Fearmongering Propaganda Is Immensely Profitable--and Distracting

If you want to stop being played as a chump, turn off the CNN/MSM and disengage from the self-referential social media distraction.

Let's start by asking: if Trump had lost and his supporters had angrily taken to the streets, destroying private property and threatening police officers while proclaiming "not my president," would the mainstream media have characterized the rioters differently than it has the pro-Clinton rioters?

Any fair-minded observer knows the answer is yes: the CNN/MSM would have lambasted the "rioting deplorables" as "what's wrong with America."

Substitution is a useful tool to expose bias. How come the CNN/mainstream corporate media isn't declaring the pro-Clinton rioters "deplorables"?

This tells us something else is going on here. I want to explain what's really going on, but first we need to run a simple experiment:

Turn off CNN, PBS, CBS et al., your Twitter and Facebook feeds, etc. for seven days, and live solely in the media-free real world for a week. If you're truly interested in understanding what's really going on in America, then come back in a week and read the rest of the essay.

Have you pulled out the CNN/MSM/social media fearmongering/propaganda dripline for a few days? This is a necessary step, as we shall soon see.

Everyone who is consuming CNN/MSM/ self-referential social media every waking hour is being played as chumps. Start by asking yourself: cui bono--to whose benefit? Who is benefiting from the ceaseless fearmongering of the CNN/social-media-parroting mainstream corporate media?

(Longtime readers know I start any analysis by asking cui bono.)

Two Power Elites have benefited enormously from the ceaseless media fearmongering: the owners of the corporate media spewing the fearmongering, and the Neoliberal camp of the Ruling Elite.

The hysterical tone of the fearmongering serves the agenda of the Neoliberals, who are desperate to maintain their grip on power.

As I have endeavored to explain over the past few years, America's Deep State no longer enjoys a monolithic unity of world-view and narrative. The Deep State has fragmented into two conflicted camps: the Neonconservatives, who espouse the globalist, interventionist foreign policy manifestation of Neoliberalism, and a smaller, more forward-looking camp that understands Neoliberalism is actively undermining our national security and our core national interests.

This split in the Deep State extends into the entire Ruling Elite. Thus we have the currently dominant globalist Neoliberal camp personified by the Clintons, the Corporatocracy that has funded them, the clubby Washington Elites (Demopublicans) and the Neocon camp of the Deep State.

The opposing camp of Elite "outsiders" is viewed as the enemy which threatens the wealth and power of the self-serving Neoliberal Elites. Longtime readers have seen many accounts here over the years that explain the key dynamic of Elite fragmentation: as self-serving personal aggrandizement poisons the values of public service, the Elite splinters into a parasitic, predatory self-serving majority and an Elite minority that sees the inevitable dissolution of the empire should the self-serving few continue their predation of the many.

Here are a few of the many essays I've posted on this key dynamic. Please read a few of these for context if you missed them the first time around:

Following in Ancient Rome's Footsteps: Moral Decay, Rising Wealth Inequality(September 30, 2015)

The Real Trouble Begins When Rising Inequality Splinters the Elites (October 22, 2015)

How The Seeds Of Revolution Take Root: the Middle Class Loses Upward Mobility(February 26, 2016)

When the Aristocracy Leaves the Commoners in the Dust, The Empire Is Doomed(October 8, 2015)

When Did Our Elites Become Self-Serving Parasites? (October 4, 2016)

The Lesson of Empires: Once Privilege Limits Social Mobility, Collapse Is Inevitable(April 18, 2016)

How Empires Fall (April 17, 2013)

Collapse, Part 2: The Nine Dynamics of Decay (June 23, 2015)

Voting With Your Feet (August 14, 2015)

Elite fragmentation is the core dynamic in play in America. The Neoliberal class, personified by the Clintons and the rest of the incestuous Washington Elite (Demopublicans), has used the self-serving corporate media to whip up a frenzy of hysteria that is ultimately aimed at the Elite camp that opposes their self-aggrandizement at the expense of the nation.

This war within America's Power Elite is for all the marbles. This explains the absurd urgency of the CNN/MSM fearmongering propaganda.

Let's deconstruct one of the many hysterical claims of the CNN/MSM: Trump's victory is a coup d'etat. This absurd claim is akin to "the Martians are coming!" Right out of the gate, it is a clueless mis-use of the term coup d'etat. If you actually want to understand the term, as opposed to using it to whip up hysteria that profits the Corporate owners of CNN/MSM, then start by reading the 1968 classic Coup d'État: A Practical Handbook by Edward Luttwak, and then move on to The Quiet Coupby Simon Johnson (2010).

The financial coup d'etat occurred in the presidency of Democrat Bill Clinton, when the Glass-Steagall Act was repealed, freeing the predatory financial elites to plunder the nation.

Presidents G.W. Bush and Obama institutionalized the coup by bailing out the banks post-2008.

So who does all the fearmongering benefit? The CNN/MSM, which profited immensely, and the Neoliberal Elite, which distracted the populace from the fatal consequences of its dominance.

The mainstream media in America is a corporate-owned media, or in the case of PBS, corporate-funded via sponsorships. Advertising rates are set by the size of the audience and the number of hours they consume the broadcast/feed.

The MSM's fearmongering propaganda greatly expanded the number of eyeballs glued to their product and increased the duration of consumers' time spent online. This increase in audience/duration has been immensely profitable to the corporate media, which has relied on fearmongering to drive audience since 9/11.

Consider this email from correspondent M.K. on his family's media consumption:

"I was struck awake this morning at 4 am with the realization that the left tried to win by selling fear. I don't mean this in a hyperbolic way... I mean they purposefully, willfully planned to sell fear as a tool to get the vote out. At first I didn't see the connection, but my subconscious did...

I'm a Agorist/Voluntarist and don't vote, because I don't wish to consent to my own enslavement... you know the drill. On the day of voting my father (76) texted me to urge me to vote, because "my children's future was at stake". This seemed odd to me, because it had never happened before and he followed up with some more fearful statement.

The day after the election, my daughter, who tends to also be level headed, texted me the following: "Uh oh... what does this mean for our country?". I tried to calm them both, but they were exceedingly fearful.

I watched in amazement at the "cry ins", demonstrations other outward pouring of sadness, hate and fear. Thus, I awoke and realized that both my father and daughter watch CNN. I really do believe that they were programmed.... This was planned and executed exceedingly well.

As you realize, "fear is the enemy" or "fear is the opposite of love". Pick your quote, but it's a powerful tool and it has been used to club my loved ones."

We can summarize the fanning of mass hysteria thusly: hyper-connectedness to a self-referential corporate/elite-controlled media produces a fear-based mass hysteria.

This fear-based mass hysteria is the perfect mechanism to distract a populace from the reality of a self-serving Elite that profits from their serfdom. Please glance at these four charts, which tell a simple but profound truth:

Productivity has risen for 36 years, but the gains from that massive increase in wealth has been captured by the few at the top of the wealth/power pyramid.If you want to understand who benefited from the CNN/MSM fearmongering propaganda distraction, study these four charts.

The income of the bottom 95% has stagnated while productivity/wealth soared.

The gains flowed to the top .1% in wealth and the top 5% in income:

The self-serving Neoliberal Elite's CNN/mainstream media did a magnificent job of profiting from fearmongering while distracting the serfs from their immiseration. If you want to stop being played as a chump, turn off the CNN/MSM and disengage from the self-referential social media distraction.


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My new book is #8 on Kindle short reads -> politics and social science: Why Our Status Quo Failed and Is Beyond Reform ($3.95 Kindle ebook, $8.95 print edition) For more, please visit the book's website.

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Seven Suggestions for President-Elect Trump

President-Elect Trump, more policy tweaks, more promises of more government free money and more symbolic gestures won't fix anything.

Though I am just another powerless peon, I'd like to offer seven suggestions to President-Elect Trump and his transition team:

1. Make sure your administration is as diverse as America. No single act will give your enemies more ammo than populating your cabinet and administration with the Usual Suspects: Caucasian elites from Ivy League universities. These privileged "experts" have bankrupted the nation financially, morally and spiritually while enriching themselves and their privileged cronies.

Populate your cabinet and administration with entrepreneurially minded, honest, hard working, forward-looking people who just happen to be African-American, Hispanic-American, Asian-American, female, gay, mixed-race, etc.

Having a cabinet that reflects the diversity of America (or just the diversity of New York City or Los Angeles County, for goodness sakes) will send a powerful message not just to the nation but to the world: America's diversity is America's strength.

If you want an example of how to do this, follow in the footsteps of the U.S. military. Yes, it's imperfect, but for a large-scale voluntary institution, it's done a lot better than most to promote a diverse spectrum of Americans.

2. Wage total war on regulatory capture and bureaucratic fiefdoms. Everyone knows federal regulations are completely out of control on several fronts. Yes, there is a need for regulations to protect the nation's air, water and resources from despoliation, its labor force from exploitation, its food supply from unhealthy additives and foreign-sourced toxic products, and so on. These safeguard regulations should be rigorously enforced.

But K Street lobbyists and the Corporatocracy they represent have mastered the art of regulatory capture: digging regulatory moats so deep and so wide that competition cannot possibly afford to meet the regulatory burdens imposed by the central state.

This is how we've ended up with a high-cost, ineffective, inefficient state-cartel economy.

The only way to tackle this issue is retire/sunset ALL federal regulations every few years, and require a constant streamlining to limit the number of regulations, lower the cost of compliance and ensure regulations are clearly composed in plain English.

The only way to root out corruption, collusion and regulatory capture is to require total transparency and open competition in all government functions.

3. Accredit the student, not the school/college. America's education system is unaffordable and failing for one simple reason: we accredit the school/college, not the student's knowledge/skill. The inevitable result of this is a cartel of self-serving fiefdoms with soaring costs which routinely graduates students who have learned essentially zero of productive value in the emerging economy.

I have described this in my book The Nearly Free University and the Emerging Economy: The Revolution in Higher Education.

By accrediting the student's knowledge/skill, we would be testing and accrediting what actually matters. By eliminating the central-planning accreditation racket of schools/colleges, we would take away the power of this cartel to relentlessly strip-mine taxpayers and students while providing ineffectual near-zero-market-value education.

The only way to make America great again is to increase productivity via distributing higher level skills across the entire populace. The current education complex has failed and the only way to truly reform it is to accredit the student, not the school/college.

4. Promote decentralized, bottoms-up localized solutions rather than top-down centralized programs. As I discussed in Now That the Presidential-Election Side Show Is Finally Ending...., the current mode of production is a legacy of World War II, when the federal government took complete centralized control of the U.S. economy and society.

The war's success led to the fatal assumption that the solution to every problem was to aggregate more power in centralized bureaucracies.

What worked in the cartel-state economy of 1945 is now failing, with catastrophic consequences. Decentralized transparent networks that share a wealth of solutions and offer localized participation are not only more cost-effective, they enable the blossoming of 10,000 solutions rather than smother the economy with a bloated centralized system that imposes crushing costs on the nation (think ObamaCare, which burdens healthcare with thousands of pages of costly regulatory requirements) while squelching local solutions.

America is an increasingly diverse nation. What sort of insanity is it to reckon that one centralized bureaucracy can come up a single system that works well for every community and household?

Replace the mindset that the "solution" must be a centralized, top-down, bloated, unaffordable bureaucracy with the understanding that centralized, top-down, bloated, unaffordable bureaucracies are the problem, not the solution.

5. Lower the corporate income tax rate to a flat 5% for all domestic corporations. An incredible amount of precious capital is squandered on tax avoidance schemes, and incredible sums of precious capital are being held overseas to avoid the absurdly perverse 35% U.S. corporate tax rate.

This perverse set of incentives costs the nation, not just corporations. To those who wish to impose high taxes on all those evil greedy corporations--you can't do it. There will always be loopholes overseas.

Make it difficult to make a profit and do business here, and business and profits will go elsewhere--and so will the jobs. Not liking this reality won't change it.

6. Increase the security of America's work force and households by encouraging entrepreneurism and food/ energy/ manufacturing security in the local community economy. It's essential that you hire people who understand the Digital-Industrial Revolution that is remaking the global economy, whether we like it or not. We all have daily experience of how this new mode of production is disrupting one sector of the old mode of production after another.

We as a nation have to learn to do more with less--more productivity, more community-based security, more wealth that is earned by skilled labor and entrepreneurism, more broadly distributed ownership of wealth-producing assets, while consuming less energy and less capital and reducing the cost burdens imposed by self-serving fiefdoms, pay-to-play corruption/collusion and centralized sclerosis.

I lay out how to do this systemically in my book A Radically Beneficial World: Automation, Technology and Creating Jobs for All and on an individual/household basis in Get a Job, Build a Real Career and Defy a Bewildering Economy.

7. Dismantle the corrosive sense of entitlement that has infected the nation. Obsessing over illusory "rights" and "what we were promised" leads to a politics of resentment and a corollary obsession with get-rich-quick schemes and avoiding the dirty work of actually building wealth rather than skimming and scamming asset bubbles.

The way to dismantle the dead-end ideology of entitlement is to promote earning, not getting, and learning real, practical, marketable skills that have value in the emerging economy.

Nobody owes anyone anything but the right to pursue happiness and the civil liberties stated in the Bill of Rights. To survive, much less prosper, we need a society and economy based on accountability and the willingness to do the dirty work, the nitty-gritty work, of making sure goods and services actually work, and to reward those doing the hard work with security and opportunities to take ownership of the engines of wealth creation.

President-Elect Trump, more policy tweaks, more promises of more government free money and more symbolic gestures won't fix anything. You must dig out the rot in our system of governance, destroy needless and burdensome state-cartel-imposed costs and encourage transparency, competition, accountability and locally based community-economy solutions.

Thanks to Chad D. and Cindy F. for suggesting that I draw up a list of recommendations for the President-Elect.


Join me in seeking solutions by becoming a $1/month patron of my work via patreon.com.

My new book is #8 on Kindle short reads -> politics and social science: Why Our Status Quo Failed and Is Beyond Reform ($3.95 Kindle ebook, $8.95 print edition) For more, please visit the book's website.

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Who Lost: A Biased Media, Pundits, Pollsters, Political Parties, Warmongers, the Corporatocracy, Pay-to-Play Grifters, Neoliberals

Fake Progressives are perfectly fine with soaring inequality and corrupt governance, as long as everyone's public utterances are politically correct.

Sometimes who lost is more important than who won. Let's review who lost the election:

1. Let's start with the Corporatocracy, which expected to once again wield unlimited influence by funding political campaigns with millions of dollars in contributions and speaking fees.

2. A biased mainstream media. My mom-in-law was watching CBS all night, so that's what we watched. All the pundits/anchors spoke in the hushed tones of a funeral. For two hours, the only images of campaign workers shown were the sad faces of Clinton supporters; not one image of jubilant Trump supporters was broadcast until Trump gave his acceptance speech.

When one of the talking heads noted that Hillary never generated the enthusiasm of the Sanders or Trump campaigns, his comment was followed by a stony silence. That he had given voice to a self-evident truth was not welcome.

3. Mainstream punditry: they got it wrong from the start and remained close-minded and arrogant in their postured superiority.

The punditry applied a double standard to Trump and Hillary. Trump's speeches and ethically questionable history were judged by moral standards, and he was declared unfit.

Hillary's actions, on the other hand, were judged by strictly legalistic standards: well, you can't indict her, so she's fit for office.

Dear punditry: you can't use double standards to promote your biases and retain any shred of credibility.

4. Pollsters. Having rigged the polls via over-sampling and under-sampling, they were laughably wrong. Here is a typical headline from election night, from the New York Times: Trump Takes Florida, Closing In on a Stunning Upset.

Only the pollsters and the MSM were stunned.

5. Political parties. As my friend G.F.B. observed, both parties ran 20th century campaigns in the 21st century. Both parties lost for this reason; both are hopelessly out of touch with a rapidly changing America.

Democrats upset with losing should look at their party's system of Super-Delegates that squelched Bernie Sander's bid.

6. Warmongers. Many Americans are sick and tired of interventionist, globalist warmongering. The only possible way they could register their opposition to warmongering was to vote for Trump.

7. Pay-to-Play Grifters. Let the investigations, indictments, prosecutions and convictions begin as soon as Trump is sworn in.

8. Neoliberals. Globalization boils down to freeing mobile capital to rove the globe for opportunities to strip-mine cheap resources, assets and labor and then move on, leaving ruined communities behind.

9. Bonus loser: Fake Progressives. Fake Progressives are perfectly fine with soaring inequality and corrupt governance, as long as everyone's public utterances are politically correct. So the oppressor class is acceptable as long as they speak respectfully while stepping on your neck.

Real Progressives see jobs and community as solutions, not welfare and central planning. Real Progressives see the eradication of warmongering Imperial pretensions and corrupt pay-to-play grifting as the essential projects of liberty and democracy.


Join me in seeking solutions by becoming a $1/month patron of my work via patreon.com.

My new book is #8 on Kindle short reads -> politics and social science: Why Our Status Quo Failed and Is Beyond Reform ($3.95 Kindle ebook, $8.95 print edition) For more, please visit the book's website.

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The Source of our Rage: The Ruling Elite Is Protected from the Consequences of its Dominance

Please read my election note at the end of the essay.

There are many sources of rage: injustice, the destruction of truth, powerlessness. But if we had to identify the one key source of non-elite rage that cuts across all age, ethnicity, gender and regional boundaries, it is this: The Ruling Elite is protected from the destructive consequences of its predatory dominance.

We see this reality across the entire political, social and economic landscape.

If I had to pick one chart that illustrates the widening divide between the Ruling Elite and the non-elites, it is this chart of wages as a share of the nation's output (GDP): 46 years of relentless decline, interrupted by gushing fountains of credit and asset bubbles that enriched the few while leaving the economic landscape of the many in ruins.

The Ruling Elite once had an obligation to uphold the social contract as a responsibility that came with their vast privilege, power and wealth (i.e. noblesse oblige).

America's Ruling Elite has transmogrified into an incestuous self-serving few unapologetically plundering the many. In their hubris-soaked arrogance, their right to rule is unquestioningly based on their moral and intellectual superiority to "the little people" they loot with abandon.

Rather than feel a responsibility to the nation, America's Elite views the status quo as a free pass to self-aggrandizement.

Much has changed in America in the past 46 years. Not only have wages and salaries declined as a share of "economic growth," but the wealth that has been generated has flowed to the top of the wealth/power pyramid (see chart below).

Social mobility has also declined drastically: Restoring America’s Economic Mobility, as has trust in government and key institutions.

As Frank Buckley, the author of The Way Back: Restoring the Promise of Americaobserved:

"In a corrupt country, trust is a rare commodity. That’s America today. Only 19 percent of Americans say they trust the government most of the time, down from 73 percent in 1958 according to the Pew Research Center."

The top .01% has seen its share of the household wealth triple from 7% to 22% in the past four decades, while the share of the nation's wealth owned by the bottom 90% has plummeted from 36% to 23%.

As I described in America's Ruling Elite Has Failed and Deserves to Be Fired and Now That the Presidential-Election Side Show Is Finally Ending...., the economy is rapidly undergoing structural changes that tend to reward the top 5% class of technocrats and managers and the top .1% with millions in mobile capital, while leaving the bottom 95% in the dust.

Rather than address this rising inequality directly and honestly, the Ruling Elite has parroted propaganda and policies that protect their gains while obfuscating the reality that most American households have been losing ground for decades, a decline that has been masked by replacing real income with rising debt.

The ceaseless parroting of the Ruling Elite and the Mainstream Media that prosperity has been rising for everyone is nothing less than the destruction of truth. This propaganda has one purpose: to mask the inequality and injustice built into the American status quo.

The rapid concentration of wealth has also concentrated political power in the hands of a few who seamlessly combine public and private modes of power.

This wealth and power protects the Ruling Elite from the perverse consequences of their dominance. Their precious offspring rarely serve at the point of the American military's spear, they never lose their jobs or income when corporations shift production (and R&D, etc.) overseas, and they are never replaced with illegal immigrants paid under the table.

Rather, the Ruling Elite is pleased to pay immigrants a pittance to care for their children, clean their luxe homes, walk their dogs, etc.

This is why we're enraged: we bear the consequences of the Ruling Elite's dominance. The system is rigged to benefit the few, who use their wealth and power to protect themselves from the destructive consequences of their self-serving dominance.

This rage is as yet inchoate, sensed but not yet understood as the inevitable result of a broken system and a predatory Elite that exploits the system to maximize their private gain by any means available.

ELECTION NOTE: As I write this Tuesday evening, it appears Donald Trump may win the presidency. For those who cannot understand how anyone could possibly vote for Trump, please read the above essay again and ponder what people were voting against by voting for Trump.

They may well have been voting against the corrupt, self-serving status quo rather than voting for the individual Donald Trump.

There are very few opportunities for powerless non-elites to register their disapproval of the nation's Ruling Elite and the corrupt status quo. Voting for an outsider in a national election is one such rare opportunity.

As I noted in October, The Ruling Elite Has Lost the Consent of the Governed (October 20, 2016).

If you still don't understand how Trump could win, please read the above essay as many times as is necessary for you to get it: the status quo of corrupt self-serving insiders generates injustice and inequality as its only possible output.


Join me in seeking solutions by becoming a $1/month patron of my work via patreon.com.

My new book is #8 on Kindle short reads -> politics and social science: Why Our Status Quo Failed and Is Beyond Reform ($3.95 Kindle ebook, $8.95 print edition) For more, please visit the book's website.

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Now That the Presidential-Election Side Show Is Finally Ending....

Sadly, our self-serving Ruling Elite is only capable of resisting needed transformation by supporting a corrupt, sclerotic status quo.

Though it has been billed as the main event for months, the presidential election has always been a side show--or from one point of view, a freak show.

As I write this on Monday, I have no idea who will win the side show unpopularity contest (i.e. the presidential race)--and it doesn't really matter as much as apoplectic partisans would have us believe.

The reason why it doesn't matter much which unpopular candidate wins is the issues facing the nation are far larger than partisan politics or the corrupt Ruling Elite that is freaking out about the possibility of a Trump presidency disrupting its self-serving skims and scams.

As I described yesterday in America's Ruling Elite Has Failed and Deserves to Be Fired,we are in the midst of a fast-moving Industrial-Digital Revolution that is upending the political, economic and social orders. The global economy's current mode of production is in fits and starts being replaced with a new mode of production that bypasses the Ruling Elite's centralized skims and scams.

Real reform is impossible in the current Status Quo, a dynamic I described in my book Why Our Status Quo Failed and Is Beyond Reform and illustrated with this chart.

The Ruling Elite will never allow real reform because real reform threatens their dominance and wealth. Instead, the Ruling Elite proposes modest policy tweaks that increase their dominance by limiting innovation and competition and transferring the systemic risks and costs of their skims/scams to the non-elites.

If a crisis does threaten their dominance, any meaningful reforms that result from the crisis will be watered down once the storm has passed.

The core problem is the Status Quo and its Ruling Elite rely on centralized hierarchies, regulatory capture and mobile capital to protect their dominance from innovation and competition. This aligned perfectly with the centralized World War II-era state-cartel/ central-bank mode of production that has dominated the economy and society since 1945.

But the Industrial-Digital Revolution is destabilizing these inflexible, centralized hierarchies which cannot compete with decentralized, flexible networks in output, efficiency or cost.

This presents the self-serving Ruling Elites with an impossible choice: either embrace the Industrial-Digital Revolution's efficiencies and watch the foundation of their own dominance and wealth crumble, or defend their bloated, inefficient and increasingly bankrupt centralized hierarchies from innovation and competition--a war they are losing and cannot possibly win.

The Status Quo is not just financially bankrupt--it is morally and intellectually bankrupt as well. The level of insider dealing, self-aggrandizement, collusion and corruption in the Ruling Elite is off the charts, and this is now visible for all to see.

The Status Quo's intellectual grab-bag of narratives and ideologies is devoid of anything remotely aligned with the Industrial-Digital Revolution. The Status Quo's intellectual grab-bag consists of 70-year old cults (the Keynesian Cargo Cult of Paul Krugman et al.) that have visibly failed and tired throwbacks to 1950: if only corporations weren't global, and if only capital wasn't mobile and if only the central state taxed us even more and borrowed and spent more...

These 1945 ideas cannot possibly succeed in the Industrial-Digital Revolution's mode of production. But both political parties, the Ruling Elites and the Establishment they dominate have no idea of how to manage this radically transformative mode of production. They are a clueless herd trampling the non-elites as they rush headlong over the cliff.

(I cover this emerging economy in The Nearly Free University and the Emerging Economy and Get a Job, Build a Real Career and Defy a Bewildering Economy, and sketch a new systemic approach in A Radically Beneficial World: Automation, Technology & Creating Jobs for All.)

No leader can stop the emergence of a new mode of production. All they can do is engineer a crash by clinging to the expiring mode of production. The leadership of the U.S. sees only one path: further centralization that increases the power of the central state-bank-cartel mode of production. This is the road to ruin, akin to protecting the buggy-whip industry and the Whig Party at all costs.

Politicians aren't actually leaders. All they can do is give voice to what the people are willing to support, resist needed transformation by supporting a corrupt, sclerotic status quo or introduce the people to a new narrative.

Sadly, our self-serving Ruling Elite is only capable of resisting needed transformation by supporting a corrupt, sclerotic status quo. A new leadership class that actually understands the new mode of production may eventually emerge, but only after the corrupt, sclerotic status quo has deservedly collapsed under its own weight.


Join me in seeking solutions by becoming a $1/month patron of my work via patreon.com.

My new book is #8 on Kindle short reads -> politics and social science: Why Our Status Quo Failed and Is Beyond Reform ($3.95 Kindle ebook, $8.95 print edition) For more, please visit the book's website.

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NOTE: Contributions/subscriptions are acknowledged in the order received. Your name and email remain confidential and will not be given to any other individual, company or agency.

Thank you, Henry D. ($50), for your superbly generous contribution to this site-- I am greatly honored by your support and readership.

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