Well except for the expanding of wars, the rise of the Tea Party, and it appears the moonbats are also in a lather.
While promoting a new documentary at the Cannes film festival in France last weekend, Peter Fonda made comments that could be construed as threats against President Obama.
“I’m training my grandchildren to use long-range rifles,” the actor told The Daily Telegraph at the international film festival. “For what purpose? Well, I’m not going to say the words ‘Barack Obama,’ but …”
Keep it classy, Pete! Then there’s this bit of bong-smoke he’s gonna blow up our asses:
“We are heading for a major conflict between the haves and the have nots,” Fonda said. “I came here many years ago with a biker movie, and we stopped a war. Now, it’s about starting the world.”
“There’s no room any more for a sissy and, like I said, don’t forget that I’ve got grandsons who I’ve trained with long-distance rifles,” Fonda repeated. “We have to run like mofos to change this world.”
OK so Henry Fonda’s son, who is also an Actor, and his daughter Bridget is also an actor is going to tell us about “Haves and Have-nots”? You gonna tell us from your Two-bedroom house in the suburbs in between shifts on your first and second job, Pete?
Furthermore Easy Rider stopped a war? You mean the Vietnam Conflict? Last I checked Easy Rider hit the theaters in ’69, and the Last Helicopter out of Saigon was only SIX years later.
I hear ya Pete, it was a gut-shot, took ’em a while to go down. You fight the power…from your Mansion in LA.
And BTW, should we talk about banning “Long Range Rifles” just for the sake of national security? I mean you can’t hunt with them! 😉
Is ANYBODY in that family sane? Has he ever been in the same zip code as reality?
From what I can gather, and since he was a self-made man, Henry seemed like a hellofva fella.
But yeah, Jane and Peter didn’t turn out well, did they?
compared to the actual mega-rich in this country, the Fondas aren’t even on the radar.
yeah, any one of ’em has probably lost more money between their sofa cushions than i make in a year, but seriously — there are lists made of the richest people in name-a-country (or in the world), and hollywood actors aren’t near the top. famous does not necessarily even mean rich; what’s-his-face the batshit loony gun nut guitar player — nugent? — is currently living, if not paycheck to paycheck, then pretty close to it. he’s still touring because he needs the money.
besides, even if they were at the top of those lists, being rich isn’t automatically an impediment to being able to see which way the wind’s blowing and being able to spot trouble on the rise. George Soros funds lots of projects he probably sees as furthering social justice and equality, even in spite of them possibly being technically against his own private self-interest. so, for all his other faults, does Bill Gates. good on ’em, says i, and more like that.
If the ‘Nuge or Fonda (both of which are certainly “has beens”) are living paycheck to paycheck its because their lifestyle is expensive. Same goes with Nicolas Cage and his financial troubles.
All of these people have very high net worth, tho I think you are right that their liquid assets aren’t much.
Still his relative wealth isn’t relevant in this case. He’s talking about a “conflict between haves and have-nots”, and he’s a silver-spoon blow-hard.
As far as Soros goes, I know your politics, Nomen, so let’s not bother with that totalitarian and his Nazi Blood-money, K?
“nazi blood money”?
that one was new to me, and knowing your politics, i wasn’t about to take your word for it — no offense, nothing personal, it’s just that i know you believe some wingnut crazy bullshit. so i googled the man to find a second opinion.
well, wikipedia not only provided plenty good examples to prove you wrong with, it provided a better criticism of Soros by far than that one. and that’s freakin’ wikipedia! you should’ve done that yourself instead of going with the tea party anti-Soros talking point.
as far as “very high net worth”… well, okay, if they have that then let’s tax ’em on it. and if it turns out they DON’T have high net worth, then higher marginal tax rates won’t affect them (or us) anyway.
(AFAIK, nugent mostly has some real estate in michigan. that’s as much a liability as it is wealth, considering the state of the state. dunno what the fondas are invested in, if anything. these people might be millionaires, but they aren’t billionaires; that means they might be wealthy, but they aren’t near to rich.)
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saay, let’s turn this into a moderately interesting flame war, i’ll bring up my most recent notion for a new tax to impose that i got from reading progressive blogs a while ago. let’s impose a new, 0.1% (that’s zero point one percent) transaction tax on selling stock. what say you, good or bad, and in either case why? i say good, because profits on holding stock for any serious length of time should dwarf it; and holding stock for very short times should be discouraged — that’s not investment, it’s reckless speculation.
something like 70% of stock sales supposedly involve stock that’s been held for an average of eleven seconds. i’d like to up that time. how about you?
Well let’s add this that of my involvement in the market, a bunch of it is in my various retirement funds that shall stay there until I’m old and gray (tho they do get managed about once a month for balance) the other part are my company options that are part of my pay. For those I essentially can buy them at a company promised price and sell them whenever. “Whenever” is as soon as I can find a bidder in the market, which are those magic seconds (probably a LOT less than 11, making the stock I hold for months average out).
Overall I feel that any sort of punitive tax to manipulate the market often cause unforeseen consequences.
Also as an employee of a publicly traded company free market speculation can swing both ways, and there is nothing like watching good corporate news cause a “Short Squeeze” drive the stock up because of the people who bet the wrong way.
And of course for us, Money made through people investing in the stock is money that can help us get a cancer drug on the market.
“as far as “very high net worth”… well, okay, if they have that then let’s tax ‘em on it”
Meaning, of course, “Let’s get together and decide that we want X amount of something we didn’t earn and use it for purposes unintended by those who worked for it. Besides, as those evil rich were out working hard, we were sitting around becomming smarter so that we may decide how better to spend their earnings.”
Yes, Weerd, you’d have to be batshit crazy to believe that the capitalists in this country have created a better system of economic advancement than those benevolent socialists in the USSR and N. Korea.
Those shabby peasants waiting in long lines for a handful of turnips really had the right idea. We should give it a try.
Just to make sure I’m getting attributed for the correct economic models I stand for.
I enjoy getting money I didn’t earn from rich people only because they agreed to pay me for my services, and I address them as “Boss”.
“Eat the Rich” simply means “Eat the Working Middle class and Poor”, because the Rich will ALWAYS have money, they just might have to lay off a few people to protect their assets.
The people who get laid off will no longer have money, and will need to go on the public tit…which I think is the intended “Progressive” model in the first place.
“The people who get laid off will no longer have money, and will need to go on the public tit…which I think is the intended “Progressive” model in the first place.”
And then when someone comes along and reminds everyone that our debt is nearing our GDP and our deficit spending is about 40% of our budget we will heart trumpeted from the rooftops “They are trying to kill Grandma!” “They are going to take away your unemployment!” And on and on.
But of course Weerd, you can always just go live in a cave. Interesting how the argument goes from “Well, since it’s ok to tax for defense and roads, then it must be ok to tax for [insert progressive idea here].”
But we must remember that this really isn’t about taxes at all, is it? This is about “social justice” in that the rich must pay a larger percentage of their earnings by democratic vote. To paraphrase Animal Farm, we all pay our fair share of taxes, some of us just pay a more fair share.
hell yeah, that’s how taxation works. don’t like that? go live in a cave somewhere.
there ARE societies that do not tax you, at all. they provide no services, either — no “purposes unintended” by anyone who didn’t directly work for them. go live in one of those if you don’t want to pay taxes. Somalia’s one. what’s a little civil war to someone who, since he needs to pays no taxes, can simply buy his own security?
or, put in other words: CIVILIZATION — pay for it, or leave it. i pay my taxes, because as the famous justice said, they buy me civilization.
This is not an all-or-nothing argument.
You’re proposing MORE taxes, I’m proposing LESS taxes, nobody is proposing NO taxes.
If you need to dust off the Straw Men, it says a lot about your argument.
straw men to battle straw men with, weerd. alcade did not exactly represent my argument in the best of faiths either, and i’m not above playing as dirty as my opposition.
except we know from historical examples, as well as international examples, that this is not the case. it wasn’t so in the 1950’s; let’s return to the marginal tax strucure and unearned-income tax structure we had back then.
the rich only get into exploitative anti-poor and anti-middle class warfare if we let them. we know that such situations can be gotten out of; it’s been done, even here in the USA — it doesn’t always even have to get violent. but we have to stop letting the class war mongers among the ultra-rich get away with it.
if we don’t, sooner or later we’ll end up with another business plot — after all, that tactic’s worked for them in other countries before, it’s how we got the very term “banana republic”. the dumber of them will convince themselves (again) that it’ll work here at home too, if they don’t get disabused of it.
“the rich only get into exploitative anti-poor and anti-middle class warfare”
Except, of course, if we ignore examples like Henry Ford, who increased the daily wages of his employees so they could purchase his products. It makes little sense to believe in some sort of “Business Conspiracy” when one looks at the fact that corporations and factories thrive on selling their goods and services to paying customers. No paying customers = bankrupt business.
“Class war mongerers among the ultra rich” is almost laughable. The ones we hear attempting to sparge the debate with their “class warfare” noise comes overwhelmingly from the left.
Your reference to violence brings up an interesting point. The problem (for me anyways) with the eventual goal of the left isn’t so much the economic utopia we are promised yet never receive, it is the gargantuan growth of centralized power which always leads to the oppression of the “working classes.” But, I suppose, what are a few tens of millions dead when we get to stick it to the man?
To be fair the modern iterations of the left and the right are both about expansion of government powers, at the expense of individual liberty.
Weather they talk about caring for the business owners or the job creators, or they talk about looking out for the little man.
No matter what they’re building up the .gov and we’re ALL fucked.
I was using the more traditional theory of right and left as espoused in The 5000 Year Leap. The Left being greater control, the Right being greater freedom.
I agree that if we use the definitions Left = Democrats and Right = Republicans we are just sitting against opposite sides of the same hole.
Yeah I tend to ascribe to the 2D grid of politics
http://www.filosofos.net/map/PoliticalSpace.jpg
(I don’t necessarily agree with how this grid is labeled, but it shows the general gist)
Overall I’m probably right around where Jefferson’s head is tho I dunno if I’m a “Jeffersonian Democrat”, but my general thought is give people enough freedom and things naturally sort themselves out, attempt to control human nature and the unintended consequences/oversights/systematic abuses, always seem to dwarf the original problem they were attempting to solve.
The most visual and visceral reaction was of course prohibition of alcohol. Drunkeness is certainly a problem, it kills a lot of people, and gets a lot of people in trouble.
But BANNING the alcohol simply created the bootleggers and the moonshiners and the criminal organizations that supported those endeavors.
As if the gang wars weren’t enough, it created the ATF, which of course still exists today and is increasingly more bloated and irrelevant.
On the economic level you can see the alterations of tax codes to attempt to take the big corporate giants down a notch (and of course get a few bucks for everybody’s irrelevant pet project) which simply causes the big businesses to diversify and create tax shelters, while small businesses have to lay off workers or shutter their doors.
And really the big game is irrelevant pet projects. Which do you think would do more economic good? Nomen’s 0.1% stock market tax, or say Disbanding the TSA and laying off all of its workforce, and discontinuing the Patriot Act?
Its as laughable to propose a new tax in this government of waste and nest-feathering, as it is for Peter Fonda to attempt to speak for the “have nots” from the red carpet of the Cannes Film Festival in a haze of bong smoke and paparazzi.
we definitely shouldn’t ignore such examples, which is why i earlier mentioned George Soros and Bill Gates. good men, on the whole, even if they both have their serious flaws — as did Ford, the antisemite.
noise? noise?! i’m talking about ACTUAL ENACTED POLICIES, fuck mere noise! the U.S. economy has for years concentrated more and more wealth into fewer and fewer hands, enriching the already rich while leaving the rest at best stagnant or even outright poorer — and this has been accompanied by deregulation, kickbacks, and corporate welfare at every level. for decades. that’s class warfare in actual action, and you dare gripe about fucking “noise”!
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honestly? the tax. i’m all for disbanding the TSA, they none of them deserve better than to be flipping burgers, and the patriot act should never have been passed in the first place, much less should it keep getting renewed… but pondering the sheer economic size of the stock market, it’s very hard for me to believe the aggregate cost of the TSA would come close to the effects of that proposed tax.
some googling says the TSA’s annual budget is 7-8 billion dollars. the NYSE’s own website claims DAILY trading volumes in the tens of billions of dollars — and that’s just for the NYSE. so yeah, my tax wins. hell, i can make it 0.01% and still win; just to be nice, i will.
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that 2-D political space isn’t much less oversimplified than the 1-D left-right axis, if you ask me… but the real picture would need more dimensions than a human can easily visualize, i believe. the picture is obviously mislabeled, however; Stalin and Hitler, while both totalitarian dictators, were NOT politically similar otherwise.
” the U.S. economy has for years concentrated more and more wealth into fewer and fewer hands, enriching the already rich while leaving the rest at best stagnant or even outright poorer”
Right… I’m not sure which history books you are reading, or if you’re simply getting your talking points directly from the Socialist Party.
In a nutshell, you are saying that here in the US, the fact that just about every family has multiple vehicles, satellite TV, cell phones, a computer or two, central heat and air, a grocery store a short distance away, running water, xbox, etc. etc. etc….
All this represents the concentration of wealth into the hands of the few while simultaneously impoverishing the rest of us?
Your arguments sound good on paper, until we look away from our computer screens and see all the things lying around the house. The economic systems which you seem to so despise brought about this continued acceleration in our standard of living.
Compared this to other countries. Examples will occur to you.
Hell you frequently see the HOMELESS (or at least those who claim to be homeless) chatting on their cellphones when they take a break from panhandling.
Oh yeah, no doubt about it. I knew a guy who actually spent time in a homeless shelter. As I recall it was the Pacific Garden Mission in Chicago, among others. He reported that several of the “residents” had Playstations paid for with their welfare checks.
My sister in law worked at a grocery store in her college days. The Illinois LINK card does not allow for the puchase of tobacco products or alcohol, yet it does provide for up to $20 cash back on purchases. After customers came through with their brand name foods, they’d get their cash back and pay for the beer and cigarettes they wanted. It drove her nuts to watch this.
This morning I was listening to the radio and they were discussing some of the wasteful government spending sent to the National Science Foundation. Among the projects funded by the taxpayers were a study to determine whether shrimp exercised an miniature treadmills would do better or worse if they were sick.
Prepare to be astounded: they discovered that sick shrimp do not do as well as healthy shrimp.
But, as has been said, “it is the price of civilization,” eh comrade?
“but pondering the sheer economic size of the stock market, it’s very hard for me to believe the aggregate cost of the TSA would come close to the effects of that proposed tax.”
That’s my point, you’re referencing the stock market NOW and assume it will stay the same just with the .gov getting an extra cut on the side. But like anything the system itself will be manipulated. Meanwhile the TSA and Patriot act will give people BACK freedom as well as give capitol back to the budget.
“Stalin and Hitler, while both totalitarian dictators, were NOT politically similar otherwise.”
Like Bush and Obama are not politically similar? The difference is pure window dressing and semantics.
dude. weerd. ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE. engage your sense of proportion here.
and Bush is far more similar, politically, to Obama than the two previously named dictators. i can’t believe that even needs to be stated to anyone who’s ever paid the slightest attention to politics— waaitaminnit…
just one of many possible cites: http://www.wweek.com/portland/article-17350-9_things_the_rich_dont_want_you_to_know_about_taxes.html
scroll down to the first table.
your counterargument only works for people who have a house. with lots of stuff lying around in it. you’re letting your privilege do your talking for you, in other words.
compared to other countries? you do know i’m an immigrant from one of those northern european welfare states, right? i’ll compare the USA to them; whaddayaknow, the USA has much it can learn and copy, by comparison.
you’ll pardon me if, after questioning my sources of information, i don’t take the talk radio you listen to at face value. whatever they told you that study investigated was almost certainly not what the study investigated. find out who ran it, at what institution, and i’ll see if i can dig up some real data on what they actually tried to find out by running the study.
(why do you care if poor people drink and smoke themselves to death, anyway? if you’re worried about their health, hell, join me in lobbying for some decent socialized healthcare; that’ll do far more for their life expectancies than policing what they can ingest. i want government out of both my bedroom AND my neighbor’s kitchen, i dunno why you’d want it in either place.)
“you’re letting your privilege do your talking for you, in other words.”
My privilege? I am far from well to do! But just because I am a homeowner doesn’t mean that I am somehow any different than the majority of Americans. Whether you own or rent, have a house or an apartment, the fact is the overwhelming majority of people in this country have a comfortable place to live. And I will say that the overwhelming majority of those who do not are in their situation not because we don’t have enough wealth taken from those greedy rich people, but because they spend unwisely on frivilous purchases or have poor work ethics.
“i’ll compare the USA to them; whaddayaknow, the USA has much it can learn and copy, by comparison.”
You’re telling me that America, with the world’s largest GDP can learn something from other countries? Have you ever wondered why so many inventions and innovations come out of America? Have you ever wondered why people come here for medical treatment instead of relying on their own socialized medicine? Have you ever wondered why we have the world’s strongest military? Have you ever wondered how we can afford to send hospital ships and rescue teams, at a moment’s notice, half way around the globe when a disaster strikes? It isn’t because we aren’t enough like Europe. When a government assumes the role of an overbearing parent with its onerous regulations and crushing taxes in the guise of “spreading the wealth around for the good of us all” it stagnates the population’s ingenuity. Sure, you can point out anecdotes, but I’d have to ask why you chose to come live here instead of staying in your own socialized paradise?
Oh, and I’m glad you brought up the whole socialized medicine angle. No, I quite frankly do not care that they are destroying their health with alcohol and tobacco. I care that they are using welfare money to feed their addictions. Welfare is supposed to be used to purchase food while someone is getting back on their feet, not to make Marlboro and Budweiser better profits.
But let us take a step back and look at socialized medicine in a more broader picture, shall we? An example: Here in IL the Democrats in the state house try to pass a motorcycle helmet law every year. Their theory is that it costs everyone money in medical bills, so it ought to be the state’s job to act as the parent and enforce a helmet rule. Now, wearing a helmet is a good idea, but giving the government the authority to become a parent most definately is not. You think it will be any different with socialized medicine? Once the government has the responsibility to provide us with our healthcare, it will seek the authority to make it as inexpensive as possible.
I’m sure socialized medicine is all well and good if one is young and only likely to experience a broken bone or tonsilectomy, but this is one ponzi scheme that heaps upon the government too much orwellian authority. But that doesn’t bother you, does it?