SaltySaltillo's Comments (982)

“Come to think of it, I think the middle east is a very small part of the very large modern slave trade.”

“You seem to have missed several critical points made by Farakh Mirza: (a) he has direct first hand experience as the son of a migrant laborer in the UAE, (b) he identified 3 key benefits to life in the UAE that were lacking in his father's homeland: education, access to food, and stable politics. I recognize that Farakh Mirza's experience is just one, and it may not be hard to find cases of people who were tricked into slavery or not allowed to leave UAE, etc... but he does have a serious point.”

“point conceded.”

“In some ways I guess it is easy to condemn the plight of the poor foreign laborers in Dubai because it is so overt and in the open. But what would be the experience of a Bangladeshi migrant laborer in Dhaka? Would it be any better? And would it move Johann Hari to write a blog post decrying the exploitation of poor Bangladeshis by rich Bangladeshis? How many articles of clothing do you own that have a label that says "Made in Bangladesh"? Can you even begin to imagine the stories of the lives of the people who made the clothes you wear on your back? The problem is that focusing too intensely on Dubai as a guilty culprit we tend to lose sight of the global problem that is the exploitation of the poor and the needy by the rich and the powerful everywhere on Earth. It is easy to ignore what happens every day in Tijuana, or Cairo, or rural California if we are so intensely focused on Dubai, which represents a tiny fraction of the global poor.”

“Other than the "its the way the world works" comment, I suppose I agree with the bigger point TheBMChief is making, which is essentially that "Why is Dubai being turned into the poster child for a criminal act - the exploitation of man by man - that is universal in time and place". The abuses of the working class in Dubai can be matched and dwarfed by similar abuses in China. You can find the same incidence of abuse and exploitation in hidden, dark corners of the American labor market. You can find the same incidence of abuse and exploitation in the working class cities in the countries these workers come from - it is a no-win situation for them: move to Dubai (or Kuwait or Doha or Riyadh or Abu Dhabi) and work as a poor laborer or move to the nearest megalopolis in your own country and work as a poor laborer in the same deplorable conditions. It is the same trade off faced by the Mexican illegal alien in this country: move to the US and try to survive in the most precarious of conditions or live in a slum in the hills of Tijuana, or in the sprawling suburbs of Mexico City. Six in one hand, half dozen in the other. I celebrate drawing attention to the plight of the poor in this world, but I question singling out Dubai as the source of all wrong.”

“Are you sure about that? About 10 years ago I was working in San Diego and there was a big news story about some middle class suburban blond white kids who had wandered up into a canyon near Rancho Bernardo and discovered a camp of illegal immigrants living in tents and wooden boxes. It made the news because the boys beat the illegals to death. The illegals were living up there because they were hidden and invisible. That is what illegal aliens in this country do - make themselves invisible, and sometimes doing so means living in boxes up in deserted canyons. All of this not to mention the farming laborers who work our fields, live in farm-provided living quarters (20 workers to a trailer) and have to buy their food and clothing at the "company store" - this has been the backbone of our breadbasket - nothing less than slave labor.”

“To be clear, can you name a single Persian gulf metropolis that was built without foreign labor? Riyad? Doha? Abu Dhabi? Manama? Kuwait?”

“Is Riyyad or Kuwait or Bahrain or Qatar any different?”

“Succinctly articulated. Thanks.”

“You seem to be forgetting something - the bulk of wealth and the bulk of income earned in this country os held by and earned by business organizations (Corporations, LLCs, etc), not upper-middle class individuals. But a big part of politics in this day and age involves the business organizations' lobbyists trying to find ways of deflecting tax liabilities off of themselves onto a readily available, easy target - upper middle class individuals (individuals making between $150 and $400 k per year). The corporations can bring to bear enormous lobbying effort to make miniscule tweaks to the tax code that save these corporations billions of dollars in tax liabilities each year, while the lawyers, doctors, engineers and mid-level managers don't have any similar ability to deflect tax liability through lobbying tweaks to the tax code, and as a consequence they get shafted - this was Warren Buffett's point. If you have BIG money, you can avoid taxes, if you have just a modest wealth, you get shafted on both ends.”

“Comparing the cost of oil today to the cost in 2002 doesn't explain a thing.”

“"Kill all the lawyers" is not a bumpersticker slogan, its part of a line spoken in Act IV, Scene II of William Shakespeare's Henry VI (Part 2). The speaker, Dick the Butcher, was one of the villians (one of Jack Cade's buddies), was proposing that the way to bring about a revolution is to surpress the rule of law and replace it with rule by force.

I suggest you go get yourself a treatise on tort law, read it, and ask yourself "where did all of these laws come from, who made them, who sought them, and why?" The bottom line is, tort law protects ALL of us. Enough with the petty harping on personal injury lawyers... you need to be reminded what society was like and would have continued to be like without the invention of 20th century tort law.”

“Every time I hear a Republican on TV (or someone parroting a Republican talking point) saying "X will cost money" what they are really saying is "X will take away from us money we otherwise would be making" but at the end of the day, isn't that what ALL laws and regulations do? I mean, HOW MUCH MORE money could be made if we deregulated even more... The elimination of consumer protection and products liability laws would quickly translate into greater revenues for companies, but doesn't ALL regulation cut into the corporations' profits? So at the end of the day, why should the cost of a law be our criteria for passing it... after all, if we really cared about what it costs a corporation to comply with a law, we wouldn't have any laws in the first place. Compliance isn't free...”

“thanks for the link. I was way too young in 1968 to be reading Life magazine.”

“But I thought "victory" happened in 1975... after LBJ was dead...”

“You know, we could just go home...”

“This is kind of like saying "The American population is over 300 million. They are divided into thousands of states, counties, cities, towns, neighborhoods, and are further divided by religion, ethnicity, and customs. But they will unite to drive a foreign occupying military force out of their nation"...

In other words, I don't see why "tribe" as a organizational unit (as opposed to municipality) is significant. And the fact that we eat pork or are infidels is not the critical thing either. At the end of the day, they have a nationalist consciousness that makes them sensitive to the presence of a foreign occupying military on their nation's soil. We would react no different if we were invaded by a foreign army.”

“You can't have your cake and eat it too. If your article was just a negative refutation of Paul, it could have stood at that, but you make a lot of positive claims and assertions, many of which are only supported by your refutation of Paul... In other words, your positive claims about bank lending or the economy do not follow from the mere fact that Paul may be wrong.”

“My day was sunnier before I read this...”

“Remind me again the part of your argument where you explain why banks will ever "start lending" as you euphamistically put it.

A better way of framing the issue would be in terms of bank leverage. Banks have been delevering since the crisis. That is a net shrinking of the credit markets. I have yet to hear your reason or argument why you think banks will begin relevering.”

“A "bubble in reverse" mr. Pollyanna is technically called a "bust", or sometimes referred to euphamistically as a "correction" or "adjustment". You are falling into a pointless argument about where the market is in relation to "real value". David8 is simply taking the view that March prices are closer to real value... I still have no idea what the reasonable basis is for either your view or his, though.”

“I second angelatc's comment and question: boom? What are you talking about? You speak as if booms and busts are normal, natural, and desirable aspect of a functioning economy. There is abundant reasonable and empirical argument to be made for the contrary: booms and busts are a symptom of ailment, not health.”

“The fact that Paul has been is and may continue to be wrong does not mean that your confidence in the system is right. Paul does not have a monopoly on reasons for criticizing what is happening and in many regards Paul is a feeble-minded economist (actually he is a medical doctor, but don't tell him that).

In other words... showing that Paul is wrong doesn't make you right.”

“Your intuitions are on track but you have put the carriage before the horse. The Chinese are not out "shopping" for US soveriegn debt. What happens is as follows: China in order to accelerate domestic industrial growth years ago artificially pegged the value of their local currency to the US dollar in order to make chinese-ma­nufactured goods extremely cost-competitive in US consumer markets. Those goods found their way into the US consumer markets, leaving Chinese manufacturers with fists full of dollars. But what can the Chinese do with so much dollars? They cannot invest directly in the US, necessarily. The only thing they can do is buy US treasuries and hold those treasuries, making the chinese creditors of the US government. This is a cycle that has been repeating itself for decades. Normally, textbooks tell us that when a country like the US runs a balance of payments deficit with another country like China for the long term, the value of the US currency declines relative to Chinese currency until parity is restored. This doesn't happen because of the artificial manipulation of the value of the Chinese currency. And China wouldn't dare let that happen at this point because (a) it would cause Chinese manufacturing to become globally uncompetitive and (b) it would mean all that sovereign US debt the Chinese are holding on to would be worthless.­..”

“This is a textbook response made up of textbook logic (you know, the "all else being equal" problems you worked on in undergrad econ courses?).­.. come back to reality: there are a myriad of ways in which demand for a roof over one's head can be met in ways that do not cause real property values to increase at rates that outpace inflation year after year. And that is the fundamental meaning of "normalcy" that you are ignoring: real property cannot behave in the long run as an asset class whose value outpaces general inflation because of what real property is and the function it serves which makes it different from industrial stocks, as an example. This is precisely the situation real estate bubble markets are facing and will continue to face.

Sorry but your "eventually" may never get here.”