Here he comes.
From The Hill:
O’Rourke raises $6.1M on campaign’s first day, exceeding rivals
Beto O’Rourke raised just over $6 million in the first 24 hours after he launched his presidential bid, his campaign announced Monday, exceeding the amounts raised by his 2020 rivals.
O’Rourke’s campaign said it took in $6.1 million in online contributions in the day after he announced his run for the 2020 Democratic nomination on Thursday morning. The El Paso Democrat’s total topped that of any other candidate who disclosed their fundraising haul for the first 24 hours of their campaign.
I think he’s going to win the nomination.
And the presidency.
And here’s how I think he’s going to do it.
“In just 24 hours, Americans across this country came together to prove that it is possible to run a true grassroots campaign for president — a campaign by all of us, for all of us, that answers not to the PACs, corporations, and special interests but to the people,” O’Rourke said in a statement.
Read on.
Most nationally prominent (supposed) progressives, centrists and conservatives (plus whatever the fuck Trump is…a criminalist, at best.) have not been “listening to the people.” They have given the idea lip service for 50+ years, but they have really only been listening to the corporate interests that provide them with the…until very recently…necessary funds to sell themselves on TV like toothpaste, Big Pharma ripoffs or insurance companies.
Them days are gone forever, but the oldsters don’t realize it. They were almost gone during the 2018 presidential campaign, but the DNC and HRC still possessed enough tranced-out TV addicts to successfully demonize Bernie Sanders…who quite rightfully scared the shit out of the established corporate controllers…and defeat his own grassroots campaign.
Then things got really interesting!!!
A cheap carny barker managed to defeat almost the entire media system of the U.S. by personal magnetism alone!!! And…he has successfully continued that feat for almost three years now.
“There’s a fool born every minute.” P.T. Barnum is credited with this statement, and although there’s no evidence that he actually said this, it is nonetheless quite true. However, there are also non-fools being born every minute, and in my 50-years-and-counting, ongoing, up close and personal examination of the population of the United States, I estimate that non-fools outnumber the fools at about 70% to 30%…”30%” being somewhere around the lowest approval ratings of say G.W. Bush and Donald Trump, just for starters.
So…why haven’t the “non-fools” already elected a federal government that represents the best interests of the people?
Confusion.
Resignation.
Exhaustion.
The Assassination Years…also known as the Long Coup and the Silent Coup.
A mass media that has spun such a fabric of lies on every level…from the news right on down to the unconsciously accepted lying that we laughingly call “advertising”…that many people have simply given up believing almost anything!!!
But the tech revolution and social media in general have now reached a state where “the people”…the 70% non-foolish people…can without too much trouble find all views of what is happening equally represented and then make up their own minds. No more media “And now the news”…a “news” continuously slanted to deceive the people in the interests of the controllers!!!
Sure, Facebook, Amazon, Apple…you name them, the big tech companies…have their own slanting tricks, as do the bot-world opinion-makers from every highly developed country in the world. But they are now outnumbered!!! They cannot effectively shout down people like Bernie Sanders or Beto O’Rourke anymore. They cannot edit the images and videos available at the push of a keyboard button to “Arrrrgh!!!” people out the way they did with Howard Dean. They will try, of course…that’s how they make their bucks…but if they couldn’t unperson/nonperson a truly ugly motherfucker like Donald Trump, how well do you think they’ll do with a plainly decent man like Beto O’Rourke?
It’s gonna be an American Spring this year and next.
Watch.
The supermajority is going to raise its head and say “Enough of this shit!!!”
Watch.
AG
P.S. And yes…O’Rourke has some learning to do on the national stage. He’s a little…coltish…sometimes. He jumps around too much; he puts a vid of his tooth cleaning online, etc.
But….and you will have to take this statement on faith from someone who has spent his entire life playing with really fine musicians…he has good time!!!
How do I know this?
That vid of him playing air drums to a rock tune in his car.
He’s highly rhythmically gifted.
“So what?” you might say.
“Does that mean that every gifted musician would succeed as a presidential candidate?”
And the answer of course is “No.”
But “good time” in a public speaker is golden!!!
And…again, take this from someone who has dealt closely with musicians on every level from grammar school kids to transcendent geniuses…”good time” is a fine measure of one’s intelligence quotient. It translates from the physical to the emotional and mental levels. Bet on it. This guy will learn…and fast…from his mistakes.
Like I said…watch.
He’s the real deal.
Watch.
AG, I think you’ll find this article interesting. The first part is a takedown of a specific attack on Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). The second part, which you’ll find more along your lines, is the “why” of the attack.
http://neweconomicperspectives.org/2019/03/a-conspiracy-against-mmt-chicago-booths-polling-and-troll
ing.html#more-11455
“So there is real money in this campaign to discredit MMT? I had wondered why, after 25 years of laboring in the wilderness, suddenly all the knives have come out. Krugman cannot talk about anything else but MMT. Everyone from Summers to Powell, from Henwood to Epstein, has to join ranks to attack a theory created by half a dozen economists?
And they’ve all adopted the Trump tactic of lies, lies, and more lies? A sheer coincidence? Or a carefully coordinated strategy?
Make no mistake about it, as Bernie would say. This isn’t about MMT. And it isn’t, mostly, about Bernie, either. They are after Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.”
Thank you, moslerfan. I read parts of the article and did some light MMT research as well. I must admit…I am just as confused about economic policies in general as have been all the economists since the beginning of history. “Economics” seems to resemble “science” in the following way:
Once something has been proven…which really means “mostly accepted by the official heavies in the field”…the next thing that can be guaranteed to happen will be that one of a number of counter-theories will eventually take its place in the orthodox catbird seat. This can take long periods of time, and world events can change things radically as well…witness the essential failure of the Russian revolution or what happened after WWII.
What endures is this:
Non-scientific, non-theoretcal monetary artists…also commonly known as rich thieves…always find a way to play the various theories. To play whatever game is in place, for profit.
Karl (aka Turdblossom) Rove explained how this system works in great detail…although not specifically in an economic sense…to Ron Suskind in 2004.
The only error in Turdblossom’s little diatribe is the following:
This is the way that things have always worked…on every level…in empires large and small.
AOC is challenging this empire’s rules and regulations…quite effectively so far, considering her age and the amount of time that she has been in a position to do so with any appreciable coverage or success…and it is responding by attacking whatever she says.
In other words, if she was opposing MMT’s tenets they would be attacking her on other fronts.
Rove said it:
Of course…all empires eventually fall. Maybe we’re witnessing the beginning of the real fall of this one.
We shall see.
Soon enough.
Thanks again…
AG
Many years ago in college I took some economics courses out of curiosity. They were basically a waste of time, and I have come to realize that mainstream economics has little or nothing to say about the real world because it is based on assumptions that have no place in the real world: rational actors, perfect competition, things like that.
MMT approaches economics from an accounting perspective. Understanding what money is, how it is created, and how it operates in the economy turns out to yield surprising insights into things like inflation, unemployment, boom and bust cycles, and creation of wealth for ourselves and future generations.
And by the way, MMT does NOT say that deficits don’t matter. Deficits have consequences; they just are not the ones that mainstream economics would have us believe.
A good place to start is “Seven Deadly Innocent Frauds of Economic Policy,” available at a musician-friendly price here: http://moslereconomics-kg5winhhtut.stackpathdns.com/wp-content/powerpoints/7DIF.pdf
“… musician-friendly price?”
Oh.
You mean free!!!
You must know some serious musicians.
Thank you…I’ll dig into it.
Later…
AG
. . . yet again:
Take it from a scientist: That could not be more wrong. Yet again you display profound ignorance of what science is, what scientists do, how/why it works, and that the notion of “proof” is for all practical purposes absent from science.
I’m team Warren all the way. KG is also starting to heat up, and I’m not convinced that Beto’s the unstoppable war machine you make him out to be. He couldn’t beat the most unlikable person in the senate, and he’s now facing several candidates who are more qualified and quite likable.
Going to be a fun several months.