President Yang's Yin: the UBI Freedom Dividend and Humane Capitalism

[Richard Stanley]

Future President of the USA (if we survive Trump that is), Andrew Yang, makes powerful arguments for a $1,000 per month Universal Basic Income, aka the Freedom Dividend, to mitigate against the real threat to American workers, that is: further automation. His plan is to easily pay for this by taxing America's tech giants.

https://www.yang2020.com/

Unlike the present fake orangutan in the White House, Yang is a successful, real businessman, made in America, not Russia and China. Yang argues that the modest $1K per month will be used to increase business massively for existing small businessmen, allow individuals to easier contemplate becoming a small businessman or more, and reducing economic desperation that helps lead to crime and such as today's opiate crisis.

He also advocates for Medicare for All, which will reduce national health care costs by about 50%, and deliver better health outcomes. He also argues for what he calls Human-Centered Capitalism:

We need to move to a new form of capitalism – Human Capitalism – that’s geared towards maximizing human well-being and fulfillment. The central tenets of Human Capitalism are:​

1. Humans are more important than money
2. The unit of a Human Capitalism economy is each person, not each dollar
3. Markets exist to serve our common goals and values

Here's more about his proposals:

On November 6, 2017, Yang filed with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) to run for President of the United States in 2020.[23] His campaign proposes a $1,000/month "Freedom Dividend" to all U.S. citizens over the age of 18 (a form of universal basic income) and other responses to predictions of mass unemployment from technological automation.[24][25] An article in The New York Times about his campaign described various new policies Yang proposes, such as a department focused on regulating the addictive nature of media, a White House psychologist, making Tax Day a national holiday, and, to stem corruption, increasing the salaries of federal regulators but limiting their private work after they leave public service.[26] Yang's campaign slogan is "Humanity First", which calls attention to his belief that automation of many key industries is one of the biggest threats facing the workforce.[27]​

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Yang has stated that he became an advocate of a universal basic income after reading American futurist Martin Ford's book Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future, which deals with the impact of automation and artificial intelligence on the job market and economy.[28]​

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Yang​

Sam Harris interviews Yang:

Joe Rogan interviews Yang:

Yang on The Breakfast Club:

Joy Reed interviews Yang:
https://www.msnbc.com/am-joy/watch/presidential-candidate-yang-s-universal-basic-income-proposal-1476512323606

What is very interesting, and even logical, is that Yang is apparently not only getting positive notice from Trump's base of unhappy blue collar folk, but even the alt-Right: https://www.businessinsider.com/white-supremacists-are-disillusioned-by-trump-and-joining-the-yang-gang-2019-3

 

[Richard Stanley]

The following excerpt is from an NBC News article about Andrew Yang's UBI proposal and his frequent comparisons to conservative Alaska's 'socialist' Permanent Fund. That article also states that Yang wants to fund the UBI from a VAT, a carbon tax, and rejiggering welfare programs (which would need less money anyways since people are getting $1000 a month from the UBI, and I'm presuming less bureaucratic overhead because of the same).

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The historic change is what Yang, 44, a lawyer turned entrepreneur, sees as the coming wave of further automation that will make a number of industries, such as truck driving, obsolete.​

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Critics like Robert Rector and Mimi Teixeira wrote in 2018 for the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, that the payouts "would decrease work among the poor and increase dependence on government."​

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But research has shown that the Alaska dividend has not caused people to drop out of the labor market, as critics of Yang's plan have suggested could happen with a national program. Instead, the influx of cash into the hands of Alaskans has led them to spend more and created a larger demand for labor.​

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Ioana Marinescu, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and Damon Jones, a professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, studied the effects of the fund on the Alaskan labor market by comparing trends in the state with similar states like Wyoming and Utah.​

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What they found was that the employment level in Alaska has tracked with the comparable states since 1982, meaning that the dividend had no detectable impact on the Alaskan labor market.​

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What's notable about their finding is that it conflicts with one of the major criticisms of Yang's "Universal Basic Income" plan: If people are receiving free cash from the government, they're less likely to work.​

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"We were like, 'Oh wow, this is interesting,'" Marinescu told NBC News. "Not necessarily what we expected because economic theory tells us that when people get money, that should reduce their desire to work. We find that what likely happened here is that receiving all this cash meant that people were spending more at local businesses, and that's stimulating employment."​

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The stimulation "about exactly balanced out any desire of people to work less," she added. "It comes down to, sure, some people want to work less, but on the other hand, there's more jobs." ...​

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2020-election/critics-say-yang-s-cash-giveaway-means-people-won-t-n991126​

 

[Richard Stanley]

Another article, excerpted below, discussing the rapid rise of Andrew Yang.

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A few months ago, Andrew Yang was a relatively unknown venture capitalist and entrepreneur running a longshot campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, with low name recognition and little footprint in the polls.​

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But thanks to appearances on the Joe Rogan Experience and the Breakfast Club— one a hugely popular podcast and the other a highly-rated radio show, both with diverse audiences — the political newcomer gained traction and a large following across social media, seemingly overnight.​

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And since then, Yang has made multiple appearances on Fox News and on conservative commentator Ben Shapiro's podcast — neither of which are usually frequented by Democratic presidential contenders.​

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Those appearances helped expose Yang to audiences who might not have otherwise heard of him, namely, the so-called "meme masters" of Reddit, 4Chan, and other forums.​

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Read more:Andrew Yang is running for president in 2020. Here's everything we know about the candidate and how he stacks up against the competition.​

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Searching #YangGang on Twitter, Reddit, or Facebook, you'll see a slew of memes about Yang accompanied by the slogan "secure the bag," which refers to Yang's signature policy proposal of giving every American adult $1,000 a month — a universal basic income program which he's termed the Freedom Dividend.​

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Some of Yang's loyal base of online support comes from liberals, but also from a sizeable contingent of former Trump supporters who are disappointed in Trump not fulfilling his campaign promise to bring jobs back to economically downtrodden areas, and are now latching on to the Freedom Dividend as the only viable solution any 2020 contenders are presenting to those problems. ...​

https://www.thisisinsider.com/andrew-yang-online-memes-2020-fundraising-2019-4​

 

[Richard Stanley]

Andrew Yang acquits himself quite well here:

 

[Richard Stanley]

The following is an excerpt of an excerpt of an interview by Vox's Ezra Klein with Rutger Bregman, author of Utopia for Realists, where they discuss the socioeconomic aspects of why such things as a UBI makes better sense (than the overt feudal/slave systems of traditional religious based cultures or the psychotically deranged, inherently excessive extremes of secular laizzez faire economics). The inherent-ness of the latter is due to the gross devaluation of 'labor' in comparison to the disproportionate overvaluation of profit from capital.

My excerpt discusses the term utopia and progressing towards a utopia, in the manner that I have discussed as a proper 'engineering approach', that of making continual improvements and not being bound to tradition for tradition sake. For with the above extremes, there will be winners and either literal or virtual slaves. Those who have been the historical winners, and those aspirants who have bought into this mindset thus always, as they are doing now, propagandically frame the slightest deviance from their profitable extremism as such as totalitarian Communism, convincing their critical mass that there are only binary options available, when in reality there is an almost infinity range of possibilities to achieve more optimum social constructs, if not utopias.

You can stream the whole interview from inside the link above, or via podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/the-ezra-klein-show/id1081584611

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Ezra Klein ​

In Utopia for Realists, you write, “in the past, everything was worse. For roughly 99 percent of the world’s history, 99 percent of humanity was poor, hungry, dirty, afraid, stupid, sick and ugly.”​

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This is a very Steven Pinker-ish argument, but where he uses that history to push us to value the system we have, you use it to argue for a radical departure of the system we have. So where do you and Pinker differ?​

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Rutger Bregman​

I would say he has a more sanitized view of history. He doesn’t show all the struggles and the fights, and the battles for power that went on [to achieve progress]. It seems quite ironic to me that the Steven Pinkers of today don’t like social justice warriors. The great achievements that they’re so happy about have often been achieved by the social justice warriors of the past.​

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Ezra Klein​

At the beginning of the book, you have this great line, “This book isn’t an attempt to predict the future. It’s an attempt to unlock the future, to fling open the windows of our minds.” Why should we be working backwards from utopia?​

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Rutger Bregman​

We know that every milestone of civilization — the end of slavery, democracy, equal rights for women — were all utopian fantasies in the past. So the point is to come up with new utopias: visions of a radically better society. It was Oscar Wilde who said, “Progress is the realization of utopias.”​

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My book was an argument against people who view politics as just another form of technocracy or management. I wanted to say, look, I know that there have been horrible utopias in the 20th century, but we shouldn’t throw it all away because progress is all about the realization of utopias.​

...​

 

[Richard Stanley]

There are growing number of video interviews out there with Andrew Yang. As such I have picked a few more that I have watched recently. His conception of the UBI, aka the Freedom Dividend, is getting more interest as people are learning about it and overcoming the knee-jerk dog whistle response to it as Socialism. No, it's just a different and reformed manner of Capitalism, that takes some of the pressure of the metaphorical boot off of peoples' throats. It's like using fertilizer to help your seedlings grow.

As Yang discusses, immigrants have not destroyed 4 million American jobs in recent years. Automation has, and before that there was offshoring of jobs to foreign slave-wage countries. And, that such automation is only accellerating. The next big shoe to drop is that of truck drivers, the largest number of blue-collar jobs in 29 American states. But that is not all. Meanwhile the likes of Amazon, Facebook, and Google pay little or nothing back into society for their extreme profits, using the public's personal data for free. Meanwhile Katy Perry is having to pay some Christian band millions for allegedly plagiarizing one of their songs.

The first video below is a compilation of various MSNBC clips that demonstrate a clear corporate bias against Andrew Yang:

Is this next one, an interview of Yang with Chuck Todd, the exception that proves the prior rule?

This next is the geek's interview with Yang, via Recode Decode's Kara Swisher:

 

[Richard Stanley]

The first video below is a 2 hour interview with Yang by Joe Rogan. They go into more of Yang's broad range of policy proposals, but also, the time allows for a broader discussion of the looming apocalypse [sic] for global, much less American, workers (including many 'professionals', because of automation and AI. And, as they discuss, the American political elites are playing to be completely oblivious to this approaching economic tsunami.

Yang predicts that this will turn violent, if not addressed sufficiently. Maybe this is indeed the reason that he is being shunned by the corporate media (see the second video and first from the prior post)? And view this in light of the recent mass shootings and their misguided motives. As Yang states, Trump is doing everything backwards to properly address the issue.

The DNC sticks its thumb on the scales again, while Yang is gaining traction in the first position under the upper tier of Dem candidates:

The following intersperses clips of Yang interviews with an Fox Business interview with Mark Cuban, where Cuban clearly explains that we must rethink American Capitalism, before its inherent inequality triggers its own collapse. Unfortunately, we will not do so, so take cover.

 

[Richard Stanley]

The following excerpt is from a great article about America's President Yang, who will kick the present Hyksos invading swamp scum out of the White House. Yang is rising rapidly, and peeling dissaffected voters away from the fake orange scum. The end of the article has some comments from some of these voters.

BEAUFORT, S.C.—Andrew Yang was sitting here in a rented silver Suburban outside a black chamber of commerce surrounded by five members of his rapidly growing campaign staff when he saw a new Fox News poll in which he was tied for fifth in the sprawling Democratic presidential primary.​

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He stared at the screen of his phone and scrolled.​

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“Three percent!” Yang said, in his characteristically dry, droll way. “This team. Is the team. That’s going to go … all. The. Way. To the White House!”​

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Yang breezily walked into the chamber building and got onto a packed elevator. To the county party chair squeezed into a corner, Yang excitedly passed along the results of the poll, listing in order the only people who were ahead of him—a former vice president (Joe Biden) and three high-profile senators (Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris).​

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“And then me!” he exclaimed, flashing a goofy, exaggerated smile.​

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Perhaps you haven’t noticed, but Andrew Yang is … surging? It sounds crazy, and who knows how long it lasts? But for now he is one of 10 candidates who have qualified through sufficiently robust polling and fundraising for this fall’s third and fourth debates. The exhausting cluster of Oval Office aspirants, at least for these purposes, has been whittled to this: the aforementioned top four, two more senators, a mayor, a former member of Congress and … this guy. Yang is a 44-year-old entrepreneur from New York and a father of two young sons who’s never run for any office of any kind before this, and whose campaign is fueled by a deeply dystopian view of the near future (trucker riots, anybody?), a pillar of a platform that can come off as a gimmick (a thousand bucks a month for every American adult!), and a zeitgeisty swirl of podcasts, GIFs, tweets and memes. Last week, as a successful governor from a major state dropped out and the bottom half of the bloated field continued to flounder, Yang passed the 200,000 mark for unique donors—outpacing an array of name-known pols. He’s gotten contributions, on average $24 a pop, from 88 percent of the ZIP codes in the country, and he’s on track, he says, to raise twice as much money this quarter as he did last quarter.​

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It’s a phenomenon hard to figure—until you get up close and take in some strange political alchemy. At the heart of Yang’s appeal is a paradox. In delivering his alarming, existentially unsettling message of automation and artificial intelligence wreaking havoc on America’s economic, emotional and social well-being, he … cracks jokes. He laughs easily, and those around him, and who come to see him, end up laughing a lot, too. It’s not that Yang’s doing stump-speech stand-up. It’s more a certain nonchalant whimsy that leavens what he says and does. Sometimes his jokes fall flat. He can be awkward, but he also pointedly doesn’t appear to care. It’s weird, and it’s hard to describe, but I suspect that if Yang ever said something cringeworthy, as Jeb Bush did that time in 2016—“Please clap”—the audience probably would respond with mirth, not pity. Critics ding his ambit of proposals as fanciful or zany (getting rid of the penny, empowering MMA fighters, lowering the voting age to 16) and question the viability of his “Freedom Dividend,” considering its sky-high price tag (“exciting but not realistic,” Hillary Clinton decided when she considered the general notion in the 2016 cycle). And his campaign coffers are chock-full of small-number contributors and even $1 donors. Still, at this angry, fractious time, and in this primary that’s already an edgy, anxious slog, Yang and his campaign somehow radiate an ambient joviality. Of his party’s presidential contestants, he’s the cheerful doomsayer. ...​

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/08/22/andrew-yang-2020-president-profile-227631​

 

[Richard Stanley]

The following is an 1.5 hour video about President Yang's most important ideas. It opens with a blitz of clips showing the dazzling breadth of immanent and existing automation that will eliminate millions more American and other global workers' jobs. It also has a compilation of Americans, past and present, that support what President Yang has termed the Freedom Dividend, which evidence has demonstrated does not reduce healthy peoples' desire to work and earn more money, presumably doing more things they are excited to do. Why? Because they no longer feel economically pressured to take the immediate (crap) opportunity to provide for basic personal or family needs.

Very interestingly, in the middle of the video is a series of clips showing rabid mind slaves, of the false binary economic dialectic, foaming at the mouth about the Universal Basic Income. These people are the classic case of people acting against their best interests, their psychology based upon their aspirational ambitions to project themselves into success, making them support the furtherance of funneling disproportionate and retrograde wealth into the hands of the ever fewer. (This disproportionate wealth is indeed retrograde for society, and even those individuals, by the destabilization of society, and that such billionaires are notoriously inefficient at productively recycling their excess capital back into societal needs for such as widespread employment.)

The paradox of the UBI solution, and similar, is that such retail giants as Amazon, and small businesses everywhere, will do even better via the bottom-up distribution of a widespread base of funds. Public facing businesses need customers with cash more than anything else. Such spending ends up getting recirculated many times within a community.

 

[Jerry Russell]

Caitlin Johnstone wrote a column about the UBI today. She sees the promise, but she's also concerned that the system could create a dystopian new underclass.

https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2019/09/08/universal-basic-income-automation-plutocracy-dystopia/

Do you know who supports the implementation of a UBI besides Andrew Yang? Billionaires. Lots of billionaires, especially the new money tech billionaires who are positioning themselves to inherit the earth in the transition to a new paradigm dominated by automation and artificial intelligence. Billionaires like Jeff Bezos, Pierre Omidyar, Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, Elon Musk, Richard Branson, Bill Gross, Tim Draper, and more moderately Bill Gates have all been seen advocating for a policy that is now being popularized as one which would level the economic playing field and take power away from the billionaire class.​

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Now why would that be? Why would a group of people who’ve clawed their way up to positions of immense wealth control, enabling them to live as modern-day kings, be so eager to suddenly give away that power? Why would they break with the trend we’ve consistently observed in rulers since the dawn of recorded history and voluntarily relinquish the power they fought to claim without a fight? Are billionaires just naturally good people inherently predisposed to compassionate action and wealth redistribution? Have we been wrong about Jeff Bezos being a real-life supervillain this entire time?​

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Of course not. This increasingly powerful class of new money tech plutocrats are not pushing to give power away, they’re pushing to secure more. As Jimmy Stewart’s character says in It’s A Wonderful Life, Potter isn’t selling, Potter’s buying.​

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I am not arguing against the general principle of universal basic income here. If humanity is to learn to collaborate in a healthy way with the ecosystem in which we evolved, a lot more of us are going to have to start doing a lot less. We’re going to have to stop using up energy driving to jobs the world doesn’t need to produce crap you have to propagandize people into believing they want so they’ll spend money on it and then throw it in the landfill. That’s obviously an insane way for an increasingly technologically advanced species to continue to function, and one way or another we are going to have to start doing a lot more nothing quite soon.​

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But imagine what will happen with a system of the kind Yang and the tech billionaires are proposing. Imagine what will happen in a society where people are no longer necessary and have nothing the powerful need. Imagine what will happen when people become dependent on a subsistence UBI set up by the already plutocrat-controlled government to sustain them when plutocrat-owned technologies render their labor completely moot. Imagine a world where a few increasingly consolidated automation firms produce more and more of the goods and services once provided by human labor and re-collect all taxes they have to pay into the UBI from a public forced by their subsistence wages to buy automation-made products and services.​

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That would be total oligarchic control. Not what we’re seeing now; what we’re seeing now is not total oligarchic control. Our current predicament pales in comparison to how bad it could get.​

 

[Richard Stanley]

Maybe the billionaire class is waking up to the reality that they are not safe if the vast majority of their fellow humans can't live with a minimum baseline of dignity?

As Yang say, not all jobs are easily automated, and the UBI does not prevent people from seeking additional means of income, no it even allows them to take risks that they otherwise would not when confronted with the daily struggle to survive till the end of the day or week. Lot's of possibilities suddenly become realizable that weren't there before.

And, contrary to the false Randian ideal, none of these billionaires made it on their own initiatives. They stand on the backs of countless others, present and past. And, in the not so short run, they will all be better off for this being implemented.

One of the reasons that today's homeless refuse to take various aid, including shelter, is they do not like what comes with it, the various rules and restrictions. This is the great thing about the Freedom Dividend, you just get it unconditionally. Many people already on government aid with such restrictions and reporting requirements can opt to convert to the UBI, thus funding the UBI will be less expensive than claimed. And billionaires (or anybody else) can opt out.

 

[Jerry Russell]

Maybe the billionaire class is waking up to the reality that they are not safe if the vast majority of their fellow humans can't live with a minimum baseline of dignity?

Perhaps so, but the proposal is currently limited to citizens of the USA. Or would it be for everyone inside the borders, citizen or not?

What about the rest of the world? Do the billionaires care about peasants in Bangladesh? Or is it OK with the billionaire class, if the ocean swallows them up?

This is the great thing about the Freedom Dividend, you just get it unconditionally.

My guess is that conservatives will only go along with this plan if some conditions get attached. Or if it's free initially, idle hands will accomplish enough mischief that there will quickly be demands for regulations.

What sort of regulations? I bet every able-bodied person will be required to show up for pro bono duty. Including, plenty of staffing for domestic police forces, and a ready supply of soldiers.

So, Yang is the high-tech billionaires' favorite candidate. As such, I'll bet you're right that he will quickly rise to the top of the Democratic heap, and run a formidable campaign against Trump.

You called it first, on April 7!! Good job.

Is this based purely on the merits of the UBI? Where's the biblical typology? Is this our King David?

 

[Richard Stanley]

Historically, the UBI concept is neither conservative or liberal, it should be viewed on its merits and not hogtied with the false political dialectic. Besides, in order for it to work, it should have no conditions whatsoever, other than an opt out provision.

As such, I don't think you should make the UBI THE scarecrow that must solve all the world's problems, else shitcan it. Yang actually has a huge number of serious policy proposals besides the UBI. And, he is saying that Global Warming is worse than you and Caitlin think it is, but he is not trying to solve it with the UBI.

I think that non-citizens should get their UBI from their home countries, and I don't otherwise see a problem with them seeking employment here, with worker's permits and asylum applications or approvals, albeit we need to be pressuring such governments to clean up their acts - by not bending over to such as American and other corporations' interests.

While I did walk to and from my dentist twice today, I do not generally see a completely Luddite and Malthusian approach as the optimal solution, albeit every incentive should be provided to avoid waste of most everything. Instead, we have a President threatening all American automakers with anti-trust action because they are willing (or pretending to be willing) to meet such as California mileage and emission standards. Interesting that such as the Saudis, the UAE, Russia, and even Iran stand to win financially if Trump does on this issue.

Fully autonomous cars will mean fewer cars will be manufactured, as fewer people, like me, will feel the need to own one. Autonomous cars and trucks will mean fewer accidents and deaths, meaning lower medical costs for society. There will be numerous such transformations.

Yang says that we have to change the economic metrics for how we value things, for example that GDP has no value for the average or below American, but relates more directly to corporations. Similarly, we have to rebalance the legal status of corporations as literal super-citizens that the Supreme court did in the late 1800's.

The problem with any system of governance is that there must be sufficient 'real' controls on who gets and retains access to power. And that all claims to such as 'secrecy' (non-transparency) similarly have sufficient controls. Unfortunately, there are currently, as always before, too many appeals to nonsense justifications to either domestic or foreign violence and/or coercion (frequently with retrograde religious or other cultural basis).

Until those are resolved, by getting enough people to pull their figurative heads out of their figurative asses, we'll be stuck making hard fought incremental improvements, of which I see the UBI and single payer health care as a huge improvement to achieving an actual middle way, as opposed to the typical bait and switch of such as the Nazis.

What is Caitlin's solution(s)?

I doubt seriously that President Yang will become President. For one thing, I don't see how Trump can allow an election, and it looks like Moscow Mitch, Pelosi and the Supremes are set to go along with the new dynasty (that is now being declared, by such as Brad Parscale).

It appears summer is effectively gone, and I hardly broke a sweat. The bedroom ceiling fan ran only 4 times (instead of two+ months straight).

 

[Jerry Russell]

Historically, the UBI concept is neither conservative or liberal, it should be viewed on its merits and not hogtied with the false political dialectic.

Historically, I'm not sure what you're seeing.

While American political discourse is highly degraded, perhaps we can use "liberal" and "conservative" in their original sense from the French Revolution. That is, supporters of the King, nobility, and the Church sat on the Right, and the revolutionaries calling for Liberty, Equality and Fraternity sat on the Left.

Wikipedia traces the idea of a social safety net to Marquis de Condorcet, who was definitely seated on the Left Wing of the French revolution, notwithstanding his noble status. And, they say the specific notion of a UBI is first mentioned in Thomas More's Utopia, depicting an ideal society with clearly liberal tendencies. In the US, Richard Nixon supported negative income tax. Back in the 1970's, Nixon was regarded as a conservative Republican, but nowadays his views and accomplishments would be seen as extreme Left.

As such, I don't think you should make the UBI THE scarecrow that must solve all the world's problems, else shitcan it.

If indeed it were possible to implement on a global level, it would go a long way towards solving the world's problems. That is, aside from environmental issues & resource depletion.

But the question CJ is asking (and I must think it's a good question, otherwise I wouldn't have posted the link) is: what does UBI mean within the current political context, and what are the effects going to be? How likely is it, that the money really will come with no strings attached?

What is Caitlin's solution(s)?

She says we need to recognize that everything that's been tried before, has failed. Therefore, we need to begin by looking inwards and understanding ourselves. We need to find our own inner truths, beyond all those failed ideas of the past. Then we can come together and start identifying solutions, while rejecting the false narratives foisted on us by the mainstream culture. It's all very nebulous and vaguely spiritual. She's a great admirer of Eckhart Tolle.

I doubt seriously that President Yang will become President.

Well then, let's be clear about our forecast, so that we can get credit if we're right. Or conversely, let's be wishy-washy and that way nobody can say we're wrong.

Would you predict that Yang will be the Democratic Party nominee for 2020?

 

[Jerry Russell]

Here's Yang's page on climate change. This is pretty impressive. But, I'm still most likely to vote for Bernie in the primary.

https://www.yang2020.com/blog/climate-change/

Climate change is an existential threat, and we need to recognize that we’re already living through the negative effects. The increase in natural disasters is costing us hundreds of billions of dollars, and the total cost of climate change will run into the trillions while taking an untold number of lives. And the people who are most affected by these impacts of climate change are the least able to deal with it – economically disadvantaged and minority communities face a disproportionate burden.​

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The right time to deal with this crisis was decades ago. We’ve waited too long, so we need to act fast and recognize that all options need to be on the table in order to adapt to the changed world we live in while mitigating behaviors that make it worse and reversing the damage we’ve already done. We can’t dismiss any ideas – especially not those that have support from the scientific community – or rule anything out because it doesn’t fit our ideological framework.​

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[Jerry Russell]

What is Caitlin's solution(s)?

Oddly enough, Caitlin's answer appeared in today's column. Coincidence? Synchronicity? Or, are Richard and Caitlin both getting calls from Illuminati Central?

https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2019/09/10/how-to-defeat-the-empire/

One of the biggest and most consistent challenges of my young career so far has been finding ways to talk about solutions to our predicament in a way that people will truly hear. I talk about these solutions constantly, and some readers definitely get it, but others will see me going on and on about a grassroots revolution against the establishment narrative control machine and then say “Okay, but what do we do?” or “You talk about problems but never offer any solutions!”​

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Part of the difficulty is that I don’t talk much about the old attempts at solutions we’ve already tried that people have been conditioned to listen for. I don’t endorse politicians, I don’t advocate starting a new political party, I don’t support violent revolution, I don’t say that capitalism contains the seeds of its own destruction and the proletariat will inevitably rise up against the bourgeoisie, and in general I don’t put much stock in the idea that our political systems are in and of themselves sufficient for addressing our biggest problems in any meaningful way.​

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What I do advocate, over and over and over again in as many different ways as I can come up with, is a decentralized guerrilla psywar against the institutions which enable the powerful to manipulate the way ordinary people think, act and vote.​

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I talk about narrative and propaganda all the time because they are the root of all our problems. As long as the plutocrat-controlled media are able to manufacture consent for the status quo upon which those plutocrats built their respective empires, there will never be the possibility of a successful revolution. People will never rebel against a system while they’re being successfully propagandized not to. It will never, ever happen.​

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Most people who want drastic systematic changes to the way power operates in our society utterly fail to take this into account. Most of them are aware to some extent that establishment propaganda is happening, but they fail to fully appreciate its effects, its power, and the fact that it’s continually getting more and more sophisticated. They continue to talk about the need for a particular political movement, for this or that new government policy, or even for a full-fledged revolution, without ever turning and squarely focusing on the elephant in the room that none of these things will ever happen as long as most people are successfully propagandized into being uninterested in making them happen.​

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It’s like trying to light a fire without first finding a solution to the problem that you’re standing under pouring rain. Certainly we can all agree that a fire is sorely needed because it’s cold and wet and miserable out here, but we’re never going to get one going while the kindling is getting soaked and we can’t even get a match lit. The first order of business must necessarily be to find a way to protect our fire-starting area from the downpour of establishment propaganda.​

 

[Richard Stanley]

Historically, I'm not sure what you're seeing.

The video has a nice compilation of historical support for the UBI, across the political spectrum. Thomas Paine, MLK, Dick Nixon, Milton Friedman, etc..

But the question CJ is asking (and I must think it's a good question, otherwise I wouldn't have posted the link) is: what does UBI mean within the current political context, and what are the effects going to be? How likely is it, that the money really will come with no strings attached?

As Yang states we need to change our manner of thinking about economics. Let's re-institute slavery, for instance. In this case, the current super-humans (aka corporations) will be made our slaves, as with robots.

The investor class has benefited disproportionately via the ability to legally procreate their corporate spawn. They create corporate babies so that they can do things like deflect personal liability and accrue other benefits. And Yang points out, such as Jeff Bezos is not paying a dime of taxes in exchange for what he has achieved and continuing to do. As such, the citizens of a country (and extendable to the world at some point) should have access to the benefits of such as their birthright. Investors should benefit for their risk, but not completely at the cost of the wider society that created the environment for them to do so.

Well then, let's be clear about our forecast, so that we can get credit if we're right. Or conversely, let's be wishy-washy and that way nobody can say we're wrong.

Would you predict that Yang will be the Democratic Party nominee for 2020?

I would love for Yang to win, but it is clear that the DNC is shading matters as it is also doing for Gabbard, Bernie, and others.

 

[Jerry Russell]

Thomas Paine, MLK, Dick Nixon, Milton Friedman, etc..

I just got finished explaining that Dick Nixon was a flaming liberal by modern standards. Thomas Paine and Milton Friedman were both great Libertarians. MLK, need I say more?

I would love for Yang to win, but it is clear that the DNC is shading matters as it is also doing for Gabbard, Bernie, and others.

Is there any clear evidence that the DNC is going out of their way to torpedo Yang's progress? If he is indeed the Billionaire's Choice, I would expect the red carpet treatment. (I confess I haven't watched any of the Yang videos yet. So if this has already been covered by the you-tubes, my apologies for asking....)

 

[Richard Stanley]

I just got finished explaining that Dick Nixon was a flaming liberal by modern standards. Thomas Paine and Milton Friedman were both great Libertarians. MLK, need I say more?

Libertarians generally don't advocated for handing out money to people for nothing. Sorry, I forgot the additional names, but there were even some fascists,

Is there any clear evidence that the DNC is going out of their way to torpedo Yang's progress? If he is indeed the Billionaire's Choice, I would expect the red carpet treatment. (I confess I haven't watched any of the Yang videos yet. So if this has already been covered by the you-tubes, my apologies for asking....)

I can't give any examples of DNC evidence, but I believe others have complained about this. The MSM has clearly excluded Yang in lists of candidate rankings, listed those below him while excluding him.

There is a video of Yang making a great speech to a DNC event, and he clearly knocked it out of the park.

 

[Jerry Russell]

Libertarians generally don't advocated for handing out money to people for nothing.

If you let Murray Rothbard or Cato Institute define Libertarianism for you, then you're right. But, what better way to give freedom to individuals, than to provide free money to meet all their basic needs? Especially if the economic goods are being provided entirely by robot slaves, so nobody has to pay any taxes. It's a Utopia that Thomas Moore couldn't even begin to imagine.

The MSM has clearly excluded Yang in lists of candidate rankings, listed those below him while excluding him.

Washington Times carried the story that CNN and NBC omitted Yang's name from their lists. But in NBC's case, they claimed it was just a mistake, and followed up with the appropriate apology & full coverage.

Perhaps what's really going on here, is another instance of factionalism among the elites. The tech billionaires might favor UBI, while the Catholic Church and the heirs of ancient European nobility want no part of it.