The US drift into Adam Curtis' broad thesis in hypernormalisation(a) continues apace I see. Great to see J Pow putting up a fight but I fear this is all going one way.
(a) >We live in a world where the powerful deceive us. We know they lie. They know we know they lie. They don't care. We say we care but do nothing.
That belief isn't the consequence of the situation, but the cause. There is ample ability to change events, but people must believe they can act and act together, as they have for centuries of democracy and for all human history. They do it in Iran. The Republicans and MAGA movement have made changes that would have been unbelievable ten years ago.
> There is ample ability to change events, but people must believe they can act and act together, as they have for centuries of democracy and for all human history.
This is the political will of a plurality of American voters. They certainly can't claim they didn't know what they would get, and they seem unconcerned by any of these actions that many of us find terrifying.
It is difficult to see how we can democracy our way out of this situation.
> This is the political will of a plurality of American voters.
This fallacy gets repeated over and over, but it's obviously false.
Have you really never voted for a candidate who went on to do things you didn't agree with? It's a quintessential fact of politics that voting for a candidate is not equivalent to an endorsement of everything that candidate does in the future. It's a premise that is obviously false when we consider our own votes, but it feels cathartic to force the claim on to the other side.
This administration's net approval rating flipped net negative very quickly after his election and has been trending downward. It's just navel-gazing to pretend like what he's doing has high approval.
> It's just navel-gazing to pretend like what he's doing has high approval
Then how is it being reflected in Congress? Where are the Republicans speaking loudly on behalf of their dissatisfied constituents and voting on bills accordingly? We shouldn't have to wait every two years for a midterms or general election for the negative approval rating to make itself known, politicians can choose any time to act in a way that shows they're listening to their constituents.
He is the most popular Republican president, among other Republicans, we have had in our lifetime. Anecdotal: I live in a red state with red friends and red family. They might not like this or that but they are unwavering in their support for Trump the man. It is still very uncomfortable to say even the most superficially negative thing about him or his policies. So, maybe there is some internal dialog going on there that I'm not privy to, but outwardly the support is 100% there, and that is all that really matters.
Trump still has plenty of support from large swathes of Americans despite his increasingly more overt actions.
For many, he _is_ doing what he was elected to do. This _is_ what the American voter wants. The American voter wants illegal immigrants out, does not care how it happens. They also want cheap oil and are willing to overlook the implications of international military action if it means they get it. They also don't care about the environment enough to curb their consumption or invest in alternative energy sources.
These preferences are all aligned with Trump's actions.
This is not a fallacy, simply an opinion you disagree with. But one which I strongly agree with.
I'm not American, and though I may not agree completely with the politicians I voted for, I have not been blindsided yet. The second election of Trump is a symptom of Americans either unable or unwilling to look beyond single issues or sports team politics.
To then turn around and act surprised is just a way to conveniently absolve themselves of the responsibility of electing him to begin with. If this wasn't the case, Trump voters themselves would be calling for his impeachment, not Democrat voters.
Approval rating means nothing if it enforces nothing.
You're missing some history that pushed former Democratic vorers to vote Trump. Taxpayer funding of NGOs that were writing grants to organizations that were effectively censoring onlinespeech. This and the Disinformation Board, and the direct phone calls from US senators and Congressmen to takedown opposition ideas n social media was a direct attack on the First Amendment by the Democrats. Yes Trump's FCC threats over Jimmy Kimmel were also wrong, but he didn't have a government agency doing it to citizens. Trump ended that system. Also, DNC threw working class under the bus and chastise them for leaving the party that screwed them. If sports team politics is what you're hearing, you're being lied to.
This “both sides” bullshit is so tired. You’re exaggerating and misleading with most of this, but even if all of this was true, it represents about a week’s worth of what Trump has done. They just shot a woman in the face, immediately started calling her a terrorist, and show no intention of even investigating it. I don’t give a single fuck about the DNC “chastising” someone when held up against this kind of slide into fascism.
If you're not American, then you may not understand the way the American voting system works.
We only have two parties. (Technically, there are some third parties, but they're effectively worse than negligible—voting for them is guaranteed to either do nothing or harm the cause you're interested in, unless the candidate is already a member of a major party and merely cross-endorsed.)
This means that if you care about one thing that one of the two major parties ostensibly supports (or is ostensibly better at than the other), more than any of the things on the other side, you have no choice: you have to vote for that party's candidate.
We also have a mainstream media landscape that is fully captured by the wealthy on the right. It is hard to overstate the extent to which our media carries water for the Republican Party.
And finally, we have absolutely abysmal civics education. It has been steadily gutted over the course of decades. To some extent, this is a deliberate move to make it easier to use the aforementioned media capture to control the average voter.
So if you're a low-information voter, you think the economy is bad, and you want to fix that, you're going to vote for the candidate of the major party that media has been telling you for 50 years is the party that's good at the economy, despite the fact that every time they're in office the debt goes up, regular people's lives get worse, and more protections go out the window.
That is exactly the problem. The first past the post single representative systems all have this feature. It seems almost inevitable that they will just because of that. Some sort of representative system will reduce this disconnect between what voters want and what they get because it allows more parties to flourish. The downside is that you end up with coalition governments. These are seen as “weak” although I’m not sure that’s a bad thing.
> If you're not American, then you may not understand the way the American voting system works.
This is incredibly unlikely, given how pervasive American politics is, and how much the results of the American elections affects the rest of the world. Additionally, having a two party system is unfortunately pretty common.
>> This is the political will of a plurality of American voters.
> This fallacy gets repeated over and over, but it's obviously false.
And it's used to condemn and justify. Most politicians, including Democrats, like to pretend that winning means the unpopular policies they happen to like are the will of the people. They will constantly gaslight you on it.
In reality, American politics gives people coarse choices that few are entirely happy with and many are very unhappy with. It's really hard to justify radical partisan action without denying that fact.
It's true that partisan politics provides only coarse choices. That's true of America's bipartisan system as well as multiparty parliamentary systems. But the parties are still dynamic coalitions that can change dramatically over time. Just look at the difference between the 1950s Democrats vs the 2000s Democrats, or the 2015 Republicans vs the 2020 Republicans.
The coarse options that are available at election time can be massively influenced in the years leading up to the election.
In this case the candidate they voted for was a convicted criminal and pathological liar.
Dishonesty is the through line of Trump’s entire life. There was no reasonable expectation his second term would bring anything else. Anyone expressing buyer’s remorse at this point is impossibly naive.
> Have you really never voted for a candidate who went on to do things you didn't agree with?
If we are talking about past culpability, this one does not works at all. Trump is being exactly who he was and what he campaigned on. This is not the case of someone switching up after being elected. This is case of who openly or tacitly supported Trump, because they thought they will personally benefit on top of having fun of watching liberals suffer.
By tacitly I mean all those bad faith "both sides" and "Trump is dove, Harris is aggressive". As an example, Latino Trump voting men were attracted by the misogynistic and male dominance content. They thought they wont be personally affected. Rural people still cheer to occupation and terrorization of cities ... and still think they are the only true Americans. They though they will be able to keep their farms like the last time. And so on and so forth.
People knew full well what is going on when they were hiding behind euphemisms about conservatives and blamed liberals when those said the truth. They just liked the project and thought they will be affected only a little.
> Have you really never voted for a candidate who went on to do things you didn't agree with? It's a quintessential fact of politics that voting for a candidate is not equivalent to an endorsement of everything that candidate does in the future.
You can look back on everything Trump said and campaigned on. He's a liar, a cheat, and a fraud but he openly campaigned on making people suffer, hurting specific groups and demolishing the government. The people either voted for him assuming he was blustering about his claims or liked what he was going to do. There's countless examples of people who when asked why they regret voting for Trump, they say because he's 'hurting the wrong people', while also saying that they would gladly vote for him again.
> It is difficult to see how we can democracy our way out of this situation.
Assuming there is no martial law later in 2026, vote to give the other party more power in Congress so the Legislative branch can actually grow a spine and push back against Executive actions.
This is disingenuous and a way to rationalise your feelings by blaming trump voters.
Firstly, it’s a two party state and choice is limited. People vote for the least worst option, or for a candidate that shares at least some of their values.
Second, many people did not vote.
Third, approval ratings show that many trump voters do not approve of his actions.
Fourth, where did “annex Greenland, abduct Maduro, remove independence of the reserve” appear on his manifesto?
Trump voters are either willfully ignorant or gleefully supportive. Maybe not the first time, but definitely the second and third time. There no longer exists other excuses.
It is totally ok to blame Trump voters. They literally wanted this to happen and it happened. OK, they did not wanted the "bad thing A" to happen, they only wanted the "evil things B and C" to happen. Usually based on what affects them personally.
> People vote for the least worst option, or for a candidate that shares at least some of their values.
Voting for Trump because you share his values is not exactly defense, something positive or even respect worthy. Yes, equally people voted for Hitler because they shared values. This commonality of values is why they are culpable and we can blame them.
If food keeps going up, it might get there but in the affluent west we run on our stomachs and as long as most of the middle class can still afford bread there won't be enough of a mass mobilization to affect any meaningful change.
Stated differently, if things really are so bad (and I would be the first to agree that things are pretty bad), then why are so many comfortable people (like me) not out on the street every day?
There are a lot of reasons for that, of course, but the bottom line is that when things get bad enough -- much worse than they are today -- then more people will take to the street, along with whatever sacrifice that entails. We're just not there yet, because for many, there is far too much to lose.
People are (and have been) taking to the streets. Americans tend to think that a protest must involve everyone otherwise it’s pointless. They don’t realize that protests typically involve a tiny fraction of the population. The more, the better of course, but stop sitting around waiting for it to get big. Either get out there now or find other ways to contribute. There’s plenty to be done.
> People are (and have been) taking to the streets.
For those not in the know, non-stop protests around the US have been taking place, though they are being censored (ie, not covered by mainstream news). I wouldn't know about it if not for TikTok, of all places. One can find coverage of "music festivals" there. They've been ongoing since Summer 2025.
There was a study a while ago, analyzing previous events to estimate which percentage of a population needs to become active to effect meaningful change. The number was surprisingly low, I think less than 5%.
It's about 3%, and the study had major flaws in its context; large westernized countries are out of scope. I don't remember paper, but I just lost this argument to a lawyer.
I was just talking to someone close to me about what to expect if (when?) Trump starts annexing Greenland. I truly believe a national strike is our best bet.
But the reality is many (most?) people are living paycheck to paycheck and can’t risk that. But knowledge workers and especially software engineers can probably fare much better in the event of immediate job loss.
Now that’s not to downplay or minimize that risk, especially if you have a family, dependents, or some unique circumstance. But I’d hope for the majority of workers in our profession, it’s the difference between “I can’t buy food next week” vs “I have about 4-8 months before I’ve drained my liquid / emergency savings”
The sad thing is I don’t know what to do. Would this make headlines? Would they cover it? Would it get condensed into a single sound bite “big tech goes on strike”?
I’m conflicted but I feel like the choice should be obvious and simple. Just do it.
People are taking to the streets. People are getting beaten, their property destroyed, their homes invaded and even murdered in Minneapolis as a result. The problem is that the US is massive; most people don't live in an active ICE zone where agents are going door to door kicking it in and pulling people out.
But even then, people are getting angrier. The injustices in Minneapolis triggered waves of protests here in Seattle. Eventually these things compound and more people become aware that we're living in the Great American Collapse.
A general strike at the level required to change things requires roping in unwilling participants as well. Probably on the scale of breaking infrastructure like payment systems or over the road shipping. If nobody can ignore current events because it's not just impacting but impeding and quickly degrading their quality of life they'll get angry. However just so long as people can go home and play their videogames, or listen to their podcasts, or read their books, they'll be able to focus enough of their attention away from events and keep their stress below the critical threshold just enough that they won't do anything. Calhoun's Rat Utopia Experiment comes to mind in that the rats suffered any number of indignities, maladies, and stressors just so long as they had ample access to endorphin and melatonin sources in strong enough bursts to stave off the constant floods of cortisol and norepinephrine.
Political theory is that ten to fifteen percent of a given population needs to actively rebel in order to enact change in a nation. The U.S. is fragmented enough by distance that you would need at least thirty percent of the national population to reach this state in order to get the ten percent in each of the six regions. Currently the number of people protesting is thought to be around four to six percent nationally, meaning it's less than one percent regionally. Part of that is because it's January, and most large scale protests happen in late spring or in the summer because schools are out and the weather doesn't suck. But part of it is simply because not enough people are motivated to act. Either pessimism or lack of direct harm is keeping them from caring.
So no matter what you're going to have to piss some people off. But it'd be better to piss off the people who will share your goals and ask forgiveness, because the other group was pissed from the beginning and have no forgiveness to ask for.
You can't, because everytime that happens, a group comes out of the woodworks that says X, Y, and Z need to be done before a general strike can even be considered.
X, Y, and Z usually involve community building, mutual aid, strike funds, housing security, and other precarity reducing actions.
> Not sure being out in the street really does much. Gives the jack booted thugs an excuse for a little recreational violence.
"Let" them do the violence. And let the violence be filmed. And let the (currently) indifferent / apathetic folks see the violence being done.
This is one way to enact change: most folks have no interest in violence and abhor it. By showing that one side is 'pro-violence' in their policies and actions you give more power to the side(s) that are not violence.
If protests worked better than the alternatives then that's what megacorps and multinational corporations would be doing instead of bribes and lobbying. 'The people' still dont understand they're playing an entirely different sport.
> Not sure being out in the street really does much.
I agree; this phrase was just a stand in for doing something -- anything -- about the state of affairs I don't like. Other than things I can do from my couch like commenting on HN.
>then why are so many comfortable people (like me) not out on the street every day?
because a lot of people have a kind of built-in main character syndrome and believe they're the protagonists of the world and things can't really go bad. They haven't internalized that there isn't some god behind the curtain that saves them.
That's how it goes in every country that ends up in the dirt, they all thought they were special, they all thought "surely we're not there yet" and you can pick their remains out of the rubble.
HyperNormalisation is one of many great documentaries by Adam Curtis, many of which are available on archive.org [1]. Specifically, I can recommend The Century of the Self and The Power of Nightmares. No need for YouTube :) FWIW, these used to be able on Google Video back when that still existed. And via torrents.
When I first watched a bunch of Adam Curtis stuff I thought it a long winded way of stating bad things have happened and have resulted in these bigger, overarching, bad things.
Thinking about it now 10 years later it feels alot different. The pervasiveness of tolerance of lies and fakeness has gone so far past anything I could have imagined being a big contributor to that.
For me, the key lies in the "We know they lie. They know we know they lie.". I'd argue that the transparency of lies is a fairly immature theme, relative to the long arc of history. Probably post-Iraq WMD is where I think it really started to ramp up and the emergence of virality/segmentation aspect of social media has really revved it up.
I would view that kind of lying as show of force: "Everybody knows it, but nobody can do anything about it, we are above even these rules."
Worse still is when it's an "affirm the falsehood to show you have been dominated by our threat of punishment" scenario:
> 'The real power, the power we have to fight for night and day, is not power over things, but over men.' He paused, and for a moment assumed again his air of a schoolmaster questioning a promising pupil: 'How does one man assert his power over another, Winston?'
> Winston thought. 'By making him suffer,' he said.
> 'Exactly. By making him suffer. Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.'
Curtis tried to make these statements on the downside of neoliberalism + postmodernism but I don't think he did a very good job based on the discussion on these films.
I think his work is just too stylized. He has such an interesting style that it overwhelms the message. I barely remember what his messaging is in films. Just the interesting visuals and ominous music.
If you read Undoing the Demos by Wendy Brown and Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition together you will understand exactly what he is going for. As a film it doesn't really work that well though beyond a kind of depressing entertainment. The themes are too subtle and philosophical along with most people don't have the background knowledge to really make sense of his points.
Hasn't this always been the case, what is different right now is that the tech enables to do this at scale, at much higher frequency that makes them more audacious, since no regular person can keep up with it. The over saturation of lies/fake news has lead to numbness and the hyper-normalisation. So, unless something directly is affecting us currently, we won't care
No. The modern Republicans want you to believe that because it’s an easy path to despair and inaction, which means they win, but the magnitude and degree have varied significantly in the past. Where we are now is something living Americans don’t have experience with unless they escaped somewhere like the Balkans in the 90s.
I think the real test will be, not whatever this administration does, but how much of that survives into the next one - how much is the new normal versus how much is a temporary aberration.
That’s true even if the next administration is Republican (Vance or whoever), but especially true if the next administration ends up being Democratic instead-which while not certain, has decent odds-the more Trump defies norms, the more voters who will wish to go back to a “normal” Presidency
I think the test beyond that is how willing the next government will be to codify meaningful changes into law. After Trump’s first time it’s as if there was a big sigh of relief and a notion of “well, we just won’t do that again”.
It’s very clear now that we need a lot more regulation of what presidents can and cannot do. Not to mention judicial reform. But if you’re a democrat theoretically getting power in 2028 you’re going to have immense pressure to move forwards, focus on kitchen table issues, yadda yadda.
And extremely severe punishment as a deterrent against future efforts. Instead of a bunch of slow-rolled court cases and deferral back to the political process.
> I think the real test will be, not whatever this administration does, but how much of that survives into the next one - how much is the new normal versus how much is a temporary aberration.
A reminder that this is the second time that Trump has been elected.
(People were saying what you're now saying after he was kicked out—an event that he says was rigged—the first time.)
Exactly: there was a brief moment when it looked like Republicans were willing to hold him accountable after the January 6th insurrection but that faltered and they circled ranks, especially when Roberts signaled that Trump had the support of the Supreme Court to the extent that they were willing to concoct a new constitutional doctrine to shield him.
A lot of people were hoping he’d just go away without them having to do anything difficult, but it’s clear that the next government has to reestablish the United States as a constitutional republic with the rule of law, even if it means hard things like trials for officials who abused their power. This kind of slide into authoritarianism isn’t an accident, and without consequences the people pushing it will keep trying.
The presidential pardon is clearly something that needs to either be heavily reined in or removed. How you do that I don't know, but turns out the US Constitution is something you can ignore, so...
The entire system of checks and balances needs some rethinking because it's clearly not as "perfect" as we've been told over and over again.
ex post facto can be ignored, and a new law of the land passed voiding pardons during 47s term. Because repealing pardons isn't weaponizing the person pardoned's behavior after the fact, it's against Presidential authority, so isn't ex post facto when it comes to the person who's behavior was legally determined to be criminal. Voiding a commutation for cause would be tougher and potential ex post facto, but not a pardon. We can void those without violating our ex post facto standards.
A lot of us are really, really hoping that there is something unique about Trump that cannot be easily reproduced by the next MAGA leader. That the movement will fragment into irrelevancy as the usual elites regain control.
It may be that I'm a naive optimist, but I agree with him. When I look at who the hard core believers envision as the next torch-bearer, none of them have what it takes. Not Vance, not Rubio (Rubio! Suddenly he is 'strong'?? When was that ever a widely held opinion??), not the Trump kids. Trump has a way of defying political gravity and repeatedly escaping the consequences that take down every other politician. In this case the liberal consensus that it's a cult may not be that far from the truth -- maybe that's a loaded term, but how else do you describe a group of supporters whose faith is so strong that their ideology changes by the day to match whatever their leader currently says, even if it is diametrically opposed to what they said last week?
One thing I think is sometimes forgotten about shifting the overton window is that it sort of doesnt matter what political leaning has their hands on the lever. When it serves a purpose, which is not always a public first purpose, people in power will leverage any lever possible. Shifts in the overton window, just add more levers and it comes down to benevolence or luck that those levers aren't used incorrectly
Some things, it just doesn't matter what the next administration does. The people of the US may, at any time, elect an administration that continues the course of breaking norms. The fact is that businesses, industries, banks, and nations have to guard against that possibility more than they need to cooperate with the next administration.
I think it's a bit fanciful to think you can take all the policies back to normal and have, Europe for instance, say "Oh good! Everything's back to normal!" I could be wrong, but I think that ship has sailed. Europe will work towards a new normal that looks to their own interests. And no action the next administration can take will change Europe's determination in this regard.
I think this will be as true of actors in the financial and industrial spheres as it will be of Europe in the security sphere.
>Europe will work towards a new normal that looks to their own interests. And no action the next administration can take will change Europe's determination in this regard.
1) Europe will do whatever is easiest at the time relative to the comfort of the people. Meaning they will have very short memories if enacting some change makes people worse off.
2) If the EU does make change with regard to increasing military spending, that is good either way for the US. Less US involvement in conflicts on a different continent.
This is clearly a fraudulent criminal investigation. Classic dictator strategy of charging opponents with trivial crimes to achieve political power grabs. US futures in stock market are way down.
But I bet a third of the country will blindly support it. They will see it as a just investigation into a crime. And they won’t care about the consequences. Or connect cause and effect. And with that much support the administration can get away with anything.
As for their various unconstitutional and illegal acts - what method is there to hold the executive branch accountable? It’s not like there’s a police force to arrest them right?
"What prepares men for totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience of the ever-growing masses of our century. The merciless process into which totalitarianism drives and organizes the masses looks like a suicidal escape from this reality."
"Politically speaking, tribal nationalism always insists that its own people is surrounded by ‘a world of enemies,’ ‘one against all,’ that a fundamental difference exists between this people and all others. It claims its people to be unique, individual, incompatible with all others, and denies theoretically the very possibility of a common mankind long before it is used to destroy the humanity of man."
"Society is always prone to accept a person offhand for what he pretends to be, so that a crackpot posing as a genius always has a certain chance to be believed. In modern society, with its characteristic lack of discerning judgment, this tendency is strengthened, so that someone who not only holds opinions but also presents them in a tone of unshakable conviction will not so easily forfeit his prestige, no matter how many times he has been demonstrably wrong."
"Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness."
"The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (that is, the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (that is, the standards of thought) no longer exist."
-- Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
Also Arendt: "The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world — and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end — is being destroyed."
"Political hobbyism" is things like commenting on the internet, as distinct from going out and convincing people to vote differently or running for offfice.
Sure, there are more and less effective ways to engage in politics. But given that people spend nearly every waking moment now staring at information-on-screen-piped-through-internet, it's frankly ridiculous to keep up this "Internet isn't real life" charade.
Perhaps things were different in 2020, but today the United States government considers online commentary a key input to its decisions. The President of the United States, Secretary of Defense, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs had Twitter on a big screen in their war room for the Venezuela operation.
Young men put Trump in power? Afraid not. The demographic data shows that if it was narrowed down to one group, it was poorly educated white Christians over the age of 50.
I mean election victories are typically both multicausal and overdetermined. Poorly educated white Christians over the age of 50 form the GOP base, but especially a GOP win in the popular vote requires far more than that.
Parties focus so much on swing voters for a reason, and a lot of these swing voters are in fact swung by what they see online.
It's called 'kitchen table politics' (we used to just do it around the kitchen table) and is kinda a core Americanism. Welcome to this cultural insight about us.
So I'm sitting here as a Canadian wondering what the American people are going to do? I understand a lot of what the President of The United States says - I even agree with some of it, the problem is I don't feel like we're engaging with the American people anymore. I really wonder where you guys are headed and what it means for the rest of us, I spent 15 years in the states, built a public company there, I really like the Americans, but I don't want annexation. I wonder where you guys are headed.
You need to know only two facts about America to guess that:
* Fifty three percent of Americans now read below the sixth grade level.
* As (ostensibly) a representative Democracy America's fate is dictated by the majority of it's citizens.
Our future is to become a broken nation governed by middle-school student level thinking. The only way to build a better America is to build a better populace, and that would be contrary to the interests of the angry, spoiled, children who seem to hold all the power now.
> * As (ostensibly) a representative Democracy America's fate is dictated by the majority of it's citizens.
No, it's determined by the people who actually go out and vote.
Bizarrely, voter turnout among younger people remains low. It's beyond frustrating to work with large groups of young people who are seemingly always talking politics and angry about something political, then to watch as half of them either forget to vote or act like they're too apathetic to vote.
The craziest part was seeing this apathy play out in states with vote-by-mail systems that required as little effort as possible. I still don't get it.
In defence of young people, it's "determined" by the people who actually go out and vote the same way a child "determines" what's for dinner when asked "would you like broccoli or brussels sprouts?"
American democracy is broken. Not in an abstract, hand-wavy feelings way but a hard, numerical, mathematical way. A two party system results in no real choice. First past the post results in a two party system. America uses first past the post. Therefore, Amercian democracy gives voters no real choice.
The self reinforcing prophecy of “somebody else’s job”.
It’s the job of politicians to pander to us, the good voter. Since they didn’t offer us something good, we didn’t vote, and that results in this current situation.
Politics is not my job, being aware of how politics works is not my job. My job is just to let them know they aren’t good enough. It’s because they aren’t good enough, that we landed up in this situation.
This is utterly delusional. I can’t comprehend of whatever mind virus made it so far into the American political discourse for this BS to still be parroted in 2026. I am blessed to be born in and to reside in a country with a comparatively much better-functioning government and voting system. You better believe that if I were American I’d be voting for the dems in a heartbeat. I’d be endlessly annoyed about it, especially compared to the vastly more palatable options where I live, but there’d be zero doubt about my decision. The culture of not voting is the biggest unforced self-own the American public has inflicted upon itself. You all get what you deserve with that one.
Because even just the boring sanity of Biden Harris was leagues better than what we all saw coming in 2024. (Putting aside that whole constitutional amendment about insurrections.)
> Fifty three percent of Americans now read below the sixth grade level.
I don't know what to think when I see these quotes. Are you writing a local newspaper opinion piece about the "decline of America"? How is it meaningful to this discussion? It's like a poison blowdart shot from behind the stage curtain that kills the messenger.
By the way, I Googled for the equivalent stat about Canada: "48-49% having skills below a high school level". I'm not here to bad mouth the Canadian education system, but I think you will find fairly similar stats in most highly developed nations.
I've been reading this topic for years. It is very common with a certain party that the other side votes against their interest, or is too dumb to vote (literacy).
You can also see it in race voting, where people will say a certain race is voting against their interest just to vote for someone with the same skin color.
It's actually a talking point that actively pushes people away from their cause.
Does this type of voting happen? Sure, but not enough to push elections. IMO it's people who are confused on why others don't think the same way as they do and try to justify why anyway they can, usually through derogatory remarks.
datsci_est_2015 explains it better than I would just a few comments down, but this isn't what I mean. I mean that people who are semi-literate or illiterate are terrible thinkers. They are, in fact, fundamentally incapable of understanding the modern world they find themselves in and are CONSTANTLY taken advantage of.
Bad thinkers make bad decisions, and are vulnerable to being manipulated in ways that good thinkers aren't. Try getting a mortgage or a car loan when you can't read complete paragraphs. Try investing your retirement properly. Try doing just about anything that modern adults are required to do. You're definitely going to pay a "stupid tax" throughout your entire adult life if you lack the ability to read critically.
People bemoan the death of journalism, but it's not the journalists fault. Did you know that USA Today was intentionally invented to be an alternative news source for people who couldn't read well? At the time it was bemoaned as the end of western civilization. Now it requires more of it's reader than the places people actually get their news from (Tik-Tok and Bathroom wall graffiti presumably).
FWIW - One side is objectively worse than the other, but it's not by a wide margin (a few basis points if I remember correctly) and it's probably just because one side lives in states that love to take the education budget and blow it on "more important" things.
This talking point never contains international comparison nor historical comparison. Most people using it do not even know what "sixth grade level" actually is. They just know it means "a little".
Who cares how they're doing it in Albania? It used to be better in America, now it's worse and it's taken our entire society with it.*
I DO know exactly what sixth grade level is. It means they can read simple paragraphs, but not critically. These people lack the ability to think critically because they never learned it. They're the ones that open phishing emails and get taken by shady real estate con-men and Nigerian prince scammers.
You can be semi-literate and be a good person. You can't be semi-literate and make good decisions. Not in the modern world.
* To clarify - Reading levels in the United States have been declining at an alarming rate for a long time. They peaked in 1992 and have been steadily decaying since. You'll also note that 1992 was the year Dan Quayle was disqualified from the presidency because he couldn't spell potato. Imagine applying those standards to a modern politician.
It would be interesting comparison, actually. As interesting as French, Germany or whatever.
> It used to be better in America, now it's worse and it's taken our entire society with it. [...] They peaked in 1992 and have been steadily decaying since.
So, yeah, this would be an interesting historical comparison. It was worst most of the time.
> These people lack the ability to think critically because they never learned it. They're the ones that open phishing emails and get taken by shady real estate con-men and Nigerian prince scammers.
You are confusing two different things here. First off, highly educated people are in fact vulnerable to scammers ... frequently because of their own confidence.
> You can be semi-literate and be a good person. You can't be semi-literate and make good decisions. Not in the modern world.
But issue in modern world are not people just dont make good decisions. It is people who make immoral decisions. Vance have good reading skills, but he is still a fascist.
> You'll also note that 1992 was the year Dan Quayle was disqualified from the presidency because he couldn't spell potato.
This is not an example of mass of people using critical thinking and acting rationally. This is an example of blown up reaction ala Twitter mob latching on something trivial and making a big deal out of it. This is example of what happen when soundbite wins over substance.
I think it’s also important to talk about what it means to “read at a 6th grade level” when this is mentioned, because a lot of people (myself included) might assume that just means they could finish and understand a book intended for 6th graders.
But there’s actually meaningful criteria that sheds some light on the critical thinking capabilities of people who can or can’t read at certain levels, especially as it pertains to propaganda. Below a certain level, people are not well-educated enough to critically assess a text against the motivations of its authors (somewhere around 9th grade). Americans are prone to conspiratorial thinking so you might think that that’s alright because they’re often skeptical of any text, but it just seems like it causes them to dig even deeper into the propaganda that’s targeted to them.
It’s kind of like learning that some people don’t have an inner monologue, or that they aren’t capable of imagining shapes or objects abstractly in their mind. Except it’s a lot more serious as it deals with critical thinking directly: these people don’t understand that what they’re reading was written for a purpose.
This isn't accidental. Religious indoctrination literally teaches generations to make special loopholes in critical thinking and healthy skepticism to maintain their faith. And it has paid off in easy to manipulate masses for centuries.
The Lippmann school of democracy sort of predisposed that people were too stupid and that through journalists would emerge a reasonable set of choices. For the most part that matches the way politics worked in the USA and most democracies until recently. Unfortunately the internet disrupted things such that suddenly everyone needs to actually be democratically adept in at least some form more akin to the Dewey school of thought.
The combination of literacy and the algorithmic propaganda machine is a pretty big stumbling block.
Interesting comment. I haven't heard this problem phrased this way nor have I heard of these schools, do you have a recommendation for learning more about this?
> At the turn of the 20th century, a crucial debate emerged between Walter Lippmann and John Dewey over the viability of democracy in an increasingly complex world. Lippmann critiqued democracy’s reliance on public opinion, arguing that citizens construct simplified “pseudo-environments” shaped by media and stereotypes, rendering them ill-equipped to make informed decisions on vast global issues. He warned that modern democracies are driven more by emotionally charged reactions than by accurate understanding, and that media, language, and time constraints further distort reality. Dewey responded not by dismissing Lippmann’s concerns, but by reframing democracy as more than a political system—it was, to him, an ethical ideal and a form of social cooperation. Viewing society as an interconnected organism, Dewey believed individuals flourish only through participation and education. He saw democracy as a continuous process of mutual growth, where every person contributes uniquely, and where the antidote to authoritarianism lies in cultivating thoughtful, empowered citizens—not in retreating from democratic ideals, but in deepening them.
She puts it all together relatively succinctly if dense. You can just read Dewey too if you want to be closer to the source. He's a bit more interesting because it is more of the road not taken out of the progressive era.
I don't think that's right - it looks like the stat is that 78% of Americans speak *only* English at home.
I'm not American, but anecdotally, a supermajority (like 80-90%) of people I know who speak multiple languages at home speak English at native fluency. (e.g. in my semi-extended family - parents/siblings/nibblings/partner/parents-in-law, there are 9 of us, and only 2 are more comfortable in French than English, but none of us would qualify as speaking *only* English at home.)
> No one has the power to save America from itself.
Wrong!! Please don’t say that! We all have power inside the US. Congress had the opportunity in 2021 to correct the wrong, but Republicans kowtowed and they are still doing so. That was the easy way. Now for the hard way, American people will have to do something about it.
The current situation is bad, but this is just doomerism.
The current administration will end. Trump can't live forever. His approval rating is already low and falling.
We're in for a bumpy ride, but then it's going to start reverting toward the mean. Not necessarily back to the way things were, but periods of extreme like this are followed by a reversion to the mean more often than not.
They way the current administration act, I start to think that their plan A is to stay for a long long time. There is so much open corruption that half of them would land in prison really quickly and they don't seem particularly bothered by that fact.
You're thinking about it with the wrong basis. They will not land in prison because they broke enough enforcement mechanisms to escape punishment. The administration will end, but the regime will not. Even if Trump died tomorrow, enough people have followed him through the holes he created that things will continue. You will of course have factions form and have those factions fight amongst eachother as they head off in their own directions, but the factions will exist in the first place. There is no way to stop them from forming and pursuing their goals without building new enforcement mechanisms, which they will obviously and vehemently impede the construction of. These people will likely die of age before they spend even a second getting a burning hot de-lousing shower and an orange one piece. This has happened every two decades in the U.S. since Reconstruction was sabotaged and prematurely ended.
I don't think you can really state that right now as certainty, it's becoming part of the illusion of continuity, this administration has shown how fragile the institutions holding American democracy together are.
The Pandora's box has been opened, it's not doomerism to see how unprecedented actions have been taken by this administration and not be sure of what's come next, you've never lived through something like that.
I had much more trust in your institutions a year ago, after 2025 I really do not believe the USA will be able to revert toward the mean anytime soon. The ultimate test for it will be the midterms, if the election this year goes well without a hiccup it might signal there is some institutional power still left in American democracy; on the other hand if there are hiccups, meddling by the federal government, and its allies (including the rich elite behind a lot of these people), it will just cement my opinion that the USA's democracy is in a death spiral.
But don't be so trusting, the cracks are obviously showing and are being exploited, just wishful thinking won't help at all your society at this moment, it's better to be a bit more doomerist and act against these actions rather than just "trusting the process" because if you end up losing the process the bottom will fall out.
I hope the OC said that in good faith, but I have my doubts. I think it's just a gentle way to accuse people like you and I of having Trump Derangement Syndrome.
Five people are voting on what to have for dinner. Three people vote for pizza. Two people vote for "You three." Pizza has won, but there is still a massive problem in that room.
Trump is not the problem, he’s a symptom. The problem is the roughly one third of Americans who think he’s great, and to a lesser extent the roughly one third who don’t care.
After all that’s happened, his approval rating is still above 40%. Those people aren’t going away or changing their minds any time soon.
'Oh gramps, for once, stop talking about the war'.
People really don't want to hear those stories because it makes them uncomfortable. I'm in an absolute minority in that I wanted to hear the stories even if they made me uncomfortable. But the vast majority of the people would love to get through life without learning history's lessons and as a result are much more likely to repeat them.
Always amusing. So sure. I like to imagine the conversations at the begining of the late bronze age collapse, or perhaps aristocrats of the western roman empire living in Gaul.
"To say anything that challenges the current trajectory is doomerism. We're in for a bumpy ride for sure, but this will all correct itself. _it has to_."
There's basically nothing the American people can do short term.
The US government is entirely non-responsive and only nominally representative.
Barring a wave of Republican retirements in the House, the absolute soonest there are any guardrails are after the 2026 midterms when a new congress is seated in 2027.
> There's basically nothing the American people can do short term.
If there are ICE agents in your area follow and film them. Create evidence of their jackboot tactics.
Most folks do not like force/violence, and the more people see the jackboot policies and actions of one side, the more folks will lean towards the side(s) that are against those policies.
There are still some things. A handful of court cases have gone against the trump admin and they have (in many cases) respected them. For example, the suits against national guard deployments in chicago. Donating to organizations using the courts to leverage the law against the trump administration does have material effects.
The senate can also still hold some things up. If you have a senator who keeps voting for trump's judicial appointments or you have a senator who is in leadership then yelling at them to stop letting trump's judicial appointments sail through is important. The fact that the dems are not using every procedural step to slow down the process is ridiculous.
Gerrymandering, infinite lobbying corruption, and manufactured consent are supposed to keep the populace doing and thinking what the 1% want, and cheating to help them. They can't even do those properly anymore with vast resources. Perhaps billionaires and failed celebrity reality stars don't make the best public administrators.
Of course there’s, it’s just that anti-Trump people don’t care as much and are not as brave as the pro-Trump people. MAGA people stormed the capitol, anti-Trump people just write well thought concerns on the internet. MAGA people for years endured deplatforming and being outcasts but developed methods to deal with it, the anti-Trump people are scared to lose what they have and are too concerned about their differences within and they are unable to build anything. It’s people with nothing to lose and everything to gain vs people with everything to lose and nothing to gain from having a fight.
Those who stormed the Capitol did it because they were against the current course of affairs. Are the anti-Trump people ever going to do something like that if they are against the current course of events? I don’t think so.
Consequently, Trump will win. That’s why people who control the capital are aligned with MAGA.
People are out there protesting right now even though ICE and the police have a history of shooting unarmed protestors. Leftists protestors are and always have been more harshly treated by this government than the other side.
> People are out there protesting right now even though ICE and the police have a history of shooting unarmed protestors
I never understand what's the point of those protests. They should be taking over power by force or GTFO. Notice that successful revolutions storm the HQ, destroy some building of iconic significance or kill/capture the leader, not just enduring the atrocities of the foot-soldiers of the people who they are against.
The peaceful protest thing works when the people in the HQ care about what you think about them, which means it only works if those protesting are their people and not the opposition.
The lefties should start taking notes on what works and what the far right did to gain so much power and start stealing their methods. Display of dissatisfaction isn't going to work, if anything that dissatisfaction is satisfaction to the right wingers. They feel giddy when see the people they hate protesting, their only complain can be that the protests are not big enough.
The pro-Trump group don't think about consequences is the thing. The anti-Trump group do, and that's a big reason why they're slow to respond. Performing a siege on the Capitol was a stupid, angry, and impulsive reaction with no thought of the consequences afterwards. That's the way the entire pro-Trump group tends to act. Meanwhile the anti-Trump group think about knock-on effects and long term consequences because they understand that nothing is an island and that everything is connected to everything else, even through degrees of separation. It makes them hesitant to do anything right away because they first have to consider what the ripples are going to affect outside of the area of their immediate focus. One group is reactive and the other is proactive, and being proactive is always going to be slower.
I don't think that's it. It has more to do with something to lose or not.
"The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose"
Liberals are generally more empathetic towards others and have good intentions when protesting. However if they have a comfortable life they will back down very quickly when faced with force. Just my opinion, could be wrong.
Nothing? Trump is playing freeway chicken with Powell, he's driving a Pontiac Fiero and Powell is driving a bulldozer. The Supreme Court has already signaled that they're not on board fucking with the Fed. This will potentially cost Trump his next Fed nomination for awhile, because GOP Senators are putting a hold on his nominations until the legal stuff resolves.
It's nothing. In a sane country Trump would have been impeached many months (or even years) ago and would have never managed to get a second chance at this.
If the continuation of the USA hinges on Powell the man should be given a spot on mt. Rushmore, but I don't think that it is going to happen. Congress and the senate are for the most part filled with people that are too afraid to act. And in the meantime a lot of other crazy stuff will happen (just look at the last 30 days) to push this out of the public eye.
39% of the country still approves of him and his fractal waterfall of disaster. So many people, and so many now gifted power and immunity to swing it at dissenting voices. That's a lot of inertia.
In the "First They Came" poem, we're already at white Christian mothers, and it's not moving the needle. I'm not sure why there isn't more talk of succession on the coasts but at this pace, it feels inevitable.
Complain to our representatives who will do absolutely nothing because the system is ripe for abuse and we’ve put people who actively want to abuse and exploit it into office.
I keep telling everyone and have been for a year, it’s not just our problem, due to global US positioning it’s now a world problem. Just ask Venezuela. Regardless of what you think about the end result the ends did not justify the means.
I for one will be collecting my (completely legal) hunting rifles and weapons I’ve had in storage since I was a kid, have them professionally serviced and grab some ammunition, on the terrible case I need to defend myself which I thought I’d never ever have to consider and I’d just sell them some day. But alas we have a lot of really really stupid as well as downright toxic voters in this country.
We vote. That’s all we can do. 50.5% of the people voted for this insanity in 2024. We can only hope they see how this is going and vote differently in 2026 and beyond.
They are headed for complete fascist take over. Going through a phase that Europeans went through a century ago, end up destroying themselves.
It’s very concerning that they have nukes. JD Vance said something about the risks UK and France owning nukes, I think he just wanted to start the conversation because I think he believes that it’s actually US that is the risk. We know that the guy is not actually a Trump ideology zealot from his pre-Trump alignment.
I think it'd be a mistake to assume that JD Vance is not exactly what he portrays himself as at this point. He certainly seems onboard with everything thats happening and is happy to defend it and push the boundaries for more lawlessness.
Remember early in his first term when he tested waters but the governmental system pushed back and kept him in check? It feels like an out of body experience to look at this and contemplate how much he’s changed about how the U.S. government conducts itself.
In his first term, he probably didn't yet understand how much power the office truly holds and how to wield it and just how far you can go with that. Because the main restriction on all of that power has always been convention rather than any actually robust guard rails. But no one, not even someone like Nixon, has ever dared to truly test that out.
He knew how much power he had back then. The difference was that the government bureaucracy worked hard to counter his agenda throughout his term. It’s why The Heritage Foundation came up with Project 2025: an organizated and cohesive plan to dismantle the bureaucracy and consolidate power. And it is working.
The first term laid a lot of the groundwork for this term as well - had he not appointed three SC Justices, things would look very different. This court has said basically that all executive actions including pretextual investigations via the DOJ are legal and that there is no such thing as agency independence, even when written into the laws that created the agencies.
Yes, too much emphasis is put on Trump. He's just the President. This crisis has been 80 years in the making.
It's the Supreme Court that has expanded the powers of the President, and previously of the Federal government, far beyond what was ever intended.
By allowing the federal government to dominate the states, the Supreme Court created a position of unrivalled power.
Trump may be an evil narcissist by the standards of normal people, but there's plenty of those sorts of people in politics. That's why you have a constitution.
Absolutely! The U.S. is defacto a Russia or China with a lower 'government expenditure/GDP ratio'
But that is not that much of a consolation if the government is allowed to pick winners and losers for kleptocracy or there is strong central planning and oversight on what should independent institutions
> He knew how much power he had back then. The difference was that the government bureaucracy worked hard to counter his agenda throughout his term.
He did not know. He was also not expecting to win, and so had to scramble to get people appointed.
He asked around and got people who were experts in their respective fields. The problem is that those experts (a) knew his ideas were bad, and (b) had integrity. It was, by and large, Trump's appointees that worked hard to counter his agent and not the government bureaucracy.
Trump did not make the same 'mistake' this time around: he appointed folks not for their competence but for their loyalty to him. That was and is the only criteria for serving under Trump.
I hate to assign him so much agency. The man seems a complete buffoon who lacks the ability to plan anything beyond real estate fraud. Instead, I look to all of the people in his orbit who can orchestrate long term goals. Sure, he will self sabotage many schemes, but will directionally go where the handlers want. Vance, Miller, Heritage Foundation, etc are the ones guiding most policy decisions.
That tariffs have been so absolutely scattershot, says Trump actually is the one calling the shots there.
His orbiters/handlers are totally throwing all kinds of stuff at him to see what sticks to his cooked brain. It's clear he's barely aware what's happening anymore. The only coherent things he can focus on are things from the 80s and 90s heydays and old and recent grudges.
It’s clear that he’s very easily persuaded on many topics that he already has a slight bias towards, but that he also has his pet projects that his handlers don’t want to mess with because that would jeopardize their political capital (ball room).
Quick heuristic I have is: vanity project = Trump; neocon pet project = Heritage Foundation; anything related to racial purity = Stephen Miller; quackery = RFK and other grifters.
The tariffs are partially his bias, but also Navarro who lost his mind somewhere around 2015 and became an economics pariah.
He still doesn't understand, I think anyone that sticks all of this to Trump is playing exactly in the hands of the powers behind him: The Heritage Foundation, Federalist Society, billionaires like the Koch, Stephen Miller, Bannon, so on and so forth, they would love to have Trump as the scapegoat for all of this.
Trump is not a smart person, he doesn't know much aside from what he's been told, and the people playing him to further their agendas would love more than anything to be kept in the shadows in case it all comes crumbling down to just pin it all on Trump, the moron.
They really didn't. It was a dog and pony show under the belief that he would not make his way back into power. The dems/reps did not want to set a precedent of holding a president to account for doing terribly illegal things. They didn't intend to actually do anything to prevent this.
The GOP in Congress abdicating its role and deferring to the executive, as well as SCOTUS continually using the “shadow docket” to rule in his favor with little to no explanation provided.
Congress: anyone falling out of line will lose his support in midterms.
Judiciary: appointments and ideological alignment with some of the Supreme Court. Thomas and Alito are fully controlled, Kavanaugh just loves a powerful executive, the rest aren't controlled but often in agreement.
Then there's his use of executive power to punish his adversaries, e.g. Perkins Coie.
The question is through what mechanism are other branches curtailing his power? It seems to be limited to strongly worded letters and speeches, indignant comments and scathing news reports but nothing real.
The execution of the Unitary Executive theory, a clear ideological descendant of Carl Schmitt’s Decisionism. Carl also had some beautiful prose describing the weaknesses of liberal democracy and how to exploit them that are very relevant to today as well.
Through the flawed primary system. Relatively few people vote in the primaries, which means they skew towards extremists. Trump can motivate MAGAns to vote in Republican primaries, which makes MAGA essentially a gatekeeper to Republican seats even in districts where the electorate at large is Republican rather than MAGAn.
He's not directly controlling the judiciary yet, but he has appointed wildly extremist judges and threatened judges who rule against him with impeachment, so he's certainly making an effort.
He's also appreciably more senile now, and a common manifestation of that is lowered inhibitions. I'm not saying that Trump was great at 70, but now that he's 80 he's considerably less in control of himself.
(If you doubt this, go watch some clips and compare how he talks now to how he talked during his first administration. If you were concerned about Biden's state in 2024, you should be concerned about Trump now.)
I came in to say the same thing -- major, major respect to Powell.
I am not a big fan of his earlier policies (or of Greenspan's and anyone after him for that matter). His "unlearn the importance of M2" did not age well. He made the tail end of the ZIRP more painful than it needed to be. But those were honest mistakes from a public servant who did his best and believed in what he is doing.
And standing up for what he believes is right, against this insanity from the president is the gold standard of what we need from public servants. My 2c.
I have bad things to say about him. But they're firmly on pause. What Trump wants for the Federal Reserve is far worse.
And anyone who is a hard-currency quantity-theory-of-money conservative, should also be appalled by it.
Trump is way worse than what the harshest critics of the Federal Reserve think about it. Nobody right or left should support it. Only the billionaires will profit off the monetary disorder.
By design, kiss the ring. It’s a natural progression of the kind of grifting that has been occurring through 2025: shitcoin rugpulls, tariff announcements, etc.
Would love to hear what you've disagreed with because the man pulled off what can only be interpreted as a miracle in landing the economy nearly back on the 2% target with no massive economic problems after we went through an unprecedented pandemic, during which Trump printed $3.5 Trillion, causing massive inflation (yes, Trump did that, not Biden).
Fundamentally, people don't like situations with no good answer. I see it again and again, present a problem with no good answer and most people will resort to the answer that aligns with their political leanings even when faced with clear evidence they are wrong.
Look how quickly big business rolled over for The Felon--because they saw what mot people have been denying since the election.
Shots fired. Even the republicans will not be able to ignore this and they know that if Powell caves in the American economy will likely collapse. So who will speak up in his defense?
Republican representatives have been very much behaving like cattle, they're scared and they think that there are no other options but to cower and to jump to Trump's every whim. If one of them stands tall and survives (which remains to be seen) and speaks up then quite possibly others will follow.
Republicans are afraid of their base. This is what has been said by republican reps when asked why they don’t break with Trump. Even now, Trump has some impressive Republican approval numbers given the scenario America finds itself in.
He operates on a version of America that is a shadow of the old nation, and in that shadow, it doesn’t actually need the capabilities and complexities it had developed over the past century. It needs to be simple enough to get votes and conversation points on Fox, and everything else can be blamed on some meme of the moment. It’s insane to see, but apparently we have the technology to make Hallucination driven government work.
My working theory is that the ai bubble is caused by trump. People are too uncertain to want to invest in most industries, but they have to put their money somewhere, so they put it in ai stocks. Since the supreme court is likely to rule trump's tariffs illegal in a week or so, this may lead to a stock market crash. As people reallocate their portfolios, they will sell their ai stocks, which will pop the bubble and cause a crash. Something to watch out for.
Remember the first time you wanted to buy a stock.
You used a product or a service that you liked immensely, realized it had a stock and wanted to be involved.
1 billion people are using AI, not dramatically changing their lives yet of course but for sure they go 'wow incredible I want to be part of this' when they make a video with Sora or generate a pamphlet without having to work
Valid theory, and if you look at the prices of assets like gold, the reallocation is already happening. But I feel a near-term crash in AI stocks is just not coming unless we are headed towards catastrophic economic conditions. Lots of market forces are involved in AI now and even people selling stocks (or a major correction) will not pop the AI bubble since the major players have invested way too much cash to just let it go away at this point. (IMO)
Yes, but for now the USD has more or less survived. If Trump forcibly removes the FED chair on a pretext things could go downhill very fast. You can probably kiss the USD as a reserve currency goodbye overnight and China is going to have a real problem given the amount of debt they hold. This could easily knock the last pillar that holds it all up away.
Uh have you met Republicans? Anyone not fully onboard that had even half a spine retired or got voted out. The rest either love it or just fall in line so they can collect paychecks.
This is... just crazy. One of those mostly boring bits of plumbing that has been left to professionals throughout the entire 50 years of my life - and they're trying to wreck it.
> One of those mostly boring bits of plumbing that has been left to professionals throughout the entire 50 years of my life - and they're trying to wreck it.
There is even a more boring and obscure bit of plumbing, the Treasury payment system, that they/DOGE went after last year:
It's also completely in character with Trump's behaviour. He is a dictator who wants what he wants and can't abide anyone standing in his way. He wants absolute authority to do as he wishes. This extends to removing foreign heads of state so he can access their countries resources and also threatening 'allies' so he can take their territory. We're watching him systematically destroy any good will or moral authority that the USA held.
It goes back before Donald was in charge of the Trump real estate business. It started with a really really shitty father who desired a “killer” business instinct in his children (read: cruelty) above all else.
Reading some of Mary Trump’s books will give some insight on the family that Donald grew up in. No love, all cruelty.
Donald is just a rich kid who inherited a big business and learned nothing but cruelty from his daddy.
I don’t think the main issue is that this type of person has been put in charge, it’s that the system can fail because of the will of one person. It kind of reveals that the guardrails were decorum and at its core Americans elects dictators that up until now chose to behave well.
More generally I think in an age of social media democracies will have to evolve to prevent leadership cults. Maybe something like the head of state being indirectly elected by local representatives.
It's also for very stupid reasons: The fed dropping rates to the degree that would satisfy Donald Trump would greatly accelerate inflation which in turn would further upset voters, who would in turn blame Donald Trump (just like they did Biden before).
Is it just a cynical view that enough voters can be convinced it's the other side at fault?
Someone who supports trump, please let me know the logic on this. Genuinely. I'm trying to read other places about these charges but they're just so slanted that they're not really trustworthy. Is there anything to this, or is it really just to pressure the federal reserve?
Exactly. He thinks he knows better than the experts. He thinks lower interest rates are good and people saying they should be higher are just trying to make him look bad. Nothing he does is a clever gambit.
I implore you to stop being credulous before it's too late. Trump supporters deeply believe, and are not shy about saying, that anyone who stops Trump from achieving his political goals should be imprisoned or murdered.
I have a family member like this who I interact with almost every day. When Renee Good was fatally shot in the face three times this family member said that she deserved it for "getting in the way" and that if she just ignored them she wouldn't have been murdered. With all of the video recordings that have come out and been extensively disseminated, pretty much everyone knows that she moved out of the way and stopped, and it was Jonathan Ross who initiated the encounter. There is no way to "get out of the way" and "ignore them" when armed figures enact force on whims. But people like my family member believe that these armed figures direct violence towards those who are dangerous rather than simply directing violence to anybody who is close enough to hurt. You cannot reason with people like that because they retroactively justify any harm in order to protect their belief in the systems of enforcement. To them order and structure are more important and valuable than agency and safety or in some cases even life itself.
I know many. They’re good people. But they’re willing to be indifferent to violence if the perpetrators are not on their team. Everyone does this to some degree, but their tendency to align on messaging is much higher than e.g. folks going at each other about their pet war.
They put a great deal of effort into talking about political violence and implying that Democrats are a source of rioting and terrorism. The indifference is only to their own violence.
And right now many have posted “lock him up” on Twitter in response to this news. Many of these users probably couldn’t describe the federal reserve or share anything at all about Powell. Their cult zealotry continues.
If citing the behavior of the most rabbid supporters is allowed (because that's who shows up to campaign rallies), then it's not hard to find an equivalent on the left. /r/all is full of people wanting various people in the epstein files, including trump, to be locked up on spurious associations.
Locking people up for crimes is different from locking them up because they are your political opponents. I don't think I've seen people on the left yelling about locking Mitch McConnell up, for instance, even if he bears much responsibility for all of this.
I think that's the point. None could name a crime, and that didn't matter.
Meanwhile, 34 actual felony convictions, court finding misuse of millions in charity funds, an attempted coup, being found liable for sexual assault, SCOTUS having to formally place the president above the law to avoid prosecution... none of it even moved the needle for those same folks.
>I think that's the point. None could name a crime, and that didn't matter.
From a 10s skim on wikipedia:
>Some experts, officials, and members of Congress contended that Clinton's use of a private email system and a private server violated federal law, specifically 18 U.S. Code § 1924, regarding the unauthorized removal and retention of classified documents or materials, as well as State Department protocols and procedures, and regulations governing recordkeeping.
I'm not saying those allegations are true, but to claim "none could name a crime" suggests you didn't even try.
>Meanwhile, 34 actual felony convictions, court finding misuse of millions in charity funds, an attempted coup, being found liable for sexual assault, SCOTUS having to formally place the president above the law to avoid prosecution... none of it even moved the needle for those same folks.
It's clearly a rationalisation. Nobody is rabidly averse to private email servers and calling for prison for every politician who used a private email server. It's Hillary specifically.
Whereas everyone thinks that all child rapists should be in prison!
> It's clearly a rationalisation. Nobody is rabidly averse to private email servers and calling for prison for every politician who used a private email server. It's Hillary specifically.
I think the world would be a better place if politicians with access to critical information were held to suitable security requirements under threats of punishment for laxity.
This would absolutely also include Hesgeth inviting a journalist to an airstrike planning meeting on Signal.
And likewise Trump putting boxes full of state secrets in a disused bathroom and on a stage.
The Trump administration are clearly hypocrites, clearly trying to throw the book at everyone else while bemoaning even the slightest consequences for themselves. I wouldn't call for Clinton's arrest, but I will say that anywhere that would arrest her should've given a much more severe punishment to Trump.
Then again, I'm not even American so I genuinely don't actually care if y'all leak state secrets like a basketball net leaks water.
Is there some well of non-rabid Trump supporters that I'm not aware of? I'm always open to the idea that I'm in a bubble, but my experience is that even the least rabid Trump supporters are completely unwilling to criticize him or oppose something he wants. Did any Trump supporters, for example, criticize the prosecution of James Comey?
>Is there some well of non-rabid Trump supporters that I'm not aware of? I'm always open to the idea that I'm in a bubble, but my experience is that even the least rabid Trump supporters are completely unwilling to criticize him or oppose something he wants.
In the context of the previous comment, the "non-rabbid" (and probably median) supporter would be someone voting Trump because they think they trust him more on the economy/immigration or whatever. They might be indifferent to his claims that he'll lock up his political opponents, or think that they're actually guilty of something, but that's not the same as being "rabbid" (ie. showing up to rallies and chanting "lock her up").
There's a difference between supporters and "the people who, in a single election, voted for him". The former tend to be pretty rabid and unmovable. Some portion of the voters are less firm in their support.
Right! With a non-fascist politician, what you're describing would be extremely abnormal; the median Biden supporter, Obama supporter, or Bush supporter would routinely take positions their guy didn't agree with even though they supported him overall. But the range of Trump supporter opinions stretches only from "politely support everything he wants to do" to "be performatively mean about everything he wants to do".
>But the range of Trump supporter opinions stretches only from "politely support everything he wants to do" to "be performatively mean about everything he wants to do".
You're basing this off... what? You're missing the options of "I'm indifferent about this", or "I don't agree with him on this but still think he's better as a whole than the alternative".
I'm missing "I don't agree with him on this" because I don't hear Trump supporters say that. Trump doesn't allow them to - he thinks it's wrong for anyone to disagree with him and illegal for anyone to try and stop him from doing something he wants to do. Again, the whole context here is that Trump is trying to jail one of his own appointees for failing to enact his preferred monetary policy.
> It is. What's more, such support is roughly the same across both parties, but both parties vastly overestimate the other side's support.
The difference between the two parties is that one elected a leader that agrees with that minority. This 2012 scene from The Newsroom outlines the difference:
I don't think this addresses the main point of my question, though. Do you know any prominent Democrats, e.g., representatives, senators, or presidents, who have called for a Republican to be killed?
> "SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR FROM TRAITORS!!!" Trump went on. "LOCK THEM UP???" He also called for the lawmakers' arrest and trial, adding in a separate post that it was "SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH."
I consider January 6 to have falsified all research along these grounds. I acknowledge, sure, that virtually nobody wants to see gun battles in the street. But if you can talk yourself into believing that a mob sent to overturn the election and install the loser doesn't count as partisan violence, you can talk yourself into believing all kinds of catastrophes don't count.
>But if you can talk yourself into believing that a mob sent to overturn the election and install the loser doesn't count as partisan violence, you can talk yourself into believing all kinds of catastrophes don't count.
How's this different than say...
>polls show 99% (or whatever) of people are against crime
>voters elect a soft-on-crime politician, crime goes up
>"I consider the fact that the soft-on-crime politicians got elected to have falsified all research that people are against crime"
It's not different. If my city elected a mayor whose buddies committed a robbery 4 years ago, and his first act in office was to parole the robbers, I would be incandescently furious and definitely say that anyone who supports him is pro-crime.
On a purely pedantic point, whatever he's advocating for isn't "political violence" any more than calling for the death penalty isn't "political violence". Yes, the death penalty plausibly could count as "violence", and the process of instituting it is political, but if you look at the questions in the first source, it's clear they're talking about stuff like politicians/activists getting killed, not the state doling "violence" as some sort of punishment.
Moving on to the actual video, if the implication is that someone says [absurd thing] on national TV, it must mean that the party (or its electorate) as a whole must support [absurd thing], then:
The guy end up apologizing, so what's the issue? I guess the expectation is that he should be canceled/fired or whatever? What about similarly absurd stuff from the left? It's not hard to find stuff like "racism = power + oppression" that's casually mentioned on npr or whatever without major pushback, even though most democrats don't believe in this type of stuff. Or is talking about killing people a special case? If so, what does that mean about discussions on the death penalty?
This response is funny to me, because there’s been a massive drop in rightwing violence in the US since Trump was elected… but that’s because state-sponsored violence isn’t counted towards the statistics.
Pretty funny how there aren’t any more Proud Boy marches, yeah? Couldn’t be that they’re all getting paid six figure salaries to round up brown people at Kavanaugh stops…
But yes. Most left wing thought leaders count state-sponsored violence as political violence, and that often includes the death penalty.
>This response is funny to me, because there’s been a massive drop in rightwing violence in the US since Trump was elected… but that’s because state-sponsored violence isn’t counted towards the statistics.
>Pretty funny how there aren’t any more Proud Boy marches, yeah? Couldn’t be that they’re all getting paid six figure salaries to round up brown people at Kavanaugh stops…
Yes, that's how protests typically work. If things are going your way, you stop protesting. Nobody is protesting for gay marriage in California because they already won.
I don’t want to assume your politics, but saying that the group of people calling for racial purity and ethnic cleansing don’t find it necessary to protest anymore because things are going their way is very much not a good sign.
Fucking wild. You can't get more mainstream opinion than this guy. Trump regularly has phone calls on air with this person, he's isn't a random someone on TV. He is one of the administrations goto mouthpieces for communicating this administration's policy on the largest news station. They are workshoping/normalizing MURDERING UNDESIRABLES on their MAINSTREAM MEDIA by hosts that the president ROUTINELY USE TO BROADCAST HIS MESSAGE. My point is THEY ARE OK WITH KILLING PEOPLE THEY DON'T WANT. A meak 'my bad' doesn't mean shit.
And you waive it away. 'Bro said my bad dude, what more do you want? You think he shouldn't be an administration mouthpiece just because he wants extra-judicial killing? Cancel culture'. You are literally Martin Niemöller:
"First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist"
...
He was literally you. He justified their calls for 'only killing Communists and only because they are bad and want to do bad things....' just like you.
If you genuinely believe that, then I have some hope that the very toxic messages I see daily in political social media, saying exactly what's being alleged here, aren't deeply held beliefs but a tiny fringe.
Fox News, a major American media company, had one of their main personalities say that homeless people should just be killed by lethal injection on air. The desire for killing for random reasons is so mainstream to them that their media is comfortable stating out loud people they don't want/are undesirable should just be killed. Their media organs are workshopping/normalizing killing undesirables.
I don’t know if you truly mean that or you’re just being glib. But if you’re serious, I’d strongly urge you to get help or just talk to someone you know and trust; even if you disagree on a lot of things.
All of the Trump supporters I knew in meatspace reassured me that he would never do his insane tariffs, and then when he did insisted that it was a good idea and they never thought otherwise. So I no longer trust that they're telling me the truth about what they want or what they would support.
Maybe eight years ago. But in my experience, Trump supporters today have no line he can cross which will cause them to stop supporting him. They might claim to, but time after time, they just find a way to justify and double down.
I continue to be surprised by people who have seen things unfold as they have over less than a year of this administration and still somehow believe we'll continue to have "free and fair" elections anytime in the near future.
We have over, and over again seeing virtually all of the "checks and balances" we learned about as kids being overridden without consequence.
This community of all other should be aware of how easy it is to exert total control of information (I'm still surprised this article is on the home page). Everyone consumes almost all of their information through digital, corporate controlled means. Even people getting together a organically socializing in bars, something that was common 30 years ago, has been replaced with online interactions. Trump does not need mandate from the people to continue to rule the country.
> Trump Regrets Not Seizing Voting Machines After 2020 Election: In an interview, the president said he should have ordered the National Guard to take the machines
We've had a number of free and fair elections in the past year, including some where the Trump-supported candidate lost. That doesn't mean we're out of the woods, but Trump has not historically been willing to go out of his way to protect the electoral fortunes of people who aren't himself, and at least some of his allies are well aware that the peace and security we presently enjoy is not guaranteed in a post-democratic US.
When it comes to harm on this scale, always expect the worst, because the harm will be generational. More importantly, Trump doesn't give a flying fuck about anything outside of the executive branch and below the federal level, because the federal level executive has control of the instruments of war. And he has already proven that nobody manning those instruments of war will disobey him. The Marines got recalled, but the National Guard didn't. This latest thing with Venezuela is just one more section of the window that's been wiped clear enough for him to see what he can do. The final bit that's still obscured is whether or not he can give direct orders to the military and security agencies to subjugate the state levels of government. I've got a large amount of certainty that within the next week or two even that bit of obscurity won't remain.
As I always tell people, if you're right there's no point in arguing about it, so the only thing I would say is that you owe it to yourself to check your predictions. Set a reminder for January 25 to confirm whether Trump has ordered the military and security agencies to invade any state capitols. I did this a few times last year, and immigration policy is really the only topic where the "expect the worst" heuristic has worked for me.
My personal belief is that he will try it and it will fail, but that will of course lead to the Coast Guard and the National Guard being rescinded from the DHS and governor's control by decree and being placed under the Navy and the Army respectively. Currently this power exists in theory, but it's never truly been implemented, even during World War II. This is something that Hegseth publicly considered when West Virginia's state Congress decided that the extended deployment of the state's National Guard troops to Washington D.C. was not within presidential power and ordered them back.
especially as if the risk premium for the US increases because of the methods used to challenge Fed independence, the rates that truly matter, treasury yields, will increase causing limiting how much consumers can actually benefit from lower headline rates
Im not convinced Trump cares anymore. For whatever reason that may be, he has decided there is nothing that can stop him at this point. There is no congress or court that will hold him accountable. His supporters are unwavering and drunk on unchecked power right now.
The MAGA crowd and their lickspittles/enablers are so far removed from reality that they only believe their leader.
And many others will vote for system-wreckers (broadly: conservatives) again, because the democrats cannot fix much of the damage done within the next legislative periods, let alone just one... even if the miracle of a trifecta happens and SCOTUS loses its majority on top of it. Rinse, repeat.
These are the very people who would help him rewrite history that yes he indeed did earn the Nobel Peace Prize as it is obviously and prominently displayed in his office, the words and records of the Nobel committee be damned.
blame Donald Trump (just like they did Biden before)
Respectfully disagree. Republican presidents get a lot more economic leeway than Dem presidents, especially from the media. This has puzzled me my entire adult life. Inflation will bother media and public, but not to the same extent it did 2021-22.
Big media works for the capital class, community newspapers and other forms of local news that are largely pro-public have been gutted. The remaining large-ish public media orgs (PBS, NPR) are currently under attack to consolidate corporate-friendly agenda-setting.
Case in point, you’d think by how things are reported that Trump brought down inflation. But inflation was down when Biden left office and Trump has done nothing to improve it.
There hasn't been a single point in my shorter life so far where things have been this out of control. The fed is supposed to be as non-political as possible. I know politics and the economy are intertwined, but tell me how this won't end up a disaster please. How do we get back to the USA we had even 10 years ago?
> but tell me how this won't end up a disaster please.
Unless you want to split hairs and argue that "disaster" is really only in the middle of the spectrum of plausible outcomes... then there is no outcome here that isn't a disaster.
At *best* this only moderately raises inflation in the short-term and somehow the rest of the world isn't shaken too much and the USD somehow still remains a reserve currency.
I'm in the "USD looses reserve currency status in 6-48 months" camp but there are some reasonable arguments against this.
This is the second or third comment I’ve seen online that says this. I’m curious how do you conclude the fed has “never been non-political?” Is this just a matter of using the right terminology? The term “non-political” (also “independent”) isn’t concerned with each board member’s individual party affiliation, or how they vote in elections. It just means that management of the fed and importantly its monetary policy I.e. the federal rate, be guided by data; not influenced by short term goals of politicians and especially not influenced by the President or his administration.
(Edit) all that to say, maybe that’s what you meant by “never at an individual level”?
And it's pitiful that he has to be a Republican for people to credit him with sincerity. I think as much as partisanship itself, poisoning discourse by labeling appeals to evidence or procedural integrity as "partisan" proves too much and gets rid of objective reality entirely, creating space for bad faith actors.
I always appreciate when people make comments like this. It helps identify the trolls or people so completely outside of reality you can mark them as untrustworthy and ignore whatever they say.
Best of luck JPow - that was a perfect statement from the Fed.
It seems like theres a bit of an inflection point right now in the US. I wonder how much entropy the system can handle it has to be near a breaking point.
> Some countries that have prosecuted or threatened to prosecute central bankers for the purpose of political intimidation or punishment for monetary policy decisions: Argentina, Russia, Turkey, Venezuela and Zimbabwe.
> If there were any remaining doubt whether advisers within the Trump Administration are actively pushing to end the independence of the Federal Reserve, there should now be none. It is now the independence and credibility of the Department of Justice that are in question.
> I will oppose the confirmation of any nominee for the Fed—including the upcoming Fed Chair vacancy—until this legal matter is fully resolved.
There’s no question about the independence of the DoJ. Its independence is undeniably gone and it is full on working as Trump’s enforcement arm. Anyone who tries to argue otherwise is a clown.
Thom Tillis is a liar and will immediately confirm whoever Trump nominates. There are no examples of Tillis or other prominent republicans ever coming together to actually effectively oppose a Trump nominee (see the current secretary of defense, or leader of DHS for evidence).
America has reached the inter-departmental warfare stage of failed states it seems. As an appreciator of all sorts of banana republics, kleptocracy and military juntas, this is a very familiar pattern of behavior.
I can't say I'm the biggest fan of the financial apparatus in general but it is more than a little heartening to see someone in the federal government with a spine for once.
From an institutional engineering POV (warning- I am a grouchy old former political scientist), it would be interesting to come up with institutional solutions for some of the problems America is facing right now. Specifically I think I'd remove the Attorney General role from the President's authority and give it to Senate, to nominate & confirm exclusively. Let's say 51 votes to confirm and 55 votes to impeach. Even among presidential systems, the US cabinet is unusually presidential-centric. I'm not a big LatAm expert, but I think they typically separate the public prosecutor from the president's nomination capacity.
Of course I would strongly prefer to not be a presidential system at all. But if we're discussing post-Trump constitutional reforms that could plausibly pass, I think removing the Attorney General/DOJ from the president's purview and also placing some checks on the pardon power seem doable
>Of course I would strongly prefer to not be a presidential system at all.
Having grown up in the US and having blinders on, I always thought all those parliamentary systems seemed unstable and sometimes comical. But now I see the value in it. Once a leader has demonstrated he is not up to the task, has grown out-of-touch, or has descended into madness, he can be replaced by his party, and if that didn't happen, a no-confidence vote could trigger an election. No guarantee either of those things would happen, but the option exists. The fixed four-year term idea now seems artificial and inflexible.
I suspect the current US leader and maybe even the previous US leader (maybe in his 4th year) would have suddenly found himself a back-bencher.
Also, the ‘leader’ in a parliamentary system is simply a lot less powerful. The executive is the cabinet, not the PM. The PM usually appoints it, but the ministers don’t get to fall back on ‘just following orders’; they are very much using their own authority. And again there’s always the threat of replacement of PM and re-alignment. Realistically, the threat is more important than the thing itself.
> Having grown up in the US and having blinders on, I always thought all those parliamentary systems seemed unstable and sometimes comical.
There are so many different variables between countries, and plain luck, that it's tough to extrapolate too much, but this just jumped out a bit for me as a Canadian - the average Canadian PM term has historically been marginally longer than the average American Presidential time in office.
It's not like campaigning and running elections are terribly hard these days. The AG (and other heads of independent executive departments) should be each their own races voted on by the public. (Yes, this obviously requires repudiating this new innovative brain damage called sparkling autocracy theory^W^W^W unitary executive theory.)
We also need Ranked Pairs voting so we end this two party duopoly bullshit. Primaries can remain, but voters should be able to vote in all parties' primaries (rather than having to pick just one).
We also need some sort of recall mechanism, either periodic option to vote no confidence (twice a year when elections/primaries are already held?), or something triggered when signatures/polling get high enough.
Since I'm making my Christmas list, we also need to drastically neuter sovereign and qualified immunity - remove their applicability for any action not explicitly authorized by the legislature (and Constitution). No more general "agents of the government" who unilaterally act with impunity, with only narrow legal ways of recovering damages.
But part of the difficulty that has precipitated our current situation is the absolute gridlock in Congress for the past twenty+ years. That's what pushed more and more power into the executive and executive agencies. I don't know if Ranked Pairs would be enough to fix that with fresh blood, or we need more direct democracy (voters can override their sen/rep vote on a bill?), or what. Maybe triple the number of sen/reps from each district so that voters won't feel they're losing their experienced politicians if they vote out the worst of the three.
I dislike the existence of the Fed, but I dislike the idea of the executive branch being in control of monetary policy even more. I'll be tuning in to see how the case progresses.
The appears to be difficult for a lot of people to like, but the Fed still exists because the people who bitch and moan about the Fed can never voice an alternative that wouldn't immediately destroy everything if it were implemented.
You can dislike a solution but admit that you can't think of a better solution, or specify that it is better than an even worse solution.
I can see why someone would have a issues with "a bunch of rich bankers appointed by politicians" controlling American monetary policy. But I can't really see a better way at least, until we can achieve a post-scarcity economy or something.
Bernanke had a strictly academic career before going into public service (and was/is probably one of the foremost experts on the Great Depression, something that was handy in 2008/9):
I think people over-estimate how many "rich bankers" are in the Fed, especially at the FOMC.
Bloomberg's Odd Lots podcast with some Fed members in recent years, especially the more obscure regional ones, about their work, and how they often go out and talk to local businesses about what's happening 'on the ground'.
I’m not denying that, but that’s not how I read the comment. That comment comes across as a relief that the Fed is under attack, but is more upset that the source of attack is the executive branch.
The eradication of the Fed and fiat money. As others have expressed, I also think the interest rate mechanism is clumsy and that bailouts do more harm in the long term than good (see one of the most recent examples [1]).
I dislike the Fed because it has (since 1913) held an unnecessarily powerful control of our nation's (and world's) money supply.
JFK was likely assassinated for attempting to retain the species backing of silver; less than a decade later Nixon would take us off the gold-backed dollar "temporarily" (i.e. 1971 - present) — the dollar's plummet since 1913 (and 1971 specifically) has been monumental.
The Fed simply has too much power to destroy the dollar savings of Americans (which is why cash and low interest bonds are so detrimental for long-term wealth preservation).
----
But I am glad the the Fed Chairman's brass-gilded balls are so big, in this struggle against our absolutely out-of-control unified executive theory President.
Personally, bitcoin and gold/silver make up the majority of my savings. Have been slowly DCA-ing out of stocks and primarily into those, these past few years... accelerated since learning the majority of stock trades in 2025 occurred in dark pools (i.e. no price discovery via public markets).
The libertarian view is that interest rates should be decided by the free market and not a central bank. Mainly due to what we're seeing now (the executive trying to take it over) and that a small board of people can make bad decisions that have reaching effects.
Markets don't always seek equilibrium. Some aspects of the economy tend to be governed by vicious and virtuous feedback cycles. Always leaving everything to markets feels like more of a religion than a reasonable policy position.
This is actually quite correct. The Fed Funds policy interest rate is a clumsy instrument because it involves chasing the ever-shifting balancing point of an inherently unstable system. You "cut" rates to increase money creation, which actually pushes your long-term rates higher due to expected inflation and leads to even more money creation for a constant policy rate, and vice versa. This can all be fixed very simply by changing the instrument to a crawling exchange rate peg, which has an inherently stabilizing effect, as seen from the effectiveness of currency board systems - that system doesn't shift against you if you stick to a bad peg, whereas it very much does if you stick to a bad policy rate.
The long term policy goal (stability in the path of nominal incomes (prices + real activity) in the very short run, and prices in the medium-to-long run) would be unaffected, but the whole operational aspect would be simplified quite a bit.
> The Fed Funds policy interest rate is a clumsy instrument because it involves chasing the ever-shifting balancing point of an inherently unstable system.
I don't know about "inherently unstable system", given that as central bank independence has grown so has, generally speaking, monetary stability:
Great Moderation basically involved the adoption of price stability as a long-term policy target, as opposed to trying to keep long-term fixed exchange rates. There's no reason to change the policy target, the issue is wrt. the policy mechanism/instrument.
It prevents banks from doing their job, so does the existence of t-bills.
They hinder the economy by suppressing creativity and ingenuity . Every time a person becomes an investor instead of an inventor the economy and prosperity of a nation falthers.
You just don't see it in stats because stats can't measure against hypotheticals but that doesn't mean it isn't true
No it did not. I don't know why people repeat this so often but it is very frustrating. Nixon unilaterally ended the gold standard because the US was printing money to pay for Vietnam and the rest of the world called the US on its bullshit. The end of the gold standard is relatively recent in history and the verdict is still out on the impact.
I think your observation assumes that inflating the value of gold relative to the rest of economy is a problem - if you do not care about that I'm not sure it matters.
In any case gold served as a strong check on monetary policy even if it had problems. Certainly it is possible to have a "sound" monetary policy without gold. I'm just not convinced in societies ability to affect sound governance of monetary policy without some "stronger" guard rails. Especially not in today's climate.
You asked about which piece "of the dual mandate", but the OP said "operates as" which I am going to reply to.
Does the Fed can any data from labor sources or unions? I am asking in honest because the few reports from them that I have looked into(mostly around unemployment) all seem to be polls solely sourced from investor class assets like companies.
If they are only sourcing from one biased source for their data, they wouldn't have to have a bad mandate or manipulate it, to operate like it was for the benefit of the data source, right?
No one. We should be on a hard money standard. The Fed shouldn't be able to socialize the impact of bad business decisions like what was recently done with Silicon Valley Bank using the BTFP. Sometimes consequences need to be realized, even at the cost of bad downstream impact to those indirectly involved. It's the only way for more resilient systems to arise since our current system interrupts important feedback mechanisms.
AI is a bubble; well, the stock market as a whole is, being led by an AI boom. At the end of a bubble (and it's not clear if we're there yet) markets find ways to self-finance. A crash means not just that the value is lower, but that the leveraged bets are now due, and those have to be paid by selling more.
When it crashes (and it's not clear when that will be), it will crash back to a cash-value baseline. And, sigh, it's not clear where that is. But it won't magically start going back up. The cyclic reinvestment engine needs to be reinvented every time.
What an unhinged moment in time. At some point, they'll need to be courageous people with the ability and funds to speak up and say enough. But will they? It does not appear so.
The titanic amount of generational neglect that has allowed even a fraction of voters to look at Trump for more than a second and find him qualified for any public office is truly fantastic.
This is one of the clear examples that Trump is seeing Putin's Russia as a model for his vision for the USA.
Threats like the ones Powell's receiving would be the end of any other presidency. Why tech elites continue to align themselves with this clownshow will be a source of incredible shame that I'll hold onto forever.
I think a lot of largest tech companies feel that they'll face retribution from the current administration for not being supportive enough but would not from future admins.
For many of the smaller players I think there's unfortunately a lot of people who realized there's significant money to be made in grifting. Many of the largest crypto proponents have pivoted into endeavors, whether crypto or otherwise, that profit off of being rewarded for being part of the 'correct' tribe.
> I think a lot of largest tech companies feel that they'll face retribution from the current administration for not being supportive enough but would not from future admins.
Hopefully we get the opportunity to disabuse them of this notion.
> I think a lot of largest tech companies feel that they'll face retribution from the current administration for not being supportive enough but would not from future admins.
The Democrats should play hardball but the geriatrics can barely take a swing.
They don’t know where the plate is, what the game is, or what day it is. They’re just hoping for ice cream when the nurse comes around with the meds. Meanwhile they are retelling stories from the 1960s for the hundredth time.
This is exactly it and parallels what happened with the end of the Wiemar Republic. There was an asymmetry in response between the Nazis and the government. You can see that in the limited prosecution and light sentences of the Beer Hall Putsch perpetrators.
The tech titans like Thiel see the Trump administration as a "big bet" a startup investment. They can "shoot for the moon" and try to realize the network state. If they fail, they figure they'll just toss the Democrats some campaign contributions and all will be good.
I would be heavily predisposed to vote for any candidate who had a public goal of breaking up the big tech companies and taxing their CEOs into oblivion. I want this primarily because of the immediate about-face they all had when Trump 2.0 was elected and them all contributing to and standing behind him during his inauguration. Had they not, mercifully, all shown themselves as the snakes that they are I probably would have mostly continued to considere them a-political-ish and not been strongly opinionated.
Guarantee there are dozens if not more in the admin insider trading like they have on so many announcements. Market manipulation right out in the open.
The slimiest swampiest criminals, they need to be put on trial.
"The threat of criminal charges is a consequence of the Federal Reserve setting interest rates based on our best assessment of what will serve the public, rather than following the preferences of the President."
Thank you, Mr. Powell. We really want interest rates set to serve the people, not the whims of the President.
why? asset holders in this country have a free fed put, wage earners get smashed in the face. you can make a solid case this institution is more harmful and free banking is much better for wealth equality.
You had a comment to explain the poor take and instead do the equivalent of point and laugh. Can you help but wonder as onlookers question what your point might have been? People undoubtedly think this way, and to discount wholesale their line of thinking without engagement does not win hearts and minds.
Venezuela, Greenland, and this. Anyone notice how these extreme events all happened around the same time of the Epstein files getting released with highly publicized questions about all the redactions? It certainly seems like a distraction game.
The difference is that the actions and rhetoric around Venezuela and Greenland and the Fed reserve are direct actions by Trump. The thing in Minnesota is a tragedy but I don’t think he told anyone to go out and kill somebody on the street.
I ask you to look deeper into what's happening there and reconsider your stance. US citizens are being beaten up and harassed, as are non-citizens. ICE officers are using their cars to ram observers and then arresting them violently. They arrested a teenaged clerk at target and then threw him out of a vehicle onto the street upon realizing he was a citizen. A woman was filmed being taken into a portapotty in handcuffs by a federal agent. The violence is quite clearly systematic. Watch the videos.
The stuff I mentioned, the clear escalation, happened over the last few days, starting on the 7th. Along with the USDA suddenly cutting off all funds to Minnesota (which includes SNAP benefits for > 100k people). I don't see how this is any different.
I find myself seeking out non-doomer people to read, since the doom and gloom doesn't really help, it's just demotivating. "Look for the helpers" and all that.
It's a particular and kind of peculiar attitude, because objectively "things ain't great" and it's really easy to dwell on that. But we also need some hope.
Lots of respected limits and lines on government power are just being casually broken, so I don't think you're wrong. Whatever's going to happen next it probably won't have the stability of the past.
Thank you for pointing this out. It is really interesting, the difference between Trump 45 and Trump 47.
I would like to add one quote to be logged on this website:
> "I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn't be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he's America's Hitler," he wrote privately to an associate on Facebook in 2016. [0]
- Trump's future Vice President, JD Vance
If we survive the fall of Pax Americana in the next few years, and journalists and historians are again allowed to operate in a free environment, I really hope that they get to the core of how we got from 45 to 47.
"Has been set," not "will be set". We've been operating under the new scheme for months. Despite Powell's protestations, there was no evidence for cutting rates, and lots of evidence for doing the opposite. Unfortunately he gave in to Trump... but that obviously wasn't enough.
The only reasonable conclusion at this point is that the fascists in the white house see their deep unpopularity, obvious loss of power in the near future (they have lost nearly every election in the past year by a landslide), and the Epstein files closing in. The obvious outcome will be at minimum jail and ridicule due to their continuous and obvious corruption, high crimes and misdemeanors like invading Venezuela, trying to invade Greenland, and sexual crimes against children. So they have to accelerate chaos to try and destroy law and order before it catches up with them and destroys them.
Its time to put up or get put down by masked goons.
I hope I turn out to be wrong, but the most convincing explanation I've seen for the "why" is that the 1945-2000 period was an anomaly, and now we're reverting to the mean: despotic governments, frequent wars for territory, and massive wealth inequality leading to powerful oligarchies as the only other important political players aside from the despot. This was the norm for the overwhelming majority of human history and perhaps it was massively hubristic to think we had escaped it for good.
It's not the only anomaly. There was a previous period of long peace between 1815 and 1914, between the Napoleonic Wars and WW1.
This balance of power was carefully set up in the Congress of Vienna following the (first) defeat of Napoleon, and was ended by the ambitions of a Kaiser who desired the prestige of globe-spanning empire yet couldn't diplomacy his way out of a wet paper bag to realize that empire without bumbling into war.
I'm not arguing against QE I am saying there was too much of it and we could have had recovered just fine without the severe inflation that landed us in the current predicament.
It's quite impressive how scared everybody is of this administration. News outlets, international leaders even in face of threats, big tech, including the delusional Musk who thought he could've handled the president's rage.
Hell even his own party is scared of speaking up, you either fall in line or you risk falling victim of the most vicious direct attacks, even if you've been a huge and core voice for the president, see senator Marjorie Green.
From Russia, to Belarus, from the Philippines to Argentina, from Hungary to Poland it's crystal clear what a failure of democracy it is to have a presidential republic.
The turning point may have been when the Supreme Court decided a president couldn't be criminally liable for anything done in office. Having no fear of consequences is quite an enabler.
The most-unamerican thing you can do right now is HOLD bitcoin/gold/silver.
If you still want fiat — and they're available — Swiss Francs are deflating least-quickly.
Otherwise, as a fellow pleb, my best advice is to get enough bullets for occassional hunting (and other tax-free methods of living) and protection.
If you're of a draftable age/gender, I'd either get extremely fit or extremely disabled. If you're a lard-ass, I'd get to a state where you can live without medicines.
This will continue until people actually get hurt. Trump is exactly what decadence looks like: people willing to vote for "their team" against any better judgement because nothing really every happens to hurt them.
The defense is that the status quo has become archaic and self-serving instead of serving the public so the current operations people doing some house cleaning and tossing a few rooms to see what’s going on in there is overdue, changes need to happen and power structures need to be shaken out a bit to make sure they are not getting in the way of the people they were created to act on behalf of, and scatter the ones who are “helping themselves” to the public coffers.
This just needs to happen every across all government, it’s like brushing your teeth to kick out the bacteria, but each individual institution needs a different kind of “floss” depending on the nature of the ways they have strayed from their original purposes.
That sounds nice, but I don't think there is much evidence that the above is actually what the current administration is doing, or even attempting to do.
Having blatantly political messages blasted across websites for national parks and on airport security video screens during the shutdown, for example, doesn't seem like a move towards "serving the public", but rather a move towards consolidation of direct control to the politicians at the top of the executive branch.
I don’t see evidence of corruption all I see is a system already heavily steeped in corruption and regulatory capture that is using fake and ironic anti-establishment narratives to try and keep it.
there’s just a lot of partisan media outlets that are trying to make it look this way because it’s the corruption paying to try and stop it so they can keep power
As a side note, is there a compelling reason why interest rates aren't set algorithmically? I assume human intuition isn't really a factor in setting them. This would eliminate concerns about political motivation.
Economic models are complex and far from perfect, and we're still waiting for Hari Seldon's psychohistory models to be created to tie together macroeconomics and macropsychology.
But who sets the algorithm? Whichever department of branch of govt was in charge of that would become have the enormous power, and political motivation would then fall to that.
Equally the same for data that goes into the algorithm - if you can control that you control interest rates.
Agreed, but we're already living that reality. Moving to an algorithmic approach provides a layer of transparency that makes manipulation easier to detect.
> is there a compelling reason why interest rates aren't set algorithmically?
Can’t believe you are saying that!! Then anyone can manipulate it like they manipulate stocks by writing hit pieces one day and gushing articles a few days after,
There's some slippery feedback loops involved, even if the models were very good, the reflexive nature of doing something like this would be very hard to get around
Terrible. Trump was even the person who nominated Powell in 2017, and now he’s being squeezed for doing the job of Federal Reserve Chair instead of bending to demands.
They're already pursuing a case against another Fed board member, and now this? I have a feeling these two cases are going to suffer the same fate as the Letita James and James Comey cases: thrown out due to incompetence and/or malfeasance. It's a disgusting, clear weaponization of the DOJ.
MAGA, of course, tried to accuse Biden of weaponizing them during his term so that they could justify the Trump 2.0 revenge tour. Now we're here.
So this is the bar for the next country to surpass the US as the world's economic super-power, if this continues it's most likely going to be China to surpass the US.
An opportunity for the EU to stop its bureaucracy and cleanup its act. If it cannot convince anyone that they are next, then one can argue that democracy is completely finished.
If this nonsense continues it will be the UAE + Saudi Arabia + China, cutting off the west and that's that.
What about another nice dinner with all the Silicon Valley CEOs paying their respect to the orange dictator? I'm sure that will appease him.
What a bunch of spineless puppets.
The US government entered a debt spiral a while ago (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A091RC1Q027SBEA), and needs lower interest rates to service its tremendous debt while trying to inflate it away by printing money. That's all it comes down to. For decades fiscal conservatives were warning about it and were laughed at. Now that we're are the end game the inevitable shitshow will become apparent. You can hate Trump (rightly so), but as much as he did contribute to the problem directly, the problem is larger and systemic, and anyone else in office would have the exact same problem now.
Exactly, interest rates must come down due to the government debt burden. This debt burden creates a strong incentive to force rates to zero, but we have to pretend the Federal Reserve is independent.
Separately, I think Jerome Powell is one of the worst Fed chairs as he is most (but not exclusively) responsible for what happened to the housing market by creating a lock-in effect and focusing on their CPI basket.
If Trump does try to politicize the fed he is going to do the one thing that the American political system will not tolerate - messing with the money of the most powerful capital class in the world. Normally, the incentives of this class are most aligned with grinding the rest of us into a fine powder suitable for lubrication of the engines of commerce, but hopefully just this once they'll come to the rescue. My only fear is that the short term quarterly obsessions that we've built might actually lead to some business supporting this decision out of a suicidal drive for short term gains.
If Trump does try to politicize the fed he is going to do the one thing that the American political system will not tolerate
I've lost track of the number of times I, and others, have said that.
Turns out there really are no brakes on the Trump Train. In the parlance of the metallic-headgear fans, any other POTUS would have been treated to a nice convertible ride through downtown Dallas by now.
(Boring, important thing that holds civilization together.)
Dunning-Kruger effect billionaire: We don't need that. What's it even for anyhow? I'm not paying for it. All these naysaying wimps and freeloaders say we can't live without out. I will use my unelected government position and bling chainsaw to cut fraud, waste, and abuse to eliminate red tape and unnecessary big government regulation. And I demand a negative tax rate, subsidies, and lucrative government contracts! Rawr!
The point is better (and stands on its own) without treading into personal attacks. Don't let a throwaway account bait you into turning it into a battle of name calling instead of sticking to readily available facts as you link at the end, it's what they often want and if they were sincere it severely diminishes the chances they'll believe your links were in good faith anyways.
Facts matter, as does telling people it is on them to understand them. Otherwise, we will spin in perpetuity refuting people who are not discussing in good faith. I stand by my assertions. I do not believe it is impolite to call out a potential lack of education, or ignoring of facts and reality. Without shared facts and reality, discussion and debate is impossible.
This is every part I agree with, with none of falling for the trap of looking bad for doing so. They've already edited the comment and posted a new one. Now the insults stand rather than just what you've said here, which was perfectly even keeled and factual.
If you're going to put the energy into refuting something, why bother wasting it by using personal insults to kick it off instead? Uneducated is at least borderline, if a bit blunt, but unsophisticated just drains any value.
I appreciate you deeply for standing up to it, I just don't want to see doing so made to look bad when the facts presented were so solid and good.
I don’t believe asserting that someone is uneducated or unsophisticated is an insult (if true); it is simply a fact and description, and stands regardless of the content of the post. Where you see malice, I see honesty and truth. “If this, then that.”
There are educated people, uneducated people, sophisticated people, and unsophisticated people (and overlap amongst). You will need to tailor your approach accordingly when dealing with each persona.
Hmm, I suppose people can see words in very different ways. If you're mother asked why the printer never works for her would you tell her she's uneducated and unsophisticated for not knowing before sending a link to the manual? It sounds like perhaps you would, but I wonder how many would really agree that's a neutrally worded approach.
Not for me to decide alone any more than anyone else alone I suppose. Thanks for sharing your perspective on it.
Yes, and she would understand why, but that is certainly different than a throwaway account making antagonistic, inflammatory political statements without citations and ignoring facts, no? Context, intent, and nuance, like facts, matter (imho).
It seems likely she would, and we are often similar to our kin I guess, but I still wonder if that's what the average person would consider neutral. I have no good way to answer that absolutely more than the next person though.
I tend to think that's because it doesn't matter who it is, it's always most productive to reply in a way which focuses on substance alone when one can't otherwise be positive. Particularly in pure text, it's so easy for things to come off worse than intended (something which has hit me quite well in the past as much as any). I've always assumed that's why the comment guidelines are so universally worded, mentioning what throwaways should be used for but with no mention of how they should be exempted from the usual approach. I.e. it's very easy for two people to feel like they are being neutral in text as the conversation escalates.
I've got to hop off for to get ready for work tomorrow. Thanks again for both taking the time to share your perspective as well as taking the time to respond to mal-intended throwaways with solid facts - it matters (thumbs up).
“Trump appointees to the US Commission of Fine Arts, however, required the project use more white marble to align with a proposed presidential mandate from the president that all new federal buildings be neoclassical in style. This luxury white marble comes from Georgia and has been used extensively in the construction of national landmarks including the U.S. Capitol. Aside from Georgia marble, the materials used throughout the Fed’s renovation are required to be sourced domestically.
“And to match the original marble facades and detailed interiors, the Fed is required to use specialized processes more costly than those allowed in Washington buildings without historical significance or not on the National Mall.”
Do you know anything about how data science works? The algorithm is to be tuned over historical data to optimize for an unchanging reward function. The problem isn't that complicated if you think about it.
> The algorithm is to be tuned over historical data
So you’re saying that historical data can’t have biases? Data cannot be collected and shared (or not collected a la jobs report) to manipulate the output? Seems a bit of a naïve take if you ask me.
If data is not collected, it is missing. A decent algorithm will be robust to missing data.
How on earth do you think the Fed sets the rate? Each board member probably has a simple spreadsheet, although they use their gut feeling in the end. It's markedly less objective and completely un-transparent.
People here are funny in that when I preach for transparency and objectivity, they preach for obscurity and individual board member bias. Their skepticism of data science shows how uneducated they are about defining and optimizing an objective function.
I’m not saying I’m against an algorithm. I’m saying that I’m against _only_ an algorithm. And we do want transparency and objectivity - nobody is denying this. I’ve worked with enough data to know that there are implicit biases, and just because data exists doesn’t mean it’s good. Let’s just say I’m skeptical that an algorithm alone can replace the Fed.
> although they use their gut feeling in the end.
That gut feeling check is pretty crucial, I think. Why not just work to make the Fed a more transparent org? And let’s say it is by an algorithm - will it be open sourced so it can be vetted?
Edit: also more crucially, who’s responsible when the algorithm fucks up?
That's just something they say to scare the children.
In any event, the point of a decent algorithm is that if the result isn't complying with the action, upcoming updates to the weights will fix it. Moreover, changes to the weight would be such that they optimize for maximum learning.
It is so weird seeing people preach for an obscure entity to do something so basic, and being shut down when asking for transparency. Today's AIs could write good model-development algorithms for tasks that are a hundred times more complicated.
Oops, the unaccountable algorithm eased when it should have tightened and Volcker Shocked when it should have eased. No prob, the weights will get tweaked and all will be well. Once the economic crisis blows over, anyway . . .
> That's just something they say to scare the children.
Is that really your response to “past results aren’t indicative of future performance”? Honestly at that point why not just let ChatGPT run loose and set guidance? Please, I implore you to think about the issue a bit deeper.
Criminal investigations in this administration are just a means of pressure and harassment, they have zero bearing on any suspicion of criminal activity. I predict that within a few days Powell will be the recipient of death threats. That's the second part of the pattern.
But it’s an investigation? Charges may not come out of it.
And think about the logic of your argument. Should this administration NEVER conduct any criminal investigations because they are all just “pressure and harassment”?
This administration has not been operating the DoJ in good faith. One only has to look at the buffoonish attempts to push through charges on Comey, James and other political opponents to see that.
Treating the investigation in good faith is not being neutral or unbiased. Expecting more of the same is.
Because it is very clear to most people - you excepted, apparently - that this is not a normal case but one that is solely predicated on putting pressure on someone who is not acting on Donald Trump's whim but based on their job description. If Powell would have reduced the interest rates further this would have never happened.
The DOJ is now weaponized as a political tool, rather than that it is used for its real purpose. If you refuse to see this that's on you, not even on Donald Trump. The FED is independent for a reason, you are seeing that mechanism in action and so far no US president has every made a move like this.
Building is much cheaper than renovation which is much cheaper than preservation. Ambitious project goals preserving unique historical assets make this project inherently expensive.
> ... complete overhaul and modernization that preserves two historic buildings that have not been comprehensively renovated since their construction in the 1930s ...
Without the Fed, how would you advise the nation deal with events like the Great Depression, the Great Recession, or COVID? Would you disagree that the Feds actions shortened these events and thus helped the public in the process?
Yes, I would disagree that the Fed has any positive influence whatsoever. It should be abolished and we should solve our problems with policy that relates to them and not pro-capital financial manipulation.
Have you read up on the wildcat banking era? The Fed, although far from perfect, was created to solve systemic problems with the decentralized American financial sector of its time. Chesterson’s fence is vital to discussions like these.
Doesn't the Fed do exactly that though? And without political influence? What would a different pro-labor system look like that could deal with national monetary crises?
I would argue that the Fed manipulating our financial system causes monetary crisis. The Fed is under the influence of capital which doesn't have the benefit of being even nominally checked by democracy. Were we (speaking as an American) to invest in our country and people we would have a healthier society and the means to deal with actual crisis.
> I would argue that the Fed manipulating our financial system causes monetary crisis.
Well, get ready because you aint seen nothin yet if you thought the Fed was manipulating our financial system. Do you honestly think a partisan system would be better?
As opposed to unhealthy unemployment which means the system collapses. Zero unemployment is not going to happen in any normally functioning society, though in the former USSR it existed. That included a lot of busywork (changing traffic lights, for instance, and requiring three cashiers to buy a bread).
If you are a complete normie, turn back now, it's gonna get conspiratorial. Otherwise, read on for some insights.
First, one must understand that the Federal Reserve was the main trojan horse vehicle for the European banking families into America. Read any number of good books, starting with the latest edition of G. Edward Griffins "The Creature from Jekyll Island".
But all that is mostly known already to those who have payed attention and done the reading... so whats next?
My conclusion is that America is being setup, in multiple ways (fall guy for global empire, etc), but one major setup that is going on right now is a twofer: 1) Jack up the US economy at any time by raising rates and unraveling the ponzi scheme and 2) If you do 1), you have the perfect excuse to try to implement some CBDC-esque new system, but this time with much more surveillance tech, for example unified ledgers that merge digital identity with financial identity, with ESG and social credit style added on. Read Whitney Webb for more on the structures being put in place for this.
So what is happening is that Trump knows the people that control the Fed, for whom the Fed chair is a mere mouthpiece, really want to suddenly and unexpectedly hike rates and soon, but Trump doesn't want it to happen under his last term, so he has been doing major backroom maneuvering to influence the Fed every time a rate-change date is coming up. Essentially he wants to kick the can to the next POTUS, but since the Fed is technically independent, it really can do whatever it wants, all he can do is fire after the fact. My guess is they will drop it on him late term, a perfect excuse to usher in the political pendulum swing of the hegelian game they play with us.
To me, that this backroom maneuvering is becoming more public tells me they really want to do the sudden rate hike.
Trump is, of course, wrong. But the independence of the Fed being at stake is a myth. Since the bursting of the dot com bubble, the Fed has operated as if the well being of the investor class is their number one priority.
I am surprised by the negative comments, the low interest rates = better thesis has always been somewhat popular on HN , now just because Trump is saying it (and operating to get there) it becomes an issue or something not to be aligned with.
There are countless comments and discussions on this board about how:
1) interest rates should be zero,
2) interest rates being non-zero create a misallocation of capital where there is a return on an investment without any ingenuity or creation behind
3) Banks are too risk averse to lending and their risk averse behavior is due to the risk free rate they enjoy when they park money at the Fed and when they buy T-bills
No matter how little ingenuity or creation is required to keep afloat a zombie company or a dubious startup, for sure it's a notch higher than what happens when that money is parked at the Fed or invested in t-bills...
the fed's goal is zero interest rate, it's not that people are negative because "tRuMp SaId So" it's because he's trying to influence the fed's decision with criminal prosecution of the chair and not through his economic policy. His policy is ass and that's why the fed can't get back to their ZIRP goal
Even if one disagrees with Fed policy, the way Trump is having the DoJ criminally prosecute Powell under unrelated pretexts is disgraceful and undermines the Fed’s independence.
Do you think that criminal prosecution for Jerome Powell for maybe doing something wrong with some building renovations under timing that just happens to coincide with the President’s personal and public vendetta against this person is worth steelmanning?
At some point it stops being steelmanning and starts becoming an invitation for some propaganda to distract from the obvious.
The more obvious something seems the more valuable steelmanning becomes, precisely because if the only steelman arguments you get (if any) are propaganda at best (instead of reasons you just hadn't considered) then you can be that much more confident your outrage is based in reason rather than feelings. My guess is there won't be many coming up with steelman arguments for this one though anyways.
Inviting propaganda is good, let the obviously weak arguments come front and center to be logically considered and ridiculed rather than put in small private group chats where they seem to grow and grow. This only works, in any way, if people stop saying things aren't worth having consideration about because it's obvious to them.
I understand the theory of steelmanning, but in cases like this it's just an high-brow version of the "both sides" style of journalism where you pretend like both sides are similarly plausible and deserve equal consideration. At the extremes, the steelmanning can turn into a game of giving the other side more consideration.
> Inviting propaganda is good, let the obviously weak arguments come front and center to be logically considered and ridiculed
That's literally what I'm doing: Ridiculing the obviously weak arguments.
And do you know what's happening? My ridicule and dismissiveness are being talked down, while you invite someone to "steelman" the argument instead. This pattern happens over and over again in spaces where steelmanning is held up as virtuous: It's supposed to be a tool for bringing weak arguments into the light so they can be dismissed, yet the people dismissing are told to shush so we can soak up the propaganda from the other side.
As a casual follower of economic news and completely ignorant of politics, my guess is that the administration believes the fed isn't acting according to mandate of stability and jobs. I have no clue how valid that is
Trump thinks lowering the interest rates means market goes up before election. That's all there is to it everyone knows it's not about stability and jobs
The interest rates? If you wanted to crash demand for dollar various things makes a bit more sense. Venezuela might be more about threatening BRICS if you squint at it. The EU–Mercosur agreement looks like it might pass - timing is kind of weird. There is maybe a kind of logic to it for exports but I think it lowers the standard of living for us plebs.
I’m a little shocked to see the quality of some comments here - I would expect a more grounded discussion. This is like Reddit / YouTube comment history. Someone please tell me this is a Wendy’s.
Sure the Fed isn’t perfect. But we don’t really have a better solution as of now because our financial systems are extremely powerful and anyone in office would love to abuse it if they can.
Sure, the renovations are ridiculous. But it’s not like this administration is austere in the slightest, so that’s a bit rich. Not to mention the cronyism prevalent across the cabinet.
There's also little genuine conversation to be had. The situation is bad, has been bad, and seems to only be getting worse. That's the only interpretation any rational person can hold. And, when everyone has the same opinion and that opinion is drastic, that creates a circle jerk.
Not the renovations themselves but the cost is supposedly at 2.5B. Personally I don’t really mind but I also don’t think government buildings need to be all that fancy with marble flooring.
It was budgeted at 1.9B (in 2019). Most of the cost overruns are from unexpected site issues like asbestos (more than thought) and water table problems. The buildings are historic, they already had marble. The marble was taken down and saved, this marble will be re-used. Some pieces are damaged, those will be new marble. These buildings are near 100 years old. I also don't think they have marble floors, but facades and other stonework.
I don't understand the cost either, apparently it only costs around a billion dollars to build a skyscraper? The Burj Khalifa only cost one and a half billion dollars when completed in 2010. I don't know that there's criminal activity here, but the cost of this is rather surprising to me. I knew the Federal Reserve was being renovated, but I thought it was something closer to a hundred million dollars.
Far too many people decide to occupy the us vs. them part of their brain with National politics as opposed to sports.
Both are basically useless as it relates to your personal quality of life but at least with the latter you can see nice geometric combinations between players on a pitch and some incredible athleticism in between
Puerile and uninformative, unfortunately. I respect that each of us has their world view, but if the last decade has shown anything at all, it is that when you are in the public square, you are asking for interlocution, not for escapism to be indulged. And the best thing is to do as you implicitly ask, and interlocute.
(a) >We live in a world where the powerful deceive us. We know they lie. They know we know they lie. They don't care. We say we care but do nothing.
That belief isn't the consequence of the situation, but the cause. There is ample ability to change events, but people must believe they can act and act together, as they have for centuries of democracy and for all human history. They do it in Iran. The Republicans and MAGA movement have made changes that would have been unbelievable ten years ago.
This is the political will of a plurality of American voters. They certainly can't claim they didn't know what they would get, and they seem unconcerned by any of these actions that many of us find terrifying.
It is difficult to see how we can democracy our way out of this situation.
This fallacy gets repeated over and over, but it's obviously false.
Have you really never voted for a candidate who went on to do things you didn't agree with? It's a quintessential fact of politics that voting for a candidate is not equivalent to an endorsement of everything that candidate does in the future. It's a premise that is obviously false when we consider our own votes, but it feels cathartic to force the claim on to the other side.
This administration's net approval rating flipped net negative very quickly after his election and has been trending downward. It's just navel-gazing to pretend like what he's doing has high approval.
Then how is it being reflected in Congress? Where are the Republicans speaking loudly on behalf of their dissatisfied constituents and voting on bills accordingly? We shouldn't have to wait every two years for a midterms or general election for the negative approval rating to make itself known, politicians can choose any time to act in a way that shows they're listening to their constituents.
For many, he _is_ doing what he was elected to do. This _is_ what the American voter wants. The American voter wants illegal immigrants out, does not care how it happens. They also want cheap oil and are willing to overlook the implications of international military action if it means they get it. They also don't care about the environment enough to curb their consumption or invest in alternative energy sources.
These preferences are all aligned with Trump's actions.
I'm not American, and though I may not agree completely with the politicians I voted for, I have not been blindsided yet. The second election of Trump is a symptom of Americans either unable or unwilling to look beyond single issues or sports team politics.
To then turn around and act surprised is just a way to conveniently absolve themselves of the responsibility of electing him to begin with. If this wasn't the case, Trump voters themselves would be calling for his impeachment, not Democrat voters.
Approval rating means nothing if it enforces nothing.
We only have two parties. (Technically, there are some third parties, but they're effectively worse than negligible—voting for them is guaranteed to either do nothing or harm the cause you're interested in, unless the candidate is already a member of a major party and merely cross-endorsed.)
This means that if you care about one thing that one of the two major parties ostensibly supports (or is ostensibly better at than the other), more than any of the things on the other side, you have no choice: you have to vote for that party's candidate.
We also have a mainstream media landscape that is fully captured by the wealthy on the right. It is hard to overstate the extent to which our media carries water for the Republican Party.
And finally, we have absolutely abysmal civics education. It has been steadily gutted over the course of decades. To some extent, this is a deliberate move to make it easier to use the aforementioned media capture to control the average voter.
So if you're a low-information voter, you think the economy is bad, and you want to fix that, you're going to vote for the candidate of the major party that media has been telling you for 50 years is the party that's good at the economy, despite the fact that every time they're in office the debt goes up, regular people's lives get worse, and more protections go out the window.
This is incredibly unlikely, given how pervasive American politics is, and how much the results of the American elections affects the rest of the world. Additionally, having a two party system is unfortunately pretty common.
> This fallacy gets repeated over and over, but it's obviously false.
And it's used to condemn and justify. Most politicians, including Democrats, like to pretend that winning means the unpopular policies they happen to like are the will of the people. They will constantly gaslight you on it.
In reality, American politics gives people coarse choices that few are entirely happy with and many are very unhappy with. It's really hard to justify radical partisan action without denying that fact.
The coarse options that are available at election time can be massively influenced in the years leading up to the election.
Dishonesty is the through line of Trump’s entire life. There was no reasonable expectation his second term would bring anything else. Anyone expressing buyer’s remorse at this point is impossibly naive.
> Have you really never voted for a candidate who went on to do things you didn't agree with?
If we are talking about past culpability, this one does not works at all. Trump is being exactly who he was and what he campaigned on. This is not the case of someone switching up after being elected. This is case of who openly or tacitly supported Trump, because they thought they will personally benefit on top of having fun of watching liberals suffer.
By tacitly I mean all those bad faith "both sides" and "Trump is dove, Harris is aggressive". As an example, Latino Trump voting men were attracted by the misogynistic and male dominance content. They thought they wont be personally affected. Rural people still cheer to occupation and terrorization of cities ... and still think they are the only true Americans. They though they will be able to keep their farms like the last time. And so on and so forth.
People knew full well what is going on when they were hiding behind euphemisms about conservatives and blamed liberals when those said the truth. They just liked the project and thought they will be affected only a little.
You can look back on everything Trump said and campaigned on. He's a liar, a cheat, and a fraud but he openly campaigned on making people suffer, hurting specific groups and demolishing the government. The people either voted for him assuming he was blustering about his claims or liked what he was going to do. There's countless examples of people who when asked why they regret voting for Trump, they say because he's 'hurting the wrong people', while also saying that they would gladly vote for him again.
Trump has (amongst?) the lowest approval of any president at this point in his tenure, even lower than his first term.
* https://news.gallup.com/poll/699221/trump-approval-rating-dr...
* https://www.natesilver.net/p/trump-approval-ratings-nate-sil...
> It is difficult to see how we can democracy our way out of this situation.
Assuming there is no martial law later in 2026, vote to give the other party more power in Congress so the Legislative branch can actually grow a spine and push back against Executive actions.
Firstly, it’s a two party state and choice is limited. People vote for the least worst option, or for a candidate that shares at least some of their values.
Second, many people did not vote.
Third, approval ratings show that many trump voters do not approve of his actions.
Fourth, where did “annex Greenland, abduct Maduro, remove independence of the reserve” appear on his manifesto?
https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-could-try-buy-greenlan...
https://www.wired.com/story/trump-cia-venezuela-maduro-regim...
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/how-trumps-wish-for-more-f...
https://www.hks.harvard.edu/centers/mrcbg/publications/end-f...
Trump voters are either willfully ignorant or gleefully supportive. Maybe not the first time, but definitely the second and third time. There no longer exists other excuses.
You haven't answered my other points.
It's just post-hoc rationalisation because you're angry.
Regarding your other points, I'm not sure I have to, but here goes:
1) I'd be keen to hear how they voted for the least worst option, on specifics.
2) Not voting is voting for whoever wins in the described two party system. At least that's how I see the trolley problem.
3) Then they weren't paying attention, but at least they can be honest when they're affected personally.
> People vote for the least worst option, or for a candidate that shares at least some of their values.
Voting for Trump because you share his values is not exactly defense, something positive or even respect worthy. Yes, equally people voted for Hitler because they shared values. This commonality of values is why they are culpable and we can blame them.
There are a lot of reasons for that, of course, but the bottom line is that when things get bad enough -- much worse than they are today -- then more people will take to the street, along with whatever sacrifice that entails. We're just not there yet, because for many, there is far too much to lose.
For those not in the know, non-stop protests around the US have been taking place, though they are being censored (ie, not covered by mainstream news). I wouldn't know about it if not for TikTok, of all places. One can find coverage of "music festivals" there. They've been ongoing since Summer 2025.
Now that’s not to downplay or minimize that risk, especially if you have a family, dependents, or some unique circumstance. But I’d hope for the majority of workers in our profession, it’s the difference between “I can’t buy food next week” vs “I have about 4-8 months before I’ve drained my liquid / emergency savings”
The sad thing is I don’t know what to do. Would this make headlines? Would they cover it? Would it get condensed into a single sound bite “big tech goes on strike”?
I’m conflicted but I feel like the choice should be obvious and simple. Just do it.
But even then, people are getting angrier. The injustices in Minneapolis triggered waves of protests here in Seattle. Eventually these things compound and more people become aware that we're living in the Great American Collapse.
A general strike might have an effect, but I'm not sure how you organize such a thing.
Political theory is that ten to fifteen percent of a given population needs to actively rebel in order to enact change in a nation. The U.S. is fragmented enough by distance that you would need at least thirty percent of the national population to reach this state in order to get the ten percent in each of the six regions. Currently the number of people protesting is thought to be around four to six percent nationally, meaning it's less than one percent regionally. Part of that is because it's January, and most large scale protests happen in late spring or in the summer because schools are out and the weather doesn't suck. But part of it is simply because not enough people are motivated to act. Either pessimism or lack of direct harm is keeping them from caring.
So no matter what you're going to have to piss some people off. But it'd be better to piss off the people who will share your goals and ask forgiveness, because the other group was pissed from the beginning and have no forgiveness to ask for.
What are they going to do with all these holding cells when the immigrants are gone?
X, Y, and Z usually involve community building, mutual aid, strike funds, housing security, and other precarity reducing actions.
"Let" them do the violence. And let the violence be filmed. And let the (currently) indifferent / apathetic folks see the violence being done.
This is one way to enact change: most folks have no interest in violence and abhor it. By showing that one side is 'pro-violence' in their policies and actions you give more power to the side(s) that are not violence.
Because that's how long it takes to organize one.
I agree; this phrase was just a stand in for doing something -- anything -- about the state of affairs I don't like. Other than things I can do from my couch like commenting on HN.
because a lot of people have a kind of built-in main character syndrome and believe they're the protagonists of the world and things can't really go bad. They haven't internalized that there isn't some god behind the curtain that saves them.
That's how it goes in every country that ends up in the dirt, they all thought they were special, they all thought "surely we're not there yet" and you can pick their remains out of the rubble.
relevant piece from a few years ago: https://indi.ca/i-lived-through-collapse-america-is-already-...
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperNormalisation>
Video, at BBC Online: <https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p04b183c>
[1] https://archive.org/search?query=creator%3A%22Adam+Curtis%22
Thinking about it now 10 years later it feels alot different. The pervasiveness of tolerance of lies and fakeness has gone so far past anything I could have imagined being a big contributor to that.
Worse still is when it's an "affirm the falsehood to show you have been dominated by our threat of punishment" scenario:
> 'The real power, the power we have to fight for night and day, is not power over things, but over men.' He paused, and for a moment assumed again his air of a schoolmaster questioning a promising pupil: 'How does one man assert his power over another, Winston?'
> Winston thought. 'By making him suffer,' he said.
> 'Exactly. By making him suffer. Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.'
-- 1984 by George Orwell
I think his work is just too stylized. He has such an interesting style that it overwhelms the message. I barely remember what his messaging is in films. Just the interesting visuals and ominous music.
If you read Undoing the Demos by Wendy Brown and Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition together you will understand exactly what he is going for. As a film it doesn't really work that well though beyond a kind of depressing entertainment. The themes are too subtle and philosophical along with most people don't have the background knowledge to really make sense of his points.
That’s true even if the next administration is Republican (Vance or whoever), but especially true if the next administration ends up being Democratic instead-which while not certain, has decent odds-the more Trump defies norms, the more voters who will wish to go back to a “normal” Presidency
It’s very clear now that we need a lot more regulation of what presidents can and cannot do. Not to mention judicial reform. But if you’re a democrat theoretically getting power in 2028 you’re going to have immense pressure to move forwards, focus on kitchen table issues, yadda yadda.
A reminder that this is the second time that Trump has been elected.
(People were saying what you're now saying after he was kicked out—an event that he says was rigged—the first time.)
A lot of people were hoping he’d just go away without them having to do anything difficult, but it’s clear that the next government has to reestablish the United States as a constitutional republic with the rule of law, even if it means hard things like trials for officials who abused their power. This kind of slide into authoritarianism isn’t an accident, and without consequences the people pushing it will keep trying.
The entire system of checks and balances needs some rethinking because it's clearly not as "perfect" as we've been told over and over again.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Wolff_(journalist)
He used the term suis generic in a (PBS?) interview to describe Trump:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sui_generis
Look at Trump's interviews from the 80s and 90s.
He was not always like this.
If he learned his ways, others also can
Some things, it just doesn't matter what the next administration does. The people of the US may, at any time, elect an administration that continues the course of breaking norms. The fact is that businesses, industries, banks, and nations have to guard against that possibility more than they need to cooperate with the next administration.
I think it's a bit fanciful to think you can take all the policies back to normal and have, Europe for instance, say "Oh good! Everything's back to normal!" I could be wrong, but I think that ship has sailed. Europe will work towards a new normal that looks to their own interests. And no action the next administration can take will change Europe's determination in this regard.
I think this will be as true of actors in the financial and industrial spheres as it will be of Europe in the security sphere.
1) Europe will do whatever is easiest at the time relative to the comfort of the people. Meaning they will have very short memories if enacting some change makes people worse off.
2) If the EU does make change with regard to increasing military spending, that is good either way for the US. Less US involvement in conflicts on a different continent.
But I bet a third of the country will blindly support it. They will see it as a just investigation into a crime. And they won’t care about the consequences. Or connect cause and effect. And with that much support the administration can get away with anything.
As for their various unconstitutional and illegal acts - what method is there to hold the executive branch accountable? It’s not like there’s a police force to arrest them right?
"What prepares men for totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience of the ever-growing masses of our century. The merciless process into which totalitarianism drives and organizes the masses looks like a suicidal escape from this reality."
"Politically speaking, tribal nationalism always insists that its own people is surrounded by ‘a world of enemies,’ ‘one against all,’ that a fundamental difference exists between this people and all others. It claims its people to be unique, individual, incompatible with all others, and denies theoretically the very possibility of a common mankind long before it is used to destroy the humanity of man."
"Society is always prone to accept a person offhand for what he pretends to be, so that a crackpot posing as a genius always has a certain chance to be believed. In modern society, with its characteristic lack of discerning judgment, this tendency is strengthened, so that someone who not only holds opinions but also presents them in a tone of unshakable conviction will not so easily forfeit his prestige, no matter how many times he has been demonstrably wrong."
"Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness."
"The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (that is, the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (that is, the standards of thought) no longer exist."
-- Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
Also Arendt: "The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world — and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end — is being destroyed."
You think the hordes of young men who put Trump into power were convinced by mass public demonstration? No: posts on the Internet.
I'm talking at expressing dissent. On that, internet achieves little.
This guy's book convinced me otherwise: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/01/political-...
"Political hobbyism" is things like commenting on the internet, as distinct from going out and convincing people to vote differently or running for offfice.
Parties focus so much on swing voters for a reason, and a lot of these swing voters are in fact swung by what they see online.
You need to know only two facts about America to guess that:
* Fifty three percent of Americans now read below the sixth grade level.
* As (ostensibly) a representative Democracy America's fate is dictated by the majority of it's citizens.
Our future is to become a broken nation governed by middle-school student level thinking. The only way to build a better America is to build a better populace, and that would be contrary to the interests of the angry, spoiled, children who seem to hold all the power now.
No, it's determined by the people who actually go out and vote.
Bizarrely, voter turnout among younger people remains low. It's beyond frustrating to work with large groups of young people who are seemingly always talking politics and angry about something political, then to watch as half of them either forget to vote or act like they're too apathetic to vote.
The craziest part was seeing this apathy play out in states with vote-by-mail systems that required as little effort as possible. I still don't get it.
American democracy is broken. Not in an abstract, hand-wavy feelings way but a hard, numerical, mathematical way. A two party system results in no real choice. First past the post results in a two party system. America uses first past the post. Therefore, Amercian democracy gives voters no real choice.
Blaming broken democracy is just a cop out. Youth voter turnout for primary elections, where there are many candidates, is also low.
It’s the job of politicians to pander to us, the good voter. Since they didn’t offer us something good, we didn’t vote, and that results in this current situation.
Politics is not my job, being aware of how politics works is not my job. My job is just to let them know they aren’t good enough. It’s because they aren’t good enough, that we landed up in this situation.
https://www.imeupolicyproject.org/postelection-polling
Because even just the boring sanity of Biden Harris was leagues better than what we all saw coming in 2024. (Putting aside that whole constitutional amendment about insurrections.)
By the way, I Googled for the equivalent stat about Canada: "48-49% having skills below a high school level". I'm not here to bad mouth the Canadian education system, but I think you will find fairly similar stats in most highly developed nations.
You can also see it in race voting, where people will say a certain race is voting against their interest just to vote for someone with the same skin color.
It's actually a talking point that actively pushes people away from their cause.
Does this type of voting happen? Sure, but not enough to push elections. IMO it's people who are confused on why others don't think the same way as they do and try to justify why anyway they can, usually through derogatory remarks.
Bad thinkers make bad decisions, and are vulnerable to being manipulated in ways that good thinkers aren't. Try getting a mortgage or a car loan when you can't read complete paragraphs. Try investing your retirement properly. Try doing just about anything that modern adults are required to do. You're definitely going to pay a "stupid tax" throughout your entire adult life if you lack the ability to read critically.
People bemoan the death of journalism, but it's not the journalists fault. Did you know that USA Today was intentionally invented to be an alternative news source for people who couldn't read well? At the time it was bemoaned as the end of western civilization. Now it requires more of it's reader than the places people actually get their news from (Tik-Tok and Bathroom wall graffiti presumably).
FWIW - One side is objectively worse than the other, but it's not by a wide margin (a few basis points if I remember correctly) and it's probably just because one side lives in states that love to take the education budget and blow it on "more important" things.
I DO know exactly what sixth grade level is. It means they can read simple paragraphs, but not critically. These people lack the ability to think critically because they never learned it. They're the ones that open phishing emails and get taken by shady real estate con-men and Nigerian prince scammers.
You can be semi-literate and be a good person. You can't be semi-literate and make good decisions. Not in the modern world.
* To clarify - Reading levels in the United States have been declining at an alarming rate for a long time. They peaked in 1992 and have been steadily decaying since. You'll also note that 1992 was the year Dan Quayle was disqualified from the presidency because he couldn't spell potato. Imagine applying those standards to a modern politician.
It would be interesting comparison, actually. As interesting as French, Germany or whatever.
> It used to be better in America, now it's worse and it's taken our entire society with it. [...] They peaked in 1992 and have been steadily decaying since.
I checked out tests and it is not true. Reading scores in 2022 were still higher then those in 1992. https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=38
So, yeah, this would be an interesting historical comparison. It was worst most of the time.
> These people lack the ability to think critically because they never learned it. They're the ones that open phishing emails and get taken by shady real estate con-men and Nigerian prince scammers.
You are confusing two different things here. First off, highly educated people are in fact vulnerable to scammers ... frequently because of their own confidence.
> You can be semi-literate and be a good person. You can't be semi-literate and make good decisions. Not in the modern world.
But issue in modern world are not people just dont make good decisions. It is people who make immoral decisions. Vance have good reading skills, but he is still a fascist.
> You'll also note that 1992 was the year Dan Quayle was disqualified from the presidency because he couldn't spell potato.
This is not an example of mass of people using critical thinking and acting rationally. This is an example of blown up reaction ala Twitter mob latching on something trivial and making a big deal out of it. This is example of what happen when soundbite wins over substance.
But there’s actually meaningful criteria that sheds some light on the critical thinking capabilities of people who can or can’t read at certain levels, especially as it pertains to propaganda. Below a certain level, people are not well-educated enough to critically assess a text against the motivations of its authors (somewhere around 9th grade). Americans are prone to conspiratorial thinking so you might think that that’s alright because they’re often skeptical of any text, but it just seems like it causes them to dig even deeper into the propaganda that’s targeted to them.
It’s kind of like learning that some people don’t have an inner monologue, or that they aren’t capable of imagining shapes or objects abstractly in their mind. Except it’s a lot more serious as it deals with critical thinking directly: these people don’t understand that what they’re reading was written for a purpose.
The combination of literacy and the algorithmic propaganda machine is a pretty big stumbling block.
> At the turn of the 20th century, a crucial debate emerged between Walter Lippmann and John Dewey over the viability of democracy in an increasingly complex world. Lippmann critiqued democracy’s reliance on public opinion, arguing that citizens construct simplified “pseudo-environments” shaped by media and stereotypes, rendering them ill-equipped to make informed decisions on vast global issues. He warned that modern democracies are driven more by emotionally charged reactions than by accurate understanding, and that media, language, and time constraints further distort reality. Dewey responded not by dismissing Lippmann’s concerns, but by reframing democracy as more than a political system—it was, to him, an ethical ideal and a form of social cooperation. Viewing society as an interconnected organism, Dewey believed individuals flourish only through participation and education. He saw democracy as a continuous process of mutual growth, where every person contributes uniquely, and where the antidote to authoritarianism lies in cultivating thoughtful, empowered citizens—not in retreating from democratic ideals, but in deepening them.
* https://www.philosophizethis.org/podcast/dewey-lippman
Also maybe from The Atlantic (from 1919), "The Basic Problem of Democracy" by Walter Lippman:
https://archive.is/https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/arch...
She puts it all together relatively succinctly if dense. You can just read Dewey too if you want to be closer to the source. He's a bit more interesting because it is more of the road not taken out of the progressive era.
There is no exact definition on this statistic and how to measure. There is also reporting biases. Single person vs household for example.
I'm not American, but anecdotally, a supermajority (like 80-90%) of people I know who speak multiple languages at home speak English at native fluency. (e.g. in my semi-extended family - parents/siblings/nibblings/partner/parents-in-law, there are 9 of us, and only 2 are more comfortable in French than English, but none of us would qualify as speaking *only* English at home.)
The cavalry is not coming, and this fire is going to take its course.
One day, maybe we will rebuild from scratch.
Wrong!! Please don’t say that! We all have power inside the US. Congress had the opportunity in 2021 to correct the wrong, but Republicans kowtowed and they are still doing so. That was the easy way. Now for the hard way, American people will have to do something about it.
Edit: Grammar
The current situation is bad, but this is just doomerism.
The current administration will end. Trump can't live forever. His approval rating is already low and falling.
We're in for a bumpy ride, but then it's going to start reverting toward the mean. Not necessarily back to the way things were, but periods of extreme like this are followed by a reversion to the mean more often than not.
They way the current administration act, I start to think that their plan A is to stay for a long long time. There is so much open corruption that half of them would land in prison really quickly and they don't seem particularly bothered by that fact.
They know, and they will do everything in their power to stop the next presidential election from being a fair one.
The Pandora's box has been opened, it's not doomerism to see how unprecedented actions have been taken by this administration and not be sure of what's come next, you've never lived through something like that.
I had much more trust in your institutions a year ago, after 2025 I really do not believe the USA will be able to revert toward the mean anytime soon. The ultimate test for it will be the midterms, if the election this year goes well without a hiccup it might signal there is some institutional power still left in American democracy; on the other hand if there are hiccups, meddling by the federal government, and its allies (including the rich elite behind a lot of these people), it will just cement my opinion that the USA's democracy is in a death spiral.
But don't be so trusting, the cracks are obviously showing and are being exploited, just wishful thinking won't help at all your society at this moment, it's better to be a bit more doomerist and act against these actions rather than just "trusting the process" because if you end up losing the process the bottom will fall out.
After all that’s happened, his approval rating is still above 40%. Those people aren’t going away or changing their minds any time soon.
And from what I've seen, the rest of 'the west' has similarly sized undercurrents of similar sentiment.
Strangely, that 40% will be made up of, largely, people whose grandparents lived through WWII.
People really don't want to hear those stories because it makes them uncomfortable. I'm in an absolute minority in that I wanted to hear the stories even if they made me uncomfortable. But the vast majority of the people would love to get through life without learning history's lessons and as a result are much more likely to repeat them.
"To say anything that challenges the current trajectory is doomerism. We're in for a bumpy ride for sure, but this will all correct itself. _it has to_."
Trump is a symptom of the problem, not the actual problem.
Cite evidence please.
Happy to show everyone how to do that.
The US government is entirely non-responsive and only nominally representative.
Barring a wave of Republican retirements in the House, the absolute soonest there are any guardrails are after the 2026 midterms when a new congress is seated in 2027.
If there are ICE agents in your area follow and film them. Create evidence of their jackboot tactics.
Most folks do not like force/violence, and the more people see the jackboot policies and actions of one side, the more folks will lean towards the side(s) that are against those policies.
The senate can also still hold some things up. If you have a senator who keeps voting for trump's judicial appointments or you have a senator who is in leadership then yelling at them to stop letting trump's judicial appointments sail through is important. The fact that the dems are not using every procedural step to slow down the process is ridiculous.
Those who stormed the Capitol did it because they were against the current course of affairs. Are the anti-Trump people ever going to do something like that if they are against the current course of events? I don’t think so.
Consequently, Trump will win. That’s why people who control the capital are aligned with MAGA.
I never understand what's the point of those protests. They should be taking over power by force or GTFO. Notice that successful revolutions storm the HQ, destroy some building of iconic significance or kill/capture the leader, not just enduring the atrocities of the foot-soldiers of the people who they are against.
The peaceful protest thing works when the people in the HQ care about what you think about them, which means it only works if those protesting are their people and not the opposition.
The lefties should start taking notes on what works and what the far right did to gain so much power and start stealing their methods. Display of dissatisfaction isn't going to work, if anything that dissatisfaction is satisfaction to the right wingers. They feel giddy when see the people they hate protesting, their only complain can be that the protests are not big enough.
I think you have the parties confused there.
"The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose"
Liberals are generally more empathetic towards others and have good intentions when protesting. However if they have a comfortable life they will back down very quickly when faced with force. Just my opinion, could be wrong.
Just bought a new 5080 this week. Hoping I can hunker down in my cave for the next couple years and see what's left of the world in 2030.
Oh yea, beer, lots of beer.
If the continuation of the USA hinges on Powell the man should be given a spot on mt. Rushmore, but I don't think that it is going to happen. Congress and the senate are for the most part filled with people that are too afraid to act. And in the meantime a lot of other crazy stuff will happen (just look at the last 30 days) to push this out of the public eye.
In the "First They Came" poem, we're already at white Christian mothers, and it's not moving the needle. I'm not sure why there isn't more talk of succession on the coasts but at this pace, it feels inevitable.
I keep telling everyone and have been for a year, it’s not just our problem, due to global US positioning it’s now a world problem. Just ask Venezuela. Regardless of what you think about the end result the ends did not justify the means.
I for one will be collecting my (completely legal) hunting rifles and weapons I’ve had in storage since I was a kid, have them professionally serviced and grab some ammunition, on the terrible case I need to defend myself which I thought I’d never ever have to consider and I’d just sell them some day. But alas we have a lot of really really stupid as well as downright toxic voters in this country.
The outcome of this is all too predictable.
It’s very concerning that they have nukes. JD Vance said something about the risks UK and France owning nukes, I think he just wanted to start the conversation because I think he believes that it’s actually US that is the risk. We know that the guy is not actually a Trump ideology zealot from his pre-Trump alignment.
That's not history as I've been taught it since grade school.
It's the Supreme Court that has expanded the powers of the President, and previously of the Federal government, far beyond what was ever intended.
By allowing the federal government to dominate the states, the Supreme Court created a position of unrivalled power.
Trump may be an evil narcissist by the standards of normal people, but there's plenty of those sorts of people in politics. That's why you have a constitution.
But that is not that much of a consolation if the government is allowed to pick winners and losers for kleptocracy or there is strong central planning and oversight on what should independent institutions
He did not know. He was also not expecting to win, and so had to scramble to get people appointed.
He asked around and got people who were experts in their respective fields. The problem is that those experts (a) knew his ideas were bad, and (b) had integrity. It was, by and large, Trump's appointees that worked hard to counter his agent and not the government bureaucracy.
Trump did not make the same 'mistake' this time around: he appointed folks not for their competence but for their loyalty to him. That was and is the only criteria for serving under Trump.
He wanted his run to allow him to start his own tv channel: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/06/donald-trump-tv-netw...
That tariffs have been so absolutely scattershot, says Trump actually is the one calling the shots there.
Quick heuristic I have is: vanity project = Trump; neocon pet project = Heritage Foundation; anything related to racial purity = Stephen Miller; quackery = RFK and other grifters.
The tariffs are partially his bias, but also Navarro who lost his mind somewhere around 2015 and became an economics pariah.
Trump is not a smart person, he doesn't know much aside from what he's been told, and the people playing him to further their agendas would love more than anything to be kept in the shadows in case it all comes crumbling down to just pin it all on Trump, the moron.
They really didn't. It was a dog and pony show under the belief that he would not make his way back into power. The dems/reps did not want to set a precedent of holding a president to account for doing terribly illegal things. They didn't intend to actually do anything to prevent this.
And so here we are.
Judiciary: appointments and ideological alignment with some of the Supreme Court. Thomas and Alito are fully controlled, Kavanaugh just loves a powerful executive, the rest aren't controlled but often in agreement.
Then there's his use of executive power to punish his adversaries, e.g. Perkins Coie.
He's not directly controlling the judiciary yet, but he has appointed wildly extremist judges and threatened judges who rule against him with impeachment, so he's certainly making an effort.
(If you doubt this, go watch some clips and compare how he talks now to how he talked during his first administration. If you were concerned about Biden's state in 2024, you should be concerned about Trump now.)
I am not a big fan of his earlier policies (or of Greenspan's and anyone after him for that matter). His "unlearn the importance of M2" did not age well. He made the tail end of the ZIRP more painful than it needed to be. But those were honest mistakes from a public servant who did his best and believed in what he is doing.
And standing up for what he believes is right, against this insanity from the president is the gold standard of what we need from public servants. My 2c.
His statement is firm and well articulated. I have nothing bad to say about the man right now
And anyone who is a hard-currency quantity-theory-of-money conservative, should also be appalled by it.
Trump is way worse than what the harshest critics of the Federal Reserve think about it. Nobody right or left should support it. Only the billionaires will profit off the monetary disorder.
Maybe not even them. Certainly not all of them.
Well doom is here. Congrats.
Look how quickly big business rolled over for The Felon--because they saw what mot people have been denying since the election.
Or labelled:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_derangement_syndrome
Oh boy would I love to join you in whatever alternate dimension you live in.
He operates on a version of America that is a shadow of the old nation, and in that shadow, it doesn’t actually need the capabilities and complexities it had developed over the past century. It needs to be simple enough to get votes and conversation points on Fox, and everything else can be blamed on some meme of the moment. It’s insane to see, but apparently we have the technology to make Hallucination driven government work.
Remember the first time you wanted to buy a stock.
You used a product or a service that you liked immensely, realized it had a stock and wanted to be involved.
1 billion people are using AI, not dramatically changing their lives yet of course but for sure they go 'wow incredible I want to be part of this' when they make a video with Sora or generate a pamphlet without having to work
GOP: "Hold my beer."
There is even a more boring and obscure bit of plumbing, the Treasury payment system, that they/DOGE went after last year:
* https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/01/musks-doge-clash...
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42904200
* https://hn.algolia.com/?q=treasury+payment+system
Every knee must (forced to) bend.
For decades he hasn’t had to tolerate “checks and balances”! Nobody could say “no” and retain their jobs under him.
The American public decided to put this type of person in charge.
The consequences were predicted.
Reading some of Mary Trump’s books will give some insight on the family that Donald grew up in. No love, all cruelty.
Donald is just a rich kid who inherited a big business and learned nothing but cruelty from his daddy.
More generally I think in an age of social media democracies will have to evolve to prevent leadership cults. Maybe something like the head of state being indirectly elected by local representatives.
Proceeds to explain how further exploitation of others will be beneficial to everyone
Someone who supports trump, please let me know the logic on this. Genuinely. I'm trying to read other places about these charges but they're just so slanted that they're not really trustworthy. Is there anything to this, or is it really just to pressure the federal reserve?
It’s a kleptocracy. He doesn’t care. He just wants cheap money from the Fed as patronage.
I thought they were upset about her emails or whatever?
Meanwhile, 34 actual felony convictions, court finding misuse of millions in charity funds, an attempted coup, being found liable for sexual assault, SCOTUS having to formally place the president above the law to avoid prosecution... none of it even moved the needle for those same folks.
None of it is about law and order.
From a 10s skim on wikipedia:
>Some experts, officials, and members of Congress contended that Clinton's use of a private email system and a private server violated federal law, specifically 18 U.S. Code § 1924, regarding the unauthorized removal and retention of classified documents or materials, as well as State Department protocols and procedures, and regulations governing recordkeeping.
I'm not saying those allegations are true, but to claim "none could name a crime" suggests you didn't even try.
>Meanwhile, 34 actual felony convictions, court finding misuse of millions in charity funds, an attempted coup, being found liable for sexual assault, SCOTUS having to formally place the president above the law to avoid prosecution... none of it even moved the needle for those same folks.
If you're talking about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosecution_of_Donald_Trump_in..., that has the same air of credibility as him going after Fed governors for mortgage fraud.
Whereas everyone thinks that all child rapists should be in prison!
I think the world would be a better place if politicians with access to critical information were held to suitable security requirements under threats of punishment for laxity.
This would absolutely also include Hesgeth inviting a journalist to an airstrike planning meeting on Signal.
And likewise Trump putting boxes full of state secrets in a disused bathroom and on a stage.
The Trump administration are clearly hypocrites, clearly trying to throw the book at everyone else while bemoaning even the slightest consequences for themselves. I wouldn't call for Clinton's arrest, but I will say that anywhere that would arrest her should've given a much more severe punishment to Trump.
Then again, I'm not even American so I genuinely don't actually care if y'all leak state secrets like a basketball net leaks water.
In the context of the previous comment, the "non-rabbid" (and probably median) supporter would be someone voting Trump because they think they trust him more on the economy/immigration or whatever. They might be indifferent to his claims that he'll lock up his political opponents, or think that they're actually guilty of something, but that's not the same as being "rabbid" (ie. showing up to rallies and chanting "lock her up").
You're basing this off... what? You're missing the options of "I'm indifferent about this", or "I don't agree with him on this but still think he's better as a whole than the alternative".
It is. What's more, such support is roughly the same across both parties, but both parties vastly overestimate the other side's support.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2116851119
https://x.com/JustinGrimmer/status/1966997411060215960
The difference between the two parties is that one elected a leader that agrees with that minority. This 2012 scene from The Newsroom outlines the difference:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGsLhyNJBh8
The GOP let (?) the inmates run the asylum.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/amp/politics/trump-says-democra...
How's this different than say...
>polls show 99% (or whatever) of people are against crime
>voters elect a soft-on-crime politician, crime goes up
>"I consider the fact that the soft-on-crime politicians got elected to have falsified all research that people are against crime"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phYOrM3SNV8
Moving on to the actual video, if the implication is that someone says [absurd thing] on national TV, it must mean that the party (or its electorate) as a whole must support [absurd thing], then:
The guy end up apologizing, so what's the issue? I guess the expectation is that he should be canceled/fired or whatever? What about similarly absurd stuff from the left? It's not hard to find stuff like "racism = power + oppression" that's casually mentioned on npr or whatever without major pushback, even though most democrats don't believe in this type of stuff. Or is talking about killing people a special case? If so, what does that mean about discussions on the death penalty?
Pretty funny how there aren’t any more Proud Boy marches, yeah? Couldn’t be that they’re all getting paid six figure salaries to round up brown people at Kavanaugh stops…
But yes. Most left wing thought leaders count state-sponsored violence as political violence, and that often includes the death penalty.
>Pretty funny how there aren’t any more Proud Boy marches, yeah? Couldn’t be that they’re all getting paid six figure salaries to round up brown people at Kavanaugh stops…
Yes, that's how protests typically work. If things are going your way, you stop protesting. Nobody is protesting for gay marriage in California because they already won.
And you waive it away. 'Bro said my bad dude, what more do you want? You think he shouldn't be an administration mouthpiece just because he wants extra-judicial killing? Cancel culture'. You are literally Martin Niemöller:
"First they came for the Communists And I did not speak out Because I was not a Communist" ...
He was literally you. He justified their calls for 'only killing Communists and only because they are bad and want to do bad things....' just like you.
Edit: oh you are just being disingenuous got it. I'm not burning another comment on you and getting throttled so here: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=brian+kilmeade+...
Source? Maybe you should update his wikipedia page because it doesn't even mention his involvement with the second Trump administration.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Kilmeade
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phYOrM3SNV8
I continue to be surprised by people who have seen things unfold as they have over less than a year of this administration and still somehow believe we'll continue to have "free and fair" elections anytime in the near future.
We have over, and over again seeing virtually all of the "checks and balances" we learned about as kids being overridden without consequence.
This community of all other should be aware of how easy it is to exert total control of information (I'm still surprised this article is on the home page). Everyone consumes almost all of their information through digital, corporate controlled means. Even people getting together a organically socializing in bars, something that was common 30 years ago, has been replaced with online interactions. Trump does not need mandate from the people to continue to rule the country.
> Trump Regrets Not Seizing Voting Machines After 2020 Election: In an interview, the president said he should have ordered the National Guard to take the machines
And many others will vote for system-wreckers (broadly: conservatives) again, because the democrats cannot fix much of the damage done within the next legislative periods, let alone just one... even if the miracle of a trifecta happens and SCOTUS loses its majority on top of it. Rinse, repeat.
Respectfully disagree. Republican presidents get a lot more economic leeway than Dem presidents, especially from the media. This has puzzled me my entire adult life. Inflation will bother media and public, but not to the same extent it did 2021-22.
Big media works for the capital class, community newspapers and other forms of local news that are largely pro-public have been gutted. The remaining large-ish public media orgs (PBS, NPR) are currently under attack to consolidate corporate-friendly agenda-setting.
Unless you want to split hairs and argue that "disaster" is really only in the middle of the spectrum of plausible outcomes... then there is no outcome here that isn't a disaster.
At *best* this only moderately raises inflation in the short-term and somehow the rest of the world isn't shaken too much and the USD somehow still remains a reserve currency.
I'm in the "USD looses reserve currency status in 6-48 months" camp but there are some reasonable arguments against this.
(Edit) all that to say, maybe that’s what you meant by “never at an individual level”?
You are a fool who has blinded yourself.
I didn’t say that you were. I said that you were a fool, which you are.
Powell normally talks around the political pressure he's been subjected to. Funny to see him call it out right here.
It seems like theres a bit of an inflection point right now in the US. I wonder how much entropy the system can handle it has to be near a breaking point.
> Some countries that have prosecuted or threatened to prosecute central bankers for the purpose of political intimidation or punishment for monetary policy decisions: Argentina, Russia, Turkey, Venezuela and Zimbabwe.
* https://xcancel.com/jasonfurman/status/2010532384924442645#m
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jason_Furman
And Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC)
> If there were any remaining doubt whether advisers within the Trump Administration are actively pushing to end the independence of the Federal Reserve, there should now be none. It is now the independence and credibility of the Department of Justice that are in question.
> I will oppose the confirmation of any nominee for the Fed—including the upcoming Fed Chair vacancy—until this legal matter is fully resolved.
* https://xcancel.com/SenThomTillis/status/2010514786467959269
who sits on the United States Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs (which oversees the Fed):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Senate_Committee...
The "independence and credibility of the DoJ" line is quite something else.
It encapsulates so much of how I want to describe things.
Selfish behavior - this adult is just a child who didn’t learn to share.
Mean and vindictive behavior - didn’t learn to empathize as a kid
Lying? You’re still a child. Grow up and then join the adults.
Adults push back on aggressors when necessary. Children cower behind the adults.
Of course I would strongly prefer to not be a presidential system at all. But if we're discussing post-Trump constitutional reforms that could plausibly pass, I think removing the Attorney General/DOJ from the president's purview and also placing some checks on the pardon power seem doable
Having grown up in the US and having blinders on, I always thought all those parliamentary systems seemed unstable and sometimes comical. But now I see the value in it. Once a leader has demonstrated he is not up to the task, has grown out-of-touch, or has descended into madness, he can be replaced by his party, and if that didn't happen, a no-confidence vote could trigger an election. No guarantee either of those things would happen, but the option exists. The fixed four-year term idea now seems artificial and inflexible.
I suspect the current US leader and maybe even the previous US leader (maybe in his 4th year) would have suddenly found himself a back-bencher.
There are so many different variables between countries, and plain luck, that it's tough to extrapolate too much, but this just jumped out a bit for me as a Canadian - the average Canadian PM term has historically been marginally longer than the average American Presidential time in office.
We also need Ranked Pairs voting so we end this two party duopoly bullshit. Primaries can remain, but voters should be able to vote in all parties' primaries (rather than having to pick just one).
We also need some sort of recall mechanism, either periodic option to vote no confidence (twice a year when elections/primaries are already held?), or something triggered when signatures/polling get high enough.
Since I'm making my Christmas list, we also need to drastically neuter sovereign and qualified immunity - remove their applicability for any action not explicitly authorized by the legislature (and Constitution). No more general "agents of the government" who unilaterally act with impunity, with only narrow legal ways of recovering damages.
But part of the difficulty that has precipitated our current situation is the absolute gridlock in Congress for the past twenty+ years. That's what pushed more and more power into the executive and executive agencies. I don't know if Ranked Pairs would be enough to fix that with fresh blood, or we need more direct democracy (voters can override their sen/rep vote on a bill?), or what. Maybe triple the number of sen/reps from each district so that voters won't feel they're losing their experienced politicians if they vote out the worst of the three.
The appears to be difficult for a lot of people to like, but the Fed still exists because the people who bitch and moan about the Fed can never voice an alternative that wouldn't immediately destroy everything if it were implemented.
I can see why someone would have a issues with "a bunch of rich bankers appointed by politicians" controlling American monetary policy. But I can't really see a better way at least, until we can achieve a post-scarcity economy or something.
Yellen had a long academic career before going into public service (with various roles at the Fed before becoming Fed chair):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janet_Yellen
Bernanke had a strictly academic career before going into public service (and was/is probably one of the foremost experts on the Great Depression, something that was handy in 2008/9):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Bernanke#Academic_and_gove...
Greenspan was in the finance world pre-Fed. Volcker was in government for his entire career pre-Fed:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Volcker#Career
I think people over-estimate how many "rich bankers" are in the Fed, especially at the FOMC.
Bloomberg's Odd Lots podcast with some Fed members in recent years, especially the more obscure regional ones, about their work, and how they often go out and talk to local businesses about what's happening 'on the ground'.
[1] https://www.wsj.com/finance/banking/the-fed-launched-a-bank-...
JFK was likely assassinated for attempting to retain the species backing of silver; less than a decade later Nixon would take us off the gold-backed dollar "temporarily" (i.e. 1971 - present) — the dollar's plummet since 1913 (and 1971 specifically) has been monumental.
The Fed simply has too much power to destroy the dollar savings of Americans (which is why cash and low interest bonds are so detrimental for long-term wealth preservation).
----
But I am glad the the Fed Chairman's brass-gilded balls are so big, in this struggle against our absolutely out-of-control unified executive theory President.
Personally, bitcoin and gold/silver make up the majority of my savings. Have been slowly DCA-ing out of stocks and primarily into those, these past few years... accelerated since learning the majority of stock trades in 2025 occurred in dark pools (i.e. no price discovery via public markets).
The Federal Reserve was not created “just because”. The US banking system was wildly unstable when run… largely as the libertarian view would have it.
The long term policy goal (stability in the path of nominal incomes (prices + real activity) in the very short run, and prices in the medium-to-long run) would be unaffected, but the whole operational aspect would be simplified quite a bit.
I don't know about "inherently unstable system", given that as central bank independence has grown so has, generally speaking, monetary stability:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Moderation
It prevents banks from doing their job, so does the existence of t-bills.
They hinder the economy by suppressing creativity and ingenuity . Every time a person becomes an investor instead of an inventor the economy and prosperity of a nation falthers.
You just don't see it in stats because stats can't measure against hypotheticals but that doesn't mean it isn't true
Both the silver standard and bimetallism have been more common than the gold standard.
Tying complex multi faceted economies to the physical abundance of specific raw materials fails to capture the full value of activities and assets.
The true gold standard was a blip from the 1870s to the early 1920s.
In any case gold served as a strong check on monetary policy even if it had problems. Certainly it is possible to have a "sound" monetary policy without gold. I'm just not convinced in societies ability to affect sound governance of monetary policy without some "stronger" guard rails. Especially not in today's climate.
Does the Fed can any data from labor sources or unions? I am asking in honest because the few reports from them that I have looked into(mostly around unemployment) all seem to be polls solely sourced from investor class assets like companies.
If they are only sourcing from one biased source for their data, they wouldn't have to have a bad mandate or manipulate it, to operate like it was for the benefit of the data source, right?
The dual mandate says nothing about asset prices. The only prices it mentions are those involved in CPI calcs.
The investor class has capital, and America is capitalist. I’m not the biggest fan either but we gotta acknowledge the reality we live in.
Section 8: Congress shall have the power ... To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof ...
You probably don't them in control, either.
Powell corrects him in real-time. Worth watching given today's statement.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2SL
When it crashes (and it's not clear when that will be), it will crash back to a cash-value baseline. And, sigh, it's not clear where that is. But it won't magically start going back up. The cyclic reinvestment engine needs to be reinvented every time.
This is one of the clear examples that Trump is seeing Putin's Russia as a model for his vision for the USA.
For many of the smaller players I think there's unfortunately a lot of people who realized there's significant money to be made in grifting. Many of the largest crypto proponents have pivoted into endeavors, whether crypto or otherwise, that profit off of being rewarded for being part of the 'correct' tribe.
Hopefully we get the opportunity to disabuse them of this notion.
The Democrats should play hardball but the geriatrics can barely take a swing.
Even the young ones act like this.
The tech titans like Thiel see the Trump administration as a "big bet" a startup investment. They can "shoot for the moon" and try to realize the network state. If they fail, they figure they'll just toss the Democrats some campaign contributions and all will be good.
The slimiest swampiest criminals, they need to be put on trial.
Thank you, Mr. Powell. We really want interest rates set to serve the people, not the whims of the President.
2025-10-03
"You Decide: What Does the Fed’s Rate Cut Mean?”: <https://cals.ncsu.edu/news/you-decide-what-does-the-feds-rat...>
2025-12-10
“A divided Federal Reserve cuts interest rates for a 3rd straight time”: <https://alaskapublic.org/news/national/2025-12-10/a-divided-...>
"‘Silent Dissents’ Reveal Growing Fed Resistance to Powell’s Cuts”: <https://archive.is/JDlB0#selection-1235.0-1235.64>
2025-12-30
"Fed Minutes Reveal Split on Interest Rates Headed Into 2026”: <https://money.usnews.com/money/personal-finance/articles/fed...>
"Deep Divide Inside Fed Raises Questions About Timing of Further Rate Cuts”: <https://archive.is/7XdPo>
"Trump says he will 'probably' sue Fed's Powell”: <https://www.aa.com.tr/en/americas/trump-says-he-will-probabl...>
HTH
So our monetary policy will be just set at the arbitrary whims of the president if this new scheme works.
Why does all of this feel like it's just sliding completely out of hand? Am I just being a doomer?
This outlet has some good things from time to time, like https://www.liberalcurrents.com/we-are-going-to-win/
That said, yeah this is really bad.
I thought this post was a good one on why doomerism is just a waste of time - featuring Ken Jennings of Jeopardy fame:
https://bsky.app/profile/goldengateblond.bsky.social/post/3m...
Some accounts at random that tend towards "this all sucks really bad - however!"
https://bsky.app/profile/olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social
https://bsky.app/profile/golikehellmachine.com
It's a particular and kind of peculiar attitude, because objectively "things ain't great" and it's really easy to dwell on that. But we also need some hope.
I’m applying to jobs in Europe.
Clearly, that is a problem that needs to be solved.
This move is public punishment for not falling in line.
I would like to add one quote to be logged on this website:
> "I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn't be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he's America's Hitler," he wrote privately to an associate on Facebook in 2016. [0]
- Trump's future Vice President, JD Vance
If we survive the fall of Pax Americana in the next few years, and journalists and historians are again allowed to operate in a free environment, I really hope that they get to the core of how we got from 45 to 47.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/world/us/jd-vance-once-compared-trum...
Its time to put up or get put down by masked goons.
None of us understand the devastation that a WW incurs.
This balance of power was carefully set up in the Congress of Vienna following the (first) defeat of Napoleon, and was ended by the ambitions of a Kaiser who desired the prestige of globe-spanning empire yet couldn't diplomacy his way out of a wet paper bag to realize that empire without bumbling into war.
The Fed absolutely crushed it. Totally unambiguous.
1. Inflation
2. Comparing peer economies
3. Counterfactual timelines
Latest 2024 budget expenses, a fairly good percentage were chocked with no ID, no supervisor or delgated authority.
Better now, no ID, no money from Treasury.
It's quite impressive how scared everybody is of this administration. News outlets, international leaders even in face of threats, big tech, including the delusional Musk who thought he could've handled the president's rage.
Hell even his own party is scared of speaking up, you either fall in line or you risk falling victim of the most vicious direct attacks, even if you've been a huge and core voice for the president, see senator Marjorie Green.
From Russia, to Belarus, from the Philippines to Argentina, from Hungary to Poland it's crystal clear what a failure of democracy it is to have a presidential republic.
If you still want fiat — and they're available — Swiss Francs are deflating least-quickly.
Otherwise, as a fellow pleb, my best advice is to get enough bullets for occassional hunting (and other tax-free methods of living) and protection.
If you're of a draftable age/gender, I'd either get extremely fit or extremely disabled. If you're a lard-ass, I'd get to a state where you can live without medicines.
—fellow blue collar american
The biggest question for me now is how the usual defenders of this lawless administration will try to defend this or both sides it.
This just needs to happen every across all government, it’s like brushing your teeth to kick out the bacteria, but each individual institution needs a different kind of “floss” depending on the nature of the ways they have strayed from their original purposes.
Having blatantly political messages blasted across websites for national parks and on airport security video screens during the shutdown, for example, doesn't seem like a move towards "serving the public", but rather a move towards consolidation of direct control to the politicians at the top of the executive branch.
He'd be called a communist by MAGA.
Equally the same for data that goes into the algorithm - if you can control that you control interest rates.
Can’t believe you are saying that!! Then anyone can manipulate it like they manipulate stocks by writing hit pieces one day and gushing articles a few days after,
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/12/fed-jerome-powell-criminal-p...
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/federal-reserve-chair-powe...
MAGA, of course, tried to accuse Biden of weaponizing them during his term so that they could justify the Trump 2.0 revenge tour. Now we're here.
Trump: Hold my beer.
An opportunity for the EU to stop its bureaucracy and cleanup its act. If it cannot convince anyone that they are next, then one can argue that democracy is completely finished.
If this nonsense continues it will be the UAE + Saudi Arabia + China, cutting off the west and that's that.
What does that mean? Do you have any idea what the EU is?
Separately, I think Jerome Powell is one of the worst Fed chairs as he is most (but not exclusively) responsible for what happened to the housing market by creating a lock-in effect and focusing on their CPI basket.
I've lost track of the number of times I, and others, have said that.
Turns out there really are no brakes on the Trump Train. In the parlance of the metallic-headgear fans, any other POTUS would have been treated to a nice convertible ride through downtown Dallas by now.
Dunning-Kruger effect billionaire: We don't need that. What's it even for anyhow? I'm not paying for it. All these naysaying wimps and freeloaders say we can't live without out. I will use my unelected government position and bling chainsaw to cut fraud, waste, and abuse to eliminate red tape and unnecessary big government regulation. And I demand a negative tax rate, subsidies, and lucrative government contracts! Rawr!
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/fed-renovation-budget-balloon...
https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/building-project-faqs.ht...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law
If you're going to put the energy into refuting something, why bother wasting it by using personal insults to kick it off instead? Uneducated is at least borderline, if a bit blunt, but unsophisticated just drains any value.
I appreciate you deeply for standing up to it, I just don't want to see doing so made to look bad when the facts presented were so solid and good.
There are educated people, uneducated people, sophisticated people, and unsophisticated people (and overlap amongst). You will need to tailor your approach accordingly when dealing with each persona.
Not for me to decide alone any more than anyone else alone I suppose. Thanks for sharing your perspective on it.
I tend to think that's because it doesn't matter who it is, it's always most productive to reply in a way which focuses on substance alone when one can't otherwise be positive. Particularly in pure text, it's so easy for things to come off worse than intended (something which has hit me quite well in the past as much as any). I've always assumed that's why the comment guidelines are so universally worded, mentioning what throwaways should be used for but with no mention of how they should be exempted from the usual approach. I.e. it's very easy for two people to feel like they are being neutral in text as the conversation escalates.
I've got to hop off for to get ready for work tomorrow. Thanks again for both taking the time to share your perspective as well as taking the time to respond to mal-intended throwaways with solid facts - it matters (thumbs up).
“Trump appointees to the US Commission of Fine Arts, however, required the project use more white marble to align with a proposed presidential mandate from the president that all new federal buildings be neoclassical in style. This luxury white marble comes from Georgia and has been used extensively in the construction of national landmarks including the U.S. Capitol. Aside from Georgia marble, the materials used throughout the Fed’s renovation are required to be sourced domestically.
“And to match the original marble facades and detailed interiors, the Fed is required to use specialized processes more costly than those allowed in Washington buildings without historical significance or not on the National Mall.”
> The interest rate can be set via an algorithm.
Who writes this algorithm? Are algorithms without biases?
> The algorithm is to be tuned over historical data
So you’re saying that historical data can’t have biases? Data cannot be collected and shared (or not collected a la jobs report) to manipulate the output? Seems a bit of a naïve take if you ask me.
How on earth do you think the Fed sets the rate? Each board member probably has a simple spreadsheet, although they use their gut feeling in the end. It's markedly less objective and completely un-transparent.
People here are funny in that when I preach for transparency and objectivity, they preach for obscurity and individual board member bias. Their skepticism of data science shows how uneducated they are about defining and optimizing an objective function.
> although they use their gut feeling in the end.
That gut feeling check is pretty crucial, I think. Why not just work to make the Fed a more transparent org? And let’s say it is by an algorithm - will it be open sourced so it can be vetted?
Edit: also more crucially, who’s responsible when the algorithm fucks up?
Because as we all know, when it comes to financial markets, past performance guarantees future results. Oh wait . . .
In any event, the point of a decent algorithm is that if the result isn't complying with the action, upcoming updates to the weights will fix it. Moreover, changes to the weight would be such that they optimize for maximum learning.
It is so weird seeing people preach for an obscure entity to do something so basic, and being shut down when asking for transparency. Today's AIs could write good model-development algorithms for tasks that are a hundred times more complicated.
Oops, the unaccountable algorithm eased when it should have tightened and Volcker Shocked when it should have eased. No prob, the weights will get tweaked and all will be well. Once the economic crisis blows over, anyway . . .
Is that really your response to “past results aren’t indicative of future performance”? Honestly at that point why not just let ChatGPT run loose and set guidance? Please, I implore you to think about the issue a bit deeper.
Then you should have probably left it at that.
Criminal investigations in this administration are just a means of pressure and harassment, they have zero bearing on any suspicion of criminal activity. I predict that within a few days Powell will be the recipient of death threats. That's the second part of the pattern.
And think about the logic of your argument. Should this administration NEVER conduct any criminal investigations because they are all just “pressure and harassment”?
Don’t be silly
Treating the investigation in good faith is not being neutral or unbiased. Expecting more of the same is.
How so? Charges were dismissed on a technicality of on the US prosecutor who brought them, not based on evidence presented.
Have you seen all the evidence? You seem very confident that no crime has been committed.
I mean we've seen the declassified Obama memo on sicking the CIA on Trump. Seems like some smoke there, why not find out if there is a fire?
The DOJ is now weaponized as a political tool, rather than that it is used for its real purpose. If you refuse to see this that's on you, not even on Donald Trump. The FED is independent for a reason, you are seeing that mechanism in action and so far no US president has every made a move like this.
I’m being serious. You seem quite confident of your opinion, so I’m asking what it’s based on?
Probably, yes. At least until they reverse course and start enforcing our most basic fundamental laws like the Constitution and Bill of Rights.
From https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/building-project-faqs.ht... which includes much more detail.
> ... complete overhaul and modernization that preserves two historic buildings that have not been comprehensively renovated since their construction in the 1930s ...
https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/building-project-faqs.ht...
Could it have been cheaper? Possibly. But let’s be real here. It’s blatant intimidation.
Enough to know we shouldn't bother replying
Well, get ready because you aint seen nothin yet if you thought the Fed was manipulating our financial system. Do you honestly think a partisan system would be better?
https://youtu.be/tU3rGFyN5uQ?si=0387L1blOdW2Ttpe
First, one must understand that the Federal Reserve was the main trojan horse vehicle for the European banking families into America. Read any number of good books, starting with the latest edition of G. Edward Griffins "The Creature from Jekyll Island".
But all that is mostly known already to those who have payed attention and done the reading... so whats next?
My conclusion is that America is being setup, in multiple ways (fall guy for global empire, etc), but one major setup that is going on right now is a twofer: 1) Jack up the US economy at any time by raising rates and unraveling the ponzi scheme and 2) If you do 1), you have the perfect excuse to try to implement some CBDC-esque new system, but this time with much more surveillance tech, for example unified ledgers that merge digital identity with financial identity, with ESG and social credit style added on. Read Whitney Webb for more on the structures being put in place for this.
So what is happening is that Trump knows the people that control the Fed, for whom the Fed chair is a mere mouthpiece, really want to suddenly and unexpectedly hike rates and soon, but Trump doesn't want it to happen under his last term, so he has been doing major backroom maneuvering to influence the Fed every time a rate-change date is coming up. Essentially he wants to kick the can to the next POTUS, but since the Fed is technically independent, it really can do whatever it wants, all he can do is fire after the fact. My guess is they will drop it on him late term, a perfect excuse to usher in the political pendulum swing of the hegelian game they play with us.
To me, that this backroom maneuvering is becoming more public tells me they really want to do the sudden rate hike.
Want a decent intro to the real fed? Try this video from the great James Corbett: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IJeemTQ7Vk
There are countless comments and discussions on this board about how:
1) interest rates should be zero,
2) interest rates being non-zero create a misallocation of capital where there is a return on an investment without any ingenuity or creation behind
3) Banks are too risk averse to lending and their risk averse behavior is due to the risk free rate they enjoy when they park money at the Fed and when they buy T-bills
No matter how little ingenuity or creation is required to keep afloat a zombie company or a dubious startup, for sure it's a notch higher than what happens when that money is parked at the Fed or invested in t-bills...
A true free market isn’t at whims of any one person.
At some point it stops being steelmanning and starts becoming an invitation for some propaganda to distract from the obvious.
Inviting propaganda is good, let the obviously weak arguments come front and center to be logically considered and ridiculed rather than put in small private group chats where they seem to grow and grow. This only works, in any way, if people stop saying things aren't worth having consideration about because it's obvious to them.
> Inviting propaganda is good, let the obviously weak arguments come front and center to be logically considered and ridiculed
That's literally what I'm doing: Ridiculing the obviously weak arguments.
And do you know what's happening? My ridicule and dismissiveness are being talked down, while you invite someone to "steelman" the argument instead. This pattern happens over and over again in spaces where steelmanning is held up as virtuous: It's supposed to be a tool for bringing weak arguments into the light so they can be dismissed, yet the people dismissing are told to shush so we can soak up the propaganda from the other side.
Sure the Fed isn’t perfect. But we don’t really have a better solution as of now because our financial systems are extremely powerful and anyone in office would love to abuse it if they can.
Sure, the renovations are ridiculous. But it’s not like this administration is austere in the slightest, so that’s a bit rich. Not to mention the cronyism prevalent across the cabinet.
"No. Neither does anyone else. Adventures happen to other people. When it happens to you, it just looks like trouble."
- The Ballad Of Sir Dinadan, by Gerald Morris, quoted from memory
Politics is now consumed as entertainment, and ask any writer of books or screenplays and they will tell you _conflict_ makes for good entertainment.
Politics should be _boring_. The fact that we demand to be entertained by our political system is a big part of the problem.
Both are basically useless as it relates to your personal quality of life but at least with the latter you can see nice geometric combinations between players on a pitch and some incredible athleticism in between
If the admin is fighting with the Federal Reserve, it means they are not focused on figuring out how to further screw us over…
> If the admin is fighting with the Federal Reserve, it means they are not focused on figuring out how to further screw us over…
Messing with interest rates for short term political gain would screw us over.