RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2024/07/23/the-big-divide/

Whether the economy is currently bubbling along or facing a slowdown, a slow-motion disaster is about to create a real crisis for the government, our future politics, and the shrinking middle class. Half of households have no retirement savings.

This is just one of many shifts in the economy that reflect the declining fortunes of the middle class. Wages have remained mostly flat for most workers—particularly those without a college degree—since the early 1970s. Recent high rates of inflation further cut into the ability of the self-identified middle class to make ends meet. But the biggest change has been the abolition of employer-provided pensions and their replacement with rickety and self-managed 401k savings plans.

All of this will only get worse over the next few decades. Social Security benefits are currently extremely modest. For those who do not own homes, rising rents will further cut into their ability to maintain a toehold on middle-class existence, assuming they can remain housed at all.

Who Gets to Retire?

It’s easy to think this is extreme, as retirement looks pretty good for most baby boomers. They are the wealthiest generational cohort, often benefiting from pensions, which are supplemented by real estate holdings, 401Ks, and IRAs. This prosperity is distributed unevenly, however.

For every retiree hitting the cruise ship circuit or playing golf, many others have learned too late that they may have to work much longer than they anticipated. The game changed abruptly during their lifetimes, as major companies shed defined benefit plans and replaced them with voluntary retirement accounts managed by workers. As this momentous change took place, the urgency of the moment was not impressed upon workers, and generational optimism blinded many to the difficult road ahead.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/pride-goeth-before-a-withdrawal

Smart lad, to slip betimes away, From fields where glory does not stay, And early though the laurel grows, It withers quicker than the rose.

The lines are from A. E. Housman’s poem “To an Athlete Dying Young.” Joe Biden is not an athlete dying young. He is a president, leaving old, at a shockingly late moment in the drama of the year 2024, just weeks before the Democratic convention. He should have slipped away a few years ago. 

About the dead, one must speak nothing but good. About Joe Biden in his withdrawal from the presidential race, commentators for now are saying nothing except that it was a difficult, poignant, and self-sacrificing deed, touched by nobility. His bombshell on a Sunday afternoon in July broke an unbearable tension in what used to be called the public mind—a tension compounded, week after week, by footage of the president walking stiffly, staring blankly, fumbling his words, and staggering as he ascended the short stairs onto Air Force One. His June 27 debate with Donald Trump was excruciating to watch. So it was that the announcement of his departure—not merely from the 2024 race but from a long and complicated public life—produced a kind of dazed relief. The first reactions were generous and grateful. And yet there was a note of nil nisi hokum in the air. 

It’s said that no president can be properly judged until 30 years have elapsed from the time he left office. By that rule, Joe Biden cannot be correctly evaluated until 2054 or thereabouts. 

For the moment, it would be well to remember that the incredible mess of American politics in the summer of 2024 is the doing not only of the egregious Donald Trump but also of a stubborn, prideful, selfish Joe Biden and his wife Jill and the rest of the Bidens, and his closest aides. In this debacle, Biden’s laurels are withered; he does not deserve much glory. In the wake of his reluctant departure from the race, he leaves a squalor of conspiracy theories and the scandal of his having persisted for so long. Conservative historians will write him off as an incompetent, while progressives—after overpraising his accomplishments—will recall him as the one who left the Democratic Party in chaos and, as may be, delivered the country to the carnivore Donald Trump.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/07/22/a-decade-of-conspiracists/

Who has most peddled conspiracy allegations the last nine years—all of them false and nearly all of them influencing national elections and public policies?

Once a target is constructed as Hitlerian, almost any means necessary to quash that perceived existential threat become justified. And we have seen a lot of them in the last nine years.

Russian collusion did not work. Christopher Steele was a fraud. Robert Mueller came up empty.

The Alfa Bank ping caper was a myth.

The Russian laptop disinformation was a lie and ruined the reputations of the “51 former intelligence authorities” who sanctioned it.

The first Trump impeachment was a strictly partisan vote, activated when Trump lost the House and Mueller had come up empty.

Only ten Republicans impeached Trump a second time; the Senate again acquitted then-private citizen Trump.

January 6 was a buffoonish riot. In magnitude and lethality, it marked only a fraction of the destruction in lives and property of the green-lit Antifa-BLM-organized 120-day “summer of love” of rioting, violence, and arson of 2020.

The post facto militarization of Washington into an armed camp, the presence of FBI informants on Capitol grounds, the decision not to beef up security forces, the weird effort to suppress videos of the riot and congressional testimonies and evidence, the promotion and canonization of the reckless officer Byrd who lethally shot an unarmed Ashli Babbitt, and the use of solitary confinement for the arrested, long detentions without trials, and inordinately harsh prison sentences (in comparison to the nearly 14,000 arrested in 2020 who were mostly released) will remain controversial until freedom of information suits release the full story of the day’s events and aftermath.

Sixteen states, in an unprecedented move, tried in vain to remove Trump from the 2024 ballot. All failed. If they had succeeded, elections as we know them would have ceased to exist.

Four prosecutorial teams, local, state, and federal, sought to bankrupt, jail, or render Trump inert during the 2023-2024 campaign cycle. All will likely fail—but risk opening a new chapter of tit-for-tat lawfare in lieu of relying on the voters to choose their own president.

The entire meme of Trump, the fascist who will institute a dictatorship, has likewise boomeranged.

Democracy is dying in darkness, given the current Democrat insider machinations of removing by diktat President Joe Biden. He won the most delegates in the Democratic “primaries”—but now apparently must be dropped either because he is behind in the polls or mentally unfit to remain a candidate or both. Stealth donors and covert politicos in the shadows—not transparent primaries and elected delegates—run the party that “defends democracy.”

But note those on the left would allow Biden to remain our president for the next six months in his debilitated state, but not to continue as their (losing) candidate. The quest for progressive power always trumps the collective interest of the nation: he’s not fit for me but fit enough for thee.

The recent assassination attempts to kill Trump likewise failed. The eerie laxity of the Secret Service and the Biden administration’s long stonewalling to prevent adequate protection for candidates Trump and Robert Kennedy, Jr., will be long examined.

No one has ever apologized for any of the above, although all were unprecedented efforts to use the courts, the administrative state, and the media to do what they feared the people might not through voting.