gas prices ...

[EricT]

I have to file mine again, got a notice yesterday that I forgot to fill in an item on one part... my phone number.


God fucking DAMMIT.

 

[dorian gray]

In 2003 a barrell of oil cost $30. Today it is well over $100.

hahahaha Adrian, did I mention I love you? I mean, out loud - not just a whisper in your ear?

 

[dorian gray]

will there be a revolution in America if McCain wins?

McCain sucks so hard.

 

[Conspicuously Absent]

And we all know how much driving a European must do out of necessity, with your vastly underdeveloped and often non-existent systems of public transport.

Hey, I WAS from canada.. and we have the same problems that way as the US. Just more expensive gas. Now it REALLY is a lot cheaper to cross the border and buy, half the price AND half the currency value.

Over here in berlin, half our transit(busses, trams, subway) is on strike... and I#d still call traffic on the streets "functional" since a lot of people just took their bikes or walked to the S-bahn.

now the other half(suburban railway) goes on strike tomorow.... Theres still trains every 30 mins, but there should be a lot more cars on the road, we'll see how that works out.

 

[lurch70]

is the public transport system run by negars there like in NYC?

 

[Reign in Acai]

is the public transport system run by negars there like in NYC?

That explains why the trees in NYC are so bunched together.

 

[lurch70]

... they did attempt to grow banana trees at one point

 

[NAD]

will there be a revolution in America if McCain wins?

No, but there should have been one years ago.

http://shootingwar.com/chapters/chapter-1

hahahaha Adrian, did I mention I love you? I mean, out loud - not just a whisper in your ear?

Never hurts to hear it.

 

[NAD]

Alright over $108 / barrel, let's all be middle class (90% of us) and keep voting Republican to get the upper class (0.01%) tax break and cushy investment strategies we all so desparately need woooooooooo!!!

The Nation

Disowned by the Ownership Society

Naomi Klein

Remember the "ownership society," fixture of major George W. Bush addresses for the first four years of his presidency? "We're creating...an ownership society in this country, where more Americans than ever will be able to open up their door where they live and say, welcome to my house, welcome to my piece of property," Bush said in October 2004. Washington think-tanker Grover Norquist predicted that the ownership society would be Bush's greatest legacy, remembered "long after people can no longer pronounce or spell Fallujah." Yet in Bush's final State of the Union address, the once-ubiquitous phrase was conspicuously absent. And little wonder: rather than its proud father, Bush has turned out to be the ownership society's undertaker.

Well before the ownership society had a neat label, its creation was central to the success of the right-wing economic revolution around the world. The idea was simple: if working-class people owned a small piece of the market--a home mortgage, a stock portfolio, a private pension--they would cease to identify as workers and start to see themselves as owners, with the same interests as their bosses. That meant they could vote for politicians promising to improve stock performance rather than job conditions. Class consciousness would be a relic.

It was always tempting to dismiss the ownership society as an empty slogan--"hokum" as former Labor Secretary Robert Reich put it. But the ownership society was quite real. It was the answer to a roadblock long faced by politicians favoring policies to benefit the wealthy. The problem boiled down to this: people tend to vote their economic interests. Even in the wealthy United States, most people earn less than the average income. That means it is in the interest of the majority to vote for politicians promising to redistribute wealth from the top down.

So what to do? It was Margaret Thatcher who pioneered a solution. The effort centered on Britain's public housing, or council estates, which were filled with die-hard Labour Party supporters. In a bold move, Thatcher offered strong incentives to residents to buy their council estate flats at reduced rates (much as Bush did decades later by promoting subprime mortgages). Those who could afford it became homeowners while those who couldn't faced rents almost twice as high as before, leading to an explosion of homelessness.

As a political strategy, it worked: the renters continued to oppose Thatcher, but polls showed that more than half of the newly minted owners did indeed switch their party affiliation to the Tories. The key was a psychological shift: they now thought like owners, and owners tend to vote Tory. The ownership society as a political project was born.

Across the Atlantic, Reagan ushered in a range of policies that similarly convinced the public that class divisions no longer existed. In 1988 only 26 percent of Americans told pollsters that they lived in a society bifurcated into "haves" and "have-nots"--71 percent rejected the whole idea of class. The real breakthrough, however, came in the 1990s, with the "democratization" of stock ownership, eventually leading to nearly half of American households owning stock. Stock watching became a national pastime, with tickers on TV screens becoming more common than weather forecasts. Main Street, we were told, had stormed the elite enclaves of Wall Street.

Once again, the shift was psychological. Stock ownership made up a relatively minor part of the average American's earnings, but in the era of frenetic downsizing and offshoring, this new class of amateur investor had a distinct shift in consciousness. Whenever a new round of layoffs was announced, sending another stock price soaring, many responded not by identifying with those who had lost their jobs, or by protesting the policies that had led to the layoffs, but by calling their brokers with instructions to buy.

Bush came to office determined to take these trends even further, to deliver Social Security accounts to Wall Street and target minority communities--traditionally out of the Republican Party's reach--for easy homeownership. "Under 50 percent of African Americans and Hispanic Americans own a home," Bush observed in 2002. "That's just too few." He called on Fannie Mae and the private sector "to unlock millions of dollars, to make it available for the purchase of a home"--an important reminder that subprime lenders were taking their cue straight from the top.

Today, the basic promises of the ownership society have been broken. First the dot-com bubble burst; then employees watched their stock-heavy pensions melt away with Enron and WorldCom. Now we have the subprime mortgage crisis, with more than 2 million homeowners facing foreclosure on their homes. Many are raiding their 401(k)s--their piece of the stock market--to pay their mortgage. Wall Street, meanwhile, has fallen out of love with Main Street. To avoid regulatory scrutiny, the new trend is away from publicly traded stocks and toward private equity. In November Nasdaq joined forces with several private banks, including Goldman Sachs, to form Portal Alliance, a private equity stock market open only to investors with assets upward of $100 million. In short order yesterday's ownership society has morphed into today's members-only society.

The mass eviction from the ownership society has profound political implications. According to a September Pew Research poll, 48 percent of Americans say they live in a society carved into haves and have-nots--nearly twice the number of 1988. Only 45 percent see themselves as part of the haves. In other words, we are seeing a return of the very class consciousness that the ownership society was supposed to erase. The free-market ideologues have lost an extremely potent psychological tool--and progressives have gained one. Now that John Edwards is out of the presidential race, the question is, will anyone dare to use it?

Read it.

 

[dorian gray]

fucken society

 

[Conspicuously Absent]

The phrase was conspicuously absent.

or so.

Alright over $108 / barrel, let's all be middle class (90% of us) and keep voting Republican to get the upper class (0.01%) tax break and cushy investment strategies we all so desparately need woooooooooo!!! Read it.

Good read, even though its nothing new. Its also the reason why I have to struggle to resist the urge to CHOKE OUT anyone who thinks voting right-wing corporate-rich serving companies benefit them in anyway.

Classic quote from over here:

Many germans are seeing the benefits of the economic upturn...

so they interviewed a ton of people from various professions, top answers:

1. I can barely make ends meet (most depressing example was a head nurse, she'd been a nurse for 35 years, and was "breaking even" while living in a 30 sq foot apartment, no car, no luxuries).
2. I got a pay-cut.
3. I got laid off.

Where is the signs of benefit? What positive signs are we seeing here? Sure, the overall total of unemployed is shrinking. But wheres the encouragement to work when you can barely survive while working your ass off for what we'd consider a barbaric wage in north america. (there is no minimum wage).



Another great one, was a talk show on the subject of how top managers earn OMGTONNNNZZ... yet said head nurse could barely afford to live in a slum. And how that was fair in any way. How is it that a manager has so much more stress and workload than a head nurse in chronically understaffed hospitals?

So the managers were arguing that because the carry the responsibility for so much money and the people they employ, that that is why its fair and ok that they earn so much more. Of course, a few weeks later, we hear that the managers of several banks had lost a few hundred BILLION EUROS on the US housing market and stock market. OOOps... so they resign... and get a pension of 31000 euros a month. A MONTH!!!!!

Or how about the example of all these companies/managers laying off 20,000 workers in order to give themselves a stock boost and a pay raise.

Where is the responsibility? I just don't see it. If they had to pay when the fuck up, sure, there is responsibility and I can see it. otherwise its just raping the system because they can (human nature).


Anyway, thats my half assed half distracted at work, while working rant on this topic. I missed a lot of points forgot some and don't give a fuck. I hate the system, but I know that thats how it is, has been and always will be, and why I hope that humanity dies out. (which the rich are well on track to accomplishing).

 

[lurch70]

expect to see Jerry and Nad in front of the PC a lot more often

http://www.cnn.com/2008/LIVING/04/23/gas.prices/index.html

 

[Demilich]

About $40 a week for me too, going 350-400km (220-250 miles?)

 

[Reign in Acai]

10.5 gallons gives me 262 miles. The fill up this morning cost me $42 shekels. I wouldn't mind only spending $29 again, but I simply compensate for the gouging by curbing my driving habits.

 

[cthulufhtagn]

Read it.

read it. this example of how easily people can be manipulated against their own interest is why i fear society.

 

[Krigloch the Furious]

$3.69 here. record.
China needs to die.
we need Alaskan oil and more oil refineries

 

[J.]

this is beyond ludicrous. $3.93 yesterday.

Since when did a gasoline bill become something to budget for month by month? Retarded.

 

[lurch70]

what are you guys crying about? its been $4.19 and higher for about 2 months already in NY.

 

[dorian gray]

LOL, I've budgeted for fuel for as long as I can remember.

Anyway, I wish people would remember that gas expense is just a small part of a much larger picture. I know many people who have traded in their trucks, vans, or what have you for a brand new hybrid and then go on to expound how much money they're saving by getting 40 mpg. I never have the heart to tell them they are now spending about twice as much per mile by getting suckered into buying a new (and unproven) technology. Financing, depreciation, maintenance, etc. is usually overlooked by the casual consumer.

 

[J.]

what are you guys crying about? its been $4.19 and higher for about 2 months already in NY.

cost of living. new yorkers "earn more"