Oh its definitely not a 100% of the time thing…just generally speaking most often when you look at party nominees, the majority of them select a running mate who was not a competitor in the nomination race (or perhaps more specifically not a primary contender).
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Again, you only have to go back one president to find another counterexample. Joe Biden was fond of pointing out that the 2008 primary race was the first election he ever lost.
So two of the last five presidents picked primary rivals as their vice presidents. (OK, six if you count the current guy. Ugh.)
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I guess he didn’t want people to remember the time he ran for President in 1988, which is understandable, given the plagiarism, CV padding and false memories of participating in civil rights marches that came up then.
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I guess I forgot about that because he withdrew so early. In 1980, Bush and Reagan had been trading barbs the way that Obama and Clinton did in 2008, so that one seems more unusual.
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Speaking as a small investor, this all sounds quite good.
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Well, H.W. Bush flat out called Reagan’s plans Voodoo Economics and guess who was Reagan’s running mate.
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I know. And there are examples of it. But if you look at the history of candidates who got the nomination and their running mates. The overwhelming majority were not an adversary from the nomination run. Just stating the facts.
The only problem I see with this is that private equity is just one method employed by the financial sector to generate high returns in a low-interest environment. The larger problem is that rent-seeking activities are allowed in GDP and/or that we view the very flawed inputs of GDP to be an accurate representation of our economy. Finance thrives because it’s engineered a skewed perspective of its contributions to the economy. “Growth” has become synonymous with the short-term status of the market, to the detriment of real production and the real, long-term fundamentals of research and development.
Without GDP reform, finance will move onto something else. Forget loopholes; they’ve rigged the statistics describing the whole show. We need statistics that reflect the actual contributions of the public sector, which drives the unchecked private sector and gets back pennies on the dollar in taxes. We need to take into account the status of our natural resources and our efforts to curtail the damage we’ve been doing.
For more reading:
- Mariana Mazzucato, The Value of Everything
- Joseph Stiglitz, People, Power and Profits
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I’ve worked a lot in finance - what finance does is morph, skew, re-shape and alter itself to achieve maximal profits and wealth growth for capital holders. Marx was absolutely right, not a shadow of a doubt.
It’s always been that way, and always will.
Laws, standards, conventions, all of that - it all gets evaporated by the aggressive and bullying thrust of the psychopaths who decide wealth is their metric (and since they’re mostly narcissistic, there you have it - like Trump, they need the glitz and glam and showiness, they need it like Gollum needs the ring).
These people are like vampire mist - they find the cracks, the inevitable gaps, of well-meaning people, and exploit them mercilessly.
It’s a war.
But it’s a winnable war. The logic is sitting right in the middle of the problem, staring out at us patiently. If you remove the ability of money to concentrate, or to network other money with a hierarchy reaching up to the psychopath, it cannot accumulate as much.
This can all be done free market style. The socio/psychopaths won’t see it coming.
People Power, dude. I’m working on it!
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