08-21-2019, 09:49 AM
(08-21-2019, 07:22 AM)pbrower2a Wrote:(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.
Paragraph 1: It is very obvious that the nation finds itself involved in a power struggle from which there so far seems to be no relief. But aren't we far enough into the 4T that the behavior you describe is seriously post-seasonal? In the book the authors describe in pretty good detail the adverse consequences of post-seasonal behavior. I also find it quite interesting that it seems more and more obvious that we can and in fact need to be quite discriminating about who you're in relationships with. Possibly a subject for a different thread, but more and more being in the wrong relationships can get you in pretty deep trouble.
Paragraph 2: Not much response needed here except to point out that some of these global relationships had opposite results of what was originally intended, Castro no doubt being a prime example as we helped him gain power not knowing how much it would backfire.
Paragraph 3: Same as P2 except to possibly analyze whether a type of Boshevik or Bastille Redux might be looming on the horizon.
I have often felt that we are past due for a modern-day equivalent of the Bastille, Boston Tea Party, Harper's Ferry of the next Rosa Parks, this time who won't go to the back of the bus for the corporate establishment.
Paragraph 4: There can be endless speculation as to alternative histories, such as if the Confederacy had won the Civil War or even if losing candidates became President. Would Al Gore, a staunch environmentalist, have done more to challenge the naysayers on the global warming issue. Just one example.
Paragraph 5: Again the deteritus and stalemate caused by the current power struggle is very much in play here. Maybe more mindfulness is needed here, and a recipe for such is enclosed in the link to an article I found. Would even staunch progressives such as Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, if elected to office, have the balls to break up the corporate trusts of our second gilded age in the manner that Teddy Roosevelt (a Republican BTW) did during Gilded Age I at the turn of the last century? Apparently the damage recession of the last decade was not enough to do the trick. Might it take a depression even worse than the one following the 1929 crash to get the job done? And do you really think there is any way we can return to the days of, say, mom and pop shops on Main Street?
https://www.adoptionstogether.org/blog/2...ndfulness/