Did… did I just slide to a parallel universe? Do I get to meet Jerry O’Connell? What the hell is going on?!
This reminds me of a manifesto I was reading for a proposed proletarian-run state. Comes from early 1900s, before the world went to shit because of the rise of fadcism. Particularly a few key points from their 25-point plan stood out to me:
- Abolition of unearned incomes [passive income, in today’s terms]. Breaking of debt (interest)-slavery.
- In consideration of the monstrous sacrifice of life and property that each war demands of the people, personal enrichment due to a war must be regarded as a crime against the nation. Therefore, we demand ruthless confiscation of all war profits.
- We demand nationalization of all businesses which have been up to the present formed into companies (trusts).
- We demand that the profits from wholesale trade shall be shared out.
- We demand an expansion on a large scale of old age welfare.
- We demand the creation of a healthy middle class and its conservation, immediate communalization of the great warehouses and their being leased at low cost to small firms, the utmost consideration of all small firms in contracts with the State, county or municipality.
- We demand a land reform suitable to our needs, provision of a law for the free expropriation of land for the purposes of public utility, abolition of land rent and prevention of all speculation in land.
- We demand struggle without consideration against those whose activity is injurious to the general interest. Common national criminals, usurers, profiteers and so forth are to be punished with death, without consideration of confession or race.
[…]
- The state is to be responsible for a fundamental reconstruction of our whole national education program, to enable every capable and industrious citizen to obtain higher education and subsequently introduction into leading positions. The plans of instruction of all educational institutions are to conform with the experiences of practical life. […] We demand the education at the expense of the state of outstanding intellectually gifted children of poor parents without consideration of position or profession.
- The state is to care for the elevating national health by protecting the mother and child, by outlawing child-labor, […]
Oops, wait, that’s excerpted from The National Socialist Program
Yeah, it turns out Nazis have always been willing to use socialist rhetoric to appeal to the working class. They know what they’re doing, but it’s only a matter of time before what’s determined to be for “the good of the workers” is coincidentally aligned with genocide and war and the greed of the ruling class…
TL;DR Nazis were always on board with taxing the rich… Until they didn’t have any more competition, at which point it’s back to oligarchy (and genocide, lots and lots of genocide).
Sooooo, current day russia?
Ya, explains a lot tbh.
Why are you reading Nazi manifestos? Most of those bullet points look terrible either way though.
Because I believe in learning from the past, and not making information forbidden either formally via regulations, nor informally via social pressures.
You can increase the taxes. The hard part is making them pay it
i love that shiteating grin on his face underneath this headline
Oh snap the broken clock was right for once.
He’s talking about rich Dems / libs
he’s talking about The Jews
It would be hilarious if trump did things that actually worked and became extremely well beloved by people because of it. Taking steps to reduce overhead to impact costs of doing business such as shop front rental coat’s. If you cause healthy deflation, you reduce cost of construction materials, and rental costs, this directly impacts small businesses that will pass the savings on to their customers. This impacts prices more than tax cuts ever will. Taxes can only be reduced so much, prices can drop to rock bottom prices increasing your spending power to the point manufacturing has to kick up to keep up with demand! Just make everyone pay the same tax percentage. I have no money left over by the time my next paycheck hits typically, I pay 30%, if my job is required to keep the business running, the economy running, and to keep the work moving, then I am just as important as the CEO that decides what work the corporation will be doing. They should be paying 30% too. This is physics 101 if you need 3 gears to run a watch, then no gear is more important than any other because it won’t run without just 1 of any of the gears! In terms of our government why is the biggest gears not providing the same input into the system? This is one thing that will stop it from ever being fixed. Reducing the load on the bigger gears and leaving it to the smaller gears messes up any geared system. You want even load across your entire machine. Until everyone is (apparently) forced to be a functioning member, this machine is going to keep having serious failures.
I’ve been hate listening to his podcast. A lot of what he says would be considered pretty eft leaning. But then a lot of it is conspiracy minded. Honestly Lauren to his podcast, it’s pretty unbearable, but he hates the elites as much as anyone here. It probably goes some way to understanding why trump won
First time I agree with Steve Bannon on anything, ever.
And hell just froze over.
Lmao it’s like when the old white men become senile and slide to the right except Bannon is morally inverted.
Maybe he doesn’t want to get targeted by the adjuster. I mean killing CEO and the rich is hot right now with the 99%.
It’s not polling all that well, tbh. Only hot with 41% across the income spectrum among youths, lower in every other demographic.
Bannon is an anger salesmen. Anger salesmen don’t sell you somene else’s anger, though – they can’t. Instead, they package up your own anger, and sell it back to you.
Bannon sees the the reaction people are habing to CEOs right now, slapping a big ol’ bow on it, and selling it back to people.
Sounds promising, except the “wealthy” he’s considering are probably in the 80k-250k bracket lol
Unless they’re targeting multimillionaires+, it’s not gonna work. The other half of this is that there needs to be an open and transparent process for keeping tracking of how taxes are spent
Edit but since it’s a bunch of kleptocrats in govt now, what to think of that? I guess rich progressives/dems/libs better make sure they’re using the same loop holes to conserve wealth that the conservatives will, otherwise it’s just playing a game rigged to kill you.
He’s just talking nonsense though. There is zero chance Trump will tax the billionaires overall. They paid him off, they own him.
But possibly of he’s feeling particularly pesky, he might target people he doesn’t like and target only them and pretend he did something meritorious.
Absolutely correct. Trump already told them if they help get him re-elected, he’ll cut their taxes.
And when has Trump ever kept his promises?
He will keep this one because in his mind it is a huge benefit to him. He’s always hated the idea of having to pay any taxes at all.
I’ll tell you wants going on. He is saying the quiet part out loud.
He is admitting that conservatives have always known what would make the country better but refused to admit it, instead have always played “dumb” by claiming their free market and deregulation approach is what they honestly believe is best for the country.
I might be reading too much into it but imo this shows that decades of democrats playing fair and true to the process is why we got here. Because selfish people realized that they can take advantage of the benefit of the doubt and just ruin the government while pretending they don’t know any better.
Pretty evil, more than I actually expected from him tbh.
"This is a 1932-type realignment, if we do this right,” Bannon explained. “Look at the demographics that got us here – black, Hispanic, white, working class, all of it. If we deliver for these people, and I mean deliver in a big way economically, then this is a coalition that could last for 50 years.”
He added that loyalty to “crony capitalism” and “tax breaks for the corporations” could “squander” a unique moment in history.
Making the economy better is how Hitler got into power too. The irony in saying this could be a 1932 style realignment is not lost on me. Trump has also said he wants to go after his political opponents and put them in prison. Also something Hitler did.
To expand on this for the unaware: Hitler came back into power for his second term in 1932. His first term, similar to trumps, was rife with turmoil and political/administrative blunders. One of the first things he did, upon returning to power, was a German version of The New Deal. They massively invested in their country’s infrastructure and provided tens of millions of jobs for the young working class, who had been suffering the worst unemployment crisis in an age. For the first time in their lives, young Germans had good jobs (with great benefits) and were contributing towards building a better, cleaner, safer Germany, all facilitated by “the national socialist party”. This was the part of nazi history that actually included socialism, and it’s how the nazi party duped an entire generation into becoming their foot soldiers. They actually delivered substantive, positive change for the people, allowed people to get comfortable with the new status quo while they further built propaganda machines, then turned that status quo into a carrot on a stick. Young nazi’s were very fearful of a backslide, so when nazi propaganda started saying all these bad people were trying to take away their newfound financial freedom, it was very easy to convince these young, relatively ignorant, working class people to “defend” the country they proudly built with their own hands.
If the GOP did a 180° on all of their economic policy, of the last 60+ years, to follow a similar story arc, I would be extremely concerned. With how down-trodden our 3 youngest generations are, the conditions for an American copy of nazi Germany couldn’t be more perfect than they are right now.
I’m not a historian. I just read a book on this subject recently. Feel free to correct or add to anything I got wrong/missed!
I’d be interested to hear which book this was!
If you appreciate books on history and this history specifically, check out what came right before it: Takeover: HITLER’S FINAL RISE TO POWER. It’s about the final six months before Hitler got there. It was surprising to me how much of an accident of history his reign was when I’d long thought it had been inevitable.
Well, it started with Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search For Meaning, which is more about what happened after the coup, until nazi’s downfall. Then, I read parts of The Third Reich by Thomas Childers, which prompted a documentary watch and I haven’t gone much further than that. But both of those books are amazing and very informative. I can try to find that documentary too, if you’re interested.
I’m interested
Found it!
If they flipped on their last 60 years of policy though… I’d be much happier with the status quo though. A new new deal and a thriving economy that helps the working class would be great. It would give far fewer issues that we need to address at once. Shit, if you got them flipped, since Republicans tend to fall in line they’ll take it as a win and celebrate it as they believed he would be good the entire time ignoring all of his policies changing. And it lands the Republicans left of the Democrats. Meaning when the Democrats lean towards the pubs to get voters … they’ll be moving left as well. If we somehow got healthcare and fair wages and taxation better through this… Then we only have to focus on ensuring they don’t subjugate populations like minorities, and get policing under control which all would be easier with a thriving economy and workforce. Less people are scared when more people are doing well. Whether someone is racist or not, the stereotypes become harder to push on people. A few other huge things like climate change, but with high taxes on the rich pushes companies to invest their money into their companies to avoid paying those taxes which in turn will churn out good things. (Either more quality, efficiency, research and expansion). Maybe we could finally catch up on battery tech and secure our own energy sources and grid for the future. That would be a great way to put America to work. Building an upgraded grid with storage and modularity for natural disasters.
Don’t get my hopes up on this shit just to
While I generally agree, I would still be extremely skeptical of those changes coming from the people that have spent the last 60 years sliding us into a situation were we desperately need those changes. If that was the play, I would see it as a decades long scam with the intent being to purchase legitimacy with a lie. The logical conclusion being they want absolute power and see a working strategy to obtain that by following in the nazi’s footsteps, with some modern revisions.
Skeptical is understandable. But we can use some wins man… if the winds blowing in the right direction better to veer the ship in the right direction than try to go agaisnt it while hurting and tiring ourselves out in the process.
The difference being that the Nazis were often competent people, and there was not the same massive base of crony capitalism with its fingers firmly enmeshed around every single area of government like there is in the US currently.
I won’t say it’s impossible, and I think they might be able to leverage social media to construct the exact same mass movement of loyal followers with the exact same horrifying results, but I don’t think the type of economic populism that did it for the Reich is feasible for the MAGA people to pull off. Definitely not with Trump at the helm.
Nazi leadership was not competent.
I mean, they took over the country and then more than half of Europe. Hitler fought in the infantry and wrote a whole book. I’m not saying they were geniuses and some parts were a pure clown show, especially after Hitler took over for real, but Trump literally just shuffles around shitting in his pants and doing whatever the last person who talked to him convinced him is a good idea.
And just like that, Steve Bannon learned about all the structures of liberal democracy that have thus far been stopping crony capitalism from squishing him like a worm on the sidewalk.
There’s a reason he isn’t hosting his little podcast in Russia or Algeria. He’s not 1% of strong enough to survive without the cushy protection afforded to white men in America who are broadly aligned with the rich people.
Thank you, this is the real lesson to take away from this, not some bass-ackwards universe shift again.
Edit: Stray thought about this again, this is why right wing populism is both effective at getting elected and devastating on countries as it shifts to fascism. Appeal to the masses while conspiring to retain power and increase wealth accumulation at the top.
None of this matters. Bannon is still useful to the media when they want a headline but he doesn’t have enough influence with Trump to actually action anything like this anyways. Trump’s cabinet is nothing but billionaires lol.
He’s talking about FDR not Hitler.
He’s definitely talking about Hitler. He might have FDR in mind for reasons of plausible deniability.
The FDR paradigm lasted 50 years until Reagan. The Hitler comparison doesn’t make sense in context given that it wasn’t a coalition in the way Bannin describes and didn’t last that long. Whereas the FDR coalition encompassed Northern liberals and Southern conservatives and controlled congress from 1932 to the 1994 mid term elections.
https://www.newsweek.com/bannon-thought-thats-hitler-when-trump-rode-golden-escalator-author-1677386
Like a lot of fascists, he tends to be dishonest about what he really means depending on what he thinks he can get away with, but he means Hitler.
One would like to think so. The problem is that imagining a right-wing Republican willing to jackboot some motherfuckers is easy; imagining one who wants to out-FDR FDR? Come on.
FDR wasn’t the champion of civil rights but he did fix the primary economic problems of the US during the depression. I personally don’t trust Bannon either but he’s clearly comparing to FDR not Hitler.
They despise FDR. Despise is too kind of a word for how they feel about FDR. That makes zero sense.
Yeah, really. I mean, there was an entire plot to assassinate FDR called the Business Plot and they counted on literally a retired general to help them pull it off, who they were going to install as a dictator. A year later the general testified against his fellow conspirators before a House committee. Nobody was actually prosecuted (huge mistake, IMO), but the final report said, “there is no question that these attempts were discussed, were planned, and might have been placed in execution when and if the financial backers deemed it expedient.”
Steve Bandwagon strikes again.
Populist gonna Populist.
