Tag Archives: profit

From the Tumblr: the NRA’s “everyone should be armed” fantasy

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divineirony: The Gun Justice Fantasy

The idea that several people shooting in a dark, crowded, tear gassed theater is better than one, because everyone who can get a gun is obviously an expert marksman with crisis intervention training and nerves of steal.

“If only people would have had guns to fire back!”- Fuck off with this argument. It’s a complete fantasy.

underthemountainbunker:

Agreed — the ‘everyone should carry a gun’ argument is completely stupid. For the reasons you say and also because just like Ta-Nehisi Coates is arguing in that post by azspot this morning, James Holmes was wearing body armor. Are we all supposed to wear body armor now too?

I wouldn’t trust 98% of the people around me to be able to identify the correct target, let alone hit it in a dark theater, with people screaming and running, alarms blaring, and their blood pressure skyrocketing. There’s good reason for use of force / tactical training.

And has there ever been one situation in modern history where an ‘armed’ citizen (who wasn’t former or current LE) saved the day? Ever?

One last thought: you want to be ‘that guy’ who starts shooting back in a crowd? Good luck with all the lawsuits!

A gun in every cold, dead hand. The NRA is a lobby for firearm manufacturers and gun dealers. Money. That’s what it’s always all about.

Privatizing government: less government equals more corporate power

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Source: phroyd

How Privatizing Government Shovels Cash to Parasitic Corporations and Undermines Democracy

Privatization as a way of avoiding constraints and accountability measures has two particularly troubling consequences. First, the government can use independent agents to do things that they themselves cannot do, betraying the whole point of keeping government in check. Especially in the world of surveillance, this practice can act as a way to get around constitutional protections enjoyed by citizens.

Second, accountability measures that have evolved through decades of public law are jettisoned when a service leaves the public sector, allowing companies to do the government’s work in a network of secrecy. Ways the public keeps a check on the government, from the Freedom of Information Act to the Administrative Procedure Act to whole regimes of other transparency laws, do not bind outside businesses.

[...] A regime of privatization shifts the debate away from the functions of government towards the allocation of those functions. For all the talk about innovation by outside contractors, what privatization largely does is preserve the scope of government services while looking for efficiency gains. And since the scope of what the government does is held constant, the real gains come from minimizing costs.

Take prisons, for example. With the addition of privately run prisons, the debate narrowly focuses on how much to spend on prisoners. Minimizing costs here will often be the result of simply providing less of a good at a worse quality, and the debate will focus on the optimal extent of these privatization contracts. Meanwhile, the greater question of when the state should imprison people fades to the background.

What’s actually public about these responsibilities disappears from the conversation. Privatization assumes that cost quantifying solutions are more fundamental to government than any discussion of ethics or values. The move away from democratic accountability is particularly worrisome because in many of these fields, the ultimate motivator of private markets, the profit motive, is in direct conflict with the public administration. The basic values, concepts and institutions of liberal democracy — political participation, elections, equal distribution of individual liberties, checks on concentrated power — do not work towards economic competitiveness.

Read more…

If you want a new war, vote Santorum

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…

THIS IS SANTORUM’S CRITICISM OF THE U.S. RESPONSE to the 2009 Iranian protests and Daniel Larison’s response:

Iran’s mullahcracy has been at war with us for over 30 years. And in 2009 there was a chance to end that. There was a chance for freedom in Iran. I have been a believer and an advocate for that possibility since my service in the Senate. I authored the Iran Freedom Support Act which, among other things, provided millions of dollars for the pro-democracy movement in Iran. At first my bill was opposed by both President Bush and Senator Obama. Both eventually relented, but neither implemented that provision while president.

As a result we were not ready when the spark struck. So, rather than supporting the dissidents there-dissidents asking for our help-the president continued his policy of engaging (and effectively supporting) the mullahcracy. The result? The dissidents were brutally crushed. Now, instead of being able to face a leadership in Iran that would be grateful to us today, we still have the same leadership in Iran that wants to destroy us and our allies in the region.

Let us make no mistake about what happened there: We sided with evil because our president believes our enemies are legitimately aggrieved and thus we have no standing to intervene.

Let’s count up the false and misleading statements. Contrary to what Santorum said, the Green movement did not represent an opportunity to overthrow the regime. That was not the Green movement’s purpose or its goal. There was nothing that the U.S. could have constructively done that would have aided them, so the charge of being unprepared is rather silly. It is a matter of record that Iranian NGOs found U.S. funding to be more of a detriment than an advantage, and it is also the case that the Green movement generally did not want U.S. or other foreign assistance. So it has nothing to do with believing that enemies are “legitimately aggrieved,” and a lot to do with the recognition that the Iranian opposition didn’t want and couldn’t use our help.

Oddly enough, one reason that the Green movement didn’t want U.S. assistance was exactly the reason Santorum gave for why the U.S. should have provided it: to make a new Iranian leadership indebted to us. The second half of their slogan, which was “na menat’e Amrika,” meant that the Green movement did not want to owe anyone outside their country.

There’s more…

AND HERE’S A GREAT OBSERVATION about military-industrial complex and a war with Iran, via: mohandasgandhi:

P.S. Halliburton sold Iran nuclear technology something like 4 years ago. So, we’re sanctioning a country we sold nuclear technology to because we don’t want them to have it, which could potentially lead to a war that Halliburton would profit from.

This is how the military industrial complex works.

Banks profit outside a free market economy #ows

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The Free-Market Case Against The Big Banks — Tim Carney advances it: 

These banks’ credit is rated higher than they would be in a free market, meaning they profit from the expectation of a bailout, if necessary. So banks profit largely through activities that do not create value or efficiencies. They profit through financial games that rest on government favors. Many Occupy Wall Street protestors demonize all profit. Conservatives defend profit-seeking as the engine that creates prosperity for all of society. But the big banks have rigged the game so that they profit without creating value. In fact, they profit from activities that weaken the economy by creating instability.

The Circle of Bank Profit:

1) create nothing of value
2) create instability and inefficiency, weaken the economy
3) because of weak economy, ask for federal assistance (bailouts, deregulation)
4) profit!

In 7 years, private prisons increased their lobbying by 165% and increased their populations by 37%

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Via Think Progress:

Today, the Michigan Messenger reports about how the private prisons behemoth Corrections Corporations of America grew over the last decade, expanding both its prisoner population and its political clout. The Messenger cites data from the U.S. Department of Justice showing that the private prison population grew from 87,369 to 129,336 from 2000 to 2009:

Then, citing figures from the Justice Policy Institute, the Messenger notes that lobbying dollars from the major private prison operators grew from $840,885 to $1,391,056 from 2002 to 2009:

I’ve posted before about the relationship between states reducing their health department budgets and how that’s almost a guaranteed influx of new prisoners. Imagine the glee at private prisons in such states, when their ‘bottom line’ is exceeded at the end of the year — the stockholders are happy, the CEOs get their bonuses. All of that success happens when states like Oklahoma argue against raising taxes on the wealthy, and instead decide to cut spending on things like “public health, nursing services, nursing home and restaurant inspections, immunizations, investigations, flu shots, newborn screenings, and mental health and substance abuse.” Not really coincidentally, Oklahoma has several CCA private prisons who lobby their state politicians. (Via: Oklahoma family reunions, meth, the Koch Brothers, and GOP politics)

This might be the Republican party’s jobs plan: lock ‘em up and collect the profits!

Related:

“The aim of the corporate state is not to feed, clothe or house the masses… “

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“The aim of the corporate state is not to feed, clothe or house the masses but to shift all economic, social and political power and wealth into the hands of the tiny corporate elite. It is to create a world where the heads of corporations make $900,000 an hour and four-job families struggle to survive. The corporate elite achieves its aims of greater and greater profit by weakening and dismantling government agencies and taking over or destroying public institutions. Charter schools, mercenary armies, a for-profit health insurance industry and outsourcing every facet of government work, from clerical tasks to intelligence, feed the corporate beast at our expense. The decimation of labor unions, the twisting of education into mindless vocational training and the slashing of social services leave us ever more enslaved to the whims of corporations. The intrusion of corporations into the public sphere destroys the concept of the common good. It erases the lines between public and private interests. It creates a world that is defined exclusively by naked self-interest.” — Chris Hedges

“Fascism is when corporations become the government” ~ Bill Maher

Jon Stewart on the news that GE had $14.2 BILLION in profits for 2010 and yet paid ZERO taxes

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Jon Stewart on the news that GE had $14.2 BILLION in profits for 2010 and yet paid ZERO taxes. See more here…

Video:

Of course for teabaggers, the knee-jerk response that their Koch-Brothers-funded organization has taught them to say is “BUT… JOBS!” Doesn’t matter if there aren’t any jobs, or that GE and other such corporations haven’t created any jobs. Their point is that these corporations could create jobs when they stop hoarding their profits — and giving them even more tax breaks means they could really, really create jobs. Plus, the alternative is Marxism! somehow.