Written by Egberto Willies and published in Medium.com on January 7, 2022
Joe Biden did something many have been waiting for him to do for a long time. Biden first acknowledged his darn good economy and played it up.
“One leading economic analyst describes what we’ve accomplished in 2021 as the strongest first-year economic track record of any president in the last 50 years,” Biden said. “Today America is the only leading economy in the world where the economy as a whole is stronger than before the pandemic now.”
The President then neutralizes a Republican talking point about inflation.
“I hear Republicans say today that my talking about this strong record shows that I don’t understand a lot of people are still suffering,” Biden said. “They say that I’m not focused on inflation. Malarkey!”
I wish the President would have said then that the greed of the capitalist corporations is taking advantage of their pricing power. After all, there are no real shortages of most items. Moreover, the supply chain problem is a screwup of the private sector partially reliant on just-in-time inventory (JITI). Instead, the President said later that capitalism without competition is not capitalism. I beg to disagree. According to Milton Friedman, the sole purpose of executives are to maximize profits for the shareholders. Destroying competition is one of its tools. Free enterprise should be what America strives for going forward. But that debate is beyond the scope of this post.
Joe Biden then slaps back at Republicans. He puts them on the defensive.
“They want to talk down the recovery because they voted against the legislation that made it happen,” Biden said. They voted against the tax cuts for middle-class families. They voted against the funds we needed to reopen our schools, to keep police officers and firefighters on the job. Lower health care premiums. They voted against the funds we’re now using to buy COVID booster shots, more anti-viral pills.”
Biden then detailed his way forward.
“I refuse to let them stand in the way of this recovery, and now my focus is on keeping this recovery strong and durable notwithstanding Republican obstructionism,” Biden said.
Every Democrat and Progressive should lean into the economy. Highlight how great it has recovered. Then point out that had they followed Republican policies, the financial support given to the poor, middle-class, and small businesses would not have occurred. After all, the Republican vote proved it. The economy would have tanked.
Written by Umair Haque and published in Medium.com 2/21/2022
You and I woke up to a terrifying new world today. War in Europe is now all but a reality again, after a lifetime of peace. War by a major military power, seemingly bent on Nazi style dominance and aggression.
That was only the second relevant fact of the day. The first?
Our governments have basically given up on Covid — to the desperate pleas of doctors and scientists, all of whom know that doing so will only prolong the pandemic, and make it much worse. We are as little as nine letters of DNA away from a truly terrible variant — one that makes Delta look like a walk in the park. That’s what science knows — not politics says.
What is really going on here? If you feel that all this is deeply frightening, chilling, that’s because it is. You are probably, like most of us, consumed with dread, which is the “freeze” part of the trauma response. That’s psychology. But the more urgent question is about our world.
So what happens from here?
In every great collapse, there are roughly three stages. We might call them something like neglect, decadence, and implosion. Sure, I’m oversimplifying — but all models do that. We are just trying to explain the present and predict the future a little bit, its general contours, its shape and weight.
Where we’ve been is cycling through the first two stages of collapse, neglect and decadence. And now we are approaching the event horizon of implosion. That is the last and final stage of collapse.
What happens in the “implosion” stage of collapse? Things spin out of control. They reach a point where they can no longer be managed. The conventional systems and orthodoxies and paradigms stop working. Tipping points are hit, and dynamics accelerate into implosive trajectories, which, by and large, become unstoppable.
Does it feel like the world is spinning out of control right about now? That is because we are at the edge of the “implosion” stage of collapse. We are dancing right at its verge. That is the point at which control is well and truly lost, and then things really go to hell.
I know that sounds dire. Please take a moment to hear me. I don’t tell you these things because I want to “doomsay,” which I’m often accused of. My motivations are always under question and attack. Do you know why that is? Because they hard to understand under our capitalist system and its values. I warn you because I genuinely care about you. That’s baffling to most because in our system, it’s not supposed to happen. People are supposed to do what’s profitable, not what’s right. Listen. I walked away from a lucrative career being a typical pundit because I couldn’t bear it. The good matters to me. I never want any being — you, a little animal, anyone — to suffer. I warn you because I care. That is totally incomprehensible to pundits, within the capitalist system, and that is why they constantly attack me with ad hominems.
I digress because I really want you to understand my motivations at this point in our relationship. I value our trust and community a very, very great deal. It is a wonderful and beautiful thing to experience every day.
We have built a community here that is pure of heart and rich in caring, intellect, wisdom, truth, goodness. But in that way, it is completely different from the corrupt and malicious world which surrounds us.
That world is now spinning out of control. And that loss of control is the hallmark of the “implosion” stage of collapse.
Let’s do a couple of examples to bring this little framework — three stages of collapse — home. Think of the canonical example, Rome. My little framework is very much along the lines of Toynbee, the great scholar of Roman collapse. Rome fell through, first, neglect. Its great public goods were underinvested in — whether aqueducts or fountains or squares and temples. People grew poor as a result. And finally, democracy collapsed. Caesar crossed the Rubicon, and took over, in a desperate, misguided attempt to become Rome’s saviour — and tyrant. He failed — thanks to Brutus and the Senate. But then nobody saved Rome — and the negligence only continued. Augustus became its first emperor, as democracy waned.
So then, because the negligence never ended, came the period of decadence. A hundred short years after Caesar crossed the Rubicon, Caligula was emperor. And his corruption, his orgies, his horse in the Senate — all these have become the stuff of legend. Fifteen year later came Nero, and his fiddle.
Negligence bred decadence. Instead of deciding to address the negligence which was bringing Rome to the point of ruin — leaving people impoverished, desperate, the empire crumbling at the edges — inequality had now spiralled to the point where Rome’s elites simply stopped caring at all. They preferred their orgies and wine and villas to trying to restore order and justice and prosperity. Who cared if their civilization was crumbling? Surely it would last another millennium or five anyways.
And decadence bred, at last, implosion. The empire flew apart. Its enemies marched and attacked it. Cults grew. The average person lost faith in it. Its once proud democracy was now a distant memory. Its armies could not keep the peace, or even secure its borders. Bang. A century after Nero came Commodus — the witless fool under whom Roman implosion has become the stuff of legend.
Why am I going through this retelling of history with you? Imagine life at each of these three stages. In the period of neglect, life wasn’t too bad. Sure, maybe your local aqueduct didn’t work very well, or your town square was in need of maintenance. But society’s basic systems — security, food, water, medicine, democracy — they all still worked.
Nobody much, in that era, would have predicted the ugliness and sordid humiliation of what was to come just a few short decades later, under Caligula and Nero. That Caligula would try to put his horse in the Senate, to drive the point home that Roman democracy was a joke. That basic systems like democracy, food, water, security, medicine would all have begun to break down. That Rome itself would burn, while its emperor fiddled. Life in that age? The age of decadence? It was brutal and desperate and ugly, for the average person. It was beginning to become a desperate battle for self-preservation and survival, while elites mostly laughed and partied and ate fine desserts.
But even then, few could have predicted what was to come next. The age of implosion. What was life like then? Society as Romans once knew it had basically stopped existing. The most basic guarantees — rights, security, stability, systems for food and water and money, had simply stopped working. You didn’t know when your village might be invaded, when life might simply fall apart into shattering violence and brutality and irrevocable ruin.
Life at each of these stages got worse — in special ways. Dramatically worse. Worse in ways that the last stage didn’t predict, and largely laughed at the warning of. And so much worse, by the end of it, that everything was out of control. By Commodus’s era, Rome could not manage its problems. Its mechanisms of order didn’t work anymore. It couldn’t impose control. Its armies were shattered. Its fields were barren. Its great waterways were crumbling ruins. And so on. Everything had spun out of control.
Now. Maybe you begin to see where we really are as a world. We have gone way, way past the age of neglect. Past the age of decadence. Now we are at the edge of the age of implosion.
Let me walk you — quickly — through how each of those stages played out for us. The age of neglect for us? We had a chance, my friends. We could have spent the surplus of our civilization doing things that genuinely expanded the human good. Like educating every single child on the planet, and giving every adult a thorough education, too — inoculating ourselves against fascism. Like giving every life on the planet healthcare — preventing today’s pandemics. Like creating a democracy that genuinely worked for the globe — not just ones that were still contested by fanatics globally — a democracy that let the world’s once abundant resources be shared fairly, and thus used wisely. Such a democracy would have prevented the economies of the richest nations, like America, from being based solely on overconsumption.
We had a century or more to do that. But we didn’t do that. And so we entered the age of decadence. That age was when the entire global economy’s point was to supply goods and services for Americans to overconsume. Our consumption ratio as a civilization is far, far too high: 80% of our economy is consumption. Any farmer can tell you: you can’t reap 80% and only plant 20% and hope to have a harvest for very long. But the entire global economy was predicated on this. China and India became labour centers which basically supplied Americans with huge cars and cheap steel and pointless gadgets and so on. Walmart and Amazon became the way station of this economy.
This age of decadence is best exemplified by the American McMansion. By the 90s, American culture had become a quest for a certain kind of life — a McMansion and a fleet of huge cars, in some giant suburb, at the end of some giant highway. Who really needed to live like this? If everyone in America was going to live like a king — then the truth was that it was costing the planet. Democracy. Life on it.
Instead of investing those resources in educating the planet or giving it healthcare or rights or freedoms…the entire point of global political economy became to let Americans live the lifestyles of mindless ultra-consumption. The very ones for which they became scorned and mocked around the globe as selfish, thoughtless idiots. Could any civilization like this really last? Americans numbered 300 million people or so — and the resources of an entire planet, from its raw materials to its labour, were basically pressed into service so they could live like kings.
Decadence. In Rome, in any civilization, the age of decadence is about a kind of corrosive inequality. How was it fair that if you were in 90% of the world, you’d be consigned to a life of poverty and poor education and illness…while America took all the world’s gains and goods, in a way that was about excess, greed, selfishness, narcissism?
The opposite of decadence is intellect, goodness, truth, justice, equality. We didn’t build a world like that. We built one where Americans could live flashy lifestyles of complete and utter excess — huge houses, multiples of huge cars, multiple air conditioners, huge debts — while the entire rest of the world was neglected. And so, ultimately, was America itself.
The next stage of decadence was American elites growing rich while its own working and middle class fell into penury. Remember how Roman elites partied and were fed grapes and had orgies while their citizens fell into poverty, unable to find work, feed themselves, educate their kids? That was more or less exactly what was happening in America. Go to Manhattan or DC or San Francisco, and you’d see huge, huge mansions or penthouses in the sky rising — by the hundreds. But go to any town or smaller city, and you’d see devastation, poverty, drug addiction, despair, and blight. Decadence had spread from America versus the world, to American elites versus their own average citizens.
And now we are at the stage of implosion. Things are spinning out of control. Precisely because we underinvested for so long. We didn’t give every life on earth healthcare — from poor people to animals — and so we are getting pandemics. And because our leaders cannot find a way to manage them, we are simply giving up. War is breaking out in Europe again, as demagoguery rises — the very same demagogue starting that war is the one who destabilised America, too. Not a coincidence. Decadence. Neglect. Breeding implosion.
I could go on with plenty of examples. We’ve barely bothered to do anything about climate change — and within a decade now, swathes of the planet will be uninhabitable. The consequences will make Covid’s lockdown look like cakewalks. People won’t have homes to be locked down in. Economies will have to bear the immense costs of cities sinking, regions burning, provinces turning into Fire or Flood Belts, refugees fleeing, businesses closing for good, harvests failing.
That’s not even the big one. Then comes mass extinction — life on this planet beginning to die off at the species level. It is happening now, but we will feel it when one species critical to a certain chain is gone — and bang, that chain suddenly stops working. There goes our food. Water. Medicine. There go our oceans, rivers, forests, fields. The world as we know it no longer exists then. Remember not being able to get stuff on the shelves when Covid hit? Now imagine that, but permanent. That is the future we’re heading into.
I need to warn you about this. And you need to plan for it. I don’t mean that you should turn into Glenn from the Yukon on that one survival show I like to watch. Run for the hills! You can if you want, but the truth is that isn’t going to work for most of us. We need to exist in collectives and communities — not just as rugged individuals.
You need to begin thinking all this through now. How will I survive the age of implosion? How will I educate my kids? Where will my income come from? Where will I put my savings? Do I have a way to feed my family, if things fail for a time? I even mean simple things like wearing masks, because yes, they work, even cloth ones, and a worse variant is coming. Or simpler things, too, like saving more and spending less, because lean times are coming.
I can’t tell you what your plan should be. But I can tell you that you are going to need one, now. It could involved leaving a failing state — like moving out of America, if you have the resources. That is a very wise thing to do. It could mean thinking of a new career altogether. It could mean retiring, and building a more independent life in a working country, even if your kids don’t understand why yet. Or it could mean listening to your kids, who are often far more attuned to all this than we adults are, and asking them for their answers.
We are going to have to make these plans. And share them. So that we become communities and collectives. It only works that way. Yes, you can survive in a shack by yourself with a gun and knife — not a problem. But we are talking about something bigger. Not just surviving, but retaining some aspect of civilization. Surviving with goodness, grace, truth, nobility. With art and science and literature and culture and society intact. We cannot do that as individuals.
So we need to, in my opinion, begin making plans and sharing them. This is how I’m going to deal with implosion. This is how I’m going to. Oh, that’s a great idea. I didn’t think of that before! Thank you. May I join you? Sure you can — let’s join hands and do it together. You bring the art, I’ll bring the science. We are stronger together.
Our future, my friends, is in community. Communities which let civilisation survive a dark age. We need to start building them now. It’s not going to be easy, and I don’t have a magic wand. We just have something even stronger. Each other.
Joe Biden’s approval ratings may have slipped, but that doesn’t mean voters are nostalgic for Donald Trump.
Written by Susan Milligan and published in U.S. News and World Report on 2/11/2022.
“No nostalgia for the Trump years is a good way of putting it,” says Charles Franklin, director of the Marquette Law School Poll. While some Democrats have been unhappy with President Joe Biden of late, “what those Democrats haven’t done is decided they voted for the wrong guy,” Franklin says.
A January Marquette poll,in fact, found that Biden would best Trump, 53% to 43%, in a hypothetical 2024 rematch,
And among Republicans who are not part of the hard-core Trump base, the former president is losing his sway, analysts say.
“He doesn’t get to speak ex cathedra anymore, where everyone just drops to their knees and believes in him,” says Mac Stipanovich, a veteran former GOP consultant who now considers himself an independent. “He gets booed by his audience. [Florida Republican Gov. Ron] DeSantis did everything but moon him, and he’s going to get away with it.”
In recent weeks, high-profile Republicans have taken on Trump, unusual behavior from party members who once feared the wrath of a Republican president who prized personal loyalty to him and punished those who didn’t provide it.
In the most startling example, Trump’s former vice president, Mike Pence, told a conservative group that “Trump is wrong” when he said Pence could overturn the results of the 2020 election by refusing to accept the states’ electoral slates. Former Trump ally Chris Christie – a potential 2024 presidential candidate – went further.
“Let’s face it. Let’s call it what it is. Jan. 6 was a riot that was incited by Donald Trump in an effort to intimidate Mike Pence and the Congress into doing exactly what he said in his own words last week: Overturn the election,” Christie said on ABC’s “This Week.”
DeSantis has openly tangled with Trump, criticizing the former president’s handling of the pandemic after Trump called politicians like him “gutless” for refusing to say whether they’d had a vaccine booster shot. DeSantis, notably, has not pledged to stay out of the 2024 presidential race should Trump decide to run again.
“(Trump) doesn’t get to speak ex cathedra anymore, where everyone just drops to their knees and believes in him.”
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell this week slammed the RNC for censuring GOP Rep. Liz Cheney of Wisconsin and Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois. The Kentucky Republican called the Jan. 6 episode a “violent insurrection” meant to erase a “legitimately certified election” – language that Trump derides.
Reports on politicians’ popularity have focused on the dismal ratings for President Joe Biden, whose approval numbers are in the low 40s, worsening an already-challenging midterm election year for Democrats.
But Trump isn’t doing any better, surveys show. An Economist/YouGov pollreleased this week found that Trump had a favorable rating of 40% and an unfavorable rating of 55%. A large portion – 45% – described themselves as “very unfavorable” toward the former president.
That survey also showed marked slippage among groups Trump carried easily in 2020 and would need to shore up a run in 2024. Among voters 45-64 years old – a group exit polls show the former president won, 50% to 49% in 2020 – 57% see the president unfavorably, with 39% viewing him favorably. Among 65-plus voters – a group Trump won, 52% to Biden’s 47% in 2020 – more than half (54%) view Trump unfavorably, with 44% seeing the former president favorably. A Morning Consult poll this week found that 60% of voters 65 and older have an unfavorable view of Trump, with 40% having a favorable view.
White male voters without a college degree overwhelmingly supported Trump in 2020, with exit polls showing the Republicans taking that voter group by a 70% to 28% margin. But YouGov’s poll found that half of that group see Trump in a favorable light now, with 46% of them disapproving of Trump.
Further, rank-and-file Republicans are moving away from a more direct identification with Trump himself. An NBC poll found that 56% of GOPers describe themselves as supporters of the Republican Party, with 36% saying they are supporters of Trump.That’s a reversal from late 2020, when 54% described themselves as supporters of Trump and 38% supporters of the GOP.
White evangelicals, for example, weren’t wild about the thrice-divorced casino owner when he was first running in 2015, Jones said. But once Trump won the nomination, “They really decided to like him more. What changed was that his status in the party changed. They adjusted their opinion accordingly, (saying) he’s our guy.”
Biden, also struggling in public opinion polls, must help his party hang onto congressional seats this fall, when Democrats are widely expected to lose seats in the House – and quite possibly, their majority there – and face a tough task in keeping their slight advantage in the U.S. Senate.
Hosting an unpopular president is generally not considered a wise campaign strategy. But the NBC poll found that Trump’s backing is no more of an advantage – and may be less of one – than Biden’s.
That survey found that 18% of voters are more likely to back a Biden-endorsed candidate compared to 21% of voters who say they are more likely to cast a ballot for a Trump-endorsed contender. Meanwhile, 36% said they are less likely to back a Biden-endorsed candidate, and 42% of voters would reject a Trump-endorsed candidate. Forty-five percent said a Biden endorsement wouldn’t matter, and 36% said a Trump endorsement wouldn’t matter.
While Trump was credited – or blamed – for primary losses of GOP candidates who crossed him while he was president, early numbers indicate he might not be as impactful now. Trump has endorsed former Sen. David Perdue in the Georgia GOP gubernatorial primary, but incumbent Gov. Brian Kemp – who told state lawmakers they could not overturn the Peach State’s election, as Trump desired – leads Perdue, 43% to 36%, in a recent Quinnipiac University poll.
Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, one of seven Republicans who voted to convict Trump, ended 2020 with more than six times the cash on hand as her Trump-endorsed rival, Kelly Tshibaka.
“I think Trump in some ways – he’s like the big, bad wolf. He huffs and he puffs and he never blows anybody’s house down, really,” former Ohio Gov. John Kasich, a Republican, told CNN on Wednesday.
The final verdict for Trump is likely to come during this midterm election year, experts say.
“If his endorsed candidates just sweep, that strengthens his hand,” Stipanovich says. “If there’s a mixed result in the primaries between Trump-endorsed candidates and the eventual nominee, that will weaken his hand.”
Meanwhile, Trump must fend off the GOP hands slapping him down.
I am my currently publishing a series of posts free on violence and peace on my site, Chats with my Muse. You are welcome to sign up to receive these posts at Chats with my Muse.
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