Communism. Good or bad. What do you really know about Communism?

[Roubignol]

"Democrat" Nancy Pelosi denounces what Karl Marx or Bakounin denounced 150 years ago.

Pelosi: Democrats are capitalists

[deepsepia]

Originally Posted by Brian249x

In the midst of insomnia last night it struck me that the solution to global warming is to immediately kill 90% of the human beings on the planet. Let's see, we start with all Hindus, Christians, Muslims, Republicans, and all non-Communist party members in China, then figure out where to go from there.

Here's a challenging [not-so] hypothetical:

"What if the long term ecological carrying capacity of the Earth is, say, 500 million people"

We all remember the movie "lifeboat", finite resources, more people than can be fed . . . but there's no ship "out there" to rescue us.

What do we do?

We do have evidence of policies that reduce birthrates dramatically -- compulsory, like in China, but also economic development and availability of family planning. So Japan and Italy both have shrinking populations, for example.

But can such policies be applied globally? How?

[bowlinggreen]

Originally Posted by xyzde69

"Democrat" Nancy Pelosi denounces what Karl Marx or Bakounin denounced 150 years ago.

Pelosi: Democrats are capitalists

Watching the whole video, I can't say what she says is wrong. I don't know how the democrats plan on bringing a decent living wage/lifestyle back for the average American worker though, and apparently neither do they.

Ranting about immigrant rights and transgender bathrooms isn't going to cut it.

[haroldeye]

Karl Marx hardly lived in poverty. He got his housekeeper (yes a household servant) pregnant. Not too many slum houses had maids. The dosh he spent was normally borrowed from other people like that nnice Mr Engels.

[Wendigo]

Originally Posted by haroldeye

Karl Marx hardly lived in poverty. He got his housekeeper (yes a household servant) pregnant. Not too many slum houses had maids. The dosh he spent was normally borrowed from other people like that nnice Mr Engels.

marxists, and it started way back with Champagne Karly himself, tend to be very good about telling other people how to live their lives. Not so good at being on message themselves

[Arturo2nd]

Originally Posted by haroldeye

Karl Marx hardly lived in poverty. He got his housekeeper (yes a household servant) pregnant. Not too many slum houses had maids. The dosh he spent was normally borrowed from other people like that nnice Mr Engels.

Helene "Lenchen" Demuth was a peasant girl who was adopted into the von Westphalen household to work as a maid. Karl Marx's wife Jenny was the daughter of Baron Ludwig von Westphalen. In April 1845, Lenchen was sent by Jenny's mother to Brussels to help Jenny care for the Marx family. The faithful servant would share the family's privations in England, bear Karl Marx's illegitimate son, and move on to run Fredrick Engel's household. She is buried in the Marx family tomb.

The Marx family was supported at various times by Karl's meager writing earnings, gifts from Jenny's parents and brother, Jenny's inheritance from her parents, handouts from Karl's mother, and subsidies from Engels. Ironically, Karl and Jenny would become comfortably well off once the royalties from volume one of Das Kapital began to flow. But the garret years in London when their children were being raised were awfully lean. The son who died in childhood had a reputation as a cunning and resourceful bread thief.

[deepsepia]

Originally Posted by bowlinggreen

Watching the whole video, I can't say what she says is wrong. I don't know how the democrats plan on bringing a decent living wage/lifestyle back for the average American worker though, and apparently neither do they.

Ranting about immigrant rights and transgender bathrooms isn't going to cut it.

Democrats have championed $15 an hour minimum wage and a guarantee of affordable healthcare. That's a pretty straightforward way of getting everyone to a decent standard of living. $15 an hour * 2000 hours worked per year= $30,000 per year. That's not rich, but its not terrible either, especially if healthcare costs are no longer a concern. The Democrats have always stood for the EITC -- Earned Income Tax Credit-- which supplements the income of working poor as well.

So I'd say that on the evidence, the Dems have done a great deal more than than "rant about immigrant rights and transgender bathrooms": they've proposed and enacted a whole series of measure which have improved the lot of the average worker.

And the Republicans?

Nothing.

So you may not have paid attention to what the Dems have done-- but that's on you, not them.

[bowlinggreen]

Originally Posted by deepsepia

Democrats have championed $15 an hour minimum wage and a guarantee of affordable healthcare. That's a pretty straightforward way of getting everyone to a decent standard of living. $15 an hour * 2000 hours worked per year= $30,000 per year. That's not rich, but its not terrible either, especially if healthcare costs are no longer a concern. The Democrats have always stood for the EITC -- Earned Income Tax Credit-- which supplements the income of working poor as well.

So I'd say that on the evidence, the Dems have done a great deal more than than "rant about immigrant rights and transgender bathrooms": they've proposed and enacted a whole series of measure which have improved the lot of the average worker.

And the Republicans?

Nothing.

So you may not have paid attention to what the Dems have done-- but that's on you, not them.

Well... if we enact a $15 an hour national minimum wage, how long before the better off classes start complaining that lunch at McDonalds now costs 20 bucks? Or that a night in a hotel is now 50% more suddenly than what it was? Or that those cheap TVs and CD players we love to grab at Walmart as extras have suddenly doubled in price?

Pelosi does make a good point about shareholder value and CEO compensation. How can we stop that sort of thing? Companies do bad things to keep that shareholder value high too. It's like an addiction.

Like Lou from Wall Street said:

"The main thing about money, Bud, is that it makes you do things you don’t want to do."

[Roubignol]

Originally Posted by bowlinggreen

Watching the whole video, I can't say what she says is wrong. I don't know how the democrats plan on bringing a decent living wage/lifestyle back for the average American worker though, and apparently neither do they.

Ranting about immigrant rights and transgender bathrooms isn't going to cut it.

It's your (American citizens) job to kick in the anthill.
In France it smells very very bad for the President.
Workers are incredibly upset that he gave tax gifts to the richest French citizens and tries now to compensate thanks to higher taxes on fuel.

Do you know how much earn a temporary French worker at Peugeot ? 800 € a month (About 900$ a month). A full time worker (not an engineer) earns maximum 1600 €.
When the director earns 15'000€ a month + bonus + commissions.
Peugeot made benefits on last year and gave a huge amount of dividends to its shareholders.
Five years ago, they thought to close the factory to transfer the jobs abroad.

This kind of economy has to stop.
IMO the only solution, is a total (worldwide) strike.
Then... (it could seem unrealistic, but I really think that the only solution at long term), it's to teach to people contentment (through meditation) and to impose fair rules to the "elites".

That must be the same in the USA and all around the world.
Just think if Chineses and Indians would have consumed crude oil like American and European... already 70 years ago?
We would have no stock remaining now.
Hopefully for us, these people maybe were more satisfied of a simple life than our grand fathers and fathers.
Chineses and Indians had no NASCAR, no F1, no American Airlines or Easyjet, no Ford Mustang, no BMW and they consumed few meat and diary products.
But... they maybe had a lot of sex to compensate. (without condom )

Here in Western world, we all let lobbies dictate our lifestyle and sold our spiritual life to merchants.

I didn't think that I'd one day speak like a preast () ), but it seems to me that our only salvation is in to reappropriate our spirituality (with or without a God), we don't have to search our hope in consumerism.


I just have to thwart Deepsepia's assertion who thinks that we still have a lot of oil.
That's not true. At least half of the ultimate stock has been consumed until today. (Maybe 2/3 of the stock)... that's huge.

Here are datas of the EIA.

1) In a growing economy we are near to the top of production.
2) US shale oil production already had its peak.




I'll requote here both specialists:

All the easy oil and gas in the world has pretty much been found. Now comes the harder work in finding and producing oil from more challenging environments and work areas.
— William J. Cummings, Exxon-Mobil company spokesman, December 2005

It is pretty clear that there is not much chance of finding any significant quantity of new cheap oil. Any new or unconventional oil is going to be expensive.
— Lord Ron Oxburgh, a former chairman of Shell, October 2008

There will be a lot of crude and shale oil for extremely rich people.

Originally Posted by bowlinggreen

Like Lou from Wall Street said:

"The main thing about money, Bud, is that it makes you do things you don’t want to do."

The worst in that story... is that the value of money (of a currency) is a pure lie.

Just a little example proving that money is... bullshit:

Remember when The United States did not want to see their gold bank disappear and suspended the convertibility of the dollar into gold on August 15, 1971.
Since that day USA has printed billions of billions that she doesn't get.
Today the BRICS are trying to create a new economy, because they don't trust the USA to be able to redeem her debt and that creates tensions all around the world.

But that's a story amoung several hundreds. Several time during the human history, indebted kings or countries didn't pay their debts. They didn't respect their words.

We can't really trust money, because governments and markets are not fairplay when playing with it.

I'd like to see a world working without money before dying. That would surely be an interesting experience.

[Arturo2nd]

The American worker was always going to be at risk for a downgrading of living standards due to automation and better education in other nations. We were able to command premium prices for our labor as long as its quality made it cheaper to use due to increased productivity. Even now we are seeing "on-shoring" because of high quality labor and the desirability of cutting transportation costs to the enormous and wealthy U.S. market. What was not anticipated forty to fifty years ago was that computer technology would automate millions of white collar office, professional, and management jobs out of existence.

The Democrats have actually done a lot for working people, but their task has been made very much harder by ideological ossification and the workers continually electing "conservatives" who have adopted anti-worker policies. We shall see what happens, but the Democrats are not likely to accomplish much more than protect some programs, investigate abuses, and make Trump's life miserable for the next two years.

The voters have hit upon the rather reasonable strategy of keeping power divided to keep either party from doing anything too rash. We may see a return to control by the Democrats in 2020, but I would predict that their House majority would disappear at the next mid-term.

An awful lot of economic and climatological factors are beyond the powers of political parties and business interests to control. Businesses seem to find ways to exploit trends from time to time. Political parties are reactionary and usually take several years to identify and attempt to solve problems. Many times the world has started fixing the problems and the new political solutions are counter productive.