The Government Owns the Means of Production

Just ignore idiotic talking points. Halliburton has NOTHING to do with the GM bailout/bankruptcy scam.

 

The government isn't a roulette table.

I'm all for the best company to be successful, not just ones that the government owns. In other words, I support capitalism.

 

I think Hyundai is an up and comer. 10 year/100,000 mile warranties!

 

the problem with GM is that its been a broken model, broken company for many many years. they have been getting their ass kicked by the japanese since the mid 80s.

the government owning them is like when you play co-ed basketball in grade school and they MADE you pass to the girl before you could score a basket.

 

only 5% of the girls in the WNBA are doable.

 

What about the corporate control of the election process via media selected candidates? Or the voting machines which we don't see the proprietary software too nor can it be audited by outside bodies due to trade secrets? The millitary industrial complex that Eisenhower talked about? Yes the "government" is taking over GM but who controls the government? Which former Investment Bank has supplied the majority of our last few Treasury secretary's and/or their closest advisors: including Henry Paulson (Bush the guy who passed TARP 1), and Robert Rubin (Who pushed for NAFTA under Clinton) and the man they are very close with Timothy Geithner, the answer is Goldman Sachs. Goldman also is the former abode of most New York Fed chiefs including Steven Friedman a man who held goldman stock while acting as head of the New York Fed after Geithner left. To say the Government owns the means of production isn't entirely accurate. Socialism for the corporations has a proper name.

"Corporatism should be more rightly called Facism for ultimately it is the merger between State and Corporation."

Benito Mussolini

This is a non-partisan effort to further concentrate power among an increasingly small elite and their bureaucratic counterparts in government. Neither Democrat nor Republican candidates are helping except perhaps at the small local level.

Here is a thought provoking article I don't totally agree with but feel raises some good points.

I for one see it as a trend towards authoritarianism more then towards collectivism but that is just me. Bush was on the same train that Obama is now driving. Really, we've been moving this direction since the Reconstruction. The Robber Barons never went away and their power was never broken. They have used the government to meet their ends for over a century now. Perhaps Eisenhower had integrity same with JFK but they are rare. Really since WW II it's been one set of tools after another Johnson (Vietnam, War on Poverty) Nixon (Watergate, Bombing Cambodia, mentor of Cheney/Rufmsfeld) and Ford (with Nelson Rockefeller as VP and bagman for the Johnson Nixon years with Rumsfeld and Cheney lurking in his Cabinet), Carter (with Zibigniew Brzenski in the cabinet), Reagan (All HW's guys after Regan got shot leading to Iran/Contra, Panama etc.) HW Bush (Mr. NWO himself), Clinton (NAFTA, Telecommunications Act), W. Bush (Need I say more?) and now Obama.

Obama who signed the retroactive immunity bill to protect the telecom companies from lawsuits over invasion of privacy and violationof the 4th amendment, is overseeing the biggest transfer of wealth in human history on a scale that would make Dick and Rummy blush. litterally Trillions of taxpayer dollars have gone to the banks either through the FED (A private corporation, check your phone book it is right next to Federal Express and is NOT in the government section as it is owned by the banks it over sees such as Bank of America) or through the Treasury TARP 2, TALF and the private public purchase of "toxic or legacy" assets where the tax payer covers the purcahse of the assets if it isn't profitable for the private party who bought them. Yes, if he were not a black man, but instead white and Republican a lot of folks who support him would be up in arms over his actions. Instead they currently see no evil. Just as a bunch of Republicans refused to see Bush's destruction of the constitution and economy for many years, as he was to them, comfortably white and Republican


It's funny to me as human history has been quite consistent for the last 10,000 years of history but people want to believe that elite and powerful people stopped being power hungry, ruthless greedy and sneaky sometime in the 1700's with the Enlightenment and supposed democracy. The fact is rich and powerful people have always vied for power at the expense of each other and the masses and nothing has changed. With the advent of widespread information and litteracy the powerful had to learn to hide their machniations from a now somewhat witting public. In the late 1600's the Vatican implented the beginings of the modern form of propaganda. Nations, royalty, the rich and powerful and eventually governments and corporations would use increasingly sophisticated forms of propaganda and disinformation to hide their activity from the masses.

Nothing has changed much really and what's more important is that it doesn't matter. Only a truly spiritual evolution will shift things for the blueprint for destruction lies in us all. It is the human mind and ego. It is our sense of seprateness that leads to our baseline emotion fear and alienation which in turn leads to selfish as opposed to selfless motivations. Luckily there is a way out. There must be something which is permanent to know that things are impermanent. There must be something changeless to acknowledge that things change. It exists within all of us and paradoxically we all exist within it. When we awakening from the dream of thought so too will we learn to master the mind instead of being mastered by it. When we have awakened then all will change in unimaginable ways. Read the teachings of Ramana Maharshi, "Sailor" Bob Adamson, Eckhart Tolle, Lao Tzu, Nisargadatta Maharaj, Robert Adams, Byron Katie and many many others. Find the sense of "I am" within, sense your own beingness. You will know you are going the right direction when the mind slows and you feel an increasing sense of peace deep within. If enough of us do this the world will truly change in a way that is sustainable. Don't stop living your life but learn to live within the present moment with spontaneous action. Use the mind as a tool don't let it use you!

 

uhhh......yes?

 

Obama did not bail out GM. It bailed out the union. This has nothing to do with GM (or Chrysler). The union employees that worked for UAW and retired with a full company paid pension (that they were eligible for at age 48). There were no 401k's- it's all automaker paid. If any of them go under, hundreds of thousands of UAW retirees lose their entire pension. Obama was commited to preventing that. No matter what the cost to the US and to us, those automakers are going to stay in business. No matter how bad the vehicles are, no matter how much money the UAW workers make, no matter how much money the automakers lose... they will be fully supported so long as the dems control the White House. I'm not arguing whether this is goor or bad, only that it is what it is.

 

What do all of you anti-bailout folks propose instead?

Let them go out of business? Nice theory, disastrous policy in reality.

BTW, have any of you noticed that the mid-80s Chrysler bailout was a resounding success, despite Chrysler's current problems?

 

You mean disastrous results in theory. You don't know what will happen if you let them fail since they didn't let them.

Sure there are people saying about all these part suppliers, blah blah blah, jobs lost, blah blah blah....but companies don't exist for the purpose of keeping other people employed, they exist to be profitable and to provide goods and services that people want.

People don't want GM products. If they are allowed to let the market play on itself someone else will step in. Its not like people WON'T need cars because there is GM. Its just a pride thing for America really....kind of stupid to support a failing company like that.

 

I'm far more for the bailout of the auto industry then for the Bank bailouts. You see these things have costs and our credit card is maxxed out. Nobody is buying our long term treasuries and bonds. Bill Gross of Pimco says that the US will lose it's AAA status for loans, this in the wake of the UK being downgraded from AAA stable to AAA negative. The long term bond yield is rising. This may not sound important but it is critical. The government has two (well three, but I will discuss that as well. Let's just say the 3rd is BAD) means of raising money:

One: we sell debt (e.g. T-bills, bonds etc.). To sell debt the AAA rating is key as it is a virtual guarantee that the investor will get their money back with a profit. The misrepresentation of Sub-Prime loans as AAA debt when converted into loan packages kicked off this disaster. Now we are having a hard time selling long term debt for the first time in modern memory, maybe ever.

Two: the collection of taxes. This year due to the recession/depression we lost so many jobs that we had a net loss on taxes as people earned more in tax refunds then the government brought in. This happened in the 1980's but things were different then. Since the 1980's we have a deficit so large that it is scheduled to consume 100% of the GDP within 5 years this is excluding long term commitments like Social Security, Veteran's benefits and Medicare (a private public scam for medical insurance companies benefits we need single payer universal health care which would cost FAR LESS!).


Option Three the bad one: So now we have taken up the Japanese idea of Quantitative Easing (QE) a euphemism for printing money. The Fed buying the treasuries with newly (electonically) minted dollars. This will cause extreme inflationary pressure. One might think with all the deleveraging we will face deflation but this is not so. Look at the price gains in commodities this year, the cost of gas, groceries etc. all are rising. QE might have worked for Japan as the rest of the world was not in recession and they could still sell their goods from their solid industrial base (we have no industry to speak of other then failing auto and military industrial) and their status as a creditor to the US. The US faces a situation far more akin to the Weimar republic or Zimbabwe where we have insurmountable debt, an extreme recession and now the printing of money.

Here is the result, the man might be a millionaire or even a billionaire but that don't help you when a loaf of bread costs millions or billions.



Or if you prefer to see a white person in trouble because you are desensitized to the plight of africans:



In the Weimar republic seen above it became more cost effective to burn money for warmth as it took so much money to buy firewood you got more heat from burning the money.

The solution? Buy some equities that are solid, buy physical gold and silver (and their related stocks e.g. mining stocks or futures but NOT ETFS!) also oil and other energy stocks and buy productive land. Physical silver is cheap still (maybe $16.50 per ounce) and can be bought here in Portland. Physical silver went from 8 marks in 1919 to about 80,000,000,000 marks in 1923 in the Weimar republic. At the same time a loaf of bread went from roughly 4 marks to about 20,000,000,000 marks for comparison. It is unlikely that it will be nearly this bad in the US but a five to tenfold increase in prices in the next 3 years is quite likely indeed.

If you don't believe me perhaps you will believe Jim Rogers the one time business partner and co-founder along with George Soros of the Quantum Fund in the 1970's which had 1000+% returns. Jim Rogers correctly called the bull market in China in the 1980's.

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Here is someone who thinks we have a shot at a new bull market based on green tech. I have green tech positions for this exact reason. I also have heavy commodity positions for the above reasons.

 

The whole premise of the OP is faulty.

The U.S. owns the postal service and the TVA and both of those compete with private companies without problems. Besides, the U.S. is not looking to compete in the auto industry.

The economy would look very similar if the Republicans had won the last election.

 

Eactly, loans on good terms for both parties, or let GM fail and the market do it's job. What pro-union folks on the left want is protected jobs what the rich want is protected markets. Unfortunately, globalization doesn't work that way. What is problematic is all the protectionism that goes on and of course all the environmental degradation and human rights violations of unfettered globalization. The solution has to be adoption of the UN universal declaration of human rights and a similar declaration to prevent catastrophic destruction of the environment. We probably will need to re-organize economics around the new realities of globalization, overpopulation and techonological and communication advances. Capitalism is preferable to communism and facism but we may need something new as infinite growth is no longer a tenable proposition.

 

The real problem with GM is GMAC. It turns out GM hasn't been profitable for years but they created a financial wing that got into sub-prime and horrible derivatives like Credit Default Swaps. This is what killed the company beyond repair. If they had reorganized in the late 1990's and stayed out of finance the problem would be FAR less severe.