I have a more cynical worldview. they always knew that free breakfast was (indeed, is) a good thing, but it was more important for them back then to fuck over this rebellious group than feed some poor ol' kids.
Those poor malnourished children? a 'cost of policy' or some other rationalized argument with which to ignore the harsh truth, that we often prefer to keep our own power safe, than feed some other's 'poor' children.
Capitalism comes into play by barely providing adequate service while suppressing wages so that a few can greatly profit at the expense of everyone else. In a society not attempting to implement the Ferengi society the school breakfast would employ people with decent wages and serve decent food.
Are you aware that other countries than the US exist that aren't Canada or in Europe? Let's pick the obvious one: North Korea. There's less brutality, oppression, and exploitation in NK than in the US?
If only we were able to look at relative things to find out if that's true.
I don't believe that was the intended message of the comment I replied to, but even if it was because strange ideas: China easily tops the US, and so does Russia.
Keep in mind that there's ~150 million people in China who subsist on less than ~$3/day or whatever. Even accounting for cheaper standard of living (4x ppp in China) it's cripplingly poor by even US poverty rates. It's the equivalent of living on like $4k USD.
Idk if you've been to rural China at all, but shit is way different there still.
When we define the US federal poverty line it's at minimum like $12k for an individual, even in the cheapest areas. That's 3x higher than the poverty line for data you see coming out of China.
You mean after they've let a few millions starve here and there?
Holy fuck, the insanity.
This makes no sense.
> I don't believe that was the intended message of the comment I replied to, but even if it was because strange ideas: China easily tops the US, and so does Russia.
As for Russia, just in terms of military (if that’s what you are referring to): One illegal invasion right now. An incursion into Georgia. The wars in Chechnya. America on the other hand has Iraq and Afghanistan as the most recent wars, and in general it seems that it is easier to count the number of years that the US has not been at war than to count the years where they have. So I think the world’s largest military which is also used in an offensive capacity wins here.
As for China I will probably have to concede the win in case you are referring to the Uyghurs, because the number of Uyghurs in concentration camps worse than Auschwitz must surely number in the hundreds of millions now, if the rhetoric of the anti-China crowd is any indication.
If you don't take population into the comparison of absolute numbers, you're not learning anything. The same applies to monetary losses. If you don't take the total amount of dollars invested into account, "dollar amount lost" is useless. Two people could lose $1000 each, one has a billion dollar, the other one has 1001. Are they equally affected?
> As for China I will probably have to concede the win in case you are referring to the Uyghurs, because the number of Uyghurs in concentration camps worse than Auschwitz must surely number in the hundreds of millions now, if the rhetoric of the anti-China crowd is any indication.
You don't need to. China's prison population is equal to that of the US, excluding the Uigurs. Include those and it doubles it. And from what is known, China is a lot harder on their prisoners than the US.
I've never understood tankies that go to insane lengths to justify and defend ex-communist countries, while they'll equally claim that "it wasn't real communism". Why defend it then?
So less prisoners per capita.
> I've never understood tankies that go to insane lengths to justify and defend ex-communist countries, while they'll equally claim that "it wasn't real communism". Why defend it then?
Am I supposed to answer this?
Aha, suddenly you want to go all "per capita" instead of "total amount"? Yeah, I think we've reached the end here. If I bring up North Korea again, you'll say "yeah, but it's less in total amount" and we'll just spin in circles.
Again, I don't get it. I'd love to understand what can be done to get people to not hold on to some ideology for dear life, but I guess you can't ask a fish why he has gills.
My mistake. I forgot the thread for a moment.
> Again, I don't get it. I'd love to understand what can be done to get people to not hold on to some ideology for dear life, but I guess you can't ask a fish why he has gills.
You don’t know what my ideology is.
[1]
> The 38th parallel, meant as a line of convenience for two armies' temporary operations, immediately took on characteristics of a political boundary, infuriating the divided people. Just two weeks after his troops landed in Korea on September 8, the US commander, Lt. Gen. John R. Hodge, sent a message to General MacArthur in Tokyo: "Dissatisfaction with the division of the country grows." [...]
> Even before reaching Korea, he had instructed his officers to view the Koreans as an enemy. When his 78,000 troops began landing, he ordered Japanese police to keep local welcoming crowds away. The police shot and killed two Koreans in the process. [..]
> In the fall of 1946, the US military authorized elections to an interim legislature for southern Korea, but the results were clearly fraudulent. Even General Hodge privately wrote that right-wing "strong-arm" methods had been used to control the vote. The winners were almost all rightists, including [Syngman] Rhee supporters, even though a survey by the American military government that summer had found that 70 percent of 8,453 southern Koreans polled said they supported socialism, 7 percent communism, and only 14 percent capitalism. [...]
> Chung Koo-Hun, the observant young student of the late 1940s, said of the villagers' attitude: "The Americans simply re-employed the pro-Japanese Koreans whom the people hated." [...]
> Seventy of the 115 top Korean officials in the Seoul administration in 1947 had held office during the Japanese occupation.
Of course the Soviets were offering support in the north, but:
[2]
> [They] never established a full-fledged military government, moving quickly to local control.
The US even horrifically fumbled what minor concessions it was willing to offer to leftist sentiment:
[3]
> The US military government had pleased the farmers by decreeing a limit on the "rice rent" of 30 percent of the crop. That was on paper. In reality, enforcement was lax, landlords still gouged tenant farmers and the military government did actual harm with a related ordinance lifting price controls and imposing a "free market" on rice. That set off a binge of speculation, corruption and smuggling of Korean rice abroad, which left subsistence rice farmers and other poor southerners with little to eat. They exploded with resentment.
> In the southern city of Taegu, people verged on starvation. When 10,000 demonstrators rallied on October 1, 1946, police opened fire, killing many. Vengeful crowds then seized and killed policeman, and the US military declared martial law. The violence spread across the provinces, peasants murdering government officials, landlords, and especially police, detested as holdovers from Japanese days. American troops joined the police in suppressing the uprisings. Together they killed uncounted hundreds of Koreans.
And this is all before the war. In which the US killed millions of people in the north with mass bombing, attacks with biological weapons, and annihilation of the north's industrial capacity. US troops even indiscriminately slaughtered thousands of refugees fleeing to the south, the same people they were supposedly protecting!
It's the same old colonial playbook, rehashed again and again. It's not like the US learned anything from this experience either.
[1][2][3] - The Bridge at No Gun Ri, pp. 47-53
In a world containing North Korea, Iran, China, and Egypt, I can't imagine how incredibly out if touch and radicalized a person needs to be to truly believe something this absurd.
Chomsky: Today's Republican Party is a Candidate for Most Dangerous Organization in Human History (2016) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4FC7PsvUjo8
Historically speaking the vast majority of them just didn't.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primitive_accumulation_of_ca...
The first fundamental error with the Russian and Chinese revolutions, as Karl Marx warned, was underestimating the difficulty and brutality required to achieve primitive accumulation. Ironically its the same analytical error that Adam Smith made, but in the interest of a different end.
For context, Karl Marx condemned revolutionary efforts in pre-capitalist nations for these reasons. This included Russia and China because they were still feudalist states. Karl Marx insisted Germany was the necessary focus.
In other words, 51 people decided to put 3.7 million children back into poverty. In one month between Dec 2021 and Jan 2022 the percentage increased from 12.1% to 17%[1]. Each and every one of those 51 people had the power to singlehandedly keep 4.9% of all children out of poverty. None of them did.
Why? If you asked all 51 of them, the most common answer will most likely be a variation of "no handouts".
[0] https://archive.is/3vZnb (census.gov link, using archive.is because census.gov blocks connections outside of the US)
[1] https://www.povertycenter.columbia.edu/news-internal/monthly...
In reality, “Studies have found…that parents have used the checks for essential items…like food, clothes and school-related expenses.”
I assume he thought that was the excuse most likely to benefit his political ambitions.
It may be a disease but it certainly delivers breakfast. And then six more meals, apparently.
Part of the deal with consumer capitalism is that there needs to be consumption. Which means that people have to consume a lot of their means on stuff. Gullet-stuff being one of them.
Blacks are of course poorer than whites. Them being more obese is not a sign of overabundance among Blacks.
Are you replying to someone else? I haven’t said that someone/some entity is starving people/denying access to food. Try to stay coherent/on track.
> A 500g bag of budget pasta is, as we established, 29p. That’s 5 meals there of 100g of plain pasta, with no butter, no salt, no sauce, and no nutrition, and a whole 147 calories per gruesome meal.
https://cookingonabootstrap.com/2022/04/12/its-not-about-the...
(By the way, that website has a lot of information about cheap, nutritious food. Jack's currently running it at cost, in addition to all her other work.)
The problems in ensuring access to fresh food in some urban areas (and rural areas too!) is well-documented (ok, food access in rural areas is less well-documented). It's much cheaper to buy sugar water than milk or eggs. You have to know that by now, right? My child receives snacks at a public school through an after school program that serves children of various socioeconomic levels. It's utter bottom-of-the-barrel commodity crap food, though "healthier" than Doritos or Takis.
In one of the poorer areas of my big US metropolis, the last grocery store is going to close, leaving thousands with no grocery store accessible by public transit.
What I find interesting is that I traveled recently to a rural area that produces at ton of big-ag commodity foods, and the food there was s(*& as well. Couldn't find anything fresh, certainly couldn't find anything local, as all they grow are soybeans and corn, acres and acres. No farmer's market, all the store produce shipped in and poor quality. Folks were not slender there, no surprise when work is riding that tractor for 11 hours and food is all from a box.
Someone above commented that the real game is inserting a private company between gov't and citizen to filter out the money and deliver crap. It sure feels that way.
Or put another way, would you support "OathKeepers Breakfast for Kids"?
The government decision-makers actually had no opinion at all about whether free breakfast was a "good thing", and didn't particularly care about the welfare of poor Black children at all. They implemented government free breakfast only to undermine the possibility of the Black Panthers or a similar group getting support for implementing it themselves.
The Panthers effectively forced the government to implement it, by showing them up, they never would have done it at all if the Panthers hadn't done it first, and did it only to take away the possibility of a group like the Panthers getting credit for doing it and using it to build support and power. Had nothing to do with the kids or whether it was a "good thing" at all.
So any cynical view will be true for a few politicians, but never for all.
As a result, the whole system strongly selects for people best able to navigate that complex web of relationship. Which means it selects against people with goals they're not willing to compromise on.
This is why, I think, in modern (democratic) countries you can't really achieve anything specific by becoming a politician. If you come in with a concrete and inflexible goal (like, to reuse the example, making the government fund free food for children), you'll likely just wash out or get sidelined by your own colleagues: if you're not willing to help with whatever others need from you, even when it means compromising your principles or going against your initial goals, then nobody else will be willing to help you with your schemes. The rules of thumb thus are:
- If you see someone going into politics to achieve a specific goal, you can assume they'll fail and the goal will not be achieved;
- If you want the politicians to do something, you need to go about it indirectly, exploiting the incentives of the entire system - for example, as alleged upthread with the food for children, by setting things up so the government will lose face / influential politicians will lose public support if they don't implement the very thing you want them to.
- Everything that's actually being achieved is achieved in a roundabout way, because the limiting factor isn't any politician's ethics, understanding, or budget - the limiting factor is the ability to align enough politicians and administrative workers to make something happen.
That is not cynical, that is the great power of democracy. No one can change rules by themselves but agreements are needed. When one person can make big changes alone then it usually a form of dictatorship and things do not go so well.
> you need to go about it indirectly, exploiting the incentives of the entire system
Politics are complicated, I also believe that. But many politicians go thru all that pain to achieve good things, not just to profit personally.
I guess the cynical bit is my belief that the flip side of this "great power" is that a democracy quickly becomes structurally incapable of doing anything significant, good or bad, to meaningfully improve things or to solve a problem ahead of time, before it turns into a crisis.
> When one person can make big changes alone then it usually a form of dictatorship and things do not go so well.
That's true, unfortunately. If it wasn't the case, democracy would not look appealing at all.
> But many politicians go thru all that pain to achieve good things, not just to profit personally.
The cynical part of my view is that no politician can "go thru all that pain to achieve" arbitrary things, good or bad. They can only directly achieve things that are already neutral or beneficial to most of their colleagues. For all the other things they'd want to achieve, a direct attempt to push the issue through will only get them sidelined or forced out, and indirect attempts (through the long process of compromising and trying to gather allies) will just wear them down and turn them into just another self-interested politician.
But to the media? Nah, don’t have to look too closely at the seams: just assume that it is the powerful trailer park whites who caused Trump. And then upper-middle class [white] liberals—irony of all ironies—lament the class-unconsciousness of poor whites, simply because the NYT told them that that is how they operate. Oh, but if those materially poor whites would only see some reason; then we could all band together against the 1%.
Don’t count on the upper-middle class to help unify anything or anyone, though. Not post-Occupy Wall Street.
I think though that one should not discount racial politics and media bias as a major contributing factor to why so many poor whites vote against their economic interests. I think LBJ had it right with his quote:
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/lbj-convince-the-lowest-wh...
I like how Faulkner put it: In the South they love the man and hate the race and in the North they love the race and hate the man. Desegregation lead to closed pool politics and helped with the decline of union membership. There is definitely an aspect of spite within white politics. To wit: let’s all suffer to keep an undeserving minority from getting something.
Keep getting in touch with the soul of the working man through LBJ.
[1] https://www.fns.usda.gov/sbp/program-history [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_Breakfast_Program
1. It was forcibly shut down by the federal government as a means to undermine the black panther's most visible community support. Both through subterfuge and direct raids.
2. The federal government then later realized that free breakfast for poor kids was a good thing, and re-implemented it