Comments by "DXR" (@MrDXRamirez) on "Thom Hartmann Program" channel.

Bill Press has it right.
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Capitalism has already lost its legitimacy. I am wondering when the working class will step forward to replace capitalism!
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To Marxist Soccer's point: I say. The one party in South Africa was an Apartheid state (one party state) yet all the parties before that experience emerged were part of the ruling classes just as the Democrats and Republicans are both an aspect of the ruling classes, as a two-party state. A one party state is not unrealistic a forecast in Jason Stanley. Should the GOP turn toward a constitutional convention and make changes to the constitution, a one party state will emerge. Right now they are not far from calling a constitutional convention. In my view the only difference between the two parties, as it stands today, is who makes up the party, a quantitative difference is all I see in them.
4
History confronts this generation in a new battle for freedom. "Us, versus the so called "Them". Depending on which angle you read that maxim it still spells out the word, 'separation'. They way things are shaping up, it appears this separation will become the mother of all battles. I hope this generation of youth define themselves better. After all the young are a majority of non-princes, kings, monarchs, or CEO's and presidents. People given only one chance in life at success deserve a chance to make the world their own. That chance has to be taken! Waiting for that chance never happens. The old concepts, ideas, theories about emancipation are relevant again.
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The mainstream economists never measure the depth of the value lost in a crisis in terms of how much labor-time society must spend to get out of a crisis. For instance, three times the amount of US GDP was the cost of the subprime crisis of 2007. It was three times more than what the American people averaged in working hours per year. Each dip in employment levels extends the years of debt does more damage to erode the value of the dollar paid to workers of all types. Each rise in employment shortens by a small percentage the debt load per year and per person but weakens consumption as America's industries require less labor-time due to automation. The economy runs the risk of over production as automation creates ceaseless production, there is no way society can pick up the slack of an entrenched mass of unemployed. With the uncertainty of a market based economy national debt is an open ended question for each succeeding generation to pay it off. As a result of speaking in abstract terms the mainstream economists and the corporations misuse the tools to govern mutual economic interests. They had nationalized the debt only to make the next big financial crisis a global crisis in proportion that the expense for one social group is too great to carry considering the tax payer is not responsible for the misuse of the credit system by banks. The opposite of privatization of the public sphere is the nationalization of debt of the private sphere to every man, woman, and child with the future of the rest of their working lives .
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Crashes are the symptom of the cause of over producing that comes from the drive to compensate for the loss of hands owing to innovations corporations use in production. Profits come from higher output or producing more with less labor in this day and age, more people in the past and thus more goods on the market is more profit once they are exchanged for money. More people are thrown out of work from innovation and innovation makes more work for more output with greater intensity, speed, a car, house, or a tool is made and out the door. Of course, to have those goods sold people have to have money in their hands, hence the credit card and low interest borrowing, people call 'cheap money', but money has nothing to do with production where the bubble begins and everything to do with circulation where the bubble finally ruptures. Not even Thom Hartman gets this.
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Actually, if I am not mistaken, the Senate is largely made up of landowners large and small. More than one landowner in Congress or in the Senate constitutes a social class of landowners.
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The response you got from "V G" is a stupid one. @Lawyer ---Relative to what foreign buyers get in relation to somewhere in terms of houses, is citizenship one of them buying properties in the US ?
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America is not a failure for the super rich. The super rich know how to fight for what they want. They cooperate with each other and get political with their wealth. They use it to ensure all things go their way. But for working people, America is a failure with each passing day. The most powerful working class in the world economically is the most powerless working class politically. The working class does not get political or cooperate with each other to use their collective power to make things go their way. It seems the paradox of working class apathy is what 'Makes America Great Again' for people who make a living by not working. People who avoid work, internally despise work and workers, find America a great place to live, here labor is a passive free agent and mostly illegal labor. While working people wait for wages to rise, something happens that can be read as a message to other super rich people in the world that wages will never rise but only by modest amounts. Notre Dame burns down and instead of the Church's own insurance paying for the restoration/rebuilding with the government, in one day millions is raised by private donation. A sign that the super rich have no intention to raise wages if they are not compelled either by the State or by a class struggle, would rather spend their wealth on a building than on the working class for higher wages.
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The religious right has dominated the political sphere and will push for a constitutional convention. At which point, there will be no impeachment and there will be no separation of church and state.
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Thom is right on this. Get the political power.
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@42stea , you are dead Wrong! You failed history, the US has always been about building an anti-socialist alliance ever since the Russian Revolution of 1917. A white ethnographic-state would do nothing to vanquish socialism, in fact, it encourages revolution and socialism. Socialism is a theory more natural to the working class brings order out of the racism, sexism, anarchy, more natural to the capitalist class by overthrowing it. You obviously pay very little attention to what happens in your own Latin American backyard. Denial of that history is a form of racism in you, belittling its importance that when Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua are identified as a 'Trioca of Terror', it is because they are socialist states. This fact goes completely over the heads of people like you! A 'barrier' in the form of a wall is not a symbol for racism, or an edifice. The promise of restoring controlling interests in Venezuela's resources is a promise to the Oil industry requires a Wall, a 'Troica of Terror', and an anti-socialist alliance of a handful of Latin American states to execute and prosecute a counter-revolution in that country. Your ignorance of America's relations with Latin America makes you as a supportive but silent ally in that counter-revolution as belittling and dismissing others to push your ideology forward on a personal level does 'Nothing' to overthrow capitalism and its social relations of race, sexism, class. To the contrary, you encourage it.
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I think freedom is a moot point when mortality and survival show a failing system in the US. The level of violence in the form of guns, weapons, law enforcement, military in the US is so high that these forces take an automatic reality of their own outside of their users. The other half of society is deprived of development. We are dealing with technology, science, in a state of ceaseless production going the course against its own natural development. Every advance occurs through industrial processes joined with the military and its direct participants have no claim to the advances in technology. I guess you can call being free of ownership of these forces is a form of freedom. But as long as science and technology serves the state as a means for social control and used to lengthen hours of work in business, freedom has two realities. Free as a modern nomad and free of ownership.
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The question becomes what do you do about it when socially the country is still intact? There are cracks in the social order but non amount to a social force that seeks the complete dissolution of the social order and the creation of a new one. 🧐
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Crashes are the symptom of the cause of over producing that comes from the drive to compensate for the loss of hands owing to innovations corporations use in production. Profits come from higher output or producing more with less labor in this day and age, more people in the past and thus more goods on the market is more profit once they are exchanged for money. More people are thrown out of work from innovation and innovation makes more work for more output with greater intensity, speed, a car, house, or a tool is made and out the door. Of course, to have those goods sold people have to have money in their hands, hence the credit card and low interest borrowing, people call 'cheap money', but money has nothing to do with production where the bubble begins and everything to do with circulation where the bubble finally ruptures. Not even Thom Hartman gets this about capitalism.
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The Trump administration can only get re-elected by prosecuting a war. This time focusing their attention of Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua, to overthrow these socialist states. The arguing going back and forth in the media and among Americans, finding all the rational reasons for and against a Wall, plays perfectly into the hands of this administration. The promise of restoring controlling interests of major oil reserve deposits and geological resources of the US Oil Industry, were lost to the Venezuelan revolution, will preoccupy for the next two years this administration. While a government shut down for Wall funding, conceals from public view a counter-revolution in progress that goes undetected at best, controversial at the worst. This counter-revolution involving an anti-socialist alliance of neighboring Latin American states receives the moral, economic and political support of the US military for the overthrow of socialist states in Latin America is the chief goal for a New American Century, to which this administration is committed.
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Money is used to replenish the value of the buildings, machines, roads, bridges etc., for an expansion of production. This is the investment of additional capital the infrastructure bill represents, the fresh investment results in higher profits and this results in an increase in the personal consumption of those profits, the part of the investment capital that works the machines, buildings, and bridges, in the next turnaround when the first investment finishes its cycle to start a new one from the profits of the prior quarter the workers are laid off. Contraction of the labor-market is the unintended consequence that never gets resolved but rather intensifies a class struggle over the greater personal consumption of profits that gets in the way of the investment expanding value with an increase in output to lower costs and labor time, rather the workers are made to work longer as an imposition to support a wealthier few.
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People are happy to return to work after the shut down. The stress, anxiety, pain, fear, anger, applying to jobs to get out, panting, scrambling, on how to pay the rent, debt, etc., the agreement is a god send to all these people. Public servants are a breed of people that get more altruistic in spite of the shut down. Even private sector workers, contractors, hurt more then the public servants by the shut down would favor legislation to ever use a shut down as a political weapon again. Democrats will pursue that demographic and will pass legislation Getting these workers to go against multinational corporations and Trump would be like getting the Freedom Caucus of the GOP to emulate GWH Bush. More of the Freedom Caucus changing life in general has to become increasingly more unstable for the vast majority of people to start walking against this faction. Right now this caucus is unknown to the majority of Americans as the head of the right wing in the GOP, as industry and finance sector militants, they operate in the background. The public and private sector workers are not going to go against their own employer who are this unified right wing caucus except if they vote down a shut down prohibition law.
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Time to create a new culture and new society and cease cooperating with the old form in every form and get armed.
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I agree with the first and second caller. Racists are slaves to racism is my opinion. The most mentally unfree people in the world are racists is my opinion. Indoctrination is a vile and pernicious component in American education is another of my opinions. Racism and bigotry is political in a society full of racism and bigotry...
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If the republicans take power and the debt ceiling is not raised when in power they would impose extreme austerity because the crash would be worse than the people paying the debt.
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The credit system offers a capitalist, or a person who poses as a capitalist which is all Trump did, millions of people do this, pretend to be what they are not. People who do to have a regular paycheck job, they have to pretend they have assets or property that makes money or the land and building, diamonds, bonds, stocks, etc., pre-qualify the loan as capital advanced. This is one point why posing is not fraud. The other point is that the law within limits gives a person total control and command over capital and the property of other's but not the control over the labor of others. Trump is a merchant capitalist as opposed to a industrial capitalist who controls capital and property not social labor.
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Insightful and plausible @darlingdear2687 , I like your point. The man responding to you, 'steven tea', dismisses your point with arrogance.
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Americans can have more socialism if they want. When Trump said “… we will never be a socialist country…”, he was talking to his generation in power sitting in the House of Representatives. The next generation has a different view and will take over the House. The details of a comprehensive Green New Deal will eventually take shape in a socialist form. Votes are not there now but it won’t be long all Americans will get on the same page with a Green industrial and agricultural revolution. I’d caution people that if the Green Revolution does not unite everyone to the necessaries of life, socialized work as the ultimate owner of the necessaries of life, then you need to modify the Green New Deal till you get it right.
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Organizing the unemployed should be a lot easier than organizing workers in Walmart. Employed workers have a harder struggle but not impossible, especially under conditions where the unempoyed have already formed mass protests and demonstrations, gives employed workers the extra power they need to shut down the employer they fight. Employers have made union organizing in the workplace a crime and the organizer hauled off to jail. One conscientious worker made the difference in Amazon and he was fired. Not sure how his rights were restored but his impact was enough to look at the problem of unsafe working conditions in Amazon as a direct blow to all workers. If one employer does it they all are doing it. Intimidating workers by firing those who attempt to organize is not a crime in States with Right to Work Laws. With that piece of awareness, think of this, there is one power employers take from workers that should not given as a free source to Amazon, Walmart or any other multinational corporation. The power of cooperation. Capital takes advantage of the culture of cooperation workers develop and they use it to the extent that they can buy it. This power remains as a potential determined by the scale of cooperation a single capitalist can afford to buy. If there are no buyers to hire workers and buy the equipment, technology, raw material, there is no economy. all that productive labor is idle and leaves the collective strength of the nation free to engage in politics, pick up the torch for a siezure of political power, wrestle it away from the GOP and democrats in a conquest of power before starving to death at the hands of Capital.
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State becomes a secular state when it recognizes no religion and no race and therefore places all religions and all races in the same category as non-political interest. Politics is specifically the business of a secular state. In Greek: Polis for people, politics, the management of people. A secular state is founded on treating particular differences of all members of society as falling into one category; everyone is an owner and the state intervenes on the politics of ownership when the whole social order is endangered by a particular form or type of ownership. All faiths, religions and their churches would fall into the category of a tax payer, contributing to the same economic surplus the military takes from and uses to develop powers that can bomb other countries to the heavens. Religion is taxed but the military is not when there is more private industry in the military than in religions would make a strange case of political inconsistencies to serve as a conscientious program the American people can support. We should be considering where the surplus goes when it is used to stimulate a given number of private industries who are not taxed to be legislated as a permanent feature of the US Tax Code that the private sector on which the military depends are never taxed yet earn their income from the same economic surplus generated by other tax payers!
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Shame on you Thom, seven wounds with one bullit on two men is not the right hypothesis. You must subtract the exit wounds and count only the entry wounds. If three entry wounds are established that adds up to six making the seventh wound comparable to the velocity of the former established three wounds and if the seventh wound finally stopped the single bullit. Then would it have a smaller circumference than the other three wounds? JFK -- I believe the only way to put all these consipiracy theories to rest and finally come to the truth is to compare the written histories of both the Americans and Cubans of the same period. A joint investigation into the facts. Beyond that nothing has changed; the failed coup d'etat against Venezuela's Maduro is a continuation of business as usual. Its getting harder for the right wing to overthrow governments because the people are seeing their motives so much clearer than the people in 1953 saw the roles of the CIA, FBI, the Mob, and the Justice Department in the overthrow of Arbenz, and the failed attempt to overthrow Castro and the installment of Pinochet and Samoza in Chile and Nicaragua and finally, Mossodegh in Iran. Funny to hear two men who were watching Leave it to Beaver and Father Knows Best, Disney, and Hillary Clinton older than these two men was a tween watching My Little Margie and Ozzie and Harriet and Ronald Reagan the host of the General Electric Show when the elites in Washington were plotting overthrows in other countries from 1950 to 1963?
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Of course, whenever the object of society is the accumulation of capital, the Mind is the last thing to get developed. Mind becomes the main focus and object of American society when its productive forces are applied to that end, rather, than applied for the separation of mind from the body and maintaining a level of ignorance in the population. The question then is more about why a certain number of people in society remain ignorant in the current form of society. For example, vocational schools as cheap as they are as far as programs are concerned in the US, were, at least, a way to unite industry and education, body and mind united. This made a well rounded and skilled person, got math and physics training from actual work. Education in America is so remotely connected to industry that is has become a secular institution like the church, existing in society but not a part of its reproductive process. Owing to this separation individuals have become split, brain development is extreme and body development extremely poor, furnishing a health industry whose object is the accumulation of capital with fresh clients, and, in other parts of the world and in society, people are all body but of extremely low intelligence for critical thinking. One can survive in America without education or literacy but that person will be completely shut out from industry that has become highly technological and always changing the technology. The requirements for the accumulation of capital, however, depends on unskilled labor being present at the drop of a dime whenever the accumulator needs the work to accumulate to be done, such as when Michael Cohen officiated an exchange between Trump and Russians for the sale of Trump Tower in Moscow, or when an illiterate worker is asked to go to the other warehouse and bring 50 more cases of toasters. In China, right now, an illiterate peasant from remote village province can rise to become a department manager of a production facility and fully literate, specialized in a skilled trade in any number of China's factory cities. They apply, no criminal background they get accepted. Factory cities unite education with production in China, this is why they will surpass even the most privileged adolescent student of an Ivy League institution, because it is mass production united with mass education, a power exceeding a handful of monopolies.
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If it were not for the financial crisis that left EU member states unable to recover and develop out of this crisis owing to several factors not important to mention here and now, but led to multiple member state's referendums to secede that organization, and that crisis profoundly ruining the lives of the unemployed the EU would be the biggest competitor threatening the US today. Combined the EU member states total higher outcomes in GDP and population diversity, social investment, and capital than the US's fifty states combined. If it were not for the huge expense of maintaining a long national boundary separating itself from the continental US, California could be its own country is how big its economic contribution to the world market is. Its infrastructure and its social investments and population diversity rivals several members states in the EU. It could if it were its own country join the EU even if it shares the same continent of the US, for that matter so can Mexico and Canada join the EU. Yet, rightly so the US has its eye on China as the next global threat to its hegemony. The EU is not a threat to US hegemony any longer. Not while it is not a federation of classless states, that it left intact the old social classes formed in the mid 20th century and brought into being new ones with the same attitude. It separated members states into those that have and those that do not have, and, consequently, when the global financial crisis emanating from Wall Street tanked the economy, it struck down not only the poorer states but the working masses of Europe as a whole. Today it is palpable the EU can end if the elites fail to deliver employment and prosperity to the working classes. This is how insistent they are in replacing the Neo-Liberals and conservative ruling parties. The question will be replace them with what? The insurmountable distrust and lack of faith in the political parties has the working classes on edge about their future and knowing the inherent inequality generated by capitalism they fear a class war is imminent. They march in haste to form coalitions and ultimately a political party of their own or put candidates in office who they think will not only disrupt the reform proposals of the elites but fundamentally take all parliamentary seats from them and rewrite the laws on commerce, trade, currency, employment, they feel does not reach their aims. I can imagine the American masses feel much the same about their elites as they become more fragile and exposed to material deprivation than they ever had before. The shock of the reality the age of prosperity is over and are reacting to each other with animus and ignorance plus a dose of distrust and lack of faith for liberal politics is only the beginning of their class struggles to come.
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The anti-socialist alliance of 1955 is not the same anti-socialist alliance in 2018. The structure of the power of the US is built on a contest between capitalism and communism. Its complete annihilation is its aim, on the other side, the party state is used as a defense against capitalist expansion in socialist societies and can never abolish itself, as long as capitalism exists. For the present socialist states are here to stay and in the hopes of Washington, decay with increasing pressure both political and economic. At this historic point the whole US workforce exists for this reason should be a remarkable statement of how our personal destinies are ruled by this conflict. If you don't get this big picture you will never understand the actions of historical personages positioning themselves within the historical tension between capitalism and communism. The difference between this anti-socialist alliance to its early beginnings is its rise to political power. Governing the state are professional statists with an allegiance to this alliance, bot ideological and military,. On the ideological side there are two strategies present in the anti-socialist alliance used to slow down the the progress of socialist societies; these include religious social pressure to appeal to families and individuals in socialist societies, which is why radios and communication with the west is restricted. And economic sanctions which deprive socialists societies to participate in world trade are intended to do damage to the family organization in socialist societies; while, on the military side, the ideological weapon is force and neoliberalism. The actions of individuals, Jong Un and Trump, in this case, can be seen as positioning. In my opinion what has been going on since the 1950's the trajectory of the anti-socialist alliance and, fundamentally, the war that cannot rest for US capitalism, morphed into big political state agencies with the religious right, MIC, Neoliberal ideologues, places the republicans and democrats on the same side in opposition to all socialist societies. How and why did Trump appear to come away with nothing from a socialist society can be explained form this historical perspective of the policies of this anti-socialist alliance to which Trump as a real estate developer/landlord/ capitalist, now president, has no connection to this history but has received the benefits of this alliance as a member of the capitalist class. He is not a politician to some, he is great businessman to others, he is not a statists to many. Provocation is not his game, strong arming China is his aim, as King of Debt, his focus is on the the trade deficit with China, he has no affinity to neoliberalism to make efforts to penetrate North Korean society to abolish it with the the productive might of the American working class. He instead will use the economic might of the working class's own enemy, the monopoly corporations, to overcome debt with China by means of seducing North Korea into the capitalist world market to raise the standard of living of North Korean families. Is he a racist, as much as we are racists, he is, everyone is racist even those who proclaim they are not, are racists with a veil over the eyes. We are racists because our society is structured on racism and slavery is still present in American society as a leftover from colonialism and slavery, not in the primitive form of slave auctions, but in the form of dependence on structurally racist institutions for the necessities to conduct a dignified life.
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All due respect, I believe i.e., Thom Hartmann, lives in the same world I do, a world where religion fully dominates the State, is the State, and influences the State in all governments barring China, Cuba. Pence, Bush, both born-again christians, are specific examples of this unity of church and state for whom the invasion of Iraq of 2003 was a crusade in Bush's mind when he said it, and a war against Islam for Cheney was a choice to commit troops to preserve America's permanent high standard of living and lifestyle against annoying and persistent to the end militant organizations interrupting the perpetual spoiled habits of 330 million people, is what it comes down to. Fix this problem and the world will be a better place. To complete the process that has already begun and is half way there, the complete transformation of the State of the few into the State of the many only the few in control of the State, need to be replaced by the many and society (where religion exists) as it was since Ancient Rome, when christians were excluded without citizenship of Rome and separated from the state is on its way toward becoming its opposite. A long process of transformation that 2000 years later the rule of the many becomes the power and political power becomes social power. Historically, the choice is simple, either the political state becomes thoroughly socialized or the high standard of living and lifestyle for the many vanishes. Obviously, the baby boomer born-again christians will choose the latter and call it God's doing, nothing we can do but to put our family first, the nation's standard of living and lifestyle second, Their indifference attitude to a material decline such as what led to Rome's decline is palpable, i.e., real. Be grateful to them for they gave Americans the reason infuse science into society and adopt a lifestyle and standard of living of moderation and equality, and gave the reason for the removal of the religion from state both personally and politically, they are the reason because they are the few struggling to hold on to the right of power and exclusive right of ownership of the Public Domain, i.e, -- (the many). They must go! Through their ideological reasoning they have positioned the State to become a holy shrine of god's will, and opposed to the will of the Public Domain to the State.
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@edwarddawn2277 He learn tax policy the hard way if he has a municipal pension and it goes dry.
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They appear to be Blackwater Mercenaries and Border Control Officers. I would not be surprised there are imported mercenaries through Blackwater.
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Sure it can be stopped. But not from home or the office. Americans are the only ones who can stop it. The way to stop it is to confront America outside of America. Americans exposing military bases around the world to the world exposes the aim, purpose and function of the military to Americans inside America can end Reaganism. So Reaganism can be defeated inside and outside the US by Americans only.
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Don Ghidoni - Nonsense.
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@Lies Bus Not nonsense.
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Just a real fast sketch on this question... Donald Trump is responsible for his own vision of society which happens to be the same vision white nationalists have for society; An Apartheid System. White nationalist are nihilists, they would destroy everything and start humanity from scratch on an homogenous basis or kill themselves. Kids become white nationalists very young, 8 years of age they begin looking at the popular conceptions of the world given to them in every form of medium that can spread the fallacies far and wide. Popular movements and culture of the baby boomers virtually threw white supremacy into the far, far away fringe of total discreditation and humiliation. By the time Reagan came around they gained political legitmacy appearing with smiling faces while spouting white supremacy. The alliances Trump is making with Big Fossil Fuel Industry and Big Pharma, Big Agriculture, basically all the Big Social Classes want the US to be Union -Free and Employer RIghts upheld. Everything else is a people's problem that can wait, except scientists are warning us there is no waiting. And, when you look around there is no waiting, extinction is upon us at the microscopic forms of life and creeping upward to the more complex forms of life extinction threatens society, property, humans and mammals. Big, midsize, employers and banks cooperate with fascist regimes. From Napolean to Hitler to Trump, strong alliances between bankers, landlords, merchants and manufacturers are built through someone who promises to force labor to work overtime and use the State to do it.
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Every generation is smarter than the previous one and has the responsibility of overthrowing the old for the new generation to create the society it wants to live in according the to the march of progress in human history. If a revolution to overthrow the psychosis of the boomer generation infesting government with its core central values of commodity fetishism you have only yourselves to blame and history will never forgive you. Get out there and tear it down!
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I think most people are confused about 'money'? The price of a car in money terms is priced at, say, $30,000 dollars. This, not because the dollar is backed by gold, another widely held confusion. The value of the car is measured by the value equivalent of some other commodity and then money is used to express this fact! I put more paper money into circulation the price of that car will rise in price. Dealers raise prices and freshly printed money is taken out of circulation. Directly, wages fall in value. I put less paper money into the economy the price of that car falls. Dealers can't make enough profit over their cost price. Indirectly, wages have risen in value. Of course, a lower price on cars and other goods stimulates growth, yes, it does, but it is also a raises how much of the market basket of goods wages can buy. Wages can buy more goods and this corresponds to a fall in profits. Profits are supported to rise by all the financial tools government has is the present situation. The Fed's job tends to equalize prices to rise and fall within a narrow latitude of movement to not invoke a crash or a revolution, to be frank. But in the main, people are confused about money because they do not understand commodities do all the exchanging and invades communities for more commodities to equate themselves against a third commodity measuring their weight. People miss the fact that a pound of bread and a pound of iron is expressing their same weight. All they see is the bread and iron not the weight common to both, in this way they can't see value common to all commodities. Money or the price expressing the value of the car is using gold as a commodity and the car as a commodity to measure the car's value. When gold is money then all the commodities in the world come alive all seeking their value equivalent in gold while the outside world sleep and is still.
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@65minimom what's the "kiss' for? A typo? Worth, riches, wealth, synonymous to the category of use-value. The tailor's work is a value because the coat is a use-value, the coat needs something else to measure its value, to qualify as a commodity is the logo of exchange-values. We have a hard time with this because the terminology is not in our vocabulary.
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Inequality appears as surplus-value of the top 1% of society. The progress made by the FDR's New Deal- enriched the 1%. All progress in every industry but one derived from this surplus-value in this society - benefited the 1%. The only parts of the total surplus-value distributed to the 99% were in housing and education, military, during the New Deal. The rest of the parts of the surplus-value i.e., communications, science, technology, the world market, the internet, machinery, inventions, divisions and combinations of labor, in short, the whole productive power of labor itself, from 1940 to now benefits the 1%. If you can see your way clear beneath the appearance of things being fake the absurdity of the proposition of a New Deal stands out as wishful thinking for the days of FDR. To me 'Inequality' appears as our own labor used by a 1% that relentlessly moves to exploit the 99% of all objective reality for itself. Objective reality being the surplus-value, surplus-value being past and present labor in all forms, labor being living human beings past and present, is the heart of the matter and nothing else is more important than how surplus-value is used to treat human beings. Where 99% of the working class is suppressed by 99% of objective reality, or the surplus-value is used to suppress a population into being no more than a working class and no less than a working class constitutes the battle of the century, do individuals wish to surrender their creative capacity to a capitalist or to a society for themselves? To this question another New Deal is on the side of not breaking the class existence of individuals, but keeping the class structure alive and well, once a working class always a working class, in a world where your own creative talents are turned against you as more inequality, the final outcome of the New Deal made with the 1%.
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Thom Hartman, the dismalest commentator on Youtube and the one most capable of discussing what should the working class do when capitalism collapses? The other Youtubers are middle class head cases with some or enough money to last longer than the working class in a crisis, when basic necessities are too expensive they rot on the shelves for not selling at normal prices, what do working people do? When oil and heat, electricity, and food are stored and locked up by their owners; even the middle class will make choices between spending their money on food or fuel, all goods and services depend on money for their consumption and the despotic nature of prices hits working people first to be deprived of these necessities--- first in line to be empty handed of money, cashless desperate creatures. Doesn't Thom et al have an obligation to humanity to come up with a bona fide answer, a plan to get the economy up and running again for these people? Of course he doesn't but he can. It is not enough to present a doom and gloom scenario without a discussion of what can and by whom, about what ought to be done? The alternative to violence, mass looting inciting the State to defend private property. Do people in this media have a responsibility in addressing this moral dilemma capitalism imposes on the working class? We know what the money owners and the owners of finance wealth will do, lock everything up and evacuate the country, where their capital is already stashed outside the US. What will happen is less likely to follow the logic of what should happen. Trump is likely to go against the logic of what should happen such as repeating what Obama did with TARP, by resuscitating the banks with an infusion of capital the banks depends on. Feds print more cash. All this does is make worse the despotism of prices against the changes in production. Favoring tariffs and protectionism against China, Trump will likely make China unload US debt no other capitalist nation will fund. In addition to Trump's proclivity to over produce in luxury goods and increase his own individual consumption, the same as what caused the Trump empire collapse in the 1990's. In the immediate aftermath of the collapse there will be no capital to invest in jobs and the working class is conditionally out of work. No work here, there, everywhere won't sink in until a year later that it is a final condition. Production comes to a standstill; what political program is going to rectify this contradiction, a neoliberal one? Of course not! People either work to live or die from the absence of work under capitalism. It is natural for a human body to be used by its possessor as a tool and be working to stay bright, healthy, ingenious. The relations of work will be the subject of the new economic plan. In the post-collapse period, all people will work the necessary amount of time needed to live. This imperative will be met with resistance from the private interests in production. All workers will want to de-privatize production and freeing science from its enslavement to capital while the owners of production simply close all places where the necessities are made. In the case of the 1990's the decade of capital flight, this means the factories outside the US stop working. This class is not likely to acquiesce with the plan of the workers to free themselves from having to be sellers to make a living to re-industrialize America. The collapse also effectively destroys the quintessential relationship of capitalism, the buying and selling of labor-power. The owners of money are not buying labor-power. The workers are going to have to take over the industries that are still here and build a new society with what they have. With a state behind the owners of money the workers are going to have to defend their actions unless the owners peacefully de-privatize production. In many ways, American working people are in the limelight coming on to the historic stage for the first time in history after the Russians had before them and the Parisian workers before the Russians and the slaves led by Sparticus before the Parisian workers. If the world community of modern workers do not come up with a plan for a new world economy built on cooperation the species will perish and there is no movie plot better than this movie when the ordinary person is dead center carrying out the extraordinary task of saving humanity from its stupid side of the Self, the Trump side et al. Revolutions are healthy thing, they occur every so often in human history and bring into the world a baby called communism based on industrial international cooperation. For the first time mankind is not an social animal like Trump and Co., but a species with an acute sense of being part of a human community and thus a new being.
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Except for the fact that 6,726 views and 67 comments constitutes a concerned audience searching for answers. We do not live in planned economy, the future is uncertain, and people do find that they have no control over their destinies under capitalism. It be great if all industries related to each other through cooperatives, and not relate to each through market prices. Mr. Wolf seems to believe cooperatives and capitalist enterprises can exist side by side, and the latter has no intention of devouring the former. Cooperatives are a closed economic system, they produce for themselves and sell not for greater market share like capitalists enterprises do for full market control, does not appear to be factor in his perspective. In reality without a strong state to restrain capitalist expansion and economic formations of monopolies from occurring in the market, cooperatives are doomed! Conserving oil is no longer a priority in the White House is how commercial media reports to the Public the White House has lifted all EPA regulations for the extraction industries. Car makers are not going to reduce their standard of emissions, in fact, higher fuel mileage vehicles will appear in the market, given it is a selling point the public wants. This alliance between State and Big Oil is for another type of consumer, the military. A military with its own fuel supply.
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History is loaded with the growth of small common bodies existing alongside 'higher unities' as in oligarchs, lords and kings, presidents. Instead of a Congress, America has a politbureau next to an executive king in alliance with Big Industry against the US public.
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It would be great that the alliance of the five nations be broken up. UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand, Israel, are not united because they are anglo Engish speaking countries. They are united because thay have an affinity with each other as settler nations in their founding. They colonized and settled countries with inhabitants by force and genocide. Historically, they rationalized and justified their actions against each other making the holocaust of indigenous people a non-history. These are the five most racist nations on earth with the most racist governments superimposed on lands originally belonging to people there long before they arrived. In effect, from a historically natural standpoint they are a people without a history, a people that faced rejection for their religion, a people that had no homeland in Europe or anywhere else. They were a people without a country, culture or society. Everything they produced arises not form a natural historical standpoint but from a super imposed idea on a foreign land. They are all foreigners. These are people who knew when they left Europe there was no returning to Europe and whatever they were to encounter in the new lands they settled they would forcibly turn it into a vision of home which came from one source, the Bible. They occupy these lands to this day, by force, the only language they know.
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