See, thing is, if you eat the whole pizza, my family actually DOES have to eat the box. You can't build something by taking things away from it. There's no such thing as "endless cost cutting" because there's not such thing as endless anything but space. And there's not a whole lot of wealth in a void. Get company, strip it bare, fire everybody but the bare minimum to keep it afloat (long enough to milk it dry) and ship the skeleton to China is isn't a viable economic engine. As a matter of fact, it's what's gotten us here. And that's what Occupy Wall St. is all about, They simply pulled the rug out of the working class and moved it to where, economically speaking, there's a slave class. Wal Mart isn't a store, it's a currency exchange. You trade USD For Yuan and the top tier pockets the USD. Ha ha. You've been white knighting three card Monte dealers.

Move all actual wealth and manufacturing methods offshore. Dismantle economy by creating a welfare state through endless "downsizing" and refusal to pay taxes into the burden created, drive America into bankruptcy after you move the last thing it was physically impossible to pick up and move offshore, (real estate), wait for the shooting to start, bail, buy back America's debt for pennies on the dollar, become the government, reinstate feudalism, ta da.

He's right, you know. Both democracy & capitalism fail, without a strong middle class.

The problem is, we've gotten so used to subsidizing layoffs, outsourcing, etc, that if we tried to turn things around, the wrenching stress in our economy would be INSANE.

it would obviously be to our long term gain, if as many goods/services as possible were produced by US workers at US wages/benefits. But in the short term, people would go apeshiat at having to pay $4 for a head of lettuce, or $100 for a pair of generic jeans.

I think that if we're going to have a prayer of surviving as a country with anything like our current standard of living, that's something we're just going to have to face @ some point. But the transition is gonna be a biatch...

Your thoughts?

werekoala: Your thoughts?

They're counting on that. They're counting on us demanding 25.00 Levis and sh*tty, 40.00 shoes all the way to serfdom.

GAT_00: It's funny because this is more or less already happening.

Yup. Sort of the point. The future IS here, it's just not the one in the brochure. At all.

And others.

We started out with the best of all possible democracies, freehold land for anybody who could come up with a few bucks, a stable, gold based currency and more resources than anywhere on earth. We then promptly started handing it over to con men, short players, and the wealthy.

We participated in and endorsed the kidnapping and purchase of foreign nationals and enslaved them, told the people we hired to represent us, we, the government... the people - that THEY were the government and they promptly said "Well OK, then!" and started making sure the people who could give them the most money had the best laws. Then we damn near went under when an attack of conscience told us that, hey, sure we killed those pesky natives but maybe, just maybe, all these black people are actually people, too. Then we dumped them, unclothed, unskilled and uneducated into the streets of a nation that shunned them.

We allowed a private bank to control our currency and they started systematically looting the treasury with Monopoly money and they still are, and just when it looked like we had screwed the pooch, WWII came along and put us all to work shooting people who, admittedly, needed shooting and the rest of us making the armaments. We came home, screwed like weasels, banged out a bunch of kids and enjoyed the most prosperous manufacturing economy on earth as we employed our own to make things for our own using our own skills, infrastructure and currency. We were housed, fed, clothed and buying new cars..

And we've been coasting on the fumes of that for fifty years. Thirty of those were spent watching a bunch of jerkoffs dismantle that economy when they realized that the Monopoly game was subsiding, they already owned all the good properties and there was nothing left to do other than bust the joint out and start over on a fresh table. And that's what's happening now. And Repo Games re-runs, Bit*chy Housewives of Moose C*nt County, WWE, iPhones, cheap jeans, endless infighting and waiting for our glorious stewards of capitalism to pull a rabbit out of their ass is not only not going to save us, it's the whole con. The game is being moved. And you don't get a token, this time. You get to watch from the sofa and if you don't annoy the players too much, they'll slip you some leftovers. America was a fresh kill in the day. Now it's a carcass. And the people we said that we overthrew to make it a free country are now firmly back in the drivers seat and they are just v.2.0 of the same motherf*ckers. So, if you're a True American, please keep using these sh*tty debt notes, keep buying Chinese clock radios and paying 120.00 a month for an ISP and crappy TeeVee shows and by all means, remember that the person up the street who doesn't have a pot to piss in is the cause of all your woes. There's a reason it feels like you're watching the credits and not the movie.

Billionair-In-Reality-Only

CheetahOlivetti: This is awesome. Mind if I borrow it?

I wholeheartedly endorse that you print up 208475098270948 copies in 24 pt. type and staple them to everything in sight.

bunner: We started out with the best of all possible democracies, freehold land for anybody who could come up with a few bucks, a stable, gold based currency and more resources than anywhere on earth. We then promptly started handing it over to con men, short players, and the wealthy.

We participated in and endorsed the kidnapping and purchase of foreign nationals and enslaved them, told the people we hired to represent us, we, the government... the people - that THEY were the government and they promptly said "Well OK, then!" and started making sure the people who could give them the most money had the best laws. Then we damn near went under when an attack of conscience told us that, hey, sure we killed those pesky natives but maybe, just maybe, all these black people are actually people, too. Then we dumped them, unclothed, unskilled and uneducated into the streets of a nation that shunned them.

We allowed a private bank to control our currency and they started systematically looting the treasury with Monopoly money and they still are, and just when it looked like we had screwed the pooch, WWII came along and put us all to work shooting people who, admittedly, needed shooting and the rest of us making the armaments. We came home, screwed like weasels, banged out a bunch of kids and enjoyed the most prosperous manufacturing economy on earth as we employed our own to make things for our own using our own skills, infrastructure and currency. We were housed, fed, clothed and buying new cars..

And we've been coasting on the fumes of that for fifty years. Thirty of those were spent watching a bunch of jerkoffs dismantle that economy when they realized that the Monopoly game was subsiding, they already owned all the good properties and there was nothing left to do other than bust the joint out and start over on a fresh table. And that's what's happening now. And Repo Games re-runs, Bit*chy Housewives of Moose C*nt County, WWE, iPhones, cheap jeans, endless infighting and waiting for our glorious stewards of capitalism to pull a rabbit out of their ass is not only not going to save us, it's the whole con. The game is being moved. And you don't get a token, this time. You get to watch from the sofa and if you don't annoy the players too much, they'll slip you some leftovers. America was a fresh kill in the day. Now it's a carcass. And the people we said that we overthrew to make it a free country are now firmly back in the drivers seat and they are just v.2.0 of the same motherf*ckers. So, if you're a True American, please keep using these sh*tty debt notes, keep buying Chinese clock radios and paying 120.00 a month for an ISP and crappy TeeVee shows and by all means, remember that the person up the street who doesn't have a pot to piss in is the cause of all your woes. There's a reason it feels like you're watching the credits and not the movie.

Makes me think of this scene...

Goodfellas (new window)

It's almost like you people are waking up. This is great.

Finally, someone gets it! Shareholders are the biggest leeches in the history of the free market.

mrshowrules: bunner: See, thing is, if you eat the whole pizza, my family actually DOES have to eat the box. You can't build something by taking things away from it. There's no such thing as "endless cost cutting" because there's not such thing as endless anything but space. And there's not a whole lot of wealth in a void. Get company, strip it bare, fire everybody but the bare minimum to keep it afloat (long enough to milk it dry) and ship the skeleton to China is isn't a viable economic engine. As a matter of fact, it's what's gotten us here. And that's what Occupy Wall St. is all about, They simply pulled the rug out of the working class and moved it to where, economically speaking, there's a slave class. Wal Mart isn't a store, it's a currency exchange. You trade USD For Yuan and the top tier pockets the USD. Ha ha. You've been white knighting three card Monte dealers.

Truth. For what little it is worth, I've never purchase a single item at any Walmart ever.

Part of me wishes I could maintain that level of purity (and I'm not faulting either of you) - I mostly avoid shopping at Walmart myself, but I have friends who are very poor and for whom it's really the only choice for their grocery shopping. I've driven them to the local super-Walmart a few times, and it's always completely packed with people. When you have $40 in cash in your wallet for groceries and that's it for a week, you have to go where the food is cheapest. You can't feed your kids on "principled stand." Seems like Walmart has become just another variation on the company store, at least for poor people.

In some asian countries, they look down on companies that have lay-offs as showing that the company doesn't know what they are doing if they hired too many people and that they don't have a clear direction of where they want to go in the future.

I agree with that idea.

cubic_spleen: Finally, someone gets it! Shareholders are the biggest leeches in the history of the free market.

This idea that corporations are beholden to shareholders on some compelling moral level is disgusting. Corporations should try to turn a profit for shareholders, sure. But I've seen "the corporation has no obligation whatsoever to anything but its shareholders" as some sort of nearly religious mantra a whole lot, and that's awful.

cubic_spleen: Finally, someone gets it! Shareholders are the biggest leeches in the history of the free market.

Sort of.

Long-term investors, the kind who buy stocks and hold them for 30 years, through ups and downs, are good for the market. But there aren't many of them anymore.

Day-traders and speculators, "investors" who want short-term gain and don't care if the company will be around next week, are what destabilized the system. They're the reason big corps hire and fire new CEOs every year, they're the reason CEOs run companies that have existed for 100 years into the ground.

Phil Moskowitz: It's almost like you people are waking up. This is great.

Agreed. It really is awesome. Mass protest and rejection of this corporate BS might be the only way to save the economy and/or America. Would have never thought it possible a couple months ago.

What happened to America is we went from "Stakeholder" capitalism to "Shareholder" capitalism in the early 80s.

Shareholder value capitalism in the U.S. since the 1980s has even failed in its primary purpose - maximizing the growth in shareholder value. As Roger Martin, dean of the Rotman Business School at the University of Toronto points out in a recent Harvard Business Review article, between 1933 and 1976 shareholders of American companies earned higher returns - 7.6 percent - than they have done in the age of shareholder value from 1977 to 2008 - 5.9 percent a year. (new window)

FuturePastNow: cubic_spleen: Finally, someone gets it! Shareholders are the biggest leeches in the history of the free market.

Sort of.

Long-term investors, the kind who buy stocks and hold them for 30 years, through ups and downs, are good for the market. But there aren't many of them anymore.

Day-traders and speculators, "investors" who want short-term gain and don't care if the company will be around next week, are what destabilized the system. They're the reason big corps hire and fire new CEOs every year, they're the reason CEOs run companies that have existed for 100 years into the ground.

Ah. Yes. Thanks for the clarification. That, and Cubicle Jockey's point of "shareholders" vs. "stakeholders" have given me some more food for thought.

God dammit Mark, stop making sense. We're trying to blame this all on the poor people!!!

All those bastards with their "I want a living wage"s and their "I want a stable job"s and their "I want a nest egg that won't be sucked dry by greedy sociopaths"s. Don't they know all that shiat puts a terrible burden on The Job Creators (blessed be they)?

Cuban and all the rest that say - "tax us more!" can pay their fair share any time they want. They don't have to wait on the tax code to catch up.

/don't buy into the bullshiat

Glicky: bunner: Makes me think of this scene...

Goodfellas (new window)

Don't even have to click to know what it is:

'And when you can't buy another case of booze, put a match to it'.

Runs through my head every time I hear some Conservatard discuss economics.

bacccc: Cuban and all the rest that say - "tax us more!" can pay their fair share any time they want. They don't have to wait on the tax code to catch up.

/don't buy into the bullshiat

Doesn't work well that way, but you know that already.

s2s2s2: [spectrumculture.com image 425x231]

If the point you're trying to make here is ""same as it ever was," I agree.

bacccc: Cuban and all the rest that say - "tax us more!" can pay their fair share any time they want. They don't have to wait on the tax code to catch up.

Greece's tax system is a de facto voluntary tax system because of an enormous shadow economy and the cultural view that taxes are for losers. You really want America to look like Greece? Fark off.

Does anybody want to start a petition with me asking Mark Cuban to run for President?

bacccc: Cuban and all the rest that say - "tax us more!" can pay their fair share any time they want. They don't have to wait on the tax code to catch up.

/don't buy into the bullshiat

Cuban and all the rest that say "tax us more" actually worked for their money, innovators who started from modest means and actually contributed something to society. The ones throwing a tantrum over paying an extra 3% are trust fund kiddies and "old money" inheritance leeches who never worked a day in their goddamn lives. That's the bullshiat; being told to suck it up and pull ourselves up by our bootstraps by a bunch of farking third-baser wannabe rugged individualists who've never put in an honest day's work in their entire bloated existence. The only thing worse than those assholes are the people who constantly stick up for them.

bacccc: Cuban and all the rest that say - "tax us more!" can pay their fair share any time they want. They don't have to wait on the tax code to catch up.

/don't buy into the bullshiat

That line is the bullshiat. Tax capital gains like income. Get rid of FICA caps. The whole "can pay more if they want" nonsense shill for the plutocracy is tiresome.

Serious Black: bacccc: Cuban and all the rest that say - "tax us more!" can pay their fair share any time they want. They don't have to wait on the tax code to catch up.

Greece's tax system is a de facto voluntary tax system because of an enormous shadow economy and the cultural view that taxes are for losers. You really want America to look like Greece? Fark off.

The irony is that people who say that out of one side of their mouth are the same ones that were wringing their hands about the debt/deficit and how Obama's spending is going to turn us into them. Cognitive dissonance much?

Dafatone: cubic_spleen: Finally, someone gets it! Shareholders are the biggest leeches in the history of the free market.

This idea that corporations are beholden to shareholders on some compelling moral level is disgusting. Corporations should try to turn a profit for shareholders, sure. But I've seen "the corporation has no obligation whatsoever to anything but its shareholders" as some sort of nearly religious mantra a whole lot, and that's awful.

It's not only that.

It used to be enough for companies to be profitable. Be in the Black.

Now they're expected to have increasing profits quarter after quarter, or they get hammered from the market / shar(k)eholders.


How does one increase something that is finite and unachievable? It's the unabashed consumerism of the greater economy leeching into private equity and the stock market. We're stuck on this little blue rock, and eventually this exponential growth will come to an end. Personally, i think sooner than later. This sort of thought on Capitalism is not sustainable, not in the long run, and apparently not in the short run as out markets are suggesting.

Cuban has a point. The line people repeat about the CEO maximizing value for shareholders as the sole job requirement for that position is crap. "Shareholders" don't get a say in the CEO or makeup of the Directors. Board makeup and executive compensation is determined in backrooms by the small groups of large shareholders, not the chumps like you or me who may hold 1 or 2k in stock in any one company.

Markets and stock values are manipulated to meet the immediate needs of the few, no consideration for the many holders.

I like his idea of holding CEO stock options to a strike price that matches what they give any other employee and forcing the actual compensation to be weighted to cash. I would argue for a maximum wage to go along with it. Hold the CEO's pay to a multiple of the mean compensation of the company's overall payroll.

BMulligan: s2s2s2: [spectrumculture.com image 425x231]

If the point you're trying to make here is ""same as it ever was," I agree.

I'll accept that, but I was going for the GOP reaction: "Sop making sense!".

bunner: Move all actual wealth and manufacturing methods offshore. Dismantle economy by creating a welfare state through endless "downsizing" and refusal to pay taxes into the burden created, drive America into bankruptcy after you move the last thing it was physically impossible to pick up and move offshore, (real estate), wait for the shooting to start, bail, buy back America's debt for pennies on the dollar, become the government, reinstate feudalism, ta da.

Wages as percent of economy:


All time low, and ignore the uptick, it's still falling. The wealthy want lots of servants and they don't want them uppity.

finkleiseinhorn: The irony is that people who say that out of one side of their mouth are the same ones that were wringing their hands about the debt/deficit and how Obama's spending is going to turn us into them. Cognitive dissonance much?

Fox News has somehow convinced them that if they raise taxes on the poor ("get some skin in the game") that the deficit will be taken care of. The poor people just don't want to pay, because they're too busy buying refrigerators. If only they'd be made to pay income taxes like the rest of the Real 'Merikans, the debt would vanish.

Finally, people are beginning to understand why history matters. It's a map of holes we fell in and ladders we climbed.

There has been one consistent bad idea, one ubiquitous villain, one endless loop filmstrip of what screws the pooch.

A dense concentration of wealth and power amongst the very few.

Anybody still have no clue as to what Occupy Wall St. is about? History is leveraged with money and guns. And we're broke.

dr_blasto: I like his idea of holding CEO stock options to a strike price that matches what they give any other employee and forcing the actual compensation to be weighted to cash. I would argue for a maximum wage to go along with it. Hold the CEO's pay to a multiple of the mean compensation of the company's overall payroll.

I like this idea, but the first detractor is always "Companies will rely entirely on contractors to avoid low-pay employees" or "They'll spin off an entire company that just handles the paperwork to keep average wages high." On its head it seems like a valid complaint, but any legislation could easily deal with it.

And in one single blog post my perspective of Mark Cuban completely changed.

So Mark, when are you running for president and where can I sign up to volunteer?

This has nothing to do with poor people shopping at Walmart. This is about the failure of supply side, trickle-down Reagonomics. Companies are firing people because there are no customers to sell goods/services to. It's not that they don't have money and we need to cut their taxes, it's that they don't need employees that are going to stand around and do nothing. You want to create jobs in this economy? Give money to people living paycheck to paycheck. They'll spend it, creating demand for goods and services, and companies will have to hire to meet that demand. Basic economics that the overwhelming majority of economists believe in, except the Republican party.