peisistratos

Almost all access to the media, access to the Internet and so forth in the US has been consolidated into the control of six corporations: AT&T/Warner, Comcast, Disney, Newscorp, Sony, and ViacomCBS. As control of almost all communication is centralized under the control of entities ultimately controlled by billionaire heirs, the natural reaction of people will be to struggle over what communications comes out of these channels.

The average inflation adjusted hourly wage is below what it was in the early 1970s in the US. All the wealth has gone to the heirs and a handful of people mostly born into the white upper middle class. Channels of communication are shut down. The monopolies I mentioned shut down Usenet and communication became centralized by them and companies like Facebook.

Everyone I have heard whining about the end of the Enlightenment recently is part of this to the manor born type, as well as their bought off stalking horses in relevant communities.

What is happening is a very natural result of what has been happening for decades. As anti-trust laws are not enforced, as the Fairness Doctrine goes away and our media channels consistently advocate oppression of nationalities alongside a newly militarized police, we don't hear of the monopolization of communication or proletarianization and impoverishment of the population or militarization of the police, the end of the Fairness doctrine - we hear the newly centralized lines of communication can't spew out their propaganda without complaint.

> Fiat currencies (that is, currency that has no intrinsic value) has existed for at least 1300 years, if not longer. They are not based on air

If paper currency got bootstrapping 1300 years ago, then why were American and European currencies gold backed half a century ago? Apparently the bootstrapped currency needed to be bootstraped again.

Gold is an ordinary commodity with practical uses (electronics, tooth fillings etc.) Its special qualities that make it a good currency candidate are its durability, portability, uniformity and divisibility. Gold is valuable due to its practical value, but is often exchanged due to its commodity qualities.

> an institution and its ability to maintain its value through whatever means it has available

The means a half century ago was to trade the paper for gold. Now that is implicit. The US stores tons of gold in Fort Knox and elsewhere - why? Obviously it implicitly backs the currency, even if the M1 supply is very large.

As currencies have existed for thousands of years, then I guess it took all that time to bootstrap to a half century ago, where the currency started running on air.

Or -

A few years or decades from now, our post Bretton Woods, post Gold Shock currency system will become untenable and be replaced by something else, as has happened numerous times throughout history, especially when the currency has no inherent value.

The a priori to all of this current hubbub is a large number of people who are not of an upper class or upper middle class white American background, who are not even heard at all.

One example would be Tulsi Gabbard. We do not hear what she says. We hear from a New York Times columnist who went to exclusive prep schools and then to an Ivy League college (where she tried to "cancel" Arab professors by testifying against them that they were antisemitic) before landing her plum role, that Gabbard is an "Assad toadie". After years of throwing mud from her aerie, she herself finally feels some criticism come in, and quits her job in a huff, with ramblings about the end of freedom.

Hillary Clinton not so indirectly implied Gabbard was some sort of stalking horse of Putin's as well. Saturday Night Live joins in. This is all not considering canceling though. It's not, in a sense, the notion that the US should not have military bases all over the world was never out there on the corporate controlled media channels . There's nothing to cancel - that show was never allowed on to start with.

Pushback against this mudslinging is considered canceling though. This is the threat to freedom we hear Sturm and Drang about.

The channels of media out there all blast forth establishment views, benefiting a minority of privileged people. They are born upper and upper middle class, white, and are American if not by birth then by coming to the US. Other voices are excluded. All that is left and that can finally be faintly heard is some criticism of these establishment narratives. That this pushback is causing demonstrations around the country and criticism of the establishment narrative is very distressing for these people.

(A tangential example - in the days after 9/11, the New York Times published excerpts of an Osama bin Laden statement. As the whole world seemed to be pivoting on this dialectic, I tried to find the full statement somewhere. I was unable to. I could not even find it on the net. Perhaps it has surfaced in the past 20 years. It reminds me of the old Irish republican cartoon of an Irishman with a British gag over his mouth representing BBC voice bans etc. When the gag is removed a dove of peace comes out. NATO bombing Serbian press is not considered censorship. Satellite installers jailed for installing al-Manar is not censorship. Privileged people who tried to cancel Arab professors getting criticism is considered censorship.)

In the current dialectic, we have to-the-manor born, white, more or less American establishment types suddenly having to contend with voices who are not necessarily white or American, who went to public schools and grew up middle class or working class or poor, who are finally having their voices heard and who are challenging the establishment hegemony. I know which side I am on.

So your counterpoint is that the call to genocide was one he relayed directly from the president of the USA?

The "I was only following orders" defense did not fly at the Nuremberg trials.

Kissinger's documented order was "anything that flies on anything that moves".

While the Nuremberg trials had a lot of evidence, they never had such direct documentary evidence of a call for genocide like that.

(or is that overblown? Perhaps only for the Cambodians fighting against the CIA backed coup of Lon Nol should shirts be torn in accusations of genocide).

The US tends to play word games to where they never armed the Taliban, Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda in the 1970s and 1980s.

In the same manner its easy to play word games to where after years of screaming headlines about genocide (which I guess does not include the US carpet bombing of Cambodia), as soon as the Khmer Rouge, whatever that is supposed to be, gets pushed out of power in 1979, the US begins aiding the KR in a myriad of ways, including in 1985 when it began somewhat openly, somewhat clandestinely, arming the Khmer Rouge. ( This marks the start of the heavy armament https://www.nytimes.com/1985/04/10/world/u-s-may-help-2-rebe... - note all the denials that any of the arms are going to the KR - later reports showed they indeed were).

It's kind of amusing to watch Americans in hysterics claiming a group is committing genocide, then arming that group for victory in their civil war, then going back to tearing their shirts about this genocide they claim happened. If it happened, then the good old USA armed the KR after all the period it supposedly happened.

Then Nigeria and Bangladesh have a significant advantage over Japan, Germany, France and the UK.

There used to be local record shops and big ones downtown - music distribution has since become pretty automated. There used to be many bookstores around - book distribution has become fairly automated. Gamestop has been closing stores and has been hit by automated distribution in recent years.

I used to buy Hagstrom map books filled with detailed current maps - they were sold in gas stations and bookstores and they even had some of their own stores. Their stores all shut down and their business shrank enormously as map navigation became automated.

There used to be a lot of tour and travel agencies around. They still exist, but are much less prevalent and are scaled down.

In fact, automation of commodity distribution has had a major effect on retail, and consequently commercial real estate.

Insofar as office work - people who work in law tell me the large number of secretaries who shuffled through cabinets full of folders containing records have largely disappeared as record retrieval has been automated. I had data entry jobs many years ago, itself a type of automation - but the jobs I did have disappeared as data distribution has become automated.

I don't know what they are measuring but I have seen the effects of a automation all around. Maybe with the closing of bookstores and record stores and video game stores, they mean the role of a retail clerk has not been much automated, which may be true. But I have seen automation have a large effect on many industries, and then rippling effects onto industries like real estate.

> The Covid-19 pandemic has provoked a wide range of lurid conspiracy theories in countries whose governments are hostile to the United States, notably Russia, China, Iran, and Venezuela... authoritarian regimes have exploited widespread public fear and confusion to generate suspicions about U.S. motives, to stoke hostility toward the United States, and to discredit the U.S. government’s sincerity in combatting the global pandemic.

With Trump tweeting "LIBERATE MICHIGAN" in support of the armed anti-lockdown group who shut down the Michigan statehouse and its lockdown efforts, I think the so-called "authoritarian regimes" have more to "exploit" regarding "the U.S. government's sincerity in combatting this global pandemic" than just "widespread public fear and confusion".

Hong Kong was broken off of China so that the British could push heroin opium on Chinamen. It's a laugh that westerners think they still have some colonial claim at what goes on in Hong Kong, based on their old drug pushing operation.

Hong Kong is a colonial relic, it makes all the sense in the world for China to reintegrate this former imperial outpost now.

The web site this comes from is named for someone who said about Israeld killing of hundreds of children in Gaza bombings "Israel cannot have a proportional response" against the Palestinians.

The 2nd largest company on the Fortune 500 has its executives doing major business with a government that dismembers Washington Post employees in foreign embassies. In fact, US defense contractors were profiting off their slaughter of Yemenis until recently. The attempts to look abroad and decide to find someone to find fault with is risible.

Looking at the examples Delong gave 25 years ago, history has been much kinder to Hobsbawm's bleak vision than Delong's.

> What has happened in the past decade that has so darkened his vision of our human future?

> The past decade has seen good news along a number of important dimensions: The environment is in better shape: the clean-up of the first world continues; the clean-up of the ex-Communist world has begun; and the third world is more aware of environmental degradation. Progress has been made in creating the international climate to guard against ozone depletion and global warming.

"heroic defender of Tientsin during the Boxer Rebellion"

Kind of a deluded notion - 40 years after the US and UK fought the First and Second Opium war to steal Hong Kong and push opium and heroin on the Chinese population, Chinamen rose up and began pushing the imperialists out. The heroes were the Chinese men fighting to push the foreign drug dealers out.

> His work is a criticism of Adam Smith's theories

Marx's work is a continuation of Adam Smith that the subject of inquiry was political economy (not "economics"), that value derived from labor and so on.

Modern establishment economics is a criticism of Adam Smith in that value comes from labor, that the study of the economy is political, etc.

As workers tend to have one goal, to have less of their labor time expropriated, there really isn't a reason to have more than one global union. Walmart has over half a trillion in revenue and over two million workers, and it makes sense a union containing those workers be of that size.

Also, if carpenters work for UPS, should they be in the carpenters union or the Teamsters? Large industrial unions do away with such jurisdictional problems.

> I think every time there is a big peak, or a big valley, some percentage of people are always peddling "but this is different"

When stocks crashed in 1929, it was different. In the US we got the New Deal, which still exists in some form. In Germany we got fascism and then a divided Germany for decades. The 1929 crash had effects felt to this day. The DJIA did not recover its 1929 level (not inflation adjusted) until 1954.

The kings and queens of Europe could point to how things never changed over the past millennia, and moved forward as they always had, until Charles I had his head lopped off in 1649. Then things began changing.

> I attempted to see a specialist for a condition that I had maybe two or three times, I ended up giving up every single time after I was told the wait time is between 3-4 months. I keep my American employer sponsored private insurance and employer determined time off policy.

I am in the US and go to good dentists and doctors, who are out of my insurance network incidentally, and they and the specialists they refer me to can easily have three month waiting times.

Also Sweden has been following the US lead of cuts and privatization since the 1990s, often led by the Social Democrats. It's a great strategy for the idle class - push through public health spending cuts due to costs, then bemoan the inevitable wait times as reason to privatize.

People have been saying the CCP is on its last legs for over 70 years.

> a member of the plot to murder four exiled opposition leaders in a Berlin restaurant in 1992; and the father of Imad Mughniyeh, the Hezbollah commander believed to be responsible for the bombings that killed more than two hundred and fifty Americans in Beirut in 1983. Mughniyeh was assassinated in 2008, purportedly by Israeli agents.

The Iranians killing their enemies is "murder", the Israelis doing the same is "assassination" - OK, got it.

> OP: In the 20th century, a lot of very smart people were Marxists — just no one who was smart about the subjects Marxism involves.

In 40 years, the USSR, whose economy was about the size of Brazil's in 1917, and who waged a civil war and repelled two waves of invasions (the first of which included an invasion by the USA after WWI) - this country under Stalin had enormous economic growth, to where it could repel an invasion by continental Europe, then launch the first satellite, man on space, moon probe and whatnot. For a country that Lenin considered to be in a holding action waiting for revolution in the west. I find that impressive.

The western anti-Marxists went through an array of nonsense in the 20th century - "The End of History", the idea that Keynesian or monetarist or whatever remedies would smooth out the business cycle.

Marx predicted worsening economic crises like in 2000 or 2008, with accompanying unemployment, overproduction and a falling of profits. Lenin predicted an unquenchable and self-destructive drive for imperialism.

Struggle sessions aren't analogous, as they were held against class enemies (out-group). More akin are the self-criticism sessions that Maoist cadre held. Communist cadre criticized themselves. Which, if you want another analogy stretching backward, would be confession in the Roman Catholic church.

Tangentially, struggle sessions only arose to prominence during the Cultural Revolution. The main criticism of class enemies were the Speak Bitterness sessions of the 1940s, where communist cadre would facilitate a village's peasants criticism of its landlords. Despite the notion that communist cadre were instigating violence, most of Mao's letters were to cadre who were taken aback by peasant's (sometimes fatal) violence toward long hated landlords, Japanese collaborators etc.

> Volcker showed that focusing on and killing inflation by raising interest rates, even to extreme levels (briefly up to ~20%), you end both inflation and stagnation.

Another thing jacked up was the unemployment rate - to 11%. Bad for the people doing the work and creating the wealth, good for the heirs receiving dividends from the expropriated surplus time if those who work.

Jacking the interest rate up to ~20% so that unemployment goes to 11% is not a stroke of genius, it's just something no one was politically capable of doing beforehand.

> Meanwhile, the overall job market is fine...

In constant (inflation-adjusted) dollars, according to the US government's Bureau of Labor statistics, current earnings for production, nonsupervisory employees on private non farm payrolls is $23.65, in constant inflation-adjusted 1983 dollars for September 2019.

In February 1973 that was $23.33 an hour. Almost a half century of economic growth, in a good economy, and workers are making only 32 cents more an hour than they did 46 years ago.

If pundits were describing wages in the Soviet Union, this would be called 46 years of stagnation and so forth. Whereas we have someone from the Bill Gates funded corporation Slate telling us "the overall job market is fine" and other niceties.

> You mean other than Bin Laden being there, of course. The Taliban provided shelter to a guy who committed a terrorist attack on the US, and refused to give him up. We would never have gone in otherwise.

The US was involved in large scale operations in the 1970s and 1980s to destabilize the secular Afghan government. The US bankrolled and armed bin Laden, and much of what would become the Taliban, in their jihad against Afghanistan's then secular government.

> gumming up the negotiating process

The negotiation process is the workers trying to keep more of the wealth they themselves create. "Gumming up" is when the people parasitically appropriating surplus labor time from those workers demand more.

> insulating low performing employees at the expense of high performing employees

Who will insulate us from the heirs expropiating dividend profits from high (and low) performing employees? What hubris that the heirs who do not work want those of us who do work in some Hunger Games competition against one another.

> The fact is that Canada spends almost exactly the same percentage of GDP on social welfare as the U.S.

If by spending social welfare you mean transfering taxpayer dollars to big health corporation dividends, then yes, the US and Canada spend about the same amount of GDP on "social welfare".

A famous economist predicted 130 years ago that this would happen.

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