Slavery today (pictures)

"Middle class": slaves and soldiers of America

Noam Chomsky: The greatest living philosopher in the World.

Milto Friedman

Father is the worst form of capitalism  whose we are all wictims!!!

STOP UBER!!!

French taxi unions have once again staged a nationwide strike, shutting down roadways across Paris in a protest against ride-hailing companies like Uber. Thousands of taxi drivers are expected to participate in demonstrations across Paris today, disrupting traffic to and from the French capital's two major airports. Protesters burned tires at a major thoroughfare on the western edge of Paris, where police used tear gas to disperse some, and two taxi drivers were injured after a shuttle bus drove through a blockade at Orly airport, French media reported this morning. Paris police say 20 arrests have been made so far.

The unions are calling for an end to non-taxi services that, like Uber and other ride-hailing apps, allow users to book rides with licensed chauffeurs — a category known in France as "voitures de tourisme avec chauffeur" (VTC). A 2014 law aimed at assuring fair competition between VTCs and taxi operators has not been adequately enforced, the unions say, allowing VTCs to eat away at their market. CGT Taxis, one of the syndicates that organized today's strike, says its revenue has dropped by 40 percent due to the rise of ride-hailing apps. Others have estimated their losses at between 20 and 30 percent.

"WE ARE DEMANDING THE ELIMINATION OF VTCS, PURE AND SIMPLE."

"The law has never been enforced, and we think it's unenforceable," says Mohammed Khamedi, secretary of CGT Taxis. "So we are demanding the elimination of VTCs, pure and simple, or compensation" for taxi licenses. (Taxi licenses are issued for free but the government has limited the number in circulation, giving rise to a secondary market where they sell for around €200,000.)

Tuesday's demonstrations coincide with a series of strikes staged by air traffic controllers, civil servants, and teachers across France. It also comes more than a year after French taxi unions staged widespread protests against Uber's low-cost UberPop service (known as UberX in the US), which connected passengers with non-professional chauffeurs. Strikes held in January and June of last year erupted in violence, as taxi drivers set cars on fire and clashed with Uber chauffeurs. Uber suspended the service following the June protests, and it was officially banned under a court ruling handed down in September.

The French government created the VTC class in 2009, as a way to supplement the scarce supply of taxis. At first, the distinction was clear: VTCs could only be reserved in advance, whereas taxis could be hailed from the street. But the rise of apps like Uber, which now has 1.4 million users in France, has dramatically shifted that balance, putting taxis and private chauffeurs in more direct competition with one another.

Uber France spokesman Thomas Meister says today's strike "is not aimed at Uber" specifically, unlike previous demonstrations, saying the taxi unions are targeting "the general organization and structure of the industry." In an email to its French users on Monday, the San Francisco-based company described the strike as an assault on France's growing market for ride-hailing apps, and sought to muster online support to ease regulations.

"The objective of this protest is simple: pressure the government to make it more difficult to access the VTC profession so as to limit competition, while the sector is booming," the email read. The message was signed by Uber and five other French ride-hailing apps, and was sent to the users of all six startups. It was headlined with the hashtag "#NonALaFinDesApplis" ("No to the end of apps"), and urged users to sign a petition asking President Francois Hollande to ease testing restrictions for would-be VTC drivers. The government was supposed to implement new testing requirements for VTC chauffeurs by the beginning of 2016, replacing a 250-hour driving requirement, but it has yet to do so, leaving thousands of applicants in limbo. The site for applicants has been down for several days, displaying a message that says a new site will be available on January 26th (the date of today's strike).

Uber has faced regulatory hurdles throughout the course of its global expansion, and has encountered particularly hostile resistance in France. At the core of this week's strike is the Thévenoud law, passed in October 2014, which imposes restrictions on the way Uber and other ride-hailing apps operate. Under the law, VTC services are forbidden from using geolocation services to show available cars, and chauffeurs are required to return to a home base between rides.

The law was designed to ensure fair competition between France's deeply entrenched taxi firms and an emerging field of Uber-like VTC services. But neither side is happy with it. Uber believes the law is unfair and impractical — the company has challenged it in European court — while taxi unions say the government hasn't done enough to enforce it, and that it's regularly flouted.

The Thévenoud law has given taxis the illusion that it would basically protect their monopoly, and that's simply not the fact," Meister said in an interview Monday. "It's just trying to create some balance, in a very clumsy way, in the industry. But taxis are absolutely sure that if the law were to be enforced, then they would have their monopoly back, which is obviously not going to happen."

Last week, Uber announced it would open its platform to taxi drivers, after France's Constitutional Court ruled that chauffeurs can work for both cab companies and VTC services, overturning a provision in the Thévenoud Law. Meister says the expansion would allow taxi drivers to have a second source of income, but it isn't sitting well with taxi unions. Khamedi describes the move as a "provocation," and says his syndicate will not work with Uber.

"WE DON'T WORK WITH ANY COMPANY THAT DOESN'T PARTICIPATE IN THE SOCIAL SYSTEM IN FRANCE."

"We don't work with any company that doesn't participate in the social system in France," he says. "They don't have the same constraints."

The government has so far given no indication as to how it will respond to the taxi unions' demands. Following June's protests, two Uber executives were arrested on charges of operating an illegal taxi operation. Ahead of this week's protests, the founders of Heetch, a late-night ride-sharing service for young people, were also taken into custody on similar charges.

"The violence is unacceptable," French Prime Minister Manuel Valls told reporters Tuesday. "No cause can justify such violence."

Although unions have historically wielded considerable influence over policymaking, France's economy minister has made a point of nurturing the country's startup industry, as it continues to struggle with high unemployment and anemic growth. Valls, Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve, and other officials will meet with a delegation of taxi drivers Tuesday afternoon.

"For me, [the taxi strike] is only noise," says Théodore Monzies, founder of the startupEurecab, a price comparison and ride-booking site for car services in France. He says apps like Uber have blurred the distinction between VTCs and taxi services, and there's little the government can do to restore it. "The trend is moving forward, and I don't see any backward movement."

But the taxi unions, as always, remain determined. "If the government doesn't meet our demands, we will continue," Khamedi says. "We will stay on-site."

CAPITALISM AND DEMOCRACY: YEAR-END LESSONS

The poor fish for their dinners. The rich, steal the poor man's fish.

2013 drove home a basic lesson: US  capitalism's economic leaders and their politicians now regularly ignore majority opinions and preferences. For example, polls showed overwhelming popular support for higher taxes on the rich with lower taxes on the rest of us and for reversing the nation's deepening economic inequalities. Yet Republicans and Democrats, including President Obama, raised payroll taxes sharply on January 1, 2013. Those taxes are regressive; they take a smaller percentage of your income the higher your income is above $113,700 per year. Raising the payroll tax increased economic inequality across 2013.

For another example, many American cities and towns want to use eminent domain laws to help residents keep their homes and avoid foreclosure. Eminent domain is a hallmark democratic right as well as US law. It enables municipal governments to buy individual properties (at market prices) when doing so benefits the community as a whole. Using eminent domain, local leaders want to compel lenders (e.g., banks, etc.) to sell them homes whose market prices have fallen below the mortgage debts of their occupants. They would then resell those homes at their market prices to their occupants. With their mortgages thus reduced to their homes' actual prices, occupants could stay in them. They still suffer their homes' fallen values but avoid homelessness. Communities benefit because decreased homelessness reduces the fall of other property values, reduces the number of abandoned homes (and thus risks of fire, crime, etc.), reduces the number of customers lost to local stores, sustains property tax flows to local governments and so on.

Used this way, eminent domain forces lenders - chiefly banks - to share more of the pains produced by capitalism's crisis. Most Americans support that, believing it will help reverse income and wealth inequalities and also that banks bear major responsibility for the economic crisis.

Yet the country's biggest banks are using "their" money and laws (that they often wrote) to block municipalities' use of eminent domain. "Their" money includes the massive bailouts Washington provided to them since 2007. Big bank directors and major shareholders - a tiny minority - fund the politicians, parties and think-tanks that oppose municipalities' use of eminent domain. In these ways, capitalism systematically undermines democratic decision-making about economic affairs.

For yet another example, the recent bankruptcy court decision about Detroit allows the city to cut retired city workers' pensions. Those workers bargained and signed contracts with Detroit's leaders over many years. They accepted less in wages and benefits in exchange for their pensions as parts of their agreed compensation for work performed. Now that an economic crisis and the unemployment it generated have cut Detroit's tax revenues, this system's "solution" includes cutting retired workers' pensions. Other cities are expected to adopt this solution. Inequality worsens as the costs of this economic crisis shift from lenders to cities (usually rich) to retired city-worker pensioners (never rich).

In these and other ways, 2013 taught millions of Americans that capitalism repeatedly contradicts the democratic idea that majority decisions should govern society as a whole. The system's tendency toward deepening inequalities of income and wealth operated across 2013 in direct contradiction to the will of substantial American majorities.

The same happened in the decades before the 1930s Great Depression. However, in that Depression, a mass movement from below (organized by the Congress of Industrial Organizations - CIO - and socialist and communist parties) successfully reversed capitalism's tendencies toward inequality. Supported by majorities of Americans, it was strong enough to obtain Social Security, unemployment compensation and millions of federal jobs for the people whom private capitalists could not or would not employ. Those programs helped average people rather than bailing out banks and other large corporations. That movement also got the government to pay for those programs by taxing corporations and the rich at far higher rates than exist now. Capitalism's deepening inequality was partly reversed by and because of a massive democratic movement.

However, that movement stopped short of ending capitalism. Thus it only temporarily reversed capitalism's tendencies toward inequality. After World War II, business, the rich and conservatives mobilized a return to "capitalism as usual." They organized a massive government repression of the coalition (CIO, socialists and communists) that led the 1930s movement from below. By such means as the Taft-Hartley Act and McCarthyism, capitalism resumed its development of ever-greater economic inequalities, especially after 1970. In the Great Recession since 2007, the absence of a sustained movement from below has allowed inequality to worsen as our examples above illustrate.

The lessons of recent history include this: To secure democratic decision-making and the kind of society most Americans want requires moving beyond capitalism. Capitalism's difficulties (including its crises and inequalities) and its control of government responses to those difficulties keep teaching that lesson. The widening gap between democratic needs and impulses and the imperatives of capitalism is becoming clear to millions in the United States but also in other countries.

For example, the Rajoy government in Spain recently imposed new levels of repression on the strengthening protests against its austerity policies. Spain's unemployment rate today exceeds the US rate in the worst year of the Depression. Rajoy wants fines of up to $40,000 for offenses such as burning the national flag, insulting the state or causing serious disturbances outside Parliament. Indeed some fines go up to $800,000 for "demonstrations that interfere in electoral processes."

Contradictions between democratic rights and demands and the processes of capitalism are accelerating into clashes in legislatures and the streets. Informed by history's lessons about capitalism and democracy, today's movements more likely will recognize the need to confront and supersede capitalism to secure real democracies. Policies that achieve only temporary reversals of capitalist inequalities no longer suffice. The system's imperatives to profit, compete and grow are now so costly to so many that its critics and opponents are multiplying fast. Once they confront and solve the problem of politically organizing themselves, social change will happen fast, too.

This piece was originally published on Truthout.

The development of man from the Australopithecus to man without a brain ( consumers )

Liberal capitalism.

Liberal capitalism

People without a house on the left side , and houses without people 's right side . The harsh truth is unfortunately !!!

Greeting for Australia!!!

On this day back in 1788 , the British ship with the first settlers from England , including a group of prisoners , sailed in the bay Botany Bay in Australia.


Botany Bay long time ago:

Botany Bay today:

Greeting for Australia!!!

History of Slavery

For beginning writers about the beginnings of slavery and slavery generally , through history.


The definition of slavery:

Slavery is the relationship between people, groups of people or nations based on economic, legal , moral , ideological , political or religious dependence and obedience. In its narrow sense , is a formal institution of extreme dependency of one by another man who is the foundation of the social system called slavery .

Sound familiar economic, legal , moral , religious addiction?!?


The earliest source mentioning slavery is the Code of Hammurabi ( Mesopotamia , around 1800 BC) which shows that had already been widely disseminated and accepted.

History of slavery in the ancient world is closely connected with warfare. Sources from Mesopotamia, Egypt, Israel, ancient Greece, ancient Rome, China, Maya civilization...
In many communities, the number of slaves is far exceeded the number of free people.

Throughout history, committed various attempts of liberation from the bondage of certain groups or the whole nation. Moses according to the Bible and the Torah out of Egypt all the Jewish people . This is probably the first recorded case of liberation from slavery.


He recently recorded a very good film on this subject with , Christian Bale in the lead role . the name of the film: The Exodus.

Slavery in the United States:

Slaves have played an extremely important role , especially in economic terms, in all societies of slavery . Such is the situation with countries such as Brazil , Bermuda , Cuba, Haiti , Jamaica, Dominican Republic and the United States . Importing slaves in the United States was banned in 1808 by which time they were already imported some 300,000 . All subsequent slaves were born in the US . Hostility between the slave-owning South and advanced north over the issue of slavery is considered one of the causes of the American Civil War 1861st.

Slavery is a major benefit to some people in the world : Slavers!!!


Do you think that with the money they earned thanks to the slavery they just gave up all this if not direct as in earlier times, then indirect , such as the case today , controlling our finances , schools , law ... To be continued...

False Freedom!!!

If you can read this blog, surf the Internet or read the latest news, do not be fooled to think that you are free. Maybe you're just emancipiated slaves who do not know they are!?! What i write, whether i am mad!!! When we were free, if not now?!?

No, no, no!!! Do not take me wrong we are not like them they are from another time .

We have these in picture below. Young, middle-aged, old... Well-dressed.

What am I saying what's up?!? Then we have in common with people from the first picture???

Absolutely nothing!

People with the first image they know who their master. Also they were provided food, shelter, did not know anything except that they are slaves.

What is it whit us?

We do like them, but we can not be assured of food and accommodation ... Also watching TV , read newspapers , surf the internet and thus get the impression that all we know . Yet perhaps know some superficial things such as: whether Kim Kardashian engaged or what she was wearing tonight or famous athletes who had bought new cars , with which the starlet spent the previous evening. But most importantly we will not read or hear on TV . And most importantly do not know that we are slaves...

But wait, who are our master??? Whom we are slaves???

If you wanted to read i will continued whit this story...