[Talbain]

I definitely agree that this bill needs to die in legislation. It's dangerous. Apologies for my mistakes in wording.
_________________

[Talbain]

What exactly is being cut in that 2.4 trillion? Doesn't seem clear in the article.

edit: Ah, here it is.

[Talbain]

Well, Texas is coming close to having mandatory water rationing. The lakes are getting awfully close to desertification. There have been a lot of wildfires, both man-made and from spontaneous combustion.
_________________

[Talbain]

[Talbain]

Big media corporations wouldn't laud such releases of information. While I worry for the whistleblowers' safety, it is a sad state of affairs that they must worry so.
_________________

[Talbain]

http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/wikileaks-idf-uses-drones-to-assassinate-gaza-militants-1.382269

IDF drones used to assassinate militants, also kills 16 civilians praying in a nearby mosque.
_________________

[Talbain]

[Talbain]

[Talbain]

[Talbain]

It's always easier to look at the group that's not challenging your hegemony.
It's also beginning to look more and more like capitalism itself is failing (which is inevitable).
_________________

[Talbain]

Sure, but corporatism is just a result of capitalism (or vice-versa, it's kinda hard to say). Either way, they're both systems built to fail.
_________________

[Talbain]

I studied the area of British history where capitalism first became a term outside of mercantilism. Even in its "uncorrupted" form, capitalism results in a concentration of wealth in the hands of very few. The reason for this is mostly because monied interests will always have an influence on the government, even at the government's expense. The boom and bust economies of then were way worse than what we have now, with mass starvation and many proxy wars as a result, but the process was effectively the same. Having read so much of that period of history, I am convinced that capitalism is itself the problem. It creates a system whereby what is rewarded is the creation of bubbles, where extreme wealth and extreme poverty concentrate (and while those individuals living in-between poor and wealthy have periods of relative stability, eventually the wealth is concentrated in the hands of the few). The middle class was largely the result of government regulation, which itself was mostly a result of capitalistic businesses killing off the country's workforce (70 hour work weeks, 12 hour shifts in cramped areas caused mass die-offs and the lack of spacing in certain industrial towns raised infant mortality rates exponentially until the government regulated the actions of these businesses--many people, particularly women, received no pay or far less pay than men, though women often worked in far harsher conditions, particularly in textile factories).

I find Investopedia's way of talking about bubbles particularly amusing.
"A bubble is a type of investing phenomenon that demonstrates the frailty of some facets of human emotion."
Damn humans, and their "human emotion."

Below is not a great definition of what happened, since it's skewed and shortened quite a bit, but it's good to just glaze over. Anyway, here's the South Sea Company crash, in an extraordinarily abbreviated form.
http://www.investopedia.com/features/crashes/crashes3.asp#axzz1Zx4pfYHa
_________________

[Talbain]

I suppose we'll agree to disagree then. In every case which I've read of capitalism influencing markets or governments, it is the central principle that is the problem. One cannot separate out, however hard one may try, the government and the market. They are inevitably entwined, and any illusions to the contrary are just that. Thus, to fix the problem, a new, better system is necessary to establish a more just way of systemically structuring capital distribution. I'd personally be interested in seeing a democratization of business, and though I've some thoughts on this, they probably aren't to a level where something could be enacted and universally followed.
_________________

[Talbain]