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Bernie Sanders rolls out ‘Stop WALMART Act’ that would block stock buybacks until retailer raises pa

Anarchon said:
So, he's making the move from socialism to communism.
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oh bull****. He's a democratic socialist. Meaning he will do what he is elected to do. If you are looking for authoritarianism, look to the right where it lives in the United States.
 
Keridan said:
Sanders is a little scary because he has learned to play the game. He definitely borders socialism. Realize, though, that his game is not as simple as he lets it seem. Item by item, he seems downright crazy sometimes. But he uses these extreme-ish points of view to scare people and companies into settling on his side of the line.
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Pretty funny that a guy who has never had a real job outside of government seems to know all about economics.
I don't buy it. I do think he is borderline nuts.
 
Keridan said:
Hey now! That one isn't fair. Libertarians want as little government as it takes to live the best life possible. We are not anarchists. Smith Libertarians like myself fully believe there is value in social programs and minimal market regulations. Extreme conservatives and anarchists using libertarian to hide their desires are the ones clamoring for a complete repeal of welfare programs.
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I agree with this.
 
poweRob said:
Jesus... you are the libertarian I've been looking for. I used to have great debates with libertarians especially in the field of economics and they taught me a lot. But those running around calling themselves libertarians as of late are absolutists. All or none. It's hard to find any libertarian with a modicum of flexibility in their rigid ideology of "all gubamint bad". Those folks need to be labelled as the anarchists that they are.
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Trust me, I know what you mean. I honestly used to believe my party was outside the usual extremism. We got co-opted, though. Maybe we got too big? We actually appear on some ballots now! It's pretty disgusting to me, to be honest. I think it happens because there is an almost completely insurmountable 2 party limitation in our system. A lot of us give up.

I also think, though, that if we are ever to be taken seriously, we have to hold out. Government is not evil. It's just too big. It's there to bring balance. It should protect rights across borders, prevent monopolies, provide for those who honestly cannot do it themselves, etc. All the extra stuff does little but cost us money and make things worse.

As a minority, our only real hope is to show we are rational and want the best for everyone.
 
poweRob said:
oh bull****. He's a democratic socialist. Meaning he will do what he is elected to do. If you are looking for authoritarianism, look to the right where it lives in the United States.
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Socialism deals with means of production. Wal-Mart doesn't produce. He's pretending he owns the sellers too.
 
trixare4kids said:
Pretty funny that a guy who has never had a real job outside of government seems to know all about economics.
I don't buy it. I do think he is borderline nuts.
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Seriously, read our two posts again. That's why I think he's scary! He know how to make you disregard him and sneak up on you at the same time. The bills he proposes and the speeches he makes have me cringing on a regular basis. But somehow he still achieves a rather high percentage of his goals.
 
Keridan said:
Trust me, I know what you mean. I honestly used to believe my party was outside the usual extremism. We got co-opted, though. Maybe we got too big? We actually appear on some ballots now! It's pretty disgusting to me, to be honest. I think it happens because there is an almost completely insurmountable 2 party limitation in our system. A lot of us give up.

I also think, though, that if we are ever to be taken seriously, we have to hold out. Government is not evil. It's just too big. It's there to bring balance. It should protect rights across borders, prevent monopolies, provide for those who honestly cannot do it themselves, etc. All the extra stuff does little but cost us money and make things worse.

As a minority, our only real hope is to show we are rational and want the best for everyone.
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I followed what the liberatarians were up to for years. The Free State movement of New Hampshire and all. If they want to break the two party system they need to push for IRV voting then embed where it's active. Right now the only place it is active on the federal level is Maine. Where a dem just won yesterday due to IRV voting in a come-from-behind move. If you are not familiar with it... get familiar with it. It destroys the "spoiler" roll in elections and give third parties a chance in our weird system. I used to work in the green party. They got too weird for me and showed that they really didn't want to grow but instead wanted to be a cool little club to get together and bitch. Got tired of that. Worked on the Ralph Nader campaign years ago and learned a lot from that process.

Libertarians need to go to get out of New Hampshire and take over Maine. The population is low, and IRV is in place. They are very independent i.e. their senator Angus King is an indy, proving even BEFORE IRV voting there that third parties can win. IRV just makes it easier.
 
poweRob said:
I followed what the liberatarians were up to for years. The Free State movement of New Hampshire and all. If they want to break the two party system they need to push for IRV voting then embed where it's active. Right now the only place it is active on the federal level is Maine. Where a dem just won yesterday due to IRV voting in a come-from-behind move. If you are not familiar with it... get familiar with it. It destroys the "spoiler" roll in elections and give third parties a chance in our weird system. I used to work in the green party. They got too weird for me and showed that they really didn't want to grow but instead wanted to be a cool little club to get together and bitch. Got tired of that. Worked on the Ralph Nader campaign years ago and learned a lot from that process.

Libertarians need to go to get out of New Hampshire and take over Maine. The population is low, and IRV is in place. They are very independent i.e. their senator Angus King is an indy, proving even BEFORE IRV voting there that third parties can win. IRV just makes it easier.
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To answer your earlier comment in kind, you are the progressive I always look to find!

Our system, top to bottom and federal down to state encourages 2 parties. In 1776, coming off a monarchy, it made sense. Now it leaves us with severely limited choices. The electoral college is possibly the most extreme example available in our time. The most extreme of either party wins the primary and they go head to head in the general. It's idiotic regardless of the rest.

IRV suits me fine. So does any truly open process. Right now, no third party can ever evolve to matter in the US. And since we are so used to it, no one believes it can.

I just hold to my guns, speak out when I can, and throw financial/time support behind 3rd party candidates. Ironically, I live in one of the few states that allows for 3rd parties to show up but is so polarized we can't get a foothold. (NC)
 
Xelor said:
I'm not nuts about broad based minimum wage (price floor) legislation, I most certainly cannot forbear price floor legislation that targets specific firms.


price-floor-deadweight.jpg

poweRob said:
It doesn't target specific firms. It is a threshold. If you are a company on wall street employing over 500 employees you can't do stock buy backs unless you pay your employees a $15 minimum wage. The stock buybacks are simply back door bonuses for executives that isn't in their paycheck.
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I don't know why a measure called the "Stop Walmart Act" that is similar to an earlier one described as the "Stop Bezos Act" is somehow not targeted at a specific firm, but if you want to say it's not..fine, for my objection to it isn't based solely on what it be called or whether it targets a specific firm, thematically or pragmatically, but rather on the fact of, as shown in the chart I provided earlier/above, its underlying economic impact -- diminution of economic efficiency -- when there's, AFAIC, no superordinate reason to do so.

A bill going by the moniker "Stop Walmart Act" but that really isn't targeted at a specific firm, Walmart, yet it proposes to restrict free exchange of goods that intrinsically carry no direct personal or societal physical health and safety risks[SUP]1[/SUP] is nonetheless a measure I cannot support.

Furthermore, just as I do not cotton to price floors, I also don't cotton to price ceilings, which is another aspect of the measure Sanders and Khanna have proposed.

price-ceiling.jpg


​

From the thread's rubric article:
"The time is long overdue for the Walton family to pay its workers a living wage."
-- Bernie Sanders​

  • [*=1]I assert that individuals whose skills and abilities do not, in the labor market, command prices those individuals seek to obtain need to avail themselves of extant opportunities that boost their salable skills so that they (the individuals) have skills/abilities to offer that do command higher prices.

"Sanders and Khanna have argued that Walmart should be spending money on pay hikes, rather than on buybacks that 'enrich its executives and shareholders.'"​

  • [*=1]WTF is the purpose of a firm if not to "enrich its owners?" Nothing, of course. If one wants to engage in operations that are altruistic rather than profit generating, the organization type to found is a non-profit of some stripe -- association, foundation, trust, etc. -- not a business, a firm.[SUP]2[/SUP]


Notes:
  1. Examples of such goods can found in the following US Code sections:
  2. I haven't checked but I wonder what the average and median so-called worker wages are at nonprofits that pay high executive salaries.
 
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Renae said:
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/b...buybacks-until-retailer-raises-pay-2018-11-15

**** Bernie and his bots.
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1. The best measure of the success of the economy is the prosperity of its population, and our goal should be to have an economy that maximizes the success of its workers.
2. The free market is really good at bringing prosperity to workers and government-controlled economies are failures, so a free-market approach is needed.
3. The free market isn't perfect at bringing prosperity to its population and needs common-sense regulation, and every economy has regulations like this.
4. One problem with the free market is that thanks to automation, outsourcing, and the decline of unions, employers don't have to give new growth to their workers and can pay them far less than their worth. This has resulted in most economic growth since 1975 going to the top 1%.
5. The solution to this problem is shifting more taxes away from workers onto the rich, and using those taxes to pay for universal healthcare, retirement investment accounts, and filling the skills gap by education aid. We should aim to a lower level of inequality we had in the 1950s and 1960s.
6. This won't hurt the economy because business people won't just stop getting richer if they are getting richer slower. Also, that money in the hands of workers will boost business sales and revenues.
 
poweRob said:
Your right. And we are going to change that. Of course there's always slavery and indentured servitude and the criminal element to subsidize living if you'd rather opt for that.
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If a living wage is implemented only young people with no dependents will be hired.

Why would a company pay for the private decisions of its employees without having a say in those decisions.

Do you really want the employee to have to get permission from the company to have another child?
 
Abbazorkzog said:
This place is devolving into an echo-chamber special snowflake hugbox for the Alt-Reich.
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Alright, so long as you're free to hug it out with the rapeocrats. Then we should be allowed to reminisce over what could've been such a horrible outcome, that we were thankfully spared.
 
He kinda has a point..if a company has enough funds to buy back it's own stock and at the same time pays it's employees so little that a lot have to get food stamps or similar help from the state... then frankly it should be a crime.

Sendt fra min SM-N9005 med Tapatalk
 
poweRob said:
Walmart doesn't have door greeters any more. Nice try though.
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Must have been a wannabe that greeted me last week. That yellow vest is certainly dapper enough to want to wear it. ;)
 
distraff said:
1. The best measure of the success of the economy is the prosperity of its population, and our goal should be to have an economy that maximizes the success of its workers.
2. The free market is really good at bringing prosperity to workers and government-controlled economies are failures, so a free-market approach is needed.
3. The free market isn't perfect at bringing prosperity to its population and needs common-sense regulation, and every economy has regulations like this.
4. One problem with the free market is that thanks to automation, outsourcing, and the decline of unions, employers don't have to give new growth to their workers and can pay them far less than their worth. This has resulted in most economic growth since 1975 going to the top 1%.
5. The solution to this problem is shifting more taxes away from workers onto the rich, and using those taxes to pay for universal healthcare, retirement investment accounts, and filling the skills gap by education aid. We should aim to a lower level of inequality we had in the 1950s and 1960s.
6. This won't hurt the economy because business people won't just stop getting richer if they are getting richer slower. Also, that money in the hands of workers will boost business sales and revenues.
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You almost made sense, then you went off into crazytown.
 
Oborosen said:
I'm wondering if they've figured out where this miraculous 15$ minimum wages was actually going to come from?
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Like Universal Healthcare, "Just pay for it, duh".
 
Oborosen said:
Alright, so long as you're free to hug it out with the rapeocrats. Then we should be allowed to reminisce over what could've been such a horrible outcome, that we were thankfully spared.
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How many open unabashed Communists have been elected to high office (and no, conspiracy theories about Obama "secretly" being a Communist don't count -squints at avatar-)?

Now, how many open, vocal, unsecretive Ultranationalists have been elected to high office?

Take a moment to allow this to sink in...
 
Keridan said:
To answer your earlier comment in kind, you are the progressive I always look to find!

Our system, top to bottom and federal down to state encourages 2 parties. In 1776, coming off a monarchy, it made sense. Now it leaves us with severely limited choices. The electoral college is possibly the most extreme example available in our time. The most extreme of either party wins the primary and they go head to head in the general. It's idiotic regardless of the rest.

IRV suits me fine. So does any truly open process. Right now, no third party can ever evolve to matter in the US. And since we are so used to it, no one believes it can.

I just hold to my guns, speak out when I can, and throw financial/time support behind 3rd party candidates. Ironically, I live in one of the few states that allows for 3rd parties to show up but is so polarized we can't get a foothold. (NC)
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the Dems did some really dirty crap to Nader in the election I worked. Busted my but collecting signatures to get him on the ballot in AZ. Got well over the needed amount then the dems contested signature sheets. Each sheet held I think 20 signatures. If they questioned just one of those signatures the whole sheet was discarded. They just kept doing that until Nader no longer had enough signatures then walked. It was blatantly apparent that the Dems and the Repubs had a wink and a nod agreement, "this fight will always be between us!" thing going on.
 
PeteEU said:
He kinda has a point..if a company has enough funds to buy back it's own stock and at the same time pays it's employees so little that a lot have to get food stamps or similar help from the state... then frankly it should be a crime.

Sendt fra min SM-N9005 med Tapatalk
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Money isn't illegal, nor can you be compelled to spend it in a specific way.
 
This feels like a grab for attention, except I don't think Bernie wants any more special attention. He's done running for higher office.
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He may not NEED special attention to position himself for a presidential run, but he still likely WANTS all the special attention he can get. He may still want to run again, and given Democrats tendency to run primary losers in subsequent elections, I would expect him to. At the least, he would like to maintain visibility in order to influence policy and promote other candidates.
 
vanceen said:
Why so?
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They are just pump and dumps to boost executive $'s. And the boost in stock value because of it does not represent actual value of the company.
 
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