11-10-2018, 10:25 PM
(11-10-2018, 07:53 PM)kiki Wrote: Some Americans may have thought that tyranny would never come to the US because the rich, celebrities, media, politicians, and American people would resist.
The rich? Big rural landowners have been the earliest backers of reactionary and fascist regimes. Big urban landowners (as landlords) are among the most reactionary interests in America, their ideal being a captive market for over-priced housing and low taxes on real estate. Think of Donald Trump as an example. The rich often have a vested interest in turning inherited assets into sources of easy money, with captive markets becoming cash cows for rich profits. Add to this the exploiter class analogous to the old Soviet nomenklatura, a bureaucratic clique that ended up with aristocratic incomes without having to invest in business like genuine capitalists and whose succession often became from father to offspring. Our executives are paid inordinately well to treat workers badly.
Quote:Who would have thought that the rich would loot the country by getting bailouts and subsidies while being the ones conspiring and building the police state by paying actors, singers, and athletes to distract Americans with bread and circuses, using reporters to push propaganda, real crises, and false flags, and buying off and corrupting politicians with campaign donations and cushy job promises to start wars, import refugees that weaken and divide the US, drive up the debt, make laws that enslave Americans, and throw crumbs to pacify the 99% in the form of food stamps, Obamacare, Obamaphones, and public housing?
Just look elsewhere in time and place.
I will admit that entertainers are paid well, but only at the apex of achievement. First-rate film and TV stars, major-league athletes, and best-selling popular musicians are doing extremely well. Fall short of the apex, and the pay drops off precipitously. People need bread, of course, and if the food supply ever stopped the system would collapse quickly. Circuses? Human nature has changed little since Roman times, except that we moderns have abolished slavery and no longer feed dissidents and heretics to bears and big cats. If we were as amoral as the Romans we would have costly aquariums in which the damned of our society would be cast to crocodiles or sharks as entertainment. Instead of chariot races we have stock car races, which are safer than those races depicted in Ben Hur.
Food aid is a poor substitute for a solid income, and I get it as the result of a disability; Obamacare may have saved my life in a rough time. The infamous Obama phone is intended to help people get jobs.
Quote:The destruction of the USA is nearly complete.
I respectfully disagree. Social rot becomes severe in a depraved 3T, and a Crisis Era usually corrects the rot in a healthy society with a healthy political system. Obama was a fine President (just look at the historical assessment that puts him just short of the top, in the league with Truman, Eisenhower, and Reagan), and Trump is just simply awful. The most despised emperors of Rome were Nero, Caligula, and Commodus (that has been a consistent assessment for several centuries), vile leaders better at entertaining gullible masses than in doing any tangible good. A President of the United States has powers similar to those of a Roman emperor except for lacking the prerogative to murder rivals and opponents. Trump is more like a bad Roman Emperor than is any earlier President, partially fitting the pattern, but he is not as evil and nowhere nearly close to Nero, Caligula, or Commodus.
The Roman Empire, according to such a historian as Arnold Toynbee, was a rotten social order from its establishment, and it took nearly 500 years before its western section (including what is now England, Wales, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Austria, Slovenia, Croatia, Spain, Portugal, the non-desert parts of Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, the German Rhineland, western Hungary, and all but the southernmost part of Italy) fell to the barbarians. Ancient Rome had far fewer resources on which to fall back even in its heyday than does the United States. To be sure, Donald Trump has imposed much institutional rot upon America, and he is not alone. He does the bidding of parasitic elites, and I can attribute much rot to a depraved culture as perverse as that shown in Cabaret.
This said, we may find our rescue in the achievements of model minorities (the black, Hispanic, and Asian bourgeoisie) who respect learning, take care of their own poor, and start new businesses -- the latter in position to out-compete the bureaucratic monstrosities doing too little for too much. Maybe we could use a 1930s-style depression to bring down some of the bloated behemoths that have exempted themselves from competition. It may be ironic, but the Great Depression was a great time in which to start a business. Just because most people were broke, there was little opportunity for material indulgence. One might as well have built sweat equity into a small business. Labor was cheap, regulations were lax, and taxes were difficult to collect. Start-up businesses rarely have income worthy of taxation -- unlike the case with the corporate giants that collapsed between 1929 and 1932. Customers were precious, so small businesspeople had to cultivate them with service and astute management. Small businesses are more flexible than bureaucratic monstrosities. Above all, small business owners lack the funds for buying politicians and hiring lobbyists. The American political system has worked best without ab overpowering nexus between wealth and political power -- as if such is not so almost everywhere else in under almost all other times
Obama took the proper course of bailing out the banks so that the economy could still flow. He did so at a price -- not of deficits (which would have been similar in volume, but with lower GDP, which is really-bad government finance) had he not done so -- but because the businesses that he rescued funded reactionary politics. For nearly the last two years we have had Donald Trump, Republican majorities in both Houses of Congress, and a majority of Republican governors of states. We have had in effect two years of political lockstep as if in a single-party dictatorship.
We may be one Lincoln or FDR away from solving many of our problems. Obama came close for two years when he had House and Senate majorities, when he was truly a great President. For the next six years he was mediocre. But that as much reflects the impatience of Americans as it does Obama. We have yet to have a leader as honest-to-Satan awful as Nero, Caligula, or Commodus. 5the Romans had three such bad emperors, and after the third it was all decay in the Latin part of the Roman Empire. (The Greek part was able to redefine and reform itself, and lasted nearly a millennium longer after AD 476).
Trump gives one much cause for pessimism, but 240 other years of American history gives one cause for optimism. Trump is an anomaly who will last but one term as President. Americans have little tolerance for corruption, cruelty, or craziness in a President.
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.