Life is funny
Skies are sunny
Bees make honey
Who needs money
Monopoly

History moves in cycles. Or actually like a pendulum. We will always swing back and forth in our politics and economics. Thus no bad will ever last forever, and unfortunately neither will any good.

But when the pendulum swings back, America will have good days ahead of it. We survived a Civil War that I’m certain many who lived through thought America would never recover from. We’ll survive Trump and the madness of the GOP because there’s enough of us who can see them for what they are.

And maybe we’ll get lucky and cholesterol will do its thing on the orange skidmark. I don’t think Vance will be as bad as Trump. He actually made a slip of the tongue and said something he really thinks, and not just what the knuckle draggers want to hear.

Sure, we have “laws and regulations” but the entire program of the Conservative movement and the Republican Party is the dismantling of those protections. They used to try and disguise it, now they don’t even bother.

The Great Depression was the result of laissez faire economics, but it took a healthy dose of New Deal Socialism and a war against fascism (bitterly opposed by the isolationist Right, you will recall) to finally put to rest the horrors of the Gilded Age. Those Progressive policies, by the way, have been under systematic attack from the Right ever since, and with particularly devastating effectiveness since the Reagan years. Trump is only the final flowering of that decades-long effort. He is not the cause of our present problems, he is the result of our long lasting and lovingly crafted political problem.

My family was deeply scarred by both the Depression and the War. and I was born shortly after they both ended, so I’ve been watching this unfold throughout my ‘nearly eight decade long life’. That gives me some perspective, I think. I simply saw it through a working class upbringing, not from the pollyannish filter of a bourgeois wannabee. If I have prospered during this time it is PRECISELY because I have conducted my education, career and life based on what I saw happening in the housing projects of Ybor City and the racist Right’s reaction to the movements and sentiments directed against my generation in the 1960s. Its no coincidence Civil Rights, Women’s Liberation, the Environmental Movement and the Vietnam war protests occurred at that time, and were so bitterly opposed by the Right. My college professors were working class blokes who were riflemen in the Big One and got their PHDs through the GI Bill. They taught me well and I listened carefully.

Yeah. Maybe I do have a ‘clenched fist life-long belief system’ but its because I’ve seen how the lessons learned in the Depression and the War were systematically perverted throughout my entire life by a political philosophy that capitalized and exploited the consumerist fantasies and racist proclivities of the American working class.

I do agree with you on one thing, though. America’s biggest problem is not its economic system, it is its political system. Where you and I differ is that I just don’t see any difference between the two. What I see is a temporary alliance between the commercial elite and their wage-slave victims, based on American racism and fundamentalist religious fanaticism. And as soon as the former gets what it really wants, the latter will be abandoned to their own fate.

A completely unregulated capitalist system would incentivize corruption and fraud. But of course we have a mixed economy and regulations and laws about those things. They still happen, but people are punished if caught, at least sometimes. Trump gets away with his bullshit but Bernie Madoff didn’t. Corruption also exists in a socialized system. And waste is a much bigger problem in top down socialism.

Bro, you have a life long belief system you cling to with clenched fists. You’re like a fundamentalist religionist seeking anything you can find to verify your system of belief and ignoring anything that disproves it.

Let’s get back to the origninal argument I made here. Honestly think about it: have you not heard your entire nearly 8 decade long life that America is on the brink of collapse? And still we have the richest economy and strongest military in the world. By far.

And before our time, think of the dark days of the Great Depression and WW2. For a decade and a half the world was collapsing. Do you think there were any Americans back then who had a bright vision of the future? Anyone who could have imagined the economic prosperity over the horizon?

What gives me some confidence in the future is the failure of the pessimists’ predictions time after time after time. I’ve heard arguments like yours since I was old enough to understand them. The biggest problem America faces today is not our economic system, it’s our political system. THAT is what worries me.

We have also given away a great deal of our industrial strength and capacity, by selling those capabilities and assets to potential rivals and adversaries. And why, for short-term profits.

Our long-term prosperity has been sold away for peanuts, just so a handful of oligarchs and plutocrats can amass huge fortunes.

The short-sightedness and greed of capitalism is not just the criminal activity of a few ‘bad apples’, its the inevitable consequence of a system that incentivizes corruption and waste.

Earth to ER. Can you read me? Your circuit’s dead…

Also, massive illegal immigration during the Biden Admin at the exact same time as the highest GDP growth rate in many decades. Hmmmm.

We are 100% in agreement about money in politics. It was bad for a long time, but Citizens United made it worse by orders of magnitude. I don’t see any progress made on that front during the next Admin. The only saving grace is both sides benefit politically from the money. But the super rich and big corporations own the politicians even more than ever now.

“Hell, I make no claims on how to solve this problem. But I can honestly claim I know for a fact who’s caused it.”

That comment immediately made me think of the debate where Trump was asked how he would, specifically, end the wars in Gaza and Ukraine. His response, “They never would have happened if I was president.” Saying something never would have happened is not a policy for solving a problem that currently exists now. I wish the moderators had followed up but they let him off the hook.

Of course, I picked doubling and tripling to make my point, in reality the expansions are usually just a few per cent per year, but the result is the same, just stretched out over time. More people want fewer jobs and salaries (after correcting for inflation) fall. The Law of Supply and Demand, oh my.

Meanwhile, what are all this borrowing and investment and frenzied activity getting us? Services, consumer goods, entertainment, luxuries. We sell millions of cell phones but we don’t make them here. Nothing we build here contributes to our future prosperity, they just keep us happy until a Trump comes along. When was the last time we built a steel mill? No we’re selling them to the Japanese because THEY”RE BETTER AT RUNNING THEM THAN WE ARE. We’re not building harbors or factories or spending on education or social services, its all bread and circuses. We’re selling automobile service policies and lending money to the poor at pawn shop interest rates.

And don’t tell me how much better things are now than then. I lived back then, and I know for a fact that’s not true. What little we have today has been borrowed from the future.

But having said that, I do have one suggestion. Make it illegal (or at least) as difficult as possible to keep moneyed interests from controlling the political process by campaign contributions and lobbying. With their resources they can bypass, and to a certain extent, even mold public opinion. They can even influence academia to teach an “Economics” science whose major axiom seems to be, “Leave Capital Alone, the mighty Scientific Laws of Economics will ensure they will only do the Right Thing in the end”.

Only the popular vote should determine whether a politician is elected or not. Money must be banished from the process. Other democratic countries have done it, why can’t we?

Yeah, democracy doesn’t always work. But letting the Capitalist write the rules of the game will never work. Just the usual boom, then bust. This cycle was somewhat attenuated after the New Deal, but more and more we are sliding back into a Gilded Age, a turn of the century explosion of entrepreneurial frenzy and great riches, but a sordid cesspool of poverty and misery and dark, satanic mills.

At any rate, my point was perhaps AI could offer a way out of the cycle?

“Why don’t we try something else, something that at least attempts to work for stability?”

Suggestions?