Our favorite resident representative of an alternate political view, John Schussler, sent me an email with a link to this blog post: The Age of the Super A*sholes – Robert Reich. His request was:
This is one of those editorials where I’d love to hear how your readers react. To me it makes total sense, but I’m guessing there are plenty for whom it does not. I’d love to hear the arguments why.
Please follow the link for the entire post. Your homework is to provide comments in support or calm, reasoned disagreement with John’s belief that Reich “makes total sense.”
I will get you started with some examples:
Elon Musk has just become the world’s first trillionaire. Donald Trump is America’s first dictator. But they have more in common than their economic and political dominance.
This presumes facts not in evidence.
The evidence is that in important ways, Donald Trump is the opposite of a dictator. I’ve pointed this out to John multiple times. I’ll make it more direct this time in hopes it will sink in. No dictator has ever encouraged gun ownership for all of the “common people.” Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun and dictators are not about sharing political power. Dictators do not eliminate government regulations. They increase them. Those two items alone disqualify Donald Trump for a dictatorship.
Although after adjusting for inflation some other people may have qualified as trillionaires before Elon Musk, let us assume that part of the statement is true. But where is the “economic dominance?” It is not like he is trying to get a monopoly on the banking industry, energy production, transportation, or even communications–all huge economic sections of our country and critical infrastructure.
Trump tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election, was impeached twice, and was found criminally liable for cooking his corporate books and civilly liable for sexual abuse.
If you read the actual Trump quotes it can easily be interpreted that he just wanted the votes to be audited. If that is an attempt to “overturn the results of the 2020 election” it was legal and hundreds of Democrat candidates have successfully overturned elections. So, what is the point of this beyond emotional inflamation?
Criminally liable… Was this for the crime which the New York state legislature passed a new law tailored specifically for Donald Trump and no one else has been prosecuted for before or since? And is currently under appeal? Yeah, I thought so. Let’s see how the appeal goes before you hang your hat on that one.
Musk paid a quarter of a billion dollars to get Trump elected president, then ran Trump’s illegal and hugely destructive DOGE. Musk’s SpaceX has all the hallmarks of a gigantic Ponzi scheme in which insiders pocket the winnings and leave latecomers holding the bag.
“Paid”? He means made political donations totaling that amount, right? And your point is?
Illegal? Citation needed. Destructive? A self-defense shooting is destructive too. But it is legal and sometime even praiseworthy.
It goes on and on. It is all emotion hanging together on half-truths. People like this need to get a better grip on reality and become mature enough to get their emotions under control. There are lots of foibles Trump is guilty of without demonstrating the extent of their TDS.
It’s largely circular reasoning. Trump is bad, therefore these things that have been done by other Presidents without complaint (at least from the Left) are bad when he does them, which is then used as evidence that he is bad.
I don’t claim Trump is good, only that is sucks less than many previous Presidents, especially his two immediate predecessors, both of whom received unquestioned support for the same activities (or worse) by the same people complaining about Trump.
They do not argue in good faith. They are fully tribal – what their opponents do is bad, what they and their allies do is good, *even if it is literally the same thing*.
I do not expect you to get through to John. Ever. Facts don’t matter to him – he has all but admitted so, and he *believes the same of us*. If your point here is to get through to John, it is pointless. God himself could descend from heaven and tell John he is wrong, and it wouldn’t make a difference.
But, for the record, I’ll address a few things:
“Trump tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election” – tried to PREVENT the overturn of the 2020 election, but he failed. Georgia, for only the most obvious, was flipped from R to D on CCTV, published to the internet for all to see.
“was impeached twice” – that is an inherently and explicitly political exercise. The Democrats hate him. Duh. He was not found guilty either time, and the charges in both cases were BS. In one of them, the charges were “How dare you notice this bad thing Biden bragged publicly about doing?!?”
“was found criminally liable for cooking his corporate books” – literally (meaning “non-figuratively”), the charges he was charged with required time travel to have actually done. There’s nothing to talk about here except New York’s bias and insanity. It’s like charging anyone living today for murdering Lincoln.
“civilly liable for sexual abuse” – he was found liable for “sexual abuse”… which no one in the case accused him of. There were two witnesses. One (him) said nothing happened. The other (her) said he raped her. There was literally no evidence submitted for the charge of “sexual abuse”, but that’s magically what the jury found. That’s without getting into the ridiculous, 40-years-later-OR-SO (since she couldn’t even claim a specific year) ridiculousness of the charges… which were unbelievable on their face for several additional reasons besides that. Again, nothing to see here but the bias and insanity of New York. Oh, and she’s also the woman who said publicly that “rape can be sexy” or somesuch insanity.
Regarding “trillionaire” – that is entirely and inherently nominal. It is more an indictment of our government for devaluing our currency than anything else. Others have existed with similar levels of wealth, arguably more, but it wasn’t *nominally* in the trillions of US dollars. That’s all.
“Musk paid a quarter of a billion dollars to get Trump elected president” – until they also complain about Soros, this is pure tribalism, as I mentioned above.
“Musk’s SpaceX has all the hallmarks of a gigantic Ponzi scheme” Of course – don’t all Ponzi scheme lower the price of some important service by 95% percent and radically improve all of humanity? That’s normal, right?
Trump is a New York City New Yorker. He has no basic understanding of the 2nd Amendment, only peripherally.
As to his campaign promises not much tangible evidence as to their being kept.
Some small items but the big ones not much at all.
Mass deportations have not happened. A little eyewash but no mass deportations.
Criminally treasonous acts that are demonstrably proven have been shunted aside.
What major arrests have happened?
Valid point, but this time around he seems to have hired people who do take the 2nd Amendment seriously.
From the “be careful what you wish for” department…
One note on the “you’ll never convince John of X:” I participate in this forum because I find some of the arguments made here interesting and thought provoking. Do I immediately flip around and say “Oh geez, you’re totally right, I’m such an idiot, I’ll proceed to adopt your view immediately?” No. But it’s been interesting to spar with some of the folks here because it has evolved my understanding of how folks on the right think about things, and has increased the level of nuance with which I approach some of these issues. I realize evolution isn’t as satisfying as complete turnabout, but expecting the latter strikes me as a bit unreasonable.
Reich is, as usual, hyperbolic and a bit overdrawn in some of his characterizations, and given that Joe’s reaction was largely to the first part and not the question Reich poses tells me Reich’s rhetoric is too fluffy to have been the right vehicle for the question. But the thrust of his argument is, I think, worth engaging: Trump and Musk are self-centered egomaniacs who are obsessed with using power to achieve what’s best for them and their families, not the common good, and have done great harm to the country as a result. Thus we’re back to the same problem we had with the gilded age robber barons: the loss of empathy and transition of power to predators who exert their own will to the detriment of everyone else.
The part I find most germane:
“The question, then, is why have two such loathsome men come to dominate America and much of the rest of the world at this point in history? Is there something about American capitalism or culture in the 21st century that has given both such extraordinary power?
Part of the answer, it seems to me, is a loss of our sense of common good — a decline of the role of public honor and public shame and a disintegration of public morality — that has allowed, even encouraged, these two dangerous men to acquire such untrammeled wealth and power.
The idea of “the common good” was once widely understood and accepted in America. After all, the U.S. Constitution was designed for “We the people” seeking to “promote the general welfare” … Yet the common good is no longer a fashionable idea. …This moral breakdown is not one of personal, private, religious morality. It’s a breakdown in public morality — in a broad understanding of what we owe one another as members of the same society. Trump and Musk exemplify that breakdown. The wealth and power accumulated by these two deeply flawed men is evidence of how far we’ve fallen, and the scale of the challenge we face to rectify it. “
You can’t have the same sense of “common good” now, with a very fractured, deliberately diversified population that is barely majority white and only sort of Christian, as you had when it was 85% white and with a strongly Christian majority. There are too many incompatible tribal sub-groups playing a zero-sum game with political power and government spending. Multicultural societies can’t work. The Somali “Learing Center” fraudsters don’t see it as a problem, we are just chumps, easy marks. Their sense of “common good” extends only to “what is good for my self, my family, my tribe, and my clan.” They are not the only ethnic / racial group who thinks that.
This article, and your self, and the left in general, have what looks to us on the conservative / traditional / right side of things like a funhouse inversion of reality, like this gal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_sQ3x2Anfs
She’s soooooo close to seeing it, but has it exactly backwards. Law abiding gun owners, heritage-American whites, citizens, men are held to a much higher standard of behavior and laws are applied more rigorously and harshly than against illegals, non-whites, illegals, women. You are for accountability… unless someone you don’t like (Musk / DOGE) is holding the government accountable and auditing where the money is actually going.
WRT the article, Musk’s comment about the West’s biggest weakness is Empathy, he’s right; it has obviously been weaponized against our own civilization. “We have to DO something!!!” Well, maybe so, maybe not, but screw-ups by others do not REQUIRE us spending our tax dollars to mitigate that harm; it certainly doesn’t require us to throw out borders open to every Akmed, M’butu, and 孩子 that gets across the Rio Grande. Recall that the Good Samaritan put the Jew up in an inn, he didn’t take him home, and he spent his own money voluntarily, not tax money extracted by force from his family.
The amount of propaganda and gaslighting to make a person hate her own people and culture and history, and so blind to injustice against them in their own country, to be completely deracinated, is both impressive and sad.
“but has it exactly backwards”
Interesting video, but I don’t think she has it backwards so much as just isn’t seeing that it’s not binary. You only have one normative state as a function of law, but you can have many prerogative states, corresponding to cultural centers of power. We have at least two: the one she discusses, where if you’re not white you’re subject to the whims of ICE who are now operating well outside the law (try and inspect one of their “detention centers.” Go ahead, try. Not even congressional representatives can get in.), and then we have another, governed by the woke gatekeepers who decide what kind of speech (as an example) is allowed on college campuses, or in many cases even in newspapers. (In Seattle the Times has been overrun by former staff from The Stranger (hard core lefty mag) and have made it nearly impossible to get real information about anything that contradicts leftist talking points. Oddly the editorial board is still centrist and occasionally says sensible things, but they appear to be an island.)
As for accountability, DOGE did nothing for holding the government accountable. They dissolved a bunch of agencies Musk and Trump didn’t like and that’s about it. If the government were being held accountable, let’s say for massive misuse of public funds, Congress would have cut off funding for Trump’s adventure in Iran. But since Congress is now a spineless toady for whatever Trump says, we get to live through the greatest military defeat for the U.S. since Vietnam.
“The amount of propaganda and gaslighting to make a person hate her own people and culture and history, and so blind to injustice against them in their own country, to be completely deracinated…”
Well, from my side of the window, it’s not that traditional liberals (as distinguished from far left “liberals” in quotes) hate western culture, they just have lots of critiques of what it’s done that haven’t been accounted for in the past. I was never taught about the Tulsa race massacre in school, didn’t even hear about it until a couple years ago. And remarkably I *lived* through the 1985 MOVE bombing, but somehow it wasn’t a dominant story getting talked about in the news and then in school and I didn’t know about that either (and I was fairly up on the news growing up). And apparently they made a purse out of Nat Turner’s skin, which is way far fucked up, but nobody seemed particularly inclined in my civics classes to point that out. We got the happy path version of history with the minimum number of critiques, e.g. slavery. I think that demand for historical accountability on the part of the left isn’t all that unreasonable, and doesn’t constitute “hate” so much as it constitutes wanting a fully accurate historical record.
“try and inspect one of their “detention centers.” Go ahead, try. Not even congressional representatives can get in”
They can, and they have. Schedule it. Show up. Don’t abuse the employees. Have your inspection. It’s not hard.
Even scheduling it is only a recommendation, not required. Not abusing the employees, now, that’s not optional. Well, unless you intentionally want to make a national story out of it or are just a freaking power-obsessed lunatic who can’t have basic human politeness.
” they just have lots of critiques of what it’s done that haven’t been accounted for in the past.”
And in practice, what “accounting for it” turns into is “America bad”, while ignoring plenty of other things that is also bad (such as what else was going on the world at the same time for comparison), but these same “liberals” leave out.
Like the Weather Underground bombings and the other lefty bombings of their era. Literally more than one bombing a day for several years by the loony left, but hey, THAT’s OK to go on the cutting room floor. No problems there.
And even the stuff that should be covered get skewed just as horribly if not worse in the other direction. Example: lynchings. Even at the very height of racial lynchings, they weren’t all black people, and both before and after that height, it was not remotely all black people. But that’s not what is taught, because making whitey out to be the bad guy is required. Where’s the complaint about that?
“fully accurate historical record”
Don’t make me laugh. It’s AT LEAST as selective, if not quite a bit more so, just in a different direction.
And that is really quite required, because a ” fully accurate historical record” would show how horrible the Democratic Party (the party of slavery, Jim Crow, and the KKK) has been on race all along, right up to this day. Can’t have that.
“Trump and Musk are self-centered egomaniacs who are obsessed with using power to achieve what’s best for them and their families, not the common good, and have done great harm to the country as a result.”
Two points:
1) Where was this complaint with Biden, a MUCH better example of the phenomenon?
2) Where is the evidence WRT Musk? He has done GREAT things for humanity, and was lauded by the left repeatedly… right up until he committed BadThink by associating with their political enemies.
I think the evidence for Trump isn’t all that great, either, in terms of the “just cares about his family” part, but I’m not really willing to defend the guy on it. He’s certainly a massive egotist, that I can definitely agree on… but again, so was Obama, AT LEAST as big.
“a decline of the role of public honor and public shame and a disintegration of public morality”
That is just utterly ridiculous to put anywhere but on the Democrats specifically and the Left more generally. JFK screwing everything female with pulse? Bull Clinton getting BJs in the oval office? Harry “It worked didn’t it” Reid? The utter lack of shame from the Left is on constant display.
Ah, but now that the Right is finally fighting back with less regard for that, accepting a leader that doesn’t care as much about shame, oh NOW it’s a problem? What BS.
As usual, it’s just the same tribalism I mentioned above – fine with the left does it, even a LOT of it, but bad when their opponents do even the slightest bit.
And the utter *assumption* that they are bad, begging the question from the beginning, gets really tiresome. I should be used to it, after a lifetime of it from the political left, but I’m not.
Well, we have so many reprehensible men in government because good men cannot endure the character assassination that comes from the level IV “colonoscopy” of an investigation that the candidates must endure, back to and including the toy car he stole in Kindergarten and never publicly repudiated. To run now, you have to have the machine behind you to suppress such mickey mouse pecadillos.
As Deoxy points out, the Democrats are not arguing in good faith.
This is because they know that they are the evil side. If you doubt this, consider the way they called for Sarah Palin to be raped because she didn’t abort her baby. Or consider the fact that Hillary Clinton put obscene decorations and drug paraphernalia on the White House Christmas tree. Granted, blasphemy can be funny at times, but this was not one of those times. This isn’t Life of Brian, it’s more like Piss Christ.
Republicans take their children Christmas shopping. Democrats get lap dances for the children they haven’t aborted from trannies.
The difference is not one of beliefs. It’s one of moral character.
And no, it is not just the Obamas and Clintons who are horrible people. It goes all the way down. Hillary wants to take your guns so you won’t be able to resist the Pakistani rape gangs when they get here; her supporters want someone with more courage than them to kill you and take your guns because, hyuk hyuk, you have a small dick.
“To describe both as selfish narcissists would be a wild understatement. Both are maniacally obsessed with increasing their own personal wealth, power, and control.”
This is wrong. It is true of Trump, but Musk actually has a vision for the world, or should I saw for multiple worlds.
“Both have been willing to break laws, norms, and other social constraints in pursuit of these goals. Both have manipulated, bribed, conned, robbed, and bullied their ways to dominance.”
Yes. In some cases, those laws, norms and other social constraints need to be broken and removed. For the other cases, well, the lawyers will hash those out.
Are they both assholes, whom I would not invite to dinner? Yes, though I might give Musk a chance at it.
Trump is a horrible man, and should be removed from office.
Musk is a great man. Reich is old enough to know that being great does not mean being nice or “good”.
Kurt
They are not *arguing* that Trump and Musk are bad – they are *assuming* it, then arguing from there.
Good luck getting them to even acknowledge that.
Also, I would argue that Trump is “scummy like a really gross used car salesman – throwing morality and ethics out the window but toeing the line, legally (or at least, really, really close)”… which, on the politician scale, is actually quite good. Witness how ridiculously far they had to dig to get anything even vaguely plausible that they could go after even for, *legally* speaking.
He also seems to actually love this country. Probably not as much as he loves himself, but quite a bit. That doesn’t make everything fine, and it doesn’t make all his decisions good or selfless or anything… but it’s nice, and I think it helps some.
The Democrats were fine with Trump when he was just a NYC developer and reality TV star. He became Evil Incarnate when he came down the escalator and eventually prevented Queen Hillary from going back to the White House.
If he had been reelected we would have had 1st term Trump and the same swamp creatures around him.
Harass the man for 4 years and now we have DOGE, Vance, Hedgseth, Kennedy, and all the others who take no prisoners.
Same with Musk, he was the Left’s darling until he started running DOGE and breaking all their iron ricebowls.
You pay too much attention to him.
In an unrelated matter, I am sitting in a government building using the wifi and there is a woman OCing. Completely illegal and no one cares.
“OCing”
Overclocking? That isn’t illegal, so far as I know… but also, you wouldn’t be able to see that, so clearly you mean something else.
A little help?
Open Carrying.
Reich is an utter moron. He rails against corporations not paying their ‘fair share’ of taxes. Very principled. Except, Bobby most recently worked a really sweet gig at UC- Berkeley where he received full pay and benefits for teaching ONE class. If he’s that good of a teacher shouldn’t he make as much, or more, than other teachers? Musk is quite handsomely rewarded for his work-same as Bobby. There is that pesky fact that his employer(UC-System)doesn’t pay taxes.
Trump was found civilly liable for raping a moonbat who, to be fair, pinned down the day of the Rape as ‘between the Fall of 1995 and the Spring of 1996’. She also admitted to felony possession of an unregistered firearm while on the stand. NYC graciously allowed her to choose the time and place to surrender this weapon without any kind of accountability.
And then there’s the Famous ‘Election Interference’ case brought by Fani Willis of Fulton County.. Willis appointed a special prosecutor against Trump who she was having a sexual affair with. Why that bitch isn’t rotting in prison-we know why.
As for falsely claiming the 2020 election was rigged- we all saw how a pudding head moron, who stayed in his basement during the campaign, garnered the most votes ever in Presidential Election. Are you kidding me. Thankfully the media and the Swamp covered for him and the election was stolen. The government’s participation was very clear. The media is worse-they are our supposed shield against government excess.
Bobby is nothing more than a useful idiot. His whole life has been slopping at the public trough-courtesy of his good friends in high places. Yes, he has a long history with the Clinton’s. I’m certain he would have been allowed entrance to Epstein’s island but, the ‘You must be this tall to participate in this ride’ disqualifies the poor boy.
Reich is a member of the ruling class. A useful idiot, shitbag who likes to lecture those less fortunate than he. It seems to make him feel worthy.
No, not an idiot. That assumes good faith and that he doesn’t know any better. But an idiot would randomly be right from time to time.
Wicked or controlled / foreign agent who knows full well he lying is much more likely to be as consistently wrong and divisive, with such coherent and targeted rhetoric.
Reich s claims that Trump is a Fascist and a tyrant mean so much when the DNC installed a weak, moronic, candidate as a Presidential candidate with no input of the people.
Is that about right? ‘Cause, if it’s not the facts, then maybe you can educate me.
Reich is an opportunistic toadle and nothing more. Folllowing and giving credence to him speaks volumes
The ad hominems here on Reich are unfortunate. You may not like what he has to say, and it may be rhetorically overdrawn, but his basic point about the loss of empathy and rise of monsters deserves honest engagement.
Oliver Kornetzke recently wrote a post that I think nicely encapsulates much of why I think it’s worth folks directly engaging with “the other side,” because really unless you’re in the billionaire class, “the other side” isn’t the left or the right:
“I’m sick of watching people get split apart over shit that doesn’t actually conflict.
You’re Catholic? Great, stay Catholic. You think God’s fake, fine, think that. You’re the most flag-waving dude on your block, or you wear eyeliner and paint your nails, doesn’t fucking matter to me, be that. You want low taxes and a strong military, and you also think your neighbor shouldn’t go broke because he got sick? You can hold both of those at the same time. There is no law or rule that says you can’t. Somebody else just wants you arguing about bathrooms and pronouns instead of asking why your paycheck doesn’t cover rent and groceries anymore.
I’m not telling you to soften who you are. Keep all your opinions, even the ones I’d call stupid to your face. Keep your pride, your faith, your flag, your “I built this with my own hands.” Keep your identity. Keep all of it. That’s not what’s on the table.
What’s on the table is a kid who died because his mom couldn’t afford the copay. A guy working 60 hours who’s still one missed paycheck from his car being his house. Towns where the water’s still poisoned and everybody knows it and nobody fixes it. None of your beliefs, none of them, actually require you to shrug at that. You just got told they did, somewhere along the way, by people who needed you distracted so they could steal more from you and get away with it.
None of this means you have to like the people you’d be standing next to either. Some of them are going to say shit that offends you or pisses you off. Somebody in this fight voted for the guy you can’t fucking stand. Somebody prays to something you think is a joke. Somebody lives in a way you don’t understand and maybe never will. I’m not asking you to like them. I’m asking you to notice who’s actually been stealing from both of you this whole fucking time while you were busy hating each other over flags and pronouns and all the other divisions being drawn among us working people.
The guy at the top with more money than a small country doesn’t give a single solitary fuck if you’re gay or straight, black or white, churchgoing or not, red hat or black nails. To him you’re both the same thing: a line that works. A line that buys stuff. A line that gets sick, gets buried, gets replaced, and doesn’t need to be thought about past that.
So fucking pick one:
Stand next to people who get under your skin, keep every bit of who you are while you do it, and actually fight for something that makes life better for you and everyone else.
Or keep going at each other while the guys robbing you both watch and don’t even bother hiding it anymore.
One of those gets us somewhere. The other one’s just what we’ve already got, and getting worse.
The only thing preventing you from having a better life is the false belief that you have more in common with the billionaire class than your next-door neighbor. You don’t. You are all disposable units of income for the billionaire class.”
So, I read all of that, and here’s the summary:
The things you are care about aren’t important. I will magnanimously let you have any opinion on any of that irrelevant minutia. What’s actually important is you agreeing with me to blame “the rich”* for all the problems in the world.
Yeah, because THAT has worked out SO VERY WELL anywhere in the world it has gotten traction.
Is this some secret pro-trans agenda to make everything think they are actually teenage girls because of how hard they are rolling their eyes, or something?
* Which of course conveniently doesn’t include some incredibly wealthy people because they make the right mouth noises and support the correct politicians (and are probably funding the writer in question or people he wants to impress) despite them doing all the same stuff (and often worse) that is supposedly the “real” problem as the other rich people.
Oh, and I almost forgot to touch on this:
“his basic point about the loss of empathy and rise of monsters deserves honest engagement.”
Only if he was honestly engaging, **which is not**, an mentioned by several different people above.
Close. Not “the rich,” but specifically billionaires (and now trillionaires). Because the consolidation of power that kind of wealth concentration creates is inimical to any real performance of democracy or freedom.
I mean, if you think massive concentrations of power are a good thing, we’re just fundamentally on different sides and will most certainly not agree on much else. I’m not a big L libertarian, but I’m definitely a small l one (gotta keep that LaRouche stink off me), so I think concentrated power in any form is to be resisted. Which is what Kornetzke talks about on a regular basis (not so much in that particular post, but in others…you should definitely follow him, he’s quite articulate) .
For example, I think the buildout of AI datacenters is coming at a massive social cost without any corresponding accountability: economically (it’s a bubble that’s gonna pop when somebody starts demanding real revenue), socially (who’s gonna pay for all these AI tokens when the bots have put everybody except plumbers out of work?), politically (citizens are protesting the buildouts, but politicians are green lighting them anyway because the oligarchs line their pockets), environmentally (I still don’t understand their water consumption…why isn’t their cooling system a closed loop?), culturally (used to be we just had the software ‘bots to yell about, now those bots are creating AI slop content that you can’t distinguish from human created, thereby removing trust in any form of communication), and so on. Did The People ask for these things? Nope. Are The People complaining about them and trying to keep them from popping up? Yes. So who’s driving it? Billionaires who could give a rat’s ass about anything but their own vision of the future, one in which the masses are not much more than an over-population of monkeys that will have to go through a massive die-off for the human population to make sense once Skynet is fully on line. You don’t have to read much from Peter Thiel or Elon Musk or Mark Andreesen for that to be clear.
So I fully agree with Kornetzke: it’s well past time for the mass of people to put down their culture war spears and spend some time focusing on the folks who are creating the problems in the first place.
“Close. Not “the rich,” but specifically billionaires (and now trillionaires).”
Fiddling with the exact definition of “the rich” doesn’t change anything (nor does it stay only that portion of “the rich” once the laws are passed). It’s also still highly selective in who gets included – Soros is only the most obvious example.
“I mean, if you think massive concentrations of power are a good thing, we’re just fundamentally on different sides and will most certainly not agree on much else.”
The problem is that you and the Left only recognizes “concentration of power” selectively. The solutions given for “the rich” problem are all GREATER concentrations of power, just with a different group – the government. The track record on that is really bad – if we’re going to get bad results (and we may), can we at least try something new instead of “give the power to the government”? I’ve seen that movie and hundreds of remakes.
And yes, you’re meaning the government. I asked you about this is a previous thread, seeking a non-government solution. I asked repeatedly. Your solution was government.
“Which is what Kornetzke talks about on a regular basis (not so much in that particular post, but in others…you should definitely follow him, he’s quite articulate”
If what you posted from him is representative, no thanks. I don’t need more BS in my life, “articulate” or not.
“I’m not a big L libertarian, but I’m definitely a small l one (gotta keep that LaRouche stink off me), so I think concentrated power in any form is to be resisted.)”
Hey, we agree! Nice to find those.
Except… what solution to the “billionaire and trillionaire” problem do you have that is consistent with that? That doesn’t, in fact, *directly contradict* that?
“Are The People complaining about them and trying to keep them from popping up? Yes.”
Not in any significance.. Go look into who is funding that astroturf.
And again, your verbiage in that entire paragraph is a fairly direct contradiction of your supposed libertarian leanings. People can build stuff on their own land with their own money. That a pretty foundational libertarian concept.
>> “The ad hominems here on Reich are unfortunate.”
When ad homs are half the content (and the TITLE) of Reich’s writing here, it is quite RICH to complain about anyone using them in return!
Ignoring for the moment the particular individuals who are supposed to be the “economic dictator” and “political dictator”, notice that sick creature Reich is doing what he always does: he is deliberately EQUIVOCATING between a handshake and a fist to the face – treating them as if they are the SAME. In other words, to use a different form of human intercourse, Reich is treating Sex and Rape as if they are both the SAME. In fact, Reich treats Sex as WORSE than rape, because sex is “maniacally obsessed” with one’s “own personal” happiness and “control” over one’s OWN body and OWN effort.
THAT, for Reich is the DEFINITION of EVIL.
The individual who REFUSES to BE raped (for the ‘good’ of the rapists who otherwise would be denied the SEX their victims are ‘hoarding’) is Reich’s DEFINITION of a ‘selfish narcissist’ aka an “asshole”.
For Reich, the person devoted to CONSENSUAL sex ONLY – and who REFUSES to have sex with anyone she doesn’t WISH to have sex with – is an IMMORAL person because she lacks EMPATHY for those who desire HER. After all, who is SHE to place HER desires over THEIR desires?! Who is SHE to deny OTHERS what should PROPERLY be THEIRS?! She should NOT be SELFISH! She should learn to SHARE herself with everyone, ESPECIALLY with those who can NOT benefit her in any way (sexually). Because, for Reich, sex is NOT a “transaction” between people – ie for Reich, there is NO exchange of values between sexual participants. And there is ESPECIALLY no respecting the partner AS a value TO you.
Demanding the sexual participant to be someone the woman VALUES? That the partner be WORTHY of her, rather than someone she PITIES or DESPISES? For Reich, that is the epitome of what makes CONSENSUAL human interaction EVIL (aka what makes “American capitalism” EVIL). Such a woman has NO “sense of common good”. She is ONLY out for her OWN happiness and doesn’t give a DAMN about those she HURTS when she denies them sex with her. She has NO honor BECAUSE she doesn’t give a DAMN about the “public” good. She has NO shame BECAUSE she is HAPPY to deny the “public” HER ‘goods’. For Reich, her “untrammeled” power over her OWN life and her OWN effort (aka over her values) is the “disintegration of public morality”. Her refusal to be a WHORE – to serve “We the people” in order to “promote the general welfare” – is what is destroying the Collective. For Reich, SHE is a “selfish jerk seeking as much happiness as possible”.
Like all the OTHER bastards Reich rails against, when it comes to sex, this woman too says those EVIL words: “The public be damned”. Because of this “me, me, me” attitude, Reich fantasizes about the “public” – outraged by her ABUSE of her power over her body – rising up to demand she be FORCED to have sex for “the common good.”
As with the Depression, WW2, the Civil Rights era, and the Anti-Vietnam movement, Reich WISHES there was a contemporary movement where everyone comes together in brave UNITY to FORCE this woman to be a WHORE – to SEX TRAFFIC her. And Reich BEMOANS the fact that such a movement DOESN’T exist – a failure Reich blames on the fact that “the common good” is “no longer a fashionable idea”. That treating a woman as a WHORE “feels slightly corny and antiquated if not irrelevant.” That there is no longer any restraint on aggressive women relegating their pleasure-giving abilities to THEMSELVES.
In fact, Reich is OUTRAGED that women as a whole have been able to DENY any and all comers as they see fit – ie he is DISGUSTED with the fact that women have been able to accumulate so much “POWER” over their own lives effort that they are now DICTATORS.
For Reich, the fact that women are SO self-righteously SELFISH with their bodies and their effort is a moral breakdown, not of personal, private, or religious morality. It is a breakdown in PUBLIC morality. It is their VILE REJECTION of the NOBLE idea that a woman OWES sex to others BECAUSE they are all members of the same society.
That women today are so DEEPLY FLAWED that they don’t even RECOGNIZE their DUTY to others is – for Reich – evidence of how far “we” have fallen, and the scale of the challenge “we” face to rectify the problem (ie to bring women to HEEL again in the name of the “common good”).
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THAT is the GROTESQUERIE that is Robert Reich.