Youtube comments of DXR (@MrDXRamirez).

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  73. The decade of the 90s was the only period of prosperity in America after the last period of prosperity in the decade of the 50s. Between the 90s and now its hell on Earth. There has not been a peaceful prosperous future for the last 25 years in the west for nations beyond their own individual wealthy elites since the start of the Iraq invasion. Perpetual war, these people are divorced from the real world. In the last 20 years never mind the last 25 or 30, we saw the rise of the Yellow Vest movement in France, we saw Brexit, a break away vote from the EU, we saw Greece get economically strangled, we saw drought, famine, climate disasters, recession in all of the European economies, a Great Recession bigger than the Great Depression of the 30s, a Pandemic, we saw the rise of digital currency as a way of not using the Dollar for trade and commerce, and so much more has happened, not to mention western allies abandoned in Afghanistan. We saw Russia bogged down by extremists receiving guns and money from Congress as a matter of policy among Congressional senators and to the average American for losing jobs of no fault of their own, a measly check. We saw riots in every city. Children shot in the crossfire of civil society falling prey to police violence and overkill. We saw barbarism in America...2 million elderly dead from COVID and Nursing Home disasters. We are in an inflation. These elites won’t even do what Nixon did to curb inflation. Why should I believe Elites presiding over the last 20 years will bring peace and prosperity in the next 20 years? You’d have to be a psychotic like they to claim they are worthy of my vote in the next round of elections, assuming election are not rigged, another thing we saw under their watch. We saw the rise of Donald Trump as an expression of how much the elites are despised by the 74 million Americans. Now a food shortage in a country that has ample food. They are not sincere on the words they speak. When they get into power the first entity to get the appropriation of the nation’s wealth is the military, year in and year out, as the only program worthy of government funding tells you something about who they are.
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  90. The way the Yalta Conference in Crimea, was taught in American history books framed the conference as a meeting of allies in the defeat of fascism. Nazism in Germany and fascism in Japan, I remember reading the chapter still present in my mind 55 years later the picture of FDR, Stalin and Churchill seated together in Yalta. The story was never written as a process of capitalist expansion into the Middle East giving concession to the Soviet Union which became the republics left to fend for themselves when the USSR fell in 1989, they became embattled with their own internal oppositions as in Ukraine, Latvia, Estonia, Balkans and so on. The history books told the story wrong as we see 80 years later the socialist economies pushing western capitalism back and the foreign policies of FDR and Churchill after the war that were carried over barbarously by Bush in Iraq than Clinton, Obama, except Trump the bump in the road that tipped the carriage of its rails, the aged Biden cannot put the cart back on its tracks. It becomes more clear that the bump in the road would not had happened if the American establishment acknowledged its own failures but it is clear why they cannot admit they were wrong. They did too much wrong to the American people and the people of the Middle East, they did what England did to India in the Middle East. They invested their capital into mining and drilling at the expense of their own industrial growth and progress. The wrong is on the order of criminally wrong. The economies of developing nations have caught up to the productive agency of the western powers. The British are still unable to grapple with the fact that they are no longer an imperial power would influence the US in the same negative way that it too is still a power controlling the affairs of the world when it is not. Living a false reality at the expense of the well being of their own neglected nations and the planet presents the problem of hubris, arrogance, lies, deception, and a fierce tendency to preserve what is lost while conditions multiply into worse shape for a majority of Americans, that now something has to be done to change the polices of the US nationally and internationally.
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  93. Scientists have been warning us that new pathogens and viruses will come with the rise in temperature of the planet. We can expect to see virus 20, 21, 22, 23, etc., each one stronger than the previous strain until we reforest the planet and restore nature back to health. Human civilization is simply not equipped to handle the speed with which new strains emerge from animals if their ecology is destroyed by human civilization. China proved, no matter how draconian the west thinks of its methods, tht socialism can handle an epidemic. The numbers do not lie. Can it be perfected, of course, trial and error a socialist system operates on a general interest that it can learn. I don't think the left cannot take the high road on this matter against the right. Since the politics of a capitalist society creates two kinds of politicians. The left suppresses human progress when it is in power and the right when it is in power preserves the economic order. France under a socialist government suppressed, America under a capitalist administration pumps money into a system to preserve it. The ecology of animal life does not discriminate between who is holier than thou on the question of human habitation, ecology and public health. Factory farming and the pet industry is only one aspect of the big picture. The relationship of war to ecology and the passing of bacteria and pathogens from the dead to living humans is one aspect of the big picture. Oil drilling and excavation is an aspect of the total picture. Deforestation is another aspect. Put all together the health of the planet declines. The uneven development of human habitation, as it is leaves one side of the planet completely deforested and the other side of the planet with a concentration of wildlife has less forestation brings animals into closer contact with humans. A collapse in the health of the planet is a driver of new pathogens and viruses. How we work, live and eat (habitation) passing pathogens from animal to humans through family, industry and urban development for 7.7 billion people, consequently, alters our public health, ecology, and industry. If you listen to American capitalists, they would tell you if the government gave money to people why would they go to work? Work is the golden goose laying golden eggs. A worker has no value because the worker creates value. Capitalist societies cannot respond the way a socialist society like China can respond to quell a dangerous and fatal virus for its stops the golden eggs. Socialist societies have the ability to stop production (economy) and not have the effect of a crisis in the same way capitalist societies experience a crisis. If you stop production and circulation in China it is not going to disrupt the economy from functioning but it will affect the social order and this mainly for fear of losing political power. In the US and the EU the impact cripples both spheres of economic activity, our social lives and the economy. And this also bears a fear that is probably on the forefront of losing political power. But in the US and EU if production is stopped surplus value cannot be realized and the entire social order falls to pieces, which is the reason most American capitalists would be opposed to Trump's allocation of money to the 70 million non-essential workers that make this economy run. Capitalist are heavily dependent on workers producing the value they accumulate. The supply chain must keep going for the supply chain is the gravy train. Furthermore, because the supply chain is the gravy train for capitalists what the government considers a non-essential worker is to a capitalist an 'essential' worker and a contradiction arises where the capitalists is antoagonistic to the government causing social conflicts and chaos, antipathy, even anarchy. A worker is torn, pushed and pulled by two sides interfering with the work of clearing a pandemic. China is in a position to help Italy, send doctors and also provide the technique that worked to reduce the viral epidemic. There is no soft way to interpret the inherent failure of the American system of its delayed response to crisis. To the contrary, the US continues to sanction other nations which cripples their ability to cope with the disease. The politics perpetuates the onsluaght of the next strain unknown to science emerges. Deforestation, damage to the ecology, uneven economic development across the planet, and our public health, i.e., poverty, homelessness continue to threaten our existence because of this inherent contradiction of the economic order and damaging effect on people when the supply chain by every means possible must continue.
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  125. Yes, ---Rude and disrespectful if this be true...I heard laughter female and male @ 2:08 from the studio while the reporter on the street made important comments relative to economic rural development outside of the cities. “Land grabbers”, in short, economic theft from its original owners by real estate and land developers, could be mining companies too that want the land, and the population once on the land are separated from it travel into the cities doubling the population size...creating an urban working class in the cities is pretty serious from many standpoints. It opens up the gates to flooding the job market with hungry new arrivals and for employers the price they pay out in wages just got cheaper for them. Hungry people know how to stretch out a meal to save a buck. But hiring for less comes with a heavy price for society. Employers can take in more with increases in productivity exhausting working people and this is reflected in a loss of 5% productivity and GDP is a substantial decrease of the total pie. The climate changes won’t permit exploiting productivity increases without a breakdown in society. Yet it is done...heading us into disaster...terminal poverty, low birth rate, shorter lifespan, social dis-unification and social alienation are not good for army. Napoleon taught us that lesson. Hotter climate is serious for the military, troops dehydrate from over exertion and die easier. The land that could be farmable is used for military bases is bad news for the society suffering a higher incidence of over exertion...all around this is a catastrophe for the human race for whatever that society contributes to the world market by way of its products...we saw a 15% drop in grain exports from Ukraine and the war there is about to enter into an escalation with newly arrived patriot Missiles from the US. None of this is looking positive for the immediate future or for the long term which is why the ethical position is to end and take a stand against the forever wars of America’s national security elite.
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  154. Place to begin to push is in Kentucky, watching the news of the death toll of the tornado a CEO was being interviewed. Its intimidating to be on camera when that is not your job. The most important words the CEO made in this interview was: “None of us are prepared for this.” Its common parlance to say prayers and hearts are with the families. But that is not enough! Prayers might change Jeff Bezos’s behavior but I doubt it. Factory owners may be nice people but in emergency situations their role in production should end right there. The slow to no response Amazon made to not release their workers is shameless negligence, and other small warehouse and factory owners also did not heed the National weather warnings. This is not what I call a ’loving’ characteristic of a people who care for one another. The working people in those workplaces are not objects that can go to cinders with the other objects in the factory or a warehouse. Die in a collapse, explosion or fire without emotion, be treated like objects. This was the point the Triangle Shirt Waist Factory Tragedy of 1911. One hundred and ten workers working overnight in a warehouse factory to fulfill Christmas toys was not as important as getting out of there before tornados come! The owners prove by their own actions that a private interest impedes rational decision making. They cannot act responsibly. Odd thing; it was all not just one employer/owner acted the same. You can’t put your life in their hands is the issue. Prayers and condolences are not a good defense against future tornado storms. Society has to make a real decision about production in general. Either owners have free reign over production and tragic yet avoidable events like this happen, or the workers have control over warehouse and factory operations and enact their own emergency evacuations. Because, 1., remote control over work and workplace by long distance management is a failure and 2., direct control by the owners is a failure of over-efficiency. And 3., using the government to enforce owners and workers to do as told is a failure. Who are i a better position to regulate production are the participants, the Workers are in the best position to decide when Christmas presents can get wrapped, or when the mustard and candles get made, not the clock and not government.
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  177. Over one hour despite the presence of heavy force. This against one single armed 18 year old is a glaring example of decay, collapse, death, of a social system. The process of disintegration of a social system never looks like a Hollywood disaster film, it spreads over a period of time and aspects of the society begins to lose purpose, relevance, use. Violence itself is an action, a verb, its not a physical force until it is set into motion and comes into contact with a physical object than it becomes a noun. Violence as a force can be controlled. It can be contained like a bomb, or dynamite contains the potential for an explosion. Violence in its objective form appears in many forms. Violence appears in the form of a person and in the form of an institution. The institution that embodies violence in latent and controlled form in society is the institution that is the Pentagon and its subsidiary enforcement agencies, the Police. The high level of efficiency in a decaying society appears as inefficiency in practical life. Cops are useless, lost purpose, and relevance from the top down. Violence has an official and formal appearance in society and it has its own purveyor of violence. Violence is also a commodity, a thing that by its properties satisfies a want of the rulers, therefore, it contains abstract labor like all commodities and compares its value against the time it takes to make some other commodity, and it has a representative owner of violence, acquired by means of a purchase, that is also a sale. The sale contains the profit the purchasing does not. The Pentagon expects a profit from the sale to other nation buyers a quid pro quo, and its subsidiary law enforcement agencies expect from society something in return. Obedience. The Pentagon is in the business of violence by means of war. As an institution the Pentagon is the largest merchant of violence in the world. Violence is its primary product. Violence gets distributed throughout the society in the material form of weapons and makes its way back to the society from which the violence came. Violence circulates through society the way money circulates through the market or blood circulates through the body of mammals. The coordinated and planned mass walk out of the students responding to this event is what the workers of all the gun manufacturers have to do against what their own union leadership would tell them, as an action against the violence. Stop the production of arms and let the whole society fall right in step behind you.
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  234. Yes, I am wondering if this stage is the stage in which the policies of Washington are turned against them, if the weapons they use to retain power are now working against them? The concentration of trade and manufacturing in one country as a policy are now killing capitalism and the political parties because the rest of the world no longer has to tolerate it! If this be the case the bourgeois classes in American society could be just as divided as the bourgeois classes in Venezuela are presently, and this is an opportunity for a general movement to step in and take power. What happens after power is taken is the hard part. Holding on to power is worrisome, because as soon as the working class takes power the counter-revolution against it is set into motion from all sides. The bourgeois classes through their economic power use their right to not sell and not buy, close down the company, or shut off the power, and the political state uses its right to take emergency measures shutting down it services to society, mostly through the DMV and modifying Traffic Safety Laws prosecutorial measures against leaders and organizations of the working class are taken. The media launches a 24/7 propaganda blitz and black outs, to further isolate the working class, and finally, a coup d'etat in the works installs a hatchet man.  We can learn from the Bolivarian revolution that the working class began immediately creating new distribution systems of the necessities of life to make themselves independent of the bourgeois order of distribution and then organized small farmers and truckers into co-ops while the urban working classes turned their homes into producing centers for real material needs. First order of the day in the life of a revolution is that you cannot change society on an empty stomach!
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  235. The problem here is that military spending and investment produces less wealth for societies. Destruction allows for a fresh start in the accumulation of capital. New roads, buildings, schools, hospitals, factories, etc. that the damaged ruined country can rebuild and be a major consumer for the nation over productive of its own products and in desperate need of new markets. Destruction is a military’s main function for capitalist economies to create wealth; regime change is the political name for the destruction in whatever country a military is active. Lives are killed in war. Young, old, un-borns, orphans, lives are permanently damaged in the process that destroys for capitalism to thrive and generations suffer long term trauma impacting the development of the human species as a whole. All militaries reaching the point of nucelar deterrence are the same. A high cost to maintain, the risks, the slow return on investment, a high rate of dependency; if you shut down half the number of America’s military bases the US economy would shrink, production would come to a standstill and a work force reduced from 155 million to 70 million is how dependent Americans are on the military for their jobs. There would be a remarkable peace dividend that would re-employ that workforce and solve the problem from the cut in the military but that peace dividend would be fought out in a protracted struggle by vested interests in keeping the war machine going. Wealth is generated through employment is the capitalism of today as it has always been from its beginnings, only now capitalism in America is over productive that destruction becomes a regular part of its business cycle or these 155 million by attrition are out of a job. Each generation outside of the US has to rebuild what was destroyed by America’s military is good for all industries inside the US who need to employ workers who are productive of profit ...so when people say they are strong and will rebuild that’s money in the bank for Capital.
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  261. 'Yellow Jackets"? He means 'yellow vests' a color that symbolizes being seen after decades of living unseen and forgotten under neoliberalism. In the states these would be federal and state employees, two employee groups divided by two authorities.  Whereas in France it is one employee group divided by one national authority wearing the vests. Social revolutions cannot begin with themselves before they have not stripped off all superstition in regard to the past.  Trump and the whole right wing in America are the past to be stripped of their patriarchy.  Tragically, the Democrats are a patriarchy too! People look to past world history in order to drug themselves concerning their own content.  The social order presents phrases ignoring the real content of this revolution. The here and now, becomes more pressing, the content of life goes beyond the phrases of the old order. American society developed a new content for itself in a revolution centered in the family and in the home, it seems the state returned to its oldest form, to the shamelessly simple domination of the the gun and the cowl rather than to be a tool for this revolution. The Trumps are turning their back on the needs of this new family social structure in society. Trump was the coup de main for white working people who threw at the Democrats an unexpected stroke in the presidential election of 2016, they now give themselves over to the coup de tete of a rash Trump. Easy come, easy go. Meanwhile the interval of time has not passed by unused.  The unrecognized revolution in the household is ripe for another eruption of social lava, a second phase of this revolution.
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  349.  @uttaradit2  True, Marx is always great therapy. But there is an upside. People should recognize that constitutional governments such as that of the EU and the US are legal institutions even beneath the veneer of being composed of individuals. Our government is not a social government composed of individuals. The changes being made in society are coming from the changes in the way work is carried out in society.  People will be working from home and those industries where jobs cannot be performed at home will go out of business.  History suppresses certain branches of industry as it also promotes the development of new ones.  China builds hospitals in less than two weeks is an example of a government that is not a constitutional republic but one that is a social institution responding to social needs in a proactive manner. Instead of spending resources on defense because of national conflicts, government can spend resources on meeting human needs. When work and society are transformed, the family is transformed, requiring a transformation of government to become a central organizer and planner to have all the needs in society met. Humanity arrives at the 21st century and 2020 is that transitional moment that breaks away all the things of the 19th century we still use today. This new way of work will call into question the need for the old economy. Why do you need a stock market or a central bank, or a boss? Why will we need school boards determining school taxes when school buildings are unnecessary when all one needs WiFi and a lap top to educate children all over the world? Why do we even need money to represent working time when work is no longer used to make goods for exchange? Why the need to retain all the things the old economy needed before the virus when the virus has changed the way we work and live giving birth to a new economy? From the changes in work and family our needs will change and in turn, the needs change our products as we become more accustomed to finding meaning in our new family arrangements, less divorce, less juvenile delinquency, less suicide, less depression, less loneliness. With less of the present-day maladies in society there is less of a need for massive military and police institutions expenditures. The major focus will be agriculture, the area of human activity vital to human survival. Search for a better life comes to an end. No more mass migration for societies ravaged by war the need to get them re-oriented to the new way of life the new international mission. Why will we need nuclear weapons if societies are finding more contentment at home? I see many benefits to this crisis. Our fears are really about losing the old way of life we have become accustomed to living. The second benefit to this virus is the environmental change, improving nature as it gets a chance to recover from human damage. Less to no fossil fuel emissions, less chances of infestation, disease and a strengthening of the human body's immune system through the increase of oxygen in our atmosphere and as we know from the paleontological record a greater diversity of life, and a general slowing down of climate change and oceans rising.
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  351. So far in the history of the United States electoral system the two parties in competition with each other have only alternated power between them and had made no major advancements in the progress of society since the origins of the military industrial complex. The weaponization of the intelligence community in the Sean Hannity clip used in this episode is a reference he makes to the military industrial complex opposing Trump by the Democrats. The implication is the power of the military intelligence community is in the hands of the president until he is impeached than it falls over to the Democrats. One can argue that from 1955 to 1975 the transfer of power from one hand to another took four then 8 years is shortening by the over politicization of the intelligence community, not exactly the same as being weaponized as Hannity puts it. America's military generals were once citizens and former civilians in uniform serving their country they are now political entities choosing who they want to work with as president and through the two parties the Joint Chiefs have a bigger hand in selecting the candidate to lead the American workforce either into battle the factories or the furnaces depending on what conditions come up. They choose who best meets their needs not those of society's needs.  The fact that the military would pay $300 dollars for a hammer is an old story, a small illustration and pertinent fact that the federal budget and accounting office of the government has no clue, no idea, NADA, of how much of the nation's wealth (taxes) gets spent on income and gets spent on living labor-power. This being the case every other statistic the government produces is inaccurate and things are a lot worse than they appear. There is no equal proportion of allocation of labor to the needs of American society in the US, its all regulated by the market. Pension funds are unpaid and defunded upon time to collect and the distance between what we as a society need and what we can produce is so wide that longer periods of growth are needed for someone to get out of their parent's basement and into a home increasing their savings in financial instruments other than home equity. America in the shape that it is in now is a miserable country as a result of the transferring of power, where one might make gains and the other will roll them back, is now a situation where the military fully dominates the whole political apparatus. Its almost better if there were no impeachment clause at all. The military structure consuming much its natural and social wealth to the point of ruin can be de-politicized from the political arena completely and be returned to its original function as serving the country without having the interference of a Congress meddle into the affairs of its citizens with an impeachment that ends up preserving a national military establishment harming the citizen(s) A political system that installs a new leader among a very narrow band of individuals worse than the old one.
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  383. Admittedly, the Spanish government's handling of the situation of this secessionist vote shows much of how authoritarian regimes still haunt modern Europe. This fiasco is a case of two wrongs do not make a right. Nationalism was what devastated Europe and nationalism in Europe benefited the US in its rise to power through world war than regional wars and national wars still carried on today and much of the reason the state of the world is in its present condition of continual social upheaval is because of war. In the context of war, a move toward independence as a state or country will always act for itself. Selfish interests had resulted in what we have seen from the past in Europe an explosion of rivalries breaking out into imperial wars that already existed in the economic sphere between states manifested themselves in tensions and ultimately war between nation states. Secessionists want to break away from having to pay taxes to Spain and through Spain pay the EU central bank. This burden is practically all on the backs of all working people in Europe not just the secessionists leading this independence. The right action is to be an internationalist if you are worker. The wrong state of mind is to be a nationalists secessionist as a worker because you are helping them pay the least taxes and doing nothing for yourself. Who pays the most tax in Catalonia is most likely the working classes eager to side with a power that can reduce its greater burden of taxation but the clamor to secede from Spain comes from a Catalonian's rich and powerful manufacturing class who carry the lightest burden of taxes on a per capita basis! You should expect to see more tricks that conceal growing economic inequality in Europe and America. Catalonian people had been taken under the sway of old ideas and its manufacturing class are choosing to turn their backs on the whole of the working masses because they can make money with money in the financial sector and hide that money off shore. The nonsense about national boundaries and borders, distinguishing themselves with a national cultural identity from the rest of Spain, and a national language, blah, blah, blah, it is really about getting out from under Spanish jurisdiction to avoid tribute--its as if the rise of fascism in Europe is starting anew but in the form of a which fascism do you prefer the Spanish or Catalonian variety? The Spanish PM and Royal Crown avoid taxes. All the transnational corporations regardless of national origin avoid taxes through European institutions and the governments reducing their share of taxes facilitate this process. Why encourage this when you can stop it!
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  384. This channel relies on the Col. for opinion heavily don't they? He's great but the there is a real need to get away from relying on one voice and one perspective. Personally, I applaud Moon and Kim, and I do agree the neocons will sabotage it. The neocons are incapable of peace on terms and conditions made by other nations and have a long history of going into treaties and truces to violate them later on. The bigger picture is history itself, the rise of Asia and China and Russia superseding the US as an economic power. All nations make decisions based on domestic considerations because all nations are buyers and sellers. Competition is universal, each and all nations and individual capitals seek to buy cheap, this helps their indigenous industries to sell dear yet below the social average price, helps their indigenous industries and the working people employed in this industries become more developed and middle class. All through the 1980's the US made a ton of profits and never re-invested into its industries. The fault of the working man, they watched it happen and did nothing. All the manufacturing plants simply deteriorated. Underutilization of capacity up by 60% of all industries gone! These were the choices corporations made, the politicians only helped them, to diversify into stocks, bonds, securities and foreign currency and export production where labor was cheaper. The political world failed in that they could have and should have protected the US working class by prohibiting the flight of capital like France and Germany do. The US happens to be in a weak position by its own failures, in that Ford can't make a car cheaper than other car makers, not able to sell dear and make profits, in foreign markets. Alcoa cannot compete alongside foreign steel, aluminum, etc., therefore, John Deere can't sell its tractors, GM, against Mitsubishi, Dawoe. American business enterprise needs every tool in the book, sanctions on nations, a tax on imports to compete, and a tax break to expand GDP beyond 2.2% by resurrecting this dead plants Trump calls the infrastructure and what we, mistakingly, think he means roads and bridges. That do need repair. When you look at how endangered the American oil industry is in relation to the oil bearing nations becoming more industrialized the policy of conquest makes perfect sense. Fortunately, the rise of solar and wind power, will sequester Big Oil and fade away the neocons to their political graves but not without a fight for Big Oil's life, the blood of the military industrial complex. The colonel might be over simplifying the political world as overly mistrusting of the other side's politics at the expense of the impact of the economic forces impacting social changes in world trade and the world market motivating certain actors on the world stage to bring a close to American imperialism.
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  437. I think if Americans really think about this they will find that the growth of monopoly capitalism, first of all, comes from the increasing number of workers under the control of a 500 multinational corporations. One corporation commands a labor force of thousands of people, 500 of them control millions of workers and this fact, gives rise to the need for a specific type of authority unique to all history. Monopoly capitalism is praised for promoting the productive forces for the species is the positive side of this trend. The downside is that the increasing number of workers falling under the control of a few monopoly corporations calls for the need of a directing authority in order to exploit the individual labor-force(s) under their command for greater amounts of surplus-value. In short, the productive forces of the corporations do not advance the working classes, to the contrary, it is for the benefit of the monopoly corporations that their success hinges on the use of science and technology to win over the cooperation of the workers. To make them worker longer and produce higher output technology must make work lighter, easier, less physically strenuous without lengthening the work day from 8 hours to 12 hours legally. As workers resist this trend the entire realm of monopoly corporations organize themselves in preparation of what they know will be a confrontation is one point. I think this is what we are seeing in the Trump-Putin affair a merger of American and Russian multi-national corporations. 2020 is a turning point, a do or die election for the working classes. Put another way, if the workers had political representatives in Congress on their side the anti-Trust laws would have been enforced and the mergers and joint-ventures between Russia and US corporations would cease. But as Congress is moving in the opposite direction against the American worker and Putin against the Russian workers a confrontation between labor and capitalism is inevitable.
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  452.  @HeresMyView  I read your reply to my question on Trump's attitude toward China as in part socialist, in part not socialist. A contradiction or a a Hybrid, which depends on history.  I am not surprised he got elected. I don't feel you got your hooks reeling in the historical problem. It getting harder and harder for the GOP establishment to get elected. The GOP is running out of fake issues to hang on to the religious vote and the general vote. Pretty soon a civil war can emerge out of a political war. This is not good news for China.  The new contradiction that emerges for the primary 1% constuency the GOP represents is another FDR administration in China. Socialist planning is the antithesis of unbridled capitalism that a good deal of China's workforce will serve a standing military for the party. We saw this happen to Russia, the back of the Soviet Union was broken by constant military defense spending at the expense of the general laboring population's development both in America and in Russia in an arms race. 1991 was a success story for the GOP. Russia has a difficult time with internal problems today as a consequence of restoring capitalism in Russia. Last May Day, the demonstrations were large and Putin called the police. Things are not fine. No New Taxes, Deregulations, Crime Bill, as the underlying oath in the GOP, is supposed to cement among three constituents, evangelicals, blue collar working class, the industrial and financial 1% establishment, a Unity. It is the last group who the first and second constituent group must serve if any of them win a presidency. The first two constituents will always be wrestling with certain actions acting as a president which contradict its own general base and the nation. Serving the needs of the GOP establishment will wear out the patience we see in Pence in relation to the CCCP. So far the blue collar base has produced no one better than Trump who can succeed him. The GOP establishment has to lie to its constiuencies and to the general public to win an election. For this reason it can never make a commitment to anything interest outside of itw own. The establishment must make the interests of its other constituents secondary to its own private interest through coercion.  As the new democrats come of age and become a majority, China will have to deal with a left regarding China as a socialist failure. Common to our three largest economies and nations are three dark histories they each bear on their conscience which is why I claimed I don't think you have a grip on the historical. History is the interaction of two forms of coonsciosness both subjective and objective. The Cultural Revolution of China, the Stalinist Period in Russia, Slavery in the United States, will never stop motivating our societies to stop acting out barbaric behavior toward each other until these atrocities are reckoned with in a very real and sincere way.
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  492. The Catalonian bourgeoisie are just as bad as the republicans in America who act for their rich and do not want any of their profits to contribute to society but are, in turn, leeching off society like parasites on the subsidies given to the business community through the instrumentality of the government and the average American supports that idea... just like the average Catalonian supports the same idea, 'independence' synonymous to 'tax cuts', frees the business community of contributing to society, no responsibility to the environment their corporations destroy, or to the people who work for them, and to the needs of the societies they live in, its infrastructure, its military. This is the most arrogant display of the kind of rich social classes the world is expected to tolerate and it extends from New York to Dubai and across the globe that this attitude prevails among the super rich. Why the average person would support their agenda is a result of trickery by its media sources. Ignorance on the part of the average person confusing social interests as the same with private interests of the super rich is pure social conditioning. Supporting the hard line action in Madrid is down right reactionary for the average person. The real wants of Spaniards and the Catalonians is being used as a way of evading and/or cutting taxes for the rich. To support that agenda in whatever form it appears is shear class betrayal. The average person is being shammed into carrying the greater burden of taxation for all the things I mentioned above. The situation will become violent because the origin and history of the Spanish government is violence. That is all they know.
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  496. My opinion: The plea to give health care to part time workers is a dead plea when health care costs are driven up the ‘do or die’ profit system of private health insurance companies in the business of disease as health care. The workers in general are divided as individual groups under individual employers destroys the solidarity that would normally develop as workers thought as one generic category. Everyone is a worker like it or not but not all employers are like everyone, like it or not. Employers get premium health care and workers do not generates the social inequality that serves to keep wages low. The matter gets complicated but the effect is a separation from your fellow compadre. Striking for self-fish reasons when all labor is cheated defies the concept of solidarity. Students walked out in solidarity of the part time workers is the correct course of action to take. They strike to add more power to the strike of the part time professors. Cooperation among all workers is key and central to success. If one is going to strike the strike ought to be about all workers getting out from under the system employers created for themselves at the expense of workers generally. Workers are more worthy of respect and dignity but the system has them behaving like bird hatchlings in a nest screeching for the mother bird feed them bits at a time. Their treatment of workers is un-dignifying as not worthy of the same class of treatment employers rips society into a luxury healthcare system for them and illness and maltreatment for workers. If not for this cancer would be a disease of the past.
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  502. Morsi died at 68 behind bars. A miltary state dominates Egyptian society. History shows that Morsi was more democratic. One of the many authoritarian regimes in the world today exercising protectionism is Egypt. Not many products coming into the US from Egypt. Its GDP is extracted from its working population through military patriarchism and nepotism. Trump cuts aid to Central America, and the sociological effect is an increase of the exodus into Mexico at the southern border. This stresses Mexico to its maximum. The deployment and expense of the operation to hold back migrants is the wrong approach for the Obrador administration. Rejection of migrants is too costly that taxing the rich in Mexico would become an option. But having an anti-tax opposition party on his hands is not what he or the country needs. The other choice for Obrador is to do what ancient Rome did before its decline and the cause of its decline was when it stopped incorporating other tribes into the city of Rome. Incorporation made Rome great as immigrants brought their own skills and trade with them that cities in Mexico can become integrative meccas for something really great in Mexico. It could lead to a situation where the tax paying public can enoy the luxury of less taxes the rich enjoy because of the incoming rise of new markets and industries immigrants bring with them. This would be a direct blow to Washington in that its policies of kicking people out is a weakness for Americans becomes a strength when migrants settle and begin production of some kind then Mexico can incorporate them into society. .
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  515. The FEMA director Peter Gaynor commands 14,000 employees, several huge federal warehouses that can fill three aircraft carriers stocked with material of all types from A to Z, and 13 government agencies. In short FEMA is a standing army and compared to the US military it is small. The military is a force of 475,000 soldiers and dwarfing the size of personnel of the military is a 1 million man police force in law enforcement all equipped as we have seen on occasion when called out to quell riots full battle regalia. The federal government, therefore, has three huge standing armies. The military has at least the same material but four times the amount of all nations combined, that is 127 nations! This is what makes the US an empire. FEMA alone could outfit the entire US with a hospital system in every state making our ordinary hospital system with all its combined resources the size of the state of New Jersey and with that shrinking, overwhelmed, reduced to the size of Rhode Island. The 14,000 employees include experts of all types, engineers, doctors, medical emergency and police, workers and the army Corp of engineers. FEMA could produce material and distribute material. The production of ventilators is a piece of cake if they do not already have them stocked which they do. The society I envision is one where the needs of all citizens can be met for three generations spanning 100 years going forward and a reduced work week from 40 hours per work of a workforce of 133 million people to 20 hours per week for all 334 million and not put a dent in the quantity of material and resources the federal government commands. To give you some proof of one small fraction of this productive power see Big Bertha boring the tunnel under Seattle Washington. One machine, a giant drill is run by four operators at the helm the whole tunnel project 2 miles long employs a workforce of 800 workers. In fact, of all the parts of the society as a whole the Public has the least down to a bare minimum hand to mouth existence from lack of its rightful share of the material wealth and resources its high level of productivity creates. In my view, the priority that makes the federal government insist the Public rely on the private sector for all its needs is its persistence to be a world empire which in this day and age is doing more harm to the planet and the species as a whole. This epidemic makes me question three things about America in order that trust be restored (1) capitalism or the government's reliance on the private sector, (2) ecology and economic inequality in society, (3) public health.
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  530. The West is headed toward a collapse of the four rudimentary actions the make up the totality for economic survival. If the people do not abandon their own economic fallacies they will never develop into higher form of human economic and social organization than capitalism. A glaring example of a society eroding the four members group actions, i.e., production-consumption-exchange-distribution, is the United States. In that country, the owners of money control the totality and capital operates and survives through exchange and distribution by destroying other capitals. Exchange and distribution are highly developed while production and consumption are starved of capital and degenerate for lack of development. When the economic order stops functioning the owners of money will leave the country left in state of chaos. Production does not determine consumption in the American system, rather, its the opposite, the other departments of the totality of the economy remain in the form of private property that in order to get the two parts working again, i.e., production and consumption, the people will have to assume full power of the State to access the factories and offices, mines, tunnels, bridges, land, rivers, lakes and canals, drilling and excavation facilities, in short, occupy the total infrastructure to get them working again. As more an more of production and consumption stop functioning or staggers like an alcoholic at hight toxic levels, chipping away at the infrastructure and driving up costs, because consumption determines production, nothing short of a complete revolution is necessary. Survival of the society is barely achieved by the mindset of the owners of money that, a definite amount of production determines a definite amount of exchange in the US for their exclusive individual consumption. Every economic system starts out with production and ends up with production - production in and for itself can only get them running again, is the new principal for this revolution. The question should capital be the starting point of production and exchange and the result of production or should the primary participants who comprise the totality, be the starting point themselves? The main activity that bears life to the human species and for the social order as a whole, is production not exchange.
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  555. Its because employers are highly sensitive to any form of worker democracy, socialism or communism and they know that those systems are far more constructive to people in general and would deprive them of making a luxurious profit off the labor of others. They want American workers to be ruled by them, coddled. Spoiled, anything but be in control of industry and commerce. They know that those systems are not anti-property but are anti-private property. They know they have to have the US Military on the side to crush anywhere in the world where workers make progress in their own lives. There is no other reason to bear such disdain for workers. They know that they must have a government that retards, slows down, rejects, and resists any true human progress and every agency i the government they control functions for them not “Us”. One day what I am saying will make you realize that all these speculations made by you and others won’t any water because the government we have in place strictly exists to crush communism. This is its mission, its sole purpose and is, therefore, not democratic government and not even a good representative government; but is a dictatorship of employers, banks, landowners, super rich religious institutions, who gang up on workers of any class, shape or size, or color, sex, and police are used to intimidate and bully. For this reason they installed Supreme Court Justices who would rule against women, men and minorities. For this reason you and I do not have universal health care. For this reason our public schools are trash. For this reason we are unprotected from disease, economic shut downs, and inflation, they are using all these mechanism as weapon against the American working class. Rail workers go on strike and the first thing the government does is order railroad companies to cancel long distance commutes. Use us rail commuters as hostages and we end up blaming the rail workers because we cannot get to work by train or we cannot get our products in the stores. This is the game they play and they are well organized with money, power, communication between them, they have think tanks, they have institutes, they news media and pundits, they have lawyers, doctors, all working against ordinary working people.
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  569. Certainly America is a different country than it was when I was kid, it has become a desensitized country. A homeless person was never tolerated in the country I grew up in. Today, to this generation, homelessness is accepted as normal. I began to see this clearly when 65 year olds were taking jobs to supplement their fixed incomes in the 80s. There has been a steady decline in the standard of living of the working class since Reagan was president coincided with a rise of the financial sector of the economy as the most productive part of the economy, productive of growth. There was also a change in what growth means in America. Excess growth versus proportional growth through an exodus of production led to a general impoverishment of society and of individuals, coincided with the destruction of the family in America. This appears to have been the result of 45 years of acclimating people to believe success depends on you as an individual. In short, Austerity. Another aspect of this America is the high level of ignorance in people and the over emphasis on culture and no emphasis on the political struggles behind those cultural matters has acted as a mass indoctrination campaign through America’s schools. There is more to get into on this subject but suffice it to say that this plan is a corrosive plan for the youth who have a higher mortality rate than older Americans from increased exposure to toxic materials allowed by Congress to be used in production as in farming, construction, and mining industries, led to a degradation of the environment younger people have a shorter life span than baby boomers as a social effect of the widening gap between rich and poor. Last thing I would say to this generation is stop fooling yourselves. Currently the America you live in is run as a Mafia government and this government is a threat to the stability of all nations on the planet! Progressives are not progressive and conservatives are not fiscally conservative as both pour billions into military build ups take up more than 35% of the budget and with permanent tax cuts to the rich will rise to half the federal budget are really parties representing a minority transfer America’s wealth from the majority to this minority creates a permanently poor working class. You can expect that when Millennials reach seniority they will be working longer hours forever positioned against a higher cost of living. In short, poor or dead before reaching retirement age. Not a joke in my view but if it is not taken seriously by this youth, they then will deserve what they get, and live to regret the apathy they have today.
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  572. This young man’s incarceration is not uncommon if we look at the historical record there have been millions of black people framed and chained. The chains are less visible today but more strongly felt...The Privy Council does not have a role model in Prince Charles’s address, to say anything but the evidence was concocted, the man should walk free. His exoneration should come with an apology though. I would not expect one from this generation. Apologizing is weakness, and you cannot remain who you are if you apologize for being in the same patriarchal family they call the ‘Firm” but of a generation after the holocaust of slavery. Prince Charles dd not have it in him to apologize for the chains and pains of millions. But! He did acknowledge independence from the Crown and the first woman Barbadian prime minister of Barbados. Not sure but I think the UK still has around 16 colonies in the world, Australia is one. DeKlerk acknowledging Nelson Mandela showed more humility than the Prince with an acknowledgement and apology for White South Africa’s legacy of Apartheid. The condition of South Africa today proves that society took a turn for the worse, Black South Africans and White ones under the leadership of the Black African National Congress did not see past the bourgeois order to establish a new society with new men and women based on quality of life not equality in law of the races. Really who cares if the law sees you as equal the important thing is the quality of life is equal for all is the best defense against racal inequality. There are no poor and there are no rich. That society failed to reach this stage of human development. Its never too late, just means that each generation adds more layers on top of the junk pile of unequal crap some future generation has to dig itself out of. We’ll have to see how the other bourgeois republics deal with their sordid past and institutions that still creep in the night. This could be a moment for the UK, and what is ironic a moment to make police a non-political institution, neutralized from making political arrests.
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  578. PR is ground zero as low as it goes from a survival standpoint. Meaning that the first premise of all human existence and, therefore, of all history, is that people have to be in a position to live in order to 'make history'. But in PR life is below that baseline, life involves the struggle for food, water, habitation, clothing, medicine, and many other things before pursuing school, employment, government. They have not even the means in their possession to satisfy those needs and cannot even begin to reconstruct their cultural and social life as it once was. PR would be a non-story to us if it were not for this one contradiction. That a population is being maintained below survival conditions in the belly of the richest country in the world unable to reach its first historic milestone of achievement. The building of the means as a fundamental condition of all history. The material world around PR's populace surrounds them in rubble and ruin reduced to a minimum, to a stick and the action to produce a stick is held back by an outside alien force in Washington DC. The second point I would make about the condition of PR and where it stands on the scale of functionality for social reproduction is the satisfaction of the first need (the action of satisfying, cannot develop into new needs). Communities become more stable, complex and grow when a people accomplish the first historical act together. This point applies to most of America, especially all those living in urban and deep rural places where social alienation and individualism as the norm works against cooperation and solidarity. Falling back into a prehistorical state of existence under the neglect of capitalism is a threat to the survival of the human species. It is essential this system be treated as criminal and the masses of people begin cultivating new values and ethics, organizations of united individuals toward remaking their own life.
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  600. Whether it was through three centuries of manufacture that we used our own cooperation to work against us typifies the way human beings shaped themselves from the 1550s and ending in 1790 to the idiots we are today. Buying the rights to an invention makes the invention no longer the inventor's. The purpose of the exchange is to separate the owner of the use-value from the use-value. Separate the producer of the use-value from the use-value the producer created is the purpose of the exchange between labor and capital. You cannot capitalize on a use-value if you don't take it away from its owner by whatever means necessary peering through the annals of human history. The invention belongs to the buyer who is in position to mass manufacture the invention and can now can employ the inventor which is even worse for the inventor's self-esteem than just selling the invention and walking away. In effect the inventor has given up any claim to the share of the market proceeds the buyer of the invention has capitalized upon. Further the inventor may have his/her own lab. But it is often the case that the buyer of the invention has invested capital in their own lab in which case the inventor has no capital of his/her own invested in the lab of the patent rights owner and would receive none of the allowances given to such an investment as per the wonder-fully one-sided and blatant US Tax Code. Now once the inventor is out of the picture from the sale of the patent rights or has joined the new patent producer the next step after the purchase is to produce it, and simultaneously create the demand for the invention n prep for the third step of re-entering the market wth the invention, so many millions of units produced and this may entail a range of tools all purchasable with money. A little imagination will suffice as to how things get marketed in America until very recently where demand is created by scarcity and scarcity is created by human destructiveness reducing the material level of the population to where the needs are varied and great. Capitalism and its economic laws are all about separating people from their own labor, tools and land. Suburbs is a classic case of what no to do in community planning unless you want to make an entire population car dependent in which make it so there is no other way to get to the store.
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  622. Class, privilege, we all know that these institutions are the gateway to entering the super rich for an individual and that the particular qualities of the the individual counts from the institution's point of view as a quantitative contribution to the institution itself. Along side the creation of a social class of kids who will in the future become the super rich, the political elite, the Wall Street capitalists, the Trump administration is on the biggest spending spree of the nation's wealth in history, giving billions in tax breaks to this class of people who will never work a day in their lives outside of privilege and the institutions themselves give back to Trump their blessing. Money the country cannot afford is spend on ideals that return nothing of value to society. The flip side of the bribes and scams, deceptions that the wealthy commit to get their kids into the social class they belong were the school crimes in black working class schools committed by the administrators defrauding tests scores skimming off the federal grants the Trump administration will terminate in his next budget, federal dollars given to working class school districts redirected for the construction of the wall and more spending on law enforcement. The solution to the problem, a problem of holding on to power, is family separation of migrant children and their parents, an act of genocide, according to the World Court and the formation of a permanent social class of privileged elite, and on the other hand, a permanent working class, tied to the Trump budget as the new vision and objectives for America becomes a caste system.
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  653. Americans are in no better shape in terms of debt as the instrument used to force the youth to become labor-power for capital. Kids graduate from college with an average of 30 thousand in debt and they have to get a job to start paying for it.  Their parents are in debt for their college, senior citizens on fixed incomes, pay Sallie Mae funded no less by the Bank of London. In effect, interest on all student loans is paid to a bank outside the US through the American government. A bank regulated by the EU not the Federal Reserve receives part of the social security incomes of millions of kids their grandparents took custody of minors living in dysfunctional homes. This to me is far worse than being an exploited peasant forced to grow cocaine to feed an American habit. Americans while being high and materially deprived willingly become commodity sellers of their own youthful labor-power is an economic and social paradox! The entire working class is straddled by debt in one form or another in the US accepted this condition. So who is better off? It would appear to me that the opposition is what is left of Venezuela's class structure as its constituency are not working class. The defunct legislature is occupied with the other social classes in Venezuelan society. A blockade by the US can do more damage as there remains a class structure big enough that uses the dollar as the circulating medium in Venezuela. As long as the dollar is present, prices and wages, rents, profits can become and are, weapons used against Chavez's revolution. Had Chavez expropriated the middle and upper social classes after dissolving the legislature and the interest of the oil companies, the dollar would have been abandoned a long time ago, its national debt owed to the IMF, evaporated, and a dictatorship of the proletariat be the one system as the only avenue toward defending its revolution from interference by the American government. Americans would be watching their government invade with the military Venezuela rather than a coup. When the Sandinistas took power in Nicaragua they did not expropriate the large landowners. Those forces were left intact in society. Whether it was by making a deal with Washington for non-interference in Nicaragua back in 1979 or not Ortega is also about to be overthrown by a coup consisting of them funded by the US. Had Chavez and the Sandinistas before him decentralized land ownership and industry, given the land to the peasants and the workers the factories, the truckers the trucks, a coup d'tat would be impossible without a central dominant social class in society the American government can use to retake power. Abolition of the class system everywhere is key to ending revolutions and counter-revolutions anywhere.  To abolish the class system of slavery the price of cotton was forced downward making it unprofitable and then the slaveholder's property confiscated was what the national government of the US did to abolish the slave class system and allow the next class system to come into being. In effect, to abolish the class system of wage-labor, oil and gas prices would have to be forced upward, so high, the working class would overthrow the government and this, is exactly the condition that gave rise to the Yellow Vest movement. Macron's national tax on gas proposal was enough to push the workers off the edge. For this reason gas prices are kept low and drilling for oil on the rise to ensure prices stay low in order to maintain and sustain the class system of a working class. Americans are in worse shape than the average Venezuelan, there only one legislature ruled, here there are 50 and each with standing armies plus a national government with a military of its own. The American government does not have to worry about sending in an invading force to quell revolts that happen in America's states. The working population is controlled by each state. Plus, in America's class structure a proletarian government inside a given state can exist with the economic class structure outside of the state completely intact. Vermont is a good example, there medicare for all can exist side by side with private health care corporations can only be medicare for some and private insurance for others, leaving intact a class system in health care. There is only one language the government of Americans truly understand, i.e., force. There is no space for an honest conversation with force, if progressives do not like American interventionism they will have to put their bodies out in the streets against it! America's class structure is as large as the working class is divided that the national government can do what it wants regardless of the opinions of a disenfranchised working class.
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  662. Global Warming benefits capitalism and capitalists not the working classes or the laboring masses in society or the world, the more the population dies off, and the quicker technology advances to displace labor, a capitalist does not have to hire human labor? Corporations can produce for themselves and sustain their own social communities as a class apart from the rest of society. Society is no longer a social order connecting buyers and sellers but now consists of disposed modern day nomads and the owners of money sustaining their own social class through the private appropriation of nature and industry. Is this not what the communists have warned humanity since communism came into being of a tendency in capitalism to create a parasitical social class that deprives humanity of the necessaries of life and the instruments of labor. The capitalist class reached a stage of concentrating the means and the ends, into its few hands, and can turn its back on society by producing for themselves. Make profits on the wars that accelerate the massive consumption of fossil fuel and directly kill humans and natural habitation in the process. Work to a layman means a job, to a social scientist it means social production. Remove the process of creating values and you end capitalism. The forecast for the workers from the social scientist is socially producing for final consumption for each person is dead. Mass production ceases when the owners of money, capital, the means and ends, cease producing for society and begin producing for themselves. Duh!
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  663. This large mass of people who cannot keep up with their current level of consumption are socially compelled to increase their consumption with credit. The banking class came up with credit and easy money to get the working class to buy more. Increased sales and revenue, which for a European revenue is the state's income means taxes, to an American revenue means profit and since there is no other special world to describe the state's income the word revenue is used, they use both words interchangeably to mean profit and income from taxes. Why is this important? Because labor exchanged against revenue produces no profit whereas labor exchanged against private capital does produce profit and when a government's top priority as the primary national interest of the country is the defense of this class of profit producers, it is because the definition of what is productive work and unproductive work rips the country apart into those who get government assistance to succeed and those who do not get state assistance to succeed is decided by its rulers, senators, that what they produce is not added value. In reality, a clown working for a circus is more productive of profit than a senator's work which produces neither profit nor revenue as far as employing workers is concerned. So - can society live and govern itself without senators? Of course it can but a senator cannot live without a society in the form of the state. Can the clown make people happy and still make a profit without the circus owner? Of course, but the circus owner-capitalist cannot live with out the many clown's labor to exploit. "Added value" is another term in the American lexicon that steers people away intentionally, I might add, from the concept of surplus-value. Added value shrouds more mystery over surplus-value, surplus-labor, a central category in understanding society through history and, the productiveness of labor, is not to the American worker the prime mover of society, its overwork, to them, or overtime, causing stress, loss of sleep, ill health, and the ones in charge of the productiveness of labor come up with solutions like having workers sleep in the factories to be refreshed for the next day's grind. The notion that the productiveness of labor can reduce the work day without diminishing the standard of living Americans enjoy consuming- never, never enters their heads for the kind of legislation needed to address the problem of exploitation in society. Also the word labor is not in their vocabulary except as a discipline, i.e., hard labor, manual labor, forced labor, labor economics if they have such a study. To explain the dual character of labor in society, the difference between the work itself and the sale of labor-power as a commodity, you'd have to translate English into their tongue for them to understand it. Hard thing to do. Work describes the activity, working describes a job to an American. Work safety, work hazards, report to work, work is a duty, not working means unemployed. To a European a job has greater social importance than just the difference between being idle and not idle, it is where profit is produced by workers while consuming a capitalist(s)'s means of production. Also the word 'production' is not in their vocabulary except as a project of some kind. As a work in progress, production has no other significance outside of being a horrible place to be eight hours a day. The production process where wealth originates becomes a strange idea to them. Work is not their own, it belong s to another. . Americans do not have a concept of social class or class struggle as the working poor in the US are saturated by an ideology of individualism - so there are no social classes operating in society in their overall view of American society, just 'bad actors', exploiting this impoverished mass of people. It is the exact opposite in Europe. Class does not mean an 'industry' with a bad apple in every bunch has been created; it means a new social class has emerged the question becomes from what source? When it comes to political power the notion of social class is important, crucial, as power is not taken by an individual but by a class of more of the same kind of individual. More than one capitalist constitutes a class of capitalists does not broadcast over to the heads of working poor Americans, who will readily agree with this assessment of society but will never act on it. Workers there have a class consciousness that allows them to act for themselves as a class. That is not the case in America since the 1960's. Two to three generations have grow up with the notion that society does not evolve and social classes do not evolve and social progress is not made through class struggle. Progress is attained when material wealth can be bought and its up to the individual to attain it, a notion that everyone starts out equal to get rich but ends up unequal is the fault of individuals. This leads straight up into the emergence of really bizarre people in American media interpreting the class struggle as a deep and profound hatred for white rich people. Americans put race before class and leave class completely out of the equation. Workers are indoctrinated in America to understand and view the other social classes in society as arriving at generational wealth through intelligence. As smarter than others to have gotten where they are. I recall a movie with Eddie Murphy and Dan Ackroyd, Trading Places, a story about social class and intelligence on a bet between two capitalists, Ralph Bellamy and Don Ameche, playing the roles of capitalists had debunked this idea. The fact that this movie was even made proves somewhere in the American mindset is an awareness of class but not of themselves as a class, so acting as a class is a totally new experience for Americans, are denunciated by the other social classes and receives little nurturance from within the working poor themselves.
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  664.  @hoosierbaddy3052  I think it is not because cheaper labor is acquired that American employers hate American workers. Its because employers are highly sensitive to any form of worker democracy, socialism or communism and they know that those systems are far more constructive to people in general and would deprive them of making a luxurious profit off the labor of others. They want American workers to be ruled by them, coddled. Spoiled, anything but be in control of industry and commerce. They know that those systems are not anti-property but are anti-private property. They know they have to have the US Military on the side to crush anywhere in the world where workers make progress in their own lives. There is no other reason to bear such disdain for workers. They know that they must have a government that retards, slows down, rejects, and resists any true human progress and every agency i the government they control functions for them not “Us”. One day what I am saying will make you realize that all these speculations made by you and others won’t any water because the government we have in place strictly exists to crush communism. This is its mission, its sole purpose and is, therefore, not democratic government and not even a good representative government; but is a dictatorship of employers, banks, landowners, super rich religious institutions, who gang up on workers of any class, shape or size, or color, sex, and police are used to intimidate and bully. For this reason they installed Supreme Court Justices who would rule against women, men and minorities. For this reason you and I do not have universal health care. For this reason our public schools are trash. For this reason we are unprotected from disease, economic shut downs, and inflation, they are using all these mechanism as weapon against the American working class. Rail workers go on strike and the first thing the government does is order railroad companies to cancel long distance commutes. Use us rail commuters as hostages and we end up blaming the rail workers because we cannot get to work by train or we cannot get our products in the stores. This is the game they play and they are well organized with money, power, communication between them, they have think tanks, they have institutes, they news media and pundits, they have lawyers, doctors, all working against ordinary working people.
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  678. Capitalists before Reagan did not have many spheres of social life that were commodified until legislation allowed different spheres of life to become things and activities to be bought and sold as exchange-values and as a privilege in the minds of capitalists doing all of the commercial speculation. Reagan attacked the institutions of labor one by one, unions first, home savings and loans institutions second, removal of these working class institutions paved the way for consortiums of capitalists, to privatize the workplace with contract workers. Dividing employment into new divisions of labor and got rid of the union definitions of work performed on the job. A cultural and social mythology came with the commodification of social life as a corresponding theology of mixed elements of nationalism and evangelical-ism. Christian universities threw graduates into the political sphere of life and by then the Democrats had already sold out the working class putting the finishing touches of the Reagan revolution with NAFTA, which buries unionized labor. Clinton, Biden and Obama later on, boasted they were better at making money than the republicans and proceeded to put in place in a grand social experiment a new socialization of the working class, ---creating a nation of idiots. Thanks to Bush we have war veterans turned nationalists and mercenaries in today's police force. Biden and Clinton's Crime Bill and Welfare Reform nailed the lid on the casket. Our society as a result of this right wing revolution appears to have elements of the past still acting out their old roles in a context that does not accommodate them. As America tries to make adjustments going forward even the most paltry attempt to reform the system right wing elements pull it back. Making themselves very clear to us as individual members of the working class they are to be expelled from power.
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  689. The Libertarians in Congress who want to roll back, repeal, water regulations signed into law by Clinton and Bush in the 1990s are anti-American!  The 1990 regulations do not cause the product to be unusable.  Trump supporters need a bad guy to blame for their own misery and Trump makes government the bad guy. They live in a 1950's stereotypical world of good and bad guys. Government did not cause the defected manufacturing of Boeing Jet airliners grounded worldwide. That was Boeing getting around regulations and a corrupt Trump EPA cutting Boeing slack on the regulations to save money in costs for higher profits. Rand Paul never called my house and asked if my toilet, dishwasher, washing machine, trickled water. Obviously, the average family consumer of appliances is always left out and never asked to verify if these Libertarian claims in Congress are right or wrong oon the question of environmental regulations. It seems the average person is not good enough to be asked, or good enough as a citizen to have clean water, clear air. The manufacturers of appliances want to get around the regulations to sell a cheaper product to Americans. They hate Europe because they cannot get around the EU standards. Manufacturers in Britain want to leave the EU for this reason, the do not want government interfering into production. Same here in the States. The first point to make about the "toilet rant" is the connection between manufacturers of appliances and the Trump supporter deceived into supporting. Unless the Trump rallies are filled and attended by the appliance manufacturers's friends and families, stockholders, the average Trump supporter is giving his/her consent to be sold a cheaper product and be responsible for the destruction of the environment. GE, Westinghouse, Whirlpool, Maytag, all profit from the repeal of EPA water standards and the American public are the losers. This is what it means to be a libertarian in Congress today.
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  692.  @thinkbeforeyoutype7106  Too bad...the USSR had more respect from the west particularly from the US which is why when I grew up the world was a fantastic place, friendly, fun, wonderful, hardly any wars around the world. The only wars that were alive when I was young started by France was Vietnam. The US picked up the habit from the French and then lost that war but winning a war is not what the aims of the US are when it goes to war. War is the way the US enriches itself. Winning is not important. What is important is the process that consumes arms. FACT: America never won a war for the sake of defeating a true enemy. State Department creates fake enemies, made up enemies, to generate war and profits. In old days profits were made by labor. People got rich by hard work, ingenuity. Not today. Oligarchs get rich off wars. Humanity will never know peace again under capitalism for capitalism depends on war. The lesson for the Russian people is: Once you get rid of communism and become like the west now you re open to the negative competition characteristic of the west. You’ve entered its turf. The west begins to treat you like you were an animal of pure rage and drums up hatred to gin up the negative side of the competition. Bully tactics. Bullies pick on you to goad you into a fight. Bullies have no respect for anything in life and will walk all over you when you don’t stand up to them. When you were the USSR you sent Sputnik up and the US got into the positive side of the competition and we had a fantastic space program creating great minds. Great movies, great art, great sports, everything was great in the positive side of the competition between capitalism and communism. Well all that died when the west fell off the wagon became a staggering alcoholic driving a runaway fire engine, always ringing the alarm, and disturbing the peace. Wars in abundance nothing but war. The good news is that capitalism cannot help but exploit all people and things for itself, it has an addiction it cannot heal from that the challenge now is the government putting our money where their mouth is. How to restrain capitalism from creating slavery, environmental destruction, racial and economic inequality, shorter life-expectancy and all around miserable and lonely population of very limited freedoms.
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  706. Striking difference in the way Marx himself treated economic categories and the way modern economist treat them. You get no sense from the modern economists of the real production relations behind the categories they use and the language is dry. Lawyers and academic economists really know how to pollute the english language. It doesn't matter what they call themselves or what theoretical stance they have the terminology lacks context, meaning, significance. The word "asset" is generally defined as a useful thing, in economics it means a 'monetary value', in business school it means property or equipment bought for business use. Marx leaves all that behind and looks at what people do in society as a common routine action, they work and they trade property, i.e., what they make, simply, they produce, use and exchange, and here he begins to look at the form of production and circulation in its present reality. If someone is useful their labor becomes a value because it has not value in society. An individual feels their self worth when they are producing value. Their work is the property of another and they are surrounded by the property of others. Real production relations take the form of a commodity. Everyone's work is equal to each others work in every private transaction is the first problem with capitalist relations encountered. Their differences vanish, I think this is a key cause for much worker dissatisfaction with the corporate world. That products of all kinds of labor are equally values and appear as a quantity of value of the products of labor, and from this, you get a society of laws, institutions and classes built around the products of labor and not the people who make the material world of products. In the bourgeois world, academic social science is no friend to labor. Workers will have to read Marx themselves when they decide to overthrow the bourgeois order.
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  719. Too tall an order for Washington to restrict the freedom of gun manufacturers to do business within the US. This is the dilemma Americans face. This Congress will not pass any gun laws more than what already is in place and those laws might even be repealed down the road. People will gradually come to realize when the next compounding event occurs and all forms of protest falls on deaf ears; a total resistance of the Congress and the President to do anything about America's violence or the gun manufacturers's rights. The whole society exists only to guarantee for each of its members the preservation of their person, their rights and their property. This is why corporations had to become people with Citizens United, to be on equal footing with citizens as a citizen. By doing this the government is hostage to money or capital or capitalism, it must enforce the right of the corporations. The only thing that is capitalist in the average person is their capacity to work for which they trade for a wage. The government is taken by big industry it is a government for and by the corporations that is headed in the direction of amending its constitution to solidify itself as impenetrable and immune to revolutions. No matter how bad things get, the tensions, the social conflicts, the intensity of the race war being waged against the black community and the war on female members of society, none of these problems are seen as problems for Congress to correct in the view of the political elite. Americans fail to realize this now but will gradually realize Washington's political elite are only a means for preserving the so-called RIGHTS OF MAN as a corporation with the same rights as you or I, therefore, there is only one course of action to take to eliminate gun violence, racism, and sexism. Enough of the rant.
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  723. Looks like Why-Dough is feeling over confident now that the calvary has come to the rescue. But I would have to say this US harassment of Venezuela is a distraction from the real problems with American capitalism and capitalism in general. Got to remind people that China and Russia are capitalist societies adopting the employer/employee relationship, the largest perpetrators of global warming are restructuring the world economy. Two places to look for this process, when the US government borrows at interest from its super rich this is accomplished through a tax cut.  Government borrows the same money the rich saved by not paying taxes, enriches America's super rich. This is what is meant by neoliberalism. In other words, a 45% tax cut robbed society by 55% of its own wealth. If the super rich refuse to lend to the US government (which would be nuts for the super rich to not accept such a deal), the US turns to China as its lender. In turn, China provides the labor and the loan money Americans work to repay to apply to its own military development. It is given the technology the American taxpayer funds goes to develop an army of a foreign competitor and country. The world being shaped by these three capitalist entities, the US, China and Russia, is the world we must live under and are inhabiting. A world humanity must abolish for a better world before these three nations lead it to ruin and barbarism. Societies become poorer, run deeper into social and economic crisis, goes on with every breath wasted on abortion, bribery, corruption, depression, equality disparities, financial swindle, hurled out as a distraction from this process. Putting the world on hyper alert sets the stage for nervous disorders in the functioning of societies is accomplished by these distractions while, in the back ground, takes place a reorganization of the way world production is financed ensuring the super rich of each respective capitalist nation come out as the winners.  My suggestion to humanity is to focus on this process of destructive enrichment. In the US, this process is facilitated by Walmart (don't laugh), a partner with China in selling all of China's products saturates the US market. The result of the flooding of China's cheap commodities is, we all work in de-skilled jobs more hours for money of less purchasing power and societies descend into social and material deprivation because wages are depressed in this arrangement the last Great Crash kept depressed.
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  735. A country would be healthier if its working conditions were socially determined by the working class. Its about time somebody pointed to labor and its problems, the condition of the American working class, the most worked, the most ill compared to working classes of other nations. Highest productivity of labor in the world and takes no advantage of it for itself.  A class that does not act for itself, rather, gives up its productivity in exchange for the value of its product to employers. The never ending tension between employers and employees is always present in society. Until one day people realize they can still be sustainable without the employee/employer relationship dictating the way people must live. Like magma that cannot be contained any longer by the volcano the American social order can no longer contain the potential of its productive forces. The workers are primed for a socialization of the economy, primed by the experience of privatizing the economy and what holds them back from realizing their potential in building a social system that works for people and society. Even the most democratic states in the US fail at the job of inspections into the workplace. The privatization of the workplace is the central character in the horror story of criminal negligence and abuses when capital has free sway over labor. Factories blown up sky high, toxic chemical and solvents, workers killed, permanently maimed workers sue employers for damages.  In our developed system lawsuits are part of the cost of doing business for employers. Hand in hand a tax system and the legal system never changes the channel from the old reruns of capitalism. It is about time someone raised the issue of working class consciousness the goal this non-thinking social class needs to acquire to unravel itself from extremely stringent and limiting relations of capitalist production.
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  780. Visiting Great Britain could be Trump's attempt to get England to not buy 5G technology from the competition -- may not go over so well with the British. If the British gun manufacturers still want to enjoy the profits the American gun manufacturers are making in the wars carried on today they are going to listen to what Trump has to say. The world economy is shaping up regionally with respect to capitalist development. Whole regions are splitting off into rival camps. There is not a uniform growth pattern to the world economy but there are different regions where capitalist development proceeds uninterrupted and where it is impeded by capitalist rivalry and competition. Where private capital is not interrupted it is facilitated by security forces. Security marred with human rights violations and indiscriminate murder. Where capitalist progress takes place China and Russia are invested and the remaining market share of the US shrinks. Overall, the world market is divided up into capitalist nations constantly butting up against each in a power struggle for higher profits. Internally, capitalist corporations rival each other and take flight where profitability is highest. Violating national interests and that of their own social class where necessary. But with little room for growth conflict, sabotage, treachery, criminal neglect, mercanary wars, destabilization of regimes, comes with the turf is the the only way to expand their market share. The alternative to this world competition of capitalism from various rival nations would be a stateless socialism in all countries, a World Council of Production, is an alternative to the polluting and killing power of capitalism generally.
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  790. I had a great chance to interview a female baby boomer who said she would vote for Biden. She and her friend another female baby boomer appeared on the scene. Being friendly I struck up a conversation. I am a baby boomer too. We talked Boomer talk for a while. I started off with Peter Tork of the Monkees died two weeks ago to break the ice. I asked her; as a woman does it not bother you that Biden has no respect for the personal space of a woman and every respect for the personal space of a man? He is not accused of encroaching the space of men only women. So it is not an issue of boundaries in Biden that he cannot distinguish someone's personal space at all as in the case with some disabled people who do not discriminate the space of a man and the space of a woman in a social context. She replied; weellll, he's old fashioned. Before this she was saying Bernie is to old. Somehow the age of Biden is ok but the age of Bernie is not despite being the same age. I thought to myself this woman is primed for abuse and I could be dominant and she will submit had she encountered a real scumbag in this public setting. I wanted to educate her as I did my daughter about predatory male behavior in American society. But I chose not to get too personal with her. I calmly rebutted her point about Bernie being too old with; the young need an older role model with experience because they have no political experience dealing with the kind of forces in society making their lives indentured by loans and cannon fodder for wars. Her friend was more in agreement with me. I poured it on, I said there is not a women on the planet who likes being treated as an object except prostitutes, are you a prostitute? She said, of course not then you cannot vote for Biden as he treats women in a milder form as objects prostitutes are accustomed to being treated by men. But on the other hand she can vote for Bernie because in him there are no allegations of behavior, he is a clean candidate, as is some of the others. I knew Tulsi would not get her vote because women of this generation tend to see other women as rivals for being something they are not, or because of their own inadequacies, a man deserves the role of political leader not a woman. P.S. Can anyone tell me how to get rid of this stupid spell check that keeps changing the spelling of my words around to what it thinks the word I am using is wrong?
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  826.  @bonitaroache73  My good citizen a similar argument took place a long time ago whether the modern state was truly to be representative of its citizens, the argument went... then the various disabilities of civil life which affect them politically must be removed, was their conclusion. Freedom has to be backed up with a desire in the citizen to be socially free from these horrible, oppressive relationships. I don't think the majority are unanimous about that at this time.   Extremists use violence to make the streets and public life unsafe. If this behavior is left unchecked it calls in the state or military to restore order. The citizen are the only people who can keep extremists and violence out of their communities, streets and towns. Police cannot because they are inherently a post facto institution.  If not met with community resistance the citizen will lose their freedom to a state occupation and driving out the extremists becomes a convenient excuse to consolidate military rule, as if this were Chile in 1976 under Pinochet. America is no longer exceptional my good friend, where things like this happen only in Europe, Latin America or Africe and the Middle East.  The citizen must be prepared to keep the streets free of violence, drive out the far right wing and capture the shame on camera, send it out to the world. Your children will not be able to roam free as you once did as a child without fear or concern of murder, abduction, or some horrible incident using innocent lives to get at the State, the lives of innocent children and people for a political aim, we typically, do not pay any attention. Organize. I think you understand.
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  835. Once that alternative energy genie is let out of the bottle there is no putting it back! Americans should realize that for every toxic and man made chemical based product that is used in factory production and every chemical compound that goes into building products largely used in all home and office building construction have a regulation. When we live and breath and work in those environments we are interacting with chemical compounds that enter into our bodies. The first group affected are the material handlers where those compounds are originally manufactured and then the secondary occupations when the product interacts with the worker. When these products are produced and consumed in some work environment the regulations mandate they are handled to reduce exposure to the workers handling them. But the removal of these regulatory controls over the countless numbers of chemicals used in the workplace speeds up the pace of work as labor time and attention given to proper handling, use and disposal can now be dedicated to produce more product. More product translates into lower prices for its seller who competes to capture a larger share of the market with the product's lower price. It is the capitalist method of reducing the cost of 'doing business' for investors. By freeing materials from controls they free the workday from controls. They can exert full sway over the workplace and the workers. They become free to exploit workers. A quantitative effect of increased sales and profits benefits a few but from a qualitative standpoint the many derive no benefit from a de-regulated work environment. This highly sought after freedom to de-regulate the work day and free the subject of labor or the conditions of work from government controls is a blow to all workers and a roundabout way of not violating the legal workday itself.
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  837. This won’t stop real estate developers from building where they should not build and people will get hooked into buying properties where they should not live. This will not change the building codes that enable builders and developers from building where they should not build. This will not stop the largest polluter on the planet from polluting. This will not stop industrial agriculture, mining, drilling. In fact, top priority on the Republican agenda when they get the White House is to expand drilling and mining. Oh, don’t get me wrong, Democrats are equally responsible furthering the destruction of the planet. Biden and the Military, CIA use these climate disaster to topple regimes they don’t like or to keep them engaged in war to weaken their economies. Prayer won’t stop, in fact, prayer enables the destruction. American industries produce commodities that are money making articles for them. The only thing that will reverse the effects on the environment is to coerce industries to produce for use and reduce money to its normal function, only then the NOAA advisories can be heeded. A president can order industries to produce for use and wipe away debt to control inflation but that president would be forced out of office. If Americans want to survive they will have kill the economic system killing them! Sorry but you have no choice other than pray for your grand kids they live which is highly doubtful since everything will be depleted of any nutrients our minds and bodies require for sustenance.
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  854. A labor struggle over the vaccine mandate intensifies around the country. Some states side with workers and other states side with employers. Some employers side with mandates and others do not. The Supreme Court did not side wth the workers but delivered a punch to the chin for workers and victory round for employers in Maine. The human body and their minds (free will) still belongs to the worker before and after work not during 9 to 5 is the opinion of the court. Depends on which body, male or female? Not all laws treat the body and mind as organically one human organism in the American legal system. But sociologically speaking... Worker resistance to the vaccine is coming from the same place workers in the garment district destroyed the sewing machine when that was introduced. The innovation replaced workers! The workers threw the sewing machine out of the factory windows. But factions of municipal workers are throwing out the vaccine not because it replaces jobs. Because it demonstrates how profoundly totalitarian the workplace has become under the rule of employers. This year’s workers resistance is coming from a biological innovation intended to make work safer is shoved down their throats! The indignity that its not your mind ordering your body to take the vaccine its some one else’s mind ordering your body around agitates worker resistance among municipal cops, fireman, teachers, transit and sanitation workers. The vaccine mandate opens a deep wound of the larger problem of powerlessness in workers of their own working conditions of employment and the workplace itself that resistance is developing and frustrations with the lack of control lead individuals to killing of co-workers and managers. This struggle intensifies and develops into a worker’s struggle for control and dignity over their lives and objective conditions.
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  863. The State makes it easier to agree with the idea of capitalism as the premier socializing force for humanity in contrast to a slave economy in the State. Americans are complicit by choosing people who degrade the State into a slave state. Sold a bill of goods and promises which amount to lies they remain pacified. The rulers in the State have learned that people will strive toward capitalism because it is easier and nearer to achieve than the dream state of the future of socialism. Politicians figured out people settle for less. So--you can get characters who seduce your vote and do nothing for you using your money, to boot. Everybody settles, thinking that their ideals will not come to fruition for them in life. Disappointed society did not live up to their expectations they settle into a lesser form of exploitation in private industry offering less wages on average and no career development to avoid falling into a worse form of exploitation at the hands of the State. The more punitive the State becomes and commercialized playing the role of a merchant, therefore, the public is dealing with in the emergence of a hybrid merchant slave state, a colonial state based on slave labor. Devils Island replicated in Gitmo (guantanamo) and down the chain of command to the prison system and its wardens are president, governor, magistrate or local sheriff. Direct exploitation of unpaid labor. Exactly the way a vassal worked the land of the Lord under feudalism and the lord takes the product of the land the vessel produced is the way Chain Gangs and inmates work the state lands and the State takes the product of labor. Done in the name of the tax payer and look upon by tax payers as restitution for their crimes. Chances of white and black becoming slave labor is palpable, can happen. It only takes a constitutional convention to amend the 13th amendment and change the wording from prisoner to civilians to legalize slavery in the US, and 33 states currently GOP states is enough to convene and amend the 13th by one political party, GOP or Democrats. Not easily done but a lot closer than they ever were to achieve their aims. That all this happens not in the private sector but in the public sector points the finger at the American public for letting it happen! The Left, Right or Center can't pin slavery in the US on the multi-national corporations. In my view you could if Jeff Bezos, as an example, offered all his employees permanent employment and housing to work for Amazon.The laws against slavery are in place since the end of the Civil War until one party established a one party state and America begins to look like South Africa of the 1940's. If it happens here it is because the People did nothing to oppose what I see is a Pro-Slavery Rebellion of the Right.
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  876. Interesting how this earth quake is treated as not a part of the other earthquake that struck Taiwan this week by this report. The theory of Continental Drift is based on the idea that the Earth’s crust behaves like a conveyor belt, pushing a plate at one end and pulling a plate at the other end that the US continent moves closer to Europe at a rate of one inch per year. The energy of the quake in Taiwan transfers over to the earth quake that happened in Mexico would in my mind be the never idle movement of the continental plate in the Pacific and the ocean water this kicked up in the upper northern regions of the Pacific in combination with a storm pushed water over Alaska as a Hurricane. I am not painting a static and isolated picture of a given fracture opening up at one place the way this seismologist explains. I am saying the entire planet is in faster motion that we can see previously imperceptible to the naked eye movements of the Earth more clearly. The Atlantic generating storms and hurricanes and the Pacific generating seismic movement is one action. We have to see a particular earthquake as a relation of movement to the totality of earth movement versus a static picture of one incident. We have to learn to see everything as a relation. Two incidents of varying magnitudes express the totality of the earth activity. Scientists who do not understand the concept of two things are equal to a third thing cannot make predictions where next this total energy will be released on the crust of the planet is a shortcoming of their view of the world of nature
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  889. The whole movement of capitalism is a never-ending circle, the only thing that changes is the excuse given to conquer, enslave, expel, rob, murder, and control the resources of other nations, is all due to the apetite of the US consumer for oil. Really when you look at it the combustible engine is responsible for our government's actions and our modern day homes, cities, towns, and villages are responsible for the radical climactic changes happening in parts of the world we do not live. If you live in America and wipe your ass, that activity is done with paper cut from trees in the Amazon Rainforest, if you buy anything in America, a gun, a pill, a car, a house, etc., you're creating the demand for more oil. This history of wars carried on by presidents one after another the last one more efficient and adept at deciet than the previous ones, is a never-ending cycle. We keep coming around to the place where we began. The combustible engine and the modern home are the two chief causes of all modern-day conflicts, these two objects more than any other object made by man consume natural resources at a high rate. The demand for fuel and power is constant and the level of consumption of fuel and power is off the charts in the US. This is not a sign of development or progress that country consumes most of the world's reosurces. Its a sign of sickness, hoarding and using other's before using your own property to satisfy this demand is the only type of foreign policy it can have with other nations. Naturally, the world will resist it. The Pentagon thinking on national interest is guided by one twisted notion that if the end of resources happens it is going to happen there and not here, does nothing to retrain Americans away from this habitaul consumption pattern. The risk we run for such a high level of consumption is depletion and continuous wars. Wars, because nations will tend to defend reserves they know the public will deplete, and the whole movement of capitalism moves in a vicious circle. War, resources, higher profits...wars, resources...higher profits...once again...wars...a century and half of this circumlocution that on the downswing repeats depression and wage reductions and we are no better off.
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  924. Unfortunately, the issue is not making government work for people. The issue is government. The federal government is ruled by multinational corporations and the rule of property dominates state governments. When Stacy becomes governor she will find the state and legislature of Georgia is based on a separation of the social classes in her state. Same as in all other states. The state can abolish class, race and sexism within itself but is inept in overcoming class, race and sexism in society even if it wanted to. The state is unable to create a genuine community which is what she truly desires. But the context in which state operates prohibits a genuine community. The state frees itself from all matters of general concern to all citizens by giving no recognition to all matters of general concern. To understand how and why this happens you have appreciate the fact that freedom, liberty, equality, security are limited political rights not unlimited natural rights. Even the most perfect democratic state is not adequate to establish a genuine egalitarian society because it is still based on a fundamental contradiction the political state and civil society. The worst case example of this separation of state and society, and the separation of individuals into social classes in society, is now! Citizens United, Right to Work, Gun Control, Tax Cuts, have transferred all the natural and social wealth of the many into the hands of the few. People cannot rely on people like Stacy to succeed against the political power of the few. The answer is not a formal rejection of conservative rule. But for a social movement to be borne that acknowledges the state is impotent to combat the unsocial consequences coming from the unsocial nature of society. A social power to directly oppose the state is the only avenue for the vast majority of Americans to be freed from the political state.
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  928. I share Harvey’s opinion, I too suspected as much that, the sociological impact of ‘Capital Flight” and----“Underutilization and idle Capacity’, of the American workforce in a crisis will be too severe on the working class. In 1972 I remember the stat was 25% manufacturing capacity was standing still (35% unused productive capacity in other industries), by 1974, the Stock Exchange estimated 4 Trillion is all the capital they will spend on American industry, relative to the size of American industry, the Wall Street Capital Investors left a gap of$650 billion worth of unused labor-power and factory capacity. These are the seeds of the Great Recession leading up to the Great Resignation. A certain quantity of capital determines a certain quantity of production (employment). The thirty years time since industry was moved out of the US economy, the Wall Street Investment Firms buy excess commodity production abroad cheap and sell goods higher than their production costs but lower than the competition has led to the growth of monopolies at the same time as it led to the Great Recession, and now with a certain quantity of labor-power, the market has trapped workers into an unbridled exploitation of labor-power in the workplace. Corporations become giants through the value changes in production and through Relative Surplus Value...they can afford to hire more workers...this is not the case for smaller producers. Companies vary from one to the other in their production composition but average out socially the simple value oriented changes of the number of workers in production raises productivity for capital to exploit without government interference into the nature of the exploitation in the current policy of the democrats who hold all three houses, they turn a blind eye to the exploitation. Government, church, jurisprudence, law enforcement, have turned their backs on the working class, due to neglect, greed, ignorance, careerism, power. As social classes, these institutions do not have the character of being, two-fold, as the class character of the working class is double-sided, and whole enough to take control of the situation, workers produce value when they are not a class of owners of labor-power. The other social classes do not have this unique quality.
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  933. 29:25: “...protecting their own power within the democratic party.” Is it in a nutshell. And, this attitude of preserving their political base from the corrosive effects of progressivism in their party is reflected in the police who are trained to preserve and protect themselves, as shown in the Uvalde situation tragedy. From attitude to policy proving that attitude is the starting point from which all criticism of the democratic party can begin, a self-conscious attitude of the elite establishment in the democratic party are hyper-sensitive of their position in society,. Self preservation is more important than society for the moment. But in the moment society is wrecked! Wealth must continue to accumulate in one direction making everyone and everything a means to that end. The “Karens” that dominate American Womanhood is a social relation that comes into sharper view when seen in the context of the establishment’s social class sensitivity, where the men are “Karens” too. How many governing bodies are headed by women who make up this establishment roll more heads than the king, how many kings blame others for the crimes they commit? Pelosi and Hillary come to mind of this older generation who holds onto capitalism, Biden comes to mind of the crimes, born-again believers of the last and final social system for all mankind is a market system of money and commodities; they bury their heads in the sand from the exploitative and corrosive effects of capitalist social relations, then blames others for its evils. An excellent interview.
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  950. Guatemala in 1955, Chile in 1976 are case histories Myanmarians should read about to understand the present path of development their country appears to be going through. Formerly, Burma and a trade route between India and China, the small region was made a province by the British for the extraction of oil. The share of this oil wealth overtime resulted in a military junta soon after Burma separated from India in 1937. Burma was on a path of development toward a civil society in 1948 when it became Myanmar, Burma would not be ready for its first civilian president until 2010. This shows the movement of people toward more liberal and social democratic policies corresponds to a new generation to be in line with France and the US where economic growth has polarized the social classes into an absolute antagonism does not give France or the US a leg to stand on, is a paradox entangling the west. By recapturing the government from a civilian cabinet, the military junta slowed down or stopped economic growth, is not going to solidify their survival. Economic growth is a total mess and it appears the military generals are stumped about restarting economic growth which was going well under the civilian president and probably a hell of a lot better if the junta had been dismantled back in 1948. If Pinochet's Chilean military junta had been dismantled Chile would not be hemmoraging with extreme social inequality and riled into protest to eradicate a Pinochet Constitution 44 years later in 2020. Chile would be on its path toward social development without interruption or interference diverting precious resources to sustain a junta had it eradicated Pinochet's Constitution, but it remained even though Pinochet or El Salvador's Samoza had long gone because the junta they created remained intact.
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  960. The democrats are a party of law enforcement as is the GOP. They brokered the reforms on crime and welfare in the 90's. Government actions have been leading up this point of mass incarcerations of immigrants and citizens, as a result, of the reforms and the democrats have nothing to say about ICE as they had nothing to say about Guantanamo. In the present they acquiesce with a demagogue in office. Charlie Chaplin delivered a great speech at the end of his movie the Great Dictator, about appeasement and acquiescence with authoritarians and social control. People should revisit the movie for that speech alone. In the event of social rebellion or revolution which authoritarianism breeds in people, the democrats have in common with the GOP will brand you, as a socialist communist, they bear on their chest in whatever form it appears shame to be associated with working people fighting for dignity. Working people need their own party. A separate party from the GOP and democrats. They need a Lulu or an AMLO. You can be sure a Nationalist Socialist Party will appear in the coming decade and more vehement white nationalists will run for president. The GOP held to a certain position on crime and law enforcement and the democrats acquiesced leaving the mass of working people vulnerable to abuses of a police state. They are also in the pocket of Wall Street and promote a standard of living for capitalist investors at least 200% greater than the average worker, and deliver an average rate of return a capitalist demands by enforcing on the workers new work laws tailor made by the GOP's law think tanks. They pose no opposition to the economic forces the multi-national corporations use to meet their consumption needs including the vast resources of the earth. Not even the term 'democrat' befits them.
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  976. Civil disobedience has to have an aim and an objective. Otherwise you will be repeating civil disobedience in five, ten, fifteen, five, ten, fifteen years. These institutions that are functionally disabling the economy come from the past. Landlords come out of the feudal past. Merchants come out the 13th century. Jesus Christ dealt with the lenders is how old banking is. Look at what they did in the past and you know what they will do in the future. Its time to break this repetition once and for all. The people born into these social classes have the means to subjugate the labor of others. Likewise, the rest of the world, all 99% are born into a working class cannot escape.  You can quit eventually be back again used by another employer. The Public from A to Z are desensitized barbarians under this modern regime losing touch with their humanity are brutalized and harming each other for the sake of things. They can leave us,---take off to a new country but we cannot leave them. What they do in the present is what they learned from the past. In the Great Depression, they boarded ships and toured the seven seas while Americans were in the throes of a world wide depression and a dust bowl. To add insult to injury leaving millions in desperate straights in a depressed country Hollywood produces luxury liner get away cruises with the stars dancing away in grotesque luxury. Today Jeff Bezos takes flight in suspended animation above the stratosphere with his brother, for fun. They have enough money to produce a rocket ship. The value of a rocket ship could rebuild Haiti into modern economy. The skewed priorities are born from the past. Civil disobedience has to have the aim of freedom from captured from the economics of these social classes of the past. Ghosts, goblins, sorcerers, with money and property haunting the present and the future they are imprisoning millions and resorting to slave labor. The disobedience has to force the present horrible situation of the state of humanity into the foreground and frankly, the civil part of it has to finish the job Zinn's generation started but did not complete.
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  997. Highway Transportation System has become a fetter, it appears as accidental. But its not. The self-activity of commuters is a fetter on the road system and new fetter replaces the old one when police close lanes. Back in the day the population was half the size was accommodated by a highway system built in that age. The system no longer accommodates commerce and leisure since the number of people are greater and the quantity of products is greater than what that system can hold. An analogy would be a flood pushing lake water into a pumping station faster than pumps can bilge and distribute the water. The pumping station’s engines cannot accommodate the amount of water and the whole city is flooded. Jackson, Mississippi is a case in point. Jackson should never have become a city. Cities should have been built where water can flow by gravity and pressure applied by narrowing the channel and then distributed to boroughs. Manhattan’s water supply is an example of that kind of engineering. All the pipes still need to be replace goes with out saying. So with the highway transportation system that should not have been widened but rather alternative roads more serviceable for leisure and the highways more serviceable for commerce to distribute the flow of traffic. Then neither mass transport system robs the free time of people. No planning. No foresight. Congress permitted these features to get worse making no changes on a national scale that pointing fingers is an acknowledgement they failed the American People but can’t admit it.
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  999. Actually this country was founded in a revolution against the French Revolution's nemesis the British Empire. This piece of American history is not known by Americans walking around in 2017, that the Founding Fathers were directly emboldened by the ideas of the Age of Enlightenment coming out of France. It is what came after 1776 that departs from revolution and descends into a reign of terror with the close of the Civil War in the unmaking of a slave into a free man. To be really technical descendants of slaves were forced to be free without rights as a citizen in the US owing to secessionists all the way up to 1965. To make matters worse immigrants during the Civil War were mostly German and Dutch merchants coming into the US through New York and Louisiana began buying land, factories and slaves were illegal. The French Revolution abolished slavery in its Caribbean colonies and all the slaveholders had to run or be killed, they relocated into the US, that was illegal. The French would had expelled slave holders from Louisiana had it not been for the debt France could not pay while fighting three wars on three fronts and a monarchy that taxed the poor to cover the cost of its lavish lifestyle. All this while the French poor mastered the art of cooking rats in a palatable way for food. Like the Catalonian governing body putting out a vote for independence of Catalonia the intent was to secede from the republic for which millions of Catalonians got their heads bashed in, basically for no good reason as it turns out. A futile exercise in law breaking. However, secessionism has never gained footing and never will. Not here, not anywhere in the world. Separatists movements are secessionists movements, secessionists are racists, and racists play on the legal or illegal status of people of any group through a reign of terror to foment chaos and anarchy as a means to turn a democratic republic into a servile republic to their aims. Secessionist are really stupid people and this would make those who adopt their line are even dumber. Considering the fact that all white descendants of immigrants in the post Civil War era stepped foot on American soil were illegal, even Donald Trump's turn of the century ancestor came in illegally.
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  1034. This is not a generation ages 30 to 40 who see this as a political problem. They did not grow up with a social consciousness. And American legislators are a breed of lawyer who do not try to solve social problems in a political way. Lawyers/legislators/politicians are trained, instructed, paid to not social problems at all. Local legislators are worse that no matter how may times a building falls or a hurricane devastates a coastline do nothing to change zoning laws and local officials, i.e., county managers et., in most states are too religious to even sound the alarm of an impending disaster. What will happen is FEMA public funds will get cut in the name of servicing the government’s enormous debt before the government lets it go dry from all the claims and private insurers by high premiums will insure the rich. A debt made larger sending weapons overseas. Mar-A-Lago will be covered others not as rich will not. In the end the allocation of public funds for disasters is more than a case of politicians not coming together to legislate remedies to social problems, the allocation rests on a class differences, as to who will get the support. I know this is the scenario that will happen because the planet continues to heat up and ocean levels continue to rise that next seasons hurricanes will strike with greater ferocity and the government’s priority is not solving the social problems of the American people. The next flood even more powerful, the next drought more severe until the whole society is basically turned into a refugee camp filled with Americans who are not rich and are not white.
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  1038. Not hard to imagine that all of Manchester as the first textile manufacturing city of the world was completely dependent on the cotton produced by slavery in the Southern States of America. For this reason the British national policy was sympathetic to the slaveholders of the South. The North was its industrialized competition. Cotton was the raw material the Manchester industries required for the production of a range of products and clothing. The factory system and a Working Class. The human part of that equation was expected to mature and take over the factories but for a short brief period right after the second world war some industries were nationalized only to be sold in a later period as prime capital merchandize and much of that free market success can be credited not to the Beatles but to Margaret Thatcher. Cities were built to accommodate the factory. When the factory goes the city goes is a thought that must have crossed the minds of the planners of Detroit back then. They went ahead anyway planning a city totally useless if the factory goes under is permissible under de-regulated social conditions the Congress was sure to legislate. When British manufacturing processes were replicated by the Americans the textile industries in the northern states of America had acquired a working class right off the boat the unemployed from Europe was more pressure on Washington to open up the west and the south by clearing away native Americans and the Slaveholders of the South. Make room for the new relationship capital has with labor on the industrial end that is not slave based was a bonus to co-opt the moral elements in support of a war with the South. Technically, the roots of the Civil War are in the Revolutionary War which was a call for armed struggle. Rich slave holders in America with roots in nobilities of Europe enlightened by the ideas of the age for independence from and of kings and monarchs became a vanguard for a new country. The only way to do that was to fight the British for independence. The thriving trade of that age was the slave trade that all partook barring pirates, a natural ally for slaves. So it would mean the founding fathers had another idea about independence than we have. Pirates were a resistance force against the slave trade as a system and way of life. The first establishment settlement before Jamestown was St. Augustine Florida, a free settlement that combined pirates and runaway slaves, army deserters, native Americans, Spanish, African, were all equally free as the next person within boundary of the settlement is really the first dysfunctional, I would imagine, establishment in North America. In many ways St. Augustine is America’s first prison that guarded the free-state inside from the absence of freedom on the outside.
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  1043. Exactly, Alfred Epding, it is a good idea. There are two aspects to labor in society. America's economy emphasizes a quantitative relation the side of labor that performs by the clock! Work is measured by time, duration, expenditure, etc. A specific style of management over labor is necessary to make a worker produce more in a given time. Methods are developed to exact the absolute last drop of a person before they quit to go home, i.e., Taylorism, and now email and cell phones exact more labor and rob a worker's free time turning it into working time. The end result when all this is generalized is the abolition of the 8 hour day if they have their way. Unpaid work increases. Minutes here and there, add up. Management attitude has gone from '..do me a favor...' to '...I need you to do this for me now.' Labor in this form, its participation in the workplace, decreases and the hours of work increases for what little live workers are still left in the shop floor. A never ending process of exploiting labor at some point comes to a head. Workers who work under a form of management that emphasizes ' value' the quantitative side of the relation create 'value relations', producing for a subsequent acquisition for anything quantitatively unlimited. The other side of labor is the work itself, a qualitative relation. The product, the labor, the labor-process. Society reproduces itself through cooperation, hence, the idea of Co-ownership or Co-ops seem logical and natural. This side of labor produces for final consumption and social production defines work if it were applied as Corbyn suggests. This side is also the more natural relation between human and nature as a general relation. Such as Climate is not the same as weather. Working is not the same as the work itself. Conservative right wingers are not able to comprehend the difference and consequently are unable to keep a tight leash on capitalism from its corrosive action on the planet and the species life. Labor in this mode owns the labor-process in the sense that the labor-process is a public place it belongs to everyone not exclusively to a few or one person. Society would move toward common form of property ownership which heightens the tension of its opposite relation, the owner non-workers. Hence the conservative Tories and the on the other side of the pond the conservative Republicans are on the defensive and heightened with alarm, private property is at a stake! So alarmed the Democrats are the owner non-workers of society like their counter-part party the Tory. Labor does not produce for exchange in this form of management, there is no overwork and there is no unemployment, and there is no distinction among people such as people who are non-workers involved in the workplace as owners and those who are workers but non-owners of the labor -process.
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  1054. People on average take for granted the fact that the 'spread' of education to the masses, not education itself, which began earlier with Alexander the Great, Peloponnesian Wars of Ancient Iran, and what not! But when people actually were able to read a book did not happen at the same time the printing press was invented and that did not happen until the end of the Renaissance. So the rich, kings, queens, monarchies, lords, dynastic families had at least one literate person in their families that could read a book was not a reality until the printing press was invented. Imagine meeting a prince or king who could not read. We assume they were born with that power. So -- for all the previous 2ooo years humanity was functionally an illiterate mass of individuals that formed some kind of language in pictograph form or song to express themselves. People used marks for they could not even write their own name. An average 10 year old Victorian girl and boy in the 19th century would read a complete book per week. Alice in Wonderland, Tale of Two Cities, Moby Dick, Journey to the Center of the Earth, compared to an average NYC 21St century teenage would consume a book per year. Russia had no pencil factories to even begin teaching people to be literate for 99% of its population. Lenin called in Armand Hammer the American capitalist to open a pencil factory in Russia. Its a regret, that this poor woman and her family fell victim to the incompetence of American administrative bureaucracy which short changes education all the time. School administrators seem to mimic in their own bureaucracy the same hierarchy of law enforcement in how they administer the funds for education, replicate bank culture in how they pay themselves first, and mimic the republican party in setting the rules that children should have no rights in society.
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  1068. How America became the poorest military power in the world is a problematic question? The life of modern industry has been a series of separate periods of moderate activity, prosperity, over production, crisis and stagnation for the working class. Birth, Fertility, and Mortality rates has been at stake for the whole of the industrial life of the working class beginning in 1833 ending in 2008 to the present hour. Mortality is usually the motive for revolutionary movements generally, apparently, not when it comes to the working class in the US! For the whole of the 20th and the 21st century corporations were the beneficiaries of the productive might of the working class. The country became poor for the following reasons... False concepts in economics, the lack of social science and false patriotism, false ideas of freedom, liberty, obscuring the reality that the individual bears the weight of personal human needs is at the bottom of existence. Each person is to deal with their survival on individualistic terms perpetuates a self-consciousness, Me first attitude. You can grow ever more frustrated expecting a lopsided economic system to work at full capacity. Its lopsidedness is full capacity. America comes way short of realizing latent talents of its people--your frustration might change into revolutionary action if you came to revolutionary theory in a rational frame of mind. But so far the social order has created higher intensities of frustration transferring the irrationality of the whole social order to the isolated individual who is the source of sick and crazy. Breaking away from this brand and stereotype is going to require each of you turn yourselves into a social power rather than waiting for a political power to break you away from the poverty of social life.
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  1108. The relations of exploitation and the world of individuals for the Trump administration has a narrow moral compass. Under the Trump administration the fossil fuel industry executives have become a class whose condition of existence are those of our whole society! To them the question is how individuals and relations are to be used, to be exploited.  When the campaign pits Trump against a democrat, he will criticize only those relations handed down from a past era and are an obstacle to the development of the energy sector. (This is why Bernie must changed the subject of Medicare For All as a need in the future, as Trump will always be looking into the past to criticize Medicare For All, and rationalize a free market position.)  Iran and Venezuela would not be a national security threat if the energy sector had no major role in the government. The mishief created in Central America to repress Venezuela's Bolivarian revolution has super militarized the military in Columbia. But something more sinister lurks in the closet of Central American leaders.  They have close ties and well connected to elites in the US. Duque, Hernandez, Sanchez, Morales, have the full support of the Trump Administration for it to say nothing of the reign of terror and violence behind the exodus of Central Americans. Drug cartels, government, military and American foreign corporations are at war with peasants, workers, students and unemployed youths, local police, journalists and organizers in a battle to privatize agriculture, education, medical health and pension, lower wages and lengthen the working day, essentially the free sway of capital over labor.
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  1109. On the one hand, the relative commodity conceals a social relation, and on the other hand, the equivalent commodity is a social value because of its own useful properties. This neoliberal economic law, is a social paradox and a social dilemma that imprisons living individuals of a society to a life cursed by a value-relation that is purely social by nature and transitory pending the social response it gets from the enormity of the crisis it creates. A system that cannot equate the content and substance of things to itself directly, -- but must use an intermediary medium and equate things of equality as an abstraction, forces itself on the natural internal value relation of things. Instead of a blessing of more equality for humanity, the rule of equality asserts itself through crisis and inequality for humanity. The utility of political crisis brings the abstract down to earth to the concrete in order for the value relation between things to start working again. Many die on the way down. By working again I mean the social relation or the value relation is hidden again until the prices of things go so far from the value substance of things again that another crash is expected and is required to bring things into equality again. Price and values deviations expressed in differences in currency values to gold values is measured by its substance found in both commodities. The whole society of individuals live life in a state of tension for the sake of things being equal is a crazy form of existence! Equality among things is the abstinence of equality among people becomes a central pathos within society's cultural life and people assume the purpose of life in general and the state in particular is to insure social equality because economic equality is always moving in the opposite direction of equality into a crisis of inequality, and all the aspirations expressed in this social order, its thoughts, opinions, criticisms, biases, and its politics, even its candidates of all persuasions, work toward the goal of achieving this equality among things presumably because it is perceived to be the closest act of creation mankind can get to God. The psychosis of the public is truly a historical paradox in the west and in the US in particular where anything goes. In reality, all we need to do is to stop treating things like people and people like things and equality will emerge natural from society's total capabilities.
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  1111. Two issues, both shooters, Uvalde and Highland Park, bought their guns legally. This means that every mass assassination thus far has been from a legal gun owner not from the people proGun rights people call “criminals”. Those people, the poor, black and brown communities, get armed and become targets for assassination because Cops know they are armed with illegally obtained weapons or assuming they are not armed, become armed with a plant at the scene of a shooting an illegal weapon to make them criminal ‘offenders’ and cry foul play. Parents are being played by prosecutors and police on the one side and pro-gun rights advocates on the other at the community level of the assassinations. Parents are dishonestly played also by two other groups on the national level of this issue. Leads me to believe the legal gun owners have much to hide opposing stricter gun laws. What would states dig up on their past that would disqualify them from owning a gun is my suspicion in addition to their racism driving the whole movement to crush poor and black people into some kind of subservience that has yet to be made clear eludes to secret and clandestine para military organizations within their ranks. The president on the other had is the other issue, he does not want to restrict gun manufacturers with gun laws that would tell them how to make their guns or how much to sell them for and where. Parents are being dishonestly played by now four parties, the president, the gun makers, on the national level, and the pro gun people, and the cops/prosecutors o the community level, while the deterioration of youths into violence and incarceration is taking place in the background. It appears until verified for parents; that parents need to take control over more than their children but control over the whole political superstructure working against them!
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  1119. American manufacturers are challenged 9:20 getting the people to work three shifts. Operating and managing three jobs shifts of say 50 workers per shift to work the factory around the clock and not be hampered by raw material or parts for machinery not on premises is a challenge. Production is so bad that even if there is a threat of a major tornado the Candle Factory night shift will go on or the workers on that shift will be out of a job. Threatening to cut you off from vital means of life is an act of terror. What would it be like under the same circumstances if the workers owned the factory? For one thing production would never leave the community. The factory will never close and move to Thailand. That’s a plus. Second thing one worker would not be allowed to work two or three shifts, hours that exceed the human limit, and be bled of all energy from an intensive labor-process. The Candle Factory would have been close the day before landfall of the tornado. That’s a plus. Third, the pay would come from contracts to produce N95s and peripherals. Big contracts enough to cover factory costs and higher wages for labor. Money is not going into the private pockets of people with some very expensive lifestyle habits like Joe Manchin, yachts, luxury mansions, expensive lawyers to defend you, etc. Some big plusses to consider as an alternative to the present day nightmare of privatization. Not the America it was in the 70s, personal circumstances were right for that generation, no rent, no bills, cheap prices, more freedoms, people could make enough to look for America. Amazing how rapidly the American Dream went from a home in the woods for around $20K to park city tents. These jobs are minimum wage and no benefits till at least three months into the job. From the workers point of view the job sucks because production is not regular. Manufacturers could potentially lock workers out because there is no raw material to be had until the supply chain gets it there. Owners of these companies cannot offer consistency of employment and they change the work process to raise the bottom line makes the job a lethal weapon. The answer to this problem is obvious but the obvious is not on the mind of a Congress that looks the other way at the damaging effects of production on working people in this country, they turn away and hate work, a part of who they are, the factory owners turn a social activity that should give you pride and dignity into a nightmare of horrors!
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  1123. Germany was in the selling position during the Great Recession and China was in the selling position, while the US, where the Great Recesssion originated, remains in the buying position. A nations gets to be in the sellers position when it has the greatest capacity to produce all products and replicate them for less the cost than the nation from which those products come from.  The contention surrounding China not playing by the rules is all about China's productive capacity to replicate brand products shrinking US markets for its brand products, a tremendous amount of income is lost to the US, less of its GDP capitalized is a potential time-bomb, a toxic concoction of a combination of glut, over production, too little money in circulation, and wage reductions, interrupts the normal cycle of capital accumulation. There is nothing a nation can do short of bombing the other nation to smithereens or by some means overthrow its government to change its rules to reduce the productive capacity of its people. Pro-Democracy movements in Hong Kong is fertile ground for creating chaos to disrupt the working day of China.  Eventually, the US will cave and make new arrangements in market sharing, the pressure to do this will come from its own farm belt. Europe is in the buying position on the same side of the exchange process as the US and Britain's decision to leave the European Union would amount to one less buyer for Germany. This would cause a fall in GDP and productive capacity in Germany and the reaction against immigrants will heighten as the job markets shrink. The world today is not what it was under the Cold War or under the single monetary currency of the dollar. The USSR provided a healthy balance between the West and the East when the US had the most amount of gold, and a solid industrial base, but in the past 45 years we have seen an extension of capital and markets with serious sociological consequences of capital flight in the US. It brought more nations into the US market as sellers, the sum of whom acting in the same way to realize most of their GDP into capital. Reinvested into production to raise their productive capacity. All but one nation followed this rule, the US capital and finance hollowed out the productive aspects of its workforce.
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  1127. Dr. Harriet Fraad presents a valid subject about working in America for women.  Technically, the government should not compensate any employer for parental and family leave a worker requires. Because from a classic economic point of view, all labor is unpaid labor. Parental and family leave is already paid for in the surplus labor consumed by the employer. Past accumulated labor paid off the time a worker's maternity and parental leave would cost the US. Employers in the US accmulate the product of present day working hours far surpasses the amount of time it takes to raise a family is how many hours per worker gives free of charge to the employers. I realize this concept of truth comes hard to believe but it is mathematically proven, the calculus is real and infallible on this question of surplus labor and surplus value. On these grounds which can be proven, the anti-abortionist have absolutelty no right at all, not even two cents worth of an opinion on whether a worker should have or not a family. They are forcing women into the workforce at lower wages in the present and this labor adds to the already accumulated labor of the past employers capitalized. If the evangelicals are repressing sexual values in society that is forcing women into the workforce as a lower paid strata of the workforce, it is because they are acting out the demands of the employers for cheap labor that social conditions would compel women to work and raise a family on their own. Making a working class family a single parent household unable to rise above that social class for individuals in that household as wages remain regulated by the market.
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  1139. The foregoing statement by the Professor marks the essential difference between an academic Marxist and a Marxist. A trained Marxist adheres to the principal of a general theory of history and a particular theory of capitalism. Class institutions, property relations and social institutions evolve not out of causality and chance, or by accident, rather, they result from class struggle regulated by law and custom. One nation is not only relating to another; they both are relating to a world economy as the agency of world development. The professor’s view is an eclectic view ranking nations according to economic power and slaps ideas on top of ideas. The scientific method traces the origin, development and finality of a given social organism. The end of a particular arrangement of nations occurs through a world economy in its variations of development is the reality of the condition of reproduction and survival for those nations. A movie produced and directed by Otto Preminger stars Paul Newman and other notables is called “EXODUS” 1960; makes distinct reference to Zionism as the settlement in Palestine of Jews and the intent to build a Jewish State/ homeland for the Jews in Palestine. Overall the movie is empathetic to the Jews but it does explain Zionism defining existence as a, “knowing of oneself”, “identity politics”, as it is defined today by the forces on the right. Gay, straight, binary, etc..The 200 year old tradition of philosophical thought defining existence as an a-priori notion of knowing who you are blocks the road toward arriving at mortality and existence as a condition of reproduction and existence. These standpoints are historically obsolete, yet the simplest reversal of the Spinoza’s axiom “I, think, therefore, I am”, to “I am, therefore, I think” grounds reality, life and mortality on a foundation of biological materialism. What is genocide? We define genocide from the standpoint of biological materialism as the slow or immediate suppression and elimination of life-giving elements. Water, power, food, hospitals and youth. All of which Israel targets to eliminate and all of which the US targets to suppress the longevity, reproduction, and existence of the American working class.
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  1140. Oil production stay high so gas prices stay low is the reason western democracies enable Saudi Arabia's behavior would have been a more direct way to begin criticizing the Trump administration. Start with the form, the economic relation, to explain the content of the social relation. The form is the concrete. You start talking about an aspect of the social relation like the Democrats do, its a long uphill climb trying to figure out the concrete manifestation of the abstract. The relation with the Middle East and the US is oil. Been so since oil became the staple for gas. The concrete is oil and gas and why these commodities became the content of the Trump sale of arms to Saudi Arabia US oil reserves are untapped, it is still pragmatic to import oil from the Saudis, as long as gas prices stay low for the American consumer AKA, the working class, the Trump administration can leverage itself against public opinion as doing something good. In the deal the Saudis get the bigger share of the US market for oil a market. In exchange the King buys American weapons products and pays for American 'know how' protection of the Royal Family and Kingdom. What the King does with his arms is his business, if he arms his son a feeble move by the King arming a child with a gun and the Power has gone to the young Prince's head, well, there have been worse things. As long as he stays in line the Monarchy can be defended. But any critic of the Prince's is silenced by abduction, disappearance and presumed dead is a proven method to restructure the kingdom and weed out its disloyal factions. Nuff said on this. The economic arrangement creates a dependency of the American consumer on a mad Prince. He sells us oil cheap enough that our own reserves are efficiently self funding, in return gas prices for us stay low. But if the Trump administration does anything to cross the Prince over this disappearance of an average reporter, he can retaliate and gas prices can shoot up! The whole Trump deal with Saudi Arabia falls apart. More land acquisitions empower the prince further to extend his kingdom into Yemen and the American consumer AKA working class carries the guilt of inaction for the sake of low gas prices. This consumer AKA working class demand has positioned the American government in relation to Saudi Arabia as unable to intervene on the wholesale slaughter and genocide of the Yemenese people. Its the same kind of consumer working class demand that rides Harley Davidson's motorcycles and peddle bike frames manufactured in Thailand and China. The concrete world from which these things in exchange through governments happen is a big fucking mystery to the American working class, why gas prices are cheap(er) than the rest of the world and why a president can criticize and shame a corporation for closing its factories in America are still selling their bikes to the American working class. Why an unassuming woman's criticism of the hypocrisy in western democracy criticizes the ruling parts of western democracies and not the working class part of western democracies for its own hypocrisies enabling the economic relation to begin with.
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  1148. The question "Is a New Global Financial Crisis Imminent?", was poorly addressed to the exclusion of the sociological impact all crisis has on the working class. Anybody who pays attention to the development of capitalism in America knows periodic financial crisis, stagnation, depression and unemployment, plus war is inherent in American capitalism. A sign in a store that reads "Everything must go!", or "liquidation sale", means the profits of businesses and particularly, the factories of workers that make all this stuff are under attack because profits tend to fall under capitalism. The inability to sell that which is produced and throwing people out of work is how crisis in America is expressed. The only people who do not know a financial crisis is imminent or chronic, are the people who don't know the history of American capitalism. Said twice to emphasis the point. It is a crisis in itself when crisis analysis in one economic sphere of activity, i.e., the financial sector, and no analysis of the impact of the financial crisis on the other sphere of economic activity, i.e., production. jobs, the workplace, the length of the working, displacement of workers, automation, signs that fewer people and companies become super rich when human exploitation is out in the open, direct, driven by hubris for higher profits. Problem with these guys is they never worked in a factory to know reality. For them the human element exists only in the financial sector and its relation to the government, the human element in production is for them non-existent in this interview. Crisis is an ongoing occurrence in all places of work under capitalism and in America exploitation culminates into a system crisis, because all businesses do the same to counter the falling tendency of profits. They consume less and less of the human resources in labor in society in correlation to the degree they invest to raise productivity with technology and science. They produce more with less workers, saturating markets with commodities to the extent sales fall precipitating a crisis.
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  1181. Can't forget the Iraq War Veterans, so angry at the liberal establishment who at the time was Joe Biden put them in harms way using 9/11 for a call for freedom and liberty against Sadaam Hussien and liberate Iraq. Congress went along with it hook, line and sinker. They gave AlQueda a place to fight Americans. The Vets came back destroyed, and used the only power they have to elect Trump, a spite vote against the liberal establishment. What did the left do? Nothing. What did the left do when these same vets showed up in Virginia armed to protest Northrum's gun laws on MLK day 2020? Nothing. The left should have been there arm and arm with the Iraq vets. Biden was then and is now in the pocket of Lockheed. Grumman, GE, all the arms makers. He then became VP to Obama, hand picked by Obama to initiate another war, the war we are in today. The next group of Veterans sent to war are not going to come back because now they will be fighting entire nations in the Middle East. As for Trump, he is the wrong man for the job. Wrong, because his path is not to deconstruct the arms industry and wrench the grip the arms industry has of our government, his path is to become an autocrat. The people supporting him never went to war. An autocrat is natural to them, they are chiliasts, believers in the second coming of Christ, God, Family and Country. They are NASCAR enthusiasts, rich evangelists, rich, spoiled Americans, country music stars, with pro-fascist leanings. Only Bernie opposed the Iraq War. Only Bernie opposes the misuse of the military, opposes invasions, opposes the arms industry, opposes industries with the highest carbon footprint. Vote Bernie if you are going to vote, its the last chance to restore America back to its original roots of American progressivism.
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  1198. I tend to think in a low field of abstract thought to take in more aspects of reality versus other occasions when a high field of abstract thought is needed to analyze fewer aspects of reality. But whatever may come of the evolution of capitalism, the workers struggle for freedom is unchanged, the fact remains that the worker must break free from the compulsion of work based on average labor-time and people must learn to work by their sheer will power. Because will power is the power that breaks all value relations Dr. Wolff eludes in his well-marked opinion. Average labor time is the Achilles Heel, if we break it, we are freed from its rule and domination and replacing that rule and authority of average working time over all individuals is a national will, collective and individual, to work, own and live. Make society a real place to thrive over a place that permits mere existence. And not just any work but the kind of work that restores health to ourselves and our planet, changes all industries, and changes the division of labor, and if we use this division of labor and its power of productivity as our own, the world can heal, thrive, and grow, without social inequality bestowed upon us through the conveniences of the clock, time, average working time, that presently, happens by chance, accident, and causality, if mouths are fed, and sick are healed, and minds are taught. Individual will supported by the mass of individuals, directs this energy to each evil to eradicate, to become a member of a species not a member of a social class is the reason all working people need to free themselves from this social category of “working-class’ , and never again shall people who enjoy working should be called a worker but just a man or woman who makes useful things by the power of their own will, gets credit for their creations, is the struggle against the rule and authority of the principal agent of capitalism, the clock and the capitalist.
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  1199. Frankly I think the Quincy Institute position is contradictory. On another note... Assume capitalism is an expansionist social system then the whole globe is covered by competitors. All nations are competitors because each nation are capitalist. Not all nations obviously, smaller ones are still using older social systems of work. Bigger ones are competitors, all bigger nations are rivals in competition, it acts upon them as a coercive law, to undercut your competition’s cost of production. France tries to undercut Germany, and Germany undercuts Britain for their economies and so on. Higher States use wars that mess up the competing nation’s ability to produce. Successfully producing the same product as your competition but at a lower cost enables you to increase your revenue stream of profits sounds like a rule of capitalism and it is. Each nation struggling to do the very same thing, acting out on this rule of competition, on each other creates a world system of pure anarchy and chaos for products to change hands. In the old days, a ration card system did a better job than the commercial jungle of competition. Mostly though, it is the cause of poverty. Innovation creates poverty. The more each nation innovates the poorer their people become. Innovation cuts labor cost and leaves people idle, without a sufficient income to survive, the economy is deprived of fresh investment and renewal but the individual nation or company benefits from the cuts brought on by innovation.
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  1227. Aristocratic lineage is a caste system. Based on this Britain is not a democracy at all (not even close); even if the monarchy is symbolic and the population votes. Aristocratic lineages were vanquished in the ancient states (Rome, Greece, Egypt) because of their disposition in society as castes based on kinship. Their locality was determined by where the caste aristocracy lived. All the work done by the workpeople of their locality was done for the caste system as private owners of the soil. While the Romans abolished the aristocratic lineages the British made the aristocracy the largest consumer of the labor of the society. Suffice it say the UK is still a Monarchy and not a Republic. Birth rates have a higher frequency of occurrence than the speed with which an heir inherits a Crown. The life of an individual can go up to 100 but the rate at which people screw each other and make babies is about every 7 minutes. Inheritance laws is what jeopardizes the existence of the Monarchy, and conversely, the birth rate is a threat to the monarchy. Charles waited some 20 years before his mother died to inherit the Crown. In that 20 year period millions of kids were born with no affinity to an old fart dressed in royal regalia except as a fairy tale character imported by Disney. When they become adults the Royals take on the semblance of one large family on welfare. I reality what looks like the royals are on the dole is actually the usurpation of wealth by a single Gen (family). People who sit around waiting for an inheritance instead of working are not admired for their maturity but are seen as spoiled. The problem the British government created for themselves is they cannot change the line of descent. The laws of inheritance have to be terminated and consequentially for everyone else which includes the lawmakers.
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  1235. Its a shame this generation does not see the Gig economy disguises as a program for the prolongation of the working day. Do the math: If one worker holds three or two jobs to make ends meet and the workforce is 132 million people, that leaves 44 million with odds two to three times against them finding a job. The legal working day of 8 hours is not violated by employers. One worker is working for two employers, sometimes three and each employer stays within the legal limit before they are required to pay health insurance, a factor that is part of wages. Wages are reduced as a consequence of staying within the legal limit of the workday for the employer and the duration of work doubles for the worker. This brings forth a mortality and health related contradiction of the effects on individuals by the intensity of work and duration of work that is never balanced out in the realm of capitalist production. A shame this generation misses this piece about their lives to act on it as a galvanizing social force. The other thing is: As people’s jobs become more intensified and the work is prolonged indefinitely all of social production where people are working two jobs in one becomes completely inefficient since the effect of this in the next cycle of investment is less new hires, cuts in pensions, and wages held constant, (wages never rise never fall below their value and survival), remains a sphere of social life free of restraint as employers have free sway over production and the workers working one, two jobs, three, have none but are constantly subject to unrelenting and successive tasks decided by non-users of the technology (the tools the workers are to work with on the job). Planning is done by those who are the non-users of these forces of technology...the ones who know the least about the job(s) and of the whole labor-process. Its a self-evident law to me but not to the person who needs to know this in their bones is a tragedy in itself; that people in their daily lives of work and working will never realize a balance between life and work in a sphere of social life that takes up the most of their time and reproductive capacity. If a balance is reached it will be hell getting there. America is home to the most dangerous gang on earth. All the political activity of the super rich against international rivalries, wars become means of coordinating and planning the prolonging of the work day of all workers in all societies through mass social control.
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  1238. This is positive. The long history of capitalism since 1929 is racked with crisis and revolution as a pattern. WWII rise of Nazism in particular and fascism in general and the Chinese Revolution in 1933. Out of that crisis the US come out clean and enjoys a 20 year long period of prosperity but by 1950 the patterns starts all over again. The Korean War and the Cuban Revolution breaks out. Out of that crisis comes a period of prosperity but by 1963, that’s right... the crisis is the Vietnam War and this ends all prosperity with a long US recession, cuts, unemployment, austerity. double digit inflation and an Oil Crisis for the whole decade of the 70s. Capitalism hits bottom at this point. But not before a 10 year period of growth and international banking structures get built up setting the stage for the next crisis to come when the Gulf War breaks out in 1980. From this point forward the American working class take the brunt of all the burdens for every crisis not created by them and the working masses blame the less fortunate victims from poor nations for the increasing misery and material deprivation the richest nation imposes on its people famed for having the poorest population among all the rich nations. Crisis is now how the economies of the west grow at all. Without crisis prices would have to be kept high by other means which in this day and age the price-setters can not draw attention to themselves and fall under public scrutiny, the best way is to generate wars and create a demand. This keeps a shortage going and prices high. Economists can blame inflation on high interest rates the masses won’t know any better. So now there are multiple wars and multiple resistance wars that are stimulating growth for mainly one sector of the economy. All sectors are made to bend to that one sector performing well in sales that all other sectors must modify themselves just to survive. Its good to see the German public is less gullible than their ancestors many of whom were far braver than their descendants in fighting Nazism, Germany still has unfinished business, a revolution that began was diverted by the first world war that broke out in 1914. This is pivotal moment for it was a decisive moment that put the above pattern into place for the rest of the century. The pattern of war and revolution. When Europe was completely leveled to the ground, broken, when Germany looked like Gaza today, wrecked, pummeled, demolished, capitalism migrated and settled in America and took its tool box of economic principals with it thus starting the robbing of generations of their chances to be the rulers of their own lives!
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  1249. Good material for a political comedy, Trump's letter to Erdogan and the Three Amigos.  The wealthy Oregon hotel magnate is a national security risk for his lack of experience in the role of ambassador to the EU. Government jobs at the highest levels are bought and sold is how this wealthy hotel capitalist got the job. Campaign donatons is the price of those jobs while other civil service jobs at the lower level of government are allocated by examination. A federal workforce is created by rank through the civil service test but the higher job of decision-making consequences of the federal government are obtained by wealthy donors. Only the rich can pay for those jobs creates a system annexed to the system of birth right of the wealthy. Through the purchase of those higher jobs they access the use of the federal workforce's resources in equipment and labor-power without paying for it. Military flights for government officials is an example. As an official ambassador to the US the rich hotel magnate does not use his own jet or security nor his own residence. He lives free of charge and his own wealth is preserved and productive of profits as a hotel chain owner. This is a civil service system that promotes parasitical class relations. The civil service system blends with the private system of wealth inheritance when the sons or daughters of the rich hotel magnate buys a post in the highest levels of government tthrough political donations, i.e., quid pro quo, we establish an order or a social class in power all the time! Especially when it is a capitalist class let into power that the system becomes contaminated by money, corruption and unaccountability. With the police in the US we have a system that is poitical and not revocable by the Public so there is no accountability for police actions detrimental to individuals in civil society. America has three systems crippling its social development, two public and one private, that are parasitical relations promoting abuse and corruption in government all paid for by the taxpayer.
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  1258. Militarized police, security is the supreme social concept of civil society; the concept of the police. Its what allows a city and society to exists, and its reason for existence to gaurantee for each of its members the preservation of his/her person, rights and property. Your taxes are spent heavily into law enforcement so that you have a sense of security of your rights and property are safe. Its a class issue when failed policing does not takes place in all communities but in certain communities. This displaces the sense of security for each citizen and distorts the idea of security. Behind the policing is social control. Cops making false arrests and barbaric practices of assaulting black people preludes the social control of a black population. There have been 433 police murders in Brazil in five months. Opposition protests are developing in response to the social control exercised by police and the miltiary. How many in the US, LA, NYC, Chicago? Anyone counting? In Honduras the military killed four in demonstrations using live rounds just yesterday 6/23/19. Policing is fully militarized in the sense that the police are equipped by the military. Ethiopia the violence begins with the actual government officials carrying out violent coups to topple one another and in Sudan the military killing demonstrators calling for a change in government policy is the intensity of the violence breaking down the concept of security and therefore, civil society shatters. These are moderate demands made by opposition groups that do not warrant a violent reaction from the State. Reckless and incompetent behavior at every level of the hierarchy in law enforcement, government and society and there is not one institution that can rectify this contradiction except the people and victims of violence themselves.
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  1260. Only 7% of the total workforce (300 million) and in the private sector (120 million) are unionized and that number is shrinking as more American workers become more reactionary and right wing in their politics. Workers are divided and voted for Trump, it was their show of defiance against the Democrats and Liberals on the Left. From 1980 to the present, the Democratic party (Clinton) got four major pieces of legislation passed that gave the advantage to Walmart and Co., Wall Street, Silicon Valley, the Military, the Financial System over the American working class. NAFTA, bank reform, welfare reform, crime bill, had set the stage for the destruction of unions and the workers degradation on two levels, material deprivation and wage suppression. At the time the unions were behind Clinton's reforms and to the average worker receiving the brunt of those reforms coming home to roost after the crash of 2007 led to Trump(ism). Effectively, the Democrats have successfully destroyed the economic base of the masses and constructed a capitalist communism for the elite ruling classes that the American working class has no chance of a revolutionary transformation of society without France, Germany, Britain, Brazil, China, India, and Russia or Latin America being the center of another world historic proletarian revolution that can spread to American workers. This talk may sound vintage but when you consider the worldwide trends of labor struggles they become more intensified in hard times. The condition of the American worker is worse than their counterparts that a major upheaval in breaking down the empire is necessary but not possible without the cooperation of workers everywhere since America's capitalism extends that far around the globe. Economics and climate change, war and disasters forces our consciousness to take account of this necessity.
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  1273. Northam is another white privileged baby boomer. He like many of his ilk dodged the draft in Vietnam.  Affluenza comes in as many forms as there are as many affluent white male Americans in a patriarchy.  He does not wear the pants in the Northam household. The governor may not to be governing Virginia at all. A similar generational thing happened that led to the fall of the Ancient Roman Empire.   The early creation of the Roman State was a union of the first three tribes, Quirinal, Palatine and Capatoline. These formed the original Roman people --the "fathers", the "patres," whose descendants in later times like the rich descendants baby-boomers of the elites of the WWII generation, organized themselves as a distinct class or order.  In Ancient Rome that generation did two things that led to the fall of Rome, they fought to maintain exclusive rights, and exclusive ownership of the public domain and they ended the practice of incorporation of distinct settlements forming the original city-state. They ended immigration and soon the ingenuity and the soul of the empire withered away like it is in the US today. More exact to the way the patricians ran the empire into the ground the baby boomers are running foreign policy in the same way through continuous conquest, i.e., perpetual war. Americans in the Military in American society have Spartacus as their example in overthrowing this capital-owning oligarchy of the social and political elite. Certain generals resigned from the Trump administration is a sign that a revolt is not palpable by the military at this time. But one never knows when a putsch is brewing that can lead the American people into a full blown rebellion against the patriarchy of this privileged social class. Time will tell, but the point is the past mirrors the present and the future.
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  1297. It is fascism enabled by capitalism, the reason there are so many immigrants in Italy is due to the increasing demand for labor-power by capital. This is step one in the law of accumulation to exploit the labor-process for the production of surplus value. There is no other way of getting rich under capitalism but through the exploitation of labor-power and this is offered up for sale through a huge immigrant population, refugees and immigrants supply cheaper labor power but more importantly, they produce surplus value at a higher intensity when they do work, they impregnate the finished product with more value, exactly what capital requires for its own expansion and accumulation, for very little investment in the person and as an outside illegal class of workers they get used by opportunists and career politicians to set the groundwork for a fascist reply to the social conditions Italy's working class is up against. But it is all a distraction from the real process of exploitation for the sake of accumulation. Same thing is going on in all western capitalist societies. Only the US is different. It has not taken in refugees and immigrants, to the contrary, by turning away asylum seekers which is illegal, the US claims to protect its industries and working class from this reserve army of labor is a fallacy because the cheap labor supplied and the increasing demand for labor-power by capital took place during the early stages of this development in the 1990's. The outside illegal workforce was already here working in jobs American would not do or were not trained to do because the working class had been abandoned by capital flight. There was no capital investment in industry in the US, it all went overseas. The US depends heavily on its military to hold this empire together. Italy is no such animal as a capitalist state. It is country led by economic rapists out for themselves for what it is worth and it is a dam shame the Italian working class have not formed their own coalition government to replace the criminal one! Italy is a carnival preyed by vultures.
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  1303. The US position is predicated on pressuring the parliamentary factions to come up with a coalition to run a government but first the terms of the government have to be consistent with the long term aims of the US occupation. Interestingly, the speculation about the American occupation in Iraq is confusing and runs very high among Americans. The opposition to US intervention in Iraq is low among the American public. A lack of understanding of Iraq's economic situation. On the one hand, Iraq has a situation that is not dissimilar to the situation in the US for its own population. High unemployment and low investment capital in to industrial and agricultural sectors, non-universal health care and low functioning education, a violent society, has led to disenchantment with the US occupation for the average Iraqi, is the same disenchantment of the average American voter with their own liberal and conservative politicians leaving defenseless the communities that make up society be raped as the tax payer for corrupt government. The average Iraqi justifiably suspect sectarian political factions of exporting into foreign banks the reconstruction funds intended to rebuild Iraq is not much different than 'Dark Money" channeled to Senators to vote against climate change rules from the Koch Brother's money juggernaut. The many reasons to oppose US foreign policy can be summed up in two words; Peace Now! On the other hand, US/Trump's continuation of the US occupation in Iraq, is the Achilles Heel of US domestic policy.
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  1309. Wow! What a report. I would advance one thesis; the Trump administration will be the last antagonistic presidency this country will ever see. I cannot see it moving back from a head on collision with the rest of humanity. It has Britain and Israel committed to it as allies but the deeper it goes into racist ideology it will lose those states to internal revolution. Just in the last 20 years the social critiques were saying capitalism would perish because it cannot sustain its insane rapacious consumption pattern of private appropriation and the people carrying all the debt. We see now those were cries and whispers from the people carrying the national debt not from the people free of the national debt. Actually given all the wealth Wall Street has raked in that alone and the wealth of the Catholic Church can pay off the national debt with their money alone. It looks to me although too early to tell, that the fools in the White House will bring about the end of capitalism to spite humanity. The real end of capitalism is nowhere near us but it is in the minds of the people in the Trump administration who will, in turn, bring about the end of capitalism, a direct result of their ideology. The death of ideology which presupposes its opposite, science. With capitalism gone science can be for the people and a new age for the common person is ushered in. That is if it is not too late! How far to the right the US has moved in just 20 years is indicative of one thesis. The American empire is in decline, a simple thesis, and has been since Nixon. It has lost control over grand areas of the world to independent nationalist movements or to communism, if you want to call it that these days, that the Trump administration is in a psychotic death struggle against the rise of underdeveloped countries. In effect, the elites are running contrary to all human history and it does prove Marx's focus on the class struggle as having a double character to it, not only a bloody affair as a war over Oil, or territory, or wage and price wars, it is not only a 'condition of humanity' as psychology would suggest. Progress is found through human conflict is its other side. The US declines and formerly backward peasant societies begin to come of age and this is how we deliver suffering humanity into the light of day of industrialization with a nuclear option, to blow them all to hell! America elects a New York Nazi sympathizer to the presidency ought to be the headline.
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  1310. This writing is probably too deep for this format but perhaps for some it is not to start a higher level of dialogue. Both sides of Congress are defining their position on Obamacare. Party leaders want to know how many flank the centrists that the ACA would become an expanded medicare versus how many want it completely abolished to come up with a compromised package deal. On the one side hangs the balance of 20 million Americans entirely cut off from any form of medical care and on the other side, the hideous juggernaut of capitalism, profit absorbing health establishment. Their next vote will help them form a national policy but it will not be at the expense of the rich establishment. Somewhere, somehow on the backs of another segment of the American people, a national policy will cost society more than society can afford. It is at this juncture the realization strikes party leaders that every sector of America's material infrastructure and social structure has been for so long neglected that 330 million people are living in 19th century conditions. A single payer system is all society can afford. Raising the debt ceiling has reached its limit so to spe After the Civil War of 1865, the rise of communism in Europe and then in Russia created a monster in the US. A monster absorbing all of the productivity of Americans for its own development. Along with that monster, a prototype personality for all to copy, mimic, mime, and be a part of the monstrous being at its core, that the very animal usurping America's total capacity to survive today had one complete century to improve upon its own being and the type A personality. Communism had a son and it is called the military industrial complex. Inside this monstrous complex society is intact, well-nourished and suited for growth of power, venality and hubris. Outside of the military society falls to pieces, here life is cosmetically coated to work for 50, 100, 300 million people over the course of a century as a bare working average. Cheap schools, cheap food, clothes, everything cheap in quality and quantity. Inside the complex the best of quality and quantity. Two different worlds and a social system implanted into the larger social body, a parasite now turned into an abscess, to use a medical analogy. A double standard flows from this contradiction, a broken pair of hedge cutters to do the job that requires a chain saw. Cheap investment for maximum output. A 19th century railroad system still in place, a dangerously decaying lead water system installed at the turn of the 20th century, a dangerously depleting environment from a hundred years of mining and experimentation. High mortality rates of the American people found in the places where they work and in society where they live. America never developed a civilization from the ground up. Its law enforcement divisions developed an institutional copy of the Pinkertons and Murder Inc., former bounty slaves bounty hunters gradually reformed to become a police force. Now Veterans become private security hire-ees. The cost or repair is so high that it can only come from one source, i.e., the Rich who won't give in. Americans have a social revolution of no choice on their hands. An apartheid system within the walls of its death star that Capitalism was too busy absorbing the productive power of previous generations under conditions that were first slaves and then wage earners let get larger and larger. Too large it will break the spine of the country. What happened to society that it has come to this point of total exhaustion in one corner and rapacious force in the other corner was the Cold War and every war following the Civil War. Financing these activities exceeded the total productive capacity of its people that something new had to replace the finite limits of a gold standard if the circulation of America corporate products were not to perish in warehouses. Fake money was invented but far too fake up against the all too striking reality of decaying social and economic superstructure. The only place where Mind is not fully developed but the body is developed is in the Military Industrial Complex and where Mind is highly developed but the body is decrepid is in society. Where matter is lacking thought is rich and where matter is plenty thought is poor.
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  1312. We are fortunate to have a strong judiciary.. In other less developed countries the judiciary is usually subordinate to governments that are really informal dictatorships in disguise. I am still waiting for Trump to make his pivot and act on his campaign promises. He gets deeper into this and we'll have four years of pure unadulterated bullshit for a government. A government worth impeaching and I am sure republicans would rather have predictable Pence as president. You do realize that some countries in recent history had several re-writes of constitutions before they establish themselves in one form of a republic or another, because of their internal fighting and weakness, between the bureaucracy, judiciary, the president, the military, power flips from one hand to another. Always the people are screwed. That America is coming to this is revealed in the fact that an artificial crisis is created to divert mass attention from real problems; nothing is done to raise the condition of the poor, the working poor, the elderly and the young and lower middle classes from poverty. This is the poorest rich country in the world. Why foment a constitutional crisis to render all parts of the government from enacting their duties? The continual bickering and haranguing the public with negative laws, the poorest are victimized, in time rights taken away and all that is left to do in their societies is to do nothing, flee or fight back. Once a total ban is in effect then special considerations are granted on a piecemeal basis, a long wait. I do not think indigenous people of the world whose fates are at greater risk will have much patience given their social condition when they encounter the next American outside of the US. I think this will enhance the forces of terror. Maybe that is what they want. If Hannibal can cut through the Alps with elephants and take down the Holy Roman Empire in one battle than you have to wonder the degree of incompetence of the generals who had 15 years and universal dominance on land, sea, air and space at their disposal and cannot take down ISIS. Other reasons explain the delay not incompetence. But for clarity sake, there is a difference between the fighters fighting the US and the masses of people thrown into the stone age and need help!
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  1315. This episode was weak in substance. The fossil fuel industry, the Koch brothers specifically, don't care about what foundations say, do or want! It is still profitable to be in oil and worst still the entire US military is totally dependent on fossil fuel. To add salt to the wound Koch International, Exxon, BP, Conoco, could give a rat's ass about the bottom line of industries that are not in oil or coal production despite how damaging fossil fuel emissions are. The daily activity of Americans is driving back and forth to work. The auto, chemical and aeronautics industry executives are what the Nobility was to the French Revolution's Jacobinites, a force of reaction and destruction to the world at large. A scourge on humanity that gave birth to the idea of 'planned obsolescence' through products and inventions have subjugated an entire population to their productions. They substituted arms and legs and built everything necessary for mobility for a machine. The State that considers the oil industry 'the' vital national interests of the county. The rest of us are secondary, what they call a 'special interest'. They can recover from divestment and return again to exploit the natural resources of the world to meet the demand of the US military dependent on oil. Until this dilemma is freed from the encroachments of Big oil and militarism in Washington nothing will change. In fact, the foundations promoting renewables stands to be defeated and crushed without the total support of the whole population. They should be addressing how lifestyle and culture must change within the American people for they are the ones buying their products. Oil seethes from every pore of the American consumer, it is under their feet in asphalt, they sleep in homes made from poly carbonite material, polyurethane in plastic in their homes, in rattles and diapers in all cribs and on babies. Every product in America is an oil based product. The social phenomenon of mass consumption of oil based products in American life and culture presents itself as immense accumulation of plastic, rubber and poly fluorocarbon elements and styrofoam is in every home, garage, business and government structure. If plastic rules oil rules and war is necessary to extract the raw material to keep oil in everyday life consumed.
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  1334. The perception of a perfect government in the view of Democrats also makes the claim Hegel makes of the Prussian State, the American government is the final achievement humans can produce in the political world. Hegel rationalized the Prussian State in the same way. Rationalizations are relative rationalizations, relative to the moment they live, purely subjective. Doing more work than what you are compensated for; is not the Marx’s theory of value and use value, value, concrete labor and abstract labor are the four elements that go into the formation of the concept of value at the level those economic categories developing through the history of work. The history of work, or the history of labor, is the subject-matter, and when people have no clue how things are made, why they are made, or what work in society looks like... in the history of work. Must not confuse surplus value and where it comes from with these categories. Where Surplus Value comes from is answered not in the first chapter. Use-value and value and the concrete and abstract labor contradiction composing value have moved into a new form, more complex, they reside in commodities and this contradiction is resolved with the introduction of money. There is no discussion about the nature of Capital or Capitalism at this point. Not even a definition. Not even a mention of Capital. The categories must originate from themselves and Capital is a category that does not emerge or come from use-value, value, concrete labor, abstract labor in their form as commodities and money. Workers in every century exchanged products as commodities and money for thousands of years and a Capitalist was never in the picture util the 16th century. Capitalism and free markets are not mutually dependent; we can have exchange without a capitalist and still have surplus value. Not only do the categories have to emerge from themselves in the treatment but they must be accurate, a clear and exact picture of reality, of the subject-matter; presented always along the lines of deductive reasoning. Essentially he is dealing with aspects of reality when on the level of discussing the circulation of social matter in society. For instance it would be wrong to bring into the discussion of the elements that constitute value in operation through the circulation of commodities and money in society when the subject-matter is production. We need to see these elements in their transformation through production and here we begin to see how surplus value comes into being. “Nuff said; go read the book yourself.
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  1355. It isn’t an empire in the field of industrial production but its social classes are still very much intact as an empire. The empire appears to have two economies within it. One which the empire itself has organized into a command economy and a general economy outside of the empire that is organized around free market labor-power and exchange. Whatever happened to the rich peasants and the farm workers working for themselves in England and America in the 15 th Century. As long as they were enriched over the centuries the descendants should still be around with a long family history of early day farmers who became growers famous for their product and what ever happened to the mass of people made poor because these past ancestral peasants and self employed farmers exploited the farm workers they hired in the 15th century became the steady flow of migrant workers supplying the labor-power growers need in the 21st Century? Are migrants employed by the new age organic farmers, animal breeders, and slaughter houses of today? The empire in its decline took other lands away from the Public and rented it out to ranchers. A Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor was the daughter of a rancher. Ranchers enjoyed 3 centuries of enrichment through an augmentation of their private lands with federal lands. This greatly increased their stock in cattle, practically for nothing of a cost, while the cattle themselves yielded a richer supply of shit (manure) for the cultivation of soil. These social classes are still intact as aristocracy and land positions in the highest court of the land as the empire declines. Large scale farmers who specialize in one crop in vast quantity run farms long term, 99 year long contracts. What reforms would change the relation of the social classes? These social classes are constant, implanted in the soil, while the humanity that fills the role of supplying the labor-power is always changing with fresh new faces increases the difficulty of redirecting the decline of empire to help them.
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  1367. The Roots of NATO in Five Sentences. It was founded as a means to contain socialism. To limit socialism to only the USSR. At the time, the US formed NATO in the later part of the 20th century on the basis of the League of Nations formed in the early part of the century after WWI. The League of Nations founded as a means to contain socialism is the precursor to NATO.  NATO's history begins in embryo form with the crushing of the Paris Commune of 1871 and any working class revolt thereafter. That's it. Postscript: The military could be used to crush a real working class revolution in the US but if for some reason the military could not be used then the dominant political class would use NATO forces to crush the US military and the working class revolution in war it sees it can come out on top as absolute ruler against both. This would be an interesting configuration of alliances where the two combatants are two social classes and two militaries engage in battle on American soil. A war on American soil shall not occur is the No. 1 Commandment of the Joint Chiefs of Staff can easily be violated by a powerful economic social class and its Capital the world depends on for its existence including the US military. Get a guy like Trump and he'll call out their incompetency. All the world is a slave to capital is what guy like him understands best. Those who own capital rule the world. NATO forces being commandeered by the capitalist class of rulers and the US military mutinied because the incompetency of the Generals failed to protect the mainland is not an unlikely scenario in times when societies come and go. Big mistakes are made by the ruling powers to protect that which is sacred to them, the working day, in a vain effort to repress the working class from ever making its own mistakes a worker can never be anything more than a worker, they fight to subordinate labor as instrument of capital, the military fights to preserve honor, freedom and mainland, the working class fights for its dignity and self-emancipation, -- the other social classes do weird things uprooted in the social turmoil. In the interlude of various battles the forces merge into one against a foreign element of national origins in what becomes a war of a working class emancipation because no other social class is functional enough to resolve the crisis. Workers win by default and necessity to end its own role in the social conflict of the capitalist paradigm.
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  1387. Bravo! It takes significant dedication and intellectual will to pour over the life cycle of a given industry. Workers who ran the factories took them over in Chile very recently. Wish I can recall the details but I do recall the worker's action was a fact. Why didn't the workers in Maine take action to the next level and claim the factory? The case of the Chilean workers holding the factory and continue to produce from the factory though they sleep in the factory and guard it at night is being litigated in court for worker ownership. Once off the premises the owners will lock out the workers so they stay in the factory 24/7, wives deliver food, stay a while.  The factory continues to pump out products and the public is supportive of the workers action and legal fight to own the factory(ies). Its a struggle for dignity that this action is not a strike but an effort to not lose a value-producing industry in the economy hits a chord in everyone. The workers filed a claim for the factory on grounds the owners broke the contract agreement before the terms of the agreement could expire or come to fruition, or be fulfilled and in doing so the workers are deprived of the source producing their wages in the productiveness of labor the factory represents, ---take away the tool and you take away their livelihood plus an industry plus a value asset to society. The Chilean owner capitalists would not have had a case against them had they waited till the contract expired and then lock the workers out. It appears certain decisions made in management led to the decline and decision to close the factories withdraw what capital they had left and shut production down is a case in litigation as I write. The capitalists blew their chances and this gives the workers a chance to take over. They will blow their chances again. They always do and when they do workers should step up to the plate take the factories over and score big.
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  1418. The formal beginnings of the creation of capitalist relations of production is the creation of labor and commodity markets. Let me describe this process US foreign policy pursues. Gradually labor becomes separated from its products and the entire division of labor in society, manufacturing and the factories is separated from labor. Products, tools, equipment, land, become independent commodities for sale, this gradually destroys an entire class of small commodity producers originally united with tools, equipment, land. Gentrification is how this process appears. The whole society splits up, falls into chaos and war, as two classes are formed. This is the historical process of capital creating itself commodity markets and labor markets in foreign countries. Out of the ruins of these small commodity producers in less developed nations, capitalism has created a new kind of working class of them as people forced to be ‘sellers’ of labor-power, torn away from their products, people that were independent producers before the change are now wage-workers, dependent on Capitalism for a living, and people who were formerly owners of land or merchants, bankers, lawyers, doctors, before the change lose their character as professionals of any legitimacy and become a class of capitalists opposed to the newly formed working class but totally dependent on them to sustain the relation of capitalist production. This is how and why fascism has great appeal to newly formed capitalists derived from the middle classes. Fascists subjugate and repress labor and force them to work for capitalists. Objective conditions are torn away from subjective labor occurs in successive phases in the history of work. People undergoing changes from the first day capitalist relations become the norm. This process is dragged out over a long period of time in the history of Europe. In the history from the first invasion in the Middle East, i.e., Kuwait this process is immediate using force as its midwife. The above historical process is the part the Libertarians do not acknowledge as the sociological and historical effect of the privilege of printing money and the Money Supply Theory.
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  1422. So far the government of Trump and the Congress are not saying too much about the horrors of abandoning the workers health care and jobs by a transnational corporation not because GM cannot compete and needs help. God forbid the other 499 transationals don't start doing the same thing as GM. It seems GM is cutting back on the only commodity it can cut back on without losing that world market status it is enjoying as highly profitable and successful. It cuts back on health care the most expensive payroll deduction for its American division. It seems healthcare is not a deduction for other GM employees in countries where production plants are not closing because healthcare is socialized in some of those countries and where it is not socialized it is not as costly as it is in the US. No wonder then the Trump government and the Congress are relatively quiet on a hot issue, Medical for All, and plant closings point to signs of a weak economy. It is a subject too thorny to be allowed on stage joined with the climate crisis they want out of the debates. It seems the problems keep piling up on the Trump government and the Congress. Pulling a magic cap over the heads pretending the monsters are not really there. Both institutions fail to level with the people they would rather let industry move away than give Americans socialized medicine as to the reasons the problems pile up. If government is so willing to let industry leave why are we so willing to let stay a Congress and president that will not accomodate industry with socialized medicine and spare the humiliation of workers pleaing for their jobs? Not to mention keep Capital and Labor home.
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  1427. The rich and super rich cannot win elections because they are a minority. Another reason their economic interest is not a universal interest the community. This is true nationally as well, therefore, the absence of a majority is a deficit and weakness to holding power by the rich and billionaire social classes which consists of industrialists, bankers, landowners, merchants, ---do not add up to over 30 million votes, ---compared to the working class alone of 136 million voters, assuming all were active voters. To offset the voter deficit the billionaire social classes pool together through various Think Tanks attacking various aspects of working class life as part of a multi-pronged assault on working people, and sabotaging the integrity and legitimacy of an electoral process. With respect to Mass shootings as a growing social phenomenon, the behavior is a measure of the extent and degree of working class frustration with society. It measures the profound suffering that I read as a success of the general assault on the working population by the dominant social classes spearheaded by these Think Tanks in Washington. Aims to maximize stresses and torment, deprive and shut out, immigrants and women in the US labor force through policy measures and media. A grouping of social classes who have an agenda to create the groundwork for a rise in worker productivity in exchange for low wages which is essential if American imperialism is to keep the billionaire class from leaving the country and taking production with them. And, if not to defeat, the least contain its imaginary enemy in China and Russia. The democrats are a party who demonstrate to this mighty social class of billionaires from various economic sectors of the economy they exploit US labor better and with more finness than their right wing republicans who carry a cross of fascism in their flanks.
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  1439. The discourse that should be happening and is not in the traditional political process is how the working class is expected to adapt to a society that cannot assure 'freedom' and economic security. I would not call half the American workforce involved in producing nothing of value to society, freedom. I think people would rather choose to do something useful to society than be employed making things that only enrich a few and do large damage to everyone else! According to the Pentagon's own studies the percentage of workers employed in industries directly involved in the arms race, makes the Military, Pentagon, Congress, the State and the presidency fully responsible for engaging half the workforce to make things of no value at all to society! If a war ends so does their contract with Lockheed, General Electric, Boeing, the first to go is their workforce despite how well paid and well supported they are by that industry. None of their engineers, chemists, computer scientists, can produce something on their own, something useful that improves the soil or resolves waste contamination in the water in society without violating patent holdings, and 2, cannot afford the capital to go into business. Not to mention recent presidents protect the top military industries with sanctions on others not doing business with the top military industries. Closes the market to enterprising individuals. The other half of the workforce is engaged in producing the necessaries of life, things we need everyday to live. This group is dissatisfied as they also feel the economic insecurity from competition slowing their work down for the same necessities but made in other societies. Wages stay the same for an indefinite period of time for these millions. It is time to the discourse follow the writing on the wall, the working class is under assault and the ability of the society to reproduce is threatened under monopoly capitalism.
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  1450. The lands from which the Rhohingya leave become important elements in the formation of capitalism in Myanmar. The country is entering a new stage of development, it is connected to the world market through its own rich industrial and banking class. As the government and its military grip controls the process, they preside over a dissolution and is opening up to foreign investment and land commercialization. The destruction of the homes regardless of religion opens up this land to commerce and exploitation. What is happening is that the formation of capitalism in Myanmar and the former Rhohingya property relations are incompatible and cannot co-exist, capital must dissolve in a historic process the former property relations of the Rhohingya for land development and for capitalist production to take hold. This process is, at the same time, a process of acquisition of one of the elements required for capital to develop, it needs free labor, in the end the refugees become free labor and the best way to produce a labor market is to dispossess people off the land. If capital under the Aung San Suu Kyi government is to enter into its next stage of progress a process of dissolution has to take place. Literally, this is the birth of capitalism through the destruction of old property relations as witnessed by the dispossession of the land of the Rhohingya. An older, ancient, social system of production being replaced by the capitalist mode of production. It would be as if we could step back into history and witness the formation of capital in the United States during the period of the Civil War, its expansion, and consequently, the dissolution of the native American property relations of common land ownership. History records the fact that it first tried native reservations, beggary, vagabondage, crime, in other parts of the world under this transition but has herded off the road on to a narrow path which leads to the formation of a labor market and working class by means of military repression in Myanmar. This report is an overview of the crisis. But it does not attempt to define the crisis in any way, shape or form relative to the prerequisites of capitalism.
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  1478. Overnight the air traffic controllers must work pay or not or the whole flying public runs the risk of flying crowded skies of jets, planes, and commercial airline traffic are bound to collide without the controllers. A shut down does a number of things. One of which is it gives the private sector a freebie. The five private air carriers get free of charge the service the air traffic controllers provide to society and if you factor in the law that prohibits federal workers to strike, Taft-Hartley Bill (1947), the controllers have no choice, they can quit is all they can do. They would be right to quit. Nobody can work for free but the skies are full of human lives depending on them to guide them down back to earth safe and sound. Quitting is not made easy...it will be on many a person’s conscience if planes crash and burn. But to go from wage-earner to indentured volunteer servant as a consequence of a shut down is a blow to the working class in this job market. What happens to the military during a shut down? Technically they become an all volunteer army through a shut down. Beyond the paycheck their oath to the Constitution will be tested to be a stronger or weaker bond than money. What happens to all national park officials? They work on a voluntary basis through a shut down. Who has final authority over them, technically the president does the rest of government is shut down and departments go into skeleton crew. Post Office workers, will they continue the post office? Without a post office technically the US is not a country if all 50 states cannot get their mail. This is a big deal and the demographic of all these workers, largely female and black. Army Veterans services would experience the same effect. Everybody’s lives stay suspended and broke until the democrats agree to give what the far right MAGA republicans or the Freedom Caucus want. They want an austerity deal, cuts in social spending, less food for pre-schoolers and high schoolers, less benefits for the needy, they want a deprivation of the working class. Delta, Southwestern, United are not about to hire air traffic controllers of their own. The government has put the working class who got into this job in a very bad spot. Cruel, actually, and oppressive with no means of bailing out in the event of a shut down given a rotten choice between forced to quit or forced to work and be used by the private sector as unpaid labor.
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  1479. A 'system' rigged by the Democrats. A class system, cruel to the workers, a callous disregard to workers. Tax breaks to the rich is the default line of the top democrats down, they create the inequity between social classes, where the working class pays more taxes than an owner of a luxury hotel. But there are more than one luxury hotel owners in America, 100 hundred of them, in fact, many of which are international owners of luxury hotels. More than one constitute a social class. It is the entire social class of luxury hotel owners the democrats rigged the tax strucutre to favor not just Marriot. What consitutes a class is, i.e., more than one, we have to include Trump Hotel Resorts and Casinos, prominent among this class who treat their workers in varying degrees but in the same way. Looking at it this way, not much has changed since Washington was president of the US, a landowner and slave owner in political power. The second point is that this is a landowning class of capitalist luxury resorts, each unit they own is a rental to the public and a commodity for sale to each other. A continuous stream of profit income dazzles people into belieiving this is the way to exist, rich.  Depending on how much of the earth's surface they own will determine if they constitute a landed aristocracy. In which case the democrats are not the ones inventing the rigged tax structure but are selling that rigged structure to the working class, presents a third point about how we should be relating to this social class through the democrats. Right now this landowning social class share in varying amounts 54,200 hotel properties in the US to which they can acquire. This is a substantial amount of land producing no share of revenue to fund society's needs is held by 100 landowners. America has this pattern of inequality in all sectors of its general economy where the same working class is subsidizing the existence of a few accumulating capital gains and no taxes.
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  1496. @genefire --- You pose an interesting question, the private interests of an oil industry is more important to the government than the soveriegnty of its own people. Do Americans want their military in Syria, is it by unanimous consent of the American public that its resources should be spent so industry executives can maximize profits controlling another country's resources? No it is not and that is why the War Powers Act of Congress has been crushed, so that, the American public have no say over the resources of their military power and how it can be used. Money dictates who can use the government's power and influence. Its time to collect $10 bucks from 336 million people and take back their own government. After all, the private sector never built the government, if government is a problem according to Reagan than he sees the American people as a problem, and if it pays no taxes to the government it should not be able to rent it so cheaply from the American people. But the clarion call is not less government to these republicans, the call is Big Government, big military spending and big intervention in Africa, Syria, Asia, in the four corners of the world the sun does not set on American military stations. Soveriegn rights of the American people surely appear to be undermined by Big Industry and Big Government as allies. The violation of the soveriegnty of the Syrian people by Turkey and the US reflects the interests of Big Oil acting through the instrumentality of the American military to enrich themselves and appropriate Syria's oil, is a big dilemma making Americans an enemy of humanity.
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  1502. So that makes the working people in three boroughs under attack by three separate departments of the city; the department of transportation’s neglect to solve hit and run accidents in working class neighborhoods in Queens and the department of housing’s neglect of maintenance, repairs, and developments in public housing for Brooklyn’s working class poor. Two assaults that are deliberate. Inside these department the low level managers can do what they want and as people these managers come from a mindset that they are better than the working poor is a disdain for humanity that the mayor of New York enables. A third department of the city, Manhattan Transit Authority, did not fall under the sway of arrogant managers controlling the resources as in the other departments. MTA introduced changes to the subway system that improves its function which is to ensure the working poor in the boroughs can get into the city to do the jobs; but under the same management, the deliberate neglect in housing and transportation, including sanitation given the number of rats, roaches, in boroughs, are conscious attacks on whole working class communities. Fourth would be the neglect of Con Edison of the general water main system known to be over 100 years old and avoided till it cannot be avoided any longer doing the necessary upgrades. The Social inequality in Manhattan is expressed by how obvious the burdens of life always falls on the working poor in city neighborhoods and for those living off the main island and never on the rich elite on the island itself means that working people have to take a more militant stand against these abuses.
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  1519. The indigenous candidate for president, Maria deJesus Patricio, recently injured in a road crash in Feb 2018, is followed by an earlier assassination of Luis Denoldo Colosio, the ruling party candidate in 1994. Assassinations is one tool of the trade used in Mexico's political class struggle, acted out between the left and right, escalating the conflicts is the violence used to silence journalists, choosing not to talk about these issues enables and leaves intact the conflicts inherent in free market neoliberalism. That Gregory Wilbert did not include the 6th candidate in the discussion at all, as if she never existed, dissed by the Real News Network, is an indication of the timidity of this internet media source, its real news only skin deep. Eighteen families own 60% of Mexico's GDP, leaving 40% of GDP available for productive consumption by the society. In the US, 500 families own the greater amount of US GDP, same is true in all the western capitalist countries that oligarchies and monopoly social formations usurp the social economy of their nations following the same pattern. In this age of mass internet media these oligarchs and monopoly corporations are far more organized and connected than the working classes of these respective countries, they plan and cooperate with each other for the preservation of their position through a master plan led by the US. The working classes do nothing of the sort, they have only reacted to the actions presented and have done nothing to fight a common enemy. Lulu's Worker's Party is the most organized, it should go international; this way what one oligarch does in one country can be countered in another country and the working class can never be at risk of violent intervention or arrest by their home oligarchs. The working class can create through technology an impenetrable force disabling oligarchs from dominating the world where the US is leader of an international league of oligarchs.
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  1521. Government has back up resources for itself in times like this so it can continue functioning. Industry and the military has back up resources so they can continue operations without interruption. The largest churches and landowners can relocate to parts of the country into other properties they own where power is working so they can function without interruption. Banks are virtually unaffected as electronic systems can move money from branches in all parts of the world their property is highly mobile can recieve payments. Its the payer who is affected when power is down and late charges continue to incur because power is up in all banks. Merchant property is insured and they recover in due course viz a viz tax credits and allowances. Everyone but the American working people have the back up resources for themselves in times like these. Funny thing,---the merchants, banks, churches, landowners, military, industry and government are not producers of the resources they possess. They are the consumers but not they do not do the essential work themselves in making the material resources for continuing their existence in situations like we are seeing in Texas. The American working population crushed under this life threatening storm are the real producers of those resources. This failure is a crisis that magnifies the real producers get no part of the resources. If they did gandma can get out of the house and in with her niece in Chicago and not have to burden the niece's life because grandma has resources. Everyone would have resources greater than men in orange suits in a search and rescue mission for you and your family. Americans need to seriously re-evaluate whose country it is?
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  1541. The question is what will the Attorney General do to prosecute? Nothing. The State has a rule of Statute of Limitations into which crimes of sexual assault cannot be prosecuted by any State's AG. It stands to reason that the public applying pressure on Rome to do something about it is a misguided last resort for action but not frivolous. The institutions themselves must be abolished or subject to prosecution for its abuses as hot houses and nurseries cultivating victims who later repeat these actions on the next generation of youths. Pedophilia produces pedophiles, at the same time, bring about the destruction of the family and thus society. The hypocrisy of the victims is that the cumulative effects of abuse comes out as a cry but the cumulative effects of the incarceration of young people in the border is a moot sacrifice. Likewise the cumulative effects of poisons exposing workers, janitors, etc., with illness that turn up in the future are not prosecutable offenses. All this says the State is not grounded in society but emerges from society as a political institution that has no responsibility in resolving abuses in society and the abuses of industry, church and state on the public. Perpetrators are rewarded and promoted is a means of dodging accountability to the society they regulate and control through its laws. In effect, all individuals in society are subjugated by these institutions. Going further the recent 24 deaths of youths in New Haven Park, Connecticut from heroin and synthetic marijuana are victims of two other institutions of the State's doing. Cartels and the drug war prosecuted by the president and the black market the State does nothing about.
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  1543. Gain a lot more traction disqualifying Biden from the presidential run through this impeachment of Trump.  Trump got on the phone and demanded a foreign leader do what Trump wants is an impeachable offense. He acts as a king, monarch, exercising unilateral powers for personal political purposes. He wants Biden's demise but this is not what the nation wants. The nation does not want to prosecute Biden for improprieties they want a chance to not vote for him but Trump does. He failed at representing the US but succeeded in representing himself.  We live in times when losing the keys to the state police car will get you fired but arresting a 6 year old citizen while in your capacity as a police officer will get you desk duty with pay.  Using foreign powers to undermine and defeat opponents will one day open the door for a foreign social class to defeat a nation. We could all be workig for Russian oligarchs the more America sells its assets to them. It is a dangerous precedent and it does have to be punished with impeachment even moreso in a world where control of a nation depends on who has the most powerful technology to control a nation. We should be looking at the rise and fall of the American economy as a rise and fall of social classes in the economy not the economy itself. Social class is an international category. Billionaires in Russia and China, work with billionaires in America and are group a consortium of capital, there is no allegiance to a nation when it comes to billionaires. Tax shelters are the proof of that. Our true national interest is the recovery of revenue income lost to the interest of a business class to have international tax shelters. Sometime the interest of the individual capitalist undermines the interest of the business class. This might be what we are seeing in Trump and his nationalism versus globalism. Capital and labor are international, they go everywhere together. Trump wants both to stay home. Corporations don't want to come home. Corporations invest in China, China as a major competitor undermining the national economy of the US contradicts our national interests when corporations are producing in China and not in the US.
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  1548. Once you lose parental custody you are longer bound to pay child support. Legally you are no longer the father of the children and no longer responsible for support of those children. You lose visitation rights and parental authority which means you cannot sign them into school or take them to a doctor, make any decisions on their behalf. As a consequence the real biological relationships of the children is destroyed, they lose their father or mother in such scenarios. Scarred for life and defiant of anyone assuming the role of parent. Your employer garnishes your wages. To change that you must get a new court order other wise the state continues to receive your income indefinitely including your social security. In the beginning the child support does not accrue a balance util a job is lost or some other crisis happens. Inevitably, a balance owed grows and grows that people could are paying support way after the kids have become adults and left the home. To have the support calculation assessed you have to harass the agencies to give you a summary and balance. This to ensure the State is not messing up the numbers causing you to owe more. Hearing officers largely handle support modifications and rule in favor of the party who appears against a party that does not appear as default mechanism. For average white or black, brown, red, green working class Americans the money for a lawyer is too high to file a motion and doing it yourself requires a person with patience and legal writing skills, plus tolerance to file motion papers. Without a copy machine, secretary to collate the servings to all parties, and the costs of sending a mountain of pages through USPS to serve all parties involved. The clerical work is daunting and not cheap. Odds are truly stacked up against you. Not to mention the motion has to be written with evidence for reasons garnishment must be lifted or modified. In this system the foster care system is presupposed. Children run the risk of placement into care from the trauma experienced in divorce. It would be way cheaper on society to cut a check to every family to meet their every need than to divorce. Parents become a citizen denied a passport and depending on circumstances lose the right to drive, get any kind of license. The whole system is meant to denigrate and punish and kept the natural family broken and apart becomes the norm of the family that many families combine of parents and children unrelated to each other biologically but brought under one roof as a social family. Quitting a job and harming yourself becomes a way out. From there one lives a life of a non-citizen. Children are weaponized used as a means with which to punish a parent, who for one reason or another cannot raise children in harmony with a mate. Men and women are turned into hostile enemies and there is always the problem of bureaucratic error with state guidelines for support. Support amounts are calculate the income of head of household where the children live; the owner of the property. If the owner rents to several people that income is not factored in state guidelines for support, they still use a model out of the 1950s when father knew best and Donna Reed was a homely home maker, to modify the support paid by garnishment of a parent’s wages or salary.
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  1550. The generation the Grand Social Experiment of Austerity of the Capitalist Order targets is youth. It is by increments of generations that Austerity is successful and wide spread. For two reasons: first austerity defines society as a society of individuals to deflect awareness in youth and replaces the theory that holds society develops within and through a class struggle, the two primary protagonists labor and capital, and in the process of using economic downturns shifts the source of wealth from a majority to a minority. The economic paradigm that finds labor is the creator of wealth is effectively destroyed. Austerity uses a trifecta of monetary, fiscal and industrial polices to crush each generation of workers for the preservation of the capitalist order is amply supported by the evidence. Austerity is not merely CUTS IN THE BUDGET, it is constantly moving as a political program carried on by each new elected politician ascribing to these aims, no matter how popular they are and always in the direction I cited. Austerity is permanent war on labor. Further, austerity was never about curtailing inflation and balancing budgets as Americans falsely believe and are falsely told. Austerity is ‘the’ method and means to the greater end of preserving the capitalist order which police, unions, schools, religions, popular culture, scholars and scientists, fit into so well to preserve the specific class relation that cannot function without force to sustain it. Permanent states of war to crush any form of opposition to this aim, ---a rigid and punishing form of totalitarianism. After 1918 and WWI, the crisis of capitalism caused a reaction of historic significance among States in Europe. Acutely aware and highly sensitized were the concerned about the survival of the capitalist system and its corresponding class of capitalists to crush socialism, a new powerful economic force in history, The system was shaken at its very core in 1918. You don’t know this, you are most likely not an economist nor old enough to have lived with the oral histories of a generation of that era. America exemplifies this social experiment; the State’s political objectives, to crush the alternative and make itself the main producer and regulator of the workforce. In short, fascism,--- the merger of state and private Capital through technocrats and economic advisors. Workers and the majority of citizens realized at that time up to the 1980s, they could be living in a different social order, and the State, city governments began to crush the alternative social order with policies in the three areas of economic life coercing workers into greater exploitation. Chickens Come Home To Roost: The high level of crime, proliferation of drugs and guns, war, criminalization and material deprivation of working people, is at the same time the social process of preserving capitalism, and the entrepreneur class at center stage of the State, for whom the police serve and protect, become the drivers of economic growth. Austerity shifts economic resources from a majority to a minority, the fall of wages and unemployment kills the worker’s voice is the lesser share of the wealth in wages your parents enjoyed when wages were high and their grandchildren will not enjoy as wages fall ( assuming you are born two decades before 1980). Labor or the working class’s incomes deflates into a material deprivation through economic downturns (inflation, unemployment); these are the tools for the preservation of the Capitalist order and for the subordination of the working class into permanent poverty.
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  1554. The only part of the plantation system in the South that can be considered profit is (was) the sale money from the agricultural and durable products slaves made over above what they required to live and what the landowner required to live. Field and commercial products the plantation's slaves produced were exported to England.  Technically, the term is not profit, its mercantile profit, excess incomes derived from trade or the sale of goods (exports) to other countries, otherwise, the slave owner's plantation was a self-contained unit of consumption by the plantation owner and family. The slave owner land owner was a hybrid merchant capitalist not an industrial capitalist whose economic category is 'profit'. What the slave landowners would call a way of life was destroyed when Grant dismantled the plantation system. Even the purchase and sale of slaves was a merchant business the way people today raise pure bred canines for sale derived a merchant profit. There was no such category in existence the described the income of a industrial capitalist until one or more appeared as in the case of the American Civil War. Without these critical designations of various forms of income the State ( federal government ) could not build a tax structure that creates the conditions for slavery to disappear. Your question is a wrong question. Plantations worked slave labor for the personal consumption of landowners and their lifestyle. The incomes (money) they derived came from the buying and selling of goods of which a slave is a good is all mercantile profit. They did not work for profit because they were not wage workers working on the property of an employer who employs tools, equipment, material, machinery and labor only to produce profit. Slavery was brutal when an African slave runaway and it was more often than not the landowner doing the work of bossing slaves around with a whip because that runaway was an expensive commodity. If the plantation registered 100 slaves and it fell to 50 because of runaways, half the value of the landowner's plantation itself will fetch that much less upon its sale. The enigma in Wolf comes from you never visiting an actual plantation to learn the difference between slavery and capitalism, you should put it on your list of things to do.
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  1555. @A.J, maybe not developed for this context but let's see here: a serf is not paid a wage but is paid in land by a Lord who, in turns, expects a certain quantity of produce from the serf or labor from the serf. What the serf does with the land is the serfs business. Typically the serf farms his portion of the land and the unused portion he rents it out to peasant farmer families with lots of kids into crowded little huts to eat a living out of the land growing potatoes and this is the way it goes until a famine breaks out and all the peasants die. The famine brings to an end the lord -serf relation this feudal rural set up of an economy. What in this feudal relation is still with us today? One thing would be the practice of subdividing land and of course, land ownership, rent is still with us from the days of feudal society. These would be the external things still with us today and have grown into monopolies corporations which, incidentally, banks and corporations were first created in the feudal early Middle Ages centuries before Leonardo Da Vinci was born around the time of the Inquisition and the Guttenberg Printing Press invention. You might say Free Speech is handed down to us from this period wth that invention. If a husband expects from his wife the cooking, cleaning, washing, managing the household, child rearing her full-time occupation then we can even add pleasure as energy expended on the pile of unpaid labor then the exchange is a bartered exchange, she gives one use-value and he gives in return to her another use-value. Tenderness and reciprocity in marriage are use-values that each partner give to each other. Joy and laughter, touch and attentiveness are use-values inherent in humans and form the bond that is broke by modern divorce which turns those use-values into exchange-values and money enters the picture. Intact families have a lot in common with serfs of yesteryear's families and divorced families which make up the majority have nothing in common with families that are not buyers and sellers, lender and borrowers to each other, injected by law into their relationships.  In our society money is involved. Money invades the relations in the home between a man and a woman through divorce and separation, the state rules children go with her and fathers pay the mother the expenses of raising children. Before the split it was strictly all barter between them. Share and share alike. Barter was the way husbands and wives related to each other for thousands of years as serfs and slaves when money was never an intermediary between them under feudalism and slavery. I think there is a lot of commonality between housewives and househusbands to the feudal serf family unit.
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  1568. Labor, i.e., the working class comes into creation when separated from its objective conditions during successive phases in the history or work. I would imagine its formal beginnings dates back to the day the factory destroyed the division of labor of commodity producers and made these skilled workers available out of need and desperation, no doubt, available for hire by capitalists who own factories. Ever since that fateful day three social conditions are continually reproduced by capitalism, 1., separation of product from workers, 2., work refined into detailed operation and a de-skilling of workers, 3., a labor-market where every producer has to sell their labor-power!  By this definiion we can conclude China and America are rival capitalist nations. The factory system recieved a lot of praise and glory when it came into being. This must have meant that a son did not have to learn his father's trade with mother mediating conflicts between them. The son could leave home, leave Pop's business, and the dull boring life of a small town division of labor, to work in a factory, earn a wage, move into a room in the city and become whatever that person chose to make of themselves, derilect or not. Leave behind the provincially minded folk of his small town or valley. Many stories are built to this effect. One comes to mind, the Great Gatsby.  A recent case of a murder in Port Jervis NY is the story of a local shoemaker/cobbler shot and killed during a robbery. The sons after their father's funeral liquidated the cobbler's business despite the fact that there was still a market for it in Port Jervis NY. They lacked the foresight and skill to keep it alive. They could have given another the chance to make it a success. If the sons had put their energy into the cobbler's business they would be far richer than they are today working their father's trade as niche market for handmade shoes in a worldwide market. The sons made a poor choice and maybe their wives encouraged them to make the wrong choice. Their wrong choices enabled in their own way the three social conditions I mentioned above to continue. The factory system was a complete break from the old traditions and ethics of work in manufacture. Now that we are many centuries away from this break and embedded in a factory system of work is computer technology and science. Labor management programs used to increase worker productivity and a cell phone that connects individuals to capitalists does two things in addition the the three mentioned above. First, the capitalist has successfuly controlled his/her workforce through the workforce against other workers, and 2., workers carry with them in their pocket the market the capitalists aim to penetrate with their products. Five big things are happening to the detriment of the working classes, they are consumers of the the technology and science investment made by capitalists and are consumers of the product the capitalists sell. These social conditions are a bigger issue than commodites having the power to walk and talk and have there own social institutions, though, that is important to know and understand, I think, their use and reliance on captitalist computer science and technology has made them vicitims of their own doing and totally dependent on working more hours under the worst conditions than ever before while the capitalists are enriched by the workers.
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  1578. I read Percival Sweetwater's comment and the others who replied. In the week of October 18th just past, 15,000 workers in Warsaw demanded of the government an ownership share of GNP.  Not higher pay, not low gas prices but an ownership share of what they produce. I think city/urban workers in the US should demand the same thing.  Rural and suburban workers in America are terrorized and isolated, they have no capacity to organize or lead. In the US, the Fed has been wise to keep inflation down. Employment in the US in Main Street is still sketchy, dicy, and dangerous. Employers at the street level are not a diverse industry at all, one can find a job but in some generic capacity, not in line with what a person hoped to become in life. Disappointments are huge in this working class. America has a gazillion malcontents and ingrates. It has no social mechanism to assist the unskilled trying to fit into a socially changing society. If you create a socially changing society then put money into it. One of the ways America creates its social diversity is through war. When it invests it goes overboard.  The ideas and the way the politics are viewed by the average person are upside down and backwards. Immense confusion and false thinking. For example, the Democratic party, why be kind to immigrants and not be anti-war as the best form of kindness. They stay home. Problem gone. To the Republicans, why be anti-immigrant and not be pro-war. Desist war if you hate immigrants so much. These irrationalities follow a motive making social diversity a necessity or a dependency by the economy. This irrational men shooting up Jews and Blacks would mean something if they turned their guns of the makers of war. But since bullets went in the wrong direction of the makers of these irrational policies the actions are remarkable of ignorance. America has a powerful working class that is at this time, ignorant as hell of its rightful claim to the economic surplus. Wall Street owes its existence to the American tax payer. The right wing decided to give that money to bankers or the game is over for them. That decision never would have happened or been left to the right wing exclusively if the workers had ownership of GNP. The Polish workers are smarter than the American ones but not as strong, just strong enough to feel confident enough to demand it. America has a news black out active on this event. Violence seems to emanate from all pours of the body politic and the social economy to feed and keep secure 130 million workers, among these only 30 million are industrial workers and only 20% are union, 6 million union workers left. Its a stupid way to live as a worker but a smart way if your are not a worker. Claiming GNP is that much harder, easier to organize 15,000 than 6 million to launch off a campaign for security and sustenance never to be used against you. The advantage the Polish workers have over American ones is that they do not have all the social barriers impeding them from a head on collision course with the right wing, a face to face challenge is not diverted by all these episodes of abnormalcy as it is in the US. Everyone has to work in Manhattan to achieve their dreams. A huge separation exists between town and county in the US. This is maintained by the difference between federal, state, and private lands, that keeps industry concentration in the city and prevents the spread of industry across the population. This opposition is really sharp in the US. The right wing do nit care how their cities and countrysides develop. Considering that unionization failed and the government failed to unify the nation with its productive forces that leaves the products backing the dollar that should be claimed as worker equity and, therefore, ownership. Poland enjoyed a good economic run in the previous decade and the workers felt they were the ones responsible for digging Poland out of a recession, they marched before the capitol; no incidence of violence reported. Their position is why accept wages when you can go for the whole pie?
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  1606. Socialism works fine when capitalism is not there to sabotage it. The basic struggle between capital and labor is the two sided nature of production... capital seeks to impose its own form of work, i.e., minimum wage work, and drives everyone into it. Meanwhile, workers tend to exert an anti-individualistic attitude and choose to remain owners of production. But since this form of capitalism has taken ownership of production away from the working class, this separation more complete in the US, than anywhere else where unions are still partners in production with capital, the American working class will tend toward socialism, or a form of common property of the community. Capitalism brings a kind of freedom that appears as a 'true freedom', in its own eyes, but, as a natural fact, the freedom to choose any buyer means becoming an individual seller of labor-power and the world of a seller in the US at the present time for the working class is 'shit' compared to that of a buyer! Concentrated ownership, i.e., public ownership in the past was state socialism. A partial socialism, is not an economic socialism. The economic side of socialism has been tried and obviously done very well for all the peasant societies that now threaten the mightiest capitalist empire does speak for socialism in those societies, where the state became and is the citadel of power for the party. In those societies the working classes were last to learn about their exploitation of each other as a 'class oriented' society persisted the exploitation. Wherein it is written the workers should have full control and management over the forces of production, no private ownership is permissible by law and the law is in unanimous agreement about the class creating effects of privatizing the means of production, had never happened before in human history. State ownership is a form of concentration and privatization of the means by the State. State property is private property in its own eyes and that of the law. Ownership falls on a party as opposed to an individual.  The belief about humanity and the working class in particular is that working class will have to learn the effects of privatization through experience. The working class will have to go through it, to know of its solution. The poor and working classes bear the direct effects of exploitation. Because of that exploitation, they are in a position to address the concerns of humanity. De-privatization could possibly resolve the conflict between science and society, workers might get universal health care from it, but the workers intention is more than universal health care, the plan is to free themselves from the cumulative effects of the workplace by revolutionizing the workplace, change the social relation of work. De-privatization removes the enslavement of science to capital, by law no economic interest of a particular kind may dominate the workplace, except the interest of humanity! This kind of social revolution was never tried before in all human history and it is an open field for a first. A working class that achieves this level of high cognitive political organization and functioning will become the first social class to embark on a mission to abolish itself as a class and all other classes with it as a consequence of its own abolition. Will history produce such a working class, only time will tell, but it don't hurt to start talking about it?
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  1607. Israel's political actions appears to the non-religious individual as an external limit to his freedom if you are not Jewish. Its become the only nuclearized Roman empire of the Middle East. You cannot be a citizen of Rome unless you are Roman. Its a state that has no checks and balances; whatever party dominates, is the ruling party. Fundamentally a totalitarian and hierarchical social structure imbues cultural and family life to a form of slavery as father and mother share unequal powers in the home. The family structure is premised on one subordinate to the other, therefore, its political life is going to be the same. The encroachments of land for its expansion follows the same historical pattern of western expansion of the federal government in the US in the 18th and 19th century. The American Indian Wars are nearly identical to the Australian Boer War in eliminating the aborigine and similar to the land encroachments of Israel. They follow a pattern of mass expropriation. This was done in Britain with the Enclosure Acts in the 19th century and led to a pauperism. Australia is also a story of expansion and follows the same pattern of development that took shape from the period of exploration to the colonial occupations and finally, modern industry. The pattern of conquest and land expansion is not unique of other nations. Most other societies developed internally by means of revolutions in the mode of production. France and Britain entered the industrial age, one by industrial powers abolishing feudalism and the other by introducing a capitalist as the modern way of producing food and etc.. These are societies that transformed under the weight of their own exegesis and not externally by means of conquest. Russia's expansionism is only recent in history. For thousands of years the Russian expanse and wilderness was already under the dominion of the Czars. Under communism, it took an expansionist turn for defense from the west, which was always suspicious and hostile of Russian backwardness but the revolution proved an ideal place for American business, Koch, Armand Hammer, Bush, to do business with the new Russian government. Denying America's economic ties to Russia is pure ignorance. Needless to say the Russian people share a national complex of being east and west and played very honorably for their own defense from tyranny and oppression. The Russians defeated the Nazis. If America turns fascist, Russia would not be on its side. Neither would China and NK, Europe being subject to Nazism is a story of the victim becoming the victimizer and having such small space they are losing their caucasian identities to the wars caucasians commit themselves to. Leave people alone and they won't leave their own places. But the nation-states created by means of conquest are inherently defensive, highly sensitive to loss, and heavy on prevention and military defense. The State is fortified against social revolutions. Things like checks and balances make it a highly insecure republic implying it can dissolve easily under the pressure of the social classes coming into conflict and therefore the founding fathers had to ensure to ratify a Constitution akin to the Enlightenment. As a colony they could not expand west but the King would through them. You have to remember the founding fathers were British transplants born in America, they were sons and daughters of pastors, slave holders and colonists and workers who were influenced by the age of enlightened thought. Fast forward to now, society can fall apart and turn into sheer anarchism on the streets but the State will still function for itself with a standing army alongside it. The problem with the State in the form of Israel, Australia and the US, they are the first of its kind to distance themselves from the society they emerged. So that whatever problems exist in society, riven as it is by conflict, (religious, economic, etc.), competition, egoism, chauvinism, in short the whole gamut of private interests, constitutes a kind of universality that appears to the individual as an external limit to their freedom. They choke off any sense of real freedom and Individual Will.
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  1629. That should read; Trump's loss is the end of capitalism in America not America herself. People do this all the time. IT"S THE END OF THE WORLD, when in fact it is the end of a social system. The world will still be here; social systems come and go. Russia is still here but the Soviet Union is gone. Could it come back, sure it can. Can capitalism come back, sure it can. Can feudalism come back, sure it can. Slavery, sure it can. Societies are transitory. To the right wing and the right wing democrats socialism is a cult of death. But to us, its a new beginning and birth. The cold sweat panic is manifested in the Christian evangelicals. The second coming of Christ and the millennium, a mystical religious doctrine of the Chosen. Hence their affinity with Israel as the Chosen. A thousand points of light said GWH Bush. In Greek the word for ' a thousand', is chilias. The American Christian evangelicals are a modern form of Chiliasts, dangerously counter-productive people. 1000 of the richest families on earth are GWH Bush's thousand points of light. Pelosi is a christian and as such shares this chiliasm with the evangelicals and the US connection to Israel. Paul Ryan is a christian and now sits on the board of Disney determining religious content in Disney movies for its spread. Christian evangelicals operate like a cadre of revolutionary forces spreading the word of the Millennium. Religious order formed as a social class right under the ordinary American's nose. Trump is not an evangelical christian, he comes from the religion of Norman Vincent Peale of NYC, he does not have to be an evangelical as their president commander in chief. He just have to give them the power of the State. Chiliasm first appeared in history during the Fall of the Roman Empire in early Christian times. These beliefs were widespread in the teachings of various medieval sects has been constantly revived when empires decay. Americans are being ruled by a sect desperately myopic about socialism because it views religion as a release in fantastic dreams of deliverance resulting from unbearable suffering and guilt.
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  1634. 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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  1639. People do not pay attention to profit, price and wages but the ruling powers do. They use these economic categories in their struggle to extract more value from working people. This is why American working people are so destitute. By raising price in circulation and decreasing costs in production they achieve a specific result of money prime. But American government lets the market regulate price, profit and wages, and that means profits comes first and prices are protected.  Government protects manufacturers prices as the Trump government is doing to protect American industry from the competitve pricing of China's products. Wages lose their values with every artificial increase in prices of Chinese goods and the working people having no representation in government buy less of the necessities of life. This scenario is not good for the worker, it amounts to economic stagnation and insecurity. An increase in the minimum wage works with a freeze on prices but this is not a pro-worker government wise enough to do such a measure. If wages reduce profits too much employers increase the duration of work in the working day to offset the profit loss and the government has little to nothing to say about it. This government has a pro-business stand that on wages, pensions, health care, parental leave, retirement, hours of work and working conditions, workplace safety, it has no stand at all and makes no committment to these economic categories. None of the reputable business school curriculums in the US require a course on worker safety for MBA graduates. Nowhere in the American industrial landscape is their a combination of employment and education, the working people suffer from underdevelopment, under education, undernourishment because the government is pro-business.
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  1663. Well, not much has changed except the characters. On the one hand, you have the direct form of exploitation ----where the vassal works on the land of the Lord. On the other, you have the indirect form of exploitation ----where the worker works in the factory of the owner. The question of the lesser evil is chucked out the window. DNC people and the GOP reveal themselves as evil to the public by their own doing. The Public can't understand why? Of course, they cannot understand the whys, watching the bully process all day does not help to identify how they are bullied themselves. Americans are covertly bullied, corralled, tamed, lulled into submission with abstractions, myths, escapism. Bully trickle down theory, is based on attitude, a conscious attitude toward property and possession that a selfish child kept in restraints by factory legislation, law suits issued by nazi like bureaucratic watch dog agencies, has been cut loose of its chains. Even given the right of possession of public lands now open to commercialization, speculation, mining and drilling. What was the EPA, what were the Factory Acts, what are the Labor Laws, what did these restraints mean that have been taken away? They were what society demanded from a capitalist things he/she cannot do in society! Thou shall not do list to capitalists. Punitive parenting of the child. These restraints were got rid off and you have Flint, Michigan's lead poisoning of the population, an exercise of genocide. Americans are prone to genocide. Who's to stop if another exercises genocide in their country--- what has the US to say about that? Nada with moral center of its own. As long as infant formula profits are not threatened who cares if you practice genocide. Not much different from other people on the planet. Evidence of apathy is found by the slaughter by deprivation of the Rhohingya and Yemen. Nothing exceptional about America if one can find evidence of genocide, mass suicide, cults, and social deviance and material deprivation among its people. This proves evil is practice within the government(s) where society's moral compass is corrupt. Depicted as a fat baby blimp the European honeymoon with Trump is over before it began. Now Trump has decided to test the material strength of the American people to withstand a drop in living standards against the living standards of the Chinese, Russian, Venezuelans, Cubans, in his war of attrition. A war between 143 million America's working population versus 1.2 billion should prove interesting to see who wins. With most Americans relying on credit the banks are ready to lend fresh consumer capital it can deduct from the GNP as its part in the tariff war effort.
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  1703. Polish grain is selling higher than Ukraine grain in Polish markets harms the Polish farmer... Polish merchants bought the Ukraine surplus grain at cheap prices wholesale...are responsible for the import but they are not the cause of the class struggle. That was the Minister’s fault. A minister who knows not how to administer diligence and fair market prices for the same class of products. The grain they bought has lost its luster sitting as surplus for two years unused...it also lost its value directly competing with Poland farm produced grain. One Polish minister quits because that minister allowed the importation of cheap grain. The social reaction to this move shows how strong a community can be when it is organizes itself into an opposition. But it should not take a crisis for working people who are in this case farmers to react. They should know in the system of exchange commodities are cheapened by competitors as economic weapons against competitors is a never ending process...take your eye off how competition works in rival land and you take your hands off the wheel...the consequences open up class conflicts in society. Agriculture is not limited to farming so when a minister fails to ensure the varieties of industries that depend on agricultural products can exchange their products with each other using money and not credit is preferred; that is a definite sign there are incompetent morons in government serving as tools for some larger scheme that has nothing to do with the progress of general production.
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  1709. “The state of the economy is what it is”, this implies the economy is unchangeable. A market system through which employment is attained is forever is a silly notion. The set up of the economy is permanent, cannot be changed, and the set up is the way Nature intended is made in the foregoing argument. The way we live, work and produce, is natural or created by God. If you cannot change the relations of production than change the relations of distribution and the result is socialism. When investigate the relations of production; there we find the extraction of wealth comes from the extraction of human muscle, tissue and bone, occurring within a fixed time period. If this cannot be changed then the socialists will never remove the extractor of value from human labor in production. Exploitation is never removed from the way we live, work and produce and the people who do the working see in socialism and socialists an enemy. This is why being a socialist places you on the wrong side in the struggle working people have against their primary exploiter(s) and the other workers doing the dirty work of extracting more work from workers for the same payment for the boss. Production can be changed and it will be changed because it is also a consumption process. Not only consuming live human beings ground down to the ground from overwork and exhaustion. It will change and must because it is a consumption process of Nature. Nature recovers slowly but can change rapidly into a state of inhabitability by small degrees, one degree too much, human habitats will die.
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  1713. Young people should be demanding a better future! The future in store for them is a life of degradation and indignity, poverty. Private ownership does not exists in Columbia or in the US. If the direct producers (working populations) did have ownership of the means of production; technology and science would not be the fruit of no-workers and non wage-earners. And since these forces of production are converted into private property they are promoted not with the intent to develop and support the growth of the working class but to defend and protect the rule over the work carried out by people in the labor-process. Medicare For All, will never be a reality for this reason. The individual has no ownership of the labor-process and no access to its progress except by means of selling the labor-power in workers for a subjectively decided wage. Since the labor-process is also a wealth creating activity of human beings, technology and science is applied for a specific purpose, to enhance the wealth producing activity of workers in a labor-process, whatever may be that process, whether it is work carried on in fields, offices, factories, the State. Technology and science becomes further socialilzed spread into whole branches of industries that go into the creation of the product. The entire foundation of the production of commodities in agriculture and industry shifts from a social system that for centuries was based on a system that denied a particular individual the private ownership of land and tools making land, tools, etc., the private property of the community, i.e., social cooperatives versus individual private business. Duque and his people in government push monopoly control over the means of production by a handful of multi-national corporations. A program to break up this monopoly up directly attacks the capitalist class in the US and the foundation it has built to extract the wealth creating activity of a working population from Latin America, and US working people. This is why Duque has nothing to offer his country. What he offers to the multinational corporations is a program that gives them the ability to produce below the individual costs of the unit and sell below the average price of the finished product. To maintain this economic relation he must repress his working population to conform to the rule of capital.
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  1727. The governor of Wisconsin has more leadership and common sense than the Wisconsin Supreme Court overuling his cancellation of elections...unbelievable, that a right wing court has great power over all the citizenry of a single state you can imagne the US Supreme Court having that kind of power to cancell an executive presidential order if a specific national act of a new presient does not agree with the Supreme Court Justices. Dissolving an institution like the Supreme Court would mea a dismantling of the Justice Department, which is not so bad an idea considering the Alt-Right is still actively dismantling FDR's New Deal and Social Security through Trump, that which they call the "Administrative State". In 1865 the Supreme Court was so partial to slaveowners it ruled blacks were not even human! Today one Supreme Court rules exposure to contaminated coronavirus public places to the Public Citizenry is okay with them, does not regard its citizens human either, not much has changed sicne 1865, an attack that is not made of bombs and rockets but made through an enforcement of the law. What needs to be done here is push Schumer and Pelosi aside from controlling the party, an internal revolt, by a new left made up of Bernie's movement and fight back the blows of the Supreme Court justices of the Trump administration through a take over the democratic party, become the direct opponent of the GOP and the far right wing of the GOP, for the removal and election of a new president nominate a new candidate and if it were me in charge of a workers left caucus wing of the democratic party I would nominate one of the more progressive governors or one of the more left mayors to run against Trump. A long as there is a far left caucus big enough to win seats from the progressives and center right democrats running on a Medicare 4 All platform will liekly be a winner and Trump can be defeated. Thanks to Bernie, he built a large enough group for a left caucus in the party, they should drop their campaign goals and form a left wing faction in the party and push the progressives and democrats out of the way, for a direct fight with Trump. Its time the enemy be face to face with the working class and get all these proxy opponents out of the way.
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  1736. The Age of Capital comes to its end in 2020 would open the 21st century as the Age of the Proletariat. Capitalism began to evolve in the 16th century and matured in the 18th century, our century is a century of revolution with the coming of its decline.  Be great if the mistakes of past proletarian revolutions and societies are heeded and we avoid the failures of communism of the 20th century. But with the most powerful economy in the hands of workers real socialism has a chance of a normal development. North Korea would not be starving in order to build an arsenal of nuclear weapons, takes a big chunk out of what can be made from their present stage of social development as a socialist society.  With China and Russia on the path of capitalist development, I doubt we will get along with the Chinese and Russians because there is a commonality of socialist elements all share. A socialist America would be wary of Russian and Chinese capitalist expansion and to have two countries not one be aggressive like America was in its pre-revolutionary history is a big concern. The change of staff in the state department would be conducting missions on how to convert Russians and Chinese working people to overhtrow Putin and Xi and the party and establish worker control is an interesting vision. Anything is possible. Most likely the US will stop meddling and use a lot more diplomacy to get countries on the right track of a real socialism that is environmentally and socially conscious. Not cheap on human needs not excessive on wants. Wars may not end but they won't be fought the way 20th century wars were fought. Young capitalist republics like China and Russia can transition back to organizing production via worker's councils when America does the same thing. I doubt a socialist America will restore the environment and end climate crisis, but instead of pulling out of the Climate Accords it would be first in line leading the world in how to fight it. A socialist America can do a lot of good for Americans, give purpose and meaning to their lives as long as all the errors and mistakes of socialism in its 20th and 19th century infancy are not repeated!
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  1740. You cannot hold police accountable if the community and state are in opposition to each other, race and religion are political weapons in America. Police organizations are organized as a national political association, the associaation of sheriffs could become a national political party overnight it is so organized, the whole police institutional social structure is a political struture to itself, it emulates the social structure of America's elite academic institutions with its own academies and branches of study, and as a large class of police with a tremendous amount of national resources they can afford to pick and choose what political candidate they want to work with. They can pressure representatives to be a major opposition and resistance to a president they do not like or law they want repealed. The police would not like Chessa Bowdoin as a DA in LA, cop organizations will pressure representatives against Chessa. Make his work and life miserable as if they hadn't from the day he was born. Manning is arrested and Snowden lives in exile, Assange is about to get extradited. The people who could have led a revolution are incapacitated to lead. In revolutionary Russia, the four of them would have been organized into Lenin's party in exile, come out in the open when the revolution in the US was ready for the next step in taking power and control from the police and its branches of standing armies. The teachings are in history of how revolutions are made and what to do next with the police is taught to us by the Paris Commune. Two lessons the American progressive left had not learned, chose to ignore, the lessons of the Paris Commune and Lenin's revolutionary strategy the American right wing took advantage of.
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  1750. The guest established a good argument for dictatorship. " We, don't care.", about the kind of havoc we have created in the world was his point. Instead of breaking alliances with a murderous outlaw prince we facilitate his rule and we do not care. Passive publics, apathetic people, make society prone to dictatorships. A passive public is not unique to America, I would take his comment to not mean we are a mean spirited people, some are, but it is unique to republics as a form of government that the Public be a passive one. Ill-informed. Asleep at the wheel, pacified. Constitutional republics depend on a tax structure and the history of taxation has always been a bloody one. Its a fragile state of existence to be a republic but the longer people are conditioned and socialized into believing taxation and external war are permanent features of the human race. Nothing we can do about it mentality reigns supreme. So to lead this passive public into war requires an attack and to lead this passive public into a revolution requires agitation. Eventually the passivity of the public creeps over to a position where all things being done are absurd and takes on an active role re-arranging all the crazy social relations until it comes up against a republic that no longer serves its function and topples it. A smooth transition of power would land it in the history annals as uniquely revolutionary. The only difficulty is the opposition who in their position in connection to society's strengths put up a fight, resist, tearing down what a new society could use to construct itself. Counter-revolution begins early and methodically to disable the new society from coming into being.
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  1781. Competition leads to monopolies and monopoly capitalism leads to competition is the repititous cycle that keeps American labor from developing further its potentialities. In effect every generation advances no further than the previous one and under the two economic systems America alternates the same two character traits appear in people. Bullies under monopoly capitalism and thieves, liars, cheaters, under competition. Never are people in America free to develop their potential on a personal and on a social level. Prohibiting social and individual progress are the two modes of work that appear under competitive capitalism and monopoly capitalism. This is why the US ranks poorly (17th) on a number of social realities, as in fertility in men and women, income, education, social well-being, personal contentment and happiness. The rest of the world will excell in these areas solving concrete problems through a cooperative model of work, finance, trade and commerce. This will happen because monopoly capitalism functions without competitors but is dependent on two factors, wage-labor and a mass of consumers. Competitive capitalism is dependent on many competitors and a mass of consumers and wage-labor for its work. The monoply stage is broken down into parts creating a comeptitive stage and the market in a competitive stage inevitably leads to a new monopoly formation of capitalism as a never -ending cycle. Capitalism is dynamic up to a point but it is cyclical by nature. Personally, I think it is a played out and boring social system that produces miserable and horrible people, social barbarism, superstition, and ideology in society and fantastic fantasies for escapists. Enablers and escapists are the sub character traits people acquire under capitalism, are formed in the family and then socialized in education.
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  1792.  @ludmilaivanova1603  I thank you as well for your insights. I grew up in a family that lived by a creed: Never Borrow Money. And I had an aunt that hated bankers,---stashed her money in her home or person. Depression era folk. To this date the best mayor NY ever had was LaGuardia, two cops on every platform and on most streets. Subway stations had food vendors selling clams. Doors were open in all places and kids were all over the place. Movies were a $.75 cents. A slice of pizza $.15 cents. Women were beautiful and men dressed great. A lot of style in the city and laughter no matter what your class background you were welcomed. The Met was free. Natural History was free. Manhattans’ universities were free or no more than $5 grand. Leonard Bernstein taught kids on Saturdays for free with a full orchestra. NY public library was a second home. Boomers benefitted from that era. A car was bought with cash at a price of $2000, more outside of the city. But you were crazy to have a car in the city since mass transit was excellent. 1970s was a the turning point. Central Park’s bandshell could be booked by anyone for a public performance. You know what’s funny I never went up the Empire State Building until I had to take a Norwegian cousin visiting to it in the late 80s. The Village was loaded with scholars, painters, artists, and lofts in SOHO were factory buildings rentable dirt cheap. Compare then to now, this is a decline and fall of American society. So I really feel for the deprivation kids are going through now as completely unnecessary. Well again, thank you and be well.
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  1799. Gabriel Wilson made up his mind what he was going to do after his exchange with his superior about a request for a transfer to another store. That transfer was most likely denied. He could not tell the boss to take this job and shove it. If he could he would have. He was trapped. He did not get what he wanted and staying at the same worksite appeared to have been out of the question to Gabriel, this brings to mind what were his reasons for his request to transfer? The likelihood is that Gabriel's time working for Stop and Shop was torture.  Employees in general are in a timorous position in society. Work does not happen in America unless a business is started out of it. If a business fails the employees are out of work is a life-threatening disadvantage. Having to find a new employer is a job in itself, a worker lost a job with higher pay only to find new jobs available with lower pay and benefits do not kick in till months down the road. When you do start a new job the first paycheck received was two weeks. Four weeks if the new hire has to wait two pay periods, and it is a big one, but not in comparison to what workers make in those four weeks. Someone could have made forty kitchen cabinets worth $2000 wholesale and got paid $890 after taxes at the end of four weeks work.  Did the wages do not even come out of the company's profits n this example. The retailer bought the cabinets at a mark up and of that the cabinet worker got 15% of its value. Wages are paid in this case by the retailer and not the wholesale kitchen cabinet manufacturer.  Worker are placed at a disadvantage in many ways, they have no claim to the product. No claim to the factory used to make the product, all this the second they sign on the dotted line and complete the W-2 form. America is no Shangri-la in the workplace. The workplace in this country is the leading cause of death on a national basis. I can imagine the treatment this man got from a crude management and a rude Public was punitive and harsh that at a young age too, which is tragic, became demoralized by his employer's practices and society to want to end his life and destroy the world of work under what he probably did not know was capitalism.
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  1815. The term 'prosperity' is used in a narrow technical sense to describe an upward swing of the recurrent business cycle. I would use the word in the general sense, cyclical swings and mild recessions affecting capital accumulation and unemployment. In reality the US has fewer customers abroad. A big chunk of our current balance of payments in the red comes from not cutting down on our imports, Oil being the biggest US purchase. Remember when GW Bush said America is addicted to oil? That financial obligation would have to be paid eventually came almost 15 years later when Trump sold military equipment to the Saudi Prince. Some billions balanced the ledger better. Was it an effort to break this addiction to oil? Definitely not, Congress would have had to order the Pentagon to cease being the largest consumer for oil and carbon emitter if that were the case. The need to continue this highly privileged position depends on the US using a certain amount of restraint in resorting to the printing press giving money to other countries more than they need as additional reserves after settling their own international obligations was violated. The US was shoveling out dollars at a faster rate spelling trouble that came in 2007. But as the leading producer of agricultural and industrial products the US enjoyed an excess of exports over imports, a favorable trade balance from 1899 to 1970. This is no longer the world we live in today. The US is not the only leading producer of agricultural and industrial commodities and its main source of inflows and outflows US trade has been cut off and diminished with sanctions and trade tariffs the normal cycle of capital accumulation and unemployment are disrupted. Prosperity is over. Cutting back on government spending abroad, cut back on providing shipping and insurance to money owners abroad, on foreign investment and foreign diplomacy, cutting back on economic subsidies to client states, eliminates the foreign exchange costs of controlling a world wide empire of the last half of the 20th century. America will lose the status of the leading world currency, and America will no longer provide the US working class a middle class standard of living by means of extracting the wealth of other nations by force. If the material resources cannot be had from other nations because of a loss of client nations than America must turn to its own resources to maintain its military costs. That cost is borne to the society in two ways for the average working person, unemployment and a longer working day. To other social classes in society it curtails their purchasing power and property value but to the average worker, the majority of the American public, it entails longer periods of economic stagnation and unemployment and a working day exceeding human tolerance. This is why the GOP is big on Right to Work laws that break Unions or make absolutely impossible for workers to organize not only on the job but off it as well. They anticipate a discontented majority and the backlash occurring at the polls from this backlash push gerrymandering voting districts as a necessity to maintain political control. As in Brazil and other places, particularly England, the backlash from workers against the austerity and attrition to rectify the end of prosperity is expressed by rude and crass, vulgar and bigoted right wing conservatives, are causing a sweep of new worker demands. Demands that object GDP fall into the hands of arrogant rulers undeserving of the economic surplus they want to use to close budget gaps crippling accumulation for an elite and festering unemployment for the mass of working people as a consequence. In Poland 15,000 Polish workers marched in Warsaw demanding the government give the workers title to GDP, the prosperity of the last decade is their's not the government's. A remarkable working class development is certain to spread. The Argentinian mistake was to take more than it needed in IMF loans and now must cut back government spending by a minimum of 25% and lower to secure the reserves built into the loan are not depleted by inflation running rampant. America working people are next on the chopping block and should be observing what other working class movements are doing to follow suit.
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  1831. Wages for the purposes of selling labor-power belies an internal contradiction in society. The contradiction that a thing is not used for what it is but for its value. Buildings, tools, cars, food, are made and used only for producing commodities, otherwise, if these material things are not used for making commodities in some way or another they will not be used by people at all, period. People become landless and sick from a separation manufactured by social policy. Science and technology get used by the general population only when that population is busy producing the commodity that needs science and technology to make. GM workers never get to use the plant during hours when operations are closed to make their own car. There is not a single factory in the US open to the workers who work there except only when they are making the item the company uses to make money. The state creates this contradiction between use and value as well. A teacher can use the school for school purposes not for teaching a personal expertise unrelated to the school and still be a teacher of that school is a negation of what a teacher ought to be...a person teaching. A pretty narrow reason why not to use these productive powers more generally for the whole society has never been more amplified of the need in past episodes of capitalist crisis and stagnation. But now every contradiction of capitalism is a global contradiction from its internal source of contradictions that it can only be resolved by re-integrating the productive elements of society into new architecture and not the factories.
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  1885. The solution to the problem of exclusion is too radical for Americans at this time. Objectively they can do way better, subjectively Americans are not convinced they can do a better job than the other social democracies to improve on the delivery of medical services to the Public. Its own form of socialized medicine has not been made obvious to them in the problem of ownership of medical devices. Ownership in its private form has created a system that even the disabled are a service to capital. The practice of medicine like everything else that is routine and rote treats people like a machine and the machine a person. Medical assistance is accessible in the work week because that is when the entire functioning medical apparatus is ringing up costs and prices and profit based on the services it provided a disabled person. It pays to keep people disabled. A weird inverted reality has become the current condition of the American Public that its public health policy has vanished. Ownership of all medical equipment and infrastructure in its public form has not yet crystallized in the American imagination as a viable way to keep its citizenry free of diseases and pathologies in better health than in other nations. For this reason America is a failing society, the object of the game of chance in health is to never be seen by a doctor, and all medical technology should be used for that specific purpose for early detection and easier eradication, the rest is a healthy social life and capitalism is far from producing a healthy social life. Way too many individual afflictions are man-made afflictions in America. A gun is one example. The choice to live in a violent society is not a true independent decision of the individual, the choice is a limitation from becoming free of violence by that individual. Violence is used to eradicate violence is simply more violent than the original violence even if it is official violence. Drugs have this same effect on free will, it defines boundaries around which free will can roam and decide as an external limitation the individual cannot exceed. Health has the same effect of limiting free will to a narrow sphere of activity in life. Money in society has the same effect on limiting free will. Free will can be exercised more and make one feel like a more developed human being or free will is exercised less depending on how much money you possess. Controlling violence, drugs, health, money, controls how much free will can be exercised early in life to where it loses the imagination to conceive of an alternative way of life.
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  1903. Though reparations are relevant and due, we still have to deal with capitalism and the social relations of work in America.  Working in America is still an oppressive act for some 130 million people and not working in America is an oppressive act for some 20 million people. Admittedly, nobody working and not working in America are whipped into submission like a slave but there is a form of slavery with invisible chains on people who work in the US as wage earners. Workers when they are sellers have to keep selling themselves in the job they hold and when they are not sellers but are working as workers in the job they are not their own boss and take no share of whatever it is they produce. A worker's reality is a different reality when altenating between the social roles as seller and producer from employers as sellers and employers as producers. As producers the product is theirs and taken away from the workers and as sellers they accumulate the value of that product. A slave produces a product but still keeps it, a worker does not. A slave cannot be separated from the means of production a worker can. In the position of a seller the worker's survival is their own and in the role as producer the worker's survival is measured by the quanitity of the magnitude of its value. Outside of work a worker has no value but as a worker working for an employer a worker produces value. These anomolies turn people into monsters and if this contradcition between the social relation of work and working in America is not resolved, there will be no humanity in the manner of the way we work as a civilization.
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  1908. The US is not wasting resources, they come to you, don’t they and you do vote leaders into office who make sure you can use these elements in your lives? Whoever you elect has no choice but to conduct the same policies of military expansion or get extricated from office. The US State Department ensures gas, oil, diamonds, lithium for your batteries, tons of raw material required by your military, i.e., uranium and cobalt, and food is made available to a population who does not think about how their lives are made by the US State Department re-arranging the affairs of the world. The US does not produce these things itself and other countries moving away from this arrangement can not be stopped from leaving the orbit of influence of the US. They can be threatened with bombs but they cannot be stopped; and you do not have to earn your money as a nation. You print it. Without that privilege America would have to work for a living. The provision of billions of dollars for long term foreign military financing as Blinken called it would put millions of Americans, literally the whole population minus the super rich into absolute poverty. Worse is the sale of America, everyone will be working some kind of property in America bought by foreign investors and/or a foreign country. I do not think you’d want that to happen where America becomes a third rate nation of super rich foreign landowners employing Americans as serfs, peasants, and slaves. Benjamin should be calling for the removal of the State Department itself and its sister agencies, although ending all war is a start.
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  1927. @John G Well, actually, I think the US is a slave society. 13th Amendment gave the rights of an individual as a free individual to emancipated slaves but took individual rights away from prisoners.  The moment prisoners were put to work producing a social product in prisons was the moment America resumed its former status as a slave society. The 13th amendment moved slavery off the plantation and into the prisons. Slavery was never abolished it laid in hibernation. With the spurious growth of privatization in the prison system large infusions of private capital investment join a prison worker of no rights with the private capital of all rights, as private property in the concrete form of machinery and technology is put together to produce a surplus. A new division of labor based on slavery is created and the inside detainment structures become the new workhouses for society, making all parts and products for the US highway system and infrastructure. At an outlay of wages paying $.60 cents per hour to a prison population a slave system is reconstituted. Capital is joined with an army of prison workers. The traditional capital-labor relationships exists on the outside of the slave system inside the prisons corresponds to pressures unable to hold back and slow down socialism in its new form of property of the East, the unrelenting growth of 6% GDP is a direct competitor to US dominance in the West. Strangely, the west is not too disturbed by the Yuan taking the spot from the dollar as the reserve trading currency in the world. The world appears to be more worried about having to finance America when China stops financing its wars. America is going to be robbed like Germany was robbed by the Colonial empires at Versaille, not even present at the the Treaty signing.
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  1931. If you are ’over the hill’, pardon the reference, this protest does not really affect you except as a father or as a relation to the younger generation. America’s christian right wing are going after the young generation to change their values, but for you a quiet war is waged, we see it in the airline business with airline employers pushing early retirements for pilots. A war employers in general are waging to lower the cost of labor. By the time the younger workers retire social security for them is gone. For those now inflation reduces the values of pensions retiring soon is a worry or made not possible. There is nobody in either party who has you back which gives you a special advantage to change the whole picture around in your favor and allow the younger generation to resist the makeover the Christians want to give them. Do not give the republicans or the democrats your vote. Vote in protest to reduce to total number of votes and let many of them lose re-election. The effect is to fill the seats with people who do not think alike and make it more difficult for the right to push their agenda through. Regarding the methods of Gen Z and Millennials versus the Supreme Court, the vulnerable against the invulnerable. The Supreme Court fired the first shot in this war if the justices require more tax payer induced protections for them and as a result this additional tax burden the over the hill gang is deeper in the hole that Vote become all the more reason to use it in protest.
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  1940. This is an example of the kind of disruption to the social process a monopoly can have on a society. It sets the price on the market of the commodity in question and other producers are forced to undersell as related to the cost of production of their own commodity. The monopoly then positions itself as a buyer of land by the assistance of a government that throws land into the circulation process and the other producers are forced to sell the farm and the store. We have this problem in several industries that are dominated by monopoly corporations in the US. Amazon is a monopoly in the distribution business. Social media is monopolized, arms manufacturing, mining, drilling, news, entertainment, hospitality, retail industries are all dominated by a handful of monopolies. Make no mistake the setting of a market prices of commodities is a weapon of attack on all the social producers in the society. In the past the social producers had the government on their side and when monopolies were formed the government broke them up was a way of re-setting competition back into the market. This is not the case today, the government(s) are against the social producers and are on the side ot the monopoly corporations, leaving the social producers without any formal power with which to defend themselves except the power of their numbers. When I go to the store and buy a gallon of milk and look at the change I have left I know it is not enough to buy the goods produced by any monopoly as the price is set high and they define our lifestyle, nobody else produces a competing product, or if it is its a fake copy not worth the money spent on it. I am being channeled by this price manipulation to pay the monopoly price. This is not freedom; its coercion.
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  1959.  @chuckleaf8027  Before the pandemic America had an unfavorable trade balance but not as severe as it is now where its gold is drained out of the country to pay off its debts worth more than all gold reserves on account. Over exporting and over importing, or what is the same thing, buying too much and selling too much is what all nations in the west did. The high productivity of labor in the US was used for the wrong purposes accounts for prices during the pandemic holding steady but since the lockdown that unfavorable trade balance slowed productivity down and production resuming at pre-pandemic levels is impossible. Now no western country can pay off their IOUs all will go bankrupt not paying its loans amounts to a declaration of war which is why you see the US military continuously appropriating more money in preparation for war against its biggest lender, and the sudden attention to the east (Taiwan) after losing very quickly in Ukraine to the Russians sounds the signal to the Chinese that Nancy Pelosi’s trip to Taiwan is expected to say we are not going to pay the debt to China, with a lot democracy hocus pocus talk,--- goes in Biden’s stead because Harris is an asshole and Speaker is next in line of succession when a president is incapacitated. Biden is demented and mentally unfit for the trip and the job, in fact, you may be watching a hologram of Biden. He has been MIA five days in row. But that’s okay, the American public has all kinds of theories and weird shit to make them feel like they know what’s happening that both sides of aisle are shoving down your throats a war to fight on behalf of their gross and criminal negligence of your economy and livelihood.
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  1964. Unfortunately you cannot sue the property itself unless it were a big international corporation; a franchise operation is too small that the owner has to get sued for damages, etc., --you have to sue its owner is a drag. They work hard for their businesses to succeed and can’t afford to hire a business property defense squad. If the city owned all the small businesses and rented them out, a lease to own program, than the city could use its police to protect those businesses, there isn’t a stake on the ground saying this is mine and that’s yours. In some places a merger could work real well. The other side of the coin is the presence of a growing desperation cities let grow. Debt borrowing specifically. Cities and towns are financed by debt. Cutting programs to the poor in places are callous attacks but the real gut punch are letting speculators in the housing market push out working people from their communities. Too many earn not enough to get ahead in cities and too few earn more than they need took over neighborhoods a working class family could no longer afford to live in. America is truly cheating this youth of their future. This youth will come back to bite America in the ass. In other places it would not work. Business councils and a free association of merchants, a small body and a large one, this is flexible gives the room to make the adjustments to do well in a changing market which means you need a forward thinking city council that does not charge endless and stupid fees for this or that but uses fees to enrich that project in the community; bureaucrats are good at dividing to an infinitesimal degree, fees, and even better at keeping them. There’s more to governing than just cutting everything in sight. A fee proportional to scale and making those assessments honest accounts for the public record redirects capital back into the community.
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  1986. So,---Trump’s strategy or I should say the Heritage Foundation who are the brains behind the whole thing, is to gut the government and overload the prisons. Overloading the prisons changes the ratio between staff offices and inmates, when it had been 2 to 1 it is now something like 5 to 1, more inmates than officers. Outnumbered, and stressed out prison officers are resorting to strikes. Inmates are resorting to riots. Together these disturbances throw society into chaos and distressed. I would hang the American Flag upside down from here forward. Gut the federal government of its employees and all the services the government provides to all constituents in all 50 states the whole population serviced in one way or another by the government are thrown into shock and awe, mesmerized that benefits, passports, licenses, whatever, are stopped. Do these two things and the last thing standing is a presidential cabinet in charge of a military and a judiciary that has been bought off. Technically, this is a coup détat, and with a Congress in league with the Heritage Foundation’s Doctrine of Anglo Christian Nationalism, a dictatorship hovers over a segregated society is established. Democracy in America is Dead and in its place is a Christian Nationalism that cannot decide if it is to be a christian state or a government of billionaires. Trump’s government is going to collapse and not make it through the four years, his coalition between the corporations and the christian nationalists will further deepen the Crisis. The way I see it Trump will side with billionaires and throw the christian nationalists under the bus, they lose their goal to make a theological state, stained by Tump’s transgressions and raise Hades against him.
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  1997.  @LuisAldamiz  You should read Capital Vol I. first three chapters very difficult but the rest is easy once you undertand the first three chapters containing the theory. Not even the European left understands the first three chapters makes the left a failure is Why? Engle's his partner misundertood the first three chapters as did Lenin and certainly Stalin never read it and neither the German Marxists, Bernstein, one exception of this crew, Rosa Luxemburg understood it, and the Russian Mensheviks Trotsky, Mao, Castro, Maduro, Xi, did not understand it.  Americans never got the book until the late 1970s. American progressives haven't the foggiest clue of what the book is about. They are the least educated on the subject matter and are highly susceptible of resurrecting fascism and empire in their mistakes.  Amazing is it not that my lone voice from nowhere over the internet is the only one who undertands the chapters I cite. But not really amazing. Marx was very careful in his procedure, like a surgeon, to build the chapters in a way that only patient people like him can get it. He would have made a great surgeon for his miraculous degree of patience and detail. Not even Marxist academics of which there are probably two in all America understand the first three chapters of Vol.I. You should know that Buttigieg's father is among the academic Marxists and look at his son, an opportunist.  It contains Marx's methodology and scientific inquiry in full bloom. Its the Double Helix of his scientific thinking and a real weapon, it will raise your own power of intellect to heights you've never known before. When Watson dicovered the Double Helix look what that did for science, when Marx discovered the economic cell-form he revealed the economic laws of motion of capitalism. I share it to whom I can, to whom I sense are open minded and inquisitive thinkers.
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  2009. There is a class war that Americans are indoctrinated to not believe exists. It is conducted through various ways. But there is no denying a class war is present. Elites ready to engage in armed struggle against unarmed people. Too quick to use the gun is a sign of weakness. America is destroying young people’s financial and social future. Students are under relentless attack as are America’s working class. When you factor in the fact that it takes less and less to produce the necessaries of life and, therefore, making social reproduction easy the masses begin to question why do they even need a capitalist, to get things done, and question why only a certain quantity of capital is invested for a certain quantity of employment as a cycle when development and growth can be even and steady, regular, and consistent; why only invest in the market, why not invest in production, why shouldn’t employment and mass education, health and nutrition be enhanced by capital investment, comes down to the problem of the concentration of wealth into fewer and fewer hands, that these life-giving activities are not invested with capital but oil, coal, diamonds, rare earth metals and biological weapons on a mass scale take all the investment capital leaving the rest of the world desperate amd deprived materially; so the only way a dominant social class can stay in power is to destroy the necessaries of life, i.e, the soil, food, water, and than, financially the banks do the rest of endenturing the masses into lifelong debt. Banks use Universities as conduits for lifelong debt servicing. The masses owe money and depend on everything through their employers. No employer who employs only for profit means No job, no health insurance, no income, no food, no housing and so on the means to obtain the necessaries of life are privatized enables a single social class of employers, large and small, to obtain the kind of means that controls the lives of billions of people, through a grand social project of “EXPROPRIATION” and “SOCIAL CONTROL”.
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  2031. There you have it. Florida Power and Light, a generic name for all the power and light utilities. In one aspect utility companies operating for profit divide into two types, 1). infrastructure which serves a working population and, 2). infrastructure that serves a non-working population. The non-working population unproductive of profit gets no prevention services. No back up in defense of a storm. Left to die. Someone who gave birth to you rots in a nursing home because you are too busy emulating individualism. The working population gets all the immediate recovery and prevention. Because this social group are productive of profit. Not for themselves but for a collection of rich capitalists deciding how to appropriate your wages in the form of a Utility Board(s), Banks, Private Industry They are plugged into all Chambers of Commerce offices across the land and own the infrastructure (hardware). Electric power is a necessary means of subsistence. To keep a population divided they must own an control the necessary means, things required for life. The productive working population and the captives whose hearts were offered to the Gods by the high priest of cannibals are both victims who willingly accept their demise. The productive working class are wonderfully spoiled in preparation of the economic slaughter by the high priests of capitalism. Florida is a laboratory of the free market experiment and it is now the epicenter of class conflict. Prevention services in the commercial sense translates into 'preservation services' of the economic categories in the historical and sociological sense, for in the end, Utilities for Profit perpetuate the same capitalist relations that divides the population into productive and unproductive impersonal economic categories. This explains the recurrence of such tragedies from WillowGlen in Long Island in 1973 to this one in Florida. Circumstances slightly different the social relations preserved, profit over people, triumphs.
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  2042.  @edifying  Oh that’s it...I was expecting something more. Okay its too simple to say the government is not living up to its ideals because it is a hostage to capitalist forces whether that force is a social class and its main economic interest that holds the government in a straightjacket, or it is a party (more than one) that shoves the American people out of the governing process. Either way, the government of the US since 1865 has been under attack by such forces the American people have allowed to happen through no fault of their own except for lack of awareness, intelligence, and a major propaganda campaign that indoctrinates from cradle to grave, have enabled those forces to assume political power. Americans have a real bad situation developing in their society, real bad. One example is how it is arming Nazis in Ukraine, to the tune of $50 billion, and Ukrainian forces sell those American weapons for the money they bring in the illegal market. But Americans think they are using them to fight the Russians...pretty dumb, eh. How your tax dollars are spent b those who pay no taxes. Did you know that Strom Thurman was a lifelong Klan member and Senator, and Clyburn who runs for re-election now in his district was friends with Thurman, both had 70 years between them to do something and had done nothing but made things worse for Carolinians. Clyburn is black. Weird. Not really. Ever read Plato’s Republic or Franz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth? In California the Democrats are literally equal to the Nazis in Policy. In NY Hockul is censoring speech thinking that will curtail hate and violence...wow...a Nazis that does not know she is a Nazis. The whole system has been flipped on its head serving a particular interests and excluding the interest of the majority. This should be less simplistic of an observation. Now here is my prediction. Republicans will take the house, senate, and the White House, and move to amend the Constitution, abolish the legal workday, and dismantle social security.
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  2071. I beg your indulgence but I must intercede on a very important and ethical point wth respect to the uniformity making all places indistinguishably the same and your career a part of that uniformity of culture I see in America as the cause of its descent into barbarism and fascism. Careers were made possible by the car and the car is what destroyed Cairo. Roads and bridges are antithetical structures for multi-generational family structures. Also they are the most ineffective form of energy consumption and are the least effective use of land. The result of this ineffective use of land and energy the single family homes came into being to resolve this incompatibility between environment and human habitation, at the expense of Cairo’s former history and glory. This paved the way for banks to dominate the economy. The city of Cairo like many American towns that are today ghost towns were all destroyed by the internal combustion engine, roads, bridges and dams. Zoning laws and land use were changed to accommodate the car and the population lost their occupations and careers to become consumers of credit. Suffice it to say that all careers and occupations required to make the car the single mode of transportation in society are careers and occupations made by the auto industry not by the will of individuals. The absence of free will among individuals in society is the presence of totalitarianism subordinating individuals in society, i.e., conformity. This is why there aren’t Frank Lloyd Wrights in America. Architects design commercial habitats designed for a commercial interest conform to the mold. The worst case scenario of this crisis is the building projects of Intel corporation who will leave behind a monolithic useless structure when the ground water it purifies as raw material for the production of its microchips usurps all the water below ground and the entire city surrounding Intel Corporation dies as a result. Coca-Cola is another culprit. Real shame, I think. I could not be an architect for this reason nor could I be a soldier for the same reason, or a cop, or a realtor, or a mayor, or a governor knowing that my work had something to do with the destruction of the lives, livelihood, environment and occupations of human beings.
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  2093. Every dollar spent on defense is a slow down in the rates of economic growth of the socialist economies is not longer true. Tulsi would be a break from that orthodoxy. However, in the context of a threat of imperialism existing give impetus to socialist economies to improve and surpass the former industrialized nations in the west but as a policy in particular, imperialism and defense spending, military build-ups, imposes a heavy burden on the US workforce that is permanent as long as imperialism and the containment of communism is the foreign policy of the US. Since 1955 the international arena was premised on the Cold War, and the hostility of US ruling classes positioned themselves as a powerful citadel of reaction...a reactionary force to this day. There has not been a dictatorship cruel or extreme enough the US State Department, Pentagon, president and Congress, had not given military and economic support. Dictatorships and fascists got anything they want as long as they proved their allegiance to America’s “anti-socialist ” group of reactionary nations. The US workforce is forever burdened supporting regimes like Chiang Kai Shek in Taiwan, The Shah of Iran, Batista in Cuba, Armas in Guatemala, Pinochet in Chile, Marcos in the Philippines, and in the late period, Saddam Hussein in Iraq, were all sentries for the containment of communism...with internal oppositions that later evolved into plethora of anti-colonial, anti-capitalist, anti-Christian terror groups. Needless to say America has shaped the world we see today and the current president the most reactionary of all promises to extend the chaos to America itself.
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  2098.  @nunyabiznez6381  The medical system is broken for people because health is a thing the medical establishment can sell. Health in America is a commodity for sale. More health you buy the healthier you are. You cannot sell health to healthy people. It was easier to let humanity fail than to use government as a means to free people of harm, poor health risks, danger, exploitation, etc., was the response of this generation to its material conditions. Let me real concrete about this.  Chlorine dioxide is raw ingredient used for the lining of water tanks and water treatment holding pools. During your adolescence water entered your body willingly from the tap. 1500 chemicals are in use in farming, mining, construction. That is a lot of people affected by the de-regulated use of chemicals in the workplace traced to cancer, hepatitus, leukemia. The government took notice and began to regulate how work should be conducted handling this chemical and it regulated its quantity in water to generate healthier bodies in children. Yesterday a private contractor welder died in Texas. Blown to smithereens welding the exterior tank on a scaffold. The Chlorine Dioxide in the lining of the tank pressurized by air was a bomb and the welder was the fuse. Work in welding as an industry is broken because a welder for a week or a month is a thing the government can buy for a week or month. Welding is a commodity for sale how this type of work is to be applied or used in connection to the chemical in that specific workplace,-- the outside of the tank, after the government purchased the use of a welder was left up to the welder.
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  2110. Side issues that are important were skimmed over by A. Goodman. When someone asks if you are looking for work and you answer yes, you have just offered your labor-power for sale. Its that simple and it is upheld in a court as a word of mouth agreement or contract. The formal mediator in the deal between migrant and owner of money is a merchant agency. The migrant said: “Not a problem...I can do it.” Well, ---Doing it is the commodity you offered up for sale through the merchant agency. One important point is the hypocrisy that comes out of the Legacy Fund. You have just entered the world of capitalism. Now capitalism is going to compensate you for its own abuses? Get real, the FIFA guy is profiting off the exploitation of migrants. The migrant does not realize “I can do it” was the doorway into capitalism subjectively but objectively those words seal the fate of the migrant as a “free agent” to be used in any which way for capital. Not quite we are accustomed to. slavery unless the migrants are the commodities for sale. Capitalism arrives at slavery by getting around it. For Europe, the migrant is always a migrant when the doors to immigration are shut and the owner of money in Qatar, the migrant will always be a “free agent” in need of a job. A “free agent” is a slave to the market. “Here’s some money to tie you offer...till the job starts”. “Thank you” says the migrant. The migrant just entered into a debtor obligation unbeknownst to the migrant with the owner of money. Forced slavery could never be so easy. No whips, no guns, no slave patrols, no police force, no forced labor camps...its all modern and clean looking on the surface until you get down to work. 2 million migrants and the $20 million are joined. Now its time to work...time to lay the foundations and change the face of the environment into a modern city oasis arising out of the desert. There is a climate change consequence to building a city in a desert is a missed point. All these educational points, I state in dialogue form, are missed in this interview and the interviewee is a good one...knows her stuff was not allowed a platform to open her observations on what happens to the migrant after they said: “I can do it”, and what happens to us when they do say they can do it.
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  2143. The idea is to work to live not living to work but there is a right wing that pushes the clock back to a time when living to work was a necessity tries to jam it down the throats of working people this idea of a ‘free worker’. Its really an 18th century idea that no longer fits the times. A free worker sells nothing more than a certain amount of forced labor as opposed to the worker who is unfree, enslaved, owned completely to one individual; is a human machine, whereas the free worker is only partially owned by one individual. But the attitude that we are nothing more than a machine for forced labor has gotten worse among employers creating a workplace dangerous on many levels, we are merely tools for their use, in a working process that dominates what we do day in and day out. Our bodies and minds are broken down by the detailed work assigned and repetition as part of this perpetual production process. This is because the times we live contains all the powerful tools to reproduce the whole human race if those tools were socialized, freed, from private hands, specifically because in private hands the technical and scientific basis of production are used as powerful tools for the creation of more value,----- for private hands and the total working capacity of society that goes into creating the technical advances and engineering goes toward sending a rich guy to space versus the improvement of the lives of working people. This would be fine if everyone had sufficient abundance and did not care or can afford to spend that much of society’s total working capacity and talent on space trips for rich guys but the facts are, the mass of the American people and specifically the labor-force are burnt out, fried, tired, and in need of a better way of life, a life where all work little to produce much and live more focusing on the important things in life such making memories, there is not much more humans require to live fulfilled lives than to be there for others, as an obligation to friend and community and above all to be connected to the world.
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  2156.  @kennethfisher7013  You should answer them that your SS check is the sum average of your own contribution of 40 years past not their’s 40 years into the future and their’s is their own contribution 40 years after you’ve gone and not your’s 40 years after your own lifetime of employment. A bit confusing but it makes sense. The calculus of SS is a guarded secret for political reasons could have been so easily dispelled if every math teacher in high school demonstrated how the social security fund works to high school students. I bet you never heard your math teacher use the fund to solve calculus problems so we are left ignorant of the foundation on which that fund depends for its reproduction...the family. The more babies we have the more of a fund there will be... the less babies we produce... the less the fund will be. Had the family become the center focus point of economics in high school instead of privatizing education to inject the Bible into the family,---you’d have three or four grandchildren who would be the future contributors compounding growth of the fund with other three or four grandchildren, by the power of 4, multiplied by the average size of the workforce of 132 million, the fund will grow and if this math were not taught with numbers only but filled in with living people there would be no ignorance or nihilism associated with it in the young about the fund. SS is associated with old age is consistent with individual(ism), isolated old people...America does not associate the fund’s relationship to the family because it would be impossible to dismantle social security, pure political suicide to do so.
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  2160. "However, being a backward feudal society...", that my friend should be your starting point. Historical and material context.  Raise the standard of living of your people first and deliver the goods for mass loyalty to the party. Every ruling class has to do this. The Soviet leaders of the party were the rulers, they launched the arms race with the US when they launched Sputnik. I believe this launching of the arms race was unintended by the Russians and SPutnik was a symbol of success for science. I don't think they knew that it would strike a deep nerve in the Pentagon of 1955 and launch an arms race.  Stalin was last of the leaders to do any writing on Historical Materialism, though thinning out, there was still a line of academics, scientist, and intellectuals developing and testing the hypothesis of historical materialism in various industry and fields. Science was a big one. I've seen something along that subject coming from Kruschev on the development of the sciences in Russia but these writings do not even enter into the classical line of literature of Political Economy dating from Marx.  In the Cold War period all the intellect was coming from individuals in society. Dissidents and anti-imperialists in the west which, I suppose, of this line Trotsky would be the first Stalin era dissident that started a new line dissidents in the post Stalinist era critcizing political party and imperialism. They, the Soviet CCCP, had to enter the modern world of changing fashion, styles, appearances, that came with industrialization in the west, i.e., consumerism and a new generation of babies born the day Sputnik was launched in 1955. Don't forget, religion in Russia was not wiped out, and religion there is not like religion here, more an orthodox affinity and patriarchal from Czarism affixed to the State. Russia still has many veterans who fought on the side of the White Russians like Cuba and Venezuela still has it enemies in Miami. East Germany had state television, one channel and it broadcasted the cold war all day as a war against the vulgar materialism of west Germany penetrating east Germany. People were afraid to say anything that they may have liked about western industrialization. Socially, the CCCP were out of touch with the effects of modernism, which, at the time, you could say saved labor. A washing machine and dish washer was the future women in the west stepped into and in the east, women were still far behind in the old world washing by hand, housework and working the obschina. Then, automation saved labor, today it replaces labor. The social development of girls in the Soviet Union was still repressed compared to the sexual revolution the mass produced Pill unleashed on girls in the west. The CCCP could not handle such intrusions into their project, the original theory of revolution was to them about the productive forces of society not the social relations of production. The social relations of production was tied up in a defensive war against the Americans, eventually that war broke the back of the USSR and set the stage of a restoration of capitalism in Russia. Puts all of us in an interesting situation with the Russians, we have a lot in common with them. They have the dark period of Stalin's blunderous aims to industrialize and we have the dark period of slavery to reconcile with.
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  2163. The tax payer always pays the cost of a crisis in capitalism. This is because the difference between productive consumption and individual consumption is surplus value. The tax payer are workers and workers are productive beyond the point ("the" edited to: "that") it takes to reproduce itself. Wages is its own fund and the length of the working day defines "productive consumption". This is the first historical point we encounter about the progress of civilizations culminating after millions of years of development. The capitalists take the 'cream of the crop'. The cry of the capitalists class is that since they come up with all the inventions they should be paid! Americans call this payment a 'bail out'. The truth is that the capitalist class owes its existence to humanity and of labor-power belonging to prior generations of long since dead workers. The question is why does the American worker not feel a sense of ownership of the surplus value since they produce it and should the surplus value that bails out Wall Street through its Congress be used against people? We also encounter a working day for workers out of which wages are reproduced and work carried on beyond a certain point becomes a process of creation of surplus-value. This generation of American workers, et al the millennial generation, do not have an awareness of a cumulative growth of wealth through the ages. Their understanding of capitalism, is the free exchange of money and goods, the market where all things are equally commodities and money arises out of this equal relationship. The only difference is their quantity undermining the quality of a worker's productivity and subsistence level or standard of living. They do not see how inequality emerges from the equality of all things in the market, buyers and sellers, equal in the eyes of the law, that inequality takes place at the interior level of society in the workplace. They do not understand as it was never taught to them that past labor determines the exchange of labor-power and living labor determines the use-value and its consumption. Buying and selling of labor-power in opposition to the absolute production of surplus-value. The first part of the workday is a consequence of the second part of the workday. Existence depends on the creation of surplus-value and surplus- value makes the wheels go round under capitalism. But they will soon feel this naked inequality as their lives of work become harder and longer with each transfer of wealth to rectify the crisis under capitalism.
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  2168. 1. No only is the property and monetary wealth of nations seized by the US government but inside the US individual state governments, modeling the federal government, seizes the assets of individuals in our own society. Bureaucracy in America are replicated in three sizes, i.e., national, state and town or city government. America is in 5th position of nations with a industrial workforce, 12.9 million factory workers. Indonesia is ahead of Mexico at 15.8 million. Vietnam is in 6th position at 12 million. Mexico is ahead of the US with 13.9 million factory workers and India has 18.4 million. China has 120 million factory workers and with the development of robot factories and robots making robots supplanting human labor in factory work, China’s working class is positioned through universal free education to cease being a working class. China could be the first society where the average intelligence level of all its 1.2 billion citizens exceeds the rest of the world, in medicine and science, math and engineering and living a life of other pursuits or more leisure being freed from the toil of work of 8 to 10 hours a day. If the same happened in the US only 12 million people would be feed from factory work out of 332 million people, twelve million former factory workers would have to find employment since other pursuits and education in America are privatized fields of activity. Need a loan to get schooled. And twelve million is not enough to make a dent for a transformation of society, 30 million would be enough, but with the side effects of AI robotics and technology, science and automation, in the labor-process supplanting more workers in other fields are going to hit a wall, finding monetary gain in other pursuits such as theft, corruption, crime, illegal trade and trafficking...or in revolution, all because education is privatized pushes workers out of other pursuits and occupations that would improve their condition in society. The seeds of revolution are already planted in the ground my friends.
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  2199. It is a difficult paradox. Can workers inside a corporation do what the executives do? CEOs make a colossal marketing campaign out of a mere phase in the production of the yearly product before re-investing the sale money back into capital again...and so on...assuring a smooth process...reconverting the sale money back into capital, or re-buying or buying all at once the right quantities of material for that level of production...you can see how quick rulers acted to clear a main artery for this process on the Ambassador Bridge Truck Convoy shut down. CEOs use market stats to decide if they buy again...the process generates extreme economic inequality. The general rule is a certain quantity of capital determines a certain quantity of production...have workers figured out the laws CEOs use to guide their decisions in order to level the playing field? The consequences for an empire built on social classes of other countries get a share of the corporations’ profits and in many cases no profits at all just jobs...and borrowed dollars...to bring the jobs back the work at home will cost more, and the profits fall, interest and inflation too high, producing the military effect to deal with rampant international unemployment and agitation. Do American working people understand how these relations are considered productive labor. That, if you take away from capital, labor bought at a rate of $.50cents a day, capitalism will perish...and so the American working class perish along with it? ...and if labor is bought to high for its own cost of production, too many people are producing nothing of value by not working for the corporations! Here a formula or a prescription is needed: if you cannot bring your jobs back and cannot let social classes, allies and friends down who make up your empire, then WTF do you do? ‘tis a complex and problematical paradox, the one social class that has the power to do it can’t because it does not have the intellectual or the theoretical power to do it.
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  2206. Stack up against working people in the US is a Power Elite. Most people see this group as a conspiratorial "Deep State". I think it is more of a superstructure of class and not a state at all. The Power Elite in Washington are composed of lawyers playing different roles as advisors, consultants to the president, they come law firms and from think tanks and from Academia. They are out of touch with the new generation who grew up under their policies and have fallen back on doing what they do best which is to make deals for the sale of arms through their political influences. If you want to rattle the 1% , break the bubble, you express the attitudes of your generation politically, you do what Steven Miller did, agitate the Power Elite, leave California, Ohio or wherever your from and bring all your high school experiences with you to impose on the rest of society by holding the 1% hostage with your votes in your pocket. The problem lies in the individual society produces that working people are their own worst enemy and are misled to be the fall guy. Miller and Trump, Bolton are second rate high school minds with attitudes formed in their adolescent years had never grew beyond them are people enamored by power and where the power comes from does not matter as long as it keeps coming. Working people keep giving them that power like there is no tomorrow. The vast majority outside of the Washington bubble, are categorized as a 'special interest', like Special Education Kids are stigmatized in high school by the mainstream the Power Elite stigmatizes all working people into a special category as outside the mainstream, implying there is something inherently wrong with the working class, came from a democrat, that it must need 'help', is premised on the notion, that we are all human, so -- how is it that the few can succeed and others cannot if it is not for personal and subjective reasons like being a deplorable person of sheer apathy and ignorance that the working masses cannot be rich? The facts are stacked against the working class because educationally it does rank low, 17th for literacy. People are stupid because they do not read, true or false? False, they read junk, not the stuff that will teach them to run a state. With the many different professional occupations supported by the Power Elite, which includes celebrities and philanthropic organization, theories become the weapon to prove the working class is defective and, therefore, should be excluded from the Public Domain because the Power Elite are not defective. The Power Elite are chosen or born into it, gifted and talented, they are the authentic religion, all other religions are copies. Offspring must be not be exposed to each other fearing contamination and spread of the defection the Elites called in science to come with a gene selection program for a perfect child as one way to battle the spread of working class imperfections and another way, a slow genocide, annihilate the working class. Fortunately, a Pope the other day dispelled that notion and advised the people to rise up against the Power Elite for its war crimes and inhumanity, but the message went over the heads of Catholic working people, confused by their leader, and Jewish working people confused by their nationality, and black working people confused by their racism and white racism, native Americans demoralized by destruction of land, Hispanics divided by a wall, everything is both real and imaginary at the same time, makes the working class appear psychotic, split in opposite direction on a range of issues that determine their lives are disunited while the Power Elite are united living in the bubble.
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  2208.  @freyfaust6218  I don't think Marx was wrong about a class of people in power unwilling to give up their power without a fight...I wouldn't give up my political power, wealth or property would you if you were Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg? I seriously doubt Trump or the Pope would give up their riches and power without a fight. I doubt very much the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist party would give up power. That aspect of your comment on what Marx said about the "bourgeoisie" makes perfect sense to me. Re: Schools...I doubt you will find one professor in the entire world of Academia teaching Marx unless you are in Harvard, Princeton, or Yale, and only then in lecture form and they are posted as lectures on Youtube. Frankly, they are boring and the professors are non-dialecticians would make a worker leave the room they are that bad. NOBODY reads Marx in the US certainly not his great opus Capital. I am interested in the problem of purging from society the old oppressors who are resistant to change. I do consider the upper middle class in the US an oppressor class but not a direct oppressor of the labor of a worker in production such as the 500 big corporations exploiting the labor of workers in other nations, although there was a capitalist arrested for storming the nation's Capitol extolling the virtues of freedom and Trump. China killed to purge these anti-communist elements in society. Venezuela incorporates their youth into working with the working class and this seems to allow the older generation to live out their lives without being purged by violence and the younger generation of the upper middle classes more amenable to the working class. This is working out well and Venezuela's General Assembly, the political body of reaction, is gone along with the Guarimbas ( no different than the type of people who stormed the Capitol). However in Brazil the uppermiddle class are nearly all sons and daughter of runaway German Nazis. These people are so demented they may have to be purged by violence or forever locked up for their racism makes them savages unable to live in civil society without expressing violence,---if the working classes of Brazil get into a tug of war with the Bourgeoisie of Brazil. America's upper middle class as virulently racist as Brazil's. Would have been different if the North completely took the southern plantations from the slave -owners but such is history. The upper middle class dominating the political field in the US, $500K and up are the liberal political class fractured among themselves, split by two camps, one part personally violent the other part institutionally violent, one actively violent and the other passively violent...their willingness to bend to the working class owing to their racism prevents change, transition and death from occurring naturally when a society reaches its point where it must change. On state control. One example is all I have. Social media. The means of communication are totally a social product. The form social media takes in our society contradicts its nature as social leaving freedom of speech to be decided by those who own the means of communication. Nationalizing social media makes perfect sense and is more fitting than privatizing it.
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  2225. There is an economic transition going on that is totally ignored. The migrants and homeless people become the problem and the target of contempt by the Public and politicians is shameless. The council and the people of Chicago are ignoring how land and development real estate projects are being built in big numbers and could easily house the migrants and homeless and then some but they are not being built for sale, they are for rent. Developers are large scale landowners and landlords, they now build and continue to own rather than build to sell, or build to suit to whoever wants to be a landlord. Your friendly neighborhood retailer like WaWa or Stewarts or Quick Check still buy what developers build but there are corporations getting in the game of buying land and developments and this group are becoming large scale landlords. Properties that go for rent is the change happening and this change has a side effect of throwing people out on the street creating a homeless population. The other change going on caused by the inflow of migrants are replacing American women of the workforce, women replaced men in the workforce 40 years ago, during the period wages were held constant. Women become the new class of managers, overseeing the new workforce of illegal migrants. This is a change that depresses and lowers wages since migrants are labor with no rights or protections. Their numbers is their only power as we witnessed the Las Vegas hospitality industry workers who walked out for higher wages around the time Autoworkers went on strike. The Las Vegas worker’s strike dropped out of the news suddenly. This is because their numbers won a higher wage. That is a message employers do not want broadcasted to America that other workers would get the same idea. Shameful how Chicago is boasting a proud ignorance at this problem without realizing that when the process is complete the American dream of owning a home has become a nightmare of anonymous corporations robbing that dream right out from under them.
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  2239. Its nice to see smaller less powerful countries engaged in diplomacy, figuring, working, solving, as it gives us direction of what other countries real interests are versus the artificial interest they had to live with imposed on them by the US and bent over backwards to satisfy, they lost much and are now getting back on track. And when the artistic touch is applied it becomes rather miraculous what human beings will fashion from nature to meet the needs for nature, themselves and others. All it takes are the means. Someone like John Bolton would do the opposite of what the world needs. He’d fire the ambassadors and close up the store. He’d tell nations in needs they cannot buy any pumps, cars, tools, devices, widget, screws, or hammers from any of America’s stores. An action that deprives, restricts, holds back, disallows the means from getting into the hands of the masses for use of their development. No figuring, solving, no working together...none of that is allowed. And who is he to tell others what they cannot do? Every nation will have to work with what is left after it has been ravaged by privatization and by the action of natural forces; how to get on the right track for its development without restriction of the means as imposed by the US. This is the next phase of human development; a humanity undivided by social roles as kings, slaves, serfs and lords, employees and employers. While prosperity is over for people in the US and Europe they do have going for them a universal power to put all nations back on track again. They can expropriate the expropriators and usher a new Age of the Common Person. From their position new openings for development emerge solving concrete problems across the planet and from what is left of the devastation by catastrophic social and natural forces a blossoming of invention, new science, new thinking, new way of Being...and literally this world of presidents, kings, princes, monarchs and oligarchs will appear and understood by all as, indeed, the last antagonistic stage of human development and a distant past.
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  2253. Right! No dam alternative to the right wing, people turn to God, and so many were already born again in the 80's added more to the religious mix. With nothing but negative choices to escape the misery of working class life and the separation of the elite from society the vote for Trump was a cry for help despite how ugly or proudly it was expressed. The vote for Trump are the hidden injuries of class coming together in someone powerful enough to challenge them. They can only hope he will challenge the elites and make working class lives better. That their vote was not wasted on the quintessential moment that could have turned things around for them, The moment the Tea party stole for the republicans and the democrats were too blind to see. They (We, Us) can only hope the vote was not wasted on a man the republicans and democrats do not steel or is defeated as so many before had been cut down from them. Religion heels and brings back a fundamental yearning for stability in working class family's lives. Lives totally disjointed by social instability is always fertile ground for a rise of movements of any persuasion. What accounts for the blindness in democrats is class distinction. What accounts for the blindness of the working class is oppression. What accounts for the power of capital is labor. At this historical juncture, this particular generation of workers, are not at the point of realizing their strength is in their numbers, nor have they come to a realization that the antidote to a corrupt civil society is not religion or free markets but in their own class awakening. Economics is the big thing! Social and political economics in particular that the next generation will use to accompany its collective strength as they react to working class strangulation by the financial machinery of Wall Street.
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  2269. Religion is mere front for their true religion Capitalism. The fundamentalist and the evangelical teachings are religions appropriate for the economic and social conditions of the 19th century and if in power the economy of the US would slide back into the levels of production of the 19th century, essentially all economic, social, scientific and technical progress, made thus far would be crushed! Why they are against abortion has to do with their own fertility rates diminishing and a separation process of the biological family is possible only through political power. Two reasons and motives explain why adoptions are a solution to infertility and a way to save people from the immiseration of capitalism. Immiseration to the religious is a personal choice not a societal condition. This to avoid having to criticize capitalism for social inequality and the sufferings of the masses. Emphasis is given to the subjective person. While on the left the criticisms of capitalism are given to objective conditions. Both extremes treat objective and subjective conditions as mutually exclusive. Both are wrong. Immiseration is a technical term used in social science to encompass the detrimental effects of crime, alcoholism, abuse, drug addictions, have on the working poor and working class creating apathy and nihilism in people, where they do not care about themselves or others around them, engage with the world through their rage, anger, hatred. In short the two polarities are antithetical and mutually exclusive in sharp tension with each other. At bottom the whole matter hinges on political power and who gets it? A true religion is one that is supported by individuals and their faith not supported by a general tax fund they do not have to pay! Religion is still the Opiate of the Masses, in other words, it is what pacifies people from taking political action in the Many and the prime ideological tool of the Few for the retention of political power. What is important is to see their actions as a group, as a social class, they exert their economic and political aims but as individuals in contact with the suffering you would never believe capitalism is their soul.
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  2274. Voting matters, the two political parties have dominated the political life of the US, a virtual monopoly over the life of the country, for over a century. They are able to retain power for that long because out of 330 million people only one fifth of the total population, around 60 million vote, keeping it that way changing district voting rules to follow the social changes in the districts is a primary mission of the two political parties. Mexico shook off the monopoly the two parties, PRI and Pan, had for a more than a century when Obrador got elected. None of that has happened in the US, the two parties still rule the political life of the nation, the only change that has changed the complexion of the Democratic Party is America Far Right. The Democratic Party has moved more to the left where it was back in the early part of the 20th Century, becoming more a party of labor inclusion. But more important than all this, a social transformation has happened that America needs to redo, redraw, and make fewer states, roughly 20 states not drawn along lines of race and language but along lines of universal elements of Nature, all need for survival, i.e., Water, Soil. Population is so dense that you cannot have one city in one state consuming all the water other states need for their progress, rivers, reservoirs, lakes and aquifers run through many states, and you cannot have a small class of agricultural producers consuming the soil and water in great quantity choking space for growth. Nothing in the form of economic policy right now in the US is compatible with a socially transformed America.
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  2280. More politicizing of a viral epidemic that has more to do with the relationship of ecology and planetary health with respect to our relationship with animals than it does with Donald Trump. I swear the left in this country are a pack of loons that it is no wonder they never get beyond where they have been for the last 60 years. If Karl Marx were alive today he'd throw the book, Volume 1, at you lefties. Marx was a scientist the left are just plain poltical junkies. The left should be politicizing the link between industry, ecology and public health, not Donald Trump. Iran is a cluster fuck of religion, politics and public health that SARs corona virus has struck it so badly. Venezuela the driver of SARs corona virus is driven through the family and in Taiwan the family and churches. In the US through homelessness and urban development and commercial deforestation. In Italy through a public health system that is as backward as it is in the US. In the UK through an underfunded national health system. What do you get when the temperature of the panet rises above normal, you get locust. What happens when religious freaks are in government and a swarm of locust popualte the Middle East and Africa you get a crazy idea of biblical plagues and inaction from government. What happens when you cut down forests where bats normally are not in contact with other animals, you get a spill over of the virus to animals and what do you get when you have an exotic pet industry and industrial development deforestation and the practice of hunting animals, you get SARs corona virus transmissions to humans. Even if sanctions were stopped yesterday, the ecology, planetary health and public health is still "the" problem. Idiots!
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  2298. I think the majority of the commentary here is weak on the history. Overpopulation poses the threat of slavery in all societies and the history of ancient Rome is a classic example of that. When that happened most societies weigh the proportion of land to population very heavily as the consequences of slavery are disastrous. I perfectly agree with the criticism that China is not a socialist society but not by the definition made by this moderator or by the commentators. Any society in which the commodity labor-power exists is a capitalist society, the two chief charactersitcs of a capitalist society is a labor-market and a money-market. Western economists separate production from circulation, separating subject from its object, and circulation becomes a dominant sphere in which the accumulation of monetary wealth occurs, thus, all the economic forms peculiar to this sphere are mechanism for the accumulation of the economic surplus, i.e., bank nterest, trade, government finance, hoarding, are historical sources of monetary wealth. On the question of what percentage China spends GDP (the economic surplus) on military defense is to me strictly a political variable.  Relative to the US, spending 7 times more than all countries of its GDP, China takes the place of the USSR not as a socialsit threat to US hegemony, but as a capitalist rival is a function of the politics of protecting and preserving the world economy from competition. Iran wishes it could spend more of its GDP on defense when Saudi Arabia purchases defense products from the US is an example of the politics of hegemony. Causing a nation to spend on its defense more of its GDP deprives the working class of its necessities and can break the back of an economy. The politics of the Cold War caused the USSR to spend its productive economic forces into military defense as a response to the threats of containment. See George F. Kennan, The Nuclear Delusion; Soviet and American Relations in the Atomic Age, 1982. It is not the style of the moderator that is abrasive, but rather, his pomposity in the treatment of the questions are void of their historical connections. Otherwise, having the decision makers in a forum meet the public is brings the state down to earth is a positive thing.
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  2300. This war brings out the glaring disparity of fire power between Palestine and Israel that it would lead the religious to the fable of David and Goliath as another fulfilled prophecy of the Bible. Israel's Missile Dome Defense Shield defending itself from a low level missile system of Hamas and the damage incurred significantly less than the damage any slingshot can hit a giant unless it got struck the right nerve at the right place and disabled the Israeli (i) command center. If it did it would be sheer luck. The poor attacked by the rich and the poor attacking the rich both sides defending themselves from the aggression that encompasses their entire relationship is at bottom a land acquisition for Israel when this is all over and Palestinians move. What makes this social relationship antagonistic is the science and technological promoted for purposes that are no good for the Palestinians ( p) as it is used by Israel (i) to rule over (p). The individual Palestinian has no access or possession of the science and technology ( s and t ) in the realm of medicine and warfare now in education and construction. A material deprivation of (p), versus the material abundance of (i). P's civic lives stands in stark contrast to the individual Jewish citizen in possession of science and technology. Made possible because s + t = i - p, palestinians are cancelled out, regarded as inconsequential beings undeserving of the growth and progress the more advanced society uses to repress them is Jewish racism, identical to the racism experienced by African Americans and Indigenous people in all parts of the world from conical western powers, nothing has changed from the 19th century in this aspect.
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  2315. The labor-force in the US equals 175 million and work an average of 8 hrs, a day. They produce a total of 1,360 million working hours a day equalling 16, 320 million working hours a year. The value production in the US is the highest in the world and the most productive in the accumulation of an economic surplus that the cost of educating one child equals 3 hours of the total hours of the whole workforce produces in one year, thereafter, education costs measured by total labor hours expended in average labor-time is less and less with the shrinking of technology. Compared to the amount of the total hours it takes to produce a Navy Aircraft Carrier, one child's full lifetime produces more value to society than the entire military naval fleet ever could in one war. The irrationality is rational when you understand the nation's productive power of society is steered in the direction to serve the military and not in the direction to serve the child for a particular interest. What this says is that the workforce is the only social class capable of resolving education in society because it is the only social class who's work produces value.  The only class who's work produces value in any shape it wants; whereas, all other jobs create work without the element of value created and cannot shape reality to fit the needs for mass education? A job this big can only be done by government or the working class directly. The government has opted out, educating the future is left to the working class.
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  2322. It occurred to me that as mammals other mammals are eaten by humans and under extreme limits of starvation humans would eat other humans. Some human cultures have (ed.) eaten humans for reasons other than material deprivation done on occasion for ritual religious beliefs. Mammals in general never commit murder or mass murder on another mammal and suicide is not a practice within the animal kingdom. Mysteries around why dead animals come up from the sea to the shore are unexplained phenomena. Kills are consumed by animals for energy and reproduction. Mammals in the animal world cannot produce their sustenance but they also do not have the need to re-produce their subsistence. They are equipped to live just by what is found from the natural world. The natural world reproduces itself and gives life to humans and animals. The biological skill human mammals never had and lost is the cooperative ability to live in the wild 10,000 years ago. The species was happy to give up the nomadic wilderness life of hardship and tight togetherness of the family where every abuse under sun saw the light of day. This is one reason I feel the Catholic Church will survive its pedophilia for another 2000 years. Humans are abusive creatures capable of horrible atrocities and it is worse in the family the society only reflects. The animals humans eat are manufactured by humans. Copies of natural beings. The 5000 pigs daily slaughtered in Smithfield farms are reproduced daily by human labor. The number of the species of farmed raised pigs is governed by the production of man. In reality, we have no idea how a real pig, chicken, fish from the wild tastes and if we do industry makes an animal suited for the taste of a human which can be far from what is natural. Nothing natural at all about eating man-made mammals. This action makes the manufactured mammals a social creature of human created not nature evolved, created by human labor, this is, is consistent with the theory of creation (ism) when you strip away theology the hand was the first tool that made transition from ape to man come to light. Star matter created life. The hand came eons later. Labor is their father and the modern industrial farm is their mother. In fact the mammal part about being human is less and less a feature built into us and what we have become as a result of thousands of years of making our sustenance by farming, extend and support a growing population of humans, is a manufactured human! Physiologically, we may not even be mammal/animals any longer extracted from wild nature for so long?
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  2325. This deal is such a good example of what capitalism is...”...we will get $400 billion dollars back”. Trump is special. Not only does he preside over a decline of the US economy but he is also its the Last Capitalist. If he fails to control inflation and interest rates and does not raise GDP to 5% from a low 2.5%. He’s finished. What then? After Trump and the MAGA republicans, the democrats are no option for a solution in a downturn. So who then takes the helm? Trump and Musk are reshaping the US economy the way billionaires would shape it, they want to lower the cost of production in everything. Unfortunately, you cannot fire technology and machines. A strong and powerful MAGA movement in Trump’s party are clashing with the ideas of the billionaire section of the party but that clash has not developed into ideas for a struggle for power. Will billionaires be the dominant class coming out of reckoning? As the billionaires position themselves to control the kind of property that controls people and Trump facilitates this, MAGA becomes a social opposition movement, I bet than a lot of politicians will come out of the closet as the leftists they were all along... when more of MAGA spreads into other sections of the population...look to MAGA for the plan that strengthens the concerns of MAGA, social security, healthcare, inflation and jobs, who will care if Ed Montana or Marylou Oaks of Nevada has socialist roots going back to the 30s. They have an economic rescue plan the others do not and they are running against the billionaire class!
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  2344. Workers in Canada, the US and Mexico do not have a vision of themselves in society as something beyond just being an ‘individual’ until conditions make them think and act as a social class. Mexico is the gateway to the other America in the central and south where workers are uprooted and because of the wealth gap, conditions are worse, they have little to be conservative about like their counterparts in the north. These are ideal conditions for Washington, that workers in all three wages for all three Americas are staggered and ranked from high to low is a problem the Left from all regions must address. This formula is a capitalist formula and it has arisen when the capitalist class is given permission by the relative states and governments in which they reside to satisfy it’s quest for higher concentrations of monetary and material wealth. The owners of financial wealth and capital tell “Shorty” just get us the markets and we’ll take care of the business of production, work and employment, and how things get produced and when, why and why not, among the three Americas. Who’s shorty? Shorty are the Pentagon, the White House and the State Department. The other problem is the thought process of the working class itself, i.e., individualism makes people not view society as a creation they can decide. Society is an external entity belonging to the super rich as the dominant social class, a vision of their own kind of workers society, does not enter their mindset as a possibility. Left voices from Canada to Argentina have a lot of dispelling to do to get the workers and peasants of all three Americas, north-central-south, united on one thought process, i.e., a better world is possible and probable for their kids. Yanis provides an answer to the question of what socialists on the left should do about gringo individualism, but it does not go far enough to develop a hemispheric unity of the working class, numbering close to a billion workers and peasants, all sacrificing for their kids sake. India’s working class population nearly equals all three working populations in the Americas. I would start by showing them what Europe has become without working class solidarity, a place where one success story of capitalism after another, also coming to the Americas, is a never ending story. A success story of capitalism is always found wherever there are pockets of mass poverty and desperation. War, genocide, poverty, degradation are vehicles of primitive accumulation. So,---the thought process ought to be where the working class is worse off is where capitalism succeeds and wins magnificently and, conversely, where the working class is better off the capitalist class fails magnificently, this describes the two poles of capitalism along a north-south alignment. In Argentina the US World Bank scores great, a glorious flow of profits from the periphery to the center, and in Canada the world bank is hardly a lender. With this sketch the migrant question is fully explained with minor details left to fill in but overall the spell is broken by the facts becomes not as important as the social inequality in the working class generated by the violent action of primitive accumulation in the Americas.
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  2349. Everybody is against this but there is no organized left channelling public condemnation of Trump and his retrogressive policies. In the Cold War, a client state had to be anti-communist to get the full backing of the American taxpayer.  My question to you, the taxpayer, are you anti-communist enough still like the generation before you in the 1950's that your money should go to this policy? Are you rich enough to afford this kind of policy? Because Trump is a McCarthyite in his tactics, and social life in America was like living in the 1950's America, a repressed society where everyone was spooked to say anything. The difference today and then is the legal and surveillance muzzle over everyone. Seems you want open relations with Cuba but persist in lowering the standard of living of Cuban people because they are a socialist society and you are not. You are a capitalist society, with capitalist relations, but so is China and Russia. We are not seeing money, property, the patriarchal family, breaking down in China and Russia as we are in the United States for internal reasons. Stability and sustainability in America is a blindly working average because of an incessant impulse to alienate GNP as a piece of merchandize. No dignity when GNP is treated as unattached commodities with no connection to useful trade work that ought to be developed with investment. Instead, your capitalists are about investing their money somewhere else, leaving you and as a taxpayer short on freedom, liberty, and security to defend factories in other countries.
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  2351. People remember as I do, Russia, then the USSR, supported Mandela in South Africa and never once forced its interest in Africa because the USSR was not an expansionist political system. In contrast, European capital and American capital expanded into Africa and dominated the country leaving it in desperate poverty for a time equal to three lifetimes, three generations of poverty. To this day the mining industry excavating COBALT for the tech industry works kids because they are nimble in mining fields. Of course then there is the notorious Blood Diamonds featured in films made in this decade. I watched a film the other day made in the 1930’s and it showed a mining operation employing children digging the landscape for its mineral wealth as part of the drama in the plot. So, ---how long has this been going. There are kids digging for COBALT right now as I write this comment. Dirt poor children. Employed by a foreign mining operation. Lets be real here. Africa is freeing itself from all brutes. It is a continent whose time has come to be one united Africa and do away with the map the British drew out for that continent. Israel is a product of British geography. Come on people, emancipate yourselves. Africa, this is your century; the Age of Capital is fast approaching the last chapter in the book with a transformation of the continent. Latin America is next to free itself from the Monroe Doctrine of the 1830s of the 5th president of the US. Seriously? The US SENATE’s actions are the actions of this doctrine to all of Latin America.
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  2378. Can't forget the Iraq War Veterans, so angry at the liberal establishment who at the time was Joe Biden put them in harm’s way using 9/11 for a call for freedom and liberty against Sadaam Hussien and liberate Iraq. Congress went along with it hook, line and sinker. They gave Al Queda a place to fight Americans. The Vets came back destroyed, and used the only power they have to elect Trump, a spite vote against the liberal establishment. What did the left do? Nothing. What did the left do when these same vets showed up in Virginia armed to protest Northam's gun laws on MLK day 2020? Nothing. The left should have been there arm and arm with the Iraq vets. Biden was then and is now in the pocket of Raytheon Lockheed Martin. Grumman, GE, Exxon Mobil, the largest oil dealer to the Pentagon. Biden formerly head of the arms services committee then became VP to Obama, hand-picked by Obama to initiate another war, the war we are in today, the war with the Russians to build up Ukraine. The next group of Veterans sent to war are not going to come back as close as it came with the assassination of Solemeini of Iran, because now they will be fighting entire nations in the Middle East. His America First policy puts all of Europe in the untenable position to choose between the US or Russia and China. With half of the British parliament invested in Hawei, England, France and Germany slides into a deep stagnation with Trump’s trade war on China.  As for Trump, he is the wrong man for the job. Wrong, because his path is not to deconstruct the arms industry and wrench the grip the arms industry has of our government, his path is to become an autocrat. Undo all the wrong wrong-doers prosecuted by the liberal establishment and create a fealty of the justice department. The people supporting him never went to war. An autocrat is natural to them, they are chiliasts, believers in the second coming of Christ, God, Family and Country. They are the NASCAR enthusiasts, rich, spoiled Americans, country music stars, with pro-fascist leanings.  Only Bernie opposed the Iraq War. Only Bernie opposes the misuse of the military, opposes invasions, opposes the arms industry, opposes industries with the highest carbon footprint. Vote Bernie if you are going to vote, it’s the last chance to restore America back to its original roots of American progressivism.
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  2397. The American working class is able to see through the hypocrisies of the military state. This is about the passing of an age of militarism. Might takes two decades for this state to finally die. But making it go away quicker is more important than anything else and can be done with the help of other nations in agreement with disarmament; but do Americans have the courage to confront their king and carry through a political revolution, what Bernie called for when he first ran for office?  The only power that can defeat the power of a king, his court, and military combined, is a social and political revolution, a fight for political power. Earlier generations showed this quite clearly and died in that effort. We owe them the dignity of implementing the ideas they believed and died for. But crucial to our being is our history. The Civil War, and all the stories we have come to know about that post Civil War period, can be seen as actions that led to the formation of the modern working class. The period of Reconstruction and its display of strikes, lockouts, raids, battles, riots, revolts, lynchings, incarceration, drugs, domestic violence, guns, all shaped the modern working class and the 8 hour working day. The modern working class of today un-attached from the natural and real material relations of production have been made dispensable. Its social power is needed as required to operate the machinery used to advance America's industrial revolution in the abolition of slavery in the first part of the century and into a military industrial complex in the middle of the 20th century. Every culture leaves behind their mark in history. Ours is the Civil War Reconstruction era introducing capitalism in the early part of the century and the military industrial complex in the later part of the century. Dazzling is the technology, to what end is nothing to marvel at. Whether future archeologist will find the remains of such institutions and decipher from it our civilization is another question. The material left behind is contaminated. It was the formation of working class and the introduction of the capitalist class that the Civil War was fought over. It took the capitalists almost 100 years to fully dominate the society with major interruptions in between, such as the labor movement and later the New Deal. Socialism was always in the forefront of their minds the ultimately enemy. I suppose now when the question comes up about dictatorship to the average American the answer will be I'd rather live under a people's dictatorship than a king's dictatorship, for militarism and dictatorship is the story of the 20th century.
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  2403. Small minded middle class Racists like Hemphill hurt the nation, cities and communities. If you start the news with the headline that ends this show the significance of the conflicts of the Middle East do not cast a dark shadowy impression on the rise of workers in France and England against conservatives that want to take away workers retirement age and rights in the minds of viewers. The positive becomes a negative when the negative is the starting point of the program has a subliminal effect on viewer’s minds. You can prove this yourself right now as you watch this program. when its over review the story line up backwards and notice the effect it has on the violence in the Middle East what will come to our own societies if masses of workers remain passive. Media manipulation of stories, images, even sounds impresses viewers minds with negative information dampening the uplifting effect of positive information such as the worker’s national strikes in Europe. DN’s editorial board uses what Hollywood has done for a century and that is to attach sound or score characteristic of negative emotion only on Indians attacking the Calvary in Westerns but upbeat and light music when Calvary is present in the shot. When Darth Vader walks into the room the music is dark. When Hans Solo is in the room the music is complimentary and light. Everything in the US is manipulation of mind and body and behavior modification leading to subjugation of the human will and spirit occurs psychologically and materially.
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  2406.  @rohanmarkjay  Yes, i know...isn’t a spectacle of the bourgeoisie (US multinational corporations) to react to what it fears the most,---Bolshevism, the parlor variety it lives with and the Russian experiment it cannot live with. The problems and conflicts of today are necessary for the realization of goals established in 1919 or rooted therein. There at the conference at Versailles the European bourgeoisie of the dominant colonial empires, already industrialized made plans for the century and thereafter in perpetuity. The Plan: Eradicate any opposition to nationalization and expand capitalism. Pretty simple mission. This coming from the experiences with the Paris Commune in France; the revolutions of Germany; culminating with the Russian Revolution and decade later the Chinese Revolution, the world colonial bourgeoisie was surrounded by communism taking hold in societies still in their peasant pre-capitalist formations and a lot of the blood relations were expropriated by the masses. Contempt for the masses was forever cemented in the breast of the bourgeoisie. They want to recover that missed opportunity Bolshevism in their view, robbed. The conference observed this fact and hitherto the more anti-communist a ruler could be the more support they got. US General Austin is in the Philippines concretizing plans for military support to the son of Ferdinand Marcos. The Philippines is on track to becoming a sentry state for the US follows the plan of 1919 perfectly, we can expect nothing short or long of this coming from the US State Department by way of foreign policy. The Good Neighbor days are history the US ensures the pre-capitalist societies in the East get industrialized by America’s related bourgeoisie of Europe’s bourgeoisie. Of course this means the American working class is no longer industrialized. American society becomes a society of a lot of lawyers and a lot of hamburger flippers who consume mass quantities of products made in other countries. Objectively, Russia was first to model industrialization for pre-capitalist societies to follow, the split in communist movements hinged on supporting bourgeoise wars for the west. But for the pre-capitalist societies in the East the colonial empires not coming in and industrializing their countries for themselves was appealing. Africa, India and Russia are intimate and the US gets a cold shoulder. A missed opportunity that would employ American workers for decades and generations given we are talking about markets of billions of people. That’s big. You can skip over capitalism and go straight into socialism was Lenin’s April Thesis that contested the Marxian linear growth of capitalism before they can develop socialism. Western bourgeoisie takes this very seriously. Anyway, there can be no progress without deviation is a law of nature and we are not genetically modified people yet. Bearbock must have an encounter with Bolshevism and the Russian Revolution, hidden in the family tree,---that is connected to 1919 somehow...I do not know her family history. Russophobia is a real phobia. It could be purely ideological as in the US or materially and biologically relatable in the offspring of the bourgeoisie as in Europe.
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  2461. Landlords as a social class were outlawed in the USSR in 1917, the same with Usury by banks, that to this day even under Putin, a landowning class has not emerged but for a few in Russian cities and these are limited to commercial properties like, industry, malls, hotels, etc.. But where people live rents are proportional to the building maintenance costs, if it’s a small building, rents are low, a larger building; rents are larger. Most Russians have no idea what a mortgage is. But here in America, a landowning class is huge and public and private debt is high as a result. In turn, taxes rise, endlessly spiraling higher and higher. They are an aristocracy of land owners, very powerful and the biggest of them are the leadership of the Senate. All senior Senators are large land owners with controlling interest in rents. Trump is a landowner. Jared Kushner is a landowner. Why these types are popular with Americans are for reasons that are ideological not for reasons that are pragmatic and practical because these men are not interested in being kind to renters, they are in business to make Capital. Of 332 million people who live in America more than half of them live on land that is not their own. NYC is a microcosm for the nation. All who work in the city work on the property of others is the same for the nation. Nobody in America that is not a part of this class works on land that is their own for their own subsistence, some bought land in remote places for homesteaded free of landowners, (a bank holding a mortgage is a landowner until paid off) and make products they can sell for additional income except for a collection of heirs to a property paid off by their parents or grandparents. And among this group, very few actually work the land for their own subsistence and livelihood.
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  2463. More than half of America's non-unionized workforce comes to around 170 million working people who are forced to work under mandatory arbitration work rules. Only 7% of America's union workers number 20 million do not fall under mandatory work rules and can sue their employer in class actions suits for damages wrought by the job. The rest cannot sue their employers because the self-employed cannot sue themselves, not yet anyway, and for those who work for themselves and their families not unionized are a shrinking middle class compared to the vast concentration of wealth into fewer hands. When you peer under the official description of the working class and throw light on all those unofficially described, the numbers are even more staggering. Mind you, all this is on the assumption that the total workforce is employed. We know in reality unemployment by official statistics are inaccurate.. Those who are subsidized to work the balance of these workers number 110 million working people are employed by the largest retailers in the world. These workers number into the millions in agriculture and domestic workers. The number of workers that will fall under the Supreme Court decision on right to work rules will number 280 million working people subject to mandatory arbitration work rules. That leaves 80 million people to be accounted for, are either MIA from society or distributed among the upper middle class of millionaires, billionaires and the super rich. The class system in America looks like a pyramid while its wealth architecture looks like an upside down pyramid superimposed over the class pyramid. If this is 'Great...', then I say... Workers of the USA, Unite!
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  2468. I recall a NY Times article , Monday, October 29,1979: Decline in Productivity in the US, spurs intense debate and study...the point is, productivity in the US in 2025 has made strides. This comes from the last 50 years of lengthening the working day and shortening the necessary portion of the workday that productivity measured by its value creation is high. If you were to get into the mind of Musk or Bezos, they worry less about losing their power to workers working more than the work time needed to keep them on a payroll as a workforce; Musk and Bezos do not care if the value their workers create is greater than the value Bezos and Musk pays them, or their workers give them more value in return than the value their wages can buy. The main concern and this is what the article is about, reveals the logic of capitalism, is the amount of use-values the workers consume during the workday must always be smaller than the amount of use-values the workers create. A surplus must always be left over. Were the workers to work only for their own self-consumption, there would be nothing left over. The last 50 years, the continuous testing and observation, medication and indoctrination , not to mention study after study on working people for the modification of their work behavior was to lengthen the working day and shorten the necessary portion of the working day with technology, to transform money into capital. What a waste to have thrown so much capital resources into improving the ways a 1% can accumulate capital. If youtubers do not produce three videos a week they lose monetization and, therefore, income modifies the content the youtuber brings to the audience. Were the youtubers to produce content they want they would not produce a surplus of videos in order to monetize their product. So forget about the social conspiratorial analysis of capitalism and use the science and logic of capitalism against itself is the lesson here.
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  2481. Here we have a very important subject and the feeble professor goes straight into 'unofficial unemployment', people not looking, people working more than one job. Then into the global competition of workers, and what workers should do about this competition and the recommendation in addition to union, strike, protest, is legislation. Get the state to raise wages, as if the state, meaning Congress, poised to overturn the Affordable Care Act, is going to legislate wages be risen at this time. The repeal of the AFA is itself a fall in the value of wages. When repealed workers will have to buy medical services if they can afford it which is promised to be kept cheap by president Trump when he unveils the new health care plan in 2020. Economist should first define what wages are, to clear up the mass confusion in people's minds about what wages really are? A wage is not what it appear to be and people get easily sucked into the appearance of things. They see the surface of the water but not what supports underneath the water from draining away.  Wages appears in our society to be the price of labor, as a certain amount of money is paid for a certain amount of work. People speak of the value of labor as if it were the natural price of labor, wages go up and down around its necessary price. But this all falls apart when you compare the output of a day's work versus the amount a worker is paid per day in wages. Wages can give the illusion it has gone up if commodity prices fall, this is pretty much what the republicans are banking on, that employers will not be greedy and raise commodity prices because the cost of production for employers has gone down, due to contracting with China, Thailand, Singapore, making their products overseas. But greedy as they are they remain unwilling to raise the wage for the American worker, keeping it flat, steady, slow variable increases, crumbs. The president calling Harley Davidson cheap for exporting jobs from Kansas. The reason is simple, too simple for people to accept, expecting more than meets the eye is appropriate when studying wages, but not when it comes to production do people have to search for something mysterious that motivates employers to enjoy the benefits of a higher volume of product, turning all that excess into cold hard cash or gold, has never been easier in America and the worker's productivity is their's to enjoy for as long as worker's are obedient performing the productivity of labor management imposes on its workers.  The professor lives in a world outside of the realm of social class struggle, and his own class of workers in Academia are equally as obedient as workers participating in productivity despite not getting a share of it, work themselves to the bone even death. The professor would instinctively know the difference between the two values, i.e., wages and productivity if he were a member of the working class. The social lifestyle of Academia puts the intelligentsia in a separate social class from workers and, therefore, wages in simple terms, i.e., 12 hrs. work = $125.00 per day, and the 4 cars per hour, or ten million loaves of bread a day, the output of 12 hrs., multiplied by 5000 workers are examples sold at the unit price, shows wages are held constant while productivity is variable and both workers and capitalists are dependent on the productivity of labor is a class struggle that is based on products, wages, price and profit. What is productivity, let the professor answer what is productive and not productive, so we may experience more eye-opening analysis on the condition of the American working class.
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  2499. Labor unions, civil liberty unions, medical and scientific community, academia, news corporations, have their own Trump supporters. The middle class professionals and the associations they belong, Golf Club Association, Kiwanis, Merchant, Bank, Better Business Bureau, Entertainment and Hospitality industries, all have their Trump emulators, acolytes, supporters. Trump world is Las Vegas in Washington D.C.. Trump has surrogates with US military and Law Enforcement backgrounds and training on the front line willing to do the intimidation necessary at leadership daring to go against Trump. Civil War can be a real thing. Trump’s social momentum has a model in Mafia social constructs, criminal organizations, classic pyramid structure, and its world wide. Many foreign big capitalists are Trump emulators and competitors at the same time. There wasn’t a movement behind third party candidates for them to be remembered that is why two stand out. Trump is no third party. He’s a splinter in one party alternating power with another . Eugene V. Debs was a third party and Donald Trump. Mention Ross Perot and its like Who? Trump could get re-elected and he could be jailed. He could be president and in jail. If what becomes the case his second term will be nothing short of a revenge mission to destroy the democratic party. America can kiss any opposition goodbye. Trump supporters are everywhere even if they are a minority, they are spread across a wide range of social institutions big enough to disrupt those institutions, whip up trouble, mischief, that the heads of all leading institutions are dead silent about Trump’s constitutional transgressions. America is today what it would be like to live under Franco in Spain in the 50s and 60s. Mouths are muzzled.
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  2504. This is the kind of journalism needed when governments become dictatorially heartless and soulless. It puts a human face on the numerous effects of sanctions on the individual. It took too long for journalism to migrate from the high place of objectivity to the the street and community to the lone place of subjectivity where damaged bodies are found. Journalists are scared too. Street documentary is the only way to change mass opinion. Mass opinion is what the 'experts' manipulate, the tools created by academics, polls, surveys, think tanks, media, serve to change or immobilize your attitude on a given subject. This is why you as an individual were never shown through media the body bags coming back from any of the invasions. This would sensitize you to its immoral and unjust nature. We know now that the "anal retentive personality' developed during the Bush years of the Self led to fascism. Germophobes, and all relations reduced to the common denominator of desease. "As Good As It Gets', is a depiction of a world in chaos and disorder racked with germ killers through the eyes of obsessed individual. "Taxi Driver" depicts a social world of leeches seen through the eyes of a obsessed vigilante. Subtle depictions that lay the groundwork of acceptance of fascism. Fascism depends on order and all things have their place, a circle in a square disturbs the fascist order of the universe as an abberation, an anomoly, everything is reduced to the one source of all creation; the Father, any deviation from that one source is an aberration. Darth Vader is Dutch for "the Father", five movie episodes spanning two generations of people cemented patriarchy that in the series dessimates a matriarchy and the rightful heir to power is nepotistic. Popular culture and political opportunism are key features to the rise of fascism in the US. In the political real world individuals pre-socialized in the fascist order of things translates into a top down social structure with diminshing rights the further down the ladder of soceity people are born. Such personality disorders are compatible ways of being in a fascist state. The formal suit replaces the restraints of military regalia of Nazism. In the private sector, individuals are selected, hired on this criteria. In the public sector they are tested for selection and placed in waiting for a spot and then rise up. The State has grown from being mere tax collectors six senturies back into an organized syndicate of agencies and 'technocrats', where upward mobility is more tangible than in the private sector. The more we are shown images of force in all its forms, the more desensitized a people we become, callous, insensitive, inactive and unwilling to take a political stand against dictatorship. Other societes are preplexed that so little opposition exists to what they see are concentration camps despite how sanitized they are made to sound.
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  2525. Invariably, the metamorphosis of China's commodities into money in the American market is a metamorphosis of America's products from money into commodities in China's markets. So the US finds itself losing money as more Chinese goods flood American markets and its own goods in China's markets are not selling. The crisis the domestic American economy faces is a paradox of a super abundance of Chinese made products with prices that should fall from the excess quanitiy of goods China produces but in order to satisfy the American manufacturer's appetite for profit the sanctions step in to raise artifically the price of Chinese goods in the US market. Which could work if a government controlled the rate of profit the manufacturers want to charge against the effect of depressing wages for the American people. US manufacturers accelerate profit rates, however, without government control and planning, so the American people always end up as the losers, earning less purchasing capacity by the day the longer this form of protectionism is carried on. The Trump administration decided to levy a tax on China's goods, and this has a double effect on working populations. The corporations moving production to another coutry to escape the tax has its sociological ramifications of displaced working people in the community from which the corporations are leaving is a particular effect on communities in that locality. And the general effect of the imposed tax on foreign Chinese products for all working people tranlates into less purchasing power as wages have remained a constant over the last 45 years going forward. Congress has the option of legislating the manufacturers cease being the recipient of government bailouts in the form of subsidies as this is a misappropriation of a public interest serving a private interest. Given there is no political pressure on Congress to take action against tariffs that react negatively back on the home market the financial condition of the American people will only get worse way before it gets better.
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  2537. They do not want to go down in history as the ones who destroyed civilization in general and want to evade prosecution for their crimes in accruing their fortunes in particular. They do this by controlling what gets seen by the public, filtering the most critical parts of the trial that would shame them before the American people, and would constitute a crime, and therefore, impeachment and removal. The filling up of the court system with right wing ideological justices is another filter, that a criminal case against them is screened and does not make it through to a trial. Dead before it gets there.  This is a political elite that cannot be removed from power without a revolution. Republicans want to be protected from the judgement of history is a good point. Not if a people's revolution can help it is the counter-point! People make history, is true ever since the 18th century. Rulers may write the wars as history but they only make wars not history. History is made by us. We should start writing it now! They do not want to be seen as the people responsible for the collapse of the capitalist system descending into a world wide depression of wars and revolutions, consequently. We all know how complicit the democratic party has been, how we recover that party is through a mass landslide election of Bernie Sanders and a mass turnout in the streets demonstrating what Jane Fonda is calling for,--- mass social power every Friday, 1789-2020!  The party would have to be re-branded, re-named, the police and justice system entirely brought down to the ground floor for reconstruction, out with the old in with the new, and Bernie would have to do that if he is elected. A massive deconstruction at the same as as a massive re-construction of America takes place will have to be charted out for this century of the common person. Our votes would have to be directed in disbanding the wing controlling the power by a changed Speaker of the House. Speaker decides what issues this nation ought to be addressing as first order of business. Senators and congresspeople would have to fight out the real tough issues this country faces and the Speaker would have to hold them to it takes a person who can see the Big picture, knows what bills meet real needs and what bills meet fake needs, to appropriate those tax dollars in an equitable way. The absolute corruption of the GOP and the flawed democratic party dissolved and permanently banned from entering politics until some far future point of a solid and concrete redemption of their evil ways restores faith and credibility which if they succeed in brainwashing children with fake history will return with a vengeance as they have returned disguised as civilized fascists from the Nazi era. It is the farmers and working people in this country who will have to restructure the economy with the money they stole, period. Re-invest the capital currently in the hands of Bezos, Buffet, Gates, Sorros, and the rest of the class of billionaires. Capital to be used for a massive re-investment into the American economy, and the working people and farmers of the US must take a stand, or permanantly live under the rule of plutocrats.
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  2543. @ Victor Lustig: Sounds like you are preaching to the choir, son. Don't tell me tell your neighbor. The poor is not a subject of my comment. You live in a class society, thus, terms have to be concise not loosely used to describe people. Is it illegal to be a working class person in the 46 states? No it is not, in fact, it is encouraged by all states. Working class is a money maker for capitalism. The poor are not exposed to workplace exploitation because they live as paupers on the street. So why are you telling the Americans are insensitive to the poor? Are you insensitive to the poor because your state government has criminalized poverty? The working class and the poor are two distinct classes of people in society. Common to the poor at one far end of society and the super rich at the other far end of society is that neither of them work for a living by means of a paycheck and neither the super rich or the Poor contribute materially to the survival of society or the human species for that matter. This is why the super rich turn to philanthropy and the Poor are on State assistance, because neither are workers creating or adding value to the economy, both are takers, the former consumes the most for the self and the latter consumes the least for the self, this makes them unproductive consumers created by what is Neoliberalism. You are probably a working person which would make you the subject of my comment. So why not tell me about your experiences with workplace exploitation, whether by man, women or machine, as perpetrator boss or victimized worker? Which are you? Sometimes people are gaslighted both, physical or mental, on the job. They become de-sensitized to the exploitation itself and become victimizers to others because they are powerless to retaliate against the real perpetrator of the exploitation. If you re one of these people don't take it out on your family or other workers experiencing the same degree of exploitation. Direct your angry at the true source and encourage others to the same and America will not be the "... home of slaves".
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  2573. The political elite and interventionism: The foreign policy establishment Ro Khanna speaks about are a military and industrial alliance of private sector executives and officials in the public sector, they interlock, with the political elite of the state. By interlocking I do mean literally through social relations that they are connected to one another, marriage, extended relatives, families. The industries that produce the modern military are the vital industries protected by this political elite. The political elite consists of political families some of whom go back to the 18th century in American politics, are groomed for the roles of political power, through Ivy League Universities and live lives of endless chances, recklessness, a world were money is not a necessity or used as a medium for exchange, services are gifts, gifts are deductible for the giver, comes as form of a subsidy disguised as a tax benefit, the fashion industry and entertainment industry and the media industry also interlock with the political elite, the secondary industries which serve this political elite, consume the majority of the nation's wealth in the style of a King's court, with lavish and conspicuous consumption; they even have their own special events all the Mozarts the society has to offer on grounds separated from the mass of the citizenry. And others more recently join this social class through politics have but one chance of entry into the political elite. If people can get into this political social class by getting elected then one has to understand the military itself as another component of the state through which people of the society can enter into this political elite. Professional soldiers become generals, and generals form a group of their own as the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a council to the president on all military affairs, civil and military life is the bread and butter of America's political system as a unity of internal oppositions. In the economy itself the largest corporations produce this social system of the political elite as a society within society. The first to appropriate and consume the economic surplus before it gets distributed to the other social classes through wages, profits, rents, tax returns and exemptions, dividends, stocks etc., is the political elite. To keep the reign of the political elite intact the Supreme Court establishes law and the State enforces it. In effect the anatomy of a social class as a complex social organization of social institutions dominating the field of all human life based on, A is non-A. Non-A, is all of us, we are not what the political elite are or have, we are its opposite destructive side, victim and victimizer, crippled and destitute. When taxes are cut the non-A listers owe the government for a tax cut means the government took less taxes from our incomes. For the A-listers a tax cut creates an economic surplus and becomes a pool of capital the government borrows and lends to all non-A listers.
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  2586.  @eo3064  It took a couple of days for me to develop a sensible reply and getting out from under this avalanche of information. What borders on conspiracy is the government's silence about its projects that weather modifications come off as conspiracies. That said, if it is not carbon emissions trail a jet than it is a chemical revolutionizing the atmosphere. This idea is within capability of the US military and its team of military scientists. But what would be its other purpose beyond the thing that gives it a conspiracy as a technology working against people?  Robert Malthus's theory of population might have an answer because in his world the problem is too little land and too many people. If they can change the atmosphere from its natural proportions of oxygen, carbon and hydrogen, it might be to make soil productive. Sheilding large scale agriculture from economic ruin the fact that it feeds the world, and the smallest natural insects hydrocycles produce can wipe out a whole crop of futures and stocks can go under. But the government is secret about it. Weather modifications must entail a use for defense. Big industrial agriculture using air as a means of production for crop production on a large scale. If industry manufactures air, then they would be making a commodity out of a natural necessity, like bottled water, and own it while, the process of polluting Earth's hydrology creates a market for bottled water, and only those who can afford it get the best water. Conspiratorial or not, its still poisoning the natural with the social.
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  2588. Imagine if the professor got a dollar from every working person in America. That would add up to 132 million dollars. The professor would be a serious contender creating a new path for growth and development. The thought that Capitalism is nothing more than collection of commodities relating to each other is a mind blowing revelation that challenges our basic premises of life right from the get go, why products should be commodities in the first place! Commodities obscure the work process in society. Makes mysterious the role of industry, science and technology in a work process and obscures the material exchanges between humans and nature, a relation of perpetual transformation, and when the work process consists of 3 billion humans on the planet, transformation happens quick! One commodity is the same as a any other commodity, so dissecting one commodity is all it takes to expose these general laws of capitalism is a challenging position. This means... Workers are bossed into making commodities every day from 9 to 5. A fixed period of time rules work, they have to make enough commodities that a profit motive becomes the end and aim of production, or there is no work at all, humanity is a hostage to a social condition. Before this happened there wasn’t a social condition to work, a watch was a town crier or a church bell, a time element was not a social program all members of society would participate with. Before a time element came into the work process, if a thing had to be made, or food had to be harvested, it was done by slaves, serfs, artisans, but when the same work had to be done after a time element took over work, and how people harvested the soil and made coats, hats, shoes, clocks, guns, they had to become free people, before they can be hired as free workers, before slaves and serfs can become known as a family of tailors, milliners, clocksmiths, gunsmiths, their very sustenance has to be torn out from under them by means of economic conquest.
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  2623. Why is the Big Question and What To Do About It is in the Question: The Owners of Financial Wealth, Money and Capital use the working class’s capacity to work beyond the necessary point, to get at the value in commodities. There is a condition to this relationship that the owners of commodities and the owners of money become mutually exclusive and yet dependent social classes on the productivity of labor, and that is, through the worker’s own productivity of labor completing the product, ----capital recovers the value of its investment in the labor-process, the cost of machinery, technology and science, from the sale of the product. Money buys and sells would be automatic if it were not interrupted by a production process of human beings, rendering people the obstacle of capitalist development. The relation is reciprocal and contradictory, a potential efficiency for any society is the amount of surplus that can be used for further development is a natural necessity, but in the capitalist epoch this aim is politicized, turned into chimera and senseless social antagonisms from social classes that come from markets live their lives buying cheap to sell dear; rarely are social classes emerging from production in the whole history of work. The capitalist epoch is not only young in the historical timeline it stands out like a sore thumb, as a historically specific class struggle between employers and employees as the main form of social production, is not the end of history. There is further development obviously humanity must undergo. The highest stage being a classless society. Ultimately, a stateless society. That would presuppose all human beings are 1., literate, 2., multi-lingual, 3., have critical reasoning and have successfully matched needs, products and labor, and 4., relate to each other as conscientious species. America ranks too low on the scale of human emancipation, trapped in a deadline employers with the aim of extracting surplus labor from people are too busy regulating production by what happens on the market, and try strike a balance between intensity and duration in using the worker’s own productivity, the high stage of capitalist development has intensified crisis and the lack of improvement in the lives of millions of people is reflected in low military recruitment standards.
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  2630. Americans have been waiting for socialized medicine since Eisenhower was president from 1953 to 1961. Pity, that the lifespan 63 years of a single individual went without a National Health Program because the change of administration and the Cuban Missles Crisis put Medicare for All into the category of being a communist plot. The bigger a circus the McCarthytes can put out the less the people will think about Universal Health Care. It was a perfect fit for the establishment right wing to politicize health as a tool of infiltration by Soviet Russia. It intimidated a generation. Is this the generation of democrats who can see past the Cold War ideology? Not be intimidated by Trump who comes from the McCarthyite era of New York anti-Communists. Americans would rather be American than socialist is their call to being patriotic to an idea of a free society of individualism or their conception of what the US or socialism is not! Its an indication they are guided by fear and fear is their worst enemy. The conservative working class wing of the GOP are the most persuaded by patriotic ideology, do not have answers to the contradictions of capitalism. Trump is this wing of the GOP, he is seen as fighting every step of the way against the establishment he was never a part, is also a McCarthyite anti-communist, a chauvinist, and embodies all the characteristics of a non-pompous establishment elite, will argue Health Care for All is socialism. One democrat will have to confront Trump on that question and call it as it is. I'd say to Trump, it is. What will they say to him? If Bernie confronts Trump with, it is socialism, an entire Cold War history comes to an end and the beginning of the era of Universal Health Care ends the century old strategy of holding everything hostage to socially control individual members of society.  But in the meantime Beoing is under some intense pressure to solve its software problems and get their planes back on the market. The product in its repair mode is eating up the billions of dollars in profits invested into making the dam thing, and to save this company from collapse, it needs that sale money, and this initiates the American president to open channels and line up buyers. Boeing is ready to re-enter the market once the software glitch is fixed. But who in their right mind is going to stick their neck out and with public funds purchase Boeing aircraft with its public safety record marred by three crashes, without being muscled into it? An idiot is who, a Juan Giaudo character, making sure people like this are positioned in decision roles in government solicits the work of Secretary of State and the help of an international network who can supply troops. People who make these decisions have to be manipulated and bought off are used. The Boeing situation solicits the work of national security experts the billions of dollars in market loss is a national security concern. Boeing, before going under, and as a handful of aircraft producers salivating for it to die surround Boeing like Jackals waiting for the kill, will become the subject of another bail out the government will impose on the American people. A patiotic bail out is likely to be the spin on Health Care, less important than the billions of profts in market share, cannot be taken for granted as a lie, or exaggeration when the Jackals are real. It would become another trick to divert attention from Universal Health Care, another effort to defer the American people of the natural right of good health, if competition in this field did not exists, if China and Russia, the Jackals, were not aggresive in defense build up.
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  2632. While Voting Rights are attacked the economy under the effects of climate change is wrecked. Silly man with his multicultural squad behind him has silly ambitions to be president of what will be a republic that cannot produce to meet the needs of its citizens. Before feeding someone he’d criminalize them for being hungry. The climate change effect on food commodities we buy in stores is felt a year later. We experience the price effects next year for what our climate had done this year to our crops and livestock, farms and large grower output. This means that with conscientious politicians something can be done one year in advance of prices rising but with the likes of people not conscientious of the food requirements for the survival needs of the Public DeSantis as governor is the last man to have in that seat. A quick glance, this year was worse than the year before. Your attention is taken away from the rise of prices to come from the effects of climate change in 2022; a life or death hit in 2023 that can last for a while. Starvation is a real probability because over 35% of world output for food was lost to climate action an effect greater than the effect the Ukraine War is said i media to have on our capacity to produce was and still is a cheap tactic, to get us to blame the Russians. All of you have seen the daily reports of climactic action devastating agricultural output, crops and livestock, locusts, farming, mining, products in general ruined by fires, floods, drought, in combination with man-made action has major producers of food, US, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, at low output. Low output from the global south taking the brunt of climate change. The farmers in India have done something the farmers in the west should have done to win more mass support and force the government to slam the breaks on neoliberal reforms. Farmers are the first to broadcast a true forecast for the economy. They farmers in India did not take up the space in protest interrupting life, shutting down Pennsylvania Ave or Quebec; dumping shit on the front lawns of politicians that in the end failed to effect a change in policy; they shaped it for the citizens to continue their lives unhampered by their demonstration and it won public opinion over to their demands,-- the Modi government backed off pushing the reforms. Florida is an agricultural state its cotton output is down 35%, cotton fields look like barren sticks in the ground. The clothes you buy next year will be polyester clothing not cotton! Put DeSantis in a polyester suit with a plate of ten beans for lunch...for abdicating his state’s responsibility to qualify registrants on 20 unidentified voters made more important than the condition of agriculture in Florida and the necessaries of life for Floridians than your enemy has been defined.
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  2654. About time. When they leave they leave a vacuum. It should get more exciting with the new generation. The high leadership of the GOP and the democratic party have failed people, roughly 170 million people, in one way or another own nothing, and who sacrifice their lives suffer and endure losses for every government shut-down, crisis, catastrophe, had government turned their back on them, or defer their needs to police the world, they tolerated a lot of bullshit for decades. Europeans scratch their heads in wonderment why the American worker has not already made a revolution! Late in coming. The GOP/ Dems are minor parties, they represent a small percentage of the total population, thus leaving a vacuum for a another party to pick up a majority. Why are they leaving? The leave because the writing is on the wall. What they know as insiders catches up to them and rather than fall in disgrace they make their exit. They know at some point the State will do to them what is done to Donald Trump. It’s not the institution itself people hate, 19% approval rating for Congress, it is the parties that have dominated Congress have become irrelevant to the life process of society. The two oldest parties in Mexico are now minor parties had ruled the State for a hundred years until Obrador got elected, the parties became insignificant and irrelevant, to the life-process of society. This why I say revolutions happen in America all the time they are not revolutions involving armies as they are outside of the US, they are social, they change because relationships change.
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  2667. Well, that would depend on how much Washington will tolerate of the changes Petro wants to make to the economy and how the billionaires and corporations of Columbia, its real estate land interests, its foreign banks interests, and foreign extraction companies take to losing profits to rich and wealthy business owners and employees taxed by the new government, plus will the military be on his side? Once in the State the whole picture changes to another reality. Easier to imagine how Bernie would have been held back by the right wing in Congress from enacting orders to tax the rich. Elections empower People outside of the State to place someone of their choice inside the State wherein the time between elections much damage is done to weaken Petro, even oust him. The pattern of the right wing in their struggle to be victorious over the left has been to use the legal system to oust an opponent. Charge them with trumped up charges, trial and lock them up. This strategy has been highly successful in eliminating any opposition. I would say the left, the social democrats, have a lot to worry about as the country could experience a far more reactionary regime after Petro. No...I think the answer is a social revolution, people power is the greater power not social democracy. I would prefer the People knock out the yoke that oppresses them and rebuild a government that is truly democratic by rebuilding an economy that is truly inclusive and responsive to need. Otherwise, we are back to the same BS but worse.
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  2670. DN reports 3:54: “White House Officials say the visit to Venezuela were not related to a possible easing of US sanctions on Venezuela amidst the Russian oil Ban”, is not an overt lie and not the truth by either DN or the Biden Administration. Its a deflection with carefully chosen words; a deception. I understand the Biden administration sent a envoy to Venezuela for oil over this past weekend. I remember hearing Biden in 1997 when he headed the Arms Senate Committee boasting about the US having total control over Russia weakened after the fall of the USSR, predicting Russia would turn to China and if not China then India and good luck with that, sarcastically phrased and the room applauded him. He said the time was good to incorporate the Baltic states into the EU, he added. Ukraine among them the most contentious to Russia, Biden praised the move, then came 2014 but before that Biden and his senate approved installing biological labs in Ukraine...Marco Rubio had Victoria Nuland ( author of the 2014 coup) on the stand in a hearing as late as last week testifying those labs are American were bombed by the invasions and that the administration is attempting to make those biological weapons labs safe from attack but to no avail, in her deposition her body language should be observed as she attempted to lie about the connection to Ukraine forces and American biological laboratories. She was further attacked by Schiff, Trumps’ primary political enemy, “ we are using Ukraine to fight Russia”. On the map of the Russian bombings they correspond to where the labs are located in Ukraine. When you pay attention to these hearings the US empire policy of no policy at all to maintain the posture of dominance before it is filtered by the media, is revealed in the testimonies, by what is not said as opposed to what is said in the testimonies. When Biden in 1997 and the entire Senate applauded him for NATO expansion, they did not anticipate back then China would become a major economic power and Russia a major producer of oil that US control would slip away from the Senate, that this failure is used by the opposing republicans to discredit democrats to win the election, especially when Biden sent an envoy to Venezuela requesting forgiveness for its hostile treatment of Venezuela’s social revolution, . The next working day, Monday, the day he announced a gas boycott, he blamed Russia for making Americans poorer. Doubtful Venezuela will help the country that tried to overthrow it and the same for Iran the other big oil producer. In the end, the Democrats and the Republicans are not worthy on any level morally or intellectually of leading this country...Americans do not have a voice in their cartel...and have only one recourse to replace them, a social revolution, as the only way to unseat this cartel from Washington.
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  2676. I think the more important issue or question is the fragmentation of the American working class and its inability to politicize its existence as a social class apart for the others. This in terms of identity politics, the American working class for ideological reasons and owing to repression, social control, an atomization process whereby the exchange between labor and capital is veiled by the commodity form of the product, is not able to identify itself as a class for itself, thus every ounce of class conscious evaporates because they cannot separate themselves from the other social classes who do identify themselves by race. For the oligarchs and the political elite, the State, Law Enforcement and Justice Department and Department of State to identity themselves by class would be their death warrant. The race identity is the reverse of identification of self by class. For the working person who interacts with people of all races and color, on a daily basis, its actually the destruction of self into social class and an empowerment tool for the ruling class. The point is to destroy social class as a way of dividing a population of humans. Its like being dipped into the acid bath and coming out dead working within that framework. Capital forces labor to negotiate on its terms. The terms being the cost of living index when negotiating with labor wages not the market basket of goods. It bargains with values in exchange not use-values produced per need. The market basket of goods is the product of labor taken away from the workers and confronts in the capitalist form as the cost of living or the commodity form of the product intended to be represented by wages. In the same way when we engage in race identity politics were are accepting the terms of communication, language, ideology and social relation as established by racists. What needs to be done is a universal action to break away from all the vestiges of capitalist relations such as value, price, profits, wages, race and class and become a class for itself, take action for itself, to be as greedy as possible in reunifying the product of labor with itself as a labor movement seeking to reunify with its product, fights to remove all barriers to that effect at the sometime as ti fights for its dignity against a virulent right wing and this is the kind of revolutionizing activity that is quintessentially a Marxist tradition, in developing a theory workers will need when they become revolutionary. In effect, Marxism does not belong in academia where what is taught is contrary to revolutionizing practice. Student are not taught how to overthrow the fascist regime in American schools, or claim their dignity in the workplace, they are indoctrinated to exist as predicates to the state for subservience to capital. We can view 'Jobs', employment and the reserve army of labor, in the same way, as the capitalist form of the social division of labor in society into which illegals are on ones side and legal workers on the other are used against each other for the leveling of wages. Competition and cooperation are also in capitalist form are to the detriment of the working class, its own productivity of labor in the capitalist form of production, is a weapon against the workers and the true source of wealth to which derives absolute wealth. I can go on and on about this. Fact is, the American worker if fragmented and is ideological stultified, intoxicated, and will probably not rise up until it is treated like blacks were treated in South Africa's Apartheid. What it needs to do is be exactly what is happening right now (April 23, 2019) Algiers, a mass movement for the complete resignation and prohibition of the entire ruling elites from power and banned from politics. See that happening then Marx become more important to you.
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  2693. This is not a generation ages 30 to 40 who see this as a political problem. They did not grow up with a social consciousness. And American legislators are a breed of lawyer who do not try to solve social problems in a political way. Lawyers/legislators/politicians are trained, instructed, paid to not social problems at all. Local legislators are worse that no matter how may times a building falls or a hurricane devastates a coastline do nothing to change zoning laws and local officials, i.e., county managers et., in most states are too religious to even sound the alarm of an impending disaster. What will happen is FEMA public funds will get cut in the name of servicing the government’s enormous debt before the government lets it go dry from all the claims and private insurers by high premiums will insure the rich. A debt made larger sending weapons overseas. Mar-A-Lago will be covered others not as rich will not. In the end the allocation of public funds for disasters is more than a case of politicians not coming together to legislate remedies to social problems, the allocation rests on a class differences, as to who will get the support. I know this is the scenario that will happen because the planet continues to heat up and ocean levels continue to rise that next seasons hurricanes will strike with greater ferocity and the government’s priority is not solving the social problems of the American people. The next flood even more powerful, the next drought more severe until the whole society is basically turned into a refugee camp filled with Americans who are not rich and are not white.
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  2694. Let me put it this way. This is not the man I would want patrolling the streets of East LA or Southside Chicago. What use does society have for someone trained to be a military marks(person)? Not that he is one but the cop who shot and killed Brianna (my pardon for the misspelling) was a marksmen.  The young drunk Sergeant's military training is not compatible with policing, contrary to what you may think. Police and the Military are similar because both are allowed to use force. But that is as far as the similarity goes. This drunkards military service training exhibits who he really is uninhibited by the alcohol and it is the subsurface reason why military service "men" and "women" ought to be restricted from serving as police in society.  The military trains to repress the true individual from the individual and makes on pain of expulsion that individual conform to a command structure. This is why America's police are not police but were kids when they went into the military and came out of with a military indoctrination while young enough to be cops and carry that baggage over to the police as a separate institution. In addition to the military service benefits the police benefits add to their compensation which is why to control their behavior it should be made law that wrongful death suits are paid out of police pensions as a way to socially pressure racists and overly repressed individuals from acting out their true emotions on the Public because they have a perception of the public that is estranged to begin with. The military for some people who cannot be human is the parent they never had and an escape from a really shitty life growing up. Where else is a trained sniper to find a job in society upon their discharge from the military? Police work is social science in general and criminology in particular and it is the science of forensics and detection closely related to archeology and paleontology and medicine in determining what went down, how the offense was committed, working to reduce the risk of you and I crossing the boundary line between what is safe and what is harmful for civil society to function.
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  2696. The high commissioner of human rights' report is one-sided. It is only one sided as long as it operates outside of the society that undergoing a social transformation. Of course it is. Lies or not while the west figures out what is happening from Geneva, there is at least one decent professor who speaks truth. Remarkable is the stage of human history where the power is in the hands of the People as the established ruling orthodoxy in Venezuela. This is a dramatic historical change from its colonial epoch, the social classes who were formerly in the position as oppressor, the old controllers of political power, are a combined outside Opposition to the Maduro government in Venezuela. The Opposition can last as long as its sources of funding lasts. Political power in Venezuela does not take bureaucratic form as it does in our society. The people power in Vnzla is a social power backed by a military, a series of community based organizations of millions of the expropriated are the expropriators, the formerly oppressed under colonialism have made private property, social property. This ha been encouraged through the sanctions pressing the republic out of necessity to organize.  Vnzla embarks on a new age of power of the people! The early stages and beginnings of class dissolution which is its most treacherous passage before entering the realm of a society free of social classes. As the commenter said 9 million are not going to rollover, when a society reaches the point Venezuela has a civil war on the Opposition side is to the Maduro side a class war and struggle for emancipation is a war about using the complex of all of society’s capabilities by and for the People.
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  2710. Our house is burning! French President Macron took center stage to douse the flames of the earth with a tweet!  Meanwhile the DNC committee does not care about Macron's sentiments on climate change, they voted the debate have no part of climate change.  A loyal committment to the energy sector leads the party of the majority. Shows how really disconnected these people are from the real world. The DNC denies climate change even when it kills them. Bernie proposes a total transformation of the energy economy into a renewable energy economy as a mandate to save the planet and all species life.  The cost of inaction is far higher, its what Extinction Rebellion had been acting on all the while, i.e, planetary motion beyond our control. The Pentagon and the Joint Chiefs on how to power their whole apparatus could be open to the idea of endless and free power.  I guess civil society will be renewable and the military part renewable and part fuel. Once homes that will produce their own light, heat, water usage, contained waste, and food, come into being, a mass conversion and modification from traditional architecture, homes and buildings, will no longer consume those utilities. This eliminates the need for a job for working people and the need for expanding markets for Big business comes to an historic end. There will no longer be a working class or a capitalist class involved in producing our subsistence. Our renewable homes will free us from working to pay bills, and a working class for lack of knowing what to do with themselves will need supportive services to make the adjustment to free time. What will a coal miner of three generations be doing after his 12 hour day and coal is gone? Be the same fate of the capitalist class when there is no money to made in all goods would put a serious dent into their lifestyle that a need for mass rehabilitation must become part of the Medicare for All plan. How will society wipe out all of the crap of the ages from its shoulders? We'd have to convert the schools system into a year round all ages education program and take away every gun from every person because its not the gun that kills its a sick society of individuals who kill. We can't leave it to chance but to take the NRA's stance on guns literally. America is not socially skilled and competent enough to handle an endless stream of guns. Individuals are afflicted with vestiges of the past, racism, sexism, breeding violence in the home and in society. The NRA is right we can't put lighter fluid in the hands of an arsonist; we can't put guns in the hands of people who kill because its a sport or because they hate people. The 2nd amendment and all the other amendments that look at us as half human, or criminals, without rights, etc., have to go. The constitution belongs to a past era and America needs a new basis for a society, it will need a new constitution because the old one is why its government is sick and cannot rule! If the government is unfit to rule then the people in it are unfit to rule poses the next problem for the American people who no longer have to work to pay bills but can now concentrate on governing themselves.
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  2712. When the FAA Chief says Boeing’s product failures are caused by Boeing’s culture of production as a priority and not on safety and quality. There is nothing wrong with emphasizing production but it should follow after safety and quality”. The FAA chief said Boeing does not have a choice. He is saying profit cannot be the end and aim of production, the end and aim of production should be quality and safety of the product. When this change occurs in Boeing what will change for the worker on the production line is the number of hours worked per worker. The good news is that planes will get built better and safer but it will cost the Boeing worker less hours and less payment since labor has no control over production. Boeing does not belong to union labor to decide the pace or speed of production and the quality. Labor can make suggestions to Boeing management but that is as far as worker control goes, and that is not enough of a representation for what is at stake from shoddy aircraft. Worker owned is compatible and compliments Public Safety...another reason for a change of ownership is to ensure the habit of making money for the sake of making money is not repeated, a change of ownership is the only way, a Board of Owners will fall off the wagon. The accumulation of money for its own sake, just to have it, is a force that overpowers human will and corrupts the Soul. But if labor did own Boeing there would be no need for unions but there would be a need for the FAA to oversee Boeing production. Workers are human too and make mistakes. Granted worker-owned would make far less errors than Boeing owned as a private corporation and the antagonism between government and the Board of Directors of Boeing would go away if the Board are removed as owners. This is a no brainer. Air travel is not a privilege, or a luxury, it’s a necessity and a utility essential to the whole economy. It is one industry that should not be privatized with so many individual private companies chasing profits obscuring production, safety and quality, as they go. The last 55 years all employers have been fighting tooth and nail through their political lobbyists in Washington to keep the government out of their production. Worker fatality in the US is high. Maybe we reached a point where the ‘relationship’ between the individual in particular and production in general cannot be divorced from each other anymore.
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  2722. It was never taught in schools the difference between the value of labor-power and the value created by it. Surplus-value had been taken for granted by several generations of the educational system of the US, low ranking in mathematics, economics, physics, and generations grew up assuming all things were made by something other than human labor, never taught a view of the nature of value. It is a 2000 year old classical discipline. The value created by labor is a surplus value, and this surplus value is distributed among individual social classes in society in many forms,. The economic categories are forms of the surplus-value such as taxes that go the government, prices that go to merchant businesses and corporations, rents that go to landowners, profits that go to entrepreneurs and investors; so the whole society can be seen from the vantage point of value, the two roles of labor in society. One form being itself a specific form of work and its other half a value form of labor. The forms appears through the ages as slave and master, than peasant and lord, merchant and artisans, capitalists and workers, all social forms of the surplus-value humans create because they must, or die. The professionals in this field dive into the origins of this surplus-value and have located in society the productive agents creating the value that adds to the total wealth of society, and it is not just one or the other, it’s the combination of both social classes. They are a combination of employers and employees and only when they work together can they become productive of value is the general idea. But when sellers and buyers do not exchange and employers are sellers and buyers and employees are sellers and buyers, things do not move, things tend to rot, become unproductive of value and drain what value was created. You can begin to see the real life consequences in this preview. For us, both are true. Farmers make more than they need to live and earn money selling what they make and it is also true that the combination of employers and workers engaged in manufacturing are creators of surplus value. The only way out of a depression, when employee and employer, are split too long, the lack of investment becomes the threat to the existence of society is dictatorship or revolution is what keeps them working and producing a surplus-value. The choices are double sided consequences, a dictatorship of a general social class or a state dictatorship of a particular class, to keep the trains running on time.
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  2735. A ‘siege’, ‘blockade’, ‘an illegal occupation’, are words used in Parliament to describe the Trucker’s Convoy is not a good sign. Its not the language of transformation. I always liked the idea of a higher stage of human development where human beings behave as a species. Life outside of the life of a trucker and a farmer disrupted by Covid restrictions have been a strain. But the greater strain on the lives of workers, merchants, bankers, landowners, manufacturers, impeded by the Convoy, are offended as they lose incomes derived from that bridge the Convoy decided to hold its protest action. A bridge that channels streams of incomes the other social classes who are not farmers, cowboys and truckers, depend. There are merchants, landlords, bankers, workers, civil workers, depend on the relative income the Ambassador Bridge delivers. They take offense and pressure the state to act for the removal of the Convoy. Without the streams of income the social classes begin to dissolve. Dissolution has meant in the past losing everything. But in 2022, losing everything is a thing of the past. A merchant may still own the store but is no longer a merchant. The landowner still owns the land but is no longer collecting rent. Banker still lends money but is no longer charging variable rates, a worker still works but is no longer a worker exclusively. Every object known to man is given its attention because people want to give it the attention, people develop a new culture and attitude of work and property.
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  2738. The economy will slip into a unrecoverable recession cutting off vital resources at the worst possible time to communities suffering catastrophes, if it shuts down. Lockdowns would sink it into an abyss of social disasters. If you were president of the US this would be the scenario in front of you. Living with COVID and its variants is the lesser evil and why states are mandating masks and vaccination that employers are doing the same. All the western governments are reacting to COVID in the same way, UK is in recession, Boris shuts down and its over, France imposes travel restriction against England one more COVID patient will devastate the economy, Italy, Germany follow suit. All the economies that are not compatible with shut downs to end a virus are in a spiral free fall in disarray are teetering. Vaccinations are seen as the alternative to a complete shut down. Close, trace, treat and isolate the patients till the virus dies; our economies cannot do this. This problem and treatment is the same as when an individual gets sick with the flu,---stay home for two weeks, ride it out, get better return to work, because China can do this the western governments want to do the same all economies are thoroughly integrated with each other, however, the governments in the west forget that their societies are not the same as China’s. Employees are still working from home and big companies are closing stores in the west, people in the west are sharing home purchases (co-buying) is how changed the home market will change the family and society,---but with COVID?
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  2745. Some economic history helps... 1948 to 1960, the US economy sustained unemployment levels of 5 to 6 million people, largely African Americans out of 135 million people. C. Wright Mills called this period the "Great American Celebration". By 1979, 13. 5 million people lived in poverty in America and 9.9 million were chronically unemployed. By 1991, unemployment levels exceeded 35 million. Nobody in the world of economic academia dared to call the US an affluent society. That is a word stricken from the annals of economic thought since 1979. It had been realized that the US economy no longer sustains the economic growth levels experienced 35 years ago for the working class. The facts are hardly 'inconsequential' as dismissed by the elite superstructure and those who accept their words as final are fooled to follow as gospel. Quite frankly, US economic performance is disastrous! However, it may be soothing to know, despite the dismal facts of American monopoly capitalism, real progress has been achieved owing to the class struggle. The current phase of monopoly capitalism versus the objective potentialities for the emergence of a new social order is for the first time an objective possibility. Accumulated scientific knowledge and the means for an affluent society had not existed in the past in any of the socialist projects endeavored in human history. Exploitation and waste of monopoly capitalism has laid the foundation for a truly affluent society in this decade or very near future. This fact, makes the class struggle a positive force, a reason to engage in the project of building an affluent society in America. The obstacle to an affluent society is the rule of the capitalist class over the vast resources of natural wealth and over the productive might of the working class.
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  2757. If inflation and the cost of living is a concern to working people in this country than they should be pointing the finger at the cause not at the effect. Supply chain breakdowns, gluts, drought, shortages, internal warfare, invasions, military build-ups; are all actions that force prices to rise and stay high as long as these actions persist. This is the actual connection between the flow of displaced migrants from their own national origins as the effect and the negative actions the government pursues internationally is the cause. If you re old enough to identify the pattern you can easily predict what will come next for working people. Following a general rise of prices which is, at the same time, a drop in the value of wages (despite the increase in the minimum wage) comes a coordinated assault from the Congress, specifically from the Speaker and Schumer, to have working people pay for all the losses each crisis generates, i.e, Austerity. Cuts in jobs and pensions and social spending. The Speaker is a member of the House Freedom Caucus, a group of near 40 senators with ambitions to cut social spending down to zero will not use their votes to approve anything unless there are cuts in social spending. Ironically, if the Freedom Caucus gets their way and funding for Ukraine is cut off, that would actually free up a lot money for domestic purposes for social spending. There is an Achilles Heel in the posture of the super conservative wing of the republican party. The working public will lose out because there is no opposition coming from working people in this country to redirect that peace dividend back into their lives. Naturally, if there is nobody saying no you can’t use this money for the military the military will gladly take it and an entire generation of working people remain poorer than they were before. In which case, working people failed to exploit that Achilles Heel in the Republican Party to get what they need. And what do you need...you need a normal workday, you need education, you need healthcare that works for you, you need housing, you need products that will not kill your babies, planes that don’t come apart in the skies, you need trains that stay on the tracks, you need clean fresh water, clean sewer drains, you need a workplace free of life threatening risks, you need your house or apartment to remain standing, you need a Park, a good school, you need a violent free society, you need your teeth fixed and you need mental health services, you need internet connectivity in rural America, and above all you need work to live. You do not need a life just for work and be overworked. Why does this happen? Well, its not a very difficult problem to figure out. It can be answered by what working people in this country do not have as stated above. If you can feed yourself and family from the fruit of your own labor, working the land or producing your own clothing, repairing your own car(s), owning a rental asset, or small to middle-sized business, or have enough money to buy what you need from the market despite inflation, an ever shrinking number of billionaires accumulating wealth at the expense of a majority would not be your present-day reality evolving into a nightmare. Stop blaming the effect and blame the cause. You will thank me for it later.
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  2758. Venezuelan migrants in the US are the innocent victims in this armed struggle the US State Department pushes in Latin America and at Venezuela in particular. Ukrainian people are innocent victims of an armed struggle the US State Department pushes against Russia. America is the cause of the world moving in a multipolar direction that America cannot do anything to stop, except total nuclear annihilation. Given the US is the only nation to have actually used nuclear weapons on another nation the world arms itself to the teeth with nukes to deter and contain aggressive US policy. US sanctions on the oil sector of the V’s economy is aimed to slow down the growth of Venezuela. The employees in the State Department do the work of pre-occupying the agenda, so that workers leaders, trade union leaders, do not get wise to the schemes to make powerless Venezuela’s economy, fragmented and atomized, isolated, deprive the working people of Venezuela of their own gross national product, and then set up the situation to blame it all on the person they don’t like, childish, but it works to get over on a working class stuck in an individual mode of thought, in turn, this policy creates and provides the purpose, need and objective reasons for a revolution. I would imagine officials in the State Department are aware the potential for a true working class revolt if they are seen connected to events, so they must operate covertly through surveillance, secrecy, detection and deterrence, and have the media evoke fear, use drug addiction and conspiracy theories by secret societies and police to keep a working class fragmented, racist among its own class ranks, sexist among its own men and women and families, and thinking false concepts to keep the working class from politicizing its own existence. What a job to be a state department official but it is easy to do when you are enclosed and tucked away from society and never see the negative social and mortal effects of the work they do as an official. People in the beltway are desensitized human beings through their own isolation from society.
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  2759. If this were England I would be in perfect agreement with Dr. Wolff, however, this is the US. Feudalism was not a mode of production in America.  The dominant mode of production in America's pre-capitalist history was not feudalism. As we all know there were two modes of production in America's pre-capitalist history: two forms of property relations. The first and original form was Native American Common landownership, and the second form, was the imported mode of production of slavery. In America the introduction of the capitalist mode of production dominated and completely wiped out the earlier two forms of production. A master bought and sold slaves and the black ancestors to Afro-Americans today were chattel slaves.  So, if Thomas Jefferson sold his Mt. Vernon estate the slaves were included as a package. He could sell slaves without land but he could not sell land without slaves. Capitalism had to change all that by changing the property relationships making property moveable (money) and not fixed (land). This took a Supreme Court decision to change the relationships but nothing phycsically in life changed at all for the former slaves in terms of work. Former slaves stll worked Jefferson's land and home, the change required Jeffferson pay a wage to his slaves now considered a 'free worker' under the law. Transitioning into socialism under capitalism in America would have to start with a worker's movement to bring the matter to the Supreme Court to outlaw wage labor to abolish capitalism. It is not likely the Supreme Court will rule against capitalism without a worker's movement since it would involve its own destruction as an institution. Some brilliant set of lawyers would have to file a petition with the high court proving socialism is in the best interest of the majority since capitalism has been in shown in court, without a doubt, to be a system that is destructive to the majority of citizens in the nation.
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  2763. The Baby Boomer generation, Mellineals and Generation X-ers, are divided by age and sex. Capitalism creates a natural division of labor between along race, gender and age under a social division of labor of work along lines of income and jobs. Divisions that prevent generations building solidarity among each other. The separated and divided groups do not relate to each other. At work, workers take on more responsibility bossing other workers, supervisor and worker relationship, a top down social structure in management. At home, parents are out of it, old school, and not tech saavy. These are divisions working their way in breaking down solidairty and unity. General social attitudes, and low and behold none of them are united and within them politcally divided. Anyone can be a candidate just by running on one single issue pertinent to the thing that divides them is how deep the divisions run. Bridging this generation gap is Bernie and Tulsi, are the only people who talk about making your life better, the others are their to divide your vote. However, the point is, the latter two generatons are last to have grown up not socialized by America's social institutions broken down by privatization. This makes them less inclined to be socially obedient. More inclined to overthrow capitalism as a fraudulent authority the more radically right wing it becomes. The other divisions in this generation is structured in a labor hierarchy. GM workers have three tiers, workers with seniority, workers on a flexible schedule and workers employed part time crushes the idea that they are all workers and solidarity. The GM strike was interesting because the workers knew a strike was necessary but for what demands to strike about was less concrete and forced the worker (union) to demand changes in the division of labor of the factory. A division in the factory that is magnified and multiplied in the division of labor outside the factory began to break down the division itself and the whole authoritarian social structure built on it. Breaking down the divisions in society is the most important issue for workers in America, whether the president is impeached or not is not going to change that which divides all workers, if anything, whatever the outcome the divisions are perpetuated.
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  2767. “Reagan's economic incompetence cost George H.W. Bush his re-election because people blamed him for Reagan's incompetence.”...the two personalities, Bush representing the national security apparatus, in the period of the Gulf War, and Reagan representing free market capitalism, in the period of Thatcher, was a republican reaction to world events and historical trends, the end of the USSR and the rise of China, to secure the national security state’s dominance in world trade and finance for US banks, corporations, landowners, military. The Pentagon and CIA found more allies for this mission in the democratic party in the same period. We are all witness to corporate democrats expelling any and all working class, et al progressive opposition through cancel culture. There is no place or room for the working class in this mission. Liberal and progressive workers that did not join MAGA before Trump when it was the Tea Party became the losers. As Trump moves into position of the national security state, the two political parties stand opposite of him, no longer is one party on the same side as Trump, and the other party opposed to him. The blue collar working class opposition to the national security apparatus is far more radical, defensive, and more aware of their class unity as MAGA in the GOP is a real force of power with the potential to make a revolution, that the progressive movement in the democratic party and its working class opposition cannot. This wing is broken, weak, and impotent. A Bernie resurgence can draw MAGA and progressives together, or if Bernie dies and leaves a vacuum, the progressives would have to make allies with Bannon to oppose the New Establishment under Trump. ...terrorism became a factor in perpetuating war,--- cementing the national security apparatus as a permanent feature of the US economy. The accumulation cycle and the business cycle are two cycles, one measuring the length of time an economy can last with no investments before dying and the other measuring the frequency capitalists in particular re-invest and how much in their businesses. Rising debt and war spending and the cost of sustaining expansionist ambitions is the straw that breaks the camel’s back.
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  2783. Buttigieg is a DNC-Trump mole or stooge like Juan Giaudo. Its a good thing hindsight is 20/20.  Had the Sandinistas in the 70's trained the Central American people on how to use arms and military tactics, a training school of their own. The Central American people would not be in the condition they re in now. They would been able to confront the American trained military and give them a real fight for their money. Hindsight is 20/20. I do blame Daniel Ortega for not building a People's Army like Trotsky built the Red Army. A secret army that today would have come out as a victorious army catching the right wing forces by surprise and expelling the US from their country. It is more dignified to fight than it is to be corralled like cattle headed to an American Gulag. Reasons why this never happened might be valid, but that the indigenous people were left to their own devices without training and arms is a failure of the left. Its a betrayal of revolutionary principals. They would have had 30 years in which the children of the Central Americans fleeing the homeland would have been ready to fight. Armed insurrection was good only for getting powwer but once in power they should have gone to work in preparing the people of what was to come in the future. The Central Americans do not have a Simon Bolivar or a Jose Marti in their history but could have. This ought to have been the long term project of the left rather than to be laser focused on the immediate moment. I say this because the US is a major military power that can destroy in a heartbeat all the work the Sandinistas accomplished in building a decent and independent society in Nicaragua. They should have expanded into Honduras, Gautemala and El Salvador building very queity an underground military force from Columbia to Chiapas. Think how the Drug Cartels would have been suppressed if there were an armed peasantry. This generation would not be suffering to the extent they are today had this been a plan. When I see Honduran troops shoveling indigenous people around it pains me to see them comply. Like the Jews, except the Warsaw Ghetto Jews in Germany, who did fight the Nazis, the majority of Jews willingly complied with the Nazis that none of them had guts to fight back. Psychologically this instills a mindset of victimization becoming the victimizer as we see Jews doing to Palestinians today. This is a holocaust of great magnitude and it falls directly on the left for permitting such an environment to come about. The Spanish Left in Central America should have learned the example of the American Lincoln Brigade who fought Franco and the Catalonian anarchists who fought the fascists and made Catalonia the richest province in all of Spain because they fought the fascists and armed the peasants and workers. Not to mention when looking at footage, the Honduran military looks like an easy army to beat. There is something so denigrating and immoral about living under the boot of Washington that the feelings of Central Americans are going to one explode into a form of barbarism sometime in the future when these victims become adults.
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  2799. Indeed. Political parties, leaders, legislators, representatives in government, none of them are capable of coping with the historical changes in patterns of consumption and production of land, they strictly rely on the oscillations in the market.  The market is only the surface --underneath which, is a constantly changing and dynamic labor-process of human beings changes the environment and changes us simultaneously. This is why, in surveying the nations in the world, climate crisis has amplified; there are too many small banks or too few big ones, too much over speculation or too little investment, too much overproduction and too little production, and too high a number of debt ridden farmers and too few big farmers with no debt, too much human labor in certain industries and too little labor in others, these are the anomolies of the capitalist world, the uneven development between social systems, are the objective factors that drag the world economy downward into a depression.  What to do about the uneven development in all things natural and social the politicans have not the faintest idea, the governments are incompetently too slow to react to crisis, and there is no centralized authority or government who can control the excesses and disparities from developing inside nations never mind outside and between them. The labor-process of human beings on a world scale and under the control of capitalism has run amok and needs to be put in check by its own human participants. This is a time when the workers of the world should unite under the claim of taking responsibility for correcting the climate crisis capitalism accelerates. This is labor's doing in the form of capitalism. Stopping the repacious exploitative nature of capitalism starts here in the US, with the US working class.
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  2802. We seem to be spinning our wheels and going round in circles about how little control we have of our lives. This is very disturbing trend. Before capitalism, in a time of simple reproduction, the payment of services of the king and the king’s armies contained the profit and all spoils went straight to the victor as the appointed owner of the wealth of the society the king annexed, was a crowned affair. It was easy to locate the source of repression and oppression at a king, monarch, dictator but when it comes to capitalism its harder to point the finger at one person or thing. In capitalism the whole thing is elusive, an enigma. Capitalism is about money making money, money must buy before it can sell, money has to buy social production where its product is injected with social labor or value producing labor before it can realize that excess value contained in a finished product in circulation in a sale. Capital cannot by-pass production but social production can by-pass capitalism is an important point people should remember. If it feels we are spinning our wheels at the lack of control in our lives it is because the general movement of capital(ism) is circular and repetitive from two distinct points, M, money and M+, money prime. All humans are interacting with each other from one of both points. Buyers when they become owners of money and sellers when they become owners of things to sell. As a capitalist, Elon Musk, is a buyer and seller, and the others in his social class are the first appropriators of social production but they are not the ultimate owners. Past labor is what the unpaid labor of others produced in the past, a dam, a bridge, a factory, a road, a utility plant etc. Capital uses these things today but does not or had not paid for their production. How you might ask did one social class come to claim a share of the surplus-value when they have nothing to do with its production? America justifies someone owning an unpaid quantity of labor as natural; and what do the capitalists do with the natural offspring of labor? They throw back into circulation and it comes to the rest of us through the various incomes we earn whether that income is profits, rents, interest, taxes, and the work we perform today is paid from the unpaid labor of past workers. Add insult to injury, everyone advances two weeks labor before they get a paycheck and the value they produced inside of those two weeks is unpaid labor. Even our payment in wages is a roundabout thing that already paid for itself. These revelations may be shocking...its get better... Merchant capitalism and banking are peculiar to circulation, of which credit and interest, are a part. People in this realm of social life who make a living from it are as trapped as the rest of us, pushed and pulled, driven by external pressure, in the general movement of capitalism.
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  2813. Banks rob from other banks when they pay off loans issued by another bank. When they assume private ownership of loans with high returns does not mean the same loans were not profitable for the selling bank. The bank selling in one country to another bank buying in another country. If the deal goes sour a series of banks in the long chain of buyers and sellers of the same number of commodity-loans offered for sale goes sour. Finally, the cities in the world financed by loans go under. In the deal the exchange consists of buying cheap relative to the size of total capital owned for the buyer. The bank doing the selling of the loans prices above the cost and below the average price relative to their profit expectation in the transaction, ---essentially, it is money making more money and money making people assist money making more of itself. An upside down world. The banks are international and bankers are buyers and sellers of money. We never have to wonder what a person we know is doing in Europe and America if they are a banker. The bankers have their own chief banker emulates a beehive of different strata of bankers. They are buying and selling money because they interact with these objects as logical economic categories of an international system of exchange. It is a world in which a person exists inside the circulation of money and the loans bought and sold is their sole activity on earth. If the rainforest disappeared tommorrow the banking system would try to sell a loan to its inhabitants. Practical wisdom goes out the window. But you could not say the same thing about another kind of owner that stalks in the social jungle of capitalism if the rainforest disappeared tomorrow. This animal welcomes its destruction, sees it as an opportunity to sieze the land, no longer of any use to its inhabitants, but very useful as a commodity to a landowner/developer as a commodity for sale. And there are little brothers and sisters as cousins depending on the usurpation of the land for its sale to the banks and share in the profit distributed over the skin of this animal. A skin covered with an evangelical cloak veiling an enterprise of usurpation, murder, arson, terror of the former inhabitants of the rainforest.
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  2830. Americans will have to fight large corporations at the local and municipal level because nothing will get done at the federal and state level to curb the exploits and abuses of large corporations in communities. And whatever is passed at the state and federal level such as this bill the republicans did not support they will repeal when they get the White House. Whatever was given to the American people is taken back. For instance, repealing the Inflation Reduction Act and making permanent the Trump Tax Cuts. I think they also want to install Trump loyalists into key decision making jobs in the civil service bureaucracy to place tighter restrictions, make it hard, on the American people for licenses, certifications, identifications, more controlling. This worries me as it would be outright fascism. They would then move to open national parks for oil drilling and increased refinery capacity in the US. A real dilemma as the Republicans are positioning the American workforce into a very tight spot. What can be done about all the product recalls and the inflation that does not raise the price but shrinks the product has to happen at the federal level with national policies on how things are made and with what, currently not enforced, is a struggle that will depend on electing people with guts and conscience to enforce the law that regulate producers of goods and product. Right now there are baby formula shortages, about 50 soft drinks with microbial contamination, to name two off the top of my head. Eliminating abuses by large corporations can be done locally when communities start passing local laws protecting their communities and the workforce just coming of age. For instance, Chipotle has around 112,000 violations of child labor violations pending before the NLRB. Chipotle is in every town and city. Locally what can be done to end this abuse of young people working in violation of labor laws for Chipotle can be done through city and town councils. If a corporation is going to close their shops, stores and chains because workers want a union then the city has the power to take the store, shops, from the corporation through Imminent Domain, and buy the restaurant(s) for resale to the employees, and overnight employees become entrepreneurs. The corporation loses a franchise would make them think twice about closing shop and leaving the town with a boarded up eyesore. But if they do pack up and leave workers becoming owners and unionized worker/owners to boot, could move like wildfire across the US.
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  2833. Well, the way I see it...there was a coup in 2014 and that coup led to this current Zalenski government, and a war in eastern Ukraine between pro-Russian separatists and pro-western Ukraines. Pro Russian separatist want no part of the government installed by the coup and pro-western Ukraines want no part of Russia deciding a government for Ukrainians. The solution is neutrality. Stop me if I am wrong here. But that is my understanding. Being neutral however is not likely with the pressure of two empires leaning on Ukraine. Layered over that conflict in Ukraine is a larger conflict between two super powers and both are fueled by gas and oil interests who include Joe Biden’s interest in Ukraine. In my mind that puts Biden as one among all the Oil and Gas Oligarchs who are interested in Ukraine for this resource Europe needs, evidently Germany needs the most, represents a big market bonus for American oil and gas and co., versus a big market bonus for Russian oil and gas oligarchs and co., who include Vladimir Putin’s interest in Ukraine. I remember the Cuban Missile Crisis and this larger conflict between super powers over Ukraine is the same thing but on the other side...with the Cuban Missile Crisis we were a hairline away from nuclear war. The Kennedys and Kruschev saved us. Today there are no Kennedys, today running governments in the super powers are not conscientious individuals of character and strength, political classes run governments in Russia and in America, and for the most part, none of us here belong to that political class.
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  2835. What is not examined by mainstream economists that are typically featured in mainstream news is the increase in material wealth that changes the magnitude of value in goods and services. For instance, a person works for one hour produces a value of one hour’s work, if that output is one unit. But when there are two units produced in one hour of value the ratio between input to output has changed the amount of value from 1/1hr to 2/1hr. As a worker’s productivity rises and creates, 3, 4, 5 flutes in one hour the value falls in each flute 3/100, 4/100, 5/100 ths of one hour’s work. In terms of price this movement should be reflected as $1.00 dollar, $.75 cents, $.50 cents, $.25 cents that a flute would sell for, instead with the greediness of the flute producers raises the price of flutes per market demand, as more kids enjoy playing the flute, prices go up and more profit is made as a result, for instance, no profit for the flute made in one hour but two flutes a gain of $.25 cents, three flutes a gain of $.50 cents, four flutes a gain of $.75 cents, five flute a gain of $1.00 dollar per flute, multiplied by a million flutes for a million kids in one million bands made the gain is 1 million dollars clear profit. Each step along the way the materials and machinery and the labor to make the flute is transferred into the flutes is a cost that paid for itself in production the day two flutes was the going rate of output. As time goes by output is increased because inevitably new machines are made by machine makers. In the meantime the worker making the flute is still producing one hour’s worth of work at a rate that has been established as a minimum wage of $15 dollars a hour. The flute maker grows larger and becomes a monopoly flute maker the more flutes are sold and the worker becomes poorer the more flutes they produce, hence, the economic inequality and the rise of oligarchy. This economic law occurs in every branch of industry despite the intentions of the product maker or the worker making the product because the product is never made by one person but by a large number of workers all working to produce in one hour a mass of products multiplied by eight hours of work the product quantity is an excess and we have a surplus of flutes. This should lead to a new kind of society but to avoid it from becoming an affluent society the economic law is forced back. Prevented from happening. If the product maker cannot sell the mass of product the profit falls and the only way to recover from this is the let workers go. After all you cannot fire a machine. And if you do not use the machine the value of the machine itself depreciates, rots away, becoming a dead machine and a loss of money invested in the machine to the owner of the machine. Congress steps in to correct this dilemma for all the owners of the machines and offers a tax depreciation allowance for the loss of value of machines. A factory is one giant machine. A city is one giant machine, and an incentive is created by the government to let machines rot, factory rust to pieces and cities to become abandoned shells while, in the meantime, the lost jobs creates homelessness, poverty, disease for the people that settled there because there were jobs and now cannot move, they are stuck! To correct this problem Congress then says okay; lets put money into people’s hands and allow the machine owners find other places in the world to make their product cheaper to continue selling flutes, they deploy all diplomatic means or the last resort use the military to this end, and we have wars, a surplus that cannot sell, and a bunch of poor people in society without homes, flutes or clothes on their backs, plus they become mentally and physically diseased but are debt ridden and gradually fall into serfdom, pauperism, even slavery.
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  2836. Life is full of wonderful surprises is it not? Trump speaking to his social class had successfully blamed the loss of jobs on the tax code and not on America's balance of trade deficit. America's balance of payments picture is dismal since the 1980's. Eurodollars (US dollars) owned by Europeans have a claim on the US economy. Short term debt in the form of deposits, government securities, individual liabilities owed to foreigners. Nothing in reserve and a trillion dollar deficit. The US sells (exports) less than it buys (imports). Oil is its largest import. You would think a Nobel Prize economist would talk about this dismal balance of trade's effect on wages in the domestic economy? The money working people are paid with is worthless currency does not appear to be a serious enough issue to be brought out in the open. The purchasing power of the dollar shrinks because of this balance of payments deficit and people turn to a credit card to get the extra value the currency does not command has become a knee-jerk habit for working people. What they need to support home, car and family, is all on plastic. The laws changed where their children will inherit the loaned capital they raised their families on. Wages ought to have risen to offset this value deficit but they have not since the 1980's is an inconsequential subject. But for Trump and friends higher wages cut into profits and profits is the end game to their existence. Credit substituted wage hikes and this was a good way to get around raising wages and for banks to gain traction on the world economy from interest rates on loaned capital. All this is left intact; nothing has changed except the condition of the working class with less goods their fixed wage can buy. Steiglitz did not mention this balance of trade deficit has become an instrument of a more blatant form of class conflict opposing billionaires against American working people to bear the burden of a reduced income. This relation persists because these are the terms for the value of the currency forced on the world economy. Steiglitz could have mentioned the threat to the planet and species life is the predatory nature of Trump's capitalism to re-arrange the politics of the world in order to rectify contradictions of its own system. Diplomacy to re-arrange the affairs of the world is non-existent with Trump.  Force and there is no belief of a harmonious imperialism in Trump and friends is their solution to this crisis.
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  2844. There is no doubt that Obama was the end of Hope. Democratic Party turned its back on people like Chache Lewis. Cache Lewis of Denver Colorado is working six days a week 16 hours a day. But divided among three employers each employer is extracting from her 32 hours of work in three days. Her work has intensified. Her physical limits of endurance is compromised. Under the law she is not full time. But three employers consume nearly a full time week’s worth of work from her. Her three employers pay no more than 96 hours of pay at $7.25 an hour. A monthly wage expense for one Ms Cache Lewis, $696.00. Yearly expense of $8,352 for her wages per year. Peanuts that equals not the amount of labor they extract. In this arrangement, its a one way street, more employers can buy labor-power cheaper. A cheapened labor-power has the effect of lowering the success of the working person as a good means for survival where a college degree did not matter. Trades jobs are high end jobs and the number of workers in those fields is small not open to the mass of people living on minimum wage. There is nobody Cache Lewis can turn. She may as well vote republican and end the misery quick than keep a democrat in office extending the misery as slow torture. The chance of a Cache Lewis revolt are higher with a republican than with a democrat in office and this makes the logic of voting a republican into office a better gamble. Notice how quickly political progressives turned to the right abandoning their more radical blue collar aspirations when Trump was in office.
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  2845. Excellent discussion, but I find it extremely concerning that labor is treated only as a means of production itself for capital by both male or female of this young generation on both sides right and left and labor is not treated with any respect the production process as a means of production for labor as an end in itself. You cannot have a capitalist without a worker and vice versa is true. What joins them together is the production process and in the US, that process serves only one side and deprives the other side. It is perfectly logical to extend the concept of means of production to how objects and subjects in the world are consumed in the world of work. Cows are a means of production for milk, land for food, labor for capital. Cows can serve as means and as a subject of labor. A cow is the subject of a butcher. Point is; it depends on what position it takes in the whole production process whether a subject or an object can be a means or an end in itself in connection to survival. A couple of examples illustrating the theory: Both humanity, animal, and tools are a means of production for their consumption by society. But in American, milk, food and capital are made for individual sale treating animals, land, and labor private property. Survival is accomplished through a sale. Socialism sees society as a means of production for the individual. Land, labor and capital are instruments of labor and the subject of labor, there is no double role in the way capitalism sees society as a means of production as a double process. Capitalists do see themselves as a means of production essential to the production process but they are not essential to the social reproduction process of society. People instinctively know work produces the necessaries of life for survival. They have to be socialized (indoctrinated) to believe a capitalist must be created before food, water, air, shelter, is produced for survival. Therefore, food, shelter and water and the working class are separated. Everything must become capitalism's prima facia, a commodity. The survival of the capitalist comes before the survival of society in the view of the capitalist class. I cannot imagine Donald trump telling the Public, folks, you do not need me to produce for yourselves. He would say you need me because I have the money that starts production, without my money there is no survival. The point of production (jobs) is not for the creation of capital (industry in general), ie., more jobs. Production under capitalism is a certain type of production unique to all past historical forms of production. Unique because its initial premise is separating living labor from capital and buying living labor as a commodity for the production of profit. Do I believe that in the last bastion of capitalism, at this present juncture in history, is the working class capable of producing without a capitalist class I would answer the nation is doomed.
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  2863. I definitely think an independent candidate would win... if a man like Trump can win indicating the conditions are so bad for the working class that they are ripe for an independent to win is a no brainer. The question is personality and temperament in the independent candidate that that person not be a rote, flat, monotoned, speaker. The working class is rejected in their own respective political parties, betrayed by democrats and criminalized by republicans, that an independent can pick up on the tensions seething below the surface of those parties. An independent would have a direct challenger in Trump who would split the working class back into their respective loyalties to their parties. Such a classic Trump move would shrink the size of the voting pool for the independent. The independent would have overcome Trump’s divisiveness with an economic program that even his working class supporters cannot refuse and what Trump failed to deliver to them when he was president. Trade war with China, vetoed safety bills, etc. The independent would have exploit every criticism conservatives have of Trump in their party preference in who they choose for the nomination; this to push people on the fence in the democratic party about voting center right if the nominee is a culture war hero of the Right and get this pool of voters to vote center left, even if it is for Biden. The greater enemy to an independent for a run of the presidency in 2024 are the Biden camp of the party. They are entrenched incumbents. Losing the White House to an independent would wipe out their integrity in the party and become a minority. It would be important to keep your enemies close to you as an independent, know what they do and say, and keep them guessing what your move will be. An independent would be wise to be not dogmatic, contrast emotions with words, express real anger where appropriate real remorse where appropriate, acknowledge shortcomings as strengths, and speak into the camera lens to the people without a script. Work the media, give them something to video, a whole new technique and approach to everything is waiting in the wings. Speak to us on the outside looking in.
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  2868. The public’s interest in the mystery about how the crime was done undermines the social significance of the crime itself. America has a generation of youth deprived of social interaction for two years and then the Public, consisting of parents, family and community, expect everything to resume as it was before their long isolation. Two years is a long time to be living in your mother’s basement that plotting the next attack on a gay bar and learning from spurious sources on the internet who to blame for your internal discontents with society, has obviously proved to be a powerful tool in shaping the minds of youth. A grand social experiment substituting human interaction with machines. Isolation is everywhere in America. People are isolated in their own cars, homes, stores, are never are they interacting through some form of custom or tradition, which is why a bar and a church are the only forms of socializing individuals get in America for the last 50 years. America socializes three times a year. Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas, are the only three days out of 365 days Americans interact with each have are obligatory experiences, not at all spontaneous, but rather mediated by commerce. There are no cafe’s, or sufficient public spaces in which to congregate, and just hang out. No free use of public space to put on concerts, dances, sport events that people can create without the authorities giving permission. America is a tightly controlled society. The individual live in a very narrow sphere of activity. Work, travel, home, store, repetitively. Food is commercialized when it should be a key element for socialization. I am not surprised in the least that the young would suffer the effects of America’s social alienation. You cannot even get a rescue animal by simply attending the same space with the dogs, being there for a while and the one that connects with you naturally, forms a bond. Everyone and every animal has to be matched, and this is pure social control that represses the natural aspects of human beings to be social. The only area in life where Americans bond is with babies and even that has become a bond destroyed by separation. I would say none of the family members of the deceased really know their relations and police are expected to sift through the social experiences and social conditioning of victims for leads through a scant amount of material evidence and interviews to come up with a killer. What they are coming with is a social history that makes no sense with the material evidence.
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  2873. A post office is significant: taken for granted by this American millennial generation. If you are without a post office you are not part of a nation. Its significance that this generation was never taught its importance in forming one nation as it can used in breaking up a nation too. As no longer a part of the US; East Oakland can declare humanitarian assistance when the utilities shut off and thousands of foreign relief organizations would descend on East Oakland. This would humiliate the US Congress and the governor of that state. If it does not belong to the nation how can a community belong to a state that belongs to a nation that cut off the community from society? It cannot. It is a community without a country or a state. Some young black scholar can leave their mark in history petitioning this matter to the US Supreme Court as a challenge if America is even a Republic when a Federal System disconnects a community from the society. The Post Office was invented in Europe. It was introduced to the US to make a United States by connecting all the territories and states then formed by Ben Franklin. In Europe, the post office connected Spain to England to France to Great Britain and to Germany, was the forerunner of the railroad. Technically, East Oakland is not a part of the United States without a post office. This black working class community is a community without a country at the moment. If the Russians came to East Oakland that would not be considered an invasion of the US because East Oakland doesn’t belong to the US. East Oakland residents consume gas and electric from American utilities that are private corporations. This fact does not reconstitute this black working class community as belonging to the US.
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  2878.  @change1996  I am afraid it is a little more than that!  Production under capitalism only happens when two social classes come together. Beyond that, people are stuck without work, is a huge problem with capitalism. The answer to that dilemmma of the experience of people thrown out of work is to undivide production in general and remove the class system contained in that area of our lives. This will insure permanency of jobs and longevity for people as the human body is designed to be physically engaged, a tool for growth and development. Capitalism does the opposite to a human being it stunts the mind and body. In doing that the other social classes not involved in production (industry) but are engaged in commerce or transport are not encouraged to distinguish themselves as something special as social classes themselves, we get less egoism, false pride, arrogance, indifference, discrimination, etc., from people in society. The unequal relationships is located in this class difference where work takes place not in society where a market makes everyone equal as owners, in theory is capitalism. In practice the US fails at making everyone equal owners of commodities, by nor re-investing profits back into production. It is difficult to claim America is a capitalist society as it retreats from trade and development. Without trade and development people remain as they were a century ago divided as owners and non-owners in society. But in production people are distinguished by their social class as unequal partners in the results of that production.
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  2904. Americans are unconscious of the risks involving the mortality of human beings in the workplace. Colleges have no degree requirement on worker safety courses for graduating MBA students.  Medical and Law colleges have no degree requirement on workplace hazards and fatalities for doctors and lawyers to determine with hard science direct cause and effect injuries and deaths consistent with machinery, automation, tools, chemical solvents and all that stuff. Workers walk into factories blind and the factories hire management with no experience or background in worker safety. This puts an individual worker in a very precarious spot being ordered around by an idiot who never worked tons of material into product by big machinery. A worker is on their own, employers don't care! Employer and management care about getting the work done or be fired and maximizing profits!  Republicans and democrats have passed legislation in 20 states ( if I am not mistaken) for the right to hire and fire workers at will.  Not because they are mean and evil greed personified that working people are treated like commodities, bought and sold.  The external demand of 300 million people keeps growing. This growing of new needs forces we work more that national diseases are transmitted from the workplaces of America. Lung cancer, leukemia, heppititus, deformed births, infant mortality, are the risks working people suffer on the job across these United States. The primary killer in the US is the workplace. The workplace is where everything from building a house to wars are made probable even concievable.  Worker safety should be the first requirement in education yet in America it is the last priority on the job. Chemical and industrial workers are in contact with ammonia peroxide, hydrochloric acid, phenol and 2000 types of regular chemicals under heavy use and in America most of them are de-regulated. Republicans and democrats respond to this de-regulation ignorantly adn dismiss the subject. A sure sign workers don't matter. Indoor pollution: a by-product in the name of energy efficiency the use of treating buildng materials posions indoor air. Some people like that new car smell but if that smell lasted for the life of the car you'd be dead from the car. The Firestone Plant that exploded in 1987 was nothing compared to the rate of plant explosions in 2019,---make a missle attack harmless in comparison. Workers are exposed to Benzine. I feel sorry for you if you work in the technology field working wire below and above ground, communications and the level of radiation posioning exposure is so high for a great number of workers; its all Accumulation Trauma for workers in America. Capitalismus accumulates surplus value but the worker under capitalism accumulates internal and external trauma. The man who never works gets the health care he does not need and the man who works gets the disease the health care system cannot treat is a deepening crisis that comes from the commodity-form of the worker's product in the workplace. The workplace is a public place engaging the whole society producing a public product that its exclusive ownership is a death sentence for all workers.
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  2907. Under funding workers pensions...California will look like Argentina's public sector workers striking for the same reasons. In the minds of the California and Argentina's public sector employers, workers are dispensable. Tools not meaningful human beings. The right of a worker to retire after 40 years of employment is attacked. The workers struggle is about dignity and that is an indignity if I ever heard one. Its about time American workers recognize an indignity when it hits them on the head. I was getting concerned that the abused are permanently damaged people. But their militancy and organization can be stronger and more robust if they all wear Yellow Vests. Far more effective, yellow is the color that signifies the workers struggle for dignity and visibility. Though I find the American labor force is the least class conscious in the world. A private sector worker employed in the oil industry works 70 hours straight and two weeks off. A relay system of oil workers produces oil non-stop. Individually, an oil worker is paid high but is the most exploited worker in the private sector relative to the quantity of riches in oil they produce for their employer. This worker must earn enough for old age while young, expected to save. The coal miner workers follow the oil workers in their exploitation by the coal mine owners. Even worse, the mine owners do nothing to protect workers from cancer whereas this risk of black lung for the coal miner is not a threat to the worker in China. Transit workers are also treated like SHIT! Women in the work force of which they comprise 58% of the workforce are under attack. Very alarming that the attacks on the labor-force in the US is not commonly understood by the American worker as attacks.
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  2915. The professor offers some very solid counter points on which one can topple from their perch the prize-fighters of capitalism and their points but for now, I think it more important that, the US labor force take stock in who hold the reigns of power in the Senate, a right wing faction understands and comprehends less than we, the concrete origins of the current crisis as man made, they believe, instead, austerity accelerates the arrival in the second coming of Christ and that the crisis of capitalism is predestined according to biblical teachings, pose a very serious threat to the working class. A Speaker of the House who believes cuts to medicaid are not on the table but if the clients so chooses to be removed from the program the agency, this man thinks a medicaid recipient will self-deport from medicaid,-- will do everything in its power to render the service of discontinuing the person’s medicaid, yet there is more, a senator who proselytizes from a cemetary an apology for the comment made to an angry audience about how everyone is going to die anyway, let it be sooner than later, is not exactly what Jesus would say...be very interesting to see how the senator’s staff persuaded itself to go ahead with this insipid video, to another senator with a background in medicine, and who in good conscience cannot vote for a bill that adds more to the national debt than its effect on increasing mortality rates. We come finally to one senator who for the reason he gave sounds pro-working class but in actuality stands on the interests of hospital corporations who will suffer staff frings and closures without medicaid. The medicaid recipients, all living, breathing, people of need and in need, are treated as objects be extremely self-absorbed and tunnel vision minded jackasses in Congress!
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  2920. He is one of America’s Oligarchs. Being opposed to oligarchs in general would mean being opposed to what oligarchs do in general as a class to meet their economic needs which is to enlarge their fortunes. But American society emulate their oligarchs, they are idolized by the media and the public. We are not going to see working class Americans challenge the oligarchy on war, poverty, inequality, unless that working class through a long protracted battle reaches the point of intolerance for oligarchy. Warren Buffet is beloved for his lack of opulence and modesty in lifestyle. Trump is emulated for his opulent and excessive materialism. Where the American working class stands in relation to their particular brand of oligarchs is a mystery to me because working people since 1980 have idolized the super rich, monarchies, and self-starting entrepreneurs,---American women especially. Trump in the end had substantial evidence that would completely discredit his enemies but he did not use them. He also had the worst people in his cabinet. The next outsider to become president has many lessons to learn from the Trump experience. The Senate and Intelligence community would guarantee he could not run for president again through impeachment. Pardoning Edward Snowden went directly against the Intelligence Establishment and de-classifying the JFK Assassination very damaging to them and he had popular support; why did he chicken out? Musk would fit right into the foreign policy of neocons bent on a war with China, Russia, Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, Africa, Palestine.
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  2932. Can you handle this truth? Americans have this false idea that workplaces they work at are safe. Society has no clue of the risks to the mortality of human beings because there is no requirement in colleges for worker safety courses in MBA programs. A generation grows up believing that worker safety is not a part of management, and the employers don’t give a damn! Cancer, leukemia, hepatitis, deformed births and infant mortality are on the job diseases in America’s workplaces. Safe to say, the workplace is America’s primary killer, industrial chemical, hydrogen oxide, phenol and 1500 other types of chemicals are regularly used and are deregulated! Indoor air pollution poisons indoor air by the treated building material used to build offices and homes. A Firestone Tire Manufacturing plant explosion would make a missile attack on Ukraine by Russia harmless in comparison. Chemical solvents, carbons and plastics, toxic substances are worked into our products in closed environments. This adversely affects workers and they suffer ‘accumulation trauma”, while Capital accumulates surplus-value the workers accumulate trauma. Wealth in America, the place where one can get rich, looks like it is distributed by markets that one becomes a billionaire but that is the lure, the myth, many are goaded to pursue. The incomes are a facade. Rent, profit, wages, interest, prices is how the economic surpluses appears in this society. Behind the facade are a definite class of owners who make their wealth off the unpaid work of others; and we can add off the death of previous workers, is the stark truth of America.
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  2935. Good observation. You know, not to interject, but... the original formation of Capital happens through the destruction of older ways of work and doing things. This is when people and the old methods of working for their livelihood are taken by force out of their possession. Arson, riots, insurgent fighting, drug invasions, crime, is how it looks in poor countries. In the rich nations if the land is to be freed from possession of millions of small homeowners and landowners they pull out a certain 'tool' to force millions into foreclosure. etc, this is an on-going, I should say, a repetitive process of separation of the life-giving objects the working class had in their possession now taken away through crisis and depressions. Capital can now exchange money for the live workers who have been set free from the objects that afforded them a living no matter what economic storm may come, ----security of property ownership before they were forcibly separated from the land and workshop was a guarantee better than any insurance policy. At one time the landscape across the US was dotted with small producers, workshops and bustling industry. Off the highways lay the ruins of a past era. The residents of Any Town USA were made free to be or become an objectless worker, propertyless, with a guitar in hand free to jump the train and head to Chicago. Capital at the time did not know how to make a guitar a commodity. But it is really only a geographic difference between the cotton fields of the South and Chicago for the dispossessed Haitians to reach Texas though the Darien Gap of Columbia, a migrant trade route that has been established now for 30 years, and this process of separation is taking place in our current world at a fast pace and to great degree cannot be held back! No,--- the landscape of old industrial America lies a baron wasteland. Malls cover over farmland. There is no need for this mass dumping of labor-power; there isn't the Capital is a mounting crisis of historic significance.
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  2944. And why would they vote this bill through? Because...the state has risen so high above society. Not all wrong if you thought that, partially that separation of state and society is a big dilemma for the American working class, and is at the same time the greatest scandal of society. No, this has to do with "When Companies Get Too Big To Fail", see Businessweek written January 27, 1975. Corporations, as part of the various branches of industry connected to the defense industry have become such important centers of jobs and income Congress dare not ever shut them down.  The price for this is our freedom. At the same time as corporations have become so important a national security factor and its defense budget passed year after year; the distance between state and society has separated the tax paying working class from the science and the state that budget comes from. The military becomes the exclusive place where an individual citizen of the urban and rural working class and technology are joined together for the purpose of war, invasion, conquest, and that it is not a natural union betweeen science and society is what makes a military social reality Orwellian or fascist. Obama left a $618 billion, Trump increases it to $738 billion. At this rate we know the next president will increase this to a trillion. The US has 8000 tons of gold in US Reserves with a book value worth $42.2 trillion dollars, not going to change anytime soon that this Congress will change course and stop funding the Defense Industry with tax payer dollars Bernie Sanders would use to fund the Green New Deal and Medicare for All. How will Bernie defend that wealth without a defense industry capable of annihilating the world? This Congress dare not stop funding the corporations and dare not use its own gold reserves to fund the military. It can't. The military is a public insitution qualifies it to be a tax funded institution. If the military were entirely privatized it could cease spending and the military would have to use its own capital not the capital of the Public's. Food for thought?  Another reason why all this continues and never will we see a president the likes of a Lincoln, Kennedy or a Bernie is Congress thinks America does not have the resources sufficient to scale down the dependency factor of Americans on corporations. They have been covinced by corporate propaganda of chronic capital shortages for continued bail outs from Congress and so the same economic relationship is kept going looking like this relationship is something new to every generation born in the US.
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  2946. Its an important strike to support. Everyone is feeling it they honk horns going by. The fall out from this strike on other businesses will be significant. It may even wane the support of the strike. It would be in the office of the AG to use anti trust laws to break up monopolies. Part of the problem of permitting capital to grow so big is that the extreme monetary wealth accrued does not come without labor getting poorer and I believe the CEOs know this. The kind of person inside the AG office of the prez, either allows monopolies to form or prohibits the size corporations can get is the decision of that person. In the eventual showdown the extreme wealth is to their advantage as a war chest to wait out a strike. A parts division stoppage is critical in countering the ability to add more into the war chest. In the 1930s the employers had the right to close the factory and deprive work to workers in the battle for higher wages instead of a fat war chest of capital. Attitudes have changed. Public Opinion would frown on the CEOs if they shut production down. They earned too much. At least, 700 times greater in income of the average wage earner in one year. Not to mention the bennies on the side and golden parachutes. What is significant are the independent auto shops and mechanics inconvenienced by the strike and their customers waiting for repairs to get done. Probably some 40 million people involved with independent mechanics and car shops are going to get slammed with no work. They will be interviewed more and more in mainstream media. Cut in a way that the interviews work on behalf of the media conglomerates invested in GM, FORD, and STELLANTIS ( the word origin is Stello, to brighten the stars). Mass media reporting was even before this strike anti-working class. The fall out has a ripple effect on the secondary work force. Auto workers want the tier system inside the factory system abolished. Fine. There is a tier system outside of the car maker’s factories replicated in society. Job listing ranked by their annual salary these jobs are middle management jobs over a crew of workers. Many firings to come. Jobs that pay more for more responsibility which in the end means less bossing around work the employer has to do themselves is done by workers bossing around other workers. All of these intricate and detailed oriented relationships that look like moving up the ladder are built on extracting the most work from people inside of a definite time period in a tier system of jobs.
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  2964. Absolutely, Americans would be three generations deep into a socialist society and China would never have become a leading destroyer of the planet's climate along with the Pentagon and the Russians. Vacationing in Cuba would have been a normal everyday experience with the family no matter how socialist they became Americans could drive from NY to Florida and get on a boat to Cuba, stay a while, come home with complete freedom of movement. Car culture would not be what it is today. The internal combustion engine would have had a short lifespan, until its replacement by a less volatile fossil fuel, a 100 miles to a gallon would have been the rule and alternative energy would have been developed 40 years ago.  Congestion pricing for NYC would never be on the table in the Mayor's mind the traffic intolerance would have been solved way before it got to the point of causing asthma. Oil would have been eradicated as the main important commodity by around the time the Beatles became popular. Universal health care when Eisenhower wanted it and JFK would have lived to old age or died of Parkinson's. Coal miners in Kentucky, no more Black Lung. Vietnam would not have happened and education would have been made free for all citizens. McCarthy, Cohen, Trump, racism, sexism, class inequality would not have existed. Reagan would have died in California as a B actor. Instead of Obama as president Shirley Chisholm would have been the fist black female president in 1969. King and Malcolm would have lived to old age. The KKK would have been outlawed in the 1960's. The internet would have been already what it is now in the 1960's. Cancer, old age dementia, autism, ADHD, like polio eradicated in 1940 in the population. Pence and his evangelists would have been no more than a church and not in government. Elvis would have lived to old age as drugs and the drug war would never had happened. None of the central and South American dictators would have come into existence and all native Americans would have increased their numbers fully integrated into society instead of reservations. Finally, Einstein would have locked secret the atomic bomb formula and Oppenheimer would not have been the coordinator of the Manhattan Project, a whole generation of Japanese people would have not been incinerated by the Pentagon. Germany would never have been divided and Stalin would not have been the ultimate paranoid monster he became. NATO would never have been conceived. Henry Wallace was your man he would have made a totally different world than today. So yes, he would have spared America of all the things I mentioned.
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  2973. Too bad, --- Biden's new secretary of state, Tony Blinken, reflects a continuation of the same Cold War hysteria that drove the world close to the brink of nuclear war in the Bay of Pigs, and what made America support every horrible dictator no matter the evil these dictators were as long as they proved they were anti-socialist/anti-USSR. Contain the spread of socialism and be a buffer state that ultimately fell apart like a house of cards.  Socialism for the Latin American countries is really a system of commonlandownership among several inter-related families and tribes as practiced for thousands of years,---not a luxury arm chair thinker's theory but a protection against the robbery of land by force. When we invade Central and South American tribes of their land with force we are repeating the exact destruction of the system of Commonlandownership of Native American tribes during the Indians Wars of the 1700s. When the result is a reduction of 60 million native Americn inhabitants to 20 million the solution becomes the problem,---the policy itself. The cause of millions of uprooted workers of all types is the result of narco-capitalism and its one crop economy to which the largest economy in the world is the biggest consumer of narco-products. The cash circulating between officials and drug lords, miltary commanders, and police operate a tyrranical state with American support, turns American society into a non-functioning social system racked by disabilities, addictions, high mortality rates, infertility, and state child dependencies while the narco-one crop cash economy circulates turns horrible evil people into billionaires,---we should reconsider this neoliberalism in foreign policy as a 75 year long step backward. Biden should develop a rational and reasonable military budget the American people can support, use a strong diplomatic corp, literally, turn back and bury the Reagan Revolution.
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  2974. Liberal progressives are well trained in setting up working people. There is also capability in working people as too forgiving and nieve of the Law of Accumulation. Every political event liberal/progressives stage is a commercial event to position labor and capital to orchestrate an exchange process all of us take for granted. They learned how to make money by selling out the working class and with that political profit they buy into corporate stock, bonds, dividends, profit share. More they do this the more they become the owners of capital the less they are the politicians meant to represent the public interest. The liberal and progressives in the party like to live in the positive side of Life, what Marx notes in the German Ideology the '...positive side of the opposition. ' They will never acknowledge their behavior in the negative side of the opposition found in the general corruption of things. They facilitate wealth and force it to maintain its own existence but also force it keep alive its own opposite, the working class. In this sense the Democratic party liberal/progressives, pro-war stance is no stance at all ends up supporting a military regime Dr. King identified "...as the biggest purveyor of violence is my own country." Progressive liberals ensure they end up as the party who appropriates this wealth to the rest of the social classes in society. Every dollar spent on defense working people lose more of the necessaries of life to a debased currency. This rule of thumb liberal/progressives dismiss with anti-working class smug sentiment. Losing more of a chunk of the necessaries of life is not a political issue, they regard any and all social and class differences in society outside of the State as 'unpolitical' and give up on making the state absorb social conflicts because that would entail its own abolition. A process the republicans can claim victory when the welfare state is dissolved and its just the social classes in society. Each class, landlords, banks, merchants, capitalists, working classes, all fighting for their share of the economic surplus and with no governing body to share it out except for a Military and an Autocrat, the State moves in the direction of a dictatorship. Outside in the world at large, the military in charge of foreign affairs positions itself as the leading citadel of reaction to slow down the growth and standard of living of socialist economies, planning war, a cost the American taxpayer bears because the tax cuts freed the other social classes from the tyranny of the liberal/ progressive government. The one class that is not freed, emancipated from the State, is the working class. The republicans completed a partial emancipation by freeing the incomes of the other social classes from taxation but had not freed the incomes of the working masses. To the contrary, the working class is subjugated to government taxation by law. How does the working class get freed from taxation and freed from bearing the cost of imperialism? It has only one power at its disposal, social power, and with it, it must declare a complete emancipation, freeing itself from taxation entails a universal freedom from war, imperialism, and the hybrid military/welfare state. Its slogan should be "Everyone In and Nobody Out' as an appeal for the abolition of America's class system.
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  2990. It is wrong to not say its the Taliban undoing America's version of school. We have problems with our education system that we should not be trying to set up other societies to copy our own flawed educational system is really the first point to make here. I would be another story if our educational system was exemplary but its not. Scandinavian schools system far better than our own should be teaching us how to educate our children. We have 6 year olds walking into schools with firearms murdering their peers. The second point is the family in Afghan society is a patriarchal family. Lines of descent is through the male. Property, wealth, money, possessions, everything is passed down from father to son as head of house hold and if not for the fact that the property did not come with a women attached this society is one step away from chattel slavery for women and girls. Male lines of descent include forced marriages, also a popular thing among Americans in certain parts of American society. Fathers in Afghanistan would have to marry daughters off she goes to her new chosen husband with a dowry. Becoming a doctor breaks the lineage of property descent and therefore the entire society founded on this line of descent. Everything a man has worked to accumulate over his lifetime would be become property confiscated by the state which is where all unclaimed assets end up. This is reported by amateurs not well at all. What is causing this vicious reaction to attack the victims of patriarchy are the owners of their wealth and property dissolving as a social class with an ancient tradition. It is not a society where inheritance passes down from mother to daughter and excludes a husband's own male children from an inheritance. Women and girls need to emancipate themselves in the political realm before they can become the way western television show women and girls as liberated lawyers and doctors.
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  2991. What do you do with these people, how would a socialist society deal with racists extremists in society? If America ended all its wars and aggressions and stopped serving the transnational corporations the peace dividend would be so huge that every man, woman and child would never see a day of crisis in the form crisis occurs in a war driven economy. Mass unemployment would be a thing of the past, hunger and poverty, ignorance and bias, solved in short span of a year and one generation given the might of American productivity working at full capacity. Right now capacity under the transnationals is at a grim 40%. 60% is idle and rotting away. Imagine what a 100% capacity could do without a private sector sticking its nose in the business of writing real history books or real food, or real functional cars that go 500 miles to gallon, real mass transit not some system that operates by the skin of its teeth. If given this chance, unfortunately the wrong phrase, the chance has to be taken away from the culprits misusing American productivity for their own advantage, take that away then the world would be sustainable and even recover from all the dead zones in the Seas and Oceans caused by commerce and consumption and all the social disequilibrium that comes with that pattern. We can change all this muck if we put our mind to it. America would be the most incredible country because it knows how to solve all these problems that foreign service would have a another age of glory, if America took this chance, in fact, I really do not understand why Americans don't simply sidestep the private sector completely and apply all the technology straight from the military to the Public. Every innovation and invention was founded and created by the military not the private sector. Innovation is already paid for by past federal budgets. Let's see the internet was invented by the US military in 1969. That means in 1969 the federal budget paid it off. So why do you need a middle man when all it takes is a team of government IT pros to wire rural America via satellite or tower. What do you really need middle men for?
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  2999.  @maxmercor5772  Well, there are two sides to the social structure. Competition and productivity are useful agencies to capitalists in cheapening the cost of production. It could be useful to the American people but they choose to not use their own productivity for themselves is itself a perplexing historical paradox. They have the power but not the intellect to end competition in the world. If there was any will involved in the decision to export production (CO2 omissions) it would have to be the will of the masses in America responsible for the loss of manufacturing and higher polluting factors on the planet. Productivity and competition belong to the American people but are what corporations use to make profits. There can be nobody else to blame for decisions the American people make in expanding their market needs and the needs of the corporations in the market at the same time. Call it generosity or gullibility, stupidity, or ignorance, it all applies to the paradox. Instead of using the fall in their necessary working time to reproduce the whole society for the benefit of society it is given free, unpaid for, to the benefit of corporations. In the competition the whole international class of corporations for a piece of the action, intensify that productivity with speed ups; work harder mandates, more labor time, tighter rules, higher output, in the workplace sets off a competition, to sell more, a result ending in a market expansion. The paradox is bound up in two distinct social realities, simple reproduction is made easer in less working time and 2., how simple reproduction appears as a false motive of the entire international class of corporations from the US, EU, UK, Japan, Australia, SA, Middle East to lower emissions when it really is raising productivity. Want proof: ask anyone who works if there work has become enjoyable, satisfying, an act of affirmation of skill, talent, rewarding, and if they answer no, they gave up their will to the capitalists.
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  3009. The absurdity of using markets to remedy the problems markets create but that is all capital can do. Markets to capitalism is an end in itself. Markets should be a means no an end in itself. We should be using money as a means for exchange of things of use not waisting human talent on things made for sale. Given it is a system that produces for exchange the industries it has taken control over no longer use money to exchange products for use between them. They no longer produce a surplus to sell the remainder as goods for a market after they acquired the necessities for their industry and livelihood. The entire underlying economic structure of industries is run over by commercial and financial capital creating drinkable water, or useful oil, and necessary gas, in maximum quantity for sale and when there is no market there is no gas, water, oil. This would never happen had the underlying economy been made stronger and kept intact. So that when corporations stop producing ventilators and masks there are still industries producing them in the US to make my point of what an underlying economy means. It is a system that cannot produce proportionally and cannot consume within proportion because its main objective is growth beyond proportion and growth is made dependent on sale. Laws can be used to stop the exploitation of nature and people but the lawmakers do not write the laws themselves in the capitalism that is America today. Think tanks formulate measures for the lawmaker who passes those measures on behalf of the largest donor operating and financing the think tank. A revolution is what America needs and one that overthrows the rule of markets over industrial activity is the message history is telling the American people.
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  3017. Gangs as a sociological phenomenon occur as outside elements to the formal social structure. They belong to the formal society because they are born into it but they are not of the social structure that lives over them. Gangs started in the 17th century, when millions of soldiers found themselves out of a job and took up piracy. Then the gangs were after Gold; Code of Laws, exercised a unity as they do today but the currency of value has changed; from gold to drugs and guns. Gangs have evidently been allowed to get too big too fail like their counter parts in the legal trade are too big to fail from their own stupidities in bad business dealings they should have gone bankrupt but had not; a new gargantuan prison complex is the same thing as a Bail Out. Elites anticipate more gangs and more sectors of the economy to collapse leaving many people’s lives without the necessaries of life. American government over the last 70 years had done nothing to keep the growth of gangs, monopolies, racketeers, from becoming Too Big To Fail. And so, what began as a small social phenomenon is now the norm. The screwballs have moved from the outside fringes of society to society’s inner citadel of power by virtue of economic size and capacity to violence. This is a threat to the Establishment social order. Its a threat to every unaffiliated gang related American. Its Terrorism. Competition on steroids makes a prison this big a necessity and a country to be the new Alcatraz is not an achievement but a real serious digression of society corrupting leaders.
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  3036. I think the concept of “empire’, is a European term to describes a mother country in possession of other countries. This definition fits the development of European modern history that European antiquity city-states became subject to another city-state is a history leading up to the Roman Empire. In the Americas the city-states of antiquity appear to have functioned independently of each other in succession and the religious aspects of each settlement reflects a uniformity of acceptance that they were probably extensions as opposed to ‘subjects’. Land or the soil does not appear to have been distinguished as city-state property from a collection of families or tribes in possession of land forming two distinct social classes as we see in Rome. Enlarging an area of shared land between various tribes as the domain of the deities an individual became owner of the land by becoming a member of the community through marriage or some other ritual. That there are two primary gods, of rain and corn, is a view of the soil and sky as gods not belonging to humans but were given to humans for life that life was sacrificed. This is a completely different attitude toward land than the attitude toward land in the history of Europe. I am not a archeo-anthropologist to really sink this theory into hard evidence but in listening closely, I see nothing in the cultures that resembles an empire controlling land in two forms of property, i.e., public and private property. I am not even sure the warriors were exclusively soldiers of a king or royal court of some kind. This would be a description consistent with how an empire behaves using force to maintain its hegemony against enemies who want to take down the empire but were more a combination of hunter/warrior in society that went after the big meat the average population did not hunt for sustenance but farmed and fished for sustenance, and these two groups formed a division of labor, thus producing new gods in the form of the jaguar, snake, eagle, to honor the contribution to their diet the warrior/hunters provided. In that division of labor are all kinds of skills and specific kinds of activities. Artists, sculptors, stone masons, embroiders, tanners, potters, metal smithing, fishing, farming, hunting, gathering, and there appears to be scant evidence of domestic work distinguishing work done by women, boys and men in the home, thus the work of reproduction was done in common or as a group and the domiciles relegated for sleeping high off the ground where wild life crawls and walks. Perhaps while watching a ball game they ate and drank. If cannibalism became an activity in the later stage of development of antiquity of Mesoamerica it would then make sense, to me anyway, that the city-states of an earlier stage had abundant meat source the later stages did not have or lost due to excess hunting and who, because of this scarcity, substituted human flesh as sacrificial of unfortunate victims of a religious belief of more blood you gave earth the more fertile the earth will be just went wild. Overkill if you will to give life to make life. Size of city-states: I think I would aim to draw a link between the geology on which the city states existed to the availability of stone the masons worked with in making a city with temple, courts, and how much rock could they quarry that determined the size of the city-state in addition to the climate. Mmmm, I wonder.
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  3048. That was short and brief. I liked it. That early experiment (USSR) never understood the relations of production. If they had understood capital as a relation. Could the revolutionists have turned the government of the Czar(s) into a government of the People? Capitalism is when production is no longer owned by the producers. Three elements involved, production (owned by a) capitalist and the workers. If we join production with workers, they will produce for their families and society. They might not produce for the revolutionists. The producers might develop the will and certainly have the means to use production for other purpose than to build nuclear weapons in an arms race. Assuming the producers are current on world affairs. Many are not. Many live in the dark ages mentally. In Russia they could not even read. America has a better chance at uniting production with labor. Average Americans can read and are not isolated from world events. The fear workers could reunite with the means runs high among America's capitalists. It could be the death of them. Nothing is forever anyway, extinction is life. The point I believe would be to make something from nothing. If there is ever a rational for workers to take production back as it was for centuries in Europe and America, it would be to make something from nothing. Right now---America has oil. The ancient Egyptians had sandstone. Greece had marble. Romans had concrete and volcanic ash. Every civilization was dealt a different geological hand until it moved into the elements formed in the Big Bang. Why are we stuck on oil which has no values leading to greatness compared to the elements of the Big Bang, which has greatness? America has scientific workers, none of them are born here is a problem, but they are here. Average workers can work jointly with scientists in production and government can become a government of the People if we want. It only takes Will Power to remove oil-based capital(ism) from general production.
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  3064. @Ross Harris,---This was tried in the 30s by FDR and from the economic theories of John Maynard Keynes, capitalism was saved and restored...but look what has happened since the 80s when this present day Billioniare class was first being created. They grew up on Greed is Good, Thatcherism and Reaganism’s individualism, parents bought into it and created a new individual with a mental attitude and they embarked on a mission , acting in unison as a class, began dismantling the good wages and employees will make you rich theory. The Car industry typifies what is being done. Ford Motor Company will never again make the F-150 the symbol of a working class vehicle, it will make super expensive cars and profit no longer on producing for the masses but instead will produce for the very rich, a car and truck, the masses will never afford. A distinct class separation where the grass is greener on one side and the lawns are mud on the other side, a society of princes and paupers, where the masses will use, buy and sell, used cars, and the dividing line between lawns of lush greenery and muddy knolls, rickety old houses and wandering dogs stand the digital sentries of the State on guard protecting the world of the super rich from the incursions of the world of the very poor, is the future society of America. This trend killed the theory of Keynes and the work of FDR, and build back better from the middle out, is a lie, a myth, a carrot dangling before the noses of the masses to follow while this separation is cemented. When it is cemented and the final stone is placed on this wall, will be the day when they will no longer need your vote to hold the office of power and military might,---democracy in America died in 1980 and buried in 2024. Emulating the rich, idealizing them, and favoring them, all contributes to the mortar in the construction of this separation, the masses themselves help to create have bit the carrot. This is why I support the railroad workers strike and I am not a railroad worker, for I see where this is going, and what the railroad workers have done is remarkable. They joined together, strength in numbers. When I see Starbuck workers on strike, I will not cross their line, I will not spend one nickel on anything that contributes to this trend. They should open a coop coffee shop directly across the street of their Starbucks and kill the mighty corporate giant that aims to kill them. Its a war, an economic war, that should be fought by thinking workers unassailed by the distractions.
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  3068. "Whoever has the Youth has the future", A. Hitler. This line is a good starting point to correct one myth around our present-day conflicts average people have about political leaders. In the US, Trump is constantly equated to Hitler for his outrageous statements and policies by his detractors, but I cannot make that analogy at all about Trump or any of the more horrible leaders in the world today. Hitler had an ideology, he was not a businessman or a manager of a large business. Like the other leaders of the time period, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, Ghandi ji, Sun Yat-sen, Mao, were all men of ideology, men of a single-minded purpose. Mussolini wrote: "Revolution is an idea that possesses bayonets". Our present day authoritarian leaders are not ideologues. In my observations, the one country where ideologues are in power and exercise the methods of the ideologues I mentioned to take power by means of coup d état is in the overthrow and exile of Evo Morales of Ecuador. There the acting president, Añez, is a born-again Christian, and Christianity is an ideology, and a woman who vows to inject by law the bible in the youth of the country. Hitler formed the Nazi Youth for the same reasons, 7 million members, all of whom pledged obedience to Hitler not their parents. Rather, people like Macron, Johnson, Trump, Bolsonaro are not ideologues but are business managers and the difference between business management and international trade or finance, if anyone has taken a course in either subject, should know that the two fields are entirely unrelated. The bad policies we see emanating from their imprint on societies stems from this one fact, in my view. The fact being, an international trade expert knows nothing about running a business and a business manager knows nothing about international trade and finance. They are focused on the particular functioning of a business and run government the allocation of trade and finance in that manner. Consequently, we get a crisis of another kind, unique from the crisis that led to the second world war as a war of political ideologies. We get economic crisis, depressions and stagnation, and mass dislocation of workers and corresponding wealth extraction benefitting business leaders and other kinds of billionaires.   "Whoever has the Youth has the future", is a line that is more appropriate when applied to industries of our day learned from individuals of the past. Whatever industry has the youth has the future and the industries taking possession of the youth in our time is media and the tech industry. The gaming industry, the cell phone industry, the military industry, garment, sports, have the youth.
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  3073. Something like this happened in Russia’s past. Russia moved troops into China to protect its port in Vladovostok which was no where in China. That was a historic blunder that provoked Imperial Japan. It did not work out so good, led to a defeat at the hands of Japanese forces, but of course, a huge failure for the Czar. A war on both fronts, 25 million lives lost. Poland is another story completely and on the other side of Russia from Vlodovostok, Poland is the west European gateway to Russia, it would be really unnerving to move troops into Poland. Looking back at the behavior of the western European powers carving Europe into shares they moved troops in an out of places like it was no tomorrow and all met up in No Man’s Land in the trenches it would not surprise me NATO would make such a blunder move. Russia helped Greece fight its independence from the Ottoman Empire...this did not please Turkey or flatter Turkish nationalism... there is a long history of troops movement that culminated into the first world war. Old wounds are still present, the Finnish War of 1808 with Russia leaves its mark in the mindset of NATO russophobia. Europe is a case study in mass psychology when you examine its history. Germany stripped of its colonies by colonial powers and through rapid industrialization, a German retaliation in a second world war. People should understand this historical legacy as millions of Russian Jews migrated out of what is now Poland to the US are by now third generation Americans. US has to traverse delicately in Europe. The extremist say stay out of it. But the world market ties us together. This is why Brexit was a exercise proving England can’t live without the EU. Historical circumstances have changed that former USSR republics are free to decide their own fate but in many of them they are presently home to a virulent nationalism that would love to see a war between NATO and Russia. Poland and Romania have not industrialized yet. When they do we will have to worry of a resurgence of a militarized state nation-states in Europe seem without fail have a habit of creating. This is role modeling they will follow; it worked for the colonial powers it should work for us. NATO is a growing threat to Russia. And Russia is not wrong about NATO. History does not favor Russia in winning wars but in every war she lost she came out gaining more territory and more powerful as a consequence is a trend Putin is not about to surrender to elites in Europe flirting with pro-nationalist forces.
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  3081. Here are some facts too. In 1860 what cost a $1.00 was something someone could not make themselves, they were self-sufficient in every other way, meeting their needs, but say they needed nails from the town hardware store because nails were not made on the farm. Agriculture was still directly a means of subsistence. In 2022 the entire population needs everything and are a mass of people completely Not self-sufficient, not even efficient, were made dependent on sale and a supply chain that is the economy. Prices can rise with the demand as all agriculture was taken over by a small number of corporations. They have excluded nature as a means of survival; people can only get to nature by market relations mediating between them and nature. Buying and selling became the way to fix the problem of landless people and this made money a necessity. But something happened that Americans give up too easily if you ask me. Over the period of 160 years a nail that was forged by a blacksmith at a rate one nail per minute is now a million nails per minute produced by machine. Very little labor involved except the button to the machines in the factory were pressed by one engineer specialist who grew to become a person that could do nothing else was soon de-skilled and made dumb compared to their distant relatives. Another fact, none of this was chance that agriculture (land) formerly a tool for individual survival became a tool for mass production. All of this was so planned out to be so efficient that the slightest interruption in the supply chain would threaten the whole society is how fragile the US economy has become.
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  3083. Good report from the professor. Based on his assessment. I would consider it pretty irresponsible and immoral putting the working people in Catalonia in harm's way. Spanish government is not messing around. Working people are the ones whose heads will get clobbered not the business class in Catalonia or the government representatives pushing for autonomy. I think the working class holds a better card to strike a peaceful settlement with Madrid's PM and acquire more democratic freedoms and tax rate. Arguing working class power can bring down Spain's economy if the working class is not shored up with more income. Because of servicing its debt, the entire social class spends less of their income on non-durables and durables, they sacrifice and are ready to strike if necessary at the injustices. I'd, rather than to cut a deal with Madrid and let the Catalan business class reap the benefits, I would cut a deal with Madrid for working people and get more democracy in the workplace, if there is going to be any deal making at all. The king sees the business class perpetrating a constitutional violation; they are his enemy. The opportunity exists to bring working people one step closer to emancipation is better than no step at all which is where this thing is going if they follow the business class. Catalonian right wing is not going to deliver on independence nor a better tax rate for working people. If anything the business class will pass the cost of Spain's terms and conditions to the Catalonian working class in the form of higher prices. To Madrid's eyes Catalonian business class has gotten to big for its britches. A better deal can be struck for working people by using this crisis as a example of what will come in the future if they get too large. In fact, like in the US too big too fail. Sometimes you get more from a hard liner under certain conditions and this may be one of those times perfect for more working class gains. I hope they see it that way, of course, this is based on the assessment given by the good professor.
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  3122. David Canatella ---This is why we get nowhere! You are suggesting no more than what has happened in the last 600 years of capitalism. Never mind, 600 years.  Longer, for the entire history of humanity that revolutions kick out the bad only to bring in the worst. From Bush we get Obama, from Obama we get Trump ---bad to worse. A redistribution of the way we work and live is not a revolution against the way we in society meet our needs. The real definition of revolution is changing the way we meet our needs. You re not suggesting in the least we do away with labor as having no value of its own but to remain the creator of wealth for this purpose. Our needs are met only if we are wealth creators is the doctor's diagnosis of the problem. The liveable share idea perpetuates the rule of classes in society and in that framework all workers do not count as a social class. Workers are not recognized as social class like the others in capitalism. To be a worker in America or in France, China, Russia, Latin America, everywhere, is to be an invisible human being subject to abuse and exploitation. Workers are not slaves but are partially enslaved by their own labor as a thing that creates wealth. Other people (corporations, banks, landowners, merchants), concern themselves with you for your labor that creates wealth and nothing more. If wealth can be created out of thin air the entire working class would be left to die. If health were something you can buy the rich would live and the poor would die.  People are not people, but are tools, a means, who live a liveable wage and work as value creators for the system at large. Condoning this relation is what I call a pretty weak imagination of what can be, given the potential of our productive power. Workers have no clout as a social class which is why the street is where they convene and not inside the walls of the decision making rooms changing how we meet our needs not reallocating and redistributing this thing you call wealth. But in changing theway food gets on your table, or when how your teeth get fixed. In our time, assuming you are a worker, work for living, we are powerless individuals in an individualistic society who need to get real and get into the seats of power and perform a major surgery on the economy as a whole.
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  3130. It is true the end of the era that was created in 1955 premised on the Cold War is fading and a new form of capitalism is emerging. America does not have the same ruling classes that existed at the time. Coming out of the close of WWII the US emerged as the most powerful citadel of reaction as a matter of policy; or no policy at all. There wasn’t a region more corrupt, criminally negligent of the vital interests of the people, no dictatorship too extreme and cruel to be denied economic, military, and moral support (i.e., US AID) of the leading power of the “Free World”,---as long as they prove their allegiance to an “anti-socialist alliance” was the so called “Deep State”, the CIA. With respect to China, not much has changed. So far Trump is not talking about a military build up. And not cutting the military budget. This would suggest that less dollars spent on defense would not slow down the rate of growth of communist countries, as an undesired effect Neocons on the democratic side welcome. The threat of imperialism does not exist with Trump, so far. Traces do exist, however, his vision for Gaza is imperialistic. In ways he is embodying two social systems. The Deep State that is over, finished, done or the new one of dollar cooperation and peace through strength, in which case, the Deep State has been destroyed by capitalism. Capitalism destroys its own capitalist forms of existence, the burden on the taxpayer is not lifted unless there are cuts to the military. In many respects not much has changed. I would say Musk and Trump head a capitalist restoration without the New Deal.
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  3133. Dr. Fraad’s subject matter recalls to mind an observation: Hollywood never made a movie of the FDR programs in a serious way showing its strengths in the construction of a new society coming out of a Great Depression, and it certainly never made a movie of the alliance between Russia and the US, in ay serious way, and there are only a few that give history justice are part of the literature America’s Right Wing are banning from Education, are still unadapted stories for the big screen, this compared to the many films Hollywood made of the Confederacy, FBI and American Indians, Military. Mosfilm is Russia’s main film producer and they churn out a lot of good movies depicting the sacrifices of Russia during the war, they also produce a lot of schlock, but film in Russia serves less as propaganda than film is used in Hollywood to depict government as inherently evil is pervasive starting in the 80s to the present. Is all done to win over Americans on their plan to dismantle FDR programs. The main subjects of Hollywood were dominated by a California rich elite of the publishing field and its own political right wing who hated FDR and went after communist and socialist screen writers. Hollywood film was always in the hands of the Right Wing and Business Class projecting patriarchy, law and order, religion, the way they saw it to rule over the Public. From film the conservative Right Wing from California jumped into television, to project and deny, America’s real social history even deeper as a secret from the Public and are now in the Internet doing it more intensely, and desperately. out in the open through the Military and shamelessness is their hubris. I learned a lot from this talk and thank you for this education. Thumbs Up!
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  3157.  @johnsuder7671  Well, the nation is not an oligarchy but it has an oligarcy in the nation the multinational corporations most other nation's oligarchy's do business with...notice throughout this entire social explosion the oligargical private sector is quiet. The law I will state is an economic law not a political one. In human history the division of labor alters earlier forms of labor exploitation. Plato called it the "curse of mankind" in his Republic Bk I. Applied to now the earlier form of exploiting labor during the height of America's economic successes is gone, vanished by the deskilling of labor and more automation making the objective conditions so organized that more subjective freedom is lost in the process of reporducing individuals and families in society. I will state that the progressives have completely embraced the democratic party's approval of these new objective restrictions taking all our freedom away and subjecting us to a modern division of labor Plato would call not the curse of mankind but the death of mankind. If you cannot see that it is the oligarchical political establishment the far right is reacting with anarchism and violence, fearless, has scared the bejheezus out of the entire political establishment that all of them on the left and the right have united as one social class against the people who they cannot distinguish if one is an anarchists or neo fascist militia except now given the technology, they have a profile and made arrests. This constitutes my point about objective restriction resulting in arrests of anyone for any reason. None of the apprehended earn a living by a minimum wage but it is the whole class of minimum wage earners who are subjected to no freedom at all.
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  3159. 10:11,--“subprime mortgage”, money sold below premium price for money. Deprecated money, cheap money. In this case, cheap money flowed into the banking and urban/rural real estate industries encouraging rampant speculation in the housing market created a boom and a bust. 26:21,--- capitalism is a social relation not a system. Capital exploits labor this constitutes a social relation of exploitation. People exploit people. These are all social relationships that determine how we interact as human beings in circulation and production. Equality as universal in society but not universal in the workplace is a social relation of exploitation. Equivalents exchanging in markets that result in surplus value is a social relation of exploitation of money for more money, equality in general and inequality in particular is a social relation. Individuals and private parties control the means of production is not a good definition of capitalism...if it were than state ownership of the means of production would become by your definition a capitalist system. We would never leave the capitalist paradigm behind for a new society if we saw capitalism as the highest stage of human development. State property is a form of private property and thus, a private party that exists as a bureaucracy owning the means of production is still a social relation of division and exploitation between labor and capital, citizens and the state. a perpetual opposition, the point is to construct a world without antagonisms and oppositions. Capitalism is a social relation like slavery, feudalism, etc., are social relations that still exists and social relations come and go not on their own and have a component of habituation tends to linger is why you need vigilant economic thinking. You need an economic theory and definition that captures the transitory nature of capitalist social relationships as history and the potential for more meaningful relationships in and between nature and society as historical.
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  3163. All the tech industries laid off workers by the thousands and this announcement adds to the list of industry giants cutting jobs. Why? AI. A new technology. All hamburgers made by machines. With AI and industrial tools and If everyone had a shared sense of obligation to work 2.5 days a week to make all the necessaries of life for all in society than the workforce would consist of all 332 million Americans no the standard 125 million people in the workforce, and the rest of the time is off for the whole population to develop themselves using the resources society has available to them, we can reduce a workday from 8 hours to 2.5 hours and still be well off, would be a historic blunder to not take that road. A society where even the president takes off two days and does some task necessary for social reproduction alongside a janitor or teacher. And one would never know who is next to them making new airplanes at Boeing...could be Tom Cruise doing his obligation to work for society. The rest of the time they go back to their careers and for the other millions of people time to raise a family would be a breeze. But AI is not a public utility, therefore, AI works as a private commodity and this will lay off retail food chain workers. Massive firings ahead. We better install a mandatory shut off chip into all the robots humans are making. Shut them off when they get too smart and dangerous to humanity, you know they will. In the background of another Great Depression but greater this time. Is the very real problem of loss of land mass due to the melting of the permafrost. Our production and consumption habits are heating up the planet and the permafrost loses its seal releasing gasses. AI can help reverse this. But for now the not good news about AI for a growing human population in need of more land is having no access to land because you have no money.
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  3164. 0:47,----“...our brilliant and Darwinian system will produce another leader...committed to take Britain through tough times...cutting burdens on businesses and families...cutting taxes because that is the way to generate growth...and the income we need to pay for public services”. Well there you have it a contradiction in the flesh. The Darwinian reference goes back to the days when Geology was coming into its own as a science and proved the age of the earth was older and time was longer....waaaayy longer than the age of the earth and creation told in the Bible, since then its been a battle between creationism versus evolution ever since. Geologic time was the key for Darwin’s process of natural evolution to be convincing and the evidence for it he provided. But how do you cut taxes a revenue source of the government and expect to cover the cost of public services said in the same breath by Boris Johnson? His now you see and now you don’t economics in speech is in practice cuts in social spending. The Darwinian principal in his head is applied as, ‘the richest in the economy survive the poorest do not!’ The very same ideas floating in the heads of the GOP, Neoliberalism or Social Darwinism, they would do on day one in the White House is make permanent the Trump Tax Cuts, undo all of Biden’s executive orders, open public lands for commercial exploitation in drilling and mining, refinery capacity to cut the import of foreign oil, cut taxes again, raise interest rates higher, do nothing about inflation because it is profitable for select businesses, and make it cheaper for more businesses to start up by incubating more jobs with less pay and no more social security contributions for both employer and employees. Very little difference between the GOP and the Tories who find Johnson a liability the British public is ready to hang.
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  3177. Socialism has not been achieved and still is yet to be developed in Venezuela, both the US and Venezuela are capitalist societies. China and Russia are capitalist societies which means societies evolve into class societies. The point of socialism is to develop into a classless society, and therefore, bring class struggle to a close, end competition with cooperation. Whenever social classes make up the whole social order there is class conflict, tension, always present in these societies though at times subtle, handled, and other times blatant, mishandled by the ruling classes in power. Only fools bamboozled by indoctrination deny the presence of social class as a source perpetual conflict even when its form of appearance is a racist one party rule state or as a social democracy with parliamentary procedures. There are societies still in this world with one foot in the 18th century, societies with peasant social classes, slaves, loyalty to family, chief, tribe, communal lands and the other foot in the 21st century with kids loyal to the Almighty Dollar and America's car culture. Get a grip on reality of the state of the world, its a starkly contrasted place where socialism has not even taken root to make a difference. The class struggle has been and still is the engine of human history.  Its time people realize that fact, deniers have amplified social conflict into an international struggle and competition for survival. We can talk about socialism's mistakes and opportunities when class conflict is no longer driving societies either forward or backward until then Trump will aways remain a demagogue likely to end as America's King Lear.  Venezuela and the US are a competition for oil markets that consume the most oil. The larger the quantity of oil consumed the bigger the profits.  Any vacuum that is created in this competition is immediately filled by a rival and this is the Achilles Heal of Trump as an individual who uses people and then leaves them flat. As the US and Venezuela are rivals in the oil market, the use of sanctions by the larger capitalist nation is a weapon in that war of competition.  In competition the main aim of each rival is to destroy the other, both have the same goal, when one dies its market share is absorbed by the winner. Winner takes all making the winner a monopoly capitalist organization controlling a greater share of the oil market. All this drama rests on the American consumer demand for oil, that the wars of competition start out as economic and end up as political wars carried on to meet a particular class interest. In the 1970's oil-bearing nations were a threat to the American oil industry. Expansion was held back by OPEC rivals. Never again said the American oil executives. Venezuela is in that position to supply the largest oil consumer with the lowest price. America is addicted to oil said GW Bush. America's car culture is the reason for the addiction. Auto, aviation, fabrications industries is where all high-end technology developed by these industries goes into vehicles than it goes into homes, buildings, infrastructure. Oil will always be still the biggest import commodity of the US to support its car culture. Survival depends on the car because jobs are not dispersed out from the cities and into the rural. Behind the distraction campaigns the Trump administration deregulates oil drilling permits off the Atlantic Coast.  What has radically changed from the 1970's is the 'free world'. The world today looks more like what the world was in WWI with a smattering of 8 rival capitalist nations with colonial ambitions. Its everyman for himself, all nations on their own, as it were, divide the world by means of war, winner takes all, brings us closer to a situation of a world of empire and revolution with more dictatorships than empires and revolutions bursting at the seams and the earth bleeding. CIA is playing Whack-A-Mole, trying to quell terrorist organizations. Since terrorism and the state are bonded as rivals, they need each other to survive, terrorism cannot exist in a world of cooperation but only in the context of competition as an instrument of the institutional violence. This is my answer to Trump claim socialism failed.
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  3197. Here’s what the Theory says: If we were slaves or serfs we would be the means of production, the direct property of the owner, but as such we are not slaves or serfs because we are only a means of production for 8 hours a day. SUMMATION: This relation makes us an indirect property of the owner and the owner is only an indirect employer to us, not our 24 hour master. As a means of production for only 8 hours a day this relation makes the means of production an outside force to us when it is not worked by us so, only when we are employed that the means of production and us, work together to produce value, but when we are not working, the value of the means do not become new capital, higher profits and more surplus-value and this absence of wealth is how the means works in the form it takes as private property works against the working class and only for the working class when value is being produced is the capitalist system of production. More Theory: When employed the means of production are social property and when not employed the means of production are private property. This is the arrangement of soil, water, air, land, they are used by the rules of a certain house, family or class, and not used outside of that house, family or class when the mass of workers are separated from the land, soil and air as means of production. The society and its laws are constructed on the means of production as private property is the form of society of the capitalist system. SUMMATION: A society and laws constructed on the basis of the means of the production as social property is a society that has yet to come into being in the US where we are no longer partially for 8 hours of 24 hours in a day, a means of production for a capitalist. In a socialist society the social property of the means of production have only one value, as useful they make the workers using the means useful or not to society, the pressure is on them to produce the material wealth society requires if it is to continue living. A party is always necessary because there are powerful enemies in the political arena constantly working to destroy what the workers aim to build as a society. The US labor force is ready to take over the means of production but are the American masses in support of the labor-force taking over the means?
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  3207. Marx's economics is not as one-sided as the mainstream of American working people believe? To account for the wealth of a nation is objective economics, to account for how workers are used in society, is a subjective strain in mainstream economics. Because it is strain the economists in the mainstream speak to the mainstream of working people strictly on objective facts and ignore the subjective individual and that person's employment as an allocation of labor in society dictated by capitalists. So that there is not one person in the entire working class who knows what their future will be. The whole society is planned behind the backs of working people. Planning a life, a family, a future is virtually impossible as working people are hinged to the decisions made by a class that rises so high above social reality that all lives are objectified as dispensable beings, able and ready to go where capital goes, where the jobs are, breaking the bond with their children. Marx's position is to demonstrate the life-process of a system, expose its internal logic, and explain its origin from the progress of human activity. I brought this up, because the video contains biases against Marx that are plain outright lies. The man is not alive to defend himself and these people never read Marx to know what he is about, they, in turn, follow the party line to malign anything that contests their status a 'communist revolutionary', scares the mainstream working person into believing capitalism, and their current status, is the only choice. Coupled wth fear, intimidation and repression of the State, a hopelessness overwhelms the working class wrenching from their souls a sense of defeat.
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  3211. The western Establishment that now resides in the US as the main citadel of power never got over the Russian Revolution. France’s Establishment never got over the Paris Commune of 1789. The Establishment lives in fear, the only nation that was not socialist at the opening of the modern era were England, France and Germany. Capitalism was back then in the minority and the working class was but a baby still in its infancy during the first industrial revolution compared with the world wide working class of 2024. The majority of the world at the time was a world of local production based on common land ownership. Back then the whole of England, France and Germany never saw or knew what a banana was unless it came through a sea based port. There is a banana in every home today. Most of the world manufactured by hand and powered its machinery by water, mule, oxen, worked for their own needs and never depended getting their necessaries of life from a market. It took around 600 years for the early city merchants and business people of Venice, Paris, Berlin, London to grow into multinational corporations, many of them going the way of the Dodo, many remain merged in business and marriage, flourished, grew into monopolies, became the modern Establishment with new offshoots for business development all on the backs of a Slave Trade and the Industrial Working Class. Guilt and fear rule the souls of the Establishment. The big fear now is that nations that were socialist in their roots and the communist have perfected capitalism, excelled into a second world economy the Establishment cannot control. Losing grip of the reigns, on a world market, is grounds for mass hysteria among the Elites, they get more nuts every day. We enter a period where one of their own falls off the deep end, a wild card in Netanyahu, threatens the Establishment even more. The great sea of humanity is out to get rid of the Establishment. The range of pathos of the super rich is borderline obsessive compulsive to downright psychotic at the prospect of a world market shrinking.
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  3220. The Founding Fathers did not establish this amendment because European refugees exiled by Kings and Monarchs of Europe were religious people, such as the pilgrims. The Why the amendment was established was in response to Kings and Monarchs of a religious persuasion who legislated the political state its personal weapon. What has happened is that the force has become the personal weapon of the political state such as the CIA has become the personal army of the president. The content of a political state is ‘force’ and force in the hands of Kings, Popes, Princes was a threat to all communities of all religions. Today the president is the threat to all religions and communities the office has a monopoly over force. In practice we say: Oh, God this elected man has his finger on the button, but for some reason, when discussing that button theoretically force and the executive office are united as one entity but never seen from the other point of view as divorced from all other entities at the same time. All the founding fathers did was to recognize all religions by recognizing no religion and this placed all religions on the same footing in relation to force or the political state which is the same thing. Force can be used against any of them who plot against the state was the Why part the framers were addressing. After all we are talking about the 17th Century that was part of a thousand year history of dynastic rule and a British King that tried to overthrow the brand new American government not once but twice despite the American Revolution. Americans seem to think the founders’ motives were benevolent and at the behest of poor slobs from Europe landing on a rock on an American shoreline. In fact, there is mounting evidence the American Revolution itself was a counter revolution to the British Crown incited by the Crown’s abolition of the Atlantic Slave Trade led by founding fathers as the first generation of American slave holders themselves.
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  3224. Pointless to report on this if you have nothing to report ...whatever military disciplinary action they have on him the man evaded it by a defection. Really the defection is the story...when was the last defection of an American to a communist country? A News Broadcast Company that gives you no news or gives you old news as new news is an insult to its audience’s intelligence, and worse, cannot examine the defection itself as subject -worthy, what a pair of silly girls. The State Department has to negotiate with North Korea for the release of the defector. Extradite him. In exchange North Korea and the Armistice still in place since the 1950s comes to a historic end with a signing the US lost the Korean War and has no claim at all in the region. After Korea, America lost another war in South East Asia. That was a flat out defeat with the Fall of Saigon unlike the partial defeat and partial victory if you consider keeping the Korean people divided a victory, which the State Department does consider it that way. The American people may want a reunification but the State Department does not. And what they want matters more than what Americans want. The Korean War was for the US symbolic of its historic decline. The State Department has gone from one war to the next, bringing about a defeat and a decline of the whole economy, and from decline to disintegration of social institutions in a span of 70 years. Assassinations and secrets made worse a decline with a deterioration of trust of the Public in State and Federal government. This event is historically significant for a lot of reasons the average person never thinks about and the two anchors appearing clueless don’t help!
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  3235. Capitalist are only capitalist because people see themselves as labor-power in the exchange relation between labor and capital. Once people stop seeing themselves as useful to another and the other as useful to them for their survival the relation between capital and labor will dissolve. If you want Big Oil to go away than the car, truck, van, bus, airplane, ship, are the things you have to stop using. Easier said than done, right? Easier to click on overnight delivery than it is not hit the button at all is a mental form of weakness. Given the diminished will power nothing I am saying will happen. With all efforts into that one goal by all walks of life Big Oil and the elite superstructure that is constructed on oil as the centerpiece of the economy, and all its corresponding forms of thought, would wither away in a year. Why a year? Why not weeks? The pandemic that struck the US during Trump's term raised alarms among the establishment that the social order was falling apart without the continuous feeding of human labor-power and Trump would have to go if he did not order the economy open. On his own he would have let the economy stay closed and the superstructure would have begun to melt down really quick bring about his own demise too. I do believe he is that insightful.  It was the creativity of the people who kept things alive during the pandemic make shifting their companies and this proves that if the superstructure built on oil did fall apart, a new economy was already in place ready to get built up. Well, Biden stopped that transformation process and brought us all back the pre-pandemic days of everything is fine. All would not have been lost if America abandoned their vehicles tomorrow. In fact, I believe with nature freed from human action there would not have been the fires, the animals in distress, without the compounding action of 2.2 billion human beings all driving in vehicles consuming oil in the process and emitting greenhouse gases giving nature no chance at all to rebound. There will be another shut down and the elite superstructure will decay, a second stab in re-inventing America, at which point the masses should turn its back on reconstituting the old ways, and transform their immediate locality into a means for a secured existence and survival. If fast food want to sell fast food then make them deliver in electric cars. Next time make your school administrators hold school outdoors on good days. Perfect time for field trips is during a pandemic where people can spread out. Next time the keep the parks open and order police to facilitate mobile living not send them off on their way to a state closed parks. The craziness comes from not having national policies on anything that the country is a harbinger of lunatics.
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  3239. I'd like to see a video that explains what the beginning of this virus in the positive sense. People should recognize that constitutional governments such as that of the EU and the US are legal institutions not social ones. The changes being made in society are coming from the changes in the way work is carried out in society.  People will be working from home and those industries where jobs cannot be performed at home will go out of business.  History suppresses certain branches of industry as it also promotes the development of new ones.  China builds hospitals in less than two weeks is an example of a government that is not a constitutional republic but one that is a social institution responding to social needs in a proactive manner. Instead of spending resources on defense because of national conflicts, government can spend resources on meeting human needs. When work and society are transformed, the family is transformed, requiring a transformation of government to become a central organizer and planner to have all the needs in society met. Humanity arrives at the 21st century and 2020 is that transitional moment that breaks away all the things of the 19th century we still use today. This new way of work will call into question the need for the old economy. Why do you need a stock market or a central bank, or a boss? Why will we need school boards determining school taxes when school buildings are unnecessary when all one needs WiFi and a lap top to educate children all over the world? Why do we even need money to represent working time when work is no longer used to make goods for exchange? Why the need to retain all the things the old economy needed before the virus when the virus has changed the way we work and live giving birth to a new economy? From the changes in work and family our needs will change and in turn, the needs change our products as we become more accustomed to finding meaning in our new family arrangements, less divorce, less juvenile delinquency, less suicide, less depression, less loneliness. With less of the present-day maladies in society there is less of a need for massive military and police institutions expenditures. The major focus will be agriculture, the area of human activity vital to human survival. Search for a better life comes to an end. No more mass migration for societies ravaged by war the need to get them re-oriented to the new way of life the new international mission. Why will we need nuclear weapons if societies are finding more contentment at home? I see many benefits to this crisis. Our fears are really about losing the old way of life we have become accustomed to living. The second benefit to this virus is the environmental change, improving nature as it gets a chance to recover from human damage. Less to no fossil fuel emissions, less chances of infestation, disease and a strengthening of the human body's immune system through the increase of oxygen in our atmosphere and as we know from the paleontological record a greater diversity of life, and a general slowing down of climate change and oceans rising.
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  3242. A mode of production would be the social form of interaction between human beings and their tools ( forces of production) that the professor finds at one end of the polarity, people with property and at the other end people without property but this is not right, because the capitalist and the worker are owners and own property. But for Marx the Earth is a force of production. Anything that produces in order to consume and consumes in order to produce constitutes a force of production. How social institutions interact with this interrelation is the problematic for capitalism. Illusion versus Reality: Both capitalist and workers are equals recognized by the law as owners of property is the illusion, but in production the two co-owners become unequal partners is the reality. Why? The worker after getting a job is now engaged in the physical transfering of capital invested in overhead, machinery, tools, materials, etc., to a product intended for sale. The sale product has a lot of money tied up into it that cannot be converted into cash if it stays in the workplace. After producing a product the capitalist returns to the market for this conversion to complete itself. The professor forgot that labor-power is the commodity unique to capitalist relations and it is a form of property that cannot be found anywhere else but in human beings. The commodity labor-power is not the same thing as the labor of workers actually working on the job. That work is the work of the capitalist and it is a process of producing surplus-value as it is producing things useful for human beings, and labor in that process becomes the value producing agent for the creation of surplus-value, lose this and you do lose the distinction made early on in Marx, between use-value and value in the commodity from which more complex social institutions emerge from two-kinds of surplus value capitalist and worker depend on becomes the difference between labor that produces use-values and value-producing labor inside a period of 8 hours. A capitalist is legally bound by a fixed period of time but not legally bound to cheapen the life of the workers in order to produce this surplus-value. Unfortunately this is what we are seeing today with respect to genocide and individuals profiting from genocide; a process of accumulation by a process of desecrating human life. Getting rich by killing people is as cheap as life can get in the capitalist enterprise.
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  3267. I doubt the Democrats would have been willing to meet with Kim. So rigid is their ideological world that a villain is required. A villain of some sort is a permanent feature of the liberal democratic ideology. Someone or thing to rationalize their idea of imperialism. Hillary would have been insisting China make democratic liberal reforms agitating Taiwan to break away, and that would have plummeted US-SINO relations into an abysmal war in the Pacific. The only thing that might have stopped Hillary in her tracks is the threat of nuclear war, but as far as acknowledging her faults, forget it. The world would have been stuck in a rigid place of continuing tensions till something disastrous broke open the impasse. This is all about the Pacific becoming the next greatest highway of trade for the US. Asia is the final frontier for western expansion. Britain gets a piece of it with the revival of railroad container transport on the route of the ancient spice trade. I never liked Trump but he seems to realize or his advisors realize this is the last hurrah for capitalism. Reducing nuclear weapons is the next logical guarantee that US-Sino relations remain mutually beneficial and balanced. But here's the problem, for every one nuclear warhead a given villain country possesses the US would have the relinquish four nuclear warheads is how deeply armed the US is. This will never occur under the Democrats and it remains to be seen if a step in this direction happens under the republicans. World pressure is in favor of de-escalation. The century has two choices, a continuation of the 20th century or a new form of international relations of east meets west. I suspect it will by virtue of the the fact that American corporations.
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  3270. Machines produce products. The copy machine is the camera's machine counter-part. The copier itself is a product and the product produces a product in the copy. The use of a copy machine preserves so many professions that rely on paper and copies it creates a perpetual effective demand. Only the raw material for paper involves nature and human labor in the harvesting of wood and that takes place in other countries where the wood is in abundance. Wood extraction in the rain forest by industry accelerates the destruction of the rain forest. Machines are ubiquitous and pervasive and intrusive to the extent that our lives are dictated by them. The human element of spontaneity and free will vanishes before us. We are controlled by machines by a security oriented social system built around them and by the social system built around what they are as the property of a particular individual or company. Machines that make machines is another stage of human progress that eliminates human labor. Labor-processes adapted to machines is a machine process involving less skilled labor produce more product. These machine processes produce a finished product in abundance, But that abundance is measured in GDP by what portion of it is sold. Measuring only what is sold leaves undetected the up-side of modern industry in its accomplishments of infinite progress of material wealth with less labor required to feed and cloth the population. For all intents and purposes the work processes that are run by machines are nearly an automatic process that frees up people with more time to get involved in other activities. Continuous production is an advantage to society, assuming Congress passed laws to promote this productivity to end poverty, this would be step forward for a more healthy and balanced society. This would lead to the eradication of crime, drugs, and poverty in society. A bold new social program toward a new social order comes up against the barrier of the ownership of machinery as a separate class.This class benefits from the discovery of an eternal source of energy used to power the system of machines on a continuous basis. Slave holders in America numbered 300, 000, a minority controlled 20 million federal US army soldiers to extend slavery into territories. See the Kansas-Nebraska Act 1859. The machine holders take the same position the slave holders took controlling the destinies of 325 million people through the instrumentality of the state.
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  3275. Ever wonder what people would look like without eyebrows...think about it the next time you are talking someone face to face. Automation's double role is never analyzed by anyone in the Left, ignored by the Right, as the key source to wealth creation it is kept a secret by the heirs of the first owners of the means of production dating back to the 15th century the early origins of capitalism itself. Until now. Right of property is the right of intellectual property. In the present historical period automation is non-issue to Koch, Tillerson, Trump, Pruit, Mnuchin , men who are interested in American capitalism retreating from imperialist policies into national policies and this means opening up America's lands to mining, steel, and commercial exploitation. Beyond this these men can give a rat's ass about what Nick Dearden of the global justice organization want or demand, yet, automation is the key to understanding how the working class is exploited and how these American industrialists get rich. Talking more about this will help educate the working class to realize they are the key to closing the gap in wealth and ownership. People can get rich in other commercial schemes but one sphere where they become really rich, a minority of ultimate rich, a class onto themselves, is by ownership of the means of production and through the exploitation of labor. The world can fall into the hands of a few in the sphere of production. The dirty work both in deed and in mind, all the world's resources flow in and do not flow out. Interestingly, a Single Payer slogan is similar. Everyone in and nobody out solves the health crisis. Even if it is only two men who operate the strip mining technology of today versus thousands of miners boring holes in the earth, the material output is what counts. The economist do not even factor into their equations of wealth and progress the MP. The MP is a flat 0. In your face they will tell it has no impact on growth, it just displaces labor, poor guys. Growth is something of what you make it. Personal happiness amidst destitution. The MP is not measured and its progress as a new tool in mankind's tool box is not measured at all. So what is measured? Labor time from its application measures wealth, 1/100, 2/100, 3/100, 4/100, then 5, 6, 7%, crash, new automation extracting more surplus labor-time till there is none for the workers themselves, a vanishing human factor in production, mass poverty the excrement of machinery and technology. So needless to say the solutions to poverty, social and economic justice, are right in the hands of the ultimate ultra-super rich. I think Dearden gets this, but not in a way that conceives the actual historical potential the MP can play in restructuring world production to get humanity back on the right track of progress, certainly Americans don't get it and the entire European working class is freaking out at the possibilities of a another Hitler, they've gone off kilter and sick of the bullshit handed down to them from all the G20 governments. They are going to make socialism if they have to beat it out of the heads of parliamentarians. Unfortunately, its like the blind leading the blind, because the G20 have no clue the MP holds the key. I would say otherwise if there was evidence of rules that promoted the forces of production but there is no such evidence, its all been beat up the bad guy politics. They attack it with legal and binding rules to tighten its applications rather than to reapply it applications by freeing it from ownership so that the world is no longer denied the product of its own labor. Are humans stupid then? Of course they are when separated from their own labor, i., automation, when they are not they are geniuses using their tools against nature to eek out a living and subsistence and politics becomes a philosophy of life. The same applies in agriculture, control the MP and you control the world. The question should be a statement, our ancestors connected to the MPs historically were way smarter than we are separated from the MPs today because of that we are going to perish by own product! True phenomenon occurring here for extra terrestrials to archeologically piece together what happened to a species and a planet that suddenly their disappearance cut off the evolutionary progress. Fortunately, they have Youtube to help figure it out. Thus I say imagine the faces of people without eyebrows, looking at the one source of pleasure of tragic comedy, the faces of people with eyebrowsI In understanding the beleaguered masses they can no longer endure the ailment of alienation as Dr. Marx diagnosed. Our problem is the economic category that does measure wealth in production in three laws; the most prominent law of which is, less labor presupposes a high level of automation and output not in the form of free time but in the form of labor-time accumulated, or he called it, surplus labor-time. What measures GDP is labor-time, how much excess labor-time denied to humanity. No one pays attention to the material substratum of automation but it is the national interest that requires the role of force to access and control the raw material. These men do not insist in breaking down trade barriers because they feel like it, it only because the country contains an element that leads to the basis of economic power. The role of automation, is two roles in one action, it creates free time that becomes for its owner surplus labor-time as the property of the capitalist. The worker or nation is deprived of surplus labor-time, thus its second role as a creator of wealth and free time. People can live in harmony in the world when the world as their product is no longer the source of their anxiety and separation. War and degradation is an expression of this dilemma. This is all the understanding the world needs to lift the dilemma. The super rich can claim hypocrisy and dismiss the left, if you have no answer to a guy like Trump who comes along and he tells you in your face to sit down, shut up, you're fake, hypocrite, you love what we produce no one forced you to buy my products and the entire movement against capitalism is stumped because you did buy all the stuff imperialism produces, that part of the ailment, would take a lifetime of psychological treatment, internalizing this contradiction and further repress the yearning for unification. The conditions are ripe for this new world restructuring and the owners of the MP's are ripe for social suicide and mass destruction. Choose.
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  3276. In the final analysis "time' is the common denominator in all production. An Indonesian worker is paid a dollar an hour is an example of how time operates against the women in the factory. Factory time robs them of time in general. Low wages forces free time to become more working time, time as duration of labor, expended in the factory on the basis of longer hours of labor entraps women from developing beyond submissive social roles. Time is money to the capitalist exploiting the labor-time of women. They produce for the factory owners, given Indonesia is a patriarchal society, most likely a him and not a her is the usurper of labor. He receives a greater quantity of value than given in exchange for the work of the women paid by a wage. And in the face of America's own history of labor struggles against its own capitalists, its young generation are the guiltiest usurpers of the labor or women and children. Downright immoral. The rule of 'time' as a theory of compensation for labor measures the value of a wage in terms of the market basket of goods is violated by the rule of labor-time in the factory. This is true wherever factory production is capitalist production. But Ivanka Trump is not the owner of the Indonesian factory. G3, the retail chain store owners, do not own her merchandise, they carry it as their product line in stores and Ivanka is paid a fortune on its total sales. How this new form of capitalism operates is by controlling consumption or in liberal language, i.e., markets where products sell dear. Products can only sell dear in markets where credit is used as a substitute for higher wages. Thus consumers are entrapped by banks and forced to use credit borrowing as a means of circulation. This is a situation that is rigged for the rich only. It is clear Indonesia has joined the rest of western culture that splits people of the same national origin into groupings of the oppressed and the oppressors. Workers there are perilously oppressed by their own capitalist factory owners. A clear case of a female based class struggle the mass of people in the West pay no regard, more especially the so called 'feminists' in the West. The sale of Ivanka's brand of clothes like any other celebrity brand name involves many class struggles often ignored at the factory level. If not for the celebrity status of the Trump name, these class struggles would be whitewashed down to 'personal responsibility' that working people's lives are savagely abused by the tyranny of the 'factory clock' and the effects of labor exploitation. The presence and persistence of the exploitation of the labor of women, children, is used in a political controversy by enemies of Trump as an 'opportunity' to derail power is a cynicism in western capitalism. Both right and left criticize each other of the same evil they both perpetrate is the height of hypocrisy. Time is everything and labor-time is specific in that the immediate work of a person in a concrete labor process is everything to that worker, it is important for social reproduction and development that employment is consistent and worth the time involved, while factory time purchased from the worker as wage labor renders employment a threat to survival to that worker on a daily basis is a reality all capitalists deny.
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  3281. Well, the comments here are jaded! The system is rigged and filled with corruption to the core are the cries. The whispers are cynical. The bourgeois institutions are inept. Unable to stop a Cholera epidemic, unable to end human trafficking across the Mexican and American border, unable to close the gap between rich and poor, and unable to stop the total annihilation of life on earth! Some feel so jaded, 'unable' is a word too soft to use against 'bourgeois institutions'. They attack the citadels of power as 'unwilling' to rectify the aberration of contradictions period. They say a war on humanity is being waged through the Fed, the IMF, the ECB. And it it is fast becoming a restructuring of the old social classes into new ones giving way to a world dominance of a few money suppliers. But! I say to these conspiracists, by no coincidence, are the usurpers in possession of all the world's resources in their raw form are to be exempt as culprits. Controlling matter guarantees the world can be shaped by their ideas. Unbelievably stupid to ignore real economic power and control is in owning the innovations of science. Whoever owns the bone owns the tribe as chief. The tools supplies the material need the new structure of society can exist. We enter the new age of geologic science from a point of existence of an old age of capitalism where these citadels of power clamor for a place. Strip mining is an innovation, our laws permit people to speculate on the innovation for the sale of tons of coal or iron, metals for a profit. Why innovations are purchased has to do with Congress not enacting laws prohibiting its purchase for private ownership and the same goes for GMO, an innovation in agriculture that hardly any human knowledge is required for cross fertilization. Farming has become as rote and monotonous as factory work has become partitioned into detailed operations. Low cost of production guarantees an edge over the competition is all that matters. Eventually all these competitors will have no competition and just one monopoly corporation in every sphere of life. But, according to the inept governments, this time monopolies won't get broken up selling off its subsidiaries. Stupidity runs high outside of Congress these days, by the time the American people 'get hip to it' the anti-trust laws could be rendered unconstitutional along with everything else that was constitutional. A constitutional convention is only four states away for the republicans. In this racetrack they have a lap and half lead on the American people. This new arrangement of social classes, a few usurpers using the many worldwide, leaves out many who do not profit from the productivity of innovation and have no money to invest in it drives a new compulsion forward, more war for the creation of new and cheaper labor markets. Perpetual war to extinction.
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  3283. Thanks, I would remind people that the US laboring population never had a labor party of its own. Not like Europe. It's class consciousness is anti-class consciousness in a conservative direction. It never advanced its own political interests nor made its economic interests political except on an ideological basis. Its experience with revolution is counter revolution of which it was subjected itself. It has been a passive element throughout the history of elites governing it that its pent up anger could overnight become class conscious and revolutionary at the treatment it receives and the condition it is in if worsened under Trump. When it is ready to vote with its feet it can it begin thinking about taking power. But there is no head, no leadership, or political party to take its message across states and into cities and towns to steal voters from liberals, conservatives, republicans and democrats, to build support to end the wars, build industry and end food and material deprivation. It has no supporters to chip away at the artificial divisions to begin dismantling the bourgeois order and embark on a new order. Most Americans are coming from a place of unity that everyone in America starts out equally and the divisions were solved long ago. Unions were necessary in the beginning but no longer are they necessary today and they willingly give up unionization. Slavery was abolished when Lincoln emancipated them and when civil rights laws were enacted. Americans believe a black person is not free in society when he or she are free on paper. A real learning process is necessary, a form of mass education to shatter the illusions and myths.
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  3287. The good news is that there will always be a strong opposition to the billionaire class in the movement formed under Bernie Sanders, they may be discouraged in defeat now but someone will arise to re-awaken their defection from electoral politics for a stronger comeback. The right wing will have a less easy time ramming legislative policies down the throats of the American people. The bad news is that time is not on the side of the American people nor on the side of the masses of people in the world facing starvation and destruction which is the reason for a total divestment from the bourgeois order, to stop it in its tracks, a pause in the counter momentum running in reverse throwing people off the train as it derails. The second most important reason is the scale of the train and its counter momentum is too large and powerful it can squash reforms in a second. They can legislate the minimum wage downward below subsistence to subjugate labor in one legislative session. A progressive movement must challenge the political force of capital with an equal force, namely, its economic force en masse, take back its productive power of labor and its power of consumption the rich depend on to realize profits, and grab hold of the levers of capital, namely, technology and science, price, profit, interest on capital, rent, wages to conform proportionally to those incomes. These are the levers regulating the American public in the hands of the political engineers of the train that are to be wrestled back into public control.
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  3293. The systemic problem is an internal problem in that officers are trained from a premise of fear of the public. The public is held in contempt by law enforcement officials, they design training programs that instruct young inexperienced officers the specific types of crimes mostly reported versus those that are under reported and concluding society is not safe. Any citizen is potential threat is the running ideology. Training programs come from academia. Academicians are usually good at citing a source. Stinson did not cite his source for his claim and how he came to the conclusion that a person is killed by a police officer every three minutes in the US. Not even Congress has a complete picture of crime in America specifically the data of police homicides. No senator can write a bill to reform a problem that is structured on a privilege of unaccountability, to answer to nobody is a special social status, when the privileges are unreported. There are no consequences for this behavior, it is encouraged by the system itself. The frequency and rate of police homicides cannot be established, therefore, needed more than reform, is a mandatory reporting of police homicides to get a true picture of reality and from that premise a total dismantling from the ground up of an antiquated law enforcement that has its origins in the Pinkertons. Academia designs program based on data from the Uniform Crime Statistics. Cops do not report police homicides and the data compiled paints a false picture of reality. Senators can't write bills to address a problem and if they did then there are senators who would oppose bills that challenge 'white privilege and power' in society because 'white privilege and power' makes them the subject of any type of far reaching bill aiming itself at 'white privilege and power'. If the data is false so is the educational training component and so are the law enforcement agencies and its new non-veteran cops.
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  3294. This international wave of virulent right wing conservatism that is now out in the open covers the earth's surface with blood, violence, and destruction in the name of free markets and austerity is a means for the concrete manifestation of more commodity-markets using money mediating the way the working classes around the world complete transactions. This is done through developed institutions created to facilitate new commodity exchanges, opening new markets for the conversion of products of labor into commodities at home and abroad, this becomes the dominant feature of capitalism with a life of its own. With a life of its own, it is important to understand how the elements of the labor process, 1., worker, 2., subject of labor, 3., automation, involve nature and mankind at the most general level defines human activity by labor, and at the particular factory level automation lengthens the working day promotes higher amounts of product output, forms a continuous surplus for its owner(s)because workers have been paid for the labor-power. Workers are in a position to advance productivity as their own property as a general union of labor and the means of production, at which point, capitalists are unnecessary, or move to exchange labor-power for a share or profits along with a wage, this would a restoration of liberal status quo, or quite possibly as a way to abolish the wage system entirely, a complete ownership of the subject of labor and the means of production would be the extreme end. These measures would stop the formation of new commodity-markets and the conversion of products into commodities... But at the present rate of exploitation it does not appear time is on anyone's side before degradation makes it impossible to live. The workers have to make a decision and act on it sooner than they like, or we all live under barbarism.
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  3295. Our revolution Nina heads is an internal revolt of the changing of the guard in the Democratic party. Nothing more than a "hey, move over, let me drive the car' revolution, a mere casting aside its old guard. Not a real social revolution at all. I have to question anyone black aligning themselves with a party of compromise and trickle down reforms given the history of the Democratic party from its birth during the early start of the Civil War. Democrats traded off with Tories territories, Missouri for Maine where slavery could exists and not exist, for the sake of expanding the Union and industrialization was done only to gain more state status to strengthen the Union but slave emancipation was never enforced to this day since the Missouri Compromise and the counter legislation of the Nebraska-Kansas Act of Congress in 1829, or the Emancipation Proclamation of Lincoln, that is a long time to have emancipation deferred. Not until Dr. King did finally blacks gained rights and in one fell swoop lost them to Democratic incompetence. Our Revolution is certainly not a proletarian revolution because there are no proletarians in the Democratic party just special interest groups, lobbyists, and corporations. Democrats are in only four states and not one single organizing office is located in a proletarian neighborhood like Detroit or Camden NJ. Like they say, these pockets of proletarian places used to be campaign stops when the neighborhoods were clean and not devastated by revolutionary reforms a mere 40 years ago. Nice places to visit but they will not live in them. I never heard any black Democrat talk about the rise of proletarian movements in Greece, Chile, Brazil, Argentina, Puerto Rico, Venezuela, Cuba, in connection to the dispossession of their own people by American corporate banks, forget it, Democrats never pushed to lift any of these oppressive policies on a consistent basis, it is always a trade off, haggling, bargaining, quid pro quo. In a nutshell they show a lack of affinity with those at the lower rungs of society. The word 'revolution' has become a commercial brand no different than Trump is a commercial brand name. Even the conservative right wing used the term revolution in their political ascendency. And revolutions did happen. The Reagan Revolution culminated in a Young Frankenstein elected into the White House and its brand name is , 'No More Taxes'. Everyone other than the proletarians in America has a revolution going on for themselves. Revolutionary austerity on the right and revolutionary reform of the left. A business revolution, technological revolution, a revolutionary diet, revolutionary new pill. But a revolution in the way we work and live a proletarian grown-up can identify with does not exist at this time in the USA. The absence of a proletarian revolution in fact makes America's proletarians the object of revolution, never the main and primary subject of revolution. The term is very popular among proletarians in mind as a wishful thinking, an abstract concept, it exists in mind only not as a practical and concrete necessity for survival and deliverance from oppressive forces. Proletarians are far more inventive and willing to externalize their ideas through invention. They take chances if an idea will fix the problem. Sometime the chance they take backfires in their face. But nine times out of ten the ideas they generate become the standard for the world anyway. Big business does not nor are they inventive. A proletarian invents a unique answer to a mass problem by trial and error and with little capital and practical sense compared to the oversaturated skimming of capital in waste and fraud that corporate Americans are ladened by a solution costs very little comparatively. They re the visionaries who get smothered and stamp out. Proletarians look toward the future, tomorrow, how will overcome yesterday's hassle and never experience it again is their logic. They are experts in the forever fix it mode of being while their counterparts exists in a trapped state of being, frozen and condemned to repetition. Society would benefit greatly with proletarians in charge, they have no malice or desire to abuse people, steal or rob wealth, cheat because all they know is how to produce and produce effectively and anything they make on their own is by instinct a 'social product'. Something we all need. Truly the most selfless social class in existence on Earth, the complete opposite of what we have now in both wings of the bourgeois world. Not too mention food. Nothing better in life than proletarian kitchens cooking up stuff far beyond a French Chef can imagine, in fact, all over the world celebrity Chefs travel the world to learn the tricks to proletarian cooking that hunger worldwide would be abolished in a week if they owned more than two pots and pan. This is my rant like it or not. Peace my brothers and sisters in revolution.
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  3300. The momentum for world revolution is intensifying. Capitalism can easily be overthrown now that it has no socialist rival as powerful as the US. I say this because the working classes can now directly confront the ruling classes, whereas in the past they had the Liberal State and the USSR, suppressing the class struggle giving some stability to the world, a sense of order under two powers which has now completely vanished. All the remnants of the Cold War, are gone, even the Liberal State has vanished and literally the ruling class dominating the central government in Washington isn't even an executive branch of all the ruling classes, each nation with its own ruling elite are acting out of survival for themselves. Some national elites are really feeble and others desperate, everyone for himself is their battle cry, because their own working classes are confronting them en masse and this exposes the real agenda of the right wing, its political aims, function and purpose were cliques promoting the growth of and for the super rich exclusively. Americans will have a great revelation realizing capitalism dead once they expose the internal government of the superrich and its military apparatus the lies and deceptions endured over the last century in human terms was a loss that never should have never happened. But Henry VIII should never have happened, Napoleon, Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, and under the rule of the working class, they never will. The political structures are destroyed and need to be thrown out start afresh with new political structures that are anti-ruling class, people based and democratic in nature, in some cases, perilous death awaits them or permanent imprisonment, thus all the ruling classes actions are 'desperate measures for survival'. Facing a reality with sober senses the cloud of ideological indoctrination blows over to usher in a new age of saving the world and humanity by a class that can no longer keep its old skin given to them by the old order and becomes, in a word, revolutionary.
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  3318. Standing Rock's native American resistance is under surveillance and COINTELPRO, this fact, will not produce outrage in the American public. Not as long as the American public is already subjugated by law enforcement and the party of law enforcement. Everywhere the sign 'Support our Police' are on suburban lawns. There is absolutely no evidence in the American public of an organized response to the sum total of repressions in this era of their struggle. Thus far, the American public observe these incidents as spectators not as participants. It is a contradiction that protest strategies will deliver justice when justice serves the economic interest of corporations. The scenario is clear the pipeline will be installed and some years down the road the pipeline will burst, leak, and be fixed rendering the land uninhabitable, tribes and other communities will be compensated and dispersed to break up the unity they developed, a pipeline as all products manufactured in the United States are planned to last only so long. Did Katrina residents mobilize to expel BP, did the coastal fisherman lead a fight or just simply waited till the compensation was distributed? This is the greatest country in the world for capitalism to exist. Its working class is the complete opposite of those filthy rebellious Europeans bent on clean air and equality. Americans would rather be clean themselves and water and air be dirty. There is no revolutionary backbone in this generation of Americans, never was. How is it possible a people on their own land can be labeled as 'insurgents' begs the question how was it possible for Henry VIII to forcibly evacuate millions of peasants off the land to give the factories in Manchester, the labor it needed to jump start capitalism yet that is what was done through a series of parliamentary enactments? To be an insurgent really means the beginning of mass expropriation. How can a simple, humble peasant be criminalized for growing food for his family and selling off his excess to get ahead in life is the same question. I know, big words, not good, more simply, get off the land or be jailed and sentenced to death was how, brute force. I can understand an illiterate 16th century peasant complying with the King's edicts, simply packing up the wife and kids and going off seeking work in factory mills for 16 hours a day, but I cannot understand how a 21st century average working class American can be reduced to the level of a peasant without an ounce of mass resistance.
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  3321. In most revolutionary periods the forces of production are more widely consumed for the production of surplus value as a way of preserving the class position of the entire capitalist class relative to the State. Productive power is concentrated into fewer hands. In this way bourgeois society begins to dismantle the state of its legislative controls over capital and begins to amplify inequities in salaries and in communities. Capital is a social relation between capital and labor and a duality of science and technology is present in that social relation. Playing a role as, innovator of production as an element of latent progress and as potential to end inequities. However, no matter how productive capitalism is material deprivation is its outcome, which obviously, hinders social reproduction, therefore, the link between the forces of production and material deprivation is expressed under capitalism in the form of class inequities. This aspect of the relation ought to be a critical component of any critique of capitalism. For the concern is the development of the human species that the forces of production facilitate a high degree of productiveness of labor in combination with the instruments of labor; to afford a change in the social relations of work. This is a big task to harness the energies of labor in society to think uniformly of their role in production not only as common users of the means of labor but also as the agency for a new society. There is a long tradition of economic thought began in the late 16th century at the very start of the age of capital which dates from 1660 to the present. Marxists praised capitalists for making advancements but more to the point their observations are unanimous that capitalism, despite its advancements and contradictions, contains a rational premise for a new society in the area of production. United labor should lead the rest of society after it restores the original unity, its means of labor and subsistence, toward coop ownerships in agriculture recombining individual producers in industry but also, a re-orientation of the organization of production for the development of the human mind in general. This way capitalism already in its late stages of development is divorced from the forces of production and these forces divested into a vast arrangement of alternative uses, re-orienting humanity away from the characteristic fallacy of economic growth of excess individual consumption and into a future society based on practical intelligence toward an even economic development of world systems. Basically a new form of property relations is critical at this juncture as time runs out for the human race. Humanity is 200,000 years old the Earth 2.3 billion years old. The world and humanity will rebound as something else without the destructive influences of corporations but how much of the resources are left to accommodate 9 billion people will require a change in the methods of production based on need not profit. Given the descent of mankind through capitalism many species went instinct by means of climate and environmental degradation mainly because humans were and still are self destructive.
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  3357. Wishful thinking. Weapons made here end up into the hands of criminals both legal ones and illegal ones, the people would have to fight with sticks and stones if they decided not to run away. The people never got the support the US has given to “these people” not for decades, they never got it, it went to elites, the rich, the military...circulated to gangs through the sale of Fentanyl and pot, this is a fact. The proof of this is in their militaries, they are equipped and outfitted with American gear and weapons, modernized, which they could not afford on the merit of their own devalued currencies. AID was used to buy the services of US military advisors and companies and training. These republics were turned into client states. AID never went to the peasant farmer. A refrigerator in “these people’s “ home market costs a fortune, do you think US weapons and military gear can be bought with pesos? Sure but they would need a billion pesos for ten machine guns. If you accept the premise, all our millions in AID spent was spent to arm an ally, so that US corporations can sell higher to us in the American market the products they buy cheaper from them. Buy cheap, sell dear. Than you are enlightened, if not, you are asleep, groping in the dark for answers. Even today, despite all that is going on, they still bamboozle, trick, lie upon, the US taxpayer. Now that you know this aspect of the whole truth what is your opinion now? This is the truth you need to face.  @msudawgma 
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  3364. This is not a generation ages 30 to 40 who see this as a political problem. They did not grow up with a social consciousness. And American legislators are a breed of lawyer who do not try to solve social problems in a political way. Lawyers/legislators/politicians are trained, instructed, paid to not social problems at all. Local legislators are worse that no matter how may times a building falls or a hurricane devastates a coastline do nothing to change zoning laws and local officials, i.e., county managers et., in most states are too religious to even sound the alarm of an impending disaster. What will happen is FEMA public funds will get cut in the name of servicing the government’s enormous debt before the government lets it go dry from all the claims and private insurers by high premiums will insure the rich. A debt made larger sending weapons overseas. Mar-A-Lago will be covered others not as rich will not. In the end the allocation of public funds for disasters is more than a case of politicians not coming together to legislate remedies to social problems, the allocation rests on a class differences, as to who will get the support. I know this is the scenario that will happen because the planet continues to heat up and ocean levels continue to rise that next seasons hurricanes will strike with greater ferocity and the government’s priority is not solving the social problems of the American people. The next flood even more powerful, the next drought more severe until the whole society is basically turned into a refugee camp filled with Americans who are not rich and are not white.
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  3378.  @pleiadesstarr453  The news about the pandemic is not fake....there was a virologist, two virologists, one from China (Wuhan) and the other Australia (Queensland) studying Bats. Article in Scientific American appeared featuring the Bat Lady’s work on Bats and was deleted at the time the question into the virus’s origins 2 years ago. Meanwhile in Queensland Australia, Bats were swamping the town with feces to the extent people had to sweep the crap to ope their doors it was that bad. Park’s were closed. A real mess and fears stoked by infectious bat disease. The virologist in China goes by the nickname ‘The Bat Lady”. Fauci’s association with the Bat Lady is in the way of funding the Wuhan Bat Lady in her Wuhan Lab of money acquired through the US military, and this is when and where the virus goes public. Fauci was not the amenable virologist he appeared to be and the public adored. The fake news part about this is concealing the true story from the Public of the virus’s origins. Why the Energy Department weighs in I think has to do with the general disorganization and incompetence of the American government. But it is definitely a subject for a good reporter to learn why other agencies are acting like the lead government institutions. As when the FED treasurer Yelle went to Ukraine to deliver a billion bucks to them. As the administrative branch of government is made weak other agencies of the government come forward. Could be the beginning of the end of the presidency as the top office of the nation.
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  3394. Gold is not reflected in dollars. What is reflected in dollars are commodities. It is not that the currency has increased in quantity and is chasing more goods on the market. No. You would be mistaken. Inflation has nothing to do with the high price levels for gold. It’s the currency reflecting the values in commodities, less labor in individual commodities that the high price levels for gold are high. World market price for gold is higher in relation to gold because vast quantities of commodities are made in less time than gold. Because commodities are expressed in dollars gold prices are high and will go higher the more commodities have less and less value. Gold has its own productivity,---comes out of the ground at a certain rate is a constant magnitude that is being compared to items with less value in them. What makes less value in commodities is the innovation individual corporations apply to their production involves less of the value creating substance, namely, the ratio between people and machines has changed. Commodities have less human labor in them. Before there were more people working that formed the value substance in commodities. Today there are less people working with higher rates of output in industries where there are more machines that the products are cheap to make. If a given nation wants dollars, it has to buy them, and a country of less advanced means would have to give up more of its industries as collateral to buy enough dollars to buy gold, or even trade with the US and other countries. The seller of dollars does not buy its dollars; the seller prints its dollars. This poses an unfair advantage to all buyers of dollars. At some point buyers will buy some other currency that more accurately reflects the real values of the products of all their industries, and the sun will set over the seller who prints dollars for sale.
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  3400. This fracas can be seen as a process of unraveling gender bias in society among non-conservative social groups or it can be seen as a dead end. The only way people are going to get over their own racism and sexism is through a revolution that strives for a human emancipation. The beginning of natural differences in one community. For centuries the Jews had been denied political rights in Western Europe, look at them now denying rights to Palestinians. The Jews exemplify the shortcomings of a political emancipation, it does not go far enough to remove the class divisions in society. Buying into a system did not advance the Jews toward a human emancipation they became victimizers in the course of being abused for so long. Napoleon elevated the Jews to citizenship before the Jews achieved any citizenship status in Germany, and Germany at the time was going through a German Enlightenment period. These were the days of early racism still buried in colonial institutions of European empires was racist to its core. All this gets caught up with talking points against each other and we are acting as subjects not citizens when sides and splits are formed. Divisive maneuvering and when a leadership says nothing all the more suspicious of an external agency lurking in the movement, the divisions deepen to become fertile ground for social control, in fact, it is social control. Masterful and artful social manipulation likely to come from an obvious right wing source with a vested interest in subverting new political movements, moles, operating in the Bernie movement, CIA money is in there somewhere hitting on the more vulnerable to weaken Bernie's growth and popularity as a real and viiable opponent to Trump. Why should these free minded Bernie people retain their own movement when they refuse to aid LBGT people in their own struggle with the established orthodoxy, is a thought all non-conservative elements feel and experience in the context of a divided people. The Women's movement was subverted from its original premise as a class movement by the right wing propaganda machine and turned into a story of the war between sexes not social classes. So be mindful not to repeat the same thing previous generations ignored.
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  3422. The substance of this internal revolt, I believe, is about Senate committee chairs having no power and the Speaker having all the power. What power? The power to bring bills to the floor for a vote. Freedom Caucus does not want to see a picture portrait of McCarthy when they open up the House Rules Book as the only rule in the book. When committees are done reviewing aspects of the American economy in need reform or legislation the Speaker has the power to not snub the committee’s work et al investigations by not bringing bills to a vote, so they can pass, to become legislation. If you are a conservative right winger and want to dismantle social security your committee might come up with a piece of legislation to cut social security and the Speaker will never bring the bill to the floor. Vice versa, committee investigations on the democratic side has a Speaker, Hakeem Jeffries, will not hold the floor from a vote on their hearings, but in becoming legislation brings on the campaign to win over a few republicans. This is where the dirty work of politics comes in...this is when you strong arm or threaten a few republicans to vote in favor of the bill. The democrats have an aggressive method of pushing legislation down the throats of the American people through their representatives. Does the Freedom Caucus mean what they say? Committee assignments mean a lot when you will never have one as an elected senator. It will be a cold day in hell when George Santos heads a committee when he gets sworn, ---the isolation treatment he’ll get will kill his career in the next election. So committee assignments do mean a lot contrary to the words of Gaetz. What NY-ers need are ballot initiatives to make recall elections the law so the state does not waste a senate term occupied by a sitting duck with have no effect of representation in Congress while he is there. What is this internal revolt mean? We saw what it means when LA City Council could not function without all its members and do its business the homeless problem in LA got worse and more infrastructure was damaged from storms the city is crippled and relying on private contractors for work does not happen was a microcosm of what happens when Congress cannot function; the national economy and the foreign economy intersect in conflicts and the Federal Government is helpless to intervene. Good video...Jimmy as a guest on his own show...is brilliant.
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  3423. "Whoever has the Youth has the future", A. Hitler in Mien Kampf,  (My Struggle). This line is a good starting point to correct one myth around our present-day conflicts average people have about political leaders. In the US, Trump is constantly equated to Hitler for his outrageous statements and policies by his detractors, but I cannot make that analogy at all about Trump or any of the more horrible leaders in the world today. Hitler had an ideology, he was not a businessman or a manager of a large business. Like the other leaders of the time period, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, Ghandi ji, Sun Yat-sen, Mao, were all men of ideology, men of a single-minded purpose. Mussolini wrote: "Revolution is an idea that possesses bayonets". Our present day authoritarian leaders are not ideologues. In my observations, the one country where ideologues are in power and exercise the methods of the ideologues I mentioned to take power by means of coup d état is in the overthrow and exile of Evo Morales of Ecuador. There the acting president, Añez, is a born-again Christian, and Christianity is an ideology, and a woman who vows to inject by law the bible in the youth of the country. Rather, people like Macron, Johnson, Trump, Bolsonaro are not ideologues but are business managers and the difference between business management and international trade or finance, if anyone has taken a course in either subject, should know that the two fields are entirely unrelated. The bad policies we see emanating from their imprint on societies stems from this one fact, in my view. The fact being, an international trade expert knows nothing about running a business and a business manager knows nothing about international trade and finance. They are focused on the particular functioning of a business and run government the allocation of trade and finance in that manner. Consequently, we get a crisis of another kind, unique from the crisis that led to the second world war as a war of political ideologies. We get economic crisis, depressions and stagnation, and mass dislocation of workers and corresponding wealth extraction benefitting business leaders and other kinds of billionaires.   "Whoever has the Youth has the future", is a line that is more appropriate when applied to industries of our day learned from individuals of the past. Whatever industry has the youth has the future and the industries taking possession of the youth in our time is media and the tech industry. The gaming industry, the cell phone industry, the military industry, garment, sports, have the youth.
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  3430. A Vote for Trump will have two major and severe consequences for American people. The first is a tariff on imports that will force every American to pay up more in price for the same product that is American made. American manufacturers do not sell direct to the Public but through agents and dealers who add to the price of an American product. The second negative effect a vote for Trump would entail is the death of the American Gulf Coast Fishing and Farm Industry resulting from more ‘drill baby drill” policies on the Gulf of Mexico the spills and big rigs tear up the coniferous habitats of shrimp in the Gulf Coast. The disappearance of shrimp is a vote for Trump. There are social effects to having a demagogue like Trump in charge. Protectionism is one part of the problem, the other part is the shrinking size of the US workforce. Harris refers to this shrinking workforce as in need of “opportunity”, she is right, there is no opportunity for the workforce under the economic conditions of the past 45 years. As the economic slowdown procedes breaking up and changing how America does business is the least kind of policies we need. The policies needed are how America works, how to expand this workforce, adding value in communities versus extracting value from them, leaving them desperate and broke. There are only different classes of workers stuck in different industries serving a life-sentence while the expectation this workforce has for itself is “opportunity”. A vote for Trump will further shrink this workforce, millions more thrown into poverty, homelessness, shoeless, and mentally unstable the whole society is a hot house for the mentally sick. We can go deeper into this but suffice it say, a vote for Trump is a death sentence for Americans.
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  3442. The FEMA director Peter Gaynor commands 14,000 employees, several huge federal warehouses that can fill three aircraft carriers stocked with material of all types from A to Z, and 13 government agencies. In short FEMA is a standing army and compared to the US military it is small. The military is a force of 475,000 soldiers and dwarfing the size of personnel of the military is a 1 million man police force in law enforcement all equiped as we have seen on occasion when called out to quell riots full battle regalia. The federal government, therefore, has three huge standing armies. The military has at least the same material but four times the amount of all nations combined, that is 127 nations! This is what makes the US an empire. FEMA alone could outfit the entire US with a hospital system in every state making our ordinary hospital system with all its combined resources the size of the state of New Jersey and with that shrinking, overwhelmed, reduced to the size of Rhode Island. The 14,000 employees include experts of all types, engineers, doctors, medical emergency and police, workers and the army corp of engineers. FEMA could produce material and distribute material. The production of ventillators is a piece of cake if they do not already have them stocked which they do. The society I envision is one where the needs of all citizens can be met for three generations spanning 100 years going forward and a reduced work week from 40+ hours per work of a workforce of 133 million people to a 20 hour work week for 334 million people and not put a dent in the quantity of material and resources the federal government commands. To give you some proof of one small fraction of this productive power see Big Bertha boring the tunnel under Seattle Washington. One machine, a giant drill with a circumference of a 5 story building is run by four operators (4?) at the helm. The whole tunnel project 2 miles long employs a workforce of 800 workers. In fact, of all the parts of the society as a whole the Public has the least down to a bare minimum hand to mouth existence from lack of its rightful share of the material wealth and resources its high level of productivity creates. In my view, the priority that makes the federal government insist the Public rely on the private sector for all its needs is its persistence to be a world empire which in this day and age is doing more harm to the planet and the species as a whole. This epidemic makes me question three things about America in order that trust be restored (1) capitalism or the government's reliance on the private sector, (2) ecology and economic inequality in society, (3) public health.
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  3471. There is a dilemma the American people have to take ownership of, and answer the problem. Americans do not want Big Oil drilling in America. So Big Oil drills abroad. As a consequence, government is used to protect a US national interest, Big Oil cannot go into other countries alone although it is possible but none of the Big Oil executives want to be in the spotlight doing deals with who Americans see as ‘bad guys’ for gas and oil right now. Government is used for that. All the ground work is set up by officials. If the president goes the exchange already happened. The Executives never have to appear in public and can decide the world price of gas and oil without public pressure, and they are not alone in moving their technology equipment abroad. Other industries go too. Textiles was the first when NAFTA was signed. Millions of jobs lost in the domestic economy NAFTA was the first of many continuous blows to follow to debase the US labor force. This feeds into the normal process of capital expansion, that is, to lower the cost of operations, and of the competitor’s. Government is used to find cheap labor abroad or create it at home. In the 80s high technology equipment is manufactured abroad, cars and trucks, parts and tools, at an accelerated rate, Beijing in a thick smog of industrial smoke; the labor conditions are cheaper than the conditions at home and money markets for the stock exchange developed a foreign banking competition in the 90s. Industrialization is a Capitalist Tool to make new rivals and deals, at the expense of social development for the US labor force.
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  3501. The government works for the ruling class and the ruling classes work against each other in a world of coercive laws of competition. In fact, they use one another to annihilate each other is more exact of a picture. The reason there is competition among the ruling class for whom the government works is the double effect the working class has on the capitalist class when it doubles its capacity to work for their employers. An increase in the unit price is possible when workers produce a value of work of 8 hours in 6 hours. The difference of 2 hours value is the surplus-value. Elon Musk is making a Tesla for $24Gs. A cheaper Tesla made at a lower unit price per car than the competition’s average car. Employers do have the edge. Tesla employees are making this possible for Elon Musk by the increase in productivity they fuel the world of competition headed by their chief in command. The new automation or technology, or the new scientific discovery, doubles labor capacity and output, less hours worked per car, to undercut the competition for a greater mass of surplus-value. Workers can do the same if they owned the automation. Having no other interest other than promoting the automation and they have put together and built a really cool car the unit cost price and sales price would reflect a true ratio between supply and demand, ---who wants the dam car and who doesn’t. When the working class doubles its workload and workers do this almost voluntarily in the US is a habit they should break; it has two separate side effects on the ruling class both social and economic. By increasing worker output, productivity, gives a result of more hours worked per fewer workers. The pandemic did not allow employers to lengthen the working day to keep workers in the office for reasons cited, employers want workers back in the office; but its too late to get them back, the pandemic sent them home and the whole production process by some new innovation had been adjusted to allow a four day work week become a permanent feature in the lives of workers. This is a win for workers and a defeat for employers in the war between bosses and workers. In wars the opponents retreat and attack it is the same in the economic war but there are many new recruits into the workforce not covered by laws and assurances that the class war is bitter scene and conceals slavery and slave production by famous and well known American corporations to be the fate of this slave population who make up a big percentage of the American workforce. Another double effect of increasing productivity; it creates a reserve army of cheap labor during the retreat and for the attack comes back with a lower wage package to offset the 1 day loss of surplus-value. Capital and the Ruling Classes are never idle to satisfy needs that are not your’s and mine and a deal is only offered for some future acquisition it can profit from.
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  3582. A economic decline does not have to be catastrophic.  Its not all an epic tragedy that the life-process of societies come to an end, disintegration of the institutions and laws, economy, are part of the natural cycle in human history. We can come to our end as an empire gracefully, Gary Cooper style. The British did not take their decline to well, it sort of happened, they were no longer the dominant power in the world, pummeled by Germany and destitute. Can an old power restore its power? Biden is doing exactly that and the EU nations are lapping it up. When a nation has a little bit of life left to it there is a potential for a revitalized social whiplash. In the 23rd Century, money in the Star Trek series does not exist and neither do the money owners. Nobody in the Starship Federation becomes a banker, a capitalist or a wage worker, landowner because money, means of production, labor-power, land, the commodities which correspond to those social roles are gone. Land is land and labor is labor and a tool is a tool, all things people need in the Federation to be a federation are not exchange-values. Go to a place like the Congo and the life-cycle of that society is premised on two social classes that mutually exclude each other but are co-dependent on each other. This relationship is a lot more subtle in a place like the US, rich and poor and employer and employee are becoming more distinctly separated social classes but are not co-dependent on each other for their survival the way rich and poor social classes in other societies coming into capitalism as opposed to those older societies leaving capitalism would rather take every one down in the ship with them than to clean up their own act. Because to work and earn was fun and healthy for a generation and like a "Candle in the Wind", Wall Street blew out that flame.
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  3597. Jimmy, billionaires that run everything in the western world is not what is going on. Going on is the wealth from your own labor passing through the hands of the billionaire class before everyone else in society gets their share. Workers are paying the billionaire class a greater value, economists call ‘surplus-value’ than what workers receive in payment from billionaires for services rendered. The workers creatoring that wealth have no share in it, is what is going on Jimmy. We pay the billionaires to work us, and the billionaires pay the rent, wages, taxes, profits and interests, after taking the greater share. This means that you and I, Tom, Dick and Harry, have no share of the wealth we create is one effect and the other effect the wealth we create dominates us like a alien force. The largest share of the wealth is a continuously augmenting share of the annual product. The augmentation happens because yours, mine, individual labor never stops working! Overtime for us is more gravy for them. This set up that makes people believe or think the actual owner of the wealth is the billionaire class even if there has not been a law passed giving the billionaire class the right of ownership to America’s wealth. Property rights get changed not through laws but through revolutions. Reagan made this revolution, we are seeing the fruits of that revolution tested against reality. A billionaire class dominating all the wealth of society constitutes a social revolution by means of concentrating the means and necessaries of life into few hands.
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  3602. Its a serious and huge subject, a study of 3,066 workers by Rand, Harvard and U of Ca in LA, American Working Conditions Survey is the first survey of American workers that is recent and targets specific questions about the work day in general, the study found, common to them all, a hostile management, dangerous conditions, intense physical work, no prospects for aging out well, no control of the schedule of tasks assigned and no control of total work hours worked. A division of labor that separates college educated and non-college educated workers based on privilege that this sample of the working population are found to have in common in their workplaces. The workers are not from the same workplace so there must be some truth to the realities of workplace abuses. The question ought to be at this point after examining the workplace relationships is the class interests involved in the commodity being made and how the people whose commodity is employed for the purpose of being the measure of value in the workplace works against them? Why are workers so disgusted with the quality of jobs because the jobs are a means not an end in itself. Machines and technology purchased by private employers are designed and purchased to increase output. The dichotomy that they supplant labor causes management to compensate for the loss of hands and increase the duration and intensity of work. In a perfect world without private class interests involved in production, machinery and technology would be designed to perfect the skill of a worker and the product of that worker. Instead, objective factors annihilate both. If the workplace, product and worker are employed to measure labor-time than average labor-time rules the particular worker with every new innovation. A person feels this alienation in them as being just a number to the company causing great dissatisfaction among the working population and the need to enforce work arises. Incentives, certain shares, privileges, marketing campaigns, are all forms of making workers compatible with a company's technology and workplace management rules. Rules that are simply designed to absorb the greatest amount of labor from a falling number of workers into their product. At this stage, working in America entails a consequence that is historic when one observes the damage to the environment is permanent from workplace hazards has made the workplace a virtual battle field of which labor and capital are the two opponents and its victims. There are no winners in this game but all lose.
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  3613. Nixon ended the draft for Vietnam because all the middle class baby boomers did not want to go fight. This is what started that generation to oppose the war. There were rich baby boomers and poor ones in the 60s. The poor ones got drafted if not in school and after high school they got drafted. College kids did not get drafted. this is why you got a lot poor working class into college. They knew if they studied they would avoid the draft and get into college. Back then a four year college floated around $5000.00 total tuition. People had the cash back then. My own father walked into a car dealership in Manhattan and bought a Chevy Impala with cash,--$3 Grand, it stunned me to see so much cash that young. Subsequently, many great thinkers came out of that social class, poets, musicians, scholars, Chief justices, they were scared of the draft they studied their asses off. But the poor white dudes from middle and southeastern America were drafted disproportionally higher with black kids in city projects drafted higher than middle class white and black kids living i the same or close to each other. People from two sides of the tracks got together and the war put a wedge between them tore families up. Becoming college educated had nothing to do with Affirmative Action. People like Donald Trump, son of a rich NY real estate builder, got out of the draft and dodged selective service. Rich baby boomers and rich millennials will not fight this war. The generation behind them will and those after them. Working class kids will fight it and the rich will hardly hear about it. They will be off the coast of Almafi Italy, yachting while some black and white kid’s flesh is burned off their face from bombings. Working class kids will die for all the wrong reasons in an immoral war that simultaneously is a threat to the health and well being of the entire world. In the critical sense if you are not in that class and social category you have every reason to oppose war, the oligarchs, democrats and republicans, and nuclear war. You can force the re-instatement of the draft by exerting your social power the way the non-rich baby boomers exerted their social power that brought Nixon down and forced him to resign. Social power is key, you need to organize that generation behind the millennials and get it together.
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  3632. Putin as a right wing nationalist is the most interesting of the bunch, I find. Xi would be another second to Putin.  Russia had traditionally looked to the west for development but it is now expanding east and forming economic ties with China in a really big way. Both China and Russia have communist revolutions in their history, they see as, liberating from past colonial and imperialist forces, and they are not wrong. Whenever the west adopts an anti-Russian stance it gains very little traction from it in the east making the west more defensive. Billionaire ambassodors unless they moonlighted in political science are not trained to see the histories and legacies that form international trade relations in the present -day world. The east represents a definite rival shrinking the size of the world market the west has to divide among themselves.  With the progress Russia and China are economically making the world market for the capitalists nations shrinks. American capitalists would rather join them than fight them as long as profits is the main part of the equation with China and Russia, it seems the Leninist theory of economic central planning appeals to western capitalism. A peculiar acceptance when their governments are anti-planners for society but are all for it planning for themselves and their own institution(s)! I guess the ethos that a worker or peasant should not be so lucky to own more of the weath they produce has to do with the 5-Year Plans Lenin introduced to industrialize Russia. Lenin took all the chance of business failure and causality out of equation. Russia took off and China followed the same path, the Marxists left a legacy and a practice or a discipline here to stay, were way better capitalist than the capitalists. Western politicians were pouring money back into the banks while they were pouring money back into worker and industry. Failure at business in America was a tough shit on you situation. Government did nothing to ensure your business got the business it needed to grow but the Communist party did enure this to the industries emerging in China and Russia. If communism did not have to curve this line of progress by defending itself from external forces and threats Mandarin would be taught in our grade schools.
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  3638. Americans would do themselves well to see the USA as getting more isolated from the world and that... is not a good thing. Its allies are falling apart at the seams. A consequence of isolation is people falling behind other nations in education, science, technology, industry, agriculture. It won’t be Barron Trump or the kids Brad Pitt who fall behind, it’ll be average Americans who will never get the chance of leaving their rundown poverty stricken isolated neighborhood, town or city, and the world and what it offers. The primary economic resources and talent of people in this country is used to keep other nations from developing. This foreign policy relation to the world deprives America’s working class the resources for its own development. There is a bitter end to American capitalism that looks like the end of the world when its really a change in the social relations of the world who are building new markets, new ways to finance production, do trade, commerce, exchange arts and culture, education and Washington recedes from this, instead, aims to suppress with force new currency relations while acting like it promotes the new forms of trade and intercourse...ideas of Washington belong to an earlier era and it adds to isolation. Nobody takes Washington seriously except as a lunatic with its finger on the trigger! A nuclear WWIII can’t be fought because too many nations have nuclear weapons it would mean the end of life on earth so the alternative is war where the main weapons are currency related science and technology used to shut down critical operations and to disable economies and have them starve in to ruin. For that the American people will lose their pensions and social security, a decent education and access to health care, their rights to dissent, and be driven into submission by the weaponization of food, homes, medicine, energy, through manipulation of prices and interests rates.
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  3663. A humane economic order is not probable within the framework of social institutions dedicated to the conversion of the concrete into the abstract. A bold and new government has to be composed of separate task forces instead of cabinet level bureaucracies! Task forces made up of people their are concerned with dedicated to dismantling the bourgeois form of America's social institutions. All based on total social control for the conversion of products into commodities, the concrete into the abstract, America's institutions punishes the poor and working class to complete this conversion. America's poor and working classes grows more inhumane and desensitized through the practices of institutions set up to fail. Failing is not failing when someone succeeds from failure describes what is really going on. The concrete manifestation of labor in society is a commodity and in a commodity producing society products are the subject of exchange, traded for each other everyday, using money mediating to complete the exchange where products passively express their values in money, in billions of transactions a day. Products interact with each other through their values interacting with a primary source of value and interact with the human race through social institutions in real need of change.  Social institutions created by republicans and democrats, through legislation to facilitate and create new commodity and labor markets. The new Democratic socialists needs a strong abolitionist wing of its new party when it eventually becomes a national party majority. Abolitionists dedicated to the abolition of the old social institutions holding back the aims of emancipating the poor and working classes, all labor in society, from the commodification of products. A new party faces a monster that gets larger, more powerful, the more people work for it.
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  3687. Taliban does not want huge amounts of capital to leave the country of course they are going to monitor bank transfers. Karzai fled the country a billionaire. That is a lot of currency to be taken out of circulation disrupting the amount of cash needed for the amount of goods that country produces and exchanges to get into people's hands for their use. Imagine if Jeff Bezos took all his wealth out of the US think what that would do your food prices. People are not smart enough to see the effects of money nor understand money. Prices go through the roof when there is not a sufficient quantity of money in circulation and this is not a country that can print money when it wants! If there was a time to exit the country it would be now when the Taliban and the US are in negotiation for the evacuation and not after the US leaves! The country is under a straight jacket of restraints, Taliban are not going to kill people they can use as leverage to loosen that straight jacket or get out of it completely. First come first serve basis is the procedure at the airport. They have to fight against a wave of desperate people. The straightjacket hurts the population not the Taliban and the expectation is that the population will get rid of the Taliban. This never works. Why the Pentagon continues to use this method of torturing a population by depriving them thinks peasants are too stupid to realize the US is causing their grief is the stupidity of the Pentagon officials. The opposite would work. Sanctions breed revolts and revolutions and this apparently is what the US strategists want to happen. Either that or they are plain sado-masochistic in the Pentagon.
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  3692. Ok now you heard the right wing response, The Great Reset, to the crisis you are living through now hear my response. In a social system designed for people the lost luggage would be sent to a clearing house for distribution to places like Good Will store. People can buy what they need cheap and the material wealth gets used not thrown out or sent into indefinite exile. Lost luggage owners compensated for their loss. In a social system designed for money and goods and services meant to be exchanged planning at the national level is impermissible to a market system of exchange. Society as a whole is forbidden to take a role in solving huge problems in a market system. Society is punished when it tries. Taught and told never to use its mighty social power as a collective power. Society would get in the way of the market system. The market system deals with natural disasters, lost luggage, gun violence, crime, political corruption, climate change, natural disasters, pandemics, market crashes, recessions, inflations, stagnation and depressions, wars, all the ills in society at present, in an individual way between small property owners and individual companies. Companies who must balance the service against their profit at all times or die against property owners asked by the government to bear the burden do the private companies do not die. Social problems and social conflicts are too big for the private market place to handle and the individual companies in society run away, close stores, hide, are scared, chicken, or swing the opposite way, give back, try heroics, even cause mischief. Populations bury their heads in the sand as individual entities cannot cope, deal or handle the conflicts, crisis and contradictions, run to the government for help on an never-ending basis usurping the total economic surplus that when we really need it the problems too big to be handled by a market system the economic surplus has dried out. This is ultimate stupidity of a market system that will destroy America if society does nothing about it the way the government does nothing about it. Society has a role to play and and a valid place from which to solve the general crisis government and private companies cannot fix, incapable of fixing, crisis too large reforms proposed over and over again cannot fix! Society can fix the general crisis in a month. If society can fix the crisis why do we need government or private industry is why society is constantly held in a state of need and desperation, hobbling on one leg, injured, to prevent its collective power from taking a role finally freeing humanity from the curse of the ages.
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  3693. Horrible institutional abuse in the death of a baby left in a Day Care Center’s Transport Van, a barbarism that need never happen in a country that is no way as poor as 135 other nations. Americans are beyond the point of humanity when they cannot raise children. But on another front “...some of his policies have been good for the country”., I agree, they have. Depending on who benefits from his policies. The infant that died in a van did not benefit from any of Biden’s policies. Biden cannot over come republican cuts on resources to millions of infants just born in the US. Face it when you give money to the military the child that has no rights until the age of 18 gets no share of the budget for life education outside of the traditional share that gets eaten up by multiple agencies. Biden’s problem is a democrat problem. A business cycle to Biden is just a fluctuation. Prices rise and they fall, tomorrow they rise again and fall. Policies fit well into that paradigm. But the paradigm itself is junk economics! Its junk because all the policy emphasis is on the sphere of consumption and there are no polices in the sphere of production. This gets them, the democrats, into deeper trouble every time when more working class black babies die and new ones face republican institutionally constructed odds. A myopia of one-sidedness. The weak points in democrats are strong points for republicans. Market fluctuations since the “COVID pandemic” on gas prices do not show the changes in the gas and oil industry of the many companies in the oil and gas market, making the rules as they go on their own, are exposed to wars and other political disturbances, good and bad harvests etc.. You can’t drill cheap if your money has to go to higher wages to cover the crew’s accommodations and meals. Even a modest increase in food prices can cripple production. Strikes is another, there many strikes and big ones too that stops the process of work from going on smoothly in society. Its not all about buying stuff its about production not breaking down and work in society has broken down.
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  3700.  @kasegiyabu5030  B+, Now you are thinking on your feet whereas before you were sounding like so many of the jackasses calling themselves Marxists. I'll have you know that Engels, Lenin, certainly not Stalin, Mao, Castro, Ho, ever understood Marx's theory of value, the cornerstone of his system, laid out in the first three chapters of Capital, Vol I, subsequently the whole communist experiment was wrong from the very start. But why you insist on being right is the product of the narrow mindedness of men thinking with their little head between their legs. Machismo, ego, self-fishness, hubris, all the qualities the class system promotes in men and women, bourgeois social values. It would do you good to shed that ugly skin. Back to the Piggies in Orwell's allegory, the collective they ran was not a class conscious collective. They were never armed with an animal militia that would defend the de-bourgeoisification of society's individuals. It was subject and prone to abuse and continuous see-saw and, on going, coup d état, by people emerging from the class system they did not abolish. One tryrant to the next tyrant, Obama to Trump, is an example. Orwell never understood the first three chapters either. Implimenting the Law of Value for the equalization of value and price, requires the class system be gone and the property relations be egalitarianized. This way technology and science would become a function of investment capital, eradicating inequities, in production. All he saw was revolts not revolutions in the mode of production because in his day of 1945, only two books of Marx was published, the entire collection of his manuscripts and correspondences, numbering about 30 were published in the 1960s. The world before 1960 did not have the benefit of Marx's complete system. By then the coup d état method of top down revolutions was perfected by the ruling classes they observed, studied and acquired from Lenin! Hopefully, you can see that our very first conversation in this dialogue was an abortion! Petty squabbling on who is right and who is wrong. Collectives are not a new system, the Iroquois Nation was a collective of tribes. The Fabian socialists of the 1800s built collectives, the Amish are a collective, the Shakers in Ohio, a collective, but none are these are socialism constructed on the theory of value. A kibbutz, but all of these are gone and absorbed by capitalism, defenseless and unable to stand on their own. This is perhaps Orwell's meaning. Collectives are closed systems with limited applicability to the larger society without the Law of Value integrating them into general production and necessary labor time. Of course, how would they know when this law was hardly known at the time and capitalism had not, in some cases, not even fully developed as it is today.  This is enough for now.
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  3703. They never did but the Congress should have cut back on foreign investments a long time ago. From 1950-1971 was the time to save capitalism. All was okay before the government over issued paper money requiring more gold to back it up. They had to exploit the South African mines more, black human labor for more gold out of the ground. Seems like Congress at the time never asked the question why should the US issue new currency to other countries more than they already held? The answer might lie in the fact that other countries can begin their own miltiary defense buildups. This would over time change the favorable trade balance the American people enjoyed because foreign countries would buy military products from industries with the excess dollars. The corporations then became too big to fail. From 1950 to 1971 was the time Congress ought to have dealt with the problem of Too Big To Fail. The American farmer, factory worker, office worker exported or sold more goods than they bought from other nations, from the 19th century up to the 1970s.  Money came in from trade the people were able to save money. Now money leaves because of trade. America buys more foreign goods than it sells its own goods. Farmers sold less and the shortfall is subsidized in an artificial market contraction and too large of a percentage of people are not able to save a dime. Before climate change, the classical answer to this disaster that is now America is a massive infusion of capital into industries that can first create a surplus in the domestic market cheaper than foreign produced products saturating the domestic market and with the excess export to nations. This would put the American people back in the swing of recieving the proceeds of trade. Re-open circulation once labor and capital are joined in production. But climate change changes everything about the way we produce. America has to turn its friends and allies into real friends and allies for a new way of being and living is a foreign concept to the leaders of American society, a provincially minded group. Be like talking to the Pilgrims in the 1600's the world will become too small for the human race, action must be taken now to avoid catastrophe and they would burn you at the stake as a heretic!
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  3705. US Air Strikes are an example of how the aim even if it means violating physical limits of human endurance is applied to service Capitalism. The Suez Canal is a tool for capitalism as much as it is a natural seaway, it becomes an instrument, in a larger process of trade that has a devastating effect on the people who perform the work and make it all happen are people paid in wages and salaries. Its technology and its science that goes into making that canal work for trade to continue on a constant basis has reached this level of use because of how cheap it is produce products today. Spread over more products is a great deal of value that in money terms represented in them becomes capital upon their sale. Here is the reason why wages fall for workers in the home country in tis scenario. It is not the diversion of traffic on the seaway that establishes for workers a new average cost for survival at home its the productive power of manufacturers. They never stop producing because of ever increasing levels of output to the detriment of workers a given rate of profits. Factory technology runs itself with no help from its participants. Work is an automatic process of pumping out cheaper products in mass quantities that a fall in wages for workers in the home country is an increase in profits for those who employ workers are constantly fluctuating to establish a new average cost of living between them is expressed in a class war. The disrupted sea lanes have nothing to do with the reasons Americans are given and are paying high prices and working down to the bone beyond human endurance, except for reasons the manufacturers and not the workers set the price of life. To this end in this scenario the US Air Strikes are really a waste of time and money and can only be assessed as a irrational military debacle offering no real gain or purpose or benefit to humanity at home or abroad.
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  3712. These images of China's factories and the people in the stores shopping or workmen in a shop, apartments buildings, avenues, streets, are centers of activity not separated by private ownership. This is a city where poverty is not possible, homelessness and hunger are not possible because the city itself is the factory and the necessaries of life, housing, food, education, are needs satisfied by the entire city, these are factory cities. They are not cities containing social classes, not cities with a population divided up into so many merchants, capitalists, landlords and workers. Without social classes the whole population works. The working day is never beyond what is necessary for the individual given the magnitude of the total labor allocated. Everyone in these cities are workers and all departments are contained through out the city, there are no suburbs or outlying industries that do work for factories, there are no independent producers who produce for consumers, bakeries and restaurant feed the whole city population because the city factory produces for all needs a city requires, and no ordering of parts from fabricators in Ohio for the product waiting in Seattle to be finished. It does not work the way westerners have been doing work for centuries. No towns built around a factories, a factory city is like a college mega-campus with production facilities for anything. The population living in these factory cities run the entire city, the State administers the city's contracts and makes the deals with outside corporations in the US, Europe, Middle East and Latin America, so that corporations in the west have their products made in one of many of China's city factories never exploits labor directly for profit.   This is the emergence of a new mode of production, change in the way of life, cities without social classes, cities that work and live as they produce everything in-house on a large scale. Everything is fabricated as the need arises and the city just grows from that point forward. People selected from all parts of China are accepted. Mostly young people willing to leave their old communities behind for a new life apply like we apply to colleges for acceptance, into one of these cities, enters a training program, learns a skill moves up to heading a department, of whatever choice I assume a person is proficient at, nobody lays to waste, rots, or dies from property. Eventually an illiterate peasant accepted into the city as an applicant becomes a literate department manager. We, on the other hand, produce for exchange, use is secondary. Producing for use is not something we understand in the west as our mental orientation is quantitative not qualitative.
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  3714. Why would this be shocking when China is a capitalist society run by a communist party. I’ll tell you why. Because in general capitalism and socialism are not understood. Capitalism treats workers badly no matter who is running it. People don’t know that. Workers in America are treated badly by capitalists and it is run by a two party duopoly. People do not know that either. They feel something is off. But the reality from what it should be in their heads and how everything goes down is a real difference to involved to explain to people with no patience to explain it. Those who study this can take advantage of the situation and do. You know who they are, the super rich and famous. Everything is produced by American corporations in China. US corporations get cheap labor and high productivity for their money; everything in the UK, Germany, France, Italy, is made in China. So all capitalists of all countries do the same thing. Monkey see Monkey do. If there is no production elsewhere but in China then it is all capitalism with socialism in name only of an elite party being capitalistic, having no real aims to extend the socialism the rich enjoy to all people. China tries and raised 700 million out of poverty out 1.2 billion is a stagnant run. By now a 1. billion should be at least enjoying life at a low cost to society. What were old peasants a generation ago are now a modernized working class. China has become an expert in making a mass of products that are actually very good. But its all One Size Fits All. You would be unAmerican to not be pragmatic about reality; traditionally Americans do not bury their heads in the sand. China is socialism and the West are democracies, is all talk and no walk. Democracy is not between the people who work for Walmart; all the democracy is for the super rich and well-connected, is reality. The lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, emulated by people who want the same but are prevented from having, is the difference between Them and the workers and mid-managers at Walmart. People blow themselves up in these places literally are practicing Nihilism not Democracy. Target, Shop Rite, Piggly Wigglys, and all the mechanics working for Midas, Quick Lube, and RockBottom Repair Shops, exercise democracy at home to the best of their ability between their kids and spouses. They decide nothing at work, they follow a routine formula of work. A change in the formula, or routine, is handed down from above and decisions are done by someone else in Manhattan, nowadays a thousand miles away if not across Continents! Call that democracy...puhleeeze!
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  3730. No doubt about it. Novalny is what Trump is to our Washington establishment, a threat. The kind of threat these men represent is directed at an entrenched social class of powerful oligarchs the establishment powers in the Kremlin are. All of it revolves around oil and oil markets. What cotton was the American Civil War oil is for competing oil producing nations. Europe does not produce its own oil. Europe is the prostitute constantly visited by competing western and eastern oil Johns. But through this dependency competing ideas for global control are like an elixir and made drunk with power the need to enlarge a sphere of influence and control over markets and we are caught up in this titanic struggle. Novalny and his movement are Russians oriented to western middle class values the old Russian bureaucracy fears considering around 30 million of them started a civil war in Russia in the past there is no telling what could happen in the future. That is just the thing, all world leaders and the masses of the world have no idea where we are or where we are going as a race on the planet or as a collection of nations, everyone is poking in the dark and doing their own thing. I only wish there was far more world news coverage than they are giving us. A hundred and ninety five nations out there surely there is news to be found in them. So blocked off from events in the world Americans will start contesting actual world population numbers are a hoax since they never see what 9 billion people on the planet are doing.
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  3738. "...shut your mouth." Ajay. The Korean people have been ready for re-unification from the day North Korea was divided pummeled and decimated by the US in 1945. "President Moon engaged in diplomacy", as if Korean families had nothing to do with pushing their leaders to this point! Your in a news black out; your media does not inform you; that your media do not cover any social opposition is official policy. And, for the many survivors of North Korea, pummeled and decimated by the US. Un's actions dispels any notion that Un is the oppressor American media makes him out to be. He put NK on a footing the US understands best, force. and then pursued peace and reunification to neutralize American diplomacy. You have not noticed 'diplomacy' is synonymous to 'force' in your country. Yet you live inside force, killing, murders, shooting, invasions. This makes your mouth full of force telling people to shut up, ultimately, your brains and consciousness, forced. The North Korean people yearn and pressure their leaders to act, to see their families once again and visit the graves of the victims, and you say this reunification happened because of one man, one single individual had the sense to engage in diplomacy to minimize the direct use of force of the US. The only credit worth of giving Trump is calling Un, "..one smart cookie". The WPNK outwitted the neocons that control your brain. There is tremendous social opposition to Duterte, Moon, Abe for their ties to the US. Essentially, they are seen by this opposition, virtually unreported to you, as sophisticated puppet regimes. It is you and your people who are in a news black out. They want to keep you separated from the masses of people are coming to realize US influence in Asia is moribund...and you say..."Trump deserves credit for accepting to meet with Un" as if this had more to do with shaping historical events! You've been watching too many Disney movies son. Next time you tell people to shut up make sure you got something real to contribute or say nothing at all or did not your parents teach you that lesson?
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  3747. At 7:30; the question of too much capital in too few hands and too little purchasing power in too many hands, a problem not going away, is a problem of the social form of labor in society and the form of property relations occurring in the economy. If a nation is going to transform itself it better know what it is it needs to transform. Don't get this right and you end up with a situation worse than one you just came out of. One of the main aims of the ruling classes in Great Britain since the beginning of civil society in the 16th century has been to deskill the working class from ever learning the skills of political administration so that if they ever did take power they would not know what to do with it, and the ruling classes, can react back in accusatory style condemning the 'revolution' and proceeding with a counter-revolution to crush it. This attitude toward property gave rise to elite schools to ensure this power is inherited within the ruling families generation after generation. We have only to look to the recent past to see how the goal of transforming society to break this cycle, failed to include the 'ourselves'. The subjective being ruled out of the transformation process. It is harder to transform yourself than it to transform objective reality. In this historic episode of social transformation coming, the center of the transformation has to be about a human freedom that transcends modernization. A move that takes us to the next higher form of social organization in our lifetime or at least creating the foundations for a new world here and now we owe to all those before us embarking on that course.
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  3749. I understand the point being made in this video but why didn’t the interviewer ask the Trump-ers what did Trump do bring down insulin prices? At times it is necessary to get people to question their beliefs as misbeliefs and put them on the spot but my theory is that Trump supporters want a civil war and Trump is a catalyst to that effect. They would become a legitimate secessionist racist and nationalist movement if Trump is defeated. His defeat would signal a civil war to them. The guy who thinks Trump will get 90% reflects how many white voters are primed for a civil war. Civil War is close to a probability because 80% black, brown and Middle Eastern votes are alienated from Biden makes the total that would have voted for Biden in a landslide a smaller total Trump can defeat with his social backing. Think of it as a Color Revolution or a coup dé état in the works because that is what the Trump movement is. Democrats have been enabling it, crushing the progressive left by initially taking the nomination from Bernie gave legitimacy to the criticism of the democratic state. This is a pattern that goes back to what the democrats did with McGovern in the 70s works against democracy. Alienating youth makes it easier for people with no socially redeeming values to get elected. This has worked for centrists democrats for a long time comfortable in capitalism until a guy comes along and voices the damage done to social groups the democrats have alienated. Suddenly the dejected become a weaponized democratic problem rather than a republican one. The individual and mass shootings have been education on what the capabilities are in your foe. You learn what kind of weapons should be used from all the “I want to thank our law enforcement and partners” press conferences. It really is laughable if it were not so serious how the centrists democrats have conducted party business. Sad situation is that innocent American people are clueless as participants in this grand social experiment. Really the Trump story is really the story of the end of the Democratic Party and Establishment, a modern illustration of how Cortez with 500 Spaniards was able to take down the Aztec Empire. The strategy of cultivating so many tribal enemies with taxation made fertile ground for the Spaniards to use against the Empire. Cortez was like Trump, a con artist. Those day, of course, taxation meant your life would be sacrificed to the God of Rain and the Sun God was enough of a terror tax to convince the tribes to join the Spanish without much convincing. What chief of a tribe wants their daughter’s heart taken out if it can be stopped by joining the guys dressed in metal. The democrats hand Trump less generous reasons to join the fight to dismantle the Establishment. White nationalist fascist youths are itching for a fight and linked with others in eastern Europe.
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  3778. Exactly professor! Truth be told, a private exchange system strips labor-capacity from the working class. Labor-capacity is turned into a commodity with a price on it is only possible when factories, offices, cities, are all privately owned. In the classical view, the forces of production, represented by industrialized machinery and tools, technology, cities, transportation etc., even science, were once in the possession of the workers as the property of the workers but never as the property of the working class as a whole except in Russia and China where a worker's state in the name of communism in its own conflicts was, at times, communism in the name of a worker's state, I view as historic lessons and examples of socialism evolving, but in the period preceding capitalism going as far back as Ancient Rome, the means of production were the property of the workers. In some places the workers were property alongside property as slaves, but when workers were made propertyless, lost their workshops, land and tools, what is left in them is their labor-capacity. In exchange for wages representing the necessaries of life is how the working poor acquire the ability to reproduce their labor capacity in the capitalist epoch. The right wing cannot argue against a criticism of privatization when that criticism looks at privatization from the standpoint of the working poor in society. The conflict that arises in a person finding their labor-capacity produces value for its buyer but nothing for its owner, is a raw deal and the wages received for that work can only buy so much and not enough to live is far lower than the value created on the job is the basic schematic for a capitalist society.
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  3816. Law of Markets are working! Jean Baptiste Say would agree. Every market has buyers and sellers ready to sell and buy, sell again at a higher rate, so things are fine. It’s only when a seller decides not to sell but stays in a position as seller that monopolies dictate price. As soon as this happens we start to see defects in production and what is normal in markets is not normal in production is expressed in cataclysmic events causing mass fatalities in the society both in terms of what happens when people lose their one form of making a living and when the process of making a living is a war zone with a high death rate. Normal for capitalism to have wage reductions at home but this is extreme... unless wage reductions happen outside the home economy others can suffer more than people here. But if, America is more like India than it is like Europe the comparison would be wage reductions in India match those in America. Meaning it would be cheaper to live in America than in India as far as the cost of living is concerned. More like its the other way around. Productivity and innovation provide a capital advantage to an individual capitalist but the real power is in who controls or owns all the surplus value currently providing the advantage to the whole capitalist class in America. This is the part of the relation that is about social control. Normally, capitalism increases productivity to produce cheaper. This is accomplished by decreasing working time for each unit produced and the sum of all innovations in industry are intended to give one company and capitalist the “competitive edge”. American CEOs are expert wage reducers in order to increase surplus value and start a monopoly situation in the market.
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  3821. For sure a double standard. Be nice if a state existed that gave you the deduction. But we must remember no matter what form of society is in existence a working class is essential. No getting around the fact that human beings have to eat and sleep. The biological imperative to work to produce our own subsistence will never leave our being(s); so it makes sense that everyone is formed into one social class composed for the majority of citizens as workers. Everyone is a worker in a worker's society guided by a pro-labor state system that we can eliminate after everyone is no longer divided into top, middle, and low level of social classes of buyers and sellers. This way a husband can still own a business and be married to a nurse and there would be no class friction between them since nursing is no longer an occupation bought and sold in this country as wage-labor and sole ownership is perfectly compatible with what people like. Work only to sell becomes a thing of the past. This would mean the working day is transformed from 123 million people working 8 hours to 332 million working 4.2 hours. What the total population can produce in 4.2 hours depends on the state of science, technology, its productive forces. Do we make a society composed of one class. Make everyone a Rosie the Riveter and there are no Kardashians or do we let everyone just buy stocks and bonds, get rid of the continuous presence of a small number of buyers of stocks and bonds and tax accordingly for a state that normalizes the use of money. Do nothing about the Kardashians getting a job working 4.2 hours five days a week. Just break up the monopolies and re-start competition and start the whole repetitious cycle getting worse each time the wheel gets a flat and can't go round. I guess I am saying... what kind of society do you want? America is only limited by its imagination.
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  3838. Eventually, climate justice will come when social justice is universally achieved.  The main social and economic paradox of the era of modern industry is the effect of machinery to displace labor and rape the planet. Creating a redundant population too large to support and over working a smaller number of the total workforce all because the high price of things is meant to perserve the value of things. We can begin to understand the natural history of work as a sequence of developments of productivity of labor in general. But first you have to understand how value works in capitalism. If a house says its price is $250,000 and car says its price is $20,000, the house and car are saying they are equal to each other through another thing. You may need 12. 5 cars or another $250 grand to equal the value of the house for an exchange to take place between buyer and seller but essentially the thing that makes the house and car the same is their value and the work embodied in those values was at the time of their making value creating activity or value producing labor. The day we do not have to do this to ourselves, label ourselves and be value creators in a value creating process called the corporation disconnected from us, when we can give up the value equation of everything will be the day work can be simply, work. The day when work (industry) is the primary focus and not work (industry) as a value creating activity the primary focus of all our actions is the day we become freed. Free of technology and science as an independent power over us as human beings, driving us toward i.e., total extinction or annihilation which ever comes first. That day will be the first day we actually take control over our lives and destinies freed from the law of value turning all things into value units including human beings. When industry and productivity are used to meet society's needs will be the first day our lives will be felt and truly lived.
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  3849. Twitter strives to separate every kind of property from every kind of labor. How does it do this? Well, --the more Twitter servers are financed as private capital and property the more Twitter employees are separated from Twitter servers as not collectively owned. If there is no collective ownership of Twitter there is no democracy in Twitter. Twitter remains private Capital under a new owner. And capital must expand to pay off its private debt in the billions. Employees must generate that wealth for Twitter therefore, the production of wealth must be extracted from its employees or Twitter gets bought and absorbed by some other corporation that buys it cheap after bankruptcy. Employees sleep in Twitter, live in Twitter’s property for the value creating process to begin consuming Twitter employees. Twitter strives to create a market before bankruptcy becomes a reality, it needs buyers for the realization of that wealth converted into profits and hard cash. The buyers for Twitter are the sellers of fascism who gravitate to Twitter can use Twitter to launch a world-wide pro-fascist movement against all western democratic institutions, amplify January 6th but on a world scale in nations where fascist elements are rooted in western societies, disseminated and planned through Twitter, constitutes the threat to democratic republics when words lead to deeds, when ideology becomes violence. It all is in the hands of Twitter employees, whether Twitter becomes their property or the property of Elon Musk, to decide the fate of the use of Twitter in society.
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  3856. If I were the family's lawyer I would have said exactly this to the press: Families no matter what their color or size cannot provide any reason in their lives for police intervention. The judges and cops have internal conflicts and boundary issues. Administration and rank and file rival each other over matters of the conditions of work, policy on cameras, reprimands, demotions. Families in the community do not want to get caught up in the middle of bureaucratic in fighting is my warning. Its not a case for the police if there was a problem of neglect but since the charge is abuse, I move to vacate the case and give it to social services, and there is no sign of physical abuse. Cops are not trained in social work. But now my client (family) is mired in a bureaucracy of child welfare concerns that will be monitoring their lives every six months because of untrained and, frankly, stupid cops. There goes the plans for a camping trip. They have to be home for a case worker. If a college professor can state an opinion why the lawyer of the family did not state an opinion to the press is the kind of timidity this country does not need. Look at the situation from a bird's eye view, the police are not policing the stores and downtown businesses, they are focused on families in the community and parts of the community more than others are monitored. The banker's house on the other side of town does not have a tail for corrupt dealings, if any, but Joe and his family out of a job or looking disheveled can be a likely suspect. Give any reason for police intervention and you get caught up in the bureaucratic odyssey that will not end before your kid's 18th birthday.
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  3866. This is why single issue protest for a single aim as in a cease fire don’t help to build a real social movement. You end up blackballed. Real social movements are based on concrete abstractions, for example, genocide happens everywhere in direct and indirect form. Movements are built on universals that are concrete when they state No More Genocide and “Not in Our Name”, is a good one. Cease fires presuppose a war will resume. No more wars in our name keeps the movement on track in changing the direction of all humanity. A protest for an end to genocide and mass killings, is a universal aim as it is open ended for a movement to act on particular nations. It has concrete application to wherever genocide and mass killings happen which happens to be 16 separate nations into which victims of genocide have no place or movement to help them is the utter bankruptcy of the western Left. The point is to build a worldwide movement for a world without genocide and war...this is a perfectly reasonable goal that becomes more concrete the deeper America capitalism sinks into a depression dragging with it half the globe. The State as guided by the present head of the US Justice Department and the Treasury are extremely self-conscious of the threats to the dollar as the reserve currency for trade and commerce world wide, that crypto-currency presents as an alternative to the standard operating procedure of loans for dollars into the economies of other nations and their transactions, purchases and sales, flow back to the US in greater quantity can only take place using dollars that if it were crypto-trade there would be no trace of any transaction carried on that the State can pinpoint and sanction or restrict suspicious foreign economic activity. If that transaction be weapons to a magnitude lethal to the power of the US the more overt will we see Janet Yellen and Merrick Garland’s faces on TV even more than the president because they occupy the real institutional power structure of capitalism.
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  3868. The economy is going to crash when the two sides fail to raise the debt ceiling this July. They can't agree on a commission into what potentially would have been a take over of the federal government much less raising the limit on how money the government can borrow and are the republicans going tax the super rich in the upper 0.001% as a way of paying for a recovery of a two-sided economy, one side over developed and the other side an abysmal swamp of underdevelopment if they don't, and the government becomes useful to the military and useless to society falling apart. They will have agree to tax the rich and the rich will be taxed. Taxes are no longer for the little people when the rich live and use society. The amount of catastrophe occurring in society will cost more than what the government can borrow if the limit is not stretched past the current limit and interest rates are going up. People who normally lend money to the government want to get pad back by the government, when that can't happen then everything the government pays for goes broke.  forebears received, way less, proportional to the cost of the catastrophes, no person or social security. Instead, intensified labor of increased value production to get the economy up and running again causes a depression to their amazement, what went wrong? A=B is what went wrong. It does not work anymore. New ways of living is changing the whole face of industry. You do not have to spend $400 bucks on air conditioner when air conditioning can be built for $20 dollars. Why buy a $20 K car when you can buy a $4k car. The industries supporting the old products running on old fuel are gone and new ones in their place spring up. Total working time becomes the rule for the new economy forcing value and price to match up, the issue then becomes well you broke it then you pay for it because our working time is too productive of what can be done than to have it used for what was done.
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  3883. I agree Tariffs can control trade and it can keep trade balances equal but that presupposes government intervention of world production and the world market, coordinating production of separate nations with the needs of each nation with the ability of each nation; humans are close this level of functioning with AI; hence the threat...the very thing Trump and the American corporate class do not want is a world coordination of production by taxing the products of one nation so they would reduce the amount of products they dump on the market, drawing more of the market away from this corporate class. who cannot share the market and must control and own the raw material which all societies use; their objective is diminish government, cut it off at the knees, make government ineffective as a tool for the people and effective as tool for the corporation class of billionaires in a free market environment, business friendly, low taxes, high profits, and wages; they decide the amount of material wealth for workers, they know what is best for you is the corporate view of humanity. Lori Wallach speaks a world where humanity is not divided on the basis of nationality and can apply AI to match the needs with productive capacities with precision. Trump is a nationalist, but more importantly, as a Pay to Play proponent, he thinks profits do not come from inside a country, but only in exchange with other countries. He is not only wrong but he is stuck in a mercantilist system of thought that the profits a country makes takes the form of money (gold and silver, bitcoin) and trade balances are settled in money. “We are going to be rich again...like never before...a new golden age for America”. The Big Shock to the Billionaire Class comes when the value of money is made worthless because the real cost of making products is so cheap, a machine, robot, or automation in general becomes accessible to everyone, --they have no reason to be even involved in making cars, they will self-deport themselves or be forced out of production and ownership of it is their last stand. Endless court battles. When profiting from humanity is no longer profitable off to their island paradises they go, some will perish, others will flee and hide, but all will be forgotten because we simply do not need then anymore, they become as obsolete as a Civil War southern plantation owner of slaves. Before this happens, no stone left unturned, to roll back everything that gives humanity the edge in this battle will go to the wayside government as founded on a constitution and a restoration of citizenship based on property ownership.
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  3897. Is Trump a Treasonous Traitor? I would ask treasonous to what 'capitalism'? Capitalism is a system of production it is not a country. One cannot be treasonous to an object, a thing endowed with social relations, just because people dress funny and interact through force i.e., the Law, Justice, capitalism and everything in it is still an object. People are objects in a capitalist economy, and as long people like being treated as an object Trump has been very consistent in delivering that treatment. Nothing treasonous there. Can we establish there is different between a county and economic system when we need to understand confusing situations. A county is a subject, made up of human beings, with emotions. We interact, we need each other for survival. On the other hand, a capitalist economy is a world of objects. In a society, a person is a subject and in a capitalist economy a person is an object, if that person lives in place that moves matter from here to there, by means of representational objects than that person is an object and subject simultaneously. An incomplete individual, partially free and partially enslaved, partially sane and partially insane, a half assed copy, a shitty representation of true freedom, a fraud, an object of ridicule and of praise, a partially developed person and impartially under developed, hence the expression, 'he's all brawn and no brains'. Lol. Truth tellers who lie. If we do not accept the difference between a subject and an object hypocrisy becomes a universal norm in the society. Who's words can you trust then if you cannot even trust your own? On the other hand, Trump is not treasonous to the country and has not thus far, betrayed anyone. As long as people accept the treatment of 'being ' an object when the subject is an object there is nothing treasonous or betraying to American society, or to the political elites, they are objects to. Its just better to be rich and an object than poor and an object. Trump is pursuing capitalism because it is easier to treat living subjects as objects. Its too hard, too much work, too much effort to bond with another human being on an emotional level as two or more subjects engaged as subjects. People in America who are good at bonding are young boys and girls. Grown ups do not bond as such, they see in each other their limitations. People like this can never commit to a social revolution. Revolution is about love, passion, pure emotion rising to a status of dignity. People struggle for this and die for it eternally with honor. There is no pay for this kind of fight. Like religion nobody pays you to realize your historic mission to be seated next St. Peter. Labor has a mission just like the anyone else. As a mass collection of people -objects in society, the treatment is the same, everyone is equally an object. But people-objects annihilate each other, you can't keep them in the same room because they are abusive to each other; they target each other, hence 'the exploitation of man by man'. I see nothing treasonous about a capitalist breaking down old institutions to expand capitalism. If the profits are in the heart of the Communist party of China, Trump will find a seat in it. Thus far, as an ailing capitalism, Trump tries to resuscitate a dying working class and seeks business where ever business can expand to revitalize the working class. Far too late in my opinion but be that as it may. If anything he is loyal to his objects; he's one sided but true, therefore, not loyal to his objects as subjects. Americans are in crisis because capitalism as an object stifles the desire of the subject to become something more than an object. Every social institution is designed to treat people as objects and they are doing their job well. The Police, the Courts, the Congress, the Church, the Employers, Big Industry, Big Pharma, the Banks, Big Media, Big Ranchers and the Big Farmers, the Big Landlords, are sticking to their business and philosophy. The individual subjects are the ones with the problem, they are unable to stick to their business because they lost what their business was. The reason for life and living for all is lost. The vocation and historic mission to converts objects into subjects is lost, the people-objects are dazed and confused and still treated as objects by a capitalist economy as a working class they can only find this freedom in each other. Self- Emancipation. Freeing the subject from being or becoming an object is the historic mission or vocation of the working class. Like the religious go to church every Sunday -- the working class should be building an economic system for themselves.
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  3900. STAY HOME! All the worse elements of the Trump administration will be revealed but not if you go to work and come into contact with confirmed and non-confirmed cases. The FEMA director Peter Gaynor commands 14,000 employees, several huge federal warehouses that can fill three aircraft carriers stocked with material of all types from A to Z, and 13 government agencies. In short FEMA is a standing army equipped with medications to cover the needs of the political elite, yet compared to the US military it is small. The military is a force of 475,000 soldiers are mostly out of the country sequestered from news and information back home and cannot help to confront another standing army potentially used against the American people, a 1 million man police force in law enforcement all equipped to quell and detain rioters in full battle regalia. The federal government, therefore, has three huge standing armies. The military has at least the same material but four times the amount of all nations combined, that is 127 nations! FEMA alone could outfit the entire US with a hospital system in every state. Our dismal private hospital system pales in comparison een with all its combined resources which would equal the size of the state of New Jersey. This virus would reduce the private care system to the size Rhode Island. The 14,000 employees of FEMA include experts of all types, engineers, doctors, medical emergency and police, workers includes branches such as the Army Corp of Engineers.  FEMA has the capabilities of meeting the medical needs of all citizens for three generations spanning 100 years going forward. The productive capacity of FEMA is beyond the expectations of the average citizen of the quantity of material and resources the federal government commands. To give you some proof of one small fraction of this productive power see Big Bertha boring the tunnel under Seattle Washington. One machine, a giant drill is run by four operators at the helm the whole tunnel project 2 miles long employs a workforce of 800 workers. In fact, of all the parts of the society as a whole the American Public has the least of its rightful share of the material wealth and resources its own high level of productivity creates. This epidemic puts everything on the table about America's material wealth, included under three big headings (1) capitalism or the government's reliance on the private sector, (2) ecology and economic inequality in society, (3) public health. But if we are dead and dying from the coronavirus and by other subsequent strains and mutations, the political elite(s) have all this material wealth for their own social survival. STAY HOME. Together and alive they will have to surrender because it is through our productive capacity that FEMA, the Military and Law Enforcement replenish and reproduce this vast material wealth and power. We are essential to the economic and political power they control because we are its primary producers of that material wealth.
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  3901. The US using Kenya as a proxy to do the bidding of imperialists is an oversimplification Jimmy. Haiti’s troubles are a distillation of the problems facing several dozen developing nations, most prominently Kenya crushed under debt: “More than 3 billion people across the world live in countries that are spending more on servicing their debt than public spending on education or health,” Binaifer Nowrojee, the president of the Open Society Foundations, wrote in Foreign Policy. For Kenya the money paid to send troops to Haiti is money that helps Ruto out of a serious crisis in Kenya is more the motive than meeting an imperialist need. Your show when talking about the plight of Haiti should be about what happens when bills are passed to increases taxes — they include a bevy of taxes on everyday essentials like cooking oil, diapers, and bread — on a population already suffering from inflation and high rates of unemployment in countries like Haiti. Your show should talk about how much of Haiti’s debt is owned by foreign creditors, like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). If Haiti doesn’t pay it, the possibility of borrowing in the future will become more difficult in the short term; over time, higher unemployment, more poverty, and overall worse outcomes for Haitians. Kenya owes $35 million of its $80 billion debt to China, IMF and World Bank. Now you might understand Ruto’s motives. As far as why the only solution out there is higher taxes to service the debt is popular has to do with alternative media dodging the question, your generation do not make the ones responsible for debt spending pay a debt crisis; there are no other solutions coming out of your own generation demanding government restore the 90% tax on the rich as it was from 1929 to 1980,--- raise taxes on the rich as a way to get out of the crisis! I hate to say it Jimmy, your generation are chumps.
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  3902. The military took them in. Took them to a base and off the island of Martha’s Vineyard where Barack Obama has property. Pretty clear to see the class structure of American society when a contradiction becomes a full blown crisis. The French working classes of 1798 saw it fit to decapitate King Louis and Marie Antionette for the same class based social bias and vitriol the peasants and working classes in France felt coming from royal Monarchy and the super rich. History is loaded with the misappropriation of public resources like this in both the Communist and Capitalist world. The disease of accumulation for the sake of accumulation does not care who or what you are but it does breed revolution more than authoritarianism breeds revolution. The Military has a role in keeping this structure alive. The resources produced by the working class used up for the 1% and the Military uses up the minds and bodies of the 99% is the structure holding the relation in place. Militarizing society is their solution to cement that relation in a Mass Indoctrination Campaign of America’s youth in order to keep the class structure in place. Future generations will never know this oppression is not the norm. If the republicans were smart and truly represented the working classes they would launch an investigation into the misappropriation of America’s military resources to social classes that do not produce those resources and by the members of the political state. A political state that recognizes only the 00.1% can not claim to represent the 99% since the interests of each social class are not compatible but contradict each other. Congress cannot investigate itself without mass hypocrisy and cover-ups, so that won’t work to alleviate the affliction. But it will make a full blown crisis in the political world. The January 6th insurrectionists started something that only the 99% can complete when the 99% are basically, fed up. Trump made the historic mistake of trying to prove to the 00.1% he was tougher than the Democrats on immigration, border control, and sanctions. This never addressed the crisis, in fact, made it possible to deflect the crisis from view. He roused a drama the military did not like but the 1% were satisfied and this approval rating kept certain generals from sabotaging Trump. And what about the State Department? Do they have a role in this class structure? They service the global interest and property of the American 00.1%. With cash and arms appropriations to foreign governments willing to sacrifice their people, and way of life, for its reconstruction suitable for the needs and into the image of the 00.1%.
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  3908. Yes the 1400s precisely, I am eluding to a hybrid social class of rich peasants and self-employed farmers where a labor-market consisted of a agricultural day workers. Migrants today are day workers. The most exploited members of the working class are migrants. Exploited by rich American farmers, manufacturers, builders, contractors, etc.. Exploited because employers can pay below the legal wage. The government does not interfere in this exchange between labor and capital . The Left operates in a de-regulated environment. Two hybrid social classes, examples of them are present in places today in Latin America are as old as the class formations...in Europe when they specialized, rich peasants became full time merchant capitalists and when small farmers began to hire more workers, they were a pre-capitalist formation becoming manufacturers more than farmers; a transitional period of early class formations giving the origins of a capitalist class that is today a global social class as origins in many places that it wasn’t a linear development, but a process of decay of older ways of working. Almost like we o longer use this tool because it was made for a machine that has been obsolete for 30 years. Now the new guy is the tool for the new machine and an evolution of a social class of many people becoming tools for the new machine has been made complete without people realizing it. “Too Bg To Fail”, remember that one? Restrict the quantity of labor a corporation can hire and they will not become too big to fail would be a policy in a new society. Examples of hybrid social classes, (the term is a biological reference for an organism), apply to life-giving social classes, meaning they produce more than they consume the latent potential to become what it isn’t are everywhere today. Self-destructive social formations, self-damaging, self -corrupting. If people are going to fight back they are going to need a Revolutionary theory. Without that they cannot locate where in society the class struggle occurs and works with social class formations and social class behavior, function as oppressors, always the general and the particular, within the framework of its existing potentials, no guiding principal of a theory on how to make a revolution, there can be no true freedom. Revolutionary theory pummels and pounds out the universal from the particular, blows it out of proportion, makes a mountain out of a mole hill on a subject of real and concretely important to working people; not on issues of no relevance to moving the working class closer to holding power. For example: Man is slashed in the face on a train in Manhattan the safety factor implications for the working class is enough to agitate for a universal strike against the mayor and Council, impeach the mayor, force the council to police the police for pretending to be police upholding the supreme concept of a civil society, security of person, property and rights, instead these are attacks the working classes. Reaction to such an action always opens up several pathways to revolution.  @jgalt308 
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  3909.  @jgalt308  Thank you for that insight and correction...much appreciated. Those are the three stages of surplus value, et al feudalism, mercantilism, industrial capitalism. Viewing the stages christened and baptized by classical theory (the official version) conceals the laws operating surplus value and value creating labor and useful labor. You lose the economic reality of the historical aspects of the Working Day, “the” primary occupation of the human species. There is an exchange between man and nature operating behind the exchange people do as business the working day embodies, a general and a particular interacting on each other. In the way there is a nucleus of a cell forms the body the two kinds of surplus value and the two kind of labor form the nucleus of whole social system. This is a far more dynamic and fluid way to treat economic forms than the boring standard method of classical theory. Historical and social forms of human labor broke out into its own branch as anthropology. If an MBA graduate wanted to know what kind of labor he/she will be dealing with in the working world they curriculum would include an anthropology of work and a history of technology, only there would an MBA graduate get a window into real life on the ground literally as peasant, artisans (guilds), and proletariat as the forms of work under the classical categories. CEOs never had a Worker Safety Course! Talk to Musk about work safety and your sense of him is, stupidity or lying. People can grasp the social forms in the evolution of work in society but as changes brought on by civil wars, revolutions, coup dé état; those forms are hidden motives to the political events, eventually these theories make their way into national security policies, in all nations, is where the danger lies. The achievements are many. All victory steps for capitalism and all negative outcomes for a swerming mass of uprooted human beings. America had artisans, peasant family farm producers, slaves and the source of surplus value were its slaves. Native tribes before slaves came upon these shores worked in conjunction with nature’s bounty. The Battle of Little Big Horn shows the degree tribes developed cooperation as a form of human labor. Surplus value was created through hunting and farming was more than the native farmer required for a living was therefore productive labor. If left intact millions of white men would have gave up the modern way of life for a native way of life in America,--it was simply a natural way of living and many who did were Jihadists of their day, rejecting civilization. Official thinking changes the definition for productive labor The producers of surplus value were native peoples and imported African slaves. They produced more than what it costs to keep them as slaves would say their landowning owner(s) on the floor of the Senate. Nay would say Musk, a productive worker is the worker who sells his free time for working time...that worker is productive of a more than the worker needs to be a worker. If you do not fit into these definitions than all the members of society who ascribe this this kind of slanted thinking are treated as criminals. So you see the class formations begin to happen with every change of the definition of what or who in society adds to society and does not take from it as the society becomes more populated with workless people. The destruction of all native handicraft industries and agriculture is a story of Dutch Conquest in the “New Land”. A prehistory of work erased. Through marriage a European man could live off the same hunting grounds the tribes mutually owned. Property formations and social combinations of work producing surplus value shows us that it is not we who decide what we are it is the distribution of surplus value that decide the things we do, all measured out in working time. I also think back then the clock had no importance to people as it does in the period of machine manufacturing period. The only concept of time we had was how long daylight lasted. Everybody was like a film director then hastening the production crew to produce the scene for shooting before they lose light. There was a natural working day for he and his own versus the social working day of many for many, the surplus value we produce is a gravy train of gifts, luxuries, health, for a few. Bernie is right, heed his latest message.
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  3911. Some thoughts on this subject of socialism... I differ with Dr. Wolff, the workplace has not been democratized and transformed, neither has the working class been democratized and transformed under socialism. It is not enough to transform the interior of society, i.e, and leave intact the exterior of society and expect exploitation to never appear again. Workplace democratization will not change the social form of work. There is only one way a working class can be transformed and that is by not being a working class. The focus of society in order to render a class a non-class, the whole of society would have to entrust in the working class to move forward with its agenda, its special project in dissolving itself as a class, in doing so the other social classes dissolves with it, and everyone is socially equal could use the working parts of the government to enforce laws against activities that could lead to the creation of a working class and, therefore, exploitation. An emancipation of labor happens when labor in the factory and offices is free to decide production but moreso, a job market, no longer separates the social power from the individual. But in the present society, we have a more difficult problem, that might be best to let die out on their own rather than force a conversion of social classes into non-social classes. Since possession of the means of production are not in the hands of the state or any social class the means belong to all social classes there is little worry law enforcement or other social class could launch a counter attack on the new socialist project as long as they are also democratized to the Public, they would depend on the public who decide outside of the workplace the allocation of social and natural resources. Also, capitalism does not automatically disappear, in other words, in a transition and transformation we still have commodity production. In the post-capitalist society what does not exists is the production of a special commodity. People will still be producing commodities for sale but they will not be selling their labor-power to produce commodities in a post-capitalist world. In the pre-capitalist world in America, people as slave holders produced commodities and used a commodity in the slaves to produce commodities. In the capitalist era, labor-power is the special commodity that produces two things, workers make commodities of some useful form and the act of working produces additional value in the commodities from which the owner(s) of the commodities can extract a greater value when sold on the market. Capital derives its wealth from the act of working and from the work itself. In both instances at work, it is one and the same individual split in half between the two functions of their labor in society pressuring to do this or that within a specific time frame. The act of working is another process separate from the work itself producing a useful thing. Governing the actions of workers becomes the job of a capitalist and inside the corporation is a virtual dictatorship over the work and workers that makes life as bad as it is outside a free zone of relief for the workers. When the sale of labor-power no longer exists the management of capital in corporations should dissolve along with it and so should the division and subdivisions of work within the hiearachy of work in the workplace.
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  3918. The international arena in 1955 was premised on the Cold War. The Treaty of Amity made Iran an ally of the US in the Cold War when Iran was ruled by His Imperial Majesty the Shah of Iran. The Ayatollah religious clerics who came into power after the overthrow of the Shah in the the revolution of 1979 did not dissolve the treaty. No reason for the new government of Iran to pull out of the Treaty, the revolution ignited was a response to decades of the Shah's retrogressive secret police supported by the US under the Treaty as part of the good relations with Iran. America gave the Shah the full support of military, weapons, aid packages, and other means the Shah used to create a secret tyrannical police. When the US give support to dictators what they do with the money is their business but when the people of a country overthrow a dictator what they do with their people power is a threat to US national security and no longer their own business. Hypocrisy is obscenely remarkable in the state department. For Bolton and his gang this Treaty represents an obstacle to an all out invasion and overthrow of the Iran's Clerical Muslim Government. So, they resolved to dissolve their part of the treaty and dishonor its commitments to a mutually beneficial relations with Iran. The pattern of making truces to violate them later is classic US imperialism. A tactic Hitler used against Poland. A tactic Pompeo uses with Iran. Pity Aaron Mate' did not bring this history and comparison in his introduction. Now re-listen to Pompeo's, Sec. of State, he frames Iran as trying to lift sanctions and using the Treaty of Amity to do that and then concludes the US will pullout of the Amity Treaty. The International Court ruled correctly, the treaty in force since 1955 is violated by US sanctions. It speaks volumes the Trump administration's proclivity to leave it to the 'experts'. The experts in this case are without the expertise of history behind them. Ideologues who continue to do damage to the US by contradicting their own country's record of diplomatic relations before the world court.
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  3972. Schwiggity's comment; a worker working less than eight hours a day, no mention of frequency, should be fired, considering the fact that workers are productive beyond the point that it takes to reproduce themselves as workers, his message is antithetical to the worker's position in society.  I remember reading a Yahoo Business News article 2/25/15; entitled What Clever Robots Mean For The Job, robots create a system of 'continuous production' is an advantage to society, and it can be a step toward a healthy and balanced society as most of the social ills in America, crime, drugs, poverty, would be eradicated. But this would be true only if Congress passed laws to promote the productiveness of labor to eradicate material deprivation in society with new programs of decentralized material wealth. The specific economic barrier to bold new programs toward a healthy and balanced society is the ownership of machinery and technology as the private property of another constituting a separate class interest that undermines the social interest of humanity. A concrete example of a barrier to Universal Health Care is the class interest of the medical machine industries. What constitutes their investment as an economic interest and a right to withhold the right of the health of the Public, to accrue profits, happens through the ownership of the advanced capital composed of two elements, machinery and technology, and labor-power. Both are owned for the duration of the workday by capital in the form of Amazon. schwiggity is clueless of what defines 'productive consumption'. He cannot be reasoned with as the facts do not back up her/his assertion.  In the field of health care the enemies of Universal Health Care are the following and all of them apply the same labor conditions for the production of the medical devices as does Amazon or any other monopoly corporation, while the worker is owned or rented during the workday, time off the production line is a loss of profits, every second, workers use on the job not producing value, a capitalist loses profits. These are: The top 10 medical device companies of (2018) lobby against universal health care in Congress, the 7 innovative biotechnology companies in California are: Monique Ellis. Medtronic. $29.7 billion. ... DePuy Synthes (Johnson & Johnson) $26.6 billion. ... Fresenius. $20.7 billion (€17.784 billion) ... Philips Healthcare. $20.7 billion (€17.78 billion) ... GE Healthcare. $19.1 billion. ... Siemens Healthineers. ... Cardinal Health. ...investment capital unpublished? The worker is productive beyond the point that it takes to be a worker, and since production is continuous, a working class is a permanent social class individuals are born into, and this is the first historical fact we encounter...about the progress of civilizations, culminating after centuries of development and knowledge the industries take the 'cream of the crop', cry, that since a capitalist comes up with the the capital and inventions they should be paid profits. A worker is productive of profits beyond the point that it takes to reproduce wages should be fired is not the creed of the new capitalists operating in labor market that have no laws and the one with laws that do not enforce the protection of workers want a worker to become a permanent part of the entire complex, work 7 days a week, 24 hours a day, rest and relaxation on premises, enslaved to the means of production for life. Firing is not going to be their modus operandi, hiring the exact number of workers the technology and machinery require and need and keeping them for life is the current trend.
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  3980. Capitalist societies cannot respond the way a socialist society like China can respond to quell a dangerous and fatal virus. Socialist societies have the ability to stop production (economy) and not have the effect of a crisis in the same way capitalist societies experience a crisis. If you stop production and circulation in China it is not going to disrupt the economy from functioning but it will affect the social order like it would in the US and the EU impact both spheres of economic activity, unless the Chinese communist party acts irrational and harms the social population. A fear that is probably on the forefront of that party's mind of losing power. But in the US and EU if production is stopped surplus value cannot be realized and the entire social order falls to pieces, which is the reason the west relies so heavily on prisons and mass incarcerations to keep the social population controlled and working the cycle of production where surplus value is produced.  It appears that a socialist society breaks the dependency the working class has with capitalists for their wages and capitalists have on a working class for their profits, a mutual dependency of the two classes in a capitalist society.  If this mutual dependent relationship between worker and capitalists were not true then the Congress of the US would not be advancing a bill to compensate the working class an income when being told to stay home if they are sick. The attention paid to the low wage and hourly workers in America proves how vitally essential the low wage and hourly workers are to the workings of the system as a whole.  How aware low income and hourly workers are or become of their essentiality is another matter?  I imagine it is the special job, duty or function, of politicians in the west to keep the working classes unaware of their essentiality to the system as a whole does explain why the US in particular is vehemently against unions and why unions in Europe are tolerated.  The bill proposed serves to keep consumption going and the workers playing their part as consumers even though their role as producers have stopped. My thinking also explains the class struggle between employers (capitalists) and employees (working class) that Lamarr Alexander takes the side of employers who, in that mutually dependent relation, a rise in wages entails a fall in profits. But this class struggle is only a general sketch of the relationship, the issue opens up a can of worms in that the social composition of the working class is the main subject, low paid hourly workers coming fromall walks of life, legal and illegal, workers, workers serving the rich and workers serving industry, housing, construction, all the different branches on industry is open up for sociological examination and the finding is absolute chaos of the condition of the working class in America and in Europe.
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  3993. The Price You Pay is not the price paid by oil producers per barrel, they have long ago made up the initial capital, the starting price of decades ago that is preserved in the oil wells themselves in what it takes to pump out millions of barrels per day western economies consume. Its all gravy for the producers. We pay a retail price that have added prices of several middle men from refinery to delivery between an individual’s car and home and the Middle East Oil Producers. There isn’t a whole lot of living labor in oil production once the set up is complete not to any great advantage in lowering unemployment; its not a job creator, to concentrate all your money into one commodity and the amount of live workers are few in number demonstrates how heavily mechanized the system of production for oil is that it is all capital intensive. The largest customer of the oil producers is the American Military and second to them the British, French, Russian, anyone with a large army; NATO and some nations that have no oil in their soil like Japan are forever oil dependent. When they speak of the Free World this is the world they mean the world of oil. Too slow and stupid to move into mass transportation is not stupidity and slowness, its a business strategy to extend the time generating capital from the sale of oil. So the price we pay is a retail price, marked up several times, all are impacted, transportation, manufacturing, agriculture, education, hospital, entertainment, real estate, retail, prices go up by all parties involved but; wages remain stagnant and a middle class loses buying power, everyone slides into a sinkhole depression because the oil producers pay a very low price for oil and sell at a very high price to the largest consumers. We lose a huge chunk of world output to this. Instead of three corn stalks to feed a family we have 1.5 stalks to feed the world family of its grain needs because nobody is going to farm fields that are bombed by militaries and driving the price of oil up for the oil producers in Saudi Arabia. This is why Ukraine is not a genuine war against a genuine enemy but has become a lie told enough times to be believed a truth is revealed by the suffering imposed on the world family the loss of its food is the gain of its oil.
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  3994. One has to believe that humans will produce for use one day and not for exchange. Build cities and towns around use-values. This way what is produced can be produced to last and we end the polluting evils of mass production. The hard part seems workers in America do not understand exchange-values. In many places such as Gary, Indiana the working class that built steel also built Gary, a city like many others put roads down on land, houses and buildings, bridges and tunnels only to facilitate the exchange of these exchange values. Today they are ghost towns where it is cheaper to tear down vacant buildings than to maintain them. When capital leaves it leaves behind its shell the succeeding generation of working people in Gary have to cover in higher taxes, stressing this class out to the maximum, relying on credit for the necessaries of life, Big Steel got more wealth out of Gary than it ever invested into the city! A society that produces for use is hard to do as long as labor is an exchange-value itself. The whole society is built for the equivalences of exchange-values for things to become money and for money to become things. Producing for use is a whole other mindset than producing for exchange-values. The former we are in control the latter the exchange-values control us. The shortage of goods stuck in the supply chain bothers us are cargo ships that carry exchange-values making the president, the White Press Secretary describe in detail the round the clock activity of port workers is an action they would never have to do or think to do if America produced for use. So controlled by exchange-values are we that ordinary men and women, children, are on the path of self -annihilation as the only exit out of this myriad world of exchange-values that require labor to move them. Produce for use and things stay put until you use them again. Goodbye supply chain, good riddance.
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  4015. The Catalans in Spain pay taxes in a unique way. Once a month everyone donates a full day on the community doing what ever needs to be done that a government would do if it collected taxes the way Spain collects taxes and the government is obligated to clean the streets or fix sidewalks, sewage etc. Taxes is paid in money here as it is in Spain. But in Catalan, taxes are paid by individuals as an obligation of work. The entire population is out in full force to do the job till the job is done. Their location is one the most beautiful in the world because they put their labor into it. As a comparison, Melie is working with ideas and interventions within the same framework of a system responsible for Argentina’s decline in the first place. Another comparison for perspective’s sake. The US prints dollars and never has to buy them is a position of power and privilege. Argentina would have to buy dollars. It would have to buy gold and its gold would be converted into dollars. At 200% its currency, the Peso, won’t buy much. Argentina could not afford enough gold to equal its needs. It would have to meet its other needs which is decided through a class struggle, by cutting down its needs and then finance the balance and that is where the austerity cuts become permanent. Melie introduces to the Public, specifically the working-class public, a new social average of exploitation by appealing to the prejudices of ordinary people. Melie is a prelude, a warm up, to that event when the conditions of the IMF are announced, the IMF wants deep cuts in social spending, pensions, social security and jobs.
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  4031. All the candidates can thank Trump for who they are. Trump is not presidential, some democrat will be presidential. Trump does not operate on a plan. A democrat will come out with the Big Picture and be a planner. Trump is a racist; a candidate will be anti-racist. Trump is a war monger; a democrat will be a peace candidate. Trump is an isolationist; a democrat will speak softly and carry a big stick. Trump is a protectionist; some democrat will promote free trade play by the rules and raise the specter of China. The one democrat who is not an opposition candidate to Trump's polarizing right wing personality is Bernie. And this is because he has built a movement of dedicated followers, whereas the others are class candidates, not willing to spill blood together if it comes down to that. Booker and DeBlasio to me, are examples of Left Opportunism in the Democratic Party. I cannot take them seriously except as an enemy along class lines and a friend along race lines. Bernie, because of his movement has a better chance of going further in reforming American capitalism toward a social democracy and defend his administration from the Coup makers in Washington working to undermine his program. The other candidates would fit into that whole constellation of Washington's elite social hierarchy do not have a movment that separates them from the establishment itself. One person alone is not going to change America, America has to change itself. Bernie people can be proud they created America's first viable political movement more people can be swept under if he won and started reversing Trump policies.
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  4032. This is not a generation ages 30 to 40 who see the condition of the social world and natural world as a political problem. They did not grow up with a social consciousness to that effect. And American legislators are a breed of lawyer who do not try to solve social problems in a political way. Lawyers/legislators/politicians are trained, instructed, paid to not social problems at all. Local legislators are worse that no matter how may times a building falls or a hurricane devastates a coastline do nothing to change zoning laws and local officials, i.e., county managers et., in most states are too religious to even sound the alarm of an impending disaster. What will happen is FEMA public funds will get cut in the name of servicing the government’s enormous debt before the government lets it go dry from all the claims and private insurers by high premiums will insure the rich. A debt made larger sending weapons overseas. Mar-A-Lago will be covered others not as rich will not. In the end the allocation of public funds for disasters is more than a case of politicians not coming together to legislate remedies to social problems, the allocation rests on a class differences, as to who will get the support. I know this is the scenario that will happen because the planet continues to heat up and ocean levels continue to rise that next season’s hurricanes will strike with greater ferocity and the government’s priority is not solving the social problems of the American people. The next flood even more powerful, the next drought more severe until the whole society is basically turned into a homeless refugee camp filled with Americans who are not rich and are not white.
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  4041. Its not unsustainable and it is a good thing if you are an employer in the meat packing industry, or a farmer, or construction firm, retail chain, gas stations and quick marts the incoming flow of immigrants supplies labor cheap to the industries in the US and if you look at the stock exchanges business is good. Investors are happy with this. It does not matter to these employers the ordeal these people endure. As illegals they have no rights and can be enslaved by American employers as young as 14 for those who made it through the Border. The Wall was Trumps chimera. A make believe closure. He used to fake out dumb Americans who find Trump appealing. Europe closes down and America opens the border. Allies are satisfying the demand and needs of American employers. Employers are not pleased wth RFK Jr., he would stop the supply line of cheap labor. RFK Jr., would never get elected for this reason. Corporations own Congress and the Senate. RFK Jr.’s policy is good for American workers but not a good policy for American corporations. If he got elected American workers would get the shaft. Corporations will move more of their work outside of the US where, once again, labor is cheap. Border Patrol cops are paid and their own hierarchy orders them to let them through. They can become naturalized once they get a job. They are contributing to society by providing labor only if legalizing them does not raise the wage they are paid. America gets her huddled masses and shoves them into every city and town in the country regardless of the toll of human suffering. Immigration in America will never be made comprehensive as Obama pursued unless corporate America is forced out of government and that is not going to happen as Americans are pro-corporate. Believers of God and the laws of Supply and Demand. Capital demands labor for the production of surplus-value and workers are the source of that surplus-value. This incoming flow of cheap labor forces wages in general downward. Now you may understand why your 30 year old still lives at home with their parents.
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  4060. Capitalism functions through crisis. Gluts, droughts, shortages, internal warfare, crisis in general keeps the price of commodities high. “ Are you better off with Biden or Trump?, This is the false thinking the American politicians use on the American working classes, a clever strategy that takes the attention away from the process of Accumulation of Capital going on in the back end of the governments. Elections are a distraction from the accumulation process. Elections distract from the crisis occurring in the background where corporations are getting filthy rich and the masses filthy destitute. I cannot emphasis this enough. Gaza, Syria, Afghanistan, Ukraine, etc are where the money is being made, corporations are enriched where people are dying. The leaders in the governments know this better than the masses do that there are four ways to enrich the bourgeoisie they represent. Crisis is a part of their tool box, and they use it for restarting capital accumulation. Take for example Gregg Abbot the governor of Texas. Had he sent migrants to all of the very wealthy communities in the US instead of sending them to the opposition’s political run cities the Border Crisis would have been solved. America’s bourgeoisie would have leaned on the Fed to take the migrants out of their communities and Congress would have taken action and debate a rational reform bill on naturalization but this would point everyone to the wars as the cause of the displacement of people and the wars are the accumulation process of the super rich. Crisis occurs in the financial and housing sectors. Really people should be asking is capitalism the crisis? There is always a coordinated assault by the leaders in government on social spending that follows a crisis. In America it would be the Speaker of the House of Representatives who would initiate austerity packages that cut social spending. In this case that honor falls on an Evangelical-Christian to decide what cuts are to go through. I think we know who this evangelical would choose to bear the cuts the most in society. As irony would have it racism was alway a tool for the bourgeoisie to dominate the American working classes but today racism is its Achilles Heel, the one faction opposed to the accumulation process resulting from war are a right wing faction in the republican party who threaten to cease Aid to Ukraine and Israel in exchange for Border security is a form of racism America’s 5000 strong bourgeoisie, owners of the Fortune 500 corporations, would sooner crush this right wing than give up the accumulation process. Crushing opposition is what the democrats do best,--they set up an opposition for prosecution and jail. But it is always the motive of preserving the accumulation process that keeps prices high behind the crushing of an opposition candidate or group, such as the Jan 6th rioters of the Capitol. There were pro-Trump working class supporters and there were far right militias and there were CIA plants among both of them. The aim was to have one of the groups break the law and then find them for trial and prosecution. If you live long enough under capitalism the pattern is evidently clear. But to younger people with less life experience with capitalism they get caught up with the subjective side of capitalism. Who the person in power is not the system that person promotes is more important to the youth. When the leaders invoke a crisis for the sake of accumulation to make ordinary people pay a generation is subjected to austerity their whole lives. So why are Europeans and Americans ignorant of capitalism and is this ignorance the reason people are unable to pull the curtain down on the system? Capitalism is the threat to the planet and the human species.
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  4075. The basic flaw in your summaries is that product is a social product they steal. No product made in America today can be said to be the product of a single person that is a product sold by large retail merchants. Big merchants sell social products. Factory produced products made by many people in more than one factory and assembled in another place before it reaches the shelves of Bergdorff’s. And that means that everyone took part in making a product. Calling a product the property of a private person is a contradiction when that private person had nothing to do with making the product. Without understanding the nature of mass social products; you’ll never get why the stealing of social products is an absurd act of people stealing from themselves. Because common to all social products when you take away their differences they are nothing but value units in a disguise of a product. Stretch the absurdity further and these people are employing personal theft time in exchange for how much social time they can grab in products in seven minutes and run for it. Its a Game Show without Bob Barker the host. Later when they convert the products into cash the stealing pays off. Now if they get caught by the cops and jailed the money they converted is still free and hopefully waiting for the thief when he gets out. Just like the Big boys who get caught stealing the fine is just a cost of doing business. You do not know the demographic well enough to assume none are in a job that pays nothing and by night or on their down time hook up with their neighborhood people and start robbing stores,---hard to turn down when some homies are carrying items they turned into a big wad of cash and your still working making nothing. Turn around and see your two kids and you might start thinking it could be worth the risk. The risk is not that big considering the method. One haul sold from a trunk of a car can bring in some big money that would take a year to earn if wages were equal to prices. Its a fast buck for a young buck.
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  4077. Conservatives use fashion and etiquette as shields against improper and vulgar behavior. Husband as fathers do all the protecting of the wives and daughters from any kind of harsh reality. Popular culture magnifies this relation in movies like 'Taken'. James Fenimore Cooper saw this too, he said 'retired in the secrets of her own abode', is American womanhood. The Americans take this from the British as the female sex relapsed in British culture into picturesque idealized womenhood. A woman is a man's idea of a woman and man is the idea of man as a projection of himself. Liberals are the vulgar and improper because the rules of that society lead to nothing else but vulgarity and impropriety. This effect creates the vicious cycle we are trapped by. Our values are manifested in other places as well. Zoning laws regulate what cannot be built and you end up with uniformity, everything is the same. Laws tell us what we cannot do and we end up acting and behaving the same. According to this stiff lipped Senator George H. William of Oregon, a conservative republican in 1866 the women of America in 2021in the military, workplaces, and in cut throat politics, in the fire, on the front lines of defense, are worthy of the vote. He said then it will be time to talk about making the women voters. Honest to God that was the mindset of a dead 19th century republican. Compare that to a live Senator today taking the vote away from women. You can understand more about capitalism by understanding sex in history.
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  4090. 3:15,----“...whether the principals of distinction, proportionality, and precaution as set out under the laws of war were expected by the Israeli forces”. Right. Capitalism has no clue what proportionality is. No clue at all. Capitalism divides people as equal owners to complete a sale. A sale is more important than people because the sale is the quintessential social relationship in capitalism on which equality and political rights of the family, church, state, property are constructed. That people cannot live stable lives for the completion of a sale is a dichotomy the OHCHR will never understand. Proportionality under capitalism does not exist, period. Socialism works on a principle of proportionality. Humanity has yet to devise a social system where force is not an economic category for economic growth. Where a gun is not a thing you can buy and sell leading to an accumulation of money and capital at the end of the sale and if someone died because of the sale...oh, well, as long as I got rich from it I don’t care, is the prevailing attitude of the Right and the Left in all the capitalist nations. Hubris. Second point, when talking about war we are talking about force and force is in itself the economic force that makes Lloyd Austin praise the Israeli use of force in the raid in Rafah, such a use of force promotes business, the Sale of billions of arms and weapons, is a sub-category under the heading of capitalism in the 21st Century. Force is distinct from capitalism and the laws of motion of capitalism do not exercise precaution in the use of force. The aim of capitalism is expansion. More markets. WE ARE IN TROUBLE...there is a Left that has no insight into what capitalism is and takes all its false precepts as a given without questioning or doubting and we have a Right that distinguishes itself as a Force in Society.
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  4109. It looks like importing a lot of have nothings from Europe to the colonies was accomplished by keeping land prices artificially high in America so the have-nothings that came kept the wage-labor market full of their lot for the capitalists (buyers-merchants) in the colonies was the story of the 18th century. The merchant-capitalist of the 17th century became the best means as a hybrid form of employing labor in a time when labor just kept on coming to America ship after ship by the droves. Formerly, a store merchant only had to add a workshop of workers and that would make a corporation. The earliest system of producing goods is born with manufacturing by hand and producing what it sells not selling things already produced as formerly the merchant restricted himself. More workers that came on board for hire the bigger the merchant got to become a full blown capitalist seems to be what the 18th century was about, the origins of the capitalists in America. A story of creating capitalists for the employment of more workers coming into the country. The Tories seemed to have had a plan, keep the price of land high enough to keep immigrants from becoming landowners and low enough to have more land owned by fewer landowners who could afford it and these people became the the forerunners to the republican party in people like Buchanan, Jackson, Polk in the Pre-Civil War period. Around the time the Indian Wars were happening to free the land from Indian common ownership and control and open the way for a western expansion of basically, slavery for the landowners and wage labor for the capitalists, side by side on the shores of California and everyplace in between. I would not put it passed anyone that this Tory split had elements that created the Confederate Congress in Montgomery.  Then it looks like the 19th century had the stream of immigrants diverted by government pressure to go from the British Colonies to America. The west wasn't opening fast enough to absorb how many were thrown into the American labor-markets. It seems the plan was plagued by Indian resistance. Remember the merchant-capitalist that became a corporation? well he wasn't the only social class to get big at the time. A huge financial Aristocracy bought so much western public land sold by the government on speculation the railroad and mining industries would expand west...this was the end of the Promised Land of the great American republic the Founding Fathers made for the immigrant workers appearing as Europe's huddled masses. The end of the Age of the Enlightenment of 1776 and the beginning of a conflicted America leading into a Civil War.
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  4123. Border Security is a good example of such a pathology, To think if American sanctions did not punish other countries from doing business with Venezuela the scum of the earth of that society would never have left it! These are people Venezuela does not care to have back or will incarcerate them. Venezuelans youth gangs will take their chances here. The migrant crime rings formed in NYC will spread and spread and stay in America. The social circumstances get bad enough and they will the Venezuelans will use them as bargaining chips to stop US sanctions. Other nations do not want to be punished by the US, their assets frozen and their transactions canceled, so they avoid doing business with Venezuela. There is a social consequence bullies are too stupid to understand, one of them is an obvious action people will take; a mass exodus the way the Jews could not go back to Europe, these migrants cannot go back to Venezuela, so they will try and try again to re-enter as recruits into gangs with resources. Effectively, Venezuela is strangled, it cannot develop its industries to absorb the unemployed, or take care of its population without the income from selling and buying on the world market the products of its domestic industries because it has been placed on a terror list and a Gang of Four as they have recently been christened leads the charge to crack down on migrants. Sanctions make a bully, a bully makes wars and wars make universal resistance, the end. The bully attitude above is identical to the bully attitude below making everyone absolutely miserable and psychotic in between unable to enjoy society and its offerings without fear of death. To this effect I say to America; Grow Up!
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  4140. How would you know if socialism makes people lazy or not if you never tried it! How lame. People see in Russia and China today another way toward industrialization and modernization and in a shorter time period than capitalism because there is no class system, everyone works, how much they work is question of available resources relative to the population. That's all they care about. Raising their standard of living is what socialism accomplishes. Here we are ten years in from the last crash pushing 2.2% GDP, American standard of living falling despite working more. Who's pocketing the wealth? A billion Chinese can out produce the GDP of Great Britain. Russia can produce the GDP of the US if it can devote what it devotes to an arms race to modernization instead.  If it comes down to a choice and it does...the younger countries will look at the eastern model of modernization, because news of how people live and work in America has traveled across the seas and only the poorest of the poor, the disposed can find a life better in America, the others more fortunate will likely take the socialist road to development. Now that this road is shut off thanks to the American president the work will have to be done by Americans. Americans clamored for more jobs and they got it. Married to the Job. Next time ask for a better and consistent standard of living and won't be given two jobs to work to equal the standard of living of your grandparents during the Great Depression. The one thing about capitalists is that they are very specific and tunnel visioned they will give you nothing and if you ask for something you will get no more than exactly what you asked for, a very linear and literally mentality. So you must ask 100 times more than you need to get it all or settle for 99% less and without and amor social backing you'll get more indignant work and misery thrown on your desk. Come Friday your gone, employers always choose Fridays to fire people at will legal in 22 states. To further your delight in social discriminatory behavior toward each other for perpetrating a discomfort and low standard of living and health options to people Ohio will turn you into a criminal if you do not become a parent, i.e., 1950's. When you do become the parent of an unwanted child the other side of the law permits employers to discriminate against you and family is not the highly esteemed social value alleged in the spirit of the law but a sham to corner you into poverty, need, isolation, dependency. Sudan is the youngest country in the world that just overthrew its autocracy. It comes into the world as a new born infant and it will be looking at the socialist model after watching for the last 20 years the way capitalism in the US has managed itself and the affairs that contributed to Sudan's decades long repression in that region under that despicable man. So self-interested, so short sighted, is capitalism that it cannot, even if it tried, to nurse young countries to take the capitalist road when they come to the fork in the road. There are still many young countries out there. North Korea is a tiny place and it has an economic power stymied is to all the other little ones out there a role model. Americans are the only people in the world sheltered from socialism as an alternative to capitalism. The elites think what you don't know won't hurt you. As for Paul Jay, that summary on socialist history he laid out was weak and is a product of the forever sequestering socialism from the American public as a censored subject in all Academia at every level of education. When there is a professor hired for the job of educating kids about socialism its usually some person who speaks way over their heads, confusing, rendering the subject like a butcher cuts meat, lifeless.
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  4153. Popular opinion thinks the world is controlled by the NSA. In this case, for once, popular opinion is partially correct. But it is not a general Evil too many people believe that is leading the world through this organization. Its central leaders are possessed by an external force of a material nature not spiritual. The higher echelons of the NSA fear they are losing control and ownership of the Public Domain drive their decisions for greater control not evil. The Public Domain is the total capacity of a nation to produce that gives the power to the presidency as an institution not Satan. In this case, America will be remembered by its Naval Power like the British Empire is remembered for its Naval Power, its economic power and its surplus product, in other words, the Public Domain spent on defenses redirects the Public Fund into the military depriving the working class economy of capital. The workers do not mean much to them is the point. Time for the workers to re-think an economy that works for them is the lesson drawn from all empires in decay in history. So the higher echelons of this organization have commandeered the material basis for violence and have organized themselves as a distinct class, or a distinct order from the rest of us. Much like the monasteries in the Middle Ages had organized themselves as an elite intelligentsia they became a citadel of economic power, then lords over the land where countless peasant farmers gave up their product in return for the work of cultivation of the lord's land and for being a peasant. Nobody in the NSA is monk, but the tendency to form themselves as a distinct class is monkish. In the practice of running the nation, every move is a move toward consolidation of power over the Public domain, and this is sensitive information, particularly if the power you are swindling from is the economic power of the working class. You do not want the Public to know the private conversations by men and women at the higher levels of this organization on how the nation's total economic capacity is to be re-directed, making people in society do this or that in order to carry out their ambitions for unilateral control in a world that is multilateral in nature. This small group are self-conscious bunch tightening their grip makes them lose grip but hastens their readiness to resist becoming an active participant in the world economy. They would prefer the Dark Ages and the Great Wall of China surrounding the American people, deprived of material and social development, accusing others of the exact crimes they commit as a decoy or deflection playing the Public and cunningly turning the tables to gaslight the world community.
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  4190. Protest the celebrities, denounce them, shame them, these are the only actions the Public has to break free of their exploitative nature making sons and daughters powerless victims under the sway of their modernism and charm. What happens in the porn world happens in the celebrity world behind private doors. Celebrities are the biggest funders to the politicians passing laws against you. There is a celebrity connected to every historic event. The fighting in Haiti for control over Haiti is traced back to two American celebrities, Sean Penn and Ben Stiller, pooled their money with Bill Clinton in 1993 they made an electric plant in Haiti. The project created 50,000 jobs but to fill those jobs the government of Haiti had to force (incentive) Haitian small property owners to sell or lose or rent, to make ends meet, small scale farming was not enough, so they quit farming and they filled the 50,000 jobs, the more they worked for the electric plant the poorer the 50,000 people got. People found themselves in worse shape leading to the present crisis that is Haiti now. Are Sean Penn and Ben Stiller responsible, they are responsible for their private interest in the project. They knew their money would get a return forever to boot. People call this residual income, really its residual profits. So there are always high profile people in company with politicians furthering the exploitation of the people as ongoing for that is how people become rich. Another example, Trump is a celebrity and a president, he wears so many hats we are not sure what he is as a man, but it is child labor that are making his golden sneakers and leather bonded bibles in other countries. If child labor returns to the US Jordan sneakers will be made here. Child labor does not cost them much and what it makes in volume of sneakers represents millions and billions in the market a part of which the children take no share at all. Unpaid labor makes the bibles and sneakers. What we are seeing here are not the individuals themselves as people but what they represent as the relations of Money, power, privilege, is in the DNA of celebrities.
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  4216.  @paulnejtek6588  American Employers do not regard a worker’s commute to work as part of their wages, but European employers do, workers in America are just paid the value of what it takes to biologically reproduce themselves, i.e., food, housing, etc., the wear and tear of vehicles, expenditures associated with travel, clothing, tools, child care, health care, are excluded in American wages. Add the commute time to a person’s job and that person’s employer saves that expense. Multiply hours worked per worker in the US by the total number of people in the workforce and only 20% of the workforce (union workers) are paid wages greater than a value amount produced in an 8 hour day the rest average an additional 4 hours on top of 8 hours they lose in the value of a an 8 hour day. Multiply the average 4 hours by 100 million workers and the value they produce equals 40 million hours of extra unpaid work compounded daily. This is a gravy train for American employers. To make matters worse for American workers they are not paid until after two to four weeks of working on the job. How much value do they produce for employers during their probation period in a job before payment in wages is created or paid back to the employer and from that point forward the worker reproduces their own wage. The law favors American Employers getting away with bloody murder and all of your politicians are dead quiet about this exploitation, not to mention a huge pool of cheap illegal labor floating used as leverage to prevent the workforce from demanding more from employers.
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  4217. How rich are the administrators of the Post Office? Do they live in mansions and drive luxury cars? I want to see evidence of a class difference between the rank and file and the upper levels of management of the Post Office. If you cannot show me the contrast between rich and poor in the social organization of the US post office than your story is bankrupt! Show me how capitalism exploits society’s need for mass communication of which the post office is a part, ---is it leasing or letting its trucks to carriers the way Ubur exploits the needs of society for mass transportation, that a class division between a driver and a car, is established and accepted in America. Uber driver works free for the owner of the driver’s car because the driver, one and the same actual owner of the car, leases the car to Uber to pick up an Uber client, during that time, the car’s owner has changed, after the Uber client has left the car the car’s owner changes back to the driver another Uber client needs a ride and the driver is reassigned a new pick up. Believe me there are enough potential Uber clients in society that regular car owners would consider renting out their cars to a corporation building a market. Is this happening to postal workers? Privatizing the post office would entail the rank and file to become the owners of the postal delivery trucks and the administrators of the post office can hire out the trucks and drivers, only then can the revenue (tax dollars) be free of the cost of delivering mail and a profit (privatization) can be made from the work of the driver’s.
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  4219. More like the friend in the White House needs the white nationalists to stay in the Oval Office, I think, aptly describes the situation than the converse. Trump is using them politically. We can break that alliance very easily with mass demonstrations targeting white nationalist with the message they're pawns in his hands, or he would have broken the alliance with the Jewish state, home of the people they hate so much. You have to use their hate to destroy Trump and them as nationalist before it biomes a situation as occurred in Italy with Mussolini's rise to power, for he used the same tactics Trump. You have to build their alliance to defeat Trump. Problem here is that non-racist whites cannot stomach an alliance with poor and working class white racists. As people in their own right, their dignity is injured and the left or the liberal left, the middle class left, just doesn't to have any sensibility of their injuries. They are dismissed, looked down upon them as ignorant fools and this incenses white nationalists to react back with hatred for the left and revive anti-communism. By doing nothing by way of inaction more damage is done to non-white working class people leaving them to be demonized as people stealing their jobs and entering the country illegally. Poor Mayan men and women and children, oppressed for centuries at the hand of white colonists, is to me shameful of the American left, a disgrace, and to report it as though it were all Trump adds to their indignities. Whit working class people have to realize their are being used before they form opinions in their own mind that Israel is needed against the big, bad and nasty Muslims. This is the function of left pedagogy, you teach not one, two, or three converts, you teach the entire mass of white workers by means of mass demonstration. Demonstration and observation are the two scientific tools the American left fails at. An absence of revolutionary theory, a phony left. Left wanna-be's who have the class consciousness but not the courage to demonstrate their aims. They betray their own theoretical principals.  When Trump makes a move he needs a mass reply. Egypt's dictator visits Trump the left should be demonstrating against that visitation with a message to white nationalist; See, We Told You Trump is Using You, join US to defeat this man who give Aid to Israel. The left does not have to educate the 'deplorable', they just have to demonstrate against every action Trump takes and aim that demonstration at the white working class voter. You defeat an enemy with strategy. He uses the greater evil abroad to control the lesser evil at home. Why otherwise would Egypt's dictator be invited to the White House, if it is not to stereotype the Muslim Brotherhood, as another big, bad, nasty group of people worthy of being listed as a terrorist group could incite another attack. So soon as a ex-military soldier converts to Islam and gets busted by California police  with a case of weapons the work of labeling all muslims is complete. What you as an American can do is to get the forgotten Patriot Act repealed by Congress, this would bring about the resumption of the War Powers Act, curtailing any president to deploy American military might for whatever reason that president thinks fit. The protests thus far, of the American left has been on issues that express the subjective desires of the left not the objective conditions which generate this subjective reactions. The real reactionaries in the American scene are the progressive left and those who support the progressives. With this I should get a lot of feedback from people reading this, which I welcome, but, frankly, progressive will not even reply for the failures of capitalism and its social ills fall on their shoulders and they are too arrogant to be humble. If you notice the white nationalists target black churches and Jewish synagogues which concerns Israel and because he speaks abstractly about the big bad, nasty democrats who left white workers flat, they feel they have an ally in the White House, as finally someone who listens to them. He treats them kindly of their crimes to maintain that alliance as it is his guarantee for re-election. So either way, you and the white nationalist are facing off against each other by the ballot. Some of them want a race war; some want what you want, a secure economic life. Instead, the left wants reforms, i.e., higher wage, universal health care and be a social democracy in the Netherlands. Go there and see there are more white nationalists in Europe than in America. This speaks for itself the failure of social democrats and progressives despite having universal health care and other worker protections. The reason is simple, progressive like capitalism and capitalism cannot survive without the exploitation of labor and cheap wages drawn from another class of people. To keep the military on his side he allocates them a cool billion despite the fact the US military already spends more on defense than Russia and China combined, if not more than two countries combined. On this question the left is absent. The only country with a dictatorship that can defend itself from a social revolution of a coup is Israel. Israel's role as the avenging homogenous white army is important to white American Christian Evangelicals, as the guardians of the millennium, where, peace, justice and prosperity among these allies is assured. Recognizing Gaza with an embassy was that gesture. A government functionary investigating white hate groups would only cause Trump to lose that alliance. If I were Trump, I'd disband that agency or investigative unit and call it: "less government", a theme white working class people built their anger on would cheer.  I really do not believe it is anything more than what I just said, that requires reading into the racist social phenomenon beyond what it appears. This is simply a case of social control and manipulation through ideological means Americans are unaccustomed to in the political sphere. Neophytes and infantile leftists get no respect from the oppressed.
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  4220.  @5british5  I doubt any of the American Jews, rich or poor, black, white or brown Jews, except the Hasidic Jews as they do not believe in a State of Israel but even they would not condemn Trump as a WN, that would cause a backlash from Israel's right wing on the Hasidim in Israel . A backlash that has already been in process legislating their lifestyle as retrogressive in the role of their women resembling the role of women in Muslim societies. A repressed female population, hideous in all respects. Anyway, I really don't give a shit about this subject, I am not jewish and their repression is their problem: I see it plain. White American working people are being played, duped, bamboozled, fools that serves as the core of Trump's success. The real enemy in this playing field are the American politicians. The ones who visit the workers in their workplaces telling them their working conditions will improve as long as they DO NOT UNIONIZE are your enemy. They want to control the workforce, as they know, the wealth they derive comes from the workers. It is impossible for corporations to sell cars and other commodities without labor producing them. They impose their lifestyle standards on workers under the strictest terms in the factory. Even the Nazis knew the working class is the true power and whoever controls this class controls the entire economy. The WN's will never understand it is all about the economics of capitalism for they are congested by a mental petrification of racist ideology, some totally hopeless, some salvageable but all can be disempowered with mass education in the form of mass protests.
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  4240. 'At this point it is unclear if anyone could face charges.', statements like this are commonly used in the press when the crime committed is done by a group. If you notice there was never a single KKK member charged with violence in all of the KK K acts of violence carried out in the 20th century because they always acted as a group. Group action is the best action and safest against cops and robbers. Cops and robbers in your community are two sides of the same rotten coin of corruption in society, they keep turning up! In Mexico the villagers acted on their own to root out corrupt cops and drug cartels. This is not a strange and unique thing. Very common for people to react this under the stresses of corruption in their community. Problem here is that these young adults are not demonstrating to their younger brothers and sisters a love and concern for them. So they can go to school happy and have a childhood. The younger ones copy the behavior the older's do not check their behavior. Cops can't charge anyone because more than one committed the act....how disappointing the Courts will have no work to do on this apparent murder by mass action in self-defense. This is why troops were invented. One mass with another mass and so, began America's journey into higher and more lethal masses of power to overcome the mass it fears the most, the Sunday Mass in the First Church of Revolution! Look how the Pentagon is being tested by some anonymous group who wants to challenge the Pentagon Establishment. I did not know Pentagon officials refer to themselves as a the 'Reservation' until I heard it from their PR man. Incidentally, if the Pentagon is reading this do something about the PR man not looking like a Private Equity Firm Capitalist dressed in $1000 suits!
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  4246. The strategy that has to happen is one that gets rid of the same type of business management that plagues our school system and work. Bell driven Pavlovian social conditioning. People lay in bed for weeks to months because hospitals don’t have to buy the equipment that makes no money for them. You think ventilators are a capital idea? No profit in it. But the bed is being paid for by an insurance carrier who will bill that patient when they get discharged and probably die of a stroke at the bill. The government is useless because it is has no sense of obligation to society as it once did, those values were cut down to a bone, that elected officials believe they are CEOs; are no going to spend tax dollars on helping patients get the equipment they need, cheapest way out of this was to develop a vaccine. Vaccines is working but it works to keep the systems going not to make us healthy and where the poor nurses are the most exploited on the front line the management dumps the work of three nurses on one nurse to save on labor expenses, including doctors, who in this country, are a materialistic lot, leave the nurses to deal with abandoned and isolated human beings bed bound. Private health care system s a death delivery system if you are a patient and if you are not a patient but need help well you should be aware that is the fault of delaying and dragging their feet on this pandemic early on because business is involved where it should not be involved, namely, health. Health is not end in itself because at the same time it is not health, its business that has nothing to do with health. Purposely killing human beings because it is not profitable is immoral and criminal and when health is profitable human beings get sick that 99% of all deaths in this country is due to the Health Establishment. Following them the next big killers are Big Oil, Big Government, Big Military, all destructive forces in their later stages of growth from their earlier days of being constructive. They now threaten the Planet! Don’t believe me? Look around.
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  4252. All we need is a president who understands that contained in Capital ($$$) is a wage-labor relationship with capital, and that this is the main form human work takes place in society and in the world today. So far not since FDR no such luck. The mega-corporations understand about themselves envision a world of standardization, preferably a world economy without nations, is a plan for the future of the world economy that suits their needs has us playing a role facilitating our own demise? How? By what means? How are we a part of our own standardization? What becomes of the wage-labor relationship in that standardization process as more of the human labor in the world takes the form of a wage-labor relation? In case you have not noticed there are not many societies left who are reproducing themselves by peasant labor. Hired labor has become the dominant form of how work takes place for 2 billion people on the planet. This is a God send for American Capital if not for the rising standard of living for working people in a few competing nations, reflecting how cheap they would pay for labor, to have the world only work when hired and the only job creators around are the mega-corporations. The president we need is one who treats the wage-labor relationship within that mega-corporate plan with respect and ensures its dignity as a social class made up of human beings. That corporate plan has set into motion certain tendencies compelling us in ways we do not even realize moving us into a system of standardization.
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  4254. The difficulty is in the fact that all of us live in a world of objects trading places and changing hands between multiple subjects through a circulation process of money and commodities, that it is difficult to tell the real value of things, and in capitalism, all objects are produced for sale, making the sale to the average citizen of a capitalist state the main way to survive in society and purpose in life, which is the exact opposite of the real relationships between industries and private producers in society. If you look on youtube; even Jamarl is producing an object in the form of critical journalism just like the guy on youtube who teaches us how to recharge our batteries using salt and boiling water is producing something useful and adds to the total wealth of society, their relationship to each other is a use-value exchange in the form of information. Capitalism is based on one act, the sale, sell more and you enrich yourself is as deep as a capitalist is as a person. To buy and sell the language of money is the only language you need. People for sellers are all potential buyers and people who are buying see people only as sellers. People exist for each other for the sale. While the producers are there for each other for self-development and enrichment, are more interesting people, they develop powerful inventions, ideas, products, and grow through experience from the interchange with each other and those who watch, listen and learn. Capitalism cannot handle a person like this. The society that is based on exchange expels creativity from the market.
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  4257. I've been watching Fox News getting all disturbed over Warren and Bernie's tax plan. The government is coming in asking for 2% from excess earnings of $50 million and if you earn more than a billion it is taxed at 3% per year. I did the numbers because Fox was screaming like banshees that this was a confiscation tax! It comes to 75,000 families will be affected by Bernie's and Warren's tax plan, only .0002% of the 332 million people. Over ten years $2.75 trillion in revenue is expected from this percentage of taxation on 75,000 families is not bad at all and they are still left with 98% of their $50 million annual income. So where is the beef Fox? It is true we are all taxed twice, once when we earn income, ie., payroll taxes and again when we buy certiain kinds of goods, houses and cars, we pay i.e., property taxes. To that complaint I'll hand it to Fox. But we have been taxed twice since before Warren and Bernie were born. Nothing new or exceptional about property taxes on homes and cars. Nothing to scream about Fox. Also, Fox gets no credit for not accounting the yearly growth rate of total GDP that makes 2% a relative minor tax. But there is a kind of property that does not pay a tax, i..e, Stocks and Bonds. Stocks and bonds are exempt of taxation and 10% of the population owns 80% of all stocks and bonds. In effect, these are the people really escaping taxation. Ironically, they pay more to hedge fund managers who charge the rich 2% a year of the value of assets and 20% of how much assets go up. The 2/20 rule hedgefund managers like Mitt Romney use. The government only wants 2% not 20% hedge fund managers charge the super rich. So its a joke, they just do not want to pay the tax is their reason and motive for screaming like cry babies about taxation on property with mouths wide open.
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  4278. Excellent diagnosis GEP...and wages are the only commodity whose price will not go up! ...all other commodity prices will rise but not the price the employers pay to get people to work for them... Understanding why a ‘double standard” exists is to understand the double role workers are cast to play in the US class system. Workers do the work itself; but it is the surplus value they create through work, employers want to buy at a fixed price in exchange for higher productivity outputs. Bessent is telling the US labor force, the employers are not going to pay wages higher than they are now... ...consumption costs per individual in society will cost you and I more to live because industries returning to produce in the US will have a higher capital costs producing in the US...the result of leaving the US and coming back to an age old outdated system that cannot outdo China...the answer block China or defeat in a war and buy labor power cheap at home... two economic realities in a head on collision... for the employers...the only commodity part of that capital cost of the employers that can be lowered is labor-power...the economic reality for employees...millennial workers of ages 30 and 40 + years old...are being told they will never afford property for the creation of generational wealth in their lifetime, and the lifetime shortens, are radical ankle bracelets on the legs of millennials in society told they will not be a class member in this society, told they are a loss of humanity, nothing left but to redeem themselves through a total redemption of humanity. We must encourage this generation told they will become the desperate who have nothing left to lose,--- a world awaits them win they win. ...
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  4283. When Mitch McConnell dies a whole new breed of republicans will take over the GOP. Right now they are a side show but never underestimate a rival in their infancy is my motto. Democracy remains unbowed and unbroken; outside of Washington democracy means a World Economy of Rules. Who’s rules is being worked out. 1. Restoring the middle class puts the small business owner on Biden’s economic radar for growth and expansion. 2. Semi-conductor development fell from 40% to 10% production legislation raises that capacity. 3. The Supply Chain begins in America is not so rosy a picture new workplaces come into being through dangerous hazards. Old workplaces remain old. But the landmark legislations do unleash the power of American capital. The problem is monitoring and regulating Capital. All construction material made in America, a re-industrialization of the US economy works for rural workers. Congress is unanimous about not cutting social security. TAXATION: There many ways to slice the pie. Taxing the corporations and the rich for their fair share would be less of an issue if there were no war spending resources that could be spent on the economy is the one important relationship Americans should think about. Every dollar spent on Defense slows down social progress in the domestic economy. There are holes in the new democratic line and there are places that will continue to suffer from policies, rational in their conception and irrational in their practicality, holding workers hostage to employers through non-compete contracts is one of them. The hazards in and outside of the workplace is another. Crucial offices whose jobs are to make society safe are compromised. Union development, paid family sick care, child tax credit, are rational policies. But when the fruits of labor deprive labor, rationality cannot work. Productivity has risen for the last 45 years per worker but what fell is the number of hours per worker worked as a consequence of automation. Automation is not recognized as the groundwork for material affluence. Automation should not be excluded as a Value Creating Force. It creates Free time when automation cannot be used to lengthen excess working time. The fruit of less time to make all the things people need to live a decent level of material comfort s denied to the worker who needs to earn a wage from two employers and not one.
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  4291. I only have four points to make: 1. War and exploitation are hand in hand the exploiters get richer when people are unstable and/or at war,--- to survive people work double hard. When they work double hard they are producing double the amount of material wealth that comes out of a mine or an oil well. Exploitation has a double role in this way of working to meet human needs, it 1.,creates a permanent demand for products that even if there is a huge supply the price stays high for the sheer magnitude of the profit margin from what it cost to get oil or minerals out of the ground....and 2., it is a bastardization of Planned Obsolescence of products that the policy of destruction of products perpetuates the demand for products makes it inevitable societies lose their agricultural and industrial growth to become full blown consumer societies like America. 2.The French economist is right to expose exploitation as the foundation of western policies but wrong to not condemn the foundation as immoral,--- if the flow of profits from the periphery is to continue flowing to the center the nations on the periphery must not develop their productive forces or the richest class in the center accruing all the proceeds have labor to exploit and it dies. 3. The COVID period showed there was no profit being made because the relationships of exploitation between people and between nations was halted by a pandemic. As soon as people started working again, and nations began to restock the shelves from barges parked offshore and when Trump said we can’t let the economy become the disease, prices on the market restarted their climb accruing profits with the resumption of work and exploitation, price is therefore dependent on exploitation, and markets are not created if people can live off what they produce independently, they have no need for modern products and do not have to buy them spells disaster for nations who depend on labor to exploit for their wealth. 4. The history of the British colonizing India, forebodes the future of Africa, when drilling and mining came into the country India was forced to destroy most of its native handicraft industries for British capitalist demanding free labor to hire for the mines and operate the machines. This demand ripped out from under billions of Indians their own industries coupled by drought and mass starvation, social progress in that country was delayed far into the 21st century. The only country that resolved this conflict between city and country, industry and agriculture, blended the two economies to be compatible parts of a total economy is China.
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  4298. America may yet see the resurrection of a new Confederacy in Missouri Republicans who do nothing but criminalize the black community. Well,--- in order to get to the place Martin Luther King Jr., dreamed it will take a struggle. They are not going to give black and brown working class people the perfect world King dreamed about. They are doing the exact opposite of the Utopia in King’s Dream and making a dystopic Apartheid State to separate the races. All black and brown, yellow, white and red people have to acknowledge they are all part of the working class. If they own a small business or they work for hire they belong to this one large social group ruled by the State and a class of employers. All workers face wall to wall social carpeting of employers from which there is no escape. If you flip the set up around all employers can escape any worker. Workers are victims of being forced into a corner to accept terms and conditions they dislike but also recognize and acknowledge workers are the future masters of society and perhaps this is what King’s dream was about. The new ruling class will be the working class and the poor. Bible says: The Meek Shall Inherit the Earth. It did not say the poor, the working class and the meek have to be black, or brown to be poor and meek. It did not have a blueprint either. It did not give any details. In a general way it alludes to the tools that make a civilization will be taken out of the hands of the State and commerce and State and commerce will be run by the meek who do all the work. This is a thought that drives the capitalists absolutely insane with reaction. They wonder how will this happen with unfit and inferior minded working class people? To know how is to change the way we look at society. Change the way we deal with injustice in society. Change or reject the way religion or socialists deal with the injustices in society.
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  4307. I tell you this...never receiving but always giving is to be a cursed person, place or thing. US Schools take in a population, trains and educates a whole new workforce and private business takes the final product paid for by society when they actively seek employment at 18. Common practice in religious institutions is to get them young. It is a sweet deal for the employers of America to get them so young, they can be shaped, impressionable, easy targets, and eager, they are inexperienced in the world of business, that to keep the influx of migrants as it is and make no changes to it would be the position employers in connection to America’s immigration. They would support the current state of affairs as is. The general social set up allows for a particular future acquisition of wealth. Products are de-regulated in how they are made and how they are sold it would not be any different in labor-markets where the product is a person and the commodity is their labor-power. Employers are tasked with the assignment to extract a given amount augmented value in a given period of time makes the whole educational process and training a conditioning process of becoming subservient to the clock that learning anything more is a distraction from this single aim. Employers get to hire future workers which translates into higher profits as jobs offer less in salary and wages. Who benefits is not this future workforce. This we know from past patterns of behavior the last batch of migrants to come have been value producers for 45 years and are still not citizens.
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  4310. If the car was used as a weapon. Than the human body was used as a weapon. Not the victim's body; alive he was using the car as a means of escape which made the car not a weapon but a means, and when the cops using their bodies surrounded the car to apprehend him the car became a weapon not because of the driver but due to the police using their bodies and lethal accessories to apprehend the driver the closer to a car you get the more the car becomes a moving car becomes a weapon. The weapons are the human being behind the armor as well as the car alternately between the ends and means was used by the driver. The greater force was the constancy of force used by the police and the power behind that force the bodies and minds of human beings was done by choice, will, volition, not by Order were they to kill but an Order interpreted as a license to kill became the modus vivendi. Prosecutor chose to save these cops. The next case the cops will be sacrificed as the pendulum goes back and forth between a sentence and an acquittal. The emotions of the public are toyed with by this truly wretched legal system that upholds the victim and victimizer relationship as something personal.  If the legal system does not operate to punish the victim and victimizer in rotating terms it loses its position as a referee in the conflict between civil society and law enforcement. If the legal system of Family, Property, and State Law loses is credibility and authority what other agency becomes the arbiter of class and social conflicts in society? The dominant corporations, the military and the public are the only three agencies capable of taking society forward in some way. The problem in America with the three agencies is that none of them are in shape intellectually to take on the task and lead society if the legal system broke down. A social paradox of enormous consequences for the survival of this republic is this intellectual ineptness among the social classes and the only remedy is a mass democratic intervention. Wouldn't life be better if the social conflicts were addressed finally and put behind us. This would transform the legal system from punitive to positive.
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  4331. Ocean temperatures rise and the heat of water is fuel. 155 miles per hour winds. This is not a freak hurricane. Future hurricanes can only vary from that magnitude and intensity. Recurrence is inevitable. Expect it and build accordingly. People will follow the developers wherever they rebuild. Developers do not build to withstand or shelter people from hurricanes of this magnitude and intensity because it costs too much. And they are not ordered by governments to do it or get out of the developer business. And there is no will of the general public to force government to get tough on developers. This apathy and passivity of the Public constantly calls up strong men, and dictators, who capitalize on sentiments to restrain the profit mongers for them. This will happen again and again until people learn the hard way. Under apathy and passivity we can only be lucky that people prove historical events that people never learn wrong. Our brains have to move from sleep mode and into an active orientation mode of our relationship to the natural world effective immediately! The developers do not live where they build they collect profits from what they build. So all the systems put in place on paper say the Public Interest is first in practice that interest is placed last. In the end, developers are safe and come out richer than they went into a place that has natural beauty of spectacular significance. We as a civilization can only reduce ocean temperature by not adding to it. Who is to decide the architectural needs of humanity the developer who builds tall standing rectangles or the Maya whose architecture was built to withstand and last thousands of years? Ocean temperature has risen and fallen many times during the span of 2000 years and hurricane winds of 155 miles per hour never tore down any of the ancient structures. They built from experience not for profit. Profit builds cheap. Experience builds to last. Nothing a modern builder -developer who builds in this century will stand 2000 years into the future. Their product will be found in fragments buried deep in the ground by future archeologists. Destroyed by great forces of Nature. I think this generation is at the crossroads between do you restrain or take private profit out of the business of building. Do you continue to appease profit makers or do you build for humanity against the great forces of Nature?
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  4333. People should read: “The End of Prosperity: The America Economy in the 1970s”, Harry Magdoff and Paul Sweezy, Monthly Review Press. The choice is depression and continuous inflation and more instability or make a society that produces for use, and money and finance are reduced to a modest accessories to a rationally planned economy. Obviously, the latter is not a choice the citadels of political power will take America as seen by Pelosi’s trip to Taiwan and Biden’s bellicose threats to an economy that does produce for use in China. The decision was made to choose the former long before this generation was born. In reading the essays documenting the Senate Hearings on the subject in the book cited above; the financial sector capitalists testified there is no solution to restore American prosperity. It would appear the latter is not even a choice as both scenarios spell the end of accumulating into fewer hands of shrinking segments of society the social wealth of the country. The selection of Biden to administer the end of American prosperity in trickle down form was made when the Democrats hit a bump in the road by the name of Trump. Scapegoats of the depression and inflation; higher prices appears as less product for your money,-- is the working class, and on the right the generation inheriting wealth, who will never understand the real source of wealth comes from productive labor not markets, will speed up instability and potentially revolution. A moment that appeared as that revolutionary day scared the daylights of the Democrats when working class rioters stormed the Capitol as the day of the end of their reign over the US empire explains the serious emphasis to prosecute opponents ready to stage putsch rebellions. But further down the road as the misery of the populace increases the staging of putsch rebellions will take on a new form of mass rebellion and overthrow of the political parties in power. When fund drives and telethons to help Americans to deep in their material deprivation cannot supply and meet the needs of the working class the latter choice becomes the only rational and ethical choice in removing leaders with no vision of the future.
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  4343. Poor black kids are living under tyranny and fascism in her school during the most important years of her life for development she is instead exposed to Neo-nazi like black cops and principal in what is most likely a black population in the school. Apparently, a teacher in a classroom could not teach the class unless this girl took off her sunglasses. An unnatural condition to impose on a 6 year old. Punish the rest and make her feel responsible the teacher chose to guilt trip the child. I would not want that teacher near my kid , ever! Incompetence of the instructor is why. This was reason enough to have referred to the principals’s office an unruly child,-- she was to be handcuffed, denigrated, treated like an animal. This school doubles as a part time Guantanamo Base. In another school the officer wasn’t even at the meeting that called the kid down to the principals office for threats and had afterwards was able to take the lives of other school kids because the administrators never checked the kid’s bag containing the murder weapon. Incompetence again. This poor child could not even conceive of such a heinous act yet she is treated like an animal as if she was plotting the annihilation of the entire school. There is no doubt I would have been killed or arrested if I were there to witness that abuse. You, ---parents need to stop sending your kids to these fascist little administrators who are running your schools and towns. You need to run them out of town and quick! This only happens where towns and cities are too busy caring about themselves struggling to survive. Little Nazis creep into public positions and use those offices to pick on the weak. Nazis select the frailest, weakest, and make rules for themselves.
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  4355. We would have to have a agricultural revolution in America to abolish the practice of slaughtering animals for mass consumption. A major transformation of land ownership and a break up of monopoly farming by the Big Farming Industry in America. The government would have to confiscate land from the monopolies in order to break them up into small farms. Agricultural schools would have to be set up to educate kids farming is a revered occupation. Nutrition and animal husbandry. Society would have to support a new age farmer as a national treasure. Architects would have redesign the town life, buildings, for a diverse range of locally grown vegetables. Transitioning from a system that produces a social product would radically be the end of American monopoly capitalism, where nothing is big anymore. A new system, really a return to an old system but enhanced by science and technology, of individually produced products. Monsanto could be an answer to world hunger avoiding slash burn farming degrading the environment in the poor countries. This is the only way to change the American diet and the diet of the world. This kind of revolution would also end nationalism as foods from all over the world are incorporated into our DNA, we develop affinities with cultures through food, form relationships and marriages. Bodies get developed and we start to develop mind evenly. Less stupid people are born would constitute a real threat to monopoly capitalism. The meat industry as we know it is a profit producing system. It produces a mass product for sale, a piece of merchandise. To the industry it is a piece of merchandise before it is a living being. If society consumed fetuses the meat industry would defend the practice of mass abortions centers the argument that it does not matter what the article is? The article is a commodity first. Its product is tied to a value relation with the GNP. Value works differently today than it did a century ago. If it took longer to make it, the thing would be more expensive, it contains more labor time and value. Its actually the opposite direction that value travels. Each chicken or egg in the market weighs in with its unit price as a smaller digit and decimal amount of GNP costs. They end up selling at a higher price because mass production is not cheap. Its heavy on machinery to farm and produce more chickens and light on labor. America has one farmer per 100 million people that it can feed meat to. This practice consumes a lot of land, a lot of water, a lot of cattle to slaughter for a lot of mouths to feed. Unnecessary when one or two mid-sized farms can yield enough for a million people in a 40 square mile area.
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  4356. It did not happen but these people say it happened so they are compensated as victims that had nothing happen to them by a foreign enemy...in short, they are usurping (in your face) the total economic surplus you produce everyday in America. In the meantime employers and managers accelerate work-processes in their workplaces and KaBoom! Farming, mining, construction, meatpacking, transportation, sectors where people spend most of their lives working are accelerated work processes. The acceleration is to lower the unit price of the product by raising output from 8 hours work to 6 hours work make more product in less time undercutting the competition with a lower price setting a new average price in the market and finally taking the bigger share of the market by selling below the old average price and above the unit price. This is the business model of owners as competitors. Heavy equipment, buildings, bridges, tankers, in every workplace across the US made unsafe with incorporated hazardous raw material into the work processes is a battle field for workers performing the jobs. Machines, automation, technology and science incorporated into a work process work people beyond the point of human endurance. Workplace hazards are never made public for fear workers would resist working conditions and America will look like Europe in month long worker strikes across most industries. They provoke a class struggle and fear the temperature of that struggle from getting hotter. Classic line is “If you can’t take the heat get out of the kitchen”. Commercial media is controlled; so you are lucky to have this alternative. The public’s attention is to be kept away from the industrial war raging between the workers and the objective conditions of work in our society. Workplace catastrophes keep happening in other sectors of the economy the workers will start to focus their attention on employers. Employers have stacked themselves into a rear defensive guard, a giant wall of employers all doing the same thing, accelerating work processes. In that formation they can escape workers but workers cannot escape the whole group of employers offering one deal; take it and shut up! In the workplace work and relationships of work are not equal. Work and relationships are only equal outside of the workplace. But inside the workplace, workers mortality is the price they pay for the higher costs of health care and other compensation costs in government obligations against employers.
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  4358. The theory of imperialism as presented by the academic critics of US capitalism in people like Wolff, Sachs, Hedges, Horne, Hudson, Cornel West, is supported by actual events around the world when observers like ourselves view the role the US plays around the world confronting its chief antagonist in China for control of Asia and Europe. When that theory is applied to the domestic crisis unfolding in the US the break up society, homelessness and violence, the spread of man made bio-engineered viruses, repression of black people, failing educational institutions among the population specifically children in math and reading; what we find consistent in imperialism abroad and capitalism at home, is that there is always an “unfortunate victim” in the grand experimental designs being played out. At home it is the black children and families, abroad its the Ukrainian people, or in whatever nation the US oligarchs and their representatives in government can find a place where war can be generated. Domestically, Oligarchs rule the US, government of the people and by the people, for the people, is a government of oligarchs, for oligarchs and by oligarchs, that not one senator is not a billionaire in Congress and in England where all prime ministers are not elected but are selected individual oligarchs, and the decline and fall of American society occurs on one side of the tracks and not the other. There are no mass killings in Martha’s Vineyard, or in Malibu, or in the Washington Beltway, Bedminster NJ, Westchester NY, nobody has died of COVID from these places and the respiratory illnesses on the rise in newborns never happens in communities where oligarchs live; all of the destructive cadences of oligarchic rule happen where the grass is not greener. Subway violence happens never happens on Central Park West or Park Ave, or SOHO, and the grades of children never sink in Bedminster NJ as they do in Union NJ, and police never protect the working masses north 96th Street but they do protect lives from crime south of 96th street all the way to Wall Street. These inequities are explained to us as social inequality in the media but given the pattern and purposeful design of them social inequality is not inborn or innate to individuals or society. Social inequality is a tool of repression; a means to weaken the potential of the masses to revolt made to appear as social inequality the government of oligarchs are trying to overcome amounts to a direct campaign of mass indoctrination in coordination with a collapse of critical reasoning and thought in the young. Imperialism and capitalism is a threat to youth around the world and at home. On the west coast a real estate oligarchy usurps the wealth of society and in the east coast a financial oligarchy usurps the labor of society, in the mid-west a landowning oligarchy usurps the most fertile land of society, each oligarchy are united as a social class against the mass of people in mainstream America who are not of White Anglo Saxon descent, and the illusion used to dissuade the oppression of the masses in America from this racism is tokenism marketed as racial equality of an ethnic in power so long as the aims of this class oligarchy are carried out by that ethnic minority. Thus we get people like Kanye West, Justice Thomas, Barack Obama, AOC, Bernie Sanders, in the pantheon of social heroes who have entered the class of oligarchs.
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  4366. How do you want to get money out of politics if you do not get the capitalists out of politics? This makes no sense. Yet this question is never answered when I listen to reporters and journalists from all the progressive channels on politics. You can’t just look at the period between two presidents figure out what kind of country you want, you have to look the long-term history of the US since the Civil War to see how things, your dreams got deferred and became a nightmare? Also, the particular way they swindle the people causes confusion in people, its purposely intricate and designed to make it harder for people to figure out. The patterns are clearer of the how capitalists defer people’s dreams, by looking at the pattern of repetition of prosperity, stagnation and depression, the normal progression of capitalism is how capitalists defer your dreams. It’s done over the long term. Americans are in worse shape today then a slave was in the pre-Civil War period. The children of this generation are already in even worse shape Americans are now due to this pattern. The problem is not capital. Capital is money the country needs to run its economy. The problem is capitalists! The difference is night and day, one is a thing that runs the economy the other is a person, man or woman, or an institution that acts and behaves like a miser and hoards all the money and then takes power to continue to hoard all the capital the country needs to run its economy and then turn their backs on society.  Nobody is going to prosecute them for evil and criminal deeds. This has been going since close of the Civil War, so what kind of country do people want, make up your minds?  All you have to do, as proof of my point, is see what has happened since the New Deal era. Reagan came into office in 1980 and undid all the programs FDR built leading up to now and Trump will finish the job Reagan started and take away social security. Social security is America’s sacred cow and the last of the New Deal cornerstones to be taken away from the people.    Very strange that a culture refuses to see this.
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  4380. Many changes going on. Central Europe is not the focus of attention for regional powers. Russia is no longer the USSR poses no threat to the US. As the CCCP, the US is hostile to China. The Pacific region is the focus of a massive concentration of US forces. How will these smaller Asian nations turn out having to take a side? Australia, the late former prime minister warned it would be a mistake to side with the Americans and did Australia listen? She sided with the Americans and pissed off the French. The Middle east is a basket case. Africa is revolting. Latin America is under the rule of the Monroe Doctrine. Containment of the USSR was the policy in the first part of the 20th after 1947 Chinese Revolution US policymakers began to use China to contain the USSR. How will the CCP deal with this US containment policy,-- Trump resurrected it after it died with the USSR and Biden pushes containment further in this first part of the 21st century? At the time and in both cases before counter-revolutions became the policy of the US the USSR and China's CCP were revolutions of modes of production. Changing the status of people tied to the land as appendages into owners of the land and both nations had a small industrial base has since multiplied that under one sovereign central government its industrial power can grow and trade with the EU, Russia and Middle Asia can only piss the Americans off. Probably to the point the US can pull out its forces from Central Europe, taking a freebie for the EU away. From its revolutionary beginnings and in theory, hegemony is not what socialism is about. So the path set by Washington set for Asia is premised on its own bias that is likely to result in a catastrophe. Three focal points that geographically make it impossible to not start a hot cold war in Asia.
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  4384. The Libyan Model is the reason a Climate Crisis exists. It has side-effects that should come wth a warning; a Surgeon General and the National Geologic Survey's public advisory on Permanent War, names and identifies all the social-psychological-physical effects of permanent war, as likely to create a social world of 99% of the human species in desperation and deprivation of all material resources and subsistence and only 1% of socially alienated human beings with a marked propensity toward nihilistic self-destruction in power. Is that the world you want for your money? You could be building homes that can withstand natural disasters and eradicating mass ignorance with mass education if your lacking in ideas on how to spend your money. US GDP is a mere 2%, very weak industrial power. Its only asset is its military, very strong. The strong depends on the weak for its funding. Industrial power is weak in America because China is stronger industrially and Capital goes where capital can make itself stronger, bigger, and can hire the most people for less the cost. Being militarily strong and left industrially weak is not cheap for labor and the cost of permanent war is paid by money that could make America industrially strong and raise the standard of living for labor from what thery are now. Trillions going into war is irrational spending and from a rational labor point of view the wars are a means only to preserve the rule of the rich who decide the wars but never fight them.  The Libyan model subjugates the American taxpayer to a theory, a capitalist theory of permanent war and permanent revolution, a never ending cycle of violence. Its an example of what a theory of permanent war would produce for those using it as the official policy of the US, to preserve their political and economic power.
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  4386. Some people would say and I would tend to agree with them the conservative trend worldwide is a working class reaction of its own demise in the West. Dispossession is the real process the masses are coping with and the demand for jobs is their clarion call. They were willing to elect a far right candidate in France with which retaliate and clobber the heads of Neo-liberals and if jobs do not come France will elect LePenn in the next election. The billionaires were able to ride this wave of working class reaction straight into power in America by creating a false opposition to the Neo-Liberals. The Democrats partook in an expropriation of the masses by a few usurpers in the capitalist East and West were complicit in breaking down the working class was Trump's line. The working class in France challenge elites with a mandate to expel immigrants. The working class in America challenged Neo-Liberals with the Confederacy. The usurpers with the aid of their political functionaries continue in the background to implement a definite aim and objective which is to control the necessaries of life. This is a goal that goes beyond being richer, it goes into the realm of world domination of the material resources that creates military might neither the Confederacy or Fascism are sentiments of the working classes in America or France. The working classes vote by what they feel and by what politics the elites create to push their goal forward. They have yet to venture into the political realm themselves and form their own politics about their dispossession.
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  4420. Reading the comments I am pleased that people are beginning to identify the mainstream media as morally and intellectually bankrupt. But this is only possible when a intellectual giant with ease ploughs through and navigates the tight and limited preconceived questions aimed at drawing out thin black and white answers, so typical of propaganda. The contrast between smart and stupid is glaring forces a viewer and listener to think. There is no question in my mind this woman does not even know who David Hume was. Chomsky wrote the book on the media's function in a command economy as fltering what information the American and British people are permitted to know. He breaks through the filtering process. Without a script this poor woman cannot think on her own cringe a viewer like me. Like watching Trump shut down verbally searching for words if the teleprompter is cut off. The tragedy is the under development of the female mind that is enforced by the corporation employing her that corporate feminism is all form and no substance. I watched a beautiful video of a beautiful town or city, I really don't know how big it is, but it appeared to be a town off the Atlantic coast called Cornwall. So I wrote a comment remarking on a well done video of a georgeous place and my immediate worry was how this town could be invaded by Trump International Resorts now that the UK will be standing on its own. Whereas the EU has something in the order of 27 nations, a Trump Resort or an American corporation would have to wait eons before it can sell its commodities in the UK. Easier to break down the standards and regulations for products when a country stands on its own than if it was part of a union. Divide and conquer.
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  4430. Speaking generally, under feudalism, you did not have to have a theory of value to know who was subjugated and who was not subjugated. Besides people back then witnessed the exploitation of man by man right in front of them on a routine basis and in every social setting through their own relatives, friends, bosses, churches, employers, social classes, states and nations. In a capitalist society, subjugation is not so clear and direct. Exploitation happens but its not out in the open or at least it hasn’t been until now in the latter stages of socio-historical development. This is because our society, a society that places a value on gold as the money-commodity, is a society of objects relating to each other as values, and money and commodities is the general social form of agriculture and industry, employment and communities, interact as values and circulate between people as buyers and sellers, that you need a theory of value to explain how someone ends up richer than yourself and acquires the powers to subjugate your person, mind and body. For this reason religion of any kind that places a God between humans and the material world is a subjugation of a non-human entity over a human entity, s projected over the real exploitation between humans, and substituting the real relationship of human and nature. Two things are happening. There is the general interaction of humans with nature and there is the specific social relation of objects concealing the exploitation between the subjects that makes the social origins of subjugation in a modern society invisible.
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  4431. The sociological ramification of capital flight are as Dr. Wolf says, capitalists thought that if not them it would be the Russians, Germans or the French or the British capitalists who would invest in Asia driven by competition that American capitalists took advantage of the phase of economic development the underdeveloped economies were becoming. What it meant for the American working class was the beginning of a deskilling process of workers, as production was moved, creating a redundant working population that would also serve as a competitive background for the reduction of wages of the working class began to take shape, and offsetting the displacement of workers by automation, the working day increased as did worker productivity. Capitalists are extracting more surplus-value from workers through a scheme of external worker competition for jobs that lowers wages, and by an internal process of extending the working day and labor output through automation. A double blow to the working class that position workers in a bad spot when the economic order undergoes other shocks and tools are applied to correct a crisis or prevent one from happening work to fix the financial side of the economy at the expense of the social side of the economy, endless policies that bail out capitalists at the expense of workers. This interplay between competition and automation defines the nature of the American class struggle, as a dramatic power play for ultimate owner and the distribution of the economic surplus. Two economic forces make necessary a working class opposition to the onslaughts of capitalist competition and the use of automation for private consumption can only be fought back by a massive strike waves and social boycotts of the specific monopoly corporations in charge of the political life of the country, to break the international competition among capitalist rival nations, and to break the monopoly formations domestically by finding work in alternative industries and spending your money on alternative products, this to weaken the international strangle hold corporations have on American workers, but the ultimate conquest is political power and workers need a political voice(s).
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  4435. Socialism went out of fashion and came back it is time it takes a seat at the table out of the shadows of the reductionism of the right wing. Their defense of private property vainly, and arrogantly, minimize the legitimacy of a Marxist paradigm for working class movements. How long before the west becomes a "Denmark", or a "Venezuela" undermines the mission, as if capitalists are not sabotaging every effort in a vain attempt to de-legitimize working class emancipation. The capitalist class stages every attempt and breeds contempt for the idea of a working class emancipation as a mission in life. The idea of working class emancipation is a vocation in economics. If it were a vocation like the Rapture is a vocation for fundamentalists in religion it would be respected. But since the vocation of emancipation lies in the heart of economics it is a direct threat to all economic usurpers. Emancipation from the tyranny of the absence of money, food, home, shelter, necessities. Emancipation from the tyranny of the absence of free will, that the Big banks, industrial capitalists, large-scale landlords, industrial merchants, all have contempt for this focused historic vocation, and fear it, the more people are drawn to the vocation of working class emancipation the more intensified are the attacks on the working class, its that simple. They fear strength in numbers only when it comes to working class emancipation. Strength in numbers as a workforces, sports team or a congregation, religious order and denomination, or strength in numbers in institutions, organizations, that do not disturb the basic framework of the economic structure that keeps the working class in a state of continual need, is not negated. The rest is all politics.
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  4438. Who might be that Deep State Pizza_Dog? Is it the MIC, CIA, FBI, HS, NSA? You and I are not a part of that state are you, I know I am not? Every moment and second of 143 million people's lives is life going to waste for a class structure drummed up as permanent! You really think the class system and its Deep State is permanent when its basis for existence is the creation of a compulsory working class? Forced labor holds the political structure together. Eventually, permanency becomes transitory itself. It simply has not become obvious to 143 million people that their existences is transitory in a permanent way as well. In that permanence work is compulsory they themselves must live with the awareness that as soon as they day or night work begins it has already ceased to belong to them. Once they sold their time they cannot sell it to someone else is a permanent condition for them in which all the trimmings of modern life, marriage, consumerism, bait individuals into a reality of non-independence. Mortgage, rent, wages, taxes, UI, Medicare, are the chains, all the various forms of programs that engulf 143 million people to compulsory labor in exchange for those programs makes life a permanent hell on earth for them. Under this administration, the immanent measure of value is compulsory labor. Once they have your ass, you are officially separated from yourself! A 143 million souls struggle for dignity have no value or worth of their own because their labor is acting as a measure of value for others! I do not think the Deep State has the mental capacity to be behind such a demonic plot because their lives is dependent of revenue not profits. In fact, I believe the Deep State would come to the aid of the 143 million if profits got so large that it threatened the Deep State of its revenues. There are three players in this fight the third outside player is asleep and unaware it has the power to cease profits and the power of profit to abdicate its rule of the state.
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  4444. And why are not the mighty and productive of machines of NASA that can create water and rain to end a drought not used in Utah? All over Youtube incredible machines is boasted for their power and size. Gigantic boring machines that can be used to redirect flood water are the machine I refer used to bore tunnels through mountains. Where are these machines that can come to the aid of the community suffering wash out? The machines though produced by tax payers are not the taxpayers to use would be my question. We are talking about the survival of society; doesn't the American government care? NASA uses a machine four stories tall to cool down jet lift off it is basically a storm cloud creating machine would ideally solve the drying up of Lakes Tahoe and Powell, the reservoirs and the Colorado River, and add water to the ground aquifers. do not understand the logic behind a government that abstains from deploying machinery of this type and scale in the service of society but is used only to send rockets into space? Taxpayers are given sand bags for making the giant cloud rainstorm machine a reality! Oh no, people think these machines do not exist. They'd rather believe that than the ulterior reality there are people in government who cannot stand people and would sooner raise a glass people become extinct. There are no evils, see nor hear of them. The large scale industrial farmers have an interesting take on how to solve the drought. Its a theory based on desperation that everyday their crops are destroyed on purpose because they cost too much to water than they would bring in profit. So by reducing the quantity of crops they raise the exchange-value of the crop because this is what the business of farming is all about, staying alive as a business. But in the meantime there is no water and well drillers are drilling 2500 feet finding nothing. The more they drill the faster thy run up a cost they cannot afford and go bust. Its a downhill spiral to doom. More dam building and more reservoirs to catch more rain water is their theory the aquifers will fill up because the more cavernous the ground becomes the more sink holes we get and the total infrastructure, oil and gas pipelines, shift and rupture and roads surfaces buckle or collapse the caverns the water had filled but are now dried up. We drive over these caverns drying up. The theory would work except for one, actually very big flaw, the promise of rains coming down in forms before is presumed regular. Rains are microbursts of storms and a changed Jet Stream is no guarantee the rains will come consistent or steady. The heat of the Sun is more consistent the rains of the clouds, and on dry days parching the ground happens. The Jet Stream has swung somewhere else. Water cannot get into the ground is the piece of the theory they refuse to accept because that part of it is linked to Climate Change. Admit climate change that postulates human activity is the cause of a hot planet and the Age of Big Oil comes to an end. Climate Change to the landowner-farmers in this country is a cock and bull story made up by some college geek is the pervasive fallacy that got Trump elected. In the hands of such people lay the responsibility for the survival of society?
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  4446. Not a rosy picture on the economic front for people who are not investors in Wall Street, that would be at best around 132 million people who will not be in a position to buy a home, pay groceries, or pay rent. They are not owners of other forms of income. No dividends, stocks and bonds, and with government cuts they won’t have a safety net, when they are thrown out of work. Millions more wandering society jobless for as long as that recovery lasts will have deleterious effects on the side of America that is destitute. Recessions cycles in the US economy have tended to become longer and more frequent and recoveries shorter and less frequent. But this recovery promises to go longer than earlier recovery cycles, we shall see. Investors are not wrong about this recovery in every sector but the housing sector. But every recovery has a coinciding recession, and so what we have is a duality. Our economy moves forward through two dependent variables bound together as a guaranteed recovery for buyers and a guaranteed recession for a third of the population of the US as sellers who cannot find a buyer for their commodity, and are asked to bear the cost of recovery, government shut downs, bankruptcies, job losses, and all the rest of the nasty social realities thrown at them. Lower gas prices is a boost for wages but when profits begin to slide employers will cut payrolls for profits and introduce AI to the workplace. AI is sure to displace millions more from the workforce. Not a rosy picture at all. Ai makes free time more probable for all members of society but AI privatized it will be applied to secure higher profits. Ai has to be one or the other not both at the same time, an end in itself and not a means to an end.
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  4459. Exactly, it is a good idea. There are two aspects to labor in society. America's economy emphasizes a quantitative relation the side of labor that performs by the clock! Work is measured by time, duration, expenditure, etc. A specific style of management over labor is necessary to make a worker produce more in a given time. Methods are developed to exact the absolute last drop of a person before they quit to go home, i.e., Taylorism, and now email and cell phones exact more labor and rob a worker's free time turning it into working time. The end result when all this is generalized is the abolition of the 8 hour day if they have their way. Unpaid work increases. Minutes here and there, add up. Management attitude has gone from '..do me a favor...' to '...I need you to do this for me now.' Labor in this form, its participation in the workplace, decreases and the hours of work increases for what little live workers are still left in the shop floor. A never ending process of exploiting labor at some point comes to a head. Workers who work under a form of management that emphasizes ' value' the quantitative side of the relation create 'value relations', producing for a subsequent acquisition for anything quantitatively unlimited. The other side of labor is the work itself, a qualitative relation. The product, the labor, the labor-process. Society reproduces itself through cooperation, hence, the idea of Co-ownership or Co-ops seem logical and natural. This side of labor produces for final consumption and social production defines work if it were applied as Corbyn suggests. This side is also the more natural relation between human and nature as a general relation. Such as Climate is not the same as weather. Working is not the same as the work itself. Conservative right wingers are not able to comprehend the difference and consequently are unable to keep a tight leash on capitalism from its corrosive action on the planet and the species life. Labor in this mode owns the labor-process in the sense that the labor-process is a public place it belongs to everyone not exclusively to a few or one person. Society would move toward common form of property ownership which heightens the tension of its opposite relation, the owner non-workers. Hence the conservative Tories and the on the other side of the pond the conservative Republicans are on the defensive and heightened with alarm, private property is at a stake! So alarmed the Democrats are the owner non-workers of society like their counter-part party the Tory. Labor does not produce for exchange in this form of management, there is no overwork and there is no unemployment, and there is no distinction among people such as people who are non-workers involved in the workplace as owners and those who are workers but non-owners of the labor -process.
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  4460. Wake up Boyd Gilbreath! The government Trump dismantled was a war government and a do nothing about it Congress for the American people, so I see Trump as the last hope for a real departure from a power struggle model of government, America needs a deep revolutionary transformation of American society and government.  It needs a transformation of its class system and frankly, its government. The presidency is really not a necessity to run society. A Senate is not necessary. A supreme court is not necessary, but a Congress is necessary to run an economy. A Congress is all we need as a democratic association of individuals for the purpose of unanimous consent. Think past a republic and into a future government simplified and all inclusive. Right now if a state or several states decide to secede as many seperatists would like the nation is back in the Civil War era. Pretty backward country if that happens in this age. Society does not need the senate or the presidency, economics is independent of these institutions but these institution need the economy to survive as institutions dominating and controlling society. I am suggesting the power side of government, the side that uses force be eradicated and states be eradicate and Congress form a new national government. I hope you wake up before this rotten government decides to annihilate life on earth first because it refuses to transform itself from a republic and become a real democratic government consisting of regional constituents. One country one time zone one government principal. All in and nobody left out. Perhaps then the world will follow a better path of growth than its present crippling course of calamity.
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  4461. Pulling our economy out of the worst crisis in a 100 years? Really Mr. Biden. 100 years ago the year 1921 began the decade of gangsterism, labor syndicalism, the Red Scare 1921-23, concentration of capital on Wall Street that led to the stock market crash and the Great Depression in 1929. Hitler covertly annihilates 7 million Jews in Germany, fascist General Ito in Japan, Russia lose 29 million fighting the Nazis and winning the second world war, and America is a land of 'Oh, Brother Where Art Thou', with Robert Johnson selling his soul to the devil in return for writing the blues into American history from that day at the crossroads in Mississippi. I do not want to be asking people 'Hey, Can you spare a dime?' in ten years. All the recoveries going back from 2007 which was a crisis greater than the Great Depression, are short recoveries. Recessions are longer and recoveries are shorter and shorter has been the pattern of behavior of neoliberalism since America declared war on Vietnam. The American economy has been on life support ever since heavily reliant on one industry,--- oil. America mistakes this mistake often. It makes itself dependent on one commodity and constructs an entire social order around that one commodity. Then America becomes envious of nations that get on the right track of human development,--senile old social class that is Washington. Cotton was king before the Civil War. The South constructed a social world around cotton and slavery. Though the North did not fire the first shot that did not stop manufacturers in Boston and NY from causing a cotton famine in the South at the same time as the war broke out. Producing cotton cheaper than the South was the first shot in the war. Fort Sumter was the second if the Civil War was a way to deplete the cotton made in the south and weaken its foundation. All wars prosecuted by the republicans and the democrats the war Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Africa wars started in those countries by America are wars that lower the standard of living of people in these countries for the extraction of natural resources. They are not to establish peace and harmony, democracy and free markets the greater danger are political parties that believe in their own propaganda. An immorality of seven days of week cannot be washed away with one day of Sunday worship a week. Meet the Press won't cut it either. Neither will a river baptism take away the immorality of using war to rescue an economy when all that means is more of the same ever closer to annihilation.
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  4462. These leaders are really poking in the dark. Putin is not going to use chemical weapons. People listening to this news need to learn how to read between the lines of what this president is saying and to the audience he speaks. They are meeting because they are losing this war. The inability to end wars is not atypical for the US. It start wars and then loses them. Wars are form of generating wealth but that can only go so far before the people into which the war is the theater of operations are at the brunt of the war. The suffering is too great. Zalenski repressed his opposition and that can last only so long sounds like his dictatorial rule over Ukraine is fading. He needs a win. He needs help. The war is profitable and there are economic interests that want the war to continue. The president wants to get re-elected needs a win. The allies are conflicted. Germany has been strong armed into the war. France tried to negotiate the war to end has its own opposition to NATO. Italy broke away from it all. Spain is not even involved. There are no allies but only a Tripartite Oligarchy that wants this war. The US is internally conflicted. The Democrats chose the wrong path to victory at home. A solid victory would have been as simple as cancelling student loans and solve the housing, health, education, crisis in the US. This is probably the weakest alliance in modern history. Nothing more than a collection of nations over reliant on the military prowess of the US. Its a vestige, its time has come to fade away. They even have Boris Johnson who is not even a PM right up there in that line up. This is really a pathetic show of impotence. The offensive they plan cannot happen in winter months they wait for warm weather relying mass opposition to this war and them in Europe would quell, become silent, passive. But they are wrong. Wrong because their own citizens are disgusted with their form of economics entailing cuts in pensions, extending the working day to cover the cost of this war and the absence of any taxation on those who want the war to continue. Neo-liberalism and the NEOCONS spearheading these goals have reached their end and the fear is how they will react to that end as they are absolutely drunk and obsessed with power. Its over. All that remains is which of the allies will get the spoils.
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  4468. The value equivalent of wages is the cost of survival in a given place or region in the country. Businesses are compelled to increase the workday when they cut down on staff because the wage has risen. They moan and groan the cost of labor is too high. In the old days to offset the loss of “hands” the workday was prolonged till you dropped on the job. But today the miracle of science and technology is applied on the work people are hired to perform to enhance their out put on the job. This often leads to a bigger problem. The business that cut its staff down by half operates the crew at double the rate with new and updated equipment is designed to make the job easier but often the outcomes are negative results. Currently, hospital management corporations applied a remote controlled system to monitor 60 heart monitor patients and a few of them died because one teleologist was responsible for 60 heart patients whereas before the change one teleologist monitored 2 patients. The result is critical units are shut down. Literally the living driven into the ground and a hefty profit to show for it. Technology applied to a given labor-process is only labor-saving from the standpoint of business not from the standpoint of the work itself. The work itself consumes more energy from less people working overtime. But to enlarge wealth, make a surplus, is the aim behind increasing the minimum wage for the effect it has on employers. A wage increase harms small business but for Big Business its sets the stage to innovate and shed more workers to lower the cost of operations and increase the rate of output with a higher surpluses and more profits.
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  4492.  @ivanfreely6366  Not quite Sonny Jim, I am living in the future that is not yet the present and it is you who are living in the past that has not yet become the future. The past is Washington D.C. the 1% political elite, the GOP, the democrats, the constitution, the Congress, the White House, the US military, the Roman Catholic Church the Evangelicals, how you live and how you work and the process of working are you chains, i.e., a job. These are all social and institutional relationships that come from the past still dominate Americans in the present. Drumming up the same ludicrous arguments that never once view these institutions as products of the past. Nothing in America is the future except its technology which is controlled by all of the above named the forces of the past. A technology that will liberate your fellow citizens and yourself from contemporary indentured servitude that chains 300 million to work for the 1%. Google is a new name or face to an old economic form of monopoly capitalism. American working people are oppressed by forces of the past ideologiaclally and politically. Monopolies came into existence before you were born and here they are again. Tariffs and protectionsim is an old, old form of economic policy dates back to pre-20th century Washington's 1%, long since dead, but now inherited by their children, who infest your government. More accurate to call the US government as the government of the 1%. You eloquently describe the life condition of Americans as a condition common to the life of a Russian peasant in 1905, or a serf of the Middle Ages, unfree and oppressed. People have indeed changed, as you say, the people you know have changed from middle class status to working class status is how much they have changed. They have become a social class of the past, i.e., a working class, a special product of the 1%, who will insure they are comfortable enough to tolerate their opporession but never in the driver's seat. As soon as these people learn to drive the car the car will forever leave the old neighborhood of the 1%, on journey into their own future. The Game of Thrones is over.
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  4496. Well, there are two sides to the social structure. Competition and productivity are useful agencies to capitalists in cheapening the cost of production. It could be useful to the American people but they choose to not use their own productivity for themselves is itself a perplexing historical paradox. They have the power but not the intellect to end competition in the world. If there was any will involved in the decision to export production (CO2 omissions) it would have to be the will of the masses in America and the developed nations responsible for the loss of manufacturing and higher polluting factors on the planet. Productivity and competition belong to the American people but are what corporations use to make profits. It could have been any nation to become the place where productivity is highest and cost of production is cheapest and that is where the international corporations will take their competition. There can be nobody else to blame for decisions the American people make in expanding their market needs and the needs of the corporations in the market at the same time. Call it generosity or gullibility, stupidity, or ignorance, it all applies to the paradox. Instead of using the fall in their necessary working time to reproduce the whole society for the benefit of society it is given free, unpaid for, to the benefit of corporations. In the competition the whole international class of corporations for a piece of the action in China, they intensify that productivity with speed ups; work harder mandates, more labor time, tighter rules, higher output, in the workplace sets off a competition, to sell more, a result ending in a market expansion. You have to accept these terms including a vaccine if you want to work. The paradox is bound up in two distinct social realities, simple reproduction is made easer in less working time and 2., how simple reproduction appears as a false motive of the entire international class of corporations from the US, EU, UK, Japan, Australia, SA, Middle East to lower emissions when it really is raising productivity. Want proof: ask anyone who works if there work has become enjoyable, satisfying, an act of affirmation of skill, talent, rewarding, and if they answer no, they gave up their will and productivity to the capitalists. 🧐
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  4520. It appears Biden lost the black vote before Cornell West ran. Hillary lost the black male vote. Obama regained the male black vote but it was not all sweet. Cracks and fissures of a party split. If West needs money for back taxes his supporters can pay it or fight it. The only black vote the democrats have are black older women. Democrats have on their hands a bunch of pissed off Gen X, Gen Z, Millennials, largely middle class. By repetition they treat the black male voter segment of the working class as people they need to get in line. Degrading. The black male has historically been on the outside. Racial overtones of the old days of slavery persist. If anything its a good thing West is running. The democrats will have their hands full fighting back the republican far right wing who want to destroy the Democratic party. If that happens a working class opposition party can step in under West. Important to be ready and build organization. A Trump return would be give the advantage to the far right, a revenge administration and civil war between the two fought out in courts, streets, wherever, but the working class not a part of Washington’s preoccupation with themselves in that internal war, have only one social enemy in society. The police surveilling and monitoring working class communities and that is enough of an obstacle that organizers do not need any more enemies in the Public realm. All organizing is infiltrated and there are enough grounds to sue the police/FBI in many states for that infiltration and obstruction as a suppression of rights that should not be exclusively relied on as a fight back only but as a part of the larger movement that interjects what the working class as a whole wants from the billionaire class.
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  4526. America in particular is a society with social institutions built on the old economic conditions of the 1940s that are no longer in keeping with the new economic conditions in the 21st Century. Until people grasp this fact they will never gain the confidence to discard old institutions and replace them with ones that fit the current social conditions that have emerged over an 80 year long period. What will occur if people do not take action and make a world transformation the present mode of production will rise and fall, rise and fall, and with each rise and each fall, the trouble and social consequences amplify, worsen, until the social system itself dives into complete disorder. For example: Freedom. In America you are free and not free at the same time. Inside the workplace where the changes have been dramatic Americans are not free but outside of the workplace Americans are free. We are partially free not fully free. To be fully free the mode of production has to change. Work and employment that was organized in the era of the New Deal no longer fits with work and employment in this century. Work makes people miserable in the long run and the free market temporarily restores a sense of happiness in the short run and neither social sphere of human activity generates any real and meaningful freedom or contentment in individuals. When we look at the Rocky mountains we are not seeing them erode in real time (our time) and we do not see the Pacific plate pushing the continental plate building new mountains. The same action is true in economics and takes place in society are movements not detectable by the naked eye does not mean the action does not happen, it is the reason why institutions become incompatible with society’s social changes. They have become unreasonable and wrong the changes have silently taken place made what used to be reasonable unreasonable and what used to be right wrong. Rather than to jump ship and head for the hills, drop out of society, people need to take control over the productive resources, and build a new social order.
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  4532. AI Story applied in the recycling business is also an application in the production side of plastic (chemical industries) and changes the consumption side of plastic (consumerism). This is the kind of human tool that controls human behavior. The kind of tool in demand by the richest of the rich and the evilest of the evil. Its also the kind of tool that is a new force of production in history, something of what the windmill was to the 14th century, or the steam engine in the 19th century, a tool that changes the social relations of how America and the world will live, eat, sleep. Whoever controls this means of production controls humanity is a storyline for Marvel comics of heroes and villains that is not for human history...its fantasy...and you can bet privatizing AI narrows down the direction humanity can go. Privatization Road comes to a fork in the road where human progress is a left and barbarism is right. The last time humanity came to a crossroads where it was a matter of life or death was when it discovered a bone can be a tool and its own hand and feet a tool for the bone. Nature made our common ancestors make the right choice back then...Nature will do the same for us in modern history but with more killing power...as the Knight told Indiana Jones he must choose wisely the cup of Christ from the many on the table, or eternal life will be forfeited, if you choose wrong. So don’t blow it people. You turn right its barbarism; turn left its eternal life without privatization controlling life.
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  4534. If Roger ever told me to my face I was complicit with humanity’s death sentence, a criminal, because I am not fighting for life, not actively engaged in civil resistance my ass and his face would look the same. Both these individuals are asking me to save western civilization and I ask them... for whom? 1., it was known 30 years ago...actually climate change was known by natural scientists in the 18th century. Besides that matter... 30 years ago these guys were idle...about climate change. Calling people out on this is arrogance... after 30 years of developing himself and Xtinction Rebellion organization,--- those 30 years he spent constitute 30 years of inaction relative to the civil resistance and disobedience happening in his day too...did anyone confront him with a didactic accusatory choice and the ask that he should save a society built on exploitation...of course not, this is rich hubris on par with the hubris of the neocons in the national security state. He should instead be humble and say I am one brick in the Wall of the social relations of capitalism that has loosened and threatens the wall to come down. We need more bricks to loosen up for that wall to come down. Its not about “survival” and not about the ‘ system’, its about capitalist relations. Civilization may be not worth saving if it is capitalism that is being saved. This is what FDR did and look where you are now. Going further human beings as a species may not be worth saving. The human species cannot as 2000 years of recorded history proves behave as a fraternal being with its own species. We are the only species who exploit our own species in the human world of nature and in the non-human world of nature exploitation of other species is a matter of subsistence not survival. Capitalism wrongly equates the production of subsistence to the non-human world of nature as a war of survival and that is a false concept of natural history. The actual jungle is kinder than capitalism. Jungles offer subsistence, capitalism is a deprivation of subsistence. And the response of the ruling classes to climate change is “tough shit, people die that’s nature and survival, deal with it”, versus the response of the Left its the “system itself” are didactic choices and as two opposing prevailing orthodoxies they are both wrong! Don’t get me wrong I love works of art, music and literature and civilization, but if it comes with capitalism why in the hell would I want to save a social system of lawyers, prosecutors, Generals. Presidents, Senators, Capitalists, merchants, landowners, and people condemned to be the exploited working classes ...as a human being? If an alternative did not exist in theory I would say burn it all down! Earth will survive even if we don’t.
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  4536. “Super brazen”...what I see are people attacking people if I knew absolutely nothing about why? Rare that we see in nature a species killing its own species to be its subsistence. Ants form colonies and help each other. They don’t dominate or devour their own kind. Fish eat smaller fish. Small fish join together to make one big protector from bigger fish eating them. There are so may variations in the natural world of animals and plants whose interaction s for survival come from being eaten, or eating something nature given. Fish are species that are the subsistence of other fish including humans. Beavers produce the means of subsistence for other species when lakes are formed by their dam constructions, and... there are species who produce nothing and consume everything in the world of non-human nature and there. Humans are the exception, we have to work with our hands and bodies to make our subsistence. Our interaction for survival is between us and the environment. The soil, water, sun, air, we will come to this realization when all the things we make to control others with are gone. Earlier we did eat our species, earlier in our barbaric stages of development. Cannibals were humans. Germans, French, British, Spanish, Italian, American, Russian, Dutch, you name it, all committed atrocities as humans killing other humans. This is only true for about 10 countries out of 150. Not a bad record for a 12000 year old species. Even if God made the world he is not responsible for what we do in that world. And if he did not make the world and us we, in the end, are responsible for our own decline and disintegration. Not all humans but more than our share dominate, destroy, or devour, vanquish, conquer, and rob other humans... and it is all done through the use of things. The control over things. It is the house of another, the car of another, the money of another, the jewels of another, the drugs of another, the food of another, more things under the control of one person and few things under the control of many people is the shape of crime in America, that drives humans to kill other humans...that’s is all it is and how we fall into trouble as a species or lose our way as they say is our own fault. Super brazen is what super-deprivation looks like to the one who has control over things and super-deprivation is what brazenness looks like to the one with no control over things.
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  4544. The nation-state of the US is home to some of the worse evils the US adopted from Europe in the 20th century. The emergence of a virulent right wing is a response to long standing failures of the American economy to employ its working population and raise their standard of living. The end of prosperity that began in the 1970's. The Trump administration has taken a protectionist stand to reduce its imports and foreign investments. The problem with limiting trade is the loss of income derived from foreign investments. Income that would otherwise contribute to a balance of payments favorable to the US economy and thus stimulate employment at home. This administration has also sharply cut our military assistance to Egypt. Sold a substantial military package to the Saudis and economic assistance to many countries cut, while at the same time as the planet is heating up, causing commodity shortages and inflation at home of commodities from the economies that are part of the Bric countries. The administration is attempting to reduce America's purchases abroad and increase foreign purchases at home with discriminatory policies against the dollar in most countries of the world does direct damage to our own economic prosperity and that of the world's. This administration compares US foreign investment income to investment income of foreign capital and sees the national defense budget as a means to resolve that imbalance. However, since monetary policy and trade policy are two-fold the cost of empire is sharply inflated, the national defense budget rose during the Vietnam War and the longest war in Afghanistan adds more to the cost of empire, has the direct negative effect of a general reduction of employment and wage earnings but a positive effect of increasing the share of the national budget going to the military generating a higher cost of empire. The 'lion's share' of the money in short-term liquid assets, cash on hand, was in 1973 (Wall Street Journal February 13, 1973 reported) $260 billion in 1971 held by '...private institutions on the international financial scene...,' the cash controlled by U.S. based multinational corporations and banks is today $3 trillion. It is clear from this figure the American working population are falling under the heels of a class formation of the institutions as opposed to a class formation of individual capitalist, bankers, and oil industrialists. It is clear from this the institutions have developed monopolistic tendencies hoarding the wealth which explains the flagrant consumption of luxury of so few super rich entities that exclude the majority of its citizens except to serve as the permanent economic source of income for the national defense of the super rich.
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  4545. No are the GOP and the Democratic Party, they are the party of No.  They are the people who give permission to JP Morgan to accumulate and tell the people they are in the way of that accumulation. They are the State and the state is a culture of No. Rules of No. Laws of No. Principals and ethics of No. No dominates the family, the person, the child, the State. No is setting limits. Limits that today are choking humanity to death. No is when there is a limit to how much of a walk into the woods, playing with a toy gun, or waiting in a car while black or brown, these states of being are limited as to how much you can consume without having another person calling the cops on you. People using what is supposed to be the guarantor of safety of person, property and society, have created a culture of using cops as tools to hurt, injured, killed, harass other people is a culture of accumulation for the sake of accumulation behind all this repression. Something else could be the party of Yes, but the culture here is one of uncertain self-doubt among the broad spectrum of the population. What is accumulation of capital but a double process. Jaime the capitalist knows his capital produces for itself the relationships desirable in society for that accumulation to happen, he can sit back watch money make money, people play the parts in the social drama Capital needs to make itself Capital, a self- construction of itself, is a process of money using people to make itself capital, in a transformation from money into capital. No means Yes to Capital and No to Labor the creator of Capital. But this is not how the American working class see capitalist relations as accumulation for the sake of accumulation.
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  4552. Migrants are isolated workers. Isolated workers foster an ideology of individualism. They come to America or Europe for self-motivating reasons, i.e., a better life etc. This motive is itself a social force. In large numbers incoming migrants find themselves in jobs through various agents dealing with employers. The hiring of illegals by American employers (owners of capital) crushes working class consciousness for American workers striking for higher wages. The Far Right uses this to defeat their political opponents and lay down nationalist aims. The Far Left does not use the incoming flow of migrants as a means to educate Americans of the intent to crush their efforts to raise wages. Workers were striking left and right after the pandemic, they were unionizing themselves in Amazon and Starbucks, and nobody on the Left used those striking situations to talk to workers in person about what forces are working against them in their struggle. In effect, American workers do not even know who the Far Left are except through a Far Right critique of them the media happly advances against Far Left political people. The American Left by their inaction to agitate and encourage the strikes allowed the Far Right to define the narrative, and, as a consequence, lost credibility and respect. Revolutions and victories are not won from behind a camera exclusively, you need to get to those striking situations in person and get on the soap box, it is work that is part, campaigning for class consciousness and class struggle and part agitation and organization, rolled into one.
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  4568. The theory of what there is...Ontology = existence. A use-value can be anything says that it is not the thing itself that makes it useful; its the position of the thing in a labor-process that counts. The labor involved in setting up the killing of a young black man in his own neighborhood does not take away the value of the gun as a use-value to society; it only suggests the gun is used in an activity of a criminal nature. Be it a negative activity of a single perpetrator, actions taken are still a labor process in which the gun is a instrument in this activity. If the activity were of a positive nature such as arming a defenseless population from an army of invaders the value of the gun is the same and its reason for existence never leaves the realm of being a use-value as a realization of an idea, i.e., the concept of security. But we can not say the same thing for other things that exist, such as money, or rent, profit, interest, wages, prices, these are ideas, economic concepts, that are real and exist. The use-value of each of these economic categories can exists only within the framework of that system, is relative to a very specific social system. The economic categories disappear along with the social system indicating that coats and cloths will still be made but not in the economic forms mentioned. Coatmaking would be what it is, useful labor and not assume the role of one of the categories mentioned. Use-value is real for the present historical arrangement of these categories but they not transhistorical, therefore, losing their use-value and cease to exist to time. Time is non-existent in Space as is sound and motion but time does exist in two forms on Earth to capture motion and weight. Motion and weight are common elements on earth that cannot be seen but exists in degrees of visibility to invisibility and must take various forms to become a material reality. For time in the abstract to become time in the concrete, human consciousness has to concieve of a clock to measure motion and for weight to be a material reality a scale must be conceived and produced to capture an object's relationship to the earth. If we want to measure a more homely item, such as, the old car is not worth the four tires on the car, a concept of value is common to the car and the tires through the amount of money it would take to buy tires retail. If not for this comparative relationship the objects enter into, value would not exist. But value does exist only when it is a use-value for something or someone else and does not exists as a value for itself.
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  4570. NO COLLEGE DEGREE REQUIRED,--- This is good... I have a degree...in my life what I encountered in those with no college education is a lack of patience and method in their mental capacities. Some may have this power naturally. Others have to train for it. Education is the same thing. If a musician wants to be great its all about practice, practice, practice that makes perfect. Read more and you will write better. Learn the rules first than you can break the rules. But for corporations the labor-power they want is to do the work they give you and the work given to you has been so refined down to the last second that actual labor really does not need a sharp, educated mind, to perform the job, in fact, people with education are not suitable for the tasks corporations want from people. Tasks have been reduced of skill, automated, and therefore, employers are let off the hook paying off the tuitions of employees they agreed to pay in prior contracts with workers in the last round of hirings. Not a victory for employees and future employees but it is an avenue for future workers to get inside from the cold that the higher education system, deans and universities presidents, injected their hubris into the veins of the working class and corporations, for a hefty price, shunned and looked down their noses at a whole class of unskilled workers. Its a victory for employers. The high cost of wages just came down for employers while the price of meat for workers at the stores has gone up.
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  4590.  @briankoontz1  Everything has to change, revolutions in the mode of production are essential for the preservation and survival of the capitalist system.The capitalist system and class radically change the methods of work, sometimes smoothly, sometimes recklessly throwing people out of work or lowering the standards of work; speed ups and slow down, cutting health care and using temp workers, strikes and lock outs...we all know for reasons of maximizing profits...so the question is, how is it that in the absence of regulation can a revolution in the way we work and live be achieved? With that question, in the context of where humans are relative to capitalism and civilization, the change has to be in civilization and production. has to be carried without a capitalist(s). 20th century America manifested capitalism culturally and legally through slavery, so that you are witnessing a meltdown and dissipation of racist thought and ideology in the Democratic party in Joe Biden, an heir to southern racist segregationist beliefs that he authored the Crime Bill with but a nod to current African Americans. After emancipation former slaves acquired property then taken back with all the burnings and lynching in the Jim Crow era. The social manifestation of capitalism in America is extreme racial segregation. The struggle, for example , to transform America into a socialist society is really a war against white segregationists, get them out of the way and production will transform relatively quickly, altering for the better the horrendous environmental relation of industry. Unfortunately, the removal of white segregationists from all the branches of government they control, in key positions, of decision-making power; and in postions they hold in the private sector, CEO's, alternating between government and industry their whole lives, is impossible to defeat without a social revolution.  Since race is a fabrication of mind, there is no such thing as "race", it is a concept not a fact of nature, race is a social fact, the revolution has to be social as well. Changes in the way we work and the abolition of white segregationist policies even in their state as being non-policies does not change the racist socialization as occurring in schools, church, bars, media. In a sense we are not calling for the overthrow of capitalism, although the call for the abolition of white apartheid requires the overthrow of capitalism, thanks to white supremacists. Racists make non-racists accidental socialists!
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  4592.  @briankoontz1  You are right about one thing socialism has no basis in religious faith, it is totally against people who deduce hsitorical succession of things into a development of ideas. From your logic we can never get to existence and from existence to logic. For you the object of thought is ultimately some aspect or dimension of existence. You can speak intelligibly of historical succession only as a logic of some existential subject matter. Reuniting man with God! A nefarious thought in itself. In a social community where culture and language form 'consciousness is conscious existence' not the 'life-process of the brain'. Thought is human not absolute; it transforms but it does not create. Absent in your thinking are 'relative distinctions' within a concrete whole, every situation are not metaphysical absolutes. You disassociate development from time and then reduce development to a purely formal attribute of the absolute. Denying any element of objective truth about 'social relations' is a radical failure to distinguish between the subject matter of development and the logical formula of that development. You have a problem going here reducing the life of societies to a 'logic', as a limit always involved in existence. A nominalist, it seems, can't avoid this kinship with crude materialistic metaphysics and subjective idealism in trying to resolve its problems with universals. So true, in and for itself, labor has no value is how labor should be in a socialist society, it is a producer of use-values for itself and not a value-producer for others, as in the case under capitalism, and as such its value is 'contained' to its function as use-value regulated by socially necessary labor-time. Technology and science is a function of investment capital under socialism. By accident you arrive at this conclusion through your logic is about the only thing I can agree with in you.
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  4594. Well, a Walnut Tree has nuts called walnuts but the nut itself is not a tree. A human embryo is not a baby because babies are formed outside of the womb. Babies are tiny people. It has nothing to do with philosophy and everything to do with State Power and evangelical christianity, or Creationism. They are not stupid people. They were very planned and methodical in their capture of government. Americans are now a subjugated people in the states they dominate. Seven million people undergoing in-vitro reproduction are denied social reproduction. They performed a coup d état that was slow and gradual over the years. When enough of them made it into government they became what constitutes a social class of christian capitalists (Amway, etc.). Pyramid schemes as you might heard of before was their business plan in the early years and putting into the hands of unsuspecting Americans their source of funding, ---profits from the sale of Amway, Mary Kay, products. Convention meetings in Vegas and other venues is where they held annual profit rallies the corporation rewarding people moving up the pyramid. Raising the capital to get elected, changing election laws to stay elected, ruling society through material, spiritual, legal, political and social, force. That is not stupidity. it’s a very well thought out successful and calculated plan for conquering the world by using America’s military might. They targeted people whose incomes was never enough. The “never enough” crowd are now a powerful social force when glued together into a pyramid structure containing them. Fast forward 30 years and the government is 7/10th occupied by Israel loving evangelical christians. The first genocide under their watch is the genocide against the Palestinians is no coincidence. If Americans want their freedoms Americans have no other alternative but to be the winners of political power. Evangelism appears over the centuries in various forms. It dates back to the early Roman christians who suffered so much persecution the second coming of Christ became a religion for them. Christianity and later evangelism has a despicable history from the 15th century going forward, more criminal and genocidal than Hitler, Stalin, Mao put together, the most deadliest of all homosapiens on earth are christians, that in every likelihood the extinction of the human race would be their doing. Not knowing your enemy is stupid. Not trying to insult readers of this state of mind personally. It is vital to orient people on how to start thinking about these people and their methods of subjugation. Creationists are infamous for denial of empirical truth and objective realities. You need to know who they are? What jobs do they hold in government that control our lives? Questions to start thinking about NOW not tomorrow. Tomorrow is too late.
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  4608. The less choice we have as individuals the more social our individuals have to become. Think about it. If humans are the only species who have to acquire health and immunities against the dangers nature poses by producing food, shelter, warmth, water, good soil, unlike all other non-human species who are either food for some other species or food for themselves foraging nature, then we are without natural immunities like other species, to develop fast enough could wipe us out faster than we can naturally heal and recover, which is the problem with our economy more than a problem in our bodies...but as we have to depend on manufacturing counter defenses it would have to be because health by our own biological needs starts with a healthy environment. Becoming more social tugs against being more individual because it is more natural for us as a species to care for our kind than watching all resources go to the care of one individual. But in a society where individualism is the dominant form of ideology vaccinating all which is how diseases is stamped out is problematic, thus all kinds of ways to get around the obstacle, is made. If production were fully socialized the effort to stamp out a disease would be easier today than ever it was in history, and our economy would not be teetering on the brink of catastrophe, a staggering alcoholic one day and a racing fire-engine without a driver the next day, searching for endless wars as the only economic stimulus that creates jobs for millions at home who work to the detriment of humanity, and work only to enrich individual corporations. Truly a deplorable state of affairs.
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  4631. Excellent to explore other forms of production. Generally, equality in production does not exist. Equality is a thing that exists outside the factory and office doors. Factories and office workers are divided by management and by a division of labor of the office or factory. We are not going to find an equality of individuals in production when people are subordinated by a division of labor that positions who does what and by individual managers who say who does what when and for how long. Equality inside factories and offices is a goal. Cooperation is a form of productive labor the management of a company uses for their value creating process but the division of labor workers put on each other over the centuries on how to build cathedrals, pyramids, and other wonders of the world did not just appear. Division of labor grew out of cooperation which we can trace to the ancient family the very start of human civilization. On this point, the employee/employer relation is only a new form of the historic relation of master and slave relations we find in serfs and lords, slaves and kings, going down through the ages in the early family between husband, wife, children. This master-slave relations has been with us for a long time adopted by the employee-employer relation as to which is master in the workplace it is traced to the very early beginnings of the tension between the rural economy becoming a slave to city economies. This is what is meant when it is said all history is a history of class struggles but the employee-employer relation is the only class struggle that hinges on the productive action of industry and commerce that becomes the actual engine of human history is what makes this class struggle unique from all others with the power to change history as we live it.
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  4645. Michael Cargill’s logic for suing the government; “they cannot walk into my house....”, than confiscate a gun I purchased and own, because on one fine day they declared that gun illegal. America is not the kind of society where big government and the people are the same thing. If only the government confiscated all the contaminated baby formula and made it illegal the baby industry have less than 6, a handful of manufacturers, supply all the formula. All industries in America are dominated by less than seven big corporations. This is a general pattern to the way Americans organize their industries. They seem nonchalant about putting life-producing industries in the hands of a group of CEOs. Why does Cargill need a bumstocked assault weapon, where does he go that requires this weaponry? If I were a black man in the US I would change my legal name, drop the surname of the Master dating back to when Cargill Corporation was founded as a grain storage business in Iowa back in 1865, but many who lost their language and names to being a slave have kept the master’s surname, unaware they no longer have to bear the name tag so police can know what slave owner owned them, ---we no longer have slave owners, restoring language and identity are no longer possible, too many years and distance between natural origins and social alienation have become sublimated into the master’s culture and society. Five generations removed from you roots, language, culture, history, of native origins is a long time to be someone you are not. The billionaire who invented the bumstock obviously cares more about the billions derived from the bumstock than he cares about the effect the bumstock has as a tool that must be operated by a human being. If the bumstock invention works for guns it can work for a roofing nail gun but given the housing crisis offers no place to make money the inventor decided to place his talents to enhance and increase the intensity of violence in a more profitable industry of war and violence. There are 332 million human beings in the US alone. Chances this tool will be used a human being to kill is as certain as death itself.
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  4647.  @shirleyfoggepiazza6984  My dear friend...the money you speak of, is paper and it is printed, the material wealth we have, is another story separate from paper money, that material wealth is in your cell phone, house, car, tools, stomach (food products), all the elements that go into our products are made from the elements extracted by our corporations who give us their products which we enjoy, comes to us at the expense of others, our wealth comes from poor nations. In simple language we robbed them. This was known to my father’s generation of Americans who built the Canal and Hydro electric plants developing Panama’s infrastructure, who today have no need to leave Panama, but my generation decided not to be reciprocal in the exchange with the three countries I mentioned. They give us the raw material and we give them new roads, as an example. We were suckered to become cheap, self-absorbed, self-centered, mean and indifferent consumers, our inventiveness and kindness, our relationship to our world, robbed, fearful of others because deep down we know the lack of reciprocity scars, --- we, as a people, lost respect for humanity. We owe those countries and eventually they will want to paid back. Perhaps their arrival is their way of demanding repayment. Either way, it is not a position of my choice nor yours’. Our politicians put us in this position to service the corporations’ needs, who, in turn service our needs. The democrats and the republicans turned us into the usurpers! I shall never vote again. If the Vote means I consent this to be the only way to treat people then I reject the Vote and the Democracy that comes with. My vote will not be a message of endorsement that I agree with their policies toward Central America and if you had any sense you would take a political stand against being the suckers they want us to be.
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  4650. It has to do with the economy of the US. It has developed a primary group of industries that are completely dependent on war for economic growth that Biden is the first president to not know what to do with the effect a war economy creates at the Border. Wars displace people but at the same time wars enrich a weapon industry’s owners and investors. The government provides the customers who are cartels and other militaries around the world, its buyers. As soon as any president or Congress stops the crisis at the Border they will have stopped a sale the weapons industry and its employees depend on. No sale brings a collapse. The dependency of lives and employers on profits from weapons sales is a choice it is not by nature an arrangement ordained by God. It can, will and should be changed. Raytheon must employ at 5000 workers all high earning skilled labor force, multiplied by at least 20 other contracted by the military weapons and parts manufacturers that average 1000s of workers and families dependent on their profits. Rather than deal with a catastrophic collapse of the US and what that would bring as a consequence internally and externally to the nation the flow of migrants will continue as the lesser evil is Biden’s thinking. The US economy functions only through war, crisis and catastrophe as a law of motion. One can bet on death and destruction and clear a huge profit. It is entirely built on the sale. Selling weapons for a profit. Other high ticket commodities furnish the means for the cash to buy weapons and if the buyer is not a criminal narco gangster than the buyer borrows dollars from our bank to buy the weapons and puts up as collateral the total annual product of their nation is signed over to the holder of the bond. The US Senate is a aristocracy of landowners mostly...they have no in depth insight into the military industrial complex as a social phenomena. Eisenhower knew it would become a problem. The problem has arrived and the general economy is paying the cost.
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  4658. I’d have to take you back to the end of the American Civil war when the owners of money and the owners of labor-power were declared equal in law, politics, and in society since the decree of the Emancipation Proclamation of 1865. Free markets conditions had been established for a period of 157 years by the State in which individuals, black, white, brown, red, were free to dispose their labor-power to any buyer, broke away the old bonds of slavery. The first condition that gave rise to capitalism is : Capitalism emerges by turning people into ‘free people’, particularly black people are no longer ‘commodity-slaves’ where the slave is the commodity. Like you and I, we have become possessors of a special commodity, i.e., labor-power. Here I might ask, would a new individual be needed for the emergence of a socialist society?Capitalism appealed to a subjective component and succeeded. The second condition is: The Owners of Money, people like Gates, Musk, etc., enjoy the Rights of Ownership, but they must find labor-power for sale. Sellers of commodities that are not labor-power must own the means of production, the raw material, implements, etc., creates a condition within a condition. The means of subsistence, health care, food, housing, medicine, clothes, have to be free of ownership of both commodity owners. Money cannot be converted into capital without such conditions in place. The abolition of the conditions are more critical than the money itself in the abolition of capitalism. The two conditions explains what the State is used for in a capitalist society. 1. Assisting or facilitating capital finding labor-power to buy and 2., breaking the bond between labor and the necessaries of life for capital to expand. I think the key to building a revolution is to reveal the conditions as having no natural basis in life but have a social basis that when people possess nothing but their own labor-power billionaires are made is reversible. The State sets the stage for the conditions the result of human history and development, the result of the extinction of an entire series of older forms of social production. The State can do the same with the capitalist class. The products produced in America are intended for the immediate consumption of the working class is the reason the products become commodities in the first place, a condition a new state would have to eradicate through education. The State can make capitalists produce cars, houses and goods that last forever, consume less fossil fuel by way of changing the miasma of consumerism. The rotten habits of the working class to over consume are conditions for the growth of capitalism are abolished without the state but with the development of a new individual, a social Being. Put the subject back into socialism and get away from the language of politics if you want the lay person to pay attention to your call.
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  4668. One reason justifies a climate denier,-----they were not alive to remember a time when climate was seasonal and regular like me. A boy and girl growing up between 1955 to 1965 grew up in a world of four perfectly balanced seasons. From 1965 to 2021 seasonal changes get shorter in duration. Creepy crawlers were everywhere in abundance. ants, spiders, bees, hornets, wasps, butterflies, nightingales, crickets, bullfrogs (big frogs) night flies, knats, mosquitos, bats, fireflies, worms after it rained, were around when I was around as a kid. Tics did not exists in the wood. Nobody got tick bites and the wood was where this natural wonderment all happened. It was fun to be in with the other species under a night sky you could see. Seasons don't last long but are more frequent and appear suddenly. A snowy season in 1955 lasted four months average it was snow not filtered through a layer of carbon in the atmosphere. Snow sticky enough to build a structure of tunnels for kids or good fluffy snow to a skiers delight...big flakes made a moving sheet of slow falling snow compared to a snowy season today, comes in short storms, giving us humans very little time to recover from the storm before it as they are more intense and do significant damage to the way we live. Californians leaving are really climate refugees with resources. Yes,---for no other reason can a climate denier exist in today's society has to do with that denier's birthdate. If you are reading this and were born in 1980 you are among a generation who know absolutely nothing of what climate was like,---only 15 years before you were born. Imagine that. Everyone born in 1980 was born yesterday when it comes to climate change. The beauty of the changing state of nature is that it is constant and when it reaches a certain degree of change there is no turning back the clock of it transformation, reinventing or remaking, birth, of itself as a new earth. Earth was once millions or billions, I forget which, of years ago a ball of ice. We are slipping into a planet becoming something other than what it was. Slipping it on that other state of being is easy and fast but getting out of it could take another millions of years, maybe billions before another life with a brain can see for the first time its environment. I don't know what the earth was like when the French Impressionists painted it? Funny thing is, they had no idea they were capturing for future generations a pristine climate in their paintings. Climate change occurs over a long period of time but in short periods of time nature gives nothing a chance to live or make a living. This not on is not for the faint of heart...its a tough concept to chew for a lot of people...but as Frank Zappa our greatest American 20th century composer said; "..if it were left to you our national bird would be an ostrich", talking to a denier.
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  4681.  @rabbithare381  The generation that had no part in making this society, the ones born into it, no older than six years ago to the ones born right now are not vested in capitalism, i.e., pensions, mortgage obligations, jobs, etc.. They are the ones who will overthrow capitalism because they are the only ones who have absolutely no affinity with capitalism the way the Millennials and the Baby Boomers are entrapped by capitalism. Just look at this mellennial Beto O'Rourke, literally a white version of an Obama, privileged, constantly apologizing for his life and far from liberal. Compare him to Biden, a man who claims he is the most progressive of all candidates, never had to say that, but he felt compelled to anyway; a flat out liar, or senility, which is it? His tract record is the total opposite of progressive. Millennials with their heads in the sand saddled by debt were robbed of their childhood tune out and boomers are people who are so out of touch with the real world, spoiled rotten to the core, express despicable hubris and arrogance are a literal danger to society, the natural world, and humanity all at once. The way I see it is either Bernie and one of the younger female candidates as a running mate is our best option until the new generation comes of age and abolishes capitalism. Trump was always a right wing anti-socialist baby boomer from the day he bought his first piece of land cheap from Mayor Beame in 1974. I appreciate your reply. Be well and DON'T FORGET TO REGISTER TO VOTE!
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  4688. Co-determination is practiced in Germany, workers are in the board room with executives, planning and producing. Not much good because they are still subservient to a dominant capitalist power in the person of the US. Point being; co-determination is a halfway mark before getting to the other side the journey is met with capitalist encroachments, take backs, and resistance every step of the way. I think we need to get across the lake to the other side full throttle and stop dilly dallying with half baked ideas about democracy. The productivity of labor is what capitalists depend on for existence it would be the productivity of labor I would weaponize productivity to remove the capitalist from the workplace completely. Problem is; Americans have bad habits of acquiescing, give-back, can’t stand their ground, second guess and put themselves last, that talks about productivity used under capitalism is taboo. No work unless woman’s rights are restored. No work unless Congress raises the minimum wage to $25 an hour. No work until Universal Healthcare is established nationwide, a national energy policy, immigration, gun violence, national plan for infrastructure development and on and on. No concession granted to the working class than the productivity is not for sale,---revolution. It really is that simple. But Americans do not think in revolutionary terms; the world is a static place and a creation of an almighty God that religion, drugs, and debasing and excesses materialism crushes solidarity, and cultivates an individual with individualistic attitudes toward property, wealth, work and society.
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  4698.  @LOUDMOUTHFLAVORS  Karl Marx has nothing to do with the disagreement of ideas in the US. There are probably only two scholars in the US who are Marxist...so I don't buy this anti-Marxist rhetoric when it is not even a threat. The ideological war is between federalist free-market neoconservatives and neo-liberal democrats, white surpremacists and evangelical christians, far from a Marxist realm of thought, a calamity of ideological strains who have a certain theory of the state, afflicts the US consciousness, that it should be reduced on the one hand or it should be expanded on the other hand, or abolished or become a dictatorship for the salvation of mankind by annihilating the human race. So your perspective is junk! Opportunity...no computer ever grew corn...land ownership is a source for generational wealth...more people own land and homes in communist countries than in capitalists ones. People there save up and buy property. Once they buy it they own it. Private banks are non-existent. Federal Reserve is a private bank and there is soooo much antipathy in this nation for the Fed and its policies. Why would anyone not want to get rid of credit finance capitalism addicted to a printing press? That problem does not exist in c-nations. Concern there is the productive forces cannot be put to use on a private basis unless capitalists are willing to spend and buy labor-power. If they don't invest nothing happens. Much wider general ownership of property in c-nations than in non-c ones. Such facts are denied everyday coast to coast.
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  4719. It means the excess of money is met with an increase in production. Problem is, production and circulation are oceans apart to the advantage of one entity and not for the benefit of all. The world is divided between rich and poor nations. This presents a social inequality that threatens the health of the planet and all species life. Where production is not; employment is low and where production is high employment is low in the system that uses innovation to lower the cost of production for money prime, it cannot employ people when innovation to the production process replaces people. Very little living labor making up the true value of things without the country buying back the difference in money prime to actual production costs is seen by how high the price of things rise to a great fall. No amount of infusion of capital will resuscitate capital. The solution is a mass dissemination of the tech hardware and a reorganization of production for the mobilization of a great many millions of people to stop living in idleness of work to the point that work is no longer a natural part of their being and disastrous to the health of the planet. Under the present order of the rich/poor nation dichotomy production and circulation are never in the same country and never proportional to real requirements of a certain standard. Not in the US, anyway. Everything is built cheap. But that still should not blind us from knowing where prime comes from. You know where it comes from when you see capital flow in and out of the process of circulation. The Fed conception of how exchange works is flawed. It sees money only going through one step. The purchasing phase and skips over to the last stage; assuming everyone will buy when they go to the stores after everyone who has money has little left of it after real expenses. For many decades many Americans did exactly that; they were buyers but the Fed forgets many Americans entered into a contract with employers for the necessaries of life; now it is clear from the creation of money prime in production that the system of market of buyers and sellers, equal in the eyes of the law, are unequal partners in production.
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  4735. So he proposes GDP increases (making people work harder) pressured to work harder due to cuts on the side of social spending. It won’t work because our economic system depends on the value of wages never falls below levels where people cannot survive and never high enough to cause profits to fall to a point where corporations say there is no money in this business, close it down. McCarthy is not aiming to balance wages and profits. He is pushing labor into a corner and straightjacket. He is proposing Austerity for the many but not for the military; not for the owners of property and financial wealth; not for a de-escalation of over-spending abroad (throwing money away on bombs and weapons) even worse news for 55 million poor people unable to afford food, rent, mortgages, pay off medical bills, no to student loan cancellation the young straddled with debt on top of other debt, car loans, house loans. These people will have to double their work efforts for employers who benefit from the productivity increase to make the debt to GDP ratio less than more than half of what all Americans who work produce; mind you there are Americans who never work because they are rich enough to avoid working for a living, but they do consume. And their consumption is paid for by the many. McCarthy proposes no cuts in their consumption habits; thus he adds more privilege to the privileged; people who do not have to double their work time such as himself a top earner who works 7 months out of the year and can still use the public funds for military junkets when not in Congress traveling and meeting foreign dignitaries making deals for his donor and, driving the price of things up. Good news for people like Trump, Gates, Soros, Bezos, Zuckerberg and Co. So here is why America is a poor country with very rich people in it. You get what you vote for.
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  4762. In a social system designed for people the lost luggage would be sent to a clearing house for distribution to places like Good Will store. People can buy what they need cheap and the material wealth gets used not thrown out or sent into indefinite exile. Lost luggage owners compensated for their loss. In a social system designed for money and goods and services meant to be exchanged planning at the national level is impermissible to a market system of exchange. Society as a whole is forbidden to take a role in solving huge problems in a market system. Society is punished when it tries. Taught and told never to use its mighty social power as a collective power. Society would get in the way of the market system. The market system deals with natural disasters, lost luggage, gun violence, crime, political corruption, pandemics, market crashes, recessions, inflations, stagnation and depressions, wars, all the ills in society at present, in an individual way between small property owners and individual companies. Companies who must balance the service against their profit at all times or die. Social problems and social conflicts are too big for the private market place to handle and the individual companies in society run away, close stores, hide, are scared, chicken, or swing the opposite way, give back, try heroics, even cause mischief. Populations bury their heads in the sand as individual entities cannot cope, deal or handle the conflicts, crisis and contradictions, run to the government for help on an never-ending basis usurping the total economic surplus that when we really need it the problems too big to be handled by a market system the economic surplus has dried out. This is ultimate stupidity of a market system that will destroy America if society does nothing about it the way the government does nothing about it. Society has a role to play and and a valid place from which to solve the general crisis government and private companies cannot fix, incapable of fixing, crisis too large reforms proposed over and over again cannot fix! Society can fix the general crisis in a month. If society can fix the crisis why do we need government or private industry is why society is constantly held in a state of need and desperation, hobbling on one leg, injured, to prevent its collective power from taking a role finally freeing humanity from the curse of the ages.
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  4765. @Curiouser and Curiouser I think the bigger picture questions the viability of the reason for government. Right now, the State protects the productive forces of the capitalist class from the working class. This is exact opposite way the State protected the working class from the restrictions and reactions of the capitalist class before the 1980 bourgeois revolution. In left theory the State would wither away once there is no threat coming from the capitalist class that it can let go of the productive forces of society, and anyone who wants can become a dentist. Aptitude, attitude and dexterity all that is required in a person to apply. But, as you know from experience first hand, the paradigm of a free association of labor is a remote idea and reality. A common goal not in the hearts and minds of working people and subsequently creates insecurity, ill-confidence, and holds them back from collectively reorganizing production, the State is wedded to the capitalist class against the working class in the US. Theoretically, if workers took the State over the productive forces would come with it. A social division of labor in society, divides skilled and unskilled labor into sub-species of work. This is social production made to suit capitalist society in general. Its factories and offices in particular a division of labor is imposed to extract from workers more labor time. Government today does not interfere in the production processes of private corporations to protect workers from the excesses of exploitation of capital in the labor process, its lack of protection is neglect. The total weakening of government is a victory of the bourgeois revolution that began in 1980. A historic defeat of the American Working Class now dissolved; grandparents and parents, no longer wth us. The new American working class is a social class of immigrants of many tongues.
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  4779. It appears the profits of this company are not wholly re-invested in a back up system for production (operations) to go manual in the event of a stoppage, but instead profits have been consumed go to support a particular luxurious lifestyle. The needs of a few owners are given priority over the needs of the nation in the system of privatization where everything is a piece of merchandize. The conclusion of Homeland Security's classified results of the investigation to the president: privatization is a weakness to the national security of the country. A back up manual system is substituted permanently for a automatic system. The remedy is to legislate a percentage of profits are re-invested and a live crew is never out of a job. The on line system was cheaper and considered fail proof by the corporation's managers. This serves as a rationalization for a lifestyle the country cannot afford to allow in my view. If and when the investigation does show privatization is an Achilles Heel. Especially when there is another investigation of UFO contact demonstrating evidence of powers beyond our own, and who is behind that power is unknown? This incident proves it is not fail proof.  As Americans we do not have the impartial representation in Congress needed to confront this Achilles Heel. All of them are billionaires in Congress are the Archilles Heel and are likely to have interests of their own in the biggest oil producer in the country. The best we can get from this crew in Congress is a short term fix and push it under the rug resume oil operations at a new higher average price at the pump.
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  4820.  @helenaquin1797  Yes, and thanks for acknowledging my comment. Trump is presiding over the last phases of the capitalist system. All the particulars of this decline tangibly reflect this decline as desperation. Armed struggle is not a working class theory but a practice of the mass of working people who populate the entire planet are forced to accept as permanent by this social class. The frictions are too intense...time to retreat... capitalist expansion (new markets) is not working out for America and France. They are kicked out of Africa. Losing the BRIC nations as a markets is a serious blow. China out producing the US is a blow...in every aspect, and just releasing a free social media and AI app, strikes a blow at the knees of the Tech Industry who consume more than they produce, take more than they receive, from the earth and from human beings...and make a product not worth its own value, except in aerospace...that only rich people can afford to consume...is a blow. Blow for blow, capitalism is seeing its final days. The problems of millions and millions of people out of work at home and abroad makes human life impossible and environments uninhabitable. I consider it a cheap move of Trump to untaxed tips when nobody is buying... too little too late...but it is cunning thinking to speed up this decline rather than to save it the way FDR saved capitalism. It puts Trump and the evangelical Christian right wing in the leadership position, amending the laws to start from scratch the rebuilding of the state with christian laws. Patriarchy and take credit for a christian reformation of capitalism...but with what markets? Where will America sell its products when trade wars and sanctions repel more nations into the arms of China? Editorial: Marx would be impressed with China. A nation he studied when it was in its last feudal stages; Oriental Despotism, he thought China as backward as Russia was under the Tsar, could never skip over capitalism, yet both western colonies became capitalist nation-states, China coming out of colonial humiliation under Britain and America with her anti-communist allies in the Pacific did what Marx never expected backward nations to do. Use capitalism to advance socialism. In the future, China will be in the position the US is in now, floundering, after reaching its height and begins its own decline, but it will have a socialist foundation already in place for a peaceful transition.
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  4822. MTA is a Hopeless Failure. That yellow grated rectangular object the MTA installed reflects about as abstract a conception of art the MTA’s management brain can handle. Anymore detail or design and blood vessels begin to pop in management. It belongs in a gallery of abstract modern art not in a subway. The object is mysterious and could be deified, worshipped by American lunatics because outside of the space it comes from nobody can figure out its use. The best thing the MTA can do is what other nations have done. They send one of their own to learn how its done and do it better at home. Between all the columns on all the platforms in the entire subway system the space can be enclosed; they can build a wall between columns and the doors of the train open a section. Russia and Britain do this. The more you decorate an environment with real art and thoughtful design the less crime you will have. But America is a culturally deprived country because there are so many cultures in the city its mayor has to be a worldly person, an internationalist, a person of the world, to understand the power of art, sight, light, sound in making people human; settling on one culture is impossible in cities; the money culture becomes the universal American culture because all can never be satisfied the dollar helps to repress the diversity. Art does the opposite. Diversity is a mosaic, a big poem to a writer, a large ocean to a fish, a world of exploration for the mind, Art is the black hole that sucks you into reading this, wanting more.
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  4829. All this bombing has increased the average 20% of total world oil output from Iraq to 35%. You'd think the oil pumps would have been decimated and the area scarce of people since the whole country was leveled but no to your surprise. Iraq supplies oil to Europe and Japan. This share of the market is in the hands of a numerically small class of nations. People say these wars are about oil. No they are about oil market shares and control over production. The Oil embargo of the 70s was a blow to Japan with no oil of her own. Kuwait was the first invasion to set off a chain of events to eradicate any form of opposition in the Middle East to the Western Alliance and the aims of this one particular industry. The only threat the oil rich nations pose to the west, is the west's own dependence on oil. George W said America is addicted to oil because he was addicted to cocaine. Addiction is his word for western dependence on oil. Western nations are consuming more oil and producing more pollution. The consumption of oil by all allied military hardware is a substantial chunk of the problem. If your going to spend more you are going to need more oil to consume and that is the general trajectory of western nations as they get hammered by climate catastrophes crippling their own societies. Societies whose life-blood is oil. Production of oil goes up, demand is high, profits are higher. Russia gave Greece to Britain in 1945 as a way to keep the British out of Hungry, Romania, and the Baltics. The Americans come in and clear off the social map any political opposition to the IMF and today Greece is decimated as a casualty of this grand social experiment. In one half of an average lifespan societies can go from decent to devastated in a state of eternal crisis is how fragile is their social and political development. Their economic surpluses plummeted. Nothing in the bank for recoveries. It will not be a shock to me when Hurricane Ida makes landfall the whole southern coastal population will become destitute and proletarianized overnight, a third of the total population never to recover the standard of living they will lose in the surging storm.
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  4833. This is great news that right wing extremist groups have dominated the GOP. What it says is that one of the major political parties in the US has absolutely nothing constructive to offer not only to a republican but to the whole country. Great news folks. The end of a party that had represented the interest of only the super rich in government since Ronald Reagan was president. Thank you Mr. Reagan and to his dead mentor Milton Friedman for adopting the worst economic policies the Chicago School of Economics ever produced. But as a consequence the super rich have moved their allegiance to the other major political party in America to promote their vast wealth as oligarchs and this movement is reflected in the betrayal of the rail workers strike. That betrayal was the icing on the cake. Officially the working person in this country has no party to represent them in government. Farmers, workers, nurses, teachers, railroad workers, truckers, white collar ad blue collar workers, have been left hanging and stranded in the political process. No health care, closing pediatric wards in hospitals, stagnant wages, lack of job security, poverty as old age retirement, there is room for a working class party in America. If only working people get over their personal level of ignorance and substance abuse that pacifies them into submission. The disintegration of the Democratic party would happen faster if working people they no longer represent would admit their allegiance to a party of betrayal has been their downfall. But two down with one split between who to represent in society at the government level is a positive development.
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  4839. America is a land of dictators its not a government dictatorship that I refer. Employers are the dictators, America has a many dictators. Elon Musk, and anyone who employs labor is a dictator of that labor,--- and so for 8 hours a day, 365 days a year, 138 million Americans employed by employers, are subject slaves to their employers. This constitutes a formalized dictatorship. If you work for the state the state is your dictatorship. The state decides how your work is to be used. If your work is used for war or for peace...you have no choice, constitutes a dictatorship. If you work for a small landscaper the owner is your dictator and for the greater part of your time including your free time is appropriated by your personal dictator. You are not free to bring a gun to work, Not free to decide how much you get paid. Not free to decide how the work gets done. You cannot change the work if the work you do is apparently dangerous for you and others. Work you do is decided by others who do not do the work. You are not free to decide how work gets done with your other fellow workers. Not free to use the work time to your advantage, the copiers, fax machines, whatever you need to get your personal work done or go to the dentist without losing something or giving something to the boss, namely, overtime work. Where is your freedom if you are not free for three quarters of your life, free only when you sleep, and free only on the patch of land you rent or own? Getting mad at Americans is an easy thing to do. Very easy to lose patience with people who are delusional about their freedoms which for the most part is the entire population. But once the unthinking American realizes how not free they really are another view of freedom begins to grow and take shape. A freedom employers, CEO dictators, all combine to crush. The CEO is the new royalty, the new kings, the only people in society who enjoy true freedom. Americans should stop pretending the CEO and them are the same people when, in fact, they are polar opposites and you cannot have Kings without people who see themselves as subjects in relation to a king.
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  4841. Bill Maher and his host do not drive the country, they never take county roads to see the depression rural America is in to know how badly the state of the economy is. They never been on the roads to cut through ghost towns and derilect buildings and boarded up and the absence of industry, farming, merchants. Rural America is devastated in worse shape than it was during the Great Depression. Completely gutted, like a vampire has sucked out the life-blood of the rural economy. Towns destroyed by Dollar Stores owned and operated by mostly foreign capital. What I am saying about Maher applies to the Democrats, they have no idea of the frequency rights of citizens are violated or the economc conditions facing rural America and the industrial base of the economy gutted, dry rotted for lack of investment. A socialist is not a democrat but is independent of democrats on the opposite side of republicans, and is the lesser of the two evils. This is why FDR ran on another party platform. A socialist is also not a tyrant like the police have become. The socialists had over 60 million members in 1930 of a population of 130 million. Debs would have won if not for FDR running. Bernie is an FDR socialist and not a Soviet style socialist Trump will try to tag on him. Those socialists are gone. I remember this distinctly when my parents and friends voted for FDR and why? I was old enough to understand what they were saying. The country did not get out of the depression until 8 years into FDR's administration is how long it took to re-establish the economy. This is why he was relected four terms. If it were not for the war as the economic stimulus the Great Depression would have lasted to the 1960s. That is why Kennedy's Man to Moon speech became a landmark speech because in 1955 the Russians launched Sputnik into space.  About the only thing at the time that raised Britian out of its depression would have been the Beatles if Hitler did not bomb London. And when did the Beatles come out 1960. If Bernie gets in he will have to have a VP like Wallace who was really behind FDR's reconstruction of the economy and who the democrats and republicans feared more than FDR. Democrats and repblicans ran gangs, mafia families and clansmens in the west all through the northeast. New Jersey, New York and Long Island were home to German Nazis Bund Camps. Democrats were too corrupt in the 30's and FDR had to distinguish himself from the corruption as the lesser of two evils, separate and apart from both parties. This is the time for an independent to be a president even if he calls him/herself a socialist or an evangelist it does not matter. Ideology is nothing to the American economy orits people. Americans care nothing about ideology.  The economy demands pragmatic leaders not ideologues like Trump or Obama or Biden. The stimulus for a re-construction of the rural economy in America is climate change. The economy forces an independent to respond to what the economy demands and at this time it demands a pragmatic and practical back to basics person. The alternative is the death of the economy. You might be rich and live but the economy will do nothing for you. All your wealth will have to go to an economy outside of the US, and all other economies are in stagnation. Even the rich are screwed and risk being rich when millions will are propertyless, this is moment in history on par to that of the period of the Great Depression.
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  4847. I am not sure pigs can revert back to becoming wild boars from which they came after 6000 years of animal husbandry and that there is not enough nature around that is not populated by humans for them to be wild and roam, they are a different animal than boars now, it appears you have no choice but to enlarge their pens and separate sows during gestation to reduce their reproduction. They are bred for sale and that is where your problem starts. Grandfather in the 1800s did not produce pork for mass consumption. So we are in territory completely different from America as the agrarian society it was when the Wizard of Oz was produced, not long ago. From a marketing point of view the price of pork will rise as the rate of conception falls. When the price of pork rises the public will seek other foods to eat and this could bring about the demise of this form of farming. It is also pretty stupid the Congress never instituted a national land reform deal to minimize the growth of large scale industrial farms like yours from becoming too big that it need to be legislated out of existence. Perhaps, diversifying your farm will make up the difference to more than one single crop will help keep your farm in your family. What will happen to the pigs if your farm goes under is likely a worse fate than where they are now. This is a huge problem because the other obstacle is finding a buyer for the farm that only a billionaire can afford and billionaires are not going to farm pigs. They will clear the land of animals for real estate developers to build more single family homes.
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  4861. The answer to this problem is to change the work day, free up the parents to bring their kids to school, something will get passed a parent a lot harder than it is for a kid to conceal a weapon on his person in a school bus full of kids. Law enforcement will never prevent school violence, wishful thinking,---foolish to believe so. Change the working day. This eliminates bussing transportation costs, frees up public capital to fill pensions, salaries, better education. The police become useful as screeners at the school doors. School day should not coincide with the workday as it is now. The workday has to change to be compatible with the school day to free up the parents. The current workday suitable for business prevents, impedes, obstructs, uses free time as work-time and robs parents from parenting. A legal workday that works exclusively for business is, RIDICULOUSLY STUPID! Using time to teach kids is a waste of time. Subjects taught in units of 45 minutes is actually 30 minutes of education and 15 minutes spent on something else. A school of 1000 kids are robbed of 15,000 hours of education time per day. Shortened or lengthened depends on the quality of the teacher’s class structuring abilities and an administrator’s abilities to use the policy and procedures whip creates an internal school conflict between teachers and administrators,---is a relation that should be outlawed by Congress not allowed. Speaking of which, where is and who is your secretary of education on all this?
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  4868. How about we talk about the use-value of everything and just leave the value of everything aside for a moment. Too often the field of economics is bent on understanding value and entirely forget what happens to use-value. What happened that there are no tailors, blacksmiths, weavers, tanners, no more highly skilled workers who produced use-values before everything became a value? When these occupations became standardized and routined and began to disappear from society, the necessaries of life for the worker was substituted for the use-values of the capitalists. The use-values of these independent producers lost their value in society. Everything that is a use-value today is a social product of the capitalist, a unit of value. But everything that was a use-value in the past before the change over in production to machinery and automation was a value-in-use. Before mechanical industry took over the work and the worker, they were a total package, a value-in-use, and together, they worked directly in a material interaction with nature. After the change, the work and the worker shrunk into a value unit and the environmental relation of work, hidden and concealed separated from the worker. Products of all kinds became equally, value units, and this fact turned all the different skills of workers into a quantity of value of products. Within this social process the quality of work, the worker, and the subject of work, is in the form of labor as value. We end up with a social system of products relating to each other with a capitalist instead of workers relating to each other in a social system of production. Use-value disappeared because the labor in them became value. Value in everything versus a value-in-use for society.
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  4890. MAGA v. Capitalists. Non Tech Workers versus two specific capitalists, Vivek and Elon. The Pro-H1B visas give the high tech jobs to foreigners. Visas are under the jurisdiction of the State Department. MAGA has two enemies in this battle, a state department issuing visas to foreign workers is a policy of the administration it falls under and the capitalists dictating immigration policy. MAGA has to dismantle the Administrative State that favors the tech Capitalists to favor other capitalists is not the trajectory, all industries consolidated and controlled by MAGA instead of capitalists is a historic trajectory. Is MAGA smart enough to run the Administrative State? Vivek and Elon are two of more and many other capitalists in many branches of industry who employ degreed foreign workers. The two economies that is created by these actions results in a modern version of a Tale of Two Cities, the story is old, and MAGA experiences unemployment is a continuation of MAGA not in the driver’s seat. MAGA is a nationalist movement but to solve the immigration problem it has to become an international movement. Workers in the same position as MAGA in their own home country must be the international arm of the MAGA movement inside the US. The immigration of Elon and Vivek is forcing American wages downward it is the importation of immigration as a commodity, it is the fentanyl for the domestic job market. Job markets flooded by cheap labor. This is why expelling the commodity or, forced deportation, is not the answer. Immigration is stopped when the societies of origin reject the billionaire classes of their own national economies pushing for open borders.
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  4892. The American government holds the American people with contempt and hostage to the US employer class (US multinational corporations) and the employer class through the instrumentality of the US military buys labor-power cheap through its war interventions generating instability and chaos in foreign countries. Jimmy is right. Hence, the immigration and border crisis in Texas and other border states is exactly what the US employer class want as it furnishes an increasing supply of cheap labor that displaces the American working class along with putting their technology into the hands of the US working class as a means of prolonging the working day and added into the workplace, intended to raise worker productivity out of fewer American workers. In effect the working day has been prolonged from 8 to 10 hours on average and the mortality rate rises through the efficacy of the manufactured viruses that can be spread through indoor ventilation systems once it enters an individual’s body. There is truth to the notion that the vaccines for COVID are an implantation of a virus and there is truth that COVID was an attack on the Boomer aging population. There is truth the Bat Lady in Wuhan developed the strain and truth that Fauci was the agent through the funding went to Wuhan. Might want to call that episode a US employer revenge on the Boomers who nearly overthrew the US employer class in the 70s. Why? The US employer class is engaged in a class struggle. Anything and anyone not of that social class is held in contempt and disdain. They hate you to be blunt! You should realize that and encourage your seniors to form a nation-wide Senior Action Committee (SAC) to take over all the towns in America throwing out the complicit and corrupt officials holding political office at the local and county level to cut the knees of the two reigning political parties acting in the interest of US employers as a whole. This will help the millennial working class in the doing the actual overthrowing in a real big way. Senior Americans have the time and time is critical in creating a revolutionary class, a revolutionary class is an educated class, high functioning people, smart, aware, cogent, tactical, truth tellers like me, are the US corporation’s worst nightmare who can snatch the government from the grip of US employers and free millennials from the rock and hard place they have been forced into through economic policies. The leisure time of a robust middle class is what enabled the Baby Boomer generation to end the Vietnam War and force a US president to resign are today the senior citizens and half the US population, roughly 215 million people out of 332 million people. Taking that leisure time away from the middle class and working classes was a specific aim of US multinational corporations could not be accomplished without capturing the government rendering it weak and dismantling the policies of the Great American Society that LBJ created through massive legislation the Boomers still enjoy today. With the rise of the gaming industry the military and law enforcement got its recruits. With increasing militarization of the police the US corporations got their domestic protection from internal revolution.
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  4899. Well, everyone knows Russia is not going to attack anyone. This is a about a dying breed of western European elites. NATO is not what NATO was in WWII. But it fascinates me that the left has no understanding of taxation as a form of surplus value and that this is the reason Trump will get re-elected.  Yes, because the left does not understand surplus-value and where it comes from that people who do understand it, on either side of the spectrum, will get the vote of the common working person every time . Trump understands the surplus value taxed from the incomes of working people is shared out to support European elites. This is a significant burden the prior presidents ignored and working people would like to be relieved of this burden even if their reasons are not all accurate of the true source of that economic burden. It is not all due to NATO that the American taxpayer loses out on the wealth they create. Actions aimed at slowing down the economic growth of a true rival is too costly to bear. This comes at a time when Trump has made and is making the rich richer but in refusing to pay taxes the sacrifices the rival imposes is a burden on America's common working people. A burden when industries are not developed enough as the rival's industries and to make up for that inefficiency, work is intensified. What I find interesting is how Biden worries Trump instead of Bernie. Bernie would cut off NATO because it makes sense and use that money for a Green New Deal, and with the Chinese rival he'd have to develop diplomatic ties for an integrated world economy to cut the tax burden fighting them on America's working class. I guess it shows that understanding surplus-value and where it comes from is not enough even for people with working class or immigrant roots. You also have to be connected to the real economy of real people in a concrete way to run a world economy.
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  4901. ...the basic idea is still the extraction of value from the consumption of labor-power...we never get a definition of capitalism from capitalism...market analysis fills in the blanks and circulation is the source for money prime in Trump and FOX World and less conservative news agencies...the acquisition of money prime does not violate the logic of the process of circulation...this is why we can have people like Trump and news corporations who are nothing more than prize-fighters for capitalism. The wealth they take or appropriate as their own comes from productive capital, they believe the buyer/seller relation is where wealth is made because there is no exploitation going in that relation every thing is equal, money for work, a mutually beneficial price agreed upon by two individuals, reflecting a real value...that value involves live workers and the hardware to produce the valuable article. If it doesn’t get made it contains no value greater than when it started out as parts. Here is where the extra value is made where the exploitation of capital and labor takes place, where the prize fighters cannot handle how value is extracted in the consumption of labor-power ...the real relations of production where money prime originates, this activity is both a production process and a consumption process,----it never has to be exploitation-al...it is because will is not the reason people go to work in society and the greater part of that material wealth derived from that process develops a social class of unproductive workers in society, ---even the rich have jobs, being rich is a job. The work of extraction from the extracted is a tough job and usually given to other workers to boss workers around. A special class of millions of lone uncle Tom worker bosses form a political base for reactionary strange and bizarre candidates. The general crisis of capitalism that began with small episodes of crisis recoverable through longer periods of prosperity is over. The productive power of the capital and labor is held back from becoming more than what it is because of, not in spite of, the buyer and seller relation of productive capital...and the individual employer to employee method of work... holds back the creative power of productive capital.
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  4921. Growing up as a kid in America is extremely hard. For the ones who's families were torn apart of necessity for survival the causes resolve themselves into resentment of loss and never forgiven.  Kids have no rights in society! They are property not individuals, property of their parents is how the Senate and lawmakers view and regard society's children. Naturally you treat kids bad they are going to react badly. Mass shootings reflect the depth of the social disorder of neglect and abuse in American insitutiitions. The State has become their parental authority owing to the social transformation of the family. The family that went from Father Knows Best to Shameless in a span of 64 years, one generation of incarcerated former youths. The state, the laws and the houses are no longer compatible to the changes in the family. Youths should be constructing and rebuilding sustainable homes. Replacing the old infrastructure with self-producing structures. Homes that harvest water and contained sewage, thermal wear, cooking and heating, wind electricity and homes that produce food is what the family of 2019 need for survival. Kids are partial citizens, a natural born right does not give them all citzenship rights.  Kids learn from other places more information about the world and themselves than they do from their parents in this increasingly technological age. If something is not done about that the information coming from darker sources on this planet can infiltrate their undeveloped minds and contaminate their being. In typical fashions, lawmakers will propose censoring laws and other lawmakers will propose sanctioning companies and businesses when in reality it is the neglect of youths causing the problem of mass shootings.
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  4928. I would take Leonardo Padura’s thesis as step further: There is not an organized opposition to any of the governments still standing in the world. The age in which we live does not have a Left to oppose the opposition of the Right. Without opposition movement on both sides real human progress or development becomes one sided and neither side can change its position in connection to the productive forces. One side develops from use of the productive agencies of society is enabled by the side that has no connection to the productive forces of society and at their own expense the weaker side develop none of its own subjective human capacities, rather, begins a abrupt and gradual social disintegration on this side of the opposition disconnected from the necessities of life. Wherever the grass is lush green on one side of the fence and barren on the other side the whole society begins to decay, fracture, and tears away at the customs that built it up in the first place. Religion, science, education become suspects in the decline, culprits, conspiracies to blame to direct the rage, anger and powerlessness in people. People lose faith and belief in the traditions and values usually passed down through the family which is the first social institution to go. Disintegrated through violence, divorce, robbery, rape, kidnapping, a cruel and venal society is the face of a historic collapse. This is what happened in Rome, all the splendor of that city, decayed, all its people fell to diseases of impoverishment, all wealth was concentrated into smaller number of people; crazy ideas of salvation and doom because an opposition to the powerful Roman Senate was over time annihilated. The disintegration of the USSR was that moment for our world history. That was the day any opposition to the US disintegrated.
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  4941. I think those who have an alternative vision for a society should begin forming social relationships that promote a new society. I would abandon the idea of reforming capitalism completely. Either get rid of it or die from it is a rotten choice to have, the alternative is a mass withdrawal from participating in anything and everything commercial. Begin using the other industries to clobber the industries operating as the financial backbone of all government transgressions, by doing damage to the others they are forced to pressure the government to get rid of Big Oil, nobody is coming into the stores! Everyone is trading or giving cars to each other and not taking out loans for new cars. Nobody is buying a house, not even the condos are selling. They are demanding a change of policy from this government, a silent motive and until they get want they want, for the lack of business all the malls will be closed down will kill capitalism. Forcing landowners to take certain actions against the government because of all the money they are losing in rent. Small farmers are getting in on the act, people are going to them to buy food, and the big chains are losing out. Even local governments are losing their tax base due to a slump in sales, the overthrows and the immoral bankruptcy of US foreign policy in relation to Israel, must come to an end if circulation of money and capital is to be saved. Wouldn't this be nice. It is not wishful thinking to form communities of communal ownership and take a huge chunk of capital away from the big chains but it is wishful thinking civil society is not rife with the nasty business of class conflict and class struggle.
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  4958. There doesn't have to be a 'What Next for North Korea', question. Imperialism is the hard line position of the US. Behind the racist attitude of the hardliners is an anti-socialist alliance. This alliance has always been its core position in relation to all the nations in the world. The hardline position allocates the revenues it draws from all its taxpayers to position the US as the most powerful citadel of reaction as a matter of patriotism and policy. I believe this defines the hardline position in the White House. The race element is based on eugenics. Pompeo is a eugenicist and even refers to the UN as the League of Nations founded by a eugenicists, President Woodrow Wilson. In the ordinary world of you and I, Pompeo would psychiatrically evaluated for believing the League of Nations is alive and well in the UN. The hard liners never seemed to have had such difficulties until now citing NK and Iran as "Too Close For Comfort.", threatens US dominance more than the other socialist societies. Nations that go along with the US position as part of the anti-socialist alliance, can play with nukes up to a point! The anti-socialist alliance has gone through some changes. Thrown into the mix are some nations other nations are not comfortable with forcing unwanted compromises to their space and time to accommodate Washington's dominance. The Press should frame the problem more concretely for people to understand what is at stake at that level of economic interrelations! The socialist economies have made remarkable strides for the last 70 years that the world economy integrates all nations that broke out of the realm of US control are heavily vested in trade, commerce, banking, with each other isolates the US, as the last man in. In a moment during which trade is being re-shaped by socialist economies and the US is unable to cope with the rise of the Yen. The US and every administration since 1955 has spent its revenue not in the development of its working class and industrial economy but into defense to slow down the rates of economic growth of the socialist economies. When world conditions did not serve the purpose of halting progress in the socialist camp the hard line policy was no policy at all with the members of the alliance. A tension is ever present in the alliance. The person who is hurt the most by all this is the American tax payer.
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  4969. I give Trump credit and the Congress that does nothing, credit for this re-unification. Nothing is the abstinence of something. Eating is the abstinence of fasting. "Determinatio est Negatio', said the 18th century Dutch philosopher, Baruch de Spinoza. "Fear cannot be without hope and hope without fear". The erratic and chaotic American administration fulfills the role of a catalyst striking fear in all humanity compels humanity toward the creation of a world without war. Trump and the right wing Congress as the world watches its barbaric missions in Iraq and Afghanistan under the pretext of a war on terror, really a reign of terror, for the suppression of radicalism threatening the monarchies of the region pushes a slow to move mass of people into making accomplishments. What it should tell the American people that US foreign policy of 'regime change', brings about the exact opposite of what it intends to suppress. But since the American people do not know how to change this by their intervention electing a smiling and rationally minded fascist into office is suicidal. All of the groups on the left are fascists, and are not left at all. Only the Marxists are genuine and have been consistently. If I had voted for Hillary that would have been like voting for McGovern against Nixon. I do not believe McGovern would have ended the war as the New Left scholars believed. He would have been co-opted by the right wing and covertly more anti-communist. Seeing is believing, watching a detestable animal in office represent you worldwide is far better of a lever for social change. This is why I voted for Trump. Trump, Bannon, Miller, make you want to punch them in the face and knock their lights out. McGovern, JFK, Obama , FDR, make you want more of them while 'behind your back' commit to policies of conquest causing the world to suffer miserably. These people are the worst of humanity. People don't respond to intellectuals. They respond to character. Usually in America the rational, beautiful, pretty or intelligent perpetuate the relations of exploitation of the system. Thus, the fascist are not Trump and the right wing, the fascists are the intelligentsia, the Obama's, Clinton's, Cuomo's, the Brown's, these are the popes who play and manipulate both sides for themselves. For instance, Steven Miller is not a fascist. He is a Jew and happens to be a very stupid Jew of poor character. Steve Bannon, a man so ugly he'd be assassinated. Scot Pruit, a sycophant, will end up in jail. Poor Cosby, a victim of lesbian fascism, they did to him the same thing done to Fatty Arbuckle. Fatty was lucky the lesbians railing against him for the death of a studio whore, were not a strong enough of a movement to persuade the jury. Cosby was not so fortunate. Not that Cosby is clean because he is not. Black capitalism in America is thoroughly corrupt and anti-communist ideologically. But if you keep putting an Obama, or an Oprah, in office, US foreign policy will always remain a policy of war and conquest. So -- Trump deserves credit for not trying to reconcile the contradictions of capitalism the way liberals and conservative do. Capitalism left to its own devices is its own enemy, barrier and gravedigger. Humanity through the ages unites through a common enemy. They fear for their skins and clamor to come up with a defense. When conditions get bad enough the Americans respond, they never install a red light where it should go based on science, only when someone is run over and killed does the light get installed. The movie: Independence Day illustrates Spinoza's philosophy perfectly. The aliens being America's right wing and the drunken pilot episodically drives the knife right into the heart of the mother ship. IF what I say were not grounded in historical reality, the enormous success of a 'B' movie would never have taken the critics and producers by surprise and Korea would still be divided. Now - Trump has to bomb not 24 million people but 75 million people. Bravo Kim and Moon, they earned a place in history in, finally, doing what would have been done by JFK had he not been assassinated by a demented left-right wing Oswald.
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  4972. Warren's realization of socialist programs is to her the task of enlightened people, she has no provision for lining up socialist teachings with the everyday lives and struggles of the working classes. How do you get people who have little time left over for themselves to think socialism?  Her criticisms of the 1%, unlike Bernie's, are detached from class inequality as an expression of the class struggle underlying the surface of society. Bernie discusses an economy that works for working people not the top 1%, he brings context into the daily particular struggles people face everyday, a rigged one-sided economy. As workers begin to strike and more plant closings take place, Bernie will get worker attention for recognizing the class struggle. Warren will get the public immediate attention criticizing the caprice of the 1%. She will not critcize the social foundation or the social antagonism upon which the 1% rests; she merely wants that power structure to be applied in a human way. She may sing the songs of the poor person and their inconsequentiality in all this misery but her understanding of the connection between this power of the 1% and the existing situation is a complete misconception of the means Oligarchs must use to become the power and remain in power. Class struggle is not a doctrine, its the school where doctrines arise and are tested, used and discarded. Working people who have been straddled by 'well-wishing' education and representatives of other social classes into overwork as the American way to success.
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  4980. ...economic interest is all that matters...every walk of life in the former federal government Trump is dissolving were considered non-political. Neutrality is how the state kept its impartiality and gave no particular class or group special attention*. That changed. Trump has filled his cabinet with 13 billionaires, most likely, having learned from his first term the revolving door between private and public of civil servants held his ideas back, this time around cutting the bureaucracy is the first task with an alliance between Oil, Gas, and Big Tech billionaires. Drill Baby Drill, government will not interfere with the executives in charge of government giving billionaires the whole Pińata that is social security, dangled by a rope in the hand of Musk, each take a swing to break the bounty of wealth stored in the fund in the name of fraud and abuse...to pay for a tax break, this is why he cannot claim to stand for the common interest of citizens...basically, 0.0001% of the population will see mass wildcat strikes shutting down industries and services before they can starve them into longer working hours. 165 million working people will come together because Trump is ripping off grandma...hard to imagine Trump will have the ranks of the military on his side many of them are family people, treat the mothers and fathers bad and the new recruits will bury you...the only people in society not connected to society are the 0.0001%. Oligarchy will not be defeated by democrats inside the beltway, oligarchy will be defeated in all 50 states. Trump brings his own opposition with him. * In practice, the US government was never impartial is a raging debate.
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  5000. Well...I hope you were not among the ones rejected for SSI if you truly need it...Politics...is a subjective thing. A great book really nails it called “Rape of the American Taxpayer, came out in 1973, Philip Stern takes a critical look at the US Tax Code as a ‘tax welfare system” of the rich. That system is failing. There are many reasons for the betrayal of US citizens. Between the average individual in the workforce and the government, a majority are unequal partners. Be different if we controlled the purse and the printing press but we don’t. The government allocating money to non-citizens at the expense of citizens is political. A political act, that has no merit as being a necessity. US born Americans are putting off raising a family. Americans in the working class are not reproducing their own workforce. Birth rate is down. Birth rate gets higher the higher up the economic ladder you climb. The rich are having babies galore. They are reproducing themselves as a social class. But declining home sales is a good indication the Fed and real estate tycoons are making it really hard for the working class to get romantically involved. Labor has to come from somewhere or the economy will tank, a depression. Migrant labor is preventing that, and they work harder producing more wealth. They have not yet met each other to start families, they are busy saving every red cent, sending home money for relatives to come to the US, but when they settle the first born generation of Americans from migrant parents will be a👶👶👶 boom...👶  @lizbethartemis4886  👶
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  5008.  @humility-righteous-giving  that would be fine if you thought more about the nature of the laws that make it illegal to kill yourself. Whether by suicide or by refusal to get vaccine and die from a virus the decision to choose is illegal according to law. Public safety means the State acts in the interest of the Right of State Property. A bridge is not your’s to jump off. The vaccine is not your’s to decide to take it or not. The Ventilators are not your’s to turn off. The gun is not your’s to kill yourself with until you buy the Right to own the Gun as a piece of Property. Its illegal to jump off the Brooklyn Bridge or take a gun to your head. Don’t you remember Dr. Kavorkian? Jurisprudence, a court of law, would hold a sentencing of a corpse if it weren’t socially morose and inappropriate but in the final record of that person’s history the State names him/her a criminal. Robin Williams is a criminal to the State for committing suicide but is rich enough to not have to enter into litigation for his freedom post mortem to kill himself. Absurd isn’t it? But that is what lawmakers create. Allegory and Absurdities. The choice to live or die is forbidden. I don’t get where the freedom in the laws are because the only thing free to act in the law is the act of buying and selling. Restrict buying and selling and you will get a vehement and hostile reaction from the State. See how quick the Ambassador Bridge opened. Freedom is pretty narrowed down to buying and selling and work. Trade and Employment. Other activities and interests of a personal and social nature are pre-decided for us in laws that script out our actions and behaviors. You need to externalize a person’s will into making A Last Will and Testament, or the property falls into State Property. When you are a vegetable the State and nobody else in your family can decide for you the choice to live or die. Immediate family need a Do Not Resuscitate Court Order to override the act of violating the law, the illegality of turning off the artificial lung, the horror of keeping a man or woman’s corpse alive is preferred over a humane end to interminable suffering. Where is this freedom?
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  5015. One underlying cause of attacks is the attitude of terrorists and the attitude of US officials. Both attitudes justify the worst behaviors on both sides, whereas, objectively, it is straight forward rotten behavior they each exhibit. If America is in every country than every country can be in America. This attitude justifies terrorism on American soil. American immigration a la deportation has already made a few future terrorists out of American born people who will turn up when thy become of age and travel back to the US in the future to exact a revenge. Should America immediately withdraw its forces in other countries, Afghanistan, Iraq, Africa, the Pacific, Latin America, the Middle East, Easter Europe, the attitude that justifies terrorism on American soil will disappear in a short time. The underlying cause is then the foreign policy of might makes right versus a foreign policy of development and defense. The other underlying cause is in the economic realm on which the politics above spin. Here the US taxpayer and consumer perpetuate the relations that bring on terrorism in our roles as taxpayer and consumer. Terrorism will not permit us to continue to be tax payers and consumers with unexpected attacks that emerge from within the society. The chief strategy to get us to stop being consumers that make the corporations rich by cashing in on raw materials ripped off somewhere else. If we go to malls then malls are targeted. If we go to supermarkets more than malls than supermarkets are targeted. As individuals we become immobilized and lose our freedoms and civil rights to buy and sell freely under the heel of an overbearing State. Because we protest nothing about the use of taxpayer dollars to finance war and aggression in any form the impression we give out is apathy--- I don't care if your family was blown up by a US war head made in Massachusetts. We, our children, our elderly, schools, and more things we use daily are targeted for revenge while the decision makers so out of reach are highly insulated from attacks. As people we have exposed ourselves to risks but we have ourselves to blame for the repetition of policies that bring those risks on.
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  5016. The reporter got it right, the US sanctions are designed to create protests by debasing the Cuban peso, making it impossible for the government to buy on the world market for lack of enough dollars. But before a country can be crippled or strangulated its rural and agriculture economy must be destroyed. The people have to become dependent on importing food not growing their own. Land and the peasants on the land have to be freed for sale. Those who work the land as small farmers are forced to find work in projects foreign investment groups bring to the country. Case in point, Bill Clinton, Ben Stiller, Sean Penn, along with then president of Haiti and other intermediaries built a power plant in Haiti that brought 68,000 jobs attracted the Haitian provincial farmers and peasants, they got jobs, but at the cost of losing domestic industry and millions of rural small farm agricultural workers, Haiti become totally dependent for its food. Jared Kushner is doing this right now in Albania. In a consortium of capital investment with the PM of Albania, a realtor, and billionaire with political connections make land deals for development. Modern development would be great if it did not destroy the natural economy of a nation to modernize it. Modern development must have free workers not workers with small plots of land as homesteaders and food vendors never have to modernize, all needs are met. Each country is different but that is why the State Department works with academics who study nations give that information over to a private sector who invest strategically to make nations fall into chaos, wars, famine, anarchy, for modern development to take over the whole country and make a unique culture and language into a generic commercial replica of downtown Vegas.
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  5040. 7:14 Government borrows money from the rich the money it could have acquired had the government taxed the rich, does not go the way the professor says. It is done this way because the private sector industry, commercial, and industrial workers, are the only social class in America’s economic system who produce value so that the government can tax to repay the loans and support other government business. We are the ones who the government does not approach to borrow is a fact, because we do not have money, is the fact but what we do have the corporations and the rich do not have is the productive labor government and the corporations, including the super rich depend on for the repayment of the loans borrowed. This is why the dollar is backed by GDP (commodities) not backed at all by gold or any other universal equivalent and it is why the working day extends or is prolonged and workers are working longer, harder, and receiving in exchange for their longer hours currency that buys less and why the commodity labor-power is paid the same rate as it was paid 40 years ago. This is because after the sale of labor-power at its fixed price is complete, labor become in the workshop, factory or office productive labor. Productive power goes up and value goes down. Money losing its value, looks like prices inching upwards, prices going up reflects values going down, the more productive people are at work. The productivity is prompted by competition, competition also drives the need to open new markets for the conversion of commodities back into money, hence, profits. Not a good scenario for workers and one that will ultimately lead to a catastrophic collapse for the working class.
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  5044. Housing is a commodity in America, it is not a Right. But in many countries more than a third of all nations housing is a Right. Hard to imagine for Americans but where there are no large banks there are no mortgages. This is why the standard of living and longevity is higher in other countries than in the US. The stress of being thrown into the streets on your own is not a killer in other nations. The point is not to move to other nations if you don't like it here. The point is other nations changed what is unnatural and made it natural to be healthy and have a place to live, so work is made possible and probable. Americans are last on the list to change social policy and keep up with the advancements in social policies the rest of our species has accomplished. The march of progress of nations is never shown or told to the American people. A roof over your head is a thing you buy. In a land where the rich live and poor die If you can buy it you got it. Health has been separated from the individual. People are made through the contamination of the material world around them sick. This is the way health becomes an object that can be bought and sold between doctors, hospitals, medical industry and the individual Health, home and happiness is not within but comes without an individual and then the right to good health is sold to you. What is wrong here is dividing people into landlords and tenants. What this creates is a class system between large and small landowners and a class system between small and large tenants. Big landowners have enough to never lose their homes or properties and the small landowners do not but depend on other for their income. This is wrong. A system has turned this poor woman into an economic parasite and the other woman with the family into a debtor.
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  5048. Leaders in America play you for a fool...you are the longer you give consent to their excuses. American population is on the decline. This problem needs outside of the box thinking for a concrete solution. Get to the root of the problem is the only way. Having kids on the farm is an asset for their labor. But farms don’t need labor in America they are mechanized; they need migrants. Leaders are resistant to give migrants citizenship incorporate them as a tax revenue source. Why? Because leaders are hanging on to the past. They look backward and resurrect the politics of blame with no shame of the past. Population decline: Kids in the city are expensive pets. Many have chosen to not have kids. City work forces shrink and lose skilled and unskilled labor to fill its ranks. And Boomers are aging out. Bob Dylan is not doing much spending, investing, performing, hiring, selling, these days. They are no longer consumers, investors, workers, all rolled into one. They pull their money out of markets for the cash and scale down their consumption habits per doctor’s orders. On the other side of the people situation on the planet is...food. Grain and fertilizer used for food production to feed the west comes in shorter supply and at a higher price the longer the war in Ukraine continues. Leaders are not interested in settlement agreements between Russia and Ukraine. The latest offensive is to recover territory Russia holds so food prices will rise for all of the rest in the world. Oil for fuel is more expensive. Safeguarding the trade routes for the Free World is not cheap... is it worth it all will begin to wonder? We are without mature sober intellectual leadership in the US to help us answer that question and takes us through the next age we enter. Japan had been dealing with population decline for decades. Japan came up with De-Sourcing. If their products are sold in America it will be made in America etc. Problem is population decline in America makes labor in short supply. Uh, oh, now what for Japan...a crisis. When one country slips into crisis they all go down in crisis. This is it, as far as, the standard of living in the west can be reached...it ain’t going to get better... we face long periods of recession and stagnation, inflation, higher taxes, longer work hours and in return for that the workers doing it all have no retirement and disposable income. Its over folks and the leaders who have no answers pretend they don’t see it coming. Holding on to power is their sole mission from here on out.
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  5052.  @hughjassle5876  A gun is not a tool because death of any life by a gun or by any other means cannot be regarded as a product. Death is not a product like hand soap or a car is a product and a tool. A gun is only a product. Its use-value is very limited, narrow, specific. Can’t use a gun to build a house or fix a car. As a product its a commodity and will never be anything more than a commodity exchangeable for money. If it is tool its a tool for the creation of wealth for the maker of the gun who makes it only to sell it. Products are made with tools and tools are used by labor. Pulling a trigger is not laborious and a trigger that comes into contact with the human hand does not require a body to rest, eat and sleep, after 8 hours work. Your argument is not only ridiculous but imbecilic. Further more Hugh Jassle, a tool is either product or a means of production only when it is used in some labor-process, depending if it is an aid, assists labor, or is a product itself of some labor-process. You don’t learn this stuff in America do you? Educational system stinks and that explains why your country is the only country on this entire earth that has a gun problem. Believe me there are bad people everywhere even before you were born there were bad people. The real issue here is masculinity and ego in society, that a gun becomes the material shortcut to confidence and masculinity buy this and you will become a man again the way America sold cars in the 60s,--- buy this and you’ll get the girl. Brainwashed by marketing. So, an AR15 is designed to kill people...yeah what is so controversial about that statement that you have exert the point as if no one can?
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  5054. The central issue here is life.  Life is more than everyone being counted as an expenditure of average simple labor offered by the far right. They take value to the extreme. Value is purely social with them and as an immaterial thing they turn value into into an objective fact! An object is not a host to value, an object is either something useful or not and the work that went into that object is useful work or not. Once you make all this real and concrete work, activity, industry into a value, or an exchange -value to be bought and sold, then another creature comes out of the woodwork. The far right start to making uniforms to emulate this value-relation an immaterial thing till finally it rules their minds...and value is never expressed in any other way but in an abstract way if you notive in the workds of the right wing of the GOP. Trump's GOP especially, which will not go away unless politically smashed to pieces. Charlie Chaplin showed it best what value became to the dictator. The value relation was kicked to bouncin g the glob and the dictator up and down in the room of his office in the Great Dictator. Earth cannot be earth with these people. Geology is not a science to these fundamentalist mental midgets. Everything is a generality chasing after another generality. Their slogans typifies this; " The West is Best", Which country in the west and what defines best...always left open ended. Patriotism and freedom, exactly what type of freedom and patriotism is never expressed in any other way except as one abstraction chasing another. The far right are always running from and never heading towards objective reality; all theories and conspiracies made to separate reality from the subject as something strange, bizarre, designed, planned and organized behind the backs of the real producers and the producers incapable of heading the charge, taking the lead, and running society by their own natural economic laws hey view with deep disdain. F-them. They worship the value-relation like a god, they are the modern versions of the Aztec priest worshipping the Sun God and Rain God with human sacrifice just because value puts clothes on their back a producer must be sacrificed to the value relation, a thing that has no material existence in the object we call life. Can you find gravity in a stone?
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  5061. When you cannot find anything on your body or in your home that is made in the US that tells you the division of labor has grown a world scale. More people are involved working for American corporations are not Americans. This means the corporations have widened their accumulation of capital on a world scale and there is no turning back on this. The fruit of this labor is too sweet. This also means that an ever-shrinking number of capitalists of a particular class, i.e., energy sector in the case of the US share in the wealth generated by this world wide division of labor. More and more people see less wealth relative to fewer owning it. This also means that labor in the US is employed not in manufacturing but in other sectors where there no wealth is generated from their activity. Acitivty that does not lead to another job, zero growth that would directly raise the standard of living of the working class. I think this is the tragic part of the decline of the American working class a done deal through debt from middle class status to material deprivation. Everyone from Bernie to Trump will try to restore the industrial base of America but it will have to be done without the corporations. Getting them to re-invest/repatriate the capital and re-industrialize America with it, is going to take a social struggle conducted on a world scale. I do not see any prospects from left or the right moving Public Opinion in this election cycle forthcoming in the direction of fighting the corporations to re-industrialize the economy.
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  5062. The US Senate, The Catholic Archdiocese of NY, NYU, Columbia U, Railroad corporations, owns land in and through the entire continent of the North America, not to mention their material wealth in gold..but you think John Hopkins is the largest landowner, this tells me that the Left needs to do its research and publish a thorough analysis of the class nature of American society. The last study of this kind was written by Paul Sweezey in the 50s. This is how far behind the Left in the US is. Thus, we are all doing our own thing and have our own analysis or awareness, interpretations, and a whole lot of bullshit that make the Left a collection of weak oppositions totally useless in the struggle, plus the Left, like yourself, ( I am assuming because you are here) have no awareness of a class struggle in society that the average Trump supporter is more class conscious than the left. Who are the Land Aristocracy of the US needs a study? This rapidly changes as land purchased by billionaires and monopoly corporations on a large scale may supersede the old aristocracy of landowners, lands purchased as a result of dispossession such as Lahiana, Hawaii. In fact, there is not a piece of land in the US that is not the property of another. The only true public land Americans as a society own are the lands on the highways, such as rest stops, and meridians (the strip of land dividing the highway). The national highway system is a system mixes public and state ownership. By law if all cars parked and occupied the meridians of highways, they would not be in the wrong in that occupation. The State would take action against such an occupation only in the name of safety not for reasons that the land occupied is state property.
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  5064. Disappointing Decoy.... I am going to shape your voice and give you a thumbs down until you get the right social analysis of the situation. Your potential is great but your analysis of this class conflict in America is weak. This level of looting by the working class and poor youths of LA in America proves there is no economic recovery and the failure of the police to control this putsch in your corner of society proves mass social power is a greater power than police repression. Other segments of the working class have not figured out a way to organize themselves against police repression. Bearing down on children in middle schools of the suburbs by Nazis pretending to be police and School Board officials is pure intimidation and repression. A broken down justice system, a military preoccupied with global domination sanctioning the threats to American imperialism aimed at Nicaragua, Venezuela, Cuba, Russia and prepping for war with China. Add to this international repression a domestic repression; a broken down health system weaponizing the CDC to inject fear of each other with therapeutic vaccinations that really do nothing to prevent Omicron, Covid, and you have a grand social experiment by democrats and republicans in league with corporations that are not ever going to give the working class jobs higher than working for a retail food chain corporations, are tactics of state repression. These political parties HAVE NO SOLUTIONS should be your message. But you were not born in a time when America had a political state that did do something and so you cannot compare but for me...it is crystal clear what is going on. In your corner of society the corporations actively working in tandem with the State are the Real Estate Billionaires pouring money in campaigns to eliminate any opposition to the democrats and republicans o the ballot and the progressives wing of the democratic party are “FAKE” leftists, all show and no substance. The Young Turks, AOC, Omar, do the work of imperialism in the countries of their origins. In the background a climate crisis weaponized through inaction by the State is used to threaten your existence. Marshall Law is not an option because the US military is positioned around the world for one reason only: to slow down the rise of China. America loses to China if troops are brought home. Suburban parents are squeezed by taxation to maintain the cost of that global misuse of the Military. The national Guard is not called out as the putsches have not risen to the level of using the National Guard. he faces of the State are people of color. A black General Austin, a gay lesbian black woman as a White Press Secretary ( I hope you realize the job of a press secretary is to lie to the public), a faggot in the department of commerce...a latino in the department of health...faces reflecting the social composition of the working class...deflects and diffuses social and political opposition from that working class. If they were all white we’d have a race war in America. Think tanks writing the laws for Congress people who are all billionaires...did you know that all railroad workers have been on strike for seven months? You could report on that strike and how that relates to shortages. Its time you step out and use your platform for more than clicks and do some real reporting for the sake of your community, live up to that obligation to them as a son of your community. I will continue to support your work is vital but you must go beyond clarification of facts and piece these elements together to a working class truly in pain and needs to find a way to overcome the forms of repression used against them.
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  5066. Great job Doc! If we as a people adhere to this sort of logic Dr. Wolf uses to interpret events, it would be so much easier to know how the social classes position themselves to the productive forces in society and easier to see the roles president are playing, which nations position themselves in opposition to the world trade, or the development of societies. We can easily ascertain what tools a president uses, i.e., FBI, CIA, NSA, Military or private citizen militias, to get its way over the progress of people everywhere.  The case of congestion pricing is a perfect example of classes in society working in connection to the city which is a productive force in itself, i.e., a city is a means of production or a tool for social reproduction. Land is a means of production depending on how it is used and positioned in the labor-process. A city is a product of labor itself and doubles as a labor-process and a value creating process. If it takes four hours commuting time then the boss demands from you four hours worth of work on the job. Got to make up for it. So we get up earlier and start our commute, turning free time into a boss's work time, we do this to offset stress and work at an even pace at work on the job. The cost of the toll of wear and tear on our mind and bodies for lack of good sleep affects us in old age. Less time in life collecting the social security funds we added to the system. The average worker times it just right, up at 3:30 am, shit, shower and shave, dress, caffeine and sugar, weed and drive, get the 5:45 am to get to sleep again. We are still super efficient in work despite the barriers to a more rational start of the workday. A dilapidating neglected mass transit system cutting into the natural rhythm of our bodies and mind. Morticians and psychiatrists could easily say their most favored advertisement for mental treatment and funerary services is the MTA.  Below 60 street Uber commutes the rich. The super rich take helicopters to work the sub divisions of the rich take Uber to work. The workers in the city take a broken down train system. Subdivision of the workers take a car and a train or bus. Super efficient commuting time for the rich is in contrast to the long commute of the working class, and their actual work time overseeing the work of the workers at all levels is super efficient extracting work from the workers. Computerized efficiency, not like the old days of docking pay and demotions and earlier on in history the whip and overseer lashing workers to work faster. You do or be gone is the demand on workers. This is a good area for the religious to express their faith in a better way than through an immoral zionism. Strike automation as a vampiric overseer sucking out the lifeblood of a worker. So many go into the process bright eyed and alive come out at the end of the work process shrunken human beings. It would be so much easier to rally workers against an obvious foe. But! The foe is not that obvious, a veil is draped over the foe most of the time until moments like this come up and they reveal their true colors, their stand on commuter pricing. Dr. Wolf's kind of thinking or consciousness lifts that veil, through learning, training your eye on the subject, becoming conscious that a single worker and the whole lot of workers in society are lumped together as one giant punching bag for abuse and re-abuse in all so many despicable forms. Wonderfully illuminated by the Doctor's guest Dr. Fraad.
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  5089. Nearly half the American workforce consists of foreign workers, i.e., immigrants. The balance of the working classes in American society are divided by standard of living , race and gender, location. The working class inside the workplace is divided by labor itself, a hierarchy of wages and income divide the working classes is the ubiquitous "chain of command". A social structure dictating orders the working class. There is never a moment's pause from need that the population separates into two groups of buyers and sellers. The State emerges from this social separation and perfects itself in defining individuals not as sovereign beings; it specifies individuals into sellers and buyers as equal in the eyes of the law. Social differences of individuals in society and the political State is based on the division between the natural human world of work and society obscured by social categories in the law that give precedence to objects being equal to each other in exchange. The objective reality of exchange obscures the values and attributes of the subject's reality. You can begin to imagine the State cannot interfere with issues of culture, language, education, housing, industry, environment, law and safety, in society except as a seller itself. It must become a private seller and transform more spheres of social life into commodities for sale. To become a privatized State, its ministerial positions have to be occupied by people who can open more social spheres of life to commercial speculation and profit. This is the present day condition of the American working class. How this differs with the British working class is probably not too far off.
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  5097. Deportation is not going to be that easy. You cannot get a US immigration judge to consent to deportation if the US does not a treaty with country they should be deported. No diplomatic relations; no embassy to take charge of the deportation. International law is international law. America can’t simply airdrop them home. What will happen is that the migrants will become bargaining chips. Hostages. The country will accept them on a quid pro quo basis. Since they come from all parts of the world the scope of the quid pro quo is going to be extremely costly to America, it could cost America becoming a dead empire. In the meantime, the US is holding the bag of migrants getting heavier and heavier everyday with more coming in has no choice but to relieve the situation by striking a deal to get them accepted and placed back to their home country where they will likely go to jail. Losing grip of an empire for small war ravaged nations to plunder the American tax payer’s wealth would be a fitting but nightmarish end to an empire that plundered its wealth from smaller thieves. The world will do to America what England and France did to Germany using migrants as bargaining chips. Naturally all the little chips develop big chips on their shoulders costing the tax payer greater sums of the economic pie maintaining them. I see two choices; first and the least preferred is to turn them all into conscripts, the other solution... is a national immigration policy backed up by a national civil education plan for the integration of migrants into society as a new working class. Bear in mind, if you do not have a working class, I am not sure what you have as a society, but I know for sure you do not have a capitalist society.
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  5104. Look at a high school or any place of learning as a workplace where labor in the form of teaching and administration is expended to produce a product in the form of a student. Now, we may have a discussion about what is going on in the workplace as it becomes a more despotic place to work; a virtual battleground where the stakes are mortal. With this in mind, violence is not limited to schools but appears in all workplaces. A public space is a workplace for some while it is a public place for others. The opposite is true, a private space is a workplace for someone employed in it while it is a private place for others living in it. In reality, everyplace, private and public, is a workplace and violence is an outcome in both spheres of social life. Based on this line of reasoning the debate should be squarely centered on workplaces in general as the responsible discourse to be made.  With this in mind, Michael Moore recently came out and accused the NRA a 'terrorist organization', and that the media should treat it like it treats ISIS. The point is to change the world not interpret it or make aspersions Mr. Moore. The NRA is a workplace as I defined it but there are no workplace fatalities associated with the NRA, compared to the fatalities in most all American industries both public and private workplaces. And so, if he were truly interested in the lives of children functioning in a workplace of adult employees he would be focusing on the despotic nature of America's workplaces and working conditions, duration of working time, compensation, that pressures this specific place of employment into a battleground and not a place where individuals can realize their latent potentials.
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  5107. Australia is ahead of the United States in terms of civl rights for gay and lesbian men and women. Passing legislation for marriage equality is a major breakthrough in eradicating gender inequality in the workplaces all over the world, especially if war breaks out the next secretary of state of the staunchest most macho-heterosexual and patriarchic homogenous nationalism that is coming out of the White House has to cope with the Aussies on North Korea. The religious evangelical Vice-President building treaties and forging alliances for control over the Pacific by Washington. This will prove to be a very interesting chapter in Australian history dealing with the Americans who banned transgender recruits an executive act deeply contested by the US Judiciary. Not exactly sure the new Aussies are going to enjoy helping a government whose main ally in the region is a bald faced violent dictator in Duterte. The judiciary in the United States still has complete autonomy from the executive office. Unlike the Judiciary and Supreme Court in Honduras they are completely controlled by the executive office presents a more difficult challenge for democracy to take hold. But remarkably the police mutinied and acted honorably toward the movement of the indigenous people---ending their reign of terror a mission the police in the US should consider when the they file in 2019 for income under the Tax Bill passed in 2018. There are tremendous advancements being and made at the same time as the threats to the species and the planet, squeezing more out of the working class, and escalating the war machine closes the year out. A lot of groundwork for social movements to come together in a quick pace, probably the fastest pace of revolutionary activity we will see will come from the average US citizen whose economic status has been reduced below the level of Roman plebeian under the magnificence of Donald J. Trump. At least I hope to see some revolutionary activity they have nothing to lose at this point but their chains as the wise man once said.
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  5108. The true source of power of the US is its navy. Without a navy the weapons of mass destruction, and the armed forces would have to be delivered by other means to the center of conflict. The Navy polices, monitors and interdicts, commercial traffic on the oceans trade ways, observing all military vessels on all the sea routes under and over water and from outer space the planet is under total surveillance. The oceans are the key to global presence and dominance the space satellite network is its Achilles Heel to losing power and dominance. Defending it is tantamount to military supremacy. The navy and all the other branches of the military costs more than half of the total federal budget to run, operate, maintain and reproduce. Its a real big deal to republicans and democrats budget appropriations sustain the military. The Navy without its defenses against incoming nuclear warhead missiles shot by other nations, rogue or friendly, can be defeated raises among neocons the question of national survival. Military installations are airports on land and ship aircraft carriers are airports in the oceans combined these form a supply chain for energy and power. The oceans are insufficient a safeguard from invasion with the development of modern technology. The neocon philosophy of nuclear confrontation if it comes to a first strike scenario is better there than here is not as removed from reality as people think! Bolton's first strike and invasion methods would have to be challenged along other lines if the Left is going to persuade Americans the angry world will not come after them the way Bolton thinks!
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  5116. Military spending accelerates inflation and will entail spending cuts for the working class because the rich do not pay taxes. Proof the rich do not pay taxes was evidenced when they made public Trump’s tax returns. The cost of war, bombs, the material and the resources that could have gone into the economy for Americans are spent on war in Ukraine. There is no return on capital to society. When the war ends the industries that produced for the war end too. There is no long-term benefit A world war involves many nations this war qualifies as a world war that puts Europe in a very bad spot having to choose between super powers (the US versus China) and playing the superpowers off each other is never a good idea for Europe. Europeans are more acclimated by socialism. Retirement without poverty versus Poverty at old age in the US which is high is the difference in quality of life between Americans and European working classes. The war in Ukraine itself is absurd from the standpoint of gross domestic product per nation in Europe, Italians would be more dangerous than Russians if you push to the extreme the logic of the State Department. Europe is likely to go east with the BRIC nations going east. Do American workers know they are exploited at a higher rate by capitalism and capitalists than European workers are? American workers are spontaneous responding to the crisis thrown at them with grace until they reach a point and implode from the stress. COVID, mass firings, inflation, cuts while war spending continues drives domestic prices up. Fed uses rates to push prices down forces wages lower. In other words, workers are getting paid money that has less value and can’t by much and would buy even below survival. The Fed is causing this to happen with higher interest rates. Matters are made no better with spending cuts to social security, hence, poverty at old age. A fight back is needed; take a stand in this struggle and draw a red line against the encroaching juggernaut of the whole system.
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  5134. If there was ever a working class ready to take the helm and drive the ship it would be, the 8 million who live in it, and the other 7 million who work in New York City. Right now they are on the receiving end of a process outside of their control. Still dazed and confused about how to focus their energy at whom and for what. But once they get to a point of focus and position with the power to rectify all the contradictions of and in the city, the nation, the world, what everyone wants, they can become the ones where our political hopes and voting power should land, a new trust, and be taken away the selfish power the landlords and capitalists that run and own the city now are creating. Islands of glory surrounded by desolation. The working class of New York City literally run the world economy. The idle rich depend on the world economy so they can live in abstinence of work and the workers can live to work in abstinence of a good life. Because the working class built the city they are the reason the State of New York as big as it is never got any major immigrants north of Manhattan and its burroughs. Upstate is desolate. Dead zones. All the action in down state and downtown below 14th Street. Its coastal positioning is like no other in the world. And, unlike other cities the city’s working class are a world mix of cultures and languages. You learn more about the world in a day than you can in four years in college. There is not a more intelligent workforce in the nation. Intelligence about the world economy and the politics acting out in the world I mean, all the deals are done in NYC, life gets dimmer the more north and west you go. The 14 million people who work that city could straighten this whole mess out because the mess we are in needs their work and insight, the others, prove time and again, do nothing. They are idle social classes, and if you are idle you are not working, and when not working you are not promoting the marvels of what makes a civilization, insead what they do is bill the working classes for less hours worked per person to cheapen their labor.
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  5152. Obama knew the next administration would rescind DACA and despite no support from Congress went ahead and issued an executive order. All presidents in the four decades prior knew who will succeed them. If the Congress had the mind to pass legislation an immigration policy would have been in place. Dulce was four years old at the time when Congress sat on its laurels. The Congress that did nothing and should have passed a comprehensive immigration plan was Tom Foley's Congress. The president then was George Bush, the old republican guard still had Washington under their control. The religious right and Tea party started by insider republicans from the same college and were junior senators in Congress enacted a mock protest, a gamble that caught on. Workers were pro-Bush and supported the Gulf War. Schwarznegger was the commanding general to launch a bloodletting on Kuwait. But at the same time workers were losing jobs and wages were static. The Fed enacted a modus vivendi and played with equity markets and rates extending credit for the housing boom and Wall Street investments that came down in 2007. The threat to America was OPEC nations. Controlling Middle East oil was foreign policy. Gas shortages and gas prices rose to $1.95 -$2.50, prices are slightly higher now $2.75 - $3.75. Certain parts of the working class react to prices negatively, the same ones who voted for Trump. Rural pick ups, trucks, boats, fuel for home heating. Rents went up with gentrification and jobs were going, going and gone out of the ball park economy with the signing of NAFTA by Clinton. Jobs left immigrants came. Jobs plummeted and illegals substituted for the loss of hands. Things took a real bad turn with a virulent right wing that forced Democrats to pass a crime bill, welfare reform, a bank de-regulation bill on top of NAFTA. This built up a militarized law enforcement and mass incarceration that we have now.
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  5180. VENEZUELA ---The lack of unity in Venezuela’s Opposition Party is the lack of unity among Venezuela’s rich elite and foreign interests. Call it the world economy for whatever reasons, or call it Washington sanctions that stifles the growth of capital in Venezuela, and whatever the elites invested in Venezuela oil or other mineral resources foreign extraction and mining companies have been essentially, kicked out of the country! The Opposition Party to whom the Venezuela’s business community belongs has become the sole opposition member to the Maduro regime. This business community cannot win the support of the people. It has to steal it. The greater majority of support of the people in Venezuela back the Maduro regime who takes the country along a different path away from the US and toward China, call this the result of sanctions which stifles development and forces into the arms of another country a neighbor. America’s Good Neighbor Policy was the first policy Neoliberals repealed. The pattern is set for other countries to do the same. Punishing countries ends up damaging the punisher with isolation, scared and alone facing hostile enemies in everyone in the world and projects what it does to people, people are doing to it. Its end makes all its projections against others become real self-inflicted prophecies. The We is what concerns me as this empire comes to an end. We are punished when the punisher is punished. We get caught up in the crossfire. We pay the price the rulers do not. The unfair burden of costs of empire and the price of its collapse is not a cost the government seeks from the super rich in whatever economic sector their wealth is anchored and are responsible for this collapse, is why the business community’s elected representatives can never win a majority and can only win by theft.
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  5200. The middle class, the smaller sections of the middle class are pro-Tump and this means the upper strata of the working class are pro-Trump.  These are people who have property to be conservative about, in an extreme form, at this juncture of the game. "He comes up from down", was the main point of the second Trump supporter, a man who resists the financial manipulations of monopoly corporations.  He's a winner. The Rocky Balboa of the World of Small to Mid-Sized Business.  Big banks are eroding capitalism and politicians are moving toward socialism which implies to this social strata 'Big Government' in the form of Totalitarianism. "He says what he says and he gets things done", he removes the legal and economic barriers for more to become winners in society.  Dissing the commenter for mispronouncing Nobel that if a teacher had done that to you in your past you are paying that forward to someone else in the future is a breech of credibility of the teacher in the past. Reason being is that this social strata has a need for Tax Reform and for the repeal of the Estate Tax, a need for a man who will get things done, fights back against the financial weapons of big banks and against the demands of maintaining the poor social strata of society, is undermined by this ridiculous rant of Cenk and Ana's. Who are these two to ignore the complaints of this highly volatile section of society that in history has played the role of supporting Nazism in Germany? Trump is their man, insult him and you insult them by denying their class struggles with big industry and they will forever be anti-socialist, because the definition of socialism comes to them from a ruling class point of view. Its up to you Cenk and Ana to poke holes in those ruling class ideas and straighten people out! The stereotypes they have engrained into their being come from the ideas and attitudes of the ruling classes about socialism and every other oppressed section of society. These are people who deny native Americans still exist in the US. Raised on history that literally says the end of a race happened on a given date. The world is flat to many of them. The holocaust never took place. They are a new generation who fell into this class of petty bourgeoisie. Next generation raised on ruling class ideas and concepts only.  They are now the new small manufactures, business owners, small landlords, and merchants, independent producers and franchise owners, realtors and retail businesses. Your job is to win hearts and minds to chip away at these delusions with real social science. I hope you stop the ranting and take a political opposition in embryo form, seriously.
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  5229. The first sign Putin meant business was when all Russians were evacuated to Russia from Ukraine earlier on. When it happened I thought would JFK evacuate NYC and Washington D.C., the way Putin evacuated Russians from Ukraine? I know Biden wouldn’t. First of all evacuation from America’s big cities is impossible, the evacuation routes are county roads of the last century. Missiles from Cuba meant inevitable death for the eastern seaboard in 1960. It was swift, orderly, planned and provided food and shelter in Russia, he really took care of his own was clever and it meant Russians in Ukraine were out of the way for a major assault, if the security needs of Russia continued to be ignored by Stoltenberger of NATO on Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Ukraine. Russia totally surrounded her, leaving the Ukrainian government and its armed population to fight if necessary for its autonomy without NATO or back under the rule of Russia. JFK came a hairline away from launching nuclear war with the Russians, he did not have much choice in the matter if the Soviets do not remove the missiles from Cuba. But Russia does have choices which raises my suspicions. An anti-war movement has sprung up in Russia which may have to go underground from the looks of the ferocity of the state to suppress this movement has still awakened a movement for a wave of strikes and protests, largely, aimed at Putin’s social circles of Russian Oligarchy at whom US sanctions are aimed, that this competition leading to war is a war of empires. A higher escalation but a continuity of the last century’s historical pattern of empire and revolution; an avenue for the expropriated to overthrow the expropriators on both sides of the Atlantic.
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  5241. If it were not for the fact that human beings have a limit of human endurance capital would push day into night. False, it pushes day into night and big pharma numbs the mind and body from its effects in the process. If upgrades in the office or factory happen and the old machines are replaced with new ones the life expectancy of the new technology is reduced to half when they are worked on a 24 hour basis versus being worked under daytime hours. Companies are free to double the rate of exploitation and the rate of consumption in two ways. By doubling working hours they reduce the life-expectancy the technology on the books. This results in a higher savings a company realizes when it deducts the investment capital in the new technology as per the US tax code. Main beneficiaries are the machine making industries. Big Pharma purchases of pill producing technology are capital depreciation allowances. The tax code enables them to retain and recover their investment and most of the surplus value. It has the same effect as reducing their capital costs. The added bonus is the workday doubled the eight hour day in a 24 hour relay system. The workers are subject to abuses indirectly. People do not see it or feel it. Sense it perhaps but not enough to cause a work stoppage. Shift work does not violate the work day. The gig economy where people carry more than one part time job does not violate the workday. Yet, in both cases the work day of two shifts in one day and the gig economy doubles the workday doubles the workday for the company while it remains unchanged for the individual worker. Mortality rates bear the consequences as working for a capitalist enterprise wears down the health of the public to severe levels raises the wealth these corporate entities accumulate for themselves as a consequence. The workers with the least protection number 70% of America's workforce. Because they are the largest cohort without protections they are the first to become pacified with an opiate pandemic in order to sustain the abuses and the economic injustices the accumulation of capital entails. As an outsider looking in the failure of workers to take a political stand on the length of their workday and the right of access to the necessaries of life describes the American situation as a historic tragedy.
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  5243. If you were alive in the 1850s you did not have to worry about machinery and modern industry suffocating life on the planet.  Only Londoners in Great Britain at the time as the only industrialized nation on earth had to worry about the effects on the environment by the rise of the modern factory. The factories, blast furnaces, steam engines, coal furnaces, being used by 27 million Londoners created the filthiest city in the world with the worst air quality. Victorian England was a dangerous place to live in more ways than one. By the 1950s productivity in industry and general employment of the population was made more regular. The combustion engine emitting diesal carbon fuel particles was still not enough where the environment would rapidly change from machinery and industry powered by coal and oil by 50 million people in Great Britain alone. However that number of people is multiplied by the number of industrialized cities in the world to get a sense of the real environmental impact of human industry. By the 1950s the science collected from around the world would have sufficient data to directly link human changes to environmental changes made by modern industry were undermined by industry executives serving in governments. This is the situation we find ourselves fighting American energy executives obstructing any human progress that might be made on industry, in particular the fossil fuel industry. The four seasons are two seasons with short intervals of fall and spring that employment and the different cotton and wool manufacturing industries on the planet would effect the quality and quantity of products derived from agriculture.
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  5261. So, ---indirectly Ukraine wins the war but at a much higher cost than Russia. Cost in the sense that the average Ukrainian will have to work more and be taxed higher as their country opens up to big money foreign investment. They lose their farms, and farmers, they lose their way of life and all the domestic industries farming generated. Ukraine increases its territory but has no capital to develop production in the territories it gained. The price of government services goes up in Ukraine but for Russia who loses the war social spending is cut back in order to re-constitute itself. Taxes will be paid as they always have but they will cease to be capital investment in Russia. They will, instead, become a disbursement of revenue. While the winner must sell its land to raise revenue for capital investment, repair the damage the war inflicted. Ukraine will have more land to sell at low prices to foreign investment to buy and move their production on the newly acquired land. Ukrainians become a workforce for Amazon and Walmart. While mining and drilling import their workers from the US and Europe. The largest foreign investor in Ukraine is most likely to be the US corporations, partly the European foreign powers will want a pice of that action, but for Ukraine’s tax structure will be of no consequence to foreign investment. All this accomplished one thing, the oil and gas market, is now redivided among oil and gas producers at the expense of Russia and strategically China is buffered as a new Cold War emerges.
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  5262. We have to be mindful that the super rich elite are more than one and international constitutes a social class. But I believe Anand G, has the tax relationship the other way around. We do pay for the tax cuts in a societal way. Assume the total wealth of society to be 100 trillion. If I cut taxes on the rich by 40%, 40 trillion is deducted from the $100T and 60 trillion is left to fund all social programs. The logical republican position is to eliminate the social programs so that society can function without dying on 60 trillion. The democratic position is to save the social programs from elimination and appropriate more money, borrow the money from the super rich, or China, if need be, to fund the social programs and subsidies including those the corporations and wealthy receive and keep the military top brass happy living in military luxury.  The president's position in relation to the $40 trillion gained is to appropriate it to the military, build a wall, enhance law enforcement. This way 330 million American license plates reveals to law enforcement where to arrest a person and continue enlarging the prison system by throwing them into jail. The next president that comes into power will have ultimate authority in spending the $40 trillion that every year is accumulated in the treasury for the president to use, i.e., 40, 80, 160 trillion $ surplus etc. Of course, this is a budget that has no balance of payments or defects, subtract those numbers from the total and you arrive at the actual wealth of the nation that social programs will compete for survival from a smaller pool of capital and it would be up to the military to insure the next president gives them more in the next budget because the accumulated capital has compounded. Thus the cycle of appropriation and accumulation of the nation's wealth becomes the property of the government not that of society, it never ends but gets larger till something causes it to fail. The question I have of you is what candidate on the left has even discussed how they will befriend the military and the public at the same time? Once in office it is either one side or the other that a new president must make the choice. Increasing taxes on social security is a form of transferring the fund from the public to the private sector. In my view, American working people have a fight on their hands, anyone who has an employer will be subordinated to the job at the employer's absolute discretion (power) because the president and the Congress have removed government from the workplace.
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  5271. Yet the businesses were not reciprocal with the artist. He gives them a piece of art for free which enhances their business. (I would have given him from my store what I would consider an equal value for his labor.) This is called reciprocity. Gratitude and he helped me I help him is cooperation. Americans have these traits built into their society. Reciprocity, Gratitude and Cooperation. Three value traits Americans give to employers willingly but repress for reasons unknown..when it comes to being that way among themselves? True, we are not sure the businesses declined these kind actions to the artist. Why that would not be a part of the story in my opinion makes the story weak. The story was about people relating to people on a given need. Its about a barter relationship in a community that can spread. One use-value ( the art) in exchange for another use-value (food, moving help, mechanical repairs) circulates among many businesses and individuals. Its really a story about an entirely new form of economy in budding shape without money or credit financing being involved created in front of your eyes and the reporter missed this entirely. Maybe the reporter did cover this as a potential solution to inflation and recession killing small business in the original story and it got edited out...we cannot tell for sure but it is certain that an answer to economic dilemmas was not told in the story. Its not a story of a man donating his labor for nothing to help bleeding businesses. That would be a story about how that artist can survive doing good work on the side.
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  5274. These skills of confrontation is what the American working class need as a whole, dealing with its political and economic enemies, of which there are many, specifically among others the Oil Companies. Most important because our home is threatened by the extraction corporations all over the world supplying 2.2 billion vehicles and 2.2 billion people day in and day out, repeating the same action endlessly, generation after generation, burning fuel never giving a single thought of the compounding effect of all individual actions added together. There are betters ways to put food on the table and pay the bills than cutting your life short from over work, over-production and over-consumption. Raping the Earth to supply oil for you the consumer is resented by the producer who punishes the consumer with higher gas prices for becoming the corrupting source of society's decline. Together with the GOP and the democrats are not innocent of this abusive relationship they have toward seniors, children, widows, is about taking away their rightful amount of social security income and education for the kiddies, and benefits the widow of a worker receives is forever finagled by government functionaries, basically bullying working people and the poor around the world. No vaccines for you these are my property I am going home say the American pharmaceutical corporations to the sick and COVID-DELTA infected. I wonder how many Christians work for Pfizer and Moderna working for a company that denies an antidote to the sick? Allowing opportunists like FOX News using images to twist reality. The one to one relationships class relationships in society where one party is unequal to the other party, whatever that inequality may rest on, are the same dynamics of the strong bullying the strong together but keeping them weak apart, isolated and feeling powerless.
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  5291. During the Great Depression the Dust Bowl engulfed the Southwest and the government came up with a solution borrowed from ancient agricultural methods the Inca used. The government under the New Deal made steps of different grade heights of huge tracks of land that would contain water longer, slow down the evaporation rate, than if the land were flat and the soil were baking under the sun. It worked, obviously, this generation would have starved if it did not work. But this government is not a New Deal Government, its a Free Market Government, a government whose mission is not to intervene in the interest of humanity. A government that intervenes when its defenses are threatened not a government that intervenes when its people are threatened. So there is a difference between what national interest means to you and what it means to Washington that most on average think nothing about and is key to how events are more planned than you think they are causal. This government will do nothing about a drought or a dust bowl is the difference between my generation and the ones living this nightmare experience today. You either have the money and assets to rebuild or you don't and the market eroding the value of your assets the race for survival intensifies a conflict between capital and labor in states hat run dry of their resources. Capital can leave the state, labor cannot, bear that in mind every state can see their future in the state capital left behind, so if you think California sucks and all the corporations move to Texas. In another 30 years, less than one lifetime Texas will look like California socially does today, a 'cesspool of hedonistic desires'.
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  5307. I am not aware of moms and dads who pay their taxes and are not aware. I think they are hyper aware the world’s rapid social transformation and shield themselves from that change with their money, power, and resources going to the most vocal defender of their way of life. I think the US government is collecting taxes to pay off its debt to China from households regardless of the social composition of the family and this is why the society cannot function. America is all form and no function. The social structure of the US is built on a nucelar family of the 1950s when families were the same. For that family America today works and functions but that is a minority and this small section of society as a social unit is a source for the environmental imperialism the anchor talks about. In my neighborhood there are only two intact families with two parents and kids and I am not even sure the kids are the offspring of both parents, doubtful, they are. My neighborhood has a total of 14 homes taken as a sample of the larger society I suspect the ratio would be around 1 and four families are a nuclear family. Beyond that tiny minority are homes containing single women or paired gay men, or single men, or paired gay women, and largely of mixed race. Thus, if I were to point the finger at a population regardless of social background and social class I would have to call out the Baby Boomers and the Millennials driving the social inequality in society, the former in charge of the corporations and the latter work for the corporations, constitute a part of the elite. Of course, the Greening of the world by elites is purely all form and no content, all cosmetic, all fake environmentalism in order to extract the necessary resources the land provides regardless of national boundaries and against the national sovereignty of people in other nations including the sovereignty of its population.
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  5308. Well I would agree but the collection of democratic individuals caring for one another in their jobs has to be based on a collective ownership of the capital that employs them so that the more the workers produce less of the economic surplus-value end up enriching a capitalist class and more of it enlarges the working class to the point that class distinctions disappear because everyone is of one class. At which time the vanguard leading this social transformation can dissolve itself as a state. People who live like Donald Trump that have more than one mansion would have to content themselves with taking part in production and lose the mansions and people who never worked would have to learn to work not steal, rob, and con for a living but be given healthcare, a job, an apartment and expect to be part of a larger project for change, and people in the middle could remain as they are while the two upper part of the society comes down from a high level of personal consumption of a material level of life and the ones at the bottom rise up to a middle level of material life, and hopefully all can partake in the dissolution of the state. A massive re-education project that teaches a new generation why the bourgeois state must go and why the socialist state is no longer necessary. The problem is; who starts and takes the lead in the beginning of this revolution that is more realistic in a country where the power of labor is high enough to support wide affluence but in history has happened only in countries where affluence was missing?
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  5309. Learning what capitalism is will come the hard way for Americans. Crisis is what keeps the prices of goods high, this makes gluts, droughts, internal warfare, shortages, illness and disease, all very favorable conditions for corporations to make money. People trying to buy a home for the first time are exceedingly pushed out of the market due to high home prices, food and durable goods. Prices rise only when there is a demand and to create a new demand planned obsolescence was enough. Still in practice it is not enough. The rich were not as rich as today that the cost to keep them rich is too high for society to bear is what makes it not enough. Must squeeze out the maximum people can offer of their lives and time to the bottom line. Creating demand out of a population that has everything already, too much, more than one family needs. Destruction of products, land, a crisis does the job. Prices stay high while products are made cheap would allow but does not for a better life. All the corporations and politicians are dead silent about the drought and fires, floods, and civil and social unrest, riots, arsons, and plant explosions, you name it...its all good for business but none of it is kind to humanity, all of it lethal! Europeans did not have to experience capitalism unbridled in real time the way Americans will. The sovereign debt crisis fomenting in American capitalism, austerity and natural disasters and no recovery except by one's own boot straps is a theory not working for the elder gentlemen who lost him trailer home in the California wildfire. This would never happen in western Europe, there are never stories of people stranded coming out of Italy, France, Spain or Germany. A natural disaster fund does not exist in America.
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  5347. American lawmakers are a breed of lawyer who do not write laws to solve a social problem. For example: When making a law about wood, timber, guns, food, homes, machines, technology, material, chemicals, they are not to try to solve the social problem caused or precipitated by these items, they are to write laws about the items themselves and they believe, these things are to be the private property of individuals despite the injustices the items bring as private property. In a word, a shallow and one sided mindset that is misguided when earth is burning and its scientific community is blowing up asteroids in space...Nero plays his violin as Rome burns. This is why Dickens could not stand America. Not that I regret Dickens’ stance. Little Big Man has more value to me than Dickens. Give the Tories a chance and they will try to burn the White House again. But the flaw in the American legislator is all punitive: When its freezing outside and people cannot afford heat citizens would be charged and prosecuted for taking wood and timber from state parks and this is how American politicians legislate. There is no originality in the legal system or free will promoted in American law. Its all technical and technicalities on a myopic level promoting social control. Amending the laws is not even a thought in the American political mindset, legislators cannot conceive to amend the law to read...when times are tough and people cannot afford heat the State shall make available all broken and felled timber for public use...and killing two birds with one stone the forests are less combustible and the population can heat themselves free of charge as it is already paid through taxes is a subversive idea in that mindset. Then there is the absolute stupidity of the Public duped to believe democracy is when a minority selects the same breed of politicians for the majority to choose as their leader. It would be a joke if not for how much artillery Americans pack as a substitute for the absence of brains. If a plane crashed on a house in Minnesota killing its passengers and residents the Minnesota legislature is not to amend its air traffic safety laws to solve this social problem over its state, instead, the laws perpetuate the social problem. It was a social problem in the days of Kitty Hawk and a bigger problem in the age of jet propulsion.
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  5348. Societies that have disappeared are those that widened the gap of social inequality. The extreme social forms of that gap as chosen by their political leadership all perished leaving behind a wreck for society to pick up the pieces and start anew. If all humans were identical it would be easier to reach a unanimous consensus on how much dictatorship and democracy are a fruitless waste of time, money and energy. Apartheid in South Africa lasted one lifetime, that’s it. Israel has a one life longevity rate. The State of Mississippi has a political apartheid system that won’t last a lifetime. Mexico and Canada. At best 60 years left. The level of social inequality in Mississippi is extreme. The burden of pollutants is put on a black working class population while a white minority of middle and elite social classes breathe pure air. Water, air, soil, electricity, are the first elements of nature a white minority alienates from the masses. In fact, this arrangement is extreme and ideal for the opposite arrangement to flourish. A democratic distribution of the pain, anguish, suffering, burden and a healing. Dictatorships are good in the sense that their extremities in social inequality delivers socialism faster than democracies. Democratic republics have one foot in and the other foot out of the waters of socialism and fascism. Not a long shelf life to nations who choose the path of repression and oppression is the main point and for those on the fence their life system shortened by half. Obviously as all doctors would prescribe the society that reduces stress, tension, conflict, and exercising mind and body, uniting town and country, so that people are not isolated in the woods can murder their whole family but can actually access a library, college or culture ant access the resources of society; so that not all resources are concentrated in one place and traveling there is a job in itself, when people in a city are all brain ad people in the country are all body, the society removing these separations has the best chance at living longer than a generation. This is what you want; no grandparent wants to die knowing their grand children have it harder .
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  5349. Will America ever perform higher than 2% GDP? Such a low GDP the nation cannot pay its debt and with such a wide gap in income, workers will never earn more than the current price of labor, and all of or most of the 2% GDP is consumed by rich people. A nation of 332 million, a workforce capacity of 133 million, and only 614 billionaires have at their leisure the consumption of the GDP of that labor force is extreme. This is a wake up call for American labor of a class struggle. In this episode of history, my hunch is that workers unionizing will only bring about more Capital Flight or outright Fascism. Capitalism is international and labor forces are national: You cannot take the workforce out of society but you can take all the tools out of the country. Leave the social problems to the State to deal with. If France can have such a law why can’t the US? French corporations cannot leave France without real reasons approved by the government. Netherlands, similar. Germany the workers are part owners of production. In America the workers are totally unattached to production embellished by a social presumption of ’freedom’. A costly price for freedom when you look at the condition of the working class in the US. Fully loaded in debt, homeless and cashless, beaten down, mentally and physically exhausted, low mortality rate. Worse is the inflation that Biden does nothing about. Nixon at least froze prices and wages to curb inflation. This time around the politicians do not even bat an eye at the eroding effects of inflation on worker’s earnings. The most modest and mild of remedies against inflation is used, they raised interests rates, thinking this will discourage employers from raising prices... and it will, slow and long over a period of time, not before a lot of people are damaged from inflation’s effects as most of the 133 million in the workforce are near under water. Will Korea face the same decline of industrialization seen in America and England? Asian nations have higher GDPs. West capitalist nations low GDP rate (2%) but when wages rise high enough and cuts into profits in Asia the companies will move production to, for example, Africa? Capitalism will develop there too. Before long capitalism has covered the globe; where to expand next is the inevitable question that is answered by war, destruction, regime change, to start the cycle of accumulation from the ground up with scorched earth policies. The inevitable economic decline all nations experience, at one time or another, is what happens when production is divided because labor is divided. Labor is a use-value and labor-power is the commodity. Workers have to decide which of their divided self they want to be?
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  5382. The West is headed toward a collapse of the four rudimentary actions the make up the totality for economic survival. What this means is a shorter life for people! If the people do not abandon their own economic fallacies they will never develop into higher form of human economic and social organization to adapt to changing external conditions. A glaring example of a social collapse of the four members group actions, i.e., production-consumption-exchange-distribution, is the United States. In this country, the owners of money control the economic totality and capital operates and survives through exchange and distribution by destroying other capitals. Exchange and distribution are highly developed in the US while production and consumption are starved of capital and degenerate for lack of development. When the economic order stops functioning the owners of money, will leave the country left behind in state of chaos. Production does not determine consumption in the American system, rather, its the opposite, the other departments of the totality of the economy after the superrich abandon investment in the US, the two departments remain in the form of private property that in order to get the two parts working again, i.e., production and consumption, the people will have to assume full power of the State to access the factories and offices, mines, tunnels, bridges, land, rivers, lakes and canals, drilling and excavation facilities, in short, occupy the total infrastructure to get them working again. As more an more of production and consumption stop functioning or staggers like an alcoholic at hight toxic levels, chipping away at the infrastructure and driving up costs, because consumption determines production, nothing short of a complete revolution is necessary. A moral and economic revolution brought about by the corrupt egos of the owners of money, affirming capitalism is its own destroyer. Survival of the society is barely achieved by the mindset of the owners of money that, a definite amount of production determines a definite amount of exchange in the US conditions society's members to be and serve the exclusive consumption of the individual super rich families. Every economic system starts out with production and ends up with production - production in and for itself can only get them running again, is the new principal for this revolution. The question should capital be the starting point of production and exchange and the result of production or should the primary participants who comprise the totality, be the starting point themselves? People in charge of humanity's main activity, the activity that bears life to the human species and the social order as a whole, in charge of production and exchange.
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  5387. 'Ordinary people have chosen to steal', of necessity they have no choice but to steal. Stealing only because the products are legally private property. But there is no state and the country is stateless, no judges or law enforcement to enforce the laws of private property. Products in the store are now just products and their social character as private property has dissolved with the dissolution of the state. It s not stealing exactly its people making a decision to meet their needs in the surrounding chaos and breakdown of civil society. The financial sectors are moribund as there are no interests rates form its central bank and capitalists stopped business. Most likely factories and mining will be shut down but if so the workers have every right to take over the factories because it was not them who broke the deal for work in his/her facility, it was the owner who is depriving the workers of their livelihood by closing it down, is a whole other legal precedent that can stand and the other part of the financial sector the shareholders and bondholders, do they buy or sell and to whom? They pressure to get paid first on the loans the government borrowed. If the state broke down the economic structure on which it rests broke down as well. No exchange between products and money shuts down circulation and distribution.  Markets and job creation, or exchange and distribution, make two parts of the whole society broken down. No work, no production, no jobs, no new hires; the other two parts of the whole society, production and consumption, are broken down, and there is no chance the same civil order that just fell can stand on its feet again. Its a social revolution by way of a breakdown of the old social order. I would imagine in the short period of days to come in order to re-start production the working classes who are the ones who know how things work and can run things will come forward in some way to rescue this wreck called South Africa. If they don't nobody else will and the country sinks into a chronic state of barbarism with a bunch of landowners, bankers, merchants, and industrialists running around defending their turf, also looting, these social classes loot too, all with their own private gangs and mercenaries.
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  5390. I beg to differ with Ms. Stein about the shamelessness of Congress in doing nothing for the country. Though it is shameful the reasons are not without sincere earnestness and diligence that Congress passed a tax overhaul. It rather expresses a deep loyalty and commitment to the owners of great wealth that this Congress sees capital as the starting point for a recovery and more desperately, a restoration of might makes right in the face of increasing rivals in Russia and China. A worker may be the creator and builder of the world the rich want and the engine of all wealth. Wealth be derived from labor and all that jazz but without capital the worker(s) cannot restore the lost industrial economic might to a dying economy. If Americans want to re-industrialize America they cannot do it without capital. On the other hand, it is not true that capital can do it without labor. Realizing this dilemma the corporations will push to cheapen American labor costs. The true remediation to the problem of chronic class inequities which is my main point is class abolition is too radical a solution for the American psyche. For rational reasons... Assume you abolish NAFTA, and nothing is there to restore the income and lifestyle of a 40 year old worker other than 'go back to school and get trained into something else', you will get a person like Donald Trump to sly his way in and preach the simplest inflammatory bullshit a dejected worker loves to hear. As far as they are concerned Trump can sink the boat and all of us in it because Democrats hand delivered nothing but bullshit to the American worker.  Remember the American worker acting this out was born into the corrupt system and never experienced America as an industrialized powerhouse the way China is today, prior to Reagan. Americans are not about to separate banks from its capital and corporations from its profits. Or spend more on domestic programs with money they don't have. They do not want to pay taxes period. If they do they want control of the taxes they have to spend. If anything Americans will hand over the farm and store, free of charge and free of resistance and hope the corporations do invest their capital into Americans. How is beyond me? There is no new frontier into which a man and his family can live off the land. Labor abroad is too attractively cheap for Andre Bretton to move its factory from Singapore. Same goes for Apple et al. The Congress will not walk away from NAFTA. If anything given their complicity and acquiescent nature of Congress to capital, NAFTA will go away as an issue quietly. Americans, zombified workers will bend toward more cooperation with capital accepting employment in the service industry. Basically more of the same and more fearing the unknown.   Think realistically for a moment, would you not do everything imaginable to derail anything that could place the 20 odd members of your clan multiplied by 500 or so clans who possess among them a capital of a trillion from losing it? Washington needs capital and will protect the golden egg that gets America back working again. This is why sanctions are regularly used or re-imposed and why diplomatic embassies are closed. Adding more rivals on the world stage ready to attract this capital is a headache Washington can do without. Corporations can invest their money in Russia as they do in China. The only selling point Trump has is the American worker willing to produce more for less and jointly Washington operates best when the whole word is completely made economically comatose with parasitical regimes doing its dirty work and where a few loyal and submissive states are allowed to exist for they dare not challenge the status quo. A world where there are no matching competitors, a view the different working class social groupings in America across race and gender lines wholeheartedly agree. If the events and actions of this president or Congress appear illogical to you it would be because the the social classes are breaking up into smaller fragments of middle class workers and a new hierarchy of workers that new lines have to be drawn between who does the work and who does not for how long and for how much.
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  5408. So, this is a problem of factory production overseas endlessly pumping out commodities more than plenty to satisfy the American population, more than what the average American needs. Factories in Asia, China, Taiwan, Thailand, Singapore, contracted by US corporations to do their work are more efficient than we think to churn out so much in so little time. The products going back to their point of origin essentially changes the entire relationship corporations have to the US. They get sold to the worker who produced them in Asia and likely for less because rising wages will buy more. This is an incredible development mirrored wages going up in Asia and wages sinking in America. A growing middle class of Asians and China and shrinking middle class in America falling into peril. Calling for relief and help, distressed and they find a response that is on their side in a right wing. For sure the Democrats will get the blame for this and the right wing will direct that blame to democrats for political gain. But it won't solve the problem. World production is the problem. World production under the free market system is chaotic and disorganized, resulting in anarchy. All societies have no control over what comes in and what goes out. Except for those societies that can produce for use can control the productive power of their factories. But for societies dependent on the exchange of goods,--- before space can be cleared for new products, they have to be sold. The manufacturers raise prices of goods on the market now in order to recover the investment made into last year's output still on barges,---- the Pacific Coast will look like this for a very long time. Moreover, the manufacturers actions will leads us straight into a deep economic stagnation that the economists and government officials seem incapable of placing a freeze on the rise of manufacturers prices to allow wages to catch up and close the demise of the middle class. The demand is the pressure to sell the merchandize. But employers are not hiring or raising wages and the products can't get off the boats fast enough to keep pace with demand. A reflection not on the American consumer's habits but a reflection of a production process Americans have absolutely no control over. In fact, as it appears before our very eyes the supply chain is controlling the destiny of our lives is just one aspect of the problem.
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  5426. The Colonel could not get his point across to well given the time frame of his interview, he got cut short. Pentagon and the CIA officials use murder, arson, bombings, assassinations, set-ups, coup d'etats, money, industry, drugs, anything that is legal and illegal, to pave the way for private industry to set up a new economy while they demolish the old economy with these sordid techniques. This is what it means to be in a relationship with the world to the CIA and the Pentagon. In the real world Bond is not running from bad guys, Bond is the bad guy. War is conquest as a power over others and ultimately an alienated power of itself who uses it. This revelation should come as a surprise to people who never read or seen more than one Shakespearean drama. Nothing new about this in the annals of human history. People are just stupid and easily taken advantage by those who are smart and do study the past to carry on the same forms of exploitation the past teaches them to stay as rulers and for the ruled to stay as the opressed. The opressed think oppressively, oppress each other, and so they self-oppress themselves while the new economic structure set up by the kings, princes, presidents and prime ministers, have everyone not in their circle stand in a relation to them as the oppressed. Nothing the oppressed can do is genuine or honest, they are percieved as lesser beings in that relation and can never stand in any other relation to a king but as a lesser being.   Every truce is a prelude to another outrageous and ferocious struggle for existence...in the last century it was the Soviet Union and communism...now its Iran and its patriarchal tyrannical religion, out to kill the power structure in Washington DC! Is the world more safe? Of course it isn't. Making the world safe is when a leader meets with another and starts engaging in a dialogue to de-escalate tensions and they come out with a treaty. A promise is not an agreement and an agreement is not a treaty. Never agree to anything; or no policy at all is a matter of foriegn policy. Who is Pompeo, a CIA man, who uses terror and violence to make Americans safe not now in the present but in the future and the oppressed think being unsafe now will bring us more safety in the future? You got to be real stupid to buy that one.
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  5427. The separation of people from the land is the foundation on which capitalism develops. A trend that is common among Americans is treasure hunting and gold prospecting using the latest technology that young people are going into all kinds of environments in the hopes they find gold. We can see these people producing videos of their hunts on youtube. With full scuba gear they dive into the deepest part of a waterfall and find gold. Who's gold is it if the waterfall and river where the gold is found in some waterfall deep in the woods belongs to somebody in New York or in Germany? The waterfall is private property and the owner of that property has a right to the gold the prospector found. In effect, the land, waterfall, river, are legally separated from the prospector. The state does not recognize the prospector as the owner of the gold although the scuba diver appropriated the gold from the rocks beneath the waters, did all the work. The law recognizes the owner of the land as the rightful owner of the value of the gold found. If the owner(s) sell the land to a drilling company it is their right. The right of the owner of the land is enforced by the laws that establish private property.  Capitalism is still intact even as the economy collapses. There are 3.7 million square miles of land that makes up the US and 640 million acres of that land is public land and 2.4 billion acres of that land is divided up into private land. But this does not tell you much unless you do the actual work of distinguishing who or what entities own private land and how much of it do they own. One giant sized agricultural company might own 10 million acres or most of the land and the rest is divided up into millions of small lots for the rest of the population to buy or sell. One senator in Congress could own a thousand acres of land, 400 senators could own up one million acres among them, and the rest divided up among millions of small private land owners, leaving the majority of the population landless. The state enforces the rights of each of these types of landowners. The Catholic Church, the Ivy league institutions, are landowners as well. All 2.4 billion acres of land in the US in some form or another is private property making capitalism still intact even as the economy crumbles to a standstill. Without land there is no production and without production there in no life is a serious problem this country will face should how we get our food breaks down because incomes have dropped and the price of foods have risen. A man sells apples on the street, the rich man buys them all up, the poor man cannot afford to buy one apple. Land set aside as public land is government land, these lands are all the federal and state buildings, parks, and sidewalks, roads, are not sold but leased to private corporations. For example in Texas, one highway lane is rented out to a private corporartion, they hope this lease arrangement will reduce traffic. Or a municipal airport rents out a building on the airport to a foreign corporation...who's land is it? Is it public land or is it private land during the life of the lease? See Elrod v Burns 427 US 327 for the answer. Either way, the mass of people cannot use that land for anything that will produce food for them, it forbids the use of land for subsistence raise chickens, prospect for gold. The land is no longer arable, useful in feeding the population if it is, on the one hand, private and, on the other hand, developed public land. What good can land do if it is a parking lot? To prevent mass starvation during a deep stagnation of the economy a government's response would have to be some kind of re-organization of the land. A return to small farming on a mass scale, something other than the way land is used now in all of society. When people are re-united with the land capitalism will be officially over and done with. Until the foundation of capitalism is changed such as increasing landownership to all the people and not divided up among a few owners, capitalism is here to stay even if it does not work for the majority.
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  5432.  @ModdedLu  The reason Trump has moved to the left has nothing to do with the democrats moving to the right or not at all in their position relative to the working class. This guy Jordan is a loon. The reason has to do with the lack of control over the coronavirus that is going to kill millions of Americans. To admit he has failed spells the end of his re-election, but he is a failure when history writes about him. Once the consumer economy is crushed by the death of millions from the virus and people become too sick the for "profit vultures" are doomed. They know this and are warning him. It takes a while to sink in. Without buyers the sellers have nobody to sell products is basic captialism 101. Right now a huge market in Italy is lost to American corporations. If Europe goes into shock like Italy that market is lost to US corporations. If the US market goes into the shock, the largest economy is lost to US corporations. So everything he is doing is only to slow down the economy from collapsing not the virus from spreading. Trump has a double crisis on his hands the end of the US economy and the pandemic. e will ultimately infuse the economy from the bottom trillions and he will call the military to use to deal with the pandemic. Once he realizes that all other tools fave failed thhose are his last resort. The problem is; the longer he delays the more time the virus enters into its airborn phase the harder it will be to stop transmission or contagion. You should be learning everything you can about this virus. You should be asking why and how did this happen? The answer is really simple, why? So simple a 16 year old girl knows the answer. A girl nobody takes seriously the message she delivers. Bernie never invited her to the podium and so he too is guilty of this neglect. The US is like Italy so ill prepared and behind the curve in treating and effectively coping with this virus that when it evolves from its transmission phase through droplets and moves into its airborn transmission phase then no place is safe. Humans have transformed the environement in such a way that it has changed our relationship to animals. With 1300 species of bats and 6 to 5 caronaviruses in all bats severe acute respiratory disease spreads through a sick planet where humans have changed the ecology in how we live with animals. We are exposed to the spill over from animals and our intimate living with animals of all varieties in cultures that either revere them religiously or adopt them as part of the society we live. The Nippa virus epidemic was caused by deforestation and the movement of bats closer to other animals. Changing ecology is crucial to how animal and human are related. Higher temperatures, human and planetary health is at the basis of this crisis and pandemic. Africa, Latin America and Asia are ticking time bombs. None of your candidates spoke to the issue of the ecology and planetary health as it realtes to diseases should tell you that all of them politicized this crisis and ignored the medical-ecological question of human habitation and health. The public is completely ignorant on the question. No question Bernie would be better than Trump because Bernie is not anti-science but that is the only reason he would be better than Trump. Trump would be better than Bernie because Trump is not anti-capitalist and will pull out all the resources to save capitalism which of necessity will call out the military who will call out the scientists.
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  5439. I would suggest reading Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, written in 1846 Edited by C.J. Arthur. Your questions are close to the questions this book addresses as part of the development of the criticism of capitalism. Dissolving the class nature of production abolishes both capital and wage-labor in production. Production is no longer divided along class distinctions with workers on the one side as hired and managers on the other side as capital. If wages as the main form of income for workers is abolished their independence as a 'free worker' is also abolished, along with its opposite, capital is abolished. What is left? Production and 330 million people, they all work for themselves and families and for society as a whole? How much time does an individual work? This answer varies with the state of science and technology. Some societies could have a 40 hour work week for individuals because productivity is low. Some per capita a 20 hour work week because productivity is high. Labor is no longer the measure of value, people are not used as the specific means by which one can become super rich. Labor is labor, useful labor, and anyone who can perform it is regarded indispensable. Industries do not produce according to demand they produce according to need. A doctor's compensation for his/her labor is the health of their patient not the social status of their income. Many, many doctors would leave the US as individuals unable to adjust to a loss of a life luxury consumption. Worse yet, the super rich individuals who have no useful skills of their own, as people who do not work, that is, would launch with their capital a counter-revolt to defeat a socialist society unable and unwilling to adjust to a life of luxury abstinence. But go read the GI, its a great read for more of its implications. Be well.
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  5440. By a 'free worker' I mean a population who serve to ensure the rise of general market conditions for the exchange of equivalents, a certain quantity of labor-power for an equivalent quantity of the necessaries of life, are people who sell their labor-power and receive money in exchange for their capacity to work, these people enter into a labor-process of another, a working day of another, the entire calendar year constitutes a yearly quantity of surplus-value produced through the consumption of the use-value of the commodity -labor-power, these are the social relations that comes with the intervention of a capitalist into the labor-process. The change from a social structure based on owner-workers to a system of non-worker owners was to be the new social form of modern industry and this constitutes a qualitative social change as the true essence of the Industrial Revolution, not the History Channel's depiction of the Age of Capital as changes in the forces of production, inventions and what not. All that comes with the ideas that differ and contrast from the reality of the self in society. A 'free worker' came into being on the American scene by the Emancipation Proclamation of 1865. 153 years of established 'free market conditions', in which you and I, regardless or sex and race, were freed to dispose our labor-power to any buyer, have been declared equal in the eyes of the Law, politics and in society, free and broken away from the bonds of slavery is our modern social reality. The southern black portion of the American working class understands very well what I mean what a 'free worker' is despite the Emancipation Proclamation. A black man in America no longer sells himself once and for all, as a 'commodity-slave' where the slave is the commodity! But now as a 'free citizen' possessor of a special commodity, along with whites included, and all men and (women), are free to sell to whom they please, is the content of the American decree in 1865; so how is it that a government cannot honor and enforce if for 153 years?
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  5445.  @CrowandRaven  US enjoys a 35% under production capacity. It also enjoys a high illiteracy rate and low math scores. Out of 100 factories that were build in the last 50 years 30 of them are rotting away is what the under capacity rate measures. Big loss for the American people who are getting less of the share of the total output of the nation when they buy stuff. Your money don’t buy much. The other 20 working factories are relegated to producing a part of a product to be installed in Mexico while the rest of the product is made Malaysia than imported back to the US for assembly by the mentally disabled in social programs scattered around the country the tax payer funds, than it goes to Home Depot or Lowes for sale. You (taxpayer) are paying for the labor that finishes the product made ready for market. The owner of the product gets the product and the sale money from the product Dow Jones Industrial averages records the price of the stock sold. Break down further the origin of the product and the workforce that makes it is smaller in size and working longer hours. The factories that rot are a tax depreciation allowance for their owners making it more profitable to let them rot than to start them up. And, America has tremendous social consequences the Public and the Media, the Government, “ignore” to making people work for so long as a way of offsetting the loss of workers to the new innovations employers add to their businesses. The effects of prolonging the working day on a smaller working cohort population are severe. These effects are reflected in the low standard for military recruits. A substantial size of the US population is over weight with diabetes, ADHD, and other maladies. The WP does not live in this world to know the actual conditions and the Public does not have the attention span to break down what is happening to them. To explain would take volumes. People will just have to feel and experience the exploitation and tragedies that spring from this condition brought on by a group of dynastic families ruling the country.
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  5450. Status Coup does a good job giving you perspecitve and analysis on the political process. But it is nieve to believe insiders are really outsiders, even Bernie.  Bernie is closer to the outside of the democratic party establishment while everyone to the right of Warren are all insiders. But what is their social class is more important, I think, than what they say they will do? Pelosi is a landowner, she belongs to a more liberal side of America's landowning class. Owning a commodity such as the Napa Valley Vineyard is world famous for its general wealth that the Pelosi family will forever be rich. The same is true for the Clintons and all the other billionaires in the democtatic party. The Catholic Church, Columbia University, Donald Trump, all landowners. Communications and technical industries are not part of the establishment landowning class but become the establishment as the years roll by and the old establishment pass on their wealth to the next generation of inheriting landowners to young to carry the mission of the party. Mission being that America, under the present social form of class and poltiical power is never threatened or changed by any outside social class, namely, the working class. America is a developed society with complex social classes but it is still a plantation based economy. The slaves have been made into wage earners divided by land, i.e., urban and rural private property, as the last remaining thread of ownership and independence that keeps the working classes from overthrowing the landed aristocracy of capitalism from power. Republicans are a war party of individual landowners not institutional landowners like the democratic party. Individual capitalists such as Koch Industries, mining companies, large scale capitalist producers are also landowners put up a titanic struggle to get their way in government to monopolize land ownership and keep the workplace under their personal ownership and control. Anyone not a part of the landowning social class dominating the two party system but are a part of the political structure like the man from Brooklyn and the woman from the mid-west, are proletarianized small or petty-landowners. Easy to see the parties are divided according the size of the landowner, the bigger the more institutionalized, the smaller the more personalized individual family or person who are dependent on the labor-porcess for a living are engaged in this class struggle without realizing it or having any control over the capital the large landowners use to maintain the social arrangement small landowners live. And who are Sanders and Warren? Why are they appealing to this multitude of petty landowners/working class; what is their social and class background that makes them outsiders inside a party structure in the same way the two working classes in society, are divided by rural and urban land ownership, are outsiders inside the poltiical structure? The common substance between them is their social class as a wage earners, not what they own, but what they produce as wage earners for the dominant social classes.
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  5477. American business was against Covid policies. They want the workers in the office and in the factory and not working from home. Too bad if they got Covid they still have to work or be replaced was and still is the position of American business. The CDC came up with the idea of ‘shelter in place’, and those workers who could did and have not changed their way is now a battle line for the bosses. Shelter in place here was mild compared to China which was forced sheltering in place that many Americans felt the Americans should do and Fauci came close to doing it to the consternation of America’s big bosses. Trump came out with we don’t want the problem to become the problem was a win for the bosses and a loss for the workers. All governments are fearful of different groups linking up in different places, different workers linking up with other workers and shutting down the economic system, this would be a serious loss in profits to the bosses, if commerce can to standstill. They reacted by firing people and closing stores in neighborhoods where robberies and break-ins happened. That and Covid restrictions tanked profits which were compensated for by government. thanks to the government the bosses did not lose but gained more profits while the workers were home sheltering from Covid and getting vaccinated. The bosses moderated their positions and ordered their workers be vaccinated and get back to work or be fired the CDC gave a near 100% effectiveness in the vaccinations as did Big Pharma. Now the test trials of Covid vaccine data is a subject of an investigation if they are so sure its safe why hide the data from the public? The battle between bosses and workers show no signs of slowing down, to the contrary, it was on Covid restriction two years ago but now the battleground is on inflation and shrinking airplane seats with bad service, low wage incomes and high energy costs, work/life issues, and general food and necessities. Bosses barraging workers on all grounds the battle got wider and is spread over a range of issues proving to be an acid test for the next president.
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  5488. You do not know which is more the immoral thing to do? Pretend you are a mayor of a town and its committee of decision-makers and you have the decision to make to shut off the water because it is so low. All of you are in session and on record discussing the water shortage in your town. A debate ensues among you. On the question: Do you order ACME Plastic Inc, and Co., to shut down and they fight you in court, or do let the community as a whole perish for lack of water. These are your choices.  Cut off the water for a few large users and you potentially cut off your food supply. True, we do, but food can grown locally, parks can become gardens, and yards can become gardens. Town garages and warehouse building can be storage of harvest for winter. It means a radical change of life that is better than putrefaction. Locally, we can become independent and only hope other communities do the same. Re-connect themselves with home grown food and be freed from the need created from without food. Acme Plastics, Inc and Co., would have to close its door and we will lose jobs, make less money...some will have to sell their homes...the impact of Acme Plastics going under will crush the economy a ghost town is what we'll have. True, but who is going to buy a home where water is unavailable? The market economy as it was is no longer what it was before the drought. Some how the banks would have to be paid off, they will foreclose regardless. One of the alderman said...'well, Acme Plastics might not cooperate...they can become desperate too! What do you do then? They have money, power over the courts, lawyers, we have Jack...nodding off...in the meeting, they can hire mercenaries and run them all out of town'. Another stated, 'we are not yet at a stage where there is no federal authority...don't panic...we can take preventative measures in the event of, an Acme Plastic invasion on Any town USA.'  What good is a factory to Acme Plastic and Co., when water is a necessary raw material that makes their product? A General Assembly was posted for the town on all to attend on Main Street. com Knowing the water and the town budget will dry up the committee members and the mayor took action a rare unanimous decision, and ordered the villagers to gear up for a major social transformation, releasing the town equipment to start tilling parks and developing a water harvesting system some brilliant child came up with in his class, and the townspeople go down in history as the little town that took a stand on the moral decision to save the future, as the little town that began the founding of a new America, it faced its hardships and losses but allowed a generation to continue doing everything themselves, teaching and making the needs they need, for the little town that survived a drought, earthquake, political and economic catastrophe and COVID.
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  5497. Speaking classically, capital ensures for itself the rise of conditions for the exchange of equivalents because then it can set up the conditions for the production of surplus-value by consuming the value of the commodity, labor-power.  With the government out of the way, and money-markets established, it can then make workers work beyond the point workers actually create the value of their own reproduction. It can then focus on automating and capitalizing on making new combinations of 'productive' workers with the technology at hand for itself.   Phase I: Free production from government control, abolish parts of the government in the way of the free exploitation of the labor-process and labor, Phase II; extend hours of labor.  In one fell swoop, air, water, soil, food, wages and the working day, are freed from federal legislation. Millions of Americans cut off from the necessaries of life. The shut down is the first attack on the working class then followed by reduced gas prices for the free mobility of labor and reduced wages is the second attack.  Is it a set up? Indeed, it is if preserving parts of the government republicans do want to keep conforms to their idea of 'Less government' and holding the shut down long enough that federal workers leave justifies the closure of that department. Fox news will blame workplace related catastrophes on the federal worker for leaving their post. The usual chorus of cries from the republican government is there is no money to rehire the departments. Republicans, Trump specifically, are using a typical strategy of the capitalists in the 1920's and 1930's, a government shut down is the updated version of a factory lock-out of the workers. Workers submitted to lower wages because a capitalist can hold out longer than the workers combined. Federal workers will leave their field because of an erosion of income and purchasing power, the department monitoring critical information about society, the main goal of the shut down, is gone. A victory for the republicans and a defeat for society. What is despicable about the republicans is that they are telling workers at the federal level that 'their lives do not matter,' a disdain, and callous disregard for the federal working classes's lives, caught up in this shut down. Phase III, attack, is overturning Roe v. Wade, which ever comes first, is irrelevant, the attacks are multi-pronged that the working class is being attacked simultaneously from all sides. Women who want to free themselves from the rule of the 'patria protestas' is immediately an attack on the patriarchy - i.e., parental authority.
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  5507. DeVory, make the connection between the raw materials a Tesla requires and a Trump Administration’s policy toward Latin America where that raw material is produced. Bolivians in Bolivia produce lithium, a necessary raw material for a Tesla Car battery. A Trump/Musk alliance means the successive government(s) in Bolivia are subject to American interference, military provocations and economic sanctions, austerity, keeping the people in that nation in poverty, and dependent for an income by finding work mining lithium. On Voting: People. The identity of people is irrelevant in a real democracy. The US Constitution does not say what people vote, or who can vote, all qualifications of voting in America were abolished in 1789, and the designation “the People” is purposely general and not specific of any group separated by means of identity, class, race or gender. The MAGA Trump movement has a nationalistic aura, patriotism and nationalism, pro-family, God, Country, these are ideas that are consistent with European fascism seen in Italy, Spain, Germany, in one form or another in the 1930s. This is not the same sort of nationalism experienced by Africans in relation to Europe such as France’s relationship to the Congolese. Or the form of nationalism in Latin America such as Spain’s relationship to Mexico, Guatemala etc. The Magna Carta divides Spanish and Portuguese colonies down into South America. God, Country, Family is the nationalism that springs from England’s relationship to the US, as a colonial power imposing a western idea of nation and society on a developing nation. This is why the American Revolution was necessary. The country had to break away from the Crown to develop itself. MAGA’s nationalism is premised on Apartheid, a segregation of the races but willing to accomodate a policy of separate but equal as long as the colonial patriarchy is white. Evidence for Elon Musk’s personal immigrant history begins with his great granddad, a pro-Apartheid South Afrikaner citizen of South Africa immigrates to Canada than to the US. Malcolm X came to the conclusion the races can co-exist ‘separate but equal’ but rejected the idea of a colonial white patriarchy heading the democracy of the races. So he was shot, done away with in a plot, a conspiracy, that remains shrouded in mystery. Without the connection between particular nations and persons with the general economic relationship of nations the MAGA movement comes off as a movement about a relation between people and things, when it is not as simple as it comes off.
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  5511. America has never won a war...only a nation under psychosis thinks it can win a war when it never has. Iran has always been used as a buffer zone against the Russians, competing in an arms race wth the Americans, as a means of containing communism, ever since the installation of the Shah overthrown in 1978 by the students of that country. Iran would have been a fully secular and westernized society following the look, the fashion, the customs, the pop scene of America in the 1950s had the CIA Dulles brothers not plotted the overthrow of their popular elected president for nationalizing the oil industry. Mossedegh and Oil meant power and autonomy from US power and that meant no more buffer to the Russians. Traces of the era still haunt the politics between Iran and the US. History is calling for a president who can close the chapter of the century. A bone of contention in Trump with Venezuela where the same thing happened the oil industry was nationalized is one of the traced elements of the Cold War. The state department has been acting to recover or roll back these losses for Big Oil ever since. Way too late, Iran is more a religious state than a secular democratic republic the US would like it to be and this can only be blamed on the anti-communists in government. By now you would think a sitting president and a state department would use the wise age-old strategy of making your enemy your friend and this will keep them from going over to the other side, but that isn't the case, this time the Americans went over to the other side and struck a deal with the Russians. Most likely will meet with Xi as the US to figure out what relationship in the 21st century will work to avoid utter and total catastrophe..
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  5512. The Therapist tries but does not succeed in looking at the Family as the cornerstone of any society and the social condition of families on average to explain the decay of the community and ultimately the whole society falling into a state of barbarism. The government does not support the family in society. I’ll say the same thing again but in a different way. Society does not support the family as the basic social unit of society. Society is government, the instrument and will of the people. Whatever that family looks like is not important, whether it is extended, a tribe or clan or just mom and pop 2.5 kids or the single parent is irrelevant to the how much of the share of social product the government allocates to support the family as a social unit that stays together, alive and well, is zero in America, the family receives no share of the social product. The social product is given to the rich in the form of tax cuts that would be made permanent by republicans once in office and the total budget for the family reduced further as well as cuts in social spending, while democrats sit back and let it happen. All families are individual families expected to support themselves in all aspects of their social reproduction through a market system and when people interact in a market system they are not interacting as people who care for each other but as buyers and sellers who care for each other, and each have one aim in mind the development of the family is not one of them. Making money through buying and selling is a form of their care for each other using money prime as a Godly endowment. The demands made on individual families expected to make it on their own entail a sacrifice too big for the individual family to handle and cope. Murder-suicide is away out from what appears to be permanent poverty against big social forces; inflation, pandemics, mass firings, climate change, police brutality, failed juridical system, family separation, divorce and crisis, forces way to big that only society can fix with its collective action. Government punishes society when it tries and government is society is the irony; like punishing yourself from fixing the social problems because a market system cannot fix it at all amounts to a poor mental health capacity of leadership to transform society. People are primed for false theories of the impending disaster.
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  5524. The China I grew up with in the 70s the China visited by Richard Nixon was than a country of millions of small peasant produces in farming and a developing industrial sector. Many of these people are now old. Taiwan was under British rule and had a corrupt reputation. The US was more interested on splitting China from Russia and there were differences between China and Russia that could be troublesome. One was whether capitalism was essential a stage to go through to modernize. Russia skipped over capitalism but Russia did not have a billion people in a small land mass. At this point, I think the Chinese CP and the Russian CP, were divided on Collectivization. Not the way for China to increase output. China had a billion people to feed. Modernization would not feed the population unless agriculture was as developed as US agriculture. Entire villages in China were large extended families that cultivated China’s soil. Now that these folks are older China built large apartment buildings. Old villages becoming urbanized employment industries. Some places have six stories apartment buildings that are occupied by relatives of one large family in all apartments in today’s China. Younger generation of workers come from all parts of the country to work in factory cities are away from their families for several months before they see them again. A father leaves to work in a city-factory when his child is in diapers and returns when his child can walk is how afar apart industrialized cities are.
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  5532. Millions of fathers are paying attention to Hunter Biden’s case as it brings into question how family courts base their child supports payments against someone who basically lives off the dole or is paid for and by whom... if it is found out (discovery) his secret service protection is given to him as a gift or paid for by Uncle Sam because he is a president’s son (in other words, You the Tax payer covering his bills including his support to his children)...is privilege. Royalty behavior of an elitist. Hunter did a NoNo by not being honest in his Case Information Statement to the Court...privilege in his case is a shameless face of hypocrisy...that mocks the present order...no consequences for usurping the wealth and power of an establishment...his case reflects another family that lives off the dole 3000 miles across the Atlantic where Hunter’s mother is in attendance as I write. Privilege crosses all national boundaries but fathers without privilege are nationally bound until support balances owed is paid in full. It is standard procedure to file modifications and show true income but that standard does not apply to Hunter with resources to lawyers to file motions for him is strange. Its political suicide if not destruction and self- ruin he seems unable to grasp...an act of nihilism and stupidity. Support is not based on household income to reflect household changes is the real problem here not Hunter. He’s his own problem. Hunter’s case provides the ground work to throw out the old system and the old method of determining child support based on the private income of two parents.
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  5536. The work of Americans has one universal form in the US system of exchange and production. The commodity form. This trait gives the US system its unique character but also its identifyng mark in the world of economic systems. There is no variation to this system like there in socialism. Products are commodities or they just do not get made, period. When the work of us all takes the form of things meant to be bought and sold we encourage captalists and (ism) to use their money to buy things for the purpose of becoming a greater amounts of money. In effect, if this is the sole purpose of life then better expect our primary social reproductive activties will cease to work at all. Complete and total break down. Because nothing will get made and if there isn't a bigger amount of money at the end of it and the majority do not hold the money to do it nothing will get done. Work will not happen and you will get loaded down with the responsibility of continuing to pay off borrowed money. But since money leaves the hands of the majority, it flies fast out of their pockets, and what grease is the bicycle chain, money is what makes products move and fall out of circulation, it takes their place, in the forever mundane and reduntant activity of buying and selling...there will never be enough money to pay off all debts. We should all know how this movie ends. One size fits all, is the value-form of the work of society is not how the work of society gets done in any socialist society we know of. Culture shapes the way a given socialism would look like. But all of them are concerned with one principal that work is done by a real plan for all to participate with the purpose of reproducing society and improving it. Work does not get done so that someone can be enriched by the work everyone performs...this distorts our wealth and makes it appear it is so enlarged next to one person owns it as its scale but next to 332 million people then you can see the real wealth of the nation.
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  5544. Let’s not bury our heads in the sand of the elephant in the room, employers do not have to buy a commodity, in the same way you don’t have to buy anything in a store, the money can stay in your pocket! These staffing shortages can be seen as a shortage of spending capital, i.e., Greed. COVID is facilitating a savings for employers at the moment is the hypothesis. The proof is provided in deeds and in the absence of words of a panic among employers. Hospital managers are quiet on this issue of staff shortages. If one came out and blamed COVID or if the executives met with the president then, I would say, the executives of the industries shutting down need your business and the government must do something about COVID. They are losing money by the day, hour, minute over this dreadful disease that has taken nearly a million lives by the ‘official ‘ count. That in itself is reason for a nationalized health system like Britain or Norway, Canada. But we are not seeing the executives freaking out, are we? They were scolded by Congress when they testified but Congress did nothing. That was Kebuki Theater. I am not advocating COVID and OMICRON is not real. I am saying the preponderance of the evidence substantiates a concerted action by employers, some more militant than others, causing people to leave the grueling work as more people are shut out of their jobs and livelihood, the more quiet they are, the more it appears as a deliberate choice not to hire, cut the Public off of the means of life, because they can, they can afford to decide the commodity they do not want to buy is your own... money stays in their pocket while many dive into a mortal leap of joblessness. Merry Christmas all and stay safe.
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  5547. In the same way that the capitalist class draws a larger income from the total economic surplus so does every dollar spent on defense. This observation was made by Paul Baran in his book the Political Economy of Growth in 1965. He further stated the forebearers of the capitalist class, Rockefellers, Duponts, etc., were less richer than Jeff Bezos, Zuckerberg, etc., and the wars prior to Vietnam, ushered in mass consumption and capitalist consumption, damaging the climate ecosystem weakening Public Health, and that 90% of the world's working population now takes the dominant form of a wage-labor relation. A world human population of 2.2 billion. Modern slavery, forced labor, forced marriages, child vicitms of forced labor, are very real social forms of labor appearing on the earth's surface but not the dominant form which is the wage-labor relation. More and more the world is divided by capital and labor in nearly all nations. Every person is proletarianized as soon as they reach age 18 is the world standard for adulthood barring the 80 million according to the last report on the subject made by the UN in 2011, that they know about, are working in forced labor conditions with their lives still ahead of them, will never work a day in their lives as a wage earner. The big topics for the revolution that formalizes this proletarianization of the planet is the standardization of the planet; correcting the wrongs of the last 50 years in Ecology and Public Health, Social Inequality, and rectifying Capitalist Consumption, Biden may not be successul in doing.
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  5558. Wonderful Update Prof. Wolff; Here is a short summary of my view. People should recognize that constitutional governments such as that of the EU and the US are legal institutions not social ones. The changes being made in society are coming from the changes in the way work is carried out in society.  People will be working from home and those industries where jobs cannot be performed at home will go out of business.  History suppresses certain branches of industry as it also promotes the development of new ones.  China builds hospitals in less than two weeks is an example of a government that is not a constitutional republic but one that is a social institution responding to social needs in a proactive manner. Even if this move by that government was to ensure their position of power an accidental finding results from that action. Instead of spending resources on defense because of national conflicts, government can spend resources on meeting human needs. When work and society are transformed, the family is transformed, requiring a transformation of government to become a central organizer and planner to have all the needs in society met. Humanity arrives at the 21st century and 2020 is that transitional moment that breaks away all the things of the 19th century we still use today. This new way of work will call into question the need for the old economy. Why do you need a stock market or a central bank, or a boss? Why will we need school boards determining school taxes when school buildings are unnecessary when all one needs WiFi and a lap top to educate children all over the world? Why do we even need money to represent working time when work is no longer used to make goods for exchange? Why the need to retain all the things the old economy needed before the virus when the virus has changed the way we work and live giving birth to a new economy? From the changes in work and family our needs will change and in turn, the needs change our products as we become more accustomed to finding meaning in our new family arrangements, less divorce, less juvenile delinquency, less suicide, less depression, less loneliness. With less of the present-day maladies in society there is less of a need for massive military and police institutions expenditures. The major focus will be agriculture, the area of human activity vital to human survival. Search for a better life comes to an end. No more mass migration for societies ravaged by war the need to get them re-oriented to the new way of life the new international mission. Why will we need nuclear weapons if societies are finding more contentment at home? I see many benefits to this crisis. Our fears are really about losing the old way of life we have become accustomed to living. The second benefit to this virus is the environmental change, improving nature as it gets a chance to recover from human damage. Less to no fossil fuel emissions, less chances of infestation, disease and a strengthening of the human body's immune system through the increase of oxygen in our atmosphere and as we know from the paleontological record a greater diversity of life, and a general slowing down of climate change and oceans rising.
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  5559. Internal programs the police implement to train cops to intervene when a cop goes off are not enough. Programs end with the next incoming administration and then get re-started in an administration that follows the one that closed it down and nothing is effected in the real world.  The programs are never given the chance to work. This is true with industry's environmental relationship to nature is never giving nature a chance to recover from its constant over use and exploitation fed on by social behavior never pausing from its constant work of exploiting individuals in physical and psychological form. Never -ending and constant cycle of abuse and exploitation is direct in one sphere of life and indirect in another sphere of life but all spheres of social life enveloped by a operate world of commodities and money. Peer pressure and peer review within the police social structure has to be made a law: Wrongful death compensations come out of police pensions. Two reasons: Victim's compensations return to bite the public as an increase to the people who committed no crime the taxpayer. The same is true with children as wards of the state from where the children come is the municipality that pays for the state's care of the child; community and parent pay more than if the child stayed home. Second reason is to make police organizations and unions non-political; no lobbying power in Washington not a place for the military and political intrigue. When the rank and file officer realizes that one of their own has caused a drop in the value of the pension saved for police retirement they will take the training programs more seriously and those who just cannot adapt to policing are terminated. Police unions would fight tooth and nail lobbying to repeal such a law but to no avail because the effect of the law is a positive one that professionalizes policing and de-militarizes it. When this happens we can stop blaming the objective condition the police present as a threat to the community and get to the mental effects of decades of subjugation has on a population forever on the run from the days the southern plantation owners learned from Boris Gudonov in the treatment of his serfs in Russia the law that said any serf caught beyond a certain point of their master's property would be hung, a bounty on their heads. Repealing a law that restores policing is hard to do. The pressure to keep internal training programs keep the police clean cannot be done on their own. The police cannot police themselves without external pressure.
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  5560. The generation the Grand Social Experiment of Austerity of the Capitalist Order targets is youth. It is by increments of generations that Austerity is successful and wide spread. For two reasons: first austerity defines society as a society of individuals to deflect awareness in youth and replaces the theory that holds society develops within and through a class struggle, the two primary protagonists labor and capital, and in the process of using economic downturns shifts the source of wealth from a majority to a minority. The economic paradigm that finds labor is the creator of wealth is effectively destroyed. Austerity uses a trifecta of monetary, fiscal and industrial polices to crush each generation of workers for the preservation of the capitalist order is amply supported by the evidence. Austerity is not merely CUTS IN THE BUDGET, it is constantly moving as a political program carried on by each new elected politician ascribing to these aims, no matter how popular they are and always in the direction I cited. Austerity is permanent war on labor. Further, austerity was never about curtailing inflation and balancing budgets as Americans falsely believe and are falsely told. Austerity is ‘the’ method and means to the greater end of preserving the capitalist order which police, unions, schools, religions, popular culture, scholars and scientists, fit into so well to preserve the specific class relation that cannot function without force to sustain it. Permanent states of war to crush any form of opposition to this aim, ---a rigid and punishing form of totalitarianism. After 1918 and WWI, the crisis of capitalism caused a reaction of historic significance among States in Europe. Acutely aware and highly sensitized were the concerned about the survival of the capitalist system and its corresponding class of capitalists to crush socialism, a new powerful economic force in history, The system was shaken at its very core in 1918. You don’t know this, you are most likely not an economist nor old enough to have lived with the oral histories of a generation of that era. America exemplifies this social experiment; the State’s political objectives, to crush the alternative and make itself the main producer and regulator of the workforce. In short, fascism,--- the merger of state and private Capital through technocrats and economic advisors. Workers and the majority of citizens realized at that time up to the 1980s, they could be living in a different social order, and the State, city governments began to crush the alternative social order with policies in the three areas of economic life coercing workers into greater exploitation. Chickens Come Home To Roost: The high level of crime, proliferation of drugs and guns, war, criminalization and material deprivation of working people, is at the same time the social process of preserving capitalism, and the entrepreneur class at center stage of the State, for whom the police serve and protect, become the drivers of economic growth. Austerity shifts economic resources from a majority to a minority, the fall of wages and unemployment kills the worker’s voice is the lesser share of the wealth in wages your parents enjoyed when wages were high and their grandchildren will not enjoy as wages fall ( assuming you are born two decades before 1980). Labor or the working class’s incomes deflates into a material deprivation through economic downturns (inflation, unemployment); these are the tools for the preservation of the Capitalist order and for the subordination of the working class into permanent poverty.
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  5567. Elon Musk at Tesla will reduce the unit price of his car from 16 hrs to 12 hrs and the difference of 4 hours will equal his new surplus-value. A Tesla car will be more common in BRICS nations than in America. Other corporations in the car industry will do the same. Sell more abroad and cut their product production at home for higher amounts of surplus-value. All leading to an increase of people without a job but also a higher intensity of competition between corporations extending out to other industries outside the car industry, causing more layoffs, a scenario of a general reduction of wages. That the multinational corporations can cut jobs and still produce the same quantity or better the rate of goods per hour, reduce output from 16 to 12 hours, to make a Tesla with a lower sticker price, or a toaster cheaper at home and abroad enriches the corporations at the expense of working people at home. What can be an economic law beneficial to society reveals a connection between productivity increases and the reduction the labor-time to make an object by a reduced workforce, robs society of the chance to be truly affluent. Capitalism uses this economic law to enrich itself and fewer hands owning the surpluses. And this sets the stage for a new social average of exploitation. A vicious competition to gain more surplus-value through the use of the military abroad, for a larger share of the market, pushes the material standard of life of the American workforce downward into increasing misery and desperation at home.
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  5571.  @xSirDudex  Average Americans are highly fearful of what they do not understand. The only ones who get a real education are elites. Conspiracists do not help the situation either as they push their view of history on to people who don't have the facts and have either an axe to grind or an agenda of their own. Elites at the very top either know how to use to their advantage this general ignorance or misuse it for whatever gain their particular social class requires to stay on top. Obama knew how to use it and Trump knows how to use it, their styles and empathies fall in different places but their class orientation to the rest of the world is to stay on top. Thre is another factor the world outside of the US are overlooking, and that is the kindness that prevails in average Americans. They don't ask for much...just a good life and something better for their kids and value honesty. A forgiving people. I admire this in them.  I will say they utterly fail in understanding the machinery in place that they call government but that comes with the failure of American public education. Given the right tools they are a remarkable people. Inventive and insightful but are never given the chance to reallyy show their stuff. The rest of the world has a lot going against itself in common with the American people. Cliques of corporate executives are more important as informal opinion leaders in the top echelons of corporate, military, and political power than the actual participants in military and political organizations.
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  5580. @ Gary Honey,----Grow up! Looks like DN got fooled or were complicit with the game of mass media psyops and diversion on its audiences. Amy Goodman plays you like a fool, (sucker). The CIA puts out a document scandal and the Media reports it long enough to take your attention away from Patriot Missiles sent to Ukraine. This action constitutes an escalation of the war by means of a Covert diversion of the public and likely Congress too, although my faith in Senate Committees on National Security are also pure theatrics, is low to none. My sense is that the national security state and the Media truly regard you (the Public) as stupid. Whatever they think of you...their strategy works to divert the public from the retirement age increased to 67. The escalation of the war. The Abortion Bans passed in Southern states. Inflation and unemployment. De-regulation of industry, etc., Hitting the Public left and right with a battery of assaults constitutes a class war. Was it not covert what DeSantis did signing an abortion law into law before midnight and announcing it as law on Twitter. All done from the privacy of a private house? He took his lessons from the pysops diversion programs. What is not reported is the massive quantities of Patriot Missiles sent to Ukraine while this document scandal unfolds. Escalating the conflict and causing a reaction from Russia to counter the new battery of weapons with harder ones. Ukrainian soldiers trained in a military base in Utah are back in Ukraine and their presence here was never reported, i.e, another covert operation. Bamford must be in on it too since he never mentions the breech of constitutionality of a government agency eavesdropping a private chat platform company without probable cause and the theft of the documents gives the national security elite probable cause to surveil or shut down a private company as a threat to national security. One hell of an evil national security state really plays tricks on the heads of the American Public paying for all this.
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  5584. No---I disagree with some of the comments especially the ones that praise John for his Oratory skills---they should qualify him to run for Congress. Skilled verbiage does not make the man. Obama had great oratory skills and was not a man of substance. Trump has no oratory skills and is hardly a man of substance. In the presidential lineage substance disappears within the form of the person. Form is more important than content in the capitalist world order. John is actually better than Congress. Congress would hold his development back, he would not never rise above the social creature he is in Congress. The only thing that would transform John is to spend 2 years living in poverty or in prison. Or in total isolation in the wilderness with little means for survival but for his own body and what he can fashion from nature the tools to assist him in his survival. There he can witness first hand environmental degradation by industry. The reason I say this has to do with perspective. What is missing in John's critique of capitalism is the point of view the oppressed subject. Earth is an oppressed subject under capitalist industry as is humanity. This lack of perspective would make him a very poor legislator in Congress, frustrated, potentially we could lose John to a conversion from legislator into a radicalized religious freak reacting to the contradictions of capitalism and not understanding the inner logic of those contradictions. I suspect he would have few allies in Congress and be railroaded by Congress itself. The foregoing institution has no will or insight into itself as an agency for transformation.
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  5588. What will bring down American capitalism? It won't be the working class Harley rider, they ride foreign made bikes and burn Chinese fireworks on Independence Day. Their behavior is the equivalent of burning the flag on Veteran's Day from a nationalistic standpoint. Tariffs, higher prices on all import goods except fireworks, and lower sales of American export goods will hurt them. While they think riding a Chinese bike and bicycles expresses their affinity with the Harley corporation as a consumer army exclusive to Harley-Davidson, loyal customers, that are loyal to someone's else's economic survival. Trump is as stupid as the Harley rider with his Chinese bike. Corporations would prefer doing their work in China than in America. They know what to expect in China. The US Chamber of Commerce, the organization to watch for in times of a serious revolution will take steps to destabilize Trump if he continues to disrupt their accumulation. In America the anarchy in politics and civil life disrupts the normal flow of capital accumulation corporations have set up with China. They would rather survive in business with less incoming profits than none at all. Adjustments to their bottom line can be made up with more firings. The effects of Tariffs is on both sides of the equation. The working class produces (works) in order to consume (buy). They have to work (sell) a commodity (labor-power) before they can buy another commodity to avoid material deprivation. To bad the Harley riders did not buy a Jap bike made in America to make his/her patriotism real and sincere the monosyllabic morons. But then again any motorcycle is not an essential necessity for life and living, gas, food, shelter, education are necessities. Foreign made fireworks and bikes, well, not at all a necessity except to nourish failing minds. On the other side of the equation, where Donald Trump and his cronies sit, the process of buying in order to sell, falls apart. Wholesale prices rise and consumer goods rot on shelves, profits sink, workers are laid off, not temporarily but permanently thrown into the anarchy of civil society without a pot to piss in. The one thing Trump is accomplishing with his policies is a separation of individuals in society; he objectifies the subject (people) and the subjectifies the object (money). The inverted reality he creates with his cronies who incidentally, should be accosted by the Public, going further, they should be restrained as a flight risk when their policies completely break down the social order and they attempt to flee the country with their billions. Social reality in America is now a class reality, thanks to the legal profession (ALEC), the objects essential for social survival and reproduction for members of society, walk, talk, relate, and have their own laws, rights and customs for their sellers/owners while the individuals in society are objectified as their buyers without employment and job security and are paid with money that buys less and less of the necessities of life.
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  5594. Capitalism in the 21st Century is not benign, it aims to produce use-values but with the aim of competition with other capitalist nations. The result of monopolization within capitalist nations that set and dictate price are part of the titanic struggles between Amercan corporations against each other, AT&T v IBM, Amazon v. Walmart, Google v. Microsoft, v Twitter, is part of the struggle of the intrarivalry among capitalist corporations of seperate nations, i.e, Huawei v. US., is part of the external competition of capitalist corporations. The silence for industry executives of the capitalist corporations does not help to answer if it is competition or hegemony they seek and why? People are going to ask, so what? Why all the fuss about China's growth or the growth of the US? The two systems of government cannot share the world market, one has to grow the other depends on world domination, is a new contradiction for the working class in China follows on the heels of the American working class. A tendency in the corporations to employ the largest number of workers in order to extract the largest amount of surplus-value for the lowest amount in payment in wages is in a state of disequilibrium and workers react with protests, strikes, at the social elements causing wages to fall, i.e., migrants, racism, climate displacement. The individual capitalist corporation and individual(s) and the entire class of capitalists can not exist without competition.  China enters into the world of competition of other capitalist and opens her up to competition. As a new competitor it preserves the system of a capitalist network that is essential for the individual to become a capitalist within that social class. Competition among separate capitalists drives each capitalist to innovate and raise the productivity of labor. How do we account for the productivity of labor under the socialist system of China the same question we had for the Soviet Union? We can account for the productivity of labor in capitalist societies but not in socialist systems. In the capitalist world and in the mind of the individual capitalist there are several aims for production that lead to inevitable results. 1., Producing use-values, 2., excess value as the aim for production, 3., monopolization to set and dictate price on a world scale. Is productivity in China used for these reasons?
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  5606. “IT NEEDS TO STOP”. That will be the day the Brits tell American corporations they cannot have their cake and eat it too. Since industry in the American economy has been gutted America and England both do most of their production in China. If we took China out of the equation the GDP of the US is close to zero and Britain below that. Living on borrowed time and money. Both nations have abandoned their working classes from an industrial point of view they are both largely service economies where the price of labor is cheaper than the labor needed for manufacturing. Migrant labor is cheap labor at the ready, held in reserve for when the time comes in the States the monopolies purchase all the land and will need that labor for manicuring, harvesting, sowing, processing, cutting, and chopping it up made ready for sale in packaging industries who mostly employ the handicapped in America to box little Johnny’s toy for under the Christmas tree. Biden can’t shut down the border. Border states do not need the flow of migrants but the cities do. They are sent to NY and Chicago, etc. But the mass migration is really how multinationals can re-arrange the economic relations in the world and the US government to rearrange the affairs of the world that Britain is no more than a utility to that effect. Right now migrants are not integrated into the economy but as high rates circulate through those economies the cost of production will rise that it won’t be worth investing capital into new housing construction or manufacturing. The Bank of England and the Federal Reserve Board have sucked the life out of British and American industry is what needs to stop.
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  5630. The reason people comply with doing overtime and over work for the boss is because the rich know they cannot become richer if society is full of individual commodity producers. Trump has to glorify the idea of being free, freedom and equality, which really means living in a constant state of dependency and need made common to all nations and then by punishing nations to accept American products exchangeable only with American dollars. There would be no way to make greater profits if everyone had the capacity to produce for themselves as in the old days. Everything has to be a market and they have to expand that market and this butts up against a rival like China who is the maker for American sellers of goods is a dilemma for the Trump administration. Oh, What to do about China? China is becoming a new seller on the block expanding its own market. Not with its products but with its capital it lends and partners with developing nations so they can stand on their feet and become buyers. China is nurturing its young upstart buyers in its nursery. Trump should be asking: What to do about America with its poor parenting skills that it cannot nurture young republics no matter how hard it tries for lack of its own parenting skills for economic development. China gives the young its capital in long term lending and Trump gives them the belt. Then he has surrounded himself with fringe lunatic people in decision making positions few Democrats cannot figure out and fewer still in his cabinet know what they are doing. The most recent abberation of an anomaly is the AG Barr. The world is only so big and it is too small for the US to share with a rival plus, the US overproduces through China and is struggling to find new markets fast falling apart due to currencies deviations, migration, war devastation, causing nations to save spending for rebuilding or coping with natural and social disasters, that buying Nike sneakers or Gucci handbags is not a priority against crisis and devastation in their own backyard.
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  5635. The war between North and South - so runs the first excuse - was merely a tariff war, a war between a protectionist system and a free-trade system: and Britain, of course, was on the side of free trade. The second excuse for the war was the Morrill Tariff caused secession. If you were British in 1862 the war between North and South to you was merely a war aimed at preserving the Union by force. The yanks cannot make up their minds to strike off fifteen stars from their banner. The Yanks want to cut a colossal figure on the world stage. But if you were a confederate soldier in 1861 you had the North on the defensive and stole Union property. You would have been part of provoking the North into war with a blatant act of war, for no other reason than that, you bombarded Fort Sumter under the command of General Beauregard ( relative to Jeff Sessions?). The question as to the principal underlying the American Civil War is answered by the battle slogan with which the South broke the peace and declared in its Secessionist Congress that what distinguished the constitution hatched in Montgomery from the constitution of Washington and Jefferson was that slavery was now recognized for the first time as an institution good in itself as the foundation of a slave republic. Whereas the revolutionary fathers, men encumbered by the prejudices of the 18th century, had treated slavery as an evil imported from England and to be eradicated in the course of time. You can't call something that never came about a restoration of a slave republic in the US. But you can call a pro-slavery rebellion an attempt to establish a slave republic which is inherently anti-free trade and anti-capitalism.
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  5637. Thank goodness we have artifacts of writing on stone that date back to a time when humanity did not make all its forms of work quantitative. We have a clear description of that work and when that work became extinct can be foretold. The past is all past work, past labor that is left in the artifact and embodying the constructions themselves. A present day sociologist is an archeologist examining the form of work of the past. The history of labor. We cannot deduce a civilization from anything not a product of labor like you said a lot of writing was written on paper is lost that could have told us the kind of society they were. The Spanish burned so many of the Aztec Books was the lowest blow to humanity ever struck. But we have to get the social history of work from the object(s) found. When the objects of modern civilization are found thousands of years into the future as fragments or as parts of a greater whole they will be looking for what kind of work made the artifacts of our age and they will find a generic form of labor made everything,. There wasn’t a this or that kind of work but just one kind of work was the dominant form of work, a kind of work that has no distinguishing features telling them that there were specific types of labor involved in the construction but one specific type of labor, i.e., generic labor time that was deduced from the monolithic discovery of unearthing Big Ben. From that clock fragment to the generic type of labor people performed they will have to connect the fragmented coins found and their symbolism inscribed to our ideas and what we believed. Our superstitions and religions which are still buried deep below the newly formed crust of the planet have not been dug up yet. What did the generic work of this society have to with the one eyed god on the back of a coin and from all the fragmented parts of our civilization what caused our disappearance, could it have been a major slave revolt, a disease, self-annihilation? What happened to the Olmecs is a mystery to us as we will be to them?
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  5656. Bill Gates does what a monopolist does, stifles progress. The under capacity of machine products made by the machine industries cuts their production down. Employment and income levels fall in several industries. An example people can understand what Bill Gates does in the field of public health and the vaccine world is what McDonalds does to every franchise owner in the burger world with their Ice Cream Machine that are forever broken. It is written into the contract that the machines are to be repaired only by the maker of the machine or else! Taylor the Ice Cream Machine manufacturer can then corner the market and keep employed the small machine Taylor authorized machine repair men as independent business owners. Stifling new machine makers from entering the market and then Taylor goes on to own the other machine makers in the event you do go to another maker its still Taylor your doing business with. How these monopolists move to get larger shares of the market is by making more industries dependent on them for the instruction manual, the How To's Fix a Problem is kept secret. Of course the other side of the problem of the constant broken ice cream machines is a work crew poorly paid and not well secure do not care about a machine that does not belong to them or the manager is unorganized to time the cleaning of the machine just right so that it can be used by lunch. The work crew hired by Bill Gates are not as indifferent to the machines they work on for Bill Gates, his machines, they are better paid, secure, more respected by their peers and society. But when it comes down to it,--- both work crews in McDonalds and in the Gates Empire have renounced their right or claim to the product they make and to its use value derived from that product the second they signed on to work for McDonald's or the Bill Gates Foundation.
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  5663. I keep telling people there is a difference between defunding the police and de-politicizing the police. The former takes away their toys the latter takes away their mouth. Law Enforcement can’t walk and chew gum at the same time. Bureaucracies of any kind are not capable of doing more than one thing simultaneously. This is why government has so many departments and offices and gets bigger and bigger. A complex society needs a simpler system of government not one that gets higher the density of bureaucracy. Police never could multi-task. If this were not true there never would have been a silent comedy era big hit of the Keystone Cops. Police should never be unionized...a big mistake to teach them how to be politically organized...you are basically giving them the ammunition to take over government. Coups have nothing to do with the main function and purpose of police in society which is the ensure your person, property and mobility in society is safe...once they get into politics like the Generals, its over. Military Generals are another crew that should never be in the White House. They get their stars by being yes men. A “Yes Man” or “woman is the last kind of person you want in the Oval Office. Last is... if they do not have any political power their rank and file cannot become captains and chiefs or commanders without an education higher than a HS Equivalency. This weeds out the stupid people from becoming cops and there are many. All of the cops on trial for murder are the stupid cops.
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  5665. Ok...you heard the Millennia left view of Biden’s voting record....now here my view of a person who was there. Anyone who is 40 years and younger on the left are clueless of the historical reasons the democrats fell back on their defense of R v W...are also clueless about who and what their enemy is...it was Thunder on the Right, the rise of Christian evangelism using abortion as their entry into the political system, of course, democrats had to compete for votes and if that meant acquiescing to the right, that’s what they did, and all the boomers who fucked up their lives during the 70s coked themselves to heights of idiocy, alcoholism, turned to religion for sobriety had kids as ‘born again’, and through prayer and kidnapped faith unwittingly became the base from which the right wing leadership became politicians. At this time TV evangelical mega-churches starting with Jim Baker and Tammy Fae Baker, then came Olsten, Church of Scientology, Church of Latter-Day Saints joined in the movement of the right. Jerry Farwell was the first evangelical to be political outside of politics as a christian agitator and started the first christian universities for evangelical religious acolytes to go into politics. 40 years later this Millennial left faces off with a counterpart right wing millennials, both are really stupid, never read Marx and cannot interpret movements in society as a development, a process of growth and strength, with its beginnings looking like a political capitulation of democrats as a party of the working class was really a sharp swing to the right following the Reagan-Thatcher anti labor paradigm felt today as a failure and abandonment, effective then to make democrats weak and make government look incompetent. Hollywood jumped in with ET, Star Wars, all the movies that depicted government as evil conspiratorial, incompetent jackasses, as shown by Spielberg in Raiders of the Lost Ark, “Top men” working on it, officials who don’t know what they have...fools’. Reagan was elected. Star Wars came into being. Video culture and the internet funneled the ideological shit down your throats like you were starving chicks in the nest. 40 years ago while you were still in the womb of your mother but the pro-imperialist/ military society you came into as a Millennial generation began the moment the doctor slapped your ass in the delivery room and mommy gave you your first Barney doll. They succeeded in overturning R v W because “You” the age 40 year old and younger let them and drank the cool-aid to use a phrase of the right. You never pushed politicians like Biden toward the left and Bernie helped to co-opt your desire for something better and he never gave you an alternative vision from the vision of the right. Bernie is no socialist. The absence of historical analysis is pitiful in the Millennial Left. You will never know how to separate historical fact from ideological bullshit. You can be bamboozled by the very clever CIA, dividing you by race and gender, and class. The ‘Great Reset’ is their next game of distraction most of you will swallow as fact. So, Jimmy, you do a good job criticizing but what good is it when you do not offer the alternative view and historical analysis of the enemy that democrats have been reacting toward since Reagan.
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  5666. Finally, a breakthrough for others to follow, perfect for all you First Amendment auditors in the US and Canada, put your money where your mouth is about the State respecting your right to photograph public property.  A man who has brains, Max Blumenthal, using property that is not the property of the US to confront leased property of Honduras to the US.  Americans, Canadians and the native Americans watching this should do the same as a cadre--- protest Washington not in Washington DC which amounts to fruitless endeavors, always falling on deaf ears, but in the world Washington occupies.   There is no country in the world that will not welcome you. In fact, notice how desolate streets are, people curious are watching from the windows and afar what this red-haired American is doing. He is left alone to report a piece on US occupation.   Occupy and pitch tents at the front entrances of US military bases with your bodies and watch how fast Trump will cave into demands to leave now. The hosts nations will never harm you unless some deranged leader goes off the wall which is always a possibility but not a probability. In fact, the people of those nations will join you.   Mass occupation on camera for all the world to see will transform the paradigm of all governments from playing ball with the US to quit playing ball with the US.   Nothing the US can do about it. The US has no jurisdiction over the property Max is walking on with his camera, it is the public property of Honduras. Only if he steps into the base does the US have jurisdiction and can arrest him. But outside Mike Pompeo can pressure the Honduran president all he wants and Hernandez will not stick his neck out, his people will overthrow him knowing the forces cannot be ordered to attack Honduran protesters, no nation that small will risk going to war with the US.    Valid passport is all you need, the occupation kept on rotation bases new Canadian American cadres replace the old ones when their visa expires until imperialism ends.   Internally the US cannot make passports harder to acquire without infringing the right of free movement as writ in the Constitution. Trump will have to broaden his travel ban only by executive order and that will not fly if Bill Gates and other wealthy Americans cannot travel the world to conduct business. Brilliant Max.   You’ve found the Achilles Heel of Capitalism.
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  5668. Working class can be really dense people sometimes especially when it comes to the notion of a “Fair Wage”. There is NO SUCH THING as a fair wage in capitalism...the notion is an invention by intellectuals in the academic social sciences and this concoction will always warrant a strike against intellectuals in a revolution as a potential enemy of the working poor,--is my word of caution to the intellectuals. Better stop calling wages fair when the outcome of what wages produce are unfair for workers of any kind and in any industry. There are three economic laws; a law in economics is when a species must do the same for its survival; such as the Working Day, Intensity (how hard people are working on the jobs, the level of exhaustion that takes a toll on people mortality,) and productivity. Academics avoid this matter like the plague knowing a revolution would erupt if people were educated. The more educated a people are the harder it is to rule them said wisely by Confucius. A fair day’s wage does not eliminate or change the three economic activities that apply for all societies in all history...economic laws are sentient laws not laws we must live by for peace and civility...economic laws tells the story of the life of human beings. It explains a condition that we must produce our subsistence or die and when the production of life as you know it wherever you are is interrupted societies can die in a month if not weeks depending on how healthy they are. By healthy I mean a high material level of necessities and means available to meet needs. Workers are a means to this effect. Workers were essential during the lock downs but when everything is opened up again they fall into the background as inessential and are shat on by the rest of us. Sudan is not one of these countries that has a high level of capabilities to make the point. You can see from Sudan it is a case of warring militias interrupting the life-process of Sudan. Humans interrupting other humans from making a living, is the example that Sudan has become in what never should happen to a society,----a militarism that breeds utter contempt for humanity. A fair day’s wage is a myth. The little nasty Nome that hexed Goldilocks to spin yarns of gold from her hair pays her $7.50 an hour to spin for 8 hours is not fair when the yarn she spun is worth $.7.2 cents per foot and she spins 1000 feet of yarn a day to the selling price the market bears for yarn at $1.00 per foot, should illustrate why there is no such thing as a fair day’s wage. Goldilocks and the Nome may have agreed to work for each and with each other as equals n the weaving room but when the Nome gives her the spinning machine to work with she and the Nome are unequal partners in the product. So when you strike, strike for reasons that are realistic like being sick of being a tool for corporate America (the living you want to make is one that permits a happy life for you, your future and your family) and when you find that the system cannot give you that stability and assurance then you come to a crossroads about the system itself especially when the system can afford it!
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  5688.  @mikearchibald744  The word has a bad rap. The classical definition of the word meant when one mode of economic life changes into a new form of economic life. The Stone Age and the Iron Age, feudalism became capitalism and slavery became capitalism, etc. This got downgraded into a negative connotation associated with violence by the victims of revolutions. France was the bloodiest 1789. I am at the tail end of the Baby Boomer generation. Boomers owe it to Millennials their time and dedication to unite as a social force for change. I always felt the boomers did not bring to completion what they started and they should do that now. Be an aid to the millennials who are the work force in the main. Politically aware Retired people have the time and the life experience. Millennials need the hindsight of age behind their actions. Boycotts and strikes combined is how solidarity can play out. Boomers do not know what products to what industries millennials fight against. Combining the two generations is significant social power for planned and spontaneous pressure. I never liked protest placards. I like one large banner and if placards are a must they should read the same thing stating the section of the population carrying them by occupation. One universal message and one united group is the function of a banner. “End Violence Now” covers all violence in every form. Universal messages get lost when placards read a bunch of single issues. Authorities are then able to twist words against a movement and the messaging makes them think protesters are dumb. Their attitude then lowers the quality of the opponent. The new politician runs against an incumbent is worse than the incumbent even when you think they were better than the last one, is true at the national level. Locally things are different. It would be a revolution without violence if people planned boycotts, strikes and hold events of solidarity.
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  5692. Demoralizing the entire Summit event is aimed to go on polluting and is a marketing campaign on climate change. It really should have been an Earth wide action in all cities in the world condemning and naming the polluters, but it, appears, the event was a show without substance. This inability to get off oil for richest nations is a changeover to renewable energies some industries are refusing to do to their last dying day,. They are subordinate to oil and the richest workers of the richest nations are subordinated to the branches of industry producing the by-products of oil would also be dead against renewables; unless they can transition into jobs in the new industry to emerge. A new industry of manufacturing the new harnessing tools for clean emissions fuel and energy will heavily depend on more of the culprits who pollute, the mining and drilling corporations, on the prowl to buy land, acquire it by any means necessary, where the geology tells them the raw material and natural resources for renewables are to be mined. We are back with the same problem worsening the health of the planet and social life. A bold historic step to restore the health of the planet would be to make mining and drilling subject to every individual, and property to all. Controlled by all. Place the extraction industries to produce under direct legislation and for use only. This action is one of respect for nature and our relationship as a species to nature, that all people across the world can easily be a part.
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  5693. Great Video: I think the MAGA architects of this Grand Social Experiment, leads inevitably to the creation of an apartheid state, or a partitioning of the nation on grounds of race, the rest of the world will reject, and go with China. In their MAGA hands they have the powerful productive forces of the US made to perfection by expert criminals. This is about the only change I see, they are not the original criminal designers of the powerful productive forces, they are the capitalist class in charge of these forces at play. They have yet to remove each fiefdom these forces continue to belong not entirely convinced of the Grand Social Experiment. Fact is, everyone produces something. A musician produces music, a thinker produces thoughts, a poet poems, etc. A criminal produces crimes. If we look exclusively at crime in America, criminals produce criminal law, and the criminal provides society with criminologists lecturing on criminal law,. The criminal produces a whole lot of police and sheriffs, special divisions, judges, hangmen, juries, and a whole industry of different capacities to create new ways of satisfying these professions,--- thanks to the criminal. The idea is that if there aren’t any criminals in socialist societies there isn’t a criminal state running them. Not to say there isn’t corruption. It is to say that attacks on property don’t happen in socialist societies worth discussing as a real attack on property. More than the total population of the US own property in China. The “peasants”* in China have enough respect for private property to not defile it with crime reflects a shift in thinking about property in general, too hard for western minds to grasp stuck in the framework of property as a limitation, as he/she has more than me. Can’t hide the fact, America in its present state is anti-private property, ownership is unequally distributed across society that a Trade War will further deteriorate the material well being of the working classes. Criminals have given much to advancing technologies and progress. Under capitalist life, erecting statues in homage to criminals would make sense for all the social institutions of deterrence they brought into this world and the miracles of science to cure disease. When someone says America is a sick society they are not wrong. Torture employs many a creative and highly skilled craft people to come up with the ingenious ways on how to punish people. Yet the criminal produces an impression, partly moral partly tragic, and in this way renders a “service” by arousing the feelings of the public. Criminals gave us highly rated crime drama series, writers, and movie directors, the criminal breaks the monotony and everyday security of capitalist life. They keep capitalism from stagnating and gives rise to an uneasy tension and agility without which even the spur of competition would get blunted. The criminal lives among the superfluous working classes and rises to the surface gives the gift of lessening competition searching out a finite number of jobs against an infinite number of unemployed job searchers, up to a certain point the struggle against crime absorbs another part of the working class does bring about a correct balance of “useful” occupations. Would locks have reached its present state of perfection if not for criminals? Infinitesimal cameras in every crevice of a Tesla is a tribute to the criminal. The Mona Lisa could not be more protected as property. The microscope would never had made into a lab as a tool to study cell biology if not for the forgers. Crimes are constant attacks on property, constantly calls into being new methods of defense and when we take leave of the world of crime inside America and look at the world of crime outside of America into the sphere of private crime the world market would not have even been created! The Tree of Sin is at the same time the Tree of Knowledge ever since Adam. Every possible occupation is a productive endeavor supports life, trade, enjoyments. Trump is the worst type of philistine and apologist for capitalist life to not be praising the criminal he is and the criminals for their contribution to the state of criminal science; he owes his existence to criminals and should show gratitude for it. * JD Vance (Juvenile Delinquent Vance).
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  5701. The transforming of nature into a commodity occurs on a yearly basis. The Accumulation of Capital, M-M^, between the Ms are three steps or stages in the cycle of accumulation of capitals where money moves from one sphere of business activity to another from circulation to production and back again to circulation, completes one circuit in the movement of capital toward the creation of M^, or surplus value. Stage 1 is a purchase (investment) of labor-power and means of production, stage 2 is production, stage three the finished product re-enters the market or circulation. So what who cares? People may say...what’s the big deal they still have their jobs. No matter to me or them how long capital takes to turnover a profit. The problem with this thinking, it minimizes and denies the work people are doing for capital is detrimental to themselves and others; people are made to carry on the work under capital which now teeters on destructive employment; plus in spite of the nature of the job, the job depends on making the company richer. Workers should see themselves as the historical force behind the socializing aspects of the division of labor. As a social class that extends world wide can benefit humanity under another social paradigm one based on use, but the process of accumulation of capital contracts to a particular, ever-shrinking, number of corporations, the scope of all productive powers of production is narrowed to this one use, in one unformed resistance to undermine the socializing aspects of the labor-process form the general battle lines between labor and capital in the US. Last reason why this thinking is false and dangerously perilous for workers to think it. Production or the labor-process, becomes a mere phase of a colossal marketing campaign of the yearly product before reconverting the sale-money back into capital again. From climate change we know production, human activity, the labor-process extended as a world wide division of labor has more importance as a consequence to human life and the health of the planet than it has importance to being a mere tool for the making and selling of the yearly social product as commodities.
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  5709.  @lesliefreeman5792  When your generation or future generation strips the political power the police have in society you will see that it is the criminologist in academia who the police unions and the international Sheriffs Association of which all sheriffs belong get all their ideas from! Criminologist are complicit with their theories that are rooted way back to Woodrow Wilson’s time that people are born criminals deny social conditions have anything to do with why a person would want to rob, loot, or kill. Bratton the former police chief of NYC goes all over the world to advise police of these strategies and tactics. He would be one such criminologist. If you remember during the George Floyd protests how protesters were pick up on the streets by swooping unmarked vans and police in Oregon. That is a a special federal unit Trump deployed to attack those protesters. In Central America the same tactics were used to kill poor Hondurans and El Salvadorans for over 20 years. Death Squads the US helped to create for their repressive governments. Thank goodness Latin America threw out the police. You re smart lady, you write well, and I can tell apart from most people who watch and comment on this channel are less informed and basically ignorant of many things the wool is pulled over their eyes. Don’t be one of them. Be suspicious of criminologists, academia, news media, and see them as separate part of one large systemic process of repressing American people. There is an element of institutional racism of the five going to prison stops public scrutiny of the Law Enforcement Establishment and the effects of that racism on the psyche of black men that breeds individual self-hatred for being black in America. James Baldwin and Malcolm X wrote and spoke about this. Both men were right. This subject is not discussed because it threatens that whole structure.
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  5711. Add that to this and you get a perfect storm for a collapse or a social revolution: Speaker McCarthy proposes GDP increases (making people work harder) pressured to work harder due to cuts on the side of social spending. It won’t work because our economic system depends on the value of wages never falling below levels where people cannot survive and never high enough to cause profits to fall and corporations say there is no money in this business, close it down. McCarthy is not aiming to balance wages and profits. He is pushing or annihilating a skilled labor-force into a corner and in a straightjacket. He is proposing Austerity and the FED proposes more unemployment to fight inflation. But on the side of social spending the military’s budget increases; and the owners of property and financial wealth pay no taxes; last, he proposes no de-escalation of over-spending abroad (throwing money away on bombs and weapons) is even worse news for 55 million poor people unable to afford food, rent, mortgages, pay off medical bills. Austerity includes no to student loan cancellation; the young straddled with debt on top of other debt, car loans, house loans must double their work efforts to catch up but it all goes to employers who benefit from the productivity increase. This is how McCarthy wants to make the debt to GDP ratio less than more than half of what all Americans who work produce; mind you there are Americans who never work because they are rich enough to avoid working for a living, but they do consume. And their consumption is paid for by the many remains at high levels of spending other people’s money. McCarthy proposes no cuts in their consumption habits; he adds more privilege to the privileged; people who do not have to double their work time such as himself a top earner who works 7 months out of the year can still use the public funds for military junkets when not in Congress traveling and meeting foreign dignitaries making deals for his donor and, driving the price of things up polluting the world with high levels of CO2 emissions furthering endangering species life warming up the oceans and rivers. Good news for people like Trump, Gates, Soros, Bezos, Zuckerberg and Co. So here is why America is a poor country with very rich people in it. You get what you vote for.
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  5718. The Democratic Establishment was rocked enough to want to eliminate any future coup attempts from any source. Eliminate the opposition at home and help friends and allies eliminate their opposition abroad. Next person who attempts a coup better have the whole Joint Chief of Staff on their side. That is if the coup is an internal one. But if the coup is not an internal faction seeking power but the ones in power are rocked by outside pressure a coup can develop as history shows. Power from them to some element they do not know can unseat their political perch. This is where intelligence comes in. Law enforcement is beefed up, stacked with cutting edge technology, to locate sources of potential groups who could in the event social pressure is so great can take power from the Establishment. Supreme Court did not help to ease this worry for the Washington Establishment, the court went rogue on abortion and created a potential source of social pressure that will punish the democrats for lack of action. Desperate democrats will seize to take advantage of this social crisis emerging. Their campaigns will look fake as it is fake authenticity to have to turn into a political campaign what people remember they had a long time to codify this right and had not is an Achilles Heel to their aims. But what if social pressure gave a particular group power which in the mind of Americans unfamiliar with the history of coup d état happened in Russia, an event that gave birth to the Washington Establishment in trouble in the US as I write? The social power that giveth the coup taketh away the coup...after all, the Washington Establishment, republican and democrat combined, is a coup. Americans call it a ‘Duopoly’, meaning they are the same party complicit with great wealth. A coup of dollars, Americans say, ‘take the money out of government’. Every 80 years a cataclysmic social event has rocked the political world to the ground at the same time every 80 years great personal wealth has eroded the rights of individuals and democracies. Social cataclysms ordering the government to do something about controlling great and powerful economic wealth. The curse of historical events is the end of the 80 year cycle...this is the time when social movements have gotten so large they bring in a new age.
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  5724. Polish workers understand the connection between value producing labor and the value of labor that American workers have yet to understand. American workers may not ever understand and act on that difference because of intensive post trauma the working class is afflicted with since 1996 to the present. Most likely because of chronic fatigue syndrome and related immunity problems with antibiotics and anti-depressants are typical prescriptions was given to 43,000 Gulf War Veterans who were partially disabled in 1996. The army predicted 50,000 casualties in that war. The US army gave large doses of an antidote used to paralyze key neuromuscular transmitters as a means of prevention against pesticides, uranium and oil. The chemical (s) released from the oil fires in Iraq hot by day rise and cold by night fall on the desert, a chemical recombination occurs would kill troops without a shot fired. The name of the disease times two the name of the drug (N2D2) is the method of modern medicine in American society comes straight out the military medical procedure of 1991. This was the beginning of the growth of children of 43, 000 Gulf War veterans who came back sick, suffering loss of energy, nervous twitching, coagulated blood plasma and metabolic brain activity symptoms of those veterans later to surface in their children. Given the cumulative effects of trauma the working class experiences in the community and in the family, the difference between value-producing labor that gives them the right to a share of its product because it made the product while paid a wage for that activity or service deprives them of their share of the product, is not yet an issue for them like it is for 15,000 Polish workers. Why this is relevant is because while the American worker is traumatized and handicapped his/her labor productivity is not handicapped. In the Polish working class they realize this productivity is their's, whereas the American workers thinks it is not their's for reasons largely, ideological.
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  5730. If the coup took place and the new cabinet installed the armed forces of Germany would not be disbanded but its high command would lose the power of commanding the army and thus, unable to defend Germany from the coup if ordered by a new high command. Democracy is a weak system in the end. Once you cut off the head the body no longer operates or functions. Unfortunately, citizens are the least empowered social group in society would have no choice but to either rebel or submit since democracies are not direct democracies but are representative democracies operating on a constitution which would have been annulled by the new head of state. Our friend Heinrich the whatever it is to his title, would be Germany’s new dictator. I would consider this a serious problem for the German people. This could happen in the US as well. Assuming Trump had succeeded and he later announced the nullification of the US Constitution, and if the insurrectionist were armed, they would have immediately decapitated the US military with the nullification of the Constitution and established Trump as America’s first dictator. America’s constitutional republic is also a representative democracy, all the people we know and have come love or hate in Congress, would have been either arrested on trumped up charges for their removal or forced to resign. We are living in times where coups are standard operating procedure used by the Right more than the Left. Its time people defend their society from these forces and the best way is to take the military away from a high command and create a war department that is not under the command of a prime minister or a president. The power of the military must rest with the majority which was the original point behind the US Constitutions 2nd amendment, that the militia of 1779 later evolving into a modern industrialized military be autonomous from the government of elected officials.
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  5734. The so called "experts" are not emphasizing a nuclear arms treaty is in the national interests of all nations concerned. Each nation is doing their own thing is real bad news! Every other nation is marching toward developing technology that is not in the interest of humanity at a rapid pace as an effort to catch to other militarized states. They see how the US respects force and only force in states like North Korea, they don't see how a state without a military, Costa Rica, can excell in economic progress faster than if they had a military, and as they desire to be free of their centuries old repressions building defenses is not going to get rid of those centuries-old oppressive relationships in their societies. Washington would dare not invade a tiny republic with no army in Central America for it will enhance the truth of the character of the American administration as imperialist simply out for conquest. Not that Washington would feel shame, they would not, conquest is 90% of post WWII American history. A tiny minority of technocrats in these otherwise socially and economcally backward countries become the decision-makers of this technology while every component that goes into these weapons are devices they must buy from the US, the exclusive seller of all that you need to build a nuclear bomb. To do this the governments aiming to nuclearize themselves must extract the savings of the population to pay for it. A new oppressive relation on top of the centuries-older ones are ignored. Two years following an agreement there is no treaty between the US, Russia, China, North Korea on ICBM development is the fault of the American administration unable to break the ice and begin a dialogue, is the fault of a protectionist president.
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  5736. To understand there is no deep state is to understand how the system works. An empire such as the US rests upon the American people. Administering the wealth of the American people takes a bureacratic form and the form of bureacracy replicates itself in other areas of the government, is cast in mysteriousness. The American people are large mass of producers not directly involved in the struggles of corporations and governments. Trump professes that he will break down parliamentarism for the American people and the undisguised subservience to government of the propertied classes are first in line to be freed from government. If the government were not occupied by a provincial minority a man like Trump would not be possible as president is still the heart of the problem. He professes to save the propertied classes by upholding their economic supremacy over the working class. And, he revived in the blue collar conservative working classes the old national glories of restoring American productivity and economic supremacy at a time when that economic supremacy is met with foreign competition. To understand Trump is to understand the loss of American productivity and industrialization that came with a sociological backlash when it was stripped away from the blue collar working class by the Financial sector of the empire. And the stark reality that the age of American prosperity is over is too bitter a pill to swallow for people who come escaping poverty and land into poverty and for the American people barely making it themselves.
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  5746. Capitalist societies cannot respond the way a socialist society like China can respond to quell a dangerous and fatal virus. Socialist societies have the ability to stop production (economy) and not have the effect of a crisis in the same way capitalist societies experience a crisis. If you stop production and circulation in China it is not going to disrupt the economy from functioning but it will affect the social order like it would in the US and the EU impact both spheres of economic activity, unless the Chinese communist party acts irrational and harms the social population. A fear that is probably on the forefront of that party's mind of losing power. But in the US and EU if production is stopped surplus value cannot be realized and the entire social order falls to pieces, which is the reason the west relies so heavily on prisons and mass incarcerations to keep the social population controlled and working the cycle of production where surplus value is produced.  It appears that a socialist society breaks the dependency the working class has with capitalists for their wages and capitalists have on a working class for their profits, a mutual dependency of the two classes in a capitalist society.  If this mutual dependent relationship between worker and capitalists were not true then the Congress of the US would not be advancing a bill to compensate the working class an income when being told to stay home if they are sick. The attention paid to the low wage and hourly workers in America proves how vitally essential the low wage and hourly workers are to the workings of the system as a whole.  How aware low income and hourly workers are or become of their essentiality is another matter?  I imagine it is the special job, duty or function, of politicians in the west to keep the working classes unaware of their essentiality to the system as a whole does explain why the US in particular is vehemently against unions and why unions in Europe are tolerated.  The bill proposed serves to keep consumption going and the workers playing their part as consumers even though their role as producers have stopped. If China were to stop producing for American and European corporations they would be forcing the capitalists to spend a great deal of their profits to move production back to their home nation or die! The communist party of China could do this once they have an established large middle class to take the place of foreign capital being used to simulate production.  My thinking does explain how a socialist society has more flexibility to quell and mobilize a working population toward cooperation when the communist party decided to intervene with the construction of hospitals, even as some fell apart, and washing down the entire country with disinfectant. A capitalist system has to incentivize and appease a working population or force it to cooperate to quell a virus, causing it to teeter on the brink of total economic collapse if not done skillfully, and I imagine the capitalists are extremely worried that Trump is not the man with the skill to manage such a task. But other problems loom, such as the inability of individual states to print their own money they eventually will run out of money and all efforts to quell the virus will evaporate into thin air. Politicians at the state level will fail and for one reason alone, they never taxed the rich enough to cover such an eventuality of their budgets drying up.
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  5758. Beneath the City of New York deep in the bedrock from its most southern tip of all boroughs to the Catskill Mountains is a distribution water system via three tunnels. Water is gravity impelled from a 90 miles distance feeds 14 million daily users. This to me is an example of 'man appropriating nature's productions in the form of man's wants', nature is adapted to change as it is conformed to human wants. But in the land of urban sprawl, suburbia and rural country, nature is an accessory to man's wants. Pruit promotes industry's use of nature for making its products. He approves Nature be an accessory in the processes these companies employ. What application do you have that would entirely transform that relationship the way a city has transformed its relationship to water? Rural America is the one slow to change and transform. The cities are far more advanced in this area. Going back to your original post about the improbability of sustainable energy by 2050 comment---this would rest entirely on how serious you believe in Scott Pruit and his war on coal is over. Pruit's opposition are not that great either on this issue. They fail to understand the distinction between use and value. Rural America's relationship to land (nature) is to shape it to fit the needs of the car, truck, tractor, dwelling, strip mall and commuter train. These commodities are quantifiably determined by the need for mass quantities of coal, oil, gas. As long as land remains an accessory to the process of industry people living in rural America do not have a relationship to nature.
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  5768. I have no issue (listen to me...as if I am a big shot, lol) with what you said on the matter of productive and productive labor but I do have a matter with the missing effect of not applying the theory to reality, so often the criticism of academics, of the two forms of surplus value, i.e., relative and absolute s/v. The relation between the general and the particular is expressed in the relationship between individual corporations (capital) and the entire capitalist class. See chapter on the Concept of RSV Vol I Kerr Edition, pg. 289. Capital has a tendency to employ the largest number of workers to extract the largest amount of s/v, for the least amount of payment in wages. Once the working day is fixed, productivity and innovation that provides the extra s/v in production and gives the employer a temporary advantage to produce cheaper, but when all corporations are induced to raise profits through innovation, labor power and labor time generally among all the corporations is cut, and the increase in productivity generates monopoly formations. The Effect: A truly affluent society in potential American capitalists extract RSV using productivity of the US labor force to lower the value of labor-power of that labor-force, while extracting ASV from under developing nations, using force, legal compulsion, to prolong and lengthen the working day from peasantries of these nations. Control and ownership of land as the means by which autocracies and militaries prosecute exploitation. Autocracies and militaries are an indispensable means to American capital in which to carry out the extraction of ASV, force and internal rivalry, to force labor to work long days, weeks, months, years.
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  5772. These are not cops but swat teams, an invasive lethal force, they are not trained to deal with violent situations the public may face; they are trained to react to violet episodes in a defensive mode protecting themselves as in the case of an offensive assault which might be how they each perceived the actions of the killer. This is a case where a military response is the wrong response. A police officer is trained to protect the preservation of persons, rights, and property, a concept of tantamount importance...on which the whole society exists. It had been going on since the Bush Administration that a military solution has been used for every circumstance and problematic situation for the greater part of this century and the last century as a solution to the risks of security is a military one. On that observation, It is not fair to call militarized police cowards when their training is administered to them by higher authorities; they are not police. If they were police and hesitated to act then cowardice is a rightful charge. But as a paramilitary force their object is too annihilate and quite possibly in their minds the hesitation was to resist annihilating the whole classroom of innocent children. Teams like this have single minded missions, highly focused, detailed that it became diffused by the situation. Insubordination of duty or mutiny of command to strike waiting might have crossed their minds. In other places where militarized police are used for crowd control the effect is the opposite. Paramilitary police have a pretense of public safety, which is to annihilate, use of excessive force, to remove the public from premises or property is not policing which protects civil society and permits protests to occur without violence endangering it. The higher authorities are responsible for this tragedy the ones in charge of training recruits.
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  5777. Women can be dictators too. The AG is one, Poras (spelling?) using her office to prevent a popular elected president, she blocks the transfer of power is a dictatorial move. If anything is learned from Jan 6th it would be you have to put your money where your mouth is. The Washington establishment on both sides united against Trump and the AG Garland, appointed a Special Prosecutor to try Trump, consequently remove him from the ballot. This action constitutes a coup dé état by democrats. A coup is anything that blocks the transfer of power from proceeding...what is gained...Poras gains the use of her office to crush the opposition of the indigenous people of Guatemala, the Maya. Lula DeSilva was jailed in Brazil and popular presidents elected in Peru, Ecuador removed. It is an international conspiracy but that would mean they meet up in secret and strategize among republican ruling elites, some do but most are caught up in their own societies, in struggles like this one, fight like their existence is at stake too busy to be part of a conspiracy, crush any opposition. Who do meet once a year are the international billionaire class at DAVOS and they conspire all day and night. But give dictators an inch they take an arm. Question remains why even bother with institutions that are inherent contradictions the people of Mexico, Canada, and the US are living under regimes who stay in power by means of a coup. If we scan across to Europe the people there are living under monarchies, some quietly rule, others rule overtly in the open with Public acceptance. Monarchies rule the Middle East as well that this century is more like a restoration of the politics of the 18th century.
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  5782. 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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  5794. The majority want a national healthcare system, fine, but the question is not only about how to pay for it.  Deep debt is carried by the Public and deep tax cuts to the Rich, limit the income of the government. Socializing health care asks other social classes to cover the cost of another health is not the way to do it.  The military has its own health care system, why not open it up to citizens? Social security card is all you need to get your teeth fixed, or lung patch up! The military health care system is fully nationalized, meaning medical technology is not private property by law. The whole military falls under the Public Domain, all it needs, is to become socialized by allowing citizens access to its services even if they are not veterans. Makes no sense to get health care from employers, let the worker get that money instead, stimulate the economy with it, the military can charge a nominal co-pay per 330 million people for services is already a source of income for improving the system the government is less obligated to cover through revenue. Employers make enough money to pay their own lifetime healthcare costs because the presence of a fully socialized military health care system brings down the cost of health care generally, that employers in private care and services are given to them at home. What billionaire dies in a hospital bed? The objective is to die with dignity if you have to die in a hospital. At home is the ideal but the majority have to make a second home out of the military for a dignified system of service. The various entry points of privatization into a partially socialized health care system is not a permanent condition in my view.  Capitalizing on medical technology leads to privatization, if medical technology is made illegal to buy as a commodity, this would make it a fully nationalized health care system. America already has a nationalized system, its just being used as part a basket of goodies, selfishly for more recruits for private aims, if opened to civil society its control would fall under the Public Domain and not in the hands of the private domain. That leaves Bernie with what to do about the national debt and the tax cuts to the rich, two problems not three.
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  5824. The 20 something year old, I admire his anti-Deep State spirit. Things have to be really bad in America for somebody to support a lowlife like Trump which says more about the Washington political establishment and the Deep State that nobody higher than the bottom of the moral and ethical pecking order can emerge to become president. It does prove that the republicans have not rigged the election system and will be working on the problem of a one person one vote system in the next four year cycle; because they are so bad,---- they cannot get elected on their own merits. But on the war, the 20 something year old (time stamp: 2.50), “...In our history...it has proven...that we (USA) have been the winners of those wars...” Indeed, the US retains control over the natural resources of Iraq and other nations in the world today. US imperialism is the winner. All of the US wars whether low or high intensity are for natural resources is a direct legacy of the Cold War. Who wins are the imperialists and the American people get a piece of that success in the form of a lifestyle that corrupts them into accepting the terms and conditions of life under an empire. The losers are not formidable enemies of a super power. Iraq is not China or Russia. Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan are nations of tribes with a low level industrial capacity operating at an early 20th century level when nuclear weapons were in their conceptional stage still in the mind of Albert Einstein. When natural resources are no longer under the control of US the US would no longer be an empire. But from the point of view of just and unjust wars, very few wars involving the US ended with a victory and only one war among them all was a just war. This 20 something year does not know the real movement of historical events and has a false concept about how his share of social labor has become low enough for him to feel his fall into the world average of poverty. This is when a real grip on historical facts are needed the most that he does not have, is a historical paradox in itself. Because if anyone can change the world and level the playing field between rich and poor, it would be his social class in conjunction with the poor of the world not Donald Trump!
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  5827. Criminologist believe in deterrence first as a warning to individuals not to commit new crimes or punishments will be harsher and they believe in a general deterrence to send a message to others not to think twice about committing a crime. Deterrence is a practice as old as prostitution. Any infraction and violation of laws on the books this method of deterrence and punishment is applied practice in Law Enforcement generally. But notice the theory of deterrence and where it begins. Its premise and starting point is the internal organization of the State, set up to be punitive, with hierarchies established and a rank system of command, the social structure starts with a social arrangement of subordination of the individual(s) crushing free and independent will. The only way free and independent will can be expressed in society is though a new social arrangement that promotes unanimous consent. The criminal justice system does not function without deterrence...the opposite of deterrence is to help. Criminologists and justices, public defenders and prosecutors, sheriffs, rank and file cops, do not help nor solve the problem of corruption but are the corruption in many rank and form. Houses are units of commodities and engender money and profits. If they were homes, built to eradicate homeless, the real estate market and banking would collapse. This would signal a state intervention to rescue banking and the housing market as a national security matter. Every rescue package of American business that buys from China pays its bills to China for the construction materials to resume the industry and for the sale of properties to foreign investors.
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  5831. Why do even need a CEO? Seriously. Workers would never make planes that fail or cars that have to be recalled. They would never let products leave their plants and factories if they are hazardous for human consumption. Their own grandchildren can die from the baby formula workers manufacture. It just would never happen that if workers had full control over all production would there be the sort of crisis and disasters the capitalist class create s repeatedly because given the aims that social class has. A workforce of 132 million do not exploit for themselves what the CEOs buy from them that is the productive individual power workers own. Individualism is America’s Dilemma. When people worked in isolation of each other, individualism, was appropriate but not today when the work societies need done is work spread over the whole world! This economic power is exploited for the development of a Self, an individual capitalist. This is a contradiction when not an atom of surplus-value is produced by a CEO. The job of a CEO is to expand corporate market share,---but making sales is not where surplus-value is made. Surplus-value is realized in the Sale, the sale is not the origin of surplus-value. Workers make the surplus-value through the sale of their labor-power. They agree to hand over to the buyer their cooperation with the buyer’s production process, indeed, a deadly process for workers. It floored me when I learned that in the Concentration Camps of Germany in WWII people voluntarily submitted to their deaths with little resistance was accomplished by isolation, separation, solitary confinement, were weapons carried over into Civil Society to condition a working class.
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  5845. Co-Workers, Matthew Branning and Michael Stark, and Branning’s corpse is missing. I’ll get to that. But, first. That’s what I got. No explanation if the two men were partners. Was Stark related to Branning as a hired worker or half owner? Its important to rule out an economic motive when you do not have a corpse. In this case you are ruling out what it could be not what it is not for that shadow of doubt when a weapon and a body are not found in a case. Compare Stark’s murder to Alex Murdaugh’s murder. A corpse not found in Starks’ and no murder weapon in Murdaugh’s case. Science will always get you in the end is the word of warning to would-be murderers. This case is important. Sociologically it speaks to the condition of America’s working class as horrendous. The history of exploitation of man by man comes out in this one social relationship that went wrong, real wrong. Branning was an owner of a small manufacture shop, he made his living by his own means. Stark was a man without means and depended on the sale of his labor-power for a living. Did they exist for one another only as buyer or seller or was they band mates gigging nights and worked together. No doubt they partied. Branning would be less representative of the whole working class because the division of labor in the US is tiered with fewer Brannings and more Starks who depend on sale for their livelihood. Fewer owner-operators and more operators, likely, we’ll find that a third tier of labor exists. There is a whole retail industry consisting of the most shameless exploitation of young and cheap labor power, you find child labor in manufacturing too, and working conditions that are slave -like. So it is a three tiered workforce. Can add a 4th tier at the top consisting of skilled workers and there are not many owner-operators in this division unless they go into their own consulting firms. The condition of America’s working class and the condition of America’s ruling class hangs on a preponderance of the evidence...as both social groups are trapped in a false idea that in this world there are people meant to be exploited by other people; a lot of clues that these two guys did it and a jury of their peers are biased against workplace violence and have no tolerance for the excesses of the rich that lead to murder. Branning is without a family of his own. We have no idea if Stark has a family or owes a family. Family is pressure, they have to live and a living is what Stark needs. They have an implicit handicap. A learning deficit born from adherence to the market as guiding principals of life and living. Workers are myopic. Elites are arrogant. Use each other and use another to kill a third. Stupidity never ends. Myopia in workers and worker-owners and hubris in the rich. Blinded and unable to function as ruler and as a working class is not what society needs to operate. Society must depend on a new arrangement for procuring its necessities.
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  5846.  @joebaumgart1146  In that comment I forgot a lot of things. It is a comment space. I do appreciate you pointing that out and respect your opinion. But I would disagree with you about pride and satisfaction is found in a job. Retirement in America is down right awful for an elder. Unless you are rich you have more access to choices. If not rich then its pure isolation. You re better off retiring outside of the US where people know how to live. They are poor but they live and create things, do things, make life worth while, they fall in love, they fight, they laugh they cry. You get none of that in retirement. Retirement is like Tinnitus a continuous droning sound that comes and goes only when you are distracted but it is always present. There is no space to walk in America. In fact, people think you are destitute if seen walking because everything is designed around a car. There are no outdoor cafés if you live outside of a city. Living in a city is better for an elder but cities have been gentrified by the rich and drive up the cost of living in a city that a fixed income cannot afford it. There are more baseball diamonds and dog parks in small towns and rural communities than there are walking parks for people and politically small towns and communities are dominated by a small clique in the community isolate retirees by offering nothing or taking it away once they give it. America is not a good place to get old in and it is not a good place to be young. Its only good for middle aged people the prime years of work is all they do. Work, work, work, work and more work, work here, work there, work at home, work at the job, work to get there, work to get back, work to eat, work to sleep. Rest comes when you are dead. Headstones read RIP, because to live is to be at war in America.
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  5858. Plato disagrees with Hernando. Plato sees the division of labor in his day as oppressive. Though Plato’s day saw a local division of labor of city-states. World trade had not encompass the globe. Instead of individuals subjugated to a division of labor we live in a world of individual nations subjugated to a division of labor. A division that divides consumption and production unevenly in the modern world. Socialists did not have a theory of capitalism they can use as a guide post for their political thinking. They still rely on legislation to cover over a given inequality in society. They help legally and politically the winner stay winners and help the losers stay losers. Year after year a winner wins more because more people are involved in world production. The working classes and unemployed at the start of the decades of Capital Flight were led down a road of desperation and mass material deprivation. A real nose dive for the American working class considering that in one lifetime they were a huge middle class to becoming debt ridden working three jobs to survive. Socialists were forever trying to reform what cannot be reformed and use the State to level out the inequities that cannot be levelled out. They think they can be good surgeons without a deep understanding of the body’s anatomy was the socialists way of doctoring capitalism. Globalization of capital led us to a concentration of profits. Profits does not reach more than 30% of world population however, production exceeds 30% of world population and through production fall into the abyss of poverty. The potential for a real conscientious political program is so ripe the working class in these late stages of capitalism have nothing to lose promoting a plan for even production and distribution. Corporations packed up their factories and moved every nail to property, formerly, peasant owned, in lands outside of the country the corporations resides. This poses a unique question of allegiance a corporation would have if their investments and where they reside are not the same country. Driving down the cost of labor-power in rich nations is their solution to that dichotomy. The special commodity cost less than it does in rich nations. It seems Italy was left behind with respect to globalization which explains why politically the fascists are popular in Europe. Income inequality, aging population, brain drain, the growth of black markets, are all features common in societies resulting from “Capital Flight”. Capital flight is when western corporations move one sector of the economy out of the country that the other sector is left to absorb the mass of unemployed. The service sector are lower paying jobs than the industrial jobs no longer in the home economy. Production is sent outbound to the periphery as a way to further expand globally and profits are inbound toward the center. Societies emerging from older forms of production converting into market economies offer a vast quantity of desperately cheap labor. A man or woman formerly a peasant tied to the land and producing for themselves are now participating as sellers of their labor-power in a labor market. This transition is not pretty. Wherever the match can be found is where they will go no matter the life consequences. They find employment working in factories and industries equipped to make a product to be sold in the US market for a higher price are contracted by leading American corporations. Western capitalism is constantly in demand for labor-power. China and Russia resist this western expansion and those nations that had been expropriated by rich nations are moving in their own direction. Once the US Congress repealed the Wars Declaration Act, the final authority to spend the nation’s wealth on wars or on anything else transferred authorization from Congress to the Executive. American people wanted the defunding of the police but what they got is a defunding of government through subsidies.
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  5866. The one good thing about Trump gone is the fall of ratings for the media corporations. Viewers get sucked into the character and the content of his character is accepted even if it is putrid in essence Trump gave media corporations a golden free ride, never had to work for their money. When he said he made a lot of people rich, he did they were just limited to about 500 of them who got rich out of 332 million who got poorer. Big media corporations do not have Trump to sell airtime at a premium any longer. And as they struggle for ratings we get news barely ever broadcasted nationally. The American people are under a news blackout by the big media corporations tells you in a serious situation they are last to inform the public. Neglect and reckless irresponsibility are reasons control and and private ownership of the means of communication should be outlawed.  Searching for stories the Public will tune into journalism is synonymous with brainwashing hapless Americans. This is such a problem that we get popup commentaries like this one to get our news. We are getting better news from comedians is how rotten to the core mass commercial media has become in America. Slime oozing out from the mouths of talking heads. With Trump gone from media we get to see media as a tool of the government and government as a tool for Big Industry. We get to see how alone the American people have become, distant and estranged from each other and their own labor by commercial media and industry wedge driven between them and the necessaries of life.
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  5869. Wait a minute! There is a hidden value-relation in commodities. We don ’t see the relation because money is in the way expressing the particular value of a commodity. If commodity and commodity were being exchanged the value-relation would be present and used as a general rule for trade. Money violates that rule of equivalents and money is supposed to be an abstract representation of the general time it takes to make an article. Instead, money invented a sale or a purchase and price. Price fluctuating up or down are violations of the rule that things of equal value are exchangeable. When commodities have checked out the value-relation is gone. That is how fast and enigmatic money obliterates value, destroys it to pieces. One minute it is actively showing you this board game is equal to those scarves because they both took the same amount of time to make but when money enters into the relation the time factor is obliterated, we have no clue where that article came form, how it was made, how long, who made it. Production in general becomes a total mystery. You cannot put your finger on it you have to freeze the transaction to explain the value-relation of commodities. But it affects us in a real big way because when the commodity in the transaction is labor-power the money paid to that worker contains less and less value. And when that money is backed by cheap products that worker is giving an employer very real hard work, effort, putting their minds and bodies into the work. In return the employer are paying workers currency for that work that is not worth much, and this is not even inflation we are talking about here.
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  5878. Its modeled after the British Constitutional Monarchy and King having ultimate powers of pardon came to real use in their war against the Scottish rebellions who wanted a Catholic king on the throne as opposed to the British who wanted a Protestant king on the throne. A war that ended the Scottish nobiltity and the highlander way of life of clan lords and serfs during the mid 1700s. The series Outlander portrays this history is worth watching the educate yourself,. This guest delivers a thin answer to the question of why have it? If an academic does not have it I am imagining the ordinary citizen does not get it either. But it should, as thin as his answer was, give you an idea that a constitutional convention to modify the constitution of its criminal code should have happened sometime after the Civil War so we would not be living under an antiquated system that easily re-instates absolutism of a by-gone era. His main answer is correct, it was a tool to release friends and allies loyal to the cause, from prison.  Clemency powers also works in the reverse, should a revolution against the Trump happen those leading the fight if captured could have their commuted sentences or parole rescinded protects the status quo. This is why a political revolution cannot be half-assed in the US, the population has to be in the majority, to amend the criminal code, just like the tax code, and any other code written up such as the Sedition Act, can be repealed when the population has complete control of both houses and congress overriding the president and when 24 states are dominated by the people can the constitution be amended. Its not that it cannot happen it means the people have to be united, of one mind, no splits, divisions, and competing rivalries, to the contrary, have to be a movement. A far cry from where the American people sit now, are the least revolutionary people on the planet, until that movement pinches their arses, and inflames the feel and desire for real change into a full blown revolutionary movement, and so voted for Obama and the Trump, but got two people who delivered little to no change, are now seeking for that change in Bernie.
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  5898. I know there are federal workers watching Jimmy, this comment is for you. Federal workers have a political opportunity in the two judges rulings ordering the Trump Administration to rehire them. Their status is limbo and while in that status federal workers are not prohibited to strike ( Taft-Hartley applies to employed federal workers not terminated federal employees) their strike is a citizens strike and demand full pay during the strike since they were terminated unjustly with a chainsaw for no reason of their own. Federal judges could rightly rule in favor of the federal workers when Trump tries to knock ‘em down in court. Federal workers can file a civil suit against Musk as a private citizen ( I think he’s a citizen not sure, if not he is then on a work visa immigrant and can be sued in International Court as a foreign usurper in a foreign land not his own). Federal workers can use their return to work as leverage against both political parties to scratch the current CR in favor of one in the interest of the federal workers. The two judges gave the federal workers a “Trojan Horse” , containing 4 legal victories, a wonderful opportunity to strike a blow that will change the whole direction of this cockeyed administration maybe even lead to his impeachment in which case pardoned like Nixon by Vance assuming the presidency. Not to worry Trump will get his library. I hope the federal workers, their leadership and lawyers for their union seize this historic chance. Federal workers would get public support if their lives are improved by the CR federal workers propose to replace the horrible republican-democrat CR.
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  5899. In a word, if the majority of American workers want paid sick and family leave they will have to fight for it! Its really about the employers losing profits to paid sick leave. In other words, being sick does not enrich the company. The excess of product workers make after their own take in a working day comes out short of the projections. Machines don’t get sick so they are constantly enriching the company but without a person operating the machine(s) the enriching process does not happen. Slow down the rate of profit causes panic attacks in employers. Workers are paid while not on the job is an attack on the whole class of employers when you look at it from their point of view. Employers, corporations and companies are essentially paying out the same amount of capital in wages and salaries for less of the value producing work they can exploit within a fixed time frame of 8 hours. So they accelerate production to maximize the gains, machinery, equipment, gear, run overtime and never stop etc.. If the working day is 8 hours and 400 workers are employed and 20 of them are sick under pay the capitalist suffers a 20% drop on the company’s profit rate already falling from a shrinking market, owing to more competition, or a crisis of some kind. Dive in deeper and there are nothing but anomalies beneath the surface which is why the best way out of this crisis and the logical solution is a national health care system and a reduction of the working day from 8 to 6, strive for 100% employment of 332 million not just 132 million people doing all the work and the rest producing nothing of value that helps to regenerate the whole society but function to generate an enrichment process for themselves at the expense of the 123 million doing all the work.
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  5906. No mention of the general rule I see. The rule being that workers are not paid the money form of the commodity. This rule comes from a proof that a wage, living or not, is the name for the commodity form of work. Working is the commodity and the work itself is someone else's money or property. So the person doing the work is controlled through the work. People who earn their living and incomes from the money form are very different kinds of people than the ones living on the commodity form of the product. A product is two things, its money when it is not a commodity and a commodity when it is not money. Its never both at the same time is the general rule. The above amounts to a social conditioning process of human beings, that in the heyday of America was better accomplished by Charlie Chaplin to win over hearts and minds than forcing capitalism down the throats of nations. People divide themselves into what amount to a major class difference among them assuming the needs of the products and money before their own needs as people. On one side the people are all sellers before they re buyers and on the other side they are all buyers before they are sellers, learning the rules of exchange, changing positions from seller to buyer, and conversely, doing this in nations that still have Kings, Monarchies, peasantries, tribes, under foreign intervention, are coping with an industrial revolution of new oligarchs of capital in quasi-feudal social structures also heavily invested in the USA, all fighting to control the working population. The military does not know where to fit into all this social chaos generated under capitalism?
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  5911. The American working class is a versatile group, this means they go where capital needs them, if capital needs labor in Wisconsin or in Asia,---corporations have their own army of workers go where the next job that promises more value than what they are given in wages takes them, house, car, moving, the entire town or city is consumed in the process,---town and city governments enable the process never charge a nickel for the use of their city or town, the town or city residents pay the bills and the corporations, take out more than they put back into communities, right down to the food and tools, person(s) everything in the production process are elements of value the action of workers turn into surplus-value. The process leaves people feeling alienated from each other and from the world of work, workers are indifferent. Capitalism has desensitized people,---they do not really care about the specific work they are doing,---a malady that stems from knowing the work you do in society is a value creating process that belongs to another and all the necessaries of life you need some faceless stranger holds in their hands in the form of paycheck. The material elements used in the production process, raw materials, equipment, workplace, water, soil, air, are to you just that, a means when these elements should be an end in themselves. Capital is indifferent to the industries, traversing the different spheres of production in the entire economy. Bosch makes better washing machines than tools. Boeing makes better weapons than they make jet airliners. The migration of capital is the economic basis of the social indifference found in the American working class.
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  5912. A transition from fossil to green will have to make provisions to secure the fossil fuel industry workers into new jobs and careers. Expecting the higher paid working class to take a job at minimum wage will create true resentment and sense of betrayal in them. A green deal will have to be a new deal for them. Problem I see is how to neutralize and remove the power of the fossil fuel industry in Washington? More important than making these bastards pay is extracting the root of their power.  The social context of their power is vast, worldwide, that its antithesis must be international in scope to match the power of the fossil fuel industry. In this sense I would think the Extinction Rebellion movement has an international readiness to be that neutralizing power. We, at home, have to combine two powers, we have to withdraw our cooperation with industries connected to the fossil fuel industry, be educated on who's products should not be sold and encourage their workers to walk off the job for a higher wage and better working conditions, all this the minute Bernie takes office. Just because he is elected the push forward does not stop and end with a Bernie presidency. Workers everywhere demanding a higher wage and conditions more humane than they work under today are key players in making this social transformation work. The Green Deal promises to put them in control of their productivity to lower emissions standards, do what they can to produce not pollute. The answer here is a two-pronged approach in diminishing the power of the network of the fossil fuel industry internally and externally to avoid a fierce and hostile reaction from this sector against the Green New Deal. They will fight it tooth and nail and never relinquish power. There are days I can swear even Trump will refuse to step down from power.
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  5923. The Russian investigation is a distraction for those who are aware the NSA, formerly the Military Industrial Complex of the 1950's, is still carrying on the old techniques of counter-revolution developed over the last 73 years et al assassinations, invasions, economic strangulations, espionage, tools of the trade acting in full force. It now focuses on Maduro in Venezuela, having just bought off Ecuadorian president for Assange, allies with Columbian right wing president, the southern command region is now confident in overthrowing Maduro from all sides, an invasion into that country. The NSA's confidence is backed up by a $100,1000th billionth dollar budget, so large that every state is dependent on its budget, so large it incorporates private and public economic sectors that no single politician, nobody from the right and the left, dare challenge the economic authority the NSA has over the general economy of the US and its share of the global market. Ever man, woman, and child in America gets its daily bread from the NSA. All they can do is make a plea on behalf of the American people that they're not fleeced. The Congress of 1978 was more aggressive and put the NSA in its place investigating its tools of the trade in full force. The Congress of 2018 are its complicit-ors. The Democratic party its political prosecutor. The American people, a mesmerized public, are given something to moan and groan about, let it be the Russians. For 75 years not one single president met with a Russian leader, the only time an American president met with a Russian leader, Yalta, Crimea 1945. Yeltsin invited to the White House does not constitute a resolution meeting of the Cold War but the Yalta, Crimea Conference does constitute the birth of the NSA 1945. From that date going forward the world has changed, social systems evolved, the American people less powerful, no longer a productive class, controlled in every aspect of their lives by an institution that answers to nobody, rather, the institution exists for itself.
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  5953.  @jamesgraham4242  Democracy existed alright.. what has not existed is a Working Class Democracy, what existed before a worker's democracy comes into being some time in the future, is a bourgeois democracy, and before bourgeois democracies, we have to cross the Atlantic Ocean to get to Fuedal Autocracies and Landed Aristocracies, Nobility, Church, King, princes, monarchs all descendants of these ruling classes coming to America as an extention of their motherland. When all of that migrates to North America, none of them are able to conquer America, the country has too many Indians, its left up to a third immigrant with no motherland to return who must settle. The British and Dutch descendant Americans and the Afrikaners, the direct enemy of the native populations in Africa and in the USA, the British criminals let loose in Australia bring the aborigine into the fold of native people's subjugation to Colonial White Minority Rule, and to transplant Aparthied from South Africa to the United States, merge with America's own home grown Apartists was the next logical terrain to restore Apartheid. Establish a one party state all over again as they did in South Africa following its loss in 1992. This conjecture won't gain any traction if Trump's new National Security Advisor, an Afrikaner Robert C. O'Brien, resigns or is fired in a year or less. But history gives this conjecture precedence in the many Napoleonic soldiers (big and rich ones) who emmigrated to the US after Napoleon's abdication and petitioned Congress to give French exiles land in Alabama. White South Africans are still trying to settle, white European descendants in North America are the most compatible to that settlement.
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  5959.  @strnglhld  The case was a horse race regarding which parent gets to the finish line first gets custody. As a footnote: Assuming she becomes pregnant multiple time, the child at birth will be taken from her again and again and again given she would be tried and prosecuted as criminal should she try to abort a pregnancy. Lets go into the future for a moment: Imagine finding out decades later that you have half siblings in jail or in foster care, adopted, through back ground checks of the FBI how your political opponents will use that against you and how that information will affect you subjectively. Who is my real mother/father is a question that can never be suppressed. Further, a child is placed in Buffalo and finds permanency through adoption but came from NYC. Who gets to pay the $60K yearly cost of caring for that child to the age of majority or permanency? All NYC residents get charged the foster cares system drives city taxes, property taxes, that sum for Buffalo raising the child? Have you ever heard any mayor announce what portion of city taxes does the state charge the county for the care of a child in placement? When the child is no longer a child the tax rate is still the tax rate it was when the man or woman was the child. People pay for other people children as mediated by the state. The child study team here pays for the child study team there leaves one child study with little resources and when the child comes from a poor or working class school district that district has to close shop and deprive the services to the kids not in care but in need. No speech treatment for Jamarl. Social inequality is the by-product of this arrangement. Want more; here’s more: People who have nothing to do with the child care system are punished indefinitely by that system. Not one senator talks about this. It is permitted to fester to generate division, disunity, anger, at which the same old party candidates can position one group against another and be voted into a career of lucrative politics on the promise they will cut taxes. Sounds good but leaves 9 or so million kids destitute languishing in poverty.
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  5967. There is truth in the professor’s words. America has never had its long overdue working class revolution. A war of independence was not a proletarian revolution and the industrial revolution that began in England, France, Germany and the US were not proletarian revolutions. A revolution directed against a king or monarch is not a revolution that changes the form of production of that king or monarch, government. Coup dé tats are easier to do than to create a revolution. What stops a proletarian revolution from occurring in the US is that men and women of working age become a part of the work force upon graduating high school and college are actually walking into capitalist relations without realizing they are becoming proletarianized the second they sign an employment agreement with an employer. Typically, a young person is enthusiastic and the family proud that their son or daughter got a “job”. In actuality, the parents have released their child to the wolves. Everyone is temporarily satisfied and nothing of what I said above become fact or reality observable to the naked eye until the shit hits the fan. Workers accept an organized form of production because they have no organization of their own. The social relationships they form before entering the workforce as, friends, lovers, etc., evaporate as experiences hard to come by the older you get. The second the deal is signed with an employer all the qualities just named go to the employer and the worker walks on a trail of life of a series of losses, one after another. Marriage and monogamy promote the creation of a labor-force at the same time as it destroys social solidarity outside of the institution into which two individuals become progenitors for the next generation of workers.
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  5971. You can eliminate historical analogy and comparison when one or more of the actors in the history being made is not active in the present. Until then the past is dragged into the present and useful to defeat an enemy. The Neocons in Washington personify this past. The international arena of 1955 was premised on the Cold War, a history when every social revolution was with the hostility of US ruling classes. The ruling elites positioned themselves as a powerful citadel of reaction as a matter of policy, or no policy at all to maintain that posture in that history has not changed that position in Ukraine. For US ruling elites there was no region too corrupt, too criminally negligent to the interest of the people, no dictatorship too retrogressive and cruel to be denied economic, military and moral support of the leading power of the ‘free world’,---as long as it proves its allegiance to the ‘anti-socialist alliance’. With every dollar the US elites spend on defense reflected a slow down in the rates of economic growth of the socialist economies blocking a rapid increase in the living standards of its people. This is the threat of imperialism imposed on socialist economies that has weakened imperialism to become more defensive and more hostile with the growth of socialist economies and specifically the development of China. A burden on the American taxpayer’s gets heavier as imperialism becomes more hostile. Socialist economies have surpassed the capitalist nations of the west, owing to the events leading up to the end of the Cold War, the ideological and political contest against socialism has failed. See D.F. Fleming, the Origins of the Cold War, 2 volumes, 1961.
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  6003. 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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  6030. No doubt about it the expiration of unemployment benefits for 9.3 million recipients and not enough jobs plus the Delta Variant making the workplace unsafe is happening because there is not an equal proportion between the allocation of workers and the needs of capitalist society in America. In the end the pension funds fed from the springs of value creating employment will go unpaid and the distance between what we as a society need and what we can produce is so wide that longer periods of growth are needed. Moreover, the elites will simply fold their arms and say they don't know what to do! Stunted development, America is a society that is stuck! Capitalism can't allocate work, it has to force equality between two things that are not equal. Credit money becomes fictitious of the fact that you can buy ten houses for the same amount of money the bank does not care how you do it but that is ten people who can't live in a house because to a bank a house is money not a life for ten families. People in times of disasters and crisis cannot live and exist for each other as particular equivalents, not everyone is equal. Everyone's is uniquely different and so are the social needs. A disaster was made of Afghanistan because Generals and the last six presidents have a sociological deficit in understanding that country's history, culture, language, traditions and values cannot be made equal when they are unequal to start out with is how we end up inequality. The facades have broken down revealing human exploitation at its source, nothing is equal and the compulsive practice of buying and selling excluded the real differences for a long time till now when buying and selling slows down to a crawl and then to a dead stop.
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  6035. Civil society uses all the productive forces a society can make to the extent these forces have grown. Slaves did make all of America’s productive forces of which their share remains shortchanged. America was a slave society and in the post slave period former slaves and descendants built the Ford Motor Company and Detroit as a automobile capital of the nation. Black labor is the creator of all material wealth and its productive forces in America, the fruit of its labor covers a span of 5 centuries. Slave labor built Harvard University, descendants of slaves built Chicago University. The very room that council takes place is a product of black labor and the clothes they wear are products of cotton produced by black labor. It wasn’t called the world slave trade for nothing. Virtually everything was a product of slave labor. The list is endless to the amount black people have contributed to the total GDP of the US, and in many cases were better at capitalism than European settlers who came ashore as owners of money. They were so good at capitalism that ESSO (Standard Oil) Corporation was the first to hire them for marketing and development into the black market. First in Blues, Soul, Jazz, an unbelievable amount of creativity the remotest parts of the world were touched in the head by black art. Russians in Siberia, so far away, Indians and India, know how to Rap. So what do we do? A re-alignment of the wealth of society is what we do. This is a case for the International Court of Justice and South Africa is in the best position to file the motion and litigate reparations. Instead of wealth going to the descendants of settlers they go to the descendents of slaves to correct the situation and everyone not a descendant of a slave or a white slave owning settler, has equal access to America’s productive forces of society.
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  6041. To Susan Mercurio,--- Indeed, the small minority of owners of all the capitals commands the US economy. But you miss the point. Apply supply and demand to the commodity labor-power and the free market regulates its purchase and sale, I think Adam Smith's dream becomes a living nightmare for the working class. Capitalism needs free labor and free labor is sold by its owners as a commodity. Its value is determined like any commodity's value. Buyers (owners of capital) cannot force an individual seller looking for a job into a job, the seller has to be willing, not compelled, to let it go to the buyers. This throws fresh light on the subject of cutting off federal benefits to unemployed workers. People are compelled into becoming sellers in order to compel them to dispose of their labor-power voluntarily? The government intervenes on the 'free market' where buyer and seller constitutes a private exchange between two people and a voluntary act but in general all the sellers are forced into an exchange is an involuntary act. Contradictions are inherent in capitalism. Anyway, capitalism is not delivering the goods... If the working class were the owners of all the capitals, they would be owners of their own objectified labor, because for Marxists labor is everything and everything is labor, and the (transnational corporations is referred here as 'capitals"), is the particular form of human labor at this time. The world is nothing more than matter and labor and all commodities are at bottom nothing more than matter and labor shaped into a human want...f a revolutionary proletariat in the US existed it would rule over the US economy and work it for its benefit.
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  6048. The FEMA director Peter Gaynor commands 14,000 employees, several huge federal warehouses that can fill three aircraft carriers stocked with material of all types from A to Z, and 13 government agencies. In short FEMA is a standing army and compared to the US military it is small. The military is a force of 475,000 soldiers and dwarfing the size of personnel of the military is a 1 million man police force in law enforcement all equipped as we have seen on occasion when called out to quell riots full battle regalia. The federal government, therefore, has three huge standing armies. The military has at least the same material but four times the amount of all nations combined, that is 127 nations! This is what makes the US an empire. FEMA alone could outfit the entire US with a hospital system in every state making our ordinary hospital system with all its combined resources the size of the state of New Jersey and with that shrinking, overwhelmed, reduced to the size of Rhode Island. The 14,000 employees include experts of all types, engineers, doctors, medical emergency and police, workers and the army Corp of engineers. FEMA could produce material and distribute material. The production of ventilators is a piece of cake if they do not already have them stocked which they do. The society I envision is one where the needs of all citizens can be met for three generations spanning 100 years going forward and a reduced work week from 40 hours per work of a workforce of 133 million people to 20 hours per week for all 334 million and not put a dent in the quantity of material and resources the federal government commands. To give you some proof of one small fraction of this productive power see Big Bertha boring the tunnel under Seattle Washington. One machine, a giant drill is run by four operators at the helm the whole tunnel project 2 miles long employs a workforce of 800 workers. In fact, of all the parts of the society as a whole the Public has the least down to a bare minimum hand to mouth existence from lack of its rightful share of the material wealth and resources its high level of productivity creates. In my view, the priority that makes the federal government insist the Public rely on the private sector for all its needs is its persistence to be a world empire which in this day and age is doing more harm to the planet and the species as a whole. This epidemic makes me question three things about America in order that trust be restored (1) capitalism or the government's reliance on the private sector, (2) ecology and economic inequality in society, (3) public health.
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  6068.  @dejayrezme8617  Indeed, it can be classified as a socialist economy and is. "Free Market" is confused by westerners to not be an ideology but passes itself off as a theory synonymous with the exchange of products for money and the exchange of money for products (buying and selling), hence the population is divided as buyers and sellers. The 1.2 billion people in China are not divided into categories as buyers and sellers for one thing, whereas, in the US and the EU, one can be a buyer today and a seller tomorrow, i.e., Ebay. People change position but are always one category or the other category at all times. However, this is not say that buying and selling does not exist in China, it does. I have you what you need and you have what I need is trade using money. Prior to the introduction of paper-money the entire world bartered one use-value for another use-value to move products from one hand to another and were never "buyers and sellers" is as old as the invention of farming, i.e., 12000 years old. That is the short version of the historical evidence.   Capital is entirely something else. Where it comes from is another question is the study of political economics.    In free markets, democracy does not exist, the proof is the hoarding of toilet paper during this crisis, or the price gauging of medical supplies in a shortage, or when there is an over production of a stock a liquidation of cars, auctions, buy by the pallet, or to raise the price of milk the slaughter of cows. Free markets cause people to go without while others have their needs met, is not democratic.    People with more money rule over people with less money is authoritarianism. This does not exist in China, but it does in the west.    Horrifying abuses? We do not see genocide in China if that is what you mean by your hyperbole 'horrifying" but yes, there is a suppression of religious institutions and movements in China. Falun Gong, Muslims, Buddhists, evangelicals, Christians, creationists, chiliasts, are suppressed and these suppressions exist because the evidence is abundantly clear from history and in the present in places like Africa and the Middle East, Europe the US, where locusts and floods devastate the population do little or in many cases facilitate the spread of a deadly virus through religious inaction or not enough action, that religious practices do not serve the needs of the population when these influences enter into government. Israel and the oppression of Palestinians, Iran is a perfect case in point the epicenter of the coronavirus is not its priority but the proxy wars between Shiite and Sunni Muslims, Modi and the suppression of the Hindu of India  Columbia and Ecuador good examples of Christian and evangelical fundamentalist religions suppressing the native populations. The large-scale landowner- Creationists in Brazil and the destruction of the Amazon rainforest for more land, timber and cattle grazing. Historically, the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, the colonization of America by puritans and the entire history of European wars over Protestantism and Catholicism, the Roman Empire and slavery.    China has good reason to keep religion out of politics, it is a small county packed with people that it cannot afford to return to its past as a feudal religious society makes socialism ideal for its needs. Can it be perfected, of course, and it is doing all the right things that socialism in Russia did not do to avoid its collapse; China learns from other nations and incorporates what works and discards what does not work.
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  6071. Social labor is the common substance of the value of the Dollar. If the cost of all wars is one trillion per month of $500 billion in two installments, as values are always expressed relatively, that amount of cash would pay off the total student debt of the US is one example of a value equivalent because being measured is social labor in these equivalents versus the amount of labor time it takes to poduce an ounce of gold being the universal measure of value. SInce actual gold was replaced by the value of some other commodity in 1973, to back the dollar, indeed, the oil market as a whole is that commodity backing the dollar right now.  It is safe and real to say the dollar is propped up on the necessity of the exploitation of the land where oil is found and where people happen to dwell on such land. Exploitation of the commodity oil cannot take place before the people are taken off the land so the US fills the role of yanking peasants, farmers, workers, entire communities off the land, to make commercial for its exploitation of the oil laying beneath it. All of America's social labor is spent on a process of expropriation in foreign lands for foreign oil market investors is the current paradox for American working people. Tommorrow it can be another commodity market, the point being, the product of labor these commodities consist of, cannot be a commodity in the first place if our working relationships are going to be based on a conscious interaction with the material world. We have to begin producing as we are in relationship to the planet not in relationship to how much money is in the bank from the oil commodity itself. How products of labor become commodities is one problem a revolution would have to solve could be solved by changing our need for oil. We as individuals would have to go down the list of our needs that depend on oil in all its forms to ultimately change our being and way of life to help the communal lands become a thing for sale with a profit motive to outsiders and who contracts with mercenary armies to do the killing of communities, to open the land up for commerical drilling. This is one way we can help these vicitimized communities and stop blaming the victim is the other. Begin with a complete re-orientation of thinking about the world and the human species. Basically, a person can not be a non-person at the same time without the political structure of that contradiction shored up by two sets of rules is the life communities, at home and abroad, experience under siege of capitalism. Two kinds of rules two kinds of labor. Work and working are two different kinds of labor. We have to understand the dollar expresses individual work time as one kind of concrete labor and acting as social labor in the form of paper as abstract kind of labor. Every dollar spent is equal to every second worked on the factory and office floor producing these needs, the more we work for the monster the more powerful the monster becomes is the paradox of our national situation. We are accomplices in the exploitation of land abroad and complicit in the exploitation of our own labor at home.
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  6124. Can't forget the Iraq War Veterans, so angry at the liberal establishment who at the time was Joe Biden put them in harm’s way using 9/11 for a call for freedom and liberty against Sadaam Hussien and liberate Iraq. Congress went along with it hook, line and sinker. They gave Al Queda a place to fight Americans. The Vets came back destroyed, and used the only power they have to elect Trump, a spite vote against the liberal establishment. What did the left do? Nothing. What did the left do when these same vets showed up in Virginia armed to protest Northam's gun laws on MLK day 2020? Nothing. The left should have been there arm and arm with the Iraq vets. Biden was then and is now in the pocket of Raytheon Lockheed Martin. Grumman, GE, Exxon Mobil, the largest oil dealer to the Pentagon.  Biden formerly head of the arms services committee then became VP to Obama, hand-picked by Obama to initiate another war, the war we are in today, the war with the Russians to build up Ukraine. The next group of Veterans sent to war are not going to come back as close as it came with the assassination of Solemeini of Iran, because now they will be fighting entire nations in the Middle East. His America First policy puts all of Europe in the untenable position to choose between the US or Russia and China. With half of the British parliament invested in Hawei, England, France and Germany slides into a deep stagnation with Trump’s trade war on China.  As for Trump, he is the wrong man for the job. Wrong, because his path is not to deconstruct the arms industry and wrench the grip the arms industry has of our government, his path is to become an autocrat. Undo all the wrong wrong-doers prosecuted by the liberal establishment and create a fealty of the justice department. The people supporting him never went to war. An autocrat is natural to them, they are chiliasts, believers in the second coming of Christ, God, Family and Country. They are the NASCAR enthusiasts, rich, spoiled Americans, country music stars, with pro-fascist leanings.  Only Bernie opposed the Iraq War. Only Bernie opposes the misuse of the military, opposes invasions, opposes the arms industry, opposes industries with the highest carbon footprint. Vote Bernie if you are going to vote, it’s the last chance to restore America back to its original roots of American progressivism.
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  6139. What is true for class is also true for political administrations in that, each new class which puts itself forward in place of the one ruling before it, is compelled, in order to carry through its aim, to represent its interests as the common interest of all members of society. A particular class interest expressed in an idealized form. Hence, "Make America Great Again", whether it is all industry executives acting as a class or if it is Trump and Macron as individuals, their ideas have to take on a form of universality, in language sanitized that as a political program of austerity comes off as the only rational and universally valid program. The final act of the working class is its own emancipation through its own abolition as a working class. True emancipation is not about the destruction of capitalism or the capitalist class. And, religious emancipation is not a universal emancipation. The working class throws in the towel to jump in the ring and takes control over the situation as a final act, when capitalism has reached a certain point of intolerance of its exploitation of labor, that the working class can go no longer functioning to live as a class in itself, and it chooses to cease being the working class a capitalist society requires. The final act is a revolutionary act of the workers putting them in the drivers seat on a road to deconstructing the entire wage system on which capitalism rests. The final act is not a violent act, nor is it a reactionary act. Not a destructive act. Its an act of sacrifice when the proletariat is small and weak but not when it is as strong and big as in France, Britain, Germany or the US. The point is to capitalize on capital bringing workers together in combinations of industries and with this new power in greater numbers the element that exploits labor for profit has no control over the general interest of society.
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  6144. Gas and homes are the two commodities vital to the social reproduction of the working class. For working people they are use-values getting them to and from home and work. They are not vital use-values to the survival of Jamie Dimon downtown in Manhattan in Wall Street. He can work from anywhere. He is not wrong about the US economy is not in a recession; he is just not right that the prosperity is reaching everyone. He does not have to overcome space and time like ordinary working people do. Working people dream all the time about owning a power that can make them appear anywhere anytime. Freedom and mobility for Jamie is an endowment of luxury given as a gift that we in the other world cannot imagine. Gas and houses are only useful to him and those of his class as commodities. Commodities and money are the objects vital to his survival. He wants commodities to do what they do best and the laws affirm commodities have this freedom to change themselves into money. Commodities must trade places with people from maker to user automatically, a no brainer, and where money is involved in that exchange he’s involved...its like you can’t get rid of him, ever so omnipresent, he and his investors are in every pore of society capitalizing on the trillions of exchanges a day and nobody is the wiser. If the commodities were NOT trading no matter their price Jamie Dimon would be singing another tune. They change places with money supplied by the Fed because of the many wars and natural disasters happening at the same time. Consumption is high during war,--- for necessities like gas and housing. Consumption is high during and after natural disaster, floods and storms, you need more gas and more housing. Capital does very poorly when people do not have to struggle for these necessities as they are not consuming a whole lot of what capital has to sell. Conditions best for Jamie Dimon are those where consumption is high. A population in need living hand to mouth are ideal conditions for Wall Street and sometimes you have to make people needier, more materially deprived, become have-nothings, not even a home, on the street, chucked out on the curb, by causing or manufacturing some kind of crisis to get them at the point where the bear necessities is all they are making for themselves and can be kept at that material level for a long time to come is the duty of the Big Guy in charge of how much money there is in circulation tinkering with price fluctuations in the market, adjusting interests rates, prices, wages, rent, pensions, everything but stocks, bonds, annuities, are tinkered with to moderate production and circulation, Powell himself. As long as Fed chair Powell can maintain these conditions money will make more money. China steps in and makes everything that needs immediate replacement because America uses her free economic zones who are total experts in producing high quality product for a low price. You would not believe the excellence in manufacturing and supply systems in China but it is used against the American people by purposely depriving them of this economic miracle solely to enrich one segment of society downtown in Manhattan is the cause of America’s downfall.
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  6179. You are not wrong and not right Jimmy. If you consider the State investigating private capital authoritarian you are then protecting the full sway of capital into more industries as a right of private property. The point of a revolution is to de-privatize private property, socialize it to its logical end. Keep land out of the hands of private capitalists. Make industries less dependent on sale for survival. Individual right to home ownership; socialist ownership of land. I would encourage senate hearings because it would reveal to the Public the complicity between the State and Capital. Anything that educates people about the nature of their sufferings emanating from the intervention of the capitalist into their working lives, the exploitation of the labor in the factories owned by Elon Musk and others of his social class would help point the finger at the State’s own venality. Move people into a movement. I do not agree it is only about censorship or strictly about a merger between private industry and the State defining fascism, not when that censoring is a way to deflect from a particular interest which violates our humanity through the exploitation of our work, commerce before industry, profits before people, values before use-values, quantity before quality, a stand must be taken against; our production for use for industry is completely dominated by commerce (commercialism), a price tag on everything subordinates our working lives to the needs of private Capital, and in the interest of humanity, the State is the society, when society fails its obligation to be a state it has failed to eradicate that exploitation, and the clash that follows, is between a failed state dominated by oligarchs implies an emergent social class must take over the state to right its wrongs.
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  6209. Voting is not compatible with fascism, why would a state become a dominant fascist state if it can be voted out of power, that would defeat the whole purpose of total control? They have to be feeling very confident that they can hold power now on a permanent basis or be delusional. They are very close to a Constitutional Amendment that would abolish Universal Suffrage and amend the 14th and 13th amendment that defines a citizen on whatever they see fit a citizen should be defined is my hunch. Replace birthright with property qualifications as it was before the American Civil War. While the vote is still in force, you better vote like your life depends on it! It's all you got in a Representative Republic. The other way to get rid of a fascist state is by a social revolution which in America, I am certain, will entail a civil war, needless to say, 9 out of 10 people would rather have a peaceful revolution than a bloody civil war. Violence as you can see escalates. The only way to prevent fascism from reappearing in the future is to abolish the combustible engine. The basis of fascist power is force in general, but in the US, the instrument of social control and force are movable objects, e.g., your car, truck, bus, food and housing, security, these needs are met by engines producing force, great force, whether it is construction, farming or industrial activity, it is not enough to be content with taking home money, the attitude of a worker has to change about the elements, gas and oil, is their product (GNP) they let become a transportable power when it is money concentrated into the hands of a few. Its just too bad the Democrats are the only game in town -- you have to watch and stay on guard with them, considering the fascist state happened under their watch and complicity. But as Nairn said they give you democracy to stay in power themselves is better than no democracy at all.
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  6213. If mainstream media is free and you get what you pay for, then freedom has become a commodity with a price. Freedom is something the person starts out as not having and must attain in American life. That is not being free. That is a deprivation of freedom. Water is a commodity, air is a commodity; yet nobody cares to inquire what a commodity is? People are desperate, the Trump sanctions force any company doing business with Venezuela will do no business in the US. A private entity like Youtube is not going to lose the American market for Abby Martin et al. This is a case of naked self-interest unable to defy Trump. Youtube empowers bullying, not just YT, but all groups, corporations, and institutions enable a big bad mob boss attitude that typifies the 1970's. Abby Martin produces for the American market. If You tube were not a private entity, an owner of a commodity called media, the government could not censor Abby Martin through Youtube and others like her. Government is punitive to private interests to attack the general interest. Government has private capital hostage, the public might want to build an alliance with private capital to get rid of the Mob tactics of the government. Youtube would rather know what the business climate will be in the future. Under Mob rule the present and the future is a perpetual unknown variable. This is what makes mob ruling possible. If air, water, soil, food, are commodities, thought can become a commodity which is really the content of media. Commodities are man-made things, air, water, soil, does not make itself a commodity. Thought is directly a man-made thing, everything we make in reality are concept constructions of the Mind. Thought may come from nature, be in nature and develop through nature but so far no natural or animal being has evolved to be independent of the natural world and must or die make their own food, water, and air to live as the main impetus for survival. The mob mentality is so far below this level of thought, its self-centeredness holds the whole society hostage to itself.
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  6231. • The government preoccupies itself with expropriating the poorest in society as it steals not only the ideals of government from civil society but also land and wealth communities produce in their contribution of labor to the society, whether it is in the form of service to the government, or in the form of labor by some product resulting from such activity. Land Made Uninhabitable Leads to the Creation of a Sub-Class of Homeless Millions - American Refugees. • Port Arthur, Texas – 2017, Sep 27. The aftermath of Hurricane Harvey is beginning to reveal the government’s attitude to a community, a public, a citizenry, turning its back on the flood victims. FEMA is not paying out funds to flood victims, the ideology of ‘personal responsibility’ is revealing its inhumanity in the form of a Dr. Ben Carson. The land beneath may be contaminated but that does not matter for oil. No one drinks it, Mankind uses it as fuel. Nature has done the job of removing humanity off the land. Uninhabitable land that will immediately be opened up for oil extraction in the aftermath. Dr. Carson, the former republican candidate for president heads Public Housing, he facilitates the process of expropriation of a community by refusing the community to return to their domiciles in public housing, easily a land deal with the government to sell the land to big oil, is clearly in the works. People should understand the devastation of Houston is really a process of expropriation of a community. Federal evictions and the sale of land, ownership by Exxon, the expropriation is complete. • Puerto Rico, Sept 27. What is the government attitude to this community? The same attitude it demonstrates to Houston’s community facing eviction, expropriation, in the wake of a Hurricane devastation. Where is the help for these people stranded on an island who face isolation and starvation? There is none. No one comes to help. Scant news that the military, FEMA, is coming or already there cannot be proven there is a total media black out. A dire humanitarian emergency exists and the government’s attitude is more about this community’s debt to bondholders in Wall Street. Is not this land now contaminated as Houston’s land is contaminated, a hurricane rendering Puerto Rico uninhabitable? Not quite, overtime the land here is expected to recover in which case Puerto Rico will become fully gentrified and the Puerto Ricans on the island expropriated as well.
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  6237. The Warrant Squad. A warrant can be issued on anyone for any reason at any time. There isn’t a third party verification system to what is warranted. So they can do what they want and face no punishment. Instead of moving society to a higher place a modern form of bounty hunting is its answer to the problem of social repression. Slaves were hunted this way as were serfs who ran away from repressive masters. This is a sign that the State has made an environment of Terror and a war zone of the poorest neighborhoods in civil society. Hunting AWOL captives. People made into prisoners. It happens in Avenue A not in Park Avenue. America is a society where non-whites only come into contact with whites on TV, movies, theater and workplaces the last vestige of civil society. They share the same roads and sidewalks, trains and buses, planes and buildings, parks, beaches, but never do they directly socialize with each other in places that are not used for work like, bars, clubs, dances, entertainment, residences, these places are all private domains where correction is needed and where there is no interference by the State. In the days of Apartheid in South Africa the races came into contact in domestic life but never shared public spaces. In the Middle East a total wall of separation divides the races and contact with a white man comes only in the form of a police man. Apartheid social systems come in many colors and languages in all countries the world over; the problem of race separation starts from the ground up, as a defect learned in civil society, not an inherent defect of the State If there are shared spaces the separated races carry on separate functions at separate times. A warfare ready warrant squad chasing a man who chose death than be taken back into custody. I automatically want to know what the man did. He wrote his own death. Not many of us can do that. Most are too scared to write their own demise. His bravery makes him legendary. Custody must be absolutely awful, repressive, and hostile to this criminal. The Department’s Forced Investigation Unit will handle the investigation of the tryst between the deceased and the two women has a dubious tone to it. To me the deceased closed the case and the two women committed no crime; therefore, no investigation required.
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  6265. Farming, mining, construction, meatpacking, transportation, sectors where people spend most of their lives working are accelerated work processes. The acceleration of work in work places is to lower the unit price of the product by raising worker output from 8 hours work to 6 hours work makes more product in less time. Works in theory but not in practice. There are less workers working longer durations of work and are doing more intensified work to reach higher output objectives. The undercutting of other businesses with a lower price is a business strategy that harms workers. It only sets a new average price in the market. The actual process of work kills workers: the bigger share of the market by selling below the old average price and above the unit price turns the workplace into a battle zone. Heavy equipment, buildings, bridges, tankers, in every workplace across the US made unsafe with incorporated hazardous raw material into the work processes is a battle field for workers performing the jobs. Machines, automation, technology and science incorporated into a work process work people beyond the point of human endurance. Workplace hazards are never made public for fear workers would resist working conditions and put up a fight. Europe in months long worker strikes across most industries are reactions to the same business model applied by employers in the US. Workers don’t like it there why should they like it here? The public’s attention is to be kept away from the industrial war raging between the workers and the objective conditions of work in our society.
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  6309. Scott Brent is saying that if the Trump Tax Cuts do not become permanent than the owners of capital will not invest their capital in the country “...this is the single most important economic issue of the day...”, important to capital equity firms, important to the workforce bearing the burden of the crisis if the equity firms decide not to buy American, when he says; “...if we do not renew and extend these tax cuts than we ( US labor force, he means) will be facing an economic calamity.” American capitalists never use the word class in their lingo, important to pretend social class is the same thing as harmless income variations, that vary by will of the individual, while social class takes position for an assault behind the veil of income variations, well, they always refer to a particular social class (whether their own or not) with a ‘we’ or an ‘us’, ‘nation’. Terms that can be taken either way. What can be worse than a calamity, Scott? A third of the total population out of work because the owners of industry will not return to the US pending Congress and the president make tax cuts the law of the land. If this is the case than the lesson here for any party of the people is to make permanent the production facilities of the investors wherever they invest inside the US economy, so when they leave they leave without the factories. They can have the capital and tax freed profits but they can’t have the production facilities the law of the land. It would be this or a Capital Gains Tax at 90%. In the current relationship the people have with corporations certain industrial and chemical companies take more out of the communities than they put back into it, some leave communities uninhabitable. Add up the value of total losses and it exceeds the value gained in profits while profits are magnificent. Officials offer long term cuts in taxes to attract corporations but never stipulate a permanency of employment clause for the communities in those deals. The atrocities are horrible, some corporations leave communities desperate for water the greater demand for water used to make their product is the community’s demise in the form of a lesser share of clean, potable groundwater. Property values sink and communities are the losers is what is wrong with the current relationship the people have with investors and employers as a social class. Scott Brent is telling the senators in their face; his class of people will buy the commodity workers in America sell in some other nation and than point the finger at the government official to blame. Most Americans revere capitalists, emulate them, and put them on a pedestal...elect them as president. Scott has on his side the blue collar working man, woman and child for now and can sick the dog on the politician on command, for the moment...but nothing is ever permanent the chains around the neck of this dog will break loose the more agitated the dog gets.
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  6328. Wow! The world is not in a good place. All the western powers are in a state of atrophy and decay and their working classes are not content with policies ending up in cuts and unemployment. So discontent are the working people in the US, they voted a demogogue who squandered precious resources for four years and delivered a failed insurrection. He left behind a disabled economy made a few rich and did not even enrich himself, or couldn't because he was president. Presidents cannot liquidate their assets and dump it into the stock market without it becoming a emolument prosecution.  If one sector goes unsupported and business activity ceases the virus won't be the only thing spreading across other sectors causing them to cease as well. This poses a very grave and serious problem for Americans. The rubber meets the road for neoliberalism. Does this new president have the tools for a sustained recovery? Other nations are in a rut. But more importantly new industry is held and old industries are promoted further by governments end up as uneven economic development in society. You would think the American people would use their right and freedom to live in a completely different country and share the same desire as that Russian gentlemen saying its time people speak up. A completley different country...what would that look like in the US, a country that has the productive capacity to support a country where there is no poverty, material deprivation or health care and educational dificits that prohibit the development of the mind and body of people in general and not just a few oligarchs and their train of retainers. The cardinal sin America commits is de-educationalizing its population with propaganda. A completely different country...Russia has the productive capacity to support a completely different country. People are calling for their share of the economic surplus. An end to the unequal ownership of the wealth of their societies as facilitated through corrupt individuals and institutions and the relentless undemocratic control over taxes and wages by the power of accumulated money of the elites, oligarchs, monarchs, kings, princes, dictators. The beginning of a new age of the common person.
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  6341.  Fook Yuu  Speaking of poverty and education...black people are not educated in socialism and communism in America. Critical Race Theory does not cover the history of socialism in black history and neither does a-critical white history in the lay out of American history, is a giant defect in the theory. Literally, 100 years of communism in most countries in the world and the American public, black and white, are not competent in socialism. They are interested in it. Heard about it. But cannot explain or understand it. Americans do not know anything about all the changes that have happened in the socialist world since the Russian Revolution! I find this shocking. The American system of education has blocked out the American people from participating in this historic subject! The subject teaches people how to act for themselves as a social class and without it, the exploitation people will experience by capitalism is an eternal suffering and yearning against the subjective and personal exploitation of giving and never receiving. One person alone cannot bring justice into the world. Therefore, theory is of the utmost pre-eminent importance. The paradox the American people present as the first nation in all history that can create a true worker's democracy but cannot because it is educationally incompetent about socialism. Poverty in education is to me the teaching of subjects as compartmentalized and bell driven, a form of mental exploitation the Department of Education in the US, together wth the monopolistic publishers, and the higher education academics, impose on young minds a form of indoctrination disguised as education in the subject area of social sciences. As if the Department of Education is the arm of the State department reinforcing anti-communism for the last 75 years. The poverty is in the Mind. Compartmentalized education inculcates the mind with static, non-integrated, thinking, and conforms to capitalist manufacture and factory production in its routinization and standardization. Thus creating a proletariat subservient to capital and a class inequality I claim is the real issue but the root of that issue is poverty and education,---you are correct. This will be a great historical tragedy to go down as the first and only nation that does not know what a worker's democracy and socialism are?
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  6367. Right at the introduction given by this person walking the streets of Venezuela, tells you there is more democracy there than in his home country. He says the vote was divided 51% USP, 44% Opposition candidate, the balance of 5% of the Vote picked up by a “bevy of candidates”. There isn’t a bevy of candidates on the ballot for candidates running for president in the US although there are four I can think of that are running do not appear on ballots in battleground states, this tells us, the Republic for which many stand represses others from even running. This is a form of totalitarianism, not quite the democracy America thinks of itself, is it? Venezuela is a step ahead of the US in terms of democracy. But of course, admitting it takes the ability of a person to rise above their social class to see things objectively. Basically, these sore losers have an agenda much bigger than the president is why they scream, kick and rant. Rich christians have a sociological agenda for society that cannot come into being until democracy is dead. We got a window to that mission from the lips of Trump to rich christians the promise of no more elections as a fix to the problem of the poor and working classes raising their voices. Democracy opens the door to the poor and working classes once every four years. Except the Greeter at the democratic doors of democracy isn’t Miss Liberty, lighting the way, it’s a nasty, flea bitten junkyard dog, there all the time, in fact, centuries, that barks as you get closer to the gate. Like JD Vance, in trouble for his own brand of down home racist bias believes childless people are subhuman is a dog barking at people of a different persuasion.
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  6369. Right, his development is the same as millions who went right to the source as a way of making sense of the Cold War. Too much propaganda was going around then as now on all sides and making up your own mind was critical. So, why doesn't a capitalist simply end world hunger and still have billions left over? No skin off his nose considering accumulation would replace such an expense. What makes a man upon acquiring private property decide to be inhumane and can the will of a person be more powerful against the force that makes one not abolish world hunger is answered? There are many answers to this question from the right and one from the left, Marx's answer? As private property controls the individuals, as wealth, private property is forced to maintain its own existence and the existence of its opposite, the working class. Private property is the positive side of the opposition. Once you understand this dialectic and apply it to history, the Cold War, police and state repression, all the US wars are actions defending the existence of private property as wealth, in effect Americans never had a government (State) for, by and of the people, is a incredible revelation to behold. Understand the other dialectic from the position of the working class it's self-destructiveness is its maintenance as a class constantly in the midst of degradation as a revolt against that degradation', a field day for the courts, police and psychologists, both legal and illegal drugs is a revolt to which it is forced by the contradiction between its humanity and its real situation. Then the oppressed working class, the refugees, the victims of natural disasters still not recovered, the incarcerated black men in America, the subjugation of women and children to sexual violence, the deluded, the spoiled to the hilt people, the masochists, racists, bigots, pundits, priests, politicians, exists to maintain the class system and the cries of the oppressed wretched of the earth move along life as destructive social elements and private property the conservative element of the whole dialectic becomes super developed. The propertied class and the working class express the same human alienation, this is the 'something is wrong' feeling people get with capitalism.
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  6372. Vlad needs more ammo from Kim. You do realize that all that can change. The world can be a place were there are governments that are not armed. Guns and ammo and the right of guns and ammo. An international weapons bans treaty would have a positive effect on the state of the world. I agree with the governor of New Mexico. Gun ban is the right direction to go for all states. She is right the Sheriff is wrong. Here’s why: The Right of Property is a right of self-interest. As property guns have more rights than people but since guns do not have a brain and a voice of their own they need an owner to do all the talking for them. Once a person becomes the voice of a piece of property, it automatically divides people into owners and non-owners of that property and government must set limits on the freedom to be an owner or a non-owner of that property. When that property are guns and the freedom of others to live is cut short by the gun’s ability the owner/representative of the gun is held liable. The bigger question about the 2nd amendment is the question of Freedom itself as a natural right versus a political right. Owning guns is a political right, and a partial freedom not a natural right and not a total freedom and this dichotomy is what makes government a necessary evil. Government must enforce the right of each owner and non-owner to enjoy a weapon thus making a violent society and the other to enjoy a non-violent society thus making a stronger enforcer of natural rights out of the government. A ban puts all of the above out of its misery. It ends that you have to choose between two evils. A bigger government enforcer or a life cut short by a violent society. The ban offers the society and government to become not larger as an “enforcer” of laws for the objects to change hands but smaller, more sensible, leaves it to people to use reason and live with principals without feeling or being unfree is encouraged in a ban. A ban is the right direction to go for all states.
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  6385. DeSantis is the king of culture wars and unfortunately, an east or west coast Congressperson cannot legislate culture wars away if you do not like them is the legal aspect that DeSantis exploits for political gain and opportunity. He rides on the coattails of Trump in the sense that he now has the reigns of the anti-coastal elite sentiments of working class communities of Florida’s rural south, people who feel their culture is robbed by the popular cultural output of both Coasts. They hate Hollywood and the NY media. Not realizing that world culture is the market of Hollywood and NY media is selling their product is a thing that cannot be stopped without re-writing the laws of the state. The rural south and mid-west react with men like DeSantis, an updated version of George Wallace. Prentice-Hall is an East Coast Established Monopoly Corporation in the printing trade. It is associated with East Coast Academia. The Ivy Leagues and Ivy Leagues is how you enter this social class, good grades, and doors open in the Pentagon-Military-Congress. It only takes one recommendation letter from a dean of an Ivy League to enter the world of Washington East and West Coast Elites to give an idea of the comparison the average person has to go through to get a Class A job. The Elites of each industry write the history and what is taught to the children of the America’s rural and mid-western communities and families of various sectors from farming to commerce to industrial to the Children who are still property of parents as were slaves in America’s past. They are little people with no rights can be taken advantage of scrupulous politicians on the right by citing the cultural imposition they never asked for or wanted. They are not wrong and the Coastal Elites are not right is the present line-up of clashing forces. Through the exploitation of the education of children a right wing gains traction, since it is true that Academia, print-media, create stereotypes of people in rural America, and it is true rural Americans live out that stereotype i real life, is fertile ground for opportunists. It does not take much to push buttons on the shirts of Americans. Long Island republicans go duped by Santos. Funny the surnames mean the same thing, i.e, Saint. Santos is priestly looking with sweater beneath suit jacket lives out stereotype as well. Its not like this in Europe. Small rural towns in France are inventive and robust. Rural America does not have to be exclusively all pick-up truck and large scale corporations. They choose to live out a stereotype manufactured by large scale agriculture and large scale monopoly retailers that everything is one uniform culture no matter where in the country you may be and small towns do not have be made for the car. The mentality of small town politicians is not on the local cultural life of their towns and villages but on how to get ahead in the world of politics, i.e., opportunism.
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  6399. Really you are blaming capitalism. Central banks belong to a money economy and a money economy belong to a capitalist economy. Economies of competition where there is not a single object not made for sale, and if it is made for use it does not count as a value, therefore, neither does the labor expended on the darn thing count as value, the system of the more sold the bigger the capitalist is breaking down, showing signs it is not compatible developing the family as a social unit, such a society cannot operate without having a monetary system that compliments the exploitation of nature and humanity,i.e., the resources of a nation and of the people of a nation. You are really saying we have become reliant on markets for our necessaries and handed over, surrendered, ownership of the means, split off as it were from the land, tools, machinery, etc., that we cannot rely on each since the means are not in our hands. You are really saying wealth comes from labor in the case of your family alive during a pre-capitalist era, the source of wealth was the labor of all cooperating in the family. This was true for the majority of families in America before America became a capitalist society, taken over by the super rich, mostly from Europe, specifically England. Surely, such a society that buys and sells must break the family up, destroy it, in order that people can be divided into buyers and sellers. Countless stories have been written about this great social split, i.e., Old Man and the son in conflict because the son does not want the farm would rather move to the city and get a job. The Cobbler’s kids sell the store. The baker’s children gave up the baking business. Countless stories of this social hemorrhage of the family social unit. Who moves into the neighborhood of families that made something like bread, butter, clothes, lose all their businesses, a giant mega corporation to finish off the death of small business. It’s a very sneaky and subtle invasion of the family commonly using popular culture to lure the young away from the rural countryside and work in the factories of New York or London, Paris, Milan, when this all started and it happened wherever the capitalist set up their industries. You are really talking about relative value relationships of commodities when in 1945 an ounce of gold was $75.00 dollars and today the same ounce is priced at $1,110.00 dollars. What has changed is the value in commodities, less and less actual human labor, goes into the making of our products is reflected in more dollars given for the same weight of metal. This means we can build a house in 10 days but it still takes a year to extract an ounce of gold from the earth. How many houses do we have give to equal the price of gold? This is not inflation this is labor productivity going through the roof since 1945.
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  6415. Because all working Americans bear direct effect of capitalist exploitation are workers in a position to address the concerns of all humanity? Something better be done because internally the GOP has never been at its weakest point of becoming a minor party which would leave no opposition to the democrats as more of the middle of the road American defect from the GOP moving the democrats to the right and this crushing the electoral left. Some ideas of the far right are practical for workers experiencing the exploits of capital in work. Reducing government over-reach and a practical tax plan appeals to the right would appeal to workers. The GOP because of their lunacy and far right extremism are losing this middle ground, but for workers less money taken out of their paycheck is a relief for the moment. An opposition will carry this further than the democrats with a plan to empower people of their personal data, a plan to get the kids back to school, a wage-price freeze to end the pandemic and an order to make the workplace safe before moving to the larger issues, could put a working class candidate in the White House and make more progress in the second term leading to a re-election to finish the total renovation of the economy and a break away from capitalist relations of work. Progressive people have to get into those county committees and start blocking the favoritism the democrats show putting the wrong people in all the key decision making offices to run for those offices. Democratizing power and party growth starts there.
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  6439.  @brandonellis8111  That makes no sense the school is racist. The school is the institution and the institution itself is a racist institution, it exists in a racist society. Unless you think America is not a racist society then your nuts! The girl is a victim, white or black, but there are likely to be out of ten students in that school one or two black kids who's parents can afford its tuition. The black to white student social and ethnic composition of the school is racist. Socially unequally and economically unequal, thus, politically racist. It is through the high price of tuition that the racism is manifested. It is through its ideology that the school is sexist. Its religion is ideologically racist. Through the neighborhood the school serves is a racist community. All America is a segregated racist society. Look around you. Any schools like this in black neighborhoods? The girl is a victim, the discussion should be about how children become racists through victimization. People who abuse become abusers is the fate of this girl when she becomes a woman. She is being socialized by sexists and racists, teaching her through punishment, that to be a sexist and racist is acceptable; being a non-racist and non-sexist is unacceptable. I don't see your joke. In fact, the point of a school such as this is to set up a separatist society, where blacks are poor and destitute and whites are rich and privileged, the seeds of an Aparthied System planted in the mind of this girl.   Our schools in Russia do not do this to black people, in fact, not even our stores segregate. Granted our society does not have a large black population but we honor their contributions with statues of Alexander Pushkin ( a black author, poet) and they attend any state university we have, and our towns have one school for all children in that town. If a kid is black, so what, he goes to school, period. We even have black maniquins in our stores, do you? I have no idea who Kulinski is, but I'd be wary of his motives if the social relations of sexism and racism in general is not emphasized in his POV. See my point, this matter is not about the girl in particular, its about your racist and sexist society!!!!! This poor creature is growing up under an Apartheid educational regime in the name of a private school. Its a breeding ground for hatred disguised as a school. Sorry for the lengthy argument but I think the subject deserves a lengthy argument. Your friends commenting on your comment are not your friends. They also breed hatred through their language and thoughts directed toward you. The level of disrespect is astounding and embarrassing are shameless, unconsciable and illiterate people.
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  6452.  @KD-rv5uo  Americans are duped. US corporations were kicked out of Europe for its GMOs before you were born and you never heard about it. News blackout, they censor and cut you off from the world. Breakfast cereal, tortilla chips, grits, canned beer, soda, cooking oil, and packing materials....mmm. that would be Kelloggs corp., El Mirasol, Quaker Co., Beer Brewers Mfgs.,Pepsi, Coca-Cola, Mazola, just to name a few corporations...and corn goes into packing material, allegedly biodegradable but if you fish the oceans the material degrades into particles entering the ocean’s sea life that you eat. Oh and Tyson Foods who during the lockdowns behaved so decently to its managers and workers. I detect a strong odor of verbal horse manure emanating from your mouth and your ultimatum is didactic and nieve. You’d make a good Trump speech writer...just clean up the grammar. Did you ever see a 5 year old obese child weighing around 120 pounds at 3 foot 8 inches tall...its pretty daunting to glimpse at the health of that child if she make it past age 40. 1 and 3 kids ages 6 out of 43 million kids consume GMO allegedly ‘organic’ products. The short mortality of the youngsters is on your hands. The products they consumed are yours because the raw material for them is yours incorporated into your farming activity the GMOs the corporations strong armed landowning farmers to use or go bankrupt. There is your ultimatum. Assuming you are a farmer: You should have gone aggressively more public in fact, against your leaders green lighting GMO production but I guess your leaders were never around when I was young or they would have had you march down Pennsylvania Ave and side with the Europeans to adopt the same standard and practice of no-GMO farming to vanquish the American GMO Cartel. Ship is arriving too late to save a drowning witch. Good bye.
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  6453. Pence's placid personality is confirmed when he decided to shit on the first historic reunification in the Olympic ceremony of NK and SK since the Korean War. A pending historic unification occurs on an incredible footing and Pence representing Americans shat on it. The old players of that war that began in June 1950 are still around. NK, China, Russia, Japan and the US supporting SK. America surrounded by the ideological forces of fascism and communism in that part of the world tells you how little progress all these countries have made in reunifying Korea because older elites of that era are still around pushing for the divisions to last longer-- holding back the generation that wants to break them down. Koreans are coming together in a big way. Of no choice of their own the world market is pushing away the old divisions of that war to the extent that no country can function without the others involved. In 1950 Thailand did not have one machine run factory and NK did not even have a house standing in the whole country. What these countries have become far supersedes NAFTA as a concept. Trade and commerce is exponentially growing and encompasses all the nations situated on the Pacific Ring of Fire. Not a single country is self-sufficient. Palm Oil production and export alone from the plantations in Burma get processed in factories in Thailand accounts for 70% of all US consumer products. America buys more than it sells in Asia. Its trade balance is horrendous and added to it a deficit used not for renewed American industrialization but for a Washington militarization of the region. Pence spoke to the young American veteran recruits stationed in Japan not as a 'promoter of American business development', trade, commerce, without an industrial base America has no future in trade. It is a country that will rely on securing by force the needs of its country and those vets will become as forgotten as the Korean vets in their retirement.
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  6460. I am sure if you pull up a record of all my comments on line you will find a prediction I made a year or to ago as I recall it. Trump will win the election and Biden will lose it because of his support to Israel. The democrats have to raise money to hire campaign staffers in three states full time is a sign of weakness. The democratic dilemma ,----you cannot protect the working class from the very people you are taking money from,---Obama, Clinton, Biden raised more money than Trump moves that party closer to being owned by billionaires. With respect to Israel, it is not that Israel has become a filthy colonist that drives Independent voters away from the democrats. It’s the fact that democrats have a open-ended blank check for Israel and democrats are moronically convinced Israel’s way is the only way, they can’t stand up to Jewish Hubris, cannot say No to Genocide is what drives voters away from Biden, and this latest round of arms support to Israel from an earlier promise to Israel, is a roundabout continuation of the same proclivity to cave into Israel’s pressures. The middle class is sick of this and it will be the middle class who will vote Trump back into office. RFK has no chance at all. On the ballot on two states is enough to put the squeeze on democrats because as they become a minority party of billionaires the middle class is a larger social class organized by Trump than are the billionaire class organized by the democrats and the working poor and middle working class are for Trump despite what their union leadership endorses.
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  6461. "Lay bare..." synonymous to 'expose', 'reveal'. Implies economic laws are implicit or hidden. Motion as in development =, movement =, process=, in formation =, never idle, not static, not a thing in isolation. Laws that are in process and are not disclosed by its outer presentational form.  Finding such laws and where they are located in the form is the quest. Then to show how these laws develop through through its main form into other forms is science. Laws are constant...the forms are variable. Form changes =, morphology. The basis of laws of motion is matter. Matter moves. Thought is matter in movement or development. Thinking is not what we see but what we are.\We are composed of matter. Matter that is biological and chemical would make thinking a material process of the brain. No brain no consciousness! Motion =, of matter implies a substratum of life that is composed of natural elements in a variable state of existence. Such as labor is part of the element that makes itself as labor and matter into other forms of matter as another element labor consumes to produce. Matter and labor are never static elements but change Nature and nature changes the elements of production. Work to consume and consume to work. Labor makes its own work. Been doing so since the origins of humanity. This makes production not what it appears in its form and that within its present day form is contained a production of two elements operating under definite economic laws was always the case just appearing in different forms considered as stages of development. A time dimension activates the laws into making progress. Two types of time, absolute time and relative time. In every thing is a labor-time relationship. Measured by duration by length or by less length of time needed. Labor is measured not by what it is or what it makes but by duration of labor-time. Labor-time is the form of labor. labor is ruled by duration of labor-time. Labor-time is a thing not of itself but is itself=, contradiction.
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  6472. An absolute withdrawal...not after invading and causing so much damage to these societies! The right thing was to never invade Iraq in the first place but use other options to get rid of the Taliban like supporting Taliban resisters. But the US wanted to show its muscle and now 20 years later a total mess is made of the country is thrown on the laps of rival factions in Iraq to fight it out.  This should give you a sense of the apparent spiteful character of Trump not giving a dam that these countries are owed some form of restoration of normalcy before leaving. This is exactly why the US will fall, a political dictatorship of an elite presiding over a command economy uses it as a plaything of no consequence to the survival of the country. Political power is all the elite want to protect and that means using cultural issues to get your riled up and support them. They hit every topic touching the pathologies of Americans and when one hit stokes a nerve in the Public they win the White House. This is the game since 1968.  Top party leaders on the democratic side are no different in lock step with the top party officials on the right side now being led by the nose by far right nationalists. Many politicians know all of this is wrong and would vote against invasions if their political life was not held against them by top party leaders if they don't vote the party line. This resembles Soviet style communism not a democracy. Forget about you and me as far as participating in big social decisions is concerned we don't even exist for this elite but in the faceless and anonymous comment section.
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  6473. It was interesting to me to learn that there are about 97 million truckers in Canada and if you compare the number of American truckers its only a third the size. Canada’s truckers invoked a federal response when they seized the Ambassador Bridge,. If America truckers shut down Route 80, that would invoke a federal response too. Route 80 produces and trucks a 100 times more money in goods than the Ambassador Bridge transports. Loss in American wages from Rt. 80 occupied by trucks...way higher than $42 million per day in wages alone as reported from the seizure of the bridge. Wage earners on the Canadian side that lost that money still supported the truckers. I somehow doubt wage earners in America would support American truckers shutting down their main way to get to work. What got Trudeau by surprise is the State cannot move a wall of machines. The truckers had the power from day one and with a little help from friends Trudeau had mutinies in his ranks. Obviously, a parliamentary revolt against Trudeau. Biden would have invoked Marshall law, and the expanse of that Martial Law would have destroyed the lives of the truckers by rescinding their license, insurance, registration, frozen their banks accounts, levied liens or taxes against pending loans, forfeited their trucks and property, while using the military to re-open Route 80. At the moment the ranks under Biden are not about to side with truckers, at least not the military ranks on a federal highway system. But it is only a federal highway system because the federal government manages that system, technically it is a national highway system and not federal property. The truckers (are legal members of the society that owns the national highway system); legally have every right to shut it down and turn it into a 3000 mile long block chain party where all can partake and then the wages lost by not getting to work would have mattered less to people. Biden only manages that highway system; he does not own it. A court would have to exert the right of property, in particular the private property of the public, the public right to the use of property as they see fit within limits. This would bring into question the use of the military on behalf of private interests losing money to the Route 80 seizure, and further bring in to question why those money earners are receiving a value and giving nothing in return for the use the Public’s property? Could a scenario like this happen in the US?
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  6496. Louis Napoleon, Simon Bolivar, Hugo Chavez, were all military and political leaders who played a leading role in establishing a sovereign state. They were all inspired by the French Revolution of 1789, the birth of the nation-state and the rank and file of the military over which they commanded were the working classes and peasantry. ICE recruits compared to US military recruits come from different class backgrounds, while all the branches of the US military is homogenous, ICE and local enforcement are heterogenous from the same or similar class and social backgrounds. A dictatorship of the military could nearly be synonymous to a dictatorship of the proletariat because the military rank and file is all proletariat and peasant origin in Venezuela. Interestingly, the US military is all proletariat through internal divisions. There is bound to rise from history an American version of an enlightenment military leader. The three historic figures had the peasantry and the working classes on their side and staged coup de'tats instead of social revolutions. Napoleon made allies out of the working classes and peasantry to overthrow the nobility and monarchy, Bolivar used French enlightenment ideas of independence for Venezuela from Spanish rule the same way the American revolution fought independence from British rule. But their countries and culture were dynamically different and so their top down revolutions were also very different in effect. Chavez led a revolution of national sovereignty of the peasants and working classes under conditions that made it ripe for a social revolution, it was their day to establish a state that was rooted in the working classes, peasantry and poor, effectively, uniting the military with the lower social classes of society. It was time to shed colonialism in its modern form. Chavez brought enlightenment ideas to the working classes and transferred oil wealth to lift the social strata from poverty. Why this late into the 21 century, it could have happened sooner in the same sense the landed aristocracy across Latin America would have been overthrown long ago if not for American interests in cheap labor-markets and money markets in Latin America. The same reasons the Emancipation Proclamation of Lincoln is yet to be fully enforced by the central government in America to improve race relations. Apartheid was abolished in the 1990's peacefully. Power relinquished without violence. American descendants of slaves and the Venezuelans workers and peasants share a history of denial of freedom from their oppressors. 200 years has passed and to this day been colonialism in its modern forms is not formerly abolished in the US. Venezuela is beginning to erase the class differences, which might be why the middle classes become more reactionary fearing survival as a middle class, and in a process of decay.
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  6501. The working day relationship to working people in the US is presented to them as a relation between products produced. For example, GDP, growth, etc. Their total working time on the job increases beyond the limits of their physical endurance working 14 hour days and with every passing day they are further damaged mentally, spiritually, physically, is a hidden injury not reflected in the economic categories reported to them about the effects on their well-being of their working time in general. Working people forget the legal working day is 8 hours long 365 days per year. But when one worker working two jobs to make ends meet that worker’s working day has gone from 6 hour days to 12 hours days, or 8 hours to 14 hours depending on the industry they are a part of. Working time surpasses the legal limit established by law and one that working classes in the past struggled to reduce to a normal workday for working people then and now for the same reasons working people are damaged by their working time today. GDP, growth, price-wage fluctuations, are categories that ignore the labor-process that produces use-values, hence product recalls are a common occurrence, prone to internal sabotage by workers themselves, a result of the over work and general dissatisfaction in workers, and officials in government emphasize the side of the working day that produces commodities with their statistics, because commodities contain more value than it originally started with. Gives hope to people to believe there is more growth my wages should increase but that is never the case. The more they work the richer their employers become is the case and the more destitute becomes the working individual. This value side of the working day and the individual worker’s potential to produce more value for their employers is the side that rules production. The working day is controlled by the employers and the employees are no longer producing for their own well-being but are producing for the well being of those who employ them. On the other side of the working day is the class that employs them also forgot this form of exploitation breeds revolution. Your day has arrived to remind them of that revolution.
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  6502. Why not send notices to actors who appear on Fox, even the ones who are in commercials. Appear on Fox and your career is ruined. But the same goes for the other networks, are they not also party of the fake propaganda machine? Without all the play acting done by actors in network productions the news organization is defunct. I do believe that celebrities play a role in this and should also be held accountable for their role choices. I also think screenwriters and news writers should be held accountable for they write what is acceptable to network. But going after these people will ruin their lives? True, it might and some will be ruined. But it is necessary that a few corporations and individuals working for them go down to demonstrate the public is to be respected and honored not abused and treated like pure SHIT with insults and hubris. What about all the chemists employed by Novartis, or the dietitians that produce Nutrisystem, or the authors of publisher's clearinghouse? These are the people who produce for corporations, who extract the earth and from animals the raw material for their products, which in making their transportable food programs promote agribusiness, who live on tax payer subsidies through a Farm Bill that is 70 years old. Nothing is innocent, all are guilty in some way or perpetuating inequality, violence, high mortality and the low birth rate of Americans. This action is highly commendable and praiseworthy but it is wooooeeffullly not enough for the monumental task of toppling the entire social structure that is virtually a weapon against the majority of people.
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  6505. What makes western civilizations at risk of internal collapse is treating all industries the same, equal treatment under the law, treating everything we make and do as things we can measure. If it is all about measuring the wealth of our industries it cannot be about the actual work expended in these industries at the same time. We do this as a society we end up with bridge collapses or data breaches, factory explosions, train derailments and cargo vessel catastrophes on a regular basis when industries are developed not for their own sake and the work that goes on in them but are developed for their quantity will kill capitalism and democracy. The heavy emphasis on Quantity hides the mutual relations of all the industries from each other, they are unattached as it were, and they are not related to the overall performance of the society. There isn’t the planned economy in society the way that there is in the military. All industries in society are free to do their own thing, the government follows behind each industries with a broom to sweep under the rug a crisis the industry made by its own failings. America does not have a SOCIAL PLAN. Nobody knows why they are working? Better put they work but it feels like forced labor since there isn’t a connection to a social goal for the whole society. Because everything has to be treated as equal Individuals are cut off from industry and left to work out survival using their own devices is barbaric when too many are device-less. The last reason western empires will collapse will come from the psychological dilemma that everything is a commodity creates, is pure sadness. This stands in direct opposition to industries that can make long life products to reduce consumption versus making durable things with a short life span that increases consumption, again the emphasis is on quantity that never, ever produced a happy people.
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  6508.  @SkyRiver1  The quote from Gurdjieff does nothing for me ...there is no God....God is a concept humans use to measure their pain and suffering... 2000 years pass us by and because there is no evidence of a resurrection to date, the day of salvation is pushed forward into the future breathes more life into the theology rather than, dropping the idea because material evidence is not found. Theology should have been a dead philosophy with the birth of Sir Isaac Newton. But 40 million claiming the election is inauthentic is telling you that when they get into power slavery will be restored and all amendments added to the Constitution from 1876 forward will be rescinded back to make America the Rhodesia of North America, is lower than a billion people believing in some form of concept of a god while in their midst another 40 million are living in modern slavery and 24. 5 million are forced labor are mostly located in the Northern Hemisphere of the Earth the domain of the US. There is no intention to abolish the share of modern slavery in the US but every intention to allow the believers of slavery in the world to enter the US.   There is a huge difference between left and right in the US. The left believe that can fix and make equal a social system inherently unequal despite the illusion of the Age of Capitalism that all people start out as equal for all. Republicans have no such belief outside of ensuring a minority remains in control of the resources and in political power. Since both are wrong social creatures of a system that produces such mental prognostications we tend to want to believe the left is different than the right and tend to go straight into denial about how different they are to sooth, disappointments, and the suffering born from the constant inability to make tangible and concrete the true potential of each human being in society.
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  6514. No doubt the most destructive to society of all political parties had been the democratic party for not standing up to the most corrupt and conservative party the GOP is an understatement compared to what is about to be an unraveling of the social order built over the last half of the 20th century. What is worse the capitalist class are richer today than they were in the 20th and 19th century and it is their consumption, their use of higher amounts of the economic surplus, that the environment and community life is left desperate, this rich social class is to blame, ----if less of the total budget went to their welfare and benefit a budget surplus would be applied for capitalization and the production of new value added production to pay off debts and get in the black. The Federal Board is no innocent bystander to this unraveling of the old economic system when the money supply in their control is used to debase others or even its own currency to keep pace with the amount of products CEOs were pumping out entering US ports from China. Credit money and fictitious capital hits the fan. At the same time as this class of CEOs acquire higher rates of income the demand for labor-power increases but their numbers are never fully employed due to a continuous process of innovating the workplace and their work leaving a reserve army of labor on the fringes of society to a pauper’s existence as the “Homeless”. A recurring question year after year; what do we do with the homeless?”. Trump might get lucky if he taps into the right formulas and combinations to restart accumulation the way Americans had it in the 50s and 60s but it will have to be an economy that does not depend on war expenditures as a stimulus for capital investment, if he were a real dictator he could use the power of the state to force the capitalist class to invest in the US or face deportation to their nation of origin and banned from re-entering the US. This would be bring far quicker results to lower the rising tide of mass unemployment and restart accumulation but that is not how accumulation operates in a capitalist society. Unemployment is a necessity for capitalism. War is a necessity for capitalism. It operates through war if not abroad than at home, if not through politics than through economics, with iron necessity leading to inevitable results, for its own expansion.
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  6526. There is no Trump obstruction of justice and collusion of the 2016 election founded by the Mueller investigation to have been compromised by the Russians. Whether Trump has a right to claim he was absolved of all connection to the Russians he will claim it anyway as political capital, encouraging his supporters. Already the legal opposition reply to him as neither guilty or exonerated. What other way can the democrats find a smoking gun but through an investigation on Trump? Now the big thing is the state prosecution of everything Trump. Trump will come back triumphant when a republican state governor in NY pardons Trump posthumously is what I call real forward thinking when NY Subways are on the brink of dysfunction and break down for some 14 million people and it cost more to make people homeless than it does to keep them in a home. NYC and NY is a land of two separate realities where what is up is down and what is down is up, left is right and right is left, a living contradiction in terms. The lesson the Russians taught us is that we are not invulnerable to outside interference. The Russians and the Chinese have the same technology as the US, they also know how to manufacture crisis and interfere with elections if they wanted. Doing so is not consistent with other objectives the Russians and Chinese have. It is the US that was put in its place, like a child it was shown the sand box belongs to other children too, the lives of other societies, are not toys to be played with. Deliberate destabilization, controlled chaos, disaster capitalism behind the facades of many distraction campaigns that took the public's eye from the real work of libertarianizing government by abolishing the rules restraining private property, is deceit. There was another time when the Russians told the US to behave when it took sides in Syria, that it could penetrate its airspace and flew aircraft along the coastline of the Gulf of Mexico.  This is another way the elites dance with each other on the world stage.
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  6530. Here is another example, the US is not part of the international treaty for the protection of waters. In the north Pacific Ocean the discovery of cobalt on the seabed floor in this region can provide sufficient storing capacity of energy for electric machinery in several industrial sectors. The ratification of this treaty delays private sector corporations poised to exploit the ocean floor with a giant vacuums, so they will get the license to proceed from Trump undermining the treaty, the treaty is sabotaged, and start mining the cobalt. The option to opt out of treaties is a pattern. A pattern found at the local and international level. A school district can opt out of a library tax and a nation can opt out of international treaty. The exemption clause is a conservative mainstay...it is the Opt Out approach to all American policy making, that if we are not party to the treaty we do not have an obligation to keep safe the ocean floor for sea life thrive, if we choose not to pay a library tax, we do not have an obligation to promote a community of library card holders and general literacy. This is how a conservative campaigns to get elected at the local level and this is how the US conducts its foreign policy; a policy that is no policy at all. Never a commitment, never taking a stand except for its own defense. Like living with a wife that is not your wife, or a husband that is not your husband, a child of yours that is not your child; always independent like an entity outside of the family makes the family live on timorous terms the bottom of its life can be pulled out from under its feet by the actions of one person or nation. The Ruling Elites of Canada are taking the same Opt Out approach of the American conservatives in power, speeding up approval processes, etc.,the International effort to keep marine life safe is sabotaged and to quarry raw material for themselves gives what the voters want which is to keep America out. What a remarkable achievement on the part of the Canadian Ruling Elites (sarcasm) I charge them with compartmentalizing to form nationatistic treaties...they are stuck in a 1918 mentality. Rich nations are consuming the natural wealth of poor nations in the same measure as they are becoming richer from its exploitation and the social structures of mankind establish a dependency to Nature, no matter how far apart rich elites see themselves from the natural world. The human world is part of the natural world like it or not, and in the non-human natural world all species are dependent on the inherent resources of the land, whether in the form of soil, oceans, rivers, lakes. The treaties we need are the ones that lead the world to work with the natural world as two elements of one system. Treaties that mimic the natural world itself. Work in defence of species and work in offence for species life.
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  6547. the proliferation of guns throughout society is a form of attrition to reduce the size of population as people are living longer and young people are deferring family... there are fewer workers from which the employers can exploit for profits and for whom the elderly are supported. Employers do not want to share this shrinking working class expected to double their intensity of work and duration of hours to make a downturn in their profits change direction and stay high if not higher. The military needs a robust working class. They can be broke which is a match for employers, banks, landlords, merchants to keep a population unable to meet these needs without them is only for “you can’t live without us is how essential they are to the economy” a justification for existence. But you can’t train people who are not physically or mentally fit for the military. Recruits have to train commandos from other countries on how to overthrow governments that won office by popular vote. Employers would agree with the military if their manufacturing were not overseas. But since they rely on cheap labor abroad I don’t think it matters if a working class at home becomes thoroughly used up and worn down to the ground. The interests of the various institutions conflict. That black kids die more from guns than white kids happens more to blacks because gun violence happens more frequently in cities where populations are mixed and happen less frequently but with higher casualties and deaths in the suburbs. There are shrinking workforces in nearly all rich nations and more old people governments have to pay out in pensions in retirement. All nations appear to be on the descent making wars more pronounced and giving impetus to militarism.
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  6572. My goodness, the American people who are struggling day to day, will never see the the light of a better day with political characters dominating the political field. Really Mr. Trump, your organization has been hacked can’t be more important than the people you wish to lead. If your political enemies is the biggest issue with you than where will you take the country, off a cliff? The nation state and the market economy are becoming barriers to a greater wealth for us all. As a man who is running for president you are sure making a national platform about yourself. Several big southern coastal towns have been completely submerged by Hurricane Debbie. Sunk! This means people cannot live in them anymore. Have you nothing to say about that? What a pitiful state of affairs, a national personality that has nothing to say about the nation. I think the reason one runs for president is to put their own private interests aside and deal with interests the public is dealing with on a day to day basis, they look to a president to help solve. And that is not all, there is a myriad of social problems you could be putting ahead of your organization while you are on the lectern. Your voice is your only power and it is waning. You deviate too much. You will never change the course of history Mr. Trump. Damage is done, too little too late. Turning to credit to save our lives is a bankers alternative that is not going to cut it. You add to the days of struggle we no longer want by whining. With no solutions to the real plight of Americans you are in the way! The world plunges deeper into a crisis, inflation, a more dire jobs report, homelessness, genocide, nuclear war,---you have nothing to say about these things. We cannot look to you for answers.
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  6583. First of all, Hillary has no knowledge of the history of technological warfare to know that the only reason nuclear weapons are brought on to the battlefield is to hit a target that cannot be struck with pinpoint accurate missiles, a 50 kiloton nuke would do the job even it missed the target by 100 miles. The other thing Hillary does not seem to have a handle on or is concealing; replenishing forces are not there in Ukraine. The casualties cannot be replaced by Ukrainians as the population is only about 63 million people. That is not the case with Russia who already replaced their casualties and have many ethnic populations in Russia that have always formed a part of the Russian military. Then Hillary cannot seem to talk about the fact that western forces cannot be snuck into Ukraine without detection by the Russian. The Russians have the same satellite surveillance systems we have. If an advance battalion of western forces goes in Ukraine that constitutes a war with Russia, indicating to me that Hillary as an insider in Washington, should be telling us as a private citizen that there are people in the White House who want a war with Russia and their reasons are not for a struggle between democracy and autocracy. As a private citizens she has an obligation to reveal what and who in our government wants a final confrontation with Russia and to what end. Then the matter of low intensity nuclear warfare of which Russia has a sufficient amount places the American people in the center of nucelar fallout and nucelar winter should be concerning enough of a motive for the truth. She could have been telling us that Ukraine is right now a country operating in the dark. Russians took out a main power grid. Showed us some empathy for those people but I did not get sense she even cares. Should could have been telling us how this war can end but I get the sense that war to her is essential for not going in that direction she was after all, Secretary of State, and that is the office of the experts in diplomacy? Yet she never mentions the word diplomacy.
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  6602. Incredible!. The actual users of the tools of the refineries, the doers have nothing whatsoever to do with the equipment. Its not their's! Its private property and as the property of the corporation the tools take on an entity to themselves to which workers say; "i don't know...you'd have to ask the company that question, I just work here".  Workers are still indifferent to their relationship with the means of production but the means of production are not indifferent to the labor-process. Every second it gets the MPs is sucking up the energy of some millions of poor slobs in the factory floor. Chopping off arms, cutting fingers, posioning lungs, causing hearing loss, blindness, loss of physical, emotional, social well being, and worse of all breeding a place so indifferent of any sociality that can drive a person to kill their fellow employees and blow up the boss in the workplace. This is how production takes place in America. Machinery, technology, running constantly, workers using the machinery and technology of non-workers, and the science behind it has it running indefintely violates the physical limits of human endurance to overwork. We are controlled by the labor-process and the process is an independent entity shaping our material world and social life. Working takes on an automatic reality outside of the workers as duration. The clock is used to measure working duration to sustain the livlihoods of non-workers. It is impossible to cultivate conscientiousness and solidarity in a workplace that uses working time to crush any form of working class consciousness. When workers are working with scientific technology the best interest of society is not in there hands, to assume responsibility for, legally workers will tell you; the CEO gets paid the big bucks to assume responsibility to not harm society. This is just another affirmation the workers are not yet ready to assume responsibility much less begin to act for their own share of the economic surplus.
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  6603. All of this is a culmination of what began in the US economy in the 90s, the tendency to centralize capitals through competition and credit. Bankruptcies facilitated this concentration of capitals is how larger individual capitals took over businesses ...still occurs, but now, the competition between the US and China amplifies this contradiction. Only recently has labor showed signs of agitation, strikes. coming back from a long period of economic blows. People experienced 45 years of indignities in the workplace. Right to Work legislation threw the labor movement back a half century. A raid in the name of something else on social security would be the final death blow to the American working class. This would mean defeat no retirement at all. At that point the conditions of the American working class would appear as destitute as the British working class was at the run of the 20th century, they would become more destitute. Weak GDP no revenues, a debt leaving too little for social spending. A nation were there is no prosperity for more than the ones who already are its usurpers. Inflation, mortgage, rates, insurance, prices, rents, taxes, all going up in cost is not enriching the person doing the work! These incomes are enriching landlords, banks, merchants and state officials, they are the ones who gain from everyone else’s loss. These general commodities, which happen to be life-giving commodities, are higher in cost and inaccessible to working people does more damage than a side effect of different income levels across the population; the above named social groups would be losers of the wealth created if political pressure to get people to work longer fails, they would resort to force, condone, turn a blind eye to it, before losing any share of the gravy train they ride to the people who proven over and over again are the real producers of wealth..
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  6613. It is true take charge of your fate. The form of property Americans only know for the whole of their lives, rich or poor, middle or outcast, from cradle to grave, is the individual form of private property. The individual form of private property promotes an ideology of individualism. Individualism for the many or what is the same thing the condition of millions of individual private property owners promotes a class consciousness of the rich. The rich are united and the working classes are disunited because individualism works to destroy or crush the development of working class consciousness and class struggle giving room and latitude for the rich to act in their interest as a social class in that class struggle. The less critical thinkers get taken in by the glorified illusions. The role of ideology is the conceal the motives to exploit all the workers at the same time. This is the only way to get rich. Exploiting a crew or one worker at a time does not make you rich. Riches are created when the entire class of workers are exploited simultaneously. These are the motives of the supervisory functions of capitalism to assert its control over any resistance from workers and to bring forward in them the cooperation and power of labor-power,---this is how a man like Bill Gates dominates the labor-process. Workers are given more responsibility in “bossing” other workers and bosses effectively create a new division in the working class but it is through the common engagement among workers that workers end up doing the detail work in the overall process. It is here where workers need to be conscious workers toward each other...as people who know how to encourage and make connections to change conditions without ridicule and insult. This is how people in the working class take charge of their fate.
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  6614. The system is not an object or a thing, that breaks or is breakable, nor broken, its a two-sided system so that it is never ever fixed and never ever broken, its a social relation of classes separating themselves from each other while in a constant state of tension. It's Mind Games, played through the instrumentality of the State to subordinate the People. Mass migration is necessary for the system's survival. Asylum seekers enter and do not leave. They will become a workforce under arms and guard. Its a system that doubles as a value creating system. Here is your cheap labor source the executives clamor for. If the system is broken for you it is fixed for someone else so that the person it is broken for ends up producing for life value for the person it is fixed for and, conversely, if the system works for you, it does not change the fact that the whole system is split into two sides, one side economic the other side social, the economic side with a new composition of a forced labor force on the inside and a civil working class on the outside, up against the class character of the State. The point here is this; intervals where the tension among social classes are more pronounced than in other intervals, is illusive. Its not about the degrees. Its about each new crisis becomes more universal...finally causing a social revolution as never dreamt of by any school of wisdom. Unfolding before your eyes is a class struggle of titanic global proportions. Class interests are becoming more blatant and apparent based on the motives and actions of the State. One class is aiming for absolute dominance which entails the subordination of all working people into a state of permanent need. Labor should be labor in a sane society not a yardstick for how much wealth can be extracted from a human being. But also a reformation of the total labor force in America is in process, there are two labor-forces now, thanks to both the mainstream political parties; one incarcerated and the other free in civil society. In effect, we have unfree labor and free labor on top of 'unpaid labor' the economists proved is the bottom of existence of the entire social structure founded long ago in the beginning of capitalism. It all appears as swindle, crime, corruption, killings, tyranny, deportation, incarceration, separation, on the negative side of the dialectic, and this working class seems directed by a principal of solidarity to fight against it, is spot on. Bravismo il proletari! Moy bien. It will be necessary that a working class, 143 million total, stand united on the principal of solidarity and lay down the LAW, its first big law of the land, to overcome the ambition from any source or place in society, the aim to control humanity=society=people through the necessaries of life and the total economic surplus. That is the only it needs for a true affluent society given the present level of material wealth in America. Whatever new social organizations are born and emerge from this titanic world conflict between capitalist rivals, who rules the world's working class, the first rule will be the prevention of the necessaries of life from becoming private property. This would only be logical since the necessaries of life are by empirical fact, social products, made by many, not one, the power of social labor, and economic planning not chance or causality has to allocate resources in accordance to what Planet Earth needs to recover, replenish, and for the species to survive within the natural world.
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  6623. Policing is the problem not the Cops. You can have a slew of radical judges that send any repeat offender to Devil’s island for life and that still will NOT fix the problem. Recidivism is a weapon to use for elections is the problem. On an off election season heinous criminals are let go and politicians use their rap sheet to scare voters to vote for them blaming the opposition. This was invented by a CIA man George Bush Sr., if anyone remembers the Willy Horton Ad he used to get elected. The fundamental problem is that neither the latte City Council crowd or the Cops, and this is true in places like Charlottesville Virginia, all City Councils deviate from the supreme concept of a civil society; that the whole society exists only to guarantee each individual the preservation of their person, rights and property. All of them get elected on some variation of the George Bush Sr., propaganda theme and violate this concept in practice. Rank and file Cops and the Citizenry are also a citizenry, thus ”recidivism” is a threat to them both. A Cop or a Citizen would never buy a house in the Bronx knowing their property can become a hospice site for migrants or some crook can transfer a title of ownership of my property to them and later sell it from under me and I would not a buy a house knowing my property can be lit on fire by some white nationalists in Virginia but I would buy property in both places if I knew the whole society was safe and free of threats. The Bush Family ruined your country.
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  6625. This "Left" are a faux left, not a real left. Clinton, Obama, Sanders, etc., are reformists not leftists. Middle and rural America are conditioned by media to believe reformists working within the framework of a constitutional republic are leftists. Sorry folks that is not left at all. Former president of France, Hollande, a leader of the socialist party is not left. Hollande is a reformist, particularly one who hates the working classes, he is more old bourgeois in attitude than the person who beat him. Macron is far right and anti-working class compared to the American version of left and right France elected a Trump. From a French working class view point having shut down the economy in a struggle over pensions, and working conditions, and health and education cuts, a struggle that has lasted now two months, two general strikes, total railway shut down and a real possible overthrow of his government by a new challenger, Macron is a libertarian free trade advocate whom big industry supports. The real left would never abandon the working class or betray it like the reformists who pose as, and are labeled falsely as left, by corporate media, particularly around election cycles, when the opportunism glares at you telling the working class a bald face lie for election purposes only is seen by those whose eyes are wide open. But to the blind, they appear as salt of the earth people. Sanders considered to be on the left and is an independent within the party and as attached to the party of reformists, he comes no where near Brazil's Lulu as a leftist and the workers party he formed. These fallacies cloud the minds of the American working class and, certainly help to divided this social class with effectiveness by corporate media, leaving them with no reference point of what a leftists is? For example, if alive today JFK by today's standards of what left and right is, would stand far left as a Marxist in the political spectrum. This is how far right the country has moved and far the pendulum has swung right. Another fallacy generated by the American working class themselves is the misunderstanding of what the accumulation of capital is, its economic function, and how it appears in society. That it is capital that requires a social organization to realize itself as more capital. Corruption and chaos appears to most Americans as defects of the personality, a person subject to influence of money, and not as the true nature of the business of accumulating capital. Accumulation of wealth appears as separate process from the social corruption and chaos which are the tools of the trade. To accumulate capital through oil, minerals, and gas is to dispossess people through war or free property and persons up for commercial exploitation through reform. Oil, minerals, coal, gas are not the only industries capable of accumulating capital, any commodity manufactured or grown on the soil and one that sells accumulates capital for its owner, i.e., guns, food, diamonds, sugar, coffee, soy, and so on. Lastly, labor is the source of capital and its accumulation, without it, there is no wealth. Currently, jobs added a 1.1% increase this month April 2018. GDP at 2%. Compared to the damage done by the 2008 crash, these figures are an atrocity, the capital accumulated in this cycle went straight into the hands of big industry and not the general economy, reflecting the fact that capital is employing labor not inside the US but still commodities are labeled where labor is cheap and in big supply, namely, China and parts of Latin America, Asia. If big industry loses this source, kills NAFTA, or TTP, America is as good as dead.
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  6648. When Trump calls the government political elite "Scumbags" he is not all wrong. The US government is dominated by a provincial minority. Easy targets for street smart people like Trump. Plus, their policies are failures to everyone else because they only work for that provincial minority. He gets that. The rank and file of his support are angry people, resentful for the economic losses endured, were thrown into the dirty world of poverty in some cases. This makes the established ruling minority easy targets for political rage.  Compared to losing jobs and industry being called a scumbag is mild for the people who got stripped of their productivity and prosperity when corporations were allowed to get too big to fail. This meant the democrats dared not take away any defense industry funding because industry and jobs are political in America that they became big centers for incomes and jobs. When they were free to export production and US job overseas annihilated the industrial working class. The day industry and jobs are just industry and jobs, not political capital, will be the day this social rage and vitriol will disappear, when capital and labor rejoin again. I can't blame it all on the privincial minority that governs America as its ruling class. A provincial minority are a product of history too, of American prosperity. They made their money and wealth in the same economy most people lost their money and wealth. It wasn't smarts, that made them rich, it was inheritance.
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  6650. There are 45 million mainland Americans who can barely afford the necessities of life, calling for them to ditch their sellout politicians and fight for independence from the American Empire would be a useless piece of advise. A sound person would encourage statehood for the island to ensure material needs are never deprived by the actions of the State and worry about revolution later. No food, medicine, home, raw materials in place to support life the population will not, because they cannot, ponder revolution or independence. It would be more constructive for Puerto Ricans and the 45 million poor to become a social power in King's Poor People's Campaign. Once a social power than theory is acquired. People on the Left come out supporting revolution as long as it is not their own are not authentic revolutionaries. A genuine Left uses revolutionary theory to intersect with a material force, practical applications, for a total transformation. King's Poor People Campaign is one such example more revolutionary than anything said or done by the Left. The campaign highlights poverty, a universal call for the poor to be freed like the other social classes have been freed from the over reach of the the State. It is the last social class in society still forced by the State to pay taxes on their labor. The campaign commands dignity and respect to the poor and working poor while they take on this monumental task of revolutionizing themselves, using their social power to free themselves from the State, to transform what the state cannot transform, society itself. King's Poor Peoples' Campaign is genuine to the American question as a struggle tool. It addresses the conditions that exclude a racial majority, and built into it is a non-violent and legitimate, perfectly legal, avenue for revolutionary theory organized into a struggle for dignity as away to abolish the poverty in general in society. Being poor is the fashion today, a universal quality of capitalist social life, and the class struggle is the classroom, where poverty is connected by race to the class structure. Naomi Klien said: "Saying No is Not Enough!", it is not enough that thought, consciousness, theory, should seek to realize itself; reality must strive toward thought to reach its highest form of expression in revolution itself. If not than 45 million poor souls swell to 50, 60, 70, and so on millions more in a war of economic attrition.
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  6691. This is a fight among whites more than it is a fight for people of color against racists. What people of color outside the US will do is make sure they are respected and kill any white person who is in particular American but of European white descent typical of most Latin American countries where whites are the least oppressed and the most privileged. Assume all people of color did not exist in the US the remaining non-racist whites must submit to the conditions of a racist society under a Trump fascist state. The rest of the world is color but the US would be homogeneously white. Its an absurd thought but just play with the idea for a minute and bring it to its logical conclusion. Take away the color divisions the philosophical differences between fascism and non-fascist whites is the next phase toward the acquisition of total power. If Trump were able to homogenize America like milk his next problem comes from his own kind who do not think at all like him. Just flat out disagree, too independent to be submissive. A fascist state cannot exist with an internal opposition. It must annihilate it. Trump will have to transform the Judiciary into Trump lackeys and use the power of the State, i.e, the military to round up white people and rehash the quarantines and concentration camps of the Nazis without the holocaust but, instead, be condemned to a caste system. As "Untouchables" a political opposition is stamped out. Whites who cannot find it in their hearts to hate people of color on the basis of a false ideology are going to have to finish the job of eradicating fascism. Oligarchy leads to revolution. Revolutions always find the answer in the problem and Capitalism and fascism historically and continue obviously, to exists side by side each other, makes capitalism the problem. The only choice left for non-fascist whites is socialism or anarchism in opposing fascism. In other words, Donald Trump is provoking his own revolution by becoming his own oligarchy and in the process creating a caste system for a segment of society that cannot conform to fascist ideology. This is why the quality of life in America is utterly a mundane existence for its population to get people to resist less and adjust without a fight to a life of a second class citizen. A segment of society without political and economic rights is newly formed and gradually more people fall into its abyss. In a real sense for white people, the rise of Trump's racism and fascism is a return to the unfinished business of Europe's class struggles between socialism and capitalism. I see fascism as an evil imported from Europe just as the founding fathers saw slavery as an evil import from Europe. They thought wrong when they thought slavery would die out eventually in the Americas without banishing or outlawing the slave-holders. Crushing the economic order slavery stood. America would never have been a host to slave holders had the first Continental Congress recognized slaves as freemen. Fascism is a European phenomenon and never had roots in the Americas until the Americas were colonized. A Trumpian society can only lead to a process of elimination of non-racist whites as the only way to annihilate opposition. Poor whites and rich whites, white liberals, socialists, non-christians, atheists, agnostics, buddhists, hinduists, white muslims, face indefinite persecution. What would his administration do with native Americans? In effect, the only power that can overcome this nightmare is a mass revolution or a long and protracted struggle among white people. America's new class battles would like like the struggles Ireland fought with Britain, that spent three generations that only now has come to some peaceful resolution. For a European to come to America today would be like stepping back into a time their own country was in the throes of feudalism and monarchy.
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  6693. I cannot believe how dumb and out of touch the governor of Nevada is. He issued a state of emergency prematurely. He manipulated the masses to buy fuel when fuel was not in short supply. The governor precipitated a panic. A gas company investigates a leak that shuts down gas lines to Nevada was a wise move by the company. Multiple state gas facilities are at his disposal to open to the public and can be refilled and charged back to the gas company. The governor has the means in his hands. But he lost his chance to go down in history as a new kind of politician, commend the gas company and explain to the public what is going on, buy state gas until the leak is fixed. However not the man of action of historical significance he is the pen he thinks is mightier than the sword and he writes an Order. He says “Don’t Panic Buy”, in so many words. What do people do? They buy in a panic. Governor is unable to read the ripples and currents in the vast ocean of the society he rules over and how to connect with his subjects to follow a plan. Exactly what America needs a Plan, it needs a planned national life, everyone who says to another with disgust “Get a Life” live life in a society that has no life without a planned economy. No national or state direction, no goals, no objectives. Just sit there and be a tool in a chair in an office describes the full range of politicians in America. Its okay to be unplanned yourself but an economy needs a plan. The Public, so jittery, nervous, fearful, feeling insecure, is ready for a Plan,-- see how they fly given how quickly they jumped to buy fuel. The governor likely had good intentions. He likely meant safety is best but an insecure population reads emergency orders as a crisis. Governor is not in touch with the world around him. Actual conditions say another thing. Fuel is not the problem the leak in the pipeline is the problem. The public assumes the leak will explode and the whole dam system will collapse stranding millions with out transportation because the governor could not explain the leak in the same way the Pentagon cannot explain a balloon from all the scraps they created when they blew it up. Dumb.
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  6696. Economies are integrated with China’s economy that European and NATO allies would lose political power if they went along with an American plan to punish China. They have more to lose from a slow down of the Chinese economy. That would entail the end of the Euro and the Dollar subjugating all the western European allies as the only way to offset the loss. In other words the American tax payer will fund what it costs Europe to live and Brussels won’t be calling the shots anymore it would be the US World Bank. But what Europe wants appears to be a matter of indifference to the US State Department, since our allies are also competitors for a share of the world market. The US position in so many deeds is; the world economy is not big enough for two super powers. Europe will have to deal with a slow down in the Chinese economy by tightening the belt and cut social spending, privatize more to generate what a recession and inflation is eroding in real wages for its working classes. European working masses are not going to take this pill lying down. Not from a nation they see is a competitor to them in the world market. The tendencies on the ground are nationalistic as a way of defending themselves from economic blows if they stay in the EU. From Portugal, Spain, Italy, Greece, Africa, go another direction, rapid shifts, in world production. New states want to come into the EU as way entering the west, changing who produces what, when and where. Asia and the great mass of billions of people between India and China total human production will deplete natural resources faster than Mother Nature can replace them.
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  6711. Capitalists are emulated by the working class and held in high esteem by society because the real economic surplus is obscured by the existence of buyers and sellers. Before the Cold War the market demonstrated to people how hard it is to sell billions of goods to make billions more in dollars by positioning buyers and sellers. But after the Cold war, the market has many cartel monopolies and these drive the economy into a ditch. Fewer companies own money the majority use credit capital and cash advances, they were buyers forced to become sellers of their businesses repetitively, and larger capitals buy smaller capitals. This is the end stages of monopoly capitalists; a society of fewer banks in the business of banking, a society with fewer industries in the business of industry, a society with less buyers in the business of buying, and so on, and the reserve capital of banks mandated to have on hand in the event of a crash are actions of withholding money from getting into the hands of other companies for expansion, this is Hoarding. Monopoly capitalism becomes too costly for the planet’s material resources and too high a cost for the working class in a deeper level of material and social deprivation. It’s basically a Decline of Monopoly Capitalism the rationalists are denying to themselves. These are tendencies really inclusive of the last stages of monopoly capitalism, but not of, capitalism itself, for that would entail the working class take on a self-emancipation project not for the dissolution of government but for the dissolution of itself as a working class. Only than will capitalism as a mode of production would cease to exist. People have to cease selling their labor-power to capitalists which is not the same thing as desiring to work, Work but not for Sale, ----for capitalism to disappear from the face of the earth.
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  6718. Kurt hit the nail on the head about a class of media public opinion manipulators when he said: “That is why they are called the Intercept...”. They are what Noam Chomsky calls the manufacturers of consent, a term that mystifies what they really are as a propaganda arm for a dominant political class. The American people should debate the democratic reaction to the measure of the Freedom Caucus; why they agreed to force the vote on Medicare 4 All and didn’t? It would be a discussion about the working class are left with no property at all except for that which the workers bear in their own personal individuality. It would be about how all the work done by work people were once connected and guided by trade and commerce. When it was clear where tanning leather, saddle making, carriage making, shoe making, whips, bags, gloves, where one industry ended another started all connected to land, ranching and animal farming. All this was lost when industries were taken over for the production of commodities by corporations and now every trade and industry, work and employment, lost quality in favor of quantity, in the amount they produce, and each corporation knows how much to produce through price fluctuations on the world market. Market is down less work for you today; market is high you are overworked. The work never striking a balance between intensity and duration in the workplace. Sheer tyranny of the market and no democracy at work. It would be a discussion about work people losing control of productive industries through democratic policies favoring corporations and disfavoring America’s working class.
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  6721. I’m convince Capitalism in the 21st Century is possible only in the form of slavery for all humanity. That if you want the good life you must be a partner as exploiter of other people’s labor. Close to a third of the world’s population lives in some form of slavery. A real indication that too many are obsessed with becoming rich that these crimes against humanity are so high in black market economies unsanctioned by the State. People as prisoners of war, as convicts, refugees, migrants, kidnapped, abducted, orphaned children and women in slave relations, trafficking of minors and adults to work in factories and fields in North America...assess it better than being what they were...they choose slavery...over deportation... just incredible how entrenched slavery is to the capitalist system of production. Slavery in private mercenary armies. Slavery in terror organizations. Work performed against the will of an individual is a form of slavery millions of people experience on a daily basis. Slavery creeped in...as the real working people were made by their employers to be so occupied with their necessary work there was no time left for the working person tog get involved and follow politics or the common affairs of society and the slave owning class never sat on their laurels to take advantage of the masses not looking. They invaded the working class with religion and family values, got into the affairs of state, and the legal system, the arts, and sciences, flipped everything on its head, polarize any opposition as an enemy...all to impose a greater burden of work on the working masses.
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  6731. 4 parties likely to vote No Confidence. Will the government fall? Even ranks within the Republican party will vote against the bill. Unions urge the working classes to be calm. Heavy street action and confrontations is making a real mess. Do the protests pose a threat to the government? Yes, or No. The government is under pressure...but will it fall is not answered? Who can predict. Why is Macron bent on attacking the retirement system? Good question. Associated with the retirement system is the working day to which employer and employees are brought together contribute a value to society as productive only when together and not apart. One side no longer wants to be partnered with labor in production the sentiment they no longer want to make this contribution and by extending the retirement age they extend the working day. A worker does not retire at 6 pm they now retire at 8 pm closer to the hour of the end of the natural lives while the two additional hours are given for nothing, mind you, to the the whole class of employers. The retirement battle is a matter of a fight between one class against another class dragging society down with it. Will the government of Macron fall, it could and will if this keeps up. A cabal of capitalists Macron is representing as its leader have a profit interest in extending the retirement age as a motive. The legislation on the floors of many European Parliaments and in Congress serve the same cabal. A vote of no confidence is the surest way the government of Macron will not fall. But he isn’t worth saving is the problem. France is the weakest link in the whole capitalist chain thanks to him is directly concerning to the rest of the nations stuck together through NATO and the EU involved in a war against Russia. Macron is making it more real that France will leave NATO; the anger of the masses is not only about the retirement age. The spread of mass revolt is under reported in the US for this reason. Germany the strongest link in the chain but no matter to the International cabal of capitalists all working in lock step that after all anti-working class laws are in place this cabal will crush government ending the Age of Constitutional Republics. In effect a pro-slavery rebellion of a Capitalist Class. Unions have a little more of a cushion and protection than do the rest of the working classes they have more to be conservative about compared to non-union workers who have nothing to lose and more of them are willing to cut the chain, and strike and take down government(s) for what they have become in the name of humanity.
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  6754. I would not take my cues from Nader, in reality the world of the financial elites of America are coming to an end but the Elites think it is the World that is coming an end. Finance Capital is its own enemy. America’s Balance and Payments and De-dollarization. Basically, the only reason another country would trade with the Dollar is because it is backed by the Atomic Bomb. This has the world hostage from which nations struggle to break free. And break free they will. BRIC nations are doing what England and France had done in the 17th century that is, they wanted to create new forms of income that were not inherently exploitative and break free from the bonds of feudalism. Read the history of Classical Economy. BRIC nations do not have the benefit of this history of classical economy to develop new forms of income as a guide to a new economic order, they are inventing as they go along with one guide line. The error of the ways of Stalinism are the guard rails. America has this history and discards it as trash. Shamelessly. And instead, creates an economy that is only good for the financial empire that speeds up a De-Industrialization. The rich do not make their money by investing in factories in Wisconsin or in New York. All this is gone. It is the reason America is behind in its chip industry and the investment is not GE’s capital or Microsoft, etc., the investment is borrowed money by the government. Put this next to all the military basis America has and the country will never pay off what it borrowed, the chip factories in Texas will be starved for new infusions of capital in the future. Yet there is more...
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  6759. Neom is a prize-fighter for middle class capitalism, keeping the middle class alive in her state. Doubtless to me the commentary by Cohen understands that aspect of the rebellious nature of the middle class. The ones who stormed the US Capitol. In a study of the participants arrested for the insurrection numbering around 700 thus far showed the were more middle class and mid aged professionals, ex-marines, than they were young Proud Boys willing to decapitate Pence's head.  Shut the state down and all the small business owners go out of business, a governor following the science would be the death knell of the middle class. You cannot fight off a pandemic and run a business at the same time. If in America the business is the subject than that makes the human being the object of he subject. Eveything you do must be done for the continuation of the business. The choice is death by a virus or by economic strangulation. Noem would rather see people die than businesses die. Nobody is open and honest that this is the reality. Neom found science denial to use as a cop out. But this choice is shown through in the willingness of a social class to overthrow the government, desperation, and that nobody appears wlling to talk about this desperation in middle class America, leading straight to a decline. What would be the decline for them. Decline will look like what it looks for the working class, $7.50 an hour. NY and California governors are governors with very large industries and corporations in them crushing small business decimated by order of their governors in followng the science. Is it any wonder that the career of Cuomo would be under attack? How many middle class businesses across the state were decimated for following his order of the science. I bet he did not expect Trump to not come through with PPEs and vents when he decided to follow the science. Warning signs were there and Cuomo did not pay attention to the details. Capt. Crozier of the USS Theodore Roosevelt blew the whistle the virus was real and got fired. In retrospect, capitalism in the liberal states weaponizes science against the economic livlihood of rural and republican states. Farmers out there supported Trump's tax war wth China suffered and made sacrifices to Trump where he did not deliver. That'a fault of their own. But the regular standard issue of the democratic party has not done anythng for them in decades, so why not support Trump? I think with Biden we are back to square one and so it appears to farmers liberals ignore this sacrifice imposing a shut down that you are supposed to survive through on your own. Nobody can get their hair and nails done and the only ones who can work are people who whose subect of work is an object like a plumber, carpenter, or a hamburger is not found to spread a deadly virus, these people can work. But they cannot work from home when they earn a living from a brick and morter retail business. If there isn't a vaccine in development soon the depression already ravaging lives will completely sink the middle class.
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  6763. A labor struggle over the vaccine mandate intensifies around the country. Some states side with workers and other states side with employers. Some employers side with mandates and others do not. The Supreme Court did not side wth the workers but delivered a punch to the chin for workers and victory round for employers in Maine. The human body and their minds (free will) still belongs to the worker before and after work not during 9 to 5 is the opinion of the court. Depends on which body, male or female? Not all laws treat the body and mind as organically one human organism in the American legal system. But sociologically speaking... Worker resistance to the vaccine is coming from the same place workers in the garment district destroyed the sewing machine when that was invented. The innovation replaced workers! The workers threw the sewing machine out of the factory windows and factions of municipal workers are throwing out the vaccine. This year’s workers resistance is coming from a biological innovation intended to make work safer is shoved down their throats! The indignity that its not your mind ordering your body to take the vaccine its some one else’s mind ordering your body around agitates worker resistance among municipal cops, fireman, teachers, transit and sanitation workers. The vaccine mandate opens a deep wound of the larger problem of powerlessness in workers of their own working conditions of employment and the workplace itself that resistance is developing and frustrations with the lack of control lead individuals to killing of co-workers and managers. This struggle intensifies and develops into a worker’s struggle for control and dignity over their lives and objective conditions.
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  6772. Peter Navarro a White House Trade Advisor to the President is one of these people who sees the main benefit to workers that will come from the wealth American steel and aluminum producers will generate from a tariff war is Jobs! This is what the American needs and wants! When they get the jobs they will produce and employers will increase the duration of work to produce even more of a surplus from their individual associates of the firm. Employers are promised non-government interference in their production. Capital will reconstitute its position in the world market and prosperity resumes. Problem with this is that it will be a long way to go for prosperity to arrive as recessions have lengthen in time not shortened. Periods of prosperity come less frequently because the actual economy is typically worse than reported to the government because of flawed data and statistics from its own government bureaus. The total economy eventually falls into chaos from government ineptness and inability to manage the accumulation of capital and its effect of the widening of poverty in society. Opening up a chasm between labor and capital, workers are working too long for too little pay and the conditions of work worsen, the individual has no choice nor can exercise any freedom to decline in the workplace any activity that poses a risk to their being as a social class saddled with debt. Simply, working in America sucks! People hate it. This tension will always be there and intensifies to a point where the whole world of autocratic rule of work and time at work comes into doubt. Tariffs cannot be sustained for too long or else all countries cease trading and the entire social order of the G-8 countries must eliminate the offender. The choices working people have is to act as a social power to tackle the problem of poor wage growth with their employers.
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  6793. They want you to work beyond the point necessary in the normal working day and longer than necessary at old age. They would welcome you to sleep in the factory or office as every ounce of your work generates triple the wealth they give you in return for your time. Employers would prolong work beyond the length of the life of a worker as the life of that worker, which can be anyone, is shortened by the exploitation, negligence, hazardous use of toxic chemicals on and during the job. They make human life immaterial to the interests of big business and the organization of work is a living hell in which to eek out a living. Left to the Republicans they would lift the legal limits of exploitation of labor. De-regulation would mean the absolute free reign of corporations over labor and the workplace. The hazardous use and consumption of lethal agents that bring on the accumulated effects on the lives of working families and communities and the legal environment conservatives want only damages employers are fined for but are never sued for the cost in human suffering. This is what they can achieve with Social Security abolished. The myth permeated around social security is that it will be depleted is a myth. Employers and employees pay into the fund. The day corporations cease to exist and employees cease to exist and the fund receives no contribution from each social class social security will cease to exist. Corporations are not about to disappear but the verge of the disappearance of social security is around the corner with this set of conservatives and liberals.
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  6836. The driving force behind American Capitalism is World Trade. I think the key is Water. Capitalism pollutes water and water is life. As a tool for farming water is universal the world over. So if we build a movement along the lines of the Water Protectors and deprive capitalism of the use of water the Left would get more traction. For instance, Coca-Cola consumes vast quantities of water and leaves a town desperate for water in Mexico and elsewhere. We get nowhere yelling at Coca-Cola on 5th Avenue in Manhattan about that. We have to broadcast the message that we demand clean water. The demo is for keeping the water clean but send that message overseas. The poor and working class can understand this more than theory. They will take action out of necessity. We should use that necessity and turn it against Coca-Cola, target one corporation till it falls, then move to the next universal tool for life, the Soil. Soil is life. Who works with soil that is a capitalist corporation? All the farm equipment and machine corporations and seed corporations. The next universal tool for life we need to protect is Air and who works with air that pollutes air, Aviation, the US military, Oil corporations...how perfect can this strategy be? Following Water, Soil, Air, comes Food. The Left does not go Vegan, it goes wild, protect all animal life. Animals are life. Who slaughters animals...you got it, the meat industry and down goes Mickey D’s. The King of Burger has fallen. Wendy’s left town. So what if you can’t get your fast food. Too bad. Eat something else. And so a movement is born that is revolutionary and neutralizes the reaction of the bourgeois order to a standstill because they produce outside of the US where they have no jurisdiction and must exert diplomacy to get Coca-Cola to stay. Government are not going to call the military out on workers throwing a foreign corporation out of their country and the US is not going to send in troops without it causing a major political scandal for the president of the US; and where they produce are typically in countries with low wages. In effect we are forcing their governments to reconstruct their economies as the monopolists have left or have fallen leaving an opening for them to build up their own industries, an Opportunity that is a god send to them. Workers outside of the US need to hear an American movement that signals to them it is okay to get rid of them. Expanding the Water Protectors movement as a movement that moves from one natural element of the earth to another to protect it from the excess consumption of capitalist corporations. I think this neutralizes any capitalist retaliation from occurring. We are peaceable operating within the framework of Free Speech. We cannot be blamed for the corporations shutting operations down overseas because we did not do the shutting and the American government has no jurisdiction over what other countries do. A movement that denounces water use by the corporations and this news spreads to where water is extracted we would be encouraging foreign workers to kick Coca-Cola out of Mexico. But if we do not answer to the needs of people desperate for water they will simply move for lack of water and Capital wins. In a sense we have to tell workers outside of our country to extricate US corporations using water in their country from their country; a message. Now don’t ask me to go out there and start it, I am 80 years old and can hardly finish this comment but I still have a sharp mind with tons of experience. I have insights that will help but I will march with you as long as I can. Imperialism, the job of a president, is to use other people to do their fighting, we should do the same. Imperialist give them guns we give them brains. When the empire is so weak the final coup dé grace can be yours. Then you can start reconstructing a new society and world.
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  6839. 5:48 Israel celebrates America’s Fourth of July? The only part of the US that will stand firmly by Israel’s side is the US Military and the American weapons industry and this is only because Israel is their biggest customer. Their allegiance to one another is a match made in Dollars. 6:35 Mass Shooting in Baltimore,---finding the one responsible and locking them up does nothing to stop a generalized Reign of Terror sweeping the black community in America. The ratio between persons and guns in America is 1:1, roughly the same number of people, 332 million people and 332 million weapons. America is an imperialist society, it sweats bullets and bombs from every pore of its body. American people have to face this reality or die from it. 8:08 Roller Coasters,---are inspected probably once every 10 years a low priority in the Department of Health and Safety. Production in general in the US is not inspected with the intensity the American people want to believe. Fatality and the morality rate is high in all jobs and workplaces. 12:30 War with China?,---stakes are too high for war with China. America and Europe are dependent on China for everything. American and European businesses strive to move their production out of cities and into rural regions of the world where labor is found cheaper than if they kept production in big cities where the price of labor is higher. Maybe if Americans make technology a function of investment their government would not be on the hunt to destroy these types of industries in another nation but would have its own capacity. Basically, China is now the global producer for the world. This not the same thing as an imperialist of the world. Get over it and make peace. 16:00 all cell phones should have this capacity is a no brainer. 16:53 Student Loans,---Biden and the Democratic National Committee of the Democratic Party (DNCDP), knew this before going into office that Loan forgiveness would be struck down by the four radical conservative pro-Trump Republican judges Trump appointed to the Supreme Court. Best way to deal with this lie is a student loan strike but my guess is that students are not educated enough on how to conduct a general repayment strike; so sadly, they will live in forever debt. If they can get over their “Me” selfish phase of their lives and reduce the size of their gluttony for material wealth they could see a better future. The whole scheme was conceived as a way to separate the privileged in society from the masses and using higher education was the way to do it. The creation of segregated grooming schools for the rich from elementary to higher education primes them to inherit political power while the poor go to the schools in their own city, town or state to acquire the skills of a workforce the Elites require in a workforce.
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  6844. Trump emerged through the Tea Party and made a coalition with evangelicals and expanded that partnership to conservative catholics in his fight against the inevitable diversity of America's population. An uphill battle for Trump and the GOP. This coalition has driven away independents and moderate women from the GOP. The secular conservatives in the GOP hate the Tea party dominance in the party. 70% of the GOP consists of Tea Party, the other two groups make up 30%. The GOP is a more religious party than it ever was in its history. Obviously, labor is not a constituent of the GOP. On labor the secular conservatives, Big Corporate Money in politics, fight worker unionization and depressing wages, evangelicals wage a war against women's reproductive rights and the Tea party lead the ideological war to keep pure the old non-diverse America of the Post WWII Era. All these problems the GOP are resisting are rallying the democrats together. Its a losing battle, the GOP is going to die and become a minor fringe party becasue the growth of percentage of foriegn born Americans has never been higher and every trend is accelerating causing a reaction in the republicans has also grown stronger in their suppression of government to solve any problem, a huge growth in support of more government for public purposes, a growth in support for multiculturalism and on immigration, he can only win as a racist. The immigration issue is taking Trump down 65% of Americans are in favor of immigration. My guess is the national GOP will be like the California republican party, a desperate more extreme right minor party.
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  6854. In GITMO they can get more information out of him by means of the torture they cannot do under federal jurisdiction. Its one thing to lay down more punitive measures its another to administer them evenly regardless of class, race, religion, gender. Trump wants to eliminate the civil part; it's a joke and laughing stock. His comment reflects a mindset, an emphasis of the military part over and the civil part, whereby, any American citizen can be held as an enemy combatant. Eight days ago a Ukrainian heiress ploughed into pedestrians with her car in Kharkiv. The driver of the Lexus, glamorous oligarch's daughter Alyona Zaitseva, 20, jumped a red light before smashing into a VW Touareg then careening onto the pavement, killing six and injuring five. If this happened under Trump's America what would get this young lady off besides 1.1 million EU from a step-father and Sayfullo Saipov with no rich uncle sent to GITMO? The use of the car (means), or the daughter of an oligarch (status), or no connection to a wider terror ring but a lone operative like the others preceding Sayfullo Saipov (facts). Looking at life as it really is the poor and working class produce one in a million of deranged individuals, typically, serial killer nut jobs like Bundy, Son of Sam or lone operators like Oswald and Paddock. The rich produce terrorists like Bin Laden, financially connected as it cost money to run a terror operation. Or they produce spoiled children raised under affluence and have wealth to corrupt the system of justice when one sour apple hits the ground. Life is a hell of a lot more varied than Trump sees it.
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  6868. There are two aspects to the way we work that are mutually exclusive. Work in the concrete sense of the term could be viewed in a general way as the material exchanges between man and nature. It is the one area of human activity that directly brings us into contact with the material elements of the earth in more than one of millions of profound ways. What our work in industry combines are the material elements from and of nature shaped to meet human needs. This is an ongoing process of interaction,-- changing human societies as societies change nature. Work in the abstract sense of the term is expressed in the significance of the clock that measures in hours, days, weeks and years, the value nature of work as a part of the total working time of society. More of that total working time is stored up in work averages in non-factory based industries and less of that total working time is stored up in work averages in non-handicraft based industries. Abstract value inputs come from varying levels of values per unit is how work is measured in the value relation products of labor have as things of use for sale. There are the double aspects of work that currently splits our country into two mutually exclusive sides. One side is expressed in a history of social classes in work conflicts and the other side lets loose a ferocious struggle for its existence. There is not one society on earth since 1980 that has taken on itself the mission of eradicating their internal histories of class struggle so that they can freely enter a stage where everything they produce for their existence is done without the curse of the sin befalling the human race the day Eve tempted Adam to bite the Apple, the scourge of the relation of man exploiting man and blaming women and children for that scourge from time immemorial.
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  6885. A Historian Perspective: Bannon is wrong about the whole of American history not having a leader as significant as Trump. This piece of what he says is hyperbole and right wing propaganda in not saying other oppositions emerged in this country and were cut down. Sitting Bull was bigger opposition than Trump. Jefferson Davis was a bigger threat. John Brown. King, Malcolm X. Julien Assange has a worldwide support backing him against the Justice department. The Branch Davidians were a mormon sect and a bigger threat. Bannon’s cause is a cause of self-interest but it does have around 60% of the country’s support. Debs had half the country behind him and lost the election because constitutionally you cannot be a president if your been imprisoned in jail. But he still ran and got half the vote against FDR. The FBI had nothing on Debs, instead the nailed the Rosenbergs to damage Debs’s huge support as a homegrown American as apple pie opposition to the State. But it is all about preventing Trump from running is the piece that is accurate in Bannon. Democrats hand this justification on a platter when they turn their backs on what this country needs to favor private interests. They leave a deep wound and will pay when people in this country vote Trump because he is an opposition to the democratic mob. Medicare for All would have guaranteed a democratic victory and ended Bannon’s cause right on the spot, Trump would lose and be gone like Liz Cheney is gone. Whoever strategizes for the democrats today are stupid and self destructive. Give people what they want and need and they will carry you over the hill is so simple a concept to grasp that private interests spends every waking hour deflecting that message in favor of the concept of profits. If he is assassinated these talking heads are going to eat their words for putting faith in an institution that has assassinated people. I will say that the FBI is not the organization it was when people in the 70s were assassinated when people were spied on and smeared by the FBI. Not the organization that blacklisted Hollywood writers. Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, John Ford testified did not rat out their screen writers. Hoover is dead and the FBI is something different. The plots to kill, the license to kill, is today the main function of the CIA under its millennial tech dependent director. The FBI has more constructive use to society however as a forensic crime agency than the CIA has for being the personal army of a president conducting drone killings and who’s next on the list in foreign countries to get rid. The president is an institutional problem for this country as above the law. Obama is free after killing more people than Trump. Biden is free. Above the law is the office of the president despite what all Americans are told, think and say “Nobody is above the law”, is historically proven wrong and , therefore, a lie.
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  6895. The working classes are in a position in production as a producer of their own subsistence and creator of surplus value. The particular arrangement of social production is as good as the material powers of human beings behind it. If we have uneven development between the combinations of these two elements in production then there is a social scenario that corresponds to how these elements are used in social production; too few people with access to the productive forces of society leads to increased competition between workers; in turn leads to less value of wages and less growth; too many workers involved in production leads to higher growth and higher wages and less competition among workers. Presently, there are 148 million workers employed in production and the balance of the 330 million employed outside of production, too few workers in production and society is split down the middle between the 01% and the 99%. The concentration of the means of production under the ownership of a single firm forms the basis of a new form of property ownership with exclusive rights to every advance connected to them. There is no connection of the detailed workers to the firm or its ownership of the means of production. The economic bond to the means of production for the working population that had existed in the past is entirely cut off. This transformation emerges from a situation where the means of production was once privately owned by independent producers of communities in a pre-capitalist era to a situation where the means of production are independent of the worker(s). A truer relationship of private property, work and the worker has vanished making the firm or corporation, i.e., capital the negation of private property when one understands the relationship between work and worker as defined in terms of the means of production that a class analysis of society of any integrity is based on this procedure. Under circumstances of uneven development there is a long arc of protracted progress that moves production from the original domestic economy is depleted of capital investment to bring into its primary social organization of production, i.e., the corporations, the world economy hinging on one nation’s capacity to produce.
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  6901. This show can be so much more than just mimicking the same run of the mill, corporate media news program, treating all working class movements in separate and in an isolated way. It reminds me of Golding's novel, The Lord of the Flies, when all the kids split off into separate gangs and fight each other. Or how the North turned the emancipated slaves into army against the South instead of the emancipated slaves fighting the the rising capitalist North. Its really time to break these engrained habits that perpetuate non-solidarity. We are all working class and we are going to lose if this continues. This is the meaning of Bernie's question: Are you ready to fight for my family, your family, the other family as one family? What the world needs now is solidarity and this show does nothing to promote solidarity. At the same time as this news item is happening there are protesters in Canada trying to block the installation of an oil pipeline and with the planet in its overheated phase leading to environmental catastrophe, people will get sick driving from the effects of a climate crisis, increases the need for medicare for all is what connects that movement in Canada to this movement in Nevada, even as they are different subjects. LBGJT could raise money for Cola miners when they strike. This would build trust and break down the culture of capitalism that promotes machismo LGBT people are dealing with fighting the same enemy. You can have a Extinction Rebellion demonstraton happening on one side of town and anti-racism demonstration on the other side of town and the report is about one not both, when they are fighting the same enemy. More people attend the anti-racism rally than the Exteinction rebellion rally and they are fighting the same enemy. This is NUTS! Yellow Vest and Extinction Rebellion and Black Lives Matter, Puerto Rico's movement against its Junta Control Board, the Virginia gun rights demonstrations, are all working class and are all fighting the same enemy.  The left in this country has one important mission building solidarity among all the separate groups fighting the same enemy and a news program that is left needs to get on track with news and commentary instead of being a placid sounding board for individual groups to broadcast their struggles. Its one battle we fight and one enemy. Very disppointing Democracy Now, especially when the rich are SOLIDIFIED as one CLASS, they practice solidarity everyday, they know each other, sleep with each other, share financial wealth secrets with each other, use the same tools and institutions for themselves and with that solidarity, they have a gang mentality and acts as one gang, they beat the crap out of the working class leaving us to ruin becasue the working class does not develop or cultivate solidarity. Solidarity is everything more important now than every before!
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  6913. One of the best things Americans can do for themselves is to learn what Capitalism is? Once they have acquired that awareness the next best thing is to quit using terms that generalize and confuse capitalism with a people, nation, or culture. What is missing in the analysis of events unfolding in Central America is the interaction of the social classes, who does what to preserve their power? Trump does certain things because the power rests on the existence of a class system in Central America as it does in the US itself. If that class structure is broken down American economic hegemony is weakened. Migrants have done just that, they ceased being labor exploited either as employed or not employed. Migrants do what they are doing not to preserve hegemony or invade, conquer, like Trump. Peasant have no power is why they act. A universal interest for their survival as a community, seeking employment, income, social and political parity, agricultural development is their motivation. Feeding a nation of 30 million is a universal interest. These universal aims, if migrant workers had government control and power the way Trump fears, is what they would implement. Knowledge of the sophisticated and complex social institutions that extract wealth form societies is not in their vocabulary but is in Trump's vocabulary. If I wanted to have my people fed I would not give the job to Trump. With 90% of land owned by a few usurpers the investment capital from Wall Street or the IMF for money loans to subsidize wheat, soy, barley, be grown by one or two mechanized industrialized farmer/landowners is highly profitable to Wall Street and the IMF. Industrial farmers/land owners pride themselves on feeding the world. In reality, feeding the world is analogous of the vast quantity of food grown for a world market of which the people are expropriated from the land. Two things are produced by industrial agriculture, one is mass quantities of commodities, the other is mass displacement of small landowning farmers. Its negative effect is depletion of natural resources.
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  6925. You can’t make a horse drink water if it does not want water is your first dilemma Tiffany Fischtenbaum. Parents decline therapy because of the presuppositions of abuse and neglect, domestic violence episodes, therapists are required by law to report, i.e, Mandatory Reporting, when suspected. Whether those suspicions are unclear to the therapist(s), sets off an investigation for child welfare checks and assessment, or abuse and neglect found through the treatment process. Anonymous reporting sets the stage of greater suspicion in parents when they deduce the only person they told about their relations in the family was the therapist and now must go back to that therapist for treatment, sorry does not fly. The State legislatures turned therapists into a cadre of double agents are in opposition to the family in society despite the well meaning intentions for stabilizing the family. Next the politics of this country have divided educated and non-educated people as two antagonistic forces that when united under one roof a war would break out. This is the fault of the superintendent of Oxford HS who did not immediately refer this kid to the police to handle based on the facts they had. Cops could have gotten a search order on the home and confiscated the weapons that day from a judge. Bureaucracies are after the fact institutions, they respond only when there is a crisis that rises to a level they define as a cause to respond. When they do respond the response is punitive. Best thing to do here is admit the educational system in the US is a two tiered educational system divided on a class basis where the rich get educated and doors open, the middle class, poor and working classes get a uniform minimum general standard education and doors stay closed.🧐 This kid hated his life and found nothing in life worth living or meaningful, believed in nothing and nothing is everything, e.g., Nihilism. This is not to say his parents are not the living and real versions of the media archetype of the Bunkers and the Bundys in media, they are derelict people who should never be parents.
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  6927. Its not a full-fledged civil war or an armed revolution against the military or the State because it has not spread to include an urban working class seeking to root out government corruption. It is interesting to compare these social movements in different countries. Gives one a sense of where people's heads are at and what prompts a revolution. The desire to be free from corruption or to be free of state tyranny. In Venezuela there is a lawless quasi-armed movement threatening the State that comes from the opposite direction of the working class under the direction of outside influences, this counter-revolution prompts the working classes to arm themselves. In this scenario what prompts armed revolution is a counter-revolution to re-take the State. So we have a society in the throws of a dual-social revolution in Venezuela. Split down the middle society must choose a path. This could develop into a second revolutionary war of independence due to inside catalyst and outside interference for V. In Mexico the State is the instrument of the cartels at the expense of its own competency. In America the State is an instrument of the multi-national corporations and segments of the working class are more repressed than others but all are repressed by means of the economy and education not force. Checks and balances were put in place by founding fathers to prevent a saturation of class interests in the State. Now a real tendency to remove those checks and balances is set into motion promises to extend corruption beyond the limits of endurance for the sake of extending markets and breaking down all barriers and forms of corruption in the name of legitimate business interests. In this scenario the working class has no defenses at all.
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  6929. Its not migrant crisis its a city crisis and that crisis falls on city residents in the form of lack of city services and austerity measures but also from the inability to restrain large real estate interests from converting city living space into rental commodities that only the affluent can afford and a failure to restrain the effect employers have shrinking available space of the city’s boroughs by letting their workers work from home that rents are pushed up and space for migrants is cut back and more streets are filled with homeless encampments. People who blame migrants and the homeless for their condition are plain stupid people. Proudly ignorant people. This is a decline of civil society, a complete dissolution, the effect of powerful economic forces in control of the government’s resources. Its an erosion of city life by government and private business pushing the working classes further away from the city and the city becoming a playground for the super rich calls into question the very legitimacy of the kind of society being formed through the stormy accusations and vitriol against the new arriving immigrants and their families. It is through a facade of unanimity that a particular class interest is detected. Its a national crisis that befalls all American citizens in the form of greater social inequality that a homeless and migrant population swell the ranks of the US population. This comes from the lack of strong national government to carry through national land reforms for the protection of wildlife, water, soil, space, cultivation, irrigation, water use, land use, extraction, zoning, and more that the most powerful economic interests concerned only with the sale of resources found in nature are given special treatment by a weak and fractious coalition of democrats and republicans in government incapable of restraining multinational corporations.
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  6931. The General, by indirect admission, verifies all the US campaigns were shock and awe, Iraq to Afghanistan, when he says Putin’s invasion is not shock and awe. Keeping NATO out of Poland the gateway to Russia, and Ukraine is the goal the reporter would and should know. NATO nuclear forces position inside the former USSR republics is way too close for Russia, her cities can be hit in a matter of minutes with no room to respond. Form this angle, Putin is playing hard, NATO will never sep foot into these regions, the security concerns of Russia are to be respected...this is Putin’s JFK’s moment when a sovereign nation consents a dominant foreign power install their nukes in the Caribbean aimed at Washington D.C and NYC, is the history observers play like they are deaf but at least this General does not. When you are no longer inside the military you are free to speak. The Oligarchs in Russia close to Putin are so rich that if they lose a mansion here they have other mansions everywhere else, same with accounts and money, sanction will be annoying but it won’t cripple the Russian investment schemes that seem to be centered on real estate and less on industry, is pretty much the same as it here in the US economy. Low level of investment into industry and employment for America; a high level of investment into property for Oligarchs. Worse is the Emergency Powers Act of Justin Trudeau which blackballs a person from the whole financial system and if you as so much as be an organizer, your going to jail, the Emergency Act holds you an enemy of the state. Seriously, look it up. Sanctions here are against Canadian citizens is a remarkable development. Of course this means the American public is next as as Public Enemy for speaking up against a war. Sanctions will hit average people hard, there will be many street protests, and Oligarchs won’t be effected that the schemes would come to an end. As this is not the only aspect to the case.
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  6942. 4:14 Extinction is not all that dramatic with a John William’s Score over images of dying species. Mass extinction is a quiet experience for non-humans but a loud, vulgar, violent mass extinction for humans. We are distracted from the decay and disintegration of nature and society going on in the background by aggressive individual and social egos living within the narrow boundaries of their mind. Will Smith, Putin, Biden, El Salvador’s president dictator, Orban, Bolsonaro, even on the left 4:08, it is right we must move away from the use of fossil fuel but not as a condition to divorce all association with fossil fuel and its oligarchs. We do not want a divorce from oligarchy and buying and selling remains intact. The circumstances demand the extinction of the practice of exchange in those two commodities. It is far more sensible to make gas and oil a public utility, illegal to trade, buy and sell, as a stock and render oligarchy a crime, prosecute it, jail it, and end the practice of buying and selling gas and oil, than it is to cut yourself off the grid and when societies collapse from the excessive sale and over consumption of oil and gas, you can’t be blamed. It does not work that way because, exchange is the killer of the planet and buying and selling generates social inequality. Oil and gas do not create exchange and social inequality by themselves. Dropping out of the fight against exchange, buying and selling, in gas and oil helps diminish the market by mass numbers but it does not free you, in fact, its a detraction, lessens the strength in numbers people need to force governments to make oil and gas illegal to buy and sell for a profit.
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  6945. @JimmyJam Humans are the only species that MUST produce its own subsistence to live. Animals consume to reproduce - humans consume to produce and produce to consume to reproduce. We are a species unequipped bodily and mentally to survive in the wild or in society on individual terms. Well, - the first fundamental condition of life is that humans must be in a position to live in order to 'make history'. Right? Before everything else life involves eating and drinking, a habitation, clothing and many other things. The second condition is the action of satisfying these needs. This action leads to new needs, and the production of this new need is the first historical act for mankind. The third condition enters into historical development, people begin to make other people. They propagate their own kind in a relation, the relation between man, woman, parents and children, the family. So far, we and the animal kingdom have these three conditions in common as mammals. Where do we as a species differ from non-human species? I guess you can say the human species is a social being or a social animal that has not yet identified itself as a species being as do animals and plants consume and produce as a species being. We never see one elephant or one buffalo, or one wolf, we see a herd and on the other side, we see individuals such as reptiles, amphibious animals. Insects have more in common with humans than humans have with themselves. For instance, Ants. There they have a social division of labor between workers and helper managers, and scouts who ensure the workers ants take the right path in finding the food, they leave traced steps on the ground scented by the workers that the direction to go is this way or that way toward the sustenance they seek for their Queen. Humans perform this action, all members of society work for the government, through domination and rules not through social communication in finding the best, easiest, most productive path toward survival and reproduction. There you have it. Ants are far more superior than humans with language and simplicity, a spider more graceful and solid a web construction than an architect can conceive a building. A web is its tool, a building to man is its domicile for social control. Now we have four aspects of primary historical relationships animals and mankind share in common. But here is where we absolutely, 100% become totally distinct. Then comes consciousness, not pure consciousness because a thought like 'spirit' is afflicted with the curse of being, 'burdened' with matter which takes the form of language, practical consciousness that exists for all people. Language arises from need, it exists for you personally and for me personally from necessity, from our sociality of being social.  A division of labor among insects is not a hierarchy but is no more and no less a division of work. Some do this; others do that. Language is used to direct the production for the new need. Humans do not produce objects for direct need, they produce objects for the direct control over their own species, which no other species does. For animals the relation to others of the same species is not a relation its a bond, they see in others themselves. A hierarchy as a human 'relation' differs from 'animal-consciousness', humans construct laws and rules that detail to all people in society the limitations of themselves found in others, I am not rich enough, or good looking enough, or not strong enough, I am not as powerful as he or she,. Only humans do this and write a constitution based of separation. The case of the discovery of language among ants dispels your notion; '...if they were aware of hierarchies, we could very well see exploitation in their species...' we know now that language in species is a tool of communication for a direct action. Language for humans is tool for direct control once we get passed the third condition of life of producing the family and new more complex needs. At this point humans are no longer a species being restricted to nature where the only difference between humans and sheep is humans do not use instinct to make decisions, or that instinct is a conscious choice. The need for a hierarchy comes into effect through extending the production of new needs and increased productivity, through the need for increased exploitation of labor for the increase of needs and the increase of population is itself a new need. This explains why the Trump administration is such a human tragedy. Some individuals have not risen beyond the stage of life of the herd mentality in the context of increased needs and population, they shut out the world. But at the same time as modern individual the needs of Donald Trump and his mode of living is highly complicated that the self is more important than life itself. Close borders, think in herd ways as a race of people or as a certain kind of Order, or social class. Israel is the epitome of this animalistic mentality. Well, that its, like or not, the science is clear and to explain it requires a long response.
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  6957. Based on what I saw in the state of the nation speech. The democrats are doomed, they will not get elected for another 30 years, a repeat of what happened to the Republicans after FDR. After Hoover who told the people in the Depression, they would have to solve your own problems and pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, the republicans did not have a president until Eisenhower. The pendulum swung from the left to the right with Trump’s election. I also think it is unconstructive to use European examples of social programs to illustrate how the working class are treated less kindly by US capitalists and government than their European counterparts because this argument, strengthens the imperialist argument that Europe does not pay enough for their own protection. It rearms Europe. A left should get back on track with the work of disarmament as the only remedy for the hysteria inside the national insecurity of nations and the work of making a revolution is never achieved by legislation. JFK pushed a Test Ban Treaty leading to a total disarmament provides an answer to the problem of insecurity nations feel in the face of 20 or 30 years of constant imperialist wars, since the death of that treaty, several more nations developed low intensity nuclear war weapons making the world more dangerous. The educated need to be educated. Democrats cannot figure out how to confront an imperialist in the White House. Currently the White House is the primary citadel of reaction in the world today. Democrats are politically ignorant, complicit, stupid, or a combination of the three, lost all objectivity subsumed by their hatred for Trump are divorced from the reality that they are a part ad belong to that citadel of reaction. The lesson Fred Hampton at one end of the pole teaches us is that real leaders of the people come from movements of the working class and nowhere else in society except in cases of people at the other end of the pole, people so rich the establishment powers that be must assassinate* them. We have two examples of how and who can make a revolution. Fred Hampton and JFK. The Trump presidency is nothing short of a “bourgeois revolution”, a total success story for capitalism and a defeat of the US labor force which had been whittled down to a mere 7% organized leaving a balance of 158 million from a total of 168 million workers unprotected and vulnerable as individuals selling their labor-power to an organized class of capitalists. *Under these constraints the forces of reaction who protect the imperialist empire covered up the assassination of a president with assassinations in general of leaders of the working class as the peace movement became more anti war and anti capitalist. The Kennedy children know from the coroner’s report the shot that killed RFK was very close range to the neck and head, Sirhan was tackled by Rosie Greer at least 20 feet away from RFK when the shot was heard fired that this Pakistani patsy was seen with a gun in his hand. Why was the patsy a Pakistani, could it be the Kennedys did not want the Zionists in Israel or the French to have nuclear weapons?
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  6958. There are 143 million working people in this country who have absolutely no single interest in common with this president's plan or intention to incarcerate migrants crossing the border. Law and order is creating a captured labor force divided on the basis of gender, separated to work in prison manufacturing which directly competes with the free labor in society of the 143 million people now working in industry. There is no other more perfect pretext than an open ended non-policy on immigration to double as a process of creating a labor force for key industries deemed national security interests. There is no labor cheaper than forced labor working by the point of the gun. The president admits publicly a naturalization program does not exists Congress has left naturalization open to commercialization and private investment. Entire consortiums of Capital go where the profit is highest and as long as the free workforce in society is paid higher than foreign and prison labor, employment and wages will drag outside prison walls while production thrives inside prison walls. Privatization will allow US corporations to contract with the central government for the production of their commodity, and the US economy will become largely composed of forced labor. What is American made is not made in America is the continuing trend. The Senate has not and will not pass legislation that curtails private capital from exploiting incarcerated labor to be the creator of its wealth when representatives in Congress stand on the side of law and order and partake in the profits of that incarceration through the channeling of money to Congress.
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  6968.  @kathrynbeecher2963  Private property dominates rural China, State and city property are enlarged versions of your own Tennessee Valley Authority or the Port Authority of New York. Cities are not the property of individuals. No landlords or landowners, there are the market features of price, money, banking, all regulated by the State, synonymous with the party, are normal uses of money for the purposes of commodities changing hands. Gold is not a universal measure of value like it is in the west. The main focus is not on the materialism of western culture but on the development of mind and body that includes all and none are left out. Universal education, China is 100 % literate, combines trade learning and academics, similar to your Special Education Vocational Schools except your vocational schools are not connected to Ford, GM, etc., as to what kind of workers they need. Education is tied to what the society as a whole needs that anyone who enters a school is selected through national testing process. If you want to be an engineer take the national test,-- score high and you will become an engineer. Home, life and family are covered. Its like going away to specialized colleges which is why most all Anthropologists, archeologists, mathematicians, love the educational system as it gives them complete freedom as opposed to the west. Anyway I can write a book, but I am not suffice it to say there is more human progress than what your eyes see in bourgeois oppositions parties and movements in the west.
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  6969.  @kathrynbeecher2963  There is a difference. Americans by the actions of your own government have deprived the American people of the progress socialism has made since the American Red Scare of 1920-23 ( you should read about it). In 2021 Americans still think socialism is the old Soviet socialism of the Bolsheviks. don't get me wrong I love the Bolsheviks for their commitment, principals, analysis, had the backs of the peasantry and proletariat, their slogan, Land, Peace, Bread. I am aware that Bill Gates spread is now an big influencer across 23 states purchased land and/or with or without buildings, the size of NJ, which would equal to the size of Israel, and other extremely wealthy real estate corporations and individuals are doing the same that it appears this accounts for the shortage homes relative to the homeless population. It is expected this class will become the new landed aristocracy and consequently, the labor required to maintain property of this scale, a class of renters. Home ownership in China is a right not a privilege. Coincidentally, did you know it takes exactly 23 states for a Congress to convene and re-write the Constitution. I find it suspicious republicans are moving in this direction at the same time as most of the available land for housing is bought up by monopoly corporations. American leadership is developing serious problems and internally grave consequences for not using its GNP to transition into socialism when the GNP was at it high point. Sovereign national debt by my calculations, is greater than US productivity can pay,---there should have been a national land reform bill in 1980 but the political bourgeois parties got away with not doing their job as political reformers and not reforming capitalism to avoid a housing crisis, and monopolies to emerge from the market. In the end, it will not be socialism that replaces capitalism. In the American experience it will be capitalism replacing itself with socialism by necessity. Each question or problem you posed to me cannot be answered here in this narrow format. The paradox is that US labor force is the mightiest in the world and the least educationally competent working class in the world.
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  6981. If I were a man from the past, a time traveler as in HG Wells' Time Machine and I fixed my future date to 2018 America -- having just left a perilous moment of the Russian Revolution, I 'd swear I was listening to the Bolsheviks when the State Department and Vice president speak about Iran. The argument runs: one of the social classes in society will have to free the rest of society; since none are capable of this project, one of them will be forced into an overthrow of a regime and this would be the audience Pence is speaking to, they all applaud. This politic became the new problem to solve for observers. How rulers fool the ruled into ruling on their behalf. But not before figuring out which class had the moral right to free everyone else from oppression had been thrown out the window in the second part of the 20th century by all leaders and politicians in the world. Had this philosophy not been thrown out the world's most criminal organization on the planet would not have become a scourge of inhumanity.  This class that was supposed to lead everyone to freedom had to meet two criteria: be a class in civil society and not be a part of civil society, also, it can only have one interest and that interest a universal one. The problem was to hard to solve, such a class motivated by material necessity to overthrow a regime happened once and never will it happen again. Haiti overthrow France and Britain proved white supremacy a mockery, they revolt as we speak as a suffering people who ought to be at the forefront of being the universal class of freedom from suffering for the rest of suffering humanity.
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  7007. Each industry is simple to understand, but when they are combined the work of each industry performs a double function. Production develops into a dual-process. This happens after the exchange of equivalents between labor and capital take place, then everything labor produces is equated to a third value element. In most cases gold playing the universal measure of value in all commodities as exchange-values. The difficulty in clarity comes from capitalist relationships and ideologies distorting the relation between production, consumption, exchange and distribution. Not understanding these elements are moments of a totality. Capital in this century does not hide the fact that the excess value it creates in production is realized in the market. Its main objective is to realize the excess surplus-value it produced from the labor employed in production. We come to a fork in the road. The labor producing such goods may be useful labor but dubious in nature of its real use- value to the planet and the species is where we stand or the other road takes us down where labor produces value and more value for the sake of value is the only true productive type of work people ought to be doing. In which case humans serve as use-values for the consumption of the capitalists and the means of production serve as values for the consumption of labor-power of the working class. Or can we reverse the relation where humans are a value for the consumption of other humans and the means of production are use-values for the production of a useful nature that ensures the survival of all species?
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  7017. Nature’s changes is imperceptible to the human eye, as a process of degrees and not immediate as man changing nature to suit man’s needs, and shape nature is immediate and perceptible to the human eye. But nature on its own goes without saying does change is not the point. Climatologist blame high temperatures but the reporter does not say the high temperatures are caused by industrial production and consumption, a process of interaction between man and nature. You can put solar panels and change zoning laws, ease the demand on water for electricity, but that is not where the problem begins. The point of consumption is not the starting point of the human activity causing climate change because both are simultaneously two separate processes in one, consumption is production, its by-product are CO2s and production is consumption, this activity uses natural resources such as water as an accessory in the process of extraction, same with large scale industrial farming, and drilling. The environmentalists do everything to avoid the elephant in the room the need for a national policies on the use of water, land and soil, they would rather dive into their technical brains than to deal with the politics of climate change and make drones to pollinate fields rather than the government invest in the cultivate bees to be released in the wild and stop the cause of their disappearance which lies in the production end of human activity. The production of drones requires material elements obtained through mining, an extraction process, causing climate change never enters the heads of environmentalists who are not real environmentalists. This is how illogical America’s environmentalism is? On the other extreme are the legislatures filled with religious people who pray rather than legislate; bury their heads in the sand from the problem to avoid using their legislative power to tell the industrial producers of food, oil and gas what they cannot do in their processes.
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  7028. rbu83145. First lets establish are we talking in particular of the State in the US or the origins of the State in general? We can point to the Roman State and Medieval State as states into which religion is the State. The Pope was the State, the patrician social class its Senate and slaves its foundation. Kings, Queens, Princes were States through out Europe's progress of cities, the State and Religion were fused all the way up to Stalin's reign. Himself tutored for the priesthood. Though I appreciate your critique of US capitalism. The corporation was invented by burghers in the Middle Ages. Once a small merchant class the State was a religious state when corporations were in the infant stages of becoming a merchant-capitalist class and this was before they became a capitalist. When the high seas was mastered by merchant commerce, the age of Adam Smith and Locke. The modern state is what you and I seem to addressing is a secular state. The American state evolved from a secular state had its foundations in slavery, its government which sought its inspiration from the revolutionaries of the 1789 in France for its constitution as a republic. The landed aristocracy of slave holders and merchant classes its Congress, slaves and settlers its foundation. Britain's model of the state does not come into being until the Civil War ends and the secular republican state becomes a central government. Corporations were a Dutch import in the 1700's mainly in the east coast. German merchant class moves into America early mid 1800's. France in the 1700's. The war for Independence creates constitutional republic. Corporations begin to penetrate the state after the Crash of 1929, as a restoration of capitalism from its world collapse. Its fusion into the State happens, the day America dropped the atomic and hydrogen bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Corporations become a handmaiden to the State under Woodrow Wilson's formation of an anti-socialist alliance as a direct response to the RR. With Trump. Pence, Pompeo (pay attention to the speeches of our new secretary of state and his references to the League of Nation is very telling). We are getting a glimpse of the State, pay attention to former CIA director Brennan blames Trump damaging the status, standing and reputation of American democracy as a full democracy in reality is only a partial democracy. My thesis of the state is the other way around from yours'; the handmaiden of the American state was the corporation(s) giving rise to the present day Military Industrial Complex (MIC). This fusion of state and corporations is complete in the 21st century (Now! Not then, but here and now!) is too recent to make the claim they were never separated in the past. We do part company, the solution for America's economic paradox is not the Russian road to the state or to a socialist society. The solution is exactly how Marx said it. We do not want to end big business we want to decentralize private ownership from the few to the many. Anybody and everyone should have a corporation fit to scale big enough to feed their own and sell products for profit, all the while, produced by an association of workers. We do not want disassociate the corporations from nationalism; we want social dividends and social profit, to denationalize government for an international government; we do not want to get rid of financial markets, we want to control money, currency, and relegate it to a normal function as a measure of value, a means of exchange and as a currency backed not by the force of the state but by the productive power of labor. We do want to democratize the workplace. I agree with you on this point. To enforce a democratic workplace and society we need a proletarian state. No other social class is capable of delivering freedom and independence but the working class. The solution comes when each person has recognized and organized their own powers as a social power so that each person no longer has to separate their own powers, talents, skill, etc., from themselves as a political power. So much so the Harvey Weinstein's of the world do work on the production line because he is selfless, egoless, conscientious, decent and dignified the society he lives considers his talent a necessity and indispensable. Stacy will never accomplish a higher community such as this in the present context of the State. Three hundred million with the same gumption as Stacy's can but not just one. Stacy to me is dead end, apart from her gumption, she is totally for the bourgeois state which we know is capable of dismissing the validity of claims against the State and its hands off policy on getting rid of all the social defects in society.
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  7033. As long as people understand the difference between commodity production and capitalist production then worker co-ops is a great idea.  But even a co-op can be subverted by a class of monopoly and imperialistic corporations who control the world price of any commodity. A co-op controls production not price. On second thought, price manipulation would be the weapon the class of corporations would use to destroy co-ops, I doubt it makes sense to even form co-ops within the framework of monopoly capitalism. A vision of a post-capitalist society is needed. A vision based on the available state of technology and science. Americans lack the general and the long term power of imagination to create the world envisioned in the present moment but are a people with great power on the immediate moment, to a fault. This must be changed in the heads of all Americans, they exclude the general and emphaisze the particular, ignore the universal concrete for the abstract concrete. I also think workers' councils under whom a given sector under their control is a more practical approach to de-privatizing the means of production and keep the government out of the production process is a more truer social way of organizing production. Versus 'nationalization of the means of production'. Make illegal to buying and selling and the transfer of private ownership of the machine, technology and scientific making industries. Distribution is a moment of the total production process of any society and it is a place government can function for planning and disaster recovery and evacuation. Every person born is automatically a soveriegn member of the society. Nobody is left out and everyone is in the general atitude of individuals promotes imagination. Imagination is to the human brain what hunger is to the stomach. For instance, the whole of agriculture falls under one worker's council, energy another, services another, health, housing, education and construction, security another. Eight workers councils run the whole field of social production and one national Congress under whom the military is controlled. This would truly close the chapter of the Age of Capital.  But it would not close the chapter on Class in Society, social classes are harder to dissolve for they require the rich and powerful be no different than anyone else and do a job for the society they are a part. Control freaks and institutions of social control are not compatible to a cooperative society. The business of security is to make people feel safe, accepted and a part, belonging to a higher community, not to strike fear and trauma into their central nervous system, stunt brain development and incarcerates the body. Religion is not compatible to a cooperative society. But I do not see a reason why it cannot die out on its own through mass education and the remaining faithful free to live without special exemption status by the society, they are not anymore different than anyone else benefitting from the producitvity of labor. Crime and criminals, addicts, abusers, pedofiles, racists, sexists, will die out in the context of a total cooperative society in a short time but need to monitored professionally according to how mushc of a risk they are to the society of new individuals.
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  7036. A fortified Green Zone...held by Iraqi Security Police Forces was fired upon by militants. This keeps going on outside the US expect to see things disintegrate inside the US. The security state here is used as a political weapon by democrats when it is supposed to be neutral. The security state of Iraq only copies the same relationship the American national security state has with Americans. Surveillance, eavesdrop, identification permits, suspect, arrest, prosecute, rescind privileges, freeze assets and accounts, harsh judicial system and corrupt police; except our’s is far more sophisticated and advanced that the Iraqis would have to spend two generations to reach the level of the US security state. China managed this in one lifetime. A community never becomes militant on its own. Trump said “We’re in their for their oil...control the oil...”, and we are in Iraq for the oil. The officials in government did nothing to reform the system they cannot reform because the security system is a transplant, not their own, and police did not back down makes Iraq another rogue security state that cannot stand. It shows that from day one of Biden’s presidency the US, he said the US is back in the game. US troops went back into Iraq and for the same reasons the democrats dislike in Trump. “We want their oil...we’re in their for the oil...control the oil...”, admitting the truth is a risk to the security state admits the security state is built on all lies and deceit. A politician is never to admit the real reasons for US interventions. The national security state is scared Trump has memos and communications showing Russia-gate was a complete fabrication more than they fear he has blueprints to nuclear weaponry is my hunch. Revealing the deceit translates into the American people voting out democrats in mass numbers and the Senate going back to Republicans at war with Democrats the security state used against them...and we are back where we were. A recurring pattern of oppressive forces ignoring the ravages of climate change this year causing more damage to society next year.
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  7043. America will end up with a high productivity of labor consumed by the rich and its Military. A two tiered society will emerge. Used cars and consumer goods for the majority turned into renters by corporate landowners and luxury advanced products and homes for the super rich. All that productivity, engineering and technology will go into the production of luxury goods and weapons; none of it will go into the consumer products or in to society except when some natural or social catastrophe forces capital investment. This professor looks at the continuation of industrialization of nations in the west from the period of the Industrial Revolution that began in France and then to England and to Germany, as a rise and fall of empires. Empires express the development of productivity but empires are not the final form of productivity. Small scale production was an essential phase for the development of social production. Wherever the peasant owns the land and the artisan owns the tools, wherever small scale production existed, it was essential production based on private property had to be broken apart and crushed. France accomplished this transition in a bloody revolution. Britain accomplished the transition in a civil war, Germany made the transition through a war it did not start. The US made a transition from agrarian to industrialization by means of the WWII, but nowhere except in the era of the Soviet Union was the division of labor and its productivity placed under social control and regulation of the forces of nature, but had not placed the free development of the productive forces of society for reasons that are debatable, led to its collapse.
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  7051. As a 70 year old I knew this film was being made a year and half ago thanks to people like you (Mike Zeroh) ...normally I never pay attention to Disney or Hollywood. If a corporation can grab my attention the marketing has to be good. On the other hand, the fans are so obsessed with Indy they are themselves a marketing for the movie. Indy fans populate my home screen with their videos on whips, jackets, boots, cosplay events, critiques, etc., like there is no tomorrow its difficult to not see this activity. I am led to say; let me go see what the fuss is all about with this movie. Another aspect for the low projections might be due to a high debt/income ratio that plagues this country and an Indy film is not a necessity. Don’t forget... there is a big chance aging boomers like me will be its biggest customer for the simple reason Harrison is a boomer. I’ll take a gamble the movie will be a success. More so overseas than in America. From the trailer it does like like a movie a boomer would like. I saw Raiders on the big screen in Manhattan when it came out...that movie is a piece of film mastery. If you watch that film without sound and in black and white it is even better...Spielberg is a master at moving actors and camera...blocking film space that nearly every shot in that film is piece of artistry, so I hope, this one will be a match to Raiders. The other thing about a film is that makes it hard to judge a film is that it could end up a failure at the box office and a classic in film history like Casablanca.
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  7062. Interesting, Phyllis Bennis thinks the democrats are nieve of what AIPAC represents. Perhaps they are, in which case, the question is, are they educable of the AIPAC-US arrangement as an accumulation process for the arms industry? White supremacy generates more than anti-semitism, it generates a multi-cultural exclusion of which anti-semitism is a part.  Its about the accumulation of capital and Kevin McCarthy's world of private property assuming life is money. I do agree with Phyllis, Congress, as a citadel of power and reaction of the ruling class is starting to crack!  The people who elected these ladies into Congress are the new labor-force, 6 out 10 work and this 60% see a white patriarchy as outmoded. These are the ladies who will change the Congress from being an Apartheid State into a social democracy, and Israel, along with many other client states that were made under the same apartheid arrangements will be on their own. A huge tax dividend for the American taxpayer will come from the end of an apartheid regime, but the problem of the arms industry a function or a means for the accumulation of capital the white supremacists control at the present time persists makes universal healthcare and paid family leave, the real needs of this new labor-force almost impossible as the military and their class consume the greater part of national income. After paying off debts the workforce is strong enough to sustain the lifestyle white supremacy imposes on labor but not enough beyond that for old age and retirement of the workforce. This is a problem, the ladies in Congress will have to change entirely, the cost to society of lavish lifestyles (private consumption) against the economic pie. Credits against the fruit that keeps on giving, female labor, a female working class, the 60% majority of workers, some 78 million women on the job 40 to 60 hours per week, the white supremacists regard as the true essence of western civilization, not for who they are individually, but for sustaining private consumption levels white patriarchies enjoy, the mass of value their produce and the gift of giving without fail or interruption accumulation for the sake of accumulation.
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  7073. What is really amazing about Russia is its size that Russians do not have to leave the country to vacation in tropical or in wintery places and everything in between like the rest of us do. There is no need to go to the French Riviera in Russia they have their own riviera. Putin is safe from a warrant but the Hague is unsafe from Russia. War is not going to come it is already here, war has been creeping all along, and is escalating to a crescendo. The job of a president is imperialism, this is what it means to be the Top Cop in the World, to be an imperialist is to open new markets for American Capitalism (business). When you are not a good imperialist the rest of the imperialists in American government hate you which was the fate of Donald Trump, he was not a good imperialist to the imperialists. He did not open new markets for American Business, rather, he caused them trouble internationally deviating from the imperialist formula of repression and his deviation gives Trump the mystique of being a victim of the Establishment; but he paid them enough that the business wing of the party could tolerate Trump. He was good capitalist. For the American people all you have are capitalists as presidents and if ever a non-capitalist becomes president, a peace maker, the imperialists in government rally to remove by any means necessary. Bernie is likely right now saying to himself when watching Trump legal battles unfold that it could have been him had he won the presidency. Bernie is not a good imperialist. All he can play in the stereotypical world of the democratic party is the guilty conscience of that party. Which leaves us with You and the question of your own liberation from the yoke of capitalists/imperialist tyranny? Imperialism is not a democracy for it exploits labor and in the workplace where labor is exploited by capitalists there is no democracy in America. So favoring imperialism the way American military recruits, officers, security, police and legal field do identifies a person as a person who resists, consensus, collaboration and cooperation is an anti-democratic person. If there are dictators in the world they are concentrated right here in the US. Re-subscribe to this show as I had to do because the show loses subscribers on purpose which is consistent behavior with the general suppression of independent news by America’s Imperialists.
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  7074. This is a story of mass discontent. When family life, individuals and society do not harmonize and compliment each other individuals break down into anomy and barbarism. Individuals are snapped to the limit. The ones that go off the handle are the ones with the heaviest burdens expected to solve by themselves while stacked up against anti-social institutions. They are expected to solve their problems by themselves and can’t. They react feeling stuck. Unable to handle serious survival issues on their own the violent behavior is their way of controlling the external social order knocking them around. And why? If it were in the DNA of human beings to be isolated and unsocial the way American society is unsocial there would be no need for community, family or society. The human species would not have survived over the last 12,000 years. Growing food changed humans from being nomads and isolated hunters to social beings working together the fields and harvest has engrained into our DNA cooperation and sociality. We would have been killed by animals far stronger and more numerous as hunters and nomads without agriculture. Wiped out! Population in America was only 150 million people one life time ago, imagine how small it was 12,000 years ago and beyond. Capitalism is the first society that contradicts this natural history of cooperation and sociality in mankind. Money is your connection to nature and to other people. Without money your disconnected from humanity and the Natural World. This breeds Mass Discontent. The police in their position of non-interference with criminal and out of control behavior express the unsocial nature of American social institutions. Not exposing the faces of people who attack others encourages the lawlessness but it shows they can know the face but we cannot gives them a step up for their own protection on the streets. In effect, take into account the unsocial character of social institution putting people in a very tight spot the cops attack or arrest an institutional victim. Should they now treat desensitized people harshly or with kid gloves is not my point.
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  7100. The owners of money, who enjoys the rights of ownership, must find labor-power for sale or you don’t have capitalism. Countries that do not have a robust job market do not attract capital investment are the least developed countries in the world. These rare typically countries where labor appears as a peasantry, small and rich peasant land owning and self-sufficient farming families. They do not produce enough for a nation of 100 above million people but enough for 60 million and under. The world is split between two modes of production. One half is industrial and the other half is agricultural. The same split appears between cities, towns and countryside, one part industrial the other part farm, and even at a higher level of abstract inspection a split at the factory level between working and the work itself, one part human the other part machine. How many jobs are more machine than human and how many jobs are more human than machine? Then at an even higher level of thought and contemplation a splitting apart of the individual self into two parts. One part connected to the means and the other part disconnected from the means. Classes of people and families emerge who are connected to the land and classes of people and families having no land at all, homelessness, vagabonds, cartels, cons and criminal elements, addicts and prostitution. Countries with 60 million people or better do not have enough colleges to train students into a job market or not enough hospitals to educate a percentage of the population into medicine because there is no capital investment in that locality or nation. The function of the World Bank can be summed up in one task, that is to create the conditions required before money can be converted into capital. If it does not like Pakistan the World Bank will lend out money under terms that oppress Pakistan. A capitalist society is a society with a job market and a money market. Its a society where companies are divided by two classes of people; the owners of money are the employers and the employees are the owners of labor-power. This pretty much covers a classical definition of class than there is struggle to that class concept because classes are never static but are in motion, after all, they are human beings. And people are never idle. Either way the condition described above is totally unnatural to the human being from a standpoint of health and what’s worse, the conditions described above have no social basis justifying they should even exist. They came about through historical development, the product of many economic revolutions, of the extinction of a series of older forms of work and employment in different cultures and societies. What makes us different from the past is the observation that all our products are intended for sale as commodities. All forms of work in society is dominated by commodity production because the greater part of our products are not yet intended for immediate consumption by the working classes. This would prevent them from becoming commodities in the first place. Historical development will bring these economic, social and political splits about for you if people do not intervene on historical development. Grab the bull by the rains so to speak. China and Russia before her found a way to deal with this problem, America will have to find its own way, overcoming the splits to move toward a unification of object with its subject.
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  7109. America was far more a trustworthy nation when Russia was the USSR.   In order to defeat socialism our government made sure our population was given what it needed to thrive not just survive and this included everything from free education to good medicine and medical practice and good wages, and lifestyle, industry and excellent sanitation, everyone was inoculated free of charge and the medical profession went to you not you going to them for a price. In the post USSR America, capitalism began to reveal what it truly is a system of production for profit, and everyone born from that day forward has made America the least trustworthy nation in the world. In fact, there is no question in my mind that even a bastard like LBJ or Nixon would have come out publicly to institute some form of medical national Marshall Plan to quell a virus such as this from emerging. America opened the door for capitalists to take over the government, an institution designed to keep capitalists out of government.   From 1980 the post USSR America as more of America's billionaires and its far-right wing made it possible through a repeal of all the safeguards America had in place to move production off shore in order to produce cheaper to accrue higher profits in America's consumer market; you could not trust government statistics on most everything got progressively worse to the point of absolute mistrust. They thought they won the Cold War but America did not and every war previous to the Vietnam and after the Vietnam war were losses for Americans but not for the dominant oil and gas industry. Now that Russia and China have gotten into the game of making profits the oil industry of all three nations intend to share the oil reserves, gas and rare earth minerals lain under the Ice of the Arctic to the detriment of the planet, in a potential nuclear war. America taking the approach of might makes right while ocean levels rise and the composition of the atmosphere of oxygen, carbon and hydrogen are changed heating the planet and giving rise to massive flooding, new biological organisms for the spread of disease, locust infestation, drought and social upheaval.
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  7115. What makes this happen are chosen policies (government decrees) that give free interaction to producers to act as free buyers and sellers without any interference by the government. Ordinary people are not clued into this brand of politicians as a generation elected into office since 1980, are the same types of people who come up through the ranks of the political parties, and in practice as government officials their job is to hinder their office, political sabotage, weaken government’s impact, effect, to ensure the Public in society is not at risk of material and economic exploitation by exercising its main functions. A personal allegiance to that anti-government theory as infallibly correct (arrogance) makes this generation of politicians an enemy of ordinary people. Ordinary people are shut out of government by an army of technocrats, who weaken or cut down government services to society in two of its primary functions: inspections in all industry and, 2., product safety and financial exploitation by private interests. In short, the two main spheres of social economic activity take an antithetical form of itself as two private spheres. The private sector establishes a class dictatorship through the final abolition of government. This would be the end of a Democratic Republic. History would position ordinary people into a society where government does not exist replacing it with private security forces paid to enforce the needs of the private sector in the spheres of production and circulation. This does not have to look or act like 1930s totalitarianism but it is a totalitarianism never the less.
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  7119. 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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  7128. It has nothing to do with stupidity and everything to do with evangelical christianity, or Creationism. They are not stupid people. They were very planned and methodical in their capture of government. Americans are now a subjugated people in the states they dominate. They performed a coup dé état that was slow and gradual over the years. When enough of them made it into government they became what constitutes a social class of christian capitalists (Amway, etc.). Pyramid schemes as you might heard of before was their business plan in the early years and putting into the hands of unsuspecting Americans their source of funding, ---profits from the sale of Amway, Mary Kay, products. Convention meetings in Vegas and other venues is where they held annual profit rallies for the corporation rewarding people moving up te pyramid. That is not stupidity it’s a very well thought out successful and calculated plan for conquering the world. They targeted people whose incomes was never enough. The never enough crowd can be a powerful social force whether are glued together into a pyramid structure containing them. They are brainwashed people. Fast forward 30 years and the government is 7/10th occupied by Israel loving evangelical christians. The first genocide under their watch is the genocide against the Palestinians. The reason these people are the material force on earth not a peace loving people at all, because of the afterlife and getting there before Nothing short of a revolution can unseat the christians in power. If Americans want their freedoms Americans have no other alternative but to win power. Evangelism appears over the centuries in various forms dates back to the early Roman christians who suffered so much the second coming of Christ became a religion. Evangelism has a despicable history from the 15th century going forward, more criminal and genocidal than Hitler, Stalin, Mao put together, the most deadliest of all homosapiens on earth are christians, that in every likelihood the extinction of the human race would be their doing. Not knowing your enemy is stupid. Not trying to insult you personally. It is vital to orient people on how to start thinking about these people and their methods of subjugation because I care enough to not want to be subjugated. Who are they? What jobs do they hold in government that control our lives? Questions to start thinking about NOW not tomorrow. Tomorrow is too late.
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  7144. Trump’s campaigns always look like AMWAY Conventions. Behind the patriotic theater and the pyramid game is another reality, its not until you get through the Door....that time becomes an element working against you from becoming a human being...Dante’s seven gates of hell...doorways that compartmentalize everyone into a detailed operation inside isolated rooms and smaller still are cubicles of people doing intensified detailed work, on a rote basis, sucks the life out of them! Work exacts ever more energy from an individual in less time. The cellphone and the work app use time to eliminate the gaps in the working day to get the proper result out of the functions of the workers. Work has become so refined and detailed that it has given rise to serfdom. It did not start out that People would become mere organs of their own function. You are an organ of your own detailed operation in life when thinking outside of it feels like a new beginning. Becoming human. Thinking, feeling, living, human being is forbidden in America. It takes time to develop who you are. Time in America is Money is what you will be told if you use time for yourself. The corporations went ahead with social plans to get people to work in a fixed period of time and in very specific, narrow, activities. ...not a single gap of free time is left in the working day. Every action is monitored to the second and caught on camera. The possibilities of being a human being is obstructed by work and surveillance as it interferes with the interaction of individuals as human beings.
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  7145. Since America does not have any lawmakers in their government that believe employers should be told what to do and what not to do with their company, product and/or materials, tragedy is what you get. A misguided Public. Americans are true believers in the Free Enterprise System (laisse-faire capitalism, translated means “leave me alone” capitalist), and left alone is exactly the way manufacturers and corporations like to be left, alone. If people only thought the way people thought back in the 16 th century when manufacturers were celebrities like Elvis for coming up with a new way to rock and deviated from the norm. That was revolutionary. Any deviation from the norm is revolutionary its just a mater to what degree is it revolutionary. In the case of “leave me alone capitalism” a capitalist like Sam Bankman-Fried is not a manufacturer. The fires he creates are all paper fires in the realm of circulation and burning other people’s pockets of their money. In the case of a “leave me alone capitalist” like Bill Gates the fires he creates are land fires, displacing small farmers and buying up huge tracts of land he becomes a feudal modern land owner and the real cause of homelessness and migrant labor. Put everyone under one roof and have them rock as a team in cooperation not for themselves but for the boss who gets more enriched from the labor he /she employs and manages like a fine tuned engine the way a coach manages a football team. They are one big family of unequal partners in work as employer and employees. The one thing Americans are taught is cooperation and this is through spectator sports they can gamble on encouraging the disease of winners and losers. Compensation for being a loser is a six pack of beer. Great education. Employer/manufacturers/capitalists, call them what you will, they alone make the profits and share the bounty of those profits among themselves and they alone have no clue the profits are made by labor, that is, not until labor slams the breaks on production...than they realize how much labor keeps the whole economy running. Holy shit...my stocks lost value...I have to sell quick! Any which way to get back on track making profits is what they will do. If it means that people are sexless because to have a sex is hated, so be it, as long as they buy, buy BuY! Go shopping , dam it...its the only aspect of American social life that soothes your corrupt soul. No government interference is the creed of the Neo-Liberals political parties and the American worker is blamed and held responsible for the destruction of their own communities and society. In Chicago the City Council and the people (the workers) are a stupid people blaming migrants and not the real cause of the migrant and homeless problem. The real estate industry into which Bill Gates is a new member, he buys to own land for homes not for sale but for rent. A direct consequence of Fed policies, raising interest rates in the name of bringing inflation down the Fed policy forces wages down and pushing people to rent because to buy is too costly positions Bill, BlackRock and others, to be a new class of renters. In other words, feudalism in America. Nice step backwards. Imagine having a feudalistic ACME Anonymous Corporation on which the Pleasantville residents are directly employed by ACME land, farm, gravel and pit work. The Fed helps the multi-national corporations and super billionaires like it was their lame brother to buy to rent huge development projects as happening where Gregg Abbot plots his latest anti-migrant assault. America is a country of the humiliated, a crisis country of humanity. In NYC the workers who can work from home are moving into the neighborhoods of workers in Brooklyn. Forcing rents to go up the workers who cannot work from home are pushed out. There one class of workers harms another class of workers. NYC City Council and mayor do absolutely nothing to protect workers from the pernicious greed of landlords. In short, Americans have become the most stupid people on earth, indoctrinated by an education system, and a news media that tells the Public lie after lie, they have no clue what to do but will come to understanding of what to do after they have lost everything and have become materially destitute in mass poverty.
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  7156. Can’t sell them is the real reason. Over production. A capitalist is the last person who should have control over a high productivity of workers. This is the equivalent of the absurdity of a 16 year old owner of a high capacity rifle. All countries are in crisis in the west. Sanctions have lowered the value of currencies below the value of the dollar that you need more dollars to buy less of the quantity of goods and vaccines the CEO extracted from the high productivity of his entire pharmaceutical workforce. All goods are products of labor. In capitalism they are exchange values. In socialism they are values. Big difference between the two societies. When goods have two sides one side suffers and the other side does not. When goods have one side to them the productivity of goods is manageable versus unmanageable. This contradiction is amplified in new social conditions with every new crisis and are always interpreted as a “...nobody wants them’. People want them they just can’t buy them with the sanctions in place and they do want the social conditions that come with them. F U America they all say! They are not buying. The effect of not buying harms the American workforce because there is no back up for American workers when there are no buyers in the world market for American goods, instead, nations create for themselves new trading partners and build a multipolar network for attaining goods. They cooperate with each other. Internal contradictions of capitalism have gone global...exceeded all national frontiers and boundaries...they make the world a state of capitalist chaos instead of a world of stability. America does not make a car or vaccine to last a lifetime, a car to run on a 100 miles to a gallon. This is an easy thing for a society to do without Capitalist enterprise using the productivity of labor to build an exchange value. So an electric car without an electric grid to support an electric car has a high price makes sense to make the car but no sense to solve the climate crisis it pretends to solve. The CEO loses profits and tomorrow he will announce the cuts to his personal army of pharmaceutical workers. Tomorrow talking heads in the media and the press secretary of the white house will blame deep cuts on staff shortages across several industries, as a side effect of people working from home, and supply chain problems and snafus. he network of railroad workers have been on strike since June of 2021 even longer the start of goods backing up in ports and stacked with no place to get re-stacked and emptied containers sent back to manufacturers overseas faster than the productivity American corporation use of the overseas manufacturers can pump out more goods. Employers never brought manufacturing back to the US and neither have any of the last four presidents and Congresses any intention of re-manufacturing the US that is not tied to competing with China, the sacrifices of the American labor force are to serve the sanctions that do nothing but strengthen China working in the multipolar network that all but few nations are participating. I think once the veil of lies is ripped off the faces of the political parties Americans will get over their fear of their political parties and be embarrassed they did not stand up to this usurper and oppressor sooner sparing themselves decades of agony and suffering. The usurper are republicans and the oppressor are the democrats. Two tiny imps of men and women behind a massive artificial wall of secrecy. One slap in the face of the political parties will bring down the entire edifice the imps have constructed to make the political parties larger than life, well organized and as large as the political parties are internally small. They have organization on their side and organization beats disorganization. Disorganization is the present condition of the American people they will get over after several defeats and body blows have been delivered
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  7163. Theoretically, the cost of production is reduced by the cost of war. War cheapens production. Reducing the cost of production and raising the absolute level of surplus-value is the sole motive of American corporate capitalism. War accomplishes this aim by throwing a nation into oblivion. Lowering the cost of production is the reason to be in Afghanistan. Capital exports production all around the world where it is cheapest to produce, cheap cost of labor-power and cheap or free land acquisition by means of financial swindle. Territorial acquisition on which to build a city in its own image just upgraded. The American people realize they have to pay in longer hours of work under less humane conditions than they would like for these wars only after they have been seduced by the false pretenses of the elites to get into them. Blame falls of the American public for not using its social power to stop giving the privilege to ruling elites the ability to print money forever. Unlike all other countries the deficit can reach infinity in the United States. All other nations operate the same way our states operate they must pay off their debts with the budget they have and still pay for all the services the state provides to all municipalities. The Federal government is exempt from this imperative. Generations from now people like Jordan will act aghast at not a 20 year long war but an infinite state of war. War reduces cost and competition drives elites to sell more, in turn, intensifying labor of the worker at home. Getting more work in the same time from all workers. Speed ups; work harder. Workers here will resist as they always do but in the case of the American worker they might be more nihilistic and self-destructive than pro-active and revolutionary owing to an extreme deprivation of education. The American public pays no attention of how or what ideological tool is used to con them to agreeing to war but this is not unique in history. Ever since the English Victorians introduced the capitalist mode of production made able by a period of non-War for that country, a passive public was also one of their creations. Non-war because the Napoleonic Wars kept England free from France's aggressive colonialism and imperialism. The making of the British Working Class was unique in that the working person could escape by rail the factory and its urban environment. The American public comes around later to the conclusion that they have been had, after the elites get what they want. But each time the elites are proactive and revolutionary in getting what they want the American workers sink deeper into the ground and sooner. Winning back lost gains, the Vote, Minimum Wage, legal limits of the workday, debt relief, medical care, education, and social development whatever happens to be going on is harder made more impossible in the workplace in particular for the American working class to restore on an individual basis. Its social power is the only answer and given the track record of the elites restoring what was lost entails all working class individuals to form a union as the only power strong enough to match the infinite power of money in the hands of the elites. The power of love, solidarity, understanding, empathy and class consciousness. The same values the elites use to advance their aims and interest are the values the working class must learn to advance their class interest.
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  7190. This is the only show on the Internet that does not take for granted the economics of capitalism. Surplus value is the difference between the selling price and the assessed value of the property, the profit of $847,174 million is synonymous with the surplus-value derived from the exchange. Anyone who rationalizes this relation is either apologizing for it or concealing it the best way they can. Jimmy is right that Stewart has become the meme of the capitalist. A person pretending to criticize it approves it in word and deed. The selling price is synonymous with the exchange-value of the property, the assessed value is synonymous with the value of the property. An assessment assesses the value of its constituent parts, the current price of land and the cost of a building on that land is added together forms the total of the value of the unit property of 6,000 square feet space. The cost of living space is the commodity reflects the real estate market average for housing for that area is an inherent aspect of any unit property. The sale money from the sale of the property is the profit not on capital but on living land space as surplus-value. Question becomes who the actual owner of this surplus-value is when there are others who take a share of it, is the owner of the SV the same person who distributes the sale money to the banks, contractors, realtors, utility providers, etc. as deductions from the surplus-value and the other question where does this difference of SV come from when the rule for exchange is to exchange between sellers and buyers an equal amount of money for an equal amount of value in the product is in no way violated.
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  7191. America is a land of dictators its not a government dictatorship that I refer. Employers are the dictators, America has a many dictators. Elon Musk, and anyone who employs labor is a dictator of that labor,--- and so for 8 hours a day, 365 days a year, 138 million Americans employed by employers, are subject slaves to their employers. This constitutes a formalized dictatorship. If you work for the state the state is your dictatorship. If you work for a small landscaper the owner is your dictator and for the greater part of your time including your free time is appropriated by your personal dictator. You are not free to bring a gun to work, Not free to decide how much you get paid. Not free to decide how the work gets done. You cannot change the work if the work you do is apparently dangerous for you and others. Work you do is decided by others who do not do the work. You are not free to decide how work gets done with your other fellow workers. Not free to use the work time to your advantage, the copiers, fax machines, whatever you need to get your personal work done or go to the dentist without losing something or giving something to the boss, namely, overtime work. Where is your freedom if you are not free for three quarters of your life, free only when you sleep, and free only on the patch of land you rent or own? Getting mad at Americans is an easy thing to do. Very easy to lose patience with people who are delusional about their freedoms which for the most part is the entire population. But once the unthinking American realizes how not free they really are another view of freedom begins to grow and take shape. A freedom employers, CEO dictators, all combine to crush. The CEO is the new royalty, the new kings, the only people in society who enjoy true freedom. Americans should stop pretending the CEO and them are the same people when, in fact, they are polar opposites and you cannot have Kings without people who see themselves as subjects in relation to a king.
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  7205. Harlem is not the black working class community it was before Manhattan got gentrified in the 80s, it is now largely a middle class black community. Even Malcolm X’s apartment is a condo today. Condo owners worth a cool million or more. The place is totally unrecognizable next to a photograph of the Old Adam Clayton Blvd in Harlem at the far west end of Central Park. Does West appeal to the black middle class section of the working class? Apparently not. He would have to go further uptown into the Jackson Heights and the Bronx to reach out to a native afro-American, Caribbean, Gulf Coast Central American working class, that as a professor neither he or Jill Stein can even speak the same languages of the working classes uptown. West is running a campaign that strictly appeals and aims to tame a white middle class section of the working class, people like Jimmy. A true revolutionary campaign garners its strength from any section of the working class and you do not need a majority to start a revolution, takes a clever minority to plan out a revolution, and the source of money to make a revolution requires empathizers with money, to agitate the masses into a movement, one that begins as an opposition to Biden and ends as an opposition to Trump using educative propaganda to critique every part about the government working people find wrong, unfair or cannot tolerate. Bernie’s campaign started in a revolutionary way but ended in a demoralizing defeat. This is a valuable lesson for a revolutionary movement.
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  7243. Big banks are still facilitating the hiding of assets of kings, queens, monarchs and dictators, while mothers are shot by police in front of their children in America and innocent families are bombed in Gaza, Palestine. Politicians hide their assets in all but one state, Florida, where by law a politician must disclose assets to run or hold an office. This goes into effect in exactly 24 hrs midnight tonight. Happy New Year to the comment section! You won a tiny victory and did not even hear about it till I mentioned it. A tiny victory for the American mass of poor working people of Florida who cannot hide their assets through Big Banks. Certain states provide sanctuary for assets. Stocks, bonds, cannot be traced. The key effort it appears what government means to them among all the richest elites is to make wealth and hide it. Well, the masses can make wealth but they can’t hide it. Their wealth is exposed and vulnerable to theft. Big theft steal from little ones. The minimum wage goes up this New Year but it goes down as fast as it went up because supply and demand, has changed to add a higher price on things. Oh, one more thing, Netanyahu is prosecuting a war on Palestine only to stay out of jail. Tomorrow he and his ilk will accuse Palestinians for the Spanish Inquisition so they can avoid jail time, any accusation will do, as long as they can prolong a war and avoid jail. He does not want to end up like the Malaysian president who got caught red handed depositing $750 billion dollars of treasury money into his Chase Bank account.
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  7244. It is interesting to note the market form of distribution of the vaccine falls flat short of actual needs in society nevermind government goals. One of the most vital aspects of a community is a health office in every town was destroyed by the new Millennium generation. Killed any chance of the vaccine finding its way across the nation. Pfizer, Maderna, Johnson and Johnson, GlaxoSmithKline, all boosting up their vaccine development but where is it going if it is not getting into the arms of the Public? A doctor should have a medical office in every high school, be on call three days per week, full time nurse, the rest of the time open practice locally or in hospital is up to him. America needs to move away from car dependency as the earliest opportunity and redevelop local independence with its needs met locally. A doctor should not be a paid employee of a hospital corporation, paid as a Schedule C 1099, a payformat that accelerates less independence of the doctor from the corporation. Society treats medicine like Uber treats its own drivers. Decentralizing medicine makes sense if sense is what one makes of a society that is concerned about its Public Health which directly ties into the general well-being of the economy. Doctors ought to be compensated with a lifetime ownership of their residency property and practice and what medicine they develop on their own patented and marketed as they see fit as long as it passes the test of a true high standard FDA. They should go back to doing home visits. Proportional distribution is the next phase of human development follows naturally out of the chaos and ambiguity of the accidental, random and improportional disastrous market form of the product of biopharmeceutical scientists and biologists joined together in a corporation far away from a doctor or anyone's arm to administer a dose.
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  7256. Tariffs are a form of raising the price of commodities, therefore, its impact on wages is to lower the purchasing power of the dollar for working people. Trump imposes protectionism against free trade, he assumes and presupposes working people in America are to make the sacrifices and bear the burden of increased taxation down the road for the cost of isolation. The rich can afford the isolation that comes from protectionism, however long it takes to win over markets by artificially raising the price of foreign imports in a trade war, but the working classes cannot. The union steel and aluminum workers can hold out as long as their employers do. But not the majority of Americans already carrying the burden of tax breaks and a ballooning deficit due to war spending. The amount is probably negligible in this round only according to analysts who focus not on the totality of American goods that do not sell or sell high in foreign markets but on how much prices rise in the home market is spread over all commodities that it is not immediately felt by American consumers. The effect is not as severe in domestic circulation the effect is quite severe on domestic production when employers compensate for the loss with more working time from their employees. The price wars will effect the lives of the majority of working people in ways that cuts short what they can buy, how much of it, and their ability to maintain their present living situation. It will also encourage employers to double the length of the working day for employees who do not have unions to protect their interests. These are the social side effects of what a trade war and tariffs means for working people. The general news discusses the effect it will have on rival countries and corporations. Little is said about the effects on working people is too sadly bares no shame on how dispensable working people have become in this system of debt and credit. As it escalates in the next round, all these workers will be considering an alternative economic system protesting against higher taxation and lowered wages along side women who are striking for equal pay.
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  7260.  @marybusch6182  I see. Well without going into detail the riddle is made more difficult to solve because of the difference between use-value and value in capitalism. For example, artisans of the past produced a commodity for sale but they did not sell their labor-power to access production. Today we can access production only if we sell our labor-power. The division of labor in society dictates the difference between labor of a particular kind, or useful labor and labor of a general kind, or value producing labor. Productivity and innovation (are use-values) these elements enable labor to provide an extra surplus value and an advantage to individual capitalists while relative surplus value (value creation ) currently as organized by Wall Street is advantageous to the capitalist class as a whole; imagine RSV the groundwork for a truly affluent society if American workers had power over RSV? The advantage individual capitalists become indoctrinated by; is to produce cheaper; innovations are provided for the purpose of providing the ‘competitive edge’. The Net Effect of all individual capitalists innovating the workplace for more S/V means an increase in free time, the decreases in necessary labor time (wage reductions) lead to a collapse or a new society. Wage reductions seen in the 1st stages of decline with The Great Resignation. The Fed reacting in this stage using inflation to reduce wages...to subjugate labor, and devalue the debt, but in its last stages, production has laws of its own incompatible to market laws, acts of desperation in order to increase S/Value and motivate monopoly formations. A boundless thirst for S/V is the motive of all the capitalists to innovate. Anyway, hope that helps...:)
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  7266. Employers and managers accelerate the labor-process and KaBoom! Farming, mining, construction, meatpacking, transportation, sectors where people spend most of their lives working are accelerated work processes for more profits. Heavy equipment, buildings, bridges, tankers, in every workplace across the US is made unsafe with incorporated hazardous raw material into the work process and expose workers to the dangers. It is not workplace violence when employers want to make up for higher costs and make worker work harder. Employers accelerate the work-process. Making machines work people beyond the point of human endurance. Crashes, cuts, explosions happen. Notice how the causes to these workplace hazards are never made public and are always under investigation is the routine answer. Commercial media is controlled that the public’s attention on the industrial war raging between the workers and the objective conditions of work in our society is non-existent. When all workers connect the dots about the work taking place in America today in her factories, farms, construction, packing industries, mines, are life-threatening for the workers performing the jobs a labor movement will be born. Right now the focus is on the contamination, a hazard effect of workplaces accelerated for higher profits, but when the catastrophes keep happening in other sectors of the economy the workers will start to make the causes the focus. Workers are confronted by a giant wall of employers all doing the same thing providing no escape for workers while, employers face an isolated worker and can get rid of that person if they do not want them on their premises. In the workplace things are not equal. Things are equal outside of the workplace but not in it where the rubber meets the road. Where the best part of our day is spent and robbing the life-giving work that working can be from the workers giving all praise to the employer for work employers never do.
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  7283. I like her. People like to own their own stuff that allows them to generate business. Latin America is primed for anarchism...no government at all. Trade and ownership versus privileged commerce and capitalism; two very different things. There is freedom of Will in trade and ownership but there is no freedom of Will in capitalism and commerce except as a consumer. Plus, everyone else, the landlord, the bank, the merchant, the capitalist, but the actual producers of wealth appropriate the product of labor of the working classes is the current state of the world that has increased the sufferings of humanity and the planet through excess exploitation and inequality. When Marx said workers of the world unite he did not mean Revolutionaries of the world unite. Bourgeois or middle class socialism was never about working class freedom going back to its origins in England with Robert Owen. Each middle class revolutionary was worse than the previous one. Only two in history were of peasant origins of middle class status, Lenin and Mao. Lenin built up organization as key and Mao built up a peasant army of youths. It helps to motivate a population when the threats are right in your face. Secret wars make it difficult to spot out the enemy. The Nazis (Himmler) in Poland was not in the faces of Christian working classes enough not like the Nazis treated the working class Jews enough for them to join in the Jewish Ghetto Uprising. Religion crushed working class solidarity from taking action, the whole working class would have expelled the Nazis from Poland. 21st century socialists have turned their backs on the project of socialism and the contrast between their abandonment and betrayal they emit gives this young lady a more revolutionary vision than the revolutionaries. I would call this the dialectics of history, or said better, human social relations are full of contradiction and hypocrisy. Comes a time when the teachers have to be taught. All the educators recruiting to fill the ranks of corrupt party officials must be expelled has not happened in Latin America because the majority rural working classes that outnumber the city proletariat are not led by one of their own. When one of their own does emerge an immediate arrest and removal is the reaction from ruling elites, hence, Uruguay. China got past these stages of great social transformation broke through the barrier to use capitalism as a means to develop further but the Latin American republics have been held back by internal and external forces never got past the stage of dissolving the social classes in order for the equal obligation of all to work is not tampered to give some freedom from work and others imprisoned by work. Humans are a rotten species when they are uneducated and they worse when they pretend to be educated.
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  7284. Wow....The ISIS LONE WOLF THEORY, reveals what higher education is really about in America. Keeping the high schoolers from being radicalized through social media which took place rapidly during the school lock downs and pandemic, keep them busy and over work the teachers in the process brought a split in the partnership relation communities have with school administrations and rank and file teachers. Next time America, the best way to prevent radicalization of youth that is now threatening to become a coordinated terrorist movement inside America, try making education free so kids have the option to not be radicalized. ISIS education is free. American education is debt crippling. Christian conservatives and liberals dominate all the political offices and the school administrations, including local government, and in states banning abortion, are too biased. They can’t advance school curriculums beyond the bible principals they hold close to their chest to compete with an ISIS education on militant terrorism. Crime and terrorism are inextricably linked in the framework of liberals and conservatives as forever elements in society does not make 332 million people safe. Not my words, Chief FBI Officer words. Take it from him. ...” I DID NOT THINK THEY WOULD DO IT”, with tears flowing down her cheek an 1861 law is adopted by the Christian conservative dominated Arizona legislature comes as a rude awakening to America women, largely middle class white women, black and brown working class women are more street saavy can smell a rat easier but their problem is their disunity lack of knowing what fascism is. White middle class women grew up thinking their whole lives that fascism only happens in Europe. Many of their own blood died fighting fascism in Europe and the two oceans gave its middle class a false sense of security that today is a powerful handicap for them. Same goes for the men. There are more fascists in the blue states if you count the apathetic than in the overtly fascist red states. This happened right under our noses. Liberals and conservative policies of privatization allowed the growth of a virulent new form of fascism to enter state government through think tanks and mega-churches. They penetrated government locally and became the bureaucracy and moved up the hierarchy of the State. APATHY aids and abets fascism. This is a collaboration, it takes two to Tango, the apathetic are passive fascists through inaction. Inadvertently collaborating with fascism by doing nothing, engulfed by Christian Evangelism with Trump at its head.
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  7295. Can't forget the Iraq War Veterans, so angry at the liberal establishment who at the time was Joe Biden put them in harm’s way using 9/11 for a call for freedom and liberty against Sadaam Hussien and liberate Iraq. Congress went along with it hook, line and sinker. They gave Al Queda a place to fight Americans. The Vets came back destroyed, and used the only power they have to elect Trump, a spite vote against the liberal establishment. What did the left do? Nothing. What did the left do when these same vets showed up in Virginia armed to protest Northam's gun laws on MLK day 2020? Nothing. The left should have been there arm and arm with the Iraq vets. Biden was then and is now in the pocket of Raytheon Lockheed Martin. Grumman, GE, Exxon Mobil, the largest oil dealer to the Pentagon.    Biden formerly head of the arms services committee then became VP to Obama, hand-picked by Obama to initiate another war, the war we are in today, the war with the Russians to build up Ukraine. The next group of Veterans sent to war are not going to come back as close as it came with the assassination of Solemeini of Iran, because now they will be fighting entire nations in the Middle East. His America First policy puts all of Europe in the untenable position to choose between the US or Russia and China. With half of the British parliament invested in Hawei, England, France and Germany slides into a deep stagnation with Trump’s trade war on China.    As for Trump, he is the wrong man for the job. Wrong, because his path is not to deconstruct the arms industry and wrench the grip the arms industry has of our government, his path is to become an autocrat. Undo all the wrong wrong-doers prosecuted by the liberal establishment and create a fealty of the justice department. The people supporting him never went to war. An autocrat is natural to them, they are chiliasts, believers in the second coming of Christ, God, Family and Country. They are the NASCAR enthusiasts, rich, spoiled Americans, country music stars, with pro-fascist leanings.    Only Bernie opposed the Iraq War. Only Bernie opposes the misuse of the military, opposes invasions, opposes the arms industry, opposes industries with the highest carbon footprint. Vote Bernie if you are going to vote, it’s the last chance to restore America back to its original roots of American progressivism.
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  7316. Also, US media will never tell the American Public that Cuban doctors found a cure for diabetes. At the expense of your health this medical progress would cause you to question the American medical establishment's legitimacy. Once you question the legitimacy of a given institution the whole structure comes tumbling down.  Right now, legitimacy in all of America's social institutions are questioned by the Public. A cure for diabetes is significantly in the Public's interests. That human progress is mired in politics, most likely referred to the CIA, not for the destruction of Cuba as a socialist society, but to steal the cure, copy it and have Big Pharma sell it to the Public, reaks of profits. But first they have to get their hands on it, determined if it can be renderd in pill form or a medical proecedure is the nature of the cure. I cannot imgine how a medical procedure cures diabetes. But I am not a doctor. Think about that. My point: the disinformation campaign of the American media is not restricted to politics but is all inclusive of any progress in all fields in the interest of the Public. You folks know government statistics are biased.  Reports on unemployment, Uniform Crime Reports, EPA reports, Warren Commission on the JFK assassination, 9/11 Commission Report, the Muller Report, the list is endless of the the lies and misinformation spread across this land. Another example of disinformation is the denial of information, the notorious news black out, say nothing about the mass opposition inside America's primary allies to the American Public. What you do not know defends the status quo and becomes a weapon used against the Public's interests. Can't wait to see how Congress defends its own legitimacy as check and balance against dictatorship when its Justice Department and the Oval Office refuse to testify. Personally, on this subject, should Trump go down like Nixon, Pence was selected to pardon Trump. My last observation is of the democrats. The old style republicans like Mueller in his report avoided Trump's money laundering relationship with the Russian oligarchs.  Signs of collusion was the report's emphasis and conclusions and the last round of questioning by the democrats revealed to me how nieve they truly are. They really think they are dealing with sincere republicans following rules and procedure was a revelation you saw fall flat on the face of Conneticut's senatr Blumenthal when asked for notations from Barr and Barr said "No'.  Kamala Harris nailed Barr, Booker too sitting next to her smirks at Barr's answers, she knows the game the republicans of this generation play is a reason why not to vote for her.  She's an insider acting as typical of all America's politicians, an opportunist. Let's hope the southern and eastern district of New York attorny general investigates the money laundering. If not Trump walks.  Who in their right mind buys any property of Trump commerical properties if not to launder their capital through some instrument in the US? They are not sincere and are not the old style republicans like Mueller. Republicans are thugs and democrats like Biden are old school. The Trump administration are white collar criminals using lawyers who say: "I have no recollection...", is a lawyer's way of lying.  The American Public shares in that nievete with the democrats and repblicans and it is time the Public realize this. This is a different country from its past.
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  7328. The real Left have been trying to tell people like yourself for decades that what is said to you by rulers is never what they mean...the term ‘civilian’ to them means a retired or former military person. ‘Civilian’ to you means someone educated in a field from a university...maybe a lawyer...doctor, teacher hence, a civilian government. Sudan is now a test case on militarism and how “militarism” re-start in Sudan what is now completely shut down all the factories, workshops? Where will the bakers get their doe, and how will the eggs get to the market...and gas get to stations...and dentist get their supplies...kids get their notebooks and pencils...toothbrush and past...and doctors get their medicine? I cannot wait to see how one of the winners of this battle form their military government and how they intend to resume production in Sudan? Because the two fighting factions are burning up precious capital the Sudanese people created. With what Capital will they start production as poor as production was in Sudan? Where will the Capital will come from and the deals they make to get it? China could help fix the dire situation of the Sudanese people but the Chinese Communist Party is not going to make deals with Military Juntas, so the American World Bank is their next choice to get the money. Africa could be a stand alone country like Russia, a country that has it all, if it were one continent of one nation but it was carved up into pieces by the British to be made weak and as a collection of small republics Africa is vulnerable to this sort of Militarism. The Pan-Africanists had been telling you ever since your were a child this would come and they were right but are gone now. There are no adults in Sudan just bully boys with toys and they have egos worthless to everyone.
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  7333.  @mfgreviews5028  What do you think the world economy is chess board, such a mechanical view of the world was debunked long ago. Petro Dollar will not last because the crucial element you exclude in your analysis is the flexibility of power of the productivity of labor, and 1.2 million people employed with an industrial base in China is flexible. US has to rely on individual capitalists, callous Millennials like, Elon Musk, to re-industrialize. He could have invested his capital in industry but chose to invest in a product that produces no real value back into the economy. He’s not making shoes, or employing a cattle rancher, tanner, leather makers, shoe makers, and factories. He’s providing Starlink internet service for a third of the population in Ukraine on behalf of the military. How do you know what China knows...you have a direct link to the Communist Party in China that we don’t...you are funny. Oil bearing states and India are closer to Russia and China physically that the US would have to occupy the Middle East to strike a deal with India. All America has holding up the dollar is sheer brute force, military might, it has no productive industry beyond what is produced by and for the military. When was the last time you drove across America off the highways. Nothing but ghost towns and dead zones? America’s capacity to produce is limited, its military expense is 32% of GDP normal when industries were in the US. Today the workforce is substandard and flunks in reading, math, science. GDP is counted by how much profit is made not by how much actual production takes place...its fictitious! You are in dreamland kiddo. Snap out of it!
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  7341. You know back in 1860 people thought slavery was a long term thing. The ancient Romans thought Rome would never die. Ancient Egyptians thought Egyptian society was permanent while the spirit world was a part of that permanency. So I don’t buy the idea that anything is a long term feature of anything. In 1860 what cost a $1.00 was something someone could not make themselves, they were self-sufficient in every other way, meeting their needs, but say they needed nails from the town hardware store because nails were not made on the farm. Agriculture was still directly a means of subsistence. In 2022 the entire population needs everything and are a mass of people completely Not self-sufficient, not even efficient, were made dependent on sale and a supply chain that is the economy. Prices can rise with the demand as all agriculture was taken over by a small number of corporations. They have excluded nature as a means of survival; people can only get to nature by market relations mediating between them and nature. Buying and selling became the way to fix the problem of landless people and this made money a necessity. But something happened that Americans give up too easily if you ask me. Over the period of 160 years a nail that was forged by a blacksmith at a rate one nail per minute is now a million nails per minute produced by machine. Very little labor involved except the button to the machines in the factory were pressed by one engineer specialist who grew to become a person that could do nothing else was soon de-skilled and made dumb compared to their distant relatives. Another fact, none of this was chance that agriculture (land) formerly a tool for individual survival became a tool for mass production. All of this was so planned out to be so efficient that the slightest interruption in the supply chain would threaten the whole society is how fragile the US economy has become.
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  7345. BLACK FRIDAY,----The images of people in stores surrounded by products, walking through aisles, malls, stores, moving in no particular direction, just browsing the objects hanging on the shelves. I thought are people active or passive in this scene? The products sitting still look passive and the people moving their bodies through the stores appear active. But what I see is not what is going on. I see a silent auction happening. The auctioneer are the products talking to you silently in your head as you pass them by and check their ticket price. They have your attention the ticket price you read is their voice taking over your inner voice. Our minds’s inner voice do not recite prices on its own. That voice saying its name has entered into your head. Subtle but very effective the products have invaded your mind. They sit harmlessly for someone to pick them up and buy them looks passive enough. Their job is to get through the check out counter and transform. Products want to change form like a caterpillar becomes a butterfly the goods change form into money. Whatever can be done to get into your cart for check is fair game. If they had legs they walk to the check out themselves to complete their transformation. They have to use your legs, your mind, your hands, your body, to accomplish that feat. After check out their mission is complete and they no longer have to actively sit on the shelf calling your attention to buy them. You can use them for a purpose that is not intended for them for all they care. The toilet paper does not care if you use it as wall paper or for its intended purpose the price inhabited its body before check out was left behind and the ew body it has is still in the store but in the form of money. The product left the store as something useful and its other self as a value stayed in the store as money. A very weird society, indeed. This transformation is so important that they are held under lock and key. So important that people assist in the transformation of products into money to ensure that transformation happens wth no disturbance or interference whatsoever. So important that people wander to look and get hooked. Its a very strange society where its products are the active player and the people the passive players told silently through words and images what to do and when to do it, even how to do it and how to feel about things. Very strange, indeed.
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  7351. I think the hanger collapse in Boise Idaho, a republican state, is symbolic of the failure of American capitalism. Production in America is privately owned, and generally speaking, production is unsafe and insecure. Government is forbidden by republicans to interfere in the private production processes of corporations. We, the Public, when we are not workers, we are consumers, when we are not consumers we are producers (working) and we are not allowed to know if what we consume and with what materials we use to produce are what they say they are. Democrats are responsible for inverting reality. Republicans are responsible for pulling the teeth out of government and democrats a responsible for making that reality an inverted one to psych out the main group in society, and pretend there are no real monsters in society who deserves to be shot can access the means of production and poison individuals for the addiction of their product tainted with heroine. The area where people spend most of their lives and cannot live without they have no control over. This is why American capitalism is dying. Its happening across all industries, Boeing the most infamous failure of capitalist production. All the layoffs and job cuts, the push to advance AI in production. No inspections to ensure things are put together correctly. Factory explosions, derailments, failed bridges, infrastructure, roads. The threat to society is the private use and appropriation of resources for sale and marketing as its principal over works people to death for the production of profits.
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  7355. No money to be made in healthy people is a system that regards all things useful and not useful to humanity to be nothing more than equals as values to be exchanged. A house, a vitamin, a mineral, any kind of material, a tool, a person’s time, land, airtime, air space, food, are equal in the sense that you can trade one with the other in different amounts. Ben Franklin made this observation about society. He would be angry to see how this relation expanded into a complex society from its simple equation. He warned that when money is used to measure these values in order to exchange them, we make an abstraction of the differences of each useful object and the work that made that object. The weirdest example of this distortion is a person’s time. Time was never an outside thing measuring work and a person’s time was never an object outside of the person. Before the 18th Century everyone worked when the sun came up and stopped working when it went down or when the subject of the work was finished if there was man made light. In money a person’s time is among all the values that can be exchanged for money is a 400 year old idea that pales in comparison to the 12000 years of human practice working on a natural rhythm of the earth’s rotation on its axis and working the soil based on Earth’s orbit around the Sun. Native Americans mastered this cycle nearly down to a T. Knowing when it was right to plant and sow, change crops, allow soil to revitalize, hunt, fish, and live by the signs given to them in Nature herself (the Great Spirit). Technically, modern humans are off our natural rotation by using time as an outside element to measure the work we do everywhere. Its no wonder we are stressed and compromised, deprived of Earth’s natural properties to stay healthy.
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  7373. The legislators are the people who make the laws that force companies to throw out products. State legislators decide the culture, the law tells corporations that if they want the tax allowance they have to throw out the food. They cannot give it away and it’s on the company. The legislators are pricks! They don’t even want to meet a company halfway. We’ll pick it up every second Wednesday is too much to give. The “legislators’ in state government could have written the tax law to say; give it to people who need it or your employees and show us proof if you want the tax allowance and the culture of meanness in corporations never has a chance to be a reality. But the politicians are mean people. Back stabbers, liars and cheaters...you are stupid if you expect the same meanness does not spread across all social relations and institutions? The other way to see this phenomenon is through the lens of market forces. Sometimes cattle ranchers and dairy farmers deliberately lower their stock to raise the price because a tax is too high on them or a tariff tax makes the competitor’s beef more expensive lowering the supply can bring in a hefty profit for a lifetime. Not a nice thing to see farmers shooting down their own steer. But on the Dollar Store Corporation the legislators let in a parasitical business and made it a business model for all businesses to exploit its employees and the consumer, DG buys cheap and sells dear below the average price, they buy from Chinese mass production factories and sell in the US, they hire US workers cheap bringing down wages in general and the commercial waste is immoral.
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  7378. My Conversation with Joe Biden: Biden your history. Sucked right into a war with Iran and WWIII the Biden Administration is isolated, ineffective and hated for not stopping Israel’s atrocities. Pivoting America to be against economies blocking growth uprooting millions of people are the effect of your policies Joe. Can’t you see that? You are so unstable the Billionaire Class would rather back Trump. All you have are anti-Russian paranoid neocon lunatics advising you. Good bye Joe. You paved the way for Trump. As much I dislike Trump he is way better than you are Joe. Too bad you were too stupid to not eliminate the neocons from your cabinet. Of course, you are old now, another four years won’t matter as death is right around the corner for you. But what a F’d Up legacy you leave on this earth Joe. WWIII, and more intensified climate catastrophes. What a man of high intellect you are. Hey Joe, where you going with that gun in your hand. You going down to shoot Iran. Shoot it down the ground. You bring your own personal family instabilities and dysfunction into the world of politics where they do not belong Joe. And the best you can advise the future is to invest their money right. Since they don’t know any better they listen. Joe, you are like a used car. It might get me there and back but the car has no features I like. Poll numbers sinking Joe. You might want do the opposite of what your doing now. If you did you’d be in sync with the country you were born into. I got a few words for Mayor Adams too that are not too flattering. No more two term presidents or mayors from here on in. The intelligent masses will never vote twice in a row for the same character until they get one that makes the MASSIVE CHANGES this country needs and WWIII is not one of them.
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  7387. Racism is a mode of production. It is tied into the economic structure of society and cannot be separated from it. Therefore, the economic structure is in control over human beings and not the other way around in the racist paradigm or economy. The problem with racists is their consciousness over racism, to them racism is a nature-imposed necessity that they cannot understand a 'black face' in historical context, for it is treated the same way the birth of Jesus Christ is treated as Born Again by christian Evangelicals despite being born once in history. Denial of history, denial of all facts and realities of oppressive forms in society. Where does the theology of VP Pence and the entire class dominating the political structure, come from? At the fall of the Roman Empire, from the Greek word 'chilias', meaning a thousand, (thousand points of light was the phrase GHW Bush used speaking to the evangelical faction of the GOP on the eve of the first Gulf War invasion about reading his lips on No New Taxes). There arose a mystical religious doctrine of the second coming of Christ and the establishment of the millennium, when justice, universally equality and prosperity will be triumphant. Chiliastic beliefs arose in the period of decaying slave society; they were based on the unbearable oppression and suffering of the working people who sought a release in fantastic dreams of deliverance. Those beliefs were widespread in early Christian times and later on there were constantly revived in the teaching of various medieval sects, are now revived in the Trump administration. Know your enemy.
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  7415. What this shows is that there is enough material wealth and productive power for all to be rich. People do not have to worry about starvation by revolution. Without a job that is the thief of all social time humanity can pursue the goal of transforming the brain and society from poor thoughts to rich thoughts from poor people to rich people as long as shelter and susbsistence is not threatened. Every forebearing social movement who sought to change society had the problem of material deprivation. Russia and China overcame material deprivation and proved a nation can. But their's are not yet a full affluent and democratized society, therefore, partial democratic and socialized societies in whatever variant is all we will see on this earth and in our lifetime as long as the world gets smaller because we number more and there is little room for two systems to exist and one of them depends on expansion for survival. For all to be rich there cannot be any major class differences among people and nations. It cost societies and the planet to maintain and sustain social class imbalances in the consumption of productive power. This cost in the form of human labor consumed more by one and not the other is a key a generator of social inequality. Social classes take up more productive power and economic development depriving others of an affluent life. Everything will have to be completely and 100% democratized for a true affluent society to arise and for a new species of man and woman to develop.
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  7417. The right wing agenda for America is not working. The Plan that experiments on the population with written laws to incarcerate black men by making their childhoods criminally poor get snatched up into the “system’, is a failure. The Plan backfired. The system has a loophole in it. Kids do not want to be controlled by an Establishment. Some kids know kids more worthy of democracy than some adults. Democracy bogs down the plan that the right wing must shift focus to get rid of democracy in the way of a successful implementation of the America they want for the 21st Century. The Age of Majority is one Achilles Heel. Black teenagers robbing Amazon and other delivery trucks, smash and grab robberies of brick and mortar stores, are sending a message to a deaf Congress in a love affair emulates Israel. Where all the Jews are rich and all the Palestinians remain destitute and the two live separate and unequal lives is not their idea of life. Only when Congress abolishes the rule of the age majority and give kids rights will the corporations regain some semblance of a market in which business can take place without losing money. Until then the entire social order is in jeopardy of collapse. The Right Wing will never put this genie back into the bottle they opened. In fact, I see no reasonable solution they can come up with but more of the same policies accelerating the decline. The same rights as everyone else above the age of 18. Eventually the kiddies will become decent and respectable citizens with the power of their own legal representation to sue for abuse and neglect of any social institution as the cause of that abuse and neglect, the real bad ones will learn there are consequences to their actions and the real good ones can vote and kick every republican and democrat out of office proven to be connected , directly or indirectly, with that Grand Social Experiment.
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  7434. If China had this problem and it did. The US would condem China's actions but the problem for better or worse was solved by China's Cultural Revolution in the 1970s. Whereas racist social elements, the slaveholders who started the Civil War, lingered since the end of the American Civil War well into the 20th century.  America's Counter Cultural Revolution of the 1960s did not even come close to building a movement of abolishing racist culture and institutions for its lack of focus and intent to abolish racism but it had the right method of changing the single patriarchy of American society. All societies have to shake off the old social structures if they want to go forward and many of the old structures resist and often wage war of a restoration of the old society, revel at a lost way of life, look backward such as Mr. Trump's Make America Great Again looks back at the height of US industrial revolution. You cannot look back. You can only learn from what is behind you. One must remove the barriers in front of them one by one to reach the goal of emancipation from human enslavement. Russia had this problem with the "White Russians" who without a doubt holding the Czar and the Royal Family captive only fanned the fires of civil war. If you hand him back you are surrendering the revolution. If you eliminate him Russia gets peace and the pro-czarist forces, well, disapate. Human history always throws a monkey wrench on a plan. Venezuela has this problem and seemingly the problem has become a solution. Guarimbas were the proviolent forces fighting the government and burning people alive who supported the legitimately elected president they now interact with the working class on developmental community projects. The violent episodes in Venezuela are never to be reported any long in the mainstream press because they don't happen anymore. America has its share of reactionary social elements that it is going to take a massive government re-education drive most likely starting at the elementary school level where the whole educational curriculum will have to be revolutionized teaching the harder subjects in shorter modules to lower grade levels once the three r's are down pat. Ignorance can only be overcome by knowledge. In America's future society everyone will have to be trained in practice and skilled in theory to be on the same level as the rest of the world.
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  7448. Sorry Mr. Dore I think your assessment differs from mine. Protecting the someone else is them. The masses are Omicron infested the Establishment Elites are not infected or if they are they can de-infect themselves with the science. Elites have been telling you all along they are following the science and medical science agrees with masks and vaccinations, that translates into government edicts in the name of public safety and since the Elites are a part of the Public, it is their safety that takes the higher priority. Separating the masses from the Establishment Elites is the best form of protection they can get from exposure of the masses and this is accomplished by limiting the extent of wealth and power the masses can accumulate. The Establishment Elites are placing the burden of safety on the masses, they perfectly realize the masses live in a world where science for the people is a contradiction in capitalism. If science is not used for capitalist production, but for public safety, science shuts the economy down, because the economy is not a relation of use-values and the relation of commodities to one another are not the subject of science is the contradiction. As the working class can only live as a working class by becoming buyers in a capitalist society, the Elites with enough wealth accumulated can live out the double standard and science can be the weapon that shuts down production and lowers the wages of working people as a blow against the demand of workplaces be continually made safe, would constitute an expenditure by Elites that would likely to sink profits below their standard of living. The burden of the new standard of living of the super rich imposed on the working population requires the permanent inclusion of a virus in the working population. Now the social policies the Elite Establishment pass through legislation can regulate people as if they were and are propertyless. So what would be the correct position to take? What we are seeing in Canada is who the State allows to protest and who the State does not allow to protest shown by the protest relation to the Cops, as friends, the protest is allied with a section of the State that is in opposition to the establishment in power.
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  7454. A person works 8 hours a day. In 4 hours the wages paid to that person is replenished by an equivalent of what that person produces. Wages are self-reproducing. The other four hours is work given with no equivalent to employers and a worker advances two weeks work before their first paycheck has produced work of no equivalent to that person in the waiting period. Looking at it this way the wage fund is never depleted and all work performed for employers by workers is not paid work; its value producing work that happens in the course of a single working day by millions of workers multiplied by an 8 hour working day by the number of working days in a year and the results are phenomenal and astronomic amounts of value creating work at the behest of employers while one hours’ work equals one hours’ work for workers in the form of wage their productivity the employers exploit for their own purposes equals more hours worked per worker from fewer workers. Raising the retirement age would be a subtraction from the portion of the wage fund workers replenish in the first four hours of the working day to 2 hours and giving the 2 hours to the employers for nothing, is really the substance of this reform package. In a rational and more socialized society the less 2 hours it takes to reproduce the working class would become the source of free time for the working class as a whole not the opposite, more working time extracted from a smaller workforce for a capitalist class for their own exclusive consumption of the wealth. Macron’s reform imposes a longer system of exploitation of workers soon to come to America incidentally, and that he forced it through is pretty honest of him that it is a direct imposition, forced, on the working class.
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  7455. 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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  7460. We might want to test his hypothesis in his '..foreign goods and market barriers..' speech in light of the developments of larger capitals taking over more spheres of industries and the huge takeovers through the buying of stocks that began in the 1980's. This was America's last period of prosperity for the middle class and working class and the last run of capital accumulation by the rich and powerful. The tendency of the business community in the decade of the 19080's was to centralize their ownership of many corporations and centralize credit. Before the crash of 2007, corporations made the business environment hostile for small capitals to survive at home and Congress made it easier for these large capitals to invest in China's then emerging industrialization abroad. The sociological impact this tendency has on the American working class was to set the stage against any rise in wages that would include health care to workers. In this period, US employers leading up to the present time in 2017, employers get from workers more value in less hours without violating the legal workday. At the same time the American worker accommodated US employers and worked several jobs. Each individual worker in two or three jobs meant two or three separate employers were given the labor of one worker cheaper than had they employed one worker full time. From 1980 to now, constitutes a 35 year period of wage stagnation and an increase in the exploitation of the American worker by US employers. US employers have been developing at a brisk pace and accumulating wealth at a brisker pace because more value is produced per individual in less and less time for them. They are not about to give up, to the contrary, this only wets their appetite for the repeal of the legal workday.
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  7466. Well the good news is that Jelly Fish have taken over coral reef and whenever jelly fish move into a coral environment of the coast line it is because the coral is dead. Jelly fish will kill you, your child, and burn your eyes to blindness, scars for life, and these fish is what you will have to dodge while you enjoy yourselves swimming at the beach. Good luck.  Spend a thousand in Atlantic City, be cool and get hospitalized the Jelly Fish leaving its lasting marks on your body. We got rid of too many sharks too. In the Everglades they raise the sediment up to confuse the small fish for a big helping and when you are permitted to fish in the Everglades, you'll kill off the sustenance of these sharks and think your'e cool because you challenged some wildlife spawning Mollies, Guppies, Toothkarps and Livebearers, in the process of fishing out the Sea Trout. To sharks and whales a helping of small fish and plankton you could imagine must be the same sensation we get when bunch of grapes are crammed into your mouth and squeezed. There is everything wrong with America that its all or nothing. Its productive powers are used against society and nature, all its brainpower is either medieval with respect to force and with respect to finness, delicacy, and grace, the brainpower goes into ordering more hamburgers. Americans are completely a manufactured people. A true passive Public too! Dead coral plant life turns white in its death. They look beautifully eerie but are dead. White plants swaying about in calming warmer waters makes it tempting to dive in and look. Coral Reef is host to most all sea life. Anchovies, small fish, come in massive swarms to spawn at locations, the whole process of biological reproduction looks like an underwater ballet, and the dolphins from below the swarm shape it for a nice big helping. Not only seal life benefits, birds, penguins, sea lions, seals, land mammals, you name it, the Coral is the Heart of the Sea of Cortez for the Blue Whale their sustenance. The killers of this food source are active out at sea. The fishing industry is literally on the sea all hours of the day, netting these swarms whre they occur. The plastics industries, luxury entertainment hospitality, beach resorts and boating industries sell a fantasy but in the process they consume the life sustenance of sea life to meet a human want, an artifical want or a false need, which is the condition the poor and working class are constantly at war with in their own lives. Boils down to a pacification plan of the public to exists in a perpetual state of need is the first condition and the second condition is the creation of a dependency on their products and control your pesonal consumption patterns.
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  7467. In the meantime employers and managers accelerate work-processes in their workplaces and KaBoom! Farming, mining, construction, meatpacking, transportation, sectors where people spend most of their lives working are accelerated work processes. The acceleration is to lower the unit price of the product by raising output from 8 hours work to 6 hours work make more product in less time undercutting the competition with a lower price setting a new average price in the market and finally taking the bigger share of the market by selling below the old average price and above the unit price. This is the business model of owners as competitors. Heavy equipment, buildings, bridges, tankers, in every workplace across the US made unsafe with incorporated hazardous raw material into the work processes is a battle field for workers performing the jobs. Machines, automation, technology and science incorporated into a work process work people beyond the point of human endurance. Workplace hazards are never made public for fear workers would resist working conditions and America will look like Europe in month long worker strikes across most industries. They provoke a class struggle and fear the temperature of that struggle from getting hotter. Classic line is “If you can’t take the heat get out of the kitchen”. Commercial media is controlled; so you are lucky to have this alternative. The public’s attention is to be kept away from the industrial war raging between the workers and the objective conditions of work in our society. Workplace catastrophes keep happening in other sectors of the economy the workers will start to focus their attention on employers. Employers have stacked themselves into a rear defensive guard, a giant wall of employers all doing the same thing, accelerating work processes. In that formation they can escape workers but workers cannot escape the whole group of employers offering one deal; take it and shut up! In the workplace work and relationships of work are not equal. Work and relationships are only equal outside of the workplace. But inside the workplace, workers mortality is the price they pay for the higher costs of health care and other compensation costs in government obligations against employers.
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  7503. The class system is older than capitalism, although the two social classes unique to capitalism are part of the whole class system they are not the creators of the class system, contrary to popular prejudice, that if we abolish the capital-labor relationship the whole class system will go with it. Sorry, the class system will not disappear if we socialize production. It would take more than that to get rid of a class system. Unique to capitalism is the value-relation between labor and capital, and only in production do they consummate that value-relation, outside of production labor and capital are not even neighbors in the same neighborhood. The rest of the social order consists of social classes much older than capitalism, i.e., bankers, landowners, merchants, clergy, politicians, military, slaves, peasants, are all ancient social classes. They have adapted to modern life or modern life has changed their appearance but economically as far as social classes survive through the ages they have always existed on wealth produced by a laboring class. Part of that laboring class became what is now free labor or wage-labor, the other parts fall into so many variables as to how people make a living is ridiculous! Suffice it to say, the wealth the social classes are supported by comes from the labor-capital relation. By now they have saved, accumulated, over thousands of years wealth through inheritance and wealth extracted from former slaves, peasants, serfs and the modern day tax payer, to never worry about money for the next ten centuries if what I will say does not happen. For this reason the tax code is well guarded in our laws as the prime mechanism preserving the class system. Can we abolish the class system by an abolition of the labor-capital relation? If we change the form of production from its present form of a class struggle paradigm into an antagonistic-free system of production wealth will still be produced. Labor and capital continue in new form. The old form resists is the problem. The class system survives on the wealth extracted from the past and the present is intact, but if we change the tax code, we change social classes and the form of production. The class system is still left intact through the laws of the state. The state is the home residence of another ancient social class, the politicians. The laboring population has to have a good reason to overthrow the politicians, the politicians have to become absolutely intolerable to the great mass of working people, just sick of the politics, sick of the general character of politicians, and be hungry at the same time. Not enough that they be jobless to get riled up, they have to be on the edge of starvation and the politicians have blind to reality, visibly living in the lap of luxury, for a takeover of the state by the mass of people to happen. Then you have to worry about the warrior classes, the Military, loyal to the old tax structure they are sensitive to losing income the new tax structure should make them an ally of the laboring population to defend the programs of the laboring population. The military can quell conspirators. Then, you have to worry how the other social classes will sabotage the programs of the laboring population and the propaganda used against the programs of the laboring population, and, above all, you have to keep the laboring population intact mentally, to keep from being poisoned by criminal elements within its own ranks. The laboring population has to become class conscious and united. Purify itself from the ideological contamination of superstition, false thinking, misinformation, ignorance, violence. On that basis push all this forward and desire an end to their own social class which automatically entails the end of the class system. If this happens humanity will never see another social class for as long humanity is alive on earth unless it falls asleep and a new class emerges to start the whole class system on a new basis, all over again. When a revolutionary plan is outlined and focus is given to the subject on how changes can be made, the project of social change, is a monumental task tried and tried again by many a people. The difference between the class struggle of capitalism to the class struggles in all human history distinguishes a laboring population movement from socialist and communists in this way, the labor-capital relationship is encouraged and socialized in order that the class system in general can be suppressed.
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  7513. The point of a planned economy is to safeguard society from natural forces where they pose a high risk to the population. The point of government is precisely the well-being of its citizens. The point of science is to aid society. In the United States none of the above are an object of interest to industry or the government to any degree of compatibility. Typically the resolution is a crisis resolved after the fact through lawsuits and legislation when a community has already been decimated. This is the basic idea of a war economy to make sure 'materiale' is distributed after a defeat and does not fall into enemy hands. Either this government sees its citizens as its enemy or it thinks and behaves materiale is to be hoarded under lock and key? The civilian economy is the the total opposite of its military sister-economy, civilians are underdeveloped to handle such crisis and the military is over developed to survive such crisis. The lack of prevention and planning of the America economy expresses this point tragically in the fatalities that an ounce of prevention is a pound of cure is never put into practice in the industries producing dangerous substances. That field of work is not an object of interest to society for reasons that baffle even the most conservative European politician. Lethal industries and their work details, what they do and how they produce their product; how they dispense with material, how they process elements to refine oil and store lethal substances are not an object of interest of this government either! Really astonishing the level of apathy. In effect nobody cares or knows the gravity of hazards so grave they gave rise to a specialized social science called Industrial Pathology. The nuclear power commission has kept old nuclear power stations relatively safe for a 70 year old institution. But under Scott Pruit it is slated for cuts in its budget and many power stations on fault lines and near big cities are in need of constant renewal. Potentially some should not be operating under such precarious conditions. In short, this environmental crisis does not affirm the idea that self-interests helps the greater good. Far from it. Voluntarism is inadequate and philanthropic aid, i.e., Red Cross, FEMA, can't cope with such a crisis. No wonder all the free trade politicians are totally silent while this environmental catastrophe unfolds and reveals a really tragic death toll. Civilian economies need planning and its citizens need education, food, medical well-being. At the current level of mass consumption of oil the industry as a whole should be under the direct control of the government. Strong position but one that will not waver. The refinery industry and its individual competitors have nothing to say, they put themselves near the Gulf; easy access for sea transport of the processed oil is a motive that works for them not society or the coastline itself and subsequent sea life. This crisis puts the industry in opposition to society and its citizens, specifically the government person in charge of mediating this conflict of interest is the wife of Mitch McConnell, Elaine Chao.
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  7525. He kept his promise made in his campaign. The promise to his very rich donors who want to see Jerusalem the capitol of Israel. People should not be surprised or shocked by this move. Trump has no principals and his evangelical supporters though they are deliriously happy about recognizing Jerusalem they are not so excited about trump himself. Neither are the Chamber of Commerce republicans interested in being identified with a sexist racist nationalist in the White House. They will not impeach him as that would cause chaos in the party. Rather the party split up is more likely the scenario to come. Transnational corporations are not married to Trump for the same reasons many of you cite, more conflict. There are three camps in the GOP and deep down they are each ready to split off from the other. The way I see it progressives will be pushed out the Democratic party by a merger between GOP big business republicans and corporate democrats. The evangelicals will have a party of some kind of their own. This can all happen in a matter of a few years.  If I were in the progressive wing of the party I would form a left party like yesterday. Right now everything is in flux and the changes happening over sexual harassment, gun violence and immigrants status are hot reasons for a rational left party of some real significance. So many of the problems emerge from false thinking about things and life in general. I hope progressives get their shit together and seize this opportunity or history will condemn them. That is just a short scope of what i think will come from all this.
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  7541. Well, you have to recall that Trump rode the wave of disgust with Clinton and Romney. Sell outs who bailed out the banks. Let them fail versus Too Big to Fail. 10 years later after the big financial collapse what do you have? 2.2 % GNP and real unemployment at 7%. Capital accumulated hand over fist by an ever shrinking minority and mass human suffering and insecurity. Clinton and Wall Street and Romney and Main Street to these voters Trump was the outsider on their side of the fence. Bernie was the inside/outsider on his side of the fence who stood for social justice. While the Republicans concentrated on not losing senate seats to hold control over the Courts. Trump is a professional bankruptcy capitalist makes a profit by producing luxury excess greater in value than the loans they were built with. Definitely American made partially mob produced with NYC construction unions in the take. Over produced luxury consumption led to the collapse of the Trump empire in 1991. Who could imagine that middle America would fall for the cleaner more presentable side of the Queens Mob influences into NYC properties in that decade? Wall Street is not a Trump fan and the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times let him know about it at every chance they can get. But still, if Wall Street can turn a profit through Trump they are not going to turn him down. The whole business environment is each to his own. A jungle is more harmonious than the workplace and society is safe under the rule of law. Stepping in is Big Oil interests and a gun lobby, both interested in continuing the wars putting up cash to shameless candidates praising their donors as politically correct just to sit there and vote 'no' on a litany of left wing agendas. The biggest agenda being 'climate change' and abortion. A war on Earth and a war on Women is how it looks from the left. And, I agree at this point, capitalism is the single biggest threat on the planet and the GOP the most dangerous organization that ever existed in history. The attitude being now is the moment and fuck the future! Its all going to be run by people of color in matter of ten years. A surge for universal health care and workplace democracy is moving the needle into a conflict that is about social class, of the People versus the Transnational Corporations.
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  7552.  @skvetny  The theory is not fully disclosed to you to decide at this point. 1. The non-human world of nature has species who produce little and devour all, i.e., the locusts in Africa and Asia is one such example. Nature does devour nature. Baby seals are a food source for vampire bats. A herd of caribou is a food source for a mountain lion. Bears are omnivours and devour plant and animals. Nature in the non-human world has no choice but to devour other natural beings. 2. One species may produce the means of subsistence of another, or nature can provide and abundant source of subsistence for some creature. 3. But! Our species is the only species that must use its own body as a tool to produce its food source. First this was done by hand, now it is done by machines. 4. It is natural for the human body to be used as a tool within its natural limits and without force. In this 4th proposition is where humanity gets hung up between what is natural and what is social. The part that uses force, i.e., forced labor of any variety as tried under communism is where communism failed is social not natural. It failed because the people at the time did not have the skill set to take from nature in a form useful to humans without robbing from the non-human world the susbsistence they require to live, is an idea humans are not ready to understand and act in accordance with that relationship. Capitalism fails in that regard as well. All forms of society and social relationship fail in this regard, the failures vary in time and place and culture. The human world of nature does not see itself as nature. It sees itself as social and defines freedom on that basis. A social right is not a natural right. Food being natural to the body is not a natural right, good health keeping to the body and mind is not a natural right, a roof over ones' head is not a natural right but acquired only be means of social rights. The theory is still incomplete here but the thinking is on the right track.
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  7556. 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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  7562. Dick Cheney is the person who privatized USAID. American contractor companies (NGOs) turned the program into a competition between contractors never sharing what the other was doing in order to compete for the greater share US AID money, while being sent across the world, pretending to be humanitarian, were propping up movements and nations with USAID money to social elements who wanted to join NATO, to strengthen NATO against....you guessed it: Russia. Hey, you guys are getting good at this. Free market capitalism turned the program into a cesspool of privateers, mercenaries, CIA agents, you name it, our money was used topple regimes unfriendly to the Cheney mission to militarize societies through pre-arranged crisis. We, as the taxpayers, are raped for huge amounts of Congressional allocations by every democrat and republican overseeing in committees meant to monitor US AID, did so, with the intent to perpetuate war, instability and conflict. By the time Trump came around the program became ripe for destruction, a dismantling and freeing up that part of the budget Congress passes and approves. Question becomes, who has the ultimate authority over those funds and who is the ultimate owner of US AID dollars? US Treasury is another federal bureaucracy tat is ripe for destructuring and who heads the US Treasury, the agency responsible for the money supply, gold, treasury bills, domestic and financial economic policy to include tax policy? You guessed it: “the secretary of the treasury”, who is that? Now it’s a Trump appointee. The head seat of the Treasury has been vacant for a while. FAA is another institution that has been cut at the knees under democratic administrations. The slashing of the FAA is responsible for the pathetically incompetent status of BOEING and all the airline disasters thus far. I question the validity of workers’ unions leaders when all of this was going on, did nothing as part of the Public they are take action against cutting the FAA. Not even the Unions acted in the interest of the Public. This is a sad situation as all these programs and institutions are cut away they reveal the breadth and scope the American taxpayer and voter had been taken for “suckers” and left empty handed.
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  7577. Funny...if the airline companies are fined deep enough from all the corners they cut and all the people they fired and the whole industry becomes literally non-functional the government will have to take air travel over. Profits get choked and the airline carriers has no capital to re-invest to run their airline. Americans through government action will have taken steps against the will of the Senate nationalizing air travel. I would consider that a revolution and a victory for the masses who only had to stand on line for days at an airport, get lost, lose their luggage, or be on a plane that nearly crashes into other planes and never once have to fight in the streets, use a gun, attack a military, and charge a Capitol building in order to socialize a huge part of the economy. All the major industries are failing. Food, health, transportation, housing, civil society, law, military would all have to be nationalized because none of these industries is working evenly for 332 million Americans. The whole thing works unevenly for a tiny minority. Funny how socialism is inevitable through capitalism’s crippled non-functionality. So much for all the money wasted on building anti-communist hysteria in Americans. If we had a crystal ball this eventuality could have been foreseen saving the country decades of poverty and misery and some very stupid presidents. Americans are going to love socialism once all that money going overseas is spent at home. The sooner you end WAR as a WAY OF LIFE the sooner you will be LIVING LIFE not Killing It!
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  7585. This is fabulous. American people are realizing the Republicans and Democrats intend to do nothing about gun violence in the US. NOTHING! Which means the parties have to be forced by mass social power to do something or forced out of power by that social power. I had been commenting the pattern of not disclosing perps and the press using terms like the “homeowner”, “the worker” , ‘a mild mannered dentist” , “the driver” whatever they are... the Press avoids releasing their identities is how the press covets their identity and when they are racists et al Nazis ...that makes the American media a tool giving the advantage to Nazis perps. The press including Amy Goodman ( of course, she is no Nazi...I like her) conceals the fact that all the mass shootings are a part of mass terror campaign to pacify Americans in preparation of the economic crash of the US to come...the BIG ONE....for which the Democrats and Republicans plan a war as the answer their economic dilemmas, as was the theory of how the US got out of the Great Depression, they believe the Super rich will spend their money and create jobs, rebalance the economic wheel, and America is back in 1965 economic levels but flat for the working class...a prosperity for them and poverty for you...with a bonus feature ...another Vietnam adventure...a foreign policy fiasco and debacle with China conceived as a war stimulation orgy. Through this they intend to put American people back into their role as a worker despite their intelligence, skill, and willing attitude to be productive people or move up the social ladder. The parents and grandparents of the people who run the US now (today) are all connected to the European Powers of Versailles, Britain and France and the US, all forced a surrender on Germany and punished her as if they had nothing to do with starting WWI. Funny right. You may move up in this world but will always feel unwanted. Like Trump. Super rich and the established super rich hate him they crucified him with dirt.
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  7589. Americans should be made aware that they are paying the salaries of every government worker of Ukraine from the money Congress previously appropriated to that country for military gear and equipment. Many problems arise from this appropriation. Ukraine is not even a sovereign nation for Ukrainians who under a news black out and press censorship live under dictatorial rule. Do you ever see a Ukrainian Youtuber or Tic Toc celebrity from Ukraine? No we don’t. This would be because internet is provided for the government and not the people of Ukraine. Remotely America provides the technological capabilities for this war. But to learn... You work hard a long day at work and are taxed a higher share than you should be only to learn that the incomes of foreign government officials, on top of our own government officials, is where y(our) money is going, is to me a real shocker and a blow the lack of fealty, and callous disregard, for “us” in the US funding this whole debacle. American people are not given the respect or dignity they deserve for their sacrifices and support. I never heard Zalensky say to the American people, thank you for your support. I have heard him plea for more weapons but never a thank you. He has been given 50 million in cash and around 70 billion in weaponry from our pockets and not one word to demonstrate a reciprocity of gratitude but at home practices censorship and jailing opponents which make me sound like I have a axe to grind, or I am from the other side. No I am neither of these. Just a person who reads is who I am. Zalenski’s behavior is an insult to me but to people desensitized to their own dignity and self-respect it is not an insult. We cover Ukrainian government payroll and at home the people who should be taxed get to keep their wealth. Those who earn more pay nothing and those who earn less pay for it all. Biden has not done a good job. And the American people should not be giving the rich who die because of plane crashes more empathy than the Ukrainian people are given bearing the brunt of this debacle.
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  7602. Doug Jones defended blacks in the 60's but he is one of these people who never step foot in a community barber shop of a black neighborhood. Too scared to be in contact with black people, too scared to challenge his own opposition. Nothing comes out his mouth, not one idea, no mention of what he intends to accomplish, literally nothing! A hallow shell of man in contrast to a loudmouthed bully. The black community has no choice but to throw away a vote on a moron because they are repulsed by the racist running against the timid. If Roy Moore can't beat this idiot than Roy Moore is an ass. There can be nobody more out of touch with the black community than Doug Jones and Corey Booker supports him? That cop who shot Shaver is depraved but he is also a prototype personality, everyone knows one in their town or family. They are vigilante types, completely wired with the latest technology in their cars, ready to capture wrong doing by authorities and citizens on video, challenge rules and rulers by means of secrecy, sabotage, and feel justified. They find employment in places that fit their mold. Not all are bad, but the prototype is a social mold individuals fall into from an early age. This personality starts to shape early in life and is ignored in every corner in society when they become adults until something to reveal their inner poisoned feelings on average people is done is when we all say, the guy needs to rot in jail. So the cycle continues for the next prototype and be blamed the same way. Who is really sick here?
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  7635. That neocon guy Ned Price and cohort in the Pentagon have to go! As a country if there is no end to this war there will not be a country. War bleeds the US economy. War generates higher taxes to the government and every home-owning American hates taxes on top of taxes. We are not lending money to Ukraine we are giving it away and tax payers will not get paid back by Ukraine. The point is to end the war in a cease fire and start talk directly with the Russians. Not matter how you try to sell this war it is a war between Russia and the US. There is a direct correlation between war and taxation this generation does not know that spending GDP on the Vietnam War was followed by a profound double-digit recession and stagnation in the 70s,---this led to crime the only domestic issue republicans got elected. It was a democrat LBJ who escalated the bombings in Vietnam and he paved the way for a deep recession that gave Reagan and Bush a platform...pure propaganda that works on a racist segment of the population and works on dividing cities from the suburbs. But this time, war is ecoside, it is not the Vietnamese America provokes into war its the Russians it provokes into nuclear war. Neocons in the Pentagon always have their finger on the trigger as if the world is static, unchanging, the same as it was in 1945, ---they can’t tell when their time is over. Neocons have to be told in no uncertain terms. If this means throwing rotten eggs at war mongers, so be it! Taxation is unequal from the start is enough reason to oppose this war.
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  7657. Capitalism is a social thing that satisfies human wants is what its prize fighters would tell you. Ii does not care or question if the wants of society are natural or unnatural. They would tell you...that's the beauty of capitalism...everything is a commodity. Well then, I would say in that case, we should begin with a commodity and deduce from that point what it is and what it is not? If you start doing that the prizefighters will flip out and start to over react; so there is no talking to these people. The only people who care to what degree are capitalism's successes and failures are its prizefighters. We want to know what makes capitalism tick? Equality is the starting point of capitalism. The law sees everyone as equal owners and makes no distinction who we are as owners. But at the finishing line where there is one owner-winner and many loser-owners there is an equality in everyone being a loser of property and there is the problem of the one owner a winner of property not being equal to all the rest. The majority develops a mass social psychological complex, as people who lose all the time, suffer loses and lose winnings, and the owner-winner develops an individual psychological complex around being special, unique, extraordinary, the one with the greater quantity of property than all the rest. Its a strange social system, everything human is incompatible with the process of converting money into capital. And, the distortion is immoral. The wants that capitalism satisfies are not real wants they are artificial wants conforming to what capitalism needs to survive.
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  7660. FEAR! Every governor from California to the New York are afraid to tax the rich! The president is so fearful of them he decided to make them tax-free! He acts big and bad but secretly he kneels before the rich. Sanders is not afraid to tax the rich he has been running a campaign for a political revolution for the last 9 years. Its paying off, he is the only politician who listens and has his finger on what the Amercan people want, and all of us agree the rich should be taxed and pay their share of the tax burden, that the burden should not fall all on the shoulders of the other social classes in society and sclude the super rich. Doing this creates monopolies and mini-monarchies in American society, sheer chaos. So, here it is is, an authentic politician who will tax the rich and build a national health program just in time to fight against a pandemic. Nothing left about that, its progressive Americanism that has a long history characterizing Americans, it only looks left because the conservative forces have moved far to the right, importing European fascism to the US and Biden is part of that in that he works with that trend. He doesn not work against this trend of foreign origins to the progressive history of Americans. In the meantime, Bernie personifies American progressivism and pragmatism. If Americans do not see that in him they do not know the progressivism of Frederick Douglass, Samuel Clemens aka Mark Twain, they don't know Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie, they do not know the real first woman to run for president; Victoria Woodhull (September 23, 1838 – June 9, 1927), was an American leader of the women's suffrage movement. When a people no nothing about their history a far right foreign invasion can easily conquer its people, its land and its society.
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  7670. An alternative society does exist that does not put all its eggs into the Stock Market. Every since the financial bubble in 2007, the US government has been enriching shareholders and CEOs. Borrowing against the hard sweat and tears of America’s working class and selling it as T Bills around the world leaving the real economy of this working class desperately poor paying these bills back to their foreign and domestic money holders. These economic desperations have rooted into the American soil a class of political opportunists cheating the sovereignty of millions and millions of struggling working people...calls for a whole new government...when you try to understand why the Chinese do better in electric cars, math, science, lifestyle and longevity, and other durable goods...why Westinghouse is no longer a household brand, why America has lost its edge, it is because the Chinese do not care about the stock market. The stock market and billionaires draw capital for personal consumption. Profits into a branch of industry that can employ the rest of the country and use versus the use of profits to pay servants to the rich as waiters, and maids, is considered more important. But rather than go full state owned and planned economy like the Russians, they took a moderate course of combining both systems, with the State holding the essential means of production... controlling a fury of market speculations from developing too big for its own britches that there is here in the US...what counts is the direct way industries relate to each other. They can only relate to each other in two ways. Relate in quantity and in quality. What does not count is their money expression as exchange values. Industries are not commodities in China. This is likely to be the single-most difficult mental block financial analysts have with China, and it is due to their knowing the price of everything but the value of nothing.
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  7690. I truly do not understand why Americans would be shocked at Boeing’s behavior producing faulty planes. Work in America is performed against the clock. People are paid more $$ to get people to work harder and faster. When people are told to do the job in a certain time frame and they do it in that time frame are they not aware their work poses a harm others? Why would they suppress these feelings and walk away knowing a hatch door at 12000 feet in the air will break open? America is in business for sale not for actual use and safety. Faulty products should be expected but the suppression of your conscience will turn you into a brute of a human being that it really is not worth covering up for a greedy corporation. The NTSB will not be looking at how workers are pushed to perform on the job. The root cause of faulty planes will be overlooked by the NTSB. What they will be looking for are the inadequacies of the production line itself the tools the management and the labor-process not the timing of the labor- process. The pace of production, the speed at which people have to turn out a certain quantity of product will not be the subject of the NTSB. The NTSB also works against the clock like everyone else and so oversights are committed. The next story and older one but still proves the same point. Nothing is made for actual use in America. Things are made for sale or they are not made at all. Nobody makes N-95 masks as a precautionary item. GM makes things for sale not for storage and distribution. When the pandemic broke out America did not have any N-95 masks. GM could have made a killing on that product had they kept the product line alive but neither was the government prepared. Private industry and government failed the American people. The migrant problem is another case in point. America can’t house them, feed them, clothe them, place them, nor can America be kind to them and host them, because in America, a house, food, clothes, and space, and time to kind, are things you buy and sell not things or actions used by people for people. This behavior is at the root of America’s chronic mental disorder. That all things must be made to be bought and sold. For some reason the entire 12000 years people have been making things for use is a history the Americans believe never happened. Whatever they are taught in schools it is not this. They are trapped in a belief system that things must be made for sale was the way all humanity for all history did things. Silly people if they were not so armed to defend this lie. In America, the selling process pushes the production process to the limit that for some overworking is beyond human endurance and hazardous mistakes happen frequently. Sellers push buyers into working longer when they are not buyers and when they are buyers the sellers want what little money they got from overwork. They giveth for long hours of work and taketh away with taller prices. This unnatural way of Being rapidly demoralizes people in society making it a crime to be kind and a crime to be poor in states making laws that further alienate people from each other unless they are buyers and sellers. If people are neither buyers and sellers they are materially deprived and are treated like a leper colony. For migrants, there is enough space in America to host tons of migrants but only at a price. Without the money to pay the price that space stays empty and Americans gets to watch their cruelty on TV, children and mothers freeze outside lays heavy guilt confusing Americans about how their own humanity turns into an inhumanity on others. The answer is; because everything is made for sale.
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  7693. America has some serious mass transportation problems. The system of inspections on the work of private companies that are too many does not work! Also, the system of compensation for damages is a deficit driver, a cycle of Peter robbing Paul. Insurance pays out what it saves in taxes. This is the reason Americans overwork. Workers are providing the revenue to government and the surplus profits to private corporations. A double whammy, corporations are freed from paying taxes, raises the deficit, increases borrowing and spending is all thanks to Trump the last president to cut taxes. A tax for cut for billionaires is a tax increase for workers but in the form of more hours worked per worker from less workers. It’s death spiral for the working class and an open door for migrant labor to replace a higher priced working class. In this day and age the legal limit of the working day should have been reduced after WWII in the 1950s and 60s when it was cheap to raise a family and have a life. That would have prevented the prolongation of the working day in 2024. But that was a time then the Mafia controlled labor. Now it will take more working time per worker to cover the repairs of an aging infrastructure and pay back increased government borrowing. Worse yet, in a time, when it takes more more dollars to pay the rent, mortgage, buy food, eat lunch, pay child care and put gas in your car. Prices are decided by the same people who pay less taxes....this makes the assault a Triple Whammy. If this isn’t bad enough the Fed prints more dollars and cheapens what a dollar can buy. How do call four economic assaults a Quadruple Whammy. Social policies in America are in contradiction with what America needs. Out of sync. The failure of keeping the workplace safe could be a problem of dishonest inspectors who let things slide in the production process, or the system itself is compromised that it has no effect on the culture of work of private corporations. Making cars, trains, planes, machinery in general, for sale leads to inferior production quality and this is life-threatening. If you are making widgets for sale the number of widgets sold is more important to you than the widget itself and how it is made. This could also be a problem that there are not enough inspectors to inspect all the private producers. Whatever be the case one thing is certain. A higher deficit and prolonged working day in an age when reproducing yourself and a family was never cheaper in world history.
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  7699. What is necessary to be done, goes beyond Medicar 4 All, every industry will have to be nationalized in the US in order to mobilize FEMA's resources to serve 332 million people and as far as the number of unemployed only 3.5 have successfully filed for benefits out of 43 million out of a job. This experience will transofrm America to develop a system of government comparable to the successes seen in the Chinese government to operate with the cooperation of the people are now have conquered the virus's exponential rise of contagion. Further, the US (Americans) are not only in an economic depression, shelter in place will induce psychological and social damage that will cause a complete social breakdown and anime of individuals and families. As far as Trump is concerned, this moment in history is a referendum on Trump, should he do the right thing as mentioned above and by the guests in this show he will win by a landslide, if he does not he will lose by landslide. Biden is irrelevant, I cannot stress that enough, he has absolutely no relevant impact as a viable leader for this country and will lose the nomination to any of the governors acting in a real leadership way the country requires at this time. Trump has a deep handicap for not responding when the warnings came in advance as America was caught completely off guard. As for the working class, unions, progressives, National Security Agency, the Justice department and Homeland Security the political conflicts between them and the push to suspend civil and constitutional rights driven by the Supreme Court, in their exercise of self-interest is a danger to society descending into barbarism must be reduced to rational and limited powers. This moment is a turning point in the economic history of humanity and America specifically, if not for Dr. Fauci's exemplary scientific diligence, calming and rational approach the people in this country would be entirely lost personifies the kind of mindset the leader of this country will need to bring about this transformation. As far as Europe is concerned there are real threats to democracy and freedom in the west coming from eastern Europe, specifically Hungary and Belarus's rise of fascist nationalism, America, China and Russia and Europe will once again have to suppress along with all of the criminally negligent right wing elements and general ignorance religious zealots pose to humanity by their inaction to respond to and deny medical science.
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  7704. Trump will never apologize no more than Hitler would have surrendered per Rep. Hakeem Jeffries Plea for an Apology from Trump. Trump called the Congress the hangmen and he the black slave with a noose around his neck, ---- a fruedian slip. These are words of a cornered and desperate man losing control feels choked to powerlessness without control over the whole political narrative. All the irony for union labor striking the car industry when one of their own is killed by a car. On Facebook, everyone should get paid for their data it harvests and sells. My guess, the contamination of baby food products will be the death knell of the Trump government once its FDA reveals it never monitored the baby food industry. Humanity has come to a point where reproducing the conditions of subservience to neoliberalism and its other cultural and social manifestations of oppression for another 30 years is simply, out of the question! Enough of the elections and referendums, the bullshit, humanity is tired of being trashed and made to feel responsible for its robbery and brute force by billionaires and the State(s). Humanity is further coming closer to a realization that neoliberalism and the State, is not the cause of humanity's deplorable condition, but both neoliberalism and the state are a consequence of humanity's disatisfaction with work, and in the very activity of work itself, its products and false wants, this is because under neoliberalism all of these products and false wants are human efforts, feelings and emotions, actions belonging to someone else making the work a day to day grind and hateful. Work ought to be a rewarding experience for everyone. Its not, instead, work and working is the cause of neoliberalism and its effect of this split between work and working, is the State arising out of need from this contradiction where people are working only to create wealth for others out of the necessary work for subsistence people must do for survival is the reality. Human dissatisfaction with the form of work under neoliberalism engenders the cause and the effect. Though it may appear that private property is the source of this social alienation occuring actively in where people work, its not. Private property of the few is a consequence of the lack of property of the many. Humanity has not yet come to this conclusion to remedy all of humanity's sufferings with a program for the generalization of private property among the population. In effect, capitalism which praises the values of private property are okay with it for the few and against it for the many, uses capitalism as an anti-private property social system is an active base of oppression.
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  7742. Yesterday a republican was for the emancipation of slaves, then they became the party of big business, then they became the party of law and order, today they are the party of the working class and law and order. Things changed. Parties are in flux with new party elements gaining momentum and steam so things are weird. Bernie has more in common with Rand Paul than he does with his own leadership for example. Democrats were in the past a party of merchants, banks, and landowners, this included farmers and ranchers, then they became a party of the industrial working class, a big movement, a historic shift, and held that position until they got into foreign affairs and wanted to prove they could be just as good as republicans re-arranging world affairs and world production and making money, and then they became the party of Big Business of Small minds. Pinheads, control freaks. Big Business and Industry always keeps their hand in both parties this way no matter who wins they win and the democrats left the working class hanging out to dry turning their attention to Asia to keep America making money. But societies everywhere are in transition, political and economic, there are many revolutions going on side by side of the wars. War and revolution, that’s the pattern societies undergo to make progress driven by struggles contained in them. Apartheid coming to an end is true human progress but that progress isn’t because we think it but it is because we see the hideousness of it in action and hate it that all join in to end it.
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  7744. Its a funny problem that Americans see as a social problem when really the migrant question is an economic problem that has nothing to do with traditions of welcoming the poor of the world. The more land is bought up by large monopoly corporations the higher the demand for migrant cheap labor the governors do not know what to do with. Where America is stuck is with a right and left wing of two parties content to have occupied by aging incapacitated elderly senators still in Congress who belong in a nursing home are presiding over the biggest expropriation of land and property owned by people of color and whites since the Reconstruction. Through natural and social disasters immediately following is an appropriation process that is violent, punishing, delays relief to victims and dispossessed, responds minimally to pressure the sale of land, buildings and property in one fell swoop to a consortium of anonymous and international investors. Congress has its head buried in the ground. The American people left defenseless to fight amongst each other in the scenario described above. What Americans need is a second revolution to overthrow the yoke that is a double economy, one that works for multi-national corporations and monopolies, and the other that does not work for the vast majority of Americans but props up the primary economy that is the military industrial complex. America has a war economy for its defenses and a command economy for its citizens. The command economy is subject to the will of institutions which presently is incapacitated by aging old men with a marked propensity toward sloth and a war economy that has all the supports, resources, at the ready for war and expansion to preserve markets and create new markets for the products of the multi-national corporations is its sole purposes exclusively. You need a second revolution, period.
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  7757.  @Verradonairun  You are confusing markets with capitalism, which tells me you know nothing about capitalism. Just another prize-fighter for capitalism is all you are. I have what you need and you have what I need has been in existence for thousands of years, waaaaay long before capitalism. Its called exchange. At one time people used one good for another good and then at a later time money was used in the transaction. On top of confusing markets with capitalism you bring in the notion of non-interference of government to demonize government as the regulator of markets when in fact, exchange regulates itself. I have more money than you therefore I can buy more toilet paper than you. Government does not play a role in telling me that I can wipe my ass with a limited supply of toilet paper that I can only buy so much toilet paper. What government does do, to regulate capitalists through the use of laws, is to tell capitalists you cannot dump hazardous waste into a river, you cannot work workers for 15 hours straight, you cannot use dangerous and hazardous substances in your products and you cannot drill for oil in a national park, etc. I detect your anti-communist ideology dating back to the 1950s when you say state capitalism regulates capitalism which is another stupid comment because the evidence is plain to see that China does not tell capitalist what the US government tells capitalists, the communist in China do not tell their own capitalists what they cannot do in production. China is the leading polluter, or was before the caronavirus caused it to shut down production. You call this the exact opposite of "true capitalism"....mmm you are upside down. And your understanding of what leftists want is upside down. Trade deals with other nations are not deals of exchange, A = B, they are arrangements, i.e., trade arrangements into which the capitalists ensure they acquire the greater share of the profits and the market they intend to sell or produce. Finally, you realize government is necessary but only as a powerless entity made weak that it cannot intervene in the interest of society but only function as tool for private industry and Big Business. You reek to high hell of a living, breathing jackass!
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  7760. What angers me about American Ranchers is their intellectual immaturity, they have been complicit with Big Agribusiness for decades. They have a Me, Mine, or the Highway mentality,---narrow mindedness based on a selfish attitude about property, as long as their land was pure other land did not matter to them and they took no political stand against PFAS chemicals the industry poured into the ground as fertilizer and as a waste product for the last 75 years since the end of the second world war. The science is taken seriously only when it hits them in the pocket and they find blame on others. The American government is even less mature, on purpose! The government gets all the science from the scientists’ of leading universities in Senate Hearing testimonies. These testimonies end up as measurements on how far the private sector can get over on the American Public, they are not taken as serious recommendations from intellects. Leaders in government have no intention about regulating private industry, they give free reign to the private sector over all markets, they stand on a non-interference policy for the State, not the other way around. Government and the private sector have become wedded as one entity, the private sector has captured government, and turned government into the common enemy of sadly...society. Members of society do not have a government...private corporations and the government on one side opposed to society on the other side. This alliance will not stop to destruct and self-destruct.
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  7761. Americans are a disturbed people. Harsh lifesyle in America. Harsh being a teenager, an adult, a child, a parent, a mother, a father. All harsh, cold, and disconnected. Media will never discuss this incident as an example of where and how this barbarism comes to be. They have vested interests in the barbarism and in not talking about it critically. One gets the sense that the working class in America is so disunited from the real world and what is happening to them in that world that all self-control is lost in their lives. Being pushed and pulled to meet the needs of institutions instead meeting the needs of themselves. Its a society under a constant state of internal conflict and external war. A society that is dissolving. A society where only the rich can live. Raised by a generation that bullshitted them to believe they can be all that they can be. Parenting or family, social structure, and technology are used as weapons for the annihilation of the working class. Literally, American society is lethal and will kill you is a really tragic state of affairs. That this incident is connected to religion is no surprise considering America wages war on Muslims. That this man attacked a baptist religious church and not a mosque tells you he was telling us he came to some realization about America's fallacies and hypocrisies. This generation of the working class were never taught the skills needed for social stability and long lasting relationships by anyone period. They will become a miserably depressed generation that will never experience joy in their lives...just walk through life projecting everything is ok when they are living a life on death row outside of prison. I feel sorry for America. It has a government that has no regard for human life.
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  7775. So, by this theory, the product belongs to the capitalist. The law of appropriation of some 160 million outside of the home does the exact opposite of every worker having the right of ownership of their labor inside the home. Value is produced outside of the home and inside the home labor has no value is the current social arrangement for millions of people in the US. Is it any wonder that inside the home there is little regard and respect or dignity between members of the family. Instead of millions of families of workers consuming their wealth they give it over to someone else. Quite the problem for humanity. Question for me is this a permanent condition? If you are not a capitalist you give up all claims to the product of your labor and no share of the market value that product accrues. This excess value goes to the capitalist is a legal right of way for the capitalist. When the workers receive wages for their labor...the capitalist is then owner of the means and the labor,--- the word capital includes both labor and the means of production (capital). Transforming money into capital depends on uniting labor and tools. Animating value producing labor and tools will produce a surplus-value even if the law of appropriation was changed back to the age old principal of the right of ownership belongs to all workers of the product and the share of wealth derived from that product. Surplus-value would not stop being produced. Animating useful labor and useful tools under worker control is still capital. It means making labor inside the home value producing labor as well. The work of all members in the family is productive of a value to society and is paid. Capital controlled by workers is nothing more than controlling their own social production and redirecting value where it is needed the most to even out the spread of wealth generally.  Repossessing the means of production and dispossessing Jaime Diamond of JP Morgan is the scary part that not everyone is on board with that endeavor, at least not right now anyway, but doing so will become a matter of necessity for the society as a whole not politics. Alienation of the means of production exist only on the value side and but on the use-value side it is a relation between workers and machinery as the prime engines of economic growth and material wealth.
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  7781. Assuming surplus-value is the consumption of use-value of the commodity --labor-power...beyond the point it has created the value for its own reproduction...the working class first gets paid for the job...but the jobs of the capitalists corporations represent a two-fold process of the worker's labor, when incorporated into the product of the corporations, the worker paid for the job is expropriated from the value, more value and surplus-value created through the job. This material wealth is then thrown on the market and profits are realized. The question ought to be answered not with cynicism, '... people want capitalism without the capitalist...' that workers being economically injured by the expropriation want. The answer to the workers ought to be surplus-value is the consumption of labor-power by the capitalist. Since surplus-value arises from production and circulation with no change in productive forces, then the change is purely of a social character. The industrial revolution in general had nothing to do with inventions and machines as it had everything to do with the intervention of the capitalist into the labor-process. Effectively, this intervention changes how societies work and live. The economic progress of the corporations ensures the rise of general market conditions for the exchange of equivalents leads to a separation of the workers from the wealth created in production. The corporations and capitalists associated with those institutions as owners first appropriate this economic wealth, but, as in the current time, not the exclusive owner of the surplus -value. I think the point of even having a left is to realize that the working class as a class is positioned opposite the industrialized system of machinery through the jobs created by the corporations. In reality, labor is not labor under capitalism and an instrument of labor created two opposing positions in the left that led to a restoration of capitalism in Russia. The Stalinists in Russia emphasized the forces of production, western Marxists emphasized the social relations of capitalism. The USSR inherited the productive forces under force to transform while social transformation in the west is stagnant. France developed the industrial forces of production in its revolution under Louie Napoleon in 1850, whereas in England the intervention of the capitalists ended feudalism in 1850. Current evidence shows that the working classes in France in 2018 is better off economically then the British working class in England in 2018. The American Civil War in 1860 was about the intervention of the capitalists over the economic order of slave holders, and it seems since WWI the American working class is had one period in which to emphasize the productive forces and made a success of it in 1955 but since then the capitalists are unable to transform society by promoting industry and investment. In 2018 the American worker is worse off than the workers of a generation ago. The corporations and the flight of capital, actions that undermine the government's role in society as a protector of the environment, the work place, are actions addressing the corporation's primary concern to become the exclusive owner of the economic surplus and industrialization was never, according to its own history intervening into the production process of society, in its soul. Lest, I say, the working classes in the west are in for a rude awakening when the exclusive owner(s) of the total economic surplus, united as a class, emerges in victory does nothing with the surplus to transform society.
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  7814. Compared to a feudal society, the modern state, declares all real distinctions in society as , "non-political". So, unfortunately, this means real social problems stemming from civil society don't call the attention of the politicians. State representatives strictly engage in the politics to access the economic wealth of the revenue created. When you get someone who runs on social issues they stand out as odd. To be the opposition to the State you have to be political and economic. Suit and red tie, a man with a plan. The state is purely a political place where people are elected to engage in political battle for control of the revenues. They go to Washington to redirect a greater portion of the fruits of society to their constituencies. If that means voting for a war and a constituent benefits in some way from a war, so be it, the voting record of that politician was pro-war. Politician may have a horrible voting record on social issues because the social problem itself is an expense on their constituent and see no contradiction in voting against it, that person may not even realize how it relates to a social problem. The communities electing politicians engage in voting for non-social reasons as well. The state has an economic and political existence not a social one. It only intervenes when harm threatens the interest of the society as a whole. Its third dimension is force and the courts. Maybe this is the reason revolutionary movements without a theory of the state don't gain much traction for their cause people, by and large, people want to know how will you socialize a political institution? How are you going to make the state see gun violence as a political problem and treat the NRA as a social force that is pro-violent?
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  7815. Russian speaking people wanted no part of the Ukraine government the war against them began. How the Ukraine government came into power is ‘the’ problem not for the Ukrainians to resolve but for the American people to resolve because it is through the agency of the American government that the break between Ukrainians and Russians took place to begin with and ramps up with intensity. This how all agencies of government stood to gain from the disturbance of an invasion was carried on, and planned, preconceived interventions, not for the American people but for a small clique is why this problem is distinctly an American problem. Embattling an opponent who is not as sure as was presented in all the western presses and media, a foe darker than evil, and whose armies not as sophisticated to conquer and manage a nation of less than 100 million people brought about a humanitarian catastrophe of historic proportions. Either American intelligence blew out of proportion Putin’s real strength or they knew it did not share the intelligence or advise against encouraging the split between Russians and Ukrainians, or the prize of Ukraine was too great to heed all reason as a result of private interest tying Ukraine and its resources to members of the political elite in Washington D.C. Distinctly an American problem because the American tax payer bears all the burden for the catastrophe, exposed to risks and harms and dangers of an economic collapse in the American economy, for reckless negligence by people, as the two political parties make opportunity out of a catastrophe endangering the planet, utter hypocrisy and are not worthy of leading this great country...is the problem to resolve.
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  7817. The Koch Brothers and the whole private sector is getting what they paid for from the Trump presidency. He is giving the private sector 1.1 million jobs six months into his presidency into which 1.1 million people will be working under a whole new set of conditions, perhaps not the best conditions to work, and not the same optimal pay new workers might expect, this is why it is important for a Marxist economist to show how Congress, on the one hand, gives free reign to industry and private industry, on the other hand, exploits labor and the environment when given free reign. The two markets doing well under this president are the commodity markets and the labor markets globally. Stocks prices rise, wages fall. A contradictory movement Marx found embedded in commodity production comes from the use of labor as labor-power to create more value for capital. The accumulation process for the private sector is also a process of dispossession of property and assets belonging to more people in the working classes. When a social and natural catastrophe occurs the state is unable to step in. For instance, Tyson foods has created a dead zone the size of New Jersey in the Ocean Gulf of Mexico as a consequence of the free rein it is given inside the factory. The commodities Tyson produces are foods and poultry, at the interior of society, the factory is where humanity interacts with science, technology, automation, machinery. These elements are employed to enrich Tyson. Not employed to enrich society despite the elements are consumed in common by labor-power. They are not controlled by labor implying labor is not in control of itself in production, nor outside of production is labor free,. The same problem exists in nature as the oceans, rivers, forests, pastures are not ends in themselves but are a means for the labor-process. The use of things is entirely dedicated to the value of things under capitalism. More of these scenarios will occur as this is exactly what this administration is giving to private capital. In this way Trump can boast he will be a most popular president on par with Lincoln for freeing capital from government restraint. Yet for the Democrats unable to recover from the onslaught of working class defection the use the state as an agency of reform is no answer to the problem of an enslaved working class under capitalism. With most US states adopting right to work laws the two markets freed of government restraint, the labor markets and commodity markets, we can expect to see wages fall and profits rise as a class dynamic in the economy. Jobs increase and stocks rise, business community thriving as the conditions of labor deteriorate and the 8 hour day become 12, 14, hour long days to compensate for the loss of 'hands' owing to innovation. Not good news for the working class from the standpoint of production and not good news for workers in the exchange of wages for labor-power. All this is very good news to the Koch Brothers and some sections of the business community. Banks would go along with it. Rent, interest, prices, all rise, except wages. Looking at the whole process from a subjective point of view, the worker's worst nightmare is being labor-power for capital. Labor-power is its imprisonment confining work into a narrow activity eventually destroying the mind and any latent potential individuals have that springs from their own creative juices. Labor-power denies labor the right to be freed from its own ancient curse found in the division of labor, over 2000 years of class divisions that withholds personal free will to rule itself. Mind is captured in the body of a slave and patrician, slave and master, wage labor and capital, in general history and specifically its historic mission is to free itself.
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  7829. The employers ICE is targeting is not the 711 corporation itself but the individual franchise/owner operator who is not likely to hire the people ICE want to deport considering an owner/operator must document employees with a W-2 does not need a problem with the IRS. The reason they give for their Gestapo actions is a pretext and lie. A franchise owner is a member of the middle class typical franchises open the way for new immigrants who pool their money together or saved 20 grand or more to buy a franchise is part of the American dream they were investing into becomes a nightmare of persecution and ruin by a secret police agency. ICE would catch more illegals if they raided Hotel conglomerates. But that would be a crackdown on corporations something someone opposite of Trump's politics would deploy as a means to repress corporations. In a country where there is a political body there is no reason for force on either side when legislation can resolve the problem. This is what makes a Trump reliant on force to get rid of some of the countries growing from the world market. In a country where the gap between city and rural life is made up of the lack of commerce and industry in the country as compared to all the resources concentrated into Wall Street in New York City, Trump has not done much to improve the employment situation for millions of Americans, especially for all those middle class kids with student loans and the economy had not done more than a 2.5% growth. There is trouble on the Trump's horizon, he needs big stories and other conflicts to draw the attention away from this deplorable track record on the American economy as it weakens weekly while corporations strengthen their bank accounts. Trump needs more of the world market than it can provide to get the growth of industry he needs. This time it appears the principals of free market economics will not invest into industry, not while it is easier for the shareholders and CEO recipient of the Tax Bill collect and buy more of their own corporate stock leaving Trump with the legacy of being America's first dictator. But with the ousting of Bannon it appears the corporations got behind Trump and for the last part of his reign America's corporations will be the rulers of society the American people will be the ruled.
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  7833. With all those nations congested around the Horn of Africa chasing after the material resources that go into the formation of products societies consume truly proves in economics and in reality in general including the present that there is a Law of Value and that law is the same for all kinds of societies and nationalities. This is explains why the idea of a superior race or society is pure delusion for that too depends on a quantity of labor from the total labor of society to produce a fascist state. The wealth of nations is determined by the quantities of the various kinds of objects it produces. For America this law of value is in the form of a vast accumulation of commodities and this mass of products needs specific amounts of labor to produce so that the question becomes: How much of Somali labor is used for the production of mineral, ores, lithium that is not used for Somali society? Is the capacity to produce of the Somali people crippled of its ability to operate in a conscious way, and not even, an unconscious way, this law of value. I think we would answer that as a yes because on average the life of a Somali individual family is very poor, dirt poor. Very little of the total labor of society goes to the average day to day working Somali family. A fraction of that total. The conglomeration of all societies chasing after the natural resources of Somalia pulls Somali labor away form its own development and uses that labor for the development of the product the nations involved are willing to go to war over. Now why in the world would you perpetuate that relation of exploitation by choosing to make electric cars and rail, solar panels, and cell phones?
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  7858. Let me give you some real clear and concrete enlightenment on the US economy. It is weak. Fed waited too long to let loose its grip on interest rates, Fed is always behind the 8 ball like the Cops are always behind the 8 ball in the criminal world, there are 7 monopoly corporations determining your future and all the rest in the market, well they are waiting to die or have died. White House measures wealth by how much GDP sells and it sold a lot so to them the economy looks great, but only a few corporations sold a lot, the other in the general economy sold little, profits falling. Jobs and production, productive capacity, idle plants, are starving for growth. Jobs added in sales and marketing are subtracted from general employment and production the White House is not measuring. Wage reductions, cuts, layoffs, over work, over time, people working longer hours for less of the market share their wages buys them even as the wage rises. All this is ignored. If union workers feel the need to strike the economy is even worse for non-union private sector employees. Monopolies are monopolies because all their capital (material means, and labor) is pocketed NOT invested back into jobs and production but re-invested back into buying cheaper to sell goods higher. There isn’t any fresh capital investment entering the economy to pick up the slack of the mass layoffs resulting from the concentration of capital into the hands a 7 world monopolies, Alibaba, Amazon, etc. China’s production is in a major recession. Not only will you not be rich in your lifetime but you will also live shorter from the stress associated with a longer workday and job intensity.  @UCzDwella201 
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  7867. Building and construction companies are stuck. Construction projects at a standstill, incomplete housing projects. 80% of their workforce undocumented do the jobs society cannot live without are targeted by the State to be deported. Tariffs intended to change the direction of capital flight, punishing corporate capital for capital flight,--producing outside the US, it is intended to change the direction of the flow of profits that had been moving from the periphery to the center,-- as a flow of jobs went in the opposite direction,-- moved from the center to the periphery attracted by cheap labor and efficient production. From the standpoint of labor, tariffs compel producers to raise their prices on everyday necessities. The inflow of profits and outflow of jobs has placed the American worker on very shaky ground, and had been circulating this way since Ronald Reagan was president, turning its back on the American working class. The remaining 20% of documented members of the workforce have to take a political stand against an avalanche of economic assaults. Think of all the homes wiped out by fires, floods, hurricanes, communities in need of rebuilding,---where will the contractors find the workers to do the work? Where else? From the Military. Thrown back into the workforce are woke recruits, men, women of one persuasion or another. As military they were unproductive labor, consuming more than they produced not adding value to society’s wealth as soldiers, but as a carpenter against their will, they make more than they consume, and add value to society...back in their decimated homes and communities spread across the country where they came from starts a long low wage journey for the American worker in Trump’s economic world of landowner billionaires.
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  7869. “The System Failed” but why the system failed has everything to do with a system that places kids back into abusive homes because it is cheaper than placing them into a privately owned and operated residential treatment center. Kids this age are not placed into foster care. Foster parents prefer babies with the aim of adoption. Kids this age end up on some form of independent living after a residential placement that costs around $60,000 per year per child. Counties are, in turn, charged by the state and counties end up raising property taxes to offset the placement costs the State incurs providing room, board, health and educational services. This infuriates politicians who have to run on “No New Taxes” pressured by home property owners to lower property taxes. School boards cut back on regular special needs education and the families who live normal lives by all the rules suffer from a cut back in services their own special needs kids need. Thus, the whole system is a failure. When this abuse surfaces and is substantiated the State CPS system has no choice but to place them into a residential system which initiates the State to bill the county of origin for the costs incurred by the other country the kids end up for their long term care. To correct this cycle of insanity would take an act of Congress, which at the moment, is a Congress with its head up its ass about investing in early child development that would, in the long run, be more beneficial in creating healthy individuals when they grow up to be parents. The parents committing this abuse were impoverished in their own childhood and adolescence have grown up to be people who should never become parents are products of this failed social system themselves magnifying the problem as a generational crisis.
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  7878. The answer to Jimmy’s question is in our understanding of ‘conquest’, as a regular form of intercourse as the official policy of the Biden Administration more so than his predecessors who laid the basis for conquest and war. The guest answered it fairly well from a sociological standpoint as a ‘racket for Ukraine’, and Putin spoiled the game pissed off the Capitalists in Ukraine and Capitalists in Russia, (recently Putin knocked off the Russian oil oligarchs compliant with NATO expansion give credence to the view of the guest) and in America, capitalists like Hunter Biden invested in Ukraine using Ukraine as a money laundering kind of thing is vague but not wholly in-accurate. Jimmy’s intelligent guess excludes the why war part of the question and why leftist parties in the west support it. War and conquest is the creation of the need for new means of production, i.e., capitalist expansion. War and conquest concentrates landed property a lot faster than waiting for old families to die out in an old society like Ukraine and their possessions falling into the hands of a few taking decades; and converting those lands into grazing land is a sign that Ukraine imports grain and goods leads to a total disappearance of a free population. Propertyless and poor like the American working class is propertyless and poor. Employment is the torturous grind keeping workers poor. Long working day, intensified work, never earning above survival and never falling below survival is a balance never struck in capitalist societies. Dollars enter Ukraine. Ukraine uses the dollars for imports of foreign cheap goods enriching government officials and creating a dependent population,---Ukrainian oligarchs get to own more land. America gets to expand its means of production into Ukraine, conquering the eastern European market for mining, drilling, oil and gas development in deals made with the newly formed Ukrainian landowning class. This is how capital accumulation expands in this particular case. Not all countries are the same.
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  7882. America has not had a “COMPREHENSIVE IMMIGRATION PROGRAM” ever, unlike other western nations. Its the only nation without one. Immigration is nothing more than the importation of a commodity. The only difference is that in this case the commodity is labor. The excess labor coming into the country is not in demand because of the high degree of automation. Industries need less labor. Some sectors are fully automated and other sectors are not. Some sectors are hiring more than others is how the labor composition of society shifts. America does not have a Congress that legislates according to the economic upswings and downturns. Our Congresspeople are law trained ideologues, opportunists and functionaries...they are not economists. People come into the country at the wrong time is no fault of their own. They have no idea the degree to which automation has spread across different sectors of the economy. These are not people educated to read how economies work in connection to automation. If they were educated they would have stayed put in their own country. But talking to them they have a perception that America is lined and paved with gold. You can thank Hollywood for that. Hollywood depicts America as a land of wealth and the films are seen all over the world is a false image. Naturally to the poor and downtrodden the place to go is to America compared to the war ravaged societies in which they live. Listening to the media even they are ignorant of the economic processes and do not know what to do or ask the right questions of their guests.
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  7887. He gave them a way to vent their anger out. That, in itself, speaks to the level of political ignorance of the American working classes. American corporations went to China, all of them are there not here, right now, they are there. Why did the corporations leave the US working class behind? Blame it on the lack of uniformity in mass public education that America could never find a consensus to improve education with job training for the working class due to individual states unwilling to cooperate, the government should have nationalized education. There was ample signs a virulent right wing was polluting education the very tool a nation needs to compete in the world economy were in the process of destroying it with cultural chimeras and social biases of evangelical christians. Democrats should have come out with a national education plan that no student can graduate without a science and tech degrees in quantum mathematics, machinery, engineering and worker safety. China’s factories after a fail are made 100% worker safe. Here the owners collect and move to the French Riviera leaving behind dead workers. The Chinese worker is so much more skilled they are leaders in the tech industry. They produce, fast, no mistakes, clean and good quality. Extremely industrious people. Runs through their history for thousands of years. They lead in robotics. But black Americans are also extremely industrious people. If not for them America would be a colonial mental case. Democrats failed to tap into that resource. I don’t think they can ever recover from it. China’s car makers out do Tesla’s top of the line car by ten times the quality and battery life. China’s education system is nationalized and top students are placed into industries China wants filled with the best through a national test. We got rid of national SATs to privatize education. in every step of the way American leaders failed to modernize and socialize America and did everything one should not do. The system there is a recruitment system the system here is a repressive system. China even under a slow down has a world market of 60 nations out 195. And guess what, if there is a war between China and the US those American corporations are not going to leave China voluntarily. State department know this, therefore, they are willing to share the world with China than be humiliated by telling several of its star corporations to come home or be jailed. Not the only humiliating experience the US State department dug itself into. China is aggressive, its build up is sending the message to American foreign policy makers to put in check a virulent right wing with ambitions of overthrowing China’s government and taking Taiwan! What to do about this? I say the democrats had their chance and should pack up and leave town, the republicans with nothing to offer to society should leave with them. No more Trumps. Pass the power over to a party that will enact the major reforms this country needs.
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  7889. True, Rate and Mass of Surplus Value did grow on the basis of the rate of exploitation of labor for surplus value by most capitalist countries except in the case of the US and China which depends on mass more than rate and had developed the mass of surplus value wide enough that a rate of exploitation of labor can work within it. This advantage might have something to do with the fact the US and China were serf and slave economies with a surplus already in the hands of an exploiting class. Less developed capitalist economies took the course of developing the rate exclusively, at which point wealth depends on a worker producing higher output in the same number of hours changing the working day itself extending the duration of labor. This happens anyway in rich countries, not by extending the working day but, rather, by innovating the labor-process, shortening necessary labor-time and this leads to a transformation crisis, how do all the capitalist countries realize their wealth stored in a mass of products? For which process the efforts of the State are needed to establish new commodity and labor markets for the sale of the mass of products and for the increasing appetite of capital for cheap labor-power overseas in the case of the US. China's population of 1.3 billion is large enough to mix rate and mass to accelerate capital accumulation. Old methods of capital accumulation are giving way to a mixed method of production to raise the standard of living without impacting the environment.
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  7935. Prayers and hearts with the families is not enough! Prayers might change Jeff Bezos’s behavior but I doubt it. Factory owners may be nice people but in emergency situations their role in production should end right there. The slow to no response of Amazon and other small warehouse and factory owners did not heed the warnings is not what I call ‘loving’ characteristic of a people who care for one another. Working people are not objects without emotion, connections, to be treated like objects was the point the Triangle Shirt Waist Factory Tragedy of 1911 meant for working people in this country. One hundred and ten workers working overnight to fulfill Christmas toys! Really, America? The owners prove by their own actions that a private interest impedes rational decision making, they cannot act responsibly. You can’t put your life in their hands is the issue. Prayers and condolences don’t cut it. Future storms are guaranteed. Society has to make a real decision about production in general. Either owners have free reign over production and this happens or the workers have control over warehouse and factory operations and enact their own emergency evacuations because, 1., remote control by long distance management is a failure and 2., direct control by the owners is a failure. And 3., using the government to enforce owners and workers to do as told is a failure. Workers are in the best position to decide when Christmas presents can get wrapped, or when the mustard gets made, not the clock!
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  7946. The downside of capitalism is---- it is its own barrier for its own growth. Because labor is a creator of value and surplus value, capitalism is pushed into an artificial need to accomplishes more product in a given time. Honestly, individual families don't need five cars or three houses and giant mansions to be comfortable and secure. Business is driven by external forces that turn industry and labor into a mere money producing machine. The consequence is that industries only relate to each other through a market and haphazardly produce and not produce based on the days results of market activity. DOW goes down someone loses a job. Some one gains a job when the market is up! The number of individuals losing and getting a job in high totals of millions in our world economy is where the total damage is real to the species and the planet. People need to get some understanding of what is falling apart in front of them? General competition forces every particular industry into reducing production time for a social product to be made and marketed. The demand for more surplus- value producing labor clashes with this reduction of labor, a result of competition, then as a consequence of technology and science injected into the workplace, Labor is supplanted, with every change in the technical composition of the workplace. The value creators, Us, sinks and so does surplus value. It would not longer be a barrier the day labor stops being the measure of value. That would be the day labor is a value for itself, a day of transformation and emancipation, until then under capitalism, labor, all individuals, have no value or worth as a human being; and the ultimate end and aim of life, as we told, is to be a productive member of society and in production, a detailed laborer of some kind creating surplus-value and a valued consumer in circulation. Ye, are halfway free. The other half of freedom has yet to be attained. Capitalism must expand and create and convert whole societies into becoming a new labor market the professional call 'modernization' and diplomats call, 'our friends and allies', for the purpose of consuming surplus-value producing labor, new western converts to the religion of surplus-value production, these trade deals an interventions take place to accommodate capitalism on its path toward its own destruction.
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  7953. 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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  7976. Its too late the small island of Taiwan and Singapore and other places have been armed and fortified with US forces. Treaties and deals have been signed. Marcos in the Philippines signed a deal with General Austen. From China’s point of view US aggression has become an encirclement of sentry states armed by American defense corporations. The build-up got no attention because to Washington the American people are not to know what their military does in the world. Its only when something horribly goes wrong that Congress investigates and we are lucky if we even get that. The American people really need to take a stand against the treatment as if they were orphans, the way children were treated in the Victorian Era, only to be seen but never heard. All foreign relations are a big secret and what is shown and told to us is never two sides of the same story is insult to injury. Corporate media is redundant, silly and futile because those who want to know find out anyway. Defense industry corporations profit from the war in Ukraine and Russia is bogged down by the conflict; the US oil and gas companies take the lion share of the European gas market. Blowing up another countries infrastructure is an act of war and Germany not doing anything about it really shows the spinelessness in European governments. We can’t point the finger at anyone else because it came from Biden’s own mouth that the North stream pipeline would be destroyed. There is a lot of stupidity in the White House spending money overseas and not spending it at home the government does not know how to take advantage of the strengths of the US economy to lift people out of their material and psychological depression because what matters more is their own political power.
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  7994. According to people who view this channel America is a society that can not be superseded by any society in the world today. America embodies the end of history. Societies can never do better than the US is the prevailing fallacy. Historical development ends where all cul-de sacs of suburbia begin. A great deception belied by a Grand Social Experiment brewed out the laboratories of the US institutions linked with the military industrial complex in the creation of more strains of deadly coronaviruses. Not knowing how the world has advanced and uninformed by news screeners withholding real news, Americans think this because they are not shown the progress made by other societies and are only shown the societies falling under the weight of their own failures or destroyed by outside forces. All information broadcasted in the US is sifted or screened by the CIA. What is shown to the American public is selected to reinforce the notion that the world is full of monsters out to destroy the US. This to justify the build up of its military where all of the efforts of the American people have gone and starving society of such progress itself as a consequence. Spain has made incredible progress, Portugal as well, of course China has made remarkable progress. Russia has made progress despite the hostility of sanctions. This is because the reserve currency of the world is fast becoming a worthless piece of currency to itself, the lack of investment into industry in the US and the financialization of production outside of the US. Comparatively, the US has collapsed and is a decaying society having had its height of progress when Amy Goodman was a young person of 18 years old...it is on the decline and fall...this process of decline does not happen in a day or a month but occurs over a period of time appears as though there are strange and bizarre people, flipped out, acting outside of the law.
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  8000. Goldfeder is an idiot! Policing is the problem not the Cops. You can have a slew of radical judges that send any repeat offender to Devil’s island for life and that still will NOT fix the problem. Recidivism is a weapon to use for elections is the problem. On an off election season heinous criminals are let go and politicians use their rap sheet to scare voters to vote for them blaming the opposition when they rerun. This was invented by a CIA man George Bush Sr., if anyone remembers the Willy Horton Ad he used to get elected. The fundamental problem is that neither the latte City Council crowd or the Cops, and this is true in places like Charlottesville Virginia, all City Councils deviate from the supreme concept of a civil society; that the whole society exists only to guarantee each individual the preservation of their person, rights and property. All of them get elected on some variation of the George Bush Sr., propaganda theme and violate this concept in practice. Rank and file Cops and the Citizenry are also a citizenry, thus ”recidivism” is a threat to them both. A Cop or a Citizen would never buy a house in the Bronx knowing their property can become a hospice site for migrants or some crook can transfer a title of ownership of my property to them and later sell it from under me and I would not a buy a house knowing my property can be lit on fire by some white nationalists in Virginia but I would buy property in both places if I knew the whole society was safe and free of threats. The Bush Family ruined your country.
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  8019. This is total BS! The AIE guy sounds more socialist than Wolf does on a policy level. How would we pay for it? Religion fits nicely into the theory of markets as a moral compass but then you have religion the opiate of the people. One problem becomes another problem. If half of Americans under 40 prefer a socialist society that number would include men and women and kids under 18 aware of socialism. Around 80 million people not including adults over 40 who desire socialism, 80 plus. That's big enough for a socialist revolution. Trump supporters are around 70 million and look at the damage they did. Could even be more than 80 million favoring socialism because there is also a working class of 122m people who could be attracted to socialism. Nearly 200 million people are languishing without a political party or leadership from any socialist party to lead the socialist revolution and its not like there isn't a socialist party? If socialism is what this demographic wants then how do they expect to realize a socialist society without a party? There are examples that socialism excels in lifting people out of poverty. China raised the lives of 700 million in one year no one lifetime. Socialism in Russia did the same achievement for its population and generalized capitalism too when the land was given to the peasants. Land, Peace and Bread was the Bolshevik Slogan. Its all based on permitting or nursing the productiveness of labor along in becoming universally owned and not privately owned. This is the role of the US government does not play in society.  The P/L is a rate, and the key which for the US is high and for China is high that poverty can be eradicated in the world in a day not a lifetime if both nations were socialists nations and not one in competition with the other. But among neither guests is the productiveness of labor the deciding factor in creating a true affluent society?
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  8026. So far on reflection of the headlines news presented here; the only social changes made in America have been superficial changes in the distribution of who does all of the work in society. Nothing has been accomplished to do away with the work itself. A shame for a highly developed nation that can easily reach this achievement. This would mean all 334 million people take part in the essential work to keep America running and the 132 million who do all the essential work now don’t have to work beyond the point they need to survive 14 hours a day. No generation in America has actually gone after the “way things are done”, to change them. Fight for a shorter working day that at the same time says you are not an American if you have no obligation to do your part. Every generation has avoided this option and so has every part of the citizenry turned their backs on a real freedom a 3 hour workday of 334 million people doing essential work society needs gives the body and soul. I can’t see DDS of Dentistry, Harry Greensmith, doing some garbage clean up on weekends so that a suburban family does not have to depend on the permanent and stagnant income of their father as a municipal sanitation worker and be stuck with that for life! This is how you get an educated citizenry, free time for self improvement by your own choice, and no force required just a lot of convincing. To choose a cosmetic freedom that brings nothing but a depressed and miserable humanity is a real loss. He Lies a Nation that Had it and Did not Use it, reads its epitaph.
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  8044. If we want a Green New Deal superimposed on this troika of industries, i.e., auto, oil, and government, than the GND must be funded from the economic surplus this troika generates for itself, that is capitalized into profits for and by the owners of this troika. Profit is the privatization of the economic surplus naturally being produced by labor and capital regardless of their proportions in production is true for all industries of all types. Replacing the machinery that runs on oil with machinery that runs on sun power does not stop the process of production, to the contrary, new cars that run on alternative energy are produced and this eliminates the need for oil and the need for an oil oligarchy. I say this because the New Deal was funded on taxing the rich higher rates, thus a transfer of wealth, from the rich to the poor, creating a Welfare State, we all want to avoid in the future. The New Deal did not involve a new source of energy and therefore did not have to do away with a generic social class over which every industry has its own oligarchy, thus, many oligarchies as a generic class become ' a thing of the past' if all industries each generate their own economic surplus that can fund their own conversion. If a product can not be adapted to a new use even if its conversion has happened the industry will disappear. Government's role would be to identify what industries will perish in the new society and which ones will succeed and invest into its population coping with those changes. The only role government should have in society is defense, health, education, disaster recovery and conservation/renewal of the environment. With oligarchy a thing of the past the conflicts are social not both economic and social with oligarchs in place. New energy will call up new products and government subsidizing the rich or the poor, is a return to the past not a leap into the future.
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  8047. Serving an arrest warrant; what was the arrest warrant about? Plain clothes cops is the best way to get guns off the streets. Age-old tried and proven methods of street intelligence gathering than bust. In the front end, your enemy is not the kid who kills the cop during an arrest warrant. The gun lobby in Congress is your enemy, representatives of Capital. These are people who do not have a problem profiting off other people’s misery. After WWI German chemical manufacturers were sentenced to prison for life for selling chemical weapons to armies despite the Geneva Accords. The passionate cry of the Police Union president on the podium speaks to this but can’t openly criticize this lobby embedded in Congress. This lobby using fabulous amounts of money from the sale of guns in the US and in the world draws a very thin line between patriotism and treason and re-election for politicians that they cannot be free to speak what they really think. Who can break this habitual silence and how institutions succumb to the force of Capital is going to take more than modest reforms to fix. Could be unfixable at this point. Several centuries of political reform can’t keep the genie in the bottle. Capital has grown to strong and has devoured the State that not too long ago was a greater power than the corporations. If the situation changes and lobbies are vacated from the premises,--- outlawed from politics the country can piece itself back to together again. I am afraid, however, this what we see in the streets is gold to the gun lobby.
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  8048. So,---according to this policy, according to G Will, the Ukrainians get the wrath of Putin’s defense encroached by (the pronoun George uses) the “We”. The global strategy of the Pentagon. The “We” in Washington D.C., as distinguished from the “Us” outside of the political elite hatch a plan that is two fold; take over and rule Asia, get Russia out of the way, bog her down in a war in Ukraine, before starting a war with China. Poor Ukrainians in the master plan of world domination by the US play the role of the worthy victim, those who suffer under the attacks of the west in the past, present and future the unworthy victims, and to the Russians resisting the pressure of west to penetrate the east the Ukrainians are showered with hypocritical empathy. What a sad plan...and if it does not work, then what, will the Pentagon order the first nuclear strike a death blow at the planet? A fight to save the Dollar as the reserve currency of the world from collapse over the Yuan. All that means is that a country cannot do business with another country unless it is done with Dollars. Through the dollar comes the whole financial structure of the US that a country can access what it needs to live by trading with other nations. The Yuan is changing all that and this is the reason Russia must fall and Ukraine must suffer! The old adage works better, as a foreign policy, if you can’t beat ‘em join ‘em. The Pound Sterling was once the reserve currency before the Dollar. Britain did not seem to take the fall of its global control over trade too hard, before the Dollar, it could not keep India down, doubtful the US can stop the growth and development of the Yuan without a bitter fight, possibly nuclear war.
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  8049. The remedies they come up with are not remedies at all...corporate interests perpetuate corporate relations in their field and nations in their market. They are competitors. More than one corporation form a social class of billionaires. The race among them is who can lower the cost of production of whatever the product or service they make wins the position as seller in the market. Amazon, Apple, Exxon, Haliburton etc., lead the pack of sellers in their field. The historical approach tells us the Why and How they became monopolies and legal and institutional studies come short of the inevitable decline of monopoly capitalism. Business cycles are a necessary evil of capitalist life, because, 1., depression are due to “adventitious circumstances”, and 2., monopolies figured out they can use government for a program of policy for a free market and individual liberty of each monopoly company and prevent depression from restarting the exchange process. The Great Depression by this theory had to happen. A banking epidemic of small and inefficient banks and mismanagement in the larger banks, rampant speculation, mortgage foreclosures and bankruptcies, living on credit, underlie the process of monopoly formations in the market, were the causes in 1929. We never had experience with a market dominated by monopolies in nearly every economic sector. This is new terrain for the historical approach. The financial process of 1929 is not much different than the financial process of 2025, the mortgage crisis then and now are the same but larger in effect making more people homeless in 2017. Farm debt was huge and maniacal speculation in urban real estate, all reasons business fluctuations required more government controls and regulations coming out of 1929. Rebound never came despite the remedies until war. Capitalism would not make it out on its own without war and without the USSR. America owed its life to the Russians in 1929 and to the Nazis fo restarting the business cycle.
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  8050. Oh please, Chris Matthews is a worm. It be great to psych him out with a mock firing squad and watch him beg for forgiveness for all his digressions of anti-humanism. He deserves to be publicly humiliated wearing Depends and nothing more on 5th avenue. The one thing I would like to see Bernie do, is not use a teleprompter to speak live. I grew up in a time when candidates did not read off a teleprompter.  When they spoke from their heart and mind. Reading off a teleprompter started with Nixon mimicking the news anchors of the day. LBJ read his speech from a piece of paper on his desk on camera. JFK spoke from memory and insight on camera. Eisenhower spoke from paper and heart and mind. FDR spoke from heart and mind. Eugene Debs was a great speaker so much so they jailed him. The audience could follow his thinking as if the audience was thinking and using the speakers voice to express themselves.  He would be the forerunner of the televangelical snake oil salesmen speakers but not acting a role. Speaking from heart and mind was the acid test for the public. It told you that person was the right man for the job. Jimmy Hoffa was great speaker, he was railing like Malcom X and King. These guys shook you when they spoke.   Reagan spoke from a prompt his acting skills helped him but he was boring speaker also. Bush was so bad it was likeable and humorous, he was the Alfred E. Newman of Mad comic books.  He knew he was bad at it and used that to persuade. Obama was a scoundrel but good reader and used prompts. This is why listening to Trump speak wrenches my brain, he is such a bad reader, actor and person to begin with. Very hard to listen and watch him speak his placid affect and monotoned voice there is no authenticity in him. Listening to Bloomberg and its like a person speaking with their nostril pinched closed. Mellineals speak like wusses, no strength in their voices lacking conviction. Timid. Amy Goodman's voicing is ragged, comes a time when you should move over. She is like watching Mick Jagger at age 78 prancing around in tights. I have not heard or seen Buttigieg speak I have a hard time watching his face, it repels me with dishonesty.  Biden is torture to listen I'd fall asleep on him. Bernie has conviction but he uses a prompt when he does not need one.  Jimmy Dore reminds of the insult comedian Don Rickles when he speaks. Polosi is a bad speaker and Warren sounds like pontificating Nun in Catholic school. Black people speak horribly when they have not been literized. When literized they are eloquent speakers. Latinos are the same way. I've heard Russians speak English better than English speakers with an undetectable Russian accent and they also speak Spanish well. Americans have a hard time with Spanish, they are better off using a Spanish translator.   Guilliani smacks his lips together that you want stand back fearing he'll spit on you when he speaks. I forgot his name because he sounds horribly gutteral when he speaks I get turned off, leader of the democrats...oh yeah, Schumer. Netanahu is the same way guttural. I think the best speakers of the English language past Shakespeare's English are the Scottish people, they speak like its music. Forces you to listen. The Irish have a great sing song inflexion to their tongue as well. Southern speakers are twanged in the tongue and Texans speak like molasses grips their dentures. Bostonians are horrible sounding English speakers. Oddly the outer borroughs of Manhattan are also horribly speaking English speakers but those born and raised in Manhattan are good English speakers with no discernable accent unlike the borrough speakers from the Bronx, Queens, Long Island, Staten Island...god awful speakers and vulgar English speakers. Lawyers are the biggest polluters of the English language.  I haven't heard midwesterners speak so I can't gauge how bad or good they speak. Prompts are the training wheels used when one learns how to ride a two wheel bike. Its gotten so bad that non-human computerized voices do the speaking which brings a thought to me. Who are the people who gave their voice to be replicated by a digital sound the corporations use? They should be publicly humiliated along with Chris Matthews in his Depends.
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  8062. Great question, I hope you are patient enough to read my reply. 46% of 333 million is 157.8 mil., enough of a majority to overthrow the entire capitalist order in one fell swoop. Imagine if all 157.8 mil people stopped shopping for a day how quickly the money for jobs, health and welfare, would turn up! A one day mass boycott would yield big political wins for the Working class, rather than to express our discontents and dissatisfaction through an electoral process every 2 to 6 year cycles. Why are Americans so fearful of a complete revolution rather settle for a partial one? An electoral win is only a partial revolution, it still leaves intact all of the economic and class relations that are present in society. Is it for the same reason men and women throw in the twill and settle for whoever and whatever is around that capitalism is enabled by the Working classes? Is a partial and political emancipation for a woman to become a CEO or, president, governor, or director of the CIA, constitute a human emancipation for women in general? The Working class is an outsider, and when it participate in the political system, the Working class is an insider. Big landowners and big ranchers got Trump in office with their money. They want the Estate Tax repealed to which he promised. The Working class pays to play with their labor and money. Is it not clear to the Working class that this political system consists of anti-socialist alliance Washington leads, and the Big banks, landowners, merchants, industrialists are more united than the Working class would decapitate Stein, Sanders, through the political structure? Sanders or Stein could have promised a repeal of the Death tax. Abolish the Inheritance tax, that is less money the Big government has to work with. No third candidate knows how to build a coalition or a government among the social classes. They fail to see how private interests can be played to leverage the Working class into a better economic condition. Third party candidates can and should learn from their political enemies how its done but they don't. Too timid, they fear the mass of the Working class will not vote for them at the first sign of being in bed with an enemy. Too immature, so far there have been three coups, Bush's re-election win against Gore using the Supreme Court was a coup, the passage of the Patriot and Citizen United Act, the ousting of Sanders and Stein from the election against Trump right under the nose of the Working class. You and I are operating in a political order not a democracy. In an earlier time, individuals were more willing and less ignorant to see the rationality of a socialist society for a developed nation. Eugene Debs garnered 90 million votes against FDR, they tolerated FDR but not his VP, Wilson was decapitated, and Wilson and Debs would have transformed America into a democracy at a time when when only 500 out of 5000 corporations were engaged in commodity production exclusively. Early Westinghouse, IBM, Mobil etc., were still small enough to not be Too Big To Fail. Today 500 corporations dominate the world's resources by means of the force the American Working class provides, free, gratis. The working class is its military, is its national guard, is it police force, all these people were not born a Jared Kushner.
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  8069. Shows the political system of the US is not a political system that can plan or manage the whole economy to ensure the separate producers do not fall apart. If the buyer disappears from the supply chain, the farmer and growers are out of business, the food rots or is destroyed in order to raise the price of the product. An act of selfishness as an attempt to recover one’s own losses becomes the motive of growers. Not by intent are they selfish. It is a market system that forces people to become selfish and learn the ways of selfishness as a part of necessary survival. Farmers and growers act out of self-preservation but it comes at the expense of the buyers. This would be because a potato is a commodity and produced as a thing for its own nutritional usefulness to human beings only as an exchange-value. The sociological consequences is a collapse of the food chain and major social crisis entailing increased hunger, disease, poverty and social anarchy. The lesson perpetually ignored and unheeded by the political system here is that food should not be a thing you can buy and sell. Prices are higher for the buyer-consumer and the seller-producers have fewer buyers. This would not be such a disaster if the science of agriculture were not so advanced but they are in the US. Scientists and farm machine producers, must find a society where their skills and products can be sold and are put to use. The political system is a republic not equipped to deal with an economic structure and the social consequences of too much food and too many people hungry that the industries in the food chain lose more jobs than it can generate. Serious problem that can lead to the end of the US as we know it. CBC Canada, the Canadian equivalent of America’s ABC or CBS news, does an exposé of this crisis that people (Americans) should look up here on Youtube to learn more about who the actors in this food chain are and what they are doing that worsens the situation.
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  8078. America's political elite substitutes the classical technical terms 'civil society' and 'alienation' with the the more popular vulgar terms 'rule of law' and 'individualism' is a run of the mill occurrence in Washington DC. The term 'political elite' is broad and includes different social groupings of the wealthiest in their field. The popular vulgar term is the 'Deep State' people use implies here one not many social groupings of political power at play in America. This term does not adequately identify the social process of many social groups forming the political elite and how they come into being through the use of force. Obama was probably the more outspoken in the use of the popular-vulgar terms since being introduced by the right wing under Reagan. Increasingly the language for the two technical and classical terms were substituted by the vulgar terminology that is now a part of every person's vocabulary. Use of the terms characterizes them as 'vulgar', 'off-base', finally, 'wrong' because civil society comprised of several social institutions is unaccounted for in the term 'rule of law', which when used by the political elite signifies one social institution the Judiciary or the State interchangeably and never at the same time and when used by the oppressed masses implies a 'conspiracy of one to many' relationship and this does not adequately identify what is occurring as a social process.  Individualism is always the alienation of the material wealth of society from individuals, the separation of state from civil society is the social process, because what is being individualized is the material wealth of society not the members of society, is another social process happening simultaneously. Coming from this perspective none of this will make any sense to any of you without understanding the concepts and their meaning, the key terms 'civil society' and 'alienation', in other words, how individuals are beset by limitations in civil society, and how material wealth is privatized by the State.
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  8096. A big part of the planning of the American transnational corporations is to make uniform a lower wage standard for the US labor-force. A union-free society and a der-regulated capitalism that promotes the sanctity of the workplace as private property. Those are big three objectives of all US corporations. By means of cheapening the commodities US labor uses in order to produce on a daily basis wages are felled by every increase in automation and innovation to the labor-process and with every intervention into a foriegn country where it can produce the goods cheaper for Amazon to resell. The scheme won't work if the US labor force does not have the purchasing power. US labor will earn wages higher than the global average but four times lower than the standard of living of the American labor force coming out of the Great Depression in the post World War II period. All generations since then will look back at that greatest generation as showing how a higher standard of living can be attained, real affluence. So another part of the plan is to ensure that history never gets told or told in a way that the period was a freak. Truth be said this is the same way American transnational corporations have interpreted the USSR attaining affluence under its Five Year Plans, emphasize the political ugliness of those successes and undermine the economic achievements. Tour Russia today and ask anyone age 70- 80-90 they prefer life under the USSR to Putin's Capitalism. Of all working classes in the world today the most economically powerful of all is the US labor force but it is also a living paradox lacking the intellectual and political consciousness it is unable to wrestle the productive forces away from capital gets clobbered on a daily basis under the Biden administration, ironically. History will show Trump provided a tiny not-worth-mentioning- modicum of protection for US labor from the economic attacks of Big Capital. But his purposes were all personal not political. The defenses are completely down now. Standard of living of American workers will sink dramatically even with the stimulus and beyond it, to no recovery. US labor has lost its middle class existence in society in a grand social experiment that ends in defeat. Got a couple of rounds left. The fight ain't over till the Fat Lady Sings.
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  8097. Obviously we can place blame on developing nations for their own inability on their part to free their populations from the politics of fossil fuel production. We cannot blame them for the doom of humanity though. But we can say corruption is a big part of the equation, if they had a vision of the future a full independence would have kept the oil in the ground. But this is not how history works. Nations are born, grow up and get old then die is how history works and the engine of that history is how easily a nation can satisfy materially its wants not by magic but by its labor capacity. Every generation believes what happened to people in the past cannot happen to them. There are always forces out there deflecting attention to this fallacy. Depends on how much of a sucker you are to believe it. Politicians resurrect the past and have no eye for the future, they sit on things, and the past happens all over again, in greater measure, proportionality and intensity, genocide, war, doom. The dirty world of politics is a constant process of never letting the past go and always promoting the same behavior, the same routines, the same relationships. People get flummoxed at the reality its happening to them when the same relationships of the past recur in the present keeps alive the dirty world of politics. It is over, finished, when we break away from repetition and habits of the doing the same thing over and over again. If we don’t we are finished. The planet will make earth uninhabitable for millions and millions of years through our encouragement. The political game of preventing a balance between intensity and duration; are the only two elements forming our purpose in life, two quantitative variables, is all we are as a species. Who we are and what we are...is never balanced but locked in a perpetual mystery in a state of unknowingness in life.
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  8099. ...the imposition of a mask is less the issue, its the vaccine passport, that enables the government to track your movements and impede your movement at will is a foreboding of government control. People saw how China quarantined entire cities but what they do not know is that survival in China does not depend exclusively on continuing or finding a job. Their material necessities are not interrupted or the population deprived when quarantined in China. Employers there cannot hire and fire and wages are not frozen if workers are quarantined is the piece of information the mainstream news does not tell American workers. The CCCP will not freeze or forfeit your assets, suspend your insurance, revoke your license, because you are not wearing a mask or getting vaccinated. No the method is one, two, three, you are swept up, taken home, given the vaccine and if you are uncooperative placed on watch all done through social media and technology, follow the quarantine and then you are out as China had done. Cases dropped the the cities came back to life. But since a job is the only way to acquire the necessities and survive in America ordering employers to vaccinate workers or be fired is seen by workers as a breech of their right of freedom by the government. Workers are not against the employers but against the State. So really this Convoy is a sign of the employer/employee economic model working for the employer(s) but not working for employees though the workers only slowly through struggle become conscious the model is the problem and the State is the symptom of the model. The employers are the lifeline for the workers the State has become the object/enemy of worker’s freedoms. As a stroke of historic luck the State is in fact totalitarian. The workers point the finger at the right place but they still have the employers who really run the show keeping them down from earning a better living and determining their lives. Freedom is still not a reality for workers but it is for employers in the employer/employee model. This is why Trudeau is a numbskull, he could have simply ordered the mandates be gone and walked among the Convoy, shake hands, and everyone would have gone home. He, like many of his generation, have no understanding of this economic model and who in that model has the raw deal. However, going in person to the Convoy organizers would have meant overcoming the phobia associated with this bias against the people, the aversion to workers, having to put down his privileged biases and disdain for workers in society. So doing what makes Joy Behar anxious and coming into contact with people in a mass protest is not her or Trudeau’s idea of a safe place after a successful indoctrination campaign of dis information and conspiracies of an invisible disease put out by our friends over in the CIA. Poor woman, has anxiety. Further its a means of social control of the population by dividing the population into two groups in the hands of people like Trudeau, a closet racist and Nazi sympathizer, does not further his cause and makes it easier for government to crush any opposition to its over-reaching power and rule over the working class.
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  8106. The problem with our military is its concept of DETERRENCE the action of discouraging an action or event through instilling doubt or fear of the consequences. This concept has infected the population, the police, the government, the schools, the relations between nations a fear of annihilation from your fellow man. Deterrence has everyone is in a state paranoia about the world and its inhabitants. It is impossible, not to mention psychologically oppressive, to view your own species as not hostile, or incapable of attack, through the idea of deterrence. The concept regards all living beings as a threat is what makes it impossible to be human under this paradigm or concept. America’s military makes humanity fear humanity and live in fear of it. Deterrence is also a police and school strategy which explains why police cannot solve crimes, cannot protect children, and schools cannot educate kids, punishments, time outs, regulations and scheduling are all methods of avoidance; all used to isolate a threat, and this concept in practice extends outward to all nations from within the mind of the individual. What America’s military develops is how best to avoid contentment, happiness, love, compassion, relationships, structure and discipline, which are the primary and natural functions or attributes of humanity as a species versus the man-made concept of hostility as the attributes the US military projects on humanity through its industrial and technology expansion. This is what is wrong with ourselves and our military culture.
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  8110. This is why progressives should chip away at the senselessness of the US spending abroad. For example, once you free up war expenditure capital a surplus is created. What it is that makes progressives afraid to challenge her is the right wing who are fearless against Med4All and the Green New Deal. A push for M4A and GND will be met with a push further to the right...its a tricky affair. If Progressives left the M4A and GND and focused on the four big declared nations, China, North Korea, Russia and Iran, by the NSA/Pentagon to be the enemies of the US have been no threat at all makes US mishchief making a political embarrassment leading to a loss of seats in both Houses for the right wing. Progressives can then attack the center democrats who are in the way of M4A because center democrats do not have a plan on how to use that dividend on the economy and society but are scared enough of the social explosion to cave on the matter. The absurdity of the progressives is made by a world that is under a pandemic and natural catastrophe making all nations in no position to be a threat to the national security of the US and the big four declared threats are actually quiet and peaceful non-interfering in US affairs is not turned into political capital to defeat the right wing! The world to progressives is currently a threat to the national security of the US in their eyes...especially the four nations mentioned, they have not debated the case of China, Iran, NK, and Russia to dispel the right wing propaganda making them as bad as the right wing perpetrating a false characterization of the state of the world as out to get them, when the reality is pain and suffering of the mass of humanity everywhere.
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  8118. This is a case where government has been cut down to its knees. Kneecapped as it were by the idea of “Less government”, and government over time is staffed with less and less qualified people, they are influenced, from top down, to accommodate a private sector in whatever building project they undertake representing a sizable profit. Banks intervene with their power by foreclosing the home helps the builders and the city, stalling the law suit, the city’s lawyer helps the bank’s foreclosure proceeding and blames the home owner for launching a suit, not a lawyer I would like, and potentially the builders are gone scot free. All bank properties that are foreclosed properties are tax depreciable deductions for banks. The city county government did not record the easement on documents so thousands of homes in two counties have easements unrecorded and the one honest piece the 1965 Utility Employer letter by A.C. Hutchinson from the Right of Way Division Engineering Department to City Public Utilities Department, his letter fell on deaf ears. Hutchinson is the only honest person in this entire history, a worker/employee of a private utility company. His letter is written in a time when private industry operating in America’s home market was not weaponized to tyrannize citizens with a goed for profit. Hutchinson would have been fired is the comparative difference between the character of employers than and employers now. Had the government heeded the engineer’s letter he would have saved 300,000 people the catastrophe of a 100 year old water main splitting open eventually to flood this suburb. Heavy rains and flood will break the main. The case is a microcosm of what is wrong with America.
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  8125.  @kataratify  Don't let democratic establishment stop you, tell them to kiss your ass! I noticed the progressives are all quiet, see nothing, say nothing, hear nothing let Schumer and Pelosi shove it down the throats of working people a bitter pill. These two people are the establishment of the democratic party. Why are they and their ideas more important than the ideas of workers in society ---what is so special about Schumer and Pelosi that they cannot be criticized or even pushed to the sidelines and let the party wing of working people run the show! Because theer is no party wing of the workers and if there were one it should go under the name of the liberation caucus and make the progressives and the establishment of two people and their followers kiss the ass of the workers and beg for their votes, the progressives are feckless cowards who never had a plan to really get working people out of harms way. I believe they want working people to die and get out of their career climbing way! The workers who Bernie courted need their own wing and be always opposite of the GOP Freedom Caucus, the more right wing the Freedom Caucus becomes, the more left wing the Workers National Health Care Caucus becomes and when necessary do what the IRA of Ireland did, it had a terrorist wing, if it comes down to that. But that won't be necessary because Schumer and Pelosi are easy to get over on and the progressives are pussies that a Workers Wing can eassily be created at the next convention of the democratic party. You don't need Bernie when you have a movement.
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  8130. I seriously doubt Boeing is cooperating with federal investigators. Boeing has a back order of planes that an investigation into its defective parts will further put on hold its customers who already paid Boeing. United, Boeing and Airport Terminals are corporations but one is a manufacturer the other is a retailer of commercial space and the third makes a plane terminal, all three employ thousands of people working various jobs and skills. Millions of people’s lives and jobs hang on the single act of Boeing and United making these sales complete so they can convert that sale money back into its business as capital covers its payroll and material expenses plus make a profit. The crisis to crisis Boeing and United hobble through amplifies the mistake of making the sale the reason any industry should exist. This industry should exist for itself as one whole industry with all its trades and skilled operators from the factory to the air terminals to the cockpit and air controllers, all one team, one co-owned industry made up of its three main parts. This would make commercial air travel safe because exchange does not come between any of the main departments. Planes would be built for people with ample leg room in seats. People would be happy to pay a high price if the quality were raised. Treating this industry as one industry it does not become a bureaucratic authority like the MTA or Port Authority of New York, or the Tennessee Valley Commision; air travel becomes a cooperative corporation owned by all its workers. A system as an end in itself. By doing this it also does not abolish the free market system because it is owned by workers but is a real participant in the market selling quality air travel with pride and shares of stock. US Worker pride restored. Anyone against this is un-American. Currently, air travel, is divided into three separate corporations subcontracting all subsections of work to make the whole system work independently of each other. If one part fails the other parts keeps going. A problem can never be permanently corrected but only fixed temporarily to stay in the game of competition. The corporations are relating to each other through a strange and bizarre market relation and are not working with each other directly as a team. The whole process from making planes to delivering air travel is divided up into three separate private corporations and more subspecies of corporations performing the work and none are accountable for the work they do. The whole system is a crisis waiting to happen in higher frequency.
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  8141. On the Crumbley Family,----You can’t make a horse drink water if it does not want water. Parents decline therapy because of the presuppositions of abuse and neglect, domestic violence episodes, therapists are required by law to report, i.e, Mandatory Reporting, when suspected. Whether those suspicions are unclear to the therapist(s), sets off an investigation for child welfare checks and assessment, or abuse and neglect found through the treatment process. Anonymous reporting sets the stage of greater suspicion in parents when they deduce the only person they told about their relations in the family was the therapist and now must go back to that therapist for treatment, sorry does not fly. The State legislatures turned therapists into a cadre of double agents are in opposition to the family in society despite the well meaning intentions for stabilizing the family. Next the politics of this country have divided educated and non-educated people as two antagonistic forces that when united under one roof a war would break out. This is the fault of the superintendent of Oxford HS who did not immediately refer this kid to the police to handle based on the facts they had. Cops could have gotten a search order on the home and confiscated the weapons that day from a judge. Bureaucracies are after the fact institutions, they respond only when there is a crisis that rises to a level they define as a cause to respond. When they do respond the response is punitive. Best thing to do here is admit the educational system in the US is a two tiered educational system divided on a class basis where the rich get educated and doors open, the middle class, poor and working classes get a uniform minimum general standard education and doors stay closed.🧐 This kid hated his life and found nothing in life worth living or meaningful, believed in nothing and nothing became everything, a world view e.g., Nihilism. He was not born a nihilist, he was socialized to become one through the relationships in his immediate family and community of peers. This is not to say his parents are not the living and real versions of the media archetype of the Bunkers and the Bundys in media, they are derelict people who should never be parents.
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  8149. A point the professor makes: “ ...the end of abundance for the masses is a bonanza of abundance for the...financial sector,” does not answer the question; How? The inequality does not happen when workers and corporations exchange a wage for labor-power. The inequality of wealth between CEOs and workers emerges after the exchange has taken place. How this happens is technical but fairly easy to understand; the worker is working on the job for a fixed period of time in a legal working day. We can divide that working day into two imaginary but very real parts depending on how advanced production may be. Three things happen: first, workers transfer the value the corporation invested in the plant, office or workshop, equipment and raw material, to whatever product the corporation is making occurs in perpetuity. A product retains this investment even if the investment was made ten years ago and the worker preserves the investment value in the product. Second, the corporation(s) have not violated any laws of the market; things exchange only happens between two equal things. In other words, if there is no other commodity the object needs to show its value the object is not marketable. This circumstance is detrimental to workers when the commodity that needs to find a buyer is their labor-power but the same circumstance is not a detriment to corporations of any sector. The same circumstance also generates gluts and food abundance in stores in the midst of mass starvation on the streets. Or, by reducing a surplus to raise the price of the goods becomes more important than what good may come from the good itself. These are phenomena that happen all at once or in isolation but always recur as the professor well knows. The market is built on equality but inequality is the end result because equality turns into inequality as soon as two partners interact in production. Work becomes a means to the greater enhancement of prosperity for owners and simultaneously, a means for the greater poverty for workers who were equal people before they entered production together. Third anomaly to happen is sociological: Work is a commodity when it is not working and it is not a commodity when it is working becomes a way of life of distortions, complexes, and crisis for individuals and families in the working class. Work, skill and creativity, expertise, differences of the work itself, only count as value producing agents in the sphere of human activity most crucial to sustaining life on the planet, i.e., production.
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  8151. Looks like the Navy Seals have some sense of decency by rejecting Gallagher. That's a relief...either that, or the Navy Seals hate Trump and are rejecting Trump's political move to pardon Gallagher. ________________________ What is capitalism? People really think they know. Its not business management and its not making money selling commodities on Ebay, unless that commodity is labor-power to produce surplus-value. Best producer of value of the year award goes to; employee of the month: John Doe. Does the same job for less the cost. Trump foams at the mouth on that kind of stuff. Society has come to this that the only commodity that produces a value is labor-power and the only commodity that reflects its value is gold. It wasn't always like this. In my life I had several CD's that made good money. My home was Equity. The federal reserve did not mess with the value of things, tinkering with the money-supply and adjusting prices as companies produced more stuf. People don't even know what a CD is today? Home equity does not exist. If LP is the only commodity that creates wealth than they are going to come after you big time. Touting how this and that about the economy. Jobs are numerous, never better. I really don't believe the person doing the work of LP really cares as long as they are working and making enough to cover the cost of their own lifestyle and family expenses. A cell phone, vehicle, house, and enough for seasonal ticket to the NFL, a couple of quarts of beer, are enough. People in this historical period are fine with that. My generation was worse, it took very little to satisfy a man. The way to his heart was through his stomach. But it was tougher to get the men of my generation to be the only source of value in society. Big business was not as big. They got bigger because they got more people to believe more LP's is the way to go and they stroked their egos with cash, sex and credit to easily be seduced into being a value unit for gold. I also do no believe they care how the stuff gets into their hands as long as they get what sustains a steady diet of a repititious consumption pattern.  Oh, well, when this generation (Milleneals and Genertion X's they are called) reach my age they will learn the human body is not a permanent miracle worker on its own, it breaks down, and its stores decades of abuses done to it when it was young and healthy. Capitalism is the sale of your mortality and well-being.
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  8162. American corporations in most industries, certainly true in the case of, chemicals, vaccines and foods, given the high rate of product recalls of these goods, cannot meet the demand the public puts on the usefulness of goods because that would subtract from the profit and interfere with the business side of production. Its profitable for manufacturers to spend the money changing the production process to shrink the product because in the long run a new social average price is established which is at the same time a new low average reduction of wages, workers paying more for less product. This is what is going on behind the distractions of Steve Bannon, Russia, or the incoming hoard of immigrants. A clever and cunning capitalist class of corporations with professional distractors to direct attention away from the subjugation of labor arranged by outside think tanks. Wake Up! Products have to pass the test as a truly useful for others before it can be sold, is no longer the case. A commodity only has to look useful to be sold in the US and there are millions of products the FDA has never even tested having been stripped of its testing capacity and mandate as a guardian of the well-being of the public obliterated by democrats and republicans. It used to be industrial sabotage in the tampering of products that were recalled. Sudafed comes to mind. Tampering done inside the factory. Baby carriages and cribs. Cars. Peanut Butter, lettuce, lysteria, ecoli bacteria, emanating from their production process. Today its in the very production process which means the sabotage is planned on the outside and brought into the factory as a definite work plan done by outside product developers and carried out by executives in charge of the operation. All this is happening because the side that rules work and production is the business side of production the process of producing commodities. The use-value side of production is totally outside the control of the workers is the reason the standard of living of Americans keeps falling.
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  8169. But here are some reasons why a workplace democracy is the only way. Right now technology and some sciences, especially in the military realm are a barrier to natural development. Societies are trampled on by a ceaseless system of production and not give a chance to develop on their own is definitely the case with societies in the Middle East coming into contact with America. Second reason: advances in science and technology in connection to labor-processes are independent of that process. The direct participants and users of the technology and science have no ownership of them. Society is made up of a majority of non-owners of the technology who use them and a minority of owners of the technology who use the science and technology for their ability to make work lighter and easier. Making each detailed operation simpler at a compounding rate. Patented the technology itself is monopolized through the price as a commodity in greater demand. People are not aware of themselves as the subject in the object because the object does not correspond with the subject, and from this incompatible dichotomy, a worker-management relation assumes the old class struggle between workers and capitalists, HR, Human Relations. Third reason is what happens when technology and science with its marvelous advances causes value to fall in each commodity and value becomes spread over a great many commodities. Socially we begin to see workers (value) laid off (fall in value) in several industries ( value in many commodities fell), a new challenge for the company to lengthen the workday as a way of offsetting the loss of "hands" ( not my reference). The rest of us will have to put in longer ours to hang to our jobs is how it all went down for small business during the pandemic as the new science and technology swept industries suitable for the applications like Amazon.. Fourth reason: A reserve army of labor, a constant supply of labor on demand, by which the employed portion of the working class is constantly threatened with by employers. I see these as four good reasons a new progressive labor movement should instruct itself.
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  8187. America is at a point where everything it created in the past with a life of its own is dying. If not dead already. Waiting for new life blown into it. Other dying institutions beckon us to bow down to our past creations and believe in its ideas, chimeras, dogmas, as the rule of thoughts. Ideology clings to dear life! Letting go is too hard to do. Out of its demise is born a new age of realism that idealism cannot tolerate. Chimeras is the Vampire of the Mind, the light of realism burns to a crisp. People are trading these imaginations of thoughts for the true essence of man, woman and child. A more critical attitude knocks out the heads of people the criminality of rampant ideology. .. ...ideas in people’s brains get flushed down a prison toilet as a way of rescuing democracy. The verdict of not guilty in one case and a guilty verdict in another case on the same subject is an indication of a legal system controlled by the dogmas, chimeras, and ideas of racism. Racism is the subject in both cases, on trial is racism in general in Wisconsin, especially with an acquittal and, on trial in Georgia are the racist actions of a particular group of men suspicious of blacks. In the former case the judge disallows the prosecution, and omits premeditated anti-BLM racism and vigilantism that broke laws as a motive and in the latter the judge allows the prosecution to criminalize a petty trespassing misdemeanor offense where nothing was stolen or removed from the property. Judge favors the defense in one case and the judge favors the prosecution in the other.
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  8190. It is a well developed speech from a capitalist point of view. The bottom line for capitalism though is it unpredictable nature in relation to gold prices. Countries can partake in free enterprise but at the end of the working day everything that was produced by these countries has to be converted into gold. The way the dollar measures all goods and services is through gold prices. Gold prices reflects US productivity. If its price is $1,045.00 per ounce that reflects a value productivity per worker per hour to be 1/1.045 value contained per unit in a product of one hours work time. Another way to understand---coats are manufactured in Thailand at a rate of 145 coats per hour enough coats to supply a huge share of the world market for some product brand. But in the Philippines coats are produced at half that rate. Insufficient to fill WalMart clothing racks because the coats take too much labor time to produce. They cost too much for Wal Mart. Wal Mart then buys the Thailand factory coats. Those are produced at an accelerated rate and sell much cheaper by the lot. I guess it is a truism to say Wal Mart dresses the buying public. The public does not dress themselves with clothes made by themselves. (Although the public dressing themselves is one thing and making clothes to their own custom fit is something entirely different---more interesting then the generic social products they put on their backs.) When it comes time for the Philippine factory to deposit its exchanges and count its proceeds the measure of how many gold ounces produced per hour is used to calculate its profits compared to many competing products in its class. If gold prices are high the Philippine factory will not buy gold but just accumulate its profits till it reaches an altitude where gold can be bought at sufficient quantity to be considered very rich. The Philippines is not in the game unless its economy produces at a high rate or it could end up broke and the coat factory foreclosed. If gold prices fall the Singapore factory could close the plant and not be any more mindful of its impact on the society because it can afford to buy enough gold reserves for two or three family generations before they start to lose it. Live out their lives in wealthy isolation till they dwindle to one homeless heir. An infinitesimal quantity of value is nothing for the rich country but everything for the poor one. Mainly because its productivity is not yet developed that the poor one cannot produce as many goods and services to add on the heap to possess sufficient gold reserves like the US can easily out-produce the less advanced countries. To become truly a sovereign equal partner in trade the traders have to come to the table willing to exchange the work of one industry with that of another industry is a form of mutual cooperation. American trade is about competition not cooperation. Chance and causality define the world of competition and poor countries cannot afford chances nor wait for causality to kick in a miracle. Without China's presence in the region and its big output gains all the Pacific Rim countries combined cannot match up to US productivity that competing with US is a death sentence for them. Rather than escape poverty with capitalism--capitalism would throw them into perpetual stagnation and abysmal poverty. China is the counter-balance to US productivity dominating that part of the world with its products, money and military. This is a humble Trump warning the Asian world to not add insult by ganging up on it to injury the declining power it is becoming. A change from the tone set when the world was told its either you are with us or against us. The tone here is I will be nice if you are nice and I do bite.
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  8192. You should not agree with O’Rourke because the inevitability of more killings like this is imminent under the present circumstances and he is not addressing the circumstances. This is a stunt for his own political ams to get in front of media. Who should have interrupted the governor are the workers of these gun makers, the employees themselves. O’Rourke is a politician, he will be the same as the ones in office now. It is not the ma or woman that makes the difference its the inherent corruptive influence of the office that woman or man is made. For example, so that I can really educate you. See how Prime Ministers of other nations travel to other countries with out massive armed and detailed security that costs billions of taxpayer dollars for each junket the president travels. This is because the presidency is the office that oppresses the world. A sheriff needs a squadron or the sheriff will get killed because the sheriff is the oppressor using laws to punish people, ruins their lives. A sheriff must go around guarded. A sheriff’s rule is force, violence. A president is a sheriff, a cop. The effective power are the employees. Congress is immobilized, they legislate on behalf of the gun makers in America. Colt, Remington, Browning, Smith-Wesson, to ensure their products stays on the market and the government does not interfere with their production. You cannot change the actions of people. The gun makers use part of their wealth in connection with the oil and gas producers, Conoco-Phillips, Exxon-Mobil, BP, etc. pool their money to ensure the market stays open for them. If an illegal gun market develops or if there are bad actors in retail selling to traffickers that problem belongs to the politicians. None of the politicians say anything about cracking down on gun trafficking do they?
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  8217. Part of the problem of being a billionaire in America today is being surrounded by people who do not tell you how you come across to the Public. They instead tell you how connected you are because the Public to the people surrounding the billionaire are a narrow and small number of people who live and have absolutely no connection to the Public. This is the case with Trump and Bloomberg. John Steyer is a billionaire of another mold as he is connected to the public by contracting with black firms and advisors in the process of making his money and will probably get a good percentage of voters for that reason. Biden is simply the older democrats living in a world of a by-gone era, they are the people who suggest WWI trench warfare for 21stcentury warfare, vestiges. The billionaire question on the minds of people, practically sick of the status quo, propelled, Buttigieg, Klobachar, Sanders and Warren in particular to the foreground of the political scene. The question is: Why do we need them when we actually do not?   The other part of the problem of being a billionaire in America, apart from living in a bubble, is that the real Public will have no access to all of the innovations in science, medicine and industry but the billionaires will. All of us will be living in the 1970s while the plutocrats live in the 21st century.  On innovation, the phenomena that has perplexed all economic thinkers on the era of modern industry is the effect of machinery to displace labor, this constitutes an economic paradox! The effect of machinery, science and technology on the worker is a self-evident law between the intensity and duration of labor prolonged indefinitely. But increasing the intensity of work, at some point, becomes complete inefficiency, and the shortening of the work day is a loss to capital strives for a solution. Piece work becomes the solution, what young people call the "gig economy", is piece work to the classical economists. The gig economy intensifies work because the worker is dependent on the machine to make a living. The machine back in the day of early modern industry was a sewing machine; today a cell phone and the data of personal lives harvested through the cell phone is the machine by which profits are accrued for a handful of billionaires. The more people use the cell phone or its applications the more profits are earned. In the early days of modern industry, the more the worker produced a given product they were paid by the weight and the quality of the product, the work intensified. Value was reduced to the quantity of labor. Time as the measure of labor.
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  8241. The internal combustion engine is a big reason war in the Middle East and with Iran specifically is on the table. America's economy is structured on whatever the auto industry manufactures. The architectural framework of the economy is designed less for people and more for the car and truck. Rail is used for shipping products over land. Roads and bridges are used for shipping products, lakes, rivers, oceans are used to ship products. Ships, rail, car and truck are products themselves we choose to manufacture. These material entities are the ones using the architecture and the car and truck ship people to a certain destination, mostly when people arrive they are in their role as consumers meeting up with the products and other people in their role as a producers meet up with the products when they return home delivering them. Even nature is a tool for this purpose. Humans do not use the oceans, rivers, lakes, land, roads, bridges, canals for themselves to meet their needs, they use these things to meet the needs of the products. The products need to move and since they do not move by themselves as dead matter they require human assistance. Every invention is merely invented to lighten the toil of moving objects around. In general people are in motion to either to buy and use a good or sell a good. People are not in motion by their own volition. Nor is their breath, pulse, mind and body their own when it to is used to move products around. In a very real sense 'free will' as natural as appetite is to the stomach has been extricated from the human mind, it does not exist in humans in this economic stage of their life. At this stage, free will exists as a latent potential, for instance, only when a person decides to visit someone for the sake of visiting, or traveling for the sake of traveling, or moving their bodies from one location to another by their own volition, is free will being exercised. This is when the mind begins to be inventive and uses nature and man's products to meet human needs that free will is fully integrated with being. A surfer has more freedom to decide how to use their own mind and body to transport themselves using the ocean's natural power over a person in possession of cars and trucks whose mind and body is used by cars and trucks to move their bodies around from point to point. The majority of the time in people's lives at this stage is driven by external need and used by an external entity not subjective free will used by the individual. Humans are not in control of their actions, rather, necessity is in control of their actions. Even if it is a fake necessity the fake-ness is real enough to make them do something in relation to it not in relation to Mind. Free will is the mind conscious of itself as being has yet to make an appearance in a new human being since it left in the life of humans before industrialization. This should raise questions that if free will does not exist than the 'free world', or the 'free market', 'freedom and independence', carry no real meaning in a world of objects deciding the activity of mankind.
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  8252. Americans are dragged into this atrocity through the irresistible urge of the arms manufacturers to accumulate a greater mass of profit, take advantage of the fall in prices, buy cheap, produce cheaper, and make more of the low priced commodities the working class consumes. The entire mass of consumer goods manufactured cheaper brings on a tendency to depress the value of labor-power, cheaper goods = less wages, pensions, etc., and overall the working class is working more for less valuable money commanding less of the quantities of the necessaries of life. By this scenario the wars and the production of arms for invasions perpetrated by ruling class individuals are supported by the labor of every working American. Anything that is used in this war in Yemen is an American product, all hardware and software, has its origins in the USA produced by the US working class. Americans sell to buy, the sale is in the working, the buying is in the wage, but the actual activity itself is the connection to the Yemenese victims of this holocaust, so that if a chemist of a chemical company produces a part needed for the weapons consumed in Yemen, that individual chemist has a moral choice to make, to work for money or work for humanity. In the case of the entire working class, their labor-power is the commodity they must sell to avoid material deprivation. The chemists and the system operators running the factory automation that fabricates the ammunitions and weapons are in a moral bind. Most all commodities the US military requires to sustain its own wars and this Yemen war puts the all the producers of those requirements into a moral crisis.
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  8253. North Korea will NOT denuclearize even if South Korea denuclearizes is the anomaly. Only a worldwide denuclearization movement can disarm both countries. A nuclear free world wide movement resolves the contradiction North Korea plays in its historic relation to the world. President Moon's position places American conservatives which include republicans and democrats, as the obstacle to a true peace. The victim in this history is Korea, the greater part of the damage of the Cold War Korean Conflict was inflicted on Northern Korea. Victims as persons are typically hyper sensitive of external threats, victims as nations are not much different, that as long as democrats and republicans are in power the victim will behave like a victim because victimization, expropriation, and appropriation by the few is the perceived policy of the US in South Korea. America will have to lay down its guns before Chairperson Kim disarms North Korea is anomaly #2. Nuclearized governments are incapable of disarming themselves, their power rests on threats as a precondition, if not power dissolves, industrial production of weapons dissolve, the basis of the power dissolves. The withdrawal of US fleets policing the Pacific Asian oceans is an indication Washington in losing control of the region as nuclear-free movements pick up momentum and carries Moon to be the historic leader breaking the use of power as a form of social control. The Col. points out the contradictions of the positions from the vantage point of the American conservatives in Washington, whose power rests on demonizing to the American public, any foreign country the US is losing influence over. Moon's position of denuclearization challenges the thesis of in keeping North Korea nuclear and would accelerate the decline of US hegemony of the region. This makes the US, democrats and republicans specifically, the primary opposition to a nuclear free world, which, in turn, positions the American public into contradiction #3? The question of its domestic economy dedicated to war and intervention or dedicated to world peace and internal social development.
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  8261.  @tomscott3  Many in the Bernie movement and many in the Warren faction and none in the Buttigieg following even care for they are all about capitalism and individual greed and self-centeredness and the Frist Amendment Audit video makers who challlenge police authority in public places, all have a conception indoctrinated into the their subjective and personal belief system that the rights in the Constitution are "permanent". An indoctrination that arises out or religion. The conception that all things are not in constant change and development, whether objects or subjects, the way they are is the way they are; ubiquitously translated into the American street talk as "It is what it is". 1st, 2nd. 13th amendments are forever and will never be changed, abolished or amended, the world is a creation of God and God is permanent. It is hopeless, a religious people are chiliasts, they can never awaken to the idea that a constitutional bourgeois republic can become an absolute monarchy even if it crashed on top of the heads. Earthly life is preordained to be a creation of God, interpreting gravity or natural selection, climate change through theological and ideological eyeglasses, not as a reshaping of matter by mankind but as laws of creation. Unearthly life is life is spiritual form in the heavens that destruction by mankind is concieved as a speeding up salvation for true believers. When the pilgrims, mormans, protestants, left Europe they brought with them chiliasm, that even the most radical person is not a pragmatist but a preacher. The Victoria Ortegas in American society haven't the slightest clue of this fallacy of an ideology to wake up enough to destroy it!
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  8278. Value is created in production and surplus value is realized in circulation. Is that how it works? Forgive me I am new to this discipline...learning a lot though. Workers produce value in excess of the values paid to them in wages when working on the job and the capitalist(s) realizes this excess value the workers formed in the finished product in circulation when selling in markets. Workers move from circulation to production and back to circulation their whole lives. They buy then work to buy more. A capitalist moves from production to circulation and back to production their whole lives and buys cheap to sell dear. Both social classes live their whole lives stuck in this cycle and production itself to both classes is an intermittent event, useful only as a means, not as an end in itself. The value creation process is used for a single purpose and not a general one for capitalists and for workers the production process the value creation process, is used by workers for a general purpose and not for a particular one like self-development, education, skill, etc. Both social classes misuse the productiveness of labor located in the production process of society for self-purposes. The productiveness of labor located outside of the workers, independent of them, as the property of the capitalist(s) make the two social classes dependent on this productiveness; the capitalists to exploit it the workers to hate it. Work is made to be not a joy for self-realization but a destructive force on human beings. That’s my take on all this. The answer is the full emancipation of the productiveness of labor from its status as the independent property of capital and be made a dependent property of the workers.
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  8279.  @scramptha5949  What happened to the chair that contains a surplus value, the value the tree cutter and the value the wood processor that goes into the wood for the chair, the value embodied by the upholstering of the chair, the threading, the fabric material, these elements go into the formation of the product, that when finished by the finishing worker, the chair contains a greater value than the value (wages) paid to the chair maker? What did you do with the chair friend? All one million of them which I must sell on the market to realize that surplus value or it will forever be tied up in its product form, unsold, after having made them in production? “When someone puts up a job posting for a chair maker at 25$ an hour, they are signaling that they value an hour of a chair makers time making chairs, more than they value 25$.” Here you agree with me S/V is produced in production by workers. “Similarly if you were to accept that job, you would be signaling that you value 25$, more than you value an hour of leisure time (or w/e other thing you could do)” Here you equate leisure time, a variable incidentally, with a $25 wages. I don’t know anyone who can go the Disney world on $25 dollars do you? What that person would have to produce is 200 chairs for a value equivalent in a trip to Disney, but if the chairs took longer to produce than it takes Disney to open a theme park then one chair would be enough. I hope your getting the point with these examples. But keep them coming I like the challenge.
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  8281.  @scramptha5949  Okay...I will talk theory with you. My original very first comment highlights one aspect of the theory and it stands. We deviated. Value comes from the use of labor-power in production by capital, its exploitation (synonymous to use and compulsion)), is the use-value of the living worker in real production for capital, the use-value of the commodity labor-power only exists for the capitalist as a producer of s/v...conscious of this or not the fact remains fact, the labor market right now is in great shape for capital, an abundance of labor-powers out there, ready to sell it for a song and praying inflation will not erode their $14 an hour to an equivalent of $5 per hour...when Biden’s sanctioning Russia is felt on te domestic economy...elites hoping higher interests rates will keep the working-class from spending ...capital is rich enough to cushion the inflationary blow but for150 million, no cushion at all except an inducement to keep your money in the bank. The strong labor market will become a weak one...capital does not have to spend and buy the commodity labor-power that has a price on it too low for its seller to want to sell goes over the heads of democrats, plus capital produces overseas. Capital does not know how much to produce proportionally to needs, so all the individual capitals (corporations) create gluts a consequence of the productivity of labor. Several more social consequences arise from the way capital exploits, uses, consumes, buys, the productiveness of labor of workers, that we need not go into here. Workers (150 million) are seven times poorer than the average CEO (capitalist) the workers naturally do not separate their productiveness of labor from their minds and bodies willingly, this separation comes from the labor as a two fold commodity, grandma’s tailoring is useful labor in particular and grandma’s labor counts as value-producing labor in general, as a senior the law says she can only earn a certain amount before meeting Uncle Sam’s taxman. You do not get to be the arbiter of value. The desired pleasure of your grandmother instilled in you for her that gladly pays the cost for her maintenance is not the value I speak of. When you said you are not sure you follow my reasoning you were correct. Value producing labor is a societal designation you are born into and become in capitalism of no choice of your own. This does not mean you were born into the working class and cannot become a capitalist. That is another subject involving the political system, not being discussed here. What kind of value producer a person becomes in a capitalist society is a societal designation only insofar as there are so many jobs Capital needs, right now. Society has no need for tailoring but it needs clothes. The sewing machine was grandma’s best friend until NAFTA was signed and all sewing came from Guatemala and Honduras, Singapore, this act of Congress downgraded grandma from home to nursing home..
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  8282.  @scramptha5949  There is a great confusion among economists, particularly about the wealth of nations. The quantities of the various useful objects America produces is how American economists and lay people examine American society. But there is a more scientific way of looking at the wealth of nations the Americans have not used in their methodology and approach on the subject. Aristotle came so close to finding this method; we owe it to him for this method. Nobody in America is taught Aristotle barring the Ivy League institutions. We know the reason Aristotle could not find the law of equivalents in his society; why A did not equal B? Slavery was the reason. The common substance that made things exchange or equal could not be found because labor in slavery was not free labor, the capacity to work was not a ‘free commodity’. Labor itself and the commodity labor-power did not exists at the time but the Law of Value, this law is a natural law and as a natural law it is the same for all forms of societies, and it is by this law that American society is criticized. All societies produce use-values for social needs to insure survival and the reproduction of the society as a whole, how the work is allocated to perform this function is a decisive question. Capitalism asserts production as a ‘blind working average’, it is criticized for not enacting social regulation of production; no equal proportion between the allocations of labor in society and the needs of capitalist society. The social relation of commodities and money that take the form of a social contract under capitalism, out of recognition of owner’s rights in the social contract, occurs as a force outside of the will of the American people runs against the natural law of equivalents. So it is impossible to know what is productive work and what is not productive work except by determining what work is exchanged against capital and what work is exchanged against the revenue of the State...economists also confuse revenue with profits; in addition to confusing the quantities of commodities with the wealth of nation (GDP); so we have millions of people who are working but in jobs that are unproductive of profit and millions in jobs that enrich capital. Capital knows how much labor it must allocate to itself to sustain its rate of profit but the government does not know and what capital does not employ the government cannot employ without heavier taxation on the productive sectors of the working class and as a consequence of this crisis the workplace has a high fatality rate.
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  8283.  @scramptha5949  Value is subjective...just not the kind of subjectivity you think...its human...its labor belonging to a human being, it human productivity capital extracts from workers’ bodies and minds in production after the exchange between labor and capital happens. This is the secret of success for capital. You get rich by exploiting labor not by selling Tupperware or Amway. I think that you think value is a subjective perception or consciousness. Value is the exertion of sweat, muscle, bone and brain of a subjective human being that gets, injected through work, incorporated, devoured, trapped, embodied into commodity production measured by time. Time (manpower hours is how Americans call this) is the general object the worker is the particular subject. Bit coin is a currency that resides in circulation, it is not capital. Bit coin has no part of production. Bitcoi competes with the Dollar backed by the force of power of the State. Bitcoin is not enforced by the State but it will be because it is a threat to the dollar. The dollar is represented by the Congress and the White House that is threatened by this ethereal currency...I say, that’s cool. Production has laws of its own apart from the laws of markets, which is why production in the US and markets are in constant need of a State to equalize the two. Capital is a social relation of two elements; workers and capitalists (employers and employees). Bitcoin is a means of payment, and a medium of circulation, and also a method of payment, but it is not a measure of value. Value units are products turned into commodities that relate to each other through the law of value, measured by time and time is crystallized in gold. What your country needs like a fish needs water to live is a social revolution. The separation between production and circulation is so wide apart that all your tax dollars are being used to support a parasitical class system of an ever shrinking number of super billionaires usurping the value produced by society’s workers. When inflation rises to 3-4% you will begin to see America rupture at the seams into a civil war and distress because production is over there in Asia and circulation is here in NYC. Brain is over there and the body is over here.
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  8287. How does bombing civil targets an act of self defense? Its not. Its an an act offense. Genocide aims to eliminate the ability of a species to reproduce itself as a species, individual, family, or society. Its targets are always life -giving objects is how you tell the difference between a defensive and offensive, just or unjust, war. The people or institutions that are directly and indirectly involved in the reproduction of social and individual life and promote life are targets constitutes a genocide. Eventually the children grow up to become fathers from which Hamas fighters are recruited seems to be the reasoning of the aggressor. The conundrum, however, is that Terrorist Organizations are built from the ranks of the aggressor. The aggressor’s survival hinges on the production of society’s economic surplus for its own appropriation and expansion; an opposite aggressor becomes a means, a tool, for that expansion or it loses its own reason of existence. Terrorist Organizations are a superimposition over the working population in Palestine, and not a homegrown resistance party of the working classes. Hamas Organization are not a communist party at which the ruling classes tremble from communist activity that immediately arms the working classes to defend themselves against aggression (Israel). Hamas is as criminal as Israel, they left the people defenseless and vulnerable is criminal. Every act of genocide has the aim of eliminating the biological and material reproductive capacities of a given people, culture or society. This is how you know objectively what kind of society; what form of fascism; what type of republic; the monopoly structure of the economy, a given nation is not when a nation calls itself a nation. There is a world market all nations are relating to that they cannot be relating to themselves when they become fascist republics. To sustain themselves as fascist republics the world market must be reconfigured in the sphere of human activity that directly reproduces life, production itself, and so its future campaigns is to change the industrial base of economies at the material level to consume the greater part of industrial output on an indefinite basis.
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  8303.  @EldritchEntityWithASmartphone  Only a fool would believe there is an ethical way to get rich in capitalism. Bernie did not exploit the labor directly that produced his book but his book is still the object that bears a higher value than what the bookmakers in the factory are paid. His publisher is the capitalist and his book is the raw material his publisher appropriates from the workers producing the actual physical book, even if that work is automated requiring one person to press a button to make a million copies,---the book is made offshore the book re-enters circulation bearing a higher value than its own material components. His income from this book is one of many items that form the cost of production of the book for the publisher. This arrangement puts Bernie where all workers should be in relation to the object they produce,---if they got a share of the product the capitalist appropriates rather than getting a straight wage to buy a pound of preservative rich bread to carry the workers through life without dying from starvation, a mere deduction from the value the book bears a sufficient income from international markets. Barring all other factors and influences this economic law holds true for all commodities produced for sale. You would be in denial into believing a man or woman can become rich without the exploitation of human labor. There are no ethics in capitalist production and private appropriation,----you will soon learn that in the coming months when your soil, water, security, food, housing, cars, trains, planes, all become threats to human life.
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  8326. There are no wars in the East, internal tensions maybe, but not battles, wars and class wars are limited to the west between western governments and western working populations working in a relationship with corporations. The corporations internally are socially organized between employer and employee as unequal partners in production. At the present time the whole field of human production is dominated by this class relation of social inequalities. Inequality in terms of work, pay, gender...power, privilege, are about labor productivity. We treat labor productivity as an object, a thing that belongs to neither the employer or the employee, both classes of people are equally non-owners of labor productivity despite the fact that you cannot have labor productivity without a human being performing it,---we are all human beings. Herein is our misery, suffering, social alienation, stems from the separation of objective elements from the subject in the field of work that escalates into external wars. The diagnosis is the human element is powerless to administer its own labor from the object consuming human labor. Productivity and technology have a life of their own as elements of production, time element and technology, are the generators of economic growth, but they are independent of the work itself creates an internal conflict. The live subjects performing the work are working to enrich an employer is the contract relationship and this relation is not a generator of economic growth. It’s actually not even a necessary relationship and a bad one at that. The relation is loaded with social inequities and traps to hand over all power to administer labor performance and technology, this contractual clause is what makes lengthening the hours of work desirable to employers. People in the west are oly free and equal before they get into a contract relationship. Once signed they become unequal partners. Like a bad marriage in desperate need of a divorce.
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  8330. History reveals, Ukraine is the biggest loser... in real lives and politically in this effort of the Biden Administration; the cruel policy of sacrificing Ukraine in order to bleed Russia. It did not work. A million Ukrainian lives lost is a substantial loss to a country of ony 37+ million people. They could have been spared if Biden changed direction earlier, if Kamala broke away from Biden’s policies, there were ample chances for the democrats to redirect that money to Americans when the first round of floods and fires tore up the infrastructure. The Christian nationalists read the writing on the wall and decided to pull out of Ukraine...leave Europe to deal with its own security in a bluff the Europeans took hook, line and sinker, in one form or another gave their offerings awaiting instruction on what to do next; the unknown had come true, they must spend more on their own defense in a time of tax cuts to the rich, the money they need has to come from the European working classes. Deeper cuts into pensions and longer working hours against a static wage are tough pills to swallow that the British PM was quick to offer sending his own troops to Ukraine if it meant the EU not fall apart to pieces speaks volumes on how emotionally not empathetic and remote the PM is to his people. The idiot not realizing the whole Ukraine campaign was meant to burn out Russia as a precursor to a NATO expansion. Russia lost millions too but the war for them meant keeping western invaders out of Russia gives meaning to their losses.
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  8332. Can't forget the Iraq War Veterans, so angry at the liberal establishment who at the time was Joe Biden put them in harm’s way using 9/11 for a call for freedom and liberty against Sadaam Hussien and liberate Iraq. Congress went along with it hook, line and sinker. They gave Al Queda a place to fight Americans. The Vets came back destroyed, and used the only power they have to elect Trump, a spite vote against the liberal establishment. What did the left do? Nothing. What did the left do when these same vets showed up in Virginia armed to protest Northam's gun laws on MLK day 2020? Nothing. The left should have been there arm and arm with the Iraq vets. Biden was then and is now in the pocket of Raytheon Lockheed Martin. Grumman, GE, Exxon Mobil, the largest oil dealer to the Pentagon.    Biden formerly head of the arms services committee then became VP to Obama, hand-picked by Obama to initiate another war, the war we are in today, the war with the Russians to build up Ukraine. The next group of Veterans sent to war are not going to come back as close as it came with the assassination of Solemeini of Iran, because now they will be fighting entire nations in the Middle East. His America First policy puts all of Europe in the untenable position to choose between the US or Russia and China. With half of the British parliament invested in Hawei, England, France and Germany slides into a deep stagnation with Trump’s trade war on China.    As for Trump, he is the wrong man for the job. Wrong, because his path is not to deconstruct the arms industry and wrench the grip the arms industry has of our government, his path is to become an autocrat. Undo all the wrong wrong-doers prosecuted by the liberal establishment and create a fealty of the justice department. The people supporting him never went to war. An autocrat is natural to them, they are chiliasts, believers in the second coming of Christ, God, Family and Country. They are the NASCAR enthusiasts, rich, spoiled Americans, country music stars, with pro-fascist leanings.    Only Bernie opposed the Iraq War. Only Bernie opposes the misuse of the military, opposes invasions, opposes the arms industry, opposes industries with the highest carbon footprint. Vote Bernie if you are going to vote, it’s the last chance to restore America back to its original roots of American progressivism.
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  8340. The FEMA director Peter Gaynor commands 14,000 employees, several huge federal warehouses that can fill three aircraft carriers stocked with material of all types from A to Z, and 13 government agencies. In short FEMA is a standing army and compared to the US military it is small. The military is a force of 475,000 soldiers and dwarfing the size of personnel of the military is a 1 million man police force in law enforcement all equipped as we have seen on occasion when called out to quell riots full battle regalia. The federal government, therefore, has three huge standing armies. The military has at least the same material but four times the amount of all nations combined, that is 127 nations! This is what makes the US an empire. FEMA alone could outfit the entire US with a hospital system in every state making our ordinary hospital system with all its combined resources the size of the state of New Jersey and with that shrinking, overwhelmed, reduced to the size of Rhode Island. The 14,000 employees include experts of all types, engineers, doctors, medical emergency and police, workers and the army Corp of engineers. FEMA could produce material and distribute material. The production of ventilators is a piece of cake if they do not already have them stocked which they do. The society I envision is one where the needs of all citizens can be met for three generations spanning 100 years going forward and a reduced work week from 40 hours per work of a workforce of 133 million people to 20 hours per week for all 334 million and not put a dent in the quantity of material and resources the federal government commands. To give you some proof of one small fraction of this productive power see Big Bertha boring the tunnel under Seattle Washington. One machine, a giant drill is run by four operators at the helm the whole tunnel project 2 miles long employs a workforce of 800 workers. In fact, of all the parts of the society as a whole the Public has the least down to a bare minimum hand to mouth existence from lack of its rightful share of the material wealth and resources its high level of productivity creates. In my view, the priority that makes the federal government insist the Public rely on the private sector for all its needs is its persistence to be a world empire which in this day and age is doing more harm to the planet and the species as a whole. This epidemic makes me question three things about America in order that trust be restored (1) capitalism or the government's reliance on the private sector, (2) ecology and economic inequality in society, (3) public health.
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  8353. We always have to go back to ancient history to understand the present. The US Senate is based on the Roman Senate. Consultants to the king were made to be patricians after the king was expelled from power. They became an aristocratic republic chosen by landowners of the State. There was nothing democratic about an Aristocracy. Landowners in America created the Confederate State in the South and landowners created the Colonial State of the North. After the Civil War, when all states were unified into one union, lawyers selected by landowners became the consultants to the State. All came from Aristocratic lineages. Lincoln may have freed the slaves but the slaves were never freed from the Senate which no longer owned the slaves but stayed active, as aristocratic families, their home being the Senate, hired them on a hourly basis. Contract employments. Special contracts with the government is the transaction and embedded in the transaction are social relations Lincoln made universal. An exchange that all of us are the sellers and the Senate as the final appropriator of wealth is the buyer of our commodity Lincoln gave us. One has to remember that work in America before Lincoln was never performed in a fixed period of time. An outside time element became necessary for this exchange to work or society just collapses with the slave now gone. America needed a Working Day. Every one works against the clock because extracting the same level of growth or higher is what the Senate does when it owned slaves. Their job is to exploit you and I not as slave because we are now freed from slavery but to exploit humanity within a specific time frame, get the maximum profit from that exploitation even if the exploitation is severe and endangers humanity’s survival. As long as the profit average is higher than what it takes to survive is all that matters in the world of America’s Aristocracy. So there you have it, the US Senate that should have been abolished in 1865. If the aristocratic families were banned from the Senate in 1865, America would have its first social democratic republic even before the Russians and the Germans in its history. Just think had the American Senate been abolished Hitler might have never come to power in Germany. The commodity of major importance back then was cotton. Whoever controlled cotton was king. Cotton in a democratic social republic would have been impossible to monopolize and be used as a weapon to control the destinies of nations. There would not have been inflation and neither a Cotton Famine. Hitler would have had no case to blame Europe for German unemployment. Aristocracy from Europe immigrated to the Americas. Its all one big happy family. But an all out legal ban on the aristocracy from entering or creating a government has not happened yet and frustrations with that are mounting.
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  8357. First understand this about the FED rate falling a 1/4 % . All the FED has done by lowering the rate is to make the price other banks pay the FED for money they borrow to lend out to their own bank depositors, cheaper. The FED lowered the wholesale price of money. In turn, the banks charge a rate to other borrowers have more retail room to raise the price yet stay below the social average cost of a mortgage. This is good for the banks and stingy for the consumer who saves around $120 bucks per month in money less paid in interest. Not a good deal I would say, considering in my day rates went from 6% in the 70s to 3% in the 80s. The Fed went from Funny Money in the 80s to Stingy Money in the 20s. Wow, I am thrilled (sic). Socially, the nuclear family is destroyed, patriarchy is wiped out. To raise children in America both parents must work and since children cannot be raised unsupervised and there is no such thing as universal child care, one parent staying home is out of the question. The changing workforce has lowered wages in general; it’s cheaper to hire a woman than a man in America because women are still second class citizens in America. They have given up the fight for parity. Now the family is extended under one roof. Two families are under a roof or 1.5 families share the same address and all contribute to pay the mortgage. This makes the relative holding the mortgage a hostile relative to the relative renting to live under the same roof, a hostile relative when the rent cannot be paid. In America, people kill each other over the smallest and petty issues. The children raised in multifamily homes will marry into another multi-family home and America will have more renters than owners spurring the growth of a new industry that builds homes to rent not buy. This will create a social class of people renting by choice and renters by need leading to the creation of a social class of landowners. Before long, America has the facade of a feudalistic society in modern form.
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  8364. The corruption and mismanagement in the Maduro government is likely real. The fault, however, is Oil as a World Commodity. Cotton was the world commodity supporting slavery. Oil is the commodity supporting capitalist competition. Competition is War. But the $3M worth of business CITGO gets from the US will be a blow to all those people who buy gas at CITGO stations. That number reflects the number American consumers purchasing CITGO gas. CITGO is always a dime to forty cents cheaper per gallon than Exxon, Standard Oil, Sunoco, BP, Shell, Cumberland Farms, etc. Sanctions are going to make all Americans pay more at the pump and more at the mercy of higher gas retailers fighting for the spoils.  Anymore dollars paid at the pump will have the effect of raising food prices reverberating across the whole spectrum of working people as a reduction of income from wages or salary. This on top of a big ass chunk of money lost to a government shut down. What the economy lost from that fiasco will be recovered slower and longer, more work hours, more work expended away from family and home, than if sanctions were not to added as salt on the wound. Income from Wages, Rents, Interests, Salaries are fixed so everyone is watching ever red cent they spend. Its at the point where people have to alternate between food and gas weeks at a time. It will be one less resource for cheaper home heating fuel for the homeowner, landlord, commercial truckers, commuters, small shops, mechanics and what not, higher landscape quotes for the suburban blind. Those who can afford the increases will pay it and more of those will take a mortal leap into a black hole of poverty. This should tell you if sanctions are in the best interest of the nation or in the best interest of US oil companies who can't knock out the competition in any other way but through a coup and by use of force.
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  8370. Hey Jamie Foxworthy --Not really...in Virginia the ruling classes saw that Americans will not disarm and are packed to the gills with weapons was enough to intimidate the crap out of the police. You give too much credit to the police and to these guys talking in this video. Iadarola and Klien are kids, no life experience in class struggles, they are actually marketing hucksters, make money every time you click on their show, in the old days we called them opportunists, angels talking over pinheads, not helping you, they appear left and democratic but are not. You just don't have any life history of experience in class struggles to know how to spot them out. i don't mean to be insulting to you. But in times like this we have to be brutally direct to teach people. The police are cowards and have been recruited from the lowest social classes of society. They are not intellects. The are men with a crisis of masculinity, they think to be a man is to be a brute, and the state recruited them to serve as intimidators of the Public. They are low functioning and ignoran men. High school level, when you confront them they wince. Give them a badge and gun and they feel like they can walk all over people and trample on people's civil rights. Low functioning people are easy meat...racists. They are the ones called out to interact with the public. Challenge them on first amendment grounds and they do nothing and say nothing and even take the verbal abuse you might give them.  Behind them are democrats and republicans, neither of whom want to take the blame for the dectruction of democracy and hallowing out of the rural economy of the US which had been going on for a very long time. Beginning with the infamous words of Ronald Reagan, "the problem with government is government", and you yourself not distinguishing government as the harbinger of your 1st and 2nd amendment rights got blindsided or gaslighted to believe that your rights will be secured if the state is diminished, i.e., less government and put your faith in worn out old free market ideas the transnational corporations peddle. Of course, nothing can be further from the truth. They know they lost the confidence and trust of the public. How they interact in the world reveals a hypocrisy based on this breech. They made a choice to be in your face as bald faced liars. They accuse the Russians of meddling in Venezuela while they meddle in Uzbekistan, Belarus and Ukraine, they wont' go to war with Venezuela or with Iran. Its all bluster brinkmanship also old and worn out. Domestically, they blew it by using a stupid police force and treating Americans like shit. Every grandmother tells you you get more flies with honey than you do with vinegar. Trump is vinegar. It won't be hard to get rid of them, what is hard is to get youth in this country off the military kick. That will be hard because they are indoctrinated. Hitler made sure he had the youth in his pocket, 7 million. You undo the indoctrination by making education universally free, then the stupid men in society with a maculinity crisis will choose school and not the military or the police as an escape hatch from a dead rural economy. Then the corporations have no choice but to invest industry at home to give them decent jobs. Their strategy was to charge people for education causing student and parent debt, and the lower social classes will join the military or the police to avoid debt. Debt financing the wars is the way they are paying for the wars. You undo this in two ways. Impose a draft and Trump's halfwitted son goes to war right next to the lower social classes and you undo debt financing of wars do it by sending the bill to the super rich. Bernie is really good at doing these two things, they know he will make them pay. All you have to do is vote Bernie into office, he is independent of the two corrupt parties and then never forget this time in your life like I never forgot my time in life and voted for FDR who also ran as an independent. You won't need to fight them with guns just show them you mean business with your guns and they will run. This is why the Virginia gun demonstration goes down in history as a pivotal moment. It showed them that if they fuck up they will be shot and all Bernie has to say is exactly that and you''ll see how fast they start writing out the checks.
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  8380. The Propublica video is good but it only shows the value side of the relations on how the ultra rich remain rich. It does not show how the rich use or operate the side of the relation that is production. How with their capital, the banks, the government and the working class alter production, distribution, exchange and consumption, as the other four elements every society have to get into motion if that society wants to survive is not explored in the video. But that's ok, people get the gist of it anyway.  A middle class fits into the areas of distribution and exchange and the working class fit into the totality at the start of the cycle of work and employment in production and at the end in consumption. Landowners fit into the realm of consumption. If landowners were slave owners they would usurp the first phase, production and at the end usurp consumption, where the working class today replaces slave employment in the spheres of activity named. Social reproduction is in the hands of the working class but directed by capital. When the video says the rich are in a separate world they mean the rich usurp this natural law. They exploit the working class in the four elements of the totality making the end an aim of each phase of that totality work for its own expansion. Before this natural law can be applied to society in a conscious manner production has to be usurped by one class not two, the billionaires have to be removed from production. Production is historical and human history is production, every economic system starts with production and ends with production. The billionaire presence in production is in the way of production becoming an end in itself and human history a chronicle of achievements for the species as a whole.
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  8382. About the segment starting at 11:51,----It’s a big subject. Biden is by no means a genuine working class candidate but he is the closest thing America has to one and already the non-working class democrats side with republicans to crush any favorable outcome for working people. In this next term, Biden has no choice but to swing to the left, the president bears the responsibility of millions of people impacted by a triple crisis, climate change, social inequality, and material deprivation, for which we have more diseases, and the Far Right, who include democrats, want him out and rather have a man with no regard for human life but his own, in power! A character trait proven when paper towels were thrown at Puerto Ricans in the aftermath of a hurricane and flooding. A hubris worse than the last president to insult you never touched the ground but flew over it after Katrina. The democrats that have no position when they should have a position are not friends of the People either. If America turns fascist and totalitarian blame right wing Democrats for enabling what will be this time next year, a shutting down of America, it will be illegal to celebrate the 4th of July and the Smithsonian is closed to the public because these institutions are the landmarks of the American Revolution that broke free from the rule of King George of England. Fascists must have a king or they cannot be fascists. Said another way, you cannot be a christian without a god. You cannot be rich without poverty. You cannot love without hate in the world; few people are smart because many people are stupid. This individualism gives rise to Big Egos and Hubris. A trait the Spanish and Italians dislike when tourist consumers leave a trail of filth behind them in their countries not of their own as tourists. The medical concern on Biden is chimera, fear propaganda, like the Wall on the Border, pretends to keep out barbarous mothers and children, actually controls America’s slave trade of migrants; an excuse to take the power from Biden. The real motives for these actions among the Far Right is the fear of expropriation of the 1% by the 99% and losing to Communism that Biden raises the hair on their backs they will forever be second to another power on the world stage. Social and economic inequality in America looks like a bent rim on a tire, fat with air on one side and thin on the other end the tire hobbles the car, and finally, a major network begins to talk about this inequality after 50 years of hiding this crisis and pretending the accumulation of wealth by the 1% is perfectly normal and natural. Grand theft can go on behind the backs of the American people and Privacy Laws takes the media off the hook from revealing the 1% . The Far Right say social inequality is all in your head. They dismiss it. Many industries collaborate and comply with the Far Right. The Medical Establishment dispenses to the Public all the medications you need to keep you numb, stupid, unable to take control of your life, kept politically sedated. The Education Establishment teaches things irrelevant to your life. Privatized Christian schools are the only schools a kid can get an education. Working class kids get led before they get lunch or an education in public schools. Well, ----now that inequality cannot be hidden, you the worker reading this, the stagnation of wages for the last 50 years you had to live with is blamed on inflation, is also a lie, inflation. Charging higher prices is not an act of God or nature but of a single institutional central bank tinkering with the money supply of an economy. Inflation decreases the number of buyers in markets and this allows only the richest of the top 1% to purchase and accumulate the economic surplus the 99% produce. Jackson, Wyoming typifies the wealth gap in America. Can a working person, union or not, afford to buy several pounds of gold or spend $1,340.00 for a single ounce of gold just to have it? Right. A working person can’t. But a rich person can and bought more gold than they need for the sake of greed. Why do the 1% own more and more properties? Super gentrification. Money enlarges into capital but what does not enlarge itself is the amount of time it takes to build a home of a given size that the expanded capital can now afford to buy three or four homes equaling its new value amount. America is a big country but its size is not infinite, at some point everyone will get pushed out of a job and a home and kicked off the land anticipates the need for a dictatorship of a minority, a King to rule over this new feudalism in America.
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  8395. Its a shame the discussion and the book does not explore ‘the right of ownership’ as the cornerstone of inheritance. Excluding this factor makes the work an incomplete work that cannot be taken seriously as useful for the left or as an advance in the history of social science. The right of ownership before the Civil War meant to be an enslaver, but, after the Civil War the right of ownership meant a black person is no longer sold once and for all as a ‘commodity-slave’, where the slave is the commodity! Black people became ‘free’, they became an owner with the same rights as other owners was the decree of 1865. The problem comes when there are two distinctive commodities owned by whites and owned by blacks. Society was split between owners of money and owners of ‘labor-power’. Money and labor-power became commodities themselves and the two owners of each distinctive commodities are equal in the eyes of the law, equal agents of commerce. At this point society demanded that labor-power should sell only for a definite period of time and the future struggle that broke out in America was the struggle for a normal working day, established the new society Lincoln called for. From this angle, labor and the union struggle for a normal working day facilitated the birth of capitalism as it left intact the ‘right of ownership’, the Emancipation Proclamation outlined. Personally, this view of the history should raise many questions about what the left in America should be and with whom it should build alliances and, ultimately, its understanding of the right of property driving social inequality in society.
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  8416. America is a classic example of subjective labor-power splitting off from the objective conditions of labor. In the US, capital accumulation by the corporations and the whole of the capitalist class has two functions. 1. In and for itself capital accumulation reproduces capitalist relationships, the primary relationship being wage-labor, in which the working class reproduces its continual existence. The current level of awareness of the working class is to make America great again, far from being sick of being a member of the working class, or abolishing the conditions of employment, individuals want a return to prosperity as it was at the height of economic power and restore the greatness of the American working class. Prosperity for the working class will never return, to the contrary, it will be increasingly more difficult to enter another social class for individuals. 2. The only reason capitalist corporations produce is to consume the usefulness of labor-power because labor-power is the gift that keeps on giving. Corporations hire labor to produce the value of the product and labor produces the value of the product to consume the use-value of someone else's capital, ie., land, tools, technology. The current level of awareness of the working class as indicated by the demands for higher wages, shows that individuals unconsciously promote the ceaseless reproduction of the same social relations of capitalism, into which the subject/object relationship is strikingly dialectical and this causes the working class to enter into an alliance with the corporations.
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  8419. Bernie's speech in the Senate in 2010 of the loss of manufacturing jobs in the US is a dismal picture of the death of the industrial blue collar American working class. Their children misguided by neo-fascists on line, are lashing out with violent rage at the neoliberal order for destroying their future was an unforseen sociological consequence the democrats missed when they ran Hillary Clinton. That was the time to push legislation on the tech industry to root violent tendencies out of the internet to protect impressionable minds. The neglect in government is corruption serving itself as they say. A whole generation lost historical context and sense of belonging fell prey to the tech industry in search of belonging and context Trump was only too happy to provide a scapegoat. Corresponding to all that going on wages were sinking, as Bernie said and the trend continues. The blue collar working class is decimated, gone, and now the average working class jobs we see people doing around us everyday pay is minimum wage. Employers have a perfect economic situation to exploit, as their companies grow larger and larger from higher rates of productivity of workers inside the offices, warehouses, shops, distribution centers, they own they can hire more labor for the lowest amount in payment in wages to move more product. The worker's share of this product is nothing. Textile industry was the first to export production from the US and with the rise of industrial production in China, a huge chunk of American general production went offshore to China. The democrats failed to take certain steps to protect the working class from the sociological dimensions of losing a job, a career, a family, a middle class lifestyle. It would be an asset if more sociologically minded people ran for office, sociologists themselves, they have certain insights that regular politicians do not, they learn from experience what not to do. Insight in Bernie makes him so special, he has a sociological mind the general consciousness of the public does not. The Public does nt have much imagination we can call a universal awareness of its own common calling, that is why we have Popes, presidents, kings, monarchs, princes, and oligarchs, injecting ideas into our heads the class struggle and the concept of working-class emancipation as a self-emancipation is not real!
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  8426. The job scene is filled with jobs that do us, we are not controlling the work in those jobs. Work is programmed, we are instructed to do the job under the constraints of time and direction by upper management doing a number on our heads and our bodies, adding stress, to our person and being. You understand what i am saying there? Jobs are used as a way to get out of the job you are already in; the backstabbing, and the added stress of more overtime to make ends meet, or getting to another job because the first job does not pay enough. You understand? It gets worse. When something opens up and jobs are calling you because you took a test five years ago, this comes as a relief because the new job pays more. You managed to take off one leg of your routine. Now one job brings the pay of two jobs, but the new job has a new standard that calls for longer hours and less sick and vacation time. A new average standard of working longer than necessary is applied in jobs that even the educated workers fall into when they land a job out of college. Still, even if the job might kill you before you can benefit from its pension plan. You choose to do it anyway because its still better than the job from whence you left. You understand what I am saying here? These are horrid times that I can see will become worse. Worse than what work looked like in Victorian England at the start of the Industrial Revolution. No unions, working conditions that heighten mortality rates, disease, physical wounds, plant explosions, long term effects of contaminants on the job, and they know it. If you collect workers comp you forfeit the right to sue the company is the set up. But you can’t live without an income. Filing for workers comp becomes a necessity and in doing the company that maimed you, are off the hook. The job scene benefits the employers and the ‘gub’mint’ treats jobs and what its like working in those jobs as none of its business.
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  8429.  @protorhinocerator142  You will need a national energy policy. There are thousands of nuclear power stations in the US already. Do a map search of all the pinpointed places in the US where a nuclear power plant is located,---you have lots of them. Aged and not maintained,---again a Congressional debacle of neglect that is to the avail of the fossil car and fuel industry. A national energy policy to the democrats and republicans opens the way toward increasing socialization in other areas such as medicine, a taboo. Big Medicine is a private interest Democrats and Republicans defend. You need more than an intelligent individual leading the country through this transition you need an entirely new Congress not ‘bought off’ by private interests like the Koch Brothers Industries. The printing press was a technological revolution as was the micro-chip in 1976, revolutionized industry, ---NY Times to be the first industry replaced the entire the typesetters. Congressional politicians are not capable of this, you have a moribund political class, unworthy of running your country, is the biggest obstacle before you can even talk about a transition. Lastly, electric car production will need the expertise of democrats and republicans to use force to go into other countries for lithium, and now you have a mining special interest as the first seller of the mined lithium sets the price, consequently, instead of the price of EV going down, it goes up, and only a small minority with money, can feel good they are not polluting but they because the mines are the polluters and damage the environment. The end users are not putting a single dent in reversing ecological effects. You have a serious problems on your hands as a nation ahead of you and its is not the catastrophic scenario you anticipate, its the political class making things worse, because they are moribund, useless, inept, functionaries for private industry and nothing more.
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  8434. Pardon my saying this but this has to be one of the worst interviews I've seen. You have a guy whose language is over technical and a host who can't pin down the concrete impact of a trade war. All this in a news program whose viewers are on the receiving end of the negative side of the trade war with Canada and Mexico. For example, an American who buys medication from Canada will be forced to buy medication from American companies. We know why they buy in Canada. Any American who buys a 2018 Harley Davidson motorcycle buys a product not made in America closes down the Harley factory in Kansas. The reaction, so far, from Canada and Mexico is retaliation, a commodity to commodity price hike and the EU's reaction to US protectionism is cold. The right wing in the US perceives itself to be the victim in world trade. Not treated fairly by its former allies because of their quasi-socialist restrictions on capital but lay heavily on US military might to contain a Russia that is no longer socialist, makes no sense in defeating socialism in the form of China and North Korea, Venezuela. Populist movements opposed to all forms of neoliberalism in Latin America are re-shaping the world that it makes the so called 'social democracies of Europe' more socialist, although partially, then Russia is under Putin. In the context of the two largest vendors of military hardware the US comes first in selling the most and the British arms industry. The cozy relationship between Israel and Saudi Arabia, shows a direct interest in reducing Iran into a servile nation but, as a result , of a universal trade war with the US, each country involved in Syria and the Middle East, are acting like everyman for himself. The wars move in a westerly direction from Iran to Africa in search of new markets, new client states, particularly anti-socialist ones. And of all the most important issues the American working class comes out of their whole process of accumulation et al trade war, a shrunken human being and nobody's talks about it! Remarkable.
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  8449. Inflation will be the one of the many failings besetting the Biden administration on the minds of voters facing his re-election. Look at the things happening as a backdrop to his administration. The public disapproves of this president; he has a lower popularity rating than Donald Trump. Losing the White House will be a long term crisis for the democrats. Rather than tackling the crisis head on,--- they hope to prevent Trump from running again. They have no evidence against Trump. They have nothing to offer the working class and a virulent right wing that overturned Roe v Wade scored a victory are empowered along. Whether Biden should even run is an internal crisis for the democratic leadership and progressives are not challenging that leadership. If not him than who? He has gas prices hovering at $5 per gallon and a recession. Combined global and domestic recessions and he has stagflation afflicting the US economy, and his proxy war in Ukraine, plus more outbreaks of violence. To do something about it would be to take a stand and choose the side of the working class and work to get the democrats to defect from the side of corporate capital. Raw social power is the only thing that will move democrats to the side of the working class. Biden does not have working class social power backing him up. The people are against him and form part of the reason the republicans win by exploiting the failings of the democratic party continually abandoning the working class. The working class is continually played in every election in more less the same manner that when the republicans lose the democrats invent a character to run against never forecasting the possibility they will lose to the character they invented to be the pretend opposition to them, is a crisis for them. The working class is alone but it is powerful enough to defeat corporate capital if that aim becomes its primary focus.
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  8460. linda green-- 'every' is right, because the war of independence was a war of conquest. The Civil War was a war of conquest, WWI, was a war of colonial powers which the US was not a colonial power at the time. IT lost the Spanish-American war but came out with two possessions Puerto Rico and Cuba and it lost one of those to revolution. The state department must be freaking out at how many losses they imposed on this country, the tax payer. WWII the Russians defeated the Nazis, the Americans only partook and rescued and reconstructed a war ravaged Europe and Germany, the Korean War was a Cold War, a war against communism that left hanging after decimating the north and dividing it from the south, is technically, a war within a Cold War that is a war of conquest of the Korean people. Vietnam was an utter failure, the Cuban Missile Crisis as an attempted invasion was a failure. America lost the space race, it broke the back of the USSR through defense build ups, it became the cop to protect the interests of its allies from the threats of oil bearing nations because of increased defense spending. No other nation would do this not even France or its cousin, Britain. When it goes to trial the prosecution can use this long list of losses as a declaration of an incompetent nation to be dismantled of its nuclear and military arsenal like Germany was stripped of its colonial possessions in the Versaille Treaty. The world of nations will declare it the last country on earth that should bear arms given this history.
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  8466. The necessaries of life are all the things that have to change not the people. When we no longer regulate the necessaries of life by the required time commonly taken in producing them is the first step and the second step is a mass conversion of exisiting Malls into trade and work centers. Then we can build a car that will last decades, fill that need, retool the car factories to make some other useful thing to the world. When a new generation of cars are needed the factories create them. Change the location of where we work. Bring work closer to home if not work from home itself but even then strict rules that technology is not privatized or you will then have a permanent stranger in your personal space and domicile through the device that beolongs to them. The idea behind the technology is not to create a Big Brother. The idea is to serve human beings. This is not a new idea, it can be found in anonymous work published in 1739-40 called "Some Thoughts on the Interest of Money in General, and Particularly the Public Funds." The other mindset shift is understanding all the phenomena on Earth and in the Universe are not acts of creation but are nothing more than a re-ordering or a re-making of matter. This is what we find when we examine the cellular structure of life on earth and matter. The laws of motion of the univers happen through two laws of physics. Creation only created the universe it does not explain motion in the universe, force, light, air, water, cellular life. The universe reproduces itself as a universe through composition and separation at the cellular level of micro organisms. When people get this idea into their bones we will be ready to commit to changing our present destructive way of life into a constructive one.
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  8470. Well, revisiting this newscast in 2021, enough time has passed to see there has not been a turnover of the Venezuelan government as of late. History since 2019 does not confirm the sociologists' view. A civil war has not broken out in Venezuela and the Maduro regime has held popularity over and above the General Assembly opposition. Several coup attempts and assassination attempts failed and V has Russian military support. Further the return of its gold is at issue. Incidentally, Trump should know that Cuba is not a major oil consumer, more gas than oil. The bottom line is that V's oil is a commodity the US cannot buy and when things cannot be bought by US corporations the entire corporate social structure whines because no longer can this resource be used to perpetuate their dominance in the oil market. Understandably so, the world market for oil is fiercely competitive, titanic struggles between corporations take place for regions rich in mineral and oil deposits. If oil need be produced it does not need competition to produce it but competition needs oil to be competition and nations are caught in a vicious cycle of ever escalating conflicts. The US appetite for oil is insatiable losing the largest oil reserves in the hemisphere due to incompetence of the last four presidents to resolve war and conflict in Latin America, its a lost cause trying to get it back. A sign the Age of Oil of things to come when the few are expropriated by the many in almost all the nations on earth rejecting the modernized material lifestyle of luxury consumption and its apparent accompanying social and class inequality.
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  8475. Why would Mitch O’Farrell ever begin to attempt to speak in Spanish when English is his first language and why would an English speaking audience need a translation voiceover when Mitch switched over to English? Media and this Council member must take everyone for morons. I get the sense the transgressions are truly understood by the transgressors. No quorum the Council is defunct, stuck. Moribund, it cannot pass new reforms to operate city services. Pinning vital services of a city to a form of governing prone to political sabotage is lunacy. Currant Price calls the resignation the beginning of a trend to eradicate racism in all its forms in city government. Let’s hope so. Lesson taken away for him is a crusade against adversaries dividing Los Angeles’s diversity. Paul Krekorkian,-- Can the Council represent 4 million people after this is on his mind? Bob Blumenfield,--- hopeful they quit and Council can do its work...more resignations to come. Pragmatic answer. Paul Koretz,---hard to decide what the next steps are in the healing process. Feels betrayed. Steps: 1., Enact New Operating Reforms, 2., form a United Council. There should be three resignations not one, DeLeone and Cidillo are pending their resignations. The meeting with council members was shut down when DeLeone and Cidillo left the council without a quorum and powerless to do anything! As it stands, three individuals and one quits leaves 2 still blocking the Council from moving forward with a full quorum of all members to change the operating procedures in running the city of Los Angeles. Everything is the same as it was for the city before the audio leak. This scenario can last longer than the effects of poor management of sanitation, transportation, utility services, housing, security, will have on the community; all falling apart when a recession is around the corner does not make the community of 4 million people standing on less timorous and shaky ground. A new form of governing is needed; an assembly, a parliament for the City of LA.
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  8482. 1960s was the last time the US economy saw unprecedented expansion. It has been all downhill the day Gilligan’s Island went off the air stunted by longer recessions and shorter recoveries. Debt is greater than assets. Double digit inflation in the 1970s. Stagflation, when the economy is stuck at 2.3% GDP and the price of meat goes up. A short ten year period of expansion in the 80s all built on borrowed time and money. Cuts in social spending in the Crime Bill and the Welfare Reform Bill of the 1990s as preparation for the decline of the US economy foreseen in thousands of hearing testimonies to the Senate on record from economists. A bank crisis in 1990 and the Gulf War. This is the pattern ever since...crisis and war to get out of the crisis. Expanding personal debt relative to individual assets owned saw a huge gap inducing more borrowing. Working people were indentured to credit lost financial freedom in return for cheaper (China Made) consumer goods. Another bank crisis in 1995 culminating in the Subprime Crisis in 2007. Safe to say a pattern of crisis is an imminent feature of the financial credit system. The period before 1960 right out of the war (WWII) and the Great Depression seems to be the prevailing mindset that permanent war will mean permanent prosperity just not for all but will pull the US economy out of a depression. Well so far the “forever wars” have not worked to restore prosperity at the level of the 1960s. Its not that America cannot reach that level with the right leadership which, at the present time, is nowhere in sight.
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  8488. Echo: Owners of Money and Property are the Elites. This class of people operate, dominate and control, three main social spheres of life. The political, economic and military spheres. 173 million people in America live their lives vicariously through the privileged power elite. When the elite want to defend their interest, they recruit manpower from this class. When the elite want to hold on to political power, the dejected ranks of this wandering public vote for them. The working class has its own sphere of life as non-owners of money, a job used to be a living and means for making and saving money, people of this social class did not start out as owners of property in America, they started out propertyless immigrants and indigenous. The Elite states are NY, Ca. Hollywood is not a state its a celebrity social class. Also oil, gas, drilling and mining industries active in NY and CA are a social class of business elites, they control your power and light, at the same, the fires on ground out west and combustible water below ground in the east is left in their wake. Alliances among the Power Elite are made on the basis of cheap prices and low wages. This is their business model for higher profits. It has been made the political program against the working classes. The business model of cheap prices and low wages appeals to cattle ranchers and farmers, big Landowners, the Catholic Church, NYU, Columbia, Harvard, Senators of Congress earn higher profits from this business model. The ground you walk on and the building you visit to the roof over your head is the private property of one of these owners of money and financial wealth. Elites compete against each other on that basis for the exploitation of labor by the 1% is the business model. That the 99% has not realized they plan to subjugate the working class and Nature under the rule of the Power Elite1% is downright shocking!
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  8493. The revolution the Americans need is one that changes the way needs are met in society. Forget confronting the state, we are in no position to confront a military machine unless we (the People) are united and armed. Besides nobody on the left in this country is into a blood battle. Individuals is all it takes, willing to organize their community. Organize 200 families in your community, collect from them $50 dollars a piece, go to several local farmers with the $5,000.00 dollars and open up an account with them for a monthly pick up of vegetables. Bring the 200 families together to a place where the food can be pulled off the truck and sort the food into two hefty bags per family. Freeze the excess food for any emergencies. Do this on a monthly basis and you will begin to change your persepective. Become a food brigade or the Hunger busters. Do not become a NON-Profit. Always run alongside this a voter registration campaign. Keep the government out of this entirely by never, never becoming a non-profit. Once you do this the movement is dead. Cut out the middle man and buy direct from the farmer(s). Do this and replicate it until the country is covered by this new way of feeding ourselves. When the economy tanks from lack of sales in the food industry the State will come after you but they can't do anything about it. Perfectly legal and within your constitutional rights to buy and sell whatever you choose to buy and sell and from whom to whom. But by this time this new movement has become national and it is ready to take on the political state and its violent mercenaries with mass people power. Now, voting makes sense as the movement is big enough to have destroyed agribusiness and raised the economic status of small farmers who will be on your side when the actual political revolution is necessary. No consumers for big businesss no big business. This capitalism 101 people, so get on the stick and do it before it does you in way you see here in this DN report. The food you are buying in the stores are all grown in a way that is contributing to global warming, poverty, and to the police state we are witnessing in this travesty. Again, the revolution America needs is not a violent one but a change in the way we meet our needs. This is not a call for a REDISTRIBUTION of Wealth, this is a movement to CHANGE THE WAY, manner, culture, of producing stuff for our needs. Create a new food economy and the political superstructure of the old economy is so weakened the revolution will take place without a shot being fired. This is, of course, if you really want a change.
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  8508. Well the fact is the masses like when somebody pokes fun at the Establishment. The masses never get the chance to hit back the Establishment with any degree of certainty and when somebody comes around that can do it for them or in their name, they cannot get enough of him or her. Mocking the elites, “Sleepy Joe”, “Comrade Kamala”, a segment of society that is crass and base eats it up. This is how Trump agitates his masses. Charlie Chaplin mocked Hitler and the timing of the release of the “Great Dictator” was patriotic for Britain entering the war with Germany. But twist and turns of historical events also made Hitler favored by the Establishment in the war against communism, for that he was a hero, and Charlie an anti-hero to the Establishment. He was expelled his movies not shown in the US. In the beginning the Establishment accepted Trump, he was given stardom, free everything, his own show, that is until he went against the war in Ukraine and showed he could work with Putin and admired Xi. At that point Trump go slapped with all kinds of charges, Russiagate, everything was set into motion that would bog Trump down. Now he is a threat to the Establishment and the other guy, Elon Musk, he associates with is somewhat sketchy a character to the Establishment, weird, different just as Howard Hughes was weird and different being richer than the Establishment of his time,--sometimes they cannot be kept in line. But together, Trump and the Establishment, fighting their battles for the throne, awoke a behemoth in the working person in this country, a giant with a split personality, one part pro-Trump and the other part pro-Kamala, one part male and the other part female, one part middle class the other part working poor, one part homogenous in character the other part heterogeneous in character, has generated fears as this giant awakens the Establishment will lose control. The biggest inconvenience to the Establishment is revolution, fearing that more than communism, although that’s spells the end of their reign too.
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  8514.  @bencampbell6479  That is because retirement for those who work was left to those who do not work. That is in part the fault of the people who work; not having strong unions, and a union filtering process to double check and rebalance the experts who are structuring companies in a way that makes companies profitable by cutting jobs and easy to sell for a profit, besides putting capital aside for that rainy day pension fund was left wide open for abuse and grand theft by raiding it. Where did it go? To China. Mitt Romney of Bain Capital based in Boston is part of that entire class of Capital Investors who moved production from the US to China, who today moans and groans about enslaved or deprived Uyhgurs in China when he made 43 billion by investing his consortium of capital in the products the country persecuting the Uyghurs,-- producing for American companies in the US out of China. Shameless hypocrisy. The other part of the fault lies with those who do not work and have no appreciation of the life of a worker, and raided pensions and retirement funds for capital to invest. Some won big others lost big but it was other people’s money not their own they lost or won. Government looked the other way. And now a titanic social battle as big as the Tsunami about to smashed the West Coast erupts from beneath the facade of ‘everything is fine’ in America, our working lives have become the chains that hold us down to the commands of Capital comes with a growing resistance. To what end awaits to be seen.
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  8519. Not only are humans powerless against Nature but they are powerless against their own creations! Its time to change that and take action. Regarding mobility in society, nothing is built for the foot. A break down of the highway system and everyone is stranded. How a train track and an above ground monorail system in the middle of highways would solve this nightmare. Science and industry was a powerful tool for a very long time until Nature imposed herself and made obvious the inadequacies of the man-made road system. Built to accommodate industry and not people, is also the Industries in general, their Achilles Heel. The land on the highway system is the only land in America that is Public Land. Highway land is not private land or federal land, or state lands, it is Public Land owned by the taxpayer. American law and British Law is founded on Roman Law, Public Land in Rome was called the Ager publicus in latin, meaning land owned in common by all citizens. The Public Lands would are the meridians and the sides the highway system in both directions. Technically the public are on their property and could if they wanted to get out of their cars and open the truck trailers and use all the cargo as means to set up a camp (better than staying in cars and dying from dehydration and frostbite ), it could repay the manufacturers of the products used since the number of people stranded are in the thousands, a collection would do, plus the greedy manufacturers will lose their reputation if they insist on repayment, and trust me there are quite a few who would sue for it. But you have the problem of people not fit for the ordeal under those conditions who cannot get it together and lose it, cause and provoke fear and people then get led astray and lose their potential to be a part of the group. Americans are not in the best of physical and mental shape but they seem to have no choice in the matter but to pull it together. Plus you have wireless and cell service makes this a world shattering event and wake up call! Thousands of people are stranded where the National Guard can evacuate only by air helicopter, as access is made impossible by road, and all the people are stretched out on public land is a crisis for all nations. Something will have to be done and hopefully some smart people will get a plan going because there are important biological functions that a human being cannot perform on a highway. A people made hostages by a creation of their own doing, cut off from the means of life, have to build it right on the spot...this is one for the history books.
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  8520. The firewood commodity controversy of collecting wood in the forest that is private property is reminiscent of what happened in 1842-43 in Germany’s Rhineland Parliament on the same matter. I find it surprising and, frankly, disappointing that the German Parliament’s lawmakers had left this law on the books since then. They made a law on wood and timber and they (lawmakers back then) were instructed to treat wood and timber as wood and timber and not make a law to solve a social problem in a political way, that is, in connection to a material poverty people are experiencing in not affording heat to their homes that in 1842 this law unleashed the police and charged with the crime of theft were people freezing to death and without fire to cook. Really shocking of the modern-day lawmakers to have left this in place. What a disappointment to me, a failure, that lawmakers took advantage of the out-of-sight, out-of-mind attitude of the German Public during times of prosperity and then turn rough forget how important it is that lawmakers be independent of a private interest influence at all times. Almost 200 years later, this poverty of lack of heat rears its head and the State takes the side of a private interest. All the forests are private property. The law was never amended that would make it law private holders of land make all broken timber and wood collectable free of charge when there is a dearth of wealth in the economy. The social democratic party should be called the social partially democratic party! Some things will never become private property of an individual without injustice; and, counting every violation of property as theft, is a contradiction when private property is theft. I hope the German middle class wake up from their delusions about capitalism. Not even the richest of all capitalist nations is without injustice, in fact, present day Americans live below or at near poverty levels and America’s shrinking middle class illustrates the future of the European middle classes, Germany’s is no exception to this unnatural recession; and while sabotage cuts off the heat supply to Europe the politicians scuttle for excuses are really doing the Public a disservice representing a private interest in that recession; a foreign private interest that is not even their own home based private interest.
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  8523. A large sweeping form of social change is needed says the professor. Revolution as the content of the change needed requires a social form. How will this revolution be arranged and carried out and by who? For this crime, the Smithsonian should conduct live ceremonies for the Public to view, the return of the bones and artifacts to each surviving relative(s). One family every two months is seen receiving their relatives given all due respects as part of the restitution. A well-planned speech given by the president of the museum and one world leader whose nation had a hand in slavery and colonialism announce how they will change and be part of he change, not resist the change. World leaders can decline but they will have to deal with their own public more aware than not that a social revolution is needed. Ruling elites can exit political power in style or face expropriation by the masses of he few, are the two choice history has given them. Neoliberalism is dead and the crap of the ages they dished out has all caught up to them. This may seem strange but it is not. European colonialism of the 18th century shaped the US into the divided nation it is today. These activities should continue until all surviving families of the oppressed ancestors are given due using the museum where this history is addressed. With this going on the background current tensions between nations should be less frictional and more cooperative. The surviving relatives are part of a continuing oppression by the modern 21st century police. The sweeping change needed here should occur simultaneously with the ceremonies. This should coincide with a sweeping revolution in American education. I think that timing for a reduced military budget proposal from a president to Congress would have that support of the American people. If we are going to have a social revolution we may as well have it controlled and planned out. Forcing a vote in Congress to de-politicize and de-militarize the police social structure is really the only reform needed to reduce police political influence on Congress. Congresspeople on the left should force a vote that the police police themselves and purge their racist elements. Autonomy with conditions. Fire them under the rule (law) that wrongful deaths suits are paid from the police pension fund. Social inequality is critical on the list of things to undo or none of this will ever get off the ground. Anyway...some thoughts for a revolution of real significance this 4:00 AM.
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  8528. US sanctions are in place to prevent the people from making history.  Such an accomplishment by the poor in society would send a message to the world another world is possible and the poor and working poor already agitated by retrogressive regimes to make history as well. A way can be found to survive the mighty empire's grip on the world market. The State department is fully aware that the way to stop the people from making history is to stop the people from building a new social order. To do this they must cut off the necessaries of life.  In cutting off the necessaries of life, they can throw a society back into an earlier age; when people were thoroughly preoccupied with the production of the necessaries and had no time to do anything else beyond producing cultural objects. The State department knows they can reduce the sensient world to a minimum, to a stick, and a stick presupposes the action of producing a stick. This is the fundamental fact about the Washington establishment in all its significance in regard to Venezuela and Iran. The one fact they did not count was the intelligence of the people. The poor and the working poor have been in the process of building a new social order from the day Chavez took power in 1998. This new society did not take the normal route of a outright social revolution or nationalization but it financed its new society. This new society emerging from the ground up is deeply seated with the mass of Venezuelans and its beginning push out the remaining upper social classes more affected by the sanctions for they are the typical consumer market for American products . Venezuela would have been reduced to a stick if it were not for the poor and working poor re-organizing the way society gets its food, housing, clothing and many other things.
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  8532. This generation notably the rich and middle class 40 somethings are spoiled. Privilege gone to their heads. No humility whatever. Lots of hubris. If they can not see it there is no evidence of truth in it. Truly a lost generation. Motivated by ignorance and fear. Forty years ago Reagan broke the back bone of the democratic party. Janice McGeachan was an infant at the time watching episodes of Barney the TV sitter in the household. Her world would be the first to have no Salt of the Earth values in her Being. Comradery, cooperation, solidarity, were not the virtues of the 80s. Former freaks and hippies became Born Again, Yippies became Wall Street brokers and juvenile delinquents of the 60s all converts to christianity The democratic party had nowhere to go but to get funded from like minded big businesses since the Unions were destroyed. The way the Southern Plantations were ripped out from under the Oligarchs in the South sweet revenge was took out on the base of the Democratic Party and then came the Clintons, Obamas, the Bidens, all corporate democrats. Poisoning the minds of children to be anti-government was pushed further depicting government as cronies, fools, hacks, idiots, over reaching and endlessly probing into the lives of characters on the Big screen. 'What...didn't you guys ever go to Sunday School...you know Mt. Charub where Moses carried the Ten Commandments', government were always stupid and on the wrong side. In reality, the US government as a world power is on the wrong side of history when it comes to Iraq, Afghanistan, Weapons of Mass Destruction, Libya, Syria, Drone killings of innocents, water boarding and torture...simply horrible and shameful with a deadlocked Congress. Big impressions for a generation to grow up in a world decided by bigoted American foreign policy. To Janice McGeachan not even Bonanza is a memory to many of us still alive. Civil society the way I remember it before cities and towns sold the farm and store to developers was a real Christmas Story, fun. Ralph was a real brother in millions of American homes. Nothing in the era after the second world war is real to this generation
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  8544. It is desirable for corporations to speed up production because the effect is a rise in profits at the expense of the lives of workers. This is how they see and understand the productivity of labor.  Speed it up until a person dies, then they know that is the limit to which they can extract labor from a person.  Not a direct maliciousness on the part of employers that workers are purposely killed on job. They don't want workers to die, they need workers. Its just a historical fact that labor and its productiveness raises the standard of living. You do it home, you build something and you got an increase of material wealth of your own. Your home is worth more than when you did not renovate the house. Production has laws of its own and are incompatible with market laws of supply and demand. Both workers and corporations or capitalists are not aware of this effect that human progress is taking place. The whole species takes less time to materially reproduce itself and neither class can see this because neither class are educated to allow productivity to raise humanity from a living in a ditch. But it is a fact, and it is proven by every form of cooperation. Basketball team, a military team, a worker team, together and combined they produce more is an economic law. This is how corporations become giants, by the cooperation of many workers each worker doing a tiny part in the whole production process, the business expands its employee pay roll, some corporations employ more than 5,000 workers, a 1000 workers and 500 workers, 100 workers and the smaller the staff the larger is the automation and machinery invested. This is why agribusiness employs one worker and humongous machine to plant and harvest a greater output. This is good time for workers to organize. The public is on their side if they do and Congress hates the president who is anti-union. Silly not to take advantage of the situation. Do it for your kids. This is my message to workers in America on this May 1st, a legal holiday for workers, that began in the US and a day your government and employers do not honor, because a day off from work is a day lost in profits. Organize, don't Mourn.
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  8563. Here is the problem of electing someone who will legislate and decree in favor of the working class. The ruling classes interpret the mass support of that person as naturally conspicuous, as anyone will be your friend if you give them a piece of the pie. Earnest fights for dignity are dismissed and very nastily, I might add. 1. Elections can be rescinded as a product of a social structure that is theirs not the workers. 2.. Thus begins a narrative on personal responsibility and sloth attacking the workers and their leader politically and legally with force and incarceration, the workers movement decays, degenerates, and this episode in the class struggle ends with defeat. Workers have to be more intelligent than appearing to the ruling classes as players in the game but want a better hand, no matter who they may be, thugs, criminals, might Joe Young with a gun, or good looking snappy super rich dudes with a good line, to not come off as parasites unable to navigate their own productive power in resolving the contradictions of capitalism the rich are perfectly aware of, is a recipe for continuous and episodic defeat. People begin to believe they are stupid by birth and ethnicity. Workers need to stake a claim on their productive might and make it theirs in the name of all the other social classes stuck in a bind and tell the super rich snazzy dudes to step aside, we are taking over the driver seat. This way the ruling classes have to rely on force which they rely on anyway, so it does not matter, but all the BS in between is removed. Starting punching and aim to beat the opponent and you want a knockout by the end of the first round. Then workers had better have a plan to run the economy and resolve the contradictions or else they lose the support of everyone not a worker.
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  8570. Insurrectionists were open about civil war they were not calling for the overthrow of the government, that was Trump’s plan with the White House Council still working there, I would imagine, why not call that guy to testify? A coup is an overthrow of the existing government replaced by another government. The insurrectionist are open about overturning the current system but that could mean anything most likely the politics of neoliberalism not capitalism which would entail the abolition of a class society and a freer association of workers and the industries they work. There is no economics in their plan. Their plan is all political. Societies are not all political, they have political elites. Political elites are a social class that no longer connect or associate with the masses. The rest of society is social and sociological, I might add confused, they are an interplay of both economics and society always evolving and this is the crux of the problem. The political elite snuff out the evolution of a society. The natural things all societies do is grow, mature and this political elite stand in the way of that in every imaginable circumstance choking the development of the working classes. If this event were a revolutionary insurrection of the working class and a coup was planned the soldiers, cops and secret service, would have mutinied against the ruling power(s) was the configuration of events in the Russian Revolution of 1917, ---not the present day configuration of the US. Its like we are looking at history from behind the mirror looking into the mirror comparing this insurrection to past ones, the Paris workers insurrection that led to the Paris Commune is exactly what the Washington Police would have done had the insurrection been a people’s insurrection, a non-white nationalist rebellion, they would have crushed a people’s insurrection like we saw in Ferguson come out in full battle array making the Russian tanks rolling into Hungry in 1956 child’s play. They would have smashed it violently! At the political level where Trump is concerned a coup d’état was in the making and moving in the same direction the insurrectionists were going initializing an internal conflict with its attack on the Capitol. Had Pence disqualified the election, and Trump’s coup succeeded that may have been the signal for internal sympathizers inside the Security Forces of the US in DC, acolytes to the cause of white nationalism to arrest any internal opposition to Trump. The next day the House of Representative would appoint Trump president indefinitely, and all branches of government present not a word of protestation as though it were a coronation of a king. The day after that every piece of progressive legislation this country had put forward in its history would be repealed and all American history re-written, abolition of the 8 hour workday, unions declared illegal, censoring Free Speech, would be hard to achieve in a country with well entrenched institutions, but it will be tried. The more stupid people become the easier it will succeed.
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  8586. She is establishing a line of questioning senate hearings have not had in over 50 years, about what the subject is not line of inquiry. The last real senate hearing that put capitalism on trial as a viable system took place in the 1930's during the depression. Senate hearings, resolving disputes on bias, had been sham hearings in the Civil War period. Smith is right about money in government is nothing new and darker back. But she masterfully mirrored government's relationship to society using the participants to verify the inadequacy of senate hearings as bought off to private interests. Her enemies are lining up at the door. You did make a good point, the last one in your vid, about bias the Public can help remove. That is to stand united against the idea that government and money are inseparable, or self-evident, or a nature-imposed necessity.  Stop believing in ideas of things being immutable, forever, permanent and the purveyors of that notion will have no market in Congress for the sale of 'all things are permanent'.  Certain groups are prone to selling this idea of money and government are ordained as natural, intended by God, to be fused into one cannonball with which to drop laws on society, these are evangelicals in politics.  The Evangelical idea of religion is, if it is not heir it is not a natural religion. This idea fused with the state presents catastrophes unfolding in the world today. We, as a People, have to disassociate, even renounce, the ideas of money, politics, government and society as permanent.
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  8595. Washington is terrified of a Haitian revolution and it looks the masses are ripe for one in Haiti! The state of Haiti is one of perpetual crisis. Natural and man-made disasters besiege Haiti. Earthquakes and hurricanes and poverty-born diseases of cholera and COVID. What appears to have been five persons posing as DEA officers conducting an operation ended up n a skirmish with security guards leaving three assassins dead and two captured. In the background the interim president vows to restore order and the western nations condemned the assassins. But for the US the situation of Haiti presents a unique American problem. The whole history of US race relations from the abolitionists to the civil rights movement might not have had happened if not for the Haitian revolution in 1791. That revolution was the biggest anti-slavery weapon the slaves and the abolitionists ever had. That revolution defeated two empires, Britain who glossed over its role in slavery ended slavery by Parliament, and France was kicked out of Haiti and went broke trying to defeat a Haitian General greater than Napoleon himself was forced to sell Louisiana for peanuts to the Americans. 'Very worrisome...' said the president. Indeed, are the thoughts of the Pentagon. Haiti has had a provincial colonial American government ever since its revolution as the counter-revolution and now a political vacuum is created with this assassination,---the nation becomes America's Lebanon in the Caribbean. The Washington dilemma is historically conditioned. A much delayed emancipation from colonialism and slavery by around 116 years might happen without a shot because a military solution won't work for Haiti. A foreign power in Haiti immediately following a 20 year long failure in Afghanistan and Iraq, Syria, Yemen, could react back on the continent as an anti-war movement and a second revolution in Haiti would further weaken America's position in the world as an empire. Washington is myopically desperate to prevent the spread of a second revolution and such an invasion puts Washington in a straight jacket, damned if they do and damned if they do not invade. A military solution is not going to rectify these contradictions in American diplomacy. This event might be the final act of the revolution Washington suppressed back in 1795 to 1905 and it may be the day when the US gracefully exist its dominion over Haiti as militarism begins to fade away in order to rid the poor nations of poverty born diseases invading the US.
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  8609. One thing not detected and investigated and prosecuted for trial is, -- who increases their salary by tens times as much wrung from Parliaments and National Assemblies when coups are carried out. Money that disguises itself as fees, representation moneys, and the artful talents of some of these miltiary and right wing leaders to feel out the weak moments where they can squeeze out more money from their class supporters and the tax payer. Millions of dollars in claim damages for the votes alleged to have been cheated during the count off are just another way of stealing the public fund, but as long as it weakens the opposition, it is considered politics. Do this in the neighborhood, the same action is theft and a crime with the punishment of imprisonment. Murder is forgiven at the high levels of governments, to kill a lot of people is public policy, to kill one person is a capitol crime. The other thing right wing opposition groups carry out as a strategy for a successful overthrow or take over of power from a person they do not like is to jail them by means of a tagging a false crime or find in the crime they committed an offense warranting imprisonment. This was done to Morsi and the Lulu deSilva of Brazil. It would have been done to Puidgedemont of Catalonia if he was not in exile, Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning, and many more where there are right wing authoritarian elements gearing up to take power and then through an appropriation of Public Funds the judicial system, law enforcement and the military, form the three pillars of the right wing phenomena people are calling fascism in this century.  The population protesting and demonstrating are really outside of the franchise even though they pay the tax to run the franchise the coup participants expropriate for themselves and allies. The old saying, showing me your friends and I will tell you who you are, applies to the right wing. When they are in power the spending of the Public Fund is non-stop and this is to keep the popualtion doing what it always does the majority of its time, working and replenishing the tax fund, keeps the masses busy and out of politics while the Public Funds spent on lavish living and military might can go on behind the scenes.
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  8610. The American people will have nothing of a government left it is that entrenched into every economic aspect of our lives,-- the more DOGE keeps cutting services. All of us are interconnected through the government, we saw first hand in the Trump-Zalenski meeting at the White House, the problems of a rich country dictating to poorer countries. Its a problem as well when the rich start dictating to the poor in their own societies. Prices went up in the era before the Great Depression because people bought more stuff. Eventually, the bubble bursts brimming with overconfidence and the whole economic system crashed. The private sector was not about to hire millions of unemployed people. The extra spending would have be made up of revenue from the higher income bracket earners. To ensure this never happens is the rationale behind making permanent by law the Trump Tax Cuts to the Rich, Billionaire Class. When it is said the system is rigged it is rigged in favor of the dominant social class in society. We know who that is. But republicans have weaponized the Congress as an institution that works against the majority of the American people, to repeal these Tax Cuts would take an act of Congress. None of the representatives of the American people in Congress are about to repeal the tax cuts. In the post Great Depression era government public spending hired the unemployed, the workers produced what the private sector refused to produce, they made things that cannot be sold for a profit, everything from respirator machines to Mt. Rushmore, things that a society can use, and benefit from, is how government over time took more control over the economy...and economy is nothing but people...the control over the use of things and people. This New Deal was not enough to get America out of the depression. WWII took us out. If you call for peace in an economy that depends on war spending in a time when the unemployed are swelling in size, a hiring freeze is sure to bring a total collapse.
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  8622. It just says that most politicians in the political world do not have their origins in the working class and as soon as few working class people, rich or poor, get into office the political world is rattled. But he does not analyze the social composition of the Republican Party, the industrial and financial sectors, the religious wing, the neocon wing, the libertarian conservatives, the agricultural sector, they are a party of the all the heads of these productive sectors, the capitalist class as a whole. One of the many factions that make up the GOP, struggle to lead the rest in meeting definite goals serving their class interest is a way of overcoming their fears and phobias. Fear of being overthrown, fear of terrorism, fear of climate change, fear of socialism and communism, when workers begin to strike, fear of them, fear of students when they begin to strike, as a whole subjective motives of one capitalist becomes an objective reality of the whole class in a violent reaction to the fear of social revolution, using its economic controls of the economy the material exchanges of society to hold on to power. Excluding everyone not of their social class and making sure the judiciary and the military is under their control at all times. The psychology of this group acting as an individual or as a social class is based on racism. For this reason, People need to pay attention to the political objectives and consequences of a one party state, if all states are red states, a ratification of the Constitution is made easier and likely annul civil rights, i.e., Roe v. Wade, and redefine citizenship along hereditary blood lines, overnight we are in a republic of an oligarchy done in the speed a pot of coffee is brewed in the morning. This would be a restoration of conditions the French Revolution of 1789 violently overthrew, a Constitutional Monarchy against a Nobility, only now in a new modified form of a republican oligarchy of government makes itself a permanent restoration insuring all opposition is outlawed and censored.
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  8626. The reason Central Americans are migrating has less to do with crop production made impossible at high elevations and soil erosion from climate change.  Inslee is wrong on this. Since the start of the War on Drugs in the 1980's, land and peasant production of the land in Central America are caught in a crossfire of the military, landowners and cartel drug lords, fighting for control over the land and control over the extraction of peasant production. The internal warfare in Central America are parasitic wars that had entrenched the peasantry into a corner where the only choice is to leave. America's role in this expropriation process was to militarize the state and drug lords against the peasantry. This was the function of Oliver North and Eliot Abrams back in Contragate and today under Trump in their aims to overthrow left governments in Central and South America. Subsequently the freeing up of millions of small plots of land formerly owned by peasant farmers open commercial speculation by capital in the world market on land. In Latin America, the South and Central American countries, exhibit fedual methods of production within a world market. The entrenchment of the peasantry led to its break up the more the world market expanded into its area. Now the problem is what to do with the parasites; who are the most productive of establishing a liberal and capitalist economy in Central America? Not the military nor the drug lords, the former does not poduce any value to the general economy, rather, it takes and the latter produces and illegal value that would cause a many political careers to fall under Congressional investgation and scrutiny leading up to the president. The land therefore falls under the control of the landed aristocracy, large scale industrial farmers, who will open the land up to investment and construction, and this will lead to a rapid depletion of soil and more intense natural disasters relating to land and land use in mining, drilling and deforestation. Hence the alliance of right wing governments who use their populations for the extraction of wealth by international capital. Inslee presents a classic liberalism of capitalism emphasizing the socializing strength of capitalism, new schools, a fair legal system, and educated workforce, open immigration, liberal government, does not solve the problem of a peasantry expelled from the countryside and the new class relations that oppress them supported by American corporations and foreign capital.
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  8627. Trump's racist counterpart in Britain First; how does a confrontation with a muslim(s) make the British economy great--it doesn't. Nazis shrouded in religion uses a video of a real event in another country that happen several months ago. We can say Sarah Huckabee is a real threat to the American public by not focusing not on the economic plan set into motion by republicans. Lauer, Keeler, Franken, Sweeney, Areskis, Conyers, are men in private industry can be fired and the industry will not be damaged but the two men in government who, if they do step down will require the entire Congress to step down for they are all sexist pigs in Congress and guilty of harassment of male aides and females.  I do believe this is the world's first live video recorded suicide. Slobodan takes his life as did his Feuer took his own life to avoid capture and defeat by the enemy. In this video the second of realization that the poison he drank was irreversible is read across his face make this video the first that I am aware of. But as a general comment, I am not aware his country has made any marked improvement in the economy during his hold on power or by the rational behind his pernicious policies. What have his people and his country gained by his white nationalist ideas? The will to invest or purchase or sell regardless of the sum of money involved had never in the history of capitalism required a tax exclusion on behalf of private capital. The one is not a condition of the other in historical terms. But in social terms a tax cut on investment capital serves as a means of risking public tax dollars and not the personal capital of the investor in the event a crash inevitably occurs as proven in the business cycle. This way the public's money is lost not theirs.
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  8635. commodities are mysterious to people...because people are never taught the equation, A = B. If money and commodities were easy to understand you would not need advisors on how to invest your money... and I am not even sure advisors are really sure they know what they are doing...they may just be acting in concert directing more capital where growth is happening...this subject will always be mysterious...to Americans...if nation A makes the linen and nation B makes the coats, it is because the amount of working time to make linen and make coats are equal and affordable to both nations, a mutual exchange but when the Dollar is used in that exchange the coat and linen trade in quantities the dollar measures. Working time in one country changes relative to the other and vice versa. If the dollar measures nothing the coat and linen don’t trade at all. If the dollar measures value it measures its own value and affordability against the values of two other separate nations finding it not affordable to buy with dollars and the linen manufacturing industry which employed a million people in the country that supplies linen to the country that manufactures coats, all lose their jobs, no trade means no work. The reckless way money advisors and investment firms decide where capital should employ labor-power (growth) by the way commodities are trading in the market tells me they know little about value relationships determining the Dollar world economy as the driving force for its shrinkage.
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  8655. SOBER HOMES SCAMS,---Embedded in America’s economy and how people are making money these days is dominantly by turning needs into commodities. Government officials are believers in the free market, it is on purpose that they make it impossible to not be a migrant, not be an addict, not be a sick person, but be a mass of people in need. You would not need government in the first place if you were all these things by yourself. Neediness in people is essential to create a free market system. This is why war and capitalism are a perfect match. A little piece of heaven on earth. Wars make people destitute and needy. People with nothing must depend on sellers who have what they need. The only problem is.... the needy have no money. Money has to be put into their hands. The government of free market believers does just that through Medicaid. Money goes right into the hands of the needy population and the sellers move quick to deceive Medicaid as legitimate providers to intercept the money. Similar thing occurs on a world scale. America puts money into the hands of needy nations and exploiters intercept the Aid. Terrorists are exploiters. They are not in it for to free the needy from need. Money is printed by Washington, a privilege no other country has actually robs America of every incentive to reach a higher standard. America thinks poor as it lives rich and everyone else has to buy dollars must steal, rob, loot, connive, to get dollars. And when the math is tinkered with the thieves, crooks, robbers, liars, cheaters from King down to the lowliest social survivor in society come out of the woodwork on a hunt for more dollars to buy the same need on a redundant basis.
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  8670. You shouldn’t call this a humanitarian crisis its not a humanitarian crisis. People have been migrating for a better life for centuries including your own kind and if anything their movement from home to new settlement might have a crisis of humanity along the way but that is not a humanitarian crisis. No again..., NYC is the number one destination for migrants for the same reasons you migrated to NYC if your from out of state. NYC is where the money is.Its where the jobs ad careers are. I am taking your video to be divisive. Right to shelter to anyone who asks,---- if such a policy exists and if it does you should show it in your video as proof of what you say are nothing more than politics, attitude, bias existing in your own generation. Migrants coming into this country in the past came and were naturalized. Naturalization was the policy until that procedure was deliberately sabotaged to make a political pawns out of migrants, used against You, a citizen, to fear monger, to hire them in jobs you won’t do, and to get you to blame migrants for your own economic woes Get that $12 billion from Wall Street that’s an option seemingly Americans refuse to consider....why is that? If Abbott really wanted Congress to take action he would have sent all the migrants to rich communities in America, and see how fast Congress comes with an immigration bill. Americans should stop enabling the rich! They can use all your roads, airports, water, electricity, and not pay for these necessaries should come as no surprise city governments have to cut services to come up with the money. A situation is created where city workers use the courts to force the mayor to pass the cuts over to another part of the total workforce. A not in my backyard mentality. Parks uptown will get the cut. Parks downtown don’t. The rich are untouched. What is happening in Argentina is starting to happen to you. The next mayor you get will be the axe man Argentina has now. He will come off as a radical and fool you into voting for him and once in office the cuts and austerity program begins backed up by a police force of one million strong.
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  8672. People should recognize that constitutional governments such as that of the EU and the US are legal institutions not social ones. The changes being made in society are coming from the changes in the way work is carried out in society.  People will be working from home and those industries where jobs cannot be performed at home will go out of business.  History suppresses certain branches of industry as it also promotes the development of new ones.  China builds hospitals in less than two weeks is an example of a government that is not a constitutional republic but one that is a social institution responding to social needs in a proactive manner. Instead of spending resources on defense because of national conflicts, government can spend resources on meeting human needs. When work and society are transformed, the family is transformed, requiring a transformation of government to become a central organizer and planner to have all the needs in society met. Humanity arrives at the 21st century and 2020 is that transitional moment that breaks away all the things of the 19th century we still use today. This new way of work will call into question the need for the old economy. Why do you need a stock market or a central bank, or a boss? Why will we need school boards determining school taxes when school buildings are unnecessary when all one needs WiFi and a lap top to educate children all over the world? Why do we even need money to represent working time when work is no longer used to make goods for exchange? Why the need to retain all the things the old economy needed before the virus when the virus has changed the way we work and live giving birth to a new economy? From the changes in work and family our needs will change and in turn, the needs change our products as we become more accustomed to finding meaning in our new family arrangements, less divorce, less juvenile delinquency, less suicide, less depression, less loneliness. With less of the present-day maladies in society there is less of a need for massive military and police institutions expenditures. The major focus will be agriculture, the area of human activity vital to human survival. Search for a better life comes to an end. No more mass migration for societies ravaged by war the need to get them re-oriented to the new way of life the new international mission. Why will we need nuclear weapons if societies are finding more contentment at home? I see many benefits to this crisis. Our fears are really about losing the old way of life we have become accustomed to living. The second benefit to this virus is the environmental change, improving nature as it gets a chance to recover from human damage. Less to no fossil fuel emissions, less chances of infestation, disease and a strengthening of the human body's immune system through the increase of oxygen in our atmosphere and as we know from the paleontological record a greater diversity of life, and a general slowing down of climate change and oceans rising.
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  8687.  @DarkMAGAOfficial  Its become traditional standard practice since Richard Nixon that every new president-elect have a back channel connection to the Russians before taking office. Kissinger did it for Nixon until 1991. Before Trump took office the back channel connection was done by a man who knew he would be wired and was, Michael Flynn, why would he do that...to establish this connection, Trump used him.  Obama threatened the Russians with cyberattacks and his VP Biden went on late night TV and laughed about it. With the Russians watching Biden's personal proclivity to disrespect people's space, it was not funny. The far right neocon crazies in the Kremlin were so alarmed they argued Putin to order a counter attack on the US. Trump sent Flynn to tell Putin not to freak out, he will sort it all out when he takes office. Putin and Obama never got along. War with the Russians before taking office was not a what he wanted. Flynn was sacrificed and to jail he goes.  Moral of my story which is true, incidentally, is that at this level of affairs the things that matter to you and I, are to them not political matters worthy enough to get the attention you or I, demand from them! This is why it is perfectly foolish to throw yourself at their feet believing your matter rises to the level of their concern, when your matter is not political enough of an issue. To Trump's credit, and I would have done the same thing, he sent an emissary to the Kremlin to calm the Russians. Hillary and her democrats are just sore losers and made up the story about the Russians were destabilizing the election through social media.  We know from the latest allegations against the former vice-president the slime in that White House, headset the toe for the next guy to be as much a pig as he likes as a man of great power, and a former president who is nowhere to be found, says nothing, on the matter of Russiagate which started under his watch. I say to you stop giving yourself to these people blindly believing your matter is truly the priority of their lives. It isn't.
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  8710. The formal view of the class struggle in society is straight forward. Labor is labor and capital is capital. But there are other ways to understand the class struggle. Just like there are two ways to understand labor and capital. The class struggle is a way of understanding historical development as the way societies advance themselves through social conflict. But! Labor is not only labor and capital is not only capital under capitalist relations. The real relation is in connection to the material development of productive labor over the ages. The formal view dismisses the productive forces as a product of labor. The real relation is, labor is capital and capital is labor. The creator of capital is the working class ( a special class) and the work of the capitalist is to extract more labor to possess the capital. The general law of capitalist accumulation is based on a), the increased demand for labor-power, and b.), denying the initial premise of an increased demand is a decrease demand for labor-power as a shrinking portion of living workers in connection to the product. In this framework the class struggle occurs in the workplace where workers producing use-values are producers of value and surplus-value and in connection to the product the number of workers falls as innovation rises in the accumulation process of capital. This creates the conditions for a relative surplus-population in society. But also in value terms the necessary labor-time produces more surplus-value. Greater material wealth and more free time to individuals is the benefit to society in a world with out the capitalist and the relations of capital not capital itself which is labor in its objective form. The capitalization of the surplus-value of the workers requires a social organization of capitalist relations to execute its realization and accumulation and this is when the production of surplus-value extends and the sphere of capital accumulation expands to open more centers of production to satisfy its increased need for labor-power, in the first premise, a)., is imperialism. This is a much more interesting view of the class struggle than the view that there will always be social classes fixed for all time. If this were the case why isn't Rome still an empire?
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  8722. The democrats are a dangerous political class, it is even debatable if they were ever to the left of the republicans.  At the turn of the 20th century, anarchists, socialists, communists, were never a part of the democratic party, so--it rejected native working class elements, the party was a syndication of the criminal elements, i.e., gangsterism and corruption, so bad that FDR had to run under another party name.   The GOP was always the party of the rich ever since slaveowners lost their status as the principal producers of wealth in society to another actor as the main creator of wealth. The capitalist and his own personal army of 'free' workers, from this point forward the social model in every relationship on a personal and social level adopted the capitalist model of social organization i.e., family, civic organization, church, local government, replicated the "one to many" equation, one capitalist and each capitalist was an owner of their big factories had their own personal industrial army of workers, and these workers were agitated by communists, socialists, organizing workers to conduct strikes for an equal partnership in the factories and higher wages. With this new social model of production the political parties took sides, alternating between workers and capitalists, as to who was seen to be the ultimate owner of the wealth. Was it the working class since without free workers, wealth or capital would not be, or is the capitalist the ultimate owner and be the one the rest of the social classes in society should depend on? Funny thing is the legal system codifies the new economy in the post slavery period on a personal basis. Property is personal not social, wealth is personal and not social, jobs are the personal property of the capitalist because labor is made into the personal property of the worker and all material wealth is personal and this changed the Overton window moving the democrats into position to be the only political representative of the working class as the opposite to the party of the rich.  Where and when did the Supreme Court come from? The Supreme Court came into existence in 1789. It is 300 hundred years old as an institution and the social model of this court is modeled after the Roman Patrician State, 500 A.D. Congress and Senate on the model of the Roman Senate. Americans have been living under a legal institution that dates back to Slavery some 2000 years! A long history of continuous rule. Its religious organization dates back to Rome and its financial system dates back to Rome. The only social institution that is an original product of the 20th century, a modern institution is the Military Industrial Complex. A military that is structured on a Roman model of "one master and a personal army of slaves". This makes every generation born into this social structure responsible in transforming it because the social structure passed down from generation to generation with a life of its own increases its social control over all aspects of human life.
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  8732. And you thought Putin was more of a tyrant as compared to Netanyahu! Nearly incomprehensible that these are the days of a dying empire, the US, has lost all soft power and influence in the world. What you see going on around you is how empires die. The whole plan was to encircle China and along the way force regime change in Russia. How hard could that be? Russia was the assigned target for NATO and South East Asia was the assigned target of the US. They blew it! One reason why they blew it and the project for a 21st Century America goes up in smoke has to do with their psychological mental health, they are all disassociated from the life of society. Some are living in nostalgia. Some are plain out right insane. But all are looking backward for the future and where does the world wide working class find itself in this chaotic collapse of western capitalism. Best answer, they are beginning to not wait around for Godot. Not waiting for the ruling elites to make things happen that is for sure. People are making their own hope and doing it through struggle, actively, blocking and disrupting the ruling elites and come around to know themselves as more than a peg in the board. Now look at where they are. The EU ruling classes are a psychological circus coming back with the wrong tact, out of touch with people, and getting nowhere fast. Utter and complete failure. Nordstream pipeline. Gas flows to Germany as I write. All failures. A record of failures since the invasion of Iraq. One set of elites to watch are the ruling elites in the Middle East. What happens when they come down on the wrong side of the Palestinian debacle and there is no right side for them is a tough spot to be in. The US has no credibility in the Middle East and Israel’s genocidal war demonstrates Israel to be a hostile aggressive state that has the full backing of the US. Everyday makes it more evident that Israel’s application to the UN should never have been accepted n 1948. Imagine a settler outpost getting recognized by the UN in 2023. All along US imperialists would use Israel to keep the Middle East in war, preoccupy OPEC nations with instability, unable to assist Russia bogged down in a war with NATO. Failed policies. None of the ruling elites know what to do. All are stabbing in the dark at the forces coming their way, floundering, with no answers to the “what” the people want. Every government and politician is completely out of sync with the masses. Government moves to the right and the societies move to the left. The mass number of resistance fighters to US imperialism the corporate press constantly refer as “terrorists” is world wide! The mass number of social movements is hitting the US in a big way. Everyone knows the US is behind it all. The curtain has been pulled down and the isolation is intense, the social pressure is monumental, spontaneous and creative, take overs, sit downs, protest right at the homes of the weapon makers, even smash and grab, riots, protests, tear away at the ability of capitalism to turn a profit. US and Israeli ruling elites are lashing out trying to save a drowning mode of production that no longer works for humanity.
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  8734. For the weapons contractors, Lockheed, Westnghouse, etc., weapons are constantly revolutionized with new technology, to stay on top of the crest of products that become second generation and widely proliferated. This is what drives the exchange between manufacturers and the governments of the world involved in this arms race.  The business of weapons is another matter where the manufacturer sells only to become enriched is laced with the immorality of profiting on other people's demise and misery from war. But to a high official of the military or the government, a manufacturer should get rich off of arms sales, this is what the American people want and expect from their leaders. If you ask any CIA-Pentagon official they will advise truthfully they do no more than what the American people want. This makes the American people the immoral entity if the action is immoral, and escalation is immoral in a nuclear age.  Elected officials will cop a plea, cast blame, deflect and deny their responsibility and culpability, and say they are the servant of the People, their constituents are his/ her people, differing constituents want different things from their representatives, and it is the People who have sovereignty over their lives as officials. They are not to blame for the annihilation of a nation if they voted for an escalation and not renew treaties, treaties are not what ther constituents want.  These are representatives of small number of constituents that do not want treaties. The mass number of constituents have no voice are not involved or asleep and unconsciously walking through life. Who is to blame are the people who pay for all of it. For not taking notice where public money is spent, for not demanding representatives meet the communities to explain why the spending spree for more advance guns and weaponry? Public officials are pedigreed to avoid discussion and debate and keep town meeting agendas very general and abstract. They are runners, which is why they run for office all the time. When they run what runs with them is the money, the wealth. Many will not show. There is your truth.  Lockheed and the rest of the arms industry will bear no responsibility, not under America's social framework. The president or the Senate will not bear responsibility for extinction. They do no more than what the People of this country voted is what transfers their guilt from them to the American people.
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  8743. Why would I want to do that when I want something new to emerge from that which collapsed. We are not talking about a country operating at a very low level of productive power. We are talking about a corrupt polity using that productive might as ends against our national interest. If the economic order collapsed tomorrow the immediate threat is the lack of food; we can live without cars but not buses, trains, and trucks to get that food around. Ok this is not a problem for we are not a country with a less developed road system. We have a developed rail system and trucking industry, and a developed road system for mass transit conversion. Reduce our oil consumption. After a collapse we are still a total amount of 8 hours multiplied by 130 million in the workforce of which 820 million hours a day, a year, a decade, etc., does not change. Collapse does not change the value aspect of employment. This is why the bondholders will insist by means of war if necessary, repayment on bonds. The workday will still create value. The collapse changed our productive capacity from 2.3% GDP to 0% GDP under capitalism. Really it is not the general economy at all that fell apart. It is capitalism that accumulated beyond what humans can produce and used this productive power to strangle society. Let me be more concrete. Dock workers in all ports get news of a system collapse the command structure is gone the only workforce in position to move the goods are the dock workers...naturally, they will fix the supply chain problem because the supply chain to them is nothing more than a supply chain. They have no other aim but to make that chain work like grease glides a wheel.
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  8745. For the first time the US could get hit. It is no longer protected by two oceans. Ordinary Americans can look up at the sky and watch a warhead appear as a shooting star and land far away with an impact that triggers Yosemite. If a Russian nuclear warhead gets through our defensive shield and you know one will, --- 9/11 is a case in point everyone was asleep at the wheel, the planes got through where they were not supposed to be; one is all it would take to throw the American Public into absolute chaos and material poverty, one strike hits a nuclear power station of which the US has thousands across its land mass, we are f*cked! Plutonium leakage, nuclear fall out, water contaminated, and as we saw in Texas the whole power grid shut down, from one storm, one strike will permanently disable power leaving us in the dark for months on end, waiting for FEMA to drag your ass out wearing hazmat suits! Not exactly the American Dream. What life in America ought to be and what is; makes a trek across the Grand Canyon a breeze. Ukraine’s neo-Nazis getting armed by our government are not going to have the corn, seed, wheat, in massive tons to send the US when Americans are flat on their face! Joe Biden exudes confidence in me that he knows how to choose totalitarians as his friends and knows how to turn his back on Medicare for all. They are on a bloodbath tirade to control Asia, global control is the only thing that matters to the Establishment. Bog Russia down till its out of the way to tackle China. The Yuan is poised as a reserve currency accepted by Saudis who snubbed Joe Biden. Congress does NOTHING to re-establish the dollar by developing the domestic economy and re-industrializing America! Frankly from the likes of American senators I seriously doubt they know what to do. After Biden gets done with the Dollar it won’t be worth rescuing. Even the progressives see no evil and hear no evil, nor care to remove all evil...people who put stock in the Washington D.C. policy of no policy at all are profiting and the media want to see a NO FLY ZONE, they want nuclear war, push the administration when are the Ukrainians going to get MIG Fighter Jets, these are middle class Karens in the Press Corp who want war.
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  8746. The decade of the 90s was the only period of prosperity in America after the last period of prosperity in the decade of the 50s. Between the 90s and now its hell on Earth. There has not been a peaceful prosperous future for the last 25 years in the west for nations beyond their own individual wealthy elites since the start of the Iraq invasion. Perpetual war, these people are divorced from the real world. In the last 20 years never mind the last 25 or 30, we saw the rise of the Yellow Vest movement in France, we saw Brexit, a break away vote from the EU, we saw Greece get economically strangled, we saw drought, famine, climate disasters, recession in all of the European economies, a Great Recession bigger than the Great Depression of the 30s, a Pandemic, we saw the rise of digital currency as a way of not using the Dollar for trade and commerce, and so much more has happened, not to mention western allies abandoned in Afghanistan. We saw Russia bogged down by extremists receiving guns and money from Congress as a matter of policy among Congressional senators and to the average American for losing jobs of no fault of their own, a measly check. We saw riots in every city. Children shot in the crossfire of civil society falling prey to police violence and overkill. We saw barbarism in America...2 million elderly dead from COVID and Nursing Home disasters. We are in an inflation. These elites won’t even do what Nixon did to curb inflation. Why should I believe Elites presiding over the last 20 years will bring peace and prosperity in the next 20 years? You’d have to be a psychotic like they to claim they are worthy of my vote in the next round of elections, assuming election are not rigged, another thing we saw under their watch. We saw the rise of Donald Trump as an expression of how much the elites are despised by the 74 million Americans. They are not sincere on the words they speak. When they get into power the first entity to get the appropriation of the nation’s wealth is the military, year in and year out, as the only program worthy of government funding tells you something about who they are.
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  8753. The economic blockade prevents other nations from buying Venezuelan products effectively the exports of Venezuela remain lower than its import needs. Exports are sales and if a person cannot sell anything the sun sets and the butter they try to sell melts when there isn’t a refrigerator to preserve it or the next day venture in marketing starts with a messy butter nobody wants. Imports are purchases and if our friend cannot buy a refrigerator to keep his butter well he then has to let the butter go sell what he can and cut his losses. Price of his butter drops with every step he takes to the market. The sanctions turn a nation into a welfare client, always needy, never able to meet those needs by themselves a nation is crippled and whatever socialism that may emerge as genuine to a working class emancipation it professes to be within the capitalist world it never has a chance to start off right. This point is the Achilles Heel against the America First people. First to defend with force (sanctions ) are first to harm working class Americans as they get put last on the help list policy. Another is the devaluation of the currency that it becomes good for wall paper is a result of the inability to sell to other nations forbidden to buy from you. Inside communities in Venezuela they are forced to produce with what means they have. Whoever can make something others need becomes a producer and as more people start meeting a need of their own and others, a bartering system arises, and it is as if we stepped back in time when isolated people were private producers and a collection of them traded their products, one use-value for another use-value, the currency is so debased it is not even used as a measure of value. Sanctions are force and force is an economic power in itself. The poor evacuate Venezuela because sanctions force an evacuation.
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  8761.  @danielhoward4566  Foreign wars have a big influence on how civility and peace is handled in society. How the Military behaves in the world influences how Law Enforcement behaves in society. Conversely, the behavior of Law Enforcement on its citizens reflects in the exact same measure the degree the Military behaves toward foreign nations. If respect and dignity does not exist in them here it does exist outside of them there. Both institutions contain youth and youth are immature underdeveloped individuals. The immaturity of youth binds the Military and Law Enforcement together as inseparable when in reality to provide security for society and to defend a nation are two entirely distinct roles one less none as more important than the other. A nation of citizens must treat as a given both institutions as too immature to handle political power. The military are bright children the society are the old and wise parents who are the real producers of all wealth. This is true because labor is a highly functional activity of brilliance and genius making things relevant to making a society work for all. This is profound wisdom to produce all the material wealth for the entire human race. Citizens cannot afford to give up their labor as the creator. Losing the power of creation entails it is used by others and not for itself. This is why the military and law enforcement should have no political power at all. No unions and no International Associations. This is what leads to fascism and dictatorship. Authoritarians are people with a lack of substance in their Being, hallow mind and soul, typically white men who must rely on hierarchy for respect and dignity succumb to this frailty of Being. Masculine is not masculine so it turns to become feminine and feminine is not feminine it turns to masculinize itself when dignity and respect become values not taught to children in their personal, social and political relations. Food for thought...and action!
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  8764. Losing faith in the national debt is as bad as a catholic sinning against the Holy Ghost, for which there is no forgiveness. America has a financial system of public credit if you look at it from the position of the Fed and Wall Street. If you look at the financial system from the position of average working tax paying family and individual its a system of public debt. We were never told the origins of this system in school. It is assumed to have been handed down to us by God himself. Nobody questioned it, till now. No matter what kind of government we are talking about they all did it. Commercial wars, manufacturing and maritime trade brought about the right conditions for this type of financial system in the Middle Ages in Genoa and Venice. It spread among the potentates. Public debt became a powerful lever for the accumulation of capital. In one click, investment houses on Wall Street turn money that is sitting around doing nothing into productive capital that the only part of the nation’s wealth that falls into the collective possession hardworking tax paying Americans is,---the national debt part. This money that Wall Street waves its mouse over drags it out its slumber without the risks of exposing it to the troubles inseparable from employment and industry and from the risks of money borrowed by all kinds of people and businesses with near bad credit potentially never getting it back is free money! Its the savory gravy that keeps pouring over GDP like a mashed potato. For the amount turned into public bonds the government’s lenders lose nothing. Bonds go on functioning in the hands of bondholders the same way as would cold, callous, hard cash. Public bonds, easily negotiable. Bondholders (in Genoa and Venice were considered a class of idle rentiers) with financiers as the middlemen between the government and the US taxpayer (or the nation) Wall Street investment houses are a modern form of a Middle Age relic as a class of idle rentiers. And where does this Capital go or get spent? In Biden’s world of increasing the national debt, its spent on how best to contain China from becoming a super power, that America is now a Pacific nation abandoning Europe and Ukraine just as it had with Afghanistan and the Middle East to retry in the east what it cannot do in the west. America is the new comer foreigner on the block in the east China has been around that neighborhood for thousands of years. Becoming Pacific is as bad a handicap a golfer can have on the course. America’s best bet is to re-industrialize its domestic economy badly in need of total restructuring to level out the inequalities eroding society.
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  8768. Why am I not surprised? Humanity has been waiting for the second coming of Christ for 2000 years that too is a complete fiction yet millions of people believe it. Of that number of people on Earth, facts are that 40 million people are modern slaves and for them the second coming cannot come fast enough! The desire to be freed and in a life they control not controlled by third party opportunists and exploiters is so great they would trek through anything to find for that chance to be free. To believe in the second coming of Christ made you an enemy combatant of the state, it was considered a seditious crime by the Roman Senate. The jan 6th Insurrection is being considered a seditious crime. Many combatants took part in an attempt to steal an election cancel the vote of the majority to enforce a power of a minority in government is a mass planned coup d état taken very lightly by the power structure in Washington. Is her participation fomenting sedition not a crime? It may have looked like the peons gathered in the streets of Rome to share a good time listening to an orator reciting the Third Book of Revelation to people who could not read. But the stories recited in that book were filled in by the imagination of the peons, slaves, ready to overthrow the Roman Senate. Since those old christian times it has been customary practice to use the least literate and intelligent segments of society as canon fodder for an outside political and economic gain. With only a face a mother can love there is no other field better than the legal field for social creatures who use the least literate to exploit to exist.
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  8775. A national strike is significant.  If the American working class went on a national strike it would spark a world wide revolution. One by one the governments where landlords, capitalists, merchant-monopoly corporations, rule the government would topple because the exploitation of labor had been for decades in the present and centuries in the past a curse on humanity. People are downright sick of being treated like S@*t, they want to exploit the labor -process they carry one for themselves...and their time has come. Its been in the making for 2000 years that the working people finally end sacrificing themselves for a venerable political minority. Proof is in Book II of Platos' 'The Republic', he said the division of labor is a brutal system of exploiting labor. It was no better in the manufacturing age then it was in the age of slavery. Arguably more lethal an effect on the working people of a country that the labor-process has become an independent power like the Military Industrial Complex. Duque and Trump are the kind of people who people would hate to service because no worker who works for them will ever get the credit for the sacrifice they make. A token of appreciation only if you unconditionally surrender your individuality over the Trump and Duque.  A social revolution is what America needs to shed the skin of its racist and colonial past, but its not going to get one with the establishment democrats who will buy it off before it begins. They know how to allocate the national income, proverbially; "Get Things Done". What will get done is a deferment of the 2000 year old wish, dream, desire, to be freed from the curse of the division of labor. The hierarchy of labor that breeds in the senses of people an attitude of not obligated to lift a finger as not in their job description under the democratic and republican form of allocating the work to be done in society. It will get one but not the kind of revolution America needs when the republicans snatch political power for another time that work in America will spark a revolt of the working class. A revolt that will need guidance and direction of its anger and not play into the formation of a dictatorship. The American working class to the republicans are a punching bag that with every blow received all they have to do is to play the recipient's anger and point the finger at the establishment democrats. For the democrats they mend the wounds with material benefits after punishing the working class for being workers. A national strike takes back the labor-process but a national factory take over is a revolution in the way we make a living, and that is the kind of revolution America needs, an economic and social revolution.
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  8785.  @TheVuduYuDu  What bill are you talking about...the CHIPS Bill he objected? Republicans have you over a barrel because the importance of making it a law that technology be a function of investment capital should have been debated in Congress and in the bill he wrote. I repeat to drive the point home: Technology should be a function of capital investment; operative word is ‘function”, meaning the technology (the means of production) stay home the capital can go if it wants. Bernie focused on his usual rebukes about tax payers funding rich corporations and the means of production, well I guess to him, that is the private property of the corporations to move as they see fit around the world and the military there as an accessory to the movement of capital investment; it goes where the money goes. Republicans can use this to make you look stupid: furthermore, I never said Bernie was the problem. The problem is not Bernie, thank you, its you, sorry to say, for not having a counter argument to the foregoing statement given by a progressive, is fodder for the right: “The left in this country has generally sort of failed to recognize the importance of capital investment. At the same time, they’re sort of complaining about companies not investing in America, they haven’t actually supported the companies that do invest in America,” said Michael Mandel, chief economist and vice-president of the Progressive Policy Institute think tank. Is this the bill you are talking about?
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  8809. Time stop 19:00 The Sphinx et al were ‘looted ‘of its bricks to build the city of Cairo. Loot would be a poor choice of words if it were not true of other cultures. Spanish looted the Aztec Pyramids of its bricks to build Mexico City. I guess if every generation builds on the foundations of products of past labor,---passed down to them the same occurs across all cultures. A habitual relation more unique to the species not to the specific culture of the species. Reusing ready made material to tear down one ruling idea that is not compatible with another ruling idea behind which is the subjugation of one ruler by another ruler, replacing the way of life (society) that ruled the ancients with a way of life (society) that rules the victor. If this practice is found in particular, the metal stretchers that could be cleaned of toxins in the event of gas attacks and harm an injured patient carried on them when Britain was bombed in WWII, the same stretchers are used to day as railings. Reusables is a natural habit, saves labor. Not all what we are about today. Things are made not to last. The Sphinx was then molded or sculpted out from rock would then mean the rock before it was sculpted had a similar shape of the Sphinx. A rock that lent itself in the eye of someone to the creation of the head of Sitting Bull in North Dakota or the heads of the presidents in Mt. Rushmore is a rock someone saw as the body of a lion that could wear the head of an Egyptian. The tools explain how it was all done. The modern rock sculptures had the handiness of TNT the ancient sculptors had rock to shape rock. If water lay underneath the Sphinx contributing to the erosion of the body would the sink eventually sink the way San Francisco High Rises are sinking built on sandy bedrock?
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  8817. How much of the social classes of the UES, about whom we never hear or see in the news, agrees with the UES Foreign Minister? That the monarchy is prepared to go nuclear if Iran does? Are the lives of the people in Saudi Arabia such an enigma they don't matter enough to be shown to the world as to who they are, and the distance between them and us is a dimension of desensitizing fraternity with working people about what conditions they live under and how that monarchy exploits and allocates its social labor is not directly tied to what lies under Iran? How much of Saudi Arabia is industrial and mechanized and how much of it still a backward country based on one crop, Oil. This is a country who we never see a product on the shelf labeled made in the UES. No Jams, Fruits, Vegetables, no washing machines, tools, cars. The enigma of this country; it does not seem to have to live by producing and selling its commodities in the world market. Yet, the country can jump right into the nuclear age. Would it survive if luxury is all it consumes and oil is all it produces? Next to Saudi Arabia the geology transforms dramatically and contains a more diverse composition of elements that lend themselves to industrial development and in this region of geography sits Iran. All within Iran's borders is uranium and rare earth metals, these elements make this country the crown jewel of the Middle East. A problem for the US is when there is a country outside of its circle who knows it has every right to exploit its own social labor for the rise of industrialization and nuclear energy development. A very perplexing problem for the US that keeps bringing it back to the Cold War when the rest of the world dropped the Cold War decades ago.
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  8828. Its over for the US. Unless the people adopt a social and cooperative attitude toward each other and change the meaning of life and wealth in their own minds, the attitude of individualism will be the death of them. The productive power of the American people for lack of direction and guidance by their government made a social culture of materialism for people to enjoy but over the course of decades that material culture served no purposes to further life and make it secure. The social culture is totally dependent on external support and is itself inefficient. Not a good combination when life in all three parts of the continent are under severe natural threats to survival. In the face of the devastation people rise to the occasion to help others but they do not have the means or the preparation to assist each other as cooperative unit, they have individual structures that isolate them and become lethal to them under natural threats and not one central locality for goods. This culture of individualism meets every need through external markets and markets depend on roads and external transport which are destroyed in a second by the force of nature. It really is sad tale to tell about a society that could have been the model of living in nature and not against it for all humanity. But it did not for lack of educating its population on this one concept all societies are concerned over, i.e., real not elected or appointed planning and development for social survival but permanent planning and even development as a rule of life.
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  8837. Duration is how employers rob workers of their free time and affordability. Duration becomes an outside time element to determine value for employers. Its the concrete activity that workers do to get or make the part or the whole product that duration, a time element, ticks away measuring and ensuring every second is not wasted in the conversion of concrete work into an abstract value. Duration of work is the only way to make the conversion and this can only be done by using time. Time is then translated into hours, weeks, days, months, and years. A slave master had a concept of time that started in the morning and ended at night. The person or family doing the work was available 24/7 to the slave master. Working time was spread across the calendar year on the plantation. Employers in the post world of slavery have a time limit. Society decided Time, all wealth has to be extracted within a specific amount of time no more than 8 hours average. You could not work people longer than that credit to our ancestors who made that a reality with their lives in many class battles with the bosses. There wouldn’t be any science if not for this 8 hr average the constant conversion of our products into commodities meant innovation to get the job done in the time given. People assume, falsely, that Time was always the way they relate to time today. Time in the days of 1618 to the days of the Civil War was one calendar day. Whatever had to be done got done the next day if it wasn’t finished the first day. Work was forced labor but it was not intensified labor as it in getting the job done in two months. You can imagine it got worse for you not better on the day you showed up on the job and the boss said to you; “Hey, you are only working 8 hours from now on so I need you to get that pile you been working on all year done in three weeks at 8 hours a clip”. Emancipation just made your work more intense you can’t put off the work for another day and dodge the whip anymore. You were now a free man, a free worker like the other 35 million. Time itself has more than one dimension as Einstein proved but to capitalism duration is the only feature time has. Time as duration, how long, how much. That’s it. Why bother learning a language? People get along with how much and how long. Never is time a question of quality, as in Relative Time. This kind of time is reserved for people exempted from living the duration of time. As you are working, people will like you. Time as duration destroys sense of self worth. Once you are out of the duration the world of capitalism pushes you away and production is closed off to you. Survival on individual terms.
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  8839. Looks like DN got fooled or were complicit with the game of mass media psyops and diversion on its audiences. Amy Goodman plays you like a fool, (sucker). The CIA puts out a document scandal and the Media reports it long enough to take your attention away from Patriot Missiles sent to Ukraine. This action constitutes an escalation of the war by means of a Covert diversion of the public and likely Congress too, although my faith in Senate Committees on National Security are also pure theatrics, is low to none. My sense is that the national security state and the Media truly regard you (the Public) as stupid. Whatever they think of you...their strategy works to divert the public from the retirement age increased to 67. The escalation of the war. The Abortion Bans passed in Southern states. Inflation and unemployment. De-regulation of industry, etc., Hitting the Public left and right with a battery of assaults constitutes a class war. Was it not covert what DeSantis did signing an abortion law into law before midnight and announcing it as law on Twitter. All done from the privacy of a private house? He took his lessons from the pysops diversion programs. What is not reported is the massive quantities of Patriot Missiles sent to Ukraine while this document scandal unfolds. Escalating the conflict and causing a reaction from Russia to counter the new battery of weapons with harder ones. Ukrainian soldiers trained in a military base in Utah are back in Ukraine and their presence here was never reported, i.e, another covert operation. Bamford must be in on it too since he never mentions the breech of constitutionality of a government agency eavesdropping a private chat platform company without probable cause and the theft of the documents gives the national security elite probable cause to surveil or shut down a private company as a threat to national security. One hell of an evil national security state really plays tricks on the heads of the American Public paying for all this.
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  8870.  @ludmilaivanova1603  I have been thinking about that...not sure if it all as nihilistic as it seems. I am leaning toward Climate Change as the biggest threat to the lives of Gen Zers (16 yr olds) and they seem not sure of what they really stand for about the social issues we face today. I do not see them as over sexualized as depicted in certain movies but I do think they can succumb to drugs as a means of desensitizing themselves to the threat climate change poses as the end of the world. They live on line and they tend to party hard. They developed a language that I still cannot decode after all I am 76 years old...I hated my generation,--still do, all baby boomers I view as thoroughly selfish and spoiled, even rotten. For example, Cher, Neil Young, Warren Buffet, Fauci, Biden, Trump, are horribly greedy people. There is very little sociology on this generation which is a tragic and my generation makes no effort to speak to them. One thing about them I admire is that they seem to know how to treat people and what not to do in treating people and are far more racially tolerant than boomers. They may the generation that puts off parenthood, and this would be a disaster for the US getting older. I do believe the Marxist have a strong paradigm far more practical than liberals but what the Marxists have not figured out is a way to communicate in their language. These kids have no adult role models directing them on how to think about the general state of the world. Somebody needs to interview them I think we have a lot to learn from them.
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  8880. The reach of America's IMF is far and wide. The very rich in societies borrow IMF loans in the name of all members of society but are not obligated to pay it back as members of society. The political representatives of all members of society sign off as the obligers for its repayment. They make society responsible for its repayment. Naturally the interest on the loan is low enough the societies do not collapse but not low enough to emancipate the borrower from the loan and in this way a relative exploitation can take place generation after generation with slight modification to the deal. Argentina like the other societies that have borrowed from the IMF are obligated to cut wages and pensions and increase working hours, also they must rearrange in society the social division of labor. Every new agreement with the IMF requires the division of labor be adjusted in order to make people who work and do not produce a profit for their employers in soceity profitable and productive labor and those who 's labor is already profitable as productive labor more profitable, is the theory of compensation for labor under capitalism. The only way societies can no longer be indentured borrowers in perpetuity to the IMF is an international labor movement that struggles for its own emancpation from IMF loans, and fights for its dignity and respect causing the political representative to find the money somewhere else for its repayment, they can no longer bully around and fool people to sign on the dotted line.
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  8885. Samsung produces memory microchips more than anyone on the planet but they do not produce logic microchip processors which are made by TBCS in Asia not China and are in greater demand than memory chip processors. TBCS engineers are the creme of the crop in this technology. But recently a new manufacturer of the component is on the scene does not design or engineer but only manufactures the unit. The Senate seeks to capitalize on this industry for the production of logic microchip processors that go into semiconductors. The Bill is a shot in the arm and gets the attention of the Senate more than the American Rescue Package watered down which is to resuscitate the failing US economy for millions of Americans. But I have to say all this comes too late as China is light years ahead of the US moving toward technology independence. Both parties coming together on this issues signifies the Senate unites on ideology more than common sense brings them together because what good is a semiconductor industry if you do not have the brain-power. The brains left the US to follow where the semi-conductor business went which used to be in Texas and is now in Switzerland happened 20 years ago. That's how late this Senate arrives at the scene. Too late. While the world was taking real steps toward this technological development the Senate was divided on ideological grounds and let the economy go to pot. This can only mean the Senate is delusional not building from the ground up to develop the brains and general economy and then the semi-conductor industry are pressured and making decisions according to the fear they have of communism not according to what the US needs to remain dominant in this field. China has the Five Year Plans and the Senate has reactionaries as elites who never surrender to communism no matter how wrong they are.
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  8894. Single payer will cost more than what the government (we) take in for just health care said the president. Michael's unresponsiveness to Amy's question and the president's condemnation of single payer does not help to convince viewers unsure of the argument for single payer. That said, Trump's statement against single payer reveals a conscious bias in the privileged classes toward the nation's economic surplus, whether they acknowledge or not, that surplus comes from the working classes, is viewed as theirs by virtue of a God-given right is now a significant problem for the working classes. The privileged social classes in the White House are imbued with an ideology blind to themselves as ideology, and prevents them from making real achievements, proves to the working masses that capitalism cannot be harmonized. Cuts are never temporary lay-offs but permanent. By not acknowledging the structural contradictions of capitalism, exactly what the liberal Democrats are doing, leads workers to their own demise. Because the side Trump represents is bent with iron necessity on their demise. The economic surplus and the greater part of it is in the form of the US military, the other parts of it in the form of social spending. In the biased view of the privileged in the White House, single payer is to be paid from social spending appropriations they intend to cut. They think that because the other part of the budget in the form of the military industrial complex constitutes the government has been given legal immunity from cuts. Government does not cut itself when it is occupied by the 1%. We can expect them to say a medicare expansion is lunacy and commence an all out economic war against working people. The budget appropriations enlarging the military is an unchanging constant to them, in fact, it is vital component to their survival as a social class ever since the state merged with the private sector. The other part of the budget; social spending is the only variable. The workers will have to push for cuts in defense and war expenditures out of which the 1% are lavishly compensated and unwilling to lose the cash cow the Middle East has become. The very rational for war is tied to this push for medicare expansion, and so is climate change, and in particular the average worker is tied to this push as a fight for dignity and humanity.
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  8896. Its intimidating to be on camera when that is not your job. The most important words the CEO made in this interview was: “None of us are prepared for this.” Prayers and hearts with the families is not enough! Prayers might change Jeff Bezos’s behavior but I doubt it. Factory owners may be nice people but in emergency situations their role in production should end right there. The slow to no response Amazon made to not release their workers is shameless negligence, and other small warehouse and factory owners also did not heed the National weather warnings. This is not what I call a ’loving’ characteristic of a people who care for one another. The working people in those workplaces are not objects that can go to cinders with the other objects in the factory or a warehouse. Die in a collapse, explosion or fire without emotion, be treated like objects. This was the point the Triangle Shirt Waist Factory Tragedy of 1911. One hundred and ten workers working overnight in a warehouse factory to fulfill Christmas toys was not as important as getting out of there before tornados come! The owners prove by their own actions that a private interest impedes rational decision making. They cannot act responsibly. Odd thing; it was all not just one employer/owner acted the same. You can’t put your life in their hands is the issue. Prayers and condolences are not a good defense against future tornado storms. Society has to make a real decision about production in general. Either owners have free reign over production and tragic yet avoidable events like this happen, or the workers have control over warehouse and factory operations and enact their own emergency evacuations. Because, 1., remote control over work and workplace by long distance management is a failure and 2., direct control by the owners is a failure of over-efficiency. And 3., using the government to enforce owners and workers to do as told is a failure. Who are i a better position to regulate production are the participants, the Workers are in the best position to decide when Christmas presents can get wrapped, or when the mustard and candles get made, not the clock and not government.
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  8898. I love how Dr. Wolff explains the difference between markets and capitalism. Sooner or later the slowdown will hit the US economy. Stock market is up, shows the stock owners are making money not the economy. Obama holds the record for highest profits to corporate America. Corporate America would prefer another term of Obama than another four years of Trump. Why? Corporate America and American workers and farmers of all kinds are in worst shape under Trump. This is fertile ground for an alliance against Trump between workers and farmers with corporate America trying to wiggle the alliance to their favor over China. The politics of this economic relation can bring about no changes at all. But there is a contradiction, the Social democrats are not friendly to China. Corporate America is friendly to China, they are making money hand over fist producing their products in China flooding the American consumer with cheap products.  China is at 6%GDP, the US at 2.2% GDP is for corporate America a contradiction over their allegiance to American society and its workers and farmers. Is it profits or people? Lower wages of America consumers is the inevitable result of buying American is a contradiction for workers in America. When corporations export production this displeases Trump about corporate America is a pro-worker position.   To get those blue collar votes Bernie and Trump will have to take the same stand against the corporations. How does a corporate president denounce corporations when he owns a corporation and is as rich unless he intends to divest from his riches? But he has not and he will not or would have a while ago. How does Bernie get workers to stop buying American without anti-American accusations damaging his reputation with workers and farmers? Conservatives in both political parties cloud the distinction between markets and capitalism all the time. The market is a system that favors the rich and the rich love markets. Naturally, we'll recieve a steady diet of propaganda bombarding Americans from every pore of society with the notion of free markets. Educating others to the reality that markets are not free and never were could not be more clearer said with Dr. Wollf telling it. Corporations know exactly how markets work, a free market never existed, the notion has a long history in capitalism as an ideological weapon to preserve class relations.
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  8901. I get it. The “international community” is really the US and its targeted sanctions. Whenever the term is used it is the US that is implied but cannot be directly named as alone in that community. One factions’s leader cannot give in to the demands of the public or he loses his wealth and power status and he cannot give in to the demands of a cease-fire or he faces targeted sanctions,--- the US takes his wealth. If the other goes forward with a peace agreement he faces the Old Guard and if he does not accept the cease fire he faces a social revolution. Crony Capitalism is behind it all, commercial economic interests sucking out the resources of the country while rival paramilitary forces engage in armed conflict would be the US commercial interests profiting in the background. In other words, American Imperialism in the person of previous presidents and in Joe Biden. Sudan is a miniature model of what will happen in the US once radical elements of the two parties split off into rivals in a power struggle and take with them their donors and factions of the police and another in the military for the White House (power) while American corporations profit in the background in the US economy. Imperialism abroad and imperialism at home. This is why China will become the next world power. China doesn’t foment wars in countries for its businesses to profit. But in order for the People of societies to not become pawns in a power struggle within their own nations they would have to resist any agreement that enables imperialism and focus their protests directly at the foreign power to leave the country and take over all the critical infrastructure to get the country running and dissolve the political parts of the government leaving intact the financial parts of the government but under their control.
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  8910. American government all in one place at the SOTU address, i.e., the Supreme Court, Joints Chief of Staff, the MIC, the Senate of Patricians, the democrats and republicans, oligarchs, the whole Power/Political Elite, came off as Single Party Rule, equal to each other, sharing control over the economic power of the working class, struggling to retain control and authority over the Public Domain, reconnoiter for a clarification of an anti-socialist pro-nationalist mission for total and absolute rule in the world, is not what I call a government. Its a class and this is class rule. Each aspect of this social class are disguised as institutions modeled after past institutions and is a collection of institutions sharing equally political power exploiting the resources of the Public and the Public Domain, they behave like a gang of nationalist clean cut thugs, is not a government. Workers in America better take their cues from the French working class on how to fight a capitalist class, expect successive straight weeks of directly challenging their police and law enforcement forces, and work to get the rest of the population behind you to realize this is a Class Rule and not a democracy of the masses. It is necessary the whole working class participate and force a shut down of the entire US transportation system of trade, commerce, and industry to end its existence. Its that simple folks! You must propagate Yellow and Red Vests on Everyone, Nobody Left Out. You must send your reporters to France and cover developments to fight the media. Though members of the elite media likely there in person, the media as a weapon in the hands of this class not there is a part of the Ruling social faction. No member of this social class sitting in that rotund barring two, and one not there I totally respect for not being there, Tulsi Gabbart, will address, alleviate, remedy, eliminate, the serious, serious issues raised in this panel but YOU! A government is a collection of individual representatives, caucuses and delegates, who operate in accordance to a Constitution and amend the constitution to fit the changing lifestyles and life-process of society all decisions by unanimous consent. This event is a public display of the capitalist class legally self-installed into power through the power of money in society saying to the Public, your lives are not worth shit ours is worth the world. America's working class a has a big fight on their hands. The objective is to overthrow them and forbid them from ever entering politics again. But since being in power, so accustomed to power, they are totally unnatural without power and completely comfortable in power intimidates the American worker from challenging them can be overcome by example of the French worker's yellow vest movement, and if it ever intends to get anywhere in history for itself the first fight will be the destruction of this ruling class. If tomorrow Macron resigns it ought to be the signal for the American working class to tear off the yoke around its neck. They are a yoke around the neck of the people. As a historian looking at societies in the past a Roman serf was better off than the American worker and an American former slave was better off than the American worker is of absolutely no consequence to this Political Elite. Die for all they care.
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  8911. It is not as funny as it appears in the context of Biden meeting with foreign investors of the America’s economy, the Prince of Saudi Arabia, want to be reassured the American working people will get to work is the reason for the emphasis of transportation. As the US economy receded, he and other foreign investors have a real claim on the US economy, to be exact 40% of US GDP never encountered a downturn. The prince is a Millennial, of an economy whose basis is one commodity, experience with the investment cycle of American Capitalism is more complex and the Great Recession of 2007 was the first contraction witnessed since he was born. American IOUs and its balance of payments, its trade deficit, imports versus exports, that, one after another, the countries have become involved in a crisis that all of them, with few exceptions, have exported and imported too much, so that they all have an unfavorable balance of payments. If you owned 40% of a given nation’s GDP I think you’d want its leader to give you some assurance you will get paid the return on your investment. This is the part of the story the news keeps out. Why reporters are kept at a distance. What is not heard is the private business exchange between seller (US) and buyer (SA). America collects from its workers through taxation to pay off its IOUs and its foreign investors with the revenue collected from the employment of 132 million people constituting the workforce. So, Mr. President will you guarantee me Americans will be employed so that you may pay me my investment return? Poor Kamala has the job of making transportation exciting but she can’t without the ability of economic thinking. Connect the commodity labor-power with transportation and IOUs. She does the best she can and is ridiculed by a public who are legislated to work overtime or foreign relationships if it cannot pay goes sour! Further, America, specifically Trump and the Pentagon and Congress approving the deal made the mistake of selling SA massive air power weaponry that if America defaults a declaration of war is just around the corner. Put this way i bet you folks are saying...holy shit, this is serious, and it is serious. The burden of repayment is on You! The media concealing the gravity of this crisis from you is insulting; as too stupid to give you information in a way that makes you think! If I were you I’d be real pissed at the media.
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  8922. Well I would feel more confident if the US had an actual solid track record in winning wars and managing colonies. It came into the colonial world of empires solidly against colonial possessions it should have never attempted to possess any colonies. It did and they are all fucked up. The Republicans or the Democrats are experts in starting wars but have never won a war they started. People think the US won the second world war but history reveals the Russians defeated the Nazis not the Americans. Ever since every war following the Civil War has ended up in a loss for the US. So, it is time to get rid of the two parties unable to break the incessant habit of starting wars, a fundamentally immoral lunacy that must be vanquished from politics. Their proclivity to start wars is a mania and driven by profiteers. America fought a defensive war only once in its history, i.e., WWII. That is the extent of it. That is my message on the international scene to those reading this. They are no better on the domestic scene, what the Democrats and Republicans will do is wait till the public simmers down from all the commotion. If there is a movement that emerges from all the protest action they will begin to study how they can redirect it as their own, how to integrate the problem the movement drew its inspiration into their politics. Masterminds at cooptation. This time a Billionaire New Yorker got chosen to lead the Free World if there is one left, one who can't think past personal enrichment. He brought along with him other New York Billionaires like Carl Icahn, Mnuchin, Pruit, to handle the dismantling of regulations in typically male dominated sectors of the economy such as the energy sector, banking, and he chose female billionaires typically from the Mid-West to dismantle regulations in education, media. Democrats are useless in preventing the dismantling, they cannot win and have no agenda worthy of the American vote. This leaves the Republicans in a frenzy of deregulation leaving the American public as the loser and the billionaires the winners. If a movement emerges that is not strong enough to throw out the two parties the losses will extend across generations of Americans never to see the light of day for the rest of this century as a beacon of democracy.
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  8923. When your laws and lawmakers are to weak to enforce the law they must be removed from their positions. Capitalist relations leads to cuts and unemployment which even the labor unions in France had to administer to their own rank and file. They humanize it by calling it layoffs, but it is the same thing as losing a job, and all of the western powers fall short in acknowledging the structural contradictions of capitalism that, in turn, lead workers to their own demise. Observers on the left see the capitalist creed of innovation lead to a falling rate of profit, but the capitalists themselves and the mainstream, have no idea why or how profits are falling. But falling they are and they are not about to hire more workers to produce value. Instead they innovate production to get more value out of less workers.  The French workers and their theorists are big on the idea that wealth is produced by labor but not big at all on the idea that nature is a producer of wealth more so than labor is. This is because labor produces value and less of it given the technological innovations. Nature produces wealth and there is differnce between wealth and value. Hence the falling rate of profit, less value from live workers due to unemployment, and innovation causing unemployment to rise, work against each other, less is sold, less sale-money becomes capital, less profits. Where this trend is not happening is in the USA. There the workers work overtime and innovation created a high productivity of labor that profits falling domestically is offset by their productivity and by profits acrued internationally. The US must maintain its beligerent posture to maintain the standard of living of its working class and that of its capitalist class, war is vital tool for hegemony. If the US were the size of France it too would be in a recession and in material decline. But is plain as day that the French ruling classes do not know what to do and the French people have to remove the incompetency rampant in their government.
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  8930.  @kateoneal4215  As a Marxist Richard is not that great to my surprise. My worry with him is the four elements that constitute the Value Theory in Marx, the first three chapters of Capital. He is a moderate to the right of Lenin. Lenin gets it. Richard misses it and when you miss that you miss the whole of Marx’s economic system; his methodology, exposition, and practice. Bernie falls nowhere near this panoply of Marxist scholars. He is to the far right of Lenin. With Sachs the worry, as he explains, was thinking like an economist when your enemy is a political class that is a Mafia. But I love them all because I have a passion for life. These folks lack a lust for life. I just wish they had a revolutionary bone in them and learned to talk to people the way Jimmy Dore talks to his audience. Fire people up. Agitate, agitate, agitate! They do not show they care. The anger in them is either absent or inauthentic. The academic aura they casted for themselves as a result of being boxed into bourgeois universities makes the revolutionary theory that the Theory of Value is a fossil. Dore shows anger. He confronts people of their stupidity without insulting them. He is a natural born teacher. Dore has the delivery down where people listen, Sachs and Wolff do not. Listening and hearing is forced when they talk economics. The point is to motivate people toward overturning bourgeois society. The socialists in the US are intolerable to me do the exact opposite. They are ideologues. For example, if the Proud Boys take a stand against the FBI or disrupt the Democratic Convention because the Proud Boys are Proud Boys the socialists would condemn the action despite the act being a good one for the working class. When the patient has no idea what is good for them they cannot administer the medicine, they let the patient suffer. On the right the Neoliberal have no reason to attack Trump when he has policies that the capitalist class really like, The Trump Tax Cuts, but because he is Trump he’s not their brand. The US military, the real enemy, the actual Mafia holding the World a hostage by the point of a gun, hates Trump. Would I vote for him? Certainly not. He’s no good for the working class. But i would support him if he reduced the military budget while in his term in office. He is now a victim of the FBI, so was Fred Hampton, Malcolm X., presents a good opportunity for the segment of the working class that is black. Obama, a sophisticated imperialist and a non descendant of American slaves, was the worst president for the working class. So it is a mess, a carnival of ideologues. The objectives of each individual or group are abstract and not grounded in Marx’s scientific thinking which makes them easy targets for the right. They lose the art of revolutionary language, words that evoke clarity, ad fail to gain traction with the Public. Harvey is another in the mold of academia that is all theory and no practice. Its a matter of principal that theory be honored and respected but not when it is does harm to the working class. None of them talk about labor, the working day, the conditions of labor, the products of labor, the double aspect of labor, the relations of work culminating into how wealth is formed in a capitalist society, the struggle for dignity, wage and social inequality, in concrete terms where people can develop a strategy to express their dissent. The working day is the weapon of the working class with which to defeat the right and far right and none of the professors teach workers on how to use it. Chomsky is more helpful, communicates to average people in a way they can follow. and presents clear analysis of the power structure as One Party with Two Right Wings. There is a Scottish economist on YT who I truly find distasteful for one reason, he has the poorest diction, speaks rapidly, thick accent, dismisses his own points and is loaded with inaccuracies. Americans have serious trouble ahead of them but they also have the ideal conditions for a revolution that will go to waste because they do not have a theory of change. A Historical Paradox the professors ought to put front and center of their lectures as a unified theme but do not for the simple reason they are not unified themselves.
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  8931. “I just feel like I am being victimized over, and over, and over again”... 132 million people in America would instantly agree with that statement. It’s a working class condemnation of capitalism. People are sick of getting burned... globally, 8 billion working class people would instantly agree with that statement too. Capitalism inside the US is worse outside of the US. So bad it makes capitalism inside the US to the American working class look good when it really sucks for them! Time is coming the last gasp of an ancient regime breathes life into a new social system that will bury it. Outside,-- capitalism makes profits through the destruction of older societies; to modernize them with its ingenuity and equipment, it all ends up bad for people who lost their small farms and the jobs replacing the millions of little farms around the world are not ends in themselves, the jobs become a means for a future acquisition of profits,---than, of course, there is mass forced starvation and ripping the land out from under whole populations through any means necessary is carried on as if these were events not man made. Inside,--- things get worse. Mass material deprivation worsens for 132 million working class Americans, victimized over and over again. The American working class they constantly violated and exploited have nothing left to give anymore...its over. Very swiftly new and more meaningful social bonds will unite people from all walks of life. What capitalism held back for so long subjectively has been released from its chains.
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  8932. Under women are African Americans and below the African Americans are the Indigenous People of the North American continent is a strange racial stacking of capitalist preferences in the world of Anglo Saxon sociology. Still that is not Phratry, the real term for Patriarchy. Phratry is a brotherhood that emerges where two or more families in the same tribe freely form an organic union for certain common objects. You can see how phratry is not limited to the State of New York based on that explanation but is replicated in the modern state and its origins are traceable to the family. Think of the meaning of the word 'benevolent' in the title the 'Police Benevolent Association', and the word 'association', another word for union and what do you have? Benevolent signifies the common object all police have and the association is the brotherhood of Police existing within the state, in a way, a double agency one is seen and the other is unseen. It is easy to see how the public is susceptible to conspiracies when phratries surround our lives. The four tribes of ancient Athens were organized into three phratries each having thirty gentes, 12 phratries and 360 gentes. Pretty even-steven that it was produced by legislative procurement not naturally evolved. How many department chiefs does the modern state have is the number of phratries and the number of under functionaries in the bureaucracy is the number of gentes...the entire super structure of society reflects what is not natural to mankind but is legislatively procured by the state. The Roman Curia is analogous to the Greek phratry, ten families to each curia and ten curiea and 300 gentes of the Romans. Curia entered directly into the functions of government voted by the curiae an assembly of gentes having one collective vote. The Senate in Washington is analogous to the Roman Senate, two political tribes subdivided by a brotherhood of 400 senators and 50 states composed of millions of families and three or four votes must be got last minute before default the fate of 332 million people in the hands of a legislative body. It starting to look pretty real and huge the more we peel the lid off of patriarchy. This patriarchy sweats out of every pour of American society sure gives observers an idea of what a revolution would have to leave no stone left unturned to heave off its shoulders a patriarchal superstructure.
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  8964. Excellent report! Papa Smurf said the diamonds are valuable in the human world. Worthless in the natural world of serfs. Hardest rock on earth turns to dust if it is pulverized. What good is it?  Rude little Smurfs bullyfye one of their own and cast blame and shame in the heat of their anger. Telling the family of Smurfs, Papa Smurf said their friend was taking advantage of their time. "Time", the human world did not always use time in such a way as to measure how it long takes someone to make something. Smurf time was used for a specific aim and before man used the labor of other men for wealth accumulation as a specific aim, human labor of any kind was a natural activity in finding and creating useful things. An activity of some useful kind, constructive, be nice to go back to that, live in the natural world of Smurfs, where time is not used to measure labor and labor is not time. Before there was a Gargamel invading the natural world of Smurfs, Smurf activity was spent producing use-values. Anybody who interpets the Smurf barter system economy of one use-value for another use-value is a real life Gargamel in propagandist clothing. Naturally, the serfs spending their labor time on something valuable in the social world of capitalism whether by chance or trickery, angered them.  Gargamel needed their labor time, as in the world of capitalism, capital needs the labor time of the working class first. Diamonds, gold, drugs, oil, or food second, and then to avoid an expropriation by the angry Working Class, Capital must annihilate labor! They have enough wealth the working class is no longer useful to capital. Gargamel can't get off that easy, if he is accumulate more diamonds out of the same place in the future he needs more Smurf activity to be useful as a value -producer. The rage of the Smurfs against the fear of the Gargamels and a planet that cannot tolerate the conflict. Happy X-Mass All.
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  8984. The Public Utitlity (Denton Texas tax payers) in the de-regulated market are charged $207 million dollars for few days of energy costs for the city of Denton. This would bankrupt the public utility and it would have to shut down and stop providing energy to the city of Denton. Or the public utility will have to borrow from bondholders to pay off the private energy corporation and the city residents of Denton owe Wall Street bondholders. It has no other choice the republican philosphy is to exclude the federal government as a back up to a national grid. Denton is on its way into becoming a dead city, empty. A place where boarded up store fronts and empty apartment buildings are common. It would cost a fortune to live there but $207 million dollars is pretty cheap for a company like Blackrock. A negotiated settlement between Blackrock the buyer and the Bondholders the sellers and Denton will be on its way to becomng hthe luxury capital of Texas for the rich. A total demoltion of the old Denton and new upstarts of bourgeois culture and commericalism too expensive that only the rich can afford. While the former Denton families are forced out of their properties by the pressure to sell to Blackwater, coming on the scene as a personal buyer on the market connected to all the realtors. Texas republicans are desperately blind to the life and death issues of their policies. If the whole society today runs like a fire engine without a driver and tomorrow staggers like an alcoholic, they don't care...as long as the final outcome the bottom line is greater than the amount invested. They live by the creed "buy cheap and sell dear". P.S. Is it Blackrock or Blackwater the giant real estate corporation I refer too?
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  8995. Every social segment of the working class is under some form of attack in the US. Abortion is an attack on women in the working class. High rents is an attack on urban and rural residents in the working class. Inflation is an attack on the working class as a consumer. High interest rates is an attack on the working class as a borrower. Low wages is an attack on the worker class as wage earners. The absence of development, security and safety is an attack on communities of youths and families of working class character. Government cutbacks is an attack on the working class as a citizen. All of these attacks are coming from landowners, bankers, merchants retailers, employers, government. Every social institution is under direct orders in a command from the Establishment that if you do not attack the working class you will be charged with hate crimes and anti-semitism your life destroyed. The Establishment uses hearings to purge those who are not complicit. In this social experiment using language and media the working class is made to attack the working class with violence and vitriol emanating from that media. The Grand Social Experiment of the Establishment has the working class on high alert and isolation, hating their neighbor, living under a reign of terror, to preserve the status quo and never oppose or question the rule of the monopoly government of the Establishment. Elites are frightened they will no longer have control over the whole range of America’s productive power is why the state of anarchy and terror persists.
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  8999. Fundamental problem here is a society whose only purpose of existence is to buy and sell. That in a nutshell is the meaning of life for capitalism. Mel Brooks could not have said it better in his movie "Life Stinks." The absence of real meaning of our actions comes from a continuous process of buying things for the sole purpose of becoming more money. All of us do what we do for the sole purpose of commodities becoming more money is a striking revelation. This is a pretty narrow aim for a human being that took 12000 years to handle more than capital increasing itself! Commodities rule over, we become commodities 12 hours a day, then we transform become human for another 12 hours a day. To many we don't know which we are anytime of the day. Eventually the commodities wear us out the human spirit dies and any light that can be seen behind someone's eyes dims lost in a world of commodities and money, rules of trade, laws, leases, titles, is nothing but a battlefield where commodities go to war to convert themselves into money, doing all the action and getting all the attention, they have men in black suits speaking for them in their own special language, they have shared international press and they use their name as a number so when money comes walking by, they can scream they can scream out loud enough to yank the money out of your pocket...and you really think you are in control? But something new has creeped in. Commodities hide their price from you and make you ask for the price leading you into the hands of a capable salesmen. Commodities push that person to sell more on the person already pushed by the first commodity looking for a price, every action we do is done on their behalf is a fundamental problem.
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  9014. The crisis is that the commodity that you have and the commodity that you need are two different things and probably in two different places, and money is the commodity that gets you from the commodity you have to the commodity you need. This is true of nations as it is of individuals inside nations where money is used. When you are trying to accomplish this transformation and a rail system and black out happens and all energy is down all the useful things stay where they are, commodities do not move between persons. The only thing to do is to walk home or try to complete that transformation by whatever means within reason because the money is desperately needed. Or the other person needs your commodity without question. But the person with the money will not sell it for your commodity because your commodity which is to be sold to someone else is not buying so the object stays put and people are stuck with a thing of no use to themselves. All the useful things that should be in use are in storage perishing as I write (in this case money being the useful thing the person is trying to attain) the money stays in the bank, circulation has broken down, there are no exchanges involving money, people will have to exchange one useful thing they own for many useful things they need from another person or family by daylight. Refrigeration is gone. How are people surviving in Venezuela in a commodity producing society that is no longer producing or selling commodities? For some 30 million people daily life will be exactly trying to overcome this very problem of getting rid of things useful to other people in a desperate act of trying to get to the product or make the product they need to live.
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  9037. Recent poll suggests the Gaza War was the reason Harris lost to Trump. Had she broken away with Biden on supporting Israel she could have lost with integrity and authenticity as the worst case scenario. She’d have left herself in position for a second run in 2029, but now the democrats are in a hole. They’d rather not make static wages and interest rates and loans a political issue for the working class than forsake a Zionist nationalist and racist passion to obliterate Palestinians, which in another poll in Israel suggests the majority of citizens in Israel support the Gaza war and the portion that oppose Netanyahu on how to prosecute that war is not as large as you might think...much respect to the Hasidim at the least a definite resistance to the draft worked with a movement to stop the war. History is beginning to tell the story, Biden, Harris and Trump, are starting to define the era as the era of class struggle, and nationalism that if there were no hostages the zionist settler movement would have gone forward with conquest unhindered and with majority support. For the American worker who knows the only wealth in Israel that is not paid for by the US taxpayer, literally Israel is a Welfare Client, are its archeological remains of 2000 years ago. Wow...betrayal of loyalties to what nation centrist democrats belong runs deep. American nationalism never went beyond protectionism and trade wars. Trade wars and high tariffs on imports have been tried before and never good for the working class only good for the oligarchs, in retaining more of their profits, workers are going to suffer more of the burden in cuts, layoffs, company closings with no new avenues of employment on the horizon. On the other hand, for people to not vote for Harris, or stay home and not vote at all, they must have been so repulsed by Israel, less concerned about reproductive rights, more concerned about prices, rent, wages, interest, taxes, mortgages, loans, ---rage and discontent spent their individuality on Trump to punish the democrats.
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  9047.  @williamabbott9437  The way to correct the growth of an oligarchy forming out of a entrenched bureaucracy is to redraw the map of the US and reduce the number of states from 50 to 20. For example, three states draw water from the same source I would redraw that map into one state to level the uneven pattern of consumption of water and soil, vital resources. There are other ways to fix this problem but all of them require the American people take control of the government. Washington DC is a district, as such, it’s legal status is separated from the legal system of the US, similar to how the Vatican is a nation within a nation with its own laws, currency, the legal status of DC should change to the city of Washington, home of the national government versus its present status as home to an oligarchy and establishment siphoning the wealth of the general US economy. Further, the nation can be run without the Senate and the Supreme Court. To me these institutions are the arm of the oligarchy, get rid of both of them, leaving the House, the Congress and the White House. In need of radical reform are the military and law enforcement, nether are defense forces but are deterrent forces which presupposes a world of criminals for their existence. Anyone who has traveled outside and inside of the US knows the world and society is not filled with criminals. Criminals are man made. The State Department’s primary clients are criminal elements. A revolution is definitely required to abolish the criminal elements acting in the world economy. The triad between the State Dept, White House and Homeland Security currently dominates the political life of the US, they make the world the way they see or imagine the world should be according to them and the Oligarchy and they block any progress the American people might enjoy otherwise.
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  9071. The conservative agenda would end up turning society into a concentration camp. The American people would have to rise up and overthrow the Fortune 500 capitalist class to bring democracy back to America, is the only alternative. A war against the working class has been a constant feature of American capitalism since its turning points in 1963 and 1974. It went full throttle in 1980 ensnaring the working class with debt in order to position the whole working class in a place where utter dependency on a job was the sole function of life. Through the two market crashes land and capital, machinery, science and technology, concentrated into the hands of monopoly corporations vis-a-vis bankruptcies and liquidations. Conservatives made sure that bankruptcy laws were reformed as a means to shatter the middle class and introduced legislation for imminent property confiscation under rigorous drug laws Richard Nixon used to destroy the anti-war movement and criminalize millions. The Conservative Capitalist Agenda is a Doctrine and every conservative for it is doctrinaire, didactic, and spins off the Monroe Doctrine when it comes to their views on the world and humanity. With a good chunk of the working class cut off from production and a series of democratic and conservative governments legislating to free capital for the perfection of machinery and technology in the workplace and then create a new class of few technically oriented machine workers in the tech industry aiding monopoly capitalism, these become powerful forces against the working class; and are a constant dead weight on the limbs of working people in its struggle for existence with capitalism. Working people who have been made homeless, separated from home and family, cut off from employment, hounded by ordinances and laws, incarcerated, break down till they perish in numbers, are not given the right to exist in the conservative world. Science, technology and machinery in capitalism are the weapons in the war capitalists have against the working class.
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  9072. One reason the money lent to construction companies were all high end and the lack of capital invested in low end housing never happened. Second... Throwing people out of work is a ‘correction’, for capitalism is an irrationality of capitalism. A ‘correction’ is a misleading term for a recession, a recession is a term for unemployment rates measuring how much of the total workforce can find a job. This government’s statistics are inaccurate of the real rate of unemployment. In the investment cycle, recessions are longer than recoveries, and GDP falls short in the repayment of borrowed capital, largely spent on Ukraine and Israel...but when the economy contracts and people are laid off, the recoveries are not sufficient enough to lower the unemployment rate, more and more people are losing jobs...and recoveries are short ended. Another factor, is, the rate of exported capital in the manufacturing of commodities the American working class in the 80s had no political response to the export of capital. It completely went over the heads of the American people satisfying its insatiable appetite for surplus-value by means of cheap labor the American, all other western corporations followed suit, opened shop in Asia and China making unemployment a permanent feature of the US economy, this came in contrast to China, employing 700 million raised out of poverty to meet western demands for a highly effective labor-force less than what the corporation would pay in wages and salaries to the average American worker. There is so much more to this perplexing struggle...time is now for people to take a political stand against the irrational policies of capitalism.
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  9088. Thumbnail said Why China Looks Down on India and really the story is about a huge power struggle with China centered on Tibet. China's story is a remarkable story for humanity. Whereas other nations do not for some reason learn from each other to improve life China observes and learns and applies what other nations have done right to reach a higher stage of development. She has lifted 700 million people out of poverty. Eradicated illiteracy among men and women. People live longer lives there. That is the equivalent of the total US population by a factor of 3 to give you the enormity and magnitude of this economic system the Chinese call communism.  Whereas India has 3 out of 5 women who cannot read or write China has 1 out of 5 who cannot read or write and China compares to India in the sense that both nations lived for generations under a caste and peasant system of production under ruling dynasties for a thousand years before China became a socialist society is a remarkable story of achievement compared to the mortality, literacy, and life expectancy rates that take into account poverty as a catalyst since India became a capitalist economy are, frankly, abysmal. China has stated its aims. Its track record verifies its stated relationship to the world since it came out into the world stage, it will not bully and not be bullied and nations doing business with China do it voluntarily, their reasons have to do with going nowhere fast under a western paradigm.  What is being presented here is an attitude Hillary Clinton exhibited about China when she ran for president; 'the rise of China is a threat to US national security', she said the rise of China, as if to mean nations are to remain underdeveloped the position of a higher stage of development is a spot the US alone can occupy. Great arrogance coming from a white woman. But it is par for the course in the American economic system that red baiting fears are ginned up when the economic order of the ruling elites in the US is underdeveloped to China's economic model. All history is re-written to propagate Hillary's mythology and to believe in that myth is where the danger lies, it is never the war on Vietnam, or the war on Afghanistan, or the war on Syria, as if these countries had wars that internally developed...not at all, history in the attitude Hillary Clinton exhibits call all these American interventions the Vietnam War, or the Korean War. Korea on its own never had a war. America made war on Korea and is still at war with Korea the divided nation that country has become the eastern outpost version of Germany's Iron Curtain.
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  9094. Eric Trump is not wrong when he say 75 million people love and will miss Donald Trump. I disagree wth those 75 million Americans but I will not say these 75 million people are not a serious problem when the balance of the population wants to move in the opposite direction. A good 12 million of the 75 million are millionaire families and America has 12 million millionaires likely support Trump. There are 800 billionaires across the US among the 75 million Trump enthusiasts are likely Trump supporters. That leaves a balance of 63 million Trump supporters who are not millionaire and billionaire families but in some are are property owners whether of a business or home and these could anyone from ranch owners to suburban condo owners mixed in with the millionaires as employees are on the recievng end of the pressure to support Trump coming from their employers, like the Pillow Guy and his staff of 1,500 wage earners. We have millionare and billionaire families constitute the upper middle class and the middle class a number around 20 million and the balance 43 million are wage earners constitute the middle and lower social classes in support of Trump. Then the age factor in support or not of Trump among this 75 million Trump supporters is divided with the larger active group being millennials and the older and younger generation less supporive of Trump over his failures with the pandemic. Outside of this pro-Trump social force is the mainstream of society a balance of 260 million people non-Trump supporters. Pakman's assessment ought to be about how the 260 million people in their aim to overcome the virus and reset the economy are kept back by this pro-Trump social class's ideological positioning relative to the pandemic and anything scientific. Fighting the ideology they hold is more important than making a quasi-psychological assessment into the character of a leading pro-Trump supporter.
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  9099. My numbers not exact but the social configuration of how they fall is close to social reality. 64 million in the workforce earn minimum wage and less 20% of 100 million in the total workforce are union workers. This division comes in three separate class relationships American families seem unable to overcome, stuck generation after generation. The total US work force is separated by income and ownership of property along three tiers. 20 million union and middle class, 64 million on minimum wage and working class, the balance of 16 million plus working people earning below minimum wage are working poor, and in this way the division of labor conquers and subjugates individuals to its economic will and it is shaped by economic policy at the international level and domestic level by representatives in Washington who, in the main, seek to defend it in the name of freedom and democracy and even shore up the rigid demarcations brought about by conscious and unconscious, direct and indirect forms of racism, comes with a promise to defend property appeals to the middle class worker-owners but not to the working poor and minimum wage workers whose property is none to protect. With this message of leaving the middle class worker's property intact the eye is taken off,  of the injustices of the division of labor, devouring every last man, women and child into a living hell of a life without privilege, access and development, is skillfully resolved into a question of "protection" from elements out to destroy the US. The international concern of the rulers have to be made the concern of the workers ruled, is not to say,  that the workers ruled do not have concerns over the rules of work to come from the need to protect the property of other social classes abroad.
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  9112. Here’s my essay for people who like to read more than two lines. Merchants are lining up at the door for the Mug Shot to appear on their T-Shirts. The joke is on us, but at least the booking process of the former president took 30 minutes not a day. At the cost of omnipresent security services to protect this guy when he is not at home with his own security detail we got charged around 3 to 30 million for those 30 minutes not to mention the peripherals required. I doubt the GAO will publish its accounting on it. A better society would come from one change though; a newly elected president should be mug shotted on day 1 for crimes and infractions they will commit in the next four years of their term...they all do. If they are war-free the whole term expunge the charges and record. He/She goes home free. If guilty they can be escorted right from the White House at the end of their term and run for re-election from jail of stay there full sentence. If it was a crime to do war the whole time the war is going a president would be in Congress defending his war would be my way. If I were Speaker i would try to push through a constitutional amendment on declarations of war to be restored to the Congress as it was...and that would be the end of war presidents and profit wars of attrition. If the Rich and Powerful don’t like the draft, Trump case in point got out of the draft for Vietnam on a medical condition. Imagine Trump a Vietnam War Vet, would have done him good, he would have had a privileged position in the military, but parents of rich kids at the time did not want their kids go to war alongside the poor ones and die in battle. Pence takes this attitude to a higher level, he said in the Republican Debate of 2 days ago, that in foreign policy he will work with anyone to fight communism so that American kids do not have to do the fighting, hence we got Ukraine to do the fighting in a country Pence believes will resurrect communism in Russia. The way things are going I would not be surprised. Russians were better off when Russia was the USSR. I think every kid should do the military at least two years for national defense duty on all forms of disasters and there learn trade, business, skills, of an equivalent of 2, 4, and 6 years outside graduate school, if recruits so choose, and all curriculums in the military require employment and industrial safety and design to operate all facilities and infrastructure renewal that society uses on a daily basis
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  9122. Nature’s changes is imperceptible to the human eye, as a process of degrees and not immediate as man changing nature to suit man’s needs, and shape nature is immediate and perceptible to the human eye. But nature on its own goes without saying does change is not the point. Climatologist blame high temperatures but the reporter does not say the high temperatures are caused by industrial production and consumption, a process of interaction between man and nature. You can put solar panels and change zoning laws, ease the demand on water for electricity, but that is not where the problem begins. The point of consumption is not the starting point of the human activity causing climate change because both are simultaneously two separate processes in one, consumption is production, its by-product are CO2s and production is consumption, this activity uses natural resources such as water as an accessory in the process of extraction, same with large scale industrial farming, and drilling. The environmentalists do everything to avoid the elephant in the room the need for a national policies on the use of water, land and soil, they would rather dive into their technical brains than to deal with the politics of climate change and make drones to pollinate fields rather than the government invest in the cultivate bees to be released in the wild and stop the cause of their disappearance which lies in the production end of human activity. The production of drones requires material elements obtained through mining, an extraction process, causing climate change never enters the heads of environmentalists who are not real environmentalists. This is how illogical America’s environmentalism is? On the other extreme are the legislatures filled with religious people who pray rather than legislate; bury their heads in the sand from the problem to avoid using their legislative power to tell the industrial producers of food, oil and gas what they cannot do in their processes.
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  9123. Would you defend a constitution that violates the rights of its citizens is a question I like answered. Or a constitution that permits the killing of non-citizens? What strikes me is that there is not one single face that is not white in the Capitol Riot. This putsch was a middle class putsch reminds of the same putsch John Bolton said he organized and failed in Live Aid to Venezuelans on the border of Columbia and Venezuela billionaire Branson funded. That putsch thought they were going to incite a reaction from the Venezuelans but little did realize the lack of a reaction was key to its failure and thus, they pretended there was an enemy on the other side of the bridge, throwing firebombs at their own buses. There was an enemy watching the putsch participants and were probably scratching their heads at them. If there was a black man there in the Capitol where Hawley ran for his life that black face cannot be seen on camera or not caught on tape, and does not represent the majority of blacks in America. Besides there are more important things than this but I will say the committee did a very good job detailing the event and exposing the close relationship between Fox News and the White House. Murdoch is now upset that Trump used his media empire but it was the media empire that profited off of Trump. If the rioters are traitors the media is culpable of that treason under cuts the committee’s objectivity republicans used successfully as partisan politics...and so this will go down in history as a failure to slow down the death of the US as a world power the world can trust.
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  9142. I'd like to see Cenk, Crystal and Saagar, raise the question of what kind of society Americans want because it has been 163 years that the question of the will of the people in America has been deferred and distracted by all the periods of American history, by every president, and by every counter movement that came up to repress the will of the people when this question was on their minds, or when risen to a higher level than just swallowing the bitter pill democrats and republicans dished out. Whether that was the aftermath of the Civil War, to the Great Depression, the Vietnam War, to the present day with how we treat South America, always deferred and the capitalists remained in power for a little under two centuries, from the Civil War to now. What kind of society do you want America? Mexico has this same problem? Two centuries of two parties really one dominant class and one party with two faces. Do you want a society that meets your needs or the needs of the capitalists, because if you look at American history every single far left liberal and democrat managed to corrupt the People's will. Whenever the will of the people came to the foreground the capitalists still held power, even during FDR, we still had corporationsn and big banks, industrialists and robber barons, and capitalists controlling Washington DC., during the New Deal. It just baffles me that people want to get money out of politics but never tackle the classes of money and most likely still stay in power with Bernie as president. Older Americans like myself can see this but I do not see younger Americans deviating from the same patterns of the 20th century, they are probably just so fearful to be associated with communism that Bernie, Ocasio-Cortez, and others like them do not take a stand on eliminating money from politics...how do you expect to ever get money out of politics if you do not remove an economy that is built around money? Eventually, the power of money will undo whatever Bernie will do just like what FDR had accomplished was undone as soon as money came back into power in 1980 with Reagan. This is crazy cycle of insanity that Americans do over an over again and expect a different result each time they do find a progressive candidate, this will only demoralize the generation that comes after yourselves, your children in the near future. They will become despondent and demoralized, depressed people when they grow thinking things will never change and we may as well all be slaves is all you passing on to your children.
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  9144. Voter apathy enabled the 45 year long process of privatization of New Deal programs of the government. The population of 332 million with the right to vote don’t use it. The far right ensures they get their people in positions of power the left does not but relies on a progressive wing of a right wing party that fails them with false leads and broken promises. The average who do use their vote about a third of the total enable this duopoly representing different sections of a large social class of owners to jockey power between them. A great contest for the owners who among them get to rule the country and a great social experiment conducted on the total population has been the social history of this country for the last 50 years and technically going back to the Kennedy assassination. A history of incomplete social revolutions and a series of deferred imperatives crushing the aspirations, hopes and dreams, specifically of blacks who fought the struggle for civil equality, opportunity and independence, prove how unequal markets of buyers and sellers truly has been since 1865. The Supreme Court Decision to strike Roe v Wade is a direct blow to the southern black section of the working class because it is not a blow to a southern rich section of white ruling classes not infringed by the decision. The SCOTUS has made abortion a class issue; black buyers because it hurts them the most are unequal to white buyers and the sellers have been pushed far away that only a rich person can use the service is a legal method of changing the economy to produce inequality in society. The method is evil to say the least. So 162 million people who do not vote can break this duopoly! Question becomes what does this Left do to rally the ones who do not vote? Get all of them to be a dollar or broke and committed to the cause donor as a monthly a member of a party standing ready to assume power in the name of their membership. The Workers Party from which the right kind of candidates are offered in opposition to the right wing for all elections is close to what America needs but not exactly. Since America is a multicultural place consisting of traumatized immigrants in the working population the language of a third party must be all inclusive. All In and Nobody Out makes the old new again.
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  9157. I think the contradiction is that the Democrats are driven to lengthening the working day for Americans in order to compensate for all the workers laid off due to the increases in wealth accrued by CEOs in all of America’s vital industries and are now a political cartel exposed acting on their behalf. Blame the CEOs and you’ll have a revolution; blame a scapegoat and your’ll have a war. Democrats do not want a revolution. Prices of goods are decided by CEOs. Workers have no part of deciding what the manufacturers suggested retail prices ought to be, this in regard to inflation. Inflation is not an object, its a small clique of employers, who decide price and use prices as a means of coercing workers to voluntarily work more hours, especially in places where people are paid by the hour, more hours of work increases the company’s wealth, more volume of goods are made, etc. This puts all the CEOs on a track to get the government to open more markets because of this higher volume and their cost is less for the CEOs making them, the profit is higher, and making them is even cheaper when not in a place where wages are high; but the contradiction is that these CEO actions lengthens the hours people have to work to keep up with the cost of expenses (prices going up). If technology and science can raise output and lengthen hours of work it can also shorten hours of work and bring prices down being cheaper per unit made. If workers acted on this side of the contradiction the propaganda of blame your poverty on someone else will have no effect on the minds of the working people; they could make some real changes taking collective ownership of technology and science.
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  9174. Deep partisan divides, you should attend Congress when it is in session and watch from the upper tier the democrats and the republicans interact. You'd be shocked! The democrats are sticking to their guns and principals and the republicans sneer, grunt, mock, irritate, verbally accost short of spitting, sneering at the democrats and it gets worse if the democrat who has the floor is black or brown. When republicans have the floor they invent things in defense of Trump and the democrats do not engage. They are Trump loyalists in the process of disintegration. The Congress is so divided by race. Republicans knowing they are shrinking minority and America has changed so much in so quick a time that this white minority feels they are on their last dying breath are desperately clinging to life! The special interest they have come to represent won't set them free off the leash. Race is really the big feature in Congress. The race relation inside Congress between white old and all male republicans and a variety of young democrats is not the same dynamic of inequality in society but it does reflect it. Outside of Congress noting a class system in society between who does the work and who does not is a revelation. Quite an eyeopening experience. CSPAN does no justice in showing the Public the interaction between republicans and democrats, the gestures and body language, the roaring grunts that sounded like a dying animal in a jungle coming from a group of old white men on the floor. Pelosi gesturing her fellow democrats remain quite or neutral. If Americans saw this of Congress they would be a hell of alot less passive about politics. I bet the people who sat out the last election will come out and decimate Trump. I am hoping this group gets electrified by Bernie.
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  9176. Nicki Haley just walked past Picasso's Guernica to the podium to speak in the clip shown on DN. How ironic. www.pablopicasso.org 'Guernica' was painted by the Cubist Spanish painter, Pablo Picasso in 1937. The title 'Guernica' refers to the city that was bombed by Nazi planes during the Spanish Civil War. The painting depicts the horrors of war and as a result, has come to be an anti-war symbol and a reminder of the tragedies of war. The Icelandic Women's Rights Association said the pay equity law is first of its kind. Under the law companies employing 25 or more workers will have to prove to the government they are paying men and women equal salaries or face penalties. This is a concrete example of a positive law most Americans see as a socialism. To Icelandic women its basic common sense socialism or not. They are not hung up on the abstractions made of the pay equity law.  An example of a government that is not Washington is a government that passes laws to ensure worker safety and security and positive personal life development. You know, Trump can take credit for any of the actions in the economy that are positive and forget entirely the ones that negative. I only wish the people running the economy understand they are the civil society Trump is profoundly against as an individual capitalist himself. He objectifies civil society which means people are object related to him by what they own or possess not by the qualities of their being. So you are not going to get a lot of very bright minds hovering around Trump. Most of his cabinet have not appeared anywhere and the ones we see daily speak with a cracked lifeless monotony that people just turn off the sound. He is there to figure it out all himself as president. Take credit when the economy succeeds and be silent when it fails. Chance and causality is the rule of the jungle of capitalism. He is social in the object world and anti-social in the subject world. There is no other self he can be like an actor can assume the life of another person and be incredible every night on a Broadway stage and leave as himself afterwards feeling an emptiness of self. That is not Trump. Trump is all object personification, a man of the street who never fought a street fight. Just plays the heads of his unsuspecting rural clique who go with him as long as free trade extends beyond America's borders.
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  9198. Big Thieves rob from the smaller thieves and accumulate a bigger piece of the pie. The small thieves rob from each other and have no share of the economic pie is the real condition we see around us. People are fighting over crumbs. The excess through an operation that consolidates technology and science into workplaces as a means to extract overtime from workers, prolonging the working day, producing surpluses, is a system on autopilot. Workers are producing surpluses that are used against the workers and the workers emulate the surpluses accumulated by people who never worked a day in their life is the strange and bizarre effect on the consciousness of the human mind on the nature of the capitalist system. The news is the enemy of the people. Listen close to the report on Ireland’s protests. The narration uses extreme right wing ideology not to analyze it as a social problem but as a motive protesters are too stupid to see through the far right as false thinking and had sprung into action to become racists all at once. The media is the friend of politicians and the politicians have a real disdain for the people, especially those who protest the crime of an immigrant not get a free ticket from being punished...the Irish working class are treated with less dignity and to be called the bigots by people who let this guy walk free is a real indication they are the enemy of the people! The racists in this crime is the racism of the establishment and how it sees the crime is broadcasted on all the establishment news syndicates and monopolies.
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  9205. The D-Day generation had a life way better than their children. Prosperity, but not for all. A color line was still deeply rooted in American life, but I’d put the start of the epoch of America’s decline on the Vietnam War. Rosie was riveting the battleships and armaments holding down the job until Johnny came back home. To do their part grandmas and pas were in civil defense. All the little rascals of that time were members of Boy Scouts, teenagers working with the CCC (Conservation Civilian Corp), apprentice programs, making all those small cement bridges across the US dated in the 1940s on them are still around today, reinforced with metal rail. Everyone rationed and tin was collected. Raimo’s junk yard is a holdover of the days when America’s industrial base needed metal. Waiting for the WWII Veterans to come home and reoccupy the jobs that came about at that time were the assigned roles of a modern civilization, thinkers and planners and the GI Bill, workers and the super amount of jobs open for managers, lawyers, doctors, teachers, Hollywood screen legends needed to filled with talent, the Arts and Sciences, America was just starting to become a real nation coming into its own came to a halt in the 70s. A decade later one out of two divided countries were reunified but it came at the price of a sharp decline in lifestyle, health, mortality, and general well being for generations following the baby boomers. The threats got bigger as a the nation became weaker that now the illusion broadcasted to the nation is the notion that any power can run roughshod over America and it would not even know it, is our present-day danger. Far from it. If Americans are poor the rest of the world’s population is even poorer. What goes down here economically goes down tenfold in another country draws the attention of the world to an America that is too weak to handle its own problems much less others.
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  9222. A key concept is surplus-value...(take Elon Musk for example, a reference only here used as figurative to illustrate the calculus) the unit price of making a Tesla car is reduced from 16 hours to 14 hours, the difference of 2 hours equals new surplus value for the personal consumption of Elon Musk. When you consider the fact that society is a collection of private capitals with corresponding industries doing the same thing as Elon Musk that is a huge number of workers taken out of production. For them the society that says survival is your own responsibility the layoffs are a serious problem. Short of a revolution these people hope their vote will change things around so they can get back into production. Sadly that is not going to happen. Expect more rounds of layoffs as AI takes root in the industries that normally are automated and use less people for the work to be carried on and the industries that need people to carry out their work are not hiring. Nobody but the department of labor and its unemployment compensation will pick up the slack and at expiration it’s a mortal leap for millions of people. So, relative surplus-value is the key theory to understand competition and establish real clarity, competition is misunderstood without knowing the concept of surplus-value, and where it comes from, why it acts as a coercive law on people like Elon Musk. Make them do things beyond dignity and respect to meet this end. Corporations are people, said Romney but not people like us, they use the surplus-value for the Self while the surplus originates from society and is not being used for the Society is the distinguishing feature. Competition is an important mechanism in which to gain more surplus-value. For reasons of a larger share of the market and to create a new social average is why the working time to make a car, a house, or any product happens and more automation in the name of efficiency encourages owners to prolong working time beyond what is necessary the human body can tolerate brings on a population decline with social consequences. A big dunk for the society as a whole into a rut so deep it has to be heaved from the rear with massive doses of capital is the Biden solution never once thinking it can get that massive infusion of excess capital from Elon Musk and Co. instead of borrowing it and printing it.
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  9232. I do not think the collapse will be global, that implies the entire world will go under and that is not the reality. Half the world will go under, that half that is the West. The West that does not have its own supply chain and a weak manufacturing capacity will go under. The other half of the world that built up its supply chain a n d industrial capacity will thrive. The workers in the West will have to copy the progress workers made in the East if they are ever to reach a stage of manufacturing made completely autonomous the East already has in position for itself, i.e., Robotic Factories. The workers are freed from factory work brings about a qualitative change in life, people put to use in other areas for the society to increase its self-reproducing capacity. The West could have been in this position 50 years ago had workers challenged the Reagan-Thatcher Establishment and not permitted the wealth of its produce be spent on war and luxury consumption for the rich. We mustn’t blame other countries for spending their savings on industrial progress. Workers in the West were deliberately misled to permit a private appropriation of social production. Now Workers in the West can’t reach the level of industrial functioning of the East who are fast creating a classless society of general affluence from its benefits,---without the overthrow of the Rich and the whole capitalist system. Seems to me what workers need in the West to get some skin in the game is not a tariff war and another Hoover, they need a revolution!
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  9247. I suppose any move to the capitalist class that has the desired effect of a rise in profits...will do...its base level... standard operating procedure for the republicans, not to tax the super rich and international corporations. As taboo refusal to tax the Capitalist Class extends in the democratic party deeply. Leading to your demise as a politician if you violate that oath. However, how historical materialism understands production is very different from the way the capitalist class understands production. That’s the beauty of this particular branch of economics. HM separates historiography from actual economics. You can spend forever analyzing prices and profits and get no closer to the truth about what happens under the same conditions to the commodity that is not a thing. Laws of the market are not compatible with the laws of production and this is why capitalism is constantly running on the edge of crisis, day and day out, its crisis magnifies and the participants of capitalism are unaware of the long term effects of increasing the productiveness of labor. Marx wasn’t the only one aware of this internal conflict the Classical Economists were aware of it too. Problem was like many today, Ricardo, Smith, etc., could not untangle themselves from the concept of labor and the commodity labor-power itself. Mainstream as pure disinformation will never talk about prices and profits, resulting from changes in technology in production, and how it effects the working capacity of a working class! I
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  9249. First of all, look at his audience in Davos, bankers. Big business in America has shut out the State from any influence on the development of its property since the 1970's. Gradually the owners of big business by means of tax cuts bought the State, which has fallen entirely into their hands through the national debt. The State is now theirs and the national debt is the Public's burden to bear describes the economic reality in the US. Now we have a situation where big industry and universal competition is about pure corporate movable property and capital invested in manufacture around the world. A given multinational corporation employs an average 5 million people worldwide, its tax benefit may not be higher than the rate of exploitation of labor it achieves somewhere else year after year. It may be harmful to itself in its quest for new markets to divest and from the standpoint of big industry, Koch et all, giving them the money that would otherwise go to the government for essential services, is likely to be added into the already existing diversified accounts corporations hold in the financial world. Third, the part of capital once used to re-invest back into factories in America's heyday are gone. Fourth because wages in value have sunk below levels of survival in America they would have to rise close or cut into profits to offset the debasement of its currency. Fifth, the world has other avenues for economic growth that bank and industrial capital must figure how they can profit from the new conditions of the world market. If anything the world market is carved up already with many state-capitals, universal competition, and much of America's share has been lost. The last frontier American capitalism lost was China .
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  9264. Under the RLA the government has a right to put workers back to work cancels the right of workers to strike. Clever legal maneuvering. What I see going on here from an economic point of view is that the commodity of the workers, their labor-power, has a price before it is a use-value, or put to use by its buyer is one observation. The worker’s commodity is a peculiar one because it becomes a use-value only after the contract between buyer and seller has expired. A worker is useful when not employed and during employment the workers become vital to the bosses as a value-producing asset. All workers face the same economic situation that their commodity is determined before their labor-power passes over to the hands of the buyer. Second observation: This relation is built into the very structure of a capitalist society, in other words, the set-up of the economy is built on a pre-determined price, that the parties, labor and bosses, know before hand the price of that labor-power in negotiations. The existence of workers as a use-value and the same workers as an asset to the company does not coincide in time. That is not the case for the bosses considered by society and the government as an asset and use-value at the same time and at all times. This relation is closer to that between a person who rents a condo. The use of the condo is sold to the user for a month, its only after you’ve lived in the condo for a month that it becomes a use-value and the rent is due, after you used it up. So it is the same with the commodity labor-power. Labor-power is paid only after it has been used is the rule. Workers advance their labor-power the use of their commodity to the bosses and permits its consumption by the buyer, in other words, a credit, before receiving payment. That the workers constantly through renewed contract negotiations between bosses and unions is no empty delusion when a crisis is at hand. The argument they make in the video about the politicians, right and left, is that the political Right and Left perpetuate the above- social relationship I explained is what distinguishes Marxists as empirical social scientists from the ideology of socialists as two different brands. It is also why the rank and file workers needs their own national, preferably, international association, a league, apart from the unions and the bosses.
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  9275.  @revgenahopper3988  Yes, its pretty bad. Patriarchy is a much older form of oppression than capitalism. Unimaginable sufferings of women and girls through the ages, as the property of husbands and fathers. Puts men in a bad spot too, the guy who can't truly be a father or a son to a father and mother without social rules dictating the norms of behavior. People forget that capitalism is a social system of exchange of equivalents, and out of equivalents exchanging for each other comes a surplus-value; an inequality comes out equality is the paradox that perplexes people brings them into denial there is stark inequality when the surface of society is nothing but the exchange of equal things. Its when billions of unit-values are changing hands. This would happen anyway, but when money is involved in the transactions it is no longer an exchange between one useful thing for another useful thing and their amounts decided by their owners; no my dear, money makes it an exchange between one thing acting as a value through the use-value of another thing. Apply this principal to the various actions from individual, town, city, nation and you get eye-opening results of the horrors of inequalty are the criminalities of money using other things as a value for itself and producing great wealth from that exchange.  The real use of money is to ensure you have what capital needs and money has what you need, its exchangeability, to buy enough subsistence and survival, fulfill our need, when that fails the social order is threatened. In this way, a population is free and this freedom is mistook as a poltical right of liberty by the population against masks at the present time when it is really a condition for the exchange of equivalents to take place and that's capitalism concealing patriarchy and patriarchy concealing racism.
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  9284. Not a good scenario for many Americans this coming year. I know the reports are all showing positive gains for many economies. Japan the US, etc., but those numbers reflect one side of a double economy. Not a good year for first time home buyers who should be in a house of their own by age 30 are still living at home with the aging parents is a crisis, in the housing sector. The national reports call this a shortage of housing but local news reports this housing shortage as a son murders his parents living in the same home...in Brooklyn or in Louisiana, anywhere. The shortage has real life consequences traceable to the Federal Reserve Board and its interest rates too high for the average person to get a home loan and move out from their parents home. Not a good sign as not one single senator in Congress would live in their parent’s home without feeling humiliated enough to blame them for giving birth to a failure for not holding a job and getting your own house. Total humiliation in a person has a bad turn out. The national news say consumers are paying less for gas but more for rent, goods, and food and many corporations are letting go huge amounts of workers. But if you are a consumer today and you lose your job tomorrow and the government shuts down the bills keep coming in no matter what your crisis is. Really not a good time for at least a third of the country. To make matters worse you own government ends up responsible for the death of your child because the links between the Middle East and American citizens are now blood ties, your child was at the wrong place at the wrong time, in a war zone your government condones and was in the right place at the right time visiting family as an American. Does not look good for the State Department, where will their allegiance be with Israel or with Americans? If it were me I would vote a Third Party. America has too much junk in the trunk.
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  9288. NATO from its very beginnings was never an independent institution. NATO was always our (USA) man in Europe. It came into being as part of the many nations America used to surround and contain the Soviet Union. It continues as an extension of the US. People born in the 50s should know this. Born in the 60s should know this. Born in the 70s people forgot this. Born in the 80s people were told a lie about NATO and believe the lie. When Ronald Reagan fired the air traffic controllers in 1980 he was signaling to all the CEOs of multinational corporations that in a war against employees the government will side with the employers or not side at all. Employers took that signal and ran with it unleashing brutal assault on American workers. The 75 year long dream that started with the GI Bill and gave workers a home, car, family and loads of fun and education at a modest price was over. During this time it appeared there was no such thing as a class struggle when America was in direct competition with the Soviet Union. American workers were better off that even mentioning the term was frowned on but all that has changed and there beneath the surface of a working economic system are virtual battles, war zones, fatalities, in every workplace in America, a class struggle never left and we can see how through it social progress is made in America’s failing economic system. Class struggle, the war between employers and employees, was quietly moving around beneath the surface for 75 years. Nobody questioned NATO real reason for existence, but that struggle has surfaced with all the indignities the working class has been enduring from this insulting rich arrogant and immature elite, the economy was made too thin to hold up NATO and the Military, multinationals and banks, all grew to scale unmanageable for us, too big to fail, to not see a collapse of American society is imminent the second one of them goes under. Under testimony to the Congress n the 70s the corporations acknowledged the US economy and the US Monetary System was going to fall and the working class would be on the receiving end of the fall. With that testimony and full knowledge of the dire situation of the US economy and world monetary system the Democrats and Republicans chose to side with the employers in what was to become a war on America’s working class, when they could have taken the Keynesian route, and ordered industry, big corporations, banks, to invest in American workers. Instead they chose to spend tax dollars on foreign intervention and expansion. Virtually pissing good money away in order that the likes of a small minority of people in power can have the satisfaction a doctrine they concocted would be implemented as gospel is the part that makes this all the more egoistic.
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  9304. The world rapidly moves into a multipolar world of trade and commerce which entails the end of the American empire. At least Vietnam had a reason for the war even if it was an immoral war. Wars since then have had no good reason to be wars. In the spectrum the most left wing president in the history of the US was FDR and the most right wing was Ronald Reagan. In Russia, Gorbachev was giving the rich title to Russian assets and gave Ukraine as a concession to the west with the promise from Bush Sr., NATO would not expand. Yet the enemies of Gorbachev were charged as right wingers because they wanted to give no concessions to the west and keep Russian assets in the hands of the State. A restoration of capitalism was going on in Russia was the real deal. During this time nobody demanded justice for the poor, underprivileged, that it became easy to charge the left as conservatives and the establishment evil, this is the start of the end. Elites will never get the full cooperation of labor is a strain that leads the decline of capitalism in general. By now capitalism encircles the globe transforming the world population into proletarians. Day workers and migrants in the millions always on the move furnishing the bodily material for the cheapest labor money can buy. Old men in succession began dropping off like flies, Breshnev, Andropov, Chernenko, Gorbachev, with the USSR gone . Only one empire remained and the unipolar world of the US empire unfolds its own weaknesses in other nations. Europe and east Europe, 2 years after Shevardnadze quit in 1991, the west remained on edge. Chernobyl was leaked by a Soviet engineer, Vladimir Suchenenko, gave the Gorbachevistas in the Kremlin control over material sensitive to the military, the meltdown was a failure of the military. Radio Moscow was Reagan’s favorite channel reporting the progress of the withering away of the State in Russia and the Democrats sign away in NAFTA working class industry and jobs never to return again. After 9/11, the prison network expands is a signature weakness not aware of itself as a weakness.
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  9315. GM could never get away with this in France or Britain. Factory acts in the 1850's were bold measures preventing abuse to the working population. The working population in 1850's America had no legal limit of the working day for two generations the working day was decided by strikes and labor struggles until it became law in 1938! A three tier labor hierarchy, top at $29 an hour, middle at $17 to 25, temps at $15... create three reasons for the strike. This is a GM model for labor organization i n the factory. The jobs corresponding to the pay scale are not all identical jobs to each other, there are differences in the work in the factory. The work is modeled after the given technology used to complete a stage in the makng of a car, that a worker is assembling a part of a car. Anyone able enough can do the work with some immediate training on the automation is the type of work generated by the technology in the plant. But the hieararchy of wages and work divisions is a GM form of management of a GM labor process. A particular type of management of which the larger share of the market for GM cars and trucks proves is a success for GM profits. What makes it work? The same duration of working hours for less the cost to GM. Passing the cost of healthcare insurance for workers to the union and raising worker productivity with machinery and technology in the plant increases the volume of product at a lesser cost than previously for GM, increases its profits. A healthy enrichment I would say for stock holders. We are witnessing a paradox in situations leading to a worse situation coming from the increasing over reliance on automation and technology in the labor-process. Workers are less enriched by its introduction to production that they become materially deprived from it. When it should be decreasing their work time it is increasing it into overtime work, doubling the value output of one shift and trebling the quantity of product without violating human endurance. Work intensity increases taking more energy from you and more money offered creates the option for the worker, may as well be working than hanging out at home doing nothing, that you begin using your free time to stay on top of the work expected of you, all those hours add up for employers. The overtime you are paid is the rate of overtime after the nomimal wage of an eight hour day. GM comes up against a physical limit of endurance of the workers to work beyond what is necessary for their recuperation and devises a plan to break up plant operations into its component functions and fit people into that labor-process with three shifts to create a perpetual process of production of 24 hours. To be fair to GM, Congress has not changed the 8 hour day based on advances in technology in the workplace. GM could have kept the same rate of pay for its workers and make three shifts of 4 hours relative to the number of cars and trucks it produces. Congress had not asserted itself on a presenting public health issue that so many workers nationally would present a public health risk in their condition as having no access to health care.
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  9352. How did a small country like Myanmar, formerly called Burma, made by the British into a province of India in the 1880s, acquire such a big military? British exported crude oil from Burma to European markets in this time period. The British capitalists were of mind to extract oil and mineral wealth from Burma. The British ranshackled the country and demolished all its indigenous and natural industries. GDP became controlled by the British. Produce oil and you end up with a British military command life regulated by hierarchy. The military relates to human beings through machines because it cannot relate to itself as a human being. The combustible engine embodied in planes, ships, bombs, submarines, that never ends distances human emotions the further away from being one becomes, the military armour humans wear show no trace of a human being in the military brain! This country was a trade route between India and China, ---a mere child. The British did all the support, maintenance and repair work of the whole military apparatus to parent this child. Now the military has taken the country dominating GDP,---what will it do with it? What is its economic program to keep all this high maintenance paid for? A is for Austerity, not progress but cuts and unemployment pays for big military industrial complexes the world now has three big ones, each doing the same dirty deeds, to pay for in cuts and unemployment. And for what? if Myanmar is a country just beginning to find its own essential independence with its first civilian president, so what? Why should a miliary fear it and lock up its leader? Because they are them, the same, identical but opposing entities,--- competing elites within the same identity or soul. Not inter-rivals but intra-rivals of the elite social classes taking the majority of the mass of people and their bitterness for a ride. Cultivating false hopes and promises from a weary, tired, public, for votes they will later betray. Navalny is a Putin and a Suu Kyi is a Navalny like Trump and Johnson are all Navalnys
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  9353. West Virginia coal country is a classic case of an industrial economy that is no more and the region's job loss...comes with the disappearance of coal production by 80% of what it used to be in WWII. Industrial capacity in the US continued to rise until it began its fall at the start of the resignation of Richard Nixon from the date of the New Deal when government marshalled all industries for the war effort. Coal country was all soot and mine ash falling from the sky. White clothing was never worn and people stayed indoors as much as possible. Black Lung Disease was the fatal curse of the coal miner and when you compare how other coal producers have made mining safer for mineworkers, coal country in West Virginia was not among them. Other mining industries have done way more than US mining companies to make mining safe from black lung but it is the highest fatality occupation next to trucking. So what happened? Capital took flight. Corporations began making their product in foreign countries leaving American labor to find employment in the service economy. The sociological ramifications of the flight of capital are enormous and felt by a reaction from America's middle class of the tendency of monopolies dominating most markets. Storm clouds were gathering. A general wage stagnation coinciding with a swift accumulation of capital began the date Clinton signed NAFTA. The 90s is history now. Easier to see it from a distance that periods of prosperity are accompanied by war for which republicans pursue and in periods of recession republicans pursue austerity, cuts and unemployment. None of them voted for the American Rescue Bill but this time the rescue plan will be paid for by the rich. We are not out of the woods yet because the US economy is too tied into the world economy for the mass of humanity to be sick with COVID variants. Democrats want to stay in power and that can only happen by regaining the confidence and trust of the voters. Going big is to show government is a lever to raise people out of poverty. If their plan fails the country is looking at throwing its vote to the most anti-establishment candidate known yet. But from the Trump experience we've learned that playng the angry guy is not enough to remove the failed establishment from power. It'll be someone revolutionary and universal because their message will hit home to all that the flawed opposition parties of the establishment are no longer relevant...time goes forward...
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  9363. History is still in 2017 a history of the ruling classes. Expropriation or dispossession of the many by the few is the story of mankind before recorded. This social history is brought to focus by archeology. But the social history that tells the story of dispossession of a few (a handful of multinational corporations) by means of the many is the story of mankind in recorded history since the first industrial revolution. The many (us) are (pawns) absorbed into the corporations or government that we have become the means a few giants can dispossess each of their property and thus accumulate more. Therefore, everything we read and write is not the story of the absorbed masses used as combatants to destroy another competing capital (oligarch). Ruling class history is the acquisition of property that controls the economic life of a people in individual countries. The social history that brought about this conscious attitude that the only property worth possessing is property that dominates people and at the same time leads to accumulation of capital is a one to many relationship. Each corporation strives to attain lower costs and has it own legion of workers multiplied by the thousands who serve as a productive power house in which to destabilize a competing corporation regardless of origin of country. To many the capitalism described above is not a system but a consequence of a series of transactions and , therefore, a just and harmless endeavor that each country has a right to conduct its business in any market in the world. These people do not see a difference in productive consumption (reality) which is a historical category and the consumption of production (illusory) which is a historically specific category. But the Pentagon does understand the difference, the working masses do not, is our current dilemma with respect to a humanity guided by individual free will and purpose. Any news outlet that does not focus human relationships on this historical premise is 100% junk propaganda in my opinion.
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  9364. In a social system designed for people the lost luggage would be sent to a clearing house for distribution to places like Good Will store. People can buy what they need cheap and the material wealth gets used not thrown out or sent into indefinite exile. Lost luggage owners compensated for their loss. In a social system designed for money and goods and services meant to be exchanged planning at the national level is impermissible to a market system of exchange. Society as a whole is forbidden to take a role in solving huge problems in a market system. Society is punished when it tries. Taught and told never to use its mighty social power as a collective power. Society would get in the way of the market system. The market system deals with natural disasters, lost luggage, gun violence, crime, political corruption, pandemics, market crashes, recessions, inflations, stagnation and depressions, wars, all the ills in society at present, in an individual way between small property owners and individual companies. Companies who must balance the service against their profit at all times or die. Social problems and social conflicts are too big for the private market place to handle and the individual companies in society run away, close stores, hide, are scared, chicken, or swing the opposite way, give back, try heroics, even cause mischief. Populations bury their heads in the sand as individual entities cannot cope, deal or handle the conflicts, crisis and contradictions, run to the government for help on an never-ending basis usurping the total economic surplus that when we really need it the problems too big to be handled by a market system the economic surplus has dried out. This is ultimate stupidity of a market system that will destroy America if society does nothing about it the way the government does nothing about it. Society has a role to play and and a valid place from which to solve the general crisis government and private companies cannot fix, incapable of fixing, crisis too large reforms proposed over and over again cannot fix! Society can fix the general crisis in a month. If society can fix the crisis why do we need government or private industry is why society is constantly held in a state of need and desperation, hobbling on one leg, injured, to prevent its collective power from taking a role finally freeing humanity from the curse of the ages.
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  9367. The Border Bill passed in the Senate is a middle finger for people who need the assistance in the US more than Ukraine should be supported because national interests depends on a free Europe. Europe is free as it wants to be and it can be freer by diplomatic means but war profits are lucrative and Senate members are making huge profits the more the war extends, despite universal European consternation against it. To the person living day to day on a wage, the Bill is a flat out rejection that their condition in society does not matter to the Senate, i would hope the republicans in the House oppose the Bill, and take out the portion funding Ukraine and Israel as a pre-condition, just do the Border piece. Bear in mind what Congress does on the southern border it will have to do the same thing on the northern border or there isn’t a point to the money spent if one border is left open and another is closed. Migrants always find a way. So if it were me I’d use more government intervention with commerce and trade and call it the best border security bill on earth. Nobody illegally enters that way. The Canadians will insist the best border security is more commerce and trade and they are not wrong. We already do a ton of business with Mexico. The flow of products is enormous and stopping the flow of goods harms working Americans who pay higher prices for the scarcity that did not have to happen! The Elites of the both parties in the Senate are not representative of the American people, however, old and feeble, they have more to conserve, whereas, the lower house is more reflective of millions in districts that have not and could use $70 billion. Many of you are hard up about more government, citing all the layers of endless bureaucracies, fees, petty rules and regs and what-not,--so recognize the bureaucracy of the Cold War era cannot do what the society wants it to do and junk it, period. Let the new technology do the work.
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  9368. It has nothing to do with stupidity and everything to do with evangelical christianity, or Creationism. They are not stupid people. They were very planned and methodical in their capture of government. Americans are now a subjugated people in the states they dominate. They performed a coup dé état that was slow and gradual over the years. When enough of them made it into government they became what constitutes a social class of christian capitalists (Amway, etc.). Pyramid schemes as you might heard of before was their business plan in the early years and putting into the hands of unsuspecting Americans their source of funding, ---profits from the sale of Amway, Mary Kay, products. Convention meetings in Vegas and other venues is where they held annual profit rallies for the corporation rewarding people moving up the pyramid. Raising the capital to get elected, changing election laws to stay elected, ruling society through material, spiritual, legal, political and social, force. That is not stupidity. it’s a very well thought out successful and calculated plan for conquering the world. They targeted people whose incomes was never enough. The “never enough” crowd can be a powerful social force when glued together into a pyramid structure containing them. They are brainwashed people. Fast forward 30 years and the government is 7/10th occupied by Israel loving evangelical christians. The first genocide under their watch is the genocide against the Palestinians is no coincidence. If Americans want their freedoms Americans have no other alternative but to win power. Evangelism appears over the centuries in various forms. It dates back to the early Roman christians who suffered so much the second coming of Christ became a religion for them. Evangelism has a despicable history from the 15th century going forward, more criminal and genocidal than Hitler, Stalin, Mao put together, the most deadliest of all homosapiens on earth are christians, that in every likelihood the extinction of the human race would be their doing. Not knowing your enemy is stupid. Not trying to insult readers of this personally. It is vital to orient people on how to start thinking about these people and their methods of subjugation. Creationists are infamous for denial of empirical truth and objective realities. You need to know who they are? What jobs do they hold in government that control our lives? Questions to start thinking about NOW not tomorrow. Tomorrow is too late.
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  9369. All National Security Inc. Security companies hire out security guards to who ever pays the most. They are mercenaries for profit in many cases when they exchange money to meet a political need of someone else, a third party. If employers want to continue hiring security firms then they will never find workers to hire. Workers are not gong to be treated this way. Take your job and shove it! People no matter how poor or desperate still have dignity, so close to death under normal circumstances, nothing to lose is the fate of the masses, resistance to fascism makes death honorable and victory sweet. Cease hiring security firms and drug testing abusing, controlling, tediously scrutinizing people and you'll find loyal workers. Employers are not economists or sociologists their thinking is cunning as deep as their pockets. If I am oligarch worth 2 billion and I do not like a certain president and wanted that president out of the way of my projects or intentions to make a killing in his country, no matter what country they are president of, I can approach a security firm and ask if they would take that assignment, and since they are covert military trained security firms catching them is going to be difficult for the authorities to do. No money trail paid in cash $1 million. Just don't get captured Trump does not like people who get caught. He'll never hire you if he ever needs you. Truly, we have become a F'd up sloppy fascist society. America is a fascist country ruled by fascists and the people standing around watching are the same as the jews who willingly got on the trains to concentration camps never putting up a fight. Apathetic, don't know what to do type of people who look like deer staring into the headlights of your car at night. Warsaw Ghettos Jews did fight to their credit and example, they never surrendered they died honorably. Cops, security guards, military men are the people who use us to go against people who fight fascism. How wrong we are to listen to them. All the security firms are competing for dollars and are all from one quarter or another man-made mercenaries armies formed in the military and law enforcement. If they were not they would not be international and conspiratorial by nature linked to assassinations.
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  9371. 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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  9378. The New Orleans Chiefs in charge of the investigation define terrorism as 1., ...”hell bent on destruction.”, and 2., as “violent extremism”. These are vague and abstract definitions. Terrorism is violence with a political aim to it and extremism can be anything. The Chiefs never mentioned the perpetrators were political identified for the Public unless they are keeping something from us, we don’t know, is the main concern here. Neither of these bozos had a political aim or purpose motivating their attacks. For one of them it was all personal. The other we are still waiting for the investigation to tell us more about the Las Vegas nihilist. What we do know is two Alumni and one active service member are of the US military, they became all that they can be, are not the only ones who are shaped by the US military. The new recruitment campaign ad says, “Marines are born to be a marine”. A marine even before you were an infant out of the womb of your mother. The US Military believes violence is not a learned skill though they teach you how to be violent when necessary and alert at all times, they believe the violence you were born has to get shaped, fitted, indoctrinated, molded and trained to conform to a hierarchical social structure of the military and society. Americans go into the military all bright eyed ambitious and bushy tailed and come out of the military a shrunken human being only to have you labeled as hell bent on destruction. Vey much the way jobs are allocated and apportioned to members of society through a market. You go into it fresh and come out after 45 years of chance and causality that you find a buyer a broken human being.
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  9383. @Political Economy,--- Well, of all people you should know profits, interests, rent, wages, are forms of the social surplus...historically specific social forms that have corresponding social classes representing these economic forms would be the general outline of the theory. The forms of the content are not immutable. What I like about Marxists that Libertarians refuse to accept as fact, if there are any of genuine persuasion is the emphasis given by Marxists to production. Production has certain laws of its own and these laws are incompatible with the law of the market place Libertarians deify. So it makes for some good fighting. How, in effect, blind to the effect of a rise in profits desirable to the entire capitalist class, as it is desirable to the working class, are unbeknownst to employer and employee, detrimental to both social classes, is the difference between the concept of labor, one lives to work, and what the commodity labor-power performs for the capitalist class from the first day on the job in the creation of surplus-value. Then to not understand that corporations become giants through the value changes in production and through surplus-value more can be employed than the average small producer. Smaller producers have two choices to work from the shrinking pool of labor, the larger pool of labor usurped by larger capitals, who now have to hire below the average, offer a shit wage, or cut their surplus-value by selling under, or sell with no return at all. Big social ramifications when the rules of the free market clash with the rules of production. A simple change in production of the number of workers raises productivity and quantity turns into quality, capitals vary individually in their economic composition, but as a social whole they average out to a new higher standard of consumption of a shrinking number of capitalists, and a never-ending thirst for labor-power, a ferocious appetite, for the destruction of all prior existing economic formations for the creation of labor-markets and commodity markets.
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  9393. Iran is what Russia was in the early 1900s. The Tsar and Duma in conflict about which institution was the legitimate ruler of society laid the groundwork for the Russian Revolution is the same conflict between the Supreme Leader of Iran and the President of the Political Establishment. Iran’s Supreme Leader is a king. Kings are kings because other people in the court of the King, see themselves as subjects to the king. People are not born by nature subjects to a king, there is not a DNA sequence in humans that makes them subjects; it’s all mental, they have to believe a king is king to believe themselves as subjects. And once you are subject its for life. The belief system is strong. Pope is a pope only because in its religion, cardinals as consults to the Pope see themselves as subjects to a Pope. The Tsar conceding to Karensky’s political establishment limited powers was a necessary step in liberalizing society, in other words, breaking up the peasantry, fighting a war with Japan, and a war with Germany, rising prices, poor crop production, had the country in a messy road toward liberalization, the whole affair ended the lives of 22 million peasants. The Tsar was out of touch with the suffering of the people, maybe kings do better now...our American news organizations do not educate viewers enough for us to know who or what king or government is actually better for the suffering masses? Supreme Leader of Iran is a King, and the president who just died on a helicopter crash; the leader of a political establishment. The winner is the power that fills the vacuum left open by the death of the president. Will it be the king or will it be the Iranian masses or will it be a liberal political establishment who are to wield political power over society?
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  9394. US manufacturing sector brings in $2 trillion, 10% of the US economy so what is the cost and benefits of going one way or the other? Bernie has a good chance building on this manufacturing sector and position the US as a green climate change producer. This manufacturing is largely in Texas is half the size of German GDP! Not to be snuffed at. So how will we choose our value units? Trump has a impoverishment of ideas, no alternative and the internal deficit gets worse. Left populism is big but corporate new media focuses on the right populism as more news worthy becausee it is uglier than the left populism. Europe in the next ten years will be a tragedy. Supply side metrics, everybody cannot be an exporter. For the system to work you need buyers and sellers. If Trump wins, his tariff war with China will be extended to Europe. Not good news for Europe, which is why Pompeo speech in the Munich conference did not go over well at all saying the West is winning. Winning what, and this implies somebody is losing...namely, Europe. Europe is caught in the middle with bad and weak governments no ideas, no solutions, embarrassed by a little girl so they ignore the problems. Between China and the US, Europe is trying to run a surplus against the world of two major supply chains is ridiculous. But since people do not feel they have any skin in the game there is more going on then a spread sheet. Austerity is the response to all the ingredients of the cake there for a long time the economic system should have been reset ten years ago and ten years out the politics has changed. Conditions were right for the left, instead the putative left were all in charge when it all went down and what did they do, they bailed the banks and this invited the right with "this is not capitalism". It wasn't capitalism. So there is a loss of credibility of the left. This will take time to rebuild but Corbyn did it brining in more members to the labor party. The supply side does everything, doesn't add up. Europe cannot agree on anything at this time and will be playing in the margins for the next ten years. No wonder Salvini in Italy is popular and Germany's right wing rears its ugly head. Governments just pull a magic cap over the heads and pretend the monsters are not there. Bernie can do more than just America First, he can level the supply chain imbalances between China, Russia and the US, raise rates, and ease Europe's push toward austerity, but they have to get rid of their current leaders. Nobody can work with Trump, and Europe's leaders are incompetent, a bad mix, as he is impossible to work with and the west needs pragmatists such as Putin and Xi are.
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  9397. All three stock exchanges performed well this year. Behind these numbers and transactions recorded on the Big Board are a class of people, the owners of financial wealth, getting rich from the sale of the means of war the corporations provide to a War Machine. The necessities of life become scarce from all the destruction and this keeps consumption below the necessary point of doing well and in starvation mode. War is keeping Palestine at the level of starvation and war is keeping Americans are at the level of making just enough to survive, barely making it. Starvation and existence are the only two modes of work for capitalism. Keeping the masses at a level where food and other necessities are barely had is in the interest of increasing profits. One of the main tasks of a CEO is to make sure consumption does not exceed production. If that happens than profits fall and wages rise. Under capitalism war creates the ideal condition to expand markets. it keeps the productive capacity of capital below the rate of unproductive consumption of the masses and production in general runs like a well oiled machine on a perpetual basis. The notion of “forever” is attached to war, unemployment, crisis and capitalism. These evils are essential if billionaires are to be made. Consequently, the corporate form of capitalism, as there are many different forms of capitalism, the American form depends people who are okay with crisis, war, job cuts, longer working hours and increased exploitation to enter into that social class after the old ones die off. They have to keep the class going to thrive and survive. Same thing with the working class. You have to keep a working class going and make sure there are replacements after working people die. Peace and prosperity for the many do not make billionaires. Peace and prosperity makes affluence which is more than enough to get by for all. Making an ever shrinking number of billionaires happens because an ever growing amount of capital eventually gets owned by fewer billionaires. It will take a while for you to let that sink it. Truth is painful but also liberating to know the system you are struggling with. The peace movements are a threat to that existence, peace is the antithesis of war and capitalism; if the masses want peace and longevity they will have to take back what they gave in suffering and invest that wealth back into themselves, roughly numbering more than half the US population need a permanent home that is not owed by a bank. For their lives to be equal with their neighbors of greater wealth a Mass must take place not just on Sunday but everyday redistributing the bounty while dismantling the old institutions half of which do not work anymore should not pose a problem to let them go.
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  9407. 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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  9412. With all due respect to the families of the victims of this tragedy, I say this.  The building industry will cover its own tracks using the government because the building and real estate industry is huge and politically powerful. This one fatal incident is not going to stop business as usual. The tragedy exposes the toxicity of building materials. The blame will fall on government for scheduling long durations of time between inspections to draw attention away from the cumulative trauma of toxic building materials when so frequently structures collapse. Officials will be portrayed as incompetent functionaries alerting too late to the company a crack in the wall they saw a year before. Instead of this leading into an investigation that from the lumber industry to the construction industry Americans are exposed to chemically treated materials the cause and effect of cancer, leukemia, hepatitis, low birth rate and birth deformities. Private construction firms involved and the Condo Establishment, notwithstanding any deviations from the plan during its construction, will come out looking clean. Business as usual a year later, in fact, the memorial could even attract new sales to the morbid. Some lower official's head will roll and more frequent inspections of buildings should sooth the public that something is being done. But America's national diseases will continue to shorten the lifespan of individuals as caused by the de-regulated use of 250,000 chemicals applied to products of all kinds, everywhere, in everything!
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  9413. What a waste of historical time to be spending it on bans when there is a revolution to be made. The only point I would make to this is put to you subjectively, if you truly believe in your god you should not require the rest of society to support you, anyone is free to have a faith, is a liberty, having tax exempt status is not a liberty nor a privilege but a lure, an escape hole from which outside religious individuals in group form can enter and invade as Trump puts it, this country. Poor America, she has a history of being invaded. Taken away from the 'savage' and reshaped into a land that it is today. The bloody masses in their own inversion of the real world into a deity see America as the society were the religious belong. A more effective way of ending a Muslim invasion is by the abolition a tax exempt status for religion. But, of course, in the context of the society America is, that would require Trump to renounce his religious-- whether its Norman Vincent Peale or Jewish, I don't know which, beliefs. Evangelical Pence and whole of the US Congress who pledge a prayer everyday to a god and swear truth emanates from the bible in parliamentary politics and in court. The flag gets less attention than the bible does from this social class in power. Its the only dam product that has a label reading Made in America and none of them use it to show the sorry state of society having lost its industrial base for growth and prosperity. The hypocrisy of its policies is glaring and astounding. Maybe , over time, after the fall of the Presidency, Congress, and Supreme Court, religion will wither away in the light of discovery the planet no longer sustain human life since there will be no constitution left to protect it the country breaks out into another Hundred Years War and waste more historical time not committing itself to a social revolution. Religion does not put food on the table, why not a tax exempt status for anyone starting an industry as a start for a social revolution?
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  9418. Animals in a Zoo live better than Americans in their own society. This is because the form of government and the form of social production are compatible with each other but not with society. Animals may be caged but at least there is a direct relationship between their care, food, health and their lives and needs. Within the democratic party, desperate right wingers want a young person they can corrupt and influence. An old guy is too stuck in his ways. The old dude running for president in 2020 has been around the block and wasn't born yesterday and the right wing in his own party are a generation younger than him. This makes them really nervous that Bernie would bring down the comfortable social arrangements the right wing of his party are accustomed to.  If he selects a young running mate which I would if I were him because I can mentor and shape that young person to finish the job I started. This is exactly the same situation the right wing of FDR's party worried over. The old guy in a wheel chair had a young Wallace more progressive than Cortez as his VP. FDR was also not going to abolish the capitalist system but Wallace may have, as Cortez might, if he selects her, had the red scare not been initiated by the right wing of Wallace's party, America would be three generations deep in a socialist society. The republicans are overt in their repressionist practices in politics but the right wing democrats are covert with their repressive practices. It is easy to deal with a Tucker Carlson republican right winger than it is to deal with a Chelsea Clinton democrat right winger. This generation of Americans are under the rule of a form of social production that takes the shape of 500 transnational corporations, they constitute a social class. And, this generation is under the rule of a form of government that is apathetic of the actions of transnational corporations. They turn their back on the people to give room to the corporations to make profits over people. My position is neither form should exist, government as we know it today, and the transnational corporations as a form of social production puts human life in danger. Boeing makes 737's that crash, the Public is at risk and this form of government ignores it. The forms are antiquated and the republican free enterprise theory is about creating sycophantic parasitic social classes using institutions that are prone to abuse and corruption.
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  9433. A remarkable summary...GDP is measured in the US by how much of the total output was sold. This makes the work of a person who makes watches less productive than the person who farms land because more food is sold than are watches. That appears to me a distortion between what kind of labor is productive and not productive. When a certain kind of work is considered unproductive that work or industry dies away and vice versa a certain kind of skill is productive that skill is enriched, enhanced, given all the attention to increase its productivity. If hamburgers sells more than books the book trade dies and the fast food places get all the latest technology for its high amount of sales; how then can you compare the real productivity of nations if the standards are not the same...you couldn’t even tell what in value went up or down, if both fell, or if both rose, or if neither fell or rose...the whole society is working on a blind working average, cutting it close by the skin of its teeth, whether capital should get invested in this or that or if the country needs more of this and less of that! A total crap shoot for an economy. The above scenario is the economic side of the pathology, a psychological side is a phenomenon across all western rich nations share alike. This is the social relation I would describe as a competition of nations that must have domination over things in order to dominate other competing nations on a world scale sets individual people up in each competing nation to be controlling of other people in their own lives, homes, and workplaces, by controlling the things people need to live, work and survive, is a curse on us all transmitted from the past we should be clamoring to break free from!
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  9439. What does an incarcerated migrant labor force do for capitalism? If they can get away with it, it is a blessing for the corporations. If Trump pulls it off the corporations have a cheap labor source contracting with the federal government. Notice the corporations are silent on Trump's incarceration plan, all but one airline company. Apparently, Trump's plan to make America great again and return capital to the US is to create a labor force that operates in confinement for which the tax payer bears the total cost for the population. Typical of capitalism in the last century was the creation of a labor force and a money market in other countries, a strategy that is not altogether abandoned by industrial capitalists in competition with its rivals. US capitalism has reached its limits for imperialist expansion. It must turn inward for solutions to the falling rate of profits of corporations, averaging 2% stock growth and GNP for the last three quarters. Pretty dismal results. Is Trump winning, he is winning against the Left but not against the Public and the left and the public have nothing to do with each other. They had split off from each the day the democrats learned they can make money like the republicans make money working for corporate interests. This goes back to Bill Clinton that the democrats abandoned the working class. How will it depress wages for the civilian workforce in the US? If you are not asking these questions than you do not understand competition in capitalism. The corporations inexorably seek to lower production costs and produce cheaply. Corporate capital accumulation depends on supplanting labor by machinery is applied on the civilian labor force a method not abandoned by the industrial capitalists in competition with rivals. There is more capital invested in machinery and technology than there is capital invested in labor. People erroneously think this action causes an increase in the cost of machinery because of a greater demand for it by industrial producers, however, they would surprised to learn that machinery and technology as a product of labor itself is cheaper. The overall outlay of capital is less the profits are higher as a result.There is a smaller amount of investment compared to old machinery and technology owing to the increase in productivity, more units produced at the same rate. Suffice it to say the civilian un-incarcerated labor-force has been increasing their productivity since WWII. The American worker made themselves over efficient and too costly for Big business to hire to compete and with the rise of China and other socialist economies catching up to US capitalism the threat of extinction is very real to the whole capitalist class. The radical solution to the economic paradox of falling profits is to create a labor force that works free and have the civilian working class pay for it while it becomes the managerial class coordinating prison production from remote offices in the country.
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  9441. America's first of series of imperial presidents to come. You might wonder how its possibe when an imperial power is elected not appointed? One thing that runs deep in the Anglo Saxon culture in America comes from the Southern plantation owners who defended hereditary privilege based on birth right when the rights of the aristocracies and monarchies of Europe were being challenged by the European capitalist classes. The idea that all men are created equal contradicted the facts of daily experience for most Southerners at the time still contradicts the Anglo Saxon belief system of race. A president may never be elected again but passed down from one son or daughter to another in the same family creating a dynasty with a belief system that holds them as above the law, above society, and closest to God. America could become what Russia was of 600 years of dynastic Czarist rule. European monarchies and dynasties and the Southern slave holders in America in the 19th century had a real affinity for each other, they lament the slave master system as the best most natural order and productive system on earth to be had. They believed the system to be the best method of creating wealth cultivating land, selling and breeding slaves, just as the Physiocrats defended the Feudal nobility. Marx said, " Bourgeois society reproduces in its own form everything against which it fought in feudal or absolutist forms", very insightful. He would see this coming to fruition in Trump, he as the incarnation of an absolute form of power.
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  9449. In the context of the World Inequality Report, getting workers back to work is essential because otherwise 70% of all land, capital and tools would be unused, unproductively consumed. If mandates and vaccines get people back to work the top 10% are happy. It means labor and capital are rejoined and the means are productively consumed. But if labor and capital remain apart then societies are in peril of survival. But for the many who are unvaccinated the mandates cut into personal freedom outside of work. The contradiction is no freedom of choice on the job, be vaccinated or be out of a job. The employer position brings into question the half-nature of freedom in America. Are we free when you are not free? The report shows a humanity divided into three parts. The poorest, the middle, and the rich. The rich who have the means are few with the greatest freedom inside work and outside of the job, and the poor who have no income or wealth and no freedom if they do have a job, n choice but to be vaccinated or perish. Our minds and bodies are not fully owned by us on the job(s) becomes the philosophical and legal question of what defines citizenship as free in modern America? World Inequality Report of 2022, Thomas Pikety and Emmanuel Siaz, Lucas Chancel and Gabrielle Zuckman, released Dec 12, 2022 The report tracks capitalism over 3 centuries. Bottom 50% of 2.2 billion people have no income and even less wealth. Poorest 50% got under 10% to share all the income there was to be had. In contrast, the richest 10% got 52% of all income. The middle, (you and I fit in this group) 40% of 2.2 billion people got 40% of all income to be had. 50% of us (2.2 bn) own 2% of wealth. Top 10% own 76% of the world’s wealth.
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  9478. It has nothing to do with stupidity and everything to do with evangelical christianity, or Creationism. They are not stupid people. They were very planned and methodical in their capture of government. Americans are now a subjugated people in the states they dominate. They performed a coup dé état that was slow and gradual over the years. When enough of them made it into government they became what constitutes a social class of christian capitalists (Amway, etc.). Pyramid schemes as you might heard of before was their business plan in the early years and putting into the hands of unsuspecting Americans their source of funding, ---profits from the sale of Amway, Mary Kay, products. Convention meetings in Vegas and other venues is where they held annual profit rallies for the corporation rewarding people moving up the pyramid. Raising the capital to get elected, changing election laws to stay elected, ruling society through material, spiritual, legal, political and social, force. That is not stupidity. it’s a very well thought out successful and calculated plan for conquering the world. They targeted people whose incomes was never enough. The “never enough” crowd can be a powerful social force when glued together into a pyramid structure containing them. They are brainwashed people. Fast forward 30 years and the government is 7/10th occupied by Israel loving evangelical christians. The first genocide under their watch is the genocide against the Palestinians is no coincidence. If Americans want their freedoms Americans have no other alternative but to win power. Evangelism appears over the centuries in various forms. It dates back to the early Roman christians who suffered so much the second coming of Christ became a religion for them. Evangelism has a despicable history from the 15th century going forward, more criminal and genocidal than Hitler, Stalin, Mao put together, the most deadliest of all homosapiens on earth are christians, that in every likelihood the extinction of the human race would be their doing. Not knowing your enemy is stupid. Not trying to insult readers of this personally. It is vital to orient people on how to start thinking about these people and their methods of subjugation. Creationists are infamous for denial of empirical truth and objective realities. You need to know who they are? What jobs do they hold in government that control our lives? Questions to start thinking about NOW not tomorrow. Tomorrow is too late.
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  9494. The DMV in my neighborhood is painless. But the video only uses the DMV to vilify government. Government is an institution of the people. To abolish it is anti-America and violates the Constitution. Issuing state certificates is not all that government does. Government created the Internet (1969), took all the risks and pays for the development of these innovations. A citizen-astronaut went to the Moon not a capitalist. Innovations make their way to the general society via the military. and how innovations get used is where the market is useful. Buying and selling apps, and space on social media..a way to move products around. These are great applications to connect person A to person B and exchange money for commodity and vice ver. But this is in the realm of markets, circulation, exchange, trading, money for goods this is not capitalism. Capitalism is something new and different. It is not markets. Free markets are older than banking and banking is thousands of years older than capitalism. Capitalism is when production is no longer owned by the producers. Government becomes all the the People have to ensure their security and survival. It has to abandon its ideals to be the defender and protect the unprotected producers who no longer in possess, as they had centuries before capitalism, the tools and land to survive and trade their surplus products. So, really, in effect, we in America are not even using government as conceived by A. Lincoln, as 'of' and 'for' and 'by' the People. The ideal of government has been robbed from the purpose of government as laid down by America's most significant architects of government. Your Problem--- government is a government of more than one capitalist. This class diverts what is available in our age to use (produce) in ways that would rival some of the more incredible innovations of prior historical ages. Private appropriation appears as an individual but it can be large group of private owners. In fact, innovations are used for one single aim and purpose for themselves not for humanity and society as it should be.
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  9495. A battle scene that will live in infamy.   This would have been supportable had the purpose of a protest/insurrection was about getting COVID relief and Med 4 All. Supportable by 2/3rds of the population now suffering 300, 000 deaths per day.  How it would have been a miraculous turnaround for Trump virtually turning him into a super star if he set his sights on handling the COVID disaster and taking credit for the most incredible vaccine advance ment in world history, rectifying the health system into one national health system and using the Defense Production Act to get the population working again and cooperating with the science but his personality got the better of him. History will be less kind to him for playing a mediocre role and be forgotten after he gets nailed to the cross. How Biden gets a handle on this COVID nightmare will define if he gets another term. Within the first four months will decide his fate as a one or two term president. If the elections were not rigged now they better not be in the near future because Trump and Trumpism will still be around to claim they were right and the insurrection of the Nation's Capitol was a victory. In a way the insurrection is warranty that future elections will not be rigged for that would spell the end of the democratic party if elections to re-elect Biden were rigged and Biden failed to nail the virus and put the economy back into working order for the ones without a job, future, wealth. It would be a last gasp for that party that could put Trump back in the driver's seat. Unless he has something else up his sleeve that we don't know about as he is still commander-in chief his powers don't evaporate until Biden is Inaugurated.
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  9496. Define Normal? You use it a lot to describe the neighborhood and France. Never a good thing to begin an essay with an abstraction “population or normality” for you end up with an abstraction at your conclusion. I think you missed the source of all the trouble which began with Renault and Peugot seeking to produce with cheaper labor had imported that labor from Africa...that is the source of present-day conflicts inside France, everything else is all in reaction to the social consequences of corporations increasing their output by cheapening the cost of production. The coercive laws of competition between capitals drive each industry to do the same and cheapen production costs...an economic analysis of external forces is overlooked in this video essay as the primary cause for the exclusion of black and muslim communities in France. For France’s auto industry to remain competitive drawing labor from its colonies was a solution that benefitted the corporations twice. They got cheap labor and they got to use that labor-power at the expense of the French taxpayer and each time a prime minister and parliament hands over a tax cut to the rich the corporations benefit thrice, they profit and pocket more, and they become lenders from whom the government borrows, at interest. This same economic phenomena appears in the US, Germany and England as endemic to capitalism in general. A cycle incurs the corporations operating under these coercive laws of competition raise the productivity of labor again, displacing more workers in society, and consuming less labor-power in production. The government requires more money to ameliorate the stressors and conflicts between the social classes and a never-ending cycle corresponds to the never-ending cycle of corporate production. In Latin a ‘Perpetuum Mobile”, or “ceaseless production”, frankly, a chief human cause for the melting of the permafrost. Your original problem is the private consumption of the means of production by a handful of corporations that all workers not just the black ones are divorced from the necessaries of life. Hence, you get riots and revolutions as that structure decays material reality and social contentment. You will never solve or explain the source of crisis et al your problems limiting your analysis to socio-political categories exclusively. The urban development project intended to house immigrants the corporations desired as a source for cheap labor, in order to remain competitive, is nothing short of a concentration camp built of buildings..to serve to exclude this population from the mainstream of “bourgeois and petty-bourgeois French society”, where, liberty, equality, fraternity, are shared values among the upper social classes. France did everything for them was a mistake by design because what is called immigration politically is really a demand for cheap labor by corporations economically. Now that the corporations are done with that labor-power it is thrown away. What reason do they have to not be riotous?
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  9501. 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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  9503. 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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  9514. Capitalism perceives any social control over its activities a threat, an attack, on what capitalism regards as ‘sacred’. For this reason any ‘socially conscious regulation’ of the workforce and working conditions as a political program would be confronted by the hostility of the capitalist class. Having control of the government this social class also controls the armed forces along with everything else the federal government controls. But one thing it does not control is the ‘iron law of proportionality’ operating inside the factory floor, workshops, offices, field, wherever labor is employed by capital, to adjust working time proportionalities, how much time should be spent on this or that, presents itself as a social modification program to increase the ’time efficiency’ of workers on the job. In the old days it was called ‘Taylorism”, what is old is new again, a particular specialty of Elon Musk. Outside the factory the proportionalities of working hours in all the different industries is reflected in the price fluctuations of the commodities in relation to each other, as value units they are exchangeable against each other at given rates and known quantities, so many shares of Exxon in dollars is equal so many shares of Lockheed Martin are exchangeable does not tell you much, so what, about what is happening in the real economy of work for the production of actual commodities of agriculture and industry, the price of a dozen eggs pulled up by overvalued stock and equity markets leaves in its wake of higher prices on all products prepared with eggs across several sectors of the total economy, to which massive cuts and layoffs is the only way to lower the cost of producing. So, in reality, the experts in the White House do not know the real state of the US economy by measuring what is happening to value units in markets. Capitalism promulgates wars that bring down empires and tear apart markets, lower the standards of life in general, to force the values in relation to each other to stabilize to make them profitable again over the most common household items, why not eggs?
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  9543. Of course, we re in the middle of this squabble that we are not privy to who knew what and when, even as they use the claim that the property alleged stolen from the White House is the property of the American public; whether Biden was advised or told to pretend to not know about the raid begs a million questions. The politicized raid does distract us from a decaying economy. I’ll give them that. Distract us from the unsocial consequences of society and of natural catastrophes made worse by the totality of our industrialization. We are on the outside of this squabble and we choose a side of the divide between billionaire politicians representing other billionaires and trillionaires who have no country the world is their pearl. Trump owns a building in NYC, two large estate mansions in two states, several thousand acres of golf course consuming water drought stricken cities and towns in America and in Europe desperately need; in his possession is a huge quantity of material wealth that in comparison to his supporters is infinitely higher than one house, two cars, toys, on 2 acres and one mid size business with which to support the family, the ones richer than these folks have more and since the democrats representing the Haves there are other Haves to side with...but are they really representative of the average American who’s property walked off the White House ...and so what if it did? Who is protected by the secrets in the documents enclosed? National Security is protected by its secrets from enemies is the prevailing theory and reply to the question if you ever get a chance to meet any of these people but that is not how the world today works. Competition is the character of western societies. Everyone is a competitor to us and a threat to national security just as we are threat to their national security as competitors to them. Competition works against the idea of making friends and allies; there are no friends and allies in a world of competition. Above that world where you and I compete to work harder everyday not out of will but out of being a Have-Not is the world of super rich people who are split in a power struggle with each other. The bubble in which they live is a wall of cameras that puts us on the outside as spectators who can choose a side.
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  9557. Capitalists are emulated by the working class and held in high esteem by society because the real economic surplus is obscured by the existence of buyers and sellers. Before the Cold War the market demonstrated to people how hard it is to sell billions of goods to make billions more in dollars by positioning buyers and sellers. But after the Cold war, the market has many cartel monopolies and these drive the economy into a ditch. Fewer companies own money the majority use credit capital and cash advances, they were buyers forced to become sellers of their businesses repetitively, and larger capitals buy smaller capitals. This is the end stages of monopoly capitalists; a society of fewer banks in the business of banking, a society with fewer industries in the business of industry, a society with less buyers in the business of buying, and so on, and the reserve capital of banks mandated to have on hand in the event of a crash are actions of withholding money from getting into the hands of other companies for expansion, this becomes too costly for the planet’s material resources and as a cost to the working class, a greater level of material and social deprivation. It’s basically a Decline of Monopoly Capitalism the rationalists are denying to themselves,--- the general crisis of war, overproduction and unemployment, are indicators of the last stages of monopoly capitalism. But not of capitalism itself for that would entail the working class embark on a self-emancipation project to dissolve itself as a working class; only than would capitalism cease to exist.
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  9567. What the administration does in the international arena directly extends or contracts the working day of the nation. For every dollar the administration spends on defense extends and prolongs indefinitely the amount of time a person has to spend at work to replenish the government's income of what was spent and annihilated in foreign wars and destruction. Duration of the working day is always a question left open ended by the Senate and Congress. Employers would push workers on the job day into night if it were not for the limits of human endurance. Their factories pump out war products under defense contracts like there is no tomorrow when a war is in process. Other parts of the economy chug along or stagger, or collapse from a dearth of investment. No employment, or people dislocated because of multiple employment, each part time gig too thin to earn a living. Families are broken down. War is a boom for the arms weapons industry and its specialized workforce. Defense fueled by the investment directly take from a public fund the Senate is the ultimate authority on how GDP gets spent and for what. The Senate has control of the work day and all the workers in the country as to how they get their share of the gross domestic product. The Senate takes its share first and buys with it the life only dreamt about in ordinary minds. Society can live without the Senate but the Senate cannot live without society. The Catholic Church is not a vital institution to the survival of a country the Senate is not vital either. The Senate's attitude toward society is like that of a parent obsessed with control over a handicapped child, along with employers strict controls over the child's movements are placed on workers to limit their movement on the job to a single redundant action. Ask no question just do as you are told.
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  9578. Employers and managers accelerate the labor-process and KaBoom! Farming, mining, construction, meatpacking, transportation, sectors where people spend most of their lives working are accelerated work processes for more profits. Heavy equipment, buildings, bridges, tankers, in every workplace across the US is made unsafe with incorporated hazardous raw material into the work process and expose workers to the dangers. It is not workplace violence when employers want to make up for higher costs and make worker work harder. Employers accelerate the work-process. Making machines work people beyond the point of human endurance. Crashes, cuts, explosions happen. Notice how the causes to these workplace hazards are never made public and are always under investigation is the routine answer. Commercial media is controlled that the public’s attention on the industrial war raging between the workers and the objective conditions of work in our society is non-existent. When all workers connect the dots about the work taking place in America today in her factories, farms, construction, packing industries, mines, are life-threatening for the workers performing the jobs a labor movement will be born. Right now the focus is on the contamination, a hazard effect of workplaces accelerated for higher profits, but when the catastrophes keep happening in other sectors of the economy the workers will start to make the causes the focus. Workers are confronted by a giant wall of employers all doing the same thing providing no escape for workers while, employers face an isolated worker and can get rid of that person if they do not want them on their premises. In the workplace things are not equal. Things are equal outside of the workplace but not in it where the rubber meets the road. Where the best part of our day is spent and robbing the life-giving work that working can be from the workers giving all praise to the employer for work employers never do.
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  9582. The attacks were on individuals in the subway system. The individual is the subject the object is the subway. Ms. Hochul makes a mistake many commonly make when they are describing their jobs. They sublimate or immerse themselves into the object. So fused together only the object gets the attention the individual immersed in the object gets no attention. Why is this important? It’s important because people are burying their feelings beyond the point they can conceal than burst! Dignity is damaged in a person; some people lost all dignity are barbaric creatures and desensitized monsters. They live but it is a life of suppression putting themselves second, compromising, and settling for not the first but for the last in too many cases. They are unaware of the overall process but are sensitive as participants to the fact that they make an industry out of tools and products. We see this process in action without the laws and institutions covering the process when young thieves steal jewelry stores because they have buyers lined up for jewelry. They know they are creating a value creating process, a market that starts with theft as its first investment. The minute they do this the street and citizens, the gun, and the car, the store and the merchant, and finally the jewels is their workplace tyrannizing a majority who belong to that workplace. They are creating more value illegally than the legal workplace creates its own value. The only difference between them and Wall Street investors is the initial investment is not robbery, it’s a mutual fund. The robbery comes later. People turn to markets because everything is suppressed outside of markets. In effect, all that is being transacted between them in markets when they are behaving as buyers and sellers, is living labor for dead labor, present labor for past labor, working for work performed in a product of labor, in effect changed forms of the same matter moving from hand to hand, a subject person has to make money from the object and gets lost in the object or the object which has become money from its sale ruins their life.
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  9589. Understanding “Reciprocal Tariffs”, from a working class point of view paints another picture. Impacted by this trade war are working people. Working people in Canada, Mexico and the US are being asked to lose more of their living standards, temporarily....as each nation impose their own tariffs on foreign imports. Temporary tariffs are a permanent pain for people who are not owners of businesses of any significant size. The burden for them is a longer working day, job losses and bills going unpaid. The competing nations sell less of their products in this trade war. This circumstance forces the price of goods to fall in the home country but rise in the foreign country. Mexican goods are cheaper for Mexicans and expensive for American consumers and conversely, American products are cheaper for Americans and more expensive for non-American consumers. In each country the total value of home market necessaries falls, cheaper to live, but this does not mean the class struggle has vanished, not by a long shot, all three societies have social classes earning incomes from rent, interest, profits, stocks, dividends, bonds, pension, all want to get paid in exchange for what they sell, and employers, a separate social class, who own the means of production offer a lower wage to offset cuts in profits the tariffs impose. What has been achieved is a new social average for wages as prices of home produced goods continue to fall for each of the working classes in the three nations. This would be the come back, the recovery seen forma working class point of view. The US corporate classes are victorious in worsening the condition of the working classes.
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  9594. I can never help ‘not’ feel that it is all projection when it comes to western analysis of the communist world and that the real historical journey these countries are taking themselves into is never understood by the average westerner through western media analysts. Western societies do not journey into the future like communism does with its five year plans designating very specific milestones for the nation to achieve, and for this reason, the west is stuck within its own paradigm looking out of the world incapable of understanding that world. Never does a prime minister or a president announce to the Public this is where we as a nation need to be in five years relative to its problems. Remodeling its material substructure and relationship to nature adapted to human wants is not planned in the west but is causal, happens accidentally by chance or through legislation. From a personal or a subjective viewpoint of what is going on in that world we know nothing about; a leader with many years ahead of himself responding to real external threats his party’s senses. Recall they do communicate. General Miley and his Chinese counterpart, and the last set of meetings between Blinken and his counter part in Europe, on return officials report and formulate in a plenary the results of those meeting and communications as sincere or not, and if they find threats are big enough Xi is called into position to be China’s historical figure. This may be how things are working out versus how we think things are in China that is leading western analysts to see the gesture as a power play for a life term as Chairman.
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