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Why don’t big businesses reduce profits when raising wages?

This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Why don’t big businesses reduce profits instead of increasing prices when forced to raise wages?|

Never in the history of generating income for oneself has anyone ever said, “Gee… I think I earned too much money. I should give some of it back.”

The answers you’ve gotten essentially echo the above sentence.

For example, many companies, like Walmart, deliberately underpay their people by enforcing tactics like union-busting and denying employees full-time status to permit them to qualify for additional benefits.

What they save on employee costs forces their people to qualify for government benefits. So even if you’re not their customer, you still subsidize their operation through your taxes. Their major shareholders laugh at you and your question.

There is no way to solve this problem within the status quo. Even worse, this problem will continue to worsen as technologies in AI and robotics mature while automation replaces jobs to reduce employment costs even further.

The Walton family doesn’t care about how their employees might struggle. Jeff Bezos considers employees dying on his warehouse floor as collateral damage and the cost of doing business. A few thousand dollars toward a token effort to address optics is a low price to pay to force people into running according to the inhuman scheduling they’re forced to endure by filling orders according to a timed system.

Part of the problem with this question is that it presumes wages determine the costs of products that you pay for when that is the furthest thing from the truth. Wages are a minimal determinant in the price of products you buy.

Products are priced at the highest level that a market will bear. IOW, the price of a product is based on a formula applied to the speed at which shelves for that product are emptied. You have probably heard of the phenomenon of “supply and demand.”

The more demand for a product, the easier it is to justify its increased cost. The company knows it will still sell its product but get a higher margin, growing annual revenue and making it more attractive to investors. In turn, its stock value increases, and it appears much more successful as a company doing business in the marketplace. The entire system is geared around pricing products as high as possible while reducing costs as much as possible. The cost of labour is considered the most significant repeat cost of an operation, so it’s always targeted for reduction. Capital costs are written off in tax deductions, so a one-time purchase far exceeding the cost of labour for the year is still cheaper than labour because of that tax benefit.

When employers, capitalists, and their flying monkeys threaten higher costs for products due to higher wages, they’re just lying to the public to create the optics that their products require price increases that are functionally unnecessary but acceptable because people believe the justifications that are given. This happened due to the COVID lockdown when companies took advantage of public sentiment to indulge in price-gouging strategies.

Solutions to this and many related problems, such as the persistence and even increase in poverty, involve multiple strategies.

  1. First, the downward pressure on wages can be addressed by eliminating the leverage of destitution that employers have with employees. Suppose an employment candidate doesn’t like the pay scale offered by an employer. In that case, they currently have a choice to begrudgingly accept being underpaid or face the risk of homelessness, starvation, and premature death. The solution to this problem is easily implemented through a Universal Basic Income. If candidates are free to turn down insufficient wages, then employers are put into a position of being more competitive to attract those they want on staff.
  2. Corporate structures are an inherently antiquated holdover from medieval organizational structures. Corporations are strictly hierarchical entities that function like mini-autocracies. This dynamic existing within a democratic society cannot be but at odds with the society it operates within. It is in the “corporate DNA” to essentially function as a subversive entity within a democratic society that inevitably plots the demise of democracy and its overthrow to institute an oppressive two-class society of owners and serfs. The solution to this problem exists within worker co-ops.
  3. Worker Co-ops (continued) Richard Woff is an economist and a professor emeritus of economics at the University of Massachusetts who provides compelling arguments in favour of worker co-ops. — Richard D. Wolff — Wikipedia — RDWolff –

  1. 4. (Numbering Bullets in this kind of HTML formatting truly sucks the big one) Finally, the primary solution to the greed infesting human behaviour today that functions as a threat to human society is to place a global cap on personal net worth. This is the most difficult of all challenges to implement because it’s already hard enough to have an entire nation agree on something. For the world to develop solidarity in this matter appears to be an unreal fantasy, but it may be the case that Donald Trump and Elon Musk are opening the door for the world to get on board with it. There is no valid argument against it, particularly since the only argument that once held validity — financing large-scale endeavours — is now rendered moot through crowdfunding. The more money that exists in the working class’s hands, the more able the working class can participate in a democratic economy rather than be subjected to the whims of psychopathic power-mongers. We must first drop this delusion that wealth is accrued only by “special humans” who stand above the rest of us. It’s becoming ever more apparent to the public that not only does power corrupt, it is the corrupt and corruptible who are attracted to power.

We are rapidly approaching a point of no return in which we will either quickly resolve the problems threatening human civilization or lose the ability to respond to a global environmental threat.

Why doesn’t Elon Musk want to save poor people in the world?

This post is a response to a question initially posed on Quora, and can also be accessed via “https://www.quora.com/Why-doesnt-Elon-Musk-want-to-save-poor-people-in-the-world/answer/Antonio-Amaral-1“

He is saving the “poor people in the world.”

The disconnect is presuming he sees other people in the world as people rather than as objects placed on this Earth to cater to his poor existence.

Haven’t you noticed how much whining Trump does about life even though he was born on third base and has destroyed hundreds of thousands of lives throughout his life? After all that destruction, he still views himself as a victim.

Ironically, they’re both victims of failing to maintain contact with their essential humanity.

They will both go to their graves, completely frustrated and confused about why most people hate them.

Sure… they have devoted followers, but those are the easy and gullible idiots to manipulate. It’s not enough because they know the people who challenge them think poorly of them.

The jealousy is why Trump can still gripe about Obama a decade later.

Supporting a hated monster like Trump is the closest Musk will get to camaraderie. Meanwhile, both regard each other as useful idiots to their self-serving causes. Once the wheels fall off in their relationship — and it will because there isn’t enough room on the planet for two competing megalomaniac egos — eventually, one of them will step on the other’s toes hard enough to escalate into an open conflict — we’ll see embarrassing demonstrations that remind us of all the sandbox behaviours we experienced in elementary school.

Sadly, the more Xitter fails, the harder Musk will go after austerity for the little people, and that’s how he will deal with his “poor stature.” Musk is this century’s poster boy for why restraints on personal wealth and power are crucial to the stability of human civilization.

The MAGAts won’t see that, though, because they’re conditioned to desire submission to authorities they’ve been accustomed to worship. They will identify more with Musk’s struggles than their fellow citizens who suffer from Musk’s spitefulness.

Elon Musk is essentially living a life of revenge against whatever broke him in his childhood. His and Trump’s attitudes and behaviours are typical for bullies who remain convinced of their infinite entitlement to destroy others. They are self-righteous in their acts of destruction to levels equivalent to extreme religious zealotry.

Musk will sincerely believe he is a poor victim for being denied the $56 billion he demanded as compensation from Tesla. Self-serving bullies like won’t stop until someone stops them. Until then, Musk in his “DOGE” role will strip away lifelines from the little people to save himself a few dollars on taxes with righteous fervour. He will sincerely believe he’s doing the right thing for society by getting revenge on his victimization.

The attitude of being a poor victim is a common among billionaires who brazenly justify denying people their right to life to save themselves a few dollars in taxes. Meanwhile, all of their justifications for austerity for the little people is presented as if tax increases are and should be equal across the board. The wealthy have had their taxes cut by more than half in the last several decades which constitutes billions in savings for each billionaire. The little people have conversely gained pennies in tax cuts by contrast. Meanwhile, people like Musk, Thiel, and those support Trump consider themselves poor and unjustly victimized if their taxes were increased by a few percentage points.

The next time you hear someone use the expression, “victim mentality,” pay close attention to the person who accuses others of having such a mentality because that expression is projection for a sociopath. We’ve all had enough experience now to understand how the corrupt will make accusations that are confessions in disguise — deflections away from responsibility for their actions. People like Musk and Trump embody that mentality. Every choice they make is a form of revenge for their victimization while anyone who suffers as a consequence deserves their fates.

Will Trump’s enemies change direction?

This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Will Trump’s enemies change direction and become his worshippers if he really can stop the war in Ukraine within the first 24 hours of his presidency?”

People who view themselves as his enemies don’t hate him for what will be his betrayal of Ukraine. They hate him for the damage he’s deliberately done to them. Handing the Ukraine over to Putin will only make them hate him that much more.

Everyone else who is disgusted by him doesn’t hate him because they hate YOU for allowing that monster a second attempt at doing a more thorough job of destroying the nation than he did the first time.

Most people understand and acknowledge what kind of demented egomaniac Trump is, and they understand that he doesn’t care in the least about policy or that he doesn’t have any vision for the nation beyond whoring himself out for attention while bilking the American people out of every penny he can for himself. Most people understand from the first time around that he’s going to sell national secrets for personal profit and that he will put the lives of American agents in jeopardy by doing so. Most people know who he is, what he’s done, and what he can do.

No one knows better than a New Yorker who’s had to deal with his rapacious stupidity for decades and up until they finally ran him out of the state.

People are not unclear about the consequences of another Trump presidency.

People are angry at the utterly contemptible stupidity that has put the entire nation at risk and will forever change American standing in the global community.

You have crossed a threshold, and you still haven’t a clue what kind of nightmare you have invited into your lives and that you have imposed upon the people you think you care about. You still don’t understand how your wives and daughters will hate you for the rest of your lives. Your grandchildren will hate you. Hell, your great-grandchildren will want to piss on your graves because you have fucked up on such a biblical level.

What’s worse is that you’re going to continue blaming anything and anyone before you understand how the nightmare you have imposed upon your nation is YOUR fault… not Trump’s fault, not the Democrats’ fault, not the fault of “librulz,” but entirely YOUR fault.

You have already lost your right to overtime pay, and I’m sure you’ve glossed that over as unimportant in your mind until you have found yourself working without sleep for a few days while expecting a huge bonus in your pay and getting peanuts in return for all your hard work. Sure, you’ll complain about how unfair that is. You’ll still drag your ass to work another three days straight, though or get fired. You will have no coverage because the budget for unemployment will have been cut back while your qualification requirements have become so restricted that most everyone is rejected.

Meanwhile, the medical health plan you counted on to keep your kid on insulin alive no longer covers them and the price of insulin skyrockets. To keep your kid alive, you’ll have to sell your car and walk to work for a 36-hour shift. Then, when you fall asleep at work because you’re too tired, you’ll get fired and lose the health coverage you need to keep your kid alive. Oh well, you can always make another… amirite?

Meanwhile, your daughter gets pregnant and then gets hauled off into jail because she tried crossing state lines for an abortion that you set up for her because you can’t afford another mouth to feed.

Then you’ll start protesting, and hope will return when “the Don” himself shows up to grace you with his presence. Then he throws you a roll of paper towel and tells you to suck it up.

Then you’ll start crying to anyone and everyone who will listen about how unfair it all is, and the “librulz” who tried to prevent all of this will flip you the same bird you flipped them when you strutted around like the cock on the block, enjoying your “librul” tears.

You won’t have anywhere to turn or anyone to turn to besides your brothers in stupidity. All you idiots that brought this nightmare to the nation will have nothing but each other to console yourselves while concocting excuses for why this isn’t your fault.

You will then realize you have only one of two choices: end it all or sacrifice yourselves to make things right.

I suspect many more of you will choose the coward’s route rather than try to make things right.

By then, the nation will be in tatters as the price of eggs will have skyrocketed to more than ten times what they were when you were complaining about Biden.

And after all that, you’ll still try to sell the notion that Ukraine should have just surrendered to Putin because you are all cowards and hypocrites at heart.

What is the least amount of authority governments can have?

This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “What is the least amount of authority governments can have in the market to allow functional free-market capitalism?”

Let’s begin answering this question by precisely identifying the role of government in market capitalism.

We, the people, through government, determine the rules by which the “game of capitalism is played.”

The government implements, administers, and referees those rules for “we, the people.”

The authority of government in this and all cases is determined precisely by the demands of “we, the people.”

Whatever authority a government has is authorized and endorsed by “we, the people.”

This is a basic explanation of how a democracy functions and from where its authority is derived.

There is no magic formula for determining how much or little authority a government has within any specific context, be it the marketplace or other social issues. Government authority is a dynamic thing which spans a spectrum of ideologies from right to left and top to bottom.

Generally speaking, “we, the people,” make demands of government, and the government responds to those demands.

Identifying who comprises “we, the people,” is where all our problems with government begin.

In the modern U.S.A., a society with arguably the most wealth and power on the planet has several stakeholders with varying degrees of power and influence on government operations — policies, procedures, laws, authority, and scope for implementing and enforcing their decisions.

This is no different than any other nation on the planet, except for how big the money and power pie is in the U.S.

The human condition is such that a contingent of us are so drawn to money and power that they deliberately influence government in ways that disempower and impoverish the many to secure money and power for themselves.

The largest pie attracts the largest contingent of the greediest among us. This is the cause of suffering for hundreds of millions of U.S. citizens today, which spills out onto the rest of the world because of its undue influence on global dynamics.

In many ways, the best thing for democracy worldwide is for the U.S. to lose most of its power and influence. If it becomes a sinking ship due to the recently elected corruption, the rats will abandon it for brighter prospects worldwide. Today, China is poised to become the greatest beneficiary of America’s power drain. It’s already benefiting from Russia’s hubris and overreach. China has been playing Putin in the same way that Putin has been playing Americans through Trump.

At any rate, to specifically answer this question, the least “amount of authority” the marketplace will have in its refereeing is already the “Lassez Faire” strategy the U.S. has been indulging in for decades. This is why the housing bubble and Great Recession occurred during the Bush Administration.

A complete lack of oversight means the predators in society have a heyday of mining suckers through fraudulent strategies to obtain their goodwill, support, and resources.

If you haven’t noticed yet, you might want to take a trip through Facebook and make note of all the advertisers.

There are at least ten scams for every legitimate advertisement because for a private, for-profit entity like Meta, generating revenue is a much higher priority than protecting their community. Ironically, they are serious about penalizing people for violating community standards.

Governments today have adopted a similar approach toward their administrative functions by outsourcing much of their responsibility to for-profit entities. The U.S. prison system is one such grotesque abomination of immorality practiced by the government through the authority it has been granted to administer national affairs under a for-profit mindset.

The fraudulent argument used to forward this human rights betrayal is an alleged saving to the people. The reality is that such a strategy represents a cost increase to the people with a dramatic reduction in the quality of service. This pattern of rapacious manipulation of government through propaganda fed to the people is most commonly associated with their (lack of) healthcare (health exploitation) system issues.

The goal, of course, in these cases is to appease the few with disproportionate power and influence in society to boost their annual incomes and quality of life at the expense of millions.

Their influence grants the government greater authority in areas that betray the people’s needs while strategically benefiting themselves.

In terms of authority in the marketplace, people are fed the lie that minimal authority is good for the market, while the reality is that it’s suitable only for the predators in the market.

To make matters worse, they succeed in their propaganda by delivering mindless solipsisms that dull critical thinking like a grifter convinces a desperate mark that they will receive a million dollars from a Nigerian prince by simply giving them a thousand dollars.

Like any sports event, a referee requires enough authority to enforce the game’s rules. If the field is big enough, additional referees are put on the field to ensure violations are spotted and dealt with effectively.

Without that oversight and the ability to respond to violations, the game is corrupted to such a degree that it’s no longer worth participating in any capacity.

Without the ability of the referee to exercise independent judgement, they end up favouring one team over all others to ensure they win every time.

In some ways, this is how the market has been corrupted by the notion that referees are unnecessary to ensure every player and every team has a fair shot of doing well in the game.

In some ways, the market has been rigged like a casino where the house always wins, and in this case, the house is the corporatocracy and the billionaires who own the house by proxy.

The less authority a government has independently from the stakeholders rigging the game in their favour, the less effective the market is for the economy. The restrictions on government oversight that are about to be stripped by the incompetence and malice characterizing the incoming administration will lead to widespread systemic collapse. This will be due to the predators among us experiencing a resurgence of freedom to victimize an entire population that will make the nation a new “Wild West of exploitation.”

By stripping consumer protections such as in food and environmental oversight systems, the outcomes are guaranteed to be fatal to an unpredictable number of mass casualties.

The next four years will be a supremely harsh lesson for those who buy into superficial soundbites because they are desperate to believe the Nigerian prince, who seems so concerned about their well-being, will sincerely deliver on their promise to drain the swamp rather than infest it with predators.

This bleeding heart bleeds for all the victims, be it left or right, liberal or conservative — but I will feel nothing but contempt for the self-serving MAGA addiction to hatred responsible for the ensuing chaos and destruction.

The people who fail to take heed of the nightmare ahead will be in for a lifetime of seriously bitter crows to chew on. I won’t be enjoying their humility, though, because I’ll be too busy grieving over the unnecessary casualties they will have imposed upon the nation.

Why is the label “socialism” often viewed negatively?

This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Why is the label “socialism” often viewed negatively when discussing progressive policies? Is there a significant difference between socialism and liberalism?”

Socialism and liberalism are distinct ideologies with no practical connection between them.

Liberalism is built on three fundamental societal values: Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality. These values inspire and guide liberal minds in supporting greater degrees of social justice in a broadly unjust world.

Socialism is the public ownership of the means of production. Socialism essentially strips plutocrats of their wealth and forces an entitled class of people to live alongside as equals to the people they prefer to benefit from their exploitation.

These two disparate concepts are often conflated as part of a centuries-long class war waged by society’s plutocrats against the proletariat (the working class) while employing the bourgeoisie (capitalists) as their armies of oppression.

Every movement toward social justice is met by resistance to the entitled classes in society who possess the leverage of despair against the working class to enrich themselves while impoverishing the weakest among us.

Every movement toward social justice is a strip of power taken from the entitled classes to enable the weakest among us to survive and prosper without suffering a dehumanizing indignity imposed upon them by the wealthy classes.

For the working class to fight for and win weekends off from labour is a cost to the wealthy class that they deeply resent and respond to with strategies to strip further dignities from the working class.

Their deep resentment toward increasing social justice and decreasing power over the working class has been deeply embedded into their psyches due to historical events like the Russian Revolution of 1917. A monarchy was violently abolished through two successive revolutions and a civil war, which spread a sentiment of hatred for the ruling class in society across the globe to inspire a similar German Revolution of 1918.

Russian Revolution — Wikipedia

The nightmare of breadlines persists to this day and has been used as a weapon of ideas against another uprising by the working class.

The plutocrats of today have learned to do whatever they can to insulate themselves from another violent uprising that would result in them losing their wealth and power to angry mobs of desperate working-class citizens.

They have invested billions over the decades to have people automatically associate socialism and communism with extreme poverty and extreme oppression. Their efforts have been supremely successful to the degree that the poorest in society today will fight to protect plutocrat wealth at the expense of their well-being.

Here’s an example of a random right-wing website, their fearmongering messaging and how successful the plutocrats have been in conditioning the working class to defend what they view as the saviours of humanity they refer to as “job creators.”

(Please do take a moment to “bask” in the sheer hatred they have cultivated within their loyal lemmings toward any form of social justice for society. These are the slugs in society who beg for a salt bath… and are deeply committed to taking all the rest of us with them on a trip to human oblivion.)

We can see the cancerous attitude as a caricature of humanity within the American political system as a corrupt plutocrat who has become a convicted felon can still campaign for president. In contrast, every other convicted felon is stripped of their right to vote while they rot in prison.

The plutocrats in society have been quietly waging their class warfare for centuries; before, they were plutocrats and considered a monarchy that assumed power over the little people through physical warfare.

They have persisted for over 100 years in a steady and patient strategy of protecting their wealth and power through every influential channel they can.

Look through this resource to see how the plutocrat class influences legislation creation through a group called the “American Legislative Exchange Council” (ALEC). This association has been responsible for literally writing the laws that are implemented verbatim to benefit themselves at the expense of the public good… and this is only the tip of the iceberg for their machinations:

ALEC Exposed

“Right to Work” laws enacted to strip workers of their rights while reducing “Right to Work” states have become the most impoverished in the nation.

Corrupt plutocrats like the Koch Brothers (Koch family — Wikipedia), the Walton Family (Walton family — Wikipedia), Elon Musk (Elon Musk — Wikipedia), Bill Ackman (Bill Ackman — Wikipedia), Steve Schwarzman and his Blackstone Group (Home — Blackstone), and etcetera.

Why Plutocrats Are Rallying to Trump

Click to access Hacker_Pierson_APSA_2019.pdf

Most hide their money behind organizations like Blackstone Inc., which bills itself as an “alternative investment management firm” and dumps millions into SuperPAC to fund the campaigns of politicians who will support their wealth acquisition strategies at the expense of the working class and the constituents who vote for them.

These are highly paid grifters whose job is to scam hundreds of millions of people out of the value of their labours, and they have succeeded to the tune of over $50 trillion from the middle class in the last few decades alone.

They have successfully converted a system of empowering the most vulnerable among us into a system of oppressing the most vulnerable among us.

They have invested billions in their war while reducing the costs of waging it to a small tax.

Their coup de grâce has been the outright purchase of the highest court in the land, seeking to convert the world into a facsimile of a medieval state with a two-class system of rulers and serfs.

Impact of the Heritage Foundation on Supreme Court nominations

Ironically, they have succeeded so well in entrenching their power to repeat the historic levels of income inequality threatening global stability one hundred years ago that we are on the verge of repeating the same tragedies.

It’s been easy to blame the motivations for all their socially destructive activities on simple greed, but the sheer irrationality of their behaviours transcends greed. It is a self-destructive behaviour that has abandoned rationality.

All of which is intended to prohibit these kinds of social justice goals for the working class:

The minimal costs of a social safety net don’t justify the extremes of greed they’ve been displaying. The only explanation for their extreme behaviour, which resembles the trajectory of an addict, is that they have been deeply scarred by history.

The revolutions of the little people throughout history have scarred them deeply, and that explains why they have invested so much into the optics of language to cause the public to viscerally reject a concept like socialism without bothering to consider aspects of the concept that can and are beneficial to society.

No one blinks about socialism when it involves public money spent on the military because security is more important to many, particularly among those who loudly and repeatedly profess their love of freedom the most.

The most frustrating aspect of all of this is that, as captains of industry and leaders in society, one would hope they would be astute enough to avoid making manifest that which they fear so much… yet, this is the state of affairs today:

Pushing people to extremes of desperation makes it seem like they’re begging for the pikes and guillotines to come out and repeat history.

They can see the escalations occurring throughout the globe. Instead of taking action to avert catastrophe, they invest in secure bunkers to save their asses from the conflagration while hoping their billions will be worth something when the entire world’s economy collapses.

For a group of people who are generally viewed as more intelligent than the masses, they seem to wallow in more profound stupidity than the under-educated people they love to manipulate while convincing themselves of their superiority.

The environmental nightmare they are inviting into our world is rapidly approaching a tipping point in which there will be no return to stability without a dramatic shifting of power throughout the globe. Yet, no inkling of this impending catastrophe seems to grace their awareness. It’s as if they’re watching a massive iceberg drifting toward them, and they’re more fascinated by its structure than what it will do when it strikes.

How soon will Article 25 be invoked to remove Trump?

This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “How soon do you think that the masterminds behind Project 2025 will invoke Article 25 to remove Trump? By now there must be many of the less insane MAGAs who see that his actions are irrational before even taking office.”

How soon do you think that the masterminds behind Project 2025 will invoke Article 25 to remove Trump? By now there must be many of the less insane MAGAs who see that his actions are irrational before even taking office.

I recently thought Trump was going to experience an epiphany where he realizes he’s being treated like the drunk uncle at the family barbeque. He may already be thinking about challenges to his power with Musk in the picture, as Elon has been hogging the limelight that belongs to him.

He needed Musk’s endorsements and money while he was campaigning. Now, he’s only tolerating him while getting some laughs at Musk’s expense to keep him in line.

Since Musk is arguably as much of a narcissist as Trump, this is when he began plotting his revenge against Trump. Musk is also more intelligent than Trump, which means he’ll keep a low enough profile to minimize pissing off Trump until he can devastate him with one punch.

However, Trump can’t be underestimated because his paranoia runs deep from a lifetime more experience fighting dirty than Musk has amassed. He may very well already have plans to shut Musk up for good. It’s hard to tell right now, but their conflict will grow. That’s as inevitable as day following night.

There could very well be a moment of realization by Trump where he begins to see himself being manipulated by the people around him who need him as a populist figurehead for entertaining the sheep but are squeezing him out of the decision-making process.

He may not care much about many of the decisions being made in his sphere of influence. He could mindlessly endorse many because they appeal to his superficiality and deep biases, but he always keeps his finger on the pulse of public optics.

He quickly distanced himself from Project 2025 before momentum against it and his campaign, by extension, could grow. He promptly removed his version of it from his website and his platform and denied knowledge of the endeavour while selecting a key figure from it as his running mate.

He may endorse all or most of it, but he won’t endorse the public backlash, and that’s going to create anxiety for him to crank up his natural paranoia and push his limits. I expect to see more fracturing within his inner circle as he realizes those around him are playing him a fool. He can tolerate that from Putin because he has no choice, but that only means his tolerance for dissent within his ranks diminishes.

He has a lot of clout they would fear because he would not hesitate to throw them under the bus to save his skin.

If he were to view Musk and Vance developing ties, for example, that would be enough for him to show signs of cracking and his paranoia would leak through his polished veneer of dismissive disinterest in things he should be concerned about.

For example, whenever he is asked to walk back comments he’s made that were proven demonstrably false, he doesn’t admit error. He displays disinterest, and he deflects responsibility away from himself.

In a case where Musk is being viewed as collaborating more closely with Vance than he wants, he’ll start driving wedges between them. His nature cannot permit open collusion against him without him taking action against it.

Trump will also find himself increasingly isolated from his staff, partly because he’s pissed them off enough to want to avoid his company altogether but also partly because they will have made enough progress on their agenda to be more comfortable in marginalizing him. It will be a delicate balance for his associates to keep him focused on the attention he craves while keeping him away from the decisions they make to forward the Project 2025 agenda. Much of their success or failure is contingent upon Trump’s ability to maintain optics over what will appear like his decisions.

They will also have to work fast to cement some of their early objectives to secure long-term goals. Trump will likely fail to maintain the integrity of the illusion he needs to satisfy his MAGAt base with his performance. His tariff strategy, for example, will hit them hard in their pocketbooks. The job market will tank, and the economy will shrink while Musk will become the scapegoat for MAGAt dissatisfaction if he receives an official appointment and makes the cuts he indicates he wants to make.

It may be for this reason that Trump tolerates Musk’s attention-whoring antics within his crowd. He will likely rely on favours from Putin to help keep Musk reigned in and set up to take the public anger hit. When the feces begin flying, Trump will do what he has excelled at doing: dodge accountability and redirect it elsewhere. This strategy could work with Musk or backfire if Musk is astute enough to anticipate the inevitable betrayal.

In any case, Musk is setting himself up to be the next Mike Pence in Trump’s administration… and I doubt Vance could be happier about that.

Musk is new and ostentatious money, while the Heritage Foundation is supported by old money. They would not be entirely happy with Musk’s overt, reckless flaunting of his wealth. It’s in bad taste and reflects poorly on all of them.

Musk has been teaching the world to hate wealth through his public antics, which poses a risk to them because they prefer to achieve their agendas through subversive actions, not overt displays of disdain toward the little people. Leona Helmsley is an excellent cautionary tale from recent history that shows how the little people can quickly rally against that kind of condescending disdain from the wealthy.

Trump, by contrast, may indulge in grotesque displays of performative wealth to keep up his appearance of wealth. He at least knows when to keep his mouth shut or where the line is drawn between igniting passions among his base and against those he’s desperate to be perceived as an insider with.

Trump’s view of his tribe was cultivated from a young age by being exposed to old-world wealth that essentially keeps itself out of the public eye, while Musk is a new breed of instant wealth bolstered by his birth lottery. He was born on third base and has behaved like he got a home run. Old wealth has lived on home base for generations, and they know how to stay there and how much more critical being incognito is to gaining widespread public attention. Trump, in this regard, is their sacrificial lamb.

In contrast, Bezos — also new wealth — is much more astute about the importance of reserved public optics than Musk.

If the nation collapses and if chaos arises, Trump will take all the blame. Those funding the Heritage Foundation will slink back into the shadows to begin working on the next phase of class warfare they’ve been waging since the dawn of the industrial age.

I don’t think the Heritage Foundation will move to eliminate Trump until they’ve secured the next election cycle because of his value to them as a pawn. Much of their success with Trump will depend on how well he plays along with them. Meanwhile, Musk, who is viewed as a more chaotic and potentially destructive element in their plans, will be the focus on who needs to be eliminated in the short term.

The MAGAts, for now, are entirely oblivious to the implications of Trump’s cabinet appointments, and many even endorse them. The anti-vaxxers among them, for example, are pleased with RFK’s positions on vaccines and agree with his superficial assessments of food quality. They won’t even blame him after going through a few rounds of food-related fatalities due to his policies.

Another reason why they won’t and can’t remove Trump in the short term is that there is no one else who can achieve a religious-like stature among the little people. My guess is that they would want Musk handled first. Then, once they’ve set up their succession process, they may try to secure their power by turning Trump into an actual martyr because they’ve already run the scenario through theatrics they’ve already tested.

Their succession process is also problematic because Vance is easily despised, even though his presentation is pretty slick. The public will reject him unless they’ve been coaxed to be more accepting of a couch fornicator… which, sadly, is entirely possible because it’s not as bad as being a pedophile.

If they move too soon with Vance, they’ll lose everything. Trump has four years to prove his value and make a graceful exit, which will depend entirely on how secure the transition to the next generation will be. If it appears shaky, his retirement will be made permanent to secure the Republican majority that Karl Rove championed over two decades ago.

All of this is, of course, wild speculation that no one should interpret as gospel.
Take my caveat as you will.

Why would it be possible to live without the government?

This post is a response to a question initially posed on Quora and can also be accessed via “Why would it be possible for people to live without the government?”

It’s not.

Without government, we would barely survive while struggling with anarchy and doing our best to avoid the bullies among us who would have free reign to terrorize anyone they please.

Life would be cheaper than it is now. Justice would be non-existent, and perversions of it would be meted out by force and without any form of protection for anyone without the power to dominate others.

Virtually all scientific and technological progress would halt. If government ceased to exist from this point forward, we would be facing a nuclear holocaust through much of the world as centuries-long enemies would no longer be restrained from indulging in their worst fear impulses. The mid-East would essentially be vaporized and rendered uninhabitable for the next century. India and Pakistan would decimate each other. Much of Eastern Europe would be bombed into rubble. China would decimate its neighbours and indulge in its most significant expansion across the globe… or it could fall apart into factions ruled by powerful interests within the nation whose infighting would also collapse the country and leave it vulnerable to external aggressors seeking revenge.

Whatever may exist of what you call home would have to be protected by traps and a twenty-four-hour armed security detail. You would sleep in shifts.

Your environment would be like living in a perpetual purge. That would likely last until we’ve culled most of our species and our numbers shrink from eight billion to a few hundred million within a few years at the outset.

Once we’ve burned ourselves out from a pent-up violence orgy, we’d start seeing primitive tribal infrastructures negotiating arrangements to secure our survival as a species. At the same time, we would find ourselves living in an entirely hostile world as we experience ecological collapse all around us from our careless mismanagement of the environment ramped up into overdrive from global conflicts.

We would make the world of the Mad Max mythos manifest and find ourselves severely humbled as a species.

As much as people may hate government and as much as many criticisms are justifiable, we need government for the simple reason that the one in five who currently manifest the mental health pandemic we’re living with is a perpetual threat to human existence.

Once we succeed at reaching a point of optimal mental health where we have overcome our psychoses, human society may evolve to a degree where government is as much an automated system as the rest of the industrialized world promises to be.

Until then, our best bet is to become more engaged in our self-governance as a collection of democratic societies — which, at this point, means “taking our government’s back” — out of the hands of the few with too much power and back into the hands of all of us.

Humanity’s worst threats have always been the few with too much power victimizing the many with too little power. This is why democracy was born and has dominated the landscape over the last century.

Sadly, those with too much power in today’s world hate it and are actively undermining it to send us all back to a medieval state of existence as a two-class society of rulers and serfs.

As much as many people may wish to mock democracy as a fundamentally flawed system while pointing out the advantages of an autocratic system, the reality is that we have never truly committed to making democracy work. If we had, we would do the necessary thing — equip everyone with the education, skills, and insights required to make proper decisions reflecting what’s best for all of us.

This last American election showed us that people are still trapped within the paradigm of what’s best for them personally in a zero-sum game that necessitates the existence of losers to support the winners.

The solution to our problems is not eradicating what we struggle with but fixing where we fail to make it work. That means improving our education systems by learning to value education on a level as if our lives depend upon it because they do.

Why is democracy considered an ideal form of government?

This post is a response to a question initially posed on Quora, and can also be accessed via “https://www.quora.com/Why-is-democracy-considered-an-ideal-form-of-government/answer/Antonio-Amaral-1“

There is no such thing as an “ideal form of government” because humans are from “ideal.”

What makes democracy a superior form of government to all others is self-determination.

What makes democracy a far more chaotic form of government than all others is self-determination.

No other form of governance is as capable as a democracy of facilitating the full achievement of human potential because no other form of governance empowers individuality.

No other form of governance is as prone to overt assaults against it, while no other form of governance can survive those assaults.

Human nature demands self-determination, while the assaults against democracy today are born of that demand for self-determination — albeit in horrifically corrupted and myopically self-serving terms.

Think about the perspectives of those displaying an aggrieved assault against democracy. They are commonly born from an autocratic mindset which expects the world to conform to their perspectives. They interpret the evolution of society as a rejection of their insular views and a violation of their rights to those views. It is Frankenstein’s monster of cancerous individuality disguising a toxic desire for sublimation to authoritarian rule by people who imagine freedom as their right to dictate the lives of others.

They are not entirely oblivious to the inherent hypocrisies they champion, or they would otherwise not conduct their protests while disguising their identities or hiding behind masks or fake profiles, managing multiple sock-puppet accounts on social media.

They are the disruptive elements in a democratic society screaming a need for a much more coherent strategy for social development. The challenge at hand, however, is not an authoritarian solution dictated to the masses, as history’s failures have made clear. Today’s dynamic in an information-rich society demands a supportive strategy of education and social welfare programs providing opportunities for healing and growth for a species emerging out of a dark and brutal history while still suffering the effects of generational PTSD.

For democracy to survive its current challenges and begin to approach whatever may be deemed as an “ideal form of governance,” our systems must evolve to prioritize the people over the plutocracy seeking to regress human civilization to a medieval state of rulers and serfs.

We will otherwise find ourselves repeating the bloody histories of our ancestors who sacrificed everything to win the freedoms far too many take for granted today.

In today’s world, the closest examples we have to an “ideal democracy” are embodied within the Nordic models of social democracy.

We would save countless lives if we could take stock of how fundamentally destructive the world’s current adoption of right-wing ideologies is for human society and global stability.

Who were the big winners and losers in the 2024 presidential election?

This post is a response to a question initially posed on Quora, and can also be accessed via “https://donewiththebullshit.quora.com/Who-were-the-big-winners-and-losers-in-the-2024-presidential-election-3“

The biggest losers are the MAGAts.

They don’t see it yet.

By the second year of his term, they’ll start to wonder what’s going on.

By the time the next election rolls around, they’ll begin seeing it’s no longer “business as usual.”

They will begin to realize that he meant what he said when he said no one would have to worry about elections any longer.

That’s when the fear will creep into them… the last of them because many will have already undergone harsh awakenings when discovering that prices have skyrocketed while employment protections have vanished. They will freak out when they find out they cannot count on retirement as they struggle with minimal incomes to survive on bare minimums. The entire nation will plunge into a recession that could very well become a depression due to environmental and regulatory mismanagement that will make the Bush housing crisis and the “Great Recession” pale by comparison.

Drug prices will skyrocket, as will medical bankruptcies. Millions will lose their healthcare as employers will cut back on employee expenses, and nothing will prevent them from converting the entire working class into a slavery system worse than it is now. The economy will radically shrink through their isolationist approach to international politics, and whoever remains will fight their neighbours for scraps.

That’s not the worst thing for them to lose, though.

No.

The worst and most profound loss they will experience is the compassion of their fellow citizens who warned them.

When they begin crying foul, they’ll find no sympathy.

There will be no quarter for them. No sympathetic shoulder will await them when they realize they’ve hit rock bottom.

They will finally get the disdain they’ve consistently demonstrated toward their fellow citizens for decades.

They will find their hatreds finally reciprocated in the harshest of terms with a simple “we told you so.”

They will find doors of sympathy slamming shut on them because they won’t be the only ones suffering from their hateful motivations. The entire nation will learn to hate MAGAts on such a visceral level that an escalation of antagonism will become the norm for the following unpredictable number of years — possibly the entire next century.

They’re going to learn how the fabricated hatred they’ve been displaying toward their fellow citizens is nothing like genuinely earned hatred.

When they finally realize the profundity of what they have lost, it will be experienced as a prolonged moment of debilitating horror that transfixes them. They will mourn the loss of a nation they professed to love. They will be overcome by paralyzing guilt accompanying the realization that they killed it by their ignorant and envious “stick-it-to-the-libs” attitudes, their hateful projections, and their self-fulfilling prophecies of doom they feared were to be caused by their fellow citizens.

They will have only themselves to blame. They will become this century’s brownshirts in the aftermath of the destruction they wrought against their people, neighbours, and fellow citizens. The entire world will regard them like drug addicts who have hit rock bottom and can’t be trusted ever again.

When they finally achieve their moment of harrowing clarity, it will be too late to turn back the clock and regain the stature of world power they enjoyed. The entire world will have marginalized the nation while permanently considering it a threat to global peace and security instead of its protector.

They will discover such a profound degree of shame accompanying a sense of loneliness and being lost and adrift in a massive ocean surrounded by the enemies they made of their fellow citizens that many will turn to suicide… and worse, no one will care if that’s what they choose for themselves. Many will feel the same relief they did when Rush Limbaugh finally stopped polluting this Earth with his hateful noise.

It will take all of the rest of this century for Americans to recover their dignity.

Why doesn’t the government give everyone 1 million each to save people from poverty?

This post is a response to a question initially posed on Quora, and can also be accessed via “https://www.quora.com/Why-doesn-t-the-government-just-give-everyone-1-million-each-to-save-people-from-poverty/answer/Antonio-Amaral-1“

That’s an utterly ridiculous idea for many reasons. Probably the best example for showing how utterly absurd this idea is is not the devastating impact it would have on the economy.

The best example of why this idea represents a monolithic level of naivety is what happens when people win lotteries.

Massive lifelong windfalls are often mismanaged because people have no experience managing large sums and overestimate how far that will take them.

It’s much better to adopt the approach the wealthy class adopted with their children.

Providing people with enough to meet their needs until they can manage their affairs intelligently.

If they are responsible and resourceful, they will find they won’t need to rely on their entire inheritance to survive when it becomes available.

We are all part of a system into which we were born and collectively form a social contract by which our cumulative efforts guarantee the health of the whole.

Since we produce more than we consume, society is accountable to all its members to ensure everyone benefits enough to meet their basic needs.

The government should not participate in and create upward wealth redistribution schemes but spread the cumulative wealth to ensure people can survive with dignity.

We are at a point where it is not only feasible but inherently a superior form of economic management than we have in place now.

It will become ever more clear to ever more people as we march headlong in our transition to a fully automated society and entire classes of jobs vanish to be replaced by robots and AI.

Creating a sustainable lifeline gives people the space to be innovative because people are naturally creative problem solvers. Allowing people to determine their life course based on their interests is the quickest and most effective way to motivate them to invent new solutions to innumerable problems we all collectively face daily.

The solution is not a windfall because that is entirely counterproductive and a short-lived benefit with dramatically adverse effects on our economy that would radically increase poverty.

The solution to our economic and social issues is to provide for the basic survival needs determined by Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.

Food, shelter, clothing, security, and the ability to invest in oneself to build a future with dignity for oneself and one’s family.

Most people’s needs are modest and don’t require a radical sum of money to transform their lives without effort magically.

Most people rise to the challenge of building a better life if they can access systems instead of being barred from access because of prohibitive costs.

For example, instead of giving away money to drain into a sinkhole, provide free access to education, and people will take advantage of that to create better opportunities for themselves on their own and without any prodding.

The difference between thinking of supportive solutions and cynical solutions like this question is between a disparagingly misanthropic view of humanity and one’s neighbours and a caring and supportive view of one’s fellow citizens as human beings simply trying to live their best lives.

The sooner we can cure ourselves of this wholly destructive attitude toward each other that we have allowed to fester and grow in society, the sooner we can progress in making this a better world for everyone.

This wholly cynical view of humanity is cultivated mainly within the MAGAt crowd. It is deliberately cultivated by a small percentage of sociopathic billionaires who routinely dehumanize people and pit us all against each other so they can continue stripping us all of our dignity while ripping us off by the tens of trillions of dollars to send us into poverty and destitution while they laugh at our misery.