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Sunday, May 4, 2025

2025-05-04

***** denotes well-worth reading in full at source (even if excerpted extensively here)


Economic and Market Fare:

His tariffs, tax cuts and deregulation efforts make up a coherent strategy to benefit Main Street


Tariff Front-Running is Already Showing Up as Reductions in US GDP Growth

................ Computers & pharmaceuticals were the two sectors behind the vast majority of that record import surge—outside those industries, the jump in imports was noticeable but not record-breaking.

.............. Outside of the rapid shifts in trade itself, consumption growth also changed considerably at the start of this year.

................. Yet it’s also important to say that the costs and uncertainty of trade policy chaos can have real negative growth effects. If a construction company rushed to buy a bunch of wood from Canada ahead of tariffs, that would show up as an increase in imports and an increase in inventories which cancel each other out. But if that company slowed down construction so it could afford to stockpile inputs, that would show up as a hidden drag on GDP in the form of lower investment. In other words, tariff front-running can indirectly slow the economy, and that’s exactly what we saw at the start of this year


Admittedly, given the varying rates at which the impact of Trump economic policies, particularly tariffs but also DOGE and immigration crackdowns are progressing, it’s hard to have a good picture of where things stand in in the US and where the bottom might be. That is not merely the result of information being retrospective in what looks to be a rapidly accelerating downswing, but also small businesses and/or intermediate goods producers taking the biggest hits, and they are generally not well studied.

But based on the tone of the press, discussions with people in the US, and a very recent and short trip to New York City,1 much, and arguably too much, of the US seems to be in summer of 1914 mode: cheerfully living in a sense of normalcy that is about to vanish permanently. To put it another way, if there was a sufficiently widespread appreciation of what was looming over the horizon, May 1 would have seen the launch of open-ended general strikes.

Trump really is well on his way to implementing a reactionary restructuring of the US and international economy. “The end of globalization” is too bloodless a formula to convey the severity of the dislocations that have only started to arrive. 

Even in the vanishingly unlikely scenario that Trump were to abandon his tariff policies in the next week, the confusion and interruption of supplies will still have done considerable harm. The longer they remain in place, the more that damage, particularly small business closures and downsizings at small and bigger enterprises, will become permanent.

Optimists take undue solace at the idea that Trump will roll back the tariffs as he wrests concessions from other countries. First, as far as the mother of all tariff blowback is concerned, optimistic press noises about China being willing to talk are misleading. Yes, Chinese official media has acknowledged Trump Administration outreach efforts and signaled a willingness to negotiate. But China has also made clear that it is still sticking to its guns: the US must drop (which may translate into “substantially reduce”) its tariffs first. ...............

Now admittedly, Trump may be forced to blink soon in his China staredown due to the US need for rare earths on which China has imposed export restrictions.2 But given Trump’s massive ego, even if he were to cut China tariffs to try to get negotiations going, it seems unlikely he’d roll them back far enough in his first go to satisfy the Chinese. And if Trump eventually climbs down far enough to placate the Chinese, the Trump Administration also seems out of touch as to how long treaty and trade negotiations normally take. Given the US being famously not agreement capable and the Trump Administration not signaling an intent to retreat from its goal of diminishing China geostrategically (which may include military action), there is no reason for China to be accommodating as far as the process of reaching an agreement or its form is concerned. ............

And the reason investors, businesspeople, and consumers ought to be at DefCon 1 alarm levels and aren’t? The best guess is that they assume that this Administration, like every one since the Great Depression, will saddle up and intervene to try to prevent worst outcomes.

But the Trump Team has openly and repeatedly expressed its Mellonite goals. It fully intends to tear down big swathes of the American economy, out of their cultish belief that new enterprises will quickly spring up to replace them.

But tons of commercial and investor behaviors are based on the assumption of a rescue, such as buying dips. If worst comes to worst, there will always be the Greenspan/Bernanke/Yellen put. Similarly headlines like the Guardian’s Trump’s tariffs: ‘It feels like Covid 2.0. So many things are getting disrupted’ give an unduly optimistic picture by suggesting that a Covid rerun is as bad as conditions might get.

Listen up: if Trump does not radically change course, what is coming will be much worse than Covid. Then, the US ramped up emergency programs, such as the Payroll Protection Plan and extended unemployment benefits, to preserve jobs and spending.

By contrast, Trump fully expects consumers to suffer considerably and is clearly unconcerned: ........

Because Trump is particularly attached to his America circa 1890 idealism and has surrounded himself with like-minded ideologues, he can’t be expected to reverse course on his tariffs, except at the margin, and then slowly. .........

We have not even factored in the impact of DOGE, which does not simply cut government jobs but far more important, guts programs and cashiers seasoned employees who could play essential roles in what would amount to economic relief efforts.

Satyajit Das, in his important two part series (see here and here) set forth other reasons why the coming crisis may prove to be intractable. ...........

In other words, the downside risk of Trump’s demolition project is far greater than anyone seems willing to admit. Too many people are operating on the optimistic assumption that somehow that can’t or won’t happen. Tinkerbell thinking didn’t have much success in the runup to the 2008 crisis. It is unlikely to fare better now.




BNP: Equities: 100 years of crashes - Tariff watch (via the Bond Beat)

Tariff crash: Market crashes that occur without a significant economic downturn can be large and volatile but tend to be relatively brief. Price action for equities this year is so far consistent with prior non-recessionary crashes. However, we think the rally off the lows is more a function of position capitulation than an ‘all clear’ signal for risk. Mega-cap Tech earnings have also helped. Our base case is that a combination of earnings downgrades and PE compression could see equities retest YTD lows.



US stocks are in for another drop that will eventually lead to a bear market in the coming months, according to veteran technical strategist Tom DeMark, who accurately called this year’s top in February and subsequent April low.

DeMark — a closely-followed analyst who’s advised billionaire investors including Paul Tudor Jones, Leon Cooperman and Steve Cohen — uses a system for predicting where markets will move, divined from a half century of chart gazing that’s based on mathematical relationships. He focuses on trend exhaustion, with his mantra being markets top on good news and bottom on bad news.

A confluence of technical indicators, sentiment shifts and cyclical timing models are flashing caution signs, suggesting a drop in the S&P 500 below 4,835, this year’s intraday low in early April. That would represent a more than 20% drop from the gauge’s February peak, pushing the index into a bear market.

“A top is imminent. Too much technical damage has been done,” DeMark said by phone. “Stocks are vulnerable right now and can easily get hit pretty badly if anything quickly changes on the global trade outlook.”

DeMark’s warning comes amid a stock-market rebound that’s put the S&P 500 Index on track to erase all of its losses suffered after President Donald Trump’s tariff announcement last month. The gauge is up for a ninth straight day Friday, which would mark its longest winning streak since 2004.  ............


Oaktree Co-CEO Sees Private Credit Trades as Low as 50 Cents

Private credit fund investors are offloading stakes at significant discounts ahead of more potential pain for the US economy, Oaktree Capital Management Co-Chief Executive Officer Robert O’Leary said. Oaktree sees more chances to buy marked-down assets. ..............

 O’Leary said this week that investors have not opened up to idea that we might be facing a recession or are already in one. 

O’Leary said a downturn could be as serious as the dot-com bubble. ‘That was traumatic, that was pretty V-shaped, so we came out of it pretty quickly… The problem here is you’re starting to put in place barriers that will shape the behavior of our counterparties.’



Tweets of the Week:
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Charts:
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(not just) for the ESG crowd:



The Climate Paradox: Why We Need to Reset Action on Climate Change

People know that the current state of debate over climate change is riven with irrationality. As a result, though most people will accept that climate change is a reality caused by human activity, they’re turning away from the politics of the issue because they believe the proposed solutions are not founded on good policy.

So, in developed countries, voters feel they’re being asked to make financial sacrifices and changes in lifestyle when they know that their impact on global emissions is minimal. Whatever the historical responsibility of the developed world for climate change, those with even a cursory knowledge of the facts understand that in the future the major sources of pollution will come principally from the developing world.

But for that developing world, there is an equal resentment when they’re told the investment is not available for the energy necessary for their development because it is not “green”. They believe, correctly, that they have a right to develop and that those who have already developed using fossil fuels do not have the right to inhibit them from whatever is the most effective way of developing.  ....................................................



U.S. Empire Fare:

With the U.S. on the decline and China on the rise, is a conflict imminent?

We are witnessing tectonic shifts in geopolitics and economics. The five-hundred-year period of Western world dominance is in the process of coming to an end; with or without the rise of rivals. Even as western capitalism turns on itself, ending the global system it built for centuries, can it still stop the rise of China? Or does this even matter…? High-tech modernity around the world is at a point of existential crisis, to which great power rivalry is but a symptom.

First, we must understand the nature of western economic decline. As American and European capitalist countries turned towards financialization after the oil-shock of the 1970’s and 80's— i.e.: as financial markets, institutions, and transactions gained an overwhelming prominence — the real economy of goods and services began to decline, and with it the living standards of the „bottom” 90% of the population. This, in combination with the loss of the economically viable half of those nations’ natural resources, led to deindustrialization, the loss of scientific and technological innovation, together with the concentration of power in the hands of the wealthy few (the top .1%). The average citizen, as a result, got poorer (much poorer) in the past quarter of a century — eventually giving up on their hopes of a better future — while the S&P 500 just kept rising and rising. Let’s review some key statistics to see why businesses in the real economy and citizens alike struggle to remain on the surface despite ever growing stock market valuations and claims of miraculous productivity growth. .................................................................................................

................................... As a result certain products will only be developed for the still relatively fast growing Chinese and Asian market, and not for the West which is already in a steep economic and technological decline (especially it’s European half.)

Tariffs and sanctions will make this rift even wider. By forcing China to sell their ever more advanced and competitive products in Asian markets, European and American exporters will find it harder and harder to sell their old and expensive technologies in the Asia-Pacific region. The world market, as a result, might all too easily be torn into two halves: a still developing East and South, and an ever faster declining West. The limitation on rare earth minerals export from China (which still dominates the market), only adds to this problem, making high-tech devices not only costly to develop for a shrinking western market, but also hard and costly to manufacture. .....................



A good way to think about human history is that it has two distinct scales. On the small scale we have the churn of daily events — the stuff of endless individual exploits. And on the large scale, we have the long-term evolution of human societies — a scale so sweeping that the actions of individuals are as insignificant as the shifting grains of desert sand. The task of social science is to somehow connect these two scales — to show how the characters of history act on a stage that they do not fully control.

Looking at the present political spectacle, it’s clear that the world order is changing. In a matter of months, Donald Trump has taken a wrecking ball to the US-led regime that reigned since the end World War II. But here is an interesting question: if Trump had not been re-elected, to what extent would things be different?

The answer depends on our choice of scale. In a world without Trump, the eddies of small-scale history would surely be altered. There would be no ‘department of government efficiency’, for example. Nor would their likely be an unfolding US-led trade war. But on the scale of long-term history, many tides would remain the same. Chief among them would be the inexorable decline of US empire. To put things bluntly, the ‘American century’ is over and will never return. ......................
............ Turning to the US imperial half life, it lasted for about 120 years, from 1889 to 2008. As such, virtually every US politician who is now in power was born and raised during the period of US dominance — an era when America was ‘exceptional’. But that era has now passed; the ‘American century’ is dead. Hence the widespread confusion among US elites, who still think in terms of US supremacy, but cannot fathom that America’s halcyon days are gone and will never return.

........... By definition, the full pulse of imperial power is visible only in hindsight, once the pinnacle of dominance is a distant memory. As such, we can say little about the imperial future, other than that the next century will likely be dominated by China. Indeed, the era of Chinese supremacy has already begun.

It happened with little fanfare in 2009. (See Figure 5.) In that year, China’s share of world energy consumption first surpassed that of the US. Intriguingly, it was also in 2009 that the US exited its imperial half life, consuming (for the first time since 1889) less than half its peak share of world energy use. Since then, the tide of US power has continued to ebb, undeterred by the minutia of partisan politics. And the tide of Chinese power has continued to rise. Within a few years, China will consume double the energy of the United States.

.......... It’s surely for this reason that China has responded to US tariffs with a nonchalant shrug. China holds all the cards, and Beijing leaders know it. In Washington, American elites still strut like Roman generals. But to the rest of the world, they look increasingly like senile peacocks.\



...................... State media and propaganda outlets have seized the moment, portraying the US as an external enemy and rallying nationalist sentiment. There’s growing pride in standing up instead of giving in.



The tit-for-tat trade escalation between the United States and China has dominated news cycles. In the backdrop of rising U.S.-China tensions is another—and potentially just as profound—change occurring in the U.S.-EU relationship. The Europeans may increasingly distrust U.S. technology and may focus on “de-risking” not just from China but from the United States as well.

The Trump administration’s aggressive attacks on European technology regulations and the cutoff of intelligence-sharing and weapons deliveries to Ukraine have led to fears in Europe that the United States could do something similar to it. Europe has suddenly become full of rumors that the United States could invoke a “kill switch” that would disable core military systems ...............


Geopolitical Fare:

Gaza sets a terrifying precedent: the radical reinterpretation of the laws of war is bound to have serious consequences on the destructiveness of future conflicts — including a US-China war


Traumatized and weary, journalists in Gaza file stories between airstrikes, capturing what remains of lives and landscapes before they, too, are erased.


As satellite images reveal China's ambitious construction of the world's largest underground military command center near Beijing, global tensions escalate, prompting experts to scrutinize the implications of this unprecedented development for international security dynamics.


Tariq Ali: On the Brink?

India and Pakistan are preparing for war. The casus belli is, once again, occupied Kashmir. Control over this disputed region has since 1947 been the main obstacle to normalising relations between the two states.


Antonio Turiel: "Europe could implode"
“In reality, the war effort, with the 800,000 million euros committed to it, may involve such an excessive effort and such losses in the already relatively tenuous state of welfare that Europe could implode, collapse socially, like those people of a certain age who insist on making efforts that decades ago they could do with ease and that today could kill them. It is something repeated throughout the history of humanity: great empires that, in a time of deep crisis, decide to try to recover the military glory of the past and succumb to the weight of military spending and the accumulation of internal problems.”
A spectre is haunting Europe. After decades of placidity (or so the media would have us believe), we have entered a state of panic, frightened (or so we are told) by an imminent invasion from Russia ...................

.......................... Europe wants to move quickly towards rearmament because, apparently, Russian troops are already appearing in Helsinki, Prague, Budapest and Warsaw. Hurry, hurry, hurry... Don't they see the existential risk for Europe?

Obviously, there is no such thing as the Russian threat. Russia is not going to set out to conquer Europe and risk triggering a response from the United States. Moreover, two European countries possess nuclear weapons (France and the United Kingdom), which is an excessive risk. And finally, there is a problem of population arithmetic: although Russia is huge, it has only 140 million inhabitants, while the EU has 450 million. In fact, it would be a logistical challenge for Russia to try to occupy Ukraine, with its almost 40 million inhabitants, on a permanent basis - it is very different to defend your territory than to occupy someone else's.

That doesn't mean that Russia is a lamb, but obviously the scenario that is being proposed to us has no semblance of reality whatsoever. A confrontation with Russia would be exhausting and extremely costly for the Slavs, even if it did not involve the occupation of territory. And, after all, why would Russia want to do that? Even today, after the fanciful European sanctions, Europe is Russia's main buyer of raw materials. And there are many people, not only in Moscow but also in Frankfurt and Paris, who are hoping that the talks between Putin and Trump on Ukraine will come to a successful conclusion (without taking into account the opinion of the Ukrainians, of course) in order to re-establish the flow of raw materials at a good price to which Russia has accustomed us.

No. The European rearmament and militarist movement has another objective and another reason, and it must be understood in the context of the rest of the decrees and directives that have been signed in Brussels in recent weeks, as a desperate response to the telluric geopolitical changes brought about by Trump's Second Coming. We already commented in the previous post about the Omnibus legislation and its consequences on the environmental level. But the European legislative machine does not stop, and so a few days ago we learned that the EU has classified as strategic, and therefore eligible for subsidies, 47 projects for the extraction of critical materials, 7 of them in Spain (led by large companies, many with environmental lawsuits). In most cases we are talking about either small deposits with little production potential or deposits that are very harmful to the environment. If Europe is rushing to accelerate these projects it is because it perceives a desperate need to accelerate. The fact is that the energy and resources crisis is advancing inexorably. .........................

At the same time, the problems that the shortage is causing in areas critical to the supply of certain materials mean that the supply chain problems of a few years ago could be a joke compared to what is coming now

Europe needs energy, it needs materials, and it needs them now. The much-vaunted renewable transition, has failed and is collapsing, and Europe does not have great natural resources. Where will we get the energy we need? The answer can be found in the first of the three questions we asked nine years ago.

Europe is going to invade North Africa.

Or, at least, this is the unconfessed intention of our leaders (and applauded by companies like Volkswagen, which sees not only cheap raw materials but also the possibility of converting to the military industry). That is why they want weapons, that is why they want to militarize consciences, that is why they need to silence critical discourse until it is too late. ...............


Vladimir Putin is the luckiest of leaders. He is engaged in a civilizational war with countries led by men or women who are either morons, delusional, or simply incompetent.

He can count on them to make one mistake after another, which has made all the difference to Russia's amazing development economically, industrially, socially – and in all respects as a nation.

Evolution, as you know, depends on two things: challenge and competition, usually in the form of conflict. The West has challenged Russia, not only competing but trying to destroy it.

The West has no plan – only a sense of entitlement. Worse, it is not led by the best and brightest – but by the worst and dimmest.

Zelensky is a good example. He's a weak, vain moron – greedy and shortsighted.

Biden is another example — a dim bulb, who could barely remember his name.

Now we have Trump who calls himself a "stable genius"-- which means he's the smartest donkey in the barn. He only opens his mouth to shit. He doesn't read. He doesn't think. He will never get dementia – because he just doesn't have enough brain cells.

Then we have people like Starmer. He needs remedial education; if not toilet training but that would impede the progress of the kids in the classes who want to get ahead.

In any case, he cannot be remediated. Nor redeemed.

Add to this Macron and a host of Europeans. I think they're all on drugs. Is China supplying them with fentanyl ? If it isn’t, it should.

What this means is that Putin can take his time.

Just sit back and wait for the enemy to commit collective suicide.

The alternative would be a conventional Western style assault with several hundred thousand troops, and massive bombing—”shock and awe”—and taking a lot of casualties, unless you could just wipe everyone out from the air.

As it is, the Russians are killing 10 Ukrainian soldiers for every one of their own in the slo-mo SMO while the Kiev regime discredits itself and its people stop believing in it.

It will take time, of course. But Russia has lots of that, although the declining Western Empire does not ..................



Media Fare:

The media's role is to disorientate us, so we disbelieve what we can see with our own eyes: that there is a genocide going on, and our own leaders are actively assisting it



..................... The undoing of American journalism began in “J-schools,” where young reporters were taught that the touchstones of neutrality and objectivity were no longer viable. At schools like the University of Texas, students are told that it is time to “leave neutrality behind.” Stanford journalism professor, Ted Glasser, has insisted that “journalists need to be overt and candid advocates for social justice, and it’s hard to do that under the constraints of objectivity.”

Editors soon picked up on the change and declared that “Objectivity has got to go” in hiring reporters committed to what I have called “advocacy journalism.”

The result has been a transformation of American journalism into a type of echo chamber that amplifies liberal and often partisan Democratic talking points. That includes framing the news in overtly biased ways  ..............



Other Fare:

It Helps to Ask

In each of the last six years, the Danish NGO AoD (Alliance of Democracies) has compiled and published the Democracy Perception Index, an international survey of national sentiments regarding democracy. What sets the survey apart is the inclusion of economic reasons as threats to democracy. So, instead of having American politicians psychologize economic dysfunction as ‘anxiety,’ survey respondents are able to answer the questions themselves.

Surprise, the survey responses have nothing to do with anxiety. They reference the distribution of economic power. In descending order, the threats to democracy are 1) concentrated income and wealth, 2) corruption, and 3) corporate control over politics. And preceding Donald Trump’s first term was the conclusion by a near-majority of Americans that the US is not ‘a democracy.’ A far larger percentage of Chinese believe China to be democratic than Americans believe the US to be. ..............

For the young, the young at heart, and those averse to learning from history, the purpose of ‘Trump!’ in 2025 is to give American-style capitalism one more try. Missed in the prior iteration were impurities in execution according the Trump & co., and not the conceptual flaws of capitalism. From Ronald Reagan to Bill Clinton to George W. Bush to Barack Obama, capitalism would have worked as advertised if only capitalism’s executors had been homicidal enough.

The immediately prior version (of capitalism) had it that abandoning industrial policy, deindustrializing the US, sending sensitive national production (e.g. defense, critical minerals, agriculture) abroad and handing national decision making to self-interested corporate hacks and inheritance wastrels was the necessary curative. The resulting rolling crises of capitalism were explained as temporary disruptions, as bugs, not features, to the point when the economic, and with it social, decline of the US became an embarrassment to our overlords. .............

Recall, at the start of this epoch the banks were heavily regulated to prevent crises before they occurred. That system worked. Then Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush deregulated. Question: how is Mr. Trump a radical departure from this history?

While the US has spent the last century declaring Russia to be authoritarian, only a slightly smaller proportion of Russians believe that Russia is democratic than Americans believe the US to be. What happened was that Cold War animosities were revived with Russiagate, and the light-thinkers who found it convincing are stuck with the residual remembrance of Cold War cliches filtered through news content intended to sell breakfast cereal. The challenge, again, is that the 0.01% richest, the oligarchs, plus the next richest 9.99%, the PMC, only total to 10% of the US population.

But what does this actually mean? In the most basic sense, it means that the priorities of the leaders of the world differ from those of its citizens. The citizens want greater control over the political decisions being made than they currently have. For a nation like the US that uses the fiction of citizen control for authoritarian purposes, it means that the hold of the uniparty is waning.  ...........


“The masses have never thirsted after truth. They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste, preferring to deify error, if error seduce them. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim.”
—Gustav Le Bon
................. In four generations, children have gone from roaming up to six miles from home to an average of just 300 yards. One result is to shrink their hippocampi—the seahorse-shaped parts of the brain near our ears that drive our spatial awareness and orientation. Children in the overdeveloped world now spend less time outdoors than prison inmates. They can’t tell East from West. It has led to a 50 percent rise in agoraphobia—fear of leaving home—and also biophobia--fear of the natural world. Jerry Brotton, author of Four Points of the Compass: The Unexpected History of Direction, wrote:

In my lifetime we have gone from looking up, aspiring to a shared global village inspired by NASA’s blue marble photograph, to looking down, glued to the blue dot on our phones as our hippocampi shrink and many of us withdraw from nature. It probably isn’t the end of civilization. After all, maps and compasses are cognitive artifacts, like the internet, and we’ve been using them for millennia.

............... In The Rape of the Mind, Joost Meerloo wrote: “Logic can be met with logic, while illogic cannot — it confuses those who think straight. The Big Lie and monotonously repeated nonsense have more emotional appeal.” Meerloo says that mass psychosis has been induced many times throughout history because “It is simply a question of reorganizing and manipulating collective feelings in the proper way.”



The illegal, unprovoked, full-scale US-UK invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003 wrecked the country at the cost of at least one million Iraqi lives. It was waged on the basis of a supposed threat from ‘weapons of mass destruction’ that did not exist. Less well-known is the fact that everyone at the pinnacle of power knew they did not exist. The whole focus on Iraq as some kind of menace was an audacious fabrication. But ‘we’ got the oil. ...............

............... ‘Mainstream’ politicians and press have been resisting the ‘Evil’ of various Official Enemies – the Soviets, the Vietnamese, the Chinese, Milosevic, Saddam Hussein, Bin Laden, Gaddafi, Assad, Putin… on and on. We are always Colonel Heffner and Reverend Collins facing an alien threat, and we are always told we have a choice to make between deluded, suicidal appeasement and ultra-violence; between fantasy and reality. Meanwhile, the progressive left has been resisting capitalism, corporate psychopathy, state warmongering for resources, and so on…

Even in our private lives, we know that millions of Reverend Collinses and Colonel Heffners are sitting beside millions of mini-me Hitlers on sofas (quite a threesome!). Here, also, we can choose idealistic, happy-clappy appeasement; or we can resist injustice and tyrannical abuse. 

............... And yet, and yet… despite all of this endlessly principled resistance, the world is full…. nay, flooded, with what looks an awful lot like ‘Evil’.

Everywhere we turn: ludicrously unsustainable over-consumption as if the next year and the next generation didn’t matter a damn; a factory farming system creating hell on earth for animals; a seething mass of military-industrial complexity gorged on war; manifestly fake political choices that are no-choice serving the same money-grubbing interests; fossil fuel fanaticism subordinating literally everyone – even, ultimately, the CEOs and their own families – to short-term profit; levers of power controlling economics and war absolutely cordoned off from public participation. Oh, we can talk the talk on social media all we like, but don’t even think about laying a finger on the levers of power. It’s a complicated game, and that outcome is not in the rules.

Noam Chomsky commented that he could not find a word to describe the climate-trashing fossil fuel interests willing to sacrifice the literal existence of organised human life for the sake of a few dollars more:

‘The word “evil” doesn’t begin to approach it.’

And… it feels almost incredible even to write it… almost no-one is doing anything meaningful about it!

The irony is exquisite – after decades, centuries, millennia of focusing on the need to resist ‘Evil’, almost nobody – certainly nobody with power – is seriously trying to resist the ultimate ‘Evil’ of human self-extinction. We are trapped in an airliner heading straight for a mountain and there is no-one in the cockpit who cares. ..................


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