How much influence do you have?
Miriam Adelson reportedly pressured Trump to push Hamas into hostage deal
Adelson’s influence on Trump goes back to his 2016 presidential campaign, when she and her late husband, Sheldon Adelson, donated more than $100 million. The Adelsons played a crucial role in crafting Trump’s pro-Israel protocols, such as recognizing Israeli sovereignty in the Golan Heights and moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem.
I've always felt that as a nation it would be better to import oil as long as the price was right. Leave ours in the ground. We can always get it later when the others run out or jack the price up.
Leave it in the ground for an emergency.
Sort of a big, oil, savings account.
Drill-Baby-Drill seems like living paycheck-to-paycheck with your oil supply.
Distribution of Household Wealth in the U.S. since 1989
Top 10% - own 60.8%Bottom 50% - own 39.2%
Top 10% - own 67.3%Bottom 50% - own 32.7%
I don't think this can continue.
In Why Nations Fail, Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, argue that one reason nations fail is when those in power grab the wealth of the nation for themselves.
We seem to be testing that theory in real time.
We're enormously confused when we try to understand the Chinese system through our vision of the CPC as a political party like the Democrats or Republicans. In China's system, the CPC isn't really equivalent to a Western political party but rather to the constitutional order itself.
The US system, pre-Trump, could be seen as a lot like the Chinese system described above but with the free-market-corporate-capitalist system playing the part of the CPC.
The FMCC is the only party in the US.
Pre-Trump, both parties were ruled by FMCC interests. There were minor differences but still, you weren't going to see any great deviation from a mostly free-market, capitalist system. The parties were two-sides of the same coin. They existed to make sure the different FMCC factions had a voice in the system and that their leaders maintained control. The system was a fixture, not really up for debate.
2016 changed that.
Social media helped connect people and ideas (right or wrong, true or not) and the voters trended away from system candidates.
Trump blew-up the Republican side of the coin by railing against the system and the swamp, being and outsider, caring about the wingnuts, etc. Bernie had the Democratic side of the FMCC running scared but in the end it held onto power there. Trump won out but was not really effective.
In 2020 the FMCC put Biden in office but he further alienated the voters with inflation (and being old). He especially irritated the right leaning libertarian tech faction of the FMCC who thew their support to Trump in 2024.
So now Trump has been captured (apparently) by that libertarian tech side of the FMCC and it looks like its going to continue to run things in this country for the time being.
All my Trumper friends think the jump in the market in November was because Trump won.
I think it was because,
The surge was a big collective sigh of ... "thank god that's over"
OilPrice.com with a scary headline about "natural gas prices soaring" from ZeroHedge?
U.S. Natural Gas Futures Soar Ahead of Historic Cold Front
The chart from the post is not so scary.
Ireland’s anti-Israel actions will not go unanswered - opinion
Expect either explosive pagers or explosive charges.
