Nope, not yet
First the good/bad news. Covid-19 isn’t going to bring down the “system.” It’s not a hard enough shock.
There are things we should learn from it, about what work is actually needed, about the fact that more people will not die because of reduced pollution during isolation periods than from the virus, and so on.
Mostly, we won’t learn those lessons.
One lesson which will be, not exactly learned, but used, is that if you don’t make it in your country, you can’t be sure of having it when it matters. Physical manufacturing matters: It can be designed in the US, but if it’s made in China, well…Trump almost stopped 3m from selling masks to Canada, be sure that the fact that he can has also been noticed.
There were already powerful forces, and not just in the Trump administration, who were unhappy with the current world trade and offshoring system. The more intelligent parts of the American permanent ruling class have noticed that the actual threat to American hegemony is China, and that when China makes things the US needs, China has the US by the balls.
They’ve been wanting to bring as much production back to the US as possible and they’ve been wanting to force the world into two trading blocs. These are the sort people who become livid when a European country chooses Huawei 5G, and start making threats about NATO.
They are, of course, right to be worried. The offshoring of production had catastrophic effects for Britain, when they off-shored to the US in the 19th century. They said the same sort of things Americans say now, “We still design, they just make the stuff.” That didn’t last: Manufacturing produces designers in time, there are things learned best when you’re right next to the plants. It took about three decades, but the design moved to the US, and Britain never recovered, eventually surviving through financialization, a weak shadow of itself, sustained on rents which the rest of the world can easily, one day, decide not to pay.
So Covid-19, which is putting shocks through the trade system anyway, is going to be used to justify bringing production back to various countries, to re-shoring. Trade will go down, not up, the supply chain will be less broken into pieces, and there will be a push towards a new cold war with two trade blocs. There may wind up being three depending on what Europe does, but the plan is to force Europeans into the US bloc.
In general economic terms in the US and UK, what will happen is just what happened after 2008—the big boys will be bailed out, those who have money (or are given trillions by the Fed and Treasury) will then buy up distressed assets. There will be fewer, bigger players again, the general economy will be worse for ordinary people, blah, blah. You know the play.
This won’t lead to revolution or revolutionary change yet, I suspect. I think it’ll take at least one more big shock before people become desperate enough. And, of course, the right play is to pick some part of the poor and have them oppress the other half of the poor in exchange for not-too-shitty a life. Poor white sharecroppers who get to call the equivalent of African Americans “boy.”
That play, given the weakness of the left in America and the UK, may well work. We shall see.
But be sure of this, there will be more shocks. This is a system which has no “give.” It has no surplus capacity to handle shocks, not at the real economy level: All our elites know is politics and printing digital money and giving it to their friends, without insisting on real production. Oh, they’ll try to re-shore production, but they are fundamentally incompetent and will run it badly. Be sure of that.
So this isn’t the big one. But climate change is rumbling, resource shortages are onrushing, and our sclerotic society and incompetent elites will turn what should be shocks that are easily handled into crisis after crisis.
The future is going to be interesting. Be prepared. The old world is dying, the new world has not yet been born, and there will be a great deal of pain and screaming in both the death and birth.
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Aqua Lung
This is a far better explanation of the stock market rally than any of the major media outlets have provided. If it can even be explained.
I’ll say this, it’s too early to conclude anything definitive about this virus that is like no other. It’s not over until the Fat COVID-19 sings, as they say.
In the meantime, I guess we should just do as Trump says and drink the Hydroxychloroquine. Boris Johnson’s handlers refuse to take Trump’s advice at Boris’ own peril.
Aqua Lung
As for “nope, not yet” I’d add, “nope, not ever.” It will never happen. I’m more convinced of that now more than ever.
Our fate is pretty much sealed and we will walk right off the cliff gleefully so long as there’s still an internet connection.
I can’t wait for the coverage from Fox News and MSNBC and CNN when the mushroom clouds blossom. That should be interesting. Fox will call it a Dem hoax as they ionize and CNN will say the fall-out appears to be discriminating against minorities. Trump will tell every one radiation diminishes with the warm weather despite the nuclear winter and in the meantime to drink a gallon of Clorox a day since it provides immunity to ionizing radiation.
The pandemic has tested us and we have prevailed. We are fully prepared for Armageddon. Yee Haw!!!
DrJ
I wouldn’t be so sure that this isn’t already “the big one”. COVID-19 just sped up a process that was going to happen sooner or later anyway: The bursting of the everything bubble.
Those millions of jobs lost won’t come back soon. Bankrupt companies will put more and more pressure on banks and the rest of the system. This crisis will eat its way through all parts of the economy. After a deflationary phase where average people will lose many or most of their assets there is an increasing chance that we will face hyper inflation. Savings, pension insurance, cash, everything will take enormous hits or be wiped out. And like I said before: Those jobs won’t be coming back.
StewartM
All said and true. I think the comment that you used to make about the US (and maybe relevant to the UK too?)–“get out, or make plans to get out”–still applies. As the pilots are incompetent, as capitalism raises to leadership those who know ledger numbers and short-term profits and nothing else, this plane is going to crash and the crash.
The difference between today and the Great Depression is that the incompetents then hadn’t yet learned that they could have the government print them more money to bail them, and only just them, out, while letting the real economy continue to suffer. Bailing them out also means that the incompetents get left in charge, that they learn nothing, which will mean that they’ll go on repeating the same mistakes. By contrast, letting them crash, like a mass extinction event in paleontology, clears the way for more competent people to step in.
I am also not sanguine about what will follow the death of this corrupt order. To put a twist on JFK’s maxim that “those who will make peaceful change impossible make violent revolution inevitable”, I would add that those who made the good guys (like Corbyn and Sanders) winning impossible will probably mean that whatever change that will happen will be made by people who are far less good, who lack their scruples, and who are more ruthless and evil.
zac
I think we’re now on a permanent slide. The only question is how long the intervals will be between sickening lurches.
I don’t think it’s sunk in yet how long this could last. I see NO credible plan for an exit, anywhere, except to hope the curve nosedives all by itself and we can just wing it until a hypothetical vaccine shows up. But if you read between the lines, you can see pretty much every government is very careful not to put an end date on this, except maybe Trump when he’s done his bump of meth for the day and he starts ranting about easter miracles. No one knows what to do. You either let the death rate shoot out of control, or you clamp down so hard your economy dies. Most countries are trying to thread the needle, but I’m not sure there’s any hole to put that thread through. it may not exist.
There’s no plan. Let that sink in.
There’s NO PLAN.
Aqua Lung
The good stuff too — Walter’s Crystal Blue Persuasion.
https://twitter.com/nogg_the/status/1247555497567322113
Trump & Biden are swinging for the same genocidal team. Both have implored the dolts to go out and vote in Wisconsin in the midst of a pandemic. Surely that will affect the statistics, right?
It reminds me of the 1950s DDT promotional video I watched where they are spraying throngs of people swimming and picnicking with billowing clouds of DDT. Some were eating hot dogs and potato chips at picnic tables smothered in the toxic clouds and smiling like it was cotton candy.
Nothing’s really changed, has it? Still as stupid as ever.
Aqua Lung
Here it is. Donald Trump is in this video and he approves of this message. Biden too since he was once a lifeguard.
Lab rats. Guinea pigs. Lambs to the slaughter.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2EtxYxEKww
Aqua Lung
Spain rises again after a tantalizing dip.
https://thehill.com/policy/international/europe/491500-deaths-confirmed-coronavirus-cases-rise-in-spain-after-dip
I have no doubt America will return to business as usual too early and it’ll be off to the races again. As zac has wisely indicated, it’s a classic case of caught between Scylla and Charybdis. Either way, we’re f*cked and there is no third way.
zac
I think apart from ‘there’s no plan’ the theme of the week has been ‘downplay, delay, and pray for good news’. we’re sort of in that lacuna where everyone is waiting to see how well the countries that more or less flattened their curves are able to reactivate their economies without causing a renewed surge in infections, while a cluster of other regions are fudging their numbers to make it look like they might be able to go that route soon as well…provided it works. It’s all smoke, though. if you’re basically successful at suppression in one area, you still have huge reservoirs of uninfected people all around you, a replication # of around 3.5, a global economy that relies on travel and interconnection, and the same exponential math you started with. best to commit to a long-term strategy than demoralize people with false openings followed by secondary shock closings.
nihil obstet
As bad as the Cold War was in terms of civic infrastructure in the U.S., it scared the elites enough to try to keep the peasants happy. Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, all pretense at public welfare has been dropped.
The issue missing here is the effect of the rise of another power to challenge U.S. hegemony. I see predictions that assume that the U.S. can continue doing what its elites want without limits from elsewhere. What happens if the IMF and World Bank are no longer U.S. subsidiaries? If the rest of the world says “Screw your claims to intellectual property”, what would the major U.S. corporations be able to do about it?
The U.S. is heavily propagandized and has therefore one of the most docile populations on the planet. Other blocs may need to allow more democracy, especially when the U.S. can no longer militarily enforce the dominance of right wing governments. How will that come home to affect us?
Stormcrow
Ian:
I can’t agree that the COVID-19 shock will not suffice to bring down the system.
I cannot argue that it will suffice either. I certainly wouldn’t be comfortable defending that position.
There are only a few things that I do, in general, know for certain.
○ Unstable systems fall to much smaller shocks than it takes to fell stable ones.
○ You don’t have to be a genius to tell whether a particular system is stable or not. Especially if you know it well. For instance, if you’re living in it, and you observe it with some care and intellectual integrity. I suspect most here present would agree that ours is anything but stable.
○ But God on his throne could not predict the time or nature of the shock that locks an unstable system into a death spiral.
○ One thing that most successful regime changes have, if they don’t involve an actual civil war, is the cooperation of the armed forces.
○ Sometimes these collapses involve civil wars too. But if the armed forces do not cooperate, a civil war or armed coup d’état is probably the only path from here to there.
○ Civil wars have a bloody awful track record, as ways of building a polity that actually serves the needs of its citizens.
Sometimes, the event that triggers a state collapse is nothing much. The 1917 food riots in Saint Petersburg began on February 22 as simple street demonstrations. But two weeks later, when the state tried to put the toothpaste back in the tube by applying their gendarmes of last resort, the Cossacks, things went sideways when the Cossacks almost literally tipped the demonstrators the wink. Yeah, they’d been at the front too, like almost everyone else in Russia who could shoulder a rifle by that time, and they were as fed up as the workers were.
Two weeks after that, Czar Nicholas abdicated.
Sometimes, it takes centuries. The Roman Empire needed not one, but two major crises with durations in the multiple decades, spaced roughly 150 years apart, before the essential political systems failed under stress. And the stress was delivered by means of intermediate to high intensity warfare.
So I simply do not know whether the COVID-19 crisis will suffice to bring our system down. But one thing is already clear: the economic bow shock of the pandemic is going to be massively more destructive than SARS-CoV-2 could ever have been on its own.
And I do have a deep respect for bow shocks.
The pair of crises that wrecked Imperial Rome were both bow shocks, generated by events that played out far beyond the effective reach of Roman influence, let alone power.
Stirling S Newberry
Doom and gloom with reliable statistics in a moron’s game. I see the commentators play it wonderfully well.
Meanwhile, from the trenches, the Monday/Tuesday bump has happened. People don’t get tested, nor are they put on ventilators. This, and other subsidiary effects, mean the people die on Sunday but don’t appear until Monday or Tuesday. Thus every week it looks better than it is.
However, this eruption is running out of map – there are bad numbers to come – but if we keep up with social distancing, it will be on the low end of the range. This did not have to happen this way, but if you have a lower class (~85% of the population) that wants to knock them all down and a greedy upper class (~3%) it is a given that your leadership will be stupid.
Aqua Lung
CNN is running with the meme that the virus disproportionately affects black folk. The messaging is that black folk don’t have adequate access to proper, effective healthcare.
Cry me a f*cking river. They had an opportunity to vote for M4A with Bernie Sanders and they unequivocally rejected it and cast their votes for Joe Biden who said he would NEVER support M4A.
Get out of my face with this bullshit, you IDIOTS!!! Black folk and the DNC and CNN simply are not credible in way, shape or form. They’re all as much walking contradictions as are Trump and his supporters and the GOP and Fox News.
Seriously, I don’t think anyone is capable of truth these days if they ever were.
In case you weren’t aware, Chinese are black folk and so too are Italians apparently and also the Spanish and the Iranians.
Aqua Lung
How about doom and gloom with unreliable statistics? Is that also a moron’s game? Otherwise, this is the most intelligent thing you’ve ever typed.
Hugh
Overpopulation and climate change will destroy the current world order. Presently, the US is the hegemon, but any hegemon which fails to stay ahead of the curve will get run over by it. And any hegemon, indeed any state, which can choose to be headed by someone like Trump, a massive incompetent with a shopping cart load of faults and defects, is falling fast. China has shown every indication of wanting to increase its power and influence, but hegemony is about creating a system and China has shown no sign of taking on the responsibilities and costs of creating its own or replacing the American one. It doesn’t matter anyway. China and the US is a competition between two dead men walking.
Re-shoring is a vague, limp nothing. What is needed is a national industrial policy. Most trade agreements have national security exceptions. What the coronavirus has shown is how fragile all these thousands miles long supply chain are. So whether we are talking iphones, computers, cars, ventilators, drugs, structural steel right down to underwear, we need to have domestic production capacity, precisely for our national security. Yes, that will limit foreign trade. So what?
I don’t see Europe going anywhere. It is a serial failure. It failed with Greece. It failed with immigration. It has failed with Brexit. It has failed with the coronavirus. Germany was skirting recession before the coronavirus hit. France was convulsed by Macron’s neoliberal coup. The East is going authoritarian. The South is going bankrupt. Where is Europe? What is Europe? Where has there been a unified response to anything?
Chiron
“The old world is dying, the new world has not yet been born, and there will be a great deal of pain and screaming in both the death and birth.”
We are going to see real change only by 2030 when Boomers finally leave politics and the economy.
bruce wilder
China has shown no sign of taking on the responsibilities and costs of creating its own or replacing the American one.
.
“no signs”?
Eric Anderson
zac:
As you mentioned, after the fall of the Soviet Union the capitalist class knew the old rules mitigating their greed no longer mattered. Climate change and resource depletion were then, and continue to be now, completely ignored by them. The assumption was that China would continue to be the peaceful giant that it always was in the past, and we could roll in and turn them. But, like Germany’s push for oil in the second world war once the coal game changed, China saw what the capitalist class did not. The raw material resource base changed. It was beginning to dwindle. Therefore, if they didn’t begin to become expansionary they would get steam rolled.
That’s what changed, and the capitalist class was willfully money blind to it. The lobbying power they exerted on D.C. in pursuit of their Chinese “money faucet” dreams made them willfully money blind as well.
Now, look at India’s military build-up. Japan’s. Saudi Arabia’s, etc. etc.
Every country in the world is preparing for the coming resource wars.
Now, consider the debate during the founding of this country between the Madison and Jeffersonians. The question behind the debate was how to keep the rural folk from slitting the throats of the merchant class every decade or so. Madison won out with his mechanistic separation of powers form of government due to Jefferson being mollified by the Louisiana Purchase. His thinking was that his rural vision for America could expand for a century, thereby keeping the merchants and farmers from each others throats. What many don’t know, however, is Hegel weighed in on the debate as well. His opinion was the debate would never be concluded until the frontier was closed.
Well, it closed about 100 years ago, along with every other frontier on the planet. There is no longer anything but propaganda and political trickery keeping the merchant class safe at this point. And there is no longer any place for the toiling class to go. The merchant class will start the international resource wars. The question is, will the salt of the earth fight for them? Or, will they turn on them?
Hegel remains to be vindicated. Tick tock tick tock tick tock.
Eric Anderson
The Chinese also took careful note of the U.S. v. USSR struggle.
They witnessed the ability of capitalism to quickly amass incredible amounts of lucre — to the ultimate downfall of the USSR.
Think they learned something? Or, do you think that shift to State controlled capitalism was just some random decision?
KT Chong
After the “$1,000” UBI that was first proposed by Mitt Romney and supported by Republicans and OPPOSED by Democrats…
What the US media has again missed — or deliberately hid: Now Republicans are out-flanking establishment Democrats AGAIN from the left, after Dementia Joe had said he would veto Medicare-for-All if he was the president, by taking experimental steps that move towards SINGLE-PAYER healthcare:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVtPnHf-uxg
Democrats have become completely irrelevant. Their only play is “Orange Man Bad!”
metamars
From “The Nation-State is Back” by Srdja Trifkovic:
Neoliberal globalization in its post-Cold War form has been dealt a mortal blow by COVID-19, which is a good thing. The architecture of global economic and political governance developed over the past three decades is collapsing before our eyes. At its root is the notion that we should not feel a special bond for any particular country, nation, or culture, but base our preferences on the quantifiable parameters of self-interest. The current crisis has had a commendably subversive effect on the process of transforming globalized society into a socio-technological system in which most human relations would be streamlined into manageable routines and procedures.
Stirling S Newberry
>How about doom and gloom with unreliable statistics?
That is what statisticians do – it is called “accuracy of averages.” Are you deliberating try to get on TeamTrump – or is this just natural for you?
Stephen
The exit plan for Coronavirus is to refine social distancing. Everybody has to wear a mask. Maintain 6 ft distance. Modify offices and factories and stores so this can happen. Restaurants will only be able to do window take out or curb side. No mass gathering. Schools will be closed until August 2021 or later. Most people won’t fly. Various borders will be closed, even internal borders when there are hot spots. Lots of testing to identify outbreaks early. Special Covid only hospitals.
If anything different is tried, there will be a big outbreak and we will
With luck there will a vaccine by mid 2021.
Benjamin
@Eric Anderson
“Think they learned something? Or, do you think that shift to State controlled capitalism was just some random decision?”
Maybe. But maybe they were just disillusioned with their status quo after Mao went and managed to starve up to 60 million of his own people to death, largely out of sheer ideological fanaticism. So maybe they just figured ‘whelp that didn’t work. Let’s try this other thing’.
Zachary Smith
I must disagree. The future is coming, and it is going to be horrible. The Power Elites in this country and elsewhere show no signs of having learned anything from this coronavirus kerfuffle. I expect them to continue to resist all reforms, and at all times remain concerned only with maximizing their own wealth.
In the short term, there are many other diseases out there, and they’re far more deadly than this one. In the barely longer term, climate change is accelerating. I don’t know which of the many possible surprises it’ll hit us with first, but at some point there will be no practical preparations to make. And I can’t foresee any recovery barring some near-impossible luck. Perhaps the inevitable damage could still be minimized if somebody really tried, but there is nobody even pretending they’ll do that.
cripes
Zachary:
Yes.
I don’t have much to add to that.
Sometimes history just stumbles along.
And sometimes incompetent elites just are.
Generally speaking I sense a long decline of the West.
Or a short one.
Hugh
bruce, it is important to distinguish between hegemonic and imperial ambitions. China definitely has imperial ambitions, internally against the Uighurs and Tibetans and externally most notably in the South China Sea and with its Belt and Road projects. The first three of these are old style colonialism. The last is, was, and will always be idiocy. The coronavirus is just the most recent example of why globalization and supply chains thousands of miles long are non-starters. Add in the political instability that will come with overpopulation and climate change along its proposed routes and again, a non-starter. What all these activities have in common though is that the Chinese see a profit for them from them. A hegemonic order, by contrast, entails large outflows of wealth and resources to create and maintain. The Chinese have not spent one wrinkled renminbi for anything like this.
As for climate change, the schedule hasn’t changed. The US and the world have to have fully formed responses to it up and running by 2030 or it is game over. China, as usual, isn’t interested. The EU is a wreck and couldn’t collectively organize a one-car parade. The US under Trump wouldn’t be able to do even that. So we are screwed, and none of this begins to touch upon overpopulation, the motive force behind so much of this which remains taboo to bring up, let alone discuss seriously.
Aqua Lung
Are you certain about this? China is investing gobs of money building infrastructure in other countries. Here’s a video of what it’s doing in the Baltics but the Baltics is not the exception, it’s increasingly the rule for China as it spreads its tentacles across the globe.
Of course, this virus could change this equation and near future waves of pandemics and climate chaos could thwart it, but it does show China aspires to be the global leader. It has no choice really. It’s as addicted to growth as America and in order to sustain that growth it must exercise control well beyond its borders. America is largely responsible for enabling China’s meteoric transformation from a peasant agrarian society to global industrial leader. Wall Street is to blame. Hang them all.
Note P0mpeo’s hypocrisy. Of course China is bribing. It has learned well from the West and if there is one thing the Chinese are excellent at, it’s mimicry. Pull the plank out of your rapturous eye, Pompeo. China is playing America’s game and it’s doing it even better.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZk68imURfA
Aqua Lung
There will not be an effective vaccine. Effective is the key word here. Any vaccine that Trump supports, I will not take. The man is a murdering psychopath as is all of Wall Street.
Aqua Lung
China’s massive surveillance state has proven extremely useful in containing the virus thus far. It can quite literally track every citizen in order to control the spread of the disease. Wuhan is opening back up and in order to travel anywhere, you are given a code. If it’s green, you are free to travel about. If it’s not, you are severely restricted.
That surveillance society was enabled by Wall Street. Naomi Klein, many years prior, wrote about this. Wall Street made huge profits enabling China’s surveillance state that is now saving millions of lives in China while America flounders and fat cat Wall Street financiers wait out the pandemic from their cozy, secure retreats as they receive bailout upon bailout and the people starve in cardboard boxes in back alleys.
This excellent article is from 2008.
https://naomiklein.org/chinas-all-seeing-eye/
China has broadened the concept of Kouji and applied it to its economy and copied the West. The copy is better than the original. The saving grace, a small consolation admittedly, is that Wall Street will be subsumed by China ultimately. At least that’s what my Silver Lining Playbook says.
“When you find your servant is your master.”
Fyi, Dallas, Texas will reach a high of 96 degrees today. Wrap your head around that. 96 degrees on April 8th. Yes, Texas can get blistering hot during the summer months but 96 degrees on April 8 is alarming to say the least. At this rate, I’m expecting 118 degrees in August.
Stirling S Newberry
“The Chinese have not spent one wrinkled renminbi for anything like this.”
You do not know what you are talking about. The Chinese have different hegemonic objectives. This is because they have different incompetent leaders.
Astrid
Aqua Lung is obviously just 450.org in new drags, after he huffed off and said he wasn’t coming back –
https://www.ianwelsh.net/staying-happy-in-self-isolation/#comment-111814
I guess his family didn’t need so much of his attending so he’s back to inflicting his mental diarrhea on strangers on the internet.
Larster
Hugh, I totally agree with your comments re Europe, but I also think this sends a chilling message to us in terms of what happens without strong national leadership. To give the pandemic issue to the states is a huge mistake IMO. You cannot exit this period of lockdown with 50 strategies. We will be just like Europe.
Of course the reason for 50 strategies is that Trump cannot assemble or lead a competent team. Can you imagine having a press sec with the resume of this bimbo during a national pandemic?
metamars
@Astrid
The next thing you’re going to say is that Lance Hunt IS Captain Amazing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9F4759XtejU
Stirling S Newberry
“I guess his family didn’t need so much of his attending so he’s back to inflicting his mental diarrhea on strangers on the internet.”
He is our Dunning-Kruger flower. I hope he is paid well to sit there and mangel the conversation.
Zachary Smith
Sub-headline which highlights US priorities:
Needless to say, there are US shortages of the protective equipment, and the many billions of dollars the US hands to the pissant nation couldn’t possibly be used to buy this stuff! The Apartheid state obviously has unlimited access to US resources.
Keep in mind that Venezuela and Iran are still being sanctioned to the greatest possible degree even during this Coronavirus pandemic. The fat slug Pompeo is Trump’s boy, and he is obviously still hoping he can jump-start that Second Coming affair. Unlike the Modly guy, I’ll betcha Pompeo doesn’t mind that Trump might turn on him in a split second.
Trump has no loyalty to his toadies
https://digbysblog.net/2020/04/trump-has-no-loyalty-to-his-toadies/
Zachary Smith
Headline from Los Angeles Times:
Hospitals say feds are seizing masks and other coronavirus supplies without a word
The materials must be distributed “in an equitable manner”. That means the states which Trump needs to be re-elected will get priority.
And of course the pissant state of Holy Israel. BTW, I didn’t include a link to my previous post because the headline had changed in the course of maybe 15 minutes. From a comment at another blog:
Learning you – or your sister – or your mother – are going to die to maximize Trump’s 2020 chances or to help Pompeo’s Second Coming Project might be a bridge too far for even the MAGA folks. Or it might not.
https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2020-04-07/hospitals-washington-seize-coronavirus-supplies
Aqua Lung
Zachary, Pompeo is that proficient merciless autocrat we ALL should be worried about. You know, the one for whom Trump is paving the way, wittingly or unwittingly on Trump’s part and I think it’s the latter.
If Trump gets a second term, and he will, Pompeo will follow him as POTUS. Then, if you’re still residing in America, you’re really really really screwed.
The Dems do not want to lead. They’re satisfied being the minority opposition foil.
Z
Wall Street and U.S. corporate management, who have enriched themselves through the rules and markets Wall Street created and corrupted via scumbags such as Robber Rubin and Larry Summers (heavy promoters of free trade, of deregulated markets, of paving the way for China to join the WTO, of reduced safety nets, of off-shoring, of sending U.S. manufacturing overseas, of repealing the separation between banks and trading houses, etc.), have taken too much from the productive economy and the working class for it to function properly, for even a civil society to function properly. There’s no telling how the sudden assertiveness of physical reality will play out in a system that is so heavily leaning against it and is ruled by people that are too arrogant to adapt. This situation in itself could lead to a reset of the economy and the power structure in the U.S.
It’s our rulers’ power versus the working class’s survival and our rulers don’t see themselves much endangered by physical reality … yet. They’re only focused on maintaining their power, or even gaining more over us. Look at how this is playing out: private equity funds cutting doctors and nurses pay during a pandemic when they are working hardest, are at the most risk, and their functions are critical for managing the pandemic.
A potential pinion point for this situation is if enough doctors and nurses go on strike to force a government take over of the hospitals and health care system and bounce private equity’s power in the health system, and hopefully the health insurance racket, to the curb.
There will likely be a lot of consternation from the medical professionals to do this because it will lead to immediate deaths that could have been prevented if they stayed on the job and I’d expect the federal government to order them back to work, but if enough of them refuse they have the ultimate control: power to mitigate the damage of the pandemic. And the fact of the matter is they are putting themselves and their families at risk and are seeing friends that they have worked with and known for years die due to the corruption of our medical-industrial complex. Patients are people that they generally don’t know, bodies in a bed, who they have little emotional attachment to, but they do for their family and co-workers and it’s got to piss them off to see their wages cut during a pandemic. And the fact of the matter is if they do strike and disempower the medical-industrial complex they’ll be saving a lot more people in the long run than the ones who will die due to the unfortunate timing of a strike.
If they win their strike, expect more worker strikes (they’re already beginning) and that’s how the working class gains power back from our rulers. The medical professionals have considerable leverage on them. Their numbers are limited, they are heavily trained and not easily replaced, and even our scumbag rulers need them because they are not the gods they make believe they are.
Z
Sid Finster
Canada may have noticed that Trump stopped 3M from exporting masks, but if Ottawa learned anything from this, it’s not “ZOMG are really at the mercy of these people and we gotta do something about it!” but “all we gotta do is get rid of that awful man and then everything will go back to the way it was!”
Accepting that the problem is systemic, not simply an aberration that happened as a consequence of too many Americans not listening to their betters, is simply too disturbing for the political classes in western countries to contemplate.
Hugh
Again it is important to distinguish between what is standard imperialism and what is hegemonic. To say that China has “other” hegemonic goals is rather to say that it certainly has goals and seeks to advance them, but those goals aren’t hegemonic. For instance, when China does development projects in Africa, it usually uses Chinese labor using Chinese products to build them and gets a lock on any resources these produce. That’s not a system. It’s a deal. And in the age of Trump it should be easy to see it as such.