In his brilliant 2018 essay about the dark heart of Trumpism, "The Cruelty Is the Point," Adam Serwer asserted that "This isn’t incoherent. It reflects a clear principle: Only the [former] president and his allies, his supporters, and their anointed are entitled to the rights and protections of the law, and if necessary, immunity from it." The book version expands the idea of that cruelty into policy, the legal system, and more, very clearly laying out the savage vision of America's slide into authoritarianism. It's all chilling and frighteningly prescient-feeling.
There is another layer to this, though, one that is less invested in any principles or coherent ideology or, indeed, reality itself. In the post-Trump (for now) era, Republicans feel liberated to just be total assholes, reason be damned. The only guiding idea, if there is one, is doing shit that pisses off their imagined enemies. Yes, you can say it's an assertion for power for power's sake, but much of it is ludicrous, so insultingly dumb, that it really appears to be mostly being an asshole for the sake of being an asshole.
Take, for instance, House Republicans changing the rules so that smoking is now allowed on the House side of the Capitol. Members could smoke in their offices, but that wasn't assholish enough, so now fuckpigs like Tom Cole of Oklahoma can cocksuck on a stogie in the House Rules Committee room, with the stench permeating large areas of the House of Representatives.
The rule first changed to ban smoking in all but personal offices in 2007, when Democrats took the House, but even squishy toy Paul Ryan and human chimney John Boehner didn't change it again. The Senate doesn't allow smoking at all. Republicans are literally endangering people around them with secondhand smoke (honestly, I don't give a fuck if it murders the GOP smokers) for something that gets Tucker Carlson all hard and throbbing since he really sets the GOP agenda these days.
And let's see how quickly they end up putting back the metal detectors, which the GOP also had removed from the House.
Everywhere you look, you see Republicans just doing asshole things. Some of them are incoherently dumb, as if they read a post on Truth Toilet or Twitter and decided the way to get the likes and thumbs up and hearts is to do it.
In Arkansas, new governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders (forgot that happened, didn't you?) has issued an executive order banning the use of "Latinx" from official communications and documents. And it's not enough that they are doing the asshole move. They have to go all Joe McCarthy on everything.
Part of the executive order is this: "All state offices, departments, and agencies shall submit a written report to the Governor detailing the findings of their review regarding the current use of the terms 'Latinx,' 'latinx,' 'Latinxs,' or 'latinxs.'" Why? Why the hell would that matter? The change in language (or, you know, "censorship") will happen regardless of how it was used in the past. It's pure intimidation; it's putting any state employees on notice. It's assholishness, through and through.
By the way, Arkansas was last led by another Republican, Asa Hutchinson, for 8 years. That means that "Latinx" was being used under a conservative. Of course, Hutchinson was the wrong kind of conservative because sanity bubbled up in him every now and then. He was an asshole, sure, but he wasn't doing things just to be an asshole. Sanders, though, has the Fox "news" cred to think of. Sanders just dissolved the Covid working groups in her state, declaring that there will be no vaccine or mask mandates and that Arkansas has "prioritized COVID-19 disproportionally." Again, everything she's saying is bad is what a fellow Republican did. And if it means killing the people of her state, nothing will halt her asshole march.
These asshole actions often have consequences on real lives. Take, for instance, the uber-asshole of the moment, Florida Governor and future loser of 2024 presidential race Ron DeSantis, who always looks like he's angry that anyone would accuse him of farting even though he totally was the one who dealt it.
While it's an asshole move for any governor to order the transport of asylum-seeking migrants from border areas to places like outside Vice President Harris's residence, DeSantis went the extra asshole mile by flying migrants in Texas to Martha's Vineyard, wasting government resources to show he's the biggest anus around.
DeSantis is working on levels of assholery that are almost metaphysically assholish. There's his battle with anything he sees as "woke," which I guess means "shit that makes straight white guys feel like they don't have all the power." In addition to the "Don't Say 'Gay'" bill, which bans any discussion of gender identity or sexuality in most school settings, and the "Stop WOKE Act," which prevents teaching anything that makes anyone sad about history, DeSantis and the nutzoid Republican legislature are now demanding that all Florida colleges and universities that receive any state funds to "report costs associated with campus diversity, equity and inclusion programs," meaning any "staff, programs, and campus activities related to diversity, equity, and inclusion, and critical race theory."
The memo requiring this was sent out on December 28. Everything was due this past Friday. They gave institutions of higher education two weeks to sort all this out, with the possibility of losing state funding if they didn't comply. On top of that fuckery, DeSantis is appointing completely unqualified right-wing and Christian extremists to the Board of Trustees of New College, a small liberal arts school. And let's not get into DeSantis's just fucking weird attack on Disney for daring to oppose the rampant homophobia of his administration. Who's fucking doing the canceling now, shitmonger?
It's all assholery. On and on and on it goes. In Congress, the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government that the Republican-led House of Representatives just passed? Assholery. The Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, which bravely says you can't kill babies and which passed the House before a sure doom in the Senate? Assholery.
Clearly, this is all just attention whoredom of the lowest order. Anything to get that sweet Tucker invite. Anything to make the other assholes tell you how awesome you are. But there is a real danger here, and it's different than the danger of the acts of wanton cruelty. Right now, all of these policies are based on completely invented issues.
No one is murdering babies born after failed abortions. No one is trying to make your kids gay or transgender. No one is harmed by the use of "Latinx" and smoking is still fucking dangerous. And, yeah, people should feel fucking sad about our fucked up American history. That's what makes you change shit. That fantasy, though, drives people to behave in ways that prop up the fantasy. The death threats against teachers and hospital workers and anyone who doesn't join in the fantasy aren't going to stay just threats for long.
But the assholes don't care that it's all a fantasy. In fact, that's part of what makes it so much fucking fun. That shit drives us crazy. Yes, some people just want to watch the world burn, but some get off on making you watch it burn with them, whether you want to watch or not. And if you don't notice the fire, they'll fan the flames until the smoke suffocates you.
Gary Stevenson explains transformation from trading desk millionaire to inequality crusader
"Flashback to Tornado Alley 2011. While on another mission i bumped into one, easily as relevant today as 12 years ago. "You've hit on it. Seemed counterintuitive to me as well considering that the GDP disparities between Blue and Red states are the mirror image of the income inequality. Gotta be wealth for there to be inequality." This of the late F6's (Mark's) headed: America’s idiot rich"
Gary Stephenson says little new, still one more vocal and talented guy on side always helps.
Related:
The Coming Republican Depression: How the GOP Turned America Into a Powder Keg, and Is About to Light the Match [...]After the last Republican-created depression, Franklin Roosevelt rejected the dogma of austerity and implemented the most ambitious suite of Keynesian policies in world history. He put people to work. He regulated the banks. He taxed the rich. He unionized the workforce. He broke up monopolies. He guaranteed Social Security, unemployment insurance, and the right to organize. P - That system — Keynesian demand-side economics —created the greatest middle class the world has ever seen. It lifted millions out of poverty, stabilized capitalism, and gave rise to the postwar economic boom. It literally created the modern American middle class. P - But starting in 1981, Reagan and the GOP declared war on that system. They gutted antitrust enforcement. They slashed top tax rates. They crushed unions. They deregulated finance. They privatized public goods. They shifted the burden of funding government from the rich to the working class. And then they blamed the victims of their policies for the resulting inequality and instability. https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=176516608
By business correspondent David Taylor and business editor Michael Janda 3h ago
Cult economist Gary Stevenson is calling for higher taxes on the wealthy. (Getty Images: Wiktor Szymanowicz/ Future Publishing)
Gary Stevenson is waging a war on inequality, and he's about to bring it to Australia.
A one-time student of the London School of Economics and Oxford University, and a multi-millionaire former Citi trader, the author of The Trading Game warns that the global elite — the top 0.1 per cent — are currently winning that fight.
"They are accumulating wealth at an unbelievably rapid pace and it's squeezing everybody else out," he argues.
"It's pushing up the prices of things like, most obviously, housing, but not just housing, you look at stocks, stock markets all over the world, you look at the gold price, you look at land prices."
He says that if younger middle-class people in Australia, like in his UK homeland, want to understand why they cannot buy their own home, they need to look at the very wealthiest people in society.
[YouTube of embedded video inserted] Gary Stevenson is waging a war on inequality and bringing it to Australia. (David Taylor)
"It's squeezing out ordinary working-class British and Australian workers and they can't afford homes," he tells ABC's The Business program.
"Then they need to take out massive mortgages.
"And, if you're taking out a massive mortgage, what does that mean? It means you're paying more interest to these billionaires, which means that your wealth goes up even slower. Their wealth goes up even quicker."
Stevenson is worried the process is already so well advanced that reversing it is an urgent mission.
"If you do not take care of protecting your middle-class wealth, you will lose it, and then you will look like Brazil, you will look like India," he argues.
"You will look like a country where a tiny elite lives an incredibly luxurious life, and all the new working-class people struggle to pay the bills. And it's happening here in the UK."
From growing up looking at Canary Wharf to working in it
Stevenson knows a lot about both the working class and the elite, because the 39-year-old has lived in both worlds.
"I come from a very poor background in East London, which is the poorest part of London," explains the son of a low-paid postal worker.
"And my plan was to just get the best degree, get the best grades, and get a great job like that."
His first degree was from the London School of Economics.
But he quickly realised that top grades were not going to be enough to land him a big-money job in a trading room, without the impressive extracurricular CVs and high-level connections many of his wealthy classmates possessed.
So he put his maths skills and street smarts to use in a game that a global banking giant, Citi, ran each year to select one of its interns.
"I won Citibank's trading game, which is a card game. I won that in, it must have been, 2006 when I was 20 years old, studying at the London School of Economics, yeah, before the financial crisis," he recalls.
He said that the game gave him an early insight into the thinking of many of his economics and finance classmates, who stuck rigidly to mental calculations about odds that made their behaviour very predictable and easy to trade against.
"So much faith in the maths," he laments.
"They didn't realise there was more at work, kind of a bigger picture about understanding humans and understanding human behaviour."
Gary Stevenson says ordinary working-class Australian workers are being exploited. (Getty Images: Wiktor Szymanowicz/Future Publishing)
He believes that is one reason why so many economists have been co-opted into providing the intellectual backing for the types of ultra-free-market policies that have allowed the rich to accumulate such vast wealth over the past few decades.
"I think a lot of economists are good at maths," he observes.
"They're not really good at questioning. They're not really good at pushing back. I think modern economics kind of produces a very sort of obedient, docile, non-questioning student."
Politicians 'basically bought by the rich'
Stevenson certainly cannot be described as obedient or docile, having walked out on Citi and fought to retain his bonuses under what he describes at the beginning of his book as extreme pressure from superiors at the bank.
He now trades on his own account, but it is his latest foray into popular economics and politics that has really ruffled some feathers.
Stevenson alleges he has been the subject of "hit pieces" by publications from the high-end Financial Times to the tabloid Daily Mail since his book came out at the start of the year.
"I think most people are behind me," he says.
"Most people know that what's happening now is not good, it's not right, and they want us to win.
"But, you know, obviously a lot of the richest people in the country, in the world, they're not happy with me and they've got a lot of money and powerful voices."
[Insert: Good to see him not including all rich people. See: There you go, Nick Hanauer told us years ago that it wasn't the wealthy like him who create jobs, but "Investors grew fearful that weak consumer sentiment could lead to a pullback in Americans’ shopping habits. Consumer spending makes up more than two-thirds of the US economy." thatconsumers create jobs. There you have it, more than two thirds of the economy.
Stevenson believes politics in the UK and most other nations has now been firmly captured by the elite.
"Unfortunately, we have created the political system where these guys who are in charge of the tax system either are, or very shortly become, phenomenally wealthy people, and their donors, and the owners of the newspapers who have a lot of power over them, are also phenomenally wealthy people," he argues.
"The people who are supposed to protect you from the rich are basically bought by the rich."
Stevenson says that is why he generally prefers to bypass mainstream media and is focused on building his online following.
"The reason I have a YouTube channel is because I'm going to use that YouTube channel to build power to force the politicians to move on this," he explains.
Gary Stevenson says he believes the elite has firmly captured politics in the UK and most other nations. (Supplied: Pål Hansen)
'Where Britain goes, Australia can follow'
Not content to spread his message online, Stevenson is travelling to Australia and New Zealand in February and March next year on a speaking tour, where he will hold events in Brisbane, Melbourne, Sydney, Perth, and Auckland.
While his message has been formulated in the context of the United Kingdom — which he describes as being in a "very, very, very, very bad" situation as bond markets threaten the sustainability of government finances — Stevenson says the middle classes across all developed nations should take heed.
"We're in the worst situation, I think, in the developed world at the moment, but, you know, everyone else is not that far behind," he warns.
"I think Australia is in a better situation than most — at least your wealth is under the ground.
"I talk about taxing the rich people; the rich say, they're gonna leave.
"Well, they can't take the iron ore, you know, they can't take it out of the ground with them. So you guys have a better situation.
"But I would like, when the Australian public watch this, they realise where Britain goes, Australia can follow.
Where Britain goes, Australia can follow, Gary Stevenson says, adding the two countries are similar in many ways. (ABC News: Andrew O'Connor)
"We are similar countries in a lot of ways, you know, we had our North Sea oil boom and we squandered it.
"You know, we had a lot of government wealth and a strong government, and we gave it away. And I don't want Australia to make those same mistakes."
Stevenson says he can already see the same trends developing in Australia that have eviscerated the British working and middle classes.
"You have a country here with the phenomenal amount of natural wealth and you would think that a country, low population density, enormous natural wealth, should be able to provide really good living conditions for its workers," he argues.
"And Australia has done a good job of that for a long period of time, but they're losing it. They're losing it because that wealth is starting to concentrate and, once it concentrates, it no longer works for the benefit of ordinary people."
His biggest piece of advice to Australians?
"If you are going to give your natural resources to private companies, you should make sure that you get a phenomenally good deal there, and you should be taking a big share of the profits."
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