peisistratos

> Don't like your boss, get another one.

I look out my window and watch the birds fly by and wonder why a human like me needs a boss, or a "job creator" or some other euphemism.

It's hard for me to comprehend someone so slavishly minded to conceive of a concept like "don't like your boss, get another one". Sometimes I ponder what is going on in the minds of "men" who conceive such a notion, just like I sometimes see a homeless man in the gutter drinking a bottle of wine and wondering what is going through his mind.

As I said, there are limited disclosures, just like the Chinese. In this case meaningless - I ask who owns this and you say "Blackrock" and "Northern Trust" as if you've answered the question. "Northern Trust" is not a who, it is just another layer of "secret ownership" to use the magazine's phraseology. I still have no idea who owns Exxon-Mobil - it is a secret, to use their phrase.

What does "secretly owned" mean?

The #2 company on the Fortune 500 is Exxon-Mobil. Who owns it? There are some limited disclosures in various places, but this is the same as Chinese firms. Exxon-Mobil is "secretly owned". What hypocrisy these western magazines have. Computer Weekly, owned by Reed Elsevier RELX makes a small fortune privatizing publication of publicly funded research. Who is behind that? Who knows? It is as much "secretly owned" as any Chinese company.

> If we agree that poverty is the problem

You must not have read what I wrote. The important thing is the social relationship between those who work and the heirs who don't work and expropriate from those who do.

Also, you mention the US, the average inflation-adjusted hourly wage in the US is below what it was in the early 1970s - that is not progress for people who work.

> so many people want to migrate to the US and so few people want to migrate to Cuba

The migration ratio between the US and Cuba is about what it was a century ago.

> always concentrate to the top

Your imagination is limited, especially considering that there was no class system when people were painting caves in Chauvet, nor was there one for the 20,000 years after then. One class of heirs parasitically expropriating from a class of workers is a new phenomenon for humans, over the long term. Capitalism is even more short lived.

> wealth...their funds

Talk of inanimate things is just an obfuscation of theirs (and yours). There are no signs pointing down from the heavens that some heir owns this or that. It scarcely matters any way.

The heirs who do not work have a social relationship with those of us who do work. We work and create wealth, they expropriate surplus labor time from us - if we are carpenters turning $150 of wood and material into $200 every hour, we keep our created wealth as wages in the beginning of the day, at the end of the day we are working only for the heir. They expropriate all the wealth we create toward the end of the day. The important thing is the labor time and social relationship, not the expropriated product of labor.

> helping...responsible

They have no role in such things. History is replete with revolutions and the overthrow of economic systems. Their role is like the czar and his pretenders in Russia - to receive the bullets and bayonet thrusts of the Bolsheviks who were replacing them.

> If Britain were putting their dissidents and muslims in concentration camps I would be very vocally criticising my own country

The UK did lock up dissidents in a mass internment during the 1970s - in the six counties of north Ireland. The Irish marched through the streets of Derry to protest and 14 (unarmed) men were shot. The queen then proceeded to pin medals on the parachute regiment who fired on the crowd.

Chinese needs no help from the Britains who launched a war to keep selling their opium and heroin to Chinese drug addicts - drug pushers using violence to keep addicts addicted, to "remember their humanity".

Most work for wages. Workers work a few hours a day creating wealth and keeping the wealth they create. The last few hours a day, they keep absolutely none of the wealth they keep - it is expropriated by heirs. It is a social relationship - we work, they live off our labor. They are parasites, and they have little helpers who they give crumbs to and argue their case, including those who tell guileless fools that a magic man who lives in the clouds named Jesus will make sure they never die.

Actually some accounts have a lot of people protesting feeling the opposite - that the "capitalist roaders" had gone too far in laying off state enterprise workers. In other words supporters of what are described as "hardliners" supporting state industry. Obviously the few initial Hu Yaobang commemorators felt differently, but mass movements grow from wider interests. And obviously there was no mass movement as the protest failed.

I have to laugh at recent news reports of students being hassled in China. The students are trying to organize revolutionary unions and want a return to communism and Maoism. It is obvious the same Western newspapers tut-tuting the Maoist students being hassled would be fulminating if they took power and started moving back to the Maoist principles that they are espousing.

The two replies are completely puzzled about what I mean by the US army marching into Los Angeles in 1992, with dozens dead in the wake.

It makes me think of people who are "shocked" that Chinese college students don't know about Beijing in 1989, and they say how the Chinese elite have suppressed events. But I talk about the US army marching into Los Angeles in 1992 and dozens dead in the wake, and it is a complete mystery to multiple people here, they have no idea what I'm talking about.

I said Los Angeles, not Houston.

It was defended at the 1992 RNC as I said - https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/patrickbuchanan199...

In fact the Republicans have this speaker saying an almost word for word echo of what the Chinese minister said.

It sounds like the US government ministers who defended the 1992 crackdown in Los Angeles at the Republican National Convention and elsewhere. The US army marched in to quell the upset, and dozens were killed.

Although we do not hear much about that in the US other than praise of the army. Just endless rehashes of Beijing events before LA happened, in the middle of Trump's trade and South China sea war with China.

> if you are going to flag or downvote please tell me what the article gets factually wrong

Half the articles on the "Weird Republic" web site you link to are bashing a host of various black people and things. Jesse Jackson, Kwanzaa, reparations for slavery, it's just article after article bashing blacks. I don't have time to read this white trash gutter nonsense, I've heard it enough before.

Two comments back you're talking about "white people were specifically being targeted for violence" and on and on racist white trash David Duke like gutter talk. I don't have the time to go out and research the falsity of every little thing. You probably don't even deserve the time I expend for this comment, I'm not going to waste my day seeing why every point of that nonsense anti-black site is wrong.

I am white and I do not look down on blacks who were not even allowed to vote or drink from water fountains in my parent's time. I look down on pathetic white trash who have accomplished nothing and have some sick desire to continue to suppress the black African nation that was kidnapped by the white American nation.

This web site has comments from white billionaires, white millionaires, extraordinary white programmers and such, and ordinary but hard working, hard studying white programmers like me, and we have no desire to waste our time exploring or even exposing the sewer that you and the Weird Republic David Duke people dwell in.

This is basically what I did as well. Worked, went to a nearby good state college at night and on weekends, CS major, no debt. Did as many classes as I could handle per semester. Initially I lived with my parents, but was in my own apartment later on. Worked out for me.

That's correct. If someone wants a vocational program to get a job, they should go to a vocational school or program. I didn't spend four years studying computer science to become a C# or Javascript code monkey.

Aside from that, in class I learned theory and was tested in that (actually we were taught how to program Java too). If I wanted to manifest that theory in an application, the expectation was that I do it in my own time.

I have no desire to see CS programs dragged down to the lowest common denominator because some companies want low-paid Javascript monkeys but require a Bachelors for the position.

> actual data

The data is available from the Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics https://www.bls.gov . The Economist's gloomy figures were right, but are gloomier if pushed back a few years as 1979 was a nadir any how.

> health

The US is off the charts in terms of health costs compared to other industrialized countries, and big business has arranged it so it is the only industrialized country with people not under health coverage.

> 401k

US Workers used to have guaranteed pensions, the 401k was a backward step, not some new benefit

Plus the fact that Google workers have all these things, and some other workers may have some if these things doesn't modify that wages have fallen.

The US has skyrocketing health care compared to everyone else, with some unconvered unlike every other industrialized countries, and guaranteed pensions no longer exist - not great arguments for an improvement.

People are not stupid, they know things are not better, despite think tank commissars trying to present ways that they are.

The article text does not really support the headline

> By last year, the poorest 10% were still earning only a miserly 4.1% more per hour than they did (in real wages) 40 years ago. Median hourly pay for America’s workers was up a little more, by 14%.

With exactly 40 years ago being in the midst of a wage downturn. Go back a little more and real hourly wages have fallen for both groups, despite GDP etc. booming for decades in relation (and out of relation as well) to population growth.

The wealth created by those who work and create wealth goes to the heirs and rentiers in America. The "job creators" who do not work and who parasitically expropriate surplus labor time and the fruits of that time from those if us who do work.

It's hard for me to read this in a US newspaper and square it with the real world. It bemoans race riots and military police in Xinjiang - in China. From the context of the Baltimore race riots three years ago I cast my mind to Xinjiang Muslim radicals within China - right next to the Afghans who American troops and military police patrol 18 years and counting, on the other side of the world. Radicals in Afghanistan who the US had originally armed in the 1970s and 1980s to overthrow the then secular Afghan government incidentally.

Then from Facebook Google and most of the surveillance San Francisco establishment, in lockstep with government PRISM, we look East to see the Chinese doing the same?

Africans in the US, native Americans at the Standing Rock reservation being water cannoned, are no better off than those in Xinjiang. More African men in the US are in the prison system than college.

The demonization of China by Americans for what Americans are doing, with less reason, is silly.

It is like the hypocrisy of telling Venezuelan military to revolt and cheering street protests in Venezuela, then going back to hearings about Russian interference in the US or condemnations of yellow vest protests. Macron praises the destructive protests in Caracas and condemns yellow vests in Paris in the same press conference.

> Those conditions had long since been fixed by the government's factory acts, but Marx couldn't mention that without undermining his central thesis that democratic capitalism was in a death spiral and couldn't improve the workers conditions, so he pretended he was citing contemporary documents

I've heard most of the anti-Marx stories - some invented, some just rumor, a few true. Never heard this one before. Not sure what one of these jibes you are referring to.

Marx traced the history of capitalism in England. Actually in his studies he showed how working conditions had gotten better in some respects. He was writing a history, so of course he referred to "obsolete...long since reports".

You are correct that he predicted capitalism was in a death spiral. Just as he had observed feudalism in a death spiral, and knew about the Roman slave latifundia economy's death spiral before that.

Corporate America going to the taxpayer to bail out "too big to fail" deregulated banks is precisely the kind of thing Marx predicted. Marx said eventually that would lead to the end of capitalism.

Who knows, the amount of carbon poured into the atmosphere increases every year, perhaps capitalism and humanity will both end at the same time before Marx's visions could be realized.

> left wing propaganda rag

I guess we are reading different Guardian's. If I go to the Guardian web site and search for "corbyn", the leader of the Labour party, #1, #2 and #4 are articles implying, or saying, that he is anti-semitic. The Guardian has been bashing Corbyn and the Labour party for years. If the Guardian is "left wing", what is Corbyn and Labour?

Also the left - George Galloway, Dennis Skinner etc., is pro-Brexit and has been for years. Corbyn is probably privately pro-Brexit, but has to stay in the middle of the debate so that the Tom Watson wing of the party doesn't bolt. The Guardian is firmly anti-Brexit other than one-off op-eds once in a while.

Today I see the establishment, mainstream media, Republican moderates and Democratic leadership foaming at the mouth with conspiracies about how Trump is a Russian spy, and how Russia controls US elections and other wild conspiracies.

Meanwhile the "radicals" - Noam Chomsky, Ralph Nader, Glenn Greenwald - as well as diehard Trump MAGA supporters, think all of these Russisn conspiracies are overblown, if they have any basis at all.

In science questioning the mainstream, establishment narrative is what leads to progress. That the establishment stigmatizes those questioning mainstream, establishment political thinking is not surprising. Of course they would be found "in error".

By the end of 1976, virtually all communists were purged from power in the PRC. Mao Zedong had said Deng Xiaoping wanted to take the capitalist road, and when he took power, that's what he did.

> blame the US

The US seized $1 billion from Venezuela, sent the army to the Colombian border, and is calling for the Venezuelan army to revolt.

They are not refusing food aid, the Red Cross etc. have been let on all along. The US announced the Venezuelan government had no sovereignty over their border and sent "aid" trucks in, which were blocked.

Incidentally, "humanitarian aid" is how the person the USA convicted as a criminal - Elliot Abrams - sent weapons to contras in and out of Nicaragua.

Off the coast of Louisiana is the Mad Dog spar oil platform, installed in 2005, which at maximum production is pumping 100,000 barrels of oil a day. Louisiana receives no tax revenue from it.

It says "Against Civilization" is "spreading versions of his message", meaning Kaczynski. But "Against Civilization" was written by John Zerzan, and Zerzan was saying these things before "Industrial Society and Its Future" was published.

In fact, while Kaczynski was more militant, Zerzan is more radical, he sees the problems not starting with industrial capitalism, but with the original agricultural slave empires of the Middle East.

Defining primitivism by Kaczynski is like defining Zionism by Baruch Goldstein, or the anti-abortion cause by Scott Roeder or so forth. Or US patriotism by the torture in Abu Ghraib.

About 9% of Lebanon's parliament is the political party Hezbollah. They have a satellite TV station, Al-Manar. Americans hooking up satellite dishes to be able to watch it have been jailed, like Javed Iqbal.

As far as what the specific question is - what has Apple tried to publish that the US tried to publish, the answer is the same with regards to any of the PRC's giant domestic corporations vis a vis China. None of them tried to publish things blocked by their governments.

It's an odd thing to say amidst Assange's extradition, to bipartisan celebration. Of course they will get him for some technicality, as opposed to the attack on WikiLeaks - China is just less hypocritical about such things.

The chart is incorrect because it does not take into account hundreds of billions in veteran's benefits, nor interest paid on past military spending (and as there is a budget deficit, the current year's military deficit spending will be tacked onto next year's military debt interest).

Not quickly, but immediately - the Compromise of 1877 abandoned reconstruction and handed back power to these people - the Redeemers.

The government and corporate America is winning the war on poverty - in preserving it, as they (somewhat) openly desire to do.

Just read Businessweek or the Wall Street Journal when unemployment falls. This is not seen as a good thing but a bad thing. I can link to dozens of examples if one can't figure out how to Google that.

That this is the case has been known for a long time - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserve_army_of_labour

I (an American) ran into this. Centcom was (is?) doing things like whitewashing the No Gun Ri massacre on Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=No_Gun_Ri&diff=185... .

That IP used to resolve to n-mnstci-142.mnstci.iraq.centcom.mil . In my spare time I add information to Wikipedia, then I am taxed and some propaganda minister in the military, being paid by my taxes, gets rid of what I said and does some Orwellian rewrite if history.

These Chinese efforts seem skin to what the US government has been doing.