The CEO's salary comes directly off the top of the companies profits. Or in many cases it is added to the companies losses. Why would anyone invest in a company that the CEO makes millions of dollars per year? This money should go back to R&D, Company growth or the shareholders as dividends. Nobody is worth more than a million dollars per year. We also need to eliminate the many ways that they receive salary. Stock options, Benefits such as life insurance, club memberships, private jets, Homes, cars etc.

Filibusters arose as a way to protect every state as a minority. But the inspiration behind it must be the rule of the Roman Senate, in which every issue had to be decided by sunset, but every one of their 100 senators had the right to speak as long as he wanted. Therefore, if a senator spoke until sunset, he could kill a bill without letting it come to a vote.

But that's not the last eerie similarity between the United States and the Roman Kingdom (yes, the kingdom, not the republic). Despite the modern use of the title, Roman kings were elected (albeit for life). Part of the process involved having the 30 curiae of the city (equivalent to our House of Representatives) choose the king by majority vote, each curia having one vote regardless of population. This compares to our backup plan of having the House elect the President, with each state having one vote, regardless of population.

I can't help feeling like there was a benign conspiracy to get the U.S. to have 50 states, just so we could have the same number of senators as Rome.

"Heroin" was named for the German word for "heroine", which does then come from Greek. Some confusion seems to have occurred among English speakers and today the word "heroine" is pronounced the same as the drug (hehr-o-in), rather than as if it were the feminine of "hero" (heer-o-in).

P.S. Sandles, I just e-mailed you a message. Tried copying & pasting your e-mail address as you wrote it here, but it didn't work, so I altered it so that it looks like: <sophsandlewould@aol.com> Hope that works. Be sure to e-mail me back to conform that it was received.

Thanks Sandles! Great to hear back from ya.

I never would've guessed how your new avatar photo appeared here. Cool. Not everything that happens by accident is a bad thing. To cite another example, when I'm playing one of my piano compositions, I'll occasionally hit a "wrong" note that sounds really neat, so I end up keeping the "wrong" note and playing it that way deliberately from then onward.

A social justice women's choir... Love it! Wonderful. I hope y'all make recordings; if you do, I'd enjoy hearing what you come up with.

Just happened to check out this thread five minutes after you posted your note! I'll e-mail you shortly, so check out your inbox when you can. - AIW

Mark, the only way to ever know if the American people can break the cycle of commercial consumerism is to try to counter by effective means. I don’t believe this has ever been tried in a serious way like what a nationalized consumer union proposes. The historical record of social engineering and manufacturing of public opinion, by state and private powers goes back to the Creel Commission during the of the Wilson administration. There are documented cases of public manipulation before that day, but this was the first state institution set up specifically to engineer public consent.

I believe you’re being far too cynical. The ruling class wouldn’t spend so much time and effort trying to control the minds of the public if they didn’t understand that the illusion is what’s keeping people under their thumb. I am not asking for revolutionary change. I’m not even asking for the majority of people to make their selves a target of the system. I’m asking people not to participate in an economy that is design to undermine the public. They don’t have stop consuming completely just don’t buy what they don’t need and this would be an effective way to give the people a voice in the system.

Consumer consent could be the 5th estate in the US and around the world. The economy is based entirely on the insane principles of unlimited growth and that unlimited grow is based on consumption. It’s all an illusion but that illusion works if people participate. The informed consumer can make choices to undermine the system that has absolutely no problem undermining the consumer. The effective collective control of financial distribution of purchasing power by a mass consumer union would give consumer consent a voice in the economic and social policies of the county.

Yes, powers would try to undermine a consumer union the moment it became effective. That’s why education is the most essential aspect I believe. An informed consumer is a dangerous consumer in a capitalist market. Lift the fog of commercial consumerism and you’ve got a person making rational decisions that can lead to effective change in our society. Nothing about what I’m proposing is simple but that premises isn’t that hard to conceive in a person’s mind. If 30 million people take their selves out of the market and that in return inspires others to do the same then you can make demands of the market that couldn’t be made otherwise.

I am not talking about destroying companies, I am just taking about the consumer having say in how those companies participate in the markets, how they treat their workers, how they move work overseas to undermine labor, how their earnings are distributed. In what I’m proposing companies can still operate any way they want, but they will no longer have the collective buying power of the Consumer Union as costumers. I believe this alone would change the way most companies operate, but this will never happen if consumption is not controlled somehow.

Parliaments are not beholden to a duopoly. They also actually work and legislate rather than the US primary function of fund raising. The US congress's main goal is electioneering. Seeking to be a placeholder or seatholder is also seeking to be an ass, since that is what goes into the seat. Choosing which ass is really not too complicated.

I agree with Thom on Sherrod Brown, Franken, Liz Warren, Bernie, and a handfull of others. I hope the KS independant wins.

Re:campaign bribery,- taxing the hell out of it is legal, Scotus made that clear with the ACA decision. Taxing is legislating and even better because the house gets a chunk of the pot. The US cassino just needs better management.

WaltB31(Post#9) ~ Thank you so much for that link. That video of Wilson pacing around Browns body says it all. No blood, no dizziness, and not once does he grab his skull, hold his head, rub his eye, lose his balance, or even shake his head. No wonder why photos of his injuries were never posted--he was never injured. He wasn't even touched!! We have all been suckered and jived by a bunch of lying racist, right wing clowns; and, I for one am PISSED!! I hate being lied to and deliberately mislead! Now I know just how those protesters felt! Since that falsified x ray originated from the University of Iowa archives and the DA's office it seems obvious that the entire story is an elaborate official coverup. In that case the hand of guilt behind this heinous crime goes far beyond Wilson himself. I certainly hope to see justice met out in this case! This cities law enforcement department needs to be made a national example of and taken to the cleaners!!

You know, consumption is also our weak spot and I wonder if we'd really be able to sustain an effort at withholding consumption. The elites know when it comes to a choice between principle and consumption the American public will choose consumption every time. George Kennan, a foreign policy advisor of Trumann said about moral uneasiness for our foreign policy of supporting brutal puppet governments in the Third World to maintain our consumeristic lifestyle in our effectual colonialism to steal the resources of those countries, to roughly paraphrase, "Put away your notions of human freedom, justice and brotherhood. We are not about to give up our life style so resign yourselves to the brutal dommination of the undeveloped societies."

I wonder if we ever could forgo consumption in a meaningful way. The Maoists believe that the American worker is "bought off", bribed. They're fat and happy in an extravegant middle class of an extravegant society and are too used to ease, comfort and dissipating entertainment. They lack the will power to act - or even care - about anything. Even the middle class dissappearing hasn't lessened the American workers' appetite for ease, comfort and dissipation.

Modern American Leninists, for this reason, believe that any revolution in the United States must be a palace revolution not a popular revolution and must be carried out by proffessional, specially trained and educated revolutionaries and not left to the mass of people. Similarly, after the revolution the society must be governed, for a period of perhaps several generations, by a dictatorship of the same proffesionals, the party members, to detox the masses from consumerism before they can be allowed to govern themselves, i.e., participate in the governance of their society.

I don't think I believe that but the weakness of will of the American workers/consumers is hard to deny.

What harm was the man doing requiring a warrant to search his home? It serves us all better that he does this than to have the police set a tone where they search anyone's home at will.

What people forget is that the constitutional "rights of the accused" and of the suspected are to protect the innocent from harassment and maltreatment by the authorities. They are not to privilege the guilty or help them to get away with crimes.

This business of "if you're not guilty of anything you have nothing to worry about" is completely fallacious. The innocent are precisely the people those constitutional rights exist to protect. Anyone who makes that former quoted statement doesn't believe that people should have constitutional rights and doesn't understand that a system where innocent people have to fear uncontrolled and unchecked harrassment by the police is, by definition, a tyranny.

Mark: I did note your caveat. I didn't expect perfection. Thanks for responding. (Do you mind if I mention that profesionalism has one "f"?)