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Ok, I've had it with OWS

dust1n

Zindīq
Speak for yourself.

By the way - LANDING a job is only the first step. Then you have to excel, and learn, and grow, and sacrifice, and work your *** off to BUILD a successful career.

As someone who has worked for over 20 years full -time, managed to build two successful careers in industries which usually require a college degree (I don't have one), and who has hired (and fired) probably well over 200 people in my lifetime - and who has managed up to 80 at a time - oh, and who also spent 10 years as a trainer for a staffing company (which also included training managers to implement hiring and retention policies), I feel pretty damn confident saying that most of the people I've met, with over 10 years of a successful career under their belt, got there by hard work, good decision making skills, and commitment to excellence.

I'm not sure if those numbers would make a sufficiently random sample to really determine how the general population does anything. I notice a huge barrage of things that seem to be at play at any given time considering someones series of employment opportunities.
 

Kathryn

It was on fire when I laid down on it.
I'm not sure if those numbers would make a sufficiently random sample to really determine how the general population does anything. I notice a huge barrage of things that seem to be at play at any given time considering someones series of employment opportunities.

Surely you don't think that most people who build a successful career spanning decades just got lucky, or, even worse, are successful because they sold out to da man or are corrupt in some way.
 

Jeremy Mason

Well-Known Member
No argument here.
But I'd say our problem is that law enforcement is a haphazard, blunt & corrupt instrument.
It will never be otherwise.

True, but it's important to identify and eliminate any abuses whether it be government or a corporation(s). I do share your skepticism in America's ability to marshal a responsible citizenry.

Corporations don't elect anyone. Their legal personhood doesn't extend to voting rights.

Yes. Where the corporations come into play and I'm talking about the monster/diabolical corporations, is they hand pick the candidates we get to select from, from both sides of the aisle by sheer monetary power. No person, without the tsunami of money that these corporations give to promote their Republican and Democratic candidates, could ever make a bleep on the political radar-screen.

What you see is the result of democracy....a terrible system....I blame "the people".
Who voted in our last 2 war mongering presidents, eh?

The people only get to pick from filtered candidates and yes it's a terrible system that was not endorsed by the founding fathers. This system was hi-jacked in the early 20th century and it is a shame that our people were unaware of what was going on. Like today, our corporate sponsored media fails us in the illusion of journalism.

As for the war mongering presidents, they're a symptom of a corporate backed military. I found this to be quite interesting.

[youtube]RVsB07CcSNw[/youtube]
Confessions of an economic hitman - YouTube



Tis a problem in any system.

I'm a dreamer. My great ancestor, George Mason was too. Let's continue to solve these problems by first exposing the problems and get this country back to it's founding principles.
 

dust1n

Zindīq
Surely you don't think that most people who build a successful career spanning decades just got lucky, or, even worse, are successful because they sold out to da man or are corrupt in some way.

Kathryn, I've spent too much of my young life trying to figure out what successful means... that being said... I don't think most people who built a successful career spanning decades just got lucky or sold out. I also don't think most people built a successful on just luck, corruption, family ties, kissing ***, etc. etc., as if those things excluded hard work or smart decisions etc. It's a strong unquantifiable mixture... I guess. Since we are getting all anecdotal, most of the jobs I have encountered, all people have such intricate and strange stories. Workplaces can be so extremely diverse... in solely just a human to human level. I don't know, I'm learning day to day; and I am a factotum, in a sense, as I prefer self-endeavors and new experiences as opposed to constant environments. Maybe I see a difference success in some ways?

I wish I could better articulate myself. I often find myself failing at doing so. But I'm trying hard to communicate effectively and truthfully take in what others are saying. I just don't think the whole of any mass of people, say over like... 5, can really be described in one sentence. There is just too much really going on for every single being to narrow down to just specific traits based on arbitrary relationships tied in by the associated of their labels. Everyone I've met and have gotten the chance to get a bit of information about their labor situation seem to encounter hard work, smart/bad decisions, luck/achievement, family tie/truly being valued for ability, and so much other stuff I can't succinctly describe.

Perhaps our work experiences allow different routes to know different people.. I really don't know are care anymore. I don't even know why bother replying to anyone in these topics. There is automatic antagonism with replies, comments barely relevant to what people talk about, a nearly-complete disregard for open-dialogue, a haste to label thousands of people by the actions of one (or to associate anyone with the easiest and most proliferate evil at hand, solely to disregard a debate or discussion as pointless)... and oh my dear lord, the list continues, I wouldn't even really know where to start or finish. I understand that most people on this forum have real lives and can't spend time to address anything.. I mean, hell, it takes me 2 hours to write a sincere post, and about another 2 hours if I want to revise it, edit it, reformat it that all words are empathic and follow thoroughly to their meaning, a task even more difficult with a crowd that is from around the world. But ****, is there really a day where not one of us can find out really quickly just how inefficient we are at describing entire social movements and current events within the few moments we take to visit an online forum?

I'm not talking about you, Kath. We disagree on a million things, but at least you take some effort to reply and read what people say...

I can't think of how to add to this post anymore at the moment. Not like many will bother to take it past face value anyways.
 

dust1n

Zindīq
People are not perfect. Groups of people are even less perfect. There are no perfect systems that are comprised of people. What it comes down to is what one finds more important: guaranteed sustenance-level living for all, or the possibility of risk and reward for the individual (but no guarantees). Some people prefer one model, some people prefer the other. Most of the time, this depends on which model one would benefit more from.

I've never really found the two items of mentioned importance to act as a dichotomy, or as mutually exclusive events.
 

work in progress

Well-Known Member
It used to trickel down, but not all the way to the bottom. Now it does not even trickel at all for the moment. People with means are sitting on their cash right now, investing is not paying off.
In his book: "Capitalism Hits the Fan - The Global Meltdown and What To Do About It" economist - Richard D. Wolff shows from Bureau of Labor and more recent CBO numbers that "real wages" -- the average hourly income of all income groups increased for an amazing 150 years...from 1820 to 1970, if we compared by decade, rather than annual growth, since they are subject to usual market fluctuations. But, since 1970, it has only been the highest income groups, for a number of reasons, who have seen income growth...and that is the reason for the present wealth gap:
Rising Productivity, Wages, and Consumption

From 1820 to around 1970, 150 years, the average productivity of American workers went up each year. The average workers produced more stuff every year than they did the year before. They were trained better, they had more machines, and they had better machines. So productivity went up every year.
And, over this period of time, the wages of American workers rose every decade. Every decade, real wages—the amount of money you get in relation to the prices you pay for the things you use your money for—were higher than the decade before. Profits also went up.
The American working class enjoyed 150 years of rising consumption, so it’s not surprising that it would choose to define its own self-worth, measure its own success in life, according to the standard of consumption. Americans began to think of themselves as successful if they lived in the right neighborhood, drove the right car, wore the right outfit, went on the right vacation.
Wages and Productivity Diverge

But in the 1970s, the world changed for the American working class in ways that it hasn’t come to terms with—at all. Real wages stopped going up. As U.S. corporations moved operations abroad to take advantage of lower wages and higher profits and as they replaced workers with machines (and especially computers), those who lost their jobs were soon willing to work even if their wages stopped rising. So real wages trended down a little bit. The real hourly wage of a worker in the 1970s was higher than what it is today. What you get for an hour of work, in goods and services, is less now that what your parents got.
Meanwhile, productivity kept going up. If what the employer gets from each worker keeps going up, but what you give to each worker does not, then the difference becomes bigger, and bigger, and bigger. Employers’ profits have gone wild, and all the people who get their fingers on employers profits—the professionals who sing the songs they like to hear, the shareholders who get a piece of the action on each company’s profits—have enjoyed a bonanza over the last thirty years.
The only thing more profitable than simply making the money off the worker is handling this exploding bundle of profits—packaging and repackaging it, lending it and borrowing it, and inventing new mechanisms for doing all that. That’s called the finance industry, and they have stumbled all over themselves to get a hold of a piece of this immense pot of profit.
The Working-Class Borrowing Binge

What did the working class do? What happens to a population committed to measuring people’s success by the amount of consumption they could afford when the means they had always had to achieve it, rising wages, stop? They can go through a trauma right then and there: “We can’t anymore—it’s over.” Most people didn’t do that. They found other ways.
Americans undertook more work. People took a second or third job. The number of hours per year worked by the average American worker has risen by about 20 percent since the 1970s. By comparison, in Germany, France, and Italy, the number of hours worked per year per worker has dropped 20 percent. American workers began to work to a level of exhaustion. They sent more family members—and especially women—out to work. This enlarged supply of workers meant that employers could find plenty of employees without having to offer higher pay. Yet, with more family members out working, new kinds of costs and problems hit American families. The woman who goes out to work needs new outfits. In our society, she probably needs another car. With women exhausted from jobs outside and continued work demands inside households, with families stressed by exhaustion and mounting bills, interpersonal tensions mounted and brought new costs: daycare, psychotherapy, drugs. Such extra costs neutralized the extra income, so it did not solve the problem.
The American working class had to do a second thing to keep its consumption levels rising. It went on the greatest binge of borrowing in the history of any working class in any country at any time. Members of the business community began to realize that they had a fantastic double opportunity. They could get the profits from flat wages and rising productivity, and then they could turn to the working class traumatized by the inability to have rising consumption, and give them the means to consume more. So instead of paying your workers a wage, you’re going to lend them the money—so they have to pay it back to you! With interest!
That solved the problem. For a while, employers could pay the workers the same or less, and instead of creating the usual problems for capitalism—workers without enough income to buy all the output their increased productivity yields—rising worker debt seemed magical. Workers could consume ever more; profits exploding in every category. Underneath the magic, however, there were workers who were completely exhausted, whose families were falling apart, and who were now ridden with anxiety because their rising debts were unsustainable. This was a system built to fail, to reach its end when the combination of physical exhaustion and emotional anxiety from the debt made people unable to continue. Those people are, by the millions, walking away from those obligations, and the house of cards comes down.
If you put together (a) the desperation of the American working class and (b) the efforts of the finance industry to scrounge out every conceivable borrower, the idea that the banks would end up lending money to people who couldn’t pay it back is not a tough call. The system, however, was premised on the idea that that would not happen, and when it happened nobody was prepared.
Capitalism Hits the Fan | Professor Richard D. Wolff
By investing, I'm not talking about the fast and loose trading game going on which is defacto gambling. I'm talking about the good old days solid investing where a person with a million dollars could live off the interest.
Ultimately, the believers in the Gold Standard may turn out to be right....I don't know...but it does look like debt-financed paper currency models are unsustainable in the long term; and the economic arguments of conservatives and libertarians have consistently pushed the mantra that markets are self-regulating for the last 40 years, so there was no plan to keep investing from spiraling out of control coming from the right. The most concise explanation for what went wrong with derivative markets, was that in an unregulated environment (thank you Alan Greenspan!) investors and brokers who were used to expanding markets and finding foreign markets with high growth, had no where to turn when the ecology started applying the brakes to real growth in human activity. So, they just created schemes to bet on existing investments in a search for high returns. The system was built to fail eventually, and cannot continue under its present form.
 

Revoltingest

Pragmatic Libertarian
Premium Member
The people only get to pick from filtered candidates and yes it's a terrible system that was not endorsed by the founding fathers. This system was hi-jacked in the early 20th century and it is a shame that our people were unaware of what was going on. Like today, our corporate sponsored media fails us in the illusion of journalism.
The problems existed long before the 20th century. If anything the primary process has become more democratic. I'm not saying that's an improvement though.
Journalism is the same slimy profession it was a couple hundred years ago.

As for the war mongering presidents, they're a symptom of a corporate backed military. I found this to be quite interesting.
[youtube]RVsB07CcSNw[/youtube]
Confessions of an economic hitman - YouTube
I'm unconvinced that leaders & in government & industry have the ability to act in concert to the extent your speaker alleges.
Collusion seems typically much more haphazard, unorganized & short term.

I'm a dreamer. My great ancestor, George Mason was too. Let's continue to solve these problems by first exposing the problems and get this country back to it's founding principles.
Sounds good to me!
 

Jeremy Mason

Well-Known Member
The problems existed long before the 20th century. If anything the primary process has become more democratic. I'm not saying that's an improvement though.
Journalism is the same slimy profession it was a couple hundred years ago.

I was kinda pointing out the Federal Reserve Act, but corruption has existed since the dawn of money. I don't doubt that journalism has been the "slimy profession" you call it. It's just more people are buying slime.

I'm unconvinced that leaders & in government & industry have the ability to act in concert to the extent your speaker alleges.
Collusion seems typically much more haphazard, unorganized & short term.

Don't kid yourself. Underestimating the power of the dark-side is foolish and is exactly why we are in the mess we are today.

vader2.jpg
 

Revoltingest

Pragmatic Libertarian
Premium Member
I was kinda pointing out the Federal Reserve Act, but corruption has existed since the dawn of money. I don't doubt that journalism has been the "slimy profession" you call it. It's just more people are buying slime.
I read history. Journalism has long been corrupt.
There's a good PhD thesis for someone....quantifying corruption & examining it over time.

Don't kid yourself. Underestimating the power of the dark-side is foolish and is exactly why we are in the mess we are today.

vader2.jpg
To over-estimate its power has pitfalls too. In my experience, humans in groups have a difficult time coordinating complex & far reaching schemes in secret.
But I'll admit that Star Wars is one of my favorite documentaries.
 
Last edited:

Jeremy Mason

Well-Known Member
To over-estimate its power has pitfalls too. In my experience, humans in groups have a difficult time coordinating complex & far reaching schemes in secret.

Secret societies have existed for many years and large amounts of money and resources keeps their gears well oiled.
 

work in progress

Well-Known Member
And I'm not so inclined to trust this kind of thinking due to somewhat obvious social outcomes. So, in effect, you want to empower a new elite that has a much better idea. So, where's the plan?
You don't get it do you? It's not like the present global capitalist system can keep merrily chugging along. The impacts of resource scarcity and environmental degradation are already intruding on the games that economists and policy makers want to play. So called "Free Trade" and deregulation of business is not providing returns for the majority of people in the world, as promised in all the optimistic futurist predictions back in 2000. Instead famines are increasing; failed states are growing; and the number of people living on less than $2.00 a day is also growing. And in the U.S., there is a growing realization which inspired the Occupy movements, that capitalism has extracted wealth from the majority and transferred it to the owners of capital.

But, as bad as things look now, they will get worse over the coming decades, as the natural constraints on human activity become harder and more difficult to ignore! Every nation will end up as a failed state dissolved into anarchy by a desperate campaign to maintain an economic model dependent on continuous growth.

And that's why I am looking at non-capitalist options for running an economy. I would be happy to stay with what I have grown up accustomed to if there was a reasonable chance they would continue working in the future. Remember, we have children, grandchildren, and future generations to consider. The choices we make today will impact the kind of world that future generations will inherit. So far, the collective record is one of a selfish, self-centered generation (especially in the West) which is on a hedonistic mad dash to squander everything that's available now, and leave nothing for those following after us! Socialism doesn't have to be imposed from the top down as in communism; but whatever economy we have in the future will have to exist in harmony with what the Earth can provide and still maintain healthy ecological systems.
Great. Was that so hard? That's what I am asking for. So, Co-op's, employee ownership... not a lot to work with, but I suppose it's a start. Anything else with a bit more meat on its bones?
I'm a machinist, not an economist. Whatever I've managed to learn about zero growth or no growth economic theories (and they are very hard to find because they don't fit traditional right and left desires) is part of my own search and discovery. I want to learn more about them, and try to figure out how these proposals will stand up against the increasingly hostile and ruthless strategies of diehard capitalists. A civilization doesn't have to turn into a failed state and collapse when there comes a time for change, but that is usually the case as the established wealthy powerful elites become more ruthless and intransigent. An exception to the rule would be the back story behind the Fall Of The Roman Empire -- because it was only the Western Empire that fell back in the 5th century, not the eastern half. The eastern empire reorganized as Byzantium and continued on for another 1000 years until the fall of Constantinople.

The major failing of Rome may have been more than the shift of commerce to the east, it also seems likely that the inability of the wealthy, politically connected rulers of Rome would not allow any structural changes to made that would threaten their economic interests. We are seeing something similar today if we look at both the defense contractors and the energy companies -- they have made huge sums of money from their commercial enterprises so far, and want to continue the same profit margins in the future, regardless of climate change or the increasing costs and risks of using war and conflict as foreign policy.
 

tytlyf

Not Religious
OWS is going strong and if you are a part of the 99% you should respect it. Now, the TeaFarts on the other hand, I think they quit with all their rallies and realized that their movement was ludicrous
 

Rakhel

Well-Known Member
OWS is going strong and if you are a part of the 99% you should respect it. Now, the TeaFarts on the other hand, I think they quit with all their rallies and realized that their movement was ludicrous
uh, yeah, no.
 

Apex

Somewhere Around Nothing
OWS is going strong and if you are a part of the 99% you should respect it. Now, the TeaFarts on the other hand, I think they quit with all their rallies and realized that their movement was ludicrous
Would you like some fries with that elitism?
 
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