Noooooooo shiiiiiiiiiiiiiit.
This is why plenty of us tried to warn people against voting for this dipshit motherfucker (not that people in a cult will listen). It’s part of why it was the media’s fucking job to report on how stupid his ideas were before he got fucking elected. Not necessarily The Atlantic specifically, but a lot of the media just fucking treated every insane thing he promised during the election as normal, valid, and like it could work. Total abdication of journalistic responsibility.
I don’t get how people don’t understand the role the media should play.
It should simply shine light on the truth and report the facts.
Instead they play politics, and abdicate that duty in favor of shock and schlock pieces.
If the media simply reported on Trump’s policy discussions factually, everyone would have seen this coming, to add to your point.
This is why news outlets should belong to us, not to billionaires. Jeff Bezos owning the Washington Post, John Henry owning The Boston Globe, Stanley Hubbard owning multiple local news outlets, Lee Enterprises owning 75 local newspapers, these are all HUGE problems.
A lot of those media journalists you suggest don’t have an obligation to journalistic responsibility … they have a corporate responsibility to the company share holders
Don’t forget the morons who didn’t vote for the dipshit because of their virtue signaling about ONE war happening across the world while completely ignoring the impact the orange doofus had on the OTHER one.
Who, aside from the MAGA media (Fox, Sinclair, OAN, etc) and CNBC dumbasses hoping for tax cuts, reported on his policies being sane?
The New York Times jerked milquetoast over the whole nation. For one.
Billionaires don’t care. They’ll be fine, we’re the ones that have to suffer.
Thanks to republican/conservative voters.
It ain’t just maga. I work with non-maga republican voters who didn’t vote trump, but also didn’t vote kamala, because they “just couldn’t do it”. These people’s only issues they talk about currently, is that people steal by taking advantage of food stamps when they have expensive jewelry and iPhones, and they think Mexicans are taking jobs all over. I’ve heard these verbatim arguments over and over. They think dems give “too many handouts”. They’re stuck in there ways and can’t be convinced otherwise.
They have no clue that it’s Republicans who are the ones to “give handouts” to billionaires and themselves, and they’re not willing to hear it.
It’s not entirely that they’re dumb. They ARE ignorant, but that’s by design. The elites have been executing this for decades and have done a great job, in the form of propaganda, indoctrination, and shitty education.
It’s hard not to think that we’re just doomed.
Wage theft is bigger than all other theft combined, but your coworkers probably aren’t nearly so upset about that.
it does depend on where though, in places where shoplifting is unpunished or unabated, it really had shut down a ton of chain stores and even local businesses due to the massive thefts, and the police refuse to do anything, despite getting such a healthy budget to begin with.
Red states probably, wage theft is even higher i bet, because of thier lax income laws and business friednly tax free/reduced legislations. people do depend on pharmacies of WG, and probably CVS too, but even those are starting to close down.
I don’t think retail theft is as big as retailers claim ( https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/18/business/retail-shoplifting-shrink-walgreens/index.html ) , but even if it was it’s still not even close
In 2012, there were 292,074 robberies of all kinds, including bank robberies, residential robberies, convenience store and gas station robberies, and street robberies. The total value of the property taken in those crimes was $340,850,358. By contrast, the total amount recovered for the victims of wage theft who retained private lawyers or complained to federal or state agencies was at least $933 million in 2012. This is almost three times greater than all the money stolen in robberies that year. Further, the nearly $1 billion successfully reclaimed by workers is only the tip of the wage-theft iceberg, since most victims never sue and never complain to the government.
https://www.epi.org/publication/wage-theft-bigger-problem-forms-theft-workers/
If you need help visualizing scale, revisit https://dbkrupp.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/
They’re still blaming the system for not presenting an ideal choice. I seem to recall adults take ownership of their fucking problems.
We’re only going to get our standing back by throwing this man in prison and impeaching the corrupt supreme court. We also need to get dark money out of our politics to save our democracy.
“…what matters is the targeting of essential structural elements of a nation: economy, foreign relations, and defense systems. Basically, the subverter (Russia) would look to destabilize every one of those areas in the United States, considerably weakening it.”
https://bigthink.com/the-present/yuri-bezmenov/
“Russia should use its special services within the borders of the United States and Canada to fuel instability and separatism against neoliberal GLOBALIST Western hegemony”
Released in the 90s, and became Russian intel agent required reading. That’s just one highly relevant quote. Check the “content” section for a few eye poppers.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Geopolitics
Feel free to google “Project Russia” next, as that was the successor to FoG.
In all reality, if the world before 2016 matters to you at all and you understand Russia has been waging a psychological war against us since the 90s and never stopped fighting the Cold War, the picture is very clear. The evidence isn’t even tangential. It’s blatant and it’s everywhere.
We just live in post-truth… which is exactly how Russia and China live. That’s why you can’t talk about certain topics in China involving tanks. (Tbh I’m just tired and too lazy to google the spelling…) Russia is literally in the midst of brainwashing children its kidnapped from Ukraine.
We have traitors in office pretending Russia is our ally and directly spewing kremlin propaganda, while attacking and damaging the United States only to hand cash to their rich buddies while we are implementing a mass deportation campaign of even legal immigrants, shipping them to horrific prisons overseas. This story never gets better at this stage without getting much worse.
Wishing everyone the best… very scared for what’s to come. :-)
There is no mastermind or master plan. If you think Trump is a Russian asset then you’ve fallen for conspiracy theory and you yourself live in a “post-truth” fantasy. Whatever Trump is, he’s not someone who can be handled (except by playing on his megalomania). If you don’t understand that yet, and pretend otherwise, you’re just adding to the noise.
Similarily, that Foundations of Geopolitics is an interesting “cookbook” but it’s just that. Russia exploits glaring weaknesses in our neoliberal society by simply buying their way into social media. Any rational country would prevent news or social media to be owned by oligarchs, spew lies for profit and and generally being open to the highest bidder. The US has failed to get money out of politics and media. And that is a result of the neoliberal world order, so - thanks Obama and all those who came before him.
The liberal mindset has been poisoned since 2016 to think there is some big enemy like Russia or China, that there is only black and white, good or evil.
It’s not puppet masters pulling strings on a marionette. It’s gardeners watching the fruits of their labor grow.
Their media campaign is part of how they influence trump. He watches Fox and reads xitter/truth social, and anything they can get into the buzz with their influence campaign shows up in front of his eyes. Tucker Carlson going to Moscow to interview Putin is a blatant example of their ties that are mostly more subtle than that.
Tulsi Gabbard is another huge win for them, and she is in charge of what intelligence Trump sees.
Trump doesn’t “take orders” from Moscow, or the intelligence sharing pause with Ukraine would have happened earlier and never resumed.
When it happened I thought: The only way Russia wins this war outright is if the US switches sides and supports them instead.
We didn’t do that. Russian control is not that tight.
It’s not puppet masters pulling strings on a marionette. It’s gardeners watching the fruits of their labor grow.
Interesting analogy. To spin this further, who allowed malicious gardeners to grow poisonous mushrooms here in our community garden? We largely abdicated the power of the state and government to the economic bureaucracy and ignored profit driven news and social media.
Yeah go away with the propaganda. Trump has been laundering Russian money since the 80s. Trump’s 2016 campaign was littered with connections to Russia.
You have fallen for the conspiracy theory that it was a “Russia Russia Russia hoax”
Mueller explicitly said that he could not exonerate Trump; if he could, he would. Instead, he outlines that the Trump campaign refused to cooperate and that Trump himself specifically obstructed justice in the case preventing Mueller from completing it – and so he (Mueller) would follow the sitting DOJ guideline a sitting president cannot be indicted. That explicitly outlines additional criminal activity by Trump to prevent identification of any connections he might have to Russia. Meanwhile, some of his staff went to prison.
You are the one thinking in black and white. Once again, as I’ve said many times, I am not advocating for marching on Russia. But they said they would destroy us from within in the 90s; once again, they created additional doctrine called Project Russia around 2009-2010 that was also used in military psyops.
I don’t really wanna hear “there’s no mastermind or masterplan” nonsense from the party that cried about “the deepstate!” and “stolen election” for 8+ years. The party that decried “new world order” for decades and went on the red scare calling people communists (and in fact to this day use “communism” and “socialism” as scare tactics)
I am not claiming our internal issues are not also a problem. But you are an absolute clown & fool if you cannot see the connections to Russia. We literally put Paul Manafort in federal prison for related charges, no? And at least 1 other campaign staffer?
And now we are handing Ukraine to Russia on a silver platter. Not demanding anything of them – and the absolute clown of a proposal our guy offered literally partitioned Ukraine in a way that set it up so that Russia could regroup and take the rest of it later.
Seriously. I’m aware there might be a little bit of irony in this statement, but it. is. not. even. hidden. anymore. “Rather Russian than a democrat”, remember? --> anyone denying the connections to Russia is a fool, or a traitor. Period. You can let me know which you are. Once again, I’m aware there might be some irony… but unlike in the red scare, MAGA is actually damaging the US irreparably – and at least some of it has clear connection to, and benefits, Russia.
Not to mention that the overall destabilizing of the US and its isolation from the world literally hands global power to Russia and China…
So what is it; fool, or traitor?
The issue isn’t Trump. Trump should be in a mental institution. The issue is that we build a world that “allows” for such people to gain power. The issue is that our news and social media allow a (very real) Russian psyop. But it’s not just the Russians. It also came from special interests like fossil fuel, China, and formerly Ukraine too.
You’re loudly yelling at the dog tearing up the flower beds, instead you should be yelling at those who let the dogs out.
But instead of talking about that, we’re talking about the latest bullshit that is being pumped into the ether. Stop the shit-factory. Nationalize the news and social media and turn them into cooperatives run by the workers. Arrest the billionaires. Take the power back. Of course now it’s too late for that, thanks Obama.
But this isn’t even thinkable for the majority. Hence you seek some bad guy you can blame.
I mean I hear what you’re saying, and I actually agree with several points, but my first response is good luck getting people to hear you about the poison that is social media or your plan for traditional media (& I don’t wanna say the bad words but you know which words the folks on the right will call that – obviously they are fearmongering) while we are dealing with literal Nazis deporting people and inching ever closer to deporting perceived enemies, LGBTQ/trans folk, liberals, etc. In fact I have told anyone I can in Canada/other countries I know or come into contact with to contact their government and advise them to take action against social media to prevent more Elon Musk-like abuse.
I am 100% interested in implementing what you’re saying - it’s one of the first real proposals I’ve heard for helping deal with this mess - but these things are only going to be able to be dealt with when we aren’t at risk of shipping even more legal immigrants or our own civilians to foreign prison camps. You are missing the forest for the trees because of your desire to fight the, and your anger at, the system.
I agree the system is broken. You are 100% right we wouldn’t be here if it hadn’t been able to be abused to this extent in the first place.
But we are here and we have to deal with the cards we are given - and considering they’re starting to ramp up social media monitoring for folks that are “pro Palestine” or “anti semitic”, it’s fairly safe to say that’s beyond a slippery slope to changing the search terms to being anti-Trump.
He’s literally revoking the security clearances of people that investigated him and threatening to prosecute them. That’s literally political prosecution unless you continue to deny Russia connections like a fool/traitor. He’s literally talking about how he wants to pursue sending American civilians that are prisoners, to foreign prisons. Just like Nazi Germany started doing to the Jews.
I say this gently because, assuming you’re a real person I again agree with some of your thoughts and think they’re worth expanding on:
get your head out of your ass. It is astonishing that you can dare make claims about the “dog tearing up the flower bed” within this context. If you think “it could never happen here,” then why are we still waiting on them to bring back the man that the Supreme Court said that the admin must bring back, and that we are supposedly paying El Salvador to house since they are still technically OUR prisoner?
You should actually read the article I posted. It calls this out directly – in that continue down this path and it’s likely you aren’t going to see reality until a military boot kicks you in the balls.
Project2025.observer <— a website tracking the progress of P2025’s phase 1 public goals. Take a look. It’s already like 50% complete.
Project2025 ends with Trump calling the Insurrection Act and using its powers to attempt to remain a dictator. Everything I have shared with you backs up that the plan is to make Trump into the “CEO dictator” of the United States.
Is this really what you would have been shouting about in Weimar Germany before the Nazis seized absolute power? That we should be focused on some other issue instead of STOPPING THE NAZIS???
"in July 1932, the National Socialists had attained but 37 per cent of the vote. But the 63 per cent of the German people who expressed their opposition to Hitler were much too divided and shortsighted to combine against a common danger which they must have known would overwhelm them unless they united, however temporarily, to stamp it out.”
Excerpt From The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich Shirer, William
They’re already in power. They’re working to ensure that they can stay in power. They are deporting people en masse, even people here on legal asylum. They are threatening to ship American prisoners there. Both Trump and Musk have made comments about wanting to jail people they view/claim as funding anti-Tesla protests (largely in reference to the damage being done but every single step brings us closer to outright targeting of anyone the right doesn’t like.)
You know it’s true. They already make jokes about how all of us have “TDS.” They joke about how liberalism is a mental illness. Do I have to continue to beat the danger into your head?
4chan is in power now. 4chan is not joking. Trump is not joking. Continue to ignore it and the Republic is lost. the world will be lucky if Europe and the rest of “the West” survive China/Russia expansion. We already know China is eyeing up Taiwan. You think with how Trump is handling Ukraine, he’s gonna put much effort into helping Taiwan? Continue to ignore it, and the entire world is in peril. It’s not hyperbole. It’s not a joke. It’s not trolling.
It’s only gonna be trolling till the first few people get killed by MAGA like Proud Boys, or ICE. Mark my words.
Sorry yall, I’m a wordy mother fker. Probably got a little bit of diarrhea of the mouth. <_<
But the 63 per cent of the German people who expressed their opposition to Hitler were much too divided and shortsighted to
lucky if Europe and the rest of “the West” survive China/Russia expansion
So who is the enemy we should focus on? Is it Trump? Is it Putler/China? Neoliberal and austerity policies of both parties that created the fertile ground for neofascism?
The OP article is about Trump and US economic policy, and I replied to a comment that segways away from “stopping the nazis” and instead focuses on the evil “Putler”.
Yeah the parallels to weimar are there, but it’s that you can’t see them - you are the ones who distract with this conspiracy theory that Trump is somehow Putin’s asset or his creation. It’s like saying that Hitler is Stalin’s puppet because they want to divide up Poland (Ukraine) - just because they help each other out it’s not reasonable to start persecuting the socialists - which they did and do now! (Tankies bad, defederate).
Buddy if you can’t hold more than 2 thoughts in your head there’s no real discussion to be had lmfao. The longer you are in denial about Russia the more power they have.
What are we personally gonna do about Russia? If you mean by force - nothing. Don’t fight a land war in Asia. (In fact, conquest & imperialism is bad, mmkay?) Bombing our enemies only makes hardened future enemies. But they are attacking every democracy, and they are assaulting ours via MAGA. That is useful to get people to see. Russia, and their agents, are not working for you/us. They are infiltrating and co-opting governments around the world.
If you can’t or won’t see it you’re just blind. 🤷🏻
Absolute dogwater argument. That I’m distracting or don’t see Weimar parallels because I also understand/see how Russia has been attacking everyone 😂😂😂😂 👎🏻👎🏻👎🏻 I’m trying to focus on unity and the many issues we are facing
And you’re here crying like a bitch “but nooo stop with Russia bad”
Are you Russian?
Anyone who claims that Russia is NOT behind all of this is either Russian, a traitor, or stupid. The evidence is enormous and perfectly clear. Its been extensively confirmed in multiple investigations, not just by our government, but governments around the world. Everybody understands it except you and the MAGA Morons. There is no remaining doubt. It’s Putin. It’s always Putin, using Skum and HitlerPig as his muscle.
When will people truly internalize that the two biggest foreign Sociopathic Oligarchs, have partnered up with the most prolific traitor in American history? None of them have any loyalty or patriotism toward America, and only see us as a big, rich, fat, lazy target to be ruthlessly exploited and looted, and it’s happening in real time before our eyes.
All they care about is money, and either Putin is paying them directly out of the Russian Treasury (HitlerPig would rape and murder his own mother for far less than a billion bucks, and Putin could order a lot more than that), or they’ve cut a deal to split the booty like the pirates they are.
Citations needed lmao. What is even the allegation? “It’s always putin”? Sounds totally rational. \s
How do you explain the behavior of the billionaires? They must lose immensely when the US influence declines. Why do most of them remain silent or even support Trump and why have they let Trump win in the first place?
What does a billionaire want, when he already has more money than either he or his heirs can spend in their lifetimes? Sure, they always want more, they have a financial hoarding disorder, but now they also want a new world order in which they have the power over governments.
In the past, billionaires were controlled by governments and their regulations. The new objective is to flip the paradigm, and take have the billionaires and their money rule over the governments with the guns.
And it starts by bringing down the biggest, baddest player in the game. America controls about half of the armed force in the world, far more than China and Russia. In addition, America has the most billionaires as well, and they are dangerous radicals, so there is plenty of inside help to accomplish it.
The bottom line is that before they can implement their new world order, they have to completely destroy the old one first, and they are all on board with that, so they can reconstruct it the way they want.
Why would you give up a democracy where you can buy the election? The military fought for the united fruit company. Which powers do billionaires not have?
The power of US billionaires lies within US companies. How do they maintain their wealth when the US stumbles and China takes over?
I already told you:
Right now, even the richest man in America has a boss - the US government. They want to reconfigure the world so that they are the bosses, and the governments work for them. Then they won’t have to worry about elections, laws, constitutions, media, anything. They are the dictators, and everyone will be begging them for whatever scraps they can get.
As for any other issues you can think of, they don’t care. They feel like they have enough money to weather any storm.
You bring up some interesting points about the billionaires and their desire about a new world order (dark enlightenment, longtermism etc) in the US, those who hold the most power. But how in the world do you square that with this:
Anyone who claims that Russia is NOT behind all of this is either Russian, a traitor, or stupid.
So are the billionaires also controlled by Putin? How can both be true? Or do you think Putin holds more influence over US elections that the US billionaires and tech bros do?
PS: Let me make my point clearer: I don’t doubt that Putin helped Trump and sow discord in the US - but who is to blame for allowing this? These are cheap things to do for any foreign actor now because we allowed to run news and social media purely for profit. If greed is good, nothing but money matters, why wouldn’t those companies make advertising deals bad actors? So blaming Putin for this is propaganda itself, because it disguises the actual causes of the democratic backsliding which started way before Trump, and would have happened despite Trump.
