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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?


To: Johannes Pilch who wrote (119646)12/26/2000 9:50:15 PM
From: WTSherman  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 769667
 
<The next civil war will be against Draconian government indeed. And I think the forces against government will lose terribly, but not without causing great pain. American government is almost innately united, and as the world grows smaller this fact will become even more important during our next internal war...

At some point, our government will become so Draconian many Americans will fight against it because they will not care to live in an oppressed society.
<


It is this kind of bilge that makes reading this board so worthwhile. The government will become "draconian" and "oppressive"? Who says so? How so?

You either don't understand the meaning of either word or are have simply reached end stage paranoia.



To: Johannes Pilch who wrote (119646)12/26/2000 9:53:53 PM
From: Catfish  Read Replies (2) | Respond to of 769667
 
I disagree that there will ever be another Civil War. It would require the ability of a large group of people to organize as a militia group. Any group attempting that tactic would be destroyed by the US internally. I think the country would descend into full fledged communism rather than have a Civil War.

If the right to own private property is outlawed, and the large corporations are privitized, we will have communism without a shot being fired.

Now, if you think this is off the wall, check out the Green Party:

This is an excerpt from the Green Party home page under 'Economic Democracy'.

Failures of the Capitalist Economic System

Today we face fundamental economic problems that flow from capitalism's basic structure of competition for private profits and growth.

Corporate Globalization: Global corporations have concentrated ownership and national states under their domination have deregulated capital flows. As a result, capital has become highly mobile due to corporate restructuring aided by new technologies of transportation and communication. Global corporations can now shift money and production virtually instantaneously to outflank people in one part of the world when they organize to assert their rights. This situation is pitting the people of one country against those of another as their governments compete for corporate investment by offering tax holidays, anti-union measures, and environmental regulation abatements.

Economic Polarization: While the technological revolution in microelectronics and automation is radically increasing productivity, the gains in productivity are accruing almost solely to the wealthy elite. Meanwhile, higher productivity under the control of global corporations is creating structural unemployment as the demand for labor is radically reduced. Instead of the higher pay and increased free time for workers if work and productivity gains were shared equitably, we have a society becoming sharply divided between securely employed technicians and production workers and a growing mass of underemployed, poorly paid, marginalized service workers.

Ecological Destruction: The ecological costs of this technological revolution cannot be separated from the social devastation it is creating. Massive ecological devastation is consuming the "biological capital" on which the economy and human life are based. As long as competition for profits and growth is the regulatory mechanism of our economy, competition will force corporate and state enterprises, as a matter of profitability and survival, to grow or die and to externalize production costs as much as possible onto the environment.

Green Economics: Democratic, Ecological, and Feminist

We call for a new democratic economic system that utilizes ecological means of production and feminist modes of distribution. It must be ecological and sustain people across the generations by having proper regard for the ecological capital of nature that is the foundation of the human economy. It must be feminist and liberate women from the double shift of household work in addition to a paid job by providing economic support for the work of child rearing and household maintenance. We call this new economic system Economic Democracy because its prerequisite is the democratic power to choose ecological and feminist means of livelihood and ways of life.

Rejecting all simplistic dogma as to either private or public ownership of productive wealth, Greens take a pragmatic approach that recognizes the need for diverse forms of enterprise and ownership to deal with diverse circumstances and the centrality of goods and services provided by households, voluntary associations, and ecosystems as well as by private and public enterprises.

Greens support democratic self-management in all five of the economic sectors-private, public, domestic, associative, and ecological-that Green economics values.

The Private Sector: Greens support a maximum of free initiative for individuals, small companies, and cooperatives, enabling all people to earn a decent living in useful, meaningful vocations within a democratically regulated economy that meets human needs and sustains the environment. We support private enterprises that are democratic, especially cooperatives.

The Public Sector: Greens also envision a much stronger sector of public enterprises in certain industries-not centralized, bureaucratic nationalization of industries, but a decentralized, democratic municipalization of certain industries and services. Where a larger-than-municipal scale is required, we call for the confederation of municipalities to share ownership of enterprises regionally and for the formation of grassroots democratic structures to perform planning and coordination functions at the national and international scales.

We thus envision a formal economy based on a mix of enterprise and ownership forms: cooperatives, democratic and decentralized public enterprises, and individual and household small businesses. All three enterprise forms will be large in terms of the numbers of people working in them. In terms of assets, we envision a large public sector, a large cooperative sector, and a smaller sector of small businesses. The enterprise form we advocate varies by industry. Our aim is to support the most appropriate form rather than deciding abstractly that one form fits all circumstances.

We further envision an "informal economy" of three other economic sectors which have been invisible to capitalist and statist economies. The value and centrality of these sectors should recognized and supported.

The Domestic Sector of household provision by (mostly) women of such goods and services as child rearing, cooking, and cleaning should be values and supported by such public policies as a guaranteed adequate income and cultural changes that democratize and share domestic tasks equitably between men and women.

The Associative Sector, sometimes called "non-governmental," "non-profit," or "third sector", is comprised voluntary associations that are formed primarily for solidaristic rather than pecuniary reasons. They provide many goods and services that the Private, Public, and Domestic sectors fail to provide and should be supported by such public polices as a guaranteed adequate income and exemption from corporate income taxes. Greens support democratic associations over top-down institutions controlled by self-perpetuating boards.

The Ecological Sector of environmental resources and services are provided by natural ecosystems. They are the foundation of human economies and essential for the continuance of human life. The Earth and its natural systems are our common inheritance, the product of billions of years of natural evolution, not human labor. As such, they should not be privately owned. They should be respected, cared for, and used in accordance with principles of ecological sustainability and restoration. All concepts of ownership of land and natural resources should be provisional and subject to collective democratic stewardship.

We regard this democratic economic vision as an alternative to both the capitalist and the statist economic systems prevailing in the world today.

The capitalist system is based on a competitive struggle to exploit people and nature for private profits and growth. We reject this system because it creates a dynamic of endless growth that is ecologically suicidal and breeds greed and domination in society.

We also reject the statist bureaucratic command economies, such as those which once dominated Eastern Europe, because they place centralized power in the hands of state elites who have likewise exploited people and nature for military-industrial expansion in competition with the capitalist countries.

Today our economy entails nearly total domination by giant capitalist corporations. This corporate sector has failed to meet the basic needs of millions and has consistently abused the environment. Our vision of Economic Democracy promotes alternative economic structures to capitalist corporations that put human needs before profits, are internally democratic, and are democratically accountable to the communities in which they function.

This is another section:

Capital: Greens support the abolition of markets in transferable corporate property rights and their replacement by democratic means of controlling capital. In private sector cooperatives and self-employed small business people, this means non-salable personal membership rights to participate in the democratic self-government of the work community and to receive net income from their enterprise in proportion to their labor contribution. In private sector credit unions, worker-controlled pension funds, and policy-holder insurance cooperatives, as well as public sector budgets, community banks, and investment boards, this means non-salable membership or citizenship rights to participate, or elect representatives to participate, in decisions regarding the allocation of investments.

greenparty.org