by Tony Wikrent
Strategic Political Economy
John Kiriakou: The Slide Into Authoritarianism
John Kiriakou [Consortium News, via Naked Capitalism 08-28-2024]
The Social Recession Is Accelerating
Charles Hugh Smith [via Naked Capitalism 08-25-2024]
A reader asked about the term social recession which he’d noted in my book Get a Job, Build a Real Career and Defy a Bewildering Economy. Here is the paragraph:
“Stagnation in opportunities to work and earn (i.e. a financial recession) leads to social recession, a loss of opportunities for adulthood: a rewarding career, family, and a home of one’s own. In a social recession, unemployed young people may be mired in adolescent narcissism, eschewing ambitions not just in work but in romance and marriage.”….In the purely financial / economic terms of growth of GDP, household income, corporate profits and the value of assets, the US has only been in an economic recession for a few months in 2008-09 and at the start of the pandemic lockdown. But when measured by the ability of just about anyone willing to work hard and practice basic frugality to buy a house and start a family, the US has been in a social recession since 2009. Demographics / economics analyst Chris H., who tweets as
CH @economica, recently posted charts which reflect this social recession, most strikingly in the collapse of the US birthrate that started in 2009. He asked: “The largest childbearing population in US history has gone on strike…maybe we should know why?”….
The social recession began as a direct result of policy responses to the Global Financial Meltdown in 2008-09, policies that favored capital and those who already owned assets, at the expense of everyone who did not inherit wealth/assets or was too young to buy assets such as houses when they were still affordable to average workers….
As I often note, average wages have stagnated for the past 45 years. This stagnation was tolerable as long as the cost of a house, childcare and healthcare insurance remained somewhat affordable to average workers, but once the engines of financialization transformed the US economy into a Bubble Economy of soaring real estate / stock valuations that then inevitably crash, triggering an even larger bailout / stimulus response that inflates an even greater bubble, the costs of home ownership, childcare and healthcare soared out of reach of all but the top 20%….
Did wages rise 10-fold to match the 10-fold rise in the cost of a modest house? No. That is social recession in a nutshell. When this fact is raised in conversation, those in the top 10% protest, but their protest rings hollow, for what they’re really saying is: since I’m doing great and all my friends are doing great, everyone’s doing great. There’s a word for this: denial. Denial cannot solve problems, it can only make them worse.
Heather Cox Richardson, August 28, 2024 [Letters from an American]
…on August 15, when Trump talked at reporters for more than an hour at his Bedminster property… he said …: “All we have to do is define our opponent as being a communist or a socialist or somebody that’s going to destroy our country.”
Trump uses “Marxist,” “communist,” and “socialist” interchangeably, and when he and his allies accuse Democrats of being one of those things, they are not talking about an economic system in which the people, represented by the government, take control of the means of production. They are using a peculiarly American adaptation of the term “socialist.”
….What Republicans mean by “socialism” in America is a product of the years immediately after the Civil War, when African American men first got the right to vote. Eager to join the economic system from which they had previously been excluded, these men voted for leaders who promised to rebuild the South, provide schools and hospitals (as well as prosthetics for veterans, a vital need in the post-war U.S.), and develop the economy with railroads to provide an equal opportunity for all men to rise to prosperity.
Former Confederates loathed the idea of Black men voting almost as much as they hated the idea of equal rights. They insisted that the public programs poorer voters wanted were simply a redistribution of wealth from prosperous white men to undeserving Black Americans who wanted a handout, although white people would also benefit from such programs. Improvements could be paid for only with tax levies, and white men were the only ones with property in the Reconstruction South. Thus, public investments in roads and schools and hospitals would redistribute wealth from propertied men to poor people, from white men to Black people. It was, opponents said, “socialism.” Poor black voters were instituting, one popular magazine wrote, “Socialism in South Carolina” and should be kept from the polls.
This idea that it was dangerous for working people to participate in government caught on in the North as immigrants moved into growing cities to work in the developing factories….
Any attempt to regulate business would impinge on a man’s liberty, wealthy men argued, and it would cost tax dollars to hire inspectors. Thus, they said, it was a redistribution of wealth. Long before the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia brought the fears of a workers’ government to life, Americans argued that their economy was under siege by socialists….
The powerful formula linking racism to the idea of an active government and arguing that a government that promotes infrastructure, provides a basic social safety net, and regulates business is socialism has shaped American history since Reconstruction. In the modern era the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision of 1954 enabled wealthy men to convince voters that their tax dollars were being taken from them to promote the interests of Black Americans. President Ronald Reagan made that formula central to the Republican Party, and it has lived there ever since, as Republicans call any policy designed to help ordinary Americans “socialism.”
Global power shift
Patrick Lawrence: “The End of Days”
[Scheerpost , via Naked Capitalism 08-27-2024]
…Three-quarters of the French stood with Chirac, whose refusal to enlist France in Operation Iraqi Freedom strained Franco–American relations for several years. Remember “freedom fries” and the French as “cheese-eating surrender monkeys?” This was the level to which Bush II brought American discourse as he manipulated public opinion prior to the invasion. Good guys, bad guys. Black hats, white hats.
There is one detail of the U.S.–French confrontation over Iraq that remains very little known. Just before the 20 March 2003 invasion, Bush II called Chirac in a late-hour attempt to persuade him to change his mind. The exchange was very heated. Bush II made a vigorous argument that with the events of 11 September the prophesied war of Gog and Magog had at last begun. I can only imagine what went through the worldly Chirac’s mind, or indeed the look on his face, as Bush II discoursed in this manner.
I know of only one account of this conversation. It is in The Irony of American Destiny: The Tragedy of American Foreign Policy (Walker & Co., 2010), a book William Pfaff published late in his life. The book sits at the end of Pfaff’s long and principled career as a sort of summation. It is rightly read as his causes-and-consequences critique of American exceptionalism. And it includes, inter alia, a description of the Bush–Chirac exchange. He got it, if I recall correctly what he told me later, from a high source in the French Foreign Ministry.
Durov’s Russian, and an interesting guy.
Eleven percent of Americans use insulin to survive. They are dead within three months of the power going out.
Between 17 and 20% of Americans need weekly if not daily mental health medication. They are all either dead or reduced to needing constant care within three to six months. (Ian-probably an overstatement, many will be functional once they come off, but a non-tapered withdrawal from most ant-depressants or GABA drugs is ugly.)
Altogether, some 66% of Americans take some kind of life-saving or life-supporting medication daily. Let’s say that at least half of those are dead within one year of the lights going out. That’s 33% of the population.
During the Rwandan Genocide, about 75% of the Tutsi population was killed in merely 100 days. Like Rwanda and unlike Bosnia, there will be no one trying to stop it, no outside forces intervening. Imagine the Pseudo-Christian White Nationalists killing 75% of the “undesirables” they can get their hands on. Imagine many more of those American “undesirables” being able to fight back as they are being genocided (the Tutsis died en masse, not generally have the resources to fight back). It will quickly become tit-for-tat, with no mercy on either side, as the “undesirables” will no longer grant any mercy once they figure out what the Pseudo-Christian White Nationalists plan for them. So that’s about 75% of 40% of the remaining population.
Then there will further be a much more massive death all around due to the lack of medical supplies and services. Add in pestilence and plague, and that increases the number.
And about a year in, the survivors will have used up remaining food stocks. If they have been unable to start farming, on a traditional MINIMAL level of about 5 to 10 farmers per 1 non-farmer, there will be starvation.
So…
345,000,000 Americans to start…
less 33% or 113,850,000 from medical issues = 231,150,000
less 75% of 40% (69,345,000) from Genocide = 161,805,000
less ~10% from plague and pestilence (16,180,500) = 145,624,500
And less ~20% due to starvation (29,124,900) = 116,499,600.
My estimate is that there will be only about 116,000,000 Americans left within two years of the collapse and the start of ACWII. That’s a 66% death rate within two years. That’s a minimum, with my being generous on all the numbers.
Estimates based on an EMP attack that takes down the entire USA power grid have been a 90% death rate in merely one year. So I’m actually looking at things with rose-colored glasses…