Any Effort To Reduce Inequality Would Make Us All Poorer? Nonsense.

CEO pay has gone up more than 14 fold from 1970 to now, and not because of their compensation equals their marginal output.

It's more because of rent-seeking.

The Pay of Corporate Executives and Financial Professionals as Evidence of Rents in Top 1 Percent Incomes | Economic Policy Institute

Furthermore, the claim that cutting CEO compensation (and thus rent-seeking) would make the world poorer, is nonsense. For instance Harvard ivory tower-dweller Greg Mankiw states:

http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/man..._percent_0.pdf

Then, one day, this egalitarian utopia is disturbed by an entrepreneur with an idea for a new product. Think of the entrepreneur as Steve Jobs as he develops the iPod, J.K. Rowling as she writes her Harry Potter books, or Steven Spielberg as he directs his blockbuster movies...

There's one fatal mistake in this theory. JK Rowling chose to stay in England despite their high taxes because she had a moral obligation to their welfare system.

So the going theory that reducing wealth inequality will make the world poorer because we'll have fewer Steve Jobs and JK Rowlings, is nonsense.

I've got another example to refute that, too: Linus Torvalds, the maker of GNU/Linux. If Steve Jobns and Bill Gates were to just up and quit because they couldn't become a multi billionaire then we'd have those resources going to Linux instead. Which is distributed for free. So much for marginal compensation.

Then there's the final problem of the theory of marginal compensation and its attempts to justify income inequality: if income inequality keeps rising indefinitely, then the 1% will find that nobody else can buy their products or services anymore. Then who will compensate them at all?

Let Me Be Straight Up About This... What Is And What Is NOT Liberalism

If you believe that summary executions by bombings or drone strikes is acceptable, despite the innocent lives that such acts snuff out of existence, you are not a liberal. Liberals oppose the taking of innocent human lives. Anything else is convenient moral expediency - aka warmongering. Supporting these things is a luxury only enjoyed by those who do not live under the threat of being bombarded. Supporting the use of air strikes and bombardments to take out enemy targets with no regard to civilian casualties is what you do when you are a privileged American or Northern Hemisphere Western world citizen who, by right of technological dominance, will never be the target of such acts of mass murder. If you support summary executions and drone strikes, you do so because your child will never die for the simple crime of being an innocent bystander. You live under the safety of the protection of due process: before you or anyone you know can be put to death there must be a trial and the discovery of evidence, and a jury that convicts you and sentences you to die. For you to say that people in the rest of the world don't deserve the same exact thing, makes you no better than the so-called terrorists. You are not a liberal if you believe in summary executions or drone strikes. Period.

If you believe that America should in any way be involved in the Middle East, you are not a liberal. What we are doing out there is nothing short of the naked mass exploitation of natural resources in the name of protecting an outdated energy industry that is killing us all. So you say we need the oil? Do you also say we need the pollution and the global warming that comes with the burning of these fossil fuels? Do you believe the fossil fuel industry propaganda about how alternative fuels and energy aren't practical? Then you most certainly aren't a liberal, because you are clinging to outdated concepts that are going to lead to disaster for human civilization. Do you deny that burning fossil fuels is causing global warming and is causing the costly, outright disastrous droughts and floods that we are seeing today? Is your counter argument "but things will cost more if we don't stick with oil"? Then you are in fact a conservative, not a liberal, and moreover, you have a nasty surprise coming to you: global warming is already making things cost more... like food.

Do you say we also need to maintain a military presence in the Middle East to fight with people in the area who don't want us there? Do you argue that we have a right to be there because their governments - largely un-elected dictatorships that they are - invited us to be there? Such naked Imperialism is not liberalism - in fact it is the exact opposite, it is conservatism. You have the privilege of adopting this conservative warmongering mindset because you live in a safe Western nation where foreign troops don't routinely drive through your streets, shooting at your neighbors. If you were a liberal you would be fighting for the right of Middle Easterners to enjoy the same privileges. Oh but they're terrorists, you argue? Another bigoted conservative belief. Try having unwanted foreign troops in your city and see how fast your neighbors start taking up arms against them. If you were a liberal you'd understand the hypocrisy of this so-called "war on terror".

Does this sound like ideological purity? You betcha it does. The alternative is that liberalism will be re-defined as blind loyalty to old outdated industries with reckless disregard to the damage being done to our environment. The alternative is signing onto an ideology that saddles our children with an even more polluted world, for the sake of immediate economic gain for our generation. The alternative to the dreaded concept of ideological purity is to accept that liberalism has evolved into naked imperialism, racism and mass-murderous savagery repackaged as "bringing democracy and civilization to the East". 

If you support drone strikes, Middle East intervention and resource exploitation, and the war on terror, you are not a liberal. There is already a home for your beliefs, and it is called conservatism.

If You Want to Shut Up a Tea Partier, Ask Them 2 Basic Questions

1) Why didn't they rise up in protest when Bush proposed to bail out the banks in 2008?

2) Why didn't the Tea Party rise up in protest when the USAPATRIOT Act was passed?

"This Country In Its Present Form Is Beyond Redemption" - Quote from a Democratic Underground user who once screamed that this was not the case.

 http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=2863072

we're endlessly at war and we do terrible things in the name of national security. We have a bloated secretive Defense and National Security Network that is hand in glove with the defense industry. In short, we do more harm than good on the world stage and we damage ourselves in the process. Our wars are driven, to a significant degree, by the relationship between government and industry. 

The gap between the rich and everyone else is growing at an exponential rate. 

Corporations own the government. No, they don't own each individual elected or appointed official but they own enough of them, or like Penny Pritzker, they are them. 

Electing democrats rather than republicans may stave off some horrors, but it makes little difference when it comes to corporate power, who is in the White House or who is in Congress. Maybe it's become some weird form of institutional behavior- the institutions are so mired in the corpocracy that individuals have little chance of effecting real change. 

I used to scoff at people who claimed that we're living under fascism. If not there yet, we're well on our way. 

I wonder if that poster will remember this thread:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=882068

In short:
TO HELL with "small, incremental solutions". WE NEED MAJOR, RADICAL CHANGES to save this country! We have Stage-4 societal CANCER and we need CHEMOTHERAPY.

Welcome aboard, Cali. The first step is to realize that America is beyond redemption in its present form. The next step is to realize that you need MAJOR, RADICAL SOLUTIONS in order to save the country.

Honestly, why don't liberals show more spine?

In 2009 the Tea Party came out in droves to oppose Obamacare. Liberals, whom they always accuse of being unemployed and so on, never came out to meet them. There were tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of these guys out there, and hardly any counter demonstrations.

Tea Partiers insulted Parkinson's Disease victims and even stomped on a woman's head while she was protesting Rand Paul. Tea Partiers even had the nerve to harass elderly protesters at a picnic out of a park, and then follow said liberals to their home and drive up on a private road right up to their driveway, nearly hitting someone in the process. Then there's the infamous episode of Tea Partiers openly carrying firearms at townhall meetings. Let's not forget the other instances of outright violence by conservatives.

Tea Partiers verbally attacked this woman who was relating a story of a woman who died and lost a baby because of a lack of insurance. She had no backup at her side to shout down these bullies.

Liberals let this happen, most of it went unanswered, and the results are pretty much history. The Tea Party earned the respect of America with its hard charging tactics, and swept into Congress in 2010.

Liberals need to learn the first rule of politics: that America respects an ass whupping, and does not respect people who back down and retreat. Don't get me wrong, nobody's saying that 18 old ladies should go fist to fist with 30 or more Tea Party male brutes who drove up onto their property without permission. Nobody's saying a single woman should go Wonder Woman and pound 2 or 3 guys who are stomping her at a Rand Paul rally. What we liberals should be asking is why wasn't anyone else there to kick these guys' asses when they got violent? That's legal, folks. It's called the God given, court-affirmed right to self defense. Failure to make use of that right emboldens bullies and makes your entire movement look weak in the eyes of the public.

Big protests make progress. Liberals could have avoided the jaw dropping losses of 2010 had they come out in force against the Tea Party. Look what happened when they came out in force afterwards: the Conservatives suffered huge losses in 2012. People say Occupy Wall Street didn't achieve anything but they brought the term "99%" to the country and it has yet to go away.

The problem is, the same mistakes are starting to get made again in the run-up to 2014. We're not out there. 90% of people support background checks and we're not out protesting for this. Mass protests of the sequester never happened. America is seeing this, and they're losing respect, because we can't stand up for ourselves.

It's not like liberals haven't had monstrously big protests in the past. So if the problem isn't the lack of a spine, then what's holding us back? Fear of Tea Party bullies? Apathy? What's up?

More Free Traitor Nonsense: "The Manufacturing Jobs We've Lost Weren't Good Jobs Anyway"

A popular meme put forth by people who feel America benefits by closing factories and putting Americans out of work, is that we don't need those jobs anyway. Or worse, they are bad jobs and we should get rid of them.

Case in point:


Lost Manufacturing Jobs: Good Riddance?

There is no question that the U.S. has lost an enormous number of manufacturing jobs to lower wage countries.  These countries include mega economies like China and a number of smaller countries such as Vietnam that have large numbers of workers willing to work for low wages. Given the current high unemployment rate in the United States, it is understandable that politicians point out that we need to regain manufacturing jobs and that the loss of jobs to other countries is a major problem for the U.S.

But before we accept the loss of many low skilled manufacturing jobs as a major negative for the U.S. and that it should be halted and perhaps even reversed, it is important to put it in the context of what we know about the social impact of simple, repetitive work.  The fact is that this type of work often has numerous negative impacts on both individuals and society in general. This was highlighted recently by the news about riots taking place in Foxconn’s Chinese factories.

Even in China, low wage repetitive work can create major conflicts between workers and corporations and be destructive to society. We learned this long ago in the U.S. and it resulted in major U.S. corporations offshoring repetitive, manufacturing work or upgrading it through technology to the point where it became skilled work. In terms of social sustainability, repetitive low skilled work is a major negative. It causes employee dissatisfaction and turnover, stress-related mental and physical health problems, dysfunctional union/management relationships and large social class differences in wealth.

The bottom line is that instead of complaining about offshoring manufacturing jobs, we should be focusing on keeping and creating the right kind of manufacturing jobs. What kinds of jobs are those? In essence, I am talking about the kind of knowledge work jobs that exist in the high-tech world and the advanced manufacturing plants of some major manufacturers. We can only keep these jobs in the U.S. if we have a skilled workforce who can meet the challenges that knowledge, information technology, and engineering present.

When you hear these arguments, remember there are two obvious fatal flaws in this argument that you probably already know, but haven't been able to point out clearly before:

1) The knowledge economy that these guys talk about, is inherently too small. So is advanced manufacturing. The number of jobs that these fields will produce are high-paying and we do need them as part of our economy and industrial base, but the inherent reality of both advanced knowledge-based jobs and advanced manufacturing is that they are high productivity jobs. Knowledge-based and high-tech manufacturing industries are inherently designed to employ fewer people to do the same amount of work. Take a look around you. How many innovation-based jobs and advanced manufacturing jobs are there? How many people are out of work? The enormous ratio of unemployed people to "advanced" jobs ratio is one that is not going to change by much even in the best of times. These jobs are tragically insufficient in numbers to cover even the people who were put out of work from regular manufacturing by foreign outsourcing.

Simply put there will never be as many of these knowledge based jobs or high tech manufacturing jobs to cover the number of people thrown out of work when we send the lower end manufacturing jobs overseas. Period. No economist can hope to keep a straight face and tell you otherwise. 

The other thing you will want to remind someone of when they spout these stupid arguments is that we already have tons of college graduates in the Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) industries out there right now, and they cannot find work in the STEM fields. Consider a man who holds a Ph D in plasma physics - not even he can get a job in this so-called knowledge based economy. 

Consider these statistics, too:

There are 101,000 U.S.-born individuals with engineering degrees who are unemployed.
There are an additional 244,000 U.S.-born individuals under age 65 who have a degree in engineering but who are not in the labor market. This means they are not working nor are they looking for work, and are therefore not counted as unemployed.
In addition to those unemployed and out of the labor force, there are an additional 1.47 million U.S.-born individuals who report they have an engineering degree and have a job, but do not work as engineers.
President Obama specifically used the words “highly skilled.” In 2010, there were 25,000 unemployed U.S.-born individuals with engineering degrees who have a Master’s or Ph.D. and another 68,000 with advanced degrees not in the labor force. There were also 489,000 U.S.-born individuals with graduate degrees who were working, but not as engineers.

If knowledge based jobs are the next big thing then why do we have so many knowledge workers who are unemployed or not even working in the STEM industry?

This is where free traitors retreat to their last resort: bigotry against American workers. "They're all incompetent!" 

2) We're already shipping knowledge work overseas. Biotech has research already moved overseas. Intel has moved a major research center to China. And let's not mention the devastation that foreign outsourcing is inflicting upon the knowledge jobs of the tech industry.

The problem with globalization is that knowledge work - innovation and research - is as easily mobile as manufacturing. It doesn't matter if you have a Ph D - someone in India could have a Ph D, too, and do the same work for pennies to your dollar. Free traitors like to avoid discussing this. Remember to hammer them about it. Mercilessly.

3) China faces unrest not because manufacturing jobs are inherently jobs where workers get abused, but because China, unlike the United States, still allows rampant abuse, overworking and underpayment of their workers. America had beaten this problem of worker abuse with workplace safety laws and wage laws, to name a few basic rights that Chinese workers don't have. In China they put you in a dorm and wake you up at random in order to fulfill a company's emergency order for a new product. They can't get away with that in America.

As for the "dissatisfaction and turnover, stress-related mental and physical health problems" - all of which are less severe in American manufacturing jobs, mind you (thank labor unions for that) - there is one other point to consider: does this genius of an author think unemployment causes less of this?

4) Knowledge based jobs and high-tech manufacturing jobs require workers with college degrees. Anyone who tells you otherwise is blowing smoke out their butts. Has this author looked outside for a second to see what the cost of such degrees are, nowadays?

So the plan here is for unemployed American manufacturing workers to run the gauntlet of high tuition costs and massive student debt to get a STEM based degree to compete with the other STEM grads out there who are unemployed and looking for work. And to compete with cheap STEM labor from other countries, too. 

What could possibly go wrong with that?

Do you feel like humiliating a FREE TRADER globalist today? Then ask them these questions

Dear Free Traders,

Riddle me this, riddle me that…

Do you think it’s better for millions of Americans to be perpetually unemployed than to bring back the factory jobs or call center jobs they used to work in?

iPads sold in America should be made in China and not America because of what now… help me out here… phobia of China, or phobia of American workers?

America is supposed to run a $500 billion trade deficit? Why doesn’t any other country want to run that kind of deficit?

Japan is negotiating a 1,000% tariff on rice for the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement, but you think America should not ever raise tariffs?

Which one of you foreign outsourcing advocates out there have ever had your call center or factory job shipped overseas?

What’s going to happen to those poor people in the third world when America’s economy collapses from all this unemployment and we can’t buy their stuff anymore? Any answers for that?

Have you ever told an unemployed American to their face that losing their job to China, Mexico or India was good for them, or the economy?

You say we’re ditching factory jobs in favor of knowledge jobs. Where are these knowledge jobs? How many knowledge job openings are there? How many unemployed are there? Compare the numbers and please explain how that knowledge-based economy is coming along. While you’re at it, would you care to explain why so many research and development jobs are going to India and China despite a glut of Science,  Tech, Engineering and Math graduates here in America?

So you say that opponents of foreign outsourcing are xenophobes. Considering that international trade is a mostly one-way street vacuuming jobs out of the United States, why should YOU not be called out as an America-phobe?

Please name one other nation on Earth that is foolish enough to outsource as much work as America does. Per capita, even.

Have a nice day.