US Politics Mega-thread - Page 1289

On September 15 2014 04:28 Dapper_Cad wrote:


Regarded by whom? There is an enduring myth that unions killed the British and American auto industries, a myth which is rarely examined. Strange that currently countries with some of the strongest union cultures on the planet (Japan, German, France) also currently build most (and best) of the planets cars.

On September 15 2014 07:35 m4ini wrote:


Fixed that for you.

We're not always happy about those though. Less in regards of the car-industry, but more public transport (like at the moment, traindrivers/pilots making a fuss). Overall though, i think unions in germany differ greatly from what a union in the US would look like, in terms of mentality. In general, union and company try to work together, they both have to make concessions to each other (and they mostly do). To me it feels like a union in the US is actually working against the company.

On September 15 2014 04:28 Dapper_Cad wrote:


Regarded by whom? There is an enduring myth that unions killed the British and American auto industries, a myth which is rarely examined. Strange that currently countries with some of the strongest union cultures on the planet (Japan, German, France) also currently build most of the planets cars.

On September 15 2014 08:33 Danglars wrote:
public employee unions

On September 15 2014 08:00 Livelovedie wrote:

Do you realize how absurd that last line sounds? A group of employees are working against the company that is employing them?

On September 15 2014 08:00 Livelovedie wrote:

Do you realize how absurd that last line sounds? A group of employees are working against the company that is employing them?

it is true that unions can be shortsighted and not act in the interest of the entire structure.

On September 15 2014 08:55 nunez wrote:

i wonder why this subset of the unions is the locus of danglars' union related discontent...

On September 13 2014 06:38 xDaunt wrote:

Upon reflection, my answer is as follows:

I'm not sure that you're asking the right question. It may be that the world would be a better place right now had the US not invaded Iraq in the 90s, but that would be a very temporary thing. From my perspective the problems that we're seeing in the Muslim/Arab world have been a long time coming and were ultimately inevitable. They may have arrived a decade or two earlier as a result of US meddling in the Middle East, but there was no stopping it from happening. Dictatorships are unstable entities, and the popular and underlying social problems were going to surface eventually as the dictatorships fell. On the flip side, I do see some utility in the US imposing international order and stability upon the world by attacking Iraq in the Gulf War. Failure to act would send a bad message around the world.

Fresh from his symbolically important role in helping to expel the Soviet Union from Afghanistan, bin Laden had been eager to play the leading role in protecting his Saudi homeland from Iraqi incursion.

In September 1990, he told Prince Sultan, the Saudi defense minister, that he could muster 100,000 fighters within three months and there would be no need for American or other "non-Muslim troops."

"There are no caves in Kuwait," Prince Sultan said in response. The Saudis much preferred the promise of hundreds of thousands of Western troops made to them by Dick Cheney, then the U.S. defense secretary, to the prospect of thousands of armed jihadists operating within their borders.

This ultimately led to bin Laden's final break with the Saudi elite and turned his organization's attention toward Western enemies, says Adam Mausner, a research associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

After U.S. forces had remained in Saudi Arabia for some years, bin Laden wrote the Saudi king that "it is unconscionable to let the country become an American colony with American soldiers — their filthy feet everywhere."

"The presence of American troops on Saudi soil galvanized the faction of al-Qaida that wanted to focus on the 'far enemy' first," Mausner says. "Al-Qaida really got on the road to 9/11 because of American troops' presence in Saudi Arabia."

On September 15 2014 15:54 IgnE wrote:



What do you think caused the problems that "have been a long time coming and were ultimately inevitable?" And how would you define those problems? Dictatorships may be unstable entities but the Unites States was the one propping up a lot of them, including Saddam.

In December 1992 Osama Bin Laden bombed a hotel in Aden and it was shortly after this bombing, and the first Iraq war, when American troops flooded into Saudi Arabia, that Bin Laden started developing his terrorist aims against the United States, issuing a fatwa to his newly burgeoning terrorist group, al-Qaeda, justifying the deaths of innocents, and later issuing a fatwa imposing a duty on Muslims to liberate Muslim mosques and lands by killing any North Americans who were desecrating them with their presence. 9/11 arguably never would have happened but for HW's war.

On September 15 2014 22:01 oneofthem wrote:
to properly judge his strats on terrorism you'd have to know detailed info about the threats and how they develop. otherwise what do you have to go on besides vague ideas of sun tzu or some such

"The stakes in 1990 and '91 were really rather enormous," says Richard Kohn, a military historian at the University of North Carolina. "Had Saddam Hussein gotten control of the Saudi oil fields, he would have had the world economy by the throat. That was immediately recognized by capitals around the world."

On September 15 2014 13:50 Danglars wrote:
When you wish to leave your psychologist armchair and discuss politics, I'll be waiting. For substantive discussion, you might even check out the links and do a little more wondering on the nature of the issues.

On September 15 2014 22:43 coverpunch wrote:

And the Obama administration isn't talking about the threats because...

Which contrasts with Desert Storm, where the article IgnE just posted had this:

Hours before President Obama announced a new U.S. military offensive against the Islamic State, one of his top counter­terrorism officials testified to Congress that the al-Qaeda offshoot had an estimated 10,000 fighters.

The next day a new assessment arrived from the CIA: The terrorist organization’s ranks had more than doubled in recent months, surging to somewhere between 20,000 and 31,500 fighters across Iraq and Syria.

The enormous discrepancy reflects, in part, significant uncertainty among U.S. intelligence agencies over the dimensions of and danger posed by America’s latest Islamist adversary.

“There is no contain policy for ISIL,” Secretary of State John F. Kerry said this month. “They’re an ambitious, avowed genocidal, territorial-grabbing, Caliphate-desiring, quasi-state within a regular army. And leaving them in some capacity intact anywhere would leave a cancer in place that will ultimately come back to haunt us.”

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, wrote in a recent op-ed that “the threat ISIS poses cannot be overstated.” She went on to describe the group as “the most vicious, well-funded and militant terrorist organization we have ever seen.”

“ISIL’s ability to carry out complex, large-scale attacks in the West is currently limited,” [Nicholas Rasmussen, deputy director of the National Counterterrorism Center] said in testimony before a Senate committee last week. The Yemen-based Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula “remains the al-Qaeda affiliate most likely to attempt trans­national attacks against the United States.”

Sen. Rand Paul wanted to eliminate aid to Israel. Now he doesn’t. He wanted to scrap the Medicare system. Now he’s not sure.

He didn’t like the idea of a border fence — it was expensive, and it reminded him of the Berlin Wall. Now he wants two fences, one behind the other.

And what about same-sex marriage? Paul’s position — such marriages are morally wrong, but Republicans should stop obsessing about them — seems so muddled that an Iowa pastor recently confronted him in frustration.

“With all due respect, that sounds very retreatist of you,” minister Michael Demastus said he told Paul (R-Ky.) after the senator explained his position during a stop in Des Moines.

Paul has built a reputation as a libertarian ideologue, a Washington outsider guided by a rigid devotion to principle.

But his policy vision is, in fact, a work in progress. While he has maintained his core support for cutting spending and protecting Americans’ privacy rights, Paul has shaded, changed or dropped some of the ideas that he espoused as a tea party candidate and in his confrontational early days as a senator.

As the prospect of a 2016 presidential bid looms larger, Paul is making it clear that he did not come to Washington to be a purist like his father, former congressman Ron Paul (R-Tex.).

He came to be a politician, like everybody else.

This transformation carries enormous risk. As Rand Paul seeks to broaden his appeal, he may damage his image as an authentic non-politician who is unafraid to stand up for his beliefs.