#British economy collapse

[britishbusinessonline]

Why The UK Economy Is Now Unbelievably PATHETIC

Discussing The UK Economy This is Great Britain it was once a global superpower that had grown to rule over 400 million people making it the largest Empire in history. Before we get into all this, great news today, about the UK Economy, Wednesday 19th of June 2024. UK inflation hit the Bank of England’s 2% target in May. However, this picture of Britain can now only be seen in history books…

[heritageposts]

Ask an older generation of white South Africans when they first felt the bite of anti-apartheid sanctions, and some point to the moment in 1968 when their prime minister, BJ Vorster, banned a tour by the England cricket team because it included a mixed-race player, Basil D’Oliveira. After that, South Africa was excluded from international cricket until Nelson Mandela walked free from prison 22 years later. The D’Oliveira affair, as it became known, proved a watershed in drumming up popular support for the sporting boycott that eventually saw the country excluded from most international competition including rugby, the great passion of the white Afrikaners who were the base of the ruling Nationalist party and who bitterly resented being cast out. For others, the moment of reckoning came years later, in 1985 when foreign banks called in South Africa’s loans. It was a clear sign that the country’s economy was going to pay an ever higher price for apartheid. Neither of those events was decisive in bringing down South Africa’s regime. Far more credit lies with the black schoolchildren who took to the streets of Soweto in 1976 and kicked off years of unrest and civil disobedience that made the country increasingly ungovernable until changing global politics, and the collapse of communism, played its part. But the rise of the popular anti-apartheid boycott over nearly 30 years made its mark on South Africans who were increasingly confronted by a repudiation of their system. Ordinary Europeans pressured supermarkets to stop selling South African products. British students forced Barclays Bank to pull out of the apartheid state. The refusal of a Dublin shop worker to ring up a Cape grapefruit led to a strike and then a total ban on South African imports by the Irish government. By the mid-1980s, one in four Britons said they were boycotting South African goods – a testament to the reach of the anti-apartheid campaign. . . . The musicians union blocked South African artists from playing on the BBC, and the cultural boycott saw most performers refusing to play in the apartheid state, although some, including Elton John and Queen, infamously put on concerts at Sun City in the Bophuthatswana homeland. The US didn’t have the same sporting or cultural ties, and imported far fewer South African products, but the mobilisation against apartheid in universities, churches and through local coalitions in the 1980s was instrumental in forcing the hand of American politicians and big business in favour of financial sanctions and divestment. By the time President FW de Klerk was ready to release Mandela and negotiate an end to apartheid, a big selling point for part of the white population was an end to boycotts and isolation. Twenty-seven years after the end of white rule, some see the boycott campaign against South Africa as a guide to mobilising popular support against what is increasingly condemned as Israel’s own brand of apartheid.

. . . continues at the guardian (21 May, 2021)

[tanadrin]

Sorry about the long ask, but what do you think about this claim: i often see marxists (and adjacent groups, blah blah) say that the united states (empire) is about to collapse or is gradually declining, something along those lines, and specifically with regard to its economy, military and ideology. For example, i was watching a video hosting Richard Wolff, and he claimed that the united states is being replaced by china as the global superpower; he compares the situation to the historical rise of the united states relative to the british empire that slowly took place in the 19th and 20th centuries. I think his comparison is slightly flawed (imo hes comparing apples to oranges here), but in the broad strokes he might be right? I also remember seeing a pretty respectable maoist on here claim the us military is failing. Idk, i would like to hear your take

This answer got real long, so I added a cut. The short version is "people who say things like this are living in a fantasy land, and you can safely ignore their opinions on anything else as a result."

The United States is not the USSR in 1990 or Somalia in 1994 or Rome in the fifth century, or anything similar. Failed states are absolutely a thing, and they're fascinating (and often quite depressing!) historical case studies, and the United States looks nothing like a failed state. It's not even about to collapse in the sense of "suffer a prolonged period of sharp economic decline that forces it to drastically reduce its presence in the wider world and curtails its power in influence." It's not even about to collapse in the sense of "experience significant regime change." The U.S. economy is, overall, doing quite well. There is no significant popular unrest. There is no elite appetite for revolution. There are not competing centers of power that would rather see the status quo burned to the ground than their rivals get power. You might want the U.S. to collapse, and you might not, but the idea it is about to is pure fantasy.

I think before we get to any other specific claims about the United States' position relative to other countries, it's important to note that claims of impending American collapse are, like claims of impending civilizational collapse or Paul Ehrlich's claim of worldwide hunger or breathless claims that the war in Ukraine is going to escalate into WW3 any day now, IMO affective claims about how the speaker feels about the world: there is a certain class of person who, whether out of nihilistic glee, hope of revolutionary change, or simply untrammeled anxiety sees the signs of collapse all around them, Doom-Is-Nigh streetcorner prophets who are emotionally invested in the idea of collapse, for whom the idea of collapse would often justify some pillar of their politics. If, after all, the US is a failed state about to be toppled by its own decadence, this would justify their inordinate degree of contempt for the US.

On another recent post someone phrased claims like this as often being more about "what would be necessary for someone's politics to be justified," and I think that's an important part of it! In fact I think "affective claims about the world being distorted into factual claims about the world bc they are what would be necessary to justify someone's politics" is a fully general phenomenon, regardless of political orientation. There are much milder forms of it than out-and-out doomerism, though of course the absurdity of doomerist claims to this degree make it really hard to take someone's claims about the state of the world seriously.

About the specific claims here:

Re: China: China has experienced terrific growth since the end of WW2, and that's great! A country of over a billion people should by any reasonable metric be one of the largest economies on Earth, and China is, it seems, taking its inevitable place internationally as an economic powerhouse. It's a big country with a ton of people, and it's terrific that it has been able to lift so many people out of the grinding poverty that prevailed throughout much of the country in the 20th century. But like a lot of middle-income countries it seems to be having a ton of trouble, for significant institutional reasons, transitioning from an industrialization-focused economy to one driven by consumer demand and consumer spending. AIUI (and I am so, so far from an expert; mostly I just read what folks like @argumate post from other sources), China has a lot of debt dragging down its economy, and weak consumer demand. China is still much poorer than the United States on a per capita basis, and though it has a large military, is much less capable of projecting its power beyond its borders. It has aspired to increase its economic and diplomatic influence through the Belt and Road initiative, but returns on this project have been decidedly mixed, and China's military and strategic focus remains decidedly confined to its neighborhood. It wants to absorb Taiwan and protect its interests in the South China Sea, and prop up North Korea and such, but it's not able to or interested in, like, fielding large carrier groups that routinely sail up and down the world's oceans or conduct invasions of distant countries like the U.S. is able to. N.B., I'm not saying those invasions are good, just that the U.S. can historically, if it wants, invade and occupy basically any small-to-medium sized country on the planet in a few weeks, and that's not the kind of capability China has, or--AFAICT--is interested in developing.

The British Empire comparison is also, I think, very misleading, and gets at something I find frustrating about a lot of modern Marxists: they want to fit everything into the model of 19th century capitalist imperialism, when the modern global system doesn't look too much like that anymore. Mostly countries like the United States, if they have economic interests in a country, don't invade and reduce the country to a status of colony to extract raw resources from. The Cold War supported a fair bit of regime change in the service of commercial interests, even in the aftermath of post-WW2 decolonization, but nowadays the tools used to develop and enforce the international order preferred by the Status Quo Coalition (which is led, but not commanded by the United States) are much more indirect. They don't involve directly administering colonies, which is significant because colonialism is, for the states that run it, expensive as hell. Sure, it's great for commercial interests--but it's often more a drain on state finances than anything else. I have come around to the view that colonialism was as much an expression of wealth as it was a means to acquire more. Britain was always a small-but-wealthy island country whose empire was much, much larger than its metropole. The vast majority of the population and wealth controlled by the United States is within the fifty states which comprise the core territory of the United States. This isn't Britain with a far-flung overseas empire which is expensive to administer and a minority of Britons on the island itself--this is a country whose wealth and industry is built on a population of 350 million or so which identifies as American first, which speaks English and votes for President and congress. Most of the United States' actual imperial possessions are tiny archipelagoes these days that are economically marginal, or else military bases overseas--these do not generate American wealth and power, they are expressions of it. For the United States to collapse like the British Empire did, it would have to lose control of California and Texas and the Midwest or something like that--which is a goofy-ass fantasy, because if the United States federal government disappeared tomorrow, I think the vast majority of the 350 million or so people living in the present borders of the United States would support re-establishing the United States federal government. Americans like and support the country they live in! This is very different from the subjects of the British Raj, or even the people of Australia and Canada, who had begun to develop their own identity (and thanks to distance from the metropole, completely divergent economic and political interests).

"The U.S. is an empire analogous Britain" is only true if you squint from very far away and don't care about the specifics of history, economics, or politics. But I think again the way to understand this claim is partly affective. If the U.S. really is the second incarnation of the British Empire, then you can cast a lot of disparate conflicts that otherwise don't fit the mold under the aegis of a broad anti-colonial struggle. It also facilitates a certain sort of base campism that some people love to indulge in--the NATO-is-always-evil-so-anything-NATO-doesn't-like-is-good angle, which has a lot of self-described leftists backing in to saying that Putin's Russia is somehow an antifascist or anticolonial force for good in the world.

"The U.S. military is failing" is pure cope. There's no country or active coalition of countries that's even remotely close to the U.S. military in capabilities. Though there is always going to be a stream of waste and corruption and medium-sized bureaucratic fuckups streaming out of the U.S. military, it remains without peer simply by virtue of one of the largest economies on the planet being willing to spend like 4% of its GDP on military stuff. The EU or China might in some counterfactual world be able to field a similar military if they spent a comparable amount, and had similar strategic aims, but they won't and they don't, so unless U.S. foreign policy drastically changes and military spending is slashed as a result, I don't see that changing at any time in the near future.

[dostoyevsky-official]

this a view of someone who's ignored european developments since 2007, opting for a rosy, outdated view of european politics, i.e. the exact type of american committing the exact type of mistake i'm warning about.

to address this point by point: not only has inflation been a global issue, but the US has consistently enjoyed the lowest inflation of any developed economy. american CPI has remained below the british, polish, and eurozone average numbers. european economies have to deal with fallout from the russian invasion of ukraine that the us can ignore: notably, in energy prices, as the US became self-sufficient in energy (and never imported any from russia to begin with, something squeezing the german economy). america is also not hosting millions of ukrainian refugees.

when discussing european instutions—and "europe" in general—one has to be more specific. do you mean the overarching institutions of the EU, criticized for a democratic deficit that many have pinpointed as one source for euro-skepticism and the rise of the far right? the EU Council, widely ignored and headed by charles michel, an incompetent, blatant nepobaby appointment whom everyone grinds their teeth over? the EU parliament, recently filled with a fresh batch of far-right hooligans, which functions more or less as a rubber stamp for the commission? the EU commission itself, headed by VdL, the latest in a string of failed local politician commissioners (who remembers the alcoholic swindler juncker?) masquerading as technocrats? the ECB, which smothers the monetary (and through the maastricht criteria, the fiscal) policy of eurozone members, thereby fueling resentment, far-right movements, and economic disparity? and all of this held hostage by the veto of one orban or fico, —or the german supreme court, when it decides it's had enough with public investment. those institutions, which remain so opaque that even educated americans—and europeans—aren't entirely aware of their function?

or do we mean the institutions of individual countries, ranging from undemocratic autocracies like hungary to the fief of the jupiter king, who called elections in june, lost them, refused to nominate a prime minister from the winning coalition, didn't name any for over a month, and then appointed a rightwing politician from a party that scored dead last, sidestepping his own centrist party? the UK, where sir keir is handing out five years in jail time to climate protesters, raising tuition fees, relying on private investment companies, and through rachel reeves' plan to fix the alleged budget hole left by hunt before further investment, again enacting austerity? this is all front-page headline news from the last half year.

european countries indeed have cheaper healthcare costs, better pensions, and other public goods that the united states does not. when considering "quality of life," remember, however, that most european countries have unemployment rates considered astronomic in america, especially for under-35s:

to focus again and again on european social democracy is to ignore that it has been steadily eroded since the end of the cold war and especially since the great recession by neoliberal political forces that crush the left and open the door for the far right. in the most blatant example, beside's macron's legislative politricks, the IMF-ECB-EC troika cut off euro cash liquidity flow to greece when syriza was trying to undo austerity under varoufakis. the greek collapse consigned a generation to economic failure, killed seniors, and curtailed possibilities for the youth. this erosion happened even in the nordic model, long imagined by americans as nothing short of a utopia:

In part due to the scrapping of wealth and inheritance taxes and a lower corporate tax than both the U.S. and European averages, Sweden has one of the most unequal distributions of wealth in the world today: on a level with Bahrain and Oman, and worse than the United States. Perhaps most dispiriting for Sanders, Sweden also now hosts the highest proportion of billionaires per capita in the world. Many of the country’s trademark social services are now provided by private firms. Its private schools even benefit from the same level of state subsidy as public schools—a voucher system far more radical than anything in the United States and that Democratic politicians would be crucified for advocating. Both here and there, right-leaning commentators in 2020 decried Sanders’s portrait as little more than what Johan Norberg, Swedish author of The Capitalist Manifesto, has called a 1970s “pipedream.” On this, Swedish observers on the left gloomily agree: despite official rhetoric, the “Nordic welfare model” is now more nostalgic myth than reality. (x)

to problematize further, there's an unadressed first world perspective: who's getting the good quality of life, why are the main economies of the EU so wealthy, and how does the EU continue to enrich itself? there are certainly many living outdoors today, drowning in the mediterranean, or dying of exposure in białowieża. fortress europe is a crime against humanity—and it doesn't beat back the far right. it weakens civic and human rights, undermines legal oversight, and criminalizes humanitarian engagement, allowing an authoritarian creep.

you shouldn't understand the political and the historical as a snapshot in time, but as a moving train. this is the state of europe today. all of the above is necessarily a simplification and an abbreviation, but there's a trajectory you can begin to trace out: given all of the above, where do you think europe is headed?

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The long, bloody lineage of private equity's looting

Tomorrow (June 3) at 1:30PM, I’m in Edinburgh for the Cymera Festival on a panel with Nina Allen and Ian McDonald.

Monday (June 5) at 7:15PM, I’m in London at the British Library with my novel Red Team Blues, hosted by Baroness Martha Lane Fox.

Fans of the Sopranos will remember the “bust out” as a mob tactic in which a business is taken over, loaded up with debt, and driven into the ground, wrecking the lives of the business’s workers, customers and suppliers. When the mafia does this, we call it a bust out; when Wall Street does it, we call it “private equity.”

It used to be that we rarely heard about private equity, but then, as national chains and iconic companies started to vanish, this mysterious financial arrangement popped up with increasing frequency. When a finance bro’s presentation on why Olive Garden needed to be re-orged when viral, there was a lot off snickering about the decline of a tacky business whose value prop was unlimited carbs. But the bro was working for Starboard Value, a hedge fund that specialized in buhying out and killing off companies, pocketing billions while destroying profitable businesses.

https://www.salon.com/2014/09/17/the_real_olive_garden_scandal_why_greedy_hedge_funders_suddenly_care_so_much_about_breadsticks/

Starboard Value’s game was straightforward: buy a business, load it with debt, sell off its physical plant — the buildings it did business out of — pay itself, and then have the business lease back the buildings, bleeding out money until it collapsed. They pulled it with Red Lobster,and the point of the viral Olive Garden dis track was to soften up the company for its own bust out.

The bust out tactic wasn’t limited to mocking middlebrow family restaurants. For years, the crooks who ran these ops did a brisk trade in blaming the internet. Why did Sears tank? Everyone knows that the 19th century business was an antique, incapable of mounting a challenge in the age of e-commerce. That was a great smokescreen for an old-fashioned bust out that saw corporate looters make off with hundreds of millions, leaving behind empty storefronts and emptier pension accounts for the workers who built the wealth the looters stole:

https://prospect.org/economy/vulture-capitalism-killed-sears/

Same goes for Toys R Us: it wasn’t Amazon that killed the iconic toy retailer — it was the PE bosses who extracted $200m from the chain, then walked away, hands in pockets and whistling, while the businesses collapsed and the workers got zero severance:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/business/wp/2018/06/01/how-can-they-walk-away-with-millions-and-leave-workers-with-zero-toys-r-us-workers-say-they-deserve-severance/

It’s a good racket — for the racketeers. Private equity has grown from a finance sideshow to Wall Street’s apex predator, and it’s devouring the real economy through a string of audactious bust outs, each more consequential and depraved than the last.

As PE shows that it can turn profitable businesses gigantic windfalls, sticking the rest of us with the job of sorting out the smoking craters they leave behind, more and more investors are piling in. Today, the PE sector loves a rollup, which is when they buy several related businesses and merge them into one firm. The nominal business-case for a rollup is that the new, bigger firm is more “efficient.” In reality, a rollup’s strength is in eliminating competition. When all the pet groomers, or funeral homes, or urgent care clinics for ten miles share the same owner, they can raise prices, lower wages, and fuck over suppliers.

They can also borrow. A quirk of the credit markets is that a standalone small business is valued at about 3–5x its annual revenues. But if that business is part of a large firm, it is valued at 10–20x annual turnover. That means that when a private equity company rolls up a comedy club, ad agency or water bottler (all businesses presently experiencing PE rollup), with $1m in annual revenues, it shows up on the PE company’s balance sheet as an asset worth $10–20m. That’s $10–20m worth of collateral the PE fund can stake for loans that let it buy and roll up more small businesses.

2.9 million Boomer-owned businesses, employing 32m people, are expected to sell in the next couple years as their owners retire. Most of these businesses will sell to PE firms, who can afford to pay more for them as a prelude to a bust out than anyone intending to operate them as a productive business could ever pay:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/16/schumpeterian-terrorism/#deliberately-broken

PE’s most ghastly impact is felt in the health care sector. Whole towns’ worth of emergency rooms, family practices, labs and other health firms have been scooped up by PE, which has spent more than $1t since 2012 on health acquisitions:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/17/the-doctor-will-fleece-you-now/#pe-in-full-effect

Once a health care company is owned by PE, it is significantly more likely to commit medicare fraud. It also cuts wages and staffing for doctors and nurses. PE-owned facilities do more unnecessary and often dangerous procedures. Appointments get shorter. The companies get embroiled in kickback scandals. PE-backed dentists hack away at children’s mouths, filling them full of root-canals.

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/17/the-doctor-will-fleece-you-now/#pe-in-full-effect

The Healthcare Private Equity Association boasts that its members are poised to spend more than $3t to create “the future of healthcare.”

https://hcpea.org/#!event-list

As bad as PE is for healthcare, it’s worse for long-term care. PE-owned nursing homes are charnel houses, and there’s a particularly nasty PE scam where elderly patients are tricked into signing up for palliative care, which is never delivered (and isn’t needed, because the patients aren’t dying!). These fake “hospices” get huge payouts from medicare — and the patient is made permanently ineligible for future medicare, because they are recorded being in their final decline:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/26/death-panels/#what-the-heck-is-going-on-with-CMS

Every part of the health care sector is being busted out by PE. Another ugly PE trick, the “club deal,” is devouring the medical supply business. Club deals were huge in the 2000s, destroying rent-controlled housing, energy companies, Mervyn’s department stores, Harrah’s, and Old Country Joe. Now it’s doing the same to medical supplies:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/14/billionaire-class-solidarity/#club-deals

Private equity is behind the mass rollup of single-family homes across America. Wall Street landlords are the worst landlords in America, who load up your rent with junk fees, leave your home in a state of dangerous disrepair, and evict you at the drop of a hat:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/16/die-miete-ist-zu-hoch/#assets-v-human-rights

As these houses decay through neglect, private equity makes a bundle from tenants and even more borrowing against the houses. In a few short years, much of America’s desperately undersupplied housing stock will be beyond repair. It’s a bust out.

You know all those exploding trains filled with dangerous chemicals that poison entire towns? Private equity bust outs:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/04/up-your-nose/#rail-barons

Where did PE come from? How can these people look themselves in the mirror? Why do we let them get away with it? How do we stop them?

Today in The American Prospect, Maureen Tkacik reviews two new books that try to answer all four of these questions, but really only manage to answer the first three:

https://prospect.org/culture/books/2023-06-02-days-of-plunder-morgenson-rosner-ballou-review/

The first of these books is These Are the Plunderers: How Private Equity Runs — and Wrecks — America by Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner:

https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/These-Are-the-Plunderers/Gretchen-Morgenson/9781982191283

The second is Plunder: Private Equity’s Plan to Pillage America, by Brendan Ballou:

https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/brendan-ballou/plunder/9781541702103/

Both books describe the bust out from the inside. For example, PetSmart — looted for $30 billion by RaymondSvider and his PE fund BC Partners — is a slaughterhouse for animals. The company systematically neglects animals — failing to pay workers to come in and feed them, say, or refusing to provide backup power to run during power outages, letting animals freeze or roast to death. Though PetSmart has its own vet clinics, the company doesn’t want to pay its vets to nurse the animals it damages, so it denies them care. But the company is also too cheap to euthanize those animals, so it lets them starve to death. PetSmart is also too cheap to cremate the animals, so its traumatized staff are ordered to smuggle the dead, rotting animals into random dumpsters.

All this happened while PetSmart’s sales increased by 60%, matched by growth in the company’s gross margins. All that money went to the bust out.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/antoinegara/2021/09/27/the-30-billion-kitty-meet-the-investor-who-made-a-fortune-on-pet-food/

Tkacik says these books show that we’re finally getting wise to PE. Back in the Clinton years, the PE critique painted the perps as sharp operators who reduced quality and jacked up prices. Today, books like these paint these “investors” as the monsters they are — crooks whose bust ups are crimes, not clever finance hacks.

Take the Carlyle Group, which pioneered nursing home rollups. As Carlyle slashed wages, its workers suffered — but its elderly patients suffered more. Thousands of Carlyle “customers” died of “dehydration, gangrenous bedsores, and preventable falls” in the pre-covid years.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/opioid-overdoses-bedsores-and-broken-bones-what-happened-when-a-private-equity-firm-sought-profits-in-caring-for-societys-most-vulnerable/2018/11/25/09089a4a-ed14-11e8-baac-2a674e91502b_story.html

KKR, another PE monster, bought a second-hand chain of homes for mentally disabled adults from another PE company, then squeezed it for the last drops of blood left in the corpse. KKR cut wages to $8/hour and increased shifts to 36 hours, then threatened to have workers who went home early arrested and charged with “patient abandonment.” Many of these homes were often left with no staff at all, with patients left to starve and stew in their own waste.

PE loves to pick on people who can’t fight back: kids, sick people, disabled people, old people. No surprise, then, that PE loves prisons — the ultimate captive audience. HIG Capital is a $55b fund that owns TKC Holdings, who got the contract to feed the prisoners at 400 institutions. They got the contract after the prisons fired Aramark, owned by PE giant Warburg Pincus, whose food was so inedible that it provoked riots. TKC got a million bucks extra to take over the food at Michigan’s Kinross Correctional Facility, then, incredibly, made the food worse. A chef who refused to serve 100 bags of rotten potatoes (“the most disgusting thing I’ve seen in my life”) was fired:

https://www.wzzm13.com/article/news/local/michigan/prison-food-worker-i-was-fired-for-refusing-to-serve-rotten-potatoes/69-467297770

TKC doesn’t just operate prison kitchens — it operates prison commissaries, where it gouges prisoners on junk food to replace the inedible slop it serves in the cafeteria. The prisoners buy this food with money they make working in the prison workshops, for $0.10–0.25/hour. Those workshops are also run by TKC.

Tkacic traces private equity back to the “corporate raiders” of the 1950s and 1960s, who “stealthily borrowed money to buy up enough shares in a small or midsized company to control its biggest bloc of votes, then force a stock swap and install himself as CEO.”

The most famous of these raiders was Eli Black, who took over United Fruit with this gambit — a company that had a long association with the CIA, who had obligingly toppled democratically elected governments and installed dictators friendly to United’s interests (this is where the term “banana republic” comes from).

Eli Black’s son is Leon Black, a notorious PE predator. Leon Black got his start working for the junk-bonds kingpin Michael Milken, optimizing Milken’s operation, which was the most terrifying bust out machine of its day, buying, debt-loading and wrecking a string of beloved American businesses. Milken bought 2,000 companies and put 200 of them through bankruptcy, leaving the survivors in a brittle, weakened state.

It got so bad that the Business Roundtable complained about the practice to Congress, calling Milken, Black, et al, “a small group is systematically extracting the equity from corporations and replacing it with debt, and incidentally accumulating major wealth.”

Black stabbed Milken in the back and tanked his business, then set out on his own. Among the businesses he destroyed was Samsonite, “a bankrupt-but-healthy company he subjected to 12 humiliating years of repeated fee extractions, debt-funded dividend payments, brutal plant closings, and hideous schemes to induce employees to buy its worthless stock.”

The money to buy Samsonite — and many other businesses — came through a shadowy deal between Black and John Garamendi, then a California insurance commissioner, now a California congressman. Garamendi helped Black buy a $6b portfolio of junk bonds from an insurance company in a wildly shady deal. Garamendi wrote down the bonds by $3.9b, stealing money “from innocent people who needed the money to pay for loved ones’ funerals, irreparable injuries, etc.”

Black ended up getting all kinds of favors from powerful politicians — including former Connecticut governor John Rowland and Donald Trump. He also wired $188m to Jeffrey Epstein for reasons that remain opaque.

Black’s shady deals are a marked contrast with the exalted political circles he travels in. Despite private equity’s obviously shady conduct, it is the preferred partner for cities and states, who buy everything from ambulance services to infrastructure from PE-owned companies, with disastrous results. Federal agencies turn a blind eye to their ripoffs, or even abet them. 38 state houses passed legislation immunizing nursing homes from liability during the start of the covid crisis.

PE barons are shameless about presenting themselves as upstanding cits, unfairly maligned. When Obama made an empty promise to tax billionaires in 2010, Blackstone founder SteveS chwarzman declared, “It’s a war. It’s like when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939.”

Since we’re on the subject of Hitler, this is a good spot to bring up Monowitz, a private-sector satellite of Auschwitz operated by IG Farben as a slave labor camp to make rubber and other materiel it supplied at a substantial markup to the wermacht. I’d never heard of Monowitz, but Tkacik’s description of the camp is chilling, even in comparison to Auschwitz itself.

Farben used slave laborers from Auschwitz to work at its rubber plant, but was frustrated by the logistics of moving those slaves down the 4.5m stretch of road to the facility. So the company bought 25,000 slaves — preferring children, who were cheaper — and installed them in a co-located death-camp called Monowitz:

https://www.commentary.org/articles/r-tannenbaum/the-devils-chemists-by-josiah-e-dubois-jr/

Monowitz was — incredibly — worse than Auschwitz. It was so bad, the SS guards who worked at it complained to Berlin about the conditions. The SS demanded more hospitals for the workers who dropped from beatings and overwork — Farben refused, citing the cost. The factory never produced a steady supply of rubber, but thanks to its gouging and the brutal treatment of its slaves, the camp was still profitable and returned large dividends to Farben’s investors.

Apologists for slavery sometimes claim that slavers are at least incentivized to maintain the health of their captive workforce. This was definitely not true of Farben. Monowitz slaves died on average after three months in the camp. And Farben’s subsidiary, Degesch, made the special Zyklon B formulation used in Auschwitz’s gas chambers.

Tkacik’s point is that the Nazis killed for ideology and were unimaginably cruel. Farben killed for money — and they were even worse. The banality of evil gets even more banal when it’s done in service to maximizing shareholder value.

As Farben historian Joseph Borkin wrote, the company “reduced slave labor to a consumable raw material, a human ore from which the mineral of life was systematically extracted”:

https://www.scribd.com/document/517797736/The-Crime-and-Punishment-of-I-G-Farben

Farben’s connection to the Nazis was a the subject of Germany’s Master Plan: The Story of Industrial Offensive, a 1943 bestseller by Borkin, who was also an antitrust lawyer. It described how Farben had manipulated global commodities markets in order to create shortages that “guaranteed Hitler’s early victories.”

Master Plan became a rallying point in the movement to shatter corporate power. But large US firms like Dow Chemical and Standard Oil waged war on the book, demanding that it be retracted. Borkin was forced into resignation and obscurity in 1945.

Meanwhile, in Nuremberg, 24 Farben executives were tried for their war crimes, and they cited their obligations to their shareholders in their defense. All but five were acquitted on this basis.

Seen in that light, the plunderers of today’s PE firms are part of a long and dishonorable tradition, one that puts profit ahead of every other priority or consideration. It’s a defense that wowed the judges at Nuremberg, so should we be surprised that it still plays in 2023?

Tkacik is frustrated that neither of these books have much to offer by way of solutions, but she understands why that would be. After all, if we can’t even close the carried interest tax loophole, how can we hope to do anything meaningful?

“Carried interest” comes up in every election cycle. Most of us assume it has something to do with “interest payments,” but that’s not true. The carried interest loophole relates to the “interest” that 16th-century sea captains had in their cargo. It’s a 600-year-old tax loophole that private equity bosses use to pay little or no tax on their billions. The fact that it’s still on the books tells you everything you need to know about whether our political class wants to do anything about PE’s plundering.

Notwithstanding Tkacik’s (entirely justified) skepticism of the weaksauce remedies proposed in these books, there is some hope of meaningful action. Private equity’s rollups are only possible because they skate under the $101m threshold for merger scrutiny. However, there is good — but unenforced — law that allows antitrust enforcers to block these mergers. This is the “incipiency standard” — Sec 7 of the Clayton Act — the idea that a relatively small merger might not be big enough to trigger enforcement action on its own, but regulators can still act to block it if it creates an incipient monopoly.

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/16/schumpeterian-terrorism/#deliberately-broken

The US has a new crop of aggressive — fearless — top antitrust enforcers and they’ve been systematically reviving these old laws to go after monopolies.

That’s long overdue. Markets are machines for eroding our moral values: “In comparison to non-market decisions, moral standards are significantly lower if people participate in markets.”

https://web.archive.org/web/20130607154129/https://www.uni-bonn.de/Press-releases/markets-erode-moral-values

The crimes that monsters commit in the name of ideology pale in comparison to the crimes the wealthy commit for money.

Catch me on tour with Red Team Blues in Edinburgh, London, and Berlin!

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/02/plunderers/#farbenizers

[Image ID: An overgrown graveyard, rendered in silver nitrate monochrome. A green-tinted businessman  with a moneybag in place of a head looms up from behind a gravestone. The right side of the image is spattered in blood.]

[mariacallous]

History grounds us.

History can help us find our footing. This is not because we can ever know what will happen next. It is rather because history can make familiar some consistent patterns of human life.

Such prompts for further thought are not analogies. When we think in terms of analogies, we get stuck on the differences, and those sticking points then becomes an excuse not to think historically at all. Of course what comes next in the 2020s won't be exactly like the 1790s or the 1860s or the 1930s or the 1990s — the reference points I am choosing here.

But in recalling these epochs (or others) we can start to see certain resemblances, certain patterns, and get ourselves thinking again.

In this spirit, I offer these four scenarios for Trumpomuskovia, the musko-trumpified America that is already upon us.

The 1790s. Rescuing Russia

One possible Trumpomuskovia rescues Russia: actively, passively, or just by collapsing. This scenario draws from the eighteenth century, the time of the partitions of Poland.

Empress Catherine’s Russian Empire, founded just decades before, was in trouble. It had no clear means of succession, and Catherine herself was the German wife of a murdered tsar (her husband). It saved itself by warfare in Ukraine, bringing under its control its fertile territories. Fortunately for Catherine the Great, its western neighbor, Poland, suffered from tremendous inequality of wealth, and was rent by struggles between clans of magnates -- or, as we would say today, oligarchs. One of her former lovers was made king. He did not always do what she wanted, but his Poland was not going to effectively resist. In this situation, Russia was able to intervene in Poland, brings about its partition, and claim Ukraine (beginning the relatively short historical period when Ukraine was ruled from Russia).

Today the Russian Federation, founded a few decades ago, is also in trouble. It has no clear means of succession, as its ruler has done away with democracy and established a personal dictatorship. He has a fantasy of Russian unity with Ukraine, based in some considerable measure on the exploits of the eighteenth-century empress, Catherine. Like Catherine, Putin counts on divisions within (and among) western powers. His campaign for Ukraine has been extremely bloody, and has brought the Russian economy to the point of collapse.

But like Catherine, Putin has favorites that are close to power: Musk and Trump. They will not always do exactly what he wants, but they probably generally will, and their will certainly bring a fractious oligarchy. Putin is counting on the Musk-Trump regime to rescue him by turning American power away from its allies and towards Russia. Quite a few of Trump's proposed appointments, and much of Musk's rhetoric, suggest that rescuing Russia will be the priority.

The 1860s. Secession

When Poland was partitioned at the end of the end of the eighteenth century, it was a shock. Could a major country simply disappear from the map? A second scenario is suggested by the 1860s, when the United States nearly did.

Some of Poland's rebels, such as Tadeusz Kościuszko and Kazimierz Pułaski, crossed the Atlantic to help America's fledgling republic, which they hoped would avoid the mistakes of their own. Kościuszko saw slavery as a curse that could weaken the United States, much as serfdom had weakened Poland. Unlike Poland, the young American republic faced no great neighbor, at least after the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 withdrawal of the British after the War of 1812. But the issue of slavery was almost enough to break the American republic anyway. In the aftermath of the Civil War, whites in southern states were able to exert disproportionate political power, by preventing African Americans from voting, and by dominating first the Democratic and then the Republican Party.

The United States in 2025 will be, in some sense, the victory of the old south. But is it a sustainable one? When people think of themselves as rebels they sometimes push too far when they actually have power. The social and cultural policies proposed by Trumpomuskovia are mainstream in much of the country, but not for most of the population. And the implementation of some of them, especially mass deportation, can reveal fault lines inside the federal government, between the federal government and the states, and among the states. An attempt to deport millions of people in 2025 could lead to clashes within and contests for control over the armed forces. Over the longer run, repressive social and cultural policies could lead to shifts of population, making the differences among the states still greater than they are. Trump has already been telling his people that the differences between them and the "enemy within" are greater than those between America and China or America and Russia.

Will Trumpomuskovia be stable? It is not a great leap for people to decide to move to California, on the logic that the state could make it alone, and already has a secession movement. Indeed, these moves are already happening.

From there it is a small step to start thinking of constellations of states that would be wealthier and more functional than the current United States. A west coast union would certainly be richer, and would have its own borders with Canada and Mexico.

It is sad to think about. But the next round of musing could easily follow: a west coast union plus Canada plus the New England, New York and Minnesota would have an economy about 2/3 the size of what was left of the United States, with a far higher GDP per capita, a better standard of living and longer life spans — just going by today’s numbers.

Such a hypothetical country would not have to worry about free trade with Canada, since it would be Canada; and it would not have to worry about free trade with Mexico, since it would have a border with Mexico. Unlike the residual United States, aka Trumpomuskovia, it would not be fighting a trade war with the European Union.

The 1930s: Electoral Fascism

This is the most familiar of the thought experiments and so probably requires the least elaboration. The resemblances are all familiar.

A politician who has attempted a coup d'état comes to power later anyway on the strength of elections, with a minority of the overall vote. He is supported by conservatives who want the Left to suffer and businesspeople who imagine that all he will do is suppress the trade unions. This politician speaks angrily of the media as "the enemy of the people" and condemns his political opponents as "the enemy within." He hopes for some kind of emergency in order to declare a state of permanent emergency -- for Hitler this was the Reichstag Fire of 1933, for Trump it could be something entirely imaginary. At that stage of fascism, an event in the real world could be made an element of a conspiracy; at the current stage, the event in the real world might not even be necessary.

Trump speaks, sensibly enough from his fascist perspective, of "Hitler's generals." What Trump has in mind is Hitler's personal control of the armed forces, which began in 1934 when soldiers and officers began to swear a personal oath to the Führer instead of an oath to the German constitution. It was indeed this event that made of Hitler the Führer, the Leader, rather than simply the chancellor or prime minister. Hitler's men opened their first concentration camp right after he came to power; if Trump's men are able to round up millions of non-citizens, they too will be in camps -- an institution, as we know, that can be turned to other purposes than its initial ones. The first major act of violence of Hitler's SS, aside from establishing those camps and running them, was a mass deportation of non-citizens.

From this scenario come the political lessons that I have tried to make familiar in other posts and in On Tyranny.

The 1990s: Reliving Russia

The fourth and final scenario is one that some of us will remember. Indeed, the 1990s in Russia might be seen not just as a point of reference, but as an origin story of Trumpomuskovia. In my book The Road to Unfreedom, I tried to argue that Russia, with its oligarchy, media monopolies, and fascism, revealed possible futures for the United States. This has never seemed a more reasonable place to begin an analysis than right now.

In the 1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, men who became known as oligarchs struggled to control the parts of the economy that could return quick profits -- the minerals, the metals, the pipelines, the hydrocarbons. All of this took place against the background, especially in the West, of either intensely naive or intensely cynical free market ideology: what ever is happening in Russia must be for the best, since without the state the magical forces of capitalism will ensure growth, freedom, and democracies. Instead, the collapse of the state led to wealth inequality, a battle for final control at the top, the perfection of alternative realities and media disinformation, and now fascism and a war of atrocity against Ukraine.

In that struggle, a doddering elected president, Boris Yeltsin, was surrounded by a cluster of oligarchs. The successor they chose, Vladimir Putin, was eventually able to tame them all, and become the oligarch king, the boss of bosses. In doing so he did not clean up the system, but simply insured that all of the dirt was his own. This situation rather strongly resembles the America of today, with an elderly president, Donald Trump, surrounded by a cluster of oligarchs. The oligarchs have chosen his successor: JD Vance.

It is very hard to tell, right now, who is actually running the show, if anyone. All of the headlines are about shocking personalities who do not identify in any sense with the larger interests of the country. Elon Musk and his tame DOGE seem set to dismantle the parts of the American government that are profitable and seize them for himself. All of this recalls late Yeltsin, and thus the transition of Putin. A difference: ketamine and fentanyl for the White House, not vodka as in the Kremlin back then.

Here’s the twist: there is actually an overlap of personnel in the two scenarios, and so now we are perhaps dealing with one history, rather than the past as an inspiration for the present. When Putin was elected president of Russia in 2000, no one would really have imagined that he would not only survive the oligarchs but become their chief and still be ruling a quarter century later. So is the Putin in this scenario… Putin?

It is tempting to imagine that Putin, who has to be regarded now as one of the oligarchs around Trump, could also unexpectedly end up on top, as America relives the Russia of the 1990s. He certainly occupies quite a lot of Trump's mental space. He is working to bully Trump, to make him feel subordinate (for example by showing naked pictures of his wife on television). Nikolai Patrushev, a central figure in the Russian intelligence and security apparatus under Putin, reminds Trump that he has debts to pay. Putin clearly has like-minded allies around Trump, Musk most importantly. Some of the people at the top of Trump's preferred national security team (Gabbard, Hegseth) mix Putinism and anti-qualifications.

Or is the Putin in this scenario Vance? Putin is now 72, and Trump is now 78. Will either of them be around in four years? Putin’s mass murderer client Assad is on the run in Syria and the ruble is well under a penny. At some point, one can at least imagine, Putin’s charisma fades. It is not hard to imagine Trump or Putin or both expelled from oligarchs' island. Putin won after the 1990s as an outsider; who is the dark horse now? Vance is the closest thing to a Putin-like figure in this scenario: odd background, less money than the people around him, rich patrons, clear ideology, smarter than he seems. But might one of his oligarch patrons actually emerge on top?

Or could Trump himself, despite looking like Yeltsin, surprise us and end up being the Putin of the scenario, first getting close to the oligarchs, then using the government to freeze them out, and finally himself getting rich, as he has always wanted?

But if our Reliving Russia scenario is the helpful one, the crucial point of resemblance is the dismantling of government and the oligarchical claim on whatever is left. Who emerges on top is, in some sense, secondary.

Combinations

History helps, because everything that has happened was something that could have happened. And those things that could have happened, usually unexpected at the time, stretch our minds about what might happen.

In the near future, in coming months and years, these four scenarios can intersect and combine. A Trumpomuskovia that seeks to rescue Russia can also be one that relives Russia. A Trumpomuskovia that looks fascist is also one that risks secession.

History warns. It would be wonderful if these scenarios helped people in positions of responsibility to make good choices.

History surprises. Strikingly, we see in most of the scenarios presence of Ukraine: for the old Russian Empire, and for the present one, and for that matter for Hitler, whose chief war aim was the control of Ukraine. Ukraine is a useful shortcut as we try to evaluate Trumpomuskovites: what do they say about Ukraine? As a rule of thumb, those that wish for its fall also want the fall of the American republic. I would expect that the first actions regarding Ukraine will be a harbinger of what is to come for America if Ukraine is sold out, expect America to be sold for parts.

History enlivens. It gets us outside the box of the daily outrages and our emotional responses. As we think outside the box, we sometimes catch a glimpse of what is inside it. In all four of these past moments, we see the problem of inequality somewhere close to the origin of political collapse. Any future rescue operation for the American republic will have to begin there.

[yuri-is-online]

My brain is whirring in the blender right now so here are the things I think twst characters would find interesting/horrifying

Atom bombs. Why would they need atom bombs? Wars were either fought with magic or swords if lilias backstory is standard war procedure. And in endless halloween, leona tells a (fake) story about a terrorist group on a yaht party or something that attacked with a magic cube. Also that whole moment with Oppenheimer where he didn't know if igniting that bomb would set off a chain reaction that would ignite all the other bombs and basically destroy the world. AND HE STILL FUCKING DID IT.

Gun. Same reasons as the atom bombs.

French revolution and the reign of terror. What do you mean 40,000 were executed and over 300,000 locked up in the time span if a few years? Why did the "french" switch between so many governments so fast? Who the hell is napoleon?

Russian revolution and Anastasia. that revolution was MESSY. But imagine telling leona or someone about how everyone thought that princess Anastasia and her brother escaped execution cause they couldn't find their bodies with the rest of the royal family. So all these middle aged women just started coming out being like "I am Anastasia", and one of these women was eventually accepted as Anastasia. Until they found out that thr royal family were submerge in vats of acid after they were killed, and because children's bones aren't quite solid, the just. Melted in the acid.

The whole mystery of those villages getting up one day and dancing themselves to death and we still don't know why.

Medieval torture devices. Like the crowd cage or when you get covered in honey and sent away on a boat to be eaten alive by bugs (jamil throws up)

The black plauge. Just. The black plauge.

Early Industrial revolution working conditions. I think even azul would get uncomfortable with those.

Mansu Musa going on tour and giving away so much gold that he collapsed entire economies.

The cold War. "Yeah so the US and the USSR were in a war-not-war because of paranoia of nuclear atom bombs but they couldn't actually go to war because if they actually went to war that would just be the end of the world so they just had a massive dick messering contest. Oh yeah! That's actually why we got the space race!"

The space race. ("The fucking moon in the sky!" "Yes azul, the moon in the sky. And Mars. And there are satellites that literally went to the cold cold edge of our solar system" "...why are you guys insane?")

American prohibition laws and the outlawing of alcohol that everyone hated so much that the government legalized alcohol again and now we have this thing called moonshine.

Mexican revolution and the solid century where their presidents just kept getting assassinated.

The greatest night in pop "we are the world". Just as a treat for the pop music club.

The entire age of exploration honestly. "What do you mean half your world didn't know the other half of the world was there until a few centuries ago?" "Oh you're gonna shit yourself when you find out what Europeans did next"

What the Europeans did next.

The world wars. Lilia has a fucking stroke while listening to it. But some of it was funny! Not really but yk! A polish bear loading an artillery Canon, an unsinkable cat, that British guy that carried a bow and arrow and played bag pipes when the nazis found him only to be the most unkillable yet unserious guy ever, a US naval captain that literally FLOODED HALF HIS SHIP on D-Day just to tilt that bitch back so they could hit the Germans better, and the US just converting a spare ship into a massive ice cream machine is pretty fucking hilarious.

The coups of the ancient past. I don't really remember who but I think this Indian (?) Prince literally threw his brother out a window, dragged him back upstairs, only to throw him out again for good measure is fucking hilarious.

The mono Lisa wasn't famous until this Guy™ stole it from a museum. The museum employs didn't even realize it was gone until someone asked where it went 💀

The way we name our countries tbh. Most of them translate to some ancient language (Spain translates to "rabbits" and Columbia is "dove"), but twst really has countries like. "Scolding Sands ✨️ and Queendom of Roses ✨️. So our country names are probably really weird to them. Especially the full country names. Do you know Hong Kongs official name? It's long as shit.

The first chainsaw was invented by two socttish doctors in the early 1800s to help with childbirth

I have many more historically rambling I could go on but this shit is getting long.

If anyone at any point wants to ramble about history they are very welcome to do so in my literal dms and not just my ask box. I love history and I love talking about it!!!

I think out of all of the things you listed the atom bomb, the space race, and the Cold War would probably be the what I think the various twst boys would find most interesting. Even in the history of our own world those things were extremely unusual, the sheer scale of something like a world war is really hard to grasp and I doubt Twisted Wonderland has had a similar event. I think the concept of such a thing would really scare the cast, though I imagine Idia, Leona, and Lilia would be grimly impressed at just how creative people can be when it comes to destroying each other. Magic isn't required to make a mess of things, sure they already knew that but oh wow. Now they're really thinking about it.

Now you know who would want to talk about all of these things? Professor Trein! He'd be really interested in learning anything and everything Yuu can remember about the history of their world. As an educator it allows him better insight into his student, and as a lover of history he gets to learn a lot of new things no one else knows.

[historia-vitae-magistras]

How do you feel about nation jobs or finances in your universe? Like are modern Matt or Alfred on government payroll even if they don’t do anything? I know you’re mentioned that Alfred is better at managing his money than Matt, is he rich??

Sorry I’m not phrasing this very well 😅

This is somewhat esoteric even for me, but I tied their abilities with money to their economic histories.

Alfred was born looking pretty pathetic next to the Spanish possessions in Mexico and South America or even British holdings in the Caribbean but, in short order, made up a significant percentage of the ships, people, and wealth of the British Empire. He became that on what was primarily the efforts of private enterprise. Alfred grows up understanding he is valuable; he represents value, and his choices create value. He's easy to love because he's a goddamn cash cow for Arthur until the Seven Years War when Britain spent a shit ton and wanted the Yanks to pay their share, and we threw a bitch fit and declared independence.

Matt, however, has the French bitching about what a money hole he is from about 20 minutes after he comes into being. The Basque, by far, made the most money initially with their fishing and whaling in the east, following what was reasonably similar to the Viking routes into Newfoundland. The fur trade that drove French settlement faced collapse about a half dozen times in his childhood, and besides a short binge economy for Ginseng and its brief boom in China, his entire existence was just fur. Dead beavers and the black market. That's it.

While the US was building ships, growing cash crops, running a fur trade economy, engaging in fishing, rope making, pitch collection, barrel making and everything and anything else, in the Caribbean, they had 90+ control over sugar production and trade routes. Canada had 10% of the population and thus 10% of the market power. We didn't do shit except freeze, fire at the British, commit war crimes against the New Englanders, ditch the farms and run off to the west to make families with indigenous women and run furs up the rivers to the point that France tried to make it illegal for people to leave the settlements of Quebec City and Montreal without permission.

So from a relatively early point, Alfred is very smart with his investments, and he's been making his investments since the early 19th century, so there's a significant but often catastrophically destroyed habit of investing. When he was younger and incredibly newly independent, he got fleeced a few times, but he's called smart and secure, especially since the 1929 crash. It's not remarkably large amounts of money because he'll never completely trust the government, and he doesn't want to attract attention or pay massive amounts of taxes, so he's very well diversified. But he's certainly not poor. All his more expensive hobbies come from a particular office in the state department that Alfred sometimes cooperates with and sometimes doesn't, depending on how anti-establishment he and the public feel.

As for Matt, having spent a lot longer as a colonial subject, it's not that he's entirely shit with money but what he knew how to do. The heart of the empire was the financial hub and was outside his control long after even the Confederation in the 1860s. The money situation has been a nightmare since the earliest days of the French Regime using playing cards to pay people. Colonial America had some similar issues. The whole concept of the US dollar originated in the 1690 invasion of Quebec when the Massachusetts Bay Colony printed its own money to fund the expedition, but Alexander Hamilton did some flash economic magic for the US in this department in the 1790s, so it got its shit together long before Canada. Matt knows what he needs to know. He was stationed in various Canadian ports, keeping an eye on his father's investments, not his own.

So, in the modern day, Alfred reads his bank statements every month, keeps track of his subscriptions and bills, and probably has an accountant. Matt is more aware of Alfred's money habits than his own. Because he's over here just kind of vaguely wondering if his debit card will work because my man cannot make heads or tails of his economy (no, seriously, Canadian economists have no idea how Canada's own shit works. Sometimes it's pretty fascinating, there's often no real consensus like the US academic economist have.) And international investors in Canada are always freaking out because the Canadian economy is always getting its shit rocked by the US economy. It's hilarious to think of people in Matt's life frustratedly trying to figure out where and what his money's doing. If their health is tied to their economies, Matt's in pretty good shape, thanks to close ties to the US, but he's randomly dying reasonably often because the US economy's tiny little ripples will randomly tear him apart. It's pretty funny (laughs so I don't sob in the Canadian job market.)

And that's pretty fitting, considering that most Canadian economic policy is boiled down to 'hope the Americans are feeling cooperative next time NAFTA comes up for debate.'

[magpiejay1234]

UK internal politics don't matter globally as British people think it does, but it is becoming clear that Farage, or a successor to him will become the next PM fairly soon, especially with Musk's backing.

Tories are ideologically inconsistent, and Labour is busier with intra-party warfare than defeating the far-right, and Farage is more palatable for the common audience than other far-right factions in Europe & UK, despite his actual politics, which he never discloses publicly.

If this happens, this will likely be the end of UK as we know it, and will likely speed up the dissolution of the Commonwealth realm (the countries that keep the British monarchy, not the Commonwealth of Nations).

Bigger question is, of course, with the fall of Labour, who will take the left. British people despise coalitions, like the French, so any broad front is dead on arrival. The only option of defascistisation is the collapse of Faragism due to internal incoherence.

Basically all other factions of British political spectrum want to stab each other, and the voter base, while smarter than the politicians, retain the Bonapartism of their parliamentary representatives.

**Lib Dems, and Greens both want to kick Labour out of England, to become the party of the left, for their respective policy goals (rejoining EU, becoming a renewable energy giant in Europe).

**Regional nationalist parties want to leave the UK to rejoin EU as soon as possible. They want to keep fascism at bay, but incorrectly view Faragism as a purely English phenomenon (it isn't, it is merely hyperlocalised in England).

**Tories want to keep using Farage as a stick to beat other parties to achieve their goals, which depending on the leader, it is either becoming a tax haven, chase mirages of British imperialism, or become a de-facto part of USA.

**Labour has no policies whatsoever, their long-term goal is to make the permanent war economy palatable for their own corporatist nostalgia for 1960s-1970s, like the USA Democrats.

Similarities to the French situation are astounding, even if the stakes are less severe.

Since all the factions will blame each other, short of voters tactically voting, Farage will sweep clean the field, like Thatcher did.

[misfitwashere]

Trumpomuskovia

Four scenarios

TIMOTHY SNYDER

NOV 30

History grounds us. 

History can help us find our footing. This is not because we can ever know what will happen next. It is rather because history can make familiar some consistent patterns of human life.

Such prompts for further thought are not analogies. When we think in terms of analogies, we get stuck on the differences, and those sticking points then becomes an excuse not to think historically at all. Of course what comes next in the 2020s won't be exactly like the 1790s or the 1860s or the 1930s or the 1990s — the reference points I am choosing here. 

But in recalling these epochs (or others) we can start to see certain resemblances, certain patterns, and get ourselves thinking again.

In this spirit, I offer these four scenarios for Trumpomuskovia, the musko-trumpified America that is already upon us.

The 1790s. Rescuing Russia

One possible Trumpomuskovia rescues Russia: actively, passively, or just by collapsing. This scenario draws from the eighteenth century, the time of the partitions of Poland.

Empress Catherine’s Russian Empire, founded just decades before, was in trouble. It had no clear means of succession, and Catherine herself was the German wife of a murdered tsar (her husband). It saved itself by warfare in Ukraine, bringing under its control its fertile territories. Fortunately for Catherine the Great, its western neighbor, Poland, suffered from tremendous inequality of wealth, and was rent by struggles between clans of magnates -- or, as we would say today, oligarchs. One of her former lovers was made king. He did not always do what she wanted, but his Poland was not going to In this situation, Russia was able to intervene in Poland, brings about its partition, and claim Ukraine (beginning the relatively short historical period when Ukraine was ruled from Russia).

Today the Russian Federation, founded a few decades ago, is also in trouble. It has no clear means of succession, as its ruler has done away with democracy and established a personal dictatorship. He has a fantasy of Russian unity with Ukraine, based in some considerable measure on the exploits of the eighteenth-century empress, Catherine. Like Catherine, Putin counts on divisions within (and among) western powers. His campaign for Ukraine has been extremely bloody, and has brought the Russian economy to the point of collapse.

But like Catherine, Putin has favorites that are close to power: Musk and Trump. They will not always do exactly what he wants, but they probably generally will, and their will certainly bring a fractious oligarchy. Putin is counting on the Musk-Trump regime to rescue him by turning American power away from its allies and towards Russia. Quite a few of Trump's proposed appointments, and much of Musk's rhetoric, suggest that rescuing Russia will be the priority.

The 1860s. Secession

When Poland was partitioned at the end of the end of the eighteenth century, it was a shock. Could a major country simply disappear from the map? A second scenario is suggested by the 1860s, when the United States nearly did.

Some of Poland's rebels, such as Tadeusz Kościuszko and Kazimierz Pułaski, crossed the Atlantic to help America's fledgling republic, which they hoped would avoid the mistakes of their own. Kościuszko saw slavery as a curse that could weaken the United States, much as serfdom had weakened Poland. Unlike Poland, the young American republic faced no great neighbor, at least after the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 withdrawal of the British after the War of 1812. But the issue of slavery was almost enough to break the American republic anyway. In the aftermath of the Civil War, whites in southern states were able to exert disproportionate political power, by preventing African Americans from voting, and by dominating first the Democratic and then the Republican Party.

The United States in 2025 will be, in some sense, the victory of the old south. But is it a sustainable one? When people think of themselves as rebels they sometimes push too far when they actually have power. The social and cultural policies proposed by Trumpomuskovia are mainstream in much of the country, but not for most of the population. And the implementation of some of them, especially mass deportation, can reveal fault lines inside the federal government, between the federal government and the states, and among the states. An attempt to deport millions of people in 2025 could lead to clashes within and contests for control over the armed forces. Over the longer run, repressive social and cultural policies could lead to shifts of population, making the differences among the states still greater than they are. Trump has already been telling his people that the differences between them and the "enemy within" are greater than those between America and China or America and Russia.

Will Trumpomuskovia be stable? It is not a great leap for people to decide to move to California, on the logic that the state could make it alone, and already has a secession movement. Indeed, these moves are already happening. 

From there it is a small step to start thinking of constellations of states that would be wealthier and more functional than the current United States. A west coast union would certainly be richer, and would have its own borders with Canada and Mexico. 

It is sad to think about. But the next round of musing could easily follow: a west coast union plus Canada plus the New England, New York and Minnesota would have an economy about 2/3 the size of what was left of the United States, with a far higher GDP per capita, a better standard of living and longer life spans — just going by today’s numbers. 

Such a hypothetical country would not have to worry about free trade with Canada, since it would be Canada; and it would not have to worry about free trade with Mexico, since it would have a border with Mexico. Unlike the residual United States, aka Trumpomuskovia, it would not be fighting a trade war with the European Union.

The 1930s: Electoral Fascism

This is the most familiar of the thought experiments and so probably requires the least elaboration. The resemblances are all familiar.

A politician who has attempted a coup d'état comes to power later anyway on the strength of elections, with a minority of the overall vote. He is supported by conservatives who want the Left to suffer and businesspeople who imagine that all he will do is suppress the trade unions. This politician speaks angrily of the media as "the enemy of the people" and condemns his political opponents as "the enemy within." He hopes for some kind of emergency in order to declare a state of permanent emergency -- for Hitler this was the Reichstag Fire of 1933, for Trump it could be something entirely imaginary. At that stage of fascism, an event in the real world could be made an element of a conspiracy; at the current stage, the event in the real world might not even be necessary.

Trump speaks, sensibly enough from his fascist perspective, of "Hitler's generals." What Trump has in mind is Hitler's personal control of the armed forces, which began in 1934 when soldiers and officers began to swear a personal oath to the Führer instead of an oath to the German constitution. It was indeed this event that made of Hitler the Führer, the Leader, rather than simply the chancellor or prime minister. Hitler's men opened their first concentration camp right after he came to power; if Trump's men are able to round up millions of non-citizens, they too will be in camps -- an institution, as we know, that can be turned to other purposes than its initial ones. The first major act of violence of Hitler's SS, aside from establishing those camps and running them, was a mass deportation of non-citizens.

From this scenario come the political lessons that I have tried to make familiar in other posts and in On Tyranny.

The 1990s: Reliving Russia

The fourth and final scenario is one that some of us will remember. Indeed, the 1990s in Russia might be seen not just as a point of reference, but as an origin story of Trumpomuskovia. In my book The Road to Unfreedom, I tried to argue that Russia, with its oligarchy, media monopolies, and fascism, revealed possible futures for the United States. This has never seemed a more reasonable place to begin an analysis than right now. 

In the 1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, men who became known as oligarchs struggled to control the parts of the economy that could return quick profits -- the minerals, the metals, the pipelines, the hydrocarbons. All of this took place against the background, especially in the West, of either intensely naive or intensely cynical free market ideology: what ever is happening in Russia must be for the best, since without the state the magical forces of capitalism will ensure growth, freedom, and democracies. Instead, the collapse of the state led to wealth inequality, a battle for final control at the top, the perfection of alternative realities and media disinformation, and now fascism and a war of atrocity against Ukraine.

In that struggle, a doddering elected president, Boris Yeltsin, was surrounded by a cluster of oligarchs. The successor they chose, Vladimir Putin, was eventually able to tame them all, and become the oligarch king, the boss of bosses. In doing so he did not clean up the system, but simply insured that all of the dirt was his own. This situation rather strongly resembles the America of today, with an elderly president, Donald Trump, surrounded by a cluster of oligarchs. The oligarchs have chosen his successor: JD Vance. 

It is very hard to tell, right now, who is actually running the show, if anyone. All of the headlines are about shocking personalities who do not identify in any sense with the larger interests of the country. Elon Musk and his tame DOGE seem set to dismantle the parts of the American government that are profitable and seize them for himself. All of this recalls late Yeltsin, and thus the transition of Putin. A difference: ketamine and fentanyl for the White House, not vodka as in the Kremlin back then.

Here’s the twist: there is actually an overlap of personnel in the two scenarios, and so now we are perhaps dealing with one history, rather than the past as an inspiration for the present. When Putin was elected president of Russia in 2000, no one would really have imagined that he would not only survive the oligarchs but become their chief and still be ruling a quarter century later. So is the Putin in this scenario… Putin? 

It is tempting to imagine that Putin, who has to be regarded now as one of the oligarchs around Trump, could also unexpectedly end up on top, as America relives the Russia of the 1990s. He certainly occupies quite a lot of Trump's mental space. He is working to bully Trump, to make him feel subordinate (for example by showing baked pictures of his wife on television). Nikolai Patrushev, a central figure in the Russian intelligence and security apparatus under Putin, reminds Trump that he has debts to pay. Putin clearly has like-minded allies around Trump, Musk most importantly. Some of the people at the top of Trump's preferred national security team (Gabbard, Hegseth) mix Putinism and anti-qualifications.

Or is the Putin in this scenario Vance? Putin is now 72, and Trump is now 78. Will either of them be around in four years? Putin’s mass murderer client Assad is on the run in Syria and the ruble is well under a penny. At some point, one can at least imagine, Putin’s charisma fades. It is not hard to imagine Trump or Putin or both expelled from oligarchs' island. Putin won after the 1990s as an outsider; who is the dark horse now? Vance is the closest thing to a Putin-like figure in this scenario: odd background, less money than the people around him, rich patrons, clear ideology, smarter than he seems. But might one of his oligarch patrons actually emerge on top? 

Or could Trump himself, despite looking like Yeltsin, surprise us and end up being the Putin of the scenario, first getting close to the oligarchs, then using the government to freeze them out, and finally himself getting rich, as he has always wanted? 

But if our Reliving Russia scenario is the helpful one, the crucial point of resemblance is the dismantling of government and the oligarchical claim on whatever is left. Who emerges on top is, in some sense, secondary.

Combinations

History helps, because everything that has happened was something that could have happened. And those things that could have happened, usually unexpected at the time, stretch our minds about what might happen. 

In the near future, in coming months and years, these four scenarios can intersect and combine. A Trumpomuskovia that seeks to rescue Russia can also be one that relives Russia. A Trumpomuskovia that looks fascist is also one that risks secession.

History warns. It would be wonderful if these scenarios helped people in positions of responsibility to make good choices.

History surprises. Strikingly, we see in most of the scenarios presence of Ukraine: for the old Russian Empire, and for the present one, and for that matter for Hitler, whose chief war aim was the control of Ukraine. Ukraine is a useful shortcut as we try to evaluate Trumpomuskovites: what do they say about Ukraine? As a rule of thumb, those that wish for its fall also want the fall of the American republic. I would expect that the first actions regarding Ukraine will be a harbinger of what is to come for America if Ukraine is sold out, expect America to be sold for parts.

History enlivens. It gets us outside the box of the daily outrages and our emotional responses. As we think outside the box, we sometimes catch a glimpse of what is inside it. In all four of these past moments, we see the problem of inequality somewhere close to the origin of political collapse. Any future rescue operation for the American republic will have to begin there.

[dramioneasks]

Author Profile: SaffronGin aka Miso

Fics can be found: ffnet | ao3 | @saffrongin

Popular Fics:

Title: Magic and Minds Author: SaffronGin Rating: E Genre(s): Romance, Drama Chapters: 45 Word Count: 119,607 Summary: In the world following the defeat of Voldemort, the economy has come to a near-complete collapse in the British Ministry for Magic as other countries have cut off trading to distance themselves from the Dark Wizard's stain and reputation. Hermione watches as her former classmates and friends all rush to make matches in an attempt to secure Pureblood inheritances back into the economy to stop a Great Depression from happening. Hermione was never going to partake, and she couldn't understand what was so appealing about Draco Malfoy.

Title: I will rise like a fucking phoenix Author: SaffronGin Rating: E Genre(s): Romance, Drama Chapters: 73 Word Count: 75,160 Summary: Hermione Granger returns to Hogwarts for her Eight Year in an attempt to complete her NEWTs. She immediately pegs Draco Malfoy as her biggest rival.

Title: The Corruption of Hermione Granger Author: SaffronGin Rating: E Genre(s): Romance Chapters: 1 Word Count: 6,160 Summary: Hermione wants to get over Ron. What better way than to proposition three men in an attempt at testing the phrase "The best way to get over someone, is to get under someone else." She thought she would be turned down, but in the end, she had her wildest fantasy come to fruition.

[longwindedbore]

Progressives bleating ‘Elon Musk is acting like he’s POTUS doing this and that domestically and in foreign countries blah, blah, blah’

Are we still not yet understanding that the true shot-callers in our ‘Democracy’ are the oligarchs who control the financial sector in conjunction with oligarchs who control natural resources and the major economic hegemonies which utilize those resources?

Do we still believe that POTUS and the Legislature run domestic or foreign policy?

Even after -

Vietnam (rubber takeover attempt #4** Couldn’t get it out of a combat zone after 10 years of occupation so EVERY domestic tire company closed up shop in the 1970s and we pull out)

Iraq 1 and 2 (oil competitor UNDERCUTTING USA export prices)

Afghanistan (the effing Taliban was going to eradicate opium just as pharmaceuticals got it approved! Oops…decades later opioid addiction crises and big lawsuit…pull out! Pull out! Pull out!),

Panama in any decade (raising prices on the oligarchs without giving them a chance to raise prices on us first!)

Niger (who knew we had troops doing security for lithium mining?)

Etc

Etc

Etc

Consider that that the current foreign ‘threats’ are…coincidentally…the last two oil producing countries - Iran and Venezuela - who are willing to undercut our export prices?

At best our voting putting Dems in power can result in some limited actual trickle-down for the 99.9%. I used to think the Dems could ameliorate foreign hardships but then there was Gaza 2024.

=====================

Skip the following if you thought the foregoing was tedious.

**All wars are for Plunder. The US made plays for French rubber in

#1. 1917-1919.

Wilson brought the US into WW1 (a war to seize colonies) immediately after the Bolsheviks concluded a peace treaty with the Central Powers.

The British and French debt for munitions and materials was so high it would have collapsed the US economy. Handing over the British/French rubber concessions in SE Asia would have gone a long way to paying the debts. (I suspect but have no evidence that Pershing kept most US soldiers off the battlefields for a year not for training as the history books state. Some contrivance over the debt and possibly seizing colonies by having the only unexhausted army in the field?)

The Brits and the French instead violated the terms of the Armistice Cease-fire (no victors) and, with Wilson’s contrivance, shifted the debt to newly declared ‘surrendered’ Germany which was stripped of its colonies and trade concessions.

The reparations forced on the Weimar German Republic, of course, created the conditions fueling the Fascist takeover.

#2. 1941.

FDR assumed it was likely that the Japanese would honor their Defense agreement with Germany and attack the Soviet Union in 1941.

At which point the US and Britain were going to seize Indonesia oil and French rubber before the Nazi occupation governments in Europe could assert control over the colonies.

The fleet sunk at Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7th was the Pacific Coast Home Fleet and should have been at its home bases in San Diego, San Francisco and Puget Sound Washington (see Major General Smedly Butler’s ‘War is a Racket’)

Instead the PCHF had been shifted to Pearl to provide support for the Asian Pacific Fleet whose home base was Subic Bay.

As soon as the Japanese fleet sailed from their home bases in November 1941 the US APF left Subic Bay steaming for SE Asia.

HOWEVER, the Japanese viewed their mutual defense obligation to Hitler voided because he attacked the USSR rather than being attacked.

So the superior Japanese battleships steamed to to SE Asia while their aircraft carriers steamed in complete radio silence toward Pearl.

In SE Asia the Japanese sunk the British Indian Ocean fleet as well as a joint Dutch/British/US APC fleet.

In the Philippines, MacArthur moved the US colonial forces to Bataan Penisula for the same reason Cornwallis moved his forces to Yorktown Pennisula and n 1781 - to prepare for forces to be evacuated.

Both Generals were unaware of where their respective fleets were. Ironically, both fleets were sent to plunder Dutch island colonies. Neither fleet was successful. Neither fleet returned for the abandoned soldiers.

Successful defense of the Philippines with both US fleets intact and a U.S./Phillipine army against a Japanese invasion had been considered a ‘fantasy’ as far back as the 1920s. The Navy and Marines in the 20s began preparing for the island-hopping retake that eventually occurred.

Accordingly, MacArthur grounded his obsolete aircraft to preserve the skilled pilots who’d have been sitting ducks for the Japanese Zeros.

[So much of US ‘history’ is rigorously factual with dates but uses whitewashing mythology as interpretation of events. I spent a long afternoon with Wikipedia’s entry ‘United States Asiatic Fleet’ which has a horrendous list of loses for late 1941 to early 1942. I did a spread sheet of when they sailed and where they were sunk to reinterpret all the texts I’d ever read on the War in the Pacific ]

#3. 1950s

[Haven’t studied this cluster-F in depth]. For whatever reason at the end of WW2 the US decided to back the French and Dutch in reclaiming their colonies (probably a white vs brown issue?). So we supported the French against US trained in WW2 Vietnamese revolutionaries The French lost.

The nation was partitioned in two.

I suspect we could have gotten the rubber cheaper from the Vietnamese than the French.

#4. 1965-1975

Neither Detroit nor the domestic tire manufacturers wanted to invest in the massive cost to change over to radial tires from the rubber tires we’d been using.

Nixon sunk the tire manufacturer’s hope for getting rubber by committing treason. To secure the 1968 election Nixon got the President/Dictator of South Vietnam to reject the Johnson Admin peace treaty. The 1968 Democratic Party was split between factions for/against the War in the same way the Democratic Party was split in 2024 for/against the Palestinians in Gaza

As the war dragged on foreign vehicles with radial tires made inroads in the US market. The tire manufacturers decided not to invest, closed their factories and sold their brand names. Detroit retooled for imported radials.

And NO, the obsolete factory machinery wasnt disassembled, packed up, and shipped to foreign countries. The machinery was disassembled, different metals and alloys separated, and shipped to scrapyards or junkyards.

[averycanadianfilm]

This election will unfold in the shadows of the American supernova. But BC’s outcome will set a global precedent. Collapsing ecosystems threaten economies and democracies everywhere, and Indigenous communities are on the frontlines in much of the world. In British Columbia, a political map to navigate the crisis is being drawn before our eyes.

[hjohn3]

Lest We Forget…

Lord Darzi’s NHS Report and the Damage the Tories Did

Source: The Telegraph

By Honest John

LABOUR WON the 2024 General Election for a variety of reasons, but one of the most significant was the state of the NHS after fourteen years of Tory mismanagement. In recognition of this, Keir Starmer’s government commissioned former Labour Minister, eminent surgeon and academic, Professor Lord Ari Darzi, to carry out a review of the state of the health service the new government had inherited and to make recommendations to form the basis of a ten year plan to restore the NHS’ capacity, effectiveness and public reputation. Lord Darzi turned his report around extraordinarily quickly. Wes Streeting commissioned the review just one week after the General Election; the Darzi report was submitted to the Secretary of State just two months later. The conclusions, if somewhat broad, are hard to argue with: Darzi confirms the wisdom of Labour’s stated prevention strategy and a renewed role for public health; he points out the dramatic fall in NHS productivity since the Covid pandemic and the urgent need to address this if Labour’s waiting list commitments are to be met; he recommends improved and focused management and less regulation and recommends significant structural reform, building on the more integrative principles of the 2022 NHS Act.

However the most enlightening and stark passages of Darzi’s review are those that analyse how far the NHS has fallen in terms of hitting performance standards it met relatively comprehensively during Labour’s last period in office and how public satisfaction in the service has collapsed from over 70% in 2010 to less than 30% by 2023. These passages lay bare what health commentators and those who work in the NHS have known for years: that the Conservative stewardship of the NHS since 2010 was an unmitigated disaster both in terms of preserving the resilience of the health service itself, but also with regard to maintaining the overall health of the nation. What makes this brief but forensic summary of Tory failure so powerful is that it appears in a document commissioned by the Department of Health itself, and that its prose is as objective as it is considered; as insightful as it is accurate. No longer is the despair at the clumsy restructuring, needless austerity, thoughtless neglect and systemic incompetence at the heart of Tory health “strategy” the province of think tanks, concerned journalists, NHS bodies and the poor benighted staff and patients themselves, but it is now “official”: a depressing account of insouciant policy failure at every level during the Tory years.

The assault began almost as soon as the Cameron Conservatives slid into power, their minority party supported in government by the useful idiots of the Clegg-led Liberal Democrats. Possessed of the conviction that only major public spending cuts could “save” the British economy, the Coalition inflicted on the U.K. the decade and more fiscal trauma known as “austerity”. Cameron himself was an ideological lightweight and easily bored, but he was surrounded by ideologues, principally his Chancellor George Osborne, but also by the uber-Thatcherite, Health Secretary Andrew Lansley, convinced that more competition, extended internal market mechanisms and the opening up of clinical services to the private sector was the “reform” the NHS needed. His NHS Act of 2010 broke up commissioning bodies into geographically tiny replacements (thereby rendering them effectively useless); required NHS Foundation Trusts to compete for the provision of all services, including cancer care, mental health services and much urgent care, and encouraged commissioners to sell off community health services and diagnostic services to private sector providers, such as Virgin Health under an invidious policy known as “Any Willing Provider”. Along the way, Public Health was transferred to local authorities, fatally divorcing it from the wider health service, small hospitals privatised, and savings targets hiked up.

The NHS had been working within a simulated market for nearly a decade when the Tories took over. It was Labour’s Alan Milburn who believed internal competition and a target culture was key to increasing NHS efficiency and productivity. However, Milburn drew the line at outright privatisation and genuinely sought to turn commissioning into a lever to secure comprehensive health provision sensitive to local needs rather than simply a means to manage the health market. Crucially the Labour government had also pumped significant amounts of new funding into the NHS which enabled Milburn to state credibly that there was enough money in the system for all NHS providers to make a surplus, and that only those slow or uncompetitive would struggle. The Conservative government however turned off the funding taps at the very point at which Lansley was marketising every aspect of the service. This manifested as a decade of below-inflation financial settlements for services for which demand was growing due to demographic factors and whose costs were inexorably rising due to the ever-rising expense of drugs and equipment. All markets - simulated or otherwise- require injections of cash at regular intervals in order to expand and invest and to meet unavoidable costs. Austerity was always an unnecessary and witless strategy for the economy as a whole, but for a health model predicated on growth, the simultaneous marketisation of care with a radical downturn in funding, was catastrophic. The NHS entered a fiscal doom spiral from which it has yet to recover.

The damage inflicted on the NHS by the twin ideological impulses to commercialise public services while at the same reduce public spending was bad enough, but the imposition of a 40% budget reduction on social care over the period of austerity economics, effectively - in the words of Wes Streeting - also “broke” NHS emergency care. With social services defunded to the extent they were barely able to fulfil their statutory duties, the resultant inability of social workers to discharge elderly patients with long term conditions from hospital into other supported accommodation, resulted in over 30% of acute hospital beds being unavailable for patient admission from A&E. With so many beds out of action, waits in Emergency Departments spiralled. Last year, just 58% of patients met the ED waiting time standard of 4 hours; in 2010, 98% of patients had been seen, admitted or discharged from ED within four hours. The crowding in A&E Departments that resulted from this collapse in performance, has led to long ambulance queues outside hospitals and the subsequent terrifying failure of ambulances to respond to so-called “Category 1 and 2” emergencies within fifteen minutes in the community - in fact delays are now counted in hours.

Elective services have fared little better. When Labour left office in 2010, the standard of 92% of patients being seen and treated in secondary care within 18 weeks of a referral by a GP, was broadly being met. That standard has not been met since 2015, and by 2020 had tumbled to less than 75% of patients. Then came Covid - a pandemic for which the NHS was hopelessly ill-prepared thanks to systemic underfunding, a complete absence of planning and a reduction and detachment of Public Health from the core NHS. The panicky and chaotic response to Covid by the Johnson regime saw wholesale cancellation of elective procedures and cancer care to maintain acute and critical care capacity for the anticipated surge in emergency demand. Waiting list numbers have, as a result of this service shut-down, spiralled to 7m patients and waiting time is resembling the ghastly Tory legacy the Blair government addressed over 20 years ago. The fact that the hapless Sunak regime needlessly kept the junior doctors’ dispute running in the belief that being “tough” with medical care givers would somehow increase Tory popularity, only exacerbated patient waits, rubbing salt in the wounds.

These are just the headlines: Darzi could have written whole separate reports about the scandal of under-provisioned and demoralised mental health services trying to keep up with unsustainable demand; the dangers to our children created by a wilful neglect of the ever-increasing needs for paediatric intensive and high dependency care; the attested failures across the country in maternity services and the shambles of a privatised nursing and residential care home sector. The NHS was not perfect in 2010, but the damage wrought upon it over fourteen years of senseless fiscal squeeze, ludicrous ideological experimentation, catastrophic and corrupt responses to a pandemic and, most crippling of all, systematic neglect of British healthcare by the Tories, must rank as one of the worst examples policy failure in recent British history.

The Tory client media immediately accused Darzi of writing a biased and political report aimed at discrediting the Conservatives rather than describing the true state of the last government’s legacy. The real truth is that Darzi only scratched the surface in his description of a service brought to its knees by a cavalcade of ideologues, incompetents and unserious clowns who knew little and cared less about services on which the British people depend. Labour will justifiably be judged on the progress they have made in fixing the “broken” NHS in four years’ time, but let us never forget who broke it so comprehensively in the first place. There is barely an area of British public policy that the procession of ghoulish Tory regimes did not vandalise, degrade or take backwards, but for the crimes they inflicted on our health and social care services alone, for so long a source of collective pride and reassurance, the Conservatives must never, ever, be forgiven.

26th September 2024

[mariacallous]

I am bad at small talk, so I went in big. “You are probably going to be the social democratic leader with the largest parliamentary majority anywhere on Earth. How does it feel?” I said to Keir Starmer during a private meeting with him and a few advisors in late 2022.

Starmer’s aides looked annoyed, while the likely next prime minister of the United Kingdom paused and tried to deflect: “We can’t take anything for granted,” which has become the unofficial motto for Labour’s general election campaign.

Yet despite Starmer’s hesitancy to bank success—he is genuinely a modest man—it is likely that on the morning of July 5, Starmer will wake up as the world’s social democratic superhero: the only center-left leader of a major economy with a parliamentary supermajority and the great hope for progressives all over the world.

The governing Conservative Party, which is historically arguably the most successful political party on Earth, now faces electoral oblivion. In 2019, Boris Johnson demolished Labour’s heartlands, the so-called red wall. Labour had become detached from its base and collapsed in its postindustrial heartlands after then-leader Jeremy Corbyn embraced the siren sounds of political extremism; he refused to sing the national anthem at a memorial for the Battle of Britain and drove the party toward a position of fiscal incontinence that scared anyone with financial assets.

Five years later, Labour is on track not only to regain the red wall but also to achieve a dream of progressives by taking solid Conservative seats in their blue wall of affluent commuter constituencies surrounding London and rural seats that have voted Conservative since time immemorial. (East Worthing and Shoreham, for example, is part of a constituency that first voted Tory in 1780 and has been reliably Tory since. Polls suggest Labour is on track to take the seat.)

What is happening in the U.K. is unusual for center-left parties, to put it mildly. Labour could gain as many as 70 percent of seats in the House of Commons—a victory that could surpass even the electoral landside of former Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair in 1997, offering lessons for progressives everywhere. A politically dominant Starmer will attend the G-7 as a leader in total political control, in stark contrast to his counterparts in France and Germany, Emmanuel Macron and Olaf Scholz, who are facing high disapproval ratings and struggling to pursue their governing agendas.

Labour’s victory in the U.K. will be important in three key regards: It will recast how progressives can win national elections and set a high-water mark for what social democrats can achieve; it will reshape British politics in new and unexpected ways that could be more important than the victory itself; and it will flip external perceptions of the U.K., resetting international views of the country and its future.

Despite the pathological obsession Britain’s political class has with America’s, it is perhaps time for Democrats in the United States to look across the pond and glean some lessons from Labour’s success.

Part of Starmer’s success has been to take an oath of omertà on culture war issues, much as the Australian Labor Party did. These include transgender rights, Britain’s colonial past, and immigration—all issues that the British right has tried to capitalize on. Starmer, a former human rights lawyer, has committed to scrap the Tories’ controversial Rwanda deportation scheme but on the grounds of practicality rather than as a wider moral statement. More broadly on immigration, the party has been treading very carefully. This is certainly not brave, but it has worked. For all the attempts to fire up the culture wars in this election, Labour has remained focused on the prize.

While the Conservatives have attempted to stoke a culture war, what remains more salient for voters in the U.K. is the perceived corruption and rule-breaking of leading Conservatives, culminating in the current scandal involving elected officials using insider information to bet on the election date.

Scandals including preferential contracts for protective equipment for the National Health Service (NHS) during the COVID-19 pandemic, where an astonishing 4 billion pounds ($5 billion) worth of faulty equipment was procured (some allegedly from companies with links to the ruling party). Then came “Partygate,” in which Johnson and current Prime Minister Rishi Sunak were fined by police for breaking COVID-era laws. A lobbying scandal involving another former prime minister, David Cameron, also caused significant public anger. Elite rule-breaking has cut through with voters in a way that the endless culture wars simply haven’t.

In parallel, Labour has pivoted from a form of identity politics under Corbyn to a very proactive position on class. Starmer has put his humble upbringing center stage in the U.K. election campaign and has spoken authentically about the “class ceiling” in British society. This has particular resonance as Starmer is running against Sunak, whose net wealth of $822 million makes him the richest leader of any democracy.

A typical Starmer set-piece homily is as follows:

“My dad was a toolmaker, he worked in a factory, and my mum was a nurse. We didn’t have a lot when we were growing up. Like millions of working-class children now, I grew up in a cost-of-living crisis. I know what it feels like to be embarrassed to bring your mates home because the carpet is threadbare and the windows cracked. … I was actually responsible for that as I put the football through it.”

This focus on class is unusual in modern British politics. Indeed, recent Labour leaders—from Blair to Gordon Brown to Ed Miliband to Corbyn—were all in different ways outsiders to the British working class: Blair and Corbyn for their relatively affluent (and privately educated) upbringings, Brown and Miliband because of their middle-class backgrounds and partly because Miliband’s father was one of the country’s most notable Marxist academics. As for the Conservatives, the days of a prime minister who was a grocer’s daughter are long gone. Cameron and Johnson didn’t just attend the same elite private school (Eton) two years apart; they went to the same university (Oxford) and were members of the same private dining club (for the most privileged).

Starmer is leaning into class politics—and it is working. The promise to impose the same value-added tax on private school fees that is applied to most goods and services (20 percent) has led to an outpouring of anger from the often very wealthy 6 percent of U.K. parents who send their kids to private schools—usefully, those who are privately educated often tend to vote Conservative. Labour’s pledge to use the private school tax revenues to invest in education for the 94 percent of kids in state schools has, on the other hand, drawn support from ordinary voters.

This focus on class has won back a group of voters who in other countries have now been captured by the right and far right. Labour now leads among working-class voters with 38-42 percent of the vote share, in contrast to Conservatives’ 22-24 percent. For those with the fewest educational qualifications, Labour leads in every age category except the over-50s.

One of the architects of Labour’s reengagement with the British working class is Angela Rayner, who is on track to become deputy prime minister. Rayner is working-class, was a mother at 16, and a grandmother at 37. Opinionated and unfiltered, an unapologetic smoker who enjoys a strong drink, she worked in a care home before rising quickly through the trade union movement and becoming a Labour candidate. Rayner’s story is a masterclass in how to elevate remarkable people into parliamentary politics. Her success is her own, but the unions cultivated her, and the membership backed her as deputy leader. She has real star power—and there is virtually no one like her in the upper echelons of the Democratic establishment in the United States.

Remarkably, the class dimension has not, it seems, alienated middle England. Disillusioned surbubanites and centrist liberals have been turned off by a Conservative Party that seems increasingly radical and dysfunctional. Starmer’s former career as the country’s chief prosecutor, and his knighthood—he is formally referred to as “Sir Keir”—have given him broad appeal, just as the Conservatives’ unapologetic embrace of the populist right’s pet causes has cratered their support.

Part of Labour’s success is due to the systemic clusterfuck that has been the last few years of the Conservative government. The Tories have foisted five prime ministers on the public since 2010—four of them elected by the party’s mostly white, male membership of about 170,000 rather than the public at large. Economic growth is anemic; there are nearly 8 million people on the NHS waiting list in England alone (in a country where the use of private medical care is uncommon); and essential public services including the prison service and local government are on the edge of systemic failure.

Yet signs exist that there may be more fundamental shifts at play. Labour leads in every age group except the over-65s. If you work, you are more likely to vote Labour; 45 percent of voters under 45 are likely to vote Labour, compared with only 1 in 10 backing the Conservative Party. Millennials will become the largest voting bloc in the U.K. in this election. Their key issues include policies to prevent catastrophic climate change (which poll well across the U.K. political spectrum), the building of homes, better transport links (especially for non-car owners, many urban millennials among them), and pro-family policies. All of these have come into play in this election.

Older homeowners across the Western world have been successful in running what is, potentially, the world’s largest cartel—by opposing construction of new homes for millennials. Labour is committed to ending that in the U.K. with a significant loosening of planning regulations that currently thwart sustainable development.

While the party has ruled out taxes on working people, no such commitment has been made on unearned income, leading to widespread speculation that the tax system may be rebalanced with higher capital gains taxes and fewer loopholes for the megarich, including for the landed gentry whose farming estates pass between generations tax-free. Labour has no love for landlords either. After nearly two decades in which London’s property market has been inflated by speculative investments from the world’s kleptocrats, the public appetite for new restrictions on foreign property ownership or new taxes has grown.

Labour has also surrounded itself with a technocratic positivist elite. This group includes Labour Together, an ambitious intellectual think tank closely aligned with Starmer’s inner circle, and the Tony Blair Institute, which has embraced a techno-futurism aligned with the country’s comparative advantage in the life sciences and artificial intelligence. Public sector reform under a Starmer government could be significant if one imagines the potential, for example, of using the NHS’s treasure trove of data (on 70 million people) to drive innovation in health care.

In stark contrast to Labour’s focus on the future, an aging right-wing voter base is now split between the Conservative Party and Reform, a vehicle that is a mix between a private company, a political party, and a personal platform for Nigel Farage—the pro-Brexit politician Donald Trump has trotted out as a posh Anglo stage prop. Conservatives in Parliament are already moving rightward. Tory MPs give statements to the media condemning the European Convention on Human Rights, a document co-drafted by David Maxwell-Fyfe—a Conservative MP and prosecutor of Nazis at Nuremberg—that was inspired by Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s vision for postwar Europe.

Meanwhile, a wing of Conservative MPs are already attempting to cast the almost certain defeat as evidence that the party did not pivot enough to the populist right. The divided right is making the admission of the controversial Farage into the Conservative Party a real possibility, a prospect that fills Labour with glee. Needless to say, the next Conservative leader is unlikely to be a moderate. With the party tacking to the right, it could soon become a vessel for Faragism and a weak British version of the Trump movement.

Finally, there are the vibes. A progressive recasting of British politics will shift narratives around the U.K. National narratives can flip in an instant: Think of foreigners’ perceptions of the United States from Barack Obama to Trump or the assumption of Chinese economic primacy to a sense of retrenchment and decline under Xi Jinping. The U.K. in recent memory was seen as a fairly stable, politically dull island anchored somewhere in the mid-Atlantic. Brexit, Johnson, and Liz Truss put an end to that. With the shift from perceived and actual chaos and an insurgent right to a progressive supermajority, attitudes will likely shift again.

Vibes are important, especially to the economy of the U.K., which may have ceased to be a traditional superpower but remains a cultural one punching significantly above its weight internationally. Six percent of U.K. GDP comes from the creative industries—from the success of British music to the Premier League, a booming film and TV industry, fashion, and the arts. That’s double the level of Germany and larger than the contribution of the German car industry to the country’s output (4.5 percent). For a country that trades on vibes and is reliant on the export of its creativity, Brexit and isolation have caused real damage.

It’s long forgotten now, but during the last Labour government from 1997 until the 2008 financial crisis, the U.K. was the fastest-growing economy in the G-7, faster than that of the Clinton- and Bush-era United States. Given the country’s currently stagnant economy, the next Parliament will be more challenging, but in a highly open society, the role of consumer confidence and investor confidence cannot be underestimated.

In a previous piece in these pages, after Labour’s historic loss in the 2019 general election, I wrote: “Radical leftism is not a drug you can take as a party and return to normal the next morning.” I was right about the election but wrong about the next morning.

No one expected Labour to turn a historic defeat into a historic victory in just five years. The circumstances the Conservative Party faced were extraordinary, but Starmer has shown that tight party management, a focus on voters and not ideology, and a sprinkling of class-based politics can reinvigorate social democratic politics.

What lessons does this hold for other center-left parties?

First, culture war issues aren’t a central motivation for most voters. On all the major culture war issues, Labour holds a less popular position than the Conservative Party. Yet when mortgage rates have risen from 2 to 5 percent, “it’s the economy, stupid.” Progressives don’t need to fear the charge of the populist right; they need smarter answers.

Second, rule-breaking or perceived corruption is a powerful motivator for voters, and global polling proves this. Progressives need a stronger line on conflicts of interest, corporate lobbying, the kleptocratic buy-up of the finest properties in the world’s global cities, and tackling emerging monopolies that exist due to political capture. Doing so counters the populist right head-on.

Third, the dominance of identity politics in left-wing online spaces is not matched by public understanding of or interest in this form of politics. Class is understood, whereas intersectionality isn’t. Class may, or may not, be the most relevant dividing line for progressives in different places—but for progressives to win, they need messengers who are from outside the upper middle class and have lived experience that resonates with people who feel disenchanted and left behind. In other words, Democrats in the United States need an Angela Rayner.

Most critically, once in power, social democrats do not have the luxury of time. Crumbling infrastructure, failing public services, falling living standards, and a lack of housing all point to direct state intervention on a scale not seen since the late 1960s Great Society programs in the United States and similar policies during that era in the U.K. Unless progressives can deliver, it will be challenged further by a populist right that is gaining momentum.

U.S. President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act has been the talk of London and Brussels for progressives, and Biden deserves more credit for his boldness. With a supermajority, Starmer has the scope for even bolder programs. A progressive U.K. government will not only reset Europeans’ views of the country, but if successful, it can aid progressive arguments within Europe that austerity and fiscalization do not generate economic growth or social stability.

Starmer’s victory will give global social democrats a high-water mark for electoral success in a wealthy democracy. The challenge for Starmer is the incredible weight of hope in an era of polycrisis. If Labour succeeds in delivering growth, building homes, and raising wages, then it will provide a blueprint that can—and should—be copied elsewhere.

[thatcrazycrowgirl]

I saw your post and wanted to share a thought i had about older! Jacob ...

I think he obviously matured over the years and definetly got more serious as well

Sooo i can imagen him and his kid just sitting on a roof somewhere after a finished training or smt and him just dropping his dad lore out of nowhere, about how he derailed a train one time and how he was kindaa at fault that the british economy almost collapsed.....

His kids probably wouldnt believe him 😭

Or maybe they would but i can imagen that the wild side of Jacob died down after he got his kids

Not everything but it would definitely be less wild

Thank you for sharing! I can actually see that! Perhaps Jacob sometimes pulls out some of that "dad lore" to try and make his kids feel better when they've screwed up something and feel bad about it; make them smile and give them some needed encouragement to try again.

And if they don't believe his stories about his younger days, well, all they really need to do is ask Aunt Evie about it. hehe

Also, yes, I definitely can see some of Jacob's "wildness" calm down as he gets older, or he just finds better ways to channel it - perhaps reserving it mainly for fight clubs and such like that. I mean, we do see that he still can be aggressive when he needs to be, so I could see him finding a more "controlled" outlet for it as he ages.