No. of Recommendations: 19
I think the swirling around the drain has progressed beyond where it will be stopped:
• My vote doesn’t matter (because of gerrymandering, and for national elections, the Electoral College); my donations don’t matter (because of Citizens United, 2010). No politician above the rank of city council has any real interest in what I have to say, and risks his position if he does (because the national parties each have a tight grip on the throat of every county and state official, courtesy of our current media and campaign financing infrastructures.)
Disempower productive citizens to this extent and before you know it they’re throwing tea in the harbor.
• The fascists have already seized the radio and TV stations (nowadays called social media e.g. X and Facebook, and Fox news.) Additionally, social media are insulated from legal consequences for any lies they choose to publish (although at least for the moment, Fox/WSJ are not.)
• There are nontrivial, strongly armed militias ready to go at a word, including the bulk of the recently released J6ers. The contemptible, un-American, jaw-dropping blanket pardons they received will be a powerful recruiting tool attracting still more aggrieved young men. The angsty sixteen-year-old high school juniors of January 6 are now angry, alienated 20-year-old men.
• The keys to the Treasury have been seized as of late last week. The Congress has abrogated the power of the purse, and safeguards against corruption and outright looting of the Treasury have been gutted. In two weeks!
• The national police and prosecutors are actively, openly, and aggressively being purged of non-loyalists.
• The fascists have seized previously-secure national databases with social security numbers, birthdates, tax records, correspondence – enough to quietly neutralize any person or group they deem to be a threat, well before involving any formal security system or court.
• The President is virtually unimpeachable given the 2024 SCOTUS decisions. Not that this really matters, as by no stretch would the current Senate be willing to stand up and do their self-evident sworn duty.
While the current POTUS is probably unable even to play checkers, this go-round he has people around him who play chess. And, current POTUS has publicly mused his itching to deploy the Insurrection Act.
It’s not a stretch to postulate that the current shock and awe is not only to flood the zone (checkers) but in fact to actually provoke the Bostons, Seattles, Research Triangles, or even the whole state of California to say, enough. But, well before any of these places would have a chance to organize a full Galt’s Gulch-style see ya, we will see our Commander-In-Chief unilaterally and legally invoke his Insurrection Act dream. Once that happens, there will instantly be lawful-order-obeying US military in public places as well as a more irregular J6-era trigger-happy militia in the less-public ones. For the bulk of Fox-watching working Americans – meaning most of our fellow citizens – the news coming out of those zones will be only what the fascists want us to see. That would be the chess move.
And, when things go badly, his playbook holds only disruption, inflammation, vengeance, and cruelty. He will thus be forced to double down on those, as he knows nothing else.
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Speaking of vengeance and cruelty: it's quite clear that the current POTUS is unable to see beyond these, plus sycophancy and of course narcissism. Additionally, he has a well-deserved reputation of, Everything he touches, dies.
That leads to what is actually my biggest concern: the financial system.
The short version: a stable fiat currency is utterly necessary for the world we live in. The US dollar has been the default (reserve) currency for the lifetime of virtually everyone living today, so it – like the ecosphere – are taken for granted.
Historically, a given fiat currently is stable until it’s not – that moment being when it loses trust as a permanent store of value. Exactly when that shift happens is, I think, most akin to Hemingway’s description of going bankrupt: gradually, then suddenly.
I think it much more likely than not that the looting of the Treasury, the profligate spending by a POTUS who has never known anything else, and the (still nearly unbelievable) potential legitimization of cryptocurrency by making it an acceptable US medium of exchange, will together lead to a quickly accelerating dollar slide – if not outright crisis – in the next few years.
One form this could take – a heavy blow, but survivable – would be for the dollar to be replaced by the euro and/or the renminbi (possibly both, with dueling spheres sharing the hegemony) as the world’s reserve currency.
This would be nontrivial: the US and its corporations and its private citizens would then be required to settle up international obligations using a currency more stable than the one we squandered away, at whatever exchange rate the rest of the world set for us. Hopefully forestalling this is that we have an unearned tailwind insofar as both of these contender currencies have real problems of their own.
The more ominous possibility is that the credibility of the USD becomes so far strained – after it has been forced to undertake a clearly impossible load of obligations – that the dollar collapses without leaving an obvious heir.
In that event, who knows? Certainly nothing good. My amateur guess: runaway inflation is the most benign result, with other scenarios (unrecoverable supply chains for most consumer goods, barter, food riots, international saber-rattling progressing beyond threats) being not so far-fetched as they now seem.
The unknowns are: how much violence? And, how much of it will be internal versus external? And, with the perpetrator knowing only disruption and cruelty: what possible end game could there be?
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It’s not quite all black. Three (well, two and a half) bulwarks are as yet untouched.
First, private property continues inviolate. That is such a fundamentally obvious cornerstone of our economy that I have a hard time visualizing any group of hard-liners gathering enough support to launch a successful assault on this via creeping nationalizations.
The second is the vested interest in the oligarchy hanging on to what they have. There is a wide swath of intelligent, informed Americans across the country with net worths in the eight, nine, ten figures who have no interest in seeing themselves or their societal place swept away…and they are entirely vested in a healthy dollar. If any group could successfully put their foot down and say, enough – it will be them.
The third bulwark is a professional military, whose allegiance is explicitly to the Constitution. Led by an ethical career professional officer corps (I’m thinking of Mark Milley, Jim Mattis, Michael Mullen, Alexander Vindman), we should be fine.
The problem here is that the core of Greatest Generation senior politicians we recently had – names like Daniel Inouye, Bob Dole, the McCain family, even JFK and George HW Bush, all of whom had an earned, honest-to-God, visceral appreciation of what the world would be without the current world order – are all gone.
More to the point, we have a military that in the last decade somehow allowed Michael Flynn to rise to the rank of three-star general. So, I’m not going to give the military an automatic pass on holding with the Constitution when POTUS orders otherwise.
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So, to return to my thesis that the swirling around the drain is now unstoppable: if I’m right, I’d just as soon get it out of the way sooner than later.
In part my rush is to save our current children the horror of confronting another crisis they had no hand in making (climate issues are going to be bad enough). We broke it (or, we allowed it to break under our watch); we need to buy it.
Another part is, by the time we turn around twice, there will be no one under the age of fifty who remembers How It Used To Be. Then, it really will be too late to reclaim what we had.
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While I’m venting, one final point:
It would be shortsighted to blame this all on one political tribe. For one thing, an honest thought experiment imagining a world where the fascist had emerged from the other tribe would only yield the same result. There is no good reason to assume (or even suspect) that there is more moral courage on the other side of the aisle. The system’s imperatives stain both sides equally, and the moral cowards – like the scum in the first simmering of a soup – have risen to the top.
Compounding this is the stubbornly arrogant cluelessness of the out-of-power party. Extending the analogy: there are several stones of truth in the vile stew we’ve allowed into our kitchen, and one of the biggest and hardest tooth-breakers is that too many people were told for too long that there were no problems when they clearly could see them, and that there were actually serious other problems…that the majority of middle Americans had a hard time seeing.
The Clinton, Obama, Biden gerontocracy now find themselves obliged to come up with a message that’s actually relevant and true, but so far: crickets. I’m not looking for help here, at least not soon.
-- sutton
looking out the window at my collapsed greenhouse, shattered by Monday's storm.
It was decades old, and a contractor friend agreed with me in January that while the exterior skin needed replacing, the framing still looked perfectly solid.
Instead, I'm suddenly stuck with salvaging what I can...probably the rototiller but not much else, I think.
No. of Recommendations: 12
Well said. Probably a little to dramatic, but also not out of the realm of possibilities and surprisingly close to what I have been thinking about the past few weeks.
I am very interested in seeing how the Supreme Court is going to rule on a couple of cases:
1. Birthright citizenship. As Albaby so eloquently described in a thread from a few days ago when he was trying to teach a pig to sing, I mean educate Dope on the law, the Constitution and the law are very crystal clear on this subject. It should be one of the most slam dunk cases ever to hit the Supreme Court. The case isn't just about precedent (which this SC has shown it will eagerly overturn), the words of the Amendment clearly say what they say and are almost impossible to interpret legally any other way.
In any even slightly sane world, the SC would rule 9 - 0 against Trump's executive orders. In fact, in any slightly sane world, the SC probably doesn't even take the case and lets the lower courts decision to shut this down stand. If anything, the only reason the SC should take the case is to reinforce the Constitution. That said, we are not in an even slightly sane legal world. This SC has regularly ignored words or facts it finds inconvenient. However, I think even if this SC takes up the case I am fairly sure Trump loses handily. It wouldn't surprise me, if Thomas or Alito supported Trump, but I think even for them it would be a bridge too far. I would bet 9-0 but expect at least 7-2.
2. The power of the purse. There are quite a few cases that will be making their way to the SC concerning how Trump has taken the power of the purse away from congress for himself. I will be genuinely curious to see how the SC rules on these. Now it is clear to most that Trump's actions are unconstitutional. He doesn't have the power to close a congressionally mandated USAID, or a Department of Education, or what not. He doesn't have the power to spend funds (his September buyouts of federal employees) that haven't been appropriated by congress yet (current congressionally approved spending only goes through March). Now even though this should be another slam dunk ruling, there is a lot more wiggle room and places for the SC to make up law where it doesn't exist. I wouldn't be surprised to see some justices support Musk/Trumps actions where they shouldn't by any sane reading of the constitution, especially in some of the murkier cases. Overall though, I still have to think that the SC will rule against Trump in all of this. This Court has been spending the past two decades trying to weaken the Presidency versus congress on things like spending and regulation. For some or the conservatives, continuing that would mean more to them than backing Trump. Furthermore, they would have to be concerned about keeping the balance between the three branches of government intact, because if they let the Executive branch usurp the constitutional powers of the legislative branch, the judicial branch would then soon follow. Even they would know this.
That said, I would have never imagined in a million years that legislators like McConnell, Graham, Thune, Scott, etc. would willingly give up the power of the purse to the executive branch so easily, yet here we are. Tim Scott was asked the other day about Trump usurping the power of the purse from the legislature and his answer should make jaws drop. I don't have his exact words, but it was to the effect of 'This is a newer different way of doing things'. He quickly realized how horrible and weak that answer was so he tried to walk it back by then saying that if the president really did try to usurp the power of the purse from the Legislature, he would be one of the first to stand up against it. However the President has done so and he still hasn't spoke up against it, in fact his initial answer was to support it.
Point is, if the legislature is so willing to give away their powers so easily, why would the judicial branch be so different? So the Supreme Court can still meekly surrender to Trump. The legislature already has.
Then there is a final point to be made. Let's say the SC does find some sanity and rules against Trump in all of these cases. What if Trump doesn't care what the SC says and continues to do whatever it was he was doing? It is clear the legislature is not going to hold him accountable. The Supreme Court doesn't actually have any power or means to enforce their decisions. The SC could rule Trump cannot close the Dept. of Education without congressional approval and must spend the money on whatever congress deemed it be spent on. Trump then ignores the ruling and continues on firing DoE employees and not following the law. Congress clearly doesn't have the backbone to hold him accountable and the SC doesn't have the means.
