Why would anyone put up with this? Ask any American and you’ll get the same answer: because America is the freest country on earth. If you believe this, I’ve got some more bad news for you: America is actually among the least free countries on earth. Your piss is tested, your emails and phone calls are monitored, your medical records are gathered, and you are never more than one stray comment away from writhing on the ground with two Taser prongs in your ass.
And that’s just physical freedom. Mentally, you are truly imprisoned. You don’t even know the degree to which you are tormented by fears of medical bankruptcy, job loss, homelessness and violent crime because you’ve never lived in a country where there is no need to worry about such things.
Consider this: you are the only people in the developed world without a single-payer health system.Oh really. Interestingly, the Swiss system was widely regarded as a possible model for US reform efforts, and I've always suspected that the eventual endgame in the US probably looks something like it.
the average American is poorer than the poorest ghetto dweller in Manila, because at least they have no debts.Given the probable reluctance of many middle-class Americans to swap places with Manilan ghetto-dwellers relative to the opposite, I'm not sure this signifies what the author thinks it does. The ability to get credit on favorable terms is clearly a form of wealth, or at least power. Americans — until recently — have had it, those in the slums in Manila probably don't. The fact that a lot of Americans have made what were in retrospect poor choices doesn't necessarily mean that access to cheap credit isn't an attractive thing.
Fully 70% of your tax dollars go to the PentagonUm, "citation needed"? In FY07 it was around 20%. Even if you drop Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, etc., and look only at the general income tax (which I think is dishonest; try not paying FICA/OASDI and tell me it's not a tax), the highest you can get to is around 54%. His general point may still hold with 20% or 54%, but the point is that he's intentionally misrepresenting.
Everyone in Western Europe...has a single-payer system.Germany doesn't. But who cares about them? They're only the most populous country in the EU.
Visa has told banks they must stop using the payment system of Chinese state-backed China UnionPay to process international transactions for co-branded Visa and UnionPay credit cards.Visa blocked in China after Unionpay dispute
The move comes as credit card companies are becoming increasingly frustrated in China, where transactions must be conducted through the monopoly UnionPay, which is aggressively expanding beyond China’s borders...
Visa’s move to block UnionPay outside China comes after US trade officials held talks in late March with Visa, American Express and MasterCard over the possibility of taking action against China for shutting them out of its growing payment processing market.
China does not allow foreign groups to issue their own credit cards, build networks to support such cards or process interbank point-of-sale transactions. Companies such as Visa are required to “co-brand” with Chinese partners to provide any of these services.
China’s banks generally charge fewer and lower fees than international competitors, and UnionPay has been offering cardholders better exchange rates on certain currencies than Visa and its peers normally charge...
While US card groups complain they are blocked from doing business in China, UnionPay-branded cards can be used in more than 90 countries and regions and the company is strongly promoting its cards abroad.
China issued around 50m credit cards in 2008, according to McKinsey . It forecasts that by 2013 the number of credit cards in China will surpass 300m.
Visa has been blocked from starting any new business in China for almost one year, after a disagreement with China Unionpay, the country’s state-backed bank card monopoly, according to people familiar with the matter.U.S. Firm Strikes China Card Deal
The problems facing Visa and other global payment companies prompted the United States Trade Representative to file a case with the World Trade Organization against China...
In its WTO case, which comes amid rising Sino-US trade tensions, the US government alleges China is breaking commitments it made to trade partners to open its bank card market to international competition by 2006.
The year-long virtual ban on new business in China for Visa, the world’s largest payments company, appears to be a major factor in the decision to file a case with the WTO now.
But MasterCard, Visa’s arch-rival, seems to have adopted a less confrontational strategy in China... MasterCard said it had signed a memorandum of understanding with Unionpay aimed at “mutually beneficial business development”.
Global Payments' Asia-based joint venture with Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corp., a unit of HSBC Holdings PLC, will be allowed to process cards backed by China UnionPay Co.—a government-owned company that has a monopoly over bank cards issued in Chinese yuan. The deal initially involves only transactions in Beijing, but Atlanta-based Global Payments hopes to be able to expand it to Shanghai, and eventually other locations, company executives said in an interview.China to Tighten Control on Inflows of Overseas Funds - "China will force banks to hold more foreign exchange and strengthen auditing of overseas fund raising, stepping up efforts to curb hot-money inflows that may inflate asset bubbles and add pressure for a stronger yuan... The government will also regulate Chinese special-purpose vehicles overseas and tighten controls on equity investments by foreign companies in China."
China UnionPay will keep its card-issuance monopoly under the deal, but the agreement opens a crack in the business of processing credit-card transactions on the back end... The lack of access to China's bank-card market has frustrated major Western card-payment companies. Until now, foreign firms have been able to tap China's consumers only when they use their Chinese bank cards overseas. That's an increasingly lucrative market as more Chinese travel abroad for business and tourism.
But with Beijing stressing the need to restructure the economy to focus more on domestic consumption, the real growth in Chinese bank cards and consumer credit will be inside China. A China-based executive for MasterCard Inc. forecast last week that China would have 1.1 billion credit cards by 2025, with spending amounting to $2.5 trillion. At the end of last year, there were 186 million China-issued credit cards, according to central-bank data.
Global Payments will be able to process payments in Beijing using both international and domestically issued cards. In a twist, that will also bring it into direct competition with China UnionPay... Global Payments Chairman and Chief Executive Paul Garcia said the company has played a role in helping China UnionPay expand overseas, which in turn helped his firm now achieve entry into China's domestic market. Originally it was necessary for the Chinese company to team up with foreign firms such as Visa Inc. and MasterCard to enable its customers to use their cards outside of China. Global Payments now provides a service in countries including Canada, Malaysia and the Philippines so that stores can accept China UnionPay cards without them being co-branded.
Dagong Global on Tuesday downgraded the local and foreign currency long-term sovereign credit rating of the U.S. by one level to A+ from previous AA with “negative” outlook.Is America Catching the 'British Disease?' - "The country failed to develop a coherent policy response to the financial crisis of the 1930's. Its political parties, rather than working together to address pressing economic problems, remained at each other's throats. The country turned inward. Its politics grew fractious, its policies erratic, and its finances increasingly unstable." [1,2,3,4,5]
The Chinese rating agency said the downgrade reflected the U.S.’s deteriorating debt repayment capability and drastic decline of the U.S. government’s intention of debt repayment.
“The serious defects in the U.S. economy will lead to long-term recession and fundamentally lower the national solvency,” Dagong said in a report.
The Chinese rating agency said the Federal Reserve’s new round of quantitative easing would further depreciate the U.S. dollar and was entirely counter to the interest of the creditors.
First, MY piss is not tested.Maybe you don't get drug-tested, that's nice. But you have no idea what's become common in this country. In the past 5 years I've had 4 different short-term computer programming jobs in NC. Two of those required the candidate to submit to a urine drug test to gain employment. It's very very common, and not negotiable.
My calls and emails may be monitored, but as I'm not associated with any terrorist movements, it doesn't affect me in the least.Unbelievable that anyone can seriously make statements like this. That any amount of surveillance is just fine, thanks. Ridiculous.
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posted by Thistledown at 6:37 AM on November 13, 2010 [2 favorites]