Proposal to Strip Corporations of Constitutional Rights Gains Momentum in Wisconsin

[cbr]

Re: Proposal to Strip Corporations of Constitutional Rights Gains Momentum in Wisconsin

PS: on an ironic note, the paycheck of the guy who owned the trucking company in china paying those forklift operators: $40 million US. So much for 'communism'...

it was fun loading up into big suburbans and blasting dust trails through the suburbs of shanghai, scattering people like chickens, on the way to a 4 hour, hard drinking lunch full of $300/plate sharkfin soup and chinese beer at a restaurant with a parking lot full of lambos and bentleys.... pretty surreal.

[mesyn191]

Re: Proposal to Strip Corporations of Constitutional Rights Gains Momentum in Wisconsin

This thread begins with a nod towards reigning in corporate power and quickly veers off to venting about public employee benefits. I love watching this debate unfold over and over again. I fully expect it to spill into the streets.

Matt Taibbi’s latest on Wall Street wives borrowing at the Fed window should be on the front pages of the NYT and WSJ. White collar crime is rampant with no prosecution, but the bullhorn provides a crescendo of wailing and moaning about the discrepancy between public and private employee compensation. It’s too rich.

Yea people like cbr and dropthatcash are everything that is wrong with this country. They look at what some get paid and think, "we aren't getting that, we should fuck them over!!" instead of "wow it costs that much to actually maintain a middle class lifestyle + have some savings for retirement? what is wrong with the gov/economy?!" which is what they should be thinking.

You could eliminate all the unions, gov. or otherwise, and it'd hardly make a dent in the budget problems, all of which are caused by mismanagement, misspending, and mis taxing. All of our problems are really political problems. Destroying unions would just destroy average wages further, which would actually hurt the economy, since its the middle class and poor that spend nearly all they make while the rich horde their wealth.

[Chris Coles]

Re: Proposal to Strip Corporations of Constitutional Rights Gains Momentum in Wisconsin

back on track, we do have to find a way to unhinge corporate leverage from government and media domination; but if we do it without removing the vast mob of uneducated, net government benefit recipients from the voting pool, it could get even WORSE.

What everyone has to realise is that this debate highlights the very simple fact that in a true competitive marketplace, the balance between public/unionised employment would be trammelled by new entrants. But they are not. If wages are low, too low, then the answer was, when prosperity ruled, you went and got a better job paying more; and moreover, close by. So then the bad employer could not deliver a product without employees and so they too had to adjust to suit market conditions.

Again, when wages are too high, then another can set up to again compete; but this time by employing for less, (perhaps by improving conditions), while still able to deliver the product. These differences provide the swings and roundabouts of a competitive marketplace.

But today, at the very bottom, down at the grass roots of the nation; there is no supply of the capital to enable a better paying company to compete. The major corporations have such a strangle hold on the process, there is no normal competition.

Unions are simply a symptom of what is wrong. You never need a union if the answer is to move to a better paid job close by.

Unions are absolutely NOT the problem; the problem is a lack of available capital to enable proper competition.

[flintlock]

Re: Proposal to Strip Corporations of Constitutional Rights Gains Momentum in Wisconsin

This thread begins with a nod towards reigning in corporate power and quickly veers off to venting about public employee benefits. I love watching this debate unfold over and over again. I fully expect it to spill into the streets.

Matt Taibbi’s latest on Wall Street wives borrowing at the Fed window should be on the front pages of the NYT and WSJ. White collar crime is rampant with no prosecution, but the bullhorn provides a crescendo of wailing and moaning about the discrepancy between public and private employee compensation. It’s too rich.

Yes, it really does give insight on to how this will all go down on Main street doesn't it? White collar crime seems to be accepted, to some degree, as something nobody can do anything about and Govt unions become the culprit instead. Why? Perhaps because we all have to deal with government employees at some point, while most of us will never cross paths with any of these white collar criminals?

[flintlock]

Re: Proposal to Strip Corporations of Constitutional Rights Gains Momentum in Wisconsin

What everyone has to realise is that this debate highlights the very simple fact that in a true competitive marketplace, the balance between public/unionised employment would be trammelled by new entrants. But they are not. If wages are low, too low, then the answer was, when prosperity ruled, you went and got a better job paying more; and moreover, close by. So then the bad employer could not deliver a product without employees and so they too had to adjust to suit market conditions.

Again, when wages are too high, then another can set up to again compete; but this time by employing for less, (perhaps by improving conditions), while still able to deliver the product. These differences provide the swings and roundabouts of a competitive marketplace.

But today, at the very bottom, down at the grass roots of the nation; there is no supply of the capital to enable a better paying company to compete. The major corporations have such a strangle hold on the process, there is no normal competition.

Unions are simply a symptom of what is wrong. You never need a union if the answer is to move to a better paid job close by.

Unions are absolutely NOT the problem; the problem is a lack of available capital to enable proper competition.

Excellent post. Unions don't get as much attention in the good times now do they? Its kind of sour grapes to some degree. "Why do THEY get more than ME? You never heard much of this when labor was in short supply and people were getting high wages and as much overtime as they wanted.

Of course $100k fork lift operators are not going to be competitive in a global market. Apparently even $25k operators won't be. So tell me again, why do we try to play in that game? Cheap TVs? $30 hard drives? Screwdrivers that cost $1 a piece. Does that offset our cost of food, medical, and energy? Not likely.

[dcarrigg]

Re: Proposal to Strip Corporations of Constitutional Rights Gains Momentum in Wisconsin

Yes, it really does give insight on to how this will all go down on Main street doesn't it? White collar crime seems to be accepted, to some degree, as something nobody can do anything about and Govt unions become the culprit instead. Why? Perhaps because we all have to deal with government employees at some point, while most of us will never cross paths with any of these white collar criminals?

Not only will most of us not cross paths with any of them, but most of us have no understanding of the financial world, and by proxy, what any crime would look like. Discuss mark-to-market vs. mark-to-model accounting and most people's eyes roll up in the back of their heads.

People can fathom the tangible. In my estimation, most Americans' conception of the economy sounds a lot more like Marx's labor theory of value than marginal utility. Of course with how complex and obfuscated the capital creation process has become, who can blame us?

We can grasp what $60k/yr, a pension, and a good health insurance plan look like. People can grasp what a teacher or a policeman does all day. So some of us think, 'I'm paying for them to live better than me!' and to keep up with the Joneses, some argue to take it away for the sake of social equality.

Many of us cannot grasp what $4M/yr, stock options, quarterly performance bonuses, incentive rewards, a $20M annuity on top of a 401(k), paid financial counseling and tax preparation, 24 hour security and drivers, etc. etc. look like. We cannot grasp what a financial executive does all day. Keeping up with the Joneses is not keeping up the Rockefellers. In the back of our minds, I'm convinced that many of us think that somehow the rentier class deserves its status. (Of course, they would have to work 20,000 hours per week and shoot three-pointers whilst balancing a checkbook and designing an iPad).

Most Americans actually argue for equality, but just on the scale with which we're are familiar.

Many of us will call taxes on the rentiers 'class warfare,' 'punishing our most productive,' and 'socialist.' Yet many of us get our blood boiling about a forklift operator making $20k more than another forklift operator. Many Americans need, fight for, and demand equality of the peasantry and petite bourgeois, but deride attacks on nobility. The third estate works hard to keep the nobility on their pedestals.

The biggest issue is that people do not see debt as an additional tax. The average household pays more in debt service than total government taxes. There is the government, then there's FIRE. In reality, it's a tax no matter how you cut it.

Not all that long ago, nobility charged taxes through the state for on the use of anything needed to get ones job done. Now the wanna-be nobility does it through debt.

Here's a quote direct from the Wikipedia page on the French Revolution. See which parts of it sound familiar:

Peasants were also required to pay a tenth of their income or produce to the church (the tithe), a land tax to the state (the taille), a 5% property tax (the vingtième), and a tax on the number of people in the family (capitation). Further royal and seigneurial obligations might be paid in several ways: in labor (the corvée), in kind, or, rarely, in coin. Peasants were also obligated to their landlords for: rent in cash (the cens), a payment related to their amount of annual production (the champart), and taxes on the use of the nobles' mills, wine-presses, and bakeries (the banalités). In good times, the taxes were burdensome; in harsh times, they were devastating. After a less-than-fulsome harvest, people would starve to death during the winter.

Many tax collectors and other public officials bought their positions from the king, sometimes on an annual basis, sometimes in perpetuity. Often an additional fee was paid to upgrade their position to one that could be passed along as an inheritance. Naturally, holders of these offices tried to reimburse themselves by milking taxpayers as hard as possible. For instance, in a civil lawsuit, judges required that both parties pay a bribe (called, with tongue-in-cheek, the épices, the spices); this, effectively, put justice out of the reach of all but the wealthy.

The system also exempted the nobles and the clergy from taxes (with the exception of a modest quit-rent, an ad valorem tax on land). The tax burden, therefore, devolved to the peasants, wage-earners, and the professional and business classes. Further, people from less-privileged walks of life were blocked from acquiring even petty positions of power in the regime. This caused further resentment.

[Ghent12]

Re: Proposal to Strip Corporations of Constitutional Rights Gains Momentum in Wisconsin

Yea people like cbr and dropthatcash are everything that is wrong with this country. They look at what some get paid and think, "we aren't getting that, we should fuck them over!!" instead of "wow it costs that much to actually maintain a middle class lifestyle + have some savings for retirement? what is wrong with the gov/economy?!" which is what they should be thinking.

You could eliminate all the unions, gov. or otherwise, and it'd hardly make a dent in the budget problems, all of which are caused by mismanagement, misspending, and mis taxing. All of our problems are really political problems. Destroying unions would just destroy average wages further, which would actually hurt the economy, since its the middle class and poor that spend nearly all they make while the rich horde their wealth.

Good ol' "you should be thinking like me." It's good that you are completely transparent with your pompous views and your contempt for reasonable discussion.

The problem is, of course, FIRE. It's simply FIRE. We have an enormous fiscal mess on our hands because millions of old people didn't save enough for their retirement and health care costs and instead fell into the rampant "Consume consume consume!" attitude that has supplanted tens of thousands of years of human wisdom over the last several decades. Our very evolution as a species taught us to SAVE, to INVEST IN THE FUTURE lest we face starvation, but the FIRE industry managed to completely reverse our hard-won wisdom over millennia in a geological eye-blink. Now our culture is different and we have to figure things out for ourselves. That's what Unions are--people looking out for themselves and themselves only. It's only natural that they are as corrupt as corporations. As an individual, however, we only have control over what we buy, who we buy it from and who we vote for in terms of giving larger entities power. That is why there is nothing we can do about private sector unions except boycott the products their corporations offer, but we should at least have a say in the public sector since that is what a Republic is supposed to be about. This is why it is completely legitimate to criticize and demonize public sector unions; however it is best to criticize and try to change the political players that those leeches are latched onto. That is where our power lies--in changing the political system, not in changing the natural process of humans congregating together for their own benefit and enrichment.

[shiny!]

Re: Proposal to Strip Corporations of Constitutional Rights Gains Momentum in Wisconsin

I like what Madison, WI is doing.

Does the Citizens United ruling effect the states' right to revoke a corporate charter? If a corporation causes harm to the community, e.g. through persistant pollution, financial wrongdoings, etc. the state should use its power to revoke the corporate charter. But most states don't seem to know they have this power. What am I missing here?

Regarding the discussion about union wages, it used to be that we all wanted jobs with good salaries and benefits that would enable us to live the "American Dream". Now that manufacturing jobs have been sent overseas, people forced into low wage service industry jobs resent their neighbors just a step higher up the ladder. TPTB love it when the lower and middle classes start tearing at each other for scraps, rather than looking at the real robber barons behind the curtain.

We could bring back higher paying jobs if we reduced all the government red tape that makes it impossible for manufacturers in the USA to compete globally. I believe we can do this without returning to sweatshop conditions that caused the necessity of Unions in the first place.

Instead of tearing each other down, I'd like to see Americans start revoking the corporate charters of JPM, Citi, BofA, Goldman Sachs...

[Scot]

Re: Proposal to Strip Corporations of Constitutional Rights Gains Momentum in Wisconsin

This thread begins with a nod towards reigning in corporate power and quickly veers off to venting about public employee benefits.

Maybe that's because public employees use their corporate power (as a union) to exploit the public for profit.

[DSpencer]

Re: Proposal to Strip Corporations of Constitutional Rights Gains Momentum in Wisconsin

My various thoughts:

So some of us think, 'I'm paying for them to live better than me!' and to keep up with the Joneses, some argue to take it away for the sake of social equality.
:

I agree with most of your overall post, but think this part needs clarified. People don't just want public employees pay cut so that money saved can be burned. They want that money BACK because it was their money before the government took it away.

Its unfair that gov. employees actually get good benefits instead of the shitty/no benefits private employees get? WTF is wrong with your thinking? Why aren't you instead thinking "hrrrm, we should really improve the benefits that private employers give out somehow!!"

Again, it's not necessarily just envy about other people's situations. It's the knowledge that they pay taxes so other people can do the same job for more money. Less money for public workers = lower taxes for private workers (in theory...)

Sure it would be great if "somehow" everyone could have more, but that isn't a very actionable idea.

But today, at the very bottom, down at the grass roots of the nation; there is no supply of the capital to enable a better paying company to compete. The major corporations have such a strangle hold on the process, there is no normal competition.

I agree with the second part, but not the first. I think there is plenty of capital desperately seeking a reasonable rate of return (why/how do you think sites like itulip exist?) and for many they'd prefer to invest in the real productive economy . The problem is that major corporations have used influence to greatly increase the barriers to entry. Think about how much paperwork and the amount of legal advice you would need to start almost any business today. How much do you think was needed 100 years ago? As always...Cui bono?

IMO - the reason to be upset with both unions and corporations is the same: they have used the government to give themselves an edge which allows them higher profits/wages at the expense of everyone else. Really we should be upset with ourselves for letting the government assist them in this goal.

[mesyn191]

Re: Proposal to Strip Corporations of Constitutional Rights Gains Momentum in Wisconsin

Good ol' "you should be thinking like me." It's good that you are completely transparent with your pompous views and your contempt for reasonable discussion.

Except this, you know, factually incorrect since I already explained my thinking prior to posting what you quoted. I'm not the one pointing out "huuur a few gov. employees make 6 figures once you factor in benefits and such, therefore they all do and they're all scum". And I'm also not the one going around whose solution to the "problem" is 1)eliminate unions and/or their wages and benefits vs private employers, 2)???????, 3)PROFIT. That is literally what they're doing. There is no reasonable discussion to be had there since its all BS and is basically corporate anti worker propaganda that they're repeating wholesale.

The problem is, of course, FIRE. It's simply FIRE. We have an enormous fiscal mess on our hands because millions of old people didn't save enough for their retirement and health care costs and instead fell into the rampant "Consume consume consume!" attitude that has supplanted tens of thousands of years of human wisdom over the last several decades.

WTF?! You say you blame the FIRE economy and then you blame people for not saving?! Do you not understand what FIRE stands for? It sure has nothing to do with the avg. person's inability to save, which isn't their fault, but due to gross mismanagement by our leaders and bankers of our economy. Given how much stuff costs how in the hell did you expect anyone to save at all anyways? I mean if you understand how expensive insurance and RE are then you know that both are essentially giant black holes sucking wealth out of our countries' middle class and poor and redistributing it to the wealthy. You do know that right?

Our very evolution as a species taught us to SAVE, to INVEST IN THE FUTURE lest we face starvation, but the FIRE industry managed to completely reverse our hard-won wisdom over millennia in a geological eye-blink.

Yea and who runs the FIRE economy? Is it the poor and middle class? You still wanna blame lack of savings if those two large groups effectively have little to no say in how things are ran now, much less for the last couple of decades? The cognitive dissonance in your post is just amazing.

[cbr]

Re: Proposal to Strip Corporations of Constitutional Rights Gains Momentum in Wisconsin

Yea people like cbr and dropthatcash are everything that is wrong with this country. They look at what some get paid and think, "we aren't getting that, we should fuck them over!!" instead of "wow it costs that much to actually maintain a middle class lifestyle + have some savings for retirement? what is wrong with the gov/economy?!" which is what they should be thinking.

You could eliminate all the unions, gov. or otherwise, and it'd hardly make a dent in the budget problems, all of which are caused by mismanagement, misspending, and mis taxing. All of our problems are really political problems. Destroying unions would just destroy average wages further, which would actually hurt the economy, since its the middle class and poor that spend nearly all they make while the rich horde their wealth.

wow, I dont know where to start... government budget and union viability are totally different subjects. what you dont seem to get is that the world has become small, and the global market doesnt give a shit what it "costs to actually maintain a middle class lifestyle + have some savings for retirement"

the global market only cares what your production is worth, adjusted for transportation costs of your product/service to a market, vs. anyone else.

today, american unions are only one more leach on the worker and the employer both, sapping productivity from both, and we already have enough leaches; the government leach on the jugular, the insurance leach on one wrist, the health care industry leach on the other wrist, the banking and finance leach between the legs, and so on.... put the union leach right up your ass if you want. Its no wonder we are anemic.... its hard enough to compete with the world today without all the drained blood.


should there be checks on the distribution/concentration of wealth and anti competetive practices? sure, even I, a strong libertarian and fiscal conservative believe that. but that distribution of wealth comes out of a pie that is massively shrunken due to government leaching, which by the way facilitates all the other leaches...

as far as the budget goes, I am pretty young, but have paid over $1m in federal income taxes already. the only thing i have to show for it is a far away military umbrella, a withered joke of a space program, a few national park visits and some miles on an interstate. but i've made a lot of bankers, insurers, accountants, bureaucrats, government workers, etc. very rich, along with execs at big consumer businesses. A tiny sum of that money trickled out of the leaches into a group of largely undeserving, unproductive welfare receiving leaches as well....

[mesyn191]

Re: Proposal to Strip Corporations of Constitutional Rights Gains Momentum in Wisconsin

Again, it's not necessarily just envy about other people's situations. It's the knowledge that they pay taxes so other people can do the same job for more money. Less money for public workers = lower taxes for private workers (in theory...)

Sure it would be great if "somehow" everyone could have more, but that isn't a very actionable idea.

Except this is basically corporate propaganda that you and others are repeating. The problem isn't that they're being paid too much, its that private non union workers are getting paid to little and under compensated. This is trivial for anyone to see. You need only note the cost of insurance, housing, and goods vs. wages and/or productivity. Also its not the same for job for more money.* (edit: that is gov. workers obviously, but still, people are bitching about them too and their "overcompensation" is similar) The anecdotes on the previous page or what you see on say Fox news of the lazy over paid union/gov. worker are just that, anecdotes.

This does not mean that there aren't any, in any sufficiently large organization there is always going to be at least a few assholes. I've ran into plenty of other private employees in other jobs who were complete assholes who did little or nothing and yet still managed to keep their job somehow. That doesn't mean all private employees are like that.

You and others are also not offering any sort of solution. You eliminate gov. worker "excess" wages/benefits and what good does that do? You maybe slice a percent or 2 of the federal budget tops, if that? What does that work out to anyways in tax savings? I'd be surprised if it was more than a few dollars per person.

Total federal work force cost is something like $150 billion BTW. Which is a lot of money. But its nothing compared to say the bank bailouts, or the cost of the military, or Social Security, or Medicare costs. Meanwhile those workers can now no longer afford healthcare, like most private employees, and/or they have to make huge reductions in their standard of living again like most private employees are having to do. Then there are the knock on effects to the economy, since these people have less to spend and they do actually spend it there is less money going into local economies where they work.

*

...
But federal employee advocates claim a straight-up comparison of average total compensation is misleading. A disproportionate number of federal employees are professionals, such as managers, lawyers, engineers and scientists. Over the years, the federal government has steadily outsourced lower-paying jobs to the private sector so that blue-collar workers cooking meals or working in mailrooms now make up just 10 percent of federal employees.
That argument is backed up by a 2002 study of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. It found that federal salaries for most professional and administrative jobs lagged well behind compensation offered in the private sector.
The CBO study concluded that the best way to measure the difference is to compare government jobs with those in the private sector that match the actual work performed. The CBO found that salaries for 85 percent of federal workers in professional and administrative jobs lagged their private sector counterparts by more than 20 percent.
...

[mesyn191]

Re: Proposal to Strip Corporations of Constitutional Rights Gains Momentum in Wisconsin

wow, I dont know where to start... government budget and union viability are totally different subjects.

But they touch on the same subjects, ie. over compensation, and there are union gov. workers too BTW, which is why I included them. edit: Also you were citing civil servants as your example on the first page, they do work for the gov.

what you dont seem to get is that the world has become small, and the global market doesnt give a shit what it "costs to actually maintain a middle class lifestyle + have some savings for retirement"

More corporate propaganda. The real problem is governments around the world allow corporations to abuse or underpay their workers in countries that many jobs get outsourced to. You've surely heard of the horrible working conditions/wages in China and SE Asia?

today, american unions are only one more leach on the worker and the employer both

OK so how much money do you think unions costs the economy as a whole? I've seen the ~20% more per person number, but if you think that is enough to sap our whole economy I don't know what to say. Also what do you propose as a solution to fixing high costs of insurance, healthcare, housing, etc. If you wanna cut wages/benefits without fixing those things FIRST you're doing no good to anyone.

should there be checks on the distribution/concentration of wealth and anti competetive practices? sure, even I, a strong libertarian and fiscal conservative believe that. but that distribution of wealth comes out of a pie that is massively shrunken due to government leaching, which by the way facilitates all the other leaches...

Did you know that corporate profits are up, back to or over pre bust levels actually, yet unemployment is up and wages are down? What if the pie has been shrunk due to the people up top taking all that "excess" money for themselves instead of lazy lazy over paid workers? edit: BTW remember the chart from the previous page that showed productivity being up considerably vs wages? Maybe those workers aren't so lazy after all...

as far as the budget goes, I am pretty young, but have paid over $1m in federal income taxes already. the only thing i have to show for it is a far away military umbrella, a withered joke of a space program, a few national park visits and some miles on an interstate.

If you think this is all you have to show for your taxes maybe you should go live in a 3rd world shit hole for a while where the people pay hardly any taxes to the government. Hell, if you wait long enough you might not even have to move!! At the rate we're going the US will be one of those 3rd world shit holes in 10-20 years.

[Ghent12]

Re: Proposal to Strip Corporations of Constitutional Rights Gains Momentum in Wisconsin

Except this, you know, factually incorrect since I already explained my thinking prior to posting what you quoted. I'm not the one pointing out "huuur a few gov. employees make 6 figures once you factor in benefits and such, therefore they all do and they're all scum". And I'm also not the one going around whose solution to the "problem" is 1)eliminate unions and/or their wages and benefits vs private employers, 2)???????, 3)PROFIT. That is literally what they're doing. There is no reasonable discussion to be had there since its all BS and is basically corporate anti worker propaganda that they're repeating wholesale.

Actually, I did not change any of your words when I quoted you. You said explicitly that people should be thinking a certain way, your way, and you specifically labelled "people like cbr and dropthatcash," as "everything that is wrong with this country." You still show great contempt for opinions contrary to your own and your style of post is a bit of a departure for the decorum of the News forum. It is clear that you wish to engage in some discussion, but it is also clear that you have no intention of convincing anyone but yourself of anything.

WTF?! You say you blame the FIRE economy and then you blame people for not saving?! Do you not understand what FIRE stands for? It sure has nothing to do with the avg. person's inability to save, which isn't their fault, but due to gross mismanagement by our leaders and bankers of our economy. Given how much stuff costs how in the hell did you expect anyone to save at all anyways? I mean if you understand how expensive insurance and RE are then you know that both are essentially giant black holes sucking wealth out of our countries' middle class and poor and redistributing it to the wealthy. You do know that right?

Perhaps you weren't paying attention on any of EJ's posts. FIRE gets rich off of debt, and they have pushed it onto people that used to know better--the poor, the middle class, and the rich (i.e. everyone). People are more indebted because of FIRE and because they fell for FIRE's sales pitch of living the American Dream on credit. Government willingly and gleefully aided FIRE almost the entire time for the past several decades, slowly funneling in new customers (forced insurance, encouraged subprime mortgages, etc.) and widening the doors for FIRE's machinery to go through (any number of unbalanced deregulations can be cited as an example). FIRE is a beast, but can you blame them for doing what every industry does or tries to do, which is acquire wealth and power for itself? Can you blame a frog for hopping? Can you blame a tree for growing?

It is a moronic pitchfork approach to simply blame FIRE for the mess they've caused and address nothing else. We the people have powers over our own lives and, politically speaking, we should have power over our government if it is to retain any sort of democratic (small d) or republican (small r) tradition. We can therefore focus only on government and on our own behavior and correct our mistakes and problems from those starting points. We can begin by collectively practicing fiscal discipline--imagine the impact on FIRE if everyone actually started behaving as if their future mattered. We can also put the screws to elected officials and tell them to reject corporate influence in favor of popular influence and to end their naked aid to corporations, especially FIRE.

To address your main point, yes, we can place blame people for their mistakes and their behavior. We are people, and we can change our behavior and our methods to achieve a better results. We can also, in a legitimate government, control our political and legal system in such a way as to limit corruption.

Yea and who runs the FIRE economy? Is it the poor and middle class? You still wanna blame lack of savings if those two large groups effectively have little to no say in how things are ran now, much less for the last couple of decades? The cognitive dissonance in your post is just amazing.

See above. The poor and middle class have had the efficacy of as much say as anyone in the political arena for quite some time (and collectively more power since most people are poor or middle class). The ineffectiveness of their political power can only be blamed on them for buying into a given candidate's bullshit.

As a side note, the term 'cognitive dissonance' is a popular term among 9/11 conspiracy theorists. This is just FYI.