It seems telling that most economic theorists are male while the traditional managers of households have been female and then, most recently, has evolved into nobody managing households at all. Humans are reverting to browsing?
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Sitting in a jar for a year did not tamp the seed’s enthusiasm.

Corporatism is the problem. An organizational structure designed to distribute authority and responsibility to minimize failure has been perverted into one that relies on failure by design. While failure by design grew out of the realization that to maintain sales, products that last for ever are undesireable and so planned obsolescence is a market desideratum, I am not sure how the corporate structure got infected. Certainly, governmental corporate entities were designed with fail-safe provisions and non-governmental corporations used to envy that feature. But, instead of setting up internal checks and balances to ensure corporate stability and lingevity, there has been a decades-long effort to make governmental entities more like the private sector and induce failure. It is almost as if failure has become a desideratum, something to brag about.

Sidney Lanier wrote on FB “Let’s cut to the chase. Mitch McConnell is an unreconstructed segregationist. He’s not a segregationist because he hates various minorities and women. No, he’s a segregationist because segregation is the key to his claim to power. His self-importance swells to the extent he can shut other people out and deprive them of their rights. Continue reading →

Memorializing an issue.
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This is a critical issue from the perspective of the financial industry. The federal Treasury interacting directly is one more example of the desired hegemony of the banks being undermined. Consider that in creating the federal reserve bank system in 1918 Congress tried to relinquish its responsibility to distribute the currency into the economy by setting up the banks as middlemen, empowered to determine who gets dollars and who does not, and that set the predicate for the argument that Congress should only spend what it first collects in taxes. The federal pension system undermined that structure by sending dollars directly to individual pensioners and orphans. Medicare created another crack by sending dollars to care providers at the behest of individual persons. The ACA continued the individualization of dollar distribution and built upon the discredit the banks had brought upon themselves with education lending to fly-by-night outfits set up to perpetrate fraud on the young. Keeping youths on family health programs was designed to disguise or distract from the termination of bank management of education loans. Together with the ACA, Dodd/Frank was a masterful attack on the hegemony that had been granted to the banks. Oddly enough, the banks brought their gradual demise on themselves with their discriminatory lending designed to exclude minorities and women. If the Community Reinvestment Act had not failed to ensure fact-based lending, Obama would not have been motivated to agree to the ACA/Dodd-Frank package, a masterful partnership that is largely unrecognized because the legislation was passed at different times.

Presumably, we will pay with U.S. dollars, which the federal government prints and issues to banks and contractors for goods and services and to retirees who are owed deferred compensation. Since our agents of government are tasked with providing for the welfare of the population and illness and injury threaten welfare, it is only logical that they contract for appropriate surgical and medical care.
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The Dude announces what he’s gonna do and then, when he does it, it is the fault of whoever does not stop him.

It is how the threat works to effect control. The starting point is that the person making the threat is doing good.

What lies beyond good and evil? Authority.

What the Dude was articulating is not unique. It is a quite common mindset. It provides the basis for a cult. It is a pattern that is familiar to all who respect authority above all else.

How can it be countered? It can’t. To counter virtue would be evil, would it not? So, what can be done? Impose restraint.

The followers are getting desperate. It is a reaction with which LEOs are all too familiar from responding to domestic abuse situations. Which means that we do have social strategies for dealing with the mindset. They just have to be deployed.

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I have been accused of being philosophical. Rightly so. I have been working out how a peculiar mindset effects control over other people surreptitously. That is, without them being aware to the point that they do evil, inflict injury, without knowing it.

We might call the process brainwashing, but there is no intent to effect any change. The object is obedience. The process is uncertain. Indeed, it may be that uncertainty is the basis. Authority rising out of uncertainty. That’s the ticket.

How do we approximate the truth? By proving all the false. In other words, truth is what is left over after we get rid of all the false.

What the liar in chief is doing is forcing Congress to admit to the truth that it is responsible for the money, how and for whom it is spent.

In a sense, by electing an incompetent, the electorate has called Congress’ bluff.

Trump did not plan it. Given the Bushes, Dole, McCain, Palin, the accidental Clinton, and McConnell, he was sort of inevitable. Congress’ big mistake was their obvious non-cooperation with Obama because they thought it would get them a pass from a prejudiced nation. Truth is people are resentful of special privilege and jealous of preferential treatment, but they are not antagonistic towards those who presumably (though not really) benefit. So, when blatant non-cooperation on Capitol Hill produced the same shitty results, it became obvious where the trouble lies. 2018 was the result, produced by supplanting not just the old guard, but the system that installed similar replacements. AOC is the result, the realization of the poobahs’ worst nightmare — that the electorate would choose.