News we missed during the week

wkmac

wkmac

Well-Known Member
Politicos of both the right and the left of whom I refer to as Statists will both equally cower in fear at the thought of gov't collapse. Although the reasons vary, they both forcefully defend the state and the need for it. Yet Detroit itself may be providing the lessons of the way forward and oddly enough the political right gets a true free market, likely much freer than they may like and then the left is given it's sense of community with a heart and empathy but not from it's traditional top down approach that it prefers. In other words, the paradigms of both are shattered.

With the Detroit city gov't all but broke and all but on life support, barely funtioning in some places and not at all in others, Detroit according to the prevailing myths of the Statists should be in a state of total bloodletting and no-man's land but oddly enough the opposite appears to be true.

Amidst Detroit banktruptcy, spontaneous order and market anarchy flourish
 
wkmac

wkmac

Well-Known Member
Somebody Might Get Hurt

There are several hard realities that most liberals — as opposed to those of us on the genuine Left — are constitutionally unable to admit into their “Why Mommy is a Democrat” view of the world. Among them are the following: First, any legislation they reflexively pass pursuant to a moral panic over people getting hurt will also result in people getting hurt. Second, the kind of society they desire can only be achieved through the large-scale, lawless exercise of power by the state. And third, the state is inevitably run by the kinds of people who enjoy exercising such power.........


Naive, well-meaning liberals — as opposed to those who simply desire to amass managerial power over society in their own hands — fail to understand that coercive power in its essence is a mechanism by which those who exercise it benefit at the expense of those over whom it is exercised. It is a weapon by which some people do things to other people. And the idea that this mechanism, this weapon, is amenable to democratic control is utterly ludicrous. As Robert Michels noted a century ago, centralized, hierarchical institutions cannot be instruments of direct rule by the many. Whatever formally democratic rules of representation they are subject to in legal theory, in practice the delegates will gain power at the expense of the delegators; the agent will exercise de facto power over the principal.


The coercive state, by its nature, is the instrument of a ruling class. Sometimes the state functionaries themselves will supplant the old ruling class and constitute a new one, as in the case of the bureaucratic oligarchy that ruled the Soviet Union. More frequently, the regulatory and welfare state will align itself with the preexisting corporate capitalist ruling class, and incorporate itself as a junior member, as in European social democracy and American New Deal liberalism.


In either case, the vast majority of society will be the ruled. And the rulers will exercise their power over us in all sorts of unpleasant ways. Once you set up an enforcement bureaucracy of cops and administrative law courts capable of shooting or imprisoning people, or seizing their assets without proving them guilty of a criminal offense, they will happily exercise this power.
Click to expand...
 
wkmac

wkmac

Well-Known Member
Paul Craig Roberts Ph.D, Economist and Co-founder of Reaganomics discusses The Social Cost of Capitalism.

When I was a graduate student in economics, the social cost of capitalism was a big issue in economic theory. Since those decades ago, the social costs of capitalism have exploded, but the issue seems no longer to trouble the economics profession.

 Social costs are costs of production that are not born by the producer or included in the price of the product. There are many classic examples: the pollution of air, water, and land from mining, fracking, oil drilling and pipeline spills, chemical fertilizer farming, GMOs, pesticides, radioactivity released from nuclear accidents and the pollution of food by antibiotics and artificial hormones.

Some economists believe that these traditional social costs can be dealt with by well-defined property rights. Others think that benevolent government will control social costs in the interests of society.

Today there are new social costs brought by globalism. For developed countries, these are unemployment, lost consumer income, tax base, and GDP growth, and rising trade and current account deficits from the offshoring of manufacturing and tradable professional service jobs. The trade and current account deficits can result in a falling exchange value of the currency and rising inflation from import prices. For underdeveloped countries, the costs are the loss of self-sufficiency and the transformation of agriculture into monocultures to feed the needs of international corporations.

Economists are oblivious to this new epidemic of social costs, because they mistakenly think that globalism is free trade and that free trade is always beneficial.
Click to expand...
 
8

804brown

Well-Known Member
Isnt it ironic that the same judge vinson who a few years ago ruled that the ACA (obamacare for the politically handicapped) was too much like big brother for it might allow congress to tax people for not having healthcare,etc...WAS THE FISA JUDGE WHO OK'D THE GOVERNMENT FORCING THE TELECOMS TO SECRETLY HAND OVER RECORDS ON US!!!!!
Amazing this is a huge story AND NONE OF YOU CONS HAVE A PROBLEM WITH THIS?? Oh thats right you are too busy bitching about the irs!! Wake up!!
 
Upsmule

Upsmule

Well-Known Member
804brown said:
Isnt it ironic that the same judge vinson who a few years ago ruled that the ACA (obamacare for the politically handicapped) was too much like big brother for it might allow congress to tax people for not having healthcare,etc...WAS THE FISA JUDGE WHO OK'D THE GOVERNMENT FORCING THE TELECOMS TO SECRETLY HAND OVER RECORDS ON US!!!!!
Amazing this is a huge story AND NONE OF YOU CONS HAVE A PROBLEM WITH THIS?? Oh thats right you are too busy bitching about the irs!! Wake up!!
Click to expand...

Shhhhhhhhh......

Senior Official in IRS' Obamacare Division Placed on Leave for Inappropriate Conduct
June 05, 2013

http://m.townhall.com/tipsheet/guybenson/2013/06/05/top-irsobamacare-official-placed-on-leave-for-inappropriate-conduct-n1613807
 
wkmac

wkmac

Well-Known Member
804brown said:
Isnt it ironic that the same judge vinson who a few years ago ruled that the ACA (obamacare for the politically handicapped) was too much like big brother for it might allow congress to tax people for not having healthcare,etc...WAS THE FISA JUDGE WHO OK'D THE GOVERNMENT FORCING THE TELECOMS TO SECRETLY HAND OVER RECORDS ON US!!!!!
Amazing this is a huge story AND NONE OF YOU CONS HAVE A PROBLEM WITH THIS?? Oh thats right you are too busy bitching about the irs!! Wake up!!
Click to expand...

No more ironic than Obama using a 7 year old Bush program to data mine Verizon (and likely others) in the first place.

Good thing the republicans under Bush openly objected to these data mining programs that Obama is now using or else they'd look the hypocrite complaining now. What.....wait.......that's right, they didn't object did they. They even called those of us who warned of the over reach all kinds of names for daring to do so.

I'll enjoy watching the Obamatons wipe the floor with them too. Nothing like a hypocrite verses hypocrite cage match.
 
wkmac

wkmac

Well-Known Member
After writing intensely, even obsessively, for years about government surveillance and the prosecution of journalists, Glenn Greenwald has suddenly put himself directly at the intersection of those two issues, and perhaps in the cross hairs of federal prosecutors.

Late Wednesday, Mr. Greenwald, a lawyer and longtime blogger, published an article in the British newspaper The Guardian about the existence of a top-secret court order allowing the National Security Agency to monitor millions of telephone logs. The article, which included a link to the order, is expected to attract an investigation from the Justice Department, which has aggressively pursued leakers.

On Thursday night, he followed up with an article written with a Guardian reporter, Ewen MacAskill, that exposed an N.S.A. program, Prism, that has gathered information from the nation’s largest Internet companies going back nearly six years.

“The N.S.A. is kind of the crown jewel in government secrecy. I expect them to react even more extremely,” Mr. Greenwald said in a telephone interview. He said that he had been advised by lawyer friends that “he should be worried,” but he had decided that “what I am doing is exactly what the Constitution is about and I am not worried about it.”
Click to expand...

Blogger, With Focus on Surveillance, Is at Center of a Debate



 
Last edited:

Similar threads

N
Amazon Is Forcing Its Warehouse Workers Into Brutal 'Megacycle' Shifts
Replies
14
Views
6K
oldngray
oldngray
Necropostophiliac
We are so embarrassed as a Country
2 3
Replies
47
Views
4K
moreluck
moreluck
728ups
Dow Closes Above 17,000 as Stock Rally Outpaces Economy
5 6 7
Replies
124
Views
10K
wkmac
wkmac
TooTechie
  • Sticky
[FAQ] Frequently Asked Questions - Read Before Posting
2 3
Replies
55
Views
128K
Usamanaeem
U
brett636
BBC News: What happened to global warming?
2
Replies
22
Views
3K
fact check
fact check
Top