The end result of the conservative revolution: Our Banana Republic

AssHatZombie said:
You like making other people poor as a profit center, don't you? That is what is happening in america. Globalization is one way money suck of wealth out of our society.
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You are obviously free not to answer but may I ask what industry you work in?
 
cawacko said:
You are obviously free not to answer but may I ask what industry you work in?
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No you may not.

Are you saying corporations dont profit from putting americans out of work, while still charging them full retail? and draining the nation based on the savings afforded to them by overseas slave labor?
 
cawacko said:
I'll bump this for Bfgrn because I am curious.
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The first person I heard put it in those terms was Robert F. Kennedy Jr. When you start to understand corporate cost externalization, you come to realize that the people who always preach 'free market' and ignore that rule are the real socialists. But to them socialism is never where the big guy steals from the little guy. And unfortunately, they don't usually object to it.

It particularly applies to environmental issue and the commons or public trust and it is easiest to understand because it manifests in physical harm to human beings.

Here's an excerpt from Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Speech delivered at the Sierra Summit 2005 San Francisco, California.

I remember when my father was fighting strip mining back in the ‘60’s, a conversation I had with him at the dinner table where he said they are not only destroying the environment but they are permanently impoverishing these communities because there is no way that you can generate an economy from the moonscapes that they leave behind and they’re doing it so that they can break the unions and he was right. In 1968 when he told me that there were 114,000 unionized mine workers taking mines out of tunnels in West Virginia.

Today there are only 11,000 miners left in the state and almost none of them are unionized because the strip industry isn’t. Using these giant machines and 25 tons of dynamite that they explode in West Virginia every day, a Hiroshima bomb every week. They are blowing the tops off the mountains and then they take these giant machines and they scrape the rubble and debris into the adjacent river valley.

Well, it’s all illegal.

You cannot dump rock and debris and rubble into a waterway in the United States of America without a Clean Water Act permit. So Joe Lovitz sued them and he won in front of a great crusty old West Virginia judge, Judge Charles Hayden who recently died. Charles Hayden said the same thing I said, he said, "It’s all illegal, all of it" and he enjoined all mountain top mining.

Two days from when we got that decision, Peabody Coal and Massey Coal who had given millions of dollars to this White House met in the White House and the White House rewrote one word of the Clean Water Act. The definition of the word fill that changed 30 years of statutory interpretation to make it legal today as it is in every state in the United States to dump rock, debris, rubble, construction debris, garbage, any kind of solid waste into any water way in this country without a Clean Water Act permit. All you need is a rubber stamp permit from the Corps of Engineers that in many cases you can get through the mail. It has none of the safeguards that the Clean Water Act provides.

And this is what we’re fighting today, this is not just a battle to save the environment. This is the subversion of our democracy.

The industry and the great big polluters and their indentured servants and our political process have done a great job and their PR firms and their faulty [biastitutes] and all these think tanks on Capitol Hill, have done a great job over the past couple of decades of marginalizing the environmental movement, of marginalizing us as radicals, as tree huggers, as I heard the other day, pagans who worship trees and sacrifice people.

But there is nothing radical about the idea of clean air and clean water for our children. As I said before, we’re not protecting the environment for the sake of the fishes and the birds and the trees. We’re protecting it for our own sake because it’s the infrastructure of our communities and because it enriches us.

If you talk to these people on Capitol Hill who are promoting these kind of changes and ask them, "Why are you doing this?" What they invariably say is, "Well, the time has come in our nation’s history where we have to choose now between economic prosperity on the one hand and environmental protection on the other."

And that is a false choice. In 100 percent of the situations, good environmental policy is identical to good economic policy [applause]. If we want to measure our economy and this is how we ought to be measuring it, based upon it loses jobs and the dignity of jobs over the generations, over the long term and how it preserves the value of the assets of our communities.

If on the other hand, we want to do what they’ve been urging us to do on Capitol Hill which is to treat the planet as if were a business in liquidation, convert our natural resource to cash as quickly as possible, have a few years of pollution based prosperity, we can generate an instantaneous cash flow and the illusion of a prosperous economy but our children are going to pay for our joy ride.

They’re going to pay for it with the muted landscapes, poor health, huge clean up costs that are going to amplify over time and that they will never, ever be able to pay.

Environmental injury is deficit spending. It’s a way of loading the cost of our generation’s prosperity on to the backs of our children [applause].

One of the things I’ve done over the past seven, eight years, since 1994, since this whole movement, the anti-environmental movement got a foothold, a beach head in Congress, is to constantly go around and confront this argument that an investment in our environment is a diminishment of our nation’s wealth. It doesn’t diminish our wealth, it’s an investment in infrastructure, the same as investing in telecommunications and road construction. It’s an investment we have to make if we’re going to insure the economic vitality of our generation and the next generation. I want to say this, there is no stronger advocate for free market capitalism than myself.

I believe that the free market is the most efficient and democratic way to distribute the goods of the land and that the best thing that could happen to the environment is if we had true free market capitalism in this country because the free market promotes efficiency and efficiency means the elimination of waste and pollution of course is waste. The free market also would encourage us to properly value our natural resources and it’s the under valuation of those resources that causes us to use them wastefully. But in a true free market economy you can’t make yourself rich without making your neighbors rich and without enriching your community.

But what polluters do is they make themselves rich by making everybody else poor. They raise standards of living for themselves by lowering quality of life for everybody else and they do that by evading the discipline of the free market.

You show me a polluter; I’ll show you a subsidiary. I’ll show you a fat cat using political clout to escape the discipline of the free market. And force the public to pay his production costs. That’s what all pollution is, it’s always a subsidy, it’s always a guy trying to cheat the free market.

Corporations are externalizing machines. They’re constantly figuring out ways to get somebody else to pay their costs of production, that’s their nature. One of the best ways to do that and the most common way for a polluter is through pollution. When those coal burning power plants put mercury into the atmosphere that comes down from the Ohio Valley and it comes down on my state New York, I buy a fishing license for $30 every year but I can’t go fishing and eat the fish anymore because they stole the fish from me.

They liquidated a pubic asset, my asset. The rule is the commons are owned by all of us. They’re not owned by the governor or the legislator or the coal companies and the utility. Everybody has a right to use them.

Nobody has a right to use them. Nobody has a right to use them in a way that will diminish or injure their use and enjoyment by others. But they’ve stolen that entire resource from the people of New York State.

When they put the acid rain in the air, it destroys our forest and it destroys the lakes that we use for recreation or outfitting or tourism or wealth generation. When they put the mercy - the mercury poisons our children’s brains and that imposes a clause on us. The ozone in particular has caused a million asthma attacks a year, kills 18,000 people, hundreds of thousands lost work day.

All of those impacts, impose costs on the rest of us. that should in a true free market economy be reflected in the price of that company’s product when it makes it to the market place.

What those companies and all polluters do is they use political clout to escape the discipline in the free market and force the public to pay their costs. All of the federal environmental laws, everyone of the 28 major environmental laws, all of them were designed to restore free market capitalism in America by forcing actors in the market place to play the true cost of bringing their product to market. What we do with the Riverkeepers - we have 147 licensed Riverkeepers now and each one has a patrol boat, each one is a full time paid river keeper and each one agrees to sue polluters.

What we do and we don’t even consider ourselves environmentalists any more. We’re free marketers.

We go out into the market place, we catch the cheaters, the polluters, and we say to them, "We’re going to force you to internalize your costs the same way that you internalize your profits because as long as somebody is cheating the free market, none of us get the advantages of the efficiency and the democracy and the prosperity that the free market otherwise promises our country.

What we have to understand as a nation is that there is a huge difference between free market capitalism which democratizes a country, which makes us more prosperous and efficient and the kind of corporate cloning capitalism which has been embraced by this White House which is as antithetical to democracy, to prosperity and efficiency in America as it is in Nigeria [applause].

There is nothing wrong with corporations. Corporations are a good thing. They encourage us to take risks, they maximize wealth, they create jobs. I own a corporation.

They’re a great thing but they should not be running our government.

The reason for that is they don’t have the same aspirations for America that you and I do.

A corporation does not want democracy. It does not want free markets, it wants profits and the best way for them to get profits is to use our campaign finance system which is just a system of legalized bribery to get their stakes, their hooks into a public official and then use that public official to dismantle the market place to give them a competitive advantage and then to privatize the common, to steal the commonwealth, to liquidate public assets for cash, to plunder, to steal from the rest of us. That’s why. From the beginning of our national history our most visionary political leaders.

And that doesn’t mean corporations are a bad thing. It just means they’re amoral and we have to recognize that and not let them into the political process.

Let them do their thing but they should not be participating in our political process because a corporation cannot do something genuinely philanthropic.

Its against the law in this country because their shareholders can sue them for wasting corporate resources. They cannot legally do anything that will not increase their profit margins and that’s the way the law works and we have to recognize that and understand that they are toxic for the political process and they have to be fenced off and kept out of the political process.

This is why throughout our history our most visionary political leaders republican and democrat have been warning the American public against the domination by corporate power.

Teddy Roosevelt and again, this White House has done a great job of persuading a gullible press and the American public that the big threat to American democracy is big government. Well, yeah, big government is a threat ultimately but it is dwarfed by the threat of excessive corporate power and the corrosive impact that has on our democracy. And you know, as I said, you look at all the great political leaders in this country and the central theme is that we have to be cautious about, we have to avoid the domination of our government by corporate power.

Teddy Roosevelt, a Republican, said that America would never be destroyed by a foreign power but he warned that our political institutions, our democratic institutions would be subverted by malefactors of great wealth who would erode them from within. Dwight Eisenhower, another republican in his most famous speech ever warned America against the domination by the military industrial complex.

Abraham Lincoln, the greatest Republican in our history, said during the height of the Civil War "I have the South in front of me and I have the bankers behind me. And for my country I fear the bankers more."

Franklin Roosevelt said during World War II that the domination of government by corporate power is "the essence of Fascism" and Benito Mussolini who had an insider’s view of that process said the same thing. Essentially he said that - he complained that Fascism should not be called Fascism. It should be called corporatism because it was the merger of state of corporate power.

And we what we have to understand as Americans is that the domination of business by government is called Communism.

The domination of government by business is called Fascism.

And what our job is is to walk that narrow trail in between which is free market capitalism and democracy. And keep big government at bay with our right hand and corporate power at bay with our left.
 
Bfgrn said:
The first person I heard put it in those terms was Robert F. Kennedy Jr. When you start to understand corporate cost externalization, you come to realize that the people who always preach 'free market' and ignore that rule are the real socialists. But to them socialism is never where the big guy steals from the little guy. And unfortunately, they don't usually object to it.

It particularly applies to environmental issue and the commons or public trust and it is easiest to understand because it manifests in physical harm to human beings.

.
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What about the entrepreneurial example I gave? Because there are far more entrepreneurs and small businesses than large corporations in the U.S.?
 
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cawacko said:
What about the entrepreneurial example I gave? Because there are far more entrepreneurs and small businesses than large corporations in the U.S.?
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So you are not interested in understanding it or learning more about it, just where I got it?
 
Bfgrn said:
So you are not interested in understanding it or learning more about it, just where I got it?
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Not what I said. I'm trying to understand it because I don't. If an entrepreneur creates a new product/service that is better than something existing and thus the sales of the existing product/service drop is that not a free market then because someone is getting economically hurt?
 
cawacko said:
Not what I said. I'm trying to understand it because I don't. If an entrepreneur creates a new product/service that is better than something existing and thus the sales of the existing product/service drop is that not a free market then because someone is getting economically hurt?
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That's totally different. That is healthy competition. The business that is losing market share has ways of turning that around.

Read the excerpt of RFK Jr's speech I posted, I think you will have a very clear understanding of what it means by the end.

You can also use the link to read the whole speech. It is excellent.
 
Bottom Line: Using slave labor to cut labor costs isn't innovation.

Its a race to the bottom will only eventually eliminate freedom from the globe.
 
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