It is a testament to the cycles of capitalism.

Ever since the last guy who acted as if the president makes decisions was punished for it and replaced by a Hollywood B-movie actor who waved and smiled a lot, the money that determines who gets to run and win these "elections" has backed "Democratic" presidents to pump up the treasury and Republicans to deplete it.

The underlying cycles of capitalism, of bubble and burst, would have proceeded regardless. They are inherent in the system. (Please address this inescapable aspect, if you're going to reply. Go ahead and argue that it wouldn't happen if all presidents were Democrats, that should make for fun.)

Your statement is meaningless by the way: "Over 50% of middle class Americans own stocks."

Don't even bother to define that great rhetorical dodge, the "middle class." See instead if you can tell us:

How much does the median household by wealth or income have invested in stocks?

What proportion of stocks are owned by the top 10%, compared to everyone else?

More than half of the people do not own even a thousand dollars in stocks. It is true that a great many middle-income and middle-wealth Americans "own" stocks in that their only or main "retirement plan" is in the form of privately-managed funds that invest on their behalf, partly in equities.

In other words, in the absence of an adequate system to assure incomes for the old, worker-bees are given the offer of having some financial manager gamble with their retirement savings. This often works out, depending on the year of your retirement, so it's considered a successful system. As to those who lose in the gamble - tough shit, right?

It's probably more of a scam than the lottery - which is proven to produce dozens of millionaires a year.

To hell with the S&P index and its new high.

Excuse me if I'm not impressed by the new high for the S&P stock index. This is good news only for the owners of stocks, and only in the narrowest sense of financial self-interest, and only in the usual temporary way. (Peaks mean you'd best be selling.)

The present economic order tells the lie that all wealth trickles down from its success, although it destroys human beings and is destroying the ecological basis for human and other life.

Anything that promotes the illusion that this system is in any way healthy is actually bad news. We should not succumb to the propaganda that presents the preferred financial indicators of capitalism as though they are more important than the GINI coefficient. How has that developed for the U.S.? For the world?

The indeces that should be relevant are the ones that tell us about student debt, the amount spent on education compared to warmaking, the real well-being of the vast majority. Tell us about the median wage! Tell us about the rate of imprisonment. Those say something about how the people are doing.

The majority of stocks are owned by the rich. (No matter how you spin the fact that about half the people have a couple of shares out of millions of shares in this or that.) So the S&P is mainly a measure of how much money is going to the rich motherfuckers who think they're entitled to own the world. Since they own the media, you hear about the S&P and the DJIA, and not the Human Development Index.

A billionaire is by definition a gangster, a warlord, a monopolist, a beneficiary of mass murder. A rise in the number of this class is a negative indicator.

What about pollution? Are CO2 emissions down?

Are there fewer bombs? How many wars are being waged? How many bases does this empire maintain? Are there fewer dead children in the rubble, killed by bombs made by U.S. corporations?

How many prisoners still at Guantanamo? How many missiles flew?

How much money is going into the MIC and "Top Secret America"? How many crimes are committed on behalf of this state?

The next financial crash and open manifestation of economic crisis are the inevitable products of this irrational system. For this reason, I will welcome them, conditionally: Because they're going to happen no matter what. People will suffer, but not because I think capitalism is a perpetual crisis machine. People will suffer because the history and the economic dynamics of the system that measures its health in the S&P index guarantee it. Crisis at least brings the opportunity to reform or finally end this system.

In short, and with all due respect: Fuck the S&P, the Dow Jones, Wall Street and the 0.1% who own the controlling interest in the banks, the holding companies, the multi-death corporations, the "philanthropic" foundations, the FIRE sector. Fuck capitalism.

With all due respect: Fuck the S&P. Fuck the Dow Jones.

Fuck Wall Street. Fuck the 1% who own the majority of interest in the banks, the holding companies, the multi-death corporations, the "philanthropic" foundations, the FIRE sector. Fuck capitalism.

What is the development of the GINI coefficient? For the U.S.? For the world?

What about the Human Development Index, how has that gone? How about the attempts at a "happiness" index, how do those look?

Tell us about student debt, the amount spent on education, the rate of imprisonment. Tell us about the median wage. Those say something about how the people are doing. The S&P is mainly a measure of how much money is going to the motherfucking rich who think they're entitled to own the world.

What about the pollution, has that gone down? Are there fewer bombs? Are there fewer dead children in the rubble, killed by bombs made by U.S. corporations?

How many wars are being waged? How many bases does this empire maintain? How much money is going into the MIC and "Top Secret America"? How many crimes are committed on behalf of this state?

A billionaire is by definition a gangster, a warlord, a monopolist, a beneficiary of mass murder. Has the number of this class been diminished? Obviously not.

How many prisoners in Guantanamo? How many missiles flew?

Fuck capitalism. Fuck war. Fuck the S&P.

BUCKMINSTER FULLER said it better!

Oh no, a libertarian attack site dislikes Marx.

Marx was absolutely obsessed with technological advancement as a means for reducing the amount of labor. It's found throughout Capital and hence it's ridiculous to say he didn't focus on this. His theory was of labor time as the element producing *surplus* value over cost inputs, an important distinction; as is the fact that labor time is conducted under differing arrangements of the productive forces. What produces an eventual price is related to many other factors including such that we would call "the market." Efficiency and reduction of required labor time contributes to the tendency of profit rates to fall over time, and thus to crises. The libertarian "Econlib" site's summary of Marx is a laughably false and simple caricature unrelated to his actual theorizing. Hardly the place to "start," any more than is Wikipedia. (Capital and many other Marxian works are online in full, I believe.) From the sound of it you may have once turned every page in a copy of Capital, but it doesn't mean you really "read" it outside your choice of an ideological framework.

Koch said people should be willing to be street-sweepers.

Where are all these paying street-sweeper jobs that all the lazies don't want to take?

Why is the liberation from labor "fear mongering"?!

The question is how it will be done, because it can be a liberation, or a nightmare. Under the capitalist system of private ownership of the means of production, it is heading toward the nightmare of making humans increasingly superfluous, the majority of them to be viewed as enemies to the all-powerful and divine dictates of the "economy."

The first step toward liberation is to see that a collective effort produces everything, that the amount of labor-time an individual puts in does not and cannot directly translate into production and rewards for participation, and that it doesn't matter: We could all work less, or do work we love, and live better. We have the means for a guaranteed income to all, in a better and happier place.

Which shall we choose?

Sadly what's most interesting...

is that (usually) no one notices who was proven wrong and even disproven stories are cited as precedents when the same kind of stuff gets repeated by all sides in the next round. Incubator babies and Huns with Belgian infants on bayonets, forever. Transpose as you will to every other national conflict. It can be Greeks and Turks, or Hindus and Muslims...

"The symbol of the Ukrainian revolution"?

The dreamers of a revolution that self-evidently never was, and it's not impossible I'd be in the square with them, if I was there. But there has been no revolution in Ukraine. One set of kleptocrats replaced another, and promptly solved the country's divides by starting a civil war with U.S. backing. Hip hip.

Burger King nixes Burger King

Now that would be a worthy headline.

I can't see how Shitburger Jr.'s menu modifications qualify as news. Even when it's negatively inflected, it's still PR for the sellers of hot grease smeared on poison buns.