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Trump says he’ll have the ‘honor of taking Cuba’ and can do ‘anything I want with it’
(www.independent.co.uk)
this post was submitted on 16 Mar 2026
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What I'm talking about here is the massive social, political and economic trends of the life-cycle of an Empire.
So keep on Zooming Back your perspective.
Here is an historic graphic of Social Mobility in the US.
Here is the Gini Coeficient that measures inequality (the higher the more unequal), which actually understates the reality because it's not that great at reflecting internal inequality in the top quintile (i.e. things like how the top 1% are now way much richer than the top 10% than before).
So all the way back in the 1970s, America started changing from the "Land Of Opportunity" were "everybody has a chance" as shown by it's massive social mobility back then to the equivalent of a feudal system - a zero-merit environment where the rich are rich because their parents were rich and those born into poverty are unable to rise up from poverty - AND on top of that the richer were getting richer and the rest were getting poorer.
For most of the population that meant more povert and less opportunity hence less hope. From that you get more discontent.
So, how do the elites pillaging a society deal with such increase in discontent due to the activities of said elites?
Deceive the masses (for example: more and more lying in Politics, Press capture and subversion into a Propaganda machine and in present day psychological manipulation via Social Media), increase oppression (for example: ever more murderous policing, criminalization of "no victim" activities and harsher punishements) and in the case of a Democracy subvert the systems by which the citizens chose who will manage the nation (for example: political corruption, Gerrymandering, taking the vote away from felons - which typically hail from the poor - and, specifically in the barelly-Democratic US system, internal capture of the two parties in the duopoly of power that rules the country as illustrated by how the DNC gave the nomination to Hillary Clinton some years ago).
So the entire system was pillaged by local elites and then when the discontent caused by that pillaging grew, it was corrupted by those very same elites to redirect or suppress the consequences for those elites.
Foreign interference in present day America, is like maggots in a zombie - they're not what made it a zombie and there would be no maggots in it if had not already been turned into a zombie.
A problem with these graphs & your inferences is it's objectively unclear what to expect. What do they look like for other countries? What part of this is explained by other factors like unique historical advantages (eg, an industrial base untouched by war during the postwar boom) dissipating as other countries rebuild & catch up? Can we decouple these time-dependent factors to get an expected baseline performance apart from them?
With that social mobility graph, should we expect nearly all children to earn more than their parents every subsequent generation indefinitely? The remarkably similar graph provided by the source cited by yours shows birthyear of the child starting in 1940. Couldn't their parents earning substantially less, perhaps by living through the Great Depression, and the postwar boom significantly explain the high proportion earning more than their parents? And as GDP per capita growth rate declines, wouldn't we likewise expect a declining proportion of children to earn more than their parents? A base of reference would really help here.
As for the Gini coefficient, we see a 7% range from 35% to 42%. While this is an increase, it doesn't seem staggering & needs evidence to distinctly support your conclusion.
Some problems you mentioned were always present or worse when that Gini coefficient was lower: gerrymandering, obstructions to vote (felon disenfranchisement, intimidation, poll taxes & tests), discriminatory incarceration, 2-party system due to plurality voting, etc. They're not new developments systematically leading in the direction you claim.
It looks like you started with your conclusion & worked backwards to confirm it with evidence that is not as conclusive as you claim. An open-minded skeptic wouldn't be convinced.
Social Mobility measures both people going up and down in social class, and its relative rather than absolute - it's a measure of movement between social classes in society, not about children being wealthier than their parents.
Your entire line of argumentation to deny it (one wonders what's your motivation to do so) is completely wrong because you don't even know what it actually means.
Rather than a wall of text of denialism, how about you provide an alternative explanation for the status of modern America compared to the days when a single white collar worker could earn enough to feed a family of 5 and have a car and a nice house.
Or is it your whole point that America is just fine and has never been better?!
Agreed! Russia can't even afford to sit at the table with the real players, they are "second string" at best.
Russia's economy is smaller than California's. Can they afford to influence a rep? Yes, as always. But our reps will take money from absolutely anyone, get in line Russia, you're right after Amazon and McDonald's and Walmart and Tesla and Blackstone and Blackrock and so on