So here goes, you know what I could give less of a fuck about? Mitt Romney's tax return.
President Obama is running a bad campaign early. This is clown campaigning bro...Ask Romney to show his foreign policy initiatives. Ask him to put his budget in writing. This dumb dumb campaigning must stop. The public is not very politically shrewd or over averagely mentally quick but some how they always see through bullshit. Whoever is running President Obama's campaign needs to be fired. Whoever let him make a news story of asking dude for tax returns doesn't know what's going on the ground in America.
People are hurting out here. It's not what you see on reality T.V... The real hood is fucked up..... And it's not too much different in white small towns up and down the east coast where the GOP is strong.
Young people who had jobs now live off unemployment checks. Mr. President, with all do respect nobody cares about his tax return. That should be a little jab here and there but not a big story. Because any and almost every American would use the tax code loopholes to their best if they knew how. And many of them do it now! People claim children that aren't theirs all the time in the hood. What happens in the hood happens in the small towns also. I don't need to see it there, I know America.
So believe it or not people need to hear Ryans and Romney's plan and then let the economist have at it from both sides in the media. If they don't release anything lean on that point. They have one or two good points the Republicans do. The school voucher idea Romney mentioned is one, and Ryan's health care reform centering on competition. But that's it that makes sense to me.
Voltaire said history is a pack of tricks the present plays on the past.
The tricks are funny in that things get recycled and re-aranged where the name changes or the concept behind the name changes so that the people of the past or the student of political history would look and be amazed.
The Republican party is liberal now. Even the people to the so called far right are okay with spending huge amounts of money. When Richard Nixon said "We are all Keynesian's now." he was speaking for the Republican party in hindsight. Then you add to that the industrial military complex and you have a recipe for huge deficits. This is where the clash of rights is most prominent. Not the only place, just the most prominent.
The people as divided as they are all share one common thing, the financial pinch of the times. Even the 1%.. Call it aggregate demand destruction. The clash is between the rights of the populous against the right's of capital. But under it all theirs the right's of the people clashing with the rights of the industrial military complex or IMC. The IMC does have rights. Weather we Americans appreciate it or not, it has secured almost unshakable stability in a very unstable world on a relatively long time basis considering the history of the world. The IMC employs a lot of people who all have right's and beliefs that blur ethnic lines at times but at different places and with different ethnicity's , and they've earned rights. These rights are clashing with the rights of the people and the right's of capital.
As time passes and we get closer and closer to the election witch is the climax of huge rights clashes we will see the red ring shift.
We've seen it in the Rise of Mitt.. This shift is the exertion of power, power is the ability to get shit to go the way you want it to go. Your exertion along with all other like minded and people who are well schooled in the ways of exerting power will determine if you win.
The people with protests have exerted power but we don't see clashes in times square between occupiers and cops anymore. Nor do you see huge teaparty rallies much. Now you see clashes in city council meetings between occupiers' lawyers and candidates or incumbents in local offices all around the country.
The country doesn't want instability so out of fear or good sense rationality instead of fighting to the death they compromise. They give their rights to the Democrats or the Republicans without knowing who the people are. They know who they say they are but the names don't match the actions. Liberals act like conservatives and vice versa depending on which town they're campaigning in that day.
People who tweet some of thee most conservative tweets in the history of political twitter are now turning around and tweeting Go Romney/I love Ryan tweets.
It's some kind of weird times in history where reality is changing rapidly. Not only that, the consequences of bad decisions are showing up faster and faster. Ryan's debt trajectory chart was extreme but cut it in half and the slope is still too high to sustain, especially if we can't get a larger number of people working. I'd rather more people had jobs to afford health care than direct help from the government to afford health care. The government has a super bad track record, what makes us think they can get health care right? The answer is competition. Competition lowers prices the best. The same with the school system. Competition would fix it.
But back to the red ring of power... It'll shift to the right because of the shear know how of exerting political power. The masses' power circle was narrow and longer vertically because they don't have a lot of ways to exert power and they're power is vertically stacked with the pole's pretty far apart.
Having superior tools to exert power, Capital along with IMC together exert the most power. The IMC will pull the ring of power in use closer and closer. Capital will do the same. Populous for the most part will vote down party lines with independent moderate this or that's jumping sides on different issues. What's demonstrated by the conservative tweeters that only want to conserve their own wealth, but the government can kick the can 4 more years thinking that seems pretty liberal to me. They say liberals are only liberal with other peoples money, it could be said that conservatives are only conservative with there own money, not with the public's. Most of the populous will be out side the ring of power in use because the majority will deligate their rights to people who's interest are different than what their actions would testify to be and many times are opposite to the interest of the populous.
By the time the election comes around here's what the shift of the red ring will look like.
They catch bit's and pieces so all speeches are crowd pleasers now. No challenges to the nation from their leaders besides I challenge you to vote for me!!. Now if you know the crowd you cater to them when your talking to them. The people in the crowd give their rights to them then they largely execute government in a way that benefits the exerters of the most power which is almost always not the populous, which also means not democratic. The Republicans know how to create their own reality. They manipulate reality better.
President Obama picked a bad staff for his first term in the beginning of his first term of which Larry Summers was the weakest link. He should have insisted the president push through as many economic booster laws as he could while the democrats had control of the congress. The window between January 2009 and November 2009 is when he should have been pushing growth economic policy. Hindsight is 20/20 but Larry had a short sighted economic plan and it's costing Pres. Obama. I blame him because he's so easy to blame. He was in the thick of it. We needed Milton Friedmon-esq foresight and we got Larry Summers... The LA Times described him this way when he stepped down from Pres. Obama's econ team;
" Larry Summers, known as a brilliant economic thinker with a prickly personality, will step down at the end of the year to return to Harvard University, where he had a controversial five-year stint as president."
That was writen here: LA Times 9-21-2010
He did so well at his last job they were mentioning him for president of the world bank not long after he stepped down from Pres. Obama's econ team. The question is was he captured before he joined the team or after?
Making him the president of the word bank would have been rewarding failure in a hugely morally hazardous way. But somebody in high places thought it was a good idea. Go figure.
It's spilled political currency milk now. The lesson is that doing the right thing at the right time in political economic world is crucial. It's the only way to tame volatility in politics. Which is crucial since volatility in politics transfers into volatility in financial markets. And volatility in politics is hard to model, but it's real and is irritating the scientific math formulated model economist and traders for the past 4 years. The volatility of the mood of the country reflects the fact It only took 3 and half years for the effects of bad political economic decisions to have ill consequences. It used to take a decade... I blame the guy in charge. If your the president your going to get the blame.
George Friedman got a shout out from John Mauldin this week. Dude is a mental mars Rover. Thinking from a different planet. He spoke on money managers giving money back because they can't make money in this market. He said it's because they don't connect politics and economics together well. He said it's Political economics not just economics. We're at the beginning again with the classic political economist. He was mainly referring to Europe but it reflects the upheaval this economic crisis has pushed through the economic landscape. A must read, that can also be used in some of our thinking in and on our own politics and economy.. If for no other reason than to know where it makes the most sense to put our money.
The American election is the most important coin toss in history as of right now. With both Romney & Pres. Obama at 50% 50% basically he's now in a close race with Mitt Romney.
How did this happen?
The ring of power in use and what it will be used for is what elections are about. Pres. Obama has a split second relative to history left to right a sinking ship. It has to be politically genius because there's not a lot of time and the opposition ain't playing fair... It's politics so what would you expect? What Romney has accomplished so far says a lot about the way the country wants to go. Or at least the way the Republican big wigs want it to go. Through it all I ask the question... How did this happen.
This is all water under the bridge now.
What's current is When Romney hesitated to bring his medicare plan out the Democrats should have leaned on that. hard! All is not lost, but if the party doesn't realize it's mistakes and correct them fast it could be another 8 years or more before they have the amount of control they had in that 2009 window.
They need to get serious with Romney. And for them to get serious with Romney they need to first attack all his policies. Get him to feel guilt about not putting his plans down on paper not for not releasing his tax returns. You make him more connected to every working person in America. Even the honest people who don't cheat on their taxes feel offended by someone asking "Let me see your tax returns." It's much better to attack him on official things through your team. Let the below the belt stuff come from outside the executive team. It stings just as much if it makes a sharp point.
Which leads me to my other favorite subject as of late, Religion.
Religion is the most powerful political tool on the face of the earth.
It has played a major part in every major political economic clash in the past 2 thousand years. Every election in modern times has had a religious aspect to it. What's political genius is some how Romney has gotten the most religious people in the world to over look his religious conflict. It came up but was quickly brushed off as if it's not a big part of electing a president or a party candidate. But here the Republicans compromised religious belief's to except Mitt Romney.
The things about Pres. Obama being a muslim throughout his whole term has made religion a topic no one wants to talk about. At least no one in high places in either dominant political party. The connotation can't be denied when you defend not being a muslim like it's such a bad thing . Politically it is a bad thing though. We would never elect a muslim for president. But at PIMCO the huge investment firm with total assets over a trillion dollars it's okay for Mohomed El Erian to have a very highly held opinion on where huge amounts of the public's money get's invested. He's a muslim. One reality is different from another with the same people largely in both. Crazy
But that's not like the president of the United States right? Right, it's not. So why not scrutinize Mitt Romney's religion? The Democrats have to do this from outside the executive office. The Democratic political machine needs a ghost in it. I want President Obama to win the election for the most basic of political reasons... Because I don't like Mitt Romney.
But unlike a lot of biased people writing about the election I'm fair to both sides. If Romney wins I won't be angry like people will be if Pres. Obama wins, that's for sure.. But then again I'm not a religious zelot. I believe in God but I have doubts about everything else beyond that. Under all our political, economic, and social institutions lies religion.
Do you remember how your mom or any woman of authority would see kids fighting over toys and come over and say, "Give me that, since you all can't play together nobody get's it."
I wish mother nature would do that with religion. The only argument that makes religious doctrine even remotely possible of being true is that God is an alien. Hold on before you close your mind! Let me make the argument. It's crazy But I think it has some legitimacy.
Religious writings talk about what happen in times long before the people who write them were alive, mostly. It's 2012 AD right now and people from now can tell us what happen then and what it meant? Wouldn't you trust the word of the person who was there alive in those times? If someone who was at the event told you what happen as apposed to somebody who just heard about what happen at the event told who would you believe? The first paragraph of the Bible Wikipedia page says a lot about the Bible.
5,300 years ago before Christ there was Mesopotamia where the city of Babylon was. They had a religion that described their Gods as essentially aliens a thousand years before the Romans. They told them they'll be back the same way Jesus promised to return. Everything is rooted in truth. So I believe the root of the Bible is truth. The great flood is in too many religions not to have some truth to it.
If they live far enough away even traveling at the speed of light or faster. (yes, something can go faster than the speed of light. Thoughts for one. Protons and Neutrons also.) It could take 10,000 years to get there. A 20 thousand year round trip. The light we see from the stars took millions of years to reach us. So when you look at stars your looking millions of years into the past. The Mesopotamian's just like lots of the old religions had stories of the gods and the humans mating. I believe the people who were there. The rest of these stories are just being retold.
The acceptance of Mormonism by Christianity for political reasons is the most recent example of using religion to exert power. But even Joseph Smiths religion says God is a man who lives close to a planet named Kolob. I shit you not.
Ancient Alien shit..
To tie it all in the IMC's best tool for exerting political power is religion. They get everybody's power to use at there will framing a lot of things in a religious context. When Bush supposedly made a mistake describing the war on Iraq
as a crusade? That was no mistake. He meant what he said. The reality is that Muslim radicals are no different than Christian radicals, or any other radical. If they could they would be dropping bombs on our asses. If the powers were reversed I'm confident that Muslim leaders would be framing the justification for bombing us in a religious context. History is full of examples. The problem is when we start killing people over religious belief's. Not since the the days of the crusades and Spanish inquisitions have religious murder been going on on the scale it does in the world today. This makes my doubts about religion even stronger. How can this be "Godly?" It could be like the alien wars the Mesopotamian's and may others passed down as a religion. Each iteration kept getting added onto by people who weren't there or were from a different culture which gave them different names. It was taken advantage of thoroughly first by the Egyptians. They controlled their populations by claiming to be God. Today we control ours by claiming to be close to God or Godly.
In WWII armed forces landed on the Island of Tanna. The natives never having seeing airplanes before said they were Gods. People went back years later and they had made replicas of the airplanes and was praying to them. These are primitive humans living in the 21st century. They did what came natural.. I'm not disrespecting anybody's religion that wasn't the goal at all. I'm just sharing where I stand on the subject. I don't know if God is an alien. I'm just saying, there is evidence.
Out of all the reasons the election will go the way it goes religion is the least understood concept but the strongest. Is that okay? I don't think so, but what do I know? I know that the clashing of rights in the political arena has been going on sense the beginning and it won't stop now. You have to trade this market with an understanding of political economy and the role religion along with race, gender, sexual orientation, and a host of other variables. It's all so nonlinear It's difficult to model. You have to discern the strongest forces and which way they are pushing and make decisions with imperfect knowledge to trade this market. It's a political economic market again. Hooray!