Wednesday, April 18, 2018

Not a bad day in Trumpland....


18 holes at your club in the morning...



Followed by a nice light gourmet business lunch, perhaps some cracked stone crab cocktail,  negotiating some bilateral trade agreements...



Meanwhile back in DC your allies in Congress send criminal referrals over to Dept. of Justice jail for all of your enemies....


Dinner then back at the club with your new business partner...


After dinner some relaxing with your model wife....





WINNING!!!!  Double trigger fingers day!!!!
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6 comments:

Konrad said...

Abe and Trump. Sounds like a puppet show.
Two peas in a neoliberal pod.

Speaking of neoliberalism, what do we mean by that term? Neoliberalism is neo-feudalism, in which a handful of people or corporations own everything and everyone. With neoliberalism the rich owners are totally unregulated, while the masses are totally overregulated, surveilled, and jailed. The masses become slaves and debt serfs.

Neoliberalism has nothing to do with “market-based reforms,” since neoliberalism means that rich oligarchs and corporations use monopolies to own and control the “free market.”

The opposite extreme is communism, in which there is no private property at all. Communism brings its own problems. The party bosses ultimately become tyrants, whereas with neoliberalism, the oligarchs are tyrants.

Ideally we want to avoid the extremes of feudalism and communism. We need a balance between capitalism and socialism. Some aspects of society are best left in private hands, while other aspects should NEVER be privatized, such as banks, prisons, utilities, the military, police and fire departments, the federal highway system, Social Security, Medicare, etc.

Such a balance between extremes can never be perfectly achieved, but it is a worthy goal. Balance is a worthy star to steer the ship of state by.

Without a balance, society eventually collapses. Whether we speak of one extreme (neoliberalism) or the other (communism) the system inevitably self-destructs, sooner or later. The USSR fell. Now it's the USA's turn. Neoliberals are a cancer that is hollowing out the USA.

April 18, 2018 at 11:13 PM
Kaivey said...

We need a balance between capitalism and socialism, but strike companies still tend to too big, we need to break up the big companies more. And tax rates need to be increased dramatically on people that get rich went why sleep.

It won't be easy to achieve because democratic government will work in the interest of common people. But it will need to attract some very clever people to take in the One Percent who run everything. Hopefully there is sufficient very clever people who do believe in duty and democratic society. Perhaps we can set up a constitution to ensure society works in a specific way.

Jeff Bozos could one day running most of the sakes in the world driving out smaller companies. This needs to be stopped. And Microsoft needs to be dealt with, and so on. Unless we do, our civilization will die out like all the Chinese ones did. They all died the same way where people got too rich and vacuumed out society.

April 19, 2018 at 9:36 AM
mike norman said...

Coverage of the criminal referral in the media. Crickets.

April 19, 2018 at 11:29 AM
Konrad said...

Kaivey writes: “We need a balance between capitalism and socialism, but strike companies still tend to too big, we need to break up the big companies more.”

Agreed. When companies become too big, they become destructive monopolies. “Too big to fail” is feudalism, in which a handful of oligarchs own everything and everyone. “Too big to fail” will destroy the USA.

Kaivey writes: “Tax rates need to be increased dramatically on people that get rich when they sleep.”

Agreed, but we should apply taxes carefully. Taxes can be used to punish or reward. Taxes can be used to promote equality or promote inequality. Taxes can be used to widen the gap between the rich and the rest, or narrow it. Taxes can be used to encourage hiring or discourage hiring.

We don’t want to make taxes so onerous that they discourage entrepreneurship, but on the other hand, we should tax corporations that become parasitic and too-big-to-jail.

Kaivey writes: “It won't be easy to achieve because democratic government will work in the interest of common people. But it will need to attract some very clever people to take in the One Percent who run everything. Hopefully there is sufficient very clever people who do believe in duty and democratic society. Perhaps we can set up a constitution to ensure society works in a specific way.”

I am not optimistic about this. The neoliberal cancer will continue to metastasize until it kills its host.

Kaivey writes: “Jeff Bozos could one day be running most of the sakes in the world, driving out smaller companies. This needs to be stopped. And Microsoft needs to be dealt with, and so on. Unless we do, our civilization will die out like all the Chinese ones did. They all died the same way where people got too rich and vacuumed out society.”

Yes. The Roman Empire likewise died from internal corruption.

Empires die for one of three reasons…

[1] A natural catastrophes such as an extended drought (e.g. the Mayan Civilization).
[2] A man-made catastrophe such the First World War, which destroyed the Ottoman, German, Russian, and Austro-Hungarian Empires.

And the most common way…

[3] Internal corruption. As Kaivey puts it, “People got too rich and vacuumed out society.”

April 19, 2018 at 12:50 PM
lastgreek said...

You know, Melania does not look at all like Trump's daughter Ivanka (who knows, maybe she did when she first met Trump). Probably explains why they have separate bedrooms...

April 19, 2018 at 4:06 PM
Kaivey said...

Thank you, Konrad, I put that together at about 5am this morning after just waking up. I swipe the words in on my phone in the little box Blogger gives you and I don't always see the typos.

It was not an easy thing to write as this is an economics blog and lots of people here are wealthy. We need to wealthy on our side so I really do admire Warren Mosler and people like him who are compassionate and considerate. I was hoping that rich people would understand that it was to save civilization and so save their society.

One of the first videos I ever put out here was how all the great Chinese civilizations died out. They all died the same way and even though they knew why, they could never stop it happening again. The merchant class became so powerful that they destroyed the middleclass. Then they had no customers and the whole thing fell in. But can you see how difficult that is to stop?

April 19, 2018 at 4:30 PM

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