Sunday

Now that The Donald is finally, truly in the top 1%, after over a half century of trying everything to get there, Trump is indisputably a billionaire. Well, kind of, at least until Truth Social hits the pink sheets. And here I was naive enough to think that Trump’s foray into politics would actually hurt his business interests. 1-800-MAGA-MONEY is good. It works. Trump -& Co. took over the Republican Party in a stockholder’s rebellion, a hostile takeover worthy of the greatest corporate raiders in American history. As with ‘Truth Social,’ the man holding the most paper in the enterprise is Donald John Trump. Right wing libs (libertarians) won the political and philosophical battle over the ‘Rockefeller Republicans’ of the Party and now the board meeting for control of the entire country re-commences with the presidential election on November 7, 2024.

Twenty-five years ago in 1998, I was at the beach in Naples, Florida at the dear old Vanderbilt Inn, getting video of a spectacular sunset at the end of a perfect day. The interesting thing about video, especially back then, was the way it could uniquely capture reality. And a cool part about most video is that it also comes with audio if you do it right, which also captures reality in an inter-related way and together, AV is the most irrefutable proof that something happened. The reason I mention this is because I’ve been going through some old DV tapes floating around without labels on them and the first one I pulled out of the box was the sunset at the Vandy in Naples. While pointing the camera at the lustrous sunset, I let the camera roll, recording the scene for some awesome b-roll, but as the camera was soaking up all those beautiful sights, the gentle sound of the North Atlantic Ocean lapping the shores of the Gulf, you also hear a rando beachcomber who came up to me and started yakking. Wasn’t long before he was complaining about taxes and Bill Clinton and all the problems in the world (this was Florida, after all) and mercifully, he finally ended his rant. Just to say something to be agreeable and sociable, I said without hesitation, “Well, that’s why I’m glad I’m a Libertarian!” I actually said that. Out loud and on tape. Now, there’s no video of this declaration because I was behind the camera, but this conversation was recorded on DV, so I know it’s real. Embarrassing to say the least, I had long ago renounced any association with the Libertarian Party (BTW, is Bill Weld still running for president this year?) and I now believe that most libertarians are assholes and I’m sorry from the bottom of my heart that I counted myself among them. I’m not alone in my humiliation, the late (as in, ‘he ain’t comin’) Robert Nozick, (not to be confused with the late CNN commentator Bob Novak), Nozick was the most prominent intellectual voice on libertarianism in American history, author of Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), the libertarian answer to liberal Harvard philosopher John Rawls’ great, A Theory of Justice (1971). But in 1983, Harvard lecturer Nozick ended up dragging his landlord, Erich Segal, writer of Love Story and fellow Harvard man, before the Cambridge Rent Control Board. Talk about embarrassing!

After Erich Segal wrote the sappy screenplay for Love Story in 1969, Ryan O’Neil, (who died last year) and Allie McGraw (spoiler alert, she dies in the movie, but is still alive and well in real life), had the highest grossing three-day opening weekend of any film up to that time, ultimately pulling in $170 million at the box office (them’s 1970 dollars). I have to admit that I kind of liked the movie, set in my hometown, I saw it on the ABC Movie of the Week for free. The basic theme of the flick was that this ultra-rich Harvard guy falls in love with a poor Radcliffe girl and his daddy didn’t like it and she dies in the end. The tear-jerker’s famously stupid line about never having to say you’re sorry to someone you love is said twice in the film: once by Ali to Ryan when they were dating, and once at the end of the movie by Ryan to his ultra-rich, distant father played by Ray Milland, as they heal their relationship after the poor lady that caused all the trouble conveniently died. Segal partly based Ryan O’Neil’s character, Oliver, on future US Vice President Al Gore, but mostly on actor Tommy Lee Jones (who also had a cameo in the movie, his first screen credit), Segal got to know both of them when they were students in Cambridge together and years later, Segal said he also modeled the character after Watergate investigator and lawyer Terry Lenzner. Love Story‘s plot moved to New York City and its inevitable sappy ending, although not before a final crane shot shot of their old Cambridge neighborhood as they drove away from law school, McGraw’s character Jenny says, “It was a good apartment for $80 bucks” and Oliver replies, “Yeah, but our new garage will cost as much.”

That apartment in Cambridge that went for $80 a month in 1970 is now going for $3,400 a month, an increase of over 4000%. During the same time average hourly earnings that peaked in January, 1973 when the rate of pay ($4.03) of the average worker had the same purchasing power back then that $23.68 an hour has today, yet even that metric is skewed since 2000, where average weekly wages have risen a measly 3% (in real terms) among the bottom half of American workers. But among people in the top tenth of distribution, real wages have jumped a cumulative 16%, to $2,112 a week, nearly five times the weekly earnings of the bottom tenth (a paltry $426 a week).

US workers earned just 12 CENTS more in an hour in 2022 than they did in 1972 while adjusted for inflation, and as we all know, price levels lately have been off the charts like back in the ‘70s, further eroding the real wages of working Americans. According to CNBC, American workers are earning an average of $27.45 per hour, and back in 1972, the same workers made an average of $3.88 an hour, so in other words, real wages — wages in terms of the number of goods and services that can be bought — have essentially been flat for the past 50 years, relegating generations of working people to a life lived paycheck-to-paycheck.Today, every trip to a box store, restaurant or grocery store is a crapshoot, where today’s prices seem 2-5% more than last month’s. On top of that, the fact that we’re all paying more money for less product, a phenomenon known as ‘shrinkflation,’ with ‘Ol President Joe Biden calling out that malarkey recently, the Wall Street Journal retorts:

In case you missed the White House memo, the U.S. economy is fantastic. It’s never been better. Stock prices and jobs are booming. Inflation and mortgage rates are falling. Happy days are here again. Yet many Americans remain unhappy. What gives? One explanation could be that government measures of inflation don’t fully reflect rising prices. Sure, headline inflation is nearing the Federal Reserve’s 2% target, but these statistics can be deceiving. Shrinkflation, paying the same price for noticeably smaller quantities of the same thing, isn’t appearing only in the grocery aisle. It’s everywhere. Americans may be paying around the same prices as they did a year ago, but they are often getting less.

–WSJ 2/4/24

Corporations have never had it so good, so our 401K retirement plans are booming, but it seems like getting through the work week with enough left over to go to the movies on a Saturday night with friends or family is an increasingly difficult prospect.

Grocery prices were up a modest 1.2%, as the cost of some items, such as eggs, dropped back. But restaurant prices were 5.1% higher than in January 2023. In other areas, prices for car insurance jumped a hefty 20.5% over the year, while personal care was up 5.3%.

–BBC 2/13/24

Libertarian Nozick, along with fellow pioneer Murray Rothbard in the 1980s, won the hearts and the money of future millionaires with a passion for Frank Hyneman Knight and Ludwig Von Mises’ limited, low taxation model of libertarian economics known as the ‘Austrian School,’ where greed is good, in a nutshell. But what attracted me the most about libertarianism, especially being draft age, was from the viewpoint of a limited military, encouraging free trade, open borders and ringing cash registers. Predictably, the other decent parts of the libertarian platform such as the freedom of thought and the rights of individuals were eventually discarded, as selfishness and greed became the core ethic of the American Libertarian movement, embodied by pretty much any billionaire you can name (Warren Buffett excluded) up to the newly minted (kinda) billionaire Donald J. Trump, as he bounces from bankruptcy to bankruptcy, lawsuit to lawsuit and appeal to appeal, stiffing creditors and playing the system like a harp all the way to cashing in on his most successful brand with the Office of President of the United States in his portfolio.

I knew nothing of all this in 1993 when I audited the Harvard course “Philosophy 192: Thinking About Thinking: Law, Science and Philosophy” with Professor of Law Alan Dershowitz, Professor of Geology Stephen Jay Gould and Professor of Philosophy Robert Nozick. I was a wannabe libertarian, figuring out what I believed in, intrigued with the idea that greed is good. I mean, shit, slap an ‘OK’ stamp on being greedy, and hell, that one’s easy! ‘Greed Works!’ as Michael Douglas’ iconic character Gordon Gekko slickly presented in Oliver Stone’s great film, Wall Street (1987). Nozick, Mises, the Chicago School and Rothbard impressed the hell out of President Ronald Reagan’s man on the economy, Milt Friedman, the true founder of the Chicago School back in those days, who once summed up a moral equation with this null set:

Do corporate executives, provided they stay within the law, have responsibilities in their business activities other than to make as much money for their stockholders as possible? And my answer to that is, no, they do not.

– Milton Friedman

The economic distress of the 1970s ushered in the ‘Me Generation’ of the ‘80s, where newly-minted libertarians fell in love with ‘Ol Milt Friedman and the economic policy enacted by the Reagan administration following his election in 1980. Today, bad-boy libertarian Murray Rothbard’s brand of wide open politics (hoping without the part about being able to sell children) is able to get a real-world test right now in the fair country of Argentina, where Elvis impersonator and ‘anarcho-libertarian’ (and Murray Rothbard lovin’) Javier Milei was elected president by the biggest electoral landslide (55%) since democracy was re-introduced to Argentina way back in… 1983. He was recently seen with Elon Musk discussing things. Argentina is the second-largest country in Latin America, home to almost 50 million people and will be a fine test-case for far right libertarian policies working out in the real world. Before 1983, Argentina was primarily known for military dictatorships and the most desirable retirement spot for German Nazis after WWII, Milei was swept to power after Argentina’s broken and corrupt economy made life miserable for most of the Argentinian people for the past 10 years.

Milei’s rise to fame as a TV show host specializing in economics (think of FOX-TV’s unfunny comedian Greg Gutman in America as a possible comparison, only Milei looks and acts much more insane), his enormous sideburns are the result of an image consultant who advised that he would make a bigger impression if he looked like Elvis Presley circa 1975, this bizarre look has obviously won the hearts and minds of Argentina’s beautiful people, however his bizarre politics are taking a bit longer to grow on the Argentines because since his election, after he devaluated the currency by half, his next agenda item resulted in a mass protest which shut down the country. Remember that Argentina was one of the most successful Latin American countries at the turn of the (last) century, following a wave of immigration which transformed Argentina into an economic powerhouse, the seventh largest economy in the world, unfortunately, Argentina would remain neutral in WWI and in 1930, before José Uriburu and his military coup started the slow decline of Argentina, which then stupidly remained neutral in WWII (rejected by the US), a 1943 military coup led by Arturo Rawson toppled the democratically-elected government of Ramón Castillo, but under pressure from the US, Argentina belatedly declared war on the Axis Powers a measly month before the Big One ended, Argentina then fell to among the fifteen richest countries in the world until the 1950s, then after a steady economic and social decline pushed the country back down into poverty and underdevelopment following the election of Colonel Juan Perón in 1946, the economy began to decline further due in part to mismanagement of government expenditures and an ill advised protectionism scheme.

Perón ruled with an iron fist and won reelection in 1951 and everything looked good for Argentina (unless you were a member of the the middle-class, a university student, professor or a member of a labor union), but then Eva ‘Evita’ Peron died of cancer in 1952 and the curtain would come down on the Perón administration in 1955 as the economy continued to tank and Perón lost all the popular support that Evita had won. On June 16, 1955, thirty aircraft of the Argentine Navy bombed and strafed a rally in his honor, the first bomb dropped on a trolley car packed with children, killing everyone on board and over 300 Argentine citizens died in the massacre. That same night, Peronist crowds burned eight churches and two basilicas in revenge for the Catholic Church’s support of the coup. In September of ‘55, Argentine armed forces overthrew Perón and started a military dictatorship that lasted until the ‘58 Argentinian Presidential Elections, won by Arturo Frondizi, followed by Arturo Illia, who won the presidency after phony elections that were controlled by the military in 1963, and predictably after that, Frondizi was jailed. Rumors of another impending military coup increased in early ‘66 as Illia’s control over his government grew shaky and the upcoming coup was openly discussed – including logistical plans and potential attack dates in the Argentine media, which exaggerated the appearance of social disorder. On June 28, 1966, a another military coup took place amid the complete indifference of Argentine citizens, when the military forced Illia to abandon the presidency and the new junta took power the following day, General Juan Onganía taking the office of the presidency this time.

A dictator from the old school, Onganía forged a new political and social order for Argentina; a typical strongman, Onganía was an authoritarian-bureaucrat opposed to democracy, relying heavily on censorship and political repression, which then led the country into the wild violence of the 1970s and Argentina’s final decline as a nation into an embattled, third-world country. Onganía set a wage freeze (amid 30% inflation and a 40% currency devaluation), which ultimately broke the Argentine economy and with his unpopularity increasing daily, in 1969, a military faction led by Alejandro Lanusse demanded Onganía resign. When Onganía refused, he was toppled in another military coup led by Lanusse, who assumed the presidency under the threat of more guerrilla violence and widespread popular discontent, by then the continuity of the military government became almost impossible to sustain and Lanusse evaluated the situation smartly and decreed a political solution that allowed for a transition back towards democracy, but like a bad coin, ‘Ol Juan Perón returned to Argentina on June 20, 1973, his plane redirected to a military airport because of fighting between armed factions that had massed to greet him at Buenos Aires’s main airport, the military junta reluctantly resigned to allow Juan Perón to return home and from 1974 to 1983, the Argentine ‘Dirty War’ would then claim over 30,000 dead at the hands of military and security forces and the death squads (AAA) hunting down political dissidents and anyone associated with leftists as they tortured them and ‘disappeared’ them, usually throwing them into the Atlantic Ocean from military planes on death flights (vuelos de la muerte). The pregnant women detainees were usually kept in jail until they gave birth, then tortured and killed and their infants were given up for inside adoption to families with close ties to the military. In 1977, the ‘Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo,’ mothers and grandmothers of the ‘disappeared’ of the dictatorship, stood vigil in the capital of the dictatorship with the hope of finding these children born into captivity during the Dirty War and also to determine the guilt of the perpetrators in these crimes against humanity. Nearly 500 children are estimated to have been illegally given up for adoption in Argentina since 1975 and over 120 cases have so far been positively confirmed by DNA tests. Of course one, last military coup on March 24, 1976 remained in power until the final return to democracy in 1983, this last coup planned and executed as part of Operation Condor, a repressive and secret coordination between Latin American countries funded and promoted by the US military.

One of the strongest platforms of the old libertarian party, aside from the greed is good economics, was the rejection of any sort of dictatorial rule in favor of a market politics which finds better things to do with their money. The example of Russia, badly damaged due to the cost of war and sanctions, added to by the misery of 50,000 war dead, with hope, Milei in Argentina, Biden in America, and yes, possibly (sort of) billionaire Trump could be there again and I pray that we have all learned the lesson to make money and not war.

April 17, 2024
Carl Holt

I started to write a post about artificial intelligence but quickly lost interest, so I shelved the topic until Skynet™ goes public, so instead of writing about something I really don’t give a shit about (when the Singularity happens, if I die, we’ll all be dead anyway) I decided to write about a subject that really does interest me: Donald Trump getting indicted (again)! It speaks to the dystopian times we’re in that a recent Reuters headline (Disinformations ‘R’ Us) reads: “Indictment could propel Trump closer to 2024 Republican nomination.” Only in today’s Republican Party can the front-running candidate actually benefit from the prospect of getting convicted of sedition, proof positive that there’s no such thing as bad news in new media, but there is, quite simply, this question for Republicans: do you believe the former president* was justified in trying to stay in office, despite the fact that he clearly lost the election? My guess is the answer will be a blank stare and a statement to the effect of, “The Prosecutor is a weak little bitch for the Democrats” (actual quote from web-toed Republican Marge Taylor Green).

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As the Ukraine-Russia War escalates with a long-awaited counteroffensive by Ukraine and news that the US will finally begin sending fighter jets as part of the Ukraine Democracy Defense Lend-Lease Act of 2022, it’s fitting and appropriate to remind ourselves of the ‘fireside chat’ Franklin Delano Roosevelt delivered on May 27, 1941, in response to the Axis powers goals of “world domination,” as he called it, when President Roosevelt announced a state of “unlimited national emergency.” His address to the nation by radio followed a formal declaration for “Military, naval, air and civilian defenses [to] be put on the basis of readiness to repel any and all acts or threats of aggression directed toward any part of the Western Hemisphere.”

The deadly facts of war compel Nations, for simple self-preservation, to make stern choices. It does not make sense, for instance, to say, “I believe in the defense of all the Western Hemisphere,” and in the next breath to say, “I will not fight for that defense until the enemy has landed on our shores.” If we believe in the independence and the integrity of the Americas, we must be willing to fight, to fight to defend them just as much as we would to fight for the safety of our own homes. It is time for us to realize that the safety of American homes even in the center of this our own country has a very definite relationship to the continued safety of homes in Nova Scotia or Trinidad or Brazil. 
Our national policy today, therefore, is this:

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The day before Elon Musk took the wheel of Twitter, after he carried that effing sink into Twitter HQ (to throw at people, I suppose?), his first viral, lame stunt as owner was the last straw that caused me to close my Twitter account that I’ve held since 2009 because I couldn’t stomach watching Musk destroy the social media platform I’d begrudgingly grown to love. Looking over the news reports of what Musk has wrought in just two short weeks, I feel seen. Now don’t get me wrong, I think Tesla vehicles are fine automobiles, and I support electric mobility and think the Tesla car model designs are sleek and efficient people movers, but I don’t support their failing, idiotic automatic driver lunacy, yet I got no problem with the cars. I wouldn’t buy a Muskmobile, mind you (check out the sweet, new e-BMW i7!) because I just can’t stand their insufferable blowhard of a CEO and ‘know-it-all genius’ owner.

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I’ve written about Fascism and Nazis a lot on this here blog through the years (now over a decade) and never in my life, at least since the darkest Nixon years, has the subject been so damned timely. Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans are (correctly) called out as semi-fascists by President Biden while Vladimir Putin in Russia makes the claim that Ukrainians are fascists, after Poots invades the peaceful European country in veritable Hitleresque-style. In America, Nazis and Fascists are without question derided as lunatics and losers, most hilariously depicted by Hollywood directors, with financing from international Jewish bankers I hear, such as Charlie Chaplin’s first talkie, The Great Dictator (1940) the great director (and proud WWII veteran) Mel Brooks in the Producers (1967) or director John Landis in the great comedy The Blues Brothers (1980) where “Springtime for Hitler” and “I hate Illinois Nazis” were funny jokes because fascists usually are a joke. Of course, the best way to attack a hateful ideology is with derision and satire and the cultural war against the Nazis was ultimately won by comedians and humorists while the actual war was won by our hardcore Allied killers, some no less hateful than the Nazis to be honest, but they were on our side.

Few remember a more polarized and toxic time in American politics, where even Watergate and the Vietnam War are being re-examined as ‘the good old days’ compared to today’s gloomy political landscape. It’s no surprise that the recent ‘leak’ of Justice Alito’s Roe v. Wade draft reversal has Margaret Atwood getting totally worked up again, she the great mind who conjured The Handmaid’s Tale was quoted recently saying, “Enforced childbirth is slavery” in regard to the long established right here in America. As a Canadian, Atwood should well remember that her country was the terminus of the Underground Railroad before the Civil War and I’d hope she’d use more caution with any comparison of these two separate and distinct rights. It follows statements in the press and Tweets comparing anyone who we disagree with to Hitler and the Nazis and that’s irresponsible hyperbole in the gravest sense and the Auschwitz Holocaust Museum has had to make that particular point a lot recently. This plea has fallen on deaf ears in MAGA-ville of course, where Nazi flags were unfurled in Disneyworld recently by disciples of the stupidest Governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, because Disney supports gay, lesbian and transgendered folks and these Nazi flag-waving Floridians couldn’t be more vile and disgusting human beings if they tried. So the notions portrayed in The Handmade’s Tale are horrific indeed, however there’s simply no comparison with slavery to abortion. Perhaps the American institution of slavery prior to the Civil War could legitimately be compared to Nazism because both institutions were created by the utmost evil ever perpetrated on the human race. Atwood’s most recent comments about her novel and the reality we all face were more measured and thoughtful:

83 years ago, the Winter War began, where Joseph Stalin had been granted Finland in a ‘quid-pro-quo’ with Adolph Hitler, prior to the Barbarossa offensive, a dazed and confused Russia (referred to in international circles at the time as the ‘Soviet Union’) were bloodied and beaten after just three months of battle, where Russia suffered 134,000 to 138,000 dead or missing with estimates as high as 168,000 by the Russian State Military Archive in this early conflict of WWII and the following Continuation War pushed the numbers far higher for both sides.

On June 4, 1940, Winston Churchill gave the greatest speech of the 20th Century, his ‘darkest hour’ speech which girded the British people for the travails that were to come to the ancient nation. Hitler had already invaded Poland and accordingly, but not expected by all, the British government had declared war on Nazi Germany but this ‘phony war’ as it was described was made very real after the British Expeditionary Force was stranded on a beachhead in Dunkirk after Germany invaded and defeated France, but miraculously the British Army evacuated as Churchill exclaimed, these hard and heavy tidings revealed that wars were not won by evacuation, this feat of escape after a lost battle, but he went on to declare exactly how the British people would go on to win the war: “We shall fight on the beaches…” and asserted:

[W]e shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.

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I’ll bet you don’t know who Jackie Gareau is, but some might know she was the real women’s winner of the 1980 Boston Marathon and she’s still running strong today, but I’ll bet you definitely know who Rosie Ruiz is. I should say was, because unfortunately she died in 2019 of cancer at the age of 66 and if anything, Ms. Ruiz was a true fighter. She went to the grave still claiming that she actually won that ’80 Boston Marathon and who can argue with that now? Of course, to ‘pull a Rosie Ruiz’ is shorthand for being a fraud and a cheater but Rosie made bald-faced lying seem almost funny. Bill Rodgers, the greatest American men’s marathoner and the men’s winner back in ‘80 is also still running strong today at 74 years old, but when he took one look at the women’s ‘winner’ Ruiz and her meaty legs and fake sweat, he immediately smelled a rat before anyone else had a clue that Rosie was a phony. Her time would have been the fastest female time in Boston Marathon history and after he asked Rosie what her splits were, she didn’t even know what the hell ‘splits’ even meant. He told the director of the Boston Athletic Association of his suspicions just before the awards ceremony, but no one believed him and shortly after that, Massachusetts Governor Ed King crowned Rosie Ruiz the women’s champion. Bill Rodgers was chagrined.

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