Or perhaps two parties each half-filled with well meaning people, but with all the levers of control corrupted.
At the moment, the Republican Party has more new uncorrupted energy stepping up to the plate. But my hope always is that we reformulate the way the game gets played and engineer a new era that will be something like the next great expansion of liberty. The liberty of the Kunlangeta harms the world. The liberty of the people broadly saves it.
After Obama gave the bankers the keys to the kingdom and Democrats didn't flinch, after watching how easily the left was manipulated about Trump, watching how the left embraced the surveillance State, embraced censorship and seeing how they weaponized race, gender and the media, screaming for social justice while giving a free pass to the accumulation of wealth in fewer and fewer hands, while seeing an opportunity to pit the minority working class against the white working class, it was a no brainer for the banks to embrace the Democratic Party.
One of my concerns is, as they seem able to justify just about anything to "save democracy" I wonder what they will justify in the handling of elections? And I wonder if they will be led into conflict with Russia and China, half-thinking it will help them win in 2022.
Trump is like an inversion of the fascist cult of personality. The Democrats formed an anti-cult of personality around him, right down to drinking the Koolaid.
"Let them know that you disapprove of anything short of immediate action to investigate criminal activity that has affected society on a large scale. Let them know loudly. Let them know that they cannot be reelected if action does not begin now. "
Nobody needs a Washington career or time on Capitol Hill to understand the first job of Congress is to be reelected and grow their own power. The biggest influence on MoC after corp largess is public pressure. When these swamp dwellers hear public anger they do adapt their actions to follow the voters & get those votes.
Nothing works better than phone calls, brief and polite is best; folks who answer phones do not make policy they take messages. Sounding unhinged and angry lands you in the "Crackpot File" and every MoC office has them.
Capitol switchboard will locate MoC by zip code if you don't know which gem is yours & every Committee has its own staff so messages can be left there as well. Most district offices also have walk in hours and every meeting or call there is recorded and sent with a daily "District Activity" packet to Washington. District staff are always locals living in the community and typically friendlier than the sharks that thrive inside the Beltway as another option.
I made an advanced order of the Fareed and Tyson book, and was just notified that the order is cancelled. What happened? Did the publisher cancel at the last minute? Are they being censored?
Politics is all theater. Trump won with huge margins. When they saw that, they shut down counting in only the 4 states needed to change the outcome and then manufactured enough votes to put a demented old man over the top.
Apologies. That's actually a long and icky story. Amazon was "concerned" about quotes from a couple of newspapers and I think the statement from the Rome summit that 17,000 physicians and medical researchers have signed. So, we had to do contracts, signatures, permissions, and a little textual changing, but not until after a few thousand orders were canceled.
"And for whatever reason, it does seem that within the past several decades, the banking networks around which so much of the corporate world revolves seems to have chosen the Democratic party as a place to consolidate power."
I think you have this backwards. It was the left that realized the power of controlling the banks as a way to consolidate power that has led us to where we are now. Consider CRA, ACORN and the control they had over bank mergers back in the 90s and early 2000s. Their leveraging of well-intentioned regulations to achieve their own policy goals was a template for the party. Obama took it to the next level with Operation Choke Point and showed how government muscle, when flexed in the face of heavily regulated industries, can be far more effective than legislation in achieving policy goals.
Hmmm. My experience in finance was that the banks are by far the most powerful industry. Almost all power is downstream from them. Nobody in finance talks about politicians buying banks. Only the other way around.
I'm very familar with the ACORN story, including pieces of it that the public is likely never to know broadly. Much is theater.
It seems important to remember that we cannot just dismantle institutions without providing a better replacement. This makes reforming any institution the economical choice, if it can be done.
What do you think the odds are that someone or ‘something’ rises from the right, a legit authoritarian that gets things done. I know some are kind of worried that will happen as a reaction to everything we’re seeing from the left right now. Not to say that we aren’t seeing authoritarianism now though.
As to not being able to handle a landslide, well, they did pretty well conjuring up a few million fingers on the scale last time. The question that bothers me is why? It seemed the threat was well enough contained. Why be so obvious?
One take is fear of an alliance between the bourgeois and the working class against the managerial class, the kunlageta, the pathocracy ... I don't know if there are hard divisions to be made.
"Let them know there is great need to rein in powers of unelected bureaucrats."
This is a point that Michael Knowles has been hammering on his podcast for several years. He lays the blame for our unelected bureaucracy mess at the feet of Woodrow Wilson.
Being inside the industry for 27 years, I can see where the perception comes from. But left to their own devices, the banking and financial services industry would gladly be left alone and contribute equally to both sides to ensure optimal outcome for their desired results. But look at which side is threatening to drop the regulatory hammer as the banks go farther and farther to appease both congress and the several bureaucracies (the Fed, the OCC the SEC, the CFPB etc) that have a say in their day to day operations. The banks contribute to the Dems BECAUSE Elizabeth Warren is pounding the table so damn hard, not in spite of it. The banks are curtailing lending and investment to oil and coal interests, firearms manufacturers, payday lenders and the like not out of their own societal belief but because they are being pressured by regulators to do so. It can be covert but when environmental groups get ahold of congress and then congress holds hearings and then asks questions like "what is your institution doing to help cutail the cycle of violence in our cities?" the message is clear.
The funniest example of this was when Maxine Waters tried to hold the banks responsible for the student loan crisis and made each CEO answer how much money they made on student loans. One by one they each answered, zero, we got out of the business when the federal government made itself a monopoly in that space. These are the people running the show.
"But left to their own devices, the banking and financial services industry would gladly be left alone and contribute equally to both sides to ensure optimal outcome for their desired results."
Are you certain?
In 2018 I did an exercise I plan to repeat in a future article. I looked up the political donations of everyone who ran a top 50 financial firm. Aside from the Congressional Finance Committee, nearly every single one favored Democrats in their giving. The era of Republican coziness with Wall Street ended in the 80s. By the time I got there in the late 90s, it was mostly Democrats. At the top, Democrats completely dominate the relationships.
Let's make sure we're not confusing individuals with firms. I just did a quick search of JP Morgan on Open Secrets and found a chart that lays out political contributions by cycle. I can't post the pic here in the comments but a link to the page will allow you to scroll down and see contributions particularly to senate and house races dating back to 1990. I know it's one firm over time but it's pretty clear.
I think we need to make a distinction between a CEO's personal political views and their willingness to impose those views on the business they have responsibility for. If it is profitable to lend to an unfavored industry, they would most certainly do it. Growth and profit are not as easy to come by as one might think (speaking as a part of the machine with responsibility for directly going out and growing assets and revenue). Furthermore, as a financial services employee, I have been subject to all sorts of training over the years. Only as the political environment evolved did I start to notice certain things. For example, long before anyone started having to do DE&I training, banks had to have regular annual training about antidiscriminatory practices, disparate impact, "people centered" language, etc. Most of this was part of annual regulatory training modules. Again, this was long before cultural training began making its way into the standard corporate training rotation.
The Clinton speaking fees are another story, too. It makes me wonder how much money gets passed around that we don't even know about. I know that news stories about Bill's take changed the numbers after being published, which was interesting to see in real time.
When I get to the point of creating a spreadsheet and list, I will share those findings.
For sure. I think the point you're making (or the one I ASSUME you were making) still stands, though. Ultimately, special interests and politicians are in each others' pockets and ears and none of us are represented in any of that despite the fact that the most powerful industries that impact our lives are making policies for and with those who are supposed to be representing our interests and it has to be stopped or at least moderated to the degre possible through transparency.
Open Secrets is fantastic & have done amazing work for years. Unfortunately the transparency led to an explosion in Dark Money PACs which far outspend the candidate donations that boil down to endorsements. Corps not only write off the donations they get billions in contracts for millions spent to buy their own candidates. Best RoI in the history of investments & big time favorite explaining the ruse.. Catherine Austin Fitts.. Make a Law Make A Business!
There's what you might term confounders? to account for donations skewed by Committee seats.. like Monopoly Chair Ways & Means is Park Place.. Intel & Ag the Railroads & Utilities so each sector has its own risk/reward investment strategy.. so much so that half the USDA subsidy dollars go to Ten MoC on House Ag.. 10/435 pocket the bulk for industrial ops w gmo commodity crops.. most farmers and ranchers get zippo. https://farm.ewg.org/progdetail.php?fips=00000&progcode=total&page=district®ionname=theUnitedStates
The Individual is confronted with a conspiracy so vast and so enormous that it fades away in its presence - Edgar Hoover
I try as you do to bring to light the darkness that surrounds us and I value your input and I value your contribution for we all are Humans and unite in our spirit and our soul.
Honestly...I've enjoyed your work, but I think you're giving off a terrible impression spamming links at this rate. That probably does drive audience, but at what cost?
I fail to see the need for institutions at all. Perhaps you can help me out -- and I'm quite serious.
Let me explain this perspective.
Let’s take the need to assure safe medicines. Easy. People like Yeadon can start their own companies as third party certification companies, a bunch of other people do that and compete… problem solved. Then people like me would shortly be in business, making millions and saving thousands of lives. And Pfizer would be out of business.
More broadly... every single case of the government punishing individuals for ingesting, injecting, or inhaling a substance that harms nobody else, is a serious violation of individual rights.
I don’t particularly even care if people want to take Covid vaccines…. lack of third party certification, for instance, could mean there’s a high potential for fraud. People might die, that’s on them -- so long as the product isn't forced. Darwin Doin Work.
It doesn’t matter whether we are talking about cannabis, ivermectin, covid vaccines, or Coley’s toxins. A truly free market would rapidly sort out the truth. (How to get there is another question: I suspect we agree more on decentralization as a possible solution.)
Given that the large majority of those incarcerated in the U.S. are there over non-objective laws, particularly drug laws - and that this rate is highest in the world - objectively makes the U.S. government the most rights violating government on earth, leaving out corner cases such as North Korea.
Not only does it *not* argue for its supposed ability to "do good" worldwide by changing other governments, it argues that the U.S. government is logically at the top of the list of governments that have no legitimate sanction to exist.
Covid only made this much clearer because it *very rapidly* affected a far greater swath of people in the “respectable” classes.
That is why I did not get all that worked up over the suppression of HCQ and ivermectin in 2020. Same fascism, different decade, returning us to 1990 mortality levels. Yawn. The government has been depriving terminal cancer patients of treatment for decades, and 500,000 of them die every year.
Only in 2021 did the rights violation become much more severe, extending not just to denial of medicine (which has been going on for 6 decades), but to outright invasions of bodily autonomy.
That’s the distinction I saw in early 2021 which clearly demarcated the beginning of Nazi policies.
But of course, it’s all the same rot.
My position for 8 years has been:
We Don't Need Reform. We Need to Burn it to the Fucking Ground.
Artful politics is: "the purposeful creation of an illusion of options for the audience." ~ Sundance
We are fooled to believe we have 2 parties in the U.S. or Canada. What we have is one uniparty controlled by the same corporations.
Or perhaps two parties each half-filled with well meaning people, but with all the levers of control corrupted.
At the moment, the Republican Party has more new uncorrupted energy stepping up to the plate. But my hope always is that we reformulate the way the game gets played and engineer a new era that will be something like the next great expansion of liberty. The liberty of the Kunlangeta harms the world. The liberty of the people broadly saves it.
After Obama gave the bankers the keys to the kingdom and Democrats didn't flinch, after watching how easily the left was manipulated about Trump, watching how the left embraced the surveillance State, embraced censorship and seeing how they weaponized race, gender and the media, screaming for social justice while giving a free pass to the accumulation of wealth in fewer and fewer hands, while seeing an opportunity to pit the minority working class against the white working class, it was a no brainer for the banks to embrace the Democratic Party.
One of my concerns is, as they seem able to justify just about anything to "save democracy" I wonder what they will justify in the handling of elections? And I wonder if they will be led into conflict with Russia and China, half-thinking it will help them win in 2022.
Trump is like an inversion of the fascist cult of personality. The Democrats formed an anti-cult of personality around him, right down to drinking the Koolaid.
"Let them know that you disapprove of anything short of immediate action to investigate criminal activity that has affected society on a large scale. Let them know loudly. Let them know that they cannot be reelected if action does not begin now. "
Nobody needs a Washington career or time on Capitol Hill to understand the first job of Congress is to be reelected and grow their own power. The biggest influence on MoC after corp largess is public pressure. When these swamp dwellers hear public anger they do adapt their actions to follow the voters & get those votes.
Nothing works better than phone calls, brief and polite is best; folks who answer phones do not make policy they take messages. Sounding unhinged and angry lands you in the "Crackpot File" and every MoC office has them.
Capitol switchboard will locate MoC by zip code if you don't know which gem is yours & every Committee has its own staff so messages can be left there as well. Most district offices also have walk in hours and every meeting or call there is recorded and sent with a daily "District Activity" packet to Washington. District staff are always locals living in the community and typically friendlier than the sharks that thrive inside the Beltway as another option.
Capitol 202-224-3121 .... let them hear you!!
Thanks for the reminder to donate to Ron Johnson !
In a reply to a comment here, Mathew links to one of his older posts. It is definitely worth a read, so I'm bumping it here:
https://roundingtheearth.substack.com/p/the-monetary-wars-part-vi
I made an advanced order of the Fareed and Tyson book, and was just notified that the order is cancelled. What happened? Did the publisher cancel at the last minute? Are they being censored?
Politics is all theater. Trump won with huge margins. When they saw that, they shut down counting in only the 4 states needed to change the outcome and then manufactured enough votes to put a demented old man over the top.
Apologies. That's actually a long and icky story. Amazon was "concerned" about quotes from a couple of newspapers and I think the statement from the Rome summit that 17,000 physicians and medical researchers have signed. So, we had to do contracts, signatures, permissions, and a little textual changing, but not until after a few thousand orders were canceled.
Interpret all that however you like.
In other words, it's censorship.
Same thing happened to me with my Kindle pre-order. But I went back to the Amazon website and was able to order it.
Steve Sweeney’s loss was a miraculous and beautiful thing.
"And for whatever reason, it does seem that within the past several decades, the banking networks around which so much of the corporate world revolves seems to have chosen the Democratic party as a place to consolidate power."
I think you have this backwards. It was the left that realized the power of controlling the banks as a way to consolidate power that has led us to where we are now. Consider CRA, ACORN and the control they had over bank mergers back in the 90s and early 2000s. Their leveraging of well-intentioned regulations to achieve their own policy goals was a template for the party. Obama took it to the next level with Operation Choke Point and showed how government muscle, when flexed in the face of heavily regulated industries, can be far more effective than legislation in achieving policy goals.
Hmmm. My experience in finance was that the banks are by far the most powerful industry. Almost all power is downstream from them. Nobody in finance talks about politicians buying banks. Only the other way around.
I'm very familar with the ACORN story, including pieces of it that the public is likely never to know broadly. Much is theater.
https://roundingtheearth.substack.com/p/the-monetary-wars-part-vi
What institution has proven itself worth saving?
We don't know until we test them.
They haven't been tested for 5-10 decades?
It seems important to remember that we cannot just dismantle institutions without providing a better replacement. This makes reforming any institution the economical choice, if it can be done.
What do you think the odds are that someone or ‘something’ rises from the right, a legit authoritarian that gets things done. I know some are kind of worried that will happen as a reaction to everything we’re seeing from the left right now. Not to say that we aren’t seeing authoritarianism now though.
As to not being able to handle a landslide, well, they did pretty well conjuring up a few million fingers on the scale last time. The question that bothers me is why? It seemed the threat was well enough contained. Why be so obvious?
One take is fear of an alliance between the bourgeois and the working class against the managerial class, the kunlageta, the pathocracy ... I don't know if there are hard divisions to be made.
https://thecirculationofelites.substack.com/p/class-dynamics
"Let them know there is great need to rein in powers of unelected bureaucrats."
This is a point that Michael Knowles has been hammering on his podcast for several years. He lays the blame for our unelected bureaucracy mess at the feet of Woodrow Wilson.
Being inside the industry for 27 years, I can see where the perception comes from. But left to their own devices, the banking and financial services industry would gladly be left alone and contribute equally to both sides to ensure optimal outcome for their desired results. But look at which side is threatening to drop the regulatory hammer as the banks go farther and farther to appease both congress and the several bureaucracies (the Fed, the OCC the SEC, the CFPB etc) that have a say in their day to day operations. The banks contribute to the Dems BECAUSE Elizabeth Warren is pounding the table so damn hard, not in spite of it. The banks are curtailing lending and investment to oil and coal interests, firearms manufacturers, payday lenders and the like not out of their own societal belief but because they are being pressured by regulators to do so. It can be covert but when environmental groups get ahold of congress and then congress holds hearings and then asks questions like "what is your institution doing to help cutail the cycle of violence in our cities?" the message is clear.
The funniest example of this was when Maxine Waters tried to hold the banks responsible for the student loan crisis and made each CEO answer how much money they made on student loans. One by one they each answered, zero, we got out of the business when the federal government made itself a monopoly in that space. These are the people running the show.
"But left to their own devices, the banking and financial services industry would gladly be left alone and contribute equally to both sides to ensure optimal outcome for their desired results."
Are you certain?
In 2018 I did an exercise I plan to repeat in a future article. I looked up the political donations of everyone who ran a top 50 financial firm. Aside from the Congressional Finance Committee, nearly every single one favored Democrats in their giving. The era of Republican coziness with Wall Street ended in the 80s. By the time I got there in the late 90s, it was mostly Democrats. At the top, Democrats completely dominate the relationships.
Let's make sure we're not confusing individuals with firms. I just did a quick search of JP Morgan on Open Secrets and found a chart that lays out political contributions by cycle. I can't post the pic here in the comments but a link to the page will allow you to scroll down and see contributions particularly to senate and house races dating back to 1990. I know it's one firm over time but it's pretty clear.
https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/jpmorgan-chase-co/summary?id=D000000103
I think we need to make a distinction between a CEO's personal political views and their willingness to impose those views on the business they have responsibility for. If it is profitable to lend to an unfavored industry, they would most certainly do it. Growth and profit are not as easy to come by as one might think (speaking as a part of the machine with responsibility for directly going out and growing assets and revenue). Furthermore, as a financial services employee, I have been subject to all sorts of training over the years. Only as the political environment evolved did I start to notice certain things. For example, long before anyone started having to do DE&I training, banks had to have regular annual training about antidiscriminatory practices, disparate impact, "people centered" language, etc. Most of this was part of annual regulatory training modules. Again, this was long before cultural training began making its way into the standard corporate training rotation.
Thanks for that link. It's an interesting one.
The Clinton speaking fees are another story, too. It makes me wonder how much money gets passed around that we don't even know about. I know that news stories about Bill's take changed the numbers after being published, which was interesting to see in real time.
When I get to the point of creating a spreadsheet and list, I will share those findings.
For sure. I think the point you're making (or the one I ASSUME you were making) still stands, though. Ultimately, special interests and politicians are in each others' pockets and ears and none of us are represented in any of that despite the fact that the most powerful industries that impact our lives are making policies for and with those who are supposed to be representing our interests and it has to be stopped or at least moderated to the degre possible through transparency.
Open Secrets is fantastic & have done amazing work for years. Unfortunately the transparency led to an explosion in Dark Money PACs which far outspend the candidate donations that boil down to endorsements. Corps not only write off the donations they get billions in contracts for millions spent to buy their own candidates. Best RoI in the history of investments & big time favorite explaining the ruse.. Catherine Austin Fitts.. Make a Law Make A Business!
https://dillonreadandco.com/
There's what you might term confounders? to account for donations skewed by Committee seats.. like Monopoly Chair Ways & Means is Park Place.. Intel & Ag the Railroads & Utilities so each sector has its own risk/reward investment strategy.. so much so that half the USDA subsidy dollars go to Ten MoC on House Ag.. 10/435 pocket the bulk for industrial ops w gmo commodity crops.. most farmers and ranchers get zippo. https://farm.ewg.org/progdetail.php?fips=00000&progcode=total&page=district®ionname=theUnitedStates
Like always very good.
Can we trust politicians? Hell no!
Can we trust institutions? Hell no!
Can you trust yourself?
The Individual is confronted with a conspiracy so vast and so enormous that it fades away in its presence - Edgar Hoover
I try as you do to bring to light the darkness that surrounds us and I value your input and I value your contribution for we all are Humans and unite in our spirit and our soul.
https://fritzfreud.substack.com/p/mk-ultra-covid-19-unit8200-israel
"there is great need to rein in powers of unelected bureaucrats" AND elected ones!
Honestly...I've enjoyed your work, but I think you're giving off a terrible impression spamming links at this rate. That probably does drive audience, but at what cost?
Fair point! I just do it automatically now. Apologies I'll remove
I fail to see the need for institutions at all. Perhaps you can help me out -- and I'm quite serious.
Let me explain this perspective.
Let’s take the need to assure safe medicines. Easy. People like Yeadon can start their own companies as third party certification companies, a bunch of other people do that and compete… problem solved. Then people like me would shortly be in business, making millions and saving thousands of lives. And Pfizer would be out of business.
More broadly... every single case of the government punishing individuals for ingesting, injecting, or inhaling a substance that harms nobody else, is a serious violation of individual rights.
I don’t particularly even care if people want to take Covid vaccines…. lack of third party certification, for instance, could mean there’s a high potential for fraud. People might die, that’s on them -- so long as the product isn't forced. Darwin Doin Work.
It doesn’t matter whether we are talking about cannabis, ivermectin, covid vaccines, or Coley’s toxins. A truly free market would rapidly sort out the truth. (How to get there is another question: I suspect we agree more on decentralization as a possible solution.)
Given that the large majority of those incarcerated in the U.S. are there over non-objective laws, particularly drug laws - and that this rate is highest in the world - objectively makes the U.S. government the most rights violating government on earth, leaving out corner cases such as North Korea.
Not only does it *not* argue for its supposed ability to "do good" worldwide by changing other governments, it argues that the U.S. government is logically at the top of the list of governments that have no legitimate sanction to exist.
Covid only made this much clearer because it *very rapidly* affected a far greater swath of people in the “respectable” classes.
That is why I did not get all that worked up over the suppression of HCQ and ivermectin in 2020. Same fascism, different decade, returning us to 1990 mortality levels. Yawn. The government has been depriving terminal cancer patients of treatment for decades, and 500,000 of them die every year.
Only in 2021 did the rights violation become much more severe, extending not just to denial of medicine (which has been going on for 6 decades), but to outright invasions of bodily autonomy.
That’s the distinction I saw in early 2021 which clearly demarcated the beginning of Nazi policies.
But of course, it’s all the same rot.
My position for 8 years has been:
We Don't Need Reform. We Need to Burn it to the Fucking Ground.