REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

A thread for Democrats Only

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Wednesday, December 18, 2024 12:56 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Trump Does Not Have a Mandate

He didn’t win a majority of the popular vote


Yes he does and Yes he did.




Buckle up, buttercup.

--------------------------------------------------

"My only fear of death is coming back to this bitch reincarnated." ~Tupac Shakur

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Wednesday, December 18, 2024 1:38 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Trump Does Not Have a Mandate

He didn’t win a majority of the popular vote


Yes he does and Yes he did.




Buckle up, buttercup.

--------------------------------------------------

"My only fear of death is coming back to this bitch reincarnated." ~Tupac Shakur
6ix, you and I both know you and Trump are lying sacks of shit.

I was amused by the ironic 60 second long video which summarizes the interior dialogue of many Americans, not just Trump and his Trumptards:

https://imgur.com/gallery/life-8xsFrO8

I finally made up my mind...
I’m tired of having goals
I’m sick of improving personally and professionally
Accomplishing anything is massively overrated
I’m exhausted at being held to any standard whatsoever
I’m at peace with never reaching full optimization
I’m ready to retire after accomplishing almost nothing and saving very little
I don’t wanna hit metrics or milestones
I don’t wanna look back at how far I have come
I don’t wanna overcome adversity and emerge as a better person
The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step and I don’t wanna take it
I wanna aimlessly meander until I wander off a cliff
I wanna lay down in the forest and slowly be consumed by vines
I wanna murder my calendar and leap into a sinkhole
Learning and growing sucks
This is who I am
Any improvement is purely accidental
I’m being pulverized by the crushing weight of daily structures
Life is chaos and so many things are outside my control
No thing brings me happiness – it only comes from within

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Wednesday, December 18, 2024 1:57 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Trump Does Not Have a Mandate

He didn’t win a majority of the popular vote


Yes he does and Yes he did.




Buckle up, buttercup.

--------------------------------------------------

"My only fear of death is coming back to this bitch reincarnated." ~Tupac Shakur
6ix, you and I both know you and Trump are lying sacks of shit.


All I know for sure is that you're a lying sack of shit.


Quote:
I was amused by the ironic 60 second long video which summarizes the interior dialogue of many Americans, not just Trump and his Trumptards:

https://imgur.com/gallery/life-8xsFrO8

I finally made up my mind...
I’m tired of having goals
I’m sick of improving personally and professionally
Accomplishing anything is massively overrated
I’m exhausted at being held to any standard whatsoever
I’m at peace with never reaching full optimization
I’m ready to retire after accomplishing almost nothing and saving very little
I don’t wanna hit metrics or milestones
I don’t wanna look back at how far I have come
I don’t wanna overcome adversity and emerge as a better person
The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step and I don’t wanna take it
I wanna aimlessly meander until I wander off a cliff
I wanna lay down in the forest and slowly be consumed by vines
I wanna murder my calendar and leap into a sinkhole
Learning and growing sucks
This is who I am
Any improvement is purely accidental
I’m being pulverized by the crushing weight of daily structures
Life is chaos and so many things are outside my control
No thing brings me happiness – it only comes from within


You are one of them.

I keep telling you that you know nothing about yourself and you need to look in a mirror.


You are the exact same asshole that you were when I quit drinking, only 2 weeks shy of 8 years ago now, and you say the exact same dumb bullshit you were saying 8 years ago.

Second is a static character.

You bring nothing good to yourself, the people around you or this world. All you have to offer anybody is judgement and your miserable personality.



Meanwhile.... if you want to ask yourself the question why so many people fit in the box you made for them above, I'd start with the US Public school system that is designed to make every adult that goes through it think like that when they come out.

--------------------------------------------------

"My only fear of death is coming back to this bitch reincarnated." ~Tupac Shakur

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Wednesday, December 18, 2024 2:20 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Meanwhile.... if you want to ask yourself the question why so many people fit in the box you made for them above, I'd start with the US Public school system that is designed to make every adult that goes through it think like that when they come out.




--------------------------------------------------

"My only fear of death is coming back to this bitch reincarnated." ~Tupac Shakur

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Wednesday, December 18, 2024 4:34 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

You are one of them.

I keep telling you that you know nothing about yourself and you need to look in a mirror.
Why do bad things happen to Trump? Or to his Trumptards? I always hear about their problems, which they claim are not their fault but it is the Democrats' fault. Is there a treatment for misophonia in Trumptards?

After researching her symptoms and finding the Duke Center for Misophonia in North Carolina, Gilbert realized there was a treatment for the disorder — cognitive behavioral therapy, or CBT, which is used to treat a variety of mental health conditions, including generalized anxiety, by helping people redirect their thinking patterns and manage their emotions. Talk therapy as a way to identify and understand triggers can also be helpful.

“This is an emotional issue. It’s about self-regulation and self-control,” Gilbert told People. “I realized I could ride out these waves but that they’re not going to go away. They never go away. But now I have all these tools to enable me to be more comfortable and less triggered. It made me feel in control.”

https://fortune.com/well/article/melissa-gilbert-little-house-prairie-
misophonia/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Wednesday, December 18, 2024 4:35 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

You are one of them.

I keep telling you that you know nothing about yourself and you need to look in a mirror.
Why do bad things happen to Trump? Or to his Trumptards? I always hear about their problems, which they claim are not their fault but it is the Democrats' fault.


What problem of MINE have I blamed Democrats for.

Be specific.

--------------------------------------------------

"My only fear of death is coming back to this bitch reincarnated." ~Tupac Shakur

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Wednesday, December 18, 2024 4:48 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

You are one of them.

I keep telling you that you know nothing about yourself and you need to look in a mirror.
Why do bad things happen to Trump? Or to his Trumptards? I always hear about their problems, which they claim are not their fault but it is the Democrats' fault.


What problem of MINE have I blamed Democrats for.

Be specific.

--------------------------------------------------

"My only fear of death is coming back to this bitch reincarnated." ~Tupac Shakur
The high price of canned chili. Inflation in general. Vaccinations. Drones flying over-head. All crimes committed by aliens. Movies you dislike. Russia invading Ukraine. Your unemployment. Gender-reassignment surgeries. Climate change is a hoax perpetrated by Democrats. Schools. Flunking out of college four times. Fear that "second" will harm you if he knew where you lived.

(Trumptards with misophonia, according to the Cleveland Clinic, are triggered, feeling intense and hard-to-control “anger, anxiety, or disgust” by Democrats.)

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Wednesday, December 18, 2024 5:16 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

You are one of them.

I keep telling you that you know nothing about yourself and you need to look in a mirror.
Why do bad things happen to Trump? Or to his Trumptards? I always hear about their problems, which they claim are not their fault but it is the Democrats' fault.


What problem of MINE have I blamed Democrats for.

Be specific.

--------------------------------------------------

"My only fear of death is coming back to this bitch reincarnated." ~Tupac Shakur


The high price of canned chili. Inflation in general.


That's a problem that everyone is going through. One of the many reasons that you just lost the election so historically badly.

Quote:
Vaccinations.


Not my problem. I was never vaccinated with a Covid shot.

Quote:
Drones flying over-head.


Not my problem. I don't live in New Jersey or New York.

Quote:
All crimes committed by aliens.


Not my problem. I don't live in a shithole blue state or a purple state with bad actors high up in the state government.

Quote:
Movies you dislike.


Not my problem. I don't watch any of them.

Quote:
Russia invading Ukraine.


Not my problem. Not anybody's problem except for Ukraine.

Quote:
Your unemployment.


Not my problem. I can get a job tomorrow if I wanted or needed to. Neither of these qualifiers have been met.

Quote:
Gender-reassignment surgeries.


Not my problem. I don't have a kid in a shithole blue state that will throw you in prison if you deny your child gender "reaffirming" surgery.

Quote:
Climate change is a hoax perpetrated by Democrats.


Not my problem. Period. Also something that I've NEVER said.

Quote:
Schools.


That's everyone's problem. It's also very easily proven when you look at ANY LIST of where America ranks in education vs. other developed countries.

SPOILER ALERT: We're ALWAYS on the bottom of said lists.

Quote:
Flunking out of college four times.


I never flunked out. I paid for it out of pocket, and then decided it wasn't for me.

I never blamed any of that on Democrats.

Quote:
Fear that "second" will harm you if he knew where you lived.


That's not a Democrat thing. That's individually applied specifically to you. Because you're psychotic. Nobody would feel comfortable if they knew that you knew where they lived.

http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=65116

You're just lucky that I'm not like you because I know where you live.





Would you care to try again?

--------------------------------------------------

"My only fear of death is coming back to this bitch reincarnated." ~Tupac Shakur

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Wednesday, December 18, 2024 5:25 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


One thing Democrats have done that is my problem because it is a problem for ALL Americans is that they've destroyed their party.

America needs a 2-party system.

Stop making excuses and fix yours.

--------------------------------------------------

"My only fear of death is coming back to this bitch reincarnated." ~Tupac Shakur

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Thursday, December 19, 2024 10:36 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
One thing Democrats have done that is my problem because it is a problem for ALL Americans is that they've destroyed their party.

America needs a 2-party system.

Stop making excuses and fix yours.

--------------------------------------------------

"My only fear of death is coming back to this bitch reincarnated." ~Tupac Shakur
The Trumptards in Congress can't get together to accomplish the simplest things: The news of the moment is the looming prospect that the federal government will shut down over the weekend.

We’ll have to see how much damage this does, but it’s already clear that assuming the worst happens — and it’s hard to see how it won’t — this will be the dumbest shutdown ever. I’d say that the incoming Musk administration (so far Musk, not Trump, appears to be calling the shots) is trying to hold itself up for ransom, but it doesn’t even rise to that level. This isn’t like 1995, when Newt Gingrich shut down the government in an attempt to extract cuts in Medicare and Medicaid — a move that seemed (and was) a foolish act of petulance, but at least had a ghost of motivation.

No, Musk is demanding — apparently successfully — that Republicans in Congress renege on a deal they had already agreed to, a continuing resolution that would keep the federal government going for the next few months. Why? Because, Musk says, of the outrageous provisions in that CR.

Except none of the items Musk is complaining about are actually in the bill. No, Congress isn’t giving itself a 40 percent raise. No, the bill doesn’t fund a $3 billion stadium in Washington. No, it doesn’t block future investigations into the Jan. 6 committee. No, it doesn’t fund bioweapons labs.
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/12/18/elon-musk-false-claims-cr-001
95252

In a barrage of posts on X Musk pushed misinformation about a more or less routine, place-holding bill that was basically a way to keep the ship of state afloat until Trump takes charge. Maybe this was in part a power play, an attempt to make Republicans in Congress show fealty to a man who clearly imagines that he’s the real president — and Trump, by meekly endorsing Musk’s position, did in fact convey the impression that Musk is leading the guy who is supposed to be in charge by the nose. But this political theater will have real consequences, for America, for Trump, and for Musk himself.

Musk has asserted that shutting the government down for a month would do no harm. And it’s true that Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid funding — which is where the bulk of the money goes — will continue. But many services people rely on will be disrupted, especially if the shutdown goes on for more than a month, which seems all too likely given Republicans’ razor-thin House majority and the dominance of misinformation in many members’ thinking.

Maybe Musk himself doesn’t expect to experience any hardship, but put it this way: I’m glad that I won’t need to renew my passport any time soon, that I don’t expect to be trying to get through airport security for a while, and especially glad that I don’t rely either on food stamps or on small business loans. For all of these things have been disrupted in past government shutdowns.

Do Musk and Trump know any of this? Almost surely not.

Much more at https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-chaos-monkeys-have-already-take
n

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Thursday, December 19, 2024 6:56 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Nobody cares about the government shutting down. We get to hear about that happening every other year.

Next.

--------------------------------------------------

"My only fear of death is coming back to this bitch reincarnated." ~Tupac Shakur

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Saturday, December 21, 2024 9:11 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Nobody cares about the government shutting down. We get to hear about that happening every other year.

Next.

--------------------------------------------------

"My only fear of death is coming back to this bitch reincarnated." ~Tupac Shakur
Nobody cares about your mental illness, 6ix. Nearly all Republican Congressmen didn't bend to Trump's mental illness, which is why government will not shut down for Xmas. The Democrats got all they wanted and Trump got nothing because he is nuts. (Congress averts shutdown after House GOP drops Trump’s debt limit demand https://www.cnn.com/2024/12/20/politics/house-senate-vote-shutdown-bil
l/index.html )

Wow, this extract from Wolff’s book is a shocking insight into Trump’s mind:

On his first night in the White House, President 'Frump complained that the TV in his bedroom was broken, because it didn’t have “the gorilla channel”. 'Frump seemed to be under the impression that a TV channel existed that screened nothing but gorilla-based content, 24 hours a day.
To appease Trump, White House staff compiled a number of gorilla documentaries into a makeshift gorilla channel, broadcast into Trump’s bedroom from a hastily-constructed transmission tower on the South Lawn. However, Trump was unhappy with the channel they had created, moaning that it was “boring” because “the gorillas aren’t fighting”.
Staff edited out all the parts of the documentaries where gorillas weren’t hitting each other, and at last the president was satisfied. “On some days he’ll watch the gorilla channel for 17 hours straight,” an insider told me. “He kneels in front of the TV with his face about four inches from the screen, and says encouraging things to the gorillas, like ‘the way you hit that other gorilla was good’. I think he thinks the gorillas can hear him.”

8:07 PM · Jan 4, 2018
https://x.com/pixelatedboat/status/949100087350710272

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Saturday, December 21, 2024 9:14 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Get Ready for Trump’s TV Government
The incoming administration will be chaotic and personalist, not organized autocracy.

By Samantha Hancox-Li | December 20, 2024, 3:00 PM

https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/12/20/trump-fox-news-tv-gorilla-channel/

In 2018, a joke tweet went viral suggesting that then-President Donald Trump spent 17 hours a day watching “the gorilla channel,” a fake TV channel featuring footage of gorillas fighting created by his staffers. In 2024, President-elect Trump nominated Peter Hegseth, whose primary qualification is appearing on Fox and Friends, for secretary of defense. Trump nominated Mehmet Oz (aka Dr. Oz), whose primary qualification is appearing on Oprah, to be Centers of Medicare and Medicaid Services administrator.

Since Trump’s election, some on the left have given in to the impulse of doom. They talk as if Trump is a god-emperor who will sweep away the American republic with a wave of his hand. Some on the right believe this too, though in their case, they approve of that course of action. Certainly Trump and his allies have declared their intention to reshape American society in an authoritarian direction.

But what we should expect is not an organized transformation. What we should expect is gorilla channel governance—chaotic, personalist, and based largely on what the president most recently saw on television.

Broadly speaking, there are two models of authoritarianism, one aimed at controlling society, the other aimed at controlling elites. The model of impersonal social control requires large, efficient bureaucracies that penetrate and permeate the masses. Such bureaucracies manage and transform the whole of society.

Stalin and the Bolsheviks are a model here. After they seized power in 1917, the Bolsheviks inherited a country wracked by external war, civil war, and famine—in other words, a mess. Over the next two decades, they would establish governing institutions—Gosplan, the Red Army, the KGB—that permeated every aspect of Soviet life and transformed a messy and dysfunctional imperial system into a superpower capable of mobilizing 17 percent of the population into arms in wartime, 61 percent of GDP into war spending, and—when the party required—killing between 6 million and 20 million of their fellow Soviet citizens. The Soviet state permeated Soviet society, and was able to mobilize the Soviet people to extraordinary ends—for the first several decades, at least.

If this model of authoritarian governance is so effective, why choose anything else? In a word: coup-proofing. Personalist dictators find themselves threatened by the existence of efficient and impersonal bureaucracies. They fear their lieutenants more than their people. Nikita Khrushchev, after all, was removed in a quiet coup by his own lieutenants, who had only to suborn the head of a single security apparatus, the KGB.

The desire to avoid a coup produces the second model of authoritarianism, which requires numerous competing centers of power with unclear and overlapping mandates. This forces those lieutenants to constantly compete for the leader’s favor. The chaos and ambiguity of power undermines efficient administration but concentrates power in the leader’s person. In Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, there was a regular police force; the secret police force of the Directorate of General Security; the Iraqi Republican Guard; and finally the Fedayeen Saddam, all of which had the nominal role of controlling domestic dissent, but which operated along completely different lines of command. Men rise to the top of such systems not through competence but through personal loyalty to the boss. Trump’s personal inclinations, as well as the Republican Party’s longstanding opposition to “big government,” suggest that Trump’s second term will be characterized by a strongly personalist administration.

Personalist systems are less effective at managing a society than impersonal bureaucracies. Moreover, they are heavily reliant on the personal abilities of the leader. Trump is not a young, energetic dictator ready to spend the next 40 years remaking America. He is a tired old man who forgets what state he’s currently standing in.

And, for the most part, he is not appointing energetic young psychopaths to remake the entire system. He’s appointing people he saw on the teevee. This is gorilla channel governance: government based not on long-term plans to reshape society energetically and carefully pursued, but on the whims of an aging leader who surrounds himself with sycophants and lives in a world of television and social media.

The proposed Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) illustrates how Trump favors the second model—that of personalist elite control. DOGE’s powers are vague and ambiguous, potentially involving major cuts to various other departments—or not, depending on the boss’s whim. On top of that, it is being created with two equal leaders, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, precisely so Trump can play Ramaswamy and Musk off one another. Maybe DOGE is going to be given broad powers to cut a trillion dollars of government spending. Or maybe that’s just a threat Trump intends to hold over whoever he appoints to those other government departments. It’s up to him—by design.

This affects how Trump will interact with existing federal bureaucracies. Trump is not constructing his administration de novo after a revolution. Rather, he is confronted with an existing bureaucratic regime of immense size. The American federal government employs 4.5 million people and controls $6.8 trillion in spending. It can be very difficult for political appointees to control the large institutions of the permanent civil service.

This is true even when the political appointees nominally have total authority over the bureaucrats. There are large informational and organizational gaps between the bureaucrats and the appointees. A toy example: The appointee proposes some new policy. The bureaucrat, who does not want to enact this policy, says, “Yes, of course, sir, we’ll get right on it.” But the plan bureacrats enact is guaranteed to take forever, and likely be challenged in court. They will do a study to see if they should do it and a year later conclude they shouldn’t. Overcoming the preferred policies of the permanent civil service requires energy, area knowledge, and attention to detail. To put it bluntly: the ability to recognize when the civil servants are running a snow job on you.

Trump has suggested courts-martial for officers involved in the Afghanistan withdrawal. This will come to nothing, precisely because it offers the military bureaucracy an excuse to spend time “following orders,” preparing for these trials, and finally acquitting the officers (who indeed committed no misconduct). And by the time that’s all done with there will be something new on the gorilla channel.

We should expect Trump to see most success when he is “swimming with the tide” of existing bureaucracies or Republican priorities—much as happened during his first term, when his primary successes were a tax cut and installing conservative judges. One example is his program of mass deportations of illegal immigrants. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection have long desired to engage in more aggressive deportations than was allowed under President Joe Biden. Here, Trump doesn’t need to remake the bureaucracy to get it to do what he wants. He just needs to take the leash off.

Even in this arena, however, we should expect to see him struggle to co-opt blue states and their administrative capacity. Mass deportations are unlikely to involve a “whole of government” effort. Trump has also suggested denaturalizing American citizens and ending birthright citizenship by refusing to issue social security cards to the children of undocumented immigrants.

However, birth certificates are not issued by the federal government, but by a dizzying array of state agencies, municipalities, doctors, and hospitals. Denaturalization requires going through courts, which grind away at their own hideous pace. Trump cannot simply snap his fingers and transform American society from a jus soli regime to an explicitly white supremacist ethnostate.

Theories without predictive power mean little, and so let’s make a forecast here: We should expect Musk to be among the first of Trump’s picks to get shanked by Trump, precisely because he has too much of his own base and is not dependent on Trump for fame or power. A clash of egos, and Musk will be out, replaced by someone you’ve never heard of.

None of this is to say that the second Trump administration will be good. He will achieve some of his goals, especially when those goals are shared by existing institutional or party structures. And the chaos of illiberal governance is an acid wearing away at functional government and liberal society. When this ends, there will be a great deal of rebuilding to do. But opponents should expect chaos and cruelty, not well-organized fascism.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Saturday, December 21, 2024 6:11 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Nobody cares about the government shutting down. We get to hear about that happening every other year.

Next.

--------------------------------------------------

"My only fear of death is coming back to this bitch reincarnated." ~Tupac Shakur
Nobody cares about your mental illness, 6ix. Nearly all Republican Congressmen didn't bend to Trump's mental illness, which is why government will not shut down for Xmas. The Democrats got all they wanted and Trump got nothing because he is nuts. (Congress averts shutdown after House GOP drops Trump’s debt limit demand https://www.cnn.com/2024/12/20/politics/house-senate-vote-shutdown-bil
l/index.html )


That's not true.

Democrats originally wanted a 1,547 page bill passed. They got 118 pages.

Trump cut out over 1,400 pages of pork and bullshit and Democrats get to go home with nothing for Christmas.

And when they come back and Trump is inaugurated, we get to start investigating Democrats and figuring out which Republicans we are going to Primary.



--------------------------------------------------

"My only fear of death is coming back to this bitch reincarnated." ~Tupac Shakur

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Saturday, December 28, 2024 9:34 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


He Leaked Trump’s Tax Returns. Will Biden Protect Him?
Tax experts say IRS whistleblower Charles Littlejohn’s leaks provided a public service — and fear Trump will take retribution.

By Matthew Sledge / Dec 28, 2024 at 5:21 AM

https://theintercept.com/2024/12/28/trump-irs-billionaire-tax-returns-
leak-charles-littlejohn/

Earlier this month, a group of professors from the normally stodgy world of tax law wrote to President Joe Biden calling on him to free the IRS contractor who leaked the tax returns of Donald Trump and thousands of millionaires and billionaires.

Charles Littlejohn’s five-year sentence was six times the recommended maximum, the professors said, despite the fact that Littlejohn’s disclosures helped shed light on a broken tax system that allows Warren Buffett to pay a lower tax rate than his secretary.

With Biden winding down his time in office, Littlejohn’s advocates, including tax code reformers from the groups Revolving Door Project and Patriotic Millionaires, are worried for the incarcerated IRS consultant. They’re calling on Biden to commute Littlejohn’s sentence before it is too late and he is forced to spend Trump’s second term in prison at risk of retribution.

“Trump has already promised to pardon January 6 insurrectionists who are convicted,” said Kenny Stancil, a senior researcher at the Revolving Door Project. “It would be a perversion of justice if they walk free while Littlejohn spends over four more years in prison.”

Calls for Clemency

Stancil’s Revolving Door Project, Patriotic Millionaires, and the group of tax professors led by Reuven Avi-Yonah of the University of Michigan — who has called Littlejohn a “public hero”— are leading the charge for clemency.

The groups have not called on Biden to pardon Littlejohn, noting that he pleaded guilty, but they did emphasize the civic-minded purpose behind his leaks.

For years before Littlejohn’s leak, and in breaking with decades of precedent, Trump had refused to release his tax returns to the public.

Trump’s Taxes: A Thousand Scandals in One

In response, Littlejohn gave the New York Times years of Trump’s tax returns, which revealed in the run-up to the 2020 election that the real estate developer, entertainer, and politician had paid nothing or next to nothing in federal taxes for years.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/09/27/us/donald-trump-taxes.h
tml

After those leaks, he handed ProPublica the tax documents of thousands of the super-rich, which showed how billionaires such as Los Angeles Clippers owner Steve Ballmer took advantage of tax breaks to avoid paying millions of dollars to the government.

Ballmer, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos — Littlejohn leaked all their returns, giving the public previously unimaginable insight into how the rich approach paying their taxes. Throughout the process, Littlejohn sought assurances from the news outlets that they would handle the files with care.
https://www.propublica.org/series/the-secret-irs-files

“Littlejohn is a whistleblower, who responsibly disclosed information of interest to the public to reputable news organizations,” Stancil said. “He had nothing to gain personally from this. He was acting in the public interest.”

Littlejohn was able to access wealthy Americans’ tax files as a consultant for the IRS. While he took steps to avoid detection, he quickly pleaded guilty after federal investigators began zeroing in on him. That type of cooperation, along with his spotless record, would normally go a long way toward lenient sentencing.

Instead, U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes in January went five times above the recommended maximum 10-month term in federal guidelines to hand Littlejohn the same 60-month sentence recommended by federal prosecutors — the maximum allowable under the law.

Reyes, a Biden appointee, said that Littlejohn’s actions posed a similar threat as the January 6 rioters. By that point, she had already sentenced seven people involved in the events of that day, handing none of them prison sentences, according to an Intercept database. (She has since sentenced three men to shorter prison terms than Littlejohn.)

“What you did in attacking the sitting president of the United States was an attack on our constitutional democracy,” Reyes said, according to CNN. “We’re talking about someone who … pulled off the biggest heist in IRS history.”

Political Pressure

Littlejohn’s supporters believe he may have fallen victim to a political pressure campaign.

Days before sentencing, every Republican member of the House Ways and Means Committee sent a letter to the judge in his case, asking her to “throw the book” at Littlejohn, in the words of a press release.
https://waysandmeans.house.gov/2024/01/24/ways-means-republicans-throw
-the-book-at-irs-leaker/

Among the victims of the leak was Sen. Rick Scott, the Florida Republican who grew wealthy leading a health care company that defrauded the U.S. government.
https://theintercept.com/2020/05/06/coronavirus-hca-healthcare-nurse-u
nion-busting/

Scott said at sentencing that the people who had their taxes leaked were “attacked for political purposes” and accused the Justice Department of going easy on Littlejohn.

“He got the sentence because the aggrieved parties were the billionaires.”

Littlejohn’s supporters argue that Scott had it backwards: Littlejohn received a far greater sentence than people convicted under the same statute of leaking information for personal gain — or of multimillionaires convicted of tax evasion.

“There’s no way, in my mind, that if Littlejohn had leaked the IRS information of a bunch of bartenders and hairstylists who hadn’t been reporting tip income, he wouldn’t have gotten six times the guideline sentence for that,” said Bob Lord, senior vice president for tax policy at Patriotic Millionaires. “He got the sentence because the aggrieved parties were the billionaires.”

Lord and other Littlejohn supporters are acting now because they believe the window may be closing for an early release.

Littlejohn, who reported to prison in May, is pursuing an appeal that could lower his sentence. Outside groups, however, are pitching Biden on the commutation request, with a hope that the president will send Littlejohn home before Trump takes office.

It is unclear whether Biden is considering such a step. The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

Stancil, of the Revolving Door Project, pointed out that Biden has reportedly been mulling preemptive pardons for political figures who could face retribution from Trump. Littlejohn could face similar threats in prison, he said.

“If Biden is considering these anticipatory actions,” Stancil said, “we think that Charles Littlejohn fits into that category of people who are at risk of potential retribution.”

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Thursday, January 2, 2025 1:18 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


How Criminal Justice Helped Break American Democracy

About the Book Criminal Justice in Divided America: Police, Punishment, and the Future of Our Democracy, by David A. Sklansky (Harvard University Press, 2025).

Published December 30, 2024

https://politicsrights.com/how-criminal-justice-broke-american-democra
cy/

Shortly after the recent election, the New York Times reported the results of a new study documenting a deep and pervasive pessimism among the American public, cutting across ideological lines. Only a quarter of Americans think the country’s best days are ahead, only one in ten thinks the government represents them well. This is broadly true both of Trump supporters and of the half of the country that voted against him. “In a sense,” the report concludes, “it is in the deep chords of distrust where Americans seem most united.”

Serge Schmemann, the Times editorial board member who wrote about the study, lamented that it “left unanswered the wrenching question that we must answer if things are to improve: Why? Why has America fallen into the deep malaise quantified by this study? Why are we so down on our country, our government, our prospects? Why is there so much hatred in our civil discourse?”

I offer a partial answer in my new book, Criminal Justice in Divided America: Police, Punishment, and the Future of Our Democracy. Failures of the criminal legal system helped to drive American politics toward populism, polarization, and pessimism. By the same token, the right kinds of reforms can not only make policing, prosecution, and punishment fairer and more effective; they can assist in rebuilding American democracy.

Crime Politics from Goldwater to Trump

It’s hard to think of an area of domestic policy other than criminal justice where American democracy has failed as spectacularly over the past several decades, or with worse consequences. It is hard to be upbeat about the country when you lack confidence that government’s bluntest tools—the police and prisons—will be used fairly and in a way that keeps you safe.

When the Republic party began its long journey toward right-wing populism in the late 1960s, no issue fueled conservative discontent more than the failure of government to provide “law and order.” The politics of crime were the heart of Barry Goldwater’s unsuccessful campaign for president in 1964, and they helped fuel the later victories of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. By the 1980s, Democrats were competing with Republicans to propose the harshest anti-crime policies, and the eventual results were the disasters of mass incarceration and hypermilitarized policing.

More at https://politicsrights.com/how-criminal-justice-broke-american-democra
cy/

Download David A. Sklansky’s books from the mirrors at https://libgen.is//search.php?req=David+Alan+Sklansky

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Thursday, January 2, 2025 1:30 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
How Criminal Justice Helped Break American Democracy

About the Book Criminal Justice in Divided America: Police, Punishment, and the Future of Our Democracy, by David A. Sklansky (Harvard University Press, 2025).

Published December 30, 2024

https://politicsrights.com/how-criminal-justice-broke-american-democra
cy/

Shortly after the recent election, the New York Times reported the results of a new study documenting a deep and pervasive pessimism among the American public, cutting across ideological lines. Only a quarter of Americans think the country’s best days are ahead, only one in ten thinks the government represents them well. This is broadly true both of Trump supporters and of the half of the country that voted against him. “In a sense,” the report concludes, “it is in the deep chords of distrust where Americans seem most united.”

Serge Schmemann, the Times editorial board member who wrote about the study, lamented that it “left unanswered the wrenching question that we must answer if things are to improve: Why? Why has America fallen into the deep malaise quantified by this study? Why are we so down on our country, our government, our prospects? Why is there so much hatred in our civil discourse?”

I offer a partial answer in my new book, Criminal Justice in Divided America: Police, Punishment, and the Future of Our Democracy. Failures of the criminal legal system helped to drive American politics toward populism, polarization, and pessimism. By the same token, the right kinds of reforms can not only make policing, prosecution, and punishment fairer and more effective; they can assist in rebuilding American democracy.

Crime Politics from Goldwater to Trump

It’s hard to think of an area of domestic policy other than criminal justice where American democracy has failed as spectacularly over the past several decades, or with worse consequences. It is hard to be upbeat about the country when you lack confidence that government’s bluntest tools—the police and prisons—will be used fairly and in a way that keeps you safe.

When the Republic party began its long journey toward right-wing populism in the late 1960s, no issue fueled conservative discontent more than the failure of government to provide “law and order.” The politics of crime were the heart of Barry Goldwater’s unsuccessful campaign for president in 1964, and they helped fuel the later victories of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. By the 1980s, Democrats were competing with Republicans to propose the harshest anti-crime policies, and the eventual results were the disasters of mass incarceration and hypermilitarized policing.

More at https://politicsrights.com/how-criminal-justice-broke-american-democra
cy/

Download David A. Sklansky’s books from the mirrors at https://libgen.is//search.php?req=David+Alan+Sklansky

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two




Good.

Now maybe we can stop pretending that it's only Trumptards that don't trust our government.

I think I've had to hear that dumb bullshit out of you a dozen times in the last week.

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Thursday, January 2, 2025 2:33 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Good.

Now maybe we can stop pretending that it's only Trumptards that don't trust our government.

I think I've had to hear that dumb bullshit out of you a dozen times in the last week.

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
Unfortunately for Texas, Trumptards act like they are having a constant mental breakdown which feels normal to them but it is not healthy. Texas Trumptards won't be able to comprehend that Trump deliberately breaking the law is a mentally unwell stance to be knee-jerk approving.

Trump already planning to break the law

The Wall Street Journal explains why Donald Trump is going to have trouble carrying out his immigration agenda and then tells us what he plans to do about it:

Trump’s advisers have said that he hopes to test the limits of the law by issuing policies he knows to be unlawful, or even unconstitutional, in a bid to persuade the Supreme Court, which is dominated by conservatives, to come to different decisions.

Republicans relentlessly referred to both Obama and Biden as lawbreakers because they enacted policies that were in gray areas and ended up being adjudicated in court. It was always ridiculous because every president does this.

But Trump isn't going after gray areas. If the Journal is right, he plans to enact policies that he flat out knows to be illegal. He's just hoping that his hand-picked Supreme Court will let him do it.

The Five Biggest Roadblocks to Trump’s Immigration Agenda

By Michelle Hackman and Tarini Parti | Jan. 1, 2025 12:10 am ET

https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/the-five-biggest-roadblocks-to-tru
mps-immigration-agenda-5bf75c43

President-elect Donald Trump has promised to deport millions of immigrants in what would be the largest deportation operation in U.S. history.

President-elect Donald Trump has promised a crackdown on illegal immigration and significant changes to immigration laws. Now his advisers will contend with long-existing headwinds to turn Trump’s campaign rhetoric into policy.

Here are five major roadblocks the incoming administration will face:

Immigration-court backlog

Most immigrants in the U.S. illegally can’t be deported without a hearing in immigration court, where they have a chance to ask for asylum or another avenue to stay in the country. But immigration courts are so backlogged that hearings are being scheduled as far into the future as 2029.

While immigrants wait for their hearings, they are given work permits, allowing them to find legal employment inside the U.S. Trump and his allies argue this process is an important factor attracting migrants to come to the U.S. to seek asylum—even if they don’t win their court cases.

Outside experts estimate that Congress would have to hire about 5,000 immigration judges—the system now has roughly 500—to efficiently sort through all existing cases as well as new ones.

Republicans hope to use a special budget process to advance Trump’s immigration program without needing Democratic votes.

Barring a large infusion of cash to hire more judges, the Trump administration could shuffle around whose hearings happen first, giving priority to people from certain countries or those with criminal histories. They could make it tougher for immigrants to delay their final hearings, which judges sometimes allow in some cases, to give immigrants more time to find lawyers to represent them.

Without a change in the law, most of the migrants who entered the country illegally during President Biden’s term won’t be legally deportable for years.

Lack of ICE agents

The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency is responsible for arresting immigrants in the country illegally, detaining them and deporting them. It has roughly 6,000 agents on staff and funding to jail about 40,000 immigrants at any given time. It doesn’t have nearly the fleet of planes needed to deport millions of migrants back to their home countries.

The government is also having trouble recruiting new border-patrol agents and doesn’t have enough asylum officers to hear claims made outside of court.

Republicans are hoping to use a budget process known as reconciliation to pass billions of dollars in spending for ICE as well as Trump’s border wall without needing Democratic votes. Even if the money comes, it will take the government time to recruit and train new ICE officers and make new detention space available.

Trump plans to declare a national emergency soon after taking office, which could unlock additional money taken out of the Pentagon’s budget for projects such as border-wall construction. Members of the National Guard or other troops won’t be allowed to perform immigration arrests, however; at best, they could be used for ancillary tasks, such as transporting immigrants. Trump’s designated border czar, Tom Homan, told The Wall Street Journal that military bases and planes could aid a deportation campaign.

Blue-state resistance

Immigrants living in the country illegally are often concentrated in big, Democratic-led cities such as New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Denver.

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson said in a CNN interview recently that he wouldn’t be cooperating with federal immigration authorities. “The law is very clear,” he said. “Local police officers are not federal agents.”

Denver Mayor Mike Johnston has expressed support for limited deportations for migrants who crossed illegally and have committed violent crimes, but he is strongly opposed to mass deportations. Johnston has said he was prepared to go to jail to resist Trump’s plan and encouraged others to protest.

While it is still possible to arrest people living illegally in blue-led cities, it is far more challenging without local cooperation. One of the most common ways ICE makes arrests is by picking people up as they are released from jail, even on a minor violation. But blue states have broadly barred local authorities from informing ICE when they plan to release someone. Such legal approaches, which limit cooperation with federal immigration authorities, are known as “sanctuary-city” policies.

Without local cooperation, ICE would need to post officers on watch outside of jails for hours or days to catch a release. They can also conduct neighborhood raids, but immigration officers—unlike regular police—don’t have warrants to make an arrest, meaning they can’t enter a person’s home to arrest them.

Trump’s immigration advisers, including Homan, have publicly discussed cutting off federal grants and even pursuing criminal prosecutions of the officials enforcing sanctuary policies.

Lack of cooperation from foreign countries

Among the reasons President Dwight Eisenhower was able to pull off a broad deportation program in the 1950s, which Trump cites as a model, was that everyone he sought to send out of the country was from Mexico. But over the past few years, immigrants crossing into the U.S. illegally have come from record numbers of countries, such as China, India, Mauritania and Uzbekistan.

The U.S. today can’t simply push migrants back across the border or even load them all onto a flight heading to the same place. It must now orchestrate a complex dance of flights, choosing where to send its limited number of planes and fighting with other governments about when—and whether at all—they are willing to receive the flights.

Many of the newly arrived migrants in the U.S. come from countries where diplomatic relations are frayed or even nonexistent, such as Venezuela.

U.S. immigration law allows immigrants to be deported to third countries if their home countries won’t take them back, but getting a third country to agree is rare. Trump has pledged to strike safe-country agreements with countries in Latin America and even Africa. He managed to reach an agreement with Guatemala during his first term to send asylum seekers from elsewhere in Central America there, but the agreement was short-lived. Only about a thousand people actually were sent.

Legal challenges

Many of the changes proposed by Trump and Stephen Miller, his incoming deputy chief of staff and longtime immigration adviser, can only be done through Congress—or perhaps even through a constitutional amendment.

A core issue they have attempted to surmount is that under existing law, migrants can legally ask for asylum even if they have entered the country unlawfully. Trump, and even Biden, sought to get around this by making asylum seekers live in Mexico while their claims were being weighed, jailing them, or coming up with new rules to make asylum seekers otherwise ineligible. As long as the law remains on the books, however, the government will struggle to find legal ways to narrow that right.

Trump has said he also wants to eliminate certain visa categories, such as one that allows U.S. citizens to sponsor their foreign adult siblings, or the diversity visa lottery, which randomly awards green cards to people from countries with low levels of immigration to the U.S. But only Congress can create or eliminate visa categories, and it hasn’t done so to a significant extent since 1990.

Trump’s pledge to end birthright citizenship, the practice of designating any baby born in the U.S. as a citizen no matter their parents’ immigration status, likely can’t be changed by Congress—let alone the executive order Trump has proposed. Most legal scholars say it would require amending the Constitution, a rare and difficult process.

Trump’s allies say that birthright citizenship is a misinterpretation of the 14th Amendment, which dates to the 19th century and in part granted full citizenship to former slaves. The most recent amendment to the Constitution was ratified in 1992, more than 200 years after it was first proposed. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Twenty-seventh-Amendment (passed 1992)

In all these cases, Trump’s advisers have said that he hopes to test the limits of the law by issuing policies he knows to be unlawful, or even unconstitutional, in a bid to persuade the Supreme Court, which is dominated by conservatives, to come to different decisions.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Thursday, January 2, 2025 4:38 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


The fact that Biden got 100 times more scrutiny for ending a failed war than any of his predecessors got for continuing it will never cease to infuriate me. https://t.co/FnIoP5vB5Z

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) January 2, 2025

Read the accompanying op-ed from the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction. We knew for years and years that we were accomplishing nothing in Afghanistan, but we lied about it over and over. And yet it's the guy who finally had the guts to admit it that gets all the brickbats.

America, Afghanistan and the Price of Self-Delusion

By John F. Sopko
Mr. Sopko has been the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction since 2012.

Jan. 2, 2025, 1:00 a.m. ET

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/02/opinion/afghanistan-audit-reconstru
ction-us.html?unlocked_article_code=1.mE4.9uuB.fTgcimSaQNH5&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare&tgrp=on

The collapse of the U.S.-backed government in Afghanistan on Aug. 15, 2021, revealed what little American lives and money had purchased over 20 years there. It also laid bare a gaping disconnect between reality and what senior U.S. officials had been telling Americans for decades: that success was just around the corner.

As the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction since 2012, my staff and I have audited and investigated U.S. programs and spending to rebuild Afghanistan — a mission that, it was hoped, would turn the theocratic, tribal-based “Graveyard of Empires” into a modern liberal democracy.

In hundreds of reports over the last 12 years, https://www.sigar.mil/ we have detailed a long list of systemic problems: The U.S. government struggled to carry out a coherent strategy, fostered overly ambitious expectations, started unsustainable projects and did not understand the country or its people. American agencies measured success not by what they accomplished, but by dollars spent or checklists of completed tasks.

As our own agency winds down and we prepare to release our final report this year, we raise a fundamental and too rarely asked question: Why did so many senior officials tell Congress and the public, year after year, that success was on the horizon when they knew otherwise? For two decades, officials publicly asserted that continuing the mission in Afghanistan was essential to national interests, until, eventually, two presidents — Donald Trump and Joe Biden — concluded it was not.

The incoming Trump administration, Congress and the long-suffering American taxpayer must ask how this happened so that the United States can avoid similar results in Ukraine, Gaza, Syria and other war zones.

We should start with what “success” in Afghanistan was ever supposed to mean. I believe many Americans who worked there over the years wanted to not only achieve important U.S. strategic interests — such as eliminating a haven for terrorists — but also secure a better future for the Afghan people.

But a perverse incentive drove our system. To win promotions and bigger salaries, military and civilian leaders felt they had to sell their tours of duty, deployments, programs and projects as successes — even when they were not. Leaders tended to report and highlight favorable information while obscuring that which pointed to failure. After all, failures do not lead to an ambassadorship or an elevation to general.

They also aren’t good business for the contractors on which the U.S. mission relied to manage and support programs and projects. For contractors, claiming success, whether real or imaginary, was vital to obtaining future business. So spending became the measure of success. (The same, of course, is true in Washington, where unspent allocations are tantamount to failure, leading to budget cuts.) Accountability for how money was spent was poor. One general told us that he faced a challenge: How to spend the remaining $1 billion from his annual budget in just over a month? Returning the money was not an option. Another official we spoke to said he refused to cancel a multimillion-dollar building project that field commanders did not want, because the funding had to be spent. The building was never used.

As one former U.S. military adviser told my office, the entire system became a self-licking ice cream cone: More money was always being spent to justify previous spending. Old staff departed, new staff arrived with “better” ideas, and new iterations of the same old solutions were repeated, for years. At the same time, many of the problems the U.S. programs faced were simply beyond our control. The sudden collapse of the Afghan government and rise of the Taliban showed that the United States could not buy favorable Afghan perceptions of the country’s corrupt leaders and government, or of America’s intentions.

Yet over two decades — and even as Afghan provinces fell like dominoes in the summer of 2021 — I do not recall any senior official telling Congress or the American people that failure was a real possibility.

Our final report will detail what many experts and senior government officials now say to us, with hindsight: that these entrenched, fundamental challenges doomed any real possibility of long-term success. Some argued that decisions made as early as 2002 — such as partnering with warlords and refusing to include the Taliban in discussions about Afghanistan’s future — set a course for inevitable failure. Others blamed poor interagency coordination, rampant Afghan corruption, ignorance of local culture and the distance between U.S. goals and Afghanistan’s realities.

There were key moments when American officials could have come clean. Before the United States began, in 2014, to transfer responsibility for security to the Afghans, a succession of U.S. generals and officials made optimistic claims that Afghan forces would be effective in fighting the Taliban, that corruption and human rights abuses were contained and that Afghan elections were democratic and fair — assessments that did not align with my agency’s reporting to Congress or basic reality. In 2013, one senior official even suggested that Afghanistan might prove to be the most successful reconstruction effort over the last quarter-century.

The fall of Kunduz in 2015 — which represented the first time since 2001 that the Taliban regained control of a major city — should have punctured the delusion that Afghan forces could hold their own. But building those forces had been the cornerstone of the U.S. reconstruction effort, whose success would pave the way for eventual U.S. withdrawal. The rosy narrative had to be maintained.

The reality was that Taliban fighters with Cold War-era rifles and dirt bikes often outperformed Afghan government forces with state-of-the-art equipment and backing from U.S. air power. The Taliban were religiously motivated to rid the country of foreign invaders and what they perceived as a puppet government installed by Washington. The members of the Afghan military — beset by low morale, chronic logistical problems and pervasive corruption — were often motivated solely by their salaries, though they, of course, also suffered hugely in the fight.

Official statements across successive U.S. presidential administrations were, in my view, often simply untrue. Just six days before the Afghan government collapsed, the Pentagon press secretary declared that Afghanistan had more than 300,000 soldiers and police officers, even though the special inspector general’s office had been warning for years that no one really knew how many soldiers and policemen were available, nor what their operational capabilities were. As early as 2015, I informed Congress that corrupt Afghan officials were listing “ghost” soldiers and police officers on rosters, and pocketing the salaries.

Important information for measuring the success of initiatives was — at times deliberately — hidden from Congress and the American public, including USAID-funded assessments that concluded Afghan ministries were incapable of managing direct U.S. financial assistance. Despite vigorous efforts by the U.S. bureaucracy to stop us, my office made such material public.

Special interests are a big part of the problem. President Dwight Eisenhower once warned of the growing influence of a “military-industrial complex.” Today, there are multiple complexes: development and humanitarian assistance, anti-corruption and transparency, protection for women and marginalized people, and many others. These are all good and noble causes, to be sure. But when it came to Afghanistan, organizations under these umbrellas, whether because of altruism or more selfish motivations, contributed to the overly optimistic assessments of the situation to keep the funds flowing. Self-serving delusion was America’s most formidable foe.

That delusion continues today. According to data provided to my office by the Treasury Department, since 2021 the United States has funneled $3.3 billion to Afghanistan through public international organizations, mainly United Nations offices, for humanitarian purposes. Some of this money helps the Afghan people, and some goes to the Taliban. In response to a congressional request, my office reported this year that between the American withdrawal in August 2021 and this past May, U.S.-funded partners paid at least $10.9 million in taxes and fees to Taliban authorities. In July, we reported that two out of five State Department bureaus were unable to show that their contractors working in Afghanistan in 2022 had been vetted sufficiently to ensure their work was not benefiting terrorist organizations.

Today, most aid to Afghanistan and other war-torn countries flows through United Nations offices that my agency has identified as having weak oversight. If we are to continue providing taxpayer dollars to these organizations, it must be made conditional on U.S. oversight agencies having full access to their projects and records to make sure funding reaches the people it is intended to help.

In Afghanistan, the office of the special inspector general was often the only government agency reliably reporting on the situation on the ground, and we faced stiff opposition from officials in the Departments of Defense and State, USAID and the organizations that supported their programs. We were able to do our work only because Congress granted us the freedom to operate independently. Inspectors general for the military, State Department and USAID, however, do not enjoy such autonomy. If we are going to fix a broken system that puts bureaucrats and special interests ahead of taxpayers, the first step is to make all federal inspectors general as fully independent as my office has been.

Ultimately, however, if we do not address the incentives in our government that impede truth-telling, we will keep pursuing projects both at home and overseas that do not work, rewarding those who rationalize failure while reporting success, and burning untold billions of dollars. American taxpayers deserve better.

John F. Sopko has served as the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction since 2012; he was appointed by President Barack Obama and served under the Obama, Trump and Biden administrations. He has been a prosecutor, congressional counsel, law partner and senior federal government adviser.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Thursday, January 2, 2025 9:06 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Good.

Now maybe we can stop pretending that it's only Trumptards that don't trust our government.

I think I've had to hear that dumb bullshit out of you a dozen times in the last week.

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
Unfortunately for Texas, Trumptards act like they are having a constant mental breakdown which feels normal to them but it is not healthy.


Shut up, faggot.

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Thursday, January 2, 2025 9:09 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
The fact that Biden got 100 times more scrutiny for ending a failed war than any of his predecessors got for continuing it will never cease to infuriate me. https://t.co/FnIoP5vB5Z

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) January 2, 2025


Biden* didn't end shit. Trump already ended that and it would have been done professionally had you not voted in Joe Biden* via massive mail-in fraud votes and murdered Laken Riley.

Your asshole did this, and now the Middle East is more fucked up than it ever was under his lack of leadership.

You suck. Matthew Yglesaias sucks. Joe Biden* sucks. Democrats suck.



--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Monday, January 6, 2025 2:57 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Lessons From New York’s Congestion Fight
“Car brain” is part of a broader syndrome, which we can’t ignore

By Paul Krugman | Jan 06, 2025

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/lessons-from-new-yorks-congestion

. . . it’s essentially crazy for people to imagine that they’re entitled to impose those costs without paying a fee for the privilege. As I wrote back in 2023, it’s like arguing that some people should have the right to dump trash on their neighbor’s land because they don’t feel like paying the fees for garbage pickup.

What does the fact that it has been so hard to do something so obviously right tell us?

Komanoff attributes it to “car brain.” It’s true that a significant number of people, some of whom I know, feel a sense of control when driving that makes them reluctant to take mass transit. (I’m the opposite: the great thing about taking the train is that I can read.) Such people aren’t necessarily conservatives, but some conservatives really seem to lose it over any suggestion that maybe people should drive less. Back in 2011 George Will wrote a column titled “Why liberals love trains” in which he declared that
Quote:
the real reason for progressives' passion for trains is their goal of diminishing Americans' individualism in order to make them more amenable to collectivism.

To progressives, the best thing about railroads is that people riding them are not in automobiles, which are subversive of the deference on which progressivism depends. Automobiles go hither and yon, wherever and whenever the driver desires, without timetables. Automobiles encourage people to think they—unsupervised, untutored, and unscripted—are masters of their fates. The automobile encourages people in delusions of adequacy, which make them resistant to government by experts who know what choices people should make.
Personally, I don’t want people to ride trains to weaken their resistance to collectivism; I just want their cars off the damn streets. But Will’s bizarre rant does illustrate Komanoff’s point that there’s something about people’s attachment to their cars that all too often makes them irrational.

Yet while cars may be special, there’s a broader syndrome — change rage? — in which a significant number of people go wild at any suggestion that they should change their behavior for the common good. The change doesn’t have to involve major cost or inconvenience; seriously, even masking up during the pandemic wasn’t that big a hardship. It’s more the principle of the thing: How dare you tell me how to live my life?

Like it or not, anger over any hint of social engineering is a potent political force. It tends to fade once new rules or restrictions have been around for a while, and become part of the background scenery: There would be a huge backlash if we were currently trying to implement the policies that reduced smoking, but at this point everyone takes those policies for granted. If other cities’ experience is any guide, New York’s congestion charge will eventually be seen as a normal fact of life, which is why it was important to get it in place even at a low rate.

But change rage is real, and trying to argue people out of it rarely succeeds. Which is why fighting negative externalities** should, where possible, leave the way people live more or less untouched. Outside New York and a few other dense urban areas, Americans aren’t going to stop driving to work. But subsidizing electric cars and renewable energy may be a workable strategy, precisely because it has so little visible effect on how we live.

Still, sometimes we really do need to persuade people to change their behavior. So yes, I am taking a subdued victory lap over New York’s congestion fee.

** There are, alas, many Americans who still deny that climate change is happening, or if it’s happening, that it’s caused by greenhouse gas emissions. After all, to take climate change seriously you have to take scientists seriously, and what do they know? (In case you’re wondering, I believe that they know a lot.)

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Monday, January 6, 2025 3:42 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Richard Nixon once called in staff to help him open an allergy-pill bottle. It was the childproof type of bottle, with instructions saying “Press down while turning.” The cap had teeth marks on it where Nixon had apparently tried to gnaw it open.
https://www.knoxviews.com/richard-nixon-and-child-proof-cap

Some additional context on behalf of Nixon for those who care. Childproof prescription bottles were supposedly first invented in 1967, but were not required until a law was passed in 1970 and signed into law ironically by Nixon himself in the 2nd year of his presidency. So for what it's worth they were likely a very new thing when he struggled to open the bottle and the early designs were more difficult to open than modern bottles if you had poor grip strength.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Tuesday, January 14, 2025 9:12 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


The Army of God Comes Out of the Shadows

Tens of millions of American Christians are embracing a charismatic movement known as the New Apostolic Reformation, which seeks to destroy the secular state. (Trump is their prophet and sword against evil.)

By Stephanie McCrummen | January 9, 2025

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/02/new-apostolic-ref
ormation-christian-movement-trump/681092/

On the Thursday night after Donald Trump won the presidential election, an obscure but telling celebration unfolded inside a converted barn off a highway stretching through the cornfields of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. The place was called Gateway House of Prayer, and it was not exactly a church, and did not exactly fit into the paradigms of what American Christianity has typically been. Inside, there were no hymnals, no images of Jesus Christ, no parables fixed in stained glass. Strings of lights hung from the rafters. A huge map of the world covered one wall. On the others were seven framed bulletin boards, each representing a theater of battle between the forces of God and Satan—government, business, education, family, arts, media, and religion itself. Gateway House of Prayer, it turned out, was a kind of war room. And if its patrons are to be believed, at least one person, and at peak times dozens, had been praying every single minute of every single day for more than 15 years for the victory that now seemed at hand. God was winning. The Kingdom was coming.

“Hallelujah!” said a woman arriving for the weekly 7 o’clock “government watch,” during which a group of 20 or so volunteers sits in a circle and prays for God’s dominion over the nation.

“Now the work begins!” a man said.

“We have to fight, fight, fight!” a grandmother said as they began talking about how a crowd at Trump’s election watch party had launched into the hymn “How Great Thou Art.”

“They were singing that!” another man said.

Yes, people replied; they had seen a video of the moment. As the mood in the barn became ever more jubilant, the grandmother pulled from her purse a shofar, a hollowed-out ram’s horn used during Jewish services. She blew, understanding that the sound would break through the atmosphere, penetrate the demonic realm, and scatter the forces of Satan, a supernatural strike for the Kingdom of God. A woman fell to the floor.

“Heaven and Earth are coming into alignment!” a man declared. “The will of heaven is being done on Earth.”

What was happening in the barn in Lancaster County did not represent some fringe of American Christianity, but rather what much of the faith is becoming. A shift is under way, one that scholars have been tracking for years and that has become startlingly visible with the rise of Trumpism. At this point, tens of millions of believers—about 40 percent of American Christians, including Catholics, according to a recent Denison University survey—are embracing an alluring, charismatic movement that has little use for religious pluralism, individual rights, or constitutional democracy. It is mystical, emotional, and, in its way, wildly utopian. It is transnational, multiracial, and unapologetically political. Early leaders called it the New Apostolic Reformation, or NAR, although some of those same leaders are now engaged in a rebranding effort as the antidemocratic character of the movement has come to light. And people who have never heard the name are nonetheless adopting the movement’s central ideas. These include the belief that God speaks through modern-day apostles and prophets. That demonic forces can control not only individuals, but entire territories and institutions. That the Church is not so much a place as an active “army of God,” one with a holy mission to claim the Earth for the Kingdom as humanity barrels ever deeper into the End Times.

Although the secular establishment has struggled to take all of this seriously, Trump has harnessed this apocalyptic energy to win the presidency twice.

If you were curious why Tucker Carlson, who was raised Episcopalian, recently spoke of being mauled in his sleep by a demon, it may be because he is absorbing the language and beliefs of this movement. If you were questioning why Elon Musk would bother speaking at an NAR church called Life Center in Harrisburg, it is because Musk surely knows that a movement that wants less government and more God works well with his libertarian vision. If you wanted to know why there were news stories about House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Southern Baptist, displaying a white flag with a green pine tree and the words An Appeal to Heaven outside his office, or the same flag being flown outside the vacation home of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, a Catholic, the reason is that the Revolutionary War–era banner has become the battle flag for a movement with ideological allies across the Christian right. The NAR is supplying the ground troops to dismantle the secular state.

illustration of the name plaque outside Mike Johnson's congressional office with two flags, one reading AN APPEAL TO HEAVEN
Alexandre Luu

And if you are wondering where all of this is heading now that Trump has won the presidency, I was wondering the same thing. That is why I was sitting in the circle at Gateway House of Prayer, where, about 20 minutes into the evening, I got my first clue. People had welcomed me warmly. I had introduced myself as a reporter for The Atlantic. I was taking notes on Earth-heaven alignment when a woman across from me said, “Your writers have called us Nazis.”

She seemed to be referring to an article that had compared Trump’s rhetoric to Hitler’s. I said what I always say, which is that I was there to understand. I offered my spiritual bona fides—raised Southern Baptist, from Alabama. The woman continued: “It’s an editorial board that is severely to the left and despises the Trump movement.” A man sitting next to me came to my defense. “We welcome you,” he said, but it was clear something was off, and that something was me. The media had become a demonic stronghold. The people of God needed to figure out whether I was a tool of Satan, or possibly whether I had been sent by the Almighty.

“I personally feel like if you would like to stay with us, then I would ask if we could lay hands on you and pray,” a woman said.

“We won’t hurt you,” another woman said.

“We just take everything to God,” a woman sitting next to me said. “Don’t take it personally.”

The praying began, and I waited for the judgment.

How all of this came to be is a story with many starting points, the most immediate of which is Trump himself. In the lead-up to the 2016 election, establishment leaders on the Christian right were backing candidates with more pious pedigrees than Trump’s. He needed a way to rally evangelicals, so he turned to some of the most influential apostles and prophets of the NAR, a wilder world where he was cast as God’s “wrecking ball” and embraced by a fresh pool of so-called prophecy voters, people long regarded as the embarrassing riffraff of evangelical Christianity. But the DNA of that moment goes back further, to the Cold War, Latin America, and an iconoclastic seminary professor named C. Peter Wagner.

He grew up in New York City during the Great Depression, and embraced a conservative version of evangelical Christianity when he was courting his future wife. They became missionaries in Bolivia in the 1950s and ’60s, when a wave of Pentecostalism was sweeping South America, filling churches with people who claimed that they were being healed, and seeing signs and wonders that Wagner initially dismissed as heresy. Much of this fervor was being channeled into social-justice movements taking hold across Latin America. Che Guevara was organizing in Bolivia. The civil-rights movement was under way in the United States. Ecumenical organizations such as the World Council of Churches were embracing the theology of liberation, emphasizing ideas such as the social sin of inequality and the need for justice not in heaven but here and now.

In the great postwar competition for hearts and minds, conservative American evangelicals—and the CIA, which they sometimes collaborated with—needed an answer to ideas they saw as dangerously socialist. Wagner, by then the general director of the Andes Evangelical Mission, rose to the occasion. In 1969, he took part in a conference in Bogotá, Colombia, sponsored by the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association that aimed to counter these trends. He wrote a book—Latin American Theology: Radical or Evangelical?—which was handed out to all participants, and which argued that concern with social issues “may easily lead to serving mammon rather than serving God.” Liberation theology was a slippery slope to hell.

After that, Wagner became a professor at Fuller Theological Seminary, teaching in the relatively experimental field of church growth. He began revisiting his experience in Bolivia, deciding that the overflowing churches he’d seen were a sign that the Holy Spirit was working in the world. He was also living in the California of the 1970s, when new religions and cults and a more freewheeling, independent, charismatic Christianity were proliferating, a kind of counter-counterculture. Droves of former hippies were being baptized in the Pacific in what became known as the Jesus People movement. Preachers such as John Wimber, a singer in the band that turned into the Righteous Brothers, were casting out demons before huge crowds. In the ’80s, a group of men in Missouri known as the Kansas City Prophets believed they were restoring the gift of prophecy, understanding this to be God’s natural way of talking to people.

Wagner met a woman named Cindy Jacobs, who understood herself to be a prophet, and believed that the “principalities” and “powers” mentioned in the Book of Ephesians were actually “territorial spirits” that could be defeated through “spiritual warfare.” She and others formed prayer networks targeting the “10/40 window”—a geographic rectangle between the latitudes of 10 and 40 degrees north that included North Africa, the Middle East, and other parts of Asia that were predominantly Muslim, Buddhist, and Hindu.

Wagner also became captivated by a concept called dominionism, a major conceptual shift that had been emerging in conservative theological circles. At the time, the prevailing view was that God’s mandate for Christians was simple evangelism, person by person; the Kingdom would come later, after the return of Jesus Christ, and meanwhile, the business of politics was, as the Bible verse goes, rendered unto Caesar. The new way of thinking was that God was calling his people to establish the Kingdom now. To put it another way, Christians had marching orders—a mandate for aggressive social and institutional transformation. The idea had deep roots in a movement called Christian Reconstructionism, whose serious thinkers—most prominently a Calvinist theologian named R. J. Rushdoony—were spending their lives working out the details of what a government grounded in biblical laws would look like, a model for a Christian theocracy.

By 1996, Wagner and a group of like-minded colleagues were rolling these ideas into what they were calling the New Apostolic Reformation, a term meant to evoke their conviction that a fresh outpouring of the Holy Spirit was moving around the globe, endowing believers with supernatural power and the authority to battle demonic forces and establish God’s Kingdom on Earth. The NAR vision was not technically conservative but radical: Constructing the Kingdom meant destroying the secular state with equal rights for all, and replacing it with a system in which Christianity is supreme. As a practical matter, the movement put the full force of God on the side of free-market capitalism. In that sense, Wagner and his colleagues had found the answer to liberation theology that they’d been seeking for decades.

Wagner, who died in 2016, wrote dozens of additional books with titles such as Dominion! and Churchquake! The movement allowed Christianity to be changed and updated, embracing the idea that God was raising new apostles and prophets who could not only interpret ancient scripture but deliver “fresh words” and dreams from heaven on a rolling, even daily basis. One of Wagner’s most talented acolytes, a preacher named Lance Wallnau, repackaged the concept of dominionism into what he popularized as the “7 Mountain Mandate,” essentially an action plan for how Christians could dominate the seven spheres of life—government, education, media, and the four others posted on the walls like targets at Gateway House of Prayer.

What happened next is the story of these ideas spreading far and wide into an American culture primed to accept them. Churches interested in growing found that the NAR formula worked, delivering followers a sense of purpose and value in the Kingdom. Many started hosting “7M” seminars and offering coaching and webinars, which often drew wealthy businesspeople into the fold. After the 2016 election, a group of the nation’s ultra-wealthy conservative Christians organized as an invitation-only charity called Ziklag, a reference to the biblical city where David found refuge during his war against King Saul. According to an investigation by ProPublica, the group stated in internal documents that its purpose was to “take dominion over the Seven Mountains.” Wallnau is an adviser.

By last year, 42 percent of American Christians agreed with the statement “God wants Christians to stand atop the ‘7 Mountains of Society,’?” according to Paul Djupe, a Denison University political scientist who has been developing new surveys to capture what he and others describe as a “fundamental shift” in American Christianity. Roughly 61 percent agreed with the statement that “there are modern-day apostles and prophets.” Roughly half agreed that “there are demonic ‘principalities’ and ‘powers’ who control physical territory,” and that the Church should “organize campaigns of spiritual warfare and prayer to displace high-level demons.”

Overall, Djupe told me, the nation continues to become more secular. In 1991, only 6 percent of Americans identified as nonreligious, a figure that is now about 30 percent. But the Christians who remain are becoming more radical.

“They are taking on these extreme beliefs that give them a sense of power—they believe they have the power to change the nature of the Earth,” Djupe said. “The adoption of these sort of beliefs is happening incredibly fast.”

The ideas have seeped into Trumpworld, influencing the agenda known as Project 2025, as well as proposals set forth by the America First Policy Institute. A new book called Unhumans, co-authored by the far-right conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec and endorsed by J. D. Vance, describes political opponents as “unhumans” who want to “undo civilization itself” and who currently “run operations in media, government, education, economy, family, religion, and arts and entertainment”—the seven mountains. The book argues that these “unhumans” must be “crushed.”

“Our study of history has brought us to this conclusion: Democracy has never worked to protect innocents from the unhumans,” the authors write. “It is time to stop playing by rules they won’t.”

My own frame of reference for what evangelical Christianity looked like was wooden pews, the ladies’ handbell choir, and chicken casseroles for the homebound. The Southern Baptists of my childhood had no immediate reason to behave like insurgents. They had dominated Alabama for decades, mostly blessing the status quo. When I got an assignment a few years ago to write about why evangelicals were still backing Trump, I mistakenly thought that the Baptists were where the action was on the Christian right. I was working for The Washington Post then, and like many journalists, commentators, and researchers who study religion, I was far behind.

Where I ended up one Sunday in 2021 was a church in Fort Worth, Texas, called Mercy Culture. Roughly 1,500 people were streaming through the doors for one of four weekend services, one of which was in Spanish. Ushers offered earplugs. A store carried books about spiritual warfare. Inside the sanctuary, the people filling the seats were white, Black, and brown; they were working-class and professionals and unemployed; they were former drug addicts and porn addicts and social-media addicts; they were young men and women who believed their homosexual tendencies to be the work of Satan. I met a young woman who told me she was going to Montana to “prophesy over the land.” I met a young man contemplating a future as a missionary, who told me, “If I have any choice, I want to die like the disciples.” They had the drifty air of hippies, but their counterculture was pure Kingdom.

They faced a huge video screen showing swirling stars, crashing waves, and apocalyptic images, including a mushroom cloud. A digital clock was counting down, and when it hit zero, a band—keyboard, guitars, drums—began blasting music that reminded you of some pop song you couldn’t quite place, from some world you’d left behind when you came through the doors. Lights flashed. Machine-made fog drifted through the crowd. People waved colored flags, calling the Holy Spirit in for a landing. Cameras swooped around, zooming in on a grown man crying and a woman lying prostrate, praying. Eventually, the pastor, a young man in skinny jeans, came onstage and demon-mapped the whole city of Fort Worth. The west side was controlled by the principality of Greed, the north by the demonic spirit of Rebellion; the south belonged to Lust. He spoke of surrendering to God’s laws. And at one point, he endorsed a Church elder running for mayor, describing the campaign as “the beginning of a righteous movement.”

Walking across the bleak, hot parking lot to my rental car afterward, I could understand how people were drawn into their realm. After that, I started seeing the futuristic world of the NAR all over the place. Sprawling megachurches outside Atlanta, Phoenix, and Harrisburg with Broadway-level production values; lower-budget operations in strip malls and the husks of defunct traditional churches. Lots of screens, lots of flags. Conferences with names like Open the Heavens. A training course called Vanquish Academy where people could learn “advanced prophetic weaponry” and “dream intelligence.” Schools such as Kingdom University, in Tennessee, where students can learn their “Kingdom Assignment.” In a way, the movement was a world with its own language. People spoke of convergence and alignment and demon portals and whether certain businesses were Kingdom or not.

In 2023, I met a woman who believed that her Kingdom assignment was to buy an entire mountain for God, and did. It is in northwestern Pennsylvania, and she lives on top of it with her husband. They are always finding what she called “God signs,” such as feathers on the porch. Like many in the movement, she didn’t attend church very often. But every day, she followed online prophets and apostles such as Dutch Sheets, an acolyte of Wagner’s who has hundreds of thousands of followers and is known for interpreting dreams.

In 2016, Sheets began embracing prophecies that God was using Trump, telling fellow prophets and apostles that his victory would bring “new levels of demonic desperation.” In the aftermath of the 2020 election, Sheets began releasing daily prophetic updates called Give Him 15, casting Trump’s attempt to steal the election as a great spiritual battle against the forces of darkness. In the days before the insurrection, Sheets described a dream in which he was charging on horseback to the U.S. Capitol to stand for the Kingdom. Although he was not in Washington, D.C., on January 6, many of his followers were, some carrying the APPEAL TO HEAVEN flag he’d popularized. Others from Wagner’s old inner circle were there too. Wallnau streamed live from near the U.S. Capitol that day and, that night, from the Trump International Hotel. Cindy Jacobs conducted spiritual warfare just outside the Capitol as rioters were smashing their way inside, telling her followers that the Lord had given her a vision “that they would break through and go all the way to the top.” In his most recent book, The Violent Take It by Force, the scholar Matthew Taylor details the role that major NAR leaders played that day, calling them “the principal theological architects” of the insurrection.

At the Pennsylvania statehouse, I met an apostle named Abby Abildness, whom I came to understand as a kind of Kingdom diplomat. It was the spring of 2023, and she had recently returned from Iraqi Kurdistan, where she had met with Kurdish leaders she believed to be descended from King Solomon, and who she said wanted “holy governance to go forth.”

I watched YouTube videos of prophets broadcasting from their basements. I watched a streaming show called FlashPoint, where apostles and prophets deliver news from God; guests have included Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, because another dimension of the NAR is that the movement is a prominent advocate of Christian Zionism.

I came to understand how the movement amounts to a sprawling political machine. The apostles and prophets, speaking for God, decide which candidates and policies advance the Kingdom. The movement’s prayer networks and newsletters amount to voter lists and voter guides. A growing ecosystem of podcasts and streaming shows such as FlashPoint amounts to a Kingdom media empire. And the overall vision of the movement means that people are not engaged just during election years but, like the people at Gateway House of Prayer, 24/7.

Read: This just in from heaven

As November’s election neared, I watched the whole juggernaut crank into action to return Trump to the White House. Wallnau, in partnership with the Trump-aligned America First Policy Institute, promoted an effort called Project 19, targeting voters in 19 swing counties. He also launched something called the Courage Tour, which similarly targeted swing states, and I attended one event in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. It looked like an old-fashioned tent revival, except that it was also an aggressive pro-Trump mobilization effort. Wallnau dabbed frankincense oil onto foreheads, anointing voters into God’s army. Another speaker said that Kamala Harris would be a “devil in the White House.” Others cast Democrats as agents of Lucifer, and human history as a struggle between the godless forces of secular humanism and God’s will for humankind.

A march called “A Million Women” on the National Mall drew tens of thousands of people and culminated with the smashing of an altar representing demonic strongholds in America. With the Capitol dome as their backdrop, people took turns bashing the altar as music surged and others prayed, and when it was rubble, the prophet Lou Engle declared, “We’re going to point to the north, south, and east, and west, and command America! The veil has been ripped!”

The NAR movement was a major source of the “low-propensity voters” who backed Trump. Frederick Clarkson, a senior research analyst with Political Research Associates, which tracks antidemocratic movements, has been documenting the rise of the NAR for years, and warning about its theocratic goals. He believes that a certain condescension, and perhaps failure of imagination, has kept outsiders from understanding what he has come to see as the most significant religious movement of the 21st century, and one that poses a profound threat to democracy.

“Certain segments of society have not been willing to understand where these people are coming from,” Clarkson told me. “For me, it’s part of the story of our times. It’s a movement that has continued to rise, gathered political strength, attracted money, built institutions. And the broad center-left doesn’t understand what’s happening.”

Which leaves the question of what happens now.

The movement certainly aligns with many goals of the Christian right: a total abortion ban, an end to gay marriage and LGBTQ rights. Traditional family is the fundamental unit of God’s perfect order. In theory, affirmative action, welfare programs, and other social-justice measures would be unnecessary because in the Kingdom, as Abildness, the Pennsylvania apostle, and her husband once explained to me, there is no racism and no identity other than child of God. “Those that oppose us think we are dangerous,” her husband told me, describing a vision of life governed by God’s will. “But this is better for everyone. There wouldn’t be homelessness. We’d be caring for each other.”

Matthew Taylor told me he sees the movement merging seamlessly into “the MAGA blob,” with the prophets and apostles casting whatever Trump does as part of God’s plan, and rebuking any dissent. “It’s the synchronization with Trump that is most alarming,” he said. “The agenda now is Trump. And that’s how populist authoritarianism works. It starts out as a coalition, as a shotgun marriage, and eventually the populism and authoritarianism takes over.”

Read: My father, my faith, and Donald Trump

In another sense, the movement has never been about policies or changes to the law; it’s always been about the larger goal of dismantling the institutions of secular government to clear the way for the Kingdom. It is about God’s total victory.

“Buckle up, buttercup!” Wallnau said on his podcast shortly after the election. “Because you’re going to be watching a whole new redefinition of what the reformation looks like as Christians engage every sector of society. Christ is not quarantined any longer. We’re going into all the world.”

On the day after the election, I went to Life Center, the NAR church where Elon Musk had spoken a couple of weeks earlier. The mood was jubilant. A pastor spoke of “years of oppression” and said that “we are at a time on the other side of a victory for our nation that God alone—that God alone—orchestrated for us.”

The music pounded, and people cheered, and after that, a prominent prophet named Joseph Garlington delivered a sermon. He was a guest speaker, and he offered what sounded like the first hint of dissent I’d heard in a long time. He talked about undocumented immigrants and asked people to consider whether it might be possible that God was sending them to the U.S. so they could build the Kingdom.

“What if they are part of the harvest?” he said. “He didn’t send us to them; maybe he’s sending them to us.”

It was a striking moment. Life Center, Mercy Culture, and many other churches in the movement have large numbers of Latinos in their congregations. In 2020, Trump kicked off his outreach to evangelical voters at a Miami megachurch called El Rey Jesús, headed by a prominent Honduran American apostle named Guillermo Maldonado. I wondered how the apostles and prophets would react to the mass deportations Trump had proposed. Garlington continued that Trump was “God’s choice,” but that the election was just one battle in the ultimate struggle. He told people that it’s “time for war,” language I kept hearing in other NAR circles even after the election. He told people to prepare to lose friends and family as the Kingdom of God marched on in the days ahead. He told them to separate from the wicked.

“If you’ve got a child and he says, ‘Come and let us go serve other gods,’ go tell on him. Tell them, ‘I’ve got a kid who is saying we need to serve other gods. Can you help me kill him?’?” Garlington said he wasn’t being literal about the last part. “But you need to rebuke them,” he said. “You need to say, ‘Honey, if you keep on that path, there’s a place reserved in hell for you.’?”

This was also a theme the next day at Gateway House of Prayer, where I waited to learn my own fate, as people began praying in tongues and free-forming in English as the Holy Spirit gave them words.

“We’re asking for a full overturning in the media,” a man said. “We’re asking for all the media to turn away from being propagandists to being truth tellers.”

“Their eyes need to be opened,” a woman said. “They don’t know God at all. They think they know all these things because they’re so educated and worldly. But they do not see God … And that’s what we need. The harvest.”

“The reformation,” the grandmother added.

“The reformation,” the woman said.

At one point, a man questioned me: “The whole world knows The Atlantic is a left-wing, Marxist-type publication. Why would you choose to go and work there?” At another point, the group leader defended me: “I feel the Lord has called her to be a truth seeker.” At another point, the grandmother spoke of a prophecy she’d heard recently about punishment for the wicked. “There are millstones being made in Heaven,” she said. “Straight up. There’s millstones.” Another woman spoke of “God’s angry judgment” for the disobedient.

“There’s a lot of people that are going to change their minds,” a man said.

“You’ll be happy with the changes God brings,” a woman reassured me. “You’ll be happy.”

This went on for a while. I wasn’t sure where it was going until the leader of the group decided that I should leave. She could not have been nicer about it. She spoke of God’s absolute love, and absolute truth, and absolute justice, and then I headed for the door.

A few women followed me into the lobby, apologizing that it had come to this. They were sorry for me, as believers in the movement were sorry for all of the people who were lost and confused by this moment in America—the doubters, the atheists, the gay people, Muslims, Buddhists, Democrats, journalists, and all the godless who had not yet submitted to what they knew to be true. The Kingdom was here, and the only question was whether you were in, or out.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Tuesday, January 14, 2025 4:23 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
The Army of God Comes Out of the Shadows

Tens of millions of American Christians are embracing a charismatic movement known as the New Apostolic Reformation, which seeks to destroy the secular state. (Trump is their prophet and sword against evil.)


Jesus christ.

Shut the fuck up.

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Tuesday, January 14, 2025 4:24 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Richard Nixon once called in staff to help him open an allergy-pill bottle. It was the childproof type of bottle, with instructions saying “Press down while turning.” The cap had teeth marks on it where Nixon had apparently tried to gnaw it open.
https://www.knoxviews.com/richard-nixon-and-child-proof-cap

Some additional context on behalf of Nixon for those who care. Childproof prescription bottles were supposedly first invented in 1967, but were not required until a law was passed in 1970 and signed into law ironically by Nixon himself in the 2nd year of his presidency. So for what it's worth they were likely a very new thing when he struggled to open the bottle and the early designs were more difficult to open than modern bottles if you had poor grip strength.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Video or it didn't happen.

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Wednesday, January 15, 2025 3:47 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Assessing Biden’s Presidency

Eric Kramer | January 15, 2025 7:07 am

https://angrybearblog.com/2025/01/assessing-bidens-presidency

Under Biden’s leadership, the Democrats failed to strengthen conflict of interest laws, disclosure laws, or laws protecting the civil service. And they failed to rein in the emergency powers Congress has granted to the President, even though experts had been warning for decades that these laws were the legal equivalent of a loaded handgun lying on a table in a community center for unsupervised teenagers. Now we face the very real prospect of the National Guard or military being used domestically to uproot millions of peaceful immigrants, and possibly even to suppress domestic protest or interfere with the conduct of elections. Unbridled executive discretion will also allow Trump to use his office to reward friends and punish enemies, a point that is well understood by the business “leaders” flocking to Mar-a-Lago to pay homage to the president-elect.

According to Dalmia, Biden’s failure to address these issues was due in part to a desire to win re-election by getting things done using executive power, and partly due to conventional thinking:

The other reason is reflexive turf-protection and hanging on to the power of the office no matter how it was amassed and how much it departs from the balance-of-power that the Constitution envisioned. “The Biden administration did not see the hardening of institutions as a political priority and let the normal bureaucratic mentality expand executive authority by default,” laments Soren Dayton, Niskanen Center’s Director of Governance, who has closely followed the administration’s foot-dragging for the past four years in frustration.

In other words, Biden remained stuck in an old mindset of governing in which enacting his policy priorities rather than addressing the new threats to America’s liberal democracy was prized. Hence, he is leaving the country deeply vulnerable to an authoritarian takeover. He warned that Trump was an existential danger, but he never took his own warning seriously and so couldn’t convince the voters to do so either.

Every country experiencing democratic backsliding can testify that their authoritarian leader was far more determined and dangerous in his or her second term. Biden had an opportunity to help America break that pattern and put some solid guardrails around the office of the executive. Unlike other countries facing similar threats, he would have been aided in his effort by America’s strong liberal democratic institutions built over 250 years, not an asset any other country in the world has. Alas, he squandered it.

Biden fell into a business-as-usual mindset and defended discretionary executive power against legislative efforts to control it. This reflects either a catastrophic complacency and failure of vision (did he not take seriously the possibility that he or another Democrat might lose the 2024 election? did he not understand that business as usual would leave the country highly vulnerable to Trump or another personalist demagogue?) or, if he did understand the threat of a Trump victory, his inaction suggests a stunning failure to exert leadership within the executive branch and Congress.

Much more at https://angrybearblog.com/2025/01/assessing-bidens-presidency

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Wednesday, January 15, 2025 3:52 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Video or it didn't happen.
There was no video connecting Nixon to Watergate or anything at all, and yet he resigned and 40 people who worked for Nixon went to jail. There was no video of any of their crimes. It was circumstantial evidence, the evidence that Trumptards fail to understand, which is doubtlessly why they are also failing in the non-political parts of life such as family, finances, health, and work.

40 of Nixon's people go to prison
https://www.google.com/search?q=40+of+nixon%27s+people+go+to+prison

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Thursday, January 16, 2025 7:59 AM

JAYNEZTOWN


California still burns, LA destroyed in fires, smoke, flames, ash and a toxic smell in the air

This is Los Angeles.
https://x.com/CatchUpFeed/status/1879553813956456656

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Sunday, January 19, 2025 8:37 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Why America Can’t Conquer Canada
Donald Trump’s nonsensical threats are an attempt to distract from his own country’s self-destruction

By Stephen Marche | January 9, 2025

https://macleans.ca/society/canada-51st-state-america/

The president-elect of the United States, the man about to be commander-in-chief of the most powerful military the world has ever known, is talking about invading Canada. Of course, he’s also talking about invading Greenland and the Panama Canal. He has declared that he plans only to use “economic force” against Canada, whatever that might mean—tariffs as shock troops perhaps. Canadians need to get used to this kind of terrifying nonsense. There’s going to be a lot more of this pirate king blather over the next four years.

Trump’s fantasies of annexation and conquest are nothing more than that. At this point in its history, America has come off of 70 years of failed imperialist adventures, in which it discovered it couldn’t hold onto Afghanistan or Iraq or Vietnam or anywhere else. America’s military position in the world is shrinking rather than expanding. West Africa is kicking out American forces and replacing them with Russians. Niger vacated its American military bases in August. At least one of the reasons that Trump is boasting about his plans for territorial conquest is that the United States, in its current position of radical instability and a complete collapse of national solidarity, has never been less prepared for conflict.

Trump has promised to return America to its traditional way of life—and, to be fair, losing wars of occupation is traditional for the United States. In the 21st century, it has become harder, not easier, to occupy populations against their will. Ordinary people have become used to controlling their own destinies, and the means of resistance have developed to the point where occupiers are always at a disadvantage. More than any other country, the U.S. has learned this lesson the hard way. When I wrote my book The Next Civil War in the late 2010s, the U.S. had recently published its manual on counterinsurgency, Joint Publication 3-24, or JP 3-24. On the surface, it was a guide to strategies for occupying and pacifying countries. Underneath, it was a big flashing sign to its own military leadership: do not do this ever again. The process of ending a counterinsurgency involves reconfiguring the basis of society from the ground up, a process which a military force, any military force, is incapable of undertaking.

The lesson of JP 3-24 is that counterinsurgency strategies have an implicit weakness: the occupiers cannot overcome the host populations except by annihilation. To hold countries, you need to impose order. To impose order you need to control populations. To control populations you need to use violence. Violence leads to violence, which is inherently antithetical to order. American forces have found that, even with the support of local governments and control of the state-building machinery, tiny pockets of resistance can make chaos more or less permanent and the attempts to quell that chaos counterproductive by their nature. To stop sectarian violence, to give peace a chance, occupiers have to put cities under surveillance and impose zones of control and eliminate terrorists. Each imposition on the local population makes their position less tenable.

That’s why America wins every battle and loses every war. They can perform military actions perfectly but they can’t recognize the ultimate consequences of those actions. War, for them, is a kind of hobby. They only enjoy it on foreign soil, when the stakes are on the other side. They cannot process attacks on their homeland, which a conflict with Canada would provide. September 11 was the most successful military action of the 21st century exactly because it exploited American vulnerability toward spectacles of violence in their homeland. The Americans played right into their enemies’ hands after a single attack. Their foreign policy decisions in the subsequent decade could not have been more self-defeating than if Osama Bin Laden had been dictating them.

American foreign policy operates on a combination of extraordinary technical facility and fundamental stupidity; this may be their defining trait as a nation. The most amazing scene in The Fog of War, Errol Morris’s documentary about Robert McNamara, former secretary of defence and architect of the Vietnam War policy, is when McNamara meets his Vietnamese counterpart, well after the war, who has to explain that the Vietnamese considered their struggle a war for independence. America’s best and brightest did not understand the first thing about their enemy—even hugely successful and intelligent men like McNamara. And the American government today, at least if Trump’s cabinet picks go through, will not be led by their best and brightest.

Even Russia is learning that occupation in the 21st century is not what it used to be. Populations now are not composed of serfs but of professionals. They have plans for themselves and for their futures. To be sure, Russia had military successes in Ukraine, although at a much slower rate and with a much higher cost than military experts expected. But its stated war aims of bringing Ukrainians under cultural and political dominion, of pouring new populations into a restored Russian Empire, died on the first day. Putin’s “mourning war,” as Foreign Policy recently called it, was an attempt to overcome its economic and demographic decline; both have only accelerated during the past three years.

Thomas Jefferson, during the War of 1812, declared that the conquest of Canada would be “a matter of marching.” But in that case, even though America had a seven-to-one population advantage, Canada still won, largely because of the incompetence and arrogance of the American commanders and the military genius of Shawnee chief Tecumseh. And America in 1812 could not have been more united. Now, the country is ripping itself to shreds. Ordinary people with Ivy League degrees are assassinating CEOs on the streets of New York, to widespread approval. Terrorist incidents are growing, executed by more sophisticated and more resourceful terrorists than ever before. Trump plans to install loyalist appointees whose stated plans are to gut the national institutions—the FBI, the CIA, the Department of Justice—to give the president-elect more impunity. As I write, Los Angeles is on fire.

And that’s what Trump’s threats are really about. They are his attempt to distract the country from its own suicide. Trump is a rage-attention machine. That’s how he has accumulated power. That’s how he is. But now that he has overtaken the Republican party and the U.S. political system, he must keep the rage machinery pointed outwards. Otherwise it will turn inwards. Civil war within his own base is already waiting in the wings. Eventually, Musk or Bannon will have to fight it out. It can be only one or the other.

Trump’s comments on Canada must be put in this context. He has to keep the world afraid of him, because the moment that stops, his power collapses. He is attempting to spread loathsome anarchy everywhere, not just here. Elon Musk is forcing governments to respond to his weird outbursts in Britain and Germany. The Danish king has had to change his coat of arms over the threat to Danish sovereignty. But think about it for a second: Trump’s “foreign policy,” if that’s even what it is, is a proposal for a multi-front violation of the territorial sovereignty of Canada, Europe and South America. I am a professional worrier about America. I am not worried about this possibility.

For the sake of argument, let us consider the absurd proposition of an American invasion into Canada. As for the military action, it is impossible to predict. There is no historical parallel of an ally conquering another ally, because, on an obvious level, it’s insane. And Canadian and American intelligence services and military forces are entirely integrated. Would that mean that the Americans would just walk over the border or, rather, would it mean that Canadian forces, integrated into the American system, could effect unprecedented sabotage?

One of the lessons of the JP 3-24 is that it only takes a few committed people to make an occupation borderline-impossible. Canada would no doubt produce many Quislings, but the vast majority of us want to stay Canadian. Widespread civil disobedience and resistance would certainly take on a violent dimension, contributing to the already violent political breakdown of various factions in the United States. America is already facing significant pressure from separatist forces within its current borders. It would add two more.

There’s also the fact that if Canada were a state, it would inject a massive left-wing presence into the United States. Democrats would be in power from that point on. But this is all absurd on its face, because, to conquer Canada, the United States would have to put itself on a war footing, and it isn’t even willing to invest enough in its public services to put out fires in its second-largest city.

America is a threat but no enemy, which puts Canadians in a complicated position. We should fear American weakness rather than strength. And America has never been weaker in our lifetimes. It is barely in a condition to defend itself, or even to understand when it is being attacked. Sometime in the next four years, America’s enemies, rather than its allies, will pick their moment and pop the United States like a balloon. All it will take is a pinprick.

The last time America was in this much turmoil, during its first civil war, Abraham Lincoln’s secretary of state, William Henry Seward, proposed an invasion of Canada, since they already had such a large standing army. Lincoln declared that he would fight one war at a time, but many people weren’t placated. The fractious Northern colonies, who spent most of their time until that point squabbling, decided that they needed to bind together into a Confederation. Our connection to each other has always been our resistance. We have largely stayed together so we don’t have to be them.

Canadian solidarity has never been more necessary than now. In the United States, it is unclear who is a traitor and who isn’t. Not so here. The key figure in Canada at this moment is Doug Ford, who is fighting for the country as a whole. And he knows how to fight. While Pierre Poilievre has said Canada will never be the 51st state, it’s unclear to me if his party is more loyal to this country or to the American manosphere. The Liberals, in disarray, have no voice. They did, however, get us through the last Trump administration more or less in one piece.

Ordinary Canadians must prepare, not for war but for chaos—economic, political, social, cultural. If your neighbour’s house is on fire, yours eventually will be too.

Stephen Marche is the author of The Next Civil War.
Download the book for free from the mirrors at https://libgen.is//search.php?req=Stephen+Marche

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Sunday, January 19, 2025 5:06 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Video or it didn't happen.
There was no video connecting Nixon to Watergate or anything at all, and yet he resigned and 40 people who worked for Nixon went to jail. There was no video of any of their crimes. It was circumstantial evidence, the evidence that Trumptards fail to understand, which is doubtlessly why they are also failing in the non-political parts of life such as family, finances, health, and work.


Video or it didn't happen.

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Monday, January 20, 2025 6:46 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Welcome to Weimar 2.0

Today, China, Russia, and the United States, to say nothing of the mid-level and smaller powers, are all running a strange simulation of the Weimar Republic: that weak and wobbly political organism that governed Germany for 15 years from the ashes of World War I to the ascension of Adolf Hitler.

By Robert D. Kaplan, the Robert Strausz-Hupé chair in geopolitics at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. | January 17, 2025, 3:00 PM

https://foreignpolicy.com/2025/01/17/global-crisis-geopolitics-conflic
t-technology-history-weimar-republic/

This article is adapted from Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis by Robert D. Kaplan (Random House, 224 pp., $31, January 2025). Download Robert D. Kaplan’s books from https://libgen.is//search.php?&req=Robert+D.+Kaplan

America’s Weimar syndrome may be obvious with the reelection of the institution-destroyer Donald Trump as president. But the entire world is one big Weimar now, connected enough for one part to mortally influence the other parts, yet not connected enough to be politically coherent. Like the various parts of the Weimar Republic, we find ourselves globally in an exceedingly fragile phase of technological and political transition.

I see no Hitler in our midst, or even a totalitarian world state. But don’t assume that the next phase of history will provide any relief to the present one. It is in the spirit of caution that I raise the subject of Weimar.

Analogies can be futile, I know, since no thing is exactly like another. Yet they are often the only way to communicate and explain. While on the one hand an analogy is an imperfect distortion, on the other hand it can create a new awareness, another way to see the world. It is only through an analogy that I can begin to describe the depth of our global crisis. We have to be able to consider that literally anything can happen to us. This is the usefulness of Weimar.

What, exactly, was Weimar? The great German historian Golo Mann called Weimar a sprawling and unwieldy “empire without an emperor.” World War I—which lasted four long years, and which ordinary Germans thought originally would be a triumph—ended in defeat, 1.75 million German military deaths, and almost a half-million German civilian deaths. The country was shattered, the royal imperial governing structure had collapsed, and Germany was on the verge of social chaos. It was in that context that leading German politicians and lawyers, meeting in the Thuringian town of Weimar, devised a new constitutional arrangement that sought to avoid the autocratic tendencies of Kaiser Wilhelm II and Otto von Bismarck before him.

But the new arrangement was just too weak to withstand the pressures of what was to come. There was no night watchman to keep the peace between its constituent parts. The federal states (Länder) legislated through the Reichsrat (upper house of parliament), retaining all rights not explicitly transferred to the central government. The nation as a whole elected the head of state, or Reich president. The president then appointed the chancellor, who with his cabinet ran the government at the behest of the Reichstag, the lower house, which was elected by the people. Two-thirds of Germany was still called Prussia, and was governed under different rules than the Länder. As for Bavaria—which, like Prussia, was a state within a state—there was constant talk of separation from the Reich.

If all this seems like a far more complicated version of the U.S. Constitution with its separation of powers and 50 states, it was—and it was made more unwieldy by economic and social anarchy. There was catastrophic inflation during the early Weimar years and catastrophic depression toward the end: a result of a very difficult postwar economy, made worse by reparations demanded by the Treaty of Versailles and by world economic dislocations.

Germany during the Weimar period from 1918 to 1933 was a vast and barely united world unto itself, where the rules of order scarcely applied. It was less a government than a system of belligerent and far-flung competing parts, given the regional differences of a sprawling and, in historical terms, recently united Germany. Weimar’s “normal state was crisis,” writes the late historian Gordon A. Craig.

In that sense, Weimar was like our planet today: intimately connected, so as to have crises that cut across oceans, whether it be COVID-19, a global recession, great-power conflicts, Middle East wars, or unprecedented climate change. To recall Weimar is to emphasize and admit the growing interdependencies of our own world, and to accept moral responsibility for it. Like Weimar’s interrelated German states, all countries are now connected in ways in which a crisis for one can be a crisis for all. The Weimar phenomenon, therefore, becomes one of scale.

Weimar was one long cabinet crisis where everything always seemed to be at stake. Central authority exhausted itself just trying to preserve order, and in the final Weimar years, all anyone could talk about in Germany was daily politics. It was truly a permanent crisis, with one breathless series of headlines following another. The public and politicians both were caught up in the moment, in all of its intensity, unable to concentrate on what might come next because the present was so overwhelming.

Mann writes: “Divided and alienated from itself, led by weak or reluctant politicians, the nation was confronted by problems the hopeless confusion of which would have daunted a Bismarck.”

It wasn’t all doom and gloom. The years of the mid- and late 1920s that were associated with Gustav Stresemann—a liberal realist politician, by all accounts brilliant, who served as both a chancellor and foreign minister—constituted a time of economic growth, cultural blossoming, and political compromises and reconciliations. There was a distinct sense for a while that things were getting better and that Germany was finally emerging out of postwar chaos. Stresemann’s diplomacy virtually removed the restrictions placed upon German sovereignty by the Versailles peace treaty after Germany’s defeat in World War I, except for the question of armaments. There was another bout of optimism, at least momentarily, when the fiscal conservative Heinrich Brüning emerged in early 1930 to lead a fairly nonpartisan cabinet of national emergency.

However, Brüning’s gifts as a technocrat were not matched by his political instincts: He lacked the ability to compromise and maneuver at a time when he was trying to force tough economic choices and hardships, including wage cuts and a tightening of credit, upon the population and the political parties. “Had Brüning been a Bismarck, he might, despite the daunting … circumstances, have been able to pull this off,” Craig writes. But Brüning’s government struggled on until it collapsed in 1932.

Brüning’s cabinet of technocrats had been eaten away by extremist forces in the streets, both Nazis and communists. It may have been the last real chance the Weimar Republic had to right itself. History is Shakespearean as well as geopolitical, a matter of contingencies, and if Brüning had not had the personal limitations that he did, the history of the 20th century might have been vastly different.

The more abject the disorder, often the more extreme the tyranny to follow, and that brings us to Weimar’s last chapter.

Weimar’s house of cards culminated in 1932 with its next-to-last chancellor, Franz von Papen, a rightist authoritarian and amateur horseman without a political base, a man whom Mann describes as “vain,” “irresponsible,” and “pitifully superficial.” Von Papen’s government just couldn’t get anything done and didn’t last the year. Indeed, at this point there was endless cabinet jockeying but no real governance. Yet even after von Papen left office, he remained a close advisor to President Paul von Hindenburg.

When asked why Hindenburg, bowing to the advice of von Papen and a few others, had named Hitler as chancellor on Jan. 30, 1933, von Papen replied, “We have [only] hired him.” “We have framed him in,” added one of von Papen’s friends, believing that Hitler could easily be controlled in that role. Mann asks what the meaning of human existence is when “such a lightweight” as von Papen could “determine the course of world history.” Again, there are large, overwhelming forces of geography, culture, and economics, and there are also contingencies based on pivotal personalities. History blends the two.

Weimar constituted a vacuum eventually filled by Nazi totalitarianism. But our world today must have a different destiny. Like Weimar, it is an interconnected system of states in which no one really rules. But world geography is still a factor. The Earth is vast enough that no individual political force can really replicate what happened to Germany at the end of Weimar, a loose-limbed republic that covered only the geographical center of Europe. So rather than risk the rise of another Hitler, we are forced to wallow in one emergency or another without pause, as crises seep and ricochet across the globe.

Weimar is now a permanent condition for us, as we are connected enough by globalization and technology to affect each other intimately without having the possibility of true global governance. And that is not the worst outcome—since, had Hitler not arrived, Weimar might ultimately have righted itself. There are quite a few Weimar democracies in the developing world—such as Lebanon, Nigeria, and Bangladesh—and quite a few of them may yet succeed. The key is to make constructive use of our fears about Weimar, so as to be wary about the future without giving in to fate.

Geography is not disappearing. But it is shrinking. Because of digital communications, cyber technology, intercontinental missiles, jet travel, space satellites, and so much else, different parts of the globe now affect each other as intimately as different parts of Germany did in the 1920s and early 1930s, with all of its factions and power centers.

The smaller the world becomes because of technology, the more that every place in it matters. Every river and mountain range becomes strategic. A coup in Niger, like what happened there in 2023, that undermines anti-terrorism activities across a vast region of Africa, exposes the fragility of our world as much as an economic crisis in China. Think of an old wristwatch: so small, but once you start to take it apart, it suddenly becomes vast and complicated. Such is our globe today and in the coming decades.

Will this new global Weimar have the cataclysmic fate of the old German one? Or will it find a measure of stability like in 1920s Germany during the Stresemann years? For that interregnum might have continued indefinitely were it not for the Great Depression that afflicted the entire developed world and sent Weimar spiraling downward. COVID-19 and climate change, despite all the trouble they have caused, have not yet had the very targeted and cataclysmic effect on the globe that the Great Depression had on Germany, which brought Hitler to power. But give it all time. Climate change and pandemics are relentless—and this is to say nothing of wars and great-power fractures.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the British geographer Halford Mackinder electrified much of the intellectual world with his now famous “pivot” theory, which stated that since the Eurasian supercontinent was soon to be connected by railways, the “heartland,” or vast center of Eurasia, held the key to world power, as it was equidistant from all the strategic points in any direction. In building to that conclusion, Mackinder fathomed that the great European imperial powers, by expanding their political control into the most distant corners of Africa and Asia, had essentially mapped out the entire earth. There was no more room left to expand, meaning that their energies could no longer be expended in faraway conquests of jungles and deserts, and so the great powers would increasingly turn on each other.

According to Mackinder’s theory, wars would become worldwide in scale, as every place could be contested. Thus did Mackinder vaguely intuit two world wars and the Cold War decades before they happened.

“Every explosion of social forces,” Mackinder wrote in 1904, “instead of being dissipated in a surrounding circuit of unknown space and barbaric chaos, will [henceforth] be sharply re-echoed from the far side of the globe, and weak elements” in between “will be shattered in consequence.” Almost everywhere there will be consequential and connected human habitation, thus every place will become of critical importance. There will be no place to escape to. The great powers will be trapped together on a finite planet.

World War I may have represented the first time in such stark terms that the great powers of Europe and North America were all bound up in one system. But attrition of the same phenomenon—a tightening and shrinking Earth on account of technology—adds up to big change. Indeed, World War II saw all the major continents of the temperate zone—Europe, North America, and Asia—integrated into the same destructive conflict system: a world system that was only deepened and intensified during the almost half-century-long Cold War. And since then, into the 2020s, there has been a steady advance of high-tech military acquisitions that has made the world and its conflicts increasingly claustrophobic. Because every place is strategic, the possibilities of conflict become more numerous than ever. And yet no global government has ever been on the horizon.

Meanwhile, the great Eurasian land powers of China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran are locked in a conflict against a constellation of forces including the United States, its western Pacific allies, Ukraine, Israel, and moderate Sunni Arab states. A high-end arms race is underway in the Indo-Pacific region with a focal point of Taiwan and the South China Sea. A breakout of military hostilities there between the world’s largest and second-largest economies could be an extinction-level event for world financial markets, as well as for supply chains.

Truly, we are all trapped with each other. Isolationism, a concept that originated when it took a week to get to Europe by steamship, is not an option; neither is muscular interventionism, since it would be unsustainable given all the accelerating crises and the possibility of being periodically caught in a quagmire. As in Weimar, the need for wise global leadership and effective, rapid-fire decision-making increases by the day, just as it seems to recede before us. A tightening international crisis demands increased cooperation among states, even as globalization — which is a shallow vehicle compared to the naked territorial interests of these same states — is not nearly advanced enough to sustain it. The first half of the 21st century may be as frightening and revealing as the first half of the 20th.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Saturday, January 25, 2025 12:37 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


No, Trump Can’t Make Manufacturing Great Again
We’re a service economy now — and that’s OK

By Paul Krugman | Jan 25, 2025

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/no-trump-cant-make-manufacturing

This post is about how Donald Trump’s policies couldn’t “make us a manufacturing nation again” even if they succeeded in greatly reducing trade deficits. They won’t, which makes it something of a moot point, but people should understand both that we are going to be a service economy no matter what, and that that’s OK: a fixation on manufacturing as the only source of good jobs is generations out of date.

In the summer of 1992 I flew to Little Rock, Arkansas for an audition. Officially, of course, that wasn’t what it was; then-governor Bill Clinton had invited a number of Democratic-leaning economists to talk about policy issues. But everyone understood that our performance would help determine whether we would be offered jobs if he won the presidential election.

At one point Clinton asked how we could get employment in U.S. manufacturing back up to historical levels as a share of total employment. Heads turned to me, since this was clearly my lane, and I answered something like this: “Well, Governor, that really isn’t possible. Even if we could eliminate our trade deficit, the manufacturing share would still be much lower than it was in the 50s and 60s.”

Needless to say, I didn’t get a job in the Clinton administration. I’ve been thankful ever since.

But I was right, and what I said then is still true. Donald Trump declared in his inaugural speech that “America will be a manufacturing nation once again.” No, it won’t. As I’ll explain shortly, Trump’s policies are actually likely to shrink manufacturing, but even if they weren’t, we aren’t going back to the days when manufacturing employed a quarter of the work force rather than its current 8 percent.

To be clear, there is a case for promoting U.S. manufacturing in sectors of strategic importance. Between Putin and Xi, the national security case for tariffs or subsidies looks stronger now than it has for generations. But such policies won’t change the fact that these days we are overwhelmingly a service economy.

And that’s OK. The popular belief that only manufacturing can offer good jobs to ordinary workers is wrong; in fact, at this point manufacturing doesn’t offer especially good jobs. We can make things better for American workers, but a fixation on manufacturing gets in the way of real solutions.

Let’s look at some numbers.

For a generation or so after World War II, America really was a manufacturing nation. Industry employed more than a quarter of the nonfarm work force:



And it accounted for a comparable share of GDP:


Source: BEA

But manufacturing’s relative importance has steadily declined. At this point substantially more Americans work in health care than in factories:


The question is, what caused this decline, and can it be reversed?

Trump obviously blames foreign competition and believes that we can make manufacturing great again if we force foreigners to stop running trade surpluses. And to be fair, America’s move into persistent trade deficits, which really began under Ronald Reagan, has been a contributing factor to manufacturing’s decline.

But trade deficits weren’t the main reason for manufacturing’s relative decline. What was? Basically, it’s the same story as the relative decline of farming as an occupation, even though America is a big agricultural exporter. We got so good at farming that we no longer needed many farmers; similarly, rising productivity in manufacturing has reduced the need for industrial workers.

Uh-oh, you may think, doesn’t that mean that rising productivity will eventually lead to mass unemployment everywhere? No, that’s a fallacy of composition; read my old Slate article “The accidental theorist,” which explains it all in terms of hot dogs and buns.
https://slate.com/business/1997/01/the-accidental-theorist.html

And while trade deficits have also been a factor, even eliminating our trade deficit would still leave us much less of a manufacturing nation than we were in, say, the 1960s.

Consider the comparison between the United States and Germany. We import more manufactured goods than we export; Germany does the reverse, running a huge trade surplus in manufactured goods relative to the size of its economy. (Like China’s trade surplus, this is a symptom of economic weakness rather than strength.)

So does Germany have a bigger manufacturing sector, in relative terms, than the United States? Yes, but even so it has declined over time, and it’s nowhere near as big as American manufacturing used to be:


Source: BEA, World Bank

And America is not going to run Germany-sized trade surpluses. For one thing, the world couldn’t and wouldn’t absorb US exports on that scale. Germany only manages to avoid a severe backlash partly because it’s a much smaller economy than America or China, partly because people tend to think of it as just part of the euro area.

No, we’d be lucky simply to eliminate our manufactures trade deficit, which would bring us roughly a third of the way toward a German-sized manufacturing sector, i.e. around 13 percent of GDP — far below its level in the 1960s, and in fact smaller than it was when I gave Bill Clinton the wrong answer.

In any case, Trump’s policies won’t eliminate our manufacturing trade deficit. If anything, they’ll make it bigger. Tariffs will lead to both foreign retaliation and a stronger dollar, hurting U.S. exports even as they reduce imports. Tax cuts will cause a potentially inflationary rise in the budget deficit; combined with the inflationary impact of tax cuts, this will cause the Fed to stop cutting rates and possibly increase them, driving the dollar and the trade deficit even higher.

True, Trump may try to force the Fed to cut rates despite the risks of inflation. If so, hello stagflation.

Anyway, the bottom line is that we are never ever getting back together to being the manufacturing nation of yore. But why should we want to go back?

Many people seem to believe that manufacturing is where the good jobs are. But that isn’t true and hasn’t been true for a long time. As of December, according to the BLS, the average production or nonsupervisory job in America’s private sector paid $30.62 an hour. In manufacturing the number was $28.34 — less than the all-industry average.

Why do people imagine that manufacturing offers ordinary workers good jobs? In part because it used to — not because there’s something inherent about working on an assembly line that leads to good wages, but because once upon a time many manufacturing workers were represented by strong unions. Now they aren’t, and manufacturing jobs are nothing special.

Also, I can’t help noting than even now many people think of working in a factory as something real men do, while, say, nursing is female-coded.

The bottom line is that Trump is (surprise!) selling a fantasy rather than an actual solution to workers’ problems. If we really wanted to bring back the days when workers without college degrees could afford a middle-class standard of living, the answer isn’t pipe dreams about bringing back manufacturing; it’s unionizing service sector giants like Amazon and Walmart.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Sunday, January 26, 2025 8:59 AM

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The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


A Review of Martin Wolf’s The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism

The Ungovernable Economy
“When I look at the world around us, I perceive a gigantic crisis of political legitimacy.”

By Trevor Jackson, interviewed by Irza Waraich | January 25, 2025

https://www.nybooks.com/online/2025/01/25/the-ungovernable-economy-tre
vor-jackson/

Free download at https://libgen.is//search.php?req=Martin+Wolf+The+Crisis+of+Democratic
+Capitalism

The reviewer also has a book available for free at https://libgen.is//search.php?req=Trevor+Jackson+Impunity+and+Capitali
sm

“Capitalism is predicated on atomized individuals, democracy on shared publics,” writes Trevor Jackson in the Review’s January 16 issue.

Reviewing Martin Wolf’s The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism, Jackson examines capitalist democracies past and present to find where the economic system of capitalism and the political system of democracy have aligned and where they have diverged. He is particularly interested in the history of policies designed to revitalize economies and nations after an economic crisis and charts the way these policies have privatized gains and socialized losses. But Jackson also insists that these events—both the crises and the state’s responses—must be understood as historically contingent, lest “expressions of ruthless class interest are reframed as basic truths.” Without considering the contemporaneous debates about class and conditions of economic inequality, he argues, we won’t understand how crisis continues to be the order of the day.

Jackson is an economic historian and teaches history and political economy at UC Berkeley. Though his research focuses on early modern Europe, he has taught courses on capitalism and inequality, the history of economic crises, and the history of economic thought. A regular contributor to the Review, Jackson has written about cryptocurrency, student debt, and economic bubbles. He is the author of Impunity and Capitalism, and his writing has also appeared in Dissent, The Baffler, and The Nation.
Trevor Jackson

I recently spoke with Jackson about his research interests in early modern Europe, the evolving relationship between capitalism and democracy, and different interpretations of historical analogy.

Irza Waraich: What initially drew you to research the economic history of early modern Europe?

Trevor Jackson: It was in part interest and in part accident. Accident in the sense that I once thought I’d become a development economist, and so I did a degree in what was known as the “political economy of late development” at the London School of Economics. There’s not a lot of undergraduate teaching in economic history, so this was the first time I encountered that material, and I found it fascinating.

Early modern Europe is one of the great focal points of economic history research. That’s where we tend to think capitalism, the industrial revolution, and the modern economy originated. The era has attracted a great deal of attention from economic historians over the years, and so it turned out to be an ideal place to learn the tools, techniques, ideas, concepts, and arguments of economic history writ large.

What specific parallels do you see between early modern capitalism and today?

One of the first things that comes to mind is in the eighteenth century, when the institutions of what today we would call financial capitalism were created. There was a great deal of anxiety among contemporaneous observers that the ability to create fortunes based on movable, intangible capital would allow the owners of those fortunes to remove themselves from communities of obligation. They would no longer be bound by the laws and customs of the nations where they resided or were citizens, because they could always leave and take their capital with them. That was perceived as a corrosive threat to the social order.

That conflict in turn became part of what I would call a crisis of political legitimacy for the old regime in Europe, which had governed the economy and society for centuries and which was, by the eighteenth century, facing mass upheaval and public critique. That conflict seems to me to be similar to our own moment: when I look at the world around us, I perceive a gigantic crisis of political legitimacy.

In your review, you write that Wolf argues that “neither politics nor the economy will function without a substantial degree of honesty, trustworthiness, self-restraint, truthfulness, and loyalty to shared political, legal, and other institutions.” But, as he acknowledges, these institutions are in crisis all around the world. How might globalization be reimagined to prioritize both global economic equality and democratic stability?

We can see that the globalization we got beginning in the 1990s has a few specific characteristics: it hinged on privatization, as well as the liberalization of capital accounts or trade policies—and essentially everything the International Monetary Fund calls “macroeconomic stability,” meaning balanced budgets and low rates of inflation. Those policies have been very good for the free flow of capital and for the creation of a truly gigantic global financial sector. They have been less good for middle- to lower-income people in rich countries, and they have not delivered high rates of economic growth.

Economists who pushed these policies were very willing to recognize, as they say, that there are “winners” and “losers.” Even now, many of them are willing to admit that the winners have been far more concentrated and the losers have been far more numerous than they had anticipated. The degree of the loss—of jobs, of security, of social prestige—and the particular political interpretation of its causes—blaming immigrants, say—have turned out to be much more corrosive to democratic culture than these economists had anticipated.

Essentially, the globalization that we’ve seen has been a project of class domination, and it was very successful. We could think creatively about other forms of global economic integration that come with built-in redistributive mechanisms to compensate what we might crudely call the losers of market integration. But what a project of global integration that is driven by a different class imperative might look like is a little unclear, in part because the postwar decades of rapid economic growth and relatively equal income distributions in the West were predicated on capital controls, which were a feature of the Bretton Woods monetary system that made it difficult to move capital rapidly across international borders. That meant owners of capital were stuck with whatever democratic political compromises were made domestically, the classic example being the very high taxes of the 1950s and 1960s.

This worked because you could tax owners of capital, and it was very hard for them to leave with their capital. That meant they had an incentive to reinvest profits and expand production at home to keep unemployment low. With low unemployment labor is relatively powerful, and this creates a kind of shared community of obligation subject to the same democratic accountability. That just isn’t viable anymore. Without those capital controls, it’s possible for capital to absent itself from a community of obligation. So how do you return to those capital controls? What kind of global economic integration could you have if capital isn’t mobile? These are very difficult political questions. But I’m not sure that integration is the thing to prioritize over, say, democratic accountability or equity.

Wolf refers to economics and politics as “symbiotic twins” and links capitalism with democracy, while also acknowledging the tension between them. What, exactly, does he aim to accomplish with this theoretical coupling?

I don’t want to read his mind too much, but there are several elements to this concept. One is that I think he wants to say that there is a necessary, maybe even causal, connection between democracy and capitalism. Now that is a very classic, usually politically somewhat right-wing claim that we can see throughout the twentieth century. Milton Friedman makes many claims of this sort, that the causal direction originates in capitalism, then to democracy, which is to say that the individual freedoms of capitalism are necessary for democracy to exist.

Now that’s a set of claims that I’m very skeptical of. However, the strongest version of Wolf’s argument would be the question, “Can we think of democracies that are also not capitalisms?” My thinking is that there’s not just one thing that is capitalism and one thing that is democracy, but rather each of those words refers to a whole set of institutional practices that can exist in different forms at different levels of complexity based on different scales of social organization.

Democracy might be a political arrangement in which more than periodically there are free and fair elections; it might be a whole set of political cultures about deliberative decision-making and the consent of the governed, the participation of the people and how they are ruled. All of the things that constitute a process (rather than a kind of event) might be what we want from a democracy. Capitalism, in turn, takes a wide variety of forms, ranging from the kind of ruthless free-market capitalism of the United States to a more constrained 1950s and 1960s Scandinavian social democracy, to a more violent eighteenth-century (and earlier) form. I am skeptical that we see any kind of reliable, necessary connection between these two concepts.

I can think of lots of cases of capitalisms that are not at all democratic, which is exactly the problem that Wolf is trying to solve. So if those formations exist, we can see that in lots of cases, democracy is in fact extremely limited. Think of the property requirements that conditioned suffrage in the nineteenth century—not to mention the exclusion of women, the exclusion of Black people, the continuing exclusion of immigrants—or how democracy coexisted with slavery in the nineteenth-century United States. I am just not sure that there is any such thing as a necessary, ideal version of these modes of social organization. I think they are always contested processes that can be changed, can be put in tension with one another, can be mutually supportive or contradictory.

In your 2024 essay for the Review on the history of economic crises, such as the many “panics” in the nineteenth-century US, you argue that the lessons derived from these events are often shaped in complicated ways by politics. How can scholarly discussions about these crises more effectively address the biases of economic history?

That is a challenging question. My instinct is to say that more history is always preferable to less, and that a wider set of examples of historical analogy is better than a narrower set. In this I’m influenced by the great economic historian Barry Eichengreen, who has an excellent book called Hall of Mirrors, where he compares the Great Depression to the financial crisis of 2008. One point he makes is that when we reason by historical analogy, we risk fooling ourselves into only seeing what we think is the same about the past, rather than recognizing what’s different about our current moment. We might draw a relatively limited set of analogies that might be erroneous. Maybe the Great Depression was the wrong analogy for 2008. Maybe we should have thought of the panic of 1907. But not many people know about the panic of 1907, and it’s not in anyone’s mind as the archetypal precedent.
Free book at https://libgen.is//search.php?req=Barry+Eichengreen+Hall+of+Mirrors

Thinking about history less as a set of lessons to be applied and more as a creative process, or a way to denaturalize the world around us and think with a very wide horizon about the potential set of changes that could take place, this opens up a radical, expansive sense of possibility. We realize that the future is actually far less bounded than we tend to believe.

You’ve expressed skepticism and uncertainty about the Trump administration, particularly in its relationships with billionaires. How might his ties to billionaires and their interests shape the near future of economic policymaking?

I think we should never believe historians when they predict the future. But there’s a great deal of concern and uncertainty about what is going to happen, particularly around democracy. Capitalism seems much less under threat. It is important to think about the future of democracy by focusing on the billionaires. This is by far the richest administration ever assembled, with the most billionaires on the transition team, in the Cabinet, and so on. It’s striking how unhinged this project of class rule is. On the one hand, it’s very easy to be alarmist and to say, well, look, we had more than a decade of open political contestation after the 2008 crisis in which the range of possible political outcomes was up for grabs. We saw a great proliferation of protest movements, different types of politics, and it’s now coalesced around an open, ruthless project of class despotism. And that’s quite terrifying.

But on the other hand, it’s also true that in his first term Trump largely failed to achieve most of his objectives, up to and including overthrowing the 2020 election. The only thing he did successfully was cut taxes for billionaires. It’s easy to imagine there will be another tax cut for them now. There’s another part of me that’s willing to think there will be some destruction and some petty grifting as these billionaires use their control of public power to drive money to themselves. That is also terrifying because for a very long while we’ve had no meaningful legislation addressing climate change, inequality, and any of the pressing issues of our time. It’s now been decades of dithering, and I don’t know if we have more time.

In my more pessimistic moments, I sometimes think this is the response to climate change, this is what the responses to the diminished expectations of economic growth are going to look like: a ruthless, zero-sum struggle for the control of a shrinking pie. The billionaires have far greater resources, far better coordination, and a far better sense of their class interest than anybody else. We have fooled ourselves into thinking that the response to climate change and inequality was in some way going to be a socially egalitarian and democratically decided one, rather than a struggle for control, power, and resources.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Monday, January 27, 2025 7:26 PM

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The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


MAGA's true believers don't understand capitalism — Trump will teach them a hard lesson

Today's Republicans have swallowed so many economic myths that reality has disappeared. They face a wakeup call

By Rich Logis | January 26, 2025 9:00AM (EST)

https://www.salon.com/2025/01/26/magas-true-believers-dont-understand-
capitalism--will-teach-them-a-hard-lesson/

America is a nation at war with its mythologies.

For all the electoral postmortems about the desire for economic change, what’s unsurprisingly absent is what seems, to me, an obvious omission: an all-enveloping misunderstanding of American capitalism.

I’m not dismissing the importance of anxiety about solvency, about the challenges that small businesses face (I’m a proprietor of one myself) and about the cost of future entitlements. (We’ll get to the problems of liberalism in a bit). Most of us in this country will worry about money for the duration of our lives.

One delusional mythology about American capitalism that has been instilled in We the People is that we somehow have a guaranteed right to prosperity; this imaginary right has been deployed by politicians who are afraid of educating their constituents about how our model of commerce actually works. Our national press has largely been lazy on this score as well.

With due respect to the many Americans who voted for Donald Trump, their overwhelming sense of entitlement dwarfs that of the hard-working immigrants who cut their grass, scrub pots and pans in the restaurants they frequent, and care for their kids and elderly loved ones. Too many Americans have come to believe they are owed financial comfort and material abundance, not to mention eggs and gasoline at predictable prices.

“Are you better off today than you were four years ago?” Frankly, it’s an illogical question in a capitalist nation. Some people are of course worse off, and I don’t mean to make light of that. But in fact, many millions are better off; Joe Biden’s administration oversaw the recovery of millions of jobs lost during the COVID pandemic and the creation of millions more. Some people out there will be worse off by the time they finish this article than when they commenced reading it. I’m not being flippant; that’s reality.

Welcome to capitalism, a system whose proponents always cite unequal outcomes as a reason for extolling it.

So eggs are expensive? Eat fewer of them. Cut down on egg whites. Let them eat yolks.

Are gas prices high? Is insurance for health care, real estate and vehicles increasing? Are supply chain constraints harming your livelihood, or your quality of life? The person in the White House has very little to do with that. Let’s recall that gas prices steadily increased during George W. Bush’s second term.

Gas was cheap in 2020 because — hello! — tens of millions of drivers weren’t driving. In fact, Trump threatened the Saudis, in the early days of the pandemic: Cut oil production, or lose U.S. military support. Why? More oil flooding the market would have driven prices still lower, and “cheap gas” does not sound like “ka-ching.”

Are gas prices high? Insurance going up for health care, real estate and vehicles? Are supply chain constraints harming your livelihood, or your quality of life? The person in the White House has very little to do with that.

Welcome to the “laws” of supply and demand, which all of us must navigate on a daily basis. If you don’t know or don’t remember these details, ask yourself why you don’t. If you’re a Trump voter, then ask yourself whether you might have voted differently in November had you been aware.

Meanwhile, we have endless debates about whether needs — access to medical care, food, affordable housing — should be rights, or should be left to the exigencies of good luck and near-perfect health.

Jeremiads about grocery prices are now an acceptable element of political discourse and, per GOP logic, we have a right to complain about them. Feeding the hungry, though? That edges too close to pinko communism. But the point our fellow countrymen and women should grasp is that presidents, whoever they are, have very little control over inflation.

You know what my wife and I did when household costs became too onerous last year? We reduced our expenses, and adjusted our quality of life.

That’s, you know, fiscal conservatism: Tightening the belts, practicing austerity, living within our means, limiting debt. We didn’t literally pull ourselves up by the bootstraps or walk to school through the snow without shoes. But isn’t that the American mythos?

Deep-state capitalism

In 2015 and 2016, even though I was doing better financially than at any time in my life, Donald Trump’s populist campaign resonated with me. I knew others who had lost their jobs and contracts to offshoring. Years before he ran for office, Trump talked about the dangers of competition with low-wage Asian nations, in particular; when I’d heard him speak, I nodded in concurrence.

But here’s what I never thought about at the time: I and other angry Americans hadn’t grasped that offshoring to increase profits was a central feature of capitalism, as advocated by both parties — but in particular by the mythologizers of capitalism on the Republican side.

So I’ll pose almost the same question nearly a decade later: What do Trump voters, and especially true believers in the MAGA community, of which I was once a full member, think capitalism is?

We legislate against some of the baser traits of our nature: incitement, theft, violence. Our laws aren’t entirely devoid of protections against avarice (such as antitrust regulations), but Americans, collectively and historically, have a high tolerance for greed.

There’s the mythology of capitalist meritocracy at work, which is still championed by many people who’ve been failed by both major political parties. Their concerns have been exploited and manipulated by Republicans who have traumatized them into believing that liberalism, rather than capitalism, is the source of their ills; that because of the evil policies of liberals, they keep working harder and harder but never seem to break even, much less get ahead.

Lest there be any confusion: I support capitalism. Entrepreneurship and innovation best advance in free markets.

But still: The rage I felt, even more acutely experienced today among the MAGA faithful, was perhaps warranted but rooted in ignorance. Trump was not wrong when he lamented the once-thriving communities ravaged and hollowed out by outsourcing. But his solution was no solution at all.

Now he has persuaded millions into believing that only he can successfully stymie the global and domestic capitalist forces that he did essentially nothing about during his first administration.

Why didn’t he do anything? Because Trump understands, in his own pedestrian way, that capitalism operates less on merit the higher one moves up in the hierarchy.

Trump is the most devoted “deep state” capitalist in American history, given the millions his businesses have earned in foreign payments. So much for thwarting the globalists. Want an argument for why the über-wealthy should pay more in taxes? If these money-hoarders could have gotten so rich in another country, they most certainly would have. Do we really believe this doesn’t apply to Trump?

In 2016, I was doing better financially than at any time in my life. But Donald Trump's message resonated with me. I hadn't grasped that offshoring was a central feature of capitalism.

Broadly speaking, the two core ideological dogmas within MAGA are: 1) liberalism is almost solely culpable for our national ills (second come the RINOs, or Republicans in Name Only, although it’s not close); and 2) Trump is the greatest fixer God ever created.

Most people who voted for Trump — especially the MAGA faithful — want and expect him, and by extension the federal government, to intervene in commerce. According to the classical definition, that would be socialism — or Marxism or communism, whichever epithet we are using today. The confusion is general, because it’s all mythological.

I cannot entirely fault those who are still looking for a hero or a superman who cuts through the noise and nonsense. The 2008 financial crisis and its brutal aftermath placed the ills of capitalism front and center, and begat an understandable skepticism in banks, government and other major institutions. What made that episode particularly deleterious, however, was not that we had too much regulation but too little; that laissez-faire ethos is rooted in the importance of land ownership, a central basis of American capitalism.

In fact, the notion that a singular person can serve as an economic savior and, in messianic fashion, usher in utopia, is much closer to a socialist-communist notion than a capitalist one. That surely does not mean the government should play no role in our economy; as mentioned above, the Biden administration oversaw remarkable growth. Trump and the Republicans, however, didn't actually campaign on any policy ideas aimed to increase economic mobility and opportunity. They benefited instead from the profoundly human delusion known as nostalgia.

People are looking for reasons why they seem to work more but keep falling behind. I sympathize; this resonates with me.

The answer is in front of us, and it is called capitalism, or at least the romantic mythology of capitalism. Our species makes sense of the world, in large part, through the stories we tell, and no country in world history is more defined by myths than the United States of America. All kinds of emotions inform those myths. MAGA believers like to tell their foes, “F**k your feelings,” but as someone who spent seven years within the MAGA movement, I can attest it is almost entirely driven by feelings. There is no logic that determines the tides and currents within the MAGA community; it took me an entire year to come to that epiphany.

Many on the political right choose to ignore that they already depend, or very soon will, on “socialist” safety-net programs such as Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid. Some part of the MAGA community is aware that the reforms brought by liberalism help to keep them alive.

In short, almost everyone is a liberal, when they need to be. Everyone is also a capitalist, or a socialist, when they need to be.

So what now?

There’s a lot of disbelief among liberals and Democrats about how so many Americans could simply overlook or ignore the public health crisis of gun violence, the loss of reproductive freedom (which affects men’s lives as well), the attacks on public education, and the marginalization and demonization of our LGBTQ+ population.

I have a slightly nuanced take here: I do think most Americans really do care about these issues — but they were all perceived in competition with the mythology of capitalism as the always-most-important American doctrine.

Mythology tends to be more persuasive than discussion of policy, which brings me to something the Democratic Party should post in all their workplaces: Americans don’t vote based on policy. Sure, some liberals do, given what we know about their news and information consumption. Information bubbles exist on the Democratic side, too, but liberal voters are far more likely to encounter a diversity of sources.

MAGA culture, on the other hand, likes to espouse rugged individualism, but is wholly conformist: Anything that even remotely seems to refute the mythologies that permeate the MAGA congregation is shunned. I had a term, during my time as a MAGA pundit, for much of what we maligned as propaganda: It was the Democrat Media Industrial Complex. The lie we told ourselves, central to our myth, was that we were independent-minded, not susceptible to being influenced.

MAGA’s ethos includes trauma, desperation, panic, despair, hopelessness and nihilism. What I want MAGA’s opponents to understand is that no one in the Trump movement came to imbibe that toxic mixture all on their own. I implore you to resist saying, “I told you so,” when Trump’s benefits are handed out exclusively to his rich buddies.

I am helping to build a new community for those who leave MAGA. When many such people have their Road to Damascus moment about the betrayal of Trump, as I did, we want to offer them an exit ramp out of MAGA. Blaming or castigating them only offers more incentive to remain within the MAGA circle. It may feel gratifying in the short term, but only creates more damage.

Trump and the Republicans didn't actually campaign on any policy ideas aimed at improving the economy. They benefited instead from the profoundly human delusion known as nostalgia.

One of our biggest civic crises in America is that so many of our citizens lack basic comprehension of the governmental and economic model they live under, or, perhaps, they willfully deny it. This does not reflect a dearth of intelligence, and I would argue that it’s not even primarily a failure in education, although that’s part of it. More than anything, it reflects the fact that our actual elected representatives, at all levels, are petrified of their constituents and reluctant to have candid conversations about capitalism, for fear of losing their positions and being primaried out as communists, socialists, liberals and Marxists, or otherwise victimized by the toxic stew of GOP lies.

The inherent flaw of mythology is that it offers its own evidence and its own truth to the believer, and anything that contradicts it is denied.

As he did in 2017, Trump has been bequeathed a relatively stable economy, for now. Once he begins to destabilize it, which will adversely affect the working class, the middle class and small business owners, the falsehoods will only ramp up: Somehow, it was all Joe Biden’s fault. We can only hope the Democrats are ready for the onslaught of shameless absurdities.

I certainly don’t think that government can solve every problem, nor should try to. Perversely enough, Trump voters want it to try, although most would deny that or are not cognizant of it. The question we can keep posing to Trump voters is this: How much time does he get to fix your economic problems, and when will you understand that he never will? Expect no good answers; there aren’t any.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Wednesday, January 29, 2025 7:15 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Revenge of the Black Zero
Paul Krugman / Jan 29, 2025 at 5:33 AM

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/revenge-of-the-black-zero

Back in 2010 — just as the disastrous push for fiscal austerity in the face of high unemployment was gaining momentum across the advanced world — my wife and I attended a conference at the Institut für Weltwirtschaft in Kiel, Germany. The keynote speaker was Wolfgang Schäuble, Angela Merkel’s finance minister, widely considered the father of the “black zero,” Germany’s commitment to balanced budgets no matter what.

Partway through the speech Robin took off the headphones carrying the simultaneous translation to focus on Schäuble’s body language. She eventually leaned over to say, “As we leave the room we’ll be given whips to scourge ourselves.”

Unlike U.S. conservatives, who rail about the evils of government debt, then pass budget-busting tax cuts which they claim will magically pay for themselves, the Germans have been serious about fiscal austerity. On the eve of the 2007 financial crisis America and Germany had similar levels of public debt as a share of GDP. Since then, however, Germany has kept debt low, while we very much haven’t:


Germany has also achieved huge trade surpluses, especially in manufactured goods, that are beyond Donald Trump’s wildest dreams. America runs a trade deficit in manufactures of more than 4 percent of GDP, while Germany runs a surplus of more than 8 percent. Largely as a result, manufacturing plays a bigger role in Germany’s economy than it does in ours, although it’s still smaller than the role industry played in, say, the 1960s:


Source: World Trade Organization and World Bank

From a fiscal point of view, then, Germany looks like a model of virtue. From a Trumpian point of view it looks like a big winner in international competition. So how has the German economy been doing?

Nicht gut.

Most glaringly, Germany’s economic growth has stalled. The contrast with the United States, which boomed under Biden, is stark:


Back when we were listening — or, in Robin’s case, not listening — to Schäuble’s sermon, many policymakers had bought into the notion that fiscal austerity would actually promote growth by increasing business confidence. At the time, I derided this view as belief in the “confidence fairy.” And Tinker Bell certainly hasn’t come through for the Germans.

Incidentally, for those complaining that Biden’s spending caused inflation, it seems worth noting that German inflation since the start of Covid has been roughly the same as in the U.S.:


And no, that’s not because of gas prices. As the International Monetary Fund points out,

It’s certainly true that the shutoff of Russian gas in 2022 contributed to spiking inflation and cost-of-living pressures. However, the rise in gas prices has proven to be temporary. After soaring in 2022, wholesale gas prices have now fallen back to 2018 levels.

Less stark as a short-run issue but obvious if you spend time visiting Germany is that the obsession with holding debt down has led to inadequate investment in infrastructure. The IMF has a fairly startling chart on this:


The IMF also notes:

Money that has been budgeted for investment is routinely underspent, often because of staff shortages in municipalities.

Arguing from personal anecdotes is always problematic, but maybe it’s worth mentioning that twice last year I came very close to missing connections in Frankfurt because one of the world’s major world travel hubs still, in many cases, forces passengers to take a bus from their plane to the terminal, and I had to lug my suitcase up and down many flights of stairs because the escalators were all out of order.

Many discussions of Germany’s problems focus on bad bets German businesses and politicians made about the future shape of the world economy, notably relying on imports of cheap natural gas from Russia and exports of internal combustion engine vehicles to China. Oh, and there’s also the deeply foolish decision to shut down all the nation’s nuclear power plants.

But a large modern economy is much more diversified and much more flexible than many people imagine. It takes more than a few troubled industries to bring about the kind of underperformance we’ve seen in Germany. As the IMF report I’ve been citing correctly notes, Germany’s problems have deeper roots, especially lagging productivity (exacerbated by inadequate public investment) and a shrinking working-age population:


That bump, by the way, is the influx of Syrian refugees Merkel permitted — the best thing she ever did and, of course, the most unpopular.

I’m not going to try to devise a new German growth strategy on the fly. What I learn from the German experience is, instead, the wrong-headedness of the obsessions that have dominated much of economic policy in the United States and across the advanced world.

An obsession with debt and budget deficits did a lot to hobble recovery from the 2008 financial crisis in both Europe and America. After Covid struck, the Biden administration, having learned from that experience, made sure that the economy got the help it needed — and we had a spectacular recovery. Germany, on the other hand, honored the black zero — and got economic stagnation as its reward.

These days Trump and company are obsessed with a different deficit, the trade deficit, and imagine that eliminating that deficit will make America rich (which it already is, but they won’t admit it.) But Germany runs big trade surpluses, especially in manufactures, and they aren’t bringing prosperity. In fact, in Germany, as in China, trade surpluses are a symptom of weakness, not strength.

A decade or so ago, many Germans I knew regarded their nation as an economic and even moral role model, exemplifying the rewards to those who practice the virtues of the Swabian housewife — frugality and hard work. At this point, however, Germany has gone from role model to cautionary tale — a warning about the costs of rigid thinking.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Wednesday, February 5, 2025 12:53 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


What to do with sincere but unpopular beliefs?

The division of labor in political change

By Matthew Yglesias / Feb 5, 2025 at 5:06 AM

https://www.slowboring.com/p/what-to-do-with-sincere-but-unpopular

My basic electoral advice for Democrats is so banal as to, at times, hardly seem worth writing down: They should get on the popular side of political issues rather than the unpopular side and try to raise the salience of their most-popular stances rather than their least-popular ones.

This was conventional wisdom in the very recent past, but it’s become controversial.

Consider gay marriage in 2008. This was a roughly 60-40 issue at the time, so Barack Obama wasn’t for it. And it wasn’t just him. All kinds of mainstream Democrats in boring safe blue seats were against it. The caucus leaders in the House and the Senate were against it. And while, of course, many liberals (myself included) thought they were wrong about this (40 percent of the population is a lot of people), nobody was angry or confused about what was going on. Everyone understood that you don’t take the 40 percent side of a 60-40 position if you want to participate in electoral politics. There were no angry anonymous staffer letters about it.

You also didn’t have today’s level of empiricism about the issue. Did Dick Durbin have to be against marriage equality to win re-election in Illinois in 2008? Obviously not. But he didn’t come out in favor until 2013 when it had become more popular. Everybody understood that, generally speaking, a political party’s mainstream leaders should avoid espousing unpopular causes. You didn’t need to prove in a laboratory experiment that it was really hurting you with swing voters; you just didn’t do it. It’s a striking contrast to the way politics is practiced today, where a view like, “Democrats shouldn’t take the losing side of a 70-30 issue about who plays on which sports team” is a controversial statement litigated in long essays and panel discussions. Among donors and operatives, it’s considered more plausible to try to win a Senate majority by running Dan Osborn-like independent candidates in states where the party brand is toxic than to try to de-toxify the brand by adopting popular positions on cultural issues.

A sticking point in this conversation, of course, is that when you have a 60-40 issue or a 70-30 issue or even an 80-20 issue, you still have lots of people with sincere beliefs (and often very strong feelings) on the unpopular side. And they don’t want to just give up, which is understandable — the outcomes of these policy debates have a real impact on people’s lives. So I think we need to revive some kind of sense that there are ways of making political progress toward progressive goals that don’t involve trying to bully politicians into adopting suicidal stances on the issues.

The division of labor

The fundamental breakdown we’ve experienced, it seems to me, is a kind of context collapse, a breakdown of the idea that different people have different jobs.

Something that I believe strongly, that I do not think the electorate particularly agrees with, is that we should provide universal cash benefits for parents of young kids.

My view of what I do in life is “persuasive writing aimed at relatively elite audiences.” So my main theory of how I can contribute to this cause is that I can try to convince progressive-minded elites that this is a better idea than competing ideas about how to spend large sums of money on helping families and try to convince conservative-minded elites that their worries about this policy are misguided. I like to talk about evidence that the negative shock to labor supply that conservatives are worried about is very small. Offsetting this, we have meaningful improvements to child well-being and some evidence of long-term benefits, including on things conservatives care about, like crime. There’s also reason to believe a more generous Child Tax Credit would increase fertility, which I’d think would appeal to conservatives.

Will my strategy on this work? I don’t know. Change is hard, but it’s the best idea I have for how a political columnist can help. And we’ve gotten far with elite persuasion on the YIMBY cause, so I really do think it can work.

Something that I do not think I can do effectively (but would love to if I could) is mass persuasion. My guess is that mass persuasion mostly happens through pop culture rather than political columns. If you look at an old movie like “Paris Blues” (1961), which stars Paul Newman and features Duke Ellington playing jazz, Hollywood liberals are going to great lengths to get white audiences to watch Sidney Poitier talking about escaping the routine racism of American life.


Going further back in time, I’ve been reading George Eliot novels, and part of what she’s doing is trying to show readers that the sharp limits placed on 19th century women’s education are bad and also that the class norms of 19th century England are arbitrary.

There are also more journalistic forms of mass persuasion, which document things that people don’t know about or bring to light information that was previously hidden. These things can feed into each other. Factual reporting can inspire works of fiction, and elite persuasion almost certainly helps explain why movies like “Paris Blues” get made at all. And then there’s feedback in the other direction — I can’t think of much recent mass culture dedicated to trying to increase sympathy for the struggles of low-income parents.

There’s also a really important role for experts and technocrats in trying to devise workable ideas. Progressives did incredible work in the 2010s raising consciousness about problems with American policing. But they really skimped on the part where you need workable solutions to the problem. A lot of policy questions have much more technical content than marriage equality or segregation. I thought “Don’t Look Up” was a really good movie about existential risk. But Adam McKay is a really bad advocate on climate change because he misunderstands the actual dimensions of the problem, which is not genuinely existential and involves hard international coordination problems and the need for new technology.

The larger point, though, is that the stuff that helps shape long-run opinion typically leads electoral politics rather than the reverse.

Kinds of politicians

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is, I think, a very skilled politician and an appealing communicator. She also has a pragmatic streak when it counts, which is good.

But despite her fundraising prowess and communications savvy, she’s an electoral underperformer relative to a generic Democrat in a district as blue as hers. It’s a very safe seat, so there’s absolutely nothing wrong with having an underperformer in it. I often think that moderate Democrats expend too much time and emotional energy complaining about members of the Squad, when it’s not The Squad’s fault that Bob Casey lost his race. You could blame Joe Biden or Kamala Harris or Chuck Schumer for creating political problems for Bob Casey. Or you could blame Bob Casey for not demonstrating enough independent-mindedness. But it’s not AOC’s fault or Rashida Tlaib’s. Giving voice to sincere but unpopular stances and underperforming from within a safe district is a perfectly valid way to live your political life.

What I think is not valid, though, is staffers for Squad members publicly opining that Democrats would do better nationally if they all acted like AOC. That’s just not true. It is true that AOC ran ahead of Harris last November, but all incumbent House Democrats in heavily Hispanic districts ran ahead of Harris. She still did worse than you’d expect given incumbency and district characteristics, though, because she’s so left-wing.

In a healthy political culture, her staff would be willing to admit that she’s an electoral underperformer, and also frontline Dems would stop giving her a hard time about it. It’s a safe seat and she’s trying to be a visionary — let her do it!

But what anyone running for a frontline seat should try to do is win the election. That means being moderate, like Jared Golden or Marie Gluesenkamp Perez or Henry Cuellar or Abigail Spanberger. Frankly, I generally think that frontline Democrats should be doing more to moderate their image. Ruben Gallego got a ton of mileage out of just coming out swinging against the word “Latinx,” which was both highly salient and had almost no substantive stakes. There are lots and lots of opportunities for members to demonstrate some loud and proud heterodoxy while still being solid progressive allies.

But I do think there has been a harmful shift among many mainstream Democrats — the people who are in positions similar to that of Dick Durbin in 2008. These are the members who ultimately shape the image of the party. They can get away with taking unpopular positions if they want to — Kirsten Gillibrand and Brian Schatz aren’t going to lose their seats if they come out in favor of a fracking ban or cryptocurrency crackdown — but if all of the members in those seats take increasingly left-wing positions, that comes to define the party, because ultimately Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer are accountable to those mainstream members. The biggest change that we need to see is a change in attitude among mainstream members from “What can I get away with being for in my district?” to “What’s a good national message for the party?”

The job of the staff is to support the members in advancing those goals, not to try to corral them into taking aggressive progressive stands. And the role of party-aligned NGOs should be to amplify the good message, not coerce members into taking riskier stances. Again, to be clear, not every single member needs to do this on every single issue. But if you want to carve out a role for yourself as a visionary, just accept that this involves a degree of self-marginalization.

Ideologically conservative, operationally liberal

If Social Security didn’t exist, conservatives would obviously hate the idea of it. We’d be talking about a gigantic increase in federal spending financed by a broad-based tax increase with the explicit intention of reducing people’s incentive to work. It’s popular, in large part, because it already exists. I don’t totally understand how it is that decidedly conservative people who routinely vote for Republican Party candidates and complain about government spending have reconciled themselves to the apparent contradiction, but they clearly have.

And this is part of a larger phenomenon that everyone seemingly used to be aware of, where the public tends to espouse conservative ideological concepts but then also agrees with lots of specific liberal positions.

This is a fact of life that is unlikely to change, no matter what you or I or anyone else says or does. This means that realistically, the best way of getting to yes with any new idea is to detach it from the realm of progressive values.

Back to the Child Tax Credit example.

When people were debating this issue in 2021, I know there was an impulse in some quarters to address the labor force participation question by contesting it on a values level — saying maybe it’s not so bad if people drop out of the labor force rather than doing grueling low-wage work. It’s possible that kind of argument will work in the future, if we start seeing AI-induced disemployment. But generally speaking, people believe in the value of work. And it’s best to try to work with them. Child Tax Credit is an efficient and non-bureaucratic alternative to other efforts to help families with children, like the creation of a giant government-run childcare system. It’s also neutral between working parents and stay-at-home parents, which keys into a values framework about labor force participation that conservatives already embrace. Could you maybe compromise and say the program will have a work requirement but exempt parents of the youngest kids, while offering reassurance that statistical evidence indicates very small impacts anyway? Then we’re really just bargaining over one year or three years or five, but within a values framework that conservatives already accept.

Jan Voelkel, Joseph Mernyk, and Robb Willer published a great paper in 2023 showing that progressive economic ideas are more popular when they’re framed in terms of “values consistent with the ‘binding’ moral foundations—e.g. patriotism, family, and respect for tradition.” This, they find, is much more effective than talking about “the ‘individualizing’ foundations, e.g. equality and social justice.”

That’s a relatively recent paper, but the idea it embodies used to be conventional wisdom. Back when the call to reduce mass incarceration had some momentum behind it, the policy change that did happen came about largely by working with conservatives who were motivated by a desire to reduce spending. This kind of crossing the lines works at an elite level as well as a mass one. The U.S. President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) which the Trump administration is now imperiling, happened because George W. Bush and members of his team were sincerely convinced that addressing HIV/AIDS in Africa aligned with their Christian values. You would just never in a million years get an ambitious project like that done on a partisan basis.

The limits of bullying

The complete opposite of these ideas is a strategy that we’ve seen repeatedly over the last decade: showing up in a space that is already ideologically committed to being progressive, and then loudly announcing to everyone in the space that in order to be a good progressive, everyone now needs to do X. That might be something substantive, like abandoning Obama-era education reform and “all of the above” energy policy, or it might be something performative, like land acknowledgments or having everyone put their pronouns in their bio. If you’re really aggressive about this kind of demand, you can get pretty far in intra-progressive fights — or at least you could in the years 2015-2024.

But as a persuasion tactic, it leaves you stuck at a local maximum.

You’re bullying people who are committed to progressive politics into going along with your ideas. But most people are not committed to progressive politics! Maybe land acknowledgments actually are a good idea, but by making them constitutive of progressive politics, you’re ensuring that the majority of the population will see them as cringe and weird. And by making Democrats seem cringe and weird, you’re making it less likely that candidates who support funding Native schools and health care will win elections and be able to deliver actual policy.

It certainly makes more sense than encouraging people to be angry at Joe Manchin.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Wednesday, February 5, 2025 1:30 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Murc's Law

The widespread assumption that only Democrats have any agency or causal influence over American politics.

By attacking the Democrats for not blocking a tax bill that they unanimously opposed, you revealed yourself to be a firm believer in Murc's Law.

“Murc’s Law” was named after a commenter at the blog Lawyers, Guns, and Money who noticed years ago the habitual assumption among the punditry that Republican misbehavior can only be caused by Democrats. Do Republicans reject climate science? Must be because Democrats failed to persuade them! Did Republicans pass unpopular tax cuts for the rich? Must be that Democrats didn’t do enough to guide them to better choices! Do Republicans keep voting for lunatics and fascists? It must be the fault of Democrats for being mean to them! Even D_T_’s election in 2016 was widely blamed on Democrats — who voted against him, to be clear — on the bizarre grounds that Barack Obama should have rolled over and just let Mitt Romney win in 2012.

https://imgur.com/gallery/imgur-needs-to-have-conversation-about-what-
murcs-law-is-how-to-spot-x6FB9ru



The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Wednesday, February 5, 2025 1:55 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
The widespread assumption that only Democrats have any agency or causal influence over American politics.


CORRECTION: Only Democrats had agency and influence over American politics up until the end of 2024.

Now they are being gutted.

The world you thought you were living in 6 months ago no longer exists.



--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Monday, February 10, 2025 9:12 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
The widespread assumption that only Democrats have any agency or causal influence over American politics.


CORRECTION: Only Democrats had agency and influence over American politics up until the end of 2024.

Now they are being gutted.

The world you thought you were living in 6 months ago no longer exists.
Trumptard, if your life is fucked up, it is your fault, not the Democrats'. Your fault. All yours. But there is something to blame on Democrats:

How Progressives Froze the American Dream

The U.S. was once the world’s most geographically mobile society. Now we’re stuck in place—and that’s a very big problem.

By Yoni Appelbaum | February 10, 2025, 5:59 AM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/03/american-geograph
ic-social-mobility/681439/

The sharp decline in geographic mobility is the single most important social change of the past half century, although other shifts have attracted far more attention. In that same span, fewer Americans have started new businesses, and fewer Americans have switched jobs—from 1985 to 2014, the share of people who became entrepreneurs fell by half. More Americans are ending up worse off than their parents—in 1970, about eight out of every 10 young adults could expect to earn more than their parents; by the turn of the century, that was true of only half of young adults. Church membership is down by about a third since 1970, as is the share of Americans who socialize several times a week. Membership in any kind of group is down by half. The birth rate keeps falling. And although half of Americans used to think most people could be trusted, today only a third think the same.

These facts by now form a depressingly familiar litany. They are often regarded as disparate phenomena of mysterious origins. But each of them can be traced, at least in part, to the loss of mobility.

In 2016, Donald Trump tapped into the anger, frustration, and alienation that these changes had produced. Among white voters who had moved more than two hours from their hometown, Hillary Clinton enjoyed a solid six-point lead in the vote that year. Those living within a two-hour drive, though, backed Trump by nine points. And those who had never left their hometown supported him by a remarkable 26 points. Eight years later, he tapped that support again to recapture the White House.

Today, America is often described as suffering from a housing crisis, but that’s not quite right. In many parts of the country, housing is cheap and abundant, but good jobs and good schools are scarce. Other areas are rich in opportunities but short on affordable homes. That holds true even within individual cities, neighborhood by neighborhood.

As a result, many Americans are stranded in communities with flat or declining prospects, and lack the practical ability to move across the tracks, the state, or the country—to choose where they want to live. Those who do move are typically heading not to the places where opportunities are abundant, but to those where housing is cheap. Only the affluent and well educated are exempt from this situation; the freedom to choose one’s city or community has become a privilege of class.

The sclerosis that afflicts the U.S.—more and more each year, each decade—is not the result of technology gone awry or a reactionary movement or any of the other culprits that are often invoked to explain our biggest national problems. The exclusion that has left so many Americans feeling trapped and hopeless traces back, instead, to the self-serving actions of a privileged group who say that inclusion, diversity, and social equality are among their highest values.

Reviving mobility offers us the best hope of restoring the American promise. But it is largely self-described progressives who stand in the way.

Find out what Democrats did wrong at https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/03/american-geograph
ic-social-mobility/681439/

Short version of the article: states and cities and towns will need to reform their rules and processes to allow the housing supply to grow where people want to build. The goal of policy makers, in any case, shouldn’t be to move Americans to any particular place, or to any particular style of living. They should instead aim to make it easier for Americans to move wherever they would like—to make it equally easy to build wherever Americans’ hopes and desires alight.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Sunday, February 16, 2025 9:12 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


A Real Post-Neoliberal Agenda

Bidenomics foundered on ten years of Democratic reluctance to declare war on inequality

By Marshall Steinbaum | February 11, 2025

https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/a-real-post-neoliberal-agenda/

The year 2014 was a heady moment in the economic policy world. That spring, French economist Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century was published in English to astounding commercial and intellectual success. The book painted a devastating picture of the post–Cold War economic order, uniting groundbreaking empirical evidence with a comprehensive theory explaining the vast accumulation of wealth and power at the top of the global economic pyramid. And it appeared at a moment when the apparatus of the Democratic Party needed just such a shock.

Now that Trump has dealt a deathblow to the post-Obama political system, it’s worth taking stock of where the Piketty moment went.

Recovery from the 2008 financial crisis, itself a consequence of Clinton-era financial deregulation, had been too long and too weak in the making; inequality ratcheted ever upward and jobs continued disappearing overseas. These trends signaled that the policies, rhetoric, and personnel of the Obama administration simply weren’t up to the task. Piketty’s reception, though not without pushback, helped cement consensus that something had to be done, kicking off a spirited effort within the progressive policy world to reform the Democrats’ approach to the economy.

Now that Trump has dealt a decisive deathblow to the post-Obama political system, it’s worth taking stock of where that moment went. Postmortems on Bidenomics have tended to focus on climate provisions, rising protectionism in trade, and the macroeconomics of stimulus and inflation. The limits of the administration’s “industrial policy,” touted as marking a “post-neoliberal” paradigm shift, have been extensively documented; it was always a national security program first — an ill-conceived reaction to fears of a rising China — and a pro-worker agenda second, if at all. The bigger, less talked-about picture is the long arc of ten years of failure to confront inequality after the Piketty moment in 2014. Across four key policy areas — taxation, labor standards, the welfare state, and antitrust — Democrats could have pursued a comprehensive program for combating plutocracy and empowering workers. But the opportunity was frittered away through a relentless focus on playing by the old rules of policy debate and routing reform through the usual elite channels, insulated from — and often outright hostile to — the voices and views of on-the-ground constituencies. All that came at the cost of forging a durable political coalition.

The result is that Trump is now festooning his second administration with the wealthiest people in world history. Getting out of this mess requires clarity about what happened over the last decade that led to this dire situation: exactly how Piketty’s clarion message was absorbed into, and then quietly killed by, a political system that sorely needed to take it to heart to have any hope of defending itself.

* ________*

Progressive taxation is the single most important policy lever for reducing the power of the rich — not because it raises revenue that can be redistributed via public programs or directly to the poor, but because it imposes a de facto statutory maximum on income or wealth, eliminating the incentive to hoard the economy’s resources. Unrestrained capital accumulation is the main reason for economic stagnation and the hollowing out of productive capacity. Conversely, as Piketty’s research shows, economic growth is both faster and more equitably distributed — meaning pre-tax top income shares are low — in jurisdictions where effective tax rates at the top are highest. When elites face limits on how much they can take home, they use their dominant position to grab less, so there’s more for everyone else.

Treating progressive taxation as a political rather than a fiscal phenomenon has two key advantages. First, it avoids playing into the hands of austerity politics, as Democratic talk about taxes always has. The point is not for the government to “raise money” to pay for programs or balance the federal budget; in fact, since the aim is to destroy the tax base north of the threshold for the top bracket, the less money steep progressive taxation raises, the more effective the policy. And second, talking this way focuses attention on class war: the reason you’re poor is that they’re rich. The political logic is self-sustaining. Straight talk about combating plutocracy grows broad-based working-class support, which makes it possible to sustain serious progressive taxation over time, which in turn wins more people to the constituency. Bernie Sanders’s attacks on “millionaires and billionaires,” AOC’s onetime slogan that “every billionaire is a policy failure”: their movement-building success with that message, even in the face of mainstream Democrats’ hostility toward it, speaks for itself. So does Claudia Sheinbaum’s recent victory in Mexico, which rode on the motto, “For the good of all, the poor first.”

All of this was more or less the explicit message of Capital in the Twenty-First Century, especially as it pertained to progressive taxation. But that message could not break through the hard shell of Democratic common sense about fiscal policy, which is structured around two entrenched strands: a right-wing strand that prioritizes fiscal rectitude, and a liberal strand that views taxes, particularly progressive taxes, primarily as a way to answer the perennial objection “How are you going to pay for it?”

Democrats frittered away momentum for combating plutocracy through a relentless focus on playing by the old rules of policy debate.

When Senate Democrats were strategizing how to oppose the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act during Trump’s first term, for example, they decided that highlighting its fiscal irresponsibility, through citations of Congressional Budget Office scores, was the only way to peel off Republican votes or mount an opposition campaign. A senator told me exactly that when I briefed the Senate Democratic Caucus on how to message on progressive tax policy. But the fight on the floor of Congress is not the only fight that matters. Although Democrats all voted against the bill, they succeeded in peeling away only one Republican vote; the legislation passed anyway. In other words, Democrats not only failed to block the bill using this approach; they failed to use the moment to break from the old technocratic rules of policy discussion, politicize the way we assess tax policy, and build popular consensus and pressure outside of Washington.

There are reasons Democrats find it hard to embrace this talk, of course. One is that the party itself has plenty of plutocrats in its ranks. Another, less well appreciated, is that Democratic Party–aligned policy experts and advisors strenuously seek to preserve their credibility in backroom political convenings, which are primarily composed of well-credentialed people affiliated with both parties — and not, that is, with voices from or accountable to popular constituencies, who speak the passionate language of anti-plutocracy. Adding a giant dose of class war to tax policy certainly would have upset that tradition, but there was nothing but political will standing in the way of Democratic leaders insisting it be done, whatever the consequences for the professional prestige of their most senior staffers.

Insofar as the progressive tax policy championed by Piketty had any presence in the Biden administration, it was on two fronts: enhancing the enforcement budget of the Internal Revenue Service and enacting an international minimum corporate profit tax rate. But both of these efforts fell far short of the bold vision Piketty elaborated. The first even reflected Larry Summers’s critique of Piketty: Why should we raise marginal tax rates on the rich to 90 percent, he complained, when we’re not fully enforcing liability at 40 percent? And the second got mired in the intractable morass of international negotiations; it was eventually enacted abroad but not in the United States due to a total blockade in Congress.

When it comes to labor standards, Biden has been feted as the most pro-labor president since FDR — at least by political commentators and union leaders, if not by the rank and file. His appointments to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) were an improvement over the status quo, though they have now been undone by Trump. But when it comes to moving legislation that would outlast appointees, the Biden administration was no different from its Democratic predecessors.

In 2021, the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act was introduced by Democratic labor committee leaders in both houses of Congress, representing the agreed-upon asks of the labor movement’s legislative affairs advisors: heightened penalties for unfair labor practices, a ban on captive audience meetings, weakening state-level “Right to Work” laws, and most controversially, an expansive definition of employment for the purposes of collective bargaining rights — the “ABC Test.” The bill passed the House but was killed in the Senate by wayward centrist Democrats Kyrsten Sinema, Mark Kelly, and Mark Warner, who played the roles of corporate-backed spoilers to the brief trifecta of Biden’s first Congress (as other Sun Belt Democrats had done for the previous two Democratic trifectas). Following that defeat, the administration’s only subsequent progress took the form of regulatory changes through the NLRB, Department of Labor, and Federal Trade Commission that were mostly struck down by a right-wing judiciary.

The most novel, and also most revealing, aspect of labor regulation today concerns the gig economy, debate over which began during the Obama administration — a time when leading labor-affiliated researchers were downplaying its significance instead of engaging its substance. Heading into the Biden administration, there were two poles to the debate: either gig workers are employees (as the PRO Act says) and settling for anything less constitutes a sellout, or (non-)employment status should be conceded in exchange for “sectoral bargaining” and a new system of “portable benefits.” The latter would effectively create a permanent two-tier system that would invite incumbent employers to replace existing workers and their unions with a lower tier of not-quite-employees rather than genuinely independent contractors, the whole thing sanctified by a paper union empowered to collect dues in exchange for the pretense of processing grievances gig employers are under no obligation to redress. Notably, both of these options end in some form of unionization.

But on both sides of this debate, actual gig workers — many of whom choose such work because they are drawn to its promise of independence and liberation from bosses — were sorely underrepresented. The pitch to workers typically made by union representatives — employment status lets you form a union, which can then negotiate a contract that gives you the protections you want, including independence — is easy for companies to organize against, not only because an independent union, let alone a contract, seems remote, but also because employers can paint union organizers as threats to worker independence. Meanwhile, the unions that play ball on the companies’ terms win the prize of collecting dues in exchange for endowing the whole charade with a pro-worker gloss.

When it comes to moving labor legislation that would outlast appointees, the Biden administration was no different from its Democratic predecessors.

It is true that some people turn to gig work only as a last resort or in desperate conditions, when they lose access to traditional employment — as was the case when Uber got its start during the darkest days of the Great Recession. But a large number of gig workers want the ability to make a living outside an employer’s supervision. That constituency would be served by a threefold agenda. First, extending the actually existing social insurance system — whose benefits are already “portable” — so that it covers them. (To be fair, some state-level enforcers have achieved this with respect to unemployment insurance during the last several years.) Second, enacting a health care entitlement that isn’t tied to employment status. And third, restricting companies’ ability to control the conduct of their work at a distance. But professional labor advocates are generally averse to strategies that don’t culminate in unionization. So long as Democratic coalitional politics designates established unions as the exclusive spokespeople for workers and isn’t pushed by bottom-up mobilization to represent or be accountable to new constituencies — including, most especially, unorganized and gig workers — that view will continue to prevail.

And indeed, it has led to several high-profile settlements in recent years that surrendered employment status only to set up company unions rather than confront and dismantle exploitative business models that prey on workers’ desire for independence and control on the job. Running through all this was Democrats’ usual tendency to see or claim a popular consensus where there actually isn’t any, just because a policy mix happens to be agreed to by everyone in the room. In this case, liberal philanthropies argued that a political base for an apparently pro-worker agenda could be secured by funding GOP-aligned “policy entrepreneurs” such as Oren Cass, who touted these labor compromises as part of a working-class conservatism. The trouble was that actually existing worker constituencies simply had no seat at the table. They were treated at best as a problem to be managed.

As for welfare, reform efforts at first had something working in their favor: the pandemic. In the midst of this structural crisis, the Biden administration did inherit a temporary expansion of the welfare state considerably more ambitious and comprehensive than anything proposed within progressive think tank circles during Trump’s first term.

Before COVID-19, the prevailing anti-poverty agenda centered on the earned income tax credit and the child tax credit. These programs are popular among policy analysts for two reasons: they are tax expenditures, so there is no budget line and hence no “handout” vulnerable as a political football in appropriations fights, and they are only available to people with labor income, which effectively hands over discretion (and with it, a cut of the proceeds) to employers of low-wage workers.

The push for universal basic income (UBI) that cropped up in the 2010s had challenged this paradigm — backed by Silicon Valley types claiming that the next technological innovation would lead to job losses for vast swaths of the working class, as well as by progressive policy reformers who saw it as a justified analog to the excessive capital income “earned” by the rich and documented in such detail by Piketty: a trust fund for the rest of us. Yet the established organizations, especially the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, heavily resisted abandoning the ground they had learned to defend: that existing programs are effective (so why would we need new ones like UBI?) and that recipients of anti-poverty aid are deserving because they are workers. In the wake of this pushback, UBI advocates such as the Economic Security Project shifted the definition of their goal to include tax credit programs, recipiency of which is far from unconditional and therefore far from universal.

Then came the pandemic, which suddenly made it impossible to blame welfare recipients for not being employed. The CARES Act, passed in March 2020, included gig workers in the New Deal social insurance system (though without their employers having to pay premiums, an enormous windfall to the sector that sailed through Congress with essentially zero debate). Meanwhile, first under Trump and then under Biden, the federal government disbursed cash payments outside the logic of deservingness, to the tune of $4,000 a household or more.

Both sets of measures effectively severed the longstanding link between formal employment and eligibility for welfare. But this important ideological breakthrough didn’t last, because once again no institutional infrastructure or popular consensus was built to preserve it. Quite the opposite: when employers began demanding a return to work in early 2021, they blamed pandemic welfare benefits for keeping workers at home — a bid to distract from their own shortsighted decision to lay off “non-essential” workers, dissolving employment relationships that take time and effort to re-form — to great effect. Congress and the Biden administration caved to that message.

While pandemic restrictions were broadly unpopular with the public — as was the inflation that resulted when the economy’s productive capacity was suddenly unable to meet demand following all those layoffs — the pandemic welfare state emphatically was not. Nonetheless, when the Biden administration declared the pandemic over following the vaccine rollout, progressive organizations went along, and welfare policy reverted to the pre-pandemic status quo: conditional on the boss’s goodwill. A great deal of laudatory ink has been spilled on Biden’s economic advisors having learned Obama’s lesson: too small a stimulus after the 2008 financial crisis caused political problems down the road. This time, the Democrats deliberately went bigger with stimulus. But then they reverted to business as usual, and this crisis was wasted too.

The policies that disappeared most quickly — cash payments and supplemental unemployment insurance — were precisely those missing from, indeed excluded by, the mainstream policy discussion heading into the Biden administration. Democrats could have conditioned their repeal on passing a permanent expansion of the favored policy — the child tax credit — but mustered no such leverage. The result alienated workers who experienced the height of the pandemic under Trump as a rare financial windfall and time of decreased economic stress. For them, Biden’s push for Americans to “get back to work” brought back all the old problems, plus the new one of inflation.

Then there is antitrust, the policy area where the Biden administration had the greatest success. While there have been major enforcement wins — an across-the-board victory for the government in its case against Google’s search monopoly; blocking some high-profile mergers on the basis that they would have harmed workers — the most significant achievement is that the reform impetus wasn’t snuffed out. Despite Trump’s reelection, it will almost certainly persist in academia, dedicated nonprofits, and non-federal public enforcers — not to mention among the public, which remains convinced that extractive monopolies dominate the economy and were responsible for recent inflation.

The key to this success was a willingness to depart from the old reform playbook and to take the establishment by surprise. As with tax policy, antitrust had been confined for decades to a highly arcane and technical domain — one in which dedicated practitioners were used to getting their way within very narrow boundaries of acceptable policy variation. Carl Shapiro, who served as chief economist in the Antitrust Division of Obama’s Department of Justice, crystallized this attitude when he said in 2018 that the division hadn’t brought a monopolization case on his watch because “there were precious few cases that warranted an enforcement action based on the facts and the case law.”

But the tide turned suddenly with the advent of antitrust as a progressive priority starting in 2016, buoyed by the growing sense that major tech players did not have the public’s interest at heart, as well as some insiders’ search for policy levers that could be pulled through unilateral executive action. Four years later, a House Judiciary subcommittee released a report on Big Tech, laying out in great detail the actual business models of leading companies and exposing their reliance on anti-competitive practices to obtain and maintain their position. Soon thereafter Biden appointed Lina Khan, who helped lead the House investigation, and Jonathan Kanter, who had sued Google in private practice, to helm the lead enforcement agencies — the FTC and the DOJ’s Antitrust Division, respectively. Unlike in tax policy, where the culture of bipartisan consensus effectively blocked reform, the pre-2016 culture of antitrust consensus worked against the establishment in this case, since it enabled these upstart reformers to tar everyone — Democratic and Republican staffers and academics alike — with the same compromised brush.

The “theory of change” was that intellectuals and insiders could take care of the policy and the politics would take care of itself. The result was a catastrophe out of which almost nothing lasting was achieved.

Yet even here, the reform effort has relied to some extent on an old pattern: marshaling credentialed experts — law professors and economists with the fanciest pedigrees and publication records — to sanctify the policy. Mobilizing a popular constituency is messy and hard; mobilizing elites was much easier, not least because proposals to this effect were likelier to win support from the progressive philanthropies leading the “post-neoliberal” charge. To this extent, the antitrust agenda too has been in keeping with the Democratic Party’s elite, top-down approach to economic policy and politics in general. Its wins have not come without the cost of perpetuating a risky political strategy.

A good example is the FTC’s rule banning noncompete clauses in employment. Evan Starr, the leading economist studying noncompetes, published a paper through the Economic Innovation Group after the ban was announced in 2023 exhaustively demonstrating its consistency with a recognized, well-published body of research as well as the speciousness of the economic arguments against it put forward by the Chamber of Commerce. Starr’s paper is exactly the kind of thing a raft of progressive policy nonprofits are meant to produce. Nonetheless, conservative federal judges blocked the rule — one dismissing Starr’s work as only “a handful of studies.” The problem is that it’s very easy to muddy up a scholarly consensus with motivated studies, and it’s nearly impossible to convince a judge (or a congressperson) who doesn’t want to be convinced that some studies are robust while others are hackwork.

Resting so much of the political burden on the power of authoritative research to structure top-down policy and persuade elites, even when the research should in fact persuade them, forgoes the option of mobilizing a popular constituency and following it where it leads, while vesting considerable veto power in experts empowered to speak authoritatively about the policy implications of their work. Tens of thousands of ordinary workers flooded the FTC with comments supporting the policy too, but the tide of public opinion made no impression on a lifetime-ensconced judiciary, all of whom are appointed thanks to their gestation in the same well-oiled right-wing political machine. Bottom-up mobilization in favor of the noncompete ban (or any other worker-friendly policy) would have meant answering the contrary judicial rulings by a call to overthrow judicial power and remove offending judges from office, but the Biden administration never even gestured in that direction or blamed the conservative judiciary for the pandemic inflation because it saw its mission as preserving faith in “our system of government,” even as that system was destroying his administration.

It is thus hard to see the last decade and a half as anything other than a missed, indeed wasted opportunity. The Great Recession sparked a major movement for progressive economic policy reform, and it was sustained in large part by major philanthropic gifts to progressive advocacy groups and think tanks. Asking why this agenda has come to naught is an important and necessary conversation to be having, but it is not well served by the aggressive, premature self-congratulation of the Biden administration and its allies over the last two years.

If reform-minded philanthropy has any future, it must help to grow popular movements and work in collaboration with them.

The loudest critique of the Democratic Party to have emerged in the wake of Trump’s reelection is that it has become too beholden to shadow constituencies without any real popular following. There is a half-truth in this argument. The real story is that the most influential progressive philanthropic efforts on economic reform largely confined themselves to doing prestige politics as usual; when they did win a seat at the table, there was no popular base to answer to and no serious effort to build one. Instead, the “theory of change” was that intellectuals and insiders could take care of the policy and the politics would take care of itself. The result was a catastrophe out of which almost nothing lasting was achieved.

The irony is that philanthropy, in principle, should free up advocacy organizations to depart from the old rules and preexisting orthodoxy, empowering progressives to recognize which constituencies are not currently represented and activate them. And indeed, other progressive foundations have been doing just that. If reform-minded progressive philanthropy has any future, it must follow their lead, helping to grow popular movements and working in collaboration with them, rather than continue to operate solely from the inside out and the top down.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Sunday, February 16, 2025 9:15 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Bidenomics foundered on ten years of Democratic reluctance to declare war on inequality


Fuck Off.

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Sunday, February 16, 2025 9:17 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
The widespread assumption that only Democrats have any agency or causal influence over American politics.


CORRECTION: Only Democrats had agency and influence over American politics up until the end of 2024.

Now they are being gutted.

The world you thought you were living in 6 months ago no longer exists.
Trumptard, if your life is fucked up, it is your fault, not the Democrats'. Your fault. All yours.


This isn't about me. This is about America.

And none of this changes the fact that your party is being gutted and scrapped for spare parts.

Also, I find it quite ironic that if I were a black man that you'd be blaming everybody but me for my problems.

You only save that racism of low expectations for people who aren't white because you are a college "educated" liberal who hates black people in your own special way.

Fuck you second.

Blacks voted against Harris, just like I told you they would.



--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Sunday, February 16, 2025 9:38 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
The widespread assumption that only Democrats have any agency or causal influence over American politics.


CORRECTION: Only Democrats had agency and influence over American politics up until the end of 2024.

Now they are being gutted.

The world you thought you were living in 6 months ago no longer exists.
Trumptard, if your life is fucked up, it is your fault, not the Democrats'. Your fault. All yours.


This isn't about me. This is about America.

And none of this changes the fact that your party is being gutted and scrapped for spare parts.

Also, I find it quite ironic that if I were a black man that you'd be blaming everybody but me for my problems.

You only save that racism of low expectations for people who aren't white because you are a college "educated" liberal who hates black people in your own special way.

Fuck you second.

Blacks voted against Harris, just like I told you they would.
Everyone I know who is a fucking thief, liar, rapist, tax cheat or con artist also voted for Trump. You Trumptards, with crappy lives that you refuse to believe are caused by your failures, your faults, your mental illnesses, voted for horrible people. I am just fine that your lives are a fucking mess. You deserve your suffering, you goddamn assholes.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Sunday, February 16, 2025 2:09 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
The widespread assumption that only Democrats have any agency or causal influence over American politics.


CORRECTION: Only Democrats had agency and influence over American politics up until the end of 2024.

Now they are being gutted.

The world you thought you were living in 6 months ago no longer exists.
Trumptard, if your life is fucked up, it is your fault, not the Democrats'. Your fault. All yours.


This isn't about me. This is about America.

And none of this changes the fact that your party is being gutted and scrapped for spare parts.

Also, I find it quite ironic that if I were a black man that you'd be blaming everybody but me for my problems.

You only save that racism of low expectations for people who aren't white because you are a college "educated" liberal who hates black people in your own special way.

Fuck you second.

Blacks voted against Harris, just like I told you they would.
Everyone I know who is a fucking thief, liar, rapist, tax cheat or con artist also voted for Trump.


Nobody believes this. Not even you.

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Monday, February 17, 2025 6:19 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Nobody believes this. Not even you.

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
I find it peculiar that angry poor white trash such as 6ix think they are not angry, not poor and not trash. If you Trumptards had more insight, you'd be able to see your fellow Trumptards for who they are. Once that was revealed to you, you'd then know why your crappy life is all your fault, not because some black got a job you think a white person deserves. See 6ix in full racist mode at "The Blacktain Anti-America Failure Thread"
http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=36&tid=66463

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Monday, February 17, 2025 6:20 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Heather Cox Richardson | Feb 15, 2025

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/february-15-2025

After World War II, the vast majority of Americans—Democrats and Republicans alike—agreed that the federal government should regulate business, provide a basic social safety net, promote infrastructure, and protect civil rights. But not everyone was on board. Some big businessmen hated regulations and the taxes necessary for social welfare programs and infrastructure, and racists and religious traditionalists who opposed women’s rights wanted to tear that “liberal consensus” apart.

They had no luck convincing voters to abandon the government that was overseeing unprecedented prosperity until the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, decision permitted them to turn back to an old American trope. That ruling, which declared segregation in the public schools unconstitutional, enabled opponents of the liberal consensus to resurrect the post–Civil War argument of former Confederates that a government protecting Black rights was simply redistributing wealth from hardworking white taxpayers to undeserving Black Americans.

That argument began to take hold, and in 1980, Republican president Ronald Reagan rode it to the White House with the story of the “welfare queen,” identified as a Cadillac-driving, unemployed moocher from Chicago’s South Side (to signal that the woman was Black). “She has 80 names, 30 addresses, 12 Social Security cards and is collecting veteran’s benefits on four non-existing deceased husbands,” Reagan claimed. “And she is collecting Social Security on her cards. She’s got Medicaid, getting food stamps, and she is collecting welfare under each of her names.” The woman was real, but not typical—she was a dangerous criminal rather than a representative welfare recipient—but the story illustrated perfectly the idea that government involvement in the economy bled individual enterprise and handed tax dollars to undeserving Black Americans.

Republicans expanded that trope to denigrate all “liberals” of both parties, who supported an active government, claiming they were all wasting government monies. Deregulation and tax cuts meant that between 1981, when Reagan took office, and 2021, when Democratic president Joe Biden did, about $50 trillion moved from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%. But rather than convincing Republican voters to return to a robust system of business regulation and restoring taxes on the wealthy and corporations, that transfer of wealth seemed to make them hate the government even more, as they apparently were convinced it benefited only nonwhite Americans and women.

That hatred has led to a skewed idea of the actions and the size of the federal government. For example, Americans think the U.S. spends too much on foreign aid because they think it spends about 25% of the federal budget on such aid while they say it should only spend about 10%. In fact, it spends only about 1% on foreign aid. Similarly, while right-wing leaders insist that the government is bloated, in fact, as Elaine Kamarck of the Brookings Institution noted last month, the U.S. population has grown by about 68% in the last 50 years while the size of the federal government’s workforce has actually shrunk.

What has happened is that federal spending has expanded by five times as the U.S. has turned both to technology and to federal contractors, who outnumber federal workers by more than two to one. Those contractors are concentrated in the Department of Defense. At the same time, budget deficits have been driven by tax cuts under Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump as well as the unfunded wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; the Treasury actually ran a surplus when Democratic president Bill Clinton was in office in the 1990s.

More at https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/february-15-2025

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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