Had a much longer comment in mind, but I think it all comes down to disaster capitalism at scale. Cranked up to 11.
Domestically and internationally. In the longer term, the goal is very much like what happened in the end of the USSR. The already filthy rich and powerful can swoop in and buy up all the distressed assets and properties for pennies. In the nearer term the regulatory apparatuses are gutted and the population is impoverished and humiliated. Anyone with half a brain would know that this type of tariff and layoff regimen is not what's going to bring industrial manufacturing back to the US. Internationally this creates the tensions that "justify" a continuing military buildup directed at more atomized "enemies."
I'm seeing pre-WWII and post-USSR all over this crap. But with, as you noted, a different type of military technology buildup based on lessons learned in Ukraine and Gaza. Heavy on surveillance and drone warfare, massive wiping out of densely populated areas and the bulk of the fighting happening in de-populated and polluted wastelands. It's a nightmare.
And that's not even taking into account the other goals of techno-feudalism and pseudo techno-utopianism.
For usa, probably more like mix of Escape from NY, blade runner, 5th element multipass, and the movie that had a guy called Spider played by henry rollins. But Im just after having a pointless march at me local capital and 4 pints deep sending it wondering what's the point and dont really know shit.
Yes, at the time yesterday my brain was having a bit of a nice soak and I couldn't remember where I saw the scene. The movie is Johnny Mnemonic. I think I was going for any dystopian stories involving megacorps (which btw makes your list every bit as relevant as what I came up with).
I'll need to check that movie out. Was it worth watching? I guess I can consult the reader reviews at IMDB. It's definitely "my generation" but I must have missed it.
No problem! I could use a good "soak" myself. Just have to find a nice pub. You know what they say about needing a "third place" to be a happy human. And mine ain't church!
Brilliant and necessary. Thank you so much, Yasha. We need this perspective and your and Evgenia’s incisive, but grounded and heartfelt voices at this time, more than ever.
Like Russia in the early 90s, various factions with different agendas are all trying to take advantage of an addled demented leader who has promised a wholesale „restructuring“ to make that restructuring benefit them. That makes it difficult to find real coherence. But if you read between the lines, Bessent and Musk do seem more or less aligned, and the goal is for the U.S. to dominate manufacturing in an AI driven, robotic factory world. They see that even in places like Bangladesh it won’t be long before fully automated factories replace people. The goal behind the tariffs is to force manufacturers to build those factories in the U.S. and not let them build higher value add manufacturing in their own countries. Basically the U.S. is trying to bully the rest of the world into mortgaging their futures to us before we lose our leverage over them.
yeah very good chance that ai/robotics manufacturing is gonna explode in the u.s. to replace human labor. and trump's people have talked about robotics being the solution to high domestic labor costs. so you're right.
i guess we file it under: yet another blow to "the let trump cook, he's killing neolibs and bringing back local production, ushering a better world for americans" narrative.
but who knows what will emerge from this if you take a long enough view.
" very good chance that ai/robotics manufacturing is gonna explode in the u.s. to replace human labor. "
Nothing I have seen so far from Trump and the rural industrial bourgeoisie indicate that they have the intellectual capability to reboot and rebuild domestic industrial engineering and manufacturing. I think this initial attempt at deglobalization will be a humiliating failure. There are too many hidden technological dependencies. There are no robotic millwrights yet. The current AI tech are mostly just linguistic chamelions, not genuine agents of mechanical, electronic and chemical engineering
Also, our current industrial workforce is seriously degraded. I have worked alongside young people attempting to work in factories and they have flailed at repairing complex machinery and retreated from the harsh environment back to playing videogames in their parents home.
A further indication of the incapability and desperation of the current US industrial base is the recent acquiescence of US Steel to be acquired by Nippon Steel. Both management and labor realize they are not up to the job of reconstruction and must accept offshore help, in spite of the profound desire for domestic control and self-determination.
" the goal is for the U.S. to dominate manufacturing in an AI driven, robotic factory world."
The real question is whether software tech dweebs have the engineering power to actually construct an alternate fully-automated industrial infrastructure. I suspect their capabilities are too shallow to succeed in the short-term.
The roots of industrial technology are ancient and deep, in ways that financialized imbeciles do not begin to comprehend.
Agreed. Their commitment to a project that creates mass unemployment without a pre-existing social safety net is proof of their callousness and casual sadism.
And also their commitment to a "eugenic" culling of the population that is surplus to requirements. RFK Jr. using HHS to spread disease and death is probably part of the equation.
Thanks for this, the insight from USSR breakup is really valuable.
Mat Stoller has a decent piece about the tariffs on his substack that does a lot of decent speculation but only settles on the notion that there's no returning to the way things were before whatever changes arrive from this mess.
Definitely, Yasha. But don't tell Scott Bessent & Trump & Bill Ackman that—they are intent on reinstituting neoliberalism worldwide forever & ever. And will cause a tremendous amount of pain in doing so. That said, the stability of the neoliberal privatization regime is wholly dependent upon the financial leverage produced by imperialist marketization abroad—because that's how liquidity is introduced into the system.
I forgot to mention the postscript about the Democrats. Some of them and their media talking heads/writers seem to at least be making noises about a return to New Deal interventions, less along the lines of the Green New Deal and more about universal healthcare, income equality, a return to real regulations and monopoly busting, etc. But they're probably just pre-election panicky noises. Again and again, the 'services economy' and 'financialization' faction always seems to come out on top, especially right after elections. Here's a good Rob Urie article from 2020 on all that. https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/01/31/the-open-letter-and-the-dnc/
His conclusion: "Here is the political conundrum not addressed in the open letter (link at top of piece), if ousting Donald Trump fails to repair people’s lives, he’ll be back in a more virulent form in a matter of a few years at most. The political import of the DNC’s re-shenanigans is that they demonstrate that the establishment Democrats absolutely do not care either about repairing people’s lives or dislodging Mr. Trump as long as they stay in power. The centrists and corporatists the DNC is installing are being placed there to make sure that nothing changes— that people’s live aren’t repaired. That is where responsibility for Donald Trump lies, not with people who vote their conscience."
It is more likely that individual US states secede than a return to 19th century robber baron capitalism. If you are in Vermont or Minnesota, it's hard not to notice that your neighbors in Quebec and Manitoba aren't doing the disaster capitalism route. Why not bug out?
Yeltsin's Russia, probably, but also Gorbachev's Soviet Union - the bit where every SSR went their own way.
I'm dismissive of discourse that the US could devolve into a civil war, I just don't see anything that can unite people's interests enough to create divided sides that want to fight.
The discourse in Canada created a crack in my thinking. Trump has revived the corpse of the liberal party in Canada and even turned the Trumpian conservatives like Doug Ford against America. If the US were to actually go to war with Canada (big if), it would be massively unpopular and might inspire big resistance in Northern and Midwest states that have tighter relations and sympathies with Canada. I still consider it highly unlikely, but that feels like an issue that could create a true schism in the American populace.
He sure does talk about it, but seems far too lazy to really do anything other than branding and a few headline grabs. Recall the workers at that Carrier plant in Indiana from his first go around?
I made this comment before but still haven’t seen you guys address this, which I think remains a critical oversight. The thing missing here is CHINA. If you look at Vance and others rhetoric, they are analogizing what the US is doing to what (they think) China did, in same way that the “liberalization” of Russia was analogized to what supposedly made the US prosper. In the Russian case, they implemented “free markets” and “democracy” with none of the rule of law, anti-monopoly, worker protections, workplace protections, or anything else which the US actually had. And now with the US they’re going to implement “protectionism” like China but with none of the government investment into housing, factories, education and healthcare.
Simultaneously, as you’ve seen with iShowSpeed touring China, the actual existing material abundance and advancement of China relative to the US will play a similar psychological role as the US played to Russia in the 90s. (Except that if we had Chinese technocrats implementing this stuff, it would not be as insane)
So I agree with you in all your points but it’s critical to make this distinction because the way that things will worse may look quite different, and I think will be dramatically worse than many expect.
That's a good point. I think psychologically, too, China is what the Dem's Abundance Agenda stuff is about. The libs want to do what China did to solve home affordability etc but they want to do it through the free-market directly so they're pushing to scrap all regulations to let the dictatorship of the developers build endless seas of shitty houses.
Yeah I agree. The thing I get worried about is that when this push by the right inevitably fails, they will say the reason it succeeded in China is because they were ethnically homogeneous. And we’ve seen the Ezra Klein types be friendly to this type of thinking before, so any defense of immigrants we’re seeing now is going to quickly disappear in the meaner society resulting from a crash and from the spin used to justify it. “We coulda had abundance if it weren’t for all those nefarious immigrants” from the right and “statistically, higher prosperity is correlated with ethnic homogeneity so we should the rights proposal for mass extermination seriously” from the Very Serious Liberals.
ugh the 'homogenous' talking point, so fucking sick of that retort - "oh Sweden can make that work because they have a homogenous society"....jfc, exactly as you describe it, the reaction is typically a shrug and acceptance
Actually, I disagree on particulars here but I think it only further reinforces your broader point on the bacchanal of elite looting that is being prepared here… Bessent's idea is to impose "reciprocal tariffs" to force other countries to abandon their own domestic production programs—and as usual the American people to do the suffering for the gains of the investor strata who will continue to farm out their profits abroad on the decks of the blue water navy & it's air supremacy. It's just more imperialism that American workers always wind up paying for.
Fain & the UAW understand that Trump isn't intent on restoring American production or even restoring a domestic production program—that's why they will wind up being the ones who clarify to the public that a robust American domestic production program is in fact not what Trump is interested in. I guarantee you that Trump will start putting in carve outs for his pals in the durable goods business. It's up to us to make that fact clear to workers.
You know this isn't about spurring domestic production otherwise the Trump administration & Bessent wouldn't be "de-leveraging the public sector" for the benefit of Wall St. This is literally just the Obama playbook all over again—just seeking out a position worldwide for it because Wall St knows that they'll be looking at mass rebellion at home.
Here's Trump's Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent at the Economic Club of New York last month: "Regulations should serve to ensure the safe and soundness of U.S. banks, drive affordability across goods and services and facilitate economic growth. And we are going to accomplish this by improving the efficiency and effectiveness of our financial sector to underwrite and finance domestic activity. De-leveraging the public sector and re-leveraging the private sector begin and end with smartly reinvigorating our regulated financial institutions."
"It seems he wants to bring back at best the 1950s and at worst the 19th century: maximum fossil fuel consumption, factories, big naval armadas and drone armies, massive arms spending in preparation for a global war."
I think his main plan is a global war. And soon. That's the only way his manufacturing fantasies make any sense. The problem for him and the National Security mind virus is that although the US military has a lot of very deadly and powerful arms, they can't be replaced anytime soon after initial conflict. The defense industrial base is completely hollowed out and will take a decade or more to rebuild. China and its proxies will utterly dominate and humiliate the US through mass production of new arms.
And I see that as the greatest danger because I think the most likely response from a humiliated Trump is to go nuclear. It all seems perfectly set up - Whisky Pete, Laura Looney and the MAGA slaves who have replaced the comparatively sane adults in the military and security chains of command.
I've been anticipating and preparing for nuclear war my whole life. It's almost become a pathological death wish for me. But I wonder if that desire is also percolating in the diseased collective unconscious of our dying empire, with Shitler as a spasm of its raging Id.
I don't believe Trump wants to reshape the global economy. The Tariff gambit is stupid, but simply about further cementing his unchecked power. It's no mistake that he's cynically attacking universities over antisemitism and getting powerful law firms to bend their knees and do pro boni work for him at his pleasure. Trump loves dictators and envies the power of Putin and Xi, and has openly talked about it.
Tariffs let him control the fate of entire companies and industries on a whim. All negotiations have a single choke point with Trump from these actions. He's already blathering on about Vietnam getting a "great deal" and Musk is prattling on about no tariffs for the EU.
Part of the history of implementing the income tax and having Congress control tariffs and treaties was to prevent exactly what is happening now with Trump. Total control of the global economy with a single person. And an incredibly stupid person with a leadership team of light weights. Congress under thin Republican control presents no obstacle to Trump. There is no Manchin or Sienma here to buck MAGA.
What team Trump's hubris won't let them see is that the global order so carefulyl built and maintained by American elites may be over with Trump's total chaos and sowing of a lack of trust. Japan, Korea, and China in talks on economic cooperation? That's wild. But pragmatic of these advanced economies to realize they now potentially have a common enemy.Europe possibly waking up and realizing they might just need to do without the US? If elites in other countries truly wake up (a big if), it could very happen that there is very little sphere of influence for the US to leverage. We might just find ourselves alone in a much reduced economy.
"I’ve seen quite a few people who are critical of consumerist culture and our technological fetish gripe online about all the negativity that’s being heaped on Trump’s tariff plan by the left."
I can imagine this, but haven't seen it. Any names worth naming?
I've heard a bit of this type of thing (or pretty close) from Jimmy Dore and maybe RBN guys and I'm sure Greenwald is getting in on it. Their content isn't focused primarily on degrowth/consumption/tech, but based on their youtube clip titles, they are doing the 'give trump a chance' thing.
Had a much longer comment in mind, but I think it all comes down to disaster capitalism at scale. Cranked up to 11.
Domestically and internationally. In the longer term, the goal is very much like what happened in the end of the USSR. The already filthy rich and powerful can swoop in and buy up all the distressed assets and properties for pennies. In the nearer term the regulatory apparatuses are gutted and the population is impoverished and humiliated. Anyone with half a brain would know that this type of tariff and layoff regimen is not what's going to bring industrial manufacturing back to the US. Internationally this creates the tensions that "justify" a continuing military buildup directed at more atomized "enemies."
I'm seeing pre-WWII and post-USSR all over this crap. But with, as you noted, a different type of military technology buildup based on lessons learned in Ukraine and Gaza. Heavy on surveillance and drone warfare, massive wiping out of densely populated areas and the bulk of the fighting happening in de-populated and polluted wastelands. It's a nightmare.
And that's not even taking into account the other goals of techno-feudalism and pseudo techno-utopianism.
Sci-fi has arrived
Sci-horror. Terminator, soon Total Recall. Then....Alien?
For usa, probably more like mix of Escape from NY, blade runner, 5th element multipass, and the movie that had a guy called Spider played by henry rollins. But Im just after having a pointless march at me local capital and 4 pints deep sending it wondering what's the point and dont really know shit.
Wait, a sci fi with Henry Rollins playing a guy named Spider?
Yes, at the time yesterday my brain was having a bit of a nice soak and I couldn't remember where I saw the scene. The movie is Johnny Mnemonic. I think I was going for any dystopian stories involving megacorps (which btw makes your list every bit as relevant as what I came up with).
I'll need to check that movie out. Was it worth watching? I guess I can consult the reader reviews at IMDB. It's definitely "my generation" but I must have missed it.
No problem! I could use a good "soak" myself. Just have to find a nice pub. You know what they say about needing a "third place" to be a happy human. And mine ain't church!
"Then....Alien?"
Yeah, when we get industrial-invertebrate hybrids.
Turn Americans docile? Is increasing what is already in place mathematically possible?
Brilliant and necessary. Thank you so much, Yasha. We need this perspective and your and Evgenia’s incisive, but grounded and heartfelt voices at this time, more than ever.
Like Russia in the early 90s, various factions with different agendas are all trying to take advantage of an addled demented leader who has promised a wholesale „restructuring“ to make that restructuring benefit them. That makes it difficult to find real coherence. But if you read between the lines, Bessent and Musk do seem more or less aligned, and the goal is for the U.S. to dominate manufacturing in an AI driven, robotic factory world. They see that even in places like Bangladesh it won’t be long before fully automated factories replace people. The goal behind the tariffs is to force manufacturers to build those factories in the U.S. and not let them build higher value add manufacturing in their own countries. Basically the U.S. is trying to bully the rest of the world into mortgaging their futures to us before we lose our leverage over them.
yeah very good chance that ai/robotics manufacturing is gonna explode in the u.s. to replace human labor. and trump's people have talked about robotics being the solution to high domestic labor costs. so you're right.
i guess we file it under: yet another blow to "the let trump cook, he's killing neolibs and bringing back local production, ushering a better world for americans" narrative.
but who knows what will emerge from this if you take a long enough view.
" very good chance that ai/robotics manufacturing is gonna explode in the u.s. to replace human labor. "
Nothing I have seen so far from Trump and the rural industrial bourgeoisie indicate that they have the intellectual capability to reboot and rebuild domestic industrial engineering and manufacturing. I think this initial attempt at deglobalization will be a humiliating failure. There are too many hidden technological dependencies. There are no robotic millwrights yet. The current AI tech are mostly just linguistic chamelions, not genuine agents of mechanical, electronic and chemical engineering
Also, our current industrial workforce is seriously degraded. I have worked alongside young people attempting to work in factories and they have flailed at repairing complex machinery and retreated from the harsh environment back to playing videogames in their parents home.
well there you go.
A further indication of the incapability and desperation of the current US industrial base is the recent acquiescence of US Steel to be acquired by Nippon Steel. Both management and labor realize they are not up to the job of reconstruction and must accept offshore help, in spite of the profound desire for domestic control and self-determination.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/interactive/2025/zito-us-steel-nippon-steel-west-mifflin/
" the goal is for the U.S. to dominate manufacturing in an AI driven, robotic factory world."
The real question is whether software tech dweebs have the engineering power to actually construct an alternate fully-automated industrial infrastructure. I suspect their capabilities are too shallow to succeed in the short-term.
The roots of industrial technology are ancient and deep, in ways that financialized imbeciles do not begin to comprehend.
They probably don’t but I am sure they are perfectly happy to make you and me suffer in the process.
Agreed. Their commitment to a project that creates mass unemployment without a pre-existing social safety net is proof of their callousness and casual sadism.
And also their commitment to a "eugenic" culling of the population that is surplus to requirements. RFK Jr. using HHS to spread disease and death is probably part of the equation.
Thanks for this, the insight from USSR breakup is really valuable.
Mat Stoller has a decent piece about the tariffs on his substack that does a lot of decent speculation but only settles on the notion that there's no returning to the way things were before whatever changes arrive from this mess.
https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/with-high-tariffs-has-trump-ended
yeah i think global free trade neoliberalism is coming to an end — neoliberalism at home though isn’t going anywhere.
Definitely, Yasha. But don't tell Scott Bessent & Trump & Bill Ackman that—they are intent on reinstituting neoliberalism worldwide forever & ever. And will cause a tremendous amount of pain in doing so. That said, the stability of the neoliberal privatization regime is wholly dependent upon the financial leverage produced by imperialist marketization abroad—because that's how liquidity is introduced into the system.
I forgot to mention the postscript about the Democrats. Some of them and their media talking heads/writers seem to at least be making noises about a return to New Deal interventions, less along the lines of the Green New Deal and more about universal healthcare, income equality, a return to real regulations and monopoly busting, etc. But they're probably just pre-election panicky noises. Again and again, the 'services economy' and 'financialization' faction always seems to come out on top, especially right after elections. Here's a good Rob Urie article from 2020 on all that. https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/01/31/the-open-letter-and-the-dnc/
His conclusion: "Here is the political conundrum not addressed in the open letter (link at top of piece), if ousting Donald Trump fails to repair people’s lives, he’ll be back in a more virulent form in a matter of a few years at most. The political import of the DNC’s re-shenanigans is that they demonstrate that the establishment Democrats absolutely do not care either about repairing people’s lives or dislodging Mr. Trump as long as they stay in power. The centrists and corporatists the DNC is installing are being placed there to make sure that nothing changes— that people’s live aren’t repaired. That is where responsibility for Donald Trump lies, not with people who vote their conscience."
It is more likely that individual US states secede than a return to 19th century robber baron capitalism. If you are in Vermont or Minnesota, it's hard not to notice that your neighbors in Quebec and Manitoba aren't doing the disaster capitalism route. Why not bug out?
Yeltsin's Russia, probably, but also Gorbachev's Soviet Union - the bit where every SSR went their own way.
I'm dismissive of discourse that the US could devolve into a civil war, I just don't see anything that can unite people's interests enough to create divided sides that want to fight.
The discourse in Canada created a crack in my thinking. Trump has revived the corpse of the liberal party in Canada and even turned the Trumpian conservatives like Doug Ford against America. If the US were to actually go to war with Canada (big if), it would be massively unpopular and might inspire big resistance in Northern and Midwest states that have tighter relations and sympathies with Canada. I still consider it highly unlikely, but that feels like an issue that could create a true schism in the American populace.
I do think he wants America to have manufacturing. He’s talked about it for decades.
He sure does talk about it, but seems far too lazy to really do anything other than branding and a few headline grabs. Recall the workers at that Carrier plant in Indiana from his first go around?
https://www.indystar.com/story/news/politics/2020/10/30/carrier-factory-what-you-need-to-know-four-years-later/6052393002/
I made this comment before but still haven’t seen you guys address this, which I think remains a critical oversight. The thing missing here is CHINA. If you look at Vance and others rhetoric, they are analogizing what the US is doing to what (they think) China did, in same way that the “liberalization” of Russia was analogized to what supposedly made the US prosper. In the Russian case, they implemented “free markets” and “democracy” with none of the rule of law, anti-monopoly, worker protections, workplace protections, or anything else which the US actually had. And now with the US they’re going to implement “protectionism” like China but with none of the government investment into housing, factories, education and healthcare.
Simultaneously, as you’ve seen with iShowSpeed touring China, the actual existing material abundance and advancement of China relative to the US will play a similar psychological role as the US played to Russia in the 90s. (Except that if we had Chinese technocrats implementing this stuff, it would not be as insane)
So I agree with you in all your points but it’s critical to make this distinction because the way that things will worse may look quite different, and I think will be dramatically worse than many expect.
That's a good point. I think psychologically, too, China is what the Dem's Abundance Agenda stuff is about. The libs want to do what China did to solve home affordability etc but they want to do it through the free-market directly so they're pushing to scrap all regulations to let the dictatorship of the developers build endless seas of shitty houses.
Yeah I agree. The thing I get worried about is that when this push by the right inevitably fails, they will say the reason it succeeded in China is because they were ethnically homogeneous. And we’ve seen the Ezra Klein types be friendly to this type of thinking before, so any defense of immigrants we’re seeing now is going to quickly disappear in the meaner society resulting from a crash and from the spin used to justify it. “We coulda had abundance if it weren’t for all those nefarious immigrants” from the right and “statistically, higher prosperity is correlated with ethnic homogeneity so we should the rights proposal for mass extermination seriously” from the Very Serious Liberals.
ugh the 'homogenous' talking point, so fucking sick of that retort - "oh Sweden can make that work because they have a homogenous society"....jfc, exactly as you describe it, the reaction is typically a shrug and acceptance
Actually, I disagree on particulars here but I think it only further reinforces your broader point on the bacchanal of elite looting that is being prepared here… Bessent's idea is to impose "reciprocal tariffs" to force other countries to abandon their own domestic production programs—and as usual the American people to do the suffering for the gains of the investor strata who will continue to farm out their profits abroad on the decks of the blue water navy & it's air supremacy. It's just more imperialism that American workers always wind up paying for.
Fain & the UAW understand that Trump isn't intent on restoring American production or even restoring a domestic production program—that's why they will wind up being the ones who clarify to the public that a robust American domestic production program is in fact not what Trump is interested in. I guarantee you that Trump will start putting in carve outs for his pals in the durable goods business. It's up to us to make that fact clear to workers.
You know this isn't about spurring domestic production otherwise the Trump administration & Bessent wouldn't be "de-leveraging the public sector" for the benefit of Wall St. This is literally just the Obama playbook all over again—just seeking out a position worldwide for it because Wall St knows that they'll be looking at mass rebellion at home.
Here's Trump's Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent at the Economic Club of New York last month: "Regulations should serve to ensure the safe and soundness of U.S. banks, drive affordability across goods and services and facilitate economic growth. And we are going to accomplish this by improving the efficiency and effectiveness of our financial sector to underwrite and finance domestic activity. De-leveraging the public sector and re-leveraging the private sector begin and end with smartly reinvigorating our regulated financial institutions."
https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/sb0045
"It seems he wants to bring back at best the 1950s and at worst the 19th century: maximum fossil fuel consumption, factories, big naval armadas and drone armies, massive arms spending in preparation for a global war."
I think his main plan is a global war. And soon. That's the only way his manufacturing fantasies make any sense. The problem for him and the National Security mind virus is that although the US military has a lot of very deadly and powerful arms, they can't be replaced anytime soon after initial conflict. The defense industrial base is completely hollowed out and will take a decade or more to rebuild. China and its proxies will utterly dominate and humiliate the US through mass production of new arms.
And I see that as the greatest danger because I think the most likely response from a humiliated Trump is to go nuclear. It all seems perfectly set up - Whisky Pete, Laura Looney and the MAGA slaves who have replaced the comparatively sane adults in the military and security chains of command.
I've been anticipating and preparing for nuclear war my whole life. It's almost become a pathological death wish for me. But I wonder if that desire is also percolating in the diseased collective unconscious of our dying empire, with Shitler as a spasm of its raging Id.
I don't believe Trump wants to reshape the global economy. The Tariff gambit is stupid, but simply about further cementing his unchecked power. It's no mistake that he's cynically attacking universities over antisemitism and getting powerful law firms to bend their knees and do pro boni work for him at his pleasure. Trump loves dictators and envies the power of Putin and Xi, and has openly talked about it.
Tariffs let him control the fate of entire companies and industries on a whim. All negotiations have a single choke point with Trump from these actions. He's already blathering on about Vietnam getting a "great deal" and Musk is prattling on about no tariffs for the EU.
https://www.reuters.com/markets/asia/vietnam-foreign-ministry-says-regrets-us-tariff-decision-2025-04-04/
Part of the history of implementing the income tax and having Congress control tariffs and treaties was to prevent exactly what is happening now with Trump. Total control of the global economy with a single person. And an incredibly stupid person with a leadership team of light weights. Congress under thin Republican control presents no obstacle to Trump. There is no Manchin or Sienma here to buck MAGA.
What team Trump's hubris won't let them see is that the global order so carefulyl built and maintained by American elites may be over with Trump's total chaos and sowing of a lack of trust. Japan, Korea, and China in talks on economic cooperation? That's wild. But pragmatic of these advanced economies to realize they now potentially have a common enemy.Europe possibly waking up and realizing they might just need to do without the US? If elites in other countries truly wake up (a big if), it could very happen that there is very little sphere of influence for the US to leverage. We might just find ourselves alone in a much reduced economy.
"I’ve seen quite a few people who are critical of consumerist culture and our technological fetish gripe online about all the negativity that’s being heaped on Trump’s tariff plan by the left."
I can imagine this, but haven't seen it. Any names worth naming?
I've heard a bit of this type of thing (or pretty close) from Jimmy Dore and maybe RBN guys and I'm sure Greenwald is getting in on it. Their content isn't focused primarily on degrowth/consumption/tech, but based on their youtube clip titles, they are doing the 'give trump a chance' thing.
Greenwald, like Taibbi, would find an excuse to „give Trump a chance“ under any imaginable circumstance so I‘m not sure that counts.
Fair, probably hardly anyone considers Greenwald a part of "the left" as well.