July 29, 2019

Trans-radicals: Commissars who adopt radical personas to trigger their own desire for suppressing dissent


Would you cancel me? I'd cancel me.
I'd cancel me hard. I'd cancel me so hard.

During this time of realigning political coalitions, many of those who had presented themselves as radicals have revealed themselves to be supporters, and even hardcore enforcers, of the status quo.

Before, their false nature remained hidden, with no real opportunity to shake up the system. Now that that chance has finally arrived for the first time in 40-odd years, they have decided to double down and intensify the status quo, rather than do something fundamentally new and different.

In particular, they want to keep the political coalitions exactly the same -- they are against the very hallmark of realignment, when a major chunk of one side defects to the other side, upsetting the existing balance of power, and resulting in a newly negotiated compromise on how the society is to be run.

The casual analysis of these pseudo-radicals is that they are cosplayers or LARP-ers -- play-acting as something cooler and more impressive than their everyday reality. They put a rose emoji in their online profile, but they belong to no organizations that are making solid gains toward whatever socialist system they're imagining themselves to support.

The truth, though, is that they are more like a different category of false-presenters -- the transgenders, especially men who pretend to be women. The characters of cosplay and LARP-ing are usually from the world of fantasy or a bygone past, with no current true examples that could challenge the cosplayers and LARP-ers for status in such roles. In politics, however, there really are realigners who want to shake up the system and rearrange the membership of coalitions to hammer out a new agreement about the social order. These figures directly challenge the radical cred of the enforcers of the status quo, who only present as something novel.

A material and structural analysis could look into what role these trans-radicals play in the economy, and where the realigners are coming from, to see how this tension reflects their opposing material motives. But the similarity to trannies calls also for a psychosexual analysis of what motivates these trans-radicals, and why they treat the true realigners the way they do.

For male-to-female transgenders, their primary type is the "autogynephile," or a man who gets sexually aroused from imagining himself as a woman. There's a link to narcissism, since no existing woman could possibly satisfy his sexual desires -- only he himself, the supreme human being, could do so, if only he were female. Hence the drive to become sexually female.

Note that they do not try to become female in other ways, including the defining way of becoming pregnant, giving birth, and nurturing children, or even the related way of being domestic and like a housewife. Nope: their only focus is on the woman's role as a sexual arouser, and their attempt to become female is to become more seductive, slutty, and bangable.

Their goals of altering biology involve only getting a pair of fake tits, crafting a fuckhole between their legs, and maybe taking hormones to make their features softer. They aren't looking to build an artificial womb, to deliver an artificial baby through an artificial birth canal, or to nurse real or artificial infants with artificially enhanced mammary glands.

Their desires are egocentric -- sexual self-stimulation -- rather than social -- nurturing babies. Their desires are non-productive -- masturbatory thoughts and actions -- rather than constructive and productive -- raising children. If anything, they dismiss and often denigrate real women's reproductive function as being "breeders," sexually bland and undesirable. They viciously compete against real women, whether in sports, in fashion, or some other gender-segregated domain.

Because no real woman is good enough to arouse them, they dial up the sluttiness to 11, presenting an utter caricature of "the sexually arousing woman" -- the clown-like make-up and hair, the costume clothing, the exaggerated sexual aggressiveness, and so on.

To sum up, there is an activity (sexual pursuit) with a subject (the man) and an object (the woman). The subject wants to become the object as well -- the man wants to sexually pursue himself-as-a-woman, who provokes his sexual drive like no real woman could. The desire is egocentric and non-productive, bordering on anti-social.

For the trans-radical, the activity is suppressing realignment, the subject is the commissar, and the object is the realigner, who is truly a radical bold new thing on the political scene.

The commissar's libidinal desire to suppress dissent and police the boundaries of coalitional membership leads him ever in search of targets -- and yet, none of the existing radicals could trigger his cop instincts as much as if he could do it himself. Step aside, you so-called system-changers, and make way for the super-duper revolutionary -- who, however, does not want anyone new to join the team, lest their entry destabilize the longstanding order of things within the coalition.

By adopting the skin of a radical, he can act as both commissar and dissident, punisher and criminal. Which is fundamental? The role that he fervently engages in, not the one that he invests little energy, resources, and time in. Trans-radicals are always cracking the whip on political criminals, and rarely bringing new members on board from the other side in order to tip the balance of power in their favor to get radically new things done. The cop is their fundamental role, the dangerous rebel their affected role to trigger their own desire to punish deviants.

And like the autogynephiles, the trans-radicals don't merely mimic the true realigners -- they present an extreme caricature of someone so far away from the ideological center. Anarcho-communist, literal white nationalist, whatever. "Economic populist" just doesn't sound extreme enough, and would not so intensely trigger the commissar's desire to crack down. If the commissar really wants to get off on suppressing dissent, it has to be "far to the left of Bernie" or "far to the right of Trump".

Nor do the trans-radicals mimic all aspects of the true realigner -- or even the key feature, namely, that the realigners are open to shaking up the agreement of how to run society, in order to cause mass defections from the other side, to gain political capital that is sorely needed to make real changes. That is the realigner's other-directed and constructive role in realignment, whereas the trans-radical is focused on the egocentric and the non-productive (leveling up their own status points for how out-there they are ideologically).

Indeed, the trans-radicals are as dismissive of the realigner's crucial feature of shaking up the coalitions, as the transgenders are of women's reproductive function. If you bring about mass defections from the other team, then you're polluting the purity of our existing in-group with the filth coming from the out-group -- that's tantamount to treason, aiding the enemy in a hostile takeover of our own team.

Just as sexual arousal holds no relation to reproduction, for the transgender, so too for the trans-radical do radical positions hold no relation to realignment. They are pursued for themselves, to satisfy individual libidinal urges.

For the realigner, a radical position is meant to spark realignment, which will require shaking up the coalitions' membership. Realigners will therefore be open to compromising on other issues that are not central to the realignment -- either they share those positions with the potential defectors from the other side, or they do not but are willing to bury the hatchet on those issues, while more pressing issues are pursued.

That is a defining aspect of realigners, without which they could not accomplish their pro-social constructive goal of forging a new coalition to implement bold new changes to the social order. And that is what most angers the trans-radicals, as though it were a total misallocation of resources -- just as the transgender thinks reproduction is a total waste of a woman's time that ought to be spent on amping up the sexual arousal factor.

And in much the same way that Buffalo Bill carries the tranny's competing-against-women bias to an extreme -- serially killing women for their skins, the better to pass himself off as sexually female -- so do the big commissars not only try to stifle dissent, but to run the dissidents entirely out of existence, then appropriating some of their radical positions, the better to pass themselves off as politically radical. Just as Buffalo Bill was not interested in the women's wombs, neither are the trans-radicals interested in the realigners' ability to forge a new coalition.

Something greater is going on than the straightforward policing of dissent by the powers that be, understood for material and structural reasons. Why go through all the trouble of adopting a radical persona? Most literal prison guards and wardens don't style themselves as prison abolitionists, Black Panthers, anarchists, etc. There's some deep psychosexual pathology that's feeding into this political phenomenon of trans-radicals.

In fact, it may only be one member of a broader class of trans phenomena. Future posts may look into trans-racial and trans-queer cases, to establish more general principles.

In the meantime, be alert around the caricatured radical -- there could be an intersectionally means-tested Medicare plan tucked between her legs.

July 26, 2019

Demographics are never destiny in a world of negative feedback mechanisms

Leftoids love to triumphantly brag about how urbanized the American population has become, and at the supposed demographic destiny that will ripple throughout the political world. Sorry, non-urbanites, you've been canceled. Lotsa luck staying alive.

Right-wingers love to parrot the same narrative, only with the emotional value reversed -- it's a sick, cruel joke of the universe that our societies keep getting more and more dominated by urban centers. Cities never sleep from hunting down a nearly extinct species -- the non-urbanite.

In reality, cities have been around for literally thousands of years, and they have never reproduced their own populations. They are endogenous population sinks, as high population density leads to greater epidemic disease burden, higher crime rates, and lower fertility rates. The material standard of living is far lower on average, although with far greater variance -- a few super-wealthy people who cannot be found in rural areas, but teeming hordes of quasi-slaves, who are worse off than their rural counterparts who toil in fields (disease, crime, etc.).

Cities only reproduce and grow their populations from exogenous sources -- migration from country to city, internal to the nation, or immigration of foreigners.

If those external sources dry up, or if there is higher migration out of cities for any reason, then the demographic destiny turns in the other direction -- a supposed future of depopulated cities, ever to be ruled over by country bumpkins and suburbanites. The emptying out of cities has already happened once in recent history -- during the rising-crime period of 1960 to 1990 -- and it will happen again during the next crime wave. Today's return to cities is in no small part due to falling crime rates from around 1990. But crime rates go in cycles, not in one direction.

And the same is true for other forces that affect the degree of urbanization, such as status-striving (pro-city) vs. restrained ambition (anti-city). They move one way for decades, then the opposite way for decades.

These various negative feedback loops keep civilization from heading off in one direction only toward further and further extremes. At most, there is logistic type growth that saturates at a certain level, without going further, such as urbanization resulting from an agricultural economy -- it got more and more urbanized after we adopted farming, but only to a certain point.

In fact, the more common dynamic is an oscillating one -- decades or centuries in one direction, then a reversal for decades or centuries. That prevents a triumphal narrative for either the country or city cheerleaders. The only constant over the long term is tension between the two, not steady erosion of one by the other.

See also: long-term tension between sedentary crop farmers and nomadic livestock herders, where either one could be in the ascendant position for decades and even centuries, only to surrender those victories over the following decades and centuries.

The same is true for the supposed demographic destiny of multi-racial migration. It's possible that diversity will beget diversity, up to a certain point anyway -- that happened when the Indo-Europeans invaded the dark-skinned natives of the Indian subcontinent. And it's apparently happening now in Brazil ("apparently" because of the shorter time scale there, compared to thousands of years in India).

Notice, though, who has maintained dominant status ever since the beginning of those migrations -- not the darker-skinned and tropical-adapted groups, but the lighter-skinned and temperate-adapted groups. So, be careful about wishing for demographic destiny involving racial or ethnic diversity.

But it's also possible that diversity will show oscillatory behavior, whether like an ongoing pendulum or a one-time rise-and-fall. It doesn't look like whites will be returning to Zimbabwe or South Africa anytime soon, after being driven out in the post-Apartheid era.

The Germanic migrations of the medieval period left minimal genetic or cultural traces outside of their original homeland, including where they had been the rulers of the post-Roman period (Spain, Italy). The longstanding genetic and cultural roots of those places proved resistant to even large-scale and centuries-long migrations of foreigners.

Nor did the North African diversity within Moorish-occupied Iberia continue on and on forever -- they got expelled back to where they came from.

And of course the diversity that arrived in North America with the Europeans did not sustain itself -- one group largely wiped out the other, eliminating the temporary diversity of the initial colonial period. Before the Europeans, the Athabaskan wave of Native American migration wiped out the much earlier Amerindian wave in large swaths of Western North America.

This quick overview has left aside the adaptive nature of the political coalition system, which adds yet another source of oscillation to the dynamics. In one period, rural and urban may team up against upstart suburbanites (like the New Deal). In another, rural may side with suburbanites to team up against out-of-control mega-cities (like the Reagan era).

A follow-up post will look at what would happen, just within the left or liberal side of the system, if urbanites determined the future. The black-humor punchline is that the Democrats would only ever nominate Hillary Clinton, and never Bernie Sanders. But stay tuned for a more in-depth discussion.

July 20, 2019

Crunk was the black dance-punk: Post-9/11 end of the world party music, with no revival today

A recent post looked at the lack of a dance-punk revival during the current vulnerable phase of the 15-year cultural excitement cycle. That genre was one of the distinguishing features of the early 2000s vulnerable phase, and yet there's hardly anything like it today, unlike all the other similarities between pop music styles from both periods.

That made me think of another distinctive genre of the early 2000s that felt too fun and danceable to belong to such a mellow phase -- and yet still channeled the dark tone and aggro attitude of the emo phase that it came from.

This genre, too, has not been revived during the late 2010s, when the similar zeitgeist should allow it to be reborn. The only major difference from dance-punk is that it was from the black rather than the white side of the production world.

Crunk music exploded from out of nowhere in 2003 and '04, far too early to be explained by the decadent and dance-crazy atmosphere of the late 2000s, which was a classic warm-up phase of the cycle, akin to the disco late '70s and the neo-disco early '90s. The early 2000s should have been too oppressively emo and low-energy to produce such bounce-heavy party-people music.

Like dance-punk, crunk appealed to girls, as well as guys, despite the dark aggro tone that turns most girls off in other cases. The aggressive tone is less of a whiny cry for help, and more like a team of drill sergeants chanting orders that the girl's inner submissive hoe wants to obey, after locating the nearest random hot guy. Listening to these songs, I still feel two or more cuties surrounding me to get their grind on. Such a wilder time.

Also like dance-punk, crunk did not suffer from the spastic rhythms and grinding-to-a-halt bridges that characterize dance music from a vulnerable phase. And it was not over-produced and multi-layered, unlike the dream pop style characteristic of a vulnerable phase. The beat was driving and easy to follow, and the instrumentation stripped down to garage-band levels, with a few simple riffs to keep you engaged the whole way through. The shouted chorus did not come off as emo screaming that might put individuals into a downward spiral, but more like chants at a pep rally to keep the group's energy levels high.

I attribute an anomaly like crunk to the same cause of the anomalous dance-punk -- the response to 9/11, which put people in a more apocalyptic mood, discounting the future and emphasizing living in the now. If we have no idea when the next major spectacle of terrorism is going to strike, we might as well party it up and enjoy each other's company while we still can, though preferring a dark brooding tone to remind us of how ominous the climate has suddenly become.

In the old post on the cultural headiness after 9/11, I wrote mostly about dance-punk, but also mentioned that crunk has always been a guilty pleasure. I was dancing in rock-oriented clubs in 2004 and '05, and didn't hear much crunk when it originally came out. But when I started branching out into hip-hop clubs during the late 2000s, it was still popular enough to come on every weekend, even if it was 5 years old by then (an eternity in club years). It also had major crossover appeal, and broke into the playlists of rock and electronic dance clubs.

The fashion of both scenes overlapped as well, with girls wearing a white t-shirt or tank-top and American Apparel athletic shorts or dark skinny jeans with a contrasting white belt -- simple, bright, skin-baring, and easy to dance in. Guys had a more put-together look as well -- no baggy pants or basketball shorts or sweatpants, but slim / skinny jeans, a belt, and perhaps some eye-catching shoes (light-colored, to contrast with dark jeans).

Unlike the dance-punk post, I don't have a handful of exceptional examples of crunk to point to during the current phase, since I don't listen to rap stations. If you know of a lone counterexample that might be out there -- something that sounds like a buried Ying Yang Twins track from 2004 -- let us know in the comments.

Otherwise, we'll end with some of the original dark, brooding hoe anthems of the post-9/11 climate.

"Get Low" by Lil Jon & the East Side Boyz (2003):



"Salt Shaker" by Ying Yang Twins (2003):



"Shake That Monkey" by Too Short (2003):



July 19, 2019

Realignment in Australia / NZ will come from the right, since neoliberalism came from the left

In a recent episode of the What's Left podcast, Aimee Terese mentions in passing why she rarely discusses Australian politics, despite hailing from down under. She says there's nothing going on, that their politics are stuck in the 1990s, and there's no entry point for a genuine left-wing movement. She means populist left or socialist left, obviously the elitist and neoliberal left have plenty of power.

Why is there nothing like the Bernie movement in America, or the Corbyn movement in Britain? Because Australia is like the Mediterranean countries -- France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Greece -- in that the neoliberal realignment circa 1980 came from the left, which has remained the dominant coalition in politics ever since. And before that, the egalitarian and populist Midcentury era was overseen by a dominant coalition from the right.

Overturning the status quo comes from the opposition's coalition, after they get enough of the dominant coalition to defect. The dominant coalition just keeps on going in one direction, no matter how sclerotic and catastrophic their governance becomes. They are too invested in the system that they themselves built and of which they have been the primary beneficiaries.

So there will never be a realignment beyond neoliberalism that comes from the left in the Mediterranean -- it has already begun with Salvini's right in Italy, and will happen in France when Le Pen wins in 2022. Nor will any such thing happen in Australia or neighboring New Zealand. Realignment from the left will only happen where the neoliberal era has been dominated by the right (America, Canada, Britain, Denmark, etc.).

See the Appendix below for a concise overview of the history of left vs. right dominance during several political eras in both Australia and New Zealand.

No matter how much the blinkered partisans want to make "left" and "right" refer to "good" and "evil" (or vice versa), they are merely variations on a common theme, which is determined by the material laws of history. The wholesome and egalitarian Midcentury came in two variations -- a left version in the Anglo-Atlantic countries, and a right version in the Mediterranean and Anglo-Pacific countries. Likewise the neoliberal hellhole since then has come in two variations -- a right version in the Anglo-Atlantic, and a left version in the Mediterranean and Anglo-Pacific.

So, too, will the post-neoliberal system come in two variations -- left in the Atlantic, right in the Med / Pacific.

Resistance to these laws is futile. The moribund dominant parties of the neoliberal era will be in the impotent opposition status during the post-neolib era, while the opposition parties of this era will shake up their membership and become the new dominant parties. And neoliberalism has destroyed the industrial-scale manufacturing basis of the modern welfare state, as well as destroying the central banks of all major nations. So something new is going to take its place as a whole system. Whether the new order comes from the left or right makes little difference, and boils down to who is currently dominant but fading, vs. who is opposition yet rising.

Concretely, if you're a populist and want to see the replacement of neoliberalism, you must work on forging a realigned left party in the Anglo-Atlantic countries, and a realigned right party in the Mediterranean and Anglo-Pacific. See this earlier post on Brexit and the disbanding of the EU relying on a realigned left in Britain and a realigned right in France (and Italy) -- Corbyn and Le Pen (and Salvini), against Merkel in Germany.

As a pleasant side effect, anti-woke left women like Aimee will find better boyfriend material when they begin allying with the nascent populist right in their countries. Such women constantly complain about what limpdick killjoys the male leftists and libs are, and tell other leftists not to hold it against them if they seek to satisfy their desires with red-blooded guys, who are more culturally conservative -- the personal is not political. And the red-blooded guys aren't going to hold it against women if they happen to be culturally liberal, provided they aren't wokescolding feminazis. It's just the right union as Me Too runs out of steam this year, and guys and girls look to mix it up with each other again.

Appendix

The neoliberal era began in Australia with the ministry of Bob Hawke (Labor) in 1983, and in New Zealand with David Lange (Labour) in 1984.

Currently, the opposition right is in power in Australia (Scott Morrison, Liberal), meaning the dominant party has yet to enter its ineffectual, disjunctive phase that immediately precedes realignment. That means the earliest that the disjunctive phase could begin would be after the 2022 election, if Labor wins and proves unable to handle the massive economic crisis headed our way (everyone's way). That would leave realignment until 2025, if the Liberal party provides a right-wing alternative to the neoliberal status quo.

In New Zealand, the dominant party is back in power (Jacinda Ardern, Labour), so they could be ripe for realignment if she proves disjunctive. Her party already had to form a coalition government with the populist, immigration restrictionist New Zealand First party (a kingmaking third party last time). Still, in most places, it looks like the big realignment elections won't begin until 2022 or later, so I'd expect New Zealand to enter disjunctive status after their 2020 election, if Labour remains in power, and then realignment to strike in 2023 or 2026, bringing the National party to new dominant status, after they commit to some system other than the neoliberal status quo.

Before neoliberalism, the proto-socialist Midcentury began in Australia with Joseph Lyons (United Australia, forerunner of the Liberal party, both of which were the main right-wing party). They came to power in 1932 after the Great Depression discredited the formerly dominant Labor party, which split in 1931 and delivered a large defection to the newly dominant United Australia / Liberal party, including the trailblazing Lyons himself. Their counterpart to FDR -- the long-serving, tone-setting leader, though not the founder of the system -- was Robert Menzies (Liberal). Their counterpart to Jimmy Carter -- the ineffectual disjunctive leader during the crisis of the 1970s -- was Malcolm Fraser (Liberal). During this 51-year period, only 11 years were governed by opposition prime ministers from Labor.

The story is a little more complicated for New Zealand. Before the Great Depression, from 1890 to 1930, the left was the dominant party (Liberal, then United from its remnants), while the right was opposition (Reform). During the depths of the Depression in the early '30s, the center-left and center-right formed a grand coalition (United-Reform), in order to stave off the further-left Labour party. This meant both the center-left and center-right bore the blame for the Depression, and since the further-left Labour party was the only alternative, they came to power to pull the country out of the Depression, from 1935 to '49. Perhaps if the dominant left (United) had been the sole party in power during the early '30s, their disjunctive phase would have given way immediately to a newly dominant right (Reform).

However, Labour's rule was not a realignment but more of an interregnum, a temporary emergency to get out of the Depression. Realignments are defined by a big chunk of former rivals defecting to the new dominant party, and Labour did not gain massive defections from either the center-left or center-right, despite instituting the Keynesian policies that ended the Depression. Rather, the realignment was the formal merger, not just an alliance of convenience, of the center-left and center-right parties into a single non-Labour party. United and Reform merged into the National party, the right-wing party that began their period of dominance in 1949, which lasted through their disjunctive phase until 1984. The longest-serving dominant prime minister was Keith Holyoake, and its disjunctive ineffectual leader was Robert Muldoon.

The Labour party changed from being a further-left third party, before and during the Depression, to the center-left second party during the Midcentury, an opposition party that only controlled the government for 6 years between 1949 and 1984.

To re-cap New Zealand: the late 19th / early 20th century was dominated by the left, and dominance switched to the right during the Midcentury, with a further-left interregnum during the Depression itself. As of the mid-1980s, dominance has swung back to the left.

July 10, 2019

Reviving the Big Labor - Wall Street alliance of the New Deal

In the comments to a post below, there's some discussion of how the Democrats can bring the working class back onto their side and become the dominant rather than opposition party.

In this comment, I review the argument I've been making for awhile here about how the next New Deal phase of the cycle is still a ways off.

But as for nearer-term solutions, I'll just cut-and-paste the comments here. The first is about how de-industrialization has destroyed the upper tiers of the finance sector, as well as the labor unions and working class, giving them a common cause to unite around. The second is about de-escalating the arms race within the finance sector itself, which was begun by the lower and middle-tier finance orgs circa 1980, not the Wall Street investment banks at the top of the pyramid, who only deregulated as a reaction to those below, 20 years later.

If you want to comment, do so to this post, as the other one is old by now and has a moderated comment section.

* * * * *

Concretely in the short term, unions and populists should highlight to the big banks and central bank how unfair it is that the manufacturers have moved so much production outside the country, where it can't be taxed, leaving Wall Street and Silicon Valley to have to pick up more of the tax tab for funding our government.

And aside from current spending, our government has taken on enormous debt since 1980, compared to surpluses under the New Deal, because mfg owners and their vast working class can no longer be taxed to pay immediately for govt, leading to debt instead.

All that debt will wreck the finance sector -- either by them having to monetize that debt, or by defaulting, either one ruining the credit score of our central bank. Their financial assets become worth a whole lot less (they're denominated in dollars, which become funny-money under such printing schemes).

Also, with less and less real production being done here, the central bank has had to fill the void by injecting more and more monetary stimulus in order to "keep the economy going". But since it's just a bankers' bubble, it's not real, and will pop. That's not an emergency, "lender of last resort" function -- they're being used as an emergency every day for 40 years.

De-industrialization is to blame for that, since industrial-scale manufacturing is an organic and endogenous source of job creation with good wages. No need to stimulate constantly -- only now and again when the credit cycle tightens. (There was not a single bubble during the New Deal era.)

And of course, finance cannot provide the jobs themselves -- they are not labor-intensive, and will never be hiring in large numbers. Only labor-intensive employers can fill the void -- but with de-industrialization, that means shitty service jobs.

Industrial mfg has high profits margins, meaning if employers compete for workers, they have to pass along a lot of that profit to workers in wages. Retail, food, etc., are very low-margin activity, and leave little for employers to pass on. Only industrial mfg is both high-profit margin, and labor-intensive / high employment numbers. That alone can sustain a modern welfare state and economy.

There's likely more to the story, but that's the basic pitch. De-industrialization has thoroughly compromised the finance sector, all the way to the top, in stark contrast to the stable finance system of our industrial mfg heyday under the New Deal.

* * * * *

As for concrete solutions in finance, the increasing precariousness was caused by deregulation since 1980. And that did NOT benefit the big Wall Street investment banks -- they did not get deregulated until the late 1990s.

Rather, early neolib deregulation was about "liberating" the middle and bottom tier financial orgs to claw their way up the pyramid to take on the stodgy old investment banks. Regional banks like Continental Illinois, the entire Savings & Loan sector, hedge funds, private equity (leveraged buy-out, corporate raiding), barely existed before 1980, let alone were they running riot.

That's who was soaring off the charts during the '80s and most of the '90s. It was all fake, so they kept going bust, but for awhile the investment banks did not have to bail them out. Continental Illinois was bailed out by the FDIC, the whole Savings & Loan sector by a special act of the federal government.

But when a big hedge fund, Long Term Capital Management, went tits up in the late '90s, it was the Wall Street investment banks who had to bail it out. Imagine that -- this new breed of finance animal has been unshackled and eating your lunch for 15-20 years, and then when one of them kicks the bucket, it's YOU who has to pay for their enormous end-of-life services and funeral costs!

Immediately after LTCM's blow-up and bail-out, the investment banks demanded that they, too, be deregulated. If the middle and lower tier were unshackled, then the top tier had to be unshackled, too, in order to keep from going extinct at the hands of the upwardly mobile breeds.

It was only then that Glass-Steagall was repealed, and investment banks allowed to form into mega-banks.

That mega-ness directly caused them to blow up and need bailing out, in 2008. One didn't even make it -- Lehman Brothers. Think of it: every fly-by-night S&L from the '80s got bailed out, and now it was clear the upstart hedgies would always get bailed out. But one of the oldest investment banks on Wall Street? Sorry, don't count on it.

Now our central bank has gotten too big to fail, after jumping on a nearly 5 trillion-dollar grenade in order to "save the economy" after 2008. But it still has 80% of the shrapnel embedded in its body, meaning it can't absorb another blast -- and the next blast will be much bigger than 5 trillion. When the current bubble pops, the Fed will have a whole new order of magnitude of liabilities on its balance sheet, in the 10s of trillions of dollars.

And there is no higher bank to bail out the central bank that prints the world's reserve currency. No central bank of Planet Earth. No central bank of the solar system. No central bank of the Milky Way. No intergalactic central bank. No central bank of all parallel dimensions. This is, at last, the end of the line for bubble-blowing.

In order to de-scale the Wall Street mega-banks, we have to level the middle and lower tier of the finance world. That's where all the problems started. Impose regulations that put those actors back where they belong, where they're not challenging the investment banks at the top. Once its safe, the mega-banks can shrink back into Glass-Steagall style investment banks.

Big labor and their workers will have no problem with any of that. They don't thrive from the S&Ls, corporate raiders, and hedge funds -- if anything, they've gotten downsized into oblivion by them (private equity).

It can be sold as "all actors in the finance sector will be taking on a smaller role, and reining in their deregulated free-for-all behavior". But the real action will be caging up the sub-investment bank tiers, who started the arms race in the first place. De-escalation of the finance arms race -- a nice way to sell it to populists.

Again, only Dems can pursue that -- they're controlled by the Wall Street mega-banks and central bank, while the GOP was controlled by the formerly low/mid-tier finance orgs who wanted to take on the big boys from Wall Street (S&L, private equity).