07-14-2018, 02:33 PM
(07-12-2018, 02:15 PM)Eric the Green Wrote:(05-19-2018, 07:33 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: We have an agonizing five and a half months to watch history unfold in America. We all have our hopes and fears. For me this could be a matter of life or death. It is that serious. America could become the nightmare of a repressive, hierarchical, and inequitable social order; with a heritage of militarism unusually severe for a democracy and great resources under command of people of limitless greed and cruelty, America could become the greatest nightmare that the world has ever known. Sure, it would not be as morally objectionable as Hitler's demonic Third Reich or Stalin's hellish Soviet Union... maybe the Germany of Wilhelm II or Italy under Mussolini, only with nuclear weapons in great quantity.
I agree with Brower's assessment of Republican control if it continues much past 2020. Until then, the rising blue wave could still have a chance of stopping the slide. Anthony is an aspiring prophet, as I claim to be, and he says an economic meltdown in Oct 2019 could make this 4T a pure one. I have said that the next recession, which I think I agree with him on the date, will not be as severe as the one in 2008. I say we were in 3T until that one in 2008, and in 4T since; but that this 4T is similar to the one that started in 1850, which the authors thought was anomalous enough to call it a 3T and shorten the 4T to 5 years in 1860-65. So even though I say the years from 2001-2008 were 3T, and since 2008 is 4T, there's enough reason to compare the situation of the 2010s to the "anomalous" 1850s.
Note that I predicted the great recession of 2008 decades in advance, including in the videos that I assume you have all seen, and it did happen, and to the month that I predicted on the T4T forum. I also predicted it would be the start date of the 4T, which is still not agreed to by all, but is still agreed to by the author of turnings, Neil Howe.
A hybrid 4T may happen if the economic elites go one way politically and the non-elites go the other. In such a case it is entirely a question of whose power prevails in the end. I see our elites of ownership and management no higher in morals than either (ownership) feudal lords and (management) the "New Class" of Milovan Djilas, who saw the managerial elites of "socialist" Yugoslavia becoming as oppressive as plutocrats when they had no accountability even if they did not own the assets. Remember -- serfdom is a very profitable and lucrative way of organizing the economy -- for all but the serfs, who comprise over 90% of the people in a feudal or neo-feudal economy that the American Right seems to want, according to the front groups and official communications of those elites. We have endured what looked for a short time a genuine 4T, then a hybrid 4T -- the latter uncomfortable and destabilizing.
FDR was far more successful than Obama not because of ethnicity (after all, FDR was frequently smeared for being a Jew, as shown in the gutter expression "Jew Deal" -- and in the 1930s, Jews were at least as much pariahs to some Americans as were blacks), morals, or intelligence. The economic meltdown compelled America's economic elites to recognize that they faced the same peril as the dirt farmer and the industrial worker. In the 1930s people did not fault the poor for the economic mess that then existed. In the 2010s the solution seems to be (once Obama rescued the banks as was necessary) to squeeze the non-rich on behalf of the economic elites because the economic elites supposedly know better than the rest of us, even if that economic elite has gotten Donald Trump as a leader to foist upon us.
It may take another economic meltdown to fully discredit the elites of ownership and management. Donald Trump is more at fault so far for being ludicrous in his expressions of politics; for many Americans he is more joke than menace. But don't let the jokes about his word salad and his gaffes on human rights fool you; such was also so with Idi Amin. Remember him? If not -- at least you haven't had him in your nightmares. A hint: the crocodiles couldn't eat his political enemies (live or freshly-killed, whichever the case may have been) fast enough.
We have alligators which are voracious as crocodiles.
It will take a severe meltdown, the sort that scares even the economic elites or makes them recognize their political futility, to bring about a whole-hearted, everyone-in-the-same-boat, response to a Crisis Era. We are going to need to see an economy that promotes small business as solutions (it may be ironic, but the 1930s were one of the best times ever to start a small business) to economic distress -- and small-business start-ups are exactly the long-term, low-yield, labor-intensive, illiquid, customer-attentive investments that we need. A nasty downturn turns many of our bureaucratic giants become the beached whales of an economy in a necessary transition. This country's political institutions were made for small farmers and for small shopkeepers, and not for crony capitalists, bureaucrats, and shysters (at least north of the Mason-Dixon line). 3D printing will allow people to make on a small, human scale what used to be necessary for giant manufacturing plants. Get the data (probably by paying for some rights), program it into a machine, and you will be able to make your own (or a customer's) fishing lure, model-car kit, replacement auto part, doll, costume-jewelry item, or perhaps even article of clothing. Such will short-circuit the supply chain. I am surprised that people don't simply download music, record it onto a blank CD, and print a suitable jacket for the CD.
Donald Trump could have stumbled into a situation that makes a non-hybrid 4T possible, either by invading Venezuela (which would be messier than Vietnam) or a trade war that hurts people who usually vote Republican. Just watch the midterm election to see how the wind shifts.
Donald Trump is as antithetical as he could be to FDR. He is nothing more than a shyster and crony-capitalist.He will make an FDR necessary to save the Union and free enterprise. Even if we 'only' get another Obama we Americans will be more patient with him this time because we will be all too aware of Donald Trump.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.