If I own a rental property or few they would most likely be mortgaged leading to a negative net worth.
1. It sounds like you may be operating under a misconception about what net worth is: The rental properties you own are assets, so the effect of those properties on your net worth are the value of the properties minus the amount you owe on the mortgage. So, for example, if you own $250,000 worth of rental properties, and owe $200,000 to the bank, that's a +$50,000 to your net worth. If you reverse those numbers, then that's a -$50,000 to your net worth.
2. If one individual has negative net worth, that's not necessarily a problem. If over 50% of Americans have negative net worth, that's probably an indication of a problem.
It's not so much a re-definition of "middle class", it's more a perpetuation of the very pervasive myth that most Americans are middle class, when in fact most are really working class.
First, an accurate definition of "middle class": At a minimum, middle class family is one that can accumulate wealth if they manage their finances reasonably well. That wealth may be in the form of pensions, retirement accounts, investments, home equity, vehicles owned free and clear, bank accounts, or just about anything else, but there has to be a clear upwards trajectory. For example, a middle class family is in a position to save a significant pile of cash that will allow them to send their child to college without their child taking out large loans. By contrast, a working class family is at best capable of paying their bills on time and putting food on the table.
The key facts are: (1) The average American family has negative net worth, which means not only are they not accumulating wealth, they're losing wealth. (2) The average American family has, over the last 15 years, cut spending dramatically on entertainment, travel, food, clothing, and almost all other discretionary categories. That means the "out-of-control spending" hypothesis is incorrect. (3) Personal bankruptcies have been increasing steadily since 1995, and then skyrocketed since 2008. Most involved: extended unemployment, medical bills (even for insured patients), and adjustable rate mortgages bumping upwards. (4) The average American family does not have the ability to pay their bills if they miss a single paycheck.
Also worth mentioning: If you're a typical/.er with a job in the IT sector, you very likely pull in about 3-5 times what the average American worker makes.
he question to ask, is whether the benefits to the public and the economy from millions of cheap airfares outweigh, say, one fatal accident a year directly caused by cheapness. I say it is worth it, although I would defend your right to choose a pricy airline with overpaid pilots.
The families of the people who live in the houses that the fatal accidents land on probably think differently. That's the problem with the "You pays your money, you takes your chances" approach to these kinds of issues - it's not just you who's taking the risk. It's the same reason why we license people to drive: the licensing process is to reduce the chances that the rest of us will be killed by someone who had no business driving in the first place.
The technical term here is "externality": Let's say that you have perfect markets, and have a choice between traveling on SafeAir or RiskAir. Now, RiskAir's ticket is cheaper. But the reason RiskAir is apparently cheaper is that they aren't paying for the risk, in the form of increased life insurance and homeowners insurance premiums for everyone who isn't on that plane and weren't given any kind of choice about whether RiskAir is making flights at all. You only see the cheaper ticket, but that's only because part of the cost is hidden from you.
Where are you getting your vegetables? The reason I ask is that there are a lot of vegetables where the standard stuff in the grocery store is a bit nasty, but fresh from a healthy plant has a sweet flavor. For example, if you eat a fresh green bean, and it's not slightly sweet, that's not a good bean.
Lobbyist: Listen, I'd like to do more money for you -- I just need to know your positions on a few issues. For instance, where are you on sugar price supports? Congressman Johnson: Sugar price supports. Where do you think I should be, Tommy? Lobbyist: Shit -- makes no difference to me. If you're for 'em, I got money for you from my sugar producers in Louisiana and Hawaii. If you're against 'em, I got money for you from the candy manufacturers. Congressman: You pick. Lobbyist: Let's put you down as for. Now what about putting limits on malpractice awards? Congressman: You tell me. Lobbyist: Well, if you're for 'em, I got money from the doctors and insurance companies. If you're against 'em, I got money from the trial lawyers. Tell you what, let's say against. Now how about pizza? Congressman (gestures to plate): I'll stick with the salad. Lobbyist: Not for lunch, shmuck, for PAC money. A lot of the frozen pizzas use phony cheese. There's a law pending requiring them to disclose it on their labels. Where do you stand? Congressman: If I vote for the labels...then I get money from the dairy industry... Lobbyist: Good... Congressman: And if I vote against the labels, I get money from the frozen food guys. Lobbyist: Excellent! And don't forget the ranchers, because they get hurt if pepperoni sales go down! Congressman: A pepperoni lobby. I love this town. Lobbyist: So which is it? Congressman: Fuck the cheese people. Thanks to them my office smelled like smelt for a week. Lobbyist: All right. For. Congressman: So Tommy, tell me -- with all this money on every side, how does anything get done? Lobbyist: It doesn't! That's the genius of the system!
You are correct, but lets be clear: "The Media" is overwhelmingly dominated by corporations, and it is not just Americas problem.
It's more of a problem in the US than in most countries, because many other countries have state-run media that is relatively free of corporate influence. There is no US version of the BBC, for example: PBS could be that, but because their government funding has been continuously cut back they spend most of their time begging for corporate cash. Now, obviously, state-run media is not free from government influence, but the countries with significant state-run media have at least something that can counter corporate media, whereas the US really doesn't.
Imagine if, say, the UK meddled in our business in the 1880s and forced us to improve factory conditions prematurely. Our growth would have been slowed and the eventual creation of the middle class would have been delayed.
That is far from an indisputable argument: 1. Working conditions in the UK were not all that different from working conditions in the US over the same period. For example, child labor was legal in both the US and the UK until well into the 20th century. 2. An overall growth in wealth does not necessarily create a middle class - you also need the distribution of that wealth to be even enough that those who are not members of the investor class are not living hand-to-mouth. If you want an example of a rising tide not really lifting all boats, look at what happened to GDP versus wage growth since 1975. 3. You're completely ignoring trade unions and government regulation, both of which changed policies dramatically. 4. I'm not sure which period of the middle class you're talking about, but if it's the one from the 1950's, you also have to factor in the lack of able-bodied men and the G.I. Bill. 5. There was another significant comparative advantage in play for the US in the 1880's: Many of the raw materials for the products of US factories were from the US, so manufacturing in the US cut transportation costs. If you're raising cattle in Colorado, it's far easier to make that into ground beef in Chicago than it is to ship cattle to Birmingham. If you're mining iron in upper Michigan, it makes more sense to do your smelting in Cleveland or Detroit than it does to ship it to Bath before smelting.
Your chart in no way refutes my argument: 1. The absolute numbers are misleading, because not only is the federal government getting larger in absolute terms, so is the population and GDP of the country. If you spent, say, $2 trillion to serve 200 million people, and now spend $3 trillion to serve 300 million people, is that really an increase?
2. Federal spending is lower now in absolute dollars than it was in 2009 ($3173.4 billion in 2009 versus $3086.2 billion in 2013). If you instead go by percentage GDP, then we're at 22.7%, which is comparable to what we spent under that notorious socialist Ronald Reagan.
3. You can see in the same chart that tax receipts took a massive hit in 2008-9, dropping nearly 25% in 2 years. So while absolute tax receipts are higher in 2013 than they were in 2009, the 2013 is lower than we had in 2006-8 and in 2000. If you instead go by percentage GDP, then we're at 16.7%, which is very much towards the low end, and 2009-10 was lowest it had been since 1950.
And of course the original claim was about state-level spending, not federal. But the numbers simply don't tell a story of a federal government growing unusually large.
I hate to sound cynical, but at this point, it really doesn't matter who you vote for in federal elections.
Actually it does matter somewhat, because industries vary where they place their bets, so when industries disagree with each other that can change what the politicians do. For example, if candidate Smith got $100,000 from Disney and $1,000,000 from Google, while candidate Jones got $100,000 from Google and $1,000,000 from Disney, then Smith will be less likely to support more restrictive copyrights than Jones.
Could it be that those contributing to the revenue might think it feels more onerous as their share of it goes up than if everyone was paying?
It would be if that were true, but tax rates are also significantly lower now than they've been in a very long time.
1941 for seem like a nice number. Any reason you chose that one?
The biggest reason for picking 1941 has to do with what happened on December 6 of that year, which was the start of a full-scale military mobilization that has largely continued for the last 72 years.
It's interesting to see folks talking about "OMG, the government is spending so much!!!!" when in fact it's been dropping like a rock since about 2009-ish. What actually happened was pretty simple to understand: In the fall of 2008 the economy took a nose-dive, shrinking the GDP and causing a lot more people to qualify for SNAP and unemployment insurance and SS disability and TANF and Medicaid and a few other programs. The cost of those programs predictably skyrocketed despite no new laws passing. Since then, as fewer and fewer people have qualified, the costs have been shrinking. Meanwhile, all the budgetary belt-tightening that had happened elsewhere in the budget is still in effect, so in fact government spending is shrinking fairly rapidly.
Also, tax revenue is the lowest it's been since 1941, so complaints about taxes being unusually high are also wrong.
For some reason its ok, for the cloud provider to run on cheezy hardware missing most of the "enterprise" features, but its not OK for random company to buy similar hardware.
There's no mystery here - when the system breaks, as it inevitably will, the IT department can blame the failure on the cloud provider rather than on themselves.
What actually happened was that the definition of "white people" changed to include the groups of people that are now considered white. At first, the only people seen as "white" were English, which is why other immigrants to the early colonies such as the Scots were pushed out of settlements like Jamestown and into the mountains of Appalachia. If you look at what people wrote about Spaniards or Italians or Ashkenazim when they were the targets of oppression, they were seen as "dark" and "dirty" and "smelly" and quite a few other epithets that are now mostly hurled at Hispanic-Americans and African-Americans. As they became more common and more powerful as ethnic groups, they moved from being "other" to being "white". In part this was because it's basically impossible to tell a WASP from a Jew from an Irishman walking down the street unless that person does something to emphasize their ethnicity. In modern times, this also affects lighter-skinned Hispanics, who are frequently able to "pass" as white until they reveal their name and/or demonstrate that their first language is Spanish.
By contrast, a black person is almost never able to successfully pretend to be white, which is one of the reasons that racism against black people has persisted much longer than racism against, say, Germans.
Here's a question then: Do you believe the same thing about residents of, say, rural West Virginia that you do about residents of Saudi Arabia? In West Virginia, the government with nominal control of the natural resources work in lock-step with the owners of the companies doing the extraction to oppress and marginalize their work force, using legal and extra-legal means to prevent the workers from organizing, just like Saudi Arabia. Many religious leaders in West Virginia preach a mutated and particularly intolerant form of their religion that advocates making war on those who don't believe in the same religion, just like Saudi Arabia, and some members of their congregations have gone overseas to try to fight that war. Many residents believe firmly in anti-intellectualism and are distrustful of those who provide scientific explanations for natural phenomena, just like Saudi Arabia.
I think you're getting the point. If you don't have the same views of those West Virginians as you do of Saudis, then your real opinion is about something other than atheism versus religion.
Actually, some of the deaths weren't meaningless at all. The terrorists who attacked on 9/11 were going after the two mechanisms that leaders of the United States use to oppose their will on the part of the world they come from. Their targets were clear: the leaders of Wall Street businesses and the US military. There was nothing random about it. The other plane was probably aiming for Chicago, which would have allowed them to hit commodities markets that control the price of oil.
That's not to say that all the deaths were because of targeting - the people on the planes, the cleaning staff, the firefighters, etc died but were not really the targets. But then again, was the general population of Baghdad really the target of the US attack on Iraq?
I'm not saying the people who died on 9/11 deserved it, but it's worth remembering that terrorists act the way they do not because they are crazy and evil, but because they believe they have legitimate grievances and that their cause is worth fighting for.
1. The US should not have to be in a position where they are making such promises. The Eighth Amendment was created specifically to put a stop to the sort of thing that the US is now promising not to do. It's sort of like announcing, completely seriously, "I swear I'm not a murderer!" - that's usually a signal you're at least involved in something you shouldn't be.
2. Nobody seriously believes those promises after what the US has done to Bradley Manning, Anwar Al-Awlaki, and what they tried to do to Julian Assange. When Julian Assange argued that the US could no longer be trusted to follow its own laws and promises and international commitments, that argument may have seemed ludicrous, but it is increasingly becoming common opinion. Another example of the US's lawlessness is that they convinced France to force Bolivian president Evo Morales to land so they could search his plane for Snowden, violating all sorts of diplomatic rules to do so.
3. The US is going up against Vladimir Putin's Russia in a battle of human rights records, and losing. That's just astounding.
I don't think there has been a massive nationwide protest here since the 70s, with the possible exception of the anti-war protests before the invasion of Iraq.
How massive qualified as "massive"?
Occupiers Wall Street had something like 75,000 people directly involved, and much larger numbers of people providing food, funding, and supplies. The largest protest running up until the Iraq War, on January 15 2003, was the single largest non-violent protest event in human history, with something like 500,000 people participating in the US, and several million worldwide. There have been lots of other significant protests, albeit limited to specific cities and events.
What's changed is (1) those in power in the US have made it quite clear that they will not change policy in response to protests, (2) The media will cover a protest only so long as the protest persists, so any 1-day event is promptly forgotten, and (3) the government is smarter about how to use force to put down protests, for example seeding otherwise peaceful protests with troublemakers who riot to change the story from "here's the protesters' message" to "here's how much damage was done".
"Because Someone doesn't like Obama" isn't the exception that the executive branch wants. The exception is "Because Someone Opposes or Embarrasses the FBI, CIA, DoD, and/or NSA".
It's easy to find people who absolutely hate Obama who the government has left alone. For example, there is nobody searching the world trying to capture Glenn Beck or Alex Jones.
By contrast, look at what the US is willing to do to get Edward Snowden: Violate Bolivia's sovereignty, and threaten trade sanctions against several countries including Russia (in violation of numerous treaties). Or look at what the US was willing to do to try to stop Wikileaks: Senator Joe Lieberman was personally involved in cajoling financial companies to refuse to send money to Wikileaks with no legal justification whatsoever.
how white people oppressed some people or other people at various times
That would be because white people did oppress a lot of different kinds of people. People who were on the receiving end of documented discrimination and oppression, with at least tacit support of the government, in the United States include but are probably not limited to: - American Indians - women - African-Americans - Chinese-Americans - Japanese-Americans - Irish-Americans, Scottish-Americans - Italian-Americans - Mexican-Americans - German-Americans - Russian-Americans - members of Socialist, Anarchist or Communist political parties - members of trade unions, other workers on strike - Mormons, Jews, atheists, and in recent years, Muslims - war veterans - citizens involved in large protests, such as the Bonus Army, Selma marchers, Chicago '68, Kent State, and most recently Occupy Wall St.
A sibling poster is right: This kind of discrimination is arguably one of the most important parts of US history, and anyone who denies it is being willfully blind. It's a very good bet that at least one of your ancestors was on the receiving end of oppression by your government.
Why not just hire Al Sleet? "Tonight's forecast: Dark. Continued dark throughout most of the evening, with some widely scattered light towards morning."
If the order was given to destroy data then there HAS to be a person who gave that order. It's time they were hunted down.
The thing is, this being Halliburton, it's possible that the person that gave the order to destroy evidence has already gotten away with much more heinous crimes and effectively has immunity from prosecution for anything he does. And if they try to hunt him down, he might shoot them in the face.
I have a fundamental problem with the "It helps us catch terrorists who are operating sleeper cells" argument: The NSA has yet to point to a single sleeper cell caught because of the data captured because of NSA surveillance. When asked about it by a House committee, they claimed that surveillance had helped in "dozens" of cases, but when prompted to name one, they came up empty.
So it's not even philosophically wrong, in the sense that we should be willing to accept a tiny risk of death from terrorist attack in exchange for proper Fourth Amendment protections. The arguments made by the NSA and its supporters have absolutely no proven basis in fact.
Slashdot Mirror
If I own a rental property or few they would most likely be mortgaged leading to a negative net worth.
1. It sounds like you may be operating under a misconception about what net worth is: The rental properties you own are assets, so the effect of those properties on your net worth are the value of the properties minus the amount you owe on the mortgage. So, for example, if you own $250,000 worth of rental properties, and owe $200,000 to the bank, that's a +$50,000 to your net worth. If you reverse those numbers, then that's a -$50,000 to your net worth.
2. If one individual has negative net worth, that's not necessarily a problem. If over 50% of Americans have negative net worth, that's probably an indication of a problem.
It's not so much a re-definition of "middle class", it's more a perpetuation of the very pervasive myth that most Americans are middle class, when in fact most are really working class.
First, an accurate definition of "middle class": At a minimum, middle class family is one that can accumulate wealth if they manage their finances reasonably well. That wealth may be in the form of pensions, retirement accounts, investments, home equity, vehicles owned free and clear, bank accounts, or just about anything else, but there has to be a clear upwards trajectory. For example, a middle class family is in a position to save a significant pile of cash that will allow them to send their child to college without their child taking out large loans. By contrast, a working class family is at best capable of paying their bills on time and putting food on the table.
The key facts are:
(1) The average American family has negative net worth, which means not only are they not accumulating wealth, they're losing wealth.
(2) The average American family has, over the last 15 years, cut spending dramatically on entertainment, travel, food, clothing, and almost all other discretionary categories. That means the "out-of-control spending" hypothesis is incorrect.
(3) Personal bankruptcies have been increasing steadily since 1995, and then skyrocketed since 2008. Most involved: extended unemployment, medical bills (even for insured patients), and adjustable rate mortgages bumping upwards.
(4) The average American family does not have the ability to pay their bills if they miss a single paycheck.
Also worth mentioning: If you're a typical /.er with a job in the IT sector, you very likely pull in about 3-5 times what the average American worker makes.
You really really don't want a smart toaster
he question to ask, is whether the benefits to the public and the economy from millions of cheap airfares outweigh, say, one fatal accident a year directly caused by cheapness. I say it is worth it, although I would defend your right to choose a pricy airline with overpaid pilots.
The families of the people who live in the houses that the fatal accidents land on probably think differently. That's the problem with the "You pays your money, you takes your chances" approach to these kinds of issues - it's not just you who's taking the risk. It's the same reason why we license people to drive: the licensing process is to reduce the chances that the rest of us will be killed by someone who had no business driving in the first place.
The technical term here is "externality": Let's say that you have perfect markets, and have a choice between traveling on SafeAir or RiskAir. Now, RiskAir's ticket is cheaper. But the reason RiskAir is apparently cheaper is that they aren't paying for the risk, in the form of increased life insurance and homeowners insurance premiums for everyone who isn't on that plane and weren't given any kind of choice about whether RiskAir is making flights at all. You only see the cheaper ticket, but that's only because part of the cost is hidden from you.
Where are you getting your vegetables? The reason I ask is that there are a lot of vegetables where the standard stuff in the grocery store is a bit nasty, but fresh from a healthy plant has a sweet flavor. For example, if you eat a fresh green bean, and it's not slightly sweet, that's not a good bean.
the CHILDREN FOR GODS sakes
Wait, are we doing human sacrifices again?
Lobbyist: Listen, I'd like to do more money for you -- I just need to know your positions on a few issues. For instance, where are you on sugar price supports?
Congressman Johnson: Sugar price supports. Where do you think I should be, Tommy?
Lobbyist: Shit -- makes no difference to me. If you're for 'em, I got money for you from my sugar producers in Louisiana and Hawaii. If you're against 'em, I got money for you from the candy manufacturers.
Congressman: You pick.
Lobbyist: Let's put you down as for. Now what about putting limits on malpractice awards?
Congressman: You tell me.
Lobbyist: Well, if you're for 'em, I got money from the doctors and insurance companies. If you're against 'em, I got money from the trial lawyers. Tell you what, let's say against. Now how about pizza?
Congressman (gestures to plate): I'll stick with the salad.
Lobbyist: Not for lunch, shmuck, for PAC money. A lot of the frozen pizzas use phony cheese. There's a law pending requiring them to disclose it on their labels. Where do you stand?
Congressman: If I vote for the labels...then I get money from the dairy industry...
Lobbyist: Good...
Congressman: And if I vote against the labels, I get money from the frozen food guys.
Lobbyist: Excellent! And don't forget the ranchers, because they get hurt if pepperoni sales go down!
Congressman: A pepperoni lobby. I love this town.
Lobbyist: So which is it?
Congressman: Fuck the cheese people. Thanks to them my office smelled like smelt for a week.
Lobbyist: All right. For.
Congressman: So Tommy, tell me -- with all this money on every side, how does anything get done?
Lobbyist: It doesn't! That's the genius of the system!
You are correct, but lets be clear: "The Media" is overwhelmingly dominated by corporations, and it is not just Americas problem.
It's more of a problem in the US than in most countries, because many other countries have state-run media that is relatively free of corporate influence. There is no US version of the BBC, for example: PBS could be that, but because their government funding has been continuously cut back they spend most of their time begging for corporate cash. Now, obviously, state-run media is not free from government influence, but the countries with significant state-run media have at least something that can counter corporate media, whereas the US really doesn't.
Imagine if, say, the UK meddled in our business in the 1880s and forced us to improve factory conditions prematurely. Our growth would have been slowed and the eventual creation of the middle class would have been delayed.
That is far from an indisputable argument:
1. Working conditions in the UK were not all that different from working conditions in the US over the same period. For example, child labor was legal in both the US and the UK until well into the 20th century.
2. An overall growth in wealth does not necessarily create a middle class - you also need the distribution of that wealth to be even enough that those who are not members of the investor class are not living hand-to-mouth. If you want an example of a rising tide not really lifting all boats, look at what happened to GDP versus wage growth since 1975.
3. You're completely ignoring trade unions and government regulation, both of which changed policies dramatically.
4. I'm not sure which period of the middle class you're talking about, but if it's the one from the 1950's, you also have to factor in the lack of able-bodied men and the G.I. Bill.
5. There was another significant comparative advantage in play for the US in the 1880's: Many of the raw materials for the products of US factories were from the US, so manufacturing in the US cut transportation costs. If you're raising cattle in Colorado, it's far easier to make that into ground beef in Chicago than it is to ship cattle to Birmingham. If you're mining iron in upper Michigan, it makes more sense to do your smelting in Cleveland or Detroit than it does to ship it to Bath before smelting.
Your chart in no way refutes my argument:
1. The absolute numbers are misleading, because not only is the federal government getting larger in absolute terms, so is the population and GDP of the country. If you spent, say, $2 trillion to serve 200 million people, and now spend $3 trillion to serve 300 million people, is that really an increase?
2. Federal spending is lower now in absolute dollars than it was in 2009 ($3173.4 billion in 2009 versus $3086.2 billion in 2013). If you instead go by percentage GDP, then we're at 22.7%, which is comparable to what we spent under that notorious socialist Ronald Reagan.
3. You can see in the same chart that tax receipts took a massive hit in 2008-9, dropping nearly 25% in 2 years. So while absolute tax receipts are higher in 2013 than they were in 2009, the 2013 is lower than we had in 2006-8 and in 2000. If you instead go by percentage GDP, then we're at 16.7%, which is very much towards the low end, and 2009-10 was lowest it had been since 1950.
And of course the original claim was about state-level spending, not federal. But the numbers simply don't tell a story of a federal government growing unusually large.
I hate to sound cynical, but at this point, it really doesn't matter who you vote for in federal elections.
Actually it does matter somewhat, because industries vary where they place their bets, so when industries disagree with each other that can change what the politicians do. For example, if candidate Smith got $100,000 from Disney and $1,000,000 from Google, while candidate Jones got $100,000 from Google and $1,000,000 from Disney, then Smith will be less likely to support more restrictive copyrights than Jones.
produce our next home grown Putin
You mean like our own CIA man turned president?
Could it be that those contributing to the revenue might think it feels more onerous as their share of it goes up than if everyone was paying?
It would be if that were true, but tax rates are also significantly lower now than they've been in a very long time.
1941 for seem like a nice number. Any reason you chose that one?
The biggest reason for picking 1941 has to do with what happened on December 6 of that year, which was the start of a full-scale military mobilization that has largely continued for the last 72 years.
States are spending more than ever.
No they aren't
It's interesting to see folks talking about "OMG, the government is spending so much!!!!" when in fact it's been dropping like a rock since about 2009-ish. What actually happened was pretty simple to understand: In the fall of 2008 the economy took a nose-dive, shrinking the GDP and causing a lot more people to qualify for SNAP and unemployment insurance and SS disability and TANF and Medicaid and a few other programs. The cost of those programs predictably skyrocketed despite no new laws passing. Since then, as fewer and fewer people have qualified, the costs have been shrinking. Meanwhile, all the budgetary belt-tightening that had happened elsewhere in the budget is still in effect, so in fact government spending is shrinking fairly rapidly.
Also, tax revenue is the lowest it's been since 1941, so complaints about taxes being unusually high are also wrong.
For some reason its ok, for the cloud provider to run on cheezy hardware missing most of the "enterprise" features, but its not OK for random company to buy similar hardware.
There's no mystery here - when the system breaks, as it inevitably will, the IT department can blame the failure on the cloud provider rather than on themselves.
What actually happened was that the definition of "white people" changed to include the groups of people that are now considered white. At first, the only people seen as "white" were English, which is why other immigrants to the early colonies such as the Scots were pushed out of settlements like Jamestown and into the mountains of Appalachia. If you look at what people wrote about Spaniards or Italians or Ashkenazim when they were the targets of oppression, they were seen as "dark" and "dirty" and "smelly" and quite a few other epithets that are now mostly hurled at Hispanic-Americans and African-Americans. As they became more common and more powerful as ethnic groups, they moved from being "other" to being "white". In part this was because it's basically impossible to tell a WASP from a Jew from an Irishman walking down the street unless that person does something to emphasize their ethnicity. In modern times, this also affects lighter-skinned Hispanics, who are frequently able to "pass" as white until they reveal their name and/or demonstrate that their first language is Spanish.
By contrast, a black person is almost never able to successfully pretend to be white, which is one of the reasons that racism against black people has persisted much longer than racism against, say, Germans.
Here's a question then: Do you believe the same thing about residents of, say, rural West Virginia that you do about residents of Saudi Arabia? In West Virginia, the government with nominal control of the natural resources work in lock-step with the owners of the companies doing the extraction to oppress and marginalize their work force, using legal and extra-legal means to prevent the workers from organizing, just like Saudi Arabia. Many religious leaders in West Virginia preach a mutated and particularly intolerant form of their religion that advocates making war on those who don't believe in the same religion, just like Saudi Arabia, and some members of their congregations have gone overseas to try to fight that war. Many residents believe firmly in anti-intellectualism and are distrustful of those who provide scientific explanations for natural phenomena, just like Saudi Arabia.
I think you're getting the point. If you don't have the same views of those West Virginians as you do of Saudis, then your real opinion is about something other than atheism versus religion.
The deaths on 9/11, while tragic and meaningless
Actually, some of the deaths weren't meaningless at all. The terrorists who attacked on 9/11 were going after the two mechanisms that leaders of the United States use to oppose their will on the part of the world they come from. Their targets were clear: the leaders of Wall Street businesses and the US military. There was nothing random about it. The other plane was probably aiming for Chicago, which would have allowed them to hit commodities markets that control the price of oil.
That's not to say that all the deaths were because of targeting - the people on the planes, the cleaning staff, the firefighters, etc died but were not really the targets. But then again, was the general population of Baghdad really the target of the US attack on Iraq?
I'm not saying the people who died on 9/11 deserved it, but it's worth remembering that terrorists act the way they do not because they are crazy and evil, but because they believe they have legitimate grievances and that their cause is worth fighting for.
1. The US should not have to be in a position where they are making such promises. The Eighth Amendment was created specifically to put a stop to the sort of thing that the US is now promising not to do. It's sort of like announcing, completely seriously, "I swear I'm not a murderer!" - that's usually a signal you're at least involved in something you shouldn't be.
2. Nobody seriously believes those promises after what the US has done to Bradley Manning, Anwar Al-Awlaki, and what they tried to do to Julian Assange. When Julian Assange argued that the US could no longer be trusted to follow its own laws and promises and international commitments, that argument may have seemed ludicrous, but it is increasingly becoming common opinion. Another example of the US's lawlessness is that they convinced France to force Bolivian president Evo Morales to land so they could search his plane for Snowden, violating all sorts of diplomatic rules to do so.
3. The US is going up against Vladimir Putin's Russia in a battle of human rights records, and losing. That's just astounding.
I don't think there has been a massive nationwide protest here since the 70s, with the possible exception of the anti-war protests before the invasion of Iraq.
How massive qualified as "massive"?
Occupiers Wall Street had something like 75,000 people directly involved, and much larger numbers of people providing food, funding, and supplies. The largest protest running up until the Iraq War, on January 15 2003, was the single largest non-violent protest event in human history, with something like 500,000 people participating in the US, and several million worldwide. There have been lots of other significant protests, albeit limited to specific cities and events.
What's changed is (1) those in power in the US have made it quite clear that they will not change policy in response to protests, (2) The media will cover a protest only so long as the protest persists, so any 1-day event is promptly forgotten, and (3) the government is smarter about how to use force to put down protests, for example seeding otherwise peaceful protests with troublemakers who riot to change the story from "here's the protesters' message" to "here's how much damage was done".
"Because Someone doesn't like Obama" isn't the exception that the executive branch wants. The exception is "Because Someone Opposes or Embarrasses the FBI, CIA, DoD, and/or NSA".
It's easy to find people who absolutely hate Obama who the government has left alone. For example, there is nobody searching the world trying to capture Glenn Beck or Alex Jones.
By contrast, look at what the US is willing to do to get Edward Snowden: Violate Bolivia's sovereignty, and threaten trade sanctions against several countries including Russia (in violation of numerous treaties). Or look at what the US was willing to do to try to stop Wikileaks: Senator Joe Lieberman was personally involved in cajoling financial companies to refuse to send money to Wikileaks with no legal justification whatsoever.
how white people oppressed some people or other people at various times
That would be because white people did oppress a lot of different kinds of people. People who were on the receiving end of documented discrimination and oppression, with at least tacit support of the government, in the United States include but are probably not limited to:
- American Indians
- women
- African-Americans
- Chinese-Americans
- Japanese-Americans
- Irish-Americans, Scottish-Americans
- Italian-Americans
- Mexican-Americans
- German-Americans
- Russian-Americans
- members of Socialist, Anarchist or Communist political parties
- members of trade unions, other workers on strike
- Mormons, Jews, atheists, and in recent years, Muslims
- war veterans
- citizens involved in large protests, such as the Bonus Army, Selma marchers, Chicago '68, Kent State, and most recently Occupy Wall St.
A sibling poster is right: This kind of discrimination is arguably one of the most important parts of US history, and anyone who denies it is being willfully blind. It's a very good bet that at least one of your ancestors was on the receiving end of oppression by your government.
Why not just hire Al Sleet?
"Tonight's forecast: Dark. Continued dark throughout most of the evening, with some widely scattered light towards morning."
If the order was given to destroy data then there HAS to be a person who gave that order. It's time they were hunted down.
The thing is, this being Halliburton, it's possible that the person that gave the order to destroy evidence has already gotten away with much more heinous crimes and effectively has immunity from prosecution for anything he does. And if they try to hunt him down, he might shoot them in the face.
I have a fundamental problem with the "It helps us catch terrorists who are operating sleeper cells" argument: The NSA has yet to point to a single sleeper cell caught because of the data captured because of NSA surveillance. When asked about it by a House committee, they claimed that surveillance had helped in "dozens" of cases, but when prompted to name one, they came up empty.
So it's not even philosophically wrong, in the sense that we should be willing to accept a tiny risk of death from terrorist attack in exchange for proper Fourth Amendment protections. The arguments made by the NSA and its supporters have absolutely no proven basis in fact.