What the Ultra Wealthy Really Want

Every “civilized” society socializes the risks and burdens of providing for the basic needs of its citizens. It shares the costs across the entire population. Some needs can only be provided for in this way — health care, the best example, is an unaffordable luxury for most citizens unless everyone equitably shares the cost of maintaining a widely accessible system.

You know everything you need to know about the top 0.1 percent of the US population (exemplified by the Kochs, Sacklers, Waltons and Adelsons) when you understand what they really want from the government they have co-opted or bought over the last 40 years: They want out of this bargain — in perpetuity, from generation to generation.

Having siphoned off half the nation’s wealth for themselves, they now want it established in law that the wealthiest are not responsible to the other 323 million of us. That if the rest of us want a broadly accessible health care system, we should build and pay for it ourselves. This is how they define “freedom.”

No class of people has enjoyed such privilege in any Western society since the French Revolution.

Choir

"Economic Expansion"

There are mornings when I'll feel drawn to a headline like this. I don't mean to pick on this firm or this analyst, particularly, but this here is American-style capitalism distilled to its purest, most venomous essence. Net:

After nine straight years of economic growth -- but actually after almost four decades in which capital assets and corporate profits have grown almost uninterrupted, while wages of working people have stagnated at near-zero growth rates -- Wall Street sees incipient "wage gains" not as an abatement in America's savage inequality but purely as a threat to corporate profitability.

After lax accounting and corporate governance standards led to a continuous stream of corporate malfeasance in the Bush years and, ultimately, the 2008 financial meltdown, the orgy of corporate risk-taking is firing up all over again. Underwriting standards, tightened after the Bush-Paulson bank bailouts of 2007-08, have been relaxed again. Another credit deterioration is coming.

Bad news: Wall Street likes the brutally regressive Trump tax reform plan. Good news: Wall Street doesn't think it has a chance of passing, at least not this year.

Wall Street is worried about the deteriorating situation on the Korean peninsula. But while the rest of us worry that Trump's idiotic bluster could inadvertently start a war that would cause 10 to 20 million casualties, Wall Street is worried about the impact on trade.

This is how Capital thinks. This report is basically bullish.

If you actually work for a living, you should invest in a pitchfork. Capitalism has built a great empire in the US. But. It. Has. Stopped. Working. For. You.

Gold leaf

Trump's Supreme Court Justice is in the same league as just about everything else Trump: Gold leaf on the surface, particle board underneath.

I just don't...

Analysis | America’s deadliest shooting incidents are getting much more deadly

washingtonpost.com

I'm not a weapons expert. I don't know the terminology. But one man was able to quietly accumulate the equipment to kill 50 people and wound hundreds more in one act. That seems to have included multiple fully-automatic rifles, with hollow-point bullets that are scientifically engineered to do the greatest possible internal damage to anyone they hit. One apparently quiet white introvert was able to check into the Mandalay Bay with that arsenal. I refuse to accept that our constitution, or anyone's constitution, entitles anyone to amass that kind of firepower. This is a recipe for an escalating bloodbath as anomie spreads through our angry, fragmented, racially divided, frustrated and increasingly unjust society. Whatever pushed this guy over the edge, there's plenty of it to go around in America. I'm not sure I know how to live here any more.

The immediate problem with North Korea

The Risk of Nuclear War with North Korea

newyorker.com

During the Korean War, the US killed 20% of North Korea's population and then DIDN'T DEFEAT NORTH KOREA. So when Trump threatens the North Koreans with annihilation, they think, yeah, well, we've been annihilated before.

My innocent assessment:

The US has demonstrated repeatedly since George W. Bush's "Axis of Evil" speech that it will NOT attack an antagonist country if that country has a credible nuclear capability. So there is NO imaginable scenario in which North Korea gives up its nuclear weapons. No threat from Trump will bring this about.

Could NK actually hit the US with a nuclear weapon? I think it's very likely it has missiles that can fly that far carrying a warhead. Could such a missile actually hit what it was aimed at? I don't know, but I'm skeptical.

But that isn't the immediate problem. The immediate problem -- the very first thing NK would do if push came to shove -- is to hit Seoul with...something. Seoul is 35 miles from the NK border and defenseless against a missile strike. Almost 10 million people live there.

Would NK actually nuke Seoul? Given that any nuclear scenario is a doomsday scenario for NK, and they know it, I can't find a good reason to rule it out.

If this completely unnecessary cataclysm actually came about, it would be by far the greatest diplomatic failure in US history. (Actually, given the likelihood of a nuclear exchange, the greatest diplomatic failure in anybody's history.) And it would be 100% Donald Trump's failure.

Debut

If you didn't stay up to hear the last track on WFHB's Sunday night show "Melody Unasked For," just before midnight, you missed the FM radio debut of my little noise poem, "Rain." Thanks, Ben Myers.