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've clearly demonstrated some knowledge on the subject so it is incorrect to characterize me as knowing nothing on it. The crimes of the U.S.government are many and some are morally reprehensible. My question was to icanhackit and it was regarding whether or not it is ever morally wrong to visit a country. I certain icanhackit did not advocate for or do business with the Khmer Rouge. As such your post doesn't really apply to me or to what I wrote.
One could argue that it is wrong to visit the U.S. and I have advocated that people refrain from visiting the U.S. for similar reasons that I advocate that people not visit North Korea. However, the crimes of North Korea seem to be at quite a different level than the U.S.
> However, the crimes of North Korea seem to be at quite a different level than the U.S.
That's debatable. It's all a matter of perspective and the difference here is that the people of NK are the ones that suffer mostly from the crimes of NK whereas the people in the US are definitely not the ones paying for the crimes perpetrated by the US.
This seems to be a recurring thing for communist nations (in so far as they are really communist, but that's another matter entirely), they are very hard on their population.
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.
That article also says the following, indicating that the propagation of this particular mistranslation was even done by Iran itself.
> But the story doesn’t end there. Karim Sadjadpour, an Iranian specialist at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, notes that Iranian government entities began to erect billboards and signs with the “wipe off” phrase in English. Joshua Teitelbaum of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs compiled an interesting collection of photographs of these banners, such as one on the building that houses reserve military forces of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. “Israel should be wiped out of the face of the world,” the sign reads in English."
> 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.
"until some post-Nasserite forces in Egypt got together and decided to kow-tow to Israel and the US during the Camp David accords"
Youre describing the camp david accord as if some jewish cabal took control of the administration of egypt. Egypt simply realized life would be better if it didn't go to war with a formidable enemy every 5 years (that is literally the average from 1948-Yom Kippur War in 1973), and it left the soviet orbit and aligned itself more the US.
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.
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).
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.
My mistake, thanks for the correction. It's still going up.
The claims that wages have not risen are based entirely on cherry-picked data, carefully choosing endpoints, and ignoring non-wage compensation as well as the fact that CPI wildly overstates inflation in the long run [1].
Also, the graph I provided is industrial production, which is going up. You might be right that capacity grew faster than production (cite?), but production has also gone up.
[1] See, e.g. Boskin commission, the lack of hedonic adjustments in healthcare, and the variable basket of goods used in chained CPI which prevents it from actually being a long term inflation measure. (I.e., inflation from 1970->2015 should only include goods invented in 1970, but chained CPI adds new goods yearly in order to accurately measure 1983->1984 inflation.)
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).