I'm growing pessimistic that this kind of activity + the egregious presidential-level crypto scams will never see justice. What's the path for that, really?
Don't elect a geriatric compromise candidate. The current administration's excesses create a massive opportunity for a pendulum swing. It's really not that hard. Hold yourself, your neighbors, your family and your friends accountable for who they vote for. And as tempting as it is, don't give into cynicism. It will take work but change for the better is always possible, and really in America, is far less out of reach than it would often seem.
Does everyone still believe this will be possible/happen/allowed by the current regime?
Why don't you work on lobbying your grandparents and their vote because I seriously doubt you are equipped for whatever armed conflict you are imagining. Have some dignity. If Americans are so called upon to defend the constitution then so be it, there is no need to prematurely soil your pants about it.
> Does everyone still believe this will be possible/happen/allowed by the current regime?
Note the previous riot was unsuccessful. And probably he'll try something similar this time so the relevant services know what to expect.
Vance however, I dont see much of that in action. But time will tell. Folks like to think it is a quiet conspiracy but every time you get a glimpse inside workings of government, if feels like they hate each other more than the next guy, regardless of who is in power.
eh I'm not really going to agree with you on this. He flinched 1 millimeter away from committing a full coup. That's not really a positive vote, it's just not as negative as it could be.
People with strong political beliefs are going to turn their head to keep their side in power rather than put someone in power that will push policies they are fundamentally against.
Blagojevich was not replaced by a Republican.
At this point presidential elections are won by getting members of the other side to stay home. So encourage young people to get out and vote if you want a Democrat. Don’t waste your breath telling someone who cares about gun rights to vote for a Democrat.
Your comment reads like you are arguing with yourself. I never suggested anything to the contrary of much of what you write, so frankly I have no idea what point you are trying to make. I suggest you re-read my comment in full as I think we are predominantly in agreement.
"this is an interpretion"
> this is a quote
Hopefully this clears things up.
fake quote> If I use triple quotes, enything is valid.
This is demonstrable via cntrl-F
I don't know what you are trying to say with the rest.
I really hate when people use " for interpretations, most of the times they are strawmen.
When I really really need to use a paraphrase, I make it super obvious, to avoid any possible confusion.
It’s so ridiculous on its face that I put in quotes what would be running through any single-issue voter’s head when they would hear a suggestion to vote for a different policy platform to oust a representative. You might as well ask a Bernie supporter to vote in Ron Paul.
It’s a rhetorical mockery device.
The point I was trying to make is Democrats can elect and nominate better candidates. But let's also not forget, single issue Republicans are not the only problem.
Institutional or single issue Democrats are also the problem. The biggest problem with Democrats is the DNC. The same people who lied to you about Biden's fitness for a second term are by and large still there. They still want your money. The DNC uses the Trump fear to escape accountability for its failures at every turn. The losers who have lost to this man for about a decade now are still there.
So I think we are in agreement, but I would add the reason more young people and independents need to vote is to replace the power structure on both sides of the aisle, not merely the one in power today. This is not "both sides", rather two things can be true. An institutional Democrat can be better than what we have today, but I think history has shown in the long run it is not good enough. What comes after this from the right in the near future may be far worse. Do not underestimate the ability for a future nominee to make the current president look like a saint... recall when people thought Bush II was a low point. It can happen again. If we keep electing mediocre Democrats, I believe it will.
Thank you for clarifying your comment, I appreciate you coming back to do that.
The made up quotation is a style designed to illustrate how dumb of a suggestion that is to people who vote on single issues.
It’s how single issue voters think regardless of Democrat/Republican. They ignore the representative’s moral failings and pick the one that will execute their policy desires.
Impossible. Democratic Party power is concentrated into a gerontocracy mostly interested in preserving their own wealth/power. Appeasement and encouragement of status quo will be the result of any Democrat victory.
Of course all this Trump shit is good precedent for them to use similar tactics to line their pockets next time.
It's not like you see better behaviour from 41 year old Zuckerberg or other younger founders.
At least with old people, you eventually have a slim chance to be one of the old bastards in charge.
You're also up against a large population which has been brainwashed, and even if someone deprogrammed is still not intellectually capable of reasoning beyond their own immediate interests. In other words, a democracy where ignorant people can vote is ultimately doomed to look quite like what we have now.
> the same powerful interests who chose to put a lunatic in charge.
I don't think this is accurate as a fact of recent history. As I recall, said interests wanted a repeat of Bush v Clinton. While they may have fallen in line since, I think this picture you are painting misses a lot of nuance. The current president was considered a joke up until the votes started coming in. So I think you are painting with an overly broad brush.
Secondly, at a certain point this starts to read like little more than cynicism. What is a suggestion you have, that isn't merely one in the negative? I genuinely sympathize with your perspective, but I'm curious what the subsequent step is then meant to be.
Thirdly, preventing egregious wrongs is pretty important. I don't believe rule of law is permanently out of reach. If your basis for this is the broad brush you painted earlier well then I don't think that actually computes. And I don't think preventing egregious wrongs should be minimized, even if structural issues are a barrier to "righting wrongs" as I believe you correctly put it. Solving those structural issues is a longer discussion, and one predicated on the requirement that there is no longer a "lunatic in charge".
That in of itself, is important. Let's also remember they could have brought the cases earlier. Your comment doesn't really address that, unless you are essentially claiming someone paid off Garland to dither away for 3 years. I gather that is not your claim? Therefore I think you're being overly cynical. As I said, in many ways it's not that complicated.
There was an AskHistorians post about the French revolution a few years ago that really stuck with me:
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/w18qt5/what_...
> Stability had hardly been a hallmark of the Revolution til that point, and really what we have seen is a revolving door of men rising to the summit of power, only to realize that once your head is above the rest it's a prime target for the guillotine. Of the early years of the Revolution, virtually any man who had been considered a leader was either dead or in exile. The King was executed in January of 1793. The Girondin, formerly indistinguishable from the 'left,' went en masse to the guillotine in October 1793. Danton & friends (dubbed by Robespierre 'the indulgents'), the literal authors of the Insurrection of August 10th which overthrew the King and declared the Republic, the 'giant of the Revolution,' had been executed in April 1794. Interspersed with these prominent deaths were hundreds of individuals who had been important players in the Revolution, whether in national or local politics, and who had now paid the price for their notoriety
In times of crisis and scarcity, the usual outcome is that anyone whose ego is big enough to think that he can lead or profit finds that they become a target for elimination. The folks who survive are the ones who focus on, well, surviving. We're headed for one of those times of crisis now, though most people don't want to admit it, and a lot of the people who are profiting off ill-gotten gains now may find that they don't live to enjoy it simply because it gives them a taste for profiteering that eventually makes them take stupid risks.
Seems like it'd be pretty easy to diversify into inflation-protected assets after taking big profits.
But I also don't see the dollar collapsing any time soon. The dollar's strength is built on the US economy, and the US economy is still one of the strongest in the world, with high productivity per person. We'll see some inflation, sure, but nothing that the rich insider traders can't hedge against.
I do not expect that there will be any real justice here. They're not gutting the average American -- they're bleeding us, extracting a small enough amount of value that they can get away with it. And we don't live in a just world.
Assets are yours only as long as there's a government to enforce your ownership rights over those assets for you. In case of government or societal collapse, your physical assets then are free for the taking to the ones with the most men with the most guns, and your paper assets are worthless.
Because Petrodollars make our global economy work, and Iran wants their partner China to be in control! If Americans lose sight of their need to maintain their role as *THE* lingua franca of international trade, then all hell is lost. The US cannot afford its military without massive consequences if it can't raise extraordinarily cheap debt through purchases of oil in US dollars immediately turned around to buy US debt to maintain that money's value.
Please do enough research to at least get the right currency before engaging in these discussions.
The forex markets are so extremely liquid and deep that trading in USD is no different than trading in any other free floating high volume currency.
Petrodollar might have mattered in 1975 when you couldn’t swap 100 million USD for 100 million euros in 2 seconds without even moving the market.
Even if the central bank might does a bad job and make a mess of the economy, the activity of 350 million people is hard to ignore.
Is it enough to _fully_ sustain the US dollar?
Who knows, but at least there is a floor, even if everybody stopped using US dollars for international trade.
Nobody thinks of the Indian rupee this way today.
I think this is a big part of both the impact of globalization and the U.S's waning power. Back around 1950, right after WW2, the "first world" (the developed west, not including Russia or Warsaw Pact countries) had a total population of just over 500M, and the U.S. was 150M of those, just under 1/3. And the remainder were largely dependent upon U.S. capital, machinery, and technology, having just bombed each other back to pre-industrial times.
Today, the developed world is about 3-4B people, and the U.S. is 350M of them, less than 10%. China alone has lifted about 500M people out of poverty and into the middle class in the last 2 decades, a population larger than the total population of the middle class in the U.S. The population of Asia is around 4.86B, 15x the size of the United States, and an increasingly large number of them are living a lifestyle close to what Americans enjoy.
Idk, I don't have any loyalty towards any of these political parties so it shouldn't bother me but part of me gets defensive when I hear them described this way today. (Hell, I remember being the weirdo anti-interventionist in my circles and it was always the tea party ass hats that were uncomfortably enthusiastic about offing people they didn't like).
sorry but this is such a coping mechanism, or doomsday talking. Neither is dollar collapsing nor US government is collapsing, as there has been no evidence whatsoever of any of that even moving towards happening, at least on any meaningfully predictable timescale (i.e. 3-5 years? while even that's rich for predictions). Anything past that is just broken clock being correct.. at some point in time.
What would it take for dollar to "collapse"? What are the exact mechanisms that would be required to start that process?
What is the evidence of US government being "toppled" with layers and layers and layers of diverse (financial, legal, military, political, social, you name it) protections in place? It's the kind of thing preppers like to dream of but it's not happpening in our lifetimes.
When things of that scale happen you see it YEARS in advance in true poverty (as in people starving), in anger (as in people getting increasingly violent) at scale, in mass mobilization of masses actually looking to topple the government. Nobody is working right now to overthrow US government, there were never any organized attempts at that, not even demonstrations of a vector that can once lead there, as in it's simply not happening (sorry you can't in all seriousness put Jan 6 there as that was shocking for US political PR, but shockingly irrelevant for any country that has gone through real upheaval). US is extraordinarily rich even in it's poor version, everyone has everything to lose and nothing meaningful to gain from any "revolution".
I mean.
Do you read the news?
these protections are not working very well these days. the administration is getting away with _so much_ criminality in plain view.
I’d say it’s 50/50 the US as it currently exists and exerts military and financial might around the world doesn’t by 2029
They believe, rightly or not that they can withdraw from the world with their wealth more or less in one piece to some kind of safe zone.
I believe the Constitution and related artefacts should be stored in the British Museum with other historical documents. Civic religion needs to be done away with.
And what does that new framework look like to you?
1. Massively increase the size of congress. Modern technology makes this feasible in a way that it wasn't when the size was capped. More congress critters means it's harder to buy off a majority of them.
2. Re-write the first amendment to significantly limit political speech. The specifics of this are obviously very thorny, but reversing Citizens United and drastically limiting the amount of money that is spent on elections is necessary to have _any_ chance of saving the country.
Passionately agree with this!
2 is dicey and I would like to try campaign finance reform first.
I don't want to throw everything out because that's how you get slavery and The Handmaid's Tale. At the same time, I'll gladly acknowledge that a lot of our institutions were rotten from the founding and to their core, and their dismantling maybe not necessary but certainly suitable for a reborn America that leaves much of its baggage behind.
Whether the majority of people believe that or not has more to do with the place of the Revolution in our national mythology than with what actually happened in reality.
The first post-revolution organizational system of the US, described in the Articles of Confederation, is very different than the difficult and contingent pivot to a federal system. Almost a million US citizens died in the transition.
~30 years later all the quick investors of the privatization run the country and have been sending all their able bodied men into a drone-based meat grinder with no end in sight.
No wait
Hacks were found in the US that distribute free money, and that was communicated to millions of people.
People showed up for said free money.
No, it is mostly just the one party.
If it’s the hedge funds or institutional money, you can absolutely be sure this will come to a head. People don’t like being taken for a ride, and if they are repeatedly taken for a ride and they are organized market participants they will come around and make sure there is a comeuppance as a collective
Record and wait. Justice is slow but has the power of the nation state. Once the leadership of this current government is gone and nobody is around to protect the offenders then its time to swoop in with the records and the justice system.
This is why its risky to join corrupt political movements led by old men, because they will use you to break the law, then die and you'll be on the hook. Much like the people who worked for the Soviets in the Baltics post war as young staffers, who administered the forced deportations and were eventually prosecuted ~50 years later for genocide or crimes against humanity.
i.e. everyone working for ICE today should be agitating for a pardon, given how racial profiling and warrentless raids are probably rather illegal in the long run.
this is pretty much how things will unfold in USA. Everything that has to happen will happen but very slowly. There is all the evidence supporting that.
Also something to keep in mind in the future: Old people have no reason to fear prison, they will die before they can get convicted.
The odds are too low of anybody getting meaningfully punished while they get to openly setup their entire family for generations using means and information not available to any normal citizen.
And while not guaranteed they are statistically more likely to suffer age related cognitive decline while still in office.
It's nice and clear, has obvious motivation and obvious sourcing.
Also obvious incentives: e.g. after your political career you will live with the system you helped build.
And then to compensate they should be paid more in terms of salary, even if that salary seems absurdly large it would be less than most of them gain from the insider info they use to make deals.
Take the median income, multiply it by 5-10 and thats their salary.
"Speaking fees" and deferred income are very different from being able to bank the profits tomorrow morning.
I don't think that this is a particular form of exceptionalism, beyond the US having a longer tradition of widespread, retail-owned shares, and law-making around that fact.
But sometimes I wonder when people are criticising the US as a culture, they're often choosing as the baseline that should be respected standards that were also defined in a US cultural context. What this sometimes means is that in internal US culture these points are seen as something that is heavily discussed, because there was a point where it was democratically decided and therefore could be undecided in the same way, like corporate personhood, or money-as-speech. In the case of the criminalization "insider trading", there is lively debate about whether this is actually a "good thing". That can sound horrific externally, because of course insider trading is a bad thing. But someone decided to make that a bad thing, and -- for historical accident reasons -- the edges of that debate was largely defined within the US.
(This is mostly just barely-informed speculation: sometimes issues like this emerge in international fora, or start in another culture and quickly spread. But the cultural and financial dominance of the US in the last century or so really makes these things often a point of debate in American terms, and a fixed point elsewhere. I speak here as an immigrant to the US and also someone who is dipped in global policy work, rather than someone who is stating this as a good or a bad thing.)
Elect people who will make justice a priority.
There will never be an investigation while Trump is president, but, it's entirely feasible to force some action in the time being to enable a case later.
FYI it may not be technically illegal it depends on all sorts of things.
If trade were made public it could be very damaging.
And realistically we don't want that. Similar with Kristi Noem, Pam Bondi, better to sit on things until Trump is out of office, so there can be no pardon.
Americans have been a democracy for 200 years and have no healthcare, no public transit, a crippling drug and homeless problem, a crippling gun violence problem... The list goes on. Democracy doesn't seem to be having the desired affect there.
Why should that suddenly change? Where's this hope coming from?
Unfortunately with 90% of broadcast television soon to be owned by a single family, overturning this corrupt power may be even more difficult.
I think it’s time for society as a whole to reconsider the social contract legitimizing the wealth of these oligarchs.
At least the USA is only 4% of the world’s population so the world economy will just find other financial hubs and currencies, no big loss.
That said, it's hard to reconcile that with the fact that Democrats continue to be the opposition party, and failed to even imprison Trump over four years for the things he'd done. And even in the best case scenario, we wouldn't expect Trump himself to live long enough to face much justice.
The optimism left in me hopes that this era can serve as an enduring cautionary tale for future societies.
For 90% of her tenure, her investments produced lower returns than an S&P500 ETF. The other 10% were all driven by NVDIA.
If she's the bar for one of the best stock traders ever, I must be a Buffet-level genius.
---
Why do people keep repeating this lie?
I disagree with this, I think things which are worse are worse. This is orders of magnitude worse, and it is impacting my life more..
To keep things focused on the tech industry, a lot of our security is ultimately built on trust (Google and Apple won't ship malicious apps, CAs, etc) and this corruption erodes that trust.
I'd like to point out it was NOT the Democrats who failed us, it was Republicans in congress who failed us. I'm really not sure how you can suggest Democrats failed us, when they had 2 successful impeachments against trump, but it was Senate Republicans that voted to not remove him when 60 votes were required in a Senate split 50/50. Every single Republican Senator except Mitt Romney in the first impeachment failed us. The second impeachment for insurrection got closer at 57 votes in the senate, but Republicans failed us again.
Democrats absolutely did not fail us, they were the ones trying to hold a criminal accountable. It was and always is Republicans who fail us.
Far too often the Democrats have been called out for "failing us" or other both-sides nonsense (not saying you did that here), when in reality they are the only viable choice (capable of winning elections, don't get me started on 3rd parties) to actually fix the calamity the Republicans always cause.
Describing them as "failing" is always going to trigger me. They've done a great job in every single hearing and debate at spelling out exactly how craven the Republicans are - if people just aren't listening and describe them as "failing", then that's a problem. They've done amazing work. The people that really failed us are the voters, but more specifically the people who just didn't show up to vote because they think the Democrats are losers, which is how "failing us" sounds to someone reading random comment threads.
My phrasing that Dems "failed us" reduces politics to a "my team versus enemy team" framing, and I'd add more nuance if I were to express it in longer form. But I don't want to get in the habit of writing purely about politics here.
Without being able to compare future liabilities to future income, we're lacking critical context. It's like they wrote half an article; kinda frustrating.
What is in discussion, are the multiple, very feasible, and very realistic scenarios, where an increase in interest rates, and a run from the dollar...Will force the US government to spend over 80% of the tax revenue, JUST TO SERVICE the debt interest....
https://i.4pcdn.org/pol/1773582592057062.jpg
Close out enough debt to make what's left serviceable. Thank our richest for their sacrifice for the nation's greater good.
The alternative is that they take the money and run. Or start WWIII. There is no in-between.
I hope they have enough direct flights to not have a layover in an unfriendly state.
I love how people pretend this established some new kind of precedent.
Y'all keep forgetting Nixon.
"Now, Therefore, I, Gerald R. Ford, President of the United States, pursuant to the pardon power conferred upon me by Article II, Section 2, of the Constitution, have granted and by these presents do grant a full, free, and absolute pardon unto Richard Nixon for all offenses against the United States which he, Richard Nixon, has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 20, 1969 through August 9, 1974."