That's just mainstream media making you feel that way. If your neighbor with kids was a union worker, you'd want them to have a better life and not end up struggling.
>Workers began walking picket lines early Tuesday in a strike over wages and the ports’ use of automation, though some progress was reported in negotiations over a new contract.
Any strike on wages/profit sharing is generally fairly straightforward. The union leaders typically want to make the lives of their members better, and that's good and reasonable. This is simply increasing cogs and decreasing net profit. You'll find me in support of these strikes in the vast majority of cases.
A strike on the use of automation is a direct form of ludditism. It strives to subvert technological advancement simply to preserve archaic jobs. It often leads to total collapses of industries as when the technology overwhelms the leverage labor has (such as the mule-drawn barges being completely destroyed by the railroads), which can cause significant frictional harm that could be avoided if the industry deflates instead of collapses.
The problem here is that strikes over technological advancement have real consequences and costs that are often born by consumers. The example of pre-fab homes being effectively banned in CA because of labor is a wealth transfer, not from businesses, but from home purchasers. Sometimes it's just better for everyone in the long run to abandon inefficient forms of production.
Pretending that organized labor always acts virtuously is naive. Pretending that organized labor always act nefariously is also naive. Anyone who makes support for workers as part of their identity chooses an instinctive ingroup loyalty position in a world full of nuance.
https://apnews.com/article/dockworkers-strike-ports-ila-long...
If all I know how to do is mine coal and there is no realistic way to move to something else and maintain my standard of living, I’m going to support coal, no matter what.
If someone wants to keep their standard of living, via coercion, by striking to keep archaic jobs, I'm going to have mixed feelings, at best, in supporting them.
When solidarity becomes about maintaining a economic status quo more than about what's best for everyone, it's not solidarity, it's system of seniority, which is inherently unjust.
People follow same pattern - they complain among themselves, but not publicly.
France's strikes are things pushed to the extreme. Result is pretty logical - economy lagging behind, wages stagnant since you can't just keep milking everybody and everything forever, reality eventually strikes back. Overpaid unfireable corrupt bureaucrats and so on. People are used to having 10 weeks of paid vacation and will burn half the place down rather than lose any of it. Compare it to neighboring Switzerland where people themselves voted against increasing minimal mandatory paid yearly holidays from 4 to 6 weeks few years back, citing negative consequences for companies and economy. Switzerland looks as it looks exactly due to such values, and so does France accordingly.
The France doesn't have that bright economic future, I am not happy stating it but its inevitable truth of where they are and where they are heading economically. It shouldn't be an example to follow, especially not in US, unless you care only about milking the current situation to the max and long term prosperity is problem for others.
As a result, there is no functional labor party or other power apparatus that promotes or otherwise values in a conceptual or real way, the value of labor
Said another way the United States is what right wing “anarcho capitalists“created it to be - a territory ruled by private corporations for the benefit of shareholders that fully captured the government.
This is why the “worst” thing you could call somebody is a communist. It calls into question the legitimacy of the government and business owner collusion.
Literacy around forms of government and power is so poor, that the only thing people can visualize as an alternative to private-state capitalism is Leninist-Bolshevism as promulgated through the USSR into the PRC under the name “Communism” which, as we have seen, is simply another form of capitalism where the state controls central production instead of central rates and laws which are created by corporations (US model of central planning).
I think the most interesting thing is that promoting ussr as communism helped America as much as it did Russia because Russia was never foundationally Marxist after the 1919 revolution into 1924 moved all of the land into the states, hands and centralized production.
So any notion of realistic labor power distribution went out the window more or less immediately after the bolshevok realized they could not control the population.
They couldn’t have helped capitalist propagandists more of they had tried
Its system is better described as an unhealthy democracy, suffering from a peculiar hybrid of diabetes and mild but persistent dementia. In any case it has multiple centers of corruption and undue influence, including populist movements (such as MAGA and the religious right), special interest groups (the gun lobby, AIPAC) which are quite powerful and not simply appendages of any particular oligarch.
As well as corrective influences (such as its judiciary branches and a reasonably free and diligent press) that keep the system from tipping over. It is also significant that its electoral process, being distributed across 50+ states and territories, actually requires significant effort to corrupt (one can't just grab the steering wheel and overturn results in multiple states at once).
It also has a deep state. It is quite significant that its functionaries get to keep their generally secure and reasonably well-paid jobs, no matter who sits in the Whitehouse, and regardless of which party runs Congress, or which countries the US is at war with pretends to be this year or the next. The key thing about these people is they don't really want control, and they don't have much of an ideology. They just want stability.
And then there are oligarchs, greasing palms and buying up news and social media outlets and so forth. But a straight-up oligarchy it is not.
“Abstract
Each of four theoretical traditions in the study of American politics—which can be characterized as theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy, Economic-Elite Domination, and two types of interest-group pluralism, Majoritarian Pluralism and Biased Pluralism—offers different predictions about which sets of actors have how much influence over public policy: average citizens; economic elites; and organized interest groups, mass-based or business-oriented.
A great deal of empirical research speaks to the policy influence of one or another set of actors, but until recently it has not been possible to test these contrasting theoretical predictions against each other within a single statistical model. We report on an effort to do so, using a unique data set that includes measures of the key variables for 1,779 policy issues.
Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence. The results provide substantial support for theories of Economic-Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism.”
Please provide me with your sources on the “Deep State”
(0) https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...
At the end of the day, I don't think these assessments can be proven or disproven by theoretical models and numerical analysis. It's not like trying to establish the effect of a certain kind of monetary policy. It's more a matter of understanding the basic ideology on which the country runs (even as many aspects of American society do change over time, for example in regard to racial/social tolerance, appetite for foreign intervention, etc).
On top of broad-scale character observation, in terms of what seems to make people really tick (and to make so many of them get so caught up in things like their guns, their pet conspiracy theories, or in their idea of some lost "greatness" that America supposedly once had, in ways that do end up moving the needle on the larger political stage, but which aren't simply the outcome of a coin-op lobbying system, gerrymandering or a muzzled press, i.e. the levers of influence that oligarchs typically work through, though of course they do get to lean on these levers and they do have disproportionate influence).
As to "deep state" -- sorry, no sources and it's an entirely unscientific assessment as well. Plenty of people have written about it though, and their stuff is easy to find also.
I’m sorry. You know what, disregard all that. I keep thinking that reasoning with sources and deep epistemological foundations works - I just need to try hard enough to explain it all! Right!?
lolzzz Then I remember that you can’t reason out of a position you didn’t reason into
Have a great day
I'm guessing they were spooked by the "deep state" reference, and all the alt-right/conspiratorial baggage it seems to imply. Actually, I tend to ignore that community entirely, so I wasn't thinking in terms of their paranoid drivel at all. But rather the far more mundane sense of a "national security establishment" as it used to be called, or "institutional government" in the sense of authors like David Rohde.
Which is why I meant it's something whose existence is perfectly obvious (and hence not needing any kind of source to substantiate) -- every working state has one to some degree. And in the US, that sector is of course very significant. And another indication of the basic (and basically obvious) point I was making that power and corruption in the US are decentralized, and not strongly tilted to any one group or flavor.
Especially not its oligarchs. The US is certainly corrupt and dysfunctional, but it's not banana republic.
So if they thought I was going to indulge them with some kind of predictable alt-right take on the subject, it's only natural for them to be disappointed.
A professional bureaucracy is a hallmark of centrally planned economies - which ALL economies that see property as real eventually turn into
This is invariant of what a system decides to call itself
The US government looks exactly like the CCP and USSR in practice
But news outlets like the BBC did pick up that label, and happily churned out articles with headlines saying "The US is an oligarchy, not a democracy". To make it, you know, easy and intuitive for the regular person to understand.
Which apparently lots of people caught glimpse of, and thought to themselves: "Yup, that's what I've always thought. And now it's proven by science."
Technically the US has been 'downrated' from democracy to anocracy. For a little more depth see [0]. You wouldn't find much about it in US media, which is not unsurprising. (Just as meaningful debate about policy is absent.)
EDIT:
> a reasonably free and diligent press
Corporate ownership has an intense effect on press. The NYT Pitchbot illustrates how this has led NYT into hilarious self-incrimination, with an endless parade of Botshidisms and False Balances, just to brush up a coup leader as a presidents candidate: https://xcancel.com/DougJBalloon
___
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_backsliding_in_the_...