Capitalism for Dummies

[Demigorgona]

Capitalism for Dummies
Traditional Capitalism: You have two cows. You sell one and buy a bull. Your herd multiplies, and the economy grows. You sell them and retire on the income.

American Capitalism: You have two cows. You sell one, and force the other to produce the milk of four cows. You are surprised when the cow drops dead.

French Capitalism: You have two cows. You go on strike because you want three cows.

Japanese Capitalism: You have two cows. You redesign them so they are one-tenth the size of an ordinary cow and produce twenty times the milk. You then create cow cartoon images called Cowkimon and market them World-Wide.

German Capitalism: You have two cows. You reengineer them so they live for 100 years, eat once a month, and milk themselves.

Italian Capitalism: You have two cows, but you don't know where they are. You break for lunch.

British Capitalism: You have two cows. Both are mad.

Russian Capitalism: You have two cows. You count them and learn you have five cows. You count them again and learn you have 42 cows. You count them again and learn you have 12 cows. You stop counting cows and open another bottle of vodka.

Arkansas Capitalism: You have two cows. That one on the left is kinda cute...

Hindu Capitalism: You have two cows. You worship them.

Swiss Capitalism: You have 5000 cows, none of which belong to you. You charge others for storing them.

Canadian Capitalism: You have two cows. Let’s make a hockey team, eh?

Chinese Capitalism: You have two cows. You have 300 people milking them. You claim full employment, high bovine productivity, and arrest the newsman who reported the numbers.

Irish Capitalism: You have two cows. You feed them potatoes and wonder why they emigrate.

Israeli Capitalism: So, there are these two Jewish cows, right? They open a milk factory, an ice cream store, and then sell the movie rights. They send their calves to Harvard to become doctors. So, who needs people?

Enron Capitalism: You have two cows. You sell three of them to your publicly listed company, using letters of credit opened by your brother-in-law at the bank, then execute a debt/equity swap with an associated general offer so that you get all four cows back, with a tax exemption for five cows. The milk rights of the six cows are transferred via an intermediary to a Cayman Island company secretly owned by the majority shareholder who sells the rights to all seven cows back to your listed company. The annual report says the company owns eight cows, with an option on one more. Sell one cow to buy a new president of the United States, leaving you with nine cows. No balance sheet provided with the release. The public buys your bull.

Cuban Capitalism: You have two cows. They try to swim to Florida.

Politically Correct Capitalism: You are associated with (the concept of "ownership" is a symbol of the phallo centric, war mongering, intolerant past) two differently - aged (but no less valuable to society) bovines of non-specified gender.

Disney Capitalism: You have two cows. They dance & sing.

Microsoft Capitalism: You have two cows. You patent them and sue anyone else who has them.

Hollywood Capitalism: You have two cows. You give them utter implants and also teach them to bullet-dodge, wall climb and shoot milk out of their utters on command.

Clinton Capitalism: You have two cows. You deny any knowledge of them.

Bureaucratic Capitalism: You have two cows. They are cared for by ex-chicken farmers. You have to take care of the chickens the government took from the chicken farmers. The government gives you as much milk and eggs the regulations say you should need.

Gore Capitalism: You have two cows. You claim you invented them.

Real-World Capitalism: You have two cows. You share two cows with your neighbors. You and your neighbors bicker about who has the most "ability" and who has the most "need". Meanwhile, no one works, no one gets any milk, and the cows drop dead of starvation.

Australian Capitalism: You have two cows. You try to wrestle them.

Iraqi Capitalism: You have two cows. They are biochemical weapons.

Perestroika Capitalism: You have two cows. You have to take care of them, but the government takes all the milk. You steal back as much milk as you can and sell it on the black market.

Jewish Capitalism: You have two cows. You set them on fire and they burn for 8 days.

Cambodian Capitalism: You have two cows. The government takes both and shoots you.

Mormon Capitalism: You have two cows. You tell everyone that they should as well.

Military Capitalism: You have two cows. The government takes both and drafts you.

Texan Capitalism: You have two cows. You teach them to fire guns.

Totalitarian Capitalism: You have two cows. The government takes them and denies they ever existed. Milk is banned.

Nevadan Capitalism: You have two cows. You charge lonely men from Arkansas to spend the night with them.

Jehovah’s Witness Capitalism: You have two cows. You go door to door telling people that you do.

Bureaucrat Capitalism: You have two cows. At first the government regulates what you can feed them and when you can milk them. Then it pays you not to milk them. Then it takes both, shoots one, milks the other and pours the milk down the drain. Then it requires you to fill out forms accounting for the missing cows.

Real Capitalism: You don't have any cows.
The bank will not lend you money to buy cows, because you don't have any cows to put up as collateral.

Environmental Capitalism: You have two cows. The government bans you from milking them.

Surreal Capitalism: You have two giraffes. The government requires you to take harmonica lessons.

Californian Capitalism: You have two cows. They are happy.

Bush Capitalism: You have two cows. You think that cows and humans can coexist peacefully. You give all of the milk to the upper class when they have cows of their own, and the lower class needs milk. Martha Stewart Capitalism: You have two cows. After decorating them, you sell them because a farmer told you the price of milk might go down. Ayn Rand Capitalism: You have two cows. You sell both so that you can invest in a new dairy company. After it does well, you sell you stock and buy a cow farm.
After that does well, you take out a loan using cows as capitol and build a milk manufacturing factory. After making your milk the most sold, you sell the company and retire to Hawaii with your millions of dollars.

[proud&white]

This should be a sticky

[Angelcynn Beorn]

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA HAHAHA!!!!!!

Thats a pukka little post Demi!

[Conchur]

That piece about world capitalism is fucking brilliant!
One of the best pieces I'v read in a while with a humorous slant on Capitalism.
The whole piece is one brilliant Cliché.
Though being Irish I must mention the notion of feeding a cow rediculous, we keep all the precious potato's for ourselves!
Oh and emigration is actually quite low, now we recieve thousands of fucking immigrants!

[Winkelried]

...pure genius... :-)

[Joe000]

Haha! Good stuff. The Japanese capitalism one cracked me up.

[Hanna]

Economics For Dummies

Watching the G20 mix it up over the worldwide economic crisis really made me wonder why the occupied White House wanted to make it so obvious that the world is waiting for them to crawl back into the hole they've dragged it into. Still more, why ask responsible world leaders in to plan, and announce before you got started that you will oppose the regulations you were supposed to enforce in the first place?

Once again, it looks from the performance being put on as if there's some serious disability behind this country's dysfunction in the highest office. It's tempting to write off the disasters as incompetence. But that's not enough to explain the bumbling wreck at the country's helm.

Today I am glad to see an op-ed from Eliot Spitzer, who was such a star as prosecutor in the office of Attorney General, then Governor, of New York before he let personal weaknesses bring him down. He details the efforts he put forth to keep Wall Street from self-destruction, which would have been managed if the laws had been enforced. The opposition of the White House destroyed those attempts to use the laws, and brought this country into another disaster so large it has afflicted the economies of the world.

Those of us who raised red flags about this were scoffed at for failing to understand or even believe in "the market." During my tenure as New York state attorney general, my colleagues and I sought to require investment banking analysts to provide their clients with unbiased recommendations, devoid of undisclosed and structural conflicts. But powerful voices with heavily vested interests accused us of meddling in the market.

When my office, along with the Department of Justice, warned that some of American International Group's reinsurance transactions were little more than efforts to create the false impression of extra capital on the company's balance sheet, we were jeered at for attacking one of the nation's great insurance companies, which surely knew how to balance risk and reward.

And when the attorneys general of all 50 states sought to investigate subprime lending, believing that some lending practices might be toxic, we were blocked by a coalition of the major banks and the Bush administration, which invoked a rarely used statute to preempt the states' ability to probe. The administration claimed that it had the situation under control and that our inquiry was unnecessary.

Time and again, whether at the state level, in Congress or at the Securities and Exchange Commission under Bill Donaldson, those who tried to enforce the basic principles that would allow the market to survive were told that the "invisible hand" of the market and self-regulation could handle the task alone.

The reality is that unregulated competition drives corporate behavior and risk-taking to unacceptable levels.


The laws written to prevent another Great Depression from ever happening again were dubbed by the rowdies in the White House as quaint and outmoded, useless regulations that Wall Street could ignore without hurting anyone. Knowing that this behavior was irresponsible, and counter-indicated by experience over decades, the law enforcement powers in New York were brought into play, and lost. The device of pre-empting state efforts to enforce laws has been a favorite of the administration, and has been very destructive to efforts to prevent disasters. It has also been brought into play to prevent recovery of damages for injury from faulty products. The lawless in the White House won this round, while the country lost.

The trust this country has lost among world powers will have a chance to revive in the new administration. It would be easier if the administration's representatives were eliminated entirely from any role in the hard efforts ahead for President Obama. They have shown they are not wise, and not trustworthy. We can't ask economic leaders of other countries to accept discredited functionaries, and shouldn't ask our own citizens to accept them, either.
http://cabdrollery.blogspot.com/

Its a very interesting article , the author explains his theory in a very simplistic way.

[rainman]

Let me go ahead and boil things down in simpler terms: your political leaders (like the prez) are low on the totem pole of power. That is why very little changes. Mostly money buys influence in the U.S. They actually sell the right to sit down and talk with members of presidential candidates staff. you want to get something done say on foriegn policy? Well pay $100,000 and you can sit down and talk with Obama's head of foreign policy. Beyond that you have secret and maybe not so secret societies and lobbyist. Those who have the money to influence politicians also tend to be the ones with money to influence or control the media.

The Federal Reserve is a private bank owned by wealthy families. It is an inherited title. Iceland's government recently went bankrupt. To whom? Itself aparently, it's own banks.

The goal is for the U.S. to go bankrupt and allow the banks to sieze whatever they want. The banks basically will do whatever they want. They have unlimited power and its a no loose proposition. They print money out of thin air and everybody must pay back that "borrowed" money with real things- their labor, their homes, cars, and eventually the nation itself.

Capitalism as it is today based on inflationary models, lending and debt ultimately always creates more debt than can be paid back. It always leads to a collpase. Once the collapse happens people are unable to pay back and value disapears from the economy (like falling stock prices or forgiveness of loans. A simple example is a home foreclosure- a $100,000 home becomes a $20,000 home). This is how the market "corrects" itself. It leads to another boom period where people take out a bunch of loans, which eventually leads to them not being able to pay them back and so on.

The reason they can never pay them back is the loans are with interest. Meaning there is always more debt than money. The only way to make up for this is through growth. An expanding economy and new people taking out new loans to put money in there to pay the old loans with. The Zeitgeist movie gives a good explanation of this.

Yes it all is done on purpose. It benefits the few at your expense. Say a bank writes down on a piece of paper that you have money. You buy a house with it and you work your whole life for it. The economy goes bad and the bank siezes your home. you have given up something that is real (your home/labor) for something that is not real (imaginary fiat currency).

The only way you can really be safe is to avoid loans unless they absolutely show a benefit to you (like if taking out a mortgage will actually save you money in rent in the long run and you have money set aside to make payments in case the economy goes sour). And to not save a lot of money, but rather put your savings in gold, land or anything with real value (not stock). Even here the gov might just decide to over tax you and take your land, but then that is an issue alltogether. Also barter where you can. Provide services to your community by voluntering your labor or resources rather than necesitating the government collect taxes in cash and distribute services in cash.

For all you hitlerites this was one of the main reasons the world went to war with hitler. The banks supported him at first and he got rid of them. They created more debt than Germany could pay back and basically raped the entire nation and were starving Germans to death. He would not trade in bank notes, but only barter with other nations. He encouraged people to barter and printed up money based on labor rather than gold or fiat (out of thin air). You had to work a day before you get paid, before the money is printed. Today we print the money first, then pay it back later.

Well let me explain how the majority of our money is made. There aren't physical dollars for it. Most money is made when a bank gives out a loan. It doesn't exist. They don't have the money sitting in a vault (though technically they are supposed to have %10 of what they loan out this typically isn't true). No they just write down in a computer or on a piece of paper that you have such and such amount of money and that's how its done. This creates new money that circulates in the economy and causes inflation (simple supply and demand). Money only gets printed when the government is willing to take on debt. So every dollar actually has interest associated with it and cannot technically be paid back (not enough dollars in the economy).

Technically this system could go on indefinately without ever crashing. The only way to do this is for the economy to always grow. Always more people, more jobs, more loans, more productivity. But realistically we know that can't be possible. So if you look everywhere in the world throughout the entire history that this system has been used you see the same pattern of collapse reocurring. turn of the century Germany. South America in the 90s and recently. Russia in the 90s. U.S. and much of the world in the 30s etc. etc. Some are worse than others.

The main way they try to mitigate the crash now is by pumping more money into the economy, which just speeds up the occurence of the next crash. It creates artificial "growth", even though nothing is produced, people now sieze hold of dollars so they can pay their immediate debts with. But it creates more long term debt.

On a big scale that's what the bail out was. People didn't have anything to pay back the imaginary loans the banks made. The banks thus would have to report a loss of profit and probably sieze assetts. So instead debt was transferred to the government and current debt made into future debt. With interest of course.

This is why the Torah commands that you shall not ever charge your brother ursury or interest on a loan. It's not a new thing.

Ultimately the goal isn't to crash the econmy. But rather to siphon off whatever you want whenever you want. To maintain a constant value to those magick dollars you pull out of your butt. And to keep people in debt to the point where they are desperate to do anything to earn that money. People will degenerate themselves and subject themselves to all manner of slavery in the false belief that they are free.