Dr. D
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You’re right: he clearly has no resonance with the press or the American people, and almost everyone dislikes him, that’s why he was elected President.
Because he’s so entirely alien to America and it’s people, his comments have no impact, and are uniformly met with a big “Huh? Who cares?” We all ignore him because he just doesn’t push any buttons. In fact, it’s been a struggle just to get in the news.
Yes, it’s been quite a mystery how someone so foreign, so un-American-like, who was reported at a 30% approval rating after the election, who apparently 60% wanted impeached on the first day, somehow got the job by turning safe states that haven’t been lost in a generation.
Or perhaps that’s not what’s been happening? Maybe he knows the people and players of America well enough to attract attention and get the goat of supporters and detractors alike, chewing up the sacred cows into a spectacle of hamburger no one can turn away from? His antics seem to have a traction, a captivation, for better or for worse, with quite a few of that diverse body called “America”, and I think that’s the point here.
As for leaving the country, where would I go? Spain? Scotland? South Korea? South America? Seems the same wherever you go: trouble. And it’s meant to be. How else am I going to get everyone to give up their rights for my beautiful overarching “solution”(tm)? If I didn’t pay billions to insure the whole world was stirred up, violent, and broken, with people running everywhere, sensible people would ignore me, and then how would I become Grand Pooh-Bah of All the Earth, buyer and seller of your daughters? Don’t get distracted. They need this struggle. We don’t. Stick to your knitting.
That seems odd and uncalled for. Does it show the recent worldview that anyone to right of Mao is now Hitler? Or is it that anyone to the right of ourselves is now Hitler?
Trouble is, such cutting away has found the Left perched on a tiny branch made solely of the Trotskyist, identity-politics wing, and not only are they too purging themselves ever-smaller with a Neo-Cultural Revolution of ideological purity, but far worse, they don’t win elections. Being ever-smaller never does.
Point being, TOLERANCE is the winning hand. Tolerance not just for races, nations, classes, but for diversity of all peoples. That is, people who are different from ourselves and think differently. Why? Because EVERYONE thinks differently than everybody else: that’s what makes the world work and what makes it worthwhile. Since that simple gradient has no clear markers, we have to let each other speak and address the concrete points of their argument, and not jump to logical fallacies like overgeneralization or false equivalence. It’s not true that all Conservatives are Fascists. It’s not even true that ZeroHedge sympathizes with Fascists. (It is, however, true that Fascists are Socialists and are therefore Leftists)
In any case, the point, the legacy of Western Civilization itself, the culmination of all we’ve learned and proven in practice, is to let the other guy speak and assume in him as much goodwill as any facts will allow. After that, after the debate, discussion, the fact-proving by due process, then we make our determination.
But not just by slinging words and adjectives, saying he once read something or met someone, that since he saw the enemy’s flag once, he must therefore be the enemy. That’s McCarthyism. That way madness lies. As we see in the news every day now.
“Did you ever notice that anyone who drives slower than you is an idiot, and anyone who drives faster than you is a maniac?” —George Carlin.That’s interesting. Volatility is, by markets, the lowest ever on record. Volatility for people is also low: it’s a steady, inexorable, unchanging collapse downward. No change here. Volatility elsewhere, Catalonia seceding today? Nothing in my experience could be more predictable. That’s hardly volatility when water is wet, yet I agree the world is unstable.
It’s unbalanced, but winter is unbalanced until spring, and summer is unbalanced until fall. Then the longer cycles turn, right on schedule, 8 year, 72 year, 200 year, as expected.
Are people really irrational? We have a name for perfectly rational people: psychopaths. They behave with perfect logic. Is someone in the way of your promotion? Ruin their reputation and get them fired. Want to sleep with someone? Lie to them. Are there too many people on earth? Kill a couple billion with well-planned, perfectly rational policies. Are profits low? Start a war. Obviously.
It’s the “irrational” part that makes humans “human.” The part where we keep old people alive after they’re productive, keeps infants and young disabled alive and their lives better when it costs society and ourselves personally. It’s part of adding that intangible, undefinable “humanity” that drives the panoply of psychopaths at the top crazy. It’s why they hate our guts, mock us, and try to kill us every day: we’re stinking up their perfect world, the perfect vision of the Junkers, the Barosos, and Merkels, the Lenins, Che’s, and Pol Pots. They see our irrationality as “weakness”, when in fact it’s part of an innate human culture, innate human strength they can never understand, and causes them to lose to those idiotic, deplorable, mud-stained commoners time and time again.
As they’ve probably lost again this time. No, you might want to examine this “irrationality” and what it means before you purge it from humanity. You might find it’s a highly evolved system that loses battles, but wins all wars.
Because we know how much Englishmen hate good weather. And shopping.
Jacinda may want to brush up on another leader:
“Like fire, [government] is a dangerous servant and a fearful master; never for a moment should it be left to irresponsible action…Government is not reason, it is not eloquence—it is force!” -Geo. Washington
At least here government is not meant to make people “feel good”. That’s not its purpose. A wheelbarrow can make you feel warm and happy inside if you’re a wierdo, but its purpose is to cart things around, not give the feels.
We were never going to pay it, why would we pay it now? All we need is someone to blame.
In a debt-system, there is no money, only power.
Over time the system has become as far away from Capitalism as is possible to be. They claim the failure of Capitalism, then proceed in their own words an examples to highlight a hundred trillion, possibly a quadrillion of market interventions worldwide, naming central banks, bond control, stock buybacks, etc. What did I just read on $400k tax incentives per employee to attract Amazon’s new HQ? And Pa’s Diner in Muncie is going to get a $400k incentive for each busboy? No? That’s not Capitalism.
Practically speaking, if you make employees expensive, like France or using Obamacare, and you make capital equipment free with 0% money then you guarantee, you force, on pain of instant bankruptcy, you demand, coerce, and enforce mass unemployment and the replacement of man with robots. It took $100T bailout and $10s of Trillions a year in interest rate suppression to insure that happens. Does that sound like it’s happening naturally? Does that sound like a free market? 90% of the NYSE is below the 200dma. But you’re going to “wealth distribute” from the 10 remaining companies — most of which like Amazon, Tesla, Netflix, have never made a single day’s profit — back to the people Tesla just destroyed with robots and autonomous cars? And since those 10 companies and their brethren SET the policy, TOOK the $100 Trillion in subsidies, and DEVASTATED their entire host populations, they’re going to say, “Oh sure pal, take all the profits I don’t have and never made, and set up a UBI. It’s the least I can do.” No, Tesla, Amazon, Excellus, they take UBI FROM the people at the point of a gun. That’s how and why they exist at all. If government didn’t steal for them, they’d collapse. Mussolini had a name for this system.
Newsflash: Unemployment, Welfare, the Dole, was never about helping the poor. If they ever wanted to help the poor, they’d just stop stealing from them. Illegally. With bribery, fraud, extortion and graft. ”Welfare” is about protecting the Rich Protecting them from having the poor come over to their neighborhood and burn their house down. It’s a payoff, hush money, a racket. Let me say again, They do not care at all, in any way, in the slightest about the poor, their life or death or suffering. The sale of their men into desperation, opiates, suicide, violence, into the Army, and the sale of their women into rape, pedophilia or prostitution is an active side benefit to be actively encouraged. Think I’m kidding? Visit Greece, Chicago, Akron, or Manchester. That’s why you want a UBI: you’ll really have them by the balls then because anyone who ISN’T on the dole will be instantly be priced out and die in a box, just like happened to honest farmers when farm subsidies started. So let’s not have a sanctimonious discussion about “helping” anyone, Varoufakis. If they cared they wouldn’t murder Greeks, much less Syrians. You of all people know power structures help no one but themselves. Ever. In history. That’s why you want them as small as possible, not ever-larger. OUT of the market, not in it. It’s been 100 years, can we stop doing the same wrong thing now? Just ’cause it has backfired and increased wealth disparity 100 times in a row?
PM of NZ is a gold-framed example to all: after decades of standard Democratic Socialism lite which has all the interventions above, after those 50 years of tax subsidies, 0% rates, and market rigging have driven housing prices in AU and NZ to the highest on earth, locking out a generation and holding them as indentured servants, holding both nations hostage to some form of financial terrorism, she finds the PROBLEM to be the market and the ANSWER to be more government, more intervention, more market rigging. Miss, we have 0% interest rates worldwide and purchases exceeding $100B a month for 10 years, and that is the free market? More than 100% of stock prices are from spiraling debt from rigged 0% rates. Draghi and Abe have bought up their ENTIRE markets. Is that somehow inadequate to you? Requiring more control, MORE intervention? I’m sorry, what “Capitalism” was it you were talking about? Because with no price for money, no possible failure, and government choosing E.V.E.R.Y winner and loser from Beijing to Berlin, we don’t have that. But she has to say it, because the alternative is to say, “We screwed up. You don’t need me, you don’t need government. Honestly, we sociopathic screw-ups need LESS power, to do LESS for you, and do more for yourselves, like honest men and neighbors.”
And your solution? We’re going to “Redistribute wealth?” MNC’s already don’t pay any taxes, ‘hon. Billionaires already pay practically zero taxes. If anything, the taxpayers pay THEM, in bailouts, in monopolies, in S&P futures levitation, in 0% rates that advantage only the 0.001%, probably less than 100,000 total people. So I don’t think raising a 30% tax rate they don’t pay, to a 90% tax rate they don’t pay, will make any difference. They didn’t pay it in 1965 either, that’s why the Beatles moved to the U.S. and why the French have left Paris now. But I’m sure since as they admit, the rich own the government, they’ll be sure to tax themselves good and hard this time and make themselves not rich any more. Breathtaking.
Boghosian is nearly so. He ran numbers from 1989? Gee, why not since Thursday last? That data set is probably just an artifact of one era’s fashion, one flow of tax policy, of one or two Administrations. In short, it means bupkis. You’d have to run at least 2 Kondratieff waves of 72 years to know anything this big. All it means is, yes, when rich people are allowed to bribe and murder at will, — with entire armies killing a million civilians each by invading 15 countries if they so choose – can print money freely, run competitors out by law, shift 3-5% of total GDP to themselves each year, they can indeed collect a lot of money. And you think tax policy, redistribution will fix this? Are you for real? And this is because, like apparently everybody else, he actually believes we live within 1,000 miles of a Capitalist system, anywhere on earth, east or west. Bruce, neither trickle down or trickle up is going to work if the oligarchs own the government and can bribe, collude, arraign, and murder at will. But he’s set to give the bribers and murderers ever more power to “fix things” by redistributing wealth away from themselves. Sure pal. Just this time.
Leads to the next conclusion: The society is not the government. They are not the same thing. Society will decide what governments, what oligarchs are permitted to do, what their incentives are. Right now, like Boghasian and Ardern, society is working tirelessly to give the violent, oppressive, extractive force more violence and more force and wonder why there is yet more extraction. They, with society, are applauding every underhanded, illegal, immoral payoff and act of violence, and lying, cheating and stealing to give the liars, cheaters, and stealers more power. Until that changes, it won’t matter what you do.
But please for the love of things holy, let’s not call this “Capitalism”, shall we?
