Home » Posts tagged 'government'
Tag Archives: government
20240915 – Where Have All the Democrats Gone
MY TAKE ON IT:
With all due respect, I think the authors are missing a big part of the picture. They correctly identified Democrats’ losses among working and middle-class people of all races and ethnicities but missed a big part of their gains. These gains came from the managerial class and business, not because they were good in economics but because contemporary businesses, both big and small, are highly incorporated into the regulatory hierarchy of government and dependent on government bureaucrats for their very existence. Ever since FDR’s revolution, these government bureaucrats have become a core constituency of the Democratic party, with the working class providing mass support in exchange for government handouts and interventions into the economy through Union support, labor legislation, welfare, and so on.
The expansion of government in all areas of life and the economy led to the creation of a massive parasitic class in overblown, hugely expensive, ineffective, and inefficient healthcare and education. This new class does not provide enough numbers to override the popular vote, but it has control over the election process, making popular vote nearly irrelevant to its results. Democratic success in 2020 and 2022 in fixing election results created overconfidence in their ability to maintain power forever.
This prompted Democrats to open borders so they could substitute Americans who used to feel themselves to be free, whether this feeling is realistic or not, and have a high demand for quality of life (American Dream) with masses of illegal immigrants that often see the difference between high-quality live in America and misery of their native countries as something natural, not related to culture and institutions. They could be excused in such thinking because all they see is that doing the same job they did back home in the USA provides 40-50 times more returns while doing nothing, and just getting on public assistance provides 10 times more. To come to America illegally and illegally vote for Democrats is a very small price to pay for such dramatic improvement.
However, I do not think this is the end of the story. Many more Americans were hurt by Democratic policies than benefited from it. These are not only working-class people who see their jobs going to illegals or that the factories they worked in before shipped to China or Mexico. It is also college graduates who invested in education and could not get decent jobs they counted on or could not move ahead because they belong to the wrong race. The history of the Soviet Union demonstrated that it is possible to suppress the majority, however miserable, using ideologically brainwashed youths and government violence. Still, it could happen only if all communications were fully controlled, any resistance or even expression of unhappiness suppressed with concentration camps or outright murder, and an organization like the KGB or Stasi fully controlled by the party had a vast network of informers. The control of the Democratic party over media, especially social media, is far from complete. The FBI is corrupted to the bone, but not KGB yet. The population not only has access to any information, but it also includes lots of people who understand the situation, including immigrants from totalitarian countries and lots of Americans educated in real history. Finally, the population is armed and seems uninclined to give up these arms. It would be interesting to see how it unfolds over the next few years or months.
20240505 – Big Intel
MAIN IDEA:
This book is written by a journalist who spent decades working in close contact with US intelligence agencies, such as the CIA and the FBI. Here is how the author defines what it is all about:” All utopian movements and societies require enforcers. Big Intel is about how these former protectors of American founding principles have followed societal trends to become the secret services of critical theory and fonts of the democracy-demolishing wokeness that the theory animates. This is a counterintelligence story—a chronicle of a battle the FBI and CIA fought for decades before they succumbed to a generations-old hostile foreign intelligence operation to destroy the United States and Western civilization from within. It’s about how American foreign intelligence was targeted and attacked as soon as it was founded. These attacks were not about partisan politics—yes, the FBI and CIA did meddle in domestic politics and still do—but something far deeper: they were meant to turn American instruments of power into enforcers of the vanguards spearheading the fundamental transformation of our country. Big Intel seeks to answer how it happened.”
MY TAKE ON IT:
All secret services of all countries are always instruments
of power. It is never the power of some abstraction, such as people, but rather
the power of a specific group controlling society’s resources and its political
and bureaucratic machinery. In a functioning democracy, resources and control
are divided between competing groups. For example, from the beginning of the
USA until the end of the Civil War, it was between Northern plutocrats and
Southern aristocrats. When the author started his career in the 1970s, it was
between business interests combining rich, middle-class business owners and
professionals represented by the Republican party and government-dependent
groups such as federal, state, and local bureaucracies, unions, welfare
recipients, and educational/cultural establishment represented by the
Democratic party. In this environment, the CIA and FBI remained more or less
neutral, directing their efforts mainly against foreign aggression and internal
criminality. While these are government bureaucracies, their role as the proper
and necessary tools of government psychologically separated members of these organizations
from other bureaucracies that mainly do staff improper for the government, such
as wealth redistribution. The huge growth of government bureaucracies in all
areas of life shifted a lot more areas of life under government control. Hence,
many previously independent groups, such as top-level business managers,
educators, medical professionals, and artists, became dependent on the
government’s handouts. Consequently, divisions within society changed from a
kind of vertical wall when approximately equal power groups, each with its own
elite and masses maintaining dynamic stability, into a kind of horizontal
separation between different floors of society, with united politically/bureaucratic/big
business elite comfortably sitting at the top level, when masses at the bottom
are losing the quality of lives as a result of the various pursuits of the
elite from globalization to climate alarmism. In this environment, the
governmental bureaucracies of the CIA and FBI necessarily lost any shade of
neutrality and had to act to protect their class interests. The big problem is
that the elite, even if it includes 25-30% of the population, is still a
minority. Its isolation and self-protection inevitably lead to incompetence
plentifully demonstrated by lost wars, massive technology, and wealth transfer
to communist China at the expense of the American population, failure in
handling COVID-19, massive illegal immigration, and other developments of
contemporary life. All this makes
society’s condition unstable and will lead to qualitative changes in its
organization and conditions. It reminds me of the last years of the Soviet
Union, including such features as the gerontologic leadership of the country
and its inability to make things work as they used to.
Equal Rights Libertarian 