A thread for Democrats Only by THGRRI

What you're talking about is entirely separate from the military, and I don't necessarily argue against it. Although it would have to pay more than army wages, and it shouldn't clothe and house people doing it either.

Kiki is talking about people handing over at least 4 years of their life under 24/7 direct management from the Military, housing non-combat duty soldiers on American soil on the taxpayer dime. Huge difference.

I'd be open to discussing your idea. I think that current military should get first dibs (downsizing our current military), and then vets should get 2nd dibs. Still leaves me out in the cold personally, but I do see a lot of benefit to this overall for the country.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Wednesday, May 16, 2018 8:55 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Why quote me then post that?

Is the simple fact that your name brought up in the previous post justification enough to segway into whatever random thought pops up in that little pea brain of yours?

Do Right, Be Right. :)

Because I wanted you to know I read what you wrote. As typical, you had nothing to say about what Trump did, but you were offended. You've got really thin skin and a really thick skull.

Now to continue what I am interested in, the Trump flip-flop for his personal profit and how foreigners can use Trump's greed to manipulate American policy. As I recall, 6ixStringJack voted for Trump and 6ix should have anticipated what would happen. I certainly did:

ZTE and the Iran Nuclear Deal

Barkley Rosser | May 16, 2018 7:37 am
https://angrybearblog.com/2018/05/zte-and-the-iran-nuclear-deal.html

The whiplash that many observers have felt on learning of President Trump’s about-face on China’s ZTE telecom company from condemning it as violating US national security and violating sanctions rules by selling to North Korea and Iran has been pretty easily explained by our soon thereafter learning that China has provided a mere half a billion dollars to a project in Indonesia where Trump interests are deeply involved. This is probably the most blatant violation of the Emoluments Clause of the US constitution yet, but do not hold your breath that anything formal will come of it, despite widespread outrage. Rather his backers will accept that this is necessary for obtaining Chinese support in dealing with Kim Jong-In in the possible forthcoming summit. This is supposed to trump all other considerations.

Of course the supposed forthcoming summit and related events, such as the recent release of hostages held by North Korea, have been trumping Trump’s withdrawal from the JCPOA nuclear deal with Iran, which has been praised by his supporters as an action that “fulfills a campaign promise” and thus just simply wonderful. However, a little noticed aspect of this in the US is triggering considerable reverberations abroad. It is the hypocrisy that while Trump seems to be blithely forgiving ZTE for breaking already in-place sanctions against Iran, he and members of his administration such as John Bolton have been unyielding to the Europeans that all of their companies must cease any economic dealings with Iran ASAP now that Trump has scuttled US participation in the deal, even though it is widely accepted in Europe that Iran is in full compliance with the deal. The spectacle of the freshly arrived US ambassador issuing an immediate “order” to German companies to immediately comply with US demands on this has raised especial hackles.

Pretty clearly the Europeans need to identify some budding Trump Organization project somewhere on the planet that they can dump a pile of money into so that their companies can get exemptions like ZTE has from having their markets in the US cut off if they continue to operate in Iran.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Thursday, May 17, 2018 2:28 AM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
What you're talking about is entirely separate from the military, and I don't necessarily argue against it. Although it would have to pay more than army wages, and it shouldn't clothe and house people doing it either.

Why not?

Quote:
Kiki is talking about people handing over at least 4 years of their life under 24/7 direct management from the Military, housing non-combat duty soldiers on American soil on the taxpayer dime. Huge difference.

Well, in the FDR plan there were "regular" jobs available to build infrastructure, paid for with Federal deficit money. But there was ALSO the Civilian Conservation Corps, which ran something like the army in that housing, food, and clothing were provided. I assume it's because they may have been working in areas with no regular housing. So there seems to be a great deal of overlap between KIKI's idea and FDR's. Maybe it's the whole military chain of command/ military justice that bothers you. It would bother me too. People who work in non-combat jobs should be subject to Constitutional ... not military ... law.

As an aside, at the time that the infrastructure was being built, it must have seemed like a TREMENDOUS waste of Federal deficit dollars! After all, the economy was so stalled out that nobody could really take advantage of all of those roads and bridges! Roads, canals, bridges to nowhere, with no traffic. They must have seemed at the time like the Chinese "ghost cities" that everyone's always laughing about, or the "One Belt One Road" program that Chinese have going: A lot of investment with no immediate utility.

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

America is an oligarchy
http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?tid=57876

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Thursday, May 17, 2018 2:31 AM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
It is the hypocrisy that while Trump seems to be blithely forgiving ZTE for breaking already in-place sanctions against Iran, he and members of his administration such as John Bolton have been unyielding to the Europeans that all of their companies must cease any economic dealings with Iran ASAP now that Trump has scuttled US participation in the deal, even though it is widely accepted in Europe that Iran is in full compliance with the deal.

Trump said quite frequently during his campaign that he thought NATO was unfairly burdening the USA. Maybe breaking the Iran deal is just Trump's wily way of causing a deep rupture between the USA and the EU so they won't lean so heavily on us. It's possible that Trump is getting EXACTLY what he wanted.

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

America is an oligarchy
http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?tid=57876

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Thursday, May 17, 2018 2:57 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Why quote me then post that?

Is the simple fact that your name brought up in the previous post justification enough to segway into whatever random thought pops up in that little pea brain of yours?

Do Right, Be Right. :)

That's how bots disseminate their nonsequiter drivel.

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Thursday, May 17, 2018 7:16 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

America’s Dismal Turning Point
By Paul Krugman, May 16, 2018
www.nytimes.com/2018/05/16/opinion/americas-dismal-turning-point.html

Austin Frakt had a very interesting piece in the Upshot the other day, on U.S. health spending – and U.S. health — in international perspective. Everyone knows that U.S. spending is more or less literally off the charts compared with everyone else, while many are aware that we have also diverged, in the wrong direction, on measures like life expectancy: we’re falling further than further behind the rest of the advanced world.

What Frakt points out is that it was not always thus. The dismal U.S. combination of high costs and poor results only began to emerge around 1980, which poses a mystery:
https://ourworldindata.org/the-link-between-life-expectancy-and-health
-spending-us-focus

What changed? In a subsequent post, Frakt suggests that U.S. exceptionalism may be related to income inequality. And it’s true that income inequality began its huge rise just about the same time that U.S. health care apparently went off the rails:

Income Gini Ratio of Families by Race of Householder. All Races

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=jS8B

But it’s not just income inequality. Lots of things had an inflection point around 1980. For example, regional convergence – in which poor states closed the gap with rich states – also came to a dead halt or even went into reverse around the same time. Incomes in Mississippi relative to Massachusetts:

Per Capita Personal Income In Mississippi/Per Capita Personal Income In Massachusetts (“I’d paste the graph here, but why bother? See the original editorial.” - second )

Meanwhile, circa 1980 financial leverage began its huge climb, with household debt relative to income soaring (and setting the stage for the 2008 financial crisis):

Image

And, of course, political polarization made its big move, again at more or less the same time:

Image

So 1980 was an inflection point for a lot of things in America. That can’t be an accident. And it’s also almost surely not an accident that this turning point coincided with the election of Ronald Reagan.

A good guess, surely, is that the whole story is connected with the rise of modern movement conservatism, which brought with it unequalizing economic policies, retreat from antitrust, financial deregulation, and more.

And surely most people would agree that soaring medical costs, rising inequality, financial crises, regional decline, etc., are bad things; so you might think that all of this would suggest to everyone that something was wrong with the newly dominant ideology. But here’s the thing: conservatives don’t see it that way. Not only do they continue to regard Reagan as America’s savior; they haven’t changed their ideas, or indeed come up with any significantly new ideas, for the past 35 years.

It would be nice if commentators who accuse Democrats of lacking new ideas knew something about this history.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Thursday, May 17, 2018 10:18 AM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

If I had to take a guess I'd say the REAL inflection point occurred around 1969. That's when the line turns around from "going lower" to "going higher". That's what "inflection point" means. (Well, technically, IIRC an inflection point is where the second derivative crosses zero.)

At that time LBJ (a Democrat) was busy spending money on BOTH the Vietnam War AND his "Great Society". That led to inflation, so that by 1973 Nixon had to take the USA off the gold standard (again. FDR originally took the USA off the gold standard in 1933). Going off the gold standard meant that money could be inflated ... i.e. created by the banks without restriction. At that point, one's "access to money" becomes THE defining factor in whether your ascent to wealth remains on-par with the wealthy. And since the wealthy always have better access to freshly-created (at-the-moment un-inflated) dollars they will always get richer faster. Both Democrats AND Republicans were complicit with this scheme.

Quote:
It would be nice if commentators who accuse Republicans of lacking new ideas knew something about this history.

FIFY

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

America is an oligarchy
http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?tid=57876

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Thursday, May 17, 2018 1:45 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
If I had to take a guess I'd say the REAL inflection point occurred around 1969. That's when the line turns around from "going lower" to "going higher". That's what "inflection point" means. (Well, technically, IIRC an inflection point is where the second derivative crosses zero.)

At that time LBJ (a Democrat) was busy spending money on BOTH the Vietnam War AND his "Great Society". That led to inflation, so that by 1973 Nixon had to take the USA off the gold standard (again. FDR originally took the USA off the gold standard in 1933). Going off the gold standard meant that money could be inflated ... i.e. created by the banks without restriction. At that point, one's "access to money" becomes THE defining factor in whether your ascent to wealth remains on-par with the wealthy. And since the wealthy always have better access to freshly-created (at-the-moment un-inflated) dollars they will always get richer faster. Both Democrats AND Republicans were complicit with this scheme.

Quote:
It would be nice if commentators who accuse Republicans of lacking new ideas knew something about this history.
FIFY

I was 17 years old in 1969, the year Signym says the Inflection Point began. You moved that point from 1980 to shift the blame to Democrats. I am not believing Signym's alternative history because I was in Texas in '69. Nixon was President then. He committed treason by extending the Vietnam so he could get elected in '68. Personally, if I had known I would not have volunteered for Vietnam.
www.commondreams.org/views/2014/08/12/george-will-confirms-nixons-viet
nam-treason

Nixon also toke the U.S. off the gold standard. Nixon’s treasury secretary and former governor of Texas John Connally said "My philosophy is that all foreigners are out to screw us and it’s our job to screw them first." Connally convinced Nixon to unleash the infamous Nixon Shock upon Europe’s unsuspecting political leaders. At the end of a crucial weekend of consultations with key advisors, President Nixon decided to make a startling announcement on live television: the global monetary system, which America had designed and had been nurturing since the end of the war, was to be dismantled in one fell swoop. The calendar read Sunday, August 15, 1971.

And in a sentence still resonating across Europe today, Connally summed it all up succinctly, painfully, brutally: “Gentlemen, the dollar is our currency. And from now on, it is your problem!”

Europe’s leaders realized immediately the gravity of their situation. They responded quickly with a sequence of knee-jerk reactions that led them from one error to the next, culminating forty years later in Europe’s current circumstances.

That's chapter one by Yanis Varoufakis, And the weak suffer what they must? : Europe’s crisis and America’s economic future.
https://thepiratebay.org/torrent/19792529/And_the_Weak_Suffer_What_The
y_Must_by_Yanis_Varoufakis_EPUB

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Thursday, May 17, 2018 1:55 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Path out of the identity vs. economic politics quagmire

There are more poor white people than poor black people in America, but the poverty rate for blacks and Latinos is more than twice as high as it is for whites.

Booker said that “we’ve destroyed the dignity of work by commoditizing workers,” going on to discuss some of the main themes of David Weill’s book The Fissured Workplace through which companies increasingly outsource the low-status job functions inside their own workplaces. So whereas Kodak’s office might once have been cleaned by janitors who were employed by Kodak, and seen as members of the team by their colleagues, today’s firms would more likely subcontract to a building services company that would employ low-wage workers who lack the benefits and job security of their white-collar not-really-colleagues.

This, like the rest of most of what Booker talked about, is unquestionably an issue that disproportionately impacts black and Latino workers. But it’s not an explicitly racial issue, so Booker didn’t racialize it.

www.vox.com/2018/5/17/17357360/cory-booker-american-progress

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Thursday, May 17, 2018 2:24 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
If I had to take a guess I'd say the REAL inflection point occurred around 1969. That's when the line turns around from "going lower" to "going higher". That's what "inflection point" means. (Well, technically, IIRC an inflection point is where the second derivative crosses zero.)

At that time LBJ (a Democrat) was busy spending money on BOTH the Vietnam War AND his "Great Society". That led to inflation, so that by 1973 Nixon had to take the USA off the gold standard (again. FDR originally took the USA off the gold standard in 1933). Going off the gold standard meant that money could be inflated ... i.e. created by the banks without restriction. At that point, one's "access to money" becomes THE defining factor in whether your ascent to wealth remains on-par with the wealthy. And since the wealthy always have better access to freshly-created (at-the-moment un-inflated) dollars they will always get richer faster. Both Democrats AND Republicans were complicit with this scheme.

Quote:
It would be nice if commentators who accuse Republicans of lacking new ideas knew something about this history.
FIFY - SIGNY

I was 17 years old in 1969, the year Signym says the Inflection Point began. You moved that point from 1980 to shift the blame to Democrats.

No, I did not. What the article calls "the inflection point" is NOT the inflection point, and anyone except SECOND can see that by simple visual examination of the curve. Or you can use fancy math, if you want but you'll reach the same point.

Quote:
I am not believing Signym's alternative history because I was in Texas in '69. Nixon was President then.

Correct, he attained office in Jan 1969, my bad. All of that inflationary spending was done by LBJ BEFORE Nixon came to office. LBJ included Social Security in the Federal budget (which had a surplus) to hide the debt generated by his deficit spending.

Quote:
In early 1968 President Lyndon Johnson made a change in the budget presentation by including Social Security and all other trust funds in a"unified budget."

https://www.ssa.gov/history/BudgetTreatment.html LBJ's inflationary spending is a historic and economic fact, so get over it.

Quote:
He committed treason by extending the Vietnam so he could get elected in '68.

From your link ...

Quote:
Nixon's newly revealed records show for certain that in 1968, as a presidential candidate, he ordered Anna Chennault, his liaison to the South Vietnam government, to persuade them to refuse a cease-fire being brokered by President Lyndon Johnson.

Nixon's interference with these negotiations violated President John Adams's 1797 Logan Act, banning private citizens from intruding into official government negotiations with a foreign nation.

So, you mean like Kerry was/is violating with Iran?

Quote:
Personally, if I had known I would not have volunteered for Vietnam.

You shouldn't have volunteered anyway, it was a pointless war; that aspect was being discussed then so you don't have the excuse of not being able to know or find out.

Quote:
Nixon also toke the U.S. off the gold standard. Nixon’s treasury secretary and former governor of Texas John Connally said "My philosophy is that all foreigners are out to screw us and it’s our job to screw them first." Connally convinced Nixon to unleash the infamous Nixon Shock upon Europe’s unsuspecting political leaders. At the end of a crucial weekend of consultations with key advisors, President Nixon decided to make a startling announcement on live television: the global monetary system, which America had designed and had been nurturing since the end of the war, was to be dismantled in one fell swoop. The calendar read Sunday, August 15, 1971.

Yes, but like all government economic policies, it takes YEARS to take effect. Obama wasn't responsible for the Great Recession, and Nixon wasn't responsible for the inflationary spending which occurred before that which led to (in essence) a "run on the dollar" and unsustainable demand for gold.

Quote:
And in a sentence still resonating across Europe today, Connally summed it all up succinctly, painfully, brutally: “Gentlemen, the dollar is our currency. And from now on, it is your problem!”

And continues to this day to be the world's problem, right through both Republican AND Democratic Presidents.

You're making the same mistake as JSF: You think that because one side is "bad" the other side must be "good". You can't seem to acknowledge that Democrats have ever done ANYthing bad. That's a serious bias you get there, SECOND.

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

America is an oligarchy
http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?tid=57876

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Thursday, May 17, 2018 3:22 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
If I had to take a guess I'd say the REAL inflection point occurred around 1969. That's when the line turns around from "going lower" to "going higher". That's what "inflection point" means. (Well, technically, IIRC an inflection point is where the second derivative crosses zero.)

At that time LBJ (a Democrat) was busy spending money on BOTH the Vietnam War AND his "Great Society". That led to inflation, so that by 1973 Nixon had to take the USA off the gold standard (again. FDR originally took the USA off the gold standard in 1933). Going off the gold standard meant that money could be inflated ... i.e. created by the banks without restriction. At that point, one's "access to money" becomes THE defining factor in whether your ascent to wealth remains on-par with the wealthy. And since the wealthy always have better access to freshly-created (at-the-moment un-inflated) dollars they will always get richer faster. Both Democrats AND Republicans were complicit with this scheme.

Quote:
It would be nice if commentators who accuse Republicans of lacking new ideas knew something about this history.
FIFY

The chart shows 1968. That was LBJ.
1969 was RMN.

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Thursday, May 17, 2018 3:35 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:
If I had to take a guess I'd say the REAL inflection point occurred around 1969. That's when the line turns around from "going lower" to "going higher". That's what "inflection point" means. (Well, technically, IIRC an inflection point is where the second derivative crosses zero.)

At that time LBJ (a Democrat) was busy spending money on BOTH the Vietnam War AND his "Great Society". That led to inflation, so that by 1973 Nixon had to take the USA off the gold standard (again. FDR originally took the USA off the gold standard in 1933). Going off the gold standard meant that money could be inflated ... i.e. created by the banks without restriction. At that point, one's "access to money" becomes THE defining factor in whether your ascent to wealth remains on-par with the wealthy. And since the wealthy always have better access to freshly-created (at-the-moment un-inflated) dollars they will always get richer faster. Both Democrats AND Republicans were complicit with this scheme.

Quote:
It would be nice if commentators who accuse Republicans of lacking new ideas knew something about this history.
FIFY - SIGNY

I was 17 years old in 1969, the year Signym says the Inflection Point began. You moved that point from 1980 to shift the blame to Democrats.
No, I did not. What the article calls "the inflection point" is NOT the inflection point, and anyone except SECOND can see that by simple visual examination of the curve. Or you can use fancy math, if you want but you'll reach the same point.

Quote:
I am not believing Signym's alternative history because I was in Texas in '69. Nixon was President then.
Correct, he attained office in Jan 1969, my bad. All of that inflationary spending was done by LBJ BEFORE Nixon came to office. LBJ included Social Security in the Federal budget (which had a surplus) to hide the debt generated by his deficit spending.
Quote:
In early 1968 President Lyndon Johnson made a change in the budget presentation by including Social Security and all other trust funds in a"unified budget."
https://www.ssa.gov/history/BudgetTreatment.html LBJ's inflationary spending is a historic and economic fact, so get over it.

Quote:
He committed treason by extending the Vietnam so he could get elected in '68.
From your link ...

Quote:
Nixon's newly revealed records show for certain that in 1968, as a presidential candidate, he ordered Anna Chennault, his liaison to the South Vietnam government, to persuade them to refuse a cease-fire being brokered by President Lyndon Johnson.

Nixon's interference with these negotiations violated President John Adams's 1797 Logan Act, banning private citizens from intruding into official government negotiations with a foreign nation.
So, you mean like Kerry was/is violating with Iran?

Quote:
Personally, if I had known I would not have volunteered for Vietnam.
You shouldn't have volunteered anyway, it was a pointless war; that aspect was being discussed then so you don't have the excuse of not being able to know or find out.

Quote:
Nixon also toke the U.S. off the gold standard. Nixon’s treasury secretary and former governor of Texas John Connally said "My philosophy is that all foreigners are out to screw us and it’s our job to screw them first." Connally convinced Nixon to unleash the infamous Nixon Shock upon Europe’s unsuspecting political leaders. At the end of a crucial weekend of consultations with key advisors, President Nixon decided to make a startling announcement on live television: the global monetary system, which America had designed and had been nurturing since the end of the war, was to be dismantled in one fell swoop. The calendar read Sunday, August 15, 1971.
Yes, but like all government economic policies, it takes YEARS to take effect. Obama wasn't responsible for the Great Recession

Yet another faulty claim, trying to deny history.

Government Economic Policies for Improvement can take years to become effective.
But Government Economic Policies to destroy the Economy are relatively immediate in their effect.

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Thursday, May 17, 2018 4:21 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Government Economic Policies for Improvement can take years to become effective.
But Government Economic Policies to destroy the Economy are relatively immediate in their effect.

I suppose a decision to commit nuclear suicide would immediately destroy an economy, but short of that the economy has to be at a really unstable point before it can be pushed into freefall by one decision or one event.

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

America is an oligarchy
http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?tid=57876

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Thursday, May 17, 2018 4:44 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:
Government Economic Policies for Improvement can take years to become effective.
But Government Economic Policies to destroy the Economy are relatively immediate in their effect.
I suppose a decision to commit nuclear suicide would immediately destroy an economy, but short of that the economy has to be at a really unstable point before it can be pushed into freefall by one decision or one event.

Or an event which forebodes 4 years of disaster.

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Friday, May 18, 2018 7:25 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

The Trump administration made a peculiar foreign policy move that seems associated with Trump family business interests. Last year the administration, bizarrely, backed a Saudi blockade of Qatar, a Middle Eastern nation that also happens to be the site of a major U.S. military base. Why? Well, the move came shortly after the Qataris refused to invest $500 million in 666 Fifth Avenue, a troubled property owned by the family of Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law.
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/03/weeks-before-blockade-qat
ar-denied-money-to-kushners-firm.html

And now it looks as if Qatar may be about to make a deal on 666 Fifth Avenue after all. I wonder why?
www.scmp.com/news/world/united-states-canada/article/2146664/kushner-f
amily-likely-be-bailed-out-qatari

Did Trump teach Qatar a lesson? Did the president of the United States betray the nation’s security in 2017 to punish Qatar for not loaning $500 million to his son-in-law?

Don’t say that this suggestion is ridiculous: Given everything we know about Donald Trump, it’s well within the bounds of possibility, even plausibility.

Don’t say there’s no proof: We’re not talking about a court of law, where the accused are presumed innocent until proved guilty. Where the behavior of high officials is concerned, the standard is very nearly the opposite: They’re supposed to avoid situations in which there is even a hint that their actions might be motivated by personal gain.

Oh, and don’t say that it doesn’t matter one way or the other, because the Republicans who control Congress won’t do anything about it. That in itself is a key part of the story: An entire political party — a party that has historically wrapped itself in the flag and questioned the patriotism of its opponents — has become entirely complaisant in the possibility of raw corruption, even if it involves payoffs from foreign powers.

Democracies have ethical rules: Justin Trudeau would be in big trouble if Canada were caught funneling money to the Trump Organization. But if the King of Qatar or Xi Jinping of China or Vladimir Putin of Russia make payoffs to a U.S. politician’s son-in-law, who’s going to stop them?

The main answer is supposed to be congressional oversight, which used to mean something. If there had been even a whiff of foreign payoffs to, say, Gerald Ford’s or Jimmy Carter’s in-laws, there would have been bipartisan demands for an investigation — and a high likelihood of impeachment.

But today’s Republicans have made it clear that they won’t hold Trump accountable for anything.
www.nytimes.com/2018/05/17/opinion/trump-china-bribe-national-security
.html

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Friday, May 18, 2018 12:54 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

SECOND, You DO realize that you're becoming PIRATE NEWS-like? You're absolutely obsessed with Trump. You bring up one allegation, and when it's been found to be wrong, irrelevant, or trivial, rather than discussing THE TOPIC you drop that one and move on to another. Clearly, you have a longstanding hard on for the guy.

Just to go back to a previous discussion about your personal history, I can't imagine what would have propelled you to volunteer for Vietnam. Was it your family? I don't think so, because they're Jehovah's Witnesses, right? And eschewing politics, don't they also eschew military service? So, not your family. Republican friends, maybe? The zeitgeist of Texas? Desire for action and adventure? Whatever it was, it left you with permanent consequence. Well, whatever. I wanted a child, and we ALL have permanent consequences! Life happens, and at least it wasn't fatal. You were 17 at the time, give yourself a break. If we knew the future, we wouldn't make mistakes. But we don't, and we do. Stop blaming everyone else for your decision, and then forgive yourself. Shit happens. Really.

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

America is an oligarchy
http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?tid=57876

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Friday, May 18, 2018 12:55 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
I suppose a decision to commit nuclear suicide would immediately destroy an economy, but short of that the economy has to be at a really unstable point before it can be pushed into freefall by one decision or one event.- SIGNY

Or an event which forebodes 4 years of disaster.- JSF

I don't understand. Maybe an example would help.

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

America is an oligarchy
http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?tid=57876

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Friday, May 18, 2018 2:30 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:
I suppose a decision to commit nuclear suicide would immediately destroy an economy, but short of that the economy has to be at a really unstable point before it can be pushed into freefall by one decision or one event.- SIGNY

Or an event which forebodes 4 years of disaster.- JSF
I don't understand. Maybe an example would help.

Such as the Election of Obama. Or the impending doom preceding it.

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Friday, May 18, 2018 2:37 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
SECOND, You DO realize that you're becoming PIRATE NEWS-like? You're absolutely obsessed with Trump. You bring up one allegation, and when it's been found to be wrong, irrelevant, or trivial, rather than discussing THE TOPIC you drop that one and move on to another.

Who is going to believe anything spouted by all of these known and proven liars?
Do you these Chicken Little Libtards even realize how much they have weakened their own positions? After knowingly fabricating, obstructing, Maliciously persecuting for so long, if they ever stumbled across a valid dispute, who could believe them?

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Friday, May 18, 2018 6:20 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
I suppose a decision to commit nuclear suicide would immediately destroy an economy, but short of that the economy has to be at a really unstable point before it can be pushed into freefall by one decision or one event.- SIGNY

Or an event which forebodes 4 years of disaster.- JSF

I don't understand. Maybe an example would help.- SIGNY

Such as the Election of Obama. Or the impending doom preceding it.- JSF

Understanding-fail at this end. If you're trying to say that Obama was responsible for the financial collapse, it was well underway even before the Nov 2008 election. There were signs of impending doom in 2007, the collapse of Bear Stearns (Hey, I bought muni bonds from that company lo these many years ago!) was a harbinger of things to come. The fall of Shearson Lehman (which took down an investment of mine in the Forex) occurred Sept 15, 2008, and my bank (WAMU) was seized by the FDIC in late Sept 2008.

All of the problems ... fraudulent lending, the real estate bubble, naked CDSs, low-low interest rates, banks lacking reserves and commingling customer deposits with speculative money, the widening of the wealth gap, the deficit and trickle-down ... came about because of things that Bill Clinton, George W Bush, and The Fed did all together. It was a clusterfuck of greed and speculation over many years.

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

America is an oligarchy
http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?tid=57876

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Friday, May 18, 2018 7:12 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:
I suppose a decision to commit nuclear suicide would immediately destroy an economy, but short of that the economy has to be at a really unstable point before it can be pushed into freefall by one decision or one event.- SIGNY

Or an event which forebodes 4 years of disaster.- JSF

I don't understand. Maybe an example would help.- SIGNY

Such as the Election of Obama. Or the impending doom preceding it.- JSF

Understanding-fail at this end. If you're trying to say that Obama was responsible for the financial collapse, it was well underway even before the Nov 2008 election. There were signs of impending doom in 2007, the collapse of Bear Stearns (Hey, I bought muni bonds from that company lo these many years ago!) was a harbinger of things to come. The fall of Shearson Lehman (which took down an investment of mine in the Forex) occurred Sept 15, 2008, and my bank (WAMU) was seized by the FDIC in late Sept 2008.

All of the problems ... fraudulent lending, the real estate bubble, naked CDSs, low-low interest rates, banks lacking reserves and commingling customer deposits with speculative money, the widening of the wealth gap, the deficit and trickle-down ... came about because of things that Bill Clinton, George W Bush, and The Fed did all together. It was a clusterfuck of greed and speculation over many years.

Nice try, Signym, but the true explanation has many more details involving bonds that were fraudulently rated (or incompetently rated, depending on who you ask) as being high quality investment grade.

What happens when the public discovers that a company owns a portfolio full of garbage, rather than AAA rating bonds? The case of Enron is illustrative. Throughout the summer and fall of 2001, even though its credit was rapidly deteriorating, the rating agencies kept it at investment grade. This was not unusual; the agencies typically lag behind the news. On Nov. 28, 2001, S.&P. finally dropped Enron’s bonds to subinvestment grade. Although its action merely validated the market consensus, it caused the stock to collapse. To investors, S.&P.’s action was a signal that Enron was locked out of credit markets; it had lost its “license” to borrow. Four days later it filed for bankruptcy.

On with the story of the Financial crisis of 2007–2008:

Triple-A Failure
By ROGER LOWENSTEIN, APRIL 27, 2008
www.nytimes.com/2008/04/27/magazine/27Credit-t.html

The Ratings Game

In 1996, Thomas Friedman, the New York Times columnist, remarked on “The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer” that there were two superpowers in the world — the United States and Moody’s bond-rating service — and it was sometimes unclear which was more powerful. Moody’s was then a private company that rated corporate bonds, but it was, already, spreading its wings into the exotic business of rating securities backed by pools of residential mortgages.

Obscure and dry-seeming as it was, this business offered a certain magic. The magic consisted of turning risky mortgages into investments that would be suitable for investors who would know nothing about the underlying loans. To get why this is impressive, you have to think about all that determines whether a mortgage is safe. Who owns the property? What is his or her income? Bundle hundreds of mortgages into a single security and the questions multiply; no investor could begin to answer them. But suppose the security had a rating. If it were rated triple-A by a firm like Moody’s, then the investor could forget about the underlying mortgages. He wouldn’t need to know what properties were in the pool, only that the pool was triple-A — it was just as safe, in theory, as other triple-A securities.

Over the last decade, Moody’s and its two principal competitors, Standard & Poor’s and Fitch, played this game to perfection — putting what amounted to gold seals on mortgage securities that investors swept up with increasing élan. For the rating agencies, this business was extremely lucrative. Their profits surged, Moody’s in particular: it went public, saw its stock increase sixfold and its earnings grow by 900 percent.

By providing the mortgage industry with an entree to Wall Street, the agencies also transformed what had been among the sleepiest corners of finance. No longer did mortgage banks have to wait 10 or 20 or 30 years to get their money back from homeowners. Now they sold their loans into securitized pools and — their capital thus replenished — wrote new loans at a much quicker pace.

Mortgage volume surged; in 2006, it topped $2.5 trillion. Also, many more mortgages were issued to risky subprime borrowers. Almost all of those subprime loans ended up in securitized pools; indeed, the reason banks were willing to issue so many risky loans is that they could fob them off on Wall Street.

But who was evaluating these securities? Who was passing judgment on the quality of the mortgages, on the equity behind them and on myriad other investment considerations? Certainly not the investors. They relied on a credit rating.

Thus the agencies became the de facto watchdog over the mortgage industry. In a practical sense, it was Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s that set the credit standards that determined which loans Wall Street could repackage and, ultimately, which borrowers would qualify. Effectively, they did the job that was expected of banks and government regulators. And today, they are a central culprit in the mortgage bust, in which the total loss has been projected at $250 billion and possibly much more.

In the wake of the housing collapse, Congress is exploring why the industry failed and whether it should be revamped (hearings in the Senate Banking Committee were expected to begin April 22). Two key questions are whether the credit agencies — which benefit from a unique series of government charters — enjoy too much official protection and whether their judgment was tainted. Presumably to forestall criticism and possible legislation, Moody’s and S.&P. have announced reforms. But they reject the notion that they should have been more vigilant. Instead, they lay the blame on the mortgage holders who turned out to be deadbeats, many of whom lied to obtain their loans.

Arthur Levitt, the former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, charges that “the credit-rating agencies suffer from a conflict of interest — perceived and apparent — that may have distorted their judgment, especially when it came to complex structured financial products.” Frank Partnoy, a professor at the University of San Diego School of Law who has written extensively about the credit-rating industry, says that the conflict is a serious problem. Thanks to the industry’s close relationship with the banks whose securities it rates, Partnoy says, the agencies have behaved less like gatekeepers than gate openers. Last year, Moody’s had to downgrade more than 5,000 mortgage securities — a tacit acknowledgment that the mortgage bubble was abetted by its overly generous ratings. Mortgage securities rated by Standard & Poor’s and Fitch have suffered a similar wave of downgrades.

Much More at "Presto! How 2,393 Subprime Loans Become a High-Grade Investment"
www.nytimes.com/2008/04/27/magazine/27Credit-t.html

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Friday, May 18, 2018 8:46 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
SECOND, You DO realize that you're becoming PIRATE NEWS-like? You're absolutely obsessed with Trump. You bring up one allegation, and when it's been found to be wrong, irrelevant, or trivial, rather than discussing THE TOPIC you drop that one and move on to another. Clearly, you have a longstanding hard on for the guy.

Just to go back to a previous discussion about your personal history, I can't imagine what would have propelled you to volunteer for Vietnam. Was it your family? I don't think so, because they're Jehovah's Witnesses, right? And eschewing politics, don't they also eschew military service? So, not your family. Republican friends, maybe? The zeitgeist of Texas? Desire for action and adventure? Whatever it was, it left you with permanent consequence. Well, whatever. I wanted a child, and we ALL have permanent consequences! Life happens, and at least it wasn't fatal. You were 17 at the time, give yourself a break. If we knew the future, we wouldn't make mistakes. But we don't, and we do. Stop blaming everyone else for your decision, and then forgive yourself. Shit happens. Really.

This.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Saturday, May 19, 2018 12:36 AM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
If you're trying to say that Obama was responsible for the financial collapse, it was well underway even before the Nov 2008 election... SIGNY

Nice try, Signym, but ...

Wow, I can't even DEFEND Obama without you disagreeing with me!

Yes, I know .... the causes of the Great Financial Collapse were many and varied, and the reasons why one event went "viral" through the financial system were even more varied. I just didn't want to detail all of them because that wasn't my point.

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

America is an oligarchy
http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?tid=57876

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Saturday, May 19, 2018 6:58 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:
If you're trying to say that Obama was responsible for the financial collapse, it was well underway even before the Nov 2008 election... SIGNY

Nice try, Signym, but ...
Wow, I can't even DEFEND Obama without you disagreeing with me!

Yes, I know .... the causes of the Great Financial Collapse were many and varied, and the reasons why one event went "viral" through the financial system were even more varied. I just didn't want to detail all of them because that wasn't my point.

Signym wrote: "I just didn't want to detail all of them because that wasn't my point." Don't even try to detail anything, Signym. Your overly articulate brain is always tricking you into thinking you understand more than you do. A truer summation would be that the financial collapse was completely beyond the control of President Obama, Bush, or Bill Clinton, but well within the control of the SEC. If you dig down deeper into that article, there are tidbits about the geniuses running the financial world:

Quote:
In April 2007, Moody’s announced it was revising the model it used to evaluate subprime mortgages. It noted that the model “was first introduced in 2002. Since then, the mortgage market has evolved considerably.” This was a rather stunning admission; its model had been based on a world that no longer existed.

Poring over the data, Moody’s discovered that the size of people’s first mortgages was no longer a good predictor of whether they would default; rather, it was the size of their first and second loans — that is, their total debt — combined. This was rather intuitive; Moody’s simply hadn’t reckoned on it. . . . And homeowners without equity were making what economists call a rational choice; they were abandoning properties rather than make payments on them. Homeowners’ equity had never been as high as believed because appraisals had been inflated.

Over the summer and fall of 2007, Moody’s and the other agencies repeatedly tightened their methodology for rating mortgage securities, but it was too late. They had to downgrade tens of billions of dollars of securities. By early this year (2008), when I met with Moody’s, an astonishing 27 percent of the mortgage holders in Subprime XYZ were delinquent. Losses on the pool were now estimated at 14 percent to 16 percent — three times the original estimate.

www.nytimes.com/2008/04/27/magazine/27Credit-t.html

The Securities and Exchange Commission could have stopped Moody's fake rating system before it became a disaster, but then the SEC would have been forced to listen to Republicans saying: "The younger generation, and society at large, is not yearning for a five-year plan of centrally delivered tractor quotas. Instead, we are a society that prizes individual autonomy and freedom of expression, and expects government to help us to achieve our goals, not set them." The SEC let Moody's profitable drama continue to the finish because the SEC couldn't be absolutely certain that the drama will end, several years later, tragically with a worldwide crash.

I changed my mind, it does matter who is President. What's important is how much risk will the President allow? Under Bush, large risks were allowed by the SEC. Under Obama, small risks. Under Trump, who is either a loose cannon or a monkey with a machine gun, the SEC is an erratic bureaucracy that will allow the financial world to take large, complicated risks with the economy.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Saturday, May 19, 2018 7:08 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
SECOND, You DO realize that you're becoming PIRATE NEWS-like? You're absolutely obsessed with Trump. You bring up one allegation, and when it's been found to be wrong, irrelevant, or trivial, rather than discussing THE TOPIC you drop that one and move on to another. Clearly, you have a longstanding hard on for the guy.

Just to go back to a previous discussion about your personal history, I can't imagine what would have propelled you to volunteer for Vietnam. Was it your family? I don't think so, because they're Jehovah's Witnesses, right? And eschewing politics, don't they also eschew military service? So, not your family. Republican friends, maybe? The zeitgeist of Texas? Desire for action and adventure? Whatever it was, it left you with permanent consequence. Well, whatever. I wanted a child, and we ALL have permanent consequences! Life happens, and at least it wasn't fatal. You were 17 at the time, give yourself a break. If we knew the future, we wouldn't make mistakes. But we don't, and we do. Stop blaming everyone else for your decision, and then forgive yourself. Shit happens. Really.

This.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

Nixon was a great persuader. He persuaded me that Vietnam was a war that was necessary to win. But he excluded a critical piece of information from his sales pitch: there could have been peace with North Vietnam in 1968 if only Nixon had not interfered with the South Vietnamese President. It is a very straight forward story which everyone who voted for Trump ought to know:
www.commondreams.org/views/2014/08/12/george-will-confirms-nixons-viet
nam-treason

If I had not gone to Vietnam after high school, I would have continued to work at Burger King for my father, the day manager. His job was not well paid. He worked it until he retired at age 62, as soon as Social Security was available. He and I both liked the food, but I preferred the Whaler and my father preferred the Whopper. Other than the tasty food, it was not the job for me. War was the job for me. As my luck would have it, war shortened my left leg and sent me back to Burger King. Returning to fast food was the easiest thing to do, but it could have worse. I could have ended in 1972 at Houston National Cemetery on Veterans Memorial Drive. Lucky me was the only one to survive more than a month a helicopter crash.

Once I’m back in Pasadena Texas to face my future in fast food, I realize I cannot stand on my feet and work for 8 hours at Burger King. I tried for months. But Nixon knew I needed to get a different job, one that can be done sitting down. Thus I went to the University of Texas at Austin, following the example of my two sisters (school teacher at HISD and nurse at many places), graduating with a BSME in 1977 at the age of 25, and had a better paying career than my father. I owe my success to Nixon and his sale pitch for winning the Vietnam War. If not for Nixon, I would have been a Burger King manager like my father. Too bad for Nixon that Watergate followed directly from the treason involving Vietnam that Nixon committed in ‘68. The story is short, yet very few have read and understood it at:
www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/george-f-will-nixons-long-shadow/2014/
08/06/fad8c00c-1ccb-11e4-ae54-0cfe1f974f8a_story.html?utm_term=.45276f6d4a50

Maybe you will read the two short stories about Nixon. The stories look at the same event from two slightly different angles, giving a good view of what Nixon did. Someday there might be a similar story about Trump, but far more amazing and entertaining than Nixon’s. Trump is a greater showman than dull old Nixon, the Quaker.
http://quakerspeak.com/was-richard-nixon-a-quaker/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Saturday, May 19, 2018 8:09 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Bill Gates Wasn't Impressed With Donald Trump during a private meeting. Start at 2:36.

Why Trump should be intimately acquainted with both HIV and HPV
https://qz.com/1281889

Microsoft founder Bill Gates told his staff at the Gates Foundation, in a recently publicized video obtained by MSNBC, that he has had two meetings with Donald Trump since the president was elected.

Gates said he tried to persuade the president during both meetings to be a “leader who drives innovation.” Alarmingly, in both, Trump asked if vaccines weren’t a “bad thing,” said Gates, indicating that Trump believes in a conspiracy that has spread throughout the West in recent years, bringing back once-banished diseases like measles with it.

And both times, “he wanted to know if there was a difference between HIV and HPV,” Gates said, “so I was available to explain those were rarely confused with each other:”

Trump’s inattention to detail, lack of even rudimentary knowledge about American history ( https://qz.com/972825 ), and fundamental ignorance about global trade is a constant in his presidency. But given his personal history, the fact that he doesn’t know or understand the difference between HIV and HPV is an almost unfathomable.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Saturday, May 19, 2018 2:57 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Signym wrote: "I just didn't want to detail all of them because that wasn't my point." Don't even try to detail anything, Signym. Your overly articulate brain is always tricking you into thinking you understand more than you do. A truer summation would be that the financial collapse was completely beyond the control of President Obama, Bush, or Bill Clinton, - SECOND

Oh yes, you with your vast knowledge of economics and finance (gained in the very last article that you read on the topic) "really" understand what went on. [/snark]

The reality is that the crisis COULD HAVE been prevented at many points. ANY ONE of those points would have led to an entirely different outcome; "ratings" was just one of those points.

The crisis could be thought of as originating with the development of "fractional reserve banking", because if banks weren't able to loan money that they DIDN'T HAVE, then they would have not themselves been able to go so far into debt.

Then again, you could say that the crisis originated with Bill Clinton, because if he hadn't done away with Glass Steagall (which separated deposits from speculative ventures) or signed the Commodities Futures Modernization Act (both on the basis that our banks were being out-competed for capital by EU banks which operated under the less-restrictive Basel rules), Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDOs) and Credit Default Swaps (CDSs) would have never been created, and so many depositors would not have had their money at risk.

Or you could blame the FDIC itself, which continued to insure deposits even as the risk increased, giving lenders and depositors a false sense of security.

Or, you could point to George W Bush, who (with his wartime spending, tax cut for the wealthy, and Part D gift to Big Pharma) blew up the deficit and grossly expanded the wealth gap, placing many people in the position of relying on debt to finance their lifestyle.

The again, you might say that The Fed (1913) caused the problem because instead of holding GWB's feet to the fire and allowing interest rates to rise with increasing public and private indebtedness, they kept interest rates artificially low, allowing a housing bubble to inflate.

Or, you can point to banks and other mortgage lending institutions like Countrywide, who wrote incredibly loose, if not downright fraudulent mortgages with surprise raises in interest rates, balloon payments, little down payment and no income verification (liar's loans) required. Do you remember ANTHONY? He used to work on the loan department of a bank and he posted here how terrible the loans were. The only reason why banks could write such shaky loans is because they knew they had a market for them, via the CDO's that they were able to create and sell.

You could blame the homeowners, who were either too greedy or too naive (or both) to understand what trouble they were getting into, and how they would come crashing down if the up-escalator of home prices ever reversed direction.

Or, back again to GWB. When States Attorney Generals attempted to prosecute banks for fraudulent lending, GWB DOJ forbade states from prosecuting banks, claiming it was a Federal matter.

You could blame the ratings agencies, who rated the bundled prime/subprime loan CDOs as AAA to be sold to other banks, Fannie and Freddie, and to investors like pension fund and other institutions who didn't understand they risk they they were buying.

And then, there were the investors on CDOs (and even CDSs) ... the retirement funds, OTHER BANKS, hedge funds ... who only saw returns on investment without looking under the hoods of the "investments" that they were buying. The bank-to-bank sales is what caused one event to spread like wildfire across the globe, as banks SUDDENLY distrusted each other's assets, and the London Interbank Overnight Rate (LIBOR) suddenly zoomed up from near-nothing to over 6% and caused a credit freeze from Lehman to Black Rock (Scotland) to HSBC.

Or you could blame the insurances (monolines) like AIG who chose to back the Credit Default Swaps which supposedly protected investors from default.

So you see, SECOND, there was a lot going on. There was plenty of blame to go around, and this all could have been prevented at any step. However, I place most of the blame on Bill Clinton and GWB, because thanks to weakened laws and no enforcement the banks were allowed to be greedy unscrupulous lenders, which is pretty much what they trend towards unless held in check.

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

America is an oligarchy
http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?tid=57876

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Saturday, May 19, 2018 7:29 PM

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

Quote:
Kiki is talking about people handing over at least 4 years of their life under 24/7 direct management from the Military, housing non-combat duty soldiers on American soil on the taxpayer dime. Huge difference.

Which we are ALREADY doing. It's generically called the military.

All I'm proposing is that we change the military's tasks and locale - from killing overseas, to providing societal value here.

SECOND is a troll because it constantly misrepresents what people post, fails to address their actual positions, and resorts to personal attacks when its brain isn't working (which is most of the time).

NOTIFY: N | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Saturday, May 19, 2018 8:49 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by 1kiki:
Quote:
Kiki is talking about people handing over at least 4 years of their life under 24/7 direct management from the Military, housing non-combat duty soldiers on American soil on the taxpayer dime. Huge difference.
Which we are ALREADY doing. It's generically called the military.

All I'm proposing is that we change the military's tasks and locale - from killing overseas, to providing societal value here.

Okay. Well I'm 100% against this, for many reasons. Some of which I've already stated. I don't imagine you'd find much support from anybody for this idea. I'd be surprised if a single person on this board other than you supported the idea, and you know of the few of us left here that we all rarely agree on anything.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Saturday, May 19, 2018 10:18 PM

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

You object to the military proper being controlled by the military chain of command? You object to the military being paid their existing pay? You object to the military being housed and fed from the military budget? You object to them being quartered in the US?

Those are absurd points. All those circumstances are the current reality. And of the roughly 1.3 million personnel, only 0.2 million are overseas. http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/08/22/u-s-active-duty-milita
ry-presence-overseas-is-at-its-smallest-in-decades/

So, where are the other 1.1 million? They're living on and off base, in the US. Here's a listing of US military bases in the US, just FYI:

United States
Alabama
Fort Rucker
Maxwell-Gunter
Redstone Arsenal
Alaska
Eielson
Elmendorf
Fort Richardson
Fort Wainwright
Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson
Arizona
Davis-Monthan Air Force Base
Fort Huachuca
Luke Air Force Base
Marine Corps Air Station Yuma
Yuma Proving Ground
Arkansas
Little Rock
California
China Lake Naval Air Weapons Station
Coast Guard Training Center Petaluma
Fort Irwin
Los Angeles Air Force Base
March Air Reserve Base
Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center - Twentynine Palms
Marine Corps Air Station Miramar
Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton
Marine Corps Recruit Depot San Diego
Naval Air Station Lemoore
Naval Air Station North Island
Naval Amphibious Base Coronado
Naval Base Coronado
Naval Base Point Loma
Naval Base San Diego
Naval Base Ventura County
Naval Postgraduate School
Presidio of Monterey
San Diego Military Bases
Travis Air Force Base
US Coast Guard Station San Diego
Vandenberg Air Force Base
Colorado
Buckley Air Force Base
Colorado Springs Military Bases
Fort Carson
Peterson Air Force Base
Schriever Air Force Base
United States Air Force Academy
Connecticut
Naval Submarine Base New London
Delaware
Dover Air Force Base
District of Columbia
Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling
Naval District Washington
Walter Reed Army Medical Center
Florida
Eglin Air Force Base
Hurlburt Field
MacDill Air Force Base
Naval Air Station Key West
Naval Air Station Pensacola
Naval Air Station Whiting Field
Naval Station Mayport
Naval Support Activity Panama City
Pensacola Florida Military Bases
Tyndall Air Force Base
United States Southern Command
Georgia
Fort Benning
Fort Gordon
Fort Stewart
Hunter Army Airfield
Naval Submarine Base Kings Bay
Robins Air Force Base
Hawaii
Coast Guard Sector Honolulu
Hickam Air Force Base
Joint Base Pearl Harbor - Hickam
Marine Corps Base Hawaii
Naval Station Pearl Harbor
Oahu Hawaii Military Bases
Schofield Barracks/Fort Shafter
Tripler Army Medical Center
Idaho
Mountain Home Air Force Base
Illinois
Naval Station Great Lakes
Scott AFB Guide
Indiana
Grissom Air Reserve Base
Kansas
Fort Leavenworth
Fort Riley
McConnell Air Force Base
Kentucky
Fort Campbell
Fort Knox
Louisiana
Barksdale Air Force Base
Fort Polk
Naval Air Station Joint Reserve Base New Orleans
Maryland
Aberdeen Proving Ground
Andrews Air Force Base
Coast Guard Sector Baltimore
Fort Detrick
Fort George G. Meade
Joint Base Andrews
National Naval Medical Center
Naval Air Station Patuxent River
Naval Support Activity Bethesda
Navy Fort Meade
US Naval Academy
Massachusetts
Fort Devens
Hanscom Air Force Base
Mississippi
Columbus Air Force Base
Keesler Air Force Base
Naval Air Station Meridian
Naval Construction Battalion Center Gulfport
Missouri
Fort Leonard Wood
Whiteman Air Force Base
Montana
Malmstrom Air Force Base
Nebraska
Offutt Air Force Base
Nevada
Creech Air Force Base
Naval Air Station Fallon
Nellis Air Force Base
New Jersey
Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst
New Mexico
Cannon Air Force Base
Holloman Air Force Base
Kirtland Air Force Base
New York
Fort Drum
Fort Hamilton
Naval Support Activity Saratoga Springs
United States Military Academy, West Point
North Carolina
Fayetteville North Carolina Military Bases
Fort Bragg
Jacksonville North Carolina Military Bases
Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point
Marine Corps Air Station New River
Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune
Naval Air Station Jacksonville
Pope Field
North Dakota
Grand Forks Air Force Base
Ohio
Wright-Patterson Air Force Base
Oklahoma
Altus Air Force Base
Fort Sill
Tinker Air Force Base
Vance Air Force Base
Pennsylvania
Carlisle Barracks
Puerto Rico
Fort Buchanan
Rhode Island
Naval Station Newport
South Carolina
Beaufort South Carolina Military Bases
Charleston Air Force Base
Fort Jackson
Joint Base Charleston
Marine Corps Air Station Beaufort
Marine Corps Recruit Depot Parris Island
Naval Hospital Beaufort
Naval Weapons Station Charleston
Shaw Air Force Base
South Dakota
Ellsworth Air Force Base
Tennessee
Naval Support Activity Mid-South
Texas
Camp Bullis
Dyess Air Force Base
Fort Bliss
Fort Hood
Fort Sam Houston
Goodfellow Air Force Base
Joint Base Myer - Henderson Hall
Joint Base San Antonio
Lackland Air Force Base
Laughlin Air Force Base
Naval Air Station Corpus Christi
Naval Air Station Joint Reserve Base Fort Worth
Randolph Air Force Base
Red River Army Depot
Sheppard Air Force Base
Utah
Dugway Proving Ground
Hill Air Force Base
Virginia
Coast Guard Sector Hampton Roads
Fort Belvoir
Fort Eustis
Fort Lee
Fort Myer
Fort Story
Hampton Roads Military Bases
Henderson Hall
Joint Base Langley-Eustis
Joint Expeditionary Base Little Creek - Fort Story
Langley Air Force Base
Marine Corps Base Quantico
Naval Air Station Oceana
Naval Air Station Oceana Dam Neck Annex
Naval Amphibious Base Little Creek
Naval Station Norfolk
Washington
Beale Air Force Base
Coast Guard Sector Puget Sound
Fairchild Air Force Base
Fort Lewis
Joint Base Lewis-McChord
McChord Field
Naval Air Station Whidbey Island
Naval Base Kitsap
Naval Base Kitsap - Bangor
Naval Base Kitsap - Bremerton
Naval Hospital Bremerton
Naval Station Everett
Wisconsin
Fort McCoy
Wyoming
F. E. Warren Air Force Base

So, in order to assuage your qualms, what are you suggesting - we disband the military? We don't pay them? We quarter them somewhere not on US soil? Do you think Canada would be accommodating?

I also specified they do NOT patrol the US under my plan - the exact same way they don't patrol the US now. And they do NOT perform private, for-profit work - the exact same way they don't perform private, for-profit work now.

I suggest you re-frame your objections, because you're making no sense at all.

NOTIFY: N | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Saturday, May 19, 2018 11:37 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
If not for Nixon, I would have been a Burger King manager like my father.- SECOND

And then, of course, the oil or gas under your ranch.

So, with all that, SECOND, why is your needle always pegged at "mad at everyone"? I understand if people are in pain or their circumstances are unbearable, but is the only reason for YOU to be pissed-off full time because you're addicted to anger?

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

America is an oligarchy
http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?tid=57876

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Sunday, May 20, 2018 12:00 AM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
So here I am, making a simple suggestion that we redirect the military - from pointless, money-wasting adventures overseas, to useful, value-producing work at home.

It seems a modest proposal, and non-partisan, in that neither side has any financial or cultural reason to be more against it than the other.= KIKI

Hi. I think that this would be OK as a TRANSITION to a smaller army as recruits finish out their contracts, but I would rather that the money be turned over to a civilian program over time.

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

America is an oligarchy
http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?tid=57876

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Sunday, May 20, 2018 2:03 AM

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

I'm making this particular suggestion because nether party seems to object to the size of the military we have, the number of people in it, or the amount of money that is spent. And a civilian corps would be too much like socialism.

NOTIFY: N | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Sunday, May 20, 2018 7:08 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

In the third part of the great Indian epic the Mahabharata, a powerful spirit named Yaksa asks the oldest and wisest of the Pandava, Yudhistira, what is the greatest of all mysteries. The answer given resounds across millennia: “Every day countless people die, and yet those who remain live as if they were immortals.”

Immortals would be fearless, yet there is a worldwide shortage of courage. That can’t be the mystery. But immortals also have infinite time to waste. There is the mystery! People kill time with trivia as if they are immortals.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Sunday, May 20, 2018 8:12 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:
So here I am, making a simple suggestion that we redirect the military - from pointless, money-wasting adventures overseas, to useful, value-producing work at home.

It seems a modest proposal, and non-partisan, in that neither side has any financial or cultural reason to be more against it than the other.= KIKI

Hi. I think that this would be OK as a TRANSITION to a smaller army as recruits finish out their contracts, but I would rather that the money be turned over to a civilian program over time.

This.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Sunday, May 20, 2018 8:48 AM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
I'm making this particular suggestion because nether party seems to object to the size of the military we have, the number of people in it, or the amount of money that is spent. And a civilian corps would be too much like socialism. - KIKI

I'm struggling to pin down what, exactly, bothers me about this idea.

I guess I would have to start that with both parties being incredibly corrupt, a solution that THEY would find politically acceptable might not be acceptable to me. In fact, whatever both "establishment" parties can agree on is more likely to be bad than good.

But aside from their approval being a sort of counter-recommendation to me, fundamentally this puts too much power in the hands of the government. It requires people to be put under the military code of justice just for "three hots and a cot" and training, more like modern-day feudalism or prison labor. And it turns the interests of the government in the wrong direction. The government should be following policies whereby everyone who wants to/ can work has a meaningful job at a living wage. Instead, it simply reduces the pressure created by the vast pool of the unemployed, and instead makes unemployment beneficial to (a) the government, because it has a pool of cheap labor that it can direct and (b) military suppliers, who make money off of providing food, housing etc. Prison-like labor, paid for with tax dollars. Its like paying for your own enslavement.

Like I said, the closest I can come to is prison labor. Aside from the practical disincentives that would make this program attractive only to the poorest and most desperate (poor pay, loss of freedom) it would not touch those who might need it the most (homeless, drug-addicted, single parents, mentally unstable) because they would be screened out at the military recruiting step. And in addition to falling under a military code of justice instead of being able to access Constitutional protections, military service-people can NEVER SUE THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT. This is an outgrowth of being a wartime organization: you can never sue for combat injuries. So the non-combat military would have no practical incentive to feed its recruits well, or to keep them safe, and instead could assign them to the most hazardous duties (Hanford cleanup, anyone?) without fear of consequence.

The best thinking-through of what this could turn out to be was in the first chapters of the first book of the Rissa Kerguelen series, Young Rissa. It was an amazing piece of prognostication that the Soviet Union would fall, and then went on to describe how terrible the world would become under global corporate power, thru the eyes of a young girl who is sucked up into its system of workhouses. Whenever I read about work-for-welfare schemes, I think of this book: First, they take away your work and then they take way your freedom.

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

America is an oligarchy
http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?tid=57876

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Sunday, May 20, 2018 1:37 PM

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

"It requires people to be put under the military code of justice just for "three hots and a cot" and training"

Which they are ALREADY doing. I'm not changing that. Today's all volunteer army requires people who make a choice to join. Some join for the college and post-college benefits, some want to make it a career, some just need a job. But they are certainly wiling to be deployed in an active war zone, and put their lives, health, and futures on the line, to get the economic benefits they seek in the military.

And note: I'm not saying we EXPAND the military.

What part of 'everything else stays the same' do people not get?

NOTIFY: N | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Sunday, May 20, 2018 1:55 PM

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

I've come to the realization (above) by watching Homicide Hunter, which is a real crime TV show. But because it's in Colorado Springs - which has a large collection of military bases and offices in and nearby (within 10 miles) - I've learned a lot about the scope and function of the US military in the economy. Your concern is that it will get that bad. Watching this show I can say it IS that bad. The military is HUGE. Collected all together, it would be a substantial city on a map. We just don't see it because we don't live next to military bases.

Here's a list (some bases have more than 1 physical location):

Peterson Air Force Base
Colorado Springs, CO
(719) 556-7321

Cheyenne Mountain Air Force Station
Colorado Springs, CO
(719) 474-1110

Fort Carson
Fort Carson, CO
(719) 526-5811

Ft. Carson
Colorado Springs, CO

US Army Department
Colorado Springs, CO
(719) 526-3410

US Army Department
Colorado Springs, CO
(719) 526-5958

JBTEC
Colorado Springs, CO

Schriever Air Force Base
Colorado Springs, CO
(719) 567-1110

US Army Space Command
Colorado Springs, CO

US Defense Contract Audit
Colorado Springs, CO
(719) 596-0960

US Defense Contract Audit
Colorado Springs, CO
(719) 596-0960

21st Force Support Squadron
Colorado Springs, CO
(719) 556-4023

Peterson AFB West Gate Visitors Center
Colorado Springs, CO

Off Post Homes
Colorado Springs, CO
(719) 591-7653

United States Air Force Academy
U.S. Air Force Academy, CO
(719) 333-2025

National Guard
Colorado Springs, CO
(719) 596-7184

50th Space Wing
Schriever AFB, CO
(719) 567-5040

NOTIFY: N | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Sunday, May 20, 2018 2:22 PM

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

And yet here you are, spending FAR more time than I ever have or will, posting obsessively, helplessly, about Trump multiple times a day. What a freaking waste of all that time.

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
In the third part of the great Indian epic the Mahabharata, a powerful spirit named Yaksa asks the oldest and wisest of the Pandava, Yudhistira, what is the greatest of all mysteries. The answer given resounds across millennia: “Every day countless people die, and yet those who remain live as if they were immortals.”

Immortals would be fearless, yet there is a worldwide shortage of courage. That can’t be the mystery. But immortals also have infinite time to waste. There is the mystery! People kill time with trivia as if they are immortals.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

NOTIFY: N | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Sunday, May 20, 2018 8:54 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by 1kiki:
I've come to the realization (above) by watching Homicide Hunter, which is a real crime TV show. But because it's in Colorado Springs - which has a large collection of military bases and offices in and nearby (within 10 miles) - I've learned a lot about the scope and function of the US military in the economy. Your concern is that it will get that bad. Watching this show I can say it IS that bad. The military is HUGE. Collected all together, it would be a substantial city on a map. We just don't see it because we don't live next to military bases.

So your solution to the problem is to expand the huge bad, and let them tell us how good it is by giving us free job training?

It's bad enough we have a volunteer army that is as huge as it is already. Expanding the program for ultra-cheap labor in the guise of training is, like Signy said, just a step up from prison labor, given that they'd be handing over their entire lives during the program.

This is a terrible idea, and I don't see any evidence that the size of our Military would shrink at all if it were enacted. If anything I think it would only grow.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Sunday, May 20, 2018 9:21 PM

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

"So your solution to the problem is to expand the huge bad"

NOT expand it !!!

I've said that many times already.

What part of EVERYTHING ELSE STAYS THE SAME do you not understand?

The military doesn't get larger. They house, feed and pay them the EXACT same way they do now. The military chain of command is the same. There are only two differences.

1 the military doesn't get deployed overseas
2 instead of doing combat duty they get trained to work on, then work on, public, not-for-profit projects.

I've been though this over a half a dozen times with you.

You are incredibly dense.

NOTIFY: N | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Sunday, May 20, 2018 9:42 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:
Your whole premise is based upon spending just as many taxpayer dollars as we do today, but to train troops at home and give them low paying jobs. I don't see any point at all to any of this.
Do you know who the patron saint of Democrats is? FDR, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

He was President during much of the Great Depression, when the financial system and the economy collapsed at the same time. FDR's plan was to print money and put it in the hands of the average person. He was basing his policy on Keynes' work, who suggested that injecting money into the economy would improve it. But rather than undirectedly tossing money into "the economy" or (worse) tossing money at the wealthy (trickle down) FDR believed that money should be directed to the poor. THEIR demand (for food, clothes, homes, refrigerators, cars etc) would lead to a resurgence in manufacturing (of said items) leading to an increase in employment and a further increase in demand ... a reverse of the negative spiral that propelled the Great Depression in the first place. He called it "pump priming".

One way to direct money at the poor were various "public works" projects, where the government would pay people to put in infrastructure. My grandfather, who was a carpenter before the Great Depression, got a job on public works. He helped put in a railway overpass, which I traveled under at least once an month. There was the public works of rural electrification, infrastructure, the building of the Hoover Dam, and the Civilian Conservation Corps. We have been living off that infrastructure ever since

Now. Do THESE jobs take away from private jobs? Absolutely not. There is no for-profit business that would invest in public roads, public bridges, public waterways, and environmental conservation. Why? Because these are PUBLIC goods, and there's no profit in it. Even though infrastructure and environmental conservation form the basis of long-term wealth, "monetization" of these factors would simply kill the goose that laid the golden eggs.

The programs that KIKI suggests sound very similar to the various public works and conservation programs that FDR implemented lo these many years ago, which formed the basis of our prosperity. I don't see anything wrong with the idea .... unless, of course, you can find an alternate (private, for profit) way to reconstruct our environment and infrastructure.

Correction: the Patron Saint of Democrats is Andrew Jackson. Hater of Freedom, lover of Slaveowners, believer that all of America should embrace Slavery and stop allowing Blacks to roam around unchained. That is the foundation, root, and soul of Democrats.

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Sunday, May 20, 2018 9:53 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
In the third part of the great Indian epic the Mahabharata, a powerful spirit named Yaksa asks the oldest and wisest of the Pandava, Yudhistira, what is the greatest of all mysteries. The answer given resounds across millennia: “Every day countless people die, and yet those who remain live as if they were immortals.”

Immortals would be fearless, yet there is a worldwide shortage of courage.

I cannot see if you are confused. Most define Courage as an act despite - or in defiance of - Fear. There is no Courageous act without the acknowledgement of Fear. Otherwise Lewis Burwell Puller would have received 5 Medals of Honor.

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Sunday, May 20, 2018 10:19 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:
So here I am, making a simple suggestion that we redirect the military - from pointless, money-wasting adventures overseas, to useful, value-producing work at home.

It seems a modest proposal, and non-partisan, in that neither side has any financial or cultural reason to be more against it than the other.= KIKI
Hi. I think that this would be OK as a TRANSITION to a smaller army as recruits finish out their contracts, but I would rather that the money be turned over to a civilian program over time.
This.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

One commonly agreed Duty, Responsibility, and Purpose of the Federal Government, the Federation of States, is National Defense.
One that is not commonly considered is Keep a Bunch of Citizens Busy, Maybe Gainfully Employed.

For anybody interested in reducing Government, reducing spending and waste, I can't see where this fits in.

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Sunday, May 20, 2018 10:43 PM

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

Section 8

1: The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States

NOTIFY: N | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Monday, May 21, 2018 8:28 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by 1kiki:
"So your solution to the problem is to expand the huge bad"

NOT expand it !!!

I've said that many times already.

What part of EVERYTHING ELSE STAYS THE SAME do you not understand?

The military doesn't get larger. They house, feed and pay them the EXACT same way they do now. The military chain of command is the same. There are only two differences.

1 the military doesn't get deployed overseas
2 instead of doing combat duty they get trained to work on, then work on, public, not-for-profit projects.

I've been though this over a half a dozen times with you.

You are incredibly dense.

Your idea is incredibly dense.

What your proposing would expand it. I'm with Sigs. Offer this to phase out a large part of the military for a very limited time, but do not take new recruits for the program.

Your entire proposal is an expansion of government over private sector jobs from here to eternity. This is ABSOLUTELY what we do NOT need. On top of that, unlike other public service jobs like delivering mail or running the DMV, these people would be 24/7 slaves to the government until their contracts are up. NO FUCKING DICE.

We need to be shrinking Government programs and jobs. Not expanding them.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Monday, May 21, 2018 7:24 PM

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

"What your proposing would expand it."

Well, that's one way to try and win an argument. Lie about what I said, and then tell me I'm wrong.

Jack, you have such a powerful reaction, you can't stop blubbering and hyperventilating long enough to comprehend what I posted. Unless you have something that factually addresses my proposal, I'm just going to write off your posts. Unless I take the time to point out that you're lying. Again. And then maybe make fun of you.

NOTIFY: N | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Monday, May 21, 2018 8:55 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by 1kiki:
"What your proposing would expand it."

Well, that's one way to try and win an argument. Lie about what I said, and then tell me I'm wrong.

Jack, you have such a powerful reaction, you can't stop blubbering and hyperventilating long enough to comprehend what I posted. Unless you have something that factually addresses my proposal, I'm just going to write off your posts. Unless I take the time to point out that you're lying. Again. And then maybe make fun of you.

Hey... look at that. Kiki resorts to calling me what she hates her normal rage bait sparring partners in the RWED call her all the time.

Guess I better lawyer up, huh guys and gals?

Do Right, Be Right. :)

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Monday, May 21, 2018 9:39 PM