yeah it got really funny, it was the one time firesand was mentioned in the past 2 years and he has a meltdown

*does a forum search of own name*

wealth distribution thread

*gasp*

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Originally posted by -667-
lol what a fucking maroon, pretending he's a working class hero that deserves a Lenin medal, over inheriting his daddy's shit farm that probably runs on immigrants and subsidies

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Originally posted by turtleman
A normal person wouldn't say that in real life because it's ridiculous and insulting. Yet here you are spouting the most hateful garbage that your demons can muster out of your darkened soul. All because of the internet.

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Nedok! I hope your son Liam is doing well. And of course your own silverback gorilla... . I can also see that the trolls and wannabe trolls are still here. This forum is like going back to a high school reunion where no one has moved on and is telling the same story over and over.

Just thought I would update you all that while you continue to complain and become more and more bitter about your life... That I am very happy with my life and this country. Haters are gonna hate.

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Originally posted by firesand
Just thought I would update you all that while you continue to complain and become more and more bitter about your life... That I am very happy with my life and this country. Haters are gonna hate.

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Originally posted by turtleman
A normal person wouldn't say that in real life because it's ridiculous and insulting. Yet here you are spouting the most hateful garbage that your demons can muster out of your darkened soul. All because of the internet.

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Originally posted by article
America is the richest country on Earth. We have the most millionaires, the most billionaires and our wealthiest citizens have garnered more of the planet's riches than any other group in the world. We even have hedge fund managers who make in one hour as much as the average family makes in 21 years!

This opulence is supposed to trickle down to the rest of us, improving the lives of everyday Americans. At least that's what free-market cheerleaders repeatedly promise us. Unfortunately, it's a lie, one of the biggest ever perpetrated on the American people. Our middle class is falling further and further behind in comparison to the rest of the world. We keep hearing that America is number one. Well, when it comes to middle-class wealth, we're number 27.

The most telling comparative measurement is median wealth (per adult). It describes the amount of wealth accumulated by the person precisely in the middle of the wealth distribution -- fifty percent of the adult population has more wealth, while fifty percent has less. You can't get more middle than that.

Why?
Here's a starter list:
* We don't have real universal health care. We pay more and still have poorer health outcomes than all other industrialized countries. Should a serious illness strike, we also can become impoverished.
* Weak labor laws undermine unions and give large corporations more power to keep wages and benefits down. Unions now represent less than 7 percent of all private sector workers, the lowest ever recorded.
* Our minimum wage is pathetic, especially in comparison to other developed nations. (We're # 13). Nobody can live decently on $7.25 an hour. Our poverty-level minimum wage puts downward pressure on the wages of all working people. Also while we secure important victories for a few unpaid sick days, most other developed nations provide a month of guaranteed paid vacations as well as many paid sick days.
* Wall Street is out of control. Once deregulation started 30 years ago, money has gushed to the top as Wall Street was free to find more and more unethical ways to fleece us.
* Higher education puts our kids into debt. In most other countries higher education is practically tuition free. Indebted students are not likely to accumulate wealth anytime soon.
It's hard to improve your station in life if you're in prison, often due to drug-related charges that don't even exist in other developed nations. In fact, we have the largest prison population in the entire world, and we have the highest percentage of minorities imprisoned. "In major cities across the country, 80 percent of young African Americans now have criminal records." (See Alexander, Michelle (2010), The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York, The New Press. p. 7. as cited in Wikipedia.)
* Our tax structures favor the rich and their corporations who no longer pay their fair share. They move money to foreign tax havens, they create and use tax loopholes, and they fight to make sure the source of most of their wealth -- capital gains -- is taxed at low rates. Meanwhile the rest of us are pressed to make up the difference or suffer deteriorating public services.
The wealthy dominate politics. Nowhere else in the developed world are the rich and their corporations able to buy elections with such impunity.
* Big Money dominates the media. The real story about how we're getting ripped off is hidden in a blizzard of BS that comes from all the major media outlets... brought to you by...
* America encourages globalization of production so that workers here are in constant competition with the lower wage workers all over the world as well as with highly automated technologies.

Is there one cause of the middle-class collapse that rises above all others?
Yes. Guess which one had the biggest impact on the growing split between the one percent and the 99 percent? Financialization!

What is that? Economist Gerald Epstein offers us a working definition:
"Financialization means the increasing role of financial motives, financial markets, financial actors and financial institutions in the operation of the domestic and international economies."

This includes such trends as:
* The corporate change during the 1980s to make shareholder value the ultimate goal.
* The deregulation of Wall Street that allowed for the creation of a vast array of new financial instruments for gambling.
* Allowing private equity firm to buy companies, load them up with debt, extract enormous returns, and then kiss them good-by.
* The growth of hedge funds that suck productive wealth out of the economy.
* The myriad of barely regulated world financial markets that finance the globalization of production, combined with so-call "free trade" agreements.
* The increased share of all corporate profits that go to the financial sector.
* The ever-increasing size of too-big-to-fail banks.
* The fact that many of our best students rush to Wall Street instead of careers in science, medicine or education.

In short, financialization is when making money from money becomes more important that providing real goods and services.

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http://www.sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/news/?id=a10e50a7-5b9d-4933-9bb8-decd3ce624dd

Richest 300 Persons on Earth Have More Money Than Poorest 3 Billion
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"i don't have pet peeves, i have major psychotic fucking hatreds"

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Originally posted by hassan-i-sabbah

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Originally posted by -667-
lol what a fucking maroon, pretending he's a working class hero that deserves a Lenin medal, over inheriting his daddy's shit farm that probably runs on immigrants and subsidies

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between the subsidies and the veritable slave labor passes for "guest workers" american farmers are probably the most pampered people in the country behind financieers and the military/defense industry

and decades of propaganda about FAMILY FARMS has all these landed gentry with sprawling estates the size of small towns thinking they're hard living salt of the earth hay seeds

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there are no farms in your frozen wasteland neo nazi country


is it true ripe[eur0] is minister of foreign policy affairs in finland?
_________________
"i don't have pet peeves, i have major psychotic fucking hatreds"

Last edited by Jon; on Wed Jul 24, 2013 12:02 pm; edited 1 time in total

Doesn't look likely to change over here anytime soon. Current versions of the farm bill still contain lavish subsidies to rich farmers(which are illegal under WTO rules BTW).

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Originally posted by article
The House of Representatives has now passed a farm bill on an entirely partisan basis. No Democrat voted for the bill, not least because the House leadership voted out the nutrition title that would have reauthorized food stamps, or Supplementary Nutrition Assistance Program.

Several Republican members also refrained from offering support for the modified legislation because of their concerns about feckless spending on farm programs that waste economic resources and disproportionately send billions of subsidy dollars to wealthy individuals. The farms that would receive over eighty percent of all the subsidies in the 2013 House bill are owned and managed by farm households and landowners with assets that are measured in the multiple millions of dollars, and incomes that are several times larger than those of the median U.S. households.

The real puzzle is why any House representative, Republican or Democrat, who has any serious concerns about reducing the federal deficit, or ending wasteful and poorly targeted programs that ship transfer payments to wealthy families and corporations, would have voted for the 2013 House farm bill. The answer leads back to the wealthy farmers, insurance companies, and agri-business lobbies that benefit most from farm programs, and their influence in farm-heavy districts. They wanted to preserve and expand agricultural entitlement programs that pay their constituents billions. Reforming the program to make it economically efficient, equitable, and effective seems to have taken a back seat to other concerns.

How else could one explain why serious Republicans who have consistently sought for more efficient and sensible fiscal policies supported a bill that includes a crop insurance program that costs over taxpayers over $10 billion per year, pays more than 80 percent of its benefits to the wealthiest 20 percent of farm households, and encourages high risk and wasteful management practices. The government picks up 70 percent of the cost of the crop insurance program that provides unlimited subsidies to wealthy farmers, thousands of whom receive six figure plus premium subsidies every year. The federal government also pays crop insurance companies like Wells Fargo an average over $2 billion a year to sell and service the policies.

Then there is a new Price-Loss Coverage program that would lock in record-high prices for farmers. If crop prices fell to historical average levels, the program would cost taxpayers as much as $18 billion annually.

Then there is a new cotton subsidy that will continue to violate World Trade Organization rules and is likely to continue to requires the U.S. to pay Brazil $147 million annually-just so U.S. cotton producers can continue to receive substantial subsidies.

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Originally posted by Jon;
there are no farms in your frozen wasteland neo nazi country


is it true ripe[eur0] is minister of foreign policy affairs in finland?

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Originally posted by -667-
It's even more hilarious in here since the climate alone makes a huge majority of agriculture unsustainable by default if the value of self-sufficiency is taken out of the equation (and that doesn't really exist in the current western world either way).

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Originally posted by -667-
But when you have walmart paying too little wages for workers and the government not only subsidizes walmart but it's employers, it's when people should feel guilty about not being of enough value. It's like some really odd comedy sketch that's so fucking out there it's not amusing because it's not understandable anymore.

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Originally posted by turtleman
A normal person wouldn't say that in real life because it's ridiculous and insulting. Yet here you are spouting the most hateful garbage that your demons can muster out of your darkened soul. All because of the internet.

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