Class Warfare

[quote]smh23 wrote:

[quote]SexMachine wrote:

[quote]pittbulll wrote:
…Obama is anti %1[/quote]

Yes it’s true. The Narcissist in Chief is the leader of the OWS movement.[/quote]

Nope. Some of their main gripes are bank and auto bailouts (Obama) and war overseas (Obama).[/quote]

Firstly, it was evident from the start that most the OWSers don’t know what they want. It’s also beyond question that this administration and their media lapdogs supported this movement whilst portraying the tea party as lunatics. And surely you wouldn’t disagree that the OWSers are going to vote for Obama?

All media and pundits, of all political persuasions, seem to agree:

“Occupy” was “an idea” (whatever that means) and not really a powerful, politically integrated movement like the Tea Party/TeaPublicans.

In many corners, the feeling is that “the idea” has all but died.

It also shows the difficulty with sustaining ANY movement (idea?) that does not have ACTUAL not “VIRTUAL” political support.

Mufasa

[quote]Mufasa wrote:
All media and pundits, of all political persuasions, seem to agree:

“Occupy” was “an idea” (whatever that means) and not really a powerful, politically integrated movement like the Tea Party/TeaPublicans.

In many corners, the feeling is that “the idea” has all but died.

It also shows the difficulty with sustaining ANY movement (idea?) that does not have ACTUAL not “VIRTUAL” political support.

Mufasa [/quote]

Well said.

[quote]sufiandy wrote:
I don’t think his comment indicated he was anti that 47%. I could say something like 47% of models would never date me, but that doesn’t mean I would take them if they changed their mind.[/quote]

he said it was not his job to worry about them

[quote]pittbulll wrote:

[quote]sufiandy wrote:
I don’t think his comment indicated he was anti that 47%. I could say something like 47% of models would never date me, but that doesn’t mean I would take them if they changed their mind.[/quote]

he said it was not his job to worry about them[/quote]

In terms of winning their votes. I though the left was all about context?

[quote]smh23 wrote:

[quote]DoubleDuce wrote:

[quote]smh23 wrote:

Politically, anything that blunt is dangerous. And saying that half of this country is made up of victims is stupid and not true, especially considering that that 47 percent is partially made up of old people living off SS (which they paid into for decades), the working poor who simply don’t have taxable income after standard deductions and personal exemptions, disabled veterans, etc. It even includes about 1500 millionaires.[/quote]

Actually, the majority of people on SS are taking money they didn’t put in. The average person takes out going on 3 times the amount that they put in. So, most of them would still count in the statistic.[/quote]

That’s right. I didn’t mean to imply that they were taking just what they had contributed. The point is that my uncle living off SS isn’t exactly a freeloading victim. And even if you think he is, you shouldn’t tell him so as a politician.[/quote]

If he is taking money he didn’t put in, believes it’s owed him, demands that money, and votes in order to keep that money coming in, then yes, he is a freeloading victim.

On the other hand, if he takes the money because it’s free money and acknowledges it’s not owed him, he’s just freeloading but not a victim.

[quote]DoubleDuce wrote:

[quote]smh23 wrote:

[quote]DoubleDuce wrote:

[quote]smh23 wrote:

Politically, anything that blunt is dangerous. And saying that half of this country is made up of victims is stupid and not true, especially considering that that 47 percent is partially made up of old people living off SS (which they paid into for decades), the working poor who simply don’t have taxable income after standard deductions and personal exemptions, disabled veterans, etc. It even includes about 1500 millionaires.[/quote]

Actually, the majority of people on SS are taking money they didn’t put in. The average person takes out going on 3 times the amount that they put in. So, most of them would still count in the statistic.[/quote]

That’s right. I didn’t mean to imply that they were taking just what they had contributed. The point is that my uncle living off SS isn’t exactly a freeloading victim. And even if you think he is, you shouldn’t tell him so as a politician.[/quote]

If he is taking money he didn’t put in, believes it’s owed him, demands that money, and votes in order to keep that money coming in, then yes, he is a freeloading victim.

On the other hand, if he takes the money because it’s free money and acknowledges it’s not owed him, he’s just freeloading but not a victim.[/quote]

Eh, depends on how long he lives and how long he’s been paying in and the future value of the payments he made decades ago. Either way, call it what you’d like, but don’t expect to get to 1600 Penn Ave by being that honest.

Anyways, not the huge deal people are making it out to be. I did see a poll that said 30% of independents are now less likely to vote for him, but that will be long forgotten as soon as the debates start.

edited

This whole argument is fucking stupid in the extreme. The US DOES NOT HAVE CLASSES in the sense that everyone talks about.

Classical Marxist thinking is about something like a peasantry that has been bound to the land forever. Change for them is impossible. They have been eternally poor and will always be so, much as the nobility will always hold the reigns of power. Laws about property are just shams to exploit the poor. After all, respecting property rights means the poor can’t have property since it is already owned by the rich, right? Change in the form of Promethean revolution is the only hope.

So let me start with the rebuttal. The public discourse flunks statistics – badly.

How it works (thanks to the economist Thomas Sowell). There are statistical categories such as lower 20%, upper 20%. These always exist just like 100% of everyone exists. I.e., making a category like “the poorest 50%” or “top 1%” trivially will have people in it always. The burning political question in the US is this: How many people STAY in these categories? Left-wing thinking (again, taken from European models since the US Left has never had an original political or economic thought in its history), taking a peasantry as the model says people never get out of these. Studies in the US – and this does not apply elsewhere – show that after 10 years, only a fraction of people remain in either category, about 10%. Let that sink in, since it means that mobility between economic strata is the norm – nearly the polar opposite of what everyone is bitching and moaning about. Roughly 4% of the US general population actually remains in the lower or upper 20% at the 10 year mark. It is this 4%, that drives economic policy for the other 96% – all wealth redistribution and poverty programs.

So who are these poor people? Who are the rich? The split is by AGE & FAMILY status. People right out of High School are poorer than retired folks. A single male is poorest right after HS. By the time he hits his mid 20’s, on average, he is in a stable relationship and has enough job skills to start making some money. Numbers are a bit different for women, but not much. This analysis also makes sense since older people have been saving and have more experience managing money – they should be better off. (That 2% that are mired in long-term poverty often never figured out how to run their lives, either.) There is no rocket science here. No dark cabals of capitalists, no mystery. This entire debate should be reframed in terms of redistributing money from older people to younger people, not “the poor vs. the rich”. When put that way, it starts to sound a lot more like simple theft than justice. Note, Sowell, who is called a conservative, used stats from various Left-leaning think tanks for his work. Very, very original and it really seems to be what I experience.

The public argument is stupid because the debate itself has been stupefied by the media, which by and large has no intellectual ability to understand anything, and politicians, whose relevance is dictated by how well they can oversimplify and enrage.

So now I come to the major players in the public debate.

The Tea Party. Mostly these are the older people who have been largely successful. They know how to manage their money and understand that when the government says “rich” it really is just targeting the elderly. Rather than helping the poor, they see themselves being impoverished by government policies then given reduced benefits. Mostly this money will go into paying for bureaucrats to manage the agencies charged with distributing these funds.

The Occupy Movement is a mish mash of fell-good Left, but the more interesting part of the demographic are the underemployed college graduates. Their claims repeatedly in the media are along the lines that “I went to school and got a History degree and have been driving a bus for the past 5 years (or living in Mom’s basement).” No place in their anger at “Wall Street” did they talk about the elephant in the room: The university system that neither understands nor likes economics. This system vends degrees which may or may not have any relevance. Why aren’t the Occupy people telling the universities to shape up? To quit telling people to get degrees in subjects that are worthless (a Ph.D. in History looks snazzy, but there are 3 positions in your field for all 500 of you.) The culture at a university about economics has several facet to it (and I work at one, btw):

  1. A lot like 50’s sex education, where nobody understands it and wanton ignorance is badge of merit

  2. simple pilfering of research money. Most schools skim off 55% of research grants for “administrative fees”. This leads to having researchers who get grants being preferred over people who know and understand the field from the perspective of making a living. Most universities have huge bureaucracies that leech money from everything in sight.

(2.5. Quick stat: in the 1950’s there were 3 administrators per 100 students at most universities. Now it is 60 admin per 100 students. This is why tuition is astronomical. In this mix, faculty are the expendable part of the equation since there is a glut of trained experts. No university will downsize itself, and instead researchers who bring in big grants get preferential treatment and the ones doing the actual teaching are lucky to get yearly contracts. Universities live in a parallel dimension…)

  1. slave labor for all research students. Seriously, undergrad and grad researchers are the worst exploited working class in the US. Shitty wages, shitty hours, no benefits and often criminally inept management from their researchers. Would you work for $1500/month with no health benefits and an 80 hour work week? Don’t forget the unsafe working conditions and badly maintained equipment in your lab either.

I see the Occupy movement as a result of the near complete failure of higher education in the US and the curious absence of serious criticism aimed at the universities themselves to be a measure of how poorly they educated their own students. They own all sides of the discourse. The more successful students whose thinking is not too far off from this are now becoming the managers that run everything… These are often the people who cause the Tea Party-ers to go into howling paroxysms – and quite often for good reason too, I have seen.

Again, this mimics an age split, not a class warfare split.

[quote]countingbeans wrote:

[quote]pittbulll wrote:

[quote]sufiandy wrote:
I don’t think his comment indicated he was anti that 47%. I could say something like 47% of models would never date me, but that doesn’t mean I would take them if they changed their mind.[/quote]

he said it was not his job to worry about them[/quote]

In terms of winning their votes. I though the left was all about context?[/quote]

The left is primarily about three things

  1. Play the victim, (or at least find a victim and blame the right for it)

  2. Class warfare. The rich only pay 70% of all income tax…that’s not enough!

  3. Race bait at every opportune time. And if there is no opportunity make one up.

If John Kennedy were alive today he’d be a republican! He was for cutting taxes and a strong military.

Interesting, vote to see results

I’ll just leave this here

http://majorityleader.gov/uploads/CRS_Memo_ABAWD.pdf

[quote]DoubleDuce wrote:
Romney never said he was against the 47%. He just stated the fact that a huge percentage of the population vote to put money in their own pocket, and that means they won’t vote for him.

In other news, the sky is blue, grass is green, and the emperor has no clothes. [/quote]

I think that is a huge advantage with you tube , he said "it is not my job to worry about them "

[quote]pittbulll wrote:

[quote]DoubleDuce wrote:
Romney never said he was against the 47%. He just stated the fact that a huge percentage of the population vote to put money in their own pocket, and that means they won’t vote for him.

In other news, the sky is blue, grass is green, and the emperor has no clothes. [/quote]

I think that is a huge advantage with you tube , he said "it is not my job to worry about them "
[/quote]

Pitt you should be more worried about the horrible job that Obama has done over the past four years. Has he worried about the 16 million more people that are now forced to get food stamps? Is he worried about the now 100 million people that are on some kind of government aid? Is he worried about the real unemployment rate of over 14%? Is he worried about selling our children’s future by racking up 4 trillion more in debt?

What someone DOES is far more important than what he SAYS.

Get your nose out of Obama’s ass for a few minutes and realize that he’s one of the worst Presidents of either party to ever hold that job!

I’d vote for any competent man or woman over Obama…he’s got to go!

[quote]pittbulll wrote:

…he said "it is not my job to worry about them "

[/quote]

Yeah, Obama really cares about the poor…

'In March 1994, a year before “Dreams” was published, Obama was the lead defense attorney on an obscure case in Cook County Court…Obama defended a Chicago slumlord and powerful political ally who was charged with a long list of offenses against poor residents. Brazier was closely allied with Obama and his firm, not least because Davis was on WPIC’s Board of Directors. Davis was also the corporation’s registered agent, and he received the court summons when the city filed suit on the South University apartments.

Brazier’s WPIC had failed for nearly a month to supply heat and running water for the complex’s 15 crumbling apartments. On Jan. 18, 1994, the day the heat went off, Chicago’s official high temperature was 11 below zero, the day after it was 19 below.

Even worse, the residents were then ordered to leave the WPIC complex in the winter chill without the due process they would have been afforded by an eviction procedure.

In court documents reviewed by The Washington Examiner, Daniel W. Weil, commissioner of Chicago’s Buildings Department, slammed WPIC for multiple municipal code violations, including “failure to maintain adequate heat,” failure “to provide every family unit with approved heating facilities,” and “failure to provide adequate” supplies of either hot or cold running water.

Things were so bad that the city’s outraged corporation counsel declared that “the levying of a fine is not an adequate remedy” and asked the court for a permanent injunction against WPIC, appointment of a receiver and imposition of a lien on WPIC to pay for repairs, attorneys’ fees and court costs.

But Obama did his work so well that in the end, on March 3, 1994, the court simply fined WPIC $50…An experienced Chicago housing attorney who reviewed the case at the Examiner’s request said $50 fines against politically powerful slumlords were not uncommon at that time. ’

  • Washington Examiner

[quote]pittbulll wrote:

[quote]DoubleDuce wrote:
Romney never said he was against the 47%. He just stated the fact that a huge percentage of the population vote to put money in their own pocket, and that means they won’t vote for him.

In other news, the sky is blue, grass is green, and the emperor has no clothes. [/quote]

I think that is a huge advantage with you tube , he said "it is not my job to worry about them "

[/quote]

Why would he worry about what he cannot change. I don’t worry about gay people, but I’m not against homosexuals.

Not worrying and being against something are entirely different. Not to mention, he is talking about voting habits and being a victim, not economic or social plight.

[quote]pittbulll wrote:
…he said "it is not my job to worry about them "
[/quote]

What would you expect from ‘bitter’ folk who ‘cling to their guns and religion?’ Obama governs for everyone:

“…preparations by Democratic operatives for the 2012 election make it clear for the first time that the party will explicitly abandon the white working class.”

http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/27/the-future-of-the-obama-coalition/

The reality is that BOTH parties are counting on a future that doesn’t include large blocks of Americans.

Neither party has a lot to be proud about.

Mufasa

[quote]Mufasa wrote:
The reality is that BOTH parties are counting on a future that doesn’t include large blocks of Americans.

Neither party has a lot to be proud about.

Mufasa[/quote]

I disagree. I think the republics generally believe their plan is best for all Americans (even if incorrectly). Obama has explicitly stated he is against the rich and is in favor of punishing people for being wealthy.

"Q: You favor an increase in the capital gains tax, saying, â??I certainly would not go above what existed under Bill Clinton, which was 28%.â?? Itâ??s now 15%. Thatâ??s almost a doubling if you went to 28%. Bill Clinton dropped the capital gains tax to 20%, then George Bush has taken it down to 15%. And in each instance, when the rate dropped, revenues from the tax increased. And in the 1980s, when the tax was increased to 28%, the revenues went down.

A: What Iâ??ve said is that I would look at raising the capital gains tax for purposes of fairness. The top 50 hedge fund managers made $29 billion last year–$29 billion for 50 individuals. Those who are able to work the stock market and amass huge fortunes on capital gains are paying a lower tax rate than their secretaries. Thatâ??s not fair.

Q: But history shows that when you drop the capital gains tax, the revenues go up.

A: Well, that might happen or it might not. It depends on whatâ??s happening on Wall Street and how business is going."

Think about this. If the republicans are the party of the rich, then they gain power by keeping the rich rich, and making as many people rich as possible. Conversely if the Dems are the party of the poor, they stay in power by keeping the poor poor and making as many people poor as possible. Even if the dems are the party of the “middle class” they gain power by hurting the rich. That is what it means to not include blocks of Americans.

[quote]Mufasa wrote:
The reality is that BOTH parties are counting on a future that doesn’t include large blocks of Americans.

Neither party has a lot to be proud about.

Mufasa[/quote]

Please explain how the republicans are pandering to illegal aliens in order to expand their voting block like Obama and the democrats have been doing.

I really want to hear this.