Johnson

[Mega]

My God do Dem-o-grats Love to spend (Other peoples) Money

[dcarrigg]

Re: Johnson

My God do Dem-o-grats Love to spend (Other peoples) Money

Thankfully, they're in good company. Not quite as good as the grand ol' Giving Out Publicmoney party. But close.

[Mega]

Re: Johnson

He printed so much money he forced Nixon to latter come off the Gold Standard, that was the start

[Woodsman]

Re: Johnson

Lyin' Landslide Lyndon was a Democrat's Democrat.

From rigging elections, getting rich off of graft and corruption, and smearing people as Russian agents, he was a man ahead of his time.

https://youtu.be/eKxj_bzA0Wk?t=7m43s

And it's true that the Great Society was his finest accomplishment, only not for the reasons we're endlessly told.

[dcarrigg]

Re: Johnson

And it's true that the Great Society was his finest accomplishment, only not for the reasons we're endlessly told.

You know I've been willing to engage here with the idea that certain tech/policy is meant primarily as social control and secondarily for it's surface purpose. And there can be no doubt that components of the Great Society, particularly the War on Poverty and all the community action were specifically designed to end-run state and local governments in part to attempt to give black folk who had been left out a voice the pluralist arena. But what was the alternative at the time? Pass money and programs through the hands of Gov. Wallace? I mean, I recall two other alternative broad ideas, Myrdal's full employment job guarantee idea and Moynihan's negative income tax fap idea. And one could argue it was a lost opportunity to have done one or the other of those, although both were expected to cost several times more than the existing means-tested benefits (Medicaid would blow up in cost over time, but not yet).

Maybe I'm just slow. I've admitted my inferior genetic heritage compared to the great WASPs, compared with whom my mind must run slowly. And I don't think anybody would make Johnson out to be a saint. And there can be non doubt the Ford Foundation was testing theories in the real world, and had for some time--look at Cloward's delinquency studies in Chicago, etc. But here's the thing: Stratman there was saying that the root of it is all top-down change. But the original community action idea went out of its way more than anything tried since to foster some bottom-up community-building. And I came from the same neighborhood, albeit it some decades later. You can put what you want on Garrity's initial decision. And sure, he lived comfortably in Wellesley with his Harvard diplomas on the wall while shuffling poor and working class kids in southie, dorchester and roxbury around. But it was upheld by Republicans on the first circuit, and then again unanimously (if I recall correctly) by the Burger Court.

Yes, bussing failed. But what was the alternative? I mean, put yourself in the driver's seat. How do you decide Morgan v. Hennigan in the wake of Brown v. Board--especially in the context of the times, following Watts and the other summer race riots and the recent passage of the fair housing act to end redlining and blockbusting and all that private sector free market realtor hocus pocus that was explicitly designed to result in racially segregated neighborhoods? I mean, what's the great alternative course of action that could have been taken that would have been so much better, even in hindsight? Truth is, even people with holes in their shoes eating butter and sugar sandwiches for big dinners with company back in the neighborhood would send their kids to catholic school if they could scrape the pennies together. One job at the shipyard, and another later as a janitor on the factory floor was enough to send my father well before bussing kicked in. For a bunch of dumb, backward, dullard, drunken, genetic inferiors, we always sure did love our books. It's not like the public schools in the Catholic neighborhoods were very good. They were racially segregated. That doesn't mean they were high quality. All those catholic elementary and high schools and colleges didn't just pop up in the mid-late 19th century and grow tremendously thereafter for no reason. And regardless, besides the fact that Johnson nominated him--and you know about Senate blue slips and how those nominations and confirmation hearings really happened until very recently--what did Johnson or the Great Society have to do with any of that?

[Woodsman]

Re: Johnson

Come on, DC. You know the score.

Did you ever wonder about the speed and ease with which many intelligent and seemingly competent members of elite organizations and institutions like Harvard and Columbia and Stanford appear so eager to justify policies and actions that support growing corruption?

Does the regularity with which the members of these fraternities of power and influence protect insiders from accountability regarding the most appalling frauds surprise you?

Would you agree that the largest majority of them are delighted with the advantages of being an insider and otherwise entirely indifferent to the extraordinary cost to all citizens of having our lives, health and resources drained to increase insider wealth in a manner that violated the most basic principles of fiduciary obligation and respect for the law?

And why is it that despite the soaring claims to good ends and good intentions, all of these Great Society type programs seem to operate in a win-lose economic paradigm that consistently and unfailingly results in more centralized economic and political power to Washington and Wall Street and less to Main Street?

Do you have any guess as to why for 55 years we have had steadily rising government budgets for programs and enforcement justified on the theory that they will make the quality of life go up and all we've seen, statistically and anecdotally, is a steadily falling quality of life? Of course you do.

You agree that bussing and education, generally, has been a failure but seem to believe there was no alternative at the time. Maybe, maybe not. But with all those degrees and pedigrees, you would think these cats would figure it out at least once. So how come they never do?

Putting aside education for a moment, think of another one of the popular Great Society programs, say HUD housing subsidies and the like. Surely, we have the capacity and know how to put in place an investment model that creates alignment between investors and the land, environment and people.

If we, for instance, financed places with equity instead of debt, we could create a way for global investors to profit from reducing consumption of scarce resources, integrating new technology into our infrastructure, healing the environment and improving the health of communities. We could spend $50,000 per home to rehab single family homes owned by FHA rather than spending $250,000 to create one new public housing apartment in the same community, but then how would we generate fees for friendly insiders?

If you illuminate the sources and uses of government resources on a neighborhood by neighborhood basis, you'll see that government monies are spent in ways that create fat stock market and personal profits for insiders at the expense of more productive outsiders who are providing most of the tax and other resources used. Insiders include big developers and property management companies that specialized in HUD-subsidized properties like then Harvard Endowment-owned National Housing Partners (NHP) and their affiliated mortgage banking operations or for investment bankers who issue municipal housing bonds for agencies like the Clinton's Arkansas Development and Finance Agency.

We can do that and have the know-how, processes, and technology available right now to make great things happen. But then the special interests whose business has become managing “the poor” would be out of business if new tools and opportunities were to significantly decrease the number of people who were poor. And many of these are traditionally powerful Democratic constituencies, including private for-profits, foundations, universities and not-for-profit agencies that have built up a significant infrastructure servicing and supporting programs to house, feed and supervise poor people.

If people were no longer poor, what is their purpose? And that's not to say that every single person at work in the poverty industries are on the take. But fundamentally, anything that empowers individuals and communities to rise out of poverty negates the need for these otherwise well-intentioned folks working in the poverty industries. If the poor can be helped and then help themselves out of poverty, then of course, the poor will not need the help of these well-intentioned people and their lives and work will have had no meaning. So what would motivate them to want to end poverty when their personal meaning and livelihood is derived from poverty continuing, if not growing.

If communities and individuals were empowered by such programs at the local and personal level, the central planners and managers in Washington and Wall Street would be in trouble. Everything from HUD real estate companies to private prisons would be shown to make no economic sense — other than to generate private profits and capital gains for insiders. And billions of government contracts, subsidies and financing would be shown to make no economic sense — other than to generate private profits and capital gains for insiders. So its a guarantee that in this corrupt environment, Great Society type programs will be subverted and turned to the advantage of insiders. Every single time.

What happened in the former Soviet Union following its demise, happened to us here at home and it was a bipartisan effort with many of the same personalities involved in looting both countries. Through “privatization,” assets were transferred out of governments worldwide at significantly below market value in a manner providing extraordinary windfall profits, capital gains and financial equity to private corporations and investors.

In addition, government functions were being outsourced at prices way above what should have been market price or government costs — again stripping governmental and community resources in a manner that subsidized private interests. The financial equity gained by private interests was often the result of financial, human, environmental and living equity stripped and stolen from communities — usually, in keeping with the 5G warfare doctrines at play, without these communities being able to understand what had happened or to clearly identify their loss.

And always with the consequence of steadily increasing the political power of companies and investors who are dependent on lucrative back door subsidies — thus lowering overall social and economic productivity. Hence, anything that improves efficiency or empowers individuals and communities runs counter to the global forces and tends to ruffle feathers. Investors like the Harvard Endowment aren't interested in paying full price for assets and are highly incentivized to oppose and subvert anything that works toward the benefit of individuals and communities since they benefit from the progressively deeper and deeper windfall discount prices associated with government privatization programs elsewhere in the U.S. and globally.

Speaking of Russia, I'm reminded of a Federal False Claims Act lawsuit against Harvard and journalist coverage regarding their role as a USAID government contractor in Russia illuminated the extent of the windfall profits that they and members of their networks were able to engineer at the expense of the Russian people, investors and the American people. So when looking at programs like the Great Society, you need to first understand that even efficiently and honestly executed privatization transactions advantage players who were the most successful at laundering money for the “black budget.” You remember the missing trillions at DoD? Can you imagine what's missing at HUD? I've heard numbers like $50 trillion across the entire USG. You have any guesses as to where that went?

It's not a bug, this constant "failure" of welfare, Great Society programs. It's a feature. A look at the public and private resource flows in communities associated with these Great Society type programs shows the vast majority of government subsidies were either not necessary or not economic — whether welfare and subsidies or prisons and the huge and growing infrastructure of community and social development and private real estate and government contractors that they support. There is a much more economic way for government to reduce domestic subsidies and crime.

Billions of dollars of government investment had a negative return on investment. We were paying millions of people — whether on welfare or government contracts or HUD property subsidies — to do things that were not productive. Change those expenditures to a positive return on investment, and extraordinary improvements in productivity are possible. And there is much work to be done that warrants investment — from repairing our infrastructure to rebuilding communities.

We have the capacity and know how to do it. But of course we don't because that does not serve the interests of those who profit from the poverty industries, be they rapacious capitalists or well-intentioned altruists.

And none of this even begins to address other really interesting and important questions like just who exactly has been bringing in drugs to these communities and where exactly is all the money from the trafficking and other illegal activities going? And how does all of this connect with the stock market and the mortgage markets and the fraud in those markets?

Like I said, you know the score better than most. The Great Society and program like it fail and continue to fail because the real intent is never what we are told. Knowing that, I'm not inclined to justify them, their progenitors, and benefactors, never mind supporting their continued funding and advancement.

And ultimately, it ties back to supporting Trump and abandoning the liberal/conservative/left/right paradigm. You know that if the Democratic party had wanted to win the election, it would have nominated Bernie Sanders. However, the goal was not for the Democratic Party to win. The goal was for Wall Street, Washington, Hollywood and Silicon Valley to win.

[dcarrigg]

Re: Johnson

I suppose I take issue a deeper level of specificity. There's a big glaring difference between how things looked when Sargent Shriver was head of the office of economic opportunity in '64 to when Reagan abolished it in '81. And in between everything was de-toothed of any radical edge it had that was designed with the purpose of empowering the poor. By the time Reagan shuffled the last few pieces of it into the cabinet departments, it was routine bureaucratic service delivery, and the iron triangle applies. But you make the leap to say the Great Society was designed for some alternative purpose, and I've seen no evidence of that.

The same goes for President Trump. I'm not convinced that he's really any kind of outsider. The man was born into wealth, got out of the draft, got an ivy league education, inherited his father's real estate empire, and became a worldwide celebrity socialite billionaire. He had an NBC show and was invited to everything down to Obama's press correspondents dinners. He staffed his cabinet and executive offices full of long-time GOP politicos, insiders, administrators, right down to billionaires and some of the highest ranking folks from Goldman. His judicial picks come straight off of lists from the Coors family via the Heritage Foundation. You've got Bolton, Blackwater, half the old swamp from the aughts. Despite all the rancor, the biggest policy move by far was a giant multi-trillion dollar corporate and top rate tax cut. He works with Rupert's Fox just as well as the Bushes ever did when they were in power. I mean, it's still early to judge his presidency. We'll see how it plays out. But I also don't see any real evidence so far that this is a president taking on Wall Street, Washington, Hollywood, or Silicon Valley. If anything, they've been by far the biggest benefactors of his presidency to date. Not that they weren't the biggest benefactors under Obama too. Still, if Mnuchin has his way, they've got a big capital gains cut coming soon too, and that without Congress. Besides a bunch of sound and fury signifying relatively little thus far about trade and social policy, I see little reason to believe that we have anything but a rather standard GOP politician in the Whitehouse.

[Thailandnotes]

Re: Johnson

The radical transformation of Jackson, Mississippi with Kali Akuno
https://www.rt.com/shows/on-contact/...ransformation/

[Woodsman]

Re: Johnson

...The same goes for President Trump. I'm not convinced that he's really any kind of outsider. The man was born into wealth, got out of the draft, got an ivy league education, inherited his father's real estate empire, and became a worldwide celebrity socialite billionaire. He had an NBC show and was invited to everything down to Obama's press correspondents dinners. He staffed his cabinet and executive offices full of long-time GOP politicos, insiders, administrators, right down to billionaires and some of the highest ranking folks from Goldman. His judicial picks come straight off of lists from the Coors family via the Heritage Foundation. You've got Bolton, Blackwater, half the old swamp from the aughts. Despite all the rancor, the biggest policy move by far was a giant multi-trillion dollar corporate and top rate tax cut. He works with Rupert's Fox just as well as the Bushes ever did when they were in power. I mean, it's still early to judge his presidency. We'll see how it plays out. But I also don't see any real evidence so far that this is a president taking on Wall Street, Washington, Hollywood, or Silicon Valley. If anything, they've been by far the biggest benefactors of his presidency to date. Not that they weren't the biggest benefactors under Obama too. Still, if Mnuchin has his way, they've got a big capital gains cut coming soon too, and that without Congress. Besides a bunch of sound and fury signifying relatively little thus far about trade and social policy, I see little reason to believe that we have anything but a rather standard GOP politician in the Whitehouse.

The Trump election reflected a backlash of the productive against the subsidized, particularly the richly subsidized.

If you look at a US county map of the election, you will note that the areas that voted for Clinton (in blue) represent the largest urban areas, enjoying the highest benefits from the centralization of the economy through government spending, programs, heavy regulation, invasion of privacy and monetary and market interventions – much of it supporting a global empire. This includes Wall Street, Washington, DC, Hollywood and Silicon Valley.

“Voters are rejecting big government, big banks, big corporations and big technology. They said no to establishment Republican primary candidates and Wall Street, and they hid from the political statheads trying to track their mood… Republican media strategist Bruce Haynes challenges his Republican and Democratic DC-based peers who are knee-deep in their drinks over Trump’s win to take a step back and look at the map of what Clinton won Tuesday night. “She won the biggest metropolitan areas in the country and a couple of Southwestern states that have seen a huge influx of Mexican immigrants,” he said. “And that is all she won and not a damn thing else.” That is, she won the top 10 populations centers where most of the wealth, commerce and power is located — and lost the bulk of America… “Look, elites don’t understand why America needs to be great again because for them America is great,” said Haynes. Their economy is strong, their lifestyle is comfortable and the communities they live in, in and around New York and Washington, are the wealthiest and most influential in the country…”

https://nypost.com/2016/11/09/trumps...n-plain-sight/

And we can demonstrate this dynamic by looking at incomes, none of which matters for a media and investors who only pay attention to data in the form of huge national aggregates. After all, the national data shows the economy is growing. So everything must be fine, right? Only for millions of people outside the coastal cities where powerful investors and media figures live, however, things are not fine.

So like I said, If the Democratic party had wanted to win the election, it would have nominated Bernie Sanders. However, the goal was not for the Democratic Party to win. The goal was for Wall Street, Washington, Hollywood and Silicon Valley to win. The “soft revolution” or “color revolution” was merely a front. This is one reason why so many people in the Republican establishment also supported Clinton.

You'll never hear it said publiclicly, but the consensus among the Democratic Party elites is that African Americans are hopeless. And that's why the Democrats are so keen to move them out and move the Hispanics in. The Democratic strategy in this election reflected that immigration strategy. Overlay the “sanctuary cities” with the blue dots in the red areas of the county-by-county electoral map of 2016 and it shows a strategy by which the rich attempt to control the political machinery with engineered immigration targeted for strategic locations. You make 30 million immigrants legal and you are talking about the end of the system as we know it.

This is also one of the reasons why the leadership of Wall Street, Washington, Hollywood and Silicon Valley have so vigorously opposed efforts to do something a simple as publishing the US budget and financial statements by Congressional district. Doing so would only document the rich subsidy flowing centrally and the extent to which it is shrinking total national wealth.

There are serious problems with leaving the current crew of richly subsidized in control. Their attempts to cover their overhead and engorge their coffers by extending centralization globally for a few more years are putting the entire world at risk. Clinton strength was on the financial side of the “central banking-warfare model.” This strength included the Neocons who promote a vision that the United States must maintain a global empire – the unipolar vision. The result has been exploding expenses for foreign wars, a military stretched globally, an explosion of dead and wounded and a European continent now being overrun by refugees from an imploding Middle East, as one civil infrastructure after another is destroyed. With this crime, we have fed the military industrial complex, a global arms industry and a mercenary capacity that has created an ever more powerful constituency for war.

This war-making edifice is expensive. It needs rich subsidy to keep it funded. Wars are funded with pubic dollars generating private profit. The public cost for each dollar of profit keeps rising. And it does not leave the US military in good shape.

One of the signature military affairs promoted by Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State was the invasion and destruction of Libya. Libya went from being the richest country in Africa to a country where one out of three people lives in poverty. We are all still trying to figure out where Libya’s 143 tons of gold went, let alone how much is related to contributions to the Clinton Foundation and campaign.

In the NY Times, Tom Friedman wrote of the refugees pouring into Europe, “The lucky few find ways to get smuggled into Spain or Germany, via Libya. Libya was like a cork on Africa, and when the U.S. and NATO toppled the Libyan dictator — but did not put troops on the ground to help secure a new order — they essentially uncorked Africa, creating a massive funnel through chaotic Libya to the Mediterranean coast.”

So we have trillions of dollars lost or missing in Mideast wars that explode American government debt, destroy numerous countries and overrun Europe with refugees. Yet, it was expected that Clinton would give us more of the same, including war with Russia.

The Trump campaign represented many on the side of the house that must implement and fight wars both foreign and domestic – the generals, the intelligence agencies and the enforcement arm. It also included the states that send the most young people into the military and receive back the most caskets and wounded warriors.

A growing number of these professionals understand that the unipolar vision has reached its limits and that the United States must draw back behind the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and become more economically self sufficient. This pullback is part of the rebalancing of our economic relationship with China at the center of the shift to the multipolar world. This is part of the effort to create a new grand strategy.

It's exactly how EJ called it a few years back. He described it as “Fortress America” and if you go back and read his reports and comments (I'd link but my paywall access was pulled after I was slandered and made a persona non grata), other than getting the timing a bit off, he was rather prescient. Back then, what he spoke about was in terms of the move to repatriate corporate cash and offshore funds into North America, to continue to develop energy independence and to rebuild our infrastructure and core military capability, and Trump represents such an adjustment.

And despite the efforts of the remaining Clinton-Bush dead-enders in the three letter agencies to save their necks by torpedoing Trump, the military-intelligence side of the central banking warfare model wants to regather its energy. It does not want to engage in wars it might not win. Not to mention that, with lead responsibilities to maintain the US dollar as reserve currency and events in the South China Sea, the US Navy has better things to do in a dangerous world than transgender training.

For decades, we have financed global growth with exploding levels of public and private debt. The Clintons rose to personal wealth and power swimming upon a sea of expanding debt that funded the centralization of ownership and control, including the Neoliberal vision of maintaining and extending a unipolar world. When the Bill and Hillary came to Washington our official national debt stood at $4 trillion. After the financial coup d’etat of trillions of dollars in bailouts and missing money, the official national debt now approaches $20 trillion. Underfunded retirement obligations and contingent liabilities will take it much higher.

The debt grew with globalization, which meant that the American middle class lost jobs and income. That did not have to happen. There were ways of addressing the needs of the middle class that could have resulted in a very different outcome. That middle class loss of status and economic strength is clearly seen in the debt that American children incur to finance a college education. Many of the adjustments to lending laws and student loan laws which allow predatory practices were made during the Clinton administration. High level student debt appears to be one of the reasons why the next generation of Americans is delaying homeownership. This is one of the reasons that the US homeownership rate has fallen to its lowest levels since 1965.

Another factor in the fall in homeownership rates is the devastation caused by the housing bubble first engineered by the Clinton administration. This bubble included massive foreclosures, resulting from unaffordable levels of mortgage debt, and a cost of trillions of dollars in taxpayer funded bailouts.

One of the ways in which sovereign governments have serviced increasing debt loads has been by engineering interest rates to record lows, particularly with the use of derivatives and significant central banking intervention. This drop in interest rates represents a significant transfer of wealth from savers and retirement accounts to governments and large borrowers – one of the reasons why pension fund and retirement underfunding will become one of the most pressing issues in both North America and Europe.

I mentioned before the over $50 trillion missing from the US government in bailouts and “undocumentable adjustments.” The US Department of Defense reported $9.3 trillion in undocumentable adjustments in fiscal 2015 alone – approximately $30,000 for every person in America. This extraordinary commitment of resources has funded extraordinary and uneconomic centralization in a manner which has harmed the general economy, the environment and productivity – a significant expenditure of government money has had a “negative return on investment.” That's also the reason I believe that one of the easiest and most effective things we can do from a fiscal perspective would be to bring transparency to the federal budget, including where the missing money has gone and how we can get it or the related assets back. And this discovery starts with transparency for the federal budget and financial statements for our individual Congressional District.

Our ability to finance with debt has depended on the willingness of the world to hold US dollars and US treasury securities and corporate debt. In part, the push to extend the unipolar vision is a push to ensure that governments around the world continue to do so. The shift to a multipolar vision means that our capacity to print infinite amounts of paper in exchange for valuable natural resources has reached its limits.

The German finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble who stated at the G20 meeting in Shanghai, “The debt-financed growth model has reached its limits… There are no shortcuts that aren’t reforms. The debt party is over. If anything the Trump victory represented the people in the military and intelligence community - minus the dead enders represented by the Brennans and Clappers and Comeys of the world wo are desperate to keep out of prison - and who know better than to try to extend it with more war. The shift to the multipolar world is upon us. A growing number of people responsible for managing the central banking-warfare model want to draw resources back to North America and rebuild the center. This means that the negotiations over the US federal budget are going to be significant in the first few years of this new administration. And once this silly Mueller soap opera is finished, the budget is where most of the real policy changes will play out.

And if I can circle back a moment, along with immigration, black people are indeed being “moved out” with predatory lending – they lost their homes – and with incarceration as the Clinton administration support for the war on drugs, expanded prison sentences and contracts to private prisons exploded. The result was the growth of a significant prison industrial complex in the United States. The US now boasts the highest incarceration rate in the world. One reason why the Clintons were successful building this machinery is due to the largesse they showered on minority elites to help them accomplish it. This success is one of the reasons we are hearing screams about “whitelash.” The last thing that folks who helped round up and gentrify their poorer brethren for a profit want is to do is look in the mirror.

While poor minorities were rounded up into prisons, poorer Caucasians were not faring well either. They were also losing their homes in record numbers as predatory loans and foreclosures swept through their communities, businesses and farms. In fact, the life expectancy of white women without a high school diploma, dropped by 5 years between 1990 and 2008. By 2008, life expectancy for black women without a high school diploma had surpassed that of white women of the same education level. The same study showed that life expectancy of white men without a high school diploma dropped by three years.

If you review life expectancy statistics in the United States. Hillary Clinton tended to carry the areas with the higher life expectancy, whereas Donald Trump carried the areas with lower life expectancy. Another way to explain these facts is that the people whose life force was being drained while government was engineering rich subsidies to Wall Street, Washington, Hollywood and Silicon Valley were looking for a way to stop that drain. They were, in fact, trying to stay alive.

And this brings us to the importance of productivity growth. Meeting retirement goals and other financial obligations requires continued productivity growth. The problem is that productivity is not growing. If you divide up productivity between labor productivity (workplace) and human productivity (outside the workplace) you'll see that recent increases in labor productivity have been achieved at great cost to human productivity. Moreover the benefits of increased labor productivity are not shared. While labor productivity has grown steadily, hourly compensation has flatlined.

One of the hopes for increased productivity is the reengineering of government, education and health care – three areas that have maintained high levels of employment while private corporations were downsizing. This generally means that (i) the tax burden to Americans has been heavy as their incomes flatlined, and (ii) the return on their savings fell as expenses steadily inflated.

Although there is potential to reengineer government, education and health care, the approach by the Obama Administration was seriously flawed. Obamacare, policies regarding health care records and Common Core were among the leading policy reasons for the Democratic defeat in the 2016 elections — and with very good reason. We need to get these changes right to generate productivity for Americans, not simply more invasive intelligence and profits for Silicon Valley. Let Silicon Valley be held to the standard of creating increased labor and human productivity as opposed to engineering surveillance capitalism that will turn Americans into prey.

Those of us who choose to live and work in the heartland of America spend a lot more time among people who are required to run family budgets, small businesses and farms. They tend to do more concrete functions, such as plumbing, construction, trucking, farming, and manufacturing. They’ve spent a lifetime mastering the art of covering their costs. They understand that you have to “sell something for more than it costs you to make it.” They are not central bankers or presidents, they can not create money out of thin air. Their financial world is accountable. Even state and local governments are required to balance budgets.

Predatory and cold blooded elites believe that problem is that the average IQ in America was 103, but a person with an IQ of 103 who has spent a life time balancing budgets scrambling to generate income in a world that only writes a check for real value-added is a lot smarter in a world without debt growth than a person with an IQ of 150 who graduated from Harvard or Yale and has been floating on richly subsidized operations in large urban centers ever since. The first person understands that you have to sell it for more than it costs you to make it. The second person is floating in a mystical bubble of inflated prices that depend on debt growth to finance activities that promote and justify central control – activities that do not add fundamental value to the economy.

Another thing that first person understands is that one of the keys to productivity is that men and women must give each other energy. Divide and conquer politics are hugely destructive to labor and human productivity. Another issue is meritocracy – “may the best man win.” Affirmative action is too expense and too complex. It is fascism with a progressive front. And a exploding number of rules and regulation are destroying productivity across Americans.

Increasing US productivity is essential and the people who understand how to increase productivity growth are pushing back. They want leadership that can lead us back to fundamental productivity growth. We can no longer afford people who are good at manufacturing more rules, blowing debt bubbles and engineering financial fraud. The long-term bull in the bond market is over.

Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 election. While I believe that there were significant shenanigans and vote rigging on both sides of the aisle, I believe Clinton lost the popular vote and the electoral vote (despite any news reports to the contrary). Let’s look at some of the reasons why. Hillary Clinton has been getting steadily richer while many of the productive people in America have been getting steadily poorer.

It is worth comparing Clinton’s profits on speeches at Goldman Sachs (who benefited richly on the end of Glass-Steagall during the Clinton administration and bailouts during Obama/Clinton, among many other policies ) to what professionals in American earn. Based on her estimated $115,616 hourly rate (before she lost, that is) she earns as much as 1284 MDs making $90 an hour and 7,707 "living wage" earners at $15 an hour. While millions of people were losing their homes and funding bailouts, Hillary Clinton was buying and living in multimillion-dollar mansions in Washington and New York.

Chelsea Clinton was married six months after the US invasion of Haiti. There are now allegations that Clinton Foundation funds helped pay for her wedding, which is estimated to have cost $3-5 million. Imagine how many Haitians would be alive today if the Clintons had allowed $3 million more of the money they raised for the Haitians to actually go to the Haitian people. Imagine why someone planning on running for President would spend $10,000 or more on a wedding cake while the Haitian people were dying for lack of shelter and safe drinking water or innocent Americans were working in private prisons as slave labor to make uniforms for the military. Of course, we all know what happened to the woman who said “Let them eat cake.”

Americans are a remarkably generous people. They have no problem with wealthy people who earn money in the markets through hard work, innovation or good luck. They do have a problem with politicians and political appointees who make money by selling influence and using the taxpayer credit to engineer private benefits – including for themselves – that shrink the pie. The average American knows that, in the long run, you have to make money by baking pies instead of stealing other people’s pies.

As allegations poured out from Wikileaks regarding the Clinton campaign and the Clinton Foundation, Americans got a taste of how “pay to play” really works, how manipulation of classified information is used to create private fortunes, and even how treason possibly occurred.

Hillary Clinton is part of a syndicate that has grown in wealth and power by centralizing control in the US in a manner that has drained the productive people who create much of the economic wealth that financed it. There were many people who voted for Trump in the 2016 election who voted for Obama in 2008. The productive wanted change eight years ago. What they got was a transfer of $27 trillion in bailouts – more than all the retirement savings in the country – to the large banks and private interests.

With the debt financed growth coming to an end, the productive were not prepared to tolerate the continued drain.

Clinton was shrinking the pie of the productive people, who do not want to be liquidated to keep the empire going. This was not about race, sex or any of the divide-and-conquer, politically correct waste-of-time air cover used to stalk the general population in support of empire building.

Clinton lost because of a productivity backlash. She would have lost to Bernie had they locked him out of the nomination and undermined his campaign as we learned through the Podesta emails. And she lost to Trump - ironically (again, as learned in the Podesta emails) the same candidate she and the media wanted so desperately wanted to run against - because they failed so miserably to understand what was happening in flyover country.

So what happens now? Will President Trump be able to lead the US towards lasting change? Maybe, maybe not, but he's the best shot we have at the moment, warts and all. Rejecting Clinton and the neolibs and the old GOP and the necons was the first step. And Trump assumes leadership of a complex machinery that is deeply dependent on harvesting global and domestic subsidy. Turning that machine around is easier said than done and in my old age and knowing what I know, it's hard to be hopeful that I will see it in my lifetime. But my Christian faith, weak and battered as it is, tells me that there is every reason for hope because God always rewards faith and hope, and usually in a manner unexpected to us.

Yes, the productive people want change. However, that change will require a broad-based commitment to shift the fundamental dependency of the US establishment and general population away from the “central banking-warfare model.” The richly subsidized, in particular, are in no hurry to convert to becoming fundamentally productive. Do we see Hillary Clinton embracing the opportunity to learn how to drive her own car or to clean her multiple homes? In my experience, there is no one meaner than the richly privileged when they are suddenly required to earn their keep.

And is Trump going to rewrite the playbook? Is he going to play by the playbook? Is he going to throw it out the door? What’s going to happen? Who can say for sure? And to your point, I think we can look to the stock markets as a bellwether for Trump. They will continue to recover as long as he doesn’t look like he is going to throw the playbook out. Just imagine if he suddenly decided that he would and it might be beneficial to the country that he did. Then the markets will go all over the place again. Because the markets are part of this state. The markets are part of waging war. They are part of the central banking-warfare state. Our entire financial system now is geared to this warfare state. It has an umbilical cord extending from it. That’s how it survives. That’s how it makes a lot of its profits directly or indirectly. Not for nothing was HSBC found out for laundering drugs. You know where a lot of those drugs were coming from? Afghanistan. This is a vicious many-headed animal that we have allowed to grow up – as Eisenhower predicted – and it may very well eat all of our lunches before it is through with us.

The task before Trump is much greater than most people appreciate. Since the election, millions of dollars have flowed to engineer protests, political warfare under the cover of a special counsel, and a vindictive corporate media that are doing their best to sabotage the administration. The political establishment is trying to build political toll booths at every turn. And again to your point, this change will not be decided by any single election or president. This is trench warfare, involving all of us. And for those of us who are true patriots and who want a country and a future to leave to our posterity understand that this president needs us. This is our country. And we want to help him.

At the very least, no matter how it turns out, we can give thanks that Hillary Clinton is never going to be the President of the United States. As Winston Churchill once said, “Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result.” We have missed a very big bullet – one that would have destroyed America.

What's left for us as individuals is to go to work, each in our own way. And to ignore the voices of the people and institutions who brought us so low while benefiting so very much. And maybe to pray. Honestly, we're in uncharted territory and I really don't know.

But what I do know is that if we the productive people of America want a country where we are once again free to be productive, if we really want America to be great again, it is going to take all of us pulling in that direction every day for the next four years. And that's why so much time, energy, and money is being directed by the forces of centralization, endless war, and intragenerational debt servitude to keep us divided and at war with each other. We need to resist that in every way available to us.

[jk]

Re: Johnson

the maps at https://www.vividmaps.com/2016/12/tr...chipelago.html are startling, and make the last election very clear, supporting woodsman's analysis. otoh, it's not clear at all that sanders could have done better because he would have likely turned out an even smaller percentage than clinton of the african-american electorate.

i read some of catherine austen fitts' stuff a bunch of years ago. i stopped reading because i felt my sanity was threatened if i took her conspiracy revelations at face value. really. i wasn't capable of accepting her reportage without reorganizing my worldview into a huge, paranoid conspiracy theory and i wasn't prepared to do that.

i mostly agree with dcarrigg's views, but believe that there is also a significant reality to those of woodsman. they are not instrinsically contradictory, not at all.

there are plenty of insider deals and payoffs. the private prison industry is one of the most obvious. add to that political cowardice and corruption [e.g. chicago parking meters, birmingham/jefferson county sewer system, etc] and the unwillingness of most voters to pay for what they vote for. [A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the majority discovers it can vote itself largess out of the public treasury- unclear attribution]. and add to that bureaucratic hypertrophy and the fact we live in a fallen world, full of venal, self-serving agents and add to THAT the complexity and contradictions of the huge societies we've constructed.

both biologically AND socially, we are still best suited to live in tribes in which everyone is related in some fashion, troops really, roughly comparable to baboon troops. our technologies, starting with agriculture first and foremost, have far outstripped our capacity for [social, let alone biological] adaptation, and the disparity is accelerating.

we weren't made for this world we've created. i can't count the number of times i've thought to myself "here i am increasing someone's antidepressant so that s/he can continue working a stressful job" or "i've got to figure out how to stabilize this person who cannot get enough sleep because of the exigencies of their life." perhaps there is some solution, though i am skeptical [cynical?] or perhaps anthropogenic climate change [or nuclear war, or the limited supplies of fresh water] is our species' reductio ad absurdum.

we're certainly not going to give brachiosaurus any competition in the survival sweepstakes.

[Thailandnotes]

Re: Johnson

"Those of us who choose to live and work in the heartland of America spend a lot more time among people who are required to run family budgets, small businesses and farms. They tend to do more concrete functions, such as plumbing, construction, trucking, farming, and manufacturing. They’ve spent a lifetime mastering the art of covering their costs. They understand that you have to “sell something for more than it costs you to make it.” They are not central bankers or presidents, they can not create money out of thin air. Their financial world is accountable. Even state and local governments are required to balance budgets."

This is such bullshit. The notion that 98% of the people on the coasts aren't working their asses off trying to make it can be refuted by anyone who lives there.

"true patriots"
is repugnant,
pure trolling.

[Thailandnotes]

Re: Johnson

I wonder how many people who care to comment on this site or others live in a mid-size city where the the mayor is white, the city manger black, the police force is well run, the city is not in the red, unemployment is low and has been for years, no corruptions to speak of for decades, etc.

Those places exist...alot of them.

[dcarrigg]

Re: Johnson

My time is short this morning, so I'll try to reply with some more care later.

But here's the rub (or at least, here's my headline thought):

Trump voters as a group overlap greatly with George W. voters. A supermajority of them voted for both. Everything you said about the urban/rural split could have applied to anyone in a polarized era in American politics. Could have been said about Breckinridge or Lincoln, Kerry or Bush.

Which leads to the second point: the electorate that supports a president does not necessarily reflect the people a president will support. Again, this president actually engaged in creating and executing policy that transfers trillions of dollars of wealth away from productive people to inheritors and speculators. No matter how much anybody writes about how he cares for the working class, they're going to have to contend with that plain, simple fact.

So counterfactuals aside, because I'm not sure Clinton would have been any better on that front, when I just take the Trump presidency on its own terms, and I don't read into it, but I look only at the policies it has created and promoted thus far and the size and scope of them, it looks like the same old song and dance. Somehow, what you see as radically different, I see as largely indistinguishable and similar to every other GOP president for the past 30 years. Even down to rural evangelical support in the voting base and electoral domination in the south.

One thing I will say about Clinton, and the last time I really want to bring her up, is her campaign was run like a stew cooked by committee, and they very foolishly tried to flip the south, spending a lot of money in the carolinas and georgia and texas, and spent very little (sometimes no) money or time in the states in the midwest they lost.
They were swinging for the fences, playing for a landslide, and they struck the hell out. That's on them. But even then, the margins were narrow.

And you don't need amnesty to flip a few of those purple states permanently blue. There are something like 2 million people in Florida alone who are permanently disenfranchised. Over 10% of the population. About 20% of the men. Disproportionately non-white. Numbers in Virginia and Mississippi and other states--especially those of the former Confederacy--aren't far off. If Virginia and Florida had Massachusetts or Vermont's voting laws tomorrow, their politics would be flipped straight upside-down.

If you want to talk about playing dirty games with millions of votes in targeted states (~6M people nationwide in this count, two-thirds of them in the south), the GOP doesn't come out looking any rosier than The Mule.

[thriftyandboringinohio]

Re: Johnson

...pure trolling.

+1

[Woodsman]

Re: Johnson

"Those of us who choose to live and work in the heartland of America spend a lot more time among people who are required to run family budgets, small businesses and farms. They tend to do more concrete functions, such as plumbing, construction, trucking, farming, and manufacturing. They’ve spent a lifetime mastering the art of covering their costs. They understand that you have to “sell something for more than it costs you to make it.” They are not central bankers or presidents, they can not create money out of thin air. Their financial world is accountable. Even state and local governments are required to balance budgets."

This is such bullshit. The notion that 98% of the people on the coasts aren't working their asses off trying to make it can be refuted by anyone who lives there.

"true patriots"
is repugnant,
pure trolling.

"We hold these truths to be self evident...to ourselves and our posterity..." so it stands to reason that everyone who does not count themselves in that cohort would object.