Rod

A lot of people do still.

So are you saying they are not the majority at the moment?

Again are their not the majority at the moment?

The entire system as it is, is not a free market. It is all manipulated by Wall Street. Futures markets are merely a way for a few to strip from the majority and this is not free. Sounds like it though.

I stand corrected two it is. The question would be, How well stocked is Joe's Stock?

Name them?



I cannot say it is valid as long as it is inflated and manipulated. I do not agree with manipulation of values. I already address this in another post. Free is not free when there is not regulations that determine if the other markets in other nations are not treating their people as equally well as American companies are legally obligated to treat there employees.

Then again we do not take out someone and shoot them when they have neglected to do their job properly. Such as has recently been reported in China.

Most American couples do not have litters these days. Maybe these third world countries need a lesson on birth control. Wait that would be infringing on their Human Rights.

Okay back to reality. It is not a perfect system it needs work and not by the few who have effectively stripped the people of their cash in order to give payoff and perks to the politicians.

Corporations should never have been given a higher status above and beyond that of an individual citizen. This has been done and we see the results as the Corporates use the tax breaks and creatively saved in taxes to pay for ringers in public offices or the perks public officials recieving.



It appeared, am I in error?

forester814

I give you credit for admitting to it.

But I imagine you must be very angry, as a person of faith, for the way Bush used and abused your trust.

Rod

I suppose you could imagine anything Forester.

forester814

I was inviting you to comment on my imagining, Rod.
I don't care if I am right or wrong... just trying to get your view.

Rod

Thank you Forester I declined.

forester814

As you wish.

Part of why I come here is to try to understand how people who are different than me think and view the world.
I thought I saw an opportunity here.

Katczinsky

That's unfortunate.

A majority and 'control' are two way different things. Even a true ideological majority is doubtful at least in the Senate.

If the Democrats had true control, then they would have a two-thirds, not simple majority. Not to mention they would need an 'ideological majority', and control over themselves.

The 'ideal' of a free-market as such is an impossibility under current material conditions. The moment you reach it, the moment it is negated by its natural progression of monopolization, acquisition, and infinite expansion. When I refer to the 'free market', and capitalism, I am referring to its nature.

A total lack of manipulation is an impossibility. A lack of regulation and oversight is the problem. The tyranny of market forces can't regulate itself when its very telos is infinite expansion. If you think corporatism and the mixed economy is bad, then just wait until all regulations are repealed and a laissez-faire is realized through the dawn of the second guilded age. The first one, and the Great Depression, necessitated regulation.

Or...as has been recently reported in Coke plants in Bolivia. Just to name one of many.

Do you support China's one-child policy?

It's far from a perfect system; it's a rotten system. The systemic problems are just that, systemic. There needs to be an opposition to the existing political and social order, not just faces. Anything other than that is a vote of confidence in the system that exploits.

Giving the individual a higher status over corporations is a Marxist concept. It's the affirmation of the ability of the individual to fully realize itself. A capitalist concept would be to affirm the supremacy status of the corporation by an ideology that 'what is good for most corporations is, ultimately, what is good for the individual'.

Americans are slowly realizing the ultimate err in trickle-down theory (which in itself is just an utterance of free-market capitalism). When you give money to the ruling class, they don't use it to eventually better the living standards of the average worker, but to further expand and solidify their control over society. Hell, I even admit that many CEO's and executives probably want to see the betterment of a general living standard, but the problem is systemic and it doesn't happen that way. Even the capitalists are slaves to market forces. Under the free market, no one's really free.

Although Obama might not necessarily be the right direction, McCain is the wrong one. If I do indeed cast a vote for Obama, it will be strategic against McCain.

__________________
"If you want to achieve peace of mind and happiness, then have faith; if you want to be a disciple of truth, then search" -- Friedrich Nietzsche

Economic Left/Right: -9.50
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -6.72

Rod

I do agree that is the nature of flesh beings that merely think of the flesh/world.

I cannot say though all corporations have tunnel vision of profits only. Although the ones that do are the ones now holding the majority of the control.



If all regulations are repealed I would say it will be a mess.

Then again maybe that is when the people will get off of their rearends and start looking out for one another. It is a case of if my personal property rights are invalid so are yours. If I have no freedom to enjoy the work of my own hands then neither do you.


Could happen here in time of people keep insisting on the government to insure all of their personal needs and dictate how people should live their personal lives. It like taxing smokers to insure that other peoples children have medical coverage. In the depression era it was alcohol beverages that resulted in backyard stills, gangsters and revenuers.



It is not my policy.



Yet it is the people who are protecting the system for they think they protect themselves in it.

Yet people will not take the initiative to support themselves in order to make that change. they play into slavery of their own free will.



I have not study Marxist so I would have no clue. I do know that when you give a corporation higher status than an individual the CEO's and employees of that corporation can conspire very easily to steal private property and privately held businesses as I am evidence of that. As a privately held corporation I had no right to even defend my own company that was soley owned by me according to the judiciary. The corporation was allowed to use their paper assuming my name and make a claim that I did not agree too at any time. Therefore essentially stealing my identy with full court aproval. Now if that is not communism to the highest degree I don't know what is. Communist claim to have the interest of the whole when in fact they have merely created a place for the Elitist. Communist use the power to increase their own power and assume they are better than and above the average citizen or even the shareholders of the society.

A corporation is rule by a few. Under the curerent laws if they have no concious those few can use the power of many to crush private enterprise (communist activity). The place we have in today's society is stockholders have no say in what the corporate leaders lead them into. The financial crisis is a good example of this among many others.

I think it is more of an emperlist concept of kings and queens in corporate positions without regulation. Again communism.

A capitilist concept is I have one product you have another poroduct. I trade you my product/products for your product/products of the same value or my labor for your labors, yet it is converted into credits called dollar bils.

When corporations have control over vast capital assets of a majority they again have a few determining the price of products made from thin air/concepts without anything more than paper. Not sure what you can call that but it is not capitalism.

What you have today is insurance companies, banks, marketers basically creating a false market that only exist on paper. No beans, eggs and chickens per say.
It is more like Communism that a majority has sold themselves too.


People don't eat paper. They eat food. What you have is a bunch of paper pushers sucking up the mainstay of society with insurance, paper, money-changing, false promises and they are calling it capitalism (wiki) and free market (wiki) all the while paying themselves a small fortune for their efforts. It is again not free market when the stockholders or people owning the society are not given full free choice.

When you have marketers that are allowed to raise the prices by driving certain markets it cannot be considered free.

When farmers are supported with tax dollars and Pork is spent through legislation it is not a free market. It is false.

When people have created a situation where a very few rule such as it is today everyone is ruled as slaves. It is obvious that giants at the moment rule the land. Yet this is what everyone has wanted. Just as a majority called for the US to go to War. They cried for it they got it.

As far as being truly "free", in the world there are these limitations so people need to get together and decide what is best for all concerned because they are all in it together. My sewer runs South so when you live South of where I live you may want to hope I processed the sewage properly. If not your water will be polluted too. Same goes for any pollution coming from any corporate or cities entities along the way.

I think your strategic move is in error. Yet this is a Democracy and you do have that right.

Rod

Since I did in fact support and vote for President Bush if I had anything personally against President Bush, I would personally attempt to inform him of this first prior to making a public post about the matter.

So in that it is not something I am willing to discuss with you or another at the moment.

As far as anyone is concerned that uses flesh as their guide the Word of God says what will be there fate.
2 Peter - Chapter 2:10

Let God be the judge.

Katczinsky

The directive of a corporation is to deliver profits to its shareholders. Unless it is a non-profit organization, by definition, the natural end of a free-enterprise is expansion, monopolization, and the accumulation of capital. It doesn't matter what the CEO's think, it is the nature of the corporate entity.

I would say that you hit an interesting point. However, I would say that it is the nature of capitalism (vis-a-vis private property) to exploit the worker and to alienate him from the product of his labor. Regulation or no regulation, this will not change so long as we continue to operate within the capitalistic production relations.

It seems that in American society, the government is mostly an institution created to protect such private property, but following the second industrial revolution and the New Deal, there entered in a different kind of regulation that attempts to protect certain 'limitations of reasonableness' that in effect protects the system itself. That is, without a regulatory effort at keeping certain working conditions (e.g. wages, health care) at reasonable level, the nature of the free market is such that it will self-destruct. It's goal is to extract as much surplus-value (product of labor alienated from the worker) as possible and to therefore exploit labor power to the greatest possible extent. It will lessen costs of production as much as possible whilst reducing the worker to the slavery of a subsistence wage as was seen in the gilded age.

The intervention into today's market crisis is just an extension of this mechanism that the state's function is to bail out the system. An opposition to state regulations, while being opposed to it's function of a protector of the system, is inevitably an opposition to these reasonable living standards. Therefore, in the end, I'm not exactly sure that the end of regulation will meet with the flourishing of personal property as you suggest. I think it will only intensify inequality.

I'm not sure I see your point. Coca-Cola and other American-based transnational corporations are allowed to murder, intimidate, and assassinate with right-wing paramilitaries precisely because the rights of the people there are not represented by the government: a 'pro-American' government that is in favor of the free-market approach to American neo-liberal globalization.

Of course, places like Columbia are the freedom-loving countries while countries that decided they didn't like this economic model of exploitation like Venezuela and Cuba are deemed 'totalitarian'.

It's interesting to hear things like that because they always ultimately come from a bourgeois perspective. Of course Chavez is a dictator: he wants to fight the American bourgeoisie's freedom to exploit and coerce.

Not entirely sure what you meant (at least in the context of a response to my comment). I would say that I agree, however, if I have you right. There are a lot of people that have become so familiar with the system that they are dependent upon it. They defend the system because, believing that they are free, they lack the very language to define their own unfreedom.

Indeed. Under slavery there were slaves that defended their condition.


While I do not know your particular case and am therefore unable to directly address it, I would like to point out a couple of things. First, you state that you have not studied Marx and do not know, but then proceed to give a false definition of communism.

First I think there needs to be an emphasis placed on the difference between personal and private property. Personal property is that property which an individual uses insofar as it cannot be used to exploit others (television, cars, etc.). Private property is the private ownership of that which is used to exploit others (i.e. the means of production [factories, land, capital, etc.]).

Communism is, as Marx says, "the positive expression of annulled private property". Communism isn't the distribution of private property into the hands of an elite, in fact, that is exactly what Marx directly refers to as an element of capitalism. Marx addresses directly the phenomenon of the accumulation of this property exclusively into the hands of the elite; hence private property. This elite is the bourgeoisie. Take note:

"You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property. But in your existing society, private property is already done away with for nine-tenths of the population; its existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence in the hands of those nine-tenths. You reproach us, therefore, with intending to do away with a form of property, the necessary condition for whose existence is the non-existence of any property for the immense majority of society. "
-Karl Marx, Manifesto of the Communist Party

What communism is, is taking this truth to the next step of the normative claim that this property shouldn't be owned exclusively by an elite, but that the people should own it collectively, and that the individual should be able to fully realize itself in the freedom of owning his own production relations. Or, to put it bluntly, as Marx does, we must abolish private property.

Again, you're using opposite definitions.

You must extend this limited bourgeois definition, however. The definition is inadequate because it is not the unique aspect of capitalism. Indeed, such trading went on in feudal societies. Capitalism is also the freedom bourgeoisie (as opposed to lords) to exclusively own the means of production and to exploit the worker. This too, is a limited definition but I don't feel like writing a book.

It is quintessentially capitalist. Capitalism is the ability of a few to own and accumulate capital. The same few own the means of production.

You're working from a definition of capitalism described by its early proponents before and during the time of our nation's founding. In other words, it is a definition only applicable to a pre-industrialist slave society. Our material conditions are much different.

__________________
"If you want to achieve peace of mind and happiness, then have faith; if you want to be a disciple of truth, then search" -- Friedrich Nietzsche

Economic Left/Right: -9.50
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -6.72