“ "Let the market decide" really means let the manipulators decide, because the markets are dominated by those who excel at manipulating. We're taught that letting the market decide means letting supply and demand take its natural course, as though we're talking about ocean tides or seasons or something, but in reality both supply and demand are manipulated constantly with extreme aggression. Manipulating the supply of diamonds. Manipulating the supply of housing. Manipulating the supply of oil. Manipulating people into wanting things they'd never thought to want before through advertising. Manipulating women into feeling bad about their bodies so they'll buy your beauty products. Manipulating people into paying $2000 for a $20 bag using branding. Manipulating people into buying Listerine by inventing the word "halitosis" and convincing them to be worried about it. Manipulating people into believing Beanie Babies were prized collectors items when they were just standard stuffed toys.
Capitalism gives us a civilization that is dominated by trickery. Those who get to the top are those who succeed in tricking as many people as possible. Tricking them into paying more. Tricking them into buying your product and not someone else's. Tricking people who actually produce something of value into making you their middle man who gets paid despite producing nothing. Tricking competitors into making the wrong move. Tricking people into asking their doctor about your extremely lucrative pharmaceutical product. Tricking people into buying or selling certain stocks or cryptocurrencies or NFTs. Tricking people by using the legal system and your team of lawyers who understand it better than normal people do. Tricking people into letting you privatize their own drinking water and then selling it back to them in bottles.
It's a scam competition. Whoever scams the best wins. How can you save the planet from destruction by human behavior when all of human behavior is driven by a bizarre scam competition? And the biggest scam of all is the narrative that this system is totally working and is entirely sustainable. That's the overarching scam holding all the other scams together.
Proponents of capitalism often decry socialism as a coercive system that people are forced to participate in, but what the hell do you call this? Did any of us sign up to be thrown into the middle of a giant unending scam competition? What if I don't want to spend my whole life being subjected to people's attempts to trick me? What if I don't want to live in a society where everyone's trying to trick and scam each other instead of collaborating toward the greater good of our world? Guess what? I don't consent to any of that. I am being coerced into this.
Whenever you talk about the destructiveness and depravity of capitalism online you'll get people saying "Hurr hurr, and yet here you are participating in capitalism" like that's an own instead of the exact problem that's being discussed. Yes! Yes I am coerced into participating in a capitalist society in order to pay the bills and stay alive. That's the problem I'm trying to address here. It's like prisoners complaining about the prison system and being called hypocrites because they are in prison.
I'm convinced that this is a huge factor in the mental health crises our society is experiencing today. We're trapped in this system where we're constantly being psychologically pummelled with an endless barrage of messaging trying to make us think and feel and desire and loathe specific things for no other reason than because it will make someone money. How can mental health prevail in a civilization where everyone's mind is continuously being yanked this way and that by mass-scale psychological manipulation? Capitalism poisons our minds as much as it poisons our air and our water.”
Excellent synopsis of the world we live in. We just watched Netflix gobble up the number two competitor. How long before we have one choice in entertainment providers and no choice in what we pay?
Precisely right about everything. A few of those state-owned enterprises are still running successfully. TVA and Bonneville are still generating power, and now they're returning to nuclear after 50 years of ignoring it.
China is conquering the world now because it's following the New Deal playbook. Find what each region does best and optimize it for local profit, not to enrich Bezos.
"The economy we’re living inside wasn’t built with a reverse gear. It doesn’t go backwards. Prices don’t come down. Not in any systemic way. The only time prices actually fall is during a collapse. A depression. A crash."
I had to stop right there ... because this statement of fact is best handled, like everything else, at the core value level, which means it can only be truly solved from the inside out - and only after facing the truth of our poorly educated selves. Eg. If we educated ourselves from an early age to do the most with the least, and to keep prices low while keeping quality high, then we would be in alignment with the physics of our own well balanced, living and growing universe, and would result in a well-balanced economical society that lives and grows in a healthy, steady, organic way that doesn't create tsunami waves, but only pleasant waves. We've been building a tsunami wave that is uncomfortably close to landing on our heads and destroying everything. That's the crash
But that's just silly me who wants everyone to have what they need, starting with great relationships with every person, place, and thing. Because how we relate, matters, maybe more than anything. And we don't get that, either, adding to the buildup of a killer wave.
If we cannot get that these core concepts infuse everything we do, then we will never be able to solve our systemic problems: We'll keep cycling in a traumatic way instead of a healthy way, so best live prepared for social and economic tsunamis at every turn. Or ... we could wise up and start assessing our values without punishing for mistakes.
It's true that we've been encouraged to think we don't need limits, but we need to take care not to put this off onto consumers, as if we're at fault. It's an institutional problem, centuries old, about the prerogative of private property and vastly disparate wealth distribution, the advantages of wealth to corner power and obfuscate its clear abusers.
Good piece. I've worked for 30 years on economic system change because the current version of capitalism chews up both people and planet. Yet, it is so entrenched in our culture and politics it is rarely questioned. In fact, as I shared in this piece, the Trump/Project 2025 regime has now tried to equate questioning capitalism with being a terrorist.
“This is what status quo Democrats don’t want to admit. Trump is a symptom, not the problem…”
Again, at the fountainhead of most human-caused problems is the profit motive — the need to extract more value from any endeavor than one puts into it. Someone or something else always has to pay the price. A child should be able to see the long-term unsustainability of this model. Yet we mask it with a host of platitudes about financial “responsibility”, while masking the harm with the need for constant economic “growth”.
Yes, a public option cannot coexist in any industry because it will always undercut the private venture’s need to also make a profit.
Once an endeavor - be it a career, company, or country - has reached maturity, the need for profit would ideally be satisfied and therefore become unnecessary, or at least deemphasized.
If Mandami succeeds in starting up pubic markets, this could lead other states and cities to do the same. It will force prices down through competition which is how capitalism was supposed to work. Excellent piece of writing.
How do we get people to stop voting agaisnt their own interests? Fox and mainstream media want us to think this is just an anomaly. Each time there's a setback, it gets worse cuz they use it as an excuse to further rip us off.
My take: if you are enslaved to buying from monopoly corporations and billionaire owned businesses of ANY kind of product or service then YOU are part of the problem. Only buying small business and LOCAL will reverse this by impoverishing the billies. JOIN the natiionwide boycott and general strike if you can, ween yourself away from the grift. The next recession/depression needs to be consumer generated in a way that makes the top 2% very much poorer. So poor they can't afford to buy up what the bottom 98% has built.
Friedman/Chicago/de-regulation of the private sector/venture capital/private equity/stock trade banking/the corruption of Congress/followed by failure to garrot the Fed in its frenzy to create a Credit enslavement of the population.
What phenomenon allegedly separated 'murka from Europe/GB? The absence of royalty. The outrageous vision of a human population granted permission by itself to self-regulate based upon - wait for it - a democratic code of conduct that overarched ALL entities, from individual adult citizens to the most massive corporate strongholds ever conceived.
To even attempt to get this done, WHAT had to happen? Commerce had to be socialized based upon this democratic Code/Constitution, and that commerce included, at its foundation, the Citizen as both individual And collective arbiter of the Means of Commerce - the financial system.
Old Dogs do not enjoy New Tricks. Their bones and muscles are tired, their teeth rounded off, their vision blurred at the extremities. Before the Constitutional Ink had dried, the corporate hegemony of GB, via grandpa Rome, had begun to re-entrench itself into Commerce, in this most stunning strategy - untaxed, unregulated, unfettered Religious Autonomy enshrined inside the First Amendment.
Religious organization is the caricature most amendable to Corporate hegemony. The top-down pyramid - Big Daddy, his BoD of archangels, and the upper floors of legal prestidigitators who constantly create jabberwocky sermons for the huddled masses to rapture around - wealth equals divine approval - the Ten Commandments of Commerce.
Built in to the Constitution is its own demise - the single branch of the triune god that cannot be challenged - SCOTUS. Logically, SCOTUS Should be regulated and commandeered by the lower courts, and those courts Should be always elected, by whom? - the Citizenry. SCOTUS serves at the pleasure of the Judiciary, whose foundation is the Vote of the Citizenry, at least in a system of Commerce that demonstrates that the Citizen is the sole driver of Commerce.
'murka has never been a democracy. It is the classic grift of the company store, the Egyptian pyramid of top down power, the hoarding disease of wetiko, wealth creates might, might creates rights and rites, all intended to keep the masses huddled and enslaved.
Look at what is now occurring. The executive wants to be god. The judicial gods are compromised, since they are appointed by the executive god. The representative gods, the archangels, are compromised by their own weaknesses, the greed and hubris that comes from the gifts of the gods of Commerce. Before Corbin can get the govt. to build anything of value, the Code of Conduct must be rent asunder and rebuilt, from the ground up. That will be akin to taking a fresh kill from a honey badger.
It's been said, time and time again, that the way forward is to invest in the people, not the corporations. Every corporate subsidy that is meant to keep jobs is always outsized relative to the number of jobs that are maintained or created. The subsidy is generally used to enrich the corporate heads, while the worker benefits remain stagnant.
When these conversations are had, they never focus on the policies that our elected representatives, local, state and federal have implemented that have knowingly contributed to our undoing.
While I can appreciate that people that have an active role to play in this system of government, I refuse to ignore that political corruption and media manipulation have bolstered the "Almighty Capitalism" mindset that is now part of our collective psyche. People simply cannot imagine any other form of economic enterprise, even if this one consistently contributes to their insecurities.
I do agree with the solutions that Corbin Trent presented in "America's Undoing - The System has No Reverse" but I believe that prices can be brought down. The pure market philosophy is that the prices are dictated by what the market can bear. It is clear that prices are untenable and unsustainable. Instead of waiting for the next crash we the people, the integral part of this economy, can adopt a need vs want mindset. The necessities in moderation not bulk. Sharing with neighbors and family to spread the cost burden. Cooperatives if you will.
The no-reverse gear insight is brillaint and cuts through so much confused political debate. What you're describing about the New Deal era isn't just historical trivia but a fundamental reframing of what actually worked. The part about the Defense Plant Corporation owning 90% of synthetic rubber capacity makes it imposible to argue that postwar prosperity came from free markets gently nudged by regulation. It came from the state deciding outcomes mattered more than market purity, then building the infrastracture directly.
This is another mistaken and misleading article that supports and, actually, helps to perpetrate the official, both conservative and liberal, propaganda about the nature of the American state that at all times, at war and peace, during crisis and expansion, adversity and prosperity serves one and only one fundamental purpose – corporate profit maximization. It serves the interests of the capitalist class (and its modern "incarnations") or infamous 1% exactly the same as the feudal state served the interests of feudal lords, and the slave state served the interests of the slave owners. And it does this by providing the legal condition for profit extraction from the labor of the working people domestically (directly) and internationally (indirectly) in the most effective and efficient ways. Saying that this state can be "transformed" in a way to genuinely (not using empty populist rhetoric, perverted science, conspiracy theories, etc.) serve the interests of the majority is either innocent delusion (a result of education, superficial views, ideological indoctrination, etc.) or political demagogy. It's very unfortunate that the author, apparently, shares the liberal or social-democratic views of Sanders, AOC, etc. about "fair", benign, humane, etc. capitalism, which is a sheer fiction.
Yes, at certain time periods that provide favorable conditions for making profits, one of which was taking place after the WWII when half of the world was in ruins, life conditions of the working people might also improve, but this is an incident rather than a feature of this economic system. And NO, "we" didn't "build" the middle class, its creation was a by-product of the social-economic development of that specific after-war period. And it was not the last time; it was the only time. Also, we should not forget who belonged to that middle working class – predominantly white males working in heavy industry, exactly the people, whose lives were devastated a few decades later during outsourcing and de-industrialization due to changed economic condition and who, have become Trump supporters. After all, it is Trump, who promises a return to the good old days of Great America.
“Socialism and Communism were genuine competitors” because they’re better systems — and so our government engaged in socialist planned economy when capitalism wasn’t working.
"The only time prices actually fall is during a collapse. A depression. A crash. And when that happens, the wealthy swoop in and gobble up everything the rest of us built for pennies on the dollar. That’s the only reverse this system has."
...
"If we want affordability back, we have to build the supply ourselves."
So long as the former is true, how are we supposed to accomplish the latter short of "ending of 'The Godfather'-style targeted butchery?
I mean, I'd be in favor of that; the Casus Belli is overwhelming, your own words make that clear, and they're never going to stop because they know it too.
From Caitlin Johnstone:
“ "Let the market decide" really means let the manipulators decide, because the markets are dominated by those who excel at manipulating. We're taught that letting the market decide means letting supply and demand take its natural course, as though we're talking about ocean tides or seasons or something, but in reality both supply and demand are manipulated constantly with extreme aggression. Manipulating the supply of diamonds. Manipulating the supply of housing. Manipulating the supply of oil. Manipulating people into wanting things they'd never thought to want before through advertising. Manipulating women into feeling bad about their bodies so they'll buy your beauty products. Manipulating people into paying $2000 for a $20 bag using branding. Manipulating people into buying Listerine by inventing the word "halitosis" and convincing them to be worried about it. Manipulating people into believing Beanie Babies were prized collectors items when they were just standard stuffed toys.
Capitalism gives us a civilization that is dominated by trickery. Those who get to the top are those who succeed in tricking as many people as possible. Tricking them into paying more. Tricking them into buying your product and not someone else's. Tricking people who actually produce something of value into making you their middle man who gets paid despite producing nothing. Tricking competitors into making the wrong move. Tricking people into asking their doctor about your extremely lucrative pharmaceutical product. Tricking people into buying or selling certain stocks or cryptocurrencies or NFTs. Tricking people by using the legal system and your team of lawyers who understand it better than normal people do. Tricking people into letting you privatize their own drinking water and then selling it back to them in bottles.
It's a scam competition. Whoever scams the best wins. How can you save the planet from destruction by human behavior when all of human behavior is driven by a bizarre scam competition? And the biggest scam of all is the narrative that this system is totally working and is entirely sustainable. That's the overarching scam holding all the other scams together.
Proponents of capitalism often decry socialism as a coercive system that people are forced to participate in, but what the hell do you call this? Did any of us sign up to be thrown into the middle of a giant unending scam competition? What if I don't want to spend my whole life being subjected to people's attempts to trick me? What if I don't want to live in a society where everyone's trying to trick and scam each other instead of collaborating toward the greater good of our world? Guess what? I don't consent to any of that. I am being coerced into this.
Whenever you talk about the destructiveness and depravity of capitalism online you'll get people saying "Hurr hurr, and yet here you are participating in capitalism" like that's an own instead of the exact problem that's being discussed. Yes! Yes I am coerced into participating in a capitalist society in order to pay the bills and stay alive. That's the problem I'm trying to address here. It's like prisoners complaining about the prison system and being called hypocrites because they are in prison.
I'm convinced that this is a huge factor in the mental health crises our society is experiencing today. We're trapped in this system where we're constantly being psychologically pummelled with an endless barrage of messaging trying to make us think and feel and desire and loathe specific things for no other reason than because it will make someone money. How can mental health prevail in a civilization where everyone's mind is continuously being yanked this way and that by mass-scale psychological manipulation? Capitalism poisons our minds as much as it poisons our air and our water.”
Excellent synopsis of the world we live in. We just watched Netflix gobble up the number two competitor. How long before we have one choice in entertainment providers and no choice in what we pay?
Could not be better said!
Precisely right about everything. A few of those state-owned enterprises are still running successfully. TVA and Bonneville are still generating power, and now they're returning to nuclear after 50 years of ignoring it.
China is conquering the world now because it's following the New Deal playbook. Find what each region does best and optimize it for local profit, not to enrich Bezos.
But, but, but… we can’t be like China; they are commies!
“It is the heart of U.S. policy to use fascism to preserve capitalism while claiming to save democracy from communism.” — Michael Parenti
"The economy we’re living inside wasn’t built with a reverse gear. It doesn’t go backwards. Prices don’t come down. Not in any systemic way. The only time prices actually fall is during a collapse. A depression. A crash."
I had to stop right there ... because this statement of fact is best handled, like everything else, at the core value level, which means it can only be truly solved from the inside out - and only after facing the truth of our poorly educated selves. Eg. If we educated ourselves from an early age to do the most with the least, and to keep prices low while keeping quality high, then we would be in alignment with the physics of our own well balanced, living and growing universe, and would result in a well-balanced economical society that lives and grows in a healthy, steady, organic way that doesn't create tsunami waves, but only pleasant waves. We've been building a tsunami wave that is uncomfortably close to landing on our heads and destroying everything. That's the crash
But that's just silly me who wants everyone to have what they need, starting with great relationships with every person, place, and thing. Because how we relate, matters, maybe more than anything. And we don't get that, either, adding to the buildup of a killer wave.
If we cannot get that these core concepts infuse everything we do, then we will never be able to solve our systemic problems: We'll keep cycling in a traumatic way instead of a healthy way, so best live prepared for social and economic tsunamis at every turn. Or ... we could wise up and start assessing our values without punishing for mistakes.
It's true that we've been encouraged to think we don't need limits, but we need to take care not to put this off onto consumers, as if we're at fault. It's an institutional problem, centuries old, about the prerogative of private property and vastly disparate wealth distribution, the advantages of wealth to corner power and obfuscate its clear abusers.
Good piece. I've worked for 30 years on economic system change because the current version of capitalism chews up both people and planet. Yet, it is so entrenched in our culture and politics it is rarely questioned. In fact, as I shared in this piece, the Trump/Project 2025 regime has now tried to equate questioning capitalism with being a terrorist.
https://cylviahayes.substack.com/p/am-i-a-terrorist
As Corbin observed in a recent post:
“This is what status quo Democrats don’t want to admit. Trump is a symptom, not the problem…”
Again, at the fountainhead of most human-caused problems is the profit motive — the need to extract more value from any endeavor than one puts into it. Someone or something else always has to pay the price. A child should be able to see the long-term unsustainability of this model. Yet we mask it with a host of platitudes about financial “responsibility”, while masking the harm with the need for constant economic “growth”.
Yes, a public option cannot coexist in any industry because it will always undercut the private venture’s need to also make a profit.
Once an endeavor - be it a career, company, or country - has reached maturity, the need for profit would ideally be satisfied and therefore become unnecessary, or at least deemphasized.
If Mandami succeeds in starting up pubic markets, this could lead other states and cities to do the same. It will force prices down through competition which is how capitalism was supposed to work. Excellent piece of writing.
How do we get people to stop voting agaisnt their own interests? Fox and mainstream media want us to think this is just an anomaly. Each time there's a setback, it gets worse cuz they use it as an excuse to further rip us off.
My take: if you are enslaved to buying from monopoly corporations and billionaire owned businesses of ANY kind of product or service then YOU are part of the problem. Only buying small business and LOCAL will reverse this by impoverishing the billies. JOIN the natiionwide boycott and general strike if you can, ween yourself away from the grift. The next recession/depression needs to be consumer generated in a way that makes the top 2% very much poorer. So poor they can't afford to buy up what the bottom 98% has built.
Friedman/Chicago/de-regulation of the private sector/venture capital/private equity/stock trade banking/the corruption of Congress/followed by failure to garrot the Fed in its frenzy to create a Credit enslavement of the population.
What phenomenon allegedly separated 'murka from Europe/GB? The absence of royalty. The outrageous vision of a human population granted permission by itself to self-regulate based upon - wait for it - a democratic code of conduct that overarched ALL entities, from individual adult citizens to the most massive corporate strongholds ever conceived.
To even attempt to get this done, WHAT had to happen? Commerce had to be socialized based upon this democratic Code/Constitution, and that commerce included, at its foundation, the Citizen as both individual And collective arbiter of the Means of Commerce - the financial system.
Old Dogs do not enjoy New Tricks. Their bones and muscles are tired, their teeth rounded off, their vision blurred at the extremities. Before the Constitutional Ink had dried, the corporate hegemony of GB, via grandpa Rome, had begun to re-entrench itself into Commerce, in this most stunning strategy - untaxed, unregulated, unfettered Religious Autonomy enshrined inside the First Amendment.
Religious organization is the caricature most amendable to Corporate hegemony. The top-down pyramid - Big Daddy, his BoD of archangels, and the upper floors of legal prestidigitators who constantly create jabberwocky sermons for the huddled masses to rapture around - wealth equals divine approval - the Ten Commandments of Commerce.
Built in to the Constitution is its own demise - the single branch of the triune god that cannot be challenged - SCOTUS. Logically, SCOTUS Should be regulated and commandeered by the lower courts, and those courts Should be always elected, by whom? - the Citizenry. SCOTUS serves at the pleasure of the Judiciary, whose foundation is the Vote of the Citizenry, at least in a system of Commerce that demonstrates that the Citizen is the sole driver of Commerce.
'murka has never been a democracy. It is the classic grift of the company store, the Egyptian pyramid of top down power, the hoarding disease of wetiko, wealth creates might, might creates rights and rites, all intended to keep the masses huddled and enslaved.
Look at what is now occurring. The executive wants to be god. The judicial gods are compromised, since they are appointed by the executive god. The representative gods, the archangels, are compromised by their own weaknesses, the greed and hubris that comes from the gifts of the gods of Commerce. Before Corbin can get the govt. to build anything of value, the Code of Conduct must be rent asunder and rebuilt, from the ground up. That will be akin to taking a fresh kill from a honey badger.
It's been said, time and time again, that the way forward is to invest in the people, not the corporations. Every corporate subsidy that is meant to keep jobs is always outsized relative to the number of jobs that are maintained or created. The subsidy is generally used to enrich the corporate heads, while the worker benefits remain stagnant.
When these conversations are had, they never focus on the policies that our elected representatives, local, state and federal have implemented that have knowingly contributed to our undoing.
While I can appreciate that people that have an active role to play in this system of government, I refuse to ignore that political corruption and media manipulation have bolstered the "Almighty Capitalism" mindset that is now part of our collective psyche. People simply cannot imagine any other form of economic enterprise, even if this one consistently contributes to their insecurities.
I do agree with the solutions that Corbin Trent presented in "America's Undoing - The System has No Reverse" but I believe that prices can be brought down. The pure market philosophy is that the prices are dictated by what the market can bear. It is clear that prices are untenable and unsustainable. Instead of waiting for the next crash we the people, the integral part of this economy, can adopt a need vs want mindset. The necessities in moderation not bulk. Sharing with neighbors and family to spread the cost burden. Cooperatives if you will.
What are your thoughts on MMT to address and "fix" our economy to re-balance prosperity?
The no-reverse gear insight is brillaint and cuts through so much confused political debate. What you're describing about the New Deal era isn't just historical trivia but a fundamental reframing of what actually worked. The part about the Defense Plant Corporation owning 90% of synthetic rubber capacity makes it imposible to argue that postwar prosperity came from free markets gently nudged by regulation. It came from the state deciding outcomes mattered more than market purity, then building the infrastracture directly.
This is another mistaken and misleading article that supports and, actually, helps to perpetrate the official, both conservative and liberal, propaganda about the nature of the American state that at all times, at war and peace, during crisis and expansion, adversity and prosperity serves one and only one fundamental purpose – corporate profit maximization. It serves the interests of the capitalist class (and its modern "incarnations") or infamous 1% exactly the same as the feudal state served the interests of feudal lords, and the slave state served the interests of the slave owners. And it does this by providing the legal condition for profit extraction from the labor of the working people domestically (directly) and internationally (indirectly) in the most effective and efficient ways. Saying that this state can be "transformed" in a way to genuinely (not using empty populist rhetoric, perverted science, conspiracy theories, etc.) serve the interests of the majority is either innocent delusion (a result of education, superficial views, ideological indoctrination, etc.) or political demagogy. It's very unfortunate that the author, apparently, shares the liberal or social-democratic views of Sanders, AOC, etc. about "fair", benign, humane, etc. capitalism, which is a sheer fiction.
Yes, at certain time periods that provide favorable conditions for making profits, one of which was taking place after the WWII when half of the world was in ruins, life conditions of the working people might also improve, but this is an incident rather than a feature of this economic system. And NO, "we" didn't "build" the middle class, its creation was a by-product of the social-economic development of that specific after-war period. And it was not the last time; it was the only time. Also, we should not forget who belonged to that middle working class – predominantly white males working in heavy industry, exactly the people, whose lives were devastated a few decades later during outsourcing and de-industrialization due to changed economic condition and who, have become Trump supporters. After all, it is Trump, who promises a return to the good old days of Great America.
THANK YOU. This is what I've been saying for years now: the government has to be a competitor to business, not a partner with it.
“Socialism and Communism were genuine competitors” because they’re better systems — and so our government engaged in socialist planned economy when capitalism wasn’t working.
"The only time prices actually fall is during a collapse. A depression. A crash. And when that happens, the wealthy swoop in and gobble up everything the rest of us built for pennies on the dollar. That’s the only reverse this system has."
...
"If we want affordability back, we have to build the supply ourselves."
So long as the former is true, how are we supposed to accomplish the latter short of "ending of 'The Godfather'-style targeted butchery?
I mean, I'd be in favor of that; the Casus Belli is overwhelming, your own words make that clear, and they're never going to stop because they know it too.