Tornado Alley (PROG)

[fuagf]

Updated: 100% And It's exactly because they "embrace ideas any sane person should give up at the age of 17" that they haven't been able to become leaders of a country with a decent democratic system in place to now. Not in history. And note they have decided to seriously go after the most powerful country in the world. One reason why is because the voting populace of the USA is among the most suspicious of government. A 2nd reason because the voting public of the USA is among the groups most susceptible to conspiracy theory, though there is huge irony in that in that most all Trump voters have missed the Thiel, Yarvin, Musk, Vance, Trump conspiracy in play at present. The most pressing reason they have gone after the most powerful country in the world is the most obvious one, they have more than enough money, but never enough power.

Oh, just realized Tornado Alley is back. Beauty! Thanks to admins, and thank you!

Update: From South Africa to the USA:

Crack-Up Capitalism: How Billionaire Elon Musk's Extremism Is Shaping Trump Admin & Global Politics
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The Ciskei experiment: a libertarian fantasy in apartheid South Africa
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Related: [...] JD Vance is the handpicked leader of the anti-democracy movement in the US
[...]Thiel is a self-styled libertarian who once wrote: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”
[...]
While investors were lured to Ciskei by the carrot of state subsidies, they also profited from the apartheid state’s liberal use of the stick. The would-be libertarian utopia operated hand in glove with the South African security forces, which punished everyday civilian acts of resistance and actively enforced the prohibition on trade unions. One activist, Priscilla Maxongo, described how women in the labour movement were routinely arrested, interrogated and tortured. She recounted having a rubber tube tied around her neck to cut off her air supply until she divulged information about the groups organising for workers’ rights.

In 1983, police killed 15 protesters when they shot into crowds demonstrating against a bus fare increase. The New York Times called Ciskei an “ugly little police state”. Thozamile Gqweta, the secretary of the South African Allied Workers, had his house set on fire with the front door wired shut; his mother and uncle died when their houses were similarly set on fire; his girlfriend was shot by police as they left his mother’s funeral; and he was himself detained for three months and tortured with electric shock. In the same year that the American libertarian magazine Reason celebrated Ciskei as a “haven of prosperity and peace in South Africa’s back yard”, security forces entered a Ciskei church commemorating the 10th anniversary of the Soweto uprising and beat the congregation with whips made of rhinoceros hide, hospitalising 35 and killing a 15-year-old boy.

The tragedy of the libertarian partnership with the police state was starkest in 1987. That year, Louw travelled to Dakar to meet members of the African National Congress (ANC) in exile. He hoped to persuade the socialist ANC that privatisation was a better way to reform South Africa. Months later, the Black civil rights lawyer who had organised the meeting was found in the back seat of his own car bound and beaten to death by the Ciskei security forces. Louw’s partners in building a libertarian utopia were actively exterminating the democratic anti-apartheid opposition.

Ciskei was a “Trojan horse to topple apartheid”, claimed a British neoliberal thinktanker on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. But it was no such thing. Rather, as a South African libertarian economist conceded with resignation after praising the results of Louw’s experiment: “If the ANC came into power in South Africa, they would conquer Ciskei and integrate it again into South Africa at large. So the continued success of Ciskei depends upon the continued survival of the South African government.”

The libertarian Bantustan was not a lever to weaken the grip of the apartheid state. Rather, it served a role in the public relations strategy of the apartheid state as a Potemkin village of supposed Black self-determination and economic liberalism, which needed the apartheid state to live.

But libertarians around the world refused to recognise this. At a time when the truth of violent state repression in Ciskei could be easily read about in major newspapers, an American neoliberal thinktanker called for Ciskei to be recognised as a separate country, even though nobody but South African elites bought the idea of Bantustan independence.

“I think [Ciskei] is a beacon for all of us on South Africa, and I am very happy with what’s going on there,” he said. “Can we have a Ciskei here?” he asked of the United States. Like many other libertarians, he saw the height of economic freedom in the form of a state unburdened by representative democracy, stripped of its capacity to tax and redistribute, and trained by the threat of capital flight to always put investors’ needs first.

Even as the Ciskei experiment showed troubling results for those who claimed to believe in freedom, Leon Louw sought to scale up the model of the business-friendly zone to a reform plan for the whole nation. In 1986 he published South Africa: The Solution, written with his wife, Frances Kendall. The book was one of South Africa’s most successful political titles at the time, selling close to 40,000 copies.

In their book, the couple proposed that South Africa and the Bantustans be fractured into a checkerboard of “cantons” where residents could “vote with their feet” by leaving with their capital whenever they desired. The central government would control no major revenue sources, make no major transfers between cantons and be constitutionally bound to respect private property rights. All education and land would be privatised.

The outcome would be what Louw and Kendall called a “marketplace in politics”. They believed that most cantons would be multiracial – but a key feature of their proposal was that “people of a particular race or ideology can cluster together in ‘national’ or ‘ethnic’ cantons to satisfy their particular preferences and escape the kind of governments they reject”. The freedom of movement would be constitutionally secured but, crucially, the right to settle would not be. In other words, you might take a job in a segregated canton but might not be allowed to live there.

This was precisely how the existing labour market worked in apartheid South Africa, as Black workers moved in and out of white areas for employment but had limited rights of residence, let alone property ownership.
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