If you were born a male in the GI Generation, you had a better chance of having a good life than any American generation (true even of blacks, compared to before, must not nearly as good as whites.) You became an adult in the best economy in American, and perhaps world history. Even menial labor jobs paid enough to have a house, a wife, 2 kids, a car and a vacation, and there were always jobs available. Leave one, you’d have another in a few weeks, maybe even a few days.
This led to a deep misunderstanding of the world, and of themselves. They assumed a benign world that worked, and that they themselves were worthy of and has caused all that had actually been given to them, even though the generations that created the world the GIs, Silent and Boomers (who destroyed it) inherited, were pre-GI. It wasn’t GIs who made the decisions that created the great post-WWII prosperity, though they were, yes, the foot soldiers (the prosperity expanded beyond the US, and is still remembered fondly in much of Western Europe.)
A similar, though not identical disease afflicts modern financial elites. They think they’re geniuses, because they make a ton of money.
But they make that money because for about 40 years the Federal Reserve and government in general (and indeed, not just in the US) have created one of the largest set of financial bubbles in history. Central banks decided securities could never be allowed to down (aka. subjected to actual market forces) and stepped in with interest rate changes, loan guarantees and actually money creation, to the tune of hundreds of trillions (added all together.)
Only a moron who starts with money at the beginning of a four decade bull market that is guaranteed by the full faith and credit of the most powerful government in the world, won’t get rich. The main danger was thinking it was still an actual market: once you realized it wasn’t, you just had to hold (the one exception being the Nasdaq crash, which everyone knew as coming.)
Contrary to propaganda, for most of history in most countries, that wasn’t a good bet. If you had “held” thru 29, you wouldn’t have recovered your money for decades (remember, you can’t use the DOW as a proxy, because most of those companies went bankrupt. They never recovered their value.) In the fifties and sixties, in a stock market designed to not be fraudulent or create bubbles, there is an up and down patter and bull and bear periods.
What modern financiers lucked into (or, for the very old ones, helped create, by financing the politicians, intellectuals and bureaucrats who created neoliberalism) was simply a fraudulent market that was no longer a market in any meaningful way.
Those alive and benefiting now are almost always not even those who helped overthrow the previous order, they are simply the lucky recipients of the Federal Reserve, Treasury and other organs of government backing dump truck after dump truck of money and pouring it into the market.
At the same time, of course, infrastructure and utilities and virtually every measure of social health and welfare have turned negative and yeah, that’s related.
Financiers are just the people in the right position to benefit from government money. All they do to deserve it is continue to keep their hold on government.
Not geniuses. Not people to take advice from, unless it’s advice on how to get in on the scam.
All the content here is free, but subscriptions and donations do help, a lot.
Jan Wiklund
We are in the last phase, as would Bas van Bavel say. There were at least three other waves before us – probably more – that have behaved in the same way. First a generally abundant market in consumer products. Then a market in factors (work, land and capital). And finally Ponzi markets that destroy everything.
The first was in Iraq, ca 500-900. The next in northern Italy, ca 1100-1500. The next in Holland, ca 1350-1750. And the next in the Anglo countries, ca 1600-2000. He also mentions China and Rome but seems not to have had enough sources to follow it up.
You can read a good review at Branko Milanovic’s blog, http://glineq.blogspot.com/2017/04/a-theory-of-rise-and-fall-of-economic.html
There is a snag, however. A hundred years ago there was a general uneasiness about “financial capitalism” that seemed to destroy everything. Not only radicals like Lenin and social democrats like Hilferding but also liberals like Keynes and conservatives like Schmoller reacted and wanted serious reform. Finally the serious reform was enacted in Bretton Woods, which secured another fifty years of wealth creation. It didn’t last forever, though. But probably nothing does.
Plague Species
The stock market is the lynch pin. It breaks, and the wheel comes off. It’s rusted through and ducked taped and glued and is about to give any day now. When it does, it all comes tumbling down. The precariat managerial class will side with hoi polloi once their retirement evaporates and their middle class status destroyed and turn on the masters. White Tigers everywhere. The FBI and all the alphabet agencies and the police won’t be able to stop the tsunami of hate and vengeance.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35jJNyFuYKQ
Astrid
I lost a lot of money in the past 15 years betting on some kind of sanity in the stockmarket (being in cash when the fundamentals looked absurd for equity price). I am the loser idiot and my bad bets means I am working a office fauna job and not “retired” to an organic farm in a nice warm weather location.
I think at this point it might be better to assume that the US economy is the stock market and everything else is expendable. I guess at some point, the US will be so hobbled physically that USG will no longer print money that the world is willing to take and no longer able to enforce abroad the IP/arbitration rights for its paymasters. But that might still be a ways off since the US has a lot of nuclear warheads and maybe some of them still work ( given the state of the other pieces of the US military, that proportion can’t be very high, but it’s a high absolute number base).
bruce wilder
A friend and I were discussing in detail circa 2002 the consequences of hollowing our the capabilities of great business corporations.
Now the American landscape is littered with the sad examples: Boeing, Intel, General Electric.
The thing is seeing the necessary consequences of bad policy was not hard to see, but if those in power never suffer for those bad policies, they cease to believe in reality, in cause-and-effect really.
It is very scary to realize that very few in current ruling political classes have a sound idea of political economic or military cause-and-effect. They believe in the power of narrative, yes, but not that the narrative should be a true story.
It is a form of socio-political insanity and it is leading toward global ecological catastrophe with or without currency collapse or world war. You cannot exaggerate how bad it may get.
Bill H
“They believe in the power of narrative, yes, but not that the narrative should be a true story.” Awesome.
Ché Pasa
Precarity was different for the parents of my generation, but it was by no means absent. I was thinking about a high school friend’s father this morning. He came to California in 1935 from the Dust Bowled Oklahoma farm his own father had bought in the 1920s and had barely been able to make a living on. By the mid-thirties, deep in the Depression, it was impossible. In California, “Okies” were luck to get work picking crops, which is what most did until the War. My friend’s father joined up in 1941 and served as a driver/mechanic until 1945. He never went overseas. He never fought the Japs or the Nazis, but he kept things moving right here at home.
He got out as a corporal. He could have taken the GI Bill but he didn’t. Instead, he went to work as a gas station attendant/mechanic, got married, fathered two sons by 1951, and in 1953 took a civilian aircraft maintenance job at the new Strategic Air Command base. He had that job till he retired 25 years later. He was working class till the day he died (hell of a nice guy, too). He was able to buy a house. His wife didn’t have to work. They never wanted for anything important after the early years. He was able to put his sons through college and see them succeed as professionals — one a relationship counselor, the other a legislative staffer.
But for their children, things started getting rougher, though stylistically they may have been better off than their parents. And for their children it’s hard to imagine a future beyond debt and despair. I don’t know them, so I can’t say that’s what they actually face, but every sign says it probably is, even if, outwardly, they’re doing fine.
I always thought that the GI generation was rewarded for their service during the War, both in compensation for their sacrifice for the Nation and in recognition for their economic suffering prior to the War. Policy choices were made that ensured a decent life for them and their offspring. A first in the history of this country. But came the student revolts of the ’60s and policy decisions were made to take that modest prosperity and security away. Until today when none of us know what catastrophe tomorrow may bring.
Astrid
The sectors servicing the elites have not reduced in quality. The fine restaurants these days are considerably better than it was 10 or 20 years ago. Luxury vacation options are much better (albeit more crowded). Medical care for the truly rich is better and it seems that even many cancers can be maintained for decades of reasonably high quality life. Private jets and helicopter transportation does away with the misery of airport security lines and congested traffic.
These people really live in a different world from the rest of us.
Feral Finster
For a long time in America, there was an unwritten agreement. It went something like this: “Work moderately hard, play by the rules that matter, and you will lead a reasonably comfortable life. Not only that, but your children will most likely have a better life than you had.”
This unwritten agreement has broken down and been picked bare. This is is why comparisons to the Sixties generation break down.
I have written elsewhere, that if the Establishment is good at nothing else, it is very good at recognizing whom to co-opt, whom to buy off, whom to ignore, whom to neutralize. But it’s a lot easier to buy people off if you have the funds.
Hugh
I agree with bruce. We have been subjected for decades to the death of cause and effect. Results no longer count. The failure to deliver is just lied about or blamed on somebody else. And it is not just our ruling classes that do this. Most of the rest of us do it too. Universal healthcare would benefit all but the rich. So call it sociali_sm and it’s dead. BLM and Trumpers are both screwed over by the PTB. So who do they hate? Each other. We could deal with climate change, but that would require thought and a lot of work. So, when we don’t have 10 years to act, announce programs that won’t do what is needed for another 30 years, if then. And so it goes.
Plague Species
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/10/10/shap-o10.html
Set up by the Obama administration no less. What good are unions when they’re working against us and not for us, police unions included but at least police unions protect who they represent whereas most of the others grift who they represent and sell them down the river.
All black guys in that photo. Go figure. Emancipation?
Willy
It doesn’t bother me so much that people less competent than I had figured out that life in America was becoming a rigged game. It bothers me that some of them actually warned me and
I ignored them, because what they were saying and doing seemed so irrationally destructive. I mean, nobody pees in the family pool, right?
I remember the six Germans from a brand name corporation who came to visit my company. We were told that we were going to be partnering with them. The first week our boss, “Big John” was absent managing his mother’s estate back east after she’d died. So our motley crew did our thing and besides showing them everything about our secret manufacturing process as we’d been instructed (the one we’d invented), there was a fair amount of beer and debauchery after hours. We got to know them well. Or so we’d thought.
When the boss returned he smirked that “knowing you guys (his techies), it’s probably time to formalize things”. So we all went to the conference room and started with formal introductions, including education and experience. We went around the table. First our crew: engineer this, tech that… then Big John. He had a PhD and 20 years in our business. I thought: “Oh yeah… we’ve got a PhD in the house.” Then it was the Germans turn. All six were PhDs.
I was speechless the rest of the meeting. Not because I was awestruck. No. I was speechless because I’d figured out that we’d been lied to. I knew our company was giving away our prize invention in exchange for the German company buying our mass-China produced product. And we workers would be getting nothing.
We went back to our offices and I was alone with the German who’d been assigned to me. He could see what I was thinking. And I, he, from the look on his face. After some uncomfortable business he finally said he empathized with us, that “this thing” hadn’t gotten to his country yet. Giving away jobs was one thing, but giving away proprietary technologies was messed up.
My other project went to China, but that’s another story.
The 800 pound gorilla in my business had declared that giving away core manufacturing and design technologies to nations like Germany, Japan, China and Russia was good business and would result in more opportunities for us workers. And all their subcontractors had to follow suit, my company included. Of course it was all bullshit, since none of those executives are even with that company anymore. Meanwhile many of my lesser-able peers are still in that business while most of the all-stars have moved on. I hear one even owns a little sports trophy shop. Seems a good business, since you know, they give all the kids trophies nowadays.
dbk
@Bruce Wilder: “You cannot exaggerate how bad it may get.”
Spot-on. And it’s getting ever more difficult to locate sources which even allude to how bad it’s going to get.
Purple Library Guy
What I’ve been wondering for many years now is just how long that can last. I mean, I’m not a fan of capitalism, but the economy we’re in is capitalist. And this behaviour by central banks etc. represents a massive, ongoing distortion of capitalist markets.
It’s like, I’m not a fan of feudalism, but in classic feudalism there was a sort of deal between peasants and lord–peasants gave a share of labour and output, lord employed a bunch of men-at-arms to keep down banditry, dispensed justice, made sure there was a mill, maybe did some land improvement measures. It was a system, and it more or less worked even if it’s clear just who was downtrodden and who was on top. You’d know something was going wrong and trouble was likely if the feudal lords suddenly stopped bothering to stop bandits or anything, but still insisted on the taxes.
We’re in roughly that situation in current capitalism. Money is a claim on wealth. If I have ten times as much money as you, I can own ten times as much of the available stuff. If I double my money and you don’t and there’s still the same amount of stuff, I get to own twice as much of the available stuff as before, and you don’t. The authorities are massively distorting markets to redistribute more wealth to the already rich, on a huge scale. And although they do it even more when they get good excuses, it’s not stopping in between, it’s an ongoing thing. It’s causing a weird dual-inflation thing, where the prices of things the very rich buy like stocks and real estate inflate while everything else mostly doesn’t . . . unfortunately the rest of us also need real estate. Finance is taking over real industry and changing its priorities, there are all kinds of impacts of this strategy. Capitalism was already IMO a bad system, but it was a system and this stuff does really weird stuff to it that I don’t think anyone fully understands–least of all the people responsible for it, who only care that it gets them a ton of free dough.
It’s like a system of systematic embezzlement from the money supply itself. Companies go down from too much embezzlement; economies could go down from too much embezzlement from the economy at large. But how long will it take? I still have very little idea.
Zachary Smith
It is true the (US) people born in the 1900-1940 era had some unexpected good fortune. On account of ‘our’ location on the world globe, the US escaped both bombing and invasion in WW2. Unfortunates like the Russians were compelled to do most of the fighting and dying, and on their own devastated lands.
Because industries in other bombed-and-invaded lands had been mostly obliterated, for a while the US had a fantastic run of economic good times. From “The Fate of the Yeast People”:
Author Kunstler obviously believed this was a very bad thing – that the peasants should have some good luck.
Another factor had been the need for increased taxes to help finance WW2. The top tax rate reached 94% in 1944, so for a fair while the filthy-rich were cut down to being merely “rich”. Their counter-offensive was impressive, though. I’m speculating now, but Joe Sixpack’s new prosperity may have been one of the keys. “Hey, you’re doing really well, but you can’t become REALLY wealthy because Damned Big Governent” stifles your chances of becoming a Millionaire. We need to cut taxes, remove useless regulations, and throttle the IRS.” All this has happened, with more than adequate support from Joe Sixpack.
The IRS has been gutted and made quite unable to monitor the top .1%. These days they concentrate on poor folks who are quite unable to fight back. The rich are “filthy rich” again, and the Supreme Court has agreed that “$_money_$” has the same election rights as the peasant voters.
Baby Boomers didn’t destroy anything any more than any other ‘generation’. They participated in the “good luck”, and more than a few of them are horrified at what has happened to the world they grew up in.
It’s the filthy-rich who are running things these days. Their “good luck” has been entirely manufactured by themselves. Any agency can be suborned, and “democracy” in the US is a total sham. With essentially zero regulation the “financial sector” has run amok. Corruption is rampant. Why not? – when sharing plates of fried chicken or “speaking” to a bunch of Rich People gets you hundreds of thousands of totally legal dollars.
https://www.ianwelsh.net/running-before-the-wind/#comment-124417
In theory Unions are a very good thing. In practice, the Union leaders may sell out. If the money is good enough, THEY WILL I’ve known of elections where the Union leaders emerged from their back room where the ballots got counted and announced the victory of candidates nobody you can find will admit to voting for. Open/honest counting of the ballots doesn’t happen in Union elections any more than it does in US elections. In both cases the announced results are a complete joke.
Hand-marked paper ballots, counted in public by skeptical humans. We don’t have it, and the US power elites aren’t likely to ever allow it. Their current system of rah-rah ‘pretend’ elections is working just fine for them.
Joan
@Willy, I can’t believe your story, oh my that’s terrible!
Willy
I once said that a culture needs to hit bottom before it can fly again. But silly me, I’d rather try an intervention. But sometimes it’s hard to do an intervention with frogs all drunk and comfy in their hot tubs. Howz that for a bad metaphor?
I keep tabs on the conservatively religious. They don’t bother rationalizing that it’s either Milton Friedman’s way or the Venezuelan way anymore. They’re starting to proclaim that if you’re poor that’s because Jesus doesn’t love you. And some say we need to try to ally with these people.
Meanwhile, Lady Gaga’s dogwalker was shot with her dogs stolen. She’s offering a half million for their safe return. Maybe this describes the economy of the future, besides stealing packages off porches?
Willy
Joan, my China story is even worse. But my last corporate experience was worst of all. I used to blame corporate sociopaths until I came here, where it suddenly all made sense. It was actually neoliberalism all along. And my fellows were just trying to keep their families fed, mostly.
Willy
Never get me started.
I remember Ted the Wizard. He was part coach, part cheerleader, part ME genius, always trying to motivate his guys to greatness. Sadly, his crew was a bunch of jaded SOSDD types. Still, we helped him come up with a process that saved lots of corporate money and improved quality. Sadly when the layoffs came he was the first to go. I’m guessing this was because he was a threat to his own PTB. I’ll never forget my last phone conversation with him. Remember the priest in Caddyshack? It was kinda like that. I have a bunch more experiences like that.
No wonder I’m so messed up
Willy
Sorry, not “the priest” but “the Bishop”. That scene in the bar. You know what I mean…
anon
I read an article recently, probably written by a Boomer, about how Millennials are doing really well since the last recession and are benefitting from the recent rise in real estate prices.
Maybe this person is friends with wealthy Millennials who got down payment assistance from their parents, because most of the Millennials I know can’t afford to buy a house, apartment, or condo. Most of the homes in my area are insanely overpriced. The majority of Millennials are not benefiting from inflation, the crazy real estate market, or the stock market being propped up.
I believe there will be a much needed correction soon. It’s fine to have digital assets and some money in the stock market, but when everything goes to hell in a handbasket, you will want tangible assets – cash, real estate, gold, something that aren’t just numbers on a screen.
Astrid
Willy,
Sorry to hear that. I do hope you land / landed somewhere better. They do exist. I have a good friend who just went through a hell year dealing with terrible subordinates and superiors, as an entry level federal manager. That sort of unhealthy work environment really messes your mind. She just got a new position that still comes with really worrying signs, but it’s kinda hard to imagine how it can be worse than what she was already dealing with. Check out Askamanager. If nothing else, it can help with a sanity check and pretty sound workplace advice. The comments can be a morass of PMC presumptions, though.
Chinese workplaces are their own kind of Hell. No wonder all Chinese millennials want to be influencers instead. Corporate espionage and stealing IP from the big noses is absolutely a thing. It’s hard to blame them considering that IP enforcement these days is just about prolonging rent extraction and had little to do with innovation.
Speaking of corporate espionage, it definitely started before the CCP went capitalist. A family friend was involved in dissembling and reassembly of a Yugoslavian motorcycle one night, before an exhibit in Shanghai, circa 1960. The Chinese (and Japanese and Koreans and Vietnamese) understand that technology know-how is power, and they will acquire it no matter the means.
Jason
@Zachary Smith: Kunstler is a self-absorbed prick.
Not offering much by way of intellectual vigor, I know (as if I ever do), but I had to get that out. And it feels good.
Jason
Willy, if Bill Murray hadn’t told the bishop to keep playing (“I don’t think the heavy stuff is going to come down for quite a while”), he never would have broken the club record. Then again, he would have lived longer. The grass is always greener. Especially when Mr Murray is in charge of getting the gophers.
Were you the Bill Murray character in this relationship?
Zachary Smith
https://www.ianwelsh.net/running-before-the-wind/#comment-124436
That was pretty much my conclusion as well. Consider this from his 2021 “predictions” in December:
In other words, Trump’s 1/6 Coup would succeed, and that was a Good Thing.
nihil obstet
The GI generation rose on the wave of the baby boomers who followed. The oldest baby boomers were also carried upwards. The later boomers and the generations that followed found the way clogged. Their parents and older siblings had the managerial jobs, where you learn how to organize and deploy groups of people. They plugged along the same route, but it didn’t take them to the same place. Without the natural development, you end up with “leaders” like Pelosi, Schumer, and Biden, which are just very public examples of what has happened throughout the society.
Meanwhile, we’ve been taught that good jobs are management, not actually working for a living.
Willy
I was a cross between Caddyshack’s Danny and Ty, but looked like Joe Rogan with hair and had an expression frozen on my face like Luke Wilson in Idiocracy. Ted was a long time ago back in the earlier days of globalization, the early 90’s. It was a mature major corporation full of political rot and disgruntled employees.
We had this young southeast Asian tech on our crew, smart and hard working. A few of us took him to lunch and I asked him where he was from. Cambodia. I kept asking questions and he told us about his dramatic escape to Thailand with two brothers, then went into this sullen trance where he rhythmically swayed back and forth. One of the others gave me this “Knock it off!” look and I apologized and changed the subject. A year later I came to work and heard he’d given his notice. He’d been doing great and the company might’ve helped him get his degree, so I asked him why. He gave me this weird look and shouted out: THERE’S NO FUTURE HERE! and laughed maniacally. His outburst echoed off the back wall and a lot of people stared. That’s when you know your job really sucks – when a survivor from the Killing Fields says it’s a joke.
The Ted incident happened a few months later. My next boss had Alzheimer’s and the one after was probably a psychopath. I’d finally had enough and looked for an exit, blaming that place. I worked for many other companies, some pretty good, but mostly doing the gig economy thing. The situation with the Germans happened around 2000.
Obviously, it could’ve been much worse. I could’ve been in the shoe biz. As a kid I’d buy Nike’s with paper route money. I remember when they fired everyone at their Oregon plant and moved production to third world countries. Then they doubled their prices with Michael Jordan’s help. The new versions were ridiculous crap, never lasting long. I vaguely remember a PBS show (Frontline?) about the Race to the Bottom where an Indonesian company went out of business with employees crying outside the locked gates because paying them $1/hr to build sneakers was too much, while a Vietnamese company paying 50 cents an hour won the contract.
Today I judge another’s IQ as well as their value as a human being by the sneakers they wear. Since brand new Coleman hikers cost a fraction as much as Nikes and last twice as long, the person wearing them might be okay. If they’re wearing new Nikes I’ll refuse to have anything to do with them again. Personally, I haven’t bought new athletic shoes in years, getting good looking and wearable ones thrifted for $15 or less. So what was the blog post about again?
Ché Pasa
A “good thing” for some. The question is who?
Zachary Smith
https://www.ianwelsh.net/running-before-the-wind/#comment-124442
The guy I was quoting was James Howard Kunstler
Van
Willy, you mention an 800 pound gorilla. I understand you may have reasons not to name names.
I am just noting here that it is past time to do precisely that in order to be clear about who exactly is responsible for the demise we are speaking about. Only individuals have agency, not abstractions such as the “neoliberal order”, or “Boomers”. Individuals who promulgated policies, made executive economic decisions, theorists at Harvard Business School and Chicago. The cheering sections at Forbes and the Wall Street Journal and the move fast and break things crowd are copy cats and sycophants much like your “boss”. Individual with names, addresses, and bank accounts.
Stirling S Newberry
That was then, this is now. In the now, you can’t even get an increase in minimum wage.
S Brennan
As predicted two days ago:
https://www.newsweek.com/biden-orders-us-airstrikes-iran-backed-groups-syria-after-iraq-rocket-attack-1572236
Good to see old draft-dodging-Joe not wasting any time cranking-up the the old War-Wurlitzer. After moving an armored battalion into Syria the day after inauguration, ol’ draft-dodging-Joe has committed US air-strikes against Syrian aggression inside of Syria. It’s what Hillary promised to her donors back during the 2016 campaign but, due to “Russian Interference” or “Racism”, was unable to deliver.
Thank God we got rid of that Hitler ‘fella…now we “liberals”can have our neocolonial wars of aggression once again..shit, four years without war…no wonder everybody here hated Trump.
Diana
Sadly, the GI generation were simply the beneficiaries of a fossil fuel bonanza, particularly oil, that began two hundred years earlier in the mid 1700s and culminated around the mid 1900s into a state of well being for your average worker that was unprecedented in any previous time in history. We came to regard it as the norm, but of course, it was anything but.
Throughout history, energy ‘surplus to needs’, is the key to success – whether it was for hunter gatherer societies who drove whole herds of bison over cliffs, who then later became sedentary through the successfully domesticating plants and animals, or the Romans who conquered vast lands and so accumulated huge wealth – success is due to how much surplus energy is available to enable consumption additional to needs. Surplus energy can take the form of plentiful large game, fertile valleys that grow crops excess to needs etc.
Back in the 1750s, fossil fuels gushed out of the ground at a cost of around $1.00 per barrel. Our vast globalized industrial complex arose from this astoundingly high density energy that was easily and cheaply accessible, transportable and store-able.
That same energy is of course, destroying the planet, and because the low-hanging fruit was picked first, leaving the tricky-to-get resources for later, we’re now faced with far less surplus energy left over after we’ve paid for exploration, deep-sea drilling, long distant transport, refining etc of FFs that are of lower quality……
That’s it really – all we’ve done for the last 20 years is used debt to bring forward consumption that we can no longer afford, because the surplus energy from FFs has declined and can no longer support a family, a car, a holiday and children for each worker.
We’ll look back to the GI generation (if we’re still around) and realize that that generation was a once-off – the result of an energy bonanza that maybe, for the first (and only) time in history, allowed all people a reasonable quality of life.
Of course, we could have husbanded that once-off resource bonanza and rationed it so that the GI generation could have expanded to several generations, but nah – we drive bison off cliffs – i.e. prudence is not in our nature, but greed is.
For more n this, see Tim Morgan’s SEEDS website, where he explains it all so well.
Willy
Van, it was the once highly respected company which had its last three CEOs walked out in disgrace, two for scandals and one for general incompetency.
———
Whenever I search up “Trump” and “antiwar” I get polar opposite opinions and damn near everything in between. Isn’t there a way to quantify any of that? Yet strangely, whenever I search up “Ichiro batting average” and “2010” I always get .315 no matter where I look. Anybody want to debate over what Ichiro’s batting average was in 2010?
Astrid
Willy,
If questioning Ichiro’s batting average would get Wall Street more free Fed money or more MIC contracts, I’m sure that information would be less clear. Maybe starting with a re-imagining of what”batting” and “average” and “Ichiro” means. And that information can get buried under layers other stuff so it’s next to impossible to find a clear answer.
Trump is no pacifist at all, but the bloodlust of the DNC type scares me. Did these people all secretly torture helpless animals and set fire to their neighbors’ houses as children?
Ché Pasa
To carry forward some of the themes brought up here…
Many of the insurrectionists believe they did win on January 6, as stated by their pretend “shaman”, by invading and occupying the Capitol and bringing the Congressional operations to a halt. They did what they set out to do and that’s all they needed to do at that moment.
So the “coup” which Kunstler said would succeed did succeed, and it was a Good Thing. But for whom? And what is “success” under the circumstances?
We’re about to hear that Trump is Back and in full glory though without the twitter machine. But he magically doesn’t need it. Not any more. He has the solid support of everyone who matters. And those who don’t support him, or rather his invincible image, don’t matter.
The winner takes it all. The loser pays the price.
From this perspective, it’s an existential struggle for power and survival that has already been won. The denouement may take some time to play out, but it is under way, and those who are not on the side of the winners will see the cost of their rebellion and defiance escalate to the point where they will be extinguished body and soul.
Catastrophe upon catastrophe is about to be visited on all and sundry and only the Saved will survive to swagger in triumph on the other side.
That’s the Drama playing out in what we think of as Real Life whether we know it or like it or not.
Ivory Bill Woodpecker
“The FBI and all the alphabet agencies and the police won’t be able to stop the tsunami of hate and vengeance.”
I would not bet my life on that.
Also, I notice PS left out the Armed Forces. I rather think they could stop it, if those other forces could not.
Feral Finster
https://www.ianwelsh.net/running-before-the-wind/#comment-124448
@S Brennan: it is truly rich to watch Team D cultists defend Biden’s attack, which probably had less cause that Stalin’s attack on Finland or even Hitler on Poland.
Willy
With former powerhouse industries like steel and tech having gone overseas, an authoritarian military economy which serves the dual purpose of serving notice to our industrial competitors by hammering pipsqueak places like Syria and Yemen, is what’ll keep the boat afloat. Yeah, that’s the ticket.
Plague Species
America is back.
Willy
Milton Friedman was a buffoon who in a slightly better world, would’ve been locked in stocks on Wall Street for the common people to decorate with seasonal costumes and rotten fruits, right alongside his Chicago School creeps. Not because they were willing to debate against Keyensians, but because they were willing use debating with Keyensians as a ruse while doing their real work behind the scenes to corrupt American culture, enrich sociopaths, and wreck the middle class.
I’m still trying to make my little aphorisms catchier and pithier.
Jason
Not because they were willing to debate against Keyensians, but because they were willing use debating with Keyensians as a ruse while doing their real work behind the scenes to corrupt American culture, enrich sociopaths, and wreck the middle class.
Beautiful.
And you didn’t even get to their “work” in Central and South America. But then it all goes hand-in-hand…
S Brennan
Thanks FF,
Honestly, all the “good” neoDs will pretend they didn’t see it coming. They didn’t see Biden immediately and without provocation, recommitting the USA to the neocolonial wars of aggression under the Bush/Obama regime [singular intended].
But..since WE HAVE TO HAVE WAR and we HAVE TO HAVE WAR, it’s far better to have a neoD like Biden start it; rather than having that orange Hitler guy, who’s puppet-master is in Moscow just waiting around in the White House for a smoking gun to appear in the form of mushroom cloud.
Face it, people who call themselves “liberal”/”regressive”/”lefty” are pro-war…and for good reason, they don’t serve and…their stock portfolio is full of DoD stocks. Let the working pay the bill in blood and toil. At least Abbie Hoffman had the decency to commit suicide when he came to the full realization of his life-long hypocrisy, sadly, the “blue no matter who” crowd never will.
Astrid
“I’m willing to become a Christian to see you burn in Hell, Milton”
Astrid
( I know he’s a Jew, but the Jewish hell doesn’t seem sufficient for purpose).
different clue
Hell is where the people who believe in Hell get to go.
” The boomers destroyed it” . . . ? Which boomers destroyed it how, please, exactly? I never voted for Reagan so you can blame me all you want, but that don’t impress me much.
I have been pre-paying for my anti-poverty insurance ( Social Security) ever since 1980, and if the antiboomeritic antiboomerites plot to make me spend my retirement living under a bridge, I will do everything I can to make them live under it with me.
I used to read James Klunster. He did some good work, featuring guest posters like Dmitry Podborits. and Dmitry Orlov. Here is a link to a guest post by Dmitry Podborits.
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2005-09-11/why-high-iq-fails-us-freakonomics-peak-oil-and-horse-breeding-manhattan-style/
But apart from that, when it became clear that James Klunster would never be anything more than a One Shtick Phony , he became too boring to read anymore. I haven’t even visited in years.
Feral Finster
Kunstler has some things to say. His problem is that he confuses his aesthetic judgments with moral judgments, i.e. “I don’t like these people’s taste so they must be bad people”.
Then, because these are bad people who don’t live the way he wishes they would, Kunstler wishes punishment upon them, and he predicts their doom, pretty much every single year.
Feral Finster
https://www.ianwelsh.net/running-before-the-wind/#comment-124452
“Trump is no pacifist at all, but the bloodlust of the DNC type scares me. Did these people all secretly torture helpless animals and set fire to their neighbors’ houses as children?”
@Astrid Like Team R, Team D is largely comprised of sociopaths. They aren’t necessarily sadists, but it is enough to say that other people’s suffering doesn’t concern them much,
Jason
Then, because these are bad people who don’t live the way he wishes they would, Kunstler wishes punishment upon them, and he predicts their doom, pretty much every single year.
He doesn’t live that way himself. Nor does he appear to even try. Psychology 101 would tell us that is the source of his misdirected rage.
Joseph E. Kelleam
Like clockwork: https://news.yahoo.com/biden-says-us-never-accept-135404551.html
This is the Cuban Missile Crisis in reverse. If he pushes it hard enough, Joe can have WWIII.
S Brennan
Trump is definitely not a pacifist but, because he is a nationalist* he puts US interests before the intrigues of foreign lobbyists.
And yeah, Trump’s perfectly willing to write checks to DoD industrialist to constantly develop new weapons, but, because he is a nationalist* he puts US interests before the insatiable desires of pentagon lobbyists who make far more money replacing weapons used in war than developing new ones.
But historically, Trump was as anti-war as the US has seen in 45 years…and before you raise the specter of Jimmy Carter, read up on Pol-Pot and the US’s aid in crushing the East Timor people to get at their oil.
As R’s go, Trump was the farthest left since Ford and a perfect vehicle to punish neoDs and rumpRs for ignoring this nation’s people and national interests but alas, the “blue no matter who” liberals**, regressives**, lefties** sided with the National Security State [NSS], their subsidiary, the Ministry of Enlightenment [media] and the right-wing loons that are a single perty under the guise rumpR & neoDs. To be fair, the propaganda was incessant and across the spectrum…even here. The USA & Allies 2016-2001 far exceeded the McCarthyism of the 50’s by many magnitudes. Without a doubt, the most disgusting display of “group-think” since we ended the last such display on 08 May 1945.
*[that is not a bad word]
**[not really, they just like to sound virtuous]
Jason
There is nothing essential about Trump. He played a “nationalist” because the opportunity was there. He would gladly have run as a fiscally conservative pro-abortion liberal democrat. But those folks never embraced him.
different clue
I agree with Jason. Trump is just a self-selling behavior machine. After a term he had clearly been all he will ever be.
And there is nothing nationalistic about plotting with the fossil fuel industry to physically exterminate America’s biophysical resource base.
Hugh
Yes, Joseph, it is commonly misunderstood that when Russia seizes the territory of its neighbors it does so for only the most peaceful reasons –that no one could or should object to.
As for Trump “puts US interests before the intrigues of foreign lobbyists.” Trump’s hardline toward Israel and Saudi Arabia are perfect examples of this.
And Trump was anti-war. Just think of how many Yemeni lives he saved by topping the Saudi bombing there.
And Trump was surprisingly left wing. Just look at how all those closet commie Republicans lined up behind him, even the really bolshie ones, like Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz.
Astrid
I am not willing to credit Trump with any kind of coherent philosophy or “goodness” but he seems to comparatively less interested in starting WWIII than the Dems. Trading him for Biden/Harris is like trading “probably very bad” with”definitely dreadful”.
I do not understand is why the Democrats and deep state are so interested in provoking Russia and China. Their paymasters are international corporations with plenty of interest in China. Surely war is bad for business. I know the theory is to win the war against the ascendent China before the US is too weak to compete. Or maybe the theory is to distract the American public while the owners of the uniparty go for a final tons of looting before the US is a full on failed state basketcase.
But it’s so risky, not just because of WWIII but the antagonism of the CCP and alienation of slightly less indoctrinated citizenry elsewhere. Is it worse it? The MIC
Is it just a case of a lifetime of terrible decisions with no consequences for people within the charmed circle, and they now all
truly believe the “tough” chickhawk rhetoric that they originally adapted to beat back charges of weakness? Is it some late in life mass dementia by our geriatric elite, eager for the opportunity to really End of History their world?
Astrid
Yes Hugh. How dare the Russians step in to protect ethnic Russians and it’s own strategic security in the Crimean against a US funded coup government.
Funny how you don’t have such serious concerns about rights of sovereignty in Venezuela, Yemen, Syria, or Palestine. Or at least not concerns that stop you from supporting people that everyone knew would escalate against their legitimate national government.
Astrid
While I’m at it, Hugh. I do love how you constantly trot out COVID19 death tolls as though Trump is singlehandedly responsible for all of them, without acknowledging Cuomo’s role in sending COVID19 patients to nursing homes or Fauci’s many lies, omissions, and clearly bad public health recommendations.
Yes, Trump is absolutely terrible on this, but so was the entire US political and business establishment. (The Europeans, while initially better, also allowed wishful thinking to overcoming good public health protocol and restarted their pandemics with sending children back to school in the fall).They all just wanted a federal handout and the opportunity to engage in disaster capitalism during and post pandemic, while Main Street is culled and twisting in the wind.
Obviously the solution to $15 minimum wage and getting the $2,000 checks out and getting everyone vaccinated is to impeach Trump again and again, and make sure that Google and Facebook deplatform any speech in favor of Trump, even if the speech is from a reputable left source trying to debunk Trump.
Astrid
And Hugh, I don’t recall you every expressing concerns about the rights of the Chagos Islanders or anyone else displaced by the nearly 800 US overseas military bases. And did you notice that Israel settlers just had to shoot some malevalent Palestinians viciously loitering on Palestinian land and threatening Israeli… It must be very important principle and absolutely okay, or our very very moral Hugh would be right on the case. Or I guess it’s okay to appropriate land as long as the evilly evil Russians and evil evil evil Chinese aren’t doing it.
Hugh
“How dare the Germans step in to protect ethnic Germans and it’s own strategic security ”
Good to see you echoing your teachers from the 1930s.
And don’t be silly. Trump did an amazing job with Covid, despite it being a hoax. Without him, the US would not be number one in the world on it –at least in deaths. Make America grievous again!
different clue
I remember when Hugh and I were both still commenting at NaCap. I remember the first time I read him upbraiding his fellow progressives for not properly condemning Putin for Putin’s anti-gay persecution wave in Russia. Which was a real problem but it appeared that Hugh was not able to recruit all the NaCap progressives into supporting his gay-rights-agenda-based hatred for Putin.
So he began widening the scope of his antiPutinitic antiPutinite antiPutinism. He began accusing Putin of all kinds of random things and condemned all his fellow progressives for not hating Putin hard enough. Then he began, and has continued, using all kinds of Republican-type rhetorical tricks and exaggerations and overlookings to try shaming his fellow progressives into joining his antiPutinitic antiPutinism.
I am just running on memory-fumes here, but I think I remember reading that a NaziFascist type group called the Azov Battalion was preparing to fly through Turkey on the way to carrying out some NaziFascist massacres in Crimea. Putin interfered with that. And when Hugh’s preferred Banderazi Nazi coup-regime in KiEV sent violent thug groups into East Ukraine to begin massacreing Russophone East Ukrainians, they rose up in revolt against possible extermination and Russia/Putin sent them assistance, as well as orchestrating the join-Russia referendum in Crimea to prevent the pro-Banderazi-Nazi NATO group from taking Ukraine and building NATO bases on Crimea.
Here is a wikipage about the Azov Battalion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azov_Battalion
Here is a picture of their emblem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azov_Battalion#/media/File:AZOV_logo.svg
It is a Nassi Swassika. What is a Nassi Swassika? A Nassi Swassika is an emblem that comes as close to a Nazi Swastika as it can while pretending to be something else. The deniability lacks plausibility.
Why does Hugh side with the Nazis?
Joseph E. Kelleam
S Brennan: ” the most disgusting display of “group-think” since we ended the last such display on 08 May 1945.”
Father Coughlin, is that you?
different clue
Oh, and . . . Biden is fulfilling one of my predictions, in that he is openly siding with the Banderazi coup regime in KiEV against Putin over Crimea. He is really just as much a risk of thermonuclear exchange between Russia and America as Clinton wanted to be.
Trump had to become really awful to make me take the highly risky risk of voting for Joemala this time around.
I hope the Republicans nominate a non-hideous non-gargoyle in 2024 so I don’t have to vote for Draculamala when she runs for President in 2024. If the Republicans nominate Tulsi Gabbard for PresNom, that would be the most delicious irony, as well as being very votable-for.
Jason
@dc:
“self-selling behavior machine” is a new one to me. I like it.
Hugh
Putin is Jesus Christ with a Russian accent. And much like the Germans before him, he doesn’t want to invade anyone, but he was forced, forced to invade Crimea. And it was a moral duty for him to sponsor an uprising in Eastern Ukraine, Russia is a small country, dontcha know, and it needs elbow room. At least, there are no skinheads in Russia, nothing like the Ukraine. So it’s all good, right?
Nothing like the smell of liberal hypocrisy in the morning.
Astrid
Hugh,
I don’t have to discredit you. You are to progressive arguments against Russia and China (and there are good ones) what PETA is to animal rights. You are losing people to your causes through your one-notedness and bad faith argumentation. I didn’t say any of the things you accuse me of saying, not even close. Maybe accusing me of saying bad things helps you feel like you have the moral high ground but nobody else would be persuaded.
The main argument I have on the topic is – who cares if China and Russia are evilly evil to their people or their neighbors (and they largely are not, they can be brutal but they’re also agreement capable and want stable governments in their neighborhoods and prosperity/stability at home)? You live in freaking USA and they’ve never done anything bad to you and your opinions mean less than zero to those governments and their populaces. Meanwhile, you do have some say and a lot of interest in the US Government. Why wouldn’t you focus on addressing wrongs that can addressed and actually matter to you (and me), versus harranging people about evilly evil Russia/China/Iran/Syria?
I would accuse you of being a Dem operative, except you are probably not one. I have IRL friends who are just as TDS and Russia Russia Russia and ChiCom loathing afflicted as you. About the only positive of the COVID19 pandemic was not having to talk to them much during the 2020 election cycle and not hear them mock Bernie Bros and worshipping Kamala Harris. (They’re actually rather nice people IRL, at least to people that they perceive as being part of their in group.)
different clue
@Hugh,
Awww . . . . https://www.deviantart.com/memedreamer/art/Troll-Face-You-Mad-Bro-296521316
Hugh
The left has no credibility on foreign affairs. Neither does the right. Part of it is intense ignorance. Part of it is looking at the world like it is some kind of amusement park. Part of it is good old American prejudices twisted and bent up until they fit whatever goofy line is being peddled. None of them make our country or the world a better place. It is just nihilism, the battle of one set of fantasies against another set of fantasies. I would think you would bore yourselves to death with it, but apparently you don’t.
Jason
I don’t know what to make of Trump vis-a-vis the deep state and its machinations. These ops are planned well in advance, though I suppose a certain politician can slow them down to some degree. I never saw any evidence that Trump was committed to reducing the military budget or operations in any significant way. Show me who your friends are and I’ll show you who you are.
Where were all the non-interventionists in the Trump administration? Am I supposed to believe that John Bolton was thrust on Trump by the deep state? Please. Sure, he got rid of him. But why he was ever there in the first place is never addressed. Nor are any other of Trump’s laughably inane personnel decisions. It’s rather easy to recognize that the country desperately needs to – in some cases alter, and in some cases entirely rid itself – of entrenched bureaucratic behavior. How one goes about doing that, and with whom, speaks volumes. Needless to say, Trump and his handlers did not impress.
Trump is the middle finger both establishment parties needed to get and a good majority of American citizens wanted – needed- to see. But beyond that…
There is more political animus across the board for China, while Russia has its proponents and detractors. I don’t hold the hatred for Russia that some do, while I also don’t go out of my way to defend it. Simply looking at a map fosters a great deal of understanding. One wishes more Americans would do so.
One country that never has to worry no matter who is in office is Israel. If that’s not a huge red flag and an invitation to inquiry for any functioning mind, I don’t know what is.
Astrid
Also, if Nazi Germany stopped at taking over German areas, or even just Slavic areas, the Western powers were totally fine with that. Krystalnacht didn’t dampen admiration of Germans amongst the US and British upper classes. It was only when the Germans turned Westward that they became a problem that must be fought.
Hugh’s analogy totally falls apart for anyone with any actual understanding of European or WWII history. There’s nothing uniquely appalling about European powers taking each other’s territory, it’s normal and accepted and happened more times than can be counted.
Only an ignoramous who happen to live on entirely expropriated native American land would think it’s some sort of unique injustice.
The Crimea belonged to the Ottomans, then the Russians, then the USSR. It has no historical ties to Ukraine. And Russia was willing to let it go until the US backed anti Russian coup happened. This wasn’t an unprovoked attack and I am willing to bet 90 percent of the locals prefer Russia to Ukraine.
Astrid
Yup, nobody had any creditability on foreign affairs, except Hugh.
Hugh, who think that neighboring countries taking over each other’s territory is automatically unique, Axis level evil and definitely not just something that happens all the time throughout history and which still happens with regularity elsewhere and with little comment today.
Hugh, who lives on expropriated native American land butt that’s definitely not the same thing.
Hugh knows that the Russians and Chinese are uniquely evil, new Axis of Evil, because they the same things that every other country has dinner throughout history. Definitely in a different category of evil from what the UK, the US, Israel, and Saudi Arabia has done. Definitely.
Willy
Back in the good old days a major part of the military budget was to keep boneyards like Davis Monthan well stocked. Lots of stuff flew around but was never really used in anger. The XB-70 was badass cool though it never made production. And the B-29 cost more to develop than the entire cost of the Manhattan Project. You can buy a Titan 1 missile base today for under a million when it cost $1.5 billion in todays dollars and became obsolete within a few years.
Big bucks keeping lots of people employed building expensive weapons is part of the American way. FDR and Eisenhower were big on those kinds of social programs, mostly blaming those dangblasted Soviets. Reagan fell back on that stuff to help kickstart his Volcker economy. Personally, I’d rather be building moonbases and lunar maglev launchers but it’s a hard sell when so many conservatives would rather bomb the crap out of little brown nations.
bruce wilder
The American foreign policy establishment, well named the Blob(tm), has no credibility on foreign affairs. When the professional elite, loaded with a false pretense of expertise, are bloody-minded morons, what hope would any mere amateur have of fathoming the depths of American misadventure, let alone the deep history and political cultures of many foreign places.
I have travelled a bit and know others who have travelled a great deal, and I come home and I encounter many Americans whose knowledge of the world is nearly non-existent. They do not know the present anywhere beyond the local mall and the cameras of Netflix; they know even less of the past and very little of philosophy. They are not malevolent (though I increasingly question the intentions of some of my Jewish friends as they watch the Zionist adventure flounder into a right-wing morass of corruption and cruelty), just unwilling to waste energy on questioning the bona fides of a Blob so secure in its power and privilege.
different clue
@Jason,
Trump was always a deeeeep ly shallow person. The sequence of events, as I remember it, was that Trump picked Pence to be his VP because Pence was ” skilled in getting things done in the Senate and wise to the ways of Washington” . . . . because he had been a governor and a senator.
And he put Pence in charge of all his staffing picks. So of course Pence picked the people he knew
and respected. And Pence never respected any non-interventionists.
Trump had a few ideas and urges about this and that. But his main desire was to be the star of the President Trump Show.
nihil obstet
I’ve watched a number of historical documentaries on 20th c. America that show politicians raging about the communists as the great aggressors aiming to take over the world. Everybody but the U.S. was communist. The U.S. had to help Europeans with elections, because the communists might dupe people enough to be elected. The U.S. had to help insurgents in developing countries or alternatively reinforce governments that were fighting communists. Honduras, Chili, Indonesia, Vietnam, the Philippines, American labor unions — the list went on and on. What was communist about all these places?
In every case, communism meant a country trying to use the country’s resources for the good of the people, from attempts at land reform to nationalization of oil and mineral resources. To rich Americans, this made it evil. The Soviet Union, and then the People’s Republic of China made were a godsend to the establishment. Now the issue is how to keep the domestic population on board for continued interference in foreign countries.
Putin’s probably as much a psychopath as any head of a large country. Large countries do a lot that is at best amoral. I don’t see Russia doing anything that you wouldn’t expect a country to do. We objected to missiles in Cuba. Why should we find it evil and aggressive for Russia to object to missile bases on its borders? It is not realistic to expect Russia to permit U.S. interests to have their way. They did once to help them move towards a more market based approach after the collapse of the self-styled socialist state, and look what that got them! And then the pro-Russian democratically elected government in Ukraine was overthrown by neo-Nazis helped by the U.S. The Ukraine government was incompetent and corrupt, but it was elected. I don’t blame the Russians for preferring it to a coup by fascists.
Does all this make me a Putin lover? I find that silly.
different clue
@Willy,
The FDR military spending was mainly targeted at Germany and Japan and a lot of it was on materiel which was actually expended in warfighting.
bruce wilder
war fighting squarely aimed at ending the war-fighting by winning the war — what a concept!!
Ché Pasa
My high school friend’s WWII GI father should have been happy at his good fortune, but my friend told me he wasn’t. He was always nice and very friendly to me, but apparently he drank and could be abusive, and he was beset by fears of what could come next. Despite his objective security, he didn’t feel secure, maybe because of growing up in hardscrabble poverty and seeing his family’s farm become worthless dust, of working the backbreaking fields up and down California for a pittance, and maybe whatever he knew of what happened in the War. He wasn’t called up for Korea, probably because he was by that time too old, but he might have worried he would be called again. I don’t know.
But one reason my friend became a counselor was because his father was so troubled — and he didn’t know what to do about it.
This state of affairs was not at all uncommon among the GI generation, despite the fact that most had achieved almost unimaginable financial and other security. Whether they knew why or how it happened is almost irrelevant. What they knew was that they were better off — sometimes much better off — than their parents and many worried it would all be taken away somehow one day. The looming threat of nuclear annihilation was certainly a factor, but doubts about the apparent security of the post-War working class were ever-present during the era, as they should be now.
But the accepted narrative today doesn’t allow for those doubts.
Material prosperity doesn’t mean much if your psychic and emotional world is always on the verge of falling apart.
Z
The U.S. worker has lived most of the last thirty years under brutal Rubinism, with a brief “reprieve” in some aspects during the Bush years in that at least there were some prosecutions of Wall Street and corporate figures early on before Rove probably started cutting deals with them to finance Bush’s 2004 campaign.
Rubinism differs from Reaganism in that under Reaganism there was the threat of legal repercussions for financial fraud while with Rubinism there are only rewards. With Reaganism there was still also some sense of sovereign national interests while under Rubinism it is markets above sovereignty and a foreign policy that serves Israel’s interests above the U.S.’s.
Z
Stirling S Newberry
I remember the shaken fallen
Who went forth and scanned a nightmare screech for an Infinite Jest of fixture,
Who killed themselves and lived forever on a Dream of Dreams,
Calm in the face of their destruction and collusion and derision on the lobster-bisque of their madness here to fore unwhisper on the deception,
That they were not what they truly were: randomness Asperger,
Bleeping on the otherside of the aisle 12-bar blues,
Spraying they were heteronormative in spadeclubs folderall games,
Denying the chance which coerced and coalesced and cower them into not mentioning their persuasion,
The is evile there: We do not mention it with bearing breath bologna spam,
Slaked to the lands of tragedy of conflict on the war for oil,
That now grinds down to a spat dopamine conclusion,
As if it never was and always will be, lavender mob unroycohnstiment,
The power to move as a lynch mob the sounds of “the other” in a chorus of inequity stance,
Incomparable illuminating as they shudder on the mean streets of Beale,
Amerika the outlaw inlaw coleslaw in the pantry police state,
That’s alright moma, that’s alright, red-neck, all the same, strange things indeed,
Under the Baldwin that they need so much invisible nation,
Unshaven towards the sun in solidities of boroughs of the need to have a fix of Morpheus in lost battalion neuter by a spiral unconscious drag on methanol density infermected:
A one-dimensional man deconstructed by Derrida.
Stirling S Newberry
I keep going on about Minimum Wage because it is one of the few things that the average person really counts on the federal government to supply. While the federal government talks to the elites of the various communities that make up the governing coalition, and receives to hand out lucre in the form of government jobs and government contracts to the cold and a few who make up their coalition when it comes down to actually helping the vast majority of their constituents, and this is both a donk and phant problem, they recoil at the expense which could otherwise be made much more concrete in terms of an interleaved system which they profit from.
Since we are in the Democratic side of the swing, they suddenly realize that minimum wage was the thing they were sent to Washington to do, and after four years they will not have done anything to alleviate the most desperate in their plight. The problem is that it is a good image if they raise the minimum wage, so they want to keep it as something which they can only be elected, rather than scale the minimum wage to some form of inflation. However, the Republican side once to index it to inflation, but the inflation measure that they want to use is substandard, and that means that the poor will get poorer and poorer and poorer and poorer (this is the public side) but as things stand now one or two senators can say “I want to import them poor” and nothing gets done.
Now they are in the aftermath is of not raising minimum wage and they suddenly realize that their moment in the sun is going to pass, largely because they took care of the elites, with bribes, and did not take care of the majority. This will shift power over to the Republican side who have similar issues concerning elites/majority with the sole exception that voting against abortion is something that they really need for a good section of their base.
different clue
Biden ( or maybe Biden’s thinking-brain dogs) want Tanden at OMB very badly. Here is an article about how Biden has last-minute pleaded with “Asian-American organizations” to pressure for confirming Tanden.
And they are playing the Race Card and the Diversity Card to do it. They will try guilt-storting Senators into confirming if they don’t want to stand “revealed as Racist”. What will Sanders do under that king of RPOC ( Racist Pigs Of Color) pressure and blackmail and extortion? Will he finally make a public point of her multiple-level corruption and her being part of the Catfood Conspiracy against Social Security? Or would that hurt his good friend Joe’s feelings too much?
Here is the link.
https://www.politico.com/news/2021/02/24/biden-asian-american-save-tanden-471558
Willy
The B-29s development was mostly completed before Pearl Harbor and the Manhattan Project was already underway. The New Deal Democrats were a lot more lookahead-pragmatic than today’s DNC and far more than their then-GOP counterparts.