How does one go about purchasing the United States of America?
First ruin it.
Give it a bad cold.
Shut it down.
Throw the lesser capitalists out of their own small businesses; throw their employees out of their jobs.
Next: take their your own profits in trade and purchase what the little people couldn’t hold.
It’s a free world, financially speaking, after all.
And funny thing — more and more (of everything – businesses in bankruptcy, related debt, foreclosures, even people) will may be coming up for sale as debt rises and capacity to return both interest and principle diminishes.
“One of the primary reasons to be fiscally responsible during periods of economic expansion is to have the capacity to fight downturns or emergencies,” said Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. “This is precisely the kind of moment, where borrowing is warranted and necessary, that we should have been preparing for over the past years.”
Even if the Big Picture looks good, the financial suffering attending the country’s COVID-19 response and related response to that on the street may nonetheless continue degrading productivity and the sustaining of wealth in short order. One may wonder with what might be coming whether the complacent “we shall see” really hacks it for the public.
That a certain portion of conservative and reactionary Republicans have chosen to develop and spread lies about George Soros — it’s practically an industry — comes as no surprise. Push-back, however, seems to me comparatively rare. The Political Correctness of the Far White Right immediately demonizes those who would defend the billionaire’s spacious philanthropy on behalf of authentic democracy, freedom, and progress.
The post that follows came about through involvement in one such conversation.
From the Awesome Conversation
Soros’s funding engages and liberates. Some of the people you hate so much appear to be fashionably “Marxist” but in fact hustling capitalist and modern Americans themselves, but they are leveraging substantial American challenges (involving bigotry) into careers.
BackChannels has come to regard the co-founders of Black Lives Matter as fashionably “Marxist” and perhaps misguided in the ways set by Soviet/Post-Soviet Active Measures — the term “Marxist” has been overplayed as a dog whistle for the nation’s reactionaries — but in fact deeply “capitalist” in their operating behavior as public figures — i.e., making their way — as modern moral entrepreneurs, each uniquely engaged in the address of the more stubborn aspects of America’s issues with class and race.
The Trump Administration lies to Americans — not as yet a still conscionable FBI (please do look up “FBI, Antifa” up to this day (August 8, 2020) and let BackChannels know of any substantiation of claims about either “Antifa” and “Black Lives Matter” as the direct drivers of protester violence.
In an open society, the role of the state is to protect the freedom of the individual; in a closed society, the role of the individual is to serve the rulers of the state. Other issues that concern all humanity – fighting pandemics and climate change, avoiding nuclear war, maintaining global institutions – have had to take a back seat to this systemic struggle.
Perhaps by overreacting to the Man Above It All — or HE who believes he is — we have been following Dr. Fauci.
Dr. Fauci is not a businessman.
Dr. Fauci is not an economist.
Dr. Fauci is not (yet) among the line level workers in entertainment and retail services damaged or shuttered by compelled COVID-19 mask-wearing and social distancing “requirements” driven by generally unconstitutional administrative and Draconian edicts.
Note that in the post-WWII “Baby Boom” generation, America has the certain challenge of retiring and burying within the next ten to twenty years an entire generation of notable Americans and the more general “population bubble” that has been theirs through life. The oldest of that generation is today 75 years old.
Dr. Fauci has been a myopic public health policy analyst whose mission has been restricted to preventing the spread of disease and thereby saving or extending lives. That has been a laudable crusade, but as thrown “candy” (Trumpian stimulus checks) fall short of needs and state unemployment support or related systems also fall short or fall away, lives may be lost to increasing crime and suicide as desperation and inevitable displacement become American realities.
Whatever the nominal economic doctrine in force, all depends on the taxing or taking of tribute from the various sources of economic productivity. As productivity, however defined, diminishes, the value in tax or tribute diminishes. In the integrated social capitalism of the west, contraction within the tax base first pressures and then diminishes also necessary and responsive public service. Entire systems of civil order and the orderly and prudent distribution of a responsible government’s portion of wealth and the obligations built around its abilities risk collapse while inviting even more disastrous “disequilibrium” and “revolution” — and criminal activity in the name of it.
Had America a leader in which The People had invested both confidence and love, we might well have faced our fears, built our capacity to treat COVID-19 cases (without wrecking other hospital services in the process) and, alas, to briefly store and bury the related dead, albeit at a pace not much higher than normal and expected. With a President who has outraged the nation, alienated a growing population of conservative Republicans, and made enemies — even when he tells the truth! — with every other tweet, that leadership appears doubtful.
Perhaps by overreacting to the Man Above It All — or HE who believes he is — we have been following Dr. Fauci.
Active Measures — The collection of Russian Agitation, Disinformation, and Propaganda Methods made evident through covert or subtle Influence Campaigns applied to wrecking the political coherence and cohesion of EU/NATO for the purpose of reestablishing Political Absolutism in the same and then using the most thuggish of feudal and medieval methods to leverage loyalty and wealth from them for contribution to the Greater Imperial Glory of Moscow, the Russian “mafia state” it has come to represent, and the immense enrichment of its oligarchy.
From the above references, one might suggest that in or with President Donald J. Trump, Washington, like Moscow, has had some kind of energized disinformation factory. It may not be the President’s factory, but he has encouraged and endorsed baseless conspiracy theories and the most disingenuous innuendo involving his political enemies.
Trump is being attacked, the memo says, because he represents “an existential threat to cultural Marxist memes that dominate the prevailing cultural narrative.” Those threatened by Trump include “‘deep state’ actors, globalists, bankers, Islamists, and establishment Republicans.”
The memo is part of a broader political struggle inside the White House between current National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster and alt-right operatives with a nationalist worldview who believe the Army general and his crew are subverting the president’s agenda.
Foreign Policy has the full memo embedded in its account.
Said Rich Higgins back in February: “Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman wasn’t the first staffer to be fired from President Trump’s National Security Council and escorted from the premises by security. I went through the same ritual on July 21, 2017. But in contrast to Col. Vindman, I lost my job because I was loyal to the president” (by Rich Higgins for WSJ Opinion, February 12, 2020).
WASHINGTON — A cabal of leftist “deep state” government workers, “globalists,” bankers, adherents to Islamic fundamentalism and establishment Republicans are conspiring to remove President Trump and impose cultural Marxism in the United States, according to a former White House aide whose darkly worded memo detailing the alleged conspiracy got him removed last month from the National Security Council.
Who has placed themselves behind the QAnon distribution?
Who has been reading and ingesting the garbage?
Who among Americans believes everything an American president might care to tell them (especially this American president)?
Bigoted, fake, weak, willful and enamored, apparently, of the kind of powerful others known to the west as dictators, who, aware of the pain he has caused others through multiple bankruptcies and countless and apparently limitless lies can respect him out of love rather than fear?
Have some Americans been so duped and convinced of “HIS” nobility in character that they cannot admit to themselves that they may have been fooled?
Americans will now have to educate themselves in relation to the collected legacies of the nation without regard for immediate resources and public or private channeling. To have become this ignorant, this vulnerable, to such an ignoramus: politically and socially obscene and tragic.
Get a firm grip on the Original Operating Instructions, chart a new course, and aspire to greatness as Americans – ambitious, colorful, curious, democratic, educated, enlightened, high minded, humanist, inclusive, independent, just, reasoning, and tolerant – sailing together (for better, not worse) through time and the universe.
Now that the United States has put itself into full reverse gear with the generational updating of the last generation (Old Left -> New Left ->New Old Lost Left; Republican Conservatives -> Conservative Right -> Far (White?) Right), it’s time to cope with a “cluster”, as one old friend may have put it, of “challenges”, among them the report of a squirrel in Colorado testing positive for Bubonic Plague.
A spokesperson for Jefferson County Public Health told CBS News on Tuesday that someone in Morrison reported seeing at least 15 dead squirrels around the town. Officials tested one, and since it was positive for bubonic plague, they expect others are also infected.
BackChannels would suggest thinking cautiously because America’s Report Card suggests those 15 squirrel dead in Colorado may have arrived right on time given a national homeless population of about 554,000 and some millions of doped out, hopped up, and missing or unsettled persons floating about the place.
As predominant head-up-butt (always warm and dark in there) COVID-19 policies continue to scour the economy of basic entertainment, service, and special occasion jobs (crippling bars and restaurants foremost) and tax base nationwide turns anemic with lost jobs – USA Today yesterday: “A closely watched gauge of layoffs across the U.S. held steady at a historically high level last week, pushing the total during the coronavirus-induced economic crisis to a mind-boggling 51.3 million” – the squirrels, the fleas, and the homeless would be joined by the soon-to-be-displaced were it not for an opening salvo by a few governors (and a few helpful laws already in place) to forestall evictions during the COVID-19 Pandemic [Refs.: https://kvoa.com/news/2020/07/16/gov-ducey-extends-executive-order-protects-renters-from-evictions-amid-covid-19-pandemic/ (7/16/2020) | https://www.masslegalhelp.org/health-mental-health/covid-19-illegal-eviction (updated 6/15/2020) | https://www.sdhc.org/evictionban/ – effective through 9/30/2020]. Nonetheless, along with the Bubonic Squirrel narrative, let us all keep a lookout on behalf of idled Americans coming apart with related emotional and financial desperation.
BakcChannels wager: lives saved in communal-medical responses to COVID-19 may be made up in rising crime, murder, and suicide rates associated with idleness, social separation, and stress.
BackChannels would strongly suggest the development of a nationwide moratorium on the notion of returning to anything resembling the old “normal” — the Ship of State has lost its moorings and “Safe Harbor” appears to be receding into the past.
America appears to be up for political grabs.
What to do?
Get a firm grip on the Original Operating Instructions, chart a new course, and aspire to greatness as Americans – ambitious, colorful, curious, democratic, educated, enlightened, high minded, humanist, inclusive, independent, just, reasoning, and tolerant – sailing together (for better, not worse) through time and the universe.
Wikipedia: “Kurt Blome” – Nazi scientist who experimented with plague: “Blome worked on methods of storage and dispersal of biological agents like plague, cholera, anthrax, and typhoid, and also infected prisoners with plague in order to test the efficacy of vaccines.”
Most generally speaking, about 99.5 percent of C19 cases do not result in death. Those that do remain associated with age-related vitality and latent and preexisting conditions. Life’s not fair, especially around 55/65-85. The oldest of America’s “Baby Boom” generation has reached a healthy but nervous 75 years. The average age of death in the United States is 78.5 according to the CDC.
On China as an Aggressive, Criminal, and Totalitarian Threat to Liberal Democracy
The United States, at least, loses billions annually in relation to China’s industrial and scientific espionage and the adaptation of proprietary processes and technologies (and not infrequently knock-offs) to grow its markets. It has been also a key and major supplier of precursor chemicals for the manufacturing of narcotics throughout the western hemisphere. Debacles involving computer, radio, and telephony technologies, much underscored by the Huawei’s global issues (e.g., https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/15/tech/huawei-fallout-5g-hnk-intl/index.html – 7/15/2020) involving consumer and defense issues (spying and incursions involving defense-related wavelengths) are real and now part of the western challenge involving the nominally “communist” regime (another issue for another post).
Biological weapons and space weapons (intended to kill western satellites, if and when necessary) appear no longer on the far horizon in defense matters.
Altogether, Sino-American cooperation in place of war would seem to require both a steadfast defense and law enforcement effort as well as some new discussion about political absolutism and totalitarian philosophy. At the moment, as China may be seeking revenge for the humiliations of the Opium Wars — so it doesn’t apply too much manpower to policing the narcotics precursor trade — and for what it may perceive as the intimidation of civilizational ambitions. “Sino-American Relations” are not looking very good.
On Sanctions Involving Select Moscow and Tehran Elites
Let’s not forget how Ali Khamenei made his first big bucks: https://www.reuters.com/investigates/iran/#article/part1 (“Khamenei controls massive financial empire built on property seizures,” Reuters, November 11, 2013. These days, the post-Communist and post-Soviet alliances support Big Rocket Man (trying to reach Israel) and Little Rocket Man (the one making Japan nervous) and Trump has been on it but with perhaps amateur enthusiasm (reference John Bolton’s book, The Room Where It Happened. For post-Soviet Moscow and Tehran, both apparently longing for more barbaric days, sanctions and “maximum pressure” campaigns may not work in a decisive manner, but that doesn’t mean we should drop them (and if Trump should move to ease Putin’s pain, then this blog shift away from any such a fawning, pandering, and placating a move.
Trumps character and character in diplomacy may undermine America’s efforts to defend its own liberal democracy and promote the same worldwide. As much has been America’s mission from its earliest days, days in which the Founding Fathers wrote far out ahead of their own age and its circumstances, and remains its mission in this day when it finds itself sorely tested by dogma, Far Out Left and (predominantly) Far White Right. To have in the President a personality that tends to go its own way — or have its own way — regardless of the advice of the experienced as well as the memory of national lessons learned — seems to represent an unwitting self-sabotage.
Perhaps all that separates Presidents Putin and Trump are America’s still-intact Constitutional checks and balances and related authentic cultural precepts, tenets, and values having to do with equality, freedom, and justice bound to a modern and spacious appreciation of universal human character and potential.
"I came here to support the people of Khabarovsk and their demand for Putin to resign… a person who hasn't fulfilled a single one of his promises," this man says in Pushkin Square, Moscow. "I think he's a typical windbag," he adds. pic.twitter.com/CqH4PYcgrb
The tapped popular perception of both of these heavy handed and extraordinarily wealthy politicians is that each exists to protect his image, his power, and his cronies and may be otherwise concerned with the needs of their respective nations overall to only a minimal extent.
The democracy of the United States of America requires — as do others — a soundly educated population on one hand and (it is this one on the other that’s tough) highly experienced and well educated statesmen on the other. The Republican vote coming for Biden, an “old school” politician with a manner familiar from far better days, will represent a mass of voting against the incumbent Donald Trump, but that will not hack it for American democracy except to forestall its dissolving into another shitty pseudo-democratic dictatorship.
Whoever wins 2020, it will be America’s 2024 election that will spell whether Americans will be governed by a fully responsive and responsible leadership or one bent by measures of dogma, excessive narcissism, and greed.
Donald Trump falsely accused Democrats of trying to “steal” Tuesday’s special election in California amid the Covid-19 pandemic by adding a polling place in one of the most diverse sections of a district.
But the county actually added the polling location at the request of the area’s Republican mayor.
The announcement that Russian President Vladimir Putin won last week’s national vote to rewrite the country’s constitution and allow himself to run twice more for president was not exactly a surprise. Putin has a long track record of winning elections through a mix of genuine popularity, electoral skullduggery, and—most important of all—ensuring that no real alternatives are allowed on the ballot. This most recent plebiscite took Putin-era elections to new depths of meaningless.
Posted to YouTube by Guardian News, July 16, 2018.
If HE hadn’t stepped off blasting away at America’s mainstream media and stable Federal agencies involved with all matters from environment to national security, HE and we might be fine, for BC believes he’s telling some truth these days. However, he has also had his indelible “Helsinki Moment” (above) and his regime (is that too strong a word?) may mirror known authoritarian governments integrated with their own state financial and political elites. The spectacle made by black clad troops herding nonviolent protesters from Lafayette Park (adjacent to the White House) may become a part of the memory of a liberal American generation for whom that kind of White House implemented thuggery — and show and tell with the Bible and Church photo-op — would seem to have been out of step with modern American political norms and values.
Posted to YouTube by The Independent, June 1, 2020.
For the United States with an Administration somewhat mirroring the authoritarianism and white nationalism associated with Moscow, one may wonder if collusion may not be found in aspects of convergence: how different does Trump’s Washington look from Putin’s Moscow?
Posted to YouTube by Guardian News, July 27, 2019.
By any sociological or financial measure, it’s good to be us. It’s even better to be our kids. In our health, family life, friendship networks, and level of education, not to mention money, we are crushing the competition below. But we do have a blind spot, and it is located right in the center of the mirror: We seem to be the last to notice just how rapidly we’ve morphed, or what we’ve morphed into. Related Story
The meritocratic class has mastered the old trick of consolidating wealth and passing privilege along at the expense of other people’s children. We are not innocent bystanders to the growing concentration of wealth in our time. We are the principal accomplices in a process that is slowly strangling the economy, destabilizing American politics, and eroding democracy. Our delusions of merit now prevent us from recognizing the nature of the problem that our emergence as a class represents. We tend to think that the victims of our success are just the people excluded from the club. But history shows quite clearly that, in the kind of game we’re playing, everybody loses badly in the end.
Has the bottom layer of the upper crust, which may be quite Up There in fluff and light, the need for institutionalized nobility even if without title?
For the purposes of cultural and political stability, such a need may be functional, good, and open to entry across America’s colorful quilt, but one may question whether it needs chicanery in the process.
Several EU/NATO states have slid into anti-democratic authoritarian political management, albeit in different ways for different reasons. Hungary, Italy, Poland, and the United States have created cause for doubting the authenticity of democratic processes in their respective domains. While I’ve cherry picked the above links, one may evaluate each independently. With regard to the United States, Evan Osnos, writing for The New Yorker, notes the following:
The latest edition was published last week, and, as you might expect, it recorded the fourteenth straight year of deteriorating freedom around the world; sixty-four countries have lost liberties in the past year, while only thirty-seven registered improvements. (India, the world’s largest democracy, has seen some of the most alarming declines.) Its assessment of the United States is also disturbing. In 2009, the U.S. had a score of ninety-four, out of a hundred, which ranked it near the top, just behind Germany, Switzerland, and Estonia. In the decade since, it has slipped eight points; it now ranks behind Greece, Slovakia, and Mauritius. Looking at the United States, Freedom House analysts note the types of trends that they more customarily assign to fragile corners of the globe: “pressure on electoral integrity, judicial independence, and safeguards against corruption. Fierce rhetorical attacks on the press, the rule of law, and other pillars of democracy coming from American leaders, including the president himself.”
Osnos goes on to more broadly explain the decline of democracy in select states worldwide. For the United States, the broader view takes in Administrations prior to Trump’s.
Nonetheless, the political picture looks grim for Americans facing up to what increasingly looks like the necessity of casting a negative vote in the coming 2020 elections, i.e., voting for a so-so candidate in order to deny the incumbent a longer stay.
Threats posed by Beijing and Moscow to America’s governing principles and way of life should not be dismissed as somehow attached to Mr. Trump who has taken appropriate measures to deal with each, even if ineffectually. The sanctioning of some of Putin’s inner circle, for example, may not have the leveraging effects wanted given the ability to move money and persons around despite the reach of American power, but the status is visible worldwide and unflattering. With Beijing and jousting over trade, there may come the reminder that in a mutually pugnacious negotiation, one’s own side might lose — but that doesn’t make the other side’s position (in this context, Beijing’s) right. In addition to the large maneuvers the public cannot avoid, there are equally large issues involving communication signals and satellites that are more known to specialists than to the public at large.
Such issues will not go away with a Biden win in the coming election and may be exacerbated by it. What may recede are the authoritarian and malign narcissistic bullying, chaos, flailing, and lying — now imagined or real — associated with the incumbent President’s previous actions and current presence, reputation, and style.
BackChannels 