Communism. Good or bad. What do you really know about Communism?

[Roubignol]

Originally Posted by crinolynne

Err... Just want to point out that while you make think it's an insult to call a commie a commie, commies don't. So please, give it a rest and come up with a more creative epithet.

I thought it only was a diminutive... like Frenchie.
Diminutives are not always an insult but a lazy way to express the full word or a form of conviviality.

[bowlinggreen]

Originally Posted by xyzde69

I thought it only was a diminutive... like Frenchie.
Diminutives are not always an insult but a lazy way to express the full word or a form of conviviality.

In America, commie is often an epithet used against those who may not even be actual communists, but promote what are regarded as overly liberal social policies.

It conjures up images in the mind of a smelly unkempt person raging at a protest rally and hurling insults at the police.

Whereas an actual communist would be some Russian guy in a KGB Border Guards uniform asking for your papers if you should decide to visit Russia, or some dumpy bald guy in a bad suit glaring at everyone in a Politburo meeting.

[deepsepia]

Amazingly, Fox & Friends Ainsley Earnhardt yesterday discussed the "US victory over Communist Japan"

“You know, we defeated communist Japan, radical Islamists. We ask our men and women to go overseas to fight for our country and sacrifice so much for our country so we can be the land of the free, the land of the brave,”

Its hard to imagine just how stupid you have to be to say something like that.

Its not that its a mistake-- people get facts wrong, they mis-speak, that's life.

But this stray comment reveals that in what passes for this dim bulbs grey matter, there are just a bunch of labels for "us" and "them" sloshing around.

We're "Land of the Brave" and they're "communists" or "Islamists", or . . . or what?

I may read too much into this, but notice the -ists that she doesn't mention us fighting-- "fascists"

. . . because as we've learned from Fox, "anti-fascists" are bad people too.

More seriously, though, Japan had a communist party, and a Japanse friend once joked to me, "if anyone could have made communism work, it would have been the Japanese".

[bowlinggreen]

“You know, we defeated communist Japan, radical Islamists. We ask our men and women to go overseas to fight for our country and sacrifice so much for our country so we can be the land of the free, the land of the brave,”

I'm sure Tojo and Emperor Hirohito are rolling over in their graves.

Maybe the Fox news person remembered something from a text book about the "Greater East-Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere" and thought that was Communist.

Why I don't pay a lot of attention to the media these days, I don't need fake news spoon-fed to me by idiots whose education is so clearly inferior to mine.

[deepsepia]

Originally Posted by bowlinggreen

Maybe the Fox news person remembered something from a text book about the "Greater East-Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere" and thought that was Communist.

If the words "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere" have ever tinkled a single neuron in Ainsley Earhardt's pretty airhead, I'll eat my Chrysanthemum Throne.

There's a moment that's priceless, when Steve Doocy tries to walk back this morsel of stupid . . . you gotta marvel at that, "so stupid that Steve Doocy noticed"

Originally Posted by Steve Doocy

“Yep, communism and Japan, and so many other things, as well,”

Say this for Airhead, she throws a hittable pitch . . .

[Estreeter]

Originally Posted by Enrico32

How many had been laid off?

The plant was going through a wind down and now closed.

2001, voluntary redundancies
2006, 2 occasions, voluntary redundancies
2011, voluntary redundancies
2013, involuntary redundancies
2016, plants closed.

Nobody lost out,
When I left the deal was, 4.5 weeks pay for every year of service plus all your outstanding annual leave and long service leave and half your unused sick leave, the company though offered and extra weeks pay for every year of service bringing it to 5.5 weeks for every year.

In the end, I got almost 3 years pay to leave, here in Australia when you're made redundant your leave entitlements are taxed at normal rate, the redundancy part is taxed at only 5%, so quite a few people like me who had been there many years got a sizeable amount.

The 2013 people who were made redundant involuntarily got the same with leave pay but got 6 weeks pay for every year of service plus a lifetime discount on any Ford product for themselves and immediate family, those who were there till the end got the same.

Nobody lost out and the company pumped a lot of money to the city council for future developing businesses and to help the city out, something they didn't have to do but did.

I see no evil there.

[deepsepia]

Worth taking a moment to observe Venezuela, which is an almost uniquely disastrous example of central planning and one party rule.

The irony here is that Venezuela was historically a wealthy country, with big oil revenues. Its entirely possible to distribute oil revenues to citizens without creating a socialist State-- Alaska does, for example

But Chavez and now Maduro have utterly destroyed the economy of a nation that until very recently exported a lot of oil, and which had what are likely the world's largest unexploited oil prospect . . . in short, a lot of money, an an economy where folks are now starving.

Today's news is that Maduro has come up with a new idea: he's created a cryptocurrency, called the "Petro" and an associated new currency for the nation, the "Sovereign Bolivar". Behind all the mumbo-jumbo, this amounts to a %95 devaluation. No one with any savings in Venezuela has anything at this point.

I particularly like Maduro's proud claim that "no experts were involved" in designing this new scheme

Originally Posted by Confusion Reigns as Maduro Mega-Devaluation Roils Venezuela

“You won’t find the IMF’s claws or ill-gotten prescriptions here,” Maduro said in a speech Friday on state television, referring to the International Monetary Fund. “No experts were involved who do not feel the clamor of the people.”

Well that's good to know. Because when I want expert opinion, I always want folks who know stuff to be threatened by the mobs, works much better in getting expert opinion.

As a benchmark, consider Chile. In 1980, Venezuelans were twice as wealthy as Chileans, today Chlleans are twice as wealthy as Venezuelans.

And the most staggering thing about all this is that Venezuela has one of the easiest hands to play in economics, even for a socialist state: pump oil. They can't even do that (oil production is collapsing, about half of what they were a few years ago).

[crinolynne]

Originally Posted by deepsepia

Worth taking a moment to observe Venezuela, which is an almost uniquely disastrous example of central planning and one party rule.

Not that I would dispute the reality of the present condition of Venezuela, I would ask a question about how they got there. I suspect the Venezuelans, like many South American economies, got a lot of help in messing up their economy from Langley.

[deepsepia]

Originally Posted by crinolynne

Not that I would dispute the reality of the present condition of Venezuela, I would ask a question about how they got there. I suspect the Venezuelans, like many South American economies, got a lot of help in messing up their economy from Langley.

No, not at all. Quite the reverse, actually.

The US made Venezuela rich. US oilmen found the oilfields and developed them.

The US has historically been Venezuela's largest oil market-- Asia is now larger, but roughly a third of Venezuelan oil is sold to the US, and much of it is refined in the US. Hard to argue that this is some made in the USA disaster, when the US buys about 400K barrels per day, that's a lot of oil (though as Venezuelan production collapses, the number goes down).

As Venezuela grew richer, they developed a highly regarded national oil company PDVSA. PDVSA trained excellent engineers, sending them to school around the world to train so that they could run their own show. They developed a very highly regarded company and expertise.

Its Chavez and Maduro who've trashed all that. No CIA, just predictably stupid things like

Originally Posted by Venezuela's Maduro seen bolstering grip on PDVSA after shake-up

JANUARY 30, 2017
CARACAS (Reuters) - PDVSA’s new senior executive line-up includes a Venezuelan navy rear-admiral, Hugo Chavez’s former Twitter manager and a leader of the late leftist president’s failed 1992 coup.

President Eulogio Del Pino, a Stanford-educated engineer, was kept on, but most of his top executives, several with long oil careers, were removed.

With little to no oil industry expertise on their resumes, the replacements draw heavily from Venezuela’s political and military arena at a time when PDVSA’s production has tumbled to a two-decade low and the company is struggling with export delays and refinery outages.

“If it was very bad (before), with these people who have no experience it’s going to be even worse,” said Francisco Ibarra, an economist with Caracas think-tank Econometrica. “I don’t know how much worse.”

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-v...-idUSKBN15E2JI

Oh, by the way, you might have noted the "Stanford trained engineer Eulogio Del Pino" -- that's a competent guy, right?

Can you guess what happened next?

Originally Posted by Venezuela's ex-oil minister and ex-PDVSA head arrested

30 November 2017
Two powerful Venezuelan former oil officials have been arrested as part of a sweeping anti-corruption operation.

The arrests came just days after the two, oil minister Eulogio del Pino and head of state oil company PDVSA, Nelson Martínez, were replaced in their posts with members of the military.

That's right: he's arrested the only guy with engineering backround, and replaced the entire management team with military officers.

None of this is made in Langley, they may not produce much in Venezuela anymore, but this is "made in Caracas"

[Estreeter]

Originally Posted by deepsepia

The US made Venezuela rich. US oilmen found the oilfields and developed them.

Mate, I gotta reply to that before the Commies do, I'll answer it for them so I can laugh, this would be about their response.

US capitalists do that for their own wealth, they pay the workers little and line their own pockets at the expense of the poor. They destroy the ecosystem drilling for oil, they want more population to buy more products that depend on oil as it's base.

Venezuela would be rich if the US had no trade embargo , not fair

Capitalism must be destroyed.


How's that for paying attention to bullshit