And what was Russia the year before Putin became head of it? It's not like corruption came in with Putin. Most Russians I know think Putin has lowered the amount of corruption, and I agree. Russia was so corrupt it was barely functioning under Yeltsin. You're correct there is significant corruption in the government, but amazingly there was even more corruption before Putin came in.
> eternal dream of Russia as a global hegemon on par with the United States
Russia's GDP is one eighth of the US's. It's ratio was even lower back in 1917. Who thinks this? Not even Zhirinovsky thinks this is realistic.
> The Russian state has assassinated journalists
Then you link to a list of journalists killed by persons in Russia. Where's the link?
Who killed Chauncey Bailey in the US in 2007? Who killed Dona St. Plite? Who killed Manuel de Dios Unanue? Scores of journalists in the US have been killed who did not agree with the government foreign policy on Haiti, on Vietnam etc.
> and jailed political opponents with impunity
How about Manning? They want to extradite Snowden. Lynne Stewart is in jail. American jails are filled with political opponents. Oh, they broke the law? Well that's what they say in Russia too.
> You'd have two classes of citizens: the workers and those who are effectively parasites off the workers
You already have that, it's called workers, and the heirs who don't work and live like parasites off workers. Paris Hilton, the Rockefellers etc. - look at the Forbes 400, the list is chock full of them. Oh wait, they're "job creators", right? I'm supposed to be grateful they are parasites living off my labor.
I am a skilled worker who creates wealth. Part of the wealth I create is sent off to these parasite heirs who have never worked a day in their life. Just like money used to go to kings and whatnot. These parasites have all kind of lackeys to spit out nonsense about why they were born with the right to live high on the hog off of my labor. I'm sure the czars of Russia had people arguing about how God had appointed them head of Russia up until they were put in front of a Bolshevik firing squad.
The parasites are in power now. They live off the labor of workers like me. They're about to start bombing Syria, trying to wipe out the last remnants of the old Nasserite pan-Arab socialism. If you look at history through the centuries though, you realize parasites who are the de jure heads of things, that drift further and further from production, sooner or later get bumped off by those with de facto control over production. It has happened so many times through history it is probably the only historical constant.
So many "entrepreneurs" and whatnot here. A lot of BS artists. You're groveling nothings, begging VCs for the chance to have limited partners expropriate labor value from the workers you want to hire. So turn around, tell me how these limited partners and heirs and parasites who have not had anyone in their family work for generations deserve to expropriate my labor. Tell me how I have an "attitude problem" which might prevent me from "succeeding", although it's pretty transparent to try to give that kind of advice to someone you know absolutely nothing about. Blah blah. Go get on your knees and beg the VC limited partners for money. You people are really a shining vision of the future.
>lower income households cant afford to pay extra for top-notch service...several people will e-mail, or tweet, or come into the comments to say theyd be happy to pay 25 percent more for their Big Mac or their Wal-Mart goods...However, there are people for whom the McDonald's Dollar Menu is a bit of a splurge, and Wal-Marts prices mean an extra pair of shoes for the kids. Those people might theoretically favor high wages, but they do not act on those beliefs... I dont know how much more they could afford to pay before they started to lose customers
Higher in the piece, she includes an infographic which says Wal-Mart makes $7,428 profit for every employee it has. It also says Wal-Mart has a profit margin of 3.5% to Costco's 1.7%.
It seems that the only method that occurs to her where the workers can get higher wages is by raising prices.
Let us consider Christy Walton, who is worth over $27 billion. She is worth $27 billion because the son of Sam Walton used to plow her pussy. Since an heir blew his load into her hole, she collects a sizable portion of the $6 billion a year Wal-Mart sends out in dividends.
She's a parasite. She is a receptacle for the jism of an heir. Workers bust their ass at Wal-Mart all day, and create wealth. She laid on her back for an heir, so she gets to parasitically expropriate the surplus labor value of the workers creating wealth at Wal-Mart. They work but don't get paid - the dividends from the hours they work, the wealth they create are sent to her. She is as useless as the Romanovs were in the moments before the bullets from a Bolshevik firing squad tore them to shreds. She has no connection to production except as a leech, no connection to the workers creating wealth and stocking Wal-Mart shelves except as a parasite.
THIS is reality. There is all kinds of bullshit, all kinds of nicey-nice little Goebbels commissar intellectual whore lackeys like McArdle around, scribbling for their pay and their masters why the parasites like Christy Walton should live so well, and why those doing all the work should be paid so little.
While they would like to blot out people's remembrance of history, two centuries ago, capitalist's had almost no power. Their champion, Napoleon, was about to be exiled to Saint Helena as the Bourbon Restoration took hold, and the last vestige of capitalist power on continental Europe was about to be stamped out. By the time several decades later capitalists became coming into power, they were almost immediately hit with the Paris Commune, and then the October Revolution.
Every power always tries to make it sound as if they have the Blessing of God, that they were around forever, will be around forever, are all powerful etc. The fact is that the powers that be having to write out screeds on how Wal-Mart workers should be paid less is a sign of a degenerating system.
In the early 1960s, American intellectuals, writers etc. had a brighter idea of the future. They wanted to improve STEM in schools, fund things like the MIT AI lab and SAIL, catch up and beat the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in the Space Race etc. Now they spent their time propounding how they can't make it any more, and have to shake the last pennies out of Wal-Mart workers pockets because they don't know how to make sustainable profits any more. And one of their biggest problems according to former GE CEO Jack Welch is overproduction/underconsumption. Yet their solution is to strip consumers of dollars, and send it to these heirs, who then have nowhere to invest in. It's an inherent contradiction within the economic system, just like feudalism and slavery and hunter-gather societies all had their own internal contradictions which ultimately destroyed them and led to new forms of production.
> The conspiracy buffs are too busy howling in protest at the thought that their government could uncover how long they spent on the phone with their dear aunt. Let me break this to you gently. The government is not interested in your conversations with your aunt, unless, of course, she is a key terrorist leader.
Let me break this to you gently. The president of the United States would never send burglars into the opposing political parties national headquarters to ransack the place and conduct espionage, in addition to many other covert and illegal actions, in an attempt to force the next presidental election his way. If the FBI and press began uncovering this, he would never abuse executive powers to strongarm the FBI, have congressmen of the same party attack television media licenses of the media companies reporting this etc. Oh yaa, this actually did happen. Within my lifetime.
It's good to hear the CIA can be trusted. In the 1980s, Congress banned the US from sending money to terrorists who were fighting to overthrow the elected government of Nicaragua. Terrorists who killed Americans like Ben Linder. Oliver North joined the National Security Council and began secretly funding these terrorists in violation of Congressional mandate. When it became public he was doing this and Congress began investigating, North testified CIA director William Casey shred all documents pertaining to his illegal activity, so that Congress could not find out what had happened.
The average American has no idea what it means when it leaks out that fibre optic beam splitters are making records of our conversations and data connections, or how something like XKeyscore work. We have a better idea of what is actually happening in this respect, which is why we have some extra concern. And a more realistic view of what is happening, despite what this former-CIA Rand Corp. apparatchik says.
> But capitalism works based not just on what you can produce, but what you can withhold. It's a "tragedy of the commons" problem: if anyone can hit a "clone chair" button for zero cost, few would pay to sustain enough professional chair makers.
You contradict yourself once here. You say capitalism is based on what can be withheld. Another word for that might be scarcity. In 1932 Lionel Robbins said "Economics is the science which studies human behaviour as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses." This is still the modern mainstram definition of capitalism.
Then you say:
> if anyone can hit a 'clone chair' button for zero cost, few would pay to sustain enough professional chair makers
The idea that value comes from the labor of chair makers is a Marxist idea. You are making a Marxist argument here. It also contradicts your first argument. You say value comes from scarcity (modern mainstream economists agree), then you say value comes from labor (which is what Marx said) which contradicts the first argument.
You're trying to make a Marxist argument for capitalism (Actually Marx did make an argument for capitalism - he said it was better than feudalism and slavery, but that's not what I mean here).
You should go on the web and read about the subjective theory of value, and then about the labor theory of value. You argue STV in the first sentence and then LTV in the second. They can not both be right, their definition of value is contradictory.
I should note you're not the first person I see making this error. As things become digital they lose their scarcity. I see all kinds of odd statements come out of this. You're not alone in this. But across the entire political spectrum, from far left to far right, all serious students of the economy agree only one side can be right, value comes from either subjective marginal/scarce/utility reasons or from a certain type of labor, but it is either one or the other. You flip back and forth between a capitalist-supporting argument and a Marxist argument. A Marxist argument for capitalism. I see this more and more, and I find it odd.
A century and a half ago, Karl Marx said the only force outside of nature which could create value was labor. This was not a new concept, but in line with what economists before such as Adam Smith had thought.
A counter-argument arose from what he may have called the "capitalist hegemons" that value arose through supply and demand and marginal utility. That if there was enough demand for something, prices would rise and a supply would come into being.
Yet nowadays these hegemons seem to be saying something different. There is a demand for IT talent. There are billions of people in the world, so it seems obvious that if you set hours at 40 a week and then raise the salary enough, eventually the demand will be filled.
The bottom line is they don't want to raise the salary.
It is possible other factors are in the way. If, to take one example, Pell Grants were higher and easier to get, maybe there would be more CS graduates. The opposite is happening with Pell Grants - they have been cut back, and are covering less college costs than they have in history.
This means less CS graduates. This means you'll have to pay more for the ones who come out, because less are coming out.
It's a strange contradictory thinking. Employers preach supply and demand, yet think it does not apply to their desire for engineers. Set hours at 40 a week and pay for them. If you want people to work more, you'll have to pay more.
There is not a shortage of engineers. There's just a flood of people who want a very accomplished, knowledgeable engineer, and want them to work on boring, brain-dead projects for 60 hours a week, and to pay them nothing and treat them like junk.
I have 10,000 jobs open right now. I need experts in Java, Python etc. I'll pay you minimum wage. You need to work 12 hours a day. See, I just added 10,000 new job openings to the shortage. How come I can't find anyone to fill these jobs?
Several years ago I was at a company and we were hiring for a position. One guy came in, who was maybe in his mid-50s. His technical skills were excellent, he could answer any question thrown at him in detail. Aside from that he was a normal, genial guy with a solid resume - we has passed on another guy with good tech knowledge but who did not act normal. I was desperate to have the position filled as people had quit and I was handling a large load.
Two managers said they didn't want to hire him. I really protested this - we had interviewed so many people and had finally found someone decent. I said he was perfect, what more could they want, what was wrong with him? I asked that last question repeatedly. Finally one said, "I think if we called him up in the middle of the night to fix a problem, he would be unhappy with that". Months later we hired a guy in his 20s, who had less technical talent.
That's the position companies are in. They pass over perfect candidates like this guy in his 50s, and then bemoan they can't find candidates.
These companies fund think tanks who have economists who tell us that value is determined by supply and demand, that if there is enough demand for something, the price for it will rise until a supply comes about. This is their philosophy, yet now they're saying there is a shortage of engineers. It is total BS. Engineers are being overworked and underpaid. People talk about high engineer salaries, they don't talk about how engineers have to pay for their own college degrees, do all that studying, then go to work, make a starting salary, then have death marches on projects etc.
Engineers are usually undercompensated for the work they do. The only exceptions to this are during tech bubbles (say 1999), but those only last for a short while. They're also made up for on the other side by tech slumps, where IT workers employable during normal times, but perhaps without a college degree, are out of work.
First world problems...right now the US is arming Syrian rebels so more Syrians can get blown to bits. You're surprised that the culture perpetrating atrocities around the world like that would also hurt the feelings of some upper middle class white "creative type"? Let me break out my violin. What happened, you opened up the window of your ivory tower and didn't like what wafted in? Take off your rose-colored glasses and take a look around you.
> It is little surprise then that Western liberals no longer breed above replacement rates. Denigrating motherhood is not the way for a people to last the aeons of time. I believe the future of the West is profoundly more conservative than the present, because Darwin. Liberalism is a suicidal ideology.
It doesn't really work like that. India has over 1 billion people, and I'm sure "traditional" lower caste women there "breed above replacement rates" as you put it.
On the other side you might have an upper middle class, white, historically mainline Protestant couple living in the US. Both have a sibling, both have advanced degrees, both have parents who went to college. Their families have slowly been acquiring wealth for generations. The couple will have two "replacement rate" kids.
On the other hand, the lower caste Indian woman has more than one child die in infancy. The family does not always have enough food to eat every day.
Yet in your mind, the Indian family is a winner because of "Darwin", because the western liberals have a "suicidal ideology". But who would doubt the upper middle class American son would not want to trade places with the Indian kid, and there's a much more significant chance that the Indian kid would trade places with the white kid.
You seem to see some "contempt" and a "misogynist" tone in the parent which I do not. You're advocating a way of life and morality and such that belongs to history, and to rural farmers in that history. The US is losing its industrial jobs never mind its agricultural jobs. Traditional life in the US is Michael Moore's "Roger & Me" vision of 1950s blue collar unionized industrial workers driving their cars back to the suburbs. A way of life going away with Detroit's bankruptcy. Your vision of women only raising kids, and more than two as you say, is not traditional, it's almost ancient tradition. It's like, Pennsylvania farmers circa late 17th century. The Amish and Mennonites in Pennyslvania live like you're talking. But most of America considers it rather antiquated.
I'm an American, and my e-mails, text messages, phone calls, and I guess even this post I am making right now is being eavesdropped on by the NSA. Snowden informed me of this.
The fourth Amendment to the Constitution is: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
When I was young, there was a president named Richard Nixon. It's probable he sent a bunch of burglars to the Democratic National Committee campaign headquarters at the Watergate hotel to do some espionage to try to fix the election his way. It's known he tried to illegally cover up this break-in - there's an audio tape of him doing this. He also was involved in a more extensive and illegal effort to fix the election and eavesdrop and conduct espionage on his political opponents. Later revelations showed the FBI was going beyond its mandate as well, sometimes to the ignorance of the Congress (such as an FBI-run political campaign against Martin Luther King Jr.) This happened in my lifetime, so fears of such things are not out of place. The tyrannical English king acted the same way in the 18th century, it's probably why fresh in the founding fathers midns they put such things in the Constitution.
Chomsky praises Snowden, and opposes bureaucratic attacks on the fourth amendment consitutional rights of Americans. For this you call him "un-American". Supporting the fourth amendment constitutional rights of innocent Americans to not have their fourth amendment rights violated is anti-American?
Here is what Chomsky says about the charge of "anti-American":
Chomsky: The concept "anti-American" is an interesting one. The counterpart is used only in totalitarian states or military dictatorships, something I wrote about many years ago (see my book Letters from Lexington). Thus, in the old Soviet Union, dissidents were condemned as "anti-Soviet." That's a natural usage among people with deeply rooted totalitarian instincts, which identify state policy with the society, the people, the culture. In contrast, people with even the slightest concept of democracy treat such notions with ridicule and contempt. Suppose someone in Italy who criticizes Italian state policy were condemned as "anti-Italian." It would be regarded as too ridiculous even to merit laughter. Maybe under Mussolini, but surely not otherwise.
Actually the concept has earlier origins. It was used in the Bible by King Ahab, the epitome of evil, to condemn those who sought justice as "anti-Israel" ("ocher Yisrael," in the original Hebrew, roughly "hater of Israel," or "disturber of Israel"). His specific target was Elijah.
It's interesting to see the tradition in which the people you refer to choose to place themselves. The idea of leaving America because one opposes state policy is another reflection of deep totalitarian commitments. Solzhenitsyn, for example, was forced to leave Russia, against his will, by people with beliefs very much like those you are quoting.
> you can't train people to be stars
Just like you can't train people to be star athletes. Except you can. Star athletes get free college tuition. Star college athletes get sent to training camps and minor leagues where they get paid and are trained on their game so they can make it to the professionals. They go through training there as well.
A tuition free university, University of Helsinki, is what Linux came out of. Free CS classes. A star was trained there.
The mentality of "you can't train stars" is bogus...it's more "we don't want to invest anything and want everything handed to us free and easy, and if we don't get it that way we'll complain about a shortage of stars"
It's great that it's been deduced that organizer labor is behind this article, and thus it's not neutral and has a hidden agenda. I'm sure someone who takes a 6% stake of high-growth companies for $14,000 is completely neutral with no hidden agenda. Also it's false that "none of these programmers are unionized". Programmers are represented by unions such as the IAMAW, CWA etc. It's possible 3 person startups have no union representation, but that's not out of the norm.
During the twentieth century, US economists promoting the values of those controlling production talked about how production was fundamentally controlled by laws of supply and demand, and economic theories thinking otherwise were silly.
Yet flying in the face of that is this idea of a "high tech worker shortage". If there really could be a shortage of high tech workers for longer than a short period, than the bedrock idea of supply and demand are bogus. Even miniscule hurdles like visas would mean nothing - if there is a mass of talent in India and a worldwide demand for that talent, then if visas were a problem, multinationals and trans-continental consulting firms would just set up there.
There is no high-tech worker shortage. There's a bunch of "idea guys" sitting around who think how much money they could make if they could hire a bunch of rock-star programmers on the cheap.
> Relying on Neumanns Behemoth, which depicted modern capitalism as Nazisms main basis, they argued that the revitalization of German democracy depended on a socialist overhaul of the countrys economy, failing to anticipate the possibility of a fresh recalibration of capitalism with liberal democracy, along the lines that emerged after the war in the Federal Republic of Germany...
Huh? First off, Germany was divided in two after WWII, something almost no one anticipated. There was no German renewal because there was no Germany.
As far as the FRG being capitalism with liberal democracy...capitalism - the FRG was dominated by works councils, Mitbestimmungsgesetz and the like since World War II, and to some extent still is. How the economy worked in the FRG after World War II is closer to how it worked in Yugoslavia than how it worked in the United States. Although even in the US how the US economy ran under the New Deal/Square Deal/Great Society into the 1960s is different than how it is now.
As far as liberal democracy...the FRG reinstated the Nazi ban on voting for the communist party...some democracy - you're OK, as long as you vote for a pro-capitalist party. This was a time when French and Italian workers almost voted in communist governments, something American's today tend to forget. The FRG's federal Intelligence service was run by Reinhard Gehlen and his crew, the Confederation of German Employers' Associations and Confederation of German Employers' Association were run by former SS officer Hanns-Martin Schleyer (later kidnapped and killed by the Red Army Faction). Not all that much changed in western Germany after 1945.
> In a 2001 story, the New York Times reported that there were 23,068 reported pickpocketing incidents in the city in 1990, amounting to nearly $10 million in losses. Five years later, the number of reported incidents had fallen by half, and by the turn of the millennium, there were less than 5,000. Today, the NYPD doesn't even maintain individual numbers on pickpocketing.
NYPD crime statistics become more and more bogus every year. Just Google "NYPD statistics" and read the articles which pop up on the front page. Every mayor and police chief wants to point to statistics showing that crime is falling, and promotions and such are all related to statistics looking good, so naturally enough, the statistics are being fudged all over the place.
There may be more or less pickpockets now than in decades past, but NYPD statistics are nothing to go by.
> what professionalism means. It's less about the neckties and watercooler politics he imagines and more about treating your peers with basic respect and human dignity
What planet did you just descend from? And what are these "peers" that exist in our profession? In my profession I have a team lead who doles out work, with a manager over him, with a manager over him and so on. The basic structure is no different than that of a dictatorship.
What's this "basic respect and human dignity" you find in your corporation which you can't find on lkml? Steve Ballmer throwing a chair across the room when a developer says he's leaving because he is going to "fucking kill Google?" Who are we to look to for these examples of professionalism and basic respect and human dignity - Steve Jobs? Larry Ellison?
Who is the one with the vivid imagination? I hope you never have to keep the network and desktops of a Wall Street trading floor running.
Back in 1999, when VC was handed out like candy and blockbuster IPOs happened every day and companies were desperate to hire even middling IT workers, I suppose a veneer of theoretical collegiality seemed to hang over dot-com's for a moment. When 2000 and 2001 rolled around, and a lord of the flies atmosphere appeared at these same startups, it was a different story.
> [Sarah Lacy] said the BART strike exacerbated what she sees as a philosophical divide in the Bay Area. People in the tech industry feel like life is a meritocracy. You work really hard, you build something and you create something, which is sort of directly opposite to unions.
I'm a programmer in the tech industry, and I feel that life is an aristocracy - we the workers, whether being at our desks 10 PM on a Saturday, or doing a night shift on BART are the ones building and creating something. The money goes to the heirs - the VC limited partners, the rentiers who get dividend checks from Apple, Microsoft, Qualcomm etc. They do not work, they create nothing, they're parasites off of us who do work.
It's the emperor has no clothes. VC limited partner heirs who've never worked a day in their life hand her a big, fat check. Then she claims the BART workers out on the job at 11 PM, being hassled by crazies are not hard workers. Shuttling people back and forth to where they need to go, they're not part of the wealth creation process apparently.
Up is down, black is white. It's amazing what these parasites and their myrmidons like Lacy spew out. People who do work are accused of not working hard enough, by those who never do any work and their paid lackeys. Saying workers don't work is hegemonically acceptable and normal, saying it's nuts like I am is radical. Too non-normative. What a load of bullshit.
If technically Poland was under Soviet occupation, then technically Italy was under US occupation.
There's much more of a case for Italy being a US satellite state than Poland being and independent state under foreign occupation. There was no independent Poland in the century before World War I. Only the two decades of upheaval between World War I and II allowed for some Polish independence.
US troops occupied Italy and are still in Italy today. Not that those who ran the US economy disapproved of what Mussolini had been doing. As Fortune magazine memorably said in 1934: "The wops are unwopping themselves". Plenty of US investor money went to Italy, and Mussolini even had some support in US liberal circles. Then World War II happens. Northern Italy, which the fascists had to work to keep down, mostly liberated itself in the days and weeks before Allied troops even arrived there. Then in 1948 the US very openly rigged elections so the Christian Democrats would win. Gladio was set up as a secret government in case the left was voted to power. As late as 1976, Italian voters voted 34.4% for the communists, 9.6% for the socialists (who still had the hammer and sickle emblem), 1.5% for the ultra-left Proletarian Democracy etc. Secret P2 lodges pulled strings at high levels, strategia della tensione was put into effect with bombings by the far right blamed on the left, with leads back to the highest levels of government. US intelligence had a massive involvement in Italy. It was no less a "satellite state" than any eastern European country.
Hungary was called a satellite state of the USSR even though it had had an independent communist revolution after World War I, put down by foreign intervention. Hungary was independent of the USSR until 1956, when the right took over and announced its desire to join NATO. England and France were invading Egypt around this time.
One must remember that pre-colonization India, say, the Mughal empire, included not only India, but modern Pakistan and Bangladesh of course. Not a central point, but an important one.
In the Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith goes on about "the mercantile company which oppresses and domineers in the East Indies". Acts of Parliament in 1700 and 1720 forbid import of fabric from India. Later on, England began forcing English textiles in India itself with various laws. England purposefully destroyed the thriving textile market of India (again India being India/Pakistan/Bangladesh in the time before and during the British occupation).
Yes, a VC is looking to unshackle the middle class, thank you! Someone is looking out for the US middle class, Scott Kupor, managing partner Andreessen Horowitz apparently.
Barf. Who is dumb enough to swallow this? Sounds like an echo of Bill O'Reilly's "I look out for the little guy".
You tend to hear this term "middle class" from on high a lot, as it means absolutely nothing. What is the middle class in the middle of? Apparently people with income of $200k or over, or assets of $1 million+ are not middle class in his definition. Excluding worth of primary residence of course, which he neglected to mention. I guess this means doctors are not middle class. They must be in the upper class - a doctor is in the same class as Alice Walton, who inherited $26 billion. What is the dividing line between the middle class and the class under it? What class are janitors in, middle, lower? Class used to mean ones relation to production, but that doesn't fit into the kind of babble people like to put out.
To the big point of why this is nonsense. If you look at the Survey of Consumer Finances done by the Federal Reserve, that 4% of Americans he speaks of are the ones who hold the majority of stocks, the majority of bonds and whatnot. Just look through one of these Federal Reserve papers and you'll see that, other than primary residences, this top 4% own almost everything. Outside of primary residences, the next 5% to 20% swallow up pretty much everything the top 4% does not get. Which is not much, relatively. The bottom 80% have virtually no wealth outside of primary residences.
The idea that the median American will benefit from investing in VC is ludicrous. The median American does not have the money to invest and benefit from this. Stocks, dividends and profits are a weapon against the median American. They are dependent on the stock owners, the small top minority, getting the lion's share of the wealth created by the median American. If American workers had strong unions and most of the created wealth in corporations went to wages, not dividends, this would hurt the owners of stocks. The weaker the median American is in this equation, the better the stock does. The median American is all about wages, the crumbs of VC he might pick up are almost nothing. He has no money to invest, so even if his shares go up 20% a year, it amounts to very little.
Obviously, this is yet another thing to benefit the very wealthy. But to sell it, people have to say it's for the middle class. Whereas the middle class, whatever that means, is actually hurt when the wealth they create at companies goes to profit and not wages. It is coming out of their pockets - they create the wealth, then it goes out to heirs like Alice Walton in the form of dividends. Or payments to limited partners from VC. And the like.
And what was Russia the year before Putin became head of it? It's not like corruption came in with Putin. Most Russians I know think Putin has lowered the amount of corruption, and I agree. Russia was so corrupt it was barely functioning under Yeltsin. You're correct there is significant corruption in the government, but amazingly there was even more corruption before Putin came in.
> eternal dream of Russia as a global hegemon on par with the United States
Russia's GDP is one eighth of the US's. It's ratio was even lower back in 1917. Who thinks this? Not even Zhirinovsky thinks this is realistic.
> The Russian state has assassinated journalists
Then you link to a list of journalists killed by persons in Russia. Where's the link?
Who killed Chauncey Bailey in the US in 2007? Who killed Dona St. Plite? Who killed Manuel de Dios Unanue? Scores of journalists in the US have been killed who did not agree with the government foreign policy on Haiti, on Vietnam etc.
> and jailed political opponents with impunity
How about Manning? They want to extradite Snowden. Lynne Stewart is in jail. American jails are filled with political opponents. Oh, they broke the law? Well that's what they say in Russia too.