In Bad Country™, the state security forces are unaccountable to local political officials and maintain their control via direct violence if challenged. Regional authorities have intervened in the matter, but time will tell if they can wrestle control of the situation away from the entrenched corrupt security forces.

It really depends on how much you make. I lived in a shitty red state for a year on one of the plans, but because I was only making like $20,000 a year, it wasn’t bankruptcy levels of expensive, and I actually needed some serious medical care that year. I think the problem gets worse the more you make ironically, because they determine all of your discretionary income should actually go to insurance companies. That of course can’t happen if you don’t have any discretionary income to begin with I guess. Say thank you and go back to work, serf.

Yeah, I don’t deny that. But feeding into the misconception that socialism necessarily results in a lower quality of life for those in the imperial core is just reinforcing capitalist propaganda. No reason for us to be repeating capitalist myths for them.

I think you’ve shifted the goalposts in this discussion. You started with a question of “how many americans just want the plunders of imperialism shared more evenly with the working class” while predicting substantial reduction in quality of life for Americans post imperialism. I contend that most Americans do not have an improved quality of life even with the imperialism: that value and wealth is retained by the PMC and bourgeoisie. Sure, “the Global North” is taking a massively disproportionate share of global GDP via ownership, financialization, and rent seeking in general, but the vast majority of that is captured and retained by the top income earners in the US. Lumping in your median global North worker with his/her boss is absurd.

“About 50.7 percent of the household income of private households in the U.S. were earned by the highest quintile in 2022, which are the upper 20 percent of the workers.”

https://www.statista.com/statistics/203247/shares-of-household-income-of-quintiles-in-the-us/#:~:text=About 50.7 percent of the,earned by the lowest quintile.

The top two quintiles account for nearly 75% of total US income. If we got more granular, I think we’d easily find income drops off very quickly as you move down the second quintile too. No matter how you cut the numbers presented, though, my point I think stands. You may disagree for other reasons, but for the sake of argument if you were to grant that most Americans don’t benefit from imperialism, then it doesn’t seem to follow that their quality of life will go down when it ends. I think you’re creating false division between workers in the imperial core and periphery. It was more true even just 20 years ago than today, but neoliberalization has been eating away at earlier concessions to the working class for decades now.

But you’ve switched gears and are talking about post revolutionary war and degrading of industrial capacity from conflict. That’s just an entirely separate can of worms. I genuinely contend that the US and world in general would be substantially more productive if you ended things like intellectual property, redundant labor due to inefficient competition instead of collaboration, and squandering of productive capacity on non-socially useful endeavors like the MIC and conspicuous consumption. Those are good organizing points for bringing more people around to an anti-imperialist mindset. Plenty of Western leftists can and do accept socialism on anti-imperialist grounds precisely because we recognize we’re in the same class as workers elsewhere in the world. If you’re asking how many American “Socialists” are actually just Vaushites/dem-sucs, I guess I’d answer most of them? But like, they’re not actually educated on political matters. They think the Nordic model is socialism. But that’s not really related to the rest of your claims that I think are out of line with the reality of quality of living and distribution of income.

I’m less sold on that narrative. A couple of things to consider:

1. Much of our domestic industry and labor power currently goes towards production of military industrial equipment and luxury goods/services for the wealthy and high earners. That’s basically dead weight as far as productive capacity goes. Redirect that manpower and industry towards more useful endeavors, and a lot could be done very quickly to reindustrialize socially useful sectors.

2. Finance imperialism does a lot of heavy lifting when it comes to sucking out the productivity of foreign nations, no doubt about it, but very little of that ever makes a material improvement in the lives of your average American. If you think the US’ ill-gotten imperialist loot is trickling down then you’re thinking about the US 50-70 years ago. Reagan and every administration since has made sure more and more of the wealth is protected from redistribution to the dirty poors. Our bridges collapse, 1 in 6 children live in poverty, and our healthcare and education is second rate at best. Don’t overestimate the quality of life of the average American.

3. The US has the natural resources, arable land, and labor power to accomplish a great deal very quickly. It’s throttled by neoliberal economic policy focusing on a rentier economy instead of a productive one. Once Wall street becomes Wall street, if you catch my drift, there’s nothing in the way of a very quickly repurposing of criminally underutilized potential. Furthermore, were the US to undergo a socialist revolution, so too breaks the intellectual property chains shackling development the world over. You predict prices would rise, but that’s only if productive capacity stayed the same. If all of a sudden global South countries are able to develop properly and aren’t forking over rents to Western financial firms, or worse yet simply prevented from developing entirely by protectionist patents/trade secrets, we could end up producing a great deal more on the global scale than ever before. There’s also presumably more cooperation between nations in the area of production beyond just getting out of each other’s way. The sharing of knowledge and technical expertise between nations and previously competing firms would reduce duplicate labor and allow for much more to get done than is today.

I think this vastly overestimates the quality of life for working class Americans. Under a hypothetically totally equal distribution of global income, most Americans would still end up making more than they do today. The U.S. is an incredibly unequal society with the lion’s share of its “income” captured by the the top 10% of earners. We die younger, work more hours, and have worse quality of life than most other “developed” countries. Under socialism the average American’s quality of life genuinely would improve, and that’s in addition to things like health care and education.

The people in the top 10% of earners would absolutely see a reduction in quality of life, and maybe even the top 20%. Besides that, though, it’s a false sense of class divide if you think the median earner at $38,000 per year is living some luxurious life thanks to imperialism. The tragedy is that more Americans who aren’t in the upper echelons of wealth/income don’t recognize that and have solidarity with their fellow exploited workers in the global south.

very interesting now please face the wall and think about rabbits

“Mass Shooting Tracker, a crowdsourced data site cited by CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Economist, the BBC, etc., defines a mass shooting as any incident in which four or more people are shot, whether injured or killed.”

Can’t wait to see the mainstream media appropriately label this and condemn the ideology that leads to such violence… Right?

Self-loathing is a hell of a drug, and white women like the superiority and privilege that comes with their status under white-supremacist patriarchal structures.

If I live in a swing state, do I have to actually go out and protest vote so the Dems get fucked? I was happy to just stay home and laugh, but if adding insult to injury would be the morally appropriate action I guess I should register.

Americans don’t know that, though. It’s not like they’re taught real history.

I hope he’s treated exactly as he deserves

Wow we have so much in common.

Now let’s get another struggle session going for the kids of monarchs.

Death to slavers.

If you want to rules lawyer this in a way that chuds and liberals will be amenable to, or at the very least you want to giggle while they suffer cognitive dissonance, remind them that even if the police kill a bystander while trying to apprehend a criminal, it’s the criminal that is charged with murder. Were the criminal not engaging in the wrongful behavior then the death would not have happened, or so the reasoning goes. Same concept on pain of legal consistency should apply to slavers and any backlash violence. It’s the slavers brutally torturing and dominating human beings for decades who make ripe the conditions for incredible blowback violence. If slavers didn’t want themselves and their families to be brutally executed, then don’t force people into bondage and torture. The slavers are culpable for all violence proceeding from people ensuring their own freedom.

Ha, I just speculated about this a few hours ago https://hexbear.net/comment/5380154

it’s my turn on the lathe everyone, step back

I was ready for it to be bad, I read the title and peppered myself for the worst, but WOW, how do you have a moment like that caught on camera and not retire from public life forever?

Hard to imagine. Perhaps directly targeting NATO satellites? Less focus on direct military targets and more intense bombing of decision centers in Western Ukraine hoping to pop as many NATO “advisors” as possible?

I was twirling my mustache with my finest mousse but then an illegal immigrant wildly flailing with a straight razor gave me a perfect shave and now I look like a fat baby!

Really a perfect microcosm for the global South resisting imperialism today. The west goes about committing man made horrors beyond our comprehension, but as soon as foreign powers do anything besides role over and die quickly (Libya, Iraq, Yugoslavia) or, at the very least, remain in a state of perpetual uneven warfare with little meaningful retaliation, they shit and piss themselves. The west doesn’t even know what to do about peer warfare in Ukraine other than cry about it and mindlessly escalate, and they’re utterly useless in responding to Ansar Allah, Hezbollah, and Iran (when they DO actually act). The west can only bully and lash out at those who are unarmed and weak, but as soon as one of their victims displays true intent and capability of self-defense they cry and play victim. Pathetic.