These are some of the latest and greatest articles that I have meant to send to you.
- Mother Jones ran a fantastic article a few months ago explaining how the American oligarchy has succeeded in its war against the middle class. Key to their strategy was the the destruction unions in the United States through Ronald Reagan’s attack on the working class. These fascinating charts show how the bottom 80% of Americans have had a net loss of income over the last thirty years that has been transferred to the top 10%. Most of that went to the top 1%. That means that every year $743 billion is lost from 80% of Americans and $673 billion of it goes to the top 1%. Inequality has also slowed economic growth as money circulates through fewer and fewer hands. A must read.
- TIME ran an interesting article on a number of myths about the recession and the “recovery.” They end concluding that the solution for America’s jobs crisis is German style industrial policy. Not everyone should go to college, and it is important for the economy to produce middle and lower tier jobs that rely on skilled labor developed through technical or community colleges. That also relies on re-emphasizing industry over services, something the United States has refused to do. Besides Obama’s bailout of the automobile companies, he has made no significant efforts to support heavy industry in the United States.
- Is India developing into an oligarchy? – Raghuram Rajan warns that India’s development is very unequal and could potentially turn into oligarchic capitalism like Russia or many Latin American countries. Economic development would proceed up to a point and then fall into a middle income trap whereby any further development of the country would depend on breaking the power of large, powerful, and well-connected industrial families. India is not there yet, but if the connections between businessmen and politicians grow even more then the country will come to resemble Mexico and not South Korea. Given that Rajan warned that financial deregulation was making the world economy more unstable long before the financial crisis, he is worth listening to.
- Are vaccines a CIA plot? – a common complaint heard in the Muslim world is that vaccine drives are really a conspiracy against poor people by the United States. Polio drives in India fail often in Muslim neighborhoods where this belief is common. Unfortunately, The Guardian, reveals that the CIA really did run a fake vaccine drive in Pakistan to “find” Osama bin Laden. Naturally, Doctors without Borders is not amused. This can undermine public health everywhere!
Notes on Election 2016
14 NovIt all went the way it was supposed to right?
While Princeton professors have to eat insects on TV because they predicted the predictable wrongly, luckily the Bhatany Report did not make any official forecasts for the presidential election. Donald J. Trump, America’s Mogul, in alliance with Rudy Giuliani, America’s Mayor, romped the Electoral College in a Rust Belt blowout that really lived up to his claim of a “Brexit times 50.” Watching CNN in a historic downtown Los Angeles theater, I knew the end was nigh when Hillary’s U.S.S. Pennsylvania triangulated into a red iceberg in the Allegheny Mountains. I almost laughed at the room’s maladroit hipster anger until I thought about, you know, the consequences.
Like Caesar galloping into Gaul, Mr. Trump astounded the inbred and sheltered pundits and pollsters and number-crunchers in the capital. They shed tears for their career paths in the once and future queen’s court.
This sack of Rome by a ragtag band of alt-right deplorables led by a Penn graduate received its votes from a population so sick and tired of politics as usual that they held their noses and voted for a birther and groper just to send Washington a message and get jobs back in exchange. They were under no illusions that Trump was a well-bred taxpayer. This was not 2004. The naïve voters were the Democrats, not the Republicans.
Andrew Jackson Trump
Earlier this year, I warned people that a Trump-Clinton race would smack of the nasty 1828 presidential election when the last American presidential dynasty crumbled before the rage of Greater Appalachia. The “most qualified man” to ever run for president, John Quincy Adams, a former secretary of state and son of a president, had won the 1824 presidential election by a vote in Congress due to an Electoral College deadlock despite getting many fewer popular votes than Andrew Jackson. J.Q. Adams still, by far, has the record for the highest IQ of any president. A well-educated Harvard gentleman, he refused to stoop to “campaigning.”
Andrew Jackson, a wild man with wild hair, hailed from Tennessee. He claimed to speak for the common man but was a fairly wealthy slaveowner and land speculator by the time he ran for president. And he did not just imagine shooting someone on Fifth Avenue, he actually did! He executed soldiers as a general and shot a man in a duel long before running for president. He did not have many ideas and not much experience compared to the series of secretaries of state turned presidents preceding John Quincy Adams. But he instead inveighed against the “corrupt bargain” in Congress that gave Adams the White House and the speaker of the house, a Cabinet job.
Running against a corrupt, elitist system, Jackson made inroads in the North with some sharp alliances (Chris Christie anyone?) and overblown rhetoric about Washington D.C. The Adams camp accused him of being a violent bigamist living in sin and adultery with his wife. Jackson supporters called Adams a pimp who supplied women to the Russian czar as ambassador.
You can guess the outcome; Jackson wins bigly, but his wife dies from depression after the election from all the negative campaigning. He throws a wild party of an inauguration by inviting the masses to the White House who promptly trash it and break all the china looking for spiked punch. Old Hickory goes on to deport the Cherokee and cause a financial crash by destroying the Second Bank of the United States and unleashing a wave of shifty loans in the West.
We have a lot to look forward to America.