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Re: What Happens After Cops Start Getting Shot?
this is a quite scary and plausible scenario that had never occurred to me. only on itulip do i occasionally get to feel like i'm naively optimistic.
Originally posted by dcarrigg
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In my mind, fwiw, it's not anywhere near a top important issue. The genie is out of the bottle. There are more guns than people in America. Anyone who wants one can easily get one whenever they want, on the day they want one, no matter age, criminal status, mental status, whatever. Passing a bunch of laws isn't going to change that. It would take some herculean, wartime effort and a much more united America than we see today to even come close to any sort of even half-disarmed America.
The only thing in my mind that matters is drawing the line here at least, and not too far. It's only a matter of time before someone like Peter Thiel decides he wants a nuclear weapon and he has the 2nd amendment right to one. Or, maybe we can reduce it a bit, let's say a destroyer, a couple of F-18s, and a handful of A1 Abrams. This is what I'd worry more about. We already saw what havoc a billionaire like Osama Bin Laden could unleash using nothing but payments to families of a few misguided poor people, plane tickets, and box cutters. And we saw how a billionaire like Robert Durst can get away with serial murder on HBO's The Jinx. And those who follow the news watched as Alice Walton got repeated DUIs, death resulting, and not only stays out of prison, but retains the right to drive. That's not to mention all the Kings of Wall Street who completely evaded any kind of justice whatsoever. Or Ethan Couch, the kid who had another DUI death-resulting case who was let free because his mommy and daddy were rich--his defense was 'affluenza,' or simply that he was brought up too wealthy and privileged to think about consequences.
Well, we're swiftly nearing the point in this country where we're closer to one person having all the wealth than total equality. That's your GINI 0.5 mark. NYC passed it a long time ago. And what traditionally happens, historically, at this point in a Republic is that the wealthy stop trusting the state military and start acquiring militaries of their own. Short of the Saudis and a few other groups, we don't see too much of this yet. But it happens every time, so I imagine it must be our future. Say by 2030 or so. The unwashed masses will have so little--even in total--compared to the billionaires, that the billionaires will start to see that they are greater threats to each other than even all the poor are to them as a group. Their cohesiveness will begin to crack. If there's anything this election's about, maybe it's that. Through the 90s and the 00s the solution was easy: Rob the middle class of the first world blind and shunt all the money to the top. Steal their pensions, slash their wages, outsource, discipline, punish, crack insider deals, pay yourselves a couple trillion out of the treasury, slash their benefits, make sure the middle class get poorer so the rich can get richer. And it worked very, very well.
But now, here we are in the 2010s. And they're starting to get more scared of each other. The middle class is mostly soaked. You can squeeze them more, and that's what the majority still wants. But others can see glimmers of hope in turning the common man against the rest. Their lines are not uniform any more. The low hanging fruit to rob--like middle class pensions--are all but gone. Public higher ed is essentially completely privatized. K-12 already is in Scandanavia, and mostly is in urban areas of the US. Most of the water and sewer systems have gone private. Most of the new highways have. Even the sidewalks and the parking meters have in most of the big cities like Chicago and Atlanta. There's not a lot of low hanging fruit you can steal from the middle class left. They are too destitute, in debt, and hopeless. The up-and-coming generation are saddled with student debt, can't save up down payments for houses, and generally don't have children or earn much anyways. There's not a lot of future there for the taking.
So what do you do? You look for where the new low-hanging fruit is. And, invariably, it will be owned by other billionaires. So they turn on each other. And as they start to see it happening, they start to seek protection. They soon realize the state can't do a lot for them, as they spent the last generation or two destroying state capacity and making it impotent so they could rob it. A state that can't bring even one Goldman Sachs executive to trial for all of the criminal mischief they did during this last recession or otherwise is not a state strong enough to protect other billionaires from Goldman Sachs. So you can't trust it. You need your own source of justice and violence to protect you.
And that's where I ultimately fear the grand 2nd amendment campaign will end up going. Too many billionaires finance it for me to believe they just really like hunting and really care about Joe Six Pack's 2nd amendment rights. They don't. They don't even let Joe Six Pack on their private compounds, never mind let him in armed. He'd be shot dead by a guard before he got within 1,000 feet.
No, they're funding this Second Amendment movement for another reason entirely. And I think you'll see that private security firms are turning more and more into private militaries every day.
The Ukraine is the test run for this. Igor Kolomoisky--billionaire owner of Privat Bank--keeps thousands of troops at the ready, personally loyal not to a Constitution or a people, but to Igor and the Bank only. For a mere $10mm per month, he keeps 2,000 active duty troops and 20,000 in reserve in Dnipro Batalion. But it's access to the big guns and aviation stuff that's more scary. I mean, as it is, an increasing amount of military tech is owned by a single family--like the Blue Brothers and the Predator Drones. I'm sure they have a couple of their own handy. It just always ends up nasty when they start going after each other. And without a strong middle class, they invariably do.
The only thing in my mind that matters is drawing the line here at least, and not too far. It's only a matter of time before someone like Peter Thiel decides he wants a nuclear weapon and he has the 2nd amendment right to one. Or, maybe we can reduce it a bit, let's say a destroyer, a couple of F-18s, and a handful of A1 Abrams. This is what I'd worry more about. We already saw what havoc a billionaire like Osama Bin Laden could unleash using nothing but payments to families of a few misguided poor people, plane tickets, and box cutters. And we saw how a billionaire like Robert Durst can get away with serial murder on HBO's The Jinx. And those who follow the news watched as Alice Walton got repeated DUIs, death resulting, and not only stays out of prison, but retains the right to drive. That's not to mention all the Kings of Wall Street who completely evaded any kind of justice whatsoever. Or Ethan Couch, the kid who had another DUI death-resulting case who was let free because his mommy and daddy were rich--his defense was 'affluenza,' or simply that he was brought up too wealthy and privileged to think about consequences.
Well, we're swiftly nearing the point in this country where we're closer to one person having all the wealth than total equality. That's your GINI 0.5 mark. NYC passed it a long time ago. And what traditionally happens, historically, at this point in a Republic is that the wealthy stop trusting the state military and start acquiring militaries of their own. Short of the Saudis and a few other groups, we don't see too much of this yet. But it happens every time, so I imagine it must be our future. Say by 2030 or so. The unwashed masses will have so little--even in total--compared to the billionaires, that the billionaires will start to see that they are greater threats to each other than even all the poor are to them as a group. Their cohesiveness will begin to crack. If there's anything this election's about, maybe it's that. Through the 90s and the 00s the solution was easy: Rob the middle class of the first world blind and shunt all the money to the top. Steal their pensions, slash their wages, outsource, discipline, punish, crack insider deals, pay yourselves a couple trillion out of the treasury, slash their benefits, make sure the middle class get poorer so the rich can get richer. And it worked very, very well.
But now, here we are in the 2010s. And they're starting to get more scared of each other. The middle class is mostly soaked. You can squeeze them more, and that's what the majority still wants. But others can see glimmers of hope in turning the common man against the rest. Their lines are not uniform any more. The low hanging fruit to rob--like middle class pensions--are all but gone. Public higher ed is essentially completely privatized. K-12 already is in Scandanavia, and mostly is in urban areas of the US. Most of the water and sewer systems have gone private. Most of the new highways have. Even the sidewalks and the parking meters have in most of the big cities like Chicago and Atlanta. There's not a lot of low hanging fruit you can steal from the middle class left. They are too destitute, in debt, and hopeless. The up-and-coming generation are saddled with student debt, can't save up down payments for houses, and generally don't have children or earn much anyways. There's not a lot of future there for the taking.
So what do you do? You look for where the new low-hanging fruit is. And, invariably, it will be owned by other billionaires. So they turn on each other. And as they start to see it happening, they start to seek protection. They soon realize the state can't do a lot for them, as they spent the last generation or two destroying state capacity and making it impotent so they could rob it. A state that can't bring even one Goldman Sachs executive to trial for all of the criminal mischief they did during this last recession or otherwise is not a state strong enough to protect other billionaires from Goldman Sachs. So you can't trust it. You need your own source of justice and violence to protect you.
And that's where I ultimately fear the grand 2nd amendment campaign will end up going. Too many billionaires finance it for me to believe they just really like hunting and really care about Joe Six Pack's 2nd amendment rights. They don't. They don't even let Joe Six Pack on their private compounds, never mind let him in armed. He'd be shot dead by a guard before he got within 1,000 feet.
No, they're funding this Second Amendment movement for another reason entirely. And I think you'll see that private security firms are turning more and more into private militaries every day.
The Ukraine is the test run for this. Igor Kolomoisky--billionaire owner of Privat Bank--keeps thousands of troops at the ready, personally loyal not to a Constitution or a people, but to Igor and the Bank only. For a mere $10mm per month, he keeps 2,000 active duty troops and 20,000 in reserve in Dnipro Batalion. But it's access to the big guns and aviation stuff that's more scary. I mean, as it is, an increasing amount of military tech is owned by a single family--like the Blue Brothers and the Predator Drones. I'm sure they have a couple of their own handy. It just always ends up nasty when they start going after each other. And without a strong middle class, they invariably do.
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