Our much celebrated Democratic president Clinton abolished the protections we had in the Glass-Steagall legislation that had protected us since 1933 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass%E2%80%93Steagall_legislation. Later, after the 2008 global crash he protested loudly that his actions had nothing to do with the following crash https://e…
This is most likely because of the US 2-party system: Both parties are 100% funded by large global and US corporations; the labels Democratic and Republican are mere deceptive PR strategies to lull 'lazy' voters into a hopeful voting pattern believing in the respective temporal election promises.
Both Presidents Clinton and Obama were servants of Corporate America and lulled us 'The Voters' into believing that they were 'Servants of the People.'
Now we are looking at Mr. Hartman's clever analysis of the 80-year cycle, and perhaps we should look at the 'distractions' of such engineered events as the Ukraine War, the Covid Re-set and the odd events surrounding the US Endless War historical scenario without, of course, falling into the sad labeling of calling anyone adherents of conspiracies. One might just look at the confluence of money flows and profits between 1980-2022, and compare that, perhaps, to similar historical eventsof the Gilded Age of the 1920-30s leading up to WWII. The financial manipulations between American and European investors between WWI and WWII are matters of history, but also subject to the 80 year cycle of a 'Harddrive' wipe of our collective memory https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/americans-who-funded-hitler-nazis-german-economic-miracle-eger
Thus the astute questioning all responsible adults should be doing as we-lemmings are marched over the cliffs is, perhaps: Who has been making the money in the 2019-2022, and who is selling the next profit scenario for our collective masters?
Looking at the US 2022 Mid-Term elections it would be worthwhile to tally up the percent of legislators, state and federal that voters simply re-elected, again. Instead of never voting for any incumbent legislator. https://www.opensecrets.org/elections-overview/reelection-rates
Like Mr. Hartman I have had the blessings of living and working in many of the world's cultures and market places, and I am praying every day that America and its voters will not go the way of Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini et.al., and find a governance balance that will respect the needs of both urban and rural communities.
Mr. Clinton and Mr. Obama both own a significant responsibility for the 1980-2020 reign of corporate governance, and it would be foolish to assume their Democratic heirs are not making similar deals with the Devil(s) like Mr. Clinton made with the Glass-Stegall repeal and the Obama care no-solution.
Just look at how Senators Murrary and Durbin are serving their pharmaceutical corporation masters by trying to make personal healthcare more expensive https://anh-usa.org/durbin-anti-supplement-bill/
Why every fourth generation? Arnold Toynbee, it is said, had the answer to that:
“When the last man who remembers the horrors of the last great war dies, the next great war becomes inevitable.”
It takes 80 years, he argued, for what Daniel Quinn called a “great forgetting” to happen, forcing a society or nation to learn its lessons all over again.
We repeat mistakes we don’t remember. Or make even worse mistakes.
If there had been a single senator in the Senate in 1999 when Phil Graham suggested doing away with Glass-Steagall, arguing that it was no longer needed because it had worked so well, they would’ve laughed him out of the building. But all the people in the Senate in the 1930s — when Glass-Steagall saved our nation from the banking crisis of the Republican Great Depression — were long dead. Almost 80 years had passed.
The very definition of an internet conspiracy theorist is one who cherry-picks favorable articles that seemingly lend credence to the biased dirt targeted at groups of marginalized people and perceived enemies -- in this case, liberals and the Democratic Party as a whole. Easy targets. Demonizing Democrats has been a class project in Republican Party dogma writ large for decades. Now, at this late juncture, they've gone full tilt boogie. Of course they have.
When it comes to equal-opportunity bashing of Democrats, notice that it's always the description never the substance; always the bad and the wrong, seldom a good word to be found; always the ugly warts, never the cure, never the beauty; all the scandals, never the many great accomplishments, never in the context of realpolitik and what's actually possible with all the give-and-take complexities in extreme human nature playing out in the stratosphere, when one party or the other holds the reins of ultimate earthly power -- you know, all the real-life consequences when it's the wrong party, people getting hurt, suffering, dying by the droves. When right-wing ideology pervades the land, we all suffer the dire consequences.
It's all the rave on the right, unchained nutballs with guns, some with Hitler mustaches, open fascism with classic Mussolini poses to boot. In direct opposition is a people's democracy in representative form, as the Constitution intended, imperfect but striving to be better. With average Joe Republican nowadays, though, it's never an honest, counterposing argument, never an in-depth analysis of their party's much greater sins, violating both the letter and the spirit of our laws and our basic principles with deliberate, despicable lies. The propagandists have kicked the dump truck into high gear at Karl Rove speeds, accusing their enemies of their own transgressions, robbing the best arguments and flipping the narrative, the oldest disinformation tactic in the book.
But most important is an imperative of blind (some would say willful) hypocrisy to "own the libs." Always the lie, never the truth. When pressed, a conspiracy wingnut's typical alternative, mostly unworkable "solutions" are so way out there that one has to wonder what happens to a human brain sucked into the "inter-tubes." Is it like getting spaghettified in a black hole? Scary stuff when considering that a good third of the citizens of the most advanced (hahahaha) nation on Earth, numbering in the tens of millions, are running buck-ass naked in the streets, dripping snot and pulling at wild hair, howling at the moon like zombies on steroids.
One could say that the firehose rhetoric is fast and furious on both sides, and that would be true. (Lol, I plead guilty as hell.) The burning question, though, is do mere words -- symbols of deeper realities -- reflect truth or lies? That's the soul-searching question we must pose to ourselves, which naturally is a most difficult thing to do in life. But failure is how we learn and grow, beyond all the rhetoric.
In effect, like it or not, we have a two-party system. So choose a side, the right side next time around! Make a real difference; change life for the better for everyone. Instead of just whimpering like lost puppies in the snow about all the injustice surrounding them, looking inside from the outside, come on in and be part of a party on the move, changing with every vote, growing in popularity, while the "other" party of liars, traitors, and fools sinks into mean-spirited irrelevance.
America can do this. We can kick big money out of our House, our Senate, our presidency, and all of our state governments, which is just as vital as the national politics if not more so. We have to gang up on the really bad guys. Too much is at stake not to show a united front in the face of this juggernaut of greed infecting both major parties, largely thanks to the really fckd Supreme Court decisions by corporatized wingnut justices, as Thom endlessly points out.
Politics is war by another name without the guns. When people give up on "the system," however screwed it may be, instead of trying to fix it, anarchy ensues, and that's when the guns come out. People lose faith in democracy at a fundamental level. Is that really where we're going at this point in history when the world is burning up both figuratively and literally? Don't we need some semblance of actual representative democracy to survive, to have any chance of saving ourselves from ourselves?
Evidently, these are fundamental questions that Republicans (mostly) have lost sight of -- the very threads holding the tapestry of our multi-racial/cultural/religious democracy together for god sake! Right now, that means joining the Democrats, hold your nose if you must, and simply out-vote the moneyed-up bastards stealing our wealth who are the true enemies of democracy.
(By the way, yes, the moneyed interests at the top of the pyramid do control the Republican Party nearly 100 percent, but the big guys also play both sides of the fence as insurance and own a sizable chunk of the Democratic Party too. Of course they do. Still, the rampant corruption of sell-out Democrats like Manchin and Sinema (among many) is certainly not 100 percent as casually purported, even though that might seem symmetrical in the usual, made-up, logical-fallacy, both-sides argument.)
This late in the game, there's not much time and opportunity left to mitigate the evils of human nature spreading around world? The clock is close to midnight on every front.
Our much celebrated Democratic president Clinton abolished the protections we had in the Glass-Steagall legislation that had protected us since 1933 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass%E2%80%93Steagall_legislation. Later, after the 2008 global crash he protested loudly that his actions had nothing to do with the following crash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass%E2%80%93Steagall_legislation.
This is most likely because of the US 2-party system: Both parties are 100% funded by large global and US corporations; the labels Democratic and Republican are mere deceptive PR strategies to lull 'lazy' voters into a hopeful voting pattern believing in the respective temporal election promises.
Both Presidents Clinton and Obama were servants of Corporate America and lulled us 'The Voters' into believing that they were 'Servants of the People.'
Now we are looking at Mr. Hartman's clever analysis of the 80-year cycle, and perhaps we should look at the 'distractions' of such engineered events as the Ukraine War, the Covid Re-set and the odd events surrounding the US Endless War historical scenario without, of course, falling into the sad labeling of calling anyone adherents of conspiracies. One might just look at the confluence of money flows and profits between 1980-2022, and compare that, perhaps, to similar historical eventsof the Gilded Age of the 1920-30s leading up to WWII. The financial manipulations between American and European investors between WWI and WWII are matters of history, but also subject to the 80 year cycle of a 'Harddrive' wipe of our collective memory https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/americans-who-funded-hitler-nazis-german-economic-miracle-eger
Thus the astute questioning all responsible adults should be doing as we-lemmings are marched over the cliffs is, perhaps: Who has been making the money in the 2019-2022, and who is selling the next profit scenario for our collective masters?
Looking at the US 2022 Mid-Term elections it would be worthwhile to tally up the percent of legislators, state and federal that voters simply re-elected, again. Instead of never voting for any incumbent legislator. https://www.opensecrets.org/elections-overview/reelection-rates
Pairing this data with voter participation many may despair at our collective ability to vote rationally and effectively in our own best interest https://ballotpedia.org/Voter_turnout_in_United_States_elections
Like Mr. Hartman I have had the blessings of living and working in many of the world's cultures and market places, and I am praying every day that America and its voters will not go the way of Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini et.al., and find a governance balance that will respect the needs of both urban and rural communities.
Mr. Clinton and Mr. Obama both own a significant responsibility for the 1980-2020 reign of corporate governance, and it would be foolish to assume their Democratic heirs are not making similar deals with the Devil(s) like Mr. Clinton made with the Glass-Stegall repeal and the Obama care no-solution.
Just look at how Senators Murrary and Durbin are serving their pharmaceutical corporation masters by trying to make personal healthcare more expensive https://anh-usa.org/durbin-anti-supplement-bill/
The Democratic Party has lost a huge section of voters working against the millions of people who now vote with Alternative Practioners https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/according-new-government-survey-38-percent-adults-12-percent-children-use-complementary-alternative-medicine.
Mr. Hartman's citations:
Why every fourth generation? Arnold Toynbee, it is said, had the answer to that:
“When the last man who remembers the horrors of the last great war dies, the next great war becomes inevitable.”
It takes 80 years, he argued, for what Daniel Quinn called a “great forgetting” to happen, forcing a society or nation to learn its lessons all over again.
We repeat mistakes we don’t remember. Or make even worse mistakes.
If there had been a single senator in the Senate in 1999 when Phil Graham suggested doing away with Glass-Steagall, arguing that it was no longer needed because it had worked so well, they would’ve laughed him out of the building. But all the people in the Senate in the 1930s — when Glass-Steagall saved our nation from the banking crisis of the Republican Great Depression — were long dead. Almost 80 years had passed.
The very definition of an internet conspiracy theorist is one who cherry-picks favorable articles that seemingly lend credence to the biased dirt targeted at groups of marginalized people and perceived enemies -- in this case, liberals and the Democratic Party as a whole. Easy targets. Demonizing Democrats has been a class project in Republican Party dogma writ large for decades. Now, at this late juncture, they've gone full tilt boogie. Of course they have.
When it comes to equal-opportunity bashing of Democrats, notice that it's always the description never the substance; always the bad and the wrong, seldom a good word to be found; always the ugly warts, never the cure, never the beauty; all the scandals, never the many great accomplishments, never in the context of realpolitik and what's actually possible with all the give-and-take complexities in extreme human nature playing out in the stratosphere, when one party or the other holds the reins of ultimate earthly power -- you know, all the real-life consequences when it's the wrong party, people getting hurt, suffering, dying by the droves. When right-wing ideology pervades the land, we all suffer the dire consequences.
It's all the rave on the right, unchained nutballs with guns, some with Hitler mustaches, open fascism with classic Mussolini poses to boot. In direct opposition is a people's democracy in representative form, as the Constitution intended, imperfect but striving to be better. With average Joe Republican nowadays, though, it's never an honest, counterposing argument, never an in-depth analysis of their party's much greater sins, violating both the letter and the spirit of our laws and our basic principles with deliberate, despicable lies. The propagandists have kicked the dump truck into high gear at Karl Rove speeds, accusing their enemies of their own transgressions, robbing the best arguments and flipping the narrative, the oldest disinformation tactic in the book.
But most important is an imperative of blind (some would say willful) hypocrisy to "own the libs." Always the lie, never the truth. When pressed, a conspiracy wingnut's typical alternative, mostly unworkable "solutions" are so way out there that one has to wonder what happens to a human brain sucked into the "inter-tubes." Is it like getting spaghettified in a black hole? Scary stuff when considering that a good third of the citizens of the most advanced (hahahaha) nation on Earth, numbering in the tens of millions, are running buck-ass naked in the streets, dripping snot and pulling at wild hair, howling at the moon like zombies on steroids.
One could say that the firehose rhetoric is fast and furious on both sides, and that would be true. (Lol, I plead guilty as hell.) The burning question, though, is do mere words -- symbols of deeper realities -- reflect truth or lies? That's the soul-searching question we must pose to ourselves, which naturally is a most difficult thing to do in life. But failure is how we learn and grow, beyond all the rhetoric.
In effect, like it or not, we have a two-party system. So choose a side, the right side next time around! Make a real difference; change life for the better for everyone. Instead of just whimpering like lost puppies in the snow about all the injustice surrounding them, looking inside from the outside, come on in and be part of a party on the move, changing with every vote, growing in popularity, while the "other" party of liars, traitors, and fools sinks into mean-spirited irrelevance.
America can do this. We can kick big money out of our House, our Senate, our presidency, and all of our state governments, which is just as vital as the national politics if not more so. We have to gang up on the really bad guys. Too much is at stake not to show a united front in the face of this juggernaut of greed infecting both major parties, largely thanks to the really fckd Supreme Court decisions by corporatized wingnut justices, as Thom endlessly points out.
Politics is war by another name without the guns. When people give up on "the system," however screwed it may be, instead of trying to fix it, anarchy ensues, and that's when the guns come out. People lose faith in democracy at a fundamental level. Is that really where we're going at this point in history when the world is burning up both figuratively and literally? Don't we need some semblance of actual representative democracy to survive, to have any chance of saving ourselves from ourselves?
Evidently, these are fundamental questions that Republicans (mostly) have lost sight of -- the very threads holding the tapestry of our multi-racial/cultural/religious democracy together for god sake! Right now, that means joining the Democrats, hold your nose if you must, and simply out-vote the moneyed-up bastards stealing our wealth who are the true enemies of democracy.
(By the way, yes, the moneyed interests at the top of the pyramid do control the Republican Party nearly 100 percent, but the big guys also play both sides of the fence as insurance and own a sizable chunk of the Democratic Party too. Of course they do. Still, the rampant corruption of sell-out Democrats like Manchin and Sinema (among many) is certainly not 100 percent as casually purported, even though that might seem symmetrical in the usual, made-up, logical-fallacy, both-sides argument.)
This late in the game, there's not much time and opportunity left to mitigate the evils of human nature spreading around world? The clock is close to midnight on every front.