Janesville, Wisconsin, USA. Thanks for stopping by!
So, we rise from the rubble...
Sunday, November 22, 2020
"The Greatest Electoral Heist in American History"
"The Greatest Electoral Heist in American History"
by Ken Blackwell
"The pieces are finally coming together, and they reveal a masterpiece of electoral larceny involving Big Tech oligarchs, activists, and government officials who prioritize partisanship over patriotism.
The 2020 election was stolen because leftists were able to exploit the coronavirus pandemic to weaken, alter, and eliminate laws that were put in place over the course of decades to preserve the integrity of the ballot box. But just as importantly, it was stolen because those same leftists had a thoroughly-crafted plan, and because they were rigorous in its implementation and ruthless in its execution.
Let’s not forget that liberals have been consumed by a fixation with removing Donald Trump from office for longer than he’s actually been in office. The sordid story of the 2020 election heist begins all the way back in January 2017, when Barack Obama’s former campaign manager and senior advisor, David Plouffe, took a job leading the policy and advocacy efforts of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, a “charitable” organization established by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan.
Earlier this year, just as it was becoming clear that Joe Biden would be the Democratic Party’s nominee for president, Plouffe published a book outlining his vision for the Democrats’ roadmap to victory in 2020, which involved a “block by block” effort to turn out voters in key Democratic strongholds in the swing states that would ultimately decide the election, such as Philadelphia, Milwaukee, Detroit, and Minneapolis.
The book was titled, "A Citizen’s Guide to Defeating Donald Trum"p, and it turned out that the citizen Plouffe had in mind was none other than his former boss, Mark Zuckerberg. Although Plouffe no longer officially managed Zuckerberg’s policy and advocacy efforts at that point, the political operative’s influence evidently remained a powerful force.
Thanks to the extensive efforts of investigators and attorneys for the Amistad Project of the nonpartisan Thomas More Society, who have been following Zuckerberg’s money for the past 18 months, it is still possible to expose the inner workings of this heist in time to stop it. Perhaps even more importantly, these unsung heroes of American democracy are dedicated to making sure that such a travesty will not become a permanent feature of our elections.
Under the pretext of assisting election officials conduct “safe and secure” elections in the age of COVID, Zuckerberg donated $400 million - as much money as Congress appropriated for the same general purpose - to nonprofit organizations founded and run by left-wing activists. The primary recipient was the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL), which received the staggering sum of $350 million. Prior to Zuckerberg’s donations, CTCL’s annual operating expenses averaged less than $1 million per year. How was Zuckerberg even aware of such a small-potatoes operation, and why did he entrust it with ⅞ of the money he was pouring into this election cycle, despite the fact that it had no prior experience handling such a massive amount of money?
Predictably, given the partisan background of its leading officers, CTCL proceeded to distribute Zuckerberg’s funds to left-leaning counties in battleground states. The vast majority of the money handed out by CTCL - especially in the early days of its largesse - went to counties that voted overwhelmingly for Hillary Clinton in 2016. Some of the biggest recipients, in fact, were the very locales Plouffe had identified as the linchpins of the Democrat strategy in 2020.
Zuckerberg and CTCL left nothing to chance, however, writing detailed conditions into their grants that dictated exactly how elections were to be conducted, down to the number of ballot drop boxes and polling places. The Constitution gives state lawmakers sole authority for managing elections, but these grants put private interests firmly in control.
Amistad Project lawyers tried to prevent this unlawful collusion by filing a flurry of lawsuits in eight states prior to Election Day. Unfortunately, judges were forced to put those lawsuits aside without consideration of their merits because the plaintiffs had not yet suffered “concrete harm” in the form of fraudulent election results. The law had no remedy to offer because the left’s lawless schemes had not yet reached fruition.
In the meantime, CTCL continued splashing Zuckerberg’s cash - only now, the organization was intent on finding Republican-leaning jurisdictions to give its donations a veneer of bipartisanship. Of course, the number of votes in play in those counties paled in comparison to those in the liberal counties. Philadelphia County alone, for instance, projected that the $10 million grant it received from CTCL would enable it to increase turnout by 25-30 percent - translating to well over 200,000 votes.
The left didn’t put all of its eggs into the CTCL basket, though. High-ranking state officials simultaneously took significant steps to weaken ballot security protocols, acting on their own authority without permission or concurrence from the state legislatures that enshrined those protections in the law.
In Wisconsin, Democrat Secretary of State Doug La Follette allowed voters to claim “indefinite confinement” in order to avoid having to provide a photocopy of their ID when requesting an absentee ballot. The exemption was intended for legitimate invalids, but COVID offered a convenient excuse for circumventing the law, despite the fact that Wisconsin had no pandemic-related lockdown rules that would have rendered anyone “indefinitely confined.” The impact was far-reaching. About 240,000 voters claimed the exemption in 2020, compared to just 70,000 in 2016.
In Michigan, Democrat Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson unilaterally voided the legal requirement that voters provide a signature when requesting an absentee ballot, establishing an online request form. She then took things a step further by announcing that she would “allow civic groups and other organizations running voter registration drives to register voters through the state’s online registration website,” granting partisan groups such as Rock The Vote direct access to Michigan’s voter rolls.
In Pennsylvania, election officials in heavily-Democratic counties that received CTCL funding allowed flawed mail-in ballots to be “cured” - that is, altered or replaced - prior to Election Day. In other counties, officials rightly interpreted this as a flagrant violation of state law. On the night before Election Day, less than 24 hours before polls were due to close, Democrat Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar sought to imbue this illegal practice with the appearance of validity by issuing a statement authorizing counties to contact voters who had cast improper ballots. Even if Boockvar had the statutory authority to do this, which she did not, the timing of her memo made it impossible for rural counties to take advantage of it to nearly the same extent as urban counties.
In numerous states, officials also absurdly consolidated the vote-counting and ballot-curing process in sporting arenas and other large venues, rather than the ward and precinct-level offices that normally handle the job. This made absolutely no sense as a pandemic-related safety measure, but that didn’t stop the officials from citing COVID as their rationale.
Consolidating the vote-counting tied the other efforts together. Instead of a manageable number of ballots being transported to small offices and counted in the immediate presence of observers from both parties, truckloads of ballots were brought to a single location, inevitably resulting in confusion and commingling of ballots from various sources. Securing those ballots from the time they left voters’ hands to the time they were officially counted should have been the top priority of election workers, but it’s not even clear whether there were logs kept identifying which ballots were delivered by which trucks and when. If such logs even exist, they have not been disclosed.
At the same time, election officials could claim that they were adhering to legal requirements that observers be “in the room” during the counting process while using COVID as an excuse for relegating those observers to the “penalty box,” far from the actual counting and curing.
This was particularly egregious when it came to ballot “curing,” a process that actually involves election workers filling out brand new ballots on behalf of voters whose ballots purportedly could not be read by machine. This could have been due to something the voter themselves did, such as spilling coffee on the ballot. It also could have been due to something that election workers themselves did, such as crumpling ballots to prevent the machines from receiving them, just as a vending machine rejects crumpled bills.
It’s impossible to know exactly what happened, because Republican observers were denied meaningful access to the process - and in some cases literally locked out of the counting rooms while election workers obscured the windows with cardboard.
These election workers, it should be noted, were paid directly by CTCL’s grants. These supposedly impartial arbiters of our electoral process are supposed to work for the people, but they were on Zuckerberg’s payroll.
All of this sounds like the stuff of fiction - the sort of thing one would expect from a cinematic thriller or a spy novel. Sadly, it’s the reality that our country is faced with after years of placidity in the face of increasingly aggressive intervention into our electoral process on the part of Big Tech oligarchs and activists with deep pockets and shallow motivations."
"Life Has Not Forgotten You..."
"How should we be able to forget those ancient myths that are at the beginning of all peoples, the myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses; perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that needs our help. So you must not be frightened if a sadness rises up before you larger than any you have ever seen; if a restiveness, like light and cloud shadows, passes over your hands and over all you do. You must think that something is happening with you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand; it will not let you fall."
- Rainer Maria Rilke
"There Are A Great Many People..."
"There are a great many people who have a vested interest
in maintaining the stupidity of the American public."
- Gore Vidal
"What Americans Fear Most In The JFK Assassination"
"What Americans Fear Most In The JFK Assassination", Part 1
by Jacob Hornberger
"One of the fascinating phenomena in the JFK assassination is the fear of some Americans to consider the possibility that the assassination was actually a regime-change operation carried out by the U.S. national-security establishment rather than simply a murder carried out by a supposed lone-nut assassin. The mountain of evidence that has surfaced, especially since the 1990s, when the JFK Records Act mandated the release of top-secret assassination-related records within the national-security establishment, has been in the nature of circumstantial evidence, as compared to direct evidence. Thus, I can understand that someone who places little faith in the power of circumstantial evidence might study and review that evidence and decide to embrace the “lone-nut theory” of the case."
Please view this complete article here:
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"Coup d'État"
What Americans fear most? The Truth...
"The Monstrous Thing..."
"The Monstrous Thing"
"The monstrous thing is not that men have created roses out of this dung heap, but that, for some reason or other, they should want roses. For some reason or other man looks for the miracle, and to accomplish it he will wade through blood. He will debauch himself with ideas, he will reduce himself to a shadow if for only one second of his life he can close his eyes to the hideousness of reality. Everything is endured - disgrace, humiliation, poverty, war, crime, ennui - in the belief that overnight something will occur, a miracle, which will render life tolerable. And all the while a meter is running inside and there is no hand that can reach in there and shut it off.
All the while someone is eating the bread of life and drinking the wine, some dirty fat cockroach of a priest who hides away in the cellar guzzling it, while up above in the light of the street a phantom host touches the lips and the blood is pale as water. And out of the endless torment and misery no miracle comes forth, no microscopic vestige of relief. Only ideas, pale, attenuated ideas which have to be fattened by slaughter; ideas which come forth like bile, like the guts of a pig when the carcass is ripped open.
Somehow the realization that nothing was to be hoped for had a salutary effect upon me. For weeks and months, for years, in fact, all my life I had been looking forward to something happening, some intrinsic event that would alter my life, and now suddenly, inspired by the absolute hopelessness of everything, I felt relieved, felt as though a great burden had been lifted from my shoulders. At dawn I parted company with the young Hindu, after touching him for a few francs, enough for a room. Walking toward Montparnasse I decided to let myself drift with the tide, to make not the least resistance to fate, no matter in what form it presented itself.
Nothing that had happened to me thus far had been sufficient to destroy me; nothing had been destroyed except my illusions. I myself was intact. The world was intact. Tomorrow there might be a revolution, a plague, an earthquake; tomorrow there might not be left a single soul to whom one could turn for sympathy, for aid, for faith. It seemed to me that the great calamity had already manifested itself, that I could be no more truly alone than at this very moment. I made up my mind that I would hold on to nothing, that I would expect nothing, that henceforth I would live as an animal, a beast of prey, a rover, a plunderer. Even if war were declared, and it were my lot to go, I would grab the bayonet and plunge it, plunge it up to the hilt. And if rape were the order of the day then rape I would, and with a vengeance.
At this very moment, in the quiet dawn of a new day, was not the earth giddy with crime and distress? Had one single element of man's nature been altered, vitally, fundamentally altered, by the incessant march of history? By what he calls the better part of his nature, man has been betrayed, that is all. At the extreme limits of his spiritual being man finds himself again naked as a savage. When he finds God, as it were, he has been picked clean: he is a skeleton. One must burrow into life again in order to put on flesh. The word must become flesh; the soul thirsts. On whatever crumb my eye fastens, I will pounce and devour. If to live is the paramount thing, then I will live, even if I must become a cannibal. Heretofore I have been trying to save my precious hide, trying to preserve the few pieces of meat that hid my bones. I am done with that. I have reached the limits of endurance. My back is to the wall; I can retreat no further. As far as history goes I am dead. If there is something beyond I shall have to bounce back. I have found God, but he is insufficient. I am only spiritually dead. Physically I am alive. Morally I am free. The world which I have departed is a menagerie. The dawn is breaking on a new world, a jungle world in which the lean spirits roam with sharp claws. If I am a hyena I am a lean and hungry one: I go forth to fatten myself."
- Henry Miller, "Tropic of Cancer"
"Yes, There Is A Meaning..."
"Yes, there is a meaning; at least for me, there is one thing that matters -
to set a chime of words tinkling in the minds of a few fastidious people."
- Logan Pearsall Smith
"The Real Damage..."
"The real damage is done by those millions who want to 'survive.' The honest men who just want to be left in peace. Those who don't want their little lives disturbed by anything bigger than themselves. Those with no sides and no causes. Those who won't take measure of their own strength, for fear of antagonizing their own weakness. Those who don't like to make waves - or enemies. Those for whom freedom, honor, truth, and principles are only literature. Those who live small, mate small, die small. It's the reductionist approach to life: if you keep it small, you'll keep it under control. If you don't make any noise, the bogeyman won't find you. But it's all an illusion, because they die too, those people who roll up their spirits into tiny little balls so as to be safe. Safe?! From what? Life is always on the edge of death; narrow streets lead to the same place as wide avenues, and a little candle burns itself out just like a flaming torch does. I choose my own way to burn."
- Sophie Scholl
Saturday, November 21, 2020
“Economy Is Being Strangled; Rental Apocalypse; Homeless Epidemic; Leisure and Hospitality Decimated”
Jeremiah Babe,
“Economy Is Being Strangled; Rental Apocalypse;
Homeless Epidemic; Leisure and Hospitality Decimated”
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Related:
Remind you of anything?
"The Housing Bubble Is Even Bigger Than The Stock Market Bubble: Be Ready For Housing Apocalypse!"
"The Housing Bubble Is Even Bigger Than The Stock Market Bubble:
Be Ready For Housing Apocalypse!"
by Epic Economist
"The housing market is about to explode into a full-blown disaster. Millions of tenants have been piling up their debt during the current recession and economists alert for a gigantic wave of evictions, foreclosures, and bankruptcies which could trigger a chain reaction leading the real state market to a crisis just as disastrous as the 2008 crash.
Nobel Prize Winner Robert Shiller affirms that the housing price bubble largely exceeds the stock market bubble, and things are about to get unsustainable pretty soon. In this video, we examine the chaotic situation of the housing market according to experts' perspectives and expose the many determinants that have been inflating this massive bubble.
As soon as the year turns, several cities will face a storm of evictions, foreclosures, and bankruptcies as the housing bubble that has been massively inflating throughout the year will explode into a full-blown disaster. With tens of millions of Americans out of their jobs and unable to pay rent for the past several months, leaving building owners struggling to meet their mortgages payments, a new study by the nonprofit CSS alerted that this situation will probably set off a chain reaction that could ultimately lead to a housing crisis comparable in scale to the 2008 crash.
CSS President David Jones explain that although the economic downturn has been the trigger for this current situation, the bubble has been in the making for over a decade. They have been pleading to political leaders to address the approaching crisis without delay, stressing that it's urgent to take immediate measures to "stop the bleeding".
Some cities, such as New York, are now in a critical position since a staggering rate of rental delinquency was registered and landlords have been eagerly waiting for the end of the forbearance period to solicit the issuance of eviction orders. Since rental payments cannot be nullified, all the unpaid rent has continued to be accumulated throughout the crisis, generating an enormous economic burden that will wreck many households when the bill comes due.
On many occasions, real estate firms entered 2020 leveraged to the maximum, demanding for ever-higher rents and then borrowing against the value of those income streams. “As real estate markets soared in several cities across the state, landlords raised rents, re-sold their buildings at higher prices, and used their properties’ rising values to take out ever-larger mortgages,” the report describes.
If this description sounds like something you've heard before, it's because you did. The report also recalls that from the mid-1990s up to the 2008 mortgage crisis, real estate firms started an irrational rush of buying and selling buildings and consistently raising rental prices. Considering rental properties are usually structured as limited liability corporations, the bankruptcy of one building alone doesn't pose a harsh impact on the finances of the real estate parent company.
In short, for the firms involved the market boom and bust can be like a game of Monopoly, but for renters, it can be the difference between having a safe home and being homeless. For the past decade such firms have been repeating the same misconduct, all of this could happen again next year.
That doesn't mean that capitalizing in the real state market is a despicable investor attitude, but allowing the formation of a colossal wave of foreclosures at the expense of entire cities' economies just to ensure predatory investments could come at a high cost to the whole nation, warns CSS President David Jones.
Additionally, for homeowners, the outlook doesn't look any rosier. Today, there are fewer homes for sale in the U.S. than ever documented in roughly 40 years, when data started to be recorded. For this reason, it's understandable why home prices are going up much faster than incomes, making homeownership less affordable for more and more Americans. "We are simply facing a housing shortage, a major housing shortage," expressed Lawrence Yun, the chief economist at the National Association of Realtors which tracks home sales. "We need to build more homes. Supply is critical in the current environment."
On a similar note, in a recent article, investment advisor for SitkaPacific Capital Management, Mike "Mish" Shedlock illustrated how home prices are in a bubble that is even bigger than the stock market bubble. On the basis of Yale University professor and Nobel Laureate Robert Shiller's evaluation, Mish explains why although stocks are overvalued considering historical measures, "it’s nothing compared to skyrocketing home values."
"Robert Shiller calls it a bubble, and so do I," Mish concludes. Basically, everywhere one can look inside the housing markets ravaging signs indicate the coming of a catastrophic burst. It's literally just a matter of time."
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Related:
Musical Interlude: Vangelis, “Beautiful Planet Earth”
Vangelis, “Beautiful Planet Earth”
Full screen mode recommended.
"A Look to the Heavens"
"Colorful NGC 1579 resembles the better known Trifid Nebula, but lies much farther north in planet Earth's sky, in the heroic constellation Perseus. About 2,100 light-years away and 3 light-years across, NGC 1579 is, like the Trifid, a study in contrasting blue and red colors, with dark dust lanes prominent in the nebula's central regions.
In both, dust reflects starlight to produce beautiful blue reflection nebulae. But unlike the Trifid, in NGC 1579 the reddish glow is not emission from clouds of glowing hydrogen gas excited by ultraviolet light from a nearby hot star. Instead, the dust in NGC 1579 drastically diminishes, reddens, and scatters the light from an embedded, extremely young, massive star, itself a strong emitter of the characteristic red hydrogen alpha light."
"I Am Convinced..."
"The longer I live, the more I realize the impact of attitude on life. Attitude to me is more important than facts. It is more important than the past, than education, than money, than circumstances, than failures, than success, than what other people think or say or do. It is more important than appearance, gift, or skill. It will make or break a company, a church, a home. The remarkable thing is we have a choice every day regarding the attitude we will embrace for that day. We cannot change our past, we cannot change the fact that people will act in a certain way. We cannot change the inevitable. The only thing we can do is play on the string we have, and that is our attitude. I am convinced that life is 10 percent what happens to me and 90 percent how I react to it. And so it is with you... we are in charge of our attitudes. "
- Charles Swindoll
"Covid-19 Pandemic Updates 11/21/20"
NOV 21, 2020 5:15 PM: "California Reports Record Jump As US COVID-19 Cases Top 12 Million; NY Sees Most New Cases In Months: Live Updates"
NOV 21, 2020 2:55 PM: "Facebook Denies 'Science' - Blocks Danish Study Questioning Efficacy Of Masks"; "Danish Study Suggests Masks Do Little To Stop COVID As Iowa Gov Insists There Is 'Evidence On Both Sides'"
Nov. 21, 2020 1:57 PM ET:
The coronavirus pandemic has sickened more than 57,923,100
people, according to official counts, including 12,078,010 Americans.
Updated 11/21/20, 4:25 PM ET
Click image for larger size.
"The Great 2020 Bailout Bonanza"
"The Great 2020 Bailout Bonanza"
by David Haggith
"Let us speak of megabanks and global corporations, chicanery and swine, and speak of how the great have feasted in the troughs of trillions dumped out by the present administration, congress, and the Fed, for 2020 makes the bailouts of the Great Recession look like childhood snacks.
Fargo banksters fail to forego illicit gains: Our story for the year begins back in January, well before the COVID crisis hit. It is not a tale of bank bailouts but of banksters getting “Get out of Jail Free” cards just as an apropos starting point.
It took four years from the time when Wells Fargo execs were “arrested,” so to speak, for creating (of all things in this era of fake everything) fake bank accounts at the end of the Obama administration - four years until penalties were meted out. Eight senior executives were cuffed to $59 million in penalties. John Stumpf, former CEO, took a $17.5 million whack on the hand from the hand of justice.
You may recall the crime: bank employees had been pushed to create millions of fake accounts in the names of Wells Fargo customers without the customers knowing. The bank, itself, paid billions in fines from bank money, but the crime instigators paid only millions. Now, you might say, $59 mil is a lot of dough, even divided eight ways, but if you weigh Stumpf’s portions against his gains, as an example, he made off quite well.
Ordered to get out of Dodge, Stumpf was set to exit into early retirement with $130 million that he had amassed in stocks, cash payouts and other compensation over the course of three decades of bank fraud. $107 million of that was in the form of bank shares he had accumulated.
Of course, his fraudulent government of the bank had diminished his share value from an earlier high of $200 million, so he did take a hit from natural causes. National outrage also pressed him to forego $45 million of the $130 million that would have been his retirement take. More outrage stripped another $28 million from Stumpf’s parting package before he got his butt safe out the doors of justice. He still exited with more than $50 million in retirement parting value.
Senator Elizabeth Warren tried somewhat unsuccessfully to press Stumpf to repay every dime he had ever made from his years of running the crime operation called 'Wells Fargo.'"
Please view this complete and highly recommended article here:
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"In a closed society where everybody's guilty, the only crime is getting caught.
In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity."
- Hunter S. Thompson
"A Kind Of Stubborn, Unrecognized Courage..."
"For many great deeds are accomplished in times of squalid struggle. There is a kind of stubborn, unrecognized courage which in the lowest depths tenaciously resists the pressures of necessity and ill-doing; there are noble and obscure triumphs observed by no one, unacclaimed by any fanfare. Hardship, loneliness, and penury are a battlefield which has its own heroes, sometimes greater than those lauded in history. Strong and rare characters are thus created; poverty nearly always a foster-mother, may become a true mother, distress may be the nursemaid of pride, and misfortune the milk that nourishes great spirits."
- Victor Hugo
"The One Chart That Predicts our Future"
"The One Chart That Predicts our Future"
by Charles Hugh Smith
"There's one chart that predicts our future, and no, it's not related to Covid - it's related to capital, specifically the concentration of capital and power in the hands of the few at the expense of the many. The chart is a map, courtesy of Brookings, showing the roughly 500 counties Biden won and the roughly 2,500 counties Trump won. This might seem like a chart of political polarization, and superficially that's clear, but the real polarization is economic-financial: there are two economies in America, and there's very little commonality in the two economies.
70% of America's economy is generated in fewer that 500 counties; the other 2,500 counties are left with the remaining 30%. The nation's productive capital is even more concentrated in a few hands and regions, and since income and political power flow to capital, the financial disparity/inequality far exceed the 70/30 split depicted in this political map.
Ownership of capital is concentrated in the hands of the top 10%, as the chart of equity ownership reveals, but the concentration is actually much more limited: the top 0.1% control so much wealth / capital that they "own" virtually all the power.
I hope it's not a big surprise that America is now a rigidly two-tier society and economy. If you're an executive at a big Wall Street investment bank, you can rig markets and embezzle billions and you'll never face any personal legal consequences such as being indicted for fraud and being imprisoned.
But try being an employee at a local credit union and embezzle $5,000 - a prison sentence is very predictable. If you're one of the 500,000+ people busted for possessing cannabis in the U.S. every year, then you're not rich and powerful, because when the spoiled-rotten child of the rich and powerful gets busted, the charges are quietly dropped, or cut to a modest fine and a misdemeanor, etc.
"Justice" is for sale in the U.S., along with rigged markets, political power, healthcare and everything else. Why should we be surprised that the economy is also two-tiered? The lower tier of the U.S. economy has been decapitalized: debt has been substituted for capital. Capital only flows into the increasingly centralized top tier, which owns and profits from the rising tide of debt that's been keeping the second tier afloat for the past 20 years.
The saying follow the money is only half-right--more importantly, follow the capital because income and power flow to capital. As this RAND report documents, $50 trillion has been siphoned from labor and the lower tier of the economy to the top-tier elites who own the vast majority of the capital: "Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018."
What's missing from the political map is the staggering percentage of residents in the wealthiest 500 counties who are precariats living paycheck to paycheck, the ALICE Americans: Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed.
As I've often observed here, globalization and financialization have richly rewarded the top 0.1% and the top 5% technocrat class that serves the elites' interests. These elites and their capital are concentrated in urban counties, and the feedback loops are self-reinforcing: the capital in the urban counties attracts more capital and talent (skilled labor), bleeding the other 2,500 counties of skilled labor and capital.
America has no plan to reverse this destructive tide. Our leadership's "plan" is benign neglect: just send a monthly stipend of bread and circuses to all the disempowered, decapitalized households, urban and rural, so they can stay out of trouble and not bother the elites' continued pillaging of America and the planet.
There's a lot of big talk about rebuilding infrastructure and the Green New Deal, but our first question must always be: cui bono, to whose benefit? How much of the spending will actually be devoted to changing the rising imbalances between the haves and the have-nots, the ever-richer who profit from rising debt and the ever more decapitalized debt-serfs who are further impoverished by rising debt?
As I explain in my book "A Hacker's Teleology: Sharing the Wealth of Our Shrinking Planet", people don't want to just get by, they want an opportunity to acquire capital in all its forms, an opportunity to contribute to their communities, to make a difference, to earn respect and pride.
That our "leadership" reckons bread and circuses is what the stripmined bottom 90% want is beyond pathetic. This map dictates our future, which is the pendulum of wealth and power being concentrated in the hands of the greediest, most rapacious few reaching an extreme and then reversing to the other extreme. How that plays out is anyone's guess, but the pendulum swing to an extreme at the other end of the spectrum is already baked in: the way of the Tao is reversal."
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