This is how a caste system works. People is not judged based on their actions but their relationship to power.
Similarly over the last few decades the number of medical doctors who have immediate family who are also doctors has grown.
Social and economic class in the US is increasingly set in stone and hereditary.
It's set up heavily tilted so you have to be rich, or dirt poor enough for a sob story, or a desired minority. Even if you do volunteer a lot and are middle class, you probably didnt know anyone that could help you into the most prestigious positions. A middle class person of equal aptitude would likely go into something like engineering or law which have fewer class-signalling non-academic purity tests.
And just generally, socioeconomic mobility has decreased in the US across the population.
But...why? Why not just let in the applicants that have the best grades?
A more cynical view is that the governing boards want a way to pick and choose who they let in. So they create "holistic" application systems to get "360 degree view of the candidate".
So train more doctors.
"‘Absurd Corruption’: Disgust as Eric Trump Brags About Scoring $24 Million Pentagon Deal" - https://www.commondreams.org/news/eric-trump-pentagon-contra...
Not at all. In a caste system a lower caste person will get attacked if he (or especially she) has any success at all. Whether or not what they did was legal or not does not factor into the equation. First priority is that the highest up dalit is lower than the worst drunkard brahmin, even if they have to kill them.
That's absolutely not what Wikipedia says. There was indeed a horrible massacre, but why do you feel the need to falsify the reasons?
The cause of this riot was not Tulsa. It might have happened anywhere for the Negro is not the same man he was thirty years ago when he was content to plod along his own road accepting the white man as his benefactor. But the years have passed and the Negro has been educated and the race papers have spread the thought of race equality.
What part of this paragpraph are you having a hard time with?
"The massacre began during Memorial Day weekend after 19-year-old Dick Rowland, a black shoeshiner, was accused of assaulting Sarah Page, a white 21-year-old elevator operator in the nearby Drexel Building.[25] He was arrested and rumors spread that he was to be lynched. Several hundred white residents assembled outside the courthouse, appearing to have the makings of a lynch mob. A group of approximately 50–60 black men, armed with rifles and shotguns, arrived at the jail to support the sheriff and his deputies in defending Rowland from the mob. Having seen the armed black men, some of the whites who had been at the courthouse went home for their own guns. There are conflicting reports about the exact time and nature of the incident, or incidents, that immediately precipitated the massacre.
According to the 2001 Commission, "As the black men were leaving, a white man attempted to disarm a tall, African American World War I veteran. A struggle ensued, and a shot rang out." Then, according to the sheriff, "all hell broke loose."[26] The two groups shot at each other until midnight when the group of black men was greatly outnumbered and forced to retreat to Greenwood."
Instead, you assert it was a mob that assembled to lynch a young man who was arrested for assault after he stepped on the foot of or grabbed the arm of a white female elevator operator when he tripped in the elevator. I guess they got out of hand when there was resistance to their murdering the kid.
Why is that distinction so important to you?
The black community resisted the lynching and stood up for the poor bastard they wanted to murder. Their prosperity as a community and individually gave them the fortitude to fight back.
It wasn’t “because they were rich”. It was because they had agency and dared to stand for their rights as a community. For a person who believes that the color of your skin makes you an inferior or superior human, that is an unforgivable affront.
It is very simple.
In the history of revolution, there is never (except in elementary school) all that much weight put on the singular act which instigated the final result. The conditions in place (Jim Crow laws, Southern pride, etc.) lead up to a final moment which our monkey brains like to point to as the cause but in reality there is a simmering cultural froth which could boil over in any number of ways: it just happens that one of the ways is what's described in the Wikipedia article, but it could have started many other ways. All of our understanding about the experience of being Black in the US during that time helps to contextualize the extreme and disproportionate outburst of violence by the White population as racially motivated, serving under an ideology best described as ur-"Great Replacement Theory".
In simpler words, the destruction of Black Wall Street is not without precedent, indeed this was merely one of the more famous and complete examples of destroying the wealth that Black people enjoyed, if only briefly due to the hate of those visiting violence upon them.
"Don't feed the trolls". They absolutely do know what they're doing.
Go read a book about it, and then if you still want to, you can tell us why this interpretation is wrong.
Racism is a complex phenomenon not limited to the simplistic view "they don't like black people". This representation is doing a disservice when some truly racist people are then justifying their actions and beliefs by saying "I cannot be racist, I'm friend with the garbage man who is black: he is a good black man, is polite to me and stay at his place. So, if I'm not racist, what I'm doing is just legitimate".
In the context of Tulsa, it is difficult to believe that the frustration of racist people seeing black people more successful than them has not contributed to the situation. It seems very natural and logical (and that's even the core of "white supremacy": it clearly states that white people deserve a better position in the social hierarchy than black people: white supremacy framing is all about how some classes are reserved to white people and not black people), and if you are claiming that it is not the case, you are the one with the burden of the proof.
While you have a point on raising that racism should not be reduced to only a class issue, you should have raised that as a precision around the discussion instead of presenting it as if racism has absolutely nothing to do with class and class sentiment.
To take back your parallel, what you do can be seen as: "A person entered a bar and was raped" (what you say) vs "A woman entered a bar and was raped". While nobody here claims that men cannot be raped, there is social phenomenon that create a gender imbalance, and it is important to not reduce the situation to "it has nothing to do with gender and the social norms around it".
In the rest of your comment, you, yourself, are doing a lot of interpretations. The fact that someone noticed that a class factor may have had an impact does not mean that they or all readers will conclude that it is the only way racism can happen (that is a huge stretch: if they know what happened at Tulsa, they very probably know a lot of other cases where the "only due to class" theory does not hold up). Same for "victim blaming": the fact that they were successful were obviously not used to excuse the massacre or pretend that somehow it was the black people's fault, the context is clearly to condemn the white racist people (and the success of the black people seems to be presented as an obvious additional factor on the racists, as it is obviously unfair to pretend that some people don't have the right to be successful).
I think the first comment was not totally perfect and would have been 100% fine if they would have simply added "class was one of the factor". But I think your reaction has way more problems and does a bigger disservice by reducing racism to a framework that can easily be instrumentalised by real racist people.
Most Americans share a delusion of perpetual glory days like a former star high school football quarterback with the refusal to accept factual reality that their country isn't uniformly excellent and is terrible in many ways including being extremely superficial, corrupt, dangerous, unhealthy, unhappy, paranoid, over-reacting, immature, selfish, unfair, disinformed, and unequal.
The word "power" is so ironic in human cultures:
It's the people with the guns (and muscles) that have the literal physical power. They could shoot the aristocrats dead if they wanted to.
The aristocrats' "power" is make-believe like the rest of their papers and numbers: The various psychological barriers which dissuade the gun-bearers from ever reaching the "want to" part.
What matters is not raw power, it’s balance. The power of one guy with guns is kept in check by the power of other guys with guns who stand to benefit from the status quo. The aristocracy’s game is to play with this balance to make sure that no other rival force emerges. They do not need any actual physical power themselves to play it.
See, e.g., Iran's IGRC. Counterexamples: China, Russia — and the U.S.?
Ironically I was watching Nuremberg last not and is is schocking how close some of the leaders of this country are to characters like Hermann Göring, or Hitler himself in talking points. They are certainly populists but the language they used is MGGA (make german great again) so to speak. And factually that were not particular that good at it either most of Germans recovery is really due to the liberal government that pass laws that built the Autobahn were laws not by the Nazi party. They certain jumped on them and accelerate them but effective governence is not really for the populist
Putin did it better; he kept the military weak and aggressively managed the risk via the FSB.
The problem you have is these elected kings. Not just any king, pretty specifically the majority of the powers enjoyed by George III in the 1790s. The fact that you still have this, unreformed over 200 years later and still think that somehow your constitutional system is modern, is a matter for despair. Get yourselves a proper parliamentary system, with maybe a head of state as a figurehead.
Trump has gotten shot once, almost twice.
Shinzo Abe got murked by some pipes from the hardware store.
No, he staged those demonstrations to win the election.
There is absolutely no picture evidence of any damage to his ear.
Then ENFORCE EXISTING LAWS. That solves good part of it.
Talking about any other solutions will have to wait for govt that's not crooked. It doesn't need revolution, it needs to not have criminals at helm
Insider trading is already illegal (this case proves it). If the problem is under-enforcement, then I agree that better enforcement is the fix.
Banning gambling is a completely separate intervention addressing a different activity, and clearly wasn't required to bring charges in this case.
The tendency of governments to create new laws instead of enforcing existing ones is how we end up with absurdly complex legal systems and the loopholes that come with them.
Until the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000, Collateral Debt Obligations were regulated differently in different states. Some said it was insurance, and thus regulated it like insurance. Some said it was gambling and banned it outright. Instead, regulation was handed to a toothless new agency who got little funding for enforcement and the rest of the world got the 2008 financial crisis.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity_Futures_Modernizatio...
I’d argue that the level of corruption we’re seeing, not just in the USA but all over the Western world, hasn’t risen to a level that warrants revolutionary action.
> nobody seems to care
And it would seem that the masses tend to agree.
We are much much better off tolerating this level of corruption than we would be attempting a revolution.
Ultimately, it doesn’t matter how fat the fat cats are so long as the general population’s standard of living doesn't go backwards too far too fast.
A certain amount of corruption is normal - as Doctorow pointed out, all complex ecosystems evolve parasites. It's much better to have a democracy with some corruption than a police state that enforces its laws perfectly.
Now, when people realise the current state of their democracy and how it reflects the needs of the people, then they'll start considering bringing out the guillotines.
Just look at something like Office Space. Just twenty seven years ago, it was a satire of the indignities and disrespect of work life. Today, the movie's work environment would be incredibly cushy.
What level of corruption would warrant revolutionary action? How much more corrupt can you get than sending forces into combat in a war of choice that disrupts the global economy and kills thousands to win a bet on a crypto platform and shift the news cycle away from accusations of rampant pedophilia among the elite and the lack of prosecution thereof?
Age limits (for Congress/Judiciary/Presidency) would be a much more targeted fix. Past ~75 you just don't have enough years left to be at risk of being affected by the things you're implementing. Dying in office of old age should be a deeply shameful way to go.
There is no we to prevent any revolution occurring once corruption or "mere" wealth distribution unsustainable discrepancy are passing some thresholds, after which it simply will feedbackloop exponentially.
Pauperization that allows some party to have chip exploitable labour too frightened to have strong collective claims is also building the social structure of bloody revolution as masses feel like rushing into brutality is the only viable left option.
The police and intelligence are well paid to keep an eye on all kinds of signals. Unless the situation reaches a point they cant pay the cops any voilence will be shut down fast, because over time they have become quite good at it. Just like we have become good at running gigantic boilers without them exploding. Even poor states are good at it. Because anyone running a farm, factory, depending on banks, telcos, ports, power grid etc are all very dependent on the state to keep the lights on. More efficent they get the more dependent they are on external structures staying in tact to stay afloat.
The world today is a much more complicated place, full of interdependcies(as covid showed us), than what it was when revolutions were seen as the solution to anything.
So Organizing and Voting still remains the easier way to cause change as tempratures rise. Thats the control and feedback mech.
Still, as I bet you could agree when not aguing semantics, its inexusable for people to declare we should accept corruption
50% of revolutions in the past 200 years have been non-violent, and the non-violent ones have a much higher success rate. Even for violent revolutions, most aren't brutal. When there is brutality, it's usually because the pre-existing conditions were already brutal.
To say nothing of the processed food and automobile industries.
takes notes
Nah, life would be better if a cleptocrat couldn’t find his way into power.
I'd say that either way the population will not rebel. If the government is smart they'll just pay for the populations Netflix, burgers and beer. It's enough to keep people passive.
We, today, are better not attempting revolution because revolutions are painful. But we are also on a downward slope which will eventually reach below a threshold where 2 things happen: their* life will be much worse off than any revolution, but also they will no longer be able to mount a revolution.
I've lived through a violent revolution. Not knowing what's happening, not knowing what tomorrow brings, while getting shot at are all terrifying. I can genuinely say that most of what came after was better. A few paid a high price for the several generations that came after to mostly have it better.
I am not advocating revolution, just doing what it takes to change course. Even voting appropriately could do it.
*I say they because it might not happen in our lifetime. But we are selling our kids' futures for our current comfort. They'll be the ones really paying our debt.
Worker's compensation in real terms has been almost flat for the last 50 years, 50 years which have seen the largest increase in productivity in recorded history by far. I'm surprised this is still not enough to you.
Well, given that people are behaving more and more violently towards said fat cats I think it's clear we're starting to reach a breaking point and people are caring. It wasn't too long ago that I saw people cheering on LinkedIn when that healthcare CEO got got, so if people are willing to put their professional profiles at risk you have to imagine it's far worse behind closed doors.
Personally I really dislike living in interesting times and greatly prefer advocating against corruption rather than letting things slide until they get a lot worse.
The reason for those price increases is those countries don't have massive fuel stockpiles. The west does have big stockpiles, and they're artificially suppressing the price of fuel by releasing those stockpiles and hoping the special operation is over before their stockpiles run out. Because if prices shoot up now, people will realize just how truly disastrous it all is and actual consequences for various governments may be had, so the only option is to kick the can down the road and hope it somehow resolves itself.
Asia is in a particularly bad situation, because even for countries that do have stockpiles, they get basically all of their oil from Iran, the UAE, east coast of Saudi Arabia, etc. Now they have no oil. America can pretend it's a 4D chess move and now those countries will buy American oil and make their economy great again. But the thing is America isn't selling any additional oil to Asia. But America is 100% dependent on cheap things made in Asia, things that are built with plastic made from middle eastern oil and powered by electricity generated from middle eastern oil and shipped on boats running on middle eastern oil. All these things take months to show any effects to Americans and Europeans, so until then, it's just a game of burying heads in the sand until the situation suddenly explodes.
We’re looking at fuel shocks, downstream the agricultural, fertilizer, and food shocks are gonna cost untold anguish and many lives. Farmer suicides and famines, as the start of a destabilizing wave.
1) for the second time in my adult life I have to ask aloud how shit Dick Cheney was saying on 60 minutes ca 1993 escaped the notice of the entire US military and its commander in chief
2) the obvious lack of a post-strike plan and confusion about how mountains and waterways work make it hard to pin down how elementary and remedial the eff-ups here really are, so incompetent and indifferent
Very few people feel impacted by that. If you consider bombing Iran was going to happen anyway because distractions are needed, the money made by the whale that consistently predicts the movements of the current administration is a relatively small thing compared to starting a war for no good reason.
One possible solution is to make all trades public and traceable to the person who made the decision and the people who benefit from that.
If the laws are not enforced or selectively enforced you live in a nascent fascist state, not a democracy, what you need is a return to the rule of law, not the abolition of it.
It's just that the problem is not the trading or betting side, the problem is the information producing side.
E.g. imagine he placed a bet that Maduro would get shot in is left eye and die.
Same goes for the congress. Them making money is by far a smaller issue compared to the havoc they can cause trying to make a few bucks on their crazy bets.
Ignoring the moral argument, it isn’t all that clear to me that this would actually be a crime for a legislator under US securities law. It may be that new laws would be required to be able to punish legislators for this kind of behaviour.
> The Senators and Representatives shall receive a Compensation for their Services, to be ascertained by Law, and paid out of the Treasury of the United States. They shall in all Cases, except Treason, Felony and Breach of the Peace, be privileged from Arrest during their Attendance at the Session of their respective Houses, and in going to and returning from the same; and for any Speech or Debate in either House, they shall not be questioned in any other Place.
Explanation:
https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artI-S6-C1-2/...
As for insider trading:
> The law prohibits the use of non-public information for private profit, including insider trading, by members of Congress and other government employees.
The main difference between the two is that betting on the date of a classified op indirectly reveals classified data that can tip off an adversary and cost lives.
Nowadays super riches run the show and even the illusion of democracy is gone.
Another thought: many political elites are probably waiting and pushing for Trump to fail to take over. It is us who are going to suffer.
The 10 best performing historical congress people stocks are all republican,a ll men, all funded by lobbys like heritage foundation...
But the face of insider trading becomes a democrat and a woman
Its sooo diffcult to guess why it happened
It’s hardly her face. After so much plastic surgery, it’s arguable it’s not even her own anymore.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Which is ridiculous because the entire thing was largely fabricated by the media for those juicy clicks. It was a "half truth" story that hinged on the public's general ignorance of derivatives trading.
While she acquired Nvdia shares days before the bill passed, it was entirely coincidental, because she had put in for those shares over a year prior. Craziest of all, which the media would never fucking say, is that she lost money on the trade.
Nancy Pelosi's most infamous insider trade is one she lost money on. It's one of the core stories I use as an example of how shamelessly misleading the media is. Destroying the country for ad views.
It needs to be fixed, and the party complaining the most has total and complete power, yet it's not even on the table!
The exact same thing happens with budget deficits, too.
So, two things. First, she's made quite a bit more than a few million dollars. Second, she's been an example of being a "suspiciously good trader" for years and years and years. Has anything happened to her? Republicans talk about her and do nothing about it. Democrats say it's a conspiracy theory. The behavior has quite clearly been normalized.
"Quod licet Iovi, non licet bovi" [1]
[1]: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quod_licet_Iovi,_non_licet_bov...
It’s that there isn’t an Attorney General who would dare attempt raise a case against the hand that feeds them.
At the moment the US is just Big Poland (PiS era).
https://crookedtimber.org/2018/03/21/liberals-against-progre...
Senate and congress are both elected. Their re-election is effectively jury nullification.
The people do not care about the crimes.
That's not to say the behavior isn't extremely slimey but they are acting within the law. Your comment doesn't mention the executive branch and the various crypto "ventures" going on, like the Whitehouse dinner for investors of $TRUMP coin of which we have no idea who invested or what they got from it.
When the people feel everyone is corrupt without any evidence then the next step is getting actual corrupt leaders like Trump's government and soldiers like this that feel corruption is standard behavior