Multi-national corporations and sophisticated investors have a heck of a lot more money and in some senses, practical power than worldly governments today that in effect have military that defend corporate and investor global interests.
Global corporations and concentrated wealth tends to out-last many government elected officials. Governments also have a tough time finding people that comprehend well the mass empirical effects of economic methods applied to the real natural world (such as ecospheric degradation). Another challenge to ordinary people is that social media is preponderantly owned by the most rich, as is the broadcast media so making substantial political change through politics is difficult to accomplish. Opinions that are published in some senses must pass through corporate-owned hoops, for example- the President of the United States with 88 million followers was recently banned from Twitter.
Philosophers have written about the problem of corporatism concentrating wealth and controlling governments in the past. In my opinion it will be very challenging for governments to battle with corporations meaningfully since politicians and Supreme Court personnel need to be corporate approved to reach high office- there just won’t be a will to battle with corporate and concentrated wealth and power. I am not optimistic.
If people have bad political leadership unconcerned about the ecosphere they live in the people can suffer obviously. With a finite quantity of natural resources the world with nearly ten billion people can run out of things and the carrying capacity of the planet, just like a ship’s, can be full. Some politicians have blind faith in technological solutions to environmental challenge and in my opinion that is very dangerous. One loss in bad engineering can bring complete systemic failure.
A political economy can be mal-adaptive for challenges that are external to in-place economic practices. If one has a Love Canal, Minamata Tragedy or usual environmental disaster Timeline: Ten Major Ecological Disasters that may seem to some business as usual, yet the mass extinction in progress- the 6th in the Earth’s history is human caused and obvious. Could Humans Ever Become Extinct?
Many humans are happy with an economy in which they are immersed thoughtlessly like ants scurrying about compiling dollars, stuffed sofas, homes and so forth while the real world outside their doors is in decline. Oceans are warming and becoming acidified, shellfish are threatened by the acid, global atmospheric heating is in progress too and asphalt to absorb sunshine is still be rolled out everyplace it seems- things that are o.k. if a limited number of people do it may be entirely destructive when a lot of people, or billions of people do it. Some people cannot believe or have faith that something is true until the disaster or salvation as the case may be is upon them. One hopes that such people do not always lead with Epimethean economic paradigms when a Promethean-forward looking viewpoint is necessary for human survival. Some people simply have no sense- consider for example how much cooler a natural lot is in the hot Phoenix sunshine than an asphalt parking lot, and multiply that heating effect all over the American south for any given day with all of those miles of asphalt roads etc. There are more than 4 million miles of paved road in the U.S.A.
Part of the problem of change is fundamental and logical; those with the most invested in a particular economic system are the most resistant to change for they have the most cash to lose. The historian Arnold Toynbee is his ‘A Study of History’ determined that civilizations cannot usually respond well to external challenges. The phenomena that went in to making a civilization what it is continues and cannot be replaced easily by something new. Social is much greater than the influence of a few new leaders with better ideas.
To change a society in a designed way that is a necessary and positive direction would require political platforms with specific goals continued over time to insinuate ecological sustainability generally. People commonly underestimate how really selfish ordinary people are in advantaged economic positions. Jesus was quite right when he said that the meek shall inherit the Earth, although God would need to bring tat condition into being rather than political reformers.
The United States of America is a collection of former colonies and territories that either revolted against imperial British rule or petitioned to join the union. Because the United States economic system is not the same as the government, and because people own private property and private capital rather than the government preponderantly (private capital is of far greater value today than public capital), answers to questions about when the American empire will collapse, like a souffle as it were, are challenging to answer as they are a little off the mark.
One might ask when the dollar will collapse and that would be possibly more accurate. Experts may know if it will yet the dollar is a universal floating currency held by global plutocrats and Chinese communists as well as Americans from the U.S.A., Mexico and Peru etc.
The American economic system’s wealthy people-plutocrats are part of a global community of plutocrats in my opinion, and wondering when their power will end is another interesting question different of course than the one about when the non-real American empire will end.
America was an empire for 20 years when it had the Philippines as a colony as a result of the Spanish American war, and so when the Philippines took their liberty from the U..S.A. I suppose that was the actual collapse of the American empire- in either 1935 or 1946 depending upon if one regards a commonwealth as independent.
One further could wonder if the influence of globalist plutocrats and corporations that are preponderantly American will collapse and that is a tough question. As an occasional science fiction writer I could develop innumerable scenarios for that, for instance, when artificial intelligence takes over the world, when a global pandemic crashes world population or when too much social use of dope and evil broadcast media reduces the intelligence of everyone so far that they cannot understand the complexity any more. It is sometimes fun to consider alternative dystopias and utopias as future possibilities too help realize the futility of every getting good intelligent politicians to make the world a much better place.
It
wasn't a good way to official usher in the President elect. Democrat
leaders were blind to the aspirations of millions of the political
opposition and believe just their own ideas are acceptable.
Intelligent people have empathy- that is they understand the point of
view of other people-Democrats tend to fail at that. When the Senate
returned to the chambers to wrap up the electoral vote process
Vice-President Pence and Majority Leader McConnell made dignified
speech addressing the issue. Then came Senator Chuck Schumer who
seemed overcome with hatred of President Trump. In most of American
history such abuse as Mr Schumer spewed would beg for a duel, and it
might be a good thing if a couple of politicians were shooting each
other instead of f' ing up the public business as they usual do.
Sadly I missed watching the spectacle live, It must have been a sight
watching Chuck Schumer wade into the mob throwing punches all around
leading the resistors defending the
sacred senate temple
from desecration. Democrat Presidents and vice are always lawyers- a
slum of lawyers since the Clintons, and Americans can expect
consigliary subterfuge and deceit four more years. It would be good
if someone with an economic and environmental brain ran for the job
and got the nomination. President-elect Biden showed his age when he
said that Americans will learn to respect Democrat leadership the
next four years, especially one assumes, as he exonerates Hunter's
relationship with Ukrainian paymasters while Dad was Vice-President
supporting the attack on Ukraine’s Russian rivals.
A
democracy requires leaders that comprehend the art of finding a way
for as many people to get what they want as possible without stepping
on the toes of others. Lawyers are good at their profession of
representing clients in litigation- they seek to win for a client and
make the other a loser. Lawyers have no special qualification for the
Presidency- they should work with laws rather than make them. The
Democrat leadership slum of lawyer-President since Bill Clinton have
sought to make Americans that aren’t goose-stepping sycophants of
their lunatic agenda losers. They expect Americans to learn to
respect corporate censorship, to respect the daily hate, to be nailed
down and compliant so they don’t need to hammer people into
silence.
Congressional opponents of President Andrew Jackson probably incited violence against him - an assassination attempt Jan 30th 1835. The Attempt to Kill "King Andrew" I am not really a fan of Australians, yet some of their reputed toughness of character might be better in such a circumstance as the gunless ‘insurrection’. One thinks of the line of Julius Ceasar when he is being stabbed to
death when he pulls up his toga over his head and says; "This is
violence". He was such a clown.
Democrats
are equally responsible for the mayhem that disrupted the electoral
college proceedings for they have made a custom since the Clinton
administration of having their way or no way as far as possible. They
are the actual party of intolerance along the lines of Joseph Stalin.
Senator Schumer definitely threw gasoline on the fire of national
division so far as he possibly could. Senator Schumer and Hillary
Clinton experienced the last gasp of 'the deplorables' that voted for
President Trump- they emulated the Democrat Party custom of forcing
the law to stretch as far as possible to benefit themselves. Senator
Schumer was aghast that the Senate chamber was “desecrated”, yet
had little to say for the year of Antifah stoning and fire-bombing of
the Federal Courthouse in Portland Oregon that drew his ire equally.
Portland Oregon doesn't count in comparison to Washington D.C.
evidently.
A
democracy cannot reasonably be run in such a way that a bare majority
can expect to get away with murder and force their policies upon 49%
of the people whenever they have a majority. In a nation of 320
million people that approach isn't wise. With oodles of weapons of
mass destruction and an overpopulated world their will be dissent
sometimes rising tom use those tools of politics through other means.
Maybe some biological custom redesigner of viruses will engineer a
subtle device to cull the population of millions- who can predict the
future? The U.S.A. Should be a nation with a reputation for trying to
tolerate the political opinions and morals of millions of people
rather than ridiculing or suppressing them to extinctions as
Democrats might like to do. The art of democratic politics should be
to make each side happy whenever possible instead of just one side
with a nominal majority. I should stipulate that I.m.o. as the world
political response to Covid 19 evidenced, there may not be any
intelligent political leaders on the planet, so getting dual
political plaintiffs in a civil matter to be happy may exceed the
I.Q. Of those elected.
Democrats
want to take America to atheism and homosexuality norms- they have
passed hate speech laws and require terms of endearment or censorship
follows in the corporate bulletin board of social media, Democrats
sponsored abortion of what- sixty million fetuses, Democrats
forced homosexual marriage on the nation when the public would, have
tolerated some sort of separate civil union establishment; they
refused to respect the onions of a virtual majority and choose the
path of conflict instead of taking a course that would accomplish
what the homosexuals wanted and left the sane institution of
heterosexual marriage uncorrupted.
Democrats
forced Obamacare on the nation with a technical vote using the
nuclear option. Leaders like Chuck Schumer say the hell with the
opinion of so many Americans against it. Some day that custom of not
finding accommodation for strong American opinions may have real
deleterious national consequences. The funny thing is that most of
the opinions that are so inflammatory are easily remedied with better
ideas including that of flooding the nation with illegal alien
workers to render the political opinions of non-Democrats minority
opinions. Phasing out American political resistance by flooding the
nation with replacement workers and voters over a few decades also
riles up several million Americans.
Many
of the ideas if the red party are as wrong as that of the blue party.
I though it might be a good idea therefore to create a third party- a
white party (red, white and blue) yet that would be construed of
course as racist these days. While Chuck Schumer is irate about what
he labeled were 'insurrectionists' storming the capital like peasants
with pitchforks might have tried in some former time or perhaps SDS
radicals leading protesters to trash a government building during the
Vietnam War, he seems unaware that his economic theories are wrong as
are those of most on Capitol Hill. No one their seems to have an idea
about how to have the Federal Reserve make those zero-interest loans
to Social Security instead of big banks who can loan out 9 e-dollars
from thin air for each e-dollar deposited by the Federal Reserve.
That custom in the quantitative easing era has in effect given 200
trillion bucks to the rich since 2008, and the world economy is only
worth may 100 trillion annually- that practice seems stupid from my
humble non-economist perspective.
If
Social security has great investment managers loan out cash from the
federal reserve keeping the usual, and even a high marginal reserve
on deposit the people of the United States would benefit more or less
equally instead of just the rich when the rich have liquidity
problems or the Federal Reserves believe they do.
China
today has an economy that is an almost perfect fulfillment of Lenin's
NEP program if it were carried out to a logical maturity. There is a
mixed economy of private investment in business under communist party
supervision. America's corporate people have signed off on investing
in China for what seems like most electronic product production as
well as innumerable other manufactures. They submit to China's law
that a Chinese subject must own 51% of any business their. Meanwhile
the U.S.A. has a jackass system of the Federal Reserve helping
concentrate wealth and power in a global plutocracy and the
plutocracy invests in China while Democrats flood the nation with
illegal alien workers while drug cartels seem like one of the best
businesses in Mexico.
President
Trump was not the worst President in U.S. History as the histrionic
Senator Schumer said. Actual President Trump did a fairly good job
until 2020 when he bungled Covid management and set an especially bad
example of not wearing a mask. He also used 2020 to accelerate
gutting ecosphere health, and of course he exited office gracelessly
bringing unwanted excitement to the Capitol.
President
Trump deserves a Nobel Prize for Peace on his Middle East work and
Democrats should remember that he started no foreign wars even while
Democrats like Rep. Adam Schiff were throwing every sort of baloney
content they could at him during the great smear the President with
accusations that he is a Russian agent, dupe or general dope for
President Vladimir Putin. President Trump was not the worst President
by any means, though he does seem to have a problem with too much
egoism. He is a billionaire so his approach can't be entirely
impractical.
War is a continuation of politics through other means. War is not generally a sport with fixed rules of engagement, declarations of intent etc. It needn’t be said they are less desirable means than intelligent responses within democracy that address all of the concerns of various parties involved as protagonists. The founder’s Declaration of Independence was a succinct statement concerning the right of revolt of oppressed masses. It should be remembered that real material, spiritual and social interests in addition to natural resources should be protected where possible rather than destroyed. If the United States for example does not need a kinetic war to improve the situation, and if the war could not actually resolve the problem and would make matters worse, then other means should precede and supplant kinetic conflict.
One concern I have is social media. Quora is a good outlet for free expression though it too may have limits.
Social Media; Utilities or Corporate Bulletin Boards?
The freedom to use social media including blogs for personal and creative constructions require the media to be less flimsy than anti-global warming arguments. Writers don’t want their works to disappear when a web site goes black. To invest a lot of time in developing a product to then experience search engine listings being cut off by Google blogs after one criticizes N.S.A. or Google policy is consistent with the blog as a corporate bulletin board rather than a public utility. It is the nature of a public utility that is apparently necessary for security of free expression.
Since the first Obama administration I have experienced every place I write either disappearing, or I have been banned for using politically incorrect language occasionally. With the new Democrat administration Google managers felt it appropriate to zero my blog listings so they cannot be found. In my opinion that was noteworthy.
The concentration of power and wealth historically occur together. With the social networking of Wall Street and the support of free money loans from the Federal Reserve to the rich who then can mint their own e-dollars nine-fold for each dollar deposited concentration of wealth has occurred in the United States. Wall Street is global so a global plutocracy may be far advanced in development. They invest in China. Warren Buffet probably has a second home their. Plutocrats own social media in America.
Social media is used to express political opinions as well as sundry other thought and product sales. If it is a corporate bulletin board the content need be satisfactory and in effect subordinate to corporate goals and mission. Anything else could be degraded in search engine listing or deleted altogether. Corporatism spells the end of democracy and rise of plutocracy with happy minions. It might be useful for the government of the United States to create a social media site maintained by the Library of Congress that would allocate one space per registered citizen to write as much as they want without fear of it being deleted, censored or degraded in public search engine listings. Democracy of the United States in the modern era cannot exist without free speech and free speech unsubject to corporate plutocratic criteria for normal publication.
Without honest competition that won’t disappear and that isn’t biased against some social element, social media will simply become entirely owned and controlled by plutocrats. Individual writers can afford to tilt against the windmills of deep pockets of Google for less than a pico-second. If Verizon now owns Yahoo and it can delete one’s web site for using corporate defined hate speech can’t it also listen in to everyone’s Verizon phone calls with technology and censor any language it deems hateful? A democracy entirely filtered through corporate owned social media and mass communications is one that will become a complete farce. That former democracy will be nothing more than a sham maintained to keep somnolent masses contented.
Would the founders of the United States have been satisfied with rich British corporations owning all social media and communications venues? I believe that after the revolution they would have certainly permitted social media owned by corporations like the Hudson’s Bay Company or East India Company, yet they would have considered independent free speech including hate speech (which should be subjective matter of opinion) vital for democracy and therefore would have established a government operated public social media for citizens to use as a free, necessary defense against British Corporate power.
Maybe the Department of Defense should operate a social media site for American citizens that isn’t flimsy and won’t disappear the first time anyone writes something like stop the queer government or criticizes the lack of revenue sharing by corporate owned blogs. American defense asks of its servants they be sworn in to defend against enemies foreign and domestic. The oath isn’t to defend against foreign enemies and lay down for domestic enemies or to roll over for global corporations. Domestic enemies of the past were fairly plain and overt unlike today. Corporate and sedulous cults may readily take over the government, pass laws limiting free speech and put a muzzle on democracy in order to accomplish not only particular social class hegemony, but to channel the concentration of wealth as well. Adequate defense requires vigilance against KGB-Tass synthetic public broadcasting media and other agencies of socialization such as social media. Government operated channels with completely free, stable public social media outlets for the use of citizens might be necessary in order for true opinion to be found.
A world government would have a Federal Reserve bank issuing e-dollar loans at zero interest to 1% of the people who could then e-mint 9x more dollars for each e-dollar on deposit. In other words they would have unlimited wealth and concentrate power globally buying up everything for plutocracy. The plutocrats would de facto partner with Chinese Communists and tech surveillance would become ubiquitous. The masses could have mass media entertainment and thought control being programmed culturally. That would be one form of world government.
Other forms would likely be some sort of authoritarian dictatorship. Without nations for firewalls against political monopoly power would concentrate just as wealth concentrates.
Economic populism would be an improvement if it could actually exist. The prospects for that are very poor though since the party exists to serve the plutocracy that owns everything in sight. The problem is the Federal Reserve enabling of free trillions of dollars for the richest. That seems a kind of treason. Quantitative easing was the most recent culprit and the last Bush and Obama administrations let the rich have north of 200 trillion dollars. The number is so large I wonder, since I am not an economist, how it can be right.
The broadcast media is owned by the rich and many analysts and commentators are motivated more by profit for themselves than accurate scholarly work. There was nothing in the constitution in support of the government giving trillions of zero interest loans to the private sector and big business. The marginal reserve of 10% means that every dollar on deposit for a zero interest loan from the Fed allow 9 more dollars to appear out of thin air for loans to others that appear with real dollars repaid. That policy unbalances the political system so much that plutocracy develops and the democracy a sham.
Populism should equate to egalitarianism rather than sycophancy with billionaires’ special interests.
It’s been said that the Second World War was the final battle of the First World War. I tend to agree with the concept. The royals of Europe had a grand conflict that ended without unconditional surrender, Germany had a revolution that got rid of the aristocracy and put Hindenburg in power of the Weimar Republic, and the former royals were very displeased-especially with the Bolsheviks in Russia. Former royals of Germany needed a populist political figure to put them indirectly back into power -and they used Hitler to bring corporatism and themselves toward a new kind of Germany able to fight the reds on the left and the decadent royals and rival free enterprises on the right from other nations.
Hitler was a very unusual fellow with a speaking voice that had a vibration at normal speech levels with characteristics others have when shouting. He was sent by military high command to infiltrate and take over the Germany National Socialist Party which he directly accomplished- he was charismatic, and the rest is history. Crown Prince Ruprecht had a breakthrough on the front reaching in to France (some say as far as far as 200 miles). He was apparently a fairly competent military leader.
If the Wehrmacht hadn’t just run out of bodies to put into the battle Germany might finally have won the war, or nearly so until more U.S. reinforcements arrived. When the armistice occurred many veterans like Hitler felt they were cheated and could have won.
The west should have fought to unconditional surrender instead of armistice in W.W.I., or have not asked for reparations from the Weimar Republic that couldn’t pay very easily, although I am confident they could have over time being industrious people. The foreign debt was a motivator for Hitler to try other kinds of economics that were Keynesian and deficit financed. The way Hitler planned to pay the war debt was likely just with the profit of winning in war with what he must have viewed as having good prospects for victory and profit.
Republicans and Democrats have supported issuing of trillions and trillions of free dollars to the rich and that seems somewhat like treason. Those quantitative easing loans at 0% put electronic deposits in big banks, and with the marginal reserve rate of 10% generally those banks could loan out 9 dollars for each dollar in their account. That means 16 trillion given between 2008–2011 amounted to 134 trillion minus the 16 trillion that needed to be repaid to the Federal Reserve. Nothing was written in the constitution about a role of government to assure that the rich are given 134 trillion now and then and the poor, nothing. Republicans in the Senate are wailing and lamenting that 430 billion for Covid relief stimulus would bankrupt the country or need to be repaid by survivors of the future.
When the Federal Reserve was started the U.S.A. was still on the gold standard. The Federal Reserve was helpful in assuring liquidity and provided some protection for depositors. When the dollar became free floating during the Nixon administration the stage was set for future unscrupulous use of Federal Reserve loans.
President Reagan and Arthur Laffer seemed to understand that the need to run a balanced budget was as important as during former times. Many viewed Reagan stimulus deficit spending as a white-washed Keynesianism and apparently that view was wrong. It was difficult to entirely revise the classical view of economics to the free floating dollar paradigm.
During the 2008–9 financial crisis their was a paradigm shift in Federal Reserve application of creating liquidity such that enabling hundreds of trillions of dollars to appear out of virtually thin air for the rich has become normative- and that policy has hidden deleterious impacts on democracy, for it reinforces the concentration of wealth and economic segregation of citizens from political power. Georgia Republicans and Mitch McConnell need to trick Georgia voters into believe they are not at fault for withholding a $2000 stimulus check in order to keep control of the U.S. Senate in the January 6 special election. Republicans either do not comprehend the vast unearned political transfer of wealth to the rich or simply are sadistic and enjoy victimizing the poor.
Big business and banks should never be regarded as ‘too big to fail’. banking and making loans is fine when the money arises from the private sector and isn’t just the result of a federal prop. It would be far better for democracy in the United States if money from the Federal Reserve that goes to assure liquidity in the private sector primarily emerged from the people of the United States in a broad base such as social security accounts.
The Federal Reserve could make zero interest loans [periodically to all social security accounts and that money could be managed en mass/concatenated and available for loans to the private sector as big banks do presently. The money multiplier of 9 to 1 would go to Americans broadly as citizens rather than to special, globalist interest. If the private sector needs special free money from the public sector it should be the public sector as actual American citizens that profit from the action as well as private sector businesses directly borrowing cash at a reasonable yet low rate of interest.. This would have numerous salutary effects.
For one thing social security would remain solvent. The U.S. Government already borrows from social security and leaves i.o.u.’s. In the future it might be possible when retiree and disabled American accounts are flourishing to forgive federal indebtedness. Loans to the private sector would be more independent from domination by corporate networks controlled by 1% of the people, and special very low loan rates could be given to students and independent small businesses. There is nothin at all remotely American about the Federal Reserve helping the rich to have more free money in a few years than the poor would earn all together in a thousand lifetimes.
Neither party really has much good sense regarding ecological economics either. When the Federal Reserves enables trillions and trillions to be dumped to the present unsustainable economic infrastructure owners that makes changing the political economy improbable. Because the rich own the broadcast media Americans can be conditioned rather easily to accept being ‘managed’ by a plutocracy. I should mention that I personally am not an optimist about meaningful positive economic reform developing.
Heidegger was interested in the phenomenal, root meanings of words. Examining language in such a subjective way might bring some to classify him as an existentialist. In that way of classification it might be said that Plato and realism was in opposition to extremist left nominalism and Heidegger was an innocent bystander. If all language is about language and classification that people make up for pragmatic reasons then it might be fair to say that things-in-themselves differ from words about them.
What can be said about reality in itself- the mass that is the steady state of mass perceptible to humans that completely defines it? Nothing I.m.o. Even structures that are man-made are founded in mass and energy that are described incompletely with word structures. In that circumstance one finds Sartre’s existential parameters congruent with Bishop Berkeley’s Three Dialog s concerning idealism. One cannot really say that the shared energy field that everyone encounters isn’t a complete production of God, or a simulation real for-itself generated by a sentient field.
