Russia wants to upend Western democracy

You sure get a lot done from Mom's basement.

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Huh. Where in NY? We have a lot of Russians here in NY, we don't hunt them down, we ask their hackers to start companies and then we give them all our money, and our private personal information.

So do you live in Trump City or Trumpland?

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Exclusive: Putin-linked think tank drew up plan to sway 2016 U.S. election - documents

It recommended the Kremlin launch a propaganda campaign on social media and Russian state-backed global news outlets to encourage U.S. voters to elect a president who would take a softer line toward Russia than the administration of then-President Barack Obama, the seven officials said.

A second institute document, drafted in October and distributed in the same way, warned that Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton was likely to win the election. For that reason, it argued, it was better for Russia to end its pro-Trump propaganda and instead intensify its messaging about voter fraud to undermine the U.S. electoral system’s legitimacy and damage Clinton’s reputation in an effort to undermine her presidency, the seven officials said.

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-russia-election-exclusive-idUSKB
N17L2N3

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According to Reuters, there's no evidence that the Trump campaign colluded in this. It was purely a Russian operation. Nor did the RISS plans say anything about the release of hacked emails. "The officials said the hacking was a covert intelligence operation run separately out of the Kremlin."

1) So we have the RISS plan.
www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-russia-election-exclusive-idUSKBN17L2N3

2) We have the RT cable network and the Sputnik news agency, which specialized in anti-Clinton stories. Trump knows ‘nothing about Russia,’ He just repeats their propaganda.
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/10/trump-knows-nothing-about
-russia-repeats-their-propaganda.html

3) We have the email hacks, which were far more extensive than initially reported.
www.nytimes.com/2016/08/11/us/politics/democratic-party-russia-hack-cy
berattack.html

4) We have the Russian troll factory in St. Petersburg writing pro-Trump tweets under hundreds of aliases.
www.nytimes.com/2015/06/07/magazine/the-agency.html?_r=0

5) We have thousands of Russian Twitter bots to make sure the tweets went viral.
www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2017/04/03/522503844/how-russia
n-twitter-bots-pumped-out-fake-news-during-the-2016-election

6) We have Fancy Bear and Cozy Bear and dozens of other covert Russian operations.
www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2016/12/new-report-says-russian-hacking
-came-russia

7) We have Guccifer 2.0.
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/dnc-hacker-guccifer-20-inte
rview

8) We have DCLeaks.com.
www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-11/russian-hackers-of-dnc-said
-to-scoop-up-secrets-from-nato-soros

9) And finally, Russia appears to have used Wikileaks for maximum exposure of all its hacks.
www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/top-russians-celebrated-when-trump-won-in
tel-report-says-source-n703741

That's a pretty big operation. Did it work? We'll never know, but given how close the election was, the answer is probably yes. Probably Trump will loosen financial regulation along the same lines as Bush, then the USA can probably have another 2008 style financial collapse. Then it is kudos to Putin for his farsighted understanding of American Capitalism! You can know as much as Putin’s best advisers about how Capitalism can repeat big mistakes by watching The Big Short. www.metacritic.com/movie/the-big-short

The following video is not a spoiler because you already lived through this -- you just didn’t understand it while the crash was happening in 2008:
The Big Short and its short message summarizing the movie

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Quote:

---

Originally posted by SECOND:
Probably Trump will loosen financial regulation along the same lines as Bush, then the USA can probably have another 2008 style financial collapse. Then it is kudos to Putin for his farsighted understanding of American Capitalism!

---

But we'll just overlook the quantitative easing that has been happening in 2009 that was the largest contributor to Obama doubling the national debt in 8 years while the quality of life for the average American fell.

We're already part of a major financial collapse. Those of us who don't understand how money works just don't know it yet.

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Quote:

---

Originally posted by 6stringJoker:

But we'll just overlook the quantitative easing that has been happening in 2009 that was the largest contributor to Obama doubling the national debt in 8 years while the quality of life for the average American fell.

We're already part of a major financial collapse. Those of us who don't understand how money works just don't know it yet.

---

History suggests there is a way to let the poor get richer, the rich get poorer. But you’re not going to like it
www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/04/19/history-suggests-there-
is-a-way-to-lower-inequality-but-youre-not-going-to-like-it/

Rising economic inequality in the United States has been a major animating force on both the political left and the right. Whether it is Sen. Bernie Sanders promising to rebuild blue-collar communities or President Trump pledging to "make America great again," today's political platforms often revolve around a return to the perceived "normal" of a vibrant middle class and more equitable distribution of wealth that America experienced in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s.

Yet with a broader look at history, it's clear that period of falling inequality was the exception, and that today's increasing inequality is more a return to the norm. And when inequality did fall throughout history, Stanford University professor Walter Scheidel argues in a new book, it tended to do so for very unpleasant reasons.

In “The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century,” Scheidel examines societies from ancient history to the present. He finds that most societies gradually grew more unequal over time, and where those inequalities were leveled out, they were almost always done so by violent forces — war, revolution or plague. The work contains some shocking lessons about the nature of inequality and what that might mean for our future.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Question: We saw an unusually large drop in inequality during World War I and World War II. Has that shaped people’s perceptions of what inequality should look like?

It has. The postwar period, the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s, has become the reference point. In that period, economic growth was strong, the middle class was expanding, and inequality was low by current standards. But since the 1980s, growth has slowed, and what growth we have disproportionately benefits the famous 1 percent, at the very top at the income distribution.

That marks a real change from the postwar period, and that is understandably perceived as undesirable. But if you look at history more broadly, it’s the postwar period that was anomalous.

When Trump said, “Make America great again,” that implies there was once a period where things were better, and in people’s consciousness it is the postwar period, where you had strong economic growth, a strong middle class and low inequality. But that’s an unusual combination, and it’s difficult to see how we would get back on that track.

Question: Your book goes far back in history to study inequality. How do you study inequality in ancient societies? What can things like burials and archaeology tell us?

If you go back in time to societies that don’t even have writing, basically all you have are graves. Some people were buried with much more lavish goods than other people, suggesting that they were better off in life and held positions of power and authority.

Question: Is it possible this time could be different?

Everything’s possible. It’s just I reckon people after World War II had the same idea. They had industrialized economies for the first time, full democracy, mass education. It was a reasonable assumption that high inequality would never return. And it turned out to be untrue, because other forces reasserted themselves. Inasmuch as there are trends visible now, like technology, globalization, aging, they actually point toward greater, rather than diminished

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