Yves here. Tom Neuberger gives an incisive and not at all cheery take on what is in store with President Biden. One tidbit stuck out: that the rule of thumb in DC is that $1 million in donations buys $1 billion in favors.
No wonder guys in private equity are so rich. The leverage is so much greater. The rule of thumb decades ago at CalPERS was that the price of a $100 million commitment was a steak dinner. Since commitment sizes have gone up over time, if anything, the gearing has increased.
By Thomas Neuburger. Originally published at DownWithTyranny!
Humpty Dumpty can’t be put back together again. Gonna be weird watching them try—gonna be dangerous when they finally realize they can’t, and go looking for scapegoats & distractions.
— Mark Ames (@MarkAmesExiled) January 20, 2021
Amid the hagiographic joy, I find myself quite concerned.
Not only am I confronted by the next neoliberal president and his or her four (or more) years in office, about which I wrote in 2016, “The more I contemplate what could easily lie ahead, the more my stomach hurts and my heart aches. One more neoliberal president is exactly one more than I honestly think I can take.”
But I also worry, given events that preceded the inauguration, that the reaction express will go entirely off the rails, in exactly the wrong and exactly the worst way possible.
The Bad Washed Clean
About the first concern, the praise-approaching-idolatory being given to the newly installed president suggests that the Standard Democratic Pattern still holds true; that very bad Democratic presidents are washed and cleansed by the receding light of the even-worse Republican presidents that preceded them.
Thus a terrible Bill Clinton followed the much worse Reagan-Bush, and was loved for it. A terrible (yes, he really was bad) Barack Obama followed the murderous Bush-Cheney regime, and is fawned over still by everyone with a major microphone, licked clean of any fault whenever his name comes up.
Yes, he codified the right of presidents to order American citizens killed — in his drone-kill program he too was a murderous man — but he told a good, if scary, joke about it, so it’s all good.
Even George Bush, the man who killed a million Iraqis, was baptized by the Obama clan and welcomed back to the Church of Your Respectable Betters.
And now comes Joe Biden, Slayer of Trump, he of the racist past and the death-by-student-loans future, to bring the ship of state to its former moorings, docked at the wharf that holds our billionaires’ yachts and their owners’ available pocket change. (It’s pretty well established that the ROI on bribes-cum-campaign-contributions is about 1000:1. That is, a million dollars in contributions buys about a billion worth of favors, benefits and federal contracts — and sometimes a whole lot more. Our professional political crooks need a better agent. I volunteer.)
I’m not sure I can watch the next four years play out, not the many betrayals sprinkled with praiseworthy deeds, nor the protective hagiography that will be spun around him as he blindly wrecks what the rest of us hold dear — the ability to live in this economy, the next generation’s climate, and this generation’s good sense, though the latter may have been a lost cause since the day Hillary Clinton first screamed “Russia” and no one told her, “No, it was actually your fault.”
Cracking Down on Everyone’s ‘Insurrection’
About more recent events I’m even more pessimistic. It looks like the national security state will use the “riot,” the “insurrection,” the whatever-it-looked-like-to-you, to clamp down even more on a beleaguered people.
The actual insurrectionists, those who stormed the Capitol, comprised, as I understand it, less than half of the whole crowd that gathered outside. Among the latter were a great many people who’d simply just had it with our entire political system and didn’t mind showing it. We can demonize them, or listen to them.
A telling statistic: The news is awash with stories of Republican support for the “stormers.” According to The Hill, for example, a “majority of Republicans” — more than 35 million voters — blame Biden for the mob that stormed the Capitol, and “45 percent of registered GOP voters” say “they actively supported the actions of the demonstrators.”
That data can be read in two ways. It’s how you read it that’s telling:
• Either half of all Republican voters are so far lost in Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” that there’s nothing left but to close them off, to scorn and contain their racist, fascist selves. Thus the censorship, the deplatforming, the crackdowns, the inevitable increased shaming.
• Or half of all Republican voters are as fed up with our well-moneyed leadership class as the whole of the rest of the unmoneyed country is, and they’re happy to join the only mob willing to express that anger for them, even if that mob, God help us, seems inclined toward murder.
Do you really think that half of all Republican voters, more than 35 million Americans, support the murder of public officials? Are there really more than 35 million QAnon believers?
You Know Something Is Happening. Are You Sure You Know What It Is?
If something else is happening, it’s a something no amount of muscular intrusive policing, domestic spying and entrapment, deplatforming by the security state’s private-sector accomplices, and continuing economic torture will cure.
In fact, the further Democratic Party leaders lean into those punishing acts, the more entrenched the mass of disaffecteds will become, and the more tempted they will be by right-wing solutions for their ills.
If Liberal America were indeed a land of grace, the place of truth and light it imagines it is and sells itself to be — we’d be facing much less of a problem. There really would be a good team and a bad one to choose between.
But Liberal America is itself a rotted tree, though of a different kind than the right-wing one, and the disaffected see that as well. If so, where can they turn to bridge the gap between their needs and real solutions?
Democrats in power, of course, could offer left-wing solutions, real ones, to bridge that gap for them and heal the emmiserated, just as their political ancestors did in the 1930s.
But they won’t.
Joe Biden: “I beat the socialist. That’s how I got elected.”
And so, as I said, I find myself quite concerned. Actually frightened, in fact. The next neoliberal president may just be the one who collapses the whole damn building on our heads.
73 comments
Comments are closed.
Joe Biden: “I beat the socialist. That’s how I got elected.”
Anti democratic machinations to remove a threat to someone that might challenge or usurp the corporatist neoliberal paradigm and the nests it feathers ***today*** verses the long run ….
“….verses the long run ….” The first thing that popped into my mind was JMK’s “In the long run we are all dead.”
The long run ain’t what it used to be.
I’ll counter that quip with the old economic joke: “First, let us assume a ‘life.'”
And in America, far sooner than our fore-bearers!
https://www.cnn.com/2019/11/26/health/us-life-expectancy-decline-study/index.html
…then again… maybe that was skippy’s point.
Actually, he didn’t beat the socialist. Clyburn and Obama conspired together to engineer the de-platforming of the socialist. That whole other bunch of DemNom wannabes all quitting on the same day and tossing their delegates to Biden was their part in the Clybama plan.
Oh well . . . . Trump ran and got elected as Luke Trumpwalker. But he turned into ( or maybe revealed himself to be) Captain Queeg. And the Democrats got the band back together to offer a remake of The Empire Strikes Back.
Well, I am one of the people who decided Captain Queeg is a more dangerous movie to live in than The Empire Strikes Back, so we voted for The Empire Strikes Back to save ourselves from Captain Queeg. Let us hope it works out less badly than Twice Around The World With Captain Queeg promised to work out.
The warning signs
Obama got the people that caused the financial crisis in 2008 to deal with the aftermath.
Trump got the usual suspects in from Goldman Sachs to drain the swamp.
Most of Biden’s team come from the Obama administration.
Nothing is going to change.
Of course, it’s not only a fool would think otherwise those that fund the swamp get to run it, and the working class need not apply, you saw that with Trump’s huge tax cut for the wealthy while the main street got the finger, the $8 trillion to shore up Wall Street, so they wouldn’t lose it, and the people loved it that is about half the nation that loved it. Biden will do as the holy rollers those who donated millions upon millions to carry him into office seeing they weren’t sure he knew where it was.!!!
That “…half the nation..” did not so much as “…loved it..” but that they were played for fools. Terran Human nature being what it is, most of those “fools” will deny their “fooldom” until the facts begin to slap them around a bit. When these ‘worms’ turn, we’ll be seeing Shai-Hulud levels of rage and destruction. You think that the Capitol Riot was bad?
I need to read more about 1930’s Europe, but my gut feeling is that the escape hatch will remain open until 2024, maybe 2026.
Beyond that, one take’s their own chances.
Well . . . Keystone XL has been cancelled. Maybe the ANWR leases might be somehow interfered with.
The Biden-voting community ( barely more than half of America) has been given a 4 year time-reprieve to begin deep and far-reaching conservation lifestyling and at the level of some cities and states re-engineering its half of society to cut its coal, oil ( and natgas) use so deeply as to degrade and attrit revenue to Big Fossil enough to cripple Big Fossil’s political and bribe-giving power.
Will Team Green use the 4 years they ( we) have gained to begin tearing down as much of the Fossil Fuel industry and community as we possibly can?
Seems to me, it’s actually less than 2 years. That’s what Obama had, and squandered. And there are plenty of signs that Biden will do what Obama did to ensure a Republican congress is elected in 2022. With the inestimable help of the DNC, of course.
Alternative interpretation, Keystone has been cancelled to boost the price of oil and help with inflation – see the GS note shared here and there online (also good for GS investors).
Inequality exists on two axes:
Y-axis – top to bottom
X-axis – Across genders, races, etc …..
The traditional Left work on the Y-axis and would be a problem when you want to increase Y-axis inequality.
The Liberal Left work on the X-axis.
You can increase Y-axis inequality while the liberal Left are busy on the X-axis.
The same can be said for the right. Trump stuck close to cultural conservatives, but really worked against fiscal conservatives/free traders in many ways. Personally, I find little to no place for culture wars in government, so long as it does its best to treat citizens equally. So, I don’t have a lot of patience for the sound and fury expended on culture in politics, and generally view areas where culture wars are successful at influencing policy as a corruption of government. People can decide what culture they want to live in by the neighborhood they move into or the church they join.
To me, the government has a strong redistributive (or not) role through tax policy and social programs. That is the proper role for government and our representatives.
It’s something no amount of muscular intrusive policing, domestic spying and entrapment, deplatforming by the security state’s private-sector accomplices, and continuing economic torture will cure ..the further Democratic Party leaders lean into those punishing acts, the more entrenched the mass of disaffecteds will become, and the more tempted … by right-wing solutions for their ills.
Yes. And yet it will almost certainly happen because there are billions in potential profits for the military-industrial complex, the acronym agencies, and the rest of the usual suspects in building out the meatgrinder.
The more resistance and reciprocal violence from the general U.S. population the meatgrinder creates as it flails around, furthermore, the more that’ll be a rationale for further building out the meatgrinder. Much as U.S. actions and the U.S. military overseas creates endless enemies that then justify further insane ‘defense’ spending by the U.S., this too will be a self-licking ice cream cone.
Finally, much of the technology to do this already exists in China and can be imported. The difference will be that whereas the CCP is relatively competent and orientated towards actual governance, however ruthless, presiding over the U.S. system will be only the same incompetent neoliberal looters and grifters.
I have wondered if, facing decreasing opportunities for profitable intervention abroad, the military-intelligence-industrial complex may just turn inwards. Selling advanced military and spy gear to domestic agencies may not be as profitable as dropping million dollar bombs, but it’s better than nothing.
It appears that we are rapidly becoming that which we opposed during the cold war: A one-party state where speaking out against the status quo lands you in the gulag, and where some animals are more equal than others. Not promising at all.
On the other hand we have some great Identity Politics optics in this administration. Form over substance, baby!
Agreed, but right now the gulag is largely digital, although there’s also the threat of gulag-ification at work, with HR departments imposing idpol re-education sessions.
What will be really interesting is whether any attempt at broader re-education for the “deplorables” is attempted. How would this be carried out? I’m thinking that camps surrounded by barbed wire are unlikely. But Kamala Harris, who has scolded us about the need to “do the work,” would be a prime candidate for Biden to designate as re-education czar. And she’s merciless.
The US already re-educates deplorables by sending them homeless and hungry into the streets. And there is no need to build camps. The deplorables will build their own camps in the streets, their cars, under overpasses, and wherever they can throw up a tent or raise a crate. We have barred penitentiary work-houses for the recalcitrant and able-bodied where their labor can be extracted as they are re-educated.
Social workers sent to homes as a pre-crime measure, with the understated threat of a visit by CPS if parents appear to be “extremists.”
Going with the zeitgeist, let’s say we de-fund the police and replace them with social workers. Do you really think those workers are going to be driving around in a patrol car issuing tickets? Or actually going door-to-door righting the wrongs of neoliberalism? They will be regime enforcement tools.
I hope I’m wrong.
We were all treated to that by the brown nosed commentators at the inauguration when no substantive policy positions were discissed among all the praises of the oh-so-nice idenity politic optics of the ocassion.
Dems are back to their own form, doing things without political cost, like removing the KXL permit in ouder to manipulate their base instead of offering concrete material benefits to Americans. During the 90s it was instructive to watch Dems pass legislation in one chamber and reject it in the other just to give their Dem colleagues talking points that they mean well but were thwarted by the mean (insert marginal group here).
Cancelling KXL will provide a kind of material benefit to those midwestern and great plains farmers whose land won’t be stolen and destroyed by and for a pipeline which won’t get built now. That is certainly a material benefit to them. And to anyone who hopes to keep eating the food which those particular farmers produce on the land which won’t be destroyed after all.
So its a small something, but its something.
The hyperbole is strong with this one.
No such camps will occur, just hyperventilating outrage at the thought of camps.
interesting how this pandemic has accelerated these trends.
My personal opinion is that the Biden administration is going to be so bad and things are going to get so much worse that we are going to see another version of Trump in 4 yrs.
Oh, I do not think it will be Trump himself or even one of his kids, but it will be someone of that same political persuasion only more stable and less personally offensive. Maybe a woman. Maybe even a woman of color.
I also think that there is going to be a serious backlash by Trump republicans against the Romney’s and McConnel’s on the right and by AOC type democrats against the Pelosi and Schummer types on the left.
Seems to me that there is an opening for a 3rd party that can bridge the political interests of the AOC types and the Trump type’s. It would have to be based on economics and foreign policy cuz they are not going to see eye to eye on the social issues but even there I think there is some room for overlap. The focus of the party would have to be to break the two existing ones. It would have to be a coming together around economics and a desire to punish/displace the democrats and republicans. Not likely, but then a whole lot of unlikely things have been happening.
https://peoplesparty.org/
Please don’t post links without adding any kind of comment. Yves has spoken out against this kind of thing before. I’m not saying the link is bad, just that you’re supposed to make your own comment with it next time.
Imagine a populist president who was intelligent, informed, disciplined, focused and hard-working, one whose goal was to deliver concrete material benefits to the citizenry and not to own the other team, one who could prioritize what he wanted and marshal resources to accomplish those goals, one who hired shrewd advisors who shared his vision and not just faces he had seen on TV, a populist who didn’t outsource policy to his vapid offspring or occupy himself in endless twitter beefs with fellow airheads. A president who didn’t hire flatterers who told him how “tough” he looked and who mocked or ignored him and his goals.
A competent version of Trump is what the establishment should be afraid of. A Huey P. Long would come prominently to mind, and he was so successful that people named their children after him, and for decades to come, the Long name was enough to win an election in Louisiana.
Imagine a populist president who was intelligent, informed, disciplined, focused and hard-working, one whose goal was to deliver concrete material benefits to the citizenry and not to own the other team, one who could prioritize what he wanted and marshal resources to accomplish those goals, one who hired shrewd advisors who shared his vision and not just faces he had seen on TV….
Your description maked me think of FDR, the scion of an old money family. FDR was no populist but saw the country needed more than business as usual or it would come apart. FDR had what comparatively looks like a kind of noblesse oblige understanding of power.
(Christopher Lasch wrote about our current crop of elites: “they have all the vices of aristocracy with none of the virtues.”)
I can imagine a new FDR type economic politician rising in either the GOP or the Dem party. There’s a reason Lincoln Project – funded by billionaires – is targeting for defeat prominent GOP pols who are showing an economic populist leaning. My 2 cents.
The triumph of materialism paints a true portrait of the United States and American “culture.” It is right and fitting that the Wall Street casino hold the reins in a political system that has normalized an ROI on political investments — er, donations — of 1 thousand to 1. I doubt FDR would be able to function, or perhaps even exist, in the current situation.
How long would the non-populists who fill the ranks of the Blob allow such a person to survive in office, if he or she could thread the needle through the thorny hedges of the Monoparty to get elected? Seems Trump lasted because he did lots of good stuff for the oligarchs. JFK? Not so much… And he was no populist or FDR.
“Divided government” any more means to me the self-serving divisions between the economic interest of one faction of the filthy rich and supranational corporations, and another. Checks and balances in the real world…
It would have to be a very-few-items shared-agenda Party. And the people who supported it for the very-few-shared-items would have to accept that every member of that Party and every voter for that Party would have to accept eachothers’ complete and total freedom to have their very own views and plans on every single thing outside that One Common Very-Few-Items Shared-Agenda.
Otherwise you won’t get enough people in it and for it to make a power political difference.
For example, if one of the Very-Few-Items on the Shared-Agenda were the Abolition of Free Trade, every member of that Party would have to be prepared to accept that some Party members and voters would be pro-abortion and others would be anti-abortion, and both would be equally welcome in the Party as long as they both hate Free Trade and work to destroy Free Trade.
Sadly, IMHO, few Americans can hold that type of contradiction for any length of time.
In Delaware, there are more than a million registered corporations, meaning there are more corporations than people and more than registered voters.
That is who Biden served for over 40 something years.
And there is even question that the corpo fascism isn’t going to get worse?
Remember how Sanders was treated by the DNC and media during the Primaries to drag Biden over that finish line.
And of course Delaware corporation law, lobbied to fit the greedy worst of corporatocracy, becomes the de facto model for the rest of the country, for those corporations that don’t just incorporate with some little drop box as their address right in the state of Delaware. There’s a reason corruption burgeons: https://www.salon.com/2016/02/22/how_delaware_became_an_american_haven_for_grand_corruption/
What benefits flow from incorporating there? The DE Secretary of State will spell them out for you: https://corplaw.delaware.gov/
Another interpretation of “fruit of the poisonous tree…”
Citation please.
You’ve got the Internet at your fingertips:
https://www.macrotrends.net/states/delaware/population
https://corp.delaware.gov/aboutagency/
I think the inflated rhetoric about how wonderful Biden is is a sign of weakness; the usual propaganda isn’t working, so now they are trying to use stronger adjectives to get results.
A wild card in all of this is the future of the U.S. economy. So many problems are accumulating, and there have been so many short term policy decisions with long term costs…
This would be a fine time for all those region-loads of people who can . . . to try crafting and evolving separate stand-alone survival political economies in their own regions, so they can at least keep surviving at a Belarussian or East Ukrainian level if the overall US economy collapses or sinks.
I wish such people luck, but I fear this may be easier said then done. I think when the crash finally happens it will have to be resolved within the United States, with its own resources and people. I don’t expect the outside world to bail out America. The U.S. is large enough and probably has enough resources to pull this off, if there is competent leadership.
Thanks Yves, RE: ‘A telling statistic: The news is awash with stories of Republican support for the “stormers.” According to The Hill, for example, a “majority of Republicans” — more than 35 million voters — blame Biden for the mob that stormed the Capitol, and “45 percent of registered GOP voters” say “they actively supported the actions of the demonstrators.”
Given this example of republican/conservatives unrelenting support for Trumpism, I liked Brian Stelter’s take on Fox as a propaganda organ for his brand. Without it, I wonder if the divide would be so stark, or the number sited above so large.
I found his book very insightful, especially for someone like me, that has never watched Fox.
https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/brian-stelter/hoax-trump/
Well, all things considered, I think to get the best out of a secondary source it is good, if you can, to look at the primary source first.
Biden cannot offer the citizenry concrete material benefits (other than possibly some token tweaks) or anything that smacks of redistribution, because his owners would never allow it. As far as they are concerned, the present system is already working just dandy.
Therefore, Biden has to focus on identity politics, wedge issues and symbolic gestures, as these do not change the way the pie is sliced.
Many people think another 4 years of a neoliberal administration will bring a more competent Trump. But I can easily see the Dems bringing a friendly face Fascism Lite (to beat Republican Fascism) to the United States.
Harris-Buttigieg 2028!
Indeed. That’s where the Dems are headed.
But: “Events, dear boy, events.” Also: “There are decades when nothing happens. There are weeks when decades happens.”
Whether the Dems will arrive where they’re headed and can keep the wheels from coming off if they do get there is another matter. We’ve entered an era of high instability.
Thomas should stop taking Jaspers. Might help.
That Jaspers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Santaroga_Barrier
Thanks for the link, Kouros. Looks like a good read.
Thomas
Can we talk about the poem please?
It is just perfect for this presidency: If you told me Pete Buttigieg wrote it, I would believe you. If you told me a 12 year old wrote it, I would believe you. If I wrote it, I would not admit. It is bad. Objectively bad. Please read Emily Dickinson and tell me I’m wrong. It is the perfect clarion call of neoliberal hell, isn’t it? Some kind of neutral, bland, suffocating blancmange of inane, gobbledygook wrapped up in smiley woke positive-thinking crap. I think you get the picture. What do you think?
I was watching the inaugural with a friend who still at times holds out hope for the Dems. As the young woman read her poem and said something like “never mind what’s between us, let’s look at what’s before us.” My friend said, “Isn’t that beautiful,” and I said, “it’s just hollow words; and why have a 22 year old, no matter how talented, speak at a moment like this? She’s there as a token mouthing youthful political fairy tales. What’s actually before her is armed military in a locked down city,” at which point he invoked that standard charge of “you’re being cynical and attacking a young woman of color,” assault. I got up and went home saying, “this is too obscene to bear any longer.” (We’re still friends.)
I wonder how your friend would have reacted if you had said ” That’s mighty Woke of you.” as you were leaving.
Best inaugural poem I’ve ever seen and heard? Maya Angelou at Bill Clinton’s 1993 inauguration. No one else comes close, and I do mean no one.
You are absolutely right. But the poem is irrelevant. All most people can see is the identity of the writer. Young, black, Harvard, raised by single mom, friend of Oprah, it has to be a good poem. Everybody says the emperor’s clothes are beautiful.
Not My President
Resist
Join The Resistance!
Over the years the thing that has most interested me is the fact that very few Americans actually leave the USA and go and live somewhere else. In general Americans appear, deep down, to be really very happy to be Americans. If they didn’t they would leave. Mexicans get up and walk to the USA, Americans do not get up and walk to Canada. Why not?
Mexicans get up and walk to the USA, Americans do not get up and walk to Canada. Why not?
Um… the winter weather? ;)
Definitely the weather … I live in Quebec (100 km north of the US border) and while the weather was mild and snow-free until mid-January (0 Celsius, then -7 for a few days), it has turned colder: minus ca. 12, although it fluctuates above and below.
Second, those that would benefit most from our more generous social programs slant heavily to the older cohort, say 60+, and they wouldn’t be allowed in.
If you are young-ish with a useful skill, then you would be allowed entry but your need for social support is much lower so the incentive to come here is much less.
I didn’t leave the US because by the time I was old and wise enough to see through the propaganda, I was too old to uproot myself and start a brand new life in a foreign country. Also probably too old to become fluent enough in an unfamiliar language to be able to communicate effectively. If I was wealthy, both of these would be less of an issue, but alas I am not.
I’m sorry, but what planet are you from?
Not leaving is no proof of contentment, it’s consistent with the great difficulty.
Even before Covid, nearly half the Americans didn’t have $400 in the bank, which means they couldn’t afford a move within the US, let alone the cost of hiring a consultant to help you with a long-stay foreign visa application.
And that’s before getting to the fact that most countries care about their domestic labor market and make it very difficult to enter. Basically, you have to be under 30 (some visas are set up to encourage foreigners who went to university to stay on) and have good educational and language skills, OR have a spouse who is a citizen OR have an employer as a sponsor. And if the job ends, you better get your ass on a plane out in the next 48 hours.
Most countries are smart about fake marriages too. Australia requires the couple to have been married for 2 years and interviews each partner separately: “What color are the sheets? What is his/her favorite snack? Who was your best man? What did you do on your first date? Which inlaws do you visit?”
Some countries do have retirement visas. Some countries require you to demonstrate a high net worth, others like Ecuador are not too difficult. But half the Americans who retire to Ecuador return in less than 5 years, as an example.
And you can’t work on a retirement visa.
And the tax compliance is a headache and costly. You have to tell the Feds about your foreign bank accounts. You have to file taxes in the US and in your new country.
I got up and moved. I moved to a place with worse weather and higher taxes (for me at least). I have no regrets.
Admittedly I am only one, but to say no one is a bit of a stretch.
Because the US dumps crops in other countries, NAFTA’d Mexico, and brings coups to any country that takes care of its people, all of which displace lots of people and sends many north to the US.
The article is worth it just for this pithy set of insights into what is more U.S. culture than the machinations of U.S. politics: >> I’m not sure I can watch the next four years play out, not the many betrayals sprinkled with praiseworthy deeds, nor the protective hagiography that will be spun around him as he blindly wrecks what the rest of us hold dear — the ability to live in this economy, the next generation’s climate, and this generation’s good sense, though the latter may have been a lost cause since the day Hillary Clinton first screamed “Russia” and no one told her, “No, it was actually your fault.”
It is U.S. impunity, which is driven by an intense desire of the U.S. upper-middle class to carry on with no consequences for their words or deeds. Already, Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi were discussing how to have a “9/11 Commission” on the Capitol riot, and Hillary Clinton wants to find out if (hold on to your hats) Putin is behind the riots. Very few of these dolts seem to understand how precarious power is.
Yet Americans are used to it. Americans want to believe (anything, so long as it is a belief), and Americans seem to enjoy being lied to. I can see now why Big Daddy’s speeches in Cat in a Hot Tin Roof about mendacity may have been such a shock to the somnolent audience.
The redacted portions of the 9/11 report supposedly showed that Saudi Arabia was tacitly supporting the terrorists. This was kept from the public. There were several interviews with a retired Senator about this that were illuminating.
I’m sure any new commission on this would be a similar whitewash and used to implement Patriot Act II which should be opposed. Our personal rights are already so subservient to “corporate rights” that we are already second class citizens.
Has the President been nominated for Nobel Peace Prize yet?
What’s taking so long? It’s been 48 hours since inauguration.
He needs to bomb a few a countries first.
There is a little problem with the 1000:1 ROI for billionaire and Corporate money invested in Government. I do not believe I could invest some of my money in Government and hope to get anywhere near the same ROI. Even if I gathered up a few hundred million friends and we pooled our investment money together — I still doubt we could hope for the same ROI. Even if a whole lot of us pooled all our money I am afraid even a modest pool of the available billionaire and Corporate money could outbid the Populace for ownership of the Government.
Isn’t that why money must be strictly segregated away from politics? This gives support to the idea that the main desire of the reactionary American oligopolists is the removal of governmental regulation of their actions.
America is such a fragmented society that any serious attempt at implementing communitarian policies is always a very difficult endeavour. Such actions usually tend to be responses to social crisis: the Panics of the 1890’s, the Crash of 1929, the emergence of the American Empire after 1945, the Civil Rights movement, the Environmental Crisis (Part One) [smog in Southern California, rivers that literally burn, Love Canal, etc.]
Do not despair. Eventually, a severe enough crisis will come along.
Stay safe and go long on micro-community organizing.
I blame the electorate.
Horrifying times.
Horrid Hillary, Michelle, and Kamala in shades of purple gowns – Coincidence? (via UK Daily Mail news scan, never clicked the link, too fricking revolting). Did horrid Schwarzengroper Nazi admirer, and demented George W. Bush, etcetera, also ‘sport’ purple accents?
Purple, being both: an historic symbol of Royalty (as purple dye was incredibly hard and expensive to produce; as I recollect from a textiles class, from thousands of oceanic whelk shells), in the so called Developed Nations™; and the ultimate merging of the colors Red and Blue
Clearly the Royalty feel no more need to deny that there’s not a dime’s worth of difference in the most venal aspirations of the Red and the Blue Political Parties.
Terrifying. Who are these people, while at least about 45 Million humans are being forced into permanent homelessness/or suicides, are they human?
Purple is supposed to be a “sympathy code-color” showing solidarity or some such with the Lesbian Community.
https://c615.co/blog/coloring-a-community-the-pink-purple-lgbt-history/
https://images.search.yahoo.com/search/images;_ylt=AwrJ6R8SyAtgkYkAvA1XNyoA;_ylu=Y29sbwNiZjEEcG9zAzIEdnRpZAMEc2VjA3Nj?p=purple+lesbian+solidarity+color&fr=sfp
I think the IdPol color declaration aspect may be more plausible than an overt flaunting of the Royal Purple.
Why have our neoliberal policymakers led us blindly into a financial crisis?
That always happens with neoclassical economics.
Neoliberal policymakers kept driving economies into financial crises because they had no idea what they were doing with neoclassical economics.
What’s wrong with neoclassical economics?
1) It makes you think you are creating wealth by inflating asset prices
2) Bank credit flows into inflating asset prices, debt rises faster than GDP and you eventually get a financial crisis.
3) No one notices the private debt building up in the economy (apart from the Chinese) as neoclassical economics doesn’t consider debt.
As you head towards the financial crisis, the economy booms due to the money creation of bank loans, just like in the 1920s.
https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/quarterly-bulletin/2014/money-creation-in-the-modern-economy.pdf
The financial crisis appears to come out of a clear blue sky when you use an economics that doesn’t consider debt, e.g. neoclassical economics, just like 1929.
At 25.30 mins you can see the super imposed private debt-to-GDP ratios.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAStZJCKmbU&list=PLmtuEaMvhDZZQLxg24CAiFgZYldtoCR-R&index=6
Policymakers set a course for a financial crisis because they have no idea what they are doing with this dire economics.
1929 – US
1991 – Japan
2008 – US, UK and Euro-zone
The PBoC saw the Chinese Minsky Moment coming and you can too by looking at the chart above.
They were lucky, it was very late in day as you can see.
They tried to pretend today’s neoclassical economics was different.
They put some complex maths on top, and said it was a new scientific economics for globalisation.
They wrapped it in a nice new ideology, neoliberalism.
The truth always comes out in the end.
The economics would reveal itself for what it was.
I know how to polarise the US.
You just need to bring back neoclassical economics.
Mariner Eccles, FED chair 1934 – 48, observed what the capital accumulation of neoclassical economics did to the US economy in the 1920s.
“a giant suction pump had by 1929 to 1930 drawn into a few hands an increasing proportion of currently produced wealth. This served then as capital accumulations. But by taking purchasing power out of the hands of mass consumers, the savers denied themselves the kind of effective demand for their products which would justify reinvestment of the capital accumulation in new plants. In consequence as in a poker game where the chips were concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, the other fellows could stay in the game only by borrowing. When the credit ran out, the game stopped”
A few people have all the money and everyone else gets by on debt.
This is what it’s like.
Is that why Keynes added some redistribution?
Yes, it stopped all the wealth concentrating at the top and gave rise to a strong, healthy middle class.
The truth always comes out in the end.
The economics would reveal itself for what it was.