The issue is that we think “Afghans” but they think “my own tribe”. And every time we have gotten involved there, we’ve caused imbalance. Not that something/someone else wouldn’t have done the same.
Unfortunately for the people who live there it’s mineral rich and occupies a geographic area with strategic military and economic value. The US is not leaving it’s just reducing the ground presence. The Orange Buffoon deserves no credit, he pledged years ago to completely withdraw. Surprise, surprise-another lie. It’s just another sad example of how US imperialism to benefit the rich at home grievously harms brown people who talk funny and worship the wrong imaginary dominating father figure in the sky.
The Taliban will! And they will give safe harbor to terrorists right in your village to train, and take your sons and your food and your women from you to serve themselves, and then attack other countries. You know how this works. Ask your father and your grandfather. Just think. if you had stood up for your own freedoms and fought for your own country, the Taliban would have been defeated by you decades ago, and the U.S. would have had no need to go there in the first place. Instead, you made your bed. Now lie in it.
Well… there’s the Taliban. The US used to corrupt at Afghan levels too, but we fixed that problem, to some extent. So their government (no, it’s not a “regime”) can also one day be rid of corruption.
The problem is, if we leave, there’s a possibility that the Taliban will come to power again. And they DO rape, torture, and bomb civilians, as part of their status quo. The US killed more civilians in our war, but that’s because it is a war. It wouldn’t have happened if the Taliban wasn’t continuing terrorism in the first place.
We are supporting a semi-democratic government that is close to coming to a peace deal with the Taliban. But the government’s rule is preferable to the Taliban. Just because, without us, the Taliban could win militarily doesn’t mean they actually have popular support.
The truth is, most Afghans don’t care who’s in charge, as long as they are left in peace. That peace might come soon. But the Taliban might leave peace talks if it thinks that it can take complete control without the US.
Also, the Taliban does drug trafficking and they are anti-vaxxers. So, you know, not good.
Not really off-topic because US military and economic adventurism is a product of US Capitalism.
See the whole exposition at https://theanalysis.news/interviews/polarization-then-a-crash-michael-hudson-on-the-rentier-economy/
HUDSON: Well ever since the Bronze Age you had the temples and the palaces providing basic needs. Because if you leave this to the private sector, then you’re going to have a situation where the private supplier has a chokehold on the economy and can say: your money or your life.
There are certain things that governments are supposed to supply and which industrial capitalism wanted government to supply. Because they didn’t want employers or their employees to have to pay for them. These are a number of things. Governments obviously have to supply military defense. You can’t leave that private people but also healthcare, for instance. The conservative party in England, Benjamin Disraeli said: health is everything; we have to spend on health.
And you don’t want to, in principle, make money off crime. But in America we’re privatizing the penal system, the jail system. So you have increasing pressure on government, on governors, to arrest people, put them in jail especially on drug use, where you can employ them at 10 cents an hour. And lease them out to companies as low priced labor.
But most of all, government is supposed to provide the infrastructure: the transportation, the communication, the telephone system. And the idea is that if you leave like cable TV to private suppliers, they are natural monopolies. The idea throughout history from classical Greece and Rome, medieval times in Europe is that natural monopolies should be in the public domain.
Because you don’t want to provide opportunities for monopoly rent. Because monopoly rent, like land rent and natural resource rent, is not a necessary cost to production. You want the necessary cost of production to be the material costs and normal profit. Because obviously you need people to have some incentive to do things. But the incentive is supposed to be normal profit, not super profits, not just a free lunch.
And so if you let transportation become privatized, then it is going to cost the workforce much more money to get to work and to get to a job. If you let the oil industry be privatized and the profits from the natural resource, and that’s the patrimony of mineral rights, oil and gas is all going to go to the private financial sector not to be used as the tax base.
And if you have the land rent, essentially if the government, for instance, in New York City, they spent let’s say a billion dollars on extending the second Avenue subway line up along the wealthy Upper East Side. That increased land values for landlords all by about twice the amount by about $2 billion. Because people now we’re closer to the subway station, they didn’t have to walk. They had better transport. All of this increase in land prices could have financed the extension of the subway and still been able to lower the subway fares for the rest of new Yorkers. Instead, the city let the landlords keep all of the gains in land value. And they just raised the income taxes and went into debt to pay for the subway.
So, you have a privatization of wealth that is not created by landlords, not created by individuals. Certainly the oil companies don’t create the oil in the ground. And the mining companies don’t create the mineral resources. All of these things are given away freely. The United States lets forestry logging companies and mining companies get whatever they can take from the public domain for free instead of getting the results of this publicly owned land to finance the public budget.
Taxes in the United States could be drastically reduced on wages and on profits, if you would just tax the unearned monopoly rent, the economic rent that is not necessary for production.
So, if you look at what Adam Smith wrote, John Stuart Mill, all of the classical economists said: this is how capitalism is going to evolve. Because if the government doesn’t have to levy an income and profits tax and just the rent tax, then it’s going to be a low-cost economy. And the more socialized and the more mixed an economy is the lower the cost structure is going to be and the more competitive it will be. And so it will force other countries to de-financialize and to free themselves from their rentier class. Free themselves from their absentee landlord class, free themselves from, you know, the foreign mining class and essentially be low cost economies, low tax economies as a result. Well, that was their idea of a free market.
And the neoliberals have essentially tried to take control of the minds of economics students and how people think about the economy to say: No, no a free market is free to make as much as you want. A free market is free from taxation on rent. A free market is where it doesn’t matter how you make your income. Anybody can just keep whatever they make, no matter how they make it whether it’s by predatory exploitative means or un-exploitative means.
Concretionist over 3 years ago
The issue is that we think “Afghans” but they think “my own tribe”. And every time we have gotten involved there, we’ve caused imbalance. Not that something/someone else wouldn’t have done the same.
Packratjohn Premium Member over 3 years ago
We’ll always have Kabul…
LookingGlass Premium Member over 3 years ago
Least we forget…Afghanistan is the GRAVEYARD of empires!! Just ask the Brits and the former USSR, for starters!!
mattro65 over 3 years ago
Unfortunately for the people who live there it’s mineral rich and occupies a geographic area with strategic military and economic value. The US is not leaving it’s just reducing the ground presence. The Orange Buffoon deserves no credit, he pledged years ago to completely withdraw. Surprise, surprise-another lie. It’s just another sad example of how US imperialism to benefit the rich at home grievously harms brown people who talk funny and worship the wrong imaginary dominating father figure in the sky.
Màiri over 3 years ago
Not looking so good for our side:
Biden Taps Bruce Reed, Deficit Hawk and Longtime Enemy of Social Security, for Deputy Chief of Staff
“You cannot have Bruce Reed in your administration and pretend Social Security is safe.”
Radish the wordsmith over 3 years ago
Maybe Russia can help the Afghans.
ncorgbl over 3 years ago
The Taliban will! And they will give safe harbor to terrorists right in your village to train, and take your sons and your food and your women from you to serve themselves, and then attack other countries. You know how this works. Ask your father and your grandfather. Just think. if you had stood up for your own freedoms and fought for your own country, the Taliban would have been defeated by you decades ago, and the U.S. would have had no need to go there in the first place. Instead, you made your bed. Now lie in it.
DeepState over 3 years ago
Nothing like listening to Ted drone one….
VadimUzdensky1 over 3 years ago
Well… there’s the Taliban. The US used to corrupt at Afghan levels too, but we fixed that problem, to some extent. So their government (no, it’s not a “regime”) can also one day be rid of corruption.
The problem is, if we leave, there’s a possibility that the Taliban will come to power again. And they DO rape, torture, and bomb civilians, as part of their status quo. The US killed more civilians in our war, but that’s because it is a war. It wouldn’t have happened if the Taliban wasn’t continuing terrorism in the first place.
We are supporting a semi-democratic government that is close to coming to a peace deal with the Taliban. But the government’s rule is preferable to the Taliban. Just because, without us, the Taliban could win militarily doesn’t mean they actually have popular support.
The truth is, most Afghans don’t care who’s in charge, as long as they are left in peace. That peace might come soon. But the Taliban might leave peace talks if it thinks that it can take complete control without the US.
Also, the Taliban does drug trafficking and they are anti-vaxxers. So, you know, not good.
T Smith over 3 years ago
Lumpy would like to help them, but he’s too busy pardoning murderers.
Màiri over 3 years ago
Not really off-topic because US military and economic adventurism is a product of US Capitalism.
See the whole exposition at https://theanalysis.news/interviews/polarization-then-a-crash-michael-hudson-on-the-rentier-economy/
HUDSON: Well ever since the Bronze Age you had the temples and the palaces providing basic needs. Because if you leave this to the private sector, then you’re going to have a situation where the private supplier has a chokehold on the economy and can say: your money or your life.
There are certain things that governments are supposed to supply and which industrial capitalism wanted government to supply. Because they didn’t want employers or their employees to have to pay for them. These are a number of things. Governments obviously have to supply military defense. You can’t leave that private people but also healthcare, for instance. The conservative party in England, Benjamin Disraeli said: health is everything; we have to spend on health.
And you don’t want to, in principle, make money off crime. But in America we’re privatizing the penal system, the jail system. So you have increasing pressure on government, on governors, to arrest people, put them in jail especially on drug use, where you can employ them at 10 cents an hour. And lease them out to companies as low priced labor.
But most of all, government is supposed to provide the infrastructure: the transportation, the communication, the telephone system. And the idea is that if you leave like cable TV to private suppliers, they are natural monopolies. The idea throughout history from classical Greece and Rome, medieval times in Europe is that natural monopolies should be in the public domain.
Màiri over 3 years ago
Because you don’t want to provide opportunities for monopoly rent. Because monopoly rent, like land rent and natural resource rent, is not a necessary cost to production. You want the necessary cost of production to be the material costs and normal profit. Because obviously you need people to have some incentive to do things. But the incentive is supposed to be normal profit, not super profits, not just a free lunch.
And so if you let transportation become privatized, then it is going to cost the workforce much more money to get to work and to get to a job. If you let the oil industry be privatized and the profits from the natural resource, and that’s the patrimony of mineral rights, oil and gas is all going to go to the private financial sector not to be used as the tax base.
And if you have the land rent, essentially if the government, for instance, in New York City, they spent let’s say a billion dollars on extending the second Avenue subway line up along the wealthy Upper East Side. That increased land values for landlords all by about twice the amount by about $2 billion. Because people now we’re closer to the subway station, they didn’t have to walk. They had better transport. All of this increase in land prices could have financed the extension of the subway and still been able to lower the subway fares for the rest of new Yorkers. Instead, the city let the landlords keep all of the gains in land value. And they just raised the income taxes and went into debt to pay for the subway.
Màiri over 3 years ago
So, you have a privatization of wealth that is not created by landlords, not created by individuals. Certainly the oil companies don’t create the oil in the ground. And the mining companies don’t create the mineral resources. All of these things are given away freely. The United States lets forestry logging companies and mining companies get whatever they can take from the public domain for free instead of getting the results of this publicly owned land to finance the public budget.
Taxes in the United States could be drastically reduced on wages and on profits, if you would just tax the unearned monopoly rent, the economic rent that is not necessary for production.
So, if you look at what Adam Smith wrote, John Stuart Mill, all of the classical economists said: this is how capitalism is going to evolve. Because if the government doesn’t have to levy an income and profits tax and just the rent tax, then it’s going to be a low-cost economy. And the more socialized and the more mixed an economy is the lower the cost structure is going to be and the more competitive it will be. And so it will force other countries to de-financialize and to free themselves from their rentier class. Free themselves from their absentee landlord class, free themselves from, you know, the foreign mining class and essentially be low cost economies, low tax economies as a result. Well, that was their idea of a free market.
And the neoliberals have essentially tried to take control of the minds of economics students and how people think about the economy to say: No, no a free market is free to make as much as you want. A free market is free from taxation on rent. A free market is where it doesn’t matter how you make your income. Anybody can just keep whatever they make, no matter how they make it whether it’s by predatory exploitative means or un-exploitative means.