Hope & Change

[Grifterwithafunnylittleha]

The conceptual, legal and business contexts of corporations is not evil. We built our country on the hope of profitable corporations.

People are what corrupt business.

Grifter

[farrarfan1]

Dear Jay Farrar,
Please start writing love songs to corporations.

That's not a bad idea. If it weren't for corporations we wouldn't have the catalogue of Jay/UT/SV cd's to listen to, or anything to play them on, or computers to talk about them on, or the clothes to wear to go buy the cd's, or the cars to drive to go buy them, or stores to buy them from, or the electricity to power the cd players. Come to think of it, if it weren't for corporations a lot of the members of this board wouldn't even have the money to buy the cd's to begin with.

We owe a big thank you to the corporations that have made possible all the joy and happiness that music brings us.

[stablew]

Dear Jay Farrar,
Please start writing love songs to corporations.

[farrarfan1]

What a mean SOB. I can't believe people still think this way.

Socialist America sinking
________________________________________
Posted: July 16, 2009
8:41 pm Eastern


By Patrick J. Buchanan
________________________________________
After half a century of fighting encroachments upon freedom in America, journalist Garet Garrett published "The People's Pottage." A year later, in 1954, he died. "The People's Pottage" opens thus:
"There are those who still think they are holding the pass against a revolution that may be coming up the road. But they are gazing in the wrong direction. The revolution is behind them. It went by in the Night of Depression, singing songs to freedom."
Garrett wrote of a revolution within the form. While outwardly America appeared the same, a revolution within had taken place that was now irreversible. One need only glance at where we were before the New Deal, where we are and where we are headed to see how far we are off the course the Founding Fathers set for our republic.
Taxes drove the American Revolution, for we were a taxaphobic, liberty-loving people. That government is best that governs least is an Americanism. When "Silent Cal" Coolidge went home in 1929, the U.S. government was spending 3 percent of gross domestic product.
And today? Obama's first budget will consume 28 percent of the entire GDP; state and local governments another 15 percent. While there is some overlap, in 2009, government will consume 40 percent of GDP, approaching the peak of World War II.
The deficit for 2009 is $1.8 trillion, 13 percent of the whole economy. Obama is pushing a cap-and-trade bill to cut carbon emissions that will impose huge costs on energy production, spike consumer prices and drive production offshore to China, which is opting out of Kyoto II. The Chinese are not fools.
Obama plans to repeal the Bush tax cuts and take the income tax rate to near 40 percent. Combined state and local income tax rates can run to 10 percent. For the self-employed, payroll taxes add up to 15.2 percent on the first $106,800 for all wages of all workers. Medicare takes 2.9 percent of all wages above that. Then there are the state sales taxes that can run to 8 percent, property taxes, gas taxes, excise taxes and "sin taxes" on booze, cigarettes and, soon, hot dogs and soft drinks.
Comes now national health insurance from Nancy Pelosi's House. A surtax that runs to 5.4 percent of all earnings of the top 1 percent of Americans, who already pay 40 percent of all federal income taxes, has been sent to the Senate. Included also is an 8 percent tax on the entire payroll of small businesses that fail to provide health insurance for employees.
Other ideas on the table include taxing the health benefits that businesses provide their employees.
The D.C.-based Tax Foundation says New Yorkers could face a combined income tax rate of near 60 percent.
In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson called George III a tyrant for having "erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people and eat out their substance."
What did George III do with his Stamp Act, Townshend Acts or tea tax to compare with what is being done to this generation of Americans by their own government?
While the hardest-working and most productive are bled, a third of all wage-earners pay no U.S. income tax, and Obama plans to free almost half of all wage-earners of all income taxes. Yet, tens of millions get Medicaid, rent supplements, free education, food stamps, welfare and an annual check from Uncle Sam called an Earned Income Tax Credit, though they never paid a nickel in income taxes.
Oh, yes. Obama also promises everybody a college education.
Coming to America to feast on this cornucopia of freebies is the world. One million to 2 million immigrants, legal and illegal, arrive every year. They come with fewer skills and less education than Americans, and consume more tax dollars than they contribute by three to one.
Wise Latina women have more babies north of the border than they do in Mexico and twice as many here as American women.
As almost all immigrants are now Third World people of color, they qualify for ethnic preferences in hiring and promotions and admissions to college over the children of Americans.
All of this would have astounded and appalled the Founding Fathers, who after all, created America – as they declared loud and clear in the Constitution – "for ourselves and our posterity."
China saves, invests and grows at 8 percent. America, awash in debt, has a shrinking economy, a huge trade deficit, a gutted industrial base, an unemployment rate surging toward 10 percent and a money supply that's swollen to double its size in a year. The 20th century may have been the American Century. The 21st shows another pattern.
"The United States is declining as a nation and a world power with mostly sighs and shrugs to mark this seismic event," writes Les Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, in CFR's Foreign Affairs magazine. "Astonishingly, some people do not appear to realize that the situation is all that serious."
Even the establishment is starting to get the message.

Do not question Obama's wisdom.
Accept it.
Embrace it.
Revel in it.
People demanded better living through bigger government and he listened.
It's all being done for our own good.
Resistance is futile, the citizens have spoken at the ballot box.

[Thomas_J_Foolery]

Look at the Enron situation as an example--deregulation enables monopolies and, in that case, planned outages to drive demand/consumer costs.

A catastrophic exception to the rule. It's a shame it was a catastrophe, but
the principle still holds.

Planned outages? Enron was behind that as well ? Did Lee Fastow have Kennedy Murdered as well? When you don't believe in nothin, you'll believe anything.

Not sure I follow you. I'm not disagreeing with what happened at Enron.
I'm just saying it was a frighteningly harmful exception to the rule.
Ultimately deregulation and competition is a good thing.

My Bad. Sorry for the confusion.

[Lawrence Fan]

Look at the Enron situation as an example--deregulation enables monopolies and, in that case, planned outages to drive demand/consumer costs.

A catastrophic exception to the rule. It's a shame it was a catastrophe, but
the principle still holds.

Planned outages? Enron was behind that as well ? Did Lee Fastow have Kennedy Murdered as well? When you don't believe in nothin, you'll believe anything.

Not sure I follow you. I'm not disagreeing with what happened at Enron.
I'm just saying it was a frighteningly harmful exception to the rule.
Ultimately deregulation and competition is a good thing.

[Thomas_J_Foolery]

What a mean SOB. I can't believe people still think this way.

Socialist America sinking
________________________________________
Posted: July 16, 2009
8:41 pm Eastern


By Patrick J. Buchanan
________________________________________
After half a century of fighting encroachments upon freedom in America, journalist Garet Garrett published "The People's Pottage." A year later, in 1954, he died. "The People's Pottage" opens thus:
"There are those who still think they are holding the pass against a revolution that may be coming up the road. But they are gazing in the wrong direction. The revolution is behind them. It went by in the Night of Depression, singing songs to freedom."
Garrett wrote of a revolution within the form. While outwardly America appeared the same, a revolution within had taken place that was now irreversible. One need only glance at where we were before the New Deal, where we are and where we are headed to see how far we are off the course the Founding Fathers set for our republic.
Taxes drove the American Revolution, for we were a taxaphobic, liberty-loving people. That government is best that governs least is an Americanism. When "Silent Cal" Coolidge went home in 1929, the U.S. government was spending 3 percent of gross domestic product.
And today? Obama's first budget will consume 28 percent of the entire GDP; state and local governments another 15 percent. While there is some overlap, in 2009, government will consume 40 percent of GDP, approaching the peak of World War II.
The deficit for 2009 is $1.8 trillion, 13 percent of the whole economy. Obama is pushing a cap-and-trade bill to cut carbon emissions that will impose huge costs on energy production, spike consumer prices and drive production offshore to China, which is opting out of Kyoto II. The Chinese are not fools.
Obama plans to repeal the Bush tax cuts and take the income tax rate to near 40 percent. Combined state and local income tax rates can run to 10 percent. For the self-employed, payroll taxes add up to 15.2 percent on the first $106,800 for all wages of all workers. Medicare takes 2.9 percent of all wages above that. Then there are the state sales taxes that can run to 8 percent, property taxes, gas taxes, excise taxes and "sin taxes" on booze, cigarettes and, soon, hot dogs and soft drinks.
Comes now national health insurance from Nancy Pelosi's House. A surtax that runs to 5.4 percent of all earnings of the top 1 percent of Americans, who already pay 40 percent of all federal income taxes, has been sent to the Senate. Included also is an 8 percent tax on the entire payroll of small businesses that fail to provide health insurance for employees.
Other ideas on the table include taxing the health benefits that businesses provide their employees.
The D.C.-based Tax Foundation says New Yorkers could face a combined income tax rate of near 60 percent.
In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson called George III a tyrant for having "erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people and eat out their substance."
What did George III do with his Stamp Act, Townshend Acts or tea tax to compare with what is being done to this generation of Americans by their own government?
While the hardest-working and most productive are bled, a third of all wage-earners pay no U.S. income tax, and Obama plans to free almost half of all wage-earners of all income taxes. Yet, tens of millions get Medicaid, rent supplements, free education, food stamps, welfare and an annual check from Uncle Sam called an Earned Income Tax Credit, though they never paid a nickel in income taxes.
Oh, yes. Obama also promises everybody a college education.
Coming to America to feast on this cornucopia of freebies is the world. One million to 2 million immigrants, legal and illegal, arrive every year. They come with fewer skills and less education than Americans, and consume more tax dollars than they contribute by three to one.
Wise Latina women have more babies north of the border than they do in Mexico and twice as many here as American women.
As almost all immigrants are now Third World people of color, they qualify for ethnic preferences in hiring and promotions and admissions to college over the children of Americans.
All of this would have astounded and appalled the Founding Fathers, who after all, created America – as they declared loud and clear in the Constitution – "for ourselves and our posterity."
China saves, invests and grows at 8 percent. America, awash in debt, has a shrinking economy, a huge trade deficit, a gutted industrial base, an unemployment rate surging toward 10 percent and a money supply that's swollen to double its size in a year. The 20th century may have been the American Century. The 21st shows another pattern.
"The United States is declining as a nation and a world power with mostly sighs and shrugs to mark this seismic event," writes Les Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, in CFR's Foreign Affairs magazine. "Astonishingly, some people do not appear to realize that the situation is all that serious."
Even the establishment is starting to get the message.

[Thomas_J_Foolery]

Look at the Enron situation as an example--deregulation enables monopolies and, in that case, planned outages to drive demand/consumer costs.

A catastrophic exception to the rule. It's a shame it was a catastrophe, but
the principle still holds.

Planned outages? Enron was behind that as well ? Did Lee Fastow have Kennedy Murdered as well? When you don't believe in nothin, you'll believe anything.

[stablew]

Deregulation of the telecommunications industry in the 80's resulted in an AT&T monopoly and customer ownership of equipment. That means they used to fix wiring issues in your home at no cost, but now it's yours, so you pay for it.

[Lawrence Fan]

Look at the Enron situation as an example--deregulation enables monopolies and, in that case, planned outages to drive demand/consumer costs.

A catastrophic exception to the rule. It's a shame it was a catastrophe, but
the principle still holds.

[stablew]

Look at the Enron situation as an example--deregulation enables monopolies and, in that case, planned outages to drive demand/consumer costs.

[Lawrence Fan]

Deregulate and you get rising costs and no accountability for quality.

Errr....isn't the whole point of deregulation to foster competition and lower costs?

[Hank Snow]

Love it or leave it! Charming. I'm not buying the United Corporatist States of Laissez-faire Capitalism.

I did not say "love it or leave it". I suggested that if a single-payer socialized healthcare scheme is of utmost importance to you, then you may want to consider moving elsewhere. Why wait around for something that may not happen? Why not go where it's a sure thing?

Thank god the founding fathers didn't have your attitude.

"Don't like taxation without representation?? Move somewhere else".

[peainthepod]

symbolism [sim-buh-liz-uhm]
–noun
the use of something as representing something else; a material object representing something, often something immaterial; emblem, token, or sign.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DzrAht2Ob1o

pea

[ShuckOwens]

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