JAPAN NEWS AND DISCUSSION
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- Assistant Language Teacher (ALT) in Kanto region
- RCS (RCSコーポレーション), Kanto
- Salary: ¥180,000 ~ ¥250,000 / Month includes performance bonus
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- Assistant Language Teacher - TOKYO - late-March start
- Interac, Tokyo
- Salary: ¥230,000 ~ ¥255,000 / Month
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- Assistant Language Teacher - Kanagawa Prefecture - late-March start
- Interac, Kanagawa
- Salary: ¥230,000 ~ ¥255,000 / Month
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SezWho2
High praise. No alternatives.
Posted in: GOP presidential field praises health law ruling
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SezWho2
Nessie, I agree that it's business common sense. That doesn't exclude greed.
I also agree that corporations are moving to countries with lower taxes and lower labor costs. (I've actually looked at that, you know.) However, lowering the taxes in the US will not lower the labor costs in the US. If anything it will produce an upward pressure on them.
I also agree that executive salaries make a negligible contribution as a line item in the corporate balance sheet. However they make a substantial contribution to the executives who make decisions to sustain quarterly profit projections.
Slicing $100B from the budget is negligible. Attempting to do this, like attempting to repeal the health care legislation, is a show pony that pulls no weight. The main problem is not corporate flight. It is that we have wide and growing income disparity and that we don't darn our socks. They're made too cheaply elsewhere.
Posted in: At Obama's midpoint, an altered State of the Union
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SezWho2
I think it is highly debatable what causes American corporations to leave America. You could say it is because taxes are too high. However, you could also say that it is because investors demand higher profits and executives demand higher performance bonuses in exchange for those profits--in other words, greed.
The US has a real problem in that it has lost its manufacturing base. Manufacturing, construction and agriculture are real. Almost everything else is derivative. The manufacturing base is not coming back. Manufacturers have no incentive to employ people. They have every incentive to terminate them, good times or bad.
Lower taxes, even if they were to lead to an uptick in employment, will much more likely lead to continued and increasing income disparity, gated communities and increasing crime. Wealth does not trickle down. The thing about wealth is that the wealthy do not leave money on the table.
Posted in: At Obama's midpoint, an altered State of the Union
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SezWho2
Cutting redundant services and personnel is good. However, that does not mitigate the need to raise taxes. Corporate profitability has increased, the Dow has flourished, and those who have enough money to be investors are relatively happy while real wages fall.
Business closes people out of jobs solely for the reason of increasing profitability for investors. Government's function is to make sure that there is a tenable balance in society. Lower taxes are not the road to a tenable society.
Americans should have vastly decreased expectations. Consumerism is eating our lunch. Henning Mankell's policeman Kurt Wallander speculated that the reason that Swedish society fell victim to social upheaval was that "people don't darn their socks anymore". I wouldn't compare America to Sweden in many other ways but, generally speaking, it's a good thing not to buy another pair of socks unless your really need them.
Posted in: At Obama's midpoint, an altered State of the Union
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SezWho2
I don't think Republicans have destroyed the country, but I do think they're on the wrong track. Lowering taxes has a psychological appeal to all while expanding government services is easily stained as being the characteristic of the spendthrift. The hue and cry about excessive taxation is clever, but it isn't the right solution.
Top tax rates were lowered from 90% to 70% under the Great Society President Johnson. Under Reagan they were lowered to 50% and then to 28%. During the Clinton years it rose to about 40% and in 2010 it was 35%. Of course, different times necessitate different measures but the point is that the nation has managed to prosper under various high levels of taxation.
Real wages, however, are lower today than they were in the early 70s. The number of Americans slipping under the somewhat arbitrary but nonetheless real poverty line is increasing. Social disparity is also increasing and while illegal immigration is a boon to employers it drives down wages and increases the social disparity. Ludicrous solutions such as denying education to children of illegals only serves to increase class distinctions.
That we can put people back to work if only we will decrease the "onerous" taxes is a fiction--albeit a fiction that resonates with the mythology of the American revolution. The problems of America are much more systemic than taxation. Taxes, particularly taxes on top earners and corporations should be raised, not lowered.
Posted in: At Obama's midpoint, an altered State of the Union
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SezWho2
The mission of the West should not be to end the rule of dictators. The mission should be to create societies that are so exemplary that people living under onerous dictatorships will end that rule themselves. When the West takes on a crusading posture it ceases to be that exemplar.
Blair may be sincere in his insistence that the West has done nothing to cause Iran to engage in the activities which he finds objectionable. However that claim is laughable and disregards the history of British imperialism and Anglo-American pressure. Idealism does not justify interference.
Posted in: Families reject Blair apology over Iraq dead
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SezWho2
If you want to consider it as such that's fine with me. However it was not an insurrection against the US or against the American form of government. It was a large scale armed action in response to the practices of private enterprise.
The practices were certainly inhumane and unnecessarily venal. And I'm sure that this was a turning point in changing the law. However, that is not what the Second Amendment contemplates. It does not empower citizens to cherry-pick laws they do not like and take armed action to change them.
I wouldn't say that denying the vote to women or blacks constituted a governmental tyranny either. Nor would I say that suffrage for these groups was obtained at the point of a gun. Guns may have been involved but that was not the consideration upon which suffrage was changed.
Posted in: The gun control debate: Do you support the right of citizens to own and bear firearms?
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SezWho2
I don't know much about this battle, however I doubt that it can be seen in isolation from all the other labor violence. Additionally, I don't think I would describe the US as tyrannical with respect to labor conditions although there is no question that it favored ownership. Positive social changes have also been achieved without recourse to guns--the expansion of suffrage being one of the most notable.
Posted in: The gun control debate: Do you support the right of citizens to own and bear firearms?
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SezWho2
While we're at it, let's not trust anyone over 30, either.
I suppose that if you were a radical with a design to overthrow the US government, having that government confiscate your arsenal would be a sign that you can't trust government. On the other hand, if you were a citizen who was worried about your government being overthrown by a radical group, you would look at the confiscation of that group's arms as a sign that you can trust it.
I think it's very possible to be vigilant without being paranoid.
Posted in: The gun control debate: Do you support the right of citizens to own and bear firearms?
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SezWho2
arrestpaul--I don't think there is any revisionism or confusion on my part. Would you care to state exactly what facts I am revising or how I am confusing the Revolutionary War with the Civil War?
The founders wrote many things into the Constitution and we have had to analyze the legitimacy, propriety and usefulness of these provisions over time. At the time of writing the Constitution, the founders gave the vote to white, male property owners--about 15% of the population at most. At a later date, we figured that was not a provision which should stand for all time.
The "rights" incorporated into the Constitution also need to be tested. None of the "rights" should be considered to be so immutable that they cannot be restated. Personally, I really doubt that the founders envisioned a society in which private citizens could walk around with machine pistols as a defense against the military force of tyrants and I doubt that would gladly accept the carnage from firearms which has become almost boringly commonplace in American society. Even if they did, sanity should dictate that this "right" should now be infringed.
Posted in: The gun control debate: Do you support the right of citizens to own and bear firearms?
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SezWho2
Not a true believer in democracy, I see. The people are the what stop a democracy from becoming a tyranny. If you don't trust the people to do that without arms, why would you trust that people with arms will not be the very force which turns a government into a tyranny?
As for the British disarming the militias, that was merely common sense. This was not the spark that ignited the revolution. The revolution was already brewing. What do you think the militias were collecting arms for? Of course the British tried to disarm them and the United States would do exactly the same thing to any private militia which it suspected of being formed for the purpose of overthrowing the government.
Posted in: The gun control debate: Do you support the right of citizens to own and bear firearms?
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SezWho2
SolidariTea--you still haven't answered the question about vigilantes. You seem to keep finding distractions.
I haven't delegitimized anything. It's interesting that you seem to worry whether my comments delegitimize the US. It would be more interesting if you had a counterargument.
I agree that whether blacks could vote in England in 1790 is beside the issue of gun control. It's also entirely beside my point. My point was that the constitution has been changed to reflect the fact that conditions in later days were not the same as conditions in the late 1700s.
"Arms" definitely are not what they used to be.
Posted in: The gun control debate: Do you support the right of citizens to own and bear firearms?
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SezWho2
Well, if we could start with a clean slate, we could ask those who support gun ownership in the U.S. to address how gun ownership would prevent tyranny. The U.S. has put down every armed rebellion against itself, including the rebellion of the South. Shouting "sic semper tyrannis" does not actually make someone a tyrant. That is name-calling pure and simple.
Furthermore, even if the founding fathers--who apparently "believed" that blacks had no right to vote and only counted for being 3/5 of a person for apportionment--also believed that personal weaponry would be effective in preventing the emergence of a tyranny, the effectiveness for that purpose now should be weighed against the mischief that personal weaponry causes.
As I said earlier I generally support the right to keep and bear arms. However, citizens of other countries keep and bear arms without having this right enshrined in their constitutions, without tyranny and without the widespread gun violence that exists in America. There are saner ways to keep and bear.
Posted in: The gun control debate: Do you support the right of citizens to own and bear firearms?
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SezWho2
SolidariTea, that state road workers in Arizona or Texas (you forget which) were fired upon by a high-powered assault rifle hardly answers the question of what you would call vigilantes in lieu of calling them vigilantes. Neither does the firing of said assault rifle constitute an act of war by Mexico against the US except in the thinking of an unbalanced mind.
Posted in: The gun control debate: Do you support the right of citizens to own and bear firearms?
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SezWho2
"Vigilantes" in Arizona may be a strong term, but it is one the ADL uses. You could prettify it, but I'm wondering what term you would use for volunteers who bring their weapons for the purposes of border patrol for which they are not paid by the state. I don't see how whether they are "organized" or not has much to do with it.
Posted in: The gun control debate: Do you support the right of citizens to own and bear firearms?
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SezWho2
Oh, my! I've studied the history of the formation of our government and I still say that it's difficult to say exactly why the Second Amendment is in the Constitution. I'll go you one better and say that it's easy to say that it's in the Constitution because the founders were trying to establish a central government where none previously existed. However, in my opinion that says nothing more than not having the Amendment would have been a deal-breaker. And that is trivial.
Scotland, Ireland and Wales were ethnically different from the folks in England and they were conquered entities. It is little wonder that they chafe still. The colonies were granted rights by the crown and given a fairly free hand in the governance of their affairs until they decided to bite the hand that chartered the considerable freedoms they enjoyed.
I have no doubt that the right to keep and bear arms was written into the Constitution partially because there was the threat that the British would return with a vengeance. However, arms had been a necessity for colonization--necessary for procuring game, necessary for defense against the native Americans that we cleared from the land, necessary for defending livestock against predators and so on.
Today, the arms in the private hands of private citizens would be somewhat ineffectual against a tyrannical US government with all its firepower. A greater defense would be the presumed patriotism of the existing military. Against a foreign invasion, arms might be useful if it ever came to that, but considering our borders and considering our military outlay, the scenario is rather far-fetched and, in any event, arms could be stashed in armories. I know the vigilantes in Arizona are armed against the great invasion from the South, but we don't need arms so much for protection against predators, for securing game or for beating down the native Americans.
The "right" has already been vastly infringed. It's time to infringe it in a way that makes sense for civilized societies. People walking around with iron on their hips and a sense of "don't tread on me" just isn't civilized.
Posted in: The gun control debate: Do you support the right of citizens to own and bear firearms?
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SezWho2
I think it's hard to say why the Second Amendment is in the US Constitution except that not including it would have been a deal-breaker. Except in American mythology, British rule was far from tyrannical and American "subjects" enjoyed freedoms which were largely unequaled in the rest of the world. Canada and Australia coped quite well without declaring an independence which was later denied to southern "states" in the US. Obviously, though, revolution would not have been possible without firearms.
I support the right of American citizens to keep and bear arms but I do not support the status quo in America, so I voted "no" to this question. I think there is a lot of nonsense around this issue. The US Constitution says that the right of citizens shall not be "infringed". Now what does that mean? It seems to me that licensing requirements are an infringement. It seems to me that denying a license to felons who have served their time is an infringement.
So, America does not have a problem with infringing upon the right to keep and bear arms. It has a problem with what constitutes infringement. I don't think that citizens should have cannons, shoulder-mounted heat-seeking missiles or flame-throwers. And as long as we can accept the premise that certain types of weapons can and should be denied to the general population, we certainly can and should regulate what types of firearms are permissible and who has the "right" to own and carry what.
Posted in: The gun control debate: Do you support the right of citizens to own and bear firearms?
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SezWho2
Couldn't agree more. However, what the Constitution says is what the Supreme Court says it says. The Court has "established" or "clarified" that the Founding Fathers intended for the individual US citizen to be able to carry enough fire power to do what the shooter has done here.
Personally, I doubt that. My point was that it is unavoidable that the Court "legislates from the bench". So, I'd like to put paid to that whole corrupt argument.
Posted in: Silence greets calls for changes in U.S. gun laws
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SezWho2
I don't think I need to rethink that. The point isn't about power. It's about reloading.
Posted in: Silence greets calls for changes in U.S. gun laws
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SezWho2
People who are upset by the notion that judges might do something called "legislating from the bench" might want to stop and think about what "arms" were in 1789.
I think people should be able to keep and bear all the muskets and flintlock pistols they want to. If reloading becomes burdensome, they could always hire caddies.
Posted in: Silence greets calls for changes in U.S. gun laws