In Booman’s too little (and way too late) about-face post regarding the so-called Trillion Dollar Coin idea (What Bugged Me About the Coin) both santiago and Frank Schnittger posted cogent responses that dealt with nuts-and bolts economic matters.
But the real “nuts and bolts” in this ongoing situation are more like these:
You know that guy, right?
and
The bolt from an Stgw 57 automatic rifle.
Read on for more.
Much more.
Santiago wrote:
What would be the effect on the economy and future US monetary and fiscal policies by proving that debt and balanced budgets are unnecessary? Nothing. Or at least nothing more grave than the last time a US President bucked similarly counterproductive conventional wisdom to get out of self-contrived fiscal and monetary mess: when Nixon declared the US dollar had no convertibility to gold, forcing the rest of the world to follow suit.
Bingo!!!
The entire system is now smoke and mirrors.
Bits and bytes.
At one time it was physical.
Iron and steel, men and women, effort and reward. Thus it was much harder to control. Harder to alter. Slower.
But now? Now it’s all “information.” Information backed up by military and quasi-military (police) force, of course….the iron fists in that virtual glove.
Whoever controls that information controls the reality…unless and until a serious emergency happens, at which point human beings who have been living in a cloud of blissful unknowing are suddenly smacked upside the head with the iron of non-digital reality.
Over the last…oh, say 12 years…some parts of the population of the U.S. have personally felt that smack several times…events that could not be informationally disappeared to any great degree.
9/11
Hurricane Katrina
The collapse of the virtual economic bubble…of these, the disaster with by far the broadest effect of on the general population
Multiple mass shootings by unbalanced individuals w/access to serious automatic weaponry….unbalanced at least in part by the ill effects of the medical and pharmaceutical establishment. “Unbalanced” because they have not only not been helped but actually driven further over ther own personal cliffs by Big Med/Big Pharma. By Big Info, because that’s how the foolishness has been sold.
Hurricane Sandy
And so on.
In each of these cases the PermaGov’s control of information has eventually been sufficient to allay the entirely justifiable fears of the American public and thus postpone an almost inevitable collapse of this system of virtual unrealities.
Chosen pols and parties have been unchosen and replaced with other choices.
Wars have been switched to other venues (Gotta keep that military happening, no matter what. It’s just about the only iron still left in this virtual fire.), and the means of war have been switched to some great degree as well. Less blood…U.S. blood, that is…and more digitally-controlled weapons. A knder, more caring form of bloody murder.
Plus the domestic control mechanisms have been tightened even further. Can’t let the marks know that they are being duped…hell, there so many of them!!! What would happen if a sufficient number of them woke the fuck up to the con? What then? UH oh!!!
And whta would be sufficient to wake a large number of people up?
Only a more spectacular disaster than has yet occurred. One that could not be covered up by the media. I mean…yes, the disasters above have hurt large numbers of people. Thousands at a time. Tens of thousands. Millions on an economic level, but not to the point of mass starvation or millions truly homeless.
Not yet, anyway.
But…a nuclear disaster of some sort? Accidental or on purpose? Climate change that finally gets to the point of nationwide drought? Some sort of pathogen…again, accidental or not…that really lays out the population?
The media thing is like those nasty chemical spray that clams to “eliminate odors.” Febreze and the rest of that artificial, poisonous shit. Eventually…say in the case of masses of decomposing bodies…the truths of the matter get so serious that they cannot be hidden. You can no more print a trillion dollar coin to erase the mistakes of the past 50 years than you can spray enough Febreze to mask the smell of an Auschwitz-level death camp. Eventually you have to go in and stop the problem.
We are not at that point yet, God help us all. The bodies are piling up by the door but we have ever-newer, ever more effective media sprays to mask the odor.
Time’s a’comin’, folks.
Bet on it.
Many of them chickens have already come home to roost, and you can’t Febreze that henhouse forever.
As I said when the whole coin stupidity was seriously being run up the flagpole to see how many erections it would cause:
I got yer trllion dollar coin.
Right here!!!
Wake the fuck up.
Later…
AG
Riiiiiight.
There’s an old line about the two greatest lies.
I won’t print it here because it’s too funky for general consumption. (And when I say that, it means it’s really too goddamned funky.)
But I will print my variation. The governmental version.
Watch.
And the shoeshine goes on.
And on and on and on and on and on…
Bet on it.
Later…
AG
At one point I said, “Screw it. It ain’t legal, but go ahead and mint it if we’re going to go off to Wonderland.”
I never said it was legal and I never said it was sane, except in the face of even greater insanity.
Read my sig, Booman?
A corollary:
And dumber’n fuck as well.
You are now almost entirely parroting the Obamacrat Party’s line. A dutiful functionary. No more and no less. If they say “This might work” you say “OH yes!!! Maybe it would” and when the flagpole saluters do not respond well and they take it down you say “I thought the whole argument in favor of the coin was dumb politically, highly dubious legally, and counterproductive strategically.”
Sorry, man? Have you been taking flip flop lessons from the Romneybot?
AG
P.S. In the “OH yes!!! Maybe it would” category I bring you …from as recently as 5 days ago:
Let’s Make it $60 Trillion!!
.
And don’t try to play the irony card again. Irony and politics have reached a breaking point when this sort of idiocy is debated seriously both in public and behind closed doors.
Irony card?
Make it an idiocy card.
As I posted on the above article:
And then you posted your “irony card.”
At which point I answered:
So?
Let’s.
AG
meh.
It wasn’t the administration promoting the coin. I really didn’t know where they stood until it was over and they started saying (privately) what I had been saying all along.
I figured they at least thought it was useful as a kind of madman deterrent, but they didn’t think that. They thought it was undermining their leverage, which is exactly how I felt about it.
When people like Laurence Tribe started saying it was legal and the press secretary refused to renounce it, I figured they might be behind it in some small way. But, they never were. It was more like a fever that overtook the progressive base that they didn’t quite know how to handle.
I don’t like the term.
It’s weak.
Like hemming and hawing only under the breath and backwards.
“Meh.”
“Wah.”
Like dat.
Backpedaling only gets you one place, Booman.
Behind.
AG