peisistratos

> pre-war German and Japanese

In the November 1932 elections in Germany, the socialist and communists got 221 Reichstag seats to the Nazis 196. 10 of the KPD's seats gained since the July 1932 election were from the socialists - the Nazis helped radicalize German left workers. On February 20, 1933 the CEOs and board members of Germany's Fortune 500 equivalents pledged millions of Marks to the Nazi party, five months later the Vatican signed the Reichskonkordat with Nazi Germany.

Nothing like that is happening now because there is zero threat from America's working class against the system. It has been losing power with each year, and even college educated professionals have been losing power for decades, something chronicled thirty years ago in "Fear of Falling". There is also no external threat of any historical significance. Fortune 500 boards have no desire to bankroll the efforts of people like Andrew Torba (Y-combinator funded Torba, who did gab.ai, and Paul Graham talks about the genetic intelligence superiority of certain races, but this is not big capital). Trump has been talking about pulling troops home, not about more Lebensraum.

> a command and control society

If peacetime USA 2018 is not an industrialized command and control society, I don't know what is. The difference is all is geared towards the heirs who expropriate surplus labor time, instead of those of us who work and create wealth.

> destroying some of our former industries such as Steel and Automotive - see what's left of former very wealthy Detroit

And what destroyed the textile mills of North and South Carolina, which were barely organized at all? They were and still are the states with the lowest unionization rates in the country.

The difference is Michigan union activists like Larry Page's grandfather sent his son to college, and then his son writes a search engine while doing his doctorate.

Meanwhile, the profits of Carolina textile mills went elsewhere, and the people in those towns are worse off than ever.

Stephen Jay Gould wrote a book about it called "The Mismeasure of Man". You can go to C-SPAN.org and see his 1994 speech on it.

The Brahmin say they are the chosen people, the Jews say they are the chosen people, Presbyterians say they are the elect - it's hard to reason people out of what is essentially a religious belief.

As behavioral modernity was not on display until 40000-50000 years ago, the idea that there is some significant genetic difference in this aspect seems silly.

The problem is that Al Queda and Osama bin Laden are the fruits of American military funding as well. The "chickens coming home to roost" as Obama's former pastor put it.

The US desired to overthrow Afghanistan's secular government in the 1970s and 1980s so it funded and armed Osama bin Laden and various jihadists to launch a terrorist campaign against the Saur government. Bin Laden had the same principles in the 1970s as he did to the end - when the Pakistani high command handed him over to the Americans (read Seymour Hersh or the Urdu Pakistani press on the handover, the US press printed fictious news on his death ).

What angered the Arabs who flew a plane into the Pentagon was imperial acts such as the US military occupation of Arabia. Propping up the Saud dictatorship which is currently supporting massacres in Yemen and slicing up Washington Post journalists in their embassies.

Bin Laden is a creation of US military funding, he does not make a good Boogeyman for more US military funding.

There is a Woody Guthrie song about that town during a strike - "1913 Massacre".

The English speaking West's relationship to China can be seen in a few things in past years. One is the UK leaving Hong Kong in 1997. The British Empire, on which the sun never set and the blood never dried, and which is causing potentially bloody Brexit chaos in Ireland today, went to war with China in 1842 in order to force opium and heroin on its citizens. The US was junior helper in these opium wars. The UK stole Chinese territory and stayed there until 1997, and unbelievable affront of imperialism.

The US can be seen in having the Air Force play hot dog on the Chinese border in April 2001 (the US military was too busy doing that to protect itself from jihadis it had funded and armed in Afghanistan to overthrow Afghanistan's secular government and then betrayed by occupying Arabia - they would strike the US to end that occupation later in 2001). They crashed into a Chinese plane, killing the pilot, then illegally landed on Hainan island without permission. Then the US press and diplomacy became enraged that the Chinese were actually inspecting the plane and were holding these military personnel who killed a Chinese pilot. Then this is followed by human rights lover Trump's recent campaign against China.

It is in this context that the demonization of China by English-speaking Western liberals currently happens in. Liberals who are also attacking and demonizing Nicaragua, Cuba, Venezuela, and who applauded Obama's overthrow of Honduran democracy several years ago with the US funded Honduran military's overthrow of the elected leader. But the US attacks and bombs so many countries, as does the UK, it's hard to keep up with who they have a campaign against from day to day.

> US military spending...provides funding for basic research

Someone has to really have drank the kool-aid to even comprehend that statement, never mind believe it. What does military spending have to do with basic research?

If what you mean is that the US has a convoluted, wasteful system where workers work, get taxed, the money is sent to the Pentagon, and physicists at universities have to write out fantasy-laden grant proposals to DARPA about how their non-military basic research work has military purposes, then yes, "US military spending provides funding for basic research". This really got going in the 1970s, I recall one story of a physicist grant proposal for a basic research study into the theory of relativity being presented as research that would benefit small trajectory changes in rocket launches.

You seem to have a high estimation of the idea of the rest of the world on the leash of imperial America (with the phrase imperial America being apropos for your picture). I suppose American academics doing basic research should also be subjected to domination by the Pentagon, in your view.

Japan has a much less wasteful funding of research with MITI. You don't have scientists wasting time writing bogus grant proposals for basic research being reviewed by people sitting at desks in the Department of Defense.

Here is an article that points to a lot of US government data, and then gives their economic/political interpretation of the data -

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

You can concur with their analysis or not, but the relevant government data is properly referenced.

The New York Times headline could be changed to "William Blunt, U.S. Policy Critic Cited by bin Laden (U.S. erstwhile ally, armed by the CIA to overthrow Afghanistan's secular government), Dies at 85".

Blum covered a lot of the US's Operation Cyclone in Killing Hope - the financing and arming of bin Laden in his jihad against the secular Afghan government in the 1970s and 1980s.

If one thinks the important thing is a dominant position in the relations of production, the effect would be reversed - the tendency to monopoly means more power for the monopoly, means it getting government help. Whether or not there is a "free market", whatever that means, would also be affected by the desires of monopolies.

> negative-decadent" youths that also goes into to who behaves the least "appropriate for society", political ideas and suspect affiliations.

From the (Western) guide:

Skinheads: Enjoy fighting

Rude Boys: Are enthusiastic vandals

Punks: Out to shock through their appearance and behavior, have anarchist leanings

Roots Boys: anti-police

I think there is a correlation, but it could run the other way - the means of production coming more and more into the hands of monopolies might have the result of the government growing as well.

Sounds like the same kind of guides that were being printed in the West https://twitter.com/TurnerMarko/status/1066830331288973314

Communism does not have the pretensions to divinity and supernatural aspects that we see manifested during elections in the USA.

It has a recognition that the forces of production change. That relations of production change, and this base changes superstructure in the society. Hunter gatherer tribes make way for Sumerian and Greek slave empires, make way for feudal Europe, which make way for capitalism and bourgeois republics.

The Paris commune, the Russian revolution, the 1936 Spanish republic etc. are seen in this light as nascent proto-steps toward the next superstructure coming out of changed forces of production and relations of production.

History has already seen four major changes from one system to another, but not by means of divinity. Marx's pointed to contradictions inherent to capitalism. I think the 2008 bailout and crisis would be a sign of the eventual end in Marx's view - US Treasury secretary Hank Paulson said GE CEO Jeff Immelt visited him on September 15, 2008 and said GE was having trouble financing day-to-day operations. Events like that are harbingers of the eventual collapse of the capitalist economic system, in Marx's view. For now, the government and taxpayer bailing out the capitalists and corporations work, in Marx's view, one day it will not work. But the collapses are only part of the collapse, advances had to have happened to shift the system as well. It is not divinity, it is history continuing to be dialectic.

In the three decades Stalin was general secretary, the Soviet Union had enormous economic growth. Russia went from being a backward peasant country ruled by a czar, to being the first country to send a satellite to space. Its success and its example were what was feared. While unemployment was 25% in the US in 1933, the USSR was charging forward, and US and European firms and workers were going there to work.

On Stalin's death, Khrushchev announced economic growth was no longer a priority, and other such policies, and stagnation set in.

China also had enormous economic development under the communist party from 1949 to 1978, and from 1978 to now (although the party took a right turn under Deng Xiaoping in 1978, to where some question if China was socialist after then).

The average inflation-adjusted hourly wage in the US is below what it was 45 years ago, leading to anti free trade Trump and Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez. Also Corbyn, Syriza, Brexit, ping-pong from Lula to Bolsonaro, TARP bank bailouts plus the carbon externalities destroying the planet.

Of course, I don't think a traditional Marxist worldwide communist revolution of factory workers led by Leninist parties will happen.

The present economic system might be eradicated though. It has not been all that long since European kings were having their heads chopped off or were being bayoneted to death in basements.

If you look at that first report of increased family income, also in the referenced Pew report it says 59% of sons make as much or more then their fathers, which means 41% are doing worse. So 4 of every 10 sons does worse than his father in this time of economic growth.

Two more factors come into play. US working class stagnation started in the early 1970s and got going in the 1980s. The study starts in 1968, which means some of the growth pointed to for the children is actually what is kept from late 1960s and early 1970s growth, not now. If the study had started five years later, the results would look worse.

Also the politically influenced Boskin commission revised historical inflation estimates in the mid 1990s, also making things look rosier. If you believe, as I do, that inflation estimates were correct in 1996 and that Boskin was wrong, then things look bleaker in that light as well.

Although 4 in 10 sons doing worse than their fathers (from the Pew report he cites) is bleak enough.

> possible overstatement of inflation

This has been the drum beat for well over two decades. Conservatives revised CPI and CPI markers to their liking in the mid 1990s with the Boskin commission. Yet if you look at inflation over the past two decades and see idle class heirs enriched and the workers creating the wealth stagnant, it's back to the old inflation-is-overstated argument. I mean, Trump is saying it this week in criticizing the Fed chair.

An odd counterpart to German conservative bankers, who seem more obsessed with low inflation and currency stability.