Latest Posts by duboisproposal - Page 5

I honestly don't care if someone is a pervert- but if they are a sadistic hypocrite and a pervert, then yeah, fuck them. So many sadistic perverts whose agenda is lying and causing pain. "but you see there is a rationale for lying constantly and setting fire to the Constitution"- nope it's just perversion and bullshit.

BOOST AGAIN

America and “national capitalism”

I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me in LA TONIGHT (Feb 19) for an event with WIL WHEATON in LA, and in SEATTLE TOMORROW (Feb 19) for with DAN SAVAGE. More tour dates here.

Thomas Piketty's 2013 unexpected bestseller (a 750 page economics book translated from French!) Capital in the 21st Century, offers a very convincing explanation of our political decay, and it continues to serve this purpose as the decay undergoes alarming acceleration:

https://memex.craphound.com/2014/06/24/thomas-pikettys-capital-in-the-21st-century/

Let me sketch out that argument really briefly for you here. Absent any kind of government intervention, markets make investors richer than workers (AKA "the rate of return on capital exceeds the rate of return from growth" or "r > g"). This is true even for extremely powerful workers who get very, very rich indeed. Piketty illustrates this in many ways, but my favorite is the Parable of Bill Gates, Liliane Bettencourt and Bill Gates (again).

Bill Gates founded Microsoft in 1975 and he stepped down as CEO in 2000. In the intervening 25 years, he built the company into the most profitable firm in human history and grew very, very rich. This is Market Lore Canon: found a successful company, grow rich.

Now, Bill Gates started with a bunch of money – he comes from a wealthy family – but he grew his personal fortune over those years in extraordinary ways, and not by investing it, but rather, by founding a company and working at it.

Now consider Liliane Bettencourt, who, during Bill Gates period as Microsoft CEO, was the richest woman in Europe. Bettencourt was born very, very rich, heiress to the L'Oreal fortune. Unlike Gates, Bettencourt didn't have a job. She just sat around, while financial planners invested her family money. Over the 25 years when Bill Gates was growing Microsoft from zero to the most successful company in planetary history, Bettencourt made more money than Gates. Gates made his money by doing something. Bettencourt made her money by emerging from a very lucky orifice and just hanging around.

But here's the kicker: after Bill Gates quit Microsoft, he became a professional investor. He stopped doing a job and started investing in companies where other people were working. Over the next 13 years, Bill Gates (investor) made more money than Bill Gates (Microsoft CEO) made in his 25 years of doing a job. He also made more than Liliane Bettencourt.

That's what r > g means: that even the most successful worker in human history can't make as much as a person who merely has a lot of money, and the more money you have, the more money you make.

If you think about this for a second, you can see how it'll play out: in economies both good and bad, the people who emerge from lucky orifices will get wealthier than anyone else, wealthier than the people who do things that grow the economy. And because they're getting wealthier faster than the economy grows, they come to command ever-larger shares of the economy, so that even when the pie gets bigger, their slices gets bigger still, and the remainder that we all share isn't just proportionally smaller – it's actually smaller. We don't just have less relative to the rich – we have less relative to our parents.

For Piketty, this is an iron law of markets, born out by analysis of hundreds of years' worth of capital flows. He devotes many of those 750 pages showing how even the most profitable sectors of the economy at any given time are disproportionately benefiting investors, even relative to the most successful managers and workers at any given time. This is where oligarchy comes from: it is the natural end-state of a market economy.

But (Piketty continues), oligarchy is intrinsically destabilizing. For one thing, once the fortunes of Bill Gates' or Liliane Bettencourt's are large enough, growing them by even, say 1% requires that some capital come from other rich people, because 1% of Bill Gates's holdings will eventually exceed 100% of the holdings of everyone who isn't insanely rich. So, over time, rich people eventually have to fight with each other in order to keep getting richer – see, for example, World War I.

That's not the only way extreme wealth inequality creates political instability. Once the 1% are sufficiently wealthy, they capture government, and the only policies that can be enacted are those that don't gore some aristocrat's ox, and once the rich become super rich, they own all the oxen. So sensible policies that are needed to ensure an orderly, stable society (for example, limiting war bond repayments to a sustainable level that won't bankrupt the economy to make wealthy bondholders even richer) become impossible, and then you get societal collapse (see, for example, World War II).

The backbone of C21 is a time-series of 300 years' worth of global capital flows, painstakingly assembled by Piketty and his grad students. This time series shows the same pattern emerging over and over: as the rich get richer, they capture more and more of the state's policy-making apparatus, triggering more wealth-friendly policies, which make them even richer, and makes their grip on policy stronger. This continues until inequality reaches a tipping point, and then you get a rupture, like the French Revolution, or the World Wars. These are orgies of capital destruction, and because nearly all the capital is in the hands of the rich, when the dust settles, they emerge with much less capital and much less power. Society is shattered, but it is more equal, and this means that we can once again make good policies that help us rebuild a society that benefits everyone, not just the rich (the French call the 30 years following WWII "the 30 glorious years").

But, if this society doesn't include some kind of mechanism to address the fact that capital is still growing faster than the economy – even a post-war boom economy – then eventually the share of wealth held by the rich will reach a tipping point, and we'll see policies that benefit the wealthy crowding out policies that support human thriving, and the rich will get richer, and they will feud with each other, and society will destabilize, and we will face collapse.

So, let's talk about Ronald Reagan! By the late 1970s, the share of wealth held by the top 10% had grown significantly from its post-war low point. With all that excess capital, the rich started spending money to promote candidates and policies that would make them richer. At a certain point, they have enough money to buy Reagan's presidency, and we get a deregulatory bonfire: lower taxes for the rich, looser rules for finance, fewer protections for workers, less spending on social programs.

This makes the rich richer, even as wages stagnate. The next 40 years are a procession of ever-more-wealth-friendly policies and politicians – not just the Bush years, but also Bill Clinton's welfare bill and Obama's foreclosure crisis – and the rich get richer and everyone else gets poorer. Monopolies consume the American economy. GDP goes up, because the corporate sector is super consolidated and it's jacking up prices and slashing wages, leaving more for profits and dividends.

Society grows progressively less stable. Policies that benefit the wealthy at the expense of everyone else – ignoring the climate emergency, slashing the safety net, starving infrastructure, etc – dominate. Inequality worsens. No one can afford a house, health care, or university. Your life's savings are stolen by a subprime mortgage, or a pension-fund raid, or bitcoin grift. Instability worsens. Policies that benefit the wealthy at the expense of everyone else – endless imperialist wars, noncompete agreements, private equity rollups – multiply. Wages stagnate. Inequality increases. The rich get richer. One political party is captured by finance ghouls. The other one is also captured by finance ghouls, but welds them into a coalition that includes virulent, apocalyptic racists.

Which brings us to today, and Trump, and imminent collapse, and Elon Musk and his child soldiers, and JD Vance, and the whole fucking thing.

Today, Piketty posted some pointed thoughts on the situation in Europe in the face of rising American fascism and belligerence:

https://www.lemonde.fr/blog/piketty/2025/02/18/trump-national-capitalism-at-bay/

It's common for Americans to write off Europe because its "economy isn't growing" the way the US economy is. Piketty points out that this is a mirage: American economic growth is due to rising prices and plummeting wages, which is great for the share price of giant American companies whose cartels and monopolies make everyone except the tiny number of Americans with substantial stock market portfolios much poorer: "When measured in terms of purchasing power parity, the reality is very different: the productivity gap with Europe disappears entirely."

Once you adjust US economic figures to account for this, it's clear that America truly is in decline – the real US GDP has lagged China's since 2016. China now has an adjusted GDP that 30% higher than America's, and it's on track to double US GDP by 2035.

The US is losing control of the rest of the world, and Trump is accelerating this phenomenon. Take de-dollarization: the US (and only the US) can make as many US dollars as it wants, so for so long as things around the world (oil, say) are available for sale in USD, the US can buy them on better terms than any other country in the world:

https://stephaniekelton.substack.com/p/trade-isnt-money-for-nothing

What's more, the fact that dollar-clearing takes place at the Federal Reserve gives the US the ability to spy on and control other countries around the world (think of US SWIFT sanctions on Russia after the Ukraine invasion, or the vulture capitalists who forced Argentina to pay up even after it defaulted on its debts). Trump's pro-bitcoin policies are intrinsically anti-dollar policies. The rest of the world was already increasingly nervous about the way that the US dollar is a vehicle for soft power around the world, we're already seeing a lot of oil denominated in rubles, and now Trump is encouraging the growth of a shadow currency that will make it even easier for transactions to take place without dollars (notably, cryptocurrency will help America's ultra-rich evade even more taxes, and commit even more bribery):

https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/what-happens-when-economic-coercion

Trump is also waging war on the CIA and NSA. Good riddance, sure – but these are also major sources for projecting US power around the world – think of the NSA's mass surveillance program, in alliance with the "5 Eyes" countries whom Trump is setting out to alienate.

Then there's trade. The US has pushed pro-oligarchic policies on the world through its trade deals. To access US markets, foreign governments must enact punitive laws that make it easier for US giants to loot their economy, like IP laws:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/15/beauty-eh/#its-the-only-war-the-yankees-lost-except-for-vietnam-and-also-the-alamo-and-the-bay-of-ham

and investor-state dispute settlements:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/27/korporate-kangaroo-kourts/#corporate-sovereignty

Not all the profits of giant US companies arise from ripping off 99% of Americans. Some of those profits come from ripping off foreigners, but that's only possible because foreign governments have passed looter-friendly policies in exchange for tariff-free access to US markets. Now that the US is shutting that down, there's no reason to allow America to continue stealing from your citizens.

As Piketty says, Trump dreams of a "national capitalism." National capitalism is a disaster, even compared to global capitalism:

the strength of national capitalism lies in glorifying power and national identity while denouncing the illusions of carefree rhetoric about universal harmony and class equality. Its weakness is that it clashes with power struggles and forgets that sustainable prosperity requires an educational, social and environmental investment that benefits all.

National capitalism walls its oligarchs off from the possibility of draining the riches of other countries, limiting them to domestic looting. Eventually, all the wealth in the country is held by its looter class, and the only way they can grow is by attacking each other. No one has more direct, recent experience with this phenomenon than Europe, a wealthy trading bloc of 500m. Trump has demanded that the EU commit 5% of its GDP to building up arms and its standing armies.

Piketty says this is a dead end. As the US is abandoning its role as global rule-of-law haven and transaction clearing house, the EU has an opportunity to become a very different kind of world power:

Europe must heed the calls from the Global South for economic, fiscal and climate justice. It must renew its commitment to social investment and definitively overtake the US in terms of training and productivity, just as it has already done in terms of health and life expectancy. After 1945, Europe rebuilt itself through the welfare state and the social-democratic revolution. This project remains unfinished: on the contrary, it must be seen as the beginning of a model of democratic and ecological socialism that must now be thought through on a global scale.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/18/pikettys-productivity/#reaganomics-revenge

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

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EFF https://www.eff.org/files/issues/eu-flag-11_1.png

CC BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed.en

Saw some of this on BlueSky, but in case anyone needs it: CDC recommended immunization schedules, Wayback Machine-archived from 2024.

Birth to 6 Years Old

7 to 18 Years Old

Adulthood

Don't rely on Internet Archive either, download these as PDFs (you can do that from the "print" link on the archived page).

If you're a parent, tell your doctor that you want these vaccines on this schedule for your child, even if/when the CDC changes their recommendations.

If you're an adult, or soon to be, and believe you may have missed any of these vaccines as a child, talk to your doctor about accessing your vaccination record and getting caught up. Many (most?) states also have an online vaccination record lookup.

A reminder to the "the American government wouldn't..." crowd. They have. They have made their own internment camps before. They have rounded up innocent citizens and immigrants before. The victims of which are still alive to this day and trying to share their stories with the world, they have been trying to warn us for a long time. George Takei (as seen above) is a famous example of this. He has written about his experiences time and time again, even publishing a book talking about his time in these camps. He may be famous now, but at the time he was just another kid forced from his home. To this day he still firmly dedicates himself to trying to educate and inform people, trying to spread awareness with his platform. The American Government can and will do terrible things. Do not let anyone convince you otherwise.

(X) (X)

ETA a new option:

(From a source I will not link.)

ATTENTION: Usians on medicaid and/or food stamps

Trump is putting a freeze on most federal funding as of 5pm ET 1/27/25. Medicare and SSI are not supposed to be effected, but Medicaid and SNAP will almost surely be effected.

If you have any refills you can send in/pick up, please try to do so before 5pm et today. If you have any remaining SNAP funds for the rest on the month. i would consider using them as well before the deadline. We do not know how long the freeze will last. Please try to prepare so you hopefully dont run out of meds before it is resolved

oh my god...

so the first screenshot is trying to look this up on tiktok normally, "donald trump rigged election" and it says that search violates community guidelines.

the second screenshot is looking up the same exact thing, but with a (australian) vpn on. canadian vpn didn't fix it fyi.

THIS is exactly the type of censorship to be looking out for on tiktok. this actually is crazy.

Reposting this from a friend bc I think it is VERY important to know of this, and for immigrants, and other possible victims of the ICE Raids happening right now

what do you mean elon musk did a nazi salute on live tv at the united states presidential inauguration twice and is now erasing the evidence off the internet by replacing the footage with the crowd cheering instead?

would be a shame if people reblogged this, wouldn’t it?

“We shouldn’t abolish ICE. We should reform the system. ICE is not the problem.”

This is what Biden said about ICE not even a year ago, in 2019.

ICE is a George W. Bush invention, created in 2003.

ICE has been putting kids in cages under Republican and Democratic administrations.

ICE has been separating families under Republican and Democratic administrations.

ICE has been used for mass deportations under Republican and Democratic administrations.

ICE has been sexually abusing women and children under Republican and Democratic administrations.

ICE needs to be abolished.

ICE needs to be abolished. 

Not “reformed”

Not “trained”

Not “re-trained”

ICE NEEDS TO BE ABOLISHED.

ICE is not in “safe hands” under a Democratic nor a Republican president.

ICE is giving women hysterectomies against their wishes, and often without their knowledge or consent. This is forced sterilizations. This is eugenics.

There is no amount of “reforming” or “training” that will fix a carceral culture where these atrocities have existed and been allowed to thrive.

Sounds like a plan! Empty Seat MAGAt Inauguration!

REBLOG REBLOG REBLOG

"In my life, I have watched John Kennedy talk on television about missiles in Cuba. I saw Lyndon Johnson look Richard Russell squarely in the eye and and say, "And we shall overcome." I saw Richard Nixon resign and Gerald Ford tell the Congress that our long national nightmare was over. I saw Jimmy Carter talk about malaise and Ronald Reagan talk about a shining city on a hill. I saw George H.W. Bush deliver the eulogy for the Soviet bloc, and Bill Clinton comfort the survivors of Timothy McVeigh's madness in Oklahoma City. I saw George W. Bush struggle to make sense of it all on September 11, 2001, and I saw Barack Obama sing 'Amazing Grace' in the wounded sanctuary of Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston, South Carolina.

"These were the presidents of my lifetime. These were not perfect men. They were not perfect presidents, god knows. Not one of them was that. But they approached the job, and they took to the podium, with all the gravitas they could muster as appropriate to the job. They tried, at least, to reach for something in the presidency that was beyond their grasp as ordinary human beings. They were not all ennobled by the attempt, but they tried nonetheless.

"And comes now this hopeless, vicious buffoon, and the audience of equally hopeless and vicious buffoons who laughed and cheered when he made sport of a woman whose lasting memory of the trauma she suffered is the laughter of the perpetrators. Now he comes, a man swathed in scandal, with no interest beyond what he can put in his pocket and what he can put over on a universe of suckers, and he does something like this while occupying an office that we gave him, and while endowed with a public trust that he dishonors every day he wakes up in the White House.

"The scion of a multigenerational criminal enterprise, the parameters of which we are only now beginning to comprehend. A vessel for all the worst elements of the American condition. And a cheap, soulless bully besides. We never have had such a cheap counterfeit of a president* as currently occupies the office. We never have had a president* so completely deserving of scorn and yet so small in the office that it almost seems a waste of time and energy to summon up the requisite contempt.

"Watch how a republic dies in the empty eyes of an empty man who feels nothing but his own imaginary greatness, and who cannot find in himself the decency simply to shut up even when it is in his best interest to do so. Presidents don't have to be heroes to be good presidents. They just have to realize that their humanity is our common humanity, and that their political commonwealth is our political commonwealth, too.

Watch him behind the seal of the President of the United States. Isn't he a funny man? Isn't what happened to that lady hilarious? Watch the assembled morons cheer. This is the only story now."

- Charles Pierce

the edit itself

this edit is getting taken down from tiktok every time someone reuploads it, its straight up censorship at this point

Im not even american but im having a great time with this

DONT LET THIS DIE

credit to miraculousgastropod for the original

reblog to be eaten by this thing

babe. I know we’re all going thru a lot rn but I just wanna give u the heads up that sesame streets future is in jeopardy. hbo has chosen not to renew it for new episodes (a series that has been going since 1969) and the residents of 123 Sesame Street no longer have a home :(

Everyone should experience a Krampus festival at least once in their lifetime