Context_free

> Also "rigged" is just conspiracy language. YOU CAN LITERALLY LOOK UP THE INDEX YOURSELF.

The idea that the government inflation indexes are rigged is conspiracy language. They are talking as if people from conservative think tanks and corporate boards are having the government fix inflation indexes to their way of thinking, or even retroactively setting inflation indexes to their way of thinking ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boskin_Commission ).

About a week after the US invasion of Iraq happened, something which New Yorker editor David Remnick heavily pushed, the magazine ran a 10000+ word hit piece on anti-war critic (and theory of computation Chomsky Normal Form creator) Noam Chomsky

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2003/03/31/the-devils-acc...

To pull one thing from this long article - one of the thousands of petitions Chomsky signed over the years was one regarding a French professor named Robert Faurisson. The piece's author wrote:

"Robert Faurisson was a professor of French literature at the University of Lyon-2, in France, who had been suspended from his teaching duties after a mob of students protested his denials of the Holocaust."

This is correct, but something is left out. Faurisson was threatened with prison as well. In fact he got a suspended prison sentence. Chomsky said at the time people should not be imprisoned for publishing books. The piece's author excluded this information from the reader. "He is against governments imprisoning people for writing books" doesn't have quite the ring of the two paragraphs the author wrote on the topic.

> Perhaps you meant Taipei, the capital?

What is the name of the island Taipei is on?

> A few kilometers away, the Chinese coast was faintly visible from Lin’s boat. He was on the lookout for Chinese sand-dredging ships encroaching on waters controlled by Taiwan.

Right. The mainland is less than 6 miles from Matsu. Taiwan is over 100 miles away. This was something Nixon and Kennedy were arguing about on television in 1960. Taiwan decided it wants control of these islands right up against the mainland, and has been going through contortions to control the coastal zone around them for 70 years. Control which China has never recognized (well Taiwan's position is that the mainland belongs to it too).

> Which lines are going up? the ones the government is most involved in. Which lines are going down? the ones with the least(by comparison) regulated markets.

Aha. So the two Baby Bell descendants own virtually all of the last mile land lines in the US, and who were cheaply sold by the government cell phone wavelength which they also both mostly control - this duopoly which spends an inordinant amount of money on lobbying at the state and federally for regulatory capture is part of the unregulated market. The government regulating exclusive spectrum use for this as part as that lack of regulation.

Your "by comparison" and "most involved" qualifiers are doing a lot of heavy lifting. Corporate America is heavily involved in desiring bailouts, regulatory capture etc. Just witness the corporate talking heads demanding more Reddit Wall Street Bets Gamestop regulation. And these were people long, not short.

The notion that "free market enterprise" wants free markets, a lack of regulatory capture etc. is a fantastic notion. And you will be hard-pressed to find Fortune 500 companies not tightly intertwined with the government, which is something they obviously desire to be by their actions.

Emma Goldman was writing about yellow journalism about prostitution and "the traffic in women" and liberal response to it back in 1910. It's 110 years later and Nicholas Kristof et al. are still publishing the same dreck in the New York Times, absolutely nothing has changed.

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/emma-goldman-the-whi...

You can find the answer here

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tendency_of_the_rate_of_profit...

This is the first thing that came to my mind as well...the current data on falling rentier rates, crises of political economy etc. makes sense in light of that old model.

Reading the New York Times article mentioning women and trafficking reminded me of this old American classic from over a century ago, about the yellow journalists of the day spinning the same stories, sans the modern streaming element https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/emma-goldman-the-whi...

It takes some tricky math to get where military spending is only 12% of federal spending.

First, a soldier wounded in Afghanistan and being treated in a VA hospital would have to have that cost excluded from the budget.

The department of energy dealing with nuclear weapon waste is excluded from that budget.

The office of a foreign US embassy serving as cover for a CIA case officer is excluded from that budget.

Interest on military deficit spending from last year is excluded from that budget.

In fact, add all these things up which don't fall within this theoretical 12% and it comes to hundreds of billions of dollars.

Also if we look at the so-called "self-made" billionaires, Bill Gates went to a fancy prep school where grammar school students had access to a computer in the late 1960s. His great grandfather was a bank president, and he was born with a million dollar trust fund. His mother was on an executive committee with the CEO of IBM.

Zuckerberg went to a high school, current tuition cost of which is over $57000 a year.

Warren Buffett's father was a congressman, his grandparents owned a retail business. Buffet was sent to an Ivy League school.

Beyond this, Kleiner Perkins did not give Jeff Bezos millions in VC back in 1996 because they liked him. He was around then, but they were too. As well as the employees shipping out books then. As well as the employees shipping books out now. Kleiner Perkins gave money then, anticipating the exploitation of Amazon factory (and non-factory) workers now. The company was not built with Bezos as some Atlas figure. It was built by millions from Kleiner Perkins in 1996, and by the exploited people doing the work there every day.

Bezos was given billions for successfully doing this. It does not waive away the expropriation of surplus labor time of those who work there.