After Afghanistan it went to Ukraine, and after Ukraine it has to be something else. This is the unstoppable flow of the defense industry moving to a new outlet.
https://charliesykes.substack.com/p/a-vivid-snapshot-of-trum...
Some highlights include a $580 million dollar bet on oil futures 15 minutes before Trump made the announcement of talks with Iran, which the Iranian government denied actually happened.
Naturally, political appointments at the SEC are preventing investigation.
Americans have been a democracy for 200 years and have no healthcare, no public transit, a crippling drug and homeless problem, a crippling gun violence problem... The list goes on. Democracy doesn't seem to be having the desired affect there.
Why should that suddenly change? Where's this hope coming from?
Unfortunately with 90% of broadcast television soon to be owned by a single family, overturning this corrupt power may be even more difficult.
I think it’s time for society as a whole to reconsider the social contract legitimizing the wealth of these oligarchs.
At least the USA is only 4% of the world’s population so the world economy will just find other financial hubs and currencies, no big loss.
I hope they have enough direct flights to not have a layover in an unfriendly state.
And then to compensate they should be paid more in terms of salary, even if that salary seems absurdly large it would be less than most of them gain from the insider info they use to make deals.
Take the median income, multiply it by 5-10 and thats their salary.
Also something to keep in mind in the future: Old people have no reason to fear prison, they will die before they can get convicted.
The odds are too low of anybody getting meaningfully punished while they get to openly setup their entire family for generations using means and information not available to any normal citizen.
And while not guaranteed they are statistically more likely to suffer age related cognitive decline while still in office.
Record and wait. Justice is slow but has the power of the nation state. Once the leadership of this current government is gone and nobody is around to protect the offenders then its time to swoop in with the records and the justice system.
This is why its risky to join corrupt political movements led by old men, because they will use you to break the law, then die and you'll be on the hook. Much like the people who worked for the Soviets in the Baltics post war as young staffers, who administered the forced deportations and were eventually prosecuted ~50 years later for genocide or crimes against humanity.
i.e. everyone working for ICE today should be agitating for a pardon, given how racial profiling and warrentless raids are probably rather illegal in the long run.
this is pretty much how things will unfold in USA. Everything that has to happen will happen but very slowly. There is all the evidence supporting that.
I believe the Constitution and related artefacts should be stored in the British Museum with other historical documents. Civic religion needs to be done away with.
And what does that new framework look like to you?
1. Massively increase the size of congress. Modern technology makes this feasible in a way that it wasn't when the size was capped. More congress critters means it's harder to buy off a majority of them.
2. Re-write the first amendment to significantly limit political speech. The specifics of this are obviously very thorny, but reversing Citizens United and drastically limiting the amount of money that is spent on elections is necessary to have _any_ chance of saving the country.
Passionately agree with this!
2 is dicey and I would like to try campaign finance reform first.
I don't want to throw everything out because that's how you get slavery and The Handmaid's Tale. At the same time, I'll gladly acknowledge that a lot of our institutions were rotten from the founding and to their core, and their dismantling maybe not necessary but certainly suitable for a reborn America that leaves much of its baggage behind.
Whether the majority of people believe that or not has more to do with the place of the Revolution in our national mythology than with what actually happened in reality.
~30 years later all the quick investors of the privatization run the country and have been sending all their able bodied men into a drone-based meat grinder with no end in sight.
No wait
Hacks were found in the US that distribute free money, and that was communicated to millions of people.
People showed up for said free money.
That said, it's hard to reconcile that with the fact that Democrats continue to be the opposition party, and failed to even imprison Trump over four years for the things he'd done. And even in the best case scenario, we wouldn't expect Trump himself to live long enough to face much justice.
The optimism left in me hopes that this era can serve as an enduring cautionary tale for future societies.
I'd like to point out it was NOT the Democrats who failed us, it was Republicans in congress who failed us. I'm really not sure how you can suggest Democrats failed us, when they had 2 successful impeachments against trump, but it was Senate Republicans that voted to not remove him when 60 votes were required in a Senate split 50/50. Every single Republican Senator except Mitt Romney in the first impeachment failed us. The second impeachment for insurrection got closer at 57 votes in the senate, but Republicans failed us again.
Democrats absolutely did not fail us, they were the ones trying to hold a criminal accountable. It was and always is Republicans who fail us.
There was an AskHistorians post about the French revolution a few years ago that really stuck with me:
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/w18qt5/what_...
> Stability had hardly been a hallmark of the Revolution til that point, and really what we have seen is a revolving door of men rising to the summit of power, only to realize that once your head is above the rest it's a prime target for the guillotine. Of the early years of the Revolution, virtually any man who had been considered a leader was either dead or in exile. The King was executed in January of 1793. The Girondin, formerly indistinguishable from the 'left,' went en masse to the guillotine in October 1793. Danton & friends (dubbed by Robespierre 'the indulgents'), the literal authors of the Insurrection of August 10th which overthrew the King and declared the Republic, the 'giant of the Revolution,' had been executed in April 1794. Interspersed with these prominent deaths were hundreds of individuals who had been important players in the Revolution, whether in national or local politics, and who had now paid the price for their notoriety
In times of crisis and scarcity, the usual outcome is that anyone whose ego is big enough to think that he can lead or profit finds that they become a target for elimination. The folks who survive are the ones who focus on, well, surviving. We're headed for one of those times of crisis now, though most people don't want to admit it, and a lot of the people who are profiting off ill-gotten gains now may find that they don't live to enjoy it simply because it gives them a taste for profiteering that eventually makes them take stupid risks.
Seems like it'd be pretty easy to diversify into inflation-protected assets after taking big profits.
But I also don't see the dollar collapsing any time soon. The dollar's strength is built on the US economy, and the US economy is still one of the strongest in the world, with high productivity per person. We'll see some inflation, sure, but nothing that the rich insider traders can't hedge against.
I do not expect that there will be any real justice here. They're not gutting the average American -- they're bleeding us, extracting a small enough amount of value that they can get away with it. And we don't live in a just world.
Assets are yours only as long as there's a government to enforce your ownership rights over those assets for you. In case of government or societal collapse, your physical assets then are free for the taking to the ones with the most men with the most guns, and your paper assets are worthless.
Even if the central bank might does a bad job and make a mess of the economy, the activity of 350 million people is hard to ignore.
Is it enough to _fully_ sustain the US dollar?
Who knows, but at least there is a floor, even if everybody stopped using US dollars for international trade.
sorry but this is such a coping mechanism, or doomsday talking. Neither is dollar collapsing nor US government is collapsing, as there has been no evidence whatsoever of any of that even moving towards happening, at least on any meaningfully predictable timescale (i.e. 3-5 years? while even that's rich for predictions). Anything past that is just broken clock being correct.. at some point in time.
What would it take for dollar to "collapse"? What are the exact mechanisms that would be required to start that process?
What is the evidence of US government being "toppled" with layers and layers and layers of diverse (financial, legal, military, political, social, you name it) protections in place? It's the kind of thing preppers like to dream of but it's not happpening in our lifetimes.
When things of that scale happen you see it YEARS in advance in true poverty (as in people starving), in anger (as in people getting increasingly violent) at scale, in mass mobilization of masses actually looking to topple the government. Nobody is working right now to overthrow US government, there were never any organized attempts at that, not even demonstrations of a vector that can once lead there, as in it's simply not happening (sorry you can't in all seriousness put Jan 6 there as that was shocking for US political PR, but shockingly irrelevant for any country that has gone through real upheaval). US is extraordinarily rich even in it's poor version, everyone has everything to lose and nothing meaningful to gain from any "revolution".
There will never be an investigation while Trump is president, but, it's entirely feasible to force some action in the time being to enable a case later.
FYI it may not be technically illegal it depends on all sorts of things.
If trade were made public it could be very damaging.
Without being able to compare future liabilities to future income, we're lacking critical context. It's like they wrote half an article; kinda frustrating.
What is in discussion, are the multiple, very feasible, and very realistic scenarios, where an increase in interest rates, and a run from the dollar...Will force the US government to spend over 80% of the tax revenue, JUST TO SERVICE the debt interest....
https://i.4pcdn.org/pol/1773582592057062.jpg
Close out enough debt to make what's left serviceable. Thank our richest for their sacrifice for the nation's greater good.
The alternative is that they take the money and run. Or start WWIII. There is no in-between.
I don't think that this is a particular form of exceptionalism, beyond the US having a longer tradition of widespread, retail-owned shares, and law-making around that fact.
But sometimes I wonder when people are criticising the US as a culture, they're often choosing as the baseline that should be respected standards that were also defined in a US cultural context. What this sometimes means is that in internal US culture these points are seen as something that is heavily discussed, because there was a point where it was democratically decided and therefore could be undecided in the same way, like corporate personhood, or money-as-speech. In the case of the criminalization "insider trading", there is lively debate about whether this is actually a "good thing". That can sound horrific externally, because of course insider trading is a bad thing. But someone decided to make that a bad thing, and -- for historical accident reasons -- the edges of that debate was largely defined within the US.
(This is mostly just barely-informed speculation: sometimes issues like this emerge in international fora, or start in another culture and quickly spread. But the cultural and financial dominance of the US in the last century or so really makes these things often a point of debate in American terms, and a fixed point elsewhere. I speak here as an immigrant to the US and also someone who is dipped in global policy work, rather than someone who is stating this as a good or a bad thing.)
If it’s the hedge funds or institutional money, you can absolutely be sure this will come to a head. People don’t like being taken for a ride, and if they are repeatedly taken for a ride and they are organized market participants they will come around and make sure there is a comeuppance as a collective
Don't elect a geriatric compromise candidate. The current administration's excesses create a massive opportunity for a pendulum swing. It's really not that hard. Hold yourself, your neighbors, your family and your friends accountable for who they vote for. And as tempting as it is, don't give into cynicism. It will take work but change for the better is always possible, and really in America, is far less out of reach than it would often seem.
Does everyone still believe this will be possible/happen/allowed by the current regime?
Why don't you work on lobbying your grandparents and their vote because I seriously doubt you are equipped for whatever armed conflict you are imagining. Have some dignity. If Americans are so called upon to defend the constitution then so be it, there is no need to prematurely soil your pants about it.
> Does everyone still believe this will be possible/happen/allowed by the current regime?
Note the previous riot was unsuccessful. And probably he'll try something similar this time so the relevant services know what to expect.
People with strong political beliefs are going to turn their head to keep their side in power rather than put someone in power that will push policies they are fundamentally against.
Blagojevich was not replaced by a Republican.
At this point presidential elections are won by getting members of the other side to stay home. So encourage young people to get out and vote if you want a Democrat. Don’t waste your breath telling someone who cares about gun rights to vote for a Democrat.
Your comment reads like you are arguing with yourself. I never suggested anything to the contrary of much of what you write, so frankly I have no idea what point you are trying to make. I suggest you re-read my comment in full as I think we are predominantly in agreement.
America is desperately missing an "Insider trading driven government is bad actually" party
The people have lost faith in both parties, we now expect our leaders to be cronies.
Insider trading is prevalent on both sides. But the brazen daily market manipulation done by this administration is different. If you dont see that you are willingly blind
Why is it good when Democrats insider trade but bad when Republicans take the exact same trades?
But because people confidently draw often incorrect or baseless conclusions based on vibes and what largely democrat controlled corporate news media tells them, they're going to fall into us versus them mentality at party lines instead of better understanding that both sides are screwing us over tremendously and not accepting a perceived lesser evil
That said, Trump is unbelievably obviously corrupt and doing immense, immediate, and obvious damage to the country in pursuit of personal enrichment. If you dont see this you are willingly blind.
I don't believe these issues can be solved at the macro level. The US has many crumbling institutions and they are still ripe for the taking. Participate in volunteer events, the local FD, join the local Masons, or similar.
Engage with people directly, locally, even or especially with people who you assume hate you (they probably don't).
There's such a thing as degrees of influence. A fool who is strictly against anything Israel suggests is just as manipulable as a narcissistic moron.
This is the new normal.
I want people to really think about what’s going on here. $1-2 billion of taxpayer money is being spent every day to literally kill people for stock and futures trades.
And nobody will be punished for this. Anyone who gets a whiff of legal trouble will just buy a person.
At some point this is going to destroy even the appearance of market integrity.
2. Let’s hypothesize the US gov’t or allies did pre-release this info to traders as a policy tool, inviting them to sell oil profitably, shaping the later price action . In a practical sense they may have brought more speculators to the short side than otherwise would have been there; is that scenario really beyond the pale?
3. News of war and sovereign relations on an international stage necessarily will test the boundaries of traditional law of confidentiality and fair practices.
You will see, that anything else other than a ground invasion, is guaranteed to give Iran a war victory.
The war should not be won. it should be ended before everyone loses.
My analysis and my comment I linked to agrees. And that is a strategic victory for Iran, Russia, China and a defeat for Israel, and the US. The worst will be the Gulf States hostages of their dueling stock pile of defense missiles running out...to which they will have to queue for, with US DOD at the front of the queue.
The US is an oil exporting country and the people pulling the puppet strings of the dominant party in power directly benefit from high oil prices.
Further, oligarchical political-economic structures also benefit from "chaos is a ladder" scenarios where their privileged knowledge and access to decision makers gives them the ability to benefit from every new conflagration. The insider trading examples are only the trip of the iceberg.
The "war" will wind down after they've made their profits and redistributed the wealth and control as they set out to do.
Gone are the days where ruling elites benefited from international commercial stability. Those with power right now want chaos, and they will continue to create it until they are held to account.
Note that all of above applies just as well to the rulers of Iran as it does to the United States. It is the people who suffer, not the elites.
If you step back, in 1979 Iran launched a revolution that had an avowed goal of “death to America”. If the Iranians play the kinetic scenario to the bitter end, they simply are demonstrating this was not mere poetry and there never was any other off-ramp, just tactically deciding at what relative strength these two systems will collide.
So Iran loses by demonstrating irrational resolve in antisocial tactics, like firing missiles randomly at neutral neighbors, which is the same precondition you take as gating victory. Conflicts are played out in the real world specifically to resolve inconsistent modeling like this held by different sides, and all parties would be well served by finding a better way to resolve the conflicting modeling here, because the most likely scenario currently is that everyone loses.
Step back further and you see that they were overthrowing a dictator that the US had installed over their democratically elected government.
No one ever really wins in war, except those not participating.
i imagine both sides are actually in the same game.
why do u think trump allow iran to sell oil still -_-. there was a lovely post earlier today on HN laying it all out pretty eloquently.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47499822
i personally think the people who do _business_ on both sides will find their way to profit out of this. as they always do.
if u look at the timing of statements u can see its just a game.
If i can find a link to the interview i'll come back and edit this post with a link and where it fits in the wsj timeline.
