Stocks A to Z / Stocks B / Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.A)
No. of Recommendations: 7
It is good to remember the wisdom of Benjamin Franklin that “we must, indeed, all hang together or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.”
My faith is different than the cult of Trumpism.
Mine is an American faith.
I believe in freedom and the rights of all people.
I believe in the freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of religion, freedom of conscience and freedom to dissent.
I believe in the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
I believe that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
I reject the violence of the state against the people as a preeminent evil.
I reject the lies of Donald Trump.
I reject the arrogance and stupidity of his henchmen and women. They are disgraces and imbeciles, who will never outrun their infamy or perfidy.
I reject MAGA and every aspect of its malice, violence, cruelty, dishonesty, scapegoating, racism, antisemitism, insanity, weirdness and lawlessness.
I reject Donald Trump and his twisted vision for America.
I reject American fascism.
I see it clearly.
It is a descending evil that must be stopped. The only thing in the world that can stop it is love.
Love of country.
Love of an idea.
As John Winthrop states in “Dreams of a City upon a Hill:”
“For we must consider that wee shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us”.https://steveschmidt.substack.com/p/i-reject-ameri...
No. of Recommendations: 3
It is good to remember the wisdom of Benjamin Franklin that “we must, indeed, all hang together or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.”
My faith is different than the cult of Trumpism.
Funny - I sort of look at Trump's political movement as the fulfilment of Franklin's maxim. Not its antithesis.
Trump's message to the GOP on most things - and the message of leaders who invite total capitulation from their supporters - is that if everyone in the party always does what the leader says with little to no dissent, everyone will get a government that much more closely resembles what they want than the alternative. Even though it's true that they will get a number of actions/policies/rules they detest, on the whole the government will be better (in their eyes) than if they dissented.
By his personal political power over the GOP base, Trump has managed to replace the role that used to be filled by political parties, which has long since been crippled by changes in the law, technology, and fundraising: enforcer. Someone to enforce party unity. Since this power is personal to him, not institutional to a party, it's different in many key respects than the party system used to be. But the key similarity is to enforce that "we all hang together or we'll hang separately" mentality.
No. of Recommendations: 2
Trump's message to the GOP on most things - and the message of leaders who invite total capitulation from their supporters - is that if everyone in the party always does what the leader says with little to no dissent, everyone will get a government that much more closely resembles what they want than the alternative.
In other words: enforced conformity. Force everyone into the same mold. If someone isn't a fit, disappear them. I could not help but notice the conflict when I was in elementary school. We were being told about how Shinyland is all about personal liberty, but what the school demonstrated was enforced conformity.
Steve
No. of Recommendations: 3
In other words: enforced conformity. Force everyone into the same mold. If someone isn't a fit, disappear them.
That's what political parties do - and certainly did a lot more of back in the day. If you bucked leadership or refused to go along with the Whip on major votes, the party leadership would exact a consequence. It's not like Tip O'Neill was running a free-for-all - party discipline gets enforced. There's a reason it's called "the party line," after all.
That's what many organizations do, actually. It's not like union members get to just choose whether or not to honor a strike called by their unions, for example. I mean, they do have that choice - but unions put a ton of pressure on members (and even non-members) to try to enforce conformity to the collective choice.
It's all the same principle: solidarity. If we don't hang together we will hang separately.
Trump's managed to vastly increase the range of right-wing stuff that can get done during the current "trifecta" of GOP control by the simple expedient of being able to require everyone in the GOP coalition to just go along with it. So the Trump Administration has been able to force changes that would be beyond the wildest dreams of his right wing base if anyone in his party was trying to attack him.
Either for his actions or his inactions. One of the most amazing things about the first nine months of the Trump Administration is that even as he broke every tradition and norm to advance his agenda, he didn't do anything of consequence to restrict abortion. Virtually nothing. And there's been almost no criticism of him to amount to anything! Here we have a Republican President who is exercising power to an unprecedented degree, acting like nothing is beyond his power, and he hasn't deigned to do anything of note on his party's most defining issue - and the base has just swallowed their tongue! Hard to imagine the same thing happening on the Democratic side, that's for sure - the Sunrise Movement would have President Bernie Sanders' ass if he tried to do the same scope of stuff on the liberal side if he were President but had decided to put climate change to the side just because it was a political deadweight.
Anyway, the GOP is vastly more effective because Trump has gotten them all to hang together - more the embodiment of Franklin's aphorism than contradicting it.
No. of Recommendations: 1
That's what many organizations do, actually.
Ayup. As noted before, I have worked for some "JCs" like Trump: they build an echo chamber around themselves, fill it with yes-men, and anyone who dares say anything his nibs does not want to hear, is pushed out.
Steve
No. of Recommendations: 1
As noted before, I have worked for some "JCs" like Trump: they build an echo chamber around themselves, fill it with yes-men, and anyone who dares say anything his nibs does not want to hear, is pushed out.
That's a little different, though.
Formal organizations, like a corporation, typically don't suffer from collective action problems. Collective action problems result when you have independent autonomous actors whose best group outcome might be if everyone cooperates, but where each decision-maker faces individual incentives to defect from the group. In the absence of some ability to enforce a common plan of action, the outcome that results from all the individual decision-making can be very sub-optimal.
Because of that, there can be a substantial benefit to trying to find a way to enforce conformity. That's why political parties have Whips (and why the Whip is usually a pretty powerful person in party leadership). If the party can force people to conform to the party line, the party will be able to achieve more of their goals. Parties are stronger if everyone rows in the same direction, unions are stronger if everyone honors the strike, etc.
An actual company or corporation typically has the ability to enforce a common plan of action. "Yes-men" aren't so defined by their unwillingness to defy the company's business plan and refuse to follow the instructions of the CEO. They're marked by their unwillingness to offer candid advice or information within the decision-making process. In almost any company, if a vice-president was actively and publicly working to get the Board of Directors to force the CEO to make a different choice or reverse one of their decisions, that VP would certainly be fired ASAP. We see that in politics - and sometimes esteem it - because political positions are structured differently than positions in a company.
