The link
The reason America never fixes its problems is that it believes they will auto-correct. This article is the ideological foundation of authoritarianism. If you prefer to smear it, I guess you could call it “emergency dictatorship,” “capitalism in decay” or “fascism.” It is the idea that freedom and liberty “don’t work,” but the logical conclusion is that authority is needed to patch society. It is not really stressing class conflict or the need for the complete elimination of private property, and thus not really addressing the issue from a Marxist-Leninist standpoint but a corrective authoritarian standpoint.

It requires a religious belief in capitalism in order to keep trying to succeed against all odds, because otherwise it is easier to give up. After all, to succeed requires many failed attempts and/or a special networking connection, especially in this global economic meltdown. I can attest to the fact that most hardcore entrepreneurs truly believe these values.

WASHINGTON — The most popular religion in America isn’t Christianity, as most of us have been taught to believe. The most cherished belief system celebrates the principles of unfettered capitalism.

That misplaced faith in free markets was on display in this past Thursday’s health care summit, when — between sound bites and talking points — Republicans argued that “choice and competition” would largely resolve the country’s health care problems. That belief — that the arbitrary, confusing and consumer-unfriendly policies and practices that we euphemistically call a health care “system” can be transformed by relying on free market principles — is confounding.

Except for beneficiaries of Medicare, Medicaid and the Veterans Affairs system — all government-run insurance programs — those of us who have insurance are utterly reliant on the private market. That’s what got us into the mess we’re in.

The health care market simply doesn’t operate like the market for cars or computers or flat-screen TVs. Sony and Samsung make their profits by selling as many of their products as they can. Health insurance companies make their profits by selling as many of their products as they can and then trying very hard not to actually deliver them.

Try to imagine that you’re awaiting delivery of your brand-new 50-inch TV, for which you’ve already made a hefty down payment. But the company calls to tell you that you violated some obscure clause in your contract, so they’re not going to bring it! In the health insurance world, it’s called “rescission.” Insurers decide they won’t honor the contract because of some alleged violation by the policy-holder.

They do that to keep their fat profit margins. Health care giant Wellpoint has proposed substantial rate increases in the individual market (policies for individuals who don’t have employer-based insurance), not just in California but in several other states. In congressional testimony last week, WellPoint president Angela Braly said the company had to raise premiums because of soaring health care costs. But Wellpoint hardly seems to be hurting; it reported a profit last year of $4.7 billion.

California’s Wellpoint subsidiary, Anthem Blue Cross, is not only proposing stunning rate hikes. The state’s insurance commissioner has announced that the company has also repeatedly violated state law by failing to pay medical claims on time and by misrepresenting policy provisions to consumers, according to the Los Angeles Times.

So, it seems, the company tells you that a policy offers broad coverage when they’re trying to get you to buy insurance. But when you need the coverage, you find out that the policy doesn’t offer broad coverage, after all. That helps explain why so many people, even with health insurance, go bankrupt after a costly illness.

Without stricter government oversight and regulation — which is the essence of the health care reform proposed by President Obama — health care costs will continue to soar while consumers get less and less. Obama’s proposals don’t represent a “government takeover,” as critics contend. The vast majority of Americans would still get their insurance in the private marketplace. But insurers would have to live by a different set of rules.

Vice President Joe Biden said it best at the summit: If Republicans agree that insurance reform is necessary, that health insurance companies should be prohibited from turning away consumers because of pre-existing conditions, that they should be prevented from enforcing lifetime caps on benefits, then the GOP must see the need for strict government regulation. You don’t get those changes in the “free market.”

And, unlike the choice of buying a computer or a car, you’d don’t really get to walk away from health insurance. If you do, you take your life into your hands. Having health insurance increases your chances of longevity.

Once upon a time, political leaders realized that all Americans needed access to electricity, and they stepped in to ensure that all households got that small miracle at reasonable rates — something that the “free market” could not provide. Americans need a similar intervention in health care now.

I just reviewed old threads started on the phora, and found them embarrassing, because they were so obviously influenced by bourgeois liberalism and an attempt to appeal to the fox news crowd. What kind of Kim Jong Il, Saddam Hussein and Vlad the Impaler fan tries to collaborate with Republican neo-liberals! And they lacked a clear cut message! It’s so obvious that I do not believe in liberal democracy and I do not know why I was not more explicit about the sham of the two party system.

In 2007 however, as opposed to 2006, The pro-JTF posts were cool because at that time the JTF used to be cool, but all this talk about “white racialism” and “western civilization” is just a bunch of Republican non-sense. My views are increased in sophistication by several orders of magnitude, but really I realized that trying to frame views into a mainstream context is cowardly! In addition to being a coward’s move, trying to “go mainstream” does not get results!

I note a few recurring themes in the posts, but that was mainly because of the environment. If a pond is full of bass fish, then your line will catch bass fish. If a forum is full of people who enjoy talking about certain themes, then you’ll adapt to that. It’s hardly autistic as the clowns on stumble inn would suggest, and more that I was responding to the environment by discussing the same topics, of course with different viewpoints! Contrary to me being autistic, my ideological opponents were, as they latched onto old fashioned ideologies and defended them whereas I always look forwards and sideways, much to the consternation of others.

I note high levels of criticism of Catholicism and Paganism. And criticism of nationalities. I guess you can say the posts weren’t all boxed into one issue.

Dear Metal Gear please post this,

The other posters here just don’t get it.  Freedom is not free.  Free market liberalism is based on “principles” rather than greed.  In other words free markets are about the liberation of the individual and not about the profit of corporations which are separate from the state.

If it was not for American imperialism, real Communists and real Fascists would have you all interned in camps.

MY COUNTRY TIS OF THEE SWEET LAND OF LIBERTY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

OH BEUTIFUL FOR SPACIOUS SKIES!

DON’T WANT TO BE AN AMERICAN IDIOT

(blood from slit wrists was found on the document)

The Kahanist approach of opposing all Arabs is incorrect. Kahanists may have common enemies but they are only useful to an extent.

Kahanism is not the right path to fight Islamic extremism.

The neo-con path is not the right path either. Liberal democracy is not the right path when confronted with theological threats.

A third way is the real option.

Everyone knows that lying, cheating, nepotism and butt kissing are what cause people who are far intellectually inferior to rise to the top in the liberal capitalism system. The only people who don’t realize this are the most self-deluded fools and their gold digger wives who sit all day in the kitchen.

Goldman Sachs…These dysgenic cowards should have been in the trade towers when they went down. Paying themselves benefits after they ruined the economy for everyone else. Nothing short of revolution will change the situation. Obama is as much a part of the system as Bush.

A tiny amount of globalists continue to serve their own interests instead of serving national interests.

It is not my generation that ruined the country but the previous generations. It is not my generation that is responsible for the unemployed state of the young but your generation. It isn’t me, it’s you. Shut the fuck up. You get to where you are because you lie, cheat and kiss ass. Then once you gain power, you immediately betray the national interests of America to globalize the economy.

Nothing short of mass executions and bloodshed will fix the question of liberal capitalists who control the American government. I wonder how big the bonuses will be in 2011.

I want Hasidic Jews on my side and reject ant-Semitic views. But I don’t care how many pro-Establishment capitalist Jews do get “purged” (to say it non-violently) if they resist attempts to break up the capitalist power structure and replace it with a corporatist authoritarian power structure. All people who sympathize with the current system can metaphorically hang from a tree, even if they are Jews. I’m not advocating violence, just being frank about what I think about liberal capitalism.

The working class must not turn to egalitarianism but to authoritarian nationalism.

The link
This article is right on the money. I happen to fit the age demographic listed here and am convinced that it is luck, not hard work, that gets people ahead. I can’t stand when some self-righteous bastard with a beer belly and a physique that reeks of an oncoming heart attack tries to tell me that I should just “work a little harder.” I have had it with free markets and liberalism. If I could hang all the people who have caused the recession, I would hang them and have fun doing it. I wish these people would be boiled in piss until they drown. And it’s affected my political views too. You can count on me holding extremist views for my entire life now.

After living through one of the most brutal recessions in U.S. history, many late teens and young adults could be scarred for life, adopting behaviors that could skew everything from their own careers to politics, corporate profits and the stock market.

Academics are beginning to study the implications of the recent recession on the current generation of Americans that age, suggesting it may have much the same effect as how the Great Depression changed so many of the youth of the 1930s into conservative spenders and investors.

Experts said people between 18 and 25 are the most likely to be affected for life as they internalize the struggles they’ve seen in family and friends and contemplate the power they will have over their own destiny.

Researchers Paola Giuliano of UCLA and Antonio Spilimbergo of the International Monetary Fund, in a National Bureau of Economic Research paper looking at recessions from 1963 to 2006, found that young people who live through downturns tend to doubt their control over their careers. Unlike people who have lived through sweeter economic circumstances, the youth of recessions tend to look at career success as luck rather than a result of personal action.

Long-term attitudes are soured most dramatically if individuals go through the stress of losing their own job, rather than simply taking in the broader angst amid a recession.

The current young generation has been hit hard directly and indirectly. In their homes, teens have likely seen parents worry about home values. In the workplace, there’s the threat to jobs as the unemployment rate remains stuck at a high 10 percent.

In addition, households are trying to replenish savings after a huge decline in stocks savaged 401(k) plans, and banks are forcing credit card holders to pay off debt and are reluctant to provide high levels of new credit.

Beyond family pressures, unemployment among 16-to-19-year-olds is at an extraordinarily high level of more than 26 percent. Students finishing college face difficult prospects, with hiring of this year’s graduates down 22 percent, according to the National Association of Colleges and Employers.

The political discontent noted by researchers is showing up in a 25 percent approval rating for Congress and slippage in President Barack Obama’s numbers, according to Gallup polls. The public’s demand for action is fueling debate on how much business regulation is needed to protect people and how much would stymie profits, the economy and stock markets.

Meanwhile, investors pulled billions of dollars out of the stock market last year and this year have put a record amount, more than $300 billion, into bond mutual funds despite recent warnings that rising interest rates could cause bond values to fall.

If investors stay on the sidelines, the stock market won’t receive the boost individual buyers provide. And if bond values fall, the individuals who fled stocks and think they are safe in bonds could get hurt again.

It is possible that a generation of preretirees, and possibly their children, have been scarred permanently by stock market losses. Research by University of California-Berkeley professor Ulrike Malmendier and Stanford University’s Stefan Nagel shows that when individuals have had low stock market returns for many years, they don’t want to take risks in stocks.

Fidelity Investments research shows that Americans 22 to 33 years old have shifted toward more conservative financial behavior too. It’s influencing everything from investing to job choices: More are seeking job security and strong benefits rather than opting to jump from job to job to further their careers.

LINK TO FORUM POLL!

This is a multiple choice poll. Guests may participate. The potential answers are these.

I would agree with the message of anti-imperialism if it wasn’t for the fact that many regimes underneath the imperialism are not worth saving. When the focus was on Iraq, I agree with everything. A secular nationalist fighting globalization is a good theme.

Why fight for the preservation of ideological systems which hate infidels and continue to thumb their nose at science? Unlike the Iraqi Ba’athists, Theocratic Muslims believe in permanent revolution just as strongly as Leon Trotsky but are not advocating socialism but Islam. If you are an idealist like me, it is saddening that the middle east can’t fight American imperialism with anything but religious fundamentalism. In some ways, I believe the victim is responsible for the rape, to put it crudely.

If the world is divided between two theological viewpoints, secularism and Islam, and only one can exist, then sympathizing with the other is self-destructive. If someone has to be supreme, then it is better America than Iran or Afghanistan. Let it be made clear that if many of these regimes had the military strength to dominate, they would take advantage of it. It is only for material reasons that America dominates. But America is not more evil than Islam.

Yes we are ruled by disgusting liberalism. Nobody denies that. Yes our leaders are corrupt. But that does not mean that I sympathize with every single enemy America has.

Libertarianism is an unquestionable failure. The economy and country has been ripped to shambles by outsourcing, uncontrolled immigration, poor loan policy, greed and a government that enables it. Globalization has created a system where each country cannot be self-sufficient and political correctness has completely destroyed this country socially. If one country crashes, they all crash. The government “solution” of bailing out the same people who caused the recession is an unquestionable failure. Our system of economics is far behind computer networking, as good networks are designed to be fault tolerant but our economy is not. Only the people who screw things up get bailed out while other people never get a chance to even start their careers.

Americans should get more militant if the government doesn’t cooperate. We’ve had enough of being bounced between a facade of two similar parties like pinballs and we’re not going to waste our lives away decaying under this system. Both parties serve the same elite and both hate communitarian nationalism. We’re not as dumb as the government thinks we are. If there is no light at the end of the tunnel, you can count on anti-government action and feeling escalating.