VictorPath

You're talking as if there is some law from time immemorial regarding this, to deal with all corporate boycotts. The 2018 law mentioned was completely driven by the Israel lobby, and all proceeding laws in this respect were due to the Israel lobby. The grand statement "When it comes to businesses, the US government reserves the right to institute international boycotts" is deceptive and farcical- this was instigated due to the Israel lobby and for all practical purposes has only applied to Israel.

Only one in fifteen private sector jobs in the US is unionized, you do not "give rise to ununionized outfits", that is the standard.

Ford has been unionized since before World War II. Actually the opposite happened in its case, unionizing GM and Chrysler made unionized Ford easier.

> I dont think currency should be democratic, it should be impersonal and outside the whims of any group of people. Gold is like that.

If gold (or some other precious metal) is such a fantastic currency for a modern economy to use, why are no modern economies pegging their currencies to gold? Why didn't Nixon keep the dollar convertible to gold?

Pretty much.

CGTN tweets are tagged with "China state-affiliated media" ( https://twitter.com/cgtnofficial ). RT (which Twitter seems to remove from search results) tweets are tagged with "Russia state-affiliated media" (https://twitter.com/rt_com ). Voice of America has no such tags ( https://twitter.com/VOANews).

Voice of America is part of the US government's executive branch, and was created and is funded by Congress, which comes from the State Department budget. It had some aspects of independence from executive control, many of which Trump did away with. RT similarly is a creation of the Russian government with similar aspects of independence to VOA. One country gets tagged, one does not.

If a man was making a real income of $95k in 1980, and was then knocked down to $55k, so his wife raises their 1 kid (as the example given), goes back to work and makes $100k - they have moved from middle class to upper middle class.

Interesting these charts start in 1980 as well. The average real hourly wage went down from 1972 to 1980, then began a recovery. So when you don't show things were better beforehand, it looks like a constant rise, which it was not.

The historical answer to that is it was restricted in Europe originally, and by the 1948 eastern Europe was under control of communist parties and western Europe was on the verge of communists being elected to power in Italy and France with militant labor unions existing (with the Labour government in the UK nationalizing much of the country). Compromise on wages, organization etc. was the watchword.

The US history was separated and a little different. The New Deal compromise was from 1933 to the 1970s, and has been somewhat rolled back since then. The average inflation-adjusted hourly wage has fallen in the US since the early 70s, so the average US worker is worse off in that respect than they were a half century ago.

> There are many laws in many parts of our country which restrict my ability to work in a given job or industry unless I join a union.

This law is called basic contract law. A company can agree to only hire via a union just like a university can agree to only sell Pepsi products.

> I prefer to have the right to choose whether to join a union or not

I prefer to have the right to choose whether I am under my management structure or not. I suppose someone could say one can go somewhere else, but that would apply to a company with an exclusive union contract as well.

> Due to the zero-sum nature of real estate, it fundamentally breaks the positive sum theory of capitalism.

From World War II to the early 1970s, the utilization of existing US capital equipment rarely dipped during the worst of a deep recession, to what have been the highest levels of capital capacity utilization rate since the 2008 financial crisis. The old lows have been about what the new highs have been. This indicates an overabundance of capital investment and overproduction, which was the opinion of former GE CEO Jack Welch.

https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/g17/revisions/Curren...

Biblical professor Bart Ehrman has written many books about how the bible was put together. The Comma Johanneum, the most explicit reference to the doctrine of the trinity is not found in the original Greek (or in early non-Latin translations) until Erasmus was pressured (against his desire) to include it in his Greek Bible in 1522.

Also, the first gospel written is thought to be Mark. In the King James Bible, Catholic translations etc. Jesus is seen resurrected by the apostles and others. This does not happen in the earliest versions of Mark.

There are lots of things like this, Ehrman goes into many of them.

You should be made aware that the US and world are divided into classes, and you are currently in the working class. You being in the position you are currently in is the entire point of the system. It is called capitalism.

With regards to Flexport, I am not in freight particularly, but I am a programmer at a big company automating shipping and truck delivery. My total comp. this year will be $170k (low for this board) and one impetus for it is to automate people like you out of a job.

Workers at Kellogg's and some other companies organized together to better their lot https://m.metrotimes.com/news-hits/archives/2021/11/19/kello...

In terms of as an individual, keep going to school. Have a realistic idea about majors, jobs available afterward. career growth etc. Look into it all - if my career goal was to be a level 6 programmer at Google or Facebook, I would look at what I need to do to get in those companies at level 1 or 2, and then what I need to get to that preceding step, working backwards. Also be cognizant you might work with people who start their professional careers at 21, and at 35 you might have a boss who is 28, and whose other reports are all younger than them.

Also, you can learn and do MVPs on the side.

Of course, all of this is hard to do working 60 hours a week, spending time with wife and community and taking night school. It is kind of the point, you are a wage slave whose purpose is to extract profit for your freight company until you conk out and are replaced. Any kind of betterment for yourself is not a consideration, as corporate profit is all, you don't matter other then the profit you generate on the treadmill. It's the economic system we live in, capitalism.

Nixon won over 60% of the vote and only lost Massachusetts and DC. Biden got 51.3% of the vote and as many states as Trump.

The title is clickbaity. Wealthy people are not getting a tax cut with SALT - any federal cut with this would wind up being taxed locally.

> Surely this activity could have started in 1950,1920, 1890

It did start in 1890. Read about the Populist Party, Cross of Gold speech, Pullman strike, Haymarket affair, US occupation of the Philippines. All of this started before the 19th century. In any old industrial city, check the date when the old national guard armories were built. Why did large, fortified national guard armories start popping up all over the industrialized parts of the country just before the turn of the 20th century?

Certainly this happens. Among other things it is useful for blackmail - "we will reveal to your wife etc. that you slept with a woman/prostitute". Spy agencies call it a "honey trap".

Eleven years ago, someone could be discharged from the US military if they were found to be homosexual. Due to things like this, it was popular to target homosexuals in the military. They were already made to conceal part of their life to keep their job, now they just add one more thing to that.

A debriefing of a double agent revealed that the British turned a high level male target by putting him together with an underage boy during the target's visit to Lebanon in the 1980's. The British had the Lebanese police barge in during the tryst and arrest the target. The offer was then made - work for us or go to a Lebanese prison and have it revealed at home you are a homosexual pedophile. The target was turned.

The Stasi had an unusual spin on this - usually males are targeted, but due to World War II, West Germany had a lack of men who had been born in the 1920s, and a lot of unmarried women of that age. So "Romeo" agents targeted secretaries working at high level offices, and this operation was a successful one.

Most spying is not James Bond level exciting - 45% of it is keeping up with technological innovation, 45% of it is getting positive press for your country worldwide, and negative press for rivals. Or maybe those percentages are juggled one way or another. The other 10% is honey traps, dead drops, wet work, ensuring Patrice Lumumba is shot and things like that.

The real "break with tradition" was America and the CIA ousting Prince Sihanouk, who had been fighting militant communists, but was in dialog with the non-militant Cambodian left. A puppet Lon Nol was put at the helm, and the US then invaded eastern Cambodia (and shot Kent State students protesting that invasion) and carpet bombed the Cambodian countryside. This is what began the destabilization of Cambodia. Prince Sihanouk in exile allied with anyone against Lon Nol, which included the communists, and he supported the Cambodian People's National Liberation Armed Forces, which liberated Phnom Penh in the spring of 1975, right around the same time Saigon was liberated from western colonialism.

> human rights organizations as this website claims, or terrorist groups as the Israeli government claims.

These NGOs get funding from the European Union, and Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch condemned Israel outlawing these human rights NGOs - so it Israel against not just this magazine, but the EU, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch etc.

> This is a strange lie you keep posting with your link to 972mag, a biased Palestinian defense magazine.

972mag is a magazine founded by Jewish journalists in Tel Aviv. When an Israeli magazine run by Jews condemns torture of Palestinians and is called a "Palestinian defense magazine", you have to wonder how provincial the thought process that would use that label is. Considering world opinion on the human rights of Palestinans who were tortured by Israel, which includes these journalists, and which includes their political pole within Jewish Israeli society, you have to wonder how isolated the group on the other side of all of this is.

> 2007: Hamas takeover of Gaza

As you mention Hamas, it gives me the opportunity to point out that Israel bankrolled Hamas founder Sheikh Yassin even prior to the founding of Hamas. This was admitted by former military governor of Gaza Yitzhak Segev and other Israeli government and military officials. Israel wanted to undermine secular political Palestinians and empower Islamist political Palestinians. Once successful, they bemoan that the Islamists they funded and worked to empower, have come to power.

Incidentally, the EU funded NGOs which Israel are spying on here are mostly secular (and even the militant groups which Israel is claiming the NGOs are affiliated with are secular as well).

> The data on this is that in 2020 the UN adopted 17 resolutions condemning Israel and 6 for the rest of the world.

> Now it’s possible that Israel is so much worse than the rest of the world

According to Israel itself, it launched 50 bombing raids in Syria in 2020. Many of the UN resolutions condemning Israel were due to those bombings and other actions Israel has taken vis-a-vis Syria. Including Israel's occupation and settlement of Syrian territory since 1967, which the UN condemned then, and upheld in 2020 along with the other resolutions.

The reason the UN condemned Israel in 2020 and not Bhutan, is Israel decided to bomb Syria many times in 2020, and Bhutan did not.

> I can also ask: why does so few other support the single somewhat functioning democracy in the region?

In the West Bank, Palestinians are not allowed to form an army, have control over borders, or even control of travel around the West Bank. So they are made to nit have their own country (which Israel opposes) but to be part of Israel. So can they vote for Knesset candidates? No. (Yet an orthodox Jew from Brooklyn who has never been to the Middle East can make aliyah to a West Bank settlement and vote for Knesset candidates immediately).

Some "democracy".

> Historically, this hasn't always been the case

The second largest political party in the first Knesset was Mapam, which had ideological ties to the Soviet Union (the largest party was the center left Worker's Party or Mapai). The USSR was the first country to recognize Israel, followed by future Warsaw Pact members Czechosolvakia and Poland. Then Hungary and Romania recognized Israel. The next year, the US decided to recognize Israel. So Israel initially had better diplomatic relations with the future Warsaw Pact than the USA.

With the 1967 war, these Warsaw Pact countries all broke diplomatic relations with Israel (except Romania, which was in the process of breaking away from the USSR). Relations between the US and Israel improved dramatically in 1967. In 1973 Israel had an ill-fated war with Egypt, whose Sinai peninsula was occupied by Israel since 1967, and in 1977, Likud took over the Knesset for the first time.

So 1967 was an important year in the relationship shift.

Israel launched over 900 attacks on Gaza in May, killed hundreds of Palestinians, and displaced tens of thousands of Palestinians. The UN estimate is 461 housing and commercial units were destroyed by Israel's bombing of Gaza.

I don't dispute even more could have been killed by Israel and more destroyed by Israel if the United Nations Security Council did not call for an ending to it and that if that did not happen "it wouldn't be a place anymore...not something anyone walks away from". People can go and look at the videotaped news reports from Gaza after the bombings and judge for themselves.

Al-Haq is a Palestinian human rights NGO funded by the European Union. Two weeks ago, Israel labeled six Palestinian NGOs, including al-Haq, terrorist organizations and has outlawed them. This was condemned by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and others. The EU also funded the other Palestinian human rights NGOs which Israel outlawed.

The US had an office in Jerusalem dealing with Palestinians that Trump closed down. Biden and Blinken began to reopen it but the Israeli government have refused permission for the US to reopen it.

This is following Israel's throwing Palestinians out of their homes in East Jerusalem back in May and replacing them with settlers, which was followed by a mass bombing of the Gaza strip by Israel, including the building in which the Associated Press had its office, a building Israel said it purposely targeted.

This amidst settlement of Palestine's West Bank by Israel which is opposed by multiple UN resolutions supported by an overwhelming majority of nations.

> then they will relocate sections of the factory gradually

In the late 1930s, Larry Page's grandfather participated in a sit down strike that helped consolidate the UAW. The grandfather auto worker made a decent union wage living and sent his son to college. The son became a professor, and his son founded Google and became a billionaire.

Meanwhile the textile mills in the Carolinas were mostly unorganized, and the post-WWII drive to organize them was defeated. And - the Carolinas still have a thriving textile industry today. No. The mills have almost all shut down and moved elsewhere. The industrial buildings serve as hipster like places for restaurants, apartments, boutiques etc. The southern textile workers never got their payday, they worked in the mills and the mills shut down.

> But wealthy people hold onto money-producing assets, which means someone is still using the stuff. Not always, but often. So it means that taxing it just takes it from one use (say, by a corporation) and puts it to another use (maybe a government use).

Industrial capacity utilization has been falling since the 1970s. So the "money-making assets" have been in use less (also the only thing that "makes" new actual wealth is labor). There is a glut of capital sloshing around profitable sectors, as the vast majority of people agree. Underconsumption (over overproduction, different words for the same thing) is generally seen as the economic problem, which higher consumption taxes would worsen.

https://monthlyreview.org/2008/12/01/financial-implosion-and...

> What's the Matter with Kansas? is a lovely example of contempt disguised as gentle inquiry, with a touch of worry over another, and it starts even with the title itself

On the contrary. The title is from the 19th century, from an editorial asking why the populists in Kansas were so left wing, something the book goes into detail about in the second chapter.

> Democracy ought not be a meritocracy, but the economy should be

The Walton heirs have over $200 billion. I guess Alice Walton ($60 billion), who killed someone with her car in 1989, nine years before being charged with DWI for driving her car into a gas meter is one of those epitomes of meritocracy. Or the Koch heirs, the Mars heirs and so on and so forth. The economy is designed for the benefit of the heirs of the St. Grottlesex set, of this meritocracy you speak of.

What was the point of striking a century ago in factories in the northeast US when workers in the Midwest and South would work for less? What kept factory owners from shipping factories to the Midwest and South?

Factories could move, but not at the snap of a finger. Union workers made good salaries, and jobs did not disappear from the northeast.

More interesting is Midwest and Southern factories. Midwest factories unionized, North Carolina textile mills did not. Midwest union workers like Larry Page's grandfather, who walked around his factory during a sit-down strike with a hammer to bash scabs and cops - they sent their sons to college with the wages they had, and their grandchildren prospered. North Carolina factory workers did not unionize, made low wages generationally, and the factories moved any way.

> the actual elite

The class position of the 0.1% (Vanderbilt heirs, Mars heirs, Koch heirs etc.) matters, but they themselves don't matter much. The bulk of the population are unskilled or semi-skilled labor, and ~10% of the population are in the professional-managerial class.

The efforts and ideology of a highly trained, highly educated, somewhat meritocraticaly placed vanguard matters, they are an existing social force, whereas the 0.1% is totally dependent on others for their position.

> For the important things (health and safety) it's never been a better time to have kids.

Last night I walked into a supermarket and in front they told me to wear a mask because of Covid delta. Then I went to a restaurant and they asked to see my vaccination card. 700,000 dead of Covid in the past 18 months in the US.

For the important things (health and safety) it's never been a better time to have kids!