Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.
Month: February 2026
It’s common to slap all the blame on Boomers, but it’s not really fair, though they certainly did plenty of harm. (Yes, some Boomers, elites are more to blame, yadda, yadda.)
But it wasn’t just the boomers. The so-called Reagan Republicans included a ton of GI Generation and Silents. The issue is that the people who created the FDR system weren’t GI Gen, they were Lost and Missionary generation. GI Gen and later lived in the economy created by those generations, but they didn’t really understand how and why it worked because they weren’t adults during the 1920s, so they didn’t get what it was reacting against or what it was trying to fix and avoid a recurrence of.
GI Gen and Silent leaders looked at all the rules FDR and co had put in place and they didn’t really understand why they existed: the rules looked stupid, there seemed to be tons of them, and they figured “we’re smarter than they were, we won’t do stupid things and life will be a lot easier with less regulation.”
Well that was the rationalization: the other issue was simple enough. Getting rid of the rules let a lot of people become rich and even the middle class thought they’d benefit (and many did, with rising housing and stock prices and lower taxes.) The rules had, quite explicitly, been intended to make sure there couldn’t be another Gilded Age nor another roaring twenties — no stock bubbles, no super rich.
But, of course, a lot of people, especially with power, wanted to become super-rich, or at least richer and getting rid of the rules that were meant to stop that was a no-brainer. Enough middle class people were convinced to go along, and enough racists also joined in (Reagan and Nixon ran heavily on racism.) So a coalition was created which destroyed what had come before.
This started before Reagan, as someone will chime in to tell us, but Reagan was the formalization, the big break.
It happened because people wanted unearned wealth, and because the old system had broken (oil spikes, end of Bretton Woods, end of gold money, staglfation, and no one knew how to fix it (or no one anyone was willing to listen to) because the architects were all old or dead.)
So when offered “you can get rich or at least affluent without work and stick it to the niggers too” a lot of people took that deal. It wasn’t just the Boomers—Silents and GI were key to it, more key than the Boomers in the early years. It’s just that they’re all dead now so we blame the Boomers. Gen-X was complicit, but were still children when the key changes were made.
Boomers get all the blame, but they didn’t start the fire that burned down the old order, they simply threw fuel on it (Clinton, especially) when they could.
This site is only viable due to reader donations. If you value it and can, please subscribe or donate.
One of the most important things to understand about companies and countries both is the difference between sustainable prosperity and burning down the house.
You’re probably aware that Boeing has serious problems. Those problems have been obviously “on the way” for a long time. When Boeing moved its headquarters from Seattle (where it makes most of its planes) to Chicago, the writing was on the wall.
BUT it was also a good time to buy Boeing stock:
The move to Chicago meant that Boeing’s executives had moved away from the manufacturing floor. It was the sign that Boeing’s culture was no longer “Engineering from top to bottom” but finance driven. And that emphasis on finance, on juicing profits, increasing executive salaries and driving up stock prices (those stock options don’t pay otherwise) had an effect. You can see it in the chart above.
Here’s a more recent chart:
Ouch.
What had happened is that Boeing was forced by the Clinton administration to merge with its competitor McDonnell Douglas in 1997. McDonnell Douglas was an “MBA” firm. Boeing was an engineering firm. The takeover changed Boeing’s culture and leadership, engineering became secondary and for over 20 years, it was good to be a stockholder.
But Boeing’s ability to make and design planes took a huge hit, there were massive quality problems and employees below the executive rank were angry and demoralized. Boeing planes started falling out of the sky. They were unable to make reliable rockets any more and eventually spending all their time on juicing profits blew up in the face.
This is a general law. The same thing happened at General Electric. If you’re old enough you remember GE as an American industrial giant, making everything from turbines to washing machines. It was a technological pioneer. Then Jack Welch took over, started firing 10% of employees every year (the “lowest performers”, supposedly) and turned GE into a finance company. After all, profits from finance are much higher than profits from manufacturing.
Unfortunately, as with American car companies, GE wasn’t really a bank. Its financial profits were still dependent on being a major industrial company, but Welch didn’t believe in manufacturing. And now GE is a shadow of itself. Jack Welch? Well he got rich, he was lionized as one of the great CEOs of the era, and he retired before GE went completely to hell.
GE will never recover, and with it went a big chunk of America’s industrial and technological might.
And it’s unlikely Boeing will really recover. If it wasn’t for China, it would be possible. But China’s building its own civilian airliners now. They’re not caught up yet: they can’t make the jet engines, but they will be able to soon. (They make excellent jet fighters, probably better than the equivalent American planes, as performance in the recent India/Pakistan border incident showed.)
So China’s likely five years out from producing cheaper more reliable planes than Boeing, which is to say, cheaper and more reliable than American jets. The European market is going to turn hard away from Boeing due to Trump’s games and their having Airbus jets as an alternative. So what’s left for Boeing? Geopolitical risk is too high for anyone but Americans to buy their planes, and Chinese jets will cost less. If you don’t want Chinese, buy European.
They screwed up the rocket they were building for NASA, giving the market to SpaceX by default (and perhaps soon other new companies.) American fighter jets are worse than Chinese jets, and even if they’re better than some other alternatives, the market is crashing on them, because with modern software, you can’t use them if the US decides to stop you. They effectively have a kill switch. Given the US has recently threatened both Europe (Greenland) and Canada, who the Hell wants to buy an American jet, when America is the danger?
Buy Russian. Buy Chinese. Buy European. But American? You’d have to be a moron.
Now let’s look at the US economy overall:
The entire US economy is being burned down. Those high profits aren’t a sign of health, they are a sign that excess profits are being taken at the expense of reinvestment in production and tech; of too high cost structures that make producing in America too expensive (because those profits indicate higher prices); of non-competitive markets, and, generally speaking, of burning down companies or the economy, or both, to make unsustainable profits.
The problem is simple enough. China’s now ahead in 89% of techs. Prices for its goods are much lower. Who the Hell is going to buy American goods? Two years ago there was an answer. American allies would, even at higher costs, because they were scared of China and wanted to stay on America’s good side. But now? After America has proved more dangerous than China to Europe and Canada and after Trump’s on-again, off-again tariffs and other insane trade moves?
China’s looking mighty good, and America is the threat.
Oh people will still “invest” in the US, if you want to call it that. If America’s in its final stages of burning down the house to generate high profits, why not? But I suspect that even that is going to drop significantly because the geopolitical and exchange rate risk is just too high. As America declines, the US dollar will as well, and when you adjust for drops in the dollar, those returns aren’t going to look so great to non Americans.
The “Burning Down the House To Generate Heat” metaphor is one for our age. Not just for Boeing or America and its economy, but for humanity and ecosphere.
Welcome to the end of American Empire.
This site is only viable due to reader donations. If you value it and can, please subscribe or donate.
The latest episode is an attempt to suggest Epstein was working for Russia:
Epstein is being described by the Polish PM as a possible Russian spy. If so, it would explain a great deal. All the Epstein “evidence” would actually be kompromat taking in the rich and powerful to serve Kremlin interests. https://t.co/yr9gnQv5mc
— Phillips P. OBrien (@PhillipsPOBrien) February 4, 2026
This is ridiculous. Epstein was close friends with the Israeli Prime Ministers. Ghislaine Maxwell’s father Robert Maxwell might have been Israel’s most important spy. Israel’s fingerprints are all over the Epstein files, and there are almost no significant ties to Russia. There’s one email where Epstein tries to coach Trump on how to deal with Putin, and some trafficking ties, though more to Ukraine than to Russia, but they are dwarfed by Israeli ties.
Elites think we’re morons. But hey, why not? I mean the “Trump is a Russian asset” lie worked (he massively increased sanctions on Russia). They lied over 80% of the time about Corbyn, including ridiculous anti-semitism smears, and it worked. They lied about WMD in Iraq, and Iraq ties to 9/11 and it worked. They lied about mass baby murders by Hamas and it worked. They lied about Gazan hospitals being Hamas bases and it worked.
They’re completely used to a plurality to a majority of the population believing their lies, so why not this time?
Are they right? Can they tell us the moon is made of blue cheese and get us to believe it? Perhaps so.
This is one of the reasons why, when I talk about war crimes tribunals I always include the media, who lied and lied and lied to enable genocide, child killing, rape and war. The media is almost entirely captured, certainly every corporate media outlet is little more than a source of propaganda. Truth only peaks out when one part of the elite disagrees with another part of the elite, but if the elites are united, as they were against Corbyn and are for mass murder of mostly children in Gaza, well, the media salutes and falls in line.
As I have said many times, the only way to fix the West and especially America is wholesale replacements of the elites and all their courtiers. No one with a conscience works at the top levels, because if someone has a conscience they can’t do the job.
They all have to go, and to ensure there’s no repeat, most of them need to be tried for their crimes, have everything they have beyond basic subsistence taken from them (they’re why so many people are homeless) and be thrown into prison.
This is is also a matter of simple self-respect from the rest of us. Enough pretending these people aren’t psychopaths who would kill or impoverish anyone if it would earn them a single bent nickel or, in many cases, even if it wouldn’t, because it’s how they get their rocks off.
It’s them or us, and so far it’s mostly been us.
This site is only viable due to reader donations. If you value it and can, please subscribe or donate.
Chinese and American flags
The period around 1980 was pivotal to the fate of nations. In the West Thatcher and Reagan came to power and finished the destruction of the post-world War II order, setting the West on a new path. This process had been ongoing since 1968, but the form of the new consensus was not clear until Reagan’s victory: financialization, crushing workers, destroying the middle class, asset bubbles and so on.
In 1978 Deng came to power in China and instituted reforms, especially market ones. This coincided with the West, and especially America, wanting to offshore and outsource their industry. This increased profits and impoverished the working and middle class. It financialized the economy: you could have the profits without the production and without dealing with uppity and powerful workers.
Reagan went after unions hard, Thatcher broke the miner’s union, the most powerful in Britain. The Federal Reserve started a long term policy of raising interest rates every time wages rose faster than inflation, meaning that over a period of decades wages rose less than inflation, and thus were reduced in real terms. The BLS moved towards understating inflation systematically, to undercut things like pensions with cost of live adjustments and to help “boil the frog”. Every change in how inflation was measured, for decades, which I am aware of, reduced the measured inflation rate. That doesn’t happen randomly or if your goal is the accurate measure of inflation.
Deng lucked into a geopolitical moment, and knew exactly how to take advantage of it. “Tired of dealing with uppity workers? Hate environmental regulations? Want more profits without the work of production? Move your production to China and we’ll make you rich!”
Deng exactly spotted the West’s weakness and knew how to take advantage of it. He also delivered: offshoring and outsourcing did make the West’s elites, and especially US and British elites filthy rich.
In exchange China got the industry and with the industry came the know-how and the technology. The technological lead always (always) moves to the country with the factory floor, and so it did in this case. It took quite a while for this to become obvious, so people could fool themselves, but the movement was inexorable. The same thing had happened when the industrial base moved from Britain to America (with tons of British financing). It took about 30 years for the tech lead to follow the industrial base. In this case it seems to have been about 20 years from China taking the industrial lead to tech supremacy, but the movement was the same.
American elites, wanting to be rich without real work and to destroy their internal enemies, those pesky workers who wanted a cut, got what they wanted. In exchange they destroyed their empire, because the real basis of the American empire was industry and technology.
The Chinese got what they wanted: China became the world’s leading industrial and technological power and a billion people were lifted out poverty.
The Gods often grant want we desire, if we’re willing to work for it. American elites got their wish. So did the Chinese.
Welcome to the Chinese century.
This site is only viable due to reader donations. If you value it and can, please subscribe or donate.
As sometime contributor DanfromTo points out, Epstein performed “necessary” tasks for the elite: control thru blackmail and the provision of experiences many of them genuinely want to have. Power is allowed to people who can be trusted with it by other members of the elite, who will do what the elites want: whether that be bailing out rich people or committing genocide.
Some people, like Biden, will do these things because they are true believers, but it’s always best to have them collared, in case they have an attack of conscience or just decide that the bread is better butter on another side.
Epstein wasn’t the first pimp to rich people and he won’t be the last. Almost no one who fucked under-age women (or performed worse acts, there are indications of murder and cannibalism in the files) has actually suffered any consequences. There’s no real reason for American elites to stop and Israel, certainly, needs collars on new members of the elite.
So who replaced him?
This site is only viable due to reader donations. If you value it and can, please subscribe or donate.
Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – February 01, 2026
by Tony Wikrent
The Crisis, No. 8 — The empire of exit and the conspiracy against America
Mike Brock, Jan 29, 2026 [Notes From The Circus]
The Director of National Intelligence stood in the parking lot of the Fulton County Elections Hub while FBI agents loaded boxes onto trucks.
Tulsi Gabbard, in a dark blazer, watching men in windbreakers carry cardboard boxes out of a building where American citizens cast their votes five years ago. Hundreds of boxes. Computers. Tabulator tapes. Voter rolls. Seized and loaded.
The Director of National Intelligence has no legitimate role at a domestic law enforcement action. The intelligence community’s remit is foreign threats—the enemies beyond our borders, the spies and saboteurs. An FBI raid on a county election office is a domestic matter, whatever pretext is offered. And yet there she stood.
Senator Mark Warner named the only two possibilities: either Gabbard believes there is a foreign intelligence angle and failed to brief the intelligence committees as required by law, or she is turning the intelligence community into a partisan instrument. There is no third option….
The same week that agents loaded Georgia’s votes onto trucks, the Financial Times reported that Trump administration officials have been holding covert meetings with separatists from Alberta.
Alberta. The province that sits atop the Athabasca oil sands—the third-largest oil reserve on Earth. The province whose eastern border is a thousand miles of prairie, whose western edge rises into the Canadian Rockies, whose people have chafed for decades at Ottawa’s carbon taxes and equalization formulas. Alberta, which has never loved confederation the way Ontario loves it, which has always felt more kinship with Texas than with Quebec.
The Alberta Prosperity Project—a fringe group seeking independence from Canada—has met with State Department officials three times since April. They are now seeking a meeting with Treasury. Their ask: a $500 billion credit facility to bankroll the province if an independence referendum passes.
Five hundred billion dollars. To break apart a NATO ally.
The State Department’s response: “The department regularly meets with civil society types.”
Civil society types. That is what they call people seeking foreign backing to dismember a neighboring democracy….
Tulsi Gabbard Drags U.S. Intelligence into Trump’s Election Fraud Campaign
[Spy Talk, via Naked Capitalism 01-30-2025]
Today Fulton County, Tomorrow???
Joyce Vance, Jan 30, 2026 [Civil Discourse]
[TW: Provides a screen shot of a social media post Trump reposted, promoting the conspiracy belief that Italy was paid by Obama to use military satellites to hack US voting machines in 2020 and literally switch votes from Trump to Biden — all under the direction of the Chinese government.]
GOP Opens Up Its Midterm Elections Playbook in Minnesota
Gabrielle Gurley, January 29, 2026 [The American Prospect]
Last October, Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson announced that the Justice Department wanted state registration data and that federal officials refused to explain why. “Other secretaries of state—both Democrats and Republicans—have asked them that. They won’t tell us,” she said.
Trump officials met group pushing Alberta independence from Canada
Ilya Gridneff and Myles McCormick, Jan 28 2026 [Financial Times]
Monopoly Round-Up: Why ICE Polices in Minnesota, and Not the Corporate Board Room
Matt Stoller January 26, 2026 [BIG]
Law enforcement budgets show we defunded those who police corporate America, while ramping up coercion on working people….
…I want to focus on the raids of the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Minnesota, where the Trump administration sent ICE officers as part of a crackdown. The net effect was controversial killings of several U.S. citizens by ICE in the last month, including one yesterday, along with broad anger among locals.
At almost the same time, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, where global elites meet, billionaire hedge fund manager Ken Griffin remarked on the oppression he felt during the Biden administration during its “regulatory onslaught.” Griffin, worth $50 billion, and bailed out during the great financial crisis, cites the challenge to the Spirit-JetBlue merger as particularly galling.
I was going to write about weird economic statistics, but I think the way we use policing resources is a much more appropriate topic based on this explicit power of state coercion that we’re seeing, contrasted with Griffin’s anger at extremely mild attempts to check corporate power….
This moment is a good one to think about how we allocate law enforcement resources. The immigration raids we see are dramatic, but do not seem to me to be the best way to achieve their stated goal of mass deportations. If the administration truly wanted to deport undocumented workers, they would crack down on the companies, like meatpackers and large farms, who hire them. But doing so would require policing of corporations and employers, which the GOP generally seeks to avoid. These large made-for-TV cracking of heads strike me as a brutal communications strategy.
And that’s true for a lot of the choices we’ve been making in policing for decades. Indeed, the era of rising corporate power from the 1980s onward was characterized by a broad defunding of the police who investigate and regulate the behavior of political and economic elites. At the same time, we have increased policing resources to impose order, if not actual policing of bad behavior, on working people. In essence, there is now a zone of elite impunity for the Jeff Epstein class, but poorer Americans are increasingly subject to a host of restrictions and state violence….
Let’s contrast the $175 billion pot of money with that of the Federal Trade Commission and the Antitrust Division, the ‘white collar policing’ of the entire corporate world in our $30 trillion economy for monopolization and consumer abuse. In 2026, the FTC will get $383 million, and the Antitrust Division budget will receive $250 million. There are about as many people at the FTC as there are guards for the Smithsonian museum complex. We have a few dozen, at most, looking at health care, a $5 trillion sector. In other words, the Federal agencies looking at all of corporate America have just 0.5% of the resources that DHS got in additional money solely to deport people. And this puny under-funded group is what Griffin was complaining about as tyranny….
The Staircase of Oppression — Watch the boot ascend.
Hamilton Nolan, Jan 28, 2026 [How Things Work]
…The first step is the scapegoating and persecution of the most vulnerable. We are already there…..
The determination to crush this resistance fuels the next step up the staircase. In America, the government has not fully taken this next step, but it is clear that many in the administration would like to. Opposition has been formally classified as domestic terrorism. Government databases of protesters are being built. The FBI has opened an investigation into the Signal chats that activists use to follow ICE agents. All of these things are flirtations with criminalizing activism.
If this step is taken in earnest, you can expect to see arrests and prosecutions of protest organizers and activist leaders; aggressive mass arrests of street protesters; and even more outright violence used by police to crush protest actions. Activists will be treated as criminals and targeted and sent to jail. The circle of government oppression, which started out by including immigrants and minorities, will be expanded to include regular people who take action to stop that oppression. The criminalization of protest—justified by the argument that impeding law enforcement is itself a serious crime—gets us much closer to real authoritarianism….
Now, imagine peeking down at all of this chaos from the next step up the staircase. That is the step where the powerful people and institutions reside: Elected officials, businesses, very wealthy people, established legal and cultural organizations, and so on. This is the group that collectively held much of the political, economic, and social power before Trump’s race to authoritarianism began. As they watch the brutal oppression of immigrants and minorities play out, and they watch the subsequent protests play out, and they watch the government deciding if it can disregard the Constitution in order to crush that dissent, this already-powerful group must make a choice. Their choice is to either use their power to stop what the government is doing, or try to keep their heads down and protect their own little kingdoms and hope that all of this madness won’t affect them too much.
I expect little courage from the already-powerful, and, in aggregate, they have so far justified this expectation….
…The final step up the staircase is almost trivial. The government need only say: Have you funded the opposition? Then you too are a criminal. Have you used your media outlet to support the opposition? Then you too are a criminal. Has your business made statements in support of the opposition? Then you too are a criminal. Have you made a movie sympathetic to the opposition, or spoken out in an interview? Then you too are a criminal.
Have you, a politician of the opposing party, taken actions that can be interpreted by us as impeding the ability of the government to carry out its vital law enforcement actions? Then you too are a criminal….
What I am saying is that the collective instinct of the powerful to protect themselves ends up having the opposite effect. They refuse to throw their own power behind the opposition to government oppression, and thereby prevent the opposition from being as powerful as it could be, and thereby allow the boot of authoritarianism to step smoothly up the staircase, right to where they are. It would have been wiser for them to do everything in their considerable power to hold the line, to fight back, to fund the activists on the front line, to speak out firmly, to take strong legal and political action against the oppression, to refuse to do anything at all to help the government do its work….