Paul Craig Roberts

Institute for Political Economy

The Failure of Democracy, How The Oligarchs Plan To Steal The Election

The Failure of Democracy, How The Oligarchs Plan To Steal The Election

October 28, 2016 | Categories: Articles & Columns | Tags: |  Print This Article

The Failure of Democracy
How The Oligarchs Plan To Steal The Election
Paul Craig Roberts
I am now convinced that the Oligarchy that rules America intends to steal the presidential election. In the past, the oligarchs have not cared which candidate won as the oligarchs owned both. But they do not own Trump.
Most likely you are unaware of what Trump is telling people as the media does not report it. A person who speaks like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYozWHBIf8g&app=desktop is not endeared to the oligarchs.
Who are the oligarchs?
—Wall Street and the mega-banks too big to fail and their agent the Federal Reserve, a federal agency that put 5 banks ahead of millions of troubled American homeowners who the federal reserve allowed to be flushed down the toilet. In order to save the mega-banks’ balance sheets from their irresponsible behavior, the Fed has denied retirees any interest income on their savings for eight years, forcing the elderly to draw down their savings, leaving their heirs, who have been displaced from employment by corporate jobs offshoring, penniless.
—The military/security complex which has spent trillions of our taxpayer dollars on 15 years of gratuitous wars based entirely on lies in order to enrich themselves and their power.
—The neoconservatives whose crazed ideology of US world hegemony thrusts the American people into military conflict with Russia and China.
—The US global corporations that sent American jobs to China and India and elsewhere in order to enrich the One Percent with higher profits from lower labor costs.
—Agribusiness (Monsanto et.al.), corporations that poison the soil, the water, the oceans, and our food with their GMOs, hebicides, pesticides, and chemical fertilizers, while killing the bees that pollinate the crops.
—The extractive industries—energy, mining, fracking, and timber—that maximize their profits by destroying the environment and the water supply.
—The Israel Lobby that controls US Middle East policy and is committing genocide against the Palestinians just as the US committed genocide against native Americans. Israel is using the US to eliminate sovereign countries that stand in Israel’s way.
What convinces me that the Oligarchy intends to steal the election is the vast difference between the presstitutes’ reporting and the facts on the ground.
According to the presstitutes, Hillary is so far ahead that there is no point in Trump supporters bothering to vote. Hillary has won the election before the vote. Hillary has been declared a 93% sure winner.
I am yet to see one Hillary yard sign, but Trump signs are everywhere. Reports I receive are that Hillary’s public appearances are unattended but Trump’s are so heavily attended that people have to be turned away. This is a report from a woman in Florida:
“Trump has pulled huge numbers all over FL while campaigning here this week. I only see Trump signs and stickers in my wide travels. I dined at a Mexican restaurant last night. Two women my age sitting behind me were talking about how they had tried to see Trump when he came to Tallahassee. They left work early, arriving at the venue at 4:00 for a 6:00 rally. The place was already over capacity so they were turned away. It turned out that there were so many people there by 2:00 that the doors had to be opened to them. The women said that the crowds present were a mix of races and ages.”
I know the person who gave me this report and have no doubt whatsoever as to its veracity.
I also receive from readers similar reports from around the country.
This is how the theft of the election is supposed to work: The media concentrated in a few corporate hands has gone all out to convince not only Americans but also the world, that Donald Trump is such an unacceptable candidate that he has lost the election before the vote.
By controlling the explanation, when the election is stolen those who challenge the stolen election are without a foundartion in the media. All media reports will say that it was a run away victory for Hillary over the misogynist immigrant-hating Trump.
And liberal, progressive opinion will be relieved and off guard as Hillary takes us into nuclear war.
That the Oligarchy intends to steal the election from the American people is verified by the officially reported behavior of the voting machines in early voting in Texas. The NPR presstitutes have declared that Hillary is such a favorite that even Republican Texas is up for grabs in the election.
If this is the case, why was it necessary for the voting machines to be programmed to change Trump votes to Hillary votes? Those voters who noted that they voted Trump but were recorded Hillary complained. The election officials, claiming a glitch (which only went one way), changed to paper ballots. But who will count them? No “glitches” caused Hillary votes to go to Trump, only Trump votes to go to Hillary.
The most brilliant movie of our time was The Matrix. This movie captured the life of Americans manipulated by a false reality, only in the real America there is insufficient awareness and no Neo, except possibly Donald Trump, to challenge the system. Americans of all stripes—academics, scholars, journalists, Republicans, Democrats, right-wing, left-wing, US Representatives, US Senators, Presidents, corporate moguls and brainwashed Americans and foreigners—live in a false reality.
In the United States today a critical presidential election is in process in which not a single important issue is addressed by Hillary and the presstitutes. This is total failure. Democracy, once the hope of the world, has totally failed in the United States of America. Trump is correct. The American people must restore the accountability of government to the people.

America’s dark imperial legacy: It goes much deeper than George W. Bush

While our 43rd president rightly takes blame for his disastrous failed wars, there’s much more blame to go around

Robert W. McChesney11.16.2014•3:59 AM •61 Comments

Excerpted from “Blowing the Roof off the Twenty-First Century: Media, Politics, and the Struggle for Post-Capitalist Democracy”

The United States unique today among major states in the degree of its reliance on military spending and its determination to stand astride the world, militarily as well as economically. No other country in the post–Second World War world has been so globally destructive or inflicted so many war fatalities. Since 2001, acknowledged U.S. national defense spending has increased by almost 60 percent in real dollar terms to a level in 2007 of $553 billion. This is higher than at any point since the Second World War (though lower than previous decades as a percentage of GDP). Based on such official figures, the United States is reported by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) as accounting for 45 percent of world military expenditures. Yet, so gargantuan and labyrinthine are U.S. military expenditures that their true magnitude reached $1 trillion in 2007.

Externally, these are necessary expenditures of world empire. Internally, they represent, as Michal Kalecki was the first to suggest, an imperial triangle of state-financed military production, media propaganda, and real/imagined economic-employment effects that has become a deeply entrenched and self-perpetuating feature of the U.S. social order.

Many analysts today view the present growth of U.S. militarism and imperialism as largely divorced from the earlier Cold War history of the United States, which was commonly seen as a response to the threat represented by the Soviet Union. Placed against this backdrop the current turn to war and war preparation appears to numerous commentators to lack a distinct target, despite concerns about global terrorism, and to be mainly the product of irrational hubris on the part of U.S. leaders. Even as insightful a left historian as Eric Hobsbawm has recently adopted this general perspective. Thus in his 2008 book On Empire Hobsbawm writes:

Frankly, I can’t make sense of what has happened in the United States since 9/11 that enabled a group of political crazies to realize long-held plans for an unaccompanied solo performance of world supremacy. . . . Today a radical right-wing regime seeks to mobilize “true Americans” against some evil outside force and against a world that does not recognize the uniqueness, the superiority, the manifest destiny of America. . . . In effect, the most obvious danger of war today arises from the global ambitions of an uncontrollable and apparently irrational government in Washington. . . . To give America the best chance of learning to return from megalomania to rational foreign policy is the most immediate and urgent task of international politics.

Such a view, which sees the United States as under the influence of a new irrationalism introduced by George W. Bush and a cabal of neoconservative “political crazies,” and consequently calls for a return from “megalomania to rational foreign policy,” downplays the larger historical and structural forces at work that connect the Cold War and post–Cold War imperial eras. In contrast, a more realistic perspective, I believe, can be obtained by looking at the origins of the U.S. “military ascendancy” (as C. Wright Mills termed it) in the early Cold War years and the centrality this has assumed in the constitution of the U.S. empire and economy up to the present.

The Permanent War Economy and Military Keynesianism

In January 1944 Charles E. Wilson, president of General Electric and executive vice chairman of the War Production Board, delivered a speech to the Army Ordnance Association advocating a permanent war economy. According to the plan Wilson proposed on that occasion, every major corporation should have a “liaison” representative with the military, who would be given a commission as a colonel in the Reserve. This would form the basis of a program, to be initiated by the president as commander-in-chief in cooperation with the War and Navy departments, designed to bind corporations and the military together into a single unified armed forces–industrial complex. “What is more natural and logical,” he asked, “than that we should henceforth mount our national policy upon the solid fact of an industrial capacity for war, and a research capacity for war that is already ‘in being’? It seems to me anything less is foolhardy.” Wilson went on to indicate that in this plan the part to be played by Congress was restricted to voting for the needed funds. Further, it was essential that industry be allowed to play its central role in this new warfare state without being hindered politically “or thrown to the fanatical isolationist fringe [and] tagged with a ‘merchants-of-death’ label.”

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In calling even before the Second World War had come to a close for a “continuing program of industrial preparedness” for war, Charles E. Wilson (sometimes referred to as “General Electric Wilson” to distinguish him from “General Motors Wilson”—Charles Erwin Wilson, president of General Motors and Eisenhower’s secretary of defense) was articulating a view that was to characterize the U.S. oligarchy as a whole during the years immediately following the Second World War. In earlier eras it had been assumed that there was an economic “guns and butter” trade-off, and that military spending had to occur at the expense of other sectors of the economy. However, one of the lessons of the economic expansion in Nazi Germany, followed by the experience of the United States itself in arming for the Second World War, was that big increases in military spending could act as huge stimulants to the economy. In just six years under the influence of the Second World War, the U.S. economy expanded by 70 percent, finally recovering from the Great Depression. The early Cold War era thus saw the emergence of what later came to be known as “military Keynesianism”: the view that by promoting effective demand and supporting monopoly profits military spending could help place a floor under U.S. capitalism.

John Maynard Keynes, in his landmark General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, published in 1936, in the midst of the Depression, argued that the answer to economic stagnation was to promote effective demand through government spending. The bastardized Keynesianism that came to be known as “military Keynesianism” was the view that this was best effected with the least negative consequences for big business by focusing on military spending. As Joan Robinson, one of Keynes’s younger colleagues, critically explained in her iconoclastic lecture, “The Second Crisis of Economic Theory,” before the American Economic Association on December 27, 1971:

The most convenient thing for a government to spend on is armaments. The military-industrial complex [thus] took charge. I do not think it plausible to suppose that the Cold War and several hot wars were invented just to solve the employment problem. But certainly they have had that effect. The system had the support not only of the corporations who make profits under it and the workers who got jobs, but also of the economists who advocated government loan-expenditure as a prophylactic against stagnation. Whatever were the deeper forces leading to the hypertrophy of military power after the world war was over, certainly they could not have had such free play if the doctrine of sound finance had still been respected. It was the so-called Keynesians who persuaded successive Presidents that there is no harm in a budget deficit and left the military-industrial complex to take advantage of it. So it has come about that Keynes’ pleasant daydream was turned into a nightmare of terror.

The first to theorize this tendency toward military Keynesianism under monopoly capitalism was the Polish economist Michal Kalecki (most famous, as Robinson pointed out in the above-mentioned lecture, for having discovered the essentials of Keynes’s General Theory before Keynes himself). In a 1943 essay on “The Political Aspects of Full Employment” and in subsequent essays, Kalecki argued that monopoly capital had a deep aversion to increased civilian government spending due to its intrusion on the commodity market and the sphere of private profit, but that this did not apply in the same way to military spending, which was seen by the vested interests as adding to, rather than crowding out, profits. If absorption of the massive economic surplus of large corporate capital through increased government spending was the key to accumulation in post–Second World War U.S. capitalism, this was dependent principally on military expenditures, or what Kalecki in 1956 labeled “the armament-imperialist complex.” This resulted in a “high degree of utilization” of productive capacity and “counteracted the disrupting influence of the increase in the relative share of accumulation of big business in the national product.”

For Kalecki this new military-supported regime of accumulation that came to characterize U.S. monopoly capital by the mid-1950s established a strong political-economic foundation for its own rule “based on the following [imperial] triangle”:

1. Imperialism contributes to a relatively high level of employment through expenditures on armaments and ancillary purposes and through the maintenance of a large body of armed forces and government employees.
2. The mass communications media, working under the auspices of the ruling class, emits propaganda aimed at securing the support of the population for this armament-imperialist setup.
3. The high level of employment and the standard of living increased considerably as compared with before the war (as a result of the rise in the productivity of labor), and this facilitated the absorption of this propaganda to the broad masses of the population.

Mass communication occupied a central place in this imperial triangle. An essential part of Kalecki’s argument was that “the mass communication media, such as the daily press, radio, and television in the United States, are largely under the control of the ruling class.” As none other than Charles E. (General Electric) Wilson, then defense mobilization director, put it in a speech to the American Newspaper Publishers Association on April 26, 1951, the job of the media was to bring “public opinion, as marshaled by the press” to the support of the permanent war effort (italics added).

The result by the mid-1950s was a fairly stable militarized economy, in which intertwined imperial, political-economic, and communication factors all served to reinforce the new military-imperial order.

Kalecki observed that U.S. trade unions were “part and parcel of the armament-imperialist setup. Workers in the United States are not duller and trade union leaders are not more reactionary ‘by nature’ than in other capitalist countries. Rather, the political situation in the United States is simply, in accordance with the precepts of historical materialism, the unavoidable consequence of economic developments and of characteristics of the superstructure of monopoly capitalism in its advanced stage.” All of this pointed to what Harry Magdoff was to call the essential “one-ness of national security and business interests” that came to characterize the U.S. political economy and empire.

Many of Kalecki’s ideas were developed further by Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy in 1966 in Monopoly Capital. Baran and Sweezy argued there were at least five political-economic-imperial ends propelling the U.S. oligarchy in the 1950s and ’60s toward the creation of a massive military establishment: (1) defending U.S. global hegemony and the empire of capital against external threats in the form of a wave of revolutions erupting throughout the world, simplistically viewed in terms of a monolithic Communist threat centered in the Soviet Union; (2) creating an internationally “secure” platform for U.S. corporations to expand and monopolize economic opportunities abroad; (3) forming a government-sponsored research and development sector that would be dominated by big business; (4) generating a more complacent population at home, made less recalcitrant under the nationalistic influence of perpetual war and war preparation; and (5) soaking up the nation’s vast surplus productive capacity, thus helping to stave off economic stagnation, through the promotion of high-profit, low-risk (to business) military spending. The combined result of such political-economic-imperial factors was the creation of the largest, most deeply entrenched and persistent “peacetime” war machine that the world had ever seen.

Like Kalecki, Baran and Sweezy argued that the U.S. oligarchy kept a “tight rein on civilian [government] spending,” which, they suggested, “had about reached its outer limits” as a percentage of national income “by 1939,” but was nonetheless “open-handed with the military.” Government pump-priming operations therefore occurred largely through spending on wars and war preparations in the service of empire. The Pentagon naturally made sure that bases and armaments industries were spread around the United States and that numerous corporations profited from military spending, thus maximizing congressional support due to the effects on states and districts.

For members of the U.S. oligarchy and their hangers-on, the virtuous circle of mutually reinforcing military spending and economic growth represented by military Keynesianism was something to be celebrated rather than held up to criticism. Harvard economist Sumner Slichter explained to a banker’s convention in October 1949 that as long as Cold War spending persisted, a severe economic depression was “difficult to conceive.” The Cold War “increases the demand for goods, helps sustain a high level of employment, accelerates technological progress and thus helps the country to raise its standard of living. . . . So we may thank the Russians for helping make capitalism in the United States work better than ever.”

Similarly, U.S. News and World Report told its readers on May 14, 1950 (a month before the outbreak of the Korean War):

Government planners figure they have found the magic formula for almost endless good times. They are now beginning to wonder if there may not be something to perpetual motion after all. Cold war is the catalyst. Cold war is an automatic pump primer. Turn a spigot, and the public clamors for more arms spending. Turn another, the clamor ceases. Truman confidence, cockiness, is based on this “Truman formula.” Truman era of good times, President is told, can run much beyond 1952. Cold war demands, if fully exploited, are almost limitless.

In the same vein, U.S. News and World Report was to declare in 1954: “What H-bomb means to business. A long period . . . of big orders. In the years ahead, the effects of the new bomb will keep on increasing. As one appraiser puts it: ‘The H-bomb has blown Depression-thinking out the window.’” (In 1959 David Lawrence, editor of U.S. News and World Report, indicated that he viewed with equanimity the suggestion that the United States “might conceivably strike first in what has become known as ‘preemptive’ rather than ‘preventive’ war.”)

Henry Luce, the media mogul at the head of the Time-Life empire, who coined the term “the American Century,” observed in November 1957 in Fortune that the United States “can stand the load of any defense effort required to hold the power of Soviet Russia in check. It cannot, however, indefinitely stand the erosion of creeping socialism and the ceaseless extension of government activities into additional economic fields” beyond the military. This was directly in line with Kalecki’s and Baran and Sweezy’s contention that the system was tight-fisted where civilian spending was concerned and open-handed with the military.

Remarking on the success of military Keynesianism in promoting economic prosperity, the influential Harvard economist Seymour Harris wrote in the New York Times Magazine in 1959: “If we treat the years from 1941 to the present as a whole, we find again that a period of record prosperity coincided with a period of heavy military outlay. . . . About one dollar out of seven went for war and preparation for war, and this expenditure was undoubtedly a stimulus to the economy.”

A military Keynesian view was close to the heart of the major U.S. planning document of the Cold War. It was called NSC-68, and it was issued in April 1950 shortly before the Korean War by the U.S. National Security Council and signed by President Truman in September 1950 (but not declassified until 1975). Drafted by Paul Nitze, then head of the policy review group in the State Department, NSC-68 intended to construct a rollback strategy against the Soviet Union. It called for a vast increase in military spending above its already high levels and considered the possibility that “in an emergency the United States could devote upward of 50 percent of its gross national product” to the military effort as in the Second World War. “From the point of view of the economy as a whole,” NSC-68 declared,

the program [of military expansion] might not result in a real decrease in the standard of living, for the economic effects of the program might be to increase the gross national product by more than the amount being absorbed for additional military and foreign assistance purposes. One of the most significant lessons of our World War II experience was that the American economy, when it operates at a level approaching full efficiency [full capacity], can provide enormous resources for purposes other than civilian consumption while simultaneously providing a high standard of living. After allowing for price changes, personal consumption expenditures rose by almost one-fifth between 1939 and 1944, even though the economy had in the meantime increased the amount of resources going into Government use by $60–$65 billion (in 1939 prices).

U.S. militarism was therefore motivated first and foremost by a global geopolitical struggle, but was at the same time seen as essentially costless (even beneficial) to the U.S. economy, which could have more guns and more butter too. It was thus viewed as a win-win solution for the U.S. empire and economy.

By the time that President Eisenhower (who played a role in this military expansion) raised concerns about what he dubbed the “military-industrial complex” in his farewell address of January 17, 1961, it was already so firmly established as to constitute the permanent war economy envisioned by Charles E. Wilson. As Eisenhower’s secretary of defense, Charles Erwin Wilson—best known for having created a major flap by saying that “what is good for General Motors is good for the country”—observed in 1957, the military setup was then so built into the economy as to make it virtually irreversible. “So many Americans,” he noted, “are getting a vested interest in it: Properties, business, jobs, employment, votes, opportunities for promotion and advancement, bigger salaries for scientists and all that. . . . If you try to change suddenly you get into trouble. . . . If you shut the whole business off now, you will have the state of California in trouble because such a big percentage of the aircraft industry is in California.”

Hence, the concern that Eisenhower voiced in his farewell address about a “permanent armaments industry of vast proportions” and that “we annually spend on military security alone more than the net income of all United States corporations” was a belated recognition of what had already become an established fact. The need for the gargantuan military-industrial complex that the United States developed in these years was not so much for purposes of economic expansion directly (though military Keynesianism pointed to its stimulating effects) but due to the reality, as Baran and Sweezy emphasized, that the capitalist world order and U.S. hegemony could only be maintained “a while longer,” in the face of rising insurgencies throughout the world, through “increasingly direct and massive intervention by American armed forces.” This entire built-in military system could not be relinquished without relinquishing empire. And so from the early Cold War years to today, the United States has flexed its military power—either directly, resulting in millions of deaths (counting those who died in the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Gulf War, the Kosovo war, the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, as well as dozens of lesser conflicts), or indirectly, as a means to intimidate.

The most important left analysts of these developments in the 1950s and ’60s, Kalecki, Baran, Sweezy, and Magdoff, insisted— going against the dominant U.S. Cold War ideology—that the cause of U.S. military spending was capitalist empire, rather than the need to contain the Soviet threat. The benefits of military spending to monopoly capital, moreover, guaranteed its continuation, barring a major social upheaval. The decade and a half since the fall of the Soviet Union has confirmed the accuracy of this assessment. The euphoria of the “peace dividend” following the end of the Cold War evaporated almost immediately in the face of new imperial requirements. This was a moment of truth for U.S. capitalism, demonstrating how deeply entrenched were its military-imperial interests. By the end of the 1990s U.S. military spending, which had been falling, was on its way up again.

Today, in what has been called a “unipolar world,” U.S. military spending for purposes of empire is rapidly expanding—to the point that it rivals the entire rest of the world put together. When it is recognized that most of the other top ten military-spending nations are U.S. allies or junior partners, it makes the U.S. military ascendancy even more imposing. Only the reality of global empire (and the effects of this on the internal body politic) can explain such an overwhelming destructive power. As Atlantic correspondent Robert Kaplan proudly proclaimed in 2005: “By the turn of the twenty-first century the United States military had already appropriated the entire earth, and was ready to flood the most obscure areas of it with troops at a moment’s notice."

Excerpted from “Blowing the Roof off the Twenty-First Century: Media, Politics, and the Struggle for Post-Capitalist Democracy” by Robert W. McChesney. Copyright © 2014 by Robert W. McChesney. Reprinted by arrangement with Monthly Review Press. All rights reserved.

George Soros Polysocio-economics philosophy

George Soros/Political, social, and economic philosophy

George Soros is a wealthy, progressive political activist who seeks to attain his ideal of open society through donating to and founding political and social organizations that enact and encourage national and global change. This page concerns the philosophy behind Soros' political and philanthropic activity. Soros is guided by Karl Popper's notion of an open society and by his own economic theory of reflexivity. To read more about Soros' career, political activity, and other work, click here.

Open society

Soros' political and philanthropic activity has been influenced by his belief in an idea of open society, a concept put forth by Karl Popper. Soros himself says, "In my definition an open society is an imperfect society that holds itself open to improvement."^[1] Soros studied Popper’s theory of open society while attending the London School of Economics. He wrote the following about Popper's philosophy on open societies:^[2]

George Soros speaks about the concept of Open Society

“

Popper argued that the empirical truth cannot be known with absolute certainty. Even scientific laws can’t be verified beyond a shadow of a doubt: they can only be falsified by testing. One failed test is enough to falsify, but no amount of conforming instances is sufficient to verify. Scientific laws are hypothetical in character and their truth remains subject to testing. Ideologies which claim to be in possession of the ultimate truth are making a false claim; therefore, they can be imposed on society only by force. This applies to Communism, Fascism and National Socialism alike. All these ideologies lead to repression. Popper proposed a more attractive form of social organization: an open society in which people are free to hold divergent opinions and the rule of law allows people with different views and interests to live together in peace.[3] Having lived through both Nazi and Communist occupation here in Hungary I found the idea of an open society immensely attractive.[4]

”

Although Soros adopted Popper's notion of an open society, he later published an essay in 2011 criticizing aspects of Popper's concept:^[5]

“

The war on terror forced me to reconsider the concept of open society. My experiences in the former Soviet Union had already taught me that the collapse of a closed society does not automatically lead to an open one; the collapse may be seemingly bottomless, to be followed by the emergence of a new regime that has a greater resemblance to the regime that collapsed than to an open society. Now I had to probe deeper into the concept of open society that I had adopted from Karl Popper in my student days, and I discovered a flaw in it. Popper had argued that free speech and critical thinking would lead to better laws and a better understanding of reality than any dogma. I came to realize that there was an unspoken assumption embedded in his argument, namely that the purpose of democratic discourse is to gain a better understanding of reality. It dawned on me that my own concept of reflexivity brings Popper’s hidden assumption into question. If thinking has a manipulative function as well as a cognitive one, then it may not be necessary to gain a better understanding of reality in order to obtain the laws one wants. There is a shortcut: 'spinning' arguments and manipulating public opinion to get the desired results. Today our political discourse is primarily concerned with getting elected and staying in power. Popper’s hidden assumption that freedom of speech and thought will produce a better understanding of reality is valid only for the study of natural phenomena. Extending it to human affairs is part of what I have called the 'Enlightenment fallacy.'[4]

”

Despite his criticism of Popper's ideology, Soros' continued belief in and dedication to the idea of open societies continues to spur him to support various social and political causes, especially his Open Society Foundations, in order to sustain open societies and help closed societies become open.

Economic reflexivity theory

George Soros speaks about his General Theory of Reflexivity

Soros developed an economic theory of reflexivity that he has said allowed him to anticipate the ebb and flow of financial markets. While he does not claim to have discovered the idea of reflexivity itself, he does claim to apply it to economics in a new way.^[2]
Soros has stated the main idea of his theory as follows:^[2]

“

I can state the core idea in two relatively simple propositions. One is that in situations that have thinking participants, the participants’ view of the world is always partial and distorted. That is the principle of fallibility. The other is that these distorted views can influence the situation to which they relate because false views lead to inappropriate actions. That is the principle of reflexivity. For instance, treating drug addicts as criminals creates criminal behavior. It misconstrues the problem and interferes with the proper treatment of addicts. As another example, declaring that government is bad tends to make for bad government.[4]

”

David J. Lynch wrote in a 2008 USA Today article, "In his latest work, The New Paradigm for Financial Markets: The Credit Crisis of 2008 and What It Means, Soros traces a straight line between today's financial turmoil and what he says are fatally flawed conventional assumptions about how markets behave. If banks, investors and regulators had embraced reflexivity years ago, there never would have been a financial crisis, Soros insists."^[6]
In the same 2008 article, Lynch went on to summarize Soros' application of reflexivity to economics as follows:^[6]

“

To Soros, the conventional approach is rubbish. Instead of a world of near-identical actors, coolly assessing their economic interests and acting with clear-eyed precision, he sees a world (and markets) governed by passion, bias and self-reinforcing errors. Because fallible human beings are both involved in, and trying to make sense of, this world, they inevitably make mistakes. Those mistakes then feed on themselves in 'reflexive' ways that, when taken to extremes, result in situations such as the now-deflating U.S. housing bubble. Standard economic theory is flawed, Soros says, because it treats markets populated by thinking human beings as if they operated according to the natural laws that govern atoms and molecules. Economists say Soros badly exaggerates the limitations of standard theory and ignores subsequent refinements. But if conventional economics teaches that markets are always (eventually) right, Soros insists they are always wrong.[4    Footnotes GoergeSoros.com, "Interview with Harvey Blume," August 20, 2006 Financial Times, "Soros: General Theory of Reflexivity," October 26, 2009 Bolded emphasis added by Ballotpedia to highlight the meaning of the term open society. Note: This text is quoted verbatim from the original source. Any inconsistencies are attributed to the original source. GeorgeSoros.com, "My Philanthropy," accessed May 25, 2016 USA Today, "Soros sees 'reflexivity' theory of economics as life's work," May 13, 2008

Something 1/2 Ass Americans do to Real 100% Americans.

Paul Gifford Goree shared his photo.

3 mins ·

paul dewitt goree‏ @paulgoree2016
15m15 minutes ago
And as I think about those who utilize their LIBERTY and FREEDOM negatively (my subjective opinion): I have little RESPECT for them, as they did towards me! I refer to them as 1/2 Ass Americans, seeming they didn't give a FUCK about where their actions where leading this nation! One decade from now (2027) let us see what time (history) brings to surface as it will be the only things that resolves. To bad we will be in a different progressing state of mind and existence!

 

 

My Micro-Techno Industrial Art---It states, "V2K Ruined USA" read the following journal article on Wire magazine: https://www.wired.com/2008/07/the-microwave-s/

 

 My Micro-Techno Industrial Art---It states, "V2K Ruined USA" read the following journal article on Wire magazine: https://www.wired.com/2008/07/the-microwave-s/

WOW and to think all the way in South America-Someone Resembles Me.

WOW and to think all the way in South America-Someone Resembles Me. He lives in Brazil and I think he's more attractive for the purpose of what the category. But still considering the crazy talk in the TRI-States of the West, finding this image of google image browser in Brazil was no surprise. But then people resemble each other all the time!



https://photos.app.goo.gl/gKN39Q47tTA4yHTx1

TARGET STORES---DISCRIMINATE AGAINST AFRICAN AMERICAN HOMELESS CITIZENS --THE LES MISERABLES OF CORPORATE AMERICA RETAIL CHAIN

 

Last night I had a terrible experience in San Francisco, at the LES MISERABLES OF CORPORATE AMERICA RETAIL CHAIN-TARGET STORES. Last week  I was provide a E-gift card from the University of Virginia. It was 1 of many compensation for being a participant in research. I receive the E-gift card in my email address and proceeded to the Target website.  Later that day I went to the Target Store on Mission St. in San Francisco and talked to someone at the customer service window. I informed her that I received this E-gift card and that I had been to the Target website. I wanted to see, seeming I do not have an electronical device, nor accessibility to a printer, could I provide her with the email pin code and bar code, by which she could possibly pull up the information and print a copy for me to use in the store. 

She informed me that under normal circumstances this would be possible or I could even just take the information I got to a cashier and they could do it from the register. But at this moment the problem they are experiencing is that they have no access to the E-gift card system/nor website. She suggested that I can call the Bush location and see if they system is working. She also suggested that I can even have the value of the E-gift card, transferred to a regular gift card and proceed that way. I went to the Bush location, but then turned around and went back to the Mission location. 2 hours had passed so I thought I'd take a chance that the system was back up. I simply shopped for a few food and grooming items and proceeded to the register. The cashier ran up the merchandise and entered the information that I had written down from my email account and the entire process went through.

However last night, I was extremely hungry and had alot of running around to do. So I rationalized it to just go to Target and use the remain balance on some food. When I went to the store, and gathered the food items I wanted to purchase. The cashier didn't know how to proceed with the transaction and she called for a manager. When the manager arrived she was shaking her head in a NO gesture before I had completely explained to her what was going on. She insisted that she can not do this transaction, unless I have a mobile device, or a print out of the barcode. I informed her I have either, and I didn't have access to those devices, and yet I was able to utilize these numbers yesterday. She insisted that she can not escalate this to a higher manager. And that she is not going to allow this transaction to be proceeded. She wanted me to leave the store, I asked for the customer service number. I then asked her if they had customer service telephones available? She said "NO".   (However the customer service representative on the telephone, asked me why didn't I use the RED PHONE? I informed him, "well I would think all stores would have a customer service telephone in the store to be utilized by customers in the store. But when I asked the Manager at the Mission store. She said that they do not have a customer service phone as she was rushing me out of the store and calling security!

WHAT WAS HER DAMN PROBLEM. I felt discriminated against as an African American Homeless CITIZENS.  Some support came from the customer service hotline, which I had to call from a pay phone. They seemed to express empathy for the terrible experience and could not believe I only wanted to purchase FOOD!!! I should have just stolen the food to really see how the Les Miserables of Corporate American Retail Chains would do. Maybe calling the police is more of an advantage when stores want to discriminate especially against HOMELESS CITIZENS. So I wonder what did this so called manager expect of a citizen and customer. It's not like TARGET is Neiman Marcus-and I probably get better customer service from Neiman Marcus.  I filled an official complaint with the Target Corporation and they expedited it. 

Today I plan on going back to Target to finish shopping as I had been enabled to. Hope they come to a new decision. Of course I will call the customer service corporate before entering the store and ask to use the RED PHONE. That the manager said did not exist at that store!  NOTE to TARGET COPORATION, this entire incident reminds me of a similar incident in Los Angeles, CA. When a group of people came into the Greyhound Bus Station and took the station over. They had someone pretend to call from district office and issue an emergency management meeting and while the real managers were quasi indisposed. They took over the station and instructed the employees. 

GREYHOUND LOS ANGELES

http://paulgoree.blogspot.com/2017/02/grayhound-los-angeles.html 
 

• San Francisco Central my store

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  789 Mission St  San Francisco, CA 94103

  open today: 7:00 am – 10:00 pm

  (415) 343-6272

 

Are there any exceptions for purchasing gift cards? shows more content

Target GiftCards can’t be used to purchase the following: American Express, Visa and Mastercard gift cards in store or from Target.com. Specialty gift cards from Target.com, including gift cards for gaming, music and restaurants, such as iTunes, Xbox and Olive Garden. Target GiftCards from Target.com.

What is the difference between a Target eGiftCard and Target Mobile GiftCard? shows more content A Target Mobile GiftCard is a gift card sent to a mobile phone number. To purchase, just select an amount and the Target Mobile GiftCard will be sent via a text message to the recipient usually within 4 hours. The mobile device needs to be web enabled as the gift card is accessible by a link. Only standard congratulations text message is available. Message and data rates may apply. A Target eGiftCard is an electronic gift card sent to an email address. To purchase, just select an amount, include a message and your Target eGiftCard will be emailed to the recipient usually within 4 hours. eGiftCards include a bar code that can be scanned in store and can also be used on Target.com.

SAN FRANCISCO CITY FLAG OF PERPETUAL TRUTH OF EXISITENCE!

REFLECTIONS OF CALIFORNIA: NOV/05/2017: As I return to reflecting in copy the exact experiences of my return to California and my Tour Of California ( http://paulgoree.blogspot.com/2017/09/tour-of-california-durning-my-revolt.html). Today I am reflecting about incidences which have been going on since I have been in San Francisco. FACTS being FACTS, if I am still on the streets, then that is obviously where I belong. As I have been put through a variety of systems to remove me and yet --HERE I STILL AM! So note to those who with intent, try to set someone up, or expose someone: THE NATURE OF A SWITCH-A-RUE, is to catch the real culprits, with "quasi one line themed urban myths (which have no truth to them at all and were probably created by city enforcement/criminology specialist to enhance new effective strategic enforcement skills. And this one gets real culprits to turn against a non-citizen (in question) as to remove what they might find as a threat or a scapegoat for their doings.  HINT HINT: IF I DON'T KNOW ONE SINGLE PERSON IN SAN FRANCISCO or BAY AREA--THEN HOW IN THE FUCK DO I KNOW  YOU! AND AS JESUS SAID, "I DON'T KNOW YOU" moving forward! (MATTHEW 25:12).

So as depicted on the San Francisco state flag: A Phoenix Fire Bird is knowing of their full capabilities. For me I will state a reference to COMMUNICATION, as being that variable for me. Now all other factors: MY PROUD TO BE HOMOSEXUAL AFRICAN AMERICAN: get it! AMERICAN, so truly, San Francisco, if you have an issue with my Homosexual Americanism, then you should know that as you judge and try to minimize my Civil Liberties! I have no other choice but to not respect the Civil liberties by which you can do so! Thus we can both DISRESPECT each other of being the AMEICANS we are. Yet what the world will witness is us each trying to tell the other, who is the more AMEICAN! Which American thinks that another American does not deserve their entire Civil Liberties??? Please let your self reflect upon that as you proceed as an AMERICAN! Here is something great, from another AFRICAN AMERICAN who just happens to be a Transexual. She was born in the same city as I (East St. Louis, Ill) and came into herself and Americanism as a Transexual in the state of Arizona. https://paulgoree.wordpress.com/2013/09/16/what-is-not-impossible-is-exceptional-indeed/.

As part of my civil liberties, innovation proceeds change. Today we are fortunate to live in a society that accepts RISK REDUCTION TREATMENT. Thus as I go about the STREETS OF SAN FRANCISCO this week. Smelling like all types of toxics, urine, and shit. It's nothing new to me. Infact, in 2008, I created a little joke, labeling the olfactory factor of substance use manipulated as --"EAU DE TOILETTE GOREE de Las Vegas, Phoenix, San Diego-Ocean Breeze, L.A., and now SAN FRANCISCO. All of these cities represent research many University across the nation are just now conducting regarding meth and it's sub-cultural collectives (which are many). So as I walk the streets of San Francisco, all that smell this "HOME BREWED SENSATION" have to now know that my intent is to associate it with Sub-Cultural Collective Substance use data, that are and will be published in Sociology and Substance use journals.  The smell represents the ELEPHANT in the Middle of the room. The elephant does not have to justify its presences in any environment. Sooner or later the presences of the elephant will rise the intent of the natural resident of the environment as they continue to ignore the elephant and proceed to remove factors of each other. During the entire time, non/few come to one very obvious observation- there is an elelphant in the middle of the room (https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/an-elephant-in-the-room)

"...San Francisco, as I exist and will continue to exist: against all efforts of man that are not within the blessing of our creator. You have come to only justify a PERPETUAL TRUTH of EXISTENCE in what is true and what is not, considering you- as you attemp to wage war (with STEEL) against that which has proven they are of a Phoenix Fire bird nature as GOD would have. EZEKIEL 36:26 (God bless me!)!

 The flag of the City and County of San Francisco, which depicts a rising phoenix, is often assumed to be symbol of the city's recovery from the 1906 earthquake and subsequent fires. However, the flag itself dates several years earlier to around 1900. It was officially adopted as the flag of San Francisco on December 16, 1940.

 In 1901, banker and art patron Mayor James Duval Phelan, mayor from 1897 to 1902, recommended to the Board of Supervisors that San Francisco adopt a flag and motto. Over 100 designs were submitted and John M. Gamble's proposal was selected. It depicts a phoenix rising from its ashes on a white field. The mythological phoenix appears in many ancient cultures and is a symbol of immortality. When the long-lived phoenix feels death is near, it builds a nest of aromatic wood and sets it afire. A new phoenix then arises from the ashes, just as San Francisco arose from the great fires of the 1850s. The motto "Oro en paz y fierro en guerra" "Gold in Peace and Iron in War" refers to the city's then-recent experience during the Spanish–American War as the embarkation point for troops to the Philippines in 1898.^[1]