I'm Certainly Not A Hamas Supporter, But The Idea That Israel Has Ever Been Interested In Working Towards

Exactly. A civics professor I had in college had a lot of fun telling us how one of the most hated occupational groups in America ended up running everything.

As for why people believe that politicians get paid so much, I think the answer is related to the ignorance of the mechanism behind "corruption", as stated above. We read about politicians accepting absurd amounts of money from corporate interests and assume that it is a function of greed and desire for personal enrichment (which it certainly sometimes is), rather than a desire to fund re-election.

Conservatives also have an interest in portraying politicians as decadent and wasteful with the average person's tax dollars, so that also contributes.

Economic competition has also intensified to the point where shitty work conditions can happen without any real interference or conscious directions from the higher ups; all you need is the misery that comes from trying to adjust to constant, rapid technological change, the pyschological pressures of marketing in the digital age, and managing customer satisfaction in an era of instant gratification. More than ever, your boss is probably just as miserable as you, if not even worse off, which leads to a perverse kind of vertical solidarity where people identify more with their superiors than with their counterparts in different industries.

This is a thing I’ve kinda danced around saying a lot, and when the time comes for me to give my full-ass explanation it’s probs gonna be pages long but for now I’m gonna see if I can give a smaller but more functional example.

a problem, I think, with some of the more sloganeering parts of communist talkin’ on here is the image of “the boss.” The image where anyone at your job who’s higher than the lowliest pleb and/or your current job status is a cigar-chomping, pocketwatch-wearing tycoon, with a schedule that just says “laugh + roll in money.”

Which boss? My supervisor? The guy doing the exact same work as I am when he isn’t busy taking calls? My other supervisor, the retirement-age woman working two jobs and 60+ hour weeks on her feet to cover living expenses? You’d have to go two or three steps up the chain of command before you got to what was basically a mediocre office job with decent pay, and is that really the face of the traitorous capitalist bourgeois class?

I mean make no mistake, the very top of the chain – the people who owned the business – were, for all intents and purposes, a hereditary monarchy, whose every interaction with us had a distinct air of “happy now, peasants?”  but “my boss” and “company CEO” are not synonyms.

Tolerance is great, but at some point we eventually begin to conflict over issues that can't/won't really be compromised on, like "is sex with children, animals, or disabled people acceptable?" or "through what mechanisms should we use limited resources to meet our needs?", for which resolution can only be achieved through successful persuasion or violence that causes uniformity.

It is really disillusioning me that the libertarians are just as bad about the whole “your rhetoric is violence, justifying my use of violence in return” thing as the commies are. Is there nobody who actually has an ideological commitment to pluralistic tolerance?

It's hard to look at senior politicians like McConnel or Pelosi and conclude that experienced politicians are somehow any more resistant to lobbyists than freshmen. Fundamentally Congress relies on lobbyists because the government has to interface with the private sector at some point, and certain private interests can make or break the fortunes of entire states. Even Bernie will jump when Lockheed Martin (a major employer in Vermont) tells him to. But this list is definitely a good starting place.

What sort of reforms would you suggest if you think term limits for Congress would be bad/more corrupt? I don't see how it would be any more corrupt than how things currently are. It's too late for me to think too in depth right now on it, but I feel like it would be harder for lobbyists to sink their teeth into a politician if they can only serve a maximum of X years. People that can just be voted in every single election would be more likely to be corrupt imo.

And how do you feel about term limits for the supreme court?

On the contrary, it is much easier for lobbyists to sink their teeth into new members of congress. New members of congress who want to survive have a strong need for legislative information and institutional experience; professional lobbyists have both, and are very eager to build relationships with the new lawmakers who need it. This is why there's an event attended by all new members of congress which is basically a convention led by lobbyists and business executives. Term limits do mean lobbyists have to create new relationships more often, but they're also the easiest type of relationship to make.

Grose, et. al. (2022): "Our survey reveals that lobbyists in states with term limits reported meetings [with legislators] in social settings more frequently than lobbyists in states without term limits (e.g., 79% of lobbyists in term-limits states met a legislator at a coffee shop and 65% in states with no term limits; p≤:01)."

I have a long list of ideas for reforming congress but if we're talking about addressing corruption specifically:

Ban members of congress, their spouses, and their senior staffers from owning individual stocks, instead requiring them to keep all of their money in pre-approved mutual or index funds while in office.

Restrict members of congress from accepting suspicious outside payments, like high-paid speeches at corporate events.

Lifelong ban on lobbying for former members of congress, along with public disclosures of their income in the years after leaving office. (Doing this effectively would also require expanding our definition of what counts as lobbying).

Completely overhaul our anti-revolving door policies and lobbying regulations to address ethics and corruption directly (this could be a long list in itself).

Turn the Office of Congressional Ethics into an independently-funded organization with authority over both chambers of congress. Further empower ethics committees as well.

Expand independent congressional organizations who can replace the role of lobbyists in providing policymakers with important legislative information (CBO, CRS, GAO, etc.)

Strengthen truth-in-testimony rules so that people providing testimony to congress have to disclose their institutional conflicts of interest.

Pay congressional staffers better, encourage their unionization efforts, and provide congressional offices with the resources necessary to conduct their own research.

(There is also a large and unambiguous body of evidence suggesting that paying legislators themselves better reduces corruption, but this is such an extremely unpopular idea that I don't really waste time advocating for it)

The US doesn't have much of a welfare state, but its privileged position on the world stage absolutely translates into benefits for its citizens. Government contracts to build ships, tanks, and nuclear weapons provide high-paying jobs to American workers. Arguably, the US welfare state takes the form of our military, which provides soldiers with socialized/subsidized housing, healthcare, transportation, and education. In the private sector, American firms benefit not only from unequal terms of exchange, but from America's actions overseas such as the destruction and looting of Iraq. I agree with your main point; most countries have welfare states and/or universal healthcare and aren't imperialist, but we shouldn't ignore the ways that Americans have genuine incentives (beyond the ideological) to support invasions and aggression.

Thank God the us doesn't have universal Healthcare otherwise we'd be an imperialist power

Why does no one remember Iraq? For all of Trump's faults, at least he didn't start a war that killed or maimed hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of innocent people and afflicted countless more with homelessness, hunger, trauma, and despair.

A quick Google would seem to indicate that Napoleon also:

-Forbid Jews from migrating within France

-Heavily restricted their ability to engage in moneylending

-Cancelled all debt owed to Jewish lenders

-Forced them to adopt surnames

-Conscripted them into the army

All of which are far more anti-Semitic than the modern policy of building a welfare state and offering people the choice to leave their religious communities.

Now I'll freely admit that I'm ignorant of Napoleon beyond some broad strokes. I would assume that, as a European gentile in the eighteenth century, he had antisemitic sentiments. But like, this seems insane:

Letting Jews out of the ghettos and removing the barriers to their participation in broader society is roughly the exact opposite of antisemitism, surely. If this is an accurate summary of Napoleon's policy towards the Jews then he was in fact a great champion of Jewish freedom, and a model for gentiles to follow rather than a cautionary tale.

When it comes to understanding migration, this needs to be taken into account: if you are in a rural area in the global south, like Honduras, you have basically no access to social services, medicine, and education. In fact, the funding for those services is actually being cut, as the social security funds have been looted by corrupt politicans appointed by a military coup. Then you have to factor in that you likely have no access to the land, and no access to credit to buy seeds, and have to sell yourself for basically pennies to an agroindustrial giant. The peasants feed the local people; the agroindustries feed the Americans. In Guatamala, there is a neo-corporate fuedalism where you are allowed a patch of land if you are willing to work, unpaid, for coffee plantations which sell their produce to the German company Ritz. If you attempt to settle unoccupied land, a local businessman will claim it is his without any proof, and the police will take his side because the Agrarian Reform Institute, which issues land titles, is controlled by coupists whose main concern is squeezing as much wealth out of the country as possible. Thugs will murder a man and his wife in broad daylight, and the judge will respond by evicting you and your family from the land.

There is nowhere else for you to go but Tegucigalpa, where you can work trying to wash car windows or selling snacks to passing cars for a handful of lempira a day. Or perhaps you could work for a few dollars a day in one of the maquila factories making textiles for the American and European market, which are set up in special economic zones called Charter Cities where the constitution and labour laws do not apply, which can close down and spirit away whenever they like to another country when they are more willing to sell their people for even less. And then you have to factor in the hurricanes that sweep through the country, destroying everything, that the rains no longer come when they used to but when they do they come in flooding torrents. Much of the north of Honduras is currently underwater; most of the banana and coffee plantations have been destroyed.

And then you factor in when you tried to change this via electing a better government in 2006, he was overthrown in 2009; when you tried to get organised and resist the coup, your friends, your loved ones, your trade union leaders and peasant resisters all turned up mysteriously dead while the military and police worked with drug gangs disguised as agribusiness like the Dinant coproration to burn down villages that opposed them. For trying to change things in the way that you were supposed to, through non violently protesting, organising, and voting for something better, you were subjected to a decade of counterrevolutionary terror and violence that the “international community” not only ignored but gave its active approval to. All of the factors listed above have not only been ongoing for the last 10 years, they’ve been intensified, hothoused by the global counterrevolutionary terror that was the response to the 2011 wave of post-financial crisis uprisings and revolutions and accelerating climate apocalypse.

And at the same time, all of this is being done so more of the country can be turned into a massive cash cow for the benefit of foreign corporations and domestic oligarchs. The wealth of your country is siphoned off and flows around the American and European financial system, benefiting them and building a consumer disneyland that looks like paradise compared to your situation. That could, even if you are worked for nothing, give you a few dollars to send home that could build your abuela in the countryside a nice home for her to live out her days. What other option is left for you and your family other than joining the exodus of people heading north, to the countries where the wealth and profits and rewards of your homeland’s suffering are being kept. And after you cross mountains and rivers which freeze you to death and sweep you away, you are faced with a massive border wall of ahte and soldiers on horses which hit you with sticks. You are faced with an immigration detention centre that will chain you to your bed while you give birth and separate you from your baby who will be given away for adoption to a white couple. When you make a charge against the border fence in Melilla, fed up with being kept in shacks with nothing while the Northerners debate what to do about the problem people their greed has forced to move, the Moroccan police will beat 35 of you to death.

And then when you get there to that golden paradise, you end up doing work not dissimilar to the work you were doing back home, working for pennies (though pennies that are valuable enough back home to buy the family that remain the tiniest slice of comfort) for an agroindustrial giant that supplies supermarkets with cheap produce picked by cheaper people. While you work in the fields, a crop duster plane will spray you with paraquat; when support organisations try to raise this with OSHA they will ask for the plane’s number, and when this can’t be provided they will say nothing can be done. In fact, inspectors are ordered to stay away from the plantations on the Texas border. A member of the Border Agricultural Workers Project says she hasn’t seen a normal child born on the border in 20 years, such is the effect of agrichemicals. If you fuck up in the slightest, have any interaction with the state, you will be deported and sent back to square one. There are a 14 million migrants in the US in the same precarious state, effectively without any way of enforcing their rights. My aunt is a Mexican migrant in California. Her son was deported because he got a speeding ticket. It was 15 years before she saw him again, other than through the bars of the border fence, when she finally got her green card.

The situation in Honduras can be repeated for almost any other country. Syria, Venezuela, Iraq, South Sudan, Libya, all the headline countries are countries that have been subjected to a severe counterrevolutionary terror. The processes of dispossession and destruction of peasant economies and communities (primitive accumulation to use the Marxist jargon) have been hothoused over the last decade by war and violence. I just wish that relatively comfortable people in the imperialist countries realised that the “migrant crisis” is the result of policies that their governments forced on others. Violence that their elites made their fortunes off. What a monstrous, barbarous way of life we have.

Idea: Resolve this problem by giving workers the power to fire colleagues that they deem lazy or dangerously incompetent. Terminated workers have the right to defend themselves in a court-like environment, with consideration given to the importance/inherent danger of their job and the consequences of letting them stay or forcing them out. Terminated workers are compensated with unemployment benefits and recieve assistance from local government in finding a new occupation.

On Post-Fascism

On the degradation of universal citizenship.

The end of colonial empires in the 1960s and the end of Stalinist (“state socialist,” “state capitalist,” “bureaucratic collectivist”) systems in the 1990s has triggered a process never encountered since the Mongolian invasions in the thirteenth century: a comprehensive and apparently irreversible collapse of established statehood as such. While the bien-pensant Western press daily bemoans perceived threats of dictatorship in far-away places, it usually ignores the reality behind the tough talk of powerless leaders, namely that nobody is prepared to obey them. The old, creaking, and unpopular nation-state—the only institution to date that had been able to grant civil rights, a modicum of social assistance, and some protection from the exactions of privateer gangs and rapacious, irresponsible business elites—ceased to exist or never even emerged in the majority of the poorest areas of the world. In most parts of sub-Saharan Africa and of the former Soviet Union not only the refugees, but the whole population could be considered stateless. The way back, after decades of demented industrialization (see the horrific story of the hydroelectric plants everywhere in the Third World and the former Eastern bloc), to a subsistence economy and “natural” barter exchanges in the midst of environmental devastation, where banditry seems to have become the only efficient method of social organization, leads exactly nowhere. People in Africa and ex-Soviet Eurasia are dying not by a surfeit of the state, but by the absence of it.

Traditionally, liberation struggles of any sort have been directed against entrenched privilege. Equality came at the expense of ruling groups: secularism reduced the power of the Princes of the Church, social legislation dented the profits of the “moneyed interest,” universal franchise abolished the traditional political class of landed aristocracy and the noblesse de robe, the triumph of commercial pop culture smashed the ideological prerogatives of the progressive intelligentsia, horizontal mobility and suburban sprawl ended the rule of party politics on the local level, contraception and consumerist hedonism dissolved patriarchal rule in the family—something lost, something gained. Every step toward greater freedom curtailed somebody’s privileges (quite apart from the pain of change). It was conceivable to imagine the liberation of outlawed and downtrodden lower classes through economic, political, and moral crusades: there was, crudely speaking, somebody to take ill-gotten gains from. And those gains could be redistributed to more meritorious sections of the population, offering in exchange greater social concord, political tranquility, and safety to unpopular, privileged elites, thereby reducing class animosity. But let us not forget though that the social-democratic bargain has been struck as a result of centuries of conflict and painful renunciations by the traditional ruling strata. Such a liberation struggle, violent or peaceful, is not possible for the new wretched of the earth.

Nobody exploits them. There is no extra profit and surplus value to be appropriated. There is no social power to be monopolized. There is no culture to be dominated. The poor people of the new stateless societies—from the “homogeneous” viewpoint—are totally superfluous. They are not exploited, but neglected. There is no overtaxation, since there are no revenues. Privileges cannot be redistributed toward a greater equality since there are no privileges, except the temporary ones to be had, occasionally, at gunpoint.

Famished populations have no way out from their barely human condition but to leave. The so-called center, far from exploiting this periphery of the periphery, is merely trying to keep out the foreign and usually colored destitutes (the phenomenon is euphemistically called “demographic pressure”) and set up awesome barriers at the frontiers of rich countries, while our international financial bureaucracy counsels further deregulation, liberalization, less state and less government to nations that do not have any, and are perishing in consequence. “Humanitarian wars” are fought in order to prevent masses of refugees from flowing in and cluttering up the Western welfare systems that are in decomposition anyway.

Citizenship in a functional nation-state is the one safe meal ticket in the contemporary world. But such citizenship is now a privilege of the very few. The Enlightenment assimilation of citizenship to the necessary and “natural” political condition of all human beings has been reversed. Citizenship was once upon a time a privilege within nations. It is now a privilege to most persons in some nations. Citizenship is today the very exceptional privilege of the inhabitants of flourishing capitalist nation-states, while the majority of the world’s population cannot even begin to aspire to the civic condition, and has also lost the relative security of pre-state (tribe, kinship) protection.

The scission of citizenship and sub-political humanity is now complete, the work of Enlightenment irretrievably lost. Post-fascism does not need to put non-citizens into freight trains to take them into death; instead, it need only prevent the new non-citizens from boarding any trains that might take them into the happy world of overflowing rubbish bins that could feed them. Post-fascist movements everywhere, but especially in Europe, are anti-immigration movements, grounded in the “homogeneous” world-view of productive usefulness. They are not simply protecting racial and class privileges within the nation-state (although they are doing that, too) but protecting universal citizenship within the rich nation-state against the virtual-universal citizenship of all human beings, regardless of geography, language, race, denomination, and habits. The current notion of “human rights” might defend people from the lawlessness of tyrants, but it is no defense against the lawlessness of no rule.

Currently interesting piece written in 2000.