The pro-labour trade is about the political system correcting the excesses of the economic system. I am not sure the political system is working as I expected, and this fills me with existential dread
Trump did not "lead an invasion into the capital". There was a large crowd that got out of control and it turned into a riot. Nothing was orchestrated or pre-planned, this was spontaneous. There are some in congress that say 200+ federal undercover agents were in the crowd, possibly provoking things. The whole thing was oddly very "thinly policed" with no fences, poor crowd contro, etc.. Especially with the size of the crowd and sensitivity of it. Knowing how large the crowd would be Trump offered the speaker of the house the national guard days before, she turned it down. There were concussion grenades, tear gas, pepper spray, mace, rubber bullets deployed on crowd provoking them before they battled police and went up to the capital. It's almost like the other side "wanted it to happen"?
I find your view of American politics to very typical of foreigners views who don't live in the USA, yet think they know what is going on. You must rely 100% on left wing propaganda BBC and CNN for all your information about the USA? I often get into heated debates when I travel abroad with many folks around the world who have these rediculous views on America & American politics. I don't know where they get them. It's like their only news source is left wing biased globalist BBC. You are treating all the corporate mainstream media anti-Trump propaganda like gospel and believing every word of it.
B.S. Yes, he did lead the jan 6 riot and had been setting the stage for months if you had listened. You're in a right-wing echo chamber. Giuliani calling for "trial by combat"? "stand back and stand by" wtaf. He's a would-be authoritarian. Luckily he's also a moron.
Anyone who cares about the truth can easily debunk these partisan lies and conspiracies. You can have your own opinion, but not your own facts.
trump planned, encouraged and inflamed this "riot" as part of his strategy to steal the election. Why do you think he refused to tell them to stand down for so long? Why do you think he was desperate to get the magnetometers removed? What do you think would have happened if the "proud boys" and their ilk had been able to bring in guns and other weapons instead of being limited to bashing police in the skull with "blue lives matter" flag poles?
trump is a sociopathic narcissist grifter who has completely conned his militantly gullible cultists by telling them whatever lies they most want to hear. You believe him because you *want* to believe him, but at some level you must know you are being lied to and manipulated. Wake up to who trump is and what he is doing, or you will end up helping putin achieve his dream of destroying the USA from within.
As in everything in life, timing is the key. I fear your existential concerns are well described by Howe's 4th Turning concept with the question, when will it arrive, or at least the denouement arrive? Brexit and Trump, and Geert Wilders are symptoms of the ongoing disillusionment that exists for the man on the street. rather than simply focusing on the fact that folks like Gates, or Musk, or Bezos are really rich, I think people are much more disgusted and concerned with the fact that people like Fauci and Biden and Clinton and Obama got rich from their time in government. Gerhard Schroder and Angela Merkel sold Germany down the drain for personal benefit. It is these actions that will bring about the revolution.
as to the age of labor, that will almost certainly be the ultimate outcome, but there could be some difficulty between now and then. in the end, I have agreed with your analysis since I first stumbled on it and think the GLD/TLT trade has much further to run, although it will also see some volatility
Since Marxism is effectively banned in the public psyche in the USA I think the public there lacks the cognitive instruments to realise what’s going on. Which is a large part of the problem
An excellent post, though of course disturbing. I am 77. Over my lifetime, I have never known weaker political leadership in the West. In the U.S., the political system has frozen up. Since the GFC, there has been no one within the system -- Keynes; Roosevelt-- who has been able to understand the system's problems and effect solutions. So, the tendency (ultimately) is to move outside the system. And we are starting to see that.
Trump was not a serious threat to the system. As was evidenced by his first term, he is easily distracted and derailed. Like his businesses, he wasn't going to do much besides stick his brand on an existing product. He let Paul Ryan totally subvert his economic agenda (based on campaign rhetoric) with the budget and he went out and sold it as the greatest budget ever.
Had the ruling class reacted with something along the lines of, give the guy a few wins and he'll fade away, they would have blunted the populist push. Instead, they lost their minds. Then went on to enact extremist alternatives.
Trump tapped into anti-war sentiment? They start a war with Russia and threaten war with China.
Trump tapped into anti-immigration? They throw the border completely wide open, cut welfare benefits for poor Americans and give the cash to the migrants.
Trump tapped into wage angst? They ramp the stock market to enrich themselves and dump the cost of high inflation on the workers.
Jailing political opponents and online censorship went wild too. Then came Jan 6, which apparently had a lot of federal agents as provocateurs. The story of that day isn't the riot, but the reaction. The ruling class is very scared of something. RFK is getting similar treatment as Trump given his threat level. Maybe things are far more fragile then they appear? Or they're really evil? Whatever it is, the cycle theories of Turchin, Strauss & Howe and Socionomics all point to a major culmination and revolutionary event over the next decade, ranging from the current regime consolidating into something very close to becoming like China's CCP to regime dissidents moving towards something more like 1920s America with open markets, closed migration and non-interventionist foreign policy.
Isn't rising inequality a side-effect of increasing overall wealth. The lower bound is always 0 but the upper bound will be ever increasing as overall wealth is growing.
This is such an odd post that showed up in my feed. Income inequality has roughly stayed constant since the early 2010s and wage growth is currently exceeding inflation. The US went deciding pro labor since 2020, first with the stimulus packages, and then with the election of Biden, who has doubled down on industrial policies that use union labor and appointing pro union employees to federal agencies. By almost every metric the US economy is going bananas. Indeed, when polled, 70% of Americans think their personal finances are doing well
The populist backlash, which has been well documented, seem to stem mostly from perceived immigration/racism.
It’s important to have some existential dread, and there are absolutely problems (climate change, Trump) but one should also reflect on why you feel so gloomy. I don’t think anything about todays economy is worse than the 30s, 40s, 60s, 70s or 80s, and we survived then too.
So I grew up in Australia, and have now lived in the UK for 20 years. At all times, the US has been an ally and a security guarantor of both the UK and Australia. One of the great ironies of life, is that US governments have far greater influence outside of the US than they do within.
US policy for the US is influenced by congress and by the judicial system. US international policy is almost solely at the whim of the executive. US business now dominates most of my activities in the UK. Everyday, I pay Amazon, Apple, Visa, Google, Netflix - and all those revenues and profits flow offshore back to the US. To make up for that that UK has high taxes, and has propped up its property market - and yet we will run a 5% fiscal deficit this year.
Now we face a US executive that has decided facing down Russia in Ukraine is not a worthy cause, and needs to be borne by Europeans. Fair enough, but will you allow us to tax US corporates that have done so well in Europe? No
Thats the problem - the US led system works well for the US, but not great for anyone else anymore. A system that extracts profits in a tax remote way, but then asks its allies to bear the cost of protecting that system militarily is not a great deal. Something has to give.
Western Civ is at the tail end of a 500 year arc starting in the late middle ages with discovery of new world & renaissance. China has a cultural system completely different from the west. Mirroring economic models is only one portion of the equation that produces the end product. It is passe to consider non-economic or political causes for societal outcomes... in the West. There is a thread floating around Twitter about Wang Huning's book on America and his criticisms of it... in the early 90s.
The US system didn't start collapsing in the 90s, the institutions that underpin society have been 'failing' for a long time, you can go back to 19th & early 20th century critics and find plenty of prescient observation. The parallel and slightly preceding collapse of the Soviet system created the illusion of capitalist victory or superiority that mask the parallels. Russian society failed in late 19th and early 20th centuries, the and subsequent attempts to engineer an entirely new system (Soviet communism) were unsuccessful. The scientific & industrial revolutions taken to their extreme today have eroded the Judeo-Christian, theocratic and very hierarchical society from which modern western civilization birthed its golden age. If anything, rapid economic growth & technological progress has created the illusion of stability of the capitalist system that arguably never existed. Tinkering with wealth & income distribution may alleviate some symptoms of social tension short term but what is the broad, unifying ethos in the West? Instead you have a fracturing into constituent groups with different visions & values
A nation is a shared cultural project/identity, people need to figure that out before addressing the shortcomings of the present economic system. When you strip out the labels, the functioning of western capitalism and rival models is not fixed. Sometimes they resemble each other, sometimes they adopt ideas from their rivals. China's 1950s economic model is not what it has today, same with the US, and it's not possible to say one model works best in all times and situations.
And yet this covers only small part of the metacrisis. Energy security issues to begin with - I wonder how your views on shale oil have evolved? Linked potential geopolitical amplifications and planetary boundaries almost all being breached. I fear there is much more coming our way interacting with also all the issues discussed above.
As usual, I can only highly recommend Schmachtenberger take on the metacrisis (and Nathan Hagens and to some extent Michael Every also).
Russell, I agree that it's only China (and possibly Russia, due to war related nationalisation and defense wages) that have gone pro-Labour
The US and Japan, amongst others, are still captured by capital interests
However in the case that US institutions collapse and Trump creates a Peronist dictatorship, isn't that the ultimate bull case for Gold and bearish for Treasuries?
What else could possibly outperform in such a scenario? Bitcoin? Oil?
Can you run an analysis on what worked for locals after LatAm coups?
Trump did not "lead an invasion into the capital". There was a large crowd that got out of control and it turned into a riot. Nothing was orchestrated or pre-planned, this was spontaneous. There are some in congress that say 200+ federal undercover agents were in the crowd, possibly provoking things. The whole thing was oddly very "thinly policed" with no fences, poor crowd contro, etc.. Especially with the size of the crowd and sensitivity of it. Knowing how large the crowd would be Trump offered the speaker of the house the national guard days before, she turned it down. There were concussion grenades, tear gas, pepper spray, mace, rubber bullets deployed on crowd provoking them before they battled police and went up to the capital. It's almost like the other side "wanted it to happen"?
I find your view of American politics to very typical of foreigners views who don't live in the USA, yet think they know what is going on. You must rely 100% on left wing propaganda BBC and CNN for all your information about the USA? I often get into heated debates when I travel abroad with many folks around the world who have these rediculous views on America & American politics. I don't know where they get them. It's like their only news source is left wing biased globalist BBC. You are treating all the corporate mainstream media anti-Trump propaganda like gospel and believing every word of it.
B.S. Yes, he did lead the jan 6 riot and had been setting the stage for months if you had listened. You're in a right-wing echo chamber. Giuliani calling for "trial by combat"? "stand back and stand by" wtaf. He's a would-be authoritarian. Luckily he's also a moron.
Anyone who cares about the truth can easily debunk these partisan lies and conspiracies. You can have your own opinion, but not your own facts.
trump planned, encouraged and inflamed this "riot" as part of his strategy to steal the election. Why do you think he refused to tell them to stand down for so long? Why do you think he was desperate to get the magnetometers removed? What do you think would have happened if the "proud boys" and their ilk had been able to bring in guns and other weapons instead of being limited to bashing police in the skull with "blue lives matter" flag poles?
trump is a sociopathic narcissist grifter who has completely conned his militantly gullible cultists by telling them whatever lies they most want to hear. You believe him because you *want* to believe him, but at some level you must know you are being lied to and manipulated. Wake up to who trump is and what he is doing, or you will end up helping putin achieve his dream of destroying the USA from within.
Well that cheered me up, Russell 😐. Tough to disagree with much of it.
As in everything in life, timing is the key. I fear your existential concerns are well described by Howe's 4th Turning concept with the question, when will it arrive, or at least the denouement arrive? Brexit and Trump, and Geert Wilders are symptoms of the ongoing disillusionment that exists for the man on the street. rather than simply focusing on the fact that folks like Gates, or Musk, or Bezos are really rich, I think people are much more disgusted and concerned with the fact that people like Fauci and Biden and Clinton and Obama got rich from their time in government. Gerhard Schroder and Angela Merkel sold Germany down the drain for personal benefit. It is these actions that will bring about the revolution.
as to the age of labor, that will almost certainly be the ultimate outcome, but there could be some difficulty between now and then. in the end, I have agreed with your analysis since I first stumbled on it and think the GLD/TLT trade has much further to run, although it will also see some volatility
Since Marxism is effectively banned in the public psyche in the USA I think the public there lacks the cognitive instruments to realise what’s going on. Which is a large part of the problem
An excellent post, though of course disturbing. I am 77. Over my lifetime, I have never known weaker political leadership in the West. In the U.S., the political system has frozen up. Since the GFC, there has been no one within the system -- Keynes; Roosevelt-- who has been able to understand the system's problems and effect solutions. So, the tendency (ultimately) is to move outside the system. And we are starting to see that.
Trump was not a serious threat to the system. As was evidenced by his first term, he is easily distracted and derailed. Like his businesses, he wasn't going to do much besides stick his brand on an existing product. He let Paul Ryan totally subvert his economic agenda (based on campaign rhetoric) with the budget and he went out and sold it as the greatest budget ever.
Had the ruling class reacted with something along the lines of, give the guy a few wins and he'll fade away, they would have blunted the populist push. Instead, they lost their minds. Then went on to enact extremist alternatives.
Trump tapped into anti-war sentiment? They start a war with Russia and threaten war with China.
Trump tapped into anti-immigration? They throw the border completely wide open, cut welfare benefits for poor Americans and give the cash to the migrants.
Trump tapped into wage angst? They ramp the stock market to enrich themselves and dump the cost of high inflation on the workers.
Jailing political opponents and online censorship went wild too. Then came Jan 6, which apparently had a lot of federal agents as provocateurs. The story of that day isn't the riot, but the reaction. The ruling class is very scared of something. RFK is getting similar treatment as Trump given his threat level. Maybe things are far more fragile then they appear? Or they're really evil? Whatever it is, the cycle theories of Turchin, Strauss & Howe and Socionomics all point to a major culmination and revolutionary event over the next decade, ranging from the current regime consolidating into something very close to becoming like China's CCP to regime dissidents moving towards something more like 1920s America with open markets, closed migration and non-interventionist foreign policy.
Great post!
Isn't rising inequality a side-effect of increasing overall wealth. The lower bound is always 0 but the upper bound will be ever increasing as overall wealth is growing.
I think this definitely used to be the case - but the last decade or so seems to have broken down.
I am definitely upset that tax rates in the UK are high, and Google and Apple pay virtually no tax here
Capitalism is a greed cult
Tends to work though
In the U.S., politicians and technocrats are owned by donors and corporations through a revolving door system.
Trump's election in 2016 was a response to that in hope of pro-labor policy but he failed.
My hope was that he really would "drain the swamp"... In the end he just repopulated it...
This is such an odd post that showed up in my feed. Income inequality has roughly stayed constant since the early 2010s and wage growth is currently exceeding inflation. The US went deciding pro labor since 2020, first with the stimulus packages, and then with the election of Biden, who has doubled down on industrial policies that use union labor and appointing pro union employees to federal agencies. By almost every metric the US economy is going bananas. Indeed, when polled, 70% of Americans think their personal finances are doing well
The populist backlash, which has been well documented, seem to stem mostly from perceived immigration/racism.
It’s important to have some existential dread, and there are absolutely problems (climate change, Trump) but one should also reflect on why you feel so gloomy. I don’t think anything about todays economy is worse than the 30s, 40s, 60s, 70s or 80s, and we survived then too.
So I grew up in Australia, and have now lived in the UK for 20 years. At all times, the US has been an ally and a security guarantor of both the UK and Australia. One of the great ironies of life, is that US governments have far greater influence outside of the US than they do within.
US policy for the US is influenced by congress and by the judicial system. US international policy is almost solely at the whim of the executive. US business now dominates most of my activities in the UK. Everyday, I pay Amazon, Apple, Visa, Google, Netflix - and all those revenues and profits flow offshore back to the US. To make up for that that UK has high taxes, and has propped up its property market - and yet we will run a 5% fiscal deficit this year.
Now we face a US executive that has decided facing down Russia in Ukraine is not a worthy cause, and needs to be borne by Europeans. Fair enough, but will you allow us to tax US corporates that have done so well in Europe? No
Thats the problem - the US led system works well for the US, but not great for anyone else anymore. A system that extracts profits in a tax remote way, but then asks its allies to bear the cost of protecting that system militarily is not a great deal. Something has to give.
Western Civ is at the tail end of a 500 year arc starting in the late middle ages with discovery of new world & renaissance. China has a cultural system completely different from the west. Mirroring economic models is only one portion of the equation that produces the end product. It is passe to consider non-economic or political causes for societal outcomes... in the West. There is a thread floating around Twitter about Wang Huning's book on America and his criticisms of it... in the early 90s.
The US system didn't start collapsing in the 90s, the institutions that underpin society have been 'failing' for a long time, you can go back to 19th & early 20th century critics and find plenty of prescient observation. The parallel and slightly preceding collapse of the Soviet system created the illusion of capitalist victory or superiority that mask the parallels. Russian society failed in late 19th and early 20th centuries, the and subsequent attempts to engineer an entirely new system (Soviet communism) were unsuccessful. The scientific & industrial revolutions taken to their extreme today have eroded the Judeo-Christian, theocratic and very hierarchical society from which modern western civilization birthed its golden age. If anything, rapid economic growth & technological progress has created the illusion of stability of the capitalist system that arguably never existed. Tinkering with wealth & income distribution may alleviate some symptoms of social tension short term but what is the broad, unifying ethos in the West? Instead you have a fracturing into constituent groups with different visions & values
A nation is a shared cultural project/identity, people need to figure that out before addressing the shortcomings of the present economic system. When you strip out the labels, the functioning of western capitalism and rival models is not fixed. Sometimes they resemble each other, sometimes they adopt ideas from their rivals. China's 1950s economic model is not what it has today, same with the US, and it's not possible to say one model works best in all times and situations.
And yet this covers only small part of the metacrisis. Energy security issues to begin with - I wonder how your views on shale oil have evolved? Linked potential geopolitical amplifications and planetary boundaries almost all being breached. I fear there is much more coming our way interacting with also all the issues discussed above.
As usual, I can only highly recommend Schmachtenberger take on the metacrisis (and Nathan Hagens and to some extent Michael Every also).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kBoLVvoqVY
Extremely similar feeling here.
This is why I think crypto is going to boom. You should go read this guys posts. I would be interested in hearing your take on his ideas:
https://goodalexander.com/
Russell, I agree that it's only China (and possibly Russia, due to war related nationalisation and defense wages) that have gone pro-Labour
The US and Japan, amongst others, are still captured by capital interests
However in the case that US institutions collapse and Trump creates a Peronist dictatorship, isn't that the ultimate bull case for Gold and bearish for Treasuries?
What else could possibly outperform in such a scenario? Bitcoin? Oil?
Can you run an analysis on what worked for locals after LatAm coups?
I’m not sure if you’re viewing it through the lens of a European/Australian but I would think things like the IRA are definitely pro labor right?
They should be - which is why I am surprised wages have not kept ahead of food inflation