What Obama should say in his second inaugural
Showing posts with label economic justice. Show all posts
Showing posts with label economic justice. Show all posts
Monday, January 21, 2013
Obama's bankrupt words make the inaugral address meaningless.
Here's my response to this article in Salon from a Democratic Party apologist,.
What Obama should say in his second inaugural
Wonderwheel
Monday, Jan 21, 2013 11:37 AM PST
What Obama should say in his second inaugural
Friday, December 14, 2012
Soylent Green is people!
When it comes to economic politics, my motto is "Soylent Green is people! If we don't eat the rich, figuratively speaking, the rich will feed us to ourselves, literally speaking."
If you don't know the Soylent Green reference, check out the 1973 science fiction film Soylent Green which I consider to be Charlton Heston's best film. It was also the great actor Edward G. Robinson's last film.
Spoiler Alert: Or jump to the synopsis of Soylent Green at Wikipedia..
Basically, for instance, there is no reasonable justification for the rich to have unearned income from financial investments at a far lower rate for "capital gains" than workers pay on their earned income. It is just one of the ways in which the rich control Congress to their own benefit and redistribute the nation's wealth into their own pockets. We see worldwide how the rich are demanding austerity from the working class for the purpose of bailing out the banks and their own lack of austerity.
As a follower of the Buddha Dharma, I begin with the premise that all these distinctions are distinctions made by the false thinking of our own mind, the mind that is one mind, because the 1istinction that we are separate minds is also a discrimination of that very same mind. As the Buddha said,
“I now universally see that everyone of the multitude of beings is endowed with the qualities of the Tathagata’s wisdom and virtue. However by means of erroneous thinking and grasping attachments, nevertheless they do not bear witness to attaining it.”
This common endowment of the Tathagata's wisdom and virtue is the basis for what we call the Golden Rule. Since we all have the shared foundation of the mind ground, to treat each other as if we do not have the same Buddha nature is the result of our erroneous thinking, false conceptions, and grasping attachments..
As a political democracy, it is the obligation of citizens to prevent the rich from stealing resources and wealth from the nation and redistributing it to their own pockets and bank accounts. The private banking system and institutions of legalized financial gambling on Wall Street, called "the stock market," "hedge funds," "derivative investments", etc. should be severely regulated to keep them fair. There is nothing wrong with markets that fairly trade in actual ownership of stocks, but these money carnivals are nothing other than gambling institutions that hold our economy in their grip.
Most importantly, the money of the government should never be dependent upon or entangled with private banking, as that is the primary way that the people's treasury is looted into the private pockets of the rich. The people's public money in their government treasury should always be held in a public bank. A public banking system is the single most important change that would prevent the kind of financial collapses that we have seen created by the gambling institutions of Wall Street. Here's a wonderful but sad story of the destruction of the Canadian public banking system at the hands of the rich in their never ending greed.
If you don't know the Soylent Green reference, check out the 1973 science fiction film Soylent Green which I consider to be Charlton Heston's best film. It was also the great actor Edward G. Robinson's last film.
Spoiler Alert: Or jump to the synopsis of Soylent Green at Wikipedia..
Basically, for instance, there is no reasonable justification for the rich to have unearned income from financial investments at a far lower rate for "capital gains" than workers pay on their earned income. It is just one of the ways in which the rich control Congress to their own benefit and redistribute the nation's wealth into their own pockets. We see worldwide how the rich are demanding austerity from the working class for the purpose of bailing out the banks and their own lack of austerity.
As a follower of the Buddha Dharma, I begin with the premise that all these distinctions are distinctions made by the false thinking of our own mind, the mind that is one mind, because the 1istinction that we are separate minds is also a discrimination of that very same mind. As the Buddha said,
“I now universally see that everyone of the multitude of beings is endowed with the qualities of the Tathagata’s wisdom and virtue. However by means of erroneous thinking and grasping attachments, nevertheless they do not bear witness to attaining it.”
This common endowment of the Tathagata's wisdom and virtue is the basis for what we call the Golden Rule. Since we all have the shared foundation of the mind ground, to treat each other as if we do not have the same Buddha nature is the result of our erroneous thinking, false conceptions, and grasping attachments..
As a political democracy, it is the obligation of citizens to prevent the rich from stealing resources and wealth from the nation and redistributing it to their own pockets and bank accounts. The private banking system and institutions of legalized financial gambling on Wall Street, called "the stock market," "hedge funds," "derivative investments", etc. should be severely regulated to keep them fair. There is nothing wrong with markets that fairly trade in actual ownership of stocks, but these money carnivals are nothing other than gambling institutions that hold our economy in their grip.
Most importantly, the money of the government should never be dependent upon or entangled with private banking, as that is the primary way that the people's treasury is looted into the private pockets of the rich. The people's public money in their government treasury should always be held in a public bank. A public banking system is the single most important change that would prevent the kind of financial collapses that we have seen created by the gambling institutions of Wall Street. Here's a wonderful but sad story of the destruction of the Canadian public banking system at the hands of the rich in their never ending greed.
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My laughing started with this subtitle:
"Now is the time to articulate a vision of capitalism that explicitly rejects the notion of 'job creators'."
The very idea of such a species of "capitalism" is a fairytale for children. Capital-ism means making money from capital. What is capital? It is money and tangible assets. Making money from capital means having other people do work with “your” capital and then giving you the lion’s share of the profits and they get the leftovers. There is no variety of so-called compassionate capitalism in which the owners of capital don’t assert their possession of the capital as god-given or hard-earned, even though it is only by sleight of hand and the force of arms that they are able acquire and maintain that capital.
For example, the raw materials of the land should belong to everyone and not to someone who has a paper title drawn on a map. Individual title to a home is one thing, and its not capitalism because the home is not used by laborers to get a profit for the home owner. But title to oil deep in the earth being held by an individual is ridiculous and only reasonable under the chicanery of capitalism’s style of three card monte. As for Wall Street’s stock “exchanges,” they are nothing more or less than the exchanges occurring every day in gambling casinos.
When private property is properly restricted to the amount that a person can physically pick up and hold and manage on their own, without additional servants or hired hands to care for it, then we will have an economic system that has to look at the remaining capital as the capital of the commons to be used in a system of economic democracy for the good of the nation, and not for the good of the corporate lords of the American Brand of Fascism.
*****
I would just add that Mr. Rollert's notion of a ideal "common capitalism" is just as much an oxymoron as Schumpeter’s "Creative Destruction."
Rollert ends with the hopeful fairy story of "a vision of economic development that doesn’t see us waiting on the deliverance of an enlightened few, but one in which there is dignity and place for everyone to lend a hand." But what does that really mean? He hasn't described a single instance of practical difference to the current system of economic injustice. Stripped of the finery, Rollert's vision of "everyone lending a hand" means exactly what we have now under capitalism, everyone lending a hand and the capitalists determining how much trickles down to the hands.
It really is silly to imagine "what Obama should say" in his inaugral, because whatever he says will have absolutely no currency in the market place of real politics, anymore than the many campaign promises of his first term that have been broken.