The currrent stimulus package passed by the Congress is a paltry amount of money. There are some reform aspects of the entire program like raising the caps on mortgages that fannie mae and freddie mac could finance despite large financial losses by both. Much of the $3.2 billion in losses were accounted for by derivative investments used as a hedge against falling interest rates on mortgages held by borrowers. The federal reserve is loaning distressed banks with non-performing mortgage loans funds against the troubled mortgages (or mortgage backed securities) as collateral. The fed may end up with $200 billion worth of …
All 610 comments by...
cabdriverinchicago
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Large corporations for years have consolidated the food industry through factory faming of livestock. Fast food outlets are merely concentrated, high demand commercial customers for beef, poultry and pork produced on these farms using cheap (usually foreign) hired wage labor, non-free range animals and tons of anti-biotics which get into the food chain. Fast food chains were thus outlets for factory farming and the concentration of production and farm income.The results have harmed both consumers and farm families. Factory farms are the main reason for the post-WWII decline of family farms. The connection between factory farms and the fast food industry …
Posted to Corporate Potluck
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I dont
Posted to Corporate Potluck
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I was just testing the html on this website. I do support the HEN with all due fervor.
Posted to Corporate Potluck
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I think some of Cosby's criticisms should be taken seriously. I do think the Juan Williams book is nonsense.
Posted to Come on Cosby, Stop Hatin'
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Much of the growth of China as a world power had to do with events in the 1990s quite aside from the growth of China's export markets and the influx of over half a trillion dollars worth of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) inflows since the early days of the "capitalist road" reforms. The decline of US military pre-eminance in the region and its support for military dictatorships in the 1980s, the decline of Japan as THE regional power due to the collapse of the Nikkei and the Yen in the early 1990s and the East Asian financial crisis of 1997-98 all …
Posted to China's Valley of Tears
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Scorp, All you do is spew mindless rage and opprobrium over cliched images with no attention to actual facts as if reality doesn't exist. China has gone capitalist and its economy has grown at a rate of 9.5% annually since the early 1990s. You act as if Mao was still in power. He's been gone over three decades. Get over it. A new game is in town and China is modern history's fourth great industrial revolution!! That's not the opinion of some leftist ragsheet. It was announced with great fanfare by the UK's Financial Times!!
Posted to China's Valley of Tears
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It sounds like the Private Equity Funds are basically venture capitalists trying to make money by restructuring profitable firms who get more profitable when pay hikes, benefits and pension obligations are eliminated by restructuring. The thing that is so embittering is when the very assets of the company are leveraged by loans that make financing these arrangements possible. It's like rubbing salt in the wound. Also by lowering wages and benefits, the very conditions of expanding financialization are created by lowering demand for consumer output making debt driven growth the only viable alternative. Clearly, the average worker is not benefiting from …
Posted to Pirates of Private Equity
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Let's leave Iraq now. It is a multibillion dollar boondoggle and a pointless bloodbath to boot.
Posted to Another War We Can't Afford
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It is doubtless the case that the Palestinians in Iraq experience a double stigma. One is that they are Palestinians and live as refugees in Iraq. The other is that they are Sunni Muslims who sided with other Sunnis in their political outlook and at one time supported the regime of Saddam Hussein as well as his ill fated invasion of Kuwait. It is no suprise that the Shi'ites have targeted them for attack. Doubtless, it is the Shi'ite militias have targeted the refugees. This is disgraceful. The number of refugees, 34,000, seemed small to begin with and now their numbers …
Posted to Palestinians in Iraq Face a Second Exile
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The crackers have really goneo off the deep end this tiem
Posted to Equating Stillbirths with Murders
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I will say this about Christy Freeman. She doesn't seem that bright. Probably won't be the next Nobel Prize winner. She doesn't need to get pregnant that is for sure.
Posted to Equating Stillbirths with Murders
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About 70% of the US public wants out of this war. Even more Iraqis want the US military out of their country. The Iraq War was one of the biggest US foreign policy failures in history. And that is no meagre distinction.
Posted to General Failure
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It does appear that many private water companies are heavily in debt. According to the Sierra Club, RWE is $28 billion in debt and Suez/ONDEO is $29 billion in debt. These debts seem to have come after a flurry of M&A activity in the late 1990s and beyond in which big outlays were made by large companies to buy out others in anticipation of an avalanche of big municiple water contracts which never materialized. Many communities with newly privatized drinking water systems struggle with high rates and bad service. Quickly increased water rates surely reflect corporate efforts to recoup funds used …
Posted to A Win in the Water War
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I don't get what's so hard about Universal Health Care. It's so desparately needed. Pass it already. It's a classic no brainer move.
Posted to Sicko's Critics and the Upside of Hitler
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Dozens of advanced countries with better average living standards for workers than ours and comparable rates of GDP growth also have universal health care as a given with no negative effects of any kind whatsoever!! Our current system is so filled with waste, financial delinquency, CEO extravagence, and instability anyhow that we might just as well go to a new system. There is little to lose and much to gain. Our current system already gives out tons of free medical care and sliding scale based services and medications. I am a diabetic with high average daily bloodsugars well over 200. My …
Posted to Sicko's Critics and the Upside of Hitler
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Nouri al-Maliki used Iraqi troops to break the strike in June and arrest the leaders. This shows that he is a US puppet. This issue means more to Iraqi oil workers than wages and conditions of work. This is most probably because the Oil Industry is Iraq's chief foreign exchange earner and main export and determines the perameters of economic development for the country. The effort to sell off the oil industry also is an effort to split up the country and deprive the Sunni Triangle of development revenue. The twin goals of profit taking and controlling the course of Iraqi …
Posted to Iraqi Unions Fight the New Oil Law
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You can't outlaw hate but you can certainly outlaw violent crimes motivated by hate. It makes sense. Hate crimes are an obvious violation of one's civil liberties in addition to one's person. Penalty enhancers make sense. If we outlaw hate crimes now maybe we can effectively outlaw hate by extention. Or at least reduce it by influencing rational people to think and influence those around them that are predisposed toward hateful violence and behavior.
Posted to Defining Hate in the United States
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Some o dem say dems a niggah hatah N' some o dem say dems a block beetah N' some o dem say dems a block stahbah N' some o dem say dems a paki bashah Fascists on de attack no batha wori foh dat fascists on de attack we will fite dem bock fascists on de attack we will coonteh attack fascists on the attack we will drive them bock. smosh der branes in cuz dey aint go nottan in em we gonna smosh der branes in coz dey aint got notton in em Lynton Kwesi Johnson
Posted to Defining Hate in the United States
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Hate crimes should have penalty enhancers added to them. We need to send the message that willfully harming someone else based on your own prejudices will not be tolerated by the law and that the law will address not only the violent act itself BUT THE DESPICABLE MOTIVE AS WELL!!
Posted to Defining Hate in the United States
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ChrisRico01, I support you buddy. I am sorry that you were shown such insensitivity and stupidity on a progressive blogsite. This and other sites have been infested with right-wingers of all kinds. I agree with you and want to support your blogspot.
Posted to Defining Hate in the United States
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Wolf you're a real right-winger. I read the story about the incident about which you posted. It was horrible. I heard about this before. The local news was full of the story and so were the blogs. I believe it took place in the mid-South. I think somewhere in Virginia. I'm not sure. This is one of the reasons I support the death penalty. I do believe that it is justice to put such people to death. Having said this I really must stick with my strongly held belief in judging the individual. The vast majority of Blacks don't commit crime. …
Posted to Defining Hate in the United States
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So what exactly is your point, Wolf? If the media report on a highly senaational crime and hysteria and violence breaks out they blame the media for ratings mongering and money grubbing irresponsibility. If the media doesn't report on a highly sensational crime than they're accused of some kind of bias and of hiding the truth on behalf of the nefarious "special interests." Damned if they do and damned if they don/t. Here's a thought. Why don't people just shut the f**k up and stop ragging on the media like it's everyones punching bag and just allow them to do their …
Posted to Defining Hate in the United States
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I like Dennis Kucinich on Fair Trade. Scrap NAFTA, FTAA, the WTO, and the rest and go for bilateral trade agreements as we have always done. The size of the US domestic market, which would grow if the middle class had more income, is leverage enough to get a fair deal. We also need to create more high paying jobs in the US. Foreign Direct Investment in the US is declining due to low effective demand in the US consumer goods market so we import everything and purchase it from Walmart which is the engine of the new economic model followed …
Posted to Making Trade Work for Everyone
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The current weakening of the Dollar is bound to increase US exports by making them more competitive on the global market while cutting imports. This is sure to balance the balance of trade deficit which is approaching $800 billion. Yet the US is still hemoraging jobs despite an increase in exports of autos and factory machine tools. Further, a drop in the dollar by to much could cause foreign investors in US debt like the Chinese to gradually shift their investments to the Euro which is more stable and increasing in value. Though the US increased exports and has thus taken …
Posted to Making Trade Work for Everyone
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The US isn't really chasing away high tech investment. More and more of it is emerging all the time. Manufacturing investment in consumer goods seem to be very profitable for many foreign firms since there is hundreds of billions of dollars worth of it. They weak and falling dollar is promoting it all the time. We stand to benefit from the jobs if nothing else.
Posted to Making Trade Work for Everyone
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WTH, Some of what you say is probably true. I know that jobs are hemoraging at a quickening pace. Somehow manufacturing investment is making its way here in durables (autos) and consumer goods (much of it food processing). I read in a report from a feature in the economist that about $4.5 trillion in manufactured goods were produced in the US economy in 2006 yet only about 12% of the US GDP is in manufacturing. The $4.5 trillion figure is about a third of the US GDP for that year meaning that about $3 trillion in manufacturing done here, the vast …
Posted to Making Trade Work for Everyone
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Toyota and Kia are taking over the US market in autos. Toyota recently surpassed GM in global sales. In 2006, only 57% of new vehicles sold in the US were from US companies down from 87% in 1970. According to a recent report Toyota has NEVER closed a US plant. While Ford and GM have terminated over 46,000 employees last year and will close 26 North American plants over the next five years, Toyota plans to open more plants and hire more US workers. Over 60% of all cars Toyota sells in North America are manufactured here. Toyota employs over 38,000 …
Posted to Making Trade Work for Everyone
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WTH, One of the things that is being pointed out with increasing frequency today is that the lowering of US tariffs is not so much on behalf of Chinese exports as US exports from China with a lot of US corporate value added. US tariffs are lowered so as to allow US corporations to resell what they manufacture abroad in the US competitively. This is where Walmart makes a killing. The UNCTAD has repeatedly pointed out that more than a third of all international trade is between parent companies and their overseas subsidiaries. Thus, FDI is the key issue not "trade." …
Posted to Making Trade Work for Everyone
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Sharrod Brown and Denis Kucinich both advocate replacing NAFTA and other free trade agreements, which have only enriched large transnational corporations by shifting jobs to low wage areas to cheapen labor and increase productivity, with more democratic bilateral agreements that respect higher labor and environmental standards. The US market is the largest in the world with over a quarter of the world GDP. This should motivate manufacturers who want special agreements, trade gaurantees and export quotas to uphold certain standards. The TNCs have collectively to much power and basically run the WTO and write the trade and investment provisions of free …
Posted to Making Trade Work for Everyone
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The real issue is fair trade not "free trade" as defined by large TNCs. Walden Bello, the executive director of Focus on the Global South, points out that the dollar value of global trade had increased from about $124 billion in 1968 to well over 10 trillion by the late 1990s, a roughly 17 fold increase. The WTO was not needed to increase world trade by removing international "barriers" as in the early post-WWII era. It was needed by the US to give its own corporations a boost at a time when their hegemony was threatened. In the 1960s, about three …
Posted to Making Trade Work for Everyone
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circumcision should not cause one to risk one's life for a little extra feeling .
Posted to Circumcision Promotion Divides AIDS Activists
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I'm not sure about your cynacism about the Democrats. Al Gore is a Democrat. At the very least the Democrats are mentally present in the 21st century enough to respect the scientific research behind the claims regarding global warming. They are far more likely to do something than those who are (a) in the pocket of the big corporate energy interests and (b) tending toward a medieval view of modern science.
Posted to Global Warming: Dim Bulbs, Bright Lights
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What is happening in Paraguay seems to be the typical consequences of corporate globalization. This involves the destruction of long-standing local economic and ecological systems in order to generate profits for large TNCs whose interests don't relate to those of most people either north or south of the equator. The TNCs listed in the article that are involved in the creation of the new Soy based agribusiness model in Paraguay are the very same ones who want to monopolize the global seed industry and reduce the world's nearly one and a half billion farmers to peons of the seed, fertilizer, and …
Posted to The Multinational Beanfield War
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Some ecology group that's concerned with organic farming. Actually the entire organic farming/ecological sustainability movement believes that about three fourths of the earth's biodiversity has been killed off mostly by GM seeds that replace varieties of hybrid seeds permanently. Most of this destruction is due to the highly concentrated seed market which aims to reduce global food production to a select group of highly resistant strains of GM seeds which will be controlled by the top six seed companies. The aim is to monopolize the means to produce food on a global scale.
Posted to The Multinational Beanfield War
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The UNFAO found that 75% of the genetic diversity of traditional crop varieties, which numbered in the thousands, were lost to replacement by GM seeds. The promotion of GM seeds, a $23 dollar industry utterly dominated by just six TNCs as of 1999, the year Pioneer HiBred was bought by DuPont for $7.7 billion, was the single biggest contributor to this dangerous trend.According to the Rural Advancement Foundation, approximately 97% of USDA lists have been lost over the past century. In order to grasp how this "Green Revolution" has impacted the third world we can look at the Phillipines where only …
Posted to The Multinational Beanfield War
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You are a true mentally damaged retard. The FAO is not a "discredited leftist source" and employs some of the world's top agricultural experts. The RAF is from South Carolina you moron. Hardly leftist. They're mostly farmers from the deep south who are sick of being ripped off by big contract agribusiness. Most are rock solid Republicans!! What do your shop worn libertarian sources say about bio-diversity anyhow? When you don't know anything about a topic you name call and name drop (and always the exact same names). Grow up and take your medication, jerk!!
Posted to The Multinational Beanfield War
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BM, Instead of posting your childish rantings why don't you just go to the Monsanto website and read their propaganda about how biodiversity is actually served by GM modified seeds. Yelling the same nonsense over and over is really getting old at this point.
Posted to The Multinational Beanfield War
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Because, as I've suggested in the above post, the Monsanto website would actually vindicate your argument over mine. You've just proven that you are so knee-jerk in your reactions that you don't even think. For you politics is a mere spinal reflex.
Posted to The Multinational Beanfield War
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Your anti-semitism is really showing now. Moon is NOT a zionist and why would anything going on in Paraguay be Israeli related? You're pathetic. Who's paying you to disrupt discussion on the progressive blogs?
Posted to The Multinational Beanfield War
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Biofuel production is already on the increase. See the article on Paraguay whose agricultural economy is set to become based on biofuels like soybeans to the detrament of most of the rural population whose farms will be taken over by foreign TNCs. The distribution of land in Paraguay is already highly unequal, about 2% of the population controls 70% of the land. The TNC invasion by the likes of Cargill, ADM, and Monsanto will only worsen the situation. Even more compesinos will lose land. Expect even more northbound immigration from such trends.
Posted to Biofuels: Promise or Peril?
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Tex, Bio-fuel cropping and refining in the US may be beneficial to many US farming communities. All I'm saying is that the third world situation may be quite different. Large TNCs like Cargill tend to dominate the entire process there as they come in and skew an already unequal social profile with very little overall benefit to the local economy or ecosystem in terms of income growth, energy savings, or foreign exchange gains, or a clean environment. Most of the benefit accrues to the TNC.
Posted to Biofuels: Promise or Peril?
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Tex, I'm not aware of any "hippy ideas" regarding agribusiness. I do know that increased food production in a world where the rate of population increase is slowing down is silly. This is about corporate profit not feeding people. The thrid world wasn't starving before colonialism and western corporate direct investment in their economically and ecologically sound agricultural systems which globalized them to the detrement of the people for profit. The question today is not production levels but distribution of land and resources. Traditional systems actually feed people much better. That is not a hippy idea. It is true. Farm economies …
Posted to Biofuels: Promise or Peril?
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Just because India became a net exporter of grains doesn't mean that the local people have better diets and increased caloric intake. If farmers are pushed from the land who once produced cheap, plentiful, organic crops that had abundant nutrition and are replaced by fewer farmers with large concentrated plots producing GM grains and animal feed for export to the west than the locals get little benefit. They will also have to import expensive staple crops that were once produced locally. There is also the unemployment effect from the agricultural changes that cause displacement and rural to urban migration. Many experts …
Posted to Biofuels: Promise or Peril?
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By all accounts the Green Revolution was an abject failure in India.
Posted to Biofuels: Promise or Peril?
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One of the worst side effects of war, according to humanitarian NGOs, is the ongoing effects of tactical and logistical residuals such as barbed wire enclosures and other disruptive infrastructure of war, land mines, and destruction from depleted uranium. All this keeps killing, maiming and disrupting and ruining everyday life long after the official hostilities cease. War, a key source of global capitalism's ability to survive, expand, and restructure capital and restore falling profit rates without the associated renewed rising employment pressures, Yet war is expensive, polluting, and filled with myriad annoyances for local populations. One of the contradictions is that …
Posted to Uncle Sam Wants Sustainability
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Tex, DU is not pure U238 but 99.8&#xU2;38 and 0.2% u235% by mass. There is also a small speck of U234 which contributes about 14% of the radioactivity emitted while U235 contributes about 1%. The remainder is Alpha radiation contributed by the U238. The other 15% is highly damaging Beta and Gamma radiation which has a very long half life. It is useful in armor piercing because it is two and a half times the density of steel and one and a half times the density of lead. The danger is that the uranium tip burns up and disintegrates because of …
Posted to Uncle Sam Wants Sustainability
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What does that have to do with the Israeli refusniks?
Posted to An Israeli Refuseniks Good Fight
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BM, Your the only one who ever presents wrong figures. The sooner youi're ejected from ITT the better.
Posted to An Israeli Refuseniks Good Fight
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US government figures don't claim more than $105 billion as of currently and possibly less. Mike stop taking your crap out on the Jews. I't wrong. We've never harmed you.
Posted to An Israeli Refuseniks Good Fight
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There is no doubt that the Bush Administration is the first modern administration to have real problems with modern science. First evolution, then stem cell research, now a new prescription drug which suppresses the adrenalin surge in PTSD victims so they can relieve the hyper-reactions they normally experience and live their lives, and now the ever present global warming issue. A new UN study which assembled over 2000 of the worlds most respected scientists has confirmed global warming as a fact (as if we needed to add yet one more peer reviewd study to the existing 950) and still Bush doesn't …
Posted to Resisting the War on Science
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Bowel Movement, If you are the "libertarian objectivist" that you claim to be than the very first line of defense is science. Logical positivism and the scientific method is sacrosanct to these people. It is held to be the only way to truth since it only deals in scientifically testable propositions. It eschews all subjective "bias" and holds itself to be value free.You object to the implications of over 950 peer reviewed studies including those of the US military and a recent UN study using over 2000 of the world's most respected scientific authorities just because it could mean a government …
Posted to Resisting the War on Science
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The issue of slavery's impact on the current situation in the US with regard to race relations has been debated since Danny Moynihan's 1965 treatise, The Negro Family: A Case for National Action. In it Moynihan argued that it was slavery and its continued effects on the US Black Community that was responsible for the poor condition and achievement rates of that community. He stressed that the patterns established by slavery such as the separation of the father from the family and the creation of dependance of the remainder of the family on the slaveholding household continued as a pattern into …
Posted to Slavery and the State of Denial
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BM, WTH. The ethnic and racial designations on government forms and applications are not for quotas but to track minority participation in the job market and education. Secondly, white racism has a determining effect on minorities while the racism of minorities toward whites in insulting but not of much consequence. I do feel that welfare is bad and Clinton was right to get rid of the transfer payments as they created dependency and some socio-pathic behaviours and expectation. One of the problems with our society is that the market doesn't create a paying job for all who want to work despite …
Posted to Slavery and the State of Denial
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Most crime victims are also black. This has been documented. What happened to your wife is regretable but not the norm. Most crime is overwhelmingly black on black. This is one reason about half the black population when asked supports the death penalty. The gang problem really created that situation. The media showed the outpouring of support for Tookie. What they didn't mention was that most African-Amercians could have cared less about him and thought his execution was justified. Also, what happened to your wife had nothing to do with racism. Those thugs probably didn't care who they robbed. They're thugs. …
Posted to Slavery and the State of Denial
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BM, You are a sorry assed racist. Showing everyone your deep, painful wounds and then attacking us as if we are responsible is absurd, although we do sympathize with you about your tragedy. Black on Black crime is not and never has been irrelevant. Black on white crime is worse than White on Black crime but then again most Whites live among other whites and are law abiding because they come from stable families and communities. Black on Black crime FAR outweighs any other type. Even when Black on White crime occurs it is not NECESSARILY motivated by racial factors. I …
Posted to Slavery and the State of Denial
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Most trials are certainly NOT filled with hearsay because the rules of evidence simply doesn't allow for it. Period! You just keep reasserting the same old crap with no evidence to support it. The Rosenbergs probably were in contact with KGB agents and probably did pass some information along but they were on trial for a specific crime. Talking to and contacting members of foreign secret services is not in itself a crime for which you can be executed. The prosecution never proved its case that the Rosenbergs (a) were guilty under the terms of the 1917 Espianoge Act or, (b) …
Posted to Slavery and the State of Denial
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BM, You are a neo-Nazi bigot and sick as well. What is it that you want?
Posted to Slavery and the State of Denial
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BIll Buckley is becoming more of a libertarian with his advocacy of legalized drugs and his opposition to war as a government racket. Still like most libertarians he is way on the right. The lib in libertarian is an illusion. To enforce a libertarian social order would require massive state repression. Scratch a Libertarian find a fascist. Such an irony!! But look at fascist sympathizer BM who claims to be a "libertarian/objectivist" whatever that means. I suspect there are many other such individuals as well.
Posted to Boomsday: Bankrupt Satire
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I am only trying to stop fascism in its tracks before it gets to far. Canada doesn't need Zundel. He is a shit. He violates the rights of Jews to live in peace and not be scapegoated, libeled, or mistreated. Let him suffer. Who told him to go and mess with the Jews in the first place? What is initiated force. In the Libertarian world you will need force to suppress the resistance of the poor who won't even be able to walk down the privatized streets. Maybe a "faith based" charity will subsidize the cost but only if they turn …
Posted to Boomsday: Bankrupt Satire
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Zundel is a known active fascist and anti-semite. His sole purpose is to agitate against Jews in order to create a dangerous, untenable, and threatening situation which will result in their mass physical harm and consequent pressure to leave their homes. This is deliberate and intolerable. All people deserve to live in peace and dignity with their neighbors free of threat from vicious incitement. Zundel's slanderous campaign of hatred is designed to bring harm to innocent people. He deserves to be in jail for what he is doing. By jailing Zundel, the government sends the message that hate and attempts to …
Posted to Boomsday: Bankrupt Satire
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Radical Islam has NOTHING to do with Israel. It is related to three things. First, it is what Chalmers Johnson has rightly described as "blowback" from the days of the Afghan War against the Soviet invasion and occupation which created the infamous "Afghan-Arabs" who became an international force for Islamic Conquest for the first time since the days of Mohammed. The second factor is the continued US military presence in Saudi Arabia, the holiest place in Islam. This is an offense to all Muslims. The third factor is obviously the continued torment of Iraq which has cost over 700,000 Iraqi lives …
Posted to Democracy Haters
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BM, You are utterly wrong. Obviously the current round of Islamic fundamentalist terrorism, including 9/11, is due to everything the US has done from Desert Storm on to the present. The facts I presented are correct and you never once addressed them in any way at all.Israel alone would not have brought the 9/11 attacks. Israel brutally occupied Arab Lands for almost 35 years at the time of the attacks and existed for over 50 years. There would have been an anti-US response much sooner and during the first Initifada if Israel were the chief antagonist and to blame for the …
Posted to Democracy Haters
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I read Cooleys book and the entire focus is on Afghanistan and the sources of Islamic Fundamentalism related to the Afghan-Arabs and the countries they came from in the fight against the Russian invasion. Cooley wrote a book called Green March Black September about the collapse of the Palestinian resistance in Jordan. He also wrote a recent book with Pluto Publishers which I have where he relates US hegemony, Israel, and the War in Iraq but he never blames Israel for the rise of Islamic Fundamentalism. It simply isn't true.Where were the fundies all throught the 1980s? Mostly in Lebanon I …
Posted to Democracy Haters
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The Rosenbergs were railroaded. The entire trail was filled with due process violations and should have been declared a mistrial. They were prosecuted under the wrong law to begin with. They should have been tried under the 1946 Atomic Energy Act and not the 1917 Espionage Act. Under the 1946 Act the defendant, if convicted, could only be sentenced to death with jury recommendation and only if the dissemination of information resulted in direct harm to the US the burden of proof of which was on the state. The US was a wartime ally of the USSR at the time of …
Posted to The Lessons of Sacco and Vanzetti
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Their political orientation doesn't make them guilty of the charges. This is fascist reasoning. Providing the Russians with nuclear related technology or classified information was done when they were allies. Thus they were not guilty of a crime according to the terms and specifications of the 1946 Act. The exact nature of the classified information was never discussed. The issue of whether or not it actually sped up the capabilities of the USSR in splitting an atom or making a deliverable nuclear weapon is in doubt. You don't address this issue and engage in your usual racist ad hominem attacks on …
Posted to The Lessons of Sacco and Vanzetti
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You have no proof. Much of what was admitted into evidence in the trial was hearsay which can't legally be admitted as evidence. A lot depended on the hearsay testimony of a fellow engineer named David Greenglass who was strongarmed and threatened into providing false testimony about providing classified information to KGB agents. This is inadmissable. There were many violations of due process of this nature. See. Committee for the Reopening of the Rosenbergs Case.
Posted to The Lessons of Sacco and Vanzetti
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The Government based its case entirely on the Greenglass testimony that the Rosenbergs facilitated a meeting between Greenglass who provided vital sketches of the bombs being developed at the Los Alamos laboratories at the time to KGB agents. Greenglass had been in contact with the Russians via a convicted British spy Klaus Fuchs as a go between. He seemingly turned states evidence by framing the Rosenbergs in order to get out from under espionage charges himself. The Greenglass hearsay testimony was used by the government to convict the Rosenbergs along with cold war hysteria about their being members of the CPUSA …
Posted to The Lessons of Sacco and Vanzetti
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Toledano didn't have all the facts. And he doesn't have a thorough knowledge of the US legal system.
Posted to The Lessons of Sacco and Vanzetti
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The threats to legal abortion are numerous. Thanks to Kissling for her heroic struggles to preserve safe and legal abortion.
Posted to A Pain, and Proud of It
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Surely you don't oppose safe and legal abortion. According to two well respected University of Chicago economists Roe vs. Wade was responsible for the drastically reduced crime rate throughout the 1990s. This was a positive effect of abortion. Don't you agree?
Posted to A Pain, and Proud of It
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As a socialist I can tell you that abortion is considered to be a human right of all women. Reproductive rights are human rights and democratic socialists of all tendencies strongly support human rights. The unborn fetus is NOT considered a human being. Civil and criminal law does not proceed from the assumption that unborn fetus's are fully human beings with their own legal rights as would be a fully born person who is out in the world. To repress the right to an abortion is to deprive a women of reproductive choice and thus her human and civil rights. Socialists …
Posted to A Pain, and Proud of It
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BM, I'm kind of suprised a racist and fascist like yourself opposes the dealth penalty. Politics is a strange thing after all.
Posted to A Pain, and Proud of It
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It is difficult to debunk someone who leans on others to argue for him. It is fine to quote other arguments but all you do is name drop and expect that to be taken seriously as an argument. If you want to join the debate than do so by making your own arguments rather than just name dropping someone you agree with politically. It would be as if I merely wrote "read Marx, Sweezy, Baran, Magdoff, Joan Robinson, Gramsci, and C. Wright Mills without presenting and explaining their arguments and relating them to the specifics of the issues at hand. Also, …
Posted to A Pain, and Proud of It
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What is this objective reality? Everything that has been claimed by some to be objective reality has been eclipsed by one thing or another. The only thing permanent is change. There seems to be no essential meaning to the world or life itself. I thought you were all down with Nietzsche and the existentialists with this one. In any case, man shapes his world more than the other way around (though as Marx says "he doesn't so as he chooses").
Posted to A Pain, and Proud of It
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Hume was a total skeptic about the possibility of epistomological truth. Kant was the most important rationalist thinker in Western thought and said that knowledge of reality was possible. He believed it was important to use reason to have a construct with which to understand empirical data. Rationalists like Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn agreed with Kant. Kuhn coined the term paradigm to refer to the totality of universal knowledge in any given period which itself could be overturned by another paradigm since knowledge does not grow by accretion but revolutionary trial and error. There is meaning but not essential meaning. …
Posted to A Pain, and Proud of It
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As the Feminist Movement often says, "If men became pregnant, Abortion would be a Sacrement."
Posted to A Pain, and Proud of It
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Even on an abortion thread you must push your racist holocaust denial. Most women btw, would think you're a moron. They're turned off by fascism because fascists are typically sexist bullies. I lived in the State of Wisconsin a long time mostly all through the 80s and I've seen real evidence of this fact. It's great to watch some naive macho Wisnurd putz trying to convince his attractive blond date(she obviously has increased his testosterone levels) in some dive of a pub that we must invade this or that country and that such and such a Republican is the man to …
Posted to A Pain, and Proud of It
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The Chicago Taxi Commission has been the Dept. of Consumer Services for some time and colostomy bags are referred immediately to the Proctology Specialists at either Northwestern Memorial Hospital or, for those with no health insurance the Stroger Center at Cook County Hospital near Union Park not far from where the Bulls play. I must say that the above post is BM's very best so far. The ad hominem attacks are based on realistic suppositions and is actually amusing. Tex has stood up for Israel but also for the Jews as well. I do not share his animosity toward Arabs but …
Posted to A Pain, and Proud of It
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It was no "word salad" but I guess anything above the level of Nazi apologia is hard for you to grasp. You are a sick moron. By the Way, isn't Wendy about your age? She might just throw over Mark Green for you. This way you can coauthor articles for the Nation Alliance Website together. As the pure blonde senior couple you could be a real inspiration to America's Aryan youth. And an abject lesson in family values!!
Posted to A Pain, and Proud of It
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It could reasonably be claimed that "socialists" carried out the most mass murders only if you ignore the crimes of the US and its allies in the third world as well as those of Hitler and the Japanese imperialists during WWII. Fascism and Capitalism allied after WWII in the third world and southern Europe in pursuit of capitalist profit. Capitalism is an inherently expansionist system while socialism is not. This is due to what Marx discerned as the Laws of Motion of Capital which force capitalism to expand commodity production and its social relations the world over in order to concentrate …
Posted to Bisexual Healing
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Chopper, You forget that the "free markets" that the Microsoft software monopoly operates in were opened by regimes supported by the US military who violently and undemocratically enforce US economic policy preferences. Also, total state control of the economy is only one approach that socialism has taken and not the one supported by most socialists. There is no reason that socialism has to have dictatorial political consequences. This is rightist dogma. Hitler's regime cannot be considered an extreme form of the US New Deal because it was both undemocratic and was mostly based on total militarization whereby the New Deal stressed …
Posted to Bisexual Healing
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The idea that Nazi Germany's economy wasn't on a war time footing until a year before Germany was forced to surrender doesn't even make common sense. What kind of footing were they on all during the War? Krupp was the states biggest contractor. By 1936, Hitler had militarized the Ruhr, had over 10 million men under arms and had the war machine going full steam. Over half a billion in US direct foreign investment was in Nazi Germany by the early 1930s. This represented just under 10% of the global total of US FDI. German militarism was profitable to US corporations …
Posted to Bisexual Healing
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I don't know what cracker college you went to but they misinformed you. Hitler's Keynsianism was based on the military. Read the Arms of Krupp and anything by Tim Mason. It is agreed that the Nazis used the military to boost overall economic productivity. By 1938, average wages and salaries were at the lowest proportion of the German GNP in Germany's history. It was not popular consumption but the military that boosted the economy. The rest is just the new trendy fascist apologia which is not worth much at all.
Posted to Bisexual Healing
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Who are you to dismiss Munzer, Mason and anyone else you disagree with. You are the HACK and you have no brains or sense but to read discredited nonsense and dogma. Also try reading Alfred Sohn-Rethal's The Economy and Class Structure of German Fascism. Also Daniel Guerin's Fascism and Big Business. Wages in 1938 were stagnant and experienced no real increase since 1928. Per capita food consumption declined markedly as did most consumption except that of the rich. The main reasons unemployment dropped from 6 million in 1932 to 300,000 in 1939 was the military economy, the carting off of many …
Posted to Bisexual Healing
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All the books you suggest are fraudulent so why read them? All the writers are more interested in their fascist agenda than historic truth. Your claim that Poland started WWII is appalling and silly. Even a right winger like Ernst Nolte would dispute it. The data about the Nazi economy is from Richard Overy and Tim Mason. The work week increased markedly as I stated and the median income stagnated. This brooks no controversy. The standard of living for the German working cless decreased. One reason for the war was that it became an extention of the German militarization process itself. …
Posted to Bisexual Healing
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"when the economy contracts prices rise, factories are reopened, and workers are recalled" I don't know whether or not you are refering to the dynamics of a normal business cycle or what but I found this claim dubious at best. Business cycles exist within the overall trend of the economy, but they usually involve a slowdown or recession which results in the consolidation of the economic through "shakeouts" that have large competitors eating up small ones, reinvestment, rehiring, some price increases and renewed activity all in a cyclical fashion. I'm not so sure that this relattes to the issue of military …
Posted to Bisexual Healing
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Debating Hitler's war economy is so much more fun!!
Posted to Bisexual Healing
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One of the better books on this topic is Tim Mason's Social Policy in the Third Reich. In it he argues that the rapid growth of Germany's War Machine and War industries grew so fast that it created significant labor shortages elsewhere in the German economy particularly agriculture. SInce the labor force participation rate hadn't changed much since Hitler took power-it was just over two-thirds of the employment age population-labor shortages aggravated all of Germany's problems and by 1938 the strengthened political position of the German Working class led to renewed industrial conflict, something German Fascism was designed to address in …
Posted to Bisexual Healing
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To say Hitler didn't have an aggressive foreign policy is quite ignorant. He invaded and conquered several countries taking over all of Europe from the English channel to the Urals. I'd call that aggression. He killed millions needlessly. The entire world agrees with this statement except for psycho-fascist morons with MENTAL ILLNESS who should not go off their medications. Germany stole all the mostly Polish speaking areas of the Polish Corridor in the Polish partitions of the 1790s. All Versailles did was return the areas to their rightful Polish owners. In addition, no one ever did anything from 1936 to 1939 …
Posted to Bisexual Healing
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William Shirer and other have published captured Nazi documents like "Case White" showed plans to invade Poland and other European countries regardless of the Wests reaction. The UK only appeased Hitler until it was intolerable. The US invested in Nazi Germany and practically built the economy back up from the scratch. The trouble was that Hitler's war plans were so extensive, always becoming more and more far reaching, that he actually outran his own industrial capacity and labor and raw material resource availability. This is not the same as NOT having the German economy on a war footing!! Read Mason more …
Posted to Bisexual Healing
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You are full of shit. All of the sources you cited are shit. Hitler invaded the USSR for conquest. According to Alexander Wirth, Stalin didn't even counter attack against the Nazi onslaught but ordered his ground troops to retreat with their artillary and not even return fire when doing so was clearly an option. The Russians were under siege for over two years before they turned the tide first at Stalingrad, then Kursk, and then as they pushed the Nazis all the way to Berlin. All the people you cite are lying fascist sympathizers and racists who have long been discredited. …
Posted to Bisexual Healing
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Frankly, shitforbrains, you are the one who doesn't present any data. Anyone who compares your posts and mine on any issue would have to conclude that I present my case more persuasively and with more supporting evidence. The Czechs suffered enormously under the Nazis. To say the Nazi dismemberment and subjugation of Europes sole democracy "saved" it and its capital city is a twisted piece of fascist reasoning. The Nazis carried out hideous collective punishments for resistance there like the massacre of the entire town of Lidice' in 1942 while it was under Nazi occupation. About 340 innocent men women and …
Posted to Bisexual Healing
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Your rant should get you committed but mental health institutions are no longer long term and if you're not insured even the brief stay is a real fortune. Anyhow, I digress. World conquest definately was in mein kampf. Reread it windbag. Sure we had the death penalty in the US...for people who committed murder not innocents or political dissidents as in Nazi Germany (what is a 10-1 policy?) You never answer any of my points. If Danzig was the whole cause of Nazi aggression and the real focal point of the war, why did Hitler invade every place but Danzig until …
Posted to Bisexual Healing
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Some good points, luminous beauty, and very well said. Expect to draw wild rage from BM, however.
Posted to Bisexual Healing
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First of all you have only made assertions without backing them up except to say that so and so says so. The people you cite with the possible exceptions of Burton Klein and AJP Taylor are NOT respected historians and would not be taken seriously by any real historian including Klein and Taylor. That is not just my opinion it is a fact and it is a view shared by most professional historians from right to left. The insane figures on Germans killed in the mass expulsions are ridiculous. There were only 7 million Germans killed in the entire war in …
Posted to Bisexual Healing
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BM, Most historians settle on a figure of 14 to 16.5 million ethnic germans resettled from Poland and other places that the Nazis occupied and expelled indigenous inhabitants. The idea was retribution for the millions of people expelled from their homes and killed by the Nazis so their property could be "aryanized" or settled with ethnic germans. The need to make room for returning displaced Poles and others in the Allied Displaced Persons camps who lost their homes during WWII due to Nazi persecution. The number of deaths of ethnic germans in the resettlement process, which was forseen as a legal …
Posted to Bisexual Healing
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I didn't use any left sources but standard historians. The high figures even if given by the BundesRepublik was revised downward. The fact that Germany settled about 15 million Volkdeutsch in place of Slavs and Jews deported to concentration camps does not negate anything else that I have said. The three million slave laborers that were imported were mostly Poles, Russians, and others while the volkdeutsch were used to settle in order to "aryanize" colonized territory in occupied Europe. Many Poles and Jews were expelled from the areas of Upper and Lower Silesia and Pomerania and were replaced by Volkdeutsch from …
Posted to Bisexual Healing
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Not true. The agreed upon figures by the current German government are about 14 to 16.5 Volkdeutsch forcibly removed from eastern europe, about half from east germany Many of them were living in eastern european communities for many centuries but many were settled there by the SS settlement program headed by Reinhardt Heydrich. Many of these volkdeutsch (generally over 90% throughout Nazi occupied Europe) facilitated the Nazi occupation and assisted the SS in rounding up and expelling Poles and Jews. They were a Nazi fifth column by all accounts. This was especially true in Poland and Czechoslovakia where they claimed to …
Posted to Bisexual Healing
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I find the freudian slip you made saying I "minimize german attrocities while maximizing my own" to be amusing and curious. Anyhow, your rant is more and more psychotic. There are no more than 15 million Jews in the world today and the figure could be as low as 12 million. The SS established the German Resettlement Trusteeship office in 1939 just after the invasion of Poland. The Race and Settlement office was in charge of all operations in occupied eastern europe related to settling millions of ethnic germans in homes and areas vacated by murdered Slavs and Jews. The Germans …
Posted to Bisexual Healing
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Saying there was no Polish or Czechoslovakian nation is more absurd than claiming there was no Palestinian nation. Poland was partitioned after for 125 years between Russian, Austria, and Germany after existing as an independant Kingdom for centuries. At one point it was the biggest country in all of Europe. Czechoslovakia also existed for centuries but was taken over by the Austrian Habsburgs. You are the liar. And a sick Nazi to boot. All your figures are false. There was never any official revision of the figures for those killed at Auschwitz. There never has been a reason for it. You …
Posted to Bisexual Healing
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The Polish Kingdom was not a joke. It was a commonwealth ruled by a large gentry class which comprised about 12% of the population according to respected British Scholar Norman Davies. The liberum veto and the far flung nature of the commonwealth made the various nobility that ruled the country through the Parlaiment, or Sejm, highly dependant on and beholden to large neighboring powers such as Prussia and Russia. By the mid-18th Century a very decentralized and loosely unified Poland become fractured enough so that the personal interests of the various compromised nobility prevented a centralized nation-state from emerging. This resulted …
Posted to Bisexual Healing
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The countries that the Nazis invaded were legal sovereign entities. They were internationally recognized as such. The Nazis were lawless barbarians who engaged in illegal revaunchism. They had NO right to do what they did. Certain parts of the Versailles settlement was legitimate. Obviously the reparations were greedy and wrong and though the allies tried to mitigate the impact in 1930 with payment reschedualling and new US loans it was still to harsh for a solid economic recovery. The Nazis stole huge areas of other countries on the meagre excuse that a few Germans were living there. Many of them were …
Posted to Bisexual Healing
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BM Your sources are fraudulent. Everyone knows that the Nazis carried aryanization programs everywhere. You disrespect the dead with your bullshit. Versailles had the force of law. The illegal siezures by Hitler didn't. Germany was the one who stole lands not the Allies. The Post WWII border settlement was just. So was the expulsion of many of the fascist volkdeutsch. The Poles were anti-semites but the Germans had a real genocide program. Denying the KultureKampt, and the Holocaust won't make them go away.
Posted to Bisexual Healing
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The Versailles Treaty did have the force of law and returned stolen lands to the Poles and Czechs. The real losers were the Russians if you ask me. Everyone but Hitler recognized the new boundaries. Germany did lose some natural resources in the immediate east like coal, timber, metal ores, and farmland. The German revaunchism is no more legal than the Zionist siezure of lands in the West Bank and Gaza out of a need for "lebensraum" and a racist belief in one' s manifest destiny. You defend German expansionism for no justifiable reason. There was a Germanization policy from Bismarke …
Posted to Bisexual Healing
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The Nazis broke international law and the norms of all civilized countries in invading and conquering neighboring countries. You don't understand this because you are a moron and a racist as everyone knows.
Posted to Bisexual Healing
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I never started the argument BM!! You did. You are the one who's turned nearly every thread into a long winded and sick defense of you notorious neo-Nazi apologetics. Most intelligent people find it sick and ignorant. You have never convinced anyone of nor really even successfully defended your contention that Germany had "no choice but to invade Poland" in 1939. Certainly, it was not necessary to achieve physical and political control (already achieved by the fraudulaent city council election of 1933) of the Free City of Danzig. The allies sat by and watched nearly seven disgusting years of German aggression …
Posted to Bisexual Healing
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What does this have to do with the Political Economy of Nazi Germany?
Posted to Bisexual Healing
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It may well be the case that heightened productivity growth may make more income available to workers. But that hasn't been the case. Most recent studies of US productivity growth over the past twenty years or so show that although there is an overall trend towards higher productivity, and GDP growth in general, workers' incomes are lagging seriously behind such growth. Increased productivity only helps workers' incomes when there exists suffient political will to make it happen.
Posted to Productivity: Is The Boom Over?
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I don't understand why teachers should become the very "model of Germanic domination" and I'm not sure the meaning of the recommendation. BM is a known fascist sympathizer and apologist. Perhaps this puts his statement into some perspective. His contempt for youth, which is something perhaps we all feel at some time, is especially rank. He is a vicious individual. He is also dogmatic and ignorant. I guess we must suffer his presence here on this and other threads.
Posted to Productivity: Is The Boom Over?
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BM doesn't know that labor has no power. The Republican congress isn't going to listen to a bunch of unskilled low wage workers complain about their lost overtime when big business is lining their pockets with campaign contributions. Even most of organized labor, what's left of it, is earning pre-tax income below the national median. The real income of the working poor may have increased a bit over time but real value of the median wage today is worth less than it was thirty years ago. Most families in the bottom 80% of society absolutely need two incomes to support a …
Posted to Productivity: Is The Boom Over?
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BM, My stats are not bogus. They are from the Congressional Budget Office. By all accounts the productivity index has lept way ahead of the growth of the national median household income which is itself quite inflated by the fact that it represents double incomes of married couples filed as joint returns. This is the case more often in the lower half of society than in the upper one percent. Caro is right to reject philosophies that cater to small elite numbers of people. They are not representitive and thus do not shed light on the truth in examining their highly …
Posted to Productivity: Is The Boom Over?
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The CBO is the most reliable of all the government sources. Besides I have reviewed all kinds of relevant sources for a few years now and the same proportionalities keep cropping up. US labor productivity has increased by at least 27% since 2000 and by nearly 90 since the early 1970s when the economy began to slow down and go into a recession. Since 2000, the real median wage has been reduced by about 6% and since the early 1970s by at least 20 to 20%. It takes more hours of labor today to purchase a standard consumer basket of goods …
Posted to Productivity: Is The Boom Over?
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You never ever give evidence for your erronious accusation of liar. Calling someone a liar only because they represent the government is childish and dishonest itself. No one else has ever credibly called the CBO's integrity into question and frankly their apporach to the data is more inclusive and reliable than other government agencies like the IRS. We have real capitalism. How much more real can it get? The tariffs are down. They are down because of all the "free trade" agreements you profess to hate. The reason? US goods manufactured aboad in China and Mexico can re-enter the US practically …
Posted to Productivity: Is The Boom Over?
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US tariffs are at an all time historic low. Customs Revenue now comprises less than 5% of the dollar value of total merchandise imports according to the US Customs Service. This is part of the globalization trend. The idea is to import US manufacturing goods back in from China and Mexico so that they are price competitive on the domestic market. Trade is being eclipsed by foriegn direct investment (FDI). Transnational Corporations (TNCs) simply move to the markets they want to sell in and begin to manufacture there through wholly owned local subsidiaries of the parent corporation. About a third of …
Posted to Productivity: Is The Boom Over?
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I hope you're not calling Einstein mediocre, BM. That is foolish even for you. You distorted much of what I said anyhow. BTW, I used mostly US Government sources not socialist ragsheets. OWH was right about taxes and free speech. Freedom isn't license. One needs to be considerate of others' rights and a responsible citizen. Walmart workers are subsidized by local and federal programs. It is Walmart's fault. The government can't abandon the workers and Walmart refuses to take up the slack regardless of the government's action or inaction. Anyhow, the state, as we know, is a tool of the rich …
Posted to Productivity: Is The Boom Over?
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BM, What property rights are you talking about. If some causes deaths from the trampling of people from a mad rush to the exits because he yelled falsely about some immenant threat in the club, theater or whatever venue he is responsible for their deaths. He failed to regard their rights to safely. He can be criminally liable. This is obvious. Also the government is not socialist nor is the published information it puts out. Socialism is a system not a thing automatically connected to public institutions like the CBO or the IRS. WTH, Globalization in the modern sense is not …
Posted to Productivity: Is The Boom Over?
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Some interesting things to consider about US trade with China and its effects on US employment could put things in better perspective. In the first place the US trade deficit is now nearing $1 trillion or about 7% of the current GDP with manufactured goods imports now making up more than 80% of the total balance of trade deficit. Despite this, and the fact that we imported about $1.4 trillion in manufactured goods, there is still about $4.5 trillion in manufactured goods that we produce in a year. About $775 billion gets exported so there is a just about a $625 …
Posted to Productivity: Is The Boom Over?
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Only a few Dems are blue dogs. The voters voted against Republicans more than for Democrats. They also voted against the War in Iraq and against the increasing wealth and income gap in the US or as they put it "the disappearance of the middle class" which they think will be addressed best by tariffs and a cut in bloated CEO salaries. People are outraged by the maldistribution of wealth and rightly see it as a threat to democracy along with the Bush attacks on civil liberties. You didn't address my point about the OWH statement. If people are trampled to …
Posted to Productivity: Is The Boom Over?
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I really don't of any "hippies" who know of much less report economic statistics. I do, however, tend to consult such sources as the US government's Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Congressional Budget Office as well as other respected sources. Labor productivity is the result of many things. Technology is one key source but there are others. Lean production, as labor activist and writer Kim Moody (not a hippy) puts it, is also due to employers downsizing the workforce while overburdening workers with more work while paying less for it. This has overwhelmingly added to the massive growth in output/manhour …
Posted to Productivity: Is The Boom Over?
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In the first place it is both involuntary and normal to panic in a dangerous situation. Also, those who don't panic can be killed by those who do. Either way no one "deserves" to die in that situation and the blame goes to the one who yells fire. Property has nothing to do with it. Here in Chicago a similar thing occured at the E2 night club in the South Loop. 21 people were killed in a panic and made rush to exit the premesis because someone yelled that anthrax toxin had been relaeased in the club. Of course this was …
Posted to Productivity: Is The Boom Over?
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Your reasoning is about as stupid as it gets. Obviously it is normal to panic in emergency situations. What do you think adrenaline does? It sure doesn't calm you down!! The truth or falsehood of the statement used to incite is utterly irrelevant. Obviously false incitement is worse than truthful incitement but the person who shouts an alarm carelessly should be prosecuted because he caused the panic. People are forced to panic in an emergency precisely because they are desparate to save their lives. I think you shrink from making the arguments because you can't and don't even fully understand them. …
Posted to Productivity: Is The Boom Over?
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Talk about pulling numbers out of one's ass, BM, you're the chief. The CIA fact book is totally reliable and is close in its claims to other reliable sources. The US has not given the State of Israel $5 billion annually since 1967. Naseer Aruri, a Palestinian writer who is as hostile to Israel as anyone, cites in his work, The Obstruction of Peace, that Israel has received about $105 billion between 1949 and 2003. The US was somewhat chilly towards Israel and only began the special relationship with the end of the 1973 War when the US delivered arms to …
Posted to Productivity: Is The Boom Over?
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I can't account for Butz and his inane rantings. Thankfully for him he had the right to free expression and a good Jewish ACLU lawyer. The figures on Israeli aid are ridiculous and utterly unsubstantiated. I know they are factually incorrect because I have checked generally anti-Israel sources, the only ones I actually read, and have never seen such inflated figure. STOP READING THAT SHITTY NOONTIDE PRESS. They are stupid Neo-Nazi liars who will mislead you time and again. The correct figure for US/Israeli bilateral government to government aid flows is slightly in excess of $105 billion. That is all. I …
Posted to Productivity: Is The Boom Over?
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Tex, In fact the PA does have a stock exchange. The last time I checked, which was a little over a year ago, there were about 25 firms listing. Most of these firms are Jordanian or Saudi. The market cap is not great. There is a big PA development agency created in 1998 called PIEFZA. They have tried to create industrial free trade zones in Gaza and the West Bank with WB and other Donor funding for building closely clustered industrial parks for foreign businesses to locate, mostly light industrial like garment assembly, food processing, beverage bottling, and pharmacuiticals. There has …
Posted to Productivity: Is The Boom Over?
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In t he first place your demographics is wrong. There were no more than 1.8 million total residents of British Mandatory Palestine by all accounts. 600,000 were Jews, 1.2 million were Arabs in 1948. By the June signing of the very last armistice agreement between Syria and Israel there were 160,000 Palestinian Arabs left in the three quarters of British Mandatory Palestine captured in the war by Israel. 15,000 Palestinian Arabs were killed in the war. There was about one quarter of the country left that the Haganah never entered. If one million Palestinians were expelled in the areas conquered by …
Posted to Productivity: Is The Boom Over?
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In the first place the term "official Jewish Historian" is anti-semitic since there is no such thing and since it gives the false impression of dishonesty, suppression of academic freedom, and propaganda. Cecil Roth is not a Zionist but an historian of the Medieval period. Your figures on Palestine are false. Read Benny Morris Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, a source that is impeccable and hardly friendly to the Zionist case. Also read the somewhat objective and very detailed Struggle for Palestine by J.C. Hurowitz which is quite honest and candid about the expulsions and the plight of the Palestinians. …
Posted to Productivity: Is The Boom Over?
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Benny Morris may have discredited himself with the infamous Ha'aretz interview but his scholarship is dead on!! Somehow he separates his political feelings from his scholarly findings. Dinnerstein is not a racist. What ever makes you say such a ludicrous thing? You are the only racist on this blog. And a lowlife. Not Dinnerstein. Truman waived the quotas by executive order allowing in about 160,000 Jews but McCarran, an anti-semite, put a rider on a 1948 80th congress immigration bill which effectively barred Jews from entering the US. The Jewish refugee problem in Europe began with under 500,000 Jews and was …
Posted to Productivity: Is The Boom Over?
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BM is an uneducated slob so he makes ad hominem attacks and then is to stupid to recall that he made them. How sad for the fascist cause.
Posted to Productivity: Is The Boom Over?
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Oh, BM just stop already!!
Posted to Productivity: Is The Boom Over?
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BM you no longer have viable arguments.
Posted to Productivity: Is The Boom Over?
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BM, You never address the points and the arguments and supporting evidence made by me or others. You answer in a combination of vile and racist ad hominem attacks, repetitious specious claims, and tired old citations of long discredited agenda driven hacks whose views very few people share. This is no way to carry on a real debate. I have decided that you have very low cognitive abilities.
Posted to Productivity: Is The Boom Over?
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Hardesty you are pathetic...and vicious.
Posted to Productivity: Is The Boom Over?
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These numbers make no sense. They are exaggerated and based on inflated perceptions of economic opportunity costs. In other words, they are anti-semitic propaganda. They are designed to inflame opinion agains the Jews.
Posted to Productivity: Is The Boom Over?
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Kudos to Tex, Wicky, and Glock for stepping up to the plate on this asshole Blonde Mike. BM is nothing but a holocaust denying anti-semite and fascist sympathizer. He is also incredibly racist. Like Pat Buchanan and other crypto-fascists as well as boni-fide neo-Nazis like Zundel and others he sees the world through the sick Germanophile lens of the racist nationalist. To him there are only two forces in the world since modern history began in 1933. Those forces are represented by Hilter and Stalin. BM sees everyone lining up on one side or another. Never mind that the US/UK alliance …
Posted to Preaching Revolution
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So I see that BM has run the entire gamut of his fascist views from holocaust denial to blaming the North for the US Civil War to blaming the Allies in WWII and the defeat of the Axis for the post war genocides in Asia like Kampuchea and Mao's massacres. He doesn't stop to consider that fascism and the oppression that it brought set up Asia for instability and chaos that brought on the revolutions that allowed bad guys to take over and commit genocide in the first place. BM, how long do you and other fascist apologists like Pat Buchanan, …
Posted to Preaching Revolution
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The author points out that the US neo-con officials he talks about are linked to the ultra-rightist Likud Party and no one else in Israel. These officials typify not so much Israeli politics or the views of most Jews or Israelis but a narrow group of rightist fanatics whose political party was recently split to form a centrist party. This was done by ultra hardliner Ariel Sharon. Likud is continually marginalized gleaning an unprecedentedly small one fifth of the vote in the 2006 election. The Israelis want peace and a viable land for peace deal. There is a political crisis brewing …
Posted to For Israel's Sake
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It is true that Kadima (forward in Hebrew) is Likud lite. That is hardly the point. In the first place Likud only has 12 Knesset seats as of the 2006 Israeli elections. This translates into an unprecedentedly low 10% of the total parlaimentary seats and is an indication of their lost political relevance in Israeli society. They are on their way to oblivion. They no longer have any meaningful contribution to make to Israeli politics. The real key, however, is the crisis brewing at the bottom of Israeli society amongst the hyper-exploited working class, and the endangered reservists who are tiring …
Posted to For Israel's Sake
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BM, Your post proves that you are a racist. First of all at NO time in history did Jews ever live in "squalor" as they have a religious code that insists on cleanliness. Jews and Muslims in medieval Europe survived plagues that Christians didn't because of their unique hygiene codes. In the second place you say that the emancipation of the Jews was a disaster for everyone but the Jews themselves. How Racist!! Even you acknowledge that Jews have made many of the most important contributions to Western Civilization ever made.Any look at modern Jewish achievements finds them to numerous to …
Posted to For Israel's Sake
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I meant the 2006 election in which the Likud polled an insignficant percentage of the total votes. Most Jews are brilliant though I may not be. Jews are disproportionately brilliant which accounts for their disproportionate prominance in society and success in most endeavors. This is not a natural or organic phenomenon but one brought about by pushy parents who insist on constant education from at least age five on up and who stress strict discipline, education, free debate and thought, and high culture. Others could catch up and surpass the Jews with similar values and concerns. No money is not that …
Posted to For Israel's Sake
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In fact the ancient Hebrews adopted much of the Hellenistic culture or at least the upper classes did. The Greeks had lasting cultural impact on the Jews and of course, it is absurd to charactorize Western Cultural history as a Hebrew/Hellenistic struggle. The Jews and their culture were marginalized for many centuries anyhow. You don't know anything about either the Jews or the ancient Greek. Go see 300 and fantasize.
Posted to For Israel's Sake
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The Jews influenced other as much as they were influenced by the great civilizations. The Jews were always highly intelligent. Jewish success and achievments existed well before the current high intermarriage rates which are confined pretty much to the North American Jewish communities. Any historian who does real research knows that the Jews were not segrated voluntarily but were forced into ghettos. The first modern Jewish Ghetto was the one in Venice in the 1500s. Ghetto is an Italian word as you might notice. The Spaniards made laws against the Jews in a number of areas and finally expelled tham in …
Posted to For Israel's Sake
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One thing Bush neglects is the Peace Process. It needs to restart and soon. The extremists need to be marginalized on both sides. Peace is possible. The current government is allowed to unilaterally determine the entire final status process without engaging the PA and Abbas. The 2006 Hamas PLC electoral victory makes things quite difficult. They still don't recognize Israel.
Posted to For Israel's Sake
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You seem to have come around to my precise original position. I have been arguing people are individuals more than members of ethnic groups for a long time.
Posted to For Israel's Sake
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I never said that!! I am against racism. What I said after months of your anti-Jewish generalizations was that the many Jews who are in charge are there by virtue of their brilliance which was not inherent in their race but in a culture that does in fact stress discipline, higher education, hard work, and an appreciation for high culture. Why is this racist. The very same opportunities are availble to all if they only seek it. This is the secret of the Jews success. Not the pursuit of conspiricy and corrupt manipulation of the system.
Posted to For Israel's Sake
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Jeez, what can I say?
Posted to For Israel's Sake
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BM is a pro-nazi racist. Pay him no mind.
Posted to For Israel's Sake
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The use of the N-word should be sufficient cause to be expelled from this website. We'll see what happens.
Posted to For Israel's Sake
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It is very difficult for me to imagine you having many Black friends. The medical personel and orderlies involuntarily forced to deal with you at the psychiatric hospital don't really count.
Posted to For Israel's Sake
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I don't advocate Soviet Psychiatric torture. I live with a serious manic-depressive who just checked himself in to a psychiatric hospital after a long manic episode that was an onus on himself, me, and his social workers. What makes psychiatric care "Soviet" when almost every country including ours provides mental health care?
Posted to For Israel's Sake
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BM, I have dealt with seriously mentally ill people my whole adult life mostly on a personal level. I dated to seriously mentally ill women one for three months and one for six months. Both were seriously bi-polar and took medication. I also lived with a three other roomates in house in Madison that included a seriously bi-polar man. He was more depressed than anything else and ultimately committed suicide. I knew another bi-polar man in Madison who drove cab in the same coop with me. He stayed up for over 72 hours straight buzzing around the city and posed a …
Posted to For Israel's Sake
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In the first place, no one ever said mental illness is contagious. Like many diseases, Mental illness is a condition which can be treated but perhaps not cured. Medical Science has established different mental illnesses as having different organic causes. Terrets syndrome is linked to excessive dopamine in the brain. Depression is now believed to be caused by Seratonin reuptake at the synapse of the neurons in the brain. That is why Prozac and other anti-depressants work to lift depression. They are seratonin reuptake inhibitors. There are also MAO inhibitors for schizophrenia and major depression to address the excessive release in …
Posted to For Israel's Sake
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You claim that if there is a physical or organic basis for a mental disease than it is a physical and not a mental disorder. Ergo, there can be no such thing as a mental disorder since all their sources are deemed by medical science to be physical. This is quite a tautology. It is, in addition, quite circular reasoning. Physical and Mental disorders BOTH have physical or organic/chemical roots. The mind is regulated by neurotransmitters as well as enzymes active in the nervous system. Human beings are basically cell tissue and chemistry. It is known that the disruption of certain …
Posted to For Israel's Sake
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I really don't know what boom BM is talking about. The economy is slow. Competent economists have discerned a correlation between a high degree of wealth and income concentration (concentrated income gets rolled quickly into concentrated wealth) and slow GDP growth. This is indisputable. The more paying jobs we lose the worse things get. Many new union contracts are settling for pay rates that put a family of four just above the poverty line. And the far right still blames unions for the economic problems!! The right should be fought politically. To bad the Dems have no cajones.
Posted to Which Side Are We On?
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The concentration of wealth is necessary to some reasonable degree in all societies in order to generate savings and investment. But every economic study shows a backward bending curve for the correlation between wealth concentration and rates of GDP growth at certain very high levels of income and wealth concentration. At a certain point high concentrations of wealth and income in any society becomes self defeating. Low overall effect demand becomes a constraint on GDP expansion as there is less and less spending on consumer durables and the economy gets hung up and slows down. Narrowly based niche markets take over …
Posted to Which Side Are We On?
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Most people with any common sense know that universal health insurance through a single payer system is not "socialized medicine" but an idea whose time has come. Society is suffering for the super profits and inflated CEO salaries of corporate health care. Premiums are running way ahead of the increase in health care costs and windfall profits are resulting leaving increasing numbers of people uninsured. It has been stated that the US spends more per capita than most industrial capitalist countries on health care with far fewer insured. This is ludicrous. Furthermore, it is noted that the cost of adding the …
Posted to The Health Care Monster Returns
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Of all obnoxious things that Libertarians say the little moronic ditty about "wages are the price of labor so they can't be to low because they are actually a price" is the most ignorant. Wages are not just the "price of labor" they are how the majority of people are able to live. Obviously markets don't determine their rate and never have. Even in periods of full employment wages have been low. The class power of the capitalists have more of a determining effect on wages than the so called market. The continued expansion of the global working class through institutionaly …
Posted to The Health Care Monster Returns
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WTH, You are correct about some things. Markets exist as modern institution and supply and demand functions here and there. However, the economy and the distribution of income, wealth and productive assets are very much a product of corporate power and influence. I have seen wages remain stagnant in the midst of a labor shortage. Employers are powerful. They can continually expand the scope of labor markets while workers have only limited bargaining power. Big retail outlets like Walmart can dictate terms even to large suppliers who formally shared major portions of large supply markets for their products. Small producers face …
Posted to The Health Care Monster Returns
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The Law assures every living person the right to life. Life and libertay cannot be taken without due process of the law. People are not required to legitimate themselves through the market. No one ever said any such thing. All life is sacred by definition. Modern society believes this truth is self evident. Medieval society never did. That is the difference. BM hasn't learned this fundamental fact.
Posted to The Health Care Monster Returns
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Life is sacred. It is not justified by success in the market. Allowing someone to die is illegal and charges of negligance can be brought against the offender. Hospitals must take all sick individuals who enter their emergency rooms and stabilize their conditions or they can be held criminally liable not just sued in a civil case. Our case law makes this clear. Also modern thought clearly holds all existing human life as sacred and worthy of defense by law. All people in US society are legally entitled to equal protection by the police and emergency services regardless of their income …
Posted to The Health Care Monster Returns
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What has all this to do with Universal Health Care?
Posted to The Health Care Monster Returns
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BM, It's true that reality doesn't consist of pure numbers but numbers explain a lot. Forgeting for a moment Truman's cliche about "lies, damn lies, and statistics" we know that "figures don't lie but liars can figure!" Anyhow, there is general agreement about the gist of my statistical claims. Inequality has grown by leaps and bounds over the past thirty years with no real progress or growth to show for it. All we have is an overbloated financial system which is used for M & A activity as well as speculative stock purcases. This situation is dangerously similar to the pre-1929 …
Posted to The Health Care Monster Returns
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What happen to the discussion on health care?
Posted to The Health Care Monster Returns
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Perhaps the elders of the New Left can show us the way to a new and badly needed political movement to address the gross injustices and madness of today's society. If they do it won't be to soon!!
Posted to Elders of the New Left
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Tex, You've obviously never been in prison. Your silly conception shows this most clearly.
Posted to Americas Slave Labor
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What impresses me about this article is not the oil angle which we could all take for granted but the 150 companies granted over $50 billion in mostly no bid contracts. The $50 billion figure is big money. I would estimate that over a third of the world's nearly 200 sovereign nations don't have an annual GDP totalling $50 billion. As time goes on the figure increases. This figure also exceeds Iraqi oil revenues and GDP of late I'm sure. All this being the case, it is easy to see how corporate globalization has created, structured, staffed, and also determined the …
Posted to Spoils of War
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Hardesty, you have been running amok with numbers ever since you went off your meds. Actually, the true figure of US aid to Israel since 1948 is about $105 billion, much less than the $250,000 billion you wrongly claimed. Much of this came back to the US in weapons and other purchases. The loans received by Israel were all repaid. Israel has good credit and its state bonds have a high international rating by Standard and Poors. Israeli GDP has been growing at a rate of about 4% annually over the past 15 years or so. High tech investment and US …
Posted to Spoils of War
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Moronic Mike, Israel, as everyone knows, has not actually averaged $5 billion per year since 1948. Anyone will tell you that. They in fact recieved most of their aid from private Jewish charities until 1967 and at no time did this aid ever come close to $5 billion in on year. The US aid began to flow in earnest after 1973 when Israel nearly lost the war with Egypt and Syria. You are entitled to your own opinion but NOT your own facts. Why should you be able to make up nonsense and present it as fact? Provide a credible link …
Posted to Spoils of War
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Israel has killed far fewer Arabs than other Arabs. Israel hasn't killed nearly the number of even one such Arab leader as Saddam or Hafiz Assad. Israel has probably killed about 50,000 Arabs civilian and military since 1947 and no more than this number. Check it out.
Posted to Spoils of War
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The sources for Assad and Saddam's casualty figures are not Zionist ones but respected international human rights agencies like Amnesty International and Human Rightys Watch (Middle East). These folks have established that Arab leaders kill more Arabs over time than does Israel. Also, you did state since 1948 for your absurd foreign aid figures to Israel . But you lie all the time like most fascists.
Posted to Spoils of War
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Mike , You have top be the biggest moron in history. In addition Tex has political categories confused. There is nothing socialist about BM's rants. Fascists are also anti-American and blame the lasting effects of WWII, "the good war", for the problems of the world today. One of the negative effects according to fascists like Hardesty, Buchanan, and others who can be found reading the National Website is the fact that the war boosted the US economy creating a broad based US middle class, strengthening its trade union movement and its political influence through the Democratic Party. Another thing it did …
Posted to Spoils of War
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BM (suitable initials for your ilk), Buchanan's advocacy regarding WWII is in retrospect, moron. The NKVD had almost no Jews and persecuted Russian Jews as much as it did others. This is particularly true since Stalin exiled Trotsky, a point which you gloss over. You cite nonsense works which are not held as reliable historic sources. You don't know ANY history. The Poles were told to allow a corridor to danzig which they did. They negotiated in good faith on all German demands. The entire world knows that German territorial demands were ridiculous. They wanted broad swaths of Baltic border areas …
Posted to Spoils of War
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BM, Danzig was really out of the Poles hands since it was a legal ward of the League of Nations. The Poles acceeded to all Hitler's demands except to relinquish the corridor to which Hitler was NOT entitled. The Nazis invaded Poland killing 7 million of its people. That's when the UK declared war on Hitler. This hardly seemed necessary or justified. Your revisionist nonsense sources have been wholly discredited. Iraq had no right to a nuclear bomb as per the IAEA rules and the 1963 NPT. What right did Saddam have to a bomb. The French were working on nuclear …
Posted to Spoils of War
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BM, The UK/French security guarantee given to Poland in March 1939 had nothing to do with Danzig. It was a response to Hitler's illegal march into Czechoslovakia, a legally sovereign country, and conquering and annexing it to the Reich while the vast majority of bohemian and moravians were Czech. He also created an independant state out of Slovakia under a fascist puppet regime and gave Ruthania to Hungary despite the fact that Ruthenia was nearly all Ukrainian. Secondly, the guarantee to Poland was well known to the Nazis to have no teeth as the UK/French and others could not take on …
Posted to Spoils of War
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Hitler did believe that Poland should not exist and said so in secret internal memos cited in the work by W. Shirer on the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. The Weimar position was irrelevant since they observed the Versaille Treaty and never invaded anyone. D. Hoggan is not accepted as a legitimate authority on the subject. The view that Hitler was appeased is absolutely universal and not at all limited to Stalin or members of various communist movements or parties. The truth as many see it, however, is that Chamberlain COLLUDED with Hitler in order to debilitate the European …
Posted to Spoils of War
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RP, I don't really know you or anything about you so to be fair I am just going to assume that you are this incredibly innocent, unschooled young neophite with orange hair, a few rilly cooool tattoos, and some strategic piercings. OKAY?? RP, what links do you really need. I have given William Shirer's exhaustive 1,600 page volume called "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" as well as some other sources including a left revisionist one called IN OUR TIME: The Chamberlain-Hitler Collusion by Alvin Finkel and Clement Liebowitz. Both are quite excellent and highly detailed diplomatic histories of …
Posted to Spoils of War