Back in the 70s and 80s, the USSR’s economy was in terrible shape. It hadn’t always been, that’s a triumphalist myth: for a long time it out-performed the West, and economic textbooks of the 50s discuss the problem that the Soviets were growing faster than we were.
So Reagan’s administration came up with a plan: they’d increase defense spending, the Soviets would have to do the same, and the strain would screw over their economy. There’s various arguments, but it seems to have worked.
Recently Trump suggested that Russia, America and China all cut their defense spending in unison. Russia was interested, China said no.
Now, of course, the US spends way more than anyone else on its military, but that’s mostly because it over-pays for everything because of vast corruption.
But the real issue here is that China is a rich state, and the US is not. Forget GDP, it’s completely misleading. China is ahead in everything that matters: 80%+ of tech fields, has more population and the largest industrial base in the world and it’s the main trade partner of more nations than anyone else, including America.
This graphic is illustrative, but it applies to everything except planes and launch capacity, and soon it will apply to them too:
As Keynes once said, “we can afford anything we can do.” The corollary is that we can’t afford anything we can’t do. China can afford almost anything because it can do almost anything. Within four years it will have cheaper and more lift capacity than the US. Its civilian airliner industry is taking off, it’ll take longer, and the competition is Airbus, not Boeing, but they’ll win that competition too: even if Airbus avoids the Boeing quality collapse, Chinese jets will be cheaper and about as good.
China can easily afford its military budget. I’d guess it could double or triple it and be OK. The US is struggling: the Trump cuts are a reflection of that, and are at the same time reducing government capacity, of which China has plenty, and unlike America government, they’re competent and at this point not even very corrupt and what corruption does exist is honest corruption—you can take a cut, but you have to deliver on time and on budget.
So China’s laughing at America. “No thanks. We’ll just keep out-producing you and we know you can’t keep up, but feel free to try.”
mago
Back in the US/Back in the USSR. . .
sorry can’t help myself.
Jerren
I’m fascinated with this line of thinking. For any that don’t already know, Dimitri Orlov wrote a very interesting book called ‘Reinventing Collapse’ about his travels to and from the disintegrating USSR over a number of years. He projects how a similar event might play out in the U.S, with many novel observations. (USSR didn’t have mortgages, for example. Also, the working class had long distrusted basic institutions and so had developed a fledgling ecosystem of practical workarounds.)
Niall Ferguson wrote an essay las summer called “We’re All Soviets Now” that makes a sanitized version of Ian’s argument for the mainstream. Ian, your analysis over the years has proven more insightful and predictive than these arrogant talking heads. Thank you for the work you do. Without the independent media we’d be in much worse shape.
GrimJim
A new creeping worry has been taking up mindspace lately.
Trump and the MAGAts and Elon and the Tech-bros and the Christofascists and the Oligarchs are not going to be satisfied with simply crashing the government.
They are going to have to crash the whole worldwide system, if they want to maintain their power, wealth, and position.
They don’t just want to create “isolationist” USA, they want to make sure the rest of the world is so damaged, they will never be a threat of any sort – military, economic, cultural, what have you.
So the “creative destruction” we are seeing applied to the Federal government will also be applied internationally.
Canada, Panama, Greenland. Crazy ass tariffs. This is all just the start to completely upend and destroy the international system.
They not only do not want any other powers in a multi-polar system, they don’t want any sort of potential resistance at all.
They want the rest of the world supine and defenseless against them.
Trump and the MAGAts out of hate and jealousy.
Elon and the Trch-bros because they will stand no rivals.
The Christofascists out of hatred, racism, and hubristic application if prophecy.
The Oligarchs because they want untraveled access to resources.
So eventually, and sooner than later, it will become obvious that their plan, as terrible as it is, is to destroy the whole system and create world-wide anarchy.
At that point, someone in a position of power with a decent number of nukes and tge needful delivery system will decide they have a better chance of surviving by hitting the US with an EMP, a la “One Second After.”
Tomorrow? Next month? Surely, not more than a few years from now.
Either they strike first or they fall…
Cor
There’s no such thing as honest corruption…
Emma
As Dimitri Orlov noted more than a decade ago. No, it’s far worse than 1980s USSR now and it’s going to be far worse than 1990s Russia.
After surveying the carnage of the last week (in Gaza and amid the US civil bureaucracy, but then having to deal with a particularly clueless pair of in-laws this week, I’m not sorry. I’m an accelerationist now.
GrimJim
“I’m an accelerationist now.” — Emma
We are all accelerationists now.
I dread reading the news. I dread opening the Internet, as you can’t get away from it.
They are now affecting everything you see and hear.
And if there is no stopping them because there is no one left with the guts, well, they need to just damn well get it all over with.
That way we can pick up whatever pieces are left and try to move on.
The problem is, it is not like fighting a dragon, which is a comparison I often see.
It is like fighting a cancer that has metastasized.
There is no head to cut off, you have to somehow kill every last bit of it.
Because if you do not, it grows right back and tries to kill you again.
We are dealing with many cancers. The Lost Cause. Dispensationalism. The Robber Baron Oligarchs. The KKK Deadenders. The Anti-New Deal Capitalists. The Anti-Great Society/Anti-Civil Rights Thermidorians. The Randian Objectivist Libertarians. The Reaganites. PNAC. The Tea Party. MAGAts.
They are all now in power. Their leaders, like Trump, are not the disease, they are merely symptoms. It is one vast tangled hydra.
Cut one head off, two grow in its place. Some heads breathe fire, others poison. Most just blindly gnaw away at anything in reach, sometimes even other of its own heads.
There is no way to defeat it.
All you can do is wait for it to finish feeding on itself, then pick off the remaining pieces.
Unfortunately, a lot of innocent people will die — millions, if not billions — before that happens.
But push it to feast upon itself faster, and maybe, just maybe, it will do less damage to everything else.
We can only hope.
GrimJim
“For any that don’t already know, Dimitri Orlov wrote a very interesting book called ‘Reinventing Collapse’ about his travels to and from the disintegrating USSR over a number of years. ” — Jerren
Dang, I haven’t thought about Orlov in years. He wrote great stuff.
Sadly, I think he was too optimistic.
If we only could just split up along some sort of ethnic/political lines as the Soviet Union did.
But the US is even worse off than Yugoslavia was.
Our ethno-religious mix is not remotely as neat and tidy as it was in Yugoslavia.
Nor is it even just a matter of urban versus rural.
Take a map of the US. Break it up into pieces by county and metropolitan areas — and break the metropolitan areas into boroughs.
Jumble them all together in a bowl, then pull them out one by one and assemble a patchwork quilt from the pieces.
That’s where we really stand.
Bits of bright red, royal blue, and deep purple, mixed with crimson, and viridian, and violet, next to brick orange, eggshell blue, and indigo, divided by black, and white, and yellow, here a bit of green, there lots of brown and grey, with dots of jale, ulfire, and dolm all over.
It is going to get real ugly, real fast, when the shooting starts.
And all but a few are like fish when it comes to governments, federal, state, county, and municipal — like fish and water, they have no idea they live their entire lives wrapped in and fed by them, until suddenly they are no longer there, and they are suddenly gasping for water as they die flopping on the beach.
In Soviet Russia, they had long before adapted to living without a functional government, so the disaster was minimized.
USAns have never lived without a government and have no idea how central it is to their everyday life.
They are about to start finding out as DOGE and Trump and crew start taking a chainsaw to the federal government.
But what they are doing is all merely prelude.
The Berlin Wall fell November 9, 1989.
The Soviet Union fell December 26, 1991.
Took a bit over two years from the first real cracks to the final collapse.
We will be lucky if we have that long.
The Yugoslav Wars lasted 10 years, and really, never ended.
They lost less than 1% of their population, though upwards of 20% was displaced during the war. Germany lost about 10% of its population during WWII, including military and civilians; the Soviet Union lost about 15% overall.
The deaths from the collapse of the United States will make those figures pale in comparison…
someofparts
This post from NCap this morning explains WHY the techbros are wrecking the US economy. Satan will give these guys bonuses for going above and beyond anything he could have imagined.
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/03/the-dark-enlightenment-the-tech-oligarch-ideology-driving-doges-destruction.html
Feral Finster
I suspect that the reason that the Soviet Union started to collapse when L.I. Brezhnev made his “stability in cadres” speech. He probably had to, but from that point on, the Soviet system selected for careerists instead of True Believers.
Eventually, the people who ran the USSR worked out that if they privatized, they could expropriate a bigger share of The Goodies for themselves.
someofparts
grim jim – Anyone who can face the grim truths of our times as you do is doing important work. If more people woke up as you have we wouldn’t be in the mess we are in now.
That said, let me speak here are someone who is at least a couple of decades, or more, older than I imagine you are. Give yourself some kind of break my dear. Find whatever silly thing works for you to give yourself a mental break from the awfulness from time to time. The reason for this, which I understand very clearly because I am so old, is that so much stress without relief is absolutely wrecking your health. All of the horrors all of us see every day are bad enough. Developing serious health issues at an early age will compound your misery. If only for the sake of your value to the community, please take care of yourself.
someofparts
as someone
somecomputerguy
Respectfully, Reagan did at trillion dollar arms build-up, against an enemy that was collapsing by the time he took office. He said it was necessary because the Soviets were ten feet tall.
Thanks CIA. We should have disbanded that organization.
The Soviet system was in trouble by the late ’60s and by the mid-70s The Soviets knew their problems were serious.
Soredemos
@somecomputerguy
A compelling thesis I’ve heard is that the Sino-Soviet split forced the USSR to divert resources to guarding against China and simply didnt have the means to operate on two fronts at once like that.
As Welsh has said, the Soviet Union started behind and always stayed behind.
Marx and Engels always imagined communism emerging out of already highly developed capitalist economies. The point of Das Kapital and other related writings isn’t that capitalism is cruel or evil. It’s that is has various fundamental contradictions that, Marx thought, would inevitably result in it imploding on itself. Workers would eventually unite in pursuit of their best interests and sorze control of the infrastructure capital had built. Society would outgrow capitalist while reaping the benefits of what capital had built.
The point is that capitalism has genuine strong points, and is revolutionary in its own right when it comes to replacing feudalism. Marx never imagined a communist revolution in a predominantly backwards place like Russia. The Soviet Union was insufficiently developed and had to attempt to catch up while mossing an entire phase of historical development.
The CCP is well aware of all of this and is attempting to have its own managed capitalist phase. This is what that ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’ stuff is all about. The vague end goal, at least for certain true believing ideologues, is still some form of true communism and a withering away of the state.
Mark Level
I love Grim Jim’s commentary and am not worried about GJ’s mental health. If the truth is objectively horrible, best to look it full in the face. Not just philosophically, but in terms of developing a survival strategy.
I would compare the US now to the 3rd Reich about mid-1943 when people started to realize it could not win. It put on a vicious fight for a while longer, but once the Germans were driven, starving and freezing, hundreds of miles back to the West (as Napoleon’s forces earlier had been) there was nothing to be done to save that Lebensraum “Vision.”
Just today I took major comfort from this conversation between Nima of Dialogue Works and Col. Larry Wilkerson. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPT_Wh6q2Og
Wilkerson is quite clear that the “amateurs” running Trump “diplomacy” are going to fuck it all up and bumble into a regional war, most likely in Western Asia, a war the US will decisively lose. . . He does show grudging respect for Witkof, but says the rest of them are in way over their heads, empty primate shrieking and poop-flinging. (Not too different from drooling Joe’s shrieking, “The US is the GREATEST military force that ever existed in human history!!”
Of course, Wilkerson admits if the US goes to full nuclear war, it’s all over for everyone. He bluntly states that no previous superpower that fell (leaving the Soviets out of the equation, since it was a voluntary stand-down) had Nukes at the time. They could decide to take the whole world down with them, I’d put the odds at 50/50, so that remains the one major fear to rightly hold. Not that there is anything that us peons can do to stop this.
Purple Library Guy
@GrimJim I agree that very likely what Musk and the Technobrats want may well involve crashing the whole world system, not just the USA.
But too bad. What the Trump phase is starting to teach Americans is, you can’t always have everything you want. Trump wants Canada, for instance–he can’t have us. He wants a US with a magically reborn economy because he waved a magic tariff wand and willed it so–he can’t have that either. The United States does not control the whole world, Silicon Valley enshittifying “platforms” do not control the whole world. They will no doubt TRY to crash the world system, but I see no reason to expect them to succeed outside the US itself and maybe Britain.
Other things may crash the world system. Climate change and general environmental overshoot, for instance. Elon Musk and Peter Thiel et al., not so much.
someofparts
M Level – I hope it was clear I was speaking of physical health, not mental health. But, that said, point taken.
Mark Level
Thanks, some of parts. I get it.
James Wheeler
If you follow Greer you will know he takes a similar line that the US is basically bust.
His view is Trump plan, effectively, behind all the bravado is a strategic withdrawal back to the North American pan-continent and re-consolidating US power and wealth as a regional hegemon.
This is effectively what the Soviets could have done. Strategically withdraw in the 1980s, cut the aid to Cuba and all the other free-loaders, and retreat to the Russian core when it still could.
Soviets tried to cling on to their empire and they imploded. Trump’s plan is to avoid that fate.
I’m with Greer on this. Reality is the Trump agenda is the ONLY alternative to a Soviet style collapse around 2030 or even earlier.
miss jennings
We are dealing with many cancers. The Lost Cause. Dispensationalism. The Robber Baron Oligarchs. The KKK Deadenders. The Anti-New Deal Capitalists. The Anti-Great Society/Anti-Civil Rights Thermidorians. The Randian Objectivist Libertarians. The Reaganites. PNAC. The Tea Party. MAGAts.
And they’re all Zionists at the end of the day. Isn’t that fascinating?
No laws against calling out the nazis or the ‘christofacists’ or whatever. One is not subject to jail for calling out the crimes of the neo-nazis. But you will go to jail for calling out the crimes of the Zionists.
Why would a ‘gentile white’ power structure create laws against calling out the crimes of Zion?
Is Zionism/Jewish Supremacism simply a front and the world is really being run by the paperclipped German Nazis?
How did the Rothschild’s get caught up in this? Are Goldman Sachs and Blackrock being run by some neo-nazi teenagers in Pennsylvania? Are they secretly run by the Banderites out of Ukraine?
miss jennings
I hope I don’t have to say that this certainly isn’t an apologia for, and obviously not an endorsement of, Nazi or any other ‘non-Zionist’ crimes.
If I am in a group setting – maybe a protest event, or just anything – and someone attempts to other ‘the Jews’ I will not be partaking, I will be condemning.
Now, with that business out of the way, I want to talk to mago and different clue in the other thread.
I’m not getting anything done but I need to talk now. Anyway, it’s a little chilly out today and my bones ache and it can be done tomorrow and…
I shoulda joined the Army.
anglo-zionist
zionist-anglo
christochabad
lubavitchersforchrist
allahsbuddha
Mary Bennet
There’s no such thing as honest corruption…
Cor, humans gonna human. There is always a certain amount of, let us say arrangements and understandings. The leaders of successful enterprises, political or commercial, know this and allow for it, while making sure that it doesn’t get out of hand, that is, compromise the functioning of the enterprise as a whole. Successful enterprises have certain set asides, for example, those technical tasks that absolutely must be done correctly, reserved for people who are both highly technically competent and highly incorruptible. For those unusual persons, a reasonable degree of eccentricity can be tolerated, provided the individual does not interfere with matters outside their own cubicle.
miss jennings
Apologies. I was doing dishes and just thinkng more about this.
Reaganites weren’t all Zionists but the Zionists won out. Reagan himself was plucked out of hollywood. Many in his adminsitration were Zionist. many attended Binyamin Netanyahu’s Jerusalem Conference on International Terrorism in 1979, a seminal event in the foundings of the ‘terrorism’ enemy image that can conveniently be slapped on any resisting force. Formerly largely sovereign locales and regions can be agitated and the ‘terrorism’ label slapped on those resisting the intentional provacations. And so on.
They all attended the 1984 JCIT conference as well.
Reagan did stop the brutal Zionist shenanigans in Lebanon but not until two months later. Who knows what to believe with Reagan who never stopped acting and clearly had signs of dementia even early on, before the full onnset of alzheiemers.
Regan went after gays even though he was gay himself and he came out of hollywood where there was at least some level of acceptance of ‘gayness’ beyond that of the general population at the time.
And Reagan ended up stymieing investigations into why people largely from the gay male population, but also the IV and overall hard drug population in general – those who were primarily from already economically depressed areas – why people were coming down with theretofore rare diseases (none were new) and dying.
They then gave these patients with already weakened immune systems a failed cancer drug that no sane person provided proper information would give to their pet let alone themselves.
And they went on guide all research -i.e. only steer fundings towards – towards looking for one single causative agent of what was in actuality a multifactorial process of dis-ease which included an extraordinary amount of mental stressors quite obviously ‘leading to’ physiological phenomena and I put ‘leading to’ in quotes because they may just as well be said to arise mutually and progress mutually.
There was a lot of ‘radical consciousness’ in these communities well beyond the issues of personal sexual freedom. A lot.
Many of the patients initially dianosed with what came to be known as ‘AIDS’ – which again came to be a moniker for a single thing in the public’s mind (and remains so even in many to most professional’s minds to this day) when in fact it is an acronym for a weakened immune system and again an acronym can’t be present in the blood supply.
So, Ronald Reagan immediately set about (or set into overdrive what Carter had begun) the destruction of regulations and unions and the working class and on and on…all while playing a friend to the working man.
In other words, he was in many ways always an elite’s elite and as we know the rules that apply to us don’t apply to them. For Reagan, they never did. Reagan gladly gave up being president of the hollywood union or whatever he was and entering the private sector and never looking back. He was very candid about it at the time. Said he was going to make some money. Well, nothing wrong with looking to make a little more and put some away for a rainy day. Take care of the fam and all.
Needless to say, Ronald Reagan did a lot more than that.
And he remains a hero to this day.
Continuing, the Libertarian and Tea Party and some of those elements all have various degrees of non-Zionism certainly at the grassroots but the further you get to the top the more Zionist it gets.
Rand Paul votes Zionist. I guess Massie doesn’t. Most lower house reps do too. There are no more safe districts like Ron Paul carved out in TX, his Randian-Rothbardian Libertarian economics aside.
Murray Rothbard and Ayn Rand allegedly disagreed about Israel. Rand was fanatical Zionist, Rothbard less so. But his libertarian cato institute economics have plundered the US while at the same time feeding Israel for decades. And Ron Paul and many non-Zionist libertarians support this economics which has really advantaged Israel at the US’ expense over the decades. It’s not just the Koch brothers funding these movements and this insanity. It’s all these elites.
Mont Pelrerin Society (‘Anglo’) was preceded by Walter Lippmann’s Colliquium which wasnt’ exactly ‘Anglo’ what with its ties to Vienna Circle which is ‘Zionist-Anglo’ at minimum. There’s a lot of good info in ‘The New Way of the World: On Neoliberal Society’ by Dardot & Laval. Interestingly, they cite philosopher Louis Rougier as having significant influence and Rougier himself was evidently influenced by this dude:
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmond_Goblot (trans necessary for non-French readers)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Rougier
Alright, stuff to do…
Ian Welsh
James,
so far he ain’t really doing it and he’s confused about who costs more in what ways. The truth is that America has been cannibalizing European industry, for example. Canada isn’t a freeloader because it buys more American goods than it sells (and stuff like aluminum can’t easily be made in America without painful substitution costs.)
None of these are really equivalent to Cuba.
Greer’s fallen into the intelligent man’s trap, I think: he sees a plan and intelligence where there really isn’t one, though there are people in the administration who are smart and do have plans. Trump is just motivated by a sense that America is being taken advantage of, without seeing clearly what it gets in return.
That said, if Trump manages to leave NATO and cut military expenditures significantly, that’d be good. But when you look at, y’know, his actual budget, it’s tax cuts for the rich paid for with health care cuts.
miss jennings
They keep killing Russian journalists.
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=h_&q=Anna+Prokofyeva&ia=web
https://yandex.com/search/?text=Anna+Prokofyeva&lr=29643
https://www.sogou.com/web?query=Anna+Prokofyeva+russia&cid=&sessiontime=1743013644309
https://qmamu.com/search?q=Anna+Prokofyeva
https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2025/03/26/russian-state-tv-journalist-killed-by-mine-near-ukrainian-border-a88483
https://tass.com/politics/1934561
https://www.foxnews.com/search-results/search#q=Anna%20Prokofyeva
https://www.google.com/search?q=Anna+Prokofyeva+on+x
miss jennings
But the real issue here is that China is a rich state, and the US is not. Forget GDP, it’s completely misleading. China is ahead in everything that matters: 80%+ of tech fields, has more population and the largest industrial base in the world and it’s the main trade partner of more nations than anyone else
This is all true except it’s important to remember that ‘China’ is international now baby.
I asked recently in another thread about what appear to be the lack of protests in certain countries against the Zionist genocide in Palestine and Zionist atrocities in the ‘MENA’ region generally. I was curious if there were any protests in China, particularly given its strong anti-imperialist messaging. So it came as no surprise when I read this:
‘Walking through Haret Hreik, Ghobeiry, and other sectors of Dahiye, security cameras, predominantly Chinese-made, are ubiquitous. Behind the counters of butcher shops and bakeries, in electronic repair stores and money exchanges, they quietly capture the daily rhythms of Dahiye. Their distributor in Beirut, Bachir Hanbali Est., supplies an overwhelming number of these surveillance systems, primarily from Dahua Technology.
Dahua’s reach in Lebanon is extensive, with cameras installed not only in commercial spaces but also in some municipal and privately owned security networks.
Alongside Israel’s mastery of signal interception and frequency-hopping surveillance, these devices may have played a critical role in the decimation of Hezbollah’s top leadership.
In almost every shop and establishment, a monitor sits behind the counter, displaying live footage from a security camera – one lens pointed inside, capturing the aisles, shelves, and cash register, and the other fixed on the street, watching the ebb and flow of pedestrians and scooters. The devices are mass-produced, sold in bulk, and installed without a second thought – the kind of cameras that flood international markets: cheap, functional, and forgettable.
But Dahua cameras have long been riddled with vulnerabilities…’
https://thecradle.co/articles/the-eyes-and-ears-that-decapitated-hezbollah
https://www.dahuasecurity.com/nl
China has to do what China has to do but it can shut the F up when it comes to imperialism. It’s an integral part of it and its an integral part of the wholesale destruction of the ‘MENA’ and it is an integral part of the genocide.
Shut up China and your silly acolytes. You’re no better. Scoundrels.
miss jennings
‘Silly acolytes’ isn’t specific to anyone. As I have said I would love to go to China and talk to many different people in China from many different walks of life so that I may get an at least somewhat better idea of, and ‘feel’ for, the situation than one can gather through internet boards.
I post this here not for the video commentary or breakdown of what may or may not have transpired, rather for the glaring deeming anomaly left unstated.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwrRpAh8vVQ
China was presented as the model for the world as far as battling covid what with its uncompromising lockdowns of the population accompanied by men in space suits ‘treating’ the air by spraying it with god knows what.
Yet Xi Jinping, 68 at the time, has no mask on. Nor do any of China’s VIPs sitting in the front row. Everyone else in the entire auditorium has one on.
This was during the height of the covid scare.
What do the leaders of China know that neither we nor their own population know?
What do all these world governors acting in concert know that we don’t?
Can I have the antidote please? Or was the cure the disease?
Not for one second I believe what you’re telling me
I know you invented disease and sell the remedy
Universe is sending me centuries of memories
So the very breath that I breathe is all I ever need
I got that Muhammad Ali up in my pedigree
Yes I be speaking my peace up in my seventies
Ain’t worry bout ya threatening me, I’m just being honest
I ain’t buying fear just because it’s all you got left
miss jennings
seeming anomaly not deeming
GrimJim
Trump’s only plan is to do what is best for Trump every chance he gets, which is what you get when you are dealing with a psychopathic narcissistic solipsist.
He has no concept of anything other than his own self-gratification and doing whatever seems best to him — always, always the “Best” and “Greatest,” because he has no memory of the past or concept of the future, only the NOW.
So, anyone ascribing any sort of “plan” to Trump’s actions is fooling themselves.
Now, that said, indeed, there are those in Trump’s administration or who are otherwise influential who have “plans.”
Putin, however, is the only one who has any grand plans on the international stage.
There are those who have “plans” for the Middle East and the peoples thereof; many of these cross over into other areas, but they generally go along with those “plans” for one reason or another, affecting all other “plans” to a lesser or greater degree.
The real “planners” are the cadre behind Project 2025. Russell Vought most prominently, the spider at the center of the web. Project 2025 cuts across all the other factional lines, so everyone is just fine with whatever he does.
Musk, of course, has his “plan,” which was A) Destroy anyone and anything that could possibly regulate his companies and then, B) Destroy as much of everything else as possible, while being sure to be long gone by the time the whole house of cards falls down, so Trump takes the blame. He’s the lead on the Tech-Bro Technocracy faction.
The various White Supremacists (some of Christofascist sort, others not) have their “plans” to deal with the non-Whites in the USA. Their “plans” are moving along quite well. Stephen Miller is in the lead here.
The Christofascists have their “plans” to turn the USA into a Dominionist Theocracy. Their “plans” are moving along quite well, if not as publicly as the rest. Not really sure who is leading this one, essentially this is part of Vought’s gig, with assistance in Congress from Mike Johnson and from SCOTUS with Alito and Barrett.
The rest, as has been noted elsewhere, are there either to do as they are told and/or screw things up spectacularly to “improve ratings” and take the heat for Trump (they are all disposable, once their value as fall-guys runs out).
But some “grand plan” to retreat back to a “regional hegemon”?
I doubt most of the folks in that administration could even spell “hegemon,” let alone tell us how that works.
Nope, there is no plan. It is all just one grand shitshow, led by assclowns.
The USA was already hitting its “Best By” date. The administration is not working toward some sort of “planned implosion,” it is simply accelerating the natural motion of historical gravity because they are all idiots (well, yes, Musk is doing his damndest to accelerate things, but toward complete anarchy, not simple deflation).
miss jennings
I was going to put this in Ian’s latest…’Trump Doesn’t Have A Master Plan’…but there was no mention of Russia or Putin so I came back here.
Again, not doing this to defend ‘the empire’ rather simply to spread some information.
Putin calls for developing cities in Arctic Circle
‘Russia must continue to develop the Arctic and improve urban environments in the region, President Vladimir Putin has said. He made the remarks at the 6th International Arctic Forum in Murmansk.
Putin reiterated that the region holds great strategic importance for Russia and that there are a number of large-scale and systemic tasks that must be addressed.
”We must strengthen the transport and logistics infrastructure, [and] expand opportunities for the economy and business with the obligatory protection of the sensitive ecosystems of the Arctic,” Putin said.
He further stressed the need to “consistently improve the urban environment and develop settlements in the Far North” and to “generally improve the quality of life” in the region to make living in the Arctic “truly comfortable and attractive.”
Putin also called on the participants of the forum to come up with concrete plans for developing the Northern Sea Route to provide its cargo flows with infrastructure and a fleet.’
https://www.rt.com/russia/614874-putin-develop-arctic-cities/
‘with the obligatory protection of the sensitive ecosystems of the Arctic’
‘Obligatory’ is obviously being used in its humorous sense here. Any person or entity that truly cares about our environment wouldn’t being planning cities in the Arctic.
Imagine if the US announced this?
Actually: https://www.google.com/search?q=us+arctic+development+rand
So, the world powers will fight over the arctic.
https://www.google.com/search?q=arctic+animals+flora+fauna
Clonal Antibody
You should read this article
Soviet Economic Decline: Did an Oil Crisis Cause the Transition in the Soviet Union?
https://www.jstor.org/stable/24808741
If you don’t have a Jstor account, the article is available at
https://www.energycrisis.com/reynolds/SovietDecline.htm
different clue
About developing the Arctic: However loud the global warming deniers shout, the drowning polar bears gurgle louder.
I expect that as global warming keeps melting off the above-sea-level perched ice features and melts down the permafrost, a lot of the low-elevation Arctic real estate which Putin wants to see developed will go underwater. Har dee har har.