Michel Moore gets destroyed in a debate about capitalism

Originally posted by DangrousDave20
reply to post by Pathos

 

Well wouldn't it be nice if education was a norm and not a luxury like it is here in the U.S.? If it works in countries like France why wouldn't work here?

No. If education was a norm in the US or other countries, the value of the education would shrink drastically. Your worth would be in pennies.

Instead of obtaining $50,000 a year, you will only get $100 a year. People go to school to make their lives better. Since it is a gateway to a better way of life, making it a norm will diminish it's worth.





[edit on 10-10-2009 by Pathos]

reply to post by Pathos


Well what's wrong with having to have healthcare if it's actually affordable? I mean people MUST have car insurance and therefore there's a crap load of companies that will pretty much give it to you for dirt cheap because they have to compete with each other. So if healthcare was the same way, say for instance a public option was introduced that's low enough to cause private companies to lower their prices in order to compete, then people probably wouldn't have a problem with being mandated into having healthcare. That's actually the goal isn't it? Everyone has healthcare and people aren't being dropped off on the sides of streets by hospitals because they can't afford their bill? I mean WTF? Go watch Moore's video SICKO (another "propaganda video" as some of you would say) and then we'll talk about healthcare.

Originally posted by DangrousDave20
reply to post by Pathos

 

Well what's wrong with having to have healthcare if it's actually affordable

There is nothing wrong with making healthcare more affordable. You can do that without creating mandates on citizens. Couldn't you?

Creating a mandated national healthcare system is not directly connected to the cost of healthcare itself. As a matter of fact and study, Massachusetts is now suffering from its implementation. Instead of the cost of healthcare going down, the price for medical treatments are going drastically up. Nationalizing healthcare caused the reverse affect. Deval Patrick had to cut back on who gets to be on the system. We are now rationalizing healthcare in Massachusetts.

Originally posted by DangrousDave20
I mean people MUST have car insurance and therefore there's a crap load of companies that will pretty much give it to you for dirt cheap because they have to compete with each other.

Massachusetts had stopped regulating car insurance, for it was causing prices to sky rocket. Once they deregulated the system, the price for car insurance drastically fell.

Also -- Since you can kill a person with a car, I can understand why we are mandated to obtain this type of insurance.

You cannot kill anyone except for yourself when dealing with health insurance. Unless you have a family, then it is your own responsibility.






[edit on 10-10-2009 by Pathos]

reply to post by Pathos


Ah,, so we should just drive up the price of everything that's valuable (healthcare, education, food) and that in turn will make it more valuable? Sure, then we'll just have a bunch of people operating things that they are not qualified to operate. Who knows, maybe one of those people will be a guy who has his finger on the Nuke China button,, and because he couldn't afford a college degree that would teach him how to do his job the right way, and he's just the lowest paying person the employee could find, he gets nervous and starts world war 3? Oh but wait, it won't matter because the company saved money by hiring an uneducated person...

Or maybe a worker at some car plant forgets a bolt in your car's suspension system and your car falls apart at 70 miles per hour?

My point is, if we don't change our education system from being one of the lowest in the industrialized world, we're going to continue to fall behind every other country that realizes what's important.

reply to post by Pathos


I think that's because it's one single state trying to implement this system, and it doesn't work like that. You can't have just one little piece of the system trying to change and not expect the rest of the country to work against it. It's called Nationalized healthcare, not statelized healthcare. I believe if the entire country implemented the change together, it would work. It works in other countries everyday.

reply to post by Pathos


Insurance companies kill people everyday by denying them insurance because a "pre-existing condition" that they had when they were 4 yrs old.

Originally posted by DangrousDave20
My point is, if we don't change our education system from being one of the lowest in the industrialized world, we're going to continue to fall behind every other country that realizes what's important.

Untrue. In order to fix our system, to make it more competitive, we have to fix what is being taught. Changes in curriculum must be made over the years, so that we can evolve it into a more affective system. We should be looking at ways to motivate people in maths and sciences. Its has nothing to do with how many people are getting an education. It has to do with how affective the system is, and what we are doing to motivate children. Quality and motivation.

[edit on 10-10-2009 by Pathos]

Originally posted by DangrousDave20
reply to post by Pathos

 

Insurance companies kill people everyday by denying them insurance because a "pre-existing condition" that they had when they were 4 yrs old.

Yes they do. That is a reflection of health insurance policy and practices. We should be looking at reforming health insurance. Two different systems.

Create a mandated healthcare system -versus- reform the current health insurance requirements and policies. Two very distinct differences.

[edit on 10-10-2009 by Pathos]

reply to post by Pathos


When this public option bill actually goes through, and things improve and people see that the government is not trying to turn us all into to zombies or whatever, then all will be well and people will find something else to worry about. Good debating with you, but I have other things to do. Later.

reply to post by DangrousDave20
It was a very good debate. Thanks. I guess we will have to see what happens next, or we will have to keep pushing for more answers.

My stand is that Michael Moore does not fully understand what capitalism is, and he is pushing for something that will lead to communism.

Thank you DangrousDave20. That was a good debate.

[edit on 10-10-2009 by Pathos]

Mike's beliefs and reasoning were developed a long-time ago when he was growing up in Flint. He is a union guy to the core. He is one of those who truly believes all the union propoganda. Mike has two categories: labor = good, management = bad. He is able to put the world neatly into those two categories. Not much gray in there. No matter how rich he becomes, he will never acknowledge that he is a lot closer these days to management than he is to labor. He could never accept that because ever fiber of his being is dead-set against evil management. He is, if nothing else, a believer.

Here is what is really going on:

Thanks for Not Being Bush
www.newsweek.com...

The title is wrong. NO one is destroyed there.
--------------------
Corporatism and Capitalism is the same thing. Or I should say - corporatism is the symptom of sickness of Capitalism.
==========
Moore is right about sickness of democracy through election. You give your power away to people you don't know, who care about how to win the competition - not about you.
==========
It is possible technologically to have DIRECT democracy, where people vote on things - not the government. E-DEMOCRACY.
========
Another option is like in Switzerland, where they are having referendums all the time.

I think there must be a mistake in your thread title. Surely you meant to write: '...Moore does not get destroyed...' I know how you must feel because I get black and white, up and down, left and right, and yes and no mixed up all the time.

This was a great post:

reply to post by 30_seconds


Here here. Well said that man! ...Woman? Grey? Reptoid?......Politician?

I'd go even further than this statement of yours 'Money was not invented as a tool of freedom, it was created as a weapon.'

Money is debt, debt is slavery.

reply to post by Pathos


I understand it is a tricky tightrope to walk. No one is denying that. For one, to decry that any government involvement is socialism is ludicrious.

After the Great Depression, the gov't put regulations on banks. Everything worked hunky dory till those regulations were taken off.

And guess what? We have the Great Recession. You need to stop and ask yourself, why are insurance companies selling and buying mortgages?And going bankrupt when they are not forced to have equity?

And those banks we bailed out are trying to pay back that money as fast as they can so they don't have to have gov't regulation and oversight! And they don't want the gov't putting in place a cap on ceo bonuses.

There has to be some regulation. Yes the founding fathers were about free market. But they also were not witnessing a situation where 90% of the world's wealth were held by a handful of companies. How is that even possible?

Regulation that keeps insurance companies from rocking the banking industry and vice versa is just common sense. No company should ever get so big, that it affects an enconomy, especially one as massive as the US.

It is kind of a double standard on ATS that people complain the the federal reserve has too much power. But then start yelling that the government is taking too much control.

Pick one.

But then I know it is ATS motto to decry anything standard.




Giving workers rights and benefits is not socialism. People talk about rights being eroded. Corporations have been eroding our rights as workers for some time now. And it is the workers that make these companies. ANd there is no reason to not be properly reimbursed for that.

Do we not all feel overworked and underpaid? I know that in my area, you practically have to negotiate time off. Everyone is exhausted. Everyone feels like they do not have enough personal time. You spend more time with your coworkers then you do with your own family.

Lets look at the stat of the American worker, starting with vacation days:

Italy 42 days
France 37 days
Germany 35 days
Brazil 34 days
United Kingdom 28 days
Canada 26 days
Korea 25 days
Japan 25 days
U.S. 13 days

We have half or a third of any other country.

infoweb

Look at this list, the United States is the ONLY country that doesn't mandate some kind of leave for employees.

wiki


Here is maternity leave by length and wages paid, scroll down to the second part for the Americas. Every counry in the America's has a better maternity leave plan then the US. Once again, the US is at the bottom of the list.

maternity leave

"Many analysts have attributed the U.S.'s high per capita income to higher U.S. productivity -- that is, output per worker. The OECD report found, however, that relative to other industrial countries, higher U.S. incomes are "largely due to differences in total hours worked per capita," not differences in output per hour. U.S. productivity growth has accelerated since the late 1990s, which has widened the U.S. lead in per capita income, but rising hours also have been "a major factor," the report said . . .

bigpicture.typepad.com...

ENEVA (ILO News) - US workers put in the longest hours on the job in industrialized nations, clocking up nearly 2,000 hours per capita in 1997, the equivalent of almost two working weeks more than their counterparts in Japan where annual hours worked have been gradually declining since 1980, according to a new statistical study[2]* of global labour trends published by the International Labour Office (ILO).

linky

And there is a discrpency there(relative deals with this a little). When recording working hours, the Japanse consider in business dinners and vacations. Americans only contribute actual working hours.

Though we keep working more and more, the Europeans are working less and less, yet, have just as high productivity. Why do you think that is?

And we pay dearly for it:

* US life expectancy ranked 24th of the WHO nations. * The US ranked 37th in overall health system performance putting it between Costa Rica and Slovenia. * The United States fell way down on the WHO list according to fairness in financing its health care system. In this category the US came in at 54th, between the Republic of Korea and Fiji.

linky

And how do these companies reward us? By shipping jobs overseas so they can make even MORE money.

NEW YORK — The movement overseas of U.S. white-collar jobs over the next few years is accelerating faster than previously expected, Forrester Research said Monday, fueling a highly charged election-year issue. Technology market researcher Forrester said in a report titled "Near-Term Growth of Offshoring Accelerating" that it expects the number of U.S. business service and software jobs moving offshore to reach 588,000 in 2004 from 315,000 in 2003. The loss of U.S. software programming, customer call-center and even legal paperwork positions should rise to 830,000 jobs by 2005, up 40% over this year, the report said.

usatoday

Saudi Arabia 1
Singapore 2
South Korea 14
Spain 12
Sweden 6
Switzerland 15
Taiwan 6
Thailand 1
Turkey 1
U.S. 140
Venezuela 1


global 500

The US has 140 of the top companies compared to everyone else. The next highest I have seen is 68 for Japan.

Feel like you’re working a lot harder these days, putting in longer hours for the same pay — or even less? The latest round of government data on worker productivity indicates that you probably are. The Labor Department said Tuesday that the American work force produced, at an annual rate, 6.4 percent more of the goods they made and services they provided in the second quarter of this year compared to a year ago. At the same time, “unit labor costs” — the amount employers paid for all that extra work — fell by 5.8 percent. The jump in productivity was higher than expected; the cut in labor costs more than double expectations.

he higher worker output and lower labor costs have been good news for companies struggling through the worst recession since World War II. So far, some 70 percent of companies in the S&P 500 have turned in better-than-expected profits for the latest quarter.

msnbc

Now I am all for a company starting up and making profit. But I am even more for Americans getting paid their dues. But how much money does a company need to make?

Basically, what is being created is a disposable work force. Do you want to be a disposable worker?

Yet you see all those pretty ads about companies working for YOU. Not really.

Protecting workers and having them get the dues they deserved is not socialsim or communism.

You want to Americans have rights? That is their right. That is EVERYONES right.

Originally posted by anyjerk
reply to post by Donny 4 million

 

I do understand and agree with what you say... Still young, but I have done research... The religous colonies seem to be a bi-product of the world government... World government a product of people we don't seem to neccesarily understand... Ying/Yang, government/religion, capitalist/communist... all seem to be a part of the same system set up by whom? World bankers I guess

Pass it on to the other youth. They are not as brain dead as the PTB would have us think. No matter what, looking into the past is the only way to know if MM is correct or blowing smoke.
the best

Originally posted by kozmo
reply to post by SpacePunk

 

NEWS FLASH: Capitalism allowed Michael Moore to earn $25M dollars! DOH!

If the country were Socialist, which this idiot is seen advocating, he wouldn't be permitted to make the kind of money he has made. So, what we have here is called HYPOCRISY. Yes, Michael Moore is a hypocrite - oh, and a moron!

Not true, however, I suspect that this is the perennial fault with US folks who time and time again totally fail to understand the difference between socialism and communism.

They are different.....try a dictionary!

Originally posted by malcr

Originally posted by kozmo
reply to post by SpacePunk

 

NEWS FLASH: Capitalism allowed Michael Moore to earn $25M dollars! DOH!

If the country were Socialist, which this idiot is seen advocating, he wouldn't be permitted to make the kind of money he has made. So, what we have here is called HYPOCRISY. Yes, Michael Moore is a hypocrite - oh, and a moron!

Not true, however, I suspect that this is the perennial fault with US folks who time and time again totally fail to understand the difference between socialism and communism.

They are different.....try a dictionary!

One in the same pal.
Try reality!

Originally posted by Donny 4 million

Originally posted by malcr

Originally posted by kozmo
reply to post by SpacePunk

 

NEWS FLASH: Capitalism allowed Michael Moore to earn $25M dollars! DOH!

If the country were Socialist, which this idiot is seen advocating, he wouldn't be permitted to make the kind of money he has made. So, what we have here is called HYPOCRISY. Yes, Michael Moore is a hypocrite - oh, and a moron!

Not true, however, I suspect that this is the perennial fault with US folks who time and time again totally fail to understand the difference between socialism and communism.

They are different.....try a dictionary!

One in the same pal.
Try reality!

.... no, they're not.

If M. Moore cared about the common man, and didn't just make movies to fatten his wallet, and gut, why doesn't he post them online free of charge?