Comments by "coolmodelguy" (@coolmodelguy6304) on "Thom Hartmann Program" channel.

  1. I'll be 59 this year and I have been dismayed to watch as everything I have been taught about the USA has fallen and turned to ash. This is not the country I grew up believing in and I fear that the "United" States of America will be fractured and broken apart after the 2020 election. The West Coast is not going to stand for a Trump dictatorship and I think the north-east coastal states will side with the west coast. With Texas and Florida in play, the fate of our nation may rise or fall over who controls our coastal ports.
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  2. Donald Trump's budget cuts the raise federal workers were going to get from 2.5% to 1 percent. In a letter to federal employees, the OMB stated that they could not get their promised raise due to a "national emergency" or "national economic distress". This means that even Donald Trump does not believe his own words about "the greatest economy ever".
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  3. I'd like to share the chilling thing I heard yesterday was about the reasons behind the rush for Kavanaugh confirmation. Lots of shiny things have been dangled to distract us . . . . but there is one case the Supreme Court agreed to hear which may disrupt the dual sovereignty of State and Federal Courts and the republicans want Kavanaugh seated before this case is heard. The Gamble vs United States case is about a felon with a robbery conviction, who upon being pulled over by the police, was found to have a firearm in his possession. Terance Martez Gamble was then charged by both State and Federal prosecutors with being a felon in possession of a firearm based on the single incident. Apparently he was convicted by both prosecutors and received an extended sentence. Upon appealing his conviction, Gamble claims double jeopardy and the case has made it to the Supreme Court. (The double jeopardy I am familiar with is that once acquitted of a crime by jury of peers, that crime cannot be charged in court a second time. Being charged by both the State and Feds is perfectly legal.) Long and short of this, if the Supreme Court decides that this is double jeopardy . . . then a state could not charge a person for something the Federal Government has charged a case on. This mucks up the system and could keep someone like Paul Manafort from being charged in State Court . . . where the president's pardon power cannot reach. The republicans have long held that "states rights" are sacrosanct, regarded as too important or valuable to be interfered with. Trump and the republicans want Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court in time to hear this case, and Kavanaugh will most certainly throw "states rights" and the 10th Amendment right out the window. It is not just about the presidential pardon powers, deciding double jeopardy in this case will muddy the waters so much that the Federal Government will feel free with this as precedent to interfere whenever they want to block State's affairs and decisions. This is a very dangerous case for a so-called conservative majority Supreme Court to be deciding. The so-called conservatives are really corporate shills, and corporations are slobbering all over themselves at the potential inroads they can make by usurping state law in favor of corporate law. The 10th Amendment is written so that powers not specifically granted to the Federal Government by the Constitution are reserved to the States and to the people. Corporations have been using the courts to strip away rights from the people for decades and grant rights to the corporations over people. A double jeopardy finding in Gamble vs the US would be a gift, a genuinely corrupt boon to corporations. Kiss democracy good-bye with a single Supreme Court decision. Notice how we have heard nothing about this at all from the networks, corporate media is too busy presenting us with other shinier objects.https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/09/trump-pardon-orrin-hatch-supreme-court/571285/
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  4. This action by the republican House members of storming a closed committee hearing room is a blatant use of force. This demonstration shows what the republicans in this country will resort to in order to keep the wealthy in power over the rest of us. In the near future this type of action will no longer be sufficient and republicans will move to use of lethal force to get their way.
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  5.  @faanlouw6109  - Your essay is flat out wrong. You have been indoctrinated, what you have written comes straight out of the Oligarch's Propaganda Handbook. Socialism is dynamic, not static. What you refer to as socialism is capitalism's propagandist version, not the evolving socialism of the current era. Even Professor Wolff is not entirely current on the evolution of socialism. Capitalism is finished as an economic model. Infinite growth is not possible for any system, natural or artificial. Capitalism surpassed the capabilities of a production based economy at least two decades ago and has long before that time been looting entire countries, draining treasuries and impoverishing the citizenry. Your last two sentences are what the wealthy rely on to protect themselves from the masses they have oppressed, while they are busy stealing the wealth of nations. Oh, and by the way, there were always private property and markets, even in the primitive beginnings of socialism. It figures you would think such garbage, you are reliant on dogma instead of the hard work of researching through these ideas for yourself.
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  6. Wealth invented racism to divert attention. In the Virginia governors race, Glenn Youngkin was CEO of the worlds largest equities firm, The Carlyle Group, an American multinational private equity, alternative asset management and financial services corporation. Is it any wonder then, that racism would be his go-to platform?
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  7. What the guest is describing about literacy and what students are allowed to read in Cuba, is literally no different than many parts of the USA today.
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  8. The only way to keep reforms like anti-trust laws intact, to keep them from being undermined and eventually eliminated, is to put an upper limit on wealth accumulation. A hard wealth cap is the only feasible way to dismantle the whole crazy cycle that Professor Wolff explained starting at the 10:52 mark.
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  9. In the past month and a half, the Federal Reserve has pumped at least $1.2 trillion of liquidity into the banking system. This has devalued the dollar by several percent (perhaps up to 5%) just in a few months time. If there is any solution, it is to place a cap in individual wealth. To visualize the effect of unlimited wealth accumulation, just blow up an balloon and leave the stem untied. All these bailouts and liquidity injections are trying to replace the escaping air from the open ended economic balloon, so the answer is to tie it off. Cap wealth accumulation at $10 million and a vast majority of these economic problems will abate.
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  10. What I have seen so far, suggests that the George Floyd murder and the subsequent property damage during the Minneapolis protest over the following days, was a coordinated effort by white suprematism movements embedded in the Minneapolis police department and the White House. Trump needs a diversion from his abject failure of a presidency, and a way to kill more black, brown and poor people by state sponsored violence, and through more infections with the Covid-19 virus. The provocative killing of George Floyd was done on purpose, in order to provoke a response from minorities and the poor people who are suffering economic devastation because of the federal governments failure to help the population, and to divert our attention from the aggressive Wall Street and corporate looting of the federal treasury that just took place, using the CARES Act as cover. The final goal is to upset the 2020 election so that Trump can maintain his freedom, because when he loses the election, he, his family and his entire Cabinet will be going to prison.
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  11. This is all out money (influence coupons). If things are ever going to change, it must begin with a hard cap placed on individual wealth so that no one individual has undue influence over political/economic decisions.
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  12. "I just think they're stupid". Brilliant answer!
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  13. I'd also like to see what the GDP is without the "weapons/defense" and "big pharma/private insurance" industries (rackets), but also without the "financial services" and "investment services" rackets. The top 20% in the USA has over $55 trillion in financial assets which pull down at least $2.75 trillion in "interest" payments, that is more than 13% of our GDP. The books on the GDP are definitely cooked. That interest payment money is mostly extracted from the bottom 80% in the form of increased housing and health care costs. Our costs for vital living provisions are going up, up , up, yet we are getting less and less in value.
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  14. You are not wrong Thom, this list of everything you mentioned should be part of the impeachment documents.
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  15. Thom, your sound levels are too low, at full volume I can barely hear you.
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  16. The most recent numbers released by Oxfam show that globally, 54% of all wealth is owned by 1% of the global population, and that the top 20% globally own 94.5% of all wealth. Stagnation is setting in to all economies because the bottom 80% has no purchasing power with which to drive the global economy. The elites are fully aware that this is a huge problem, yet they are rudderless, incapable of dealing with the situation and furthermore, are unwilling to alter their own behavior. It is really up to us to alter the behavior of the wealthy elites, they will not do so on their own. Personally, I want to cap individual wealth accumulation and ownership of all assets at $10 million per person. That much, no more. If they can't deal with that, tough shit.
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  17. Thom, it is not the oligarchs at the core of democracy's demise. Rather, it is the underlying economic structure that places no limits on individual wealth accumulation. A system without upper and lower limits will always fail over time.
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  18. The real problem we have is this, interest payments on the 1%'s wealth exceed three times our annual GDP growth. The 1% are eating us alive.
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  19. No one looks at economics in the same manner as one looks at cosmology. The mass of "wealth" has always been larger and grown faster than the economy. On this day, the mass of wealth is larger than it has ever been, over five times the size of our economy. That wealth will simply roll over anything in its path, leaving destruction in its wake. Always been this way and always will be, until we decide to control that mass.
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  20.  @faanlouw6109  - That is the go to response of all deniers, show me one example where socialism has worked successfully. Every country on the planet uses socialism to one degree or another. Socialism, for Marx, is a society which permits the actualization of man's essence, or in the modern sense a system where the basic needs of survival are a social responsibility and the individual person can rise to the level made possible by accomplishment of both the individual and the society combined. Capitalism now relies on annualized compounding of wealth, unearned income derived from wealth itself, which is unsustainable.
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  21. Inflation is fundamentally misunderstood as a supply and demand issue, because we are still using an ancient textbook. Inflation is no longer tied to markets, it is tied to asset prices. As the market cap for any company grows, so will inflation associated with that company. If the company fails to inflate prices, it's market cap with drop. Since asset prices continue to expand, inflation is baked in to likewise allow for market cap expansion. Take gasoline for example, the market cap for oil companies has expanded by over 50% in two years, which in turn necessitated an increase in gasoline prices to further grow the market cap. We are being sold the idea that the Ukraine war caused gas prices to increase, because the war is excellent cover, but the war has little to do with the actual price of gasoline. Same pattern plays out for everything we buy, while diverting us with tales of supply train issues or some other story to cover for the need to raise prices to support the growing market capitalization (stock price) of the company.
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  22. For the cost of this "internment" plan, all homeless could easily be housed without losing their freedom. More people are on their way to homelessness and it will include people that used to think it would never happen to them. The 1% in this country have $30 trillion in accumulated wealth they are not spending, at a mere 2% interest it would take all the GDP gains for 2018 plus an additional $40 billion to pay. Yet when I look at S&P500 index funds, they have been paying over 9% since 1994. Look at a more moderate 5% rate of return, that comes out to $1.5 trillion which eats all 2018's GDP gain plus 1/20th of the entire economy. Thom reported on the U.S. Treasury report in August 2019 which spelled out in detail that in 33 years, the top 10% will own ALL wealth in the USA. The bottom 90% are all going to end up in internment camps. Bernie 2020.
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  23. We have a decades old running con that almost everyone is unaware of. In one business quarter, Q1 of 2021, financial assets gained over $4 trillion in value. If that were to hold for the remainder of the year, the gain would be $16 trillion, which would be over 2/3 of our GDP. People don't understand that all the pain they are feeling, barely able to hold on, is because our economy was set up to be drained in the late 1960's. Just ask yourself how it is that a pile of financial assets five times the size of our economy could even happen, then can gain over 10% in the same year as our economy shrinks due to Covid-19.
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  24. Greed stops when we make it stop. It is past time to put a hard limit on wealth accumulation.
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  25. My reaction to Thom's report is this: There seems to be an awful lot of organized money behind this "Antifa" uproar on Facebook. Smells like propaganda.
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  26. We in the USA cannot avoid fascism unless and until we recognize what is causing this phenomenon in the modern age. The lead up to fascism is the real story behind this "winning" economy, which never gets told. Here I will tell the story in parable. Its really simple, a 500 pound man is sitting on the head of a 200 pound man. While the 200 pound man goes to work every day, the 500 pound man does nothing but sit on the 200 pound man's head. The 200 pound man works hard and gets a 2.5% pay raise for the year. At the end of the year, the 500 pound man demands 10% of the 200 pound man's gross pay and all the raises in pay. The 200 pound man pays the demand every year without question. The cycle continues without end. In this story, the 500 pound man is the financial assets of the top 20% in the USA. The 200 pound man is the U.S. economy. The top 20% skim at least $2.5 trillion from the U.S. economy every year without lifting a finger to actually earn that money. They call it "investing" in the economy, but taking all GDP gains plus 10% of the total GDP by calling it "interest", or "rate of return", well I've got another name for it. It's a racket. This is why we have Trump and the fascist MAGA crowds at his rallies. Until we are willing to recognize this, we are doomed.
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  27. Wealthy people should never be allowed to own major market media companies.
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  28. I've been examining some facets of our economy very closely and what really alarms me is that financial assets of households and nonprofit organizations have passed the $90 trillion mark. These assets generate either interest or dividends, sometimes both. If you select a median interest rate of 5% just to do some simple calculations for the purpose of understanding the economic impact, the sum total of interest comes out to $4.5 trillion for 2019. Compare that to the GDP of 2019, which was $21.5 trillion, the interest for these financial assets is greater than 20% of our total economic output. We now have an economy which is geared toward providing a rate of return on "investments", rather than an economy which is geared toward making profit from productive enterprises. If the Federal Reserve continues to print money to, as Thom put it, "inflate an air mattress" under the economy, a severe crash is inevitable.
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  29. Here is the list of items where the capitalist corporations are really sticking it to us, this is the wealth extraction economy at work. The cost of childcare gone up 546% over thirty years. The cost of healthcare gone up 601% over thirty years. The cost of pharmaceuticals gone up 894% over thirty years. And finally: The federal student loan burden being carried by our youth has gone up 14,800% over thirty years.
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  30. If you look at the view numbers for any of "Fox News" videos, they are sky high compared to all other YouTube channels. I look directly at the owners of media outlets, Fox is owned by a billionaire. Propaganda is more interesting to believe than facts, lies more interesting than truth. These billionaire and corporate owners of major media have an agenda and it is not a good one for anyone but themselves. P.S. Corporate ownership is not faceless, it is the executives, boards of directors and mostly obliquely the shareholders who write the agendas. The purpose of these agendas in their simplest definition is to take something valuable that cannot be done above board or in the light of day.
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  31. To the horror of my wife, I told her that if we get a centrist democrat like Joe Bidon or Kamalla Harris on the 2020 Democratic Presidential ticket . . . . I would be voting third party. She is rightfully horrified that a split vote will bring us another four years of Trump. However, there is no lessor of two evils . . . there is only evil unless we can get a progressive on the democratic ticket for president. It is time to hold our ground. Sanders 2020.
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  32. + Deborah Walker - I'll be 59 this year and I have been dismayed to watch as everything I have been taught about the USA has fallen and turned to ash. This is not the country I grew up believing in and I fear that the "United" States of America will be fractured and broken apart after the 2020 election. The West Coast is not going to stand for a Trump dictatorship and I think the north-east coastal states will side with the west coast. With Texas and Florida in play, the fate of our nation may rise or fall over who controls our coastal ports.
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  33.  @faanlouw6109  - "Cathy Elings-Sysel good for you. Enjoy it while you have the freedom to do so. It is a lot more difficult to enjoy socialism under a socialist system." Still carrying on with your indoctrinated nonsense I see. Seems that we have arrived at a spot where capitalism is difficult to enjoy under a capitalist system. See how easy it is to turn the meaning of a phrase by substituting a different word? Think for yourself man! You are just regurgitating what the wealthy want you to believe.
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  34. Trickle down stagnated our wages and tripled our living costs (at a minimum). Reality is . . . all wealth is being Hoovered Up and given to the wealthy. Extraction Economics at work!
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  35. Here is "simple, straightforward stuff". We cannot have wealth accumulation growing faster than the economy, not even on paper. That situation gives a select group of people more power than whole cities and states full of voters. In 2021, financial assets gained value greater than 66% of our entire economic output. We must contain wealth accumulation within the boundaries of real economic performance, otherwise what we have is wealth growing like cancer and taking over functions wealth is not meant to control.
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  36. Productivity since Reagan, up 321%. Wages up 1/10 of 1% for the workers . . . meanwhile living costs have tripled or more. I find it repugnant that all productivity gains plus tripling of rents is not enough profit. When is it going to be "enough profit"? This is unsustainable. Seriously past time to cap wealth and income levels. We have a minimum wage, there should be a maximum income also. Accumulation of wealth past a certain point is wasteful and toxic. Humanity has to make a decision.
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  37.    - Plus, there is every possibility those drones which hit the Saudi's came from the U.S., just blame it on the Iranians.
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  38. Yes indeed. What we need to create is a sustainable economy, not an economy based on infinite annual growth.
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  39. Who needs logic when propaganda is easier to believe? I was checking on a comment notification when I noticed a Fox News video in my feed titled "Fired Space Force commander's Marxist warning is 'completely true':". I clicked through, listened to about a minute and then went to the comment section. Everywhere there were comments that were completely idiotic and out of touch with reality. The word "cult" is the only viable descriptor. When billionaires are able to own huge swaths of media, they convert people with their propaganda. Nothing I read indicated that any of these people knew who Karl Marx was or what his books were about. They were more than willing to just jump on board with Tucker Carlson and trash everything, not realizing that their "freedom" will be lost completely when the oligarchy eventually topples our government and economy.
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  40. The only way to stop this is to put a hard limit on wealth accumulation. The wealthy ARE the problem, lets get rid of them by making them ordinary.
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  41. Thomas - Your mother's broker is certainly not a "family friend". I've been examining some facets of our economy very closely and what really alarms me is that financial assets of households and nonprofit organizations have passed the $90 trillion mark. These assets generate either interest or dividends, sometimes both. If you select a median interest rate of 5% just to do some simple calculations for the purpose of understanding the economic impact, the sum total of interest comes out to $4.5 trillion for 2019. Compare that to the GDP of 2019, which was $21.5 trillion, the interest for these financial assets is greater than 20% of our total economic output. We now have an economy which is geared toward providing a rate of return on "investments", rather than an economy which is geared toward making profit from productive enterprises. If the Federal Reserve continues to print money to, as Thom put it, "inflate and air mattress" under the economy, a severe crash is inevitable.
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  42. Look at the way this man keeps grinning when Thom has him cornered. He knows that his policies just screw the middle class and the poor, and he is happy to do it. With the central banks including our Federal Reserve propping up the stock markets right now, he knows damn well that the stock market is a casino for the wealthy and that it is too unstable to count on for a stable income. Yeah, the blind man is going to count on a steady income from the stock market. Give me a freaking break.
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  43.  @chrismullaney8369  - Naw, just that people should give some thought to the situation now. The upheaval in our society comes from the exponential growth of wealth, which has passed the point of sustainability. Simple as that. Everything going on, from Covid-19 to the recent national protests, are being used to divert our attention from the fact that wealth has grown so large that in order to continue growing, it must consume the national treasury and the host economy to survive. Now the wealthy are willing to do everything necessary to preserve their wealth and privilege. Since they have already sacrificed the well being of most people in society, they well aware of how quickly the greater majority of people can turn on them.
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  44. I'm calling this one cooked. Score: Michelle Swanson zero, six commenters with with 28 thumbs up between them. We have a loser folks!
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  45. This racism and other-blaming was all brought to the surface and promoted by the very wealthy and industrial capitalists over 40 years ago, who needed a convenient narrative to obscure the neo-liberal agenda to create the modern Kings and Serfs society. . . which they knew would strip most Americans of their assets and wages over the past 40 years and accelerate the stripping over the next 40 years. This racism narrative is how they are hiding their action from all of us. Here is what we really need to be concerned with: The Macro Economic Scales. Right now 17 international wealth funds have $50 Trillion in their portfolio's seeking a rate of return. Even at a paltry 5% rate of return, it will only take 14.4 years to double. That is $50 trillion in "free" money gained in 15 years. Where is that going to come from? Certainly not from the legitimate "productive" economy, no . . . it will be "extracted" from all of us and from "regime change" countries. It is time for us to back public policy that puts a hard limit on wealth accumulation, because the appetite of "rate of return" investments cannot possibly be met. When you extrapolate out to 45 years, the $50 trillion of today will becomes $400 trillion. That means $350 trillion dollars gets sucked out of the planet just to pay interest. This is beyond unsustainable, it is destruction, disaster, rape, murder and plunder rolled into one ugly ball. You ever see what happens to a rooftop when too much snow accumulates on it? Collapse. The modern narrative of racism and other-baiting is meant to obscure the nature of the coming collapse. The sheer mass of that much accumulated wealth is going to collapse everything world wide . . . and we have to stop this. Time for an income and wealth cap, it is the only way we can manage this outrage.
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  46.  A OK  - How does one get ten subscribers on their YouTube profile with absolutely no content on their channel? You're an Idiot and obviously uneducated Troll who does not realize that grade 2 or 3 children do not have the foggiest idea what happened to Italy, Spain or Germany in the 1930's . . . . so you yourself are obviously not from any "western country". So why are you really here? Getting paid well? Rubles being deposited in your account regularly?
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  47. Thom, the problem is, we cannot do anything until "housing units" are removed from the economic category of "capital assets".
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  48.  @Clusterboy  - We have an obsolete Constitution. First Amendment: I am free to tell lies, and you are free to believe my lies.
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  49. The outside forces have been attacking ever since Reagan, no armies required.
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  50. To the horror of my wife, I told her that if we get a centrist democrat like Joe Bidon or Kamalla Harris on the 2020 Democratic Presidential ticket . . . . I would be voting third party. She is rightfully horrified that a split vote will bring us another four years of Trump. However, there is no lessor of two evils . . . there is only evil unless we can get a progressive on the democratic ticket for president. It is time to hold our ground. Sanders 2020.
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