They aren't Republicans & they aren't Democrats.....so what are they?

[FunkyHiFi]

though i suppose one can debate if the republicans in power are really conservatives in the definative sense....or rather just crafty business men/women who found the conservative base "ripe for the picking" when it comes to lemmings for an election.
my emphasis

This is quoted from a post Qdrop made in another thread & I just wanted to say that he put into words what I've had rolling around in my head for awhile now. BTW: The bold-faced part is what I believe.

Cold, calculating, greedy & incredibly selfish people is who I think are controlling this country's government and many of its corporations.

But fortunately I've seen more and more people catching on to their slick little mind games and after they are voted out of office I think we as a population will learn from this experience. Because I also didn't believe fellow citizens would sell out their own country for an extra house by the lake and the loaded BMW w/optional navigation system.

[Qdrop]

But fortunately I've seen more and more people catching on to their slick little mind games and after they are voted out of office I think we as a population will learn from this experience.

let's hope so.

well, let's do more than hope...let's put some work into it and make it happen.

[ASsman]

Because I also didn't believe fellow citizens would sell out their own country for an extra house by the lake and the loaded BMW w/optional navigation system.
Heh. I'd like to believe that. They can and do, as long as they are ignorant to the fact, or somehow justify it.

[FunkyHiFi]

or somehow justify it.
On some news show last week (I watch a lot so can't remeber which--Lou Dobbs maybe?) a panel was discussing outsourcing, the trade imbalance and its negative effects on America. One of the guests had the nutsack to say directly to the host & the camera that all this demonstrated the " economic power of the American consumer" and what a positive thing this was for those other countries' economies.

I just busted out laughing--what HUGE stinky piece of propaganda! Talk about a major spin job!

These people are either incredibly divorced from reality or they are incredibly contemptuous of us "Regular Joes".

[Ace42]

Cold, calculating, greedy & incredibly selfish people is who I think are controlling this country's government and many of its corporations.

I think the term you are looking for is "capitalists." And capitalists will behave in a capitalist manner. They are inextricable from American culture, because they represent what America stands for.

[FunkyHiFi]

because they represent what America stands for.
1) capitalism is only ONE aspect of American culture. I've lived here 39 years and know this to be true.

As far as many of the popular images of the United States are concerned, unfortunately many people in other countries only see: what Hollywood puts out (mostly shallow stereotypes of American culture to sell tickets/generate TV ratings); what that country's own media thinks is interesting or makes us look bad to make them look better; and wealthy/loudmouthed/60+ American tourists that get upset because there are no hamburgers, Twinkies or other "proper" food on that country's menu.

2) I don't believe every capitalist is an arrogant lying a-hole.

I hang out with several business-oriented people (including a close buddy) that enjoy making money and sometimes are aggressive about doing so, but they don't cheat anybody or use questionable tactics to accomplish that goal. Just because a person is aggressive when doing his job doesn't mean he is immoral or unethical. But I've also known lots of laid back people who were also very sleazy and plain repulsive to be around.

Contrary to what some may think, not EVERY U.S. citizen works in the financial sector either. Believe it or not, we also have many artists, musicians, veternarians, engineers, fireman, plumbers, computer programmers, peace activists(!!), teachers, astronomers, etc, etc, etc. And amazingly enough, 95% of the people I hang out with never talk about the amount of money they earn, complicated financial schemes to make more of it, or even world domination!

BTW: not all of us drive SUVs either. :rolleyes:

I think the large majority of American citizens are decent people, and though I think 51% of them may be too trusting as far as certain politicians and corporations are concerned (see "sell out" paragraph above), I certainly don't think they are intent upon causing harm to other countries or their citizens.

I don't know--team sports are very important to many, many Americans so maybe to many of them they have this unspoken belief that they should trust their coach at all times. Unfortunately, in my opinion this coach doesn't have his TEAM's welfare in mind but rather just himself and a few select friends and organizations.

[Qdrop]

^^
excellant post, man.

it's nice to see someone else sticking up for this country on this board.

[Ali]

Cold, calculating, greedy & incredibly selfish people is who I think are controlling this country's government and many of its corporations.the entity controlling the US is more than just the people in power, it's the ideology adopted by those people to get them into power and perpetuated by the people while they are in power, it seems to have a life of its own. it exists before they arrive and persists after they leave

The Secret Team (http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/ST/ST.html) is a description of that entity, how it works and the effects it has. I know I've posted the link before, but that was a while back and it's relevant to this thread. The most remarkable development in the management of America's relations with other countries during the quarter-century since the end of World War II has been the assumption of more and more control over military, financial and diplomatic operations at home and abroad by men whose activities are secret, whose budget is secret, whose very identities as often as not are secret -- in short, by a Secret Team whose actions only those implicated in them are in a position to monitor and to understand. You might be able to buy the book, but copies are hard to come by (strangely enough). Print it chapter by chapter and read it carefully. Very, very interesting and not a hint of Paranoia.

[FunkyHiFi]

it's nice to see someone else sticking up for this country on this board.
Well hell, to many members here it's like every American has horns and a tail--I'm getting sick of it. Because it's only a tiny minority of U.S. shitheads causing problems for the rest of the world but many Americans are finally starting to realize that they have been used and lied to.

I wish there was a way for people from other countries to see what an average American person was truly like, and trust me the bitchy/snobby/whining airheads on The Real World and most other reality shows are not--repeat NOT--an accurate picture of that person!! Remember, good TV ratings aren't generated by shows about nice, ethical people happy to be living with each other :rolleyes: and having a camera stuck in your face 24/7 with the director standing nearby changes the way most people act.


The Secret Team is a description of that entity,.....
I would be completely unsurprised if such an organization existed--there are too many weird things happening that make little sense.....on the surface anyway.

[jusme1072]

my emphasis

This is quoted from a post Qdrop made in another thread & I just wanted to say that he put into words what I've had rolling around in my head for awhile now. BTW: The bold-faced part is what I believe.

Cold, calculating, greedy & incredibly selfish people is who I think are controlling this country's government and many of its corporations.

But fortunately I've seen more and more people catching on to their slick little mind games and after they are voted out of office I think we as a population will learn from this experience. Because I also didn't believe fellow citizens would sell out their own country for an extra house by the lake and the loaded BMW w/optional navigation system.

i hate to tell you this, but this is what we all thought when we voted papa bush out, we thought everyone had come to their senses after 12 years of recession and war. but here we are again!

[FunkyHiFi]

but here we are again!
Here's my wishy-washy answer: :)

I'm no sociology expert but I think it takes a while for an entire society/culture made up of 240,000,000 people to learn and change its collective mind about certain things.

[yeahwho]

They are exactly what we invented, we, the American citizens can thank us for our leaders.

I'm excerpting from a review of the excellent book, "Running on Empty", by Peter G. Peterson, It is an accurate description of our 2 party system pandering us to the point of bankruptcy.

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

When George W. Bush was governor of Texas, Peter G. Peterson tried to convince him that the rickety finances of Social Security and Medicare posed a pressing philosophical and moral question. Mr. Peterson has been chairman of several corporations and of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and was secretary of commerce under President Richard M. Nixon. As president of the Concord Coalition he has warned that politicians are endangering the economy by recklessly promising government benefits that they have no will -- and no way -- to finance. The question he raised with Governor Bush was ''whether a modern, media-driven democracy that only focuses on immediate crises could respond effectively to a very different kind of threat -- a silent, slow-motion, long-term crisis like entitlements.''


Three years into the Bush administration, Mr. Peterson has his answer. It is no. Benefit spending now takes up an eighth of gross domestic product and is rising steeply. The deficit has spiked alarmingly since 2000, and under the most favorable demographic circumstances imaginable: for the past two decades the huge baby-boom generation has been in its prime work years, paying benefits for a relatively small number of nonworking seniors and children. Things are about to change dramatically for the worse. Soon, senescent boomers will be collecting the checks, and there will be only two-and-a-quarter workers per beneficiary.

With precision and punch, Mr. Peterson's ''Running on Empty'' lays out why we are in a lousy position to dig ourselves out of this hole. The United States now has the lowest savings rate in the developed world. Much of the growth in entitlements has been paid for by defense cuts that were reaching their limits even before Sept. 11. The annual current-account deficit -- what America has to borrow to finance its excess of imports over exports -- is a dangerously high $540 billion, or 5.1 percent of gross domestic product. Net financial liabilities to foreigners have risen to $2.6 trillion today, from zero in 1980. With a third of public debt held abroad, the consoling thought that ''we owe it to ourselves'' is no longer operative.

How we reached this pass can be stated simply: Republicans undertax, while Democrats overspend. For decades, Mr. Peterson writes, Democrats ''labored patiently to purge America of its traditional aversion to deficits,'' bribing voters with jobs and social-service programs that the country could not afford. Starting with the Emergency Recovery Tax Act of 1981, though, Republicans have learned that tax cuts and write-offs can be used as bribes in exactly the same way. Dependent on deficit spending, both parties have blown through every institutional constraint erected against reckless tax cuts and benefit expansions, from the Gramm-Rudman deficit ceilings of the 1980's to the Budget Enforcement Act of 1990. And they have blown the Social Security-tax surpluses meant to offset predictable future shortfalls.

While Mr. Peterson blames both parties for conniving against fiscal common sense, he puts the present administration in a class of its own. George W. Bush has discarded traditional Republican qualms against big government, replacing the old Democratic model of tax-and-spend with his own model of borrow-and-spend. Thanks to three unaffordable tax cuts and an unfinanced Medicare drug benefit that will eventually cost $2 trillion a decade, Mr. Peterson writes, ''this administration and the Republican Congress have presided over the biggest, most reckless deterioration of America's finances in history.''

Unfortunately, fixing the federal budget will require more than just cleaning up after the Bush administration, Mr. Peterson warns. Revenue lost from the Bush tax cuts will indeed have to be recaptured, but the fiscal threat from entitlement programs functioning normally is 10 times as large. Mr. Peterson recommends a program to reform them. Switching from wage-indexing to price-indexing, as Britain has done, and establishing mandatory savings programs could put Social Security on a sound footing by midcentury, he writes.

Medicare and Medicaid, which will cost more than Social Security by the end of this decade, are trickier. Mr. Peterson would start by introducing ''managed competition,'' capping the deductibility of employer health plans and reining in malpractice lawyers. He would reform the budget process by reinstating the Budget Enforcement Act of 1990, which required cuts to balance new spending.

Mr. Peterson has laid out his level-headed argument at book length several times now. Why has it continued to be ignored? Maybe Americans have tacitly given up on the idea that large, New Deal-style entitlement programs can work over the long term -- whether because such programs inevitably get corrupted by politics and bureaucracy, or because even a well-managed welfare state is a competitive albatross in an age of globalization. Mr. Peterson himself notes that nine-tenths of baby boomers think ''government has made financial promises to [their] generation that it will not be able to keep.'' The guarantee of a secure retirement is already being rescinded in the minds of the citizenry, if not yet in the statute books.

But Mr. Peterson also entertains a darker possibility: that ''our national leaders are providing the American people with precisely what they want.'' Debt, he notes, is particularly alluring in periods of partisan intransigence. If the two sides cannot compromise on priorities, each can take what it wants while dumping the bill on future generations. Americans used to understand this temptation and flee it. Thomas Jefferson warned: ''To preserve our independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our election between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude.''

So it may be that some terrible change has come over the national psychology that admits to only two diagnoses. Either the complexity of government has outrun the capacity of a democratic public to understand it, or that public, understanding well the options Jefferson put before it, has chosen servitude.

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

Sorry for the long ass review, it is by subscription only. link (http://query.nytimes.com/search/article-printpage.html?res=9B00E2D61F3CF931A2575BC0A9629C8 B63)

[Whois]

i hate to tell you this, but this is what we all thought when we voted papa bush out, we thought everyone had come to their senses after 12 years of recession and war. but here we are again!

Which clearly demonstrates that it is pathetically easy to manipulate the average American.…despite all the screaming and moaning to the contrary.

"Sheep! ALL OF YOU!! *gunshots*"

[FunkyHiFi]

Yeahwho: thanks much for that quote.

I think I saw this on a C-Span Book-TV episode but some guy was talking about how corporations over the decades have trained us to buy or do certain things that are in their interest. This wasn't exactly some huge new revelation--just look at all the commercials on TV urging us to buy such-n-such new deodorant and your life will be soooooo much better--but by using the word "trained" he made me think of it in a whole different way. "Programmed" would also fit in the above sentence. :(

In other words, as many here have observed, many other people will buy something simply because it's supposed to be cool, everybody else has one, or you will mysteriously somehow be a better person in some unspecified manner just by owning that product. They are quite subtle with this because coming right out and saying "please buy this non-essential gizmo, because we need the money really badly" won't move much product. I'm not saying it's always bad to own something simply for the pleasure of owning it (a piece of art for example) or buying some trendy thing just for the hell of it because it IS fun to let your hair down periodically (yes, I still own--but don't wear anymore!--a Swatch watch) but jeez to have your entire life revolve around buying this stuff ALL the time IMO is definitely not a good thing.

Here's a modern example related to one of my own hobbies: widescreen plasma/LCD HDTVs.

Here we are, the economy still sucks, many companies still downsizing their labor forces, credit debt through the roof...........and there all these people scraping money together to buy an item that can cost upwards of $6,000 and for what? To watch TV shows using an imaging system that according to many experts actually has a slightly worse picture than a CRT-equipped TV; that 90% of the time aren't in the widescreen format, and that aren't in HD quality.*** And if you dont use those crummy stretch modes to fill out the rest of that 16:9 ratio screen, all those hundreds of older TV shows filmed in regular 4:3 ratio usually look smaller that if you just bought a nice old-skool 4:3 TV for much less money (obviously if you only watch letter-boxed dvd movies & HD channels such a TV might be worth it to you--no analogy is perfect. :o ).

But man, the picture sure is BIG! And having a TV that can hang on the wall just like in a sci-fi movie is so sexy, so kewl and so......NOW. Logic would dictate such extremely pricey stuff is not needed in many (most?) people's lives, so many advertisers try to get around that pesky part of your brain by purposely pushing your emotional buttons to get you to open your wallet.* (I think there's a saying that goes something like "The brain doesn't understand what doth the heart desires" -my apologies to the literature majors out there!).

Advertising using the above tactics is not illegal, but to me anyway it can many times border on--and sometimes be--unethical. Getting you to buy the new hamburger with the new Ultra-Yummy Special Sauce for only $2.99 is no big deal, but when it comes to multi-thousand dollar items that offer no real/usable technical improvements, THAT pisses me off.

ANYWAY..........

Not to sound like a conspriacy theory nutcase, but there are very subtle processes going on that affect people's decisions and I don't think many people realize it.....and I don't mean just the burger and TV industries.**

* this scenario obviously doesn't apply to people that can truly afford such technology, because amazingly there are people that actually work their asses off to make their money and just want to enjoy it. I used to work with an unmarried firefighter that always had excess money to burn & no college loans to pay like I do so he was always looking to put something else in his apartment before he did get married. So I'm careful not to point a self-righteous finger at everybody that drives by in a new car or has a 40gb iPod in their pocket.

** I was close to becoming a marketing major back in the 80s so have some knowledge of those systems. You can read about it yourself in this magazine (http://www.advertisingage.com/).

*** when the U.S. switches over to mandatory digital TV broadcasting in the next few years, there is no requirement to broadcast HD signals--it just has to be a digital signal which can provide an image the same as, or worse, than what we have right now with analog signals. :mad:

[jusme1072]

Which clearly demonstrates that it is pathetically easy to manipulate the average American.…despite all the screaming and moaning to the contrary.

"Sheep! ALL OF YOU!! *gunshots*"

not all of us, some of us have special glasses we got from our alien counterparts, and we can see the conspiracy happening when we put them on! now if only i could find a way to market these thing....

[yeahwho]

Yeahwho: thanks much for that quote.

In turn thanks for the AdAge (http://www.adage.com/) page, I signed up so I can observe from the peanut gallery.