obrero
This thread is great for watching college educated Americans pontificate with great moral indignation about things they know nothing about (but think they know everything about).
Uh...this is "whataboutism". Let me helpfully link that for you - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism . See what the article says? We're talking about what we're always talking about, the crimes of North Korea, the crimes of Russia etc. If you point out things the US did, that's "whataboutism". We can ignore that.
The electricians all left at 5 PM. They belonged to the IBEW and had pension plans, job security with seniority etc. IT used to bitch about how they'd leave at 5 PM when we had to start doing some work. They would have stayed past 5 PM, but the super wealthy bank would have had to pay them (not us) overtime, and they almost never did that.
The other IT people would also moan about how stupid they were compared to us. How stupid are they? They leave at 5 PM, or get overtime if they do, they have job security, they don't have to work all hours or are paid well if they do any how, they had pensions and job security based on seniority. Who were the real fools?
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There is more than one scene where Nixon talks about how he wants to get rid of J. Edgar Hoover but can't. In another the Attorney General calls FBI agents "the Gestapo".
It reminded me of another tape - a phone conversation LBJ recorded of him talking to another Attorney General - Robert Kennedy. Kennedy talks about how his subordinate, Hoover, was not only not taking orders from him, but was having agents monitoring, writing reports and spreading disinformation about him ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVHnkIPGC6M ).
Forget the FBI monitoring non-violent political figures like Martin Luther King Jr., or Vietnam peace groups - presidents and their attorney generals began to fear their power.
The Church committee was supposed to fix this, but it was stonewalled in many ways, and by the 1980s we saw the FBI revive these political witchhunts again against groups like CISPES, and even groups run by Catholic nuns concerned about the rapes and killings of Catholic nuns in Central America.
This was not said, it's just Zionist propaganda. Even the Washington Post says so ( https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/post/did-a... ).
The fact that this lie is repeated over and over shows you how thoroughly Zionist propaganda has propagated through the US media.
What? Egypt got no "foreign aid" until some post-Nasserite forces in Egypt got together and decided to kow-tow to Israel and the US during the Camp David accords. For Jordan it is pretty much the same thing, from the attacks on Black September on.
The politicians running these countries were bought off to play nice with Israel. This is more or less openly stated in journals like Foreign Affairs. The money to Egypt and Jordan is money being given indirectly to Israel.
What a laugh. A Palestinian in Hebron whose family has been there for thousands of years gets no vote, whereas a Jew from Brooklyn who just got off a plane and steals his land does get a vote in the Knesset. This is a democracy? How deluded do you think we all are?
No working class housing groups are trying to stop new buildings. They're just asking for the same things groups like these have asked for almost a century.
Article translation: "Hack employee of the Washington Post Co. says wealthy parasite developers and trustafarian transplants should ignore everything long time, mostly working class black people want, they don't matter". Well why not, that's the same message we've been hearing in this election campaign all year.
that is what "more capital equipment exists" means. Its utilization of 87%+ in the late 1960s to below 77% in 2011 is the problem.
> inflation-adjusted hourly compensation has never been higher
The chart you refer to is very obviously NOT inflation adjusted. Adjusted for inflation it was higher in the early 1970s - it has fallen over 45 years.
> making up random facts
I am citing data correctly. You are pointing to charts showing hourly wages are 10 times what they were 50 years ago and saying they are not adjusted for inflation.
The problem is utilized industrial capacity has been falling for decades. Companies are not employing the invested capital and machinery they already own at anywhere near full capacity. So why invest more?
Even with capital utilization rates falling for decades, there is still overproduction - or underconsumption, depending on the angle. Corporations are flush with cash reserves. Naval Ravikant turned down a $600 million blank check from Chinese investors. Meanwhile wages have been moribund for a long time. Inflation-adjusted hourly wages were higher in the U.S. 45 years ago. Real hourly wages aee lower, yet more capital equipment exists and productivity has risen. It is trying to sell more to people who have less.
The economic report of the president (US) has US industrial capacity utilization rates- over 87% from 1967 to 1969. By 2011 it was below 77%. (table b54 of the economic report of the president 2013).
So the link to this military contractor's death to ISIS is very tenuous. This has to be established first, and there is almost nothing to establish it on - he was a Jordanian police officer, not an ISIS militant. Then you have to say Twitter is engaged in running afoul of material support of terrorism laws. These laws generally would mean something along the lines of that in some back office of Twitter, Jack Dorsey was storing up Kalashnikov rifles which he was going to ship to the Taliban in order to assault American bases there.
In 1929, the Republican (!) Secretary of State rolled up all the old World War I spying operations saying "Gentlemen do not read each other's mail". How far the US has fallen in freedom from the day Stimson uttered those words a century ago.
England: English colonialism from Drogheda to Amristar, plus the domestic Peterloo, child labor etc. Also, how many millions did England deliberately starve to death in the 1840s?
Germany: I can list off what the Krupp/Voegler/Thyssen financed Nazi party did for a while, then go back to before that
What are those atrocious consequences? For Russia? First satellite in space? First man in space? Or do you mean for the PRC, run by the standing committee of the Politburo of the Communist Party of China? Which is currently the second largest economy on earth (in some measures the first)?
What are those atrocious consequences? If you want to mention eggs broken along the way, remember to mention those of the US (extermination of the Indians, slavery, company towns etc.) or England (from the siege of Drogheda to Amritsar), Germany (Sieg Heil!?) and so forth...
I very clearly said I am not going to lump together NASA and the DoE. Now you're claiming to people, who can clearly read my post, that I did lump them in, when I explicitly did not lump then it.
I do lump the State Department in with the military, as it's all more or less the same thing, beyond even that the CIA etc. routinely uses the State Department for cover ( http://voices.washingtonpost.com/spy-talk/2010/06/state_dept... ). Foreign embassies that have the ambassador go out and threaten the other state's executive with US military intervention can't really be considered on the domestic social spending side of this military/social breakdown that is being discussed.
> It's bigger than this other number
The point is that military spending was being presented as smaller than it is - by saying veteran's benefits were not part of military spending etc.
Before what? Before was Stephen Glass's invented anti-black stories (and other invented stories). Bell Curve are blacks genetically stupider than whites covers. Or the cover with the smoking welfare queen and her pickaninny - "Day of Reckoning". And on and on. Most of the black writers I follow on Twitter were happy with Hughes changes. Before it was just a bunch of Jewish self-styled intellectuals who liked to dump on the schwartzes.
Then you also have to count that portion of the interest on the debt that was due to past military spending.
The amount of military spending the US government does is higher than what you are presenting.
You quote from the Times but leave out the next sentence:
"Prosecutors have said Hezbollah operated Al Manar in Lebanon as a way to raise money and recruit volunteers for attacks."
So his "business relationship with Hezbollah" is Hezbollah makes money off its channel in some manner. Under that criteria, every television channel in the US, every magazine, every newspaper could be banned according to your reasoning, yet you can contort this in some theoretical way so that it has nothing to do with the content.
This is a ridiculous thing to day. For one thing there is no public conversation about income inequality. The press is owned by corporations, whose majority ownership is billionaires. Even this forum is owned by Y Combinator, a corporation which owns shares of companies who have collectively raised billions of dollars.
I mean, elected political parties like Hezbollah in Lebanon have television channels like Al-Manar. When someone like Javed Iqbal in the US sets up receiver satellite cards so Americans can watch this channel - he was sent to prison for over six years. That's the "public conversation" in the USA.
There have been somewhat open channels of public discussion on the Internet like Usenet. Which is why the US government and last-mile monopolies got together to work to crush Usenet a few years ago, which for the most part worked in severely harming it.
Then it's also in the interest of the idle class heirs who expropriate surplus labor time from those of us who work to try to muddle the conversation. The idle class is who has been working to take the "focus" off "specific underlying components". It's farcical that the people working to confuse the issue then go on to complain how it seems so unfocused.
It's pretty simple - any created wealth is created through work. Heirs who do not work can then only live by expropriating surplus labor time from those of us who do work. It's as simple as that. It's been happening for 10,000 years, whether it's called slavery, or serfdom, or modern wage slavery. It's all the same thing. Among we who do all the work and create all the wealth has been awareness of the 1% parasites who feed off of our labor.
If the focus of the issue is confused, it's because the offending group wants it to be confused - the people who own the press, who jail the Javed Iqbal's who allow different views from elected parliamentary parties, who crush public forums like Usenet etc.
If you're not going to make money by working and creating wealth, you have to make it as a rentier, expropriating wealth created during surplus labor time of those who do work.
It causes a struggle for where the money goes - the worker who created the wealth by their labor, or to the heir in the profit of that expropriated labor time.
Poverty and unemployment are backbones of pushing that wealth towards the heir and away from the worker creating the wealth. That's why his note on ending poverty etc. is so phony. Heirs aren't trying to lower unemployment or end poverty, they work hard to create it.
It's not a secret. It's said openly in Businessweek - http://www.businessweek.com/1999/99_44/b3653163.htm . The problem as they see it is when unemployment gets too low. It puts a crimp on their parasitism on those of us who work and create wealth.
It's that he went to Phillips Exeter Academy.
A high school that costs over $36,000 a year (tack on more than $10k more if you're boarding there).
Zuckerberg is rare among these creatures in that he likes programming and wanted to build something. Most of them are the kind of parasites you can see in a documentary like "Born Rich" (it's on Youtube), who will live luxurious lives off the profit they expropriate off of those of us who do work and create wealth.
They are not people like you, spending months of drudge work going over BSD code back in the mid-1990s to find rfork holes and such, who two decades down the line might see a little payoff due to the efforts of their labor.
The problem is the people on the rentier side of the economic inequality scale are doing the opposite. They want poverty. The need poverty. It is the cornerstone of the rentier system.
Here is a BusinessWeek article: http://www.businessweek.com/1999/99_44/b3653163.htm
What does it see as the problem? Unemployment is too low. Too many people who want to work are working. Businessweek sees this as a problem. CEOs and LP's and rentiers see this as a problem.
Workers work. They create wealth. A carpentry shop has carpenters bang wood and nails together to make tables. The workers labor creates wealth - wood and nails becomes a table which costs more.
For the first six hours a day the worker keeps the wealth they create - their wage. The rest of that revenue goes for replenishment of supplies - wood, nails, 1/90th of a hammer cost etc.
For the last two hours a day, the worker is not paid the wealth they create. It goes in profit to the heir who owns the manufacturing plant. The worker's surplus labor time is being expropriated by the heir.
If unemployment was low, if poverty was lessened - then those who work could demand to be paid for more of their time. Increasing unemployment, increasing poverty lessens the chance of this happening.
The LP's, the heirs want poverty. It's an essential cornerstone of their profit and expropriation.
Centuries ago, most of the world were farmers under feudalism (or hunter/gatherers etc.) There was not structural unemployment then. Lords wanted farmers working hard to sow during planting and reap during harvest. Only in our modern age of capitalism do those who control production desire poverty, unemployment etc. That Businessweek article lays out a portion of that ideology, it's been spoken of elsewhere for a long time.
The idea that the heir LP's on the other end of the inequality divide want poverty to end is absurd. The reserve army of labor is a foundational necessity of the system.
It's not surprising to me at all to see Americans overthrow a secular democracy, install an ayatollah-back dictator who less than two years later starts a bloody campaign against the Bahai...
...and then to see those same Americans shaking their heads in moral outrage how the Iranian ayatollahs (who they empowered) are persecuting the Bahai in the modern day.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/syria/1...
Well, it says that an Islamic militia backed by the US gave up its arms to Al-Qaeda. Although two things to note with the sub-title "Moderate rebels in Syria that the US have armed and trained to fight jihadists have surrendered to al-Qaeda".
#1 - the adjective "moderate" is applied to the group. This is an Islamic militia whose origins were backed by the Muslim Brotherhood to create a government mimicking that of Mohammed's during the time of the caliphate. Would that be called moderate if they weren't in a strange alliance with the US?
#2 - not mentioned any where in the article is that some Harakat Hazm went over to Jabhat al-Nusra.
The US and shah and Savak did too well stamping out secularism, left-wing ideas, even liberal ideas about parliament, democracy etc. Eventually the ayatollahs and Bazaari etc. amassed great power, and turned on the Shah.
Mossadegh was never in the pocket of the ayatollahs, but he did try to qualm moderates like Kashani. But Kashani eventually turned on him (the hard-line preachers had far before).
Also - the Shah in direction with Falsafi started the anti-Bahai campaigns in 1955, which had not been going on under Iran's parliament. The US puts in a puppet, in less than two years he stirs up a massive anti-Bahai campaign which involves riots, lynchings. You seem to be in complete shock, you want to be a westerner being pious and holier-than-thou against something the west itself did, against the will of Mossadegh and the elected parliament of Iran.
So western readers knowing this can know the history - the secular parliament of Iran was overthrown when the US and UK backed the ayatollahs and others in ousting it. Then in the 1970s, the ayatollahs wanted an end to US influence in Iran, which is when Iran began becoming a pariah. US nuclear companies were printing ads in newspapers boasting about how they were helping make Iran a nuclear power ( http://img.myconfinedspace.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/04/sh... ). This is in the years before the GOP invited Netanyahu to Congress to scold Obama that he wasn't bombing Iran for wanting to use nuclear power (also, it's implicit that Israel is allowed to be a nuclear power, Iran isn't).
It has little difference from other countries - if you notice, the US has been working to overthrow the last of the old Nasserite pan-Arab nationalist pseudo-socialist governments like in Iraq, Libya and more recently Syria. In fact, the US has been arming jihadists fighting Assad's secular government - something Putin himself has noted. Meanwhile the US backs to the hilt Islamic dictatorships like Saudi Arabia, Brunei etc. which are lapdogs to the US.
This notion that the US government is against Islamic radicalism is absured. It's true enemies are always the Qadaffis, the Saddam Hussein's, the Assads, the Mossadeghs. The US supports Islamic fundamentalist jihadists - Osama bin Laden is a creation of the US, banking his and the mujahideen fight against a secular socialist Afghani government. Sylvester Stallone made a Rambo movie where he went to Afghanistan and fought alongside the Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters, attacking the secular socialist Afghani government and Russians, the end of the movie credits are "dedicated to the brave Mujaheddin fighters". That movie came out in 1988, 13 years before 9/11.
This is one of the main reasons the US government and the corporations which monopolize the last mile of communications effectively killed off Usenet in 2009.