Marx and Keynes

DONATE: ‪http://bit.ly/7OwKc2‬
BLOG: ‪http://punkpatriot.blogspot.com‬
FACEBOOK: ‪http://bit.ly/1OtiqI‬
TWITTER: ‪http://www.twitter.com/punkpatriot‬
STORE: ‪http://punkpatriot.etsy.com‬

The History of Ayn Rand's Philosophy

All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace

The Punk Patriot interviews Ayn Rand

There was an audio problem with the original, and I finally got around to fixing it.

Ayn Rand has been dead for nearly 30 years, making her quite the "get."

Seeing what consequences her philosophy has had for the world, will she recant?
Watch and find out!

DONATE: http://bit.ly/7OwKc2
STORE: http://punkpatriot.etsy.com
FACEBOOK: http://bit.ly/1OtiqI
TWITTER: @punkpatriot

Link to Nathaniel Branden's rebuff of Ayn Rand's cult: http://bit.ly/muKj
Also, Ayn Rand had a serious crush on a serial killer who kidnapped & brutally dismembered a 12 year old girl and modeled the protagonists in her stories after him:
Article 1
Article 2

REVOLT! Dennis Trainor Jr of NoCureForThat and ACRONYM, LIVE at Freedom Plaza

Just got done editing and uploading this for No Cure For That.

The Invisible Hand of the Free Market is Invisibly KILLING YOU

The Invisible Hand of the Free Market is willing to put the lives of thousands at risk, entrusting Uranium Conversion to unskilled temp labor.

Via the United Steel Workers

In this video, GRITtv's Danya Abt and cinematographer Zac Halberd traveled to Morris, N.J., to talk with workers from United Steelworkers Local 7-669, who have been locked out by Honeywell Corp. for nearly a year. The members recently came to Honeywell headquarters to exercise their rights as shareholders.

The 228 skilled uranium workers have been locked out of the nation's only uranium conversion facility since June 28, 2010. Watch the GRITtv segment, then sign our petition calling on Honeywell to bring back the experienced USW workers by clicking here. Please pass it on!

The invisible hand of the Free Market is invisibly trying to kill you.

Colbert reports on the wealth gap

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
The Word - New Country for Old Men
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog Video Archive

GET YER T-SHIRTS

Small Medium Large XL

The Punk Patirot Fixes the USA Economy

With quantitative easing, people are worried about inflation!
If we don’t do anything, the Fed is worried about deflation!
By blaming our shitty economy on people who receive welfare checks, we’re having a big problem with CONFLATION!

I’m the Punk Patriot, and I’m going to fuckin’ fix the economy for you.

I was watching the news the other day, they were doing “man on the street” interviews, and I saw this one person give his thoughts on the economy: “I think thar’s too much people gittin on welfur, and too much of our jobs is bein’ sent overseas.”

Well, you got half of that right. Thanks to NAFTA, CAFTA, and the WTO, our manufacturing jobs have almost all left the country. Manufacturing is important, because it’s a job that takes a low-cost raw material and transforms it into a high-value consumable good. This happens through the MAGIC OF LABOR!

Because people are working on transforming low value materials into high value goods, the product that they create using their skilled labor has more use and therefore more value, than the stuff that they started with. Which means that they are creating wealth. Factories are not just places to create goods, they are places that create wealth. And right now, all our wealth is being created in other countries. Thats why the economy fucking sucks so bad.

I work in a boot factory. I make boots. I transform leather and rubber, both of which are relatively low cost, low value materials, into a high-value, higher-function good-- a boot.
You can’t keep your feet dry and warm with scrap leather and rubber alone. You need it to be crafted into a fucking boot. That takes skilled labor. You’re welcome.

Your retail jobs don’t do this. They simply move a product from one place to another. You will never grow an economy on retail sales, because the margins are slim, and no wealth is created by moving a product from one point to another. An economy based entirely on retail sales-- which is what we’ve pretty much had for the past 30 years, will eat itself alive- which is pretty much what we’re seeing right now.

Now, the address the conflation of “Too much people gettin on welfar”...

For whatever reason, it’s a common misconception that people receiving welfare is bad for the economy. People getting on welfare isn’t the reason you don’t have a job. The reason you don’t have a job is because nobody fucking MAKES anything anymore. Which means that all our wealth has left the country. Which means that nobody has any money to fucking buy anything anymore. Which means that the retail jobs are having to lay people off. Which means that more people have less money to buy things with. Which means that more layoffs are in the works. Which means that more people have less money to spend.

Welfare spending actually reverses this trend. If a person receives welfare spending, what do they spend it on? (DRUGS!) No! Actually they spend it on food and rent. If more people have more money to spend on food and rent, then the grocery stores can hire more people, and the superintendents are better able to afford repairs. Which means that construction and repair workers can stay employed and grocery stores can hire more people, which means that they can buy other things like cars. Which means that more people can get paid to make cars. Or whatever. Money flows in one direction-- from the bottom, up. This is a fundamental truth of capitalism. Fixing the interest rates for all the rich fucks on Wall Street can start doing more derivatives trading again doesn’t do ANYTHING to fix the economy.

Which is why Quantitative Easing is doomed to fail. Capitalism is fundamentally flawed, and supply-side economics, which apparently even Obama has drunk the kool-aid on, is even more so.

You’re not going to fix fundamental flaws by fucking around with interest rates. The problem isn’t our monetary policy, it’s our monetary system, which is biased towards savings, wall street mathematical gymnastics, and scarcity. It’s the fundamental flaws in our entire economy-- that we do NOT RECOGNIZE that the poorest people amongst us are actually the ones who create all wealth in society by providing consumer demand. If it wasn’t for consumer demand, all the pioneers of industry would be wasting their money and time. Which with the economy in recession, it looks like they’re doing.

Rich people don’t create jobs. They don’t create a single fucking job. If labor hadn’t worked their asses off striking and protesting and doing work-slowdowns, and sit-down strikes, and taking police billy clubs to the head, and being shot and killed, so that we could have all the labor laws we take for granted, things like overtime pay, minimum wage, the right to organize, a half hour lunch, 15 minute breaks, OSHA safety requirements, etc etc etc-- we’d be no different than those third world countries that all our jobs have gone to.

If we didn’t have these labor protections mandated by law, we’d be working our fingers off- literally right off our hands, getting them caught in unsafe machinery, or permanently damaged due to repetitive motion injury.
Now Randian regressives who would prefer we live in a pre-Great Depression laissez-faire, free-market system, would have us believe that we should be willing to make ourselves POORER-- by taking cuts in benefits and wages, to make ourselves richer, by having more jobs. We aren’t going to make ourselves richer by making ourselves poorer. That’s so fucking illogical I don’t even know where to begin with debunking that...

You want to fix the fucking economy? I’ll fix it for you.
First thing we need, is a trade policy where we stop importing goods from whoever is fucking over their workers the most, just because it’s cheaper to do so. We can harness the greed and consumption of America to do good work for the rest of the world. Pure free-market economics is like a child with an overactive ID and no superego telling them what’s right and wrong.

What we need is to put in a safeguard to protect us from our own greed and stupidity. If we implement a trade policy in which we only trade with countries who have labor laws and environmental protection laws at least as good as our own, then we force third world countries to give their lower class more protection by their governments, and increase their standards of living, by giving them more labor protections, and higher wages, and more protection from getting poisoned by lazy fucks that we call the “captains of industry”, who pollute because it’s cheap and easy to do so.

Second, we need to implement a MAXIMUM WAGE law. Now there’s been talk about this for a while. Some think we should just cap it arbitrarily. I think that’s wrong. I think that would stifle the GOOD things about capitalism and greed-- the incentive to make the best fucking product you can for the lowest amount of money to the consumer, so that you can make the most money you can. Capitalism works really well for creating amazing consumer goods. Like cellphones and computers. People really wanted to be able to watch YouTube videos and so now you can do it on your fucking PHONE. In fact, some of you are probably watching this on a phone. A FUCKING PHONE! That’s crazy! That couldn’t happen without capitalism responding to consumer demand.

But there’s a problem-- the Average CEO makes 10million dollars a year.
The average worker makes 40,000 a year or less. The average worker spends the majority of their income on meeting their basic needs-- which is all shit that actually makes our economy function.
The average CEO keeps it. This is called “dead money.” That money sits in the bank, or goes to wall street where it does mathematic gymnastics, but doesn’t create a single fucking job.

So what’s the solution? The maximum wage needs to be indexed to the lowest paid employee at any company. Let’s set it at say, 20 times what your lowest paid employee makes-- which is roughly the same ratio that we saw in the 1950s and 1960s, a time when the USA was far more properous. Back in the 1960s, indexed for inflation, we worked half as many hours, got paid the same amount, but the cost of living was a third of what it is now.

Today, CEOs make roughly 300 times as much as their lowest paid employees. That’s fucking absurd. If a company is doing really well, it’s because of EVERYBODY at that fucking company working their ass off, least of which is the CEO. If they have enough money laying around to give themselves bonuses, they have enough money to let everybody share in the wealth. After all, all those poor fucks are the ones who put their labor into making that company successful.. They should share in that wealth. So if a company does well, and the executive board wants to give themselves raises as a pat on the back-- go ahead. But you have to a raise that is proportional to your income-- to everybody else in your company. If you want to give yourself a raise, you have to give EVERYBODY in your company a raise.

This forces more of the wealth downwards into the lowest classes, where it belongs. Because it’s all going to end up back in the pockets of the CEOs anyways. Fixing the economy to work better for the rich and the traders on wall street, is like fixing a tree to work better for a fungal parasite. You’re going to end up killing the tree.

This is the punk patriot, to life, liberty, and pursuit of a less fucked up government.

BRANDS: Your life-long friends

You know these faces. You probably know these faces better than you know people in your own neighborhood. Better than you know members of your extended family. They were there with you when you were born. They were there with you as a child. They visited you every day on TV.
Who are they?
What do they want from you?
They just want to be your friend. They make things for you. Are they the ones who made these cookies? Your oatmeal? Your big mac? Your breakfast cereal?
"Be our friends! Let me hang out in your home!" they cry, with their silent pleading eyes.
And you do. You always have. You always will. They will be with you throughout your adult life. They're always so happy to see you. They always will be.
They will visit you every night on TV, even as you become old and fragile. You will age and decay. They will not. They will be with you, these friends, as you reach the end of your life and die. They will be there, silent, watching. They will not mourn your passing.

They're all so happy to see you! They always will be.

[VIDEO] Evolution and Capitalism

Evolution and Capitalism

by The Punk Patriot



Our society today has largely been shaped by the selfish individualism of Ayn Rand, in ways we won’t fully understand for centuries.

So much so, that nobody growing up in this age knows any different from it. People raised in the post-Reagan world see these drastic changes in human behavior as just being the status-quo.

Individuals are having to change in order to better cope with this new environment that Ayn Rand’s philosophy has created.

Empathy, something born from the communal lifestyle of our ancestry in social mammals, is becoming maladaptive.
To become a member of the most successful elite, one needs to behave in ways that are anti-social, misanthropic, disingenuous, and cold-hearted.

Now average lay people might call such behavior immoral, or they might call such a person a “selfish asshole”, but this type of behavior is actually beneficial to the individual, given the confines and structures of our autistic economics.

The very things we think of as making us human: love, empathy, concern for others, are now in the world we live in, maladaptive behaviors.

The Neo-human, the human evolving to best suit this crazy new breed of hyper-capitalism, has no genetic needs to socialize, to love, to be loved, to care or be cared for. What this Neo-human needs to survive, can be purchased with money.

Emotional currency is useless and worthless to him. With no desire to be loved, and no empathy for others, this autonomous being feels no emptiness, and does not feel lonely. He can kill with out a second thought.

Contemporary psychology will call this person a sociopath, but contemporary psychology is still mired in the mammalian standards of what is normal. Soon, as hyper-capitialism reaches a crescendo, and our social norms are slowly redefined by this dramatic shift, it will turn out that WE were crazy for thinking our systems morality had value.

The Punk Patriot Interviews AYN RAND

Make more shows like Possible: Donate

FUCK THE RICH

FUCK THE RICH! But wait! The Rich create all the prosperity in the USA right?

No. They don't.

Labor does. The rich survive off of our labor. Labor creates all wealth in society. Labor lays bricks. Labor builds buildings. Labor paves roads. Labor build vehicles. Labor farms food. Labor transports food. Labor repairs roofing. Labor fixes cars. Labor makes clothes. Labor makes everything in the economy that has value. Labor makes everything in our infrastructure, which enables the larger exchange of goods and services. The rich, or the investment class, on the other hand, are parasites. They make their money off our labor-- many times over.

Let's say that you work in a factory and you make widgets. The labor that you put into making that widget is worth MORE than the wages that you are compensated with. So you are paid LESS than what your labor is actually worth.

Why? Because the widget is sold back to you at a "profit." The management class makes money off your labor twice-- once in creating wealth (the widget) and a second time, by profiting from the sale of the widget. So when you purchase your labor back from yourself, you are paying more than you were compensated. But then the Management class needs all that profit to pay back the investment class.

Now the investment class. They contribute nothing in creating anything, and yet they have all the money. Why? Because they had enough money TO START WITH that they were able to put money into the Wall Street investment game. Their money does their work for them. They might say, invest in a company, but then that company is expected to pay them back-- with interest. So the rich make money off the money they already have. You only need to get rich once, and then you can profit infinitely by simply "investing" in the labor of others.

The investment class also profits in abstract ways off of the this process, and then again in even more abstract ways that profit from the profit of profit-- and even the profit of loss. These are things you might have heard about during the financial meltdown, things like short-selling, hedge funds, futures selling (essentially betting on labor or resources that doesn't even exist), etc.

Without the labor class making and buying all the shit that makes the economy go 'round, the whole system collapses. That's what you're seeing right now. People in the labor class are losing their jobs by the hundreds of thousands, we are losing all our money, and nobody has any money to put into the system to keep this crazy carnival ride going. Except the rich. They could stimulate the economy by paying for health care and paying unemployment insurance, and creating jobs. But they don't do that. They just play with their money on Wall Street, which creates no value, creates no material wealth, and provides no public services and does almost nothing to facilitate the flow of goods and services.

Fuck them. We don't need them. Do they really all want to go live on an island with John Galt? I hope they do, and I hope they leave the rest of us alone. We've been lied to and told that we need them. We don't. We really don't at all. We are the ones who create wealth. We are the ones who drive the economy. We are the ones who run the place. But we've been told we don't, to shut up, to sit down, to get in line. We are a nation of dogs that have been raised by ticks. The rich are parasites on society. They contribute absolutely nothing towards the greater good of society, yet they take everything in terms of monetary wealth.

Fuck'em.

The Punk Patriot * WOODSTOCK TURNS FORTY-- and?

Could Woodstock have been organized on Facebook?