imbokodo

The US invaded and seized Guantanamo Bay in 1898. What was the cause for that?

It's a standard American imperial idea. The US seizure and continual occupation of Guantanamo Bay is "legal". Cubans reclaiming what Americans stole in other parts of Cuba is "illegal".

It's quite a joke. The US invading and seizing sugar plantations from 1898 to 1959 is legal, the American thieves being driven out is "illegal" and "without any compensation".

This sort of imperial hubris is why Arabian patriots have been flying planes into the Pentagon.

Cuba pointed missiles at the US because the US was openly gearing up for one of its many invasions of Cuba, shortly after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion. The Soviets put nukes there because the US put nuclear missiles into Turkey.

The US government has declared they want to destroy the US. It has been the US interfering in Iran, not vice versa.

The US banned Nobel Prize winner Linus Pauling from leaving the US, only giving him one shortly before his second Nobel prize to avoid international embarrassment.

Playwright and former Marilyn Monroe husband Arthur Miller was denied a passport, blocking him from seeing the Crucible open in London.

Civil rights icon Paul Robeson was denied a passport, explicitly to deny him the opportunity to talk about the state of national oppression of those of African descent in the US.

Also NY Post reporter William Withy Jr., Corliss Lamont, Howard Fast, Rockwell Kent...

In more recent days one can not drive a car in the US without a license, travel a plane without one, take an Amtrak train without one or ride a Greyhound bus without one. The US absolutely exercises control over where its citizens can go, many of these restrictions are new.

What you're talking about used to be discussed a lot. You can go to Wikipedia, or elsewhere, and read about relations of production, alienation, the expropriation of surplus labor time and what have you.

In the past, those who work organized around these issues, discussed them and had a common philosophy and so forth.

Those benefiting from your labor broke up or supplanted these organizations and now have control of the discourse. Many workers feel as you do, but the ones who benefit from exploiting you have been fairly successful from isolating you from the many who feel as you do.

I would suggest reading about the subject, then seeking out and dipping your toe in local organizations which deal with such things.

You're correct, China had a long history of famines prior to the communist party coming to power in 1949. Shortly after they took power, and achieved stability in Korea, they began to set the stage to end this from happening again.

I never heard of a famine in 1985 though.

It costs money to intern Irish patriots without trial in your colony's concentration camps

> from a European perspective

Go to Wikipedia and read about the 1960s in the US - Freedom Riders (whites and blacks sitting next to one another on a bus) almost being beaten to death, buses burned, riots on school integration, dogs and firehoses turned on black children, people registering black voters murdered, 4 little girls murdered at a black church by the Klan, civil rights workers and leaders beaten and jailed and murdered and on and on.

Look to the USA currently - before US football games are played the team must stand and salute the USA and the controversies around that, the Black Lives Matter movement and the politician and media hatred of the concept of black lives mattering - which means police killing blacks for no reason. Or the rage against tearing down Confederate statues with inscriptions praising white supremacy like the one in New Orleans. The anti-blacks murdered someone who wanted the Confederate statue in Charlottesville taken down last year - in fact hundreds of Nazis and Klansmen and other far right groups marched there, and the state government and judiciary has blocked the city government from tearing down the statue. Dylan Roof hated blacks and walked into a church murdering blacks.

And on and on. The former African nation enslaved in the US is still an oppressed nation in the US, along with Puerto Ricans, Hawaiians and such.

Africans being represented at Harvard at a level proportional to their population in the US is an anomaly in the existing oppression of Africans on the US, and all this hubbub is an attempt to correct that.

> There is zero commitment from the major nuclear powers for an eventual complete denuclearization

The nuclear powers agreed as part of the 1970 treaty on the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons, particularly article 6, that they would pursue a complete nuclear disarmament. Of course, they have not fulfilled their obligations over the past half century and non-nuclear powers have complained about this, and the International Court of Justice agreed with them in 1996. A UN resolution in 1999 condemned the US for restarting a nuclear race - only the US, Israel, Albania and Micronesia voted against it. Bush withdrew from the ABM treaty in 2002. The US has been in a nuclear arms race since then.

> You don't need microfilm to read the NY Times; the entire archive is available on their website.

This was not the case when I did this thirty years ago.

> You read ~1800 newspapers from 100 years ago?

I concur with your observation that if you stop reading that sentence after the first few words, it makes less sense than if you read the whole sentence.

> Anyway, can you provide a basis that substantiates any claim in the parent?

I already did.

> I don't mean one link to one article

August 13, 1918 NY Times front page - article headline "Red leaders flee, reach Kronstadt, entire Bolshevist government escaping from Moscow". Of course history shows us that the Bolshevist government did not collapse in August 1918.

> there is nothing like HN for unsubstantiated claims about Russia like the parent, which are ceaseless

I have received ceaseless upvotes for my comments on the lies the Times has told about Russia over the past century, and I wish to thank the товарищи who gave them to me - from wherever they are in the world.

I once read the New York Times from 1917 to 1922 on microfilm, guided somewhat by an index. Every article was about how the government of "Mr. Lenine and Mr. Trotzky" was on the verge of collapse. It gave a very false picture - well, the Times still gives a false picture of Russia today.

If you have access to microfilm, instructive is an article from June 23, 1918 titled "Lenine ready to resign". Of course this was another false story - although he was shot two months later which caused an illness in him that caused him to slowly withdraw until his death five years after.

But there are many stories of this type. Ultimately, however, dominant communist power in Russia ended because Russian communists themselves decided to hold Multi-Party elections (to be even more tangential - some think Lenin would have had a coalition government of Bolsheviks and left socialist revolutionaries if he had not been shot and retired to Gorki).

Instructive is the smear campaign against SMTP Creator and IANA head Jon Postel by anonymous "senior government officials" in the months before his death. It was a classic government smear campaign, against someone who did so much, for such low pay, to get the Internet working. He was repaid by the government hounding him in the months before his death. Thankfully John Gilmore held up the torch on all the shady deals going on after he died, even though not much was done.

> Unions prevent those businesses from being able to maintain competitive pricing in global markets due to labor costs, so those obligations eventually put the company out of business or force it to move operations - normally out of sheer survival since other companies in the space will be doing the same.

Well this is false on a number of levels but is a common argument - "if you're the one doing all the work and creating all the wealth, don't organize with the other workers to keep more of the wealth you create, or the soi distant 'job creator' heirs expropriating your surplus labor time might send you into poverty".

Of course no one ever tells the heirs who expropriate profits from these companies that they should shirk in fear in organizing together for their class interests.

You make a number of discordant points. If we are in an economic system, the fourth one in the past few millennia, where "the growth phase is over", then clearly it is also the beginning of the end of the fourth economic system, and the birth of the fifth system which was born in the Paris Commune is coming.

Pensions are dying as are other old age moneys - it is under attack, and organized workers are what keeps it alive.

Companies don't have a problem with competitive pricing. They have a problem with below-desired profits. The business press says this. See the recent (non-union) Facebook drop.

"Out of business or move"...GM was organized in 1936. Larry Page's grandfather helped do that. In fact Page has held up the weapon his grandfather carried during a strike. The grandfather then made enough to send his son to college. And the son's son formed Google. Maybe GM profits fell at some point, but the family had already moved on.

Compare to the completely unregulated textile mills in the Carolinas. No unions, yet the plants still closed down and left the country. Low paid grandchildren with no college education now see the big employer in town shutter up and they are out of luck.

Thanks, I would prefer the former case.

As far as understanding international capital flows and cycles, Karl Marx spoke about that a century and as half ago and spoke about overproduction, recessions, falling profits, continuing income inequality etc. Not in a liberal social democrat way, but in a way that showed the system would eventually self-destruct as feudalism in Europe had, or how the Roman Empire and it's slave latifundias did, or as hunter-gatherer bands had on the face of the agricultural Sumerian slave empires.

The contradictions and self-destructiveness Marx pointed out are still happening - one example being the 1999 Glass-Steagall bank deregulation followed 9 years later by the "too big to fail" taxpayer TARP bailout.

It's not hypocrisy - it's contradiction. It's cognitive dissonance which will eventually rent things apart - which has been renting things apart.

As a worker creating wealth, I'll take my own council and organize together with my fellow workers as opposed to prostrating myself before the parasitical heirs expropriating my surplus labor time for scraps of food.

A social worker I know told me about little girls with venereal diseases, which they got from their mother's boyfriends or stepfathers.

Sometimes people make the decision to move to a place which is nice because of a homeowner association's strictness, then complain that the HOA is enforcing it's rules on them as well. Or the same really for living in a suburb with an eagle-eyed police force.

If you live in an area where people want you to watch your kids then you will have to watch your kids.

The real problem is children of very negligent parents who are not being protected, not yuppies who move to or travel to some uptight suburb and then complain the police enforce the law on them too.