[Zebrabitch]

I'm actually thinking of joining the anti-globalization protests.


You know, Greenpeace has long been considered filled with environmentalist whack-jobs. And Americans have, for years, ignored anti-IMF/WEF/Globalization efforts.


But now I think it's clear that these guys do have a worthy cause and I'm gonna see which of these groups is worth donating a little of my paycheck to each month.


No globalization without representation!



Protesters rally against World Economic Forum | Reuters

[Nubtoubrem]

I am not anti-international financial institutions and I think blaming the IMF for this recent economic slump is just silly. However I sympathize with the French worker's current protests agains the French Government handing out massive loans to the financial institutions and industry leaders but providing nothing for the common worker. We have the same situation in my opinion and something needs to happen here as well.

[Zebrabitch]

I am not against the World Bank's original mission statement or what international economic institutions were originally designed to do.


But that entire scene has been perverted into a quest of "how do we slash barriers for multinational corporations such that they can exploit the labor resources of poorer countries" so they can flood western countries with cheap products? That's ALL they care about.

Forget the environment, forget balanced trade, forget state sovereignty.


The profit motive is a good thing and it can also be a dangerous thing. I am not a lassie libertarian; I do believe unchecked greed can lead to economic destruction and can be ruinous for societies which some extreme libertarians argue is just "make-believe."

I don't even see why this is an argument today---we used to pick and choose who we traded with before the New Deal, and we tried to make sure we didn't get screwed in the process.

Now we have let ourselves becomes enslaved to this process where the only way we can raise government revenue is to punish our own citizens at home, and we can't levy excises for fear of reprisals. At the beginning of this country, ALL of our income came from different forms of excise taxes. It wasn't a lot of money, but we paid down our Revolutionary War deficit down to $0; and we never... NEVER had a period in our history where we were NOT trading with some foreign country.


Our tax system is bunk, we refuse to slash departments within the executive and right-size our military and raise excise taxes (i.e., on oil imports) in order to at least.... at LEAST... zero out our annual budget deficit.



And this week the Treasury is unloading nearly a trillion dollar's worth of new bonds to market. There will be buyers of those bonds this time... but what about next time?

I know we're going to come back to the bond trough a year from now and auction off more of these turds of securities that we can't pay for.

I don't even understand why anybody is buying these things. They are worthless.

I am not anti-international financial institutions and I think blaming the IMF for this recent economic slump is just silly. However I sympathize with the French worker's current protests agains the French Government handing out massive loans to the financial institutions and industry leaders but providing nothing for the common worker. We have the same situation in my opinion and something needs to happen here as well.