Personally I think that the connections of this incident to US imperialism are slightly more interesting than passengers not being let out of their seats (Which doesn’t seem *entirely* unreasonable to me personally) 😛
Well, the two are connected; as Spencer points out, attempts to impose aggression on external enemies always end up heightening constraints on the domestic population as well.
The psychology of those government goons is really quite telling. Passengers save the day, and they bark at the pilot for trying to use the bathroom while they are all held prisoner for several hours?
Here’s a funny related article about Putin “chastising” capitalist Oleg Deripaska for not paying wages to workers in the town of Pikalevo. The article goes on to say that these monocities are all over Russia, and that Putin does “not approve” of worker demonstrations. Could we be witnessing the rise of real soviets and real mutual aid-based federations!? For the former Soviet Union that would be the height of irony.
“Could we be witnessing the rise of real soviets and real mutual aid-based federations!? For the former Soviet Union that would be the height of irony.”
Well, not really:
“In virtually every anti-Soviet uprising of the post-WWII period, the resistance was libertarian socialist in character. In East Germany in 1953, Hungary 1956, Czechoslovakia 1967, and Poland 1981, the resistance organized workers’ councils in the factories and saw themselves as fighting against a bureaucratic ruling class that had supplanted the capitalists. Come to think of it, as another example of history’s tendency to rhyme if not repeat, this sounds a bit like events in the Soviet Union before the Bolshevik party machine hijacked the sovyets and Lenin suppressed the workers’ committees and placed the factories under one-man management.” – http://c4ss.org/content/1449
More information on wages and stuff: Apparently the IRS busily “reclassifies” many independent contractors as employees every year, because then they can wring more tax money out of businesses. This can sometimes be good (FedEx drivers were being treated like employees and thus did not want their contractor status anymore) or bad (as a contractor you might be fired if the business has to pay more taxes on you). Finally, if a contractor holds even one job as an “employee” the IRS can reclassify all of your jobs as “employee”: http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/article-30177.html
Personally I think that the connections of this incident to US imperialism are slightly more interesting than passengers not being let out of their seats (Which doesn’t seem *entirely* unreasonable to me personally) 😛
Well, the two are connected; as Spencer points out, attempts to impose aggression on external enemies always end up heightening constraints on the domestic population as well.
The psychology of those government goons is really quite telling. Passengers save the day, and they bark at the pilot for trying to use the bathroom while they are all held prisoner for several hours?
Here’s a funny related article about Putin “chastising” capitalist Oleg Deripaska for not paying wages to workers in the town of Pikalevo. The article goes on to say that these monocities are all over Russia, and that Putin does “not approve” of worker demonstrations. Could we be witnessing the rise of real soviets and real mutual aid-based federations!? For the former Soviet Union that would be the height of irony.
“Could we be witnessing the rise of real soviets and real mutual aid-based federations!? For the former Soviet Union that would be the height of irony.”
Well, not really:
“In virtually every anti-Soviet uprising of the post-WWII period, the resistance was libertarian socialist in character. In East Germany in 1953, Hungary 1956, Czechoslovakia 1967, and Poland 1981, the resistance organized workers’ councils in the factories and saw themselves as fighting against a bureaucratic ruling class that had supplanted the capitalists. Come to think of it, as another example of history’s tendency to rhyme if not repeat, this sounds a bit like events in the Soviet Union before the Bolshevik party machine hijacked the sovyets and Lenin suppressed the workers’ committees and placed the factories under one-man management.” – http://c4ss.org/content/1449
Point taken. Also, I meant to link to this article but apparently HTML link tags aren’t the correct way to do it:
http://leninology.blogspot.com/2010/01/obama-in-aden.html
More information on wages and stuff: Apparently the IRS busily “reclassifies” many independent contractors as employees every year, because then they can wring more tax money out of businesses. This can sometimes be good (FedEx drivers were being treated like employees and thus did not want their contractor status anymore) or bad (as a contractor you might be fired if the business has to pay more taxes on you). Finally, if a contractor holds even one job as an “employee” the IRS can reclassify all of your jobs as “employee”: http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/article-30177.html