Asbestos insulation is actually perfectly safe, in the wall.

Older apartments, particularly ones that have been regularly renovated or poorly maintained, don’t do a good job of keeping asbestos inside the walls. Also, asbestos itself tends to break down over time and become more difficult to keep contained. This makes asbestos cleanup extremely difficult and expensive.

A good article for understanding the relationship between the police and other unions. But it doesn’t answer the question

Why don’t the cops simply seize the means of production themselves? What keeps them loyal to the bourgeois?

Sitting and not doing anything

Why are the only two options “Be a three term Congresswoman” or “Do Nothing”?

Having an influence increases the chances of getting what you want.

The problem is that AOC has no influence. She can’t impact the language of legislation, the priorities of national spending, or the operation of her assigned committees.

Imagine if people primaried Nancy Pelosi.

Its been tried, repeatedly. Her position is unassailable, largely by way of name recognition. The cost of running a campaign in a media market as expensive as San Fransisco’s is astronomical. That, combined with her influence in state and local political leadership, means Dems close ranks and shut more left-leaning candidates out of public leadership in local political establishments.

Nancy Pelosi is likely trying to tank AOC’s committee bid because she feels she’s making the best decision for the party

Oh well, in that case, I guess who are we to question her judgement.

Odds are that the Kims and probably a number of people at the top would be worse-off if things changed.

I mean, when you compare North Korea to the poorer parts of the periphery that capitulated to neoliberal capital - Haiti, Liberia, the former Yugoslavian states, Argentina right now, the Philippines, Lebanon or Iraq or Gaza - even the lay resident is getting out reasonably well off. They aren’t living in an active war zone, they’ve got a backwards but still functional economy, and they’re even making inroads on foreign trade at long last.

The xenophobic siege mentality of the Kims appears to have spared them a far worse fate, just by keeping the country isolated from shit like COVID and The War on Terror. They never got the windfall of the 20th century industrial economy, but they also didn’t get systematically wiped out like American Natives or Black Angolans or Rohingya Muslims.

No. But its worth understanding why AOC has survived in her seat longer than Cori Bush or Jamal Bowman did. She’s been following the Sanders entryist playbook, thinking she can eventually get a seat at the table. But every two years, she gets played as a sucker - raising the party a ton of money, then getting stuffed back into the box when her usefulness has passed.

Bush and Bowman couldn’t bring in that kind of coin, so they’ve been punted from the organization and replaced with more doctrinaire loyalists. AOC gets to hold her seat just so long as she finds enough people to keep bankrolling the consultant fees.

At some point, she needs to recognize she’s being strung along or she just becomes another part of the problem.

The top brackets are manifestations of the bottom bracket. Its a divide-and-conquer strategy, and foolish to ignore on its face.

For centuries women couldn’t own property, couldn’t hold professional jobs, and couldn’t participate in politics. Same with ethnic minorities. Queer sexual preference was outright prohibited by law and used to disqualify candidates from office, to break up organizations with police action, and to deny people access to private careers and public services.

You can come at this from a vulgar Marxist perspective and only see the Owners v Workers. But you’re missing why owners have power if you neglect the layer upon layer of privileged class surrounding them.

If it really does just boil down to Workers v Owners, why don’t the cops simply seize the means of production themselves? What keeps them loyal to the bourgeois if they themselves are not invited to the Epstein Island Bunga-Bunga parties? What keeps suburban professionals loyal? What keeps religious radicals loyal?

There’s more at play than mere title to real estate or collection of rent. You have to face an ideology that’s caked on thick.

You can attend local Democratic party meetings in your city. You can also vote in the primaries and you could also call Nancy Pelosi yourself.

Good news, everybody. I put in a quick call and made a few salient points. Nancy agreed with me on all of them and says she’s reversing her decision.

even if I disagree with her sometimes I still wish her a full recovery

Why are you so invested in licking boots?

All comes down to $$$

AOC is fine when she’s getting trotted out on Twitch-Plays-Pokemon to beg for dollars. But actually giving her power? Fuck that. No business interest would ever donate to the party again if they thought she was what they’d be buying into.

I’m sure he’ll have an air tight alibi

They’ve been building her up for the entire series. She’s playable in 3.

That’s why complaining about this would be such a joke

You can’t intimidate them when their economy is already just six different kinds of tax dodging schemes in a trench coat.

People will call it Woke

how do workers in other industries prevent the corporation they work for from taking in the revenue

Keep doing what you’re doing without operating the cash register, whether that’s serving meals or fixing cars or whatever.

For some stuff this won’t work (entertainment, for instance, needs a full work stoppage to compel capital concessions). But if you’re working to rule at a point of critical infrastructure, the only thing that really needs to stop is the financial side of the business.

It’s not even just a “wildly unrealistic” promise

Dating back to Nixon’s Economic Stabilization Act of 1970, Presidents do in fact have the authority to set price controls. And this was common practice through the Carter Administration. Under Reagan, the The Council on Wage and Price Stability (which was organized under a '74 amendment to the Econ Stabilization Act) got moved under the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. And its powers have largely gone unused by the generation of neoliberal Presidents and their economic advisors who succeeded it.

But it isn’t wildly unrealistic nearly so much as it is wildly unpopular among DC pundits and ultra-orthodox free market economists.

it astonishes me that so many people believe he can drive down prices in light of the fact that he’s also proposing a thing whose specific purpose is to prop up prices

It’s arguably the secret weapon he could use to rebut the threat of price-spikes under a tariff regime. Margins on retail goods are absurd - 60% to 80% of retail product prices find their way into some form of overhead or profit in the supply chain. An administration that did want to cap prices absolutely could drive down the real cost of consumer goods nationwide without actually hitting the labor/materials costs of those products.

However, they’d do this on threat of a capital strike. The handful of mega-corporate manufacturers, distributors, and retailers could respond to price ceilings by freezing activities and setting off a massive “Venezuela Style” supply shock that they’d then order their media wings to blame on the President’s actions. This would foment a reactionary backlash and likely trigger waves of stochastic violence aimed at anyone who supported the price ceiling policy. At this point, the only play a president would have is mass nationalization and centralization of economic authority. And good luck with that.

That’s the real Sword of Damocles hanging over the head of any executive daring enough to exert power against the corporate boards that ultimately govern the country.

It won’t. He’ll be lucky to make it to trial at all. Good chance he’s found suicided to death in prison, like good old Jeffery E.

moreover the idea that Marxists have never achieved change ignores the existence of the USSR, Cuba, PRC, Vietnam, Laos, and so forth.

The Westoid Brain is incapable of appreciating AES. Everything is either Not Real Communism or a book club that contemplates their own navels indefinitely.

When the SRs in pre-1917 Russia celebrated “an end to theory” as a unifying principle and claimed “assassinations transfer power,” they were wrong. Assassinations create temporary voids taken by those closest to the spot, always another bourgeois and never a transfer. What is required is organized effort to rise above the Bourgeoisie as a class so that Capital is controlled by humanity, and not the inverse. It was the dedication to theory and organizing the working class that proved the Bolsheviks, and not the SRs, correct.

Need that vanguard party to occupy the vacuum and initiate the reforms. It can’t just be stochastic violence.

That said, guys like Luigi aren’t operating in a vacuum either. They are the consequence of their material conditions (in this case, excruciating back pain in a country that refuses to deliver medical care in an efficient manner). So it seems trite to get mad at a man who was subjected to these horrifying economic forces. This stochastic violence is a consequence of the contradictions in the capitalist system, not a solution to it or an avoidable symptom of it.

You have to read guys like Luigi (and Thomas Matthew Crooks and Dylan Roof, etc, etc) the same way you’d read a cork going off a bottle you just shook up. Or the hurricane that slams into your coastline after decades of climate change. Praising/villanizing Luigi for offing a CEO makes about as much sense as praising/villanizing a tornado that levels a gas plant.

Is the diamond made out of me or am I made out of diamonds?

Its long protein strands all the way down.

most climate activists are seen as spoiled kids

This message brought to you by the Oil & Gas Industry of America.

O&G! It’s where you get the ad bucks! Say what we tell you to say or GTFO the airwaves.

farmers vote for the right

The majority of field hands don’t vote, either because they don’t have legal residency where they’re working or they don’t have access to voting infrastructure due to their ghettoization or they don’t have citizenship under current naturalization laws.

The folks who vote are the exurban land-owners and their administrative staff. They’re regularly organized within religious institutions to instill certain socio-economic ideology, they are promoted based on their fealty to the local land barons, and they benefit from the disenfranchisement of their landless field hands which gives them a strong incentive to defend the anti-democratic status quo.