***Official Political Discussion Thread***

[IATT]

 

[05fordgt]

Yet anyone of us exceed the PayPal threshold for selling sneakers and forget about the 1099 will be in DEEP DOODOO!!!

CORRUPT As hell!!

 

[osh kosh bosh]

man people really hate inflation.

 

[Nike Jordan]

Biden's approval doesn't look that bad, by comparison.

 

[sneaksoy]

man people really hate inflation. like to blame politicians for their problems.

Ftfy

But inflation also sucks. Especially for the poor.

 

[Belgium]

Yet anyone of us exceed the PayPal threshold for selling sneakers and forget about the 1099 will be in DEEP DOODOO!!!

CORRUPT As hell!!

I've had my Paypal account frozen about 7 or 8 times for "EU Anti-Money Laundering compliance check", with the last one resulting in a report to my bank and the feds. I can at least understand the last one because it was a $20k payment for a Telegram username from a Russian person, however all the previous ones were all nonsense. All previous times Paypal froze my account, they demanded information on dozens of transactions. Most of said transactions would be around $50 on average, with any outliers never exceeding $600.
Either way it's a nearly annual hassle and I always get cleared, just like I got cleared by my bank and the federal tax investigators.
I meticulously keep contemporaneous memorandums (both digital and written) for every Paypal or Bitcoin transaction just to deal with nonsense like this.

 

[IATT]

 

[essential1]

Trump losing an election because he called Milwaukee a terrible city would be a twist of fate that no one could write.

 

[IATT]

 

[IATT]

 

[IATT]

 

[05fordgt]

Policy debate? What ****ing policy? He hasn't said one damn word about ANY policy for the people besides ban abortion and IVF.

 

[05fordgt]

JFK, would be so disappointed! This guy makes donuts look brilliant.

 

[rexanglorum]

man people really hate inflation.

Very roughly speaking, the post WWII History of the G7 can be divided into 4 phases.



Phase 1: The Bargain between Capital and Labor.

Labor unions can exist as long as they are not communist. In exchange, very cheap energy (facilitated by colonial and pseudo colonial relations), the G7's status as industrialized nations, and high population growth will allow the average worker's median real income to keep increasing year after year.


Phase 2: The Neoliberal turn.

This is the late 70's, 80's, 90's, and early 00's. The social contract that workers generally would get increasing real wages simply for not rebelling and/or working with Communists, cannot coexist next to high profits/ rates of return for the wealthy under conditions of no-more dirty cheap imports.

The "solution" was to stint the most vulnerable members of the working class and more or less throw them out of the body politic, subject them to high degrees of stigma and discipline imposed by both the State and capital. Allow workers above a certain cutoff to become micro capitalists.

Can you speculate on future real estate prices? can you develop your human capital in a way that the market will reward? Great! You get a tax cut and high rates of return and maybe even real wage increases.


Phase 3: The Crash.

The 2008-2009 Financial crisis was an actual "Great Reset." In many ways ,it was like the transition between Phase 1 and 2. Macro economic factors create a situation where even more of the working class has to be proletarianized, marginalized, surveilled, and hyper exploited. Capital also undergoes a major consolidation, financial and non financial firms continue merging, great and small landlords re-entrench, and seek higher rents, cheap lending allows "tech" companies to make long-term monopoly plays (which, ironically, subsidized middle income people's consumption which created false sense of prosperity amid every stagnating wages and rising rents, for a short while).

Phases one, two, and three are subsidized by colonial plunder. Phases two and three were powered by financialization, which was undergirded by colonial plunder. For example, we can say that a house near New York, DC, or Los Angeles, nodes of colonial plunder, are worth a millions of dollars but actual labor done by someone in Bangladesh, is worth pennies. This arbitrage, kept enough workers on the side of the current political and economic order.


Phase 4: Post Covid and the Rise of Middle income Countries.

The treats have been revalued once again.

By this point, Capital has casted off most workers to poverty or precarity. It has rapidly shutdown it's little socially democratic popup needed to get through COVID. IMO the elites want to return to Phase 3. They were making lots of money and they had enough of the working class on their side.

Nevertheless, what worked in phase 3, is not enough. The only way that capital owners can stay rich, is to really squeeze the working class, including its most subsidized and cossetted members (in the anglophone context, that means middle class, white collar, homeowners). Although capital is squeezing workers with even higher rents and RTO (really a giant corvee, 5-20 hours of unpaid commuting, which is alienated time and therefore a form of labor. All to subsidize commercial real estate, because commercial real estate owners must never take a loss, although they must to be taxed on the returns they have gotten because they took a "risk" by being able to buy downtown real estate); the biggest squeeze capital is putting on its otherwise favored workers is higher consumer prices, which we call "inflation," because we hope it can be solved via monetary tightening alone.

The problem, for Western Consumers, though, is that ever growing multitudes of consumers in the growing middle income countries, are making claims to resources that were once very cheap and exclusive for Western Consumers. The World is in the midst of a second decolonization. Colonialism and neo Colonialism, allowed the elites in the G7 to get rich and become ever richer WHILE subsidizing enough of its working class' standard of living to maintain legitimacy.

Parts of the global workhouse, especially those in China, are becoming as rich as the middle class in the G7. As long as Western elites expect to accumulate and consume at recent historical rates, everyone who is not an elite will be squeezed more and more.

What is causing the woes of ordinary G7 citizens is not so much money being printed (after all, phases two and three, were largely subsidized by printing money), it is the fact that the ruling classes in the G7 will not give an inch of ground and due to a rising middle class outside the G7, all that printing is starting to turn into very real and very persistent inflation.

Where do We go From Here?:

In the G7, there is growing divergence. There are the young and the old.

The Young want the elites to take a downgrade. They want peace and collaboration to be established with the world outside of the G7, and an expansion of the social welfare state.

Meanwhile, the old, cannot conceive of such a world and will engage in magical thinking and are willing to bomb, harass, culturally erase, bar from entry, or hyper exploit people who to not "look" like "traditional" citizens of G7 nations.

The next few years of G7 politics will consist of liberal/center left parties telling people to learn to live with less, to upskill, and that monetary tightening will make consumer goods cheap again. They will be opposed by right-wing, "populist," parties who will blame declining standards of living, for non elites, on immigrants, gays, and the emancipation of women. We will go back and forth with that for quite some time.


I do hope that the forces of socialism will be ready for such a fight. Otherwise, the forces of barbarism will prevail.

 

[IATT]

 

[IATT]

 

[rexanglorum]

I agree.

I criticize the Biden administration all the time. It is basically a regency of global capital, the Grand Bourgeoisie: private equity, big tech, Wall Street, Hollywood, etc.

Those entities aren’t good but they are better than the alternative, a regency of the petty bourgeoisie: landlords, franchisees, restaurant owners, landscapers, contractors, etc. And a regency of the ****tiest business owners you’ve ever met is exactly what Trump’s administration will be.

At least the grand bourgeoisie is tolerant to supportive of a higher minimum wage, public education, a social safety net, and dignified and legal immigration.

 

[rexanglorum]

Colonialism is always about plunder.

 

[IATT]

 

[IATT]

 

[gry60]

Colonialism is always about plunder.

Why are you surprised, when the Finance minister is a settler?

 

[rexanglorum]

Conservatives will wax poetic about their desire to torture-murder child molesters but then they support systems that victimize children on an industrial scale.

Like 0.1% of the work of protecting child is keeping them safe from creepy dudes who hangout near schools. The rest of the work is building a better and less hierarchical society so that children are not rendered vulnerable and/or subject to institutional abuses in the first place.

 

[ballinsam23]

Bunch of cowards with their faces covered. Tryna mask zionism as Jew, people arent stupid. Its only going to get worse.

 

[Fozz]

Trump losing an election because he called Milwaukee a terrible city would be a twist of fate that no one could write.

 

[IATT]