The scare story is true this time. Democrats should use it to warn Americans—even to oust Trump—BEFORE he wrecks the country. But they'd have to stop being so scared.
I've recently been thinking that the EU, UK, Canada, Australia, NZ, Mexico, and other like minded countries should get together to form a consortium. A kind of sovereign wealth fund shared between them. This entity would fund the development of products in a few key areas to undermine the American oligarchs and reduce their dependence on us.
They could create an electric car to rival Tesla and the Chinese. A social media app to rival Meta and X. A smartphone to rival Apple. A private space/satellite company to rival SpaceX. A cloud computing company to rival AWS. It wouldn't have to be all of the above. Just start with one or two and build from there.
Linking it to your idea, it would be all the better for them if this entity could be funded by bonds that would compete with US treasuries.
As far EVs there is know how in Europe. I lived a year in Switzerland five years ago and we had a used little (I mean "little") Renault Zoe (ZerOEmissions, haha). It was smaller than the Bolt we have now but it was a perfectly good car with all the attractive attributes of electric driving and a 300km range which is adequate for European distances.
1. Scumbags will never grow weary of scumbag antics. Scumbag antics are their mukbang.
2. I’m assuming that in our gerontocracy, we still have far too many members still serving in Congress today who voted to impeach Clinton. Hard to understand why they aren’t being asked repeatedly to justify that vote vs. not even considering it for what trump has done/is doing.
If only bc we all have some sick fascination with contortionists.
3. If we say the words “basement” “downstairs” or “foosball” one of my dogs squeals and comes racing for the basement door. Even if he’s across the house and sound asleep. It’s visceral. This is a comment about the words “impeach” and “abolish”. What do we do about this? We $10,000 pyramid the thing and describe where we’re going without using those words. Or we wait until the dog is outside to go in the basement. Inconvenient? Yes. More peaceful and effective? Also yes. This is a comment about how elected officials should talk about the words “impeach” and “abolish”.
4. There is no way that most of this current crop of legislators can talk about the topic of your post in a way that will be comprehensible and impactful for most of the human beings in this country. They will drone on and on and sound elitist and we’ll have lost them before their second graph with annotations.
Democrats could tie many of the admins ‘bad acts’ to the economy if they wanted to. They could also tie all of those bad acts to elected republicans in general.
A party wide message that there’s a mentally (& physically) unfit madman who only cares about himself running the country into the ground at our expense should be pretty easy to craft at this point.
Alas, being scared of their own shadows and quietly hoping for the best is the default position for too many.
Instead of using the threat of debt and deficits purely as a cudgel towards impeachment, we can also use it to restrain in the short term. The US ACTUALLY has too much debt and is on an unsustainable path. We need to rein in.
Why not start now and use that as a cudgel against all things of the populist and spendthrift Republican Party which requires money for ICE, the military, etc.
I think Robert Armstrong at the Financial Times is credited with inventing TACO. FWIW he mentions the exact same fear regarding the unintended consequences of consistent escalation in TACO tactics (from TACO -> FAFO)
I don't actually quite understand how this is supposed to work. We talk about impeachment and someone is going to back off? No-one will of course. So you begin the process in the house. Maybe you find the GOP votes to impeach (this is possibly doable). It goes to the Senate. Are you even sure Fetterman will vote do convict? Depending on the circumstances of the time you will find some GOP votes (Rand? Tillis? Cassidy? maybe). But there is no way to find the necessary supermajority.
It's ok to occasionally bring up impeachment as a last resort. But as a threat it won't have sufficient efficiency and put in practice it will lose. If the GOP showed serious signs of distancing itself from Trump there would be an opening but I believe even Papa Schumer would then be able to act.
I don't think it makes the Democratic Party look any more impressive to have three consecutive impeachment losses.
One more point: If Trump is removed we'll have President JD. This does not sound like a very attractive prospect. Nobody can predict where his ruthless opportunism would lead him but I prefer not to find out.
California has juicedby its climate fund (essentially a sovereign wealth fund denominated in carbon terms, ie Tonnes Avoided CO2, TAC) by recognizing the TAC-values in forests under management. These are very large values that respond well to investments. They are auditable physical assets (How much TAC are contained in the Yuba River District of the Tahoe National Forest? How have Biden-Newson investments improved the financial characteristics of these carbon assets? The forests managers in CalFire and the USFS know, even though the Feds are, for now, forbidden from expressing things in TAC terms.)
California's approach demonstrates the feasibility of carbon accounting and finance to support forests-health programs.
This approach is available to everyplace the primeval forests once grew. France! Britain! Switzerland, where the Celts turned the forests into charcoal for their innovations in ferrous metals! Kentucky! The Hmong lands of the Southeast Asian forests! Peru!
Excellent breakdown of the TACO ratchet dynamic. The insight that markets keep updating thier beliefs so each provocation needs to be more extreme is genuinely useful for understanding where this trajectory leads. I recall reading about similar escalation patterns in hostage negotiation theory where bluffs get called incrementally. The scary part isnt the chicken game itself but that the logical endpoint requires crossing a line nobody can undo.
Canada is basically boycotting the US and it's working. The rest of the world could shift their purchases. In a world where a ONE BILLION DOLLAR Inititation fee makes you a member of his thugs club in the new Gaza Riveria, what is $100,000,000 at the moment a one time drop? Also I don't know but it seems to me this whole peace club is totally ILLEGAL and certainly IMMORAL. Thank you Brian.
If the Epstein files were to actually be released, this situation would quite likely change. Rather than face an actual impeachment, he would resign quickly. He would get in his jumbo jet with the money and fly away, hurt feelings and all. We would then have to deal with the leftovers.
The national Democrats and their PMC elites are followers, not leaders, resisting popular will and opinion to the last billionaire contributor. Being a voracious reader of voices on the political left, calls for "institutional reform", or "shakeup", or "dumping and reconfiguring" are the prominent themes, directed against the usual targets. But, invariably, there is either pushback, willful ignoring, or summoning of friendly and influential "centrist" insiders to consul against "radicalism" and for "kitchen-table" issues. And I'm afraid that's today's and tomorrow's state of play amongst the Dems, which almost guarantees the "seizing defeat from the jaws of victory" scenario, congenitally the Dem's problem, and seemingly uncorrectable, tant pis.
But I keep hearing that Republicans are better for the economy... Are you saying that's a lie? lol
I've recently been thinking that the EU, UK, Canada, Australia, NZ, Mexico, and other like minded countries should get together to form a consortium. A kind of sovereign wealth fund shared between them. This entity would fund the development of products in a few key areas to undermine the American oligarchs and reduce their dependence on us.
They could create an electric car to rival Tesla and the Chinese. A social media app to rival Meta and X. A smartphone to rival Apple. A private space/satellite company to rival SpaceX. A cloud computing company to rival AWS. It wouldn't have to be all of the above. Just start with one or two and build from there.
Linking it to your idea, it would be all the better for them if this entity could be funded by bonds that would compete with US treasuries.
I’ve been batting around the idea of a defense alliance. NATO - USA + a few others. Just kick us out of NATO.
As far EVs there is know how in Europe. I lived a year in Switzerland five years ago and we had a used little (I mean "little") Renault Zoe (ZerOEmissions, haha). It was smaller than the Bolt we have now but it was a perfectly good car with all the attractive attributes of electric driving and a 300km range which is adequate for European distances.
1. Scumbags will never grow weary of scumbag antics. Scumbag antics are their mukbang.
2. I’m assuming that in our gerontocracy, we still have far too many members still serving in Congress today who voted to impeach Clinton. Hard to understand why they aren’t being asked repeatedly to justify that vote vs. not even considering it for what trump has done/is doing.
If only bc we all have some sick fascination with contortionists.
3. If we say the words “basement” “downstairs” or “foosball” one of my dogs squeals and comes racing for the basement door. Even if he’s across the house and sound asleep. It’s visceral. This is a comment about the words “impeach” and “abolish”. What do we do about this? We $10,000 pyramid the thing and describe where we’re going without using those words. Or we wait until the dog is outside to go in the basement. Inconvenient? Yes. More peaceful and effective? Also yes. This is a comment about how elected officials should talk about the words “impeach” and “abolish”.
4. There is no way that most of this current crop of legislators can talk about the topic of your post in a way that will be comprehensible and impactful for most of the human beings in this country. They will drone on and on and sound elitist and we’ll have lost them before their second graph with annotations.
Democrats could tie many of the admins ‘bad acts’ to the economy if they wanted to. They could also tie all of those bad acts to elected republicans in general.
A party wide message that there’s a mentally (& physically) unfit madman who only cares about himself running the country into the ground at our expense should be pretty easy to craft at this point.
Alas, being scared of their own shadows and quietly hoping for the best is the default position for too many.
Instead of using the threat of debt and deficits purely as a cudgel towards impeachment, we can also use it to restrain in the short term. The US ACTUALLY has too much debt and is on an unsustainable path. We need to rein in.
Why not start now and use that as a cudgel against all things of the populist and spendthrift Republican Party which requires money for ICE, the military, etc.
IIRC Republicans do not bear the entire blame for straitjacketing Obama into austerity. The name Larry Summers comes to mind.
Maybe Americans should also think about selling their US Treasuries and reinvesting in blue state municipal bonds.
I think Robert Armstrong at the Financial Times is credited with inventing TACO. FWIW he mentions the exact same fear regarding the unintended consequences of consistent escalation in TACO tactics (from TACO -> FAFO)
I don't actually quite understand how this is supposed to work. We talk about impeachment and someone is going to back off? No-one will of course. So you begin the process in the house. Maybe you find the GOP votes to impeach (this is possibly doable). It goes to the Senate. Are you even sure Fetterman will vote do convict? Depending on the circumstances of the time you will find some GOP votes (Rand? Tillis? Cassidy? maybe). But there is no way to find the necessary supermajority.
It's ok to occasionally bring up impeachment as a last resort. But as a threat it won't have sufficient efficiency and put in practice it will lose. If the GOP showed serious signs of distancing itself from Trump there would be an opening but I believe even Papa Schumer would then be able to act.
I don't think it makes the Democratic Party look any more impressive to have three consecutive impeachment losses.
One more point: If Trump is removed we'll have President JD. This does not sound like a very attractive prospect. Nobody can predict where his ruthless opportunism would lead him but I prefer not to find out.
California has juicedby its climate fund (essentially a sovereign wealth fund denominated in carbon terms, ie Tonnes Avoided CO2, TAC) by recognizing the TAC-values in forests under management. These are very large values that respond well to investments. They are auditable physical assets (How much TAC are contained in the Yuba River District of the Tahoe National Forest? How have Biden-Newson investments improved the financial characteristics of these carbon assets? The forests managers in CalFire and the USFS know, even though the Feds are, for now, forbidden from expressing things in TAC terms.)
California's approach demonstrates the feasibility of carbon accounting and finance to support forests-health programs.
This approach is available to everyplace the primeval forests once grew. France! Britain! Switzerland, where the Celts turned the forests into charcoal for their innovations in ferrous metals! Kentucky! The Hmong lands of the Southeast Asian forests! Peru!
As we like to say in California,
Si se puede.
I would like to see an analysis of what happens if the UK, Canada, Japan…and even China dump Treasuries.
The only “friends” Trump is currying favor with are other dictators & oligarchs, as illustrated by his new scam “Board of Peace”.
Excellent breakdown of the TACO ratchet dynamic. The insight that markets keep updating thier beliefs so each provocation needs to be more extreme is genuinely useful for understanding where this trajectory leads. I recall reading about similar escalation patterns in hostage negotiation theory where bluffs get called incrementally. The scary part isnt the chicken game itself but that the logical endpoint requires crossing a line nobody can undo.
Canada is basically boycotting the US and it's working. The rest of the world could shift their purchases. In a world where a ONE BILLION DOLLAR Inititation fee makes you a member of his thugs club in the new Gaza Riveria, what is $100,000,000 at the moment a one time drop? Also I don't know but it seems to me this whole peace club is totally ILLEGAL and certainly IMMORAL. Thank you Brian.
If the Epstein files were to actually be released, this situation would quite likely change. Rather than face an actual impeachment, he would resign quickly. He would get in his jumbo jet with the money and fly away, hurt feelings and all. We would then have to deal with the leftovers.
If James Carville gets his wish and gets to be reincarnated as the bond market, he might save us all 🥲
The national Democrats and their PMC elites are followers, not leaders, resisting popular will and opinion to the last billionaire contributor. Being a voracious reader of voices on the political left, calls for "institutional reform", or "shakeup", or "dumping and reconfiguring" are the prominent themes, directed against the usual targets. But, invariably, there is either pushback, willful ignoring, or summoning of friendly and influential "centrist" insiders to consul against "radicalism" and for "kitchen-table" issues. And I'm afraid that's today's and tomorrow's state of play amongst the Dems, which almost guarantees the "seizing defeat from the jaws of victory" scenario, congenitally the Dem's problem, and seemingly uncorrectable, tant pis.