US Domestic Politics and internal affairs

Ex-US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright Has Died

Former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright has passed away at the age of 84, her family announced on Wednesday.

Born to Jewish parents in Prague, Czechoslovakia, in 1937, her name was Marie Jana Korbelová until being legally changed in her youth. Her parents converted to Roman Catholicism when she was very young and she later said she did not know she was Jewish until her late 50s. Her father Josef Korbel, was a Czech diplomat until resigning in 1948 following the communist takeover.

Albright's family emigrated to the United States and she became a naturalized US citizen in 1957. She later studied at and taught at Georgetown University in Washington, DC, and made her leap into politics in 1978, when she was recruited as the National Security Council's liaison to Congress by US national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, her former teacher at Georgetown.

In a 1996 interview with CBS, Albright defended the Clinton administration's economic sanctions against Iraq, saying that the deaths of 600,000 Iraqi children under the age of 5 was "worth it."

https://sputniknews.com/20220323/ex-us-secretary-of-state-madeleine-albright-has-died-1094128103.html

Let her corpse fester, with worms perforating her eye sockets and the rest of her other orifices! Rest In Piss!

So she was taught by Zebigzero Brzezinski... that explains a lot.

No nice things to say about that witch...  apart from Ding dong... the witch is dead...

Can't properly celebrate till HC is in the ground killing the grass and making the worms sick.

That evil woman was complicit in bombing the Serbs when she was Secretary of State. She also had no problem with starving Iraqi children with sanctions. Another war criminal bites the dust. First Rumsfeld, Then Colin Powell and now this witch.

I am mot surprised by this, the CIA has done similar things in foreign countries:

https://en-volve.com/2022/03/28/bombshell-cia-officer-openly-confesses-to-rigging-2020-election-for-joe-biden-and-says-they-would-do-it-again/

andalusia wrote:I am mot surprised by this, the CIA has done similar things in foreign countries:

https://en-volve.com/2022/03/28/bombshell-cia-officer-openly-confesses-to-rigging-2020-election-for-joe-biden-and-says-they-would-do-it-again/

A triumph for democracy. The NATzO definition of "democracy".

It is only democracy if the right side wins it seems... otherwise it is Russian interference.

The interview of Chris Hedges by Jimmy Dore going on right now is right on target with where the US is going.
The current woke fake left spasm is lubricating a fascist revival. This is exactly what I am seeing. When corporations
are sponsoring "leftists" then you know they are fake. This is social engineering where an anti-woke backlash will be
harnessed to give the US a fascist makeover.

What about Michelle?

Joe Biden tells Barack Obama he will run for a second term, The Hill reports

One of the sources consulted by the outlet assured that, despite his declining approval ratings, Biden remains the Democratic candidate most likely to defeat Donald Trump.

US President Joe Biden has told former President Barack Obama that he plans to run for re-election in the 2024 presidential election, according to sources gathered by The Hill.

"[Biden] wants to run and he's clearly letting everyone know," said one of the sources familiar with the conversations between the two politicians.

Also, the person consulted by the media pointed out that the tenant of the White House, despite his declining approval ratings, is still the Democratic candidate most likely to defeat Donald Trump in an eventual showdown.

"I don't think [Biden] thinks there's anyone in the Democratic Party who can beat Trump and that's the most important factor," the source stressed.

During a press conference in Brussels last month, the US president told reporters that he would be "very lucky" to compete against his rival in the 2020 elections, former President Trump.

Despite the fact that Biden and Obama had lunch together in early April, it would not be clear when exactly they talked about the possible candidacy.

For its part, the White House has not yet provided comment on the alleged exchange between the Democratic leaders.

Yandex Translate from Spanish

https://actualidad.rt.com/actualidad/427398-biden-decir-obama-postularse-segundo-mandato

When I was young it was the republican party that was the war party, and democrats were for peace... these days the democrats are still activists happy to break rules to get what they think is right.

Remember all the shops boarding up their windows just before the 2020 elections were announced... most western media outlets made out like they were protecting their businesses in case Biden won and the Trump supporters went ballistic, but the reality is that it was because they feared the democrats... when Trump won in the earlier election there was a lot of denial and lots of demands for recounts that were not censored, and a lot of protests and violence and damage with signs saying things like "not my president".

How quickly people forget... it was all Russian interference and other BS.

The real irony is that China likely funded Biden because Trump was getting a bit rough with China and of course the democrats were fine with that because that is the result they wanted and they will get into bed with anyone if they think it will help them achieve their goals... nazis, ISIS... Bojo... yet they pretend their sht don't smell at all.

They say you get the leaders you deserve... but that assumes you have a say in who gets elected and it seems in the US you don't.

Well Biden was in office... if not the top job when this Ukraine shit started and he clearly signed off on it too because his son seems to be hip deep in the Bio Weapons labs BS, and he had a plan for Covid to fix everything.... and it clearly didn't work, so I really don't know what he is going to use to win the next election with... ironically if he gets Iran back into that nuclear agreement he is going to lose the Jewish vote, while not adding much, so that would be a net negative for him.

Ironically Trump could run promising to tear up any agreement they do make which will please both the Jewish vote and the evangalical christian vote too who think the end of days is coming...

The real kicker and main counter argument to those claiming Russian interference in US elections.... what is the point... both sides are fully anti Russian so there is no candidate to push or sneak through for Russia at all.

Wont stop them getting the blame if Trump gets reelected... I am sure they are beyond caring though.

It is not a matter of "if" China founded the Democrats. This is established. Sen. Barbara Boxer was getting money from Hikvision for example.
And see what the US government just did with the "sanctions" on Chinese imports which are basically lifting tariffs on said imports.

Do not be turned off from the denigration of "leftists". These have nothing in common with actual leftists.
LGBTXYZ extolling is not the priority for real leftists. There are plenty of memes out there on the inversion
of the US left over the last 20 years.

US Federal Reserve Increases Interest Rates by 0.5% in Biggest Hike of 21st Century, 04.05.2022.

US stocks stalled on Wednesday after rallying earlier in the week, with the S&P 500 taking the biggest hit, in anticipation of the Fed’s decision following the end of its monthly meeting.

In a move anticipated for weeks, the US Federal Reserve has increased the Effective Federal Funds Rate, which governs how much banks can lend to one another, by between 0.5% and 0.75%. It is the single largest increase since 2000 - a sign of how serious the inflation problem is.

“The Committee decided to raise the target range for the federal funds rate to 3/4 to 1 percent and anticipates that ongoing increases in the target range will be appropriate,” the central bank’s Federal Open Market Committee, or FOMC, said in a statement. In March, the FOMC raised the interest rate to between at 0.25 to 0.50 percentage points.

The Federal Open Market Committee also announced plans to reduce its balance sheet of $9 trillion in government and other debt securities that it has bought up in recent years in an attempt to buttress the economy without further cutting interest rates. The Fed plans to slash that by $95 billion a month, beginning in June.

The aggressive rate hike comes as inflation, already hitting a 40-year high earlier this year, has continued to increase. According to numbers released in mid-April by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the price of consumer goods tracked by the Consumer Price Index increased by 8.5% over the previous 12-month period.

A number of factors have driven the dollar’s value downward, including shortages and speculation caused by manufacturing and shipping interruptions due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and the US boycott of Russian petroleum products in retaliation for Russia’s special operation in Ukraine, which caused gasoline prices to spike.

Prices in global markets continued to climb on Wednesday as the European Union discussed its own proposed ban on Russian imports, which supply nearly half of the bloc’s energy needs. Brent Crude, the international price benchmark for crude oil, increased by 4.47% on Wednesday, hitting $109.4 per barrel. Natural-gas prices also rose by 4% to $8.35 per million British thermal units. For petroleum, that is a 57% increase from a year ago, while for natural gas the increase is nearly 300%, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Fed chair Jerome Powell has long tolerated inflation as the price of the US’ economic recovery from the catastrophic crash that heralded the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, when much of the globe paused trade for several weeks and the US economy contracted by 20%. That tolerance ended in March 2022, when the Fed increased interest rates by 0.25 percentage points in response to record-level inflation. The central bank is expected to continue increasing interest rates to at least 2.7% by the end of the year, in an effort to reduce inflation to below 2% per year.

“Volatility is likely to continue. Rate hikes have just begun, inflation looks sticky, many geopolitical issues have no obvious offramp, and midterm election rhetoric is just ramping up”, Ross Mayfield, an investment strategy analyst at Baird, told clients earlier this week, according to CNBC. “Though the domestic economy has been resilient, corporate earnings are hanging tough, and the US consumer continues to spend, instability - driven by inflation and rates - should continue in the near-term. Have we seen this year’s market low? Possibly not”.

https://sputniknews.com/20220504/us-federal-reserve-increases-interest-rates-by-05-in-biggest-hike-of-21st-century-1095268635.html

I want to know do people on this forum think the US is a hyper libertarian oligarchy society that worships the market?

Why is it that people in Russia do not worship free enterprise capitalism like Americans?

Many right wing libertarians here in America want to privatize social security, public education, health care, etc......


Why is it countries like Japan, Singapore, Russia, Germany and others are able to have respectable public education but the US can't?

Is it due to the Russia and Japan being more homogeneous and have a common culture?

People say that the Public Schools are bad because it is a socialist idea and a government monopoly but the Soviet Union did a good job in educating students in Math, Science and literacy.  

I want to know what is the rebuttal to the American idea that government is bad at running things?


https://drpfconsults.com/educational-system-in-america-compares-education-countries/

https://bigthink.com/the-present/finland-education-system/

https://www.edchoice.org/school-choice/faqs/how-does-school-choice-work-in-other-countries/

Uncle Joe is not even Venezuela's Chavez. Also, soon there may be a lack of toilet paper in the US retailers' shelves:

The great California exodus: Americans flee to Mexico in the face of runaway inflation, 14.06.2022.

The widespread increase in prices in the United States has led thousands of Californians to emigrate to Mexico, where their income better covers their needs.

The arrival of Americans in Mexico, mainly in the country's capital, has been a topic of debate since the beginning of 2022, when an invitation for foreigners to travel to the Latin American country to work remotely went viral.

Despite the criticism, this phenomenon is far from decreasing and, on the contrary, the arrival of more and more Americans is reported, mainly from the so-called "Golden State", California, a state that since 2020 reports a drop in its number of inhabitants.

"I would say at least half of it comes from California. Suddenly the cost of taxes, the crime rates, the public policies, and all the things that people are unhappy with in California make them come down to Mexico," Darrel Graham, a real estate representative, told The Daily Mail.

According to the American newspaper, house prices in California, on average, exceed $ 797,000, while in Mexico they reach $63,596. Meanwhile, monthly rents range from $1,503 in California and Mexico to just $430.

Meanwhile, food prices continue to rise, aggravated by inflation caused by the sanctions imposed on Russia. According to data from the US Department of Labor, consumer prices have increased by 1% in May alone, which is in addition to annual inflation of 8.6%.

Products such as eggs have increased by up to 32%, while chicken has risen by 16.6%, also due to an avian flu that killed 6% of chickens to be sold, in January this year.

Although officially there is no exact number of Americans who have decided to live in Mexico, it is known that at least 280,000 Californians left their place of residence in 2021.

Yandex Translate from Spanish

https://mundo.sputniknews.com/20220614/el-gran-exodo-de-california-estadounidenses-huyen-a-mexico-ante-la-inflacion-descontrolada-1126766512.html

@andalusia

The US is exceptional not in the way it thinks of itself but in the identity it evolved from the 1630s. Puritan, Calvinist values
are at the core of the US even if it was mainly Catholic for a long time. The worship of the laissez-faire market (not free) and
the formation of robber baron oligarchy flow from the "God loves rich people" and "if you are poor, then you have yourself to blame"
Calvinist rubbish. I routinely hear the latter claim as if there are no exogenous factors in life. If you have no address and phone number,
then you are not going to get hired or get a bank account. The system pile drives you into the ground the poorer you become.

The welfare system in the US is a mimic of the European one because it was ideologically convenient during the Cold War. Even in
Canada which is not like the US in key ways, the spring back to the 1930s was fast in the early 1990s when the pressure of the
"communist threat" disappeared. But Europe has become a US colony so it does not matter. The US system and ideology is
all about the privileged minority riding on the peasants in many ways like the feudalism of old. But there is no serfdom like before
but a mental serfdom where everyone thinks they are ultra-free as they get it in the rear.

The second amendment gun love in the US is an example of half baked nonsense being treated as a great thing. No amount of
rifles and ammunition is going to defend some peasant from the lords using the state as a tool. If you analyze where the second
amendment comes from, it was all about organizing militias and not gun love. Organization is the key. But even some US peasant
militia is still going to get rolled over if the lords want it.

Why is it that people in Russia do not worship free enterprise capitalism like Americans?

Because most end up rather more rich than anyone really needs to be, which suggests they are greedy self centred people who don't care about anyone other than themselves... the opposite of what should be worshipped...

A good example would be Microsoft and Bill Gates... Bill Gates isn't that smart, but he got into a situation where his company was making more money than they could have printed themselves... most of their original money came from MS DOS... Microsoft DOS... which is a basic programming language that was installed on computers to allow the user to control the computer and load programmes and software. He took an existing DOS from the time and modified it and then got $50 US dollars for every personal computer sold in the US with it installed on... it is like inventing a type of step that is easy to clean and creates good grip so you are unlikely to slip on it even when it is icy and then pave all staircases with those steps for safety, and every time someone uses each of those steps they send you 10 cents or something... you invented the step but you don't have to make them or invent anything you... you just get this steady income from the users of your step... so you can use that money to develop other things people use and make more money off that too.

He didn't need to be smart to do that... but it really helped to be a hard faced bastard.

He could have said it was someone elses work which I modified a little so give me $20K and everyone buying computers would have saved $50, or he could have done what he did and made billions.

The guy who first designed the electronic Spreadsheet did not patent his design... he had an accountant friend who used spreadsheets that were actual paper spread sheets, and he came up with the idea of a computerised system... his friend... once he understood how the computerised system worked just said one thing... how much... how much money do you want for a copy of this for me... he said $50 (must have been the going rate for everything in those days)...

He came back a few days later saying that instead of spending 4-5 hours at home every night doing spread sheet work on paper, he now does it in about half an hour and can print out bits and do extra calculations he previously would not bother with because of the time consuming nature, and he also said he showed his accountant friends and they all wanted their own copies... $50 each.... but without a patent lots of spreadsheets were developed and sold some with all sorts of extra features and options of course but the inventor did not become rich... he was just a programmer who wanted to help his friend and other people in the same position.

So which is the person who deserves the accolades and money... the greedy business savy bastard, or the guy wanting to help his friend and others like him spend more time with their families...

Many right wing libertarians here in America want to privatize social security, public education, health care, etc......

They will claim the reason is to make it more efficient and get rid of publicly funded bloat, but there is no reason why the government can't do the same.

The core problems with privatisation is... the people with the money to afford it... are they interested in doing a good job or are they trying to control an area of the market and get a monopoly to make money.

Should healthcare be profitable... and how profitable. When a CEO of a drugs company justifies increasing the price of a life saving drug by 1000% by saying his job is to maximise returns for stock holders, and that treatments generate more income and more customers than cures do you have to ask yourself is that morally acceptable.

A government run system might not be so efficient but developing cures means less sick people and reduces the chance of transmission of transmissable diseases and conditions, and gets more people not just back to work but functioning as normal human beings which is what the health system should be for.

Private companies might say the purpose of education is to get young people to a level where they can do their job in terms of language and math and logic and common sense...

Certainly tertiary education should be about advancing knowledge working with industry and business, but all industry and all business to progress and get better.

Business would see working with tertiary education as a chance to get some cheap labour to solve some things that cost them money, or just save some money getting some jobs done.

People say that the Public Schools are bad because it is a socialist idea and a government monopoly but the Soviet Union did a good job in educating students in Math, Science and literacy.

There is a saying of "it is not what you know but who you know"... often the school you went to can determine if you do well in some industries, and getting to know the future managers and CEOs of companies does not hurt either... if you know the boss well it is easier to progress.

I suspect most senators and congressmen don't send their kids to public schools so when they cut funding and those public schools cut good programmes then they are not effected... even more so they can point to poor results and suggest privatisation as a good solution to their problems.... do you want some irony... often those private schools get government funding too... and often rather more government funding than the public schools get, though of course the private schools are where the 1% went and their children will go so funding is not normally too much of a problem.

Private prisons in the US are popular because it is slave labour because US law means you can pay inmates anything you like and lets face it... given the choice of working or sitting alone in a cell for 23 hours a day I know which I would choose.

Any incident and you get a longer sentence... unless you are sick and need expensive medical treatment or expensive medication and then you will be out as soon as possible I suspect.

I want to know what is the rebuttal to the American idea that government is bad at running things?

Americans seem to fear government control and think the solution is corporate control... what they don't realise is they have both... corporate money controls their government... it flows to both sides... both parties so it does not matter who you vote for... they win.

Europeans seem to be the opposite and are anti big corporation and pro big government.

Personally I think if the government is going to get a percentage of everything I earn and then another percentage of everything I spend (ie income tax and goods and services tax) then they should be spending that money to look after everyone in terms of education and health care and law and order.

Some things should not be run for profit... police, prisons, education, healthcare, old folks homes, water and electricity... I also think if there are factors that make some services unprofitable then the government should step in and take over or provide those services and upgrade them to the point they could become profitable.

Here in New Zealand we used to have a decent rail service, but these days it is in tatters... being a long narrow country rail connections make sense.

The south island of NZ is long and narrow and it would not be safe to drive from one end to the other in a day, but for instance there is a rail line going from top to bottom and across the middle in a few places too.

Here in Dunedin a few years ago decided to replace our Rugby stadium with a covered stadium. Our university offered to pay a portion of the cost if it was made closer to the university campus and our government graciously didn't contribute anything so the rate payers paid most of the cost.

I am not a huge sports fan so I didn't really care, but now it is built it has been very successful with concerts and other events held there that wont be cancelled because of the weather.

Beside the new stadium is a rail line heading out to the port of dunedin and I think it would be money well spent to put a train station there with airstairs over to the stadium... that way you could buy a ticket to a rugby game or a concert or event anywhere in the south island... turn up to the nearest railway station and get on a train that takes you right to the stadium... no car chaos, no parking issues, just go in to the venue and come back when it finishes and get on the right train and go home. You might even buy an open train ticket and spend the night in Dunedin and go home the next day or so if you want to keep partying.

The point is that private enterprise wont risk the costs involved, but the government could because they would see it as solving traffic issues during concerts as well as boosting public use of stadiums they build with public money and want to get returns on.

The point is that private enterprise can take risks but wont if there is no financial reward. A government can take failures and losses if it does something useful for society... and a government can be ruthless regarding staff numbers and deadlines if they want to be... generally the more transparent a department or project is the more efficient it becomes...

The second amendment gun love in the US is an example of half baked nonsense being treated as a great thing. No amount of
rifles and ammunition is going to defend some peasant from the lords using the state as a tool. If you analyze where the second
amendment comes from, it was all about organizing militias and not gun love.

It is interesting that gun love in the west is frowned upon but the love of cars or computers is just fine... despite the fact that cars and electronics probably kill more people in the west each year than guns do...

At least he can breathe without being reminded.