crony maronie

This weekend:  met goals on my Writing List; created a tactic for administering cat health-syrup product (Success!); enjoyed music, and thought about election, with theory suddenly occurring:  Is it possible that Donald Trump might have Tourette's Syndrome?


I had never heard of that condition until I read a Sue Grafton mystery titled, "H" Is For Homicide -- one of the characters in the book had it.





------------------------------


I've had another thought / theory for a while about Candidate Trump, and believed on some level that I must not be the only person thinking it.  On "My Statesman" from Austin American-Statesman, Jonathan Tilove wrote about what I was thinking:


-------------------- [excerpt, My Statesman, Sept. 12, 2016] -------------------


Good day Austin:


Back during the Republican primaries, there was a suspicion voiced by some Cruz partisans and others that Donald Trump might be a Clinton stooge -- a plant, an asset, an operative --





whose mission it was to wrest the Republican nomination from any candidate capable of defeating Hillary Clinton and then deliver the general election to Clinton by running a campaign so over the top and beyond the pale that few sane people would vote for him.... --------------------- [end, Excerpt] ----------------


~~ Another idea I've thought about for a while was this:


Globalization


is a plan for the world,


being "paid for" by


American working people,


with their jobs.




It seems like globalization is a good thing;





however, two points suggest themselves, when I think about this.


1.  People in this country who work for a living, earning anywhere from $20,000 a year to $420,000 a year, have essentially been "sent the bill" for globalization, yet it is a bill we did not agree to pay.  We were not asked; we did not say "Yes."  And


2.  It seems like the people in power who (a) decided to have globalization, and b) decided how to pay for globalization, were U.S. presidents, congresses, and corporate heads, and the people to whom they "sent the bill" were not


themselves,


their children,


their other relatives,


their friends,


their business associates, etc. 


It appears that they pushed "the bill" outside of their circle of People-They-Care-About-And-Who-Can-Give-Them-Support-And-Profitable-Influene-In-Return, out to the Rest-Of-Us.




It's concerning, because America is supposed to be


capitalism, not


cronyism.


It's supposed to be


democracy, not


oligarchy.




On that same post from Austin American-Statesman appeared a Reader Comment from Rick Kennerly which partially addresses these aspects:


------------------- [Comment] ----------------------- Heard ARH's interview on the Ezra Klein podcast.  Wish it had been a call-in show. 


I would have floated this thesis: 


I've thought for a long time that both Trump and Sanders were pumping from different ends of the same pool of discontent and that the #BLM/Incarceration reform movements were mostly indications of the


mostly unseen


sump


draining off


America's severe unemployment problem,


disguised as the school to private prison pipeline.





For years I'd listen to economists come on NPR shows like Diana Rhem and talk about net jobs won or lost, but never a word about the quality of those jobs. 


As far as they were concerned, losing a union steel job with health and retirement was offset by picking up a kids job at McDonalds. 




There never was a qualitative gauge of jobs won or lost. 




All we've been doing in this country for the last 40 years is


push the unemployed displaced skilled workers down into service jobs and then


displacing the working poor into busking and office cleaning, and then


pushing the poorest, least educated right into prisons. 


It is difficult for Trump voters and Sanders voters and #BLM protesters to see, but at some level they all have the same enemy. ... ------------------------- [end, Austin Comment] ----------------------------




* Note -- I think you could change the phrase "poorest, least educated" to "normal people who don't happen to have Connections to Someone With Power."  (It looks to me like the phrases, "least educated" or "not educated" are sometimes used and misused in a way that's not legitimate....)


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