This week we must remember why we give thanks for CAPITALISM and FREE TRADE!
AZDuffman
founded at Plymouth in 1621. The colony was first organized on a
communal basis, as their financiers required. Land was owned in
common. The Pilgrims farmed communally, too, following the "from each
according to his abilities, to each according to his needs" precept.
The results were disastrous. Communism didn't work any better 400
years ago than it does today. By 1623, the colony had suffered serious
losses. Starvation was imminent.
Bradford realized that the communal system encouraged and rewarded
waste and laziness and inefficiency, and destroyed individual
initiative. Desperate, he abolished it. He distributed private plots
of land among the surviving Pilgrims, encouraging them to plant early
and farm as individuals, not collectively.
The results: a bountiful early harvest that saved the colonies. After
the harvest, the Pilgrims celebrated with a day of Thanksgiving
Too bad so much of the country doesn't realize this today. With every
promise of "free health care" and "making people pay their 'fair
share'" we take steps back to the socialist system. Hopefully the
rest of the country sees the light in 2012!
It may already be happening--Obama is now below 50% in approval and
less than 40% want a public option in health care.
tooly
Thanks AZ. Once again, we see how socialism has ALWAYS but ALWAYS
failed in the many attempts it has been tried down through history.
It makes a fatally flawed assessment of human motivation. When there
is no ownership, there is this sense of 'not my responsibility' that
prevails [and defacto ownership falls to the overseers]. Life becomes
a 'job' and you wait for orders.
tenjets
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Except that none of AZ's Plymnouth Colony story is true. Private land
grants were granted before they ever set sail. Pilgrims went there to
develop commerce and live a religious life. You guys should stop
automatically believing what you read in anonymous e-mails.
Tim
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And capitalism and free-trade never fail? You watched the news lately?
Ever heard of the US banking system? How do you spell bailout--
CAPITALISM? So how do you feel about GM since you bought it?
ZerkonXXXX
> William Bradford
Bradford wrote in 1644, "like an ancient mother grown old and forsaken of
her children...Thus, she that had made many rich became herself poor."
AZDuffman
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No, I learned it in grade and high school 20+ years ago. At first it
was socialized and they nearly starved. Some ov the very connected
people got land grants, Bradford gave land to EVERYBODY to develop on
their own.
You should stop believing what you read from the Huffington Post and
dailykos.
AZDuffman
No one said it will work 100% perfect 100% of the time, but capitalism
finds its way eventually. Socialism has proven to be a faiulre.
I think GM should have been given to the bondholders to run, not
bailed out. That would be letting capitalism work.
tooly
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A simple wiki investigation incovered thus:
""
For its first two-and-a-half years, the economy of Plymouth Plantation
took the form of a communal system. There was neither private property
nor division of labor. Food was grown for the town and distributed
equally. According to William Bradford in Of Plymouth Plantation:
“ The experience that was had in this common course and condition,
tried sundry years and that amongst godly and sober men, may well
evince the vanity of that conceit of Plato's and other ancients
applauded by some of later times; that the taking away of property and
bringing in community into a commonwealth would make them happy and
flourishing; as if they were wiser than God. For this community (so
far as it was) was found to breed much confusion and discontent and
retard much employment that would have been to their benefit and
comfort.[147] ”
By 1623, facing starvation Plymouth Plantation's leaders took another
course. Upon allotting private land plots it is evident that
productivity increased. Again, according to William Bradford in his
account:
“ So they began to think how they might raise as much corn as they
could, and obtain a better crop than they had done, that they might
not still thus languish in misery. At length, after much debate of
things, the Governor (with the advise of the chiefest among them) gave
way that they should set corn every man for his own particular, and in
that regard trust to themselves; in all other things to go in the
general way as before. And so assigned to every family a parcel of
land, according to the proportion of the number, for that end, only
for present use (but made no division for inheritance) and ranged all
boys and youth under some family. This had very good success, for it
made all hands industrious, so as much more corn was planted than
otherwise would have been by any means the Governor or any other could
use, and saved him a great deal of trouble, and gave far better
content. The women now went willingly into the field, and took their
little ones with them to set corn; which before would allege weakness
and inability; whom to have compelled would have been thought great
tyranny and oppression.[147]
"""
So, yes, looks like AZDuffman was correct in his post. And socialism,
once again, clearly shown for it's inferior productivity and
incapacity to provide real world solutions.
On this thanksgiving, I am taking a special moment to remember the
hardships of those before me [us] and to reaffirm my present duty to
DO EVERYTHING I CAN TO STOP THESE CREEPS IN WASHINGTON NOW WHO WANT TO
DESECRATE THE MEMORIES OF SUCH STRUGGLES BY, ONCE AGAIN, AFTER SO MANY
MANY FAILURES, INVOKE SOCIALISM. Won't they ever learn?
Nickname unavailable
another free market debt fueled demandless house of cards darling is
imploding:Milton Friedman’s beach club:Dubai, indeed, has achieved
what American reactionaries only dream of an oasis of free enterprise
without income taxes, trade unions or opposition parties
http://www.newleftreview.org/?view=2635
New Left Review 41, September-October 2006
On the rim of the war zone, a new Mecca of conspicuous consumption and
economic crime, under the iron rule of Sheikh al-Maktoum. Skyscrapers
half a mile high, artificial archipelagoes, fantasy theme parks—and
the indentured Asian labour force that sustains them.
MIKE DAVIS
FEAR AND MONEY IN DUBAI
‘As your jet starts its descent, you are glued to your window. The
scene below is astonishing: a 24-square-mile archipelago of coral-
coloured islands in the shape of an almost-finished puzzle of the
world. In the shallow green waters between continents, the sunken
shapes of the Pyramids of Giza and the Roman Colosseum are clearly
visible. In the distance, three other large island groups are
configured as palms within crescents and planted with high-rise
resorts, amusement parks and a thousand mansions built on stilts over
the water. The ‘Palms’ are connected by causeways to a Miami-like
beachfront crammed with mega-hotels, apartment skyscrapers and
yachting marinas.
‘As the plane slowly banks toward the desert mainland, you gasp at the
even more improbable vision ahead. Out of a chrome forest of
skyscrapers soars a new Tower of Babel. It is an impossible half-mile
high: taller than the Empire State Building stacked on top of itself.
You are still rubbing your eyes with wonderment as the plane lands and
you are welcomed into an airport shopping emporium where seductive
goods entice: Gucci bags, Cartier watches and one-kilogram bars of
solid gold. The hotel driver is waiting for you in a Rolls Royce
Silver Seraph. Friends had recommended the Armani Inn in the 170-
storey tower, or the 7-star hotel with an atrium so huge that the
Statue of Liberty would fit inside it, and service so exclusive that
the rooms come with personal butlers; but instead you have opted to
fulfill a childhood fantasy. You always have wanted to play Captain
Nemo in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.
‘Your jellyfish-shaped hotel, the Hydropolis, is, in fact, exactly 66
feet below the surface of the sea. Each of its 220 luxury suites has
clear plexiglass walls that provide spectacular views of passing
mermaids and of the famed ‘underwater fireworks’: a hallucinatory
exhibition of ‘water bubbles, swirled sand and carefully deployed
lighting’. Any initial anxiety about the safety of your sea-bottom
resort is dispelled by the smiling concierge. The structure has a
multi-level fail-safe security system which includes protection
against terrorist submarines as well as missiles and aircraft.
‘Although you have an important business meeting at Internet City with
clients from Hyderabad and Taipei, you have arrived a day early to
treat yourself to one of the famed adventures at the ‘Restless Planet’
themepark. After a soothing night’s sleep under the sea, you board a
monorail for this Jurassic jungle. Your first encounter is with some
peacefully grazing brontosaurs. Next you are attacked by a flock of
velociraptors, the animatronic beasts—designed by experts from the
British Natural History Museum—so flawlessly lifelike that you shriek
in fear and delight. With your adrenaline pumped up by this close
call, you round off the afternoon with some snowboarding on the local
indoor snow mountain (outdoors, the temperature is 105°). Nearby is
the world’s largest mall—the altar of the city’s famed Shopping
Festival, which attracts millions of frenetic consumers each January—
but you postpone the temptation. Instead, you indulge in some
expensive Thai fusion cuisine. The gorgeous Russian blonde at the
restaurant bar stares at you with vampirish hunger, and you wonder
whether the local sin is as extravagant as the shopping . . . ’
Fantasy levitated
Welcome to a strange paradise. But where are you? Is this a new
Margaret Atwood novel, Philip K. Dick’s unpublished sequel to Blade
Runner or Donald Trump on acid? No. It is the Persian Gulf city-state
of Dubai in 2010. After Shanghai (current population 15 million),
Dubai (current population 1.5 million) is the planet’s biggest
building site: an emerging dreamworld of conspicuous consumption and
what the locals boast as ‘supreme lifestyles’. Despite its blast-
furnace climate (on typical 120° summer days, the swankier hotels
refrigerate their swimming pools) and edge-of-the-war-zone location,
Dubai confidently predicts that its enchanted forest of 600
skyscrapers and malls will attract 15 million overseas visitors a year
by 2010, three times as many as New York City. Emirates Airlines has
placed a staggering $37-billion order for new Boeings and Airbuses to
fly these tourists in and out of Dubai’s new global air hub, the vast
Jebel Ali airport. [1] Indeed, thanks to a dying planet’s terminal
addiction to Arabian oil, this former fishing village and smugglers’
cove proposes to become one of the world capitals of the 21st century.
Favouring diamonds over rhinestones, Dubai has already surpassed that
other desert arcade of capitalist desire, Las Vegas, both in sheer
scale of spectacle and the profligate consumption of water and power.
[2]
Dozens of outlandish mega-projects—including the artificial ‘island
world’ (where Rod Stewart has reportedly spent $33 million to buy
‘Britain’), the earth’s tallest building (Burj Dubai, designed by
Skidmore, Owings & Merrill), the underwater luxury hotel, the
carnivorous dinosaurs, the domed ski resort and the hyper-mall—are
already under construction or about to leave the drawing board. [3]
The 7-star hotel, the spinnaker-shaped Burj Al-Arab—looking much like
the set of a James Bond film—is already world-famous for its $5,000
per-night rooms with 100-mile views and an exclusive clientele of Arab
royalty, English rock stars and Russian billionaires. And the
dinosaurs, according to the finance director of the Natural History
Museum, ‘will have the full stamp of authority of the Museum in
London, and will demonstrate that education and science can be fun’;
and profitable, since the ‘only way into the dinosaur park will be
through the shopping mall’. [4]
The biggest project, Dubailand, represents a vertiginous new stage in
fantasy environments. Literally a ‘themepark of themeparks’, it will
be more than twice the size of Disney World and employ 300,000 workers
who, in turn, will entertain 15 million visitors per year (each
spending a minimum of $100 per day, not including accommodation). Like
a surrealist encyclopaedia, its 45 major ‘world class’ projects
include replicas of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Taj Mahal and
the Pyramids, [5] as well as a snow mountain with ski lifts and polar
bears, a centre for ‘extreme sports’, a Nubian village, ‘Eco-Tourism
World’, a vast Andalusian spa and wellness complex, golf courses,
autodromes, race tracks, ‘Giants’ World’, ‘Fantasia’, the largest zoo
in the Middle East, several new 5-star hotels, a modern art gallery
and the Mall of Arabia. [6]
Gigantism
Under the enlightened despotism of its Emir and CEO, 58-year-old
Sheikh Mohammed al-Maktoum, Dubai has become the new global icon of
imagineered urbanism. Multi-billionaire Sheikh Mo—as he is known to
Dubai’s expats—has a straightforward if immodest goal: ‘I want to be
Number One in the world’. [7] Although he is an ardent collector of
thoroughbreds (the world’s largest stable) and super-yachts (the 525-
foot-long ‘Project Platinum’, which has its own submarine and flight
deck), his consuming passion is over-the-top, monumental architecture.
[8] Indeed, he seems to have imprinted Scott and Venturi’s bible of
hyper-reality, Learning From Las Vegas, in the same way that pious
Muslims memorize the Qur’an. One of his proudest achievements, he
often tells visitors, is to have introduced gated communities to
Arabia, the land of nomads and tents.
Thanks to his boundless enthusiasm for concrete and steel, the coastal
desert has become a huge circuit board upon which the elite of
transnational engineering firms and retail developers are invited to
plug in high-tech clusters, entertainment zones, artificial islands,
glass-domed ‘snow mountains’, Truman Show suburbs, cities within
cities
—whatever is big enough to be seen from space and bursting with
architectural steroids. The result is not a hybrid but an eerie
chimera: a promiscuous coupling of all the cyclopean fantasies of
Barnum, Eiffel, Disney, Spielberg, Jon Jerde, Steve Wynn and Skidmore,
Owings & Merrill. Although compared variously to Las Vegas, Manhattan,
Orlando, Monaco and Singapore, the sheikhdom is more like their
collective summation and mythologization: a hallucinatory pastiche of
the big, the bad and the ugly.
The same phantasmagoric but generic Lego blocks, of course, can be
found in dozens of aspiring cities these days (including Dubai’s
envious neighbours, the wealthy oil oases of Doha and Bahrain), [9]
but al-Maktoum has a distinctive and inviolable criterion: everything
must be ‘world class’, by which he means Number One in the Guinness
Book of Records. Thus Dubai is building the world’s largest theme
park, the biggest mall (and within it, the largest aquarium), the
tallest building, the largest international airport, the biggest
artificial island, the first sunken hotel and so on (see below).
Although such architectural megalomania is eerily reminiscent of
Albert Speer and his patron’s vision of imperial Berlin, it is not
irrational. Having ‘learned from Las Vegas’, al-Maktoum understands
that if Dubai wants to become the luxury-consumer paradise of the
Middle East and South Asia (its officially defined ‘home market’ of
1.6 billion), it must ceaselessly strive for visual and environmental
excess. If, as Rowan Moore has suggested, immense, psychotic
assemblages of fantasy kitsch inspire vertigo, then al-Maktoum wants
us to swoon. [10]
From a booster’s viewpoint, the city’s monstrous caricature of
futurism is simply shrewd branding for the world market. As one
developer told the Financial Times, ‘If there was no Burj Dubai, no
Palm, no World, would anyone be speaking of Dubai today? You shouldn’t
look at projects as crazy stand-alones. It’s part of building the
brand’. [11] And its owners love it when architects and urbanists,
like George Katodrytis, anoint it as the cutting edge:
Dubai is a prototype of the new post-global city, which creates
appetites rather than solves problems . . . If Rome was the ‘Eternal
City’ and New York’s Manhattan the apotheosis of twentieth-century
congested urbanism, then Dubai may be considered the emerging
prototype for the 21st century: prosthetic and nomadic oases presented
as isolated cities that extend out over the land and sea. [12]
In its exponential quest to conquer the architectural record-books,
moreover, Dubai has only one real rival: China—a country that now has
300,000 millionaires and is predicted to become the world’s largest
market for luxury goods (from Gucci to Mercedes) in a few years. [13]
Starting from feudalism and peasant Maoism, respectively, both have
arrived at the stage of hyper-capitalism through what Trotsky called
the ‘dialectic of uneven and combined development’. As Baruch Knei-Paz
writes in his admirable précis of Trotsky’s thought:
In appending new forms the backward society takes not their
beginnings, nor the stages of their evolution, but the finished
product itself. In fact it goes even further; it copies not the
product as it exists in its countries of origin but its ‘ideal type’,
and it is able to do so for the very reason that it is in a position
to append instead of going through the process of development. This
explains why the new forms, in a backward society, appear more
perfected than in an advanced society where they are approximations
only to the ‘ideal’ for having been arrived at piecemeal and with the
framework of historical possibilities. [14]
In the cases of Dubai and China, all the arduous intermediate stages
of commercial evolution have been telescoped or short-circuited to
embrace the ‘perfected’ synthesis of shopping, entertainment and
architectural spectacle, on the most pharaonic scale.
As a sweepstake in national pride—Arabs versus Chinese—this frantic
quest for hyperbole is not of course, unprecedented; recall the famed
competition between Britain and imperial Germany to build dreadnoughts
in the early 1900s. But is it an economically sustainable strategy of
development? The textbook answer is probably not. Architectural
gigantism has always been a perverse symptom of economies in
speculative overdrive, and each modern boom has left behind
overweening skyscrapers, the Empire State Building or the former World
Trade Center, as its tombstones. Cynics rightly point out that the
hypertrophic real-estate markets in Dubai and urban China are the
sinks for global excess profits—of oil and manufacturing exports,
respectively—currently being pyramided by rich countries’ inability to
reduce oil consumption and, in the case of the United States, to
balance current accounts. If past business cycles are any guide, the
end could be nigh and very messy. Yet, like the king of the enigmatic
floating island of Laputa in Gulliver’s Travels, al-Maktoum believes
that he has discovered the secret of eternal levitation.
The lodestone of Dubai, of course, is ‘peak oil’ and each time you
spend $50 to fill your tank, you are helping to irrigate al-Maktoum’s
oasis. Fuel prices are currently inflated by industrial China’s
soaring demand as well as growing fears of war and terrorism in the
global oil patch. According to the Wall Street Journal, ‘consumers
will [have paid] $1.2 trillion more in 2004 and 2005 together for oil
products than they did in 2003’. [15] As in the 1970s, a huge and
disruptive transfer of wealth is taking place between oil-consuming
and oil-producing nations. Already visible on the horizon, moreover,
is Hubbert’s Peak, the tipping point when new petroleum reserves will
no longer offset global demand, and thereafter oil prices will become
truly stratospheric. In some utopian economic model, perhaps, this
windfall would become an investment fund for shifting the global
economy to renewable energy while reducing greenhouse gas output and
raising the environmental efficiency of urban systems. In the real
world of capitalism, however, it has become a subsidy for the
apocalyptic luxuries that Dubai is coming to epitomize.
Miami of the Persian Gulf
According to his hagiographers, Dubai has arrived at its blessed state
thanks largely to the entrepreneurial vision that al-Maktoum inherited
from his father, Sheikh Rashid, who ‘committed himself and his
resources to turning his emirate into a modern world-class entrepôt
where free enterprise flourished’. [16] In fact, Dubai’s irresistible
rise, like that of its parent, the United Arab Emirates, owes as much
to a sequence of fortuitous geopolitical accidents. Dubai’s chief
regional advantage, paradoxically, has been its modest endowment, now
rapidly being exhausted, of offshore oil. With a tiny hinterland
lacking the geological wealth of Kuwait or Abu Dhabi, Dubai has
escaped poverty by a Singaporean strategy of becoming the key
commercial, financial and recreational hub of the Gulf. It is a
postmodern ‘city of nets’—as Brecht called ‘Mahagonny’—where the
super-
profits of the international oil trade are intercepted and then
reinvested in Arabia’s one truly inexhaustible natural resource: sand.
(Indeed, mega-projects in Dubai are typically measured by volumes of
sand moved: one billion cubic feet in the case of the ‘island world’.)
If the current mega-project blitzkrieg, exemplified by Dubailand,
succeeds as planned, Dubai will derive all of its GDP from non-oil
activities like tourism and finance by 2010. [17]
The platform for Dubai’s extraordinary ambitions has been its long
history as a haven for smugglers, gold dealers and pirates. A late-
Victorian treaty gave London control over Dubai’s foreign affairs,
keeping the Ottomans and their tax collectors out of the region, but
otherwise allowing the al-Maktoum dynasty to exploit their ownership
of the only natural deepwater port along 400 miles of what was then
known as the ‘Pirates’ Coast’. Pearl fishing and smuggling were the
mainstays until oil wealth began to generate increased demand for
Dubai’s commercial savvy and port services. Up to 1956, when the first
concrete building was constructed, the entire population lived in
traditional ‘barastri’ homes made from palm fronds, drawing water from
communal wells and tethering their goats in the narrow streets. [18]
After the British withdrawal from East of Suez in 1968, Sheikh Rashid
joined with the ruler of Abu Dhabi, Sheikh Zayed, to create the United
Arab Emirates in 1971, a feudal federation bound together by the
common threat of the Marxists in Oman and, later, the Islamists in
Iran. Abu Dhabi possessed the greater share of the UAE’s oil wealth
(almost one-twelfth of the world’s proven hydrocarbon reserves) but
Dubai was the more logical port and commercial centre. When the city’s
original deep-water ‘creek’ proved too small to handle burgeoning
trade, the UAE’s leadership used some of their earnings from the first
‘oil shock’ to help Dubai finance construction of the world’s largest
man-made port, completed in 1976.
Following Khomeini’s revolution in 1979, it also became the Persian
Gulf’s Miami, providing refuge to a large community of Iranian exiles,
many of whom specialized in smuggling gold, untaxed cigarettes and
liquor to their puritanical homeland, and to India. More recently,
Dubai under the tolerant gaze of Tehran has attracted large numbers of
wealthy Iranians who use the city—more like Hong Kong than Miami —as a
base for trade and bi-national life-styles. They are estimated to
control as much as 30 per cent of Dubai’s current real-estate
development. [19] Building on such clandestine connections, Dubai in
the 1980s and early 1990s became the Gulf’s principal dirty-money
laundry as well as a bolthole for some of the region’s most notorious
gangsters and terrorists. As the Wall Street Journal recently
described the city’s underside:
Its gold and diamond souks, houses of barter and informal cash-
transfer storefronts have long formed an opaque business world based
on connections and clan allegiances. Black-market operators, arms
dealers, terrorist financiers and money launderers have taken
advantage of the freewheeling environment, even if the vast bulk of
business is legitimate. [20]
In early 2006 the US Congress erupted in a furore over Dubai Port
World’s imminent takeover of the London-based Peninsular and Oriental
Steam Navigation Company, which operates docks from New York to Miami.
Despite support from the Bush Administration, Dubai was forced to
withdraw from the deal after a firestorm of accusations on cable news
programmes and radio talk-shows about the supposed dangers of ceding
control of American commercial ports to a Middle Eastern government.
Much of the controversy was unquestionably fuelled by anti-Arab
bigotry pure and simple (US port operations are already largely under
management of foreign-owned firms), but Dubai’s ‘terrorist
connection’, an outgrowth of its role as the Switzerland of the Gulf,
has been well documented.
Indeed, since 9/11 a huge investigative literature has explored
Dubai’s role as ‘the financial hub for Islamic militant groups’,
especially al-Qaeda and the Taliban: ‘all roads lead to Dubai when it
comes to [terrorist] money’, claims a former high-ranking US Treasury
official. Bin Laden reportedly transferred large sums through the
government-owned Dubai Islamic Bank, while the Taliban used the city’s
unregulated gold markets to transform their opium taxes, paid in gold
bullion, into laundered dollars. [21] In his best-selling Ghost Wars,
Steve Coll claims that after the catastrophic al-Qaeda bombings of the
US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, a CIA scheme to target bin
Laden with cruise missiles while he was falcon hunting in southern
Afghanistan had to be aborted because he was in the company of unnamed
Emirati royalty. Coll adds that the CIA ‘also suspected that C-130s
flying out of Dubai carried weapons to the Taliban’. [22]
In addition, al-Maktoum for almost a decade provided luxurious
sanctuary for Bombay’s Al Capone, the legendary gangster Dawood
Ibrahim. His presence in the sheikhdom in the late 1980s was hardly
low-key. ‘Dubai’, writes Suketu Mehta, ‘suited Dawood; he re-created
Bombay in lavish parties, flying in scores of the city’s top film
stars and cricketers as guests, and took a film starlet, Mandakini, as
his mistress’. [23] In early 1993, according to the Indian government,
Dawood, working with Pakistani intelligence officials, used Dubai as a
base for organizing the infamous ‘Black Friday’ bombings in Bombay
that killed 257 people. [24] Although India immediately requested
Dubai to arrest Dawood, he was allowed to flee to Karachi, where he is
still sheltered by the Pakistani government; his criminal
organization, ‘D-Company’, meanwhile, has reportedly continued to be
active in the sheikhdom. [25]
War zone
Dubai now enjoys high marks from Washington as a partner in the War on
Terror and, in particular, as a base for spying on Iran; [26] but it
is probable that al-Maktoum, like the other Emirati rulers, still
keeps a channel open to radical Islamists. If al-Qaeda so desired, for
example, it could presumably turn the Burj Al-Arab and Dubai’s other
soaring landmarks into so many towering infernos. Yet so far Dubai is
one of the few cities in the region to have entirely avoided car-
bombings and attacks on Western tourists: eloquent testament, one
might suppose, to the city-state’s continuing role as a money laundry
and upscale hideout, like Tangiers in the 1940s or Macao in the 1960s.
Dubai’s burgeoning black economy is its insurance policy against the
car-bombers and airplane hijackers.
In many complex and surprising ways, Dubai actually earns its living
from fear. Its huge port complex at Jebel Ali, for example, has
profited immeasurably from the trade generated by the US invasion of
Iraq, while Terminal Two at the Dubai airport, always crowded with
Halliburton employees, private mercenaries and American soldiers en
route to Baghdad or Kabul, has been described as ‘the busiest
commercial terminal in the world’ for America’s Middle East wars. [27]
Post-9/11 developments have also shifted global investment patterns to
Dubai’s benefit. Thus after al-Qaeda’s attacks on America, the Muslim
oil states, traumatized by the angry Christians in Washington and
lawsuits by WTC survivors, no longer considered the United States the
safest harbour for their petrodollars. Panicky Saudis alone are
estimated to have repatriated at least one-third of their trillion-
dollar overseas portfolio. Although nerves are now calmer, Dubai has
benefited enormously from the continuing inclination of the oil
sheikhs to invest within, rather than outside, the region. As Edward
Chancellor has emphasized, ‘unlike the last oil boom of the late
1970s, relatively little of the current Arab oil surplus has been
directly invested in US assets or even deposited in the international
banking system. This time much of the oil money has remained at home
where a classic speculative mania is now being played out.’ [28]
In 2004, the Saudis (500,000 of whom are estimated to visit Dubai at
least once a year) were believed to have ploughed at least $7 billion
into al-Maktoum’s major properties. Saudis, together with investors
from Abu Dhabi, Kuwait, Iran and even emulous Qatar, bankroll the
hubris of Dubailand (officially developed by Dubai’s billionaire
Galadari brothers) and other colossal fantasy projects. [29] Although
economists stress the driving role of equity investment in the current
Gulf boom, the region is also awash with cheap bank credit thanks to a
60 per cent increase in the local deposit base and the slipstreaming
of the US Federal Reserve’s easy money policies (the currencies of the
Gulf emirates are all linked to the dollar). [30]
Much of this money, of course, dances to an old tune. ‘A majority of
new Dubai properties’, explains Business Week, ‘are being acquired for
speculative purposes, with only small deposits put down. They are
being flipped in the contemporary Miami manner.’ [31] But what is too
often ‘flipped’, some economists predict, may ultimately flop. Will
Dubai someday fall from the sky when this real-estate balloon bursts,
or will peak oil keep this desert Laputa floating above the
contradictions of the world economy? Al-Maktoum remains a mountain of
self-confidence: ‘I would like to tell capitalists that Dubai does not
need investors; investors need Dubai. And I tell you that the risk
lies not in using your money, but in letting it pile up.’ [32]
Dubai’s philosopher-king (one of the huge offshore island projects
will actually spell out an epigram of his in Arabic script) [33] is
well aware that fear is also the most dynamic component of the oil
revenues that turn his sand dunes into malls and skyscrapers. Every
time insurgents blow up a pipeline in the Niger Delta, a martyr drives
his truck bomb into a Riyadh housing complex, or Washington and Tel
Aviv rattle their sabres at Tehran, the price of oil (and thus Dubai’s
ultimate income) increases by some increment of anxiety in the all-
important futures market. The Gulf economies, in other words, are now
capitalized not just on oil production, but also on the fear of its
disruption. According to a recent survey of experts by Business Week,
‘the world paid the Persian Gulf oil states an extra $120 billion or
so last year because of the premium in prices due to fear of
unexpected supply disruptions. Some cynics argue that oil producers
welcome the fear of disruption because it boosts their revenues’.
‘Fear’, according to one of the senior energy analysts that the
magazine consulted, ‘is a gift to oil producers’. [34]
But it is a gift that the oil rich would rather spend in a tranquil
oasis surrounded by very high walls. With its sovereignty ultimately
guaranteed by the American nuclear super-carriers usually berthed at
Jebel Ali, as well as by whatever secret protocols (negotiated during
falcon hunting trips in Afghanistan?) govern the Emiratis’
relationship to Islamic terrorism, Dubai is a paradise of personal
security, from the Swiss-style laws governing financial secrecy to the
armies of concierges, watchmen and bodyguards who protect its sanctums
of luxury. Tourists are customarily ordered away by the security
guards if they attempt to sneak a peek at Burj Al-Arab on its private
island. Hotel guests, of course, arrive in Rolls Royces.
Milton Friedman’s beach club
Dubai, in other words, is a vast gated community, the ultimate Green
Zone. But even more than Singapore or Texas, it is also the apotheosis
of the neo-liberal values of contemporary capitalism: a society that
might have been designed by the Economics Department of the University
of Chicago. Dubai, indeed, has achieved what American reactionaries
only dream of—an oasis of free enterprise without income taxes, trade
unions or opposition parties (there are no elections). As befits a
paradise of consumption, its unofficial national holiday, as well as
its global logo, is the celebrated Shopping Festival, a month-long
extravaganza sponsored by the city’s 25 malls that begins on 12
January and attracts 4 million upscale shoppers, primarily from the
Middle East and South Asia. [35]
Feudal absolutism—the Maktoum dynasty owns the land area of Dubai —
meanwhile has been spruced up as the last word in enlightened
corporate administration, and the political sphere has been officially
collapsed into the managerial. ‘People refer to our crown prince as
the chief executive officer of Dubai. It’s because, genuinely, he runs
government as a private business for the sake of the private sector,
not for the sake of the state’, says Saeed al-Muntafiq, head of the
Dubai Development and Investment Authority. Moreover, if the country
is a single business, as al-Maktoum maintains, then ‘representative
government’ is besides the point: after all, General Electric and
Exxon are not democracies and no one—except for raving socialists—
expects either to be so.
The state, accordingly, is almost indistinguishable from private
enterprise. Dubai’s top managers—all commoners, hired meritocratically
—
simultaneously hold strategic government portfolios and manage a major
Maktoum-controlled real-estate development company. ‘Government’,
indeed, is really an equities management team led by three top players
who compete with one another to earn the highest returns for al-
Maktoum (see Table 2). ‘In such a system’, writes William Wallis, ‘the
concept of a conflict of interest is barely recognized’. [36] Because
the country has one ultimate landlord, and myriad streams of rent and
lease payments all flow to a single beneficiary, Dubai is able to
dispense with most of the sales, customs and income taxes essential to
governments elsewhere. The minimal tax burden, in turn, leverages the
sale or lease of Dubai’s golden sands. Oil-rich Abu Dhabi, meanwhile,
subsidizes the residual state functions, including foreign relations
and defence, entrusted to the Emirates’ federal administration—itself
a condominium of the interests of the ruling sheikhs and their
relatives.
In a similar spirit, personal liberty in Dubai derives strictly from
the business plan, not from a constitution, much less ‘inalienable
rights’. Al-Maktoum and his executives have to arbitrate between
lineage-based power and Islamic law, on the one hand, and Western
business culture and recreational decadence on the other. Their
ingenious solution is a regime of what might be called ‘modular
liberties’ based on the rigorous spatial segregation of economic
functions and ethnically circumscribed social classes. To understand
how this works in practice, it is necessary briefly to survey Dubai’s
overall development strategy.
Although tourist development and its excesses generate most of the
‘buzz’ about Dubai, the city-state has extraordinary ambitions to
capture as much value-added as possible through a series of
specialized free-trade zones and high-tech clusters. ‘One of the ways
that this trading town along a creek has reformulated itself into a
megalopolis’, writes an ABC News commentator, ‘is by throwing in
everything and the kitchen sink as incentives for companies to invest
in and relocate to Dubai. There are free-trade zones where 100 per
cent foreign ownership is allowed, with no individual or corporate
taxes or import/export duties whatsoever.’ [37] The original free-
trade zone in the port district of Jebel Ali now has several thousand
resident trading and industrial firms, and is the major base for
American corporations selling to the Saudi and Gulf markets. [38]
Most future growth, however, is expected to be generated within an
archipelago of specialized ‘clusters’. The largest of these cities-
within-the-city are Internet City, already the Arab world’s principal
information technology hub, with local subsidiaries of Dell, Hewlett-
Packard, Microsoft, and others; Media City, home to the Al Arabiya
satellite network and various international news organizations; and
the Dubai International Financial Centre, whose DFIX al-Maktoum hopes
will grow into the largest stock exchange between Europe and East Asia
as foreign investors rush to tap the Gulf’s vast reservoir of oil
earnings. In addition to these mega-enclaves, each with tens of
thousands of employees, Dubai also hosts or is planning to build a
Humanitarian Aid City, as a base for disaster relief; a free-trade
zone dedicated to the sale of used cars; a Dubai Metals and
Commodities Centre; a ‘Chess City’ headquartering the International
Chess Association and designed as a vast chess board with two ‘King’
towers, each 64 storeys high; and a $6 billion Healthcare Village, in
collaboration with the Harvard Medical School, that will offer the
wealthy classes of the Gulf region state-of-the-art American medical
technology. [39]
Other cities in the region, of course, have free-trade zones and high-
tech clusters, but only Dubai has allowed each enclave to operate
under regulatory and legal bubble-domes tailored to the specific needs
of foreign capital and expat professionals. ‘Carving out lucrative
niches with their own special rules’, claims the Financial Times, ‘has
been at the heart of Dubai’s development strategy’. [40] Thus press
censorship (flagrant in the rest of Dubai) is largely suspended inside
Media City, while internet access (regulated for content elsewhere) is
absolutely unfettered inside Internet City. The UAE has permitted
Dubai to set up ‘an entirely separate, Western-based commercial system
for its financial district that would do business in dollars, and in
English’. Although not without ensuing controversy, Dubai even
imported British financial regulators and retired judges to bolster
confidence that DFIX plays by the same rules as Zurich, London and New
York. [41] Meanwhile, to promote the sell-off of Palm Jumeirah
mansions and the private islands that make up the ‘island world’, al-
Maktoum in May 2002 announced a ‘freehold revolution’, unique in the
region, that allows foreigners to buy luxury property outright and not
just as a 99-year lease. [42]
In addition to these enclaved regimes of greater media and business
freedom, Dubai is also famously tolerant of Western vices, with the
exception of recreational drugs. In contrast to Saudi Arabia or even
Kuwait City, booze flows freely in the city’s hotels and expat bars,
and no one looks askance at halter tops or even string bikinis on the
beach. Dubai—any of the hipper guidebooks will advise—is also the
‘Bangkok of the Middle East’, with thousands of Russian, Armenian,
Indian and Iranian prostitutes controlled by various transnational
gangs and mafias. The Russian girls at the bar are the glamorous
façade of a sinister sex trade built on kidnapping, slavery and
sadistic violence. Al-Maktoum and his thoroughly modern regime, of
course, disavow any collusion with this burgeoning red-light industry,
although insiders know that the whores are essential to keeping the 5-
star hotels full of European and Arab businessmen. [43] When expats
extol Dubai’s unique ‘openness’, it is this freedom to carouse and
debauch—not to organize unions or publish critical opinions—that they
are usually praising.
An indentured, invisible majority
Dubai, together with its emirate neighbors, has achieved the state of
the art in the disenfranchisement of labour. In a country that only
abolished slavery in 1963, trade unions, most strikes and all
agitators are illegal, and 99 per cent of the private-sector workforce
are immediately deportable non-citizens. Indeed, the deep thinkers at
the American Enterprise and Cato Institutes must salivate when they
contemplate the system of classes and entitlements in Dubai.
At the top of the social pyramid, of course, are the al-Maktoums and
their cousins who own every lucrative grain of sand in the sheikhdom.
Next, the native 15 per cent of the population (many of them
originally Arab-speakers from southern Iran) constitutes a leisure
class whose uniform of privilege is the traditional white dishdash.
Their obedience to the dynasty is rewarded by income transfers, free
education, subsidized homes and government jobs. A step below are the
pampered mercenaries: more than 100,000 British expatriates (another
100,000 UK citizens own second homes or condos in Dubai), along with
other European, Lebanese, Iranian and Indian managers and
professionals, who take full advantage of their air-conditioned
affluence and two months of overseas leave every summer. The Brits,
led by David Beckham (who owns a beach) and Rod Stewart (who owns an
island), are probably the biggest cheerleaders for al-Maktoum’s
paradise, and many of them luxuriate in a social world that recalls
the lost splendour of gin-and-tonics at Raffles and white mischief in
Simla’s bungalows. Dubai is expert at catering to colonial nostalgia.
[44]
The city-state is also a miniature Raj in a more important and
notorious aspect. The great mass of the population are South Asian
contract labourers, legally bound to a single employer and subject to
totalitarian social controls. Dubai’s luxury lifestyles are attended
by vast numbers of Filipina, Sri Lankan and Indian maids, while the
building boom (which employs fully one-quarter of the workforce) is
carried on the shoulders of an army of poorly paid Pakistanis and
Indians, the largest contingent from Kerala, working twelve-hour
shifts, six and a half days a week, in the asphalt-melting desert
heat.
Dubai, like its neighbours, flouts ILO labour regulations and refuses
to adopt the international Migrant Workers Convention. Human Rights
Watch in 2003 accused the Emirates of building prosperity on ‘forced
labour’. Indeed, as the Independent recently emphasized, ‘the labour
market closely resembles the old indentured labour system brought to
Dubai by its former colonial master, the British.’ ‘Like their
impoverished forefathers’, the London paper continued, ‘today’s Asian
workers are forced to sign themselves into virtual slavery for years
when they arrive in the United Arab Emirates. Their rights disappear
at the airport where recruitment agents confiscate their passports and
visas to control them.’ [45]
In addition to being super-exploited, Dubai’s helots—like the
proletariat in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis—are also expected to be
generally invisible. The local press (the UAE ranks a dismal 137th on
the global Press Freedom Index) is restrained from reporting on
migrant workers, exploitative working conditions, and prostitution.
Likewise, ‘Asian labourers are banned from the glitzy shopping malls,
new golf courses and smart restaurants.’ [46] Nor are the bleak work
camps on the city’s outskirts—where labourers are crowded six, eight,
even twelve to a room, often without air-conditioning or functioning
toilets—part of the official tourist image of a city of luxury,
without poverty or slums. [47] In a recent visit, even the UAE
Minister of Labour was reported to be shocked by the squalid, almost
unbearable conditions in a remote work camp maintained by a large
construction contractor. Yet when the labourers attempted to form a
union to win back pay and improve living conditions, they were
promptly arrested. [48]
Dubai’s police may turn a blind eye to illicit diamond and gold
imports, prostitution rings, and shady characters who buy 25 villas at
a time in cash, but they are diligent in deporting Pakistani workers
who complain about being cheated out of their wages by unscrupulous
contractors, or jailing Filipina maids for ‘adultery’ when they report
being raped by their employers. [49] To avoid the simmering volcano of
Shiite unrest that so worries Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, Dubai and its
UAE neighbours have favoured a non-Arab workforce drawn from western
India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal and the Philippines. But
as Asian workers have become an increasingly restive majority, the UAE
has reversed course and adopted a ‘cultural diversity policy’—‘we have
been asked not to recruit any more Asians’, explained one contractor—
to reinforce control over the workforce by diluting the existing
national concentrations with more Arab workers. [50]
Discrimination against Asians, however, has failed to recruit enough
Arabs willing to work at the lowly wages ($100 to $150 per month) paid
to construction labourers to meet the insatiable demands of the
exploding skyline and half-built mega-projects. [51] Indeed the
building boom, with its appalling safety record and negligence of
workers’ most basic needs, has incubated Dubai’s first labour
rebellion. In 2004 alone, Human Rights Watch estimated that as many as
880 construction workers were killed on the job, with most of the
fatal accidents unreported by employers or covered up by the
government. [52] At the same time, the giant construction companies
and their subcontractors have failed to guarantee minimum facilities
for sanitation or adequate supplies of potable water at remote desert
labour camps. Workers also have been exasperated by longer commutes to
worksites, the petty tyranny (often with a racial or religious bias)
of their supervisors, the spies and company guards in their camps, the
debt-bondage of their labour contracts, and the government’s failure
to prosecute fly-by-night contractors who leave Dubai or declare
bankruptcy without paying back wages. [53] As one embittered labourer
from Kerala told the New York Times, ‘I wish the rich people would
realize who is building these towers. I wish they could come and see
how sad this life is.’ [54]
The first tremor of unrest came in fall 2004 when several thousand
Asian workers courageously marched down the eight-lane Sheikh Zayed
Highway toward the Ministry of Labour, only to be met by riot police
and officials threatening mass deportations. [55] Smaller
demonstrations and strikes, protesting unpaid wages or unsafe working
conditions, continued through 2005, drawing inspiration from a large
uprising of Bangladeshi workers in Kuwait during the spring. In
September, an estimated 7,000 workers demonstrated for three hours,
the largest protest in Dubai history. Then, on 22 March 2006, bullying
security men ignited a riot at the vast Burj Dubai tower site.
Some 2,500 exhausted workers were waiting after the end of their shift
for long overdue buses to take them back to their dormitories in the
desert, when the guards began to harass them. The enraged labourers,
many of them Indian Muslims, overwhelmed and beat the guards, then
attacked the construction headquarters: burning company cars,
ransacking offices, destroying computers and smashing files. The
following morning, the army of labourers defied police to return to
the site, where they refused to work until Dubai-based Al Naboodah
Laing O’Rourke raised wages and improved working conditions. Thousands
of construction workers at a new airport terminal also joined the
wildcat strike. Although some minor concessions along with draconian
threats forced most of the labourers back to work at the Burj Dubai
and the airport, the underlying grievances continue to fester. In
July, hundreds of labourers at the Arabian Ranches project on Emirates
Road rioted to protest the chronic shortage of water for cooking and
bathing at their camp. Other workers have held clandestine union
meetings and reportedly threatened to picket hotels and malls. [56]
The unruly voice of labour echoes louder in the deserts of the UAE
than it might elsewhere. At the end of the day, Dubai is capitalized
just as much on cheap labour as it is on expensive oil, and the
Maktoums, like their cousins in the other emirates, are exquisitely
aware that they reign over a kingdom built on the backs of a South
Asian workforce. So much has been invested in Dubai’s image as an
imperturbable paradise of capital that even small disturbances can
have exaggerated impacts on investors’ confidence. Dubai Inc. is thus
currently considering a variety of responses to worker unrest, ranging
from expulsions and mass arrests to some limited franchising of
collective bargaining. But any tolerance of protest risks future
demands not just for unions, but for citizenship, and thereby
threatens the absolutist foundations of Maktoum rule. None of the
shareholders in Dubai—whether the American Navy, the Saudi
billionaires, or the frolicking expats—want to see the emergence of a
Solidarnosc in the desert.
Al-Maktoum, who fancies himself the Gulf’s prophet of modernization,
likes to impress visitors with clever proverbs and heavy aphorisms. A
favourite: ‘Anyone who does not attempt to change the future will stay
a captive of the past’. [57] Yet the future that he is building in
Dubai—to the applause of billionaires and transnational corporations
everywhere—looks like nothing so much as a nightmare of the past:
Speer meets Disney on the shores of Araby.
A version of this essay will appear in Mike Davis and Daniel Monk,
eds, Evil Paradises: The Dreamworlds of Neo-Liberalism, to be
published by New Press in 2007.
[1] Business Week, 13 March 2006.
[2] ‘Dubai overtakes Las Vegas as world’s hotel capital’, Travel
Weekly, 3 May 2005.
[3] ‘Ski in the Desert?’, Observer, 20 November 2005; Hydropolis:
Project Description, Dubai, August 2003, www.conway.com.
[4] See the Mena Report 2005, at www.menareport.com.
[5] As a Dubai tourist official once complained to an American
journalist about Egypt: ‘They have the pyramids and they do nothing
with them. Can you imagine what we’d do with the pyramids?’ Lee Smith,
‘The Road to Tech Mecca’, Wired Magazine, July 2004.
[6] Official Dubailand FAQS (from the marketing department). ‘It’s as
if a list of all known human pastimes have been collected on
PowerPoint slides and then casually voted on by a show of hands.’ Ian
Parker, ‘The Mirage’, The New Yorker, 17 October 2005.
[7] Parker, ‘Mirage’.
[8] The Maktoums also own Madame Tussaud’s in London, the Helmsley
Building and the Essex House in Manhattan, thousands of apartments in
the Sunbelt states, enormous ranches in Kentucky and what the New York
Times describes as a ‘significant stake in DaimlerChrysler’. See
‘Royal Family of Dubai Pays $1.1 Billion for 2 Pieces of New York
Skyline’, 10 November 2005.
[9] Saudi Arabia’s ‘King Abdullah Economic City’—a projected $30
billion development on the Red Sea—will in fact be a satellite of
Dubai, built by Emaar, the giant real-estate company owned by the
Maktoum dynasty. See ‘OPEC Nations Temper the Extravagance’, New York
Times, 1 February 2006.
[10] Rowan Moore, ‘Vertigo: the strange new world of the contemporary
city’, in Moore, ed., Vertigo, Corte Madera, CA 1999.
[11] ‘Emirate rebrands itself as a global melting pot’, Financial
Times, 12 July 2005.
[12] George Katodrytis, ‘Metropolitan Dubai and the Rise of
Architectural Fantasy’ Bidoun, no. 4, Spring 2005.
[13] ‘In China, To Get Rich Is Glorious’, Business Week, 6 February
2006.
[14] Baruch Knei-Paz, The Social and Political Thought of Leon
Trotsky, Oxford 1978, p. 91.
[15] ‘Oil Producers Gain Global Clout from Big Windfall’, WSJ, 4
October 2005.
[16] Joseph Kechichian, ‘Sociopolitical Origins of Emirati Leaders’,
in Kechichian, ed., A Century in Thirty Years: Shaykh Zayed and the
UAE, Washington DC 2000, p. 54.
[17] Jack Lyne, ‘Disney Does the Desert?’, 17 November 2003, online at
The Site Selection.
[18] Michael Pacione, ‘City Profile: Dubai’, Cities, vol. 22, no. 3,
2005, pp. 259–60.
[19] ‘Young Iranians Follow Dreams to Dubai’, New York Times, 4
December 2005. There is also a dramatic recent influx of wealthy
Iranian-Americans and ‘some Dubai streets are beginning to resemble
parts of Los Angeles’.
[20] WSJ, 2 March 2006.
[21] Gilbert King, The Most Dangerous Man in the World: Dawood
Ibrahim, New York, NY 2004, p. 78; Douglas Farah, ‘Al Qaeda’s Gold:
Following Trail to Dubai’, Washington Post, 18 February 2002; and Sean
Foley, ‘What Wealth Cannot Buy: UAE Security at the Turn of the 21st
Century’, in Barry Rubin, ed., Crises in the Contemporary Persian
Gulf, London 2002, pp. 51–2.
[22] Steve Coll, Ghost Wars, New York 2004, p. 449.
[23] Suketu Mehta, Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found, New York 2004,
p. 135.
[24] S. Hussain Zaidi, Black Friday: The True Story of the Bombay Bomb
Blasts, Delhi 2002, pp. 25–7 and 41–4.
[25] See ‘Dubai’s Cooperation with the War on Terrorism Called into
Question’, Transnational Threats Update, Centre for Strategic and
International Studies, February 2003, pp. 2–3; and ‘Bin Laden’s
operatives still using freewheeling Dubai’, USA Today, 2 September
2004.
[26] Ira Chernus, ‘Dubai: Home Base for Cold War’, 13 March 2006,
Common Dreams News Centre.
[27] Pratap Chatterjee, ‘Ports of Profit: Dubai Does Brisk War
Business’, 25 February 2006, Common Dreams News Centre.
[28] Edward Chancellor, ‘Seven Pillars of Folly’, WSJ, 8 March 2006;
on Saudi repatriations, AME Info, 20 March 2005.
[29] AME Info, 9 June 2005.
[30] Chancellor, ‘Seven Pillars’.
[31] Stanley Reed, ‘The New Middle East Bonanza’, Business Week, 13
March 2006.
[32] Lyne, ‘Disney Does the Desert?’.
[33] Viewed from space, 1060 Water Homes at The Palm, Jebel Ali, will
read: ‘Take wisdom from the wise people. Not everyone who rides is a
jockey.’
[34] Peter Coy, ‘Oil Pricing’, Business Week, 13 March 2006.
[35] Tarek Atia, ‘Everybody’s a Winner’, Al-Ahram Weekly, 9 February
2005.
[36] William Wallis, ‘Big Business: Intense rivalry among the
lieutenants’, Financial Times, 12 July 2005.
[37] Hari Sreenivasan, ‘Dubai: Build It and They Will Come’, ABC News,
8 February 2005.
[38] Pacione, ‘City Profile: Dubai’, p. 257.
[39] Smith, ‘The Road to Tech Mecca’; Stanley Reed, ‘A Bourse is Born
in Dubai’, Business Week, 3 October 2005; and Roula Khalaf, ‘Stock
Exchanges: Chance to tap into a vast pool of capital’, Financial
Times, 12 July 2005.
[40] Khalaf, ‘Stock Exchanges’.
[41] William McSheehy, ‘Financial centre: A three-way race for
supremacy’, Financial Times, 12 July 2005.
[42] ‘A Short History of Dubai Property’, AME Info, August 2004.
[43] Lonely Planet, Dubai: City Guide, London 2004, p. 9; and William
Ridgeway, ‘Dubai, Dubai—The Scandal and the Vice’, Social Affairs
Unit, 4 April 2005.
[44] William Wallis, ‘Demographics: Locals swamped by a new breed of
resident’, Financial Times, 12 July 2005.
[45] Nick Meo, ‘How Dubai, playground of business men and warlords, is
built by Asian wage slaves’, Independent, 1 March 2005.
[46] Meo, ‘How Dubai’.
[47] Lucy Williamson, ‘Migrants’ Woes in Dubai Worker Camps’, BBC
News, 10 February 2005.
[48] See account posted on 15 February 2005, at
secretdubai.blogspot.com.
[49] On the jailing of rape victims, see Asia Pacific Mission for
Migrants, News Digest, September 2003.
[50] Meena Janardhan, ‘Welcome mat shrinking for Asian workers in
UAE’, Inter Press Service, 2003.
[51] See Ray Jureidini, Migrant Workers and Xenophobia in the Middle
East, UN Research Institute for Social Development, Identities,
Conflict and Cohesion: Programme Paper No. 2, Geneva, December 2003.
[52] ‘UAE: Abuse of Migrant Workers’, Human Rights Watch, 30 March
2006.
[53] Anthony Shadid, ‘In UAE, Tales of Paradise Lost’, Washington
Post, 12 April 2006.
[54] Hassan Fattah, ‘In Dubai, an Outcry from Asians for Workplace
Rights’, New York Times, 26 March 2006.
[55] Julia Wheeler, ‘Workers’ safety queried in Dubai’, BBC News, 27
September 2004.
[56] Fattah, ‘In Dubai’; Dan McDougall, ‘Tourists become targets as
Dubai’s workers take revolt to the beaches’, Observer, 9 April 2006;
and ‘Rioting in Dubai Labour Camp’, Arab News, 4 July 2006.
[57] Quoted in Lyne, ‘Disney Does the Desert?’.
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http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601110&sid=a.2e8IrtpImE
Dubai Autonomy Fades as Crisis Strengthens Abu Dhabi (Update2)
By Henry Meyer and Zainab Fattah
Nov. 24 (Bloomberg) -- Until last month, a billboard at one of Dubai’s
busiest roundabouts featured one photo, of Dubai ruler Sheikh Mohammed
Bin Rashid Al Maktoum. The new billboard says “Long live our Emirates
union” and also shows United Arab Emirates President Sheikh Khalifa
Bin Zayed Al Nahyan.
Dubai’s financial woes have tamed the once-independent emirate and
forced it closer to Abu Dhabi, which holds 90 percent of the U.A.E.’s
oil. Sheikh Mohammed last week demoted three business aides and fired
one. All had been pivotal in the debt-fueled expansion of past years,
requiring Dubai’s rescue with a $10-billion loan from the U.A.E.
central bank.
The global financial crisis that swept into Dubai last year not only
put an end to a construction boom that saddled it with $80 billion of
debt. It may also mark a turning point in the U.A.E.’s history toward
a stronger central state, which investors say will make Dubai a more
attractive destination by bolstering its creditworthiness.
“Abu Dhabi is pumping 2.5 million barrels a day of oil, of course you
want it and Dubai to be working together,” said Emad Mostaque, a
London-based Middle East equity-fund manager for Pictet Asset
Management Ltd., which oversees more than $100 billion globally. “They
don’t need to compete against each other,” he said in a phone
interview.
Mostaque said he is positive on Arabtec Holding PJSC, Drake & Scull
International PJSC and Depa Ltd., all Dubai-based construction
companies expanding into Abu Dhabi.
Central Bank
Sheikh Mohammed in February turned to Abu Dhabi, holder of the world’s
sixth-largest crude reserves, for a $10 billion bailout. The central
bank, which has its headquarters in the country’s capital of Abu
Dhabi, bought the entire bond issue.
Dubai is seeking an extra injection of $10 billion by the end of the
year, Sheikh Ahmed bin Saeed Al-Maktoum, chairman of the emirate’s
Supreme Fiscal Committee, said Nov. 16. The bond would get “majority
government” participation, Mohammed Ali Alabbar, chairman of Emaar
Properties PJSC and a member of the Dubai Executive Council, said Oct.
9.
The renewed financial lifeline comes as Dubai and its state-owned
companies have to repay $15.8 billion of bonds and loans maturing this
year, $9.2 billion in 2010, $19.8 billion in 2011 and $17.3 billion
the following year, according to a Deutsche Bank AG report in August.
Islamic Bonds
The sheikhdom raised $1.93 billion last month from the biggest sale of
Islamic bonds in the Gulf Arab region this year. It was made possible
by investors’ confidence that Abu Dhabi stands behind Dubai, said
Tristan Cooper, a Dubai-based Middle East sovereign analyst at Moody’s
Investors Service.
“Assumed backing from Abu Dhabi and closer ties between the emirates
bolsters investor confidence generally in Dubai and helps to attract
foreign investment,” Cooper said by e-mail. Dubai’s $80 billion debts
are equivalent to 100 percent of the city-state’s 2008 gross domestic
product and nine times its 2008 revenue, according to Moody’s.
The cost of protecting Dubai bonds from default traded at 317 basis
points today from a peak of 977 in February, five-year credit-default
swap prices show. The contracts get cheaper as perceptions of credit
quality improve.
Since the start of the year, when Sheikh Mohammed launched a new Web
site dedicated to his activities as prime minister of the U.A.E., he
has been seen increasingly in public in that role. A front-page story
on the Dubai-based Gulf News on Nov. 8 showed the Dubai ruler touring
a new desert resort in Abu Dhabi’s Western Region with Sheikh Khalifa,
who in addition to being president also leads Abu Dhabi.
Separate Army
The air show in Dubai this year was inaugurated by the Crown Prince of
Abu Dhabi and Deputy Supreme Commander of the U.A.E. Armed Forces
Sheikh Mohammed Bin Zayed Al Nahyan, brother of the president,
alongside Sheikh Mohammed.
Dubai split from Abu Dhabi in 1833. It kept its independence thanks to
the U.K., which pursued a policy of divide-and-rule in the Gulf
emirates, according to the 2008 book “Dubai: The Vulnerability of
Success,” by historian Christopher Davidson.
Though Dubai grudgingly integrated with Abu Dhabi in 1971 in a
federation of seven emirates, it maintained a separate army until
1996, the book said.
Billboards of the two sheikhdoms’ rulers are going up in Dubai ahead
of the Dec. 2 celebration of the 38th year since the U.A.E. was
founded.
Sheikh Mohammed, 60, who became ruler of Dubai in 2006, accelerated
his brother’s policy of diversifying the economy from dwindling oil
supplies by transforming Dubai into a tourism and finance hub.
Tower and Islands
The emirate is building the world’s tallest tower and largest man-made
islands in the shape of palm trees. This year it had to shelve plans
to construct a new waterfront development the size of Hong Kong Island
and “Dubailand,” a leisure park that would have been three times the
size of Manhattan.
Home prices are down more than 50 percent from their peak in the third
quarter of 2008, Deutsche Bank AG said on Nov. 5. Prices may drop as
much as 30 percent more, UBS AG said Nov. 18.
“The whole strategy of diversification was a consequence of oil
running out and wanting to keep their independence,” said Eckart
Woertz, an economist at the Gulf Research Center in Dubai. “Now this
diversification model is in dire straits and Abu Dhabi is the one that
can help Dubai out.”
Dubai oil production began in the 1960s, reached a peak of about
350,000 barrels a day in the late 1980s and has now declined to about
80,000 barrels a day, said Dalton Garis, a professor at the Petroleum
Institute, Abu Dhabi. The U.A.E. government says Dubai oil reserves
will run out within 20 years.
‘Shut Up’
On Nov. 9, Sheikh Mohammed said people who speculated about relations
between Dubai and Abu Dhabi should “shut up,” at an investors’
conference in Dubai organized by Bank of America Merrill Lynch.
The ruling lines of both emirates are “the same family, not only that
but the same tribe, the Bani Yas tribe,” he said. They “ruled many
many tribes in the Arabian Peninsula for hundreds and hundreds of
years.”
Eleven days later, the sheikh removed the governor of the Dubai
International Financial Centre, Omar Bin Sulaiman, who had led efforts
to transform Dubai into a Middle East finance hub. This came 24 hours
after he dropped Mohammad al-Gergawi, Sultan Ahmed Bin Sulayem and
Alabbar from the board of the Investment Corporation of Dubai, the
emirate’s main holding company.
The centralization of the U.A.E. “could be the price Dubai has to pay
for the Abu Dhabi bailout,” said Woertz. “This might cause some
bruised egos here and there.”
To contact the reporters on this story: Henry Meyer in Dubai at
hmey...@bloomberg.net; Zainab Fattah in Dubai at zfat...@bloomberg.net
Last Updated: November 24, 2009 09:09 EST
tenjets
>
> - Show quoted text -
I read it here: http://www.answers.com/topic/plymouth-colony. Land
grant were given. Later, Bradford divied up the lands equally (now
there' a socialistic concept - a government land grab and
redistribution of wealth.)
tenjets
>
> - Show quoted text -
A simple google search found this site:
http://www.answers.com/topic/plymouth-colony
Somewhat different than Bradford's self-serving recounting of his
story.
AZDuffman
>
> - Show quoted text -
Hardly comparable. Back then there was no wealth so they said,
"Here." They took form no one. Kind of like today you are given
education for free but must use it.
Still, the socialism didn't work and capitalism did.
Jerry
> And capitalism and free-trade never fail? You watched the news lately?
> Ever heard of the US banking system? How do you spell bailout--
> CAPITALISM? So how do you feel about GM since you bought it?
What is your definition of capitalism? This is important. Do you know
what you are talking about?
The US banking system is not an example of capitalism.
The bailouts were a violation of capitalism. Companies should be
allowed to fail. Capitalism without failure is like Christianity
without sin.
Government takeover of a company is not capitalism.
Personal questions:
1. Do you drink fluoridated water?
2. Are you on a psych drug?
(I suspect that the common inability to understand capitalism is
partly due to fluoridated water and psych drugs. These things do brain
damage.)
Beam Me Up Scotty
How many pages of regulations are there to create your free trade?
Capitalism isn't what failed it was Fannie Mae and that's not a
Capitalist entity it is a government sponcered entity.
Tim
> On Nov 24, 8:22 am, Tim <tbees...@aci.on.ca> wrote:
>
> > And capitalism and free-trade never fail? You watched the news lately?
> > Ever heard of the US banking system? How do you spell bailout--
> > CAPITALISM? So how do you feel about GM since you bought it?
>
> What is your definition of capitalism? This is important. Do you know
> what you are talking about?
Far more than you can ever hope for.
>
> The US banking system is not an example of capitalism.
>
Really, so banks aren't owned by shareholders and run for profit? Do
you know what you are talking about? Better yet, who owns the Fed. and
do they run it for profit?
> The bailouts were a violation of capitalism. Companies should be
> allowed to fail. Capitalism without failure is like Christianity
> without sin.
Agreed. So capitalism does or does not exist in the U.S.?
>
> Government takeover of a company is not capitalism.
>
> Personal questions:
> 1. Do you drink fluoridated water?
> 2. Are you on a psych drug?
>
> (I suspect that the common inability to understand capitalism is
> partly due to fluoridated water and psych drugs. These things do brain
> damage.)
I suspect that your attempts at being witty are simply a pathetic
dodge. You want your cake and want to eat it too.
Rod Speed
Another bare faced lie. Not one of the military, cops, judiciary etc etc etc has failed.
> It makes a fatally flawed assessment of human motivation.
> When there is no ownership, there is this sense of 'not my
> responsibility' that prevails [and defacto ownership falls to
> the overseers]. Life becomes a 'job' and you wait for orders.
Another bare faced lie. Medicare didnt do that.
John Stafford
Beam Me Up Scotty <Then-Destro...@Talk-n-dog.com> wrote:
> Capitalism isn't what failed it was Fannie Mae and that's not a
> Capitalist entity it is a government sponcered entity.
It can be called a government agency now, but it was not before
September, 2008, and the vast majority of its shares are owned by major
banks and the stock is tubing.
Rod Speed
> No, I learned it in grade and high school 20+ years ago.
A mere child. And too stupid to actually check what it was taught in school now too.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plymouth_Colony#First_winter
> At first it was socialized
Another lie.
> and they nearly starved.
Not for that reason they didnt.
> Some ov the very connected people got land grants, Bradford
> gave land to EVERYBODY to develop on their own.
It was MUCH more complicated than that.
> You should stop believing what you read from the Huffington Post and dailykos.
You should check what you thought your school taught you.
Rod Speed
Another lie with the military, cops, judiciary, etc etc etc.
> I think GM should have been given to the bondholders to run, not bailed out.
You have always been, and always will be, completely and utterly irrelevant.
What you might or might not claim to think in spades.
> That would be letting capitalism work.
How odd that its that that sank it.
Rod Speed
More fool you. The problem with understanding capitalism
was around LONG before either were even invented.
> These things do brain damage.)
Only in your pathetic little pig ignorant drug crazed fantasyland.
Rod Speed
Another lie. It was the capitalism that failed, all those sub prime loans.
> and that's not a Capitalist entity it is a government sponcered entity.
Pity it wasnt what produced the GFC. It had been around for a hell of
a long time before the GFC, so it cant have been what produced it, fool.
AZDuffman
> >> And capitalism and free-trade never fail? You watched the news
> >> lately?
> >> Ever heard of the US banking system? How do you spell bailout--
> >> CAPITALISM? So how do you feel about GM since you bought it?- Hide
> >> quoted text -
>
> > No one said it will work 100% perfect 100% of the time, but capitalism
> > finds its way eventually. Socialism has proven to be a faiulre.
>
> Another lie with the military, cops, judiciary, etc etc etc.
None of these things are socialism, they are regular government
services. Learn what socialism means before making youself look like
a usenet idiot all the time.
> > That would be letting capitalism work.
>
> How odd that its that that sank it.- Hide quoted text -
Not odd at all, an intelligent person, which I realize leaves you out,
realizes GM made ugly cars like the Aztek and junk for many, many
years. So capitalism gave the consumers choice of a GM car that
breaks down or a more reliable Toyota. What *is* odd is that someone
thinks capitalism means all companies get to stay in business like you
state.
Rod Speed
> Rod Speed <rod.speed....@gmail.com> wrote
>>>> And capitalism and free-trade never fail? You watched the news lately?
>>>> Ever heard of the US banking system? How do you spell bailout--
>>>> CAPITALISM? So how do you feel about GM since you bought it?
>>> No one said it will work 100% perfect 100% of the time, but capitalism
>>> finds its way eventually. Socialism has proven to be a faiulre.
>> Another lie with the military, cops, judiciary, etc etc etc.
> None of these things are socialism,
Another pig ignorant lie. They were ALL done outside govt at
one time and worked MUCH worse when done like that, most
obviously with mercenarys and private armys with the military.
We even had tax collection done by other than govt at one time too.
> they are regular government services.
Just because we worked out that those are best done by govt.
>>> I think GM should have been given to the bondholders to run, not bailed out.
>> You have always been, and always will be, completely and utterly irrelevant.
>> What you might or might not claim to think in spades.
>>> That would be letting capitalism work.
>> How odd that its that that sank it.
> Not odd at all, an intelligent person, which I realize leaves you out, realizes
> GM made ugly cars like the Aztek and junk for many, many years.
Still capitalism that sank it, fuckwit.
AZDuffman
> >>> I think GM should have been given to the bondholders to run, not bailed out.
> >> You have always been, and always will be, completely and utterly irrelevant.
> >> What you might or might not claim to think in spades.
> >>> That would be letting capitalism work.
> >> How odd that its that that sank it.
> > Not odd at all, an intelligent person, which I realize leaves you out, realizes
> > GM made ugly cars like the Aztek and junk for many, many years.
>
> Still capitalism that sank it, fuckwit.
You are still making a jerk out of yourself--capitalism sinking it was
capitalism working--companies with better product all survived. Learn
to think instead of just calling names.
Rod Speed
> Rod Speed <rod.speed....@gmail.com> wrote
>> AZDuffman wrote
>>> Rod Speed <rod.speed....@gmail.com> wrote
>>>>> I think GM should have been given to the bondholders to run, not bailed out.
>>>> You have always been, and always will be, completely and utterly irrelevant.
>>>> What you might or might not claim to think in spades.
>>>>> That would be letting capitalism work.
>>>> How odd that its that that sank it.
>>> Not odd at all, an intelligent person, which I realize leaves you out, realizes
>>> GM made ugly cars like the Aztek and junk for many, many years.
>> Still capitalism that sank it, fuckwit.
> capitalism sinking it was capitalism working
Only in your pathetic little pig ignorant fantasyland.
That was capitalism NOT WORKING, fuckwit.
AZDuffman
How is a bad company failing "capitalism not working" please explain
in more than one line and without calling names if that is possible
for you.
Michael Gordge
> > The US banking system is not an example of capitalism.
> On Nov 25, 3:15 am, Tim <tbees...@aci.on.ca> wrote:
> Really, so banks aren't owned by shareholders and run for profit?
Ewe fucking stupid fucking useless commie cunt, when the state
dictates the terms and conditions of business (banking is a business)
then that business is NOT an example of capitalism.
The US banking system IS fucking regulated to the eyeballs with dopey
draconian anti-progress laws, ewe brain dead commie idiot, capitalism
requires a free unregulated market, the US banking system is therefore
NOT an example of capitalism, its not even in the same universe.
MG
Michael Gordge
>
> The US banking system is not an example of capitalism.
Correct.
> The bailouts were a violation of capitalism.
Correct.
> Companies should be
> allowed to fail.
Correct.
> Capitalism without failure is like Christianity
> without sin.
Shrug, christianity is irrational capitalism is ration.
> Government takeover of a company is not capitalism.
Correct, even government regulations of business totally destroys
capitalism.
MG
Michael Gordge
> It can be called a government agency now, but it was not before
> September, 2008,
Ewe dumb fuck, the government regulated it, the government stole its
profits, it is government sticking its fat ugly nose into business /
capitalism that destroys it.
MG
Michael Gordge
> Another lie. It was the capitalism that failed, all those sub prime loans.
What fucking leftist garbage, laws were invented to stop banks
discriminating e.g. on age and health and ability to repay, and laws
were invented to stop banks sharing details of a person's poor finance
track record with other banks, it was nothing more than dopey leftist
regulations that lead directly to the so called sub-prime loans.
MG
Nickname unavailable
almost to a "T", just about everything that comes out of your mouth
is either stupid, a lie, or someone else's lies. of course they took
from others, there were others here first. but i realize in the
conservative world, if someone else does not have the same wealth and
power to keep the wolves at bay, then those others, become invisible.
Nickname unavailable
if there are rules to abide by in capitalism, then it is not free,
because if the rules are to be enforced, it can only be done by
government. if the rules are voluntary, then you are free to ignore
them.
but as usual, we see the response of a crank, who does not understand
that the constitution was not written for capitalism. its a system of
rules and laws. we did away with lots of the rules and laws that
governed capitalism, now we have the "voluntary rules".
Nickname unavailable
it was the unregulated mortgage brokers, banks, and the unregulated
wall street. quit lying.
Nickname unavailable
he is a simpleton. anyone, and i mean anyone, with at least a pulse,
and one functioning brain cell can see that the federal reserve, is a
for profit, private sector entity, that sets its own rules.
Nickname unavailable
quite lying again. i have proven to you more than once, toyota is
being held up by subsidies from their japanese government. see the
latest toyota republican? it looks like they kept out important safety
equipment for more profit. typical.
toyota republicans and their killer cars:toyotas deliberately left out
safety features for more profit:Toyota failed to incorporate important
failsafe measures allowing drivers to control the vehicles, the 3.8
million recall failed
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601110&sid=a4H_6VytE09Q
Toyota Sued by Consumers Over Sudden Acceleration (Update1)
By Margaret Cronin Fisk and Alan Ohnsman
Nov. 6 (Bloomberg) -- Toyota Motor Corp. has failed to correct a
problem with the throttle control system on some of its vehicles,
causing them to suddenly accelerate, lawyers for consumers said in a
lawsuit.
Los Angeles residents Seong Bae Choi and Chris Chan Park, who claim
they experienced multiple instances of unintended acceleration, filed
the suit as a class action yesterday, seeking to represent all U.S.
owners of certain Toyota and Lexus models.
Toyota last month said it would recall as many as 3.8 million vehicles
including Lexus ES luxury cars, Camry sedans and Prius hybrids over a
potential flaw in which floor mats shifting out of position could jam
the accelerator pedal. The mats aren’t the problem, plaintiff’s lawyer
David Wright said.
“Neither driver error nor floor mats can explain away many other
frightening instances of runaway Toyotas,” Wright said in a statement.
“Until the company acknowledges the real problem and fixes it, we
worry that other preventable injuries and deaths will occur.”
John Hanson, a spokesman for Toyota’s U.S. sales unit, said he hadn’t
seen the suit and declined immediate comment.
2,000 Complaints
The plaintiffs claim Toyota and Lexus owners have made more than 2,000
complaints of sudden acceleration to the company and government
agencies. They also allege that sudden acceleration episodes have
resulted in accidents causing 16 deaths and 243 injuries.
Toyota failed to “incorporate important failsafe measures” allowing
drivers to control the vehicles, the lawsuit said.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration on Oct. 30 declined
a request to investigate Lexus ES models for possible flaws related to
vehicle electronics that may also cause unintended acceleration.
The plaintiffs in the California lawsuit claim that unintended
acceleration episodes are linked to an electronic throttle control
system called ETCS-i in these vehicles.
An initial design called for “an electronic throttle control and a
redundant mechanical linkage between the gas pedal and the engine
throttle control as a failsafe in the event of a sudden unintended
acceleration,” according to the complaint.
This feature would disconnect the electronic throttle control and
allow a driver to stop the vehicle, the plaintiffs said. The company
began selling vehicles without this feature around 2001, the consumers
allege in the lawsuit.
‘Failsafe Measure’
They also claim Toyota failed to include another “failsafe measure”
that would “automatically reduce the engine to idle when the brakes
are being applied while the throttle is in an open position,”
according to the complaint.
The plaintiffs are asking for an injunction, ordering the company to
recall all Toyota and Lexus vehicles equipped with ETCS-i.
On Oct. 30, in a statement posted to the Federal Register denying a
request for further investigation of Lexus ES models, NHTSA said “the
only defect related to vehicle speed control in the subject vehicles
involved the potential for accelerator pedals to become trapped near
the floor by out-of-position or inappropriate floor mat
installations.”
The agency said that after interviewing the Lexus ES owner who sought
a federal investigation, examining his vehicle and conducting a range
of tests on drive-train and electric systems, it failed to find
sufficient evidence of electronic flaws.
The agency said that denying the petition “does not constitute a
finding by NHTSA that a safety-related defect does not exist.”
Toyota, the world’s largest automaker, has its U.S. sales headquarters
in Torrance, California. The company is based in Toyota City, Japan.
The lawsuit is Choi v. Toyota Motor Corp., CV 09-08143, U.S. District
Court, Central District of California.
To contact the reporter on this story: Margaret Cronin Fisk in
Southfield, Michigan, at mcf...@bloomberg.net; Alan Ohnsman in Los
Angeles at aohn...@bloomberg.net.
Last Updated: November 6, 2009 19:10 EST
Nickname unavailable
ROTFLOL. you must live a really sheltered life.
Nickname unavailable
except, even partial deregulation led to the sub prime, cdo mess. i
think i asked you weeks ago, is the monetary supply expanding, or
contracting right now?
Nickname unavailable
somalia is such a capitalist super power:)
Nickname unavailable
gee, then how did the independent of regulation mortgage brokers, and
wall street end up in such a mess. government had no hand in
regulating them.
Fred Weiss
> ...:Dubai...an oasis of free enterprise... under the iron rule of Sheikh al-Maktoum.
Your nickname, Nickname, must be "pig ignorant fool" if you don't see
the contradiction.
Maybe that's why you'd prefer to keep in unavailable.
Fred Weiss
Michael Gordge
> gee, then how did the independent of regulation mortgage brokers, and
> wall street end up in such a mess. government had no hand in
> regulating them.
In your dreams cockhead, the fucking government has been sticking its
disgusting grubby little hands into every single aspect of business
since formation of the Federal reserve.
You leftist cockheads are so fucking nauseating, ewe invent
regulations to control and ewe steal from the proceeds of business /
production (via tax) but never want to take ownership / repsonsibility
when things go wrong, especially when they go wrong as a direct result
of your anti-human anti-business anti-progress interference, such as
the laws ewe cockheads invented to stop banks discriminating on age
and health and ability to repay loans and share information on the
creators of bad debts.
MG
Michael Gordge
> it was the unregulated mortgage brokers, banks, and the unregulated
> wall street. quit lying.
Stop lying ewe leftist cockhead, the state regulated banks and they
began doing so with formation of the federal reserve.
MG
M Purcell
>
> A simple google search found this site:
>
> http://www.answers.com/topic/plymouth-colony
>
> Somewhat different than Bradford's self-serving recounting of his
> story.
Next week we will need to remember why we are buying gifts.
Jerry
> On Nov 24, 12:38 pm, Jerry <story.je...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > what you are talking about?
>
> Far more than you can ever hope for.
question if you are going to talk about capitalism.
Ayn Rand's definition of capitalism:
"Capitalism is a social system based on the recognition of individual
rights, including property rights, in which all property is privately
owned."
> > The US banking system is not an example of capitalism.
Not if the government decides interest rates and generally tells
bankers how to run their business. It looks to me like Hitler's
fascism. Under Hitler you could own property but the government told
you what to do with it.
> Really, so banks aren't owned by shareholders and run for profit? Do
> you know what you are talking about? Better yet, who owns the Fed. and
> do they run it for profit?
If you want to know the truth about the Federal Reserve, listen to
Edward Griffin's famous lecture about the Creature from Jekyll Island,
available free on the web. The Fed is perhaps the worst thing that
ever happened to the USA. If Isaac Newton was still around, he would
give them the death penalty for making counterfeit money.
> > The bailouts were a violation of capitalism. Companies should be
> > allowed to fail. Capitalism without failure is like Christianity
> > without sin.
>
> Agreed. So capitalism does or does not exist in the U.S.?
There is probably no country on Earth that is pure capitalist or pure
socialist. If it was pure socialist, it would self-destruct. The USA
currently is more socialist (or fascist) than capitalist.
> > Personal questions:
> > 1. Do you drink fluoridated water?
> > 2. Are you on a psych drug?
>
> > (I suspect that the common inability to understand capitalism is
> > partly due to fluoridated water and psych drugs. These things do brain
> > damage.)
>
> I suspect that your attempts at being witty are simply a pathetic
> dodge. You want your cake and want to eat it too.
I did not make any attempt to be witty. My questions are sincere and
are not intended to be rude or smartass. The evidence for capitalism
and against socialism is so abundant and so obvious that when so many
people oppose capitalism, one must doubt either the honesty or the
intelligence of those who oppose capitalism. Ayn Rand said something
about hatred of the good for being good, and about altruism. She is
probably right. But after conversing with people in the Obama Forum,
I'm starting to think maybe stupidity is a major factor.
Some of the people in the Obama Forum are so stupid that they think
rolling the printing presses and giving every person $100 million
would make the country wealthy. That is how much they understand of
economics. After patiently and unsuccessfully trying to reason with
these people, I have come to the conclusion that "stupid" is an
accurate word to describe these people, even if it is undiplomatic and
untactful. I would not have believed it if I had not seen it. The next
question is: how did they get that way?
In an attempt to explain massive and extreme stupidity, we can look at
government controlled education where students can graduate from grade
12 and not be able to read and write. We also can look at psych drugs
(which damage the brain) and fluoridated water (which lowers IQs).
Also there are other things that damage the brain that are on the
increase. You can find lectures by Russell Blaylock for more
information about things that cause brain damage.
Rod Speed
> Rod Speed <rod.speed....@gmail.com> wrote
>> AZDuffman wrote
>>> Rod Speed <rod.speed....@gmail.com> wrote
>>>> AZDuffman wrote
>>>>> Rod Speed <rod.speed....@gmail.com> wrote
>>>>>> AZDuffman wrote
>>>>>>> I think GM should have been given to the bondholders to run, not bailed out.
>>>>>> You have always been, and always will be, completely and utterly
>>>>>> irrelevant. What you might or might not claim to think in spades.
>>>>>>> That would be letting capitalism work.
>>>>>> How odd that its that that sank it.
>>>>> Not odd at all, an intelligent person, which I realize leaves you out, realizes
>>>>> GM made ugly cars like the Aztek and junk for many, many years.
>>>> Still capitalism that sank it, fuckwit.
>>> capitalism sinking it was capitalism working
>> Only in your pathetic little pig ignorant fantasyland.
>> That was capitalism NOT WORKING, fuckwit.
> How is a bad company failing "capitalism not working" please explain
Even someone as stupid as you should have noticed that it was just bailed out by govt, fuckwit.
Rod Speed
>> Jerry <story.je...@gmail.com> wrote
>>> Tim <tbees...@aci.on.ca> wrote
>>> The US banking system is not an example of capitalism.
>> Really, so banks aren't owned by shareholders and run for profit?
> when the state dictates the terms and conditions of business (banking
> is a business) then that business is NOT an example of capitalism.
According to that utterly mindlessly silly line, there is no capitalism
anywhere, because ALL business is regulated in some way, even
if thats just with anti trust and consumer law etc, fuckwit.
Jerry
>
> if there are rules to abide by in capitalism, then it is not free,
> because if the rules are to be enforced, it can only be done by
> government. if the rules are voluntary, then you are free to ignore
> them.
> but as usual, we see the response of a crank, who does not understand
> that the constitution was not written for capitalism. its a system of
> rules and laws. we did away with lots of the rules and laws that
> governed capitalism, now we have the "voluntary rules".
Ayn Rand's definition of capitalism:
"Capitalism is a social system based on the recognition of individual
rights, including property rights, in which all property is privately
owned."
The "rules" or role of government in capitalism is to preserve
individual rights.
The purpose of the Constitution was to restrict government power. The
Constitution is far from perfect. Jefferson and all those guys would
have written a better constitution if they had Ayn Rand to help them.
Of course that was not possible because Ayn Rand was not around at
that time.
Rod Speed
> Rod Speed <rod.speed....@gmail.com> wrote
>> Beam Me Up Scotty wrote
>>> Tim wrote:
>>>> tooly <rd...@bellsouth.net> wrote:
>>>>> Once again, we see how socialism has ALWAYS but ALWAYS
>>>>> failed in the many attempts it has been tried down through history.
>>>>> It makes a fatally flawed assessment of human motivation. When
>>>>> there is no ownership, there is this sense of 'not my
>>>>> responsibility' that prevails [and defacto ownership falls to the
>>>>> overseers]. Life becomes a 'job' and you wait for orders.
>>>> And capitalism and free-trade never fail? You watched the news lately?
>>> How many pages of regulations are there to create your free trade?
>>> Capitalism isn't what failed it was Fannie Mae
>> Another lie. It was the capitalism that failed, all those sub prime loans.
> laws were invented to stop banks discriminating
> e.g. on age and health and ability to repay,
You're lying now. Those sub prime loans were never required by any law, you silly little pathological liar.
> and laws were invented to stop banks sharing details of
> a person's poor finance track record with other banks,
Another bare faced pig ignorant lie.
> it was nothing more than dopey leftist regulations that lead directly to the so called sub-prime loans.
Another bare faced pig ignorant lie.
Michael Gordge
> except, even partial deregulation led to the sub prime, cdo mess.
Utter fucking leftist garbage, state mandated regulations caused the
mess, they always do they always will.
Capitalism stops the moment the state sticks its fucking ugly
parasitical envy ridden nose into any and all business.
> i
> think i asked you weeks ago, is the monetary supply expanding, or
> contracting right now?
Which is asking me, is the state still printing and supplying money
that is totally unrelated to the production of goods and services,
answer yes.
MG
Jerry
> > (I suspect that the common inability to understand capitalism
> > is partly due to fluoridated water and psych drugs.
>
> More fool you. The problem with understanding capitalism
> was around LONG before either were even invented.
True. But with less excuse. We have the internet, for one thing.
What word best describes someone who thinks rolling the printing
presses and giving every person $100 million would make the country
wealthy? Maybe "stupid". This kind of stupidity is rampant on the
Obama Forum.
Jerry
> he is a simpleton. anyone, and i mean anyone, with at least a pulse,
> and one functioning brain cell can see that the federal reserve, is a
> for profit, private sector entity, that sets its own rules.
Homework assignment:
1. On Google Video, search: "federal reserve" griffin
2. Learn how the Federal Reserve was formed.
Les Cargill
It would serve the stated purpose of the system *better* than what
they are doing now, at roughly the same cost ( after you divide the
total spent on TARP et al divided byt he appropriate number of people).
--
Les Cargill
Rod Speed
> Tim <tbees...@aci.on.ca> wrote
>> Jerry <story.je...@gmail.com> wrote
>>> What is your definition of capitalism? This is important.
>>> Do you know what you are talking about?
>> Far more than you can ever hope for.
> Good. Then what is your definition of capitalism? This is an
> important question if you are going to talk about capitalism.
> Ayn Rand's definition of capitalism:
She doesnt matter a damn on something as basic as that.
> "Capitalism is a social system based on the recognition of individual
> rights, including property rights, in which all property is privately owned."
>>> The US banking system is not an example of capitalism.
> Not if the government decides interest rates and generally tells
> bankers how to run their business. It looks to me like Hitler's fascism.
Then you need new glasses, bad.
> Under Hitler you could own property but the government told you what to do with it.
Another pig ignorant lie.
>> Really, so banks aren't owned by shareholders and run for profit?
>> Do you know what you are talking about? Better yet, who owns
>> the Fed. and do they run it for profit?
> If you want to know the truth about the Federal Reserve,
> listen to Edward Griffin's famous lecture about the
> Creature from Jekyll Island, available free on the web.
Just because some fool claims something, doesnt make it gospel.
> The Fed is perhaps the worst thing that ever happened to the USA.
Another pig ignorant lie.
> If Isaac Newton was still around, he would give them
> the death penalty for making counterfeit money.
Another pig ignorant lie.
>>> The bailouts were a violation of capitalism. Companies should be
>>> allowed to fail. Capitalism without failure is like Christianity without sin.
>> Agreed. So capitalism does or does not exist in the U.S.?
> There is probably no country on Earth that is pure capitalist or pure socialist.
No probably about it.
> If it was pure socialist, it would self-destruct. The USA
> currently is more socialist (or fascist) than capitalist.
Another pig ignorant lie.
Just another of your pathetic little pig ignorant fantasys.
IQs have in fact increased since the introduction of fluoridated water.
> Also there are other things that damage the brain that are on the increase.
Easy to claim. Have fun actually substantiating that claim.
> You can find lectures by Russell Blaylock for more
> information about things that cause brain damage.
Just because some fool claims something doesnt make it gospel.
Rod Speed
>>> (I suspect that the common inability to understand capitalism
>>> is partly due to fluoridated water and psych drugs.
>> More fool you. The problem with understanding capitalism
>> was around LONG before either were even invented.
> True. But with less excuse. We have the internet, for one thing.
Doesnt do a damned thing to understand something as complex as capitalism.
Even more cant even manage to grasp what socialism
is, or even notice that the US economy is riddled with it.
> What word best describes someone who thinks rolling the printing presses and
> giving every person $100 million would make the country wealthy? Maybe "stupid".
Yes. Or just pig ignorant. Yes, I know thats two words.
> This kind of stupidity is rampant on the Obama Forum.
Sure, but thats got nothing to do with fluoridated water and psych drugs.
That sort of flagrant stupidity was around for a hell of a long time before either were invented too.
Beam Me Up Scotty
NO I won't, There is no Christmas until Obama leaves Office.... that's
his Socialist buddies preference so I plan to let them see the economics
of it.
There was no birthday this year, I asked people to forget it this year....
I am planning to NOT celebrate until Obama is out.
MY Christmas list is ZERO.
I will share some eggnog and a few smiles but that is it. NO tree, No
gifts, NO KWANZA or anything else and no driving in circles.
Nickname unavailable
that is not a refute of what i posted. OBTW, i was right about china
when you were shilling and investing in your MAOIST empire.
Nickname unavailable
> On Nov 25, 7:42 am, Nickname unavailable <Vide...@tcq.net> wrote:
>
> > gee, then how did the independent of regulation mortgage brokers, and
> > wall street end up in such a mess. government had no hand in
> > regulating them.
>
> In your dreams cockhead, the fucking government has been sticking its
> disgusting grubby little hands into every single aspect of business
> since formation of the Federal reserve.
>
the federal reserve is not a government entity. it was the results of
the deregulation of our governments constitutional right to create
money. the federal reserve act, privatized our money supply, and we
cannot even audit them. you are simply outraged at the results of your
own policies. YOU WANT GOVERNMENT OUT OF IT! now you got your wish.
and a whole shadow banking system, out of the reach of the federal
government, has now grown so huge, that its creating bubbles in just
about everything it touches, and its regulation free sucker.
> You leftist cockheads are so fucking nauseating, ewe invent
> regulations to control and ewe steal from the proceeds of business /
> production (via tax) but never want to take ownership / repsonsibility
> when things go wrong, especially when they go wrong as a direct result
> of your anti-human anti-business anti-progress interference, such as
> the laws ewe cockheads invented to stop banks discriminating on age
> and health and ability to repay loans and share information on the
> creators of bad debts.
>
> MG
of course that is the rant of a lunatic, and it does not refute what
i said.
Nickname unavailable
most mortgage brokers were unregulated. wall street and the banks
were regulated because of the great FDR. wall street, and the banks
was deregulated in 1999, and the banks and wall street married again,
unregulated risk taking. you are so stupid, you are simply outraged at
the results of your own policies, and like all typical conservative/
libertarian cranks, you blame some one else, and refuse to take
responsibility for your own crank polices.
Nickname unavailable
> On Nov 24, 11:15 am, Tim <tbees...@aci.on.ca> wrote:> On Nov 24, 12:38 pm, Jerry <story.je...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > > What is your definition of capitalism? This is important. Do you know
> > > what you are talking about?
>
> > Far more than you can ever hope for.
>
> Good. Then what is your definition of capitalism? This is an important
> question if you are going to talk about capitalism.
>
> Ayn Rand's definition of capitalism:
> "Capitalism is a social system based on the recognition of individual
> rights, including property rights, in which all property is privately
> owned."
>
ayn rand was a crank, who attracted little boys to her cult thru sex.
she was sly, and clever. but all cult leaders are that. she knew that
she would get all sorts of little boys masturbating away, under her
control.
> > > The US banking system is not an example of capitalism.
>
> Not if the government decides interest rates and generally tells
> bankers how to run their business. It looks to me like Hitler's
> fascism. Under Hitler you could own property but the government told
> you what to do with it.
>
the federal reserve is the privatization of the money supply. its a
for profit private entity, that we cannot even audit.
> > Really, so banks aren't owned by shareholders and run for profit? Do
> > you know what you are talking about? Better yet, who owns the Fed. and
> > do they run it for profit?
>
> If you want to know the truth about the Federal Reserve, listen to
> Edward Griffin's famous lecture about the Creature from Jekyll Island,
> available free on the web. The Fed is perhaps the worst thing that
> ever happened to the USA. If Isaac Newton was still around, he would
> give them the death penalty for making counterfeit money.
>
its unconstitutional, as all privatization is.
> > > The bailouts were a violation of capitalism. Companies should be
> > > allowed to fail. Capitalism without failure is like Christianity
> > > without sin.
>
> > Agreed. So capitalism does or does not exist in the U.S.?
>
it exists under the laws, rules, and regulations created by
constitutional law.
> There is probably no country on Earth that is pure capitalist or pure
> socialist. If it was pure socialist, it would self-destruct. The USA
> currently is more socialist (or fascist) than capitalist.
>
ROTFLOL. you know little, because of your indoctrination at a young
age.
> > > Personal questions:
> > > 1. Do you drink fluoridated water?
> > > 2. Are you on a psych drug?
>
> > > (I suspect that the common inability to understand capitalism is
> > > partly due to fluoridated water and psych drugs. These things do brain
> > > damage.)
>
> > I suspect that your attempts at being witty are simply a pathetic
> > dodge. You want your cake and want to eat it too.
>
> I did not make any attempt to be witty. My questions are sincere and
> are not intended to be rude or smartass. The evidence for capitalism
> and against socialism is so abundant and so obvious that when so many
> people oppose capitalism, one must doubt either the honesty or the
> intelligence of those who oppose capitalism. Ayn Rand said something
> about hatred of the good for being good, and about altruism. She is
> probably right. But after conversing with people in the Obama Forum,
> I'm starting to think maybe stupidity is a major factor.
>
somalia is a super power.
> Some of the people in the Obama Forum are so stupid that they think
> rolling the printing presses and giving every person $100 million
> would make the country wealthy. That is how much they understand of
> economics. After patiently and unsuccessfully trying to reason with
> these people, I have come to the conclusion that "stupid" is an
> accurate word to describe these people, even if it is undiplomatic and
> untactful. I would not have believed it if I had not seen it. The next
> question is: how did they get that way?
>
what is deflation? do you recognize it, and what would you do. OBTW,
is the monetary base expanding right now, or contracting?
OBTW, conservatives are the ones who created this massive debt
starting in 1981.
> In an attempt to explain massive and extreme stupidity, we can look at
> government controlled education where students can graduate from grade
> 12 and not be able to read and write. We also can look at psych drugs
> (which damage the brain) and fluoridated water (which lowers IQs).
> Also there are other things that damage the brain that are on the
> increase. You can find lectures by Russell Blaylock for more
> information about things that cause brain damage.
we also know that most for profit, or private, or charter schools do
no better or worse than public schools.
Nickname unavailable
> On Nov 24, 3:32 pm, Nickname unavailable <Vide...@tcq.net> wrote:
>
> > if there are rules to abide by in capitalism, then it is not free,
> > because if the rules are to be enforced, it can only be done by
> > government. if the rules are voluntary, then you are free to ignore
> > them.
> > but as usual, we see the response of a crank, who does not understand
> > that the constitution was not written for capitalism. its a system of
> > rules and laws. we did away with lots of the rules and laws that
> > governed capitalism, now we have the "voluntary rules".
>
> Let's go back to the definition of capitalism.
>
> Ayn Rand's definition of capitalism:
> "Capitalism is a social system based on the recognition of individual
> rights, including property rights, in which all property is privately
> owned."
>
are you a collectivists? OBTW, ayn rand is not credible. she is the
laughing stock of the world.
> The "rules" or role of government in capitalism is to preserve
> individual rights.
>
capitalism is a economic system, not a political system, its a system
that can reside quit comfortably in just about any political system.
you seem to be confused.
what we have in america, is constitutional law, and its a
interventionist document for a reason.
> The purpose of the Constitution was to restrict government power.
yes, in some cases. in many cases the constitution states that the
government can regulate.
The
> Constitution is far from perfect. Jefferson and all those guys would
> have written a better constitution if they had Ayn Rand to help them.
> Of course that was not possible because Ayn Rand was not around at
> that time.
the moon is no longer considered to be made of green cheese.
Nickname unavailable
> On Nov 25, 7:41 am, Nickname unavailable <Vide...@tcq.net> wrote:
>
> > except, even partial deregulation led to the sub prime, cdo mess.
>
> Utter fucking leftist garbage, state mandated regulations caused the
> mess, they always do they always will.
>
of course that is a lie. unregulated mortgage brokers created the
loans, banks bought them, then resold them to wall street, wall street
sold them to suckers. all unregulated.
> Capitalism stops the moment the state sticks its fucking ugly
> parasitical envy ridden nose into any and all business.
>
capitalism resides quite comfortably within just about any political
system. you are simply a member of as cult.
> > i
> > think i asked you weeks ago, is the monetary supply expanding, or
> > contracting right now?
>
> Which is asking me, is the state still printing and supplying money
> that is totally unrelated to the production of goods and services,
> answer yes.
>
you know little. what is deflation, and how would you battle it?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financetopics/recession/6190818/US...
US credit shrinks at Great Depression rate prompting fears of double-
dip recession
Both bank credit and the M3 money supply in the United
States have
been contracting at rates comparable to the onset of the
Great
Depression since early summer, raising fears of a double-dip
recession
in 2010 and a slide into debt-deflation.
By Ambrose
Evans-Pritchard, International Business Editor
Published:
11:59PM BST
14 Sep 2009
Professor Tim Congdon from International Monetary Research said US
bank loans have fallen at an annual pace of almost 14pc in the three
months to August (from $7,147bn to $6,886bn).
"There has been nothing
like this in the USA since the 1930s," he
said. "The rapid
destruction of money balances is madness."
The M3 "broad" money supply, watched as an early warning signal for
the economy a year or so later, has been falling at a 5pc annual
rate.
Similar concerns have been raised by David Rosenberg, chief
strategist
at Gluskin Sheff, who said that over the four weeks up to
August 24,
bank credit shrank at an "epic" 9pc annual pace, the M2
money supply
shrank at 12.2pc and M1 shrank at 6.5pc.
"For the first
time in the post-WW2 [Second World War] era, we have
deflation in
credit, wages and rents and, from our lens, this is a
toxic brew," he
said.
It is unclear why the US Federal Reserve has allowed this to
occur.
Chairman Ben Bernanke is an expert on the "credit channel"
causes of
depressions and has given eloquent speeches about the risks
of
deflation in the past.
He is not a monetary economist, however,
and there are indications
that the Fed has had to pare back its
policy of quantitative easing
(buying bonds) in order to reassure
China and other foreign creditors
that the US is not trying to
devalue its debts by stealth
monetisation.
Mr Congdon said a key
reason for credit contraction is pressure on
banks to raise their
capital ratios. While this is well-advised in
boom times, it makes
matters worse in a downturn.
"The current drive to make banks less
leveraged and safer is having
the perverse consequence of destroying
money balances," he said. "It
strengthens the deflationary forces in
the world economy. That
increases the risks of a double-dip recession
in 2010."
Referring to the debt-purge policy of US Treasury Secretary
Andrew
Mellon in the early 1930s, he added: "The pressure on banks to
de-risk
and to de-leverage is the modern version of liquidationism:
it is
potentially just as dangerous."
US banks are cutting lending
by around 1pc a month. A similar process
is occurring in the
eurozone, where private sector credit has been
contracting and M3 has
been flat for almost a year.
Mr Congdon said IMF chief Dominique
Strauss-Kahn is wrong to argue
that the history of financial crises
shows that "speedy recovery"
depends on "cleansing banks' balance
sheets of toxic assets". "The
message of all financial crises is that
policy-makers' priority must
be to stop the quantity of money falling
and, ideally, to get it
rising again," he said.
He predicted that
the Federal Reserve and other central banks will be
forced to engage
in outright monetisation of government debt by next
year, whatever
they say now.
> MG
Nickname unavailable
yes, it was formed to absorb, and cover the losses of the robber
barons. you have so little to teach.
Tim
> > On Nov 24, 12:38 pm, Jerry <story.je...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > > The US banking system is not an example of capitalism.
> > Really, so banks aren't owned by shareholders and run for profit?
>
> dictates the terms and conditions of business (banking is a business)
> then that business is NOT an example of capitalism.
>
> draconian anti-progress laws, ewe brain dead commie idiot, capitalism
> requires a free unregulated market, the US banking system is therefore
> NOT an example of capitalism, its not even in the same universe.
>
> MG
Ergo capitalism does not and has not ever existed. Sooooo, dumb ass,
how do you know that cap'ism works, how do you know it's the only
moral system (acc. to dopey rand)?
Tim
> On Nov 24, 11:15 am, Tim <tbees...@aci.on.ca> wrote:> On Nov 24, 12:38 pm, Jerry <story.je...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > > What is your definition of capitalism? This is important. Do you know
> > > what you are talking about?
>
> > Far more than you can ever hope for.
>
> Good. Then what is your definition of capitalism? This is an important
> question if you are going to talk about capitalism.
>
> Ayn Rand's definition of capitalism:
Bwaaaa ahaaa. Hey bud, if you're a randroid, that's your problem.
> "Capitalism is a social system based on the recognition of individual
> rights, including property rights, in which all property is privately
> owned."
>
> > > The US banking system is not an example of capitalism.
>
> Not if the government decides interest rates and generally tells
> bankers how to run their business. It looks to me like Hitler's
> fascism. Under Hitler you could own property but the government told
> you what to do with it.
>
> > Really, so banks aren't owned by shareholders and run for profit? Do
> > you know what you are talking about? Better yet, who owns the Fed. and
> > do they run it for profit?
>
> If you want to know the truth about the Federal Reserve, listen to
> Edward Griffin's famous lecture about the Creature from Jekyll Island,
> available free on the web. The Fed is perhaps the worst thing that
> ever happened to the USA. If Isaac Newton was still around, he would
> give them the death penalty for making counterfeit money.
>
I'm well aware of the history of the fed. It's a scam.
> > > The bailouts were a violation of capitalism. Companies should be
> > > allowed to fail. Capitalism without failure is like Christianity
> > > without sin.
>
> > Agreed. So capitalism does or does not exist in the U.S.?
>
> There is probably no country on Earth that is pure capitalist or pure
> socialist. If it was pure socialist, it would self-destruct. The USA
> currently is more socialist (or fascist) than capitalist.
>
> > > Personal questions:
> > > 1. Do you drink fluoridated water?
> > > 2. Are you on a psych drug?
>
> > > (I suspect that the common inability to understand capitalism is
> > > partly due to fluoridated water and psych drugs. These things do brain
> > > damage.)
>
> > I suspect that your attempts at being witty are simply a pathetic
> > dodge. You want your cake and want to eat it too.
>
> I did not make any attempt to be witty. My questions are sincere and
> are not intended to be rude or smartass.
Then I'll just attribute it to the fact that you appear to be a
randroid.
The evidence for capitalism
> and against socialism is so abundant and so obvious that when so many
> people oppose capitalism, one must doubt either the honesty or the
> intelligence of those who oppose capitalism. Ayn Rand said something
> about hatred of the good for being good, and about altruism. She is
> probably right. But after conversing with people in the Obama Forum,
> I'm starting to think maybe stupidity is a major factor.
ayn rand was a psuedo-philosophical hack who wrote overly long boring
books chock full of two dimensional characters--no wonder she sells so
well in the US.
>
> Some of the people in the Obama Forum are so stupid that they think
> rolling the printing presses and giving every person $100 million
> would make the country wealthy. That is how much they understand of
> economics. After patiently and unsuccessfully trying to reason with
> these people, I have come to the conclusion that "stupid" is an
> accurate word to describe these people, even if it is undiplomatic and
> untactful. I would not have believed it if I had not seen it. The next
> question is: how did they get that way?
>
That's nothing, feddy weiss (another local randroid) thinks that oil
is infinite. Mickey Gowdge (yet another randroid) thinks that energy
costs rise because people insulate their homes. Randroids can out dumb
anyone, maybe the GOP is an exception.
> In an attempt to explain massive and extreme stupidity, we can look at
> government controlled education where students can graduate from grade
> 12 and not be able to read and write. We also can look at psych drugs
> (which damage the brain) and fluoridated water (which lowers IQs).
> Also there are other things that damage the brain that are on the
> increase. You can find lectures by Russell Blaylock for more
> information about things that cause brain damage.
Or balme ayn rand.
Jerry
> > Ayn Rand's definition of capitalism:
>
> Bwaaaa ahaaa. Hey bud, if you're a randroid, that's your problem.
I never was a Randroid or an Objectivist. I was kicked out of every
Objectivist discussion group I was ever in except APO. Objectivists
tend to despise me in the worst way.
> I'm well aware of the history of the fed. It's a scam.
And it should be ended. I hope Ron Paul succeeds in getting rid of it.
> > I did not make any attempt to be witty. My questions are sincere and
> > are not intended to be rude or smartass.
>
> Then I'll just attribute it to the fact that you appear to be a
> randroid.
Appearances can be deceptive.
> ayn rand was a psuedo-philosophical hack who wrote overly long boring
> books chock full of two dimensional characters--no wonder she sells so
> well in the US.
Many years ago when I first read Atlas Shrugged, I had little interest
in novels, especially long novels. Nonetheless I read Atlas Shrugged
from cover to cover. After reading it the first time, I had the
impression that there was much more substance to the novel than I had
picked up from the first reading, so I read it again from cover to
cover. Since then I read parts of it many times.
Nope, I am not a Randroid and am not an Objectivist.
> > After patiently and unsuccessfully trying to reason with
> > these people, I have come to the conclusion that "stupid" is an
> > accurate word to describe these people, even if it is undiplomatic and
> > untactful.
> That's nothing, feddy weiss (another local randroid) thinks that oil
> is infinite. Mickey Gowdge (yet another randroid) thinks that energy
> costs rise because people insulate their homes. Randroids can out dumb
> anyone, maybe the GOP is an exception.
I do not believe I ever encountered a Randroid or an Objectivist who
was so stupid as to think that the economic problems of the USA can be
solved by rolling the printing presses and giving every person in the
USA $100 million.
> > In an attempt to explain massive and extreme stupidity, we can look at
> > government controlled education where students can graduate from grade
> > 12 and not be able to read and write. We also can look at psych drugs
> > (which damage the brain) and fluoridated water (which lowers IQs).
> > Also there are other things that damage the brain that are on the
> > increase. You can find lectures by Russell Blaylock for more
> > information about things that cause brain damage.
>
> Or balme ayn rand.
Ayn Rand is not responsible for the stupidity of the people in the
Obama Forum. They don't have any more use for Ayn Rand than you do.
lorad
> William Bradford was the governor of the original Pilgrim colony,
> founded at Plymouth in 1621. The colony was first organized on a
> communal basis, as their financiers required. Land was owned in
> common. The Pilgrims farmed communally, too, following the "from each
> according to his abilities, to each according to his needs" precept.
>
> The results were disastrous. Communism didn't work any better 400
> years ago than it does today. By 1623, the colony had suffered serious
> losses. Starvation was imminent.
>
> Bradford realized that the communal system encouraged and rewarded
> waste and laziness and inefficiency, and destroyed individual
> initiative. Desperate, he abolished it. He distributed private plots
> of land among the surviving Pilgrims, encouraging them to plant early
> and farm as individuals, not collectively.
>
> The results: a bountiful early harvest that saved the colonies. After
> the harvest, the Pilgrims celebrated with a day of Thanksgiving
>
> Too bad so much of the country doesn't realize this today. With every
> promise of "free health care" and "making people pay their 'fair
> share'" we take steps back to the socialist system. Hopefully the
> rest of the country sees the light in 2012!
>
> It may already be happening--Obama is now below 50% in approval and
> less than 40% want a public option in health care.
Screw the psychopathic witch-burning Pilgrims
There's nothing to be thankful for... not after 8 years of republicon
looting.
Thankfullness? Hell No.
Anger?.. Yes.
Michael Gordge
> the federal reserve is not a government entity.
hahahahha ewe're a fucking joke, who the fuck do ewe think appoints
the chairman, fucking santa clause?
>. YOU WANT GOVERNMENT OUT OF IT! now you got your wish.
Crap, the scummy parasitical retarded bastards are into every single
aspect of your life.
MG
Rod Speed
> AZDuffman <srduffy1...@gmail.com> wrote
Not into necrophilia, dunno about you tho...
> There's nothing to be thankful for... not after 8 years of republicon looting.
> Thankfullness? Hell No.
> Anger?.. Yes.
Then do the decent thing and set fire to yourself or sumfin.
1Z
> No one said it will work 100% perfect 100% of the time, but capitalism
> finds its way eventually. Socialism has proven to be a faiulre.
Pure capitlalism as espoused by Libertarians and the like
has never worked anywhere. What works
is mixed system.
Nickname unavailable
and you thought the monetary base was expanding:) you know nothing.
somalia is your paradise, so walk the talk.
Nickname unavailable
well said. look what milton friedman did to ireland, new zealand,
chile, eastern europe, iceland, the u.s.a., and the u.k.. and when the
politicians/cult members of those countries are questioned why they
did what they did, they say they did nothing wrong, and milton was
right, and everything is working just fine, pure insanity. the latest
collapse, dubia, was called milton friedmans beach house paradise.
what a mess it is.
Jerry
>
> Pure capitlalism as espoused by Libertarians and the like
> has never worked anywhere.
nearly pure form on a small scale for a short time. Was it ever tried
in nearly pure form on a large scale for a long time? If so, could
someone point to some info on that?
Software development seems to be almost totally free from government
control apart from copyright and copyleft. There is no such thing as
going to jail for practising software development without a license.
Anyone with a computer and an internet connection can make any kind of
non-malicious software they want and put in on the internet without
any hassle from government. Therefore software development seems to
qualify as nearly pure capitalism in a small segment of society.
Question: Should government crack down on programmers who don't have
any formal credentials?
If NO, then you have capitalism and that (you say) doesn't work.
If YES, then specifically what should the crackdown be?
Nickname unavailable
you have refuted nothing, including how you would handle deflation. i
think this is way over your head.
Nickname unavailable
i guess its working quite well in somalia. although, under pure
capitalism, life spans seem rather short, maybe the mid 40's:)
obtw, is the monetary base expanding right now, or contracting, and
if its contracting, how would you fight deflation? this is simple
stuff, it should be easy for you to respond to.
i will even give you the latest example of deflation.
Fending off empty holiday shelves
Tight credit and slow sales are putting retailers in a crunch on
financing their inventory.
By Catherine Clifford, CNNMoney.com staff reporter
Last Updated: November 25, 2009: 3:02 PM ET
Karen Zebulon, owner of Gumbo, is using a loan from Seedco Financial
to stock up on toys for the holiday season.
Jessica Furst is the owner of Artez'n Gift and Gallery, an Atlantic
Ave. retail store that sells products made by Brooklyn artisans.
Furst used a holiday loan to stock up on one of her most popular gift
items: pint glasses with Brooklyn landmarks on them.
Kepler's Books is a cultural mainstay of the Menlo Park, Calif.,
community.
Montanta Fish Company wants to expand and hire more workers, but can't
land the loan it needs.
NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- With sales slow and credit tight, small
merchants are scrambling to stock their shelves for the year's biggest
shopping season.
Retailers traditionally borrow money to buy holiday inventory. But
credit for small businesses has dried up this year, and with the
recession slowing sales, few merchants have cash on hand. The crunch
is forcing business owners to find new ways to keep running.
For a handful of New York City retailers in one hard-hit stretch of
Brooklyn, a small community lender is playing the role of Santa Claus.
Lesia Bates Moss, president of Seedco Financial Services, noticed an
ever-increasing number of vacant storefronts along Atlantic Avenue. In
response, she hosted a meeting with a dozen area retailers to find out
how her organization could help.
One common problem the merchants cited was getting enough credit to
buy sufficient holiday inventory. So Seedco Financial, a nonprofit
that specializes in financing for underserved communities, launched a
streamlined holiday program: Retailers who could provide a marketing
plan for spending the money and driving foot traffic would get fast
loans.
On Monday, Seedco staffers started delivering checks. A typical loan
request is for around $20,000, to be repaid over the next year at
interest rates of 6% to 10%.
"It doesn't take a lot in the way of capital access to help these
businesses," Moss said. "We really needed to get money into the hands
of these merchants before Black Friday, so they could stock their
stores."
Toys and beer glasses: Karen Zebulon, the owner of toy and clothing
retailer Gumbo on Atlantic Ave., is one of Seedco Financial's
borrowers.
"Especially this year, because we have had such hard times, we really
need a boost," she said. "If I can really strategize and plan and buy
the right merchandise, I think it can be a turning point for me."
Zebulon plans to ramp up her inventory of toys, because even in tight
times, customers continue to spend on kids. She's impressed at how
quickly Seedco Financial got cash into her hands.
"This was -- you could say -- a godsend," she said. "It is saving me
and saving a lot of other merchants that are receiving the loans."
Without the financing, she would have been pulling a string of all-
nighters trying to handcraft toys to stock her shelves.
Artez'n Gift and Gallery, which sells products made by local Brooklyn
artisans, also got a loan from Seedco. Owner Jessica Furst got her
check on Monday and "ran to the bank." She plans to use the cash to
stock up on one of her best-selling items: pint glasses with
illustrations of Brooklyn landmarks on them. They're a proven customer
lure, drawing in tourists and others who make a special trip to
Artez'n for the glasses.
With sales slow this year, Furst wouldn't have been able to afford to
produce the Brooklyn beer glasses without the last-minute loan. "I
would have been without them again, which would have been a loss of
income for me, and possibly a loss of customer base," she said.
She will also use some of the loan money to fix the high-end printer
she uses for her graphic design business. The small loan will make a
big difference for Furst: "It will enable me to get back on my feet."
The big challenge for merchants will come over the next month. The
National Retail Federation forecasts that this year's holiday sales
will decline 1%, to $437.6 billion.
"The real concern is, can you sell stuff?" said Bill Dunkelberg, chief
economist of the National Federation of Independent Businesses. "I am
sure inventory accumulation has been cautious. It doesn't look like it
is going to be much better than last year, which was terrible."
Squeezing by: Not every retailer is lucky enough to have a community
lending program to turn to.
Clark Kepler's dad opened Kepler's Books in 1955. Like so many other
independent bookstores, Kepler's Books is fighting for sales in an
industry now dominated by Big Box discount retailers and Internet book
sellers. Four years ago, with the shop on the brink of closure, 25
members of the Silicon Valley community voluntarily donated $1 million
to save the neighborhood bookstore.
The recession has further ravaged the business, which saw a double-
digit sales decline. "We had the most difficult time this last several
months with the cash-flow issues," Kepler said. "We managed to get
through it, but we were robbing Peter to pay Paul every step of the
way."
One way the shop is coping is by churning inventory faster than it
typically would. Bookstores can return unsold goods to publishers, and
Kepler is shuffling fast to fine-tune his holiday lineup.
"It is a mad scramble much of the time," he said. "We have needed to
scrutinize our inventory more and more to be sure that we have books
that are selling." A book that languishes is "like money sitting on
the shelf that we are not utilizing."
Kepler could use additional financing to give his bookstore more
breathing room, but he's had little luck with the banks. He talked
with one lender about a Small Business Administration-backed loan, but
pulled out after deciding that the loan available for his shop
wouldn't be big enough to justify all the effort involved in the
application process.
Kevin Stein, co-owner of the Montana Fish Company in Bozeman, Mont.,
is also frustrated with the banks. "We have been to every bank in
town," he said. "If we could expand into a bigger facility, we could
take on more business, we could hire more people -- it is a win-win."
But so far, with no expansion loan yet available, Stein's seafood and
wine market isn't doing its usual seasonal hiring. "We didn't lay
anyone off, but it was a combination of not rehiring and not hiring
for the holiday season," Stein said. To make up for the staffing
decrease, Stein and his co-owner have upped their own hours.
"As employees filtered out, we just simply didn't rehire, which means
I spent a lot less time at home," he said.
Like the merchants that borrowed from Seedco Financial, Stein is now
looking outside the banking industry for help. He's trying to get a
loan directly from the Small Business Administration, through its
disaster lending program. A natural glass explosion one block away
from Montana Fish may make the company eligible.
Stein and his business partner, Travis Byerly, have been pulling
together mountains of documentation.
"It is a little mind-boggling," Stein said of application process.
"But it is a great loan if we can get it. It could be a game changer."
Rod Speed
> 1Z <peterdjo...@yahoo.com> wrote
>> Pure capitlalism as espoused by Libertarians
>> and the like has never worked anywhere.
> It can't work if it is not tried.
You dont need to shoot yourself to prove its not great for your health.
> Was it tried?
Nope, no one was ever that stupid.
> Maybe it was tried in nearly pure form on a small scale for a short time.
Nope, no one was ever that stupid.
Even Somalia aint actually that stupid.
> Was it ever tried in nearly pure form on a large scale for a long time?
Nope, no one was ever that stupid.
> If so, could someone point to some info on that?
No such animal. Even HongKong before it was handed back to china wasnt that stupid.
> Software development seems to be almost totally free
> from government control apart from copyright and copyleft.
Thats not what pure capitlalism as espoused by Libertarians and the like is about.
> There is no such thing as going to jail for practising software development without a license.
Thats not what pure capitlalism as espoused by Libertarians and the like is about.
> Anyone with a computer and an internet connection can
> make any kind of non-malicious software they want and
> put in on the internet without any hassle from government.
That is just plain wrong with some software. Have a look at what happened with PGP for example.
> Therefore software development seems to qualify as
> nearly pure capitalism in a small segment of society.
Nope.
> Question: Should government crack down on programmers who don't have any formal credentials?
Thats not what pure capitlalism as espoused by Libertarians and the like is about.
> If NO, then you have capitalism and that (you say) doesn't work.
Thats not what pure capitlalism as espoused by Libertarians and the like is about.
> If YES, then specifically what should the crackdown be?
Its already happened with copyright.
tooly
> On Nov 24, 8:05 am, AZDuffman <srduffy1...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
>
>
> > On Nov 24, 9:24 am, tenjets <spameister3...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> > > On Nov 24, 3:52 am, tooly <rd...@bellsouth.net> wrote:
>
> > > > On Nov 23, 11:55 am, AZDuffman <srduffy1...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > > > > William Bradford was the governor of the original Pilgrim colony,
> > > > > founded at Plymouth in 1621. The colony was first organized on a
> > > > > communal basis, as their financiers required. Land was owned in
> > > > > common. The Pilgrims farmed communally, too, following the "from each
> > > > > according to his abilities, to each according to his needs" precept.
>
> > > > > The results were disastrous. Communism didn't work any better 400
> > > > > years ago than it does today. By 1623, the colony had suffered serious
> > > > > losses. Starvation was imminent.
>
> > > > > Bradford realized that the communal system encouraged and rewarded
> > > > > waste and laziness and inefficiency, and destroyed individual
> > > > > initiative. Desperate, he abolished it. He distributed private plots
> > > > > of land among the surviving Pilgrims, encouraging them to plant early
> > > > > and farm as individuals, not collectively.
>
> > > > > The results: a bountiful early harvest that saved the colonies. After
> > > > > the harvest, the Pilgrims celebrated with a day of Thanksgiving
>
> > > > > Too bad so much of the country doesn't realize this today. With every
> > > > > promise of "free health care" and "making people pay their 'fair
> > > > > share'" we take steps back to the socialist system. Hopefully the
> > > > > rest of the country sees the light in 2012!
>
> > > > > It may already be happening--Obama is now below 50% in approval and
> > > > > less than 40% want a public option in health care.
>
> > > > failed in the many attempts it has been tried down through history.
> > > > It makes a fatally flawed assessment of human motivation. When there
> > > > is no ownership, there is this sense of 'not my responsibility' that
> > > > prevails [and defacto ownership falls to the overseers]. Life becomes
> > > > a 'job' and you wait for orders.- Hide quoted text -
>
> > > > - Show quoted text -
>
> > > Except that none of AZ's Plymnouth Colony story is true. Private land
> > > grants were granted before they ever set sail. Pilgrims went there to
> > > develop commerce and live a religious life. You guys should stop
> > > automatically believing what you read in anonymous e-mails.- Hide quoted text -
>
> > > - Show quoted text -
>
> > No, I learned it in grade and high school 20+ years ago. At first it
> > was socialized and they nearly starved. Some ov the very connected
> > people got land grants, Bradford gave land to EVERYBODY to develop on
> > their own.
>
> > You should stop believing what you read from the Huffington Post and
> > dailykos.- Hide quoted text -
>
> > - Show quoted text -
>
> I read it here:http://www.answers.com/topic/plymouth-colony. Land
> grant were given. Later, Bradford divied up the lands equally (now
> there' a socialistic concept - a government land grab and
> redistribution of wealth.)- Hide quoted text -
>
> - Show quoted text -
the famine was solved only when people were given private ownership.
when the land was held in common [the first 2 years or so] and
everyone worked communally, they nearly starved and there was
dischord. Read your history.
1Z
OK, I admit it. There *is* indoctrination in the US public school
system...
tenjets
Take it easy, buddy. Sheesh. You people are exasperating. Even though
republicans were ruining the economy and putting us into unfunded
wars, I always enjoyed my friends and family during holidays. Stop
being such a brat about it.
Nickname unavailable
read recent history, over 1.2 billion people world wide are starving
right now, that rely on global free markets to feed them. the free
market has simply manipulated the price of commodities, and starvation
is the results.
i see little difference between the systems of free markets , or
communism, in either system, almost all of the wealth and power ends
up in the hands of a few.
M Purcell
>
> read recent history, over 1.2 billion people world wide are starving
> right now, that rely on global free markets to feed them. the free
> market has simply manipulated the price of commodities, and starvation
> is the results.
> i see little difference between the systems of free markets , or
> communism, in either system, almost all of the wealth and power ends
> up in the hands of a few.
Well globally, markets are subject to different regulations in
different countries. Charity is what is needed to end hunger and I
think Democracy is a pragmatic way of distributing power.
Rod Speed
> Nickname unavailable <Vide...@tcq.net> wrote
>> read recent history, over 1.2 billion people world wide are starving right now,
That's a lie.
>> that rely on global free markets to feed them.
Another lie.
>> the free market has simply manipulated the price of commodities,
The real dregs of the world dont pay for any commoditys, they are subsistence farmers.
>> and starvation is the results.
Another lie.
>> i see little difference between the systems of free markets, or communism,
No surprises there...
>> in either system, almost all of the wealth and power ends up in the hands of a few.
Another lie. There are no free markets.
> Well globally, markets are subject to different regulations in different countries.
That isnt the problem.
> Charity is what is needed to end hunger
Nope, its never done that yet.
Whats actually done it with all except those who are
dieting or are anorexics is stuff like the green revolution.
> and I think Democracy is a pragmatic way of distributing power.
Yep, leaves the other alternatives for dead.
M Purcell
> M Purcell wrote
> > Well globally, markets are subject to different regulations in different countries.
>
> That isnt the problem.
Just the facts.
> > Charity is what is needed to end hunger
>
> Nope, its never done that yet.
Your sense of charity overhelms me.
> Whats actually done it with all except those who are
> dieting or are anorexics is stuff like the green revolution.
It hasn't done that yet.
> > and I think Democracy is a pragmatic way of distributing power.
>
> Yep, leaves the other alternatives for dead.
Sorry, they're still around.
Rod Speed
>>> Well globally, markets are subject to different regulations in different countries.
>> That isnt the problem.
> Just the facts.
You wouldnt know what a real fact was if one bit you on your lard arse.
>>> Charity is what is needed to end hunger
>> Nope, its never done that yet.
> Your sense of charity overhelms me.
Your pathetic excuse for mindless bullshit overwhelms no one, as always.
>> Whats actually done it with all except those who are
>> dieting or are anorexics is stuff like the green revolution.
> It hasn't done that yet.
Corse it has. We only see famine and starvation when the entire
country has degenerated into the most obscene levels of civil war
and civil choas or when fools like Kim Jong Il rule the roost now.
>>> and I think Democracy is a pragmatic way of distributing power.
>> Yep, leaves the other alternatives for dead.
> Sorry, they're still around.
So stupid that it cant manage even the simplest figures of speach.
zzbunker
> William Bradford was the governor of the original Pilgrim colony,
> founded at Plymouth in 1621. The colony was first organized on a
> communal basis, as their financiers required. Land was owned in
> common. The Pilgrims farmed communally, too, following the "from each
> according to his abilities, to each according to his needs" precept.
Well, the thing you still idiots that farm like that, is that the
why the people with brains work on GPS, rather than moss.
That's why work on AI, rather than the South Forty.
That's why they work on UAVs, and Atomic Clock Wristwatches, rather
than salt preservatives.
That's why they work on Holographics, rather than Weather Almancs.
That's why they work on Self-Replicating Machines, rather than
wagon wheels.
That's why they work on Digital Books and Self-Assembling Robots,
rather than Monday..
That's why they work on DNA, rather than Turkey Hunts.
That's why they work on Drones, rather than Tax Collectors.
That's why they work on Microwave Ovens, rather than barn raising.
That's why they work on Biodiesel, rather than Candles.
That's why they work on Hybrid-Electric Energy, rather than wells.
That's why they work on Helicopters, rather than seed bags.
That's why they work on Cyber Batteries, rather than storm drains.
That's why they work on Combines, rather than Plows.
Les Cargill
Nope. Productivity and an effective system of rule of law
work much better. "Charity" WRT Africa often ends up propping
up strongman kleptocracies.
> and I
> think Democracy is a pragmatic way of distributing power.
Sometimes.
--
Les Cargill
Les Cargill
Y'know, if somebody really enjoys self-flagellation *that much*...
leave 'em to it.
--
Les Cargill
Deacon
> AZDuffman wrote
>
> > Rod Speed <rod.speed....@gmail.com> wrote
> >> AZDuffman wrote
> >>> Rod Speed <rod.speed....@gmail.com> wrote
> >>>> AZDuffman wrote
> >>>>> I think GM should have been given to the bondholders to run, not bailed out.
> >>>> You have always been, and always will be, completely and utterly irrelevant.
> >>>> What you might or might not claim to think in spades.
> >>>>> That would be letting capitalism work.
> >>>> How odd that its that that sank it.
> >>> Not odd at all, an intelligent person, which I realize leaves you out, realizes
> >>> GM made ugly cars like the Aztek and junk for many, many years.
> >> Still capitalism that sank it, fuckwit.
> > capitalism sinking it was capitalism working
>
> Only in your pathetic little pig ignorant fantasyland.
>
> That was capitalism NOT WORKING, fuckwit.
what they could have done,in plymouth,is to use iq and create
monominded social setups
M Purcell
> M Purcell wrote:
> > Well globally, markets are subject to different regulations in
> > different countries. Charity is what is needed to end hunger
>
> Nope. Productivity and an effective system of rule of law
> work much better. "Charity" WRT Africa often ends up propping
> up strongman kleptocracies.
How about an effective system of assistance? I don't restrict charity
to giving money but include actually trying to help other people.
Stable governments would certainly help but first they need to be put
in place and I doubt this will happen by itself. Obviously we will
need to produce enough food.
Fred Weiss
> M Purcell wrote:
> > Well globally, markets are subject to different regulations in
> > different countries. Charity is what is needed to end hunger
>
> Nope. Productivity and an effective system of rule of law
> work much better. "Charity" WRT Africa often ends up propping
> up strongman kleptocracies.
Les, right again.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/feb/26/international-aid-capitalism
Fred Weiss
Rod Speed
>>> Well globally, markets are subject to different regulations in
>>> different countries. Charity is what is needed to end hunger
>> Nope. Productivity and an effective system of rule of law work
>> much better. "Charity" WRT Africa often ends up propping
>> up strongman kleptocracies.
> How about an effective system of assistance?
It doesnt work, even in the west. FAR too many get trained into putting
their hands out instead of getting off their arses and helping themselves
and you end up with self replicating generations of welfare bludgers.
> I don't restrict charity to giving money but include actually trying to help other people.
Sure, but even that doesnt work in africa or anywhere else either.
Yes, you need decent social safetynets and handouts when natural
disasters which are impossible for the dregs to allow for entirely happen,
but we havent been able to work out how to stop that breeding self
replicating generations of welfare bludgers, even in the affluent west,
let alone the armpits of the world like africa where they keep pumping
out FAR more kids than their circumstances can possibly support.
> Stable governments would certainly help but first they need
> to be put in place and I doubt this will happen by itself.
It doesnt happen with even the most gung ho attempts to impose it either.
> Obviously we will need to produce enough food.
We have worked that out quite a while ago now.
We havent worked out how to do something about the very fundamental
problem of them pumping out FAR more kids than their circumstances can
possibly support tho except via the affluence route and we havent worked out
how to make an armpit of the world like africa affluent, so that doesnt work there.
M Purcell
Again, I do not restrict charity to handouts, I also include providing
the opportunity for them to help theirselves. The first step seems to
be providing a stable government with the associated infrastructure
such as social programs and access to contraceptives. Obviously we
haven't figured out how to do that yet but I'm hopeful we will learn
something from Afghanistan and Iraq.
Beam Me Up Scotty
Don't let the new world kick you in the ass on your way to your new
endeavor.
John Jones
> William Bradford was the governor of the original Pilgrim colony,
> founded at Plymouth in 1621. The colony was first organized on a
> communal basis, as their financiers required. Land was owned in
> common. The Pilgrims farmed communally, too, following the "from each
> according to his abilities, to each according to his needs" precept.
>
> years ago than it does today.
You are arguing that when people work together the result is always
disaster.
Beam Me Up Scotty
When people work for themselves, the result is better.
Rod Speed
Niether do I. The green revolution stuff wasnt anything like
handouts and was in fact the most effective form of charity
that did something about starvation that we have ever seen.
> I also include providing the opportunity for them to help theirselves.
Its a hell of a lot easier said than done while ever they keep pumping
out FAR more kids than their circumstances can possibly support.
> The first step seems to be providing a stable government
We havent been able to work out how to do that with the dregs of the world.
We did work out how to do it with Japan and Germany after
WW2, but we have been completely hopeless at it in the
vast bulk of the ex colonys in Africa and South America etc.
We never managed it with SE Asia either.
> with the associated infrastructure such as social programs
We never did work out how to do that with the dregs of the
world like India and Pakistan and Bangladesh and Sri Lanka etc.
We didnt even manage to work out how to get out
of India without immense piles of corpses left behind.
> and access to contraceptives.
Thats trivial to do. The problem is getting the fools to use them.
They wont even use them when they will die of HIV/AIDS if they dont use them.
> Obviously we haven't figured out how to do that yet but I'm
> hopeful we will learn something from Afghanistan and Iraq.
About the only thing we will learn from either it to not invade
either again and not be stupid enough to try invading Iran etc.
While the British did make a worthwhile contribution in India, it didnt
do a damned thing about the most fundamental problem, pumping
M Purcell
> M Purcell wrote
> > Again, I do not restrict charity to handouts,
Education would be needed and the Catholic Church hasn't helped. I
suspect it is a lack of social programs that encourages people to have
more children to provide a safty net and I think it was the prior
industrialization of Japan and Germany that made it possible to
rebuild but it's practically from the ground up for third-world
countries. In any case I believe the governments will eventually have
to restrict births.
Les Cargill
> On Nov 27, 9:05 am, Les Cargill <lcargil...@comcast.net> wrote:
>> M Purcell wrote:
>
>>> Well globally, markets are subject to different regulations in
>>> different countries. Charity is what is needed to end hunger
>> Nope. Productivity and an effective system of rule of law
>> work much better. "Charity" WRT Africa often ends up propping
>> up strongman kleptocracies.
>
> How about an effective system of assistance?
It's just awful. It has a really checkered track record, but
it's all but inhuman to expect people to not try.
To the extent is wasn't pure rationalization for
exploiting people, this was the founding
principle of the British Empire.
> I don't restrict charity
> to giving money but include actually trying to help other people.
But that inflicts on you a burden that's very heavy. It's
extremely difficult, and if you've done it, I salute you.
> Stable governments would certainly help but first they need to be put
> in place and I doubt this will happen by itself. Obviously we will
> need to produce enough food.
We do. That hasn't been a problem for some time now.
--
Les Cargill
Rod Speed
>>> and access to contraceptives.
> Education would be needed
The dregs of the world cant even manage to get them to read and write.
> and the Catholic Church hasn't helped.
Doesnt explain why the moslems and heathens have FAR
more kids than their circumstances can possibly support.
> I suspect it is a lack of social programs that encourages
> people to have more children to provide a safty net
There is no way to provide them with 'social programs' that avoid that.
> and I think it was the prior industrialization of Japan
> and Germany that made it possible to rebuild
It was MUCH more a mindset. And Germany didnt do that immediately
after WW1 ended, so it cant just be industrialisation that matters.
> but it's practically from the ground up for third-world countries.
It doesnt even work in a place like South Africa which does
at least have something reasonably viable education wise.
> In any case I believe the governments will eventually have to restrict births.
Yes, thats certainly what worked with china, but I cant see anyone else doing it that way any time soon.
Les Cargill
NO, that's simply wrong. When people work together according
to what they think is right, things generally get much better.
Even if they're wrong, they'll usually figure it out. People
are amazingly plastic in that way. You don't have to have perfect
SAT scores to be adaptible.
When somebody thinks they have a monopoly view of
what is right, and think they can construct a
committee to enforce it, that is when things go wrong.
Cooperation is as natural a state as Man has. It is the
abuse of, the cooption of natural cooperation for the
purpose of *empowering a few* that goes off the rails.
--
Les Cargill
Les Cargill
Absent hubris, yes.
--
Les Cargill