When socialism comes to America..

[kalm]

Are we capitalisming enough yet?

So?
There shouldn‘t even be a fed min wage. It should be $0. The states should be able to set their own minimum wage if they choose to have one.

So? You can’t possibly serious.

Start with the minimum wage isn’t about economics. It’s philosophical. It’s been low for decades when compared with productivity. Keeping it low is wealth extraction and eventually leads to dependency, high consumer debt, and lower sales.

[BDKJMU]

So?
There shouldn‘t even be a fed min wage. It should be $0. The states should be able to set their own minimum wage if they choose to have one.

So? You can’t possibly serious.

Start with the minimum wage isn’t about economics. It’s philosophical. It’s been low for decades when compared with productivity. Keeping it low is wealth extraction and eventually leads to dependency, high consumer debt, and lower sales.

Totally serious. Where in the Constitution does it talk about their being a federal minimum wage? The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

Let every state set their own minimum wage.

[kalm]

So? You can’t possibly serious.

Start with the minimum wage isn’t about economics. It’s philosophical. It’s been low for decades when compared with productivity. Keeping it low is wealth extraction and eventually leads to dependency, high consumer debt, and lower sales.

Totally serious. Where in the Constitution does it talk about their being a federal minimum wage? The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

Let every state set their own minimum wage.

Oh…I’m sorry, I was choking on the irony of an ICE and MAGA supporter using the constitution in an argument.

There should be a minimum wage. Just like there should be tighter education standards. That way, red states can get closer to carrying their own weight.

[BDKJMU]

Totally serious. Where in the Constitution does it talk about their being a federal minimum wage? The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

Let every state set their own minimum wage.

Oh…I’m sorry, I was choking on the irony of an ICE and MAGA supporter using the constitution in an argument.

There should be a minimum wage. Just like there should be tighter education standards. That way, red states can get closer to carrying their own weight.

Yeah, state ones.

As I recall under Obama they were calling for $10 in his 1st term, maybe $12 by his second. Trump I the donks were calling for $12, $15 by the time he left office. Biden the donks were calling for $15, and still are. If raised it to $15 you‘d soon have the left calling for $18 the. $20. If raise it to $20 you‘d have the left by the early 2030s if not the end of this decade calling for $25. The left is so predictable. No matter what the fed min wage is raised to, the left always eventually calls for higher.

[UNI88]

Totally serious. Where in the Constitution does it talk about their being a federal minimum wage? The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

Let every state set their own minimum wage.

Oh…I’m sorry, I was choking on the irony of an ICE and MAGA supporter using the constitution in an argument.

There should be a minimum wage. Just like there should be tighter education standards. That way, red states can get closer to carrying their own weight.

MAQA yahoos treat the Constitution like their mom's skirt - they hide behind it when convenient but come out and act like alpha males when they think they have the upper hand.

It is the law and the foundation of our republic. All amendments are important and should be protected. If trump, micro johnson and other MAQA yahoos don't like how it limits them then they should amend it or STFU.

[Caribbean Hen]

https://nypost.com/2026/02/09/us-news/n ... s-mamdani/

Newly elected Mayor Klamdami is killing off the homeless

18 dead

[BDKJMU]

It comes in the form of the Democrat Party.

[kalm]

It comes in the form of the Democrat Party.

This what a party dominated by the establishment and monied interests looks like. They may be too liberal but break it down issue by issue and the majority of voters would find themselves agreeing with policies that are to the left of the party.

[Caribbean Hen]

Are we capitalisming enough yet?

Stop crying about the rich, if they want to give they will, if they don’t wanna give no shame on them at all.

In 1979 minimum wage was 3.25 an hour, inflation was 19% and a mortgage was 16%. CD paid 14%

Don’t be a consumerist
Be a frugalist

Get yourself a steady income that includes three squares a day and healthcare just for starters ….. not every day will be fun

[kalm]

It comes in the form of the Democrat Party.

This is what a party dominated by the establishment and monied interests looks like. They may be too liberal but break it down issue by issue and the majority of voters would find themselves agreeing with policies that are to the left of the party.

[kalm]

Are we capitalisming enough yet?

Stop crying about the rich, if they want to give they will, if they don’t wanna give no shame on them at all.

In 1979 minimum wage was 3.25 an hour, inflation was 19% and a mortgage was 16%. CD paid 14%

Don’t be a consumerist
Be a frugalist

Get yourself a steady income that includes three squares a day and healthcare just for starters ….. not every day will be fun

Those numbers are a snap shot during a severe recession and if minimum wage had tracked inflation it would be solidly above 20% today.

We have our home on 20 acres in Eastern Washington, a vacation home on Puget Sound, 6 cars, a tractor, and zero debt. So don’t worry about old kalm. I’m talking about the over-all economy, standard of living and strength of the middle class for our kids future in a consumer based economy.

This wealth gap and number of billionaires is not sustainable.

[kalm]

Are we capitalisming enough yet?

Stop crying about the rich, if they want to give they will, if they don’t wanna give no shame on them at all.

In 1979 minimum wage was 3.25 an hour, inflation was 19% and a mortgage was 16%. CD paid 14%

Don’t be a consumerist
Be a frugalist

Get yourself a steady income that includes three squares a day and healthcare just for starters ….. not every day will be fun

I know you’re not a big reader, CH but perhaps this was assigned to you in high school?

Regardless, it’s a great reminder.

“His novel about migrant workers was so controversial, towns burned it in public bonfires. The FBI opened a file on him. He won the Pulitzer Prize—then the Nobel. John Steinbeck wrote about America's invisible poor, and America never forgave him for it.
In 1936, John Steinbeck did something most successful authors wouldn't consider: he abandoned his comfortable writing desk and spent weeks living alongside migrant workers in California's labor camps.
He wasn't researching from a distance. He slept in their tents, ate their food, picked crops beside them, and listened to their stories of desperation. Families who'd lost everything in the Dust Bowl, traveling west with the promise of work that never paid enough to survive.
What Steinbeck witnessed enraged him.
Children starving while California's agricultural industry made fortunes. Workers beaten by police for trying to organize. Families living in ditches because camps were full. An economic system that required human suffering to function—and insisted the suffering was the workers' own fault.
He returned home and wrote The Grapes of Wrath in a white-hot fury, finishing the 464-page novel in just five months.
When it was published in April 1939, America exploded.
The novel followed the Joad family—Oklahoma farmers driven from their land by drought and bank foreclosures, traveling to California only to find exploitation, poverty, and violence. Steinbeck didn't soften the reality. He showed police brutality, corporate greed, starvation wages, and a society that treated poor people as disposable.
Corporate farmers were furious. The Associated Farmers of California denounced the book as communist propaganda. Kern County, California—where much of the novel was set—banned it from libraries and schools. The county's Board of Supervisors called Steinbeck a liar and condemned his "obscene sensationalism."
Public book burnings followed.

In several California towns, citizens gathered to throw copies of The Grapes of Wrath into bonfires, declaring Steinbeck was trying to destroy America. Librarians received threats for keeping the book on shelves. School boards prohibited teachers from assigning it.
The FBI opened a file on Steinbeck, monitoring him as a potential subversive. J. Edgar Hoover's agents tracked his movements, his associations, his speeches—convinced he might be a communist agent spreading un-American ideas.
Steinbeck's crime? Describing poverty as a systemic failure rather than personal weakness. Suggesting that corporations bore responsibility for human suffering. Portraying poor people as dignified human beings worthy of compassion.
But something else was happening simultaneously.
Ordinary Americans—especially those who'd lived through the Depression—were buying the book in staggering numbers. Within months, The Grapes of Wrath became one of the fastest-selling novels in American history. People who'd experienced hunger, eviction, and humiliation read the Joads' story and saw themselves finally represented in literature.

In May 1940, Steinbeck won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
The same book California was burning had earned American literature's highest honor. The contradiction revealed a nation at war with itself over what stories deserved to be told and whose suffering mattered.
Steinbeck didn't soften his approach. If anything, the attacks made him bolder.
He continued writing about people that literature typically ignored: migrant workers, cannery employees, factory laborers, the chronically poor. His 1937 novella Of Mice and Men portrayed the friendship between two ranch workers—one intellectually disabled—navigating a Depression-era world that had no place for vulnerable people.
East of Eden, published in 1952, was his most ambitious work: a multi-generational saga exploring good and evil through two California families. Steinbeck considered it his masterpiece, a sprawling examination of human nature and moral choice.
But it was always The Grapes of Wrath that defined him—both as triumph and liability.
In 1962, the Swedish Academy awarded Steinbeck the Nobel Prize in Literature, citing his "realistic and imaginative writing, combining sympathetic humor and keen social perception."
The announcement triggered immediate backlash in the United States. Critics questioned whether Steinbeck deserved the honor. The New York Times published skeptical commentary. Literary elites suggested the Nobel Committee had made a mistake, that Steinbeck was too "popular" and "sentimental" to warrant such recognition.

Steinbeck accepted the prize knowing his own country remained ambivalent about his work. America loved the idea of a Nobel Prize-winning American author. It was less enthusiastic about an author who'd spent his career documenting American failures.
He died in 1968 at age 66, still controversial, still defended and condemned in equal measure.
Fifty-five years later, The Grapes of Wrath remains required reading in American schools—including in the California counties that once burned it. The novel that was too dangerous for libraries is now considered essential to understanding American history.
Steinbeck's real legacy isn't awards or sales figures. It's this: he made invisible people visible. He wrote about Americans that polite society preferred to ignore—and refused to look away even when powerful institutions demanded silence.
The migrant workers he lived alongside in 1936 didn't need a savior. They needed a witness. Someone who would see their suffering, believe it was real, and tell the truth about what caused it.
Steinbeck was that witness.
His books weren't comfortable. They didn't flatter American mythology or suggest poverty was noble. They showed hunger, desperation, and systemic cruelty—and insisted readers see it too.
That's why they burned his books. That's why the FBI tracked him. That's why he won the Pulitzer and the Nobel.
He wrote the truth about who America left behind. And both his critics and his champions knew it.“

[Caribbean Hen]

Stop crying about the rich, if they want to give they will, if they don’t wanna give no shame on them at all.

In 1979 minimum wage was 3.25 an hour, inflation was 19% and a mortgage was 16%. CD paid 14%

Don’t be a consumerist
Be a frugalist

Get yourself a steady income that includes three squares a day and healthcare just for starters ….. not every day will be fun

I know you’re not a big reader, CH but perhaps this was assigned to you in high school?

Regardless, it’s a great reminder.

“His novel about migrant workers was so controversial, towns burned it in public bonfires. The FBI opened a file on him. He won the Pulitzer Prize—then the Nobel. John Steinbeck wrote about America's invisible poor, and America never forgave him for it.
In 1936, John Steinbeck did something most successful authors wouldn't consider: he abandoned his comfortable writing desk and spent weeks living alongside migrant workers in California's labor camps.
He wasn't researching from a distance. He slept in their tents, ate their food, picked crops beside them, and listened to their stories of desperation. Families who'd lost everything in the Dust Bowl, traveling west with the promise of work that never paid enough to survive.
What Steinbeck witnessed enraged him.
Children starving while California's agricultural industry made fortunes. Workers beaten by police for trying to organize. Families living in ditches because camps were full. An economic system that required human suffering to function—and insisted the suffering was the workers' own fault.
He returned home and wrote The Grapes of Wrath in a white-hot fury, finishing the 464-page novel in just five months.
When it was published in April 1939, America exploded.
The novel followed the Joad family—Oklahoma farmers driven from their land by drought and bank foreclosures, traveling to California only to find exploitation, poverty, and violence. Steinbeck didn't soften the reality. He showed police brutality, corporate greed, starvation wages, and a society that treated poor people as disposable.
Corporate farmers were furious. The Associated Farmers of California denounced the book as communist propaganda. Kern County, California—where much of the novel was set—banned it from libraries and schools. The county's Board of Supervisors called Steinbeck a liar and condemned his "obscene sensationalism."
Public book burnings followed.

In several California towns, citizens gathered to throw copies of The Grapes of Wrath into bonfires, declaring Steinbeck was trying to destroy America. Librarians received threats for keeping the book on shelves. School boards prohibited teachers from assigning it.
The FBI opened a file on Steinbeck, monitoring him as a potential subversive. J. Edgar Hoover's agents tracked his movements, his associations, his speeches—convinced he might be a communist agent spreading un-American ideas.
Steinbeck's crime? Describing poverty as a systemic failure rather than personal weakness. Suggesting that corporations bore responsibility for human suffering. Portraying poor people as dignified human beings worthy of compassion.
But something else was happening simultaneously.
Ordinary Americans—especially those who'd lived through the Depression—were buying the book in staggering numbers. Within months, The Grapes of Wrath became one of the fastest-selling novels in American history. People who'd experienced hunger, eviction, and humiliation read the Joads' story and saw themselves finally represented in literature.

In May 1940, Steinbeck won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
The same book California was burning had earned American literature's highest honor. The contradiction revealed a nation at war with itself over what stories deserved to be told and whose suffering mattered.
Steinbeck didn't soften his approach. If anything, the attacks made him bolder.
He continued writing about people that literature typically ignored: migrant workers, cannery employees, factory laborers, the chronically poor. His 1937 novella Of Mice and Men portrayed the friendship between two ranch workers—one intellectually disabled—navigating a Depression-era world that had no place for vulnerable people.
East of Eden, published in 1952, was his most ambitious work: a multi-generational saga exploring good and evil through two California families. Steinbeck considered it his masterpiece, a sprawling examination of human nature and moral choice.
But it was always The Grapes of Wrath that defined him—both as triumph and liability.
In 1962, the Swedish Academy awarded Steinbeck the Nobel Prize in Literature, citing his "realistic and imaginative writing, combining sympathetic humor and keen social perception."
The announcement triggered immediate backlash in the United States. Critics questioned whether Steinbeck deserved the honor. The New York Times published skeptical commentary. Literary elites suggested the Nobel Committee had made a mistake, that Steinbeck was too "popular" and "sentimental" to warrant such recognition.

Steinbeck accepted the prize knowing his own country remained ambivalent about his work. America loved the idea of a Nobel Prize-winning American author. It was less enthusiastic about an author who'd spent his career documenting American failures.
He died in 1968 at age 66, still controversial, still defended and condemned in equal measure.
Fifty-five years later, The Grapes of Wrath remains required reading in American schools—including in the California counties that once burned it. The novel that was too dangerous for libraries is now considered essential to understanding American history.
Steinbeck's real legacy isn't awards or sales figures. It's this: he made invisible people visible. He wrote about Americans that polite society preferred to ignore—and refused to look away even when powerful institutions demanded silence.
The migrant workers he lived alongside in 1936 didn't need a savior. They needed a witness. Someone who would see their suffering, believe it was real, and tell the truth about what caused it.
Steinbeck was that witness.
His books weren't comfortable. They didn't flatter American mythology or suggest poverty was noble. They showed hunger, desperation, and systemic cruelty—and insisted readers see it too.
That's why they burned his books. That's why the FBI tracked him. That's why he won the Pulitzer and the Nobel.
He wrote the truth about who America left behind. And both his critics and his champions knew it.“

Oh, trust me, I know you were born with a silver spoon in your mouth….

HS?



I absolutely hated the classwork of school, they always put me in with a college bound crowd and basically it was go to the library and do the research and you tell me what you learned… needless to say I never did the research

That’s not what I needed because when I was in the library I was doing nothing but talking with the girls and reading the sports page… I needed the teachers to actually teach me something

I learned a lot, but nothing that helped me in school

When I got home if I wasn’t planning or organizing some type of sporting event with the neighbors which was on a country road and never easy, I was lighting up the net that I had on the side of the barn … loved hoops and could shoot it

Even back to my middle school days, and one of the teachers was the high school basketball coach, my job was to get him talking about ACC basketball so the other kids could goof off while myself and the history teacher chatted about basketball … he loved hoops to

[kalm]

I know you’re not a big reader, CH but perhaps this was assigned to you in high school?

Regardless, it’s a great reminder.

Oh, trust me, I know you were born with a silver spoon in your mouth….

HS?



I absolutely hated the classwork of school, they always put me in with a college bound crowd and basically it was go to the library and do the research and you tell me what you learned… needless to say I never did the research

That’s not what I needed because when I was in the library I was doing nothing but talking with the girls and reading the sports page… I needed the teachers to actually teach me something

I learned a lot, but nothing that helped me in school

When I got home if I wasn’t planning or organizing some type of sporting event with the neighbors which was on a country road and never easy, I was lighting up the net that I had on the side of the barn … loved hoops and could shoot it

Even back to my middle school days, and one of the teachers was the high school basketball coach, my job was to get him talking about ACC basketball so the other kids could goof off while myself and the history teacher chatted about basketball … he loved hoops to

Silver spoon! Well look who’s envying the rich now!

And all on teachers and NAIA coaches salaries! Move over, Rothschilds!

Btw, you didn’t need to explain that you loathe school, research, learning. You didn’t read what I posted did ya?

[Caribbean Hen]

Oh, trust me, I know you were born with a silver spoon in your mouth….

HS?



I absolutely hated the classwork of school, they always put me in with a college bound crowd and basically it was go to the library and do the research and you tell me what you learned… needless to say I never did the research

That’s not what I needed because when I was in the library I was doing nothing but talking with the girls and reading the sports page… I needed the teachers to actually teach me something

I learned a lot, but nothing that helped me in school

When I got home if I wasn’t planning or organizing some type of sporting event with the neighbors which was on a country road and never easy, I was lighting up the net that I had on the side of the barn … loved hoops and could shoot it

Even back to my middle school days, and one of the teachers was the high school basketball coach, my job was to get him talking about ACC basketball so the other kids could goof off while myself and the history teacher chatted about basketball … he loved hoops to

Silver spoon! Well look who’s envying the rich now!

And all on teachers and NAIA coaches salaries! Move over, Rothschilds!

Btw, you didn’t need to explain that you loathe school, research, learning. You didn’t read what I posted did ya?

At that age, I certainly didn’t

I read your post … interesting. My kids read those books but not me, I’ve been busy…

[kalm]

Imagine an insurance industry who’s basic model is:

Deny coverage = profit.

[Caribbean Hen]

Imagine an insurance industry who’s basic model is:

Deny coverage = profit.

Foreigner’s flock here for health care too, but admittedly it’s the ones that can afford too. Why don’t they stay home for health care?

[kalm]

Imagine an insurance industry who’s basic model is:

Deny coverage = profit.

Foreigner’s flock here for health care too, but admittedly it’s the ones that can afford too. Why don’t they stay home for health care?

Similar to education, we have a fine healthcare system…for those with money.

[Caribbean Hen]

Foreigner’s flock here for health care too, but admittedly it’s the ones that can afford too. Why don’t they stay home for health care?

Similar to education, we have a fine healthcare system…for those with money.

And there is always one solution but so many refuse to take it.

[Caribbean Hen]

"It is not a remark on who Maduro was as a leader. He canceled elections. He was an anti-democratic leader. That doesn’t mean that we can kidnap a head of state and engage in acts of war just because the nation is below the equator," Ocasio-Cortez said.

Always knew this ditzy lady has never looked at a map and embarrassingly has no clue how close it is to her beloved Puerto Rico

[kalm]

"It is not a remark on who Maduro was as a leader. He canceled elections. He was an anti-democratic leader. That doesn’t mean that we can kidnap a head of state and engage in acts of war just because the nation is below the equator," Ocasio-Cortez said.

Always knew this ditzy lady has never looked at a map and embarrassingly has no clue how close it is to her beloved Puerto Rico

But she’s right about the rest and woukd bury Trump in a game of knowledge. Or are you going to be on board with kidnapping Orban and Putin?

Somebody’s intimidated by a woman…

[Caribbean Hen]

The distraught dad of a 16-year-old boy who was shot and killed during a wild teen brawl in the Bronx Wednesday night said he wants the gun-toting thugs who took his son’s life to be held accountable.

“I don’t forgive,” Bryan Corley, whose son, Christopher Redding, was gunned down in the Kingsbridge melee, told The Post through tears. “I want to see them off the street. They are walking around as if there are no consequences, no repercussions for their actions.


“The Wednesday incident occurred in the Kingsbridge section of the Bronx amid what officials and witnesses characterized as an escalating wave of violence in the borough, prompting affected family members to criticize Mayor Zohran Mamdani and law enforcement for not doing enough to keep New Yorkers safe.”

[kalm]

The distraught dad of a 16-year-old boy who was shot and killed during a wild teen brawl in the Bronx Wednesday night said he wants the gun-toting thugs who took his son’s life to be held accountable.

“I don’t forgive,” Bryan Corley, whose son, Christopher Redding, was gunned down in the Kingsbridge melee, told The Post through tears. “I want to see them off the street. They are walking around as if there are no consequences, no repercussions for their actions.


“The Wednesday incident occurred in the Kingsbridge section of the Bronx amid what officials and witnesses characterized as an escalating wave of violence in the borough, prompting affected family members to criticize Mayor Zohran Mamdani and law enforcement for not doing enough to keep New Yorkers safe.”

So this only happens with Democrat socialist mayors? And it’s a bit of a stretch relating this to economic philosophy, no?

[Caribbean Hen]

The distraught dad of a 16-year-old boy who was shot and killed during a wild teen brawl in the Bronx Wednesday night said he wants the gun-toting thugs who took his son’s life to be held accountable.

“I don’t forgive,” Bryan Corley, whose son, Christopher Redding, was gunned down in the Kingsbridge melee, told The Post through tears. “I want to see them off the street. They are walking around as if there are no consequences, no repercussions for their actions.


“The Wednesday incident occurred in the Kingsbridge section of the Bronx amid what officials and witnesses characterized as an escalating wave of violence in the borough, prompting affected family members to criticize Mayor Zohran Mamdani and law enforcement for not doing enough to keep New Yorkers safe.”

So this only happens with Democrat socialist mayors? And it’s a bit of a stretch relating this to economic philosophy, no?

Sounded like a good kid that actually had a father that cared about him. The kid was playing football and was killed for nothing … that is horrible but yea could happen anywhere

But

Not only do you have a socialist mayor, but you have a mayor who doesn’t think much of the NYPD

Let’s see how this plays out for ole Klamdami

[kalm]

So this only happens with Democrat socialist mayors? And it’s a bit of a stretch relating this to economic philosophy, no?

Sounded like a good kid that actually had a father that cared about him. The kid was playing football and was killed for nothing … that is horrible but yea could happen anywhere

But

Not only do you have a socialist mayor, but you have a mayor who doesn’t think much of the NYPD

Let’s see how this plays out for ole Klamdami

Versus the ex-cop mayor who preceded him? NYC was thriving for its citizenry back then?

It will play out just fine for me.