Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: Poverty Page 2 of 3

On Bangladesh’s Textile Disasters

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On May 12, 2013

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My father worked in Bangladesh for 8 years in the 80s, and in East Pakistan (what Bangladesh was called pre-independence) in the 50s.  I have relatives who live in India, and I spent my summers and many Christmas vacations in Bangladesh.  My mother spoke fluent Hindi (though that isn’t the language spoken in Bangladesh) as she grew up in Darjeeling and Calcutta.

Let’s run through the points.

The first is the simplest: I find it interesting that there is so much textile manufacture in Bangladesh. There was none to speak of in the 80s.  Let me put it crudely, Bangladesh is way down the chain, there are very few poorer, more corrupt countries in the world outside of Africa.  The textile industry is running out of cheap places to make clothes if they’re in Bangladesh.

The second is this: Bangladesh’s government will never enforce safety regulations in the textile industry. It is impossible, it will not happen.  Nothing happens, nothing gets done in Bangladesh without baksheesh—bribes.  Bribes are the actual salary of government employees, they are not paid enough to live decently on without them.  Textile factories will be throwing off so much money, in Bangladeshi terms, that virtually anyone can be bought, and with so much money at stake, anyone who can’t be bought will be otherwise dealt with.

Which means that if textile manufacturing jobs are to made safer it must be done by the companies buying the textiles, like Joe Fresh.  Only they can do it, because they control the money spigot. If unsafe work circumstances will cost the people running the factories money, they will fix it, assuming that the audits are thorough and rigorous, by incorruptible people.  Those people will have to be outsiders (outsiders aren’t necessarily incorruptible, but locals can be gotten to too easily) though they will need local fixers on staff.

My prediction is that some nominal steps will be taken, but only nominal ones. You don’t do textile manufacture in a country like Bangladesh because you want safe, you do it because you want cheap.  Really, really cheap.  Bet on the big headline disasters being only the tip of the iceberg, with routine maimings and horrible work conditions being part of the daily life of the workers.

All that said, if you live in Bangladesh, odds are you have no options.  These jobs may be horrible but they are jobs, and pay better than most of your other options.  That’s why the textile companies are there, no one who has other options would work in their hellhole sweatshops.

Ultimately that comes back to us and our corporate leaders.  We want cheap clothes, they want outsize profits (they don’t pass most of the “cost savings” on.)  If you aren’t dirt poor yourself, I suggest you look at the label, and if it’s made in a third world country (including China), don’t buy it.  It’s not much, but it’s about as much as you can do.  And, generally speaking the quality of clothes will be better.

If you really want to do something about this, tie work safety to allowing clothes made in such countries to be imported to developed nations, and have the inspectors be government employees of the country where the clothes will be exported.  That goes against everything our current government and corporate leaders are willing to do, however, and also offends the sensibilities of many on the left  so just get used to the fact that a lot of blood stains your clothes, just like lots of blood is mixed in to your oil and is used to fertilize your food.

Some basics on the economy

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On September 3, 2012

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1) the majority of new jobs are bad.

2) the economy has still not recovered all lost jobs, either in absolute #s or as a percentage of the population

3) so there are fewer jobs, and what new jobs have been created are worse. They pay worse.

4) The upper middle class job market has recovered, which is why those folks are no longer panicking and are telling you that the economy isn’t so bad as all that.

5) the failure to force the rich to take their losses and to break up the banks means that the same people who caused the 2007/8 financial crisis still control the economy and the government.

6) failure to restructure the economy to get off oil and over to an electrical economy means that the US (and the world) are caught in the oil price dilemna: any real recovery increases oil price and will be derailed by those high oil prices.

7) Europe, ex. Germany, is in recession.

8 ) the developed world is in depression, it never left depression.  During depressions there are recoveries (such as they are) and recessions, but the overall economy is in depression.

9) China’s economy is slowing down.  Since China is the main engine of the world economy, followed by the US, this is really bad.  If it goes into an actual recession, bend over and kiss your butt goodbye.

10) Austerity is a means by which the rich can buy up assets which are not normally on the market for cheap.

11) the wealth of the rich and major corporations has recovered and in many countries exceeded its prior highs.  They are doing fine. Austerity is not hurting them. They control your politicians.  The depression will not end until it is in their interest for it to do so, or their wealth and power is broken.

12) The US play is as follows: frack. Frack some more.  Frack even more.  They are trying the Reagan play, temporize while new supplies of hydrocarbons come on line.  Their bet is that they’ll get another boom out of that.  If they’re right, it’ll be a lousy boom.  If they’re wrong (and the Saudis think they are, and the Saudis have been eating their lunch since 2001) then you won’t even get that.  Either way, though, they’ll devastate the environment, by which I mean the water you drink and grow crops with.

13) For people earning less than about 80K, the economy never really recovered.

14) If you’re out of work more than 2 months your odds of getting another job drop through the floor.  If you do get one, odds are it will pay much less than your previous job.

15) Canada is undergoing austerity madness at all levels of government, and the corporations, with historically low tax rates, are not going to spend either. With Chinese demand for commodities dropping, expect a nasty recession.

16) Australia, having tied itself completely to China is about to reap the downside of that decision.

17) Wages are being systematically broken in the developed world.  The rich do not believe they need you, except as wage-slave labor.  You will all be company store slaves, paying rental streams to everyone to be allowed to continued to eke out a miserable existence.

18) Since the US sells protected works (so called “intellectual property”) you will continue to see a massive attempt to break anyone who doesn’t pay IP rent to the US.  Some countries (Sweden, Germany, among others) are going along.  But there are signs of rebellion.  Apple may have won against Samsung in their ridiculous attempt to enforce patents on obvious solutions, but both Japanese and Korean courts threw the cases out.  Paying rent to America, the hegemon, when the world system is working is one thing, paying rent when the world isn’t working is another.

19) Stirling Newberry says, and I agree, that none of this is stable, but it will last as long as the majority of the baby boom, the silents and a good chunk of the Xers still think they can hang on to their little piece of the pie, and screw everyone else.  It will most likely break down in 2020/24, which is when the demographics turn.  Young people today are completely screwed, they have astronomical student loans, no or shitty jobs, can’t afford a house and can’t afford to start a family.  Note that the places where revolutions, peaceful or otherwise, are happening, are places where the majority of the population is young.  Latin America, the Middle East.

Addendum

20) The economic numbers you hear don’t mean squat. Headline inflation does not matter, ask yourself instead “what are my fixed expenses?”  Start with food.  Jobless claims #s cannot be compared to prior numbers because less people have the sorts of jobs that let you make those claims.  For the #s to make sense you’d have to adjust them for the reduced # of jobs which allow claims.  The unemployment rate has dropped even though there are, in absolute terms, less jobs, because people have given up looking.

21) The money the Fed floods into the financial markets (quantitative easing, among others) is mostly NOT getting to ordinary people, and whatever Bernanke and his apologists say, it was never intended to.  It is intended to prop up financial actors, and keep the rich richer.  It has done what it is supposed to do.

The Musical Chairs Economy

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On February 19, 2012

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Ok, for some time, folks have been after me for a formal economics post.  What’s going to happen in the future in the US?

The answer, for around the next 5 to 6 years, maybe longer, is the musical chairs economy.  Let’s lay out the basics.

What has happened is that the general circle of prosperity has been reduced.  Less people now live in the “good” US economy.  When they drop out of that economy they also use a lot less oil and gas, and even electricity.

Since the US can no longer sell nearly as much paper in exchange for real resources and goods, the US now has to sell something the rest of the world wants.  One part of that is intellectual property, which is why you will continue to see stricter and stricter IP laws.  The other part of that is hydrocarbons.  The world is still hungry for oil.  And if Americans use less of it, and if the US moves massively to fracking of unconventional oil (which it is) then the US can, again, become an oil exporter.  (Remember, for much of the 20th century the US exported oil.)

This plan includes impoverishing large numbers of Americans, since the reduction in oil use is not primarily being produced by providing the same services with less energy, but that is not an issue to those who run America’s industry or politics, since they do not, despite rhetoric, care about the welfare of ordinary Americans.

This game, in a lesser form, has been going on for a long time.  In the older version, going on since at least 1980 or so) production was offshored or outsourced, workers laid off and they never found good jobs again.  Industries of the past were offshored, but industries of the future were mostly not created (the internet boom being the last large-scale industry creation episode).  When they were created, they “went to scale” in other countries–once how to produce was understood, the production was done overseas, where it was cheaper, not just in wages but in terms of regulations (for example, batteries are made in China by hand.  Batteries, of course, are mostly acid containers.)

The game has now moved into a more virulent stage.  During the 2000’s various economists and financial gurus used to laugh that the fools overseas were giving America real goods and resources in exchange for worthless paper.  They thought they had found a free lunch, and many of them were right, form themselves, individually (who cares about fellow Americans?  If they can’t make too bad for them.)

So what happens now is a recovery of sorts.  Life is not so bad for the upper middle class and the upper class (I don’t include the oligarchs in the upper class, they are the ruling class, the upper class are the lawyers, doctors, judges, county pols, mid-level real-estate developers and so on.)  Since the majority of the population who wants a job can find one, who cares if millions of Americans are unemployed?  They are not economically functional in this economy, it is better for them to just go away, so that oil can be sold overseas.

Bear in mind that the short history of American economics in the post-war period can be summed up as “suburbanization.”  Wave after wave of developments, and the money which were made from them.  Suburbanization, by its very nature, requires gasoline, because it requires cars.  Suburbs do not, and probably cannot, have rapid transit.  They are also not economically self-sufficient, generally deliberately (the horror of some one working from home causes vapors amongst developers and suburban homeowners, it seems.)

Peak oil may or may not be here, but it’s pretty clear that peak cheap-oil has passed.  The American lifestyle of the 20th century, which has not been fundamentally changed by the internet and assorted telecom gadgets, is oil based.

So, there will be recessions and non-recessions (amidst what is an ongoing long Depression).  And in each recession those who fail to grab a chair will be cast out into the dispossessed.  Those who keep their chairs will be allowed to keep some facsimile of the “American lifestyle”.

The people who run the American economy and political system will continue along these lines so long as it continues to bring them money or power.  As noted, they do not have fellow feeling for other Americans, they believe they earned everything they have, and that if someone else isn’t prosperous, it’s because they didn’t earn it.  Such useless eaters are a drag on society.

I emphasize the thought process, which some will find polemical, because it is at the heart of the problem.  It is the most important part of the post.  There are other options, from the managed decline favored by environmental purists through to various types of smart growth.  They are not being pursued and will not be pursued because they are more work with less certainty of who will reap the profits and power than simply managing the current decline, and culling the herd from time to time, as necessary.

“The powerful do as they will, the weak suffer what they must.”

As long as you, the people, believe you are weak, you will suffer what you must.

The monopoly of violence and simple solutions to supposedly insoluble problems

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On August 11, 2011

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One of the interesting things happening in Britain is the formation of ad-hoc groups for neighbourhood defense.  People have noticed that the police can’t defend them, and have decided to defend themselves.

This it is not a good thing for the State, which is why the police are strongly against it.  This is potentially the beginning of the breakdown of the monopoly of state violence, and the beginning of the creation of militias.  Normally, of course, I’d be aghast at the creation of militias.  They lead to nasty sectarian strife, etc… and if they take off, that’s exactly what will happen.

But what they also are is a crack in the social contract between state and citizens, an acknowledgement that the State can’t defend its own ordinary people.  And as you walk down this path, citizens start questioning their support for the State, period — whether in taxes, or in obedience to the State’s law.

Normally, again, this is a bad thing.  Heck it’s a bad thing here, but just as with the riots it is a natural reaction to the current situation.  When the State doesn’t do its job properly, whether that’s running the economy for everyone’s benefit, not just a few; or whether that’s maintaining the basic monopoly of violence (which includes basic social welfare so that the designated losers of the system don’t resort to uncontrollable violence), people start opting out.

States which don’t perform their basic functions become failed states.  There are a lot of ways to get there, but one of them is to allow the highest inequality in the developed world to exist in your capital (sound familiar?).  Those people lash out, you can’t repress them effectively anymore, others step up to do what should be your job.

Those who say there is no solution are, as usual, full of it.  There is a solution, and it is obvious.  Britain had plenty of money for the Iraq War, had and has plenty of money for Banker salaries and a housing bubble.  A chunk of that money could have easily made sure this didn’t happen, but the choice was made to have rich bankers and bomb Muslims: those were Britain’s priorities.

But if you wanted to fix it, first you clamp down hard (you now have no choice, because you didn’t care about these people), then you offer them a future.  You basically give everyone who wants a job, a job, put ex (or current) sergeants and corporals in charge, move any non-married men and women out of the city, and put them to work fixing and building things. There are always roads and buildings to be repaired, ditches to be dug, farmers who need help and so on.   You hire out of work tradesmen, and they teach them skills.  You pay them decently, you feed them, you house them, you give them skills.  After 4 or 5 years, you start putting them back into the private work force, and you subsidize their first job.

This isn’t rocket science, it is dead obvious.  Yes, it is expensive, but it is less expensive than the Iraq War or bankers bonuses.  And it is a hundred times more humane, and will prevent further occurrences while improving race relations, your economy, your tax base and you workforce.

When people say there are no simple solutions they are, in the current context, almost always full of shit.  What they mean is that there are no simple solutions which are socially acceptable either to the governing class or to society as a whole.

Innocents were already being hurt in Britain

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On August 10, 2011

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So a guy gets hurt in the riots.  He lives in the most unequal city in the developed world. He is a part of the society which condemned these people to hopeless lives, to the point where they rioted, after 333 of them died in police custody over 13 years with not one cop being convicted of anything.  They rioted after a black man was shot and the police lied about it.  They rioted when there is one job for ever 58 applicants where they live, where right out of high school most of them will never hold a job.

Riots aren’t pretty, if you don’t want them to happen, make sure your society doesn’t abandon a racial minority to squalor and hopelessness.

You should all know better. Yes, it’d be nice if they were more targeted against the people who have fucked them the most, but y’know, that’s the way riots go. Hell, even clearly political riots like the Greek ones started out with the rioters fucking up their own neighbourhoods.

This is why you don’t let things get to the point where people riot, don’t let their lives be completely intolerable. As Stirling noted, even soulless technocrats from the liberal era understood that.

I have sympathy for the victims, but so what? I have more sympathy for the 333 people who died in police custody. They lost a lot more. And it may not be that shopkeeper’s fault, but that’s how these things go. When you treat people like sub-humans, they eventually show you what that means.

I am not going to play the gutless liberal game of condemning people who have been treated like animals for lashing out in pain. Is Britain a democracy, or not? If it is, then everyone is complicit, if it isn’t then a revolution is needed and anyone who isn’t working towards one is complicit. And in the meantime, a lot of innocents are going to get hurt, that’s what happens in unjust societies.

If people won’t help those in pain, then those in pain will share the pain. That’s what happens, especially when you’re talking young men who never had a chance, who were born with no future, and society just doesn’t care.

British bankers were making millions, billions, and British government couldn’t find enough money to help these people? To give them jobs?

And British society tolerated those priorities?

The Depression and the future

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On June 5, 2011

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Ok, everyone’s talking about the oncoming recession.  What it is is the second downleg of the depression we’ve been in since the financial crisis.

All of this has been baked in since 2009.  Since January 2009, when Barack Obama announced his stimulus, which was not just too small, but put together so badly that it was evident it would not kick the economy out of the doldrums.  The stimulus would be seen to fail (it doesn’t matter how many jobs it “saved” what matters if it created a good economy.)  Meanwhile Obama made it clear he had no intention of restructuring the economy, shutting down any of the major banks or of disrupting the paper for oil securitization game.

So, anyway, what’s happened since 2009 was baked into the cake.  What is happening is what anyone halfway competent should have expected to happen and that includes the massive wave of austerity in the developed world, the high commodity prices, and the continued liquidation of public assets to feed private greed.  If anything it’s slightly worse than I expected.  I would have hoped that some nation other than Iceland would prove to have enough guts to tell the vultures to fuck themselves, but apparently we’re all eunuchs or morons these days, and the Greeks still aren’t rioting amongst the mansions of the rich, I notice.  So who cares what they think, anyway?

I suppose it’s tiresome to keep saying “I told you so”.  Certainly I’m tired of it, but the point is that this could all be predicted, was all predicted (well, not all, I didn’t get the revolutions in Arab countries, though I know someone who did and the clues were there.)  Assume that what is happening is, essentially, what your lords and masters are at least ok with having happen.  If they weren’t, it wouldn’t be happening.  This isn’t a case of incompetence, they didn’t even try to make this stuff not happen.

The future you’ve got coming from you is a future of unconventional oil extraction: aka fracking.  The play is to get back to cheapish oil and make that run for as long as it can.  That is what WILL happen.  That is baked into the cake.  The only economy these people want to run is an petro economy. They will do whatever it takes to run one and continue to use their position in control of legacy capital to extract rent and tax the future.  There will be more controls on so-called intellectual property (a contradiction in terms if there ever was one).  There will be more security theater.  There will be more austerity, which means taking public assets and turning them into what appear to be revenue producing private assets.

This will go on until the last drop of cheapish conventional oil has been pumped and the last suburb built.  Americans, and apparently the developed world, will do whatever is required to see this happen.  They will kill whoever they have to kill.  That’s what the developed world is, now.  This is only compounded by stupidity like Germany going off nuclear without a clear plan of how to replace the energy.  Remember, boys and girls, yes, there is blood mixed in with that oil.  A lot of it.

This the future, the next goodish economy will come from unconventional extraction.  Not sure how long that will last.  It will come at great environmental and health costs, but Americans will give up anything to keep the petro-economy going, so, so be it.

What’s this gonna mean for you?  The good jobs are going to keep getting scarcer, and if you aren’t willing to do evil (work for any insurance company, anything defense related, most good paying education jobs, most good paying healthcare jobs, virtually all financial industry jobs, etc…) then they will essentially non-existent.  Real wages after real inflation will continue to trundle down.  Even inflation adjusted wages as measured by the BLS may show declines.  Employment WILL NOT recover in your lifetime if you are over 40.  That doesn’t mean there won’t be ups and down, but it won’t have a long sustained up.  Financial markets will continue to be a rigged game, and if you want to play, realize you need to play as if the game is rigged, not as if you’re in a free market.

Unless you can pay premium, the quality of everything you buy will continue to go downhill. Want a good burger?  Closing in on $8.  Want a shitty fastfood burger?  $2 or less.  Public transportation will get worse, more libraries will close.  The cops will make less calls and be less helpful.  The schools will be worse in most places and keep getting worse.  Eventually Medicare will be slashed to the bone, and so will SS.  Not necessarily destroyed, but so weakened they might as well be.

It’s gonna be a long 20 to 30 years folks.  Does this have to be the future?  In theory, no.  In practice, well, yes, apparently it does.

Core CPI is exactly the wrong thing to watch

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On April 16, 2011

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Our lords and masters (h/t Americablog):

Those trends came as real income dropped 0.5 percent for the month.

The Labor Department said its Consumer Price Index increased 0.5 percent after rising by the same margin in February. That was in line with economists expectations.

Core CPI is vindication for officials at the Federal Reserve who have viewed the recent energy price spike as having a temporary effect on inflation.

Food and gasoline rose 0.8 percent, the largest gain since July 2008, after increasing 0.6 percent in February.

When thinking about inflation, think of individual’s (or companies) surplus income, that is, how much income do they have left to spend after their necessities.  Necessities include food, housing, heating and transportation.  To a lesser extent, clothes, though most people don’t need to buy clothes every month.

Goods inflation, that is to say, core inflation, is mostly in items that you don’t have to buy. Sure, you might want to, but you don’t have to have a new toaster, or TV, or computer.  Food, on the other hand, you have to have.  If you live off rapid transit, and most Americans do, then fuel for your car is something you have to have otherwise you can’t get to your job: you must buy it, at whatever price it is selling for.  Heating oil is something you have to have, freezing to death is bad.

If you earn $2k a month and your fixed bills come to $1,600, your expendable income each month is $400.  If oil and food rise enough that you have to spend an extra $50 you’ve lost 12.5% of your income.  If they rise enough to cost you $100 a month, 25%.  That margin is what matters to most people.  And for people close to the line, the extra money they must spend may kick them from surplus into a personal deficit, at which point they have to start borrowing money, usually at usurious credit card rates of over 20%.

The day laboring class is particularly vulnerable to this.  A bit of drying up of work, an increase in the price of food, and they can reach the point where they can’t afford to eat enough every day.  When that happens you either get a revolution, or you get famines.  This was particularly a factor, by the way, in Egypt.

Inflation in what people must have is what matters to most of the population.  But it isn’t what matters to your lords and masters.  Food costs and fuel costs, are, for them, roundoff errors.  If  you’re really rich, spending $1,000/day on food doesn’t even show on the scale.  So, by and large, goods inflation is what matters to them, personally, though they may have business concerns about fuel inflation (and note that inflation in oil leads to food inflation very directly.  Modern agriculture is how we turn oil into food, essentially.)

So when someone talks about core inflation being the most important form of inflation, check your wallet, it’s likely lighter than it used to be.

An American Future

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On December 6, 2010

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So, I’m peering into my looking glass today, or rather tonight, as the snow eddies down, the first snowfall of winter, and it’s winter I see for America, and for the world.

It’s clear at this point that America is only the shell of a democracy, and instead is run by a self-perpetuating oligopoly whose only law, whose only imperative, is its own survival and aggrandizement, no matter what the cost to America, to American citizens, or to anyone else in the world who is not part of the western elite class.  The same is, with America switched to Europe, true of the oligopoly who run Europe.

This is not a stable situation because the economics of it is not stable.  In order to bail themselves out they are enforcing austerity policies which are wreaking and will continue to wreak economic havoc in the real physical and social economies of the countries whose policies they control.  They are contracting the franchise, the membership of the oligopoly, pushing more and more people out of it, even as they impoverish millions of peoples at the bottom end of the economy.

They have created a two tier system of laws, where important people who commit trillions of dollars of systematic fraud are not prosecuted and where war criminals responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands are winked at, while small people are locked up for the most minor of crimes, where bankruptcy is essentially impossible for the small people, but the big people skate and are given whatever amount of money is necessary to bail them out of any bad decisions they have made.

They have created a surveillance state where they track in real time, without warrants, the movements of citizens through cameras and by tracking credit cards, debit cards and even loyalty cards. Their servants stare at the naked bodies of everyone who wants to travel by air or grope their genitals, inflicting sexual humiliation on the public as a matter of course.

When embarassed, as with Wikileaks leaks of diplomatic communiques, their response is a deranged manhunt combined with a truly Soviet-style screaming of “I can’t hear you” as they try and ban soldiers, the Library of Congress and public servants from reading information everyone has access to. This isn’t just authoritarian, it isn’t just jejeune, it is delusional.  Every principal and teacher knows that if you tell people they shouldn’t read something, that will make them want to read it.  If they wanted people to think they shouldn’t read these revelations, the reaction should have been muted, “ho, hum, nothing there”, not a deranged attempt to shut down anyone who mirrors the Wikileaks site and threats against anyone who dares read the information.

Meanwhile, in Congress, politicians of both parties, with Obama’s blessing, are set to extend tax cuts.  A few months ago the mantra was “deficits, deficits, deficits”, but now deficits don’t matter.  This isn’t to argue whether they do or not, simply to note that their real ruling ideology is that governments should only spend money on rich people, and that money spent on the middle class or poor is bad.

It will also, and I guarantee this, not help the economy.  The past 30 years, and the past 10 years in particular, have been a huge experiment in tax-cutting, and for ordinary people, the result has been stagnation and now an absolute decline.  Because ordinary people do not have pricing power, either as workers for their labor (since there are plenty of people who need jobs) or as consumers (because the oligopolies who sell food, energy, telecom and so on know you must have their services) every single red cent of tax cuts which go to the middle and lower class will be taken away by corporations and the rich.  Those corporations and rich will then use that money to either play leveraged financial games or to offshore jobs to low cost, low regulation domiciles.  Not only do tax cuts not do any good, they accelerate the loss of US jobs.  No, this isn’t what you’ve been told, indeed propagandized, for the last thirty years.  But how has trickle down economics worked out for you?  Are you going to believe your lying eyes, or the talking heads who tell you that tax cuts create jobs?

So the economic situation is going to get worse. That doesn’t mean there won’t be cyclical ups and downs, just that the trend line is down, down, down.  And every trend line reaches its end.  My guess, at this point, is that the US has only one business cycle left before a Russian style collapse.  The rest of the world just does not need to sell you oil for lousy dollars which don’t buy the future and don’t buy anything else, either.  At this point what must be gotten from the US are a few capital goods, jetliners (well, from the US or Europe), some software,the very best military equipment and some miscellanea.  That’s it.  That’s all.

The rest can be bought from other countries.  Now, if the next tech revolution was going to happen in the US, they’d have to keep their hands in, but it’s now clear that, no, that isn’t going to happen either.  American producers don’t, American consumers can only do so if heavily subsidized by China, and American technology is more and more a joke at anything other than killing people.

The US is going to be cut loose.

The reaction to that will be war.  Maybe in Iran, maybe in Korea, maybe in Saudi Arabia. Where doesn’t really matter, but it’s going to happen, because it’s the only card the US will have left and after Obama destroys the Democratic party by gutting Social Security, Veterans benefits and overseeing the cutting of Medicaid, yes, President Teabag is going to get in, whether Obama is primaried or not.  And the only way to both provide stimulus and get the resources the US is going to need and no one else will soon want to sell to the US, is going to be war.

I have said it before, and I will say it again.  If you can get out, get out.  If you can’t get out, but you have children, get them overseas—send them on exchanges, send them to overseas relatives for a year, send them to a foreign university (they’re better and cheaper).  Get them out, even if you can’t get out.

The game isn’t over in the US, but the smart money is that the first revolution in the US isn’t going to be a revolution of the left, it’s going to be a nutbar revolution from the right, and it is going to be extraordinarily ugly.

In the meantime, if you have to stay, make sure you’re on good terms with your neighbors, your spouse, your friends and your family.  Figure out how to grow food wherever you are and how to reduce your dependence on anything but people you trust.  (Don’t trust any corporation.)  And, if you can, organize.  Organize locally, organize at the State level, organize nationally.  Understand the age of compromise is over. It is now too late to save the old system.  It’s over.  We tried, and we failed.  It is beyond “reform”, it is going to flame out, the only question is how many people it will burn to death as it does so.

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