From Tent City Skid Row, CA To the Ghettos of Detroit, MI, USA

[notme 20,979]

15 minutes ago, Laayla said:

mining region of the Appalachians, it has become almost normal for people to go shopping with food stamps. And those who lose their home often have no choice but to live in a car.

This is my home. And I've relied on food stamps, and I've come very close to homelessness. The only people you can count on anywhere in the world are the other poor people. Wealth is power and power always corrupts. The billionaires - and even most other rich or "upper middle class" people don't care whether the normal folks live or die as long as they aren't inconvenienced. 

Why do we have so much overlap between "working poor" and "essential workers"? If the work is essential, shouldn't a person be able to live off its paycheck? 

[Laayla 4,899]

Bismehe Ta3ala 

Assalam Alikum dear sister @notme

I honor and respect you deeply because of your compassion, humility, and a truthseeker for justice.

God protect you and your family from all harm.   

These questions need to be sent to the so called Justice Democrats in Congress, but they have proven themselves to be the Fraud Squad.

Many poor people will give their shirts right off their backs, but the rich wouldn't even look twice at a poor person.  The disparity is amazing.

M3 Salamah, FE AMIN ALLAH 

[Caroling 92]

18 hours ago, notme said:

'm a civil engineer and human rights activist.

My dad is a retired civil engineer. He’s never complained about widening roads/more lanes being a problem for traffic. In fact, he complains that in high traffic areas where only two narrow lanes are in place congests the route. It really depends on the road, the area, and overall place. That suburban area I mentioned had really old roads, and traffic was always a nightmare because that was sometimes the only route for most people to get to point B (the freeway). It was always congested until the next several lights where the roads were wider and more lanes added. Two lane roads for a sparsely populated area is fine, not so much for a highly populated area. 

 

 

18 hours ago, notme said:

Progress would be insuring that nobody is without necessities like food, shelter, medical care, education, and transportation. The United States can afford to do that, but it doesn't. Why not? 

I agree with this. I don’t deny that we should all have free healthcare at this point, but what you just mentioned: many ME countries, such as Iran, UAE, etc., are very wealthy, but they don’t do anything for it’s people. Nothing. They only keep the wealth for themselves, the top politicians, (or in the UAE’s case, “the locals”) and everyone else is made to suffer astronomical costs of everything. People in the Middle East are underpaid, wether you’re a doctor or a bank teller, and have crazy high expenses. So most people in order to survive, have to scam people on the side, bribe, and cheat their way for more money. The countries are wealthy enough to turn their third world countries into developed places with the amount of oil they have alone (excluding other things) but they choose not to. Because they don’t care. The US might have one con, lack of free healthcare, but it has so many other good aspects: anyone can go to school and apply for student loans, get a degree, work in their field, change careers, buy a house, and have kids, if they work for it. Everyone has an opportunity to at least go to school. There is loan forgiveness. In the Middle East, there is no such thing as free public education until college like in the US, you can’t get loans for college, and in the UAE, you can’t even get a part time job if you are a student or else your visa will be invalidated.

If you work minimum wage in the Middle East, good luck finding a one-bedroom apartment that you’ll be able to afford on your own, but having roommates in an apartment to split the costs is also illegal for no reason, so everyone has no choice but to have roommates. At least in the US, you can afford a one-bedroom on minimum wage or just over. In the UAE, even nurses and health professionals have to work at minimum wage jobs because of discrimination or whatever reason. It’s not uncommon to get a degree in the Middle East, but not be able to use it because they just won’t give you job despite the job market being abundant. 
 

The US not having free health care is only one con out of a million that exist in the Middle East. I could go on, but as someone who has temporarily lived in the Middle East for only a few years (briefly in my early teens), you have no idea the extent of hellish living conditions and corruption that goes on in Middle Eastern countries, even if you are considered wealthy. That’s why when I see people migrate to the US, then talk smack, while living comfortably, it makes my blood boil. Poverty in the US isn’t the same as poverty in any Middle Eastern country. It sucks, but in the Middle East, everything sucks even more. 

Edited February 28 by Caroling

[Caroling 92]

12 hours ago, notme said:

even most other rich or "upper middle class" people don't care whether the normal folks live or die as long as they aren't inconvenienced. 

I’m sorry you’ve had this experience with wealthier people not caring. Not all wealthy people are like that, though. Some of my family members in the Middle East have built and donated schools for impoverished and rural areas so that the children could get an education. We have always helped the poor. 

Edited February 28 by Caroling

[Laayla 4,899]

Bismehe Ta3ala 

Assalam Alikum 

@PureExistence1

@yasahebalzaman.313

@Anonimo

Sister @notme I would like to bring to your attention a journalist who was awarded the Pulitzer Prize as a foreign correspondent for the NYT.  Chris Hedges wrote the following about the American Empire:

 

The physical and moral decay of the United States and the malaise it has spawned have predictable results. We have seen in varying forms the consequences of social and political collapse during the twilight of the Greek and Roman empires, the Ottoman and Hapsburg empires, Tsarist Russia, Weimar Germany and the former Yugoslavia. Voices from the past, Aristotle, Cicero, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Joseph Roth and Milovan Djilas, warned us. But blinded by self-delusion and hubris, as if we are somehow exempt from human experience and human nature, we refuse to listen. 

The United States is a shadow of itself. It squanders its resources in futile military adventurism, a symptom of all empires in decay as they attempt to restore a lost hegemony by force. Vietnam. Afghanistan. Iraq. Syria. Libya. Tens of millions of lives wrecked. Failed states. Enraged fanatics. There are 1.8 billion Muslims in the world, 24 percent of the global population, and we have turned virtually all of them into our enemies.

We are piling up massive deficits and neglecting our basic infrastructure, including electrical grids, roads, bridges and public transportation, to spend more on our military that all the other major powers on Earth combined. We are the world’s largest producer and exporter of arms and munitions. The virtues we argue we have a right to impose by force on others — human rights, democracy, the free market, the rule of law and personal freedoms — are mocked at home where grotesque levels of social inequality and austerity programs have impoverished most of the public, destroyed democratic institutions, including Congress, the courts and the press, and created militarized forces of internal occupation that carry out wholesale surveillance of the public, run the largest prison system in the world and gun down unarmed citizens in the streets with impunity. 

The American burlesque, darkly humorous with its absurdities of Donald Trump, fake ballot boxes, conspiracy theorists who believe the deep state and Hollywood run a massive child sex trafficking ring, Christian fascists that place their faith in magic Jesus and teach creationism as science in our schools, ten hour long voting lines in states such as Georgia, militia members planning to kidnap the governors of Michigan and Virginia and start a civil war, is also ominous, especially as we ignore the accelerating ecocide.

All of our activism, protests, lobbying, petitions, appeals to the United Nations, the work of NGOs and misguided trust in liberal politicians such as Barack Obama have been accompanied by a 60 percent rise in global carbon emissions since 1990. Estimates predict another 40 percent rise in global emissions in the next decade. We are less than a decade away from carbon dioxide levels reaching 450 parts per million, the equivalent to a 2 degree Celsius average temperature rise, a global catastrophe that will make parts of the earth uninhabitable, flood coastal cities, dramatically reduce crop yields and result in suffering and death for billions of people. This is what is coming, and we can’t wish it away.

Ispeak to you in Troy, New York, once the second largest producer of iron in the country after Pittsburgh. It was an industrial hub for the garment industry, a center for the production of shirts, shirtwaists, collars, and cuffs, and was once home to foundries that made bells to firms that crafted precision instruments. All that is gone, of course, leaving behind the post-industrial decay, the urban blight and the shattered lives and despair that are sadly familiar in most cities in the United States. 

It is this despair that is killing us. It eats into the social fabric, rupturing social bonds, and manifests itself in an array of self-destructive and aggressive pathologies. It fosters what the anthropologist Roger Lancaster calls “poisoned solidarity,” the communal intoxication forged from the negative energies of fear, suspicion, envy and the lust for vengeance and violence. Nations in terminal decline embrace, as Sigmund Freud understood, the death instinct. No longer sustained by the comforting illusion of inevitable human progress, they lose the only antidote to nihilism. No longer able to build, they confuse destruction with creation. They descend into an atavistic savagery, something not only Freud but Joseph Conrad and Primo Levi knew lurks beneath the thin veneer of civilized society. Reason does not guide our lives. Reason, as Schopenhauer puts it, echoing Hume, is the hard-pressed servant of the will. 

“Men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved, and who at the most can defend themselves if they are attacked,” Freud wrote. “They are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness. As a result, their neighbor is for them not only a potential helper or sexual object, but also someone who tempts them to satisfy their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work without compensation, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill him. Homo homini lupus. Who, in the face of all his experience of life and history, will have the courage to dispute this assertion? As a rule, this cruel aggressiveness waits for some provocation or puts itself at the service of some other purpose, whose goal might also have been reached by milder measures. In circumstances that are favorable to it, when the mental counter-forces which ordinarily inhibit it are out of action, it also manifests itself spontaneously and reveals man as a savage beast to whom consideration towards his own kind is something alien.” 

Begins at 30:54

Those who want to watch instead of reading

 

 

 

Edited February 28 by Laayla

[notme 20,979]

2 hours ago, Caroling said:

I’m sorry you’ve had this experience with wealthier people not caring. Not all wealthy people are like that, though. Some of my family members in the Middle East have built and donated schools for impoverished and rural areas so that the children could get an education. We have always helped the poor. 

I'm glad your family is good people in spite of their wealth. That is rare. Wealth is a test. Most rich people are going to be very unhappy on the Day of Judgment. 

I've never even visited the Middle East so can't comment on conditions there, but conditions being worse elsewhere does not make bad conditions here ok. 

And I disagree that lack of health care is the only major problem we need to work on. 

[Laayla 4,899]

Everywhere You Look, American Empire Is Crumbling

BY EDITORJanuary 23, 2021

 26 Commentson Everywhere You Look, American Empire Is Crumbling

If you need proof that the last superpower, our very own empire, is indeed crumbling, consider the year we’ve just lived through, not to mention the first few weeks of 2021.

[Beverly & Pack / CC BY 2.0]

By Rebecca Gordon / TomDispatch

How can you tell when your empire is crumbling? Some signs are actually visible from my own front window here in San Francisco.

Directly across the street, I can see a collection of tarps and poles (along with one of my own garbage cans) that were used to construct a makeshift home on the sidewalk. Beside that edifice stands a wooden cross decorated with a string of white Christmas lights and a red ribbon — a memorial to the woman who built that structure and died inside it earlier this week. We don’t know — and probably never will — what killed her: the pandemic raging across California? A heart attack? An overdose of heroin or fentanyl?

Behind her home and similar ones is a chain-link fence surrounding the empty playground of the Horace Mann/Buena Vista elementary and middle school. Like that home, the school, too, is now empty, closed because of the pandemic. I don’t know where the families of the 20 children who attended that school and lived in one of its gyms as an alternative to the streets have gone. They used to eat breakfast and dinner there every day, served on the same sidewalk by a pair of older Latina women who apparently had a contract from the school district to cook for the families using that school-cum-shelter. I don’t know, either, what any of them are now doing for money or food.

Just down the block, I can see the line of people that has formed every weekday since early December. Masked and socially distanced, they wait patiently to cross the street, one at a time, for a Covid test at a center run by the San Francisco Department of Health. My little street seems an odd choice for such a service, since — especially now that the school has closed — it gets little foot traffic. Indeed, a representative of the Latino Task Force, an organization created to inform the city’s Latinx population about Covid resources told our neighborhood paper Mission Local that

“Small public health clinics such as this one ‘will say they want to do more outreach, but I actually think they don’t want to.’ He believes they chose a low-trafficked street like Bartlett to stay under the radar. ‘They don’t want to blow the spot up, because it does not have a large capacity.’”

What do any of these very local sights have to do with a crumbling empire? They’re signs that some of the same factors that fractured the Roman empire back in 476 CE (and others since) are distinctly present in this country today — even in California, one of its richest states. I’m talking about phenomena like gross economic inequality; over-spending on military expansion; political corruption; deep cultural and political fissures; and, oh yes, the barbarians at the gates. I’ll turn to those factors in a moment, but first let me offer a brief defense of the very suggestion that U.S. imperialism and an American empire actually exist.

https://scheerpost.com/2021/01/23/everywhere-you-look-american-empire-is-crumbling/

 

[Caroling 92]

33 minutes ago, notme said:

'm glad your family is good people in spite of their wealth. That is rare. Wealth is a test. Most rich people are going to be very unhappy on the Day of Judgment. 

I agree with this (most rich people are going to be unhappy on the Day of Judgement) because I have seen how some people who became a little bit better off end up becoming giant snobs who think they are the most amazing people because of their wealth. But I guess they were just horrible people. I don’t know. Maybe their snobbery and lack of care for others IS the rule, not the exception. I believe that wealth should never change a person or cause you to look down on someone for having less. I was raised to look at a person not based on their wealth or status in life, but how they treat other people.
 

To be honest, I thought most better off families were like mine: using their extra wealth to give back to others. You mentioned it was rare. I wasn’t aware that it was rare; I thought it was the golden standard. Both of my parents help people, really go above and beyond to help out, and their parents did the same. That’s all I’ve ever known, really. Give back to others if you can/have disposable income. 

Edited February 28 by Caroling

[notme 20,979]

11 minutes ago, Caroling said:

I wasn’t aware that it was rare;

This is part of the problem. They think they are good and generous, when actually they either have a hero complex, or are just completely clueless about how to care, or both. 

[Laayla 4,899]

Bismehe Ta3ala 

Assalam Alikum Sister @notme

Were you able to watch the ted talk for brenee brown?

[notme 20,979]

2 minutes ago, Laayla said:

Bismehe Ta3ala 

Assalam Alikum Sister @notme

Were you able to watch the ted talk for brenee brown?

Yes I did. It was definitely worth a listen. Thanks for sharing that. 

[Laayla 4,899]

^^^

You're welcome dear sister

This video was taken February 15, 2021.

Gabriel does travel videos and is in Portland, Oregon.

After a snowstorm, many homeless people are living in tents.

It's a disaster!  

 

[Laayla 4,899]

Bismehe Ta3ala 

Assalam Alikum 

With over a million views, Peter Sentenello is currently living in California and he explains how thieves can go into CVS or Walgreens and steal over $900 of items and nothing will be done about it.

Also in San Francisco, with so much homelessness in the city, people defecate and urninate all over the city.  Fox News with Tucker Carlson did a whole series about the corruption in SF. 

You can't make this crap up. (pun intended)

 

Starts at 5:53

 

M3 Salamah, FE AMIN ALLAH 

[hasanhh 10,365]

On 2/28/2021 at 5:30 PM, Laayla said:

It's a disaster!  

No, your posted video was a waste of  my time.

You want 'disaster', try getting a video of the on-coming illegal invasion.

[notme 20,979]

On 2/28/2021 at 5:30 PM, Laayla said:

After a snowstorm, many homeless people are living in tents.

In Norfolk VA and Richmond VA, the police confiscate the tents and personal property of homeless people. Groups are working to provide "survival pods" and tiny houses, but these also will be stolen by the authorities if they are placed on public space or abandoned lots. 

17 hours ago, Laayla said:

how thieves can go into CVS or Walgreens and steal over $900 of items and nothing will be done about it.

If people are stealing necessities because they can't otherwise access them, they should not be punished. If people are stealing due to greed, they should. 

[Laayla 4,899]

AMERICAN EMPIRE, CLIMATE CHANGE, COMMENTARY, COVID-19, ENVIRONMENT

Chris Hedges: The Age of Social Murder

March 3, 2021

 

 

Suicidal Folly 

At Joint Base Balad, Iraq, U.S. soldiers board aircraft. (U.S. Air Force/Erik Gudmundson)

The massive resources allocated to the military, which when the costs of the Veterans Administration are added to the Department of Defense budget come to $826 billion a year, are the most glaring example of our suicidal folly, symptomatic of all decaying civilizations that squander diminishing resources in institutions and projects that accelerate their decline.  

The American military — which accounts for 38 percent of military spending worldwide — is incapable of combating the real existential crisis.  The fighter jets, satellites, aircraft carriers, fleets of warships, nuclear submarines, missiles, tanks and vast arsenals of weaponry are useless against pandemics and the climate crisis. The war machine does nothing to mitigate the human suffering caused by degraded environments that sicken and poison populations or make life unsustainable.  Air pollution already kills an estimated 200,000 Americans a year while children in decayed cities such as Flint, Michigan, are damaged for life with lead contamination from drinking water. 

The prosecution of endless and futile wars, costing anywhere from $5 to $7 trillion, the maintenance of some 800 military bases in over 70 countries, along with the endemic fraud, waste and mismanagement by the Pentagon at a time when the survival of the species is at stake is self-destructive. 

The Pentagon has spent more than $67 billion alone on a ballistic missile defense system that few believe will actually work and billions more on a series of dud weapons systems, including the $22 billion Zumwalt destroyer. And, on top of all this, the U.S. military emitted 1.2 billion metric tons of carbon emissions between 2001 and 2017, twice the annual output of the nation’s passenger vehicles.

A decade from now we will look back at the current global ruling class as the most criminal in human history, willfully dooming millions upon millions of people to die, including those from this pandemic, which dwarf the murderous excesses of the killers of the past including the Europeans who carried out the genocide of the indigenous peoples in the Americas, the Nazis who exterminated some 12 million people, the Stalinists or Mao’s Cultural Revolution. This is the largest crime against humanity ever committed. It is being committed in front of us. And, with few exceptions, we are willfully being herded like sheep to the slaughter.

It is not that most people have faith in the ruling elites. They know they are being betrayed. They feel vulnerable and afraid. They understand that their misery is unacknowledged and unimportant to the global elites, who have concentrated staggering amounts of wealth and power into the hands of a tiny cabal of rapacious oligarchs. 

The rage many feel at being abandoned often expresses itself in a poisoned solidarity. This poisoned solidarity unites the disenfranchised around hate crimes, racism, inchoate acts of vengeance against scapegoats, religious and ethnic chauvinism and nihilistic violence. It fosters crisis cults, such as those built by the Christian fascists, and elevates demagogues such as Donald Trump. 

Social divisions benefit the ruling class, which has built media silos that feed packaged hate to competing demographics. The greater the social antagonisms, the less the elites have to fear. If those gripped by poisoned solidarity become numerically superior — nearly half of the American electorate rejects the traditional ruling class and embraces conspiracy theories and a demagogue — the elites will accommodate the new power configuration, which will accelerate the social murder. 

The Biden administration will not carry out the economic, political, social or environmental reforms that will save us. The fossil fuel industry will continue to extract oil. The wars will not end. Social inequality will grow. Government control, with its militarized police forces of internal occupation, wholesale surveillance and loss of civil liberties, will expand. New pandemics, along with droughts, wildfires, monster hurricanes, crippling heat waves and flooding, will lay waste to the country as well as a population burdened by a for-profit health care system that is not designed or equipped to deal with a national health crisis.

https://consortiumnews.com/2021/03/03/chris-hedges-the-age-of-social-murder/

[Marcy 9]

On 2/25/2021 at 3:23 PM, Laayla said:

@Marcy

Hello.  I wanted to bring your attention to this thread.

What is happening in your state?  Do you see corruption at the state or national level?

Why are many Americans so polarized?

After Rush Limbaugh's death, his legacy is remembered by the likes of Trump.  That's nothing to be proud of.

I watch YouTube channels for independent media, the likes of Abby Martin, Jimmy Dore, Medea Benjamin, Kyle Kulinski just to name a few.

I agree with their political positions, but not when it comes to religious views.  For example, they would agree with the legalization of marijuana.  I wouldn't.  They agree on pro choice, I'm pro life.

As you are a devout Christian, how do you see the state of affairs in America?

M3 Salamah, FE AMIN ALLAH 

Whether it is on the state level or national level, there is moral depravity.  Mankind has turned from God and his laws and create their own.  I too am against legalization of marijuana and am pro-life.  As a Christian, I am a follower of Jesus Christ.  Many claim to be Christian, but do not follow Christ and his righteousness.  There will be a day that God will judge.  Americans, like so many around the world are being taken in by the ways of this world.  Why?  Because Satan is still allowed to move about.  The one thing we have to look forward to, is that God will put an end to the evil that exists.      

[Son of Placid 1,469]

On 2/27/2021 at 5:08 PM, El Cid said:

 

Does this make you angry as well?

https://iran-hrm.com/index.php/2021/02/19/iran-hangs-already-dead-woman-zahra-esmaili-lawyer-says/

https://iranhumanrights.org/2021/02/irans-political-prisoners-are-dying-due-to-denial-of-medical-care/

Why am I mentioning this? Because on this forum, I've come to believe that the majority of people believe Iran to be perfection. As a human rights activist doesn't this make you angry? In fact this entire topic was made in response to people criticizing Iran so it's very well fitting and not irrevalant to the discussion. 

As brother Tawhidi says "For every one violent verse in the quran, I can show you 10 from the Bible".

And I'll say this to you and everyone of your elk. "For every one problem you'll complain about the advanced countries, I'll show you a thousand problems facing the countries you hail to be championing in everything good and Shi'a like."

The good outweighs the bad. Enjoin in the good, don't grasp for the straws simply because it's fashionable to tear down the achievements of better men.

Maybe I need a description of who exactly you mean when you say "better men". We often rate society by their richness or popularity, assuming they are better people while behind closed doors they prove otherwise. 

[Panzerwaffe 1,215]

On 2/27/2021 at 7:08 PM, El Cid said:

 

Does this make you angry as well?

https://iran-hrm.com/index.php/2021/02/19/iran-hangs-already-dead-woman-zahra-esmaili-lawyer-says/

https://iranhumanrights.org/2021/02/irans-political-prisoners-are-dying-due-to-denial-of-medical-care/

Why am I mentioning this? Because on this forum, I've come to believe that the majority of people believe Iran to be perfection. As a human rights activist doesn't this make you angry? In fact this entire topic was made in response to people criticizing Iran so it's very well fitting and not irrevalant to the discussion. 

As brother Tawhidi says "For every one violent verse in the quran, I can show you 10 from the Bible".

And I'll say this to you and everyone of your elk. "For every one problem you'll complain about the advanced countries, I'll show you a thousand problems facing the countries you hail to be championing in everything good and Shi'a like."

The good outweighs the bad. Enjoin in the good, don't grasp for the straws simply because it's fashionable to tear down the achievements of better men.

there is hope ! Thanks for saying this 

[Panzerwaffe 1,215]

On 1/29/2021 at 3:55 PM, notme said:

Poverty in "the richest country in the world" is indeed disgusting. But those with money have power, so probably the only way to correct the problem will end up being revolution. I, as a mostly-pacifist, really hope we can correct this with peaceful means like reasonable taxes for the wealthy and universal basic income, health care, and housing. It's almost too late. 

no we destroyed ralph naders and bernie's careers by a resounding majority 

we in america hate all revolution, we HATE socialism while not understanding what it means and while demanding all its benefits

the problem is the "educated" middle class which sees imaginary social evils and lives in a self righteous bubble and does not know how the world works 

wealthy will always be evil but whose votes keep them in power ?

I really wish we can rehabilitate the image of socialism in america, putting the "social" in SS checks many of us love to receive 

Edited April 11 by Panzerwaffe

[Allah Seeker 1,528]

Been watching this channel and it breaks my heart to see these. Really nothing else makes me wanting to see the zuhur more than thinking of all the poor homeless people.. 

Those people know more what life is about than most of us. Really down to earth.