[citation needed]

I would start with the excellent site by Yves Smith, Naked Capitalism. The writers there are not wild-eyed ideologues, but people who have spent careers in the financial industry, working at pretty high levels. They've been all over this story since the Wikileaks documents broke. Remember, it was Wikileaks that published the secret TPP documents as well, which put the efforts to push that treaty through the tunnel on its heels, at least temporarily. Sunshine can be a great disinfectant.

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com...

And in case you need a citation regarding sunlight being a disinfectant, I would give you none other than the great Louis Brandeis:
http://sunlightfoundation.com/...

I would say 30 years, but it is arguable. Though I would say the era from just before Theodore Roosevelt through JFK was a period of trustbusting and Glass-Steagall, which together led to a period of real prosperity and greater, more equal, freedom for working people and along with that, minorities and women.

But there's no question that starting in 1980 with the executive orders gutting financial regulation, the fascism has been in full bloom.

The part that's dangerous to us is that it is another brick in the wall of corporate sovereignty.

The TISA is classified so investment groups wouldn't take advantage of it before it went into effect, thus screwing you and I over.

For five years after it becomes law?

Also, it's been in negotiation for 2 fucking decade, so not really 'Obama'.

Exactly right. This treaty, which creates corporate sovereignty, is being negotiated in secret...from us. Do you really believe for a moment that it's also secret from the companies that will benefit, like Goldman Sachs?

Every president for the past 30 years has been playing for the same team. And the team does not include us.

If corporations must do what is "legal" and people must do what is "moral", then how can anyone make the argument that corporations are people, my friend?

But, we are constantly being told that our nation is founded on "Judeo-Christian principles", which they say are the foundation for "man's law".

So how can corporations be people if they do not adhere to "man's law"?

Correct

Were you responding to me? If so, note I never claimed the goal was to "erase stories from the net." I simply said that it "won't work," and by that I mean it won't do very well at achieving its goal, which -- as you correctly note -- is to make stuff harder to locate.

See, here's the problem. If TFA works, we basically have a database to find everything people have registered to be "forgotten." As I said, if this site continues to exist, then the EU ruling is ineffective: it only managed to get rid of some search engine links, while also facilitating a system where people who want to do even casual actual background checks know the second place to go. In effect, it makes it easier to find, if someone puts forth just a step beyond the minimal effort.

For people who actually care about finding the details of someone's reputation, the ruling may thus make it easier to find information someone really wants hidden... which seems to be the opposite of the EU goal.

THIS. All of the stories on this decision seem to be focusing on people who are clearly bad or did terrible things in the past.

But our modern news and social media society on the internet archives all sorts of crap that isn't actually true, and never was true. But the salacious headline will always draw attention; the minor blurb on the back page will never be remembered when the charges are dropped or the person is acquitted or everyone just admits that it was a mistake.

(Just to be clear: I don't think the EU decision will actually work, and TFA is proof of it. But we do have a real problem -- even if 95% of the claims made so far have been by people who committed horrible bad past acts, the real injustice is to the 5% who just got caught up in media attention for something that turned out not to be true, or even nowhere near as horrible as people claimed.)

Nope -- that's NOT why most people carry a balance on a credit card. They "don't have enough money to get what [they] WANT."

Yes, there are lots of poor people out there in dire straits, but most of them can't even qualify for credit cards, because they don't have reliable income or whatever credit history they have is bad. The people who charge extra on credit cards are typically people who have enough money for what they NEED, but they WANT more stuff faster than they can make money to get it. If they really NEEDED something, there are often ways to take out loans that would give a better interest rate than a credit card, or they could get government assistance or something if it's a basic human need.

The other group of people who carry a balance are the people who usually did pay off their balance in the past, but they've lost a job or had some other unforeseen expense. Most of these people could also have been saving more for a "rainy day," but I have a little more sympathy for them. And there are some for whom the "rainy day" has lasted so long that it depleted a reasonable savings... they should perhaps not be faulted either.

But most people just use credit cards for crap they don't need that they can't afford, but they want it NOW. And I personally think that's a stupid financial decision, because at credit card interest rates, it will cost you more in the long-term than just waiting a little while to save up or just buy something more affordable that will work in the meantime, like responsible adults do.

Well, I was a little off, but closer than you -- the average lifespan of the dollar bill is about 18 months. I do remember reading something a while back that estimated it to be a little less than a year, but this fact is from the people who make the bills (and thus have to replace them), so I'm tempted to believe them over an AC. I've seen other estimates, but none more than 2 years.

As for your other points, at no point did my post even argue in favor of eliminating dollar bills; I simply pointed out a savings by the government. I was just correcting a previous post that made it sound like the cost of dollar bills didn't have anything to do with him. You think coins are inconvenient? Fine. I never said they weren't. Try a course in reading comprehension before attacking people randomly (and making up your own "bogus facts").

And precisely what is the "intrinsic value" of gold and silver? Copper mostly sells for its market value as a raw material. Gold and silver have huge premiums on their price compared to their actual utility, just like fiat currencies.

All that would need to happen is for you to end up in a situation where "shiny rocks" are not particularly useful, and gold and silver would be worthless too. Just like fiat money, gold and silver "only work because people want them to and trust them to," but that could ALSO break. The only reason to trust them any more is because they have a longer history of made-up fake value ascribed to them.

In real "survival" circumstances, the people who will be able to buy stuff will be those with food, clothing, tools, weapons, etc. Those things have something closer to "intrinsic value," since humans will almost always need them. Gold and silver are just more traditional "fiat" money, and their value is held up by the market, just as any other currency.

You talk as if there was some difference between the corporations and the US government.

http://www.defenseone.com/tech...

It's interesting that right at this moment, the Obama Adminstration is pushing an international treaty that will make it so that corporations do not have to comply with a country's laws. It's called "TISA" and it's so bad that it was supposed to be secret for five years after it's ratified and put into action. We only know about it because Wikileaks released a leaked portion of it.

Secret laws being adjudicated in secret courts. All at the behest of corporations who then want (like Microsoft) to not have to comply. It's a pretty ugly type of fascism.

The best the US administration can hope for here is to shatter the US software industry into a thousand small associated companies with strict data sharing agreements to handle overseas data.

That might not be so bad. The notion that the internet is some wild frontier where no laws apply, because technology is a pretty weak one.