hector
@hector@lemmy.today
- Comment on Acciracy 1 day ago:
That’s the reefer madness. East Asia takes a very hard line against drugs. As late as the 70s people in Japan would get 30 years in prison for possession of marijuana. Dealing drugs is often the death penalty across the region.
- Comment on Rage for the machine? 1 day ago:
I dragged the democrats into the topic of globalism predating the right co-opting it for malign and ad hoc reasons, and it being a left issue going back to the 90s and before, as in the WTO protests in seattle, and not limited to that, and as in Union opposition to building factories in low wage countries, buying their machines, and exporting our technology there to save money on labor and environmental costs to undercut wages in the developed world, because the democrats embracing globalism, and neo liberalism in the Clinton model, allowed the Right to do an end run around the democrats and seize the issue under cynical arguments to win over enough low information voters to win the elections.
It worked and America First worked, because the democrats have become the status quo and allowed the republicans to adopt the mantle of reform, a change of roles from the great depression that saw democrats as the party of popular reform and representing workers, that was upended when the democrats were captured by monied interests after the 1971 business roundtable had big money make the first iteration of the long game to undo the gains since the new deal and to kill the republic in all but name, project 2025 being the newer iteration of that same game plan. Amongst the many campaigns they started, from infecting labor with the mob and law enforcement; changing numbers like the CPI to understate inflation, 2-3% from 5-8% average just by 2008 for 50 years prior, several rounds of changes to understate it; to corrupting the democratic party, turning it into a creature of the rich, working for the donors, whose goal is to play good cop to R bad cop, (even as R’s are now playing hitler they continue as it’s 1990,) and to crush popular reform in the cradle, making sure democratic leaders are weak, and won’t upset the license the rich continually grant themselves, ratcheting the country to plutocracy, and a police state and it’s erosion of liberties.
As such, and I explained it somewhat but since you asked so reasonably, the democrats failing to oppose shipping or jobs, technology, and capital, to brutal autocracies that enslave millions, thousands of millions, of people to 6 days a week, 12 hour a day factory jobs, working for starvations wages, while they dump their pollution in the ditch, no protections, no social services to speak of. In china many aren’t even citizens in the cities they work in, they are illegal immigrants in their own country. Forced off of their family farms in the Great Leap Forward where smallholders, a majority of the population at the time, were forced off their land and into the cities to feed the industrial meat grinder, to use the greed of the west against it, to get their technology, and their factories built for free, and to get a veritable veto in many respects with the ability to nationalize any of the factories over there on 99 year leases.
The non citizens of the city aren’t legally allowed to be in those cities, they can be beat up, arrested, fired, and run out of town on a word from their employer, after being forced off of their family farms prior.
It’s a system that only benefits the ruling classes. It sold out American workers, started a race to the bottom, both in wages and regulations, and in quality of products, sold out the workers in the countries they shipped the jobs to, that perhaps got the worst end of the stick, and then dump goods here for cheap, with no tariffs to compensate for undercutting labor and the environment to force our remaining companies to follow suit or go out of business.
By not calling that out, and representing the interests of workers, it allowed the president to pretend to do so, and win. It’s not hard to understand and frankly I feel at this point anyone claiming ignorance at this point is doing so willingly to distract from the issue, whether it’s to excuse their own miscalculations about supporting and trusting the wrong people, or whether they are actually the enemy manipulating us, or whatever else possibilities there could be. The republicans can only win as such because the democrats are captured. There is no way out under their leadership, and they continue to blame others, the voters, the “left,” for their loss, to justify staying in power to do it again. Even as those arguments are not logical, they knew the candidates and platforms would lose, but forced them anyway, and because they allege they lost due to bigotry it’s ok to have thrown the election? Based of a false premise it’s a nonsensical point.
So that is why it has to be brought up, because they are fixing elections now and the succession fight in 2028 might be the last chance to take it from them, and these democrats are unwilling and unable to do so. Everyone knows they are being screwed if not by whom, we all know what the electorate is, ignorance is no excuse. We need reform for it’s own sake too, the plutocratic rot is visible on the surface and the rot is throughout the body politic, everyone sees it’s sick, and without popular reform we are going from treating with leaches and mercury to surgery with Dr Goat Balls. (A doctor that pioneered a method to switch out man testicles for goat testicles, had the most powerful radio tower and station in the country, and then in mexico right across the border promoting it, until the AMA, newly formed finally put a stop to him.)
- Comment on Given the obviously wide reaching implications of the Epstein files why arent other world governments demanding access or copies? 1 day ago:
It would apply to cia intelligence. But this epstein thing is so high up in the chain, with such a critical mass of baby rapers in positions of power, that there would’ve been pressure to hide the information, to not record it as such in the first place perhaps. And or restrict the information from those allies.
- Comment on Given the obviously wide reaching implications of the Epstein files why arent other world governments demanding access or copies? 1 day ago:
That’s true, and what else is true although not widely known is the 5 eyes alliance is in large degree an end run around laws we have preventing our intelligence agencies from spying on their own citizens. We have our allies do it, then share the information back with us. Even if it’s the US initiating the investigation/operation, doing all the work itself. They put an ally on the letterhead and forward the information there and back and call it intelligence sharing.
- Comment on Given the obviously wide reaching implications of the Epstein files why arent other world governments demanding access or copies? 1 day ago:
Yeah they have to play the victim to justify their fascism. Don’t insult our intelligence pretending we don’t know the truth.
- Comment on Given the obviously wide reaching implications of the Epstein files why arent other world governments demanding access or copies? 1 day ago:
And or are supplicants of the US. Beholden to the US for security, for their economy. The US undergirds all of their currencies, controls world trade, etc. The sanctions regime is secretive and capricious, and they are not afraid to abuse it. Not even before this administration, and obviously these new guys are unbound by any past restraints. Not just the president, the party, this is the new thing it doesn’t go back to normal with our new supreme leader, presuming the democrats fail to take it back, a safe presumption at this point seeing as the same people are in charge of the party.
- Comment on Rage for the machine? 1 day ago:
You didn’t make a reasoned argument no, I don’t think you’ve done that in any interaction we’ve had online, you respond with personal attacks to reason. Which is to be expected as none of your opinions stand up to reason. So obscuring the issue with slander is the only way you can “win.” The same way the president “wins” arguments, or the politicians that copy him. All the way down the line to prole at lemmy, emulating the leader. Talk about sad.
- Comment on Rage for the machine? 1 day ago:
Pathetic, your argument is basically the same as excusing all epstein conspirators because Q co opted it.
Too dumb to refute but here we are. I recognize your name too, this isn’t your first wrong-headed opinion backed by personal attacks when questioned. Which makes sense because you can’t use reason.
- Comment on Rage for the machine? 2 days ago:
Your condemnation of globalism as bigoted because the right co-opted it is like excusing the epstein list because of q. It is too dumb to refute, one would think, but here we are. Have fun pushing the electorate into a doomed to fail strategy, and blaming everyone else for it.
- Comment on Rage for the machine? 2 days ago:
Who gives a fuck what you think?
- Comment on Rage for the machine? 2 days ago:
You don’t get to cancel entire left issues because the right cynically co-opts it. You better hope so anyway.
- Comment on Rage for the machine? 2 days ago:
By keeping establishment democrats in charge you guarentee the republicans will win. How do you not get that?
But no, keep blaming the voters for rejecting the candidates with the platforms they’ve made clear for decades they will reject and only grudgingly choose every other time only as a rejection of the other party. Feel free to get worse every cycle and coast off of browbeating everyone into voting for the less bad option, even though we know that won’t reliably win, and republicans are planning on fixing elections, meaning they only have (had, thanks pal,) to win once.
What is the word for when you keep doing the same thing expecting different results? That seems to describe you here. As you pass the blame for doomed to fail strategies to justify keeping those same people in power to fail again, in perhaps the last chance before elections are fixed beyond recall, and make no mistake, they already are fixed beyond whatever milquetoast democrat playing to a mythical center voter that wants to get fucked by corporations but with crumbs allocated to them and kinder words.
Maybe you can run with Liz Cheney as VP!
- Comment on Rage for the machine? 2 days ago:
You have no idea what you are talking about, globalism has been used for 30 years, and there were huge left protests in Seattle and elsewhere as such.
Bottom line, you think you know things without having learned them, meaning you have no credibility, and that you can be tooled by malign interests to manipulate your fellow citizens to ill outcomes.
- Comment on Rage for the machine? 2 days ago:
Tis you missing the point. The person I responded to just condemned everyone opposing globalists, and globalism, as anti jewish, because the far right co-opted anti globalism and identified jews as the culprits, rather than Wall Street, and big money.
Globalism, globalists, is not synonomous with “jews” at all, and that type of reactionary response, to defend or reject completely something unfairly attacked or supported by the right, is what loses credibility, and furthers captured interests remaining captured.
When the republicans want to make the fda worse, and attack them for whatever, we (you,) will defend everything about the fda, even though in reality we know they have for decades been run by pharma board members and executives and lobbyists that have ratfucked them for 40 years. Defend against unfair attacks, don’t defend their fact free campaigns to schedule a plant with demonstrably false arguments, and the like.
Likewise the far right conflating the abuses of wall street in globalism with jews shouldn’t lead you to support wall street’s globalism. Oppose the incorrect conflation of globalism with one group of people when it’s many groups of big monied interests.
It’s about too dumb to have to argue, which makes sense since you didn’t actually make a reasoned argument but a rather nonsensical refutation of an ill defined point.
- Comment on Rage for the machine? 2 days ago:
Their own politicians are the most sold out to wall street, every accusation is a confession truly.
- Comment on Rage for the machine? 2 days ago:
I think that’s been a thing since like the 80s or 90s, in the UK first and then here. Not all punk but the scene got filled with nazi types back then, according to things I’ve seen on like tv idk specifically.
- Comment on Rage for the machine? 2 days ago:
Maybe the right means that. Here in the real world, we mean wall street, shipping all of our factory jobs to other low cost countries to exploit their workforce and undercut wage and environmental laws. But don’t let me get in the way of you stroking off the democrats that betrayed us and embraced globalism and allowed the president to do an end run around them on trade.
- Comment on Beyond fucked up 3 days ago:
I wish I had more sources handy for this, I have this though.
- Comment on Beyond fucked up 5 days ago:
The problem with that is false convictions happen. There were hundreds of false convictions for child rape and devil worship in living memory, in the 80s and 90s, the Satanic Panic.
- Comment on Beyond fucked up 5 days ago:
You do realize, well several things, the inflation rate wasn’t as understated then as now. The Unemployment rate wasn’t as understated as now, they only count people receiving unemployment benefits as unemployed, it’s a worthless number.
But by 1980 the Business Roundtable of 1971’s long game to unmake liberal democracy and the new deal and resulting gains of unions and the middle class was in full swing, they cooperated together on what they agreed on, which included reducing us to poverty, and making a police state, to get to where we are heading now, fascism.
The first thing that I mentioned, the inflation rate, meant that at that point, we had not gone through a half century of inflation registered at 2-3 percent when in fact it was 5-8 percent, under the old unchanged standard, changed in bad faith by said illiberal forces. So a minimum wage job could still support a family, but by the 80s that was noticeably becoming less true.
- Comment on Beyond fucked up 5 days ago:
I actually do not remember that because I actively ignored all popular music, all royal family, all oj simpson, and the rest. I still do. Oh yeah, also actor’s names, I try not to learn them.
- Comment on Name it 6 days ago:
Not Cirith Ungol.
- Comment on A Statement From The White House 6 days ago:
You do realize we are exposed to way more and worse chemicals than they were in previous generations? I don’t know what world you think you are living in, that after they phased out lead they didn’t allow more and worse ones in with little to no protections, based on industry funded research that starts backwards from it’s safe to design studies.
It’s way worse now than you realize.
- Comment on JD Vance visits Milan, Italy 1 week ago:
I doubt he eats that much of the fast food himself, and that it’s more of a public image thing, he wants to look like he’s eating it.
- Comment on JD Vance visits Milan, Italy 1 week ago:
May we ask some of what you were banned for? Just voting or comments? I always drop accounts after a 2nd violation so I don’t get permabanned but want to quit completely as their violations are usually not against the rules, and often I think for other reasons, dishonest.
- Comment on Billionaires with $1 salaries – and other legal tax dodges the ultrawealthy use to keep their riches 1 week ago:
To summarize some of the source material for articles like this, by propublica: propublica.org/…/billionaires-tax-avoidance-techn…
- Not selling stock, no income to tax, they rather borrow against stock value, which isn’t taxable.
- The 5 Billion IRA, pioneered by Peter Thiel, the Roth IRA is a type of account that shields income from taxes and is intended to help working people save for retirement. In 1999 Thiel stuffed low value paypal shares into his that reaped billions in untaxed gains.
- High Tax Rate Trading into Low Tax Rate Income. When they do realize income, billionaires do it by recognizing gains on long term investments, such as stock sales, which are taxed at lower rates, (bush tax cuts lowered it even farther than it was, info not part of article I’m citing though,) Jeff Yass, head of Susquehanna International Group, a Wall Street Parasite, pioneered creative ways to transform short term trading gains into long term ones. Saving over 1 billion in taxes in 6 years as such. (To have that much in short term gains, it’s likely they are utilizing Flash Orders. Tapped into exchanges, computer programs on lightning fast switches ascertain the movement of stocks by the trades being submitted, and slips in their trades on those stocks leveraged with borrowings before those orders go through, making a sort of parasitic gain, it’s not even illegal.) Details propublica.org/…/jeff-yass-susquehanna-tiktok-tax…, and propublica.org/…/jeff-yass-susquehanna-tiktok-tax…
- Sports ownership: Make money while legally reporting losses. (This encompasses more than sports ownership but losses in any investment have long been offset against taxable income in others, they can pull losses back 3 years to offset taxes already paid, or forward like 10 years to offset future income. This is why billionaires have paid virtually nothing since 2008, even as the government bailed them out and they have never been richer.) But the article details sports teams allowing for even profitable teams to allow erasing taxable income. Sometimes the same expenses can be deducted twice, like costs of players’ contracts. Allowed to depreciate players’ value, and so many deductions that the owners pay less in taxes than people working at the stadiums serving food and beverages or working ticket kiosks or security.
- Special tax breaks for Oil Drilling. Billionaires can pay zero taxes in ten years taking advantage of all of these tax breaks, many furthered by the Bush administration, at Dick Cheney’s influence. Although that is not mentioned in the article.
- Using Hobbies as sources of offsetting taxable wealth. Race horses, 6 owners harnessed 600 million in write offs on horse racing operations at the 2021 Kentucky Derby for instance. Luxury Hotels for another, Beanie Baby founder Ty Warner went 12 years without paying taxes after splurging on a couple of four seasons hotels.
- Change the Laws. Investing in politicians pays for itself. Not the least with this administration, but let’s be honest, none of them have changed anything back. Business owners also slashed their salaries and categorized the money as passthrough income to avoid taxes.
- Tech Billionaires pay less than hedge fund managers now, of the top 400 earners, those with over 110 million/year in income, overall they paid low rates, but Tech, heirs, private equity executives, stood out for drawing on the type of techniques mentioned above. Also wealthy politicians like the governors of colorado and west virginia used them. propublica.org/…/how-these-ultrawealthy-politicia…
- The real champions of tax avoidance paid so little they collected stimulus checks, at least 18 of them in 2020, because their returns placed them below the cutoff of 150k for a married couple. propublica.org/…/these-billionaires-received-taxp…
- Holes in the estate tax that you can drive an armored convoy through filled with gold. They’ve been poking holes in the estate tax for decades, once again the bush administration made a lot of changes that enabled basically all of the billionaires to avoid this tax. All under dishonest arguments, railing against the injustice of the tax affecting family farms and the like, which it did not do. It only affected the largest estates, and now it doesn’t touch them.
Half of the 100 richest families used real estate dodging trusts in just one method of dodging this tax. One three century long fortune passed down to a great great granddaughter collecting 210 million before her 19th birthday with no taxes levied for instance.
In analysis of this information from the linked propublica article and the public record, none of this would be possible if the IRS actually enforced the law against the rich. Neither party has changed the IRS back to what it was before the Bush Administration, let alone to what it was before Reagan.
Bush reassigned something like tens of thousands of auditors, two different times, from the wealthy to the poor. Their new thing is chiseling people out of the Earned Income Tax Credit. The cost of these enforcements exceeds the amounts collected, and they habitually with the EIC prevent/take away the credit when the person qualifies to receive it. Denying benefits to people that qualify for them, spending more money on doing it than they save.
While the rich do the above, and everyone down the line from them also chisels the feds out of all the money our corrupt lawmakers have given them ways to do over the decades. The entire tax burden has been shifted onto the shoulders of working people that we’ve been led to have nothing but contempt for. If we are working we have contempt for those below us, even as the ones handing you that opinion have contempt for you being below them.
The democrats didn’t change anything back, not to any significant degree, and even Biden getting a lot of money to actually refund the IRS didn’t go into effect for years, guarenteeing it would be cancelled by the Republicans unless the democrats won, something they do over and over, with broadband internet to rural areas for instance. In the WPA they started projects in 6 months, or democrats set things up to take years and years before any work is started. It’s not something the republicans force on them, they choose to set it up this way.
Beyond putting a timeline on the IRS doing anything, they didn’t wholesale change all of those auditors back to the wealthy where they MADE money on enforcements not lost it, not to any large degree, as Obama didn’t before him despite token gestures to look like they did something. Then just to top it off, Biden cancelled a quarter of his IRS funding in exchange for increasing the debt limit, the Republicans threatened to scuttle the ship they were all on, Biden refused to negotiate, but the republicans knew better. They played chicken, threatening to blow them all up, and Biden caved. He was chosen to cave, they have never won a game of chicken. He cancelled a quarter of the funding. All moot anyway as republicans now control the federal government anyway and will turn that money against their opponents and critics now.
- Comment on Billionaires with $1 salaries – and other legal tax dodges the ultrawealthy use to keep their riches 1 week ago:
Propublica went into some detail about this in a series of articles surrounding their acquisition of the tax returns of some rich dickheads in the US here, including Bezos who paid 600 bucks in federal taxes in 2020 when his worth skyrocketed, and he claimed the child tax credit, just to twist the knife into the poor.
You pay more taxes than bezos does. If one year they did seemingly pay a lot of taxes, you can’t even be sure they didn’t later offset losses back three years to claw that money back, or they can pull losses forward a larger number of years to offset gains.
Think how this treatment would work for working people in the first place. You are a corporation, you hold a job, collect a wage. All the gross income from that is offset by your expenses. Your housing, transport, insurance, healthcare, food, etc. You would pay on what is left over, then you could still find ways to spend that money that would be going to taxes after expenses on charitable donations to offset paying even that, and could find a way to benefit yourself through that giving, especially if you made your own charitable organization, and paid your family members or pals an obscene salary for running that charity. After all you have to retain that talent for your non profit, and it takes a lot of talent to convince people you are worth a half of a million a year for attending a few board meetings and otherwise signing off on operations of a nonprofit.
Here is one of the articles there are a number of related ones: propublica.org/…/billionaires-tax-avoidance-techn…
- Comment on locked and bloated 1 week ago:
Wtf is Ice doing with machine guns anyway. They run around american cities with assault rifles, and it makes us look like some third world war zone. That’s never been a thing before now, and we shouldn’t want to normalize federal agents carrying around automatics, as if they will need them like that. Let alone normalizing them executin american citizens without cause and then slandering them to justify it.
The president all but cancelled the 2nd amendment while he was at it, and he never took that back, he switched up the guys in charge and pretended to back off. The precedent is set now, the feds can summarily execute under false pretense in full view of cameras and they will still lie to justify it, and the state will not even charge.
That is the precedent the feds were trying to set, for the elections. They want to establish the states being powerless to curtail federal agents. What a fucking joke no red state would allow that. There is no investigation of the incident, they are investigating protocols, not the agents.
State prosecutors need to charge both summary executions, and they should file recall petitions if they don’t. It’s important.
- Comment on Did you have one? 1 week ago:
Is this the idf shitposting?
- Comment on Japan cancels cherry blossom festival over complaints of tourists littering and ‘defecating’ in yards 1 week ago:
I wonder though. The ones running the governments, maximizing the revenues for them to spend, might want more of a population. They might need more rate payers as they borrowed (read stole) the pension contributions in excess of current pension costs over the decades, and now with more retirees, and that money they already taxes already spent, there is a shortfall they don’t want to pay back. They all want to default, and the right wing everywhere will try to in whatever ways they can first chance they get, and Japan is probably no exception.
The ones providing jobs likewise probably want a larger pool of desperate unemployed to keep wages down, so they don’t have to give back to workers some of which they took from to give to investors.
I wouldn’t take as gospel that we need more people, the ones telling us the way things are are the last ones we can trust, and that will follow from the west, to the far east here as Japan has the same dynamic the western nations do.