- cross-posted to:
- news@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- news@lemmy.world
A federal appeals court blocked a racist Florida law that restricts Chinese citizens from buying land from being enforced against the two people who sued the state. The court did not, however, block the law entirely; it’s still in effect for everyone else. One of the judges, Nancy Abudu, agreed that this was a blatant violation of the Fourteenth Amendment, and the ACLU of Florida intends to continue fighting to prevent this law from being enforced more broadly.
This fight isn’t over, but this decision certainly acknowledges the discriminatory nature of this law and is a big win.
(Taken from an email sent to me by Never Again Action.)
Not to the extent I have seen the “foreign” ones do (Do we have a word other than foreign to use here? I don’t like it in this context. Anyway…) and are much easier to go after if they do. I’m not talking about just squeezing us for every penny, I’m talking they are trying to force us into collapse.
Perhaps you might know a few instances of foreigner capitalists owning and abusing the land and raising rent prices in a manner that hurts renters and the land. Black Rock capital is an American corporation that has consolidated and owned lots of apartments. https://eightify.app/summary/economy-and-finance/blackrock-s-dominance-in-housing-market-raises-concerns
You are complaining about Saudi corporations owning and abusing the water table when plenty of American corporations do the same thing. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/drought-water-scare-gets-attention-agribusiness-giant-adm-flna1c7114296 However, out of necessity they will have to appear to conserve water due to bad press and make a lot of articles about how they say that they are saving water. They will need to because appearing not to care will affect their stock price.
The issue is not foreign capitalists, it is capitalism. And capitalists just doing what is most profitable will lead to a collapse regardless. Capitalism is always in crisis, then the people get angry due to the negative outcomes, then they get the government to come in and regulate these corporations. However the neoliberal institutions are pulling back democratic control from the people to service the bottom line of these corporations even further. That is more dangerous for stabilizing capitalism than the foreigner capitalists.
This neoliberal model has brought poverty to many of the nations in South America, Eastern Europe, Asia, and Africa for this very same reason. Western corporations have exploited people in these countries like this. Now they are coming back to us. Dollars have potential to lose value more than ever before, but land does not as much. The main problem has always been the contradiction between those that work the land and live in apartments and those that profit from it despite their distance from it whether it be a foreign corporation or a domestic capitalist.
Yes, my issue is with unfettered capitalism. But if the tankie removed around here think that means I’ll support communism, they are solely mistaken. Moreso I have an issue with anyone from any country trying to tear down another country. Period. And if you think the US needs torn down because of capitalism, you can get fucked. The US has a lot of issues, but you don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Roosevelt was able to regulate capitalism because capitalism wasn’t working under Hoover for the people (alot more than usual). Also a communist country was starting to thrive and industrialize. This inspired many communists to unionize their workplaces. Many of the leadership were communists in all of the unions. These unions had political power. Roosevelt was very popular among the American proletariat. He saved capitalism through his negotiations with the borgiosie and meeting the needs of the American workers. Furthermore due to the large oceans protecting the North American continent, the ravages of World War 2 left the United States mostly unscathed. Industrial workers were able to produce goods for higher prices temporarily because they were the only ones able to manufacture complex goods. As other countries were able to bring their industry back up online over time, this competitive edge waned in relevance. The capitalists were making less profits from industrial production so they leaned into rent seeking and finance. They offshored the jobs of the former industrial centers. They made it harder to unionize and strike. The generations after have noticed capital taking power back from the people. Now we are in neoliberalism. Letting the borgiosie have political power is the problem. They will always make things worse.
What part of capitalism is worth preserving? The “good times” of America were brought by stealing land from native Americans, enslaving Africans, exploitative working conditions of immagrants, the luck of geography, and the severely exploitative system of the Breton Woods system. https://yewtu.be/watch?v=M0Ef_hbNsBs&listen=false
All of which if you are a decent person would recognize that these are bad. All of these are the conditions that bring wealth to the United States. That’s the bathwater. Where is the baby?
China sees no need to do exploitation in this manner and is offering better trade deals and seeking to engage in countries as equals rather than dominate them like the Breton Woods system. They have capitalists, but they have no political power. Why not try to reform the United States to crack down of these parasitic capitalists like China does for the good of the people? We have much to learn from China. But our leaders won’t listen. China encounters problems and they solve them. America encoutners problems and they fester with everything else.
That is why there is so much demonization of trans people, ethnic minorities, and foreign nations to distract people from the fact that capitalism is not meeting the American people’s needs.
“America” historically as a concept has been mostly an institution of exploitation. To get rid of the exploitative systems is to destroy what makes it “America”. Thus the death of America is the means of saving the people by giving them the power to determine their destiny, not controlled by the greedy capitalists.
That is far too long to dive into properly as I’m about to crash, but I will say that the baby is the US; you know democracy. At least its supposed to be even though it’s an oligarchy at this point, but it can be fixed if we get our shit together. Capitalism is the bathwater, and once again, communism is not the answer either. And if you really want fix these things, it’s much better to present it as such and not “the death of America”. Union leaders being communist isn’t a surprise, and I’m very much pro-union. Hell, one of my favorite folk singers was communist, but he wasn’t a tankie, and I doubt those union bosses were, either. They just had faith in an economic system that doesn’t work, just like capitalists.
Why isn’t communism the answer? What kind of answer do you have? Anything but agreeing with a “tankie.” I don’t expect you to respond seriously, so you even take yourself seriously?
The word other than ‘foreign’ that you’re looking for is ‘capitalist’, but as you seem to be specifically talking about foreign capital, there’s no need to be squeamish.
Foreign capital is unlikely to invest with the intention of collapsing the US economy. Investors invest to get a return. Any collapse that follows is simply from the weight of the contradictions of capitalism. If foreign capital is permitted to sharpen those contradictions, it’s only because domestic (neoliberal) capital has created a system to facilitate such practices because it also benefits from it.
There are vulture capitals, of course, but the US has these aplenty and any foreign capitalists looking to do shock treatment to the US are a drop in a deep and wide ocean. Who needs foreign capital for that when the domestic state is run for exactly that purpose?