Happy [sic] New Year

Since Trump’s return to the White House in January 2025, the editorials have been filled with claims that the United States is slipping into authoritarianism. While this possibility is greeted with cheers by right-wing extremists, it is a source of dire concern for liberals and for moderates like me.

As Niels Bohr (and Yogi Berra) observed, predictions are hard, especially about the future. That doesn’t seem to discourage many people.

 

Today’s dire forecast for the new year comes from Emanuel Pastreich:

 

“In a healthy society, where citizens actually play a role in politics, the politicians rise to the top because their primary mission is serving the needs of their clients, whether they are bankers, businessmen, generals, or other interest groups in the general population. Politicians can play the central role because they reflect the needs of citizens. As long as politicians can effectively meet the needs of the bankers, the generals, and the citizens, and keep the money flowing to them, the system remains stable.

 

“If wealth is too concentrated, however, to the degree that the bankers can pay off everyone and gain complete control of the economy, then they rise to the top because bankers need only service a small number of the super-rich to obtain absolute power. The politicians become their puppets and the generals are paid off by the bankers. That is what the political system in the United States has become today.”

*snip*

“A political system run by bankers, however, will encounter enormous problems over time because everything will be decided on the basis of short-term profits, and no one will do anything for the sake of others, or follow an ideal greater than personal interest. As a result, the foundations of government, and of society, will crumble. Eventually the government will collapse into anarchy, or it will drift into war as a means of generating profits and enforcing the bankers’ iron-fisted rule over the people.

 

“At that historical moment, the generals rise to the top because they have a viable chain of command that continues to function even as the government fails, and because they speak the language of force and violence, which will become the only language that has authority once the legitimacy of politicians and bankers has been destroyed.”

Buckle up, peeps!

https://fpif.org/why-is-the-united-states-drawn-to-war/

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Yes, the CDC can change its mind

The Nobel Laureate economist Paul Samuelson famously acknowledged in a Meet the Press interview: “Well when events change, I change my mind. What do you do?” This observation applies to the advice from medical authorities such as the CDC and WHO during the COVID pandemic. Some members of the public are fond of pillorying these agencies for having published different guidelines at different times, as though health officials are in the business of issuing ex cathedra dogma rather than responding to incomplete and ambiguous information. Science doesn’t deal in proof, it deals with the weight of evidence. A scientific hypothesis is one that is capable of being tested and falsified by experiment. I get it. I used to teach problem-based learning to first year medical students, and they often struggled with what to do with incomplete and ambiguous information, which is what physicians in clinics do every day. Sometimes, one cannot wait for all the tests to be completed and all the data analyz...
Read more

I agree with RFK Jr.

Though it feels weird to say it, RFK Jr and I agree on something: curtailing direct-to-consumer marketing of pharmaceuticals. “ The Trump administration is discussing policies that would make it harder and more expensive for pharmaceutical companies to advertise directly to patients, in a move that could disrupt more than $10 billion in annual ad spending.   Although the US is the only place, besides New Zealand, where pharma companies can directly advertise, banning pharma ads outright could make the administration vulnerable to lawsuits, so it’s instead focusing on cutting down on the practice by adding legal and financial hurdles, according to people familiar with the plans who weren’t authorized to speak publicly on the matter.   “The two policies the administration has focused in on would be to require greater disclosures of side effects of a drug within each ad — likely making broadcast ads much longer and prohibitively expensive — or removing the industry’s ability to d...
Read more

About that Trump lawsuit

So Trump is suing Rupert Murdoch for defamation because of the release of a salacious doodle. Nothing remarkable about Donald J. Trump weaponizing the legal system against his opponents, I know. But there are some things that do bear remark here: “ . . . he's suing Rupert Murdoch personally. But you know who he's not suing? Lachlan Murdoch, who's actually the chairperson of News Corp and Fox, who's actually the decision-maker. Rupert Murdoch has no official role there anymore. He's an adviser.   “So, I thought that was revealing in a lot of ways, because it isn't just about going after the entity. It's sort of this expansion spillover, trying to send as much of a message as you possibly can. He's sort of hitting every potential lever, not just against Murdoch and that empire, but then all the other media properties in the future. It's also about sending an example.” “HAYES: Yeah. That, to me, is the point here, is that these lawsuits are not lawsuits...
Read more