Why would obama draw out any troops from anywhere? We need to have an open-ended threat from now through all eternity or our enemies will just out-wait us. We need to remain firm in our commitment to destroying the world and our nation by maintaining our empire. The big corpses will make more and more money and have more and more power. What’s not to like in an eternal state of war?

How hard is it to understand that the government needs to switch out its current methodology. Instead of cutting programs to spend less, how about the government stops borrowing to fund itself and instead reverts back to how it funded itself before Reagan through taxes?

Why do we slit our own throats in the form of lowering taxes and then act all astonished when all of a sudden we can’t pay for services we setup decades before? Sure, we are doing idiotic things like running 3-5 unfunded wars, but I don’t understand our logic. Tax less, borrow and spend more, profit?

How about the rich go back to paying 70% (or whatever it was) in taxes?

We are idiots and this only shows we continue to pay lip service to the core problems our country faces.

It is so good to see such bipartisany agreement in Congress that by cutting spending (and throw in a tax cut or two for the rich) the economy will spring to life and jobs will sprout like mushrooms. After all, the elderly and sick will be so much better off if you take money out of their hands and give it to the rich. Those living on Social Security have had their day; they are nothing but “greedy geezers” and just spend the money. Spending the money in the national economy does nothing for jobs; it is those rich that are worried about the direction of the economy that will provide the jobs as soon as they see that the government will not spend anything to fix our problems.

They will provide jobs that pay equivalent rates to China or whichever sweatshop labor country du jour comes to light. I find it amusing that everyone thinks things will get better once China and India’s standard of living come up. Really? you don’t just think businesses will then swap over to Brazil, Russia or whatever country they can exploit?

Perhaps I am a bit cynical, but when I see things like the Gates Foundation going over to India and doing all this humanitarian work, I don’t see them doing it from the goodness of their hearts. I see them reinforcing and growing their potential labor pool and in turn ensuring that wages stagnate in the US and the rest of the post-industrial world.

Oh you great unwashed masses just don’t understand how the world works. These great business leaders are out there on the front lines everyday working diligently for the betterment of the nation. So what if they went a little over the line in doing business; the regulators were just mean to them and don’t believe in capitalism. To show how the law is applied equally to rich and poor alike, the rich get their hands slapped when they break the law and the powerless get put in a maximum security lockdown for disrupting an illegal sale of government property. The rich should be rewarded so well. After all, they convinced the government that they were too big to fail (if they were connected, if not, too bad Lehman) and needed the uncontrolled financial support. The bonuses are just to show that they did their jobs.

Exactly correct. When the elites can drive the workers into working for whatever the elites are willing to give out of the goodness of their hearts, then the elites and t-baggers will be happy. The military will look like the better deal and eternal war can rage on as we fight the enemy of the day. That’s why there is the big push to “reform” education. By denying education to larger and larger segments of society and making the teaching profession into an unprotected job, it will push the elite agenda forward more easily.

Whew, it’s lucky the Democrats control the Senate.

Wherever did you get such a quaint notion?

Mornin’, BT, pups

Neoliberalism is the path by which the elites intend to reclaim the class power they enjoyed during the Gilded Age of the late 1800s and the 1920s. When one grasps that concept all this stuff falls into place. It’s not about controlling the schools or this or that. It’s about controlling everything.

It’s about controlling everything.

Exactly: the only objective reason for massing up such huge incomes is to exercise political control. This is a self-fulfilling prophecy, since the more unequal is the distribution of income and opportunity, the more fearful the super-rich become that the proles will revolt. So they need even more control. The first group to experience the crunch will be the environmentalists. We’ve already seen a bit of that in preparations to impose ‘law and order’ in the event of serious protests against things like shale gas pollution and the sell-off of the National Parks and Wilderness Areas (coming soon to your local cinema). Labour protests will be next. Down to the end of the 1930s, the elite did not hesitate to shoot strikers and anyone else who endangered ‘property rights.’ Coming again to your local cinema.

There is one effective protest. Emigrate. The US people are a captive population, like southerners before the Second World War. They can’t or won’t leave, and this makes them hostage to whatever the power elite want to do. The elite no longer have an interest in a high-wage economy.

The problem with emigrating is that all of the industrialized countries are going down the neoliberal path, including China. Inasmuch as nationalism is a feature of neoliberalism immigrants have no political power in their new home.

Fuckin’ John McSFB just can’t get enough of war. He’s gonna push for the US to bomb every country in the Middle East, Africa and Asia as revenge for the way the North Vietnamese treated him. That that revenge involves the deaths of thousands of American men and women and a couple million other people concerns this self-absorbed son-of-a-bitch not one whit.

Mornin’ all, mornin’ SD.

That’s how it looks to me and I am a mere wee ‘pup yapping at yer educated heels.

Serious case of untreated ptsd and projection there. It’s actually very sad to see if you are a bleeding-heart liberal. Makes me angry, too. And also.

Off to swim in the great capitalist cesspool.

US KIA Afghanistan: 1,632

US KIA Irak: 4,463

Iraki, Afghan and Pakistani casualties: estimates vary to over 1.5M

US MBS 2011: 21,328 and counting

G20, the Financial Crisis and Neoliberalism

No war but class war

Never. Give. Up.

Be good to yourselves, and all other living things

Namaste

Using ptsd as an insult against one’s rational basis for a statement is new to me. I guess the chicken hawks are all immune.

to object to the above comment you can click on the nym, go to the bottom and flag the commenter as inappropriate

Only problem with that is that these people have hacked the site and can post without using a user name.

•Good times for our Galtian Overlords.

Diagnosis is clear.

Prognosis is not so good.

Heil, Galtian Übermenschen…

What’s amazing to me is how many of the “rank and file” citizens docilely go along with all this unmitgated crap. Far too many citizens are utterly cowed under and complacent about how they’re being robbed blind. I hear stuff daily, where your average min wage earner bows & scrapes to the notion that “taxes are too high” for the upper 1%, plus unending War, Inc, is teh greatest!! woo-hooo yay team

When so many citizens are so complacent and agreeable, why wouldn’t our Galtian Overlords take advantage of them??? It’s the nature of the beast.

Folks like bloggers at FDL are in the vast minority. Most citizens are too overfed and dull to notice or care about any of this crap.

I don’t know how to wake them up.

Well, then, I’ll just have to hold my breath until I turn gay.

We’re running WordPress version 3.1.2, the latest stable is 3.1.3. There were apparently some security holes patched in 3.1.3 that may affect 3.1.2. Additionally there were some suspect changes in some of the modules that was reported on one of the sites. Not sure of the interworkings of Firedoglake, but we may need to do some patch work?

The people of which you speak are like druggies or alkies: neither you nor I can wake them up. They must wake themselves and see that they need help. By ‘help’ I mean to clean out the rat’s nest in congress.

You can look at:

http://wordpress.org/news/

Additionally, I am going purely off the headers in the output of the website:

meta name=”generator” content=”WordPress 3.1.2″

embedded in all the HTML on the site.

Heh. Speaking of inappropriate advertising, I currently have an exhortation to join T-Paw for the Iowa straw poll on 8/13. “Results Not Rhetoric!” Yeah, like when Timmeh doesn’t just promise to cut funding for infrastructure, he actually makes highway bridges collapse….

when I see things like the Gates Foundation going over to India and doing all this humanitarian work, I don’t see them doing it from the goodness of their hearts. I see them reinforcing and growing their potential labor pool and in turn ensuring that wages stagnate in the US and the rest of the post-industrial world.

YEP! Couldn’t agree with you MORE. I shudder in revulsion anytime someone starts *praising* Gates & others for their alleged “humanitarian” good deeds. Load of crap; it’s all done with selfish purposes in mind.

Plus the notion that the super-wealthy should NOT have to pay taxes, but then they can sort of “redeem” themselves by their “charity” is also CRAP. So someone fabulously wealthy like Gates gets off paying next to no taxes (really), but somehow he’s this great guy bc he gives to charity or sets up foundations through which he can launder his money and get further tax reductions.

It’s bogus. Charity is all very well, but by it’s very nature, it’s unreliable and is NOT the same as a steady source of revenue to keep programs going. THIS is a key point that far too many citizens don’t get.

A story: over a decade ago, Gates started out by giving US libraries funds to buy computers. MORE of those US libraries than you might imagine are still holding those ancient, outdated PCs together with chewing gum & bandaids because they don’t have enough money to purchase replacements.

Something like 40% of our population does NOT have a PC and the Internet at home, although the wealthy like to pretend that more do. Poorer folks OFTEN rely on US libraries not just for trad. lib. services, like book borrowing, but more often to use computers and the Internet (which you almost HAVE to do to get jobs anymore). Yet many US libraries are being de-funded in this economic climate, and some are still using ancient Gates Grant computers that are over 10 years old.

And no: Mr. MoneyBags Richy-Rich Gates has not deigned to provide more PCs for USA libraries.

Who’s fooling who in this picture?????

Agree, but I wish somehow there was some way to reach them. US citizens have permitted themselves to be bought off with trinkets & beads & smoke & mirrors.

As long as citizens complacently buy into the bogusness of the “two party” system, we are effen screwed.

I do what I can to try to wake up some that there is NO difference between RepubliRATS and that what we’re in is a Class WAR. Not having a lot of luck so far but will keep on trying.

Flagging it at least alerts the mods.

If the mods are not aware of this problem, then we have bigger problems that these annoying comments. I asked this question on another thread: if this group has hacked into FDL, are our personal data files safe?

They are just spammers, they haven’t hacked the site.

When a user is banned, and you click on their name, you get the MyFDL home page by default. Doesn’t mean they hacked in.

Hurm..

http://news.softpedia.com/news/WordPress-3-1-3-Contains-Security-Fixes-and-Clickjacking-Protection-202462.shtml

Should look at the logs and compare times of the “globalsell” spam posts and see what we see.

My concern are the posts that don’t have a name associated with them. There was one earlier today that had no name and just a timestamp. That is a bit disconcerting. I don’t think that the site has been hacked, but I think something is afoot.

According to some poking around, there was an exploit that affected installs prior to 3.1.2 which seemed to be doing rogue spam posting. This was supposedly fixed with 3.1.2. It could be rogue .jpgs and .gifs that contain executable code in them that is being evaluated and executed by the system.

Dunno. Probably should have your tech folks look at it.

The oldest globalsell post I see in the Google powered search of the site is from June 10th.

Meh, after poking around I see that some plugins have recently become susceptible to attack in the form of MySQL injection or otherwise, so since we are back a revision on WordPress, it wouldn’t be beyond possibility that some of the plugins are potentially vulnerable to exploit.

I’d recommend looking at the spam/attackers posting times and refer to your logs and see if you can correlate a particular remote POST to those times.

I’d make an effort to update all the plugins and core site.

I just have to comment on my native state’s trip into insanity with their mandatory traffic checks. It’s going to be a very expensive harvest for South Carolina’s farmers. Georgia farmers have already have been hit with a dose of reality.

I wonder how it will take these folks to realize that they have shot themselves in the economic foot.