So Reuters ran a story about a company that sells dispersant chemicals being used right now in the Gulf of Mexico. This company is called Nalco Holding Co.

The article reads,

* Shares up 20 cents after the bell
May 17 (Reuters) - Water treatment services firm Nalco Holding Co (NLC.N) said on Monday it will likely have generated about $40 million by the end of this week from the sale of dispersants following the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Well isn't that great. While all the animals are dying and millions of gallons of chemicals are being dumped in the Gulf of Mexico to avert a leak that, by the way, is still leaking, these bastards are bathing in the money they just got from selling this shit. I see RECORD PROFITS coming out of this. And it's all at the expense of poor people, so who gives a damn, right?

What a disgrace.

Not new thoughts -- primer

I know the meaning of life that nature intended. It sucks. It's all just consumption and reproduction, isn't it? That's really the evolutionary goal if you think about it. Desire manipulates people to think and act in really funny ways. All we're doing in life is chasing desires, some perverted, some realistic. And don't even start with the whole God thing.

Living in this society is kind of like injecting heroin into yourself. The addiction is this game that we're all playing here in society. Get a fucking job, go here, go there, look at the tree, walk into the building, stare at a squirrel, eat dinner, go home, go to bed. In society, we have these responsibilities that keep us tethered to the heroin of society and its attendant problems. It's not exactly easy to leave society, either. This society won't tolerate people killing themselves and being rid of their conscious lives which might suck a whole lot.

Most wealth is inherited in this day and age. The rich get richer and everyone else wallows in the mire. The government owes a whole lot of money to these folks, and you wonder why all the legislation in this country contains so many favors, handouts, loopholes, watered-down provisions, etc. People lament giving up their money because they have this sense of entitlement. We think it's okay that Mark McGwire's son automatically gets to play pro baseball.

That's why "get money, get bitches" is so irrelevant to me. I don't like either of those things a whole lot.

You can never get ahead in life. You can only help to clean up existing messes while you're here on this planet. Our stuff comes at a price paid by more than just the consumer.

"OF COURSE!!!!" -Cenk Uygur

Typical conversation with an all-too-common YouTube asshole who disagreed with FairEconomics about MannixThePirate's retarded response to Gary's response to MannixThePirate's fail-plagued rant about taxation and economics. Whew. Did you get through that sentence alright? Here's a video for context:



One message that was sent to me after I made a nasty comment replying to a follower of MannixThePirate was:

your a communist

its capitalism its not fair

lifes not fair

I was also indulged with mind-blowing comments such as this one:

in capitalism the more you put into society the more you get out of it, so if you want equality your probabely just lazy

I'm not even going to address these comments because the person writing them is an absolutely retarded weasel and a simp. This person is most likely a high-school retard who is some how acting out and on some kind of trip about how cool cars and and fireworks and beavis and butthead kind of humor are. Looking at his most recently posted comments, he actually directs people to false-flag Gary's video response to MannixThePirate as you can see, temporarily, here:
blah

Yeah, just another typical "Libertarian" retard out there who gives the party a bad name. I'm telling you, actual Libertarians ought to be more upset than they are about having people butcher what they believe in and falsely align themselves with them.

Stating the obvious but I feel like it needs to be said

Republicans are on the side of the bankers because they don't support financial reform. The system is very unstable as-is. Most people don't realize how big of an issue naked credit default swaps and derivatives are.

The Democrats need to frame this issue in November as "Sen. XX didn't support financial reform" and then attack that person based upon those beliefs that are so misguided and so blatantly in favor of special interests.

Rethinking capitalism

It's a well-known fact that political buzzwords thrown around today to describe different political ideologies do not correspond to reality. Words like Socialist, Nazi, Liberal, Conservative, Libertarian, Communist, Anarchist, Totalitarian, and Fascist are all used to malign someone's image in a certain way. People try to use these buzzwords to try and discredit someone's argument. For example, "WE can't have a public option cuz that's Socialist." Calling it Socialist immediately makes it explicit that the policy about which we are debating cannot work for Amerikkka because it is fundamentally against our way of life and traditional American values.

That's why today I wanted to talk about another word: capitalism. Libertarians and Republicans have a very different understanding about the way in which capitalism is supposed to function. Republicans, as believers in Reagan's agenda, posit that capitalism is merely self-interested parties trying to accrue duckets by any means necessary. For Republicans (and Democrats too), being a big corporation implies that that corporation exerts a lot of influence in Washington. In other words, mixing politics and the economy is okay.

For Libertarians, the free market should remain "free" in the sense that no one should exert undue influence on the market such that another individual is not free to start a competing proprietorship or corporation. This means that no one company can become so large as to completely dominate a sector of the economy. According to Libertarians, this usually happens when a corporation tries to mix with government to get special favors or dispensations.

So, to clarify, the Republican conception of capitalism couldn't be farther off from what Libertarians believe. Republicans are big believers in corporations like Enron, who pretty much became so large that they created their own private markets or dominated the ones that were already in existence. They thrive on corporate handouts, and the Citizens United ruling probably made them want to go out and dance in the street. I hate when Republicans tout "free market ideals", as if those were synonymous with the version of capitalism to which Republicans actually subscribe. It's time for Republicans to own up to the fact that they're not really pro-free-market at all. If anything, they're against the free market the most. Was it not Adam Smith who postulated that capitalists are the worst for the free market, because they are the ones who look to profit by any means necessary?

People are confused by economic and political terms. It doesn't help that the Republicans throw around buzzwords so that it appears that they support free-market principles when in fact they hate the free market. It is reminiscent of 1984, where the language itself becomes so muddled and "refined" that if people start to hear pro-capitalist rhetoric couched in terms of the "free market," people will start to think that increases in numbers of House/Senate Republicans will correlate to how free the market is, when in fact it's just the opposite.