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  1. #781
    Senior Member Emil El Zapato's Avatar
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    The best to you and family Chris
    “El revolucionario: te meteré la bota en el culo"

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  3. #782
    Senior Member Emil El Zapato's Avatar
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    Americans don't want guns for self protection against government, they want guns so they can try to overpower government. They don't stand a chance, if they insist on this approach to American politics, the body politic will unceremoniously eliminate them. It's harsh, but if the citizens insist on acting like citizens of an authoritarian state wishing to change their authoritarian leader (this is a projection of the highest order and truly symptomatic of a mass disordered public consciousness) they will be dealt with; with the authoritarian response that is typical, they will die a death by machine gunning on the capitol steps. The reality imposed by such actions would make it very difficult to return to what was before and might very well accomplish the desired end even in defeat.
    “El revolucionario: te meteré la bota en el culo"

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  5. #783
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    Quote Originally posted by NotAPretender View Post
    Americans don't want guns for self protection against government, they want guns so they can try to overpower government. They don't stand a chance, if they insist on this approach to American politics, the body politic will unceremoniously eliminate them. It's harsh, but if the citizens insist on acting like citizens of an authoritarian state wishing to change their authoritarian leader (this is a projection of the highest order and truly symptomatic of a mass disordered public consciousness) they will be dealt with; with the authoritarian response that is typical, they will die a death by machine gunning on the capitol steps. The reality imposed by such actions would make it very difficult to return to what was before and might very well accomplish the desired end even in defeat.
    I don't know, I detect pre-revolutionary fervour in the United States right now. I have no idea where it will lead, but it is unlikely to end well for most of those involved, including the revolutionaries themselves. Perhaps the closest parallel is Weimar Germany, or pre-war Italy and Spain, where fascists and antifascists battled it out amongst each other, both on the streets and in the polls. In the end, the fascists won and I wonder if a similar process isn't likely to take place in the US.

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  7. #784
    Senior Member Emil El Zapato's Avatar
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    It could happen. Right now, the anti-fascists have a majority, but with the superb skills of propagandism that the right holds, the growing smaller predominance could swiftly change. Can't hardly wait!
    “El revolucionario: te meteré la bota en el culo"

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  9. #785
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    https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/...b-spy-new-book

    ‘The perfect target’: Russia cultivated Trump as asset for 40 years – ex-KGB spy

    The KGB ‘played the game as if they were immensely impressed by his personality’, Yuri Shvets, a key source for a new book, tells the Guardian

    Donald Trump was cultivated as a Russian asset over 40 years and proved so willing to parrot anti-western propaganda that there were celebrations in Moscow, a former KGB spy has told the Guardian.

    Yuri Shvets, posted to Washington by the Soviet Union in the 1980s, compares the former US president to “the Cambridge five”, the British spy ring that passed secrets to Moscow during the second world war and early cold war.

    Now 67, Shvets is a key source for American Kompromat, a new book by journalist Craig Unger, whose previous works include House of Trump, House of Putin. The book also explores the former president’s relationship with the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.

    “This is an example where people were recruited when they were just students and then they rose to important positions; something like that was happening with Trump,” Shvets said by phone on Monday from his home in Virginia.

    Shvets, a KGB major, had a cover job as a correspondent in Washington for the Russian news agency Tass during the 1980s. He moved to the US permanently in 1993 and gained American citizenship. He works as a corporate security investigator and was a partner of Alexander Litvinenko, who was assassinated in London in 2006.

    Unger describes how Trump first appeared on the Russians’ radar in 1977 when he married his first wife, Ivana Zelnickova, a Czech model. Trump became the target of a spying operation overseen by Czechoslovakia’s intelligence service in cooperation with the KGB.

    Three years later Trump opened his first big property development, the Grand Hyatt New York hotel near Grand Central station. Trump bought 200 television sets for the hotel from Semyon Kislin, a Soviet émigré who co-owned Joy-Lud electronics on Fifth Avenue.

    According to Shvets, Joy-Lud was controlled by the KGB and Kislin worked as a so-called “spotter agent” who identified Trump, a young businessman on the rise, as a potential asset. Kislin denies that he had a relationship with the KGB.

    Then, in 1987, Trump and Ivana visited Moscow and St Petersburg for the first time. Shvets said he was fed KGB talking points and flattered by KGB operatives who floated the idea that he should go into politics.

    The ex-major recalled: “For the KGB, it was a charm offensive. They had collected a lot of information on his personality so they knew who he was personally. The feeling was that he was extremely vulnerable intellectually, and psychologically, and he was prone to flattery.

    “This is what they exploited. They played the game as if they were immensely impressed by his personality and believed this is the guy who should be the president of the United States one day: it is people like him who could change the world. They fed him these so-called active measures soundbites and it happened. So it was a big achievement for the KGB active measures at the time.”

    Soon after he returned to the US, Trump began exploring a run for the Republican nomination for president and even held a campaign rally in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. On 1 September, he took out a full-page advert in the New York Times, Washington Post and Boston Globe headlined: “There’s nothing wrong with America’s Foreign Defense Policy that a little backbone can’t cure.”

    The ad offered some highly unorthodox opinions in Ronald Reagan’s cold war America, accusing ally Japan of exploiting the US and expressing scepticism about US participation in Nato. It took the form of an open letter to the American people “on why America should stop paying to defend countries that can afford to defend themselves”.

    The bizarre intervention was cause for astonishment and jubilation in Russia. A few days later Shvets, who had returned home by now, was at the headquarters of the KGB’s first chief directorate in Yasenevo when he received a cable celebrating the ad as a successful “active measure” executed by a new KGB asset.

    “It was unprecedented. I am pretty well familiar with KGB active measures starting in the early 70s and 80s, and then afterwards with Russia active measures, and I haven’t heard anything like that or anything similar – until Trump became the president of this country – because it was just silly. It was hard to believe that somebody would publish it under his name and that it will impress real serious people in the west but it did and, finally, this guy became the president.”

    Trump’s election win in 2016 was again welcomed by Moscow. Special counsel Robert Mueller did not establish a conspiracy between members of the Trump campaign and the Russians. But the Moscow Project, an initiative of the Center for American Progress Action Fund, found the Trump campaign and transition team had at least 272 known contacts and at least 38 known meetings with Russia-linked operatives.

    Shvets, who has carried out his own investigation, said: “For me, the Mueller report was a big disappointment because people expected that it will be a thorough investigation of all ties between Trump and Moscow, when in fact what we got was an investigation of just crime-related issues. There were no counterintelligence aspects of the relationship between Trump and Moscow.”

    He added: “This is what basically we decided to correct. So I did my investigation and then got together with Craig. So we believe that his book will pick up where Mueller left off.”

    Unger, the author of seven books and a former contributing editor for Vanity Fair magazine, said of Trump: “He was an asset. It was not this grand, ingenious plan that we’re going to develop this guy and 40 years later he’ll be president. At the time it started, which was around 1980, the Russians were trying to recruit like crazy and going after dozens and dozens of people.”

    “Trump was the perfect target in a lot of ways: his vanity, narcissism made him a natural target to recruit. He was cultivated over a 40-year period, right up through his election.”

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  11. #786
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    Whoever the military supports will win. My guess is that it will be....the military. So, military dictatorship and not likely a left leaning one. Before that happens different factions within the military will likely duke it out, too, before the faction that wins ends up dominating.

    The U.S can't be split up militarily by regions or states, because of their nuclear arsenal in just about every state. They really have to end up uniting in the end. If not, whoa....very frightening.

    Quote Originally posted by Chris View Post
    https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/...b-spy-new-book

    ‘The perfect target’: Russia cultivated Trump as asset for 40 years – ex-KGB spy

    The KGB ‘played the game as if they were immensely impressed by his personality’, Yuri Shvets, a key source for a new book, tells the Guardian

    Donald Trump was cultivated as a Russian asset over 40 years and proved so willing to parrot anti-western propaganda that there were celebrations in Moscow, a former KGB spy has told the Guardian.

    Yuri Shvets, posted to Washington by the Soviet Union in the 1980s, compares the former US president to “the Cambridge five”, the British spy ring that passed secrets to Moscow during the second world war and early cold war.

    Now 67, Shvets is a key source for American Kompromat, a new book by journalist Craig Unger, whose previous works include House of Trump, House of Putin. The book also explores the former president’s relationship with the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.

    “This is an example where people were recruited when they were just students and then they rose to important positions; something like that was happening with Trump,” Shvets said by phone on Monday from his home in Virginia.

    Shvets, a KGB major, had a cover job as a correspondent in Washington for the Russian news agency Tass during the 1980s. He moved to the US permanently in 1993 and gained American citizenship. He works as a corporate security investigator and was a partner of Alexander Litvinenko, who was assassinated in London in 2006.

    Unger describes how Trump first appeared on the Russians’ radar in 1977 when he married his first wife, Ivana Zelnickova, a Czech model. Trump became the target of a spying operation overseen by Czechoslovakia’s intelligence service in cooperation with the KGB.

    Three years later Trump opened his first big property development, the Grand Hyatt New York hotel near Grand Central station. Trump bought 200 television sets for the hotel from Semyon Kislin, a Soviet émigré who co-owned Joy-Lud electronics on Fifth Avenue.

    According to Shvets, Joy-Lud was controlled by the KGB and Kislin worked as a so-called “spotter agent” who identified Trump, a young businessman on the rise, as a potential asset. Kislin denies that he had a relationship with the KGB.

    Then, in 1987, Trump and Ivana visited Moscow and St Petersburg for the first time. Shvets said he was fed KGB talking points and flattered by KGB operatives who floated the idea that he should go into politics.

    The ex-major recalled: “For the KGB, it was a charm offensive. They had collected a lot of information on his personality so they knew who he was personally. The feeling was that he was extremely vulnerable intellectually, and psychologically, and he was prone to flattery.

    “This is what they exploited. They played the game as if they were immensely impressed by his personality and believed this is the guy who should be the president of the United States one day: it is people like him who could change the world. They fed him these so-called active measures soundbites and it happened. So it was a big achievement for the KGB active measures at the time.”

    Soon after he returned to the US, Trump began exploring a run for the Republican nomination for president and even held a campaign rally in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. On 1 September, he took out a full-page advert in the New York Times, Washington Post and Boston Globe headlined: “There’s nothing wrong with America’s Foreign Defense Policy that a little backbone can’t cure.”

    The ad offered some highly unorthodox opinions in Ronald Reagan’s cold war America, accusing ally Japan of exploiting the US and expressing scepticism about US participation in Nato. It took the form of an open letter to the American people “on why America should stop paying to defend countries that can afford to defend themselves”.

    The bizarre intervention was cause for astonishment and jubilation in Russia. A few days later Shvets, who had returned home by now, was at the headquarters of the KGB’s first chief directorate in Yasenevo when he received a cable celebrating the ad as a successful “active measure” executed by a new KGB asset.

    “It was unprecedented. I am pretty well familiar with KGB active measures starting in the early 70s and 80s, and then afterwards with Russia active measures, and I haven’t heard anything like that or anything similar – until Trump became the president of this country – because it was just silly. It was hard to believe that somebody would publish it under his name and that it will impress real serious people in the west but it did and, finally, this guy became the president.”

    Trump’s election win in 2016 was again welcomed by Moscow. Special counsel Robert Mueller did not establish a conspiracy between members of the Trump campaign and the Russians. But the Moscow Project, an initiative of the Center for American Progress Action Fund, found the Trump campaign and transition team had at least 272 known contacts and at least 38 known meetings with Russia-linked operatives.

    Shvets, who has carried out his own investigation, said: “For me, the Mueller report was a big disappointment because people expected that it will be a thorough investigation of all ties between Trump and Moscow, when in fact what we got was an investigation of just crime-related issues. There were no counterintelligence aspects of the relationship between Trump and Moscow.”

    He added: “This is what basically we decided to correct. So I did my investigation and then got together with Craig. So we believe that his book will pick up where Mueller left off.”

    Unger, the author of seven books and a former contributing editor for Vanity Fair magazine, said of Trump: “He was an asset. It was not this grand, ingenious plan that we’re going to develop this guy and 40 years later he’ll be president. At the time it started, which was around 1980, the Russians were trying to recruit like crazy and going after dozens and dozens of people.”

    “Trump was the perfect target in a lot of ways: his vanity, narcissism made him a natural target to recruit. He was cultivated over a 40-year period, right up through his election.”
    Holy Crap, I haven't read that yet but just posted the very same thing, just not quite as long a time frame. Excellent find. Thank you so much!

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  13. #787
    Retired Member Hungary
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    https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2021...ter-covid.html

    Epidemic of Despair Could Haunt America Long After COVID

    Posted on February 4, 2021 by Yves Smith
    Yves here. Americans tend to ostracize people who are downwardly mobile, as if their bad fortune were contagious. The isolating effects of income and job loss are even worse under Covid due to the rise in inequality, the difficulty of finding new work, and needing to limit social activities. More deaths of despair are almost baked in. This article suggests there could be a long tail of desperation due to the damage Covid and economic decline are wreaking on already distressed communities.


    By Lynn Parramore, Senior Research Analyst at the Institute for New Economic Thinking. Originally published at the Institute for New Economic Thinking website

    Long before the virus, many Americans were sinking under waves of despair. Without transformative policies, that despair, with the added fuel of the pandemic, may turn into a tsunami. The aftermath could leave communities under rubble for decades to come.

    Just in the 21st century, Americans have been threatened by everything from foreign and domestic terrorism to an increasingly aggressive and militarized police. Unable to count on jobs, adequate safety nets, or health care, they have watched the affluent make a killing on Wall Street. They have been spoken down to by politicians and the media, sensing that unless they are rich, the political system will ignore their voices. As research has shown time and time again, they were right.

    Accused of being bitterly divided, when Americans agreed on something, like a single national program to provide health care coverage run by the government, their preferences were dismissed by their representatives (including the new president) as radical or impossible. Things that make life worthwhile and bearable, like an affordable education or a dignified retirement, grew increasingly out of reach. The middle class was turning into a relic. The people watched America devolve into what looked like a third-world country, with two separate economies in which experiences, prospects and even life spans diverged.

    Life expectancy in America dipped for the first time in decades in 2015. Experts hoped it was a fluke. It wasn’t. It happened again in 2016. And again in 2017. Not since the Spanish flu had such a decline lasted so long. Many suspected economic inequality was a driving factor, noting that while poor and middle-class Americans were dying younger, the richest were not only living it up, but living longer. A recent Danish study shows that from 2001 to 2014, the life expectancies of wealthy Americans grew 140% faster than those in low-income groups – an outlier among nations.

    Deaths of Despair

    In a 2015 study, Princeton economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton sounded the alarm about midlife white men and women without college degrees dying by suicide, drug overdoses, and alcohol-related ailments at record rates. People in these groups reported feeling sicker, more stressed-out, more prone to chronic pain, and less able to work and cope with daily activities. While their incomes were higher than Hispanics and African-Americans without college degrees, these whites felt a sense of chronic loss.

    Case and Deaton termed the trend “deaths of despair” – what happens when you can’t get ahead no matter what you do. In a book released in March 2020, they named America’s greed-driven opioid epidemic, job instability, a predatory health care system, shredded social safety nets, unbalanced labor markets, and globalization policies as factors contributing to the tragedy. The United States stood out among nations for its inequities.

    Before the pandemic, sociologist Shannon Monnat of Syracuse University was tracking deaths of despair by drug overdose, especially those linked to the opioid scourge. She concluded that while Big Pharma behaved horribly in pushing drugs it knew to be highly addictive, opioids would not have seized communities in a death-grip without the growing gap between haves and have-nots. Policies had an impact on mortality, blocking access to medical care and failing to promote decent, secure employment. Inequality was killing people.

    Her research, focused on whites (the group with the highest drug mortality rates over the last two decades, other than American Indians), showed a pattern of people dropping like flies in both cities and distressed rural communities that relied on disappearing manufacturing and mining jobs, as well as lower-paid, more insecure service industry employment. She found that misery in those places didn’t just happen. It was stoked by politicians who refused to address jobs or health care or safety nets. When the pharma reps came to town, they found a worn-out population ripe for exploitation. Monnat saw that in communities with more economic stability, a strong social safety net, and better quality jobs, fewer people were dying from opioids.

    Monnat is now working with a team conducting field research on how the coronavirus pandemic is impacting populations of drug users in New York state. What she is finding has her worried about the growing contagion of despair.

    Overdose Deaths Surge

    The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has already reported a rise in overdose deaths in the U.S. during the COVID-19 crisis, with synthetic opioids fingered as the primary culprit. Monnat notes that the reason for the increase is not yet clear. While isolation and loneliness due to the shutdown may certainly play a role, she also considers the decreased ability of people with addiction to access in-person treatment and recovery programs, the challenges of telemedicine, and changes to treatment protocols.

    Monnat also noted that, “the supply chain for drugs, just like the supply chain for toilet paper, has been significantly interrupted by COVID-19, causing further chaos.” For example, the United Nations Office on Drug and Crime reports a decline in the international production of heroin and disruptions to its distribution due to factors like reduced air travel and border scrutiny. This has brought to the drug scene more fentanyl, a synthetic opioid pain reliever which is 50 to 100 times stronger than morphine. Drug smugglers like fentanyl because it’s cheap to transport: a small amount packs a powerful punch.

    Monnat observes that fentanyl was already a huge problem before the pandemic and responsible for most drug overdose increases over the past three years. Now, the deadly substance is even more prevalent, often mixed in with other drugs as a filler and showing up not just in heroin supplies, but also in cocaine and methamphetamines. Some overdoses may result from people not knowing what they’re getting. “Fentanyl is increasingly showing up in pressed pill format,” says Monnat,” so people think they’re buying an Oxy on the street but it’s actually a fentanyl pill.”

    Monnat’s research on drug use currently focuses on upstate, central and western New York. With her team at Syracuse’s Lerner Center for Public Health Promotion, she is asking people about their patterns of use and treatment experiences both before and after the pandemic, along with things like job and family stress and mental and emotional health. One change that concerns her is the possibility of more people using drugs alone during the shutdown, without a friend who could revive them if they overdose.

    COVID-19 is likely altering the geography and demographics of drug overdoses, a picture that has shifted over the course of the pandemic. Early on, infection rates had a high impact in cities, but over time, the case and death rates have become higher in non-metro areas. “These are the places that missed the first bout but may not have taken adequate precautions,” says Monnat. “I’m looking at counties where there are high numbers of people who tended to support Trump, who believe that the virus is a hoax, refuse to wear masks, and ignore social distancing mandates.” Monnat’s own home county in New York, Lewis, recently saw the highest 7-day case increase rate of any county in the state, a grim title it has held for the last two weeks.

    Beyond the health impact of the pandemic, Monnat worries about communities suffering economically, especially in places that rely on tourism and recreation.

    “There’s distress in some of what used to be economically better-off areas,” says Monnat. “They’ve missed summer and fall seasons, and now winter, with the skiing and snowmobiling. We’re now looking at Great Recession-type effects in those places, or even worse. Of course, some of these places never fully came back from the recession in the first place.”

    Drug fatalities before the pandemic tended to cluster more in areas linked to manufacturing or mining, but Monnat sees the recreation and tourism-dependent areas, along with service-dependent communities, as particularly vulnerable now. She points out that it’s too early to know if deaths of despair are already occurring more in those areas because death data are not yet available at the regional or county level, but she expects to see geographic shifts, and demographic changes, too. “There will be a lot of factors to unravel,” she explains. “People who would have moved to tourist areas for a season are not going to have moved there, so you might have a whole different demographic profile than you would have seen otherwise.”

    Monnat stresses that deaths of despair don’t affect all groups equally, but notes that since 1990, drug overdose is the only cause of death that has risen across every age group, race, ethnicity, and both sexes. “The rates of overdose were already increasing among Blacks before the pandemic,” says Monnat. “Mostly it was because of increased fentanyl exposure, especially among the older Black men who saw their once-reliable drug supply increasingly contaminated with fentanyl.”

    The despair of COVID-19 is not a new despair, necessarily, but something that has been brewing for decades. The once-emerging Black middle class has been decimated by the loss of unionized jobs, creating economic hardship and downward mobility. Monnat points out that inner city areas with large Black populations had been devastated long before now, and the pandemic has only made things worse. “What has changed is that fentanyl is more prevalent, and it’s increasingly deadly” says Monnat. “With the pandemic disrupting the drug supply, the user community, treatment providers, and even harm reduction availability like syringe exchange, user populations are more vulnerable than ever.”

    Breakdowns on race and gender on drug overdose during the pandemic are not yet available, but Monnat is especially concerned about one group — mothers. The CDC has reported that drinking was already on the rise among women before the pandemic and that the uptick coincided with the Great Recession. A report by JAMA Network Open has revealed that the pandemic has accelerated that trend. Alcohol use is linked to both suicide and drug overdose and raises the possibility of fatality.

    “There’s so much added stress on mothers with school-age children, juggling work and caregiving,” she warns. “You’ve got the drinking, but women also have high prescription rates for anti-anxiety medication, like benzodiazepines, and when you mix them with alcohol, that can increase risk of overdose. Besides the risk of overdosing on drugs, there’s also the risk of creating chronic health conditions from heavy drinking over a long period of time that we wouldn’t necessarily see manifest themselves in deaths now. But we might be seeing this group of mothers 20 years from now having higher rates of liver cancer or cirrhosis.”

    Monnat says that while the opioid crisis particularly impacted working class whites, at least in the earliest waves, the damage of COVID-19 will be spread among more groups. “And it’s not just the pandemic,” she explains. “There’s what I call the ‘2020 effect.’ The year was stressful because of race relations and a president who seemed to be creating chaos at every opportunity. Even 9/11 didn’t impact the country like this. Every time you turn on the news it’s something new to worry about, some new crisis or problem. The anxiety is constant, and everyone is exhausted.”

    What Are the Remedies?

    Monnat emphasizes that above all, widespread and quick vaccination has to be at the top of the agenda for preventing more deaths of despair. “In order to restart everything and get people back to their somewhat normal lives, they have to feel safe going out into the workplace, or to recreation and other consumption-based and activity-based places.”

    She notes that reopening schools would help mothers, who bear the brunt of kids being at home. “That’s really part of the vaccination piece,” says Monnat. “With new variants and added risk, schools have to have proper equipment and protocols, like testing regimes similar to what is done on college campuses. Here at Syracuse University, we have a good model with regular testing, reporting of the results, and wastewater testing. You need procedures that not only protect people from contracting the virus but also immediately mitigate when you have cases on campus.”

    Monnat also sees an infrastructure bill as an obvious win for everyone. “For five years now I’ve been saying we need a new deal for the 21st century. The New Deal was put into place in western Europe after WWII to rebuild after a war. We haven’t been through an official war, but in a lot of communities it sure feels like the economic and infrastructural and social fabric decay is a lot like the experience of war. Certainly, post-Covid, it will feel like we’ve been through what amounts to a short war. An infrastructure bill would create jobs, help our falling-down infrastructure, and it has bipartisan support. That should happen right away.”

    Monnat warns that COVID-19 will cast a long shadow, not just over human health but in communities that are breaking down. “Trust in government, trust in media, trust in science, even trust in your own family have been strained,” she says. “Families have been torn apart because of different willingness to accept facts. There are good stories, like people caring for each other and bringing each other food, but on a macro-social level, the pandemic has accelerated a disruption in the social fabric of communities.”

    Tears in America’s economic and social fabric are likely to have negative implications for decades to come. “The impact will affect the political candidates that people get behind and support, people’s willingness to help out their neighbors,” says Monnat. “We didn’t come together in the same way that we did after 9/11. That tragedy created divisions, but it feels like between the pandemic and Trump and the murdering of unarmed Black men by police, we’ve had a year of the magnification of political and cultural and social divisions.”

    Is America’s current capitalist system, with its large concentration of wealth and worsening disparities, equipped to handle the potential tsunami of despair? Like a growing number of experts, Monnat’s answer to that question is “no.” In her view, taking on economic inequality is crucial, and depends on the Biden administration’s willingness to push through an agenda that creates a more equitable tax structure. “You see with the pandemic that the very rich have gotten richer, so they can afford to pay their share of taxes,” says Monnat. “Where else are you going to get money to dig out of this hole? You can’t get any more money from lower and middle-income taxpayers. Even more so than the Great Recession, we’ve continued to redistribute wealth toward the wealthiest and the only way to mitigate that is to change the tax structure.”

    The writing appears to be on the wall: Only a serious reform of American capitalism can address the kind of distress and insecurity so severe that it kills. Is the country ready for this critical shot in the arm?

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    I believe the country is ready. There is a significant segment which seems to prefer destruction.

    I believe most want equity which leads to more opportunity to do things and create more opportunity.

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    Quote Originally posted by Dreamtimer View Post
    I believe the country is ready. There is a significant segment which seems to prefer destruction.

    I believe most want equity which leads to more opportunity to do things and create more opportunity.
    Sure, American society is ready, it always was, but powerful business interests have stopped it from introducing a social democratic model along the lines of Western Europe. Now though, I think it is too late, the wealth that was there for previous generations is now largely gone. Last year the US borrowed half of its federal spending, which was mostly financed by money printing. If anything, current social programmes will have to be cut back significantly, to avoid a run on the currency, hyperinflation, national bankruptcy, or a combination of these. The rest of the world will not tolerate forever America's "extraordinary privilege" is printing the de facto world currency to finance its own crazy expensive and increasingly inefficient and corrupt programmes. At some point, the US dollar will be cut loose and US living standards will sink below Mexico's or Brazil's in a very short time.

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    You may be right. We seem to have the ability to pull ourselves out of the morass before things get too bad. I hope that will hold true a little longer.

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    "Last year the US borrowed half of its federal spending, which was mostly financed by money printing. If anything, current social programmes will have to be cut back significantly, to avoid a run on the currency, hyperinflation, national bankruptcy, or a combination of these. The rest of the world will not tolerate forever America's "extraordinary privilege" is printing the de facto world currency to finance its own crazy expensive and increasingly inefficient and corrupt programmes."

    Cut back social programmes or war mongering?

    Biden just officially ended financing of the Saudis for the war in yemen. He also 'suspended' financing UAE which will have a major impact on American corporate war complex.

    I'm not sure I understand the above statement that you made though Chris ... Would you care to elaborate on how American money printing has an impact on the World Economy?
    “El revolucionario: te meteré la bota en el culo"

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    On the positive side this 'could' start a push for the war machine to turn to domestic product innovation and 'peaceful' global production ... Time will tell for that one, the world does like its war machines.
    “El revolucionario: te meteré la bota en el culo"

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    Quote Originally posted by NotAPretender View Post
    "Last year the US borrowed half of its federal spending, which was mostly financed by money printing. If anything, current social programmes will have to be cut back significantly, to avoid a run on the currency, hyperinflation, national bankruptcy, or a combination of these. The rest of the world will not tolerate forever America's "extraordinary privilege" is printing the de facto world currency to finance its own crazy expensive and increasingly inefficient and corrupt programmes."

    Cut back social programmes or war mongering?

    Biden just officially ended financing of the Saudis for the war in yemen. He also 'suspended' financing UAE which will have a major impact on American corporate war complex.

    I'm not sure I understand the above statement that you made though Chris ... Would you care to elaborate on how American money printing has an impact on the World Economy?
    Simply put, the Bretton Woods agreement, where the dollar was pegged to gold and other Western currencies pegged to the dollar, was supreceded by an arrangement, where the dollar is no longer pegged to anything, but it is the de facto world currency, and most importantly, it is the (essentially only) currency with which oil can be purchased on the world market. This new arrangement is usually referred to as the petrodollar. In any case, the fact is that international trade is conducted largely in US dollars and most US dollars that have ever been printed (whether digital or paper) are currently abroad, being used for international trade.

    So, for instance, Germany cannot use Euros directly to buy oil from Saudi Arabia. It first has to obtain US dollars, by exporting goods to the US, so in exchange for the US dollars it gets, it can buy oil from Saudi Arabia. This is oversimplifying it, but the end result is that the Fed can print copious amounts of US dollars at home (called monetization), without causing inflation to spiral out of control. This is because new money supply ends up mostly abroad, as these dollars are actually are in short supply internationally and needed to conduct trade between third parties. Many countries also need to keep large US dollar reserves (Asian countries mostly) to be able to trade internationally and keep their currencies and thus exports competitive.

    It is all fairly complicated, but it results in what Charles De Gaulle called the USA's "exorbitant privilege" of being able to print the world currency, without causing inflation at home. The trouble with this model is, that once other countries choose to replace the US dollar in international trade, the value of it will sink like a stone, causing hyperinflation. Nobody knows when this will happen exactly, but it's pretty much baked into the cake at this point. When the music stops, all those dollars held by foreigners will "come home" to buy up US assets, making it rapidly lose value, but it will still be better than just holding worthless US paper. I think this might happen any day now within the next decade, resulting in much lower living standards than what are currently possible.

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    Interesting. All the more compelling reason for the U.S. to play globally nice. Apparently, Trump and his cohort weren't aware of those conditions.
    “El revolucionario: te meteré la bota en el culo"

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    Trump was aware. But he doesn't care. Why should he, as he says, because he won't be around?

    But will nations really stop using the dollar any time soon? They might have sooner under a second Trump term due to the chaotic and untrustworthy dynamic he created and tried to accentuate.

    People don't really want to leave a system until they have an alternative, and even then...

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