After the Pentagon brass formally hijacked our foreign policy in April when they coerced the Trump administration into pursuing regime change in Syria, and then intensifying our commitment to the largest exporter of jihadism when they gave hundreds of billions worth of weapons to Saudi Arabia, the announcement last night of a troop surge in Afghanistan comes as no surprise.
Now that the Pentagon party is back in power, it is the military elites who will raid the treasury to inflate a bubble, after eight years of the Wall Street party inflating a bubble for the financial elites.
What did shock most people, though, was the total lack of commitment to any clearly defined objectives for winning -- or rather, any clearly defined criteria for declaring that Uncle Sam has officially "gone bust" in Afghanistan and is getting the hell out.
So far, even though they hate our guts, the militaries of Afghanistan and Pakistan have not attacked American soil, nor have terrorist groups from either country -- how many American civilians are an acceptable number killed if the war escalates to that level? A hundred civilians? A thousand civilians? Another September 11th?
Over 2000 American soldiers have already died there -- will 5000 dead be enough? Or 10,000 dead?
Over 1 to 2 TRILLION dollars have already been wasted there -- will 5 trillion dollars be enough? Or 10 trillion dollars?
Over 16 years have already been squandered there -- will 30 years be enough? Or 100 years?
Last night the Pentagon signaled that it is willing to send every last soldier into the meat grinder, waste every last dollar that the government has or that it can borrow, and spend every last year of our country's existence occupying Afghanistan. Anything less would be "taking options off the table".
The refusal to level with the war-weary American people will not be matched in communications with our allies. Certainly the other NATO leaders will know how many troops we're sending, how much weaponry, how many vehicles, and roughly how much that all costs.
More importantly, the various warring factions within Afghanistan will know the facts -- they're right there on the ground, you think they're not going to be able to tell whether an additional 4000 vs. 40,000 troops have started climbing up their mountains? Or whether an additional $10 billion vs. $100 billion worth of equipment has started driving down their roads?
The Afghan forces will have the keenest awareness of how much the American presence will have grown by, and how it is being used. They don't need to tune in to CNN to figure that out.
So the only people who will be in the dark are the American people, and the Pentagon preemptively dressed them down for even thinking about asking for a commitment not to go beyond certain limits for troops deployed, dollars spent, and years gone by.
This is no different from the Wall Street behavior and attitude when it was their party in power under Obama. There was no limit to how low interest rates would go, nor how long they would be kept that low, nor how many trillions of dollars the Fed would burden its balance sheet with in order to bail out the financial elites. Anyone asking those questions was told to shut up and just go along with the bailouts, or else there would be apocalyptic consequences for the economy.
Now we're told that if we don't bail out the Pentagon, arms dealers, and defense contractors forever and ever, our national security will collapse. Same BS, different vendor.
Our ruling class has escalated beyond callousness toward its subjects, to outright hostility against them. The elites are not only going to continue sucking as much blood as possible out of America's body, they have now opened fire on anyone who tries to pull the parasite away from its half-dead host.
Doubling down on their part will only cause doubling down on the people's part -- next time it won't be a magnanimous deal-maker who the voters send to negotiate with the Swamp. It will be a remorseless Terminator, leading a larger army of single-minded machines. The mere specter of revolution is the only thing that has ever caused a parasitic elite class to change its ways and begin running society for the good of the people.
But since Trump is only the initial good cop, expect the civil war / revolution atmosphere to get worse over the short term.
August 22, 2017
August 21, 2017
Immigration obstruction, from liberal cabinet heads to Hispanic-majority Border Patrol agents
An article in the LA Times reviews the data on immigration enforcement so far during the Trump administration, pointing to the same conclusion I and others have reached for months now -- that the picture is largely unchanged from the Obama era, other than illegal border crossings being down.
Even there, they have risen for the past three straight months, likely showing that the initial drop was due to would-be immigrants believing that they would not be able to live and work illegally in the new era of Trump, therefore not bothering to try crossing the border.
Now that it is becoming clear that there's no wall in sight, that deportations are lower than under Obama, that Obama's catch-and-release program is still de facto policy, that DACA is still in effect, and that the courts tie up any attempt to control the flow of foreigners, the immigrants' perception has shifted toward a more cautious willingness to start crossing the border illegally all over again.
The longer the lack of strong immigration action persists, the more convinced the immigrants will become of the weakness of the American border, and they will keep crossing more and more until they're back at Obama-era levels again.
As for deportations falling, the LA Times quotes an ICE spokeswoman who assures us without any numbers that there has merely been a shift in the type of deportation -- from the meaningless definition of turning people back right at the border, to removing people who have actually settled somewhere in the interior of the country.
The lack of numbers is telling because every other claim is backed up by statistics, whether released to the public or to the investigative reporter by request. Trump, his team, and his rationalizers in the media and the general public can quote how much illegal border crossings have fallen, down to the percentage point.
If there has really been a surge in true deportations, and a decline only in the fake deportations, everyone would be touting it -- whether they were in favor, saying look at the good job we're doing, or whether they were opposed, saying look how awful the situation is under Trump.
We'll see these stats anyway in the year-end report, so the total lack of specificity suggests they're trying to hide something in the meantime.
Even assuming that one type of removal has replaced another one-for-one, that still implies that the total investment in deporting illegals has not changed from Obama. The argument assumes that the amount of time, money, and manpower is exactly the same as it was under Obama, only being allocated to the interior rather than the border.
Yet we expect a greater investment under Trump, not the same old amount. Why don't we have twice the money and twice the manpower devoted to this problem now, allowing not just a substitution of one kind of enforcement for another, but an increase over that to boot?
As usual, Trump himself is not to blame -- he's certainly not the one ordering the investment to remain unchanged. But also as usual, Trump is not omnipotent -- close to the opposite, in fact, when it comes to immigration, since almost nobody in the government feels compelled to carry out his instructions on this issue, whether cabinet secretaries or lowly officers.
Quiet mutiny is the order of the day on immigration, as the outsider President has minimal political capital (perhaps even political debt) with which to inflict consequences on those who betray the policies he ran and won on.
We've seen General Kelly, as head of DHS, betray the immigration program by hiring Kevin McAleenan to lead US Customs and Border Protection, which includes Border Patrol. McAleenan is an open-borders Obama holdover who had been deputy at CBP, now promoted to the top by General Kelly.
But now I'm starting to wonder how much of the sabotage and subversion is due to the Border Patrol agents being majority Hispanic -- estimates are just over 50%, from the end of George W. Bush onward. I couldn't find stats on how much of the ICE agents are Hispanic.
Naturally, Hispanic agents are going to sympathize more with Hispanic border-crossers than Anglo agents would, especially if the Hispanic agents are not deeply rooted in this country. Ditto for deporting illegals within the interior who have already started to live and work here, perhaps with families here. If a majority of Border Patrol agents are Hispanic, that might explain why catch-and-release is still the norm.
VDare wondered the same thing in February when there were only initial reports of some agents not wanting to carry out Trump's orders. Most of us don't know that these BP agents are mostly Hispanic. I figured if they were federal agents, they were recruited around the nation and then assigned to the border. But it looks like they're recruited locally, where the population is much more Hispanic than the nation as a whole.
The LA Times article points to another series of problems that comes from the BP agents being mostly Hispanic, although they don't mention that this is because the applicant pool is so Hispanic. Namely, that such a large fraction of the applicants fail for really bad reasons -- not passing the drug test, having engaged in human trafficking, having dealt drugs, not passing a lie detector test, and so on. Anglos would pass these background checks at far higher rates.
VDare also discussed the criminal consequences of having such a Hispanic BP force -- soaring corruption, sometimes with agents who may not even be American citizens working on behalf of Mexican drug cartels.
One solution to this problem, without making it explicitly racial or ethnic, would be to begin recruiting drives from the Rust Belt states that flipped for Trump. They have among the lowest rates of immigrant residents. It could be framed as helping out the economically left-behind workers of the Rust Belt, giving them something patriotic to do for decent pay until the factories start coming back. I favor Western Pennsylvania -- Appalachians are territorial, and would be natural border agents.
A second solution would be to re-assign deployed members of the armed forces -- Americans ought to protect America instead of Afghanistan. If there are fewer BP agents under Trump than under Obama, and if the goal of adding 5000 seems out of reach, then just cut the number who are in Germany by 5000. They will pass the background checks more or less with no problems, and they won't need very much additional training. It would also boost their morale, giving them something clearly productive to do to defend their country, rather than ask why the fuck we're still in Afghanistan.
Other better solutions may be out there, too -- but they certainly will not come from the cheerleader squad who just chant "never sick of winning" no matter what the numbers continue to show. While that cuts out a fair share of hardcore Trump supporters, it does not include the immigration single-issue people like Mark Krikorian, Ann Coulter, CIS, and immigration beat reporters at conservative media outlets like Breitbart and Lifezette, or frankly the LA Times.
I've seen no sign that they're going to rationalize whatever the data say just because a hardliner won the election -- there are so many sources of subversion throughout the government and the private sector employer base, and Trump is not a literal God-Emperor who knows all of the facts (especially with General Kelly restricting what info the President receives), and who has the power to implement his wishes with the snap of a finger.
Now it is our job to help turn up the heat on those subversives on behalf of our only-human President.
Even there, they have risen for the past three straight months, likely showing that the initial drop was due to would-be immigrants believing that they would not be able to live and work illegally in the new era of Trump, therefore not bothering to try crossing the border.
Now that it is becoming clear that there's no wall in sight, that deportations are lower than under Obama, that Obama's catch-and-release program is still de facto policy, that DACA is still in effect, and that the courts tie up any attempt to control the flow of foreigners, the immigrants' perception has shifted toward a more cautious willingness to start crossing the border illegally all over again.
The longer the lack of strong immigration action persists, the more convinced the immigrants will become of the weakness of the American border, and they will keep crossing more and more until they're back at Obama-era levels again.
As for deportations falling, the LA Times quotes an ICE spokeswoman who assures us without any numbers that there has merely been a shift in the type of deportation -- from the meaningless definition of turning people back right at the border, to removing people who have actually settled somewhere in the interior of the country.
The lack of numbers is telling because every other claim is backed up by statistics, whether released to the public or to the investigative reporter by request. Trump, his team, and his rationalizers in the media and the general public can quote how much illegal border crossings have fallen, down to the percentage point.
If there has really been a surge in true deportations, and a decline only in the fake deportations, everyone would be touting it -- whether they were in favor, saying look at the good job we're doing, or whether they were opposed, saying look how awful the situation is under Trump.
We'll see these stats anyway in the year-end report, so the total lack of specificity suggests they're trying to hide something in the meantime.
Even assuming that one type of removal has replaced another one-for-one, that still implies that the total investment in deporting illegals has not changed from Obama. The argument assumes that the amount of time, money, and manpower is exactly the same as it was under Obama, only being allocated to the interior rather than the border.
Yet we expect a greater investment under Trump, not the same old amount. Why don't we have twice the money and twice the manpower devoted to this problem now, allowing not just a substitution of one kind of enforcement for another, but an increase over that to boot?
As usual, Trump himself is not to blame -- he's certainly not the one ordering the investment to remain unchanged. But also as usual, Trump is not omnipotent -- close to the opposite, in fact, when it comes to immigration, since almost nobody in the government feels compelled to carry out his instructions on this issue, whether cabinet secretaries or lowly officers.
Quiet mutiny is the order of the day on immigration, as the outsider President has minimal political capital (perhaps even political debt) with which to inflict consequences on those who betray the policies he ran and won on.
We've seen General Kelly, as head of DHS, betray the immigration program by hiring Kevin McAleenan to lead US Customs and Border Protection, which includes Border Patrol. McAleenan is an open-borders Obama holdover who had been deputy at CBP, now promoted to the top by General Kelly.
But now I'm starting to wonder how much of the sabotage and subversion is due to the Border Patrol agents being majority Hispanic -- estimates are just over 50%, from the end of George W. Bush onward. I couldn't find stats on how much of the ICE agents are Hispanic.
Naturally, Hispanic agents are going to sympathize more with Hispanic border-crossers than Anglo agents would, especially if the Hispanic agents are not deeply rooted in this country. Ditto for deporting illegals within the interior who have already started to live and work here, perhaps with families here. If a majority of Border Patrol agents are Hispanic, that might explain why catch-and-release is still the norm.
VDare wondered the same thing in February when there were only initial reports of some agents not wanting to carry out Trump's orders. Most of us don't know that these BP agents are mostly Hispanic. I figured if they were federal agents, they were recruited around the nation and then assigned to the border. But it looks like they're recruited locally, where the population is much more Hispanic than the nation as a whole.
The LA Times article points to another series of problems that comes from the BP agents being mostly Hispanic, although they don't mention that this is because the applicant pool is so Hispanic. Namely, that such a large fraction of the applicants fail for really bad reasons -- not passing the drug test, having engaged in human trafficking, having dealt drugs, not passing a lie detector test, and so on. Anglos would pass these background checks at far higher rates.
VDare also discussed the criminal consequences of having such a Hispanic BP force -- soaring corruption, sometimes with agents who may not even be American citizens working on behalf of Mexican drug cartels.
One solution to this problem, without making it explicitly racial or ethnic, would be to begin recruiting drives from the Rust Belt states that flipped for Trump. They have among the lowest rates of immigrant residents. It could be framed as helping out the economically left-behind workers of the Rust Belt, giving them something patriotic to do for decent pay until the factories start coming back. I favor Western Pennsylvania -- Appalachians are territorial, and would be natural border agents.
A second solution would be to re-assign deployed members of the armed forces -- Americans ought to protect America instead of Afghanistan. If there are fewer BP agents under Trump than under Obama, and if the goal of adding 5000 seems out of reach, then just cut the number who are in Germany by 5000. They will pass the background checks more or less with no problems, and they won't need very much additional training. It would also boost their morale, giving them something clearly productive to do to defend their country, rather than ask why the fuck we're still in Afghanistan.
Other better solutions may be out there, too -- but they certainly will not come from the cheerleader squad who just chant "never sick of winning" no matter what the numbers continue to show. While that cuts out a fair share of hardcore Trump supporters, it does not include the immigration single-issue people like Mark Krikorian, Ann Coulter, CIS, and immigration beat reporters at conservative media outlets like Breitbart and Lifezette, or frankly the LA Times.
I've seen no sign that they're going to rationalize whatever the data say just because a hardliner won the election -- there are so many sources of subversion throughout the government and the private sector employer base, and Trump is not a literal God-Emperor who knows all of the facts (especially with General Kelly restricting what info the President receives), and who has the power to implement his wishes with the snap of a finger.
Now it is our job to help turn up the heat on those subversives on behalf of our only-human President.
Categories:
Economics,
Geography,
Human Biodiversity,
Politics
August 15, 2017
Trump explodes "one side only" BS about Charlottesville
Now that's the Trump from the campaign trail, unshackled from his Pentagon boarding party handlers! Suck on this, General Kelly:
From a press conference about infrastructure, the questions from the press went immediately to Charlottesville, trying to pin him further against the wall. But here in an impromptu setting, his natural instincts came out and he called out the Violent Left in addition to dissing the White Nationalists, as well as lambasting the media for only portraying one side as violent.
He also did a good job of de-contaminating whatever normies were in attendance at the rally, who just wanted to protest the removal of a Confederate statue rather than throw up Nazi salutes, saying they were not violent, and pivoting to ask whether the statue-removers will target George Washington and Thomas Jefferson next, since they were slaveholders too.
Great comeback, making the media and Establishment now stick up for the Violent Left and extremists who want to topple any historical monument on the grievance that all of American history is corrupted and stained by the legacy of slavery etc.
Larger lesson: Trump supporters need to do everything they can to remove the Pentagon boarding party from his cabinet. Easier said than done, but that must remain a top priority -- we see how he wins on his instincts, and gets led to the slaughter when the Generals pressure him into appeasing the executioners (which they do by design, to remove him from office).
From a press conference about infrastructure, the questions from the press went immediately to Charlottesville, trying to pin him further against the wall. But here in an impromptu setting, his natural instincts came out and he called out the Violent Left in addition to dissing the White Nationalists, as well as lambasting the media for only portraying one side as violent.
He also did a good job of de-contaminating whatever normies were in attendance at the rally, who just wanted to protest the removal of a Confederate statue rather than throw up Nazi salutes, saying they were not violent, and pivoting to ask whether the statue-removers will target George Washington and Thomas Jefferson next, since they were slaveholders too.
Great comeback, making the media and Establishment now stick up for the Violent Left and extremists who want to topple any historical monument on the grievance that all of American history is corrupted and stained by the legacy of slavery etc.
Larger lesson: Trump supporters need to do everything they can to remove the Pentagon boarding party from his cabinet. Easier said than done, but that must remain a top priority -- we see how he wins on his instincts, and gets led to the slaughter when the Generals pressure him into appeasing the executioners (which they do by design, to remove him from office).
August 13, 2017
Trump: invite big Dem to presser condemning "both sides" extremists
The media, Deep State, and Democrat party don't care about whoever got killed and injured today in Charlottesville. They're just using the event to score political points against Trump, his supporters, and their America-first vision, by collectively blaming all of them for the act of a marginal white nationalist.
That attempt to tar & feather all Trump voters as racist Nazis blew up in their faces during the election season, because everyone knows there aren't tens of millions of Nazis in America. Saying so made the anti-Trumpers sound utterly insane to normal people, and discredited whatever else they were trying to say about Trump's vision.
By the same token, the white nationalists should learn the same lesson: they were irrelevant to Trump's victory. There aren't enough of them to make a dent at the ballot box, and they were not the ones driving the narrative and news cycle -- that was Trump himself. Nor were his amplifiers on social media a bunch of white nationalist LARPers.
The attempt at making Trump repeatedly disavow the wannabe Nazis also failed to achieve the intended goal of putting Trump on the defensive. True, he doesn't want to have to respond to every simpering fag who screams out "Do you want the support of these white nationalists?!" Still, he truly does not identify with them or like them, so he can sincerely disavow them and not "give" anything to the enemy ideologically.
Now it is time to lob the collective blame grenade back over into the enemy's territory where it came from. The other side has already made clear that they intend to target all Republicans, even if they were vocal never-Trumpers. So we have to respond in kind by casting blame at the broadest level, as in the disruption of a Trump assassination performance that blamed the entire audience for contributing to the normalization of political violence.
Applied strongly enough, collective blame can prevent the rise of a violent minority, as the other side's majority cracks down on its black sheep to avoid further blame.
Toward that end, the best way forward for Trump is to invite a high-ranking Democrat to a joint press event where each one disavows and condemns the extremist violence coming from their own side, calling out specific groups, as well as a general statement about condemning political violence "no matter who commits it, and no matter who it targets".
He could invite Obama to condemn the cop killings committed by those radicalized by Black Lives Matter, as Trump condemns the church bombing and car attack by white nationalists.
He could invite Hillary Clinton to condemn Antifa -- after which Attorney General Sessions opens an investigation into them as a domestic terrorist organization, since the FBI has already begun to investigate the Alt-Right.
He could invite Joe Biden (who claims there's "only one side" in political violence) to condemn the Alexandria shooter who targeted Congressional Republicans as a whole.
He could invite the head of CAIR to condemn the radical Islamic terror killings from just the recent past.
It would be more powerful to have two or more big Democrats, and more Republicans than just Trump (although not some spineless cuck), to make the event more of a clear bipartisan team effort to tone down the rising political violence.
It's win-win for Trump: if they accept, he forces them to concede the point that everyone already knows, about liberals and Democrats being far more prone to collective violence, he forces a public apology and denunciation, and he avoids being portrayed as the "only side" responsible for collective violence.
If they refuse, he forces them to concede their hypocrisy about caring about political violence, and that they are tolerating and even encouraging future political violence by their side, while exploiting human tragedy just to score cheap shots against someone from the other side of the aisle. He comes off as magnanimous and says how sad it is that the other side cannot bring themselves to condemn the violence coming from their own side.
Either way, they have to drop one of their major masks, and the media will have to follow suit.
If Trump is not allowed to pursue this winning strategy by the Pentagon coup members in his cabinet, then some other high-profile Republican could take his place, and invite similar-ranking Democrats. Tucker Carlson inviting Rachel Maddow, for instance -- and both broadcasting the same event during their shared primetime slot of 9pm.
We can never let the general public forget about who commits the vast bulk of collective violence in this country. And we won't have to draw a pie chart -- although both sides will be condemning extremists on their own side, the audience knows how many BLM cop killings or radical Islamic terror attacks there have been, as opposed to white nationalist murderers.
My guess is the other side would reject the bipartisan outreach effort, just as the White House press corps laughed at Mike Cernovich for asking them to condemn Antifa after a string of violent clashes throughout April, or as Virginia Governor McAuliffe just ignored a question from Breitbart London editor Raheem Kassam if he condemned Antifa. Oh well, at least the media, Deep State, and Democrats will never be able again to harangue Trump and his supporters about white nationalists.
That attempt to tar & feather all Trump voters as racist Nazis blew up in their faces during the election season, because everyone knows there aren't tens of millions of Nazis in America. Saying so made the anti-Trumpers sound utterly insane to normal people, and discredited whatever else they were trying to say about Trump's vision.
By the same token, the white nationalists should learn the same lesson: they were irrelevant to Trump's victory. There aren't enough of them to make a dent at the ballot box, and they were not the ones driving the narrative and news cycle -- that was Trump himself. Nor were his amplifiers on social media a bunch of white nationalist LARPers.
The attempt at making Trump repeatedly disavow the wannabe Nazis also failed to achieve the intended goal of putting Trump on the defensive. True, he doesn't want to have to respond to every simpering fag who screams out "Do you want the support of these white nationalists?!" Still, he truly does not identify with them or like them, so he can sincerely disavow them and not "give" anything to the enemy ideologically.
Now it is time to lob the collective blame grenade back over into the enemy's territory where it came from. The other side has already made clear that they intend to target all Republicans, even if they were vocal never-Trumpers. So we have to respond in kind by casting blame at the broadest level, as in the disruption of a Trump assassination performance that blamed the entire audience for contributing to the normalization of political violence.
Applied strongly enough, collective blame can prevent the rise of a violent minority, as the other side's majority cracks down on its black sheep to avoid further blame.
Toward that end, the best way forward for Trump is to invite a high-ranking Democrat to a joint press event where each one disavows and condemns the extremist violence coming from their own side, calling out specific groups, as well as a general statement about condemning political violence "no matter who commits it, and no matter who it targets".
He could invite Obama to condemn the cop killings committed by those radicalized by Black Lives Matter, as Trump condemns the church bombing and car attack by white nationalists.
He could invite Hillary Clinton to condemn Antifa -- after which Attorney General Sessions opens an investigation into them as a domestic terrorist organization, since the FBI has already begun to investigate the Alt-Right.
He could invite Joe Biden (who claims there's "only one side" in political violence) to condemn the Alexandria shooter who targeted Congressional Republicans as a whole.
He could invite the head of CAIR to condemn the radical Islamic terror killings from just the recent past.
It would be more powerful to have two or more big Democrats, and more Republicans than just Trump (although not some spineless cuck), to make the event more of a clear bipartisan team effort to tone down the rising political violence.
It's win-win for Trump: if they accept, he forces them to concede the point that everyone already knows, about liberals and Democrats being far more prone to collective violence, he forces a public apology and denunciation, and he avoids being portrayed as the "only side" responsible for collective violence.
If they refuse, he forces them to concede their hypocrisy about caring about political violence, and that they are tolerating and even encouraging future political violence by their side, while exploiting human tragedy just to score cheap shots against someone from the other side of the aisle. He comes off as magnanimous and says how sad it is that the other side cannot bring themselves to condemn the violence coming from their own side.
Either way, they have to drop one of their major masks, and the media will have to follow suit.
If Trump is not allowed to pursue this winning strategy by the Pentagon coup members in his cabinet, then some other high-profile Republican could take his place, and invite similar-ranking Democrats. Tucker Carlson inviting Rachel Maddow, for instance -- and both broadcasting the same event during their shared primetime slot of 9pm.
We can never let the general public forget about who commits the vast bulk of collective violence in this country. And we won't have to draw a pie chart -- although both sides will be condemning extremists on their own side, the audience knows how many BLM cop killings or radical Islamic terror attacks there have been, as opposed to white nationalist murderers.
My guess is the other side would reject the bipartisan outreach effort, just as the White House press corps laughed at Mike Cernovich for asking them to condemn Antifa after a string of violent clashes throughout April, or as Virginia Governor McAuliffe just ignored a question from Breitbart London editor Raheem Kassam if he condemned Antifa. Oh well, at least the media, Deep State, and Democrats will never be able again to harangue Trump and his supporters about white nationalists.
I literally went to the White House to ask the media to disavow poltical violence.— Mike Cernovich 🇺🇸 (@Cernovich) August 13, 2017
They laughed. #Chalottesville pic.twitter.com/nvN7XkpMX7
I just asked @GovernorVA if he wanted to condemn antifa as well as neo Nazi groups. He heard. Refused to answer. pic.twitter.com/W7vcH4fSI0— Raheem 🇬🇧 (@RaheemKassam) August 12, 2017
August 10, 2017
Jewish elites divorcing Zionism, courting Islamism
One of the most interesting and unstudied shifts in contemporary politics is the gradual distancing away from Zionism by Jewish elites in the West, when some flavor of Zionism used to be obligatory during the last several decades of the 20th century.
But with Muslims growing among the grassroots thanks to mass migration, the liberal base choosing "Islamophobia" as their bigotry boogeyman to battle, and Wall Street wanting to open up Muslim societies to foreign investment, the Jewish elites of the 21st century have little choice but to slink away from Zionism and develop at least a friendly working relationship with Islamism. And with Israel's waning military dominance in the Middle East, the Pentagon-led GOP has less and less need for Jews who are Zionist.
This represents just the latest case of a Jewish managerial elite favoring whichever group is rising in power -- making peace with them so that the middleman minority elite can be left alone to manage entire sectors of the society. The Ashkenazim played this role in the German and Slavic societies for century after century, without any thought of establishing their own ethno-state or supporting such a state at a distance. The Sephardim played a similar role under the Muslim rulers of Medieval Spain and, when they were expelled in 1492, under the Ottomans.
In America, too, most Jews didn't care about Israel during the first half of the 20th century. They wanted to rise up the ranks of the managers of the newly industrialized American nation. Not even the Holocaust made American Jews fixate on Israel as a supposed release valve nation.
It wasn't until the Israeli military began defeating the Arab armies around them, including the mighty nation of Egypt, that American Jews started to feel patriotic about Israel. That is also what brought it to the attention of the federal government, who had decades earlier turned back boats of Jews fleeing the Nazis. Now that the Jewish state could offer something we wanted -- local muscle to apply against our enemies in the oil-rich Middle East -- suddenly the Pentagon wanted to be best buds.
But Israel has not won major battles for decades now, making their triumph during the late 1960s and '70s look like more of a fluke. When a grassroots nationalist army like Hezbollah manages to drive you out of their homeland, Uncle Sam is going to start questioning your ability to serve as one of the "local cops on the beat" (Nixon).
Of course our #1 ally in the Middle East, Saudi Arabia, has not had much better luck at pushing around its neighbors (ISIS in Iraq in Syria, invasion of Yemen, stand-off with Qatar). But at least the Saudis are sitting on a shitload of oil, unlike Israel, and we've been partners with them for far longer. Among the Pentagon brass, this means a weakening concern over Israel, and relatively more emphasis on Saudi Arabia.
The Pentagon is the main power group that controls the GOP; the junior partner is the Cultural Right, including evangelical Christians. And they have made the opposite shift in emphasis -- after September 11th, they've become more suspicious of Muslims generally and of Jihadi Arabia in particular, while growing ever more attached to Israel as the site of the Holy Land and "the only democracy" in the increasingly unstable region.
These diverging trends have created cracks in the Jihadist-Zionist coalition.
So, Zionists can no longer rely on the elites on the Pentagon / GOP side to reflexively have Israel's back. Can they turn instead to the Democrats? After all, the main power group controlling the Dems is the finance sector, and that is overwhelmingly Jewish, along with lesser power groups controlling the Democrats, such as the media and academia. Recall the mismatched demographics of the two parties: GOP elite leans jihadist, while base leans Zionist; Dem elite leans Zionist, while base leans jihadist.
They're bound to find sympathy there, but slowly those Jewish elites are beginning to cool on the idea of kneejerk defense and promotion of Israeli interests.
The main interest of the big Wall Street banks is opening up new countries for investors and central banking concerns. Israel is not that big of a market to break into -- but Iran, with nearly 10 times the population of Israel, is. That's the real reason why the Democrats were so big on removing the sanctions against Iran -- so the financial elites could finally start investing there and selling there, which is of no concern to the Pentagon.
They had to work in a nuclear non-proliferation angle to throw a bone to the Pentagon / GOP, but the main goal reflected the financial elites who control the Democrats. That's also their main worry about Trump pulling out of the Iran deal -- they don't care about nuclear weapons, but about the uncertainty that such moves will create for the investors and bankers who thought they were going to have a nice sanction-free business environment in Iran.
Aside from Wall Street wanting to get along with Iran for investment purposes, even if that displeases their co-ethnics in Israel, the Democrats also face anti-Israeli sentiment from their electoral base. Some are Muslim themselves, while most are liberal white people who are obsessed with eradicating "Islamophobia" from their society. This includes a rising share of younger Jewish liberals.
From these various grassroots factions, the movement to Boycott / Divest / Sanction Israel has grown rapidly, and within another bastion of the Democrats -- college campuses. This movement has mainstreamed the view of Israel as a European colonialist invader that has been exploiting the native population of Palestinians. Since the subjects are Muslim, that makes the state of Israel ipso facto Islamophobic.
The media have to both reflect the interests of the power groups who are their senior partners -- like Wall Street -- as well as resonate with the views of their lay liberal audience. Both of those sources are increasingly hostile toward Israel, or at least losing patience, so the media can no longer present a ceaseless narrative of "Israel has done nothing wrong".
None of these shifts has been completed, and the process is still ongoing. But it is clear in which direction the trends are headed. Whether you're a member of the Jewish elite that controls the banks, the media, academia, or Democrat politics, you have no choice but to distance yourself from Zionism. And the weakening Jewish state offers you little in return nowadays anyway, so that just makes the decision easier.
Note that this change is not away from Israel-first and toward America-first -- far from it! It is back to the rootless cosmopolitan stereotype, where there are no nations, and you simply throw in with whoever happens to be rising in power, wealth, and influence.
These days, that includes radical Islamists and their liberal sympathizers: "Behead those who blaspheme Allah!" = "Fire the Islamophobic bigots from their jobs!" A century ago it would not have included Muslims at all, and in another century, it may go back to not including Muslims. Goy group A, goy group B -- as long as you ingratiate yourself with them, they'll leave you alone to manage the complex society.
Nowhere is this tendency most striking than in the devil himself, George Soros. A recent NYT op-ed laments the punishment that Soros is taking from the government of the Jewish state, which has grown hostile to the world's premier promoter of dissolving demographic barriers between nations. That would erode the Jewish character of Israel, and Soros the progressive globalist has been happy to push for turning it into a melting pot of Jews and Palestinians.
Don't take the writer's word for it: Soros strongly came out against both Putin and Assad during their joint liberation of Aleppo from the jihadist militias. That proves that Soros doesn't care about Arabs in general, but only those who do not resist globalist interventions and takeover of their societies, and the Islamic radicals who have been trying to overthrow Assad are thoroughly international in scope.
The irony of Soros being opposed to Israel as a Jewish ethno-state, and the Israeli government being hostile toward Soros, is lost on the "Joooz" dead-enders among the Alt-Right. They think powerful globalist Jews must be pro-Israel, and that Israel would promote such individuals as agents of Israeli influence.
Someone writing for one of their blogs tried to get the message out two years ago, pointing out how fruitless and backwards it was for the Twitter troll armies to descend on globalist Leftist Jews with supposed killshots like "How about open borders for Israel, then, huh?" -- when the target is on the record enthusiastically wanting Israel to open its borders, make peace with Palestinians a la the South African whites did with the colonized blacks, and so on and so forth.
As the internal dynamics of the Democrat side lead more and more elite Jews to distance themselves from Zionism, these attacks will become even more outdated. Jewish elites are going back to rootless cosmopolitanism, so why would they bind themselves to a particular state like Israel? That would make them Islamophobic in the eyes of their grassroots base, and it would halt the investments made in Israel's enemies like Iran by the Wall Street banks who are their senior partners on Team Democrat.
But with Muslims growing among the grassroots thanks to mass migration, the liberal base choosing "Islamophobia" as their bigotry boogeyman to battle, and Wall Street wanting to open up Muslim societies to foreign investment, the Jewish elites of the 21st century have little choice but to slink away from Zionism and develop at least a friendly working relationship with Islamism. And with Israel's waning military dominance in the Middle East, the Pentagon-led GOP has less and less need for Jews who are Zionist.
This represents just the latest case of a Jewish managerial elite favoring whichever group is rising in power -- making peace with them so that the middleman minority elite can be left alone to manage entire sectors of the society. The Ashkenazim played this role in the German and Slavic societies for century after century, without any thought of establishing their own ethno-state or supporting such a state at a distance. The Sephardim played a similar role under the Muslim rulers of Medieval Spain and, when they were expelled in 1492, under the Ottomans.
In America, too, most Jews didn't care about Israel during the first half of the 20th century. They wanted to rise up the ranks of the managers of the newly industrialized American nation. Not even the Holocaust made American Jews fixate on Israel as a supposed release valve nation.
It wasn't until the Israeli military began defeating the Arab armies around them, including the mighty nation of Egypt, that American Jews started to feel patriotic about Israel. That is also what brought it to the attention of the federal government, who had decades earlier turned back boats of Jews fleeing the Nazis. Now that the Jewish state could offer something we wanted -- local muscle to apply against our enemies in the oil-rich Middle East -- suddenly the Pentagon wanted to be best buds.
But Israel has not won major battles for decades now, making their triumph during the late 1960s and '70s look like more of a fluke. When a grassroots nationalist army like Hezbollah manages to drive you out of their homeland, Uncle Sam is going to start questioning your ability to serve as one of the "local cops on the beat" (Nixon).
Of course our #1 ally in the Middle East, Saudi Arabia, has not had much better luck at pushing around its neighbors (ISIS in Iraq in Syria, invasion of Yemen, stand-off with Qatar). But at least the Saudis are sitting on a shitload of oil, unlike Israel, and we've been partners with them for far longer. Among the Pentagon brass, this means a weakening concern over Israel, and relatively more emphasis on Saudi Arabia.
The Pentagon is the main power group that controls the GOP; the junior partner is the Cultural Right, including evangelical Christians. And they have made the opposite shift in emphasis -- after September 11th, they've become more suspicious of Muslims generally and of Jihadi Arabia in particular, while growing ever more attached to Israel as the site of the Holy Land and "the only democracy" in the increasingly unstable region.
These diverging trends have created cracks in the Jihadist-Zionist coalition.
So, Zionists can no longer rely on the elites on the Pentagon / GOP side to reflexively have Israel's back. Can they turn instead to the Democrats? After all, the main power group controlling the Dems is the finance sector, and that is overwhelmingly Jewish, along with lesser power groups controlling the Democrats, such as the media and academia. Recall the mismatched demographics of the two parties: GOP elite leans jihadist, while base leans Zionist; Dem elite leans Zionist, while base leans jihadist.
They're bound to find sympathy there, but slowly those Jewish elites are beginning to cool on the idea of kneejerk defense and promotion of Israeli interests.
The main interest of the big Wall Street banks is opening up new countries for investors and central banking concerns. Israel is not that big of a market to break into -- but Iran, with nearly 10 times the population of Israel, is. That's the real reason why the Democrats were so big on removing the sanctions against Iran -- so the financial elites could finally start investing there and selling there, which is of no concern to the Pentagon.
They had to work in a nuclear non-proliferation angle to throw a bone to the Pentagon / GOP, but the main goal reflected the financial elites who control the Democrats. That's also their main worry about Trump pulling out of the Iran deal -- they don't care about nuclear weapons, but about the uncertainty that such moves will create for the investors and bankers who thought they were going to have a nice sanction-free business environment in Iran.
Aside from Wall Street wanting to get along with Iran for investment purposes, even if that displeases their co-ethnics in Israel, the Democrats also face anti-Israeli sentiment from their electoral base. Some are Muslim themselves, while most are liberal white people who are obsessed with eradicating "Islamophobia" from their society. This includes a rising share of younger Jewish liberals.
From these various grassroots factions, the movement to Boycott / Divest / Sanction Israel has grown rapidly, and within another bastion of the Democrats -- college campuses. This movement has mainstreamed the view of Israel as a European colonialist invader that has been exploiting the native population of Palestinians. Since the subjects are Muslim, that makes the state of Israel ipso facto Islamophobic.
The media have to both reflect the interests of the power groups who are their senior partners -- like Wall Street -- as well as resonate with the views of their lay liberal audience. Both of those sources are increasingly hostile toward Israel, or at least losing patience, so the media can no longer present a ceaseless narrative of "Israel has done nothing wrong".
None of these shifts has been completed, and the process is still ongoing. But it is clear in which direction the trends are headed. Whether you're a member of the Jewish elite that controls the banks, the media, academia, or Democrat politics, you have no choice but to distance yourself from Zionism. And the weakening Jewish state offers you little in return nowadays anyway, so that just makes the decision easier.
Note that this change is not away from Israel-first and toward America-first -- far from it! It is back to the rootless cosmopolitan stereotype, where there are no nations, and you simply throw in with whoever happens to be rising in power, wealth, and influence.
These days, that includes radical Islamists and their liberal sympathizers: "Behead those who blaspheme Allah!" = "Fire the Islamophobic bigots from their jobs!" A century ago it would not have included Muslims at all, and in another century, it may go back to not including Muslims. Goy group A, goy group B -- as long as you ingratiate yourself with them, they'll leave you alone to manage the complex society.
Nowhere is this tendency most striking than in the devil himself, George Soros. A recent NYT op-ed laments the punishment that Soros is taking from the government of the Jewish state, which has grown hostile to the world's premier promoter of dissolving demographic barriers between nations. That would erode the Jewish character of Israel, and Soros the progressive globalist has been happy to push for turning it into a melting pot of Jews and Palestinians.
Mr. Soros’s humanitarianism and universalism represent an expression of post-Holocaust Jewish identity that is anathema to the hard-line nationalism of Mr. Netanyahu’s governing coalition, which adheres to the classic Zionist mission that sought to end anti-Semitism and diaspora existence by gathering all Jews in the historic land of Israel. As in this case with Hungary, Mr. Netanyahu is increasingly aligning Israel with illiberal, autocratic states like Russia, Turkey and Egypt. The ultimate cynicism of such alliances is visible in Mr. Netanyahu’s willingness to tolerate the anti-Semitism of the global right-wing nationalist camp if it will bolster the Greater Israel movement.
Don't take the writer's word for it: Soros strongly came out against both Putin and Assad during their joint liberation of Aleppo from the jihadist militias. That proves that Soros doesn't care about Arabs in general, but only those who do not resist globalist interventions and takeover of their societies, and the Islamic radicals who have been trying to overthrow Assad are thoroughly international in scope.
The irony of Soros being opposed to Israel as a Jewish ethno-state, and the Israeli government being hostile toward Soros, is lost on the "Joooz" dead-enders among the Alt-Right. They think powerful globalist Jews must be pro-Israel, and that Israel would promote such individuals as agents of Israeli influence.
Someone writing for one of their blogs tried to get the message out two years ago, pointing out how fruitless and backwards it was for the Twitter troll armies to descend on globalist Leftist Jews with supposed killshots like "How about open borders for Israel, then, huh?" -- when the target is on the record enthusiastically wanting Israel to open its borders, make peace with Palestinians a la the South African whites did with the colonized blacks, and so on and so forth.
As the internal dynamics of the Democrat side lead more and more elite Jews to distance themselves from Zionism, these attacks will become even more outdated. Jewish elites are going back to rootless cosmopolitanism, so why would they bind themselves to a particular state like Israel? That would make them Islamophobic in the eyes of their grassroots base, and it would halt the investments made in Israel's enemies like Iran by the Wall Street banks who are their senior partners on Team Democrat.
Categories:
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August 7, 2017
Trump movement cannot brag about still-worsening economy
Trump is looking for some good news to give the American people hope, and to attack his detractors, given the overall disaster of a nation America has become since Inauguration, thanks to the ever intensifying elite sabotage of Trump himself and the broader populist-nationalist movement.
There is a widening Deep State coup in plain sight, a first ever and a new low in the history of our democracy. The media are complicit in this coup, operating 24/7 as agents of the Deep State against the Trump movement. Another low in how our institutions function.
Healthcare continues to be a disaster that is only getting worse.
Tax reform will take forever, crowding out important priorities, and will only manage to cut taxes without cutting spending, making our debt situation worse. That may get compounded by a $1 trillion infrastructure program, which would be fine if it were actually paid for. The Democrats are the party of "spend with already collected taxes," while Republicans are about "spend with ever ballooning debt".
And we stand ready to get sucked into at least one and possibly more new pointless wars, on top of remaining in Afghanistan -- maybe North Korea, maybe somewhere else in the Middle East, maybe Venezuela, and possibly Russia itself. We will fail everywhere as usual since the first Korean War, the failure will cost trillions of dollars (without raising taxes = more debt that balloons from interest), and these failures will be the coup de grace to military morale.
Not to mention the continued demographic trends that threaten the stability and prosperity of America and the American people, as illegal immigrants remain here in the same numbers as under Obama (15-20 million), and as the same number of new immigrants are invited in per year.
Other than that, things are turning out wonderfully!
Now, Trump and his voters realized that we wouldn't Make America Great Again in the first six hours, days, weeks, or months -- but once it gets to six years, and the cheerleaders are still telling us to wait, well...
And it is not the fact that we haven't made total progress in such a brief time, it's that in most areas we haven't even been moving the ball down the field. It has either stayed still or has been moved back toward our own end zone. That makes it no longer a matter of "just give it more time" -- sure, a little more time in the current direction, and Trump will get removed or assassinated. We need to reverse these trends, not just let things go on for a longer time.
Measures of voter support do not count as accomplishments per se. Trump has more followers on social media, still draws large crowds, and would win re-election against Hillary or a generic Democrat -- so what? The election is over, it's time to apply his popular support to some area outside of the ballot box, to actually accomplish the agenda that he campaigned on, given that the Establishment will not help us out one bit and will eagerly sabotage that agenda.
So far, the bright spot that Trump has been trying to point to, in contrast to all that garbage, is the economy, and primarily the stock market. Nothing has changed from the campaign trail when he said it was just a big fat bubble, and now that the Democrats are out of the White House, the Fed can safely pop the bubble by raising interest rates and be able to pin the blame on a Republican president. Most of the rise has been driven by a handful of mega-companies, none of them components of the Trumpian goods-based economy -- over-valued tech like Facebook, Google, Apple, Amazon, etc.
Job creation is no better than under Obama, still way down per capita compared to even the Reagan years when we were already declining as a great economy. The jobs are part-time, low-paying, and in dead-end or bubble sectors like healthcare, education, and other service staples of the gig economy. We can't even joke about retail jobs anymore, since those are going to Amazon fulfillment centers -- just as low-paying as retail, but now in more dystopian workplaces.
So just like Trump said on the campaign trail, the unemployment numbers are phony -- some guy working 10 hours a week as a barista counts as employed, and if he quits that altogether and decides not to look for anything new, he's still employed!
Wage growth has been falling since Inauguration Day, continuing the stagnation of the past several years.
As all these aspects of income and wealth have declined, expenses have shot through the roof. Median home prices rose for yet another year, they are now up 50% compared to the low of 5 years ago, and key regions like Southern California are higher than before the housing bubble popped last time. And tuitions keep skyrocketing. With so little income growth, that means debt keeps rising -- or that people are going without the thing in the first place, like renting instead of owning a home.
And most of the goods and services that we buy are not getting better in quality. Especially the big-ticket expenses like housing, healthcare, and education.
In other words, our standard of living has continued the deterioration of the past 40 years, and the conditions are worse than they were before the last Great Recession.
If the economic news were truly so much better over the past six months, you personally and many people you know or even run into and chat up would have great news to share -- a new full-time job, higher wages or salary, in a non-bubble sector that won't get wiped out when the Fed raises interest rates or the government scales back your workplace's grant funding, not to mention cheaper housing, cheaper cars, cheaper food, cheaper everything, and less and less debt.
Although enthusiasm and hope were high at the outset, six months later reality is starting to set in. It's not that people think Trump himself failed, or hasn't tried. Most will blame the rigged system, the Swamp, and all the other forces that had been fucking this country over for decades, and will continue to even with an anti-Establishment guy in the White House.
They will conclude that it's going to take a major assault on those Establishment forces in order to reverse longstanding trends, not just a kind-hearted negotiator who wants to make deals and bring everybody together. They are going to want Trump to say, "Hey I tried with the nice guy routine, and now it's time to get tough and not take "no" for an answer".
In the meantime, that is the attitude that Trump himself and his supporters must take. There is little more than symbolic token victories to point to so far, other than refraining from getting involved in yet another disastrous globalist trade deal or climate deal. That is more of a halt than a reversal, and the re-negotiation of NAFTA so far is leaving manufacturing by the wayside, and focusing more on agriculture, finance, and the media.
The more we try to gloat about the stock market, as though ordinary Americans own any stock and as though it weren't a bubble, and the more we try to spin the jobs reports as anything other than a continuation of the trend from Carter through Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush Jr, and Obama -- the more out-of-touch we're going to sound to ordinary Americans, including Trump supporters.
The support of the masses is the sole, only, and exclusive leverage of the Trump movement, since it has no support but rather outright hostility in all elite institutions. So we must stay as in-touch with normal Americans as possible, or lose the only strength we have at the negotiating table against the elites.
If that means being brutally honest, so be it -- we can truthfully and easily tell people that the elites are still the problem since they're not honoring the election outcome, and continuing on with business as usual. Apart from being more honest and connecting better with the people's everyday lives, it will give them motivation to start mobilizing in one way or another against the elites. There is no other way to light a fire under the asses of our insulated and contemptuous elites.
The last thing we want to attempt is to tell the American people, or just Trump supporters, that everything is getting better, and to feel hopeful rather than worried about where things have been heading the first six months, and the next six months.
That will make them mistrust us, because they're not stupid and realize that the Establishment and its elites are a lot harder to force into serving the public than Trump made it seem during the campaign. And it will also keep them complacently or apathetically on the sidelines, leaving the movement and its President with nobody to have his back when and where it matters.
There is a widening Deep State coup in plain sight, a first ever and a new low in the history of our democracy. The media are complicit in this coup, operating 24/7 as agents of the Deep State against the Trump movement. Another low in how our institutions function.
Healthcare continues to be a disaster that is only getting worse.
Tax reform will take forever, crowding out important priorities, and will only manage to cut taxes without cutting spending, making our debt situation worse. That may get compounded by a $1 trillion infrastructure program, which would be fine if it were actually paid for. The Democrats are the party of "spend with already collected taxes," while Republicans are about "spend with ever ballooning debt".
And we stand ready to get sucked into at least one and possibly more new pointless wars, on top of remaining in Afghanistan -- maybe North Korea, maybe somewhere else in the Middle East, maybe Venezuela, and possibly Russia itself. We will fail everywhere as usual since the first Korean War, the failure will cost trillions of dollars (without raising taxes = more debt that balloons from interest), and these failures will be the coup de grace to military morale.
Not to mention the continued demographic trends that threaten the stability and prosperity of America and the American people, as illegal immigrants remain here in the same numbers as under Obama (15-20 million), and as the same number of new immigrants are invited in per year.
Other than that, things are turning out wonderfully!
Now, Trump and his voters realized that we wouldn't Make America Great Again in the first six hours, days, weeks, or months -- but once it gets to six years, and the cheerleaders are still telling us to wait, well...
And it is not the fact that we haven't made total progress in such a brief time, it's that in most areas we haven't even been moving the ball down the field. It has either stayed still or has been moved back toward our own end zone. That makes it no longer a matter of "just give it more time" -- sure, a little more time in the current direction, and Trump will get removed or assassinated. We need to reverse these trends, not just let things go on for a longer time.
Measures of voter support do not count as accomplishments per se. Trump has more followers on social media, still draws large crowds, and would win re-election against Hillary or a generic Democrat -- so what? The election is over, it's time to apply his popular support to some area outside of the ballot box, to actually accomplish the agenda that he campaigned on, given that the Establishment will not help us out one bit and will eagerly sabotage that agenda.
So far, the bright spot that Trump has been trying to point to, in contrast to all that garbage, is the economy, and primarily the stock market. Nothing has changed from the campaign trail when he said it was just a big fat bubble, and now that the Democrats are out of the White House, the Fed can safely pop the bubble by raising interest rates and be able to pin the blame on a Republican president. Most of the rise has been driven by a handful of mega-companies, none of them components of the Trumpian goods-based economy -- over-valued tech like Facebook, Google, Apple, Amazon, etc.
Job creation is no better than under Obama, still way down per capita compared to even the Reagan years when we were already declining as a great economy. The jobs are part-time, low-paying, and in dead-end or bubble sectors like healthcare, education, and other service staples of the gig economy. We can't even joke about retail jobs anymore, since those are going to Amazon fulfillment centers -- just as low-paying as retail, but now in more dystopian workplaces.
So just like Trump said on the campaign trail, the unemployment numbers are phony -- some guy working 10 hours a week as a barista counts as employed, and if he quits that altogether and decides not to look for anything new, he's still employed!
Wage growth has been falling since Inauguration Day, continuing the stagnation of the past several years.
As all these aspects of income and wealth have declined, expenses have shot through the roof. Median home prices rose for yet another year, they are now up 50% compared to the low of 5 years ago, and key regions like Southern California are higher than before the housing bubble popped last time. And tuitions keep skyrocketing. With so little income growth, that means debt keeps rising -- or that people are going without the thing in the first place, like renting instead of owning a home.
And most of the goods and services that we buy are not getting better in quality. Especially the big-ticket expenses like housing, healthcare, and education.
In other words, our standard of living has continued the deterioration of the past 40 years, and the conditions are worse than they were before the last Great Recession.
If the economic news were truly so much better over the past six months, you personally and many people you know or even run into and chat up would have great news to share -- a new full-time job, higher wages or salary, in a non-bubble sector that won't get wiped out when the Fed raises interest rates or the government scales back your workplace's grant funding, not to mention cheaper housing, cheaper cars, cheaper food, cheaper everything, and less and less debt.
Although enthusiasm and hope were high at the outset, six months later reality is starting to set in. It's not that people think Trump himself failed, or hasn't tried. Most will blame the rigged system, the Swamp, and all the other forces that had been fucking this country over for decades, and will continue to even with an anti-Establishment guy in the White House.
They will conclude that it's going to take a major assault on those Establishment forces in order to reverse longstanding trends, not just a kind-hearted negotiator who wants to make deals and bring everybody together. They are going to want Trump to say, "Hey I tried with the nice guy routine, and now it's time to get tough and not take "no" for an answer".
In the meantime, that is the attitude that Trump himself and his supporters must take. There is little more than symbolic token victories to point to so far, other than refraining from getting involved in yet another disastrous globalist trade deal or climate deal. That is more of a halt than a reversal, and the re-negotiation of NAFTA so far is leaving manufacturing by the wayside, and focusing more on agriculture, finance, and the media.
The more we try to gloat about the stock market, as though ordinary Americans own any stock and as though it weren't a bubble, and the more we try to spin the jobs reports as anything other than a continuation of the trend from Carter through Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush Jr, and Obama -- the more out-of-touch we're going to sound to ordinary Americans, including Trump supporters.
The support of the masses is the sole, only, and exclusive leverage of the Trump movement, since it has no support but rather outright hostility in all elite institutions. So we must stay as in-touch with normal Americans as possible, or lose the only strength we have at the negotiating table against the elites.
If that means being brutally honest, so be it -- we can truthfully and easily tell people that the elites are still the problem since they're not honoring the election outcome, and continuing on with business as usual. Apart from being more honest and connecting better with the people's everyday lives, it will give them motivation to start mobilizing in one way or another against the elites. There is no other way to light a fire under the asses of our insulated and contemptuous elites.
The last thing we want to attempt is to tell the American people, or just Trump supporters, that everything is getting better, and to feel hopeful rather than worried about where things have been heading the first six months, and the next six months.
That will make them mistrust us, because they're not stupid and realize that the Establishment and its elites are a lot harder to force into serving the public than Trump made it seem during the campaign. And it will also keep them complacently or apathetically on the sidelines, leaving the movement and its President with nobody to have his back when and where it matters.
Categories:
Economics,
Education,
Health,
Media,
Politics,
Psychology,
Technology
August 4, 2017
GOP: Zionist base, jihadist elite. Dems: jihadist base, Zionist elite
In the all-out effort to dump H.R. McMaster, a member of the neo-con Pentagon boarding party into the White House, the America-first movement is hammering away at the faultline that I explored in an earlier post and comments. In foreign policy, the GOP coalition is made up of those supporting Zionism (the Cultural Right) and those supporting jihadism (the Pentagon). The Zionist sympathizers come from the electoral base, while the jihadist sympathizers come from an elite power group.
Although the cracks in this coalition may have been there for awhile, they really started to widen before, during, and just after the long Middle East diplomatic trip. Israel got the cold shoulder, while Saudi Arabia got hundreds of billions worth of weapons and the iconic wizard globe picture.
After such a big let-down for the electoral base of the GOP, who were expecting a greater focus on the Holy Land than on decadent sandniggers dancing around with swords, there is a ripe opportunity to weaken base support for the Pentagon brass by driving home how little they care for Israel relative to Jihadi Arabia.
It's damn difficult to get Republicans to sour on the military, but if they see what grand purpose it's being mis-used for, they will totally be on board with shaking up our priorities to something more sensible. And while military priorities are not held by plebiscite, when even the Republican voters start to question the Pentagon's alliance with jihadists, that partnership is not going to last much longer.
This internal contradiction of the GOP is paralleled on the Democrat side as well. Their electoral base (Cultural Left) is aligned with jihadists, or Sunni extremists, as part of their war against Islamophobia -- which is never a "fear" of peaceful Muslims, but only the jihadist types, so that their struggle against Islamophobia enlists Muslim Brotherhood types like Linda Sarsour. But their party's elite power group is Wall Street, which is controlled by Jews rather than Muslims.
If somebody wanted to whip up the Democrat base against their own party's power elite, they could use the natural disgust that extremist Muslims have toward Jews, and say how dare our party be run by Jewish Wall Street. There would have to be some concrete policy Wall Street was pursuing that was against Muslims -- say, investing in Israel and therefore against the Palestinians. The BDS movement to boycott / divest / sanction Israel has mostly targeted another power group in the Democrat coalition that is disproportionately controlled by Jews -- higher ed -- but the logic is the same.
Just like Republicans and the military, you'd think it would be impossible to get hardcore Democrats to turn against academia, but the rapid spread of BDS shows that it can be done if they don't like the ends toward which higher ed is investing its money.
When the elite power groups are faced with the prospect of their electoral bases being totally opposed to the elite policies on a tribal group level, the elite group's first thought is to simply switch bases -- the Pentagon would take the Leftists against Islamophobia from the Democrats, and Wall Street would take the Israel-worshiping Christians from the Republicans.
That degree of re-alignment would take a long time. In the meantime, each power group tries instead to "grow their base" by "reaching across the aisle". McMaster hires a diversity consultant from the Muslim Brotherhood-esque CAIR (per Cernovich), while a university admin advertises its investments in Israel to draw in a larger applicant pool that is moderate and conservative.
Still, these largely amount to token gestures, and the two parties are stuck with the tension between their base and their elite power group.
Especially in a climate of populist uprisings, it looks like the outcome will be the base continuing to put pressure against the senior partners in their coalition, and reforming them from within. It will be Republican voters who turn the Pentagon away from its widespread support for Islamic extremists, and it will be Democrat voters who secure a student loan debt jubilee from the creditor class.
Although the cracks in this coalition may have been there for awhile, they really started to widen before, during, and just after the long Middle East diplomatic trip. Israel got the cold shoulder, while Saudi Arabia got hundreds of billions worth of weapons and the iconic wizard globe picture.
After such a big let-down for the electoral base of the GOP, who were expecting a greater focus on the Holy Land than on decadent sandniggers dancing around with swords, there is a ripe opportunity to weaken base support for the Pentagon brass by driving home how little they care for Israel relative to Jihadi Arabia.
It's damn difficult to get Republicans to sour on the military, but if they see what grand purpose it's being mis-used for, they will totally be on board with shaking up our priorities to something more sensible. And while military priorities are not held by plebiscite, when even the Republican voters start to question the Pentagon's alliance with jihadists, that partnership is not going to last much longer.
This internal contradiction of the GOP is paralleled on the Democrat side as well. Their electoral base (Cultural Left) is aligned with jihadists, or Sunni extremists, as part of their war against Islamophobia -- which is never a "fear" of peaceful Muslims, but only the jihadist types, so that their struggle against Islamophobia enlists Muslim Brotherhood types like Linda Sarsour. But their party's elite power group is Wall Street, which is controlled by Jews rather than Muslims.
If somebody wanted to whip up the Democrat base against their own party's power elite, they could use the natural disgust that extremist Muslims have toward Jews, and say how dare our party be run by Jewish Wall Street. There would have to be some concrete policy Wall Street was pursuing that was against Muslims -- say, investing in Israel and therefore against the Palestinians. The BDS movement to boycott / divest / sanction Israel has mostly targeted another power group in the Democrat coalition that is disproportionately controlled by Jews -- higher ed -- but the logic is the same.
Just like Republicans and the military, you'd think it would be impossible to get hardcore Democrats to turn against academia, but the rapid spread of BDS shows that it can be done if they don't like the ends toward which higher ed is investing its money.
When the elite power groups are faced with the prospect of their electoral bases being totally opposed to the elite policies on a tribal group level, the elite group's first thought is to simply switch bases -- the Pentagon would take the Leftists against Islamophobia from the Democrats, and Wall Street would take the Israel-worshiping Christians from the Republicans.
That degree of re-alignment would take a long time. In the meantime, each power group tries instead to "grow their base" by "reaching across the aisle". McMaster hires a diversity consultant from the Muslim Brotherhood-esque CAIR (per Cernovich), while a university admin advertises its investments in Israel to draw in a larger applicant pool that is moderate and conservative.
Still, these largely amount to token gestures, and the two parties are stuck with the tension between their base and their elite power group.
Especially in a climate of populist uprisings, it looks like the outcome will be the base continuing to put pressure against the senior partners in their coalition, and reforming them from within. It will be Republican voters who turn the Pentagon away from its widespread support for Islamic extremists, and it will be Democrat voters who secure a student loan debt jubilee from the creditor class.
Categories:
Economics,
Education,
Human Biodiversity,
Jews,
Morality,
Politics,
Psychology,
Religion,
Violence
August 3, 2017
China has rarely controlled Korea throughout history, no puppet strings now either
In the ramping up of tensions between the Pentagon and North Korea, much is being made of China's supposed powerful influence over the Hermit Kingdom. We don't have much of a relationship with NK directly, but we do with China, and they have a strong relationship with NK, so if we pressure China, we can indirectly pressure NK.
The trouble with this argument is that China has rarely had control over the Korean Peninsula. Sure, they're the #1 destination by far for NK's exports, but by now we should know that economic sanctions rarely work, no matter how strong or how long, if the target is determined to resist.
What China would really need to have is geopolitical and military influence over NK. They do not. They don't even have a base in NK. Of course they have a larger and stronger military, but that's true for China and just about any other nation in the world, other than regional or super-powers. That doesn't mean those nations can be pushed around by China, or that they act as vassals of China.
And while China and NK have a history of Communism, so has China and the USSR -- and that didn't prevent the Sino-Soviet split. Just because they're ideological fellow travelers from the same rough part of the globe doesn't make the smaller one a satellite of the larger one. The closest European analogy would seem to be China as the USSR, NK as Yugoslavia, and SK as Greece.
In fact, when has China ever controlled Korea during its long history?
It turns out that it has only done so during one of its dynasties, the Han. China defeated what is now NK (though not SK) around 100 BC and left the Four Commanderies of Han, the principal and most enduring one being the Lelang Commandery, which was centered in what is now Pyongyang. Chinese rule lasted uncontested until roughly 100 AD, when the growing state of Goguryeo in northern Korea began chipping away at the Chinese presence until it was totally absorbed by 300.
That is the only long, stable period of Chinese control over Korea.
Northern Korea has been controlled by other states from mainland Northeast Asia, but they were not Chinese, even though some of them ruled over China as well as NK. They all belong to the nomadic Steppe empires that have flourished to the north of China for centuries -- Liao, Jurchen (Great Jin), and Mongol. And not all of these groups managed to conquer Korea if they also got China -- the Manchus ruled China from the 17th to 19th centuries, but did not get Korea.
China's first dynasty began around 1600 BC, so out of 3600 years it has only controlled NK for 200-400 of them, and even that was 2000 years ago.
Today's situation is the historical norm between China and NK. Expecting China to be able to pull on some puppet strings and have NK dancing however they want, at least in their geopolitical and military behavior, is writing a letter to Santa Claus.
The role of historical constraints on current foreign policy is not only unappreciated, it is not even thought of. See also: ignoring the long history of who has controlled who between Iraq and Iran. Since 500 BC, if the two were part of the same polity, Iran has always been the expanding power and Iraq the conquered power. Gee, what could possibly happen if we weaken the hell out of Iraq? Just maybe it will be Iran who fills the vacuum.
That is not to say that historical constraints are fixed forever. But it does require honesty about how unusual of a situation the Pentagon's plans are. Maybe they're well within historical norms, maybe they're mixed, maybe they're rare, and maybe they've never happened before. That has to be one of the first questions we ask when evaluating whether or not to proceed. Let's try to avoid what is a pipe dream from the perspective of thousands of years of history.
The trouble with this argument is that China has rarely had control over the Korean Peninsula. Sure, they're the #1 destination by far for NK's exports, but by now we should know that economic sanctions rarely work, no matter how strong or how long, if the target is determined to resist.
What China would really need to have is geopolitical and military influence over NK. They do not. They don't even have a base in NK. Of course they have a larger and stronger military, but that's true for China and just about any other nation in the world, other than regional or super-powers. That doesn't mean those nations can be pushed around by China, or that they act as vassals of China.
And while China and NK have a history of Communism, so has China and the USSR -- and that didn't prevent the Sino-Soviet split. Just because they're ideological fellow travelers from the same rough part of the globe doesn't make the smaller one a satellite of the larger one. The closest European analogy would seem to be China as the USSR, NK as Yugoslavia, and SK as Greece.
In fact, when has China ever controlled Korea during its long history?
It turns out that it has only done so during one of its dynasties, the Han. China defeated what is now NK (though not SK) around 100 BC and left the Four Commanderies of Han, the principal and most enduring one being the Lelang Commandery, which was centered in what is now Pyongyang. Chinese rule lasted uncontested until roughly 100 AD, when the growing state of Goguryeo in northern Korea began chipping away at the Chinese presence until it was totally absorbed by 300.
That is the only long, stable period of Chinese control over Korea.
Northern Korea has been controlled by other states from mainland Northeast Asia, but they were not Chinese, even though some of them ruled over China as well as NK. They all belong to the nomadic Steppe empires that have flourished to the north of China for centuries -- Liao, Jurchen (Great Jin), and Mongol. And not all of these groups managed to conquer Korea if they also got China -- the Manchus ruled China from the 17th to 19th centuries, but did not get Korea.
China's first dynasty began around 1600 BC, so out of 3600 years it has only controlled NK for 200-400 of them, and even that was 2000 years ago.
Today's situation is the historical norm between China and NK. Expecting China to be able to pull on some puppet strings and have NK dancing however they want, at least in their geopolitical and military behavior, is writing a letter to Santa Claus.
The role of historical constraints on current foreign policy is not only unappreciated, it is not even thought of. See also: ignoring the long history of who has controlled who between Iraq and Iran. Since 500 BC, if the two were part of the same polity, Iran has always been the expanding power and Iraq the conquered power. Gee, what could possibly happen if we weaken the hell out of Iraq? Just maybe it will be Iran who fills the vacuum.
That is not to say that historical constraints are fixed forever. But it does require honesty about how unusual of a situation the Pentagon's plans are. Maybe they're well within historical norms, maybe they're mixed, maybe they're rare, and maybe they've never happened before. That has to be one of the first questions we ask when evaluating whether or not to proceed. Let's try to avoid what is a pipe dream from the perspective of thousands of years of history.
Categories:
Economics,
Geography,
Human Biodiversity,
Politics,
Violence
August 1, 2017
"De-funding" sanctuary cities -- by a whopping 0.5%
In another lesson in "reading beyond the headline," it turns out that the DoJ's supposed crackdown on sanctuary cities will de-fund less than 1% of federal grant money to state and local governments. From the LA Times:
Somehow I think the very wealthy cities that are being targeted will be able to withstand half a percent of their grant money being taken away -- whenever that's going to happen anyway. Here we are, half a year into the Trump era, and they haven't gotten squat taken away. And that's with Mr. immigration hardliner as the Attorney General -- c'mon Sessions, hit them with your best shot! Time is running out.
"Cracking down" on sanctuary cities makes me think of the National Guard storming the city and hauling illegals away by the hundreds every day in the largest 10 cities. Or tightening the screws on all federal funding the city gets, not just through the DoJ, and not just through one little program within the DoJ.
This fits into the general pattern we have seen, and probably will continue to see, with the most hot-button topic of the election season, immigration. Adrenaline junkies want to just pop the headline in their mouth and get amped up all day -- whether they're raging against it or pumping their fist in favor.
That allows the Establishment to do nothing but token gestures -- they will get the same reaction from the haters and fan-boys no matter what level of action they take, and since they want to preserve the status quo, just make it a minimal action.
That makes immigration one of the main issues on which we will have to try to primary the cucks -- not just national politicians trying to get into the Congress, but governors and state legislatures as well.
But in order to repeal and replace the Republican Establishment, we're first going to have to take a cold hard look at what is actually going on in the Trump era. If we just look at every headline and respond with "All right, never tired of winning!" then there is nothing to be upset over, and no reason to primary the GOP sell-outs.
A Panglossian tone will never motivate ordinary voters to get out and do the grassroots activities that need to get done in order for a populist and nationalist insurgency to take over the GOP.
The new policy, announced by the Department of Justice, will apply to all cities that get grants from the so-called Byrne Justice Assistance grant program, for which the administration has requested just over $380 million for the coming year.
So far, the new policy applies only to those justice assistance grants, which local jurisdictions can use for a wide variety of programs related to law enforcement, including drug treatment, witness protection and prisoner reentry programs.
Although the move carries considerable symbolism because of the high-profile debate over sanctuaries, the money involved is roughly half a percent of federal grants to state and local governments, according to figures from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.
Somehow I think the very wealthy cities that are being targeted will be able to withstand half a percent of their grant money being taken away -- whenever that's going to happen anyway. Here we are, half a year into the Trump era, and they haven't gotten squat taken away. And that's with Mr. immigration hardliner as the Attorney General -- c'mon Sessions, hit them with your best shot! Time is running out.
"Cracking down" on sanctuary cities makes me think of the National Guard storming the city and hauling illegals away by the hundreds every day in the largest 10 cities. Or tightening the screws on all federal funding the city gets, not just through the DoJ, and not just through one little program within the DoJ.
This fits into the general pattern we have seen, and probably will continue to see, with the most hot-button topic of the election season, immigration. Adrenaline junkies want to just pop the headline in their mouth and get amped up all day -- whether they're raging against it or pumping their fist in favor.
That allows the Establishment to do nothing but token gestures -- they will get the same reaction from the haters and fan-boys no matter what level of action they take, and since they want to preserve the status quo, just make it a minimal action.
That makes immigration one of the main issues on which we will have to try to primary the cucks -- not just national politicians trying to get into the Congress, but governors and state legislatures as well.
But in order to repeal and replace the Republican Establishment, we're first going to have to take a cold hard look at what is actually going on in the Trump era. If we just look at every headline and respond with "All right, never tired of winning!" then there is nothing to be upset over, and no reason to primary the GOP sell-outs.
A Panglossian tone will never motivate ordinary voters to get out and do the grassroots activities that need to get done in order for a populist and nationalist insurgency to take over the GOP.
Categories:
Geography,
Human Biodiversity,
Media,
Politics
July 30, 2017
Break up insurance monopolies if they raise prices rather than take lower profits, as their costs go up
The Trump administration is making two related threats to the insurance monopolies, in an effort to lower the prices people pay in the wake of Obamacare. Both focus on the higher costs that insurance monopolies face when less healthy people are drawn into their coverage programs:
1) End the subsidies ("BAILOUTS") that the insurance monopolies get from the government, which were intended to keep them from raising their prices to off-set the higher costs of covering a less healthy group of people (poorer people, pre-existing conditions).
2) End the government mandate that everybody sign up with the insurance monopolies. If everybody signs up, that means healthier and younger people must do so, and they won't be consuming much healthcare, which off-sets the greater amount consumed by the new sicker groups included under Obamacare. If they were no longer required, that would lower the amount that these younger and healthier people spend, since they would choose to consume little or none, and would be free from financial punishment.
Both of these aspects of Obamacare are forms of the insurance monopolies extracting wealth from ordinary citizens -- the first through government funds from taxpayers, and the second through young / healthy individuals.
The propaganda argument claims that these insurance monopolies have no choice -- if they're supposed to cover a group of people that is sicker on average than under the old scheme (they are poorer, have pre-existing conditions, etc.), then that raises the costs to the companies, who now have to provide more of their products and services.
This argument is always wrong, and is just an attempt to enshrine corporate greed over consumer well-being. Very simply, if costs to the provider increase, that can just as well cause a reduction in the company's profits with no change in the prices they charge to consumers. They could eat the higher costs themselves, rather than pass them along to the consumer by jacking up their prices.
But doesn't corporate greed prevent such a caring and altruistic solution? Not necessarily. If the market for their products and services is competitive, that will take care of the greed problem. If costs rise for all insurance companies, and by similar amounts, the greedy company that tries to preserve its old profit margins by jacking up prices will see their customers flee in droves after the sticker shock. They will price themselves out of the market, which will be overtaken instead by rival companies who decide to only modestly raise their prices.
That sets off round after round of competition over price, so that they all end up at the old price and no gouging of consumers. With higher costs and similar prices and revenues, that means the seismic change took place in the area of profits -- lower margins and lower total profits.
Only if the market is highly concentrated into the hands of just a few gigantic corporations, can the providers jack up their prices in response to higher costs, and not lose all of their consumers, who have no one else to buy from.
The insurance and pharmaceutical markets are two such cases, where the sectors have become highly monopolized after decades of mergers and acquisitions, altering the landscape from dozens or hundreds of competitive providers into one where just a few tower over whatever is left. That is a major cause of the soaring prices of healthcare over the past several decades.
The #6 spot on the Fortune 500 within the US is held by UnitedHealth, which has grown to the largest HMO in the nation after two decades of buying up the major insurer in a state, going state by state until they're all part of a sprawling HMO empire. After buying out so much of the competition, they don't have to worry about losing consumers if they gouge them on prices as costs to the company increase. Where else will their consumers go? Anthem? Aetna? Humana? Same story with them.
Along with the ability to gouge consumers on prices in response to higher costs to the company, their immense wealth and concentrated power also allows them to more easily buy off the government, as they did with Obamacare. If the insurance monopolies had to cover sicker people, the insurers did not want to eat those costs themselves -- they wanted somebody else to pay for the higher costs. So they got the government to directly subsidize them, and got the government to require individuals to sign up who would not be consuming much healthcare but would still have to pay high rates.
Monopolization also weakens innovation, since one company does not have to find ways to "build a better mousetrap" -- or deliver a better product at a lower price -- in order to lure consumers away from rival companies that have worse products at higher prices. They can keep on doing whatever failed garbage has made us the sickest nation, based on how much we pay for healthcare, and not worry about angry consumers leaving for providers that give us more bang for our buck.
So, when the insurance monopolies threaten the Trump administration about how the White House's actions will force the insurers to raise their rates, the audience needs to hear this forceful rejection by the entire Trump team -- and anyone in Congress who isn't still a total sell-out to the monopolies (whether that means progressive Democrats or competition-minded libertarians -- perhaps another role for the Bernie-Rand-Trump coalition).
The American people must become accustomed to hearing the counter-argument that higher costs to some company just means the companies are going to eat those costs themselves and accept lower profit margins, or else they'll price themselves out of the market. And that if that isn't going to happen, that must mean the market is highly concentrated and needs to be broken up into many players of similar size.
In launching a populist war against the insurance monopolies, the Trump faction has to let the American people know that the plans to end government subsidies and end the mandate will be accompanied by vigorous trust-busting. In the meantime, Trump can use the bully pulpit to shame the insurance monopolies for trying to gouge the American people on prices rather than accept lower profits, when they're already richer than God and at the top of the pack in the Fortune 500.
"Here I am trying to lower h'care premiums, yet insurers insist on jacking up prices. WRONG: they eat higher costs, and accept lower profits, or monopolies will be broken up!"
Related post: same reasoning, applied to slapping tariffs on American companies who off-shore their production. That imposes a higher cost on the provider, but that does not translate into higher prices to consumers -- only lower profits for the stockholders, if the market is competitive.
Either great minds think alike, or someone with access to Trump's ear read that post and passed the message along to the man himself. Shortly after, I remember during one campaign rally when he threatened the big fat 35% tariff, he broke into an aside and said something like "by the way, that doesn't mean higher prices for consumers, because the companies will still have to compete on price".
Let's hope the Trump-verse is still listening, or that great minds are still thinking alike. We must dispel once and for all with this fiction that higher costs to a company mean the same profits and higher prices -- it means the same prices, and lower profits!
1) End the subsidies ("BAILOUTS") that the insurance monopolies get from the government, which were intended to keep them from raising their prices to off-set the higher costs of covering a less healthy group of people (poorer people, pre-existing conditions).
2) End the government mandate that everybody sign up with the insurance monopolies. If everybody signs up, that means healthier and younger people must do so, and they won't be consuming much healthcare, which off-sets the greater amount consumed by the new sicker groups included under Obamacare. If they were no longer required, that would lower the amount that these younger and healthier people spend, since they would choose to consume little or none, and would be free from financial punishment.
Both of these aspects of Obamacare are forms of the insurance monopolies extracting wealth from ordinary citizens -- the first through government funds from taxpayers, and the second through young / healthy individuals.
The propaganda argument claims that these insurance monopolies have no choice -- if they're supposed to cover a group of people that is sicker on average than under the old scheme (they are poorer, have pre-existing conditions, etc.), then that raises the costs to the companies, who now have to provide more of their products and services.
This argument is always wrong, and is just an attempt to enshrine corporate greed over consumer well-being. Very simply, if costs to the provider increase, that can just as well cause a reduction in the company's profits with no change in the prices they charge to consumers. They could eat the higher costs themselves, rather than pass them along to the consumer by jacking up their prices.
But doesn't corporate greed prevent such a caring and altruistic solution? Not necessarily. If the market for their products and services is competitive, that will take care of the greed problem. If costs rise for all insurance companies, and by similar amounts, the greedy company that tries to preserve its old profit margins by jacking up prices will see their customers flee in droves after the sticker shock. They will price themselves out of the market, which will be overtaken instead by rival companies who decide to only modestly raise their prices.
That sets off round after round of competition over price, so that they all end up at the old price and no gouging of consumers. With higher costs and similar prices and revenues, that means the seismic change took place in the area of profits -- lower margins and lower total profits.
Only if the market is highly concentrated into the hands of just a few gigantic corporations, can the providers jack up their prices in response to higher costs, and not lose all of their consumers, who have no one else to buy from.
The insurance and pharmaceutical markets are two such cases, where the sectors have become highly monopolized after decades of mergers and acquisitions, altering the landscape from dozens or hundreds of competitive providers into one where just a few tower over whatever is left. That is a major cause of the soaring prices of healthcare over the past several decades.
The #6 spot on the Fortune 500 within the US is held by UnitedHealth, which has grown to the largest HMO in the nation after two decades of buying up the major insurer in a state, going state by state until they're all part of a sprawling HMO empire. After buying out so much of the competition, they don't have to worry about losing consumers if they gouge them on prices as costs to the company increase. Where else will their consumers go? Anthem? Aetna? Humana? Same story with them.
Along with the ability to gouge consumers on prices in response to higher costs to the company, their immense wealth and concentrated power also allows them to more easily buy off the government, as they did with Obamacare. If the insurance monopolies had to cover sicker people, the insurers did not want to eat those costs themselves -- they wanted somebody else to pay for the higher costs. So they got the government to directly subsidize them, and got the government to require individuals to sign up who would not be consuming much healthcare but would still have to pay high rates.
Monopolization also weakens innovation, since one company does not have to find ways to "build a better mousetrap" -- or deliver a better product at a lower price -- in order to lure consumers away from rival companies that have worse products at higher prices. They can keep on doing whatever failed garbage has made us the sickest nation, based on how much we pay for healthcare, and not worry about angry consumers leaving for providers that give us more bang for our buck.
So, when the insurance monopolies threaten the Trump administration about how the White House's actions will force the insurers to raise their rates, the audience needs to hear this forceful rejection by the entire Trump team -- and anyone in Congress who isn't still a total sell-out to the monopolies (whether that means progressive Democrats or competition-minded libertarians -- perhaps another role for the Bernie-Rand-Trump coalition).
The American people must become accustomed to hearing the counter-argument that higher costs to some company just means the companies are going to eat those costs themselves and accept lower profit margins, or else they'll price themselves out of the market. And that if that isn't going to happen, that must mean the market is highly concentrated and needs to be broken up into many players of similar size.
In launching a populist war against the insurance monopolies, the Trump faction has to let the American people know that the plans to end government subsidies and end the mandate will be accompanied by vigorous trust-busting. In the meantime, Trump can use the bully pulpit to shame the insurance monopolies for trying to gouge the American people on prices rather than accept lower profits, when they're already richer than God and at the top of the pack in the Fortune 500.
"Here I am trying to lower h'care premiums, yet insurers insist on jacking up prices. WRONG: they eat higher costs, and accept lower profits, or monopolies will be broken up!"
Related post: same reasoning, applied to slapping tariffs on American companies who off-shore their production. That imposes a higher cost on the provider, but that does not translate into higher prices to consumers -- only lower profits for the stockholders, if the market is competitive.
Either great minds think alike, or someone with access to Trump's ear read that post and passed the message along to the man himself. Shortly after, I remember during one campaign rally when he threatened the big fat 35% tariff, he broke into an aside and said something like "by the way, that doesn't mean higher prices for consumers, because the companies will still have to compete on price".
Let's hope the Trump-verse is still listening, or that great minds are still thinking alike. We must dispel once and for all with this fiction that higher costs to a company mean the same profits and higher prices -- it means the same prices, and lower profits!
July 28, 2017
After "repeal and replace" fails, Trump cannot let GOP brand taint his ideas too
Today the American people, especially Republican voters, realize that the GOP exists only to peddle red meat ideas to their base in order to gain access to Washington, and then dump those promises immediately upon joining the Swamp.
"Repeal and replace Obamacare" is not some vague platitude like "defend the Constitution" or "fight for the rights of the unborn". It's a concrete policy target whose success or failure cannot be spun in the way the other red meat promises can be. And their effort failed, big-league, despite controlling all branches of government.
It was all just a lie to elect more of their party into the Congress for their own sake, and to raise boatloads of donor money on the theme.
Trump went to bat for the GOP Congress -- not zealously, but at least holding pow-wows, threatening unwilling Congressmen, and refraining from advocating his own longstanding single-payer goals. He used their slogan on the campaign trail, "repeal and replace". He did not appear to be at war with his own party in Congress, or even neutral.
The public will probably link Trump with the healthcare bill failure, just as they did when Trump's approval ratings took a nosedive right after the House's first failed attempt back in March. Trump had nothing to do with the creation of that bill or the dynamics of its failure, but unless he was vocally against it, Republican voters assume he was roughly on the same page as them idea-wise, and part of the same team effort to pass it mechanics-wise.
So they blamed him for being part of the losing team: maybe he didn't do enough to put good ideas in it, or didn't do enough to cajole the hold-outs by using his supreme office and bully pulpit.
Now that the GOP brand has been cemented as being cynical liars and spineless do-nothings, the Trump faction must distance itself from the GOP. The plan was for the bold, fresh Trump movement to stage a hostile takeover of the GOP and subject it to a major brand rehabilitation, to keep it viable and even thriving long-term.
But so far, the GOP is dead-set against adapting itself to the Trump movement, other than giving in somewhat on re-industrialization. They are determined to ride it till the wheels fall off. They'll all either have golden parachutes, to mix metaphors, or they'll have their brains rotted out by tumors anyway.
We'll see if the new RNC Chairwoman, Ronna McDaniel, can right the ship or not. It means making a decisive break with the failed conservatism of the past several decades, orienting toward populism and nationalism, and fielding candidates who are sincere rather than feckless or outright deceitful.
The temptation will be the status quo because there's simply far too much donor money and influence with power groups (Pentagon, Big Pharma, Wall Street, media, etc.) from sticking with what has failed.
The elites and their power groups are degenerate, clueless, wasteful, and dangerous. They must be ignored, and the general public appealed to. In other times, when we had an elite that was stewardship-minded, you could just rely on them and not so much on public outreach. But now that the elite is so infested with parasites, they cannot be relied on to produce results, let alone guide something as large as one of the two national parties toward long-term sustainability.
Trump won with the people, not the elites or any of their power groups -- indeed, against their constant and hysterical objections. The GOP can either imitate the successful, or go extinct.
If Trump tries to advance his big plans through Congress rather than the executive branch, and especially if he plans on only working with the GOP, his winning ideas will inevitably become corrupted by the losing Republican Establishment. His momentum will tumble off a cliff, and after perhaps limping into re-election, the movement will get cut off from top power after that.
That leaves three paths:
1) Advance the agenda through executive branch parallels of legislative functions, like Obama did, by getting creative if necessary. Works best for things that the public is not too interested in, or won't mobilize over. E.g., ending support for jihadist militias in Syria.
2) Go through Congressional GOP, but against their failed orthodoxy, and daring them in public to defy him and the tens of millions of voters who finally delivered the White House to a Republican. He must back this up with a threat to sic his mob of rabid supporters on anyone who defies the majority of citizens. E.g., deporting at least half the illegal population by the end of his term, de facto end to labor-related visas, etc.
3) Go through Congress on a topic with bipartisan appeal, like infrastructure.
The common theme in those paths is that they don't require a lot of political capital, since Trump has effectively zero or negative capital among DC Swamp dwellers. Something that everyone loves, like rebuilding roads and airports, doesn't require Trump to give them anything beyond his signature at the end. Something that the GOP opposes, but that the Trump mob demands, can be gotten by appealing to those with whom he has immense capital (citizens). And executive actions are unilateral, although making sure they are enforced is another question.
After six months of failing at their own topics rather than pursuing and achieving the Trump agenda, it's pretty clear that the GOP will never consider Trump's political debt paid off, after he burned their party and brand to the ground during the primary and general. So even if he does build up a modicum of capital with them over four years, they will not consider it enough to put him in positive territory, and they will therefore never do him any big favors in good faith. They won't even call off the Deep State coup, and they control all branches of government.
The natural first step would be for Trump to re-adopt his campaign trail tone about how he's not a conservative, how he wants to convert Democrats and Independents, while also detailing what a disaster the other major party is too. Everybody already sees how much the Democrats suck, though: they don't control anything because no one trusts them. The Democrats are a thoroughly defeated non-entity in contemporary politics.
What matters now is distancing himself from the GOP, which people actually do trust, but which consistently disappoints and outright betrays them. Whether that eventually leads to forming a new second party to supplant the GOP, or whether enough pressure causes the GOP to finally relent and let the Trump movement take over, remains to be seen. But we can't tolerate any more typical Republican bullshit, or the stench and disease will rub off on the Trump movement as well.
"Repeal and replace Obamacare" is not some vague platitude like "defend the Constitution" or "fight for the rights of the unborn". It's a concrete policy target whose success or failure cannot be spun in the way the other red meat promises can be. And their effort failed, big-league, despite controlling all branches of government.
It was all just a lie to elect more of their party into the Congress for their own sake, and to raise boatloads of donor money on the theme.
Trump went to bat for the GOP Congress -- not zealously, but at least holding pow-wows, threatening unwilling Congressmen, and refraining from advocating his own longstanding single-payer goals. He used their slogan on the campaign trail, "repeal and replace". He did not appear to be at war with his own party in Congress, or even neutral.
The public will probably link Trump with the healthcare bill failure, just as they did when Trump's approval ratings took a nosedive right after the House's first failed attempt back in March. Trump had nothing to do with the creation of that bill or the dynamics of its failure, but unless he was vocally against it, Republican voters assume he was roughly on the same page as them idea-wise, and part of the same team effort to pass it mechanics-wise.
So they blamed him for being part of the losing team: maybe he didn't do enough to put good ideas in it, or didn't do enough to cajole the hold-outs by using his supreme office and bully pulpit.
Now that the GOP brand has been cemented as being cynical liars and spineless do-nothings, the Trump faction must distance itself from the GOP. The plan was for the bold, fresh Trump movement to stage a hostile takeover of the GOP and subject it to a major brand rehabilitation, to keep it viable and even thriving long-term.
But so far, the GOP is dead-set against adapting itself to the Trump movement, other than giving in somewhat on re-industrialization. They are determined to ride it till the wheels fall off. They'll all either have golden parachutes, to mix metaphors, or they'll have their brains rotted out by tumors anyway.
We'll see if the new RNC Chairwoman, Ronna McDaniel, can right the ship or not. It means making a decisive break with the failed conservatism of the past several decades, orienting toward populism and nationalism, and fielding candidates who are sincere rather than feckless or outright deceitful.
The temptation will be the status quo because there's simply far too much donor money and influence with power groups (Pentagon, Big Pharma, Wall Street, media, etc.) from sticking with what has failed.
The elites and their power groups are degenerate, clueless, wasteful, and dangerous. They must be ignored, and the general public appealed to. In other times, when we had an elite that was stewardship-minded, you could just rely on them and not so much on public outreach. But now that the elite is so infested with parasites, they cannot be relied on to produce results, let alone guide something as large as one of the two national parties toward long-term sustainability.
Trump won with the people, not the elites or any of their power groups -- indeed, against their constant and hysterical objections. The GOP can either imitate the successful, or go extinct.
If Trump tries to advance his big plans through Congress rather than the executive branch, and especially if he plans on only working with the GOP, his winning ideas will inevitably become corrupted by the losing Republican Establishment. His momentum will tumble off a cliff, and after perhaps limping into re-election, the movement will get cut off from top power after that.
That leaves three paths:
1) Advance the agenda through executive branch parallels of legislative functions, like Obama did, by getting creative if necessary. Works best for things that the public is not too interested in, or won't mobilize over. E.g., ending support for jihadist militias in Syria.
2) Go through Congressional GOP, but against their failed orthodoxy, and daring them in public to defy him and the tens of millions of voters who finally delivered the White House to a Republican. He must back this up with a threat to sic his mob of rabid supporters on anyone who defies the majority of citizens. E.g., deporting at least half the illegal population by the end of his term, de facto end to labor-related visas, etc.
3) Go through Congress on a topic with bipartisan appeal, like infrastructure.
The common theme in those paths is that they don't require a lot of political capital, since Trump has effectively zero or negative capital among DC Swamp dwellers. Something that everyone loves, like rebuilding roads and airports, doesn't require Trump to give them anything beyond his signature at the end. Something that the GOP opposes, but that the Trump mob demands, can be gotten by appealing to those with whom he has immense capital (citizens). And executive actions are unilateral, although making sure they are enforced is another question.
After six months of failing at their own topics rather than pursuing and achieving the Trump agenda, it's pretty clear that the GOP will never consider Trump's political debt paid off, after he burned their party and brand to the ground during the primary and general. So even if he does build up a modicum of capital with them over four years, they will not consider it enough to put him in positive territory, and they will therefore never do him any big favors in good faith. They won't even call off the Deep State coup, and they control all branches of government.
The natural first step would be for Trump to re-adopt his campaign trail tone about how he's not a conservative, how he wants to convert Democrats and Independents, while also detailing what a disaster the other major party is too. Everybody already sees how much the Democrats suck, though: they don't control anything because no one trusts them. The Democrats are a thoroughly defeated non-entity in contemporary politics.
What matters now is distancing himself from the GOP, which people actually do trust, but which consistently disappoints and outright betrays them. Whether that eventually leads to forming a new second party to supplant the GOP, or whether enough pressure causes the GOP to finally relent and let the Trump movement take over, remains to be seen. But we can't tolerate any more typical Republican bullshit, or the stench and disease will rub off on the Trump movement as well.
July 27, 2017
Immigration still at Obama levels: Time to put the pressure on
Rex Tillerson's State Dept is continuing to issue visas like it's still the Obama years, for both immigrants and "non-immigrants". Many of the non-immigrant visa holders will overstay their visas and become illegals -- this is by far the #1 source of illegal immigration now. Instead of sneaking over the border, the US government gives them a "non-immigrant" visa, and then looks the other way if they choose to remain here after it's expired.
Here are the month-by-month figures for the Trump administration, in thousands:
There is no decline over time. Cumulatively there have been 243K immigrant visas, and 4.1 million non-immigrant visas. Taking the monthly average so far, and multiplying by 12, gives a projected figure for the year of 584K immigrant and 9.9 million non-immigrant visas.
How many of each type did Obama let in? Here are the annual figures from fiscal years 2007 to 2016, in thousands for immigrants and in millions for non-immigrants:
The projected figure for immigrant visas in the first 12 months of the Trump administration, 584K, is well above every year from Obama's terms except for 2016, and even then would only amount to a 5% drop.
The projected figure for non-immigrant visas, 9.9 million, is at or above every year of Obama's terms except the last two, and again would represent just a 5% drop from 2016.
Trump supporters voted for far more than a measly 5% drop in the number of immigrants flooding into our country. But since the GOP Establishment is so in favor of open borders, they're betraying the voters, against Trump's wishes (he campaigned on moratoriums and questioning birthright citizenship, not token gestures).
I guess they figure if Republican voters don't like the immigration policy, they have no other party to vote for instead. But that will only force us into making closed borders a demand during bitter primary battles against the Establishment. If they don't want that level of civil war in the Party, then they must reduce immigration levels by at least half. There really ought to be a moratorium, but in the interest of compromise, half. If they don't give us what we voted for, then it's right back to primary battle mode.
And if they betray Trump's promises by this much, the President himself will want to avoid looking like he got played for a sucker, and won't mind endorsing and perhaps even holding rallies for anti-Establishment Republican challengers. It's not just the executive branch officials like Secretary of State who determine immigration levels -- Congressmen can put pressure on them, like Senator Tillis did recently by jamming up a nomination until he got more cheap labor visas out of the executive branch.
By the end of July, there will be about 250K immigrant visas in total, and about 5 million non-immigrant visas. That right there is half of the level from Obama's second term. So achieving the goal of halving Obama's immigration level would require a more or less shutdown for the remaining six months.
We will find out how much the Trump faction wants to tackle the flow of new immigrants, or how much leverage they have against the open-borders globalists. We've already seen that the rate of deportations is lower than under Obama -- at the going rate of 17K deportations per month, even after all four years of Trump's first term, that would only remove 816K, rounded up to 1 million.
But there are at least 1 million new immigrants every year, including now under Trump as under Obama. There will be about a half-million who will be legal long-term immigrants, and of the other 10 million supposedly temporary immigrants, all it takes is single-digit percentages to overstay and remain, to fill out the rest of 1 million new long-term immigrants in just one year.
General Kelly at DHS is not removing them fast enough to counter-act the rapid pace at which Tillerson at State is flooding them in. There are already perhaps 20 million illegals here, so solving that problem means ramping up deportations and more or less closing off the in-flow. Otherwise the flooded ship will only take on more and more water until it finally sinks.
I'm going to do regular monthly updates on this topic so we can monitor what is actually going on, rather than what the spin tells us. Immigration is such a hot-button topic, that both sides play the endorphin rush game -- the globalists want to wail like Trump is sending millions out of the country and slamming the door shut on newcomers, while Trump cheerleaders want to jerk themselves off to the exact same scenario. But that scenario is wrong, and only keeping tabs on the data will tell us that, not imagining whatever scenario lets us get an endorphin rush of outrage or gloating.
If our audience is globalists, then yes, we should make them afraid of all the things Trump is going to do to their precious little worldview. Demoralize them. But if our audience is fellow Trump supporters, sympathetic Republicans, curious Independents, and so on, then we need to tell them the honest truth so that we can get ourselves fired up to put the pressure on Tillerson, Kelly, and the GOP Congress to carry out the damn agenda that we voted for with Trump, in both the primary and general.
Here are the month-by-month figures for the Trump administration, in thousands:
| Month | Immigrant | Non-immigrant |
| Feb | 44 | 695 |
| Mar | 52 | 907 |
| Apr | 48 | 735 |
| May | 55 | 884 |
| Jun | 45 | 908 |
There is no decline over time. Cumulatively there have been 243K immigrant visas, and 4.1 million non-immigrant visas. Taking the monthly average so far, and multiplying by 12, gives a projected figure for the year of 584K immigrant and 9.9 million non-immigrant visas.
How many of each type did Obama let in? Here are the annual figures from fiscal years 2007 to 2016, in thousands for immigrants and in millions for non-immigrants:
| Year | Immigrant | Non-immigrant |
| 2007 | 434 | 6.4 |
| 2008 | 470 | 6.6 |
| 2009 | 469 | 5.8 |
| 2010 | 482 | 6.4 |
| 2011 | 476 | 7.5 |
| 2012 | 482 | 8.9 |
| 2013 | 473 | 9.2 |
| 2014 | 467 | 9.9 |
| 2015 | 531 | 10.9 |
| 2016 | 618 | 10.4 |
The projected figure for immigrant visas in the first 12 months of the Trump administration, 584K, is well above every year from Obama's terms except for 2016, and even then would only amount to a 5% drop.
The projected figure for non-immigrant visas, 9.9 million, is at or above every year of Obama's terms except the last two, and again would represent just a 5% drop from 2016.
Trump supporters voted for far more than a measly 5% drop in the number of immigrants flooding into our country. But since the GOP Establishment is so in favor of open borders, they're betraying the voters, against Trump's wishes (he campaigned on moratoriums and questioning birthright citizenship, not token gestures).
I guess they figure if Republican voters don't like the immigration policy, they have no other party to vote for instead. But that will only force us into making closed borders a demand during bitter primary battles against the Establishment. If they don't want that level of civil war in the Party, then they must reduce immigration levels by at least half. There really ought to be a moratorium, but in the interest of compromise, half. If they don't give us what we voted for, then it's right back to primary battle mode.
And if they betray Trump's promises by this much, the President himself will want to avoid looking like he got played for a sucker, and won't mind endorsing and perhaps even holding rallies for anti-Establishment Republican challengers. It's not just the executive branch officials like Secretary of State who determine immigration levels -- Congressmen can put pressure on them, like Senator Tillis did recently by jamming up a nomination until he got more cheap labor visas out of the executive branch.
By the end of July, there will be about 250K immigrant visas in total, and about 5 million non-immigrant visas. That right there is half of the level from Obama's second term. So achieving the goal of halving Obama's immigration level would require a more or less shutdown for the remaining six months.
We will find out how much the Trump faction wants to tackle the flow of new immigrants, or how much leverage they have against the open-borders globalists. We've already seen that the rate of deportations is lower than under Obama -- at the going rate of 17K deportations per month, even after all four years of Trump's first term, that would only remove 816K, rounded up to 1 million.
But there are at least 1 million new immigrants every year, including now under Trump as under Obama. There will be about a half-million who will be legal long-term immigrants, and of the other 10 million supposedly temporary immigrants, all it takes is single-digit percentages to overstay and remain, to fill out the rest of 1 million new long-term immigrants in just one year.
General Kelly at DHS is not removing them fast enough to counter-act the rapid pace at which Tillerson at State is flooding them in. There are already perhaps 20 million illegals here, so solving that problem means ramping up deportations and more or less closing off the in-flow. Otherwise the flooded ship will only take on more and more water until it finally sinks.
I'm going to do regular monthly updates on this topic so we can monitor what is actually going on, rather than what the spin tells us. Immigration is such a hot-button topic, that both sides play the endorphin rush game -- the globalists want to wail like Trump is sending millions out of the country and slamming the door shut on newcomers, while Trump cheerleaders want to jerk themselves off to the exact same scenario. But that scenario is wrong, and only keeping tabs on the data will tell us that, not imagining whatever scenario lets us get an endorphin rush of outrage or gloating.
If our audience is globalists, then yes, we should make them afraid of all the things Trump is going to do to their precious little worldview. Demoralize them. But if our audience is fellow Trump supporters, sympathetic Republicans, curious Independents, and so on, then we need to tell them the honest truth so that we can get ourselves fired up to put the pressure on Tillerson, Kelly, and the GOP Congress to carry out the damn agenda that we voted for with Trump, in both the primary and general.
Categories:
Geography,
Human Biodiversity,
Politics
July 26, 2017
What collective action do Trump rallies lead to, post-election?
Last night in Youngstown, Ohio, Trump held a rally in the northern Appalachian section of the Rust Belt, which has voted reliably Democrat in presidential elections going back to the dawn of the New Deal era in 1932 (aside from the bloodbath against the McGovern in '72). They were not solid Reagan Democrats, even though they fit the demographic profile.
The last time there was solid Republican support in the region was during the Progressive Era, circa 1900 to 1930. If the Trump movement manages to re-align the GOP away from the failed Bush model of appealing to suburbanite yuppies, and into a new Progressive party (in the sense of Teddy Roosevelt, not SJWs), the Republicans can reclaim this territory that they have not held for nearly a century.
That depends on whether or not the Rust Belt sees real progress made over the next four to eight years. Salesmanship counts for nothing if you don't deliver the goods.
The Establishment in DC and the economic elites will do everything they can to make sure that working-class Americans get paid less and less in real income, while their cost of living only goes up and up. How else is the top supposed to keep getting richer? Most of the soaring inequality over the past 40 years has taken the form of the elites extracting wealth from the middle and lower layers of the pyramid -- not by something honest like inventing a better mouse trap.
That means Trump will get little help within DC, although the GOP is at least somewhat willing to make concessions on trade policy in order to placate these new Rust Belt voters. In general, though, the struggle will fall to the people themselves. That is Trump's only real leverage in the negotiations over how American society will be shaped -- the immense size of his supporter base that he alone can mobilize into collective action (e.g., at the ballot box and winning the Electoral College).
Watching the crowd live on TV, and reading reports from outside the venue, it's clear that Trump supporters are still fired up for the agenda that the President campaigned on over the past two years.
But what are they supposed to do after the rally is over, in order to help propel that agenda forward? The rallies feel like pep rallies or tailgate parties, which prepare a fan base to show up in force on the battlefield against a rival team -- or at least, to intimidate the other team from the sidelines. But still, rallies prepare a group of people for collective ritualistic combat.
During campaign season, the most powerful thing to do as a group was cast a vote in the upcoming primary and then general election. That's why rallies are held leading up to a vote, rather than months ahead -- they galvanize people into collective action. This electoral option no longer exists.
They could tune into the debates, follow him on social media, put up signs and wear hats, and other ways -- outside of vote-casting -- to signal to everyone else how large his support base is. Well, we know by now that he has a very large and very zealous fan base, so there is little room for growth in that area as well.
And now, Trump is actually presiding over the executive branch of the federal government -- so now his large supporter base can actually use their size to get things done in Washington. They need an issue to focus on, and a strategy to implement.
These Trump voters, who were the only way the GOP could have won the White House, are not interested in the Establishment's healthcare proposals, which they can sense by intuition will be more of the same rape by insurance and drug corporations. If it were truly good, Trump would be giving specifics, explaining how the pieces work, and getting fired up. And he would be catching a lot of flak from the Establishment -- if he is pushing something that they have been eagerly pushing for a long time, it's probably not good for the people, and Trump is just trying to sell the unsell-able crap from the GOP orthodoxy.
The discussion of tax policies also received only polite applause from the working-class Rust Belt audience. They know that tax rates have been falling for decades, both for individuals and corporations, all while good jobs and industries have been sent out of the country. Rust Belt people know by now that there are no frustrated industrial stewards who really, really want to invest in America and Americans, but just can't make it work because of those darn sky-high tax rates.
By now, they're wise to the ruse -- as tax rates have plummeted, investments have left for the Third World to chase higher ROI, so the elites are not frustrated stewards but greedy bastards.
At least Trump did not tout the stock market bubble this time, which nobody in the Rust Belt benefits from, and which is bound to pop anyway during his term. A stock market decline will accompany re-industrialization and other forms of improving incomes and lowering cost-of-living for the working and middle classes -- that means higher labor costs and lower revenues for the rent-seeking industries that make up most of the stock market bubble these days. It will unwind the long-term stock rally over the past 30-40 years, as we unwind the de-industrialization of that same period.
The issue for Rust Belt voters is re-industrialization, which they know will not be affected by GOP tax policies. The only good tax in this area is a big, fat 35% tariff on the goods that American companies produce abroad, slap their brand on it, and sell it here, drawing revenue from American consumers without hiring American workers.
As for strategy, Trump and his team needn't be shy about rabble-rousing in northern Appalachia. The region is a historical hotbed of ordinary people banding together for populist causes. In 1916, as tensions were beginning to rise around the nation, a strike by steelworkers at the Youngstown Sheet and Tube plant grew into a riot that eventually burned down most of the business district. Another wave of strikes hit in 1937 in the smaller steel companies, so that by WWII most of them were unionized as well as the big one, US Steel.
Nobody on either side likes that level of confrontation -- but either you treat the people right, or they're going to treat you as the enemy. During and after WWII, labor unrest had substantially calmed down, because business leaders had taken the hint from the many waves of strikes during the Progressive and early New Deal eras. They didn't want to wind up at the guillotines, or on the losing side of a Russian-style Revolution in America.
What the people of the Rust Belt need now is a way to participate in collective action against the elites who have wiped out their livelihoods by sending their good-paying jobs outside of the country. By now there may only be a corporate headquarters to target, rather than steel mills themselves. Or government buildings where the policies are made. Or the banks that finance the industrialization of the Third World.
And maybe the targets will not be in lower-level cities like Youngstown, but in the higher-scale cities where the wealth and power have become concentrated.
Large crowds can march on them, protest outside, occupy the buildings, form picket lines to disrupt business as usual -- something to let the elites know that the people are sick and tired of seeing their economy and communities being destroyed, and that they're only going to escalate things until they get them back. They don't have political favors to call in with the US Senate or the board of investors, so they'll have to use their only leverage, which is their immense numbers and determination.
I'm not saying Trump has to begin by leading a mob carrying torches and pitchforks toward the law firm building that crafted the contracts for leaving America and investing in the Third World. But at the very least, he could urge them to call their local politicians, and hold marches or demonstrations at the private sector places that have wiped out American industry. "Let them hear the voice of the forgotten man and woman."
Now that they have cast their ballot, there must be something collective for them to do in order to drop less and less subtle hints to the elites that they must change from anti-social to pro-social, and that business as usual will be disrupted until they do.
The last time there was solid Republican support in the region was during the Progressive Era, circa 1900 to 1930. If the Trump movement manages to re-align the GOP away from the failed Bush model of appealing to suburbanite yuppies, and into a new Progressive party (in the sense of Teddy Roosevelt, not SJWs), the Republicans can reclaim this territory that they have not held for nearly a century.
That depends on whether or not the Rust Belt sees real progress made over the next four to eight years. Salesmanship counts for nothing if you don't deliver the goods.
The Establishment in DC and the economic elites will do everything they can to make sure that working-class Americans get paid less and less in real income, while their cost of living only goes up and up. How else is the top supposed to keep getting richer? Most of the soaring inequality over the past 40 years has taken the form of the elites extracting wealth from the middle and lower layers of the pyramid -- not by something honest like inventing a better mouse trap.
That means Trump will get little help within DC, although the GOP is at least somewhat willing to make concessions on trade policy in order to placate these new Rust Belt voters. In general, though, the struggle will fall to the people themselves. That is Trump's only real leverage in the negotiations over how American society will be shaped -- the immense size of his supporter base that he alone can mobilize into collective action (e.g., at the ballot box and winning the Electoral College).
Watching the crowd live on TV, and reading reports from outside the venue, it's clear that Trump supporters are still fired up for the agenda that the President campaigned on over the past two years.
But what are they supposed to do after the rally is over, in order to help propel that agenda forward? The rallies feel like pep rallies or tailgate parties, which prepare a fan base to show up in force on the battlefield against a rival team -- or at least, to intimidate the other team from the sidelines. But still, rallies prepare a group of people for collective ritualistic combat.
During campaign season, the most powerful thing to do as a group was cast a vote in the upcoming primary and then general election. That's why rallies are held leading up to a vote, rather than months ahead -- they galvanize people into collective action. This electoral option no longer exists.
They could tune into the debates, follow him on social media, put up signs and wear hats, and other ways -- outside of vote-casting -- to signal to everyone else how large his support base is. Well, we know by now that he has a very large and very zealous fan base, so there is little room for growth in that area as well.
And now, Trump is actually presiding over the executive branch of the federal government -- so now his large supporter base can actually use their size to get things done in Washington. They need an issue to focus on, and a strategy to implement.
These Trump voters, who were the only way the GOP could have won the White House, are not interested in the Establishment's healthcare proposals, which they can sense by intuition will be more of the same rape by insurance and drug corporations. If it were truly good, Trump would be giving specifics, explaining how the pieces work, and getting fired up. And he would be catching a lot of flak from the Establishment -- if he is pushing something that they have been eagerly pushing for a long time, it's probably not good for the people, and Trump is just trying to sell the unsell-able crap from the GOP orthodoxy.
The discussion of tax policies also received only polite applause from the working-class Rust Belt audience. They know that tax rates have been falling for decades, both for individuals and corporations, all while good jobs and industries have been sent out of the country. Rust Belt people know by now that there are no frustrated industrial stewards who really, really want to invest in America and Americans, but just can't make it work because of those darn sky-high tax rates.
By now, they're wise to the ruse -- as tax rates have plummeted, investments have left for the Third World to chase higher ROI, so the elites are not frustrated stewards but greedy bastards.
At least Trump did not tout the stock market bubble this time, which nobody in the Rust Belt benefits from, and which is bound to pop anyway during his term. A stock market decline will accompany re-industrialization and other forms of improving incomes and lowering cost-of-living for the working and middle classes -- that means higher labor costs and lower revenues for the rent-seeking industries that make up most of the stock market bubble these days. It will unwind the long-term stock rally over the past 30-40 years, as we unwind the de-industrialization of that same period.
The issue for Rust Belt voters is re-industrialization, which they know will not be affected by GOP tax policies. The only good tax in this area is a big, fat 35% tariff on the goods that American companies produce abroad, slap their brand on it, and sell it here, drawing revenue from American consumers without hiring American workers.
As for strategy, Trump and his team needn't be shy about rabble-rousing in northern Appalachia. The region is a historical hotbed of ordinary people banding together for populist causes. In 1916, as tensions were beginning to rise around the nation, a strike by steelworkers at the Youngstown Sheet and Tube plant grew into a riot that eventually burned down most of the business district. Another wave of strikes hit in 1937 in the smaller steel companies, so that by WWII most of them were unionized as well as the big one, US Steel.
Nobody on either side likes that level of confrontation -- but either you treat the people right, or they're going to treat you as the enemy. During and after WWII, labor unrest had substantially calmed down, because business leaders had taken the hint from the many waves of strikes during the Progressive and early New Deal eras. They didn't want to wind up at the guillotines, or on the losing side of a Russian-style Revolution in America.
What the people of the Rust Belt need now is a way to participate in collective action against the elites who have wiped out their livelihoods by sending their good-paying jobs outside of the country. By now there may only be a corporate headquarters to target, rather than steel mills themselves. Or government buildings where the policies are made. Or the banks that finance the industrialization of the Third World.
And maybe the targets will not be in lower-level cities like Youngstown, but in the higher-scale cities where the wealth and power have become concentrated.
Large crowds can march on them, protest outside, occupy the buildings, form picket lines to disrupt business as usual -- something to let the elites know that the people are sick and tired of seeing their economy and communities being destroyed, and that they're only going to escalate things until they get them back. They don't have political favors to call in with the US Senate or the board of investors, so they'll have to use their only leverage, which is their immense numbers and determination.
I'm not saying Trump has to begin by leading a mob carrying torches and pitchforks toward the law firm building that crafted the contracts for leaving America and investing in the Third World. But at the very least, he could urge them to call their local politicians, and hold marches or demonstrations at the private sector places that have wiped out American industry. "Let them hear the voice of the forgotten man and woman."
Now that they have cast their ballot, there must be something collective for them to do in order to drop less and less subtle hints to the elites that they must change from anti-social to pro-social, and that business as usual will be disrupted until they do.
July 25, 2017
Trump needs warriors, not perfect gentlemen, to win
Diehard Trump supporters, along with the President himself, have been souring on Attorney General Sessions as the Deep State coup has expanded in scope and intensified in severity over the past several months.
Sessions opened the door to this coup by recusing himself from the Russia witch hunt, leaving his liberal Democrat deputy Rosenstein to appoint the Special Counsel Mueller after what was an inevitable firing of FBI Director Comey. Sessions could have withdrawn his recusal and stepped in to shut down the coup once he saw how bad it was getting, but he continues to maintain his recusal.
The reason Sessions gave for recusal was that some people might think he was an integral member of the Trump campaign, so that an investigation of that same campaign would have given him a conflict of interest. In order to avoid even the possible semblance of a potential quasi-conflict, he recused himself.
In a context of there being no crime, no evidence, and a naked attempt by the Deep State to overturn the election, a Democrat AG would never have recused himself and left Obama or Hillary wide open to sedition, even if the AG had been their formal campaign manager, and a Democrat President would never have accepted it from their appointee.
Republicans, especially of the conservative type, continue to prize their own personal reputation for integrity, propriety, and even-handedness when an enemy army is marching straight toward them with guns drawn. In war, sometimes you have to act crudely and inappropriately in order to keep from getting wiped out by the other side, and no one can be even-handed and dispassionate when only one side is hell-bent on wiping the other out by any means necessary.
"Blind justice" would mean an immediate shut-down of the witch hunt against Trump (no crime cited, no evidence either), and an immediate empaneling of grand juries (not the phony political theater of Congressional hearings) to prosecute the crimes of Hillary and Bill Clinton, Loretta Lynch, Obama, Susan Rice, the Podesta brothers, and all the rest of them. Throw in the Republican backstabbers, too, if we need to be bipartisan.
When a conservative completely misunderstands the context, he cannot be said to be pursuing propriety, which is necessarily context-sensitive. He is simply out-of-touch, reckessly so if the stakes are high for making an incorrect assessment.
Back in the 1950s, when the body politic was not at polarized war with itself, and when both parties agreed to rules of fair play, then what Sessions did would have been proper. In 2017, when conflict, bias, and duplicity are the only constants in politics, what he did was to back away from shielding his leader, who remains vulnerable to being taken out by an utterly amoral enemy force that is operating in war mode.
Propriety, in this context, would have meant nipping the coup in the bud by not recusing himself, and shutting these witch hunts down, even if it meant the bad-faith inquisition of the mass media would try to shame him into recusal for being "involved in" the campaign under investigation. He should have told them that everyone is "involved in" everything, if you argue it right, and it's not as though he were a central figure to the campaign's operation. "So think what you want about my integrity, the American people know this is the right thing to do to protect their vote from being overturned by this coup attempt."
The cult of decorum that paralyzes conservatives stems from a total misreading of what kind of environment they're in. When you're on the battlefield, what is proper is to shoot or be shot by the enemy -- a mindset you would never take on in a cooperative environment like moving a heavy piece of furniture together. We are at war, so that means we must act like it -- acting otherwise is not "remaining above the fray," it is sticking your head in the sand and getting mowed down by the advancing army.
The Democrats are not afraid to get mean and dirty because they see themselves at war, and hey, you don't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs. Slandering Sessions as a racist during his confirmation hearing, going after the finances of Trump's family, and giving a pass to a Democrat would-be mass murderer targeting Republicans -- hey, war is hell, and these are all toward the greater good of ensuring that the righteous side wins over the evil side.
Any hope that the Democrats or the elites would sign a ceasefire with us after Trump's election have been flushed completely down the drain. That became obvious months ago. So like it or not, our side too must go into the same mindset as theirs -- we will slander one of theirs even if we don't believe the charges, we will sic the top executive agencies on them just like they did on us under Obama, and we will give a pass to the tumor gnawing away at John McCain's brain.
War is hell, we don't like thinking or acting this way because we're not inveterate sociopaths like the elites have become. But by now it is either them or us, and fighting with a self-imposed handicap is tantamount to surrender and suicide. We're not going to keep on thinking and acting that way once we have defeated them, and reconciliation and fence-mending can begin. But until they are defeated, we have no choice but to pulverize them with no mercy. The harder the clobbering, the swifter the resolution.
In the meantime, it's time for a reality check about what we're up against:
We need people who are going to be as relentless and no-holds-barred against the enemy as they are going to be -- and have been -- against us. I wouldn't be surprised if, even after the Mueller witch hunt gets shut down, some other bogus pretext gets conjured up to launch another one. The AG must be vigilant from start to finish of Trump's term.
If Sessions cannot be persuaded to play that role as AG (and I don't think that he is a brutal vicious killer), then he has to go, as close as he is to Trump ideologically. Only the AG can shut down these Deep State coups coming from the DoJ, and shame and admonish the Republican Congress for allowing their own separate witch hunts to continue in the Intelligence committees. Whoever fills the role of AG must absolutely be willing to protect the President from these threats, which no other position can intervene to stop.
Who could take his place? Giuliani is an obvious choice, but there may be more obscure choices too.
The two complaints I've heard about Giuliani are that he could never get 50 votes in the Senate -- in which case Trump appoints him during the upcoming recess, and while the Senate decides when to hold a confirmation vote, the new AG shuts down the witch hunt.
The second is that he was for sanctuary cities as Mayor of New York in the 1990s, and amnesty more recently. Him and virtually every other Republican, aside from Sessions. But the main role of the AG in this context is preventing the Deep State coups from succeeding, rather than letting them fester, expand, and terminate the body politic. If he were chosen by Trump, after the immigration-themed election, I doubt he would go against Trump's wishes about sanctuary cities.
Plus it's not like Sessions has cracked down on sanctuary cities either -- issuing warnings for defunding so far, rather than doing the defunding, or escalating quickly in order to bring them around before Trump's first four years are up. We know he has never defended them, but if he's not going to be a brutal vicious killer, we need someone who will be.
And to his credit, Giuliani helped to craft the Muslim ban so that it would not be challenged as discriminating against a religion. That actually did go through in two executive orders, and has only been tied up in courts below the Supreme Court. Sadly, that's a greater tangible result on hardline immigration policy than the AG himself can claim so far.
Giuliani was also experienced at surveilling radical mosques after 9/11 in order to foil future attempts by jihadists already living within our borders. Radical Islamic terrorism was a major theme of the election, and continues to resonate with voters. He'd probably find it easier to label CAIR as a terrorist organization, especially now that our jihadist allies in the Middle East are targeting Qatar for its support of political Islam groups like the Muslim Brotherhood (while ignoring their own support for far more violent forms of Islam like ISIS).
Giuliani also broke up the mafia so much that the Sicilians put out a hit on him during the 1980s. Not to mention breaking up gangs during the falling-crime period of the 1990s. That would translate much more naturally into breaking up jihadist cells, MS-13, and other organized groups of bad hombres.
Again, maybe there's someone better yet than Giuliani, but he seems like a much better fit than the current AG for the world we actually live in.
Like Ann Coulter, I favor transferring Sessions to Homeland Security, where he can devote all his attention to immigration, terrorism, and drug cartels, and not have to get into the muck with the Deep State witch hunts. That would also dislodge one of the three members of the Pentagon boarding party, General Kelly, who could not sound any less like Trump on immigration if he tried.
It's nothing personal -- it's war, and if someone doesn't want to perform their duties in a certain role, they have to be assigned to a different role. People need to put aside their concerns over their personal image, and do what's best for the team to win against the advancing army with guns drawn.
Sessions opened the door to this coup by recusing himself from the Russia witch hunt, leaving his liberal Democrat deputy Rosenstein to appoint the Special Counsel Mueller after what was an inevitable firing of FBI Director Comey. Sessions could have withdrawn his recusal and stepped in to shut down the coup once he saw how bad it was getting, but he continues to maintain his recusal.
The reason Sessions gave for recusal was that some people might think he was an integral member of the Trump campaign, so that an investigation of that same campaign would have given him a conflict of interest. In order to avoid even the possible semblance of a potential quasi-conflict, he recused himself.
In a context of there being no crime, no evidence, and a naked attempt by the Deep State to overturn the election, a Democrat AG would never have recused himself and left Obama or Hillary wide open to sedition, even if the AG had been their formal campaign manager, and a Democrat President would never have accepted it from their appointee.
Republicans, especially of the conservative type, continue to prize their own personal reputation for integrity, propriety, and even-handedness when an enemy army is marching straight toward them with guns drawn. In war, sometimes you have to act crudely and inappropriately in order to keep from getting wiped out by the other side, and no one can be even-handed and dispassionate when only one side is hell-bent on wiping the other out by any means necessary.
"Blind justice" would mean an immediate shut-down of the witch hunt against Trump (no crime cited, no evidence either), and an immediate empaneling of grand juries (not the phony political theater of Congressional hearings) to prosecute the crimes of Hillary and Bill Clinton, Loretta Lynch, Obama, Susan Rice, the Podesta brothers, and all the rest of them. Throw in the Republican backstabbers, too, if we need to be bipartisan.
When a conservative completely misunderstands the context, he cannot be said to be pursuing propriety, which is necessarily context-sensitive. He is simply out-of-touch, reckessly so if the stakes are high for making an incorrect assessment.
Back in the 1950s, when the body politic was not at polarized war with itself, and when both parties agreed to rules of fair play, then what Sessions did would have been proper. In 2017, when conflict, bias, and duplicity are the only constants in politics, what he did was to back away from shielding his leader, who remains vulnerable to being taken out by an utterly amoral enemy force that is operating in war mode.
Propriety, in this context, would have meant nipping the coup in the bud by not recusing himself, and shutting these witch hunts down, even if it meant the bad-faith inquisition of the mass media would try to shame him into recusal for being "involved in" the campaign under investigation. He should have told them that everyone is "involved in" everything, if you argue it right, and it's not as though he were a central figure to the campaign's operation. "So think what you want about my integrity, the American people know this is the right thing to do to protect their vote from being overturned by this coup attempt."
The cult of decorum that paralyzes conservatives stems from a total misreading of what kind of environment they're in. When you're on the battlefield, what is proper is to shoot or be shot by the enemy -- a mindset you would never take on in a cooperative environment like moving a heavy piece of furniture together. We are at war, so that means we must act like it -- acting otherwise is not "remaining above the fray," it is sticking your head in the sand and getting mowed down by the advancing army.
The Democrats are not afraid to get mean and dirty because they see themselves at war, and hey, you don't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs. Slandering Sessions as a racist during his confirmation hearing, going after the finances of Trump's family, and giving a pass to a Democrat would-be mass murderer targeting Republicans -- hey, war is hell, and these are all toward the greater good of ensuring that the righteous side wins over the evil side.
Any hope that the Democrats or the elites would sign a ceasefire with us after Trump's election have been flushed completely down the drain. That became obvious months ago. So like it or not, our side too must go into the same mindset as theirs -- we will slander one of theirs even if we don't believe the charges, we will sic the top executive agencies on them just like they did on us under Obama, and we will give a pass to the tumor gnawing away at John McCain's brain.
War is hell, we don't like thinking or acting this way because we're not inveterate sociopaths like the elites have become. But by now it is either them or us, and fighting with a self-imposed handicap is tantamount to surrender and suicide. We're not going to keep on thinking and acting that way once we have defeated them, and reconciliation and fence-mending can begin. But until they are defeated, we have no choice but to pulverize them with no mercy. The harder the clobbering, the swifter the resolution.
In the meantime, it's time for a reality check about what we're up against:
Listen, and understand! That Terminator is out there! It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear! And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead!
We need people who are going to be as relentless and no-holds-barred against the enemy as they are going to be -- and have been -- against us. I wouldn't be surprised if, even after the Mueller witch hunt gets shut down, some other bogus pretext gets conjured up to launch another one. The AG must be vigilant from start to finish of Trump's term.
If Sessions cannot be persuaded to play that role as AG (and I don't think that he is a brutal vicious killer), then he has to go, as close as he is to Trump ideologically. Only the AG can shut down these Deep State coups coming from the DoJ, and shame and admonish the Republican Congress for allowing their own separate witch hunts to continue in the Intelligence committees. Whoever fills the role of AG must absolutely be willing to protect the President from these threats, which no other position can intervene to stop.
Who could take his place? Giuliani is an obvious choice, but there may be more obscure choices too.
The two complaints I've heard about Giuliani are that he could never get 50 votes in the Senate -- in which case Trump appoints him during the upcoming recess, and while the Senate decides when to hold a confirmation vote, the new AG shuts down the witch hunt.
The second is that he was for sanctuary cities as Mayor of New York in the 1990s, and amnesty more recently. Him and virtually every other Republican, aside from Sessions. But the main role of the AG in this context is preventing the Deep State coups from succeeding, rather than letting them fester, expand, and terminate the body politic. If he were chosen by Trump, after the immigration-themed election, I doubt he would go against Trump's wishes about sanctuary cities.
Plus it's not like Sessions has cracked down on sanctuary cities either -- issuing warnings for defunding so far, rather than doing the defunding, or escalating quickly in order to bring them around before Trump's first four years are up. We know he has never defended them, but if he's not going to be a brutal vicious killer, we need someone who will be.
And to his credit, Giuliani helped to craft the Muslim ban so that it would not be challenged as discriminating against a religion. That actually did go through in two executive orders, and has only been tied up in courts below the Supreme Court. Sadly, that's a greater tangible result on hardline immigration policy than the AG himself can claim so far.
Giuliani was also experienced at surveilling radical mosques after 9/11 in order to foil future attempts by jihadists already living within our borders. Radical Islamic terrorism was a major theme of the election, and continues to resonate with voters. He'd probably find it easier to label CAIR as a terrorist organization, especially now that our jihadist allies in the Middle East are targeting Qatar for its support of political Islam groups like the Muslim Brotherhood (while ignoring their own support for far more violent forms of Islam like ISIS).
Giuliani also broke up the mafia so much that the Sicilians put out a hit on him during the 1980s. Not to mention breaking up gangs during the falling-crime period of the 1990s. That would translate much more naturally into breaking up jihadist cells, MS-13, and other organized groups of bad hombres.
Again, maybe there's someone better yet than Giuliani, but he seems like a much better fit than the current AG for the world we actually live in.
Like Ann Coulter, I favor transferring Sessions to Homeland Security, where he can devote all his attention to immigration, terrorism, and drug cartels, and not have to get into the muck with the Deep State witch hunts. That would also dislodge one of the three members of the Pentagon boarding party, General Kelly, who could not sound any less like Trump on immigration if he tried.
It's nothing personal -- it's war, and if someone doesn't want to perform their duties in a certain role, they have to be assigned to a different role. People need to put aside their concerns over their personal image, and do what's best for the team to win against the advancing army with guns drawn.
July 23, 2017
Pessimistic on the elites, optimistic on the people
The tone of most diehard Trump supporters -- from Lou Dobbs to Alex Jones to Mike Cernovich to random white working class voters to yours truly -- has changed over the past several months, away from the triumphalism of the transition and Inauguration period, and back toward insurgency. What gives?
Quite simply, we thought that after we sent the elites the mother of all rude awakenings throughout the campaign, culminating in "Trump wins!" on election night, they would begin to negotiate with us. Given how stinging and unambiguous our rejection of their vision was, the negotiation should have been over the terms of their surrender. But at least some form of reconciliation between the insulated parasitic elites and the alienated and abused citizenry.
And yet while relations should have moved toward repair and harmony, they have instead moved toward further fracture and conflict between the upper and below-the-upper layers of society. That has come from the elites doggedly holding onto their parasitic grasp over the highest levers of power, not from the people who were content to signal the greatest vote of no confidence ever in human history, and then go back to their normal everyday lives.
It is the elites who have reneged on the social contract -- not just silently withdrawing from it and hoping nobody notices, as they had begun to do during the 1970s and '80s, but now actively conspiring to subvert, in plain sight, the loud-and-clear will of the people.
This is most obvious in the escalating Deep State witch hunt against Trump, where Democrats play bad cop and Republicans play good cop against the detained President. This conflict will absolutely not end until one side shuts the other side down. Either the Trump faction within the administration will shut down the witch hunt, or the witch hunt will shut down the Trump faction.
We cannot autistically quibble over what particular forms these two sole outcomes may take. A victory for the Trump faction could conceivably stem from Trump himself firing Mueller, or AG Sessions rescinding his recusal and firing Mueller, or Trump firing Deputy AG Rosenstein and anyone else further down until he finds someone willing to fire Mueller, or or or...
And a victory for the witch hunt could conceivably stem from a formal exit from office by Trump, or by others in his camp, or Trump becoming neutered while remaining nominally in office, or a witch hunt that has no final conclusion but manages to consume so much attention, resources, and political capital, that very little is left over to pursue the Trump agenda. Maybe the GOP Congress would formally voice no confidence, maybe they would only stand idly by. Maybe an element of the military would speak up, or even act up, and maybe they would not. Or or or...
The point is that particulars do not matter -- either our side will shut down their side, or they will shut down our side. As Chuck Schumer warned on primetime, the intelligence agencies "have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you" if you take them on. Just because plan A doesn't succeed, doesn't mean that plan B through plan Z are not also running. Our job is to keep all of those subversions from toppling the democratically elected President.
Although the coup is the most threatening plot against the President's agenda, the elites have sabotaged his efforts on all other major fronts as well. For every step that Trump takes in the right direction, the whole rest of the elites take us ten steps backward. And on issues that were central throughout the campaign, where the elites cannot feign ignorance about what the American people voted for.
At the macro level, they have sidelined the major issues of the campaign -- immigration, global entanglements, re-industrialization, radical Islamic terrorism -- and pursued their own issues that nobody cares about or does not trust them to do the right thing -- re-shaping healthcare in the GOP's mold, revising the entire tax code, and maybe in the distant future something about infrastructure (in America, not Afghanistan).
Those are the standard obsessions of the GOP orthodoxy that were decisively rejected by hardcore Republican voters during the primary. If we wanted the insurance monopolies to re-do Obamacare, or the Koch Brothers to re-write the entire tax code, or the Club for Growth to set our national economic priorities, we would have voted for any of the other dozen GOP candidates. We did not, so we did not.
It is a baldfaced betrayal of the voters that the GOP Congress is acting as though Jeb Bush had won the election, rather than the guy who reminded Americans that "the World Trade Center came down under your brother's reign".
Even on the issues that the elites are pursuing, they are not taking positions that the people want.
Trump did not run on "getting the government out of healthcare" (a failed GOP slogan), has defended single-payer on both moral and cost-efficiency grounds since the 1990s, and said the government will pay the hospital bill of a poor person who gets sick so that they will not be "dying in the streets".
Trump barely put together a tax plan during the campaign, and none of his fans cared one way or the other about it. But certainly the white working class voters in the Rust Belt who delivered him victory do not care about slashing corporate tax rates or abolishing the estate tax that only targets the inheritances of the ultra-wealthy.
In fact, when Trump was planning a campaign in 2000, he not only promoted single-payer healthcare, he also wanted a 14% tax on wealth or total net worth, not just income, which would have paid off the entire federal debt and left enough over for a middle-class tax cut. With the corporate elites preparing the tax reform plans (Cohn, Mnuchin, Brady, Ryan, et al), we can be sure that they are not planning to soak the rich in order to relieve the middle class.
And on foreign entanglements, Trump ran on a clear America-only platform. He did not point to a single alliance that the American people were benefiting from, and repeatedly named all of the parasites who have been "ripping us off big-league" for decades. Those alliances have only been ramped up, with the military-industrial complex sending hundreds of billions worth of arms to Jihadi Arabia, the Pentagon sending thousands more troops to Afghanistan, escalation within Syria, serving as South Korea and Japan's military for free as tensions rise with the North, and the all-out sabotage of Trump's plan to "get along with Russia" -- from the ever-intensifying hysteria over "meddling" in the election, to economic sanctions, to speeches in Warsaw devoted to the theme of containing Russia, to commitment to regime change against their allies (still the official goal in Syria, and maybe next in Iran).
Trump's victories have mostly taken the form of blocking new entanglements that the elites had been hoping to enter us into, where we were not already entangled -- TPP, Paris climate accords, regime change in Venezuela, etc. The one exception may be NAFTA, although the prognosis looks uncertain after the statement of goals barely discusses manufacturing and re-industrialization, but is heavy on agriculture, finance, and media sectors. Trade is the one area that the Trump faction has had the most success in -- at least getting their people into top positions (Ross, Lighthizer). With the rest of the big picture showing concerted elite betrayal, we can no longer just rest assured that the Trump people will prevail over the corporate globalists in the NAFTA re-negotiations.
Also in the big picture -- elite betrayal is not limited to the Trump agenda. The British elites have already signaled their intention to water down or neuter the Brexit victory, against an electoral uprising of the people. And the Democrat Establishment has refused to move in a populist direction, against the wishes of half of its own voters and the wishes of any Trump voter who might consider voting Democrat at the state or local level. They are still the party of Wall Street and identity politics, and have expanded into outright sedition, becoming the most zealous accomplices of the Deep State against the democracy.
So far, then, there is minimal evidence that the elites have decided to relent and compromise with their alienated and increasingly angry populations. The only place where the people can exert leverage is at the ballot box -- but the elites might just ignore the outcome and carry on as before, or even double down in order to punish the people for daring to issue a public vote of no confidence.
There are other ways that the people can use their leverage, which consists entirely in their sheer numbers rather than political connections, favors owed, blackmail, wealth, and so on and so forth. If it comes down to torches and pitchforks, the side with the larger mob will defeat the side with the smaller mob. At a lower level of escalation, it could be a million protesters surrounding the CNN building, or a million marching on the Pentagon, or a million forming a picket line around a plant that is sending its jobs out of the country or that relies on immigrant labor (legal or illegal).
Those mass direct actions, along with mass participation at the ballot box, turned the country around during the Progressive Era, including the closing off of immigration during the 1920s. If the elites refuse to make deals with our good-faith negotiator, Trump, then we will have no alternative but to escalate the type of person we send into the White House, and the kind of actions we take elsewhere -- from complaining on the internet, to occupying the City Halls of sanctuary cities.
So far, the people seem determined not to just go back to alienation mode as the elites sabotage the nascent populist and nationalist revolt. In an earlier time, we would've just said, "Yeah, well politics sucks and you can't change things after all, so let's just go back to our lives and block it all out again." Now the people are getting more and more angry that the government isn't doing what we told them to do, and how the elites are more and more flagrantly treating us like a bunch of peons who will never get a voice in how the society is run.
That smoldering anger is promising -- it means the Trump faction can stoke the embers into a real fire, unlike in the aftermath of most elections where everyone goes back to their own preoccupations. But that means that Trump and his team must shift gears back to the rabble-rousers they were during the campaign, and give the people something concrete they can channel their immense numbers into, something beyond casting the vote that we have already cast.
Most of what the people want is already on the books somewhere -- it's just gone unenforced by the executive and judicial wings of the government for so long. Trump's faction has very little political capital within the DC swamp itself, and will likely continue to be unsuccessful at changing things through legislation or even executive orders (who will enforce the should-be enforcers?).
Trump can take to the bully pulpit, but only if it manages to fire up the people who then take concrete mass action against the elites who refuse to follow and enforce existing laws. Virtually nobody in government respects Trump, so they will not respond to his attempts to shame them or chew them out. The only way for Trump to really light a fire under someone's ass is to sic his mob of rabid supporters on them. No one in the Swamp has that large and that zealous of a mob of their own, and what are they going to do instead -- try to call in favors from the CIA to gun down a mass of citizens protesting their parasitic elites?
Smug and naive triumphalism is no longer tenable. The verdict is in: the elites are hell-bent on not just ignoring the voice of the people but punishing them for daring to speak up, and a President who has only political debt within the DC swamp must mobilize the people into action to counteract the widespread subversion of democracy by the doubling-down elites.
Quite simply, we thought that after we sent the elites the mother of all rude awakenings throughout the campaign, culminating in "Trump wins!" on election night, they would begin to negotiate with us. Given how stinging and unambiguous our rejection of their vision was, the negotiation should have been over the terms of their surrender. But at least some form of reconciliation between the insulated parasitic elites and the alienated and abused citizenry.
And yet while relations should have moved toward repair and harmony, they have instead moved toward further fracture and conflict between the upper and below-the-upper layers of society. That has come from the elites doggedly holding onto their parasitic grasp over the highest levers of power, not from the people who were content to signal the greatest vote of no confidence ever in human history, and then go back to their normal everyday lives.
It is the elites who have reneged on the social contract -- not just silently withdrawing from it and hoping nobody notices, as they had begun to do during the 1970s and '80s, but now actively conspiring to subvert, in plain sight, the loud-and-clear will of the people.
This is most obvious in the escalating Deep State witch hunt against Trump, where Democrats play bad cop and Republicans play good cop against the detained President. This conflict will absolutely not end until one side shuts the other side down. Either the Trump faction within the administration will shut down the witch hunt, or the witch hunt will shut down the Trump faction.
We cannot autistically quibble over what particular forms these two sole outcomes may take. A victory for the Trump faction could conceivably stem from Trump himself firing Mueller, or AG Sessions rescinding his recusal and firing Mueller, or Trump firing Deputy AG Rosenstein and anyone else further down until he finds someone willing to fire Mueller, or or or...
And a victory for the witch hunt could conceivably stem from a formal exit from office by Trump, or by others in his camp, or Trump becoming neutered while remaining nominally in office, or a witch hunt that has no final conclusion but manages to consume so much attention, resources, and political capital, that very little is left over to pursue the Trump agenda. Maybe the GOP Congress would formally voice no confidence, maybe they would only stand idly by. Maybe an element of the military would speak up, or even act up, and maybe they would not. Or or or...
The point is that particulars do not matter -- either our side will shut down their side, or they will shut down our side. As Chuck Schumer warned on primetime, the intelligence agencies "have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you" if you take them on. Just because plan A doesn't succeed, doesn't mean that plan B through plan Z are not also running. Our job is to keep all of those subversions from toppling the democratically elected President.
Although the coup is the most threatening plot against the President's agenda, the elites have sabotaged his efforts on all other major fronts as well. For every step that Trump takes in the right direction, the whole rest of the elites take us ten steps backward. And on issues that were central throughout the campaign, where the elites cannot feign ignorance about what the American people voted for.
At the macro level, they have sidelined the major issues of the campaign -- immigration, global entanglements, re-industrialization, radical Islamic terrorism -- and pursued their own issues that nobody cares about or does not trust them to do the right thing -- re-shaping healthcare in the GOP's mold, revising the entire tax code, and maybe in the distant future something about infrastructure (in America, not Afghanistan).
Those are the standard obsessions of the GOP orthodoxy that were decisively rejected by hardcore Republican voters during the primary. If we wanted the insurance monopolies to re-do Obamacare, or the Koch Brothers to re-write the entire tax code, or the Club for Growth to set our national economic priorities, we would have voted for any of the other dozen GOP candidates. We did not, so we did not.
It is a baldfaced betrayal of the voters that the GOP Congress is acting as though Jeb Bush had won the election, rather than the guy who reminded Americans that "the World Trade Center came down under your brother's reign".
Even on the issues that the elites are pursuing, they are not taking positions that the people want.
Trump did not run on "getting the government out of healthcare" (a failed GOP slogan), has defended single-payer on both moral and cost-efficiency grounds since the 1990s, and said the government will pay the hospital bill of a poor person who gets sick so that they will not be "dying in the streets".
Trump barely put together a tax plan during the campaign, and none of his fans cared one way or the other about it. But certainly the white working class voters in the Rust Belt who delivered him victory do not care about slashing corporate tax rates or abolishing the estate tax that only targets the inheritances of the ultra-wealthy.
In fact, when Trump was planning a campaign in 2000, he not only promoted single-payer healthcare, he also wanted a 14% tax on wealth or total net worth, not just income, which would have paid off the entire federal debt and left enough over for a middle-class tax cut. With the corporate elites preparing the tax reform plans (Cohn, Mnuchin, Brady, Ryan, et al), we can be sure that they are not planning to soak the rich in order to relieve the middle class.
And on foreign entanglements, Trump ran on a clear America-only platform. He did not point to a single alliance that the American people were benefiting from, and repeatedly named all of the parasites who have been "ripping us off big-league" for decades. Those alliances have only been ramped up, with the military-industrial complex sending hundreds of billions worth of arms to Jihadi Arabia, the Pentagon sending thousands more troops to Afghanistan, escalation within Syria, serving as South Korea and Japan's military for free as tensions rise with the North, and the all-out sabotage of Trump's plan to "get along with Russia" -- from the ever-intensifying hysteria over "meddling" in the election, to economic sanctions, to speeches in Warsaw devoted to the theme of containing Russia, to commitment to regime change against their allies (still the official goal in Syria, and maybe next in Iran).
Trump's victories have mostly taken the form of blocking new entanglements that the elites had been hoping to enter us into, where we were not already entangled -- TPP, Paris climate accords, regime change in Venezuela, etc. The one exception may be NAFTA, although the prognosis looks uncertain after the statement of goals barely discusses manufacturing and re-industrialization, but is heavy on agriculture, finance, and media sectors. Trade is the one area that the Trump faction has had the most success in -- at least getting their people into top positions (Ross, Lighthizer). With the rest of the big picture showing concerted elite betrayal, we can no longer just rest assured that the Trump people will prevail over the corporate globalists in the NAFTA re-negotiations.
Also in the big picture -- elite betrayal is not limited to the Trump agenda. The British elites have already signaled their intention to water down or neuter the Brexit victory, against an electoral uprising of the people. And the Democrat Establishment has refused to move in a populist direction, against the wishes of half of its own voters and the wishes of any Trump voter who might consider voting Democrat at the state or local level. They are still the party of Wall Street and identity politics, and have expanded into outright sedition, becoming the most zealous accomplices of the Deep State against the democracy.
So far, then, there is minimal evidence that the elites have decided to relent and compromise with their alienated and increasingly angry populations. The only place where the people can exert leverage is at the ballot box -- but the elites might just ignore the outcome and carry on as before, or even double down in order to punish the people for daring to issue a public vote of no confidence.
There are other ways that the people can use their leverage, which consists entirely in their sheer numbers rather than political connections, favors owed, blackmail, wealth, and so on and so forth. If it comes down to torches and pitchforks, the side with the larger mob will defeat the side with the smaller mob. At a lower level of escalation, it could be a million protesters surrounding the CNN building, or a million marching on the Pentagon, or a million forming a picket line around a plant that is sending its jobs out of the country or that relies on immigrant labor (legal or illegal).
Those mass direct actions, along with mass participation at the ballot box, turned the country around during the Progressive Era, including the closing off of immigration during the 1920s. If the elites refuse to make deals with our good-faith negotiator, Trump, then we will have no alternative but to escalate the type of person we send into the White House, and the kind of actions we take elsewhere -- from complaining on the internet, to occupying the City Halls of sanctuary cities.
So far, the people seem determined not to just go back to alienation mode as the elites sabotage the nascent populist and nationalist revolt. In an earlier time, we would've just said, "Yeah, well politics sucks and you can't change things after all, so let's just go back to our lives and block it all out again." Now the people are getting more and more angry that the government isn't doing what we told them to do, and how the elites are more and more flagrantly treating us like a bunch of peons who will never get a voice in how the society is run.
That smoldering anger is promising -- it means the Trump faction can stoke the embers into a real fire, unlike in the aftermath of most elections where everyone goes back to their own preoccupations. But that means that Trump and his team must shift gears back to the rabble-rousers they were during the campaign, and give the people something concrete they can channel their immense numbers into, something beyond casting the vote that we have already cast.
Most of what the people want is already on the books somewhere -- it's just gone unenforced by the executive and judicial wings of the government for so long. Trump's faction has very little political capital within the DC swamp itself, and will likely continue to be unsuccessful at changing things through legislation or even executive orders (who will enforce the should-be enforcers?).
Trump can take to the bully pulpit, but only if it manages to fire up the people who then take concrete mass action against the elites who refuse to follow and enforce existing laws. Virtually nobody in government respects Trump, so they will not respond to his attempts to shame them or chew them out. The only way for Trump to really light a fire under someone's ass is to sic his mob of rabid supporters on them. No one in the Swamp has that large and that zealous of a mob of their own, and what are they going to do instead -- try to call in favors from the CIA to gun down a mass of citizens protesting their parasitic elites?
Smug and naive triumphalism is no longer tenable. The verdict is in: the elites are hell-bent on not just ignoring the voice of the people but punishing them for daring to speak up, and a President who has only political debt within the DC swamp must mobilize the people into action to counteract the widespread subversion of democracy by the doubling-down elites.
Categories:
Economics,
Morality,
Politics,
Psychology,
Violence
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