CHARTS: Here's What The Wall Street Protesters Are So Angry About...

[mesyn191]

Re: CHARTS: Here's What The Wall Street Protesters Are So Angry About...

Right now the national spotlight is focused on "the 1%" which, as has been pointed out on this forum (by whom, I have forgotten--my apologies) is the wrong demographic to focus any attention on except thanks for creating basically all the jobs that exist.

They aren't the job creators, they're the rentiers who're getting rich off of everyone else. That is the reason why people keep harping on about wealth disparity and falling wages for everyone but the top 1%.

Focusing on "the 1%" is akin to focusing on "white people" or "men" for the problems created by so few. It is orders of magnitude incorrect, but hey, who cares about the fates of so small a minority of people? Tax them to the hilt, soak the rich, and redistribute it to the rest of us!!! Democracy now! Etc.

You're beating on a straw man. "Soaking the rich" has nothing to do with changing the economic system or system of government or even necessarily "punishing" them, not to say that some people don't want that in OWS or elsewhere, its about fixing the wealth disparity. The methods that the 1% have been using to suck up more and more wealth over the last few decades are fundamentally dishonest and unethical. The methods they used were against the law...until they got the laws changed in their favor and helped get their lackeys in as the regulators.

[c1ue]

Re: CHARTS: Here's What The Wall Street Protesters Are So Angry About...

It's all about trends, c1ue--pay attention. Now that we're agreed that democracy is a terrible form of government, why should we support trends towards democracy? Or more importantly, why should we not oppose them? You speak of exchanging positions and compromise--these are the very essences of a republican system.

Sorry, but you've made a leap which does not in any way describe my position.

I don't think democracy is a terrible form of government - it is no worse than any other form of government.

Every form of government in existence has fundamental flaws which ultimately will be exploited.

Secondly you are conflating government with society. Whatever the form of government, society has its own means of creating and then enforcing societal mores.

Under Communism, even though private ownership of real property was now illegal, there was still plenty of competition for housing. The only difference was that this competition took place in the fields of bureaucracy and influence as compared to in the capitalist fields of money and influence.

The reason for the competition, however, was the same.

The process I described previously is thus not necessarily a formal procedure: in many ways the Jim Crow legislation of the South was exactly a form of majority/minority legislative sausage.

You say a republic is not implementable, but I say it must be simply because I refuse to be so cynical as to believe that only mobs and criminals can possibly have their way. We at one point had a (flawed) republic, but then in the process of removing its flaws it has been all but converted into a democratic republic; what we have now is a hybrid that includes the worst of both worlds where the majority can disaffect the minority and cronyism is woven into the very fabric of the political system.

Frankly the mythologizing of American government prior to World War I is way overdone. America's government survived as a republic in its first 150 years mostly due to irrelevance: irrelevance on the world stage, and irrelevance to its people.

Neither of these conditions is true any more.

As for Republican forms of government: they have just as many problems as any other. There are innumerable historical examples of this - ranging from the takeover of the Roman Republic by Julius Caesar, to Venice's infamously petty and semi-competent government, to our present sclerotic mess in the Senate.

While I understand your fear and loathing of having to bow down before the will of the majority, frankly I don't see how you can possibly imagine that having a "true Republic" in any way changes the potential for tyranny.

Why do you believe that your representatives in a Republic will somehow act any better than your representatives in a representational democracy? Unless you're one of those billionaire big fish, your voice is merely one of multitudes.

Right now the national spotlight is focused on "the 1%" which, as has been pointed out on this forum (by whom, I have forgotten--my apologies) is the wrong demographic to focus any attention on except thanks for creating basically all the jobs that exist. Focusing on "the 1%" is akin to focusing on "white people" or "men" for the problems created by so few. It is orders of magnitude incorrect, but hey, who cares about the fates of so small a minority of people? Tax them to the hilt, soak the rich, and redistribute it to the rest of us!!!

While I agree that it is certainly not all the 1% which are the problem, at the same time I strongly believe that the problem largely resides in part of the 1%.

To advocate status quo because of the former is to deny the truth of the latter.

Secondly saying that 'soaking the rich' is what is being advocated is pure polarization propaganda.

I've shown over and over again that the 1% do not in any way pay an equitable share of taxes. The trends in finances between the demographic quintiles clearly demonstrates this.

As Chris Hedges noted: what has been going on is demonstrably both illegal and corrupt. To say somehow that the 1% are the 'job creators' - that is such an idiotic fallacy that multitudes will be happy to refute that.

Democracy now! Etc. Don't think that President Obama's "not one dime of tax increase if you make less than $250,000/$200,000/$150,000" push wasn't along the same vein. It's tapping into the ignorance and fear of an easily-manipulated majority in order to keep the votes coming; it's so easy a caveman could do it--See: the prior administration (I keed, I keed). It is simply plain to see that democracy is awful, and produces awful results. If and when it comes time to make "adult decisions" about matters, democratic trends will ensure that they can never be done.

If you believe that Obama is in any way a populist panderer, as opposed to a special interests Judas goat, then clearly you have a completely different understanding of Obama's actions as compared to pretty much anyone outside of fringe ultra right groups.

As for democracy: if you don't like it, there are plenty of non-democratic places you can go to.

It isn't like you're being held to stay under the umbrella of a government you cannot tolerate.

The United States still more or less allows you to say whatever you want, but the price for that is that you have to listen to what everyone else has to say.

And if enough of them say it, then sooner or later 'it' becomes law. This can be good, bad, or any spectrum in between, or even shifting from one end to the other and back again.

[Ghent12]

Re: CHARTS: Here's What The Wall Street Protesters Are So Angry About...

They aren't the job creators, they're the rentiers who're getting rich off of everyone else. That is the reason why people keep harping on about wealth disparity and falling wages for everyone but the top 1%.

Aha, so the "top 1%" are not job creators, but merely rentiers who are getting rich off of everyone else. Is this your final position--that no rich people employ anyone, and that they are all undeserving of their incomes?

That is truly a ludicrous notion.

You're beating on a straw man. "Soaking the rich" has nothing to do with changing the economic system or system of government or even necessarily "punishing" them, not to say that some people don't want that in OWS or elsewhere, its about fixing the wealth disparity. The methods that the 1% have been using to suck up more and more wealth over the last few decades are fundamentally dishonest and unethical. The methods they used were against the law...until they got the laws changed in their favor and helped get their lackeys in as the regulators.

It doesn't appear to be much of a strawman since it is pretty much in line with what you first said. You carelessly blame "the 1%" for being dishonest and unethical and causing most or all of the economic problems we face, yet you would be almost as accurate in blaming "white people" or "Native American women" or "the Jews" for being dishonest and unethical and causing most or all of the economic problems we face. You'd still be many orders of magnitude off. Do you honestly think that "the 1%" are some collective hive mind who have all acted unethically, illegally, and are the perpetuators of cronyism?

Please don't be so indiscriminate when you advocate eating a minority group that you arbitrarily classify as bad.

Sorry, but you've made a leap which does not in any way describe my position.

I don't think democracy is a terrible form of government - it is no worse than any other form of government.

Every form of government in existence has fundamental flaws which ultimately will be exploited.

Secondly you are conflating government with society. Whatever the form of government, society has its own means of creating and then enforcing societal mores.

Under Communism, even though private ownership of real property was now illegal, there was still plenty of competition for housing. The only difference was that this competition took place in the fields of bureaucracy and influence as compared to in the capitalist fields of money and influence.

The reason for the competition, however, was the same.

The process I described previously is thus not necessarily a formal procedure: in many ways the Jim Crow legislation of the South was exactly a form of majority/minority legislative sausage.

I pretty much summarized what you said in context. I guess I must truly not understand where you approach things from, because to me "a bad thing" is "a bad thing." C'est la vie.

I am not conflating anything inappropriately. Government is the collective or coerced political will of some individuals, and nothing more. People interact with each other on many levels, which is why I support the only least-harm principle for political interactions--a republican government (not a Republican government). It is political interaction that is the most potentially dangerous among all the others, and it is responsible for more death and suffering than all the combined economic, familial, tribal, or religious interactions combined. Although I believe I have made myself clear in the distinction between how people interact and what I think is best on the political interaction front, I have no doubt that you will find a way to misinterpret what I've said as is essentially always the case (hence this clarification, and the one after, and the one after...).

Frankly the mythologizing of American government prior to World War I is way overdone. America's government survived as a republic in its first 150 years mostly due to irrelevance: irrelevance on the world stage, and irrelevance to its people.

Neither of these conditions is true any more.

That's not really true in any sense of how you could mean it. The republic survived a bloody Civil War to address some of the important loose ends left in the Constitution. It was nearly lost at least twice in that time period. It thrived by taking advantage of opportunities.

As for its modern relevance, it is no surprise that democratically-trending government will become more and more relevant to people. That doesn't mean it's a good thing, nor does it mean that the government wouldn't be able to survive if it were to become less relevant.

As for Republican forms of government: they have just as many problems as any other. There are innumerable historical examples of this - ranging from the takeover of the Roman Republic by Julius Caesar, to Venice's infamously petty and semi-competent government, to our present sclerotic mess in the Senate.

While I understand your fear and loathing of having to bow down before the will of the majority, frankly I don't see how you can possibly imagine that having a "true Republic" in any way changes the potential for tyranny.

Why do you believe that your representatives in a Republic will somehow act any better than your representatives in a representational democracy? Unless you're one of those billionaire big fish, your voice is merely one of multitudes.

A republican form of government may indeed have its own problems, but it's still the best one available. You bring up Julius Caesar, but Hitler was given a mandate by democratic election too. It's all water under the bridge though--the best system to maximize liberty is a small, focused republic designed primarily or exclusively to give liberty by law to everyone. There's no shame in advocating such a thing, and there's no reason to doubt that it can't exist for centuries. "A republic, if you can keep it," and all that. There are numerous applicable quotes, but the point is that a small republic is best for maximizing liberty, and constant vigilance by those with political power is required to maintain it.

As for the actual mechanism of acting in a manner more suited towards maximizing liberty, that is achieved through the careful application of checks and balances. The 17th Amendment, for example, removes one such balance by trending towards a centralizing of power. It removed the authority of more local governments to determine how they are represented at the national level, and now we have a rather superfluous system where we have one Representative and one Super-Representative. The next logical extension of that would be to have one state-wide Representative elected democratically to a third house of Congress--then we can have one region-wide Representative elected democratically from several states to a fourth house of Congress, then one nation-wide Representative elected democratically from each half of the country into a fifth house of Congress.

Do you understand the point? Representatives now have different mandates than they did prior to the repeal of the democratically-trending 17th Amendment, and thus the balance between state and federal government was shifted ever so slightly into the federal government. Centralized power is a dangerous thing, and trends towards centralizing that power ought to be resisted.

While I agree that it is certainly not all the 1% which are the problem, at the same time I strongly believe that the problem largely resides in part of the 1%.

To advocate status quo because of the former is to deny the truth of the latter.

Secondly saying that 'soaking the rich' is what is being advocated is pure polarization propaganda.

I've shown over and over again that the 1% do not in any way pay an equitable share of taxes. The trends in finances between the demographic quintiles clearly demonstrates this.

As Chris Hedges noted: what has been going on is demonstrably both illegal and corrupt. To say somehow that the 1% are the 'job creators' - that is such an idiotic fallacy that multitudes will be happy to refute that.

So with your knowledge that only a small portion of "the 1%" are part of the problem, how do you act? Do you boldly advocate policies to de-accumulate everyone's wealth, or just from "the 1%," or do you advocate actual solutions to problems such as enforcing laws against fraud?

You're right that I was using rhetorical devices. Your reaction is quite the point to them. The whole blanket classification of "high income = criminal," which is exactly what is meant with "the 1%," is the fallacy, far more than "high income = job creator," is which at least has empiric truth to it (in the sense that rich people and entities are basically the only employers of others). The entire process of collectivism is a fallacy, but that is a whole 'nother can of worms.

As for "equitable share of taxes," you have only shown what you want to see. My definition of "equitable share of taxes" would be defined entirely differently and more along the lines of pay-per-use, not pay-per-income.

If you believe that Obama is in any way a populist panderer, as opposed to a special interests Judas goat, then clearly you have a completely different understanding of Obama's actions as compared to pretty much anyone outside of fringe ultra right groups.

As for democracy: if you don't like it, there are plenty of non-democratic places you can go to.

It isn't like you're being held to stay under the umbrella of a government you cannot tolerate.

The United States still more or less allows you to say whatever you want, but the price for that is that you have to listen to what everyone else has to say.

And if enough of them say it, then sooner or later 'it' becomes law. This can be good, bad, or any spectrum in between, or even shifting from one end to the other and back again.

Your round-about insult only insults my intelligence, not as you intended via association with any individuals with groups. A "populist panderer" and "a special interest Judas goat" are not mutually exclusive; in fact they go hand in hand on many occasions. It's called spin. If you don't think Obama's "not one dime" campaign promise was populist pandering, then I'm afraid you're the one in disagreement with what can be said to be a common wisdom on the matter, since it is a textbook example of it.

The rest of what you said, something about advocating my departure from the country, makes no sense and is irrelevant.

[Guest]

Re: CHARTS: Here's What The Wall Street Protesters Are So Angry About...

Problems solved, you can all go home now.

1. Campaign contributions limited to $1,000 per person, organization, or business. That's it. Imperfect, but no legalized bribery system as we have now.
2. De-globalize economy by enforcing OUR environmental, labor, and safety laws fairly. All products imported must conform broadly to minimum standards or be subject to seizure/fines. Same for all outsourced positions. If you want to require employers to provide 12 weeks family leave here, you have to do it for your employees in India as well.
3. De-regulate broadly to reduce burden on businesses.
4. Enforce immigration laws and set moratorium on all but urgent cases until unemployment falls below 5%. Mandate e-verify be used with fines for violators. Imprison repeat violator employers.
5. Withdraw military from Empire building/protection racket for corporations overseas to help reduce deficits.
6. Cut entitlement spending. SS "disability" requirements are a joke. Ever notice how the fewer teeth you have and the further into Apalachia you get, the more likely you are to suffer from soft tissue injury or "depression"?
7. Simplify and move to a consumption tax to draw capital here and encourage production, encourage savings(the only real source of capital), and discourage the flow of money into tax havens.
8. Move rapidly to lower fuel cost drain on economy with nuclear power, phase out use of dino oil for non-essential uses. Increased local drilling/mining, export more coal, lower regulation on energy production. Fix the distortions of the incentive system. Why does a 40mpg diesel Passat not get incentives but a similar sized Chevy Volt does?
9. Move towards a vastly reduced role for the Fed, if any.
10. Return election of Senators to state control to better represent state interests.
11. Allow health insurance sales accross state lines, remove mandatory coverages, remove tax deduction by employers for employee healthcare costs.
12. End FDIC insurance on deposits for banks "too large to fail". Break them up. Eventually move to reduce coverage to low limits or entirely as it encourages depositors to not care about banks' health and for banks to make risky investments.


It's not really that difficult.

[mesyn191]

Re: CHARTS: Here's What The Wall Street Protesters Are So Angry About...

Aha, so the "top 1%" are not job creators, but merely rentiers who are getting rich off of everyone else. Is this your final position--that no rich people employ anyone, and that they are all undeserving of their incomes?

They employ people but they're not the mythical job creators they're often made out to be. If you got rid of the 1% tomorrow there would still be jobs left in the country and more could and would still be made by either the government or other businesses. Given the business practices of nearly all the of companies the 1% own and/or operate and their tendency to try and push down wages and outsource jobs among other things such as lobbying themselves into positions of monopoly or oligopoly its pretty clear they don't care about anyone else's situation or the well being of the country itself.

It doesn't appear to be much of a strawman since it is pretty much in line with what you first said. You carelessly blame "the 1%" for being dishonest and unethical and causing most or all of the economic problems we face, yet you would be almost as accurate in blaming "white people" or "Native American women" or "the Jews" for being dishonest and unethical and causing most or all of the economic problems we face. You'd still be many orders of magnitude off. Do you honestly think that "the 1%" are some collective hive mind who have all acted unethically, illegally, and are the perpetuators of cronyism?

More straw man beating and putting words in my mouth too. I didn't mention word one about race or conspiracy, I called them rentiers and mentioned the wealth disparity and falling income for most everyone but them. Which you did not and haven't even tried to refute. You do not need some Dark Lords of Commerce gleefully manipulating things to their own evil ends while twisting their mustachioes in some smoky dark back room for the 1% to benefit at everyone else's expense. I'm not suggesting at all that these people are all working in concert. I am after all identifying them by their economic status and not by some sort of vauge handwavy connection to the Rothschilds or concpiracy youtube link or whatever.

[*T*]

Re: CHARTS: Here's What The Wall Street Protesters Are So Angry About...

You're correct. It was a broad generalization and unwarranted. I was thinking of the folks on this side of the pond. Regardless, I apologize.

no apology due -- the British perpetrated many horrors.

[c1ue]

Re: CHARTS: Here's What The Wall Street Protesters Are So Angry About...

Aha, so the "top 1%" are not job creators, but merely rentiers who are getting rich off of everyone else. Is this your final position--that no rich people employ anyone, and that they are all undeserving of their incomes?

That is truly a ludicrous notion.

The facts are: new jobs are created by new small businesses.

The top 1% create no more new small businesses than any other segment, in fact as a group they destroy jobs. I highlight the CEO contingent of the top 1% in particular.

So your assertion that rich people create jobs is in fact wrong. Rich people do employ others, but as far as overall job creation goes, they don't.

It doesn't appear to be much of a strawman since it is pretty much in line with what you first said. You carelessly blame "the 1%" for being dishonest and unethical and causing most or all of the economic problems we face, yet you would be almost as accurate in blaming "white people" or "Native American women" or "the Jews" for being dishonest and unethical and causing most or all of the economic problems we face. You'd still be many orders of magnitude off. Do you honestly think that "the 1%" are some collective hive mind who have all acted unethically, illegally, and are the perpetuators of cronyism?

Please don't be so indiscriminate when you advocate eating a minority group that you arbitrarily classify as bad.

Frankly you're getting more and more incoherent.

OWS is about Wall Street. Wall Street is a major component of the 1%, and an even larger component of the 0.57%. Yes, there are other components: CEOs are an even larger part of the 1% - but in a real sense CEOs are complicit in what Wall Street has been doing.

So while you keep trying to say that the rich are innocent, you keep failing to actually show any evidence of this.

You're also continuing to try and polarize this discussion by framing the debate in terms of "soak the rich".

I have never advocated confiscation - nor do I do so now.

1) Taxation on those who are 1% is lower than it has been for literally generations
2) The 1% have more wealth and are gaining higher income in terms of overall economic share since just before the Great Depression
3) Concentration of wealth has consistently been shown to add instability to an economy
4) Arguably the concentration of wealth we're seeing is both structural and significantly criminal: structural in terms of significantly reduced taxation, and criminal in terms of literal crimes such as massive fraud by banksters and their minions

So while theoretically the top 1% could all, or even mostly, be Bill Gates type 'innovators', in reality they are not: not all, not even a significant fraction.

I pretty much summarized what you said in context. I guess I must truly not understand where you approach things from, because to me "a bad thing" is "a bad thing." C'est la vie.

I am not conflating anything inappropriately. Government is the collective or coerced political will of some individuals, and nothing more. People interact with each other on many levels, which is why I support the only least-harm principle for political interactions--a republican government (not a Republican government). It is political interaction that is the most potentially dangerous among all the others, and it is responsible for more death and suffering than all the combined economic, familial, tribal, or religious interactions combined. Although I believe I have made myself clear in the distinction between how people interact and what I think is best on the political interaction front, I have no doubt that you will find a way to misinterpret what I've said as is essentially always the case (hence this clarification, and the one after, and the one after...).

Your definition of least harm seems curiously to coincide with your desire for no taxes, or barring that as low taxes as can be achieved.

Unfortunately economic data, history, the present legal system and public opinion show that your views are unsupportable and unsupported.

That's not really true in any sense of how you could mean it. The republic survived a bloody Civil War to address some of the important loose ends left in the Constitution. It was nearly lost at least twice in that time period. It thrived by taking advantage of opportunities.

It is true in every sense.

America prior to World War I was a non-entity in the world stage; the Spanish American war was the first notice that the United States could at the least play in its own backyard by beating up a 3rd rate European power.

And while you are correct in seizing opportunities, at the same time you're discounting the facts. The United States as a nation was larger than any European nation even before the Civil War:

US population in 1850: 50 million
France population in 1850: 36 million
England population in 1850: 27.5 million
Germany population in 1850: 35 million
Spain population in 1850: 15 million

And unlike China and India - which had much larger populations - the US was undergoing the same Industrial Revolution as the above European nations.

The whole 'plucky little United States' meme has been wrong for 150 years and counting.

A republican form of government may indeed have its own problems, but it's still the best one available. You bring up Julius Caesar, but Hitler was given a mandate by democratic election too. It's all water under the bridge though--the best system to maximize liberty is a small, focused republic designed primarily or exclusively to give liberty by law to everyone. There's no shame in advocating such a thing, and there's no reason to doubt that it can't exist for centuries. "A republic, if you can keep it," and all that. There are numerous applicable quotes, but the point is that a small republic is best for maximizing liberty, and constant vigilance by those with political power is required to maintain it.

Your views are as amusing as they are unrealistic.

The reality is that we have a republic: at present our laws and our nation are governed by a select few. And the problems we are seeing today are exactly what you'd expect from a decadent republic: corruption.

Somehow in your mind a small republic will be governed by people who think like you, when in reality the republic will be governed by people who want power, like the ones we have now in the Senate.

Do you understand the point? Representatives now have different mandates than they did prior to the repeal of the democratically-trending 17th Amendment, and thus the balance between state and federal government was shifted ever so slightly into the federal government. Centralized power is a dangerous thing, and trends towards centralizing that power ought to be resisted.

You are again demonstrating that your historical understanding is flawed. The battle between federal power and state's rights existed at the very beginning of the United States. And ever since, it has been going the way of the federal governments.

You think that somehow this tide can be reversed when in reality a full "state's rights" type government is how you end up with a Goldbergian monstrosity like the Holy Roman Empire or 16th century Poland - both entities which held back their populations' economic and political development for literally centuries.

So with your knowledge that only a small portion of "the 1%" are part of the problem, how do you act? Do you boldly advocate policies to de-accumulate everyone's wealth, or just from "the 1%," or do you advocate actual solutions to problems such as enforcing laws against fraud?

What I've advocated has been quite clear.

It is your unwillingness to consider them that is the barrier to your understanding.

Taxation and regulation: it was working post-Depression, let's go back to that policy.

Clearly Reagan's inauguration of "supply side economics" has failed.

We had taxes of 60% on the top marginal income levels in Reagan's day, let's try that for a change (back).

We had Glass-Steagall, let's bring it back.

As for "equitable share of taxes," you have only shown what you want to see. My definition of "equitable share of taxes" would be defined entirely differently and more along the lines of pay-per-use, not pay-per-income.

I've shown data.

Where's yours?

Your round-about insult only insults my intelligence, not as you intended via association with any individuals with groups. A "populist panderer" and "a special interest Judas goat" are not mutually exclusive; in fact they go hand in hand on many occasions. It's called spin. If you don't think Obama's "not one dime" campaign promise was populist pandering, then I'm afraid you're the one in disagreement with what can be said to be a common wisdom on the matter, since it is a textbook example of it.

The more you speak on this subject, the more you demonstrate your ignorance.

Obama speaks one thing, but acts another.

As Dr. Michael Hudson has noted - he is the perfect rentier's politician: he can deliver the population's votes but then enacts what he's promised to his donors.

If you cannot distinguish between rhetoric vs. actions, then clearly you some conceptual mental work to undergo.

[Ghent12]

Re: CHARTS: Here's What The Wall Street Protesters Are So Angry About...

The more you speak on this subject, the more you demonstrate your ignorance.

Obama speaks one thing, but acts another.

As Dr. Michael Hudson has noted - he is the perfect rentier's politician: he can deliver the population's votes but then enacts what he's promised to his donors.

If you cannot distinguish between rhetoric vs. actions, then clearly you some conceptual mental work to undergo.

Ignorance? You keep yourself in ignorance perpetually with your own confirmation bias and your "facts-blinders" which are inane and unimportant in all but the most detailed of discussions. Based upon your insistence of "the facts" being all that matters combined with your downright idiotic method of applying them, not to mention your problems in rhetoric stemming from your insistence upon using the incorrect definitions of words, there's no point in even speaking with you about broad subjects--especially when you ignore the facts!

Obama's actions include his "populist pandering," which is the word you used. If you cannot accept your own words and the facts as they are and not how you wish them to be, then that is a problem for you to solve on your own, not me.

What I've advocated has been quite clear.

It is your unwillingness to consider them that is the barrier to your understanding.

Actually, what you advocate varies wildly from the list you just posted. We are on the same page with regards to actually enforcing laws. But you can go to hell with your tone and all of your nonsense and refusal to acknowledge facts as they actually are. As a start, you can research early American history and find your version of events to be heavily influenced by your own confirmation bias for seemingly the sole purpose of rhetorical points. Things are not as you wish them to be; they are what they are.

[c1ue]

Re: CHARTS: Here's What The Wall Street Protesters Are So Angry About...

Ignorance? You keep yourself in ignorance perpetually with your own confirmation bias and your "facts-blinders" which are inane and unimportant in all but the most detailed of discussions. Based upon your insistence of "the facts" being all that matters combined with your downright idiotic method of applying them, not to mention your problems in rhetoric stemming from your insistence upon using the incorrect definitions of words, there's no point in even speaking with you about broad subjects--especially when you ignore the facts!

Obama's actions include his "populist pandering," which is the word you used. If you cannot accept your own words and the facts as they are and not how you wish them to be, then that is a problem for you to solve on your own, not me.

You say Obama is pandering to the populace, yet where are the WPA jobs?

Where are the increases in direct subsidies to people?

Where are the happy unions?

Where are the ecstatic African Americans, now that an African American is President?

It seems the only happy people these days are banksters.

Clearly the problem is not in the facts, but in your viewing of them.

Actually, what you advocate varies wildly from the list you just posted. We are on the same page with regards to actually enforcing laws. But you can go to hell with your tone and all of your nonsense and refusal to acknowledge facts as they actually are. As a start, you can research early American history and find your version of events to be heavily influenced by your own confirmation bias for seemingly the sole purpose of rhetorical points. Things are not as you wish them to be; they are what they are.

Again and again you spout how it was all so good in the early American times, but failed to actually provide evidence.

And again, I ask that you provide this evidence.

It seems more like you look at all the aspects of the early United States you desire today: small government, freedom due to low technology and zero government interest, no taxes - and yet you seem to also believe that the US can be pre-eminent economically and in the world political stage without taxes or without government to collect it.

The US was a non-entity on the world stage from 1850 to 1918 even as it was a very large, populous, and industrialized power precisely because of its government (or lack thereof).

At least recognize what you will get if what you desire occurs.

And then extend the analysis to consider:

What happens to the US as we know it now when oil goes off the petro-dollar standard? Which is what happens when the US cannot militarily hold up its post Oil Embargo Faustian deal.

What happens when the US dollar drops from being the majority central bank reserve currency to an overall presence more in line with its actual economic output? In 1999, the US dollar was 63 percent of CB reserves; today new reserves are more in line with 35%, and economically the US is under 25% of the world economy by dollar volume, and arguably closer to 20% taking into account positioning vs. the dollar.