It's times like this that bring out the inner revolutionary in me.

[Jackpine Radical]

I absolutely hate the idea of the bailout, and at the same time I recognize that a lot of people are going to be hurt if something isn't done. Nevertheless, what Bernie Sanders said keeps ringing in my ears. If a corporation s too big to fail, it's too big to exist. My ideal solution would be to nationalize the bastards, and then move on to Big Oil, the railroads, the power companies, etc. Actually I wouldn't insist on nationalization. Collectivize them, maybe. Anyway, that ain't gonna happen.

What I really think is happening is that the Democrats are in the process of being further co-opted, and maybe turned into the party of Big Bidniss as a replacement for the self-immolating Republicans.

Aargh! What's an old northwoods Red to do?

[The Magistrate]

1. Sen. Sanders Is Correct, Sir

At minimum, the old 'trust-busting' spirit needs to be revived.

The natural tendency is for capital to concentrate in ever fewer hands, which works to the detriment of society as a whole. Government needs to vigorously oppose this tendency.

[Two Americas]

2. that is it

Clear, brief, understandable. You say in a few words what the rest of us can't get to or reach consensus on with 40,295,350 posts. Well, 40,295,351 posts after this one.

Our politics need not be any more complicated than what you said here, and need not be such a source of confusion and controversy.

Best post in a long time. Thank you.

[OneGrassRoot]

4. I was just about to post a thank you to The Magistrate, too...

and then "saw" you, TA. :)

Yes, thank you for summarizing this so clearly, Magistrate. It's what I needed this morning: clarity.

:)

[tom_paine]

9. "Trust busting" now THERE'S a word the Democrats need to re-introduce

or it's modern equivalent.

As we know, the Bushies follow the book 1984 as an instruction manual, more or less. Thus, for 30 years or more they have gradually followed the pattern of The Party in the book 1984 when they said

(here I paraphrase) We shall literally deny the people the linguistic tools to talk badly about the government or life.

This, in fact, has happened. Not quite as dratsically or obviously as Orwell wrote, that would be bad PR in this new model of Inverted Totalitarianism.

(if you haven't read this, Magistrate, please do: http://www.truthdig.com/arts_culture/item/20080515_chalmers_johnson_on_our_managed_democracy )

Anyway, my whole point was to say yes, we need to reintroduce the word "trust-busting" or it's modern equivalent to the American Vocabulary again and b) what a daunting task in the toxic Corpro-Bushie-M$M (though improving slightly lately...is it a mirage? we'll see...) environment that has been created by 30 years of Orwellian Linguistic Manipulation and only a slight pushback for not even a decade.

[anarch]

10. yes...more trust-busting, less trust-betraying!

[The Magistrate]

24. That Is An Interesting Piece, Mr. Paine

Its general thrust is quite sound. It is the great open secret of our country's history that it was founded not so much to express but rather to contain democracy. The founders were concerned mostly with preserving the liberty of the propertied. This demanded a government that was not autocratic in form, since autocrats routinely pull the reins on property-owners, and yet required a government that would not allow the broad strata of small-holders and wage earners to effectively mobilize their numbers to assert their own interests against large property holders. The nightmare of the founders was that people would vote themselves title to mortgaged properties, and otherwise manage the country's finances in ways that would benefit debtors rather than creditors. Certain parallels to present difficulties are obvious; this is a deadlock the system often butts itself into, and it was designed from the start to produce a result of the sort we have seen. A number of expedients and circumstances in our country's early history, which need not be detailed here, combined to keep the system working without the people turning effectively to the mass of their numbers in democratic action to secure policies that would vindicate their own interests against those of the large property-holders. But most of these have either disappeared from the legal structure, like restriction of suffrage to propertied persons, or played out, like the safety valve of frontier land to be had for the staking out and improving of. The thing cannot now be maintained save by the classic judicious mix of fraud and force that has always marked rule in favor of a privileged minority. Further, the more wealth concentrates in fewer hands, the more the system must come to rely on force, fraud being harder to employ the more stark the division between the privileged and the rest becomes. It is possible to have something approaching democratic rule still when one man has a million dollars and a thousand have ten thousand dollars each; it is not possible when one man has ten million dollars and a thousand have but a thousand dollars each. The one man can only maintain his position then by hiring and arming a few of the thousand with charter to stand off the rest with the weapons in their hands. That is, for better or worse, the traditional pattern of human society and governance since the first of what we are pleased to call civilizations formed in their pyramidal structures with a god-king at the apex and layers of priests and aristocrats reared up upon the base of a peasantry. Whether it is intended or not, this is what the unregulated play of human greed must produce over time.

[apocalypsehow]

28. "Your people, sir, is nothing but a great beast." - Alexander Hamilton.

I don't quibble with your post in the slightest, but would like to expand upon a theme related to it. The problem becomes particularly acute in vast multi-ethnic and multi-cultural "empires" (I use the word in the classical sense) where crude appeals to religious/racial categories are no longer permitted as rallying cries to unity - save in the most subtle ways - in order to maintain domestic peace in the large society.

For instance, for a hundred years after Reconstruction the plutocracy that ruled the political realm of the American South could appeal to the poorest, most ignorant white laborer by pointing out that no matter what else he might be, he was still "better" than this his black neighbors because of his skin color. What is often not realized is that white supremacy was just as much a tool to keep the poor white working class quiescent as it was to keep African-Americans oppressed, or "in their place," as the saying had it. The ruling class well knew that the second poor whites and poor blacks put aside race as a factor in their social intercourse and realized their deplorable economic conditions, they would no doubt rid themselves through the ballot box of their political overlords. Huey Long actually tried a corruption-ridden version of this in Louisiana, an experiment that was abbreviated by an assassin's bullet.

I think we are finally seeing in 2008 the coalescence of an emerging consensus nationwide that is geared to just such an economic realization - whether it is successful in supplanting the current order in favor of a more just arrangement is the great question that an Obama administration will, ultimately, either succeed or fail upon. Or one of the great questions; there will no doubt be the foreign policy challenge. In any event, 2008 could, in my mind, actually be one of the most consequential elections of our lifetime (I know, I know; politicians say that about every election), and for the reasons discussed both in your post and this one.

[bean fidhleir]

3. "Aargh! What's an old northwoods Red to do?"

Work for a legal structure that prevents the accumulation of capital. It should be illegal for anyone to own more property than will provide them a living. Anyone who wants to own the means of anyone else's living should be in therapy or jail.

[Fumesucker]

6. Define "provide them a living"...

The Devil is, as always, in the details.

What one person sees as wretched excess another may well see as marginally adequate, tastes and styles differ greatly.

[bean fidhleir]

11. Of course tastes and styles differ greatly. But why should anyone be obliged

to suffer because J. Psychopath thinks he always deserves the very best in life?

Locke and the other Enlightenment theorists, living in feudal Britain where the titled wealthy owned all the land (much of it stolen via the Enclosure Acts), postulated a natural right to property. By "property" they meant just enough land for self-support.

To me that makes very good sense. "Property" should mean enough "means of production" to live on by one's own labor. In today's world, that might be land or it might be some equivalent. But nobody should be able to get themselves into a position where they own someone else's means of living.

[The2ndWheel]

5. I'd substitute organization for corporation

If a form of organization is too big to fail, it's too big to exist. That includes the 2008 version of the US Government(and any other nation state, and including all the examples you list, and more), which votes for billions(or trillions) of dollars that it doesn't have to be pumped into a failing and unsustainable financial system that was allowed to continue its growth trajectory by the use of credit and interest.

If an unsustainable form of organization must be sustained because of its unsustainability, in that if we don't do something this time, for example, 1 million people will be impacted, and if we don't do something next time, for example, 2 million people will be impacted, then its well beyond the time to figure out a different way to live on this planet.

[asteroid2003QQ47]

7. Extrapolate.

Become more familiar with the common thread of failed empires and equate that with "too big to fail, it's too big to exist" as relative to Uncle Sam's Empire/Nation.
"Nationalization" would then seem problematic, would it not?
---------------------------------------------------

Revolutionary moments attract those who are not good enough for established institutions as well as those who are too good for them.
--George Bernard Shaw

[Jackpine Radical]

14. Yes, I see centralization as a problem.

I would sorta like to see the economic world run by a loosely connected network of collectives, co-ops, and small private proprietorships, if such a thing could be made to work. I'm somewhat inspired by the book The Starfish and the Spider. Here's a quote from the Amazon page for the book:

Brafman and Beckstrom, a pair of Stanford M.B.A.s who have applied their business know-how to promoting peace and economic development through decentralized networking, offer a breezy and entertaining look at how decentralization is changing many organizations. The title metaphor conveys the core concept: though a starfish and a spider have similar shapes, their internal structure is dramatically different—a decapitated spider inevitably dies, while a starfish can regenerate itself from a single amputated leg. In the same way, decentralized organizations, like the Internet, the Apache Indian tribe and Alcoholics Anonymous, are made up of many smaller units capable of operating, growing and multiplying independently of each other, making it very difficult for a rival force to control or defeat them. Despite familiar examples—eBay, Napster and the Toyota assembly line, for example—there are fresh insights, such as the authors' three techniques for combating a decentralized competitor (drive change in your competitors' ideology, force them to become centralized or decentralize yourself). The authors also analyze one of today's most worrisome "starfish" organizations—al-Qaeda—though that group undermines the authors' point that the power of leaderless groups helps to demonstrate the essential goodness and trustworthiness of human beings.

[bean fidhleir]

15. Another example of "eye of the beholder"

The authors also analyze one of today's most worrisome "starfish" organizations—al-Qaeda—though that group undermines the authors' point that the power of leaderless groups helps to demonstrate the essential goodness and trustworthiness of human beings.

I should think there are quite a number of people who see us as the terrorists and al-Q as the freedom fighters who represent goodness and trustworthiness.

[Jackpine Radical]

16. Yes, of course.

There is a critical point in here: the issue of values. Al-Q arose in large measure as a reaction to centralized, hegemonically-minded western imperialism. Since I'm no more fond of religious fanaticism and blowing up innocent people than I am of corporate imperialism, I'm in a sort of "pox-on-both-their-houses" posture.

To go beyond this specific instance, I'm not really sure how you keep anh organization clean. Publicly held corporations are automatically psychopathic by the nature of their charters--acting only in the narrow self-interest of their shareholders--and governmental organizations tend to drift rapidly off-course. I have seen state and county government up close and dirty, and it seems to me that no matter what the original intent of a governmental structure, they tend to go off-kilter pretty rapidly. The wrong behaviors are rewarded (e.g. "empire-building"), the wrong kinds of people rise to power, and the entire structure becomes badly twisted by a nearly inescapable system of perverse incentives. That's what went wrong with the welfare system, with HUD, and with almost every other administrative structure I have observed. It's truly amazing that some things still work as well as they do: Medicare, Social Security--even though I bet their internal dynamics are as badly screwed up as the systems I experienced.

[bean fidhleir]

17. "I'm not really sure how you keep an organization clean"

Don't you, though? It looks like you do: "the wrong behaviors are rewarded". Isn't that a standard rat problem?

What behaviors do we want to reward?

The behaviors we need to extinguish via therapy or jail seem somewhat clear: greed heads the list. I can't prove it, but intuitively I'd bet taxation as a brake on greed actually acts as an intermittant reinforcer. Thoughts?

[Jackpine Radical]

19. Yes, I see the solution--sort of--on an abstract level.

And believe me, I know all about rats, Skinner boxes, and reinforcement schedules. Hell, I made a substantial portion of my living for years writing behavior programs for mentally ill and retarded people.

The problem always seems to come down to Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? How do you keep the system honest?

And yes, ultimately, the solution keeps coming back to engineering better people. But that raises the ugly spectre of Clockwork Orange and all that. Personal liberty always seems to include the freedom to be an asshole. I would love to figure out a way that we could raise an entire generation of kids free of major abuse, trauma and neglect in ther formative years.

[bean fidhleir]

20. Engineering better people?? Wherever did you get that?

When we reward some behaviors and extinguish others, are we really "engineering better people" (or rats, as the case might be)? All the evidence says they remain unchanged in every fundamental way --they're merely more skilled at getting their needs (or desires) met in the context where they find themselves at the time. Different rules, different behaviors, but the same rats/people. No?



"How do you keep the system honest?"

Facile of me to say so, but: reward honesty and extinguish dishonesty? We do the opposite now, as you've pointed out. There's very little that's healthy in our current system. We have massive amounts of longitudinal and cross-cultural evidence that material wealth is a hygiene factor for all but a minority of the population, while social rewards are powerful general motivators. Yet what is our reward system based on? Uh-huh.

[Jackpine Radical]

22. I was speaking somewhat for dramatic effect. In fact, I have a fairly optimistic view

of people.

My notion of "engineering" would consist of steps such as helping people to form healthy superegos, so that they will do the "right thing" even in the absence of external rewards; providing them with healthy self-regard so they can form judgments on their own, trust their own opinions and resist the blandishments of conmen; letting them grow up with a sense of safety and security so they can remain rational when put under stress, etc.

[Stinky The Clown]

8. Well .... I'm pretty much in the same camp as you .....

If they're too big to fail, they're too big to exist.

I favor more nationalization, too. Radical nationalization as a way to counter the free wheeling unregulated antics of the last 30 years. A pendulum cannot be forced to stop midswing, or only swing from center to right.

[kentuck]

12. You are not the only one...

:shrug:

[coalition_unwilling]

13. Answer: Tune in, turn on, and drop out! - n\t

[Jackpine Radical]

23. Aw, I did that in the 60's.

[coalition_unwilling]

26. I missed out by 10 years (born in 1959), but Leary's

dictum seems even more a propos nnw.

Time to get off the grid. Think globally, buy locally.

Won't you take a ride on the flyin' spoon?

[earth mom]

18. Answer: Stop paying Taxes.

It's about all we have left shy of going all French on these bastards.

[Uncle Joe]

21. They need to be Teddy Roosevelted, break them up.

Competition thrives when you actually have competitors, a handful of trusts and monopolies only lead to corruption, incompetence and dumbing down of the subject mega corporations.

The mega corporations or trusts have gained so much power as to control both major political parties, in this situation the American People can only lose.

This is why we have mega corporations that profit from imprisoning the American People instead of lifting them up and promoting their freedom, waging war instead of peace, profiting from sickness instead of taking care of the American People's health, delivering the vast majority of misinformation consumed by the American People thereby dumbing the people down instead of enlightening them and literally destroying life as we know it by turning the planet in to a toxic waste dump.

[Greyhound]

25. How about letting them collapse and deeding the remains to the employees? n/t

[Two Americas]

27. we have to fight

You have to fight for justice, it is not something that we can merely select or choose. To fight, we must see that there is a fight, what the fight is about.

The right wingers battle night and day on behalf of their wealthy and powerful clients. They are relentless and ruthless. They never waver from the fight. We are missing in action, don't even show up on the battle lines, deny where the battle lines are, deny the nature of the battle. We urge caution, we advocate compromise, we reward and applaud cowardice. We cripple and distract and undermine our strongest fighters. We confuse the people about the nature of the battle.

The New Deal or Teddy's trust busting are not items on the buffet table for us to select. They were episodes in the ongoing battle, a time when the working people were fighting back a little more. They were compromises, things that happened as part of a dynamic process, not products on the shelf for us to examine and then decide to buy or not buy.

I hear too many people talking like this: - "I think we need a little justice, but we can't go too far. I kinda like what Teddy did. You know, a little more fairness and justice but not going all radical and stuff like that. I think I will be for that. I pick that."

"Oh you can't fool me, I'm sticking with the union" as the words to the old song go. The nature of the "fooling" that people were resisting is the fooling that we see people express here. "Oh that offer by the bosses is better than what we had before. Maybe they aren't so bad. Can't we just slow down here and take baby steps? Why do we have to fight? Sure it isn't perfect, and don't get me wrong I agree with you about all of the goals and everything, but we do need to be realistic. Once we compromise with the bosses, which we need to do right now, then we can start taking baby steps again, because these things take time."

You have to fight for justice. That requires clarity of purpose, and that means that you must start with a 100% commitment to justice, period, you can't start with the intention of shooting for some sort of pleasant or comfortable compromise. It also requires a sober and honest assessment of reality. You can't go into the battle thinking "well maybe we can avoid trouble" or "gee maybe the wealthy aren't really trying to screw us, and some of them are nice" and pretending that there is a level playing field, when the whole problem, the only reason to be talking about this at all, is because there is not a level playing field.

"Oh you can't fool me, I'm sticking with the union."