The currrent stimulus package passed by the Congress is a paltry amount of money. There are some reform aspects of the entire program like raising the caps on mortgages that fannie mae and freddie mac could finance despite large financial losses by both. Much of the $3.2 billion in losses were accounted for by derivative investments used as a hedge against falling interest rates on mortgages held by borrowers. The federal reserve is loaning distressed banks with non-performing mortgage loans funds against the troubled mortgages (or mortgage backed securities) as collateral. The fed may end up with $200 billion worth of …
All 610 comments by...
cabdriverinchicago
-
-
Large corporations for years have consolidated the food industry through factory faming of livestock. Fast food outlets are merely concentrated, high demand commercial customers for beef, poultry and pork produced on these farms using cheap (usually foreign) hired wage labor, non-free range animals and tons of anti-biotics which get into the food chain. Fast food chains were thus outlets for factory farming and the concentration of production and farm income.The results have harmed both consumers and farm families. Factory farms are the main reason for the post-WWII decline of family farms. The connection between factory farms and the fast food industry …
Posted to Corporate Potluck
-
I dont
Posted to Corporate Potluck
-
I was just testing the html on this website. I do support the HEN with all due fervor.
Posted to Corporate Potluck
-
I think some of Cosby's criticisms should be taken seriously. I do think the Juan Williams book is nonsense.
Posted to Come on Cosby, Stop Hatin'
-
Much of the growth of China as a world power had to do with events in the 1990s quite aside from the growth of China's export markets and the influx of over half a trillion dollars worth of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) inflows since the early days of the "capitalist road" reforms. The decline of US military pre-eminance in the region and its support for military dictatorships in the 1980s, the decline of Japan as THE regional power due to the collapse of the Nikkei and the Yen in the early 1990s and the East Asian financial crisis of 1997-98 all …
Posted to China's Valley of Tears
-
Scorp, All you do is spew mindless rage and opprobrium over cliched images with no attention to actual facts as if reality doesn't exist. China has gone capitalist and its economy has grown at a rate of 9.5% annually since the early 1990s. You act as if Mao was still in power. He's been gone over three decades. Get over it. A new game is in town and China is modern history's fourth great industrial revolution!! That's not the opinion of some leftist ragsheet. It was announced with great fanfare by the UK's Financial Times!!
Posted to China's Valley of Tears
-
It sounds like the Private Equity Funds are basically venture capitalists trying to make money by restructuring profitable firms who get more profitable when pay hikes, benefits and pension obligations are eliminated by restructuring. The thing that is so embittering is when the very assets of the company are leveraged by loans that make financing these arrangements possible. It's like rubbing salt in the wound. Also by lowering wages and benefits, the very conditions of expanding financialization are created by lowering demand for consumer output making debt driven growth the only viable alternative. Clearly, the average worker is not benefiting from …
Posted to Pirates of Private Equity
-
Let's leave Iraq now. It is a multibillion dollar boondoggle and a pointless bloodbath to boot.
Posted to Another War We Can't Afford
-
It is doubtless the case that the Palestinians in Iraq experience a double stigma. One is that they are Palestinians and live as refugees in Iraq. The other is that they are Sunni Muslims who sided with other Sunnis in their political outlook and at one time supported the regime of Saddam Hussein as well as his ill fated invasion of Kuwait. It is no suprise that the Shi'ites have targeted them for attack. Doubtless, it is the Shi'ite militias have targeted the refugees. This is disgraceful. The number of refugees, 34,000, seemed small to begin with and now their numbers …
Posted to Palestinians in Iraq Face a Second Exile
-
The crackers have really goneo off the deep end this tiem
Posted to Equating Stillbirths with Murders
-
I will say this about Christy Freeman. She doesn't seem that bright. Probably won't be the next Nobel Prize winner. She doesn't need to get pregnant that is for sure.
Posted to Equating Stillbirths with Murders
-
About 70% of the US public wants out of this war. Even more Iraqis want the US military out of their country. The Iraq War was one of the biggest US foreign policy failures in history. And that is no meagre distinction.
Posted to General Failure
-
It does appear that many private water companies are heavily in debt. According to the Sierra Club, RWE is $28 billion in debt and Suez/ONDEO is $29 billion in debt. These debts seem to have come after a flurry of M&A activity in the late 1990s and beyond in which big outlays were made by large companies to buy out others in anticipation of an avalanche of big municiple water contracts which never materialized. Many communities with newly privatized drinking water systems struggle with high rates and bad service. Quickly increased water rates surely reflect corporate efforts to recoup funds used …
Posted to A Win in the Water War
-
I don't get what's so hard about Universal Health Care. It's so desparately needed. Pass it already. It's a classic no brainer move.
Posted to Sicko's Critics and the Upside of Hitler
-
Dozens of advanced countries with better average living standards for workers than ours and comparable rates of GDP growth also have universal health care as a given with no negative effects of any kind whatsoever!! Our current system is so filled with waste, financial delinquency, CEO extravagence, and instability anyhow that we might just as well go to a new system. There is little to lose and much to gain. Our current system already gives out tons of free medical care and sliding scale based services and medications. I am a diabetic with high average daily bloodsugars well over 200. My …
Posted to Sicko's Critics and the Upside of Hitler
-
Nouri al-Maliki used Iraqi troops to break the strike in June and arrest the leaders. This shows that he is a US puppet. This issue means more to Iraqi oil workers than wages and conditions of work. This is most probably because the Oil Industry is Iraq's chief foreign exchange earner and main export and determines the perameters of economic development for the country. The effort to sell off the oil industry also is an effort to split up the country and deprive the Sunni Triangle of development revenue. The twin goals of profit taking and controlling the course of Iraqi …
Posted to Iraqi Unions Fight the New Oil Law
-
You can't outlaw hate but you can certainly outlaw violent crimes motivated by hate. It makes sense. Hate crimes are an obvious violation of one's civil liberties in addition to one's person. Penalty enhancers make sense. If we outlaw hate crimes now maybe we can effectively outlaw hate by extention. Or at least reduce it by influencing rational people to think and influence those around them that are predisposed toward hateful violence and behavior.
Posted to Defining Hate in the United States
-
Some o dem say dems a niggah hatah N' some o dem say dems a block beetah N' some o dem say dems a block stahbah N' some o dem say dems a paki bashah Fascists on de attack no batha wori foh dat fascists on de attack we will fite dem bock fascists on de attack we will coonteh attack fascists on the attack we will drive them bock. smosh der branes in cuz dey aint go nottan in em we gonna smosh der branes in coz dey aint got notton in em Lynton Kwesi Johnson
Posted to Defining Hate in the United States
-
Hate crimes should have penalty enhancers added to them. We need to send the message that willfully harming someone else based on your own prejudices will not be tolerated by the law and that the law will address not only the violent act itself BUT THE DESPICABLE MOTIVE AS WELL!!
Posted to Defining Hate in the United States
-
ChrisRico01, I support you buddy. I am sorry that you were shown such insensitivity and stupidity on a progressive blogsite. This and other sites have been infested with right-wingers of all kinds. I agree with you and want to support your blogspot.
Posted to Defining Hate in the United States
-
Wolf you're a real right-winger. I read the story about the incident about which you posted. It was horrible. I heard about this before. The local news was full of the story and so were the blogs. I believe it took place in the mid-South. I think somewhere in Virginia. I'm not sure. This is one of the reasons I support the death penalty. I do believe that it is justice to put such people to death. Having said this I really must stick with my strongly held belief in judging the individual. The vast majority of Blacks don't commit crime. …
Posted to Defining Hate in the United States
-
So what exactly is your point, Wolf? If the media report on a highly senaational crime and hysteria and violence breaks out they blame the media for ratings mongering and money grubbing irresponsibility. If the media doesn't report on a highly sensational crime than they're accused of some kind of bias and of hiding the truth on behalf of the nefarious "special interests." Damned if they do and damned if they don/t. Here's a thought. Why don't people just shut the f**k up and stop ragging on the media like it's everyones punching bag and just allow them to do their …
Posted to Defining Hate in the United States
-
I like Dennis Kucinich on Fair Trade. Scrap NAFTA, FTAA, the WTO, and the rest and go for bilateral trade agreements as we have always done. The size of the US domestic market, which would grow if the middle class had more income, is leverage enough to get a fair deal. We also need to create more high paying jobs in the US. Foreign Direct Investment in the US is declining due to low effective demand in the US consumer goods market so we import everything and purchase it from Walmart which is the engine of the new economic model followed …
Posted to Making Trade Work for Everyone
-
The current weakening of the Dollar is bound to increase US exports by making them more competitive on the global market while cutting imports. This is sure to balance the balance of trade deficit which is approaching $800 billion. Yet the US is still hemoraging jobs despite an increase in exports of autos and factory machine tools. Further, a drop in the dollar by to much could cause foreign investors in US debt like the Chinese to gradually shift their investments to the Euro which is more stable and increasing in value. Though the US increased exports and has thus taken …
Posted to Making Trade Work for Everyone
-
The US isn't really chasing away high tech investment. More and more of it is emerging all the time. Manufacturing investment in consumer goods seem to be very profitable for many foreign firms since there is hundreds of billions of dollars worth of it. They weak and falling dollar is promoting it all the time. We stand to benefit from the jobs if nothing else.
Posted to Making Trade Work for Everyone
-
WTH, Some of what you say is probably true. I know that jobs are hemoraging at a quickening pace. Somehow manufacturing investment is making its way here in durables (autos) and consumer goods (much of it food processing). I read in a report from a feature in the economist that about $4.5 trillion in manufactured goods were produced in the US economy in 2006 yet only about 12% of the US GDP is in manufacturing. The $4.5 trillion figure is about a third of the US GDP for that year meaning that about $3 trillion in manufacturing done here, the vast …
Posted to Making Trade Work for Everyone
-
Toyota and Kia are taking over the US market in autos. Toyota recently surpassed GM in global sales. In 2006, only 57% of new vehicles sold in the US were from US companies down from 87% in 1970. According to a recent report Toyota has NEVER closed a US plant. While Ford and GM have terminated over 46,000 employees last year and will close 26 North American plants over the next five years, Toyota plans to open more plants and hire more US workers. Over 60% of all cars Toyota sells in North America are manufactured here. Toyota employs over 38,000 …
Posted to Making Trade Work for Everyone
-
WTH, One of the things that is being pointed out with increasing frequency today is that the lowering of US tariffs is not so much on behalf of Chinese exports as US exports from China with a lot of US corporate value added. US tariffs are lowered so as to allow US corporations to resell what they manufacture abroad in the US competitively. This is where Walmart makes a killing. The UNCTAD has repeatedly pointed out that more than a third of all international trade is between parent companies and their overseas subsidiaries. Thus, FDI is the key issue not "trade." …
Posted to Making Trade Work for Everyone
-
Sharrod Brown and Denis Kucinich both advocate replacing NAFTA and other free trade agreements, which have only enriched large transnational corporations by shifting jobs to low wage areas to cheapen labor and increase productivity, with more democratic bilateral agreements that respect higher labor and environmental standards. The US market is the largest in the world with over a quarter of the world GDP. This should motivate manufacturers who want special agreements, trade gaurantees and export quotas to uphold certain standards. The TNCs have collectively to much power and basically run the WTO and write the trade and investment provisions of free …
Posted to Making Trade Work for Everyone
-
The real issue is fair trade not "free trade" as defined by large TNCs. Walden Bello, the executive director of Focus on the Global South, points out that the dollar value of global trade had increased from about $124 billion in 1968 to well over 10 trillion by the late 1990s, a roughly 17 fold increase. The WTO was not needed to increase world trade by removing international "barriers" as in the early post-WWII era. It was needed by the US to give its own corporations a boost at a time when their hegemony was threatened. In the 1960s, about three …
Posted to Making Trade Work for Everyone
-
circumcision should not cause one to risk one's life for a little extra feeling .
Posted to Circumcision Promotion Divides AIDS Activists
-
I'm not sure about your cynacism about the Democrats. Al Gore is a Democrat. At the very least the Democrats are mentally present in the 21st century enough to respect the scientific research behind the claims regarding global warming. They are far more likely to do something than those who are (a) in the pocket of the big corporate energy interests and (b) tending toward a medieval view of modern science.
Posted to Global Warming: Dim Bulbs, Bright Lights
-
What is happening in Paraguay seems to be the typical consequences of corporate globalization. This involves the destruction of long-standing local economic and ecological systems in order to generate profits for large TNCs whose interests don't relate to those of most people either north or south of the equator. The TNCs listed in the article that are involved in the creation of the new Soy based agribusiness model in Paraguay are the very same ones who want to monopolize the global seed industry and reduce the world's nearly one and a half billion farmers to peons of the seed, fertilizer, and …
Posted to The Multinational Beanfield War
-
Some ecology group that's concerned with organic farming. Actually the entire organic farming/ecological sustainability movement believes that about three fourths of the earth's biodiversity has been killed off mostly by GM seeds that replace varieties of hybrid seeds permanently. Most of this destruction is due to the highly concentrated seed market which aims to reduce global food production to a select group of highly resistant strains of GM seeds which will be controlled by the top six seed companies. The aim is to monopolize the means to produce food on a global scale.
Posted to The Multinational Beanfield War
-
The UNFAO found that 75% of the genetic diversity of traditional crop varieties, which numbered in the thousands, were lost to replacement by GM seeds. The promotion of GM seeds, a $23 dollar industry utterly dominated by just six TNCs as of 1999, the year Pioneer HiBred was bought by DuPont for $7.7 billion, was the single biggest contributor to this dangerous trend.According to the Rural Advancement Foundation, approximately 97% of USDA lists have been lost over the past century. In order to grasp how this "Green Revolution" has impacted the third world we can look at the Phillipines where only …
Posted to The Multinational Beanfield War
-
You are a true mentally damaged retard. The FAO is not a "discredited leftist source" and employs some of the world's top agricultural experts. The RAF is from South Carolina you moron. Hardly leftist. They're mostly farmers from the deep south who are sick of being ripped off by big contract agribusiness. Most are rock solid Republicans!! What do your shop worn libertarian sources say about bio-diversity anyhow? When you don't know anything about a topic you name call and name drop (and always the exact same names). Grow up and take your medication, jerk!!
Posted to The Multinational Beanfield War
-
BM, Instead of posting your childish rantings why don't you just go to the Monsanto website and read their propaganda about how biodiversity is actually served by GM modified seeds. Yelling the same nonsense over and over is really getting old at this point.
Posted to The Multinational Beanfield War
-
Because, as I've suggested in the above post, the Monsanto website would actually vindicate your argument over mine. You've just proven that you are so knee-jerk in your reactions that you don't even think. For you politics is a mere spinal reflex.
Posted to The Multinational Beanfield War
-
Your anti-semitism is really showing now. Moon is NOT a zionist and why would anything going on in Paraguay be Israeli related? You're pathetic. Who's paying you to disrupt discussion on the progressive blogs?
Posted to The Multinational Beanfield War
-
Biofuel production is already on the increase. See the article on Paraguay whose agricultural economy is set to become based on biofuels like soybeans to the detrament of most of the rural population whose farms will be taken over by foreign TNCs. The distribution of land in Paraguay is already highly unequal, about 2% of the population controls 70% of the land. The TNC invasion by the likes of Cargill, ADM, and Monsanto will only worsen the situation. Even more compesinos will lose land. Expect even more northbound immigration from such trends.
Posted to Biofuels: Promise or Peril?
-
Tex, Bio-fuel cropping and refining in the US may be beneficial to many US farming communities. All I'm saying is that the third world situation may be quite different. Large TNCs like Cargill tend to dominate the entire process there as they come in and skew an already unequal social profile with very little overall benefit to the local economy or ecosystem in terms of income growth, energy savings, or foreign exchange gains, or a clean environment. Most of the benefit accrues to the TNC.
Posted to Biofuels: Promise or Peril?
-
Tex, I'm not aware of any "hippy ideas" regarding agribusiness. I do know that increased food production in a world where the rate of population increase is slowing down is silly. This is about corporate profit not feeding people. The thrid world wasn't starving before colonialism and western corporate direct investment in their economically and ecologically sound agricultural systems which globalized them to the detrement of the people for profit. The question today is not production levels but distribution of land and resources. Traditional systems actually feed people much better. That is not a hippy idea. It is true. Farm economies …
Posted to Biofuels: Promise or Peril?
-
Just because India became a net exporter of grains doesn't mean that the local people have better diets and increased caloric intake. If farmers are pushed from the land who once produced cheap, plentiful, organic crops that had abundant nutrition and are replaced by fewer farmers with large concentrated plots producing GM grains and animal feed for export to the west than the locals get little benefit. They will also have to import expensive staple crops that were once produced locally. There is also the unemployment effect from the agricultural changes that cause displacement and rural to urban migration. Many experts …
Posted to Biofuels: Promise or Peril?
-
By all accounts the Green Revolution was an abject failure in India.
Posted to Biofuels: Promise or Peril?
-
One of the worst side effects of war, according to humanitarian NGOs, is the ongoing effects of tactical and logistical residuals such as barbed wire enclosures and other disruptive infrastructure of war, land mines, and destruction from depleted uranium. All this keeps killing, maiming and disrupting and ruining everyday life long after the official hostilities cease. War, a key source of global capitalism's ability to survive, expand, and restructure capital and restore falling profit rates without the associated renewed rising employment pressures, Yet war is expensive, polluting, and filled with myriad annoyances for local populations. One of the contradictions is that …
Posted to Uncle Sam Wants Sustainability
-
Tex, DU is not pure U238 but 99.8&#xU2;38 and 0.2% u235% by mass. There is also a small speck of U234 which contributes about 14% of the radioactivity emitted while U235 contributes about 1%. The remainder is Alpha radiation contributed by the U238. The other 15% is highly damaging Beta and Gamma radiation which has a very long half life. It is useful in armor piercing because it is two and a half times the density of steel and one and a half times the density of lead. The danger is that the uranium tip burns up and disintegrates because of …
Posted to Uncle Sam Wants Sustainability
-
What does that have to do with the Israeli refusniks?
Posted to An Israeli Refuseniks Good Fight
-
BM, Your the only one who ever presents wrong figures. The sooner youi're ejected from ITT the better.
Posted to An Israeli Refuseniks Good Fight
-
US government figures don't claim more than $105 billion as of currently and possibly less. Mike stop taking your crap out on the Jews. I't wrong. We've never harmed you.
Posted to An Israeli Refuseniks Good Fight
-
There is no doubt that the Bush Administration is the first modern administration to have real problems with modern science. First evolution, then stem cell research, now a new prescription drug which suppresses the adrenalin surge in PTSD victims so they can relieve the hyper-reactions they normally experience and live their lives, and now the ever present global warming issue. A new UN study which assembled over 2000 of the worlds most respected scientists has confirmed global warming as a fact (as if we needed to add yet one more peer reviewd study to the existing 950) and still Bush doesn't …
Posted to Resisting the War on Science
-
Bowel Movement, If you are the "libertarian objectivist" that you claim to be than the very first line of defense is science. Logical positivism and the scientific method is sacrosanct to these people. It is held to be the only way to truth since it only deals in scientifically testable propositions. It eschews all subjective "bias" and holds itself to be value free.You object to the implications of over 950 peer reviewed studies including those of the US military and a recent UN study using over 2000 of the world's most respected scientific authorities just because it could mean a government …
Posted to Resisting the War on Science
-
The issue of slavery's impact on the current situation in the US with regard to race relations has been debated since Danny Moynihan's 1965 treatise, The Negro Family: A Case for National Action. In it Moynihan argued that it was slavery and its continued effects on the US Black Community that was responsible for the poor condition and achievement rates of that community. He stressed that the patterns established by slavery such as the separation of the father from the family and the creation of dependance of the remainder of the family on the slaveholding household continued as a pattern into …
Posted to Slavery and the State of Denial
-
BM, WTH. The ethnic and racial designations on government forms and applications are not for quotas but to track minority participation in the job market and education. Secondly, white racism has a determining effect on minorities while the racism of minorities toward whites in insulting but not of much consequence. I do feel that welfare is bad and Clinton was right to get rid of the transfer payments as they created dependency and some socio-pathic behaviours and expectation. One of the problems with our society is that the market doesn't create a paying job for all who want to work despite …
Posted to Slavery and the State of Denial
-
Most crime victims are also black. This has been documented. What happened to your wife is regretable but not the norm. Most crime is overwhelmingly black on black. This is one reason about half the black population when asked supports the death penalty. The gang problem really created that situation. The media showed the outpouring of support for Tookie. What they didn't mention was that most African-Amercians could have cared less about him and thought his execution was justified. Also, what happened to your wife had nothing to do with racism. Those thugs probably didn't care who they robbed. They're thugs. …
Posted to Slavery and the State of Denial
-
BM, You are a sorry assed racist. Showing everyone your deep, painful wounds and then attacking us as if we are responsible is absurd, although we do sympathize with you about your tragedy. Black on Black crime is not and never has been irrelevant. Black on white crime is worse than White on Black crime but then again most Whites live among other whites and are law abiding because they come from stable families and communities. Black on Black crime FAR outweighs any other type. Even when Black on White crime occurs it is not NECESSARILY motivated by racial factors. I …
Posted to Slavery and the State of Denial
-
Most trials are certainly NOT filled with hearsay because the rules of evidence simply doesn't allow for it. Period! You just keep reasserting the same old crap with no evidence to support it. The Rosenbergs probably were in contact with KGB agents and probably did pass some information along but they were on trial for a specific crime. Talking to and contacting members of foreign secret services is not in itself a crime for which you can be executed. The prosecution never proved its case that the Rosenbergs (a) were guilty under the terms of the 1917 Espianoge Act or, (b) …
Posted to Slavery and the State of Denial
-
BM, You are a neo-Nazi bigot and sick as well. What is it that you want?
Posted to Slavery and the State of Denial
-
BIll Buckley is becoming more of a libertarian with his advocacy of legalized drugs and his opposition to war as a government racket. Still like most libertarians he is way on the right. The lib in libertarian is an illusion. To enforce a libertarian social order would require massive state repression. Scratch a Libertarian find a fascist. Such an irony!! But look at fascist sympathizer BM who claims to be a "libertarian/objectivist" whatever that means. I suspect there are many other such individuals as well.
Posted to Boomsday: Bankrupt Satire
-
I am only trying to stop fascism in its tracks before it gets to far. Canada doesn't need Zundel. He is a shit. He violates the rights of Jews to live in peace and not be scapegoated, libeled, or mistreated. Let him suffer. Who told him to go and mess with the Jews in the first place? What is initiated force. In the Libertarian world you will need force to suppress the resistance of the poor who won't even be able to walk down the privatized streets. Maybe a "faith based" charity will subsidize the cost but only if they turn …
Posted to Boomsday: Bankrupt Satire
-
Zundel is a known active fascist and anti-semite. His sole purpose is to agitate against Jews in order to create a dangerous, untenable, and threatening situation which will result in their mass physical harm and consequent pressure to leave their homes. This is deliberate and intolerable. All people deserve to live in peace and dignity with their neighbors free of threat from vicious incitement. Zundel's slanderous campaign of hatred is designed to bring harm to innocent people. He deserves to be in jail for what he is doing. By jailing Zundel, the government sends the message that hate and attempts to …
Posted to Boomsday: Bankrupt Satire
-
Radical Islam has NOTHING to do with Israel. It is related to three things. First, it is what Chalmers Johnson has rightly described as "blowback" from the days of the Afghan War against the Soviet invasion and occupation which created the infamous "Afghan-Arabs" who became an international force for Islamic Conquest for the first time since the days of Mohammed. The second factor is the continued US military presence in Saudi Arabia, the holiest place in Islam. This is an offense to all Muslims. The third factor is obviously the continued torment of Iraq which has cost over 700,000 Iraqi lives …
Posted to Democracy Haters
-
BM, You are utterly wrong. Obviously the current round of Islamic fundamentalist terrorism, including 9/11, is due to everything the US has done from Desert Storm on to the present. The facts I presented are correct and you never once addressed them in any way at all.Israel alone would not have brought the 9/11 attacks. Israel brutally occupied Arab Lands for almost 35 years at the time of the attacks and existed for over 50 years. There would have been an anti-US response much sooner and during the first Initifada if Israel were the chief antagonist and to blame for the …
Posted to Democracy Haters
-
I read Cooleys book and the entire focus is on Afghanistan and the sources of Islamic Fundamentalism related to the Afghan-Arabs and the countries they came from in the fight against the Russian invasion. Cooley wrote a book called Green March Black September about the collapse of the Palestinian resistance in Jordan. He also wrote a recent book with Pluto Publishers which I have where he relates US hegemony, Israel, and the War in Iraq but he never blames Israel for the rise of Islamic Fundamentalism. It simply isn't true.Where were the fundies all throught the 1980s? Mostly in Lebanon I …
Posted to Democracy Haters
-
The Rosenbergs were railroaded. The entire trail was filled with due process violations and should have been declared a mistrial. They were prosecuted under the wrong law to begin with. They should have been tried under the 1946 Atomic Energy Act and not the 1917 Espionage Act. Under the 1946 Act the defendant, if convicted, could only be sentenced to death with jury recommendation and only if the dissemination of information resulted in direct harm to the US the burden of proof of which was on the state. The US was a wartime ally of the USSR at the time of …
Posted to The Lessons of Sacco and Vanzetti
-
Their political orientation doesn't make them guilty of the charges. This is fascist reasoning. Providing the Russians with nuclear related technology or classified information was done when they were allies. Thus they were not guilty of a crime according to the terms and specifications of the 1946 Act. The exact nature of the classified information was never discussed. The issue of whether or not it actually sped up the capabilities of the USSR in splitting an atom or making a deliverable nuclear weapon is in doubt. You don't address this issue and engage in your usual racist ad hominem attacks on …
Posted to The Lessons of Sacco and Vanzetti
-
You have no proof. Much of what was admitted into evidence in the trial was hearsay which can't legally be admitted as evidence. A lot depended on the hearsay testimony of a fellow engineer named David Greenglass who was strongarmed and threatened into providing false testimony about providing classified information to KGB agents. This is inadmissable. There were many violations of due process of this nature. See. Committee for the Reopening of the Rosenbergs Case.
Posted to The Lessons of Sacco and Vanzetti
-
The Government based its case entirely on the Greenglass testimony that the Rosenbergs facilitated a meeting between Greenglass who provided vital sketches of the bombs being developed at the Los Alamos laboratories at the time to KGB agents. Greenglass had been in contact with the Russians via a convicted British spy Klaus Fuchs as a go between. He seemingly turned states evidence by framing the Rosenbergs in order to get out from under espionage charges himself. The Greenglass hearsay testimony was used by the government to convict the Rosenbergs along with cold war hysteria about their being members of the CPUSA …
Posted to The Lessons of Sacco and Vanzetti
-
Toledano didn't have all the facts. And he doesn't have a thorough knowledge of the US legal system.
Posted to The Lessons of Sacco and Vanzetti
-
The threats to legal abortion are numerous. Thanks to Kissling for her heroic struggles to preserve safe and legal abortion.
Posted to A Pain, and Proud of It
-
Surely you don't oppose safe and legal abortion. According to two well respected University of Chicago economists Roe vs. Wade was responsible for the drastically reduced crime rate throughout the 1990s. This was a positive effect of abortion. Don't you agree?
Posted to A Pain, and Proud of It
-
As a socialist I can tell you that abortion is considered to be a human right of all women. Reproductive rights are human rights and democratic socialists of all tendencies strongly support human rights. The unborn fetus is NOT considered a human being. Civil and criminal law does not proceed from the assumption that unborn fetus's are fully human beings with their own legal rights as would be a fully born person who is out in the world. To repress the right to an abortion is to deprive a women of reproductive choice and thus her human and civil rights. Socialists …
Posted to A Pain, and Proud of It
-
BM, I'm kind of suprised a racist and fascist like yourself opposes the dealth penalty. Politics is a strange thing after all.
Posted to A Pain, and Proud of It
-
It is difficult to debunk someone who leans on others to argue for him. It is fine to quote other arguments but all you do is name drop and expect that to be taken seriously as an argument. If you want to join the debate than do so by making your own arguments rather than just name dropping someone you agree with politically. It would be as if I merely wrote "read Marx, Sweezy, Baran, Magdoff, Joan Robinson, Gramsci, and C. Wright Mills without presenting and explaining their arguments and relating them to the specifics of the issues at hand. Also, …
Posted to A Pain, and Proud of It
-
What is this objective reality? Everything that has been claimed by some to be objective reality has been eclipsed by one thing or another. The only thing permanent is change. There seems to be no essential meaning to the world or life itself. I thought you were all down with Nietzsche and the existentialists with this one. In any case, man shapes his world more than the other way around (though as Marx says "he doesn't so as he chooses").
Posted to A Pain, and Proud of It
-
Hume was a total skeptic about the possibility of epistomological truth. Kant was the most important rationalist thinker in Western thought and said that knowledge of reality was possible. He believed it was important to use reason to have a construct with which to understand empirical data. Rationalists like Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn agreed with Kant. Kuhn coined the term paradigm to refer to the totality of universal knowledge in any given period which itself could be overturned by another paradigm since knowledge does not grow by accretion but revolutionary trial and error. There is meaning but not essential meaning. …
Posted to A Pain, and Proud of It
-
As the Feminist Movement often says, "If men became pregnant, Abortion would be a Sacrement."
Posted to A Pain, and Proud of It
-
Even on an abortion thread you must push your racist holocaust denial. Most women btw, would think you're a moron. They're turned off by fascism because fascists are typically sexist bullies. I lived in the State of Wisconsin a long time mostly all through the 80s and I've seen real evidence of this fact. It's great to watch some naive macho Wisnurd putz trying to convince his attractive blond date(she obviously has increased his testosterone levels) in some dive of a pub that we must invade this or that country and that such and such a Republican is the man to …
Posted to A Pain, and Proud of It
-
The Chicago Taxi Commission has been the Dept. of Consumer Services for some time and colostomy bags are referred immediately to the Proctology Specialists at either Northwestern Memorial Hospital or, for those with no health insurance the Stroger Center at Cook County Hospital near Union Park not far from where the Bulls play. I must say that the above post is BM's very best so far. The ad hominem attacks are based on realistic suppositions and is actually amusing. Tex has stood up for Israel but also for the Jews as well. I do not share his animosity toward Arabs but …
Posted to A Pain, and Proud of It
-
It was no "word salad" but I guess anything above the level of Nazi apologia is hard for you to grasp. You are a sick moron. By the Way, isn't Wendy about your age? She might just throw over Mark Green for you. This way you can coauthor articles for the Nation Alliance Website together. As the pure blonde senior couple you could be a real inspiration to America's Aryan youth. And an abject lesson in family values!!
Posted to A Pain, and Proud of It
-
It could reasonably be claimed that "socialists" carried out the most mass murders only if you ignore the crimes of the US and its allies in the third world as well as those of Hitler and the Japanese imperialists during WWII. Fascism and Capitalism allied after WWII in the third world and southern Europe in pursuit of capitalist profit. Capitalism is an inherently expansionist system while socialism is not. This is due to what Marx discerned as the Laws of Motion of Capital which force capitalism to expand commodity production and its social relations the world over in order to concentrate …
Posted to Bisexual Healing
-
Chopper, You forget that the "free markets" that the Microsoft software monopoly operates in were opened by regimes supported by the US military who violently and undemocratically enforce US economic policy preferences. Also, total state control of the economy is only one approach that socialism has taken and not the one supported by most socialists. There is no reason that socialism has to have dictatorial political consequences. This is rightist dogma. Hitler's regime cannot be considered an extreme form of the US New Deal because it was both undemocratic and was mostly based on total militarization whereby the New Deal stressed …
Posted to Bisexual Healing
-
The idea that Nazi Germany's economy wasn't on a war time footing until a year before Germany was forced to surrender doesn't even make common sense. What kind of footing were they on all during the War? Krupp was the states biggest contractor. By 1936, Hitler had militarized the Ruhr, had over 10 million men under arms and had the war machine going full steam. Over half a billion in US direct foreign investment was in Nazi Germany by the early 1930s. This represented just under 10% of the global total of US FDI. German militarism was profitable to US corporations …
Posted to Bisexual Healing
-
I don't know what cracker college you went to but they misinformed you. Hitler's Keynsianism was based on the military. Read the Arms of Krupp and anything by Tim Mason. It is agreed that the Nazis used the military to boost overall economic productivity. By 1938, average wages and salaries were at the lowest proportion of the German GNP in Germany's history. It was not popular consumption but the military that boosted the economy. The rest is just the new trendy fascist apologia which is not worth much at all.
Posted to Bisexual Healing
-
Who are you to dismiss Munzer, Mason and anyone else you disagree with. You are the HACK and you have no brains or sense but to read discredited nonsense and dogma. Also try reading Alfred Sohn-Rethal's The Economy and Class Structure of German Fascism. Also Daniel Guerin's Fascism and Big Business. Wages in 1938 were stagnant and experienced no real increase since 1928. Per capita food consumption declined markedly as did most consumption except that of the rich. The main reasons unemployment dropped from 6 million in 1932 to 300,000 in 1939 was the military economy, the carting off of many …
Posted to Bisexual Healing
-
All the books you suggest are fraudulent so why read them? All the writers are more interested in their fascist agenda than historic truth. Your claim that Poland started WWII is appalling and silly. Even a right winger like Ernst Nolte would dispute it. The data about the Nazi economy is from Richard Overy and Tim Mason. The work week increased markedly as I stated and the median income stagnated. This brooks no controversy. The standard of living for the German working cless decreased. One reason for the war was that it became an extention of the German militarization process itself. …
Posted to Bisexual Healing
-
"when the economy contracts prices rise, factories are reopened, and workers are recalled" I don't know whether or not you are refering to the dynamics of a normal business cycle or what but I found this claim dubious at best. Business cycles exist within the overall trend of the economy, but they usually involve a slowdown or recession which results in the consolidation of the economic through "shakeouts" that have large competitors eating up small ones, reinvestment, rehiring, some price increases and renewed activity all in a cyclical fashion. I'm not so sure that this relattes to the issue of military …
Posted to Bisexual Healing
-
Debating Hitler's war economy is so much more fun!!
Posted to Bisexual Healing
-
One of the better books on this topic is Tim Mason's Social Policy in the Third Reich. In it he argues that the rapid growth of Germany's War Machine and War industries grew so fast that it created significant labor shortages elsewhere in the German economy particularly agriculture. SInce the labor force participation rate hadn't changed much since Hitler took power-it was just over two-thirds of the employment age population-labor shortages aggravated all of Germany's problems and by 1938 the strengthened political position of the German Working class led to renewed industrial conflict, something German Fascism was designed to address in …
Posted to Bisexual Healing
-
To say Hitler didn't have an aggressive foreign policy is quite ignorant. He invaded and conquered several countries taking over all of Europe from the English channel to the Urals. I'd call that aggression. He killed millions needlessly. The entire world agrees with this statement except for psycho-fascist morons with MENTAL ILLNESS who should not go off their medications. Germany stole all the mostly Polish speaking areas of the Polish Corridor in the Polish partitions of the 1790s. All Versailles did was return the areas to their rightful Polish owners. In addition, no one ever did anything from 1936 to 1939 …
Posted to Bisexual Healing
-
William Shirer and other have published captured Nazi documents like "Case White" showed plans to invade Poland and other European countries regardless of the Wests reaction. The UK only appeased Hitler until it was intolerable. The US invested in Nazi Germany and practically built the economy back up from the scratch. The trouble was that Hitler's war plans were so extensive, always becoming more and more far reaching, that he actually outran his own industrial capacity and labor and raw material resource availability. This is not the same as NOT having the German economy on a war footing!! Read Mason more …
Posted to Bisexual Healing
-
You are full of shit. All of the sources you cited are shit. Hitler invaded the USSR for conquest. According to Alexander Wirth, Stalin didn't even counter attack against the Nazi onslaught but ordered his ground troops to retreat with their artillary and not even return fire when doing so was clearly an option. The Russians were under siege for over two years before they turned the tide first at Stalingrad, then Kursk, and then as they pushed the Nazis all the way to Berlin. All the people you cite are lying fascist sympathizers and racists who have long been discredited. …
Posted to Bisexual Healing
-
Frankly, shitforbrains, you are the one who doesn't present any data. Anyone who compares your posts and mine on any issue would have to conclude that I present my case more persuasively and with more supporting evidence. The Czechs suffered enormously under the Nazis. To say the Nazi dismemberment and subjugation of Europes sole democracy "saved" it and its capital city is a twisted piece of fascist reasoning. The Nazis carried out hideous collective punishments for resistance there like the massacre of the entire town of Lidice' in 1942 while it was under Nazi occupation. About 340 innocent men women and …
Posted to Bisexual Healing
-
Your rant should get you committed but mental health institutions are no longer long term and if you're not insured even the brief stay is a real fortune. Anyhow, I digress. World conquest definately was in mein kampf. Reread it windbag. Sure we had the death penalty in the US...for people who committed murder not innocents or political dissidents as in Nazi Germany (what is a 10-1 policy?) You never answer any of my points. If Danzig was the whole cause of Nazi aggression and the real focal point of the war, why did Hitler invade every place but Danzig until …
Posted to Bisexual Healing
-
Some good points, luminous beauty, and very well said. Expect to draw wild rage from BM, however.
Posted to Bisexual Healing
-
First of all you have only made assertions without backing them up except to say that so and so says so. The people you cite with the possible exceptions of Burton Klein and AJP Taylor are NOT respected historians and would not be taken seriously by any real historian including Klein and Taylor. That is not just my opinion it is a fact and it is a view shared by most professional historians from right to left. The insane figures on Germans killed in the mass expulsions are ridiculous. There were only 7 million Germans killed in the entire war in …
Posted to Bisexual Healing
-
BM, Most historians settle on a figure of 14 to 16.5 million ethnic germans resettled from Poland and other places that the Nazis occupied and expelled indigenous inhabitants. The idea was retribution for the millions of people expelled from their homes and killed by the Nazis so their property could be "aryanized" or settled with ethnic germans. The need to make room for returning displaced Poles and others in the Allied Displaced Persons camps who lost their homes during WWII due to Nazi persecution. The number of deaths of ethnic germans in the resettlement process, which was forseen as a legal …
Posted to Bisexual Healing
-
I didn't use any left sources but standard historians. The high figures even if given by the BundesRepublik was revised downward. The fact that Germany settled about 15 million Volkdeutsch in place of Slavs and Jews deported to concentration camps does not negate anything else that I have said. The three million slave laborers that were imported were mostly Poles, Russians, and others while the volkdeutsch were used to settle in order to "aryanize" colonized territory in occupied Europe. Many Poles and Jews were expelled from the areas of Upper and Lower Silesia and Pomerania and were replaced by Volkdeutsch from …
Posted to Bisexual Healing
-
Not true. The agreed upon figures by the current German government are about 14 to 16.5 Volkdeutsch forcibly removed from eastern europe, about half from east germany Many of them were living in eastern european communities for many centuries but many were settled there by the SS settlement program headed by Reinhardt Heydrich. Many of these volkdeutsch (generally over 90% throughout Nazi occupied Europe) facilitated the Nazi occupation and assisted the SS in rounding up and expelling Poles and Jews. They were a Nazi fifth column by all accounts. This was especially true in Poland and Czechoslovakia where they claimed to …
Posted to Bisexual Healing
-
I find the freudian slip you made saying I "minimize german attrocities while maximizing my own" to be amusing and curious. Anyhow, your rant is more and more psychotic. There are no more than 15 million Jews in the world today and the figure could be as low as 12 million. The SS established the German Resettlement Trusteeship office in 1939 just after the invasion of Poland. The Race and Settlement office was in charge of all operations in occupied eastern europe related to settling millions of ethnic germans in homes and areas vacated by murdered Slavs and Jews. The Germans …
Posted to Bisexual Healing
-
Saying there was no Polish or Czechoslovakian nation is more absurd than claiming there was no Palestinian nation. Poland was partitioned after for 125 years between Russian, Austria, and Germany after existing as an independant Kingdom for centuries. At one point it was the biggest country in all of Europe. Czechoslovakia also existed for centuries but was taken over by the Austrian Habsburgs. You are the liar. And a sick Nazi to boot. All your figures are false. There was never any official revision of the figures for those killed at Auschwitz. There never has been a reason for it. You …
Posted to Bisexual Healing
-
The Polish Kingdom was not a joke. It was a commonwealth ruled by a large gentry class which comprised about 12% of the population according to respected British Scholar Norman Davies. The liberum veto and the far flung nature of the commonwealth made the various nobility that ruled the country through the Parlaiment, or Sejm, highly dependant on and beholden to large neighboring powers such as Prussia and Russia. By the mid-18th Century a very decentralized and loosely unified Poland become fractured enough so that the personal interests of the various compromised nobility prevented a centralized nation-state from emerging. This resulted …
Posted to Bisexual Healing
-
The countries that the Nazis invaded were legal sovereign entities. They were internationally recognized as such. The Nazis were lawless barbarians who engaged in illegal revaunchism. They had NO right to do what they did. Certain parts of the Versailles settlement was legitimate. Obviously the reparations were greedy and wrong and though the allies tried to mitigate the impact in 1930 with payment reschedualling and new US loans it was still to harsh for a solid economic recovery. The Nazis stole huge areas of other countries on the meagre excuse that a few Germans were living there. Many of them were …
Posted to Bisexual Healing
-
BM Your sources are fraudulent. Everyone knows that the Nazis carried aryanization programs everywhere. You disrespect the dead with your bullshit. Versailles had the force of law. The illegal siezures by Hitler didn't. Germany was the one who stole lands not the Allies. The Post WWII border settlement was just. So was the expulsion of many of the fascist volkdeutsch. The Poles were anti-semites but the Germans had a real genocide program. Denying the KultureKampt, and the Holocaust won't make them go away.
Posted to Bisexual Healing
-
The Versailles Treaty did have the force of law and returned stolen lands to the Poles and Czechs. The real losers were the Russians if you ask me. Everyone but Hitler recognized the new boundaries. Germany did lose some natural resources in the immediate east like coal, timber, metal ores, and farmland. The German revaunchism is no more legal than the Zionist siezure of lands in the West Bank and Gaza out of a need for "lebensraum" and a racist belief in one' s manifest destiny. You defend German expansionism for no justifiable reason. There was a Germanization policy from Bismarke …
Posted to Bisexual Healing
-
The Nazis broke international law and the norms of all civilized countries in invading and conquering neighboring countries. You don't understand this because you are a moron and a racist as everyone knows.
Posted to Bisexual Healing
-
I never started the argument BM!! You did. You are the one who's turned nearly every thread into a long winded and sick defense of you notorious neo-Nazi apologetics. Most intelligent people find it sick and ignorant. You have never convinced anyone of nor really even successfully defended your contention that Germany had "no choice but to invade Poland" in 1939. Certainly, it was not necessary to achieve physical and political control (already achieved by the fraudulaent city council election of 1933) of the Free City of Danzig. The allies sat by and watched nearly seven disgusting years of German aggression …
Posted to Bisexual Healing
-
What does this have to do with the Political Economy of Nazi Germany?
Posted to Bisexual Healing
-
It may well be the case that heightened productivity growth may make more income available to workers. But that hasn't been the case. Most recent studies of US productivity growth over the past twenty years or so show that although there is an overall trend towards higher productivity, and GDP growth in general, workers' incomes are lagging seriously behind such growth. Increased productivity only helps workers' incomes when there exists suffient political will to make it happen.
Posted to Productivity: Is The Boom Over?
-
I don't understand why teachers should become the very "model of Germanic domination" and I'm not sure the meaning of the recommendation. BM is a known fascist sympathizer and apologist. Perhaps this puts his statement into some perspective. His contempt for youth, which is something perhaps we all feel at some time, is especially rank. He is a vicious individual. He is also dogmatic and ignorant. I guess we must suffer his presence here on this and other threads.
Posted to Productivity: Is The Boom Over?
-
BM doesn't know that labor has no power. The Republican congress isn't going to listen to a bunch of unskilled low wage workers complain about their lost overtime when big business is lining their pockets with campaign contributions. Even most of organized labor, what's left of it, is earning pre-tax income below the national median. The real income of the working poor may have increased a bit over time but real value of the median wage today is worth less than it was thirty years ago. Most families in the bottom 80% of society absolutely need two incomes to support a …
Posted to Productivity: Is The Boom Over?
-
BM, My stats are not bogus. They are from the Congressional Budget Office. By all accounts the productivity index has lept way ahead of the growth of the national median household income which is itself quite inflated by the fact that it represents double incomes of married couples filed as joint returns. This is the case more often in the lower half of society than in the upper one percent. Caro is right to reject philosophies that cater to small elite numbers of people. They are not representitive and thus do not shed light on the truth in examining their highly …
Posted to Productivity: Is The Boom Over?
-
The CBO is the most reliable of all the government sources. Besides I have reviewed all kinds of relevant sources for a few years now and the same proportionalities keep cropping up. US labor productivity has increased by at least 27% since 2000 and by nearly 90 since the early 1970s when the economy began to slow down and go into a recession. Since 2000, the real median wage has been reduced by about 6% and since the early 1970s by at least 20 to 20%. It takes more hours of labor today to purchase a standard consumer basket of goods …
Posted to Productivity: Is The Boom Over?
-
You never ever give evidence for your erronious accusation of liar. Calling someone a liar only because they represent the government is childish and dishonest itself. No one else has ever credibly called the CBO's integrity into question and frankly their apporach to the data is more inclusive and reliable than other government agencies like the IRS. We have real capitalism. How much more real can it get? The tariffs are down. They are down because of all the "free trade" agreements you profess to hate. The reason? US goods manufactured aboad in China and Mexico can re-enter the US practically …
Posted to Productivity: Is The Boom Over?
-
US tariffs are at an all time historic low. Customs Revenue now comprises less than 5% of the dollar value of total merchandise imports according to the US Customs Service. This is part of the globalization trend. The idea is to import US manufacturing goods back in from China and Mexico so that they are price competitive on the domestic market. Trade is being eclipsed by foriegn direct investment (FDI). Transnational Corporations (TNCs) simply move to the markets they want to sell in and begin to manufacture there through wholly owned local subsidiaries of the parent corporation. About a third of …
Posted to Productivity: Is The Boom Over?
-
I hope you're not calling Einstein mediocre, BM. That is foolish even for you. You distorted much of what I said anyhow. BTW, I used mostly US Government sources not socialist ragsheets. OWH was right about taxes and free speech. Freedom isn't license. One needs to be considerate of others' rights and a responsible citizen. Walmart workers are subsidized by local and federal programs. It is Walmart's fault. The government can't abandon the workers and Walmart refuses to take up the slack regardless of the government's action or inaction. Anyhow, the state, as we know, is a tool of the rich …
Posted to Productivity: Is The Boom Over?
-
BM, What property rights are you talking about. If some causes deaths from the trampling of people from a mad rush to the exits because he yelled falsely about some immenant threat in the club, theater or whatever venue he is responsible for their deaths. He failed to regard their rights to safely. He can be criminally liable. This is obvious. Also the government is not socialist nor is the published information it puts out. Socialism is a system not a thing automatically connected to public institutions like the CBO or the IRS. WTH, Globalization in the modern sense is not …
Posted to Productivity: Is The Boom Over?
-
Some interesting things to consider about US trade with China and its effects on US employment could put things in better perspective. In the first place the US trade deficit is now nearing $1 trillion or about 7% of the current GDP with manufactured goods imports now making up more than 80% of the total balance of trade deficit. Despite this, and the fact that we imported about $1.4 trillion in manufactured goods, there is still about $4.5 trillion in manufactured goods that we produce in a year. About $775 billion gets exported so there is a just about a $625 …
Posted to Productivity: Is The Boom Over?
-
Only a few Dems are blue dogs. The voters voted against Republicans more than for Democrats. They also voted against the War in Iraq and against the increasing wealth and income gap in the US or as they put it "the disappearance of the middle class" which they think will be addressed best by tariffs and a cut in bloated CEO salaries. People are outraged by the maldistribution of wealth and rightly see it as a threat to democracy along with the Bush attacks on civil liberties. You didn't address my point about the OWH statement. If people are trampled to …
Posted to Productivity: Is The Boom Over?
-
I really don't of any "hippies" who know of much less report economic statistics. I do, however, tend to consult such sources as the US government's Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Congressional Budget Office as well as other respected sources. Labor productivity is the result of many things. Technology is one key source but there are others. Lean production, as labor activist and writer Kim Moody (not a hippy) puts it, is also due to employers downsizing the workforce while overburdening workers with more work while paying less for it. This has overwhelmingly added to the massive growth in output/manhour …
Posted to Productivity: Is The Boom Over?
-
In the first place it is both involuntary and normal to panic in a dangerous situation. Also, those who don't panic can be killed by those who do. Either way no one "deserves" to die in that situation and the blame goes to the one who yells fire. Property has nothing to do with it. Here in Chicago a similar thing occured at the E2 night club in the South Loop. 21 people were killed in a panic and made rush to exit the premesis because someone yelled that anthrax toxin had been relaeased in the club. Of course this was …
Posted to Productivity: Is The Boom Over?
-
Your reasoning is about as stupid as it gets. Obviously it is normal to panic in emergency situations. What do you think adrenaline does? It sure doesn't calm you down!! The truth or falsehood of the statement used to incite is utterly irrelevant. Obviously false incitement is worse than truthful incitement but the person who shouts an alarm carelessly should be prosecuted because he caused the panic. People are forced to panic in an emergency precisely because they are desparate to save their lives. I think you shrink from making the arguments because you can't and don't even fully understand them. …
Posted to Productivity: Is The Boom Over?
-
Talk about pulling numbers out of one's ass, BM, you're the chief. The CIA fact book is totally reliable and is close in its claims to other reliable sources. The US has not given the State of Israel $5 billion annually since 1967. Naseer Aruri, a Palestinian writer who is as hostile to Israel as anyone, cites in his work, The Obstruction of Peace, that Israel has received about $105 billion between 1949 and 2003. The US was somewhat chilly towards Israel and only began the special relationship with the end of the 1973 War when the US delivered arms to …
Posted to Productivity: Is The Boom Over?
-
I can't account for Butz and his inane rantings. Thankfully for him he had the right to free expression and a good Jewish ACLU lawyer. The figures on Israeli aid are ridiculous and utterly unsubstantiated. I know they are factually incorrect because I have checked generally anti-Israel sources, the only ones I actually read, and have never seen such inflated figure. STOP READING THAT SHITTY NOONTIDE PRESS. They are stupid Neo-Nazi liars who will mislead you time and again. The correct figure for US/Israeli bilateral government to government aid flows is slightly in excess of $105 billion. That is all. I …
Posted to Productivity: Is The Boom Over?
-
Tex, In fact the PA does have a stock exchange. The last time I checked, which was a little over a year ago, there were about 25 firms listing. Most of these firms are Jordanian or Saudi. The market cap is not great. There is a big PA development agency created in 1998 called PIEFZA. They have tried to create industrial free trade zones in Gaza and the West Bank with WB and other Donor funding for building closely clustered industrial parks for foreign businesses to locate, mostly light industrial like garment assembly, food processing, beverage bottling, and pharmacuiticals. There has …
Posted to Productivity: Is The Boom Over?
-
In t he first place your demographics is wrong. There were no more than 1.8 million total residents of British Mandatory Palestine by all accounts. 600,000 were Jews, 1.2 million were Arabs in 1948. By the June signing of the very last armistice agreement between Syria and Israel there were 160,000 Palestinian Arabs left in the three quarters of British Mandatory Palestine captured in the war by Israel. 15,000 Palestinian Arabs were killed in the war. There was about one quarter of the country left that the Haganah never entered. If one million Palestinians were expelled in the areas conquered by …
Posted to Productivity: Is The Boom Over?
-
In the first place the term "official Jewish Historian" is anti-semitic since there is no such thing and since it gives the false impression of dishonesty, suppression of academic freedom, and propaganda. Cecil Roth is not a Zionist but an historian of the Medieval period. Your figures on Palestine are false. Read Benny Morris Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, a source that is impeccable and hardly friendly to the Zionist case. Also read the somewhat objective and very detailed Struggle for Palestine by J.C. Hurowitz which is quite honest and candid about the expulsions and the plight of the Palestinians. …
Posted to Productivity: Is The Boom Over?
-
Benny Morris may have discredited himself with the infamous Ha'aretz interview but his scholarship is dead on!! Somehow he separates his political feelings from his scholarly findings. Dinnerstein is not a racist. What ever makes you say such a ludicrous thing? You are the only racist on this blog. And a lowlife. Not Dinnerstein. Truman waived the quotas by executive order allowing in about 160,000 Jews but McCarran, an anti-semite, put a rider on a 1948 80th congress immigration bill which effectively barred Jews from entering the US. The Jewish refugee problem in Europe began with under 500,000 Jews and was …
Posted to Productivity: Is The Boom Over?
-
BM is an uneducated slob so he makes ad hominem attacks and then is to stupid to recall that he made them. How sad for the fascist cause.
Posted to Productivity: Is The Boom Over?
-
Oh, BM just stop already!!
Posted to Productivity: Is The Boom Over?
-
BM you no longer have viable arguments.
Posted to Productivity: Is The Boom Over?
-
BM, You never address the points and the arguments and supporting evidence made by me or others. You answer in a combination of vile and racist ad hominem attacks, repetitious specious claims, and tired old citations of long discredited agenda driven hacks whose views very few people share. This is no way to carry on a real debate. I have decided that you have very low cognitive abilities.
Posted to Productivity: Is The Boom Over?
-
Hardesty you are pathetic...and vicious.
Posted to Productivity: Is The Boom Over?
-
These numbers make no sense. They are exaggerated and based on inflated perceptions of economic opportunity costs. In other words, they are anti-semitic propaganda. They are designed to inflame opinion agains the Jews.
Posted to Productivity: Is The Boom Over?
-
Kudos to Tex, Wicky, and Glock for stepping up to the plate on this asshole Blonde Mike. BM is nothing but a holocaust denying anti-semite and fascist sympathizer. He is also incredibly racist. Like Pat Buchanan and other crypto-fascists as well as boni-fide neo-Nazis like Zundel and others he sees the world through the sick Germanophile lens of the racist nationalist. To him there are only two forces in the world since modern history began in 1933. Those forces are represented by Hilter and Stalin. BM sees everyone lining up on one side or another. Never mind that the US/UK alliance …
Posted to Preaching Revolution
-
So I see that BM has run the entire gamut of his fascist views from holocaust denial to blaming the North for the US Civil War to blaming the Allies in WWII and the defeat of the Axis for the post war genocides in Asia like Kampuchea and Mao's massacres. He doesn't stop to consider that fascism and the oppression that it brought set up Asia for instability and chaos that brought on the revolutions that allowed bad guys to take over and commit genocide in the first place. BM, how long do you and other fascist apologists like Pat Buchanan, …
Posted to Preaching Revolution
-
The author points out that the US neo-con officials he talks about are linked to the ultra-rightist Likud Party and no one else in Israel. These officials typify not so much Israeli politics or the views of most Jews or Israelis but a narrow group of rightist fanatics whose political party was recently split to form a centrist party. This was done by ultra hardliner Ariel Sharon. Likud is continually marginalized gleaning an unprecedentedly small one fifth of the vote in the 2006 election. The Israelis want peace and a viable land for peace deal. There is a political crisis brewing …
Posted to For Israel's Sake
-
It is true that Kadima (forward in Hebrew) is Likud lite. That is hardly the point. In the first place Likud only has 12 Knesset seats as of the 2006 Israeli elections. This translates into an unprecedentedly low 10% of the total parlaimentary seats and is an indication of their lost political relevance in Israeli society. They are on their way to oblivion. They no longer have any meaningful contribution to make to Israeli politics. The real key, however, is the crisis brewing at the bottom of Israeli society amongst the hyper-exploited working class, and the endangered reservists who are tiring …
Posted to For Israel's Sake
-
BM, Your post proves that you are a racist. First of all at NO time in history did Jews ever live in "squalor" as they have a religious code that insists on cleanliness. Jews and Muslims in medieval Europe survived plagues that Christians didn't because of their unique hygiene codes. In the second place you say that the emancipation of the Jews was a disaster for everyone but the Jews themselves. How Racist!! Even you acknowledge that Jews have made many of the most important contributions to Western Civilization ever made.Any look at modern Jewish achievements finds them to numerous to …
Posted to For Israel's Sake
-
I meant the 2006 election in which the Likud polled an insignficant percentage of the total votes. Most Jews are brilliant though I may not be. Jews are disproportionately brilliant which accounts for their disproportionate prominance in society and success in most endeavors. This is not a natural or organic phenomenon but one brought about by pushy parents who insist on constant education from at least age five on up and who stress strict discipline, education, free debate and thought, and high culture. Others could catch up and surpass the Jews with similar values and concerns. No money is not that …
Posted to For Israel's Sake
-
In fact the ancient Hebrews adopted much of the Hellenistic culture or at least the upper classes did. The Greeks had lasting cultural impact on the Jews and of course, it is absurd to charactorize Western Cultural history as a Hebrew/Hellenistic struggle. The Jews and their culture were marginalized for many centuries anyhow. You don't know anything about either the Jews or the ancient Greek. Go see 300 and fantasize.
Posted to For Israel's Sake
-
The Jews influenced other as much as they were influenced by the great civilizations. The Jews were always highly intelligent. Jewish success and achievments existed well before the current high intermarriage rates which are confined pretty much to the North American Jewish communities. Any historian who does real research knows that the Jews were not segrated voluntarily but were forced into ghettos. The first modern Jewish Ghetto was the one in Venice in the 1500s. Ghetto is an Italian word as you might notice. The Spaniards made laws against the Jews in a number of areas and finally expelled tham in …
Posted to For Israel's Sake
-
One thing Bush neglects is the Peace Process. It needs to restart and soon. The extremists need to be marginalized on both sides. Peace is possible. The current government is allowed to unilaterally determine the entire final status process without engaging the PA and Abbas. The 2006 Hamas PLC electoral victory makes things quite difficult. They still don't recognize Israel.
Posted to For Israel's Sake
-
You seem to have come around to my precise original position. I have been arguing people are individuals more than members of ethnic groups for a long time.
Posted to For Israel's Sake
-
I never said that!! I am against racism. What I said after months of your anti-Jewish generalizations was that the many Jews who are in charge are there by virtue of their brilliance which was not inherent in their race but in a culture that does in fact stress discipline, higher education, hard work, and an appreciation for high culture. Why is this racist. The very same opportunities are availble to all if they only seek it. This is the secret of the Jews success. Not the pursuit of conspiricy and corrupt manipulation of the system.
Posted to For Israel's Sake
-
Jeez, what can I say?
Posted to For Israel's Sake
-
BM is a pro-nazi racist. Pay him no mind.
Posted to For Israel's Sake
-
The use of the N-word should be sufficient cause to be expelled from this website. We'll see what happens.
Posted to For Israel's Sake
-
It is very difficult for me to imagine you having many Black friends. The medical personel and orderlies involuntarily forced to deal with you at the psychiatric hospital don't really count.
Posted to For Israel's Sake
-
I don't advocate Soviet Psychiatric torture. I live with a serious manic-depressive who just checked himself in to a psychiatric hospital after a long manic episode that was an onus on himself, me, and his social workers. What makes psychiatric care "Soviet" when almost every country including ours provides mental health care?
Posted to For Israel's Sake
-
BM, I have dealt with seriously mentally ill people my whole adult life mostly on a personal level. I dated to seriously mentally ill women one for three months and one for six months. Both were seriously bi-polar and took medication. I also lived with a three other roomates in house in Madison that included a seriously bi-polar man. He was more depressed than anything else and ultimately committed suicide. I knew another bi-polar man in Madison who drove cab in the same coop with me. He stayed up for over 72 hours straight buzzing around the city and posed a …
Posted to For Israel's Sake
-
In the first place, no one ever said mental illness is contagious. Like many diseases, Mental illness is a condition which can be treated but perhaps not cured. Medical Science has established different mental illnesses as having different organic causes. Terrets syndrome is linked to excessive dopamine in the brain. Depression is now believed to be caused by Seratonin reuptake at the synapse of the neurons in the brain. That is why Prozac and other anti-depressants work to lift depression. They are seratonin reuptake inhibitors. There are also MAO inhibitors for schizophrenia and major depression to address the excessive release in …
Posted to For Israel's Sake
-
You claim that if there is a physical or organic basis for a mental disease than it is a physical and not a mental disorder. Ergo, there can be no such thing as a mental disorder since all their sources are deemed by medical science to be physical. This is quite a tautology. It is, in addition, quite circular reasoning. Physical and Mental disorders BOTH have physical or organic/chemical roots. The mind is regulated by neurotransmitters as well as enzymes active in the nervous system. Human beings are basically cell tissue and chemistry. It is known that the disruption of certain …
Posted to For Israel's Sake
-
I really don't know what boom BM is talking about. The economy is slow. Competent economists have discerned a correlation between a high degree of wealth and income concentration (concentrated income gets rolled quickly into concentrated wealth) and slow GDP growth. This is indisputable. The more paying jobs we lose the worse things get. Many new union contracts are settling for pay rates that put a family of four just above the poverty line. And the far right still blames unions for the economic problems!! The right should be fought politically. To bad the Dems have no cajones.
Posted to Which Side Are We On?
-
The concentration of wealth is necessary to some reasonable degree in all societies in order to generate savings and investment. But every economic study shows a backward bending curve for the correlation between wealth concentration and rates of GDP growth at certain very high levels of income and wealth concentration. At a certain point high concentrations of wealth and income in any society becomes self defeating. Low overall effect demand becomes a constraint on GDP expansion as there is less and less spending on consumer durables and the economy gets hung up and slows down. Narrowly based niche markets take over …
Posted to Which Side Are We On?
-
Most people with any common sense know that universal health insurance through a single payer system is not "socialized medicine" but an idea whose time has come. Society is suffering for the super profits and inflated CEO salaries of corporate health care. Premiums are running way ahead of the increase in health care costs and windfall profits are resulting leaving increasing numbers of people uninsured. It has been stated that the US spends more per capita than most industrial capitalist countries on health care with far fewer insured. This is ludicrous. Furthermore, it is noted that the cost of adding the …
Posted to The Health Care Monster Returns
-
Of all obnoxious things that Libertarians say the little moronic ditty about "wages are the price of labor so they can't be to low because they are actually a price" is the most ignorant. Wages are not just the "price of labor" they are how the majority of people are able to live. Obviously markets don't determine their rate and never have. Even in periods of full employment wages have been low. The class power of the capitalists have more of a determining effect on wages than the so called market. The continued expansion of the global working class through institutionaly …
Posted to The Health Care Monster Returns
-
WTH, You are correct about some things. Markets exist as modern institution and supply and demand functions here and there. However, the economy and the distribution of income, wealth and productive assets are very much a product of corporate power and influence. I have seen wages remain stagnant in the midst of a labor shortage. Employers are powerful. They can continually expand the scope of labor markets while workers have only limited bargaining power. Big retail outlets like Walmart can dictate terms even to large suppliers who formally shared major portions of large supply markets for their products. Small producers face …
Posted to The Health Care Monster Returns
-
The Law assures every living person the right to life. Life and libertay cannot be taken without due process of the law. People are not required to legitimate themselves through the market. No one ever said any such thing. All life is sacred by definition. Modern society believes this truth is self evident. Medieval society never did. That is the difference. BM hasn't learned this fundamental fact.
Posted to The Health Care Monster Returns
-
Life is sacred. It is not justified by success in the market. Allowing someone to die is illegal and charges of negligance can be brought against the offender. Hospitals must take all sick individuals who enter their emergency rooms and stabilize their conditions or they can be held criminally liable not just sued in a civil case. Our case law makes this clear. Also modern thought clearly holds all existing human life as sacred and worthy of defense by law. All people in US society are legally entitled to equal protection by the police and emergency services regardless of their income …
Posted to The Health Care Monster Returns
-
What has all this to do with Universal Health Care?
Posted to The Health Care Monster Returns
-
BM, It's true that reality doesn't consist of pure numbers but numbers explain a lot. Forgeting for a moment Truman's cliche about "lies, damn lies, and statistics" we know that "figures don't lie but liars can figure!" Anyhow, there is general agreement about the gist of my statistical claims. Inequality has grown by leaps and bounds over the past thirty years with no real progress or growth to show for it. All we have is an overbloated financial system which is used for M & A activity as well as speculative stock purcases. This situation is dangerously similar to the pre-1929 …
Posted to The Health Care Monster Returns
-
What happen to the discussion on health care?
Posted to The Health Care Monster Returns
-
Perhaps the elders of the New Left can show us the way to a new and badly needed political movement to address the gross injustices and madness of today's society. If they do it won't be to soon!!
Posted to Elders of the New Left
-
Tex, You've obviously never been in prison. Your silly conception shows this most clearly.
Posted to Americas Slave Labor
-
What impresses me about this article is not the oil angle which we could all take for granted but the 150 companies granted over $50 billion in mostly no bid contracts. The $50 billion figure is big money. I would estimate that over a third of the world's nearly 200 sovereign nations don't have an annual GDP totalling $50 billion. As time goes on the figure increases. This figure also exceeds Iraqi oil revenues and GDP of late I'm sure. All this being the case, it is easy to see how corporate globalization has created, structured, staffed, and also determined the …
Posted to Spoils of War
-
Hardesty, you have been running amok with numbers ever since you went off your meds. Actually, the true figure of US aid to Israel since 1948 is about $105 billion, much less than the $250,000 billion you wrongly claimed. Much of this came back to the US in weapons and other purchases. The loans received by Israel were all repaid. Israel has good credit and its state bonds have a high international rating by Standard and Poors. Israeli GDP has been growing at a rate of about 4% annually over the past 15 years or so. High tech investment and US …
Posted to Spoils of War
-
Moronic Mike, Israel, as everyone knows, has not actually averaged $5 billion per year since 1948. Anyone will tell you that. They in fact recieved most of their aid from private Jewish charities until 1967 and at no time did this aid ever come close to $5 billion in on year. The US aid began to flow in earnest after 1973 when Israel nearly lost the war with Egypt and Syria. You are entitled to your own opinion but NOT your own facts. Why should you be able to make up nonsense and present it as fact? Provide a credible link …
Posted to Spoils of War
-
Israel has killed far fewer Arabs than other Arabs. Israel hasn't killed nearly the number of even one such Arab leader as Saddam or Hafiz Assad. Israel has probably killed about 50,000 Arabs civilian and military since 1947 and no more than this number. Check it out.
Posted to Spoils of War
-
The sources for Assad and Saddam's casualty figures are not Zionist ones but respected international human rights agencies like Amnesty International and Human Rightys Watch (Middle East). These folks have established that Arab leaders kill more Arabs over time than does Israel. Also, you did state since 1948 for your absurd foreign aid figures to Israel . But you lie all the time like most fascists.
Posted to Spoils of War
-
Mike , You have top be the biggest moron in history. In addition Tex has political categories confused. There is nothing socialist about BM's rants. Fascists are also anti-American and blame the lasting effects of WWII, "the good war", for the problems of the world today. One of the negative effects according to fascists like Hardesty, Buchanan, and others who can be found reading the National Website is the fact that the war boosted the US economy creating a broad based US middle class, strengthening its trade union movement and its political influence through the Democratic Party. Another thing it did …
Posted to Spoils of War
-
BM (suitable initials for your ilk), Buchanan's advocacy regarding WWII is in retrospect, moron. The NKVD had almost no Jews and persecuted Russian Jews as much as it did others. This is particularly true since Stalin exiled Trotsky, a point which you gloss over. You cite nonsense works which are not held as reliable historic sources. You don't know ANY history. The Poles were told to allow a corridor to danzig which they did. They negotiated in good faith on all German demands. The entire world knows that German territorial demands were ridiculous. They wanted broad swaths of Baltic border areas …
Posted to Spoils of War
-
BM, Danzig was really out of the Poles hands since it was a legal ward of the League of Nations. The Poles acceeded to all Hitler's demands except to relinquish the corridor to which Hitler was NOT entitled. The Nazis invaded Poland killing 7 million of its people. That's when the UK declared war on Hitler. This hardly seemed necessary or justified. Your revisionist nonsense sources have been wholly discredited. Iraq had no right to a nuclear bomb as per the IAEA rules and the 1963 NPT. What right did Saddam have to a bomb. The French were working on nuclear …
Posted to Spoils of War
-
BM, The UK/French security guarantee given to Poland in March 1939 had nothing to do with Danzig. It was a response to Hitler's illegal march into Czechoslovakia, a legally sovereign country, and conquering and annexing it to the Reich while the vast majority of bohemian and moravians were Czech. He also created an independant state out of Slovakia under a fascist puppet regime and gave Ruthania to Hungary despite the fact that Ruthenia was nearly all Ukrainian. Secondly, the guarantee to Poland was well known to the Nazis to have no teeth as the UK/French and others could not take on …
Posted to Spoils of War
-
Hitler did believe that Poland should not exist and said so in secret internal memos cited in the work by W. Shirer on the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. The Weimar position was irrelevant since they observed the Versaille Treaty and never invaded anyone. D. Hoggan is not accepted as a legitimate authority on the subject. The view that Hitler was appeased is absolutely universal and not at all limited to Stalin or members of various communist movements or parties. The truth as many see it, however, is that Chamberlain COLLUDED with Hitler in order to debilitate the European …
Posted to Spoils of War
-
RP, I don't really know you or anything about you so to be fair I am just going to assume that you are this incredibly innocent, unschooled young neophite with orange hair, a few rilly cooool tattoos, and some strategic piercings. OKAY?? RP, what links do you really need. I have given William Shirer's exhaustive 1,600 page volume called "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" as well as some other sources including a left revisionist one called IN OUR TIME: The Chamberlain-Hitler Collusion by Alvin Finkel and Clement Liebowitz. Both are quite excellent and highly detailed diplomatic histories of …
Posted to Spoils of War
-
The go ask alice remark is telling. You must be on drugs if you think Mike makes more sense than me. Everyone knows the real history. You think Hitler was reasonable. You're a sick moron too. In addtion you prattle on nonsensically like an idiot from California.
Posted to Spoils of War
-
I believe that the UK and France declared war on Hitler only after he invaded Poland. BM, you are a sick fascist. Anyone that you disagree with you call a Red. You advocate murder and fascism. You are simply a more rightist version of Bush and Co. with your advocacy of fascism and repression. You believe in war but against countries that never menaced us like Venezuela and other left countries. Everyone knows your story. You slowly lost your mind in Oakland going from being some kind of Trotskyist in the seventies to being a fascist like you are now. Some …
Posted to Spoils of War
-
BM, It is quite obvious that they Nazis planned to conquer all of Europe even before the invasion of Poland. Documents exist to show that Hitler never intended to allow an independant Polish state to exist when in fact it hadn't between 1793 and 1919 when it was reestablished by the Versailles Treaty. The Poles did negotiate in good faith. They offered Hitler a corridor to Danzig as well as extra-territorial area to construct transportation lines. The Nazis had already controlled Danzig politically by virtue of the City Council. It was not necessary for Germany to control the foreign policy of …
Posted to Spoils of War
-
BM Your assertion that Stalin spoke Yiddish in his home is laughable. You are a true white trash moron. You are a pathetic piece of crap. Keep on pushin' that Hoggan guy. He is white trash as well.
Posted to Spoils of War
-
Tex, Thanks for the great post. This is something for BM to chew on. I'm sure, however, that he'll find some "blame Israel" angle. He always does.
Posted to Spoils of War
-
BM, You are a liar. You quote the same old holocaust denier hacks that I have shown to be disproven scientifically and historically. Everyone knows that the Nazis were not tortured at Nuremberg. Albert Speer was NOT tortured into writing two books in Spandau in which he confirmed every war crime the Nazis were accused of at Nuremberg. You are just a dumbass Nazi sympathizer and Jew hater as everyone who reads your posts can clearly see.
Posted to Spoils of War
-
Tex, I want to commend you on your brilliant refutation of BM (Bowel Movement?). He has run me out of energy. He persists in quoting only holocaust revisionists who are shown to be frauds and who fabricated data or made logically fallacious arguments. Most of these fools quote mostly from each other or distort the independant data the do use. Tex you are truely great!! Despite our disagreements about other issues I'm here for you on this one. Though conservative, you are the only one who has stood up to this Neo-Nazi racist and holocaust denier. One can tell by the …
Posted to Spoils of War
-
I've heard of all the anti-Zionist writers that you've pointed out and NONE of them deny the holocaust. And since when is acknowledging the holocaust a "left" political position. Most normal reasonable people from the far right to the far left acknowledge the historic event.The Nazis themselves freely acknowledged it. The Nazis were not tortured at all. Those who testified were given due process. The Nazis did however, try to kill witnessess so they couldn't testify at Nuremburg. In some gruesome cases they succeeded. The sense in which you use the term revisionist for the Israeli Scholars like Morris and Schlaim …
Posted to Spoils of War
-
BM, You are a racist moron and should be removed from the ITT website permanently!!
Posted to Spoils of War
-
Too bad!! Doesn't say much for the overall judgement or professional standards of the ITT staff. Free speech is one thing. You are a disgraceful bigot!
Posted to Spoils of War
-
You cleaned nobody's clock in any sense. And by the way you are not the one who gets to decide on that issue. The opinions of other qualified people count more. I have provided historical evidence to all your repetitive lies and quotes of discredited sources. Your "evidence" consists of phony data and adhominem attacks and name calling. You also repeatedly engage in race and Jew baiting as if it were a form of argumentational logic. By most lights you are an extremely bigoted, dishonest, ignorant, and vicious individual with whom civilized and enlightened debate is utterly impossible. One of the …
Posted to Spoils of War
-
Holocaust Revisionism is a purely rightist cause. The cause is to revive fascism as a political movement.
Posted to Spoils of War
-
The State of Israel is not a fascist state although its illegal military occupation is undemocratic and oppressive and should cease. The US State is not corporate state fascism (whatever that means) and FDR's New Deal was successful and widely supported not only by people of all strata but by big business as well. There was NO other way out of the Great Depression. Laisse Fairre economics is a total myth and never actually existed nor could it possibly exist. The State is instrumental to every single economic system's establishment and maintanence because pure economics doesn't exist, only an historically integrated …
Posted to Spoils of War
-
I have read all of the Jewish "New History" authors listed above and not a single one claims that Israel is a fascist state. Ze'ev Sternhell comes closest in his analysis of "Labor Zionism" and its glorification of Labor not so much as a mode of class struggle in the Marxist sense of the workers struggling to appropriate the surplus of production or change the social system altogether but as a non-class based glorification of laborers as promoting the nation and national destiny through creative and productive work and thus defining their citizenship role. Here labor glorifies the state and the …
Posted to Spoils of War
-
It is very clear that you know nothing of WWII, Israeli fascism, or shiksas shitting in cabs in Chicago. You were factually inaccurate on all three vital issues.
Posted to Spoils of War
-
The picture didn't look sexual. I could barely make out what it was about much less does it appear sexist or appeal to the prurient interest. It looked inoccuous enough. I think we should worry about other issues.
Posted to Portrait of the Activists as Young Women
-
I Loved the Forces of Viktory album with Fite dem bok. and Sonny's lettah. One of my friends labelled it one of the best anti-fascist albums ever made. Made in the early 1980s during the race riots LKJ sang Some of dem say dem a nigga hatah/an some of dem say dem a block beetah/an some of dem say dem a pakki bashah/an some of dem say dem a black stabbah/ Fascists on de attack don' batha worry fo dat/fascists on de attack we will fite dem bok/fascists on de attack we will coooontah attack/fascists on de attack we will drive …
Posted to Dread Beats
-
Chavez is a real man of the people.
Posted to The Caracas Consensus
-
Mike, The Estate Tax is ONLY for the Rich. If you're not a multi-millionaire don't worry...or as we say in Chicago...fughettaboutitt!!
Posted to We Are All Waiters Now
-
Mike just google Estate Tax and you'll get zillions of explainations. The state of California, since Proposition 13 in the late 1970s, has been notorious for real estate appreciation rates that are so high that they run so far ahead of the incomes of the owners that people can't afford to live in a house or dispose of their property once they die. Also, estate means your total net worth not just a physical piece of land or real estate. There are also so many allowable deductions when calculating the tax. The IRS website assures us that only the richest 2% …
Posted to We Are All Waiters Now
-
First of all there is no such thing as one world government and there never was. National states are actually strengthened by globalization which is something they helped bring about. Sovereignty has always been a myth. It's all about the hyper-mobility of capital. Secondly, the gold standard is bullshit. It didn't stop the great depression and prolonged it once it occurred. All experts across the spectrum from Milton Friedman to JM Keynes to Paul Sweezy agree on this point. Every country that abandoned its gold standard after 1929 saw an almost immediate pick up in economic expansion. This is simply because …
Posted to We Are All Waiters Now
-
BM Libertarians are racists and exploiters. You are both with your holocaust denial and pro-capitalist inequality.
Posted to We Are All Waiters Now
-
I would be happy if indeed it were true. Even modern demographics shows its true. In 1939, about 12 million Europeans were Jews and the world Jewish population stood at about 18 million. Today there are only about 12 million Jews in the world. Low birth rates I don't think so especially since the US Jewish population went from 4.2 million in 1945 to just over 6 million by 1970. Today, because of low birth rates and high intermarriage rates the US Jewish population is closer to just over 5 million. There is another 5 million in Israel and another million …
Posted to We Are All Waiters Now
-
You have not proven your statements with facts and neither have the HR morons. The idea that millions of Jews are living in the old Soviet Union is false. Why would Stalin and Truman collude together on such a perposterous thing when they stood to gain nothing from it. A certain number of Jews escaped to the Soviet Union but very few. Less than a million. Your references never proved their baseless assertions they just made them and you being stupid and sick were happy to believe them. That is your choice. But it is wrong. If you knew what you …
Posted to We Are All Waiters Now
-
What does this pathetic asshole mean by taking his rage out on innocent people. Certainly it wasn't Jewish people who attacked his wife. Why the sudden burst of Holocaust Denial? And he personally attacks me. I'm from Chicago!! I've never seen any of his friends or family and yet he attributes a vile remark about me from one of them. He is nuts. He and his vile, hatefilled remarks need to be removed from the entire blogsite. People deserve to be treated with respect. The things that he says have real consequences and the people that are propagating this hatred are …
Posted to We Are All Waiters Now
-
BM, It might interest you to know that Proposition13 is something on which I have great expertise. I Met both Howard Jarvis and Tom Hayden, a State of California legislator and key opponent of the resolution in Madison, Wi in 1978. At the time there was a tax revolt in the State of Wisconsin mostly based in the rural areas where farmers felt they were being soaked for lots of money with very little return in terms of services or needed infrastructure like roads and public lighting. In a very real sense, and especially for the senior citizens, property taxes are …
Posted to We Are All Waiters Now
-
Mike you're a pathetic neo-Nazi. Your slang gives you away ("mudpeople?") None of it really made sense until you said you were originally from Virginia. Damn its an awful big coincidence that nearly every damn neo-Nazi bigot of some kind or another can trace their roots back to the South. April Gaede who claims she's from Bakersfield with her neo-Nazi twins who perform under the name of "Prussian Blue" (a pseudonym for the blue haze residue from cyanic acid used in gas chambers-a nice touch for two 12 year old girls) is really from One of the Carolinas. I refuse to …
Posted to We Are All Waiters Now
-
Major, Major I gave this badly psychologically damaged moron two great websites that answer not three but dozens of thoughtless, bogus claims by the Historical Revisionists (HR). One of them is www.hdot.org and another is the www.nizkorproject.org. They both have dozens of references and take on the specious claims of HR frauds one by one. One especially interesting myth debunked by Lipstadt herself is the claim that the Jewish community contrived the story in order to get money for Israel. Since the German reparations to Israel was based on the number of Jews which survived and made it to Palestine not …
Posted to We Are All Waiters Now
-
TexanMan, In the first place political beliefs are an exellent reason to "smear" people, as you say. In the second place the Latino culture in Texas and the white "redneck" culture of the deep south are two very different things. I'm not saying all southerners are reactionary and all northerners are progressive. There are exellent examples of anomalies in both regions. My personal favorite is C. Wright Mills. A Texan like yourself. Changed the whole way we think about sociology. Now some folks call him a left Weberian. Far as I kin reckon he preferred to be called a "plain Marxist" …
Posted to We Are All Waiters Now
-
Hey Asshole, Glad you actually think the Nazis were unfairly treated at Nuremberg. Witnesses were actually cross examined. The Nazis got better due process than they gave anyone else. They in fact were never coerced. How could they have been coerced? They received top grade legal representation. These sickos were guilty as hell. It is impossible to fake a genocide of this magnitude but it is easy to twist and misrepresent legitimate evidence and present it to uneducated crackers like yourself and be effective based on the low congnitive ability of your audience. One example is the so called Leuchter Report …
Posted to We Are All Waiters Now
-
Hey Tex, I can tell you're from Texas by your arrogance. Your success deserves to be congratulated. You deserve much credit for your success but you recieved help from progressives. Subsidized student loans, education at a land grant college, free public education before that, and, of course, a European engineered car built by unionized workers with high morale who do their job right, and who work for a company who received government assistence (perhaps in the form of tax subsidies) for technological R&D which made German cars the best in the world. State/Corporate long term relationships to develope product markets and …
Posted to We Are All Waiters Now
-
I don't know where you come up with 2 million illegal mexicans in Chicago when the entire population is only 3 million.
Posted to We Are All Waiters Now
-
Mike you are a pathetic little neo-Nazi. You've claimed elsewhere that Hitler was no threat. That's news to most of the world, including most Germans. Without Hitler Stalin might have been overthrown before he could kill very many people and a Jewish state would never have been established as very few Jews had any interest in it and none did before Russian pogroms in the 1880s on through WWI aftermath. The consequences in the pacific theatre were dire. Japanese colonialism brought communism to Korea and China as well as Indochina yet one must also credit oppressive social conditions. This is something …
Posted to We Are All Waiters Now
-
Texas, I actually agree with some of the comments you made at the very bottom of your post. Don't agree with the rest. As Oliver Wendell Holmes once said, "Taxes are the price we all pay for civilization." What makes you think our earnings come purely from our own efforts. I work hard to and face dangers. I know you and many others do to. I also don't think those who don't work by choice (whether rich or poor and there are many of both) deserve much of societies consideration. However, none of us live and work in a vacuum. The …
Posted to We Are All Waiters Now
-
Hawaii Jack (Jack Barnes, ex-trotskyist who wrote pamphlets for Pathfinder Press on such issues as Cuba and the Russian Revolution?)aren't we unstable? Speaking of civilized, no who actually is doubts the fact that the holocaust occured. Why would they? The pictures alone are proof enough for most. Logically speaking it is hard to fake a genocide that big. Why would the big powers do it. They all appeased Germany with vast conquests and fed her direct investments helping to build up her war machine until the Nazis attacked friendly little Poland for no reason. Did you think Poland was a legitimate …
Posted to We Are All Waiters Now
-
You really ARE insane and so is your stupid "wife" (its hard to believe your actually married even to this individual). First of all the holocaust is in fact settled truth. No one but crackpots disbelieves it. No believes that the Nazis were subjected to "show trials" at Nuremburg and, most importantly, everyone believes that gas was used at Auschwitz and probably eight other places. Fred Leuchter was stripped of his credentials. He describes himself as an engineer but in fact he was never actually trained in engineering. Apparently he studied history which you obviously have not. If you did, you …
Posted to We Are All Waiters Now
-
None of the so called sources you mentioned are legitimate scholarly history by legitimate scholars but hate propaganda by shitforbrains fascist liars like yourself. First the plebicite was for the political fare of the 16 counties of the Polish corridor not for the actual city of danzig itself. Danzig was a "free" city under LON trusteeship. This was not illegal as the city itself was in dispute due to its mixed population and its being geographically embedded in Polish territory. The entire Polish corridor was more than three quarters Polish. Colonel Beck who was Poland's foreign minister did negotiate in good …
Posted to We Are All Waiters Now
-
Your sources have been delegitimized by most professional historians. Hoggan and Irving are self-professed anti-semites and pro-fascist. Poland never gave the Nazis an excuse to invade and occupy it, kill nearly 7 million of its citizens and deport over a million and a half east to the Reich for slave labor. As a libertarian I realize slave labor appeals to you which only means that you and your scum libertarian ilk are, in truth, only fascists. The transference of Danzig to league trusteeship was a compromise position between leaving it in German hands or giving it to Poland. You say Poland …
Posted to We Are All Waiters Now
-
You are a stupid racist of monumental proportions. You act as if the Western colonial powers had nothing to do with the failure of decolonization in many cases. UK and France never stopped playing a major role in Africa and the Middle East. Many of these dictators got military and economic aid from the European community.You never prove your assertions you just name call people and throw out wildly unsubstantiated figures. You are sick and fascistic. All fascists like you are morons. Your answer to everything is to go into a completely irrelevant rant about how many people Stalin and Mao …
Posted to We Are All Waiters Now
-
Jack what are you saying? Jewish women only date anti-semite fascists. Your history is all wrong by the way. So are the jerks you read. They are not respected historians. To blame german attack on Poland on UK/French pact that was all but defunct. No historian does that. Not even Ernst Nolte who is as right wing as you can get. The Malmedy trials were legit. the Nazis killed 84 disarmed US soldiers after they surrendered during the battle of the bulge. the nazis were much worse than the allies. you are just biased toward fascism like most libertarians. Hitler had …
Posted to We Are All Waiters Now
-
According to Charles Higham who wrote "Trading with the Enemy" the US had about $475 million worth of direct investments in Nazi Germany when the US entered the War. This represented about 8% of total US direct foreign investment in 1941. It probably accounted for more than half of total FDI in Nazi Germany at the time. There were over a dozen US firms doing business there at the time. It helped sustain Hitler's war drive. It also enriched US capitalists.
Posted to We Are All Waiters Now
-
Poles negortiated in good faith. Beck didn't have the backing of the UK and France who later capitulated to Hitler without a fight. Hitler would have invaded Poland no matter what. This has been proven. You state that Nazis were tortured into confessing to crimes in EVERY warcrimes trial so you can deny crimes. This is a false and cowardly approach to "history" which you know nothing about anyhow. The Nazis were never tortured before any trials or this would have come out. No reliable source has ever claimed that Nazis were tortured. It is another fascist lie. You are one …
Posted to We Are All Waiters Now
-
The Demjaniuk trial didn't show the witnesses lied at all. What it showed was that technology hadn't gotten sophisticated enough to make the trawniki photo clear enough to show it was Ivan. Since it was a murder trial evidence had to be beyond a shadow of a doubt and D was cleared. He was however obviously guilty.
Posted to We Are All Waiters Now
-
You, sir, are the lump of shit. The witnesses did NOT lie and were not paid or otherwise encouraged to do so. This is enormous disrespect for those who suffered something neither you nor anyone else has ever suffered. You are evil. It is well known that if the trial took place today and with today's technology instead of in the 1980s Demjaniuk would have been easily convicted. It is also well known that the prosecution, led by the able Micheal Shakhed, made a much stronger case than did the defense. Because it was a capital case all evidence and not …
Posted to We Are All Waiters Now
-
The Israeli high court never determined anyone lied and certainly not the witnesses. Show were this is the case. Were they charged with purgery? Hardesty, you viciously make shit up out of prejudice all the time and you are a moron. Buchanan is a right wing nazi sympathizing anti-semite and is known as such. Quoting him proves nothing. Demjanjuk owes his very life to Israeli integrity and to the slow pace of technological advancement in photo analysis. This is all one needs to know about the case!!
Posted to We Are All Waiters Now
-
You're the "tribal" liar. You belong to the neo-Nazi moron tribe. The Israeli court affirmed the testimony of the eye witnesses. The widely agreed upon reason for aquital was the failure to sufficiently tie Demjanjuk to the picture on the Trawniki Card which was proven not to be a "Soviet Forgery" as alleged by the Defense team. You could not possibly show any evidence of intentional misrepresentation by any of the prosecution witnesses because there was none and none was alleged even by the defense. Your own anti-semitic bigotry is all you have to go on. You are pathetic. You should …
Posted to We Are All Waiters Now
-
BM, I really don't know how such a sick creature as yourself could possibly exist. How do you live with yourself. You are pathetic. Hating Jews must consume you and now you want to consume others with hate. For your information the Israeli high court aquitted Ivan not because the Witnesses testimony was unreliable. You can find no such finding by the court and you know it. You are making stuff up. Typical of holocaust deniers. The aquital was due to the inability of the prosecution to connect Ivan to the picture on the Trawniki Card. Today's photo enhancement technology would …
Posted to We Are All Waiters Now
-
One of the reasons that the Left is so concerned with indentity politics is because capitalism is racially structured both in terms of income stratification and occupationally. Identity groups have formed the basis of economic structuring in many places throughout history. The integration of identity groups into various societies has often been the fulfillment of some economic roll or another. Usually it is cheap labor but sometimes it's other things. This is why identity politics survives. Addressing identity is an important part of addressing social stigma and inequality.
Posted to White Progressives Don't Get It
-
I am not saying to put all our eggs in the IP basket. I just realize a lot of social problems still break down statistically by race in this and many other societies.
Posted to White Progressives Don't Get It
-
This whole discussion is getting ridiculous as they often do.
Posted to White Progressives Don't Get It
-
I'd like to know what the Jews have done to M. Hardesty to make him so hostile to them. Certainly Jews have nothing to do with the maladies of the distinguished M. Hardesty!!
Posted to White Progressives Don't Get It
-
WTH, You seem slightly conservative but well informed, fair, and reasonable. Do you have any comments on BM's violent commitment to Holocaust Revisionism? It's really quite frightening!! I never thought I'd see this stuff on the ITT blog even from the worst trolls. What are your thoughts?
Posted to White Progressives Don't Get It
-
You have proven NONE of your baseless and violently hateful assertions. Of Course HR is bigotry. To negate the reality of the worst planned genocide ever in order to hold it up rather as an example of the pernicious and deceitful nature of the victims who scored the entire myth at the expense of all humanity is to you not a bigoted act? You are truely nuts. Since you are the ones accusing the Jews and others of lying than the burden of proof is on you to show the story is false. Wiesenthal and other scholars have proven the opposite …
Posted to White Progressives Don't Get It
-
The US is one of the foremost users of anti-personal weapons along with Israel. This betrays a strategy of depopulation, colonization, conquest, pacification, and occupation. The efforts to clear certain areas in order to restructure them politically and engage in ethnic cleansing is one reason the US is so dependant on massively destructive weapons that are aimed at populations such as cluster bombs, white phosphorus, napalm, and chemical defoliants. The US strategy is not based on fighting an organized conventional military enemy to achieve concrete military objectives but is arrayed against populations in order to reorder local societies and establish political …
Posted to What We Leave Behind
-
Texas Independant, you are far more Texas than Independant!! It is all to easy to forget that the bottom 10% has never much benefited from US progressive federal programs and never were able to do so. AFDC is gone. Social Security should be saved as people worked hard for years for low wages and also put into the system. A far greater amount of federal subsidies go to the working and middle classes. These programs entail, but are not limited to, educational loans, small business loans, farm subsidies, subsidized mortgages, the GI bill, and tax deferred retirement accounts. These are all …
Posted to Turning Back the Tax Revolt
-
Texas, In the first place you claim that the US federal budget is 58% committed to programs for the poor and elderly. That would mean nearly 1.5 trillion are committed to these programs which is not true. Social Security payouts are about half a trillion annually and don't come out of the federal budget but from a separate fund. TANF blockgrants have averaged around $16 to $17 billion annually since the law was passed in 1996. In the years since the law was passed the TANF participation rate nation wide has slid from 67% in 1996 to 48% in 2001 and …
Posted to Turning Back the Tax Revolt
-
First of all SS and unemployment are insurence programs that involve payment to the federal government but are not purely out of federal taxes but specially earmarked contributions. Secondly, it is a fact that Americans pay less taxes for what they get than anyone else in the industrial world. It has been shown time and again that the post and pre tax income distribution structures in the US are about the same. Taxation in the US hasn't been redistributive since the top bracket went from 91% during FDR to 70% in the 1950s. The stratication patterns remain the same. Taxes are …
Posted to Turning Back the Tax Revolt
-
Koffi Annan is great!! He didn't steal nearly as much as US contractors. Over 9 billion unaccounted for at the end of the War!! Also Scorp, I meant the Walmarts of the world who pay nothing and import everything taking down our whole economy and the whole middle class with it!!
Posted to Turning Back the Tax Revolt
-
There was $8.9 billion in the escrow account for the oil for food program that was immediately transfered illegally to the federal reserve and was never accounted for to congress or any oversite body. And it was illegal because according to the UNSC resolutions that established the program and all resolutions pursuant to the goals and administration of the program the money was supposed to be in a special UN escrow account not at the FED. The real scandle was that the war was a showcase for neo-liberal capitalist development by US corporations which took over the Iraqi economy. The $50 …
Posted to Turning Back the Tax Revolt
-
The debt as a proportion of GDP game is misleading. Sure current account deficits under FDR were large but the depression made the US GDP quite small. We were still an industrializing nation at that point. FDR's deficits to run the New Deal and the War were also the reason we came out of the depression. So it is misleading to talk about deficits as a proportion of the economy without mentioning the incredible spurt in economic growth. Average growth rates under FDR exceeded 5.6% while those under Reagan's "Seven Fat Years" were only 3.7%. A middle class grew under FDR …
Posted to Turning Back the Tax Revolt
-
Scorp, In fact #81 prohibits Iraqi farmers from saving and reusing seeds of "new" plant varieties registered under the law. The law is an amendment of an old Iraqi patent law from 1970 except that it expands on it so much as to make it an entirely new law. Never in Iraqi history was it legal to patent life forms. For over 10,000 years in Mesopotamia, long a breadbasket of the region until US dumping and now, Order 81, farmers saved and bred seeds and developed a rich biodiversity in edible grains. Now all this is threatened with the Bremer Orders …
Posted to Turning Back the Tax Revolt
-
Scorp, You have no right to make ad hominem attacks on people you don't know anything about only because you don't approve of their politics. This is typical right-wing bullying and intolerance. It is also ignorant beyond belief!! I think a lot deeper than you have by the look of things. I really don't know who you think you are!! Global South corrected their mistake about Bremer Order 81 in a recent press release to mean that the Order prohibited Iraqi farmers from saving only patented seeds not traditional ones. The real problem is that given US subsidized grain dumping for …
Posted to Turning Back the Tax Revolt
-
Scorp, it may interest you to know that Reagan didn't bring down the Soviet Empire. It was a drastic drop in world oil prices after 1986 and hence a foreign exchange bottleneck which made debt repayment and needed technology imports difficult. Also, Soviet oil production had been seriously declining along with domestic economic growth because oil prices didn't reflect actual domestic oil scarcity meaning that the Soviet Union was depleting its oil resources to fast and needed to free up the economy in order to adjust. It also needed to maintain energy production and supply levels to continue economic growth. It …
Posted to Turning Back the Tax Revolt
-
Scorp, How the hell can an uneducated right-wing moron such as yourself tell others whether or not they're educated just because you disapprove of their views. The so called movement for academic freedom is nothing more than a rightist ploy to infest the last bastions of free thought in the US, American Universities, with rightist morons who want to spread culture war BS and degrade the level of academic discourse down to that of an unschooled cracker. In my entire 6 years as a student at the UW I never saw any student attacked, demeaned, prejudicially graded or treated, or excluded …
Posted to Turning Back the Tax Revolt
-
Scorp, You exhibit all the qualities of a right-wing neanderthal. First you put words in my mouth. I never "complained" that my degree wasn't useful except for unskilled labor. In fact, if you would have read what I actually stated you would have discovered that I stated the opposite. I said I was very proud of my degree and time spent at the UW-Madison (with a politically diverse group no less!!) I'm sorry you don't know the joy of a higher education. As they say it's never to late!! Reagan didn't use common sense. It is well known that the "Cold …
Posted to Turning Back the Tax Revolt
-
Seeing your opponent as corrupt and inefficient is no reason to knowingly engage in actions that could take the world to the brink of nuclear war when your opponent isn't threatening your security. It is you, Scorp, who is admitting to contradicting your past claims. You have always seen the world in a myopic "good and evil" scenario dogma. Now you are admitting to US aggression. Instigating an arms race in order to bring down your opponent is an unprovoked act of aggression. The Soviet Union only wanted to stabilize the Kabul Regime and by Brezhinski's own admission we drew them …
Posted to Turning Back the Tax Revolt
-
Mike, We seemed to have instituted in effect the 10% flat tax of steve forbes without a vote for it in congress. The effective rate of taxation across the nation accounting for joint returns and deductions puts the US taxpaying public at an average effective tax rate of 15% or so. Not much more. And the economy is still sluggish and not producing much in the way of good jobs. All we have are deficits and a skewed national distribution of income with slow economic growth.
Posted to Turning Back the Tax Revolt
-
I'm very sorry to hear that Mike.
Posted to Turning Back the Tax Revolt
-
Mike, You've done about as good a job as anyone could do. This Scorp is a warmonger. All he knows is violence and rigid thinking. Too bad. Scorp, Most socialists don't subscribe to the Soviet model of authoritarian central planning. Most socialists don't regard the market as either strictly a capitalist creation or a natural, transcendental institution that has always existed by virtue of human nature but rather a quintessentially historic and modern innovation which uses price to reflect the true scarcity of resources and to create certain efficiencies in production and distribution. Prices can also be used to clear markets …
Posted to Turning Back the Tax Revolt
-
Scorp, I believe that historians will see Leninist centralized state planning and ownership as a development and modernization strategy for poor backward countries whose brief experience with industrial capitalism was highly destabilizing. These countries, China, Russia, Vietnam, Korea, and some others all experienced deep political and social trauma. They either experienced rapid integration into the global economy at the hands of foreign colonizers which developed a foreign dominated capitalist system that was highly exploititive using hated domestic collaberators as partners often in the context of war and occupation or, as in the case of Russian, industrialized quickly and thoroughly causing deep …
Posted to Turning Back the Tax Revolt
-
In fact, I did farm in the Middle East. I picked vegetables on a Moshav in Israel. Importing and Exporting similar commodities at the same time is called redundant trade in the ag biz and is quite common. We do it with beef all the time!! In Iraq the idea is to import surplus US basic grains while cultivating and exporting specialty grains for exotic pastas via TNC marketing networks. A handful of large domestic farmers will participate in this operation. It won't balance the trade if there are greater grain imports or if most of the earnings accrue to the …
Posted to Turning Back the Tax Revolt
-
The market for GM seeds are amoung the most concentrated markets in the entire world. Just six TNCs control 98% of the global market in GM seeds. About 80% of all patents on genetically modified foods are held by 13 TNCs. The roughly one and a half billion farmers in the world who rely on traditional farming methods are now threatened. Their livings and national markets are are threatened. So is global food security. Poor farmers ability to continue to farm and save seeds for traditional farming is threatened by the move to GM food cultivation . It will cause more, …
Posted to Turning Back the Tax Revolt
-
If GM seeds were the choice of farmers in the third world or even in the first (which they're not) the WTO would not have needed to push through the TRIPS agreement in 1994 which guarantees the TNCs 20 year patent protections for their seeds. The seeds often contaminate the soil and germinate all over cropping up in other fields or in the same field in places where it has not been planted for several seasons. Monsanto el al. take farmers to court for royalty payments in response to these situations and often win. There companies are a menace and are …
Posted to Turning Back the Tax Revolt
-
Scorp, Patented high yield seeds are not, as you suggest in your criticism of Paul Ehrlich's assertions in the late 1960s, a response to the problem of low agricultural productivity, population explosions, or other Malthusian falsehoods. It is based on a desire of a few large agribusiness firms to monopolize and control the source of the world's food supply in order to profit enormously. When six large companies control almost all the patented seed varieties for field crops there is a danger that is greater than simple restraint of trade. They have control of the world food supply and can turn …
Posted to Turning Back the Tax Revolt
-
You said he was wrong in 1968 and he is still wrong today. YOU need to learn to think you unschooled asshole and stop criticizing others. I also think that six seed companies controlling the world food supply is wrong, dangerous, and unwise. It is not comparable to other examples of monopolies. For about 50 years farmers have become increasingly productive with less and less of the food dollar accruing to them. They are only making big suppliers and TNCs rich.
Posted to Turning Back the Tax Revolt
-
Scorp (Ann Coulter?), Anyone who has watched what is going on in Iraq or Afghanistan has to conclude they are the biggest failures ever in US presidential history. We are shamed before the world. Further, Farmers have been complaining a long time about their simultanious rising productivity and declining income. This is the fault of TNCs who sell ever greater expensive inputs that create self justifying needs for use. More and more money is going to TNCs at the expense of farmers and consumers. Ecological farming is organic, rising in popularity, taking a larger share of the market, and better all …
Posted to Turning Back the Tax Revolt
-
Mike, In all our wars, despite official policy distinguishing between friend and foe in any particular place we're fighting, we always end up conflating the entire population in propaganda and deed. This was true in Vietnam and it is true in Iraq. Racism, thus, drives much of the enthusiasm for conflict. People never make a distinction between the people and the leadership over whom they have no control. This kind of racism is useful in encouraging soldiers to fight and so it goes on in war after war. This leads to war crimes like My Lai and Haditha, America IS quintessentially …
Posted to Turning Back the Tax Revolt
-
The Lancet figures are actually the only scientifically established ones according to most reasonable sources. The Lancet study is globally the most respected source on the subject of Iraqi civilian casualties caused in the conflict with coalition forces and the insurgency since May 2003.
Posted to Turning Back the Tax Revolt
-
The Lancet study implies about 500 deaths daily. They claim 601,000 deaths from gunfire with another 54,000 deaths due to the health effects of the war related to dirty drinking water due to lack of electricity to run water purification plants, disease epidemics, and lack of medical care. About 31% of the gunfire deaths are said to be from coalition forces with the remainder from terrorism and insurgent attacks. These figures are as of October 2006. Most mortality experts claim that the Lancet's research methods were sound.
Posted to Turning Back the Tax Revolt
-
Scorp, You throw around political labels in a meaningless manner. Imperialism was more the creature of 19th century capitalism than merchantilism. In the period of merchantilism settler colonialism and conquest, especially in the New World, was prevalent but imperialism picked up steam in the mid to late nineteenth centuries when the UK and US industrial revolutions got into gear. Western European overseas imperialism was also a response to monopoly capitalism's need for cheap raw material inputs, food to feed growing urban working class populations, and overseas markets for surplus production. It also served the UK as a place of settlement to …
Posted to Turning Back the Tax Revolt
-
I see you haven't yet learned about civilized discourse. Scorp what I've forgotten years ago about thinking you'll never learn if you live several more lifetimes. You seem to be an arrogant cracker. Am I being unfair? Did you actually attend school? Good thing for the information superhwy or lots of folks wouldn't know their ass from a hole in the ground. That could even include me. I found your frenetic rant laughable. Obviously I meant capitalist imperialism. US capitalism has always been inherently expansionist while Soviet Communism "consolidated Socialism in one country." Anti-Slavery and Anti-Imperialist movements ended neither. Tenant farming …
Posted to Turning Back the Tax Revolt
-
Scorp, Your version of Russian history is utterly warped. No one accepts it, even conservative historians. Drop the shit if you want to debate history and politics seriously. You're not amusing. And you tell others to "learn to think." Shameful!!
Posted to Turning Back the Tax Revolt
-
Scorp, All revolutions start with a violent illegal act. That is what makes them revolutions. Ours was no different. Boston Tea Party, anyone?
Posted to Turning Back the Tax Revolt
-
Scorp, No revolution's leadership deliberately intends to harm most of the people in the society in trys to transform. This makes no sense. The US revolution consolidated state power and decisively unified the country with the end of the US Civil War in 1865. The US never faced a counter revolution. It faced modest UK attempts at subversion which ended in 1812. After that the US was free to expand unhindered by foreign attacks. By contrast, the Soviet Union was invaded, occupied, blockaded, and sealed off between 1917 and 1923 by fourteen separate invading Armies and expeditionary forces. The "attempt to …
Posted to Turning Back the Tax Revolt
-
You continually harp on war communism and Lenin and Stalin and Mao. It is because it is easier to criticize their failures and insanely associate them with anyone who doesn't accept your ultra-rightist republican bullshit than to look at the obvious failures of neo-conservative warmongering and neo-liberal corporate globalization. The first 35 years of US post-WWII society saw unprecedented GNP growth rates, income growth rates, profit rates and productivity growth. It was also a time which coincided with a high rate of Union density (one third of the US work force) high real incomes, relative income equality, and high progressive tax …
Posted to Turning Back the Tax Revolt
-
Also Scorp, Your Soviet history is warped as usual. In March 1921, the NEP replaced war communism which was explicitly a temporary policy to deal with the foreign invasion of the country and the Civil War with Denikin and the White Armies. The New Economic Policy (NEP) was an effort to privatize the entire Soviet economy except for national finance, railroads and some heavy industry. Under this policy market forces were allowed to determine agricultural prices after a modest 10% tax on the market value of the grain. Some modest redistribution of land to the land poor and landless peasants increased …
Posted to Turning Back the Tax Revolt
-
War Communism did end in 1920. By March 1921 the NEP began with a 10% in kind tax on the peasants and a majority privatized economy including grain collection. Most of the people that died before 1924 in Russia died because of blockades, war, invasion, military siege, disease, and starvation. All this was war related and not due to economic policy per se. The NEP relieved much suffering, especially after the political and military situation was stabilized. The Stalinists took power and shifted toward forced collectivization at the expense of most of the society in order to pursue heavy industrialization. This …
Posted to Turning Back the Tax Revolt
-
Soviet Russian history from the revolution to the death of Stalin is really quite irrelevant. The American Left does not seek to follow the old Soviet model. Their critique of US corporate capitalism is based simply on the inequality generated by globalization, deunionization, no minimum wage hike in ten years and no social legislation passed at the federal level since Reagan came into office in 1980, and corporate takeover of the US economy at the expense of the environment, workers, local communities, and the shrinking middle class. What the new, new left is all about is finding a way to fuse …
Posted to Turning Back the Tax Revolt
-
Mike, It seems to me that you are a HOLOCAUST DENIER. You have claimed that the only people that died in Nazi death camps between 1942 and 1945 were bombed by the allies. This is the neo-Nazi line. Also there were very few who escaped. Of the 12 million Jews in Europe in 1939, six million were shot or gassed and another 5 million made it to saftey behind Soviet lines. Another million or so survived, escaped, and later resettled. Today there are very few Jews in Europe except for Russia. Ironically a large number of European Jews are Sephardic Jews …
Posted to Turning Back the Tax Revolt
-
You're really fucked up, Mike. Lipstadt won her case in a UK court against David Irving and bankrupted his sorry ass in the process of doing so!! The Holocaust revisionists and IHR have NO credibility with anyone except neo-Nazis, uneducated thugs, and, unfortunately, a growing number of Muslims who think there is a lot of political capital to be made from this shit. They never did any independant scholarly research and mostly cite one another as evidence. No one would accept the claims made by legitimate Holocaust scholars if they weren't true. The Nazis themselves confessed to the truth of the …
Posted to Turning Back the Tax Revolt
-
Every one of the people you cite have no scholarly credentials. The lampshades/soapbars story was never fully considered historic fact although many non-Jewish European historians have documented in the German Archives SS laboratories experimenting with the remains of deceased camp inmates to see what Practicle value their skin, teeth, fatty tissue, and organs could have for industry (see Carl Tighe's GDANSK: National Identity in the Polish-German Borderlands, Pluto Press. 1990). This book was nominated for a silver PEN award. The research into the parts on Nazi attrocities and outrages is impeccable though this is not the prime focus of the work. …
Posted to Turning Back the Tax Revolt
-
What's Iraq got to do with the Shoah? And what kind of authority on the Holocaust is your wife Nina? Does she speak the necessary languages as do the real holocaust scholars to do the research? From what I see you are an intolerant moron with no education and you like to slam Jews who never harmed you just to get your jollies. Holocaust revisionists have been shown time and again to be frauds. They have an agenda which is to harm Jews as such. Scorp, I agree that Stalin is one of the worst people in history. No one makes …
Posted to Turning Back the Tax Revolt
-
Every single work of the Holocaust Revisionists has been shown to be academically fraudulent. Chomsky and Zinn think Holocaust revisionism is a fraud and fascistic in every way imaginable. You and your wife need serious counciling. You seem to have real issues. My life is a bit of a mess so I'm no one to talk but you guys need real professional help.
Posted to Turning Back the Tax Revolt
-
...And this has what to do with the price of tea in China?
Posted to Turning Back the Tax Revolt
-
The American Historical Association refuses to acknowledge the IHR as either a professional scholarly association or as purveyers of valid scholarship on the subject of the Holocaust in Europe during WWII. Many compatent scholars all over the world have read their work and claim that it is fraudulent, filled with fake data, misquotes, fudged data, quotes from non-existent sources. One such work to be so reviewed is called "Did Six Million Really Die." There are others as well. These so called revisionist "scholars" tend to quote from each other rather than primary sources and few actually even have proficiency in the …
Posted to Turning Back the Tax Revolt
-
BM Like most knuckleheads you don't listen. I told you that the conservative IRS is the source for the 2% figure on the number of households effected by the estate tax. The median income of this group is well in the millions. The accumulated marketable wealth is much higher. These people are multi-millionaires and enjoy many deductions before their wealth begins to be taxed at a modest progressive two tiered rate. Retirement funds are tax deferred. The Estate Tax allows a one million dollar deduction and Bush wants to push it to two after which top bracket is 45% than reduced …
Posted to Turning Back the Tax Revolt
-
Hardesty you are the only one which is on crack. Most of the people don't even know about the estate tax much less are they the source of agitation for its repeal. It's all about the rich and so are the libertarians. You live in a shithole called Oakland. I don't call it that because it's inter-racial. I live in Evanston. It is about 40% Black and a wonderful place to live. The cops both White and Black watch every neighborhood like a hawk. That is the difference between Chicago and California. You need more dedicated Police Officers and people who …
Posted to Turning Back the Tax Revolt
-
BM You didn't give me sources you gave me garbage. You have never made one argument which proves any HR thesis. I told you what the proof was. The HR morons just spew lies. Nobody but punks believe them. The Wiesenthal center never published names of living people claimed to have died in the genocide in Europe. This is a lie. Wiesenthal has only told the truth. Your figures on Mao and Stalin are way off. They are in fact insane and proof of your insanity. No one has ever claimed these figures for Mao and Stalin or any of the …
Posted to Turning Back the Tax Revolt
-
I did check out the sources pigboy and there is a reason they're not taken seriously. There is also a good reason that people go to prison for spewing this crap. Spreading hate in order to villify a nation is bullshit. You haven't checked out the website I gave you which is www.hdot.org which basically debunks all the HR scum as just that. You have never refuted anything that Lipstadt has said and neither have the HR morons. GO to the site I gave you. Besides there's no possible way that people would believe this narrative if it wasn't true. It …
Posted to Turning Back the Tax Revolt
-
BM is a criminal is his stalwart defense of Nazi Germany which can be found all over the various ITT threads and his denial of the Holocaust which has been proven over and again with documents, pictures, testimony of both perpetrators, victims, and witness, as well as the official archival materials of every government involved in the genocide. That BM decides to close his eyes to this shows the truth of that old biblical wisdom, "there are none so blind as those who WILL NOT see." I have told him time and again that the "sources" he holds up are not …
Posted to Turning Back the Tax Revolt
-
Hardesty you are a pathetic little creature. There is no one with an ounce of humanity that would believe the crap in those so called works of the Holocaust Denyers. They are motivated by hate. All of them are connected with neo-Nazi causes or anti-Jewish causes. Is this a coincidence. Lipstadt's victory proved that these people all had no scientific or historic evidence, Rudolph Hess willingly testified and wrote a book detailing everything that is claimed about Auschwitz. The cremation/gassing capacity was enormous especially when you consider how much work was gleaned from millions of prisoners and how emaciated they were …
Posted to Turning Back the Tax Revolt
-
Lowlife, I don't know why so called "libertarians" would stand up for the worst form of dictatorial oppression the world has ever known, Nazi Fascism. I guess it just shows your natural allies are fascists. You really DO only care about the survival of capitalism and greed at the expense of most of humanity. You are all racist and hypocritical morons. No one ever bought your bullshit "racism of low expectations" line of crap. Minorities know that you "liberfascists" think of them as genetically inferior. You'ld also think that people who hold science in such a high regard as you claim …
Posted to Turning Back the Tax Revolt
-
First of all Liberals and the Left were the first to condemn Saddam and demand he be sanctioned for his human rights abuses at the very same time the Republicans were taking him off the US Dept. of State terror list and sending him all manner of weapons and funding including VX nerve agent and weaponizable biotoxins. The US put the Ba'athists in power in 1963. People are tought hate. There is no hate gene. I could'nt grasp the rest of the psychobabble.
Posted to The Power of Mean
-
Though my MA was in Political Science from the UW-Madison, I took many economics courses. Non-were tradtional macro-economics which I learned "on the fly" by development economics, labor economics, and agricultural economics all of which is based on the principles of macro-economic principles. There is an excellent book which I've yet to finish call Debunking Economics by Steven Keene. He takes the basic rationality utilitarian ideas behind neoclassical economics and debunks them. There is no real connection between wage levels and labor productivity. This is true especially now during the ongoing jobless recovery. Supply doesn't create its own demand. Says law …
Posted to What We Learn When We Learn Economics
-
The article is great. I am no fan of modern R&B preferring the earlier varieties but I think the insights here were excellent. Our society is getting shallower by the minute, certainly much more so than in Tina Turner's time. All the songs are about immediate gratification and attaining wealth and respect. We are truely witnessing the death of intellectual, musical, and emotional depth. It is true that Madonna's sexuality was more liberating for women because she was in control and because she said it was ok to be curvey and have a realistic physique. Madonna also broached difficult issues for …
Posted to Beyonce's Bootyful B'Day
-
Beyonce is hot!!
Posted to Beyonce's Bootyful B'Day
-
I am familiar with the Tuskegee experiments as well as COINTELPRO during Nixon as well as the Bush warrentless wiretaps today. I know both African-Americans and others in the US have good reason for paranoia and mistrust. But it is one thing to direct it at the government or large concentrations of wealth and power like transnational corporations. It is quite another to prejudicially attack ethnic minorities like Jews or tar all Whites (most of whom are poor) with the same brush. This is why Black nationalism (or Zionism or any other kind of nationalism) is weak in its critique of …
Posted to Farrakhan Steps Back
-
So Farrakhan is dying? Oh well. How relevant is this guy and his movement. He shares with the neo-Nazis a common love of the discredited tract, The Protocals of the Learned Elders of Zion. I heard once that he commands the support of ten percent of the African-American community. This is to bad. Could anyone imagine ten percent of the American Jewish community supporting the likes of the JDL and Mier Kahane? The Jewish Community is rather small. Ten percent of them would be less than 600,000 souls. That this many people could support a clerico-fascist bigot is unfathomable. It is …
Posted to Farrakhan Steps Back
-
Horse, I know the NOI likes to promote many conspiricy theories such as Whitey spreads drugs and guns in the ghetto to keep Blacks down and killing each other, Jewish doctors deliberately inject black babies with the AIDS virus (Steve Cokely, assistent to Chicago Mayor Gene Sawyer in 1989), Whitey blew up the levees in New Orleans using barges loaded with dynamite (Dick Gregory), and a host of other shit. The Protocals of the Learned Elders of Zion is another NOI favorite. Were it not for the NOI this particular tract would have died long ago instead of being preserved in …
Posted to Farrakhan Steps Back
-
Can't we just all get along?
Posted to Farrakhan Steps Back
-
Hijinx you are a real moron. How did you find this site? The tax cuts didn't make jobs. We had a jobless recovery remember. During the comparitively high tax Clinton era millions of jobs were made and growth proceeded at an annual average 3.5% between 1995 and 2000. The recession began in the first quarter of 2001 and ended in the last quarter of that year. Domestic average monthly job creation has been lower in the last five years than in any of the early recovery periods of the other post WWII recession. This is an established fact. Most of the …
Posted to What Did the Voters Say?
-
There was no Clinton recession only a Bush recession. It is official that the recession began in the first quarter of 2001. True there was a dot.com crash and NASDEQ meltdown but these events didn't cause a recession. The recession in the early years of Bush II resulted from a stimulus package that created then aggravated the new Bush deficit and failed to focus on the working and middle classes who tend to spend a greater proportion of their disposable incomes. Also corporations invested heavily overseas through outsourcing and FDI. You reactionaries never address these questions. Niether do you examine free …
Posted to What Did the Voters Say?
-
You are rightwing fascist scum. Surely you must know that the Bush tax cuts from 2001 shifted the federal tax burden to the middle class from the richest quintile and in particular top 1%. According to the CBO the top quintile's share of total contribution to federal tax revenues declined one percent from 65% to 64% while those who earn between an average of $34,000 and $51,000 increased their share of the contribution to the federal income tax revenues by 2%. The poorest tax payers recieved less than an average of $300.00 annual tax savings while the richest 1% recieved an …
Posted to What Did the Voters Say?
-
One of the core considerations in the tax cut issue is equity. There is a deep sense that in this country since the Reagan era, the rich and the big corporations have not been shouldering their fare share of the burden. Reagan sold the middle class on the skewed tax cuts on the basis of trickle down supply side economics. In 1980, the American middle class which was created by a system of progressive taxation, trade unionism, which at its peak organized one third of the US labor force, and a host of federal programs, trusted Reagan to save them with …
Posted to What Did the Voters Say?
-
W. Otis, You are a liar and a moron. Where do you get your BS? The richest US income quintile never contributed more than 65.7% of the Federal Government's tax revenues according to the Congressional Budget Office and a host of other reputable sources. The upper 1% may have contributed between 25 and 36% of the tax burden over the period spanning the late 1990s to 2004 but it is commensurate with their share of the national wealth. The idea that the very rich contribute over 95% to federal income tax revenues is insanity at best and doesn't even make logical …
Posted to What Did the Voters Say?
-
Texas Indy, You got Social Security all wrong. Yes, we are an aging population but the workforce is growing all the time (even, as I am told, workforce participation-not employment-is somewhat decreasing) and is currently more than 142 million people. This is more than half the US population. Even the estimated 5% of the workforce that is illegal pays $6 to $7 billion into the system that they never retrieve so this helps even more. The system has trillions and is secure at least until 2040. The payroll tax is fine at 15% and doesn't need to be raised. Perhaps the …
Posted to What Did the Voters Say?
-
Texas Indy, The current Social Security program supports 48 million people over 33 million of whom are retirees over 62 years of age. The average annual payout per recipient is $10,500.00. No fewer than 66% of these retirees rely on SS for more than half their income which means that SS is keeping more than two thirds of the 33 million seniors above the conservatively established national poverty line. These figures also suggest that if SS were replaced by private retirement accounts more than half of retirees would lose income upon retirement because of their inability to commit enough savings to …
Posted to What Did the Voters Say?
-
What the Heck, There are shortages but the contributions are also growing. If the economy starts to grow (and it has just slowed these past two quarters) then SS will be in fine shape. Also, the Boomers are among the wealthiest retirees many with individual retirement accounts. The savings rate has only recently dropped to a negative rate of minus 0.5%. I say raise the income cap on payroll tax from the current $92,000 to $100,000 or more. What's wrong with this proposal? We've got to save SS!! It's the only retirement plan most people have or to which they can …
Posted to What Did the Voters Say?
-
So, WTH, do you want to eliminate the cap in order to gain more money to secure the program and stop the cheating? I don't see how this is inflationary. It sops up money and reduces the deficit while not adding to total spending. It's using taxes to pay the government's bills not further borrowing. Perhaps your suggestion is best.
Posted to What Did the Voters Say?
-
The discussion has become quite uncivil. Some conservatives have multiple alias's but I think WTH and Redhorse are themselves. Scorp and Tina1 could be the same (I have often thought they were Ann Coulter) but I think that most people are honest about their identities. Maybe I'm just a Polly Anna of the left. I don't want to get into the first Gulf War all over again. It is painful. I do believe that the sanctions regime had a horrific humanitarian effect. Denis Halliday told the truth. I also believe that we goaded Saddam into invading Kuwait in order to invade …
Posted to What Did the Voters Say?
-
Your views on Kuwait are out of line. It is one thing to have preferred a diplomatic solution to the Iraqi invasion and to decry the Kuwaiti regime as a dictatorship. It is quite another to wrongly assert that no one would have objected to the Iraqi (Saddamist) digestion of Kuwait on the grounds that it is not a real country. BM, frequent, irresponsible statements like this are one reason more people are not drawn to the left. In the first place, the current, highly diverse, population of Kuwait is just under 3 million most of whom are Muslims. Only one …
Posted to What Did the Voters Say?
-
BM, You are quite correct. I don't know how I could make such a dumb mistake. Of course, one third is currently citizens and the rest guest workers. At the time of the invasion, only 30% at best of the 215,000,000 Kuwaiti residents were actual citizens. Most of the rest were foreign guests that were there to run the oil industry. Today , there is nearly 3 million of whom one third is kuwaiti. Of that only 15% has the franchise. Kuwait was highly undemocratic. But it was not freed by Iraq. I agree with you on such issues as slant …
Posted to What Did the Voters Say?
-
I don't try to hide my political identity. I would like to see a left political caucus of socialists like DSA and the Greens because I think socialism will eventually be a viable political option in this country. The middle class was not eliminated by socialism or the government but by unbridled corporate capitalism. The contradictions of this system and the stagnation for the majority of working masses that it produces will lead to a socialist agenda. One day that label will NOT be a stigma. Until then, we have to be content with the term progressive. By the Way W. …
Posted to Progressive Caucus Rising
-
Well said!!
Posted to Progressive Caucus Rising
-
WTH, People have been trying to put their miserable hands of these hardworkin' good folks out of resentment for a long time. I say back off!! Most ot these people are law abiding hardworking G-d fearin' folks whose only crime is impatience with the immigration system. Big Deal. They don't use more services than other people and they don't commit more crime. Stop reading Barb Coe's racist newsletter. The illegals that commit crimes are the same gangster thugs from Tihajauna who running over the border to pursue criminal activity and who have no intention of staying here. They don't represent the …
Posted to Immigrants Sue to Retrieve Funds Seized in Arizona
-
It is often forgotten that people who cross illegally go through incredible hardship. Moreso than the one's who cross legally. They have breached the law to be sure. It isn't really the right thing to do. But it is no excuse to steal their money. My understanding is that most of the real vindictive rage against illegals, who are coming here in lower numbers that they were ten years ago, is coming from the deep south (excluding Texas and Florida) where illegal immigration is hitting Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama, and Tennessee. I should have figured these nice Christian folks would vent …
Posted to Immigrants Sue to Retrieve Funds Seized in Arizona
-
WTH, It does seem to be true that white people in the southern states I mentioned are more prejudiced than others and that their backlash is providing a good deal of the impetus for immigration reform. Perhaps many illegals were purposely directed to these states in order to produce the backlash. I have been one ot the writers pleading for a complex understanding of this issue and for a minimum use of generalizations, stereo-typed imagary, and hyperbole. I know laws exist for good reasons and should be obeyed. Immigration laws must be adhered to in the interest of national security and …
Posted to Immigrants Sue to Retrieve Funds Seized in Arizona
-
Your points are well taken. Health, economic, and safety concerns all trump the desire to return to a lost forever world of total freedom of movement. I guess immigration laws exist to protect society. No one has the right to bring disease into a place where it doesn't exist or use open borders to get away with crimes. Also a society's capacity to absorb people is limited no matter how wealthy that society. Having said this, however, I so think that we give a generous conditional amnesty and address the labor market needs in the US as well as the need …
Posted to Immigrants Sue to Retrieve Funds Seized in Arizona
-
Your proposals seem reasonable.
Posted to Immigrants Sue to Retrieve Funds Seized in Arizona
-
First of all, I want to commend Katha Pollit for her wonderful and very aptly titled book. I for one do have major problems with organized religion. And yes i do think many religious adherents in the US have very low cognitive ability. How can one describe an individual that believes the earth is only 6,000 years old or that the earth was created in just six days? Can such an individual be respected as intelligent? These folks are the underpinnings of a regime and political trend that will undo our democracy and wreak the havoc of war upon much of …
Posted to Virginity or Death!: A Conversation With Katha Pollitt
-
The hippies didn't give you any of those things the government did from what I read in the underground press, man. And who cares how many abortions occur. Do you really want all those folks around anyhow? And what's wrong with high divorce rates? Does it affect you and your relationships? Human Papaloma Virus could be cured with a vaccine but who is against it? The same crackers who like G-d, guns, and country. Get a clue dude!!
Posted to Virginity or Death!: A Conversation With Katha Pollitt
-
The hippies and the 1960s didn't bring any of those problems mentioned above. Careless behaviour did. Divorce is not as bad as kids living through their parents bad marriage. Marriage is a legal contract like any business. If you went into business and signed a legal contract with a partner and the deal went sour would you continue to stay in business losing money just because you once put pen to paper? Chances are you would sell your share and leave cutting your losses. Well marriage is really no different. The crackers want to tell everyone else how to live. They …
Posted to Virginity or Death!: A Conversation With Katha Pollitt
-
Minerva. Thanks for speaking out! And so eloquently!! Trolls like the ones that have been infesting this site ever since I've been coming here don't get it and now they want to beat up on single moms. Like they know what being a single parent in Bush's Amerika is really like. Not only do you often have to put up with Walmart wages and no benefits or help from absentee dads but now these assholes are up on a high horse stigmatizing people who they don't even know for not being Ozzie and fuckin' Harriet. You're also right to point out …
Posted to Virginity or Death!: A Conversation With Katha Pollitt
-
Kim and Chopper, Its nice that you can enjoy the Ozzie and Harriet lifestyle. Most of us can't. Things are tough these days. Kinda suprised you've heard of In These Times. Anyhow, you may be interested to know that it was actually the Republicans that are responsible for partial birth abortion. Back when Clinton was president he agreed to sign a bill banning partial birth abortion which was had massive bipartisan support in both houses. Barb Boxer, a Democrat from California, attached an amendment to the bill that stated that an exception to the ban would be made if it was …
Posted to Virginity or Death!: A Conversation With Katha Pollitt
-
Only 70,000 dead Iraqis over the last three and a half years, eh chopper? The official US casualty figures for Iraq civilians which are the most conservative passed that long ago. The Lancet says as of October 600,000 to 650,000 Iraqi civilians dead since the US/UK invasion. In addition, there is a consensus of a death rate of over 100 Iraqis a day in a spiralling civil war! This is according to independant press reports and UN investigations. So I figure we're approaching the 700,000 mark soon enough!! Stop watching FOX NEWS there Chopper. Your view is way to skewed!! …
Posted to Virginity or Death!: A Conversation With Katha Pollitt
-
Kimberly, In college they teach spelling. Opportunity and higher are the correct spellings of the words you misspelled. And who said anything about college and jobs and relative earnings. I thought we were talking politics. Anyhow you mention Kurt Vonnegut. Isn't he one of the banned writers from the libraries where you live? Just Kidding!! I noticed you put HARD WORK in all caps. Thanks. No one is lazier than a Chicago cabbie! Or freer from occupational hazard (think exit wound in the middle of the forehead!). What a cush job, huh? I really don't know what your point was on …
Posted to Virginity or Death!: A Conversation With Katha Pollitt
-
Kimberly, The fact remains that the Boxer amendment was a security provision not a loophole. It was not a last ditch attempt to save Partial Birth Abortion (PBA) which is so rare as to be worth little attention. I am very pro-choice and am uncomfortable with PBA. It seems that if the baby is almost all the way out, sucking its brains out before delivering it won't save the mother who I would have thought would have died by this point were she to be in a critical situation due in whole or in part to child labor. Anyhow the bill, …
Posted to Virginity or Death!: A Conversation With Katha Pollitt
-
I also don't have medical benefits. I am glad you and your husband were accomidated by a public hospital. I have diabetes and many related health issues and waited a long time on two occaisons to be treated in Cook County Hospital. Once I spent a week with a cellulitic infection in my left leg. You have to excuse me because I've suddenly forgotten what all this fascinating person stuff has to do with the price of tea in China!! As far as Boxer's amendment, I think she was trying to cover all bases. I don't think she was trying to …
Posted to Virginity or Death!: A Conversation With Katha Pollitt
-
Universal Health Care needn't be inefficient or slow in servicing patients. In a system as wealthy as ours and with the money spent it is a crime that all people aren't covered, at least minors. Certain states like Illinois are attempting to get programs going that will guarantee health care to children of those who are uninsured. Advocates of the single payer system are not trying to establish "socialized medicine" whereby the government runs a huge health system from mostly tax revenue, employing medical staff, running the hospitals and clinics, providing equipment and medication, and provided anciliary services like ambulences. What …
Posted to Virginity or Death!: A Conversation With Katha Pollitt
-
You are more than just right of George McGovern my friend. You are an ultra-rightist of some kind or another. The MSM is not left at all. The nation is liberal not far left. So is the American Prospect. I read the MSM. It is very cautious and conservative. It banged the war drums for Bush & Co. It toes the line on a range of things like Iraq being "the front line in the war on terror." The far right likes to malign the media because the MSM is staffed by people with college educations who use big words and …
Posted to Virginity or Death!: A Conversation With Katha Pollitt
-
Chopper, You made one statement that I thought was questionable. You said that the MSM journalists, whether broadcast or print media, don't intentionally spin the news to reflect a liberal bias or promote a liberal political perspective but rather do it unconsciously. This puts you in direct opposition to Ann Coulter who has said, "the very first thing that any jounalist in the National MSM does when reporting a story is ask, 'how can I spin this in order to promote a leftist political agenda.'" I suppose this kind of reactionary lunacy is to over the top for you so you …
Posted to Virginity or Death!: A Conversation With Katha Pollitt
-
Chopper, You honestly believe the US political order (which is what I meant) is a "liberal left-wing order." What planet are you from? I don't think you get politics my friend. Liberal is not left wing. Liberalism saved the US capitalist system and this is a fact. The Nation is pretty standard liberal fare. Nothing far out about it. The recent elections show that the MSM is NOT out of touch or to the far left of the general electorate. Murdoch style yellow journalism did a head trip on Joe Lunchbox over the MSM and fanned the flames of prejudice and …
Posted to Virginity or Death!: A Conversation With Katha Pollitt
-
The East Coast establishment is never really explained. They seemed to pursue very popular policies which uplifted the country out of poverty made the US the number one economic power in the world. The state intervention from the New Deal on was heartily supported by big business on down. There was massive poverty in the US during the Great Depression and much fear of the direction of the country's consequent political direction. The right is trying to rewrite the whole history of that era but no one who really remembers is buying it. The Nation magazine is the USA's oldest surviving …
Posted to Virginity or Death!: A Conversation With Katha Pollitt
-
Chopper, I am quite familiiar with neo-classical labor economics. If wages exceed productivity or labor is employed beyond the point where the marginal productivity of labor brings diminishing returns unempoyment will result because demand will run ahead of production of goods and services causing inflation and consequent interest rate hikes which will cause a recession and thus unemployment and lowered wages anyhow. But libertarians like yourself carry this around like a dogma which doesn't fit the reality. Most economists agree that a rise in the current minimum wage would not cause inflation. We are even in a unique situation in this …
Posted to Virginity or Death!: A Conversation With Katha Pollitt
-
I agree we are a nation of dummies but our "education president" failed to fund no child left behind and so here we all sit!! I'm suprised you don't know anyone who worked for minimum wage for more than a year. I know many and they are good workers. It is true that many jobs pay above the minimum but not much above it. When wages increase, employers usually insist on better productivity. Most people in this society are well beyond their remuneration in productivity. Windfall profits coexisting side by side with an impoverished toiling workforce is testimony to this incontrovertible …
Posted to Virginity or Death!: A Conversation With Katha Pollitt
-
Chopper, Studies for 2005 differ greatly. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the US Dept. of Labor. there were just under 500,000 wage earners who got the federally mandated minimum of just $5.15/hour out of over 75.6 million US employed persons who earn an hourly wage. According to the survey those under and over 25 years of age are divided 60% and 40% respectively. According to other surveys,however, about 7.3 million wage earners get the federal minimum wage about half of whom are between 25 and 54 years of age, a third of whom, according to the Center for …
Posted to Virginity or Death!: A Conversation With Katha Pollitt
-
I am no real expert on the complex issue of education. I know that there are many problems. I know also that many public schools are failing and there is just cause for real concern. Many are justified in their indignation at public education in America today and have every right to be skeptical of just spending more funds as a way out of the education crisis. I also know that American has always been a rigid class society and after a brief respite from this pattern in the immediate post WWII era is reverting to old ways. Many recent studies …
Posted to Virginity or Death!: A Conversation With Katha Pollitt
-
Chopper, Your last post is irrelevant. The old barrons came down because the economy's structure changed not because America is a fluid society without hard class boundaries. The BLS survey doesn't sound right. Even the CATO website figured 8 to 9 million minimum wage earners. Maybe I misunderstood something.I do realize that whatever the figure it is only about 5 or 6% of the total economically active population. This is not the point. The point is that wages are key to fighting poverty. The Post WWII experience showed this. Higher Union wages created a middle class. According to Henry Ford, no …
Posted to Virginity or Death!: A Conversation With Katha Pollitt
-
There is very little "Marxist dogma" left in third world today. Everywhere free market fundamentalism is the order of the day and everywhere the greatest inequality and poverty exists on an unprecedented scale. The greatest boom period of economic growth in places like Latin America and East Asia, areas of the third world with high rates of economic growth, was in the 1950s, 60s, and early 70s when import substitution industrialization was the order of the day and when the governments in these areas were very proactive in the economies of these countries. In the 1980s growth rates declined precipitously with …
Posted to Virginity or Death!: A Conversation With Katha Pollitt
-
Chopper, Comparing anyone to North Korea is ridiculous. Comparing South Korea in the 1980s to South Korea in the 1990s up to today after adopting many ill advised IMF free market reforms, like abandoning protection for her domestic market in consumer durables and ceasing to fund R&D in these industries, is more reasonable. The Asian Tiger economies, including South Korea, did much better in terms of annual GDP growth, employment rates, manufactured goods exports, and income growth before these US enforced IMFreforms. The Koreans were forced to revalue the Won upward by 40% in terms of the US Dollar to make …
Posted to Virginity or Death!: A Conversation With Katha Pollitt
-
I actually respect Milton Friedman a lot. I don't agree much but I think he is one of the few conservatives who deserves the epithet of "public intellectual." He is an intellectual force to be reckoned with and has many supporters and detractors. He did make a solid contribution to monetary theory and in this sense is not just a pundit like so many others. He also writes for the common reader. Money Mischief is one of his lesser known works which you should check out and which I think makes the monetarist case in a much more powerful way with …
Posted to Virginity or Death!: A Conversation With Katha Pollitt
-
The Liberty/Equality tradeoff is, in my opinion another dogma. The conservatives express the tradeoff just as you did and they also find that attempts to gain greater equality often sacrifice both equality and freedom. This is mostly because they believe that there exists a natural order which if disturbed can't produce positive outcomes as intended by its natural workings but if left alone an "optimal mix" of freedom and equality will emerge. The trouble, we are told, is with liberals and others who tamper with social systems in an endeavor to achieve perfection and get neither equality or perfection. It is …
Posted to Virginity or Death!: A Conversation With Katha Pollitt
-
It is funny how conservatives want to avoid dealing with Bush by saying he is not a conservative the way the left avoids dealing with the failings of socialism by saying this and that socialist regime isn't REAL socialism. The people making the criticisms never buy into it. Conservatives must OWN Bush mistakes and all because they supported him and much of what he did, backing down only when they say the writing on the proverbial wall or when the vast majority of people turned agianst it. The use of the term dogma is used generally NOT as an unalterable truth …
Posted to Virginity or Death!: A Conversation With Katha Pollitt
-
Chopper, once again you save your most questionable statements for last. Only Soros might qualify as rich AND powerful. Maybe. The politicians you mentioned are not more powerful than the rivals that may or may not outnumber them. The US Congress and Senate, it has been well established, are among the weakest of our political institutions at the federal level. Gates and Turner are rich but don't have much pull. I find the Michael Moore comment laughable (sorry). You would be suprised who the rightists are calling "elites" these days. I could be anyone who could sieze the opportunity for more …
Posted to Virginity or Death!: A Conversation With Katha Pollitt
-
Chopper - The American Economy is becoming increasingly financially based. For example stockmarket bubbles have played a greater and greater roll in creating a wealth affect in driving the economy. This is based in part on the growing number of transactions. In 1975, for example, 19 million stock trades traded daily on the NYSE. By 1985, the volume had reached 109 million. Currently in 2006, 1.6 billion shares, with a value of over 60 Billion are traded daily on the NYSE. Currency spectulation also looms large in the US and world economy and exceeds the dollar value of global trade in …
Posted to Virginity or Death!: A Conversation With Katha Pollitt
-
The bible clearly directs people to reject neither homosexuality or abortion. These two hot button issues were never an issue at all until the late 19th century. Homosexuality was largely ignored as a significant number of histories greatest luminaries were openly homosexual. Abortion was never an issue until the 1860s when the UK made it illegal. The US soon followed suit leaving it up to the states to pass their own laws. By WWI, abortion was illegal in all 50 states. Even the Vatican never took a position until 1869 when a papal decree made it a sin. Before this point …
Posted to Face-to-Face With the Fundamentalist Base
-
One approach that may be useful in dealing with the absolutist arguments of the religious right might be ones grounded in existential or postmodernist thought. Postmodernists, following thinkers like Nietsche or Foulcault, don't not believe in absolute truths because they hold that all knowledge is historically conditioned and interest bound. Further, all truth is mediated by power relations in a given society and the discourse that bounds the perameters of acceptable ideas. There are no essential meanings in the world that predispose outcomes and no absolutes that transcend history. Everything is kept in the bounds of historic epochs even everyday things …
Posted to Face-to-Face With the Fundamentalist Base
-
The current desertification of China's valuable agricultural land is one of the many negative impacts of the global economy. Rising grain prices due to massively increased grain imports could benefit US farmers and, of course, big Agribusiness firms like Cargill and ADM who receive most of the subsidies and control most of the US grain exports. This goes along with the way in which China's export boom benefits US transnational corporations more than the Chinese workers or their communities. China's industrial revolution is the most foreign dependant of all four historic industrial revolutions (UK, US, Japan, China) and the most reliant …
Posted to Chinas Growing Desert
-
Halliburton is a corrupt giant that acts like an attached adjunct of the Bush Administration. We've apparently reached a corporatist form of regime whereby a cluster of big corporate cronies enrich themselves as close partners of a government in the pursuit of a long term political agenda. They become a politically interested integral part of the regime rather than an outsider who is soley concerned with money. Fascist regimes often operate this way. Krupp and IG Farben seemed to operate within the Third Reich in this manner coming to symbolize the Reich itself and its goals and ideology rather than just …
Posted to Halliburton Hearts Congress
-
This is just another way that power can easily be concentrated in the hands of a corrupt executive branch that tries to override congress. Sources of funding from congress are probably a minority of the total quantity of funds available for US government operations. The congressional power of the purse is a myth. There are so many ways around it. One is accruing public debt from the sale of treasury notes and bonds. The other is selling drugs. Look at Afghanistan. Suddenly they have sold 6,100 tons of poppy crop this year from an historically unprecedented 165,000 hectres (400,000 US acres) …
Posted to The Tragedy of Gary Webb
-
Hey Opuleboy, How you turn any discussion into an excuse to rag on the Jews is beyond me. Do you ever give your anti-semitism a rest? Should only articles on the Israeli occupation be published. Yes, its ok to discuss other things. Do you think because Kaufman is Jewish (and probably has as much to do with Israel as the man in the moon) he is obligated to spend his life doing mea culpas about this damn occupation. The nuts he's writing about all are Zionists of such fanatical degrees it would cause Sharon to blush. Get off your high horse …
Posted to Jesus Is Tragic
-
"Supremicist Zionist"? Is that anyone who doesn't obsess about the Israeli Occupation of Palestine 24/7?
Posted to Jesus Is Tragic
-
I didn't call you anti-semitic for criticizing Israel. Those who know me and have read my published work in Marxist journals know I hate Zionism and have made far reaching critiques of the Zionist ideology, state, and occupation. I just don't believe in ackwardly and inappropriately bringing it up for discussion at every turn purely in order to stigmatize all Jews. This is ignorant and prejudiced. Furthermore, the State of Israel has cost the US taxpayer to date just over $100 billion. Most people support a two state solution to the crisis and don't hate Israel or blame it for all …
Posted to Jesus Is Tragic
-
You equate the Texan with me. The Texan is not a liberal just a Zionist. From the sound of things he is not at all critical of the status quo. He probably likes Bush & Co. as well. My comments above were quite informative and critical of Israel in a credible and serious manner. Do this mean I'm evil and not to be taken seriously as a true leftist?
Posted to Jesus Is Tragic
-
Well said Admiral.
Posted to Jesus Is Tragic
-
Zionism is a complex topic but to explain briefly it began as a secular political movement in Europe of Jews who wished to settle in Palestine less for religious reasons than as a nation with its own culture and language (Hebrew) wishing to establish a modern sovereign state. In a real sense Zionism is a Christian ideology because of Christian biblican endtimes prophesies about Jews returning to their ancient patrimony in Israel. Jews don't share this distinctly religious belief because only the Messiah's will can establish renew the Jewish control of Israel not human secular political movements. Religious anti-Zionism is based …
Posted to Jesus Is Tragic
-
I've read many such books which are based on purely Jewish sources like Benny Morris's The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem and found them to be excellent. Morris's political volte face in late 2000, which was a reaction to the Al Aqsa Intifada and the suicide bombings, did not affect his research on pre-1967 Israel and the Israeli treatment of the Palestinians both in war and peace during this time. He continues to uncover military and government documents through Israel's Freedom of Information statute that reveal massacres, expulsions, and expropriations in this period. One of the reasons that most of …
Posted to Jesus Is Tragic
-
Tex, You must understand that no one likes Israel much these days. The final death toll in Lebanon is officially 1,400 which is high given Lebanon's four million people. There were over a million refugees. The destruction was vast. The country will take years to recover fully. Meanwhile the offensive against the Palestinians is unrelenting. Gaza is under siege once again and the West Bank is being expropriated as we speak. Israel's occupation has been oppressive for to long. Its time for a change.
Posted to Jesus Is Tragic
-
Redhorse, Israel, (the proper spelling), is guilty of plenty of wrongdoing without making up crap that is wrong and silly. First of all, Israel's GDP is over $150 billion at this point making foreign aid less than 4% of her economy. Foreign direct investment continues to be significant and most of it is US based. FDI accounts for between a fifth and a quarter of Israel's gross fixed capital formation according to UN Trade and Development studies. Israel has always had a large domestic manufacturing base which exceeds the US's as a proportion of GDP. Like the US, Israel is outsourcing …
Posted to Jesus Is Tragic
-
Israel is also an engine of globalization. This is connected with the war in Iraq. I'm researching into this issue. Outside of oil, the Middle East has the lowest rate of foreign direct investment inflows and the highest proportion of state owned enterprises of any region in the world. Bush sees the US position as the world's only superpower to reverse this trend!! He is seeking greater profit on a long term basis for US firms. He also seeks to improve the global structural position of US capital vis a vis the Middle East. This will ensure US hegemony. It will …
Posted to Jesus Is Tragic
-
Yo Tex, You're awful sympathetic to Israel and the Jews to be a REAL TEXAN. Are you? Maybe its that Old Testiment Protestantism that equates the Israelites entering Caanan with the American settlers coming to the New World that garners unlikely sympathies with the Jews and their cause. The Exodus Narrative is a powerful one and one that has lasted through the ages. Zionism, BTW, is not a term of derision. It was a movement officially begun in Basil, Switzerland in 1897 which pursued a Jewish homeland in Palestine in order to create a sovereign state there for the Jewish People. …
Posted to Jesus Is Tragic
-
The UN voted to partition Palestine into Jewish and Arab states in November 1947. The British Army still occupied the country and its mandate would expire in May 1948 when Israel declared its independance. Though the Jews were only 30% of the entire population of Palestine, Israel received about 55% of the entire area of British Mandatory Palestine including the eastern Gallilee, the entire Negev in the south, and a narrow strip along the coast from just north of Tel Aviv down to present day Ashkelon just north of Gaza. It escalated a war with the two Palestinian militias, including one …
Posted to Jesus Is Tragic
-
If you mean the original partition resolution then yes I understand Arab opposition. They saw themselves as the 70% majority in Palestine and resented the Jews being given 55% of the country with the majority of the arable land. Even in the partitioned Jewish state the Jews were barely a majority. The Palestinians allowed many Jews into Palestine during the Holocaust and many gave them assistance and support. Proportionately Palestine took more Jewish refugees from Europe than any other country including the US and the UK. Now the Palestinian Arabs were being asked to basically hand over their country for crimes …
Posted to Jesus Is Tragic
-
Your claim that many of the neighboring Arab states, particularly Jordan, had designs on the Palestinian state and fought over pieces of it in 1948 is part of the historic record. Mainstream historians like Dan Kurzman in his exhaustive and excellent "Genesis 1948" and revisionist historian Avi Schlaim's "Collusion Across the Jordan" document this fact. Israel became Palestine after the Arab invasion in the late seventh century. In 680AD the Al Aksa Mosque was built and the Muslims remained in control under various Calliphs until the Turks in 1517. They ruled with the Calliphate in Constantinople until the British took over …
Posted to Jesus Is Tragic
-
The origins of the Zionist movement are controversial and complex. What has virtual unanamous agreeement is that the Nazi Holocaust of Jews in Europe enabled the coming into being of the modern state of Israel. Zionism as a movement is Christian in origin. Jews have always accepted the Talmud's interpretation of the Old Testiment prohibition of the secular establishment of a sovereign state for the Jews in Palestine. Such a state must only be brought by the Moshiach (Jewish Messiah). Christianity holds that Jewish control of Israel and its ancient biblical lands by Jews is a precondition for the return of …
Posted to Jesus Is Tragic
-
History Teacher, I had a hard time understanding what you were saying. Are you saying that the makers of the movie were unfairly critical of the subjects they portrayed? They only rolled the cameras and let the people they filmed do their thing. Why is that unfair? It is interesting to note that both the rightist proponents of Christian Fundamentalism and the leftist opponents of it both thought the movie made THEIR point!! This is the sign of a truely NEUTRAL film. The fact that some Christians found the portrayals of the Fundamentalists objectionable is testimony to the actual objectionability of …
Posted to Jesus Is Tragic
-
I am glad to see the usual trolls are stalking us once again. Let's start with this: Fascism as a political typology doesn't fit anywhere in the Islamic world because it is a self-consciously modern ideology and system which applies only to modern nation-states and modern mass society. These fascist states use modern institutions, technology, and forms of organization to consolidate and centralize their political power. They tend to have highly developed, industrialized economies which are capable of autarchy and not easily subject to foreign domination. They are deeply nationalist and use myths of historic national glories to mobilize the support …
Posted to The Neocons Lexicon
-
Jay Cline You obviously never read a scholarly book on Fascism. You also don't understand the political nature of propaganda. To say that I am a racist for limiting fascism to modern European and other highly advanced societies is ignorant!! Fascism is not just authoritarian rule. One of the reasons that it is limited to Europe and Japan under the Emperor is that the concept of a nation-state is absolutely instrumental. The historic specificities of European political development between the 1880s and the start of WWII, nationalist and racial ideology, the creation of nation-states out of Continental Empires, the abolition of …
Posted to The Neocons Lexicon
-
Jay Cline, If you were to approach this subject at most universities like you do here you would flunk out immediately. You have NO powers of refined reasoning whatsoever. Let me examine the points that are even worth considering one at a time. You say nation-states are not a modern invention. They are utterly modern. Before the late 19th Century the main forms of political organization were either multi-cultural/lingual empires such as the Ottoman, the Imperial German, the Austro-Hungarian, and the Russian Tzarist. On the other hand was the extremely local level such as the village. These formed political identity and …
Posted to The Neocons Lexicon
-
Jay Cline, The Spartans and Athenians were just that, regional identities that became part of the ancient Greek Empire. They wouldn't become Greek nationalists until they fought British control of the peninsula in the 1830s and concieved of themselves as Greeks with a desire to create a unified, territorially defined nation-state. Nation by the way is English for the Greek word Ethnikos. The nation-state is newer than the concept of ethnic culture or the nation. This concept wasn't actively politicized until the 19th century so it didn't become politically relevant until then! Most nation-states were established immediately after WWI. They are …
Posted to The Neocons Lexicon
-
Hey Jay, Spoken like a true reactionary!! And wrong, wrong, wrong!!! First of all not all cultural identities are nationalist in charactor. Nationalism is learned as is all political culture and not inherited genetically. The roots of nationalism are quite shallow. I'll resist comparisons! Citizenship is also an historic concept in great flux. The ancient Greek concept is far different than the notion of citizenship to emerge from the French Revolution and the 18th century European Enlightenment. We are looking at two very different societies with different socio-economic structures and different levels of development. There is also two millenia of history …
Posted to The Neocons Lexicon
-
I quite understood your claims regarding the nature of nationalism. The nation is not rooted in human psychology. It is not kinship writ large. It is not the political manifestation of natural human tendencies to be gregarious. It is not evolutionary territorialism or the seeking of protection from intruders by sticking with the familiarity of the pack. Nationalism is a modern ideology that is inculcated by authority for political purposes. These purposes involve securing support for the nation-state as a mode of social organization by creating an new historic identity for mass society called nationality. The nation-state is the organizational form …
Posted to The Neocons Lexicon
-
Jane Doe, Your comment on the broken link between sovereignty and democracy under conditions of globalization leaving citizens of the nation-state with no representation or grievance procedure is quite apt. The logic of transnational capital, and the new division of labor it commands according to the imperatives of the rate of profit, has broken down the old social formation. The old Keynesian model, along with its progressive reforms, capital/labor accord, and democratic process, is being replaced by the dictatorship of capital. The conflicts and chaos we see is the consequence of the collapse of the liberal state which for over two …
Posted to The Neocons Lexicon
-
Jay Cline, On the close relationship between capitalism and nationalism and the nation-state we will certainly have to agree to disagree. On the issue of fascism and modern technology I must stress that complete centralized control of mass society is enabled by modern technology. So is conquest and modern warfare. Fascism is a truely modern typology. It is also related to capitalist crisis and certainly was in the 1930s in Europe when economic and working class political pressures on the system would have caused capitalism's sure demise without the intervention of the fascist state to shore up its weaknesses in the …
Posted to The Neocons Lexicon
-
Jay Cline, I never said that Fascism was uniquely advantaged by technology but only that it was a necessary but not sufficient condition for its emergence as a form of rule. Obviously other types of rule are empowered by technology including democracy which by the way doesn't require such a thing to be Democratic. The main part of the argument was that fascism is self-consciously and by definition modern and constitutes a decisive break with previous modes of traditional authoritarian rule. Fascism is necessarily urban (Mussolini thought of it as "futuristic" and part of the general 1930s futurism movement of which …
Posted to The Neocons Lexicon
-
I won't venture to classify China. Even state capitalism is a stretch because of the degree of private control of industry and other sectors of the economy. However, State Capitalism is the very best way to charactorize the current type of regime in China. Iran under the Shah was fairly close to a modern Fascist state. Persia is certainly a nation-state and the Shah was a great admirer of both Hitler and Mussolini whose regimes and modes of mass organization served as models for the Shah. His regime was highly modern and nationalist in its conflicts with Arab states like Iraq …
Posted to The Neocons Lexicon
-
First of all there is a clear enough consensus on fascism to understand that it is modern and that it uses technology to accomplish levels of control and compliance that only modern regimes can achieve. The bureaucratic State is the core of the fascist rule which is essentially secular although it does not repress organized religion. Your point on a fascist Caliphate is ridiculous. A Caliphate is religious authority not state. It could entail theocracy. You can't have a fascist Caliphate any more than a fascist Papacy. Both are religious and rely on religious doctrine. Nationalism is totally separate. Neither Islam …
Posted to The Neocons Lexicon
-
First of all I never said Fascism was only about state control or only about anything else. You absolutely delight in taking any one thing I attribute to fascism as a typology of rule and accuse me of hinging the entire argument on that one thing. You've this with the state, technology, modernity, industry, bureacracy, and numerous other things. Many things merge to make fascism a unique modern form of rule in the 20th century. You have yet to learn what every incoming college freshman learns in his first history class, that is the phrase "the necessary but not sufficient condition …
Posted to The Neocons Lexicon
-
I really have to say that you two are the most obnoxous trolls I've ever seen. And annoying!! My statements were not tautologies. Never has there been a technologically backward fascist regime in history. BTW, I never said technology freed people. Anyhow, technological advancement is part of fascism's self-identification as a modern society and a society aspiring to material progress. I don't believe my defense of this point is tautological. The term Islamo-fascism was not meant to be a scholarly assessment or Iran's regime typology. It would never pass muster in any University under any circumstances. The pundits that coined the …
Posted to The Neocons Lexicon
-
One of the most obvious connections between fascist regimes and their objectives of total state control and racial purification if the relationship between IBM and the Nazi Regime in the 1930s and beyond. A well known and exhaustive work on the subject involving a team of over 100 researchers by journalist Edwin Black tells the entire story. The story begins with a German-American inventor named Hermann Hollerith who invented a machine using punchcards to process and register data much like a primitive form of computer technology. The first major use of his technology was the gathering and sorting of data for …
Posted to The Neocons Lexicon
-
Jane Doe, I agree with your post 100%!! I would never hold that technology is fascism's leading feature and that there is some kind of technological determinism that predisposes regimes with great technological abilities to use them to vest all power in the state apparatus. Clearly fascism is political and is a response to the crisis of the old regimes inability to impose order, as well as reproduce the conditions of capitalist profitability. Robert O. Paxton, a historian from Columbia U. , deemed European fascism's early encounter with western support/compacency as both (a) indicative of Western capital's need for a profitable …
Posted to The Neocons Lexicon
-
The term Islamo-fascism is inappropriate since Iran is an authoritarian theocracy utterly bereft of many of the key features of modern fascism. Fascist regimes are inherently secular due to their stress on the nation and race as the focal obsession. Islamo-Fascism is thus a real contradiction in terms since it is purely religious. In addition, theocracy is just as strong in Saudi Arabia which is every bit as repressive as Iran if not more so. They also have a stronger state and carry out more executions in general and of women in particular. They are also close allies of the United …
Posted to The Neocons Lexicon
-
"...race is a useful idiot..." No. Race is a myth focused upon and glorified in fascist Narrative (not ideology) in order to draw support and legitimacy from the masses over which the state rules. "...but so was the purity of Christianity." No.The Church was very weak in Nazi Germany. The Nazis sent 74 noted German bishops and other high clerics to concentration camps. The Catholic Church was persecuted by the Nazis. Pope Pius XI had to sign a Concordat with Hitler to try to secure guarantees to respect the Church's interests. In the thirties the Council of German Bishops released an …
Posted to The Neocons Lexicon
-
Luminous Beauty, You have hit the nail on the head. Don't expect to much from some people in the way of results, however!!
Posted to The Neocons Lexicon
-
First of all it is the absolute height of lunacy to lump Chavez in with Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. He was twice democratically elected which is something we can't say for another dictator, George W. Bush. Chavez also shows more compassion to his citizens. If the EU is collapsing why is the Eurodollar stronger than the US dollar despite the fact that all global oil trade is in dollars and over 75% of foreign reserves in central banks all over the world are US Dollar denominated. Maybe W.'s growing national debt and deficits are to blame. Everyone is worried about them …
Posted to The Neocons Lexicon
-
Just because the Nazis allowed religion didn't make them religious in the sense of a theocracy you pain in the ass!! The fact that they ordained their own Bishop and usurped all identities including religious ones makes MY point even better than even I did! In the second place one can dispute whether or not fascism has a distinct ideology like Marxism or liberal democracy. What is fascist ideology? Ideology is not just a loose collection of tendencies but a coherent and cohesive set of linked ideas that undergird political agenda. Fascism consists more of a concrete program of national regeneration …
Posted to The Neocons Lexicon
-
Hugo Chavez is not Hitler you silly a**hole. Furthermore, I explained my position on fascism more than is necessary. Stop trolling. You need to get laid!!
Posted to The Neocons Lexicon
-
Scorp, You need to stop relying on NewsMax or whatever rightwing source you use because it is wrong and misleading. Chavez is having problems right now but he is maintaining the oil facilities. In addition, Venezualan oil is very expensive to refine because unlike "Arab Sweet" from the Persian Gulf it has higher sulpher content and takes more processing. The price per barrel is less than that fetched for the Saudi oil. This contributes to Venezualas problems. I don't know of Chavez really killing anyone either. I wasn't aware, as you imply, that the EU, our closest trading partners and political …
Posted to The Neocons Lexicon
-
I expected serious political debate not trollish mudslinging!!
Posted to The Neocons Lexicon
-
Islamo-fascist doesn't reflect any reality whatsoever. There is no such thing. We've gone through all the reasons why this is the case. All J. Cline has done is make silly ahistoric generalizations ("nationalism has always existed because it is in people's genes"), accuse others of circular logic when it is he that is guitly of such logic, and nit pick in an impish manner about the use of terms (such as pointing out that technology isn't needed for fascism because there is no visible relationship. Most aggriegously he is guilty of post hoc ergo propter hoc logical fallicies. He obviously doesn't …
Posted to The Neocons Lexicon
-
There no such thing as elitist in the sense that you use the phrase. I have never said that anything about fascism was simply true by definition but by virtue of history and fascism's own self conception. I know this must sound like "elitist" phrase-making to you. Fascism is an early 20th century phenomenon. There are no fascist theocracies although the Church rallied support to Franco and Salazar in Spain and Portugal respectively. Though technologically behind Germany and Japan, they were modern states and colonized foreign possessions and were able to control and settle them. Your remark earlier in the thread …
Posted to The Neocons Lexicon
-
One attempt to clarify the notion of fascism is Michael Mann's exhaustive work "Fascists" which is a sociological study of interwar European fascism. Fascism is not a transcendental idea but an historically specific reference to a type of rightist authoritarian rule in the mid twentieth century which had no precedent and will probably never be repeated in the future. It seemed to be specific to a particular time in history and to emerged only in modern societies. Some of the core features of fascism, according to Mann, is a cleansing nationalism, stateism, class transcendence, and militarism. The first aspect of fascist …
Posted to The Neocons Lexicon
-
You twisted the meaning of my statements. I never said fascism was abberant, had no historic context, or emerged and existed in a vacuum. Those are your wrongful interpretations of what I said and it reflects little experience with scholarly reasoning and research. You must abandon laymen's thinking when dealing with these types of subject matter. Fascism is a unique and historically specific typology of modern authoritarian rule. Its context was the crisis of highly developed societies and the emergence of nationalist ideology in the late 19th Century in Europe which nourished the post WWI nation-state and the nationalism which accompanied …
Posted to The Neocons Lexicon
-
Talk about BS, Cline you're full of it!! The two statements don't contradict each other unless you look at things narrowly. Fascism WAS an abberation in that it never existed as a whole, functioning system before WWI although, in dialectical fashion, it was a system that synthesized aspects of old forms of European authoritarianism into a wholly new form of rightist dictatorial rule called modern fascism. This doesn't mean it had no context. The context was merely its social and physical environment and the circumstances under which it emerged which I pointed out was the crisis of the old regimes' ability …
Posted to The Neocons Lexicon
-
I get it. Your being paid to repeat stuff I said in other posts as if its yer idea and I actually disagree to drive me insane! You have to much time on yer hands my friend. Who's yer daddy?
Posted to The Neocons Lexicon
-
Jay Cline, You must read a book on fascism before debating the issue on scholarly grounds. Books like Daniel Guerin's Fascism and Big Business is a good start. So is The Anatomy of Fascism by Robert O. Paxton. Michael Mann's Fascists gives a unique sociological perspective and Stanley Payne's Fascism is a noted contribution (if it encourages you I knew Payne at the UW-Madison. He is a conservative historian and a noted expert on Modern Spain and Portugal. Guerin is a Marxist and Paxton a standard liberal. Mann is a non-Marxist leftist and is very ecclectic in his expansive and far …
Posted to The Neocons Lexicon
-
The Romanian Iron Guard were centered heavily in Bucharest. Aside from this, nationalism is not a broad and complex topic with a great expanse as you suggest but a very narrow one. It is an essentially modern phenomenon. Neither nationalism, or any other political tendency, is part of human nature. These things are deeply historic and specific to epochal development. This is where I think we REALLY part company. I am influenced by thinkers like Foucault and Neitzsche and other post-modernists in addition to Marx and the dialectical approach to history. I believe that history synthesizes key aspects of one epoch …
Posted to The Neocons Lexicon
-
I went to the TNR website but I didn't want to pay to read the rest of the article which looked quite interesting. I also don't know what it had to do with the price of tea in China.
Posted to The Neocons Lexicon
-
As far as I know most of the Eastern European Fascist movements in the 1930s and 1940s that collaberated with the German Nazis and formed Waffen SS divisions didn't have a distinct urban or rural identity but recruited from all areas of the countries where they existed including big cities. They were deeply nationalist, xenophobic, violent, allied with larger fascist mentors, and carried out roundups, mass murder, and revaunchism on behalf of their Nazi overlords. Some of these countries were less developed than Germany but it didn't make them less fascist. Many were fascist movements that didn't have complete control of …
Posted to The Neocons Lexicon
-
Arby, In order to criticize the term "neo-con" you will have to understand its origins. It is not an epithet or term of derision assigned this tendency by the left. Neo-conservatism, the respectful term preferred and originated by Neo-cons themselves, was a political tendency that has its roots in the 1950s with the start of the Cold War. Its originators, but by no means its total membership, were American Jews whose political roots derived from the Left, usually Trotskyist. With the revelations of the Crimes of Stalin and the sense that Communism was a highly repressive failure these individuals founded a …
Posted to The Neocons Lexicon
-
Glad to see the old gang is back. Wonder where everyone has been. And why no one is lending their old pal "cabbie" a hand on the neo-con lexicon thread. I've having a heck of a time with two of the worst trolls on this blogsite. Check it out!! Anyhow it is interesting to see the Bushies downplay their usual "stay the course" messege right at mid-term elections. The civl war over there is raging and who ever thought that we'd be responsible for killing nearly three percent of the total Iraqi population. This is quite an achievement. These war criminals …
Posted to Sick to Death of Bush
-
I am thrilled to find that the old SDS is being revived. There can hardly be better news. I've meet Tom Hayden twice and spoke with him. I think he's done a lot for progressive politics in this country. SDS has the potential to be a great umbrella organization of progressive activism. My only question is where do I sign up?!
Posted to SDS, New and Improved
-
One of the reasons the Bush Administration initially missed the terrorism story was that their obsessive "state worship" blinded them to the simple fact that states are not needed to support and sustain "terrorist" movements. In fact, Hezbollah is a vital and legitimate part of the Lebanese State doing quite well what the PLO attempted but failed to do over 20 years ago when they were expelled from Lebanon by Israel. Hezbollah commands a great deal of respect and legitimacy both running Lebanon and militarily defending it. Its social organizations are needed and its military is formidable in defending Lebanon against …
Posted to Examining Irans ties to Hezbollah
-
I don't know why Israel has the right to rip up Lebanon and engage in massive eco-terrorism by bombing the fuel tanks attached to power generating facilities south of Beirut because of foolish, irresponsible statements made by the Iranian leader. This is the main excuse being used: Ahmedinijad's inflammatory statements about Jews and Israel. Now what is widely considered a genocide against innocent people has been commited in Lebanon pursuant to the goals of neo-conservative conquest of the region. In addition, the Eastern Mediteranian has been toxified at the expense of the US and other taxpayers. Israel is way out of …
Posted to Examining Irans ties to Hezbollah
-
Decampe, How long are we going to continue to hear the same nonsense blaming the Palestinians and their leadership for the collapse of the Oslo Accords? The Israelis never simply quit Gaza but merely redeployed troops outside the area while continuing to maintain logistical, military, sovereign control from outside. Israel can determine whether or not aircraft can land at the Gaza Airport and in fact completely controls the airspace around Gaza. True, the 8,000 settlers were removed with compensation and resettled in the West Bank where Israel plans to strengthen the occupation. It must be remembered that Dov Weissglass, Sharon's chief …
Posted to Examining Irans ties to Hezbollah
-
Decampe and Dizz, Why don't you wake up. Both the ICJ and an Israeli High Court have declared the Wall a violation of international law as is the occupation itself. Even the US Juror on the ICJ, himself a Jew, concurred with the other jurors' opinions but dissented on technical grounds. The wall has rendered the economy of the West Bank unviable by all accounts. It has usurped over one sixth of the land much of it arable land just for security purposes itself. The discontuguities created has made doing business and travel impossible on any reasonable basis. This has been …
Posted to Examining Irans ties to Hezbollah
-
Dizz, The ICJ, on June 9, 2004, decided that the construction of the Wall violated several areas of international law including prohibitions on collective punishments prohibited under the Fourth Geneva Convention as well as confiscation of property, forcible moving of populations, and the dramatic alteration of the physical landscape of areas under foreign occupation. The Wall also violated several sections of the 1907 Hague Convention. The actual length of the Wall is intended at this point to be about 780 km. Nearly half of the Wall is fully constructed and operational. Under Olmert's "Realignment Plan" , costing $2 billion, Israel will …
Posted to Examining Irans ties to Hezbollah
-
Dizz, I believe that like one of your past elder statesmen from Israel's early period, Abba Eban, advocated and extolled the virtues of ethnic cleansing in the 1950s at the United Nations in a speech blaming the Arab States for the enduring suffering of the Palestinian people. He cited a litany of instances of 20th Century ethnic cleansing during WWI and WWII involving Turks expelling Greeks from Anatolia, Russians expelling Germans from Poland etc, and seemed to imply how unfair it was in their hour of need the Israel's could somehow not follow in this wonderful tradition. Unmindful of the fact …
Posted to Examining Irans ties to Hezbollah
-
Dizz, You misrepresented what I said! The Arab League offer of 2002 did not ask that Israel admit millions of refugees and employ them in high paying jobs while giving up its security concerns. The offer was in return for a complete withdrawl to the pre-1967 lines and a willingness to discuss the refugee issue (there are still many stateless Palestinians in Camps all over the occupied territories from the 1948 War) in accord with UNGA resolution 194 III which would probably result in a repatriation of only several thousands of people, 22 Arab League states would offer Israel peace and …
Posted to Examining Irans ties to Hezbollah
-
The Arab League proposal of March 2002 was really based on the Saudi Initiative of the Saudi Prince which envisioned "normal relations" between ALL Arab States and Israel as being "the same as relations between the Arab States and States other than Israel with which there are normal relations" that is peaceful relations with possiblities of deepening ties in other political, economic, and cultural areas. The reason that the peace between Israel and Egypt and Jordan is not popular on the Arab street is Israel's continued occupation of the WB and Gaza as well as attacks on Lebanon. The reason the …
Posted to Examining Irans ties to Hezbollah
-
The Arab minority in Israel has highly qualified rights though admittedly many of them enjoy a better standard of living than Arabs in neighboring states. Ethnic Cleansing is not always 100% complete and Israel could not feasibly expel the Arab population within its borders. According to Benny Morris, Israel expanded its portion of partitioned Palestine in the 1948 War by 20% expelling 750,000 indigenous Arabs in the process. Left with 160,000 Arabs within the expanded boundaries of the new state of Israel she was hardly in a position to expel the rest while desparitely seeking support for a suitable armistice arrangement. …
Posted to Examining Irans ties to Hezbollah
-
Dizz and Decampe, Your arguments are rediculous. The 1967 War was an aggressive war. The capture of the West Bank was certainly not necessary as it was held by a non-aggressor, Jordan, who didn't violated the armistice of 1949 by militarizing the West Bank considering that hostilities threatened Jordanian held territory and the fact that Jordan was liable for the Palestinian population there and in Jerusalem that would soon be subject to Israeli aggression and occupation. The fact that ethnic cleansing and aggressive military conquest was the norm before 1945 doesn't make it morally acceptable or a reasonable option today. I …
Posted to Examining Irans ties to Hezbollah
-
Decampe, You claim that my skull is thick and that I am somehow in a different world. It is you to whom these observations apply! I lived in Israel for three years in the early 1990s and spent a summer there in 1978 when I met the Israeli historian Benny Morris. He gave our group (the American Zionist Youth Federation-no friend of the Palestinians or the peace movement I may add!) a guided tour of Jerusalem and a very thorough rundown of the city's long history. He didn't shy from making political commentary. I now realize that he had been researching …
Posted to Examining Irans ties to Hezbollah
-
It has long been understood by the Arab World that no real military option against Israel exists and that negotiations based on the relevant UN resolutions and international law is the best way to assure peace and justice for the Palestinians. Israel could respond by pulling up all the settlements in the West Bank while seeking an accomidation with the PNA on shared sovereignty in Jerusalem without dividing the city. The eastern municiple boundaries will definately have to be redrawn and settlers withdrawn closer into the pre-1967 lines. Obviously the separation wall will have to be removed. The only thing that …
Posted to Examining Irans ties to Hezbollah
-
States like Syria would be thrilled so long as they get the Golan Heights returned. They have been looking for a land for peace deal for a long time and if they got one they could probably be counted on to do the US bidding in Lebanon. They did just this in the early part of the 1975-6 Civil War in Lebanon by helping the Maronites against the PLO and the Shi'ites before switching sides after a military confrontation with Israel. All the other Arab League states have either a peace treaty with Israel or would sign one with US mediation …
Posted to Examining Irans ties to Hezbollah
-
One of the things that the defender of Payday loans overlooked in his utter ridiculous defense post is that like all high risk loans, lower interest payday loans would necessarily be frontloaded. That is they would included all of the interest payments in the first few payments so that only by paying it off in the first or second installment could one save any interest at all. Being poor the borrower would need the entire schedualled life of the loan if not longer. This would ensure that a typical $500.00 loan carrying a 36% APR interest charge would be repaid in …
Posted to Economic Populism Proves Popular
-
As an article on labor issues this was an eye opener. Conditions are worsening and union ability to confront these problems and enforce existing laws is declining. Industries such as meat packing are have a reputation for large numbers of illegal immigrants especially in places like the IBP plants in Nebraska and Iowa. It has been suggested that it is not so much the availability of cheap immigrant labor that has resulted in the downgrading of the structure of work and the filling of those roles with illegals but rather the role of globalization in weakening workers and unions, restructuring work …
Posted to Processing Pain at Smithfield Foods
-
The low pay is no sweat for Mayor Daley. He gets the increased tax base from the Big Box retailer whether or not the employees get a raise in pay. So if he thinks a proposed minimum floor for wages and benefits would drive the Big Box retailer away he's against the pay hike. It's the Federal and State governments, not the city, that get to subsidize low Big Box wages and benefits through public aid, food stamps, medicare, and section eight housing for single parents with dependants. I resent the fact that these multi-billion dollar industries that are impoverishing the …
Posted to Bigger Salaries for Big Box Workers?
-
According to my understanding the initial effort to get this amendment passed never made it out of the Republican dominated Congressional committee in which it originated. This is a pathetic attempt at yet another redneck wedge issue to get the Toby Keith/NASCAR/WWF loving crowd all riled up! In other words, the Republicans are falling back on the old reliable culture wars in the absence of political substance. At a time when we're about to lose the entire Middle East in one fell swoop after three bloody years in Iraq where there is an open civil war as Israel is wilding all …
Posted to Go On, Amend Away
-
Judy and Tina, you are both uneducated crackers! Your reasoning is convaluted and stupid. Christians do not offend Jews. Most Jews could care less what Christians believe. Most people can care less what Holiday greeting people use and this whole thing about Jews trying to take Christ out of Christmas is hystierical ignorance. It is an attempt to bring a wedge issue out to cause hate and divide people. If gays offend Chistians than it is because these Christians like Judy are woefully ignorant! In addition, Judy, you are a liar and a fraud. No Jews would ever move to AK …
Posted to Two Faces of GOP Hate
-
Julycanute, You most certainly are an anti-semite and an uneducated redneck moron. You talk about the Jews as a group harming you personally when no such thing has occured and you openly speak of causing them physical harm. This I must assume stems from prejudice. As far as Mel Gibson is concerned Jews don't hate him because he is a Christian. Jews don't ever care what religion others profess. The Jewish community feels it is owed an apology for his hateful slander in associating them with the devil. He knows how gullible and uneducated you rednecks are and how riled up …
Posted to Two Faces of GOP Hate
-
July Canute, What do you consider an "attack" on Christians? Who has made such an attack? You just generalize and scapegoat. Do you think that the anti-Ralph Reed tone of the article constitutes an attack on Christians? How stupid! I've seen much greater anti-Christian right views expressed by real Christians who are sick of being associated with the far right evangelicals. In fact, I've never seen an attack in the US on Christianity at all. This is a clerico-fascist smokescreen for attacks on minorities and those who oppose our unelected fascist government. One of the signs of fascism is when pundits …
Posted to Two Faces of GOP Hate
-
The attack on the USS Liberty was probably already known about in advance by CIA of DIA officials and approved secretly. The issue probably reflects a serious split in the US foreign policy establishment over the then controversial issue of the extent of US military support for Israel in light of the Soviet position in the middle east and the cold war. The incident occured during the June War which put Israel in full control of ALL of British Mandatory Palestine. No concensus had yet emerged in the State Dept. which saw Israeli Nukes as key to US influence in the …
Posted to Two Faces of GOP Hate
-
Judy canute Jews have always done disproportionate good to all the societies they've ever lived in. This is an historic fact. They tend to be educated professionals and bring progress, technological advancement, wealth, and culture to places they inhabit. Israel is a place Christians foolishly sent them packing to against their will. You say that the US is a Christian country (wrong!) though it is secular. Then you claim inadvertantly that it is the reason that the US is universally despised. How bizarre?! You need to know it is US imperialism that has earned us a bad rap. You also need …
Posted to Two Faces of GOP Hate
-
Both Kerry and Gore are equally pro-Israel. Very few Democrats are critical of the Israeli occupation at all although many want to restart the peace process with the Palestinians and place all issues on the table for negotiation including the Wall, settlements, final status for Jerusalem, borders between the two states, mutual security, and Palestinian rights within Israel proper. No Democrats oppose support for Israel outright! Kerry supported the war because like everyone else in the house and senate he was fed bogus intelligance on Iraq, WMDs, and al-Qaeda terrorist linkages. The Jews have nothing to do with the Democratic Party …
Posted to Two Faces of GOP Hate
-
The only joke, "Julycanute", is your ignorant and senseless ranting! The ITT blog has never attacked Christians, no one says your an "Aryan nationalist" for defending Palestinians (which many individual Jews and Jewish human rights and peace groups do more effectively than you who only uses the issue to spread hatred of Jews), and no one is attacking Christians in the process of attacking your ignorant, hateful ranting especially as you and other Nazis credibly deny being Christians based chiefly on the dubious claim that Christianity is a "Jewish Cult or Myth" as the official Nazi line variously goes! The ITT …
Posted to Two Faces of GOP Hate
-
Uncle Remus, Your fourteen points on [US] fascism seems to be right on target. I believe that it is appropriate to the current situation in the US. It is quite scarey. Action needs to be taken. I suggest that we all insist on widespread monitoring of US elections including international observers (this would really embarrass the Bushies). This last point refers to our supreme democratic right! It's really to bad that the very first MODERN democratic nation needs foreign observers to assure a free and fair election but I guess that is what happens when fascism looms on the horizen. Herbert …
Posted to Two Faces of GOP Hate
-
As they say, Just Say No!
Posted to Two Faces of GOP Hate
-
The problem is not the Bush Administration's mental illness although I am thoroughly willing to believe that this is a contributory problem! The real issue is the psychosis that has now gripped the entire US society. We have now begun to accept the unacceptable. This is historically common to societies in profound crisis whereby fear and the scapegoating of "enemies" is used to keep people in line. Fear becomes society's legitimating ideology and an effective means of control. People are told who to blame and who to fear! Fascism is immanent when people are given a mythological national heritage to worship …
Posted to Two Faces of GOP Hate
-
Bush doesn't want to fund further public education when he wants to expand the US military in order to fight numeroius was simultaniously for hegemony and corporate profit. Cannon fodder doesn't need a Ph.D. The epoch of nation building has been over for three decades and we are on to globalization. The one-sixth of the world population considered to be the "Bankable sector" already can provide for itself! Now the point is to concentrate wealth and power even more with our militarized low road strategy of global capitalist development. I'm afraid this doesn't include improving the social conditions of the remaining …
Posted to Two Faces of GOP Hate
-
Trilateralism has nothing to do with fascism. It is cold war liberalism and a 1970s version of the old open door policy coupled with bilderburg petro-dollar supremecy, aid to the third world for nation building/free market capitalism, and clinton style globalization as against populist economic nationalism that supported tariffs to protect old heavy industry and the federally subsidized extractive industries and agriculture.
Posted to Two Faces of GOP Hate
-
Trilateralism is a form of corporatism and does have a global outlook but it is not the kind of exclusive, elitist corporatism of the Bush Administration. Their corporatism is a kind of elitist rule which entails crushing, rather than accomidating, the popular sector and is highly authoritarian rather than inclusivist and co-opting of some popular agenda and concerns! This is the difference between the bourgeous liberal state and the repressive authoritarian one in a time of capitalist crisis! There are different modes of rule! Trilateralism existed at the apex of working/middle class political power in US society and thus the balance …
Posted to Two Faces of GOP Hate
-
I was wondering. Could Tina1, Scorp, or Natalie actually be Ann Coulter? What are some thoughts out there?
Posted to Was the Presidential Election Stolen?
-
Tina 1, I have long sat by in silence reading your insane rantings. I really don't know who or what you are but its looking worse all the time! You advocate the abrogation of both international law and US constitutional law including decisions reached by rather conservative courts over the past few years with regard to the status and treatment of detainees and then have the nerve to call everyone else a traitor. You advocate the illegal and indescent unilateral abrogation of Habeas Corpus, the core of any constitutional democracy and the sole thing that has separated tyranny from democracy for …
Posted to Postmark Guantánamo
-
Tina1 Do you believe hurricaines are the most effective crime fighters? New Orleans also had above national average rates of black homeownership. There is good and bad everywhere. Do you think the hurricaine saved people from being murdered? Most of the black residents would disagree. They form the majority of the murder victims. Your contention about the cleansing effect of the hurricaine is racist. The people who suffered most were law abiding. The criminals had less to lose.
Posted to Postmark Guantánamo
-
Tina1, why do you come to post on the left blogs? Why don't guys like you and Scorp go to the FReepers or Matt Drudge or some other site for a change? Do you love arguing? Are you paid trolls? Someone once told me that it is the case but I really don't see the value of it for anyone. It is good to have healthy debates but that is what is going on anyhow without self-rightous morons from the far-right coming into the picture and hurling ignorant insults and name-calling. Having a discussion means being respectful as you are admonished …
Posted to Postmark Guantánamo
-
Frog, I thoroughly understand!
Posted to Postmark Guantánamo
-
As one who couldn't even afford to file bankruptcy I must say that the credit card companies actually make tons more money off the poor than the rich because the poor carry a balance over into the next billing cycle and pay high interest and fees. The poor pay usurous interest rates on small amounts of debt more than covers the bankruptcies of the rich whose "good credit" allows them to get back into the game after filing. They are even considered great risks because they are no longer liable for past debts freeing up all their income to pay new …
Posted to Bankruptcy Law in Shambles
-
One of scorp's most absurd claims is that the Iraq War is a bargain. Both Iraq and Afghanistan have cost the US taxpayer nearly $1 Trillion thus far by some estimates. This at a time of unprecedented deficits and tax cuts. Eager to prompt either the apocolypse or a major depression or both, John Negroponte, of El Salvador death squad fame, has proposed relaxing many of the SEC's corporate accounting and reporting rules. Presumably, this is in honor and commemoration of the recent Enron Verdicts. How relevant! Is this the most insane Administration in US history or what?!
Posted to Why Exiting Iraq Wont Be Easy
-
Scorp, Your figures are as usual misleading. The actual dollar figures for both wars may be under $300 billion by most estimates but they fail to include money spent on both reconstructions and other private security contracts not all of which is transparent, veterans benefits, interest on the federal deficit and national debt we keep accumulating in order to finance the war, plus the increased energy costs to the US economy based on the war's effect on Gulf production and the price per barrel of high grade crude from the Persian Gulf. By many researchers accounts this will easily top $1 …
Posted to Why Exiting Iraq Wont Be Easy
-
Scorp, In my customary rage at all such nonsense I did mispeak confusing federal debt and deficit. I stand corrected. One thing we all can agree on is that the US economy grew much faster and added far more jobs under Clinton than under Bush. Under Clinton productivity, national median income, per capita income, and per capita GDP growth all grew much faster than any of these things under Bush after he took office in 2001. According to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, the post-2001 recovery from the recession that began in the second quarter of 2000 and ran …
Posted to Why Exiting Iraq Wont Be Easy
-
WTH, Inflation adjusted median incomes rose under Clinton and declined under Bush. In constant 1996 dollars $39,500 was worth more than $42,000 in 2002. This figure declined in nominal terms over the next two years by nearly $2,000 so there was a real loss of purchasing power for the working class under Bush. These are incontrovertible facts! To call Iraq a democracy in the heart of darkness is like saying Enron is a model of business ethics. They are absurd. I've heard the same old tired arguments about Fallujah over and over again. Bing West wrote a book blaming Bremer for …
Posted to Why Exiting Iraq Wont Be Easy
-
Scorp, You are very poorly informed. What amazes me is that the period of the fastest and most thorough era of economic growth in our history, 1945-73, had the highest annual average rates of per capita GNP growth, the highest rates of labor productivity, the highest growth rates of end-use energy efficiency, and the highest rates of industrial utilization capacity. All this took place during America's highest rates of union density, income and wealth equality, middle-class growth, and high rates of social spending. This shows that the Keynesian welfare state did not harm economic success but rather promoted it! The Reagan …
Posted to Why Exiting Iraq Wont Be Easy
-
Scorp, LBJ never spent over $6 trillion on welfare. There wasn't that kind of money then. Be real! Everyone knows the Vietnam war took precedence over social welfare. Get your facts straight!
Posted to Why Exiting Iraq Wont Be Easy
-
George Will is not a great source since he is a stiff ass right-winger and uses biased sources that distort the reality. I do hate the idea of welfare and think that job training and job creation are the way to uplift people out of poverty. I do have the old work ethic!
Posted to Why Exiting Iraq Wont Be Easy
-
scorp, Manufacturing in the US is over. China is fast becoming the world's workshop. Wages in this country have been flat in real terms for decades. We simply cannot race to the bottom any longer. There is such a thing as overproduction. Wages are driven down in capitalist competition until there isn't sufficient effective demand to absorb all industrial output. Both Keynes and Marx understood this point! In late monopoly capitalism capitalists don't lower prices in order to clear markets as predicted by Say's Law. In modern times this would cause deflation and isn't possible as a matter of course due …
Posted to Why Exiting Iraq Wont Be Easy
-
Scorp, You completely distort the entire history of the Gulf Wars and the UN diplomacy surrounding it. First of all the entire first round of UN resolutions between 1990 and 1991 regarded Iraqi withdrawl from Kuwait and only later for sanctions, sanctions committees and the embargo. Later in the 1990s, calls for disarmament and inspection like UNSC 687 in 1995, UNSC1284 in 1999 which established UNMOVIC, and in Nov. 2002 UNSC1441 which posited military force for non-compliance with these resolutions emerged in the UNSC. France and Germany at some point offered proposals to end sanctions and some other UNSC members supported …
Posted to Why Exiting Iraq Wont Be Easy
-
Scorp, You distort and twist data so as to confuse and the issue at hand. The high rate of urban crime in the USA is such that it rivals over time many places where there are low level civil wars in terms of casualties of violence. The US has twelve times the Iraqi population. Of course the absolute number of Iraqis killed is less than the US casualties in the USA. Per capita comparisons might yield a different statistical result. And so what if it did not. Are these two things worth comparing. How unflattering to the society you idealize and …
Posted to Why Exiting Iraq Wont Be Easy
-
Scorp, You, like so many ideologues you are hopelessly out of touch. You label those like Red horse "Stalinist." How so? You make blanket generalizations out of context like "all suffering comes from ideologues while all relief comes at a great price from the "democracies." You never mention that democracies like the US and UK have often supported dictators of the extreme right out of fear and greed. One of those was Saddam Hussein and the Ba'athist Party in 1963. They overthrew a center/left coalition led by General Karim Qassim which included a highly tepid and reformist Iraqi Communist Party. Was …
Posted to Why Exiting Iraq Wont Be Easy
-
Scorp, The list of coups is very long. I will provide some examples but I suggest you look into a book called Killing Hope by William Blum. It is very comprehensive. US intervention has a long history. There are very few places we didn't intervene after 1945. We did very little in Africa because The UK and France were active there and had long established colonies. So did Portugal and Belguim. We did have a hand in the coup in the Belgian Congo in 1961 against Lumumba. The CIA was active there. I also believe that the coup in the early …
Posted to Why Exiting Iraq Wont Be Easy
-
Scorp, On the issue of fascist regimes you played with semantics. In this way you avoided the issue of irrefutable US involvement in third world rightist dictatorships. The definition of fascism as a modern political typeology steming mainly from Europe as a nationalist dictatorship of the far right is irrelevant. US support for countless rightist dictatorships in the third world is the issue. They were unforgivable, attrocious, led to needless suffering, and, in the case of the middle east, led to intractable problems which were have today inherited. Let's focus on this instead of the various definitions of a complex political …
Posted to Why Exiting Iraq Wont Be Easy
-
Scorp, You are as abusive as you are stupid. What does the broad conquest of peripheral vassel states have to do with ideology or modernization? They're separate issues. Why does the fact that these old empires broke up after the fall of communism, deligitimize the idea that communist regimes in their inception faced the daunting tasks of modernization as well as recovery and stabilization from war and its drastic effects. Obviously all these issues contributed to the brutality of regimes which reformed later under different circumstances! This was my main point. Scorp, I don't know who or what you are but …
Posted to Why Exiting Iraq Wont Be Easy
-
Scorp, Your history is total garbage! Fascist regimes which emerged in Europe in the 1920s and 30s were not a response to communist aggression. This is absurd. What communist aggression? Lenin surrendered huge tracts of territory to Poland to the point that interwar Poland was only 60% Polish speaking. The Fascists in Europe were the outcome of the crisis of capitalism and to the potential restiveness of the working classes. They feared internal rebellion. Most of all the European depression engendered a crisis of overproduction which was eliminated through military Keynsean pump priming and war and conquest. It had nothing to …
Posted to Why Exiting Iraq Wont Be Easy
-
Scorp, Two rightist fallacies. The first is that the right wing coups assisted to varying degrees by the CIA in the post-WWII third world were responses to KGB meddling. In no case was there the least bit of Russian involvment. The Belgian Congo may have been an exception but Lumumba's ties to the Soviet Union didn't mean that he would allow the Congo to become a "Soviet Satellite" and in any case he had popular support. In NONE of the Asian (except Korea and Vietnam) or Latin American cases was there any Soviet involvement. The arguments for Soviet involvement in Latin …
Posted to Why Exiting Iraq Wont Be Easy
-
First of all, Russian industrial output was substantial. Russian may have had no industrial exports in 1914 but neither did the US. GB and other countries dominated world market. Russian may not have been ready for revolution but Lenin never robbed people. The US Congress was lied to about WMDs and al-Quaeda links deliberately. All informed sources now agree! The Iraqi Liberation Act was signed by Clinton but pushed for by the Republican House and Senate. Weapons inspectors had long eliminated all WMDs and potential WMD production capacity long before US invasion. Interestingly you fail to address the Latin American issue. …
Posted to Why Exiting Iraq Wont Be Easy
-
Now they are attacking Murtha for telling the truth. This was an illegal war of aggression with no end in sigh. According to a pro-Bush Administration poll over three fourths of the Iraqi people only trust their own local police or the Iraqi army to keep them safe. According to the same Repulican Institute poll, only 1% of the Iraqi people trust the US military at all. Iraq is becoming more repressive all the time and is becoming another Lebanon only worse. Its time to leave!
Posted to Why Exiting Iraq Wont Be Easy
-
The choices that the US has in the MIddle East grow narrower every day that the illegal and immoral occupation of Iraq continues. This is also true of the occupation of Palestine by Israel. Bush has recently blamed suicide bombings for most of the problems in Iraq and for Iraq's inability to reach a stable and peaceful political solution to its problems. The Balkanization of the country and its turning into a new Lebanon is the real problem in Iraq, not terrorism. The fratricidal civil war, which came about mostly through US imperialist meddling with Iraq's internal affairs as it attempted …
Posted to Charting a Sane Course in the Middle East
-
Of course national health care makes perfect sense. Anything is better than the current system. The health care system is sucking as much surplus dollars out of the productive economy as the energy industry. The US automakers are by far hurt the most with $1,500/vehicle cost addition due to health care costs. When I was a construction laborer eleven years ago the Laborers' International Union added $3.00/man hour to the wage bill to cover health insurance costs. That is an effective 15%/hour raise for the entire staff just for health care. The health care corporations are greedy and are raising costs …
Posted to Careless Industry
-
The problem is managed care which wastes hundreds of billions of dollars on administrative and other redundant costs which could be saved in a single payer system. More people would have access to care and the money lost through delinquancy would be saved by a more stable system of collecting and charging for premiums and by taxing to fund the system. We would spend less per capita and insure more people. Also, certain fees for procedures should be regulated. Health care providers should have more say in policy than corporate suits. A public trust could administer the funds for the system …
Posted to Careless Industry
-
One study a few years ago estimated that of the nearly $400 billion spent in the private US health system in administrative costs alone in 2003, a single payer system would have saved as much as $286 billion or nearly $7,000 per uninsured in the US at that time. The number of uninsured in the US in 2003 was officially estimated at over 41 million people or 15% of the US population. The administrative cost savings gained by shifting to a single payer system could have easily paid for a comprehensive health coverage program for the entire uninsured population many of …
Posted to Careless Industry
-
Wolf, I've seen similar figures. Perhaps somewhat higher. In 2004 at the height of per capita health care costs when the $1.9 trillion in spending represented about 18% of the GDP the profits on over $272 billion in revenue in the managed care industry was between $11.5 and 12 billion or 4.5%. There was a slow down in the rate of growth of profits. Only energy firms earn 10% of revenues in profit or more. It is a great deal of money when spread out over the number of subscriber households. To spread it out over the national population is ludicrous …
Posted to Careless Industry
-
Spreading out the savings accruing from the switch to a single payer national health care system from the present one would leave anywhere from $5000.00 to 8000.00/uninsured American for a program of national health care coverage. Considering that we as a nation annually spend about $5,300.00 per capita on health care itself, the amount left over just for insurence premiums is certainly reasonable and workable. All I can ask is why it is not done?Perhaps Bush is to controlled by big insurence, pharmacuticals, and managed care corporations.
Posted to Careless Industry
-
Seems we got sidetracked from the issue of universal health care. We should pursue both the topic and the cause!
Posted to Careless Industry
-
A recent report says that even illegal workers pay into the social security system from which they will not be able to collect in the future. I found it logically hard to believe but aparently there is money collected by employers and paid to the Federal Government (and sometimes pocketed illegally by the employer) on behalf of people who are not registered in the social security system. The annual average amount of this sum in recent years ranges from $6.4 billion to $7 billion. The Feds don't investigate the irregularity that this necessarily entails. They just keep the money! It is …
Posted to Careless Industry
-
UNITE/HERE is a vital part of the labor movement. They deserve our suport.
Posted to Hotel Workers Rising Tide
-
Wolf, The cost of living certainly figures in to the setting of salaries since the level of pay needs to be sufficient to attract and retain workers. You also mentioned productivity levels. In the economy generally, labor productivity has outstripped wage levels. In fact, most economists of all stripes have conceded that there is now a new disconnect between labor productivity and wage levels in favor of capital. This has been true for about five years beginning with the late 2001 jobless recovery. The return on labor investment is at an historic high! The living wage movement is on the march! …
Posted to Hotel Workers Rising Tide
-
Wolf, Your anti-consumerist message is fine except as the world comes to depend and be based upon new technologies they become necessities and not luxuries. People got along before electricity, autos, telephones, and indoor plumbing at one time but try doing without it now! Not practical! Although cutting down on some excesses and substituting healthy and socially gregarious alternatives would doubtlessly help society and even the economy. Here's a tip for you. Try working for $5.15/hour and getting by in any US city. Not to easy. We have income ratios in the economically active population of almost 500 to one. Forty …
Posted to Hotel Workers Rising Tide
-
Wolf, It isn't possible for anyone but the top 1% of the population to cut back to 10% of their pre-tax income. I agree that restoring progressive taxation is a good start. We need more. Numerous studies have historically shown that progressive taxation, while useful for paying the governments bills and holding down the rate of deficit growth, doesn't actually redistribute wealth and income in US society. This is well agreed upon.Reinvigorating trade unions, establishing a "social" wage comprised of universal health care, transportation, education, and other services, and establishing a living wage since a growing number of housefolds have come …
Posted to Hotel Workers Rising Tide
-
"If you have 3 kids with no college education, they [sic] you are stupid" Tina1 You are the moron as usual! People should get a living wage for the work they do. They have a right to raise families as much as the rich who exploit them. Right now one in six people are at the poverty line and one in five children are at the poverty line. This is not poor family planning.This is because of a class war on working Americans!
Posted to Hotel Workers Rising Tide
-
Lobby or no lobby the recent Israeli elections were quite scarey! The real difference is that the elections brought the racist transfer agenda, once considered taboo and in some extreme cases a cause for censure, out of the shadows and into the open where it has gained much respectiblity. Several of the parties, including Avigdor Leiberman's Israel beitaynu (Israel is our Home), a reactionary culturally Russian Jewish oriented party, openly advocate transfer--the total or near total expulsion of Palestinians from the area of British mandatory Palestine or Israel/Palestine. The entire Knesset is dominated by the far-right. The only Left party, Meretz …
Posted to The Israel Lobby and its Discontents
-
The Israeli elections of March 2006 were the most dangerous in its history. It is quite clear that Israeli democracy is in full retreat. Of the twelve political parties to poll the required 2% of the vote to be eligable to submit a party list to be seated in the Knesset (Parliament) only 4 were from the left and of those 3 were Parties representing primarily Israeli Palestinians. The left recieved 15 of the 120 seats, not enough to form a caucus or to swing a major vote. The one non-Palestinian-Israeli party to get to seat members in the parliament was …
Posted to The Israel Lobby and its Discontents
-
Epistrophy says, "As for Noam Chomsky, anyone familiar with his work can predict what he will say before he says it. He is very selective about the sources he sites [sic!] and takes the same position again and again. Chomsky is Jewish. He has admitted to taking the extreme opposite position as Mearsheimer and Walt." Perhaps, but so has the Egyptian Marxist scholar (and Muslim) Samir Amin who is among the most respected voices on the Left and who has unequivocally stated that US support for Israel "has nothing to do with public opinion or ethnic lobbys", but with unabashed imperialism …
Posted to The Israel Lobby and its Discontents
-
Major Major, You are beginning to see reality!
Posted to The Israel Lobby and its Discontents
-
Epistrophy, You are quite correct to hold states and individuals entirely responsible for their actions! I think Chomsky does too. Refering to Israel as a client doesn't absolve it of the crimes it has committed as a modern state. Nor does it absolve the individuals who made the official decisions or the ones who actually committed the crimes themselves. What Chomsky and other have tried to do is cite a higher and more embracing political context within which this takes place. Clearly without US imperialism Israel would have little significance. Zionism is more Christian than Jewish as it reflects the Christian …
Posted to The Israel Lobby and its Discontents
-
Major Major, You will surely be interested in a book by Micheal Prior called The Bible and Colonialism. He critiques colonial consciousness as being historically linked to and politically legitimated by the Exodus narrative in the Old Testiment. The modern settlers are the "Chosen Ones" who expel the native Canaanite "savages" who are deemed morally "unworthy" by virtue of their lack of western cultural trappings such as belief in scientific progress, private property, the Protestant work ethic, European Enlightenment era notions of "citizenship", and the modern nation-state. It is an intersting read and a critique of the modern expansionist colonial experience …
Posted to The Israel Lobby and its Discontents
-
Frog, Perhaps the real role of AIPAC is not the bribing of key Politicians but the control of US political discourse on the issue of Israel/Palestine. This is even more important for them in the long run!
Posted to The Israel Lobby and its Discontents
-
epistrophy, The reference is Jeffrey Isaac, in Social Research Vol. 69 #2 (summer 2002) Hannah Arendt on Human Rights and the Limits of Exposure; or Why Noam Chomsky is Wrong about Kosovo.
Posted to The Israel Lobby and its Discontents
-
MajorMajor, I agree that there is a link between European capitalism and US colonialist expansionism. As settlers came from Europe to settle the US, social pressure was relieved in European cities by reducing the reserve army of labour and thus the political pressures on nascent European capitalism. The US also provided markets for finished goods and a source of cheap raw materials like cotton for European industries. Yet I am not sure if Israeli colonialism and US capitalism have the same symbiotic relationship. US imperialism uses the Israeli client to suppress Arab nationalism by militarily applying pressure on militants and the …
Posted to The Israel Lobby and its Discontents
-
Knocko. The Israelis do in fact have a lot of investment in the US. Most of it is in the fields you mentioned like, computer software, medical supplies, and consumer electronics. Israel also has somewhere between 70 and 90 firms which list on the NASDEQ because there is more money to be made and duel listings with the TASE will only bring a heavy capital gains tax from the Israeli government on such stocks because of their foreign listing being considered a reason to tax domestic investment in those stocks as foreign capital gains. It is also important to note that …
Posted to The Israel Lobby and its Discontents
-
Knocko, You are truely to kind in your praise!!! I am very grateful!!! Major, Major has some interesting and important points about the prevention of Middle Eastern/European Union economic integration. The US has always tried to marginalize any but its own influence in the region. This seems to have been the consistent policy since the 1971 rejection of the Rogers Peace Plan and Rogers' replacement as US Secretary of State by Henry Kissenger. If chaos in the region has entrenched theocracy and deepened religiously oriented forms of political resistence to outside intrusion then this cause has been even more profoundly served …
Posted to The Israel Lobby and its Discontents
-
Opeluboy, How is it that you post this trash then turn around and expect people not to consider you a bigot. You just don't understand. Israel is not about the Jews. Its about the US keeping everybody elses influence out of an oil rich area called the Middle East. The frontline Arab states like Jordan, Syria, and Egypt also wanted to prevent the emergence of an independant Palestinian state. Read Avi Shlaim's Collusion Across the Jordan and you'll see how each of the Frontline Arab states fought each other for pieces of Arab Palestine in order to enhance their respective realms …
Posted to The Israel Lobby and its Discontents
-
Opeluboy, You referred to all Jews when you called the US Jewish community "that arrogant and narcissistic 2% of the population who could give a fuck about the rest of us and use our blood and treasure to prop up their supremicism in a crumby little Valhalla none of them want to live in." If this isn't anti-semitism than what is!? The vast majority of Jews have little or nothing to do with Israel. Most just want to live normal lives in the US. Most of the concern for Israel, when it does manifest itself, comes from the fact that almost …
Posted to The Israel Lobby and its Discontents
-
First of all NOBODY is accusing critics of Israel of anti-semitism. Old shitty neo-cons don't count! Most of the people on this thread, particularly Opeluboy, are setting up a straw man to knock down. If you call whole groups of millions of people you don't know wretched names expect to be considered bigoted by reasonable people! Even many Zionists, much less Jews, oppose the continued occupation of the Palestinian Territories. The Jews and the "Israel Lobby" are not an obsticle to change in US foreign policy in the Middle East much less an obsticle to open discussion anywhere. Tom Segev, the …
Posted to The Israel Lobby and its Discontents
-
Frog, That is because you are still fixated on AIPAC and not other sources of support for the status quo. This thing about "the Lobby" is a canard. Other sources of support are far more important. The Lobby only spends about a million bucks annually and then only on local US Congressional races (not the Senate or the White House) where the opposing candidate is weak. Undying support for Israel never SAVED any candidate who was weak and unpopular or who was in a crisis over some other issue! Just get it through your heads! US policy is firm on this …
Posted to The Israel Lobby and its Discontents
-
Frog, I don't recall ever making any personal attacks on YOU per se. I just want people to understand the complex nature of US foreign policy and that it is not reduceable to public opinion, lobbies, or conspiracy. Imperialism, as Lenin reminds us, is a stage of history--not a policy or an elite whim. Anyhow, the latest figure for AIPAC annual spending I could find is $1.28 million for 2003. This would not buy as much influence as many other lobbies but considering the US is predisposed toward the current policies anyhow the point is not so crucial! I often find …
Posted to The Israel Lobby and its Discontents
-
Frog, I really don't understand your remarks. Are you saying that global US economic hegemony would have been saved by an even handed ME policy? The decline of US economic hegemony began with the collapse of the US Dollar and the Post WWII Bretton-Woods Agreement in 1971. This began the long decline with the end of the Gold standard, energy price hikes, inflation, recession, and deindustrialization. The US became a net capital importer in the immediate wake of the Reagan Regime's induced recession and high interest rates in the early 1980s. The high interest rates drew in foreign capital as the …
Posted to The Israel Lobby and its Discontents
-
Frog, As far as I'm concerned I defamed nobody and never resorted to hysteria. I simply presented some facts and asked some hard counter-factual questions to which no one seems to have a good answer. I never said or meant to imply that the Israeli state is simply an outright tool of the US. I do think that the US sees Israeli military might as a way to ensure US hegemony and block multilateral influence in the region. US military buildups are historically designed to give the US uncontested control in the area it seeks to dominate. This is true in …
Posted to The Israel Lobby and its Discontents
-
There are those who would say that the Palestinians already have their state and have thus far failed to conform to international norms. Yet nothing which consists of the Palestinian's current political conditions scarcly approaches a viable sovereign state. Gaza is a besieged and impoverished Bantustan which is suffering from occupation and an internal power struggle. The West Bank is even worse since it is more thoroughly dominated by the IDF and is cut off from independant supplies of water, drainage and sewage disposal, ports, and arable land for food self-sufficiency. No one who is familiar with the situation can judge …
Posted to The Israel Lobby and its Discontents
-
I recently saw a 20/20 news program edition where many young African-Americans spoke out against the idea that by virtue of their academic achievement they were "acting white". It has gotten to such a point that Illinois Senator Barak Obama has weighed in on the side of the students who object strongly to being expected to hue toward a popular stereotype at the expense of their academic success. The students thought it unfair to be ostrocized because they were smart. It is also racist to think of academic ability as white regardless of your race. I was heartened by the students' …
Posted to Acting Your Race
-
Wolf, Plan B doesn't prevent a zygote from implanting in the uterous but prevents or obstructs ovulation and thus fertilization. Read the Article above! Your neanderthal lies (and murderous suggestions that pregnant women wanting birth control be shipped to Iraq to be killed) reveal the true nature of the "right to life" movement's hypocracy! They don't value life at all. They just want to control women! It is also obvious that they don't value human lives that actually exist, just fetuses as a way of inhibiting reproductive rights and spreading their patriarchial agenda. Demented morans like Rick Santorum hate birth control …
Posted to Contraception in the Crosshairs
-
Wolf, Here are some points I want to address. I read the plan B website you provided. Thanks! I also note that it basically works by preventing fertilization. Even if in the rare circumstances it prevents the zygote from implanting it is NOT abortion since the women in question is not pregnant until the fertilized egg implants in the uterine wall in order to grow and be nourished. If this fails to occur the zygote remains stagnant, cannot develope, and hence pregnancy cannot occur. Thus, no abortion. To oppose Plan B just because preventing implantation can occur sometimes is an act …
Posted to Contraception in the Crosshairs
-
Wolf, Life doesn't necessarily begin at conception because the zygote needs to implant first in order to develope hence the argument of the Plan B advocates. One must also take into consideration that the earlier the pill is ingested the greater the chance fertility will be PREVENTED in the first place making the entire issue moot! I don't think this is the core of the problem anyhow. This is an issue about people's privacy and rights. The state should play no part in telling people what to do with their private medical issues. Besides, our entire legal system and society is …
Posted to Contraception in the Crosshairs
-
The question of when life begins is, oddly enough, a non-starter in this whole debate because it leads to absolutes which cannot serve as a realistic resolution to a public issue. The practical and realistic question policy-makers should look at is, "do we want abortions in the third trimester by desparate women often at the hands of butchers, or do we want to abort a simple fertilized egg with a harmless pill often before it even implants in the wall of the uterus?" This is what a realistic and intelligent person asks. The fanatics ask questions that can only be answered …
Posted to Contraception in the Crosshairs
-
Knocko, The reason I argue so vehemently against pro-lifers and Pharmacists who refuse to issue Plan B. is that Plan B helps women cope with unwanted pregnancies without resorting to abortion. To say that preventing a zygote from implanting--which is rarely the way Plan B works as it prevents ferlilization--is the same as partial birth abortion is unreasonable. This is what many of them believe. They are NOT the same. Most pro-lifers and the Pharmacistis in the article are FANATICS because they do not use REASON. They are people who want to think and act in ABSOLUTE terms without seeing that …
Posted to Contraception in the Crosshairs
-
Knocko, My main purpose was to argue that one must not do more harm with a law than the law was mean't to prevent. One must also be realistic. To say, for example, as many pro-lifers would, that a young girl who is raped by her evil stepfather must carry the pregnancy to term even though she could obtain Plan B within 72 hours and end all the trauma that would ruin her life is ignorant and fanatical. Most reasonable people would agree! No reasonable person would argue that a fertilized egg is more important than a person who has been …
Posted to Contraception in the Crosshairs
-
People need to leave their fanatical beliefs at home when they go to work, especially if they have the potential to unduely affect the lives of others. One's religion may require one to have no truck with birth control or abortion but no one's religion requires them to be a pharmacist! There are other jobs. This is not just my opinion. It is that of a lower court judge in California who long ago ruled in favor of a couple facing eviction from their apartment by their fundamentalist Christian landlady on the grounds that they were not legally married. The ruling …
Posted to Contraception in the Crosshairs
-
Many people see illegal immigration as a form of labor migration and a consequent "taking of US jobs from Americans." While modern immigration is certainly a form of labor migration the question as to whether or not "American jobs" are being taken is debatable. Since there is a two tier labor market in the US, as there is in any place that has significant illegal labor immigration, the jobs being "taken" are actually intended for those who are migrating to them since no other laborers are willing to do them. Further, such critics fail to address the fact that the US …
Posted to Theyve Come for Us All
-
This entire issue turns on NAFTA and globalization. Since the implementation of NAFTA by Mexico in 1994, millions of hectres of Mexican farmland has been lost and hundreds of thousands of farmers producing corn and basic grains have been forced off the land. Though the Mexican government promised that the agricultural sector would become more efficient, produce cheaper food, and receive more government aid to support technological improvements for those remaining on the land, none of the promised reforms occured. Between 1994 and 2000, government aid to small farmers dropped from $2 billion to $500 million. The market has been taken …
Posted to Theyve Come for Us All
-
The NAFTA record is clear. Mexico experienced a 9% decline in per capital income growth by the late 1990s over the 1981 peak growth year just before the first major debt crisis of 1982. A 28% decline in the rate of per capita new investment also occured in the 1990s over the earlier recorded peak growth period of the pre-1982 debt crisis period. One impetus for the agreement was the incredible amount of foreign direct investment (FDI) that began pouring into Mexico up until the NAFTA treaty. Over $91 billion of Foreign Direct Investment poured into Mexico over the five years …
Posted to Theyve Come for Us All
-
Jay Cline, There is no question that we should have a generous immigration policy. Most of us decend from immigrants. But it is a policy that needs to be controlled. Uncontrolled immigration can strain any society beyond its capacity to cope. Problems arise that are difficult to solve. I have always believed that the overall economic growth that immigrants create through their low wage labor and savings offsets their demand for services. In fact, such services as healthcare and education consists of an efficiently provided social wage which supports this low wage labor force that enriches mostly big business (some would …
Posted to Theyve Come for Us All
-
I've run across some interesting observations. Back a few years ago when the number of illegal immigrants in the US was thought to be around seven million instead of eleven million, it was estimated that they contributed about $7 billion to the social security tax fund (about $1000.00/undocumented worker) and many more billions to the medicare and general tax funds. Since these workers were and continue to be issued social security numbers and have taxes deducted accordingly they are paying into a system from which they will not be able to draw payments. This, in addition to their lower than average …
Posted to Theyve Come for Us All
-
Frog, The "other guy" is Karl Marx and he made reference to a reserve army of labour. I do think even 6% is to low an estimate for US unemployment but it is one that we can easily agree on. Many say it can be any where from 7-8% and some might even insist it is as high as 10%. I do think there is a lot of underemployment and certainly low wage employment. The fastest growing job categories are in the unskilled services sector and mostly paying well under the median wage of $16.00/hour. One interesting figure from some of …
Posted to Theyve Come for Us All
-
One of the points this writer tries to make about factory farms is the environmental damage they cause and how they monopolize vital resources like water causing cost increases for the community. They mostly exist because of the monopolization of the market for poulty, pork, and beef by four big food processing and packing conglomerates who control between 65 and 80% of the market for these products. These big conglomerates pressure the intermediate factory farms (called Consolidated Animal Feedlot Operations-or CAFOs by the industry and the USDA) by downward monopsonist pressure on the "gate prices" of their livestock thus forcing more …
Posted to Meat-Industrial Complex
-
nyvegan, Your observations are quite on the mark! This is an issue about which I am gravely concerned as well! The environmental impact of factory farming is only one major concern among which are the inefficiency use of grain for food energy which as you point out consists of a transfer of resources from the poor to the rich as well as the ethical treatment of farm animals. I do think that the entire issues turns less on our consumption habits or attitudes than on the role of agribusiness in the globalization of capital. The article touches on the concentration of …
Posted to Meat-Industrial Complex
-
Frog, Since the 1990s, an increasing proportion of US livestock products are marketed outside the US mostly in East Asia. Japan was the single biggest buyer of US beef until the "mad cow" disease fear. I believe they now are purchasing our livestock products again. What is amazing is how US pork and chicken are quickly entering the growing Chinese and Korean markets where the raising of pigs and chickens are a widespread tradition. The real logic to this is to somewhat offset the trade deficit with East Asian countries. This can never really be done with US agricultural products. The …
Posted to Meat-Industrial Complex
-
Frog, One of the significant reasons that I found these trends so interesting is that the US used to import a good deal of beef from overseas mostly because it was cheaper to graze and slaughter cattle in the third world than in the US. Rising beef prices in the early 1970s began to push indigenous small holders off the land in such places as Guatemala and Brazil where much deforestation was carried out in the name of grazing land for cattle. This gave rise to political crises and ecological ones. The cattle was slaughtered and processed more cheaply in Latin …
Posted to Meat-Industrial Complex
-
According to the USDA's Economic Research Service over 231 million pounds of US pork were exported to foreign markets in the month of January 2006 alone. The US is the world's pork export leader. Its two main foreign markets are Japan and Mexico. US pork exports exceed that of beef and poultry due to fears of diseases like poultry influenza (AI)and mad cow disease.
Posted to Meat-Industrial Complex
-
I know that livestock exports are a recent development in US agriculture. Our traditional exports have been grains particularly wheat. It could be that much of the live cattle exported to the third world is grazed on land formerly occupied by poor tenant farmers and small holders displaced in order to make way to feed cattle to be slaughtered and re-exported as meat to affluent consumers in the rich countries, This deprives the poor in the third world from adding to the local supply of food staples like corn, sorghum, barley, wheat, rice, and certain vegetables. Expensive imports from the US …
Posted to Meat-Industrial Complex
-
The more factory farming is driven by fast food and other institutional markets, the more overproduction by large-scale corporate producers lowers prices putting small scale, family based agriculture out of business in the US thus concentrating land and earnings from the sale of livestock products and field crops. Dumping in the third world logically follows such overproduction in the US and the consequences are drastic. The traditional agricultural systems in the poor countries become transformed and linked to the US food distribution system. These countries become integrated into a globalized food production chain involving the local creation of concentrated, often foreign …
Posted to Meat-Industrial Complex
-
Arnove is merely reiterating what many of us in the progressive movement have long understood: That the US imperial venture in Iraq is the failure that it was predisposed to be as are all imperial ventures. Here after three years of brutal occupation where, unlike in the past, there is not even the pretence of nation-building imperial plunder has brought the sharp response that one could reasonably expect. US imperialism has knocked over a hated tyrant after years of supporting him and even once pulling him back from the brink of collapse at the hands of his own people in the …
Posted to The Logic of Withdrawal
-
I'm not sure that Sunnis and Shi'ites are actually natural or historic enemies as the Bush Administration conveniently portrays them. After the establishment of some of the early Sunni Califates like the Ummyaads in Spain and the Abbysids in Damascus there was peace between the two factions. Certainly, by the time of the Turkish conquest the fighting ceased and the New Califate in Istanbul was respected as the Center of all Islam. In the three provinces of what was to become Iraq, Mosul, Baghdad, and Basra the Sunnis and the Shi'ites got along and there was no sectarian instability anywhere in …
Posted to The Logic of Withdrawal
-
Mr. Cline, Just what kind of "democracy" do you think exists in this current bloodbath called Iraq. Does it occur to you that almost none of the preconditions for a LEGITIMATE and FREE and FAIR election ever existed in that country from the time of the US/UK invasion down to the present and that the candidates were so highly vetted by the US military that the entire experience was rendered meaningless. In the case of the 2005 elections for national assembly most of the purple fingered Iraqi voters didn't even realize what posts the election was for and simply voted hoping …
Posted to The Logic of Withdrawal
-
WTH, The returning military personel hate the media in general and they certainly hate the negative news about Iraq because it seems to define everything in very narrow terms and doesn't really get to the neglected issue of their positive individual interactions with many of the Iraqi people which does exist. They take the criticism of the war personally and can't separate the war as an issue with what they as individuals are doing and thinking. This is the problem with politics in general. How to separate out aspects of issues at many different levels and also separate individuals from the …
Posted to The Logic of Withdrawal
-
WTH, People are being slaughtered everyday and some of the killing is by US troops who mistakenly kill innocent people unaware of martial law stipulations like curfew times, when and where to stop for road blocks, or because they unknowingly approach security sensitive sites. Many are often killed in such situations because of their lack of ability to comprehend English. There are reports of tragedies coming out of Iraq daily. The country is in a state of war mostly because of the sectarian violence promoted by US policies or due to resentment caused by the US/UK military presence. The best thing …
Posted to The Logic of Withdrawal
-
It seems that many afflications thought to have been wiped out long ago have returned with a vengeance such as syphalus, TB, and certain kinds of topically spread and airborne infections. This is perhaps symtomatic of the whole pattern of social regression over the past two decades. The broad public health concerns for which no expense was spared from the end ot WWII unitl turn of the new era with the onset of the "Reagan Revolution" was seen as constructing the sturdy social infrastructure needed for a stable, profitiable, and just society. Today's outsourcers and globalizers no longer see any point …
Posted to Are Hospitals Hazardous to Your Health?
-
Thanks for the highly expert if anal retentive explaination of the spread of disease. Also thanks for the correct spelling of syphillus. I think that your point about anti-biotic resistant strains coming from anit-bacterial soap and other surface cleansers is a good one. I realize that stuff like TB and Syphillus have never been totally wiped out though they were reare when I was young. It seems they're making a comeback and it seems that it could be related to all the other regression that we are making as a society. I think greater regulation of the health care profession would …
Posted to Are Hospitals Hazardous to Your Health?
-
Salim Muwakkil's concerns that HIp Hop has stagnated as an expressive art form and is trapped in "ghettocentric" cliches about hoes and gangstas is well taken. The sensationalist and flashy "stripper chic" and self-empowerment images of young thugs with their ostentatious "bling blings" and luxury cars has run it course. All Hip Hop is saying is how certain folks have "made it" in a kind of cynical way. We are treated to all manner of Vegas-style sensationalist imagery. How many more scenes of dapper dudes in front of their big mansions and limos loaded with sulaciously inviting women are necessary to …
Posted to The Kanye West Effect
-
Randall Terry is one of the major forces of American Clerico-fascism that must be opposed. The article speaks for itself!
Posted to The Crescent Menace
-
The issue of "acting in good faith" seems to be the core of the sanctions debate. Clearly neither side excersized good faith in negotiating: for Saddam it was a tool to gain greater sympathy and control of his populace through broad nationalist appeals, while for the US it was a convenient, politically safe holding pattern that promised the temporary containment of the Ba'athist Regime in Baghdad. Neither side could long sustain his position based on the sanctions arrangements! Clearly, the sanctions hurt the Iraqi people more than the Ba'athist elite and Saddam. This really didn't bother the US political elite since …
Posted to Were Sanctions Worth the Price?
-
Scorp, The sanctions clearly succeeded in disarming Saddam (there is no real reason to ASSUME the WMDs are outside Iraq) though they did so at an enormous cost as per many independant investigations of humanitarian conditions during the twelve years they were in place. The Kurdish story is interesting because the US used the no-fly zones to begin the momentum toward the regional dismemberment of Iraq. This was a geostrategic game, not a humanitarian one. The Kurds suffered enormously under the sanctions regime more because of the many failed CIA inspired attempts at a Kurdistan based insurrection/coup against the Ba'athist Regime. …
Posted to Were Sanctions Worth the Price?
-
Liberal, I do not believe that the ruling Syrians are Shi'tes. Assad, both Hafiz and Bashir are Alawites-an ancient biblical sect which speaks both Arabic and Assyrian (a language probably similar to aramaic) and practice eastern orthodox Christianity not Islam. Your point about Syrian hostility to Iraq making it unlikely that the Syrians would help Saddam hide WMDs from the US/UK Coalition and the UN Security Council is well taken. Those who make such allegations are far to impressed with the self-serving and self interested claims of former high level Ba'athist defectors who are filled with post war opportunism and are …
Posted to Were Sanctions Worth the Price?
-
Is BHL a Neo-con in disguise-only more charming?
Posted to The Lies of Bernard-Henri Lévy
-
Speaking as an anti-clericist in the great tradition of the French Revolution and the Spanish (not US) Republicans, I must humbly disagree that all organized religion is evil. Some organized religion can be quite charitable as well as socially active. You also gloss over the fact that Lerner is a Jew and speaking as one myself I can tell you that we are a highly secularized people. Though there are many Jewish conservatives these days (some put the estimate at about 25%) mainstream religion is never inculcated in a way that predisposes one toward political conservatism as is the case with …
Posted to Organizing the Religious Left
-
The gay bashing in current US political culture is frightening precisely because so much of it is orchestrated by the White House and the Republican Party. The Bush Administration is so beholden to the Christian Right that it cannot feasibly oppose or fight them. This is why I have tried in other discussion threads to pose the issue of the immanent threat of Fascism in US society. Historically, the rise of fascist regimes in highly developed, industrialized societies begins with the vilification of a scapegoat in order to galvanize mass opposition to a common "enemy" which is said to be a …
Posted to An Anti-Gay Easter
-
Wiley, You're absolutely correct about the warning signs of impending fascism. Women are key targets as are generally marginalized social groups like gays and ethnic minorities. Everyone scapegoats the intellectual--without intellectuals people would be more comfortable with their ingnorance and prejudices. If you haven't seen the movie, The Exorcism of Emily Rose, please go see it. I think it was directed by Karl Rove. It says everything there is to say about Bush era redneck America. There was one great line spoken by the women who played the mother of Emily Rose-the wholesome farm girl who allegedly became a victim of …
Posted to An Anti-Gay Easter
-
First of all, most gays are in fact highly well educated professional people which is why they were the FIRST to get their house in order in the midst of the AIDS crisis years ago. They are intellegent people and are highly succeptible to mass public education campaigns unlike legions of unschooled American rednecks who continue to smoke, drink, and gamble despite the obvious degenerative effects on their lives and the lives of those around them! As far as "gay culture" is concerned you make many unfounded generalizations which could also apply to many straight people! Further, much of your hateful …
Posted to An Anti-Gay Easter
-
First of all gays represent about 10% of the US population. Secondly, your homophobia is misplaced! Gays are no more or less "moral" than the general population and quite possibly more so. They are on average more educated and have a far lower crime rate! In any case, you need to deal with your unbridled hatred of a community which neither threatens you nor has done you any harm.
Posted to An Anti-Gay Easter
-
Johnny, Your absurd and evil notion that the majority should strip away the rights of any minority they disappove of is purely Hitlerian and has no place in democratic discourse. You ask, in the absence of religion where do rights come from (as if religion grants rights!) The framers of the US Constitution believed that human rights were both self evident and inalienable. That is to say the notions of the 18th C. Enlightenment, upon which our nation's constitution is based, hold that all people are equal regardless of society and its rules and that all people deserve freedom, life, property, …
Posted to An Anti-Gay Easter
-
Johnny, I really don't know what your beef is or why you have all this "anger" (your word) at gays. The US Constitution guarantees ALL people rights equally even if the American political system has often historically violated this particular intention of the document in the past. The Constitution doesn't single out Gays as a group for whom rights should be bestowed but neither does it say there is any legal basis for denying them equal rights. Equal rights for gays are thus "eminating" rights ie implied in the obvious intent and practical meaning of applying the Constitution. The same argument …
Posted to An Anti-Gay Easter
-
Johnny, All I said was that the Constitution guaratees all people the same rights even if the American political system throughout its long history at certain times denied those rights to various social groups. In addition, you have expressed great animosity towards gays that you have not expressed towards others. You want to deny them the same rights. You denigrate ALL gays as a group in a way you would never do to others. Stop at once! No one is asking you to BE gay. You must learn to tolerate those who are different! I know you must have been taught …
Posted to An Anti-Gay Easter
-
Freepers go home!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Posted to An Anti-Gay Easter
-
Dear Johnny, At times I'm slow to recognize things but it seems you are a FReeper. Is this the basic reason for your anti-gay hatred? Perhaps it is! The FReepers tend to hate a lot of people. One might say it is odd they LOVE America while hating most of the people who live in it!!! The FReepers seem to be a purile lot. Much name calling, lots of semi-literate babble, not much substance. I notice Wiley has lots of patience for you. She probably thinks you're one of the much maligned earnest salt of the earth types that much misunderstood …
Posted to An Anti-Gay Easter
-
Wiley, That's all well and good. I am never for self-rightously chastizing people who don't know to much better than to be racist. I try to just say "I refuse to hate someone simply because of their skin color, language, ethnicity religious background etc. Wiley, the country is getting more racist everyday and it really has nothing to do with the Left. I'm constantly hearing a barage of anti-Mexican hysteria on the radio here in "liberal" blue state Chicago ranting on about how one in twenty people in the US workforce are here illegally etc. So what? They only help the …
Posted to An Anti-Gay Easter
-
Wiley, There is nothing wrong with theory. You artificially separate it from the "way that real people feel" about things. In fact, theories are about all aspects of human behaviour. They try to explain the evolving of feelings in masses of people in terms of the social phenomena that theory analyzes. What's wrong with that?! All I tried to say was that racism doesn't stem from "human nature" or natural instincts toward tribalism or territoriality like evolutionary or "bio-sociology" tries to contend. Rather, in modern societies, racism comes from the deliberate ordering of the division of labor in the economy and …
Posted to An Anti-Gay Easter
-
Johnny, I sometimes find it tough to get through your posts. They don't come across very clearly to me. Do you hate gays or not? Sould they be accorded equal constitutional rights, or not? You have to answer these questions for yourself and others that you wish to communicate with unequivocally or else stop the BS. Be direct. Say what it is that you think and why???
Posted to An Anti-Gay Easter
-
Johnny, Let's get one thing straight-I despise Political Correctness as one of the dumbest things ever in our country's history and also somewhat damaging through the resentment and exasperation it creates. Having said this I must note that you said some offensive things about gays and also seemed to be advocating the revocation of their rights. Perhaps you don't mean it. I don't really know! Anyhow, judging the justice of a cause by its tactics and degree of success makes no sense. Tactics and degree of success is arbitrarily related to causes and in any case has NO bearing on whether …
Posted to An Anti-Gay Easter
-
Johnny, Stop belaboring this and learn how to just say what you mean and be precise. Don't play games. It's not about me. If someone advocates taking away a minority's rights simply because they don't like them or find them offensive I feel I should call them on it. That's it! Also the subliminal FR in "FRight wing" was easily and understandably taken to mean Free Republic which is a nauseatingly bigotted and reactionary blog! Can you blame me if I conflated the two things?! Stop whining and get with the program. Maybe Wiley can help?
Posted to An Anti-Gay Easter
-
Wiley, Many of the your posts which respond to my remarks don't really address the issues I raise and worse, you tend to put words in my mouth and misinterpret what I say. You've been doing this for a while. I don't think I'm better than others for commiting six and a half years to higher ed. at UW. I study all the time. I recommend others do the same. I also am autodidactic. I don't regard formal education as the only kind either. Nor is it necessarily the most valuable kind. I feel that the world would be better if …
Posted to An Anti-Gay Easter
-
Wiley, The person who said that you painted a red dress to express subliminal anger is nuts. So what? Does this deligitimize all academic analysis? I should think that most educated people would have laughed at such a superficial and unrepresentitive example of psychoanalytic evaluation of someone's art. Instead you think it represents every academics mentality, including mine. That is unfair! Also, I don't judge people and their views as a "self-appointed intellectual" but I don't think people should be dishonest either. The reason I suggested Gramsci (whose ideas about consciousness should be utterly accessable and easy to understand) is not …
Posted to An Anti-Gay Easter
-
Wiley, The idea that the past has NO connection to the present is flat out absurd! No one except for perhaps nihilists make this assertion! The real debate is not IF the past influences the present but HOW it does so. The far right (like the Freepers) think that the past utterly determines the present because change is illusory. They are fond of saying, "the more things change the more they remain the same" because they are extreme essentialists, that is they believe there is a transcendental predetermined meaning in human history that will predispose all outcomes. Liberal enlightenment theory believed …
Posted to An Anti-Gay Easter
-
Wiley and Johnny, You both make ignorant statements about all kinds of stuff and then you mock others because they understand more because they actually took the trouble to understand what's going on in the world and what it means. Johnny's posts have been a total mess starting from the classic homophobe freeper to apologetic recanter while Wiley has taken the REAL arrogant high handed approach by trashing others and taking everything personally whether or not it is addressed toward her. She began be attacking me personally in the thread on the NYC Transit Workers Strike after I made a very …
Posted to An Anti-Gay Easter
-
Kudos to LC for a great article! I've wanted to be old all my life! Being young has never worked for me! I'm unhappy! At least when I'm old I'll get Social Security, Medicare, and a lot of rest and time to write, write, write!
Posted to Sex and the Septuagenarians
-
It seems to be quite absurd to base poverty statistics, especially ones used to determine program eligiability on the old model developed in 1963. Food costs in the US occupy a lower portion of the family budget than anywhere else in the entire world! Certainly nobody spends thirty three percent of their income on food when the average spent on housing for those at or around the median is held to be about twenty five percent. This figure to has increased for those below the median, however. Most people below the median income spend about 20-25% of their income on food …
Posted to Lies, Damn Lies and Poverty Statistics
-
Wiley, Localizing food production and organic and sustainable farming is an immense topic and one of great complexity. Agribusiness has undoubtedly increased the cost and decreased the quality of food for most people today. In some interesting internet research I was doing I ran across a website called CARP (Corporate Agribusiness Research Project) in which it is estimated that about three quarters of the farms in the US currently produce about 7% of the value of produce sold while about 7% of the Farms glean three quarters of the value of farm products sold. A fascinating inverse proportion but also one …
Posted to Lies, Damn Lies and Poverty Statistics
-
Worse than the independant feedlots, which are only part of a vast vertically integrated industrial agribusiness structure and a weak link at that, are the big four meatpackers (cargill, IBP, conagra, and national farmland) who control 85% of the US market for Beef. They pay the feedlots low prices for slaughtered cattle while jacking up the price to the consumer. In recent years the average rancher went from taking two-thirds of the retail beef dollar to two fifths currently. The small local cattle farmers that don't operate the big feedlots can hardly get in the game at all and usually consign …
Posted to Lies, Damn Lies and Poverty Statistics
-
Wiley, I understand what you're saying about ranchers slaughtering their cattle to cut rather than incur loses. This has less to do with the invisible hand than with the Corporate (beef packing and retailing) monopolization of the US economy. Ranching is itself pretty concentrated-more than half of the beef sold to the big four packing houses come from 5% of the big feedlots. I say support the small free range ranchers and cut down on red meat in general; its unhealthy and very expensive! Red meat has a lot in common with the automobile and fossile fuels like coal, oil, and …
Posted to Lies, Damn Lies and Poverty Statistics
-
I hope impeachment succeeds! It is the therapy and the solution for the return of US democracy!
Posted to Lies, Damn Lies and Poverty Statistics
-
WTH, I basically agree with the thrust of your comments. Though turning over the management of a US port facility to a foreign power isn't necessarily a security risk and certainly not unprecedented I have serious questions about Du'bai. The US public'a basic instincts are right. There is a contradiction between fighting terror and opening our borders to the area of the world that hosts and finances so much of the world's terrorism especially while cutting related security funding! Bush increasingly appears pathologically greedy using the Waronterror politically. The mixed signals from Bush are beginning to wear thin on the US …
Posted to Lies, Damn Lies and Poverty Statistics
-
WTH, The US media does report much that is negative about the US presence in Iraq. The media is not liberal or conservative but a very large business enterprise that goes along with the prevailing winds. At the moment the majority of US public see very little good that can come of further occupation of that country. Even conservative sources admit that various news polls around the country show that most Americans do not feel that the Coalition can bring about a stable, peaceful, healthy, democratic regime in Iraq. Most everyone wants a timetable for an orderly US withdrawl. Most see …
Posted to Lies, Damn Lies and Poverty Statistics
-
Kudos to Sue Douglas for her brilliant article and for reminding us of the horrible nature of women's oppression in the days before TItle VII and the "Movement." Often the key to the extent of a society's civility is the treatment of women. Current issues in the Middle East have certainly highlighted this among other things. Women's rights are once again endangered by the drive toward theocracy and the conservative political mood. Progressives must join together to end this threat and restore the acceptibility of gender equality.
Posted to Friedan and King: Super Models
-
Duckworth is a good candidate and probably deserves some support. Anything to dump H. Hyde! It is high time the Democrats come up with a realistic strategy to challenge the witch hunting tactics of the Republicans who question everyone's patriotism while always seeming ready to do business with all the terrorism funders in the Gulf! The Republicans are the REAL unAmericans and should be shown up in 2006!
Posted to In an Illinois Primary, Threes a Crowd
-
Wiley (and maybe some others), It is always offensive when people denigrate the Nazi and general European Holocaust which killed six million Jews (one third the world population and half the European population of Jews by 1939 census count). Even proportionately speaking nothing has ever matched this in history! To compare Nazi extermination of Jews with Israeli treatment of Palestinians is beyond ridiculous. In 1948, there were 1.25 million Palestinian Arabs. Today there are almost 9 million, 3 million of which live in Palestine and another million in pre-1967 Israel--a strange genocide indeed!!! Israeli Sociologist, Baruch Kimmerling calls Israel's treatment of …
Posted to Islam vs. the West: Clashing Sensibilities
-
Wiley, Why would you leap to such an unwarrented and outright stupid conclusion that I don't equate the Israeli apartheid wall with a kind of Ghettoing the likes of which the Jews of Europe experienced for many centuries. I am involved with the Jewish peace movement and as I've previously said oppose even the idea of a Jewish state. I have good reason to feel this way. I lived in Israel for over three years (July 1992-September 1995) and saw not only maltreatment of Arabs but the fact that Zionism has entirely failed the Jews in its supposed mission to provide …
Posted to Islam vs. the West: Clashing Sensibilities
-
Wiley, I have just reread one of your above posts and it does seem you are really nuts--or are you just pathologically thoughtless and insensitive. What about the Holocaust don't you get!? What do you want to deny?! Do you hate Jews?! Lots of people seem to! Let me tell you the 6 million figure comes from Eichmann himself. What else perplexes you? That Zyclon B didn't leave a steely blue hue in ALL the gas chambers called Prussian Blue. Many forensic chemists claim it doesn't necessarily always do so because the compound is heavily sensitive to conditions. Feel better? Believe …
Posted to Islam vs. the West: Clashing Sensibilities
-
Frog, The only problem with your assertions is that they're wrong. It is NO accident that holocaust revisionism is the sole preserve of neo-nazis and their sympathizers-they are politically motivated and want to mainstream fascism by denying its greatest crime. The ultimate intent is to create and promote a viable fascist movement in the US which they are well on their way to doing. The so called Holocaust industry (term coined by anti-Zionist Jewish scholar Norman Finkelstein of whom I have great respect) is not trying to push a particular version of history on anyone. Their ongoing effort to collect data, …
Posted to Islam vs. the West: Clashing Sensibilities
-
Frog, Not all history is revisionism. This is a self-conscious appoach. Finkelstein and I don't see the same holocaust industry. He sees an "industry" emerging just after the 1967 Israeli war of aggression which opportunistically and cynicaally exploited the past suffering of the Jews of Europe for dubious political purposes like the US imperialist agenda. I see the potential for such an industry to expose fascism and genocide both today and historically. Let's not through the holocaust industry baby out with the imperialist bathwater. By the way Jeff Rense is a kind of Neo-Nazi like Zundel. Beware!
Posted to Islam vs. the West: Clashing Sensibilities
-
Frog, I have read much of Finkelsteins work, heard him publicly share a podium with Ali Abunimeh the founder of "the electronic intifada" (Abunimeh was the better speaker by far that day) and know his views. He teaches political science here in Chicago at De Paul University in a very Chic, gentrified north side community called Lincoln Park! Finkelstein's problem with the Holocaust Industry is that it is used to promote the wrong message not that it exaggerates the extent of the genocide as neo-Nazis claim. Finkelstein divides Holocaust scholarship into two somewhat neat periods: pre-1967-the year of Israel's expansionist war …
Posted to Islam vs. the West: Clashing Sensibilities
-
Maria, First of all I didn't start the conversation about the Jews and the Holocaust. If you followed the postings on this thread you have seen that the discussion somehow turned immediately toward david irving and "holocaust revisionism" in the postings of "the anti-war conservative" and was picked up by "WTH", "Wileywitch", and "Frog". I merely responded way later in the discussion. I find it amazing that you glossed over several earlier disrespectful postings about the subject by others and only later singled out mine as inappropriately "starting" the conversation. I find your attitude distinctly anti-semitic and justly so. I know …
Posted to Islam vs. the West: Clashing Sensibilities
-
Frog, I don't read ANY Holocaust revisionist material but I do read stuff by Finkelstein and others who accept all the valid historic evidence for the facts but object to the self rightous moralism which politically slants the lessons such that they validate US militarism as the defender of civilization against "evil" as determined US leadership. I suggest Zygmunt Baumann's Modernity and the Holocaust whereby he sociologizes the event mostly in order to make the case AGAINST Jewish exceptionalism. I also recommend Enzo Traverso's Marxism and Auschwicz and The Origins of Nazi Totalitarianism in which he sees the alienation brought about …
Posted to Islam vs. the West: Clashing Sensibilities
-
Maria, I don't know about your family but I do know about Argentina. The country was known, especially during the "dirty war" of the military against the poltical opposition, as one of the worst bastions of anti-semitism in the entire world. Of the 10,000 peope who disappeared in this horrible period (1976-1983) 1000 to 1,800 were Jews according to various human rights organization estimates. This would place the Jewish number of disappeared at 10-18% of the conservatively estimated total despite the fact that Jews are barely 1% of the entire Argentine population. In addition human rights reports from the period well …
Posted to Islam vs. the West: Clashing Sensibilities
-
LB, In my hacking experience I've never met an Illini. Nor have I met a Potawatami, the major tribal group from this area which by treaty in the 1830s, just before Chicago's legal incorporation as a municipality, agreed to move west of the Mississippi River after decades of armed conflict with the European settlers. Billy Cauldwell, who was half Potawatami, brokered the agreement between the White settlers and the Native Chief and consequently a major street in Chicago's posh Edgebrook neighborhood was named for him! Chicago is full of Native American history (Fort Dearborn? Captain William Wells?) and many people are …
Posted to Islam vs. the West: Clashing Sensibilities
-
Frog, Enzo Traverso wrote a wonderful short literature review in English published by a UK left publisher called Pluto which you've probably heard of in the States. Here they are printed and distributed by Guillford-an academic publisher which also prints Science & Society, the oldest and probably best Marxist Journal of theory and critique started in 1936. I guess this is their 70th anniversary year! Anyhow, Traverso's book is called, Understanding Nazi Genocide: Marxism after Auschwicz. He makes many of the arguments that I make and is thoroughly against the idea of "Jewish exceptionalism" in any way. Needless to say he …
Posted to Islam vs. the West: Clashing Sensibilities
-
LB, For once we agree!
Posted to Islam vs. the West: Clashing Sensibilities
-
LB, I didn't mean to be dismissive in my last comments. I actually agreed strongly with what you last said. Also, I didn't notice gaps in any of your earlier postings or things possibly omitted. Did you say you personally experienced anti-semitism. I'm curious about it. I have also but somewhat mild compared to other experiences people have had. I guess everything is relative. I veer off from the position taken by much of the left on the Holocaust industry and don't understand their impulse to deny anti-semitism's existence. They've always believed that Zionism and purely Jewish issues like anti-semitism were …
Posted to Islam vs. the West: Clashing Sensibilities
-
LB, Buddism is different than the "Abrahamic" faiths, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. For one thing the Abrahamic faiths are all based on egoistic narratives that are particularist in their basing and reference to places, people, and sacred spaces. It is also ethno-linguistically bound and historically situated. They seem to be the prototypes of all the succeeding "good and evil" narratives that shape the modern world perceptions of their followers! Many on the left gloss over anti-semitism for fear of being perceived as neo-conservative due to the fact that the neo-cons have hijacked the entire issue in order to defame their enemies. …
Posted to Islam vs. the West: Clashing Sensibilities
-
LB My intention was really to criticize the Abrahamic faiths on the basis that I previously mentioned. I feel that Buddhism, being transcendental in charactor, is far more spiritual since it is not tied to worldly places, specific individuals, and historic periods. This leaves room for arrogance and worldly conflict. Buddhism's transcendental spirituality and ethical principles are better as a moral and spiritual guide. Buddhism's intellectual depth seems greater as well. The Buddha had great wisdom. Is it true that he said "There is no way to happiness, happiness is the way?" I wish to know more about Buddhism but need …
Posted to Islam vs. the West: Clashing Sensibilities
-
LB I always thought that the Zen Buddhist philosophy was based, as you suggest, on the Yin and Yang or in western philosophical lexicon, the dialectic. This notion is that truth is not strictly one thing or another but contains elements of opposite forces that together comprise a dialectical whole. Marxists apply this notion to historical analysis by saying that current historic epochs are a synthesis of past and current phenomenon. History is thus neither evolutionary nor nihilistic but revolutionary in that real change occurs but by synthesizing certain past elements with radically new ones into a wholly new outcomes. Marxist …
Posted to Islam vs. the West: Clashing Sensibilities
-
The response to Katrina increasingly looks like thinly disguised ethnic cleansing!
Posted to Katrina: After the Storm
-
I recommend anything by Benedict Anderson. He is a good and remarkably clear writer considering the complexity of his subject matter. I read much of Imagined Communities and found the basic ideas quite fascinating. Anderson is a great historian and political theorist.
Posted to Radicals Without Borders
-
The shameful, violent response of the faithful to the cartoons cannot be condoned. However, I can well understand the sharp reaction to such goading disrespect. The cartoons were a stupid idea and, yes, the reactions were entirely predictable. Perhaps this was the motivation on the part of the cartoonists-to villify all of Islam by baiting a few into rageful acts of destruction and violence. It served the West's political purposes given the global context in which this is occurring. Further, it will add to counter-incitement against innocent Muslims who will bear the brunt of the West's rightous anger and paranoia. …
Posted to What was your first reaction to the controversy surrounding the Danish cartoons?
-
The violence should not be condoned yet the reaction to such hateful disrepect was understandable.
Posted to What was your first reaction to the controversy surrounding the Danish cartoons?
-
The cartoons were disrespectful.
Posted to What was your first reaction to the controversy surrounding the Danish cartoons?
-
The cartoons were a disrespectful provocation. No, the violence was not a reasonable response but that has little to do with the fact that they were probably planted for political reasons in order to elicit paranoia inducing violence on the part of SOME Muslims. This would produce the stigmatizing reaction and hence justify more "war on terror" imperialist aggression. The cartoons must be seen in the context of Western Imperialism.
Posted to What was your first reaction to the controversy surrounding the Danish cartoons?
-
An exellent acount of the very beginnings of Guantanamo's inmates is a book by David Rose called Guantanamo. The book begins with a harrowing account of a journey from Afghanistan to Guantanamo in a cargo plane of some of the first internees. Many of these 300 men were picked up by the US military at Mazaar al Shariff after the famous standoff with the Taliban in late 2001and turned over to the Northern alliance. The 300 were stuffed like sardines into a freight container whose inside tempeture was over 100 degrees. The Northern Alliance warlords shot airholes into the container with …
Posted to Paradigm Shift
-
Labor can never win without the sympathy of the general public or of other parts of the Labor movement which it once enjoyed. One of the problems is that we are now a selfish and hardnosed society; deeply unsympathetic to one another and full of self-defeating bitterness and resentment. Often we tell each other "shut up and just do your job." This is no way to get a better deal for the growing number of us working poor with no rights whatsoever and no recourse or grievance procedure. Atomizing society's lower half will make us weak in the face of our …
Posted to In Search of Solidarity
-
Wileywitch, You obviously didn't listen to a single thing I said! People don't show sympathy toward one another and are very individualist and unable to relate to the situation of one's fellow humanity whose experiences are similar. This has nothing to do with ideology. People in other societies are far more class consciousness and get further because of it. They are less likely to identify with their bosses over some stupid check and more likely to bond with other workers. There class consciousness doesn't stop in the work place but extends to their communities. Class in other societies means verything; certainly …
Posted to In Search of Solidarity
-
Wiley You say that we "on the formally educated left" should stop insulting the very working class we want to organize against the system and "start listening." Listening to what? Religous tirades, torrid tales about corruption in high places, wild conspiracy theories, astrological speculations? I've heard enough!!!!!!!! I know many working class people that are highly intelligent and politically astute but most of them have tended to be much older and veterans of old struggles like the labor movement in the 1930s and 40s or the anti-war movement in the 1960s. Some were involved in the old 1960s era civil rights …
Posted to In Search of Solidarity
-
Wiley, I spent 14 years in Madison. Half the time I studied. Half the time I worked for a Cab coop called Union Cab. It had about one quarter activist-workingclass-intellectuals and half real working class people who grew up as working class folks. The experience of the coop being a workplace democracy was transformative for many people's conscioussness. People had rights. We shared our earnings in the form of dividends and decisions were taken democratically. We showed solidarity with other workers in other businesses. I'm proud to have been part of this experience to show workers there are alternatives to the …
Posted to In Search of Solidarity
-
Wiley, I don't discriminate with regard to the effects of religion. It makes all takers conservative in general. In the case of minorities, there IS liberation theology (MLKing, Oscar Ramero etc.) that doesn't exist in the US white community (some epochal examples of populism notwithstanding). White working classes historically tend toward fascism in situations of extreme crisis because of the way their consciousness has been formed by mythological notions of being independant yeomanry, racial superiority and national destiny. They also scapegoat others yet minorities do this as well. A real economic crisis in the US will be a political disaster and …
Posted to In Search of Solidarity
-
It appears as though the main grievances of the TWU were not wages but pension and health care benefits. A 1.5% contribution on the part of union members to the pension fund was made to offset retirement costs and I suppose there were contributions demanded to offset rising health care costs. Most union contracts now have some kind of contribution from the union member for health care. National health insurence anyone?! The members voted the contract down by 7 votes out of a total of 11,461 votes (11,227 for ;11,334 against). They returned to work anyway and now it seems as …
Posted to In Search of Solidarity
-
Garrett It sure seems as if the transit workers you run into are real a**holes! As many have claimed, life in NYC can be a real embittering experience all 'round. People really aren't reasonable. The story of the transit worker ignoring the mugging is incredible. I certainly would gotten as much information as I could on the guy and reported it to the police and if they didn't care I'd go to the press. What kind of an a**hole would instinctively respond to something like a mugging. As far as breaking the law is concerned you have to remember that the …
Posted to In Search of Solidarity
-
I've done a little research on the TWU strike in NYC in 12/05. It seems that the REAL issue was pensions after all. In a world of labor relations where workers are losing everything to companies reporting record profits and record compensation packages for CEOs, kudos to Toussaint for saving the TWU pension package. The MTA wanted to boost the retirement age by seven years from 55 to 62 while lowering the amount recieved at retirement through the creation of a second tier of employee for pension benefits. The union rejected this but accepted a raise in annual salary contributions to …
Posted to In Search of Solidarity
-
Garrett, It seems that over the past four years or so the MTA ridership and fares have increased faster than costs and MTA rate of employment. The debt is being paid down and the debt service ratio to revenue is declining. The MTA is vital for the jobs, services, incomes, and economic growth it generates for the NYC. The pension contribution increases from 2% to 6% and the 1% increase in health care contributions should lessen the deficit especially since they're based on higher average earnings. Things like mass transit in cities need to be prioritized at a time when energy …
Posted to In Search of Solidarity
-
Garrett It seems that you are ranting hysterically about the size of the general debt of the state and city of New York. What is your point. The city workers are not at fault. Their demands and contract are reasonable. More and more of the debt is interest to bondholders. The system needs better funding from the federal government. Mass transit will save resources and make the economy more efficient in the end. What the pundits are angling for is leveraging the MTA and a privatization of the system which will mean big fare hikes to cover the privatization costs and …
Posted to In Search of Solidarity
-
Wiley, The tendencies which I describe in the white/european working classes toward fascism in times of capitalist crisis is not essentialist, that is to say something inherent in their very nature as a class but one conditioned by how white workers experience class relations and the political culture that is created in the process. Class is not a trascendental or essential charactoristic of an individual but a social and historic category created by relationships formed around the mode of production in any given society at any given time. Ruling classes tend to inbue workers with a deep sense of nationalism. Though …
Posted to In Search of Solidarity
-
Liz You are completely insane! Nothing you said relates to the above postings. You are the first discussant to post seven of your own posts in a row and not once address the issue at hand! The issue, a serious one, is the right of public employees-over three quarters of all unionized employees in the United States-to strike over unacceptible working conditions and contract terms. This is especially vital as tax give backs to the super rich are narrowing support for much needed public services as more and more privatization puts these services out of reach of the poorest. The NYC …
Posted to In Search of Solidarity
-
In the first paragraph above I meant more than the rest of the County's (USA) combined. Not all the countries in the world! Very sorry---cabbie.
Posted to In Search of Solidarity
-
Sorry its the second paragraph. I've got Liz disorder! Yikes!!!!!!!--cabbie
Posted to In Search of Solidarity
-
The actual figure for current annual NYC transit ridership is just over one billion---about half the US's total annual urban commuter ridership. Still a pretty daunting challenge to any urban commuter transit system staff wouldn't you say?!
Posted to In Search of Solidarity
-
The imprisonment of hundreds of prisoners at guatanamo bay without legal recourse either in US courts or international law, being denied either a writ of habeus corpus or the scrutiny of international human rights organizations is a modern tyranny which must be challenged no less than that of the Taliban or Saddam Hussien. It is the penultimate US hypocracy! Niether Rumsfeld nor anyone in charge of the facility has come forward with any evidence as to why any of these men should be kept in detention. If there was solid evidence of there connections to terrorism there would be ample displays …
Posted to Walking to Guantnamo
-
One of the things not mentioned in any of the postings or the article itself (but which is explained in full in a recent issue of The Nation) is the sheer political corruption involved in dealing with the issue of coal mine safety. It seems that Mitch McConnell-a Republican Senator from Kentucky-spent much of his time and effort fighting aspects of campaign finance reform such that energy companies, like the one involved in the mining accident in WV described in the article, could spend as much as they wanted buying politicians. Since over ninety percent of coal industry donations go to …
Posted to Coal Miners Slaughter
-
The more people make Israel and its occupation a distinctly Jewish issue the further we get from the topics to be addressed by the peace movement. The fact is that poll after poll find most Jews both in the diaspora and in Israel in favor of an end to the illegal occupation and a total withdrawl from the Palestinian territories. The Jews don't control the Israel government or its decisions anymore than most Americans control what goes on with the political decisions of the Bush Administration. One of the real problems is the Wests actual love affair with religious fundamentalism. The …
Posted to Hamas: Sharon's Legacy?
-
The roots of the current situation in the Palestinian Territories is quite interesting and go back to the first intifada in December 1987. At the time it broke out, the PLO and Arafat had been evacuated from Beirut to Tunisia for abour five years and had become comfortable as a government in exile living on lavish contributions from the Arab League states and others. Their main role went from leading the struggle to diplomatic activity. In the time being, Hamas stepped into the breach and built a solid base of support especially in Gaza, a hotbed of seething misery. This was …
Posted to Hamas: Sharon's Legacy?
-
WIley's maps basically told the real story of the occupation and its objectives. They also indicate the real reason for Oslo's failure to bring a lasting peace. The objective of colonialism is expansion and the elimination/marginalization of the native population. Since 1948 over 600 new Jewish outposts, settlements and towns have emerged while Palestinian ones have been erased. The resulting bantustans that we see today that are the legacy of this historic process which the Oslo Peace Process only codified and stabilized, are to contain a diminished Palestinian population as a confined labor reserve for the growing archipeligo of Industrial free …
Posted to Hamas: Sharon's Legacy?
-
Major Major's attempt to apply the core notions of B. Moore from "Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy" to the current situation in Occupied Palestine is not useful. Moore was not writing about small intensely foreign controlled, colonized, and occupied societies but independant and somewhat developed ones. His main concern was to understand why societies of similar levels of development-Japan, Germany, UK, US so often took a different turn in establishing their political systems. The answer, he discovers, is in the underlying social and political alliances forged between and amoung differing rural and urban social classes as determining the ultimate form …
Posted to Hamas: Sharon's Legacy?
-
major major, After reading your comment posted a few posts above, I better understood what you were trying to say about Moore's notions of social transformation and its relationship to class alliances. In fact, you do make interesting points that well describe some of Moore's more salient ideas. I suppose that if we tried to relate YOUR interpretation of Moore to the current situation regarding Arab politics in the Occupied Palestinian Territories we could say that the globalization of that society's increasingly concentrating economy is producing a highly destabilizing landless and jobless proletariat that the Israeli State is trying to manage …
Posted to Hamas: Sharon's Legacy?
-
One of the core things that I believe and have always tried to impart in my posts is that Fundamentalist Islam is key to the newest strategies of transnational capitalism and corporate-led economic globalization. The reason is quite simple. Transnational capital abhors nation building. Most any kind of secular nationalist regime in the third world, particularly in the Middle East much of which regards itself as under the jackboot of imperialism and neo-colonialism, is going to pursue some kind of nation building. This entails taxing and borrowing to build up a modern infrastructure (including human capital) in order to create a …
Posted to Hamas: Sharon's Legacy?
-
It was Israel that broke off negotiations with the Palestinians five years ago, relentlessly bombed and destroyed PA security infrastructure needed to contain the second Intifada, engaged in a near genocidal military incursion into the West Bank early 2002-operation defensive shield-and continued a policy of targeted assassinations, illegal usurpation and occupation of land, house demolitions, and the construction of the apartheid wall unanimously condemned by the ICJ at the Hague. By all accounts most Palestinians oppose the hardline political positions adopted by Hamas which is why they soft pedel their destruction of Israel position which remains in their charter. Most Palestinians …
Posted to Hamas: Sharon's Legacy?
-
The story of the two Clinton appointments now on the Supreme Court, Bader-Ginsberg and Breyer, is a very interesting one. By the time Clinton got around to appointing these two he had already saw a big fight coming in the Senate the likes of which we now have been seeing over the various Bush nominees. This is something he badly wanted to avoid. He asked a ranking Republican Orrin Hatch to pick two compromise candidates that both parties could avoid a protracted struggle over. The result was Ginsburg and Breyer.
Posted to An Imperial President
-
I don't know much about the government of Hugo Chavez but I know that he is part of a grand wave of electoral victories for the Left in Latin America (LA) which is an indication of the great disapproval of the old neo-liberal model of privatization, globalization, and export-led development that has impoverished so many average Latin Americans. While the rich mostly benefit from schemes like NAFTA, CAFTA, and the FTAA, most people lose jobs, farm land, income, services, and suffer from expensive imports of formerly domestically provided basic needs and currency devaluation through capital flight. The early era of import …
Posted to No Discounted Transit for Oil
-
One interesting fact in refutation of Tina1's claims regarding the so called benefits of the Bush tax cuts for the rich is that not only have they not spurred much GDP growth or domestic job creation but they actually have created a greater tax burden on the working poor and middle classes. While the top 1% have collectively enjoyed billions in tax cuts, others less fortunate have actually seen their effective rates of taxation increase. According to a study by the Center for American Progress, 41 states have passed state and municiple tax increases. Most states have seen property taxes on …
Posted to No Discounted Transit for Oil
-
The crime issue is a difficult one for the left because it arouses the passions and because the admittedly abnormal levels of sociopathic behavior in US society is impossible to defend or even explain at times. Furthermore, many American sociopaths arouse so much understandable contempt for their senseless crimes that liberals and the left tend to give up in frustration on the whole crime issue. It is very ungratifying to continue to cop the same old plea about poverty and a bad environment for people who repeatedly and remorselessly take human life as if it was nothing. I do not believe …
Posted to Reflections on Tookie's Execution
-
One of the problems with the increasingly consolidated corporate media today is the widespread and deliberate degradation of the national political discourse through right-wing talk radio like Rush Limbough and news shows like Fox as well as other sensationalist features and programing. They put complex issues across as simple black and white things with liberal vs conservative labels so as to either praise or stigmatize a view according to taste. George Orwell in a famous essay called Politics and the English Language shows this problem to be a very old one whereby buzzwords and code expressions substitute for true independant, reflective …
Posted to Reflections on Tookie's Execution
-
whattheheck, I agree with your assessment of the flaws in US society and about our basic incompetence and lack of curiosity. We are woefully uneducated. I am from the Chicago area so I really don't see as much ignorance as people from other parts of the country. To be exact I am from the North suburbs where people are pretty well educated. I have met fundamentalist Christians who believe that the world is only 6,000 years old and that it was created in only six days to boot. Believe me its chilling. Everything in the world that happens from an unforseen …
Posted to Reflections on Tookie's Execution
-
Rocco, I think that the separation of church and state is key to the further enlightenment of modern society. Enlightenment era intellectuals like the French Revolutionaries and the US founding fathers were very skeptical of religion. The French exhibited bold anti-clericalism as a response to the corruption and repressive nature of the Church while the founding fathers in the US like Thomas Paine remained deists not tilting toward any religious particularism. Guys like Paine or Sam Adams couldn't really denounce religion because, unlike revolutionary France, religion was popular in the US and because religious freedom was a big part of the …
Posted to Reflections on Tookie's Execution
-
I followed much of the Alito hearings on NPR and C-Span. Alito is chilling! He is a quiet demogogue and extremist who abuses legal logic to mislead. He evaded Sen. Schumer's questions about his views that Abortion rights are neither settled law nor protected under the US Constitution. In his written legal opinions he seems to use technicalities to justify twisting the actual intention of the law. He has little respect for stare decisis or the idea of eminating rights established by consensus and repeated rulings by other jurists whose reconfirming opinions amount to "settled law." The idea of legal stability …
Posted to Alito Hearings Drowning in Words
-
Wileywitch, I only have a MA in Political Science from the UW-Madison. I drove a cab up there to. Union Cab Cooperative is for whom I drove. About six and one half years. That is the history of my youth. There are many good books out there on the drive of the far right to take over the court system in the US. I believe this is more integral to the vast right wing conspiricy and the failure to stop 9/11 than even the preservation of global US hegemony or the securing of vast untapped oil and gas reserves in the …
Posted to Alito Hearings Drowning in Words
-
I don't believe the objection was political. Some people are just very toughy.
Posted to Alito Hearings Drowning in Words
-
Being an open minded leftist I gave country music a chance and have been listening on and off for some time. I must say that I regard true country music of the 40s, 50s, and 60s to be a genuine expression of the attitudes and feelings of the people and communities from which it stems. It represents an aspect of authentic American culture and is an honest portrayal of the lives, struggles, pain, and joys of the people of the regions where this music first derived. Naturally, its appeal became widespread with the growth of a national music industry in the …
Posted to Country's Jingoistic Jingles
-
Killing innocent people doesn't win the "war on terror" it just creates lots more terrorists! The news hasn't reached the Red States yet but in fact Iraq, once a stable albeit brutal dictatorship with Saddam's uncontested power free to crush rival groups is NOW a hot bed of Al Qaeda activity. Incidents of terrorism, somewhat rare before the invasion of Iraq, is now taking untold thousands of lives! Iraq under the Baathists was one of the few places where terrorists both has no quarter and from where they recieved no funding (unlike our allies Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, etc,) and one …
Posted to Country's Jingoistic Jingles
-
minerva, this is a wild comment! Please explain!
Posted to Country's Jingoistic Jingles
-
I recently watched with horror a documentary film on line in which US troops are indiscriminately firing at a distance at civilians in vehicles trying to escape from the genocide in Fallujah. US troops admitted to the use of White Phosphorus or "willy pete" (the military code word) against civilians and not as a defensive smokescreen to disguise troop movements from the enemy. Photos of charred corpses are the proof that US WP projectiles were basically suffered mostly by civilians. The civilian casualty rate was higher than that of the insurgents. That the US committed war crimes in Fallujah is beyond …
Posted to White Phosphorous Lies
-
Religion and politics are mixing great in the US. Soon we'll be a theocracy. Religion and politics mix only if you don't care about democracy. Religion is about absolutes. Politics is about compromise, diversity, and inclusion. Religion and Modern Democracy were born in different times. They can't mix!! History shows this and Fritz Stern's article is brilliant.
Posted to A Fundamental History Lesson
-
Tom Hayden brilliantly encapsulated the many issues that the anti-war movement has broached with regard to the futile and immoral nature of this imperialist war: the collapsing "coalition", the lack of representitiveness of the new Baghdad Regime, the failure (and transparency) of Iraqization, the loss of US allies' respect in the world, the great cost in lives and resources, and the total lack of legitimacy for going to war based on the lack of either WMDs or official state sponsership of terrorist activity abroad. The key motives have proven to be not only oil and a restoration of US hegemony in …
Posted to Exiting Iraq
-
The amazing thing about the two and one half year long U.S.occupation of Iraq is the fact that it created violent sectarian animosities that were long suppressed under Baathist rule. US imperialism wishes to portray the Iraqi problem as one of ethnic divisions ala Yugoslavia yet it is the US occupation that has fostered and aggravated these divisions through a biased election process that helped the Shiites through a party list system that favored their numerical superiority. In addition, the Occupying forces all but created a separate Kurdistan and is giving the Kurdish militias the right to act as the army …
Posted to Echoes of Oslo
-
The end of the multifiber aggreement of the early 1970s certainly precipitated the proverbial race to the bottom feared by labor movements all over the world and the communities they support. At stake is jobs and wage levels. Since 1979 between 5 and 6 milliion manufacturing jobs have been lost in the US due to trade aggreements like NAFTA, FTAA, and now CAFTA which is only the more updated version of a host of bilateral free trade initiatives dating back to the Reagan Administration such as the Caribbean Basin Initiative and the General System of Preferences renegotiations giving the Caribbean and …
Posted to New Fair Trade Model Needed
-
Disunity in the current US labor movement may not necessarily be a bad thing. It could create different poles of political orientation and influence and serve as a mode of testing alternative methods of organizing drives and collective bargaining. The US has always seemed to have greater labor unity for its relatively proportionately smaller labor movement than other industrial capitalist countries where there is greater ideological factionalism. Still many of these countries' labor movements have more power in general. The US labor movement not only needs to build a much bigger base but become much more politicized beyond the business unionism …
Posted to Labor Split a Mixed Bag
-
The US labor movement faces many difficult challenges at the moment. The minimum wage is probably at its historic lowest real level-at about 61% of the poverty level for a family of four at full time employment! Over 10 million manufacturing jobs have been shipped abroad in the past 30 years and now that the rate has slowed white collar service jobs are increasingly being outsourced to other countries. The challenge faced by labor is daunting. Health insurance is increasingly out of the reach of more and more people as health care corporations collude to monopolize services and available staff in …
Posted to Labor Split a Mixed Bag
-
A few key things need to be clarified with regard to the Rove affair and the entire war in general. I have actually read a little of Wilson's fascinating book and what struck me most about his trip to Niger was not only the obvious fraudulent nature of the documents presented as evidence by Powell in the UN but the obvious conditions which Wilson encountered in Niger during his trip. By the time Wilson made his now famous trip to that African country, France, Niger's main customer for nuclear fuel as well as about every other industrialized country that ever used …
Posted to Downing Street: A Dead-End In American Media
-
Jack Barnes is an ex-Trotskyist who published many books and pamphlets years ago with Pathfinder Press, a Trotskyist publisher based in London and New York. He has since repudiated his old political views and has become a Libertarian.
Posted to Get Used to It
-
I think the basic universal wage, or "living wage" as the movement for it refers to minimum wage reform is needed. As a society we have failed to keep wages and incomes of the working up with cost increases and a consequent loss of real income for increasing numbers of people has resulted. There are people who work more than 40 hours/week and get no overtime and need to go to food pantries and soup kitchens to stretch their incomes to make ends meet! This is the unfortunate hallmark of our global age! The way we measure poverty should also be …
Posted to Class Consciousness Matters
-
Liz, Cabdriverinchicago is Steve. Somehow after the changes I could not retrieve my old username. I think your idea of a basic income guarantee would be excellent as it would raise significant numbers of people out of poverty while stimulating the economy somewhat through increased purchasing power at the very bottom of the income ladder. As has been advocated for years, engaging the poor in their own programs is a good idea as well! It would be great if health, child care, and other such benefits were universally available as part of a social wage so that it would not be …
Posted to Class Consciousness Matters
-
By now no one can possibly doubt the destructive impact of US imperialism on Iraq and also the world. A war waged not only for oil and the control of its global production and distribution but also a major test case of US led corporate globalization is failing miserably. Very little has be down to reconstruct the country with Iraqi infant mortality rates at all time highs and unemployment sustained at peak levels. The basic infrastructural restoration is going at a snail's pace with sustained electrical power and clean water unavailable to most outside the Green Zone. The victory over Saddam's …
Posted to How to End the War
-
The nonsensical official explaination resonates in your views. The real story is much different. US imperialism broke international law and the 1956 Geneva Accords to which it was a signitory in order to pursue an illegal, separate, repressive, corrupt, and highly unpopular regime in the South! This was to avoid an Vietnamese nation-wide election in which Ho CHi Minh was expected to garner over 80% of the vote! Instead of accepting a Vietminh electoral victory, which would have certainly resulted in a kind of Statist developmentalism SANS collectivization or any of the disasterous Maoist policies in China, US imperialism frantically opted …
Posted to How to End the War
Return to cabdriverinchicago's profile
- Joined July 20, 2005
- Last Visit January 2, 2008
Other Profiles
IN THESE TIMES COMMUNITY MEMBERS
- 1.
- 2.
- 3.
- 4.
- 5.
- 6.
- 7.
- 8.
Ignoring Outrage, Obama Set to Expand Pentagon Presence in Colombia
- 9.
- 10.
RSS Feed