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Grand Unified Theory of Recent American Politics


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2024 Jun 1, 4:11pm   5,159 views  129 comments

by Patrick   ➕follow (61)   💰tip   ignore  

The largest cost for every employer is wages. Employers want to pay lower wages to have higher profits for themselves. Lower wages are good for owners, but bad for employees.

American wages are high relative to most other countries. So what is an employer to do about that?

Nixon went to China in 1972, and I imagine this is what he said to Mao: "You have vast numbers of desperately poor people. The American ruling class would like to get richer by moving our manufacturing to China, where your people will accept dramatically lower wages than American workers. How about it?"

Mao thought: "Wow, this guy is a traitor to his country, but I should take advantage of American corruption and agree to help move US manufacturing to China. America will transfer all of its manufacturing technology to us for free, which would otherwise take us many decades to catch up on."

Mao said: "OK"

And so US manufacturing was moved to China and the entire Midwest was devastated as five million jobs were lost to China. Consumers were happy with lower prices for manufactured goods, but did not connect these prices to the devastation of the rust belt.

US wages were still too high for the US ruling class, which is never satisfied, no matter how wealthy. The housebuilding, farming, and meatpacking industries in particular lobbied in DC to reduce protection of the US border with Mexico, claiming a "labor shortage". But that was a lie. There is no shortage of American labor, only a shortage of Americans willing to work for very low wages. At high enough wages, American labor is easily available.

But the ruling class got their way as usual, and to import people willing to work for low wages, the border was deliberately weakened. Millions of illegal aliens flooded in, and the housebuilders, farmers, and meatpackers employed them illegally for about half as much as they would have to pay American citizens.

Employers were again happy with the lower wages, and Americans were further impoverished because they were again forced to compete with vast numbers of desperately poor people. Consumers were happy with lower prices for construction, vegetables, and meat, but did not connect these prices to the open southern border right away.

But after a while, even ordinary consumers started getting wise to what was going on, and objected to the outsourcing of jobs to China and importation of illegals, seeing the devastation it was creating in America.

The ruling class then came up with the strategy of calling all the newly impoverished white US citizens "racist" in their corporate media, to distract and divide the working class. Since maybe half of the working class was white, and half black or Hispanic, this worked well to divide them and prevent the political unity necessary to fight the oligarchy.

Impoverished and vilified as racists by the ruling class, poor white people turned to drugs to escape, and the Sackler family in particular supplied them with opiates, killing millions while generating billions of dollars in profits.

Around this point, Warren Buffett said "There's class warfare, all right, but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning." Admirable honesty there.

When the left and right briefly united against the corrupt and manipulative ruling class during the Occupy Wall Street protests in 2011, the ruling class decided to appeal to the resentments of the incompetent to deepen divisions and distract the hoi polloi from looking upward at who was actually impoverishing them. The oligarchy told the least competent people, who are rightly insecure about their abilities, that they should get preference based on race, sex, or sexual perversion for college admissions and jobs which normally require long training and difficult qualification tests. The incompetent loved it because it shifted blame for failure from themselves onto smarter and harder working people.

So the well-justified anger at betrayal and exploitation by the ruling class was redirected to be anger at competent ordinary people working in essential jobs.

The infrastructure of the US began to fall apart as competence became much less important in getting hired than having the right victimhood qualifications. The current US Vice president is a good example of this racism and sexism in hiring, as she was selected explicitly because of her race and sex but is clearly incompetent. Boeing's hiring based on diversity quotas has made air travel much more dangerous for everyone. Medical schools now admit very weak students based on race, making medical care a very risky proposition.

Enter Donald Trump. Born rich but never accepted by the rest of the ruling class because of his uncouth manners, Trump was stung by their rejection. Even in ancient Greece, rejected members of the oligarchy traditionally turned to the common people for support. So Trump decided to appeal to the common people and give away the game, explaining exactly how the rest of the ruling class was screwing them over with outsourcing to China and insourcing illegals. He ran for president in 2016, not really expecting to win.

But he did win, because no other candidate among either Democrats or Republicans had the slightest interest in helping ordinary people raise their wages. Maybe Bernie did, but Hillary had him (politically) bumped off. Nearly all politicians are on the payroll of various large corporations which benefit from outsourcing to China and importing illegals. Those corporations donate generously to reelection campaigns, or not, depending on the obedience of Congressmen to their wishes.

Trump simply stepped into the gap left by the Democratic Party's betrayal of the working class, the Democrats' traditional base of support. Trump was also greatly helped in 2016 because Hillary is so odious that people were more horrified at the thought of having her as president than at having a reality TV star.

As president, Trump failed to drain the swamp or build the wall, but he did raise tariffs on Chinese goods, close the southern border, and raid US companies which were employing illegals. During the Trump administration, the black unemployment rate hit its lowest point ever because of these raids. For example, Trump had a chicken-processing plant in Chicago raided, and it turned out that every single line employee there was illegal. When those illegals were rounded up by INS, the factory had no choice but to hire local black US citizens for those jobs at about twice the hourly wage they had been paying.

Big corporate employers were enraged at Trump. Cutting off the supply of low-wage illegal aliens meant that several trillion dollars a year would go to poor and middle class US citizens as wages instead of to the very rich as dividends and stock price gains.

Those trillions of dollars per year is what all this fighting is really about.

Ironically, the overall economy is always much more prosperous when workers get high wages, because then the workers can actually buy products, instead of only the rich being able to afford anything. When the rich get more money, they just throw it on their pile of cash in the basement. When the poor get more money, they spend it. This spending is one reason the economy was doing so well under Trump. So the short-term greed of owners was strangling their own long-term prosperity.

Then Trump pissed off the ruling class yet more by refusing to start any new wars. US foreign policy had been dictated by weapons makers like Raytheon and Lockheed Martin up to that point. They like wars. Wars mean weapons sales, and weapons sales means profits. Profits can be used to bribe Congressmen who then distract everyone with "racism" and other bullshit non-problems to get votes while never mentioning what their donors really want. It's a big circle of corruption, and Trump was getting in the way.

When it became clear that Trump was going to win again in 2020 because he had actually helped common Americans get some of those trillions of dollars which had been rerouted from wages to dividends, the oligarchy, including people like Gates, Zuckerberg, and Soros, decided that something must be done. They arranged to have him impeached, but impeachment didn't remove him. They impeached him again, but again to no effect. So they called their henchman Fauci at NIAID and told him it was time to release the latest virus he had been working on, this one in Wuhan. Fauci's work had to be done in Wuhan because it is illegal in the US to deliberately make viruses more infectious to humans. The release of the virus provided a convenient pretext for universal mail-in ballots, which are the perfect vehicle for election fraud. Fauci and other NIAID employees also stood to reap millions from a dangerous experimental "vaccine" against the new virus.

The virus was originally called "Wuhan Virus", which makes sense because Fauci paid Peter Daszak to create it at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, but since China is central to the revenue stream of the US oligarchy, the name of the virus was forcibly changed in the media, to "covid". Anyone continuing to use the correct name (Wuhan Virus) was labelled "racist" once again.

The oligarchy also sponsored BLM and Antifa riots in big cities in 2020 to increase voter unease with Trump's presidency, and set off booming fireworks in dozens of cities over and over for weeks to increase anxiety. Then for good measure, they lit forest fires along highways up and down the west coast to create an ominous pall of smoke while also supporting their scientifically fraudulent "global warming" bid to take over all energy production by dictating which sources of energy were to be allowed. The wealthy bought waterfront property and insurers didn't charge them any higher premiums than they would for higher land, because the insurers all know that sea levels are not actually rising.

Trump also pissed off the giant government worker goldbricking class. This is an army of guys at the FBI, NSA, Homeland Security, etc. who can easily commit clandestine crimes and who number in the hundreds of thousands. They are all pension multimillionaires. Trump noticed the huge expense of these goldbrickers and mentioned that he would like to start decreasing their numbers and slowing their wage growth. They were therefore happy to help the oligarchy commit the above crimes via BLM, and by lighting forest fires, and by locking down the economy to reverse Trump's economic success, etc. They are the very opposite of public servants, being enemies of the public, especially the FBI.

In November 2020, the oligarchy carried out their election fraud. Everyone went to bed on election night seeing that Trump was the clear winner. Then the voting machines, all connected by cellular or internet, reported back the number of fraudulent ballots needed to swing the election, and a sufficient number were printed up and delivered at 3am in the swing states. When everyone woke up, the impossible 3am surge in ballots made Biden the "winner" of a rigged election.

A million common people who had benefitted from Trump's presidency collected in DC to protest the fraud. But Pelosi and the FBI were ready for them with their Jan 6th entrapment scheme. The FBI hired Ray Epps to urge the protestors to go into the Capitol, and when the protestors were still too peaceful, happily staying within the velvet ropes in the Capitol, FBI agents dressed as Trump supporters smashed furniture and windows. The "Buffalo Man" was literally given an escorted room to room tour of the Capitol by Capitol Police, but after the FBI plants smashed things up, Capitol Police then arrested him and he was imprisoned, as was the plan all along. Video of his very peaceful Capitol tour was suppressed until Mike Johnson became speaker. Much more video is still suppressed to protect identities of the FBI agents who were smashing things up. US veteran Ashli Babbitt was shot and killed by a Capitol Policeman, who was praised for murdering her, since she was a Trump supporter.

The FBI still refuses to say even approximately how many of the protestors were actually FBI agents pretending to be Trump supporters.

The FBI then arrested more than 700 real election fraud protestors and hasty kangaroo courts sentenced them to many years in prison under novel legal theories invented on the spot. Most are still in jail today, real US political prisoners. The oligarchy tried to label Jan 6th as an "insurrection" but what kind of insurrection is completely unarmed? No one was buying the "insurrection" lie except people already blinded by hate for Trump.

After the fraudulent election, the FBI and media quietly admitted that Hunter Biden's laptop actually did belong to him, and that it did document not only his illegal drug use, weapons violations, and pedophilia, but also the bribery scheme whereby Hunter sold access to his father to Chinese and Ukrainian oligarchs. 51 former US "intelligence" officials publicly asserted before the election that the laptop was fake. They lied, but the corporate media suppressed the story of their lie, so most people still have not heard about it, nor have any of them been prosecuted for their overt interference in the election.

Note that the corporate media is 100% owned by the same ruling class which benefits from outsourcing to China, importing illegals, and starting wars. The Washington Post, for example, is owned by Jeff Bezos, who is the largest shareholder in Amazon, which imports most of their products from China. The Atlantic, as another example, is owned by Laurene Powell Jobs, Steve Jobs's widow. She also profits from manufacturing Apple products in China.

Corporate media like the Washington Post obediently reported hoaxes and lies to support the oligarchy's narratives, such as the "fine people" hoax, the Russian collusion hoax, the Trump Dossier hoax, the "full hospitals" hoax, the "safe and effective" lie, the "100% effective" lie (when you can for yourself look up that the best reported absolute risk reduction was under 1% and only for a short time), the climate change hoax, various "hate crime" hoaxes like Jussie Smollett's, that Hunter's laptop was disinformation when it was actually true, and on and on without end.

Reporters with integrity who questioned the repeated hoaxes were systematically fired or quit the corporate media in disgust, people like Bari Weiss, Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, Alex Berenson, and Tucker Carlson. They are now all independent reporters via the internet.

TV stations have exceptionally weak editorial integrity now that most of their advertising revenue has been eaten by Google and Facebook. They are willing to say anything to please any advertiser who will give them enough money to stay alive. They found their savior in Pfizer. In return for Pfizer dollars, they simply had to lie and claim that the vaccine is "safe and effective" over and over. It is in reality anything but safe and effective. It killed millions of people worldwide, at least 1 in 800 of anyone who took even one shot.

Note that ivermectin does seem to help against vaccine damage because it binds to the spike protein generated by the mRNA as well as it binds to the spike protein in the virus. Note also that many people died because the FDA ran a disparagement campaign against ivermectin in order to boost "vaccine" sales for Pfizer and Moderna.

Sadly, Trump himself took a million dollars from Pfizer for his 2017 inauguration party and obediently continues to tout their horrifyingly dangerous vaccine even now after it is perfectly clear that it killed vast numbers of people and not only helped no one, but after a few months made everyone who took it more likely to catch the virus and more likely to get seriously ill or die. Random young people continue to drop dead of vaccine-induced "heart attacks" daily, and the corporate press says not a word about the true cause. This makes them complicit in murder.

The virus itself was very weak. The median age of a Wuhan Virus death is greater than the median age of death overall. The only way to die from it is to be on death's door to begin with. The majority of supposed virus deaths were in nursing homes, and the majority of those deaths were induced with Midazolam in order to collect large payments per "virus" death from the government. This was another mass murder. There was never any need for the vaccine at all. Mandating it to most people on earth was the worst crime against humanity ever, but hey, Pfizer got $100 billion from it, so not a total loss, right?

Right on schedule, the Biden administration provoked a new war, this time in Ukraine. "Aid" to Ukraine is really payments to US weapons makers, so they were also happy that the usual DC circle of corruption had been restored.

As Biden's corruption was compounded by his obvious senility, it became clear that Trump would win for a third time in 2024. So the oligarchy decided to sacrifice the integrity of the US justice system to get Trump. Literally Trumped up charges were invented, a corrupt judge and jury installed, and yet more novel legal theories were invented on the spot, such as the idea that the jury did not have to agree at all and Trump could be found guilty anyway.

So here we are. Trump is more popular than ever because pretty much everyone can see through the latest sham trial of Trump. Even most Democrats are starting to feel a bit nauseous about the obvious corruption of the justice system to get Trump.

It is very uncertain what will happen next. (Late July: What happened next was the CIA's attempted murder of Trump in Butler, PA.) The ruling class is desperate to maintain their trillions of dollars of income from outsourcing jobs to China, importing illegals, and starting wars.

One solution is the make corporate charters subject to a public vote for renewal. Overtly evil corporations like Pfizer would be dissolved and shareholders bankrupted if they failed a vote of public confidence. Voting to dissolve specific corporations must absolutely be in-person and on paper, with valid US ID proving citizenship and no exceptions whatsoever for any reason. Ballots would be kept for five years after the vote. Any group of citizens would be allowed to recount the votes in person at any time.

Please copy this essay to anywhere you think people might read it. I'd also be grateful for feedback on how to improve it. You can comment here:

https://patrick.net/post/1381434/2024-06-01-grand-unified-theory


« First        Comments 91 - 129 of 129        Search these comments

91   DOGEWontAmountToShit   2024 Aug 1, 1:59pm  

HeadSet says


Patrick says


Yes, $6,000 per year for 340 million people would be about 2 trillion dollars.

We do not have 340 million workers.



Yes, about half that:


92   Patrick   2024 Aug 1, 2:38pm  

True, and I know the article said "Americans saw their incomes jump", but I'm guessing that $6,000 per person is about how much every person in the US loses to outsourcing and illegal immigration.
93   Patrick   2024 Aug 1, 2:41pm  

https://sashastone.substack.com/p/when-is-it-americas-turn


Trump vs. Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and now, Kamala Harris can be seen as a populist uprising against an elite cabal that has claimed this country for their own.

It took me too long to see it. Now I can’t unsee it. ...

Donald Trump crashed the party. We took it all personally. He was doing this TO US, to HER, we thought. It would take me eight years to realize it wasn’t personal. He represented millions of Americans whose biggest priority wasn’t electing the first female and making history. ...

Trump is trying with his campaign to reach beyond the confines of his MAGA base. He visited the Bronx. He talked to a Crytpo crowd. He went to SneakerCon.

And now, he’s thrown himself to the wolves at the NABJ. They were angry that a “racist” was invited, but I think some of Trump’s message got through: he was going to fight for them, for cheaper gas, for lower food costs, for safer streets, for better jobs. There had to be at least one open mind in that crowd willing to give him a shot.
94   Patrick   2024 Aug 6, 8:31pm  

Patrick says

The oligarchy also sponsored BLM and Antifa riots in big cities in 2020 to increase voter unease with Trump's presidency, and set off booming fireworks in dozens of cities over and over for weeks to increase anxiety.



97   Patrick   2024 Aug 18, 5:35pm  

Patrick says


The release of the virus provided a convenient pretext for universal mail-in ballots, which are the perfect vehicle for election fraud.


https://slaynews.com/news/general-flynn-blows-whistle-covid-bioweapon-introduced-rig-2020-election/


General Michael Flynn has blown the whistle and warned the American people that COVID-19 was created as a “bioweapon” that was unleashed onto the public in order to rig the 2020 election for the Democrats.

Flynn explains how Covid was a bioweapon aimed at influencing the 2020 election to prevent President Donald Trump’s re-election.

He also explains that the effort sought to alter future election systems to keep Democrats in power.

Flynn, who served as the 24th U.S. national security advisor in the Trump administration, said:

“The whole purpose of Covid was to make sure that the 2020 election was in the bag… once they did that, the real part of Covid, introduction of Covid, of the bioweapon by China, was to ensure that we could change our election system and process.”
98   Patrick   2024 Aug 20, 4:04pm  

Patrick says

Trump simply stepped into the gap left by the Democratic Party's betrayal of the working class, the Democrats' traditional base of support.


https://www.2ndsmartestguyintheworld.com/p/the-council-who-is-running-the-united


President Trump masterfully seized the opportunity to take hold of the disenfranchised Americans openly denigrated by Hillary, that “The Council” had exploited for decades while hidden in plain sight. Trump’s power and popularity made him an immediate, dangerous enemy of “The Council.”

The subsequent overwhelming support for President Trump spoiled the election rigging “The Council” had in place for Clinton (whom they could control and had selected). But, they did not have the infrastructure in place to rig the 2016 election “enough.” They would not make the same mistake in 2020. From that moment forward, Trump had to be destroyed.
99   Patrick   2024 Aug 20, 8:03pm  

Patrick says

There is no shortage of American labor, only a shortage of Americans willing to work for very low wages. At high enough wages, American labor is easily available.

But the ruling class got their way as usual, and to import people willing to work for low wages, the border was deliberately weakened. Millions of illegal aliens flooded in, and the housebuilders, farmers, and meatpackers employed them illegally for about half as much as they would have to pay American citizens.

Employers were again happy with the lower wages, and Americans were further impoverished because they were again forced to compete with vast numbers of desperately poor people.



100   Patrick   2024 Aug 28, 11:57am  

Patrick says

Then Trump pissed off the ruling class yet more by refusing to start any new wars. US foreign policy had been dictated by weapons makers like Raytheon and Lockheed Martin up to that point. They like wars. Wars mean weapons sales, and weapons sales means profits. Profits can be used to bribe Congressmen who then distract everyone with "racism" and other bullshit non-problems to get votes while never mentioning what their donors really want. It's a big circle of corruption, and Trump was getting in the way.



103   Patrick   2024 Sep 15, 11:26am  

Patrick says


During the Trump administration, the black unemployment rate hit its lowest point ever because of these raids. For example, Trump had a chicken-processing plant in Chicago raided, and it turned out that every single line employee there was illegal. When those illegals were rounded up by INS, the factory had no choice but to hire local black US citizens for those jobs at about twice the hourly wage they had been paying.





104   Ceffer   2024 Sep 15, 11:32am  

Patrick says

https://x.com/UltraDane/status/1832068412194906603

LOL! Everyone gets subverted except the super rich and their whorish minions.
105   Patrick   2024 Sep 15, 5:02pm  

Patrick says


But the ruling class got their way as usual, and to import people willing to work for low wages, the border was deliberately weakened. Millions of illegal aliens flooded in, and the housebuilders, farmers, and meatpackers employed them illegally for about half as much as they would have to pay American citizens.



106   Patrick   2024 Sep 15, 8:33pm  

Patrick says

Then Trump pissed off the ruling class yet more by refusing to start any new wars. US foreign policy had been dictated by weapons makers like Raytheon and Lockheed Martin up to that point. They like wars. Wars mean weapons sales, and weapons sales means profits.



107   Patrick   2024 Sep 17, 5:00pm  

Patrick says

The ruling class then came up with the strategy of calling all the newly impoverished white US citizens "racist" in their corporate media, to distract and divide the working class. Since maybe half of the working class was white, and half black or Hispanic, this worked well to divide them and prevent the political unity necessary to fight the oligarchy.

Impoverished and vilified as racists by the ruling class, poor white people turned to drugs to escape, and the Sackler family in particular supplied them with opiates, killing millions while generating billions of dollars in profits.



108   Patrick   2024 Sep 19, 5:09pm  

Patrick says

Trump simply stepped into the gap left by the Democratic Party's betrayal of the working class, the Democrats' traditional base of support.



109   HeadSet   2024 Sep 19, 7:51pm  

Patrick says

Trump simply stepped into the gap left by the Democratic Party's betrayal of the working class

True, and any union that supports the Dems with the Dem's mass import of illegals has sold out. Unions should use the term "Superscab" when referring to illegals. Superscabs cut worker wages, union or not.
110   Patrick   2024 Sep 20, 8:56am  

Patrick says

As president, Trump failed to drain the swamp or build the wall, but he did raise tariffs on Chinese goods, close the southern border, and raid US companies which were employing illegals. During the Trump administration, the black unemployment rate hit its lowest point ever because of these raids.


https://nitter.poast.org/TrumpWarRoom/status/1837144369733800324#m


112   Patrick   2024 Sep 22, 7:48pm  

Patrick says

Trump simply stepped into the gap left by the Democratic Party's betrayal of the working class, the Democrats' traditional base of support.



114   Patrick   2024 Sep 26, 12:48pm  

Patrick says

The housebuilding, farming, and meatpacking industries in particular lobbied in DC to reduce protection of the US border with Mexico, claiming a "labor shortage". But that was a lie. There is no shortage of American labor, only a shortage of Americans willing to work for very low wages.


https://slaynews.com/news/colorado-meat-factory-accused-trafficking-haitian-migrants/


Colorado Meat Factory Accused of ‘Trafficking’ Haitian Migrants

A meat factory in Colorado has been hit with allegations of “management-led human trafficking” by a labor union.

The United Food and Commercial Workers Union (UFCW) has accused the JBS SA meat processing plant in Greeley of “trafficking” migrants from Haiti.

The UFCW has urged federal, state, and local authorities to investigate the Brazilian food company JBS SA over the allegations.

Similar accusations have been made regarding human trafficking networks exploiting migrants at factories in Springfield, Ohio, and Charleroi, Pennsylvania.

The allegations revolve around the thousands of Haitian migrants who were imported into the United States by the Biden-Harris administration.

UFCW Local 7 President Kim Cordova said the migrants from Haiti and other foreign nations were transported into the country legally

However, they were immediately exploited for cheap labor in an alleged human trafficking scheme, according to Cordova.
115   Patrick   2024 Sep 27, 10:31am  

Patrick says

When the left and right briefly united against the corrupt and manipulative ruling class during the Occupy Wall Street protests in 2011, the ruling class decided to appeal to the resentments of the incompetent to deepen divisions and distract the hoi polloi from looking upward at who was actually impoverishing them. The oligarchy told the least competent people, who are rightly insecure about their abilities, that they should get preference based on race, sex, or sexual perversion for college admissions and jobs which normally require long training and difficult qualification tests. The incompetent loved it because it shifted blame for failure from themselves onto smarter and harder working people.


https://thuletide.wordpress.com/2022/02/05/how-elites-control-the-masses-foucaults-four-modes-of-power-simplified-explanation/


By granting positions of power and influence to society’s outcasts, losers, and freaks, the Left nurtures an incredibly loyal flock to function as a middle-management caste; the flock knows fine well that they would be powerless without their Leftist shepherds.
116   Patrick   2024 Oct 5, 9:04am  

Patrick says

Trump simply stepped into the gap left by the Democratic Party's betrayal of the working class, the Democrats' traditional base of support.


https://www.coffeeandcovid.com/p/media-brain-fungus-saturday-october


Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal ran a story headlined, “Trump Floats Long-Shot Proposal for 10% Cap on Credit-Card Rates.” At a rally this week, the former President announced a platform proposal to temporarily cap credit card interest rates. Combined with his proposals to eliminate taxes on tips, social security, and overtime pay, it is the strongest working-class package proposed by any major candidate in a generation.

“While working Americans catch up, we’re going to put a temporary cap on credit-card interest rates,” Trump said at the rally in New York. “We can’t let them pay 25 and 30 percent.” ...

Critics, who gave Kamala a pass on her idiotic idea for grocery-store price caps, pointed out the obvious issue that fabulously wealthy credit card companies’ interest rates are intended to account for the risk of not being paid back. Capping rates would probably reduce the amount credit card companies are willing to loan to low-income borrowers with limited prospects of paying those loans back.

Almost everyone is missing the point. It’s not about the wisdom of price caps. The market for loans is nothing like the markets for commodities or services.

Since recorded history, under common law excessive interest rates have been criminal offenses. Unsurprisingly, until relatively recently, all 50 states had serious criminal laws on their books for usury, which is the crime of charging someone too much interest. If you loaned me money in Florida at credit card rates, I could file a police report against you and you would be arrested, charged, and potentially imprisoned.

Last century, two states —Delaware and South Dakota— rescinded their usury laws. Because banks are subject to the laws of their states of incorporation, all credit card companies are incorporated in either Delaware or South Dakota. In other words, due to a legal loophole, credit card companies get away with criminal conduct. ...

Again, usury has been a crime since the Code of Hammurabi and remains a crime in 48 states. Usurious credit card interest rates are literally criminal. They can only get away with it because of a legal loophole. Using loopholes to escape criminal liability for something that civilization has always considered an immoral crime is not ethical or even defensible.

Argue about self-responsibility all you want, but the bottom line is: banks do not occupy the moral high ground this time.

Trump’s credit card cap proposal rips the mask off Democrats’ faux compassion for low-income Americans. They are literally victims of a crime that isn’t enforced by two states. Love it or hate it, Trump’s proposal shows the Democrat party is the amoral, uncompassionate party of the big banks.
117   HeadSet   2024 Oct 5, 5:57pm  

Patrick says

“Trump Floats Long-Shot Proposal for 10% Cap on Credit-Card Rates.”

Interest rates may not be able to be set at a national level. Like abortion, the courts may determine the issue to be up to the states.
118   Patrick   2024 Oct 6, 11:02am  

Patrick says

The housebuilding, farming, and meatpacking industries in particular lobbied in DC to reduce protection of the US border with Mexico, claiming a "labor shortage". But that was a lie. There is no shortage of American labor, only a shortage of Americans willing to work for very low wages. At high enough wages, American labor is easily available.


https://captroyharkness.substack.com/p/the-camp-of-the-saints-after-50-years


The business class is represented by a manager at a pork processing plant. Looking to take advantage of cheap labor, he is slaughtered like a pig by African workers and turned into a can of pate.


119   Patrick   2024 Oct 6, 1:41pm  

Patrick says

Right on schedule, the Biden administration provoked a new war, this time in Ukraine. "Aid" to Ukraine is really payments to US weapons makers, so they were also happy that the usual DC circle of corruption had been restored.




120   Patrick   2024 Oct 6, 3:04pm  

Patrick says

Trump simply stepped into the gap left by the Democratic Party's betrayal of the working class, the Democrats' traditional base of support.



121   Patrick   2024 Oct 8, 3:53pm  

Patrick says

Trump simply stepped into the gap left by the Democratic Party's betrayal of the working class, the Democrats' traditional base of support.




125   RC2006   2024 Oct 30, 7:47am  

Can civil war be avoided this decade? Media and left keep pushing non stop division that I doubt will stop or slow if Trump wins. Our debt is so out of control now how much longer can the government keep up with entitlements which I think is the only thing keeping the peace at this point.
126   DOGEWontAmountToShit   2024 Oct 30, 8:02am  

RC2006 says


Can civil war be avoided this decade? Media and left keep pushing non stop division that I doubt will stop or slow if Trump wins. Our debt is so out of control now how much longer can the government keep up with entitlements which I think is the only thing keeping the peace at this point.


More debt = more future demand for dollars. And most dollar debt isn't even created by the US and state governments, but foreign nations owed to other foreign nations in the eurodollar markets. Our USTs are just used as reserves for that outside banking system. And if stablecoin usage like Tether takes off, then demand will rise even more. Tether will use USTs or other sovereign dollar denominated debt for most of its reserves, too.

It's weird and counterintuitive to Americans, but it's reality. Has been for 70 years or so now. We look at things thru a lens that omits the rest of the world's issuing of dollar denominated debt.

Players TRY to get out of it. France did by redeeming their dollars into gold. And now some in BRICS (Russia and China, mostly). The Japanese and Europeans had delusions of reserve currency grandeur in the 90s and 00s, too. Look where those plans ended up.

BRICS is PR bullshit. Sure, nations can settle trade accounts between each other to reduce dollar usage. But that isn't because the dollar is crap and that process doesn't need BRICS. But that process means there can't be permanent creditor nor debtor nations, too. Which is why BRICS as the PR whitepapers and Russian propaganda describes is doomed. They could go full gold standard and it is still doomed because of that.

We might go under, but most of the rest of the world will go before us. And yes, that matters. At that point we can be like, "OK, we now peg the dollar to gold again. Have fun with that." or something similarly asshole-like.

DemocratsAreTotallyFucked says




https://medium.com/the-geopolitical-economist/how-the-uk-is-becoming-a-third-world-economy-8fbdfdb412ea
127   Patrick   2024 Nov 5, 9:10pm  

https://jameshowardkunstler.substack.com/p/escape-from-psychopathocracy


Why does it seem that the Democratic Party is in it solely to remain in power? I will tell you: because it controls the money-flows to the vast cadres of a vicious parasitical bureaucracy and its support system of outside orgs that commit crimes and make war on the rest of us. It’s called “the blob” for a reason. It’s exactly like that monster out of the 1950s horror movies, a shape-shifting leviathan that devours everything in its path with only one purpose, to grow ever larger until it consumes. . . everything.

In my state of New York last week, the DEC authorities sent a swat team to seize a man and woman’s pet squirrel and raccoon and then killed the animals. Why? Because they could. How is that different from the DOJ swatting and seizing a grandmother for walking through the US capitol building and then stuffing her in prison for the rest of her natural life on misdemeanor charges? It’s not different. They are both demonstrations of deliberate cruelty — and that’s why the squirrel story resonated so widely around the country. You know exactly what it says: we can take whatever is dear to you. . . your pets. . . your livelihood. . . your freedom. . . your life. ...

You’ve no doubt heard about one of the blob’s instrumental players, Rep. Jamie Raskin’s audacious plan to un-do the election, should Donald Trump happen to generate a landslide vote that overwhelms Marc Elias’s ballot-box-stuffing operation. The Raskin scheme is to disqualify Mr. Trump as an “insurrectionist” by an act of Congress before the January 6 certification ceremony. Of course, that would suppose a Democratic majority in Congress, which is unlikely to be the case.

But Mr. Raskin put his foot in his mouth so deeply that he nearly choked to death last week when, discussing election matters with entertainer Bill Maher on TV, Mr. Raskin stated that he would accept the results only of a free and fair election — with himself left to determine whether it was free and fair. This, you understand, is exactly what he accuses Donald Trump of doing in 2020: thinking-and-saying that the election might not have been free and fair.

The problem for Mr. Raskin is that this sort of “election denial” he exhibits is exactly the basis for accusing Mr. Trump of “insurrection” in the first place. Thus: Mr. Raskin has just made a potential “insurrectionist” of himself. What’s more, as if the Jack Smith Case in Judge Chutkan’s DC court was not already compromised enough by the SCOTUS decision on presidential immunity, Mr. Trump’s lawyers can now call Jamie Raskin as a witness in the case, play the video of his remarks to Bill Maher, and ask him how expressing doubt about the freeness or fairness of an election amounts to “insurrection.”
129   Patrick   2024 Nov 10, 3:48pm  

Patrick says

Then Trump pissed off the ruling class yet more by refusing to start any new wars. US foreign policy had been dictated by weapons makers like Raytheon and Lockheed Martin up to that point. They like wars. Wars mean weapons sales, and weapons sales means profits. Profits can be used to bribe Congressmen who then distract everyone with "racism" and other bullshit non-problems to get votes while never mentioning what their donors really want. It's a big circle of corruption, and Trump was getting in the way.




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