Almost. it is 'selling America’s future to the top 20%. It would take at least 10% to actually form a viable economy. The Roman Empire and the British Aristocracy in antiquity realized that. So has Putin, North Korea., and Saudi Arabia. The system needs a critical mass to ensure survivability and continuity
Absolutely, You have the concept down pat. They are like a ‘condom’ economy - they give you a sense of comfort, security, and safety while you are being screwed. Except for the ‘crowd funded health care’ - that is an American hangup.
No, it is not happening now because of Trump. Trump s happening now because of the way America works. No matter who was in charge, the panic and outcome would be the same. America was at the breaking point, and nothing could have prevented it. Even Obama made that clear. Individually, yes you are correct about ‘If I shot’‘’'. The reality is 'EVERYONE collectively in America is doing the shooting, because ‘shooting’ has become culturally acceptable. So holding the individual accountable for herd action is just insanity. You stop the herd action at the herd level. Changing the action of an individual just does not make a difference in herd action. When Trump is deposed, Vance will be far worse than Trump could ever be. Vance is focused. Blaming Trump just makes it easier for Vance.
The problem is not Trump. America would be in the same predicament no matter who was leading or what party or what ideology they had. Obama hit the nail on the head when he talked about the dangers of financializing America - making money on money instead of making product. A substantia portion of the American GDP has nothing to do with generating tangible wealth, it is a result of inflating paper wealth - the value pf stocks, the price of gold, the value of real estate, the interest payments from other people on borrowed money, interest on your savings account that is only as valuable as the bank that holds the account. None of this wealth can actually buy anything tangible, except more paper wealth. Eventually, the country begins to look like Musk - on paper, enormously wealthy, but in terms of liquid money, unable to buy very much. Musk has to use his paper asset wealth to BORROW real money on, if he wants to do anything big.
Generally, Trump is not alone. All of America is just running around stupidly cuckoo crazy because they realize there is not a single thing they can do to actually stop the decline. They are in pure panic mode, grasping at anything that comes along, and panic is always chaotically unpredictable except for the nature of the outcome… All they can do is to position themselves individually so that when the country goes ‘splat’ they have a chance of surviving.
For Canada to avoid the splat, we need to put as much distance between us and the ‘splat’ as we can, instead of being at ground zero of the impact.
Precisely. Vance will use Trump’s erratic behavior as a reason to have him impeached by the mid-terms, and then Vance will fulfill his goal of becoming President.
I wholeheartedly agree. The West has gotten what it deserves. America squandered everything, and is now left with nothing but scraps.
Wake up, people.
Taiwan makes 50% of the world’s semiconductor ‘chips’. They just announced a US$100 billion investment to build a fab plant in the US, to manufacture chips in the US. A few things about that.
No American company has anywhere close to $100 billion to invest in anything, The American corporations used their profits to buy back their stock not to invest n production. What cash they had left over, they invested in stocks and bonds, which they have to try and sell before they can use the money. American corporations are. essentially, cash liquidity poor despite their huge profits. They do not have the liquidity to build anything. Musk may be the world’s richest man on paper, but a few Chinese financiers have much greater liquidity wealth than he does, and they are actually able to BUILD things. It is the difference between financialized wealth and actual money.
South Asia has enough investment money to build more kilometers (miles, if you are American) of high speed rail every year for the last several years than the US has TOTAL, and this money is just a drop in the bucket to them. There just is not enough liquidity in American corporations to build anywhere close to what China can do. American corporations squandered their wealth in the pursuit of maximizing profit payouts to shareholders, and the shareholders just used this capital to buy the same shares at higher and higher prices Not a penny of that money went into building new plant, it just went to increasing the price of existing shares.
Essentially, America is becoming a branch plant operation of Chinese corporations with profits going back to South Asian investors, and Americans get stupidly low wages. America is rapidly becoming the low-wage country of the world. The lower the stock market goes, the cheaper it is for South Asian money to buy up control of American corporations. When GM went bankrupt, China bought the restructured shares. When Ford almost went bankrupt, China bought the non-American Ford subsidiaries to save Ford, but essentially gained complete control of Ford. All profits from Ford auto sales go back to China. Haier now owns General Electric Appliance Division, and is now making what are essentially Haier appliances in America, using cheap slave-labor-wage Americans to build them cheaper than they can in China. All the profits, however, go back to China.
The Law of Unintended Consequences. The Trump misguided policies are just accelerating the sell-off of America. Trump wants foreign corporations to build their product in America, using cheap American labor, ignoring completely that the profits all flow out of America and the foreign investors now control American production.
Like Trump said, it is a good time to get rich. Like Trump dd NOT say, it is the South Asians that are getting rich. China owns most of the American treasury bills, now China will soon own most of the American production plant.
I did not look at the time stamp, just that it seemed more appropriate to my post than the one it showed up under.
Vance does not think so. Fact is, Trump is far too EASY to control by those around him. Even Putin knows how to manipulate him.
Vance is in no way worried about what will hurt the Republican party politically. They let that concept lapse when they chose Trump as the candidate. By all previous political reasoning, Trump should have been a disaster politically, but that did not stop them.
The fact that the Supreme Court has already acknowledged that Trump should be disqualified from being President under the constitution for Treasonous actvity feeds right into their hands.
Trump will not make it past the mid-terms. Vance, who is the main mover-shaker behind the 2025 manifesto, will make sure the Senate impeaches Trump for treason, and the fact that under the Constitution he can NOT be President - an then Vance will assume the Presidency. If you think Trump is far-right, wait until Vance takes over. And since Vance was not ELECTED President, he can serve another two full terms - 10 years total. At the end of the ten years, The top 20% income earners - some 70 million Americans - will be living in luxury while the 0ther 80% will be nothing more than indentured servants. The Handmaidens Tale will be mild in comparison.
I am not convinced Paul had much to do with it. Fact is, the congregations Paul wrote to seemed to be very well established. Paul just kept them informed and in line. It was arguably John the Baptist that set up the infrastructure of the religious order that Jesus appropriated. In point of fact, it is contentious as to who died first, Jesus or John the Baptist. History is written by the winning side, and Jesus just happened to be on the winning side. It could just as easily have been ‘Baptistianity’.
Constantine ‘converted’ because his empire was crumbling militarily, and so he switched to using ‘religion’ instead of ‘statehood’ to protect the Roman Empire.
Was this a misplaced response to my post?
Humans are a herd animal. It is in our genetics, our genes, our nature, to follow a pack leader. Religion was the method of establishing this pack leader well before we had any notion of ‘nation’ or ‘statehood’ or ‘ethnic identity’. All religions are founded in their basic concept based on this natural human herd instinct. And like any herd, the leadership is always determined by some violent confrontation between leadership contenders to determine which person will be the alpha, or dominant, leader. Unfortunately, humans tend to forget that we are animals in our nature, and behave just like all other animals, except that we are just a bit more intelligent than many other species and a lot more aggressively competitive.
So with this in mind, humans were bound by nature to have religion, and to be lead by a religious leader (before we invented statehood, after the Peace of Westphalia). Basically, the only choice humans had was ‘what religion’? it is a matter of which religion was the most aggressive, and after that factor, the most appealing. The ‘savior’ part made it ‘appealing’, but ‘aggression’ was still the major factor. Christianly may have been appealing before Constantine, but it was not aggressive until he brought the military power of the Roman Empire behind it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constantine_the_Great_and_Christianity
‘Christianity’ and ‘the Roman Catholic Church’ are two very different things. Christianity had very little traction in the world until a certain Roman Emperor saw his empire in decline, realized that military power alone would not keep it strong. What he needed was a borderless, stateless religious empire, with this mythical God as his power source, so he appropriated the Christian religion, made himself the leader (Pope) of it, and used religion, not military power, to control the people. To this day, the Roman Empire and the power of the Roman Emperor to rule all mankind continues under the guise of the Holly Roman Catholic Church. It has very little to do with Jesus Christ, and everything to do with the perpetuation of the dominance of the Roman Empire and the dictatorial authority of the Roman Emperor.
If you are in a car, and the tires are going flat, is it a deterministic, nihilistic, view that inevitably, no matter who the driver is, the car will soon have to come to a stop? The choice, of course, is how catastrophic the stop will be - a controlled stop or a calamitous stop?
The trouble with America is that, even if Harris won, the entire American system is still based on an adversarial, winner-take-all system. In that regard, as Obama found out, the system is inherently unstable and unsteerable. Every move Harris tried to make, would be opposed and every attempt made by the opposition to undermine it. Under such conditions, progress is impossible. But even a controlled landing is impossible. No matter how much time America had, the fundamental problem was unfixable without a complete reset. The American governance system is basically unworkable and dysfunctional. The Civil War proved it, and the Civil War never really did end.
America has to split up in order for the parts to function properly again. The two sides are basically incompatible, and divorce is the only viable solution, apart from continuing the fighting, hating, and constant battling. Prolonging the situation will only lead to both sides destroying each other.
In point of fact, when Trump is deposed by Vance, the inevitable split will accelerate. Half of America will never live under the 2025 Manifesto, and the other half will never allow it to be undone once Vance puts it in place.