MCViewPoint

Opinion from a Libertarian ViewPoint

Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

« Previous Entries
Next Entries »

Exclusive: Russia’s Sergey Glazyev introduces the new global financial system

Posted by M. C. on April 16, 2022

However, sovereign interests of Russia and China logically led to their growing strategic partnership and cooperation, in order to address common threats emanating from Washington. The US tariff war with China and financial sanctions war with Russia validated these concerns and demonstrated the clear and present danger our two countries are facing. 

https://thecradle.co/Article/interviews/9135

By Pepe Escobar

Sergey Glazyev is a man living right in the eye of our current geopolitical and geo-economic hurricane. One of the most influential economists in the world, a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and a former adviser to the Kremlin from 2012 to 2019, for the past three years he has helmed Moscow’s uber strategic portfolio as Minister in Charge of Integration and Macroeconomics of the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU).

Glazyev’s recent intellectual production has been nothing short of transformative, epitomized by his essay Sanctions and Sovereignty and an extensive discussion of the new, emerging geo-economic paradigm in an interview to a Russian business magazine.

In another of his recent essays, Glazyev comments on how “I grew up in Zaporozhye, near which heavy fighting is now taking place in order to destroy the Ukrainian Nazis, who never existed in my small Motherland. I studied at a Ukrainian school and I know Ukrainian literature and language well, which from a scientific point of view is a dialect of Russian. I did not notice anything Russophobic in Ukrainian culture. In the 17 years of my life in Zaporozhye, I have never met a single Banderist.”

Glazyev was gracious to take some time from his packed schedule to provide detailed answers to a first series of questions in what we expect to become a running conversation, especially focused to the Global South. This is his first interview with a foreign publication since the start of Operation Z. Many thanks to Alexey Subottin for the Russian-English translation.

The Cradle: You are at the forefront of a game-changing geo-economic development: the design of a new monetary/financial system via an association between the EAEU and China, bypassing the US dollar, with a draft soon to be concluded. Could you possibly advance some of the features of this system – which is certainly not a Bretton Woods III – but seems to be a clear alternative to the Washington consensus and very close to the necessities of the Global South?

Glazyev: In a bout of Russophobic hysteria, the ruling elite of the United States played its last “trump ace” in the hybrid war against Russia. Having “frozen” Russian foreign exchange reserves in custody accounts of western central banks, financial regulators of the US, EU, and the UK undermined the status of the dollar, euro, and pound as global reserve currencies. This step sharply accelerated the ongoing dismantling of the dollar-based economic world order.

Over a decade ago, my colleagues at the Astana Economic Forum and I proposed to transition to a new global economic system based on a new synthetic trading currency based on an index of currencies of participating countries. Later, we proposed to expand the underlying currency basket by adding around twenty exchange-traded commodities. A monetary unit based on such an expanded basket was mathematically modeled and demonstrated a high degree of resilience and stability.

At around the same time, we proposed to create a wide international coalition of resistance in the hybrid war for global dominance that the financial and power elite of the US unleashed on the countries that remained outside of its control. My book The Last World War: the USA to Move and Lose, published in 2016, scientifically explained the nature of this coming war and argued for its inevitability – a conclusion based on objective laws of long-term economic development. Based on the same objective laws, the book argued the inevitability of the defeat of the old dominant power.

Currently, the US is fighting to maintain its dominance, but just as Britain previously, which provoked two world wars but was unable to keep its empire and its central position in the world due to the obsolescence of its colonial economic system, it is destined to fail.

See the rest here

Be seeing you

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , | Leave a Comment »

You’ve Been Misinformed

Posted by M. C. on April 16, 2022

Let the sunshine in to disinfect the arena. Cast the Demons back into darkness. You go, Elon!

You’ve Been Misinformed

James Howard Kunstler

Isn’t it obvious by now that pervasive dishonesty is the foremost crisis of many crises in Western Civ generally and American life in particular? All our authorities have made themselves false, lying their way into the broad collapse of confidence that drives the nation toward some culminating horror show of strife and loss.

The go-to lever of concerted mind-fuckery has been the term-of-art misinformation, applied especially to things and propositions that are truthful — thereby confounding the public’s ability to discern truth in anything, or to discover how they are being misled in matters of life and death. We’ve allowed the worst in human nature to disgrace ourselves. Satan, Father of Lies, is Western Civ’s paragon of disgrace, and so American life appears more and more Satanic and disgraceful.

All this was epitomized in the operation of Twitter, the cheerful little bluebird of social messaging which evolved in a very few years into an instrument of coercion, punishment, deception, and lying, until it became clear that Twitter’s misinformation was misinformation itself. Half the nation doesn’t believe anything it is told by those in authority and the other half revels in its reckless abuse of authority.

And so, it’s refreshing to see one Elon Musk act to seize control of this Satanic vector of disgrace. Mr. Musk appears motivated to defeat the culture of lying by restoring open debate in the ubiquitous online public arena. It’s a heroic deed. But, you see, it’s not merely Twitter’s management or its biggest shareholders that Mr. Musk is messing with, but malign forces in the US government, which have surreptitiously taken control of Twitter and other social media to work its will on events. If you don’t know that Twitter, Facebook, and Google are proxies serving the US Intel Community, then you have not been paying attention.

Using Twitter to impose that culture of pervasive dishonesty in public chatter is what gave permission for all others to follow the script. Medicine has succeeded completely in disgracing and destroying itself by lying about everything connected to Covid-19, from its origins, to the insanely outlawed treatments for it, to the harmful actions of the vaccines, to the hidden data that might tell us the results of all that lying. Twitter set the tone for that with its censorship policies. Anyone who suggested that lockdowns, masking, remdesivir protocols, and vaccine mandates violated common decency was tossed out of the arena, often with added punishment of losing a career, a professional license, a livelihood, and having to endure the betrayal of colleagues cowed into silence.

Twitter also enabled the suicide of higher education, which has succumbed to a plague of Jacobin craziness that would embarrass the inmates of an old-time locked ward. The failure of authority on campus is cosmic. Can you name a single college president who has raised a voice against such manifest idiocy as men competing in women’s sports, the invention of ersatz fields of study, the re-segregation of dormitories and graduation ceremonies, the shouting down of invited lecturers, the persecution of free-thinking faculty, the kangaroo courts for sex disputes, and a hundred other violations of intellect and decency?

All this coerced insanity has been nurtured by social media’s sly mechanisms for bending narrative into propaganda: their beloved algorithms, all fine-tuned to destroy anything that touches on truth. The result is a country so marinated in falsehood that it can’t construct a coherent consensus of reality, and can’t take coherent actions to avert its own collapse.

See the rest here

Be seeing you

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: , , | Leave a Comment »

The Problem With Public (Government) School Superintendents Is the Same Problem With Jon Stewart, But With the Additional, Lethal Yoke of Bureaucracy

Posted by M. C. on April 16, 2022

It’s become abundantly clear that the people most loudly accusing America of being a bastion of “systemic racism” are either economic ignoramuses, or self-serving cowards. In the case of Jon Stewart, it’s a bit of both.

To whit, the superintendent asked me what I would do to address the disparities. I first replied what I would not do, which is scapegoat “systemic racism.” I then informed him that there is no perfect “solution,” but only trade-offs, and that beyond disparities, the best way to foster and facilitate better opportunities for all individuals of all colors, is to at least start addressing the anti-liberty public policies destroying culture and economy. Ending these policies will at least help to restore liberty-based culture which will necessarily foster and facilitate better opportunities for all individuals, to pursue meaningful, productive lives.

By Jason Peirce

It’s become abundantly clear that the people most loudly accusing America of being a bastion of “systemic racism” are either economic ignoramuses, or self-serving cowards. In the case of Jon Stewart, it’s a bit of both.

Case-in-point is a recent episode of Stewart’s show “The Problem with Jon Stewart.” In the episode, entitled “The Problem with White People,” Stewart joined two of his guests in eagerly condemning a third, Andrew Sullivan, as a racist. Sullivan’s transgression was his mere willingness to question Stewart and the other guests’ assertions that America today is a hotbed of “systemic racism.” Stewart displayed ignorance regarding America’s complicated history with race, as well as the role current economic policies play in destroying the lives of individual Americans of all races. He displayed cowardice by defaulting to the virtue-signaling, mob-appeasing accusation of “racist.” I don’t want to spend too much more time discussing Stewart. That said, there is much to learn from Sullivan’s must-read summary of the episode.

The fact is that the obsession with “systemic racism,” driven by Critical Race Theory (CRT), is pervasive throughout all American institutions, from “woke” corporate America, to the federal government’s alphabet bureaucracies, to academia and public education. Everything driven by CRT only serves to agitate more social conflict, while distracting from the anti-liberty economic policies which demonstrably harm individuals of all races. This problem is arguably most evident at the intersection of CRT and America’s public (government) education system.

This brings us to a meeting I had last summer with the superintendent of my local school district on the Space Coast of Florida, Brevard Public Schools, (BPS). Like many districts across the country, BPS is skirting responsibility for racial disparities in educational outcomes, by blaming “systemic racism.” In BPS’ case, blacks and Hispanics lag behind whites (though it’s interesting to point out BPS’ apparent lack of concern that all races, including whites, lag behind Asians.)

The leadership of BPS suffers the same shortcomings as Jon Stewart. But BPS is a public bureaucracy. All public bureaucracies extend a unilateral power relationship to the people they ostensibly exist to serve, at the people’s expense. Bureaucracies are inherently geared toward self-preservation. Criticize or seek to change the bureaucracy, and the bureaucracy will defend itself by any means it can.

By blaming “systemic racism,” BPS is sacrificing the well-being of students of all colors. For example, the message to white students is, that they’re guilty of “white privilege” and beneficiaries of “systemic racism.” The message to black students is, that they’re helpless victims of oppression, with the chances for a successful life stacked against them, and therefore they must be held to different educational and disciplinary standards (a form of soft bigotry). The effect on society is  destruction of goodwill and greater conflict in communities.

“Systemic racism” is also being used to expand the BPS bureaucracy. For example, the disparities, along with George Floyd’s death, and BLM’s subsequent daily lootings, beatings and burnings of people and cities across the US over the summer and fall of 2020, were used to Trojan Horse-in BPS’ CRT-informed Diversity and Equity (DE) Program. [Sadly, the BPS school board’s conservative members, including the co-founder of the national, conservative, parental rights organization Moms For Liberty, supported “overcoming racism” trainings (school board agenda minutes, page 4) and the creation of the DE program. Yes, there’s many lessons to be learned here, beyond the scope of this article.]

BPS’ new DE director wasted no time in identifying “systemic racism” as the program’s cause du jour:

“(BPS) Leadership is also doing a great job of understanding how systemic racism, biases, how mindsight really helps in driving all of these necessary changes (sic).”

She continued, to refer to Floyd’s death as a catalyst for similar DE programs across the country, even though there was zero evidence Floyd’s death was due to “racism.”

The DE director then declared her dedication to “Antiracism,” which is anything but “anti-racist” (and more just another way to attack capitalism), before expressing her grand-plan to root-out  “unconscious bias” in teachers and administrators:

“One of the things we will be doing within the district is really being more conscious and committed to unconscious bias training. Also, trying to not only create this shared awareness, of not only what biases are, this systemic racism, things of that nature…(sic)”

Beyond the tossed word-salad, the director offered zero evidence to back her claim that disparities are due to “systemic racism.” Nor did she attempt to prove the existence of “unconscious bias” in teachers and administrators.

As to the latter, outside of explicit word or deed, how can anyone truly divine if racism is in another’s heart and head? They can’t, unless they’re a mind-reader.

As to the former, “systemic racism,” those obsessed with it never do provide current evidence of its existence. The simple truth, is disparities do not necessarily prove “systemic racism.” Furthermore, “systemic racism,” requires two things to exist. One, is codified law. The other is mass social acceptance of racism. Neither can be found in America today. (Of course, this is hardly to say that “systemic racism” never existed in the US, or that America’s unfortunate and complicated history regarding race, should not be discussed and analyzed.)

As for how my meeting with BPS’ superintendent came about, over the previous school year, I had reached out via email on numerous occasions, regarding my family’s objections to the racist, CRT-informed material my 6th-grade daughter was bringing home from her elementary school. The superintendent offered an in-person meeting to discuss the matter. I accepted.

For the record, I advocate for freeing the children, and ending compulsory, government education altogether. At the least, full school choice would be a great step in the right direction. So, even though my perspective on education amounts to an existential threat to BPS and the superintendent’s livelihood, I looked forward to the opportunity to meet him on his home field, so to speak, firsthand, to try and wrap my head around his logic (or lack thereof) regarding why he’s comfortable with racist, CRT-based material in BPS.

The meeting unfolded as I thought it would. I provided evidence CRT was in the district. I informed the superintendent that he was presiding over the destruction of children in BPS, and the district itself. Parents of students in BPS were already at war over CRT, the DE program, LGBTQ+ issues, and the effects of covid lockdowns, and mask mandates, for example. Sides were forming. I told the superintendent he had chosen a side against many children and families he’s supposed to work and advocate for. I added that CRT was doing exactly what its proponents designed it do: create conflict to divide, destroy, and ultimately conquer.

The superintendent played both ignorant and cowardly, alternately deflecting, denying, and defending CRT’s existence in the district. He failed to commit to do anything about it. Rather, he circled-the-wagons, attacking all criticism of BPS and of himself. This confirmed firsthand, my concerns that CRT and bureaucracies like BPS pose an existential threat to America.

This is not hyperbole. CRT is a radical, Marxist ideology. Its own proponents liked it to a virus, designed to destroy Western Civilization, starting with the nuclear family. Bureaucracies are inherently inefficient and ultimately unsustainable. Bureaucracies radicalized by CRT, the growing trend across America, are at war with all-things liberty. Simply, liberty, and racist, CRT-driven bureaucracies cannot co-exist. Suffice to say, if liberty doesn’t win – liberty, the rising tide which lifts all boats – every American loses, sooner than later.

To whit, the superintendent asked me what I would do to address the disparities. I first replied what I would not do, which is scapegoat “systemic racism.” I then informed him that there is no perfect “solution,” but only trade-offs, and that beyond disparities, the best way to foster and facilitate better opportunities for all individuals of all colors, is to at least start addressing the anti-liberty public policies destroying culture and economy. Ending these policies will at least help to restore liberty-based culture which will necessarily foster and facilitate better opportunities for all individuals, to pursue meaningful, productive lives.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , , | Leave a Comment »

America’s Exceptional Amnesia (About Those War Criminals…)

Posted by M. C. on April 16, 2022

The question now for U.S. government officials such as Secretary of State Blinken, who has shunned negotiation for months, is this: Why allow the destruction of any more human lives and property in Ukraine before agreeing to sit down and talk? Blinken may believe that dead Ukrainians are a small price to pay for U.S. foreign policy objectives, but the victims would surely disagree, 

https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/americas-exceptional-amnesia-about-those-war-criminals/

by Laurie Calhoun

The top-ranking U.S. diplomat, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, recently denounced Russian president Vladimir Putin as a war criminal, which has resulted in a marked uptick in the usage of that term throughout the media. Putin decided to invade Ukraine in February 2022 and has killed people in the process. That’s what happens when leaders decide to address conflict through the application of military force: people die. The U.S. government has needless to say killed many people in its military interventions abroad, most recently in the Middle East and Africa. Yet Americans are often hesitant to apply the label war criminal even to figures such as George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld, whose Global War on Terror has sowed massive destruction, death, and misery, adversely affecting millions of persons for more than twenty years.

Nor do people generally regard affable Barack Obama as a war criminal, despite the considerable harm to civilians unleashed by his ill-advised war on Libya. “Drone warrior” Obama also undertook a concerted campaign to kill rather than capture terrorist suspects in countries such as Pakistan and Yemen, with which the United States was not at war, and he armed radical Islamist rebel forces in Syria, which exacerbated the conflict already underway, resulting in the deaths of even more civilians. Obama’s material and logistical support for the Saudi war against the Houthis in Yemen gave rise to a full-fledged humanitarian crisis, with disease and starvation ravaging the population.

Moving a bit farther back in time, U.S. citizens and their sympathizers abroad typically do not affix the label war criminal to Bill Clinton either, despite the fact that his 1999 bombing of Kosovo appears to have been motivated in part to distract attention from his domestic scandal at the time. The moment Clinton began dropping bombs on Kosovo, the press, in a show of patriotic solidarity, abruptly switched its attention from the notorious “blue dress” to the war in progress. Throughout his presidency, Clinton not only bombed but also imposed severe sanctions on Iraq, as a result of which hundreds of thousands of civilians died of preventable diseases.

Despite knowing about at least some of the atrocities committed in their name by the U.S. government (torture, summary execution, maiming, the provision of weapons to murderers, sanctions preventing access to medication and food, etc.), many Americans have no difficulty identifying Vladimir Putin as a war criminal while simultaneously withholding that label from their own leaders. Viewed from a broader historical perspective, none of this may seem new. During wartime, much of the populace dutifully parrots pundits and politicians in denouncing the foreign leaders with whom they disagree as criminals, while supporting the military initiatives of their own leaders, no matter what they do. Is the use of the term of derogation war criminal, then, no more than a reflection of the tribe to which one subscribes?

All wars result in avoidable harms to innocent, nonthreatening people: death and maiming, the destruction of property, impoverishment, psychological trauma, and diminished quality of life for those lucky enough to survive. Given these harsh realities, some critics maintain that all war is immoral. But morality and legality are not one and the same, for crimes violate written laws. In the practical world of international politics, what counts as a criminal war has been delineated since 1945 by the Charter of the United Nations, which Putin defied in undertaking military action against Ukraine.

According to the U.N. Charter, to which Russia is a party, any national leader who wishes to initiate a war against another nation must first air his concerns at the United Nations in the form of a war resolution. The only exception admitted by the U.N. Charter is when an armed attack has occurred on the leader’s territory, in which case the people may defend themselves, on analogy to an individual who may defend himself against violent attack by another individual in a legitimate act of self defense. Barring that “self-defense” exception, the instigation of a war by a nation must garner the support of the U.N. Security Council, the permanent members of which have veto power over any substantive resolution. Putin knew, of course, that the United States would veto any Russian resolution for war against Ukraine and so did not bother to go to the United Nations at all.

See the rest here

Be seeing you

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Deflation: Bad for the Government, Good for Producers and Consumers. What’s Not to Like?

Posted by M. C. on April 15, 2022

Deflation is only bad for the government. In a deflationary economy, it cannot tax people indirectly via inflation and it can’t use monetary policy to artificially boost the economy and get votes before there is the inevitable recession. Consumers (mainly the poorer) and entrepreneurs are the ones who benefit from deflation (due to lower prices and larger profit margins, respectively).

https://mises.org/wire/deflation-bad-government-good-producers-and-consumers-whats-not

Andre Marques

Governments lie about the inflation rate and benefits from it, so, it is no surprise when they talk against deflation (for the purpose of this article, assume inflation as a general increase in prices and deflation as the opposite), which would be good for consumers and the economy, but bad for the government. (While Austrian Economists define inflation as an increase in the supply of money, the net effect of inflation is an increase in asset prices, as well as a distortion of the structure of production.)

Prices fall in a scenario where the currency is not inflated and, therefore, there are more sustainable investments and increased productivity. In an economy with little or no government intervention (at least few monetary interventions and few regulations, government spending and taxes), there are more long-term investments (capital investments, for example), which increase the economy’s productivity. In a deflationary economy, the purchasing power of money tends to increase, as there is no monetary inflation by central banks and prices tend to fall. Consumers can purchase more products and services and companies have higher profit margins.

But governments do not like deflation, they are the most indebted entities. Inflation is beneficial to borrowers, as they repay loans in a currency with lower purchasing power than when they took the loan. It is even more beneficial to the government since it can expand the money supply to pay the debt. Furthermore, inflation is good for the government because it creates an apparent economic boom, which will eventually be wiped out by a recession. But, as this can take a few years, the short-term incentive for the incumbents is to take advantage of this instrument.

Two typical arguments given by governments against deflation are as follows:

“Deflation Will Cost Entrepreneurs”

The reasoning behind this statement is that, if prices fall, entrepreneurs will sell products and services at lower prices than the cost to produce them. However, this statement does not hold if we consider the fact that, in a deflationary economy, the currency’s purchasing power tends to increase. So even if entrepreneurs get less money (nominally) than what their products cost, in real terms, they will still make a profit. In addition, the prices of the inputs used in production will also fall in a deflationary economy.

Therefore, with the use of productivity and management of expenses that every company must have, it is possible to sell the products at low prices, but with the same or even higher profit margin than in an inflationary environment. (Note: even if we disregard this gain in purchase power and lower production costs, it would be possible for the entrepreneur to protect himself through future contracts). And, precisely because prices get lower, consumers buy more products and services (without going into debt) and companies profit more due to the reduction in costs that occurs thanks to deflation. This is particularly the case in the technology sector. Computers today are cheaper and much better than they were 30 years ago. Because prices got lower (due to increased productivity), consumers began to buy more, which increased the industry’s profits, which brought more investments and higher productivity.

“Consumers Will Postpone Consumption under Deflation”

The reasoning behind this argument is that if prices are constantly falling, no one will buy the products and services because individuals will always expect prices to go down. This also does not make sense, as there are always products and services that people have to purchase (such as food and medicine). Nobody starves themselves to death or does not purchase medicines because a year later they will be cheaper. 

See the rest here

Be seeing you

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , | Leave a Comment »

Is the Woke Cultural Agenda of Union Leaders Undermining Support For Unions?

Posted by M. C. on April 15, 2022

Is the Woke Cultural Agenda of Union Leaders Undermining Support For Unions?

As national support for unions approaches record levels, interviews reveal: a rarefied form of progressive leadership threatens to dampen their appeal among workers.

Glenn Greenwald and Batya Ungar-Sargon

NOTE FROM GLENN GREENWALD: As is true with all of the Outside Voices freelance articles that we publish here, we edit and fact-check the content to ensure factual accuracy, but our publication of an article or op-ed does not necessarily mean we agree with all or even any of the views expressed by the writer, who is guaranteed editorial freedom here. The objective of our Outside Voices page is to provide a platform for high-quality reporting and analysis that is lacking within the gates of corporate journalism, and to ensure that well-informed, independent reporters and commentators have a platform to be heard.

By Batya Ungar-Sargon

Doug Tansy is living the American Dream. A 44-year-old Native Alaskan, Tansy is an electrician living in Fairbanks in a house he and his wife Kristine own. Kristine has a social work degree, but for 13 years she stayed home to raise their five kids. It was something the couple could afford thanks to Tansy’s wages and benefits, secured by the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. All of Tansy’s union friends have similar stories; those who chose not to have kids traveled the world on the money they earned. 

Tansy started an apprenticeship right out of high school, a decision he calls “one of the best things I ever did for myself.” His high school pushed everyone to go to college, which Tansy did, but to pay for his first year he took a summer job working construction. It provided an instructive contrast with his college courses. “College was certainly challenging, but it didn’t excite me. Construction did. It grabbed me,” Tansy told me. “I was always told ‘find what your hands want to do, and when you do, do it with all your might.’ And I did.”

Tansy now serves as the assistant business manager of the IBEW in Fairbanks and as president of the Fairbanks Central Labor Council, which is sort of like the local chapter of the AFL-CIO. “I consider myself a labor person and that simply means a lot of what we do is focus on the middle class,” Tansy explained. “Putting really great wages into our economy and helping people save up to get ahead, to pay off a house.”

But the union is about more than just securing a middle-class life for working class Americans. Tansy calls it a fraternity. “If I ever have trouble, I can make one phone call and that’s the only call I need to make,” he says. “They will take care of the rest of it and whatever I need will be coming.” And this support system traverses ideological and ethnic divisions. The IBEW in Fairbanks has Republicans, independents, Democrats, progressives, and everything in between. Debates can get testy, especially when social issues like abortion come up in the breakroom. Tansy has also on rare occasions experienced racism. And yet there is a deep bond connecting the members of the IBEW that crosses ideological lines.

This bond is the result of a simple fact: that more unites members of the union than divides them, and that what unites them is sacred. “Having good wages, good benefits, good conditions, and being treated fairly and with dignity in retirement should not be only for Republicans or Democrats or red states or blue states,” Tansy explained. “To me, these are nonpartisan issues that should be for everybody. And that’s how we reach our common ground.”

Tansy’s story is not unique. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Americans who belong to unions in the U.S. make on average 17% more than their non-unionized brothers and sisters, with a median $1,144 in weekly earnings—compared to $958 for those not unionized. It’s not just wages, either. Unions offer apprenticeships and ongoing training, a debt-free career, a pension, and workplace safety and other protections. They give workers a seat at the table and a voice to balance out the power of the businesses they work for, no mean feat at a time when the majority of working-class Americans are living lives of precarity. Working-class wages decoupled from production and stagnated in the late 70s; it’s estimated that over $47 trillion of working- and middle-class wages have been sapped from the bottom 90% of earners and redistributed to the top 1% since then.

So it’s no surprise that approval of labor unions is the highest it’s been since 1965: 68% of Americans told Gallup they approve of unions last year. And yet, despite this fact, Americans aren’t signing up to join unions at record rates. Just the opposite: fewer Americans than ever belong to unions, a scant 6% of Americans working in the private sector. Many believe they are a dying institution in the U.S.

Some cast this as proof of yet another case of working-class conservatives choosing a cultural stand against their economic interests. William Sproule is the Executive Secretary-Treasurer of the Eastern Atlantic States Regional Council of Carpenters and says his union is actively engaged in combating negative stereotypes about unions when recruiting. “In the South and other parts of the country, the Southeast, even some of the middle of the country, you say the word ‘union,’ people have been basically brainwashed to think that there are people like me who are some kind of fat-cat millionaires who are stealing money from their pension funds and all this other stuff, all these bad things they try to present about unions,” Sproule says.

Of course, there are political reasons unions aren’t popular in some corners of the South. Labor has for a century been affiliated with the Democratic Party and remains so. Sproule views the Democrats as much better for organized labor, and though the Carpenters Union will endorse pro-labor Republicans, right now he says it’s important that the Democrats maintain control over government. “The predominant anti-union forces do seem to come from the Republican Party,” Sproule says, citing things like punishing, anti-union “Right to Work” laws. The Carpenters Union advised its members to vote for Joe Biden based on the policies President Trump pursued that were hostile to organized labor—things like deregulations at the National Labor Relations Board and appointments of pro-business judges, among other things. 

For the rest see Glenn Greenwald on Substack

Glenn has a free weekly email

Be seeing you

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: , , | Leave a Comment »

How The U.S. Does ‘Diplomacy’

Posted by M. C. on April 15, 2022

As the New York Herald-Tribune put it in 1857, in the United States “diplomacy is the sewer through which flows the scum and refuse of the political puddle. A man not fit to stay at home is just the man to send abroad.” 

https://www.moonofalabama.org/

The U.S. doesn’t do diplomacy. Every country has its own interests. But the U.S. and its pricks in the State Department insist that its interests must have priority over all others. Any country that disagrees with that will be called out on this or that issue or will even get sanctioned.

March 19 2022: President Xi Jinping Has a Video Call with US President Joe Biden

The two sides exchanged views on the situation in Ukraine.

President Biden expounded on the US position, and expressed readiness for communication with China to prevent the situation from exacerbating.

President Xi pointed out that China does not want to see the situation in Ukraine to come to this. China stands for peace and opposes war. This is embedded in China’s history and culture. China makes a conclusion independently based on the merits of each matter. China advocates upholding international law and universally recognized norms governing international relations. China adheres to the UN Charter and promotes the vision of common, comprehensive, cooperative and sustainable security. These are the major principles that underpin China’s approach to the Ukraine crisis.

March 21 2022: US announces new sanctions on Chinese officials over ‘repressive acts’

The State Department said it would impose visa restrictions on Chinese officials it said are believed to be responsible for “policies or actions aimed at repressing religious and spiritual practitioners, members of ethnic minority groups, dissidents, human rights defenders, journalists, labor organizers, civil society organizers, and peaceful protestors in China and beyond.”

April 11 2022: Ukraine dominates Modi-Biden talks

Mr. Modi, who spoke via videolink to Mr Biden, described the situation in Ukraine as “very worrying” and said he had spoken, several times, with both Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Russian President Vladimir Putin and had not just urged peace, but also direct talks between them. India’s unwillingness to call out Russia by name for its attack on Ukraine has not gone down well in Washington, but U.S. officials have also said that they hoped countries that have relationships with Moscow might leverage them to bring about a resolution to the situation.

April 12 2022: US Monitoring “Rise In Human Rights Abuses” In India: Antony Blinken

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the United States was monitoring what he described as a rise in “human rights abuses” in India by some officials, in a rare direct rebuke by Washington of New Delhi.

“We regularly engage with our Indian partners on these shared values (of human rights) and to that end, we are monitoring some recent concerning developments in India including a rise in human rights abuses by some government, police and prison officials,” Mr Blinken said on Monday in a joint press briefing with US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar and Defense Minister Rajnath Singh.

January 10 2022: Chas Freeman – Diplomacy as an Instrument of Statecraft: A Practicum

What distinguishes diplomats from courtiers, securocrats, and other bureaucrats in a national capital is a reliance on empathy: the ability to see the world through other eyes and to use this insight to induce others to see their interests the way the diplomat wants them to see them. It takes more than a diplomatic passport, position, or title to make someone a “diplomat.” Diplomacy, like other skilled work, requires knowhow gained through training, mentoring, on-the-job experience, and awareness of historical precedents. It is a calling and a role, not a job title.

Yet diplomacy remains at best a proto-profession in the United States, thanks to the uniquely American reliance on the political spoils system to staff even key national security functions. This makes diplomatic appointments to benefit appointees and their political parties rather than the country. It thereby enshrines amateurism and incompetence. As the New York Herald-Tribune put it in 1857, in the United States “diplomacy is the sewer through which flows the scum and refuse of the political puddle. A man not fit to stay at home is just the man to send abroad.” Only one thing has changed about this in the last 165 years. Female campaign donors and celebrities now compete with men for appointments to what they imagine are ambassadorial sinecures in plummy places abroad, leaving seedy and dangerous places to lifers.

Posted by b

Be seeing you

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

Conspiracy and Intrigue: The lives of JFK and King David

Posted by M. C. on April 15, 2022

Conspiracy and Intrigue: The Lives of JFK and King David

By Jim Fedako

An open letter to my fellow Christians

My Fellow Christians –

Reading two books concurrently can lead to a confluence of thought. Take, for instance, the two books I have open, the Bible (specifically 1&2 Samuel and 1 Kings) and Jacob Hornberger’s new volume, An Encounter with Evil: The Abraham Zapruder Story. Both are tales of conspiracy, intrigue, and betrayal. Yet, many of my Christian brothers and sisters can only conceive the first being true. Why is that?

In his book, Hornberger details the sordid history of Kennedy’s assassination – a tale of government actors subverting our federal republic by committing regime change – in a manner that many may pejoratively call conspiracy theory or revisionist history. Yet Hornberger includes sworn statements and irrefutable facts. Simply, he tells the truth.

Many Christians are incredulous when confronted with a non-mainstream history of the US. The belief is our government would not and could not commit purposeful acts of evil. You see, the US is the shining city on the hill, blessed by God, doing good works throughout the world. Of course, the occasional and regretful tragedy has occurred, but all were accidents, the inadvertent mistakes of sinful people trying to do good in a fallen world.

Given this view, it is inconceivable that elements inside government would conspire to assassinate the president. And that others would remain silent and go to their graves with the truth. It just couldn’t happen here. No way. Never.

However, when confronted with the life of David, a man after God’s own heart, all manners of deceit and scheming are accepted as truth. Those three books of Samuel and Kings recount David’s rise to power, reign, and death – a history of vile treachery inside the house of a righteous man.

We, as Christians, do not say, “These tales about David are pure conspiracy theory. They are lies written by those whose agenda is not of God.” No, instead we say, “Do you see the wickedness that can happen to and by a man of God? The scheming, double-crossing, and backstabbing. It never ends.”

Yet, it does end, once the subject is changed to our federal government. However, believing our officials would never commit acts similar to those noted by Hornberger is akin to believing our politicians and bureaucrats stand above David and his house.

Now, I am not saying you must believe Hornberger. I am simply saying you need to read his book, and read it with the life of David in mind. You may not accept Hornberger’s case, but you must accept his facts. And you must accept that what happened in the David’s life could have happen in DC.

Jim Fedako [send him mail] is a business analyst and homeschooling father of seven who lives in the wilds of Sunbury, OH.

Be seeing you

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , | Leave a Comment »

Rafael Riqueni

Posted by M. C. on April 14, 2022

Flamenco Magnifico!

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: , | Leave a Comment »

Obama’s ACTUAL Legacy

Posted by M. C. on April 14, 2022

“The utter gullibility of the public”

Be seeing you

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: , | Leave a Comment »

« Previous Entries
Next Entries »