The Madoff Scam

Invest a a million bucks with me and I wll guarentee to send you back $100,000 in interest every year for the next nine years.

After that don’t call me, I’ll call you.

Oh! And tell your Jewish friends about the sweet deal I am offering.

Apprently this is just the tip of the next capitalist iceberg to begin melt-down.
Hope you’ve got a life boat.

I like Maddoff because he confessed. I don’t like it when they deny the charges and drag things out.

Madoff is simply capitalism at its best.
Every man for himself. This is just reason number
4 million 345 thousand to do away with capitalism.

Kropotkin

I’m not ready to give up capitalism because when I try to think of better economic systems and I take different systems to their logical conclusions, they end up with bigger problems then the ones I tried to fix in the first place.

The thing about capitalism is that it’s been around for a long time and a lot of flaws within the system have been corrected over the years. If we changed our economic system it would be like starting from scratch and there wouldn’t be any guarantee that the new system would ever be better than the one we have.

I second that motion.

200 years of capitalist scams led to the Great Depression of '29/'33
Another 75 years of capitalist scams has led to the coming Depression of '09/'12

If you keep doing the same thing over and over again and expect a different result each time that, as the saying goes, is insane.

There is always a better mouse trap.

I don’t consider this a rebuttal. We’re not talking about mouse traps.

In the same way that 95 years of drinking, smoking and womanizing leads to death. Like 800 years of corruption lead to the fall of Rome. You can do better than that, MM. :wink:

If I ran my family estate the way capitalists have run America over the past two centuries I woud deserve to be pillaried by my descendents as a scoundral and wasteral.
99% of wooded land gone. Millions of bufflo dead. The water table of evey city poisoned. The soil of every farm poisoned. The air poisoned. All the spoare cash gone up in gambling smoke. The entire infrastructure crumbling. Future generations deep in debt.

Want me to go on?

I have laid out plans for a better mouse trap on several threads, and it did not take a rocket scientist to do it. Any asshole could do better. Capitalism has turned out to be the greatest blood-sucking leech of all time, with tentacles reaching across the globe. Worse, its a terminal disease. at least the leech lets go when it is sated.

             <img src="/uploads/default/original/2X/7/74e0b512d0785fa2c1814dec8e59abd3b488d64f.gif" width="48" height="50" alt=":character-yoshi:" title="Mario riding Yoshi"/>
 Yoshi!

I see ebb and flow, Mag. That says as much about Democracy as it does economics. Still, capitalism is pretty heartless at times.

It is all a scheme, and a scam… What do you do when the rich people get it all, all the property and all the money… These forms of relationship lose meaning as soon as they all get in a few hand…People have to have them for them to be meaningful… So as soon as the rich get them all, they have to be taken back, or a new form with new meaning has got to replace the old meaning for good… Simple said; and really simply done…

Yoshi!

The problem to me is human nature. If you look at any culture ever it has hierarchies. There are people who are the shit and people who are shit. The communists tried to fix it, but what they found is that you just get a new group of people hording power. Instead of the rich it became the government.

No matter what laws you create, I don’t think it will matter. People by nature create social hierarchies. If you look at other pack animals like wolves and gorillas they create hierarchies too. The behaviors wolves and gorillas display, I believe, are identical to humans. They assign each member a rank and what members are allowed to do is based on their rank. For wolves, only the alphas can mate. If a non alpha is caught mating he can be killed by the other pack members. For gorillas, the alphas are the first to be groomed. For lions, alphas get the first share of food from a kill. Humans are the same. We by our nature, like the wolves and gorillas, create hierarchies. That is why the words King, Honcho, Emperor, Shogun, Warlord, President, Chief, and Sultan exist. Because figuring out who is, and competing to be, the chief/president/sultan is what we naturally do and no system of government can ever change that.

What a way to talk about our national religion… How do you want to go???Burned at the stake or boiled in oil???

All the above would be naturally true if some 2.5 million years ago, a supernatural event had not occured. One fine evening, while squatting some distance from the communal campfire, enough neurons in the evolving cerebral cortex of a primitive hominid made enough electrical connections between the intuitive right side of the brain and the analytical left side, for a dim moment of self-revelation to take place.

Over there around the fire was them, over here under the tree is I.

For the first time in three billion years Nature had produced one specie with enough consciousness reflective enough to see itself as separate from all else. In that moment an ape-man, became a hu-man - the first and only being ever to become a living witness to Creation.

That first human was still an animal, and behaved like one, with one mega-normal difference. This particular primate, among all 255 of its fellow specie, had created within its consciousness a phantom ego. An invisible witness was born within itself and it started to mature. It began as a naive inner sense of self that could gradually, with increasing certainty, analyse and judge the ethical efficiency of its own behavior in relation to the behavior of its fellows.

The growth of that ego was fed by an extention of the basic sharing ethic. By sharing his kill with the entire family group instead of eating it all himself, the ego of the hunter became larger and more self-assertive. Thus, by feeding his phantom ego via the sharing ethic, mankind accellerated his survival potential, via ever increasing technological acieviements, far above all other animals.

Our consciousness remains in an evolving process of self-development. Mankind is still new to himself. We have yet to realize our full sagacious potential. We still have all our basic animal instincts. But we are no longer simply an animal. Our potential is infinitely greater.

We no longer think our original clan chief and our Bronze Age clan totems are direct descendents of God and that all other clans and their totems are lesser beings.
We no longer think that our paramount chief, or Iron Age King and his royal blood-line are Divinely appointed.
We are beginning to realize that our Steel Age president is not an infalible George Washington, or our republican sytem of government is the finest on the planet.

In short, we are growing out of our naive view of who we are. We are leaving childhood behind. We are becoming adults and we are questioning every single one of our primitive values.
We are beginning to realize that each and every one of us is indivuially responsible for the well being of this planet.

The only hierarchy that exists is that which lies within the individual ego - the infant must become a child, then reach puberty and become a teen then celebrate young adulthood and become a parent and then die as a fully self-realized sage.

When all ego’s see their own maturation and their own self-management of their conbsciousness in this way, then out-side governmental supervision and all the laws it uses to guide us, will end and man will finally be a self-realized being, responsible to the adult within himself and at peace with his neighbor.

MM, name one society in human history that did not have classes and ranks. If what you say is true, why in the course of history there has never been a culture that did not have leaders and followers?

I can’t name one society that did not have rank and classes since the division between the sexes is a very early example of classes… But I can say that where people were divided by honor and courage that the best were more likely to lead, since honor came most from service to the community… Where wealth is the equivalent of honor the society is on a downhill slide… Wealth destroys societies, and in fact, destroys all human relationships, since trust, and honor, are essential to healthy relationships… Where money is dear, honor is cheap, and few societies can survive having much while all early societies survived having very little…

Well said.
During the 99,000 generations of the Stone Age there was no clear heirarchy.
The system was vaguely matriarchal. Young males migrated to neighboring familes looking for mates. The females never left their hunting territory. Ma, the fertility Goddess ruled spirituality. Among the San Bushmen of the Kalahari, children as young as eight years are given an equal say at the camp fire.

Hierarchle structures have been necessary for human evolution. Male gods ruled the spirituality of the Bonze Age. Clan loyalty could only be sustained by a superstitious belief that the Clan chief was divinely appointed at birth.

That totemic superstition bled into sustaining nationalism in the person of the King, where Mangods (Sons of God) ruled.

Hierarchal structures got diluted in republican adminstrations by simply according social respect for the person of the President. Protestation (religious skepticism) ruled.

Modern mass communication has revealed the falibilities of high office. We are beginning to realize that idolatory of celebrities, the very rich and very educated is a juvenile occupation. We are gradually coming full circle. Equality of all personages within the human family is on the horizon.

This actually proves my point that there are hierarchies. Children are given an equal say. They don’t have an equal say by nature because they are not equal. It has to be given to them by the more powerful.

Not at all. There is no patronizing attitude among Bushmen. There is no set heirarchy. Leadership fluctuates. Life on the edge of ever-present starvation is fatalistically matter of fact. There is no artifcial intellectual politics to argue over. An eight year-old’s sober observation is as valid as a fifty year old and is accepted as such.

I have managed to achieve more or less the same sense of equal value among my own family group. Leadership among us fluctuates daily, even hourly. It depends on what task is the more urgent and who initiated it. My position as father is honorary and ceremonial. Now and again I go primitive and beat my chest like the chief gorilla, but mostly nobody feels inferior.

With the internet at our command, filled to the brim with the accumulated knowledge of our kind, we have the very tool that can make us all feel more or less equal to any challenge and rid us for ever of dommination by another. The whole point of maturation is to arrive at a sense of personal power, with enough wisdom to realize that is the individual right of all. Striving to be top dog or making another feel sub-servient is symptomatic of personal insecurity. It is immature.

I can’t imagine having no economy; but why not simply replace capitalism with something that works better… Or else consider that self service and exploitation are natural given our sense of self and community; and then make those who want to exploit everyone pay for the pleasure… It would not be so bad if you kept wealth from being hereditary, and if you made wealth support society instead of society supporting wealth… Then there should be a test of honor… If you make a contribution to society and can show you deserve your wealth, then keep it…Otherwise, if you cannot show honor you cannot show ownership… And Property should always show a pure public purpose…If everyone is working toward a single goal, and wealth is working against it, then forget the weatlh, and tell the wealthy to get out of the wagon and push, or hit the road with empty pockets…