I have this morning posted a video on why I think it's Trump's economic plan to crash the world economy so that there might be a bailout to benefit the wealthy.
That video was recorded late last week.
Over the weekend, occasional commentator and long-term friend of this blog, Ivan Horrocks sent me this from MSNBC broadcast over the weekend:
The suggestion in that broadcast from Chris Hayes is that not only does Trump want a bailout, but he and his cohort want one for Bitcoin because they know how unstable it is without state support.
I suggest watching it. Everything he says is plausible and supports three things I have always said.
First, Trump has only the interests of the wealthy at heart.
Second, he and they know that there is no real value in Bitcoin because it has no obvious use except for crime - and I am not accusing them of that.
Third, they want to capture the capacity of the state to support their wealth, not least by supporting the supposed value of Bitcoin.
The Republican plan to hold a strategic Bitcoin reserve cannot be explained in any other way, in my opinion, but I look forward to well-reasoned alternative views.
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Bitcoin is majorly useful to facilitate trade between consenting adults which has been criminalised by government, mainly the US one.
No-one serious is suggesting that the users of Bitcoin for trade want their activities to be crimes. This really is a government caused problem, and they are getting in on the wrong side of it if they intend to buy some.
What you are saying is it is used for criminaql activity. We expect governments to define crime – and punish it. We accept their definitions if we believe in democracy. You spell all that is wrong with the GOP and those who support Bitcoin.
I think Norman has a point about how the USA was originally conceived which was as a Republic that respected rights, although it has gradually lost its way since going to a directly elected Senate over the past 110 years.
The idea was that the Federal Government only passes laws that are needed. Contrast that to the UK where the central government passes laws that they would like. In a liberal world what drugs you put in your body should be none of the business of the government, and all the business of you, and your friends and relatives if they care about you or are affected by your behaviours. But under democracy that responsibility gets shunted upstairs to legislators. The tyranny of the majority prevails and if 51% of them think Drug-A is a bad thing and the world is made better by criminalising it, then criminalised it will be. That this fills the jails and doesn’t solve the problem in the round doesn’t concern those who espouse democracy.
In a true Republic that would not happen.
Politely, grow up, as the USA has.
The Founding Fathers did not imagine the world Lincoln faced when he began this process of change, or what exists now. But maybe you still believe in slavery too? I suggest you stop pretending the politics of the 18c still apply now. They do not, and only the proponents of abuse wish they did.
is the criminality finding ways of not paying their taxes in full?
It is theft from the rest of us.
Trump’s recent conversion to believing in crypto is not all that odd. His own family have set up a crypto currency company and his pal Musk has his own crypto currency too. There is short term money to be made, all this government interest is driving up the values of all crypto.
The Chinese are far more sensible , having banned it’s use. No government should be bailing out crypto losses or even investing it.
Besides,like most people, Trump likely has no idea about what crypto is. The irony is that no individual has overall control, which is something he really wouldn’t like.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/11/12/why-is-trumps-election-as-us-president-prompting-a-bitcoin-surge
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/11/12/why-is-trumps-election-as-us-president-prompting-a-bitcoin-surge
It seems to me that Bitcoin and other cryptoassets provides a means for people to evade taxes that most of us have to pay.
It seems that HMRC plans to “crackdown on crypto tax evaders”.
See: “UK leads international crackdown on crypto tax evaders” ( 10 Nov 2023)
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/uk-leads-international-crackdown-on-crypto-tax-evaders
The only use of Bitcoin I have any remote awareness of is when it is used to pay hackers who hijack a companies computers with ransomware. This happened where a friend of mine works. The ransom was paid in bitcoin to retrieve all files that were less than 72 hours old. Everything else seemed to be safe in a cloud storage somewhere.
Crime, in other words
There is another way to explain this and the way to understand it is to look into the ultra right wing Libertarian sentiments of the PayPal mafia. This is Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and David Sacks, all figures who are currently brewing into the flesh of the next administration.
Peter Thiel is not directly involved, but his avatars JD Vance and Vivek are.
There is an extremist ideology that asserts of the only purpose of a government is in its monopoly of violence to support the ultra wealthy, and that they should control the world‘s money supply. These are people who embrace the philosophical view that the true nature of humanity is sociopathic and sociopathy is the highest virtue.
These aren’t idle words as well. Peter Thiel in particular has a long track record of being against democracy against market systems, and as an individual who sees “technology is an alternative politics”. A host of billionaires in the US has driven to seize control of the US government of society for a half century. This effort goes under the heading of the Koch network, but the PayPal mafia can be considered the ideological heirs of that network. Both have spent hundreds of millions of dollars every year over decades to deliver the United States into their hands and they have succeeded.
The UK is almost entirely under their influence as well. The Tory Party’s major figures have all made pilgrimage to the heritage foundation, one of the institutions established by that network, to formulate and proselytize policy favorable to total dominion by wealth. The US they’re probably the UK can rightly be called plutocracies. We are now in plutocracies ruled by the ideology that the world went off the right natural path of civilization in the wake of World War II.
Will competing factions of wealth and power get into conflict with them. Oh yeah, they will corporatists are interested in economic stability, and regulation favorable to their profit they aren’t interested in a destruction of the world order. I don’t know, and I don’t think they’re really quite prepared to deal with the world’s wealthiest men and the nightmare they consider to be utopia.
“There is an extremist ideology that asserts of the only purpose of a government is in its monopoly of violence to support the ultra wealthy, and that they should control the world‘s money supply.”
@G
True, but in the USA a rebellion is brewing and getting ready to boil over. One can hear it if one knows how to listen.
Just look at the social media response to the murder of the CEO of United Healthcare.
When the masses have had enough of being overlooked and lied to, they will make their will known.
I agree, but I think calling it a bailout is innacurate. This is a pump & dump.
Crypto’s ultimate usecase has been as a scam; using unregulated financial markets to do things like pump & dumps – as seen in Hawk coin, referenced by Hayes in the video.
The problem is that in 2022, the big dump happened and lots of people were left holding the bag (I have an uncle who lost some savings doing crypto trading, in fact). People were disillusioned, and regulators started cracking down.
So the Crypto people realized a new plan: Use their ill-gotten gaines to bribe American politicians into supporting Crypto (as both Harris & Trump claimed to). This strategic reserve is to leave the Federal Reserve holding the bag once the big players cash out.