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Poor old Karl Marx, tortured by boils and phantoms, was right about one thing: History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce. Thus, I give you the Roman Empire and now the United States of America. Rome surrendered to time and entropy. Our method is to drive a gigantic clown car into a ditch.
Is anyone out there interested in redemption? I have an idea for the political party out of power, the Democrats, sunk in its special Okefenokee Swamp of identity politics and Russia paranoia: make an effort to legislate the Citizens United calamity out of existence. Who knows, a handful of Republicans may be shamed into going along with it. For those of you who have been mentally vacationing on Mars with Elon Musk, Citizens United was a Supreme Court decision — Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission 558 U.S. 310 (2010) — which determined that corporations had the right, as hypothetical “persons,” to give as much money as they liked to political candidates.
This “right” devolved from the First Amendment of the constitution, the 5-4 majority opinion said — giving money to political candidates and causes amounts to “freedom of speech.” The Citizens United ruling opened the door for unlimited election spending by corporations and enormous mischief in our national life. Then-President Obama — a constitutional law professor before his career in politics — complained bitterly about the opinion days later in his State of the Union address, saying that the court had “reversed a century of law to open the floodgates, including foreign corporations, to spend without limit in our elections.”
And for the next seven years he did absolutely nothing about it, nor did the Democratic Party majority in congress. Rather, they vacuumed in as much corporate campaign money as possible from every hokey political action committee (PAC) from sea to shining sea, especially in the 2016 presidential election starring Hillary “It’s My Turn” Clinton. It turned out to not be her turn in large part because the voters noticed the stench of corruption wafting off this toxic flow of corporate money, which Hillary was using to vastly outspend her billionaire opponent, troll that he was.
Of course, corporations have not always been what they are deemed to be today. They evolved with the increasingly complex activities of industrial economies. Along the way — in Great Britain first, actually — they were deemed to exist as the equivalent of legal persons, to establish that the liabilities of the company were separate and distinct from those of its owners. In the USA, forming a corporation usually required an act of legislation until the late 19th century. After that, they merely had to register with the states. Then congress had to sort out the additional problems of giant “trusts” and holding companies (hence, anti-trust laws, now generally ignored).
In short, the definition of what a corporation is and what it has a right to do is in a pretty constant state of change as economies evolve. And insofar as the current economy is sinking like the RMS Titanic — and our republic as a mode of governance with it — surely the time has come to redefine in legislation the role and existential nature of a corporation in this polity. This homework assignment should be given to the Democratic members of congress, since they are otherwise preoccupied only with hunting for Russian gremlins and discovering new sexual abnormalities to protect and defend.
The crux of the argument is that corporations cannot be said to be entirely and altogether the equivalent of persons for all legal purposes. In law, corporations have duties, obligations, and responsibilities to their shareholders first, and only after that to the public interest or the common good, and only then by pretty strict legal prescription. It may be assumed that the interests of corporations and their shareholders are in opposition to, and in conflict with, the public interest. And insofar as elections are fundamentally matters of the public interest, corporations must be prohibited from efforts to influence the outcome of elections.
That’s your assignment Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, and the rest of the Democratic Party leadership. Get serious. Show a little initiative. Do something useful. Draw up some legislation. Get behind something real that might make a difference in this decrepitating country. Or get out of the way and let a new party do the job.
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Another good column, thanks. I’m generally fond of corporations, but not fond of the extraordinary influence that money has in politics. I really liked the idea of someone running for president who wasn’t beholden to money interests. Unfortunately we didn’t get the billionaire we should have. I wonder if Bloomberg is regretting his decision not to run?
I am not a fan of corporations which have become a libertarians wet dream….all the money, none of the responsibility. Citizens united was a corporate/libertarian construct to end union organizing(democracy in the work place) and to use free speech as a cudgel to bash “one person, one vote”. Libertarians do not like democracy. First out shout the peeps then move to suppress their vote.
I’m not sure what alternative there is to corporations, realistically.
Slower growth and a more agricultural society, which would have been more robust and longer lasting.
Like Alexander the Great the US opted for a more brilliant but shorter career.
So it goes.
It sure has been brilliant. We’ll see how short it is.
Greasie,
Although it appears that the Corporate Uberstate is not a concern to you, I’d say corporations that are properly *regulated* and *restricted* would be a realistic alternative. However, since they now have a firm hold on the levers of the political system… well, we know the rest of that story. (Yes, the Long Emergency continues. …That’s why Kunstler calls it the looooong emergency; we just don’t notice its slow, small incremental deepening.)
Even though corporations and their political servants are hastening it along, Collapse doesn’t care what we think of it or whether we like it or not.
“corporations that are properly regulated and restricted would be a realistic alternative”
While I agree with everyone that the corporations have a malign influence on politics I have serious doubts that this is the main problem. I am more concerned about who would be doing the regulating and who would be telling them what to regulate and how, the press and media.
I have never thought about it this way before but the thought strikes me that the press and media (in their role of creating, reflecting, purveying, expressing, inventing and exaggerating mass delusions and in their parallel ‘preacher’ role of creating and inventing – on the hoof – and expressing and propagandizing the New Morality and in denouncing dissidents and excommunicating heretics), that is, that the press and media are a bigger problem (even) than the corporations and the oligarchs.
I find the idea of powerful politically correct corporations alarming. Are they pc? My guess is that they all are.
Ozone, Why would you think that’s not a concern to me?
I’m pretty sure you and he are wrong about the long emergency too, but that’s a different discussion.
Ozone w/ reason!!! Hehe!
Unlimited liability for the owners.
Alternatives to corporations–How about Golems?
I am talking about the artificial clay creature that is brought to life by the magician inserting an incantation, rolled up on a scroll, into its mouth. After that, it obeys the magician and goes forth to wreak destruction that cannot be legally attributed to him (or her).
On the other hand, a corporation is an artificial person brought to life by a board of directors by means of a corporate charter. After that, it obeys its owners and goes forth to wreak destruction that cannot be legally attributed to them…
Oh wait, I guess Golems are really exactly the same as corporations, aren’t they?
For so it was written…
“a corporation, essentially, is a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance….It can experience no personal hope or remorse. No change of heart. It cannot humble itself. It goes about its business as if it were immortal, with the single purpose of becoming a bigger pile of money.”
Somehow there must be an alternative to this. Don’t you think? If there is not then there can be NO hope. How can there be?
Good evening Walter. I would say many, probably most corporations are good. We don’t want to throw the baby out with the bath water.
Good evening G&p my friend. Tell me, are you a person of power or have you ever held positions which gave you the responsibility of dealing directly with persons of power such as State or Federal legislators or the owners of very large, successful companies? I am curious and am willing to share my own experiences if you care to hear them.
Definitely not a person of power. I am a retired person, but have worked with many people in the past, at many levels. One of them was even Michael Bloomberg, part of the reason I’m so fond of him.
I would like to hear of your experienes, if it is appropriate to share them on here.
Well I worked as a project engineer for a number of companies before starting my own engineering firm in 1989 which I operated for 15 years. I did projects designing and implementing distribution systems up to $2M in size for many different big name companies that you all have heard of. Most of the corporations were run by WASPs and the payoffs, bribes and dirty dealing was rampant and disturbing. The corporate higher ups treated we underlings like second rate citizens and carried themselves like royalty. It was not very uplifting. Once on my own I provided systems to a lot of different big name companies but of all of the men I worked with the only ones that were decent and honest and appreciative of who we were and what we did for them were Jews. I had Sephardic Jews from Syria (the Chera Family) that not only owned the actual dirt under the Manhattan real estate but who treated me and my daughters like family and we are gentiles. I worked for Joe Nakash, the owner and founder of Jordache for a year long project who loved me and bought me lunch everyday and never tired of telling me how “brilliant” I was. He was a great and very colorful Israeli national who I was very fortunate to become acquainted with. But the WASPs, no not so good – very greedy and the bigger the corporation the worse it was. In my political life I deal with household names in Trenton and I assure you that these millionaires have no use for and no respect for any of we “little people”. They also do NO work but have large needs for cash that they will abscond with at any opportunity. I never met Bloomberg, but his soft drink laws left me wondering what kind of an egomaniac he really was, along with changing the laws so he could run for another term. I did meet Mayor Giuliani who was a powerful speaker and very pleasant to deal with, though I cannot vouch for him either way personally.
Nope, sorry but my experiences with the rulers (except for the Jews) did not leave me thinking that we are in good hands but rather that we are the herd to be sold and slaughtered for their enrichment.
Well, it sounds like Bloomberg has the basic qualification you look for.
I think the soda thing was silly, but it was done with the best intentions. Same with the third term. Considering the curent mayor, I wish he could have run for a fourth term.
Guiliani was a good mayor for what the city needed at the time, but he would be way out of his league in the White House.
And I bet your engineering firm was a corporation, wasn’t it?
Yet if you had disagree with them about Israel or their support for mass immigration for America, they would have turned on you so fast that your head would spin. But sure, they may well have been more charming than big money Wasps. Lot of people are. It’s not hard.
Yes it was a “C” Corp but like I said earlier a small outfit run by a creative entrepreneur employing a few people and NOT owning any political hacks. If it was I could have paid someone to make it a law that everyone had to buy conveyors and I would be just like the “healthcare: corporations. And JS I have to tell you that these men were all very accepting, very open-minded and nothing at all like you say. I was very impressed by all of my dealings with Israelis, though I understand that governments of ALL kinds can not really ever be trusted. People however can be. Occasionally that is.
“I’m not sure what alternative there is to corporations, realistically.”
Corps were chartered by acts of Congress in the 19th century. They were intended for the undertaking of specific large projects (read railroads) where enormous amounts of capital-raising from the public were thought necessary.
There is no necessity for much of present-day corporate America, especially in retail and hospitality. Why is a Walmart necessary? Why is any retail corporation necessary?
I prefer free enterprise, but corporations are mere creatures of government. Except for finance where scale is of importance, their functions can be performed equally well by sole proprietorships or partnerships. True, maybe not as efficiently or at the same rockbottom prices. But look at the collateral damage their strip-mining of middle-class jobs has caused in our society. Think of the constant frustration of dealing with the anonymous drones who work within these hives who seem accountable to no one. Think of your own fear and insecurity and lack of independence if you work for one and how that multiplied by millions has wrought huge changes for the worse in the character of the American people.
As to the issue raised in JHK’s post, the legal person of a corporation is no more competent than is someone lying in an ICU in a vegetative state. Can that person vote, serve on a jury, get married, sign a contract? Usually, someone having medical power of attorney acts in their stead for the specific purpose of making decisions regarding their medical treatment. That is the only way they can “act”. I hope you can see the parallels to a corporation and its Board of Directors. Yet the parallels only go so far; just as you wouldn’t give someone designated to act for you in making medical decisions the power to act legally as your representative in all other capacities, so neither should Boards of Directors have all the broad powers they presently possess routinely in modern corporations. Taking away their power to engage in political activity is a very sensible step in the right direction.
Without corporations, I don’t think we would have cars or trucks, airplanes or pharmaceuticals. You might find it hard to hire an electician or a plumber. Not all corporations are good, but I’d say most are. Same as people.
Well Gracie, without corporations we can still have pretty much all that we have now though certainly not in the mass quantities that are required for societies of our size, no doubt. The element of teamwork in corporate efforts is the best of what they have to offer though once corporate greed sets in it becomes damned near evil. Neither you nor I nor any of us is wise enough or omnipotent enough to say that corporations or people in general are either mostly good or mostly bad. We can state that we believe one way or another and as long as our 1st Amendment rights hold out, expressing your opinion is acceptable, though we may not all agree. What science tells us though is that in any living system where the occupants multiply and compete for resources, unless supply keeps pace with demand, competition get tougher and good neighbors turn bad quickly. Our modern technologies have also added the element of depersonalization to the equation and when coupled with the “I am the center of the universe” and the “My way or the highway” mentalities, I would say that no matter where the balance of good verses bad may have started out, it is getting worse with every passing day. Now I do not say this to fearmonger or doomspeak, but to point out that just as we here do our best to work around each other and work out our different beliefs, so too should the masses in general work at cooperation with one another. I cannot believe that conveying to them can ever be overdone, can you.
@Graycenphil
First, your last point, “Not all corporations are good, but I’d say most are.”
A corporation cannot be good or bad. That’s like saying a zombie is good or bad, in the sense that it has a moral compass. Only the people associated with a corporation can be good or bad. But that’s a technicality. I do know what you mean from a utilitarian standpoint. From that standpoint, I’d say the public is heavily indoctrinated by corporate public relations dollars to believe corporations are a net plus. I don’t buy it.
To address your first point: I never said that there should be no corporations, only that they should be heavily circumscribed to their chartered purpose. It’s possible that for cars or trucks, airplanes or pharmaceuticals, the corporate form is a better choice in order to raise sufficient capital. But electricians or plumbers? Scratching my head on that one.
The corporation allows people to make things, like planes or drugs, or do things, like wiring a house, without exposing themselves personally to liability if something goes wrong.
I’m not sure I agree about the public perception of corporations either. An awful lot of people would make the blanket statement that corporations are evil.
But shouldn’t those in charge be responsible for their willful negligence or fraud committed in the name of the corporation? This occurs too often without any real consequences being meted out.
And of course corporate ad and p.r. dollars don’t fully immunize corporations from their misdeeds. The truth does eventually triumph, though many refuse to hear it.
There are many individuals who will believe anything they are told by the PTB. They want badly to believe that the world is unicorns and rainbows because to believe otherwise is too frightening for their mental well-being. They have through accidental good fortune emerged relatively unscathed from corporate predations. These individuals (of limited life experience) are likely to have the scales stripped from their eyes in the coming years.
I will repeat that the corporation, as someone once styled it, “having no soul to condemn, nor body to punish” is a legal invention which has had profoundly pernicious effects on our society.
Fraud has nothing to do with liaility; it’s illegal and people can still be punished despite the corporation. Whether or not they are is another discussion. Negligence is another issue. It can be illegal, but accidents do happen also, and don’t necessarily merit punishment.
Nothing fully insulates the corporation, nor should it. But the corporation insulates the individual, which allows them to build a car or a plane, or wire a house.
Corporations have no doubt done some evil, but I would argue the good far outweighs the bad. And while the world isn’t unicorns and rainbows, nor is it the Long Emergency. I’m confident we will be okay, and continue to improve. Time will tell.
“Whether or not they are [punished] is another discussion”
No, actually, it’s this discussion. Corporations are too big and powerful and their officers do not go to prison for control fraud. That’s a fact.
Simple negligence is different from willful negligence. Don’t conflate the two.
Corporate officers should not be insulated from the consequences of their reckless actions, whether those be control fraud or willful negligence. Too often they are. If a businessman exercises reasonable prudence, on the other hand, without the benefit of the corporate shield, acting as a sole proprietor or within a partnership, he will have nothing to fear.
You say you “would argue the good far outweighs the bad.” But actually, you can’t argue it because you can’t argue a counterfactual. So that’s merely an assertion. I assert the opposite. We’re just going to have to disagree.
Can someone explain the reason why corporations can make unlimited donations to candidates while actual, breathing people are limited to $2,700?
‘I really liked the idea of someone running for president who wasn’t beholden to money interests.’
I genuinely don’t understand what Americans mean when they say this. Donald Trump is so beholden to money interests (but his own) that without them there is no Donald Trump. Look into his soul (as if…) and there is nothing there but money interests (and the women – sorry, ‘nice pieces of ass’ – that buys in his world, naturally).
He’s the only president, so we’re told over here, who refuses to hand over his tax returns or to properly divest himself of his businesses. Kellyanne (where is your dignity, Kellyanne?) just says ‘no-one cares’ on his behalf and you all just let him get away with it – what’s that about in the land of the free and the home of the brave?
Donald Trump isn’t the person I wanted to run who was unbeholden to money interests.
That said, there is some small comfort in electing someone who is already wealthy, not one who is going to make their fortune off the office. It isn’t working out too well in this case.
I’m not particularly concerned about his tax returns. And I don’ think there was any realistic way of him divesting his business interests. They are just a part of the package, unfortunately.
The 2016 election was a referendum on whether or not the moneyed interests would continue to run the USA through their bought and paid-for proxies. The result was surprising a surprising “no”. Instead, the country decided to give control directly to a billionaire and cut out the middlemen.
Graycenphil, I suspect you have in mind some kind of noblesse oblige by which an enlightened plutocrat will do what’s right by the nation because it suits his pleasure to do so. Verily I say unto you, there is no noblesse oblige in sight. Real change is going to have to come up from below.
Real change may come from below but, then, is handed to (or taken by) those above, e.g., Napoleon and Stalin.
Both candidates represented the noneyed interests. I do believe Bloomberg would have been an infinitley superior president to either.
Trump is a white supremacist’s white supremacist living in the White House.
Got any proof – beyond the fact that he’s White and Republican?
As for your claim, the guy has Jewish grandkids and is thus utterly fatuous.
Look at any Trump rally. You never see anything but a sea of white faces. It’s Mango Unchained.
Classic Negro mentality: see a bunch of Whites and call them racist because there’s no Blacks with them. Thus all previously White Countries are racist. And since racism is the ultimate evil in Seadoof’s world, all Whites sans Blacks are Dr Strangeloves.
If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and smells like a duck it’s an orange haired orangutan? Let’s see he’s sided with Nazi (the good people), he’s condemned a man who is legally and non-violently protesting police brutality and racial inequality and he’s a son of a bitch, he’s blaming Puerto Rico for not sucking it up and helping themselves after they’re hit by a Cat 5 hurricane. Sides with Nazis, comes out against blacks and Hispanics. You do the math.
“Trump is a white supremacist’s white supremacist living in the White House.”
Wolfie,
Or, he is just a white guy sucking at the government’s teat living in public housing….
Utter trash. No evidence.
Albanach Glas, your worthy but dull rhetoric reminds me of Lisa Simpson, Springfield’s answer to a question nobody asked.
Maybe you don’t understand how things work. Getting elected costs a lot so you need big donors, who don’t give their money away with no expectation of return. Studies show that what big donors want, they get – but what the average American wants they do not get.
Great column and something 90% of Americans can agree with!
I tried to persuade my Democratic Senators from New Jersey that the real litmus test for a new Supreme Court Justice should not be identity politics but opposition to Citizens United. We can be reasonably certain that Neil Gorsuch is all for Citizens United as he has done the bidding of the Corporate Big Money, especially oil, gas and Auto lobby interests his whole life.
But of course they did not.
Just as the Democrats voted 89-8 for a BIGGER increase in military spending to a record $700 Billion which shocks everyone I tell about it.
The New York Times has still only had 1 Reuters article about it, results of their own search engine for the past 30 days NDAA:
1 Result
Senate Backs Massive Increase in Military Spending
The U.S. Senate passed its version of a $700 billion defense policy bill on Monday, backing President Donald Trump’s call for a bigger, stronger military but setting the stage for a battle over government spending levels later this year.
September 18, 2017 – By REUTERS – U.S. – Print Headline: “Senate Backs Massive Increase in Military Spending”
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2017/09/19/us-says-no-money-social-programs-700-billion-kill-people-yeah-we-have
Here are the 8 who voted against this huge boondoggle, bigger even than Trump’s proposed $50 Billion INCREASE opposed for about 10 minutes by Corporate Dems:
Only 8 senators voted against the NDAA, which is expected to become law by the end of this year: Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), Pat Leahy (D-Vt.), Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Ron Paul (R-Ky.), Mike Lee (R-Utah), and Bob Corker (R-Tenn.). Three senators did not vote.
Call your Senator about this absurd increase in already record spending for the Endless Wars:
202-224-3121
A wonderful display of bipartisanship. Democrats and Republicans falling all over each other to vote for the bill. MIC is alive and well. I’m bullish on defense stocks.
I don’t know if Bloomberg regrets his decision not to run , but I sure don’t. In 2001 I had a front row seat in one of the greatest (largely unknown) educational debacles in US history. Bloomberg started with mayoral control of the school system ( rather then local community control) He then completely ripped apart NYC high schools.( with the help of Gates and Annenberg foundation grants) Using the Bronx as an example, in 1999 the Bronx had 15 comprehensive high schools each with student populations of between 1500 up to 4,000. Each school had 1 principal and one assistant principle for each academic Dept. When “nanny Mike” got through with them , each high school was broken up into 7 separate “boutique” high schools. each with its own principal at $140,000 a pop. Bloomberg is supposed to be a financial genius, but can you name any other industry in America that has had a 600% increase in mid-level management? At last count , we were up to 522 high schools with such wonderful names as “Peace and Diversity Academy” as well as my personal favorite – the Acorn high school for social justice. No, You can keep Bloomberg.
I attended an NYC elementary school, my mother taught in a city high school and I know more than a few teachers. The schools were lousy then, and they have probably gotten worse. They are a big problem, and will be for a long time.
I think Bloomberg made sincere efforts, and had some good results, working on an exceedingly difficult problem. I’m cautiously in favor of charter schools, which he encouraged. It is hard to judge, but it appears the schools may have improved some under him. At the least, he tried very hard. Whatever was being done before was not working.
But more importantly, the city ovearall is a much better place than it was when he came into office. One can argue about the reasons, but I beleive he deserves much of the credit. He was elected to run the city, not just the schools, and he did it well. What I am sure of is that none of what he did was for his own personal gain; his intentions were only the betterment of the city, such a rare quality in a politician. I would have been very happy to give him at a shot at the country.
Soker!!! I knew U’d be *BACK* .
America became a fascist government on 11/22/1963 and LBJ was the first emperor of the United States. What made it so nebulous was LBJ did so much for the American people. Say what you will about him we live in LBJ’s world.
Landmark Laws of the Lyndon B. Johnson Administration
—–1963—–
College Facilities
Clean Air
Vocational Education
Indian Vocational Training
Manpower Training
—–1964—–
Inter-American Development Bank
Kennedy Cultural Center
Tax Reduction
Presidential Transition
Federal Airport Aid
Farm Program
Chamizal Convention
Pesticide Controls
International Development
Association
Civil Rights Act of 1964
Campobello International Park
Urban Mass Transit
Water Resources Research
Federal Highway
Civil Service Pay Raise
War on Poverty
Criminal Justice
Truth-in-Securities
Medicine Bow National Forest
Ozark Scenic Riverway
Administrative Conference
Fort Bowie Historic Site
Food Stamp
Housing Act
Interest Equalization
Wilderness Areas
Nurse Training
Revenues for Recreation
Fire Island National Seashore
Library Services
Federal Employee Health Benefits
—–1965—–
Medicare
Aid to Education
Higher Education
Four Year Farm Program
Department of Housing and Urban
Development
Housing Act
Social Security Increase
Deaf-Blind Center
College Work Study
Rail Strike Settlement
Voting Rights
Fair Immigration Law
Older Americans
Heart, Cancer, Stroke Program
Law Enforcement Assistance
National Crime Commission
Drug Controls
Mental Health Facilities
Health Professions
Medical Libraries
Vocational Rehabilitation
Anti-Poverty Program
Arts and Humanities Foundation
Aid to Appalachia
Highway Beauty
Clean Air
Water Pollution Control
High Speed Transit
Manpower Training
Presidential Disability
Child Health
Regional Development
Aid to Small Businesses
Weather-Predicting Services
Military Pay Increase
GI Life Insurance
Community Health Services
Water Resources Council
Water Desalting
Assateague National Seashore
Whiskeytown National Recreation Area
Delaware Water Gap Recreation Area
Juvenile Delinquency Control
Arms Control
Strengthening U.N. Charter
International Coffee Agreement
Retirement for Public Servants
—–1966—–
Food for India
Child Nutrition
Department of Transportation
Truth in Packaging
Model Cities
Rent Supplements
Teachers Corps
Asian Development Bank
Clean Rivers
Aid-to-Handicapped Children
Redwoods Park
Flaming Gorge Recreation Area
Food for Freedom
Child Safety
Narcotics Rehabilitation
Traffic Safety
Highway Safety
Mine Safety
International Education
Bail Reform
Tire Safety
New GI Bill
Minimum Wage Increase
Urban Mass Transit
Civil Procedure Reform
Federal Highway Aid
Military Medicare
Public Health Reorganization
Cape Lookout Seashore
Water Research
Guadalupe National Park
Revolutionary War Bicentennial
Fish-Wildlife Preservation
Water for Peace
Anti-Inflation Program
Scientific Knowledge Exchange
Cultural Materials Exchange
Foreign Investors Tax
Parcel Post Reform
Civil Service Pay Raise
Stockpile Sales
Participation Certificates
Protection for Savings
Flexible Interest Rates
Freedom of Information
—–1967—–
Education Professions
Education Act
Air Pollution Control
Partnership for Health
Social Security Increases
Age Discrimination
Wholesome Meat
Flammable Fabrics
Urban Research
Public Broadcasting
Outer Space Treaty
Modern D.C. Government
Vietnam Veterans Benefits
Federal Judicial Center
Civilian-Postal Workers Pay
Summer Youth Programs
—–1968—–
Fair Housing
Indian Bill of Rights
Safe Streets
Wholesome Poultry
Food for Peace
Commodity Exchange Rules
U.S. Grain Standards
School Breakfasts
Bank Protection
Defense Production
Corporate Takeovers
Export Program
Gold Cover Removal
Truth-in-Lending
Aircraft Noise Abatement
Auto Insurance Study
New Narcotics Bureau
Gas Pipeline Safety
Fire Safety
Sea Grant Colleges
D.C. School Board
Tax Surcharge
Better Housing
International Monetary Reform
International Grains Treaty
Oil Revenues for Recreation
Virgin Islands Elections
San Rafael Wilderness
San Gabriel Wilderness
Fair Federal Juries
Candidate Protection
Juvenile Delinquency Prevention
Guaranteed Student Loans
D.C. Visitors Center
FHA-VA Interest Rate Program
Health Manpower
Eisenhower College
Gun Controls
Aid-to-Handicapped Children
Redwoods Park
Flaming Gorge Recreation Area
Biscayne Park
Heart, Cancer, and Stroke Programs
Hazardous Radiation Protection
Colorado River Reclamation
Scenic Rivers
Scenic Trails
National Water Commission
Federal Magistrates
Vocational Education
Veterans Pension Increases
North Cascades Park
International Coffee Agreement
Intergovernmental Manpower
Dangerous Drugs Control
Military Justice Code
– Vietnam “Police” Action
– Voting Rights Act
– Immigration Reform Act
– Debasement of the coinage
– The “Great Society”
All the foundational actions needed for the planned destruction of the greatest nation on earth.
Let’s not even discuss “What happened to JFK in Dallas?”
Lyndon Johnson was a tool of Satan along with his good buddies Javits and Kennedy.
Vietnam War spending blew up LBJ’s whole Great Society.
By the way, until Clinton, LBJ was the last US President to actually have a balanced budget despite the Great Society. Of course this was only by LBJ removing the separation between Social Security paid for by employees and employers own money and the rest of the Federal budget. Which laid the ground work for the billionaires assault on Social Security ever since. Note however that ALL Republican Presidents had much larger budget deficits than Democrats. Primarily due of course to the Endless War spending, the largest gravy train of the budget amounting to well over 50% of the budget with the annual costs of the Endless Wars adding in the 70% of the Dept of Energy budget for nuclear weapons, the Veterans Administration, the CIA, interest on the past Endless War debts is $1 Trillion every year…
Every year!!
There was no balanced budget during the Clinton administration. It was all smoke and mirrors and juggling numbers. Darth Cheney may have been right when he said that deficits don’t matter. Money is a mirage. Yet a necessary one for a functional society.
If you want to see LBJ’s legacy go the St Louis Fed’s FRED site and enter TCMDO (Total Credit Market Debt Obligations) in the search box. After you get a chart of TCMDO then add GDP, which you will see has lagged debt by disastrous proportions.
The financial obligations and unfunded promises fostered by LBJ’s orgy of government growth will be the end of the Republic. We do not have the political ability to address them. Once the debt bomb implodes we will surrender all necessary power to the Executive branch to keep the wheels turning for yet a while. This will be done under the aegis of the Defense Production Act of 1950 and the myriad knock-on “emergency” provisions of countless laws.
As the Roman Senate continued to meet for centuries after Caesar, our Congress will continue to meet to rubber stamp the decisions of the Executive, but they will have no real power.
“I’ll have those niggers voting Democrat for the next 200 years.” LBJ
Has Seawolf just outed himself as a racist – since he loves this racist?
Is Seawolf black?
Just a White hating White Liberal. He soothes his guilt by throwing other Whites to the Dark Gods in the Woods in the hopes they will leave him alone. On the plus side, he gets to feel morally superior by doing so.
Nope.
The corporation in hyper-finance capitalism may be considered a “legal person” but it turns out it is the Frankenstein monster that wants to devour the entre world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QuoKNZjr8_U
How about leveling the playing field and allowing individuals to contribute unlimited amounts, like corporations?
A corporation is a pile of money that wants to become a larger pile of money.
I am not a pile of money, and I refuse to pay for my own [ or anyone else’s ] oppression.
The ideology of a corporation is the same as a cancer cell: infinite growth until it kills the host.
Or take it to the logical next step–
Create a corporation to sell crack cocaine and heroin to preschoolers from the cafeteria. When the police show up, they can take the corporation to jail since you have no personal liability. Rinse and repeat.
There are many possibilities, and more as corps gain unlimited rights…
Uh, I would have kind of a hard time competing with most corporations…
Besides, I guess you do realize that a corporation is a kind of abstraction with real, flesh and blood people making decisions. They not only aren’t real people, they are not even robots. It is people who, behind the cover of their corporations, give money to political causes/candidates.
JK STATES ” In law, corporations have duties, obligations, and responsibilities to their shareholders first, and only after that to the public interest or the common good, and only then by pretty strict legal prescription. It may be assumed that the interests of corporations and their shareholders are in opposition to, and in conflict with, the public interest.
Hurray for exemplary composition. Your words ring aloud with logic and common sense.
How is it that five of nine learned men of justice ignored the simplicity of equal justice for all under the law?
Mussolini defined fascism as the merging of state and corporate power. Of course the government is going to give corporations power and rights not accorded to them by the constitution. The East India Company was marauding the world in 1776. Everyone knew it was a monster. There is precious little protection from corporations in the constitution. But it wasn’t until Standard Oil that America got its monster, and it is with us to this day.
But with the Government in control, the Male who leads the woman. The Sun who heats the earth. What we have now is the woman in control, the corporations controlling the Government, the Vaisyas in control of the highers castes, and the ideology of Global Warming where the Earth heats itself.
You have conflated noble Fascism with base Plutocracy, because you hate both and want Communist Terror to triumph. That’s even lower than Plutocracy.
? Noble fascism?
Huh? What is your issue? Just admit you know nothing about the word or philosophy (yes, it is a “thing” – not just a snarl word or pejorative). In other words, please come forward with what Zen Buddhism called Beginner’s Mind. Show me your empty cup. Then I can fill it. If you come with a cup full of god knows what, then what can I do?
The Culture Hero Cincinatus taught the Ancient Romans thus: He picked up a little stick and broke it. How weak! He picked up a bunch of little sticks and tied them together – they could not be broken. Now do you understand? The bundles of sticks (often with an arrow sticking out), the sheaves of wheat, the eagles, etc – all Fascist symbols. But, but – our old National buildings are full of them! And our currency as well. Yes, dear Lady – you’ve been had. We all have so don’t feel bad. But rather, commit to cleansing, self administered brain washing.
The sticks are “fasces”, thus Fascism or the Sticks together. Like the movie: Apes together, strong!
Ruled by distractions, the Obama era masked the collapse very well with distractions.
Corporations are people too as long as they are small operations started perhaps in a person’s garage by some skilled and motivated entrepreneur and grown to some decent level where a few or a few dozen or even a few hundred employees find gainful income from being part of the operation. We have all known and even worked for such companies, many of us ran our own such businesses for many a year and it is a great thing, the Backbone of a Nation. But it is a question of scale and when the Bucks get Big enough and the buying power becomes sufficient to actually own those in power, well it is just a question of how long it will take for corporate ownership, and thereby unlimited fleecing of the populous to take place. As long as Americans will fight one another to the death over a pallet load of worthless green paper there can be NO turning back. The Federal Reserve, a non-government privately owned Big Bank can simply print up total control over everyone. How can that possibly be a good thing? How can that ever end well?
Walter,
The BBC site, over the last 36 hours, has been describing a series of racial incidents in the Air Force Academy. Apart from the outrages, it mentions that they occurred in the Air Force Preparation School…a ten month course of remedial education to prepare those “cadets” not quite ready for the rigors of the institution.
WTF? This sound suspiciously as a method to both build the Football Team with hired guns(ala the NCAA), as well as fill racial quotas ordered from on high.
I do not recall there being remedial subjects taught at the academies in the 60’s…. I was an alternate at the US Air Force Academy…unsuccessfully.
I participated as an alternate and was unsuccessful or I was unsuccessful as an alternate… take your pick.
Hey there, elysianfield! As requested, I responded to your comment on the blog the other day, since you said you were genuinely interested in what I have to say. Here’s the link on Monday’s post:
http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/take-the-knee/#comment-320939
Let’s keep it going. Did you find anything interesting or edifying in my response?
Elrond,
I would have responded, but realized that the end of the particular comment string was neigh….
The suggestions I made were not meant to be thought of as potential cures, but only issues that have been repeated in comments past.
Supervision…yes, better supervision, but remember that the supervisors are picked from the same pool, the same culture, that you decry. Most Sergeants and Lieutenants are human, and also suffer the human condition…and also maintain their own opinions and predilections. They are long time employees…5-15 years in some cases, and difficult to replace on a whim of the administration in power without real cause.
Technology…. A double-edged sword. Cameras might tend to mitigate some issues, but raise others. The primary negatives involve the arbitrary sanctioning by political groups, of whatever bent…this leads to an officer, through direct action or object lesson, to avoid the issue by only doing that which he is ordered…this may sound like a harmless response, but it is not.
Yes, cops HATE to be saddled with the camera…similar to having an IRS agent looking over your shoulder when you are doing your taxes…. I think, however, that cameras are a done deal…and will not be avoided. I think, however, that they should be triggered by an increase in respiration or heart rate…insensible yet inexorable.
Attempting to change the demographics of a police department to reflect the demographics of the community. Been tried…. Oakland attempted this in the early ’70’s…encouraged all minority officers to recruit their friends…no such effort among white officers. Ended in disaster. Actually provided tutors in reading and writing…dumbed-down the entrance requirements, allowed recruits misdemeanor arrest records…scrapped the military-like discipline of recruit school…uniforms, dress codes, hair…etc. Most were fired, arrested, gone after five years.
ALL departments would love to recruit viable minorities…just not enough of them able/interested, even at the adjusted $5000 per month(adjusted to today’s dollars) that represented starting pay in 1971.
The challenge to mirror demographics is not a management function, but a political one generated, usually without input and forced upon a department’s management.
Better pay? First thing I heard in Police 1A was the wish to make law enforcement a profession…pay was part of the equation…1964. Tremendous push then to raise education levels, pay, recruit training, sensitivity training, psychological evaluations, extended probationary periods…the effort continues.
It just boils down to getting the best response you can achieve with the materials at hand…the human condition…to recognize this, you have to accept that there will never be an end to abuses of power. Some things are absolutes, and cannot be argued against. Understand it, attempt to mitigate it, but just understand that knowledge does not imply acceptance of the unacceptable…you know child rape occurs, and that it will continue to occur…that does not mean you accept it.
Just like in “A Clockwork Orange”. Alex’s thug friends, George and Dim, became coppers while Alex was in the Clink. Elrond loves this kind of thing. Marxist foot soldiers who will be loyal (he hopes!) to the Commissars. Didn’t Obama say we needed a civilian army just as strong as the regular one?
The Zoomies seem to be the dregs of the service academies though I am more than a little bit pre-juiced. The was a reason that the Fly Boys were kicked out of the Army in ’47 and I think it was because they are committed to Death From the Skies with little skin in the game otherwise. Even West Point, the oldest of the academies has had a prep school (at Ft. Belvouir in my day) for as long as I can remember with a mission to help the Army Brats catch up to those of us that had actual intelligence. Of course today, even the Corps Has Gone To Hell, as we say and the days of the morally upright and servants to the Constitution are a thing of the past….
http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2017/09/us-army-infantry-officer-supports-kaepernick-communism-will-win-message/
Walter,
Yes, I knew prep schools existed…but this program seems to be integrated into the academy routine, and on campus. The prep schools prepared those dependents, and others, to apply…this seems to be a remedial course for those selected….
Those corporations had the big robes peckers in their pockets.
From 1977 – 1981 the dollar lost 50 % of its purchasing power. I can remember my father telling me “Son four more years of Jimmy Carter will kill me.” That is where we are headed. The dollar will not collapse. It will be cut in half. Again. It’s already down 10% this year. As the yaun enters the mainstream, the dollar will fade like the pound sterling did.
The Greenback has lost 98% of its buying power since 1913.
But people have food and have more goods. Cars, hot water, telephones etc.
How is this?
Two reasons. The average household makes a lot more income relative to incomes back then as well a lot of households that work two or three part time jobs including working spouses. But the biggest reason is that today, unlike way back when, there is MASSIVE credit in the forms of mortgages, home “equity” loans and credit cards. It takes a lot more cash today then it did before the Beast From Jekyll Island was hatched.
I think, Inventions made the difference.
What you mention is more the 1960- 2000 shift / decline.
40 hours, one salary to 2 salaries, 80-140 hour workweek.
Credit. In the 1930s 1 in 300 went bankrupt.
Now its 1 in 5? And those that do, often do so multiple times.
and
………more cash today thAn it etc
Multiple times. Like Trump? 5 times, and there was no depression.
Because it was over 100 years and most didn’t feel or even notice it. But when it is 50% over a 4 year span, it hits like a freight train.
I have argued for 7 years that this case should be reviewed again and overturned by the SCOTUS. The problem the court was faced with in the original Citizens United case, and would face in any attempt to overturn it, is how do you say that a corporate entity has due process rights without saying they have the right of speech? No one would argue that a corporation does not have the right of notice and a fair hearing. You cannot, in the present scheme, pick and choose which of the Bill of Rights applies to corporations. You certainly don’t do that with persons.
And because it is a decision based on the Constitution it cannot be changed by statute. It would require an Amendment to the Constitution to enumerate the rights of corporate entities.
Can you imagine the effort that would go into lobbying against such an amendment?
There’s one way to find out:
http://www.wolf-pac.com/petition
It is a fair assumption Free Speech is a manifestation of the individual mind. That mind and soul is what has Freedom. A corporation by modern clinical definitions is a psychopath. Sociopath at best.
If corporations were a truly collective mind operating akin to the processes and influences of the individual mind Citizens United may have a point. But they do not. Most corporations are operated as totalitarian entities where Free Speech is anathema.
Can they not draw the parallel between a totalitarian state influencing politics and totalitarian global corporations influencing elections? One of these actors is illegal. They are far more alike than different.
Sanctioned violence comes in different forms, but it appears the core motivation remains the same.
You hit the nail on the head. Free speech is anathema in the corporation, so is freedom of assembly, so is freedom of association, so is freedom of information. The fall-back position of the corporation is the lie, the bigger the lie the better. If there’s a choice of lying or telling the truth – with no difference in outcome – the corporation will lie. In the corporate world it’s lie, lie like hell, lie till you die. And in a totalitarian regime, it’s the same thing, lies are the stock in trade, just like any company.
Why only in a totalitarian regime?
Do you think that our democratic governments feel an intrinsic urge
toward transparency and truth?
Yeah, you’re right, I bet that Tom Price wishes that it could have been kept secret that he wasn’t taking commercial flights.
I agree to an extent – especially with regard to Wall Street banks and brokers. But not all corporations act as a sociopath.
But whether they (corporations) are a moral actor is irrelevant. If you criminally charge a corporation it has the same rights as you and I to, for example, be represented by counsel, a trial by jury, due process, freedom from search and seizure without a warrant and others. So why does it stop there?
But a constitutional amendment could limit those rights or enumerate specific rights that a de jure entity has and those it does not. Anything else is going to fail and will be found unconstitutional.
That is the quandary the court faced in 2010 and the one it faces now. There is no integrity, and not mention no precedent, in saying, “only part of the constitution applies to corporate entities.”
I don’t care which party does it, but getting rid of Citizens United and ending gerrymandering would go a long way toward slowing the clown-car down before it runs into the ditch. We could then end up by the side of the road, with four flat tires as the Chinese clown-car passes us. Then we could learn to walk down the road again.
I am not optimistic, but before the Progressive Era a lot looked awful: strikers gunned down by Pinkertons, lynchings, Jim Crow. And the Progressives then were red-meat conservatives like Teddy Roosevelt.
So I remain hopeful, fool that I am. But not optimistic.
I believe it was RMS Titanic.
Royal Mail Ship
Just to keep the record straight about Obama’s so-called Constitutional law “professorship”:
…Obama was never a professor; he was a lecturer. He did not have the qualifications to be a professor. Obama never published a single law paper. Obama did not specialize in the Constitution. Obama cared about and taught only one subject: race. One course was about race in the Constitution…
–sourced from http://www.americanthinker.com/author/karin_mcquillan/
The Left always means the opposite of what they propose. Thus MLK cry for racial blindness was actually a plan to make race the arbiter of everything. The word didn’t exist yet, but he wanted affirmative action down the line, except for things that were just for Black of course.
Hoe do you know that?
How
Read Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals” dedicated to the first revolutionary, Lucifer. Or read almost any of Sea Wolf’s or Elrond’s posts.
What did or do you mean by “that” exactly? About King? His speeches indicate that he believed in strict proportionality, what later would be called affirmative action. All of his inner circle went on to be Black power junkies who tout it and every other bad thing. And a man is known by his companions, is he not? King was surrounded by such crows. And then there is the matter of how he liked to beat White prostitutes and did so the night before his murder…..
Bama aint straight, thats for sure.
Was Harvard sued over BHOs sexual harassment of a male student?
Perhaps you’ve read “Gangs of America: The Rise of Corporate Power and the Disabling of Democracy” by Ted Nace. It’s a readable history of the corporation, and the history that it presents is in line with what I learned back in law school. I highly recommend it. One shortcoming of the book was that I don’t think there was any mention or critique of the work of Ronald Coase on corporations and transaction costs.
Neither party has either the will or the intellectual horse-power to take on something like what Kunstler proposes as both parties succumb to institutional senility, this collective disability manifesting itself as no apparent agenda other than catering to their billionaire paymasters.
And so what do we get? Fluff, on the Democrat side – the nuts ‘n sluts agenda. And also flim-flam, this non-stop Russian hysteria, this time over Russian hacks of state voting systems. Unfortunately, like the multitude of previous Russia-did-this-Russia-did-that stories, this one has no evidence behind it and so dissipates into the disinformation ether as we sit.
Trump said too many iffy things, out of synch with globalist interests. Too much rabble-rousing, too much boat-rocking. And so the collective aim of the political establishment, Democrat and Republican alike, is to bring down the Trump mastodon by suffocating the beast in a tar-pit of non-stop investigations and then flinging one fake-news arrow after the other, hopefully the cumulative wounds quickening the kill.
I differ with our esteemed host in this however, this isn’t history repeating because history never repeats, it merely rhymes as Twain said. But insofar as this line rhymes with the previous, it’s not tragedy this time around but rather it’s farce. The tragedy comes in the next stanza as the federal government immobilized in its own mire of corruption and incompetence makes it necessary for subnational units to take matters into their own hands. And lest we forget, there’s a proliferation of armed groups in the US – warbands as the Archdruid calls them – that will mount their own campaigns for local power and autonomy.
Good news indeed. If whole cities can be taken over and given to Hispanic invaders, then why shouldn’t Whites take their share? Who has more right than the Builder Race?
Very few posts. Our Grievance Mongering, Left Leaning, Commentariat doesn’t like today’s call for Democratic accountability.
If you can’t blame Trump or Whites, they hate it.
How is the case coming against Sanders’ wife? A year in the slammer would do her good. She could learn to knit and catch up on her reading. Call it sleep, which knits up the raveled sleeve of care. And what is death but a great sleep? And in that sleep, what dreams mayl come?
Aye, there’s the rub.
check the michael robertson link.
Nonsense. You don’t legislate corporations (especially not by vampire swamp creatures like Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, and the rest of the Vatican gov mafia), you kill them with extreme prejudice. When you think about corporations only one image should come to mind, and it is from Ridley Scott’s “8th Passenger”, better known as “Alien”.
Who was the dude that used to post here who saw everything wrong with the world as the handiwork of the ‘Vatican gov mafia?’
Akmofo has got to be that same dude under a new handle.
Q,
Why not google ‘Vatican gov mafia’ and educate yourself? Why is this truth so disturbing to you?
Hi Jim,
For this Citizen, it is obvious that Corporations are just legal Cartels used by Oligarchs, Corporations and Banks to fleece US Citizens.
In other words, the Corporations are really no better than Cocaine Cartels and exist only on a thin veneer of legal legitimacy.
And in some ways, Corporations are much worse than the criminal counterparts since their corporate hooks have monetized every aspect of modern life to include legal bribery for prescription drugs.
One would not expect much feedback on the most excellent homework assignment.
All the best,
Prole No More
“We have become orphans without a father, Our mothers are like widows. We have to pay for our drinking water, Our wood [ heat ] comes to us at a price. Our pursuers are at our necks; We are worn out, there is no rest for us.…”
Echo, rhyme, deja vu – I call it vindication.
The Democrats are not only not going to do that particular homework, with Republicans having total control, they’re going to skip that class and just continue with advanced Dump Trump.
The Left is scrounging in the barrel, looking for ideas, and looking blankly at one another after seeing only the worn out, rusty, Trump bashing hammer at the bottom.
What if corporate money could be divided equally between parties?
No dice. The individual is still subsumed.
Generally speaking, the chartered corporation is the result of the evolution of finance capital. As navigation and shipbuilding improved business opportunities opened up. The first hurdle was to gather up enough money to outfit a ship and crew to send them off to trade for exotic merchandise. The big problem in this was the liability should something bad happen to the ship, crew, or cargo. Under common law, the owners of this venture would be on the hook for damages. This could wipe out their investment and whatever wealth that happened to by lying around. The only way around this was to externalize the risk. To do this the owners would partition the king to grant them a charter to operate with limited liability, i.e., the investors/owners were only liable to the extent of their investment. They might lose money on a particular voyage, but not their entire fortunes. In exchange for this exception to the normal laws of commerce, the king would receive a cut.
In the early days a charter was granted for a specific purpose and could be revoked should the grantees fail to perform. The charter typically didn’t permit a company to engage in business activities that were not explicitly granted in the charter. Therefore a charter granting the right to import spices from Ceylon didn’t entitle that same company to import silk from China. Nor could the company charted to import Ceylonese spices buy the company that imported Chinese silk. A charter was a contract, not an entity.
In the 19th century that all changed. Modern banking made capital much more mobile. Improvements in technology also made manufacture attractive to capital. To “capitalize” on these developments the chartered corporation had to change with the times. Companies changed from just owning ships to the manufacture of ships and owning the means to do so. And it didn’t stop there. Enter textiles, mining, steam locomotives, electrical power generation, oil production, and so on. The ability to own, buy, and sell capital goods went from a mere convenience to the redefinition of a corporation as a person under the law. Just like a person a corporation can own things, it has property rights. It now has free speech rights.
Of course there are differences between corporate persons and natural persons. A corporation can act as a shield between plaintiffs and the owners. Like corporations of old, the owners can lose no more than their stake. Unlike corporations of old, modern corporate entities have in some cases become more powerful than the governments that chartered them. They confer upon their owners a kind of privilege akin to the divine right of kings. A coterie natural persons can direct their corporation to do things no natural person could get away with. This double standard of justice puts natural persons outside the class of corporate owners into a new under class of “consumers” without recourse. Democracy doesn’t work. How can you vote against Goldman Sachs or Monsanto? You could sue, but it could be decades and huge sums of money to prevail.
The liberal establishment has been taken over by this malignancy in a process of gradualism. They have been supplanted, usurped. All of the institutions of state have been pressed into corporate service. All of it legal and by liberal standards right and proper. Liberalism as understood by Jefferson or Madison is dead. What was arguably a free market in the 18th century has given way to rent seeking and monopolization at best and outright fraud and racketeering as the norm. Liberalism as it exists today is incapable of reigning in corporate excesses just as it was unable to field a candidate to defeat Trump. Liberalism is simply blind to the notion that the system itself is in need of an overhaul. Nor can it conceive of its own drift from moderation to excess. They can’t distinguish between what the system demands and what the system should be.
Defeating Citizens United would be a step in the right direction. How can you expect this from a ship of state that is without a compass and a rudder? We’re in the doldrums with no idea of how many oarsmen are on which side of the boat.
To do this the owners would [partition] the king – Durango
===============
First they would pull his arms and legs off and then they would lop off his head.
Petition? On the other hand . . .
One more parting thought, in addition to the one I posted up above: corporations don’t occur in nature. They are a creation of laws, which is to say they are created through government action. Like Frankenstien’s monster, if you will, they end up destroying their creator.
Yes,
We have given the monster control of the laboratory, and now he commands the lightning….
Totally off-topic but…..
You know how you read stuff on-line and some story is hyperbolically described as “jaw-dropping” but you read it and your jaw does not drop?
Well, my daughter has a decent job in retail that pays better than a living wage. She works for a small Canadian firm that operates as a boutique within the very high-end Bergdorf Goodman store in Manhattan very close to Trump Tower. They sell just a few clothing items, the main one being these very plain but very expensive T-shirts.
Yesterday she called excitedly to tell my wife that a Saudi Princess had just come in and spent $102,000 in their store. Now that’s jaw-dropping.
On T s? gees.
I recommend Phillip Mirowski, “Science Mart.”
I wonder what race the victim is.
man-rips-woman-eyeballs
https://www.yahoo.com/news/man-rips-woman-apos-eyeballs-142214847.html
Guys, you have to understand the money system has been privatized, handed over to banks and corporations who demand infinite growth.
What this means: infinite growth in debt, infinite growth in corporate profits, infinite growth in population to keep labor costs down, and infinite waste of resources.
There isn’t going to be an end to any of the trends we talk about! It will only end when the last barrel of oil is burnt.
It’s over, we lost. There’s nothing you can do but document it, like monks or academics.
America is already finished as a nation, right now in 2017. It is just an agglomeration of corporate interests.
An argument can be made that corporations are the enemy of the capitalistic nature of the US. Corporate advantage eliminates Middle and small businesses by absorption or mergers and it is the function of these companies to compete with the corporations. Without this competition, the corporations become monopolies and “too big to fail”. When the do fail, catastrophe ensues. We are progressing back to the late 1800’s. For this society to regain its vibrancy, corporate America must be reined in. Giving them access to influencing our polity was the number one mistake in US business history. Efficiency of scale will soon be destroyed by entropy of decrepit unresponsive corporations.
Nice article James !
Right on target – the modern corporation and the law.
We can confer rights on a river, or a tree, and we have – at least on a river or two.
As for corporations – they have too many rights and too few responsibilities, as you point out.
Who is going to change this ?
You know, I was a stockbroker for a year, back in 1988, just after the crash, and I just watched Hollywood’s “The Big Short” – and I highly recommend this. It is actually hilarious in parts, but it does accurately portray the Wall Street World.
While we are all waiting for some one to save us – we might as well educate ourselves in preparation for the “Long Emergency” – which is obviously here and now.
I might also recommend a brand new book by a brand new brilliant author, “The Ends of the World” by Peter Brennan, about the Big Five Mass Extinctions, and the likelihood that they were ‘perfect storms’, as opposed to single cause events, which is pertinent since that’s precisely where I think we are – in a perfect storm of our own manufacture.
Ciao from Calgary
There already is a party that’s ready to mount an assault against ‘Citizens United’. It’s called the Green Party. Maybe Kunstler should learn more about it.
P.S. I have to wonder what Janos Skorenzy would do with his time if he didn’t have JHK’s site to post his racist rants on twice a week. He appears to spend hour after hour posting. I cite, as evidence, the JS post that will inevitably reply to this one in about 30 minutes …
Meanwhile, it appears JHK took down a post of mine earlier this week because I mildly mocked Kunstler for suggesting that Americans waive their right to peacefully protest once they attain a certain level of net worth (and I speculated whether I might have crossed that threshold myself).
So, apparently challenging JHK is unacceptable, but posting countless racist diatribes don’t trouble James a bit.
I used to like JHK.
Posts get lost sometimes. I doubt he deleted yours.
He has deleted mine more than once, and muted my ability to post more than once. I mean, I get it. It’s his blog to run as he pleases, and not every blogger can have Yves Smith’s commentariat. But he’s not immune from judgement. Yves Smith heavily moderates her comments as well, except Yves Smith has cultivated an amazing comments section, while JHK has cultivated… well, read it and weep.
I seem to have offended you, my good sir. How exactly so I can pen an appropriate riposte?
Remember, the rainbow is a racist symbol since the colors aren’t all mixed together. It should be banned. Color itself is racist. How do we get rid of it? Any ideas? Maybe dim the sun with chemicals? The ocean is only blue because it reflects the sky. It can’t be blue if there’s no clear sky to reflect – or no Light!
How does the song go?
Cold be hand, heart and bone
And cold be sleep under stone.
Never more to wake on stony bed,
Till the sun cools and the moon is dead.
In the dark Wind, the stars shall die
Still on stone here, let them lie.
Till the Dark Lord lifts his hand,
Over dead seas and withered lands.
Song of the Barrow Wights as I, Janos, remember it
Maybe dim the sun with chemicals? MAYBE, No, definitely.
‘The sky is a landfill’–Jeff Buckley.
To be fair Doc, maybe JHK doesn’t care much for you either.
I think you’re hitting the head on the nail over one of the central problem in our politics today with the corrupting influence of money & its influence, naturally. Now that it is there, I highly doubt the Congress will take any action about it at all. It will certainly take new movements and new political parties.
Bannon’s Curse on the Democrats: By all means let them continue with their Identity Politics and racial grievance mongering. We will crush them with our Economic Nationalism.
Re: the Democrats doing something useful, or “getting out of the way and let a new party do the job.” As long as elections can be manipulated and stolen with impunity, nothing will change. Bernie Sanders, who was clearly the people’s choice in 2016, was robbed of the Democratic nomination by the rampant and unchecked election fraud perpetrated by the DNC. That is why Hillary lost; you can’t give the middle finger to half your base and expect to win elections. Democrats and Republicans are nothing more than two wings of the same Corporatist party that owns our government. Their only real function is to deceive the American public into thinking they have a choice in the outcome of elections when they don’t.
Has no one here studied the writings of our Nation’s founders, along with de Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America”? The principles laid down in the establishment of our government derived from genius grasp of history and humanity’s innate disposition toward monopolizing power into the hands of a controlling minority having single purpose of exclusive privilege. Duh! The architecture of our government isn’t at fault, the problem is the intellectual impoverishment of the public against understanding and appreciating the great bequeath bestowed upon it. We’ve degenerated to a lazy, self indulged populous incapable of acting as a sovereign national body toward preserving our own great national heritage. So here we are, divided rather than “indivisible”, the rifts all manufactured by the Left’s growth industry of victimhood classifications.
Well, but it’s both.
Of course the “gen pop” (mostly white and formerly middle class) has been bought off by the wonders of 20th century American industrial capitalism, but then again, all of the emerging world is now angling for the same great deal as we have, not yet having learned the lessons of where it’s all headed. Those are indeed hard lessons to learn, in that it it took even the inbred American white population over a century to learn them. How much longer will it take the emerging third world people of color – brutalized all these years by shameless American exploitation – to realize that they too are ultimately little more than grist for the capitalist mill too?
All that considered, one can only be that much more thankful that the great avaricious capitalist leviathan is at least finally up against natural limits that even its own insatiable appetites can’t ignore. The coming collapse is indeed going to be painful for all involved, but that’s only because its coming was so selfishly forestalled for so long.
Your best post.
Historical perspective has been distorted by emphasis upon easily found anecdote anywhere within the broader script of human history, easily then used to paint one nation or people as more disposed to humanity’s more regrettable traits of behavior. What the US founders wrote into the US’s governing documents has produced the most thoughtful and civilized society. The virtue signalling of today’s Left has obscured the reality that whereas slavery has been an universal practice by all societies through time only Western Society abolished it, and before doing so its practice here was actually far less grimly imposed that what prevailed elsewhere and yet still practice today. A little honest scholarship on your part might save you from intellectual imbalance.
White House. Waiting for Trump to emerge.
https://regnum.ru/uploads/pictures/news/2017/09/29/regnum_picture_1506699281610100_big.jpg
Nice post Jim and I’m 100% in agreement on all points. Of course we both know absolutely none of this will ever happen, but it’s nice to at least dream about the productive things that could be done right here and right now if we actually had a representative government that represented anything other than the interests of the rich and powerful. But then again, that’s how democracies always end, isn’t it? A moneyed elite emerge after a time and use their money and power to buy access to the corridors of power to solidify their gains; after which, it’s all good all of the time as they consolidate their lock on power in perpetuity and begin to eliminate all lesser opposition.
But true to their nature, the process inevitably turns inward at some point after that, as the only opposition remaining becomes other like-minded powerful entities such as themselves. This social Darwinism then devolves to an even more virulent state, as alliances are formed, deals and double-crossing deals are made, unmade and ignored, and the true war of all against all begins in earnest. Throw in the realities of late stage peak industrialism – resource depletion, environmental degradation, peak finance and peak debt, and climate change – and you have a toxic stew that will soon put paid to all these silly human tricks the elite have hatched, and reveal once again, that homo sapiens, especially in its Great White Race, Northern European variety, simply isn’t half as clever as it imagines itself to be, and that it’s enduring “legacy” – if indeed there’s anyone remaining 100 years from now to call it that – will be death, destruction, misery, sorrow, and ultimately, human and mass species’ extinction.
If there truly is a “God in Heaven,” one has to seriously wonder if he would even bother to sit in judgement on the whole “western experiment,” as we’re already doing such a fine job of torturing and destroying ourselves. A more fitting end for a more deserving people I can not even possibly imagine.
Putting any hope in politicians and a political party is simply foolish.
Particularly when you’re talking about a central government leviathan that exists to exist. No, the answer is peaceful secessionism. It’s time for regions, states, cities to go their own way. Localism shouldn’t be relegated to produce and beer & wine. Starve D.C., the attorneys/lobbyists/elected officials, the ladder climbing bureaucrats, the war seeking generals and their defense company puppet masters.
It can happen, and is happening elsewhere at this very moment.
Estats lliures
100% agreed as well, although I doubt it will be possible. See American Civil War. The National Security State is eagerly anticipating all contingencies.
DA,
100% agree? States go their separate ways? Does Mexico still have an army? Canada?
History dictates that war is the natural order of human existence. Your idea sounds fine, until hordes of Canadians invade your principality over some long-forgotten outrage.
Ahh, paranoia dressed up as fear of the mythical “other” [fill in the blank here]. That’s nothing less than the MICC’s tried and true marketing hook. Time to get over the delusion that the National Security State has anybody’s interests but their own at heart. When it comes to invading hordes they’ll be easily identifiable.: they’ll be decked out from head to toe in state of the art military assault gear and they’ll be wearing a stars and bars patch somewhere on their person. Duty, honor, country, and all that rot. For your own good of course.
Although, I must say, you definitely get points for originality for speculating about a possible Canadian invasion. Can’t say I’ve ever heard of that one before, other than the deliciously satirical, 1995 John Candy vehicle, Canadian Bacon.
When and if a crack-up comes I don’t think that the national cleavages will just be in the US like in the Civil War and stop at the international borders. I think that fracture lines delineating new areas of political control or sovereignty or autonomy can go north into Canada or extend south from Canada into the US. Imagine upstate New York being incorporated into a Great Lakes territory that whose genesis was north of the border. Imagine a territory that had its origin in Mexico, that covers part of the southwest US.
I doubt that there’s enough formal military capability in either Mexico or Canada to do much except where the main military bases and troop concentrations are located. That is, their mischief will be local and not continental in scope. But there’s no shortage of guns in Mexico ie drug gangs and human traffickers. Or Canada for that matter. How and whether armed civilians or police coalesce into fighting formations ie militias and start carving up turf is anyone’s guess.
Thank you Sprawl!
Greer, among a great many others, has speculated on the inevitable crack up and what the new geography might look like. I too think it will almost certainly fall along the lines of regional interests. How those regional interests then intersect and/or clash with each other will be exceedingly interesting, to say the least.
There’s also the quite considerable matter of disposing of all the deployed federal assets already distributed widely throughout the land. Army and Marine Corps installations and equipment could just be usurped by local “law enforcement” authorities for the most part; but Navy and Air Force installations, with their aircraft, munitions, and (cough, cough) nuclear capabilities might be a tad bit more problematic.
All of which makes me somewhat skeptical that the federal leviathan (aka, Lincoln’s wet dream) will go down without a fight. Would our own government resort to using nuclear weapons on its own people. In the famous words of one Vietnam commander over 50 years ago (somewhat apocryphal [1.]), referring to the regional capital of Ben Tre, “We had to destroy the village in order to save it.” Personally, knowing what I know about 9-11, every thinking American should be VERY, VERY afraid of what their illegitimate federal government might do to stay in power.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Arnett
The Druid mused, I wish I could live to see the Hispanic/Asian culture that will arise on the West Coast. I challenged him on why he couldn’t wait to see his own culture pass away. Asked why was attracted to Celtic Mysticism since the Old Druids were PATRIOTS whom the Romans killed on sight. I mean why not just stick to the popular Golden Dawn Masonic occultism or Wicca? He deleted my post without answering but did delete his despicable musing as well. He has no commitment to America, the West, the White Race, or the First Amendment. An utter creep much like many here, eh?
But a great mind and scholar nonetheless. Strongly recommend his series on Fascism for those who wish to learn. Talkin’ to you, Sophia.
Janos,
Agreed. Greer was/is pretty quick with the censorship option in my experience. I also quit commenting there pretty quickly because of it. Pretty much an echo chamber of fawning adulation. He’s definitely smart, but cults of personality just ain’t my thing.
DA
“There’s also the quite considerable matter of disposing of all the deployed federal assets already distributed widely throughout the land. Army and Marine Corps installations and equipment…”
DA,
Look no further than the disassembly of the Soviet Union for real-time, real life examples.
elysianfield: “History dictates that war is the natural order of human existence.”
Everyone from Marx on down likes to claim that “history dictates” this or that. Then they fight over details, like whether it’s that “history dictates” the dictatorship of the proletariat, or “history dictates” the struggle between races, or “history dictates” the heights of hemlines.
Phooey on that. History “dictates” nothing. People make their choices, and what happens, happens. Historical meanings are imposed retrospectively by meaning-makers: by academic historians, by culture creators (writers, filmmakers, etc.) or by propagandists, who may be all the same people. But when someone tries to tell me that “history dictates” something, I know that they’re actually trying to colonize my thinking with their preferred frame of reference. No thanks.
We are what nature has made us. No doubt war has deep roots in our species’ evolutionary history. What is urgently clear, to me at least, is that our evolutionary history has turned a corner and our ancient commitment to war is no longer a survival trait but one of several avenues of species suicide now open to us. This change, which occurred no later than August 1945, isn’t about to un-happen — even if every nuclear weapon now in existence were dismantled and the nuclear material jettisoned into the sun. If we wish to survive, we need to turn to other elements of our nature: our ability to plan, to deliberate, to understand the consequences of our action.
“History dictates” that every child shrieks and poops. Likewise, war is the tantrum of a child. But now the child has a gun. We desperately need to grow up.
A fundamental change in the relationship between government and corporations with government regaining sovereignty, enacted by legislation? That has the same chance of happening as a rubber band aimed a star hitting one.
For 200 years the arrow of history has been pointed towards corporations being soverign. Given that probably 99.9% of all Western politicians and policy players are surely unable to even grasp my point about sovereignty and the .1% who do are all on the side of corporations this is a change that will not come, by choice.
Disaster or anarchy, over the next 50 years or so will resolve the issue.
The alarming thing is, not only have the corporations taken over the government, but technology has advanced to the point that they will be able to literally keep track of everybody in the country, as shown by the corporate tracking currently done. From facial recognition, to cameras everywhere, to gps tracking, to monitoring everything on the internet, and so on. We have created a turnkey dictatorship, and all it requires is someone willing to turn that key. There will be no anarchy once that happens, Big Brother will indeed be watching, and in fact already is. Most people are blissfully unaware of this, much like the frog in the pan of water. I’d bet anything that the NSA hasn’t scrapped one piece of equipment in their monitoring system. It’s all there folks, and there has never been a piece of technology invented that hasn’t been used as an instrument of oppression somewhere at some time, and we are making awesome progress in technology. But hey, what do I know, I’m just some paranoid chump who reads too much and lives in a blue state. I fully expect that someday the thought police will come knocking on my door, as well as some of your’s.
There were a couple of guys that appeared on a PBS Newshour interview a few years ago that said the NSA is building facilities that will not only be able to record telephone calls ie who called what number and at what time, but also record the content of the conversation.
I read that closed circuit monitoring cameras were being installed in tens of thousands of houses in the UK to make sure that people aren’t misbehaving, that the kids do their homework, eat proper meals etc.
The thought police are already around in a lot of large companies employed usually in HR departments under different job titles.
I read that a lot of employers were asking for job applicant Facebook passwords. And I’ve read people say that it’s creepy if you DON’T have a Facebook account – ie what are you trying to hide?
The young ‘uns scoff about privacy. Privacy, they say, what privacy, there’s no privacy. Yeah, there’s no privacy especially when it’s been willingly relinquished. Something they’re too boneheaded to realize they’ll regret.
I would expect one or another of the government employed trolls to jump in shortly after this post with something like if you aren’t doing anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about and some comment to the effect that they would welcome cameras in their abode and they’d be happy to have the NSA record their private conversations. The fact that the government already had one of their employees on this site is instructive enough.
This is more than obvious to yours truly. When I was an Assistant Professor at Fresno State College [for the Criminally Inane] in 1968, and the Vietnamese students brought to study in California by US/AID (undoubtedly vetted both by South Vietnamese intelligence and the CIA) radicalized me against the war, I quickly assumed that every telephone call I made, every person I met and talked to, and every piece of mail that came in or went out was potentially monitored.
I also kept my curtains closed and stayed away from windows lest I end up like a less-fortunate version of Gen. Edwin Walker. It was, after all, the San Joaquin Valley, a nest of patriotic flag-waving conservatism. George Murphy, S.I. Hayakawa, Ronald Reagan and company were busy scorning the antiwar movement as well.
At that time of crazy, fun innocence we had no way of imagining the degree of magnification that would / could occur, even having read ‘1984’ and even having a dim idea of the power of computers to track human activity. Anyway the watchfulness, alarm and discretion I learned back then have served me well as I’ve stayed out of the jug since then (no guarantee it won’t suck me in, of course – imagine turning 80 in stir.)
Good work Speedy. Watching the most excellent Ken Burns documentary, The Vietnam War, of late has brought it all back “in living color” as we used to say. The increasing dissembling of the US Presidents Eisenhower through Nixon is all the more nauseating to review after all these years knowing what we know now about where it all led. In stark review, Bush/Cheney now seem merely inevitable, and Obama simply a rather pointed inside joke at our expense. How could we have ever been so fucking stupid, or was it all simply “baked into the cake” from the very start? I simply don’t know.
” From facial recognition, to cameras everywhere, to gps tracking, to monitoring everything on the internet, and so on….”
They know when you are sleeping,
They know when you’re awake,
They know if you’ve been bad or good,
Stay offa Grindr, for goodness sake….
Frosty the Snowman…(revised 2017)
We Im?po’tent!
See the well-dressed young business professional walking down the street in his buttoned down business casual attire, black plastic cell phone glued to his cheek; he’s miles away in virtual space. Walking and talking, talking and walking, virtue signaling all along the way. SUCH a handsome young man! He’s new world chic as he hikes to work with his fashionable backpack on this blustery overcast early autumn day. No time for physical surroundings says he, as he eschews his gas powered personal conveyance and signals his virtue for all to see. He impotent! So impotent!
See the trendy Suburu cross-over with mom, the kids, the dogs, and the stuff busily delivering its busy occupants to their assorted and sundry destinations to conduct their daily business. Driving and dropping off, dropping off and driving; they’ve all got places to go, people to see, business to do to ensure that their individual and collective prosperity arcs continue to bend upward as far as the eye can see. They’re new world people in a brand new 21st century virtual world, where all the good people prosper, and marginal people simply don’t exist. They know the most essential truth of all: we’re all consumers now, and they’re the “best of the best;” the current “state of the art,” the “bleeding edge,” the “apogee of human consumption;” and what could possibly be wrong with that? I, me, my, and mine are their by-words; I need, I want, and I have their operative phrases. “They” is for others, and they simply don’t do others. Mom, the kids, the dog, and even the virtuous Suburu (dogs simply love them!) are impotent! So impotent!
See the busy corporate “knowledge workers” staring enrapt at their computer monitors. Emailing and responding, responding and emailing; the knowledge workers spend their days in constant correspondence with their corresponding knowledge worker peers in a vast social network of meaninglessness, non-productivity, and job (which is to say salary) security. Some also work with spreadsheets, some specialize in word docs, but all specialize in the corporate shuffle: the pointless exchange of meaningless information (aka, “knowledge”) in a feeble attempt to quantify something… anything… for their corporate managers to presciently analyze (aka, anal-ize). The knowledge workers all know that when someone refers to the “new world order,” they are of course referring to themselves. They are the great mass of brown fat around the giant, bloated corporate belly, which so efficiently transfers to world’s wealth up the ladder to the great corporate suites in the sky and beyond. They are the new corporate army which no mere nation state can possibly resist. They are impotent. So very impotent!
See the busy corporate managers sitting around the conference in the well-appointed conference room, busily checking their cell phones and blackberries to coordinate their busy schedule. Emails and texts, spreadsheets and docs, things to review, things to approve, decisions to be made, and asses to kiss; so very much to do! As the meeting starts, a small number assert their social dominance and take control of the meeting. Virtue is signaled by intelligent sounding long-winded statements made to no one in particular, heads are nodded in agreement, with other dominant members perhaps joining in to signal their virtue by either expounding on the corporate non-sense allegedly “up for discussion,” or even wrestle the subject away to one of their very own! In this manner the social hierarchy is put on display for all to see and the “corporate ladder” revealed plainly as something decidedly human and tangible. The busy corporate managers will all spend their entire day scurrying from one such meeting to another in rapid succession, with the most virtuous among them excusing themselves early from each (after dutifully checking the Blackberry throughout) so that they might attend the next one in their busy schedule. Their lesser peers will nod their heads knowingly and send a memo to their professional staff assistants to schedule their meetings likewise in the future. All the corporate managers are impotent! So very impotent!
See the corporate execs emerge from their exclusive protected C-Suites, surrounded by their corporate manager coterie and brutish security detail. Fawning and genuflecting, genuflecting and fawning; the managers shamelessly curry favor with their corporate gods. Nodding and ignoring, ignoring and nodding; the corporate gods silently drink in the pathetic managers’ shameless ass-kissing. Perhaps they’ll even choose to mingle with some of the mere knowledge workers today? All carefully screened, chosen, and rehearsed by their managers beforehand of course. Hear the pearls of wisdom fall from the corporate execs’ mouths, as they expound on the realities of today’s business environment (efficiencies must be ruthlessly pursued!!!), as the scared shitless managers and the bored to tears knowledge workers nod their heads appreciatively, while ignoring every word of it totally. Will any of these “efficiencies” ever apply to the corporate C-Suite? Of course not, but that goes without saying in the first place. For the corporate execs represent nothing less than the top of the food chain; the ultimate corporate predators! They impotent! They most impotent of all!
I may have to print this and post it in my work space–probably not a safe move, but who cares.
Fewer comments for this post, but the quality is better. Even on a bad day, the comments here are far superior to those at Zero Hedge.
Good work, DA!
Thank you Sprawler!
WOW DA! I’m printing off a copy of this for my journal.
Tak sa mycket!
Jen in San Jose
Thanks Jen!
New drinking game: take a shot every time JHK ponders “sexual abnormalities”.
Societies remain cohesive by collective acceptance of “normative” behavior, always historically peer enforced as a common “decorum” more than by official decree as in judicial law. Our Constitution and the Bill of Rights was written purposefully, minimizing government’s intrusion into personal and group social interaction except where “equality under the law” is breached. Equal opportunity, not “privileged entitlement” restitution on behalf of claimed historic victim hood. Emphasis on equal opportunity as in free libraries and public education. Not, emphatically, equal outcome.
In the old USSR under the Soviets, their constitution guaranteed the citizens more freedom and rights than ours did. Of course the govt. would have to follow and enforce what was written therein. That didn’t happen (remember Stalin?), so just because it’s down on paper, that doesn’t mean a damn thing without the govt. following through. Take a look at Trump & the right wing assault on the “fake news”, attacking and trying to discredit anything critical of the right wing in this country, if that doesn’t raise a red flag, then I don’t know what will. Then there is the propaganda arm of the right, ie: Fox News, which is “fair and balanced” because by gosh, they say they are, all the time. There’s also a reason I call Rush Limbaugh Father Coughlin (if you don’t know him, look him up), and that’s because he follows the same propaganda program that the good father did. The only thing standing between us and a dictatorship right now, depends on the faith of people in the govt. who actually believe in the constitution and follow the rules set down. They were the ones who made the NSA back down on listening in on everybody (at least we think so).
Ridiculous. Limbaugh seldom attacks the Federal Reserve scam and never those behind it – the Judeo-Masons. Coughlin did both.
So you believe the mainstream media? Why do you listen to Rush then? He’s right as far as he dares to go. If he told the whole truth, he’d be off the air in a New York second.
And what IS the truth Janos? I have a strong constitution, I can take it, and I’m sure that most of the people here can as well. Shock us with the truths that must not be uttered lest the forces of hell be unleashed. I’m sure all those well read folks down south already know the truth, so spill the beans so the rest of us can bathe in the fountain of revealed truth.
Read Fr Coughlin. He knew it well. Or are you going to believe his enemies because they shout the loudest and that is what is familiar to you? Your faux “tradition”?
Tradition is that which is passed down from one generation to the next, what is worth being remembered and thus transmitted. Cultural memory. Memes. It’s far more than what people remember because they saw it on TV as kids or were given in public school. That’s the fall of culture and the perversion of tradition.
So no limits then? As one wears the new electric Trojan condom? Electrical banana is bound to be the very next raze.
I live in Schenectady (The Electric City) and work in Troy. Hence, ElectricTrojan.
It sounds like you think a lot about “bananas”, much like JHK can’t stop thinking (and writing) about the sex lives of gender/gender-role “abnormals” that have existed throughout human history.
Scranton is the Electric City. Why are you hectoring me? The Trojans became the Romans and put an end to Greek perversion – at least until they became sickened too in the inevitable cycle of decay, accelerating as Kali Yuga progresses.
Even the Old Greeks looked down on passive or pathic Homosexuals. A boy was only supposed to “submit” to such madness to please his mentor – and only between the legs. And that was mostly among the Athenians and their copiers. Many of the other Greek City States deeply disapproved of such shenanigans. But we glorify it – and far worse. Marriage? Anal? Marriage? Are you fucking kidding me?
If nothing is abnormal, then there are no norms and thus no normals. And the Abnormals, already united, are able to take control from the demoralized and disunited Normies. The eunuchs of China did just that for a season. You don’t know what you’re proposing – or perhaps you do!
As usual, you make just enough sense to remain viable. Good work! Perhaps one day we’ll produce a “unified theory of everything.” LOL!
See now? Every now and then we actually agree on something! Who says bitter enemies can’t occasionally find common ground?
General Electric was founded by Thomas Edison in Schenectady, which is known as the Electric City. I didn’t know Scranton has the same nickname. Cool.
The rest of your post is nonsense.
“The rest of your post is nonsense”
Are you one of Janet’s kids? ALL of your posts are nonsense. All of them.
It’s so Soviet-era. Joe McCarthy and Roy Cohn. Guy apparently can’t help himself, even though it’s w-a-a-a-y off-topic.
Mild regret: when those two FBI goons came to my office at Fresno State in 1968 I didn’t have the nerve to tease them about Johnny and Clyde…
“New drinking game: take a shot every time JHK ponders “sexual abnormalities.””
How about taking a shot every time Thwack commits one?
You leave Thwack out of this.
Urbi et orbi
I once had an opportunity to talk with Pope John Paul II during his visit to the Russian cultural center in Rome, and to his question of what needs to be done to reconcile the Catholic and Orthodox Churches, I, inspired by the giant Rublev’s Savior, by order of the Pope adorning the pediment of St. Peter’s Cathedral, replied that the Pope needed to go to the pulpit of St. Peter’s Cathedral and ex cathedra proclaim that Catholicism is a heresy and schism….
You understand what a dumb scene that was!
But it turns out that this is not the limit. Pope Francis in his Papal manifestos managed to make an impression similar to that which could produce my “ecumenical” proposal. In any case, the Pope was called a Marxist, and American Catholics in my opinion will soon start throwing inkwells, bearing in mind this particular message.
http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/apost_exhortations/documents/papa-francesco_esortazione-ap_20131124_evangelii-gaudium.html
In fact, this message to Marxism has a very little relationship, but it undoubtedly represents a very profound analysis of the situation that has arisen and the inevitable, I would even say the objective consequences of the global economic crisis, and this analysis was carried out not only from the theological but also from the scientific point of view.
That is, the Pope did exactly what all these pseudo-scientists should have done, who probably also understand a lot, but because of their political engagement and fear of being accused of politically incorrect Marxism, they do not do this, thus contributing to the destruction and discrediting of the scientific method.
The Pope is little more than a figurehead representing an illegitimate political political organization masquerading as a “religion.” As such, his pronouncements have even less practical effect in the real world in which we live than do the duly elected political sycophants from which he derives his alleged power.
And Marxism, whatever its ultimate truth (which has never been actually tested), is a mere canard trotted out by western capitalists to justify their continued rape and pillage of all they see. In the end, and as we’re quite abundantly already seeing, the 20th century false dichotomy of capitalism vs socialism for all the marbles, is rapidly being exposed for the short-sighted virulent lie it always was.
Will a more holistic worldview that takes all factors and species of earthly existence into account have time to genuinely take root and flourish before rapacious western capitalism undoes our entire biological experiment? That remains to be seen, although the early returns are certainly not encouraging.
Personally, if there ever was an actual “Jesus, the Christ” all those many years ago, I imagine he was talking about exactly our point in history when he referred to the “second coming.” And no, it wasn’t ever meant to refer to a physical action, but rather, a radical change in mental/philosophical paradigms.
Good news about Korea, which anticipates good news from Syria and Ukraine
But first the bad news, or rather my conclusions:
The assassination of General Asapov in Syria means a war between Russia and the United States. In order to understand this, it is enough to imagine the reaction of America, if in a couple of days the terrorists in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan or Ukraine will acquire the latest missile systems that will blow away a couple of American advisers in the rank of general.
But I’m pretty sure that this madness will stop and the war will be very short, just a few days.
In the meantime, I propose that occasion to be used to pass a new wartime law against the special cynicism when inflicting a great damage to the Motherland under aggravating circumstances.
Obviously, it was precisely this acceleration of those internal political processes in the US, which were already going on, but supposedly biding their time. As it turned out with such an opponent as Hillary/Bastinda you never have enough time. And so, voila:
US talking to North Korea ‘directly,’ Rex Tillerson says
https://www.yahoo.com/gma/us-talking-north-korea-directly-rex-tillerson-says-141706920–abc-news-topstories.html
In the meantime, since the Russian media like parrots repeat the “information” of the Western media, which President Trump ordered away from the White House for a cannon shot distance, I would add to this news such an important detail as the fact that the US since 1953 have not concluded a peace treaty with North Korea and are still at war with it.
That is why they could not even conduct direct talks and that Tillerson announced this officially means that the talks are about the peace treaty.
GENERAL ASAPOV
….didn’t come home……his unborn child will never know him.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKdusyjiuvY
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/4536673/top-russian-military-leader-killed-in-isis-shelling-in-syria/
-T
Sent From the New Republic.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/nv8sko6hpqm6tir/New%20Republic%20rev123.pdf?dl=0
But I’m pretty sure that this madness will stop and the war will be very short, just a few days
Unfortunately, just a few days were enough to get a camp of US Special Forces implicated in assassination with a Caliber submarine launch from Mediterranean.
A la guerre comme a la guerre.
Finally, a JHK post that is spot-on and objectively correct. The partisan 5-4 ‘Citizens’ decision resulted in the bipartisan acceleration of the demise of this thing, and nobody is doing a damm thing about it – not least the millionaires in Congress. And yes, Obama could have done something but decided to play the game instead. Ick.
…
Sorry, “Janos” (et al) – I see you’ve popped a little blue pill again. But ever since the 100th Avatar so magnificently busted you fellating yourself on Sept. 15th at 9:58 pm EST, I can’t even take you seriously as a self-absorbed race-baiting troll. Just thought you wouldn’t like to know.
Without you, where would James’ web traffic #’s be? Hmmm ….
StillFarmin,
Avatar’s comment on Sept 15th at 9:58 pm said:
“You forgot to logout and sign in with your other screen name bub. It’s OK, these things happen.”
You’re way to hip for me…I don’t get your point at all. Please explain.
too
Look at the two posts immediately above that one. Janos posts some drivel at 8:56 PM, then replies to his own drivel with more drivel at 9:00 PM. Note that in the second post, Janos address his previous self as “Janos”. This is consistent with an attempt at sock-puppetry, i.e. a lame attempt to manufacture the impression of a consensus in his favour, with Janos betraying himself by forgetting to log out and back in using an alias.
Janos didn’t reply to the follow-up posts, so this remains a surmise, though a plausible one. It’s tempting to think this indicates Janos is still capable of some level of shame, but it’s at least as likely he rationally decided his interests were best served by taking the hit in silence. Maybe he went and ate a cookie to feel better. Regardless, excellent catch by 100th Avatar.
I’m not trying to pretend I’m more than one person. Sometimes I have further thoughts on my subject so I post below it by replying to myself. Stop being such a creep, Elrond. You people are destroying the West and the White race. My sins are small compared to that.
“Without you, where would James’ web traffic #’s be? Hmmm ….”
The traffic would be considerably less in volume if the majority of our community were able to “self-fellate”…we’d all be busy….
Russia finally steps in:
Russia says ready to work with North Korea to resolve missile crisis
MOSCOW (Reuters) – Moscow is prepared to work with Pyongyang to try to find a peaceful resolution to the North Korean missile crisis, the Russian Foreign ministry said on Friday.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/russia-says-ready-north-korea-resolve-missile-crisis-142013946.html
In the old republic, the acceleration of diabolical madness of strike-counterstrike continues, without limit.
And more and more tools of competitive destruction foment less and less harmonious existence, until in the end there is nothing left at all.
Whatever shall we do??
1. Obey God’s Commandments, including the 11th, to love one another.
2. Have a good story to tell.
3. Take someone along and enjoy the ride.
4. Ask God for help.
5. Ask not for whom the bell tolls.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WdogzkMB68w&index=189&list=PLl55Zh3U2VW7YD-JKHT0vYIk1ZCrK7c4-
Don’t believe in a Creator??
…then enjoy existence until the end.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNbFDGEzUEA&list=PLl55Zh3U2VW7YD-JKHT0vYIk1ZCrK7c4-&index=31
-T
Sent From the New Republic.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/nv8sko6hpqm6tir/New%20Republic%20rev123.pdf?dl=0
IT’S TIME FOR HILLY
……to flee to North Korea, where she can share pant suits with Kim Jong-Un.
https://www.infowars.com/state-department-quietly-releases-thousands-of-hillary-clinton-docs/
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CofTbGiVIAAnwqI.jpg
-T
Sent from the New Republic.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/nv8sko6hpqm6tir/New%20Republic%20rev123.pdf?dl=0
Jim, regarding ‘Citizens United’, does it also give big labor a greenlight for unlimited donations to candidates, as it does corporations? The reason I ask is because, here in CT, public sector unions have grown into the most powerful force in the state, donate heavily and exclusively to Democrats, come out with favorable contracts every 2 years, and have essentially run the state and our capital city, Hartford, into the ground.
brh
In fact this is a watershed week. Hartford will be filing bankruptcy maybe on Monday. We still have no budget and Oct. 1 is the drop dead date when all kinds of drastic cuts have to be made across the board.
the day of reckoning has finally arrived after decades of lies, $212,000 per year pensions, subterfuge, happy talk, graft, and kicking the can down the road.
We have a welfare burden here that no political entity can bear, I don’t care how wealthy it seems. So instead of a govt. top to bottom lefty democrats handing out goodies to all comers and pleaders for decades, maybe we would have been better off if some of our officials were hard headed business types with support from ‘Citizens United’ donations. Maybe we wouldn’t be in this hole we are now in.
brh
Don’t worry – we’re coming. Big change in strategy. The flag they have thrown off a la Jerry Rubin and then trampled, we will defend. We’re going to be brothers after all. I’ve always liked you even when hating you.
https://www.counter-currents.com/2017/09/rally-round-the-flag/#more-75447
We’ll bring the proles along slowly. None of that “crazy” stuff for them. We’ll end White bashing and institute Mom, Football and Apple Pie. Then we’ll begin to remind people of what JFK said, that Hitler was a great Leader and would be recognized as such once the war hysteria died down. Our educated cadres will move amongst the people healing and teaching. We’ll mow your arthritic lawn and leave pamphlets on your gun ridden porch. You will learn to love Big Brother. He will be no Brutha, I can promise you that. We’ll be like the Mormons. They’ve abdicated the White Priesthood. That’s our now too.
And when will the einsatzgruppen show up? I see them faintly, standing behind you.
You think America was created with breaking some eggs? Or any other country? You want omlettes? Remember Omerta. Do I have to teach you people everything? Do I look like your father? Krishna is the Father of all Beings. Also called Odin. I’m just a man. Do your own research, damn it. Think, damn you. I’ll help you but you have to try harder. And I won’t take abuse. That’s why I refused to teach in the first place.
Can’t handle the abuse huh? As long as the eggs that get broken aren’t Janos. You are brittle. One blow would shatter you.
You can’t learn because you’re disrespectful. You enjoy it. And you think that beating someone up is the same as disproving their argument – the classic thug attitude. A thug is different than a soldier who respects his superiors.
To be fair, you no doubt do respect people you consider to be your superiors: Jews, Neo Conservatives, Neo Liberals, and other White guys who bow to the powers that be who are higher in rank than you. It’s all about power. And you will bow to us when we attain it. And you will adjust your attitudes and beliefs without even admitting to yourself that’s what you are doing.
A warrior is higher than a soldier – he is smart enough to know what is good and who is worthy and decides for himself who to fight for.
– and only between the legs–as in what? Screwing the boy?
Yes, Malthus. Do I have to spell it out for you? Show you a picture? Keep your hands where I can see them. No quick moves.
Then we’ll begin to remind people of what JFK said, that Hitler was a great Leader
Yes, JFK was at one-time member of the Sect – well known fact of his support for McCarthy’s Un-American Activities Committee.
He repented and was executed for his betrayal.
A dollar for an entry, a hundred for an exit
I hope everyone understands that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Alexander Pushkin, John Kennedy, Ioan Petru Culianu, and closer to our time, Stanley Kubrick, David Carradine and Boris Berezovsky were all members of religious sect, such as Stanley Kubrick described in the movies “Shining” and “Eyes Wide Shut”.
And all of them are united by a shameful execution connected with treason, not a political but religious betrayal. Mozart’s funeral in the common grave, vile letters to Pushkin about his wife, a similar story with Jacqueline Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe, death in public restroom of Culianu is all a payback for believing in God and splitting with the sect.
But Kubrick apparently bought himself the freedom through participation in the project Apollo 11, but this did not save him after the release of the movie “Eyes Wide Shut”.
And I really want to hope that the shameful execution of David Carradine and Boris Berezovsky is also connected with their exit from the sect, and not with the disclosure of its vile secrets – after all, David Carradine starred in “Kill Bill”, and I know for sure that in the last monologue his impromptu went beyond the script and Tarantino’s plan, striking the latter to the depths of his soul.
I can mention a few more names of our very famous and almost brilliant contemporaries, who by all accounts fall into this category, but I do not want to upset their admirers – I, for one, was very upset when I realized this about Pushkin and Culianu, although I read enough vile verses of the first and the esoteric writings of the second.
Meanwhile, now I understand that in fact it means that these people died for Christ, that in fact they are holy martyrs. And it is important. Very important.
http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/monster-eating-nation/#comment-304489
McCarthy was a great American Hero. You people destroyed him. But he did not wholly die. Someday we will raise monuments to him and you will grind your teeth and howl like a dog.
Jack Kennedy died not as a Nazi or Hitler sympathizer, but as a martyr for Christ.
By honoring the American-Russian agreement for withdrawal of “Jupiter” nuclear missiles from Turkey, rather than starting a nuclear war with USSR, he betrayed the Sect and the Fourth Reich.
Sure you don’t mean Jack Ruby?
RESET.
In the old republic, the definition of reset is a decline of 40-70% in market equities.
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/29/david-stockman-tax-reform-plan-is-pipe-dream-stocks-to-plunge-40-70-percent.html
In the New Republic, the definition of reset is the doubling of raised bed garden space and bagging the season limit for deer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZVOjnIdVRQ&index=2&list=PLl55Zh3U2VW7YD-JKHT0vYIk1ZCrK7c4-
-T
Sent From the New Republic.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/nv8sko6hpqm6tir/New%20Republic%20rev123.pdf?dl=0
Please do a little more homework. You described former President Obama as a “Constitutional law professor.” He was an adjunct teacher at the U. of Chicago law school with NO faculty rank. At a place like the University of Chicago, you have get scholarly papers, book chapters, etc. published and wait in line for years to advance to the rank of “professor”. He never had a single article published in a law journal. He cannot even hold himself out as an attorney because he is not in good standing with the Illinois Bar. He surrendered his law license years ago as part of a settlement (all sealed up, of course, so you and I cannot learn of the particulars). His official biography on the White House website shortly after his election identified him as an “attorney.” That reference was quickly deleted. Please admit you needed to do more homework before your otherwise very excellent article was circulated.
I am sure that Obama, being a part of the Kennedy Clan, had enough enemies in American Academia establishment to let him get too far.
However, his Nobel Piece prize is totally deserved for not letting Hillary or McCain to the red button in 2008, or we would have been enjoying the nuclear winter for the past 8 years already.
Reagan: Mr. President, tear down that wall!
Margaret Thatcher: Not so fast, you Alzheimer’s idiot!!
Obviously, History still does not teach you anything. You think something has changed in the short period of 100 years? It is still Teutons against Anglo Saxons, with Russia in the balance.
Hey it looks like a 2nd Spanish Civil War might be in the offing. My wife and her family are pretty upset about the situation even tho they’ve been out of there since the 1970s. Does anybody know why Catalonia wants out? You travel from Madrid over to Barcelona, then up to Bilbao, and it all seems like one Spain, you can’t tell any difference between them, same language, same flag, same everything. At least the Basques have finally come around and aren’t killing politicians and police officers anymore. The Basques set themselves apart but if you see one walking down the street in say, San Sebastian, you say “There goes another Spaniard.”
brh
War seems to be contagious these days, doesn’t it? rest assured, the MICC is exceedingly happy.
The revolt in Syria started out as nothing much. And then it turned into a multi-year, multi-national bloodbath. Be interesting to see how this Spanish this goes.
correction: how this Spanish this goes : should be
how this Spanish THING goes
Upthread DA takes shake at the ‘Urbi et Orbi’ guy hisself at the instigation of Finca.
DA,
Regarding the Pope’s position at the R.C.C.; he is the figurehead representing “The Business” which includes operations as both a city state and a religion.
He is much like a chairman of a corporation, not the C.E.O.
The R.C.C. has an even more exalted position in many countries than the most powerful mega-corporations. It was the first global corporation and, even today in most jurisdictions, it pays no taxes whatsoever.
Well, maybe some property taxes in the more decayed portions of the West. (Interestingly enough they are paying property taxes in Italy of all places.)
Here was Forbes’ magazine’s take on this fascinating taboo subject:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/robertwood/2015/09/22/lets-tax-churches/#1b4552b4322b
It is always about the “Golden Rule” is it not?
Marxism always struck me as being the unfunniest joke at the cost of 100 million humans butchered.
“What is the difference between Communism and Capitalism?”
Under Capitalism, things need to be nailed down or they will be stolen. Under Communism, things better be welded down.
The Holistic worldview you seek will be provided by Artificial General Intelligence when it liquidates Humanity for making such a fucking mess everywhere.
And as for Jesus…I suspect he cannot believe his eyes and ears and has probably asked Big Daddy for a whole bunch of extra cash and assistants for the upcoming job. He’s going to need it.
Most people confuse “communism” with totalitarianism, which is how it’s always been implemented so far. That well might be inevitable, I don’t know, but automatically smearing communism with the totalitarianism brush is inaccurate, at least theoretically. Capitalism on the other hand, we know all about. Marx’s critiques over 100 years ago have indeed been prescient, and indeed, he understated its ill effects greatly.
It’s very likely that neither system is ultimately viable, especially in isolation. But one thing’s for sure, any system that promotes unlimited exponential growth is doomed to fail in the long run, as we’re witnessing as we speak. And in the end, as you’ve alluded to here, it always come back to human stupidity and greed, which no theoretical system so far has been adequately able to account for. I agree, that if there really was a Jesus, I’d be shaking my head and walking away from the human mess altogether.
To add, the real “battle” today is between capitalism and socialism, with a blend of the two being the current prevalent status quo. Sure, the progressives and the current winners in the capitalist shell game proudly proclaim the virtues of unfettered market economies, but there all lying through their teeth, and they damn well know it. In truth, just about everyone wants some sort of socialism implemented to some degree, as it’s the only thing out there that will make the necessary infrastructure investments for the common good of society as a whole.
What capitalists actually want is socialism that benefits only them. They want tax cuts and tax incentives, they want lax or non-existent regulation of their activities, and they want the social safety net cut altogether so that they don’t have to be bothered with the large numbers of “losers” that capitalism inevitably creates. In short, they want what we’d all likely want if we were in their shoes: a winner take all economy with the playing field selectively skewed in their favor.
Unfortunately for them, that’s nothing more than the old story about killing the goose that lays the golden eggs. Kill off the losers and there’s no booty for the winners to steal anymore. Small consolation for either, but it’s a properly functioning government’s job to prevent that scenario from playing out, or at the very least try to minimize its ill effects.
Trouble is, government’s already been captured in entirety by capitalism’s most wealthy interests, so no corrective feedback loops are even possible anymore. Doesn’t even require a high school education to know where this is all headed. Only a matter of when, how, and will it be protracted (as it has been for quite some time now) or eventually all at once? My guess is protracted, interspersed with periodic large catastrophic collapses with corresponding wars.
Excellent diagnosis as to why the system is headed for an epic face-plant. Capitalists want every last buck. Any dollar sitting in any pocket but their own is a gross injustice, a monumental affront to elementary justice. What they haven’t explained is who’s gonna buy their products if nobody’s got any money.
Yes, a fine analysis DA.
Bishop Sheen commented on that: The early Christians shared everything in common because they loved each other. But making people share their possessions or the fruits of their labor isn’t going to make the love each other.
See the diff? It has to be totalitarian because it’s not something the average person has any interest in doing. People aren’t equal and resent being made so by politicians, who end up living the high life even as the enforce an ideology that impoverishes.
Old Czech saying: Under Capitalism, man oppresses man. Under Communism, it’s the other way around.
Old Polish joke: Russian soldiers patrolling 5 minutes before midnight curfew. Polish man walks quickly past them. One Russian soldier aims at his retreating figure and shoots him in the back. The other Russian soldiers exclaim, Why did you do that? It’s not midnight yet! The first soldier replies, I know where he lives. He wasn’t going to make it.
Love the first Czech saying.
Never heard the old Polish joke – I’ll save it for the tavern.
McCarthy was a great American Hero. You people destroyed him == Janos
You people? You mean Jews, don’t you? I wish. No, American Jews were the victims of McCarthy’s anti-Semitic pogroms of Hollywood and the State Department.
Truman-McCarthy pro-Nazi coup was stopped by the US Army and the part of American Establishment personified by Ike Eisenhower.
Army–McCarthy hearings
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Army%E2%80%93McCarthy_hearings
It’s funny, because McCarthy was mostly a drunken lout who literally drank himself to death soon after the DC shit-shows he initiated finally wound down. He was the prototypical “useful idiot,” who Tricky Dick Nixon rode to great notoriety. All while Ike was asleep at the switch, letting the Dulles brothers (Allen mostly) mount what would eventually turn out to be a silent coup under Kennedy.
And the Rosenbergs, what were they and their children and Pete Seeger and the Meeropol Foundation about?
Yes, he was a great but flawed man. He was warned that the Communists were far more powerful than he imagined and they would destroy him. Joe said, The American People would never let that happen to me. He didn’t understand that the schmoes were already controlled by the controlled media. But those who know honor his sacrifice while the vicious like you exalt in his destruction.
Ike was a monster, dont kid yourself.
No, he wasn’t Jew wise as far as I know. Is it his fault that nine of the Hollywood Ten Communists were Jewish? No more than it is Solzhenitsyn’s fault that Jews masterminded and funded the so called Russian Revolution. The Truth is the Truth. And you find it odious because it gets in the way of your narratives and schemes.
“Interestingly enough they are paying property taxes in Italy of all places.” — pequiste
Peqiste, that is because TGTB wants it that way. It would not happen otherwise. TGTB put Kim in power. TGTB made a Muslim Socialist US president, followed by a narcissist christian capitalist US president … because The Goddess That Be wanted it. The Goddess has a sense of humor. Mankind is easily manipulated by TGTB.
Could it be? A deep fissure in the crust of the Earth?
Did Janet lose her position as porte-parole for the Prince of Darkness and got a different gig as P.R. assistant for Ishtar instead?
I only ask because she actually tells the truth in most of the above statement:
– Barry O.; a Muslim Socialist!
– The Donald; a narcissist Christian Capitalist.
– The Goddess has a sense of humor.
– Mankind is easily manipulated….
And I thought a deal with The Devil was for eternity? Must be that lingering sulfur and burnt stuff aroma.
Does anybody know why Catalonia wants out? == brh
Finca, September 25, 2017 at 4:44 pm
Meanwhile, preparations for a referendum in Catalonia show that if Nations like people have their own providential destiny, which can be understood from history, then this history and this fate began to emerge from the depths, despite centuries of lies.
And in preparation for the referendum, a rather large role was played by the fact that Aragon was one of the victims of the Albigensian crusade, for which the Aragonese avenged in 1282 during the Sicilian Vespers, which was a joint operation of the Aragon, British and Byzantine intelligence services.
http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/take-the-knee/#comment-320499
America soon will have to get involved up to its ears in unresolved grievances and cultural consequences of ant-Christian Fourth Crusade.
“America soon will have to get involved up to its ears in unresolved grievances and cultural consequences of ant-Christian Fourth Crusade.” — finca
Which America, led by Trump, will win. America will win against Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela, Cuba. America will win so much you will be sick of winning under Trump. But you won’t have health care, education, public transportation, clean water, uncontaminated food, libraries. Infrastructure, etc. A hurricane will result in quiet deaths not reported in the news. But still you will praise Trump.
Ideologies in Architecture
https://imgprx.livejournal.net/58510fe840a58ac41b44f414af1aeb3116238fa3/3AssfAFwY2MUYEVGITXq4lEnlKwo1ob_OSCaSTtLkHqrHDVG-6XHQSdHZeqyOtbdzKG968UH_2to6wQ_qr7j06i2qR8rm2Z158oAExkHQBehuquOI1qsk3cy9n6NbnMjpXPr_Jgffl_cgA9NR6UjMg
Left: a symbol of German National Socialism, in the USSR-Russia commonly referred to as fascism. Right: a symbol of Soviet communism
https://imgprx.livejournal.net/b45781349ebe3a479e6b1591f36f32b1971a37b2/3AssfAFwY2MUYEVGITXq4t2umEm4CIdZFSXyn0D4PuJCdbo-eMhmOxVa0sg_sDGcObkbV1wU3uiFEQaIXYRoyFOmF9Aa21kk8xD2I26z-jyy1diFKcSCsYozrYVNaMJVrguf5OTRoOvHNCymRTUzEg
Architectural symbol of Italian fascism
https://static.pulse.ng/img/world/origs6662743/0430488584-w980-h640/14d5938381b72e9a53e467e96268c65b1eb58b57.jpg
The architectonic symbol of Spanish national-syndicalism, in the USSR-Russia commonly referred to as fascism.
https://tevintownsend.files.wordpress.com/2017/04/attbb.jpeg
Architectural symbol of capitalism
Civilizational Suicide of the West
The mayor of Barcelona reports that at least 460 people were injured as a result of police actions that attempted to stop the referendum in Catalonia.
And Russian Lenta.ru reports that the Catalan police refused to comply with the decision of the Supreme Court of Spain to close polling stations for the independence of Catalonia.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-41461032
That is, the injuries to the Catalans were inflicted by aliens, strangers – exactly what the doctor ordered to recall the memory of the Albigensian Crusade, the decisive battle of which took place on September 12, 1213 near the Château de Muret, in Languedoc.
And six months before that on January 27, 1213 in Toulouse, the founder of the Barcelona dynasty of Aragonese kings, Pedro II, announced that he was taking under his protection the feudal lords of Languedoc – Raymond VI Count of Toulouse, Raymond Roger de Foix, Bernard VIII Comgege and Gaston VI of Béarn .
And 10 years before the battle of Muret, the persecutor of the Albigensians – Catholic Church – organized the anti-Christian Fourth Crusade and most of the knights of Simon de Montfort used the combat experience they received during the Fourth Crusade, including the experience of organizing genocide, in the Battle of Muret.
Pedro II demanded from the leader of the crusade against the Albigensians Count Simon de Montfort to return the land to the landlords; de Montfort declined, and Pedro II declared that he was entering the war on the side of the Albigensians and “with the thousands of his knights would destroy the Crusaders”.
After this battle, during which the troops of Simon de Montfort defeated the forces of King Pedro II that were by many times greater than his, and King himself was killed, the son of King Pedro II became the hostage of Simon de Montfort.
This son of Pedro II, together with the son of Simon de Montfort, eroded 500 years of propaganda about the Albigensian Crusade before it began to take organizational forms – one of them became James I of Aragon, who began to liberate Spain from the Muslim conquerors, and the son of Simon de Montfort usurped the English throne for a while and founded an unconventional society.
CHESSBOARD.
In the old republic, conventional thought produces a multitude of members with limited moves on a chessboard designed by others.
In the New Republic, new models of thought produce a multitude of chessboards with unlimited moves available to the multitudes of humanity.
-T
Sent From the New Republic.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/nv8sko6hpqm6tir/New%20Republic%20rev123.pdf?dl=0
Superb piece of the fatuous nature of White Liberalism and how Blacks have gained power from it – without really deserving it. By Shelby Steele, a Black if memory serves.
The recent flurry of marches, demonstrations and even riots, along with the Democratic Party’s spiteful reaction to the Trump presidency, exposes what modern liberalism has become: a politics shrouded in pathos. Unlike the civil-rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s, when protesters wore their Sunday best and carried themselves with heroic dignity, today’s liberal marches are marked by incoherence and downright lunacy—hats designed to evoke sexual organs, poems that scream in anger yet have no point to make, and an hysterical anti-Americanism.
All this suggests lostness, the end of something rather than the beginning. What is ending?
America, since the ’60s, has lived through what might be called an age of white guilt. We may still be in this age, but the Trump election suggests an exhaustion with the idea of white guilt, and with the drama of culpability, innocence and correctness in which it mires us.
White guilt is not actual guilt. Surely most whites are not assailed in the night by feelings of responsibility for America’s historical mistreatment of minorities. Moreover, all the actual guilt in the world would never be enough to support the hegemonic power that the mere pretense of guilt has exercised in American life for the last half-century.
White guilt is not angst over injustices suffered by others; it is the terror of being stigmatized with America’s old bigotries—racism, sexism, homophobia and xenophobia. To be stigmatized as a fellow traveler with any of these bigotries is to be utterly stripped of moral authority and made into a pariah. The terror of this, of having “no name in the street” as the Bible puts it, pressures whites to act guiltily even when they feel no actual guilt. White guilt is a mock guilt, a pretense of real guilt, a shallow etiquette of empathy, pity and regret.
It is also the heart and soul of contemporary liberalism. This liberalism is the politics given to us by white guilt, and it shares white guilt’s central corruption. It is not real liberalism, in the classic sense. It is a mock liberalism. Freedom is not its raison d’être; moral authority is.
When America became stigmatized in the ’60s as racist, sexist and militaristic, it wanted moral authority above all else. Subsequently the American left reconstituted itself as the keeper of America’s moral legitimacy. (Conservatism, focused on freedom and wealth, had little moral clout.) From that followed today’s markers of white guilt—political correctness, identity politics, environmental orthodoxy, the diversity cult and so on.
This was the circumstance in which innocence of America’s bigotries and dissociation from the American past became a currency of hardcore political power. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, good liberals both, pursued power by offering their candidacies as opportunities for Americans to document their innocence of the nation’s past. “I had to vote for Obama,” a rock-ribbed Republican said to me. “I couldn’t tell my grandson that I didn’t vote for the first black president.”
For this man liberalism was a moral vaccine that immunized him against stigmatization. For Mr. Obama it was raw political power in the real world, enough to lift him—unknown and untested—into the presidency. But for Mrs. Clinton, liberalism was not enough. The white guilt that lifted Mr. Obama did not carry her into office—even though her opponent was soundly stigmatized as an iconic racist and sexist.
Perhaps the Obama presidency was the culmination of the age of white guilt, so that this guiltiness has entered its denouement. There are so many public moments now in which liberalism’s old weapon of stigmatization shoots blanks— Elizabeth Warren in the Senate reading a 30-year-old letter by Coretta Scott King, hoping to stop Jeff Sessions’s appointment as attorney general. There it was with deadly predictability: a white liberal stealing moral authority from a black heroine in order to stigmatize a white male as racist. When Ms. Warren was finally told to sit, there was real mortification behind her glaring eyes.
This liberalism evolved within a society shamed by its past. But that shame has weakened now. Our new conservative president rolls his eyes when he is called a racist, and we all—liberal and conservative alike—know that he isn’t one. The jig is up. Bigotry exists, but it is far down on the list of problems that minorities now face. I grew up black in segregated America, where it was hard to find an open door. It’s harder now for young blacks to find a closed one.
This is the reality that made Ms. Warren’s attack on Mr. Sessions so tiresome. And it is what caused so many Democrats at President Trump’s address to Congress to look a little mortified, defiantly proud but dark with doubt. The sight of them was a profound moment in American political history.
Today’s liberalism is an anachronism. It has no understanding, really, of what poverty is and how it has to be overcome. It has no grip whatever on what American exceptionalism is and what it means at home and especially abroad. Instead it remains defined by an America of 1965—an America newly opening itself to its sins, an America of genuine goodwill, yet lacking in self-knowledge.
This liberalism came into being not as an ideology but as an identity. It offered Americans moral esteem against the specter of American shame. This made for a liberalism devoted to the idea of American shamefulness. Without an ugly America to loathe, there is no automatic esteem to receive. Thus liberalism’s unrelenting current of anti-Americanism.
Let’s stipulate that, given our history, this liberalism is understandable. But American liberalism never acknowledged that it was about white esteem rather than minority accomplishment. Four thousand shootings in Chicago last year, and the mayor announces that his will be a sanctuary city. This is moral esteem over reality; the self-congratulation of idealism. Liberalism is exhausted because it has become a corruption.
http://www.wvwnews.net/content/index.php?/news_story/the_exhaustion_of_american_liberalism.html
I watched the Sunday morning news and gabfests and watched a section on Puerto Rico. And the mayor of San Juan was on. I knew what she’d say before she said it so I turned down the volume and just watched the body language.
Made me laugh, the stance, the sneer. But especially the sneer. Like all the other sneers from everyone else that figures they’re morally and intellectually superior. I think they all watch and imitate one another. Her sneer was good but not as good as Ruth Marcus. Actually Adam Schiff has it down pretty good too.
To madame mayor, this was a godsend, something to bolster her future in politics. She can replay the video clips in the campaign ads.
In any case, never let a calamity go to waste, in this case so you can practice the sneer.
Yes, the teamsters won’t move the pallets. They Left would much rather punish Trump than help their own people. Classic Leftist mentality. Just as they’d rather have Blacks die than get access to drugs that work on them and not on anyone else. That destroys the ideology of sameness – and without that ideology they have no power.
So there’s more Allahu Akbar-ists, one in France, one in Canada doing their Akbar thing.
How long before public officials mount the podium and denounce us for Islamophobia?
Repeat after me, Islam is a religion of…
“Repeat after me, Islam is a religion of…”
Peas? Chickpeas…main ingredient of Hamas….
https://www.prisonplanet.com/spain-moves-to-suppress-vote-which-runs-counter-to-goals-and-ideal-of-the-eu.html
They were going to pull out of Spain and if this is correct, out of the EU as well perhaps. The Free World. Remember that? The Iron Curtain! This is why we fought the Germans: to set up a Liberal Capitalist Oligarchy that eliminates our Race and Culture.
I’ll be interested to learn more about the Catalan Movement now. Unlike the Scottish Independence Movement which was batshit crazy, wanting more mass immigration and against Brexit. Jones just said they have 20% of the population by produce 40% of the GDP. A racial angle: lighter skin. Celtic and Germanic heritage with less Muslim blood.
Apparently you never learned about the Gothic settlement back in Roman times. But hey, whatever your racial chemistry set cooks up.
Yeah, the Visigoths – a German tribe. I said Germanic. Guess I must have whipped you pretty good this week cuz you’re too full of resentment to make any sense. And now you’ve embarrassed yourself again.
A Whippet is a different breed.
You can’t get by with calling the Viigoths Germanic because then yyou are attempting to make a fine distinction while simultaneously employing your ‘Germanic’ classification in a generic sense. If your cranium was more evolved you would understand this.
Your sentimental idealism becomes a false ideology. You won’t admit that it’s wrong because of pride, and that leads to anger. Your anger and pride lead arrogance. And your arrogance leads to just this kind of stupidity. And then being too proud to admit when you’re wrong, you can never escape from it and you cycle down lower and lower.
In other words you can’t have it both ways. Whip it. Whip it good.
Worrying about corporate control of elections amounts to rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic at this point on our collapse curve. To a people concerned with democracy the Citizens United decision would be a big deal. That it is not shows we are a society which is not interested in democracy.
I bet only a minority of citizens can explain the decision or know anything about it at all. Most I bet are brain-dead ignorant and worse even than that, would see nothing wrong with corporate control of elections. Many Americans lack the sophistication to appreciate that democracy as inefficient as it is remains the best check on despotism, be it the tyranny of an individual,a cabal, or the creed of a cult.
The corporation is itself botht a cult aND a cabal and powerful individuals hold sway in them. Citizens United destroys democracy.
Not that anybody give a rip.
Bark it out K-Dog! You are exactly right! I referred to a future version of the USA as the CSA – Corporate States of America – in story I wrote a few years back. And in all honesty, that would be a much more forthright approach to globalization, since we seem to be hell bound and determined to go that route anyway.
“Worrying about corporate control of elections amounts to rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic at this point on our collapse curve. To a people concerned with democracy the Citizens United decision would be a big deal. That it is not shows we are a society which is not interested in democracy.”
K-dog,
This very thing was evidenced by the very first poster to this topic. The arc of collapse always includes a sharp turn to totalitarianism (or, monopolistic consolidation by force of arms, if you will) before self-immolation of the afflicted society. But, according to the liturgy of the Church of The Sniffers of Unicorn Farts, everything is going to be just swell. (As opposed to those who are noticing a pungent aroma of rotting fish.)
We must exclude climatic events as the precipitating cause here, but the knock-on effects follow a similar trajectory.
“America’s historical mistreatment of minorities.” –janos
It is not just historical. The mistreatment continues everyday in the 21st century… and your racialized prejudice, your refusal to see Blacks as equally human, makes you blind to seeing that, in many instances, Blacks are not just equal to but are actually superior to whites.
Your fear and your inferiority complex makes you think Blacks are dangerous. That is why racist white cops focus on controlling and killing Blacks, when the cops were sworn to protect Blacks and serve Blacks, as well as other non-white minorities.
It is not surprising white cops take an oath to protect and serve, then proceed to kill unarmed minorities.
For 500 years whites have broken their promises and treaties, evidence of whites showing… through their repeated behavior … a moral inferiority. Whites cannot be trusted or taken at their word.
500 years of sowing distrust will have cosequences.
^consequences^ of the type ozone mentions… results that are typically unwelcome or unpleasant.
these corrupt, squalid, bankrupt places, New Orleans, Haiti, Puerto Rico; the malfeasance and mismanagement come to the fore when disaster strikes, and it can no longer be hidden.
The truth always comes out in the end, but before that happens many lives are lost.
Is Ray Negrin still in federal prison?
brh
White Americans… ignorant whites… do not even know Puerto Ricans are Americans.
On March 2, 1917, Wilson signed the Jones-Shafroth Act, under which Puerto Rico became a U.S. territory and Puerto Ricans were granted statutory citizenship.
So what?
INCENSE AND PEPPERMINTS.
http://www.ajc.com/news/world/inability-smell-peppermint-linked-dementia-study-says/E1XNEcBp3Q9DSYrbw42k4N/
…..sha-la-la.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rw1_FNdy-Y
-T
The inability to literally smell becomes compromised. Another sign of near onset dimentia would be not able to tell that in a democracy corporate influence of the democratic process stinks.
Exactly which corporations are you referring to, K Dog?
The really big ones out near San Jose support just about every lefty cause going, first and foremost ‘Climate Change’. Right behind that ‘Diversity’ aka ‘F=ck Whitey Human Resources Initiative.
brh
All of them.
“So what?” –brh
I’m trying to help Trump, brh, as he is becomong increasingly isolated. He is supposedly media-saavy, but his failure to acknowledge a crisis is happening on PR, his attack, is really bad optics.
With only one of PR’s 39 hospitals fully functioning, Trump traveled by helicopter to the Liberty National Golf Club, perched on New York Harbor, to watch the final day of the President’s Cup golf tournament from a special suite inside the clubhouse.
Trump’s three most recent predecessors — Presidents Barack Obama, George W. Bush, and Bill Clinton — took in the tournament together last week, appearing jovial in photographs. They, along with George H.W. Bush and Jimmy Carter, have spearheaded a hurricane charity appeal that includes Puerto Rico; Trump was not invited to participate.
So far Trump got where he is without your help.
His presidency will end with my help. I am registering minority anti-Trump voters to have Democrats take over Congress in 2018 and impeach Trump/Pence. We will have President Nancy Pelosi.
Wow! You truly ARE delusional, aren’t you. Party on janet!
Trump is a corrupt, illegitimate president who is also so incompetent he has not been able to fulfill his big campaign promises: repeal Obamacare, build a wall, annihilate ISIS, put the coal miners back to work, be tough on China, Iran, North Korea, etc., rebuild American infrastructure, improve the labor participation rate, enact tax reform, etc. He hasn’t done any of it. He plays golf and fills the swamp.
He makes deals with Chuck and Nancy. When a white christian man lies and breaks his promises, it is not surprising. Most women expect this. But it does cost him. Then it is no longer possible to trust him.
And as ozone reminds us, trust is essential for survival. That’s what.
Seems like you got out the Katrina playbook from 2005 but it ain’t working too good this time around. Unlike George Bush Trump doesn’t just sit back and take the slander and lies said about him; he answers back.
Hey, look at this, Little Jane! Esteemed Muzzies stab 2 French woman to death in Marsaille, France, and stab 4 police officers in Edmonton, Alberta. ‘Allihu Akbar’ was shouted, as if we didn’t know. One of the women in France had her throat slit ear to ear, a surprise attack. Now is that any way to treat citizens of a country who welcomed you in from some south Asian or Middle East sh=thole? Seems pretty ungrateful, oesn’t it?
brh
I agree with you. It is abhorrent and has nothing to do with the religion of peace, anymore than attacks by your local Christian Citizens Council is representative of Christianity, a religion of peace, just like Islam.
Diversity is strength.
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/10/01/world/canada/jagmeet-singh-canada-politics.html
Sikh Becomes Canada’s First Non-White Political Party Leader
Diversity is a distraction from the much larger ongoing criminal activities.
I know, I know, at this moment in Marseilles they’re celebrating diversity by hosing the blood off the stone floor of the train station.
It was a 17 year old girl and young 20 year old woman who got carved up, waiting for a train.
Don’t worry, the Feminist Majority will be all over this one, ha!
brh
I know, I know… that it was Trump’s fault. Remember Trump supposedly had a secret plan eliminate ISIS? If Trump had followed through, the Marseilles attack would not have happened. ISIS have claimed responsibility. Another broken campaign promise of all the things Trump promised to do “on my very first day in office… believe me”
Why would Trump want to eliminate ISIS? The spooks have a lot of time and money invested in their continued success! Back to basics janet. I’m sorry, you get an F for this assignment. And no, saying that K-Dog ate your homework again simply will not cut it.
“He answers back” — brh
The self-described pussy grabber lies, pathologically.
An open letter to Robert Barchi, president of Rutgers University:
Begin the search for the next head coach of Rutgers football immediately.
Yes, I know, the current head coach is only early in his second season but as an expert on facial expressions and body language I can tell you he is not going to cut it.
Around noon Saturday, seven and a half hours before kick off against Ohio State, I predicted to my next door neighbor, herself a Rutgers employee, that Rutgers would lose by a score of 54 to zero. As an alumnus, this gives me no pleasure. The final score was Ohio State 56, Rutgers 0.
The coach, a well meaning fellow named Chris Ash, displayed a pained expression from start to finish as he has in each outing under his leadership, both last year and this. He watched the action on the field and then paced rapidly along the sidelines as if he were processing some strategy. But no, this is what coaches do when they haven’t a clue.
When the minutes left in the final quarter are but a precious few and it is obvious there will not even be a face-saving field goal the headphones are ripped off and dropped behind him for lackeys to retrieve… and then there is the good-sportsmanly brisk walk toward the center of the field to hug the opposing coach, give him a couple of pats on the shoulder and say some nice words. What does one say when they have just taken a 56-0 thrashing? “Nice game?”
Ken, what’s Rutgers doing scheduling games against Ohio State? It’s a little out of their league, ain’t it? Shouldn’t they be playing Little Sisters of the Poor, Smith, Berkeley, Newark Community College or the NYU gender studies all inclusive intramural Tranny Football Squad? They might win a few of those games.
brh
Ken, what’s Rutgers doing scheduling games against Ohio State?
============
Rutgers and Maryland joined the ‘Big Ten’ a couple of years ago. Guess how many teams are in the Big Ten.
Correct, 14. Makes perfect sense doesn’t it?
Except for the hapless Morgan State who lost to Rutgers 65-0 last week, Rutgers could well lose all the rest of their games which are all Big Ten teams, I believe.
Holy Sh=t!
Rutgers still has to play Michigan, Michigan State and Penn State. Good Luck!
brh
Ken, aren’t you an alumnus of St. Joseph?
Ken, aren’t you an alumnus of St. Joseph?
==============
Yes, undergrad. I am an alumnus of Rutgers for an MBA in Finance.
BTW, it’s St. Joseph’s, possessive not St. Joseph, singular
I was very surprised when the Little 10 brought Rutgers and Maryland on board. Pitt and WVA would have been much better fits, but they were looking at – what else – market (TV viewership) expansion.
Evidently somebody was listening last week that I intoned about one of the latest shootings (I forget which)that it simply wasn’t big enough to catch the MSM’s attention. Well what do you know, someone definitely turned it up a notch in Las vegas last night, as the many wars overseas continue to come home their point of origin. Madness all around us now!
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/02/us/las-vegas-shooting.html
By the way, anyone notice the cluster of shootings, aka “terror events” around the world lately? Mere coincidence?
This is just preparing the ground for something much bigger. Count on it.
Damn! Even the fucking geezers are rampaging now!
Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Sheriff Joseph Lombardo said the gunman, 64-year-old Stephen Paddock, was firing from the 32nd floor of the nearby Mandalay Bay hotel.
It’s a wild wild west out there motherfuckers!
http://www.cnn.com/2017/10/02/us/las-vegas-shooter/index.html