Index

The Swing of the Pendulum

I read in the New York Times where Scott Minerd, the chief investment officer of Guggenheim Partners, said:

The political pendulum is swinging. The conservatives found out they’re being held hostage by the extreme right. Now the Democrats are going to find out they’re being held hostage by the extreme left.

While this sort of comment is hardly surprising coming from the economic right wing at the greed-is-good fest that is Davos, it also shows just how scared the rich are that Americans are getting wise to their tricks. The question here is not IF the fascists of the orangutan variety are going to lose and vanish, but WHEN, and how many of the rest of us are they going to kill or maim in the meantime.

When I was growing up and watching the United States start its slide into fascism with “Tricky Dick” Nixon, today’s “extreme left” was pretty much middle of the road.  Except for the very rich and a few egghead economists that should have known better, nobody bought the lunatic idea of “trickle-down” economics.

The economic engine of the US economy was the huge middle class, we knew it, and we were doing our best to keep that engine running with improved science, engineering and math education (including actually spending money on it - crazy, right?) and we were all enjoying the benefits of that revved up economy.

Taxes on the rich were higher by far than even the farthest-left would dare suggest today, and the economy ran really well that way. The people that spend money - the lower 80+% of the income brackets - were improving their lot, and their income was, in general, growing faster than inflation.

It is pretty obvious that the extremely rich have a lot to fear from a return to reasonable taxation, especially living “high on the hog” as they have been, absorbing all of the improvement that come from automation and other productivity improvements, and they want to keep it that way. It is also pretty obviously time for real people to wake up and put the idiots that bought “trickle down” and all of the other greed-is-good bullshit back into the dumpster they crawled out of.

The con artistry of the economic right wing has pretty much wrecked the United States’ economy and done a lot of damage to Europe, and the social damage that is accompanying that has given Putin and his Fascist right-wing tools opportunities that they would never have otherwise had. Putin was trained in finding and promoting social unrest in the Soviet Union days, and he has proven to be adept at applying those lessons in a world where the rich have become oligarchs and pirates, and social inequity and inequality has run rampant. Mixing in stone-age religions and their toxic mentalities from both the christian and muslim tribes has added fuel to that social fire with their inability to comprehend the more open society necessary to the current world. That stone-age mentality is what elected Trump and represents at least half of his “base.”

The rich really do have a lot to fear from the current swing of the pendulum, and they are feeling particularly helpless knowing that the real war was over decades ago, and their attempt at turning the clock back has only slowed down the inevitable flattening of the economic order, just as the social order has already flattened. Trump and his Twitter addiction have attempted to use that social flattening to bypass the intellectually competent sectors of society, and to the extent that he has succeeded, he has also discredited the media he used.

Putin and the supermarket tabloid that calls itself Fox News have done the same with other areas of social media, and those that profited from the growth of social media are feeling the wrath of the rest of us for letting them contaminate that world with their toxins. Facebook, for example, would have been able to keep their profitable privacy-invasion business model untouched for quite a bit longer if they hadn’t decided to make short-term profits from letting the unfiltered dreck and disinformation of the fascist far right in. Nobody was paying attention until it got too deep and too dangerous.

As we get closer to the 2020 election, the fascists’ social media lie machine has swung into multi-billion-dollar high gear, and the cult of the orange turd is as far from reality as ever. The real question is whether the rest of us will actually think about the stakes before we allow the fascists to completely destroy the country. We already have a constitution that is little more than a piece of paper at this point, so we either decide to revive it, or suffer the fate of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, with the resulting deaths of thousands or millions of people, and the complete and utter destruction of the United States, except possibly in name.