Marxism-Leninism
78 karma · joined December 4, 2020
John P. O'Neill of the FBI headed that investigation and he left the FBI and was head of WTC security on the day of the attack. He told people he thought he expected another attempt.
By the logic of that tweet, the CIA was hiding behind and deliberately using the civilians working in the WTC complex as human shields to hide from the Saudi 9/11 militants looking to remove US military bases from Saudi Arabia.
Then the Soviet Union launched Sputnik. Then they put a dog in space. Then they put a man in space. And the narrative changed.
Yitzhak Segev, once the Israeli military governor of Gaza, funded Ahmed Yassin and encouraged antagonism in him against secular Palestinian political forces.
It's funny for Israel to fund the founding of Hamas, encourage Muslim religious antagonism against more internationally appealing secular Palestinian figures, and then turn around and whinge about the people that they bankrolled. Hamas was bankrolled by Israel and its no secret.
Working people around the world know this and stand in support of Ahmad Sa'adat and other Palestinians to live free of the barbarism and tyranny Zionism is inflicting on them right now.
I guess that's why top performing movie stars, NBA basketball players etc. have their wages depressed?
Maybe companies lowballing salaries, or being in secret, illegal cartels to drive down salaries of high earners like that lawsuit showing Eric Schmidt and Steve Jobs did, can depress wages too?
> Negotiation is an extremely important skill in life
Yes, which is why companies have scores of lawyers, HR personnel etc. to draw up IP assignment agreements etc. In fact the company has people who specialize solely on negotiating salaries. Your advice is for workers to shun working in concert with their fellow workers since they're so high performing, and walk into this phalanx arrayed against them solo. You also advise someone spending the time to become a top performer to spend their spare time becoming better negotiators, in order to get over on the team of negotiating specialists they will be facing.
"The west" was severely outgunned by the west - the largest political party in France in 1948 was PCF, the communist/socialist alliance in Italy almost won that year. Finland remained outside the eastern bloc simply because it was no longer seen as being part of a threat. In the UK the Labour party which tossed out Churchill while he was in Potsdam was busy nationalizing the commanding heights of England's means of production (although they were not as militant as their comrades on the continent of course).
The west was busy trying to hold onto the West, never mind intervening in Prague.
On February 21st, 1948, the non-communist ministers handed in resignations, without any pressure from the communist party. You left that part out. On February 25th the resignations were accepted. This was not a "coup" - they lost the elections in 1946 and decided to abandon the government in a failed power play. Also, as you note, the president of Czechoslovakia in the 1930s, Benes, a non-communist, presided over this.
The militias committed no violence, took over no buildings or the like and were not involved in the cabinet. The majority of Czechs did not find factory workers being armed to defend themselves to be as threatening as you apparently do.
If you really want to see elections being fixed, look at the fixing of the elections in Italy in the same year against the communist/socialist coalition.
But that which is true of scientific academies is also true of all constituent and legislative assemblies, even those chosen by universal suffrage. In the latter case they may renew their composition, it is true, but this does not prevent the formation in a few years' time of a body of politicans, privileged in fact though not in law, who, devoting themselves exclusively to the direction of the public affairs of a country, finally form a sort of political aristocracy or oligarchy. Witness the United States of America and Switzerland.
Consequently, no external legislation and no authority - one, for that matter, being inseparable from the other, and both tending to the servitude of society and the degradation of the legislators themsleves.
Does it follow that I reject all authority? Far from me such a thought. In the matter of boots, I refer to the authority of the bootmaker; concerning houses, canals, or railroads, I consult that of the architect or the engineer. For such or such special knowledge I apply to such or such a savant. But I allow neither the bootmaker nor the architect nor savant to impose his authority upon me. I listen to them freely and with all the respect merited by their intelligence, their character, their knowledge, reserving always my incontestable right of criticism and censure. I do not content myself with consulting a single authority in any special branch; I consult several; I compare their opinions, and choose that which seems to me the soundest. But I recognise no infallible authority, even in special questions; consequently, whatever respect I may have for the honesty and the sincerity of such or such individual, I have no absolute faith in any person. Such a faith would be fatal to my reason, to my liberty, and even to the success of my undertakings; it would immediately transform me into a stupid slave, an instrument of the will and interests of others." - Mikhail Bakunin, 1870
Of course I have been hearing the same thing at various times about Cubans, Venezuelans, Russians, Palestinians, Iraqis, Syrians, Iranians, Libyans - Blinken just denounced the arrests of those involved in the post-coup massacre in Bolivia. And on and on. This piece is an example of the drive for ever expanding imperial policy under an authoritarian government.
https://www.aei.org/articles/counterpoint-unions-are-irrelev...
"A one-size-fits-all union-type compensation contract with pay determined mostly by seniority and not merit is no longer desirable or relevant for the workers of the 21st century."
At the sermon on the mount, Jesus said "you are the salt of the earth". A literal take would be Jesus was saying the listeners were salt. You can be subjective and think this is a metaphor, but allowing for metaphors in the bible puts an end to literalism.
What scripture? As Bart Ehrman has written in his books condensing scholarly tomes for the layman, there are many scriptures, and we don't have the originals. The Comma Johanneum being the clearest passage that there is a trinity is not found in the Greek until the 15th century. Mark thought to be the earliest gospel, it ends without a clear resurrection from the earliest manuscripts - a resurrection was tacked on later. The story of the adulteress Jesus refused to condemn is not found in the earliest scriptures. And on and on. Much of contemporary scripture were things invented centuries after the events recorded.
What killed off the textile mill manufacturing in North Carolina, a state with the lowest (tied with South Carolina) unionization in the country?
The difference is unionized factory workers in the 1930s in Michigan sent their children to college, like Larry Page's auto worker grandfather. Non-unionized North Carolina textile workers could not afford college, and their children worked at textile mills until they closed down, and their grandchildren are in worse shape than they were.
One question is - what has improved under capitalism? That children don't have to go to dangerous, Dickensian factories is one improvement. Between labor agitation and capitalists realizing a literate population was more profitable, this changed in industrialized countries.
Neighbors denouncing their black, Mexican, LGBTQ what have you neighbors. Then other neighbors denouncing the denouncers - this latter part seems to be where you start having a problem with it.
Incidentally, the US government surveils its citizen's phone calls etc. far more than the DDR under Honecker ever did.
Do those laborers include the Nicaraguans (or Americans like Ben Linder) who were massacred by the Contras Mondale advocated funding for so that they could overthrow Nicaragua's democratically elected government?
Insofar as how long it goes on, if you look at US WWI propaganda they were talking about German soldiers massacring babies in Belgium (the killing babies lie is a common one - from incubators to Assad gassing babies)
Oops! That was the US Air force 13 years ago, bombing a couple hundred kilometers southwest of Xinjiang, in a bordering country ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wech_Baghtu_wedding_party_ai... ).
It's illustrative how Americans get up in arms about how the Chinese dealing with Muslim terrorists in their own country deal with human rights, while they have flown across the world to perform massacres in the country on Xinjiang's western border.
I'm sure many other organizations would love the power to force people into their subscriptions. And I'm sure their high ranking officials would come up with incredibly good reasons as to why they are absolutely essential to social justice or whatever.
English economist David Ricardo made a similar statement in the early 19th century. The example he used was Portuguese wine being traded for English cloth. He said both countries benefited from their specializations - England producing cloth, Portugal producing wine. Ricardo's work is a foundation for a modern view of comparative advantage and free trade.
English economist Joan Robinson revisited this example over a century later. She asked what the results over the past century were for the economies of England and Portugal in pursuing this course - one country industrializing to build textile mills, one country remaining more agricultural with much less industrialization. I'm sure I don't have to tell you what she found in that investigation, the answer is obvious.
The invasion of western Europe happened in 1940 from the east and then in 1944 from the west. This talk of "invasion of western Europe" is ahistorical. In 1956 the communists had 103 seats in the French parliament, the next largest party - the socialists - had 95. The US interventions in Italy's 1948 election exceeded Russian interference in Czechoslovakia in 1948 (the events of which were precipitated by the February resignation of the opposition from the ministry). Up until 1976 the communist party won over one third of the vote in Italy.
This notion of a united "West" fearing an invasion from the east is popular in some quarters, but is not what was the reality in Western Europe, and few western Europeans of the time had this view.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-tyne-30224841
Meanwhile when China deals with Muslim terrorism within its own borders there's calls of "genocide" (I suppose something akin to England's genocide in Bengal during World War II, or in Ireland in the 19th century etc.)
Perplexing to see westerners who go to the other side of the world to bomb weddings in Afghanistan get into a Calvinist/liberal "moral" froth about China confronting (mostly non-violently) Muslim terrorism within its own borders, slightly west of the where the west has been occupying for two decades.