The big question for the year 2020 is simple: can America get its mind right?
POSTED BY: SIGNYM
UPDATED: Sunday, January 12, 2020 10:08
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Quote:America was never "peaceful", at least not externally. I think what he means is: not in a state of simmering civil war
The Meta
The big question for the year 2020 is simple: can America get its mind right?
If the answer is no, we may not have much chance of continuing as a peaceful,
Quote:Amen. The transnationals have managed to manipulate us into a state where we are chasing after ever-smaller ever-more fragmented identity-victimhood tribes (Does being a black female bisexual give me more brownie points than a white trans female?) Insted of focusing in what unites us, we're fighting over some theoretical advanatge that is supposed to come to us as "victims". Which, btw, will never come, because were too disunited to make our common situation better.
functioning country. The era of the long emergency, as I call it, is of a piece with Strauss and Howe’s figurative winter in their Fourth Turning view of history playing out in generational cycles analogous to seasons of the year. Whatever you call it, the current disposition of things has had a harsh effect on our collective psychology. It has made an unusually large cohort of Americans functionally insane, believing in demons, hobgoblins, and phantoms, subscribing to theories that, in previous eras, children would laugh at, while contesting obvious realities and provoking grave political hazard.
The madness is distributed over many realms of American life, with the common denominator of a thinking class fallen into disordered thinking. The disorder is led by the information media and higher education with their crypto-Gnostic agendas for transforming human nature to heal the world (in theory).
It includes a grab-bag of delusions and deliberate mind-fucks ranging from the morbid obsession with Russian interference in our affairs, to the crusade against free speech on campus, to the worship of sexual perversity (e.g. the Transsexual Reading Hour), to the campaigns against whiteness and maleness, to the incursions of woke-ness in the corporate workplace, to the cynical machinations of economists, bankers, and politicians in manipulating financial appearances, to the effort to divorce reality from truth as a general proposition.
Quote:Hence, WISHY can't seem to see that being willing to kill 7 billion people would make her even worse than Stalin, and REAVERBOT thinks that punching a "Nazi" in offense is morally acceptable, and not just plain assault and battery.
These diseases of mind and culture are synergized by an aroused political ethos that says the ends justify the means,
Quote:Since people have totally lost their moral bearings and can't seem to apply their outrage and their own rules to ... themselves.
so that bad faith and knowing dishonesty become the main tools of political endeavor. Hence, a venerable institution such as The New York Times can turn from its mission of strictly pursuing news and be enlisted as the public relations service for rogue government agencies seeking to overthrow a president under false pretenses. The overall effect is of a march into a new totalitarianism, garnished with epic mendacity and malevolence. Since when in the USA was it okay for political “radicals” to team up with government surveillance jocks to persecute their political enemies?
Quote:
This naturally leads to the question: what drove the American thinking class insane? I maintain that it comes from the massive anxiety generated by the long emergency we’ve entered — the free-floating fear that we’ve run out the clock on our current way of life, that the systems we depend on for our high standard of living have entered the failure zone; specifically, the fears over our energy supply, dwindling natural resources, broken resource supply lines, runaway debt, population overshoot, the collapsing middle-class, the closing of horizons and prospects for young people, the stolen autonomy of people crushed by out-of-scale organizations (government, WalMart, ConAgrNOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Well, I don't usually get into meta (or mega) trends because there're just too many vested interests with too many ways to game the system competing with each other. Even something like oil - which is a finite physical quantity - is evaluated in terms of cost of production (which MMT could rescue) v price of crude (determined by cartel v anti-cartel activity and national energy policies). And then there's the secondary effects of things like France's many nuclear power plants (what ARE they going to ultimately do with them), NORD Stream II sanctions, Turkstream etc, and what you mentioned - gas deposits in the E Mediterranean.
That said - I'll make few comments here and there.
Quote:When 'the usual' methods fail to deliver 'the usual' results, I think that reactions could be denial, doubling-down, war, internal strife/ dissolution, and the only thing that will ultimately work, which is an accurate assessment of the problem(s) and addressing them.
The Meta
The big question for the year 2020 is simple: can America get its mind right?
If the answer is no, we may not have much chance of continuing as a peaceful, functioning country. The era of the long emergency, as I call it, is of a piece with Strauss and Howe’s figurative winter in their Fourth Turning view of history playing out in generational cycles analogous to seasons of the year. Whatever you call it, the current disposition of things has had a harsh effect on our collective psychology. It has made an unusually large cohort of Americans functionally insane, believing in demons, hobgoblins, and phantoms, subscribing to theories that, in previous eras, children would laugh at, while contesting obvious realities and provoking grave political hazard.
The basic problem for the US as I see it - after WWII the US was the last man standing among industrialized nations. National corporations were free to exploit the rest of the world as if it was colony (and our foreign relations were geared to supporting whatever dictators could guarantee profits). But over time the rest of the world recovered/ developed, leading to fewer places able to be exploited, and at the same time national corporations became international ones. For lack of external options, and as national corporate identity was replaced with a global one, the US became just another nation to exploit. The fatal flaw of capitalism - that you can't indefinitely suck profit at every turn of the production/ sale cycle - came home to roost. That's why we're now seeing HERE the deep slide in the common standard in living, and the concentration of more and more wealth into fewer and fewer hands.
Anyway, given that people are deeply tribal and so more likely to see problems as caused by the 'other' (instead of themselves or skewed systems), and that fixing the problem would require a national reset of identity (which is very hard to do even on an individual level), I don't believe that we're going to rationally address our problems.
Quote:
The madness is distributed over many realms of American life, with the common denominator of a thinking class fallen into disordered thinking. The disorder is led by the information media and higher education with their crypto-Gnostic agendas for transforming human nature to heal the world (in theory).
It includes a grab-bag of delusions and deliberate mind-fucks ranging from the morbid obsession with Russian interference in our affairs, to the crusade against free speech on campus, to the worship of sexual perversity (e.g. the Transsexual Reading Hour), to the campaigns against whiteness and maleness, to the incursions of woke-ness in the corporate workplace, to the cynical machinations of economists, bankers, and politicians in manipulating financial appearances, to the effort to divorce reality from truth as a general proposition.
Quote:
Amen. The transnationals have managed to manipulate us into a state where we are chasing after everNOTIFY: N | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Since the article above mentions the Deep State's efforts to remove Trump from office, I thought I'd mention this here:
Just as an example of what I learned watching the Ukraine-gate testimony - among other things, I learned some of how the Deep State operates.
The Long-Term-People at the NSC, at State, at the Pentagon ... all know how things are 'supposed' to go. For example, Ukraine is a critical security partner: ”A strong and independent Ukraine is critical to U.S. national security.”
Now, the origins of this policy are murky, and the reasons are even murkier. But everybody knew it was true - from Fiona Hill to Alex Vindman to Philip Reeker (who? you might ask ... yes, they swept the floor getting testimony).
So, for example Vindman was in charge of writing a 'talking points' memo for the Trump/ Zelenky call, the contents of which, as I gathered from the testimony, weren't reviewed by anyone up the line. He was essentially writing Trump's Ukraine policy statement that EVERYONE was on-board with across all the agencies. It was supposed to reaffirm Ukraine's importance in US national security and commit the US to helping Ukraine militarily. And by the tenor of his testimony, my sense was that this was beyond being JUST a well-established inter-agency bible, it was deeply personal. Be that as it may ...
As I said, everyone understood what Ukraine policy was supposed to be. And that's why everyone was all aflutter when Trump didn't hop to it and give his hand in marriage to Zelensky in blessed nuptials on the assigned wedding date after Zelenksy's election ... or after his inauguration ... or after the parliamentary elections. In fact, Trump seemed to be a decidedly uninterested groom, trying to check out Zelensky's teeth and kick his tires first. But eventually the July 25th phone call date was set.
The Deep State had all gotten its relevant parts together, decided what needed to be, and literally wrote the policy script by the hand of Vindman, to be recited by Trump. And if Trump was any other president he'd have acceded to his assigned role as mouthpiece/ figurehead/ groom for the Deep State's policies.
Well, he didn't do that. According to Vindman, Trump completely ignored the talking points he - Vindman - had so carefully crafted.
I guess someone forgot to tell Trump that his role in setting foreign policy was only supposed to be cosmetic --- that he wasn't supposed to ... uh ... DO anything on his own.
Anyway, the testimony gave me a lot of insight into the specific workings - or should I say machinations - of that part of the Deep State; and how completely unelected and unaccountable people run the show.
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In order to resolve the disconnect which jumps iout whenever I read some of your posts, please consider inclusion of a disclaimer that you are from California, which is why you are not part of the real world.
I do realize CA is the land of great business in signs, as long as they say Out of Business, Space for Rent, Space for Lease, Space for Sale. etc.
But in my lifetime I cannot recall hearing such a deluge of ads from employers begging for people to come work for them. Work for us because we are employee owned. We give $3,000 signing bonuses. WE give $5,000 signing bonuses. We are more centrally located. All these endless lists of reasons why everybody should come work for these companies.
Meanwhile, kids (in their 20s and 30s) who claim they are ready to work are all stoned, or can't be bothered to actually show up for work for 5 consecutive days, or cant be bothered to put away their gamephone while on the workroom floor.
I cannot imagine that anybody who does not actually want to work isn't employed.
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I'm not sure where unemployment comes into the picture in any of my posts ... but ...
I did a quick lookup. Overall, California unemployment tracks national unemployment. But unemployment isn't the whole picture, there's also the national labor force participation rate. (I don't believe there are figures for California.) In 1999 it was ~67%, slowly dropping to 66% in 2008, and then it hit the skids cratering to ~62.5% from where it hasn't significantly recovered. https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-labor-force-p
articipation-rate.htm
Despite the lower unemployment rate, the marvel of all the economist talking-heads is that wages haven't gone up. In fact, for most people, inflation-adjusted wages haven't gone up since the 70's. 
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most-us-workers-r
eal-wages-have-barely-budged-for-decades/
Now, as we all know - or we should - the CPI calculations are a load of crap, because they don't use a constant basket of goods, they use some fudged 'equivalent' - the switcheroo having been instituted in 1987 under dubya. https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/1987/01/art1full.pdf
So REAL inflation in probably higher, and that means people's REAL wages have been going down.
And that's despite a soaring GDP, which has (in inflation-adjusted dollars) gone up from ~ $5000 in 1970 to ~ $15,000 in 2019. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GDPC1/
Finally, a year or so ago I tried to find figures for the percent of people in full-time jobs, part-time jobs, temp jobs and gig work, and failed. But of the waiters I talk with (of both sexes), nearly all have at least two part-time sans-benefits jobs, and some are doing gig work on the side as well like GrubHub and Lyft. And that's despite the fact that, unlike federal minimum wage, the California minimum wage applies to food service workers and is $11 for small (<25 employees) businesses.
If businesses are serious about needing workers they need to pay an adequate salary, provide full-time work with benefits, and show that there'll be some stability in employment. Yanno, adjust to the pressures of the 'free-market'. If they don't do that, then imo they're just virtue-signalling whining.
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Quote:Why the unnecessary snark? I don't recall ever being snarky with you and I can assure you that California is very much in the real world.
Originally posted by JEWELSTAITEFAN:
In order to resolve the disconnect which jumps iout whenever I read some of your posts, please consider inclusion of a disclaimer that you are from California, which is why you are not part of the real world.
Quote:Near where you live? 'Cause I sure don't see that happening around here! Whar we have are McJobs.
I do realize CA is the land of great business in signs, as long as they say Out of Business, Space for Rent, Space for Lease, Space for Sale. etc.
But in my lifetime I cannot recall hearing such a deluge of ads from employers begging for people to come work for them. Work for us because we are employee owned. We give $3,000 signing bonuses. WE give $5,000 signing bonuses. We are more centrally located. All these endless lists of reasons why everybody should come work for these companies.
Have you ever considered the possibility that your region may be different from California, especially considering the glut of cheap-labor illegal immigrants around here?
Quote:You mean, where you live? Or are you now posting about CA? Or everywhere?
Meanwhile, kids (in their 20s and 30s) who claim they are ready to work are all stoned, or can't be bothered to actually show up for work for 5 consecutive days, or cant be bothered to put away their gamephone while on the workroom floor.
Quote:What we have are McJobs. People may be "employed" but they can't actually make a living here because they're working 10-29 hours a week for $11-15/hr in a region where the median home costs something like $700,000.
I cannot imagine that anybody who does not actually want to work isn't employed.
This isn't a problem just in CA, western NY state (NOT NYC) has much the same underemployment problem, and it seems there is a lot of that going on in the Midwest too. Maybe you're trying to extrapolate a national situation from localized experience.
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Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake
Happy New Year, WISHY. I edited out your psychopathic screed!
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Yup.
The job market is "better", but nowhere near what is being claimed.
I was getting jobs thrown at me for $11 to $15 an hour when I was 19 years old, and that was through a temp agency. Those office type temp agencies don't even exist anymore. At 40, I'll probably end up finding a part time job making somewhere in the same ballpark. With 20 years of inflation, that number should be $22 to $30 an hour to break even.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:$11 in 2000 is $16.43 in 2020 (Not $22, as you guesstimated)
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Yup.
The job market is "better", but nowhere near what is being claimed.
I was getting jobs thrown at me for $11 to $15 an hour when I was 19 years old, and that was through a temp agency. Those office type temp agencies don't even exist anymore. At 40, I'll probably end up finding a part time job making somewhere in the same ballpark. With 20 years of inflation, that number should be $22 to $30 an hour to break even.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/2000?amount=11
$15 in 2000 is $22.40 in 2020 (Not $30, as you guesstimated)
In other words, you were not as valuable as you believe you were.
www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/2000?amount=15
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:Does this help?
Originally posted by 1KIKI:
I'm not sure where unemployment comes into the picture in any of my posts ... but ...
I did a quick lookup. Overall, California unemployment tracks national unemployment. But unemployment isn't the whole picture, there's also the national labor force participation rate. (I don't believe there are figures for California.) In 1999 it was ~67%, slowly dropping to 66% in 2008, and then it hit the skids cratering to ~62.5% from where it hasn't significantly recovered. https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-labor-force-p
articipation-rate.htm
Despite the lower unemployment rate, the marvel of all the economist talking-heads is that wages haven't gone up. In fact, for most people, inflation-adjusted wages haven't gone up since the 70's.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most-us-workers-r
eal-wages-have-barely-budged-for-decades/
Now, as we all know - or we should - the CPI calculations are a load of crap, because they don't use a constant basket of goods, they use some fudged 'equivalent' - the switcheroo having been instituted in 1987 under dubya. https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/1987/01/art1full.pdf
So REAL inflation in probably higher, and that means people's REAL wages have been going down.
And that's despite a soaring GDP, which has (in inflation-adjusted dollars) gone up from ~ $5000 in 1970 to ~ $15,000 in 2019. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GDPC1/
Finally, a year or so ago I tried to find figures for the percent of people in full-time jobs, part-time jobs, temp jobs and gig work, and failed. But of the waiters I talk with (of both sexes), nearly all have at least two part-time sans-benefits jobs, and some are doing gig work on the side as well like GrubHub and Lyft. And that's despite the fact that, unlike federal minimum wage, the California minimum wage applies to food service workers and is $11 for small (<25 employees) businesses.
If businesses are serious about needing workers they need to pay an adequate salary, provide full-time work with benefits, and show that there'll be some stability in employment. Yanno, adjust to the pressures of the 'free-market'. If they don't do that, then imo they're just virtue-signalling whining.
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/laus.t02.htm
They don't give the exact figure for Participation Rate, but that figure is Labor Force Divided by Civilian non-institutionalzed Population. Can you calcualte what you need, or is that information missing for you?
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Quote:i apologize. My mind was being pulled apart by some mentions of no jobs, lack of labor articipation, high unemployment, while my radio has been deluged with 2 types of ads: (1) come work for us, and (2) buy diamonds from us. I don't think I was specifically addressing you, just whoever was posting about the lack of jobs, when there are 7 million Jobs unfulfilled in America right now.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:Quote:Why the unnecessary snark? I don't recall ever being snarky with you and I can assure you that California is very much in the real world.
Originally posted by JEWELSTAITEFAN:
In order to resolve the disconnect which jumps iout whenever I read some of your posts, please consider inclusion of a disclaimer that you are from California, which is why you are not part of the real world.
Again, sorry.
Quote:Quote:Near where you live? 'Cause I sure don't see that happening around here! Whar we have are McJobs.
I do realize CA is the land of great business in signs, as long as they say Out of Business, Space for Rent, Space for Lease, Space for Sale. etc.
But in my lifetime I cannot recall hearing such a deluge of ads from employers begging for people to come work for them. Work for us because we are employee owned. We give $3,000 signing bonuses. WE give $5,000 signing bonuses. We are more centrally located. All these endless lists of reasons why everybody should come work for these companies.
Have you ever considered the possibility that your region may be different from California, especially considering the glut of cheap-labor illegal immigrants around here?Quote:You mean, where you live? Or are you now posting about CA? Or everywhere?
Meanwhile, kids (in their 20s and 30s) who claim they are ready to work are all stoned, or can't be bothered to actually show up for work for 5 consecutive days, or cant be bothered to put away their gamephone while on the workroom floor.Quote:What we have are McJobs. People may be "employed" but they can't actually make a living here because they're working 10-29 hours a week for $11-15/hr in a region where the median home costs something like $700,000.
I cannot imagine that anybody who does not actually want to work isn't employed.
This isn't a problem just in CA, western NY state (NOT NYC) has much the same underemployment problem, and it seems there is a lot of that going on in the Midwest too. Maybe you're trying to extrapolate a national situation from localized experience.
-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake
Happy New Year, WISHY. I edited out your psychopathic screed!
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Quote:Oh - I was trying to compare
Does this help?
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/laus.t02.htm
They don't give the exact figure for Participation Rate, but that figure is Labor Force Divided by Civilian non-institutionalzed Population. Can you calculate what you need, or is that information missing for you?
federal unemployment (available figures) : CA unemployment (available figures)
and for completeness
Federal participation rate (available figures) : CA participation rate (FIGURES NOT AVAILABLE).
Thanks for the help but I was trying to find CA state participation rate which doesn't seem to be available.
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The Central Contradiction of Capitalism: r > g
The overall conclusion of this study is that a market economy based on private property, if left to itself, contains powerful forces of convergence, associated in particular with the diffusion of knowledge and skills; but it also contains powerful forces of divergence, which are potentially threatening to democratic societies and to the values of social justice on which they are based.
The principal destabilizing force has to do with the fact that the private rate of return on capital, r, can be significantly higher for long periods of time than the rate of growth of income and output, g.
The inequality r > g implies that wealth accumulated in the past grows more rapidly than output and wages. This inequality expresses a fundamental logical contradiction. The entrepreneur inevitably tends to become a rentier, more and more dominant over those who own nothing but their labor. Once constituted, capital reproduces itself faster than output increases. The past devours the future.
The consequences for the long-term dynamics of the wealth distribution are potentially terrifying, especially when one adds that the return on capital varies directly with the size of the initial stake and that the divergence in the wealth distribution is occurring on a global scale.
(One example: S&P 500 grew 29% in 2019 while the GNP of the USA grew only 2%. With 29% for r and 2% for g, it is true that r > g for 2019. That r > g won’t happen every year, but in the long term it does.)
https://countryeconomy.com/gdp/usa
www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/042415/what-average-annual-return-sp-
500.asp
The problem is enormous, and there is no simple solution. Growth can of course be encouraged by investing in education, knowledge, and nonpolluting technologies. But none of these will raise the growth rate to 4 or 5 percent a year. History shows that only countries that are catching up with more advanced economies—such as Europe during the three decades after World War II or China and other emerging countries today—can grow at such rates. For countries at the world technological frontier—and thus ultimately for the planet as a whole—there is ample reason to believe that the growth rate will not exceed 1–1.5 percent in the long run, no matter what economic policies are adopted.
With an average return on capital of 4–5 percent, it is therefore likely that r > g will again become the norm in the twenty-first century, as it had been throughout history until the eve of World War I. In the twentieth century, it took two world wars to wipe away the past and significantly reduce the return on capital, thereby creating the illusion that the fundamental structural contradiction of capitalism (r > g) had been overcome.
To be sure, one could tax capital income heavily enough to reduce the private return on capital to less than the growth rate. But if one did that indiscriminately and heavy-handedly, one would risk killing the motor of accumulation and thus further reducing the growth rate. Entrepreneurs would then no longer have the time to turn into rentiers, since there would be no more entrepreneurs.
. . . it seems to me that all social scientists, all journalists and commentators, all activists in the unions and in politics of whatever stripe, and especially all citizens should take a serious interest in money, its measurement, the facts surrounding it, and its history. Those who have a lot of it never fail to defend their interests. Refusing to deal with numbers rarely serves the interests of the least well-off.
More at “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” by Thomas Piketty
www.pragcap.com/thoughts-on-thomas-pikettys-capital/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Fewer than half the people surveyed across the income groups think inequality—seen as the income difference between the rich and the middle and lower class—is a serious issue. In fact, slightly more high-income people (42%) than middle-income ones (41%) think it’s a serious problem. And barely half the people interviewed think it should be a priority of some sort for the government to reduce inequality. The only bracket where the majority of respondents said the government should do more to alleviate inequality was those in the lower-income bracket (67%).
“People are having problems with their lives but are not blaming them on income distribution,” Blendon said. Despite so much political and academic focus on the subject, he said “it’s not as clear to people that inequality is an issue.”
Most Americans don’t really care about inequality https://qz.com/1780450/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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The big question for the year 2020 is simple: can America get its mind right?
When I think about, say John Bolton with his finger on 'the button', or Nixon, or Hillary, or Netanyahu, it gives me pause.
These are seriously unstable individuals with a already-existing bent to 'punish' or attack other nations. They have a whole raft of justifications, rationalizations, and calculations, for what is, essentially, an emotional response. My tribe. The other tribe. GET 'EM!
With great power SHOULD come great wisdom. And if it's not there, we teeter on the edge of annihilation.
So I think about any generic human. Who was the wisdom to consistently, without pause, wisely wield that power?
It's just a thought that while we've created powerful things, we're really just monkeys inside.
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