[Ratmagiclady]

Framing it a bit different:

If by working hard you net say $50,000/ year but "welfare " pays to keep you alive at $25,000 per year there is massive incentive to "work hard"..

When working hard nets you $30,000/year but welfare keeps you alive at $25,000 per year there is much less incentive........

Of course, people do have an inflated sense of what 'welfare' exists (At this point not much,) and even what social disability insurance pays out (Really, more like ten. ) If there's any problematic 'incentives' involved, it's any 'incentive' to have *children* (or more children on these programs just to have enough to go around, and I'm not even sure that's operative as much as are other pressures to not use contraception, etc. There's also the very real problem that, while even a minimum-wage job would pay tons more for a childless person, there's both a lack of health care, (And with lack of some kind of single-payer plan, a huge incentive for low-wage employers to fire people just before they *qualify* for health care, or or keep people's hours just short of 'full-time,' etc,) usually expenses just to get there, and for a long time now, a general lack of job/hours security.

But people do throw out figures that give a pretty inflated impression of just how much people are actually working with, here. Even a minimum wage job *pays* a ton better, when you talk about yearly income, (and of course you're paying income taxes and FICA, but even so.) Some questions of 'incentive' are really kind of rich-people thinking, ...namely, not thinking of all the complications that are the reality for low-income people and workers. (That mean 'minimum wage' isn't really 'living wage.' People are putting something like 80 percent of their take-home into just rent in some places: the place I'm living in, myself, you're lucky to rent a *room* for this in a lot of places. (And this wouldn't be viable for me if I couldn't start with an old car: If I was healthy, I could take one of the few, expensive buses, if work happened to connect there and be during the right time of day: but as they cut back on the routes and jack up the fares, that becomes less viable for many, too. People who work every day have to keep up some kind of reliable transportation, basically... And it's a system which enforces a certain amount of car-dependence unless you can afford to pay the rents on a place that you don't *need* a car. I kind of potentially could have gone anywhere in the country, ...if I could arrange housing remotely: the problem being trying to find, say, a good co-op someplace urban, where you don't know anyone. And people understandably want to know who they might be living with. )

Oftentimes they already *are* working hard, too, at whatever other work they can scrounge up, just to make up the difference.

And this really gets to where there just isn't enough in or staying in/circulating through local economies: the wealth is 'redistributed' to the top, where it stays.

Now how do you fix it?? Cut welfare to $0 per year and make people work hard to basically support others for a break even pay of $25,000/year...........

Nope welfare (a guaranteed living wage so to speak) is perfectly fine AND 1) doable w/ the fed 2)desirable as a sponge for a labor pool during up times.. AS LONG AS the middle class is healthy and prosperous.

It is the ONLY way to humanely (both by human (they are us, our gene pool our future workers/soldiers heritage ect.) and religious morality) fix the problem.........

Racing evertything to the bottom on "beat them w/ a stick" morality is wrong and counterproductive to a healthy society, especially one that prides itself on being the richest most advanced (arguable at this point) one in the world.

Why is that so hard to understand.. Leading by example is a million times more productive than leading by a whip...........

There's definitely that. Certainly, telling everyone 'Get a job' when *a* Even in boom times the companies *want* at least four to five percent unemployment rates, (by the regular reckoning, even, never mind 'real unemployment rates.' ) That has to be *someone,* even in boom times. (Or else, they complain, labor costs are too high, and then consumers don't get their goods quite so cheap. There's also, of course, only so many burgers to flip to begin with, and I mentioned how *those* kinds of jobs don't come with any job security in particular: not only are people not getting living wages, they're often behind the eight-ball all the time cause there are *gaps* in that employment just from getting shuffled around. (And also the fact that the low-income workforce can constitute an endless supply of scapegoats for management that's incompetent or even dipping into the till: this can ruin some people's work records mighty fast. (One reason a nice Mom and Pop operation is a lot better to work for than corporate ones sometimes: there's no Corporate for your supervisors to be CYA'ing at. )


But, anyway, yeah, that 'beat them with a stick' 'moralistic' mentality, is trying to think in middle-class terms at most: the richest certainly seem to apply a different logic to themselves than the poorest, who feel 'capitalism' most directly: they keep claiming that 'Starving you out will motivate you to succeed,' while, 'Well, we rich people need more and more billions for nothing, or else we won't have 'incentive' to do anything with the billions and billions we've already got!' How's that make sense?


And the simple fact is that *no* one's going to be making a lot of money when the customers can't buy essentials, never mind other products or services.

When it comes to the 'budget crisis' that comes of, well, the corporate agenda and corporate profiteering... what's happening there is that the richest are getting a damn-near free pass to make money hand over fist by simply *taking* and then gambling with it among themselves, then using the debt that made to look at even our Social Security and what little the bottom half/bottom 99 percent have, even, and they want the government to take more of *that* through regressive taxation and of course more tax cuts and free passes for themselves... Before *doing* anything.

Then they attack the character of regular folk for not being on top of their 'competition.' As if their zero-sum 'competition' could *possibly* mean 'Everyone wins,' (Frankly, I think it *erodes* the character of the rest of us. You know, you hear some pot dealer whining that the government's arresting him when it's the 'drug war' that means he's been making thousands a month on weed in the first place. And here's me being law-abiding and knowing, 'You know, I couldn't afford what your prices probably are, if they *did* allow it for medical use. (Which, to be honest, I've had to be thinking about: tobacco's a poor form of self-medication in some ways, (It has obvious health drawbacks, but it *does* have medicinal effects) but they've doubled the prices of *that* with regressive taxes: I hate feeling stoned, but loss of appetite, chronic pain and anxiety, autoimmune issues themselves exacerbated by stress... a little medical ganja make sense, but that'd be the last thing the 'Beat em with a stick' mentality would ever want to accept: what, something that practically grows itself would help? ) And meanwhile, of course, there's a growing meth problem making even these gentrified streets a lot more dangerous, ...cause people can't afford the pot, and the cops are still going for the big pot busts to keep their funding. The stuff's just easier to find, so we're spending a lot of tax money chasing hippies instead of dealing with the meth, ...instead of sending these strapping, often pretty badass cops to deal with the big human trafficking ...ie *slavery* problems in this state. The cops I've talked to at all down here seem pretty smart and aware, maybe kind of gung-ho, maybe kind of drive faster than is a net gain for public safety, ...but apart from apparently deciding in Atlanta to commemorate Stonewall by re-enacting 60's raids on gay bars, they've generally seemed like good and dedicated folks who'd probably rather be rescuing modern slaves than chasing hippies around, making meth more attractive to pushers. And the funny thing about talking to that pot dealer was how much it struck me, 'You sound *just* like the messed-up 'values' and whining of 'big business.' )


But speaking of 'moralism' ...they spend a lot on counterproductive stuff and then say 'We can't afford education, unless of course it's to teach ignorance in the name of moralism and make more teen pregnancies and urban poor...' ...we have to deregulate this and this and this, ....We need to be 'business friendly' so we can keep feeding developers, and keep unsustainable sprawl 'growing,' when we *don't have the freaking water for this and people can't afford the fuel to get there.*

And what just ends up happening is the corporations demand more and more *out* of the workers, say, 'Pay for your own remedial education while of course trying to pay your way,' and then *wonder* why so many say, 'This is all a racket, I'm gonna deal drugs, or check out on them, then steal to get more of them,' ..It's not cause 'the poor are lazy,' or 'the rich' are somehow the ones ill-used if they don't get more and more every time money changes hands. It's cause people are stuck, and feel both powerless and look at the sense of entitlement the 'successful' also spend billions to tell people to identify with. Then frustrate them at it. With sticks. And balance sheets.

Frankly, I was considered pretty-gifted as a kid. Still am, (Though I think at some point I got kicked one too many times in the basic arithmetic part of the head. ) I had a *lot* of advantages. Also a lot of those were used against me to try and coerce me into being something I never was, (cause, in part, of what abusive preachers and 'values conservatives' tell everyone to do to people like me, with their hard earned money, of course... ) Then they'd say, 'You're smart, work your way up from the mail room if you want to use that noodle. What? *Our* mail room? Clearly, you can't walk all day, and you have a pre-existing condition: Work your way through college, by performing some physical so you can use those skills we demand you show up to then come back and ...work your way up from ...err, the mail room, '

(Can you imagine what it's like for someone my age who's *black,* too? (Admittedly, a little melanin might have gone a long way in my particular case, all other things being equal, but they aren't: Some of my physical problems from being even *more* common among African-American women, but that may be partly cause stress is a bigger factor than sunlight. Even I can take a few rays if I have a little bit of a cortisol in reserve. And stress, even more than lack of money, may in fact be the biggest burden pushed down from the top: maybe that's cause even to the 'middle class' people have this idea that being poor is just working with smaller numbers. But some of the numbers just don't get smaller.

Some stuff doesn't scale that way, either: There's notions that being poor means you have 'less stuff,' for instance... And unless you've just really lost everything, it really doesn't: what you have, is less space. And maybe instead of one thing that works, you might have two or three that 'kinda work' and you might be afraid to let go of. Rich people stain a blouse, they throw it away, buy a new one. Maybe I pick up that blouse somewhere "This'll look respectable if I cover it with X item,' And when I try to dress decent, I'm trying to pull stuff together that's been packing materials and the contents of a couple Army duffels some of it since the Nineties. (Some of it would be things you buy at the Goodwill cause you can't afford the laundromat right now, too. And I think some of those days are kind of gone, too: not only are the thrift stores pushed out to where it takes a special trip, and more expensive, relatively, the stuff in em was more-cheaply made to begin with. I'd be dressed better, admittedly, if near everything I could squeeze out hadn't been going to equipping for photo enterprise for a lot of years. (It's also pretty obvious that though people used to get rid of pretty-well-made stuff that'd last years, even if out of fashion, now it barely lasts through *being* in fashion, and usually isn't very practical. Or even interesting. Forget about shoes. ) Even then, it's like, you could end up with suitcases full of cameras: 'This one has a meter, this one has good flash synch, this lens works in the dark, kinda, this one I can carry, this one focuses short.. On the plus side, I've been taking a little inspiration from a favorite TV show lately: 'It's a pile of junk, junk parts.' 'You're not seeing the whole picture, the parts may be junk, but you put em together and you've got a Firefly, a half-decent mechanic can keep that flying forever.' But even I've been like, 'Crap, what am I even trying for, with this anymore.' )


The Right tries to act like everything's separate from their social agenda, but it's *not.* They want to apply 'sticks' to people for not being straight, not being Christian, not being the right *kind* of Christian, even, and exactly how is that supposed to constitute "incentive" for someone like me, or countless others, to feel 'community minded' in *Georgia,* or even *want* to become one of the robber barons? They want to gut anything that might keep this place halfway-running, then claim somehow coercive 'faith based' things will somehow fix it all with.. more sticks, while preserving corporate profits and make right-wing *control* and *exploitation* somehow worth living in.

And people aren't balance sheets, nor, really, is faith of any sort. And I got faith, maybe more than some could figure. But in *this* kind of operation, no, I don't. And I *was* a gifted kid. And if I'm a little barmy now, I think a lot of it has to do with having been scapegoated by a system I could have told you from first grade *isn't going to work.* Especially if no one has an idea what it's supposed to work *for.*


And at this point you've got a lot of people just thinking we should all be 'working for' extracting more money out of others, in a system that can't keep up with itself. Never mind find enough people to hit with sticks to ever balance even its own brutal equations.

Frankly, I sometimes resent being the one that actually has to feel bad about it. I *was* supposed to be some kind of freakin' genius and I've basically spent fourty years trying to survive the sticks. And a few kicks in the head.

And, you know, I don't think I resent *working hard, while not 'winning'* It's not *even* about resenting *suffering* while the self-righteous whine like their abuse of people is something being done to *them,* cause in a way they suffer a lot worse if that was even a basis for 'comparison.' I think what I resent, and what I think may drive the rich even madder in their own way than I am, ..is the same damn contradictions. I didn't choose to be poor, or choose to be sick, but I did choose to not become what some others look at those contradictions and do become, even if they are considered well-favored by their own denialist standards, ... or can and are willing to fake it. (And, yeah, in this case that does mean 'straight people,' but it applies elsewhere.)

I do think that's why the RIght has gone... Well, kind of mad. Even by their own standards, if they had a memory. Even of what they thought they were about in like 1990. In some ways, that's fresher to me than it must be to them: I actually did lose mine for a while, lived again, got it back, and spent some time trying to put back together what was in between. They must on some level understand what of what they keep trying to sell *didn't* work. I feel ashamed every day that I couldn't do better. (I realize I was a little preoccupied at the time, of course, but, I was raised to high ideals and expectations, about all of which I find damn near broken. And the numbers have certainly gotten even more bewildering in practice, but they *still* don't work. They still can't be *monkeyed* into 'prosperity' if we don't ...most of all, use energy inputs that aren't based on milking limited resources for as much short-term profit for a few as possible. No, alternatives aren't 'free,' but they *will* both put people to work and keep producing instead of just consuming. )

We're all supposed to be smarter than this. When I was young, these 'stick people' only saw that as, 'You're really smart, that means you're hurting us if you won't both obey ridiculous denialist demands, both on science and your personal life, and use those smarts to be *really good at doing the wrong damn thing.* '


They talk about 'incentives,' ...Incentive should be 'Get your heads out of the sand and stop thinking problems go away if you hit the right queers enough.'

We already *passed* certain tipping points. By my estimation, eight years ago was when we needed radical action cause it'd already been put off too long. Now we're in denial-rather-than-any-kind-of-mitigation and fighting over how much more or less to make it even worse.

You bet I feel guilty. I'm supposed to have been one of the smart kids.

I probably shouldn't feel guilty, though: we've got a smart President for once, and even he's gotten his efforts bullied to nothing more than kind-of-ineffectually-slowing the race to the bottom. What we voted him into office to do wouldn't be everything, y'know, but it would have worked. We just didn't get to see it.

---

Last edited by Ratmagiclady; 10-14-2011 at 12:46 PM.

[shooz]

If you really think the 99% includes only those that are the educated underemployed.
Think again.
As wallstreet realizes, they don't have much left to confiscate, they set their sights a bit higher on the ladder.

CMKX Diamonds Shareholders Coalition Information Web Site

[SteveM]

There are rallies starting up here now.....

Occupy Wall Street coming home to Canada

What started online in Vancouver, with the rallying hashtag cry of #OCCUPYWALLSTREET — will materialize Saturday in rallies and camp-outs in at least six cities across Canada — Ottawa, Victoria, Toronto, Montreal, Calgary and of course, Vancouver.

[shooz]

Go Canada!............

Here's the first commercial from the Occupy movement, and an RT interview with Jesse LeGreca.

Occupy Wall Street, the Commercial


The bottom line is we are all tired of corruption.

[larryinlc]

I'm amazed at the condescending attitude shown towards the protesters by the television dj's. It's as if they think of themselves as being superior. They act as if they are being paid by their corporate sponsors to belittle the little people to protect the skin they have in the game. Oh wait, they are.

CNBC....bought and paid for by Wall Street.

Larry

[SteveM]

In an interview with the CBC's Peter Mansbridge, Governor of the Bank of Canada Mark Carney said he sympathizes with their viewpoint.

"I understand the frustration of many people, particularly in the United States. You've had increase in inequality because of — and this started before the financial crisis — but because of globalization, because of technology," he said

Deregulation from my viewpoint is the biggest threat the US economically. Why would a stockholder from another part of the world care about the ramifications of actions taken for the stock they own to US interests?

Here we are, with a country the size of Canada holding the lions share of the top 10 strongest banks in North America, and leading those is the government run "Bank of Canada" complete with it's own Governor. I'm sure the Tea Party would cringe if that information was well know in the US.

If regulation of the banking sector and markets is so bad, why is it outperforming deregulation?

[redrockcoulee]

Deregulation from my viewpoint is the biggest threat the US economically. Why would a stockholder from another part of the world care about the ramifications of actions taken for the stock they own to US interests?

Here we are, with a country the size of Canada holding the lions share of the top 10 strongest banks in North America, and leading those is the government run "Bank of Canada" complete with it's own Governor. I'm sure the Tea Party would cringe if that information was well know in the US.

If regulation of the banking sector and markets is so bad, why is it outperforming deregulation?

The Canadian banks are not doing as well as they could though, apparently most of them have suffered losses in their American subsidiaries. Even our conservative Minister of Finance stated he understood the reasons for OWS.

[boriscleto]

Only from the mind of a Canon user.

Hot Chicks of Occupy Wall Street

[jolepp]

BBC News - Occupy Wall Street protesters move to Times Square

[xjjohnno]

Larry as an old veteran of social protestsI expect no less from the main stream media. According to them you have professional demonstrators and rent a crowd although I'm buggered if I can figure out who is paying the bill for the rental or pro services. Obviously the brief is to deny credibility to those who dare to raise their voices in protest, obviously they are part of some grander financial trading cartel out to ruin the status quo.
SMC we as members of a civil society are expected follow rules being laws, why should banks and other financial groups be exempt, yep I agree with regulating the mongrels as they are obviously unable to regulate their own behaviour.

[jolepp]

...
Economists used to believe that we had to hold our noses and put up with high inequality as the price of robust growth. But more recent research suggests the opposite: inequality not only stinks, but also damages economies.
In his important new book, “The Darwin Economy,” Robert H. Frank of Cornell University cites a study showing that among 65 industrial nations, the more unequal ones experience slower growth on average. Likewise, individual countries grow more rapidly in periods when incomes are more equal, and slow down when incomes are skewed.
That’s certainly true of the United States. We enjoyed considerable equality from the 1940s through the 1970s, and growth was strong. Since then inequality has surged, and growth has slowed.
...

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/16/opinion/sunday/kristof-americas-primal-scream.html

[shooz]

If you've not seen these, they are definitely worth a look.

Are the concepts perfect? Perhaps not, but they are a step towards sustainability.
Steps not taken, change things for the worse.

BTW. great explanation of MMT.

The Zeitgeist Film Series Gateway | Zeitgeist: The Movie, Zeitgeist: Addendum, Zeitgeist Moving Forward

[jva59]

I've posted a few shots of yesterday's occupy Pittsburgh event over at the capture a stranger thread.

https://www.pentaxforums.com/forums/mini-challenges-games-photo-stories/43981...ml#post1682691

[shooz]

Thanks for that jva59.....

Here's a few more facts on the 1%.

5 Facts about the Wealthiest 1 Percent - Yahoo! News

[boriscleto]

You Tube

You Tube

You Tube

You Tube