gfcrefugee-blog

[gfcrefugee-blog]

They’re not stupid. They were just given a choice between more of the same things that have been crushing them for thirty years and someone who fired incompetency and rewarded a job well done on TV. They’re not the brightest sparks in the engine cavity, but they knew he would do something different and that was enough. “We live in a world where literally 10% of the global population could provide super-abundance to everyone. We do not have a where-to-make-things-in-factories problem. We have a distributional problem and a political problem.” - Mark Blyth, Professor of Political Economy, Brown University.

Trumpism is more like a cult than a movement!

[gfcrefugee-blog]

We live in a world where literally 10% of the global population can provide super-abundance for everyone. We do not have a racist, sexist, homophobe, white genocide or terrorist problem. We have a distributional and political problem. The 0.1% hoover up all the new income generated in the global economy and the two parties haven’t spoken to each other in decades. They’ve only been speaking to the 0.1%. Solve that and you make those other problems disappear.

How do we save conservatism?

We need conservatism as one side of a dialogue. Without it, our political system is hopelessly lopsided. So how do we bring back conservatism from the abyss, throw away the xenophobia and racism and anti-intellectualism that now defines it?

At this point, conservatism has been taken over by Trumpism, by Breitbart and Fox News, by hatred for immigrants and hatred for liberals and hatred in general. Matthew Continetti believes that our current permutation of conservatism will die out and be replaced with something else, but what if the next permutation is worse? Do we simply wait for things to get better? How do we fix the rot?

Maybe conservatism has to root itself in intellectualism once more, shedding the lies and the nonsense that it has been spewing for decades. Yes, I said decades, as Obama’s presidency was countered by a primal nativist scream and Bush Jr’s presidency was fueled by a holy war for democracy, not to say anything of Gingrich’s House of Reps or the Moral Majority or Southern Strategy.

So let’s take conservative ideas back to basics, push away the racism and the xenophobia and the misogyny and the violence, and try to create a future where conservatism has something to offer both the political discourse and the citizens of America.

[gfcrefugee-blog]

Just What Are Our Problems?

It is not which bathroom people can or should use, though that is a problem for a tiny minority of gentle souls and a lot of aggressive ones. It is not which God people serve, though it becomes a problem if they compel it onto others. It is not the colour of a person's skin, the nature of their intimacy, the cast they were born into, nor the history of their in-group. We are all at the end of history. It is not the disappearance of factory jobs, or the tsunami of jobs that will be lost to automation that is just on our horizon, as many of these jobs are monotonous, poorly paid, and bad for your health. About a third of the jobs we do have that pay decently are essentially pointless. Our problem is not, therefore, people too lazy to work, few as there are of those. Literally, 10% of the global population could provide super-abundance for everyone right now, such is the efficiency of our productive machinery and the poor sods who toil repetitively alongside them. It is not that we have too much debt either, though it may feel like it on your household balance sheet, for central bank interest rates are still stuck near 0%, right where they were at the bottom of the collapse nine years ago. The problem it would appear is that we’re not borrowing enough. It is not even sovereign debt, though the squeaky politician's sound bite gets the nods of editorial approval, because as Japan is demonstrating, if your central bank buys back your debts, you don’t actually have any debt. And it certainly is not inflation because, as Mark Blyth points out, since the crisis, central banks have dumped 13 trillion digital US dollars, Euro, Kronar and other still sovereign first world currencies via quantitative easing and other programs into the global financial system and there's no inflation anywhere. 

Except in the stock market. That’s been growing at 15% per annum. If only we had an interest rate to bring that inflation under control. Or real estate bubbles. They've rigged the game for pain now, this 0.1%. If they don't get what they want politically, traders dump your currency and send prices soaring. This was Venezuela's sin too, though the pain has been rather differently deployed, being used only as a source of oil. Make no mistake, their suffering is just as manufactured as old blighty's.

The problem is definitely not wind farms, solar panels, and other energy harvesting technologies either. That’s the easiest choice for us to make, climate hoax or not. The 0.1% don’t like it because you can’t charge for the wind, tides and sunshine, can you? Not like the black goop from terrorist funding Gulf Oil absolute monarchies. You can charge for repairs to property from hurricanes, cyclones and other consequences from not listening to scientists though, can’t you? Our problems are three, from which all other problems unfold. They are; distributional, political, and environmental. The 0.1% block all attempts at solving the first two and are doing their level best at thwarting the third as well. They have all the growth in income, they have almost all the politicians by the short and curlies, (and those that aren’t haven’t offered a workable solution, just an outdated one), while your friendly neighbourhood oil and gas billionaires and their friends at the consolidated media mega-corporations have programmed your ideology so you never think to look where all the fuckery is taking place and put your blind allegiance in a TV actor who had his show cancelled where he portrayed a boss firing people. it’s easier to just blame the individual for their circumstances that way. No one but yourself to blame. I’m sure that’s what they told the slaves just before whipping them bloody. Easier and faster than getting the 99.9% to gang up on the 0.1% anyway. Unless they wear dresses, of course. Then it’s game on.