The USA backed a military coup that ousted the Haitian government in 1991. The US again backed a military coup that ousted the same president, Aristide, in 2004. The president in the 2004 coup was transferred from the US to Haiti to lead the country.
The US won't let Haiti run itself. So what do Americans do? Complain about how Haitians are taking advantage of their infinite amount of charity. Please.
Ho-hum. The military campaign which lead to these people's deaths was planned by one man. Osama bin Laden, a Saudi plucked from obscurity when the US government began (via ISI) heavily arming him so that he could oust the secular Afghan government and wage a jihad to impose his own vision of an Islamic government. It is some irony that the people in the Pentagon who sent arms to Mr. bin Laden and his cadre would some day have an airliner plow through their building by the anti-imperialist they had empowered.
I guess we'll never see long, mawkish stories in Esquire about the people the US had killed in Afghanistan in the US-backed attempt to oust the secular government and impose the proto-Al Qaeda and proto-Taliban's vision of government. America was gung-ho for bin Laden, when he was killing other secular types. People who "took the other side" on Afghanistan were who were pilloried in the US, beyond the pale, followed by the FBI etc.
Then the US decides to plant military bases all over "Saudi" Arabia. The US refers to the country always with the prefix "Saudi", as if its puppet dictatorship there had a divine right which extended to the country name. Some Arabians, Mr. bin Laden, and some of the fellows who plowed into the aforementioned World Trade Center and Pentagon did not appreciate this foreign military occupation. After all, the US had been arming them for a long time to fight against foreign imperialists setting up their military bases on foreign lands.
I should note that when the US kills civilians with bombs, it accuses the foreign country of having "human shields" around military installations. Well obviously the Pentagon is a military target. By the US standard I just mentioned the World Trade Center is a military target as it had military intelligence and such offices there. So by the US standard, the people who died were "human shields" cast their to die to protect the military intelligence offices in the World Trade Center.
Tired of this mawkish nonsense fifteen years on. The US is who armed this jihadist to fight against secular governments, the US rung his home country with military bases (which in a typical bully/coward way were gone within two years of 9/11 - 9/11 worked, the pitiful helpless giant skulked away in a cowardly manner).
It's kind of like the imperialists of France bombing Syria, then asking for worldwide bereavement, world leaders holding hands and marching through Paris to mourn the fact that some brave Syrian anti-imperialists decided to bomb them back a month later.
I can understand a powerful nation deciding to subjugate weaker nations, but this mawkish mourning about the "victims" of anti-imperialists fighting to regain control of their countries from the imperialist American aggressor is sickening. Americans are who armed this guy to wage jihad on secular imperialism to begin with. Then they decided to ring his country with their military bases.
But the US did "do business" with the Khmer Rouge. The moment the Khmer Rouge fell from power in 1979, the US began fighting for them to keep control of the Cambodian United Nations seat. The US began arming them as well.
This thread is great for watching college educated Americans pontificate with great moral indignation about things they know nothing about (but think they know everything about).
I'm too impatient for negative replies...let me write my own. Let me try to get into the mind of some Phillips Exeter heir who now lives in the Mission and is working for Zynga or something...
Uh...this is "whataboutism". Let me helpfully link that for you - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism . See what the article says? We're talking about what we're always talking about, the crimes of North Korea, the crimes of Russia etc. If you point out things the US did, that's "whataboutism". We can ignore that.
I just love how to the manor born, bloodthirsty white Americans love trying to feel high and mighty about how superior, morally and otherwise, they think they are compared to the rest of the world.
If you're a to the manor born, bloodthirsty white American - downvote this post! Show your moral indignation with me too! Help hide the truth of the crimes of US imperialism in Korea I laid out! See how fast you can get this flagged and to the bottom of the article comments! Move your morally righteous white professional finger to that downvote or flag button! You've got the karma, you've got the moral righteousness on your side, get to it! Listen to Trump - don't be a weakling before the enemies of the United States!
I used to work in IT at an investment bank. We got no overtime, and had to work all hours - 9 hours a day, sometimes starting at 7 AM, weekend work, pages in the middle of the night.
The electricians all left at 5 PM. They belonged to the IBEW and had pension plans, job security with seniority etc. IT used to bitch about how they'd leave at 5 PM when we had to start doing some work. They would have stayed past 5 PM, but the super wealthy bank would have had to pay them (not us) overtime, and they almost never did that.
The other IT people would also moan about how stupid they were compared to us. How stupid are they? They leave at 5 PM, or get overtime if they do, they have job security, they don't have to work all hours or are paid well if they do any how, they had pensions and job security based on seniority. Who were the real fools?
There is more than one scene where Nixon talks about how he wants to get rid of J. Edgar Hoover but can't. In another the Attorney General calls FBI agents "the Gestapo".
It reminded me of another tape - a phone conversation LBJ recorded of him talking to another Attorney General - Robert Kennedy. Kennedy talks about how his subordinate, Hoover, was not only not taking orders from him, but was having agents monitoring, writing reports and spreading disinformation about him ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVHnkIPGC6M ).
Forget the FBI monitoring non-violent political figures like Martin Luther King Jr., or Vietnam peace groups - presidents and their attorney generals began to fear their power.
The Church committee was supposed to fix this, but it was stonewalled in many ways, and by the 1980s we saw the FBI revive these political witchhunts again against groups like CISPES, and even groups run by Catholic nuns concerned about the rapes and killings of Catholic nuns in Central America.
> Don't forget that Egypt and Jordan get foreign Aid, 1.5B$ while Israel gets 3B$
What? Egypt got no "foreign aid" until some post-Nasserite forces in Egypt got together and decided to kow-tow to Israel and the US during the Camp David accords. For Jordan it is pretty much the same thing, from the attacks on Black September on.
The politicians running these countries were bought off to play nice with Israel. This is more or less openly stated in journals like Foreign Affairs. The money to Egypt and Jordan is money being given indirectly to Israel.
What a laugh. A Palestinian in Hebron whose family has been there for thousands of years gets no vote, whereas a Jew from Brooklyn who just got off a plane and steals his land does get a vote in the Knesset. This is a democracy? How deluded do you think we all are?
The language in this is Orwellian. She talks about how new construction is needed and how people are stopping it. Then she points to examples where people are not stopping it, just not letting developers do whatever they want (the dangerous junk developers build near me is insane), then she goes back to saying we need more housing.
No working class housing groups are trying to stop new buildings. They're just asking for the same things groups like these have asked for almost a century.
Article translation: "Hack employee of the Washington Post Co. says wealthy parasite developers and trustafarian transplants should ignore everything long time, mostly working class black people want, they don't matter". Well why not, that's the same message we've been hearing in this election campaign all year.
that is what "more capital equipment exists" means. Its utilization of 87%+ in the late 1960s to below 77% in 2011 is the problem.
> inflation-adjusted hourly compensation has never been higher
The chart you refer to is very obviously NOT inflation adjusted. Adjusted for inflation it was higher in the early 1970s - it has fallen over 45 years.
> making up random facts
I am citing data correctly. You are pointing to charts showing hourly wages are 10 times what they were 50 years ago and saying they are not adjusted for inflation.
Debt is a symptom, not the disease. Excessive debt is a method of not dealing with problems and kicking the can down the road. Of course it makes things ultimately worse, but why do people need to go into debt they can't get out of, and why do people finance loans to people who can't pay them off in the first place? The central problem lay in that direction.
The problem is utilized industrial capacity has been falling for decades. Companies are not employing the invested capital and machinery they already own at anywhere near full capacity. So why invest more?
Even with capital utilization rates falling for decades, there is still overproduction - or underconsumption, depending on the angle. Corporations are flush with cash reserves. Naval Ravikant turned down a $600 million blank check from Chinese investors. Meanwhile wages have been moribund for a long time. Inflation-adjusted hourly wages were higher in the U.S. 45 years ago. Real hourly wages aee lower, yet more capital equipment exists and productivity has risen. It is trying to sell more to people who have less.
The economic report of the president (US) has US industrial capacity utilization rates- over 87% from 1967 to 1969. By 2011 it was below 77%. (table b54 of the economic report of the president 2013).
The facts which Wittes gives are way off. He links to "civil suits against the companies who provide service to ISIS and other bad guys". The civil suit is regarding a Jordanian police officer who shot and killed an American military contractor. Other than this lawsuit, almost nothing is linking the officer to ISIS. If you read the lawsuit, they really have nothing linking this officer to ISIS either, other than a vague statement from a supposedly official ISIS source.
So the link to this military contractor's death to ISIS is very tenuous. This has to be established first, and there is almost nothing to establish it on - he was a Jordanian police officer, not an ISIS militant. Then you have to say Twitter is engaged in running afoul of material support of terrorism laws. These laws generally would mean something along the lines of that in some back office of Twitter, Jack Dorsey was storing up Kalashnikov rifles which he was going to ship to the Taliban in order to assault American bases there.
In 1929, the Republican (!) Secretary of State rolled up all the old World War I spying operations saying "Gentlemen do not read each other's mail". How far the US has fallen in freedom from the day Stimson uttered those words a century ago.
In 2001, George Bush ordered the Air Force to fly along the Chinese border, to purposefully set off China's attack systems. Then, one of the fighter jets rammed into a Chinese pilot, crashing his plane and killing him. Then, the attacking US plane landed without authorization within Chinese territory. The Chinese sent a crew aboard the airplane and the US media and politicians went ballistic about how "the Chinese are spying on our technology!" and demanded the equipment be returned. The plane pilot was given the Distinguished Flying Cross upon his return to ticker tape parades.
Not long after this Bush said "You're either with us or you're with the terrorists". Which country has an us against the world mentality?
> Economic "attacks" are often seen as attacks by nation states, not by individuals
What is TPP but an attack by various nation states against China? The main purpose of the TPP is an economic attack on China (with some benefits thrown in for copyright holders etc.) Governments have been attacking China for the past 2+ centuries, they are not imagining it. General MacArthur was bombing China in the 1950s, causing China to enter the Korean war.
Hugo Chávez has been dead for three years, and the Venezuelan parliament is controlled by right wing parties. Obviously economic problems of today are attributable to someone buried three years ago, not the right wing parties who control the parliament today.
It's interesting how Venezuela's economic problems started with Chávez. How did Chávez come to power? If you look at the history of Venezuela from World War II on, you see a lot of economic problems. Chávez was elected because of the economic mess his predecessor presided over.
Chávez died in the spring of 2013. Oil prices began diving in mid-2014. I don't fully blame the right wing parties which control the Venezuelan parliament for their economic problems - they're dealing with a problem all oil-producing countries are dealing with right now. The plunge in oil prices since mid-2014. For how long is the Washington Post and the right wing parties controlling Venezuela's congress going to blame the three year gone Chávez for Venezuela's economic problems?
The US taxpayer and government funds public research, and the results are given as private profit to publishers. Swartz downloads papers en masse, something he may have had a murky right to do as an MIT fellow. This results in MIT, JStor, and the US government persecuting him. The New Yorker and Larissa Macfarquhar don't look for the darker side of all of this in the government persecutions and taxpayer money for public research privatized by corporations, but in Swartz himself. Conde Nast is just another big corporation (watch the nth generation heir of it in a piece more illuminating than this one - "Born Rich") coming to the defense of another big corporation in the slimy way someone like Larissa Macfarquhar specializes in, although its the New Yorker it's middle-brown, and in a slimy quote subtle unquote way. No articles on the darker side of other big publisher corporations for sure.
The US won't let Haiti run itself. So what do Americans do? Complain about how Haitians are taking advantage of their infinite amount of charity. Please.