My recent intervention against Paul Krugman is bearing good fruit. The morning after I posted it on X, he replied by trying to spin the whole thing as if I were a rabid Trumpist. That’s fine, he boosted my post and now it’s going viral.
But then something even more ironic occurred. Krugman was so afraid of the power of a single independent voice bursting his bubble publicly, that he felt compelled to churn out one of his dumb NYT articles, repeating the Trump slander and pumping up a partisan conflict. Liars like Krugman love conflicts, like the one depopulating Palestine right now.
This does not bother me, for one important reason. It represents how precarious these elites’ entire situation is. If people really begin to see through the thin veil of the NYT and other outfits, they will see a desperate little club of “economic royalists” desperately trying to play their “wurlitzer” of international media, but here’s the basic point–– Whether or not you win a “participation trophy” for inventing a category of economics devoted solely to LYING ABOUT THE ECONOMY (which is the alpha and omega of Poor Paul’s “expertise”), Anglo-American financial hegemony is still collapsing before everyone’s very eyes. This is not simply a matter for celebration, however, because people in my District in the South Bronx are living through this disaster, day by worsening day.
“For 250 million of us, the economy isn’t working at all. There is daily financial insecurity, and one serious illness, accident or natural catastrophe—like the hurricane and its effects in Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina and Florida—tips us into poverty. For at least 50 million of the remaining 100 million, it also doesn’t work, but they are either living on occupations that depend on the massive unprecedented debt that the United States owes the rest of the world, or have figured out a way to live on debt so long as the stock market bubble holds up, and their portfolio is still acceptable enough for them to keep writing virtual checks, though they too, cannot save anything.
Then, there are about 50 million people that are either the slaves or the beneficiaries of what Ray McGovern calls the “Military-Industrial/Congressional/Intelligence/MEDIA/Academia/Think-Tank Complex,” and of those, no more than 20% are really “in the loop.” And that’s what we really mean, today, by the Democratic and the Republican parties. They don’t care about poor people, unless they can use someone “poor, but talented” to beat up on the rest of us. Everyone else is just conforming—pretending to believe in things that actually personally disgust them, in many cases. In the media, the so-called “free press,” these are the only people that we actually hear from, in general, in the country. They are the “opinion-molders.” Luckily, however, the arrogance of these people is directly proportional to their stupidity.
As for “Nobel Prize-winning economist” and liar Paul Krugman, don’t take my word for it. Look around the United States today, and then ask yourself: What does a “No-Balls” Prize in Economics actually mean today? Whom does it help? Who has benefitted from it? Are you and your family better off, or worse off, in the past 20 years? Is the country better off, or worse? Are the cities better off, or worse? Are the roads, bridges, highways, tunnels, dams, hospitals, schools, better off, or worse? Are you happier with the country now, than you were twenty years ago? Is the country a happier place than it was twenty years ago?
It doesn’t matter whether these people {think} they are in touch with the rest of America—they aren’t. They are fighting amongst themselves, and are numerous enough to believe that they represent “America,” when they, and their opinions, in fact represent the wrong turn that the American economy took after the assassination of JFK. It is said that it became the “post-industrial society,” when it actually became the “de-industrial” society.
So, today, America no longer builds cities. When is the last time that America built a city of one million people from scratch? In 1945, America had 1,000 working shipyards. Today it has 20. America has no high speed rail, let alone magnetically levitated trains. It claims to be interested in limiting pollution, but it doesn’t build coast-to-coast maglevs? Why does China have 45,000 miles of high-speed rail, but America has 0 miles of it? Isn’t high-speed rail the most obvious way to replace short plane hops between New York City and Washington DC, or between Boston and Newark, Chicago and Detroit, Atlanta and Birmingham, San Francisco and Los Angeles?
Everywhere we see collapse, and young people see no future. Yet we are told that everything is really fine, that we just need artificial intelligence, virtual reality, fake news and our drugs of choice to “see how much better things are than you think.” I’m not doing that.
I know that new cities have to be built, and old ones rebuilt. I know that building a national advanced transportation network of high-speed rail, especially magnetically levitated trains, above and below ground, would put hundreds of thousands of Americans to work. I know that our entire energy grid needs literally thousands of gigawatts of electricity for the future industries, farms and cities that we should be powering, as we expect our population not only to grow, but to prosper. And I know that no such plan for over a quarter of a billion of us is even in the minds of the people that think they should govern the rest of us.
I don’t agree with that, and I’m not going to agree to that. I have a different idea. I say we take the Army Cops of Engineers, our veterans and retired veterans, and our millions of unemployed youth, as well as those millions of people in dead-end jobs, and build and re-build this country. No more ideology, no more political correctness, no more identity politics bullshit. We need not only the promise of a better future, but a pathway to a better future.
I call it the “Space CCC”—the Space Civilian Construction Corps. The idea is pretty straightforward. We take the cutting edge of the technologies being developed through our space program—which means we increase the funding for space research and development—and start a crash program for energy production, infrastructure repair, high speed rail for transportation of freight and people, and building of new cities. We expand the Army Corps of Engineers, and transfer the hundreds of billions we are wasting defending ourselves against non-existent enemies around the world to the “new workforce” of 35 million Americans or more who would sign up for such a program yesterday, if you proposed it today.
We can work out arrangements with unions for training. We can work out arrangements with the military for college and even high school joint training and military service programs. We can restart vocational training in high schools, which will empty out the identity politics classrooms overnight, thus making people instantly happier. And we can provide gainful employment for men and women that should be paid enough to raise a family of four or more people based on the hard work of 40-plus hours a week, instead of two people each working 50, 60 or more hours, and still not being able to make ends meet, let alone save money.
I no longer want to hear that “the problem is much more complicated than that.” If the problems are more complicated, then it means that the management is wrong. It means that the leadership is wrong. It means that the American people have to find the right people among themselves, and right now, to un-complicate the problem.
All my life in the South Bronx, I have heard that nothing can be done. I’ve even heard that for 50 years before I was born, people were saying that nothing can be done. You mean to tell me, that the country is 250 years old, and that for one third of that time, nothing could be done in the South Bronx? I say, that needs to be changed now, this year, this month, this week, today. And I don’t want to hear that I, or you, should be patient.
Intervene!