You are browsing the archive for free markets.

Avatar of IfLizWereQueen

by IfLizWereQueen

The perfect comeback for the jackasses in Congress who recently voted to continue to ship jobs overseas

November 28, 2011 in 2012 Elections

As I’ve mentioned, the Congressional millionaire Wall Street shysters are laying it on  thick and corporate sponsored mainstream media is doing all they can to assist their Congressional stock monkeys.  The day before Thanksgiving, CBS 60 minutes invited the American people into the home of Eric Cantor, the man who sponsored two of the disastrous trade agreements that the Obama administration just shoved through Congress shortly before Thanksgiving.

Then we had Pete Sessions blathering to the people of the 32nd U.S. Congressional District of Texas about how those trade agreements were going to “support” jobs in Texas–over 64,000 of them in his District.  If you weren’t listening carefully to Sessions BS, you might have misunderstood him to say that he created 64,000 jobs in his district.

The Economic Policy Institute estimates that the agreement with Korea (just one of three trade agreements) which is expected to be the largest trade deal since NAFTA, will increase the US trade deficit by $16.7 billion and displace 159,000 US jobs within the first seven years after it takes effect.

Those who want to know what a good job that Pete Sessions has done, should ask the children who live in Dallas county what they think of his leadership.  What has Mr. Sessions done for them?

The majority of the people in the 32nd district, located in Dallas County, are not doing so well–especially our children.  The annual report on the health and quality of life of Dallas County’s children was out a week ago.  The report titled “Beyond ABC: Assessing Children’s Health in Dallas County” states 18 percent of all children in the county are uninsured. That’s more than twice the national average.

More than twice the national average of children are uninsured here in Dallas County and 37% of the children in the city of Dallas alone live in poverty–that’s a whooping 192,500 children–enough children to fill the Cowboy Stadium twice.  WHAT ABOUT THEM, PETE, WHAT HAVE YOU DONE FOR THEM?

 

 

Hey boss, I’m trying to pull up by my bootstraps, but they just ain’t there any more. They plumb fell off after using them so much for the past 30 years.  

___________________________________________________

But in all of the BS swirling around as these political jackasses work to defend their indefensible behavior and votes against the people, no one did it quite as well as Joe Barton–remember the guy who apologized to BP and still was re-elected?  Well his BS reached new heights.  His explanation to his constituents of why sending jobs overseas is a good thing is priceless, but no less priceless than the reaction of a Daily Kos blogger, Ministry of Truth who wrote in response to Barton’s comment. Rep. Barton:     ”If we’re going to have a free society and a free market you have to give people the option to locate outside the United States.”  Well it remains to be seen if the voters in Joe Barton’s district will be as stupid as they were in 2010 and vote for him again.

” .  .  . What would you rather have? Free markets for multinational corporations to exploit, or jobs in America?

    Yes, in a free society where gay people can’t marry, women can’t make decisions about their own bodies and workers don’t have the right to collectively bargain, at least we can take comfort in the fact that we have free markets! Hallelujah, Lord be praised! Watching our jobs get shipped overseas is worth it as long as markets are free. Corporations are people, my friend, and their freedom trickles down to you in the form of cheap products at Walmart that you can’t afford because your Walmart wages are so low you need foodstamps to survive. But you are supposed to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps, so this shouldn’t be a big deal, because the bootstrap company you used to work for closed down their plant in America and moved to India, and now the bootstraps you need are available at Walmart for a low, low price. . . . “  SOURCE

 

Proclaim the Queen!

    Tags: , , , No Comments »

    Avatar of IfLizWereQueen

    by IfLizWereQueen

    Leaps of Faith are appropriate for religion–not politics or economics

    October 18, 2011 in Conservative Nonsense, Economics and Ideology, Occupy

    Leap of Faith by Art Enrico

    One of the bloggers from Firedoglake, cmaukonen, inspired me this morning.  His post today is titled Occupy Wall Street Rediscovers the Radical Imagination.  (All links to all sources follow at the end of my post.)

    _____________________________________________________

     


    No, he is not naked–not if you close your eyes, that is.

    Here is my inspired response:

    Yes cmaukonen, I was particularly jarred by the Guardian quote which reminded me all over again about the utter tripe that we have been fed regarding ‘free’ markets:    “. . .Everything we’d been told for the last decade turned out to be a lie. Markets did not run themselves. . .”

    This is the most absurd piece from the Milton Friedman neoliberal economic tripe ever and yet millions for the past 40 years have been accepting it as the gospel. To me this has always been as absurd as the citizens in The Emperor’s New Clothes who all pretended that the Emperor was not naked.  If they had read Margaret Heffernan’s book, Willful Blindness, they would never have been suckered into that fraud.

    I have never ceased to be amazed by the number of people who at least claim to believe the nonsense of markets adjusting themselves. Anyone who believes in “free market” nonsense (and this includes about 99% of Congress, Obama, and all of his administration) are either liars, certifiably insane, or perhaps mindless followers who don’t stop five seconds to allow one or two synapses to fire as they consider the absurdity of an inanimate object animating itself.

    Market do NOT adjust themselves!

    Markets do NOT adjust themselves. They are manipulated by crooks on Wall Street like those from Goldman Sachs commodity index who in 2008 manipulated the price of wheat (by buying and buying and not selling, thus creating the false effect of scarcity in the wheat market, falsely inflating its value and thus raising prices). These shenanigans have a real life effect on people.

    In 2008, millions more than usual starved to death because they could not afford to purchase wheat. At the end of 2008, which incidentally was the year of the largest wheat production in 100 years, the surplus wheat was sold as feed to livestock corporations. In my opinion, Goldman Sachs, its CEO and all executive members should be tried for crimes against humanity for their manipulation of the wheat market in 2008.

     

    Remove the Quality of “Faith” from Politics and Economics and replace it with Reason

    We need to remove the quality of “faith” from politics and replace it with “reason.”

    To believe that “markets adjust themselves” or that “corporations are people” is no less a “leap of faith” than the one that Kierkegaard referred to in the context of religion. In order to be a true believer in any religion one must cross that bridge of faith to get to the other side.  Putting one’s faith in a deity is one thing and putting one’s faith in fallible human beings at best, and proven criminals at the worst, is different  matter altogether.

    Faith is appropriate, even necessary, for religion. Myths are appropriate for entertaining stories. However, neither faith nor myths are appropriate for politics and certainly neither are appropriate to form the basis of a stable economy that serves the majority.

    You got me started, cmaukonen and it’s not even 8:00 am here in Dallas! With you, who needs coffee!

    __________________________________________

    SOURCES AND RECOMMENDED READING

    1. Occupy Wall Street Rediscovers the Radical Imagination – cmaukonen,  Firedoglake

    2. The Five Commandments of Milton Friedman’s Broken Ideology for the Rich – Iflizwerequeen

    3. Willful Blindness – Margaret Heffernan - www.mheffernan.com

    4. Soren Kierkegaard – WIKIPEDIA

    5. To purchase a print of Art Enrico’s painting: Leap of Faith

    Proclaim the Queen!

      Tags: , , , , , , No Comments »

      Avatar of IfLizWereQueen

      by IfLizWereQueen

      Anton’s Blindness–a perfect analogy to explain Americans insistence that unfettered markets are the way to value the world properly

      January 20, 2010 in Class War, Wall Street

      MORE FROM RAJ PATEL’S BOOK–THE VALUE OF NOTHING

      Patel has the perfect analogy to illustrate the continued adherence of some to “free” markets, in the face of all concrete evidence to the contrary.

      Anton’s Blindness is a rare medical condition that usually happens after a stroke or traumatic brain injury in which its sufferers are blind, but possessed of a feverent belief that they can see.  Patients see unexplained phenomena–one reported seeing a new village outside her window that she couldn’t recall having been built.

      Insisting that free markets can light up our world and then make excuses when they fail spectacularly is no less a confabulation than pretending to see when you are blind.

      What characterizes today’s markets are exchanges that are driven not by needs, but by profit. The terms on which markets operate are set by the powerful.  Our tragedy is to have allowed this to happen.

      Before Americans can overcome their current blindness, they need to overcome their ignorance.  They need to understand more clearly how the culture of the “free” market affect them.  They need to learn how things become stuff to be bought and sold.  They need to learn how they have become the blind seers of modern market society that we call “consumers.”

      *************************************************************

      My wish for the USA is that every member of Congress would read THE VALUE OF NOTHING by Raj Patel and take his message to heart.

      Proclaim the Queen!

        Tags: , , No Comments »

        Avatar of IfLizWereQueen

        by IfLizWereQueen

        On “free” markets and Freedom

        September 14, 2009 in Economics and Ideology, Liberal Activists

        Liberal author and academic George Lakoff discusses a neoconservative concept he calls “Free Market Freedom,” and describes its application to the current War in Iraq.

        —–

        George Lakoff talks about “Whose Freedom: How the Right is Stealing Our Most Precious Idea and What We Can Do About It.” An advisor to the Democratic party, Lakoff states that the conservative revolution has remade freedom in its own image and deployed it as a central weapon on the front lines of everything from the war on terror to the battles over religion in the classroom and abortion.

        Proclaim the Queen!

          Tags: , , , No Comments »

          Avatar of IfLizWereQueen

          by IfLizWereQueen

          Republicans hate Democrats more than they love America

          March 16, 2009 in Conservative Nonsense, Economics and Ideology

          First and foremost:  While we have right-wing conservatives crying in their soup today that the conditions “are not their fault”, don’t you believe them.  It IS their fault. It is the fault of their greed, their lust for power, and the past 30 years of the failed right-wing neo-liberal economic policies that have guided our nation, eviscerated the middle class and destroyed the poor.

          In terms of Bill Clinton, the best that can be said of him is that his economic policies were more sound than those of Reagan, Bush I or Bush II, but in every other way he was a good Republican.  Also it is good to remember that where as Bush II ruled for 6 years with a Republican majority in both houses, Clinton only ruled for 2 years with a Democratic majority.

          WHAT HAVE THE CONSERVATIVES DONE? [Source]

          • According to the World Economic Forum, forty percent of the entire world’s wealth has been destroyed in the recent financial collapse. In the U.S. alone, between housing and the stock market, more than $18 trillion in wealth has already been destroyed.
          • More than 10,000 homes go into foreclosure every day. More than 20,000 people lose their job every day. And the collapse is accelerating, developing its own self-reinforcing dynamic. Job losses breed foreclosures, reducing demand, leading to more job losses and further degradation of the financial system. None of the stopgaps designed to stanch the bleeding have yet worked. There is no bottom in sight.
          • Meanwhile, debt has risen to astronomical levels. Reagan and Bush I quadrupled the national debt in only twelve years. Bush II doubled it again in only eight. It is now ten times higher than it was in 1980 when Reagan was elected. Total public and private debt exceeds 300% of GDP, half again higher than it was in 1929.
          • Notwithstanding the destruction inflicted on the economy by Republican policies, the most devastating breakdown is in the intellectual foundation on which right wing economic ideology itself is premised. Free market doctrine, the secular religion of right-wing America, is in utter, irretrievable shambles.
          • One of the most lofty tenets on which free markets are premised is their claim for themselves that they are “efficient,” that is, that market prices always reflect “fundamental values” of assets. But if that’s true, how could the world’s largest insurance company, AIG, have lost 99.5% of its market value in only 18 months? How could the world’s largest bank, Citibank, have lost 98% of its value over the same period?
          • Free markets clearly do not align risk and reward, allocating capital to its most productive uses, as its promoters advertise. They clearly do not automatically return to equilibrium, but must be bailed out with trillions of dollars of injections from the shrinking coffers of the public to the ever-bulging coffers of a private priesthood of pillage and plunder.And in perhaps the greatest indictment of all, one going back to its primeval roots in Adam Smith’s eighteenth century opus, The Wealth of Nations, the unrestrained behavior of self-interested individuals clearly, manifestly, does not “coalesce as if by an Invisible Hand to the greatest good for the greatest number.

          “Success will require much more than luck, hard work, brilliant policy, or soaring rhetoric. It will require cooperation and contribution from every American. It is those two offerings, cooperation and contribution, that Republicans are intent on withholding, the better to ensure Obama’s failure.

          Simply put, the Republicans hate Democrats more than they love America.

          Proclaim the Queen!

            Tags: , , , , , , , No Comments »

            Occupy Wall Street

            Links to Occupy Sites

            OCCUPY TOGETHER; Occupy Dallas FaceBook; Occupy Dallas Website; Occupy Wall Street; Occupy Washington; Occupy Houston; Occupy Austin; Occupy Chicago; Occupy LA; Occupy Atlanta; Occupy Cleveland; Occupy Seattle; Occupy Miami

            VOTE YOUR HEALTH INSURANCE CHOICE!

            Which is the best choice:
            Public option
            Single payer
            Status quo
            pollcode.com free polls

            Categories

            The Queen’s Archives


            Iraq Deaths Estimator