Reply #65: Yes there was poverty before the US. There was feudalism.

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Was the Burgher revolution a step from the horrors of feudalism? Yes. But since you've read Marx, you already know that his point was that capitalism was a step towards communism. And I've read quite a bit of French history and British as well. There would be no communism without the French Revolution. And there would've been no French Revolution if it weren't for the American Revolution. And the French Revolution inspired the Paris Commune, which inspired Lenin.

Of course there was poverty before capitalism. Where do you think the capitalists got their money? They were the manored vassals who did well during the Renaissance, because the royalty were too lazy and neurotic to figure out how to trade. Trade wasn't possible until the Moors pulled back. When they did the new technologies made available over the centuries allowed them to travel far and wide. Why would a king want to leave his castle? What on earth for? So the vassals did and they became rich. With the assistance of the wealthiest kings, they set up banks and so forth. But the serfs were the serfs. Until the French Revolution, that's all they'd be.

But that's EUROPE, not Asia or Africa or Latin America. Latin America was indigenous. And no, there really was no "poor" in Latin America. There were rather advanced kingdoms with their own literature and laws and nothing but public space. Life wasn't perfect, I'm sure. But pre-colonialism unleashed a torrent of blood and death rather quickly.

Now we use them as our outsourced slave labor. No more Mayan literature or sculpture. Now it's 10 cents a week in a coffee finca, sexual assault from the white owners, and burying your kids in coffee boxes and suitcases. And China was of course colonized then brutalized by Japan. Despite all the hubhub, I'd guess that there were LESS deaths under communism than at any other time and most certainly less then under Chang Kei Shek, who used to shoot communists in the back of the head in the street. Currently it's the worst of both worlds: a totalitarian factory state.

I don't blame America. I blame global capitalism and the ever expanding state. I think we were a really interesting country until corporate personhood. I think we really jumped the shark during the cold war, though. We'll never get back to who we were because the concept of nation states is crumbling.