The MSM has avoided promoting the truckers in the form of free press coverage, so Andrew Callaghan has to go in with a lavalier mic yet again. I set the timestamp to begin at my favorite interview. Remember the (sometimes kinda fair) criticisms of Occupy Wall Street's scattershot messaging? This "convoy" is far, far worse. At least OWS touched on wealth disparity, privatizing gains and socializing losses via bailout, and the revolving door between big business and its supposed regulators. The forces behind the "convoy" have successfully misdirected legitimate class-warfare-based grievances into absolute nonsense. Trumpism in a nutshell. edit: I guess it's hard to argue you're part of a lower, oppressed socioeconomic class if you're bitching about high gas prices in between doing laps around DC in an 18 wheeler. I still think it's only a matter of time before a majority of these people talk each other into escalating their protestings, which probably requires ousting the current leadership. I bet a bunch of these same folks will heed future rallying calls to serve as armed poll watchers and whatever else is perceived as beneficial to Trump. But for now, a shoutout to me, to whom I also issue a "Damn boiiiiiii, you were hilariously wrong!!". So far.
My criticism of Occupy Wall Street came from George Packer. His argument was that OWS fell apart because they had no concrete demands. I've mellowed a bit - "concrete demands" aren't necessarily the responsibility of the protesting party. Obviously if you have protests, you are making some portion of your constituency unhappy. I think the problem, in a nutshell, was that OWS was screaming "BE MORE LEFTIST" while the Tea Party was screaming "BE MORE FASCIST." The Democrats looked at OWS and went "lol" while the Republicans looked at the Tea Party and went "whee!" The Yellow Vests protests didn't really have a focus either, until someone threw up a list of demands and they sorta went "yeah, that." I'm just coulda,shoulda,woulda-ing here but the reading I have done since has led me to conclude that the effective thing for the Obama administration to have done would have been to prosecute financial crimes on Wall Street. But they weren't going to do that because (A) they were super-chummy with the criminals on Wall Street (B) they were dependent on the continued cooperation of Wall Street because (C) American governance has been a beard for American corporate interests for 130 years. I used to hate economics. I used to hate the Business section. I used to despise all this talk of interest rates and shit as if it actually mattered. But fuckin' hell the 4-500 books I've read on history and economics since 2008 have left me with a pretty firm conviction that the apocryphal, anti-semitic Rothschild quote "Permit me to issue and control the money of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws" is truthy. I've come around to the idea that the basic problem we face in the United States is our wholesale rejection of Keynes and our adoption of Friedman. Keynes: Friedman: That was September 13, 1970. Everything went worse than expected. So we're at 52 years of "corporations owe you nothing" which, in a capitalist economic system, means "the government owes you nothing." That's really hard to elucidate a cogent response to. Unfortunately believers in Democracy expect the government to respond positively while believers in Money look at the Oligarchs and go "I could do that job no problem."I expect to see the State, which is in a position to calculate the marginal efficiency of capital-goods on long views and on the basis of the general social advantage, taking an ever greater responsibility for directly organising investment.
Insofar as [a business executive's] actions in accord with his "social responsibility" reduce returns to stockholders, he is spending their money. Insofar as his actions raise the price to customers, he is spending the customers' money. Insofar as his actions lower the wages of some employees, he is spending their money.
Those charts are incredible. Another thing that happened in the beginning of '72 is that Nixon visited China. That has played no small part in the relative power of the American worker. The question is now that China is getting expensive, do we begin to see a rebalance or do we just move shit to Africa? There are a lot of Africans who would love to not be in poverty, too.