The tea baggers (at least the original, non-co-opted ones) have WAY more in common with these folks than they'd like to admit.
It's no different than people dismissing the message to the tea party by calling them radical right wingers and racists. exactly. The fact that some can't, or choose not, to see this is puzzling to me.
This is something both Republicans and Democrats are incredibly wrong on---the war on drugs has to end. However, don't tell that to Republican and right-wing zealots who want to keep filling jails even when the degree to which jails are overcrowded are unconstitutional---and ruled as such by the Supreme Court such as in California where Three Strikes lead to a prisoner suicide every week. I'm pretty sure it's something OWS stands for as well. Way to sympathize.
They don't even care if they are wrong. The War on Drugs is too big to fail. It's basically a government jobs program - something the OWS does stand for.
Wow. yeah, I'm pretty sure the OWS are for the War on Drugs and military budgets because the government is doing them. haha, wow. Make a choice in your flawed image of the protesters. Are they weed-smoking hippies or hard-line WAR ON DRUGGERS. The two don't go together well.
No, I think you are too ignorant to realize what positions people hold, and what is at stake here. While I'm partial to OWS due to some of the demonstrators having very basic knowledge about what they want, I highly doubt people with your position understand very much either. In fact, I would venture a guess that the following statements---Greenspan and the Taylor Rule, "issuer pays", pigovian taxes, rational expectations, and moral hazard draw blanks for you.
My position is that people who wish the government to take their money (and forcibly from others) are guilty for bankrolling the crime and violence the government commits on the citizenry. Asking for more taxes is asking for more people to be imprisoned.
Very long, but interesting article... Revealed – The Capitalist Network that Runs the World 19 October 2011 by Andy Coghlan and Debora MacKenzie AS PROTESTS against financial power sweep the world this week, science may have confirmed the protesters' worst fears. An analysis of the relationships between 43,000 transnational corporations has identified a relatively small group of companies, mainly banks, with disproportionate power over the global economy. The study's assumptions have attracted some criticism, but complex systems analysts contacted by New Scientist say it is a unique effort to untangle control in the global economy. Pushing the analysis further, they say, could help to identify ways of making global capitalism more stable. The idea that a few bankers control a large chunk of the global economy might not seem like news to New York's Occupy Wall Street movement and protesters elsewhere. But the study, by a trio of complex systems theorists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, is the first to go beyond ideology to empirically identify such a network of power. It combines the mathematics long used to model natural systems with comprehensive corporate data to map ownership among the world's transnational corporations (TNCs). "Reality is so complex, we must move away from dogma, whether it's conspiracy theories or free-market," says James Glattfelder. "Our analysis is reality-based." Previous studies have found that a few TNCs own large chunks of the world's economy, but they included only a limited number of companies and omitted indirect ownerships, so could not say how this affected the global economy - whether it made it more or less stable, for instance. The Zurich team can. From Orbis 2007, a database listing 37 million companies and investors worldwide, they pulled out all 43,060 TNCs and the share ownerships linking them. Then they constructed a model of which companies controlled others through shareholding networks, coupled with each company's operating revenues, to map the structure of economic power. The work, to be published in PloS One, revealed a core of 1318 companies with interlocking ownerships (see image). Each of the 1318 had ties to two or more other companies, and on average they were connected to 20. What's more, although they represented 20 per cent of global operating revenues, the 1318 appeared to collectively own through their shares the majority of the world's large blue chip and manufacturing firms - the "real" economy - representing a further 60 per cent of global revenues. When the team further untangled the web of ownership, it found much of it tracked back to a "super-entity" of 147 even more tightly knit companies - all of their ownership was held by other members of the super-entity - that controlled 40 per cent of the total wealth in the network. "In effect, less than 1 per cent of the companies were able to control 40 per cent of the entire network," says Glattfelder. Most were financial institutions. The top 20 included Barclays Bank, JPMorgan Chase & Co, and The Goldman Sachs Group. John Driffill of the University of London, a macroeconomics expert, says the value of the analysis is not just to see if a small number of people controls the global economy, but rather its insights into economic stability. Concentration of power is not good or bad in itself, says the Zurich team, but the core's tight interconnections could be. As the world learned in 2008, such networks are unstable. "If one [company] suffers distress," says Glattfelder, "this propagates." "It's disconcerting to see how connected things really are," agrees George Sugihara of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, a complex systems expert who has advised Deutsche Bank. Yaneer Bar-Yam, head of the New England Complex Systems Institute (NECSI), warns that the analysis assumes ownership equates to control, which is not always true. Most company shares are held by fund managers who may or may not control what the companies they part-own actually do. The impact of this on the system's behaviour, he says, requires more analysis. Crucially, by identifying the architecture of global economic power, the analysis could help make it more stable. By finding the vulnerable aspects of the system, economists can suggest measures to prevent future collapses spreading through the entire economy. Glattfelder says we may need global anti-trust rules, which now exist only at national level, to limit over-connection among TNCs. Bar-Yam says the analysis suggests one possible solution: firms should be taxed for excess interconnectivity to discourage this risk. One thing won't chime with some of the protesters' claims: the super-entity is unlikely to be the intentional result of a conspiracy to rule the world. "Such structures are common in nature," says Sugihara. Newcomers to any network connect preferentially to highly connected members. TNCs buy shares in each other for business reasons, not for world domination. If connectedness clusters, so does wealth, says Dan Braha of NECSI: in similar models, money flows towards the most highly connected members. The Zurich study, says Sugihara, "is strong evidence that simple rules governing TNCs give rise spontaneously to highly connected groups". Or as Braha puts it: "The Occupy Wall Street claim that 1 per cent of people have most of the wealth reflects a logical phase of the self-organising economy." So, the super-entity may not result from conspiracy. The real question, says the Zurich team, is whether it can exert concerted political power. Driffill feels 147 is too many to sustain collusion. Braha suspects they will compete in the market but act together on common interests. Resisting changes to the network structure may be one such common interest. http://www.newscientist.com/article...e-capitalist-network-that-runs-the-world.html
Want to understand why there needs to be a movement to counter corporate power? <table style='font:11px arial; color:#333; background-color:#f5f5f5' cellpadding='0' cellspacing='0' width='512' height='340'><tbody><tr style='background-color:#e5e5e5' valign='middle'><td style='padding:2px 1px 0px 5px;'><a target='_blank' style='color:#333; text-decoration:none; font-weight:bold;' href='http://www.thedailyshow.com'>The Daily Show With Jon Stewart</a></td><td style='padding:2px 5px 0px 5px; text-align:right; font-weight:bold;'>Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c</td></tr><tr style='height:14px;' valign='middle'><td style='padding:2px 1px 0px 5px;' colspan='2'><a target='_blank' style='color:#333; text-decoration:none; font-weight:bold;' href='http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/mon-october-17-2011/ellen-schultz'>Ellen Schultz</a></td></tr><tr style='height:14px; background-color:#353535' valign='middle'><td colspan='2' style='padding:2px 5px 0px 5px; width:512px; overflow:hidden; text-align:right'><a target='_blank' style='color:#96deff; text-decoration:none; font-weight:bold;' href='http://www.thedailyshow.com/'>www.thedailyshow.com</a></td></tr><tr valign='middle'><td style='padding:0px;' colspan='2'><embed style='display:block' src='http://media.mtvnservices.com/mgid:cms:item:comedycentral.com:399859' width='512' height='288' type='application/x-shockwave-flash' wmode='window' allowFullscreen='true' flashvars='autoPlay=false' allowscriptaccess='always' allownetworking='all' bgcolor='#000000'></embed></td></tr><tr style='height:18px;' valign='middle'><td style='padding:0px;' colspan='2'><table style='margin:0px; text-align:center' cellpadding='0' cellspacing='0' width='100%' height='100%'><tr valign='middle'><td style='padding:3px; width:33%;'><a target='_blank' style='font:10px arial; color:#333; text-decoration:none;' href='http://www.thedailyshow.com/full-episodes/'>Daily Show Full Episodes</a></td><td style='padding:3px; width:33%;'><a target='_blank' style='font:10px arial; color:#333; text-decoration:none;' href='http://www.indecisionforever.com/'>Political Humor & Satire Blog</a></td><td style='padding:3px; width:33%;'><a target='_blank' style='font:10px arial; color:#333; text-decoration:none;' href='http://www.facebook.com/thedailyshow'>The Daily Show on Facebook</a></td></tr></table></td></tr></tbody></table>
I saw that and I agreed with it. But the similarities to what happened to our Social Security system are so similar that I was amazed it wasn't addressed. That's the problem right now. Both sides have major issues that need to be addressed. Quit playing the blame game and join together to get rid of all the BS that is going on right now.
"Tax me!" When Baez Defied the IRS In 1964, the folksinger began her 10 year anti-war tax protest By Nancy Ramsey | Apr 12, 1991 http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,313918,00.html When T.S. Eliot wrote that April is the cruelest month, he wasn't talking about tax season. But ever since 1913, when the U.S. income tax was established, citizens have been filing returns that have not pleased the IRS. In the early '60s especially, antiwar activists sometimes refused to pay all of their taxes, and the most public pro-tester of all was folksinger Joan Baez. In mid-April 1964, Baez wrote to the feds saying that she refused to pay 60 percent of her taxes — the portion of the federal budget that was going to the Defense Department. ''Weapons and wars have murdered, burned, distorted, crippled, and caused endless varieties of pain to men, women, and children for too long,'' she declared. Her action shouldn't have come as a surprise: A bit earlier she had refused to sing ''The Star-Spangled Ban-ner'' at a White House appearance and instead sang her then lover Bob Dylan's ''The Times They Are A-Changin'.'' The times may have been a-changing, but the IRS was not. It responded to the 23-year-old Quaker's protest by slapping a $50,000-plus lien on her Monterey, Calif., house. And, unlike the military, which let some draft resisters claim the status of conscientious objector, the IRS offered no such option for tax protesters. ''If there were a good-faith belief that exempted you from paying taxes, we'd have 100 million converts,'' says IRS spokes-man Don Roberts. For the next 10 years, Baez refused to pay a portion of her taxes. ''Sometimes a representative from the IRS would appear at my concert venue and take cash from the register before it even reached the promoter,'' she wrote in her autobiography, And a Voice to Sing With. ''I was accused of being impractical, because, of course, the government got my money plus fines.'' Asked today if she would do it again, Baez declined to comment. But her spokeswoman assured Entertainment Weekly that Baez does pay her taxes — just like the rest of us.
I have little sympathy for people like you, because if we had it your way our nation would have never been as great as it has been, and would still basically be a third world nation now. Taxes made possible The Hoover Dam, Rural electrification, our nation's interstate highway system, postal delivery, etc. The list goes on and on. Without those things Our nation would be third rate, third world, and in a different technological age than we are today. Our taxes go towards a lot of things I disagree with, but I understand that an election process can help change that. I also understand that without taxes our whole nation would be worse off.
Worse than being the world's leading jailer? The horror. I have little sympathy for people like you. People like Joan Baez show true courage, those who cry "tax me!" are weak, stupid and immoral.
Yes, being a third world nation when it could have been avoided with some taxation is worse than being the world's leading jailer. Being a third world nation reduces the life expectancy, and health of an entire nation, greater infant mortality, poverty, etc. If somehow the suffering of all those innocents is worse to you than being the world's leading jailer, then I don't think you have the sense of morality you are trying to portray.
