>>Do you seriously think there are fewer terrorists in Iraq now than there were before we invaded?
>Who knows? Not me, and certainly not you. We are killing a lot of terrorists in Iraq.
Com'on, let's keep at least one hand in reality here. Killing people is not killing terrorists -- there's a huge difference. The US military has fallen into the same "body count" patterns as they did in Vietnam.
As to your main point about "more or less" terrorists consider the following articles:
The latter article is particilarly interesting. Our "friends" the Saudi gov't has caught literally hundreds of Saudi citizens going to Iraq to be suicide bombers. Their studies have found that most were not long-term militant fundamentalists and that the single reason for them making them militant was the illegal US/UK invasion of Iraq.
You'll also find reference in that latter article as to what the US CIA thinks:
The CIA's National Intelligence Council concluded in a report earlier this year that ''Iraq and other possible conflicts in the future could provide recruitment, training grounds, technical skills, and language proficiency for a new class of terrorists who are 'professionalized' and for whom political violence becomes an end in itself."
Lie: "We have evidence proving that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction."
Not-Lie: "We have evidence suggesting (or strongly suggesting, or indicating) that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction."
What you wrote above is quite true. It's a case of wording that defines the lie or the truth.
But it is worth noting that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, and others bluntly spoke of their certainty that Saddam Hussein had WMD -- thus, they lied. And from what we know from the Downing Street Memos and other sources, we also know that they deliberately set out to lie and did.
I don't have the time to cite this chapter and verse -- minimal research by yourself can prove the point -- but here is one quote to illustrate the point:
"Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam now has weapons of mass destruction." -- Dick Cheney, vice president of USA, 26 August 2002 (Sources)
There is absolutely no doubt in the above -- Cheney lied. And you can find many other such quotes by Bush and others; but again, with the Downing Street Memos and other sources available, there is now no doubt -- we're led by liars who deliberately lied to start a war of aggression.
From Dictionary.com: wholesale: "2. Made or accomplished extensively and indiscriminately; blanket: wholesale destruction."
Considering that Bush and Cheney and their crew flew across the country making speeches and appearing on TV shows for literally months drumming up support for their war of aggression, I think that certainly makes it "extensively and indiscriminately" and/or "blanket".
It remains to be seen how the current wave of methadone addiction sweeping the Midwest will affect future crime rate.
Methadone addiction? Man, you've got to do more drugs. Are you sure you're not talking about methamphetamine (aka Meth; Speed; Crystal; Glass; Crank; Tweak; Yaba) addiction?
Specialists are saying that we'll miss the good old days of crack heads.
Let's try to stay with reality here. If you're nostalgic about the 80s cocaine/crack epidemics and widespread usage, what you're really saying is that you miss the CIA importing huge amounts of coke into the US. There have been many journalists who have documented the CIA's importation of drugs, enough so that the issue simply is no longer in doubt. You've never heard of the Iran-Contra scandal and the fact that people in the US using coke/crack helped to fund death squads and Contras in Latin America, all with the help of our "glorious" CIA?
She's doing what all slimey politicans do -- she's jumping on an issue which will offend the fewest possible people (young people don't vote very much anyway) in order score points and look like a hard-fighting politician struggling for truth, justice, and the American way.
I mean, just look at this completely worthless Congress: they ignore the US military's widespread and continuing torture, they ignore Bush's wholesale and blatant lies to start the war in Iraq, they ignore Karl Rove's lying and outing of a CIA spook just to score points in a game of political revenge, and they whitewash everything from the 9/11 investigation to Halliburton robbing taxpayers blind.
Yet they find time to rant about baseball players on steroids, Janice Jackson's nipple during the Superbowl, and Hillary's whining about cyber-sex in GTA.
The founding fathers aren't just rolling in their graves -- they're vomiting with disgust and the coffins are getting full!:-(
I kind of like that idea -- and if you burn a few of them it'll give them a toy to take home, which would probably be unusual for these types of training sessions.
Perot Systems? Correct me if I'm wrong, but is this Ross Perot's company?
Didn't Ross Perot get his start by a gov't-funded Texas Blue Cross/Blue Shield software development project, which Perot then copied and started selling back to the gov't, semi-successfully until then-Calif. Gov. Ronald Reagan gave him a huge contract that made him a millionaire and put him on the road of becoming a very rich man?
The part that tells them that laws on rare occasions, now and then, from time to time, sometimes, are supposed to be enacted for the interests of the people, and are not solely passed for the exclusive benefit of big business.
Only 7 bombs? The US and UK drop more bombs than that on Iraq in a slow week.
While the injuries and loss of life is truly sickening, the British people can take solice in the knowledge that their military has killed far, far more innocent Iraqi civilians than would be killed in a dozen of these types of reprisal attacks on London.
If you lie through your teeth to wage an illegal and aggressive war, you should expect that people will respond in any way they can.
I can't tell you how sick and disgusting I think it is to "justify" the incineration of thousands and thousands of civilians in order to make moves on a global chessboard of what you think some other country might do.
Russia rarely expanded after the Second World War.
Especially compared to the US!
Who's the real empire here? How many times did the USSR invade the US? None. But the US and other western countries occupied parts of the USSR for years (from WWI into the 1920s) trying to overthrow the young Bolshevik gov't.
Who knows what the USSR might have evolved into without that aggression against it. But that is just conjecture.
We do know that the US encircled the USSR with bases, illegally flew spy planes over its territory, rigged industrial accidents, and used every dirty trick in the book in a war of aggression known as the "Cold War."
No matter how you figure it -- numbers of interventions, number of outright invasions, numbers of gov'ts overthrown and replaced by puppet regimes -- it is clear who the world's aggressor nation is. It is the US. The aggression of the US around the world in the past century dwarfs anything the USSR dreamed of, or anything achieved by the British, or other, empires.
That might not be pleasant for us to acknowledge, but facts are facts.
Well, they did after their cities were firebombed and burned to the ground, their Navy sunk and the gains they made in the war largely reversed...
The point is, they knew they were beaten and wanted to end the war. The US ended the war -- on the same conditions the Japanese were proposing through third parties -- but only after nuking two cities to show the Soviet Union how ruthless and "mighty" the US was.
I think that originally that the United State intended to 'string up' the Emperor and[...]
I've never read anything like that.
I have read repeatedly that the US knew that the Emperor was manipulated by strongmen in the military and the military-industrial complex of Japan. The US view was generally that he was a weak Emperor who had bent to the desires of the military.
Many other people in the government kept trying to point out that their own intelligence was telling them that the Japanese government was willing to surrender under certain terms,
Quite true. And it should be pointed out that the only hard Japanese "term" was that they wanted assurances that their Emperor could stay in power.
The US refused, then dropped the bombs.
Then the US signed a peace treaty which did assure the Japanese that the Emperor could remain in power.
By bombing Japan, the US avoided having to clean up hundreds (if not thousands) of islands and hundreds of cities, over an immense area.
That all sounds wonderfully simple -- until you remember that before the bombing, the Japanese were working through multiple other countries to surrender.
As for the Japanese armies in China and on mainland Asia, they were already defeated by both the Chinese communists and by Russia's Red Army.
Remember, before we nuked Japan, the US could park battleships only a couple of miles off the Japanese coast and shell at will without resistance. Japan was militarily defeated.
Japan could have put up some resistance in case of a US invasion of their home islands, but the much quoted "million American casualties" is an out and out lie. The US military calculated estimated casualties from an invasion as around 200,000. Horrendous, yes, but your comment seems to imply that the Japanese still had a viable and functioning military -- they didn't.
The real reason for the nuking of Japan?
As WWII journalist and author Studs Terkel put it, "Why did we drop [the atomic bombs]? So little Harry could show Molotov and Stalin we've got the cards. That was the phrase Truman used. We showed the goddamned Russians we've got something and they'd better behave themselves in Europe. That's why it was dropped. The evidence is overwhelming. And yet you tell that to 99 percent of Americans and they'll spit in your eye."
Oh, what a romantic vision, those hard working people designing a bomb to kill Japanese civilians -- needlessly, when one considers that the Japanese gov't was frantically trying to make peace at the time of the bombing.
But our nationalistic historical revisions never remember General Leslie Groves' words, the military commander of the WWII Manhattan Project: "There was never, from about two weeks from the time I took charge of this Project, any illusion on my part but that Russia was our enemy, and the Project was conducted on that basis."
Or even WWII journalist and author Studs Terkel's comments: "Why did we drop [the atomic bombs]? So little Harry could show Molotov and Stalin we've got the cards. That was the phrase Truman used. We showed the goddamned Russians we've got something and they'd better behave themselves in Europe. That's why it was dropped. The evidence is overwhelming. And yet you tell that to 99 percent of Americans and they'll spit in your eye."
Instead, we use such nostalgic "tourist attractions" to build up the PR for another new generation of nuclear weapons that the US is more eager than ever to use.:-(
Service sector jobs include [c]omputer programmers, engineers, nuerosurgeons, bankers, and accountants. Americans have these high paying, high skill jobs.
Let's get serious. Gartner (check/. here, it was reported) stated that 10% of all computer jobs would be lost in 2004. Colleges report a huge decline in CompSci enrollment -- those jobs are being outsourced. Obviously, not all will be outsourced and you'll still find ads wanting programmers and IT people. But a 10% decline in one year does not spell a rosey job picture! Anyone in tech will tell you that.
Engineering jobs as a whole in the US are also in decline. We don't need tons of engineers if much of our manufacturing is done overseas.
Do you really want to pretend that neurosurgery and finance are such high-demand, growing job markets that it is going to make up for the millions of well-paying manufacturing and tech jobs that are being lost overseas?
Let's get real. You and I and other bright and ambitious people may have only a little problem getting a job. It's the macro trends that are killing us. Those trends report a massive outpouring of good jobs moving overseas from the US.
As to your quote about the 5% unemployment rate, let's be equally real. The unemployment rates have been cooked for decades. If we only count in the "discouraged" workers -- those poor souls who have been unemployed for too long so that the gov't no longer counts them -- the unemployment rate will almost double.
The AFL-CIO also has numbers of what the real unemployment rates would be if we calculated them the same way that we did during the 70s and 80s. Want to guess what they show?
If outsourcing is bad for America, then isn't outsourcing bad for your state, your hometown and for your family?
Whether outsourcing -- in this case meaning outsourcing jobs overseas -- is bad for your hometown/family, etc., depends on a number of factors. Obviously, if my work is in a company reliant on exports, I'm going to think it's good.
But overall, stats from both the US gov't and labor organizations reflect that we're losing more jobs overseas than we're gaining jobs from exports or from other job creation. (Bush *still* has a net job loss record during his presidency.)
things i suspect aren't true: - the US built its industry based on high tariffs and high labor costs.
Check any decent history of the 1800s. You'll find that tariffs were a huge source of gov't revenue and was -- decade in and decade out -- the perennial political issue. Working classes, in general, wanted low tariffs to have access to cheap goods, and capitalists wanted high tariffs to protect their industry (the capitalists typically controlled gov't and politics).
As for high labor costs, again, any good history of the 19th century will cover that. Though not recorded in typical US history books, there was a huge "push-pull" dynamic going on with European labor. Many Europeans came to America for free land and opportunity and became immigrants. But there were also many who were "pulled" to the US attracted by the high wages, and then were "pushed" back home during times of depression. Good economic texts will also document the labor costs as a driving force for US industrial automation and innovation.
- jobs being created in the US are overwhelmingly in low-paying service industries
I've mentioned Paul Craig Roberts repeatedly, so I'll quote a part of one of his articles, The US Labor Force: One Foot in the Third World: "In May the Bush economy eked out a paltry 73,000 private sector jobs: 20,000 jobs in construction (primarily for Mexican immigrants), 21,000 jobs in wholesale and retail trade, and 32,500 jobs in health care and social assistance. Local government added 5,000 for a grand total of 78,000. Not a single one of these jobs produces an exportable good or service. With Americans increasingly divorced from the production of the goods and services that they consume, Americans have no way to pay for their consumption except by handing over to foreigners more of their accumulated stock of wealth. The country continues to eat its seed corn."
"Only 10 million Americans are classified as 'production workers' in the Bureau of Labor Statistics nonfarm payroll tables. Think about that. The US with a population approaching 300 million has only 10 million production workers. That means Americans are consuming the products of other countries labor."
So that's the May 2005 stats. And I'll refrain from adding that it takes about 150,000 jobs per month to be created just to break even (the number of people turning 18, increases in population, etc.).
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Yes, I'm aware that the Yuan is pegged to the dollar. But in the case of a dollar collapse, the Yuan could easily be detached and allowed to float like any other currency.
As to the Chinese Yuan devaluing if the Chinese stop it from being pegged to the dollar, that just doesn't make sense. Are you sure you don't have that backwards?
The US gov't is trying to get the Chinese to allow the Yuan to float freely like other currencies. The Chinese refuse, primarily for two reasons:
(1) The Yuan would rise and thus make Chinese exports more expensive on world markets (which is the public reason why the US gov't wants the Chinese to float the Yuan; this is 180 degrees opposite of what you claim).
(2) It would open the Yuan up to currency manipulation by wealthy capitalists, int'l banks, and currency traders, such as we saw in the East Asian financial collapse during the 1990s. The Chinese saw what happened to their neighbors, and, well, they aren't stupid.
This business school professor reiterates many of the same points brought out in these discussions. He tells an interesting story about how Mexican workers are now seen as "rich" and how employers are using the Central American "free" trade pact to drive down the wages of Mexican workers by threatening to move jobs from Mexico to Honduras.
Ahh, the wonders of corporate globalization without any element whatsoever of democracy.:-(
The interview can be watched in Real video or listened to in an MP3 stream.
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You don't know much about economics, do you?
First, the American military is impressing nobody. The swelled head bubble about the US being so militarily invincible has been popped by brave Iraqis defending their country with little more than assault rifles and light arms. The weakness of the US military is shining clear for all to see. While the US is dangerous, the world is no longer in awe.
Second, the US economy can also be easily popped. If China were to dump the 600-800 billion dollars its central bank holds into the international currency market, the US economy would implode and we'd be pushing around wheelbarrows full of currency to buy groceries just like they did in Weimar Germany. Sound extreme? Not if you read the mainstream economic journals. They all readily admit that such a move would quickly put the US into a deep economic depression.
Don't believe it? When, a few months ago, South Korea's central bank announced they were "diversifying" their currency holdings to lessen the amount of depreciating dollars they hold, Wall Street responded by dropping more than 200 points in 1 day. The US quickly talked to South Korea and they announced that they were not going to diversify their holdings (only later to do it slowly and privately).
But fortunately, it would not be in China's interests to dump their dollars, since it would also ruin the Chinese export market to the US. Hell, China's getting rich off from the US, why mess up a good thing? The only way China would do this would be if we were to mess about with Taiwan or something very serious.
Another weak point is the fact that the US pays for its oil imports in what can only be termed a shell game. We arm-twist oil producing countries to only price their oil in dollars. So Saudi Arabia prices their oil in dollars, we can print all the dollars we want (and we do!), and the Saudis have to take them. In the 80s we forced the Saudis (and similar puppet regimes, e.g. Kuwait) to invest those dollars into the US stock market or in US Treasury Bonds (because if the Saudis were to do anything else with them, it would illuminate how weak the dollar is). It's a shell game, but the end result is that it's another way we're selling off the country.
This oil scam can be easily popped. It will only take a group of oil producing countries to price their oil in currencies other than the US dollar. If this were to happen the US banking industry would lose huge transaction fees and we'd have to pay "real" money for oil.
And what do you know, Iran is in the process of setting up an oil market which would use multiple currencies to buy oil. Gee, you think that might explain a bit of the US hostility towards Iran?
And what do you know, Russia has talked about just that -- pricing its oil in Euros. Even though it's only talk, the US response has been harsh and explains a lot of the recent rhetoric about Russia's undemocratic policies (we had no problem with non-democracy under Yeltsin).
Of course there was one oil producing country who did break these rules and dared to price its oil in a currency (the Euro) other than the US dollar.
That country was Iraq.
But if you think the economic rules of empire don't apply to the "invincible" US military and economy, just ask the British about those rules.
I'd say that percentage is about right -- 5% sounds in the ballpark.
Of course, during election season that number will pop up to 25% or so, as rhetoric-filled speeches about jobs fly about like mosquitos in a Minnesota summer.
But you're right. Though the Democrats bleat about this a bit more than many Republicans, all in all both parties are bought and paid for by the corporations who are laughing all the way to the bank thanks to our "free" trade policies.
The division of labor is a good thing, but we're talking about something completely different here. The US built its industry based on high tariffs and high labor costs. The original EU was such a success because they implemented policies which aimed to slowly raise up poor EU countries' wages in combination with a slow lowering of the tariffs in wealthy EU countries.
Now the voters in two wealthy countries shot down the EU constitution. The opposition was overwhelmingly from the working classes. They're not stupid, they knew that constitution would force them to compete against Turks and other poor countries and their wages would go down the tubes along with the social benefits it took them decades to win.
I'd urge you to read some independent views on the subject of outsourcing. As I mentioned, Paul Craig Roberts writes extensively on the topic. Hell, even mainstream types like Lou Dobbs have begun to question the "free" trade gospel. Look at the type of jobs which are created now in the US -- they're overwhelmingly in low-paying service industries. Those service jobs do not generate anywhere near the amount of wealth as manufacturing jobs do; as the dollar plummets, those service jobs won't pay for our imported oil, let alone our other import demands.
When you see the part where Wal-Mart literally tells a mid-western hosiery company to shut down its US plants and move to China, ask yourself: Is that really good for America? Yes, we get cheaper socks. But hundreds of Americans get thrown out of good paying jobs and are tossed into the unemployment line.
With unfettered "free" trade, we're in a race to the bottom. American workers are literally forced to compete against the poorest workers in the world, workers who, in China's and many others' case, have no labor rights and work under appalling conditions.
Do you honestly think we can maintain our standard of living in such a situation? We're selling off and mortgaging our economic industrial power to produce things that we could easily produce here. We're in a race to the bottom forcing Americans to compete against the poorest laborers in the world. Who do you think is going to win that competition?
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Having our laptops and PCs made this way may seem great -- for as long as the Chinese keep funding our ever-increasing trade deficit by taking our declining dollars and purchasing our treasury bonds.
Dell and HP are at least keeping some design and marketing jobs in the US.:-/
But if they follow the lead of many other American companies (e.g. GE), that design will be out-sourced overseas. American corporations are being destroyed by their own greed and shortsightedness. Many American companies are now only shells -- they're a brand name with a US-based sales and marketing force and everything else done overseas.
Fool yourself if you want, this is not a sustainable way of doing business. Consumers may think they've got it great now, with prices going down. But those same consumers are transferring wealth overseas and we're only able to do it now because the rest of the world allows the US to get into debt that no developing country could -- we can do it only because of the dollar's dominance.
Eventually that dollar dominance will evaporate and we'll realize that we transferred huge amounts of wealth and industrial power to foreign countries, all based on an ideology of greed and "free" trade.
Now, none of these are my own ideas; this is seen clearly by those on the political left and also by "traditional" conservatives. People like Reagan's Asst. Sec. of the Treasury and former Wall St. Journal editor Paul Craig Roberts have written extensively on this foolish but deliberate economic suicide. The mainstream corporate mass media avoids this -- it may upset people, cause them to question the conventional wisdom, or, worse in their view, impact their short-term profits.
Laugh and enjoy it while we can; things that can't go on forever don't.
Someone please mod the parent post up. An "insightful" rating would seem appropriate.
Or better yet, a mod rating of "cutting through the rhetoric and clearly seeing a money grab combined with forcing a porn ghetto on all 'net users" would be more accurate.
How in the hell is the stinking hippie RMS helping humanity?
Go back and reread any of the many Slashdot articles which document the use of GNU software in developing countries. Whether it's cheap computers in India for poor people or African (or European!) schools being able to afford computers because they now run GNU/Linux.
Stallman's contributions involve far more than Emacs (and no, I don't run Emacs either:-). He was the key person behind the GNU C compiler and many other pieces of software, in addition to one of the driving forces behind founding the Free Software Foundation and the entire free software movement.
Compared to the Microsoft millionaire who made money, in part, from Microsoft's illegal activities and now has a "claim to fame" that he funds a company which replaces Starbucks and Green Mountain Coffee with a different expensive brand in college student lounges, Stallman is literally a "Mother Theresa" figure.
Who's doing more for humanity: the guy providing another choice of expensive coffee to college students or the guy who has provided millions of dollars (billions if calculated the Microsoft way!) of advanced software to the developing nations of the world?
Slashdot Mirror
>Who knows? Not me, and certainly not you. We are killing a lot of terrorists in Iraq.
Com'on, let's keep at least one hand in reality here. Killing people is not killing terrorists -- there's a huge difference. The US military has fallen into the same "body count" patterns as they did in Vietnam.
As to your main point about "more or less" terrorists consider the following articles:
Inter-Press Service: Iraq Seen as Weakening Terror War
Seattle Times: Iraq Emerges as a Terrorist Training Ground
Boston Globe: Study Cites Seeds of Terror in Iraq
The latter article is particilarly interesting. Our "friends" the Saudi gov't has caught literally hundreds of Saudi citizens going to Iraq to be suicide bombers. Their studies have found that most were not long-term militant fundamentalists and that the single reason for them making them militant was the illegal US/UK invasion of Iraq.
You'll also find reference in that latter article as to what the US CIA thinks:
Lie: "We have evidence proving that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction."
Not-Lie: "We have evidence suggesting (or strongly suggesting, or indicating) that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction."
What you wrote above is quite true. It's a case of wording that defines the lie or the truth.
But it is worth noting that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, and others bluntly spoke of their certainty that Saddam Hussein had WMD -- thus, they lied. And from what we know from the Downing Street Memos and other sources, we also know that they deliberately set out to lie and did.
I don't have the time to cite this chapter and verse -- minimal research by yourself can prove the point -- but here is one quote to illustrate the point:
"Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam now has weapons of mass destruction." -- Dick Cheney, vice president of USA, 26 August 2002 (Sources)
There is absolutely no doubt in the above -- Cheney lied. And you can find many other such quotes by Bush and others; but again, with the Downing Street Memos and other sources available, there is now no doubt -- we're led by liars who deliberately lied to start a war of aggression.
From Dictionary.com: wholesale: "2. Made or accomplished extensively and indiscriminately; blanket: wholesale destruction."
Considering that Bush and Cheney and their crew flew across the country making speeches and appearing on TV shows for literally months drumming up support for their war of aggression, I think that certainly makes it "extensively and indiscriminately" and/or "blanket".
It remains to be seen how the current wave of methadone addiction sweeping the Midwest will affect future crime rate.
Methadone addiction? Man, you've got to do more drugs. Are you sure you're not talking about methamphetamine (aka Meth; Speed; Crystal; Glass; Crank; Tweak; Yaba) addiction?
Specialists are saying that we'll miss the good old days of crack heads.
Let's try to stay with reality here. If you're nostalgic about the 80s cocaine/crack epidemics and widespread usage, what you're really saying is that you miss the CIA importing huge amounts of coke into the US. There have been many journalists who have documented the CIA's importation of drugs, enough so that the issue simply is no longer in doubt. You've never heard of the Iran-Contra scandal and the fact that people in the US using coke/crack helped to fund death squads and Contras in Latin America, all with the help of our "glorious" CIA?
Hillary is doing what do-gooders always do.
:-(
Hillary? Do-gooder? Gimme a break.
She's doing what all slimey politicans do -- she's jumping on an issue which will offend the fewest possible people (young people don't vote very much anyway) in order score points and look like a hard-fighting politician struggling for truth, justice, and the American way.
I mean, just look at this completely worthless Congress: they ignore the US military's widespread and continuing torture, they ignore Bush's wholesale and blatant lies to start the war in Iraq, they ignore Karl Rove's lying and outing of a CIA spook just to score points in a game of political revenge, and they whitewash everything from the 9/11 investigation to Halliburton robbing taxpayers blind.
Yet they find time to rant about baseball players on steroids, Janice Jackson's nipple during the Superbowl, and Hillary's whining about cyber-sex in GTA.
The founding fathers aren't just rolling in their graves -- they're vomiting with disgust and the coffins are getting full!
I kind of like that idea -- and if you burn a few of them it'll give them a toy to take home, which would probably be unusual for these types of training sessions.
Perot Systems? Correct me if I'm wrong, but is this Ross Perot's company?
Didn't Ross Perot get his start by a gov't-funded Texas Blue Cross/Blue Shield software development project, which Perot then copied and started selling back to the gov't, semi-successfully until then-Calif. Gov. Ronald Reagan gave him a huge contract that made him a millionaire and put him on the road of becoming a very rich man?
What part of DO NOT CALL dont they understand?
The part that tells them that laws on rare occasions, now and then, from time to time, sometimes, are supposed to be enacted for the interests of the people, and are not solely passed for the exclusive benefit of big business.
Only 7 bombs? The US and UK drop more bombs than that on Iraq in a slow week.
While the injuries and loss of life is truly sickening, the British people can take solice in the knowledge that their military has killed far, far more innocent Iraqi civilians than would be killed in a dozen of these types of reprisal attacks on London.
If you lie through your teeth to wage an illegal and aggressive war, you should expect that people will respond in any way they can.
Actually, that alone is a pretty good reason.
I can't tell you how sick and disgusting I think it is to "justify" the incineration of thousands and thousands of civilians in order to make moves on a global chessboard of what you think some other country might do.
Russia rarely expanded after the Second World War.
Especially compared to the US!
Who's the real empire here? How many times did the USSR invade the US? None. But the US and other western countries occupied parts of the USSR for years (from WWI into the 1920s) trying to overthrow the young Bolshevik gov't.
Who knows what the USSR might have evolved into without that aggression against it. But that is just conjecture.
We do know that the US encircled the USSR with bases, illegally flew spy planes over its territory, rigged industrial accidents, and used every dirty trick in the book in a war of aggression known as the "Cold War."
No matter how you figure it -- numbers of interventions, number of outright invasions, numbers of gov'ts overthrown and replaced by puppet regimes -- it is clear who the world's aggressor nation is. It is the US. The aggression of the US around the world in the past century dwarfs anything the USSR dreamed of, or anything achieved by the British, or other, empires.
That might not be pleasant for us to acknowledge, but facts are facts.
Well, they did after their cities were firebombed and burned to the ground, their Navy sunk and the gains they made in the war largely reversed...
The point is, they knew they were beaten and wanted to end the war. The US ended the war -- on the same conditions the Japanese were proposing through third parties -- but only after nuking two cities to show the Soviet Union how ruthless and "mighty" the US was.
I think that originally that the United State intended to 'string up' the Emperor and[...]
I've never read anything like that.
I have read repeatedly that the US knew that the Emperor was manipulated by strongmen in the military and the military-industrial complex of Japan. The US view was generally that he was a weak Emperor who had bent to the desires of the military.
Many other people in the government kept trying to point out that their own intelligence was telling them that the Japanese government was willing to surrender under certain terms,
Quite true. And it should be pointed out that the only hard Japanese "term" was that they wanted assurances that their Emperor could stay in power.
The US refused, then dropped the bombs.
Then the US signed a peace treaty which did assure the Japanese that the Emperor could remain in power.
By bombing Japan, the US avoided having to clean up hundreds (if not thousands) of islands and hundreds of cities, over an immense area.
That all sounds wonderfully simple -- until you remember that before the bombing, the Japanese were working through multiple other countries to surrender.
As for the Japanese armies in China and on mainland Asia, they were already defeated by both the Chinese communists and by Russia's Red Army.
Remember, before we nuked Japan, the US could park battleships only a couple of miles off the Japanese coast and shell at will without resistance. Japan was militarily defeated.
Japan could have put up some resistance in case of a US invasion of their home islands, but the much quoted "million American casualties" is an out and out lie. The US military calculated estimated casualties from an invasion as around 200,000. Horrendous, yes, but your comment seems to imply that the Japanese still had a viable and functioning military -- they didn't.
The real reason for the nuking of Japan?
As WWII journalist and author Studs Terkel put it, "Why did we drop [the atomic bombs]? So little Harry could show Molotov and Stalin we've got the cards. That was the phrase Truman used. We showed the goddamned Russians we've got something and they'd better behave themselves in Europe. That's why it was dropped. The evidence is overwhelming. And yet you tell that to 99 percent of Americans and they'll spit in your eye."
Oh, what a romantic vision, those hard working people designing a bomb to kill Japanese civilians -- needlessly, when one considers that the Japanese gov't was frantically trying to make peace at the time of the bombing.
:-(
But our nationalistic historical revisions never remember General Leslie Groves' words, the military commander of the WWII Manhattan Project: "There was never, from about two weeks from the time I took charge of this Project, any illusion on my part but that Russia was our enemy, and the Project was conducted on that basis."
Or even WWII journalist and author Studs Terkel's comments: "Why did we drop [the atomic bombs]? So little Harry could show Molotov and Stalin we've got the cards. That was the phrase Truman used. We showed the goddamned Russians we've got something and they'd better behave themselves in Europe. That's why it was dropped. The evidence is overwhelming. And yet you tell that to 99 percent of Americans and they'll spit in your eye."
Instead, we use such nostalgic "tourist attractions" to build up the PR for another new generation of nuclear weapons that the US is more eager than ever to use.
Service sector jobs include [c]omputer programmers, engineers, nuerosurgeons, bankers, and accountants. Americans have these high paying, high skill jobs.
/. here, it was reported) stated that 10% of all computer jobs would be lost in 2004. Colleges report a huge decline in CompSci enrollment -- those jobs are being outsourced. Obviously, not all will be outsourced and you'll still find ads wanting programmers and IT people. But a 10% decline in one year does not spell a rosey job picture! Anyone in tech will tell you that.
Let's get serious. Gartner (check
Engineering jobs as a whole in the US are also in decline. We don't need tons of engineers if much of our manufacturing is done overseas.
Do you really want to pretend that neurosurgery and finance are such high-demand, growing job markets that it is going to make up for the millions of well-paying manufacturing and tech jobs that are being lost overseas?
Let's get real. You and I and other bright and ambitious people may have only a little problem getting a job. It's the macro trends that are killing us. Those trends report a massive outpouring of good jobs moving overseas from the US.
As to your quote about the 5% unemployment rate, let's be equally real. The unemployment rates have been cooked for decades. If we only count in the "discouraged" workers -- those poor souls who have been unemployed for too long so that the gov't no longer counts them -- the unemployment rate will almost double.
The AFL-CIO also has numbers of what the real unemployment rates would be if we calculated them the same way that we did during the 70s and 80s. Want to guess what they show?
If outsourcing is bad for America, then isn't outsourcing bad for your state, your hometown and for your family?
Whether outsourcing -- in this case meaning outsourcing jobs overseas -- is bad for your hometown/family, etc., depends on a number of factors. Obviously, if my work is in a company reliant on exports, I'm going to think it's good.
But overall, stats from both the US gov't and labor organizations reflect that we're losing more jobs overseas than we're gaining jobs from exports or from other job creation. (Bush *still* has a net job loss record during his presidency.)
things i suspect aren't true:
- the US built its industry based on high tariffs and high labor costs.
Check any decent history of the 1800s. You'll find that tariffs were a huge source of gov't revenue and was -- decade in and decade out -- the perennial political issue. Working classes, in general, wanted low tariffs to have access to cheap goods, and capitalists wanted high tariffs to protect their industry (the capitalists typically controlled gov't and politics).
As for high labor costs, again, any good history of the 19th century will cover that. Though not recorded in typical US history books, there was a huge "push-pull" dynamic going on with European labor. Many Europeans came to America for free land and opportunity and became immigrants. But there were also many who were "pulled" to the US attracted by the high wages, and then were "pushed" back home during times of depression. Good economic texts will also document the labor costs as a driving force for US industrial automation and innovation.
- jobs being created in the US are overwhelmingly in low-paying service industries
I've mentioned Paul Craig Roberts repeatedly, so I'll quote a part of one of his articles, The US Labor Force: One Foot in the Third World: "In May the Bush economy eked out a paltry 73,000 private sector jobs: 20,000 jobs in construction (primarily for Mexican immigrants), 21,000 jobs in wholesale and retail trade, and 32,500 jobs in health care and social assistance. Local government added 5,000 for a grand total of 78,000. Not a single one of these jobs produces an exportable good or service. With Americans increasingly divorced from the production of the goods and services that they consume, Americans have no way to pay for their consumption except by handing over to foreigners more of their accumulated stock of wealth. The country continues to eat its seed corn."
"Only 10 million Americans are classified as 'production workers' in the Bureau of Labor Statistics nonfarm payroll tables. Think about that. The US with a population approaching 300 million has only 10 million production workers. That means Americans are consuming the products of other countries labor."
So that's the May 2005 stats. And I'll refrain from adding that it takes about 150,000 jobs per month to be created just to break even (the number of people turning 18, increases in population, etc.).
Yes, I'm aware that the Yuan is pegged to the dollar. But in the case of a dollar collapse, the Yuan could easily be detached and allowed to float like any other currency.
As to the Chinese Yuan devaluing if the Chinese stop it from being pegged to the dollar, that just doesn't make sense. Are you sure you don't have that backwards?
The US gov't is trying to get the Chinese to allow the Yuan to float freely like other currencies. The Chinese refuse, primarily for two reasons:
(1) The Yuan would rise and thus make Chinese exports more expensive on world markets (which is the public reason why the US gov't wants the Chinese to float the Yuan; this is 180 degrees opposite of what you claim).
(2) It would open the Yuan up to currency manipulation by wealthy capitalists, int'l banks, and currency traders, such as we saw in the East Asian financial collapse during the 1990s. The Chinese saw what happened to their neighbors, and, well, they aren't stupid.
Just today Democracy Now is running an interesting interview with a person involved in the Central American "free" trade pact.
:-(
This business school professor reiterates many of the same points brought out in these discussions. He tells an interesting story about how Mexican workers are now seen as "rich" and how employers are using the Central American "free" trade pact to drive down the wages of Mexican workers by threatening to move jobs from Mexico to Honduras.
Ahh, the wonders of corporate globalization without any element whatsoever of democracy.
The interview can be watched in Real video or listened to in an MP3 stream.
You don't know much about economics, do you?
First, the American military is impressing nobody. The swelled head bubble about the US being so militarily invincible has been popped by brave Iraqis defending their country with little more than assault rifles and light arms. The weakness of the US military is shining clear for all to see. While the US is dangerous, the world is no longer in awe.
Second, the US economy can also be easily popped. If China were to dump the 600-800 billion dollars its central bank holds into the international currency market, the US economy would implode and we'd be pushing around wheelbarrows full of currency to buy groceries just like they did in Weimar Germany. Sound extreme? Not if you read the mainstream economic journals. They all readily admit that such a move would quickly put the US into a deep economic depression.
Don't believe it? When, a few months ago, South Korea's central bank announced they were "diversifying" their currency holdings to lessen the amount of depreciating dollars they hold, Wall Street responded by dropping more than 200 points in 1 day. The US quickly talked to South Korea and they announced that they were not going to diversify their holdings (only later to do it slowly and privately).
But fortunately, it would not be in China's interests to dump their dollars, since it would also ruin the Chinese export market to the US. Hell, China's getting rich off from the US, why mess up a good thing? The only way China would do this would be if we were to mess about with Taiwan or something very serious.
Another weak point is the fact that the US pays for its oil imports in what can only be termed a shell game. We arm-twist oil producing countries to only price their oil in dollars. So Saudi Arabia prices their oil in dollars, we can print all the dollars we want (and we do!), and the Saudis have to take them. In the 80s we forced the Saudis (and similar puppet regimes, e.g. Kuwait) to invest those dollars into the US stock market or in US Treasury Bonds (because if the Saudis were to do anything else with them, it would illuminate how weak the dollar is). It's a shell game, but the end result is that it's another way we're selling off the country.
This oil scam can be easily popped. It will only take a group of oil producing countries to price their oil in currencies other than the US dollar. If this were to happen the US banking industry would lose huge transaction fees and we'd have to pay "real" money for oil.
And what do you know, Iran is in the process of setting up an oil market which would use multiple currencies to buy oil. Gee, you think that might explain a bit of the US hostility towards Iran?
And what do you know, Russia has talked about just that -- pricing its oil in Euros. Even though it's only talk, the US response has been harsh and explains a lot of the recent rhetoric about Russia's undemocratic policies (we had no problem with non-democracy under Yeltsin).
Of course there was one oil producing country who did break these rules and dared to price its oil in a currency (the Euro) other than the US dollar.
That country was Iraq.
But if you think the economic rules of empire don't apply to the "invincible" US military and economy, just ask the British about those rules.
I'd say that percentage is about right -- 5% sounds in the ballpark.
Of course, during election season that number will pop up to 25% or so, as rhetoric-filled speeches about jobs fly about like mosquitos in a Minnesota summer.
But you're right. Though the Democrats bleat about this a bit more than many Republicans, all in all both parties are bought and paid for by the corporations who are laughing all the way to the bank thanks to our "free" trade policies.
The division of labor is a good thing, but we're talking about something completely different here. The US built its industry based on high tariffs and high labor costs. The original EU was such a success because they implemented policies which aimed to slowly raise up poor EU countries' wages in combination with a slow lowering of the tariffs in wealthy EU countries.
Now the voters in two wealthy countries shot down the EU constitution. The opposition was overwhelmingly from the working classes. They're not stupid, they knew that constitution would force them to compete against Turks and other poor countries and their wages would go down the tubes along with the social benefits it took them decades to win.
I'd urge you to read some independent views on the subject of outsourcing. As I mentioned, Paul Craig Roberts writes extensively on the topic. Hell, even mainstream types like Lou Dobbs have begun to question the "free" trade gospel. Look at the type of jobs which are created now in the US -- they're overwhelmingly in low-paying service industries. Those service jobs do not generate anywhere near the amount of wealth as manufacturing jobs do; as the dollar plummets, those service jobs won't pay for our imported oil, let alone our other import demands.
On a consumer level, take a look at the PBS Frontline documentary "Is Wal-Mart Good for America?"; it's viewable freely online in Real video format.
When you see the part where Wal-Mart literally tells a mid-western hosiery company to shut down its US plants and move to China, ask yourself: Is that really good for America? Yes, we get cheaper socks. But hundreds of Americans get thrown out of good paying jobs and are tossed into the unemployment line.
With unfettered "free" trade, we're in a race to the bottom. American workers are literally forced to compete against the poorest workers in the world, workers who, in China's and many others' case, have no labor rights and work under appalling conditions.
Do you honestly think we can maintain our standard of living in such a situation? We're selling off and mortgaging our economic industrial power to produce things that we could easily produce here. We're in a race to the bottom forcing Americans to compete against the poorest laborers in the world. Who do you think is going to win that competition?
Having our laptops and PCs made this way may seem great -- for as long as the Chinese keep funding our ever-increasing trade deficit by taking our declining dollars and purchasing our treasury bonds.
:-/
Dell and HP are at least keeping some design and marketing jobs in the US.
But if they follow the lead of many other American companies (e.g. GE), that design will be out-sourced overseas. American corporations are being destroyed by their own greed and shortsightedness. Many American companies are now only shells -- they're a brand name with a US-based sales and marketing force and everything else done overseas.
Fool yourself if you want, this is not a sustainable way of doing business. Consumers may think they've got it great now, with prices going down. But those same consumers are transferring wealth overseas and we're only able to do it now because the rest of the world allows the US to get into debt that no developing country could -- we can do it only because of the dollar's dominance.
Eventually that dollar dominance will evaporate and we'll realize that we transferred huge amounts of wealth and industrial power to foreign countries, all based on an ideology of greed and "free" trade.
Now, none of these are my own ideas; this is seen clearly by those on the political left and also by "traditional" conservatives. People like Reagan's Asst. Sec. of the Treasury and former Wall St. Journal editor Paul Craig Roberts have written extensively on this foolish but deliberate economic suicide. The mainstream corporate mass media avoids this -- it may upset people, cause them to question the conventional wisdom, or, worse in their view, impact their short-term profits.
Laugh and enjoy it while we can; things that can't go on forever don't.
Someone please mod the parent post up. An "insightful" rating would seem appropriate.
Or better yet, a mod rating of "cutting through the rhetoric and clearly seeing a money grab combined with forcing a porn ghetto on all 'net users" would be more accurate.
How in the hell is the stinking hippie RMS helping humanity?
Go back and reread any of the many Slashdot articles which document the use of GNU software in developing countries. Whether it's cheap computers in India for poor people or African (or European!) schools being able to afford computers because they now run GNU/Linux.
Stallman's contributions involve far more than Emacs (and no, I don't run Emacs either:-). He was the key person behind the GNU C compiler and many other pieces of software, in addition to one of the driving forces behind founding the Free Software Foundation and the entire free software movement.
Compared to the Microsoft millionaire who made money, in part, from Microsoft's illegal activities and now has a "claim to fame" that he funds a company which replaces Starbucks and Green Mountain Coffee with a different expensive brand in college student lounges, Stallman is literally a "Mother Theresa" figure.
Who's doing more for humanity: the guy providing another choice of expensive coffee to college students or the guy who has provided millions of dollars (billions if calculated the Microsoft way!) of advanced software to the developing nations of the world?