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Topic: The John Kerry/George W. Bush thread (Read 66552 times)
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I'm not a Libertarian, although I do admit I end up sounding like one more often than not; Libertarians are far too idealistic to the point of naivete for my personal tastes. I like my roads, I like my public infrastructure (electricity, phone, clean water, and in my local case, lots of bike trails that allow me to commute without using my car), and I like the fact that I don't have to raise my own private army in order to defend myself, that professionals are on call 24/7 in case my house catches fire, etc. Tax money well spent as far as I'm concerned. If I call myself anything, I call myself a "centrist" or an "independant", because it's the non-category that I think fits the closest. 
So do I, sometimes, though I think potentially from a different angle from yours. For one thing I don't like that both sides of the political spectrum have negative things to say about free trade, nor that both sides of the political spectrum have positive things to say about various forms of media censorship, nor that both sides of the spectrum like to spend huge amounts of money and put the budget into deficit. But I am more of the left-wing kind of centrist than the right-wing kind -- I'd rather lower spending than raise taxes, and I'd rather cut the military than cut social services, and I'd rather schools teach boring, biased PC tripe about how history is defined by white people being mean to brown people than have them teach dangerous nonsense about the Earth being created in seven days 6000 years ago.
As far as "looking it up", I will invoke Death_999's previous plea to not assume that the other party is ignorant of what they speak unless they openly prove otherwise; I have used the term rightly, as per Benito Mussolini's definition of fascism:
I think that the mere fact that no candidate from any political party has been able to mount a successful campaign for high-level public office in the U.S. without major corporate backing in recent history, and the relative unwillingness of the U.S. government to punish corporate lawbreakers (e.g., Enron, Microsoft) would make my point for me in this case.
It's worth reading into definitions, especially definitions that come from several decades ago; the meaning of "corporate" here isn't what you seem to think it is.
The "corporate" referenced in "corporatism" does not mean a "corporation" as people use it meaning "money-making concern". It means any sort of "corporation" or grouped organization of people. And if you read more about what he said and what he actually did, the "merger" wasn't an alliance, it was an actual merging into one power under single, centralized control (hence the linkage of fascism with dictatorship). it was a statement of Mussolini's belief that all organizations, social or economic, should be part of a single monolithic state, rather than being scattered and competing against each other.
Fascism was *not* an outgrowth of free-market capitalism; fascism was inherently opposed to the free market, as it is to most kinds of individual freedom. Corporatism was actually a lot older than Mussolini, and was generally invoked by kings and queens as a pretext to seize direct control of traders and merchants within their border and take all their money. This is pretty much the opposite of what you're suggesting, that people who happen to become rich can buy themselves out of the power of the state. If we lived in a corporatist economy, there would be no war between Coca-Cola and PepsiCo to decide what brand of soda Americans would drink; George W. Bush would appoint a set of bureaucrats to head the Beverages Corporation, a government council that would assume direct power over all Coke and Pepsi bottling plants, which would be forced to merge their management into a single Cola Syndicate. All of its profits would be rolled into the national budget, and any losses would be made up by payments from the national budget. Everyone would be required by law to work for a corporation, and a corporation would be more like a medieval guild than a company; indeed, that's what corporatism at that time meant, trying to turn away from modern, international capitalism and back to a time when guilds bent the knee to the king and tradesmen were under the crown.
You have to also remember that fascism means more than just the economic system of corporatism, just as Marxist-Leninist communism means more than just a socialist economic system. Mussolini was adamant that fascism was a political, social *and* economic revolution. Dictionaries all slightly differ, but the usual points surrounding fascism are a highly charismatic dictator with unquestioned authority, a single ruling party whose unquestioned authority stems from the dictator, absolute censorship of dissident opinions, and a continuing process of nationalistic expansion through conquest. More subjective factors include a focus on youth and on revolutionary change, and a distrust and distaste for all forms of tradition, especially religion, and a rejection of philosophies based either on altruism or on individual freedom.
You can say that our government is *like* a fascist government in some negative ways, just like some far-rightists claim our government is like a socialist government in negative ways, but many things make it not *actually* fascist. No single man is an absolute dictator who has the unquestioned right to rule because of his force of will; we still feel like people get their right to power from the system, not vice versa. We do not constantly expand our political borders through conquest, and, no, expanding trade is not the same thing, especially to the fascists, who despised the "false" power of capitalists. We still constantly appeal to tradition, to religion, to altruism and to individual freedom to justify our actions rather than asserting that nationalism is its own justification. No f
Modern "corporatism", which you seem to use to refer to the disproportionate influence some money-making corporations have on our government, is still a form of "pluralism", something antithetical to the so-called "totalitarian" communist/socialist and fascist governments. Our government is not a single unit of power groups that all have the same agenda and need worry about no others; our government has to listen to all sorts of different kinds of people, labor unions, corporations, issue-based lobbying groups, the "man on the street" analyses of the press, and so on, and even if some of those powers have more power than others, all of them have to share power, and none of them is directly part of the government and gets all the power of the government.
Frankly, it seems to me that unless the state became radically socialist and destroyed the mechanism of profit corporations, some level of "corporatism" is inevitable; the whole way money works means that there'll always be people who can buy more ads and get their voice heard more loudly than others because they can pay for more stuff, because they're better at making money than other people, and if those people who are good at making money band together to form organizations whose purpose is to make money, such organizations will become the most powerful things around.
But I think you do exaggerate. For one thing, Enron did not, for instance, get a big bailout from tax money to keep it afloat; it was allowed to sink, as many corporations are allowed to sink every year, and usually the only way corporations can get those kinds of benefits are to get a good PR campaign that convinces everyone their poor workers will be unemployed if they don't get kickbacks. (Hence why the corporate welfare is concentrated in agriculture, which Americans have a soft spot for.) Also, the fact that corporations work in environments where lots of money is thrown around means that lots of money must be spent to keep people honest (as it has always been), and so corporate crime is inherently harder to track down than crime that happens on the streets to little old ladies. I agree that we haven't instituted enough reforms to prevent shady accounting practices, but it's damn hard to think of a way to do that that doesn't cost huge amounts of taxpayer dollars and won't make it impossible for corporations to earn money. (And a lot of the rhetoric around the second point is that if corporations can't earn money they can't pay workers, which is what gets the voters riled up. Despite attempts to create a class struggle theory for America, we still have lots of corporations and industries being most ardently defended by labor unions and employee organizations.)
Also, despite the rhetoric, Bill Gates did not actually do anything illegal (at least, not out of the really famous things he's done to make a lot of money), nor has what he's done been terribly worse than what tons of other people were doing at the same time he was rising through the ranks. He was just a lot more persistent at it and good at it than his competitors, but every shady thing he's done has been within the letter of the law. You have to hand it to him that in the sense of working hard, stressing himself out and ruining his social life, he did earn his success (even if he's a crappy programmer).
Exactly, and that is the discussion I would like to be having, since without it there really is little framework for understanding someone else's point of view, which is, I think, part of the reason this thread has gone on and on -- intractably so -- for pages and pages. What rights are YOU willing to give up, and in exchange for what? What is your personal price for freedom? (and I do appreciate your candor in answering despite your claim that it will go nowhere)
I think it goes nowhere because the State of Nature doesn't exist; because there's no such thing as a person living in absolute freedom who has all his rights, and the only possible such person is a person living in total isolation. A "right" is only something you can define at all in terms of what rights other people don't have (I have the right to life in that others don't have the right to kill me), and so it becomes dangerous to talk about trading some rights for other rights and trying to come out on top, as though rights were quantifiable and measurable.
Better to talk about what policy is just better for you and which one is worse for you, in terms of utility; it's just as vague an idea, but at least it's not one that biases you toward one kind of *feeling* over another, as though the feeling of "freedom" or "having rights" is the freedom above which all other feelings are judged. That leads to people talking about things like "trading your rights for wealth", as though the right to have enough to eat and buy the things you want isn't also in its way a right, as though because free speech is easier to think of as a right than having good wages free speech is somehow nobler or loftier than good wages, which I really don't think it is -- in an absolute and final choice between the two I'd pick the actual material benefit over the abstract political one (and when you use words like "benefit" or "utility" this way of looking at it becomes obvious).
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Erm, I don't see the connection between my last post in this thread and being against Bush. It was mostly why I don't think it's fair to call America "fascist", and along the same lines why I don't think it's fair to say that the two political parties are the same and that everything in our country is so bad that voting won't do any good.
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You wouldn't mind it because you really think it would benefit Americans, or because it'd put your country in a better position (if you're not an American)? I find it very hard to imagine that massive armed revolution and anarchy anywhere could lead to anything very good.
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GeomanNL
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Look at that number.
http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/
Stuff like Enron and Microsoft is really peanuts compared to this.
I'd think the real power is in the hands of some super-rich organizations, who've lent some major sums of money to the gov't, and those aren't Enron or Microsoft, but more likely the banks and trust funds.
That's to some extent the situation in the Netherlands at least - Â our gov't also ows major sums of money. The funny thing is (well I think it's funny) is, that at some point, the debt grew so big, that it could only be paid off (and paying all the other bills like schools and hospitals) by borrowing more money, from the same organizations. Â You never hear of this though, so I'm sort of guessing here.
Anyway, the point I wanted to make is, I don't think there's much fascism involved, just a very delicate balance of financial (inter)dependencies, which they don't want to break for fear of economical meltdown. And I suppose it doesn't matter that much who's elected and who's not, cause they all need to deal with the same economic reality, and there aren't major different ways of dealing with it.
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« Last Edit: September 06, 2004, 02:53:33 am by GeomanNL »
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Zeep-Eeep
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Good Grief
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Revolution
« Reply #174 on: September 06, 2004, 09:21:18 am » |
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Sure, there are different ways. Look at early communist China. Linen's idea of a money-less system or Cuba's nationalist view of money. There are lots
of examples to choose from.
Back to the need for reveolution. We are talking about a country founded
by rich slave owners, who decided that only their class, race and gender should be allowed to vote. Now, some small steps forward have been taken. However, there are still huge, glaring problems with the class system of America. We are talking about a country in which over 10 billion dollars are spent every month on cell phones. Cell phones! Billions of dollars are spent every month in movie theatures and on video games. Yet some people sleep in the streets. Some children go to bed hungry in the land of plenty. Some people go to jail or are labeled terrorists in the land of the free.
How many more people have to die of cold before people cry for a change? How many of your sisters, mothers and daughters must die of breast cancer before results are demanded? America has been, since its creation, in the hands of rich, self-centred, white men. So, I ask you: Does it really matter whether Americans vote for Bush or Kerry in the next election? No. Neither of these over-priviledged men is going to over-turn the system that made them. They will support, nurture and aid it. All the while, stealing, corrupting and using their "fellow" Americans.
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What sound does a penguin make?
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Sigh. Zeep-Eep: My family comes from China. I don't really want to talk in detail about the Chinese Communist Revolution, or the Russian Revolution that preceded it, or the similar revolutions that occurred in other countries, except to point out that THEY DIDN'T WORK. Communist parties across the globe continue to argue about *why* they didn't work. Maybe they're right that a socialist utopia could exist in some future society with different presuppositions from ours (one where the widespread adoption of powerful technology has created true plenty worldwide, maybe) could have a socialist utopia, but the balance of evidence is that despite a lot of hard work and a lot of fervent idealism, armed communist revolutions in today's world DON'T WORK.
If you're going to go on about how they were infiltrated by counterrevolutionary forces, that they only failed because they were taken over by a few incredibly clever self-serving dictators or because the capitalist world order sabotaged them, then it may not be worth continuing this conversation. Someone who believes that the huge, endemic pathologies inherent to modern communist states could be caused by a small cabal of evil people misleading everyone else in the revolution is probably capable of believing anything.
By the way, the problems you have with America are a little weird. I can understand the rage at "maldistribution" of resources where lots of people have luxuries and some others starve (though it's better, in my view, than societies where just a few people have luxuries and the vast majority of the population starves). I would argue there's no good replacement for the money system that we currently use to distribute resources; while there are inequalities built into it I *do* believe that a good society needs to reward those who produce value for others and punish those who don't, and I don't believe that the different productivity and usefulness among different people is wholly a social construction of class.
However, I don't get your other objections. We... don't punish the mentally ill the way we should? So there'd be no insanity defense in your perfect society's courts? Somehow I do think that crazy people who don't know what they're doing should be treated differently from evil bastards who kill with full knowledge of their actions. And it's not like we let mentally ill killers go out on the street; we try to protect society from them and treat them, which is entirely reasonable.
I don't totally understand the objection to requiring presidential candidates to be natural-born. Yes, the US was founded by people from many different nations, but it was still a nation founded on certain cultural ideals and mutual loyalties, not an open international forum. It was a *new* nation, not a meta-nation meant to transcend nationalism (something some American politicians would do well to remember). I don't think I particularly like the idea of a meta-nation, like the UN; nations are founded at least partly on ideas and values, and a meta-nation whose only value is that it will treat everyone else's set of ideas and values neutrally is kind of repugnant to me, leading to things like Libya chairing a committee on human rights.
And yes, there is divided opinion on separation of church and state. There has been since the very beginning, in fact; Thomas Jefferson and James Madison famously didn't see eye to eye on that issue, and the particular phrasing of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment (as with many other phrasings in the Constitution) was an explicitly careful phrasing so as not to favor either interpretation. Even so, the US has *more* separation of church and state than most other countries, either countries that have an established church supported by tax dollars (the UK) or that have a state government that feels free to "tweak" people's choice of worship (France, banning Muslim headscarves, or more extremely, the PRC, banning any kinds of Buddhism that look "dangerous").
The country is not perfect, but to be brutally honest it's better than nearly any other country I might choose to live in, and if put through the randomizing engine of armed revolution or at least major political upheaval I have severe doubts it would come out looking better than it does now.
By the way, when you can think of a way to organize a country, based on real, historical examples that have worked, so that there are *no* people who are poor (we don't have to say no one's poorer than anyone else yet, just no one poorer than some objective definition of "poverty") and *no one* being kept in prison. (You do realize that despite the prison system's problems, there are a lot of people who really are criminals and really want to break the law and hurt others for their advantage. Some of them are even actually terrorists, and want to maim and kill random innocents in order to make a point.) I'm willing to bet you won't get very far; most people who've tried it haven't. Look at the great record most communist nations have had keeping their people out of poverty and out of prison.
GeomanNL: It's an oversimplification to say that because governments are in debt they're in the control of banks and lending agencies. To say so is to internalize the money system, to assume that the social meaning of money at the small scale scales all the way up. In real life creditors have power over debtors because creditors can sue, can foreclose, in some countries can send you to debtor's prison, and so on. Governments, however, are the ones who provide the infrastructure that allows lawsuits, foreclosures and debtor's prisons. Governments are the ones with the social legitimacy that allows the laws that uphold the money system to work, and the military power to keep those laws stable. So when a government is in debt, it's actually usually seen as a way for the *government* to gain power; it means that the government has (by implied force) taken money from banks and lending institutions, and the banks and lending institutions are now required to behold themselves to the government's financial leadership so that they can get back the interest on the debt and keep the money in circulation (and themselves in business). This was Alexander Hamilton's original argument for the existence of a national debt in the first place, a way to tie the nation's financial institutions and government together so that the government would not be in the position of running out of money and having to raise it through emergency taxes, and the banks would not be too independent of the government and capable of forming small, independent economies of their own with their own currency. It's very hard for the banks to put pressure on the government using their credit, since they're scattered and multiple while the government is singular and central, and since the government *can* for the most part take as much money as it wants without fear of being arrested or sued, as long as they're sure the banks can handle it.
This doesn't mean national debt isn't a problem; this complex balance that holds our political and economic system together isn't totally elastic, and if the government pulls too hard and asks for too many loans from banks, the banks may reach the point where they can't or won't pay, necessitating conflict and confrontation. (When governments reach this point they often resort to hyperinflation, an early sign of a government's fall -- witness pre-WWII Germany.) However going too far the other way isn't good, either -- a very small debt allows banks to have all kinds of economically destabilizing free rein as they become less dependent on the government central bank's revenue to set their liquidity. It also creates *more* potential for a conflict of interest between the government and the private sector; the measure of deficit is really a comparison between how much tax money is going into the private sector and how much private money is going into the treasury, and since it's easier for the government to exert control over the private sector by paying *them* than vice versa, those who want government neutrality would usually prefer that the money go the other way.
(Yeah, I'm minoring in economics. Not a very intensive minor, though, so feel free to rip apart my assertions if anyone knows better.)
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GeomanNL
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Sure ; but owing someone money, reduces your freedom of choice what to do with a given sum of money. If you owe a lot of money, this freedom is limited a lot. This is sometimes visible in gov't policy.
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Sweden's a great place, and I've often said that the Scandinavian countries are probably the best alternative overall system to the American system in the world; the other European countries are generally unsatisfying compromises between the way Scandinavia and America operate. But Scandinavia, I think, has its own problems; the suicide rate is high and accelerating compared to that in the US, the economy is slow and torpid, and there's a real problem with shrinking generations (that will exacerbate the slow economy as each new generation of workers is smaller and less willing to work). The living is great in Sweden, but they don't make very much stuff; they can exist because countries that do make a huge amount of stuff (like the US) create a lot of leftover goods that go into the world economy. Scandinavia couldn't be Scandinavia without the economic powerhouse of the US, which generates most of the technological innovation and capital that powers the world economy and is the trading partner for most of the world. I wouldn't mind retiring to Sweden or Norway, but it's in the US and countries more similar to it where more of the world's work is done.
And, anyway, Scandinavia isn't much of an argument against the money system. The government has a powerful social-welfare safety net, but money is still the primary means of transaction between people, and capitalist investment is still the way most things are made. Scandinavia is not outside the money system, and except for the very early days of their history neither were any of the modern communist nations. Other systems *exist*, but none of them actually work for anything very important on a very large scale -- true socialism has only ever been realistic on the small scale, as with the Amish, or the Israeli kibbutzim, or the Oneida community (and when they haven't had religion holding them together on the inside and some degree of protection and support from an outside government, they've tended to collapse fairly quickly -- the Oneida community is an example).
I don't feel much of an emotion of pride regarding the US -- after all, I personally have almost nothing to do with what makes it good. I do choose to identify as an American citizen and serve the interests of the American nation-state, which is nationalism at the most basic level, but I'd hope any citizen of any nation would feel the same sense of duty. I also feel that Americans are responsible for improving the state of affairs in their country, but I think the best way to do that is to have a realistic perspective on how the country compares to others; while you can certainly err either way, I think even now there are too many Americans who feel their duty is to be critical of their own country above all others, and seek to imitate other countries when it would be better to be different from them.
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