Here's a bad omen for the Dem Party

[Xavier_Onassis]

XO, I think for some audiences, it's best to avoid any kind of figurative speech and deal strictly in concrete realities, short sentences and short words.
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I agree entirely. It is like passing out fingerpaints to the children just before they shoot the kindergarten class picture.

[sirs]

Try not to make a mess, then.

Uncle Thomas Sowell is hardly any authority on Black people

Oooops, too late

[Kramer]

Obama, and congress, caved to the money carrying lobbyists, not to the moderate Democrats. While we got short changed I can assure you none of them did.


BSB

Geepers I never ever would have figured that one out without you spelling it out so succinctly!

[Plane]

sirs, there's a fine line between stupidity and insanity.  Try to stay on the side of stupidity. 

The "parasites" at the bottom of the societal ladder are NOT going to eat you or infect you.  The very worst they can do to you is to degenerate into such a hopeless state of dependency that you might have to shell out a few more bucks in tax dollars for extra welfare benefits and police services.  The few meagre bucks that they can extract from the taxpayers pales into insignificance when compared to the looting of the Treasury and the economy by Wall Street and corporate America.

   See how close you are to understanding?

     Just this close.

    If you combined the costs of social services, prisons and police, what part of the budget would be larger right now?

[Michael Tee]

<<If you combined the costs of social services, prisons and police, what part of the budget would be larger right now?>>

It's not a relevant question for comparing the costs of the predators at the top versus the parasites at the bottom, because the predators have even got their paws into the prison system now.  Falsely billed to the parasites, large portions of the prison expenses are actually paid out as profit to the giant corporations which own the for-profit prisons, and multiplying the cost burden of the prison system as a whole by lobbying to maintain laws mandating prison terms for non-violent offenders and the perpetrators of victimless crimes.

So even big chunks of the prison system expenditures really can be chalked up to the predators at the top.

As for the rest of the expenses attributable to the "parasites" how many are due to ill health caused by the predators' lobbying against health care reform for decades?  Probably most of it.  How much are due to the sicknesses related to alcohol and tobacco, again protected by billion-dollar lobbies?

How much of "parasites'" cost is due to stolen (off-shored) American jobs sacrificed to corporate America?  How much die to theft of pensions and life savings by corporate and Wall Street criminals>

Let's hope, for your sake, there are some "parasite" expenses still left over that CAN'T be attributed to corporate and Wall Street greed and crime..  Those remaining expenses would be totally dwarfed by the current on-going costs of the Bush wars.

[Plane]

Social services is already the biggest part of the Federal budget , and the portion is even bigger if the States are added in.

I am not worried about preditory behavior top or bottom , I am worried more about a huge system that is making us all dependant on it, it will make parasites of us all eventually.

[Michael Tee]

plane, the "parasites at the bottom, predators at the top" paradigm was Pooches, who stated or inferred that the threat from both ends was more or less equal.

Most if not all of my posts that followed that were directed towards dispelling what I considered to be the false notion that the threats from both ends were equal.  From a class-war perspective (which IMHO is the only meaningful and realistic way to assess what's going on in the U.S.A. and has been for decades now if not forever) it is the elite at the top (metaphorically dubbed "the 1%,") who have obviously concentrated most of the power in their hands through consolidation of media ownership, financial and commercial interests, and outright bribery of politicians, either in the form of "legitimate" or illegitimate payoffs.  The "power" of the parasitical bottom ranks (jobless, sick, dying, often through no fault of their own and almost invariably due to class-war policies aided by demagoguery) is largely mythical, another straw man developed by the 1%'s propaganda to divert the nation's consciousness away from correct class-war analysis of the problem.

[Plane]

  It is the nature of power to consolidate , as dewdrops on a windowpane .

  How would you prevent it?

    In most nations the powerfull are an even smaller number than 1%.

[Michael Tee]

<<It is the nature of power to consolidate . . .

<<How would you prevent it?>>

I'd make the FCC a lot more accountable than it is now, when it's run for the benefit of the broadcasting industry and not the public.  Its decisions are responsible for the degree of media consolidation that you see today, it is NOT the result of natural forces like dewdrops on a windowpane in your absurd analogy.

I'd strengthen existing antitrust legislation to the point where the current degree of media consolidation was reversed or if necessary write new legislation specifically aimed at the MSM to break 'em all up, although I think in this case the FCC may already have the powers it needs, it's just a case of the corporations corrupting the politicians who make the appointments to the FCC and probably can tinker with its rules if needed.

Short answer is the system is the result of media concentration and the system has the power to reverse it.  But as long as the special interests (including Wall Street and corporate America) control the politicians through campaign funding and under-the-table pay-offs, you are not going to see any significant changes in media consolidation.

    <<In most nations the powerfull are an even smaller number than 1%.>>

Without suipportive data, that is just pure meaningless bullshit.  As far as I can tell, any studies about concentration of wealth shows the USA far ahead (i.e., more wealth-concentrated) than any other Western or industrialized country, but I wouldn't crawl out on a limb the way you just did without any kind of supporting data.

[sirs]

Plane actually helping to reinforce a point I made quite a while back.  While the left, libs, Socialists, and Communists attempt to decry greed and money as the evil of all evils, the true evil is power.....the power to dictate who, what, when, how much, how little, anyone can do, earn, be allowed to... whatever.

It's one thing to have laws to defend one person from infringing on the rights of another.  Quite another kettle of fish, when you have a 3rd party power (the Government, be it led by a King, Dictator, or Party), have such power to tell you where you can and can't live, what you can and can't own, how much you can and can't make, what you can and can't eat (not because its supposedly cancer causing, but because you might get fat).  Even getting to the point on how much carbon dioxide one is allowed, or have to pay for extra carbon credits

The true evil is Power, and its what the hard left craves.  Not that there aren't any RW extremists that would want to use the Government to enforce their version of morals, but they are exponentially far fewer than what the current crop of leftists in the country inhabit, in Government

[Michael Tee]

<<The true evil is Power, and its what the hard left craves.  Not that there aren't any RW extremists that would want to use the Government to enforce their version of morals, but they are exponentially far fewer than what the current crop of leftists in the country inhabit, in Government>>

So right in the abstract, so wrong on the facts.

Power today is exercised by special monied interests but sirs can't see it that way, since he equates money with virtue in almost every case although I would guess that even sirs would find something objectionable in the wealth, say, of organized crime or certain individuals like George Soros.

sirs has no concept of class-war realities, probably because he denies the very existence of the class war, and so is unable to see that the monied power exercised at the top of the economic ladder is exercised by his own class enemies.

I think in sirs we have a perfect example of the Left's failure to preach class war realities in America, not only converting many in the war to support the interests most antithetical to their own, but to blind them to the existence of the class war itself.  This is a huge surrender to the power of the MSM and the educational establishment.  So far as I can tell, only a token spirited effort to preach the realities of the class war has ever been made, a lot of it in comic book or graphic novel form.  This is an area where the Left has to come to grips with its own failures and stop blaming the MSM for their own impotence.

[BT]

I doubt anyone on these boards is naive enough to state categorically that there is no class warfare. The disagreement resides in definition and justification.

[Michael Tee]

<<I doubt anyone on these boards is naive enough to state categorically that there is no class warfare. >>

Wouldn't surprise me to find more than one.

<<The disagreement resides in definition . . . >>

Not being an expert, I just start with the basic Marxist definitions and stand ready to be corrected if anyone has made any valid modifications in them in the past 150 years.

<< . . . and justification. >>

Justification?  I don't think even Marx asked for a "justification."  I thought class war was just accepted as the natural state of things in a pre-socialist industrialized world.

[sirs]

<<The disagreement resides in definition . . . >>

Not being an expert, I just start with the basic Marxist definitions and stand ready to be corrected if anyone has made any valid modifications in them in the past 150 years.

"How do you tell a communist?  Well, it's someone who reads Marx and Lenin.  And how do you tell an anti-Communist?  It's someone who understands Marx and Lenin."...........Ronald Reagan

[sirs]

Here's some realities for Tee, that he and his fellow leftists/marxists/socialists don't get.  No, you're not smarter than the rest of us.  No, you're got going to change this nation into a socialist one, much less a communist one.  Freedom is just that damn important to us.  It was ingrained into our DNA and allowed to take root when the founders established this nation, and provided us a Constitution by which to govern.

I realize that those words, in our Constitution means squat to you.  I realize you think America is this terrorist nation.  Anything that you can conclude to justify that template is on your table, be it simply calling those you disagree with fascists, calling people of another race vile names, because they don't agree with your twisted ideology, be it calling for revolution, be it civil or armed.  Ends justify your means.

Problem

Too many of us who believe in that freedom, in the Constitution, AND ARMED.  So you can rant, rave, call us all kinds of names, its going to get you no where, outside of an ulcer perhaps, and a 10month wait to be treated for it.  But knock your socks off