Unfortunately I can't get myself and those I care about off this planet (no, thank you, Elon) and we all will most likely lose a lot, possibly life and limb on account of this.
There is no way this ends well if it is not arrested.
That definitely tells me there's ego at play here more than anything else. Even money.
That's the unheard of part of this year. Even the most blatantly corrupt politicians know not to actively throw money into a furnace.
Its very much about centralizing power while very carefully restructuring capacities, not decentralizing power.
Instead you need to get some adults back in the room and start doing things like prosecuting government officials for corruption regardless of which party they're in, passing the laws that lower the cost of living even over the opposition of the people getting paid the higher costs, and actually enforcing antitrust laws instead of both parties using them as a cudgel to get tech and media corporations to bend the knee politically in exchange for not enforcing them.
But to do that you have to step on the toes of the banks and the National Association of Realtors and the trades unions on housing costs and the healthcare companies and the AMA on healthcare costs. Which the rest of the public wants you to do, but that's not how you get paid off, so it's not what they do.
Instead they talk a big game but when it comes time to do it, they offer up economic sophism like rent control or medical price controls that not only don't solve the problems but generally make them worse. And then people don't like them because they suck.
So then:
> Maybe the other party should do the other thing then? Actually decentralize things and reduce federal power in ways that stick between administrations. Then the next Trump wouldn't have the power to do things like this, and meanwhile California and other states could be setting their own emissions standards or imposing network neutrality or antitrust rules etc. without federal interference.
If you define the bad things they're not allowed to do narrowly then they'll trivially avoid the restrictions while still doing bad things. What works better is to define the good things they are allowed to do. But then the good things have to be defined narrowly, because a broad definition makes it easy to get bad things into the tent.
So a proposal can either be to prohibit some bad things on paper while not really doing it in practice, or it can be to permit them to do only the things that have to be done federally for some specific reason and define them narrowly enough that it doesn't just let them do whatever they want. Those are the only real options.
No, we simply realize that 20 years of compromise for a party blatantly breaking the rules is not working. You can call it "flipping the coin" if you want, but in my eyes we've been trying to continue a game of chess after dozens of illegal moves.
Maybe continuing to play the game as if nothing happened isn't the solution this time.
Here's the second clause of the 18th amendment (prohibition of alcohol), ratified in 1919 and repealed by the 21st:
> The Congress and the several States shall have concurrent power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
In other words, in 1919 it was generally understood that the federal government didn't have the power to so much as prohibit alcohol, and they needed a constitutional amendment to grant that power (without withdrawing it from the states through preemption).
Most of what the federal government currently does was intended to be unconstitutional, until FDR threatened to pack the Supreme Court if they didn't knuckle under and approve his unconstitutional acts, and then they did. Likewise Roe v. Wade, initiated by the Court itself in a year the left held the majority and then kept that way for half a century even though its logic was muddled and inconsistent with those same opinions they themselves wanted that said the government does have the power to regulate healthcare providers. Likewise gun control, which the constitution not only didn't give the federal government the power to do, it explicitly constrained them from it.
You can think that any of these things would be good policy, but without breaking the rules to enact them you'd need to amend the constitution. So never mind 20 years, this has been going on for a lot longer than that.
But if you abandon the rules because it's expedient, and then they abandon the rules because you did, and then you abandon even more of the rules because they did, we all end up in a place nobody likes.
There are many issues on which not everyone agrees what should be done. If the federal government does them, the same solution is forced on everyone even if a large plurality of people would prefer something else and those people constitute the majority of various states, so it makes more sense to let each state decide for themselves. There is nothing stopping them from all doing the same thing if there was consensus.
And when there isn't consensus, you get to see how each of the alternatives turn out when different states do different things:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laboratories_of_democracy
But if the federal government is even allowed to do them then whichever faction has the federal majority imposes their will on everyone else and prevents that from happening.
> Talking about "breaking the rules" in this context
The post I responded to was the one that brought up "breaking the rules". My point is that you should follow the rules if you want to complain about others breaking them.
I would say the problem is people doing bad things, and the rules are disconnected from any substantive connection to what is good or bad, and from any essential connection to the idea that the people (not any apparatus of government) is the final arbiter of what should be done.
You also need some rules to temper tyrannical majorities unless "51% of the vote means you get to oppress the minority" is your idea of a good time.
And a lot of these are in the nature of a Ulysses pact. When nobody wants anybody to censor them, and everybody knows that they won't always be in the majority, we can form a general consensus that we all agree not to censor the opposition when we're in the majority and in exchange they can't censor anyone when they're in the majority. For that to work you need an effective mechanism to constrain the majority or some fool is going to steer the ship into the rocks as soon as they hear the Siren song.
Then the broad consensus gets written into the constitution which in turn requires broad consensus to change. If nobody's playing dirty.
Whereas if everybody's playing dirty then pretty clearly the checks and balances aren't working and we need some better ones.
And yeah, pretty clearly the alleged checks and balances we have weren't the right ones. The problem is that the system we have set up enshrines the difficulty of changing those checks and balances as one of its primary features. That's why I think we're not going to get anywhere by trying to chip away at the edges of our problem within the existing constitutional framework.
I mean I'm sympathetic; I fully support having adults back in the White House, even from above the 49th parallel. It does not, however, seem realistic.
People seem to make this mistake a lot.
People want adults back in the room because that's how they get the results they want. Now, are they currently doing the things that will cause that to happen? Obviously not. But "they" is us. There is no external "them" to delegate this to and then blame when it goes wrong. Things get done when someone does them. If you want it done then the someone is you.
That doesn't mean you can solve the entire problem yourself, but it also doesn't mean you can't make a contribution. The absence of trying is the presence of failure.
Now let's consider how we've gotten screwed in the past. The primary recent mechanism is that nobody likes how things are going, but half the country is convinced that the problem is the other half and vice versa. And then they direct their efforts into having their party "win" even though their party sucks because both parties suck. Which absorbs all the inclination people have to try to fix things and throws it into a black hole as everyone's efforts do nothing more than cancel out the efforts of their countrymen on the other team.
If you're being divided into teams then you're playing someone else's game. That makes people think the goal should be to win the game. But the goal should be to change the rules so that people with common interests aren't stuck on opposing teams.
Score voting would be a good start.
Or what's left of it...
The fact that a couple of million (billion?) people could die as a result of their landgrab is none of their concern. The billionaire class appears to be divorced from reality to a very dangerous degree, and there are enough useful idiots willing to hand them their support to make this a very dangerous time. I don't think we've ever been closer to potentially losing it all than we are right now.
You're looking at 'divide and conquer' on a scale that we have never seen before and there are enough dominoes falling already that I don't even know if it still can be arrested.
To become a billionaire requires sociopathic disregard for the suffering of others and a pathological need for more.
There's no such thing as a good billionaire.
If you don't realize it by two you never will. Really, this is completely out of proportion by now, Marie Antoinette was a pauper by the standards these people live by.
But the point stands.
I'm not saying you shouldn't realize it before 10M, I'm saying you should probably stop hoarding resources after 10M at most.
I can see how my phrasing was a bit ambiguous there.
In general their money isn't money, it's stock. The thing it buys them is being the CEO of their company instead of letting Wall St pick someone even worse.
The real problem is that companies are now so large that you'd have to be a multi-billionaire to have a controlling interest.
The list almost always reads the same on every major corporation. Vanguard, Blackrock, State Street, ect... Numbers may be slightly out of date in some cases. If the Institutionals all vote together or collectively, almost none of the wealthy have "controlling amounts". (wikipedia listings)
- NVIDIA: The Vanguard Group(8.280%), BlackRock(5.623%), Fidelity Investments(5.161%), State Street Corporation(3.711%), *Jensen Huang(3.507%)*, Geode Capital Management(2.024%), T. Rowe Price(2.013%), JPMorgan Chase(1.417%)
- Apple: Vanguard Group Inc(9.47%), Blackrock Inc.(7.76%), State Street Corporation(4.04%), JPMORGAN CHASE & CO(3.20%), Geode Capital Management, LLC(2.41%), FMR, LLC(2.05%)
- Microsoft: The Vanguard Group(8.9%), BlackRock(5.6%), State Street Corporation(4.0%), *Steve Ballmer(4.0%),* Fidelity Investments(2.9%), Geode Capital Management(2.1%), T. Rowe Price International(1.9%) (Ballmer is a notable exception)
- Alphabet: The Vanguard Group(7.25%), BlackRock(6.27%), State Street Corporation(3.36%), *Sergey Brin(3.0%)*, *Larry Page(3.0%)*, Fidelity Investments(2.07%), Geode Capital Management(1.76%), T. Rowe Price(1.73%) (Sergey and Larry each get 10x votes)
- Amazon: (Notable exception to this trend) *Jeff Bezos(9.04%)*, The Vanguard Group(7.96%), BlackRock(4.93%), State Street Corporation(3.5%), Fidelity Investments(3.22%), Geode Capital Management(2.03%), JP Morgan Investment Management(1.81%), Eaton Vance(1.5%), T. Rowe Price(1.48%)
- Meta: (Another exception) *Mark Zuckerberg (13.5%)*, The Vanguard Group (8.8%), BlackRock (7.66%), Fidelity Investments (6.28%), State Street Corporation (3.97%), JPMorgan Chase (2.38%), Geode Capital Management (2.27%), T. Rowe Price (1.95%)
- Broadcom: The Vanguard Group(10.03%), BlackRock(7.63%), Capital World Investors(4.53%), Capital International Investors(4.04%), State Street Corporation(3.95%), Geode Capital Management(2.12%), Insiders[Various](2.04%)
- Tesla: *Elon Musk(12.9%)*, The Vanguard Group(7.2%), BlackRock(4.5%), State Street Corporation(3.4%), Geode Capital Management(1.7%), Capital Research & Management(1.3%)
Notably, in-practice they probably usually just vote whatever one of the main founders, CEO's, ect... recommends unless there's some actual major issue. Although that's so far above my pay grade, no idea what actually goes on.
Funnily, the next one on the list is JPMorgan and they're controlled by ... Vanguard, Blackrock, State Street... Who in turn control major portions of NVIDIA, Apple, Amazon, Meta... It's all rather incestuous and circular.
And funnier, they all own each other.
Vanguard itself is weird, like a mutual fund, and owned by its funds, then in turned owned by shareholders. However, *those* owners, are almost entire large institutional also. Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo, UBS Group, JPMorgan Chase, LPL Financial, Envestnet Asset Management, Ameriprise Financial, TIAA Trust, Dimensional Fund Advisors, Beacon Capital Management, Betterment, Wealthfront Advisers, and Cove Street Capital
Blackrock is pretty the same circular ownership: The Vanguard Group(9.08%), BlackRock Inc(7.02%), State Street Corporation(4.95%), Temasek Holdings Ltd(4.28%), Bank of America Corp(4.28%), Capital Research Global Investors(3.78%), Morgan Stanley(3.62%), Charles Schwab Corporation(3.14%), Capital World Investors(2.68%), Geode Capital Management(2.32%)
State Street is ... of course, the same ownership: Vanguard Group Inc(13.23%), Blackrock Inc(8.71%), JPMorgan Chase(6.06%), State Street Corporation(4.83%), FMR, LLC(4.05%), Invesco Ltd(3.00%), Harris Associates L.P(2.73%), Geode Capital Management, LLC(2.66%), Dodge & Cox Inc(2.43%), Morgan Stanley(1.71%)It's almost like there could be a book about this from a hundred years ago:
https://www.amazon.com/Other-Peoples-Money-How-Bankers/dp/19...
- And, thanks for the reference on the book. Never seen it before, yet not very surprising it looks pretty much like the Gilded Age with '"robber barons" who's fortunes were made at the expense of the working class, by chicanery and betrayal of democracy.'
Don't bother looking it up on the wildly published document though. Just "ask questions"
Isn't the EU's plan to make everyone pod people and use them for energy, like the Matrix? Potentially.
American billionaires sure do.
But their plan appears to be quite messy and harder to execute on than they thought so all we have so far is a lot of destruction with not much to show for it. Even the White House looks like a demolition site and not a peep about it.
I believe that if any past president had so much as suggested this rather than executed on it they'd have been impeached instantly.
Couldn’t be anything else to be honest.
He's also a by-the-dictionary-definition fascist authoritarian including the part where corporations are untouchable and above the law, so long as they pay to play with his new mafia government modeled directly on Russia.