The Left: Robespierre did nothing wrong

Discussion in 'The Mainboard' started by bricktop, Jan 17, 2017.

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  2. three stacks

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  3. Taques

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    that article had some intense liberal-on-liberal violence
     
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  4. three stacks

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    lmao
     
  5. Can I Spliff it

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  6. Taques

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    in other non-trump news on our shitty world: china invented laser guns to squash working class anger, but they are quick to note that “you can turn the intensity down so that it only causes intense pain instead of immolation”

    China's destructive laser rifle has a half-mile range

    https://www.popsci.com/china-laser-rifle-energy-weapon?src=SOC&dom=fb
     
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  7. Prospector

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    2A numbnuts are gonna love this
     
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  9. BellottiBold

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    lol (I got it, and you will too)
     
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  12. JGator1

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    Stolen from Michael but Meghan McCain could make literally anyone sympathetic to Mao's belief that rich kids should be sent to work camps
     
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    https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/08/why-the-nordic-model-wont-work-in-the-u-s
    By Ben Shapiro

    It has become fashionable on the left to say that the United States should adopt the social welfare policies of Nordic countries like Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Scandinavia. Radical socialists say that just because these countries have higher per-capita incomes, roaring economies, lower inequality, lower poverty, more innovation, more leisure time, better healthcare, subsidized childcare, free college, and more happiness, they provide an argument for socialism. They do not.

    First, they are not socialism. They are actually capitalist, and that is why everything they do is working. Sure, the state may own a gigantic percentage of the means of production, and have“large public sectors, strong job protections, and labor markets governed by centralized union contract.” But socialism means tyranny and an incompetently-managed centrally planned economy. None of these countries has so much as a single gulag. Nordic countries are not socialism, and anyone who thinks Stalin is good should look elsewhere for their economic model.

    Second, they are socialism, but nothing they do is actually working and also they are very different from the United States and none of their policies would work here. It’s important to remember that the United States is not a Nordic country. We have more people. We are in a different hemisphere. We do not speak Norwegian. Crime is low there, whereas we put many more people in prison without achieving nearly the same level of safety. The whole comparison is apples and oranges. Saying that free college and single-payer healthcare would work in the United States just because it works in Sweden is like saying that we could watch the Aurora Borealis in Miami if the government said so. Well, we couldn’t. That’s a fact, and facts don’t care about your feelings. You may think you can just wake up and start speaking Swedish. But you can’t. Fact.

    The Nordic countries are not the flawless paradises that leftists say they are. The social welfare state has eroded any semblance of a work ethic. We can see this from the fact that Norwegians work fewer hours, take more vacation time, and are higher paid than their American counterparts. Working yourself to death is the American way. These Nordic countries are being destroyed by their enormous sloth. Bernie Sanders and the Hysterical Left think America should also be destroyed by giant sloths. Is that the future we want for our children?

    Because social democratic programs sap a country’s vitality, they are correlated with depression. People in Nordic countries often get high rates of Seasonal Affective Disorder. This is almost certainly due to the fact that it is extremely cold there. But paid maternity leave almost certainly contributes, because of a culture of dependency. It’s no accident that Bernie Sanders is from Vermont. Hope leftists like six-month winters.

    I have other things I can say. In Finland, 6 percent more students are enrolled in STEM majors than in the United States. This is a statistic leftists never mention. Why are they afraid to tell the truth? In the Nordic countries, unions and employers collaborate peaceably. Unions here are not peaceable. They are always holding signs and “fighting” for 15. You can’t collaborate productively with someone who is always trying to fight you. It doesn’t make sense.

    Also, these countries pollute. Norway profits from oil. Only a leftist could think this was leftism! If you want free healthcare, you need to be willing to accept the environmental damage. If socialists knew basic economics, maybe they’d realize that.

    Norwegian prisons are unbelievably comfortable. Norway gave Anders Breivik an Xbox. Do you think he deserved one? No. Yet the left insists mass murderers deserve video games. Typical.

    Something about migration. Homogeneous. Cohesion. Culture. Equality is born of trust. You can have social democracy, or you can have non-racist immigration policies, but you’re not allowed to have both. That’s just a fact, and facts don’t care about people.

    Yes, it’s true that people who have actually lived in Nordic countries have said that their strong social safety nets have almost nothing to do with a uniquely homogeneous or altruistic culture:

    This vision of homogeneous, altruistic Nordic lands is mostly a fantasy. The choices Nordic countries have made have little to do with altruism or kinship. Rather, Nordic people have made their decisions out of self-interest. Nordic nations offer their citizens—all of their citizens, but especially the middle class—high-quality services that save people a lot of money, time, and trouble.

    But none of that changes the fact that there are fjords in Norway and none in the United States. It’s wishful leftist delusion to think that what works in one place could provide a useful example for another place. Have I mentioned demographics? There are fewer people in Scandinavia, which matters for reasons I cannot explain.

    Free healthcare sounds nice. Free college sounds nice. Being able to take time off to spend with your newborn child instead of immediately having to return to work or else get fired sounds nice. But nice things cost money, and people in these countries pay taxes. If you think taxes aren’t money, you’re a snowflake.

    Leftists, therefore, must stop looking at the Nordic countries. Rationality requires it. Please, please stop looking at the Nordic countries.
     
    #12517 Croomsday, Sep 8, 2018
    Last edited: Sep 8, 2018
  14. Bruce Wayne

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    Stopped reading about here
     
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    Click the link hoss.
     
  16. VaxRule

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  17. Can I Spliff it

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    EDITOR’S NOTE: This article is not actually by Ben Shapiro. Though it might as well be.

    lol
     
  18. Bruce Wayne

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    I ended up reading the whole thing (without clicking the link) and still thought it was him. That is how you parody
     
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    Shapiro definitely wrote that and you will not convince me otherwise
     
  20. BellottiBold

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    I knew it was him when there were back to back paragraphs claiming it wasn't and was socialism
     
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  23. brolift

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    https://www.cnbc.com/2018/09/10/tru...take-tough-stance-against-the-hagues-icc.html

    Trump administration to take tough stance against International Criminal Court
    • The United States on Monday will adopt an aggressive posture against the International Criminal Court in The Hague, threatening sanctions against its judges if they proceed with an investigation into alleged war crimes committed by Americans in Afghanistan.
    • President Donald Trump's national security adviser, John Bolton, is to make the announcement in a midday speech to the Federalist Society, a conservative group, in Washington.
    • "The United States will use any means necessary to protect our citizens and those of our allies from unjust prosecution by this illegitimate court," Bolton will say, according to a draft of his speech seen by Reuters.
    We're the baddies
     
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  25. Taques

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  26. Name P. Redacted

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    Meh i'm not ready to cynically cast aside nike's decision.
     
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  27. brolift

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    I don't think its cynical to call a spade a spade. Doubt they are willfully wanting to squash Kaeps movement, its just something that happens when you've got capital.
     
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  28. Taques

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    im sure nike genuinely cares about police brutality
     
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  29. VaxRule

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    They may or may not. They’re hoping people that don’t like police brutality think Nike’s responsible for Kaepernick taking his stand.

    As far as commercials go, I still liked it though.
     
  30. Prospector

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    Argument
    Al Qaeda Won
    Seventeen years after the 9/11 attacks, the terrorists have definitively won the battle for the American mind.
    By Stephen Marche September 10, 2018, 2:33 PM
    This year marks the 17th anniversary of 9/11, an awkward number offering an awkward amount of hindsight. The day is not quite memory, not yet history. Subsequent events during those 17 years—not only the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq but also the arrival of the smartphone and social media—have transformed its significance. 9/11 was a defining moment in the history of war and terrorism, but it was also the first attack conceived for and executed through the means of digital connection. It was to the internet what the Challenger explosion was to cable television, an event defined by the arrival of the way it was related, an act of war suited to technologically enabled mass storytelling and media saturation. The Canadian scholar Marshall McLuhan once predicted that World War III would be a “guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation.” 9/11 was the beginning of that war.
    T.E. Lawrence, who turned himself into the pop culture icon Lawrence of Arabia, was the great innovator of guerrilla information war in the 20th century. His best-known platitude held that “[t]he printing press is the greatest weapon in the armoury of the modern commander.” His autobiography Seven Pillars of Wisdom provides the fine details of how he came to that understanding. Lawrence was sick, and in camp, in the sweltering heat of his fly-ridden tent, when it occurred to him that Carl von Clausewitz and the other great military theorists of earlier eras would have considered the war he was waging unwinnable. The Arab forces could not destroy the enemy, take the major strongholds, or break the courage of their opponents, which was how the great generals of the past had defined victory. The insight crept up on him: What if those definitions were all wrong? What if, instead of winning the war by the traditional definitions of victory, the definition of victory changed? “[A]s I pondered slowly, it dawned on me that we had won the Hejaz war,” Lawrence writes. “I brushed off the same flies once more from my face patiently, content to know that the Hejaz War was won and finished with: won from the day we took Wejh, if we had had wit to see it.” He didn’t need to win. He just needed to decide he had won and convince the world. The struggle was to change the definition of victory, to change the meaning of the events rather than the events themselves.

    The term Lawrence gave to this kind of semantic warfare was diathetics, a phrase borrowed from the Greek philosopher Xenophon. It was a battle for the stories people tell and for the public consciousness that emerges out of the stories that people tell.

    We had to arrange [our soldiers’] minds in order of battle just as carefully and as formally as other officers would arrange their bodies. And not only our own men’s minds, though naturally they came first. We must also arrange the minds of the enemy, so far as we could reach them; then those other minds of the nation supporting us behind the firing line, since more than half the battle passed there in the back; then the minds of the enemy nation waiting the verdict; and of the neutrals looking on; circle beyond circle.

    Diathetics is an extension of guerrilla warfare, in the sense that it is used by the weaker force against the stronger and uses the lines of communication against those who have laid them down. The sabotage of lines of communication turns the greatest strength of the more powerful force—the ability to convey information and materiel across distance—into vulnerability everywhere along the line. Rather than sabotage the lines of communication along the periphery, diathetics sabotages the network at the center, the source of the meaning being communicated.

    Osama bin Laden understood diathetics instinctively and explicitly. “It is obvious that the media war in this century is one of the strongest methods,” he told Mullah Mohammad Omar in a letter in June 2002. “In fact, its ratio may reach 90 percent of the total preparation for the battles.” The front is cultural, the conflict over narrative.

    The power of diathetical warfare increases as the means of mass communication expand. We are in the middle of the greatest expansion of mass communication in human history. Social media and the smartphone, with cameras, were not yet ubiquitous in 2001. But cable news had long before erased the distinction between news and entertainment. Reality television as a genre had just been invented. The internet had very recently become commonplace in the American home. 9/11 was the first news event that happened to everybody at once. It did not matter how distantly removed you were from Manhattan or the Pentagon; because of the instantaneous communication network, you were at 9/11 if you were at a screen. The events of 9/11 were inseparable from their recording.

    The cultural front opened by 9/11 keeps widening, and the terms of the struggles along those fronts, as each new technology opens them, are almost impossible to recognize immediately. In 2015, Jeff Giesea published his famous essay on memetic warfare in the NATO journal Defence Strategic Communications. Despite its immense influence—it predicted, and possibly shaped, Russian techniques of disinformation in Ukraine, Russia, and the United States, and Giesea went on to run significant elements of Trump’s election campaign—the essay’s key insight has not really been dealt with seriously. Russian meme factories achieved, with minimal expense and no direct violence, their country’s deepest foreign-policy aims: a sharp decline in U.S. influence in the world, the endangerment of the post-World War II alliances of the liberal order, and the humiliation of the notion of human rights. There has been no retaliation.

    Memetic warfare is only the latest element of the diathetical struggle that has been ongoing since the arrival of the internet. The cultural front is along every point of the network—television, the press, movies, songs, sermons, advertising, and social media. Everything that gives meaning is a battleground. Diathetics is the rearrangement of the enemy’s mindset by spectacle and the means of its consumption. This is a new kind of war and a deeply confusing one. Confusion is its purpose. The problems of assessment are substantial. The line between what is military and what isn’t has blurred, and the cultural front seems ridiculous, beneath the dignity of the military and totally beyond the purview of soldiers anyway. Memetic wars, wars of popular culture, are ridiculous. That does not alter their effectiveness. A reality television star with the world’s most elaborate comb-over has helped achieve Russian foreign-policy aims.

    Even to look at 9/11 as a work of culture, to investigate its significance, is fraught in itself. The occasion is sacred, suitable for solemn reflection. Real people really died. But as painful and grotesque and offensive as it may seem, if you want to understand America’s current vulnerability, you have to look at 9/11 as a show. It is a war show that the United States lost and continues to lose.

    [​IMG]
    The Statue of Liberty and the World Trade Center towers before the attack. (Owen Franken/Corbis via Getty Images)

    Begin with a basic question: Why the Twin Towers? Before 1993, U.S. counterterrorism agencies did not consider the World Trade Center a likely target. They worried about water systems, transportation networks, and military installations. The World Trade Center was not a beloved or culturally important structure like the Empire State Building. It featured a pair of large, banal skyscrapers.

    Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, was the first to recognize the towers’ potential as symbols within a spectacle. He would have seen them first in the company of Omar Abdel Rahman, a blind sheik who preached in a mosque in New Jersey. From his neighborhood, the towers rose up across the waters, totems without faces. They were little more than objects of substantial mass.

    Mass death was always at the core of Yousef’s vision for a terrorist act. After his arrival in New York, he initially cruised through neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Queens, looking for ways to murder Jews in significant numbers. But he simply could not find a target of the necessary scale. Originally, Yousef wanted to flood the towers with cyanide, to convert them into death camps in the sky. The bomb used in the 1993 attack was constructed of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil but Ramzi Yousef also explored lacing the bomb with poison. A judge in his case assumed he had used sodium cyanide but that it had burned off from the heat of the explosion. But there was no forensic evidence Yousef ever managed to find the poisons he desired. Generally, his craftsmanship was poor: The cyanide burned off from the heat of the explosion. (Eventually, on 9/11, the towers came to resemble nothing so much as the smoking towers of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen; the attack possessed from its inception the quality of a pocket Holocaust.)

    It’s easy to forget that until 1993, until the World Trade Center was a target, terrorism and assassination and guerrilla warfare stood in direct antithesis to slaughter on an industrial scale. The specificity of the target had been at the heart of political murder for nearly a millennium. The original assassins were Ismaili Muslims, who killed rulers rather than armies. The capitalists and fascists and imperialists led subservient masses into meaningless death; the terrorists knew whom they killed. The essential nature of the propaganda of the deed was that it waged war against those responsible for the system rather than those who suffered under it. Russian anarchists believed that insurrectionary acts against the ruling classes would bring about revolution, but their targets were, as a rule, individuals. (There were exceptions, such as the bombing of the Liceu Theater in Barcelona in 1893, but they were rare.) Carlos the Jackal targeted OPEC leaders and the people who ran Zionist organizations. The forces of guerrilla warfare attached a strategic as well as a symbolic value to individual life. Their smaller numbers meant they could not waste themselves except at a high price.

    Yousef saw that the World Trade Center’s brute scale, its sheer bulk, expressed better than any other building the banal dominance of modernity. His letter to the New York Times after the 1993 bombing explicitly described it as an attack from “the fifth battalion in the Liberation Army,” and the political movement to which he was an inheritor belonged to the Russian anarchists, Lawrence of Arabia, Mao Zedong, Che Guevara, the June 2 movement in Germany, and Carlos the Jackal. It is essential to understand the necessary framework for guerrilla informational war: To wage diathetics, you have to belong to the culture you hope to distort, and you have to hate that culture at the same time. Diathetics can only be waged both inside and outside a culture; to know what effects a spectacle will have, you have to comprehend the context into which it will be received. Lawrence was a prime example of an inside-outside man and so was Yousef. Yousef was not a good Muslim: He drank, womanized, never prayed, and never fasted. Almost everyone involved in the 9/11 conspiracy was stuck between the West and Islam. On Sept. 10, 2001, Mohammad Atta checked out of his hotel in Boston, rented a car, and drove with one of his co-conspirators, Abdul Aziz al-Omari, to Portland, Maine, where they shopped at Walmart and ate at Pizza Hut. No one knows why. Like salesmen in town on business, the Saudis left in Boston tried to call for prostitutes but didn’t end up hiring any because the prices were too high. Al Qaeda’s ideology was Islamist, but its techniques and ideas were Western.

    After the 1993 attack, the symbolism of the World Trade Center took on a significance far beyond itself. Various dreams of its explosion scattered like a billion dark seeds over the global soil. “Time to get paid, blow up like the World Trade,” Biggie Smalls rapped. Because it had survived, the center became a point of pride for U.S. counterterrorism officials. After his capture, when Yousef was transferred on an FBI helicopter to the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Lower Manhattan for trial, the SWAT team took off his blindfold as they were flying down the Hudson River. “You see, it’s still standing,” one SWAT member said, indicating the World Trade Center.

    “It wouldn’t be if we had had more money,” Yousef answered, shrugging.

    In September 2000, New York’s Joint Terrorism Task Force had its 20th anniversary party in the Windows on the World banquet room. For al Qaeda, and for Islamist terrorism generally, Yousef’s career opened more than a possible target; it revealed the tantalizing possibilities of ambition against ambition, the scope of terrorist acts that matched the scale of the targets. This blaze of originality found fulfillment through two much duller men: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was Yousef’s maternal uncle, and bin Laden.

    Mohammed had a degree in mechanical engineering from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University and had lived in the Philippines, Bosnia, and Qatar. He had traveled widely and conceived of the rejection of modernity as a calamity of the sky. Planes, like skyscrapers, were miraculous, inhuman, unnatural, and an affront to tradition itself and to the traditions of any people or creed—both tool of and symbol for the radical decentering of modern life. Originally, Mohammed imagined a version of his earlier Bojinka plot, in which he wanted to take 10 planes, one commandeered by himself, to the United States and make “a speech denouncing U.S. policies in the Middle East before releasing all of the women and children passengers.” Yousef’s strike on the World Trade Center altered his ideas.

    Sometime in the middle of 1996, Mohammed met with bin Laden at Tora Bora, in eastern Afghanistan, and brought a portfolio of schemes, most of which involved a combination of planes and U.S. targets. For two years, Mohammed and bin Laden worked through the conspiracy in all its grand detail. These negotiations were similar in scope to those between a director and a producer: a compromise between the grandiosity of vision and the certainty of accomplishment. Bin Laden became the biggest celebrity after 9/11, but his prominence had little to do with his real role in the attack, being neither instigator nor creator nor performer. The audiences needed a supervillain, an evil genius. Somebody’s face had to be on the firing range targets. A face had to be on the urinal cakes.

    Atta was simply an executor and had no role in the imagination of 9/11. His face suited the blankness of the act, though. His roommates in Hamburg recalled that he found the ordinary conversation of crowds unbearable: “Chaos, chaos,” he muttered at a screening of The Jungle Book as the crowd chatted before the show. For his meals, he would take whole boiled potatoes, skin them, smash the potatoes into a mound, and then for a week consume the cold potatoes, leaving the fork in the mound when he put the mess back in the refrigerator. The only trait that anyone recalled about Atta was that he was organized and punctual. Yet he left the Comfort Inn in Portland at 5:33 a.m. for a 6 o’clock flight and made it through security just 15 minutes before takeoff. He nearly missed the appointment for his own death. Stage fright.

    [​IMG]
    A pedestrian in Guatemala City watches the New York attacks on CNN as they unfold on Sept. 11, 2001. (Andrea Nieto/Getty Images)

    From the moment the first plane hit the first tower, the level of recorded information about 9/11, as an event, was unprecedented. Those closest to the event itself were, in a sense, those most removed from its meaning—distance being one of the defining attributes of informational guerrilla war. In the case of 9/11, the people who knew what was going on with the most clarity were those living farthest from the event itself. Bin Laden, in the mountains of Afghanistan, wanted to watch the scenario unfolding live. Ali Hamza al-Bahlul, his chief video technician, couldn’t manage a strong enough signal. They listened on the radio instead, to the BBC’s Arabic service, with some 50 of bin Laden’s men.

    The heroism of the first responders was that they went into the catastrophe with all that they did not understand. “I think the entire world knew more than we did,” Jules Naudet claimed in his 2002 documentary, 9/11, following New York City firemen on the day of the attack. “We didn’t have a clue what was going on outside our lobby.” The tower itself was a meaningless eye in a hurricane of meaning. The most extraordinary scene in the whole of 9/11 is the firemen arriving at the tower and opening an elevator. The people inside, escaping, look annoyed. For everyone else, the world had changed. For them, it was still an ordinary day full of ordinary bullshit, such as being stuck in elevators.

    The fact that 9/11 was a media event was even clear to those in the towers at the time. Stephen Tompsett, a computer scientist attending the Risk Waters conference at the Windows on the World restaurant, emailed his wife, Dorry, from his Blackberry: “Watch CNN. Need updates.” Even to those in the towers when the planes hit, what mattered was on television. Greg Trevor, in the public relations office on the 68th floor, saw fire and glass tumbling outside the window. When his phone rang, he picked it up.

    “Hi, I’m with NBC national news,” the voice said. “If you could hold on for about five minutes, we’re going to put you on for a live phone interview.”

    “I’m sorry, I can’t. We’re evacuating the building.”

    “But this will only take a minute.”

    “I’m sorry, you don’t understand. We’re leaving the building right now.”

    “But, but, this is NBC national news.” Didn’t he understand? This was no affiliate. This was network.

    By 8:51 a.m., Matt Lauer on NBC’s Today show declared: “We wanna go live right now and show you a picture of the World Trade Center.” The second plane hit the South Tower at 9:03. That day, cable news achieved its fulfillment as a format, mimicking traumatic memory. The clip rolled over and over. A smoking tower. A plane flying into a tower. The clip rolled over and over, with new clips added, fantasies spiraling from fantasies, commentaries piling up, voices crashing into voices. Television lurched into collective mind, creating the event by playing and replaying, working and reworking, the moving image.

    The manager of a Duane Reade drugstore just north of the World Trade Center said on the day of the attack: “The only thing I sold today was cameras. Within an hour of the first initial hit, we sold 60 to 100 cameras.” Rather than hit the location of mass media—midtown Manhattan—the 9/11 attackers chose to strike within viewing distance. A terrorist act without spectators is meaningless. Its triumph is in its recognition, and, even more, the size of its triumph is the size of its recognition. Recognition requires a slight distance.

    The view was worth more than any public statement: the sweeping cords of the Brooklyn Bridge, the icon of American will and know-how, the achievement of the once impossible, a bridge more than a mile long, the beginning of American greatness, containing in its history all the strangeness of America, ending in catastrophe inveigled in desolation.

    Then, from the top of the tower, in imperfect focus because of the range, the grainy image of a man tumbling through the air, leaping into death, discontinuous, twisted, senseless, angelic, tormented. No one could fathom him.

    The towers fell, and a great white spume poured through the city, swallowing the faces, covering all the cameras in an omnivorous white fade. The screens went blank.

    [​IMG]
    A paratrooper in the U.S. 82nd Airborne cleans his weapon near a flag at half staff in Orgun-e Kalan, Afghanistan, on the morning of September 11, 2002. The first anniversary of the worst terrorist attacks in history was a normal working day for the troops. (Chris Hondros/Getty Images)

    Diathetical warfare is a struggle for meaning. In the case of 9/11, that struggle began instantly, and it continues to this day. The terrorists manufactured, as they intended, a spectacle of interrelated images. These were created not just by traditional media but also by individuals sharing media over the internet. In 2001, the majority of Americans didn’t have the internet, and it worked by dial-up connection. Most press organizations had just opened digital venues. Nonetheless, 9/11 revealed the new media in all its world-consuming power: instantaneous communication as a basic fact of life. The first critical reaction to 9/11 took place on United Airlines Flight 93. Its passengers were the first Americans to grasp that terrorism itself had changed, that the strategy of simply waiting quietly for others to negotiate was no longer available. “I know we’re all going to die,” one passenger, Thomas Burnett, told his wife. “There’s three of us who are going to do something about it.” Todd Beamer famously declared, “Let’s roll,” before he died living up to its meaning.

    The misinterpretation of 9/11 began before the smoke had cleared. At Booker Elementary School, President George W. Bush, informed of the catastrophe, continued to read The Pet Goat like a boy waiting to be told what to do. His press secretary, Ari Fleischer, held up a sign in big block letters so that the press wouldn’t notice: “Don’t say anything yet.” Bush read along, the students slowly enunciating each word: “A girl got a pet goat.” His flummoxed face was defeat itself. “This crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take a while,” he told the press later, using the one word he could not afford to use. Then he turned bin Laden into an outlaw from the movies: “I want justice. And there’s an old poster out West, I recall, that says, ‘Wanted: Dead or Alive.’” Bush and bin Laden were raised on the same shows. Bin Laden’s favorite show as a boy was Fury—the story of an orphan child who is the only one who can ride a wild stallion and who saves guest stars from trouble episode after episode. What could be better for him than to be as beautiful and free as an Old West outlaw wanted dead or alive? Did he not dream of being an untamable thing?

    But it would be foolish to blame America’s diathetical defeat on Bush’s casual incompetence or bin Laden’s narrative instinct. Diathetical warfare uses the collective storytelling system against its creators. That’s what makes it so hard even to perceive. The goals of diathetics remain the goals of guerrilla warfare. The first aim is to provoke a massive overreaction. The larger goal is to reorient the behavior of the enemy, to alter the mindset to a state of despair and counterproductive reaction.

    The massive overreaction was inevitable given the brute size and scope of the media and the collective unfamiliarity with its effects. Perspective becomes impossible in an environment of media saturation, or, rather, perspective is irrelevant—9/11 could not be just another act of war any more than the O.J. Simpson trial could be just another case. Distortion is at the heart of the disaster. In 2001, heart disease killed 700,142 Americans, accidents killed 101,537, and influenza killed 62,034. Sugar is vastly more dangerous to public safety than terrorism. In hindsight, 9/11 was not the most important historical event that year. In a hundred years, 2001 will be remembered for the launch of the 3G network in Japan and the entrance of China in the World Trade Organization—the advent of an instant global communications network and nascent Chinese power were both events with much more long-term consequences than what we call 9/11. Even to mention these facts seems distasteful, as if I’m missing the point. That size of meaning is the core victory of the diathetic effect. “Everything changed on 9/11” is the one thing everyone can agree on. A victory for the United States would have been for nothing to have changed.

    Diathetics works. For the cost of the lives of 19 terrorists, al Qaeda sparked the global war on terrorism, with its subsequent $2.1 trillion cost and the loss of thousands of American lives. More importantly, they changed the way America thought of itself and the way the world thought of America. They made powerful people believe that the war against Islamist terrorism, a technologically incompetent fringe hiding in caves in the most remote locations in the world, presented a threat comparable to the fascist war machines of World War II. They convinced America that the only way to protect itself from this threat was to suspend civil liberties. Seventeen years later, America is stumbling back from the Middle East, believed by its own people and by the rest of the world to be a defeated occupier. The Taliban is still a force in Afghanistan. The central proposition of radical Islamist movements since Jamal al-Din al-Afghani—that Islam was anti-modernity—was proved to everyone’s satisfaction. The consequences of these changes in mindset were vast, elaborating themselves in ways that would have been inconceivable to bin Laden or to anyone else.

    Why did America tell itself such a disastrous story about 9/11?

    At the core of the failure was American exceptionalism, the assumption, which in my experience no American escapes entirely, that what happens in the United States matters more than what happens elsewhere. American exceptionalism is a form of political myopia, making perspective nearly impossible, even among the most educated.

    The legacy of World War II was also decisive. The military narrative of the liberation of Europe was less important than the story of the reconstruction—America’s overwhelming might underpinning a liberal order. The Bush administration dreamed of a war of liberation, a war against fascism, a war to build liberal democracy, just the kind of war their fathers had waged. The neoconservative fantasies were plugged into images borrowed from documentaries of Europe from their childhoods. From that fantasy, they were able to conjure whatever arguments were needed, even though the struggle against al Qaeda was not even against a state, never mind a system of government.

    The concentration of energy that drew itself around 9/11 emerged from so many more deeply rooted American narratives, too: the glorification of war in and of itself, the need for redemption from Vietnam, cop shows and blockbusters and the single-minded structure of their storytelling—good guys kill bad guys. As the former CIA agent Amaryllis Fox put it in her viral video: “You are the empire, and we are Luke and Han.” Straight racism and simple xenophobia contributed, too.

    Notice that some of these narratives are shallow and ignorant and some of them are real and substantial. Some belong to the educated elite. Some are lowest common denominators. Some are fictions; some aren’t. None of those distinctions matter—diathetical warfare preys on the whole of a collective mythology, the stories we tell ourselves in order to live. When Bush said, “Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists”—a perfect statement from al Qaeda’s point of view—the phrasing emerged out of movies he had seen and books he had read and conversations he had heard.

    The museum commemorating the events of 9/11 is a more durable failure: It looks like a Holocaust memorial, which is exactly what Ramzi Yousef intended. The face of Mohammad Atta is nowhere; therefore it is everywhere. A quote from Virgil’s Aeneid—“No day shall erase you from the memory of time”—has been inscribed on the wall. The dreams of the terrorists are fulfilled: Their victims have given them entry into history.

    To this day, the border guards at John F. Kennedy International Airport face all day, every day, a sign that calls for them to remember 9/11. Nothing could define U.S. diathetical defeat more completely.

    [​IMG]
    One World Trade Center looms over the National September 11 Memorial in the footprint of the original towers in downtown Manhattan on Sept. 16, 2014. (Tim Clayton/Corbis via Getty Images)

    Walmart sold 116,000 flags on 9/11. In Iraq, key chains appeared with pictures of the Twin Towers crumbling soon after. A friend of mine returned from Iraq with a poster of bin Laden riding a unicorn with a Kalashnikov rifle in each hand. That poster, not the position U.S. forces hold in the Baluchistan hills, is the reason that victory is impossible in Afghanistan.

    9/11 exposed, more than any other event, the fundamental vulnerability of the United States, which was not at its borders but within its culture. The vulnerability lies within the greatest glory of American life, its explosive variety of expression, its sanctity for the freedom of the press, its movies and debates and sermons and songs and advertising, its bottomless need for drama, its constant invention and reinvention of itself. The conditions that made that vulnerability possible have only intensified over the past 17 years. The fracturing of media, the expansion of the scope of information, the role of screens in our lives—these have all increased exponentially. The rise of social media and the smartphone means that the diathetical battlefield is more dominant than ever.

    The biggest vulnerability the United States faces in the diathetical struggle is that it refuses to recognize its vulnerability. The effects of social media have become apparent, but the U.S. government, the media, and the tech sector have shown exactly no will to defend themselves from the consequences. Controlling social media is a matter of national security. Those in power in the United States are simply too old to see it. That control will have to be in the hands of elected officials. The creators of the vast networks along which guerrilla informational war has been waged have shown, over and over again, that they possess no loyalties beyond their financial interests. There are few patriots in Silicon Valley, at least insofar as patriotism conflicts with self-interest. Values are not scalable.

    Meanwhile, it is inevitable that other countries will engage in their own cultural operations against the United States. The logic is impeccable: Why attack U.S. soldiers and diplomats if you can attack the State Department? Why attack the State Department if you can help elect a president who won’t bother to hire anyone at the State Department? Eventually countries friendly to the United States will have to participate. If they don’t, only America’s enemies will. Already, in its tariff war, Canada has targeted individual districts on the basis of their political representatives. Why not start using social media to exert the same pressure? If U.S. opinion, and hence U.S. power, is for sale and cheaply, Canada will have to buy. The behavior of the United States is simply too integral to its national interests. Why wouldn’t anyone do the same?

    Diathetical warfare is the battle for hearts and minds, not other people’s but our own. The only real defense against guerrilla informational war is clarity, the rarest and most precious of victories. That struggle involves humility and self-awareness—commodities perpetually in short supply and in deteriorating condition. The campaign for clarity requires more strength of purpose, more perseverance, more intelligence than bombing. No wonder it is so rarely undertaken.


    Stephen Marche is a novelist and essayist who lives in Toronto. His most recent book is The Unmade Bed: The Messy Truth About Men and Women in the Twenty-First Century.
     
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    'If the Republicans had a compelling economic story to tell, they'd be telling it'


    [​IMG]


    As the economy hums along at what many economists consider full employment and the stock market continues to tick up, Republicans aren't getting much of a bump in their quest to salvage control of Congress.
    That's probably because the stock market isn't a major factor for most Americans trying to pay their monthly bills. What counts? How high their wage is and whether they can afford food, gas, housing, and health care on that salary. As CNBC's John Harwood writes:

    In a recent survey for the Democratic Senate campaign, [pollster Geoff] Garin asked voters across 13 Senate battleground states which set of economic facts is most important: big increases in jobs and middle-class tax cuts, or wages not keeping up with inflation and health costs. A 62 percent majority — including 91 percent of Democrats, 72 percent of independents and 34 percent of Republicans — chose the latter.

    That's probably why poll after poll has shown that Democrats and independents rate health care as either their No. 1 or No. 2 concern. Affordability is a central pocketbook issue for them and Republicans have done absolutely nothing but take swipes at Obamacare that have driven up premiums.

    That's left the GOP, after two years of unified control of the federal government
    , with nothing to run on but a scorched-earth fear-and-smear strategy.

    "If the Republicans had a compelling economic story to tell, they'd be telling it," Garin told Harwood. "It's not because they haven't thought of it. It's because it doesn't work."

    oh, from DK
     
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    dk

    Is the country really 'divided'—or is it just Republicans vs. the rest of the nation?


    Daily Kos Staff
    Thursday September 13, 2018 · 11:22 AM CDT
    144 Comments 144 new
    [​IMG]

    The results of a Detroit News survey this week gauging how Michigan voters feel about the special counsel probe into Trump/Russia prompted an interesting and astute observation from the pollster who conducted it.

    "People like to say, 'Oh, everyone’s so divided right now,' but I don’t think that’s the case," said Richard Czuba of the Lansing-based Glengariff Group. "Democrats and independents are viewing these issues similarly, and it’s in fact the Republican base that’s viewing issues differently than everyone else."

    The poll found that 63 percent of Michigan voters support Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation, while 31 percent do not. More than 51 percent viewed the probe as "fair," while 32 percent called it "rigged" (17 percent weren't sure)...
    That 30-something percent number recurs in poll after poll regarding just about anything Trump, such as his approval rating, while Democrats and independents appear to be much more closely aligned on a multitude of issues. In fact, a line regularly written by pollsters these days often states something along the lines of, "Republicans are the only demographic group to believe. ..." Meanwhile, a majority of every other demographic group—men, women, Democrats, independents, whites, people of color—believe something different. Take this July Quinnipiac poll, for instance, which found voters believe 51-35 percent that the Russian government has compromising information on Trump.

    Republicans don't believe 70 - 18 percent there is compromising information, the only listed party, gender, education, age or racial group which does not believe it.

    If you look at Civiqs polling on whether respondents view Russia as an "ally or foe," solid majorities of both Democrats (88 percent) and independents (59 percent) say Russia's a foe, while less than half of Republicans do (47 percent).

    Or look at Kaiser's most recent tracking poll of top issues for voters: both Democrats and independents ranked health care and corruption as their top two issues; while Republicans put economy/jobs and immigration at No. 1 and 2. Immigration ranked second to last for both Democrats and independents. And while Russian election interference was a top 4 issue for both Democrats and independents, it was dead last for Republicans.

    [​IMG]
    But perhaps even more telling than comparing Republicans to Democrats/independents is comparing Fox News viewers to people who get their news just about any other way. That's a question the Detroit News poll asked of Michiganders about whether the Mueller probe was fair.

    The survey found that 70 percent of respondents who primarily get their news from the Fox News cable channel say the Russia investigation is "rigged."

    Voters whose primary source of news is something other than Fox (newspapers, radio, network television, local TV, CNN or MSNBC) overwhelmingly declared the probe "fair."

    Maybe it's not Republicans vs. the rest of us but rather Fox News watchers vs. the nation.
     
  34. BellottiBold

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    There is no denying this imo
     
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    Well yeah
     
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  37. Bruce Wayne

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    Those kinds of articles are so disgusting

    :doge:
     
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    I just got that in my inbox this morning too.
     
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  39. Prospector

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    US spends $81 billion a year to protect global oil supplies, report estimates
    • The United States spends about $81 billion a year to protect oil supplies around the world, according to an estimate by Securing America's Future Energy.
    • SAFE released its study the same day President Donald Trump claimed Middle Eastern countries are hiking oil prices while benefiting from U.S. protection.
    • Retired military commanders associated with SAFE say the focus on defending oil supplies is diverting budget dollars from other priorities.
    from CNBC

    Published 1 Hour Ago CNBC.com

    [​IMG]
    Marwan Naamani | AFP | Getty Images
    An American flag flies near US Navy boats docked at Bahrain's Salman port in the capital Manama, on May 12, 2013
    The United States military spends about $81 billion a year to protect oil supplies around the world and keep fossil fuels flowing into American gas stations, according to new analysis.

    Securing America's Future Energy, a think tank that advocates for reducing U.S. dependence on oil, released the study the same day President Donald Trump claimed that some Middle Eastern countries are pushing up crude prices while benefiting from U.S. military protection.

    The $81 billion price tag is likely "very conservative" and doesn't include the full cost of the 15-year war in Iraq, according to SAFE, whose CEO Robbie Diamond also leads the pro-electric car group the Electrification Coalition.

    The estimate pencils out to 16-20 percent of the Defense Department's annual base budget, showing the nation's oil habit has a direct military cost, SAFE said. It also means the government subsidizes the cost of oil to the tune of $11.25 per barrel and the price of transportation fuels like gasoline and diesel by 28 cents a gallon.

    Americans "spend somewhere around $3 per gallon, but we're really paying a lot more because of all the operations in the Middle East," said retired General Charles Wald, vice chairman and senior adviser at consulting firm Deloitte and a member of SAFE's Energy Security Leadership Council.

    "If we can reduce our dependence on oil, we could reduce our presence in the Gulf and use the funds for other critical military priorities, like cybersecurity or hypersonic weapons." -General Duncan McNabb, former commander of U.S. Transportation Command
    U.S. crude oil production is poised to reach 11 million barrels a day and eclipse output from top producer Russia, but the United States still imports roughly 8 million barrels a day.

    On Thursday, Trump renewed his call for the 15-nation oil producer group OPEC to tamp down crude prices, which are near four-year highs. Trump suggested that OPEC members like Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Kuwait owe the United States, saying "We protect the countries of the Middle East, they would not be safe for very long without us."

    To be sure, government agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration don't factor in the cost of protecting oil supplies when they set fuel policy. The agencies say the cost is actually zero because the Pentagon wouldn't save any money if it stopped defending foreign crude flows. It would simply reallocate those funds elsewhere. A 1992 Congressional Research Service assessment came to a similar conclusion, SAFE notes.

    However, SAFE says this approach doesn't account for opportunity cost. In other words, the military could devote budget dollars to other priorities if it wasn't focused on protecting the parts of the world that supply the nation with oil, particularly the Persian Gulf.

    "If we can reduce our dependence on oil, we could reduce our presence in the Gulf and use the funds for other critical military priorities, like cybersecurity or hypersonic weapons," said General Duncan McNabb, former commander of the U.S. Transportation Command and a member of SAFE's council.

    Defending Persian Gulf oil is a "major distraction" from "existential defense issues," said John Lehman, former Secretary of the Navy under President Ronald Reagan and another member of SAFE's council.

    "Our existential threats are what we should be concentrating on. We should concentrate on East Asia and an increasingly revanchist Russia," he said.


    [​IMG]
    OPEC could struggle to counter spikes in crude oil prices, RBC's Helima Croft says 19 Hours Ago | 01:29

    SAFE is not the first group to try to put a price on the cost of protecting oil supplies. Its study uses methodology developed by the RAND Corporation in an earlier report and draws on seven earlier studies to come up with an average. Those studies produced estimates ranging from $27 billion in 2004 to $100 billion in 2008.

    Retired military commanders stressed that it is very difficult to determine the cost of a specific mission like protecting oil because defense assets serve multiple functions.

    "Take the example of an aircraft carrier," said Admiral Dennis C. Blair, co-chair of the SAFE council. "It performs humanitarian operations, demonstrates a show of force, enforces no-fly zones in the Middle East, fights in wars, and lives for 50 years. How do you allocate its cost across those various missions?"

    However, the exclusion of Iraq and Afghanistan war costs from most studies means the $81 billion figure likely underestimates the cost of protecting oil, members of SAFE's Energy Security Leadership Council said.

    Factoring in in the cost of the Iraq War, the price of protecting oil is closer to $30 per barrel, or 70 cents a gallon, over a 20-year period, a separate analysis found. SAFE said that cost is largely separate from the ongoing cost of $81 billion a year.

    "The wars in the Middle East have been related to the balance of power in that region and control over oil states," Lehman said. "You don't want to fall into the trap of the left and say that we only went into Iraq for their oil but depending how you phrase it, the costs can be attributed to the strategic dependence we have on Gulf oil."
     
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  40. Bruce Wayne

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    If only we had an unlimited supply of alternative energy options that we could utilize here that wouldn't require us to spend that much money to defend oil
     
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  41. brolift

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  42. Prospector

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    from something called Foreign Policy in Focus

    There’s a New Crash Coming

    Skyrocketing debt, Wall Street deregulation, a fraying social safety net, and a diminished dollar could soon leave the United States looking like Greece.

    By John Feffer, September 19, 2018.

    [​IMG]Print
    [​IMG]
    Shutterstock

    Donald Trump is the epitome of irrational exuberance.

    You might remember that phrase from the 1990s. Alan Greenspan, the head of the Federal Reserve at the time, was describing how the tech boom was creating a bubble by generating enthusiasm way out of proportion to the actual value of the new companies.

    Such an unwarranted economic boom was hardly something new, so it was easy to predict what would happen next. Periods of irrational exuberance — whether the dot-com expansion, Dutch tulipmania in the 17th century, or the housing bubble in America of the 2000s — have always led to a sudden crash and a serious hangover.

    And now, here we go again.
    Trump, always exuberant when talking about himself and his putative accomplishments, loves to boast about how well the American economy is chugging along. The stock market reached its all-time high at the end of August. In its second quarter this year, U.S. economic growth was 4.1 percent. Unemployment remains below 4 percent, and inflation remains moderate. Even wages are going up.

    Irrationality enters the picture because there’s little if any connection between the president’s policies and the outcomes he lauds (since these trends began before he took office). Also, the prosperity that has resulted from this economic expansion has largely been enjoyed by the wealthier sectors of society. Finally, Trump’s economic fever dream is fueled by an enormous and growing amount of debt.

    When it comes to irrational exuberance, it’s never if there will be a bust but when. On the tenth anniversary of the financial collapse of 2008, it’s worth looking at the potential pinpricks that will pop Trump’s hot-air balloon and send America crashing back to earth.

    Mountains of Debt

    Let’s start at the top. It doesn’t take a math whiz to figure out that an expansion of military spending, an overall budget that’s as big as his predecessor’s, and a massive tax cut would produce an enormous budget deficit.

    Although Trump promised to balance the books if he became president, he’s done the opposite. The deficit for this year will rise to $890 billion (it was about $660 billion when Obama left office). The shortfall in government expenditures will rise above $1 trillion next year.

    Deficit spending makes sense during a recession. What Trump is doing now is essentially allowing the rich to siphon the cream off the top, providing the middle class with some skim milk, and leaving the sour dregs for everyone else. And unlike during earlier economic expansions, government revenues are actually falling, which is what small-government advocates are secretly cheering: less money, less government.

    It’s not just the government that’s in hock. Total household debt reached a new high in August: $13.3 trillion. That includes a record amount of student debt ($1.5 trillion), an ever-growing amount of mortgage debt ($9 trillion, which is perilously close to the $10.5 trillion it reached during the mortgage crisis in 2008), and an overall credit card debt that just surpassed $1 trillion for the first time.

    Then there’s corporate debt. Companies have taken advantage of low interest rates to borrow like crazy. This summer, corporate debt hit a new high of $6.3 trillion. Worse, the cash-to-debt ratio, which was 14 percent in 2008, has dropped to 12 percent: that’s $1 in cash for every $8 of debt.

    Economists are quick to reassure the public that all of this debt is not catastrophic. After all, the economy is humming along. America doesn’t look like Greece.

    But all this debt is like the termites eating away at the foundation of your house. You don’t see anything wrong except a bit of sawdust and the faint sounds of consumption. And then one day, you’re sitting at your kitchen table and, boom! You’re sprawled out in your basement with the wreckage of your house around you.

    As long as institutions continue to extend credit, debt is manageable, not a crisis. In other words, if creditors are still willing to buy Treasury bonds, then the United States is good to go.

    But that’s a big if.

    Chestnuts in the Fire

    Currently, the U.S. government owes $21 trillion, which is slightly more than the household and corporate debt combined. The owners of U.S. debt include federal agencies like Social Security (which currently runs a surplus that it uses to buy Treasury bonds), the Federal Reserve (which bought a lot of debt during the financial crisis to lower interest rates), mutual funds, and banks.

    Foreign countries also hold about a third of the debt. China and Japan own a little more than a trillion dollars each, followed by Brazil, Ireland, the UK, and Switzerland.

    In ordinary times, foreign ownership of U.S debt is uncontroversial. Countries with revenue surpluses need a safe place to park their money. And the United States has never defaulted on its sovereign debt, unlike Greece or Argentina.

    But these are not ordinary times. With the sharp downturn in U.S.-Russian relations, Moscow decided this spring to unload 84 percent of its holdings of Treasury bonds. That amounts to about $87 billion, a considerable sum.

    Russia, of course, is not one of the major holders of U.S. debt. But Russia’s not the only country in a selling mood. Japan got rid of $18.4 billion in Treasury bonds in the spring. In the first half of 2018, Turkey unloaded 42 percent of its holdings in U.S. debt. Both countries currently have trade disputes with Washington.

    The big player, however, is China, and right now the Trump administration is escalating its trade war with China. Trump just announced tariffs on another $200 billion in Chinese imports after targeting $50 billion of goods in the first round. If China retaliates with more tariffs of its own, the Trump administration is threatening a third round sanctioning all Chinese imports. China’s counter-sanctions are smaller, since it doesn’t import as much from the United States.

    But China could retaliate in other ways, such as devaluing its currency. A potentially more devastating action would be to follow Russia’s example and sell its stake in Treasury bonds.

    Again, this wouldn’t necessarily have much effect on the U.S. economy as long as other buyers step in to take China’s place. And that’s when all that other debt comes into play. At a certain point, foreign creditors will no longer support unsustainable U.S. spending. They won’t pull the U.S. chestnuts out of the fire.

    Here’s another sign that foreign confidence in the U.S. economy is waning. For much of the post-World War II era, international transactions have been conducted in dollars. That has meant that people — and countries — have wanted dollars. But that situation is changing. The U.S. dollar remains the currency of choice for transactions, but by an ever-diminishing margin. As of July, it was used in 39 percent of transactions. The euro was in second place at 35 percent. Further down the list came the pound, the yen, and the yuan. The fall of the dollar anticipates an eclipse of U.S. global economic hegemony.

    It’s hard to predict when all of these indicators will converge. Hedge fund manager Ray Dalio expects a major economic downturn in the United States in two years, after the impact of the tax cuts disappears and the government finds itself short on money. He predicts that:

    We have to sell a lot of Treasury bonds, and we as Americans will not be able to buy all those treasury bonds. The Federal Reserve will have to print more money to make up for the deficit, will have to monetize more, and that’ll cause a depreciation in the value of the dollar.

    This will be no ordinary downturn. Irrational exuberance has pushed up stocks above their value, sent household and corporate debt into the stratosphere, and burdened the government with debt it will have greater difficulty covering. Interest rates remain low, so there’s no real option to lower rates to stimulate the economy. Martin Feldstein, former chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisors, anticipates a $10 trillion drop in U.S. household assets. “When the next recession comes, it is going to be deeper and last longer than in the past,” he says.

    The bottom line: the United States would finally turn into Greece.

    The austerity programs Washington has supported all around the world will finally be visited upon the United States. And if the United States goes down, it will drag much of the global economy with it. After all, U.S. debt is only part of a larger problem. As Walden Bello explains:

    Financial operators are racking up profits in a sea of liquidity provided by central banks, whose releasing of cheap money has resulted in the issuance of trillions of dollars of debt, pushing the level of debt globally to $325 trillion, more than three times the size of global GDP. There is a consensus among economists along the political spectrum that this debt build-up cannot go on indefinitely without inviting catastrophe.

    Forecast: More Inequality

    The Trump administration, in addition to its irrational exuberance over the current economic expansion, is taking various steps to make matters worse. It is pushing for greater deregulation of the financial sector: rolling back elements of the Dodd-Frank bill, gutting the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and appointing top regulators who have close ties to Wall Street.

    “Instead of draining the swamp,” quips Aaron Klein, policy director of the Center on Regulation and Markets at the Brookings Institute, “the Trump administration is telling the alligators…that the zookeepers are taking a nap.”

    Economic inequality is not an unintended consequence of deregulation. It’s one of the goals. You might think that the administration simply wants to move as much money as it can to the 1 percent before the debt hits the fan. But here’s the really depressing part. The wealthy make out like bandits during an economic downturn as well.

    As Colin Schultz explains at Smithsonian.com, the stock market did well after the last financial crisis:

    Anyone whose finances survived the initial blast had a chance to regain ground in the recovery — or even profit. But families with net worths closer to the average often have a huge portion of their overall wealth invested in their houses. With the value of that gone, they had little wealth left to reinvest.

    So while families hovering around the average net worth lost 36 percent over the past decade — dropping from $87,992 in 2003 to $56,335 in 2013 — people in the top 95th percentile actually gained 14 percent in the same tumultuous period — going from $740,700 in 2003 to $834,100 in 2013.

    All that “creative destruction” you hear about when there’s a market “correction”?

    Ultimately it’s just the sound of the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. The termites are having a feast. But they’re not dining out at mansions.

    [​IMG]
     
  43. brolift

    brolift 2sweet
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    Kansas State WildcatsDenver NuggetsKansas City ChiefsBarAndGrillBig 8 Conference

    As long as we've got the lower class so squeezed their only option to not starve is to become a troop, and the troops are out there blowing the hell out of things ensuring the dollar is the global currency, will this continue without a collapse?
     
    Redav likes this.
  44. Can I Spliff it

    Can I Spliff it Is Butterbean okay?
    Donor

  45. Can I Spliff it

    Can I Spliff it Is Butterbean okay?
    Donor