Month: January 2025

He ruled for about the normal time for Canadian Prime Ministers. This, from Taibbi, is well-written nonsense:

Canadian Prime Minister and feminist heartthrob Justin Trudeau resigned this morning. His departure completes an unprecedented popularity cliff dive, dropping from 65% to an incredible 16% approval rating over the course of a nine-year reign that men will chuckle over, from now through the end of time. Centuries from now, fathers will sit sons on their knees and tell The Fall of Trudeau as a cautionary tale.

Trudeau had about nine years:

Harper had 9 years;
Martin had 3;
Chretien had 10;
Campbell had less than one, but was an unelected caretaker PM; and,
Mulroney had 9.

American red-pill nonsense is just that. Trudeau was was a gifted politician who was bad at policy. He resigned because his own caucus wanted him gone, as they think they’re more likely to keep their seats without him.

The Liberals won’t win the next election, the standard pattern in Canadian politics is for the Liberals and Conservatives to alternate. Barring some huge surprise, the Conservatives will rule next. But how much of a majority they have will depend a lot on who the next Liberal leader is.

This is a nothing-burger. Yes, Trudeau could have been a better Prime Minister. He mishandled Covid in the same way as almost every other western leader; let in way too many immigrants, and inflation, especially in rent and food hurt him just like it did every other neo-liberal government of the era.

I despise Trudeau. He’s an empty neoliberal suit coasting on being le dauphin. (Son of Pierre Trudeau, one of Canada’s greatest Prime Ministers.) But he was a gifted politician, and his fall is bog standard for Canadian post-war Prime Ministers. It is entirely normal and has nothing to do with red-pills, cucks, soy, pick-up artists, feminism or any other culture nonsense. All of that is just noise, he may have been attacked on the cultural politics of the day, but he lost because people became worse off under his rule and because his time was, essentially, up. Even a very good Prime Minister finds it hard to hold on for more than two terms in Canadian politics.

He’s not an extraordinary cautionary tale and no one except historians will remember him in fifty years, let alone centuries from now.

SUBSCRIBE OR DONATE

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – January 05, 2025

By Tony Wikrent

On January 5, 2025

Comments

By Tony Wikrent

Guide for the perplexed – Google is no longer the best search engine

[The Register, via The Big Picture 01-01-2025]

Perplexity offers several advantages over Google as a search engine, making it a compelling alternative for many.

Stand Out: How to Prevent Obeying in Advance

[3 Quarks Daily, via Naked Capitalism 01-03-2025]

Wikileaks has just put all its files online. It’s all there!

DefendDemocracy.Press, January 1, 2025

Wikileaks has just put all its files online.

It’s all there: Hillary Clinton’s emails, McCain’s guilt, the Vegas shooting perpetrated by an FBI sniper, Steve Jobs’ letter on HIV, Pedo Podesta, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Iran, Israel, the military-financial complex, the mafia/mafias, CIA agents arrested for rape, conspiracies, CIA false-flag attacks, the WHO pandemic, etc…..

Strategic Political Economy

How Fascism Came

Chris Hedges, December 29, 2024

For over two decades, I and a handful of others — Sheldon Wolin, Noam Chomsky, Chalmers Johnson, Barbara Ehrenreich and Ralph Nader — warned that the expanding social inequality and steady erosion of our democratic institutions, including the media, the Congress, organized labor, academia and the courts, would inevitably lead to an authoritarian or Christian fascist state. My books — “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America” (2007), “Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle” (2009), “Death of the Liberal Class” (2010), “Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt” (2012), written with Joe Sacco, “Wages of Rebellion” (2015) and “America: The Farewell Tour” (2018) were a succession of impassioned pleas to take the decay seriously. I take no joy in being correct.

“The rage of those abandoned by the economy, the fears and concerns of a beleaguered and insecure middle class, and the numbing isolation that comes with the loss of community, would be the kindling for a dangerous mass movement,” I wrote in “American Fascists” in 2007. “If these dispossessed were not reincorporated into mainstream society, if they eventually lost all hope of finding good, stable jobs and opportunities for themselves and their children — in short, the promise of a brighter future — the specter of American fascism would beset the nation. This despair, this loss of hope, this denial of a future, led the desperate into the arms of those who promised miracles and dreams of apocalyptic glory.”

President-elect Donald Trump does not herald the advent of fascism. He heralds the collapse of the veneer that masked the corruption within the ruling class and their pretense of democracy. He is the symptom, not the disease….

The End of New Deal Liberalism, by William Greider, exactly 14 years ago

Tony Wikrent, January 04, 2025 [RealEconomics]

Bill Greider was the former national affairs editor at Rolling Stone, who left us in December 2019. The man was a prophet — from exactly 14 years ago:

The End of New Deal Liberalism
By William Greider
The Nation, January 5, 2011

(reposted by Physicians for a National Health Program)

We have reached a pivotal moment in government and politics, and it feels like the last, groaning spasms of New Deal liberalism. When the party of activist government, faced with an epic crisis, will not use government’s extensive powers to reverse the economic disorders and heal deepening social deterioration, then it must be the end of the line for the governing ideology inherited from Roosevelt, Truman and Johnson.

Political events of the past two years have delivered a more profound and devastating message: American democracy has been conclusively conquered by American capitalism. Government has been disabled or captured by the formidable powers of private enterprise and concentrated wealth. Self-governing rights that representative democracy conferred on citizens are now usurped by the overbearing demands of corporate and financial interests. Collectively, the corporate sector has its arms around both political parties, the financing of political careers, the production of the policy agendas and propaganda of influential think tanks, and control of most major media.

What the capitalist system wants is more—more wealth, more freedom to do whatever it wishes. This has always been its instinct, unless government intervened to stop it. The objective now is to destroy any remaining forms of government interference, except of course for business subsidies and protections….

Sanders Lays Out Plan to Fight Oligarchy as Wealth of Top Billionaires Passes $10 Trillion

Jake Johnson, December 31, 2024 [CommonDreams]

Tracking the Signs of Decline in America

By Ian Welsh

On January 2, 2025

Comments

If you want to be a decent analyst, let alone a forecaster, you need to know how to find real information. A lot of official statistics are either useless (inflation, unemployment numbers) or misleading.

Russia, with assists from Iran and North Korea and China (in non military goods, though often useful for making military goods) is out producing NATO in war material. If you just look at the GDP of NATO vs. Russia/China/Iran/NK you’d predict that couldn’t happen and you’d be wrong and like a lot of people you’d think Ukraine might or would win the war.

Most people go on and on about how the US still has a bigger economy than China, but China has way more industry and leads in about 80% of technological fields even as the US can barely build ships, is losing its steel industry and is only creative in biotech and infotech. These same people will tell you how well the US economy is doing. China’s shifting its house building to primarily government. Meanwhile:

Eighteen percent last year.

Since 2020 billionaire wealth has doubled.

GDP tells you how much activity in your country is conducted thru money, as opposed to unpaid labor. That tells you much economic activity you can easily tax. That’s all it tells you.

It doesn’t tell you how well off your people are. It doesn’t tell you how healthy they are. It doesn’t tell you (directly) how many tanks you can build, or planes or missiles. It doesn’t tell you if you can feed your population if foreign shipments are disrupted. It doesn’t tell you how many of them have homes and how many of those homes are good. it doesn’t tell you how many people do or don’t have healthcare. It doesn’t tell you how advanced you are technologically. It doesn’t tell you if your flagship airplane company can’t design and build good planes any more.

It also doesn’t tell you that America is doing better than Europe and its other allies because US economic policy is set up to cannibalize their industry. When Germany loses energy-intensive firms, a lot of them move production to the US. Burning down America’s allies to slow America’s decline isn’t a sign of strength.

America’s in decline because its entire political-economy is set up not to be productive or to spread wealth around, but to funnel money to the rich without them having to produce much of anything. China’s stock-market trades sideways, like America’s did in the 50s and 60s. Americans make money on housing and stocks without having to do a thing. Private Equity makes money by buying companies with debt, loading the companies up with that debt and then driving them into bankruptcy, destroying real productive economic activity in exchange for dollars in a declining country.

Real power comes from real production, technology, a healthy and loyal population, and the ability to turn all of that into military power when necessary. America’s military, for years now, has been unable to meet recruiting goals. Its enemies are ahead on missiles and drone, catching up on airplanes and outproducing it massively in ships.

China’s rising. Russia’s rising. America and its allies are in serious decline.

THE END

SUBSCRIBE OR DONATE