Do you remember the GameStop short squeeze? There’s a relationship between it and the offer from Elon for Twitter. The common thread is the existential threat the hoi polloi (deplorables, plebs, and the rabble) represent to the elites, and whilst Elon isn’t a commoner, he holds provincial thoughts (wrongthink) about free speech that cannot challenge officially sanctioned narratives™.
And the common man also understands with a certain deftness the old George Carlin bit about the club. Joel Kotkin says the working classes are ready to erupt but the swamp is deep and not the caged animal described by some patriots.
Category Archives: Crony Capitalism
In manifestos and the darkly allusive language of prophecy…
“Across the country, people struggling to make a living — from the propertied gentry to smallholders and labourers — were sick of a ruling class that had become a byword for venality and corruption: frittering away taxpayers’ money; incapable of dealing with the slow collapse in public order; indifferent to even the most modest proposals for reform; ineffective and disunited in every respect — except, apparently, when it came to preserving their own vested interests.”
(1) Fraudsters cash in as Dems shovel out billions and billions in COVID relief (NY Post)
“At times, the centre seemed unable to hold. Politicians urging unity and moderation watched aghast as factions tore at each other, all restraint set aside. This was a landscape littered by murders and executions enacted through fearful self-defence and hungry ambition, and justified with the merest skim of legal process. Speaking the language of populism and clamouring for reform, squabbling elites raised private armies and manipulated widespread public discontent to their own advantage, sparking insurgency and revolt against a battered political establishment. The system of hereditary monarchy itself seemed to teeter on the brink.”
(2) Pelosi Skeptical Of Need To Ban Trading Stock In Congress: It’s About ‘Trusting Our Members’ (HUFFPOST)
Quotes are from The Brothers York by Thomas Penn
Weekend 487.1
(1) Viacom/CBS, Inc. (NASDAQ:VIAC), a publicly traded company, goes full commie. Does anyone remember MomCorp from Futurama?
>>> The Star Trek Communist Hopes Star Trek Can Inspire A Real Revolution
(1a) ViacomCBS CEO Bob Bakish’s Pay Rises to $39 Million in 2020 (Hollywood Reporter)
(1b) Viacom Stock Is A Bargain Pullback Opportunity (Investing.com)
Weekend 352.0 (…which one’s Pink?)
I’ve written this before but I’m infinitely more happy NOT writing about (or following) politics. On the other hand, I’ve been roused by the gross proliferation of trough-eaters oozing and matriculating from every layer of our spent culture.
On second thought, I’m going back to sleep now. Please wake me when there’s a candidate and party that believes in (1) private property, (2) free markets, (3) the profit and loss system, and (4) limited government.
(1) Last Night’s Debate Underlines Why Congress Is a Problem for the ‘Establishment’ Republicans (NRO)
“One of the major themes of this primary season has been Republican voters angry at their own party in Congress, anger that is both more jarring and more unforgiving in a party whose top-to-bottom strength in Congress and state capitols is the best it has been since the 1920s. At the core of that anger is a sense that the Capitol Hill GOP never seems to get around to doing the things it promises the grassroots even with significant majorities in both Houses of Congress. Meanwhile, voters see Republicans on the Hill trying time and again to cut deals with Democrats to serve the interests of the donor and lobbyist classes, like saving the Export-Import Bank or repealing the medical-device tax. Why, voters want to know, does Obama keep winning? Why don’t the people we elected deliver what they promised, or at least leave some blood on the floor trying?”
(2) Donald Trump Is Shocking, Vulgar and Right: And, my dear fellow Republicans, he’s all your fault. (Politico)
“Trump is in part a reaction to the intellectual corruption of the Republican Party. That ought to be obvious to his critics, yet somehow it isn’t…If you live in an affluent ZIP code, it’s hard to see a downside to mass low-wage immigration. Your kids don’t go to public school. You don’t take the bus or use the emergency room for health care. No immigrant is competing for your job. (The day Hondurans start getting hired as green energy lobbyists is the day my neighbors become nativists.) Plus, you get cheap servants, and get to feel welcoming and virtuous while paying them less per hour than your kids make at a summer job on Nantucket. It’s all good.”
(3) Marvel President Perlmutter’s Support For Trump Draws Fire (Forbes)
Swope Redux
(1) Checkmate: The Economic Chess Masters Play a Losing Game (National Review)
“The nature of our technologically enabled present global connectedness means that for the first time in human history all economic activity happens in immediate relation to everything else. You cannot isolate the variables, which is a real problem if you believe in political management of the economy and see the policy question as nothing more than a really tough math problem.”
(2) U.S. Export-Import Bank: From Apple Pie to Endangered Species (Bloomberg)
“Though Democrats widely support Ex-Im, Barack Obama criticized it while campaigning for president in 2008, calling it “little more than a fund for corporate welfare” at a time when opposition to government spending, triggered by the bailouts that year, was growing.”
(3) Ex-Im inaction prompts GE moves (CT Post)
(4) Pelosi ‘Very Excited’ about the Republicans’ Attempt to Revive Ex-Im (National Review)
(5) A quote from Liberal Fascism by Jonah Goldberg:
“Gerald Swope, the president of GE, provides a perfect illustration of the business elite’s economic worldview. A year before FDR took office, he published his modestly titled The Swope Plan. His idea was that the government would agree to suspend antitrust laws so that industries could collude in order to adjust “production to consumption.” Industry would “no longer operate in independent units, but as a whole, according to rules laid out by a trade association…the whole supervised by some federal agency like the Federal Trade Commission.” Under Swopism, as many in and out of government called it, the state would remove the uncertainty for the big-business man so that he could “go forward decisively instead of fearsomely.”
Weekend 332.0
(1) Eminent domain on steroids? New bill threatens cities, towns (Fairfield Citizen)
(2) How Bad Religion Has Bequeathed Us ‘An Anxious Age’ (The Federalist)
Weekend 248.1 (Our Elites)
This is WHY I stopped writing about politics. The first example is local and the second is national BUT both demonstrate the “I got mine, you get yours” attitude of the New Aristocracy.
Peggy Noonan wrote an op-ed in 2005 about the elites and since its publication they [elites] have grown more brazen in their hypocrisy and naked subjugation of the “fart people”.
Did you know that while your payroll taxes are going up, the fiscal cliff deal is a bonanza for many corporations (including the movie industry)? Fair share and shared sacrifice, for the low information voter, are sensible words repeated ad nauseam by our elite to obfuscate their grab.
(1) Last-minute firefighter promotions before retirement spark pension questions (Fairfield Citizen)
(2) Current TV Sold To Al Jazeera; $500 Million Deal For Al Gore and Co. (Forbes)
Weekend 217.1 (Crony Capitalism Edition)
Crony Capitalism ALERT
Rival: City’s bike-sharing program ‘tainted’
A rival bidder is trying to put the brakes on Chicago’s plan to launch the nation’s largest bike sharing program — by claiming the path was greased for an Oregon company where Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s transportation commissioner once worked.
Josh Squire, owner of Bike Chicago, charged that Transportation Commissioner Gabe Klein “tainted the process” by failing to disclose his prior relationship with winning bidder Alta Bicycle Share.
Related
The Roots of Hardship: Despite massive amounts of aid, poor countries tend to stay poor. Maybe their institutions are the problem. (WSJ)
“Just as inclusive institutions feed on each other, so do their opposites: Extractive political institutions support the economic institutions that protect the interests of the elite against new entry from competitors. The wealth of the elite so created can make the hierarchical, authoritarian state even larger and more repressive, increasing elite wealth even more.”
A book our own elites should read.