Generational Dynamics World View

[pbrower2a]

(10-31-2017, 10:57 AM)John J. Xenakis Wrote:

(10-29-2017, 02:24 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: >   I interpret Donald Trump's "Make America Great Again" as a return
>   to most of the norms of the 1920s -- no welfare state, no concern
>   for the environment except for profits that can be extracted from
>   it, much higher inequality of income, weak-to-nonexistent unions,
>   ess reliance upon education, bosses fully in control of employees,
>   and no welfare state. He can't shrink the military, and he would
>   not dare bring back Jim Crow. Obviously he can't undo the
>   technological improvements from then.

The thing that I really love about Trump's tweets is that they drive
people like you absolutely crazy, and make it clear that you still
don't have a clue why you lost the election.  Part of leadership is
learning how to identify and disarm your enemies, and Trump does that
very effectively with his tweets, because you guys can't talk about
anything else.

OK, Hillary Clinton did not run a good election. She went after votes that she did not get or that were less important than votes in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin (or Florida) that really would have made a difference.

Donald Trump is the first demagogue to win the nomination of one of the two main political parties. Except for Dwight Eisenhower, all Presidents from Cleveland on have some record of service in elected or appointed office (this includes the Cabinet), so we all have some record of the politician's conduct as a political leader. With Trump we got a pig in the poke. Indeed we really got a pig. We got someone who has no idea of how the political process really works.

At least with Eisenhower we had a clear image of his personality. Exhibiting a chilly rationalism, caution, respect for institutions and legal precedent, and a willingness to cut deals with usual opponents, he would be a fine President. That sounds much likie another recent President. Maybe not in the league of Washington, Lincoln, or FDR, but well fitting the time. If I compare Obama to anyone it is Eisenhower even if Obama shot his way through public office quickly, was a little younger, and had no military service.  I can show you an overlay of Eisenhower and Obama elections whence I conclude that Eisenhower and Obama appealed to much the same political culture as shown by the states. Partisan affiliations can change in states, but their political cultures rarely change except for demographics.

Quote:The phrase "Make America great again" is not about a return to the
1920s, and the end of the welfare state or ignoring the environment.
I haven't heard anyone even suggest those things, which shows how
completely moronic and laughable your statement is.

Donald Trump is a Marxist stereotype of a capitalist. For good reason, Marxists use that stereotype -- a rapacious hedonist devoid of conscience -- as their strawman argument against capitalism. That, to the surprise of nobody, is the worst sort of capitalist. Donald Trump is not an innovator. He's basically a rent-collector. He is not out to expand a market; he is out to get more out of the market in which he is by grabbing more income from tenants. Railroad magnates at least made transportation available to settlers in the thinly-settled West and replaced draft horses with more efficient transportation between cities. John D. Rockefeller II was as much an innovator in discovering fuels for household and commercial use as he was in distributing those fuels. Henry Ford may have been a piece of work, but at least he made automobiles available to the proletariat. Don't forget the charitable institutions that Andrew Carnegie (lots of libraries, many extant) and Howard Hughes (medical research) established through their bequests. I have no idea what Warren Buffett intends to establish with his gigantic fortune, but it will likely be something that we will want to keep in the privat4e sector.


As a demagogue, Donald Trump created or adopted a vapid and ambiguous slogan that he could use to mean whatever he wanted it to mean while convincing other that it means something very different. He has sold out his voters to the rapacious hedonists like him as plutocrats and to the executive elite.

Quote:The phrase "Make America great again" is actually about recovering
from the disasters of the Obama administration.

No -- it is about refuting the idea that an erudite non-white fellow could be President, something that grated on white people especially in the Mountain and Deep South, and of the rise of non-white, non-Christian people into the middle class as America let its industrial base erode. It's about celebrating the "low-information voter" who has been the supporter of demagogues from Vladimir Lenin to Adolf Hitler to Hugo Chavez and sticking it to the egghead who prefers counterpoint to country music.

The erosion of America's industrial base began long before Obama, and accelerated under Dubya as he pushed a bubble economy based on people buying houses that they couldn't really afford. As Friedrich Hayek suggests, it is the capital-devouring bubble that does the damage and the financial panic (as in 1929 or 2008) that shows when people realize that the bubble won't sustain itself.

Donald Trump, who surprisingly got catcalls from Corporate America during his campaign, since kissed up to those elites at the expense of everyone else. That's one way to disappoint the masses, if not those who own and manage the assets.

Quote:The most obvious example is Obamacare.  Obamacare was a financial
disaster.  I knew that from day one, and I wrote about it in 2009.  It
was perfectly obvious to anyone who cared that Obamacare was going to
end in financial disaster.  Obama lied about it every time he opened
his mouth -- keep your doctor, keep you insurance plan, and everything
else he said about it.  He lied every time he opened his mouth.

With any major reform comes unintended consequences. We cannot assume that the unintended consequences are all bad. Social Security, for example, cut heavily into the sale of whole-life insurance policies. IRA accounts have made possible a great inflation in the cost of nursing homes that the politicians have given blank checks with our signatures upon them. Expansion of opportunities for college education in the early 1960s made possible the counterculture of the late 1960s . That's not only true of political change; it is also true of technologies. Automobiles made possible such prolific bank robbers as John Dillinger and the Barrow-Parker gang, and television has become a wonderful tool for numbing the minds of multitudes.

For the worst sorts of unintended consequences, simply stick to the preservation of rotten institutions and practices.

Quote:In fact, everything that I predicted in 2009 would happen has
happened.  I was pretty much 100% right about Obamacare from the
beginning.  On the other hand, everything that Obama said about
Obamacare has turned out to be a lie, which was obvious to me.

But other countries have national healthcare. Of course their systems are responsible to elected officials who have budgets to meet. Germany has physicians paid far less than American physicians -- but German physicians got their education from the start of undergraduate school through medical school at practically no cost

Quote:So it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone the enormous contempt I have
for Obama when I was 100% right and for 8 years I've had to watch him
openly lie and put the entire American economy at risk to satisfy his
own ego, for something that was provably a financial disaster from the
beginning.

OK, here's your disaster. From the spring of 2009, this has been a good time to be an investor.




It isn't simply inflation driving up stock prices and dividends:

Quote:And so Trump's "Make america great again" applied to Obamacare
is to fix this financial disaster to try to limit the damage.
That's real leadership.

With President Trump trying to repudiate everything that Obama does, it is only a matter of time before we have another nasty economic downturn. I have no idea what sort of solution Donald Trump would have.  Oh -- burn more coal? Open the spigots on effluents? Burning more coal will get us the global warming that the President says is a hoax. More pollution means quick profits but great human and environmental costs that cost us heavily in side effects (lead cuts into intellectual ability and creates behavioral problems and creates crime waves) and future remediation.

Quote:Then there's foreign policy.  Obama's foreign policy never made any
sense to me.  He had no clue what's going on in the world on the day
he took office, and still had no clue on the day he left.  The worst
was his whole "red line" farce about wmd's in Syria, which was an
enormous disaster for America because it showed how weak we were under
Obama.  Trump's missile attack on Syria earlier this year did a lot to
reverse Obama's disaster.

As shown by the dictator of North Korea loosing missiles to incinerate numerous Japanese and South Korean cities while Obama was President, the continuing survival of Osama bin Laden, and the acceleration of the frequency of terrorist attacks upon America and its allies. Whoops! Obama doesn't incite anti-Americanism. Pardon the Star Trek reference, but he likes to serve his revenge cold.

Quote:Then there's John Kerry.  I still just can't get over this.  John
Kerry said in 1971 that American soldiers were worse than Nazis, and
he confirmed his 1971 remarks in 2006, around the same time that he
said that all American soldiers were stupid.  I just can't get over
Obama's appointing this jackass as secretary of state, a thumb in the
eye to every American soldier, and showing enormous disrespect to the
military.  This is another sign of Obama's contempt for America and
America's values, and putting the country at risk.  This is
unforgivable.

And then we had to watch as Kerry lurched from one foreign policy
disaster to the next.  To say that Kerry is a jackass gives him too
much credit.

Even I concede that John Kerry wasn't up to the job.

Quote:Once again, Trump showed real leadership by appointing Rex Tillerson
as secretary of state, who is working to undo the disasters of the
Obama foreign policy.  This is what he means by making America great
again, not your idiotic interpretation of ending the welfare state.

An unconventional choice. Someone connected to the fossil fuel business and with no record of diplomatic, military, or elective service? We shall see. Tillerson often has his spats with the President.

Quote:Then there's Obama's use of tsunamis of regulations to cripple the
economy.  Trump has shown real leadership by reversing many of those
regulations.  The irony here is that people call Trump a dictator when
it's clearly the opposite -- by reversing the regulations he's making
the country freer.  It's Obama who was pushing the country to
dictatorship by his tsunami of regulations, and it's Trump pushing the
country away from dictatorship by ending the regulations.

No, he's simply doing what the most rapacious plutocrats want him to do.

Quote:Finally, there was Obama's contempt for the law and the Constitution.
You talk about dictatorships, but Obama's contempt for the
constitution is the real danger to America's democracy.

Obama was openly contemptuous about religious freedom, gun ownership,
and free speech when it didn't agree with him.  But Obama went way
beyond that.

I saw none of that under Obama. Tell me all about his Great Gun Grab, as I must have missed it. If anything it is President Trump who is squelching science when it runs afoul of his economic agenda.

Quote:Obama used the IRS to target Republican organizations, he started a
criminal investigation targeting a Fox reporter, he misappropriated
billions of dollars to give to his cronies to prop up Obamacare and
other programs through sweetheart deals with contributors, he invited
violent groups like BLM to the White House, he refused to bring
criminal charges against banks that caused the financial crisis, but
instead took billions of dollars in donations from the money that the
banks gained from illegal activities in the financial crisis, and so
forth.

Obama is no friend of legal misconduct. Black Lives Matter  has an agenda, but that is for police to be less trigger-happy around black people than they are around whites. Protesters at one Black Lives Matter event ended up shielding cops from a shooter at one protest at Dallas.

Pull a gun on a cop and you will end up dead. There are no protests about that.

Quote:Conservatives have more fully documented Obama's almost unending
criminal activities and threats to America and American values:

http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/...residency/

http://thefederalist.com/2017/01/19/10-w...residency/

There have been no Obama officials indicted for any law-breaking. There would be plenty of opportunities for indictments and convictions if there were any wrongdoing suitable for prosecution. If a judicial system with plenty of Obama appointees is making things tough for bad actors under Donald Trump... do the crime, do the time.

In view of the indictment and house arrest of Paul Manafort, we can all see that President Trump has much more tolerance of shady associates than did Obama. Your problem with Obama is that you dislike him and his position on the political spectrum. I would have big trouble with a Trump-like Democrat as President if he were similarly corrupt and capricious. If I want drama, I'll grab a video or go to the theater, thank you.

Quote:These are really serious threats to America's democracy, and Trump is
showing real leadership with "Make America Great Again" by reversing
Obama's disasters.

He is setting up America for real disasters, as by baiting Kim Jong-Un. Kim Jong-un can of course act up in the worst way possible without being baited, but I see it this way: I'm not throwing stones over a fence where a couple of Rottweilers lurk. I want those Rottweilers to have no reason to vault, knock down, burrow under, climb over, or break through a fence to knock me down (which is basically a fall) and inflict some nasty lacerations from its teeth and claws.

This is a severe fault of character.

Quote:Democrats are hoping to use Mueller as a weapon to kill Trump.  If
they succeed, then hopefully Price will continue to reverse the Obama
disasters and work to make America great again.

Price? I thought you meant Mike Pence, an unabashed reactionary who wants a return to the 1920s.

Quote:Anyway, have you read today's tweets?  I'm sure you'll find something
to scream about.

I have learned to avoid the President's impulsive tweets. Aren't you sick of all that "Crooked Hillary" nonsense?