Obama admin halts prosecution of USS Cole bomber

[Little-Acorn]

If this sort of appeasement worked, the Islamic militants around the world would absolutely love us by now.

Do they?

I am disgusted by this.

--------------------------------------------------------------------

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/08/26/AR2010082606353.html

Administration halts prosecution of alleged USS Cole bomber

By Peter Finn
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, August 26, 2010; 8:47 PM

The Obama administration has shelved the planned prosecution of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, the alleged coordinator of the Oct. 2000 suicide attack on the USS Cole in Yemen, according to a court filing.

The decision at least temporarily scuttles what was supposed to be the signature trial of a major al-Qaeda figure under a reformed system of military commissions. And it comes practically on the eve of the 10th anniversary of the attack, which killed 17 sailors and wounded dozens when a boat packed with explosives ripped a hole in the side of the warship in the port of Aden.

In a filing this week in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, the Justice Department said that "no charges are either pending or contemplated with respect to al-Nashiri in the near future."

The statement, tucked into a motion to dismiss a petition by Nashiri's attorneys, suggests that the prospect of further military trials for detainees held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, has all but ground to a halt, much as the administration's plan to try the accused plotters of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in federal court has stalled.

Only two cases are moving forward at Guantanamo Bay, and both were sworn and referred for trial by the time Obama took office. In January 2009, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates directed the Convening Authority for Military Commissions to stop referring cases for trial, an order that 20 months later has not been rescinded.

Military officials said a team of prosecutors in the Nashiri case has been ready go to trial for some time. And several months ago, military officials seemed confident that Nashiri would be arraigned this summer.

"It's politics at this point," said one military official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss policy.

[Kathianne]

Unbelievable! This administration in general and the justice department in particular are the worst, ever on so many fronts.

[Solar]

Is anyone really surprised, the Marxist not only bows to every dictator on the planet, he apologizes for America every chance he gets.

[krisy]

I am astounded that these guys have not been prosecuted yet!!!!!!!

This justice dept SUCKS :rolleyes:

[DragonStryk72]

Well, that pretty much solidifies whoever the Republicans put forward for President 2012. Not a chance at this point, cause they're gonna murder on this one, and it's his own fault entirely.

[Agnapostate]

Terrorists are only prosecuted or recognized as such based on their usefulness to state administrators anyway. Yasser Arafat was a "terrorist," but Menachem Begin apparently was not despite his leadership of the Irgun. Megrahi's release is protested because he is a "terrorist" despite the fact that there were probably inconsistencies in his trial and he released a lengthy dispute of his conviction, but Luis Posada Carriles is all good because he targets an official state enemy.

[Solar]

Terrorists are only prosecuted or recognized as such based on their usefulness to state administrators anyway. Yasser Arafat was a "terrorist," but Menachem Begin apparently was not despite his leadership of the Irgun. Megrahi's release is protested because he is a "terrorist" despite the fact that there were probably inconsistencies in his trial and he released a lengthy dispute of his conviction, but Luis Posada Carriles is all good because he targets an official state enemy.

This is true, and, or in this case Hussein understands and empathizes in their plight.

Have you ever seen an administration so Hell bent on the destruction of the American way of life, all the while appeasing the enemy?

[Gaffer]

This is true, and, or in this case Hussein understands and empathizes in their plight.

Have you ever seen an administration so Hell bent on the destruction of the American way of life, all the while appeasing the enemy?

Worse yet, I expect the pardons are going to fly all over the place when he leaves office. Terrorists, murders, rapists and others are going to be walking the streets in droves.

[Solar]

Terrorists are only prosecuted or recognized as such based on their usefulness to state administrators anyway. Yasser Arafat was a "terrorist," but Menachem Begin apparently was not despite his leadership of the Irgun. Megrahi's release is protested because he is a "terrorist" despite the fact that there were probably inconsistencies in his trial and he released a lengthy dispute of his conviction, but Luis Posada Carriles is all good because he targets an official state enemy.


This is true, and, or in this case Hussein understands and empathizes in their plight.

Have you ever seen an administration so Hell bent on the destruction of the American way of life, all the while appeasing the enemy?

So true my friend, and unlike Clinton, pardoning thieves and drug dealers, Hussein will be pardoning enemies of the State and other communists/Marxists akin to himself.

[Agnapostate]

This is true, and, or in this case Hussein understands and empathizes in their plight.

Have you ever seen an administration so Hell bent on the destruction of the American way of life, all the while appeasing the enemy?

Yes, certainly. I'd nominate Andrew Jackson, orchestrator of and shameless apologist for ethnic cleansing.


Humanity has often wept over the fate of the aborigines of this country, and philanthropy has been long busily employed in devising means to avert it, but its progress has never for a moment been arrested, and one by one have many powerful tribes disappeared from the earth. To follow to the tombs the last of his race and to tread on the graves of extinct nations excite melancholy reflections. But true philanthropy reconciles the mind to those vicissitudes as it does to the extinction of one generation to make room for another. Philanthropy could not wish to see this continent restored to the condition in which it was found by our forefathers. What good man would prefer a country covered with forests and ganged by a few thousand savages to our extensive Republic, studded with cities, towns, and prosperous farms, embellished with all the improvements which art can devise or industry execute, occupied by more than 12,000,000 happy people, and filled with all the blessings of liberty, civilization, and religion?

Gotta love Ole' Hickory, eh? :salute:


So true my friend, and unlike Clinton, pardoning thieves and drug dealers, Hussein will be pardoning enemies of the State and other communists/Marxists akin to himself.

LOL. I'm a communist. And I know many Marxists, though I'm not one myself. And the American socialist movement is quite firmly united against Barack Obama.

http://www.revleft.com/vb/why-obama-not-t128791/index.html?p=1666434

http://www.revleft.com/vb/obama-socialisti-t136057/index.html?t=136057

http://www.revleft.com/vb/marxist-anaylsis-obamai-t136665/index.html?t=136665

That said, why do you keep calling him "Hussein"? It's not customary to call a person by his or her middle name, so you seem to be emphasizing the fact that his name is Arabic, which is a language? Do you have some hatred of Arabic language or a dislike of ethnic Arabs? :dunno:

[Solar]

Yes, certainly. I'd nominate Andrew Jackson, orchestrator of and shameless apologist for ethnic cleansing.

Gotta love Ole' Hickory, eh? :salute:


LOL. I'm a communist. And I know many Marxists, though I'm not one myself. And the American socialist movement is quite firmly united against Barack Obama.


I also know you're a young and confused fool, that doesn't understand the meaning of being a commie.

[QUOTE]
Oh boy, some moron on the Internet said he isn't, so there!
Does the word socialized, in socialized medicine, mean anything to you?
The fact that his every move has been toward bringing down the our very way of life, the heart of what it is to be American?
Are you truly that blind?
I find it interesting that the www.cpusa.org has been backing him, yet you can't make the connection.
And FWIW, there is no difference in a Marxist and or Commie!
Read and learn!
"Karl Marx describes in his communist manifesto, the ten steps necessary to destroy a free enterprise system and replace it with a system of omnipotent government power, so as to effect a communist socialist state. "
http://www.libertyzone.com/Communist-Manifesto-Planks.html


Because he shares not only blood but ideology with a former dictator.
Only a Racist would see that as Racist!
Are you a Racist?

[namvet]

he just pissed on the graves of sailors. should we expect any more from a muslim????

[Agnapostate]

I also know you're a young and confused fool, that doesn't understand the meaning of being a commie.

No, you ignorant moron, there's not a single reputable socialist who will claim that Barack Obama is one.

http://www.cnn.com/2010/POLITICS/04/14/Obama.socialist/index.html


Billy Wharton should be happy.

"Socialized health care" is on its way. The "socialist agenda" is taking over America. And best of all, Barack Obama, a "committed socialist ideologue," is in the Oval Office.

But Wharton, co-chair of the Socialist Party USA, sees no reason to celebrate. He's seen people with bumper stickers and placards that call Obama a socialist, and he has a message for them: Obama isn't a socialist. He's not even a liberal.

"We didn't see a great victory with the election of Barack Obama," Wharton says, " and we certainly didn't see our agenda move from the streets to the White House."

Are many Americans secret socialists?

Obama's opponents have long described him as a socialist. But what do actual socialists think about Obama? Not much, says Wharton.

"He's the president whose main goal is to protect the wealth of the richest 5 percent of Americans."

He and others say the assertion that Obama is a socialist is absurd.

"It makes no rational sense. It clearly means that people don't understand what socialism is."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/13/AR2009031301899.html


The funny thing is, of course, that socialists know that Barack Obama is not one of us. Not only is he not a socialist, he may in fact not even be a liberal. Socialists understand him more as a hedge-fund Democrat -- one of a generation of neoliberal politicians firmly committed to free-market policies.

http://www.politicsdaily.com/2009/09/09/top-u-s-socialist-says-barack-obama-is-not-one-of-them/


So if the United States has elected a socialist president, the socialists must be pretty excited, right? Claiming just a single U.S. Senator (Vermonter Bernie Sanders) and exactly zero members of the House of Representatives as their own, putting a socialist in the White House would represent the greatest achievement of any socialist alive today.

But there's just one problem. The socialists won't claim Obama as their own. They won't even call him a socialist.

Frank Llewellyn, the National Director of the Democratic Socialists of America, the country's largest socialist organization, said Obama is most definitely not one of them. "He's not any kind of socialist at all," Llewellyn told me this week. He called the president "a market guy," which is hardly a compliment coming from a man with serious reservations about market capitalism.

"He's not challenging the power of the corporations," Llewellyn added. "The banking reforms that have been suggested are not particularly far reaching. He says we must have room for innovation, but we had innovation -- look where it got us. So I just...I can't..I mean it's laugh out loud, really."

I posted several forum threads to demonstrate that socialist leaders are not being duplicitous or are out-of-step with the rank-and-file; the overwhelming majority of socialists recognize that he is not one, because he has not taken steps to enact worker ownership and management of the means of production. The mention of the health care issue is amusing, because apart from the fact that the enacted legislation was not single-payer or inclusive of a public option, even full-blown "socialized" medicine does not involve worker ownership and management of the means of production. Indeed, it sustains the physical efficiency of the labor force in the context of the capitalist economy, and is therefore anti-socialist in a sense.

[Little-Acorn]

No, you ignorant moron, there's not a single reputable socialist who will claim that

:lol: :lol: :lol:

[Solar]

Yes, certainly. I'd nominate Andrew Jackson, orchestrator of and shameless apologist for ethnic cleansing.



Gotta love Ole' Hickory, eh? :salute:



LOL. I'm a communist. And I know many Marxists, though I'm not one myself. And the American socialist movement is quite firmly united against Barack Obama.

http://www.revleft.com/vb/why-obama-not-t128791/index.html?p=1666434

http://www.revleft.com/vb/obama-socialisti-t136057/index.html?t=136057

http://www.revleft.com/vb/marxist-anaylsis-obamai-t136665/index.html?t=136665

That said, why do you keep calling him "Hussein"? It's not customary to call a person by his or her middle name, so you seem to be emphasizing the fact that his name is Arabic, which is a language? Do you have some hatred of Arabic language or a dislike of ethnic Arabs? :dunno:


No, you ignorant moron, there's not a single reputable socialist who will claim that Barack Obama is one.

http://www.cnn.com/2010/POLITICS/04/14/Obama.socialist/index.html



http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/13/AR2009031301899.html



http://www.politicsdaily.com/2009/09/09/top-u-s-socialist-says-barack-obama-is-not-one-of-them/



I posted several forum threads to demonstrate that socialist leaders are not being duplicitous or are out-of-step with the rank-and-file; the overwhelming majority of socialists recognize that he is not one, because he has not taken steps to enact worker ownership and management of the means of production. The mention of the health care issue is amusing, because apart from the fact that the enacted legislation was not single-payer or inclusive of a public option, even full-blown "socialized" medicine does not involve worker ownership and management of the means of production. Indeed, it sustains the physical efficiency of the labor force in the context of the capitalist economy, and is therefore anti-socialist in a sense.

:laugh::laugh::laugh::laugh:
You said all that BS and had the audacity to call me a moron?:laugh::laugh::laugh::laugh:

Ya know, I bet Commmies all over Venezuela were saying the same thing about Chavez, yet look how that turned out.

You can go on all day about how he isn't a socialist, but it wasn't for lack of trying, his own party put the brakes on most of his crap, so to claim he isn't a socialist based on what he got through, is nothing short of having ones head buried so far up, they can see out their own mouth.

[Pagan]

:laugh::laugh::laugh:
You said all that BS and had the audacity to call me a moron?:laugh::laugh::laugh::laugh:

Ya know, I bet Commmies all over Venezuela were saying the same thing about Chavez, yet look how that turned out.

You can go on all day about how he isn't a socialist, but it wasn't for lack of trying, his own party put the brakes on most of his crap, so to claim he isn't a socialist based on what he got through, is nothing short of having ones head buried so far up, they can see out their own mouth.

Well with most all fools expressing the virtues of Communism and Socialism they leave out the key element that renders both of them enemy's for the common man, the human element. You know Greed, Lust for Power, etc. etc.

Just like a when I was a teenager sitting in a bus station someone was touting the beauty of Communism and I asked "What if someone is Greedy". They replied "No one is greedy in Communism" which I promptly replied "Well I'm greedy". Needless to say they shut up and left. :laugh::laugh::laugh:

[Agnapostate]

:laugh::laugh:
You said all that BS and had the audacity to call me a moron?

Ya know, I bet Commmies all over Venezuela were saying the same thing about Chavez, yet look how that turned out.

You can go on all day about how he isn't a socialist, but it wasn't for lack of trying, his own party put the brakes on most of his crap, so to claim he isn't a socialist based on what he got through, is nothing short of having ones head buried so far up, they can see out their own mouth.


Well with most all fools expressing the virtues of Communism and Socialism they leave out the key element that renders both of them enemy's for the common man, the human element. You know Greed, Lust for Power, etc. etc.

Just like a when I was a teenager sitting in a bus station someone was touting the beauty of Communism and I asked "What if someone is Greedy". They replied "No one is greedy in Communism" which I promptly replied "Well I'm greedy". Needless to say they shut up and left. :laugh:

Are we still sure that LOL'ar and Chafin' aren't the same person? I think I suspect a formula of half the post consisting of ":laugh::laugh::laugh::laugh::laugh::laugh:". Just a guess, though. ;)

[Solar]

Are we still sure that LOL'ar and Chafin' aren't the same person? I think I suspect a formula of half the post consisting of ":laugh::laugh::laugh::laugh::laugh::laugh:". Just a guess, though. ;)

Chafin?
Nope, I'm new to the forum.
I came from LNF after the admin proved to be a complete hypocrite.
Been there for years, with around 50000 posts, I come seeking new liberal hunting grounds.:flameth::wink2:

[Little-Acorn]

I think I suspect a formula of half the post consisting of ":laugh::laugh::laugh::laugh::laugh::laugh:". Just a guess, though. ;)

Is it anything like the far more common pattern of a leftist not being able to refute what someone said, and so he changes the subject and starts making personal comments about the poster instead?

Naw..... :lame2:

[Agnapostate]

That would imply they'd said something needing refutation, which is not the case, since I stated my premises and made a conclusion based on evidence that I cited, and they just contradicted me. That isn't an argument; it's just noisemaking on their part. Whatever. :dunno:

[Little-Acorn]

That would imply they'd said something needing refutation, which is not the case, since I stated my premises and made a conclusion based on evidence that I cited, and they just contradicted me. That isn't an argument; it's just noisemaking on their part. Whatever. :dunno:

"Pagan" pointed out that a normal and common human failing, greed, would interfere with the intended functioning of communism (and, I assume, its kissing cousin socialism).

His point remains unrefuted.

[Agnapostate]

"Pagan" pointed out that a normal and common human failing, greed, would interfere with the intended functioning of communism (and, I assume, its kissing cousin socialism).

His point remains unrefuted.

This thread is not about socialism. It's not even whether about Barack Obama is a socialist, though I let myself get sidetracked onto that. So my point that he is not one, and is not recognized as one by socialists (including myself), was simply ignored, and drowned in the moronic bullshit that was to follow.

As for socialist/communist remuneration, it's eminently more meritocratic than capitalism, since capitalism is based on compensation for the output of one's labor and one's property, allowing some to simply inherit significant amounts of physical capital or titles to productive resources and gain rewards without hard work, whereas those who put forth the greatest effort may reap the least rewards. This is manifestly immoral, in my view. Socialism, conversely, is based on remuneration for one's personal labor effort, with consideration of needs incorporated.

[Solar]

This thread is not about socialism. It's not even whether about Barack Obama is a socialist, though I let myself get sidetracked onto that. So my point that he is not one, and is not recognized as one by socialists (including myself), was simply ignored, and drowned in the moronic bullshit that was to follow.

As for socialist/communist remuneration, it's eminently more meritocratic than capitalism, since capitalism is based on compensation for the output of one's labor and one's property, allowing some to simply inherit significant amounts of physical capital or titles to productive resources and gain rewards without hard work, whereas those who put forth the greatest effort may reap the least rewards. This is manifestly immoral, in my view. Socialism, conversely, is based on remuneration for one's personal labor effort, with consideration of needs incorporated.

Capital is the measure of a mans worth in a Capitalistic society.
There is nothing restricting man in a free society, but in a communist one, you have the Gov inserting itself in every aspect of your life.

Tell me, who is going to be the judge of a mans worth in your Utopia, the gov?

In our current system, a man can build a home, or work in a factory and be rewarded monetarily, while someone that uses their intellect can create ideas that generate new products, from a better paint, to a new medicine and be rewarded even more.

Tell me, will you be the one to judge which one of these contributing workers deserves more pay?
Right now they are both rewarded based on their productivity. In your system, one will lose the incentive to work, yours is a program of punishment of the productive.

Old Russian saying: We pretend to work, and the Gov pretends to pay us...

[Agnapostate]

Very well. If you insist on continuing the derailment of the thread with another topic, I'll oblige.


Capital is the measure of a mans worth in a Capitalistic society.

Strictly speaking, money (financial capital) isn't even a true form of capital, since it is not an independent factor of production. It is a medium of exchange utilized for acquisition of legitimate factors of production and other resources.


There is nothing restricting man in a free society, but in a communist one, you have the Gov inserting itself in every aspect of your life.

While I am enjoying your archaic use of "man" in your pseudo-intellectual pretensions of being a nineteenth-century philosopher, your claim that capitalism somehow approximates a "free society" is flatly wrong. Before I elaborate on that point, we'll first examine your claim that there is "nothing restricting man in a [capitalist] society" with consultation of the empirical literature into social mobility under the current economic paradigm. I'll refer to several sources on this matter.

1. Solon's Intergenerational Income Mobility in the United States (http://www.jstor.org/stable/2117312): "Social scientists and policy analysts have long expressed concern about the extent of intergenerational income mobility in the United States, but remarkably little empirical evidence is available. The few existing estimates of the intergenerational correlation in income have been biased downward by measurement error, unrepresentative samples, or both. New estimates based on intergenerational data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics imply that the intergenerational correlation in long-run income is at least 0.4, indicating dramatically less mobility than suggested by earlier research."

2. Zimmerman's Regression toward Mediocrity in Economic Stature (http://ideas.repec.org/a/aea/aecrev/v82y1992i3p409-29.html): "This paper provides estimates of the correlation in lifetime earnings between fathers and sons. Intergenerational data from the National Longitudinal Survey are used. Earlier studies, conducted for the United States, report elasticities of children's earnings with respect to parent's earnings of 0.2 or less, suggesting extensive intergenerational mobility. These estimates, however, are biased.downward by error-contaminated measures of lifetime economic status. Estimates presented in this paper correct for the problem of measurement error and find the intergenerational correlation in income to be on the order of 0.4. This suggests considerably less intergenerational mobility than previously believed."

3. Björklund and Jäntti's Intergenerational Income Mobility in Sweden Compared to the United States (http://www.jstor.org/stable/2951338): "We have presented a new technique for estimating intergenerational income correlations on independent samples of fathers and sons, if data on actual father-son pairs are unavailable. We used this technique to generate comparable estimates from the United States and Sweden. Our findings contradict the notion that the United States has higher intergenerational mobility."

4. Gangl's Income Inequality, Permanent Incomes, and Income Dynamics: Comparing Europe to the United States (http://wox.sagepub.com/content/32/2/140.abstract): "In most of Europe, real income growth was actually higher than in the United States, many European countries thus achieve not just less income inequality but are able to combine this with higher levels of income stability, better chances of upward mobility for the poor, and a higher protection of the incomes of older workers than common in the United States."

5. Corak's Do poor children become poor adults? Lessons from a cross country comparison of generational earnings mobility (http://ftp.iza.org/dp1993.pdf): "In the United States almost one half of children born to low income parents become low income adults. This is an extreme case, but the fraction is also high in the United Kingdom at four in ten, and Canada where about one-third of low income children do not escape low income in adulthood. In the Nordic countries, where overall child poverty rates are noticeably lower, it is also the case that a disproportionate fraction of low income children become low income adults. Generational cycles of low income may be common in the rich countries, but so are cycles of high income. Rich children tend to become rich adults. Four in ten children born to high income parents will grow up to be high income adults in the United States and the United Kingdom, and as many as one third will do so in Canada."

This can be summarized visually:

http://i357.photobucket.com/albums/oo18/Dolgoff/IncomeDecileProbability.jpg

Sizable accumulations of financial capital are usually derived from direct inheritances, not a lifetime of careful toiling and saving, as Glenn Beck might have you believe. Perhaps I could interest you with reference to Summers and Kotlikoff's The role of intergenerational transfers in aggregate capital accumulation (http://www.jstor.org/stable/1833031). Consider the abstract:


This paper uses historical U.S. data to directly estimate the contribution of intergenerational transfers to aggregate capital accumulation. The evidence presented indicates that intergenerational transfers account for the vast majority of aggregate U.S. capital formation; only a negligible fraction of actual capital accumulation can be traced to life-cycle or "hump" savings.

:dunno:


Tell me, who is going to be the judge of a mans worth in your Utopia, the gov?

My "Utopia"? Your laughable promotion of the "free market," a perpetually nonexistent pipe dream that is present only in the textbook, renders you the utopian idealist through and through.


In our current system, a man can build a home, or work in a factory and be rewarded monetarily, while someone that uses their intellect can create ideas that generate new products, from a better paint, to a new medicine and be rewarded even more.

Tell me, will you be the one to judge which one of these contributing workers deserves more pay? Right now they are both rewarded based on their productivity.

Not at all. In the case of capitalist wage labor, its proponent will simply answer that unlike slavery, it is based on voluntary association, and the authoritarian hierarchies that characterize the labor market are not morally problematic. But we first have to analyze the conditions of potentially liberty-restricting power that surround its existence. I typically refer to the spectrum of influence terms that the political scientist Robert Dahl uses, which ranges from rational persuasion to manipulative persuasion to inducement to power to coercion to physical force. We know that physical force is not the only negative influence term, and even pseudo-libertarians would likely admit that aside from inducement, all others aside from rational persuasion are morally problematic. Their support for laws against fraud, for example, would be indicative of their opposition to "consensual" yet manipulative persuasion.

Yet we do not see a consistent opposition to manipulative persuasion in the capitalist labor market emerging, nor a consistent opposition to conditions of power and coercion occurring. Those conditions are manifested in this way described by David Ellerman:


When a robber denies another person's right to make an infinite number of other choices besides losing his money or his life and the denial is backed up by a gun, then this is clearly robbery even though it might be said that the victim making a 'voluntary choice' between his remaining options. When the legal system itself denies the natural rights of working people in the name of the prerogatives of capital, and this denial is sanctioned by the legal violence of the state, then the theorists of 'libertarian' capitalism do not proclaim institutional robbery, but rather they celebrate the 'natural liberty' of working people to choose between the remaining options of selling their labour as a commodity and being unemployed.

Hence, robbery committed via means of a gun is condemned as coercion because though the victim "consents" to being robbed and can theoretically not do so, the consequence of this is likely to be an injurious and possibly fatal gunshot wound. Similarly, though the wage laborer "consents" to enter into a contract with his or her employer and can theoretically not do so, the consequence of this is unemployment and subjection to the conditions of indigence and destitution, which may include homelessness, perpetual hunger and thirst, malnourishment, poor health, and in some third-world and even first-world countries, death. This is perhaps not typically as grave as an injurious and potentially fatal gunshot wound, but propertarians would certainly condemn a robber who threatens to beat instead of shoot his victim just as swiftly.

This problem is augmented further when we consider the fact that "labor is often sold under special disadvantages arising from the closely connected group of facts that labor power is 'perishable', that the sellers of it are commonly poor and have no reserve fund, and that they cannot easily withhold it from the market," as noted by Alfred Marshall. This further complicates the negative conditions of power and coercion that mark entry into the capitalist labor market. In addition to that, we have a propensity for manipulative persuasion based on the conditioning of the working class to be inferior to the coordinator class in terms of rationally determining contract provisions in a fully informed manner. This problem was noted by Sidney and Beatrice Webb:


The manual worker is, from his position and training, far less skilled than the employer...in the art of bargaining itself. This art forms a large part of the daily life of the entrepreneur, whilst the foreman is specially selected for his skill in engaging and superintending workmen. The manual worker, on the other hand, has the smallest experience of, and practically no training in, what is essentially one of the arts of the capitalist employer. He never engages in any but one sort of bargaining, and that only on occasions which may be infrequent, and which in any case make up only a tiny fraction of his life.

This compulsion is all explicable on the basis of the constrained social mobility that characterizes the capitalist economy. Because wage laborers are essentially compelled to accept authoritarian conditions because of constrained social mobility, they are subject to misappropriation of the surplus value that they produce.

http://i357.photobucket.com/albums/oo18/Dolgoff/ed4a754f.png

As put by Ernesto Screpanti, "capitalism is an economic system in which surplus value is extracted in the production process by using wage labor and utilized in the circulation process to sustain capital accumulation." The natural tendency of capitalism is to exacerbate inequalities as a result, since preexisting differences in initial endowments determine placement in the hierarchical internal structure of the orthodox firm.


In your system, one will lose the incentive to work, yours is a program of punishment of the productive.

I find there to be no contradiction between rightist ideological axioms and socialist principles. At the heart of any remunerative system is the profit motive, and the consequent tendency to produce for a reward of material gain. Socialism is moral according to rightist axioms because reward is incumbent upon contribution.

If anything, capitalism is anti-rightist because of its fundamentally anti-meritocratic nature. When a system is centered on a number of people that too often simply inherit their assets and parasitically deprive others of the just product of their labor, while the losers are the workers who put forth the most effort, often in arduous physical tasks, its compensatory structure is not one of fair rewards for hard work.

In genuinely socialist theoretical literature, the ideals of equality of opportunity and scalar remuneration are emphasized. Quoting from Peter Kropotkin’s A Conquest of Bread:


Let us take a group of volunteers, combining for some particular enterprise. Having its success at heart, they all work with a will, save one of the associates, who is frequently absent from his post. Must they on his account dissolve the group, elect a president to impose fines, or maybe distribute markers for work done, as is customary in the Academy? It is evident that neither the one nor the other will be done, but that some day the comrade who imperils their enterprise will be told: "Friend, we should like to work with you; but as you are often absent from your post, and you do your work negligently, we must part. Go and find other comrades who will put up with your indifference!"

This was is so natural that it is practiced everywhere, even nowadays, in all industries, in competition with all possible systems of fines, docking of wages, supervision, etc.; a workman may enter the factory at the appointed time, but if he does his work badly, if he hinders his comrades by his laziness or other defects, if he is quarrelsome, there is an end of it; he is compelled to leave the workshop…

Take, for example, an association stipulating that each of its members should carry out the following contract: “We undertake to give you the use of our houses, stores, streets, means of transport, schools, museums, etc., on condition that, from 20 to 45 or 50 years of age, you consecrate four or five hours a day to some work recognized as necessary to existence. Choose yourself the producing groups which you wish to join, or organize a new group, provided that it will undertake to produce necessaries. And as for the remainder of your time, combine together with whomsoever you like, for recreation, art or science, according to the bent of your taste.

Twelve or fifteen hundred hours of work a year, in one of the groups producing food, clothes, or houses, or employed in public sanitation, transport, and so on, is all we ask of you. For this amount of work me guarantee to you the free use of all that these groups produce, or will produce. But if not one, of the thousands of groups of our federation, will receive you, whatever be their motive; if you are absolutely incapable of producing anything useful, or if you refuse to do it, then live like an isolated man or an invalid. If we are rich enough to give you the necessaries of life we shall be delighted to give them to you. You are a man, and you have the right to live. But as you wish to live under special conditions, and leave the ranks, it is more than probable that you will suffer for it in your daily relations with other citizens. You will be looked upon as a ghost of bourgeois society, unless some friends of yours, discovering you to be a talent, kindly free you from all moral obligation towards society by doing all necessary work for you.

And finally, if it does not please you, go and look for other conditions elsewhere in the wide world, or else seek adherents and organize with them on novel principles. We prefer our own.”

This is what could be done in a communal society in order to turn away sluggards if they became too numerous.

What's far more important than this theoretical vision, however appealing it might seem, is the capacity for real-world implementation of this agenda. While facets of workers' ownership and management have been achieved in many contexts, the enactment of a remunerative system along these lines has been less common. However, when it was accomplished during the social revolution of the Spanish Civil War that occurred in the anarchist zones of the Republic, it was reasonably successful. Quoting from Sam Dolgoff's The Anarchist Collectives:


It would be…correct to say that the libertarian collectives in each locality (to assure just and equitable sharing of goods and services, and prevent hoarding and speculation) worked out their own systems of exchange. They issued their own local money in the form of vouchers, tokens, rationing booklets, certificates, coupons, etc., which carried no interest and were not negotiable outside of the issuing collective.

Aside from the loose term of the use “money,” Burnett Bolloten gives a fair general idea of the exchange system in typical libertarian communities:

“In those libertarian communities where money was suppressed, wages were paid in coupons, the scale being determined by the size of the family. Locally produced goods, if abundant, such as bread, wine, and olive oil, were distributed freely, while other articles could be obtained by means of coupons at the communal depot. Surplus goods were exchanged with other anarchist towns and villages, money [the legal national currency] being used only for transactions with those communities that had not yet adopted the new system. (pp. 61, 62)”

Some collectives did in fact abolish money. They had no system of exchange, not even coupons. For example, a resident of Magdalena de Pulpis, when asked, “How do you organize without money? Do you use barter, a coupon book, or anything else?” replied, “Nothing. Everyone works, and everyone has the right to what he needs free of charge. He simply goes to the store where provisions and all other necessities are supplied. Everything is distributed free with only a notation of what he took.”

Supplementing that is Robert Alexander's The Anarchists in the Spanish Civil War:


There was wide divergence in so far as methods of distribution of the output of the collective – and other things brought in from the outside – were concerned. Almost always there was some kind of community warehouse or warehouses from which such things would be dispensed, although there were some collectives which still had some private stores in their midst. There might also be common-service establishments, such as barbershops, although in this case, too, there was no uniformity.

The great majority of the agrarian collectives undoubtedly adopted the principle of “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” Each family was assigned its share in accordance with its number of members. But again, there was great variety in the way in which this principle was applied.

Reflecting a widespread anarchist belief that money was one of the major roots of the evil of the capitalist system, a large number – probably a majority – of the collectives abolished the circulation of legal tender money within their confines. Of course, even most of those which took this step had to make the Republic’s currency available to those of their number who for one reason or another went outside of the collective.

There was much variation in what the collectives substituted for money. There were some which experimented with merely allowing the families belonging to the collective to take out of the common storehouse what they needed, without further ado. However, even in such cases, it was often necessary to establish a ration system for goods which were in short supply, particularly those coming from outside the community. In some cases, a general ration system was established, where every family was allotted a given amount of every product depending on the number of members it had – even in these cases there was sometimes provision for a family’s exchanging part of its ration of one product for more of another one.

Perhaps in the largest number of cases in which the collective suppressed the circulation of regular money within their bounds, there was substitution of something else of local manufacture which served the same purpose of money. Usually printed, such instruments were called “bonds” or “tokens,” or were given some other name, rather than “money.” From the anarchist point of view, they had the virtue that they were only expendable within the collective, and so discouraged saving, which might before very long have engendered differences in wealth among the members of the group.

While there has been practical implementation of my own respective ideology, where is the much-promoted "free market" capitalism in action?


Old Russian saying: We pretend to work, and the Gov pretends to pay us...

That you would cite the Russian experience when addressing me is pointless, because I am an anarchist and reject Leninism. I concur with Kropotkin in his condemnation of the Soviet state of affairs, issued in 1921, when he certainly had nothing to gain from criticizing those in power: http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/anarchist_archives/kropotkin/kropotlenindec203.html


Russia has already become a Soviet Republic only in name. The influx and taking over of the people by the "party,” that is, predominantly the newcomers (the ideological communists are more in the urban centers), has already destroyed the influence and constructive energy of this promising institution – the soviets. At present, it is the party committees, not the soviets, who rule in Russia. And their organization suffers from the defects of bureaucratic organization.

To move away from the current disorder, Russia must return to the creative genius of local forces which as I see it, can be a factor in the creation of a new life. And the sooner that the necessity of this way is understood, the better. People will then be all the more likely to accept [new] social forms of life. If the present situation continues, the very word “socialism” will turn into a curse. This is what happened to the conception of “equality” in France for forty years after the rule of the Jacobins.

You would refer to the Soviet Union as "socialist" because of it's name, but I wonder if you would take the leaders of the "People's Republic" of China at their word that such a description is accurate?

[Sweetchuck]

Why would anyone be surprised? BO has consistently demonstrated that he goes against the grain of American values and principals.

He may pardon KSM if he ever gets tried and convicted.

[Solar]

Very well. If you insist on continuing the derailment of the thread with another topic, I'll oblige.



Strictly speaking, money (financial capital) isn't even a true form of capital, since it is not an independent factor of production. It is a medium of exchange utilized for acquisition of legitimate factors of production and other resources.



While I am enjoying your archaic use of "man" in your pseudo-intellectual pretensions of being a nineteenth-century philosopher, your claim that capitalism somehow approximates a "free society" is flatly wrong. Before I elaborate on that point, we'll first examine your claim that there is "nothing restricting man in a [capitalist] society" with consultation of the empirical literature into social mobility under the current economic paradigm. I'll refer to several sources on this matter.

Pay attention, I said in a free society, but even a Capitalist free society is by far more free than any other system in the World.


1. Solon's Intergenerational Income Mobility in the United States (http://www.jstor.org/stable/2117312): "Social scientists and policy analysts have long expressed concern about the extent of intergenerational income mobility in the United States, but remarkably little empirical evidence is available. The few existing estimates of the intergenerational correlation in income have been biased downward by measurement error, unrepresentative samples, or both. New estimates based on intergenerational data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics imply that the intergenerational correlation in long-run income is at least 0.4, indicating dramatically less mobility than suggested by earlier research."
Yet you believe this ctrap despite the evidence?
The is not enough evidence available, but scientists are concerned that liberalism is a mental disorder.


2. Zimmerman's Regression toward Mediocrity in Economic Stature (http://ideas.repec.org/a/aea/aecrev/v82y1992i3p409-29.html): "This paper provides estimates of the correlation in lifetime earnings between fathers and sons. Intergenerational data from the National Longitudinal Survey are used. Earlier studies, conducted for the United States, report elasticities of children's earnings with respect to parent's earnings of 0.2 or less, suggesting extensive intergenerational mobility. These estimates, however, are biased.downward by error-contaminated measures of lifetime economic status. Estimates presented in this paper correct for the problem of measurement error and find the intergenerational correlation in income to be on the order of 0.4. This suggests considerably less intergenerational mobility than previously believed."
And this is bad why?
In my book it is good that Aristocracy die, this allows another to take their place that is more productive, instead of inherently sitting in an undeserved position.


3. Björklund and Jäntti's Intergenerational Income Mobility in Sweden Compared to the United States (http://www.jstor.org/stable/2951338): "We have presented a new technique for estimating intergenerational income correlations on independent samples of fathers and sons, if data on actual father-son pairs are unavailable. We used this technique to generate comparable estimates from the United States and Sweden. Our findings contradict the notion that the United States has higher intergenerational mobility."
Translation: We can't prove our point, so we made up a system that makes us appear to make sense.
Prostate, are you really this damned gullible?


4. Gangl's Income Inequality, Permanent Incomes, and Income Dynamics: Comparing Europe to the United States (http://wox.sagepub.com/content/32/2/140.abstract): "In most of Europe, real income growth was actually higher than in the United States, many European countries thus achieve not just less income inequality but are able to combine this with higher levels of income stability, better chances of upward mobility for the poor, and a higher protection of the incomes of older workers than common in the United States."
Again, they are playing with the evidence, mush in the way their compatriots play with the evidence of AGW


5. Corak's Do poor children become poor adults? Lessons from a cross country comparison of generational earnings mobility (http://ftp.iza.org/dp1993.pdf): "In the United States almost one half of children born to low income parents become low income adults. This is an extreme case, but the fraction is also high in the United Kingdom at four in ten, and Canada where about one-third of low income children do not escape low income in adulthood. In the Nordic countries, where overall child poverty rates are noticeably lower, it is also the case that a disproportionate fraction of low income children become low income adults. Generational cycles of low income may be common in the rich countries, but so are cycles of high income. Rich children tend to become rich adults. Four in ten children born to high income parents will grow up to be high income adults in the United States and the United Kingdom, and as many as one third will do so in Canada."
There is no excuse for bad parenting, none!
Yet you are beginning to contradict yourself.



Sizable accumulations of financial capital are usually derived from direct inheritances, not a lifetime of careful toiling and saving, as Glenn Beck might have you believe. Perhaps I could interest you with reference to Summers and Kotlikoff's The role of intergenerational transfers in aggregate capital accumulation (http://www.jstor.org/stable/1833031). Consider the abstract:
Pure BS, I am by far richer than my fore fathers ever dreamed of, and it is thanks to them that I live the life I do.






My "Utopia"? Your laughable promotion of the "free market," a perpetually nonexistent pipe dream that is present only in the textbook, renders you the utopian idealist through and through.
Interesting, I'm living in mine, and like a typical lib, will never be happy in any system.
Think about that for a moment.



Not at all. In the case of capitalist wage labor, its proponent will simply answer that unlike slavery, it is based on voluntary association, and the authoritarian hierarchies that characterize the labor market are not morally problematic. But we first have to analyze the conditions of potentially liberty-restricting power that surround its existence. I typically refer to the spectrum of influence terms that the political scientist Robert Dahl uses, which ranges from rational persuasion to manipulative persuasion to inducement to power to coercion to physical force. We know that physical force is not the only negative influence term, and even pseudo-libertarians would likely admit that aside from inducement, all others aside from rational persuasion are morally problematic. Their support for laws against fraud, for example, would be indicative of their opposition to "consensual" yet manipulative persuasion.

I can only assume you were trying to refute my point, and failed miserably in the process.


Yet we do not see a consistent opposition to manipulative persuasion in the capitalist labor market emerging, nor a consistent opposition to conditions of power and coercion occurring. Those conditions are manifested in this way described by David Ellerman:



Hence, robbery committed via means of a gun is condemned as coercion because though the victim "consents" to being robbed and can theoretically not do so, the consequence of this is likely to be an injurious and possibly fatal gunshot wound. Similarly, though the wage laborer "consents" to enter into a contract with his or her employer and can theoretically not do so, the consequence of this is unemployment and subjection to the conditions of indigence and destitution, which may include homelessness, perpetual hunger and thirst, malnourishment, poor health, and in some third-world and even first-world countries, death. This is perhaps not typically as grave as an injurious and potentially fatal gunshot wound, but propertarians would certainly condemn a robber who threatens to beat instead of shoot his victim just as swiftly.

This problem is augmented further when we consider the fact that "labor is often sold under special disadvantages arising from the closely connected group of facts that labor power is 'perishable', that the sellers of it are commonly poor and have no reserve fund, and that they cannot easily withhold it from the market," as noted by Alfred Marshall. This further complicates the negative conditions of power and coercion that mark entry into the capitalist labor market. In addition to that, we have a propensity for manipulative persuasion based on the conditioning of the working class to be inferior to the coordinator class in terms of rationally determining contract provisions in a fully informed manner. This problem was noted by Sidney and Beatrice Webb:



This compulsion is all explicable on the basis of the constrained social mobility that characterizes the capitalist economy. Because wage laborers are essentially compelled to accept authoritarian conditions because of constrained social mobility, they are subject to misappropriation of the surplus value that they produce.

http://i357.photobucket.com/albums/oo18/Dolgoff/ed4a754f.png

To blow a huge hole in your argument, in a free Capitalist system, anyone has the option to be an employer, unlike your ideal, you will never have any option other than being a slave to the political machine.
Again, think about that for a moment!


As put by Ernesto Screpanti, "capitalism is an economic system in which surplus value is extracted in the production process by using wage labor and utilized in the circulation process to sustain capital accumulation." The natural tendency of capitalism is to exacerbate inequalities as a result, since preexisting differences in initial endowments determine placement in the hierarchical internal structure of the orthodox firm.

When you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit!


I find there to be no contradiction between rightist ideological axioms and socialist principles. At the heart of any remunerative system is the profit motive, and the consequent tendency to produce for a reward of material gain. Socialism is moral according to rightist axioms because reward is incumbent upon contribution.

If anything, capitalism is anti-rightist because of its fundamentally anti-meritocratic nature. When a system is centered on a number of people that too often simply inherit their assets and parasitically deprive others of the just product of their labor, while the losers are the workers who put forth the most effort, often in arduous physical tasks, its compensatory structure is not one of fair rewards for hard work.
Another flaw in your thinking. You do realize that any employee can be part owner in most business today, it's known as public trading.

I
n genuinely socialist theoretical literature, the ideals of equality of opportunity and scalar remuneration are emphasized. Quoting from Peter Kropotkin’s A Conquest of Bread:



What's far more important than this theoretical vision, however appealing it might seem, is the capacity for real-world implementation of this agenda. While facets of workers' ownership and management have been achieved in many contexts, the enactment of a remunerative system along these lines has been less common. However, when it was accomplished during the social revolution of the Spanish Civil War that occurred in the anarchist zones of the Republic, it was reasonably successful. Quoting from Sam Dolgoff's The Anarchist Collectives:


Do you have the ability toward debate, or just a copy paste fool, that hopes to overwhelm his opponent with boredom?


Supplementing that is Robert Alexander's The Anarchists in the Spanish Civil War:

While there has been practical implementation of my own respective ideology, where is the much-promoted "free market" capitalism in action?

Look around fool!
Almost all of the advances in the last 100 years came from America, no all, but by far the largest percentage.


That you would cite the Russian experience when addressing me is pointless, because I am an anarchist and reject Leninism. I concur with Kropotkin in his condemnation of the Soviet state of affairs, issued in 1921, when he certainly had nothing to gain from criticizing those in power: http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/anarchist_archives/kropotkin/kropotlenindec203.html
Irrelevant!
Communism is the end product of socialism.


You would refer to the Soviet Union as "socialist" because of it's name, but I wonder if you would take the leaders of the "People's Republic" of China at their word that such a description is accurate?
In China, one works, or they die, there is no other option.

[Agnapostate]

Pay attention, I said in a free society, but even a Capitalist free society is by far more free than any other system in the World.

I suppose that's arguably true in that capitalism is essentially the only economic system that exists in the world today? But even so, the more leftist social democratic capitalism that you inaccurately refer to as "socialism" is more associated with freedom than the Anglo-Saxon and liberal democratic capitalism of the U.S.


Yet you believe this ctrap despite the evidence?
The is not enough evidence available, but scientists are concerned that liberalism is a mental disorder.

That sentence lamented a previously existing gap, and tried to fill it. It was also the earliest-dated of the social mobility related texts that I provided. This marks your first rejection of an empirical study without refutation.


And this is bad why?
In my book it is good that Aristocracy die, this allows another to take their place that is more productive, instead of inherently sitting in an undeserved position.

Yes, that is why constrained social mobility is negative. This is the second instance of a rejection of an empirical study without refutation, as well as a strong indication that you are not even comprehending the thrust of this literature.


Translation: We can't prove our point, so we made up a system that makes us appear to make sense.
Prostate, are you really this damned gullible?

This marks the third rejection of an empirical study without refutation. Criticize specific methodological deficiencies that you believe exist in the study, LOL'ar. We both know that you're too stupid and ignorant to do so, but does it really have to be so vapid and blatantly empty as this?


Again, they are playing with the evidence, mush in the way their compatriots play with the evidence of AGW

This marks the fourth rejection of an empirical study without refutation. You should have not responded, instead of humiliating yourself this badly. Then again, in an echo chamber full of other anti-intellectual troglodytes, your clumsy rejection of empirical research will probably gain you respect.


There is no excuse for bad parenting, none!
Yet you are beginning to contradict yourself.

This marks the fifth rejection of an empirical study without refutation. You might be the most horrendously unskilled debater I have ever encountered on this forum, which is a significant accomplishment.


Pure BS, I am by far richer than my fore fathers ever dreamed of, and it is thanks to them that I live the life I do.

This, apart from being an anecdotal experience with no bearing on the empirical assessment of a large data set, actually seems to validate the conclusion of this particular study in that you gained due to the merits of your ancestors, not your own. What happened to unseating the aristocracy?


Interesting, I'm living in mine, and like a typical lib, will never be happy in any system.
Think about that for a moment.

Is that a fact? Where is the "free market" capitalism? When and where has it ever existed? Never and nowhere.


I can only assume you were trying to refute my point, and failed miserably in the process.

Actually, a more effective sign of miserable failure is a complete absence of any argument, or even any pretension to that effect. Are you even remotely familiar with how a debate works?


To blow a huge hole in your argument, in a free Capitalist system, anyone has the option to be an employer, unlike your ideal, you will never have any option other than being a slave to the political machine. Again, think about that for a moment!

This is pointless repetition of a previously made statement that was already rebutted by exposure of the constrained social mobility and cycle of surplus value extraction that exists in the capitalist economy. Instead of idiotically repeating the same talking points over and over again, consider some rebuttals.


When you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit!

Another non-response. Are you quite certain you're familiar with the English language?


Another flaw in your thinking. You do realize that any employee can be part owner in most business today, it's known as public trading.

Another inane comment. Most people respond to the observation about surplus value extraction with a refutation that involves time preference or something along those lines. You're far below that level, it seems.


Do you have the ability toward debate, or just a copy paste fool, that hopes to overwhelm his opponent with boredom?

If you define a single facet of the imbecilic repetition that has marked this post of yours as "debate," then no, I don't possess that particular ability. I actually read others' posts and respond to them with logic and evidence. You don't seem to have acquired those skills yet.


Look around fool!
Almost all of the advances in the last 100 years came from America, no all, but by far the largest percentage.

You're clearly far more idiotic than I gave you credit for. The capitalist powers of the modern world did not develop through "free markets," the United States included, but through a web of protectionist policies that included extensive tariffs and quotas. Consider Ha-Joon Chang's Kicking Away the Ladder (http://www.paecon.net/PAEtexts/Chang1.htm):


Contrary to the conventional wisdom, the historical fact is that the rich countries did not develop on the basis of the policies and the institutions that they now recommend to, and often force upon, the developing countries. Unfortunately, this fact is little known these days because the "official historians" of capitalism have been very successful in re-writing its history.

Almost all of today’s rich countries used tariff protection and subsidies to develop their industries. Interestingly, Britain and the USA, the two countries that are supposed to have reached the summit of the world economy through their free-market, free-trade policy, are actually the ones that had most aggressively used protection and subsidies.

I'm beginning to wonder if you're a leftist deliberately setting out to embarrass rightists by depicting them as incredibly stupid. You might have overdone it a bit.


Irrelevant!
Communism is the end product of socialism.

Communism is a variant of socialism, with other variants (such as market socialism) existing. You refer to a specific Marxist transitory model, but anarchists have never accepted it. Regardless, do not attempt to cite any Leninist experiences to me again when I've made it exceedingly clear that anarchists have always rejected the Leninist tradition.


In China, one works, or they die, there is no other option.

And accordingly, it seems that the description of the country as a "people's republic" is grotesquely inaccurate. Therefore, if you will maintain that the term "republic" can be misused and misrepresented in such a manner, I will maintain that the same can be done with the word "socialist."

[Solar]

Very well. If you insist on continuing the derailment of the thread with another topic, I'll oblige.



Strictly speaking, money (financial capital) isn't even a true form of capital, since it is not an independent factor of production. It is a medium of exchange utilized for acquisition of legitimate factors of production and other resources.



While I am enjoying your archaic use of "man" in your pseudo-intellectual pretensions of being a nineteenth-century philosopher, your claim that capitalism somehow approximates a "free society" is flatly wrong. Before I elaborate on that point, we'll first examine your claim that there is "nothing restricting man in a [capitalist] society" with consultation of the empirical literature into social mobility under the current economic paradigm. I'll refer to several sources on this matter.

1. Solon's Intergenerational Income Mobility in the United States (http://www.jstor.org/stable/2117312): "Social scientists and policy analysts have long expressed concern about the extent of intergenerational income mobility in the United States, but remarkably little empirical evidence is available. The few existing estimates of the intergenerational correlation in income have been biased downward by measurement error, unrepresentative samples, or both. New estimates based on intergenerational data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics imply that the intergenerational correlation in long-run income is at least 0.4, indicating dramatically less mobility than suggested by earlier research."

2. Zimmerman's Regression toward Mediocrity in Economic Stature (http://ideas.repec.org/a/aea/aecrev/v82y1992i3p409-29.html): "This paper provides estimates of the correlation in lifetime earnings between fathers and sons. Intergenerational data from the National Longitudinal Survey are used. Earlier studies, conducted for the United States, report elasticities of children's earnings with respect to parent's earnings of 0.2 or less, suggesting extensive intergenerational mobility. These estimates, however, are biased.downward by error-contaminated measures of lifetime economic status. Estimates presented in this paper correct for the problem of measurement error and find the intergenerational correlation in income to be on the order of 0.4. This suggests considerably less intergenerational mobility than previously believed."

3. Björklund and Jäntti's Intergenerational Income Mobility in Sweden Compared to the United States (http://www.jstor.org/stable/2951338): "We have presented a new technique for estimating intergenerational income correlations on independent samples of fathers and sons, if data on actual father-son pairs are unavailable. We used this technique to generate comparable estimates from the United States and Sweden. Our findings contradict the notion that the United States has higher intergenerational mobility."

4. Gangl's Income Inequality, Permanent Incomes, and Income Dynamics: Comparing Europe to the United States (http://wox.sagepub.com/content/32/2/140.abstract): "In most of Europe, real income growth was actually higher than in the United States, many European countries thus achieve not just less income inequality but are able to combine this with higher levels of income stability, better chances of upward mobility for the poor, and a higher protection of the incomes of older workers than common in the United States."

5. Corak's Do poor children become poor adults? Lessons from a cross country comparison of generational earnings mobility (http://ftp.iza.org/dp1993.pdf): "In the United States almost one half of children born to low income parents become low income adults. This is an extreme case, but the fraction is also high in the United Kingdom at four in ten, and Canada where about one-third of low income children do not escape low income in adulthood. In the Nordic countries, where overall child poverty rates are noticeably lower, it is also the case that a disproportionate fraction of low income children become low income adults. Generational cycles of low income may be common in the rich countries, but so are cycles of high income. Rich children tend to become rich adults. Four in ten children born to high income parents will grow up to be high income adults in the United States and the United Kingdom, and as many as one third will do so in Canada."

This can be summarized visually:

http://i357.photobucket.com/albums/oo18/Dolgoff/IncomeDecileProbability.jpg

Sizable accumulations of financial capital are usually derived from direct inheritances, not a lifetime of careful toiling and saving, as Glenn Beck might have you believe. Perhaps I could interest you with reference to Summers and Kotlikoff's The role of intergenerational transfers in aggregate capital accumulation (http://www.jstor.org/stable/1833031). Consider the abstract:



:dunno:



My "Utopia"? Your laughable promotion of the "free market," a perpetually nonexistent pipe dream that is present only in the textbook, renders you the utopian idealist through and through.



Not at all. In the case of capitalist wage labor, its proponent will simply answer that unlike slavery, it is based on voluntary association, and the authoritarian hierarchies that characterize the labor market are not morally problematic. But we first have to analyze the conditions of potentially liberty-restricting power that surround its existence. I typically refer to the spectrum of influence terms that the political scientist Robert Dahl uses, which ranges from rational persuasion to manipulative persuasion to inducement to power to coercion to physical force. We know that physical force is not the only negative influence term, and even pseudo-libertarians would likely admit that aside from inducement, all others aside from rational persuasion are morally problematic. Their support for laws against fraud, for example, would be indicative of their opposition to "consensual" yet manipulative persuasion.

Yet we do not see a consistent opposition to manipulative persuasion in the capitalist labor market emerging, nor a consistent opposition to conditions of power and coercion occurring. Those conditions are manifested in this way described by David Ellerman:



Hence, robbery committed via means of a gun is condemned as coercion because though the victim "consents" to being robbed and can theoretically not do so, the consequence of this is likely to be an injurious and possibly fatal gunshot wound. Similarly, though the wage laborer "consents" to enter into a contract with his or her employer and can theoretically not do so, the consequence of this is unemployment and subjection to the conditions of indigence and destitution, which may include homelessness, perpetual hunger and thirst, malnourishment, poor health, and in some third-world and even first-world countries, death. This is perhaps not typically as grave as an injurious and potentially fatal gunshot wound, but propertarians would certainly condemn a robber who threatens to beat instead of shoot his victim just as swiftly.

This problem is augmented further when we consider the fact that "labor is often sold under special disadvantages arising from the closely connected group of facts that labor power is 'perishable', that the sellers of it are commonly poor and have no reserve fund, and that they cannot easily withhold it from the market," as noted by Alfred Marshall. This further complicates the negative conditions of power and coercion that mark entry into the capitalist labor market. In addition to that, we have a propensity for manipulative persuasion based on the conditioning of the working class to be inferior to the coordinator class in terms of rationally determining contract provisions in a fully informed manner. This problem was noted by Sidney and Beatrice Webb:



This compulsion is all explicable on the basis of the constrained social mobility that characterizes the capitalist economy. Because wage laborers are essentially compelled to accept authoritarian conditions because of constrained social mobility, they are subject to misappropriation of the surplus value that they produce.

http://i357.photobucket.com/albums/oo18/Dolgoff/ed4a754f.png

As put by Ernesto Screpanti, "capitalism is an economic system in which surplus value is extracted in the production process by using wage labor and utilized in the circulation process to sustain capital accumulation." The natural tendency of capitalism is to exacerbate inequalities as a result, since preexisting differences in initial endowments determine placement in the hierarchical internal structure of the orthodox firm.



I find there to be no contradiction between rightist ideological axioms and socialist principles. At the heart of any remunerative system is the profit motive, and the consequent tendency to produce for a reward of material gain. Socialism is moral according to rightist axioms because reward is incumbent upon contribution.

If anything, capitalism is anti-rightist because of its fundamentally anti-meritocratic nature. When a system is centered on a number of people that too often simply inherit their assets and parasitically deprive others of the just product of their labor, while the losers are the workers who put forth the most effort, often in arduous physical tasks, its compensatory structure is not one of fair rewards for hard work.

In genuinely socialist theoretical literature, the ideals of equality of opportunity and scalar remuneration are emphasized. Quoting from Peter Kropotkin’s A Conquest of Bread:



What's far more important than this theoretical vision, however appealing it might seem, is the capacity for real-world implementation of this agenda. While facets of workers' ownership and management have been achieved in many contexts, the enactment of a remunerative system along these lines has been less common. However, when it was accomplished during the social revolution of the Spanish Civil War that occurred in the anarchist zones of the Republic, it was reasonably successful. Quoting from Sam Dolgoff's The Anarchist Collectives:



Supplementing that is Robert Alexander's The Anarchists in the Spanish Civil War:



While there has been practical implementation of my own respective ideology, where is the much-promoted "free market" capitalism in action?



That you would cite the Russian experience when addressing me is pointless, because I am an anarchist and reject Leninism. I concur with Kropotkin in his condemnation of the Soviet state of affairs, issued in 1921, when he certainly had nothing to gain from criticizing those in power: http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/anarchist_archives/kropotkin/kropotlenindec203.html



You would refer to the Soviet Union as "socialist" because of it's name, but I wonder if you would take the leaders of the "People's Republic" of China at their word that such a description is accurate?


I suppose that's arguably true in that capitalism is essentially the only economic system that exists in the world today? But even so, the more leftist social democratic capitalism that you inaccurately refer to as "socialism" is more associated with freedom than the Anglo-Saxon and liberal democratic capitalism of the U.S.



That sentence lamented a previously existing gap, and tried to fill it. It was also the earliest-dated of the social mobility related texts that I provided. This marks your first rejection of an empirical study without refutation.



Yes, that is why constrained social mobility is negative. This is the second instance of a rejection of an empirical study without refutation, as well as a strong indication that you are not even comprehending the thrust of this literature.



This marks the third rejection of an empirical study without refutation. Criticize specific methodological deficiencies that you believe exist in the study, LOL'ar. We both know that you're too stupid and ignorant to do so, but does it really have to be so vapid and blatantly empty as this?



This marks the fourth rejection of an empirical study without refutation. You should have not responded, instead of humiliating yourself this badly. Then again, in an echo chamber full of other anti-intellectual troglodytes, your clumsy rejection of empirical research will probably gain you respect.



This marks the fifth rejection of an empirical study without refutation. You might be the most horrendously unskilled debater I have ever encountered on this forum, which is a significant accomplishment.



This, apart from being an anecdotal experience with no bearing on the empirical assessment of a large data set, actually seems to validate the conclusion of this particular study in that you gained due to the merits of your ancestors, not your own. What happened to unseating the aristocracy?



Is that a fact? Where is the "free market" capitalism? When and where has it ever existed? Never and nowhere.



Actually, a more effective sign of miserable failure is a complete absence of any argument, or even any pretension to that effect. Are you even remotely familiar with how a debate works?



This is pointless repetition of a previously made statement that was already rebutted by exposure of the constrained social mobility and cycle of surplus value extraction that exists in the capitalist economy. Instead of idiotically repeating the same talking points over and over again, consider some rebuttals.



Another non-response. Are you quite certain you're familiar with the English language?



Another inane comment. Most people respond to the observation about surplus value extraction with a refutation that involves time preference or something along those lines. You're far below that level, it seems.



If you define a single facet of the imbecilic repetition that has marked this post of yours as "debate," then no, I don't possess that particular ability. I actually read others' posts and respond to them with logic and evidence. You don't seem to have acquired those skills yet.



You're clearly far more idiotic than I gave you credit for. The capitalist powers of the modern world did not develop through "free markets," the United States included, but through a web of protectionist policies that included extensive tariffs and quotas. Consider Ha-Joon Chang's Kicking Away the Ladder (http://www.paecon.net/PAEtexts/Chang1.htm):



I'm beginning to wonder if you're a leftist deliberately setting out to embarrass rightists by depicting them as incredibly stupid. You might have overdone it a bit.



Communism is a variant of socialism, with other variants (such as market socialism) existing. You refer to a specific Marxist transitory model, but anarchists have never accepted it. Regardless, do not attempt to cite any Leninist experiences to me again when I've made it exceedingly clear that anarchists have always rejected the Leninist tradition.



And accordingly, it seems that the description of the country as a "people's republic" is grotesquely inaccurate. Therefore, if you will maintain that the term "republic" can be misused and misrepresented in such a manner, I will maintain that the same can be done with the word "socialist."

Empirical study, My Ass!!!
It's a Fuckin opinion piece!

I have to guess you are in your early twenties, and I base this on your inability to understand the World around you.

The professors that brainwashed you are complete idiots that suffer from the same disorder, seek help, or get a real job.

[Agnapostate]

Empirical study, My Ass!!!
It's a Fuckin opinion piece!

No. It's a set of peer-reviewed studies in scholarly journals. The first, second, and third were from the American Economic Review, published by the American Economic Association. The fourth was from Work and Occupations. The fifth was from the Institute for the Study of Labor. The sixth was from the Journal of Political Economy


I have to guess you are in your early twenties, and I base this on your inability to understand the World around you.

The professors that brainwashed you are complete idiots that suffer from the same disorder, seek help, or get a real job.

The concession that you have offered through lack of argument is accepted. Thank you for your participation.

[Solar]

No. It's a set of peer-reviewed studies in scholarly journals. The first, second, and third were from the American Economic Review, published by the American Economic Association. The fourth was from Work and Occupations. The fifth was from the Institute for the Study of Labor. The sixth was from the Journal of Political Economy



The concession that you have offered through lack of argument is accepted. Thank you for your participation.

Again, it is nothing short of an opinion piece, seeing how there is no way to measure aggregate capital accumulation because not everyone divulges their actual true financial holdings.
Not to mention, taking into account illegal immigration.

The bottom line is, they had to guess at much of the data, seeing how there is no way to possibly to collect it.
Or they were stuck with what little data was available.

So it is either wrong at it's core, or nothing short of an opinion piece.

I stand on what I said earlier, you are nothing but a brainwashed kid, or a pissed off gov employee, or both.

[Kathianne]

In any case, economics and DOJ aren't really related.

[Agnapostate]

Again, it is nothing short of an opinion piece, seeing how there is no way to measure aggregate capital accumulation because not everyone divulges their actual true financial holdings.

So it's your heartfelt belief that this study was based on unverified personal testimonials? Have you even bothered reading it? Of course not.


Not to mention, taking into account illegal immigration.

Kindly elaborate.


The bottom line is, they had to guess at much of the data, seeing how there is no way to possibly to collect it.
Or they were stuck with what little data was available.

So it is either wrong at it's core, or nothing short of an opinion piece.

Then why don't you submit a rejoinder to the same academic journal and see how that turns out for you? I'm sure they'll be enthralled by your intellect, just as we all are.


I stand on what I said earlier, you are nothing but a brainwashed kid, or a pissed off gov employee, or both.

And you are an individual who offers personal insults instead of arguments. What of it?