And since when has CalTech been into econometric modeling?

https://www.usnews.com/best-graduate-schools/top-humanities-schools/california-institute-of-technology-110404

Ranked 14th highest econ department in the country. Math modeling and economics are joined at the hip.

Why would you want to efficiently rebuild the Third Reich?

I mean, who else would have been able to run the government

Holocaust survivors and refugees, for starters. Germany was fully occupied by the US and USSR, so all the big decisions were going through DC/Moscow anyway. Turning the government over to survivors and any resisters you could find would have made far more sense than simply handing the country back to the Fascists.

It’s impossible to have a fair election when you’re at war.

How many elections has the US held during war time? Hell Lincoln won his second term before the Civil War was over.

The entire global trade system is in free fall.

It’s so crazy to blink past tanking indexes in Tokyo, Frankfurt, and Dubai while pumping a fist and announcing “Fuck yeah! We got Russia!”

If anyone should be extremely worried right now, you’d think it would be the Saudis. Not one of the most sanctioned countries on earth.

Ironic given the support this sub shows for involuntary conscription

people cannot see the errors of their ways and therefore cannot change

Not when they are immersed in a roiling pot of fascist propaganda, no. You can’t see error when you are surrounded by media justifying your decisions. You can’t find the will to change when you’ve been told again and again that circumstances are beyond your control.

Right now, German media is as bad as anything the MAGA Americans are churning out, with migrant hysteria and xenophobia hitting a fevered pitch. Combined with the energy crisis in Europe and the economic downturn globally, it’s a recipe for a new wave of Fascist dictatorship that Germans as rapidly buying into once again.

Ukrainian constitution prohibits elections during war.

Under martial law, specifically, it seems.

One hell of a state of exception they’ve got there. Can’t imagine why anyone in power would want it to drag on indefinitely.

zelensky’s popularity shot up after Trump and Vance’s oval office disgrac

So he’ll be excited about holding elections?

even the opposition told them to fuck off.

Keep telling yourself that

Public services will sky rocket in 2025!

Elon Musk laughing

No they won’t.

Look at Cuba. Now look at the US. Now look at Cuba again.

Okay, now image Cuba but without the public health care, housing, jobs programs, and mass transit.

the alternative is to lay down, let Russia take the country

That’s a foregone conclusion if Trump can strong arm Ukraine into elections and Zelenskyy gets washed (as looks increasingly likely given how unpopular he’s become). Then control tilts back to a bunch of Russia-friendly Ukrainian business goons more interested in doing deals than fighting over turf.

How many poorly equipped press-ganged infantrymen want to die for Ihor Kolomoisky’s vision of a future Ukraine?

I was responding to your original premise, that “Germans never stopped being Nazis” - and you know it.

Germany’s post-World War II government was riddled with former Nazis

For a more than 20 years fter World War II, nearly 100 former members of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi party held high-ranking positions in the West German Justice Ministry, according to a German government report.

From 1949 to 1973, 90 of the 170 leading lawyers and judges in the then-West German Justice Ministry had been members of the Nazi Party.

Of those 90 officials, 34 had been members of the Sturmabteilung (SA), Nazi Party paramilitaries who aided Hitler’s rise and took part in Kristallnacht, a night of violence that is believed to have left 91 Jewish people dead.

…

The prevalence of former Nazi officials in the ministry allowed them to shield one another from post-war justice and to carry over some Nazi policies, like discrimination against gays, into the West German government.

One lawyer who helped craft discriminatory laws barring marriages between Jews and non-Jews during the Nazi regime held a top family-law position in the post-World War II Justice Ministry, according to The Local.

“The Nazi-era lawyers went on to cover up old injustice rather than to uncover it and thereby created new injustice,” said Heiko Maas, Germany’s justice minister who presented the report Monday, according to AFP.

The infiltration of the post-war West German government by former Nazis was not limited to the Justice Ministry. A report released late last year found that between 1949 and 1970, 54% of Interior Ministry staffers were former Nazi Party members, and that 8% of them had served in the Nazi Interior Ministry, which at one point was run by SS chief Heinrich Himmler.

How can Germany “deport” an EU citizen?

Have a half-dozen men with guns grab the person, shove them into the back of a squad car, drive them to a jail, make them wait in the jail until transport can be arranged, drag them to a plane, force them onto the plane, fly the plane to an Israeli-occupied territory, kick the person out of the plane into the hands of some genocidal Israeli lunatics, and leave.

Is there any way for them to block an EU citizen from coming back into Germany?

Tear up their travel documents, for starters. Sending them to a country where they are at extreme risk of permanent arrest, torture, and execution also works.

More Ukrainian conscripts, obviously. Just keep throwing out waves of them until the Russian front line breaks.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1306859/us-imports-by-commodity-from-russia/

It does look like we import about $3B/year. Mostly fertilizers, which make up 1/3 of total imports, and some raw metals and a bit of heavy machinery. But that’s minuscule beside our trade balances with the top of his tariff list - China, the EU, Vietnam, Taiwan, Japan, and India. We do $20B/year with tiny little South Korea, as a point of comparison. We bring in $6B/year from South Africa.

To my knowledge, we don’t import Russian vodka in any significant quantity. Anything “Russian” branded is typically imported from one of the neighboring states - Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, Romania. Red Army Vodka, for instance, is from a Polish company.

Embracing the Ultra-Nationalist Paleocon wing of the Republican Party and stuffing your administration with goldbugs and Silicon Valley anarcho-capitalists?

Why does an American President consuming American Propaganda and regurgitating a uniquely American public policy at the behest of his wealthiest American peers and hooting white-nationalist proles waving American flags get flagged as Russian?

Obama was pretty decent no?

How Obama Destroyed Black Wealth

Neil Barofsky, the bailout inspector general, later testified that protecting the banks was the actual goal. The administration’s aim was to “foam the runway” for the banks, as Barofsky witnessed Tim Geithner tell Elizabeth Warren. HAMP failed, in other words, because it was not designed to help homeowners.

As a result, in many cases HAMP actively enabled foreclosure. Its re-default rate — the fraction of people who got a modification and later defaulted out of the program — was 22 percent as of 2013. Only about $15 billion of the original $75 billion appropriation was spent by mid-2016.

Out of an initial promised 4 million mortgage modifications — itself a drastic underestimate — by the end of 2016 only 2.7 million had even been started. Out of that number, only 1.7 million made it to permanent modification, and of those, 558,000 eventually washed out of the program.

…

Former Wells Fargo employees later testified that the bank deliberately tricked middle-class black families (who they called “mud people”) into subprime “ghetto loans.” Overall, a Center for Responsible Lending study found that from 2004 to 2008, 6.2 percent of white borrowers with a credit score of 660 and up got subprime mortgages, while 19.3 percent of such Latino borrowers and 21.4 percent of black borrowers did.

The effects of the foreclosure disaster are starkly apparent in Survey of Consumer Finances data. To start, the homeownership national rate shows a marked decline over almost the whole Obama presidency, reaching the lowest rate since 1965 (before slightly rebounding).

I really want to say Bush’s useless Trillion dollar wars are worse than this.

I would say Bush’s bailout of the O&G sector in '01 and the Financial Sector in '08 laid the seeds for worse social and ecological conditions over the subsequent two decades. Similarly, NAFTA and the subsequent midwestern de-industrialization was nightmarish for US industry and Mexican agriculture.

These blunders set us up to need international trade. What’s crazy about Trump’s tariffs is that he’s not addressing the underlying infrastructure problems or the crushing post-Great Recession debt traps. He’s just squeezing at the point of the supply chain in order to punish American industry and labor for adapting to the sabotaged economic landscape of the neoliberal era.

It is the economic equivalent of kicking a guy in the kidneys after he’s already been laid out on the ground.

The US has been sanctioning Russia for the better part of the last decade. We aren’t tariffing them because we aren’t trading with them.

We also aren’t tariffing Venezuela, Cuba, or North Korea, for the same reasons.