A thread for Democrats Only
POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
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Affirmative Action is cancer and Wakanda Brown Jackson is a moron.
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Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.
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This article has been adapted from Peter Turchin’s forthcoming book, End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration.
https://tertulia.com/book/end-times-elites-counter-elites-and-the-path
-of-political-disintegration-peter-turchin/9780593490501?affiliate_id=atl-347
America Is Headed Toward Collapse
History shows how to stave it off.
By Peter Turchin, June 2, 2023
As most Americans’ quality of life declines, growing competition among elites is tipping the U.S. toward collapse.
How has America slid into its current age of discord? Why has our trust in institutions collapsed, and why have our democratic norms unraveled?
All human societies experience recurrent waves of political crisis, such as the one we face today. My research team built a database of hundreds of societies across 10,000 years to try to find out what causes them. We examined dozens of variables, including population numbers, measures of well-being, forms of governance, and the frequency with which rulers are overthrown. We found that the precise mix of events that leads to crisis varies, but two drivers of instability loom large. The first is popular immiseration—when the economic fortunes of broad swaths of a population decline. The second, and more significant, is elite overproduction—when a society produces too many superrich and ultra-educated people, and not enough elite positions to satisfy their ambitions.
These forces have played a key role in our current crisis. In the past 50 years, despite overall economic growth, the quality of life for most Americans has declined. The wealthy have become wealthier, while the incomes and wages of the median American family have stagnated. As a result, our social pyramid has become top-heavy. At the same time, the U.S. began overproducing graduates with advanced degrees. More and more people aspiring to positions of power began fighting over a relatively fixed number of spots. The competition among them has corroded the social norms and institutions that govern society.
The U.S. has gone through this twice before. The first time ended in civil war. But the second led to a period of unusually broad-based prosperity. Both offer lessons about today’s dysfunction and, more important, how to fix it.
To understand the root causes of the current crisis, let’s start by looking at how the number of über-wealthy Americans has grown. Back in 1983, 66,000 American households were worth at least $10 million. That may sound like a lot, but by 2019, controlling for inflation, the number had increased tenfold. A similar, if smaller, upsurge happened lower on the food chain. The number of households worth $5 million or more increased sevenfold, and the number of mere millionaires went up fourfold.
On its surface, having more wealthy people doesn’t sound like such a bad thing. But at whose expense did elites’ wealth swell in recent years?
Starting in the 1970s, although the overall economy continued to grow, the share of that growth going to average workers began to shrink, and real wages leveled off. (It’s no coincidence that Americans’ average height—a useful proxy for well-being, economic and otherwise—stopped increasing around then too, even as average heights in much of Europe continued climbing.) By 2010, the relative wage (wage divided by GDP per capita) of an unskilled worker had nearly halved compared with mid-century. For the 64 percent of Americans who didn’t have a four-year college degree, real wages shrank in the 40 years before 2016.
As wages diminished, the costs of owning a home and going to college soared. To afford an average house, a worker earning the median wage in 2016 had to log 40 percent more hours than she would have in 1976. And parents without a college degree had to work four times longer to pay for their children’s college.
Even college-educated Americans aren’t doing well across the board. They made out well in the 1950s, when fewer than 15 percent of 18-to-24-year-olds went to college, but not today, when
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
(It’s no coincidence that Americans’ average height—a useful proxy for well-being, economic and otherwise—stopped increasing around then too, even as average heights in much of Europe continued climbing.)
And it's a good thing too...
Why Tall People Die Younger: The ideal height for the longest life
SPOILER ALERT: My height. 5'7" for a man is the perfect height. (5'3" for a woman). Every 4cm above that increases cancer risk by 10%, let alone all the other issues such as heart failure.
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Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.
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Quote:Maybe that's why big dogs die a lot younger than small dogs?
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
(It’s no coincidence that Americans’ average height—a useful proxy for well-being, economic and otherwise—stopped increasing around then too, even as average heights in much of Europe continued climbing.)
And it's a good thing too...
Why Tall People Die Younger: The ideal height for the longest life
SPOILER ALERT: My height. 5'7" for a man is the perfect height. (5'3" for a woman). Every 4cm above that increases cancer risk by 10%, let alone all the other issues such as heart failure.
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Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger
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US warships cost at least twice as much as they should
CNN has a remarkable story today about the vast difference in cost between warships built in the US and those built in Japan https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/02/asia/japan-south-korea-naval-shipbuildi
ng-intl-hnk-ml-dst/index.html
The country’s newest Maya-class destroyers are armed with 96 VLS cells that can fire both anti-ballistic and anti-submarine missiles, while the “quality of its sensors and systems stands at the very top end of the spectrum.”...Those 96 VLS cells put the Mayas on par with the newest of the US Arleigh Burkes, but there’s a crucial difference between them: The Arleigh Burkes cost $2.2 billion; the Mayas cost a billion dollars less.
....And it’s not just the Mayas. Take Japan’s Mogami-class frigates; speedy, stealthy 5,500-ton warships with 16 VLS cells that fire surface-to-air and anti-ship missiles. All done with a crew of 90 and a price tag of about $372 million each. By contrast, the first of the US Navy’s under development Constellation-class frigates are expected to cost three times as much and require twice as many crew.
These Japanese ships, along with others from South Korea, are designed to be very similar to American ships:
All these Japanese and South Korean vessels are designed to incorporate US technology, weapons, spy radars and the Aegis command and control system.
So why the vast difference in cost?
Cost overruns, endemic in US defense contracting, are not common in Japan, Schuster says, because — unlike the US — the country holds manufacturers to their estimates.
“A Japanese shipbuilder’s bid is an absolute. If they finish it below expected cost, they make a larger profit. If they encounter delays and mistakes, the builder has to correct it at their own expense,” Schuster said.
That sounds . . . a little too easy. There has to be more to it than "we won't pay a nickel more than you bid." Requirements change, specs change, and timetables change. It's hardly possible in the real world for a bid to stay frozen in the face of that.
And yet, unless there are some accounting tricks involved, there's the bare fact that the Japanese ships are similar but cost billions less than US versions. How? Are the US ships not actually all that similar? Or is our procurement really so screwed up that we pay twice as much for basically the same ship?
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
US warships cost at least twice as much as they should
US everything costs at least twice as much as it should.
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Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.
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Quote:The Japanese and Koreans make cars cheaper and better than Americans. And the Japanese/Koreans have those car factories in America with American workers. The Japanese/Koreans could do the same with warships, since they sell warships at low cost to their own military, assuming Congress wants to stop American defense contractors from cheating the hell out of the country. But that assumption might be incorrect. For example, Congress recently passed a law that prevents the IRS from collecting the $1 trillion that rich cheaters don't pay each year, so it is not obvious that Congress would want to stop defense contractors from cheating.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
US warships cost at least twice as much as they should
US everything costs at least twice as much as it should.
IRS chief says $1 trillion in taxes goes uncollected every year
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-treasury-irs/irs-chief-says-1-t
rillion-in-taxes-goes-uncollected-every-year-idUSKBN2C0255
Cutting IRS funding is a gift to America’s wealthiest tax evaders
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2023/01/26/cutting-irs-funding-i
s-a-gift-to-americas-wealthiest-tax-evaders/
What The Debt Ceiling Agreement Means For The IRS
What policymakers give, policymakers can take away. Nine months after Congress enacted President Biden’s proposal to boost the Internal Revenue Service’s 10-year budget by $80 billion, the president and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) have agreed to cut the IRS’s budget by up to $21.4 billion over the next three years as part of a deal to raise the debt ceiling.
https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxvox/what-debt-ceiling-agreement-mea
ns-irs
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:The Japanese and Koreans make cars cheaper and better than Americans. And the Japanese/Koreans have those car factories in America with American workers. The Japanese/Koreans could do the same with warships, since they sell warships at low cost to their own military, assuming Congress wants to stop American defense contractors from cheating the hell out of the country. But that assumption might be incorrect. For example, Congress recently passed a law that prevents the IRS from collecting the $1 trillion that rich cheaters don't pay each year, so it is not obvious that Congress would want to stop defense contractors from cheating.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
US warships cost at least twice as much as they should
US everything costs at least twice as much as it should.
IRS chief says $1 trillion in taxes goes uncollected every year
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-treasury-irs/irs-chief-says-1-t
rillion-in-taxes-goes-uncollected-every-year-idUSKBN2C0255
Cutting IRS funding is a gift to America’s wealthiest tax evaders
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2023/01/26/cutting-irs-funding-i
s-a-gift-to-americas-wealthiest-tax-evaders/
What The Debt Ceiling Agreement Means For The IRS
What policymakers give, policymakers can take away. Nine months after Congress enacted President Biden’s proposal to boost the Internal Revenue Service’s 10-year budget by $80 billion, the president and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) have agreed to cut the IRS’s budget by up to $21.4 billion over the next three years as part of a deal to raise the debt ceiling.
https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxvox/what-debt-ceiling-agreement-mea
ns-irs
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
I SAID EVERYTHING.
Stop focusing just on the military because that's what your Media Masters are bitching about today.
The American Government wastes money everywhere it spends it.
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Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.
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Quote:East Texas is overflowing, like a plugged toilet, with people complaining about the Federal government. I guess it is too complicated for them to understand that there are actually two kinds of people at the level of Congress and the top echelons of government procurement. One kind sets up a program to accomplish an admirable task and the other kind exploits that program to make themselves rich. The wealth seekers claim that they are the other kind of people, the ones who want to accomplish something admirable, but every step of the way they are cooperating and coordinating with outsiders who are cheating the government. When the cheaters resign from the government, they go work for the corporations that cheated the government.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
I SAID EVERYTHING.
Stop focusing just on the military because that's what your Media Masters are bitching about today.
The American Government wastes money everywhere it spends it.
Although the influence powerhouses that line Washington's K Street are just a few miles from the U.S. Capitol building, the most direct path between the two doesn't necessarily involve public transportation. Instead, it's through a door—a revolving door that shuffles former federal employees into jobs as lobbyists, consultants and strategists just as the door pulls former hired guns into government careers.
https://www.opensecrets.org/revolving/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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White resistance to federal power
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n11/eric-foner/the-little-man-s-bi
g-friends
Earlier? this year, Randy McNally, the speaker of the Tennessee Senate, issued a proclamation declaring April 2023 Confederate History Month. He urged ‘citizens from across this state’ to remember their ancestors’ ‘heroic struggle’ for ‘individual freedom’. Observers outside Tennessee may find it incongruous to identify a war fought to preserve slavery with the ideal of freedom, but Jefferson Cowie, who teaches history at Vanderbilt University, in the heart of the state, wouldn’t be surprised. His new book seeks to explain why so many Americans, especially but not exclusively in the South, have understood freedom as an entitlement limited to white people. Cowie argues that ‘white freedom’ has long entailed the power to dominate others, especially non-whites, without interference from the national government. The fear that white freedom is under assault by Blacks, or immigrants, or a faraway national government, helps to explain why in the last election Donald Trump carried Tennessee in a landslide, winning 60 per cent of the vote and all but three of the state’s 95 counties. In many parts of the US, every month is Confederate History Month.
Since the election of Ronald Reagan, historians have struggled to explain why so many members of the white working class have abandoned their loyalty to the Democratic Party of Franklin D. Roosevelt and decided to vote for candidates whose policies, including tax cuts for the rich, hostility to trade unions and an embrace of economic globalisation, undermine their own economic interests. In perhaps the most widely read book on the subject, What’s the Matter with Kansas? (2004), Thomas Frank argued that the upheavals of the 1960s generated fears and resentments that allowed issues such as abortion rights and racial equity to eclipse economics. Cowie’s book is both an ambitious history lesson and a contribution to this ongoing discussion, recently reinvigorated by working-class support for Trump.
Cowie’s previous work includes Capital Moves (1999), an account of how RCA, a manufacturer of radios and televisions, obsessively pursued cheap labour at home and abroad, and Stayin’ Alive (2010), which drew on images of workers in popular culture to argue that organised labour is no longer a self-conscious power in American life. In both, he was able to weave class, culture, politics and ideology into a consistent narrative and to connect local histories with national and global events. The same qualities are evident in Freedom’s Dominion. The book covers more than two centuries of American history, seeking to explain the evolution and enduring power of a racially inflected understanding of freedom.
The oldest of clichés and the most inspiring of human aspirations, freedom is fundamental to Americans’ sense of themselves as individuals and as a nation. ‘Every man in the street, white, black, red or yellow,’ the statesman Ralph Bunche wrote in 1940, ‘knows that this is “the land of the free” ... [and] the cradle of liberty.’ Cowie’s account builds on Tyler E. Stovall’s recent book White Freedom, which argued that the crystallisation of the notion of freedom as a natural right, simultaneous with the expansion of slavery in the Atlantic world, led to it being increasingly racialised as an ideal. ‘Oppression and freedom are not opposites,’ Cowie writes, nor is a rhetorical commitment to liberty incompatible with an insistence on the right of those who enjoy freedom to enslave others.
Cowie focuses on four eras in the history of a place most readers won’t have heard of: Barbour County, located in south-eastern Alabama. It might seem counterintuitive to pick a county located in the pre-Civil War cotton kingdom, later the site of rigid racial segregation, to epitomise the evolution of American freedom. Some readers will recoil from the idea that the US is Barbour County writ large: why not choose New York City or a county in California to illustrate the dream of
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