Political Discussion

[RenegadeMonster]

Kazakhstan leader gives 'kill without warning' order, as bodies lie in the streets

Kazakhstan President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev has ordered security forces to "kill without warning" to crush the violent protests that have paralyzed the former Soviet republic and reportedly left dozens dead.

www.cnn.com

I really haven't been following the news that much, but I did hear there were protests over rising fuel prices.

Can someone sum up what is going on here. Is this a case of the government not allowing protests / protesters to shut down the economy or is there any truth behind the claims that the protests are organize terrorism from foreign countries.

Either way, I don't agree with whoot to kill without warning on protesters.

 

[Jan]

Kazakhstan leader gives 'kill without warning' order, as bodies lie in the streets

Kazakhstan President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev has ordered security forces to "kill without warning" to crush the violent protests that have paralyzed the former Soviet republic and reportedly left dozens dead.

www.cnn.com

I really haven't been following the news that much, but I did hear there were protests over rising fuel prices.

Can someone sum up what is going on here. Is this a case of the government not allowing protests / protesters to shut down the economy or is there any truth behind the claims that the protests are organize terrorism from foreign countries.

Either way, I don't agree with whoot to kill without warning on protesters.

This sums it up quite well

Revolt in Kazakhstan: What’s Happening, and Why It Matters

As protests in the oil-rich Central Asian country gain momentum, the events threaten to reverberate across the region.

www.nytimes.com

 

[RenegadeMonster]

What Biden is missing on for-profit college debt

The Biden administration has chosen not to reinstate an Obama-era rule meant to prevent students from taking on too much debt to attend predatory for-profit colleges. Instead, it is undertaking a monthslong process to write a new version.

www.cnn.com

The Biden administration continues to fall short on student loan relief. And late last year, has allowed the Trump Administration's repeal of bans on federal student loans being used for predatory for profit schools while they write new rules that will take at least a year if not longer to go into effect if they ever even do go into effect.

The Biden Administration's focus also appears to be on preventing future student loan debt issues and not be resolving current ones.

Other than the 115,000 people defrauded by ITT Technical Institute, no other student loan debt has been forgiven. Instead the focus appears to be on not giving out future federal student loans based on gainful employment. Meaning, it only targets blocking federal student loans from being used on expensive predatory schools that don't yield high salary jobs able to pay back the student loans after graduation.

 

[debianlinux]

Fun fact, I was defrauded by ITT but got to pay it all back!

 

[RenegadeMonster]

The GOP's assault on voting rights continues with 3 states looking to require hand counting of all ballots, an antiquated and time consuming process. More states are likely to follow.

There is no reason to require hand counting of ballots, and hand counting ballots would actually result in a higher likelihood of errors happening with the vote.

But since hand counting takes time. And more time to count the results in a day and age were people expect instant / same day results will only help the GOP sow doubt in the election results. Meaning this could be used as a tool for challenging the results of an election that is favorable to them.

 

[Jan]

The GOP's assault on voting rights continues with 3 states looking to require hand counting of all ballots, an antiquated and time consuming process. More states are likely to follow.

There is no reason to require hand counting of ballots, and hand counting ballots would actually result in a higher likelihood of errors happening with the vote.

But since hand counting takes time. And more time to count the results in a day and age were people expect instant / same day results will only help the GOP sow doubt in the election results. Meaning this could be used as a tool for challenging the results of an election that is favorable to them.

I have to admit I am a Fan of zhe hand counting. We do it this old-fashioned way over here with paper ballots and hancounting and no election Maschinen.it works fine, you have a pqper Trail for recounts and normally results are in sometime during election night.

 

[nolalady]

What Biden is missing on for-profit college debt

The Biden administration has chosen not to reinstate an Obama-era rule meant to prevent students from taking on too much debt to attend predatory for-profit colleges. Instead, it is undertaking a monthslong process to write a new version.

www.cnn.com

The Biden administration continues to fall short on student loan relief. And late last year, has allowed the Trump Administration's repeal of bans on federal student loans being used for predatory for profit schools while they write new rules that will take at least a year if not longer to go into effect if they ever even do go into effect.

The Biden Administration's focus also appears to be on preventing future student loan debt issues and not be resolving current ones.

Other than the 115,000 people defrauded by ITT Technical Institute, no other student loan debt has been forgiven. Instead the focus appears to be on not giving out future federal student loans based on gainful employment. Meaning, it only targets blocking federal student loans from being used on expensive predatory schools that don't yield high salary jobs able to pay back the student loans after graduation.

If Biden sets off a debt jubilee in one area, our corporate oligarchy is going to get really nervous. Remember, nothing fundamental was going to change, and that includes highly lucrative interest payments. Banks cannot take part in the stock market so they have to find other ways of creating revenue that has the same level of financial engineering as the stock market. They figured out that if they take housing prices out of inflationary indexes, and then give cheap credit at low interest rates as to drive up the cost of real estate as an asset class, they can collect more interest payments on inflated real estate while padding their books with risky investments. They realized that they could also exploit students in a similar way. Keep inflating the price of college to make people borrow more and more and more, so that they would continue to collect interest payments month after month. To suddenly reverse course and allow those payments to go unmade, and those people who were poised to collect interest payments will no longer get paid. Those people are the people that pour dark money into political campaigns in order to pay off our politicians. So these people cannot be expected to just take the loss, because what sort of precedent would that set in our society? We would have to admit that our free market needs a lot of regulation and some redistribution in order to work for most of the people. And that sort of redistribution would do away with these billionaires, so that can't happen.

 

[RenegadeMonster]

If Biden sets off a debt jubilee in one area, our corporate oligarchy is going to get really nervous. Remember, nothing fundamental was going to change, and that includes highly lucrative interest payments. Banks cannot take part in the stock market so they have to find other ways of creating revenue that has the same level of financial engineering as the stock market. They figured out that if they take housing prices out of inflationary indexes, and then give cheap credit at low interest rates as to drive up the cost of real estate as an asset class, they can collect more interest payments on inflated real estate while padding their books with risky investments. They realized that they could also exploit students in a similar way. Keep inflating the price of college to make people borrow more and more and more, so that they would continue to collect interest payments month after month. To suddenly reverse course and allow those payments to go unmade, and those people who were poised to collect interest payments will no longer get paid. Those people are the people that pour dark money into political campaigns in order to pay off our politicians. So these people cannot be expected to just take the loss, because what sort of precedent would that set in our society? We would have to admit that our free market needs a lot of regulation and some redistribution in order to work for most of the people. And that sort of redistribution would do away with these billionaires, so that can't happen.

That of course assumes the debt goes unpaid. I don't see that happening, like every. I think a bailout is needed like the government did for the big banks and auto plants during the recession a decade ago. That's the only way we'll see things get done.

Speaking of the cost of education. Here is a news story from today about antitrust and price fixing to limit financial aid by major US universities.

Yale, Georgetown, Other Top Schools Illegally Collude to Limit Student Financial Aid, Lawsuit Alleges — The Wall Street Journal

A new federal suit adds to continuing efforts to change college admissions practices

apple.news

 

[nolalady]

That of course assumes the debt goes unpaid. I don't see that happening, like every. I think a bailout is needed like the government did for the big banks and auto plants during the recession a decade ago. That's the only way we'll see things get done.

Speaking of the cost of education. Here is a news story from today about antitrust and price fixing to limit financial aid by major US universities.

Yale, Georgetown, Other Top Schools Illegally Collude to Limit Student Financial Aid, Lawsuit Alleges — The Wall Street Journal

A new federal suit adds to continuing efforts to change college admissions practices

apple.news

How many times are we going to use government dollars to bail out private companies and individuals who created a risky and leveraged market where they made mind boggling profits before defaulting due to bad business decisions? When are we going to stop paying these people to ruin our society?

 

[Max Sterling]

How many times are we going to use government dollars to bail out private companies and individuals who created a risky and leveraged market where they made mind boggling profits before defaulting due to bad business decisions? When are we going to stop paying these people to ruin our society?

When these people stop paying the people who make these decisions. Until it's illegal for businesses and institutions to give kick backs and favours to politicians, they'll be filling each other's coffers until the world burns.

 

[RenegadeMonster]

Not to mention that not bailing out the said businesses negatively impacts the economy and shareholders. So we can't have that. But we don't care to help or bail out private citizens.

One thing that pissed me off last year was Texas bailed out the power companies who lost billions of dollars when the Texas power grid nearly collapsed last winter during the cold spell. The power companies had a huge loss with their fixed rate customers who were heating their homes because the cost of power jumped by more than 2400% at one point. Meanile, the average poor joe who took a chance on the paying the going rate in hopes of saving a few bucks ended up with multi thousand dollar electric bills. And they were just told tough luck, that's the risk you took by not having a fixed rate plan...

 

[David A.]

I heard a report today on the power of disinformation.

Today is January 6th, and one year later after the capital riots more people believe that the 2020 election was stolen today than did 1 year ago. And I find this factoid just mind boggling and can't wrap my head around it.

But apparently there is a lot of misinformation out there and people who read it take it for fact. And the trust in our system continues to decline. I have a bad feeling that ugly elections are going to be more common in the future.

Slow descent into facism

 

[Joe Mac]

So today has been a spectacular clusterfuck of a day even by bojo’s Tory Party’s startlingly inept standards.

First, their COVID contract VIP lane, under which they justified handing out contracts their mates and donors was found illegal by the High Court

Use of ‘VIP lane’ to award Covid PPE contracts unlawful, high court rules

Government’s use of system to award deals to two firms during first Covid wave found to be unlawful

www.theguardian.com

Second, bojo finally admitted to being at the Downing Street garden booze up in May 2020 when most of the country was still in the strictest lockdown and the death rates were still high.

Boris Johnson admits attending Downing Street party during lockdown

Prime minister apologises and says he was at event for 25 minutes on 20 May 2020

www.theguardian.com

 

[nolalady]

So today has been a spectacular clusterfuck of a day even by bojo’s Tory Party’s startlingly inept standards.

First, their COVID contract VIP lane, under which they justified handing out contracts their mates and donors was found illegal by the High Court

Use of ‘VIP lane’ to award Covid PPE contracts unlawful, high court rules

Government’s use of system to award deals to two firms during first Covid wave found to be unlawful

www.theguardian.com

Second, bojo finally admitted to being at the Downing Street garden booze up in May 2020 when most of the country was still in the strictest lockdown and the death rates were still high.

Boris Johnson admits attending Downing Street party during lockdown

Prime minister apologises and says he was at event for 25 minutes on 20 May 2020

www.theguardian.com

Look at your politicians acting all American. Giving out illegal contracts to friends our national past time.

We had similar issues with the CARES Act and it was found that a large portion of that money didn't go where it was supposed to. However, we shy away from saying that the awarding of money and contracts is illegal even though it was totally rigged and illegal.

ETA: Oh wow, this quote:
The judgment noted that gowns supplied by PestFix were deemed unsuitable for use in an NHS clinical setting. PestFix-supplied FFP2 masks were also found to be unsuitable for use in the NHS while its FFP3 masks failed testing and there were issues with the gowns. There are ongoing commercial disputes with PestFix with respect to the FFP3 masks and the gowns.

We were dealing with this with the VARES system that was supposed to be set up by Deloitte for the CDC to track vaccine stuff. It still doesn't work and we poured millions of dollars into it.

 

[Joe Mac]

Look at your politicians acting all American. Giving out illegal contracts to friends our national past time.

We had similar issues with the CARES Act and it was found that a large portion of that money didn't go where it was supposed to. However, we shy away from saying that the awarding of money and contracts is illegal even though it was totally rigged and illegal.

ETA: Oh wow, this quote:
The judgment noted that gowns supplied by PestFix were deemed unsuitable for use in an NHS clinical setting. PestFix-supplied FFP2 masks were also found to be unsuitable for use in the NHS while its FFP3 masks failed testing and there were issues with the gowns. There are ongoing commercial disputes with PestFix with respect to the FFP3 masks and the gowns.

We were dealing with this with the VARES system that was supposed to be set up by Deloitte for the CDC to track vaccine stuff. It still doesn't work and we poured millions of dollars into it.

It’s been rampant in the UK for centuries too. I’m sure it’s learned behaviours given from where you’re country has grown. The public school and oxbridge boys club is such a blight.

But yes, Converative ethos is killing the NHS. So much that used to be done in house has been sub-contracted out based solely on the bottom line. It has led to cost savings but it has also led to a spectacular decline in the quality of the support services and you know areas like cleaners and catering are pretty fucking important in a hospital setting. The fact that they’re giving the jobs out to mates and donors is just insult added to that injury.

 

[nolalady]

It’s been rampant in the UK for centuries too. I’m sure it’s learned behaviours given from where you’re country has grown. The public school and oxbridge boys club is such a blight.

But yes, Converative ethos is killing the NHS. So much that used to be done in house has been sub-contracted out based solely on the bottom line. It has led to cost savings but it has also led to a spectacular decline in the quality of the support services and you know areas like cleaners and catering are pretty fucking important in a hospital setting. The fact that they’re giving the jobs out to mates and donors is just insult added to that injury.

I haven’t read extensively but I know of some of the issues because the articles I read cite the decline of the NHS due to extensive privatization. The word contractor is becoming a dirty word because it’s synonymous with under qualified, under paid for employees and under no obligation to produce results because they are temporary for the contract company.

 

[Joe Mac]

I haven’t read extensively but I know of some of the issues because the articles I read cite the decline of the NHS due to extensive privatization. The word contractor is becoming a dirty word because it’s synonymous with under qualified, under paid for employees and under no obligation to produce results because they are temporary for the contract company.

It’s a mentality that’s spread across the public sector since the 80s. For example the cleaners at my work are all privately contracted and the place is just not clean. It’s not so important in my work environment and even with Covid I’m perfectly capable of wiping down my desk with a disinfectant spray whenever I’m in. I also don’t blame the cleaners, they’re all underpaid, on zero hour contracts and have no surety of pay or employment. Something in our society was fundamentally broken in the early 80s with Reaganism and Thatcherism and it’s very difficult to see how we right it now with everything so polarised and everyone so damn focused on individualism.

 

[nolalady]

it’s very difficult to see how we right it now with everything so polarised and everyone so damn focused on individualism.

The focus on individualism is by design, and not at all a bug. I'm all about the rights of the individual, but when it becomes nothing more than a mechanism to pigeon hole us to sell us shit, that's when individualism got warped (and yes, I think that started to pick up steam in the 70's and was going strong in the 80's). There was a shift in the 80's in economic theory where we switched from thinking about production on a societal level and instead defined the smallest economic engine as the person (or the family unit, either way Regan and Thatcher loved this crap). When we started thinking of people in terms of productivity, and we considered ourselves individual economic engines that work towards our individual goals of economic stability. When we started telling people to think of themselves as businesses and then took that idea one step further and came up with the goal to "optimize" our time. This theory doesn't really work well in the real world because each one of our little economic engines of production has real consequences on other people's engines of production. We wanted to believe that we could operate in an independent sphere so that my economic decisions about what I am going to do with my time would in no way effect your economic decisions about what you are going to do with your time. And none of these tiny economic engine activity adds up to equal a much larger economic system.

But that's not true. When I work, how I work, where I spend my money, it all affects the people around me and everything they do affects me. When we focus on ourselves alone to attempt to optimize our economic opportunities, it becomes a very competitive environment very fast--a dog eat dog world. In these sorts of environments, humans do not thrive. It has been shown that humans work better in cooperative environments than they do in competitive environments. When we focused on full employment policies--anyone who wants a job gets a job that they can make a living off of--we had people, as a society, getting better as a whole, but we realized that full employment didn't optimize business efficiency and business owners could have more money, if they paid less wages. They realized that they could pay less wages if they punt the production over to people half a world away that they can treat like slaves. The slave labor didn't happen at first. We were only trading with democratic nations up until the 1960's--South Korea and Japan--but we realized that we could keep consumer prices down if we switched to China and other nations that weren't as committed to democratic ideals. I think this is ultimately when we sold our soul as a nation. We forgot that products have to be made by people and those people deserve a living wage. Then we became hooked on slave labor cheap goods to the point that it became much easier to justify the production rather than live without next season's jean jacket.

The only way to survive climate change is degrowth. Most politicians don't want to acknowledge that, but the truth is that we all need less stuff and that stuff needs to be less disposable. If we come back to the world with the mindset of full employment along with careful resource allocation that benefits people over businesses, I think we could survive as a species. But if we keep on competing for resources because we are all so over focused on our individual needs, we'll never get out of this.

 

[RenegadeMonster]

Biden game a speech calling for the elimination of the filibuster and a call of action to pass voter reform yesterday.

Mitch McConnell responded today and of course he had nothing tood to say about it or Biden.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell blasted President Joe Biden's speech pushing for the Senate to change its filibuster rules to pass voting and elections legislation, saying Biden compared "a bipartisan majority of senators to literal traitors."​

​

"How profoundly — profoundly — unpresidential," McConnell said Wednesday on Capitol Hill. "I've known, liked and personally respected Joe Biden for many years. I did not recognize the man at the podium yesterday."​

​

McConnell said Biden's speech was a "rant," "incoherent," "incorrect," "beneath his office," and "unbecoming of a President of the United States."​

 

[nolalady]

Biden game a speech calling for the elimination of the filibuster and a call of action to pass voter reform yesterday.

Mitch McConnell responded today and of course he had nothing tood to say about it or Biden.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell blasted President Joe Biden's speech pushing for the Senate to change its filibuster rules to pass voting and elections legislation, saying Biden compared "a bipartisan majority of senators to literal traitors."​

​

"How profoundly — profoundly — unpresidential," McConnell said Wednesday on Capitol Hill. "I've known, liked and personally respected Joe Biden for many years. I did not recognize the man at the podium yesterday."​

​

McConnell said Biden's speech was a "rant," "incoherent," "incorrect," "beneath his office," and "unbecoming of a President of the United States."​

Getting rid of the filibuster will be great until the GOP wins back the senate in 2022...