So now that the fake news media has run out of academics and politicians who have been predicting that the United States will soon find itself in the middle of its second Civil War, they can trot out a leading business guy who is saying the same thing. In this case it’s Ray Dalio who runs the world’s largest hedge fund, Bridgewater Associates, which has some $150 billion (not million) under management these days.
This little bankroll gives Dalio enough free time to write a book, ‘Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order,’ which he is now advertising on his LinkedIn page but I’m sure it will be sitting right up front when I wander into Barnes & Noble today. Meanwhile, Dalio’s prediction that we are heading towards Armageddon was immediately picked up by Bloomberg and other so-called business ‘news’ venues online.
Now it turns out, incidentally, that Dalio believes we are becoming captive of the most extreme political arguments on both sides because the gap between the ones who have the money and the ones who don’t is becoming too wide. Has a guy whose personal worth is somewhere around $20 billion all of a sudden become a disciple of Thomas Piketty and the inequality crowd?
Not really. Because Piketty’s argument is a thinly-disguised attempt to restore the income tax rates to back where they were before Reagan cut the top rate in half, But Dalio’s not interested in seeing his tax bill go up. In fact, according to his LinkedIn post, his plan to reduce the possibility of a civil war is to cut the deficit by cutting spending. Gee – what a new and novel idea!
By the way, at no point in his so-called analysis of history does Dalio show the slightest understanding for how things have changed and therefore how we should evaluate what those changes really mean.
For example, and Dalio is hardly alone in this respect, he gives as an example of the increased polarization the fact that only 36 percent of the respondents to a 2021 Gallup poll have either a ‘fair’ or ‘great deal’ of trust in today’s media, whereas in 1976 the same number in a previous Gallup poll was 72 percent.
How could anyone make a reliable comparison of how views on the media have changed over the past 50 years when the media itself has changed so dramatically over the same period of time? If you had asked the average adult to define the word ‘media’ back in 1972, the ponse which would have started and ended with CBS, NBC, and ABC.
Know what you would get today if you asked the same question? You’d get an answer that would probably begin with FOX, or MS-NBC. I flew from Los Angeles to New York City in 1994, and when I walked into LAX and sat down to wait for my flight to be called, it was the first time I ever looked at a TV screen showing CNN. And Dalio wants to be taken seriously when he compares media from today back to before anyone in the United States could subscribe to a cable channel to get their news?
Let’s get one thing straight right now, okay? The Civil War which we fought between 1861 and 1865 was not (read: not) a political and military conflict between two different groups who both wanted to control the same government. It was a political and military conflict between two independent countries, unless of course you want to believe that the Confederate states never seceded from the United States.
Fine. You can follow Ray Dalio and believe whatever you want.
I still think Joe has summed up the so-called threat posed by the Proud Boys, the Three Percenters, and all those other schmucks in the most brilliant way, namely, that if you want to take on the United States government, you’d better show up with your F-15.
If anyone’s demented these days, it’s not Joe Biden. It’s someone who would buy into Ray Dalio’s bullshit and actually spend twenty bucks on Amazon to buy his book.