When I watched the discussion in which you took part recently - you posted it here - (the wonderful Kwame Anthony Appiah was there with you too - btw, when he gave his BBC-Reith-lectures a few years ago I thought his teachings about creed, nationalism and cosmopolitanism should be mandatory in every school!) I was a bit surprised how little intellectual "fight" there was "left" in everyone except for yourself...
But I can understand the dilemma (Anne Marie Slaughter mentioned that it didn't "work" last time, to stop the Trump administration through open argumentative challenges, and of course she said that she would draw the line when it would come to an open attack on the judiciary)
The Dems all seem to want to behave more "rational" than the other side.
The problem seems to be that every possibility of a serious debate goes up in smoke (it is eerie to witness this from here in Europe, a bit like in Orban's Hungary or with the PIS-Party in Poland... But this is the US... It reminds me of Naomi Klein's theses in Doppelganger; she dives into the dark "Bannon-universe"... It has a much more surreal feel to it than the first time around) - any semblance of a neutral acknowledged "authority" seems to be melting away like ice cream in the sun.
I was glad you mentioned Gaza and USAID in the discussion!
It seems to take a lot of stamina for everybody right now - you can sense a creeping exhaustion.
But, as you rightly pointed out: this is only half of the US...
I was already imagining a big strike or a walk-out of half of the US... There are brave protesters out there!
A friend of mine said "but what if a kind of civil war erupts" and I replied "the left will be peaceful and if they go on strike altogether, it will change everything"... surreal ideas...
It is like the horrible Brexit- situation: back then I used to remind my friend in London of the fact that the pendulum could as well easily swing back again one day (and at least there it already did - a bit...)
But of course there is a lot of "human" and "institutional" collateral damage (I hate this cynical military term ever since it had been coined, some twenty years or so, ago) in its wake... And this is just very sad to see. Keep on being insistent and persistent! I admire you passionate scientists and journalists immensely! And I am grateful! It might sound naive and/or corny (I don't mind) but it is heartfelt:
I am glad I can listen to Ones and Tooze (or read yours and my other brilliant substacks here) to know that there are actual human beings, fine people who work hard to help me make sense of this puzzling geopolitical situation. One doesn't feel so alone anymore. This is real. And it is the one great thing about our new media world. Thanks!
Philip Pilkington is an unorthodox macroeconomist.
Andrew Collingwood is an equally skeptical journalist.
Lately, both have realised that - post-Ukraine, post-Afghanistan withdrawal - the old, unipolar, US-led world order is in its death throes.
In its wake, something new is being born. But what shape will that take? That will depend on a combustible combination of economics and geopolitics; trade and military muscle.
Each week, our duo take three off-radar news stories and explain how each is shaping our multipolar reality.
There's one plausible explanation for the randomized damage that Trump is so intent on, so quickly. He doesn't have any choice. He has an inexorable handler who, with blackmail or some more sinister threat, feeds him his lines. He's exhausted but has to keep swinging the wrecking ball. Just as Ruby probably had no choice but to shoot Oswald. We shouldn't read too much into his thinking processes. Still, it's a mystery why so many educated people have followed him. He must have a predator's instinct for the vulnerable and malleable.
It is this that I find so bizarre about the Trump team, they are almost goading the rest of the world into abandoning the US dollar in ignorance of the enormous benefits that they receive from managing the worlds reserve currency.
They must have great faith in the anti-democratic aspects of their project because destroying the dollar will not be good for the average American consumer, so one could imagine this removing a big enough chunk of their voter base to make a difference at the next election having to be offset, from a planning perspective, by a mass disenfranchisement of that section of the electorate.
Thanks for your reply. I am sympathetic to the policy goal of reducing US trade deficit, and probably the US dollar as a reserve currency tends to keep the US dollar too high and force the US to have a persistent trade deficit. The US cannot have both. If they want to reduce their trade deficit, they need to give up the “strong dollar policy”.
But taxing capital inflows is probably not the best method. I seem to remember Warren Buffet suggesting a way to manage the trade deficit. I can’t remember the details of his proposal. It may have involved some kind of implicit tax on capital inflows, but the “tax” would be explicitly tied to some trade deficit target.
The Trump admin's 'naked imperialism' isn't new, it was plain to those outside the US since the turn of the century.
Also, any list of the Trump admin's sponsors should not omit Netanyahu, representing ultranationalist version of the Israeli project. Just as Biden pivoted from Afghanistan to Ukraine, Trump has pivoted from Ukraine to Yemen (and almost certainly Iran to follow).
As the "soft power" (eg USAID sponsored "journalism") versions of domestic propaganda structures of the Obama-Biden era are hardened under Trump (as visible eg with Columbia students), they simultaneously will be put to work to defend - with physical force vs US residents - an openly genocidal project.. Elephant in room.
This toxic combination of veto-holding constituents in the Trump admin aren't here to dismantle US/EU soft power - that already happened under Biden. This round is going to to bury it most completely and permanently. The process is not going to be pleasant at all, but the silver lining is that the elites in the rest of the world will be freed of the obligation to social propriety, that they must pretend to believe UScentric/Eurocentric propaganda.
Only those who don't know what America is (a serial exploiter of lands and peoples) finds Trump's foreign policy surprising. Trump is just the mask slipping from the Empire of Lies ...
Tooze makes a sharp point: Trumpism isn’t merely anti-fact, it’s anti-elite-claimed rationality. The Mar-a-Lago Accord idea underscores this—an economic strategy that horrifies neoliberals, yet has deep intellectual roots. The key question: is this movement sustainable beyond Trump, or is it another iteration of right-wing populism that burns out without institutional grounding?
The problem with Trumpism, for America, is that all the rest of the world becomes a mark for targeting and exploitation (except Israel, of course, for which the whole world, including the USA is a mark). And it is clear to everyone that this goes against the long held policies of cultivating "alliances", policies derived from the realization of the fact that the US cannot do it alone (as much as they made it sound that they can).
After all, it was the Russians that defeated the Nazi Germany, and it was the Russian invasion and destruction of the Manchurian Army in 3 weeks that convince the Japanese Imperial Army to surrender fast to the Americans, not the atomic bombs.
All this holds until they run smackdab into some reality that requires re-engaging with reality. Pandemic in 2020 -- does it have to be nuclear war, bio war, cyber war? Hope not.
Extending the tax cuts (and therefore the budget deficits), will simply flood the world with more dollars. This will increase the trade deficit (and maybe inflation), all else equal. So, the Fed will have to raise interest rates (if Powell dares piss off Trump) or the dollar will weaken all by itself.
The PMC is not monolithic in opposition to Trumpism. It is very diverse. One subset of the PMC is Wall Street and the FIRE sector. I think Schumer backed off fighting the tax cuts because this sector wanted them continued,. Therefore, the financialization and hollowing-out of the USA will continue. What is the solution? Isn't a much weaker dollar a move in the right direction?
And the Advent of AGI which to me seems to be driving so much of this.
If US achieves AGI is 3 or so years and with a 2 year lead on China, then the US has its only chance of staying No 1 in the world.
Any later and China's superior wetware (human talent) will win the race to AGI - it already has won the economic race.
This explains lots. US bullishness in the face of being a declined power already. The rush of the tech giant leaders (Bezos and Zuckerberg - Must was there ahead of them) to sign up to Team Trump. They want to be there when Multi-hundred billionaires become multi-Trillionaires.
If you are not convinced yet, wait till you grade the next round of student essays.
Glad to see you are so critical of the Dems refusal to understand what they screwed up over 4 years.
There is another aspect to all this - Trump and Biden are equally guilty in letting the cat out of the bag as to how dreadful US policies have been for the non European world.
Everyone free of the BBC and CNN can see the evils of Israel.
Likewise the direct support and encouragement of al qaeda / ISIS / HTS terrorists was never so clear to the world (and Tulsi talked about it openly).
The 1 million Ukrainian middle aged men sent to the frontline and died is wholly the result of an outrageously dishonest western media and governments who kept this all quiet.
Irrespective of what Trump does next, the reputation of US (and Europe) has been destroyed in the rest of the world.
re AGI - There is no such chance. The dreamers at the moment dream of a balance of power. But as the energy constraints are removed due to very mid-tech renewable power systems, the potential of large population is unleashed, and you're looking more realistically at China #1, India #2. In the meantime, US has knocked out the EU as a coherent force for a generation at least.
If you have AGI (and it does seem to be approaching in next 3-10 years in at least a modest form) then numbers no longer matter.
What might matter with weak AGI is the number of really high quality / hi IQ people you have to direct it. Then China wins - China has a lot more talented Chinese with IQ over 140 than US (with half the AI workers in US being chinese immigrants)
With strong AGI you don't even need many directors.
I hesitate to predict what will happen with AGI - but have no hesitation in saying that early strong AGI is the best hope for any Americans that want to compete with China for the rest of the century. The choice is simple - MAD; lose a conventional war; accept a junior role in a multi-polar world (cleary the smart solution for a nation without ego issues); fight and pray for early strong AGI.
Seems to me the gang hanging around the Whitehouse are going for the last choice.
In my view, ~10 years is too late for the US, any technological lead will be in the rear view mirror by then. "3 years in a modest form" leaves it to the Republicrat political system to do something with that capability. Are they going to build some kind of robot army and take over the world in that timespan? I don't think so...
Chinese Artificial Intelligence (AI) models have long been a feature of everyday life, and were widely used in China’s industrial and service sectors for many months before news of them reached Wall Street in late January.
yep. Chinese industry well practiced to operationalize tech and do the subsequent scale-up, doing both faster than US.
And the other thing in the near-term is... US capacity to do AI application scale-up depends on TSMC. I.e. made by Chinese people 300 miles off the Chinese coast. Can't very well make a move to lock in "another century of US hegemony" until a US duplicate of TSMC is built out on the other side of the Pacific. I guess they have to try with whatever they got just to avoid falling behind, but I really don't think there's a story here of US maintaining leadership.
The whole point of AGI is that that is the moment when Human capacity is no longer relevant as the bulk of the work can be done by AI.
But I think we agree, AGI is likely to come too late or too weak for US to compete against China. Nevertheless there is no other Win/Lose way for US to win, and they are just not psycologically ready to play the Win/Win games China would be willing to play.
You didn't know how to finish the list and yet found such a beautiful way to do so . . . You're right, this does feel like the high pandemic, except with less hope and much less clear vision for how to find a way out and through . . . I think so often of many of the posts you mention here, and thank you for the additional links to other thought-provoking pieces . . . I appreciate your work and thank you for it . . . I am doing all I can to keep the faith and believe in the capacity of better angels to prevail, and, I think it will be the project of the rest of my lifetime and beyond . . .
RE Point 6: I think the focus on lies and rationality is a red herring here, as Butler's formulation as presented here is messy and contradictory: she can't seem to decide if the enjoyment of Trump's base is based on knowledge (to care if trump is lying i first have to know the 'fact' he is up-ending, which is not an exact, but a close enough formulation to cynicism, which does not describe Trump's traditional base as much as his newer (much smaller) paranoiac alt-right base (think Jimmy Dore)), or more generally psychic enjoyment (the thrill of the rallys, engaging in racisms etc).
Your (Adam) appraisal while lucid, focuses on what i would consider her missteps towards a movement in the right direction in regards to theory.
All i desire is for your point 6 then to be split into two:
6a) what you said
6b) what she said subtracting anything that has to do with knowledge/rationality
Sure, i consider this point of political import, but my true motivation of writing this is the personal satisfaction that statements like this from Butler show that after 30 years she is finally moving away from Derrida and closer to Lacan. Encore!
So what happens if a major creditor like China doesn’t want to convert its Treasuries into some new form of long term U.S. debt? Does the Trump Admin refuse to honor existing Treasuries? I can’t imagine we’d get close to anything like this without the bond markets going insane.
I was for a long time of the opinion that the US will ultimately refuse to pay its debt. After all, why to have such a big and expensive military if you won't use it, eh?!
I mean the “Mar-a-Lago Accords” lay out a plan to turn existing debt into some new “Century Bond.” Unclear how that would actually work but it seems like the whole thing is a threat to Treasury liquidity.
To your point number 7, I would recommend “In The Long Run,” by Jonathan White, who links the proclivity for often irrational action and disdain for the in-place decision-makers with the Italian Fascist movement in the early
decades of the 20th century. Unfettered change and disruption in order to keep moving forward to an unspecified and often changing set of goals, with little thinking about the consequences. The means would always support the undefined ends. There are differences between MAGA and this earlier movement but the similarities stand out. One is no clear ideology other than the exercise of power and the desire for constant institutional change.
Democrats think they have lost voters due to economics. Obamacare and Bidenomics were designed to bring back disaffected working class voters. It did not work. It is culture and lost status that motivates them. Until Democrats and the opposition find an acceptable cultural form of debate they will continue to lose voters. Like it or not, these voters decide elections.
That is why the first priority of Biden should have been the border. Bidenomics and a focus on working class economics not help Jon Tester, Sherrod Brown or Bob Casey.
Due to the constitution of the US, states powers, and demography, the Democrats are doomed to a minority status if they keep thinking voters are voting against their self interest on economics. I live in a deep red state, the Democratic brand is toxic. No amount of economics can outrun the sense that democrats are elitist snobs who want to impose “wokeness”.
When I watched the discussion in which you took part recently - you posted it here - (the wonderful Kwame Anthony Appiah was there with you too - btw, when he gave his BBC-Reith-lectures a few years ago I thought his teachings about creed, nationalism and cosmopolitanism should be mandatory in every school!) I was a bit surprised how little intellectual "fight" there was "left" in everyone except for yourself...
But I can understand the dilemma (Anne Marie Slaughter mentioned that it didn't "work" last time, to stop the Trump administration through open argumentative challenges, and of course she said that she would draw the line when it would come to an open attack on the judiciary)
The Dems all seem to want to behave more "rational" than the other side.
The problem seems to be that every possibility of a serious debate goes up in smoke (it is eerie to witness this from here in Europe, a bit like in Orban's Hungary or with the PIS-Party in Poland... But this is the US... It reminds me of Naomi Klein's theses in Doppelganger; she dives into the dark "Bannon-universe"... It has a much more surreal feel to it than the first time around) - any semblance of a neutral acknowledged "authority" seems to be melting away like ice cream in the sun.
I was glad you mentioned Gaza and USAID in the discussion!
It seems to take a lot of stamina for everybody right now - you can sense a creeping exhaustion.
But, as you rightly pointed out: this is only half of the US...
I was already imagining a big strike or a walk-out of half of the US... There are brave protesters out there!
A friend of mine said "but what if a kind of civil war erupts" and I replied "the left will be peaceful and if they go on strike altogether, it will change everything"... surreal ideas...
It is like the horrible Brexit- situation: back then I used to remind my friend in London of the fact that the pendulum could as well easily swing back again one day (and at least there it already did - a bit...)
But of course there is a lot of "human" and "institutional" collateral damage (I hate this cynical military term ever since it had been coined, some twenty years or so, ago) in its wake... And this is just very sad to see. Keep on being insistent and persistent! I admire you passionate scientists and journalists immensely! And I am grateful! It might sound naive and/or corny (I don't mind) but it is heartfelt:
I am glad I can listen to Ones and Tooze (or read yours and my other brilliant substacks here) to know that there are actual human beings, fine people who work hard to help me make sense of this puzzling geopolitical situation. One doesn't feel so alone anymore. This is real. And it is the one great thing about our new media world. Thanks!
Ones and Tooze has many blindspots.
I would suggest to listen to Multipolarity... https://www.youtube.com/@multipolaritythepodcast
"
Philip Pilkington is an unorthodox macroeconomist.
Andrew Collingwood is an equally skeptical journalist.
Lately, both have realised that - post-Ukraine, post-Afghanistan withdrawal - the old, unipolar, US-led world order is in its death throes.
In its wake, something new is being born. But what shape will that take? That will depend on a combustible combination of economics and geopolitics; trade and military muscle.
Each week, our duo take three off-radar news stories and explain how each is shaping our multipolar reality.
"
There's one plausible explanation for the randomized damage that Trump is so intent on, so quickly. He doesn't have any choice. He has an inexorable handler who, with blackmail or some more sinister threat, feeds him his lines. He's exhausted but has to keep swinging the wrecking ball. Just as Ruby probably had no choice but to shoot Oswald. We shouldn't read too much into his thinking processes. Still, it's a mystery why so many educated people have followed him. He must have a predator's instinct for the vulnerable and malleable.
This is dumb. Please come up with a more interesting conspiracy theory if you are going to chalk it up to a conspiracy.
Would not taxing capital inflows hasten decline of the US dollar as the dominant reserve currency?
It is this that I find so bizarre about the Trump team, they are almost goading the rest of the world into abandoning the US dollar in ignorance of the enormous benefits that they receive from managing the worlds reserve currency.
They must have great faith in the anti-democratic aspects of their project because destroying the dollar will not be good for the average American consumer, so one could imagine this removing a big enough chunk of their voter base to make a difference at the next election having to be offset, from a planning perspective, by a mass disenfranchisement of that section of the electorate.
Thanks for your reply. I am sympathetic to the policy goal of reducing US trade deficit, and probably the US dollar as a reserve currency tends to keep the US dollar too high and force the US to have a persistent trade deficit. The US cannot have both. If they want to reduce their trade deficit, they need to give up the “strong dollar policy”.
But taxing capital inflows is probably not the best method. I seem to remember Warren Buffet suggesting a way to manage the trade deficit. I can’t remember the details of his proposal. It may have involved some kind of implicit tax on capital inflows, but the “tax” would be explicitly tied to some trade deficit target.
The Trump admin's 'naked imperialism' isn't new, it was plain to those outside the US since the turn of the century.
Also, any list of the Trump admin's sponsors should not omit Netanyahu, representing ultranationalist version of the Israeli project. Just as Biden pivoted from Afghanistan to Ukraine, Trump has pivoted from Ukraine to Yemen (and almost certainly Iran to follow).
As the "soft power" (eg USAID sponsored "journalism") versions of domestic propaganda structures of the Obama-Biden era are hardened under Trump (as visible eg with Columbia students), they simultaneously will be put to work to defend - with physical force vs US residents - an openly genocidal project.. Elephant in room.
This toxic combination of veto-holding constituents in the Trump admin aren't here to dismantle US/EU soft power - that already happened under Biden. This round is going to to bury it most completely and permanently. The process is not going to be pleasant at all, but the silver lining is that the elites in the rest of the world will be freed of the obligation to social propriety, that they must pretend to believe UScentric/Eurocentric propaganda.
Only those who don't know what America is (a serial exploiter of lands and peoples) finds Trump's foreign policy surprising. Trump is just the mask slipping from the Empire of Lies ...
Tooze makes a sharp point: Trumpism isn’t merely anti-fact, it’s anti-elite-claimed rationality. The Mar-a-Lago Accord idea underscores this—an economic strategy that horrifies neoliberals, yet has deep intellectual roots. The key question: is this movement sustainable beyond Trump, or is it another iteration of right-wing populism that burns out without institutional grounding?
The problem with Trumpism, for America, is that all the rest of the world becomes a mark for targeting and exploitation (except Israel, of course, for which the whole world, including the USA is a mark). And it is clear to everyone that this goes against the long held policies of cultivating "alliances", policies derived from the realization of the fact that the US cannot do it alone (as much as they made it sound that they can).
After all, it was the Russians that defeated the Nazi Germany, and it was the Russian invasion and destruction of the Manchurian Army in 3 weeks that convince the Japanese Imperial Army to surrender fast to the Americans, not the atomic bombs.
All this holds until they run smackdab into some reality that requires re-engaging with reality. Pandemic in 2020 -- does it have to be nuclear war, bio war, cyber war? Hope not.
Extending the tax cuts (and therefore the budget deficits), will simply flood the world with more dollars. This will increase the trade deficit (and maybe inflation), all else equal. So, the Fed will have to raise interest rates (if Powell dares piss off Trump) or the dollar will weaken all by itself.
The PMC is not monolithic in opposition to Trumpism. It is very diverse. One subset of the PMC is Wall Street and the FIRE sector. I think Schumer backed off fighting the tax cuts because this sector wanted them continued,. Therefore, the financialization and hollowing-out of the USA will continue. What is the solution? Isn't a much weaker dollar a move in the right direction?
And the Advent of AGI which to me seems to be driving so much of this.
If US achieves AGI is 3 or so years and with a 2 year lead on China, then the US has its only chance of staying No 1 in the world.
Any later and China's superior wetware (human talent) will win the race to AGI - it already has won the economic race.
This explains lots. US bullishness in the face of being a declined power already. The rush of the tech giant leaders (Bezos and Zuckerberg - Must was there ahead of them) to sign up to Team Trump. They want to be there when Multi-hundred billionaires become multi-Trillionaires.
If you are not convinced yet, wait till you grade the next round of student essays.
Glad to see you are so critical of the Dems refusal to understand what they screwed up over 4 years.
There is another aspect to all this - Trump and Biden are equally guilty in letting the cat out of the bag as to how dreadful US policies have been for the non European world.
Everyone free of the BBC and CNN can see the evils of Israel.
Likewise the direct support and encouragement of al qaeda / ISIS / HTS terrorists was never so clear to the world (and Tulsi talked about it openly).
The 1 million Ukrainian middle aged men sent to the frontline and died is wholly the result of an outrageously dishonest western media and governments who kept this all quiet.
Irrespective of what Trump does next, the reputation of US (and Europe) has been destroyed in the rest of the world.
re AGI - There is no such chance. The dreamers at the moment dream of a balance of power. But as the energy constraints are removed due to very mid-tech renewable power systems, the potential of large population is unleashed, and you're looking more realistically at China #1, India #2. In the meantime, US has knocked out the EU as a coherent force for a generation at least.
[Agree on Europe]
If you have AGI (and it does seem to be approaching in next 3-10 years in at least a modest form) then numbers no longer matter.
What might matter with weak AGI is the number of really high quality / hi IQ people you have to direct it. Then China wins - China has a lot more talented Chinese with IQ over 140 than US (with half the AI workers in US being chinese immigrants)
With strong AGI you don't even need many directors.
I hesitate to predict what will happen with AGI - but have no hesitation in saying that early strong AGI is the best hope for any Americans that want to compete with China for the rest of the century. The choice is simple - MAD; lose a conventional war; accept a junior role in a multi-polar world (cleary the smart solution for a nation without ego issues); fight and pray for early strong AGI.
Seems to me the gang hanging around the Whitehouse are going for the last choice.
In my view, ~10 years is too late for the US, any technological lead will be in the rear view mirror by then. "3 years in a modest form" leaves it to the Republicrat political system to do something with that capability. Are they going to build some kind of robot army and take over the world in that timespan? I don't think so...
China using AI now:
https://kdwalmsley.substack.com/p/long-before-deepseek-blew-up-wall
Chinese Artificial Intelligence (AI) models have long been a feature of everyday life, and were widely used in China’s industrial and service sectors for many months before news of them reached Wall Street in late January.
yep. Chinese industry well practiced to operationalize tech and do the subsequent scale-up, doing both faster than US.
And the other thing in the near-term is... US capacity to do AI application scale-up depends on TSMC. I.e. made by Chinese people 300 miles off the Chinese coast. Can't very well make a move to lock in "another century of US hegemony" until a US duplicate of TSMC is built out on the other side of the Pacific. I guess they have to try with whatever they got just to avoid falling behind, but I really don't think there's a story here of US maintaining leadership.
The whole point of AGI is that that is the moment when Human capacity is no longer relevant as the bulk of the work can be done by AI.
But I think we agree, AGI is likely to come too late or too weak for US to compete against China. Nevertheless there is no other Win/Lose way for US to win, and they are just not psycologically ready to play the Win/Win games China would be willing to play.
You didn't know how to finish the list and yet found such a beautiful way to do so . . . You're right, this does feel like the high pandemic, except with less hope and much less clear vision for how to find a way out and through . . . I think so often of many of the posts you mention here, and thank you for the additional links to other thought-provoking pieces . . . I appreciate your work and thank you for it . . . I am doing all I can to keep the faith and believe in the capacity of better angels to prevail, and, I think it will be the project of the rest of my lifetime and beyond . . .
RE Point 6: I think the focus on lies and rationality is a red herring here, as Butler's formulation as presented here is messy and contradictory: she can't seem to decide if the enjoyment of Trump's base is based on knowledge (to care if trump is lying i first have to know the 'fact' he is up-ending, which is not an exact, but a close enough formulation to cynicism, which does not describe Trump's traditional base as much as his newer (much smaller) paranoiac alt-right base (think Jimmy Dore)), or more generally psychic enjoyment (the thrill of the rallys, engaging in racisms etc).
Your (Adam) appraisal while lucid, focuses on what i would consider her missteps towards a movement in the right direction in regards to theory.
All i desire is for your point 6 then to be split into two:
6a) what you said
6b) what she said subtracting anything that has to do with knowledge/rationality
Sure, i consider this point of political import, but my true motivation of writing this is the personal satisfaction that statements like this from Butler show that after 30 years she is finally moving away from Derrida and closer to Lacan. Encore!
So what happens if a major creditor like China doesn’t want to convert its Treasuries into some new form of long term U.S. debt? Does the Trump Admin refuse to honor existing Treasuries? I can’t imagine we’d get close to anything like this without the bond markets going insane.
I was for a long time of the opinion that the US will ultimately refuse to pay its debt. After all, why to have such a big and expensive military if you won't use it, eh?!
Is there a threat to the liquidity of Treasuries?
I mean the “Mar-a-Lago Accords” lay out a plan to turn existing debt into some new “Century Bond.” Unclear how that would actually work but it seems like the whole thing is a threat to Treasury liquidity.
Judith Butler? 🤡
Excellent commentary on Trump 2.0.
To your point number 7, I would recommend “In The Long Run,” by Jonathan White, who links the proclivity for often irrational action and disdain for the in-place decision-makers with the Italian Fascist movement in the early
decades of the 20th century. Unfettered change and disruption in order to keep moving forward to an unspecified and often changing set of goals, with little thinking about the consequences. The means would always support the undefined ends. There are differences between MAGA and this earlier movement but the similarities stand out. One is no clear ideology other than the exercise of power and the desire for constant institutional change.
Democrats think they have lost voters due to economics. Obamacare and Bidenomics were designed to bring back disaffected working class voters. It did not work. It is culture and lost status that motivates them. Until Democrats and the opposition find an acceptable cultural form of debate they will continue to lose voters. Like it or not, these voters decide elections.
That is why the first priority of Biden should have been the border. Bidenomics and a focus on working class economics not help Jon Tester, Sherrod Brown or Bob Casey.
Due to the constitution of the US, states powers, and demography, the Democrats are doomed to a minority status if they keep thinking voters are voting against their self interest on economics. I live in a deep red state, the Democratic brand is toxic. No amount of economics can outrun the sense that democrats are elitist snobs who want to impose “wokeness”.
Inflation (partially a byproduct of war mania, partially covid) loomed large in the 2024 election
It is not the beginning of the end; it is not even the end of the beginning. Four years to go, and it is just the beginning of the beginning.
you want to wash your mouth out with soap.there is no "ethnic cleansing of gaza",there is a liberation of gaza from hamas.toe the ici line,my friend
So over 17000 + children killed because one day they could join Hamas is moral, ethical, and just, eh?! Fuck off!
what a repulsive excuse for a human you are.