With the Gini index, mean household means nothing. What the median US household is worth is what means anything. If only one household had all wealth, its vicissitudes and upswings would change the mean - but not the unknown median.
50 karma · joined September 6, 2023
Ahmad Sa'adat is a "military fighter"? At the age of 70? He has been in Israeli prison for years.
Israel killed over 1000 Palestinians from 2018 until before Operation al-Aqsa Flood. There's nothing really unusual about it from.that context. And Israel us currently massacring civilians in Gaza every day.
> the catalyst of the current episode of this conflict
Israelis murdered people on an aid flotilla a few years ago, and are evicting West Bank Palestinians from their homes with settlers, as the Israelis parade around the al-Aqsa mosque.
Haaretz recently printed how Netanyahu also was encouraging Hamas as he wanted war and west Bank settlement, not to make deals with Fatah.
We can go through business by business and see the rise of monopolies and oligopolies. Universal owns half of the US music market - Universal, Sony and Warner own over 80% of the US music market. Accounting is done by the Big Four, advertising by its own Big Four.
Just down the line - consolidation, oligopoly, monopoly. That is what markets produce. Standard Oil reversed its breakup into ExxonMobil, as did the Baby Bells into Verizon and AT&T. Even the government intervention into the monopolies gets reversed.
> We believe central economic planning elevates the worst of us and drags everyone down; markets exploit the best of us to benefit all of us
> We believe central planning is a doom loop; markets are an upward spiral
There's many things off with this. The USSR from the 1920s to early 1950s had enormous economic growth - particularly in the 1930s when so-called free markets in the West had collapsed, by the 1950s and early 1960s it was sending satellites and men to space - before the West. Also, the PRC had enormous economic growth from the early 1950s to late 1970s (and afterward as well).
Also, the US economy is centrally planned. Billions are flowing to military contractors for Israel right now as they were to the Ukraine before - the US is pumping over $800 billion (really over a trillion) this year into this centrally planned economy, and it also de facto plans for the giant medical sector. The Internet we type on was built over decades with government money.
But most importantly, as these are more minor issues - it is a false comparison. The Soviet Union had markets selling radishes for rubles, just like the US does (for dollars). So both had markets.
The difference is the USSR from the 1920s to mid-1960s made production decisions based on the general welfare, the desire for a space program etc. Workers on collective farms made their own decisions, with perhaps some government quotas. In the US decisions are made to benefit the heirs who own companies as opposed to the workers who do the work.
But that is a minor point. The point is that both had markets, little different from one another. But the distribution portion of the economy for the US is compared to the centrally planned production if the other economy. It makes no sense. The US production controlled by and for the benefit of heirs is unmentioned. The USSR-like market identical to to the US market is unmentioned. We compare US production to USSR-like distribution. The comparison makes no sense. Purposefully.
Iran had a parliament in 1953, when the US and UK launched operation Ajax after the prime Minister nationalized Iran's oil. The prime Minister was ousted, a dictator replaced him - who returned to Iran on a flight with Allen Dulles. The conservative mullahs were western allies in removing power from the parliament.
Then this structure the west put into place fell out of alignment with the west in 1979, and we suddenly hear an enormous amount of stated sympathy about "women trapped in these regimes". Sympathy that we didn't hear when the CIA was handing SAVAK lists of progressive, secular women to arrest or kill. It's farcical.
Control of oil sales reverted back to British Petroleum (and the Seven Sisters) after the US/UK ousted Iran's prime Minister with Operation Ajax. Not all of Mosaddegh's changes were undone as it would gave destabilized the Shah.
> Second, he wasn’t replaced with a dictator. The Shah had been in power
The Prime Minister ran the government like a modern western government, the Shah was a figurehead. What you're saying is the US and UK wanted to remove the modern parliament to revert to an older, anti-democraric, conservative, traditional government. Which is what happened, and now the Swedes and westerners are whining about the traditionalism the west foisted on Iran, now that it is no longer western aligned.
Aside from mullahs and the dictator, the CIA gave money to criminal elements in Iran to help regain western control.
The Shah was a figurehead and left for Italy. He did not want to run Iran or even go back but was convinced to by westerners. He flew back to Iran with Allen Dulles.
> had forced his father to advocated over a decade before
Forced his father to advocate? Advocate for what?
The same with Arafat - he was conciliatory to Israel and its western support at Oslo, with Hamas and the PFLP being less so.
Both were not fighting when.they got the prize, but being conciliatory.
I just watched videos today of an ongoing ethnic cleansing of Armenians in Karbakh that is happening today. Although from the mouths of a lot of western governments this is not an ethnic cleansing but a lot of Armenians spontaneously deciding to leave after a military invasion.
The Ukraine was fighting to regain its territory prior to Russia's intervention, and Russia was effectively accusing the Ukraine of performing an ethnic cleansing of Luhansk/Dotensk. Whether accurate or not, this was their justification for intervention too.
What I'm saying is it seems depending on a country's interests, what is an ethnic cleansing and what is not seems in eye of the beholder.
The US carpet bombed Cambodia just like it did Vietnam, and Chomsky condemned this.
This nebulous "Khmer Rouge" you refer to was armed by the US starting in 1979 and even more so in subsequent years. The US worked to put them back in power and put economic, military and diplomatic support behind it. As reported in the New York Times, ABC News at the time. Chomsky was against this.
The US establishment was anti-Khmer Touge until 1979, then began arming and supporting them in 1979. By the late 1990s they began going out of favor in the US establishment. Chomsky's opinion hasn't changed, he was against the US bombing Cambodia during the Vietnam War.
As he adjusts to his new situation, his behavior changes. The moral code of rural Oaxaca is different them that of east LA. His moral code changes. Perhaps he always gave a great amount of help when needed to neighbors in rural Oaxaca, but stops doing that as much. This changes. In Oaxaca, he did not steal from his friends, nor does he in LA. This does not change.
It's obvious even in US culture. Two students go to Harvard, one goes into engineering, one diplomacy. What group are the moral traits of candor, frankness and directness valued? What group are the moral values of politeness and courteousness valued? Morality can be relative, depending on the situation. But for some situations it is not, the more universal things.
The workers create all the wealth and do all the work. The heirs who own the controlling stake in a big company like Siemens do not work, but expropriate surplus labor time doing work.
You have the workers who do all the work and create all the wealth on one end, and the heirs who parasitically expropriate the worker's surplus time on the other. It's obvious to those of us who work who the "argument" is against.
By this logic, working 48 hours is more productive, working 54 hours even more productive, 62 hours even more productive. It can be cranked up even more - the English did and took meticulous records on it.
Dialecticaly it created a strong Labour party which took power in 1945 and nationalized coal, the bank of England, hospitals, telecommunications, national rail, iron and steel - the commanding heights of the economy.
What would happen if I began installing or moving pipes at my company that management and ownership told me not to? A "gang" of security guards or policemen would visit violence on me to stop.
You are aghast at the people actually doing the work and creating the wealth enforcing their rights, but make no mention of the heirs who own Siemens and their "gangs" working to expropriate surplus labor time and profit.
The federal reserve is meeting today and tomorrow. They usually say implicitly (although sometimes explicitly) what an Australian real estate mogul recently came out and explicitly said - they're trying to drive unemployment up and wages down. If this isn't done, it's a threat to the aristocracy, to the heirs expropriating their rentier wealth in profits, interest etc. This is the real meta-problem. The heirs and their allies are working to generate poverty, homelessness, unemployment etc., in the case of the real estate mogul quite openly. The recent corporate response to writers, auto workers etc. is yet another side of that.
Like who, the hundreds of civilians the US massacred at No Gun Ri ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Gun_Ri_massacre )? Or all the other civilians shot and bombed by the US Air Force, as internal documents and testimony attest to? Or the firebombing of cities by the US air force? Or the rapes and murders US military personnel have carried out in South Korea in the past decades? Or the decades of dictatorship in South Korea that the US military occupation shored up?
Average inflation-adjusted weekly earnings were higher in the 1970s then now. The average inflation adjusted hourly wage is lower than what it was a half century ago. A the growth in the past half century has been hoovered up by the heirs, by the aristocracy. This has a naturally radicalizing effect, and changing election laws will not change anything other than send that radicalization to the streets.
In fact much of the world was like this only a few centuries ago.
From 50,000 years ago to 10,000 years ago there were no capitalists, no kings, no slave owners.
production to the needs of the community, distribute the work to be done among all those able to work and guarantee a livelihood to every man, woman, and child. The education of the individual, in addition to promoting his own innate abilities, would attempt to develop in him a sense of responsibility for his fellow men in place of the glorification of power and success in our present society.
It is not a system of horrible oppression, it is how the few remaining hunter gatherer bands live in the Amazon right now.