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Ricardo, you and SteveC are giving me a fucking headache.
All of this reading and reinterpretation of political positions and world views is for pussies anyway.
We need a binary algorithm for this stuff. So please provide something similar to Professors Syd's world view generator if you want me to listen to you.
NOT investment THEN socialism.
Investment THEN capitalism.
Soclalism == bad.
NOT socialism == good.
See how easy that is.
He probably can get you something for the headaches and at least you can get a good burger!
[QUOTE=Sidney]China is a dictatorship. AR is a wanna be K dictatoship. USA is turning hard left. France? Sweden? No clue? North Korea is a dictatorship.---- Two right, two wrong, and 3 ok. Son, you need more homework, less chica time, and fewer beer nights with the boys! I may recommend that you be expelled from Harvard![/QUOTE]Sidney, all kidding aside, do your REAAAAALY believe Obama is a socialist?
He is a politician and has already shown himself, despite the rhetoric, to be a tool of big business. If by "socialist" you mean proponent of a corporate welfare state, then I agree with you 100%.
When the US budget runs into TRILLION dollar deficits, it generally isn't because the money is going to welfare moms, NEA grants, and god forbid, education and healthcare. It is going to Wall Street, the nebulous Military Industrial Complex, and probably in the next year or so, the healthcare industry. (We can start another thread on California's budget woes and the prison industrial complex if you want.
That's how I see it. I would rather it go to NEA grants, education, and, god forbid, health care. If that is liberal to you, then yes, I am a flaming pinko commie who was brainwashed from living in SF for 11 years. My red state relatives already think that, one more ain't gonna hurt.
My point is, the govt is going to spend the money anyway, why can't it be for something less destructive and more humane?
I wonder who is working at Cocodrilo tonight.
On your economic short-hand profiles, I won't go country-by-country other than to the China conundrum.
When I was in Beijing last year, on a deal that my partners backed out of, I saw a much different country from the one I knew from prior trips in mid-1970s and late 1980s.
You are right, it is not socialist, nor is it communist, nor is it capitalist. In economic terms it a unique, new hybrid. In political terms it is a corrupt dictatorship with a bizarre mix of private and public investment. In regard to business ethics they could be Argentines.
Still, if I were you though, I wouldn't be so quick to bet against them. Right now with their enormous foreign reserves they offer the best hope available to restart global growth. Ironic isn't it, the best hope for capitalism is the land of Mao!
(As an aside, you know dictatorships can be capitalist, as long as the means of production are left in private hands.
On the Obama front, I regret to inform you that one thing we studied, when I worked on the Watergate Committee back in 1973 and 74, was what were legitimate grounds for impeachment. Sorry, but turning hard left is not an impeachable offense, neither is turning hard right (or Cheney would have been done in) and thankfully neither is getting your dick sucked.
Looking back to that time, if I had only known, the country could have saved lots of time and money, if I had sent you the goods on Tricky Dick and convinced you to publically "demand" his resignation or impeachment. He would have slinked back to Yorba Linda pronto.
Now watch your back though, my sources tell me when Rahm Emanuel heard you might get into the "demand" business over his boss, he contacted some ex-Blackwater guys down here - hanging with CFK - to keep an eye on you!
Be cautious but try not to get any more paranoid!
Extended the embargo on Cuba for another year.
Sidney to provide details of further socialist measures.
My buddy don't kid yourself. My support for Obama is no more a function of a dysfunctional brain than your fear of him is. I do fear the US is fucked, but not due to the smart guy who is trying to fix it before it falls off the edge.
The greatest danger isn't liberalism run amuck, The fall of the US will more likely come as a result of corporatism that no longer serves its shareholders and out-of-control financial behemoths. The Masters of the Universe still play their games that they don't even understand with manipulations and machinations that have turned the markets into anything but credible guides to the functioning of the real economy.
Wall Street is a casino and like ther counterparts in Macau and Vegas and the old Mafia captains, the casino management skims huge personal profits from the house take every day, because no one can really stop them.
You are too smart not to recognize a scam when you see one.
On the unholy trio, W, Tricky Dick and Dickhead Cheney, I said turning hard right was specifically NOT an impeachable offense (same as turning hard left) so Bush and Cheney skate.
Nixon was a fucking law breaker plain and simple - as confessed to in open court by his co-conspirators and detailed (even with the missing 18 minutes) in verbatim tapes of him talking like the Don in the Oval Office.
Do you think suborning perjury, laundering cash to be funneled to accused felons in jail to buy silence, ordering breaking and entering into the offices of your political opponents and on and on were not crimes?
If you do, you shouldn't oppose opening up half the jails in the US letting out anyone who did less than the Dickster. With the money we save we can pay for insurance for illegal immigrants. At least they didn't cross the border in a White House limo!
If you ever get in legal trouble for god's sake don't act as your own lawyer!
[QUOTE=Ricardo]Taft after serving as President went on to become the Cheif Justice of the Supreme Court. At 72 years old, he died of old age - not at the hand of an assassin.
John Wilkes Booth's murder of Lincoln had zilch to do with taxes.
Booth and his co-conspirators hatched a plan to kill Lincoln, VP Johnson, and Secretary of State Seward to help the Confederacy. Although Lee had already surrendered to the North, Booth and his crew refused to accept that the war was over. [/QUOTE]True, my mistake, I don't know how but my mind mixed the names Taft and Garfield. Some days I get these little gizmos in my head.
About Abe's death, well I was trying to make it look like a joke, you know instead of J. W. Booth, an angry taxpayer, but obviously it didn't work. Thanks for the comment anyway. Maybe next time and after a humor refreshing course I will be able to make a real joke about history. Cheers!
Don't you realize several of our pals who post see nothing to joke about when its comes to taxes!
To me its only money where I pay and get fucked - same as any monger!
I get mixed up about our Presidents too, but remembered Taft was so fat a would be assassin would have been worried if he tried anything up-close-and -personal, the chief exec's body might fall and crush him!
[QUOTE=Sidney]C's September sales esimated to decline 30%! Clunkers is over, they mfg no replacement inventory, and basically Fiat is ''in over their head''
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Sid told you so! Fiat--what a joke![/QUOTE]A few years ago, a friend on mine's father went to his doctor for a routine check up. When his tests came back, his doctor called him to return to the hospital the next day. When they met, the doctor gave him the bad news that cancer had been found. It is a story told thousands of time a week across America.
As you can imagine, he and his family were both worried and scared. My friend's mother was beside herself to the point she needed to be put on medication for anxiety for a while. Fortunately, as a former construction worker in a union company, he had excellent insurance and was able to be scheduled for emergency surgery two days later.
After the surgery was completed the doctors gave the family a mixed report – again a common outcome. They were hopeful they had caught and removed all of the cancerous cells, but they set up an aggressive regimen of radiation and chemotherapy to try to assure elimination of the cancer threat and at a minimum have it go into remission. They could provide no definitive timeline or any prognosis of a defined outcome.
Cancer, its causes and treatments, can be looked on as a metaphor for the current global economic crisis. As can the manner in which my friend's mother dealt with a horrible time in her life.
At various times, the sad and angry woman attacked the doctors as quacks who were using medical voodoo to treat her husband and claimed that they wanted him to stay sick so they could make more money treating him. He wanted to sue them for malpractice. All of this because the surgery, radiation and chemotherapy didn't cure him fast enough in her eyes. Her emotions were understandable, if not her rationality.
My friend's mother's thoughts and behavior are exactly akin to the critics - like Sidney - of President Obama's treatment of the economic crisis. It hasn't worked fast enough, therefore he is a quack and it will never work. At least my friend's mother had good reason for her purely emotional mind-set.
For many years, a threatening condition went undetected in the global economy. Finally, last fall, that condition reached a critical mass and metastasized to where it began to attack critical financial and economic organs with potentially catastrophic implications for the economic corpus as a whole.
As the hidden bubble began to burst, the deterioration in the global housing market, became clear for all to see. Immediately, and in some haste, radical surgery was performed when the US Treasury and the Fed let Lehman Brothers fail. Soon a number of important, but not essential organs (AIG, et al. Were put under the knife.
As the radical surgery was being performed, a future regimen of economic radiation treatments (in the form of renewed regulation of the markets) was begun. It was accompanied by aggressive economic chemotherapy (in the form of various forms of capital infusions into the financial system and into the base economy) Because of the quick, unorthodox and aggressive intervention, the economy was saved from the possibility of flat-lining.
Treatment has been underway for very brief period. Measured both by the length of time the hidden disease had been building and the severity and breadth of the damage that had been done to essential organs and the integral health of the global economy, treatment is obviously in its early stages and should be judged accordingly and additional treatment may be required.
Just like in a case of advanced cancer, at such an early stage, despite some encouraging signs, whether and when full economic health is restored cannot be answered with confidence as yet.
Unfortunately, critics of the President are attacking him with a venom that is borderline unhinged.
Without the excuse my friend's mother had of fear for the survival of her life partner, from marginally serious critics like John McCain to the psychotics like Rush, Sean and Glenn, relying solely on ideology, politics, ignorance, guilt stemming from silent awareness of who really spread the cancer and / or mean-spirited resentment, they are driving a dangerous public debate.
Too bad Sid has bought into it!
My friend's father died after nine months of a valiant fight. His mother finally resigned herself to the reality that his doctors did their best in a losing war. Let's hope our economy has a better fate, but I doubt reality will ever be accepted and acknowledged by the whack jobs.