NightRychune wrote:QUOTE (NightRychune @ Sep 4 2012, 06:19 PM) the poors are irrelevant to the affluent because most of the money made and spent in politics by the affluent today is detached from everything the poors would be spending their limited funds on - high-value financial transactions and, essentially, creating money and moving it around via securities, derivatives, commodities, and so on. it's the most efficient way of making money to date - why would you need to set up a large manufacturing base and then sell products when you could just move some digital numbers around with a cheshire cat grin as your and your company's bank accounts get bigger and bigger? from there, you can create holding companies, trade in thousands of different fields, commodities, and products and make even more money!
there are a number of firms dealing in staple crop (wheat, soy, corn, rice) commodities that are thrilled about the very recent drought conditions - which is very bad for low-income people since it means food prices for them go up which puts even more of a strain on their already-limited income - because it means their investments in these commodities are going to be worth even more money. while a decent human being would seek to keep the prices for these things down instead of cash in on environmental catastrophe, a decent human being probably wouldn't be in favor of slashing taxes so they could hold onto a few million more dollars while millions of people lose unemployment benefits, health care and welfare, either
gun control is well and good, but having guns is not the fundamental reason people like jared loughner, james holmes, or jeffrey johnson pull guns in public and seek to kill people - mental illness, likely derived from social stress, insecurity (personal as well as financial) and a feeling that they have nothing left to lose are the core of that problem. the galvanizing culture in the united states has been one that thrives on fear and paranoia, and it's compounded by a major political party whose solution for everything is to be divisive and blame society's problems on specific groups - muslims, illegal immigrants, blacks, hispanics, welfare recipients, drug users, and so on. an effective song and dance, certainly, but that charade is going to fall apart in a big, nasty way. it always does.
I should have said the Republican voter base in general rather than the super rich but you're right, from what I can gather on OpenSecrets it appears that a very large percentage of contributions to political campaigns come from the financial sector. They make small business owners and mid level professionals agree with policies that are detrimental to the population at large.
As for the gun massacres, guns don't prompt the attacks but having them readily available definitely makes it easier for these people to carry out attacks. It's not like these guys are hardened criminals that could obtain firearms even if there was a widespread ban, and even if they could, I'm virtually certain the rate of gun massacres would decreased based on the evidence we have.
One thing I'd like to add that's only tangentially related is the recent police response to the Empire State shooting. From what I read, it would appear that even trained professionals (NYPD) have difficulty subduing a suspect without having civilians caught in the crossfire. In my opinion this severely undermines the notion that a better armed populace is safer because people can defend themselves. If we can't trust police officers to make clean kills, why should the country trust millions upon millions of regular civilians to do so?
