The Peasants Win

And the Dow is up 4%

durable goods

Musa is hella verbose. But once again I think he’s on the right track when he states:

Similar patterns held in 2020: the occupations and employers with the most workers who donated to the Biden/ Harris campaign included teachers, educators and professors, lawyers, medical and psychiatric professionals, people who work in advertising, communications and entertainment, consultants, HR professionals and administrators, architects and designers, IT specialists and engineers.  Industries that provided the highest total contributions to the Democrats included securities/ investments, education, lawyers/ law firms, health professionals, non-profits, electronics companies, business services, entertainment and civil servants. Geographically speaking, Democratic votes in 2020 were tightly clustered in major cities and college towns where knowledge economy professionals live and work — and outside those zones, it was largely a sea of ‘red.’

Essentially people who don’t touch hammers, pipe wrenches, drywall, wet cement, hay bales, livestock, junction boxes, gurneys, impact wrenches, cash registers, forklifts, deep fryers, fishing nets, diesel pumps, leaf blowers, mortar, conveyer belts, acetylene, infusion pumps or F-250 steering wheels. I think you get the picture.

According to my Peasant Theory, we Americans fall into three functional classes. The ‘one percent’ aka the Rulers (which are more like 3%). The Genius class who work directly for the Rulers and the rest of us, the 85% who are the Peasants. Every once in a while we get the opportunity to select new Rulers, and that is a lovely double edged sword. You can’t always get what you want, and sometimes you need a good kick in the pants. The symbolic capitalists just got one, and once again Elon Musk who is very much unlike Jeff Bezos, Sumner Redstone, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Ellison, gets a win. Isn’t a billionaire just a billionaire? Nope. Musk depends, unlike those other guys, on manufacturing. Hands on work, moving large physical objects, shaping steel and operating cranes, where people lose fingers if they screw up.

Today is the beginning of a season of spin and contextualization and a lot of wannabe geniuses saying “What had happened was…”. I’m going to repeat what I’ve been saying more or less consistently since I first came up with this theory. By the way, it happened in 2008 during the genesis of Occupy and the Tea Party. The Rulers of America let the banking system get away with it, and a lot of wannabe geniuses actually had no idea what was going on. So they were bailed out. When a bridge collapses, when a junction box explodes, when the mortar doesn’t hold the bricks, nobody gets bailed out. Certain institutions, often run at arms distance by sucky algorithms and dubious protocols, become too big to fail and don’t suffer the consequences of their demonstrated incompetence. Those institutions have flacks and their flacking is well distributed by the mainstream media. But you know this. That’s why you don’t trust public schools and your distrust of such institutions is baked into the cynical status quo. The peasants bear the brunt and we wish these spin doctored Rulers could be held to account. BTW, we just finished TARP a year ago.

Today I’m going to pick on Dallas Raines. He has been a weatherman in LA for 40 years. He makes $500k per year and is close to 70 years old. How complex is the job of the weatherman for Los Angeles? How wrong can he be? It doesn’t matter, he’s an institution. He would be one of the smallest talking heads of the sort who will be spinning the sort of propaganda that is part of the recommended daily allowance for the symbolic capitalists. If you dare to click on the above link, you’ll also bear witness to Jimmy Kimmel who is not the Devil but a pretty big demon.

The Gap
I recall a great interview with Peter Robinson from 2016 in which the journalist who followed Trump the closest made the gap between Americans abundantly clear.

I am generally neutral on the symbolic capitalists because I’m mostly convinced that the lacuna in actual science innovation has been spent on consumer products that make us lazy rather than the promise of 20th century ‘space age’ technology that would make us stronger. There is very little low hanging economic fruit in America and aside from smartphones we’ve basically got shale oil, a few electric vehicles and not much else. But I am always on the edge about a postmodern economy. We can’t keep talking up the metaverse where you can ‘live out your fantasies’ and never decide what a woman is. This is where the Left stepped out of line and the Peasants started saying wait a goddamned minute.

I’m going to say something obvious that you probably have never heard. Elon Musk is the greatest manufacturer in the world. What kind of people dislike the growth and influence of manufacturing in the US economy? Maybe the powerful people who profit from the immaterial world. These are the people who have been calling Trump a virtual Nazi. To clarify, I despise the corruptibility of the immaterialists. But we’ll get to them separately. They long ago lost the plot, last night they lost their grip.

durable goods.

The Opportunity
So here’s the opportunity, and for a while I think it’s going to be a zero-sum game but the pivot point will be the Heterodoxers, the previously cancelled, the recent sharp immigrants, the tiger moms and the resurgent hands-on economy. This has been a populist election but the opportunity to break the narrative of identity is going to be a telling distinction between those champions of the virtual economy and those of the material economy.

I’m not trying to predict what the Right or Left will do. The proof will be in the way money flows. Berkshire Hathaway is still selling off Apple holdings. This is the first pillar.

I have no idea whether or not Trump can or will fulfill promises to the American middle class. But I think he’s better off listening to Elon Musk than he was in listening to Steve Bannon. I want to see things better off for the Peasants so let me express just how:

1. Deficit and debt reduction, duh. 36 trillion ain’t no joke.

2. Simplified immigration policies. Proactive criminal deportation. Fewer class of asylum. States must agree to take ‘quotas’ proportionate to their populations within reason.

3. FEMA-ize homeless populations. Integrate and build more mental health treatment facilities. Eviscerate criminal predators from camps.

4. Reshore manufacturing. Incentivize strategically robust supply chains. Clean up crap community college ed. Mobilize hundreds of thousands of restored manufacturing employees. Durable goods. Durable goods. Durable goods.

5. Strategically act against drug cartels. Get a new weaponized Nancy Reagan. Just say Hell No.

6. Disinvest in virtuality. Reinvest in the material world. Make kids love skateboards and building forts again.

7. Destroy double standards in education. Subsidize homeschooling. Give books to houses without them. Reinvigorate public libraries with federal funds. More field trips to bakeries, construction sites.

8. Revamp the military acquisition policy. Break up the majors and/or decentralize the industrial complex. Certify more ITAR companies. Build simpler weapon systems.

9. Stop talking about abortion.

10. Establish new identification regimes. SSNs gotta go. Follow the examples of Global Entry, Real ID, OAuth2, Apple iCloud.

11. Speed up FOIA responses. Host all results to the public indefinitely.

12. Keep Lina Khan. Find more like her. Decentralize power.

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These are common sense reforms. I haven’t heard anything that leads me to believe either party is coherent on such matters. Then again, I only pay attention during the playoffs…