In order to ensure that this thread continues to meet TL standards and follows the proper guidelines, we will be enforcing the rules in the OP more strictly. Be sure to give them a re-read to refresh your memory! The vast majority of you are contributing in a healthy way, keep it up!
NOTE: When providing a source, explain why you feel it is relevant and what purpose it adds to the discussion if it's not obvious. Also take note that unsubstantiated tweets/posts meant only to rekindle old arguments can result in a mod action.
On December 20 2017 03:17 zlefin wrote: ok, checked it out the info on it; so the bill is definitively horrible trash meant to play politics with the tax code and help the rich at the expense of others. shame on the republicans (who are shameless so it won't effect them being willingly evil). too bad we can't imprison them for their poor conduct; we really need better ways to hold politicians accountable.
The problem is that Americans don't like using the system we have to hold politicians accountable. It is a decent system, we just suck
Well they did in 2006 and 2008. The problem is that after 2010 the president kept the country running while congress sat on its hands, which sort of let them dodge the whole being held accountable thing.
On December 20 2017 03:17 zlefin wrote: ok, checked it out the info on it; so the bill is definitively horrible trash meant to play politics with the tax code and help the rich at the expense of others. shame on the republicans (who are shameless so it won't effect them being willingly evil). too bad we can't imprison them for their poor conduct; we really need better ways to hold politicians accountable.
The problem is that Americans don't like using the system we have to hold politicians accountable. It is a decent system, we just suck
Well they did in 2006 and 2008. The problem is that after 2010 the president kept the country running while congress sat on its hands, which sort of let them dodge the whole being held accountable thing.
This is only because we as Americans suck. It was pretty easy to see what was going on and to hold them accountable. Again, we just suck
voting people out of office isn' tadequate accountability for some failures/misdeeds; jail time would be more appropriate, or at least stripping their pensions. but the fact that some americans suck does indeed make it a lot harder to do as well.
The Republican tax bill that the House and Senate are set to pass as soon as Tuesday night would give most Americans a tax cut next year, according to a new analysis. However, it would by far benefit the richest Americans the most. Meanwhile, many lower- and middle-class Americans would have higher taxes a decade from now ... unless a future Congress extends the cuts.
The average household would get a tax cut of $1,610 in 2018, a bump of about 2.2 percent in that average household's income, according to a report released Monday by the Tax Policy Center, a nonpartisan think tank that has been critical of the tax overhaul plan.
However, extremes make averages, and the benefits would be much larger for richer households. A household earning $1 million or more would get an average cut of $69,660, an income bump of 3.3 percent. Compare that to the average household earning $50,000 to $75,000, which would get a tax cut of $870, or 1.6 percent.
Source This is a great tax bill. I plan on being in that 1% come this time next year, so I am all for it. Sorry peasants. Eat cake. /s
So what are the downsides to saving a few hundred/ a thousand bucks? What are going to be the drawbacks here? Perhaps gutting important programs to pay for these small tax breaks?
On December 20 2017 03:17 zlefin wrote: ok, checked it out the info on it; so the bill is definitively horrible trash meant to play politics with the tax code and help the rich at the expense of others. shame on the republicans (who are shameless so it won't effect them being willingly evil). too bad we can't imprison them for their poor conduct; we really need better ways to hold politicians accountable.
The problem is that Americans don't like using the system we have to hold politicians accountable. It is a decent system, we just suck
Well they did in 2006 and 2008. The problem is that after 2010 the president kept the country running while congress sat on its hands, which sort of let them dodge the whole being held accountable thing.
This is only because we as Americans suck. It was pretty easy to see what was going on and to hold them accountable. Again, we just suck
You are not wrong. A pretty smart reporter for NPR once said “Congress is a pretty accurate representation of the population.” It becomes a lot harder to blame Washington when you see it like that.
On December 20 2017 03:17 zlefin wrote: ok, checked it out the info on it; so the bill is definitively horrible trash meant to play politics with the tax code and help the rich at the expense of others. shame on the republicans (who are shameless so it won't effect them being willingly evil). too bad we can't imprison them for their poor conduct; we really need better ways to hold politicians accountable.
The problem is that Americans don't like using the system we have to hold politicians accountable. It is a decent system, we just suck
Well they did in 2006 and 2008. The problem is that after 2010 the president kept the country running while congress sat on its hands, which sort of let them dodge the whole being held accountable thing.
This is only because we as Americans suck. It was pretty easy to see what was going on and to hold them accountable. Again, we just suck
You are not wrong. A pretty smart reporter for NPR once said “Congress is a pretty accurate representation of the population.” It becomes a lot harder to blame Washington when you see it like that.
while thta is true; I still blame washington, cuz i'm a blamer and a critic. also cuz it's their job to see past the stupid. such a nuisance to switch to a gov't form better than democracy, but the republicans are tryin to prove its necessity.
On December 20 2017 03:17 zlefin wrote: ok, checked it out the info on it; so the bill is definitively horrible trash meant to play politics with the tax code and help the rich at the expense of others. shame on the republicans (who are shameless so it won't effect them being willingly evil). too bad we can't imprison them for their poor conduct; we really need better ways to hold politicians accountable.
The problem is that Americans don't like using the system we have to hold politicians accountable. It is a decent system, we just suck
Well they did in 2006 and 2008. The problem is that after 2010 the president kept the country running while congress sat on its hands, which sort of let them dodge the whole being held accountable thing.
This is only because we as Americans suck. It was pretty easy to see what was going on and to hold them accountable. Again, we just suck
You are not wrong. A pretty smart reporter for NPR once said “Congress is a pretty accurate representation of the population.” It becomes a lot harder to blame Washington when you see it like that.
Same with the US president. Pretty accurate representation of the US population.
On December 20 2017 03:17 zlefin wrote: ok, checked it out the info on it; so the bill is definitively horrible trash meant to play politics with the tax code and help the rich at the expense of others. shame on the republicans (who are shameless so it won't effect them being willingly evil). too bad we can't imprison them for their poor conduct; we really need better ways to hold politicians accountable.
The problem is that Americans don't like using the system we have to hold politicians accountable. It is a decent system, we just suck
Well they did in 2006 and 2008. The problem is that after 2010 the president kept the country running while congress sat on its hands, which sort of let them dodge the whole being held accountable thing.
This is only because we as Americans suck. It was pretty easy to see what was going on and to hold them accountable. Again, we just suck
You are not wrong. A pretty smart reporter for NPR once said “Congress is a pretty accurate representation of the population.” It becomes a lot harder to blame Washington when you see it like that.
Same with the US president. Pretty accurate representation of the US population.
The only good thing Trump did was provide overwhelming evidence that we can and will regress. He provided a harsh look at a version of America that folks were not willing to accept existed.
The Republican tax bill that the House and Senate are set to pass as soon as Tuesday night would give most Americans a tax cut next year, according to a new analysis. However, it would by far benefit the richest Americans the most. Meanwhile, many lower- and middle-class Americans would have higher taxes a decade from now ... unless a future Congress extends the cuts.
The average household would get a tax cut of $1,610 in 2018, a bump of about 2.2 percent in that average household's income, according to a report released Monday by the Tax Policy Center, a nonpartisan think tank that has been critical of the tax overhaul plan.
However, extremes make averages, and the benefits would be much larger for richer households. A household earning $1 million or more would get an average cut of $69,660, an income bump of 3.3 percent. Compare that to the average household earning $50,000 to $75,000, which would get a tax cut of $870, or 1.6 percent.
Source This is a great tax bill. I plan on being in that 1% come this time next year, so I am all for it. Sorry peasants. Eat cake. /s
So what are the downsides to saving a few hundred/ a thousand bucks? What are going to be the drawbacks here? Perhaps gutting important programs to pay for these small tax breaks?
because the tax bill is going to be followed shortly there-after by attempts to gut medicaid, medicare, and social security, but only for people who do not currently use them, essentially fucking over young people while letting older people say "fuck you, got mine"
On December 20 2017 03:17 zlefin wrote: ok, checked it out the info on it; so the bill is definitively horrible trash meant to play politics with the tax code and help the rich at the expense of others. shame on the republicans (who are shameless so it won't effect them being willingly evil). too bad we can't imprison them for their poor conduct; we really need better ways to hold politicians accountable.
The problem is that Americans don't like using the system we have to hold politicians accountable. It is a decent system, we just suck
Well they did in 2006 and 2008. The problem is that after 2010 the president kept the country running while congress sat on its hands, which sort of let them dodge the whole being held accountable thing.
This is only because we as Americans suck. It was pretty easy to see what was going on and to hold them accountable. Again, we just suck
You are not wrong. A pretty smart reporter for NPR once said “Congress is a pretty accurate representation of the population.” It becomes a lot harder to blame Washington when you see it like that.
Watch "George Carlin - Maybe it's not the politicians who suck?" on YouTube
Lol, I actually have to agree with Cornel West on something. Fuck.
He uses neoliberals like Bannon/Breitbart uses globalists. The article's a shitshow, but he hits some obvious points.
In short, Coates fetishizes white supremacy. He makes it almighty, magical and unremovable.
Check. But then again, wasn't it obvious that Coates welcomes the 'magical' conceit by explicitly comparing it to an ancestral talisman and glowing amulet that Trump cracked open?
Coates praises Obama as a “deeply moral human being” while remaining silent on the 563 drone strikes, the assassination of US citizens with no trial, the 26,171 bombs dropped on five Muslim-majority countries in 2016 and the 550 Palestinian children killed with US supported planes in 51 days, etc. He calls Obama “one of the greatest presidents in American history,” who for “eight years ... walked on ice and never fell.”
Double check.
It is clear that his narrow racial tribalism and myopic political neoliberalism has no place for keeping track of Wall Street greed, US imperial crimes or black elite indifference to poverty.
Right on narrow racial tribalism, but West's in crazytown chalking it up to Wall Street and US imperialism. 'Black elite indifference to poverty' is a mixed bag, because there are elites that only use it to seek political power, but he's very obsessed with class conflict in his use.
This gross misunderstanding of who Malcolm X was – the greatest prophetic voice against the American Empire – and who Barack Obama is – the first black head of the American Empire – speaks volumes about Coates’ neoliberal view of the world.
Never leave us Cornel West. This shit is too rich.
On December 19 2017 17:50 mozoku wrote: Ehh, that's still not that close to what you said and the article is definitely trying to spin a narrative.
For example, it claims the PKI was openly working within the system and unarmed. And that Suharto "blamed" the coup on a PKI plot. In reality, the PKI was in power to begin with and lost power when a preemptive assassination of some alleged leaders of a suspected coup went badly wrong. That hardly rings of the "innocent victim portrayal in article. Not that that justifies anything on its own.
Here's a recent NYT article that covers the same cables, but with less innuendo.
The US involvement is limited to handing over some lists of known communists to be purged and aiding in media suppression. Not a shining star for the US, but not really an outlier by the standards of the time. I'm less sympathetic to some geopolitics-based justification for immorality in 2017, but the Cold War was a time when there were legitimate survival motives in play.
It's hardly comparable to, say, what the British Empire did--which is the impression you give when you accuse the US of supporting genocide, mass enslavement, and resource exploitation. For one, the US was primarily motivated by self-defense in the Cold War, rather than profit. Second, no enslavement actually happened. Third, Indonesia (voluntarily) welcomed US corporations because it felt the investment would simulate the economy--which it most certainly did. The US didn't show up with an army and enslave/massacre the locals for profit.
Moreover, it's much easier to say the US should have acted more in alignment with its stated principles on 2017 than it was in 1967. Given the uncertainty of the period, I can sympathize with US leaders at the time compromising on principles some to err on the side of keeping its citizens safe. I would expect Indonesians to do the same to Americans if the situation were reversed, and I wouldn't think any less of them for it.
So you're saying you would be ok with a million murdered Americans if it furthered Indonesian economic interests? Are you taking the piss?
There was no legitimate survival interest in this genocide, it was an economic coup, organized and supported by America and the UK, with the aim of stamping out an ideology that they didn't like and the secondary goal getting an infinite supply of cheap labour and cheap natural resources from a country that should be one of the richest in the world. A million people killed, with the full support of the US government. Minimize it all you want, its a disgrace.
Yes, the Cold War was an imperialist plot to exploit poor countries. There was no real threat. How could I forget?
If your argument boils down to the equivalent of sticking your fingers in your ears, I'm going to leave the discussion here.
The cold war was poor countries being used as pawn in a proxy war that no one ever bothered to clean up after. The US made the fate mistake of winning the cold war decisively, so they were the only country left to blame for the state of the middle east and other developing nations.
In the end you jzst outspent the USSR and the people of it paid. It was never a noble cause.
Would i want the USSR to win? Never ever ever ever, but not everything about it was bad, it just got locked into a war it couldn't win if not for m.a.d.. I'm actually frightened about what the US would have done whiteou m.a.d..
I think a lot of the EU had a different opinion when the USSR had half of Berlin and we didn't know shit about what was going on past that. But the US and NATO sort of washed their hands of all of those problems created by winning once the wall fell.
On December 19 2017 17:50 mozoku wrote: Ehh, that's still not that close to what you said and the article is definitely trying to spin a narrative.
For example, it claims the PKI was openly working within the system and unarmed. And that Suharto "blamed" the coup on a PKI plot. In reality, the PKI was in power to begin with and lost power when a preemptive assassination of some alleged leaders of a suspected coup went badly wrong. That hardly rings of the "innocent victim portrayal in article. Not that that justifies anything on its own.
Here's a recent NYT article that covers the same cables, but with less innuendo.
The US involvement is limited to handing over some lists of known communists to be purged and aiding in media suppression. Not a shining star for the US, but not really an outlier by the standards of the time. I'm less sympathetic to some geopolitics-based justification for immorality in 2017, but the Cold War was a time when there were legitimate survival motives in play.
It's hardly comparable to, say, what the British Empire did--which is the impression you give when you accuse the US of supporting genocide, mass enslavement, and resource exploitation. For one, the US was primarily motivated by self-defense in the Cold War, rather than profit. Second, no enslavement actually happened. Third, Indonesia (voluntarily) welcomed US corporations because it felt the investment would simulate the economy--which it most certainly did. The US didn't show up with an army and enslave/massacre the locals for profit.
Moreover, it's much easier to say the US should have acted more in alignment with its stated principles on 2017 than it was in 1967. Given the uncertainty of the period, I can sympathize with US leaders at the time compromising on principles some to err on the side of keeping its citizens safe. I would expect Indonesians to do the same to Americans if the situation were reversed, and I wouldn't think any less of them for it.
So you're saying you would be ok with a million murdered Americans if it furthered Indonesian economic interests? Are you taking the piss?
There was no legitimate survival interest in this genocide, it was an economic coup, organized and supported by America and the UK, with the aim of stamping out an ideology that they didn't like and the secondary goal getting an infinite supply of cheap labour and cheap natural resources from a country that should be one of the richest in the world. A million people killed, with the full support of the US government. Minimize it all you want, its a disgrace.
Yes, the Cold War was an imperialist plot to exploit poor countries. There was no real threat. How could I forget?
That's a strawman if I've ever seen one. Nobody is saying there wasn't a "real threat" + Show Spoiler +
(although, if you care to, please do define that threat. Were they going to invade the US? Take over the world? What is it exactly that was so threatening? Was it the dark ominous music in the background that played on the TV whenever they mentioned the Soviets that was so threatening to you in the 70s or 80s? What was it, exactly? Did you read a textbook that said the Soviets were considered a threat by the US government and then just left your thoughts at accepting that as a fact rather than an assessment from a power that had the distinct interest to picture such a threat? Please, expand on this "real threat")
. It's just the way that this was handled was... less than optimal... in many cases.
On December 20 2017 04:57 Plansix wrote: The cold war was poor countries being used as pawn in a proxy war that no one ever bothered to clean up after. The US made the fate mistake of winning the cold war decisively, so they were the only country left to blame for the state of the middle east and other developing nations.
Haha. Yeah, nobody blames Russia for anything that's happened. Haha. It's just so funny, I can't stop laughing. Come on man, you're just feeling hurt (once again) for being confronted (once again) by the evils of your own nation that you so patriotically support.
The fact that Mao was inspired by the USSR didn't really help their public image either, even if the post-Stalin USSR leadership was somewhat more reasonable.
That's a strawman if I've ever seen one.
Not really, the guy's argument is just super unclear. He called the G30S an "economic coup" and I assumed he meant that the US supported it for imperial reasons (as is the ultra-left reason for anything America does). In that case, what I'm responding to is his literal argument. I don't see any indication in his post that he thought the Soviet Union played a significant role in US decision-making.
He's too busy ranting and repeating himself to write anything clear to enough to understand, let alone thoughtfully respond to. Hence why I said I was leaving the discussion.
On December 20 2017 05:02 Velr wrote: Hey, it was "self defense"...
In the end you jzst outspent the USSR and the people of it paid. It was never a noble cause.
Would i want the USSR to win? Never ever ever ever, but not everything about it was bad, it just got locked into a war it couldn't win if not for m.a.d.. I'm actually frightened about what the US would have done whiteou m.a.d..
For sure one of the really interesting things about the cold war is looking back on it and seeing the difference in sizes between the USSR and the USA military compared to the glossed over simple version, at least for the first part of the cold war.
Like you look at the Cuban Missile crisis and in your head you think it's about the missile positioning between these two equally matched super powers. In reality at the time the US had something like 10x the nuclear missiles which does add an extra context to the events (not that it excuses Russian actions during that time or anything).
EPT
