Bernardo de La Paz
Bernardo de La Paz's JournalLet's do reverse Shock & Awe onto the regime
There is safety in numbers. Encourage state and local governments to push back together. Here's how it goes:
The regime is always posting notices that such and such entity is being investigated for DEI, latest I saw being Hennepin County. If lots of counties and cities and states and businesses and NGOs and educational institutions announce that they are keeping DEI in place like Costco, Delta, and Apple have, then the DoJ will be swamped with the need to do "investigations".
Keep the corrupt DoJ bogged down. All those entities can support each other in whatever ways they can, sharing successful cases, strategies and so on. Yes, the DoJ will start prioritizing but because of disfunction they will be less effective.
How to do this? Let all those institutions know that you and those you know want pushback and explicitly reference the idea of safety in numbers and banding together. Let politicians at all levels of all stripes know that you and those you know support politicians who demonstrate spine and courage.
DoJ was ** created ** to defend Civil Rights in 1870
Grant appointed Amos T. Akerman as attorney general and Benjamin H. Bristow as America's first solicitor general the same week that Congress created the Department of Justice. The Department's immediate function was to preserve civil rights. It set about fighting against domestic terrorist groups who had been using both violence and litigation to oppose the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution.[9]
Why sustained protest is needed to build towards later wider mass action
This video has an excellent explanation. Mass action started in April and must be sustained and built so that when a general strike is organized it will work and the resistance will be so large and so general that it will overwhelm.
Studies have shown that all it takes is 3.5% committed and active part of the population participating in non-violent resistance.
That is good trouble. My heart goes out to those who are prepared to resist.
to member ihaveaquestion: https://www.democraticunderground.com/132271913
Too low / high depends on expectations, risk & time. * Be Here Now. * "Too late" is not the best way to think of things.
Think about the possibility of cutting your losses / ride your winners. Timing markets is difficult and emotional. You have to ignore emotions and make rational judgments. Always think of reward-risk ratios and consider time scales with regard to need for money.
Forget what you paid for stuff. Be here now. Make your best decision as to outlook for where you think the market might go from here. Think as if you had nothing and then a fairy gifted you your current holdings this morning. You might wish to preserve capital for later, use it now, or you might wish to invest.
If you think it is going down a bit and then will recover, ... if you expect economic conditions to improve before it goes down much, then probably hold. Likewise if you think it will go up from here. That puts the reward-risk ratio more in favour of reward. But even if you hold those opinions, you might for other considerations weight the risk factor larger. For example, if you anticipate a need for money (cash) in the near or medium term, perhaps for desirable or anticipated expenses or imminent retirement, you might consider taking some money out.
But if you think economic conditions will significantly worsen, and that the market may in time react with a significant downturn (say more than 15% down from here) consider selling now and buying lower later. There the reward of holding goes down and the risk goes up. I sold my stock fund in January and moved into a bond fund and money because I thought the risk was outweighing the reward and I have my own circumstances.
If you are youngish (say less than 50), you might decide to wait for a drop and a return, but that can take a few years and even sometimes as long as a decade or more to get back to even.
This is not financial advice, it is advice about thinking. Speak with a certified financial planner and explain your outlook, your needs, your time horizons and your risk tolerance. If the discussion and advice doesn't make sense (many are locked into the all-purpose all-situations 60/40 mentality), then seek more advice.
I wish that every time people make rational pragmatic decisions, somebody doesn't pop up and say "they blinked"
It is an all too common simplistic and very shallow kind of remark (not the person, the remark, folks).
It is symptomatic of a world view that insists on purity tests and loyalty tests. Fundamentally it is binary thinking; the False Dichotomy logical fallacy. The world is full of nuance and shades of grey and degrees of things and gradations. It is a false choice. It is the most pernicious of all logical fallacies and the most common. It is the kind of thinking that scientists and engineers and doctors avoid. Scientists rarely speak in certainties but explain the limits of the data and the theory. Doctors don't say "you're a goner" but rather things like "If you do A and B you will greatly improve your chance of living more than six months". (Of course there are many exceptions.)
You can avoid it too, if you set your mind to it. ("You" being used in the plural, general sense, address all who are prone to it.) It is easy to stop that kind of thinking if you become aware of it and notice it every time you use it and every time you see others use it. Look for it. Train yourself.
I dread the torrent of "He blinked" remarks forthcoming against Prime Minister Dr. Mark Carney, D.Phil. Oxford, B.A. Harvard, when he negotiates some kind of resolution to the tariffs. Probably a NAFTA 3.0 (CUSMA 2.0), similar to what previous pragmatic Canadian Prime Ministers negotiated.
Pragmatism is NOT a sign of weakness. It is one thing to say tRump blinked because he is fundamentally a weak sack of shit with no vision and no strategic understanding and no thought out plan. tRump is not pragmatic or rational. He is reactive and emotional.
As to Xi, he has many motivations not all of which are known or clear. Maybe he blinked, but I doubt it. He did not become leader of a huge nation with a violent past within living memory by being a coward or stupid. (1949 Revolution, Great Leap Forward famine, Cultural Revolution, Tiananmen Square)
Let's not apply the slur against intelligent caring pragmatic leaders like Carney who are facing a challenge that would make 99.9% of DU members quake in their boots because of the weight of the responsibility.
maga will believe every word UNTIL they don't. Nobody knows what the tipping point will be
Rising prices won't do it, not initially.
It starts with individual maga here and there losing jobs or businesses. Whispers will be heard in maga hallways. Eventually they won't just be hearing about friends of friends but their own friends and family will lose a job or two or shifts will be cut in half or 35 year old children will move back into parent's house.
At some point, for each maga, they will suddenly realize, "wait a minute, this is kind of bad". When enough of these occur, a tipping point will be reached and there will be a rush of talk among maga "hey, is this as bad for you as it is for my family?" And maga will move against tRump.
There will always be a 10-15% of the populace who think tRump is a saint and a martyr. But at some point even a majority of maga will turn against tRump. They may not admit it so much on opinion polls because they wouldn't want to be "recorded" in any way against tRump, but their actions will reveal distrust and disgust even while being in denial.
It might be mass maga calls to brokers "Get my 401k out of the market now!" Might be staying home from voting in Nov 2026. Might be panic buying of used pickup trucks. Some will even march in protest.
Democrats must be ready and address economic concerns while maintaining maximum pressure against the abduction and disappearance of people. Especially they must address the young males who even now feel left behind by the economy despite working hard.
Nobody knows when the tipping point occurs, but Democrats, liberals, and progressives must be ready to help power a Blue Storm Surge Nov 2026.
Supply shortage wave will roll from LA/SFO starting about May 25, reaching NYC about June 5.
April 2: "Liberation Day"
April 2 night: Libation Night
April 3: Liquidation Day
April 9: Tariffs vs China imposed, quickly ratched up to 145%
Everything in transit is theoretically exempt but might get slowed down. Businesses did what they could to expedite in advance but it was limited.
Cargo Bookings for May are down 40% vs May 2024. Basically that is for orders that had to be placed after April 9. Takes about 45 days for order to go Chinese factory to dock to ship to ocean to LA to sit on dock. 55 days to get to NYC by ocean or add 10 days from LA to NYC by truck including lading and off lading.
April 10 + 45 days --> May 25.
April 10 + 55 days --> June 5
Timing of course is approximate, but expect there to be a period of about two weeks to go from sort of normal to noticeable spaces on shelves and another two weeks for it to become undeniable and much remarked on.
mahatmakanejeeves https://www.democraticunderground.com/1116100359
applegrove https://www.democraticunderground.com/100220265346
Paul Krugman cargo bookings graph reposted in bluesky:
The crash in container ships arriving at the Port of Los Angeles (busiest in US) depicted in this graph should hit in a few weeks, which means lost business for truckers and probably some empty shelves in stores.
— Nicholas Grossman (@nicholasgrossman.bsky.social) 2025-04-24T14:59:13.804Z
Unless something big changes, the problems should become more apparent in the summer.
A tender is a load offer from a shipper to a trucking company that is sent electronically. These are actual loads and are transmitted a few days before they are scheduled to be picked up. This is the most current and reliable indicator of market demand.
The white line is 2025 and has begun an ominous little dip:
Kindleberger Chart premonition of tRump trade death spiral legacy, but in a different way
Here is Kindleberger's chart from his 1983 textbook. I think I have seen a similar chart in Galbraith's earlier book on the Great Depression though might have been less comprehensive.
What may be different this time is that this one was begun, suddenly, by one man. This means 1) it is largely reversible, depending on how long he is allowed to persist, and 2) the rest of the world may fare better than the US because they are free to trade among themselves; America Alone.
For the crowd: how applicable do you think this is, and how might it be different this time?
Sat. Apr 19 protest Taxation without Representation & Hell Salvador
On April 19, the 250th anniversary of the Battles of Lexington and Concord, protest peacefully against wannabeking tRump the Zero. He also shares some madness with his model, King George III.
No Taxation without Representation. In a cowardly act of supplication the Republicon Congress gave wannabeking tRump 0 the power to impose tariffs with no oversight under the guise of an economic emergency which is not an emergency. A thin election win is not a mandate and the American populace has turned against him and tRumpconomics. Tariffs are taxes on the American people and he is imposing unpopular taxes on the American people without proper representation.
The madness of wannabeking tRump 0 is so all-consuming that now he kidnaps people in America with unmarked vans and unidentified anonymous kidnappers, and wants to send American citizens to Hell Salvador where they will disappear into the hellholes. The Constitution protects all people in the USA, citizens and non-citizens, including visitors.
Protest the madness of wannabeking tRump 0 on April 19 anyway that you can, anywhere you can. Maintain situational awareness. Protest in towns, in cities, on highway overpasses. For the sake of your freedom and for the sake of Freedom.
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