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Richard Posner

User Profile Image Richard Posner
Member since : May-26-2009 (Unsubscribed)
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Richard Posner 9 months ago
It is very clear that this topic is prime troll bait.
There is no possible response to people who choose willful ignorance over simple, uncomplicated facts.
All you birth certificate obsessives are wasting your time on a non-issue. There are plenty of valid criticisms to be raised about Obama. This birth certificate crap is not one of them.
But then again, I sometimes forget that the only purpose of trolls such as yourselves is to waste time and create hostility and discord.
Beyond all this, do any of you actually believe that the war criminal Bush was ever legally elected to either term?
Can you possibly be insane enough to imagine that brain dead McCain would have been a better choice?
This country is history and that is exactly what ALL the money worshiping politicos are working for. It has been decided that America is to become a third world country and that is the agenda of our corporate owned "government", republicrat and demopublican alike.
Do any of you actually bother to read and comprehend what anyone else says before launching into your rabid, mindless ranting or do you just have a few "talking points" that you repeat over and over hoping that if you say them enough people will believe you?
Richard Posner 9 months ago
scheideck, get a life. Are you simply incapable of reading? There are plenty of valid problems with Obama. Stop grasping at psychotic straws.
http://www.factcheck.org/elections-2008/born_in_the_usa.html
Richard Posner 9 months ago
beebe75, I agree and share your sadness.
Richard Posner 9 months ago
pecohen, who would you trust for your committee? In most cases you only get to choose one side of an issue. Follow the money.

dougolat, well said. Valid points all.
Richard Posner 9 months ago
bobcat, I am not suggesting for a moment that voting for McCain would have been a better choice. I would not have voted republican with a gun to my head. I am simply saying that my vote for Obama was wasted. There is no "change" coming, at least not positive.
So far there have been nothing but superficial gestures made to placate the hapless marks who voted for him. I count myself as one of the conned.
He gives us words while his actions serve only the moneyed upper class. Make no mistake, the most important war in which America is engaged is the class warfare within its own borders.
Although it would have made not an iota of difference in the outcome of the election, I would feel better had I written in Nader or Kucinich or Mickey Mouse. Had I done so, at least I would now be able to say I had not been duped by the greatest marketing campaign in the history of presidential elections.
Barack Obama serves the same masters as those before him and they are not the people of America.
The only real difference between him and the others who are carving up the world for their own personal gain is that Obama operates with a scalpel instead of a chain saw. At least we can now say we are being screwed with a little finesse.
Obama is another selected president, chosen by the moneyed elite. His assignment, with which he is obviously having some success, is to soothe the populist beast back into the slumber from which the neocons nearly woke it. He is oil cast upon troubled waters. Snake oil to be specific.
Until we can elect an actual leader, someone who will make a stand, someone from outside the two party country club, we’ll continue to get what we’ve got.
Please don’t imagine for a moment that I am here to push the rightwing agenda. I am so far left of Obama that you’d need Air Force One to get to my position from where he is.
Obama, a student of constitutional law, refuses to obey that law and prosecute the criminals that preceded him. In so doing, he becomes complicit in their crimes.
I had hoped that he would at least stand up to the health insurance companies. He has caved. Unless we get single payer, everyone in, no meaningful change will be made.
All the funds necessary, and more, for the programs that are desperately needed for Americans could be had by simply slashing our destructive, empire building “defense” budget. America spends more on death and destruction than the next top fifteen nations combined. Obama has increased military funding.
What is being done with the economy is simply the perpetuation of the system that brought this disaster upon the world. When the dust finally settles we will have fewer and even bigger, more powerful banks than we had before. We are being thrown from the frying pan to the fire.
For a look at the least that must be done: http://www.monetary.org/
One more thing bobcat, I haven’t the faintest idea who the “gleanerl” is.

chloe, get a life. There are plenty of valid problems with Obama. Stop grasping at psychotic straws.
http://www.factcheck.org/elections-2008/born_in_the_usa.html
Richard Posner 9 months ago
Nuclear power is pure insanity. Nor is it renewable, clean or even efficient.
What has kept renewable energy marginalized and expensive has been the obstructionism of the entrenched energy industry, which is willing to see the planet raped and the human race decimated in order to continue the pathological capitalist pursuit of more, more, more profit. Profit before all else.
How can any sane person maintain that a poison spewing, astronomically expensive nuclear plant has any advantage over individual residential and business renewable energy systems?
Lew Hay, chairman and CEO of FPL, said, "If our cost estimates are even close to being right, the cost of a two-unit plant will be on the order of magnitude of $13 to $14 billion. That's bigger than the total market capitalization of many companies in the U.S. utility industry and 50 percent or more of the market capitalization of all companies in our industry with the exception of Exelon." This, he said, "is a huge bet for any CEO to take to his or her board."
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2008/06/02/nuclear_power_price/#
Once the plant is on line it still must transmit energy long distances through inefficient, power-wasting grid systems. Then we must consider the amount of energy consumed to produce the materials for the construction of a plant, to actually build the facility and to mine, process and transport the fuel, which is non-renewable, deadly and rare. Then there’s the waste disposal problem for which there is no solution.
There are already homes in America which are receiving monthly checks from power companies because they are producing more energy than they use. There is at least one large American dairy farm that operates entirely on methane gas produced by the manure of its livestock. The simple fact of the matter is that renewable energy, used by individuals site by site, would put the energy giants out of business. That’s why it hasn’t been in use for the last fifty years or so.
As the transition from non-renewable becomes inevitable we will see legislation passed by the corporate owned congress making it illegal for individual home and business owners to generate their own electricity. Once the power giants have accepted the fact that a new paradigm must be put in place, they will take the necessary steps to ensure that that capitalist ownership machine will be in complete control of it. The process is already underway.
We will be forced to buy our energy, still transmitted over giant inefficient grids, from huge corporate owned wind and solar farms. The only difference will be that, after the initial investment for the necessary hardware, the corporations will be getting the power they sell us absolutely free. There will be no need for extraction, processing, refining or shipping. Nonetheless we will pay as much as, if not more than, we do now for the privilege of turning on a light.
The greatest failing of our energy system is our energy system. Huge, inefficient and antiquated power grids waste more than half the energy that is produced. Large centralized power plants of any kind are inefficient from the moment of construction. The greatest loss of energy, which can be up to two thirds of what is produced by any given plant, is the transmission of that energy over long distances to the end user. The cheapest, safest, most cost effective and efficient way to provide energy is on a site by site basis. Every new structure could easily be built with the necessary hardware to make it completely self-sufficient. Existing structures can be retrofitted.
The next problem with our energy system is the people who use it. Self-interested, arrogant, wasteful and gluttonous, the average American consumes five times more energy than the average global citizen. If everyone would just switch to energy efficient light bulbs it would cut demand enough to equal the output of two nuclear plants!
The only people that would continue to promote the corporate ownership of the means to produce energy are psychopathic, profit driven capitalists or their apologists, who worship wealth and power over all else, including the well being and survival of their own children and grandchildren.
The easiest, fastest, safest and cheapest way to improve our use of energy is to conserve. Our wasteful, “non-negotiable” lifestyle, created by the obscenity of free market capitalism, is at the root of most of our problems and those of the world at large.
The capitalist lust for endless and ever increasing profits, which drives a society indoctrinated to mindless consumerism, is hastening us toward becoming the proud inhabitants of a third world planet.
I find it no stretch to envision the starving masses, confined to crumbling cities of the future which have been left to rot, their antiquated and neglected infrastructures collapsed by disasters or simply decay and never repaired.
In gated, guarded fortress communities, the rich elite, the master race, will live in luxury with all their needs provided by privatized corporate suppliers.
And by the way, guess who has lots of money invested in nuclear power.
Can you say oil companies?
Not to mention U.S. taxpayers to the tune of tens of billions in subsidies.
Richard Posner 9 months ago
Please don't assume bobcat that I'm thrilled with what Obama is doing. I just can't tolerate right wingnuts who spew totally unfounded nonsense simply because they have nothing of substance to support their cause.
I have come to sincerely regret having cast my vote for our current president. He is one more in a long line of politicians who has chosen to serve the elite rather than the people who put their faith in him. His actions thus far have done nothing but drive ever more nails into the coffin of the republic.
If the banking system, including the Federal Reserve, is not nationalized immediately, the fate of working class America is sealed. This is the Project For The New Third World Amerika. We will soon see gated, guarded and privatized "Green Zones" of the elite and impoverished, squalid "Red Zones" for the people of America.

"IT'S EASY TO IMAGINE A FUTURE IN WHICH GROWING NUMBERS OF CITIES HAVE THEIR FRAIL AND LONG-NEGLECTED INFRASTRUCTURES KNOCKED OUT BY DISASTERS AND THEN ARE LEFT TO ROT, THEIR CORE SERVICES NEVER REPAIRED OR REHABILITATED.
THE WELL-OFF, MEANWHILE, WILL WITHDRAW INTO GATED COMMUNITIES, THEIR NEEDS MET BY PRIVATIZED PROVIDERS." SHOCK DOCTRINE by Naomi Klein

“If the American people ever allow banks to issue their currency, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations which will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property, until their children wake homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.” – Thomas Jefferson
Richard Posner 9 months ago
http://www.factcheck.org/elections-2008/born_in_the_usa.html