Zalatix
Zalatix's JournalIf every woman in America who was ENRAGED by the GOP's war on women were to protest this Spring
the media would listen.
Because between that many women and the men the GOP has also pissed off about this issue, there wouldn't be much of an audience sitting indoors for them to broadcast to.
Might as well fucking sponsor the protests and put up ads on the building windows because that's the only way they're gonna reach any meaningful audience.
That is, if we're all pissed off enough to take it to the streets.
OCCUPY SPRING AND SUMMER!!!!!
Liberals, please answer me this question
Why, when the Tea Party was rampaging across America in 2009
were liberals not absolutely SWARMING the Tea Party with counter protests?
Where were we in 2009?
How any liberal Democrats and liberal activists are there in America, and why were they not there to challenge the Tea Party?
Why? Why didn't we join forces with Occupy Wall Street in 2011?
Any DUers living in Ireland? Is this story true?
http://intentious.com/2012/04/07/ireland-the-slave-capital-of-europe/April 7, 2012 | Keelan Foley | 6 Comments
Ireland: The slave capital of Europe
On first glance this title may appear to be a bit extreme. Especially for those of you with the fantastical view of Ireland as a green lush country over-populated with mystical little leprechaun’s, where we dance our way to the pub to battle our on going love affair with the ‘black stuff’ (by which of course I mean Guinness). A more likely story reads closer to these lines. The green has long been washed out of our lands thanks to the almost non-stop year round rainfall. Also we do not dance our way to the pub for two reasons. One being that the literal meaning of the term ‘slip jig’ would be put to the test with our abundance of rainfall. The second, and more plausible, reason being that the cost of a ‘night out’ in our recently nominated ‘happiest country in the world’ would amount to a bill equaling a weekly spend on groceries. And what about the slaves I hear you ask?
Ok, so Ireland may not be leading the way in terms of conventional slavery, by which I mean that there is not a great deal of human trafficking carried out in this country. Not to say that it does not happen. But in terms of this article I hope to highlight a new form of slavery which has actually been spearheaded by our very own Minister for Social Protection. Ironic right? Well welcome to Ireland. The land of 1000 welcomes and all that. But at this point I suppose you want to hear about this legal brand of slavery?
Here in Ireland our devout ministers and government officials, looking for a solution to the great unemployment epidemic which is spreading through the country, have come up with a ‘flawless’ amendment to the problem. In a genius moment of clarity they have decided that the main problem surrounding employment is money. Well salary and wages to be precise. So to counteract this problem, they decided to stop paying workers. But of course this would be illegal, so they opted to pay workers 5o euro per week instead and have label it as the ‘National Internship Scheme’. But let me clarify this a little bit. Of course the entire working population takes home more than a measly 50 euro per week. I should have specified earlier that the scheme only applies to educated workers, who have obtained a formal College/University degree.
(www.jobbridge.ie)
How many Free Traders do you know who have given up their job to someone offshore or a visa holder?
Too many free traders keep saying that Americans who want to be hired to produce goods or services for the American market are John Birchers for wanting such jobs instead of letting people in other nations take them.
So do you know of any free trader who has quit their job and offered it to one of those poor people abroad, to or a visa-holding immigrant?
Or are they all about "sacrifices from thee but none by me"?
Edited to add: YES, I know, if you ask free traders about this, they will tell you that this is racist, this is American Exceptionalism, hate the foreign poor, and so on. However, the point here is, what have they sacrificed?
The most basic problem with corporations. Explain it this way to your neighbor.
Corporations see customers and workers as two distinctly separate concepts. To them, one is not the same as the other.
Corporations see profits as their life blood and workers (as in, paying them wages) as overhead, a drag on their profits. Corporations want to totally eliminate the latter while maximizing the former.
However, Corporations DO realize that the two are one and the same. They simply disregard that fact for as long as they can. They will simply discard the millions of people who cannot afford their products and concentrate on those who remain that can afford them - case in point: developing markets overseas and moving sales forces overseas while Americans languish in unemployment. America is a dying market because of their desire to cull workers and cut wage costs, so they are moving onto other nations.
Now ask your neighbor, are they a worker or a CEO? Where do they think they stand?
In the event of a total economic collapse what are the two most important things to have?
I was compelled to post this after seeing some spam ad about some guy selling survival secrets in the event of a hyperinflationary scenario. (Not John Williams, but some other dude.)
If you are certain that the dollar is going to lose value, what are the top two things that you must have in advance? Hint: It ain't gold, foreign currencies or ammunition.
So this "Joe Muto", the Fox Mole, is getting SLAMMED in Yahoo! comments
by people who despise his spying activities.
http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/cutline/gawker-fox-news-mole-identified-fired-network-nailed-131254992.html
Does it not occur to any of these people that Fox's owner has been caught spying on people ILLEGALLY?
Remember when I ranted that the point of modern Capitalism is to kill off millions of people?
Well, President Obama has even publicly acknowledged that we are facing an era of social Darwinism.
First of all, let me start with the fact that I believe that when it comes to President Obama, words mean very specific things. Plus, I sincerely doubt that he was in any way trying to exaggerate the problem.
Social Darwinism comes in several flavors. One is a nationalistic flavor which favors the exploitation of "lesser" nations (read: globalism, and the holding down of wages abroad and the siphoning of foreign natural resources to slake Capitalism's need for cheap labor), imperialism (such as the invasion of Iraq), eugenics, Laissez-faire individualism (i.e., Ayn Rand), and finally the Malthusian aspect, which deals with population control.
The Malthusian aspect of social Darwinism is the one we're seeing the most of right now. This aspect deals with the concepts of survival of the richest and weeding out the poor, which are all based on the Malthusian concept of population control. The type of social Darwinism that the Republicans are pushing now, in the end, is aimed at cutting down on the number of human beings in the world. Why? So that there will be fewer people competing for the prime cuts of land, plus the energy, food, and water that the Plutocracy wants to enjoy or even waste; for instance, they want you to STFU about their huge water fountains that they run in the middle of a drought. You won't STFU, and your needs put a crimp in how many fountains they can run at full blast, so it's time for you to simply go away.
The kind of social Darwinism we're dealing with today relates directly to the method of Malthusianist population control that is under way. Social Darwinism in Nazi Germany was dedicated to the forcible extermination of those deemed unfit; or to the outright deprivation of resources from those who were deemed unfit.
Now ask yourself how different things are now from this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neues_Volk
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"60,000 Reichsmark is what this person suffering from hereditary defects costs the community during his lifetime. Fellow Germans, that is your money, too."
Compare this to today's Conservative movement: their ongoing quest to deprive the poor of welfare and school lunches, their attempts to decimate job training programs or render them irrelevant, their quests to chop Social Security funding, and their hatred of the idea of a livable wage.
Many people stop at this point and cite Occam's Razor: basically asserting that this is about bringing America back to Feudalism, while using the poor and homeless as a warning to us that we better tow the line or we'll become like them. According to Occam's Razor, this is about stifling the working class into submission.
Unfortunately, Occam's Razor fails to cut this, and President Obama knows clearly that this is true; he used the term social Darwinism for a very specific reason. That reason being, point of social Darwinism does not stop at beating the working class into submission; it pushes for starving the 99% into a population decline. A steep decline, by whatever necessary means that the Plutocracy can get away with: summary executions by piloted or automated drones abroad, domestic police brutality, the exploitation of workers abroad, the mass firing and impoverishment of American workers domestically, and the destruction of all social safety nets.
The Plutocracy even has its backup plans in place in case they lose the class war. Between the rampant purchases of water rights around the world, the ongoing war against alternative energy sources, and the growing water shortages and state government-level water access conflicts here in america, we're headed for a major global resources crash. A Malthusian wet dream.
We've already been served a very public notice as to when all the Malthusian social Darwinistic shit will hit the fan: 2030.
http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/sideshow/next-great-depression-mit-researchers-predict-global-economic-190352944.html
Now, 2030 might not be the exact point where a big crash happens. But haven't liberals and environmentalists been warning for decades that this could happen if we don't turn things around? At this point, if the social Darwinists aren't called out and stopped, all we have left to argue about is the exact year. Ask yourself: when that date finally comes, do you think the Plutocrats will see any kind of decline? That snapping sound you hear is the sound of Occam's Razor breaking.
So, now, President Obama has carried out Step #1: he has called social Darwinists out, publicly. Now what you have to ask yourself is, do you believe what President Obama says?
Another reason to appreciate Senator Bernie Sanders
&noredirect=1A major Globalism myth explodes: Germany does NOT practice free trade.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ian-fletcher/how-do-other-nations-bala_b_628157.htmlHow Do Other Nations Balance Their Trade? Try Germany
Germany's covert trade barriers--which should perhaps better be called "trade balancing measures," as it would be a mistake to confuse them with crude protectionism--begin with careful control over Germany's currency. As Americans presumably realize by now, thanks to our problems with China, overt or covert currency manipulation can do a lot to improve a nation's trade performance at the expense of its trading partners. When Germany was still on the Deutschmark, for example, it did not allow mass asset sales and foreign borrowing, preventing its currency from being manipulated, and thus it was protected against trade deficits. Germany's adoption of the euro constituted a de facto downwards manipulation of its own currency, because the euro is essentially a one-size-fits-all "blend" currency, too strong for the weaker economies of Europe, but too weak for the stronger ones. The net effect is to encourage a trade surplus by the strong countries and the gradual selling-off and indebtedness of the weaker ones. Because two-thirds of Germany's trade is with the rest of Europe, euro-related policies have a huge effect on German trade.
Another key policy: Germany does not use the credit system to subsidize short-term consumption as the U.S. does. For example, Germany has remarkably few credit cards per person. This tends to direct lendable money into investment, not consumption. This tends to favor balanced trade because investment strengthens industrial competitiveness, while consuming more than one produces necessarily means sourcing from abroad (as there's nowhere else to get goods if you didn't produce them yourself). Different tax policies also have a big effect. Above all, Germany has a 19 percent value-added tax (VAT) and the US doesn't. So American goods entering Germany pay a border-adjustment tax, but German goods entering America don't, a fact perfectly legal under WTO rules.
The corporate structure of Germany also fights trade deficits. Germany's universal banks, for example, pressure the companies they own stakes in not to source components from abroad, which would weaken supplier companies they have big loans to. Similar pressures operate in retail and other parts of the supply chain. And the generally high level of German state involvement in industry, ranging from training schemes to state-owned banks, comes with similar strings attached. As one German puts it,
The excruciatingly high technical and quality standards of many German (and now European) goods, ranging from the need for cars to do 150 MPH to survive the autobahn to the fact that American appliances (other than a few elite brands like the top Whirlpool, Jenn-Air, and Subzero models) are regarded as 1970s junk to European consumers, serve as barriers to penetration of European markets from the low end. This low end is, of course, the thin end of the wedge, as Americans learned from watching first Japanese and then Chinese imports to this country. Some of these standards are based on actual laws; others are deep set cultural preferences and thus consumer-driven.
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