• @UnderpantsWeevil
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    17 hours ago

    Indeed, the man went BANKRUPT 4 TIMES. Let that sink in as a clear indication of his incompetence.

    If you can go bankrupt to the tune of a billion dollars, walk across the street to another bank, take out a new billion dollar line of credit, and keep shitting in your gold plated toilets, then I’m not clear how you are the incompetent one.

    Trump highlights the real dividing line between Rich and Poor in America, and its the proximity to cheap, easy lines of credit. If you can discharge a billion dollars of debt time and time again, while I’m stuck on the hook for a few grand in credit card debts or a tens of thousands in student loans for the rest of my life, its trivial for you to remain rich while it remains onerous for me to escape poverty.

    they do demand other services like dissolving NATO

    This isn’t a demand from the Russians, its a demand from the paleocons and the libertarians. Long before Putin was mayor of St. Petersburg, guys like Ron Paul and Pat Buchanan were lobbying to remove the US from every international organization. And their ideas were well-received, in the same way Brexit and Yugoslavian balkinization and the parsing out of micro-states like Hong Kong and Singapore and Israel were well-received.

    Building these ultra-wealthy megapolises, surrounded by high walls and armed to the teeth against working class dissidents, has been the project of the western ultra-right wing for decades. Ayn Rand lionized it in the form of Galt’s Gulch. Heinlein romanticized it in “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress”. Friedman and the Chicago Boys forced it onto Central America and the Caribbean states during the Reagan Era. Now Trump is making this vision manifest in the beating heart of the Republic.

    American balkinization is a plutocrat final solution to federal regulations authored by elected authority. It is the mirror side of Lincoln’s dire warning against A House Divided. For the class of American revanchists who revile a democratic state, this is a deliberate end game.