After Such Knowledge

 About that Technocracy map... I submit that we already live in one. When doing "my own research" (oy jeez) I found this very small compact book by a woman whose name I can't remember. Printed during the Depression, it listed and described alternative economic systems much in the news. Fascism's advertised theory was in it. So was Communism. These were fresh back then. Technocracy was in there. I think Social Credit was too. Not the Chicom arm-twisting but something dreamed up by an engineer named Douglas. When I started becoming interested in the Progressive political movements of the North Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin arc, there was a sense these folks had created their politics from their interaction between a harsh environment and the plundering robber barons who made their existence infinitely worse than it had to be.  These political movements owed their philosophical ideas to a lot of things but their curiosity was directed by their real economic dilemmas.  The...

I assure you that I prefer cynicism to Leader-worship (unless it's a Progressive). Neither side is right and neither side is telling the whole truth, both sides are manipulating the public and have for decades. It's building up to a second civil war and the GOP (the Neoconfederacy's party after the Southern Strategy) lost control. Neoliberalism was how the Eastern Establishment controlled us using methods described in the Century of the Self. The GOP side is just plain nasty exploiting the lurid fantasies of the p'tit-boos since the John Birch Society, a social class that no rational society ought to produce. It's a basic rule of social processes that power begins as service and ends as abuse. When this affects the rate of growth cults of unreason proliferate. Vested interests will defend their dominant positions by exploiting these. Why make up any of their own? Bob Welch did, but he was only reviving one from 1810. Crowds go mad when denied emotional and psycholog...

  The Broken Economic Order How to Rewire the International System in the Age of Trump Mariana Mazzucato March/April 2025 Published on February 25, 2025 In many ways, Donald Trump’s election to a second term as U.S. president is a story of economic dissatisfaction. For the first time in decades, the Democratic candidate received more support from the richest Americans than from the poorest. In 2020, most voters from households earning less than $50,000 a year opted for the Democrat, Joe Biden; in 2024, they favored the Republican, Trump. Those making more than $100,000 a year, meanwhile, were more likely to vote for Kamala Harris than for Trump. Declining support for the Democratic Party among working-class voters reflects a deep disenchantment with an economic system that, under administrations led by presidents of both parties, has concentrated wealth at the very top, enabled the growth of the financial sector at the expense of the rest of the economy, trapped people in cycles of...