The first week of the Trump restoration has recalled the times when a company has gone through a reorganization or had a management shakeup. Companies run on the decisions made by the people inside the company and those decisions are the result of the habits of mind, the company culture. Even the big decisions tend to follow a predicable course once you understand the culture.
When there is a reorganization or a new management team comes in, it feels like a shock to the system because it is a shock to the system. The new ways of doing things rattle the old culture because the new ways or the new people conflict with the old ways and those old ways must give way or those old ways must break the new people and the changes they are trying to implement.
Watching Trump act as the new CEO, sitting at the old CEO’s desk, cavalierly signing executive orders while stunned media asks questions, it recalled those experiences with corporate shakeups and takeovers. In 2016 he was the guy hired over the objections of the senior managers. In 2024 he is the new owner. It is an entirely different atmosphere now compared to then.
All of this has recalled an old idea of America as a corporation. The business of America is business, because America is a business. As such, a way to understand her is through the lens of business. That is the show this week. It is an alternative history of America as a business and a history of the managerial revolution through the lens of the old expression, shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations.
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This Week’s Show
Contents
- Intro
- Alternative History
- The Macro Business Cycle
- The Managerial Cycle
- Not All Businesses Fail
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Nearly all businesses fail. Zero Hedge’s very motto is “On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.” Buddha codified the same idea well over two millennia ago in his doctrine of the impermanence of things, that everything has an arising and a ceasing. Ecclesiastes offers much the same wisdom with the famous observation that to everything there is a season. For all the hoopla surrounding Trump 2.0, the grim fact is that at best, he’s fighting a rear guard action against overwhelming odds. At worst, he’s the pawn of the usual powers behind the throne.… Read more »
I mostly thought Trump was there to crash land the plane, not resume flight. In that any relief from Clown World is welcome.
“Ecclesiastes offers much the same wisdom with the famous observation that to everything there is a season.”
Ecclesiastes was penned well before Buddha. Highly recommend reading the whole thing.
I didn’t reply to your thing yesterday as it was late. This comment is helpful. I will try and be brief. Firstly, the linguistic aspect of Indo-European is solid. Latvian and Sanskrit and then Latin and Ancient Greek are descended from it. Your personal opinion doesn’t matter. Moreover, it is clouded by your theological/religious biases that come up consistently since you have been posting here. I think we all need to connect with this part of our history and biology because it binds us all together as a single people without requiring us to abandon any particularities – Westphalian nationality;… Read more »
Even Gods fail. Just ask Ra.
Buddha codified the same idea well over two millennia ago in his doctrine of the impermanence of things, that everything has an arising and a ceasing. He taught “sabbe saṅkhārā aniccā” (all saṅkhāras [conditioned things] are impermanent” not, for instance, ‘sabbe dhammā aniccā’. See v. 277-279 of the Dhammapada of the Pāli cannon for the three marks of existence, about which some interesting details could be, I think, sussed out and clarified thorough a careful analysis with term logic. Also, it’s by the way that Gotama refused to assert whether or not the universe is eternal and is regarded in… Read more »
“sabbe saṅkhārā aniccā”
Wow, I was just about to say that!
“For all the hoopla surrounding Trump 2.0, the grim fact is that at best, he’s fighting a rear guard action against overwhelming odds.” Yes. He is. I never thought it was possible for Trump of all people to actually “Make America great again.” But politics is not about absolutes, it is about incremental changes that are possible within a certain window of opportunity. As a normal, heterosexual, English-speaking white man and native-born citizen, after only one week of Trump the target on my back has gotten much smaller. The boot is not pressing quite as heavily on my throat, and… Read more »
I feel pretty much the same way but I suspect I am merely fooling myself. The long run still doesn’t look all that good but I am enjoying the short run.
But the breather gives you a chance to prepare and develop alternative/parallel societies.
Enhance your grey man characteristics, and live your life as disconnected from the circus as possible.
Mostly, that’s all you can do.
As Keynes said, “In the long run we are all dead.”
Indeed. I no longer feel quite so certain I’d be thrown in an imperial dungeon for speaking the wrong truth in public. And that translates into more freedom and less uneasiness for me.
This stuff also has a cascading effect. It’s not all Trump. There are downstream effects of White people being able to speak freely and voice their feelings, and their enemies know this – this is why they try to prohibit it. This is basically the entire point of the Yoel Roth, Susan Wojcicki, etc. censorship regime. This is why the Resistance was so fierce in 2017-2018, even though, as Scott Greer pointed out, Trump’s EOs and actions go wayyyyyyyy beyond what he did back then. This is why we had a color revolution in 2020, the regime could not allow… Read more »
I think the way things worked out,(The deep state stealing the election, and then trying to crucify Trump), has produced a better outcome for Orange Man.
If he was reelected, he may not have developed the mindset to do what he is doing.
Agreed, like Z always talks about, they can only think one step ahead. They thought that Trump was permanently done in 2021 and his supporters were neutered forever. They couldn’t even conceive of a world where he survives the lawfare and re-emerges.
It’s possible that, if he plays his cards right, Trump could be our version of Gorbachev. Remember those two Russian words, glasnost and perestroika, openness and restructuring, respectively. Trump seems to doing more of the latter right now but the election results are also freeing people up to speak more openly about a lot of long-suppressed topics. So I’d say both are moving forward. What we are hoping for of course, is that these processes will run away and eventually smash the whole system whether Trump or anyone in his inner circle want that or not. This is essentially what… Read more »
“Overwhelming”? “Insurmountable odds?” Shame on you Ben. You’ve given up without so much as firing a shot! And hell’s bells – our enemies? You couldn’t ask for a better foe! They’re fake, they’re gay, mostly unhappy women, queers and lunatics. They don’t even need any help from us – they will destroy themselves in time. Look at California where the retarded lesbian fire chiefs gawp and stutter and point fingers at each other because there was no water in the fire hydrants. Fire prevention is only ONE essential service that has been pozzed. Like their neglected old growth forests… all… Read more »
Very well said. And excellent use of Z’s analogy – I will enjoy being on the landing, but I will never mistake it for leveling the staircase or somehow reclimbing to the top.
The business of the US is war.
I like to describe the American people as warlike but unmilitary. Those hundreds of years of conquering a continent have left their mark.
Yes, and you can see this quite clearly in how the U.S., militarily, tends to fall into the stone-age behaviors of their former continental enemies, such as taking body parts as trophies and demanding unconditional surrender.
Indeed. Perhaps America at large is a gang of negroes sitting on the stoop of a burned out rowhouse in Baltimore. They look menacing as they flex and wave their pistols around – but you know it won’t be long before somebody gets shot, probably accidentally.
Now there’s a tautology for you.
Considering our win-loss-draw stats in the conflicts we’ve been involved in since World War II, we’d better find a new line of business.
War is the business, not victory.
I remember that a Japanese politician – playing off the Hoover quote – once quipped:
The business of Japan is the Japanese.
Smart people those Japanese.
The removal of the security details of Bolton, Pompeo, and former Iran envoy Brian Hook moves them up to the top of my list of suspects who were involved in the assassination attempt on Trump. It’s not as if Trump is canceling the security details of anyone who ever crossed him, or the list would be practically endless. For some reason(s), he picked these 3 specifically. While the msm makes a lot of noise about the confirmation process for the relatively inconsequential Hegseth and Gabbard, they are radio silent on RFKJ. That’s suspicious. The major for profit consolidated defense contractors… Read more »
As someone who spent over two years hiding in the woods and working from home to avoid needles I am most pleased by the news Trump canceled Fauci’s security detail.
RFKJ will require a recess appointment.
If it comes to that I expect they just won’t take a recess. Like Trump’s last term.
Many whites have a deep desire that humanity bind itself together as a big corporation ruled by meritocracy. Under this charter, we will have the highest possible productivity and deracinated harmony.
The problem is that no race feels inspired by this vision except whites, generally speaking.
If you throw down your weapons and declare your pacifism, you are in a terrible situation if your competitors don’t follow your example.
https://indianexpress.com/article/india/donald-trump-h-1b-visa-programme-united-states-9794799/
https://www.informationliberation.com/?id=64818
This is why the impossibility of space colonization is a great tragedy. If only we had hope if leaving the rest of them behind it would provide great encouragement. Living in such a small world with the dusky hordes constantly dragging us down… it all feels so futile.
What’s that famous line? ‘It’s all so tiresome…’.
Bitter reactionary: That’s my version of “Imagine.” Imagine there are no Palestinians, no Israelis, no Indonesians, no Nigerians, no Pakistanis, no Somalis . . . What a wonderful world it could be.
I wouldn’t say space colonization is impossible but it requires cheap abundant energy and that means nuclear power and that means pushing the green commies out of power. Things do seem to be moving that way though.
The Kennedys have an enormous trust based in Fiji to avoid the American inheritance taxes they helped pass. Pretty much puts the later generations on an allowance that they can’t completely squander.
Rather than just making America a better-run corporation, I think a classic dissident insight is we need to become a real nation, not just an economic zone.
Now that the frontiers and easy pressure-release valves have been closed for generations, our whole society needs to grow up and have the mature institutions and customs that mediate internal conflict and orient everyone towards the long-term.
Eliminating birthright citizenship seems a clear step on this path. If the courts will allow it. The text of the 14th seems pretty straightforward to me, but that hasn’t stopped them before.
This was one of your best shows. I found it to be absorbing and prescient.
The business thing is a reflection of the modern world. Western civ started in the ruins of Rome, became centered in today’s France, came to the British Isles via the Normans, which became the center as power moved from land to sea— the ‘British’ Empire— which moved to America and became centered on DC. Kind of a paradox, the trade thing and this reinvention being enabled by territorial expansion. No more new worlds to colonize, until we get to Mars lol. In the meantime, we have to figure out how to reinvent Western Civ (or maybe a new civ) as… Read more »
Never fear! Elon “Space Ranger” Musk is leading the charge into the universe. Soon, we will have McDonalds at Proxima Centauri.
Gimme a large order of McMoon Nuggets and a supersize glass of Black McMatter.
He wants to colonize Mars to insure human survival if we end up totally screwing things up here on Earth. Tells us pretty much everything we need to know about our ruling elites. That and the fact that any trip to Mars is almost certain to be a one-way ticket across the River Styx.
Educational cartoons. That’s the quality of his thinking (and extent of his knowledge). Why do those say we’d go to Mars? To escape the ruin of Earth, plagued by the white man and his sin, his bad-animal drives to have and to move.
Add narcissism (drugs), midwit smugness (probably sub-midwit), physical ugliness, compulsive lying (always caught, never punished), the royal toddler’s (or Reddit moderator’s) tantrum as model of authority, etc., and the idea becomes to take all our having and moving.
“To Mars?”
“…What?”
It’s a fantasy. Mars makes Antarctica look like Club Med (and that’s not even considering the trip to get there – 6 months of irradiation).
Speaking of corporatism, it appears the Great Taking is real since Larry Fink of Blackrock is openly lobbying for the SEC to tokenize financial assets:
https://www.zerohedge.com/crypto/blackrock-ceo-wants-sec-rapidly-approve-tokenization-bonds-stocks
Sigh. Where’s Luigi when you need him?
Good podcast. I liked the analogies and they do kinda fit American history, we are a corporation and the business of America is business as Coolidge said.
Off topic fellas – please forgive the diversion… but: I notice our Esteemed Blog Host is on Nitter. Is that the same as Twitter? I notice that many other of my favorite deplorable crime thinkers are on it too. So… do you have to sign up for it on Twitter? (Errrrr… Heil Hitler, Elon!) Should I re-evaluate my stance on those platforms and sign up? I ask as a doddring outhouse Dissident, or perhaps a “Dissident-adjacent” old stubfart flailing about in a foreign country that used to be my home, long ago… I love the dissidents, I love their rotten… Read more »