Disagree. This is the result of decades more bullshit from other american presidents, political figures, and 3 lettered organizations ran by ghoulish wastes of skin. There have been many famous people who have been outspoken about this shit in that time too. 9/11 and America’s batshit insane reaction to it was just more of the same dumb bullshit the rest of the world has come to expect from it’s governments and citizenry.
I posted 6 words. you somehow didn’t read half of them.
And to be honest, @Serinus@lemmy.world is probably right, since I was thinking of the broader surveillance world etc, not the current offensive by Russia against the world.
America is doing terrible things at home and abroad, but that isn’t enough for the tankies. They need us to have always been like this.
We haven’t. This is the first time we’ve had a president that wasn’t at least trying to do the right thing by his people, no matter how misguided.
I think even Reagan fully bought into the trickle down bullshit and thought he was doing the right thing for America and Americans by paving the way for corporate oligarchy.
I think W (from his perspective at the time) justified our invasion of Iraq with both liberating the people and reducing our reliance on Israel and Saudi Arabia.
The orange tyrant doesn’t give that much of a fuck. He doesn’t need to have anything sold to him other than his own name.
You’re so preoccupied with your knee jerk anticommunism that you’re doing revisionist, apologist history for the Reagan administration. Was Reagan doing what he thought was the best for the people when participating in the Iran Contra affair? Come on, the US is a country that has always operated to secure its own imperialist hegemony since it became a global super power. Every single government since the start of the Cold War has operated to do that by any means necessary, even committing genocide and propping up fascist regimes worldwide.
You mean the people who kept threatening people with nukes? The people who proliferated atomic weapons giga? The ones who did 56 military interventions (old figure btw, doesn’t include Venezuela, for example) in South America post WW2? The one that proliferated military bases all across the world? The Bay of Pigs people? The ones that invaded Vietnam because they were bored? The people who made North Korea the most bombed place ever? Coup in Guatemala so that bananas were cheap? The people who would rather destroy civilization than coexist with the USSR? You’re saying that system worked relatively well? I’m saying that they were barbaric up to and through current events.
America is doing terrible things at home and abroad, but that isn’t enough for the tankies. They need us to have always been like this.
We haven’t. This is the first time we’ve had a president that wasn’t at least trying to do the right thing by his people, no matter how misguided.
I see. I agree that Trump is different to the ones that came before (except Andrew Jackson) , and I agree that the tankies are trying to claim it’s been like this, but this kind of shit has been pretty common in US history. And so has the opposite. Sometimes administrations are tainted by the populus or take wrong turns in otherwise good administrations, but there’s usually some bullshit somewhere. Even people like FDR have things they fucked up.
Tankies stop at the system is fucked. It can’t be improved according to them, tear it down and build a new thing. Obviously that won’t happen and if we tried it would animal farm into something worse right off. And just isn’t true, the system here worked relatively well after the second world war. Never perfect, but with controls on the system and governed by mostly reason, we did make the most prosperous working class the world has every seen by a large margin. Now gone, chiseled away by the CPI having been understated for half a century averaging 2-3 percent a year just by 2008 under the new measures, while it was 5-8 percent under the old.
That was not a good faith change, it was done to steal from working people at every level and stage, and give to investors, and no one questions it even still, as the ivy league suits tell us our buying power has never been higher, when that clearly isn’t true.
The post war economy created the most prosperous working class in history but at whose expense?
The entire post-war period is littered with the US toppling third world anti-imperial movements for the sake of bolstering its position in the world/gaining economic advantage. It’s a farce. It was unsustainable. It required the slaughter of countless people to hold up that US economy. And that’s not even getting to the modern imperialist project held up by the IMF, forcing disadvantaged nations to essentially fully give themselves over to American corporations with no material gain on their part.
All that cold war bullshit had nothing to do with the high standard of living working people TOOK from the ruling class in the Great Depression, when they had some real leadership in FDR’s New Deal, and Unions.
All the subjugating other peoples had nothing to do with the high standard of living. Korea, vietnam, and so forth to all of latin america. None of that helped working people, imperialist wars never help working people’s situation. Unions, and good leaders got those gains. They put 90% taxes on the rich at obscene levels to discourage the rich taking more than their share, etc.
And that is what is missing now, organization, we need unions, but not just around where we work, we need to be organized otherwise, I think innumerable groups federated together on general forums, to cooperate on what they agree on, like not getting fucked by the super rich without consent. From that forum, where we can organize around issues, cooperate on what we agree on, both privately and publicly, we could find and groom real leaders to take government from these parasites that now control it. We are stronger than they are, we just need to unite.
It’s easy to say “Oh, I wish we had unions like we did back in the day.” But we had unions back in the day and they didn’t stop things from turning out the way they did. What we need is a sober analysis of the class dynamics and why things went awry, and what we can do differently going forward.
The government in the postwar era used a carrot and a stick to root out communists. The stick was McCarthyism, but the carrot was the fact that the government was willing to cooperate with unions provided they showed a willingness to purge communists, like the AFL/CIO did.
The decision of unions to cooperate with that is a major reason why everything has gone to hell. In the short term, sure, they got to enjoy a higher standard of living. But all the while, the ruling class was building power through imperialism and anticommunism. At a certain point, they were simply powerful enough that they no longer needed the unions’ cooperation at all, and so they betrayed and dumped them, in the Carter/Reagan era. The only thing that could’ve stopped that shift would have been if the unions had stood together in solidarity, for example in a general strike. But “standing in solidarity in recognition of a common class interest” is the sort of thing that commies do.
Decades of riding high on the promises of the New Deal era transformed unions to become almost entirely self-interest, with no solidarity even with other domestic workers, much less with the global south. And of course, all of this is a very white perspective on things. The offer to get a high standard of living in exchange for ratting out commies was never really extended to minority groups. And again, confronting racism and using your voice and position to blah blah, again, commie shit.
“You give up all ideals, all solidarity, all high minded ideals of justice and equality, and kick out the people who won’t, and we’ll give you some real nice benefits. And who cares if we get to secure our position in a generation or two, you’ll have retired by then anyway.” This is the foundation of the “left” anticommunism that won out in the West. Of course, now, that offer has been rescinded, because the ruling class already got what they wanted. And yet, we still have plenty of people who love punching left at communists for no real reason. They’re not even offering a reward for it anymore! But whether because of force of habit or indoctrination or whatever brainworms, people are still throwing around “tankie” the way they used to throw around “pinko” or “red.”
If we manage to rebuild unions, we need to ensure that they do not become compromised by narrow self-interest like they did before. We have the ability to build them from the ground up with the correct approach, but it’s only through recognizing the mistakes of the past that we have the opportunity to correct them.
Disagree. This is the result of decades more bullshit from other american presidents, political figures, and 3 lettered organizations ran by ghoulish wastes of skin. There have been many famous people who have been outspoken about this shit in that time too. 9/11 and America’s batshit insane reaction to it was just more of the same dumb bullshit the rest of the world has come to expect from it’s governments and citizenry.
I posted 6 words. you somehow didn’t read half of them.
And to be honest, @Serinus@lemmy.world is probably right, since I was thinking of the broader surveillance world etc, not the current offensive by Russia against the world.
It’s funny. We’re awash in terrible things happening in and from America, but that isn’t enough for the tankies. It’s almost like they have an agenda.
not sure I follow what this means
America is doing terrible things at home and abroad, but that isn’t enough for the tankies. They need us to have always been like this.
We haven’t. This is the first time we’ve had a president that wasn’t at least trying to do the right thing by his people, no matter how misguided.
I think even Reagan fully bought into the trickle down bullshit and thought he was doing the right thing for America and Americans by paving the way for corporate oligarchy.
I think W (from his perspective at the time) justified our invasion of Iraq with both liberating the people and reducing our reliance on Israel and Saudi Arabia.
The orange tyrant doesn’t give that much of a fuck. He doesn’t need to have anything sold to him other than his own name.
lol. lmao even.
Christ, what a bootlicker.
You’re so preoccupied with your knee jerk anticommunism that you’re doing revisionist, apologist history for the Reagan administration. Was Reagan doing what he thought was the best for the people when participating in the Iran Contra affair? Come on, the US is a country that has always operated to secure its own imperialist hegemony since it became a global super power. Every single government since the start of the Cold War has operated to do that by any means necessary, even committing genocide and propping up fascist regimes worldwide.
From @WhatDoYouMeanPodcast@hexbear.net
I see. I agree that Trump is different to the ones that came before (except Andrew Jackson) , and I agree that the tankies are trying to claim it’s been like this, but this kind of shit has been pretty common in US history. And so has the opposite. Sometimes administrations are tainted by the populus or take wrong turns in otherwise good administrations, but there’s usually some bullshit somewhere. Even people like FDR have things they fucked up.
Tankies stop at the system is fucked. It can’t be improved according to them, tear it down and build a new thing. Obviously that won’t happen and if we tried it would animal farm into something worse right off. And just isn’t true, the system here worked relatively well after the second world war. Never perfect, but with controls on the system and governed by mostly reason, we did make the most prosperous working class the world has every seen by a large margin. Now gone, chiseled away by the CPI having been understated for half a century averaging 2-3 percent a year just by 2008 under the new measures, while it was 5-8 percent under the old.
That was not a good faith change, it was done to steal from working people at every level and stage, and give to investors, and no one questions it even still, as the ivy league suits tell us our buying power has never been higher, when that clearly isn’t true.
The post war economy created the most prosperous working class in history but at whose expense?
The entire post-war period is littered with the US toppling third world anti-imperial movements for the sake of bolstering its position in the world/gaining economic advantage. It’s a farce. It was unsustainable. It required the slaughter of countless people to hold up that US economy. And that’s not even getting to the modern imperialist project held up by the IMF, forcing disadvantaged nations to essentially fully give themselves over to American corporations with no material gain on their part.
All that cold war bullshit had nothing to do with the high standard of living working people TOOK from the ruling class in the Great Depression, when they had some real leadership in FDR’s New Deal, and Unions.
All the subjugating other peoples had nothing to do with the high standard of living. Korea, vietnam, and so forth to all of latin america. None of that helped working people, imperialist wars never help working people’s situation. Unions, and good leaders got those gains. They put 90% taxes on the rich at obscene levels to discourage the rich taking more than their share, etc.
And that is what is missing now, organization, we need unions, but not just around where we work, we need to be organized otherwise, I think innumerable groups federated together on general forums, to cooperate on what they agree on, like not getting fucked by the super rich without consent. From that forum, where we can organize around issues, cooperate on what we agree on, both privately and publicly, we could find and groom real leaders to take government from these parasites that now control it. We are stronger than they are, we just need to unite.
It’s easy to say “Oh, I wish we had unions like we did back in the day.” But we had unions back in the day and they didn’t stop things from turning out the way they did. What we need is a sober analysis of the class dynamics and why things went awry, and what we can do differently going forward.
The government in the postwar era used a carrot and a stick to root out communists. The stick was McCarthyism, but the carrot was the fact that the government was willing to cooperate with unions provided they showed a willingness to purge communists, like the AFL/CIO did.
The decision of unions to cooperate with that is a major reason why everything has gone to hell. In the short term, sure, they got to enjoy a higher standard of living. But all the while, the ruling class was building power through imperialism and anticommunism. At a certain point, they were simply powerful enough that they no longer needed the unions’ cooperation at all, and so they betrayed and dumped them, in the Carter/Reagan era. The only thing that could’ve stopped that shift would have been if the unions had stood together in solidarity, for example in a general strike. But “standing in solidarity in recognition of a common class interest” is the sort of thing that commies do.
Decades of riding high on the promises of the New Deal era transformed unions to become almost entirely self-interest, with no solidarity even with other domestic workers, much less with the global south. And of course, all of this is a very white perspective on things. The offer to get a high standard of living in exchange for ratting out commies was never really extended to minority groups. And again, confronting racism and using your voice and position to blah blah, again, commie shit.
“You give up all ideals, all solidarity, all high minded ideals of justice and equality, and kick out the people who won’t, and we’ll give you some real nice benefits. And who cares if we get to secure our position in a generation or two, you’ll have retired by then anyway.” This is the foundation of the “left” anticommunism that won out in the West. Of course, now, that offer has been rescinded, because the ruling class already got what they wanted. And yet, we still have plenty of people who love punching left at communists for no real reason. They’re not even offering a reward for it anymore! But whether because of force of habit or indoctrination or whatever brainworms, people are still throwing around “tankie” the way they used to throw around “pinko” or “red.”
If we manage to rebuild unions, we need to ensure that they do not become compromised by narrow self-interest like they did before. We have the ability to build them from the ground up with the correct approach, but it’s only through recognizing the mistakes of the past that we have the opportunity to correct them.
Agree with you on the organization front. Awakening mass class consciousness should be the focal point of every single person left of center.