Kulyk legally entered the U.S. in late 2023 along with his wife, 38, and daughter, who’s now 5. The family was sponsored by U.S. citizens as part of the Uniting 4 Ukraine program, a humanitarian program set up in April 2022 to allow Ukrainians fleeing Russia’s war to live and work in the U.S. on “parole.”
Once the initial two-year parole period expires, entrants can file for re-parole to remain in the country longer. That’s exactly what Kulyk says he did. His wife and daughter’s applications were approved. But his remained pending.
He said he was putting groceries in his car on Jan. 1 when he was approached by three ICE agents.
“I explained to the ICE officers that the war was killing people, that my wife had a disability, that it was violence, terrorism which we had escaped from but one of them began to laugh,” Kulyk told The Daily Beast. “I asked why he was laughing and I was told that he was pro-Russian, wanted Russia to win the war.”
This new brand of authoritarians are so far from capitalism anyway lol. We’ve got a kleptocracy like Russia. There is not capitalism here.
Capitalism is simply private ownership of the means of production. That’s literally the only defining attribute. Theoretically capitalism works best with complete market freedom, but since that inevitably leads to monopoly, the most successful capitalist nations have always had a strong regulatory state to prevent the ruling class from destroying the world in their greed-fueled feeding frenzies.
Yes, key characteristics include profit motive and competitive markets driving economic exchange. You and Milton Friedman bot acknowledge it needs strong regulatory guardrails and income redistribution to prevent the capitalists from taking over the government/world. Citizens united (2010). So back to my argument of ‘no capitalist, kleptocracy’. We barely have a functioning government to enforce ownership and they are stealing everything they can. It’s a kleptocracy. or as I like to call it 7 monopolies in a trench coat. trump just took 10% of Intel because he could. The capitalist is the government, the government is the capitalist, we no longer have competitive markets, people no longer work for profit they work to not starve. Capitalism is dead. Long live what ever this shit is.
Kleptocracy, as you call it, is literally just capitalism functioning as intended. Since the end of feudalism there has never been separation between capitalist and government, because they’ve always had control of the means of production, hence control over the economy, hence control over whoever the fuck they want. There have been some few times in history where workers were able to secure rights for themselves in exchange for not fully going revolution, but in between those times, capitalists have always tried to crawl back those rights and secure even more for themselves, and they do it legally, by owning the media and the politicians. This is basic political-economy theory stuff, not some Milton Friedman Neo-capitalist apologia bullshit. Literally none of his ideas have led to the betterment of societies, can’t we just abandon Chicago school of economics already?
Nothing had gotten better since when now? Like nothing at all in humanity has improved since what year?
I did not say that nothing has improved, I said that none of Friedman’s ideas have been the cause of improvement. In fact, many of them have been a great hindrance to the global betterment of humanity.
It’s just a pretty sharp critique without offering a solution or representing the problem.
Global poverty, access to medicine, more free movement for people, global connections. Decline in regional conflicts, Idk I think the world has improved a lot of ways in the last 50 years. The USA may be in a serious decline right now, but the world is still pretty solid and will go on without us for better or worse.
All of those progresses are despite neoliberalism, not because of it. Neoliberalism is great at one thing only - concentrating wealth in the hands of the already wealthy. If there was no resistance to neoliberalism, we’d already be living in dystopia instead of rapidly approaching it.
So the prevailing economic theory of the world in the last 50 years has done nothing. Where have the improvements come from?