speed Internet.

The law strips away 50 years of consumer protection for landline telephone subscribers. It guts the PSC’s authority to regulate rates of basic phone service in areas with little or no competition.

The bill tracks ALEC’s “Regulatory Modernization Act,” which prohibits any commission from regulating rates and charges, terms and conditions of services, mergers or acquisitions and more. According to the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, in 2009 and 2010, the telecommunications industry gave Walker $87,822.

He recently named former state Rep. Phil Montgomery chair of the Public Service Commission. Montgomery was ALEC’s Legislator of the Year in 2005 and formerly headed ALEC’s Telecommunication and Information Technology Task Force’s Subcommittee on Competition. AT&T serves on ALEC’s corporate private enterprise governing board and lobbied hard for the bill in Wisconsin, along with other telecommunications firm, such as Verizon, another ALEC member.

• Health insurance: Vukmir and Rep. John Nygren are seeking co-sponsors for legislation that would permit the purchase of health insurance policies from insurers not licensed in the state of the purchaser. Such policies are not subject to the mandated benefits required in all health insurance policies sold in the state of the purchaser. The legislation would permit the sale of substandard health insurance policies, thereby crowding out more comprehensive policies that cover necessary care. It would then allow the insurance commissioner to waive state mandates so state insurers could compete in the race to the bottom.

“This is a way around what they call mandates and we call consumer protections,” says Robert Kraig of Citizen Action of Wisconsin. “This legislation will hollow out the state’s insurance policies and undo consumer protections and standards we have built up over years.”

The bill is based on the ALEC “Health Care Choice Act for States.” In 2010, according to the ALEC “State Legislators Guide to Repealing Obama Care,” 19 states introduced such legislation, and Wyoming enacted it.

Vukmir is the ALEC Health and Human Services Task Force co-chair for 2011. Her corporate co-chair is Guarantee Trust Life Insurance company, which sells insurance in Wisconsin and stands to benefit from the ALEC health care agenda.

Vukmir was given the Legislator of the Year award by ALEC in 2009. The ALEC award goes to “council members who have distinguished themselves by advancing, introducing and/or enacting” ALEC policies. She was recognized for “working to stop a government-run health care proposal in Wisconsin” in 2007, according to local news reports.

http://www.alecexposed.org

Re: Just so you know who's in charge

Posted: Fri Jul 22, 2011 2:57 am
by Sirfindafold
Shove this thread up your ass.

Re: Just so you know who's in charge

Posted: Fri Jul 22, 2011 3:16 am
by The Seer
Is LTS Tard on vacation?

Re: Just so you know who's in charge

Posted: Fri Jul 22, 2011 3:24 am
by BSmack
Papa Willie wrote:God DAMN, dude. Put it all into 2 short sentences, and THEN I'll read it.
I'll do it in one.

We've been screwed out of our democracy by our corporate masters.

Re: Just so you know who's in charge

Posted: Fri Jul 22, 2011 3:48 am
by mvscal
Sounds like a bunch woo woo bullshit to me.

Re: Just so you know who's in charge

Posted: Fri Jul 22, 2011 6:11 am
by Dr_Phibes
88 wrote: What do you think organizing means? Why is it just for the left?
Cause when you do it, it's 'corporatism'. They can crack on you, without indicting themselves. Capitalism (unlike corporatism) is a perfect,1950's snapshot of FDR, mom and pop soda stands.

Re: Just so you know who's in charge

Posted: Fri Jul 22, 2011 12:42 pm
by smackaholic
Dr_Phibes wrote:
88 wrote: What do you think organizing means? Why is it just for the left?
Cause when you do it, it's 'corporatism'. They can crack on you, without indicting themselves. Capitalism (unlike corporatism) is a perfect,1950's snapshot of FDR, mom and pop soda stands.
Capitalism, FDR and the 50s can't possibly be tied together in one sentence...until now.

Re: Just so you know who's in charge

Posted: Fri Jul 22, 2011 1:37 pm
by Goober McTuber
88 wrote:Woo woo bullshit indeed. Do you suppose the cadre that includes the Sierra Club, Greenpeace, any number of business ventures that Al Gore has his fat fingers in, etc. have meetings in which they adopt legislation they hand to the Congress and state legislators with their donations? What about the labor unions and the Card Check legislation? Are you telling me those well-funded special interest groups had absolutely no involvement with the legislation their bought-and-paid-for minions in public office introduced at their behest?
Perhaps I’m just pissed that the groups that share my viewpoint aren’t as well organized. There’s no denying that over the past 20 years or so more and more wealth has been transferred from the middle class to a very, very small group at the top. If you think this is a good thing, you’re a fucking idiot.

Re: Just so you know who's in charge

Posted: Fri Jul 22, 2011 2:32 pm
by Mikey
You're in the crosshairs now Goobs.

Re: Just so you know who's in charge

Posted: Fri Jul 22, 2011 2:39 pm
by Goober McTuber
I don't know. Even mvscal agreed that that was a recipe for disaster.

Re: Just so you know who's in charge

Posted: Sat Jul 23, 2011 4:25 am
by Shlomart Ben Yisrael
88 wrote:
At the risk of being accused of TVOing you, do you have a link to support that stupid statement? At no point in this country's history has the top 5% of taxpayers shouldered a greater burden of the government finances than at present. 47% of the citizens of this country pay absolutely no federal income tax (some even get a refund on taxes they did not pay - think about that). What has been transferred from the middle class? And how has the transfer been accomplished?

You are the greatest troll that has ever lived. Props.

Re: Just so you know who's in charge

Posted: Sat Jul 23, 2011 4:43 am
by LTS TRN 2
Of all the galling bullshiters, SS is tightly cornered as an obvious prop.

Re: Just so you know who's in charge

Posted: Sat Jul 23, 2011 7:06 am
by LTS TRN 2
okay..and as a proxy Tea Bagger, are you really willing to walk the entire world economy into a harrowing clusterfuck based on simplistic and childish fears?...on Ayn Rand gibberish somehow softened into eighty seats in the house? I gather you have several guns and are prepared to start shooting folks during a subsequent national insurrection, but really, have you thought this through?....oh yeah..

Re: Just so you know who's in charge

Posted: Sat Jul 23, 2011 7:13 am
by mvscal
88 wrote:What has been transferred from the middle class?
Their jobs.
And how has the transfer been accomplished?
By migrating those functions to low cost geographies in Asia and elsewhere. Saves the company a bundle, makes Wall Street cum and gives those execs a nice, fat bonus.

MBAs are killing this country stone fucking dead.

Re: Just so you know who's in charge

Posted: Sat Jul 23, 2011 7:29 am
by Dr_Phibes
smackaholic wrote: Capitalism, FDR and the 50s can't possibly be tied together in one sentence...until now.
It's anything you want it to be, as long as you've got a warm, nice fuzzy feeling inside. Like Norman Rockwell, he's good.

Re: Just so you know who's in charge

Posted: Sat Jul 23, 2011 12:12 pm
by Carson
I blame it all on Al Gore for inventing the Internet and making it easier to outsource jobs.

Fukk you, ozone man.

Re: Just so you know who's in charge

Posted: Sat Jul 23, 2011 3:07 pm
by Screw_Michigan
mvscal wrote:MBAs are killing this country stone fucking dead.
I thought lawyers were the ones who would be lined up against the wall first. Make up your fucking mind already.

Re: Just so you know who's in charge

Posted: Sat Jul 23, 2011 3:37 pm
by Shlomart Ben Yisrael
Screw_Michigan wrote:
I thought lawyers were the ones who would be lined up against the wall first.
Bullets cost money and rope can be made from eco-friendly, sustainable hemp.

Plus, the gallows is a much grander spectacle.

Re: Just so you know who's in charge

Posted: Sat Jul 23, 2011 3:37 pm
by King Crimson
c'mon guys...everybody knows the solution to the problems of the free market.....is more free market. it has always been thus.

it produces competition which is good for the consumer...never monopolies.

Re: Just so you know who's in charge

Posted: Sat Jul 23, 2011 3:42 pm
by Shlomart Ben Yisrael
88 wrote: Are you guys going to take a swing, or just let the strikes pass by?

At what? Your "oh, those poor, downtrodden billionaires"?

Nobody is on your side on this. Even today's Republicans find the 90's Gordon Gekko routine loathsome.

Re: Just so you know who's in charge

Posted: Sat Jul 23, 2011 11:12 pm
by Shlomart Ben Yisrael
88 wrote: The policies of the United States are killing this country stone fucking dead. We allow goods to enter this country at incredibly low prices, which makes it impossible for American manufacturers to compete and then bitch because American manufacturers send the manufacturing jobs overseas to remain competitive in their own home market. It doesn't take an MBA to figure out that if you can't beat 'em, you better join 'em. Otherwise, you are out of business.
Ahhh, the "protectionist" capitalist...


Invisible Hand not so "handy", is it?

Re: Just so you know who's in charge

Posted: Sat Jul 23, 2011 11:42 pm
by mvscal
88 wrote:
mvscal wrote:
88 wrote:What has been transferred from the middle class?
Their jobs.
You need to think this through, amigo. The American middle class, which is the largest consumer of goods, wants those goods dirt cheap. And the only way the American middle class can get dirt cheap goods is if they trade their jobs for cheap goods. And they did.
Back away from the kool aid, dumbass. Now go find one individual whose job was offshored who is stoked to have traded his job for cheap shit from China.

I'll be waiting.

Re: Just so you know who's in charge

Posted: Sun Jul 24, 2011 10:42 am
by Shlomart Ben Yisrael
Image

Re: Just so you know who's in charge

Posted: Sun Jul 24, 2011 1:34 pm
by poptart
88 wrote:Why are you bagging on billionaires? There are only 403 of them in the entire United States, and they have an average worth of 3.5 billion: http://www.rferl.org/content/Forbes_Ric ... 80413.html
Let's say we wiped all of them out with 100% taxation, we'd collect 1.4 trillion dollars. Not even enough to cover the deficit in this year's budget.
Good post, and it shines a spotlight on Barry's truly insane budget - and on the idea that taxing rich folks more is any kind of solution.

It's the SPENDING, stupid.

Re: Just so you know who's in charge

Posted: Sun Jul 24, 2011 4:14 pm
by Truman
Good take, Goobs. BTW, that very, very small group at the top is called “the Federal Government”.

What 88 and pops said.

Obama wants to raise the debt-ceiling $2.4 trillion on the backs of households who make at least $250,000 a year – the same group of taxpayers whose entrepreneurism represents 99.7% of all businesses in this country and provides jobs to almost half the nation’s private sector employees. These folks make our economy. What does government do other than suck us dry?

With Barry’s raised debt-ceiling, the CBO estimates federal spending to be $46.1 trillion over the next 10 years. Read that figure again, folks. $46.1 trillion. Naturally, House Stupor Boehner has countered the Idiot-in-Chief with his own proposal to trim that figure back a whole whopping 5.2% over the next decade.

Of course, such reckless “cuts” in future spending are clearly unacceptable to Oxerxes. And the $1 trillion out-laid for health-care reform, $128 billion in unspent stimulus funds, his $53 billion high-speed rail proposal (really, Barry?), spending on "green" jobs and student loans, and virtually any structural changes to entitlements other than increased squeezing of payments to doctors, hospitals and health-care professionals aren’t even up for consideration to address the current "crisis".

A pox on both houses. Not only should Obama be impeached for breaching the public trust, Boehner should be recalled for maladministration. Neither should hold public office past January, ’13.

Re: Just so you know who's in charge

Posted: Sun Jul 24, 2011 4:18 pm
by Dinsdale
Truman wrote:Neither should hold public office past January, ’13.

Good luck with that. I'll hold this office for another 20 years, because I have a D next to my name.

Sin,
Rep. David Wu (D), Oregon 1st District

Re: Just so you know who's in charge

Posted: Sun Jul 24, 2011 11:15 pm
by mvscal
88 wrote: Aren't you old enough to remember Ross Perot and the "giant sucking sound" he spoke about?
According to you that giant sucking sound was a good thing.

I don't give a rat's ass about free trade or cheap shit from China. My only metric is whether or not an action is good for America. Exporting millions of jobs, while importing millions of unskilled peons is decidedly not good for America. Wages have been stagnant for 30 years while the incomes of the corporatist parasites at the top have increased almost exponentially. Again, this is not good for America.

Re: Just so you know who's in charge

Posted: Sun Jul 24, 2011 11:29 pm
by Shlomart Ben Yisrael
mvscal wrote:Wages have been stagnant for 30 years while the incomes of the corporatist parasites at the top have increased almost exponentially.
You son-of-a-bitch! These paragons of industry are busy golfing their fingers to the bone, having to witness the crushing shame of their children driving last year's model Audi...

...and all you care about is your precious roof over your head and before able to afford insulin for your sick parents?

GO BACK TO RUSSIA!

Re: Just so you know who's in charge

Posted: Mon Jul 25, 2011 12:44 am
by mvscal
88 wrote:It would be great if the US could protect its home market while expanding its export market. Unfortunatley, that cannot be done when your home market is the #1 market in the world.
You are completely assbackwards on that. We have the number one market. If you want to participate in that market then you pay our piper or you can sell your shit to your own peons and see how that works out for you. Personally, I think we win that battle easily.
I agree with you that corporate CEO's are getting paid way too fucking much for the service they perform. But that is the fault of the board of directors, that hands them the salaries and benefits. And the composition of the board of directors is the shareholders' fault, who elect them. Untfortunalte,y it is a fact that most multi-national corporations are controlled by institutional investors that put people on the board who run the companies for near-term stock value increases rather than long term sustainability, and instruct their chosen board members to find compliant CEO's who are willing to do the things that make stock prices go up in return for large salaries and benefits.
Well we can discorporate them just as easily as we can incorporate them. Corporations aren't people. We can do whatever the fuck we want with them. If they don't like it they can leave and peddle their shit someplace else. We can do that because we are the number one market, remember? We can slap tariffs on their goods & services and index them to the cost of labor in the country of manufacture and make them punitive enough to bring that labor back to America....or they can try to sell their shit to the dirteating peons who make their shit. In return, the government can reduce the onerous regulatory burden that forced them out of the country in the first place.

This could be done but neither business or government would do it willingly.

Re: Just so you know who's in charge

Posted: Mon Jul 25, 2011 12:50 am
by Shlomart Ben Yisrael
mvscal wrote:Corporations aren't people.
Wrong, dipshit.

Re: Just so you know who's in charge

Posted: Mon Jul 25, 2011 1:00 am
by smackaholic
mvscal wrote:
88 wrote:It would be great if the US could protect its home market while expanding its export market. Unfortunatley, that cannot be done when your home market is the #1 market in the world.
You are completely assbackwards on that. We have the number one market. If you want to participate in that market then you pay our piper or you can sell your shit to your own peons and see how that works out for you. Personally, I think we win that battle easily.
I agree with you that corporate CEO's are getting paid way too fucking much for the service they perform. But that is the fault of the board of directors, that hands them the salaries and benefits. And the composition of the board of directors is the shareholders' fault, who elect them. Untfortunalte,y it is a fact that most multi-national corporations are controlled by institutional investors that put people on the board who run the companies for near-term stock value increases rather than long term sustainability, and instruct their chosen board members to find compliant CEO's who are willing to do the things that make stock prices go up in return for large salaries and benefits.
Well we can discorporate them just as easily as we can incorporate them. Corporations aren't people. We can do whatever the fuck we want with them. If they don't like it they can leave and peddle their shit someplace else. We can do that because we are the number one market, remember? We can slap tariffs on their goods & services and index them to the cost of labor in the country of manufacture and make them punitive enough to bring that labor back to America....or they can try to sell their shit to the dirteating peons who make their shit. In return, the government can reduce the onerous regulatory burden that forced them out of the country in the first place.

This could be done but neither business or government would do it willingly.
rack.

we should have completely free trade with western europe, japan and a few other civilized places. we should tariff the fukk out of the dirt eaters and tariff the fukk x 2 out of those that flagrantly cockblock us on the diplomatic front such as china.
would this lower the standard of living for the average middle class shmuck? yeah, a bit, but it would put a fukk load more into the middle class boat paying taxes rather than being tax burdens. of course it would mean a few wallymart CEOs might have to sell a few of their beach houses.

Re: Just so you know who's in charge

Posted: Mon Jul 25, 2011 1:46 am
by mvscal
smackaholic wrote:would this lower the standard of living for the average middle class shmuck? yeah, a bit,
Actually, it would raise the standard of living for the average middle class shmuck.

Re: Just so you know who's in charge

Posted: Mon Jul 25, 2011 1:50 am
by Dinsdale
mvscal wrote:Well we can discorporate them just as easily as we can incorporate them. Corporations aren't people. We can do whatever the fuck we want with them. If they don't like it they can leave and peddle their shit someplace else. We can do that because we are the number one market, remember? We can slap tariffs on their goods & services and index them to the cost of labor in the country of manufacture and make them punitive enough to bring that labor back to America....or they can try to sell their shit to the dirteating peons who make their shit. In return, the government can reduce the onerous regulatory burden that forced them out of the country in the first place.

This could be done but neither business or government would do it willingly.

Would it be gay to tell you I love you, Assface?

Re: Just so you know who's in charge

Posted: Mon Jul 25, 2011 4:56 am
by mvscal
88 wrote:I agree with you mvscal, regarding tarriffs and trade. Unfortunatley, trade barriers and tarriffs have had a history of causing wars.
Were starting to circle the drain here. If that isn't worth fighting for...what is?
But I don't know how you would make countries like China do that.
We don't need their consent or their cooperation. We just do it and let the chips fall where they may.