[Quinny]

Interesting thoughts. Thought I would share it here as many of you have already taken a 'red' pill

It also isn't about taking ownership of the means of production - Or is it??

http://www.moneytruth.org/economic_rights.html

Economic Rights

I think that, in the informationally connected world we inhabit today, a revolution in the way we live is inevitable. And I really think that that revolution will be an intellectual one, a revolution in our understanding.

What Might Economic Rights Entail?

The technology of money is a universal, non-exclusive, non-hierarchical technology by its very design. Thus money could and should represent the rights and sovereignty of every human being on Earth.

Economic inclusion should therefore be the right of all. But I really think it's a mistake to think that we need to offer packaged 'solutions' to the world. It seems to me that literacy is its own solution and informed people will go on to craft democratic economic structures which we can presently only speculate at. Pre-empting that (for our own accolades?) always appears to result in embarrassment. However, and only for the purpose of illustration, I'd like to venture the following:

1. Having rights in the world isn't an attempt to limit individual potential or make everyone the same. It's just simple decency. In fact, replacing unearned privilege with rightful inclusion seems that it would add a great deal to our diversity. But what is considered 'fair' or 'rightful' access to money must surely lie with democracies to decide.

2. The right to exploitation free access to money is a right with regard to accessing new money. Anyone seeking debt, then, has two logical options: to draw on their own rightful access to new money or turn to the already existing stock of money and truly borrow. The fact of money as a common facility throws up the question of which economic actors should be able to access it. Should corporations be able to draw new money into being or should they be required to borrow already existing money when seeking debt? Should banks be able to create money for their own purposes or should they too have that privilege revoked? My suspicion is that literate people would seek to limit rights to sovereign, flesh and blood (natural) persons and their governments also. Firms, then, including banks, having no comparable rights, would have to turn to the rightful holders of money and borrow for their ventures. This would grant the rightful holders of money some say over how those firms employ that money and would ensure that the cost of firms' risks or abuses are not socialized. That, after all, is the nature of investing, to accept risk in return for having your money work instead of you.

[Rod_Cloutier]

Gerald Celente is predicting riots in the streets by mid-summer 2014. He has an impressive track record for predictions. He predicted the 1987 stock market crash before it happened, he predicted the collapse of the USSR before it happened. (No one else predicted this) He predicted the collapse of the dot com bubble, the 2008 economic crash, the bankruptcy of the automakers, the longest recession, ect.

Riots in the street by mid-summer seems the opposite of economic rights. Worrisome, scary, but expected:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=pl ... oQku8#t=17

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNWbt5sn ... ilpage#t=0

My 'red pill' status will have me stocking up on food and other essentials before mid-summer just in case.

[rollin]

Current governmental and market paradigms are fully dysfunctional. They all lead to destruction. Any new paradigm that does not fully include the workings and well being of nature is doomed to a hellish death.

So to speak of monetary rights is to speak of a minor shift In a destructive societal paradigm. Absolutely a waste of time and energy, intrinsically doomed to failure.

[GHung]

Fiat rights. Funny that. There are no rights where those sworn to enforce them are the same people violating them.

[Quinny]

If you actually look at the information it is radical to say the least. It won't happen under current system but does offer thoughts for how post-collapse/socialist system might use money without it being totally centrally planned.

[Graeme]

Robert Reich: Inequality has warped the minds of America’s rich

The former labor secretary on why our country's wealthy won't pay anything close to the tax rate of 40 years ago

America has a serious “We” problem — as in “Why should we pay for them?”

The question is popping up all over the place. It underlies the debate over extending unemployment benefits to the long-term unemployed and providing food stamps to the poor.

It’s found in the resistance of some young and healthy people to being required to buy health insurance in order to help pay for people with preexisting health problems.

It can be heard among the residents of upscale neighborhoods who don’t want their tax dollars going to the inhabitants of poorer neighborhoods nearby.

The pronouns “we” and “they” are the most important of all political words. They demarcate who’s within the sphere of mutual responsibility, and who’s not. Someone within that sphere who’s needy is one of “us” — an extension of our family, friends, community, tribe – and deserving of help. But needy people outside that sphere are “them,” presumed undeserving unless proved otherwise.

The central political question faced by any nation or group is where the borders of this sphere of mutual responsibility are drawn.

Why in recent years have so many middle-class and wealthy Americans pulled the borders in closer?



It’s easier to be generous and expansive about the sphere of ”we” when incomes are rising and future prospects seem even better, as during the first three decades after World War II when America declared war on poverty and expanded civil rights. But since the late 1970s, as most paychecks have flattened or declined, adjusted for inflation, many in the stressed middle no longer want to pay for “them.”

Yet this doesn’t explain why so many wealthy America’s are also exiting. They’ve never been richer. Surely they can afford a larger “we.” But most of today’s rich adamantly refuse to pay anything close to the tax rate America’s wealthy accepted forty years ago.

Perhaps it’s because, as inequality has widened and class divisions have hardened, America’s wealthy no longer have any idea how the other half lives.

Being rich in today’s America means not having to come across anyone who isn’t. Exclusive prep schools, elite colleges, private jets, gated communities, tony resorts, symphony halls and opera houses, and vacation homes in the Hamptons and other exclusive vacation sites all insulate them from the rabble.

America’s wealthy increasingly inhabit a different country from the one “they” inhabit, and America’s less fortunate seem as foreign as do the needy inhabitants of another country.

The first step in widening the sphere of “we” is to break down the barriers — not just of race, but also, increasingly, of class, and of geographical segregation by income — that are pushing “we Americans” further and further apart.

salon

[Plantagenet]

Robert Reich: Inequality has warped the minds of America’s rich

The rich would pay higher taxes if the US tax code forced them to pay. The problem isn't with today's rich----they are no different then the rich have always been. The problem is in today's tax code. It lets politically influential corporations like Google and GE and the Hollywood studios get off with paying near zero taxes, while tax rates go up and up on the struggling middle class.

Blaming the rich is a waste of time. The problem is the corrupt and incompetent leadership in DC, who would rather fly out to California and have yet another record-breaking fundraiser with their wealthy supporters then do the work of making Google and other California corporations pay their share of taxes.

[Fishman]

Ay yes, each according to their needs. I think this was tried numerous times last century. Try a history book. None of it turned out well

[Lore]

Blaming the rich is a waste of time. The problem is the corrupt and incompetent leadership in DC, who would rather fly out to California and have yet another record-breaking fundraiser with their wealthy supporters then do the work of making Google and other California corporations pay their share of taxes.

It's the plutocracy that's pulling the strings behind those politicians. For most of these it's not the money, but the power and the prestige to use it to manipulate the world in their personal vision.

[Plantagenet]

Blaming the rich is a waste of time. The problem is the corrupt and incompetent leadership in DC, who would rather fly out to California and have yet another record-breaking fundraiser with their wealthy supporters then do the work of making Google and other California corporations pay their share of taxes.

It's the plutocracy that's pulling the strings behind those politicians.

The American people can't vote to the replace the people in the plutocracy. We can vote to replace the dullards and cut-purses in DC.

[Lore]

Blaming the rich is a waste of time. The problem is the corrupt and incompetent leadership in DC, who would rather fly out to California and have yet another record-breaking fundraiser with their wealthy supporters then do the work of making Google and other California corporations pay their share of taxes.

It's the plutocracy that's pulling the strings behind those politicians.

The American people can't vote to the replace the people in the plutocracy. We can vote to replace the dullards and cut-purses in DC.

The problem is that they only get to choose between those that the puppet masters put in front of them.

[copious.abundance]

Gerald Celente is predicting riots in the streets by mid-summer 2014. He has an impressive track record for predictions.

LOL, no he doesn't. All you need to do is search his website.

http://www.geraldcelente.com/gerald-cel ... no-clothes

www.trendsresearch.com www.infowars.com trends forecaster, author, and CEO of The Trends Research Institute, Gerald Celente, who has predicted revolution, food riots, and tax rebellions in the United States by 2012.

Ahhh, guess what? It's 2014. His prediction is two years overdue. LOL!

But like most doomers I have little doubt he's completely forgotten that, and will continue to predict imminent riots. When aforementioned riots fail to materialize, he'll just kick the prediction can down the road.

Reminds me of Shadowstats' John Williams, who began predicting imminent hyperinflation somewhere around 2008!

[ralfy]

Ultimately, the issue has to be seen in light of resource and energy availability.

[Pops]

I have no idea what the OP is about unless it is rejecting corporate personhood, is that it?

But more broadly I think we can say the economic tank really is full to the peak.

If you think about it, the massive accumulation of wealth today has been manufactured directly by fossil fuels. There were rich people a couple of hundred years ago (relative to the poor of the day who were really poor) but they were rich as a result of the labor of (poor) people and since the supply of people and the work they could do was limited, so was the wealth. After coal and especially oil, the amount of work that could be done became virtually unlimited, now we regularly move mountains, change the course of rivers, leave the planet.

To the extent that nowadays money doesn't relate to human work but to fossil work.

The buzzwords are "Knowledge Economy" - what does that mean anyway? It means we take for granted that actual, physical work will simply happen, that there is an unlimited supply of work available and all we need is an idea for an app or to invent a real estate trance or make a high speed trade faster than the next guy and boom, it's off to the races and the money starts flying from our butts without the least human work expended.

So now there are uncountable trillions of units of currency out there, both real and virtual. Those trillions are now largely the product of fossil work, to the extent that humans are becoming redundant and are rapidly being replaced by fossil fueled machines. The belief that keeps that balloon inflated is the holder believes, someone else will likewise believe, that his currency represents value. But even more basic than confidence and probably very rarely contemplated is the idea that the money held will be able to purchase something of value in the future. And how will that thing be produced?

Fossil fuels.

The thing that guarantees the conceptual value of all that money is the idea that sometime in the future someone will be able to offer the holder something of real physical value in exchange for his abstract money, something that is the result of real physical work. As pointed out above, work now done by fossil fuels way beyond the ability of human labor to ever replicate.


So the question is, what happens when it becomes clear that there can never be enough work performed - product produced - to spend all that imaginary money on?
.

[Fishman]

"The Republican hijack of the US budget process and attempted bankrupting of the federal government feels like a tax rebellion."
Just too funny to believe. The Dims control Senate and the Presidency, not the Republicans fault the Senate and Presidency are incompetent politically. The House has always set the budget, again, pick up a history book. And after the recent House passing a budget, the CBO said we were breaking the system financially by going the way of the Dims. Math, its hard for liberals.

[davep]

Is it possible for Americans to discuss anything vaguely political without descending into schoolboy name-calling? There's essentially no difference between the two choices economically anyway, so IMO it just creates a false dichotomy allowing the elites to carry on unhindered.

[ROCKMAN]

Somewhat weak link to the topic at hand but does wedge in sideways when you consider we’re essentially talking about the general public’s understanding the intricacies of our financial, energy and political systems. So here’s a bit of the sampling of our electorate that must chose the proper leaders to pull us out of our tailspin:

"Does the Earth go around the Sun, or does the Sun go around the Earth?" If you answered the latter, you're among a quarter of Americans who also got it wrong, according to a new report by the National Science Foundation. A survey of 2,200 people that was released Friday revealed some alarming truths about the state of science education across the country. Out of nine questions in the survey, participants scored an average 6.5.

Only 39 percent answered correctly with "true" when asked if "The universe began with a huge explosion," while only 48 percent knew that "Human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals," according to the statement. Asked whether there needed to be more government funding for science, 30 percent said there should be. The survey was conducted in 2012, but the results were only presented on Friday at an annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Chicago.

Good to remember that the vote on any person who thought the sun revolved around the earth counts the same as yours. Which reminds of the joke in “City Slickers” when the brother explained the sun does set in the east. It only sets in the west when you’re in the east. I wonder how many Joe6pack’s laughed at that joke? I'm also reminded of a statement I heard long ago when we were seeing very high motor fuel prices: "We don't need any more oil wells. What we need is more gasoline wells." True story.

[SteveO]

Ay yes, each according to their needs. I think this was tried numerous times last century. Try a history book. None of it turned out well

Massive inequity turns out pretty badly too. The French, the Bolshevik and the Chinese Communist revolutions all come to mind.