08-21-2019, 07:22 AM
(08-20-2019, 12:33 PM)AspieMillennial Wrote:(08-14-2019, 08:55 AM)Hintergrund Wrote:(07-22-2019, 10:22 AM)David Horn Wrote: The last great monopoly breakup was AT&T in 1984 -- certainly a 3T effort.
If this was the last one, and occurred when the 3T started*, it was rather the last gasp of the 2T.
* I admit that the border at 1984 isn't as clear as that of eg 1929 or 1945/46. Still, good enough.
(07-22-2019, 10:44 AM)David Horn Wrote: A political resolution requires some degree of consensus. How does that occur?
No damn idea for today, but last time, FDR's landslide happened. Check out the reasons for it.
(07-26-2019, 04:20 PM)Mikebert Wrote: Well you can access my most recently published paper here:
Read it. Can big changes not happen until the Unequality goes even higher? We're still under 1929 levels.
Also, didn't Bill Clinton raise the tax rate a bit?
(08-01-2019, 01:11 AM)AspieMillennial Wrote: If the bad guys win, the cycle is broken. If the US lost WW2 and the Nazis won then that would've been a broken cycle.
In every Crisis, someone loses. Ask the British loyalists after the ARW or the Southrons after the ACW. But the American cycle still went on.
Someone loses in every cycle but if the bad guys lose it's obviously different than the good guys losing. If the good guys lose it could be catastrophic. This is what happened when communism won in 1917.
The cycle isn't broken; politics is. American politics has had aligning the money with politicians and policies that the donors want since the Reagan Revolution. The economic elites have their agenda, which includes having the general society rewarding them for doing what they want to do: market consolidation, corner-cutting at the expense of the environment and consumer safety, evisceration of organized labor, and elite indulgence. 3T memes of plutocracy still dominate public life and come to the fore with a President who fits a Marxist stereotype as a political leader in an ultra-capitalist society.
At the least the Loyalists were not strung up from makeshift gallows from Calais, Massachusetts (Maine was then part of Massachusetts) to Brunswick, Georgia. At least the Union did not encourage slave revolts in which slaves took over the plantations, killed the male members of the planter families, and raped the white women. America and Britain chose to treat the defeated Germans and Japanese (except for war criminals) with much more kindness than the leaders of the Axis Powers.
As for the Bolshevik Revolution -- that was a real horror in the result, far worse in effects than one could have expected. Obviously Lenin had a huge body count, but after him came Stalin who did even worse. The association of much of the core of Bolshevik fanatics as leaders with apostate Jews fed the antisemitism that became a cornerstone of Nazi and other fascist ideologies (including the Hlinka Guard in Slovakia, the Ustase in Croatia, the Arrow Cross in Hungary, the Iron Guard in Romania, and eventually people who would become Nazi collaborators in occupied countries -- and the British Union of Fascists and National Socialists, and the 1915 KKK in America, which did not. Antisemitism would become a part of Italian fascism as Nazi influence became powerful in Italy.
No Bolshevik Revolution means that Hitler never achieves power. The optimum would have been that Kerensky stayed in charge and an elected parliament guides Russia through some rough times... but that of course did not happen. No Bolshevik Revolution also means no brutal White movement in Russia which itself flooded Europe with refugees from White terror -- including many Jews.
Who knows? Maybe the cycle will force politics to fit their normal course again and discredit 3T ways in which American politics are stuck. Maybe it will take a damaging recession to compel the breakup of cartels and trusts and encourage small-scale economics again. Small-scale entrepreneurs who must defer to the harsh reality of competition have less capacity to exploit workers and consumers than do monopolistic behemoths with bureaucratic management out for itself at the expense of everyone else.
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.