Jack2014

The TPer Rs are continually trying to privatize or eliminate all regulatory functions in order to facilitate the ability of Americans to sue for simple things like clean drinking water and big free dangerous food. Periodic release of tainted hamburger should be a lesson that needs heeding. Corporations are incapable of policing themselves because of their insanity concerning profit margins and executive pay and benes.
Besides,every time the TVA is mentioned for privatization, the TPers and Rs from the south god pink. Why? Because the government builds and maintains the facilities while $$$ is generated to satisfy stock holders. This results in very cheap electrical costs for most of the southern states east of the Mississippi. For example,the TVA's nuclear power stations need high maintenance requiring billions$$$.of course, have the government pay. Right MxConnell? Here's some more tidbits brought to you by the Koch's

GOP Privatization Would Substitute an Un-Electable Board of Directors for Democracy

By: Hrafnkell Haraldssonmore from Hrafnkell Haraldsson
Saturday, October, 11th, 2014, 8:34 am

The Republican Party makes much of the idea that people can be “dependent on government.” Whether their target is b****s (where we’re often told that, entitlement” handouts to b****s keep them “dependent” on the government), Latinos (where we’re often told immigrants are only coming to the United States for “free stuff”), or women (where we’re told they want free contraception to subsidize their s**tty behavior), we are told that these people are motivated solely by the lure of “entitlements” and hand-outs.
Never mind the government hand-outs rich Republicans get in the form of tax breaks and subsidies.

As Deborah Foster explained in 2012,

[Republicans] have come up with the phrase, “entitlement society,” and have spent a lot of money trying to get “Real Americans” (particularly White, Christian) to worry that we have one, and that it is ruining the country. They have preached that entitlements are going to bankrupt the nation and doom its children and grandchildren to lower living standards, debt, even some form of s***ery. In short, they promote what Jeffrey Sachs has called “entitlement hysteria,” the irrational fear that social programs will wreck the country, encourage dependence and sloth, and benefit unworthy groups who don’t deserve them, despite a considerable amount of available evidence to the contrary.
You remember the 47 percent argument; the idea that 47 percent of the people are economically dependent on the other 53 percent. You surely remember that rich white guy Mitt Romney said these 47 percent of Americans don’t matter. You should. It made #1 after all on Yale’s list of most notable quotations for 2012:

There are 47 percent of the people who will v**e for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it — that that’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will v**e for this president no matter what. … These are people who pay no income tax. … [M]y job is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.
Funny that Mitt Romney has no problem representing the rich white people like himself, and corporations that pay little to nothing in the way of income taxes.

This obsession with liberals and free stuff runs deep and wild. Supposedly, the Democrats won in 2012, wrote Jennifer Rubin in The Washington Post, by “feeding its base cotton candy.”

Better than the steady diet of h**e and fear fed its base by the Republican Party, I’d say.

And not to be too obvious or anything, but when Bill O’Reilly said on E******n Night 2012 that…

It’s not a traditional America anymore, and there are 50 percent of the v****g public who want stuff. They want things. And who is going to give them things? President Obama.
…He was talking about b****s, Latinos, and women.

But this argument is being pushed by the Red states, which are economically dependent on the Blue states. I’ve always liked cats, because cats have the misguided notion that they are the masters and that we somehow exist to serve them. But what I find charming in cats I find obscene coming from Republicans.

What the Republican Party does not advertise is that Republicans are “dependent on corporations.”

What Republican politicians get for being dependent on corporations is money. We imagine that we are paying them to do their jobs, which from our perspective entails representing us in the halls of government. But their real pay is that they receive from corporations in exchange for their v**es. Stop talking about your Republican congressman. He is not yours at all, but the wholly owned property of one or more corporations.

And all your average Republican receives from these corporations which own them, directly or indirectly, is, well, what everyone else receives from corporations: nothing. Generally, not even a living wage, and that’s if you work for them. To see the t***h of this, you have only to look at the example of McDonald’s, or Walmart.

And trickle down? The more money Walmart makes, the fewer benefits it passes on to its employees. Walmart wants to destroy so-called “safety net” yet increasingly expects its employees to depend on this much-maligned “free stuff” in order to subsist.

The calculus here is as brazen as it is horrifying, and points to the worst abuses of the Gilded Age: work till you drop. You think you’re important to them? Look how they treat the soldiers they send to war after they’re no longer of use to them.

Abraham Lincoln wrote “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth,” but it is perishing. It is being devoured before our eyes by greedy corporations, which have bought politicians are courts and are now buying the government itself through what Republicans call “privatization” but which is really “corporatization.”

That is exactly what stripping powers from government, and handing it to the public – in other words, for profit – sector is, as the complete disaster of the GOP-led charter school s**m demonstrates. And it is easy to see why.

What matters to corporations is the bottom line: profits. What matters to government, say in the matter of public schools, is outcome. The education of the children sent to attend those schools. But the corporations which run these charter schools don’t exist to teach the children. They exist to enrich the entities running the schools because that’s why corporations exist.

Seen in that light, does privatization really seem like such a good idea?

Think about this for a minute: we can elected our governments. We can also un-elect them if they go to far, through recall campaigns. Ultimately, we have control over who serves in our government through the democratic process.

The democratic process does not exercise control over who runs a corporations. We have no control over a CEO or over a board of directors. We can’t recall what we can’t v**e for in the first place. It is difficult to imagine a government every being as terrifying as a corporation.

Sure, you can point to the Founding Fathers and their distrust of big government, but you have to remember that they were writing only on the cusp of the Industrial Age, back in a day when manufacturing was still largely a cottage industry.

You also have to remember that when the interests of freedom-loving colonists collided with the big corporation of its day, the East India Company, the colonists were no more enamored of corporate power than they were of royal power. They were witness first-hand of the unbridled power of regulation-free corporatization. It is difficult to believe they would be big fans of it today.

The Founding Fathers bequeathed us democracy, the idea that political power derives from the will of the people. Increasingly, that power derives from the pocketbooks of the wealthy, and of corporations. It is increasingly evident that if we are to speak of democracy, that we are not speaking of the Republican Party.

GOP Privatization Would Substitute an Un-Electable Board of Directors for Democracy was written by Hrafnkell Haraldsson for PoliticusUSA.
© PoliticusUSA, Sat, Oct 11th, 2014 — All Rights Reserved
→ Read more about Hrafnkell Haraldsson ←
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Benefactors in chief.


Facilitator in chief


Privatizing the PO is a disaster waiting to happen

Jack2014

Then there's income ine******y
How does privatization address that? Makes it worse because it suppresses wages and benes for workers. Just more profits and profit takers.

Who Really Knows How To Address Income Ine******y And Save Us From The Grave?

By: Tim Librettimore from Tim Libretti
Saturday, October, 11th, 2014, 6:24 pm

So how exactly can we address income ine******y by simply asking everyone to learn new sk**ls and find a better job, avoiding the reality of the need for a re-distribution of social resources? We can’t.

Analyzing the evolution of class and income ine******y under capitalism, Marx and Engels famously asserted, “What the bourgeoisie . . . produces, above all, is its own gravediggers.” They meant that the capitalist class would through relentless exploitation create conditions for its own death by unifying the working class into an engine of historical change, spurring the revolutionary o*******w of capitalism itself. Marx and Engels, of course, delighted in this prospect, envisioning an egalitarian socialist society.

These days, the prospects do not seem quite as gleeful. While the capitalist class, including but not limited to the infamous–and infamously greedy–one percent, might no doubt be engaged in digging their own graves, the rest of us might really need to worry that they will be digging our graves too–at least one can infer as much from a recent Harvard Business School study. The study, entitled “An Economy Doing Half Its Job,” points out that while large and midsize businesses have been performing strongly coming out of the Great Recession, “middle-class and working-class citizens are struggling.” This “divergence,” the study argues, is “unsustainable.” The study underscores corporate America’s self-interest in improving the overall standard of living in the U.S., warning, “Businesses cannot thrive for long while their communities languish.”

While the Harvard minds raise the scary specter of the unsustainability of a society characterized by intensifying income ine******y, the solutions the study proposes offer little to re-direct American values or behaviors to privilege sustainability and address the problem’s roots. The study, in its own way, rejects pessimism, thankfully arguing against accepting “the decline of American living standards as the unfortunate but unavoidable consequence of today’s economic reality.” While seeing as futile any policy attempting to “redistribute gains,” Harvard’s optimism rests in a call to “invest and set policies to make Americans so productive that they can command higher wages even in the face of these dynamics [of globalization and technological change].” In short, the study calls for more of the same, accepting the basic framework of class society and simply asking people to increase their value within the capitalist marketplace, rather than entertaining for a second the option of redistributing wealth and re-thinking our basic standards of fairness, equity, and value.

At the risk of sounding arrogant, I wish these Harvard minds had read my recent article “How to Address Issues of Income Ine******y? De-Mythologize Upward Mobility,” arguing rather than asking individuals to increase their value, we need to t***sform how we value the work individuals do and remunerate the vital contributions, especially by those in low-wage jobs, which make our collective lives possible. I pointed out that which seems obvious but which pundits invariably overlook, namely that as a society we need the work that gets done in those “low-wage” jobs to be accomplished for us. It is socially necessary labor, so asking people to raise their standard of living by developing new sk**ls to move “up the ladder” won’t eliminate those “low-wage” jobs or make any less necessary the work that those occupying those jobs do for us. So how exactly can we address income ine******y by simply asking everyone to learn new sk**ls and find a better job, avoiding the reality of the need for a re-distribution of social resources? The t***h is, we can’t. And the t***h is also that as a society we have, in fact, been re-distributing wealth from the bottom and middle to the top for the past several decades with little complaint from the top about redistributive policies. So why are they so frowned upon now? Obviously, this is a rhetorical question.

Even former President Bill Clinton recognizes the need for a change in economic behavior and values suggestive of redistribution. At the recent Clinton Global Initiative, he offered the prediction that corporations will someday care more about their employees and overall social well-being than maximizing profits, suggesting they will do so “because of proof that markets work better that way.” He prophesized this choice: “We’re going to share ine******y, misery, and conflict, or we’re going to share prosperity, responsibilities and a sense of community.”

While a hopeful prediction, we can find examples of thriving enterprises that already have these values built into their plans; and they aren’t necessarily doing so “because of proof that markets work better that way” but because they value people and the work they do, promoting a broader social vision. Take Honey Butter Fried Chicken, a small, independently-owned restaurant on the Northwest side of Chicago. Josh Kulp explains that he and his co-chef and co-managing partner Christine Cikowski, along with their business partners and designers Jen Mayer and Chris Jennings, opened the restaurant “in a conscious attempt to provide a space where employees could thrive.” They wanted to be “known and respected not only for offering responsible and delicious food . . . but also for being an amazing place to work.” Kulp stresses that “from the outset, we have emphasized paying a fair wage, offering paid sick time, paid vacation time, and health benefits,” which they have been able to offer through Affordable Care Act. They share all financial information with their employees and hope to offer profit-sharing to their employees in the future.

They do not ask the busboys or dishwashers to increase their value or improve their sk**ls to earn a higher wage. There is a recognition that for the restaurant to be successful, this work is necessary. They don’t try to de-value the work to maximize value. They have in fact re-valued the work by focusing on the vital role the worker fulfills in the enterprise. This is not a re-distribution of wealth but simply a sensible distribution of it. In my one visit to the restaurant, Kulp introduced me to several of his employees, including younger ones whom he was encouraging to attend college. It was clear Kulp viewed his business as part of a larger social project that will lead to the kind of humane world he envisions and from which he will benefit.

While Adam Smith, chiefly a moral philosopher, argued that if each individual pursued his individual interests to the fullest, generating as much revenue as possible, such behavior would in the end serve the public good more than if one acted with serving the public good as a conscious end. “I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good.”

Well, we can certainly see that Smith’s vision has resulted in a world in which a substantial number of people do not have their basic needs met. The generation of wealth in our particular socio-economic system does not promote the commonweal but leads to gross ine******y. The vision of Kulp and his people, one that foregrounds a vision of the Great Society, has perhaps found its time, moving us beyond Smith’s proverbial invisible hand.

I know I wish Kulp had written that Harvard Business School report. Perhaps he will issue a Honey Butter Fried Chicken report. If he does, I hope it has the same authority, as he and his partners are wise.


Who Really Knows How To Address Income Ine******y And Save Us From The Grave? was written by Tim Libretti for PoliticusUSA.

Lil Willie Loc: Zero Beach Floridian

Gee, what a "wind bag"! Too much crap to make any sense.

Jack, if you're for an audience you missed me. Too discussed for me take time to research your statement, next time be more concise!

Some of the discourses are boring and trying to make sense of what the author is trying to say.

Sorry to step on you toes, so lighten up.

Jack2014

I've always been a wind bag. Can't help,it
Besides,I'm not done yet
This is a real windy type of subject and I have researched it and written on it for 2 years.