Capitalism, corruption, civil war...

Well, your RASR uncle (residually adult-sane Republican) has a week of gloating and joy. Let him wallow in Attorney Gen. Barr's summary no-collusion conclusion...even though its negative about Trump-Russia collusion specifically concerns only Russian 2016 election interference during the 2016 election (always the weakest link to Trump), and has nothing to do with the blatant collusion that's manifested since then, in demolishing our alliances, sciences, intel-services and every other U.S. fact based profession.

Consider: Six essential cons that Define Trump's success: This article by Jonah Greenberg (except for the last (silly) paragraph) cogently dissects six ways that Donald Trump has “succeeded” by cheating. 
By lying his net worth vastly upward to get loans…

…by lying it vastly downward to evade taxes…

…by ripping off contractors and lenders till only Deutsche bank would work with him, laundering Russian mobster money…

…by assaulting the very existence of things called (facts).
…by portraying perpetrators as victims.

Never mind all that. Right now, just one U.S. citizen matters. Chief Justice John Roberts. If he swing the decision to decide in favor of basic justice and the American Experiment, political gerrymandering will be banished. If he is a hack - or a blackmail victim - then we will have no easy path out of this phase of the American Civil War. It could wind up pretty harsh.

== Essences of Capitalism ==

As I’ve long predicted, some of the RASRs and saner libertarians are gradually realizing that oligarchy is no friend to open-accountable-competitive-creative market enterprise.  Investment guru John Mauldin is one I’ve long been urging to end his ostrich denial. Now, in his influential newsletter, Mauldin quotes from Jonathan Tepper’s new book The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition

In industry after industry, (Americans) can only purchase from local monopolies or oligopolies that can tacitly collude. The US now has many industries with only three or four competitors controlling entire markets. Since the early 1980s, market concentration has increased severely. We’ve already described the airline industry. Here are other examples:

·       Two corporations control 90 percent of the beer Americans drink.
·       Five banks control about half of the nation’s banking assets.
·       Many states have health insurance markets where the top two insurers have an 80 percent to 90 percent market share. For example, in Alabama one company, Blue Cross Blue Shield, has an 84 percent market share and in Hawaii it has 65 percent market share.
·       When it comes to high-speed internet access, almost all markets are local monopolies; over 75 percent of households have no choice with only one provider.
·       Four players control the entire US beef market and have carved up the country.
·       After two mergers this year, three companies will control 70 percent of the world’s pesticide market and 80 percent of the US corn-seed market.

The list of industries with dominant players is endless. It gets even worse when you look at the world of technology….  The federal government has done little to prevent this concentration, and in fact has done much to encourage it. Broken markets create broken politics. Economic and political power is becoming concentrated in the hands of distant monopolists.

Mauldin avows that some industries require such massive scale that they can only support a small number of producers. Passenger aircraft, for instance. 

In turn, I have pointed out examples where capitalism is clearly working, when steered by enlightened regulation. One example is the burgeoning of solar and wind power. Another is surprising, till you think on it… automobiles. 

With twenty major players, worldwide, competition is fierce, with the result that every year auto showrooms feature better cars that last longer, are built sturdier, offer spectacular standard features and safety, all at declining inflation-adjusted prices. Spurred by regulations, auto-makers deliver vastly improved efficiency, saving consumers billions at the pump, and -- after prodding by some geniuses -- are shifting to electric at a rapid pace.

So the problem is not what young sophomores are reciting on campus, capitalism at its competitive, AdamSmithian basic. No, the problem is that markets have always been distorted by cheaters!  

It’s what humans do, when they get the power to do so. And hence, as Smith himself said, we need governments to transparently and carefully regulate, especially in ways that keep the playing field flat and fair.

And yes, that includes investing heavily in R&D that’s beyond any corporate ROI horizon. And it especially means investing in all children! Because what is a competitive playing field if it is biased to handicap most players, from the very start? 

Most liberal programs – those that aim to uplift all kids out of poverty – are defensible in strictly capitalist terms! And those who deny this aren’t actually Smithians at all. They are oligarchists. They are feudalists.

== Short takes ==

Right now, Democrats still retain a monopoly on expertise and evidence-based policy. They should not relinquish it easily.

Nearly 400 Southern Baptist church leaders and volunteers have faced sexual misconduct allegations in the past two decades, two newspapers found, with as many as 700 victims — some as young as 3. And this is just one section of the evangelical Baptist movement.  There are reports of over a thousand such cases among “independent” Baptist pastorages… among the most fire-breathing and radically anti-modernist. Oh, do preach to us.

Poseidon: Russia's New Doomsday Machine describes Moscow's unmanned automated drone submarine designed to deliver a 100-megaton warhead to inundate U.S. coasts with nuclear tsunamis, leaving the most populous parts of America drenched-radioactive wastelands. Author Dr. Peter Vincent Pry is one of the nation's foremost experts on nuclear weapons and strategy, director of two Congressional Advisory Boards.

There’s an aspect to this that’s scarier. Throughout the Cold War, we got a stream of defectors who blew the whistle on crazy Soviet plots. Kremlin muscovite craziness hasn’t gone away, but Putin (raised in the KGB) has made it his highest priority to make sure we get few defectors this round, despite planning such horrifically heinous weapons. 

How? Our inflow of defectors in the Cold War depended on our ability to: (1) protect them, (2) offer decent prospects living in the West, and (3) maintaining the moral high ground. Consider how Putin and his agents have undermined each of these systematically.

== Short takes ==

WODI = “What If Obama Did It?”  Latest example, emerging news that Donald Trump used threats and money and oligarchic favors to get not one, or two, but all of his high school, military academy, college and SAT records secured and hidden forever. Now why would he do that? “Former officials of the military academy that President Trump attended say wealthy alumni directed them in 2011 to remove and hide Trump’s academic records.”  

The same fellow who demanded Obama’s birth certificate, then refused to believe it (nor dozens of 1962 copies of the Honolulu Advertiser birth announcement, found in garages all over the islands) and has lied about the IRS audit of his tax returns, and who allows no US officials anywhere near his secret debriefings with communist and “ex” communist dictators, now want us to have no way to verify his “stable genius.”

WODI

And finally....

From the Axios China report: The ideological tightening inside China has contributed to a more rigid and shrill group of PRC diplomats. Earlier this week Bloomberg reported on this trend... “[F]oreign diplomats in Beijing say that the behavior of Chinese officials has become far more aggressive and assertive in private meetings in recent years. Their discussions have become more ideological, according to one senior foreign envoy, who described the behavior as a strong sense of grievance combined with increasing entitlement about China’s international role and rights.

If you want to understand how the top officials at the PRC rationalize their fierce determination to centralize power over their people and the world, I go into it here. They are very smart. Maybe a quarter as smart as they think they are. And therein lies danger for us all.

The Velocity of Money… and Revolution

If you’re perfectly comfy with the economy’s gyrations, then pay no attention as I explain what’s actually going on. Economists have been recognizing signs of serious dislocation for some time. Even right-of-center fellows like newsletter mavens John Mauldin and Lacy Hunt have finally recognized the core indications. I wish I could share their excellent newsletters with you. But – at some risk of misinterpreting or even treating them unfairly – I intend to paraphrase. And criticize.

A recent Mauldin missive correctly cites the most disturbing symptom of trouble in the U.S. economy: a plummet in Money Velocity (MV).

To quote John:  “You may be asking, what exactly is the velocity of money? Essentially, it’s the frequency with which the same dollar changes hands because the holders of the dollar use it to buy something. Higher velocity means more economic activity, which usually means higher growth. So it is somewhat disturbing to see velocity now at its lowest point since 1949, and at levels associated with the Great Depression.”

Somewhat… disturbing? That’s at-best an understatement, since no other economic indicator is as telling. MV is about a bridge repair worker buying furniture, that lets a furniture maker get dentures, so a dentist can pay her cleaning lady, who buys groceries….

There are rare occasions when MV can be too high, as during the 1970s hyper-inflation, when Jimmy Carter told Paul Volcker “Cure this, and to hell with my re-election.”  But those times are rare. Generally, for all our lives, Money Velocity has been declining into dangerous sluggishness, falling hard since the 80s, rising a little in the 90s, then plummeting.

Alas, while fellows like Hunt and Mauldin are at last pointing at this worrisome symptom, they remain in frantic denial over the cause. Absolutely, it is wealth disparity that destroys money velocity. Bridge repair workers and dentists would spend money – if they had any.

We have known - ever since Adam Smith gazed across the last 4000 years - that a feudal oligarchy does not invest in productive capacity. Nor does it spend much on goods or services that have large multiplier effects (that give middle class wage earners a chance to keep money moving). Instead, aristocrats have always tended to put their extra wealth into rentier (or passive rent-seeking) property, or else parasitic-crony-vampiric cheating through abuse of state power.

See my earlier posting: Must the Rich be Lured into Investing?

== Situation Normal: Cheating Flows Up ==

Do not let so-called “tea party” confederate lackeys divert you. The U.S. Revolution was against a King and Parliament and royal cronies who commanded all American commerce to pass through their ports and docks and stores, who demanded that consumer goods like tea be sold through monopolies and even paper be stamped to ensure it came from a royal pal. Try actually reading the Declaration of Independence. “Taxation without representation” was about how an oligarchy controlled Parliament through jiggered districts and cheating, and used that power to funnel wealth upward.

Here’s a fact that shows where we came from… and might be going: over a third of the land in the thirteen colonies was owned – tax-free – by aristocratic families.

The U.S. Founders fought back. After their successful revolt, they redistributed fully a quarter of the wealth and land, and they did it calmly, without the tsunami of blood that soon flowed in France, then Russia, then China. That militantly moderate style of revolution actually worked far better at fostering positive outcomes for all. For the people… and yes, for local aristocratic families, who retained comforts, some advantages. And their heads.

Nor was that the only time Americans had to push back against proto-feudal cheating, which we now know erupts straight out of human nature. The Civil War was certainly a massive ‘wealth redistribution’ by giving millions of people ownership of their own lives and bodies. During the 1890s Gilded Age, we avoided radical revolution in favor of reform – e.g. anti-trust laws.

Our parents in the Greatest Generation – who adored FDR – sought to prevent communism by keeping market enterprise flat, competitive and fair. Far less radical than the Founders, their reforms created the flattest social structure and the most fantastic burst of economic prosperity, ever.

And dismantling the work of that generation has been the core aim of the confederate aristocracy, since Reagan.

== Dire beasties! Debt and the Fed ==

But let me share with you more of the myopia of decent men. John Mauldin continues: “Debt is another big issue for Lacy Hunt. People compare debt to addictive drugs, and as with some of those drugs, the dose needed to achieve the desired effect tends to rise over time.”

John then shows a chart (he always has the best charts!) revealing the additional economic output (GDP) generated by each additional dollar of business debt in the US. Needless to say, the effectiveness of each dollar of debt, at growing healthy companies, has plummeted.

Um…. Duh? Once upon a time, the purpose of corporate debt was to gather capital to invest in new productive capacity (factories, stores, infrastructure and worker training), with an aim to sell more/better goods and services that would then produce healthy margins that pay off the debt, across a reasonable ROI (Return on Investment) horizon.

This would then actually decrease the net ratio of debt to company value, across a sapient period of a decade or so.  This approach still holds, in a few tech industries, but not wherever companies have been taken over by an MBA-CEO caste devoted to Milton Friedman’s devastating cult of the quarterly stock-price statement.

Today, companies borrow in order to finance stock buybacks, market-cornering mergers and other tricks that our ancestors (again, in the Greatest Generation or “GGs”) wisely outlawed. Tricks that GOP deregulatory "reforms" restored to the armory of cheaters. Tricks that enable the CEO caste to inflate stock prices and meet their golden incentive parachutes, with the added plum of pumping rewards for their Wall Street pals who arrange the debt. 

Every parasitic act of “arbitrage” is justified with semantically-empty incantations like “correct price determination” – mumbo-jumbo spells that bear absolutely zero correlation with reality.

No wonder each added dose of debt is ineffective at actually growing long-term company value! What’s so hard to understand? Why are Mauldin and Hunt puzzled? 

Oh, yeah. They are honest and sincere men, at last able to perceive symptoms. But alas, they are also far too stubborn to acknowledge the root disease -- a conspiratorial cabal of would-be feudal lords. Loyal to a fault... (well, these plutocratic connivers are their friends)… John and other residually-sapient conservatives choose denial over admitting that Adam Smith had it right, all along.

Instead, Mauldin focuses again and again on his chosen Bête Noir … the Federal Reserve, even though the Fed has almost insignificant power over any of the things we’ve discussed here.  It’s Congress – Republican for all but two of the last 23 years – who sent U.S. fiscal health plummeting, from black ink to red that’s deeper than an M Class dwarf star. Congress did this while devastating every protection against monopoly/duopoly or financial conspiracy.

== Misunderstanding your own icons and heroes ==

Consider that Friedrich Hayek – often touted as the “opposite to Keynes” – actually agreed with John Maynard Keynes about many things, like the need for a very wide distribution of economic decision-makers. In an ideal market, this would be all consumers, empowered with all information. (There goes Brin’s broken record, repeating “transparency!” over and over.) Though yes, a 21^st Century Keynsian will call for a government role in (1) counter-cyclical stimulation and (2) inclusion of externalities, like the health of our children’s children and their planet. (Note the spectacular success of the greatest modern Keynsian politician, California's Jerry Brown.)

Hayek complained that 500,000 dispersed and closely watched civil servants could never substitute for the distributed wisdom of an unleashed marketplace of billions. Hm. Well, that’s arguable. But so?

What does the right offer up, as its alternative? A far, far smaller, incestuous cabal of a few hundred secretly-colluding golf buddies in a circle-jerking CEO caste? That’s gonna allocate according to widely-distributed market wisdom?

Hayek spins in his grave.

This selfsame CEO-caste went on a drunken debt spree that blatantly served the cabal and not their companies, nor the economy or civilization.

Blaming the Federal Reserve for that is like condemning the owners of a liquor store for all the drunk drivers crushing pedestrians. Sure, the low price of booze might have contributed, but it’s not the primal cause. Oh. And yes, it’s been Congress that keeps funneling wealth from the middle class into gaping, oligarchic maws.

== Some of these guys almost get it ==

How I wish I could share John Mauldin’s newsletter with you! It’s smart! I mean it. I always learn a lot, the charts are excellent. Moreover, I get self-pats on my own back, for assiduously reading the smartest commentators that I can find, from every side. Also, John’s a cool dude and way fun. I read every word and its maybe 70% real-smart stuff!

(For contrast, see the super-smart liberal “Evonomics” site; the place where Adam Smith is most-discussed and would be most at-home.)

Moreover, John does honestly acknowledge – forced by the blatantly obvious - that income and wealth disparities are problematic and rising, while money velocity plummets.

Only then he goes to the newest catechism of the rationalizing right… arm-waving that technology is at fault. 

Yes, okay, automation has a depressing effect on middle class wages. So? Then it is time for a conversation about the social contract again. Like how to keep the middle class “bourgeois” – by keeping them vested in shared ownership of the means – as well as output – of production. It’s what the Greatest Generation did, while troglodytes accused them of “communism.” The most-entrepreneurial generation in history, they were far from commies.

== Some in-yer-face time ==

Okay, it’s that time again; so let me talk again directly to the confederate/feudal elites aiming to restore inherited hierarchies of old. This is no longer about Mauldin, but the would-be overlords standing right in front of him, in his blind spot.

Dear oligarch-traitors. Let me avow that human nature and history seem to be on your side. Our experiment in flat-fair-open systems always had the odds stacked against it. Hence, you feudalists will probably get your wish. Briefly. The middle class will very likely fall into proletarian poverty while you rake it all in.

Your evident plan is to leverage new technologies to entrench oligarchic rule, right? I depict something like it in EXISTENCE, though done by far smarter zillionaires than you.

Only – was it really part of the plan to wage open war on every single fact-using profession? Now including not just science and journalism and law, but the FBI, intelligence agencies and the military officer corps?  And all the folks who are innovating in genetics and artificial intelligence, too? Really? Are you that confident?

Or else, perhaps you are like so many past lords -- so lulled by sycophants that you cannot hear Karl Marx chuckling, as he rises from his mere-nap. (Copies of his works are flying off the shelves, faster than any time since the 1970s.) If so, you may get much more than you bargained for. More revolution than any sane person would want.

Adam Smith wasn’t the only one to seek a way out of this dilemma. Nor were the U.S. Founders. Will Durant – one of the greatest historians – said this, in his book, "The Lessons of History":


“In progressive societies the concentration (of wealth) may reach a point where the strength of number in the many poor rivals the strength of ability in the few rich; then the unstable equilibrium generates a critical situation, which history has diversely met by legislation redistributing wealth or by revolution distributing poverty.”

The recent “great” time for America was built by moderate, if somewhat leveling, legislation. The Greatest Generation chose a Rooseveltean alternative to violent revolution. And it worked -- inarguably, spectacularly -- till cheating once more gained the upper hand.

Me? I stand with the Founders. With Adam Smith and a flat-fair-open market society filled with opportunity for all and grand, cheat-advantages for none. A relatively-flat society that still has loads of incentives. One wherein true competition among healthy-confident equals can thrive, pouring a positive-sum cornucopia for everyone.

And now, yes, “equals” must include all previously-squelched sources of talent – genders, races and the raised-up/blameless children of the poor.

You confederates, you are the traitors to that flat-fair-open-accountable Better Capitalism. The form that stood up to Marx and quelled him to sleep. The only kind of market system that can withstand the coming wind, when he awakens.

I stand with the Greatest Generation… and greater ones to come.  

I stand with the moderate, scientific, flat-fair revolution that accepts facts and complexity and denies simplistic incantations. Moreover, that moderate/calm/eclectic kind of revolutionary numbers in the tens… hundreds of millions. We include nearly all of the most-skilled, and our growing cadre hears the alarum.

We awaken. We rise. And you had better welcome this. Because it will either be our reforms or the tumbrels of Robespierres.

Choose.

Explaining the Gut Punch

Okay… cue background music. Robert Palmer’s “Women are smarter in every way.” Our anthem for tonight. And perhaps for four years.

And so let us continue with more unconventional and alternative perspectives on the election.  But first, just a few words on the frenzied protests in our cities. 

Oh, I’m sympathetic to the revulsion, and appreciate raw passion. (Crisis hotlines are helping people cope.) Still: “Did all you folks in the street vote? Did you precinct walk and knock on doors? Did you try to engage (and even listen to) a few of your red neighbors, this round? What is it you expect raucous demonstrations to accomplish? Other than give opportunities for street trolls (learn the French term agents provocateurs) to draw camera attention, by burning flags? I’m curious.

Oh, I can dig the sense of desperation. Among those clasping for straws, one fellow begs Warren Buffett to offer to pay any fines incurred by any members of the Electoral College who cannot stomach the duty before them. Over 4 million have signed the petition on Change.org for the Electoral College to make Clinton president on December 19, using the excuse that she won two million more votes than Mr. Trump.

Hm. Not impossible, in theory, but that ‘salvation’ ain’t gonna happen, and indeed probably shouldn’t. Though the glimmering possibility could help explain why Donald Trump is keeping mum and making pleasant sounds, wanting no scandals till after the Electoral College vote. 

A more tasty fantasy... For the electors to pick Tim Kaine as Vice President. To serve as a caution, always lurking at DT’s elbow. But also to deter Paul Ryan from ever betraying Trump by trying this trick. Yeah, right. 

The least implausible and most eloquently argued Electoral College Gambit is this one put forward by E. J. Xavier. “Force House Republicans to Elect Trump.” 

Huh?  Read that again. It’s not a fantasy about reversing the election results. That’s not happening, folks. But getting enough electors to abstain, so that no candidate gets a majority? That would throw the choice to the U.S. House of Representatives. And what would that accomplish? Paul Ryan’s majority-of-states there would then choose a Republican, and it would be Trump. So what’s the deal? It would force them to take full responsibility for Trump. Read Xavier’s essay. It is persuasive enough that thirty or so Republican electors might… well…

Nah. Sci Fi can be fun and we’ll return to fantasy politics later. But now it’s time to dive into that turbid sea of rationalizations for what actually happened. How did we get punched in the gut?

 First from fabulators of the right.

== The Bushite Establishment Rationalizes ==

Those who concocted this mess, who egged on the lobotomization of the Republican Party – especially Glen Beck and George F. Will – have been seen moaning imprecations in every direction except toward the nearest mirror. They, along with Rupert Murdoch, Roger Ailes, Dennis Hastert and the Fox Elite, created the frothing creature we all witnessed at those rallies. DT merely leaped into the saddle, toppled the appointed jockeys, and expertly grabbed the reins. But you did this, fellahs. We aren’t interested in your fairy tale excuses, boys. Or Megyn Kelly’s.

A more interesting conservative source is John Mauldin’s newsletter, which offers up some choice justifications. For example, international financier Charles Gave targets the globalist “Davos Men,” citing Trump as a reversion to basic nationalism: “Trump’s election victory is a clear indication that the majority of people are not interested in a world government, but want to return to a classical, local democracy.”  

Good try, Charles. As if ‘world government’ was even remotely on the minds of the Trump electorate. And as if ‘democracy’ was the visceral goal of a putsch whose principal outcomes - every policy goal shared by Trump and the GOP -- will favor oligarchy, all the way down till we reach 1789.

His father, legendary money-mover Louis Gave, starts out much wiser by citing Alexis de Tocqueville, who wrote the following of American democracy:

“The election becomes the greatest and, as it were, the only matter which occupies people’s minds. Then political factions redouble their enthusiasm; every possible phony passion that the imagination can conceive in a contented and peaceful country comes out into the light of day… As the election draws near, intrigues multiply and turmoil spreads. Citizens divide up between several camps each of which adopts the name of its candidate. The whole nation descends into a feverish state; the election becomes the daily theme of newspapers, the subject of private conversations, the object of every maneuver and every thought, the only concern of the present moment. It is true that as soon as the result has been announced, this passion is dispelled, all returns to calm, and the river which momentarily overflowed its banks returns peacefully to its bed.”

Perspective, indeed.  Alas, Louis doubts things will settle down this time. Far more on target than his son, he writes:

“Back in 2004, John Kerry had made the theme of his campaign the problem with the “Two Americas”. And of course, back then Kerry referred to the rich and the poor. But this vote illustrates that the US really is dividing into two countries as the gulf in voting patterns widens along income, education, gender, class, and urban/rural divides. Increasingly, Americans seem to live in self-reinforcing echo-chambers where they solely interact with people who hold the same beliefs and values. Combine this new reality with the news filtering capacity provided by social media algorithms and it is clear that growing parts of the country will never have to confront uncomfortable facts, or opinions.”

And yes, I predicted this Echo Chamber Effect long ago, in Earth (1989). And its possible, catastrophic outcome, in The Postman.

John Pavley, Sr. Vice President at Viacom, takes this thought farther, talking about how these new media are causing social breakdowns. moreover, this lobotomization is familiar, from history.

Remember, the first effect of the printing press was to exacerbate intolerance... till printed books later empowered people to fight against it. Or ponder the way 1930s radio first wrought fanaticism and horror before it fostered empathy. Likewise, Pavley talks about how monsters are using the new media more effectively, before they can increase our reasoning ability and empathy:

“The broadcast technologies of the pre-social media world coerced us into consensus. We had to share them because they were mass media, one-to-many communications where the line between audience and broadcaster was clear and seldom crossed. Then came the public internet and the World Wide Web of decentralized distribution. Then came super computers in our pockets with fully equipped media studios in our hands. Then came user generated content, blogging and tweeting such that there were as many authors as there were audience members.

“Here the troll was born…. Every time you share a link to a news article you didn’t read (which is something like 75% of the time), every time you like a post without critically thinking about it (which is almost always), and every time you rant in anger or in anxiety in your social media of choice, you are the troll.”

Max Read argues in New York Magazine that our ‘echo chamber’ mentality, to gather in likeminded swarms online, may have been a crucial factor this year. Polemically fervid-uniform ’nuremberg rallies”... and there are (yes) some on the left, too.

“All throughout the election, these fake stories, sometimes papered over with flimsy “parody site” disclosures somewhere in small type, circulated throughout Facebook: The Pope endorses Trump. Hillary Clinton bought $137 million in illegal arms. The Clintons bought a $200 million house in the Maldives. Many got hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of shares, likes, and comments; enough people clicked through to the posts to generate significant profits for their creators. The valiant efforts of Snopes and other debunking organizations were insufficient; Facebook’s labyrinthine sharing and privacy settings mean that fact-checks get lost in the shuffle.”  

Yes to much of that. Fretful over how social media are being blamed for the Echo Chamber Effect, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg published a response to accusations that “fake news” on Facebook influenced the outcome of the U.S. election, and helped Donald Trump to win. Oh, if only he were interested in simple ways to make this a win-win.

== An amputation we cannot afford ==

Of course this relates to the decline of professional journalism, which endangers us all. Each year, we train thousands of ambitiously dedicated young people -- some of our very best -- overflowing with curiosity, to go forth and ask questions of the widest variety of sources. The profession has many lapses and can fail at times, but it happens to be one of the three dozen or so that deal most avidly in those things called facts. And hence, journalism -- along with science, teaching, medicine, civil service, economics, diplomats... and let me repeat, above all science... have all been declared enemies by Fox, the alt-right and trumpism. They share this, down to the marrow.

But journalism is being undermined even more powerfully by one flaw in today's internet! By the Net/web's astonishing over-reliance on advertising to pay the bills. A business model that has worked far longer than I ever expected it to. But by sucking away the revenue source of old fashioned, fact-centered investigative news media, this business model has harmed us all.

In this series of articles at the bold Evonomics website, I make the case for micropayment systems for online content, offering the "secret sauce" that could make them (at last) work.  And possibly save professional journalism. And possibly thereby... all of us.

(Advertising Cannot Maintain the Internet -- Here’s the “Secret Sauce” Solution and Beyond Advertising: Will Micropayments Sustain the New Internet?)

Alas, even as we discuss the Internet's real design problems – recalling that every new medium since glass lenses and movable type has rocked society and done harm, till we learned to use it well -- Louis Gave and John Pavley and the others are still pointing to a surface phenomenon. 

An exacerbating tool or symptom, rather than the disease.

What disease? Alas, Americans know no history, or the context for all of this should be blatantly obvious -- that this patterned illness has struck before! Many times. In its most violent manifestation it was called the Civil War – lately “culture war.” 

And – manifestly - it’s been deliberately re-ignited. 

Moreover, we’ll see that this is the only model for recent events that actually fits every single thing that happened.

== A pause for the Sci Fi perspective ==

More of these rationalizations in a moment. But let’s pause, at intervals, to try striking a lighter – if cynical – tone.

The most compellingly science fictional interpretation? “If Nate Silver was our Hari Seldon, then Donald Trump is the Mule.” Some of you get exactly what that means. If not? Then save it for another time.  (Late addendum: This fellow took the same comparison and put it to lyrics: ‘The Mule’ — An Anti-Trump Power Ballad'.)

Or take this from my blog’s comment section, where A.F. Rey related... ‘My wife said first the Cubs win the World Series, now Biff is in charge. It's Back to the Future coming true.’

Oops. And we left Jennifer sleeping on the porch swing. Biff. Oh sweet lord. Are there any differences?

Ah, but now we’ll never know if Bill Clinton would have been called “First Laddy.” Or if she’d have given him a cabinet appointment, to keep him both busy and close… or an ambassadorship to keep him far. (Sweden, if she still liked him; Afghanistan, if not.)  Now? We can only speculate.

Enough comedy. Back to work.

== Finally… more chillingly plausible sci fi ==

There’s so much material.  So let’s put it aside for now and post what we’ve got.  Except for this final thought.

The ‘Prediction professor’ who called Trump’s big win also made another forecast: Trump will be impeached. 

Allan J. Lichtman’s book, “Predicting the Next President: The Keys to the White House 2016,” was among the few that forecast successfully the results of this election.

Lichtman also puts forward a forecast that’s similar to a “what-if” that I issued, months ago, based on a obvious fact — that the Republican establishment “don't want Trump as president, because they can't control him. He's unpredictable. They'd love to have Pence — an absolutely down-the-line, conservative, controllable Republican. And I'm quite certain Trump will give someone grounds for impeachment, either by doing something that endangers national security or because it helps his pocketbook.”

Adds Lichtman: “The Democrats cannot rebuild by pointing fingers at Hillary Clinton and her campaign, which as the Keys demonstrated, were not the root cause of her defeat,” he said. “The Democrats can rehabilitate themselves only by offering an inspiring progressive alternative to Republican policies and building a grass-roots movement.”

Oh, I will talk about that. As if anyone listens.

===

-- return to Part I: We are in it, all right, but "figuratively" or "literally"?
or continue to Part III: Might some zillionaire save us?