freagle

And yet, her takes are better than most Democrats

I guess the royal family don’t “own” Buckingham Palace and they never did. They just have full and exclusive control over it.

There’s one very real sense in which a homeowner today owns their home more than the royal family owns Buckingham Palace - the homeowner can sell their home.

This is a good example of how private property differs from historical forms of property. The king was not allowed to just buy and sell royal palaces, flipping them for profit. This is also true for the nobility in monarchical societies. The king could entitle someone with land, but they didn’t sell it to them and the noble couldn’t then turn around and sell it for a profit. The merchants, however, hated this, because it meant that the government was in the way of making profits. This is what makes private property different. If you continue to insist that monarchies were based on private property and that democracies are not, you are going to arrive at completely incorrect conclusions because your analysis is based on fundamental misunderstandings.

I wonder why homeless people in a sovereign were never offered shelter under a palace roof? Why sleep in the palace when they could they could just die in the military on behalf of their benevolent queen?

The reason was not private property. Homelessness really started being a problem in England around the late 1300s and there wasn’t that much private property then. Back then, none of the people owned any land and all of the land was part of the kingdom and the nobility was entitled. No one was buying and selling land and houses and such for profit. It was feudal society, and serfs worked the land they lived on in exchange for the rights to live on it. The nobility sold the commodities they produced, but the land itself was relatively open and unenclosed. The Black Death destroyed a ton of social relations and lots of people became homeless. But that was event driven, not structural.

Structural homeless emerged under mercantilism. The drive for profits and the emergence of private property in England converted previously common land, entitled to nobility for the caretaking of for the whole country, into profit-driven enclosures. The nobility fenced off the land and filled them with sheep to produce wool for the market. Suddenly, homeless in London jumped to 6-times as bad as it was in NYC in 2000. The only solution to the problem ended up being sending the homeless to the Americas as colonists.

Private property creates scarcity, not abundance. I’m not arguing for the return of the monarch nor arguing that the crown was benevolent. I’m saying that feudal society was not organized around private property and in fact private property as we know it did not exist, almost at all, until the 1600s and when it emerged in Europe the effect was actually increased wealth disparity and poverty and mass migration of poor citizenry to the colonies in search of more abundance (at the expense of the indigenous inhabitants).

The same rules would apply if a president declares himself dictator, and used his authority to line his pockets via privatization of government agencies and public services under vague claims about efficiency and getting rid of beuracrats on behalf of the American tax payer.

Again, no. The United States Postal Service is a government enforced monopoly. DHL, FedEx, UPS, and other delivery services are expressions of free market competition. If the president decides to privatize the USPS so that the market can deliver the mail, that’s liberalism. It’s the very definition of liberalism. The USPS being a government enforced monopoly is nearly identical with the Royal Mail being a function of the crown. It’s ILLIBERAL, by definition of what liberalism is, and you KNOW this because as you stated, it’s the open market and unfettered competition that is liberal and it’s the government interference and enforcing monopolies or oligopolies that is against liberalism.

You are literally running up against the contradictions of liberalism in your own analysis, you just don’t see it yet.

The hospital was inefficient, so we let the horse loose and told him to go nuts. Why bother to fix a broken system when you can just destroy, and take away any public control?

Hospitals in the US were never under public control. The liberal solution to public goods was always to have private philanthropy and charity. The Catholic Church is the largest non-governmental healthcare provider in the world. And liberal market competition states that if the catholic church does a bad job at it then other organizations can compete with them and do better. The problem with hospitals was not that they were inefficient. The problem with hospitals is that they were generating revenues but not generating profits to shareholders. Again, liberalism emerged from mercantilism, and the first issuance of common stock was a way to raise private capital without the crown - private property - and the logical extension of this is that if a hospital is generating revenue, then there might be a chance for it to generate a profit and therefore we can convert the hospital into a publicly traded company and raise private capital by having private investors invest their money in an efficient capital market to buy a share of the hospital to fund its development and operations and in turn the hospital can return profits to the individual investors - all without any government involvement. And you know how that turns out. Again, that’s free market competition with individualist “meritocracy” running the show. And what it results in is scarcity, not abundance.

Remember your basic economics. Price as a function of supply and demand. If supply far exceeds demand, prices crash to zero. If prices crash to zero, you can’t generate the revenue needed to operate. Therefore, if you’re going to use markets, you must have sufficient scarcity to generate a high enough price to maintain operations, and what that means is that some people MUST go without.

Stalin didn’t own the collective, but when he decided to seize agrarian peasant land and let them die in a famine (while suppressing word of what he was doing from reaching his working class base in cities) he was doing it for the collective.

Yes. The USSR was abolishing private property at that time. The Kulaks owned their farms under a private property regime. The USSR enacted forced collectivization - they ABOLISHED private property. That’s literally what they were doing. Your argument that somehow this was the same as privatization and the antithesis of democracy shows just how broken your understanding is. The Kulaks that you are arguing favor of were relying on the private property regime for their claims to the land and the USSR was abolishing those private property claims. The Kulaks were liberal, and the USSR was illiberal.

However, the history of famines in the region is very clear - the region suffered catastrophic famines every 6 years for over a century. The USSR’s decision to collectivize the farm land was a decision in the service of ending the cycle of famines. It took about 20 years, but they did achieved it. They managed to increase the food supply by leaps and bounds through collectivization and mechanization. The Kulaks, in protest of collectivization, chose to burn their food stores and slaughter their animals and let them rot. Literally. The people who owned the private property, on the philosophical basis that they had the freedom to do so given to them by private property, chose to DESTROY THE FOOD PEOPLE RELIED ON because the USSR abolished their right to profit from their private property. And again, you have correctly identified the Kulaks as your current ideological peers, that is to say, they were liberals as you are, but surely you don’t think that destroying food in a region that suffered regular famines for over a century was the correct course of action.

After the USSR ended the root cause of famines in the region, they immediately were facing an existential war against the Third Reich. The next famine that hit the region was caused by that war. After they won the war, the USSR became the second most well-fed country in the world. That’s directly from the CIA’s research. So yes, the government of the USSR was in fact focused on the national scale problem of famine, food scarcity, nutrition, and distribution and they did in fact solve that problem for the public good and they did so espousing the liberal values of universal emancipation while rejecting the liberal power of private property.

But you don’t even HAVE to believe that it was good. You really don’t. You just have to understand your fundamental error in your analysis. You need to read about liberalism and private property. Get started by letting a.i. just summarize the readily available sources for you. Try this prompt: explain the link between liberalism and private property

Don’t only take my word here. Actually research your beliefs. Challenge your assumptions.

You have bunch of things wrong.

The King and the Kingdom were not private property. This is critical for you to understand and to make sense of liberalism and history. Kings didn’t own anything. The kingdom was a sovereign, the king was identical with that sovereign, the king managed the kingdom to the benefit of the kingdom. It was essentially a managed commons system.

This is why the phenomenon of “enclosure” is such a critical turning point in history. What used to be common land, used by all the peasants and yeoman, became enclosed and privatized to be used only in exchange for profit making. It sent the peasantry into abject poverty in a matter of years.

The concept of something being held in common, or state owned is what we say now, was the dominant form of holding. Like today, no one owns the navy. You can’t buy or sell it. Similarly the king did not own the Navy. It was part of the country, it was for the common defense. Under the monarchy everything was essentially structured that way.

It was the emergence of private property as we know happened around the 16th century, long after the concept royal sovereigns were fully developed. It’s not possible to understand the history of private property and say that the crown/monarchy was actually private property and democracy made it public property. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of history and critical concepts for this discussion.

Private property created an opportunity to undermine the power of the monarchy. Instead of the power being the state, it could be imbued in the individual through private property. This was a direct assault against the crown’s power. Private property was a direct assault against the crown’s power. And thus, liberalism, followed by conservatism, is born. Liberalism challenged the crown with values of liberation and powers of private property and profit.

State protected monopolies and oligopolies do this.

No. You are assuming that what we mean by markets here is the opportunity to start your own company. That’s not the opportunity I am talking about. I am talking about the opportunity to live in a shelter or eat food. Markets a rationing tools, and as rationing tools they are profit driven. This is why we cannot solve hunger with capitalism. If we produced enough food for everyone to not go hungry, then the price would fall below profitability. If we overbuilt housing so that everyone can afford a shelter, it means the prices are so low that there’s no incentives to build housing. This is how markets work. It’s fundamental.

would actually allow equal freedom of competition between all people.

No. They wouldn’t. By law they might, but not in reality markets are winner take all. They always tend towards monopoly because monopoly is efficient. Once all the land in a village is owned, the price of land in the village doubles. That means most people can’t participate in that land market anymore. Then comes consolidation. As individual land owners age out, and they want to sell for a profit, they have to sell to people with more money. The people with more money buy their own land and then buy the land of others, consolidating and creating more scarcity. That scarcity increases the value, and thus consolidation leads to 1 - 3 people owning everything in the village. If you know much about small towns in the US, you know that 1-3 families usually own the majority of them. Even in NYC there are more and more blocks that are owned by 1 or 2 landlords. So yes, by law everyone is allowed to participate, but that’s never been the outcome of markets in all of human history ever.

As we say, the poor and the rich are equally free to sleep under bridges. The poor and the rich are equally free to skip meals and eat from the trash. The poor and the rich are equally free to die in the cold.

This is why they find liberalism and democracy so threatening.

Oligarchs have only ever emerged from democracy. There were no Russian oligarchs in communist Russia. Stalin died owning just a set of simple clothes, some household furniture, and a couple of paintings. Oligarchs in Russia emerged towards the end of the USSR, during the period of liberalization and became fully formed during the period of liberal economic shock therapy where everything was rapidly privatized. These things are written about extensively. Your perspective is not based on history but false narratives that Western liberals make up to maintain a sense of stable identity in the world.

plus a war fought against oligarchs who owned slave and opposed democracy, is what ended slavery.

Not exactly. The North made tons of money on the slave trade. Specifically the financiers, the insurance companies, and interestingly enough the universities. Harvard made a bunch of money on the slave trade. Wall St traders financed the kidnappings and lent money to slavers and built portfolios of common stock in the slave trade and in plantations and in the buying and selling the output of slaves.

The situation was not one of pure ideological difference.

In fact the war was fought to protect private property. The movement to abolish slavery was picking up speed during the industrial revolution because you can’t use slaves in industrial settings. The work requires the worker to be more engaged than you can achieve through slavery. So the North stopped needing slaves and instead needed freemen to work. Thus, because their economic needs were no longer tied to slavery, and indeed were antithetical to slavery, it made sense to get rid of slavery and create a larger pool of free workers. The South didn’t have industry, and abolishing slavery meant state intervention to steal their private property. Just like the king of England threatened to do before the colonists launched the revolution. Literally the king and the democracy both attempted to steal the private property of slave owners and the slave owners, believing in private property, fought back.

This is exactly what I mean. Liberalism is internally contradictory. It has values and it has a theory of power and the values are in contradiction with the theory of power. America is the quintessential representation of that contradiction. Both sides are liberals, but the ones we call Liberals are all about liberal values and ignore the theory of power and the side we call Conservatives are all about liberal power and ignore the values.

Consider Neoliberalism and Neoconservatism. Under Neoconservatism, we will bomb people and take over their countries in order to force private property and markets on them. Focus entirely on power. Under Neoliberalism we will demolish every government program even the ones that have broad popular support and privatize everything even if it kills people, we will eliminate public transportation to boost private market profits, etc. They are two sides of liberalism, they show us the contradictions.

What you’re after is liberation, and liberalism doesn’t offer liberation. We’ve seen it progress for 400 years. It doesn’t lead to liberation. That’s why communist theory emerged. The drive for liberation is ever present in us as humans, and when we live under oppression for long enough we discover new ways to liberate ourselves. Liberalism emerged to free white land-owning wealthy men from the oppression of royalty. The masses did not invent liberalism - the opulent minority did. That’s why the country’s founding fathers were the way they were. They were all rich international traders. They had no intention of giving women the vote. Hell, they had no intention of giving the masses a vote. In fact, they understood it was going to happen and they hedged against it by creating the Senate! They were liberals.

Communist theory emerged because liberalism failed to liberate the masses. I mean FFS, women got the right to vote in the 1920s and then 30 years later we were lobotomizing them for stress responses! The right to vote is not the end of oppression. It’s not even the beginning of liberation. It’s a specific right that doesn’t matter if you’ve been lobotomized. So communist theory emerged because liberal oppression replaced monarchical oppression. And it analyzed liberalism and found that the contradictions inherent in liberalism were structural. Communist theory took the values of liberalism and then asked “what theory of power would promote these values better”. And it found that it was in direct opposition to the theories of liberal power - markets and private property have to be eliminated as fundamental power structures and must be fully subjugated to the needs of the people.

This makes communism anti-liberal while simultaneously promoting the values of liberalism. Both liberalism and communism state that they value universal liberation and equality, but liberalism has not produced this and communism is a theory as to why. That’s why thousands of American women expatriated to the USSR in the 20s and 30s. That’s why 40 percent of the chemistry PhD’s awarded in Soviet Russia in the 60s went to women and during the same period in the United States, that number was a measly five percent.

Liberalism has failed to live up to its values after 400 years. Liberalism was in charge under some of the worst atrocities in human history. Liberalism failed to liberate, because despite its values, liberation is about power, not ideas. Liberal power is not emancipatory, it’s elitist. Liberal values are emancipatory, but without the power, they are just window dressing. Communist power structures are emancipatory, and we see that with every experiment - the end of the cycle of famines, the massive poverty alleviation, the democratic structures integrated into every layer of life.

If you’re committed to the highest values of liberalism, you should consider the critiques of liberalism from the left.

https://jacobin.com/2020/10/karl-marx-liberalism-rights-igor-shoikhedbrod-review

Not sure what you mean by this? Liberalism simply promotes equal values and protections for everyone.

No. That’s not all liberalism is. Liberalism specifically is a denial of monarchy, which is a power system, not merely a value system. Liberalism moved the seat of power from the crown to private property. That is a fundamental pillar of liberalism. Removing private property is illiberal.

Owning land isn’t inherently contradictory to liberalism as long as everyone is allowed opportunity to own land

Correct, but private property IS contradictory to the VALUES of liberalism, and since liberalism moves power from the crown to private property, liberalism is INTERNALLY contradictory. Let’s take a very simple example of a piece of land. The legal regime that enshrines private property says that if I own a piece of property, let’s say 100 acres of forest, I can deprive literally every single human being living now and that will ever live from the benefit of the land. I can kill them for trespassing, I can hire guards to kill people who trespass. And I am one person. There are currently 8 billion people on the planet. 370,000 people are born every day. Private property says I can deprive ALL of them of this part of the planet, and I can pass that ownership down to incorporated trusts or other family members and they can continue the deprivation.

This is obviously contradictory to the liberty of all from a pure logic standpoint, but the reality is that private property is co-developing as common stock is developing. So now the ultra rich can accumulate ownership of land they’ve never seen, touched, or have any relationship to, but they can still fund militias to kill anyone who tries to use the land. Liberalism is why the top 1% of wealth owners on the planet own more wealth than 95% of the world population. This is the logic of liberalism. It’s in-built. It’s not because they VALUE private property - although a lot of liberal schools of thought have moved private property up to the level of value - it’s because liberalism used private property to defeat monarchism.

When the law is abused to favor land owners in a society and prevent others from accessing the same opportunities, it is opposed to liberalism

The law isn’t being abused. It is being USED. Markets are rationing tools. They INHERENTLY prevent others from accessing equal opportunities. Rationing by markets means there absolutely must be a group of people who cannot afford the same amount as other people. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be a market, it would be quota. Markets and private property and wealth accumulation are expression of individualism, which liberalism values, and markets and private property are explicitly liberal power structures. That’s why when we see the elite trying to apply markets to everything under the sun we call it “neoliberalism”, because liberalism promotes markets as the power structure for distribution despite the fact that it does NOT afford all of society to access the same opportunities.

So in fact, when the law protects land owners, it is quintessentially liberalism. Liberalism is NOT populism, and in fact in every liberal society you will find liberal thinkers for centuries that argued against populism. Liberalism is NOT a mass liberation philosophy. That’s what communism is, explicitly (“the doctrine of the conditions of the liberation of the proletariat”).

However the laws that stack the deck in favor of land owners are typically created by anti-egalitarian conservatives to ensure wealth is maintained within the same families by passing estates down from one generation to the next without taxing them.

See, this is why language drift is so dangerous, because it makes it so hard to have discourse and get everyone on the same page. Conservatism is a philosophy that emerged AFTER liberalism emerged specifically to reassert the monarchy. The Tories in the US revolutionary war were conservatives. They didn’t support private property as the seat of power, they didn’t support merchants rising to the top. They supported the king. It was the US revolutionaries that were the liberals, the ones what wanted to rule the land based on “merit” generally measured by who could earn the most votes and who could earn the most money and accumulate the most wealth. That’s liberalism. That’s rugged individualism. The people we call “conservatives” in the US are actually liberals in the philosophical sense. Both Democrats and Republicans support private property, support wealth accumulation, support defending private property with violence, and support markers as the means of distribution. These are the power systems of liberalism. The values are all wishy-washy and narrative. To the liberals of the American Revolution, individual freedom included the right to buy and sell slaves and no king was going to stop them from doing that. To the liberals of today, that’s distasteful, but so is abolishing private property or using the government to ration life necessities.

If you look at voting records, it’s the liberals in New York that stack the deck for land owners. In fact, if you look at every single state, it doesn’t matter what they call themselves, they stack the deck for land owners. Because that’s how liberalism plays out in the real world. It’s the foundation of liberalism - how does liberalism propose to promote its values? Private property and markets. The people who oppose private property and markets (communists) are considered illiberal and they are correct. The communists believe that liberalism is internally contradictory - decent values, rotten power structure. It’s illiberal to suggest that we can achieve the same or better values by abolishing private property and greatly curtailing the use of markets.

So filling the Senate with people who aren’t opposed to justified taxation would seem to solve that problem very quickly. Again, you seem to be inadvertently making popular arguments that are often used by the right when attacking liberalism.

Again, you literally can’t because the Senate is structurally designed from the beginning to prevent this. This is such an important point. 60% of the population is only represented by 24% of the Senate. The Senate was design from the beginning, by the founders, to represent the interests of the land owners explicitly to prevent populism from truncating their private property rights. You would need to redo the constitution and completely change the way the Senate is elected, which would make it effectively identical to the House (hence you might as well abolish it).

As for the essays you’ve cited, yes, there is a backlash against American Liberalism from American Conservatives, but as I’ve said, American Conservatives are philosophically liberal. American Liberals, for example, think the government should impinge on property rights for the greater good. American Conservatives argue that this reduces the liberty of land owners, and they are not wrong. American Conservatives also argue that it is possible to implement such controls so as to create new markets and the government would in effect pick winners and losers in the market, and they’re not wrong. This is because Liberalism, as a philosophy, is inherently contradictory.

But let me be more clear here. There is a 3-way fight, not a 2-way fight. It’s not Liberals against Conservatives. It’s Liberals, Reactionaries, and Communists in a 3-way fight. Liberalism did not completely eliminate the previous world order of monarchs and aristocracy. It took hundreds of years for liberalism to win against them, but there are still plenty of monarchies in the world and the aristocrats still hold on to their wealth. But, the monarchs and the aristocrats integrated with the liberal world order (see UK) because they saw within liberalism the contradiction we are talking about and they can operate within it. Fascism, too, saw the contradictions in liberalism and exploited them - using free association to organize their movement, free speech to spread hate and fear and lies, free markets to justify intervention to protect the wealth of the nation, private property to justify Germans occupying land in other countries.

Communism emerged as a critique of liberalism from the left. Conservatism emerged as a critique of liberalism from the right. The US is not in a battle between liberals and conservatives. It is in a battle between two factions of liberalism. And of course it is, because they purged all the monarchists and they purged all the communists. The only thing left in the country is liberalism, and the existence of a schism needs some language. It is a testament to US propaganda that the two names for the factions became “liberal” and “conservative”, both of them inaccurate in different ways but both of them completely breaking the concepts the words meant and making it impossible for you and I to have useful discourse.

Yes, it is well known that communist critiques of liberalism must be incredibly careful to avoid lending power to conservative critiques of liberalism, and also to reactionaries (a different category we can talk about later). But that does not mean that left critiques of liberalism are the same as right critiques.

Nice analysis! Yes, the contradiction between liberty and slavery is at the heart of liberalism. Liberalism, beyond its espousing of values, also has a theory of power. Because liberalism emerged in monarchical aristocratic societies, it inherently bears the shape of the . But it also emerged as an attempt formalize and abstract the changes that mercantilism brought about.

What this resulted in was a philosophy of individual liberty in opposition to the subjugation before a monarch, but predicated on the fact that individuals could go make fortunes through imperial adventurism. And in fact, while it stated in its abstract values “liberty for all”, it fundamentally seated power in private property, which was necessary because the only way to scale up mercantile adventures was through the raising of debts from as many wealth people as possible. Mercantilism is what ended driving the first ever instance of common stock.

Private property allowed land (and common stock in large adventures) to be pulled away from the control of the sovereign and aligned well with the abstract values around individualism. But it’s clear that liberty for all is impossible if power is seated in private property. The vast vast vast majority of humans do not own private property. They could not invest in mercantile adventures. They could not buy land to create breeding plantations. Liberalism has held this contradiction since its emergence.

Private property and liberty for all are contradictory. Obviously we see this with chattel slavery. But equally we see it with the robber barons, the great depression, the opium trade, the imperialism, the necolonialism, the oil theft, the CIA overthrow of elected governments in order to control oil and weatlh.

The values of liberalism are in contradiction with the mechanics of liberalism. This is why liberatory movements of the last 150 years have been revolutionary. Not because the desire is to burn everything down but because destroying the foundation of the power structure of liberalism is required to finally resolve the contradiction of liberalism and move into liberation - a movement that champions the values all humans intuitively understand while breaking from the systems of power that betray them.

To your original point, this is why we cannot merely corrupt the bureaucracy. You cannot merely put good people in the Senate. It’s impossible. The Senate is structurally minoritarian. It privileges land over people. It enshrines the power mechanics of liberalism which are in contradiction with its values. The only solution for the Senate is abolition. That would require a wholesale change to the Constitution. But then you’d have to do it 51 times, because the states all replicated it in their constitution. And that’s just one bureaucratic structural issue. You’d still have to deal with common law, which privileges owners over the masses. You’d have to deal with private property law, which privileges owners over the masses. You’d have to deal with intellectual property law. And on and on and on.

It’s not the people in power that are the problem. It’s the structure of the power. The power structure was built by liberalism. The contradiction is not accidental, it is inherent. The solution is to remove the liberalism and move beyond it to the next phase of human society - a society that merges power and liberation together and actively structures itself around the resolution of contradiction, not merely the management of it.

You seem to be confusing my opinion differing from yours with me being “confused"

Apologies. What I meant was that you are confused about what your enemies are doing. That’s a reality. They are not destroying the foundations. They are returning to the foundations.

This is still America

Yes, the land built on indigenous genocide by European settlers. You need to remember what happened in the 1970s AIM trials - the US judges ultimately based their arguments on the Doctrine of Discovery, literally they word of the pope saying that the savages in the world could be enslaved, assimilated, and killed if they resisted. I know 50 years feels like a long time ago, and that it probably your enemies that made that argument, but Ruth Bader Ginsberg wrote a majority opinion for SCOTUS and literally said the same thing - US territorial claims are founded on the Doctrine of Discovery.

So yes, it’s still America. A euro-centric white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. That’s reality.

at least until THEY destroy it

Your enemies, the Trumpers and ICE and whatever, are not trying to destroy America. They are trying to reform it and bend it back to the foundations of genocide, enslavement, mass murder, environmental extraction, etc. Reconstruction and Civil Rights were REFORMS on top of that foundation. And it didn’t get very far - the cops still killed black people without any consequences, black people were still disproportionately in prison doing slave labor, the US was killing millions around the world and both parties supported it as did the news papers and technology companies.

These are not differences of opinion. These are historical facts, from before the founding to the actions of Democrat presidents and politicians literally up to the present day.

The response to the problem was reconstruction (not demolition) and the civil rights movement, and both faced opposition and subterfuge while they were being built.

And both failed to address the foundation, which is why we are where we are. Reconstruction and the Civil Rights Movement are evidence supporting my position.

Especially when burning the house down is also the goal of my enemy who wants to steal the land and rebuild a house that I won’t be welcome to live in.

This is confused logic. As it turns out, your enemy has far more income with the foundation builders than either do with you. You may see DJT as a totally evil human being, what with the human trafficking and rape and corrupt use of power for self-enrichment and what not. But he’s nothing compared to Thomas Jefferson who literally built and managed breeding plantations, where trafficked humans were raped and their children taken from them and sold as slaves. Thomas Jefferson kept a slave girl in a small room attached to his bedroom with no windows and only one door. And then, when he tried to use his power to end the transatlantic slave trade. Why? Because he wanted to charge a higher price for his “domestically bred slaves”.

OK? Do you get it now? The foundation was built by your enemies too. Your enemies don’t want to burn the whole thing down. They want to remove those reforms you talked about. They want to get rid of your remodel, revert it back the way it was, and then continue living on that foundation.

You are confused because you think somehow your current enemies are abberations trying to destroy everything when they’re actually the norm and they’re trying to destroy everything YOU care about and keep everything they care about.

You’re missing the point. You can’t there from here. You can just slowly take over parts of the government and “corrupt” them in the direction you want. What we have emerged from what we had. The foundations of the system are the problem. The symptoms are just the current manifestation.

It is the unfortunate reality that the path forward goes through “rupture” or “revolutionary change”. This doesn’t have to mean violence, but it means a fundamental break from the past and the creation of a fresh foundation.

But police are supposed to be members of the larger community with accountability to the community.

This is easily disprovable.

Do police enforce the laws against wage theft? How about workplace safety? How about landlord malfeasance? How about any of the most broadly damaging crimes to a community?

No. Police enforce the law when you break the landlords window, but not when he refuses to fix it. Police enforce the law when your employer demands you leave public property, but are not responsible for wage theft.

Police solve very few crimes, 40% or less of felonies. They have never been accountable to the broader community.

Except when they were used to keep black slaves on the straight and narrow when they ran errands in town for their masters, or when they “cleaned up” all the recently freed black people who were homeless and moneyless. The black people were in the minority so it could be said then that the police served the broader community.

But other than that, no. The police have always been a necessary function of private property, because the rich acquire too much property and they need an entire paramilitary group to patrol their holdings against the masses.

You can see this in the strike breaking that local police did. And then you can see it again in the state police system which was created because local police started to refuse to beat their neighbors. The state police was modeled after the US occupation of The Phillipines. Not designed for public accountability but for military occupation.

Prisons too. US prisons have never been rehabilitive. They have always been a human grinder. When the slaves were freed, US prison populations went from 90% white to 90% black. The prisons leased the prisoners back to the plantation owners for profit. Today, prisons generate around $11B in profit for private companies. Meanwhile, the US has the world’s largest parole system, absolutely abysmal recidivism rates, and only recently lost its place as number 1 incarceration rate, being overtaken by El Salvador, where we are shipping prisoners, and Cuba, where prisons are rehabilitive and incredibly psychologically more welcoming, far less violent, and where the US has been literally paying people to fight against the government. China’s carceral system is way better than the USA’s and has been for many years.

No. There is no going back to the way things were and taking back the bureaucracy. It was designed by slavers, rapists, mass murderers, genocidaires, and robber barons. It’s designed to be completely unaccountable to the masses and always has been. James Madison, 5th president, wrote in the Federalist Papers that the purpose of government is to protect the opulent minority from the will of the majority and that the Senate should be the body that enforces this.

You’re not going to make any progress while the Senate remains. No amount of ideologically motivated bureaucrats is going to fix that. There’s no prior time to go back to where the entire system wasn’t fully aligned on mass murder, genocide, universal exploitation, military adventurism, psychotic wealth accumulation, starving children, etc.

Hell, US sanctions alone have killed 40 million people around the world in the last 50 years. That’s a bipartisan consensus. As is funding the police and selling them military surplus, as is the prison industrial complex, as is funding the military, as is spying on US citizens, as is maintaining good relationships with brutal dictators, as is undermining democracy anywhere it threatens profits.

It’s time to face the reality. There’s nothing behind us that worked, there’s no going back, and if there was a way to go back, it would be back to brutal, proto-fascistic system that would produce the same results we have today.

This is what did it for you, Bernie? Not the Princeton research? Not the genocides? Not the decades of unauthorized wars? Not the 100-mile zone? Not the “enemy combatant” designation? Not free speech zones? Not the WikiLeaks revelations? Not the Snowden revelations? Not the disaster capitalism? Not the commitment to invade The Hague if ever brought up on charges?

A $10M donation did it? That’s what makes you wonder?

Wait what? Kristi Noem ran DHS under Obama? What am I missing?

435 voting members of the House. You could get 200 new people and still won’t have enough.

100 senators. Most of the country is sparsely populated. 52% of the population has 20% of the votes in the Senate. That’s unfixable.

Same outcome with a change in Congress

Are you serious right now? The Democrats are fully onboard. They supported the creation of DHS. The supported the expansion of border patrol. The supported the expansion of ice. They supported the expansion of local police. They supported the transfer of military surplus to the police.

The Democrats are not going to save you. They’re not Marvel heroes. They’re not even basic protestors. They haven’t done shit on decades.

Buying imports with your only revenue is exactly the problem when you use that money to destroy your own domestic farms and factories.

It certainly does when you’re a total market economy. Chavez nationalized a bunch of food production and collectivized the farms.

Venezuela’s debt tripled because the government issued billions in bonds on the open market while oil was at an all-time high of over 100 dollars a barrel

Because it was a petrostate when Chavez was elected and it was literally the only and best source of economic wealth the country had after decades of deliberate underdevelopment by compradors working with the imperialists to keep the country dependent. This is standard IMF/Word Bank shit. Venezuela didn’t become a petrostate in 1999 as part of its economic strategy. It started a revolutionary movement in 1999 on the basis of an impoverished petrostate riddled with corruption and neocolonial economics. You can’t time the markets. Chavez made the best decisions he could with limited experience, limited foresight, and the limited amount of embedded skill and experience in the community to run a country under a collectivized and nationalized model. The 2008 oil price crash was, in essence, an economic natural disaster that occurred at an incredibly fragile time for Venezuela.

You can absolutely say that they did bad a job of nationalizing and collectivizing. And of course they did, they were at the beginning of their revolutionary process. Russia’s collectivization and China’s collectivization processes went terribly before they actually solved their cycles of famines. It takes time to build these things. Venezuela’s only chance was the price of oil remaining high. They lost their bet with the market. They didn’t have many other choices. And again, if you want to present what they are, I refer you to the Monday-morning quarterbacking critique.

Being a revolutionary state that is collectivizing and nationalizing land, industry, and natural resources is not a way to get help from the international community with financial problems. The US was already engaged in covert operations by 2002, on the ground in Venezuela. By the 2008 crash, covert operations were maturing and intelligence networks were established. Venezuela was going to have to figure it out on their own. It took 9 years to go from electing Chavez to the crash. It took another 9 years before the economy showed signs of recovery, particularly through allowing USD into the economy. And then the US sanctioned Venezuela, determined that it should not recover.

I’m sure you would have done better if you were in charge.

Calling Smartmatic’s whistleblowing imperialist is a convenient way to ignore that they were the regime’s closest partners for 13 years

Such editorial restraint you have. Not mincing words are we. The regimes closest partners. Really?! Not Morales? Not Castro? Not PDVSA? Not Sidor? No, of course it was Smartmatic. I mean, who could say otherwise right?

If you spend over a decade letting capitalists run your unhackable democracy, you do not get to act shocked when they reveal how the sausages are made.

And apparently you don’t get to question the veracity of their statements even though that have plenty of financial incentives to lie. It’s such a weird thing for you to claim is unassailable. A private company? Lie?! How could they!? They had a contract with the government that lasted 13 years!!! How could they lie!!!

You people are far too credulous.

As for the report from 2019, let’s see how unbiased and fact based it is:

Expressing deep concern for the more than 4 million people compelled to leave the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela and also that the 2019 Venezuela Humanitarian Response Plan identifies a population of 7 million in need because of, inter alia, violations of the rights to food and health, violence and insecurity, the collapse of basic services, the deterioration of the education system, lack of access to pre- and post-natal care, and insufficient mechanisms for protection from violence and persecution on political grounds

By this point the sanctions were well established. No mention? Just that the Bolivarian government is committing violations of the rights to food and health? US covert ops on the ground since 2002 (also well established by the time the report came out). No mention? Just that the Bolivarian government is overseeing conditions of violence and insecurity? And after all that, insufficient mechanisms for protection from violence and persecution on political grounds? My brother in Christ - this year there were literally Venezuelans openly asking for a full scale invasion in exchange for oil money. I know the UN categorizes that as “political opinion” and “freedom of expression” but give me a fucking break.

Also strongly condemns the widespread targeted repression and persecution on political grounds in the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, including the excessive use of force against peaceful protests, the excessive use of force during security operations, arbitrary detention, torture, ill-treatment, extrajudicial executions and enforced disappearances by security forces, such as the Fuerzas de Acciones Especiales and pro-government civilian armed groups

Oh man. Can you imagine? A Bolivarian revolution with pro-government civilian armed groups actually choosing to fight fellow Venezuelans? Man, I wonder what could ever cause them to do that? It couldn’t be brainwashing, do you think? Maybe there’s legitimate security concerns with subversive and counter-revolutionary action on the ground in a country that the US has been targeting for 20 years and has fully function covert operations on the ground? Maybe? No. It must be condemned as “political violence” that truncates “the fundamental human right” to choose to be a junior partner to a psychopathic genocidal empire.

Urges the Venezuelan authorities to immediately release all political prisoners

Can you imagine releasing Machado… oh wait. She’s not in prison. In fact, she was detained briefly and then released. Real murderous dictator vibes there. How is she still alive? Is it A) Venezuela isn’t just murdering the opposition or B) she’s well protected by US covert ops operating in Venezuela?

Expresses grave concern at the fact that there have been at least 6,000 killings resulting from security operations in the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela since January 2018 and that, according to information analysed by the High Commissioner, many of these killings may constitute extrajudicial executions;

This report is from September 2019. That report LAUNCHED the fact finding mission. Meaning the 6K number was arrived at before fact finding began.

If you actually read each of the fact finding reports, the first doesn’t actually use “internal chain of command documents” in its methodology and only reviewed about 274 cases and only investigated 223. The methods they used were: “confidential interviews, both in-person and via secure telephone or video connections; (2) confidential documents obtained from individuals and organizations, including legal case files; (3) a call for submissions; and (4) review of open source information”. Not exactly confidence inducing.

I just went through all 5 years of fact finding reports. There is nowhere near deaths totally 5k/year. I encourage you to go through the documents yourself and find evidence for the claim of 5k/year. There is ONE claim of 5k deaths in 2018 that they claim is provided directly by the Venezuelan government. The footnote says “Provided by the Venezuelan government”. I haven’t found the actual source. The Venezuelan government denies that the number, which appears to mean that it denies having provided documented evidence for the number. That’s all I’m able to find right now, so I’m considering it hearsay until I see whatever document the UN thinks the government provided them.

I’m not an authoritarian. Dismantle the US too.

I disagree with the great Satan, but I believe all of his lies

Anyway, this has been fun. Keep simping for the empire while also claiming you hate it. They love when you do that.

I wonder why Venezuela’s debt tripled starting the year that the US tanked their ability to access debt at non-usury rates. So curious! Blowing oil revenues on imports? You don’t say? You mean they bought things with their only source of revenue. Shockingly corrupt!

Oh I don’t dismiss the chairman of the holding company that owns smartmatic as a capitalist. I dismiss him as an imperialist. The British upper class has a lot to do with oil imperialism. Just ask Iran what happened when they nationalized their oil.

I dismissed the founder and CEO of smartmatic as a capitalist because he is. He’s clearly not a Bolivarian or he wouldn’t be in bed with a British Lord building out digital voting infrastructure in the periphery. He stands to gain a lot from the capitalists coming back into power, and the chairman does as well.

As for the report, the UN claims that the Maduro regime killed 5k people but they make that claim by extrapolating from interviews, news articles, and satellite footage. There has been no corroborating evidence on the ground. It’s totally specious.

As for torture, I don’t think anyone in Venezuela is losing sleep over American spies and their collaborators getting the “enhanced interrogation” techniques that those same American spies unleashed on the world.

Look, I’m not saying the Venezuelan government is run by saints. They’ve done things that are harmful to people, they’ve killed people, and they have most definitely killed innocent people.

But the US kills almost 6k annually through prison deaths alone, and another 1000 in police custody/police homicides. Every country has black ops, every country does spy hunting, every country under attack by the US has to take calculated risks understanding that they are going to be catching innocents in the net.

And again, Maduro wasn’t wrong! Machado was literally asking US oil companies to convince the US to invade in exchange for wealthy contracts. We know for a fact that Machado and her cohort were working directly with US covert ops running money, arms, training, organizing, and facilitation. It’s not like there wasn’t a covert subversive international threat inside Venezuela. There was one and the Bolivarian Armed Forces is responsible for finding these people, disrupting their networks, and stopping their operations.

You can’t use moral logic here unless you apply it evenly, and the result of you applying it evenly would be that nearly every country would need regime change because their leaders are bloodthirsty dictators who indiscriminately commit human rights violations.

The reality is that Maduro is unpopular because 1) the economy is shambles from economic sanctions, 2) there’s still a large contingent of capitalist roaders who would rather be a junior vassal of the US and make their millions as compradors and 3) he is uncharismatic as fuck.

The masses are suffering economically and have been for years. Under Maduro, food production for major domestic food crops more than doubled and national food availability more than quadrupled. That’s astounding given their situation. The masses still want the Bolivarian revolution to proceed. They do not want to become a neocolony again. But they want the suffering to end. And all the US has to do is stop the crime against humanity that is collective punishment.

The idea that we need to focus on the unconfirmed 5k people killed by the government instead of the multiple thousands killed by the sanctions and the 20 years of violent subversion that the US has been enacting is a clear sign that you don’t have your priorities straight. Or rather, you do, but they are aligned with the empire.

I disagree with Satan, but I believe all his lies

The US sanctions regime for nVenezuela back in 2006 restricted its access to credit markets, they weren’t “formal sanctions” but they were government actions to economically harm Venezuela. That caused a debt trap for the country which weighed the economy down and it never recovered.

The voting machine company that made those claims has a British Lord as a Chairman, and the CEO of the company is a capitalist in Venezuela. Hardly an unbiased source.

And the UN republished reports that are specious pretty often. Instead of arguing from authority about the UN says this or that, read the actual report. They don’t have proof of the numbers dead that they claim. They have speculation based on research methods including interviewing emigres and looking at satellite images. They don’t have researchers on the ground figuring it out, they are publishing numbers with plenty of room for interpretation.

Don’t believe everything you read.

The UN has always characterized anti-subversive activities as human rights abuses. They’ve done it in a dozen countries. And again, they don’t actually have documentation of crimes against humanity. Read their own report.

In 2013, Maduro was incredibly popular. Hell, in 2019 he was incredibly popular. So despite the fact that he felt it was critical to prevent the American-aligned party, who was actively calling for a US invasion, from taking power, he was still their by the will of the people for at least 8 of those 12 years.

The claims that Maduro was a dictator are primarily biased readings of a conflict between the US and the anti-imperialists in Venezuela. The US first started organizing regime change in Venezuela 25 years ago. The first attempt was staffed by Venezuelans, but funded, organized, trained, and facilitated by the US. The sanctions have killed tens of thousands of Venezuelans and driven poverty and hunger to levels of desperation. This is why there’s been millions of emigres.

For 25 years the US has been sending covert operations staff to Venezuela, training people who would like to overturn the government against the will of the people, and when Maduro stepped into office he became part of that battle. His choice was to hunt the subversive elements in the country and purge them, with or without murder. Even at the worst estimates of his body count, which are based entirely on speculative evidence and just sort of guessing based on satellite imagery and interviews with poor hungry people (who will say anything for safe passage and food for their kids), he has some far less violence than the US has to Venezuela in the same time frame.

This is not a choice between a dictator and a US intervention. These are interrelated processes. The crack down on dissent is a result of the president of Venezuela securing the country against US subversion. If the US wasn’t subverting, the president wouldn’t be cracking down. We know this because it happens in the run up to nearly all historical regime changes run by the US. Iran under Mossadegh also nationalized the oil fields, just like Chavez, and he was also popular, just like Chavez, but when the US and UK started building the operations for the coup, Mossadegh had to find them and stop them. If he didn’t, they would harm the Iranian people. He spent a couple years getting more and more draconian on his attempts to find the spies and subversives and purge them. And he lost in the end.

Maduro was not wrong that there were literally US spies and special ops all over the country. He was not wrong that the opposition party was working with them. He was not wrong that they were trying to harm the Venezuelan people for money and power. But he failed to stop them.

So now we’re left with the question - should he have purged harder, or should have done it differently? And the only way you can answer that question is if you understand what the government of Venezuela was doing for the last 25 years since Chavez first took office. You need to know how they were working to prevent this sort of outcome, what things they did implement, and then you need to study what other governments have implemented and whether Maduro could have done it differently.

And at that point you’ll hopefully be humble enough to realize that you’re Monday-morning-quarterbacking running a fucking country when you’re up against a US regime change operation and that you really have no ground to stand on to critique Maduro as a dictator who needed to be stopped for the good of his people.

Wait what? Obama and the Clintons were also Republicans?

So your argument is that this article is fine because journalism is when you moralize and make false equivalencies and just generally write your own opinion without actually doing any journalism because Russia bad. That’s your whole argument. Someone tried to warn us about the pending invasion of Ukraine that we all knew was coming, because Russia is so evil that no one could possibly know what they’re up to and need fiction writers that are “dissidents” to tell us what’s happening behind the iron curtain.

This article is trash and there’s no way to defend it so you have to resort to arguing that trash articles that fit the narrative are fine because Russia bad.

And if you think I’ve spread any disinformation here, go ahead and call it out. I’ll be happy to back it up with sources instead of vague literary allusions to YA murder fantasies.