Keep In Mind

~ Clarissa

I wrote this in August of 2015 and it’s as relevant as ever. More so, if anything.

Several years ago, Putin tried to abolish welfare assistance for about 1,2 million people in the Greater Moscow area (where cost of living is higher than wherever it is that you live). People got angry, took to the streets, protested, and Putin had to cave. The welfare assistance was left in place.

Two weeks ago, Putin once again abolished the same welfare measures. Not a single person protested.

Moral of the story: if you fire up people’s diseased patriotism and allow them to feel no shame for hating their neighbors, you can easily take away all of their welfare protections.

And what it is that Trump is doing right now? Exactly.

Keep this in mind in the next couple of years.

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Published by Clarissa

4 thoughts on “Keep In Mind”

  1. You wrote about fake outrage about Trump’s tweets & co. drawing attention away from the real issues. This review of Ivanka Trump’s 2009 self-help book, “The Trump Card,” may be seen as another example, but it is simply funny. The funniest part:

    \ When Ivanka was a kid, she got frustrated because she couldn’t set up a lemonade stand in Trump Tower. “We had no such advantages,” she writes, meaning, in this case, an ordinary home on an ordinary street. She and her brothers finally tried to sell lemonade at their summer place in Connecticut, but their neighborhood was so ritzy that there was no foot traffic. “As good fortune would have it, we had a bodyguard that summer,” she writes. They persuaded their bodyguard to buy lemonade, and then their driver, and then the maids, who “dug deep for their spare change.” The lesson, she says, is that the kids “made the best of a bad situation.” In another early business story, she and her brothers made fake Native American arrowheads, buried them in the woods, dug them up while playing with their friends, and sold the arrowheads to their friends for five dollars each.

    http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/ivanka-trumps-terrible-book-helps-explain-the-trump-family-ethos

    Suddenly remembered “When Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov was a kid…” stories for children. Then the supposedly ideal Ulyanov was worshipped for (supposedly) helping his mother as a child and all people as an adult. Now money is worshipped in itself in such “self-help” books. Not Franklin’s commandment to work hard and be frugal since those people have never limited themselves in anything. Not any spirit of entrepreneurship since forcing your father’s employees to buy from you stuff they do not need or want is not entrepreneurship in any sense.

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