I’ve been fond of the word proctocracy, meaning “rule by assholes” - derived from the greek word proktos (anus) that gives us words like proctologist.
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[quote=“Kimmo, post:32, topic:89815”]The grief will continue, and continue to increase, as long as complete fuckwits are at the helm, running the ship aground.[/quote]In the meantime, further research into scatological pejoratives will inevitably produce an appropriate remedy.
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This is what the Right doesn’t get. Something happens they don’t like, they vow eternal vengeance, and use every trick legal and illegal to get it reversed.
Something happens the Left doesn’t like? “You lost, get over it.”
Name them! It should be a very short list.
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This has been dealt with before. She actually said “brioche”, i.e. sweet bread.
This story is actually about dysfunctional corporatism. The price of bread in Paris was fixed, the price of brioche was not. The bread shortage arose because the bakers naturally decided to make more expensive brioche with bigger margins for their rich customers. Shkreli wannabees, if you like.
But there was a further law that if insufficient bread was baked the government could rule that brioche must be sold at the price of bread for the day - hence Marie Antoinette’s instruction. (Antonia Fraser is the source for this version, she did considerable research on the period.)
The point was that the opponents of the king had better PR than he did, and this story was so easy to spin that the temptation was irresistible. Louis wasn’t one of history’s better rulers, the French aristocracy in general was particularly kakistocratic, but the other side was no better.
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The only ones that I can think of either gave in to the corruption or left.
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McCain was doing so well until Palin happened.
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He was the first one that I was thinking of when I wrote “gave into the corruption”.
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*Kekistocracy. The alt-right neo-nazis are pulling the strings, let’s get the terminology correct.
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It’s a reaction to what the socialist policies have done.
There’s one large socialist policy in the US. Social security.
Stage 1.
People hand over lots of real wealth to the state. They are owed a pension. That’s a debt, pure and simple. Not that SS ever admits to the debt in the accounts.
Stage 2.
The state spends the money. Mostly using it to pay its debts. End result, there is no capital in the SS system. You can’t blame capitalism for this, there is no capital.
You can’t blame neoliberalism either
So why would the the debts be omited from the books?
Run aground ages ago. Social security owes 200 trillion with no assets. Now
what?
Social security is keeping my mom off the streets right now.
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We’ve had this conversation in another thread, but I’ll summarize again for anyone who is confused about how pensions work and why you can’t just look up their liabilities.
It is a debt, but it is not a debt to pay people back what they paid in, it is a debt to pay them what they are owed under the plan. Because of the nature of the plan a person might be paid more or less based on things currently unknown (e.g., if they die in an accident before they collect anything, they get paid $0, if they live to 112 they get paid plenty). That’s why liabilities are estimated by actuaries rather than known precisely. It’s more like a bookie than a bond.
Pension plans, public and private, are in big trouble because they are Ponzi schemes. The fact that, like any Ponzi scheme, they need an ever growing pool of investors to stay afloat was public knowledge from day one. But there is nothing being hidden or kept on separate books, publicly available actuarial reports that tell you exactly how much trouble they are in are a google search away. Everyone is welcome to look at the problems in the open air, and it’s easy to find people who are.
You may take issue with the fact that the government is allowed to pass a law that says, “Thou shalt pay $X into a pension plan but may never see a penny back,” but they have just as much power to pass that law as they do to pass a law that says, “Thou shalt pay $X in taxes and we will use those to fund the police even if you aren’t the victim of a crime.”
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