Time for a big picture view of where we are

After a week away from writing at length, I wanted to wade back in with a short series of posts looking at the big picture of where we are and the implications for the midterms.

Image - Anna Lefkowitz / MS NOW; Nathan Howard / Getty Images

Good morning, my friends, long time no detailed thoughts from me. Unusually, we have had a stretch of good rain-free weather and warm temperatures across the pond. As I explained previously, I have been converting a wilderness at the bottom of my garden into a place to grow our own vegetables and a planting space to create a refuge in which to write over the summer months, all on a budget.

Anyone who has ever done such a task at 66 years old as a solo project will tell you that to do that, ‘on a budget’ requires long, backbreaking days when you frequently ask yourself, “Why am I doing this?“. As I think I explained previously, I needed an escape from sitting in front of a computer day after day, trying. to make sense of this new world we are all being forced to inhabit with a madman determined to stuff his pockets with as much money as he can before he is ousted from the While House.

I have to tell you that while it’s proving a hard job, there’s nothing like Mother Nature to teach you; this planet is only on loan to us, and she will always prevail if we neglect the space we have carved out to inhabit. Ignoring climate change will not diminish nature’s ability to adapt to the mistakes we make. We are not threatening nature; we are merely shortening our own stay as a species on the planet. This is probably why the likes of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are so keen to colonise Mars. We can ignore the impact of climate change all day long, but, being the selfish species we’ve become, we are simply shortening the lease period for future generations. Why should we care? I’m afraid it has come to exemplify who we are.

Tragic outlook aside, I needed to get some solid days in the garden to do all the heavy lifting, quite literally. Trees have been felled, and the ground has not been rotavated; it’s been turned over with a spade, a fork and lots of sweat, not to mention some blisters and a challenge to perseverance. Add to that, I’ve lost over a stone and a half in weight in the last five weeks. In short, despite feeling pretty exhausted, I’ve achieved a lot and am feeling much healthier than I did. More importantly, though, I feel much better mentally and in better shape to continue the fight and keep telling the unvarnished truth amidst the chaos of Trump’s descent into the abyss. Oh, and once I’m done, I will share the before-and-after pictures of my labour for those that might be interested.

Anyway, that’s enough about me. How are you feeling? While I may have been in the garden, spade in hand, I have had the news playing in my now moderately tamed jungle area, and I noted none of it has been good. One thing that stood out for me is the ‘deal, no deal’ fiasco between Trump and Tehran. The constant signals of ‘a deal is imminent,’ coming daily from Trump to calm markets, are frankly a joke, but the markets appear not to care anymore. There is now no better example of belief in ‘alternative facts’ than the markets, which seem to have adopted the approach of ‘make hay while the sun shines,’ even when it’s clearly raining.

I know I keep talking about it, but it never gets old. Trump is a man who has carved an alternative utopian reality out of what are the most dangerous times of his own making. Let me assure you, you are not on your own if you have chosen not to live in his fantasy world. I promise, it will be much easier to deal with its collapse, which, by the way, is inevitable. This is not a matter of if, but when. The true tragedy is that the cost will be borne by those who can least afford it.

The reason these monsters are able to profit with impunity is that we allow them to, and you should never lose sight of that. Trump finds himself in a situation where all his energy has to be invested in hiding the truth under a deluge of lies and misdirection. He came to power on the understanding that he knew he had at most, 4 years to fill his pockets, and he’s certainly hit the ground running. He’s no longer hiding the corruption and is basically telling the American people, ‘Catch me if you can’.

He fought the election on the issues of the cost of living and immigration. This was all about tapping into public sentiment. The whole campaign, without exception, was just a series of lies to facilitate the biggest heist on the US Treasury in modern history for him and his friends. Let me reiterate, he DID NOT win a landslide or receive a large mandate from the American people. He was the beneficiary of a society sick to the back teeth of politicians. Ninety million people sat it out in 2024, and they didn’t do that for a laugh; they did it because they felt ignored and unheard.

I have said in the past that bad politics is a plague on the houses of both parties. After a week away from writing about the impact of sub-par politicians, the one thing I’ve come to learn is that the more you refocus on the details, the more the anger rises, bringing with it a sense of being knowingly manipulated by those who pretend to serve our interests while filling their own pockets. I have long said that one of the best investments a democracy can make is to pay politicians higher wages from the public purse and exclude them from receiving ‘donations’. Rest assured, you will soon find out who is in the job to serve the public and who is in it to enrich themselves.

Elections should be funded by the state based on an agreed-upon fixed calculation for each race depending on whether it’s for a federal or a state seat. Taking the money out of politics is the only disinfectant that will deliver free and fair elections. Voting should be compulsory, as in countries like Australia. Genuine participation in politics can only be fostered in the knowledge that every vote counts and all voices are heard. There would be no requirement for term limits because great representation should not be sacrificed at the altar of bureaucracy. Finally, the General Election day should be a public holiday. Then I wake up and realise it will never happen because big business and a handful of billionaires own Politics LLC.

We unfortunately live in a world where we’ve become accustomed to an instant fix for everything. There was a day when if I wanted to do the family shopping, it meant getting to the supermarket (if you were lucky, by car), taking the time to walk around and get what you needed and travelling home. If you were forced to do that on public transport, as is not uncommon in the UK, it introduced a whole new challenge: you were limited by the weight of the shopping you could carry. I’ve experienced both, so let me tell you, taking shopping home on a full bus in the middle of winter is no fun. Today, if I want to shop and am prepared to pay the cost of the convenience, I can have the same shopping delivered to my door in 20 minutes from the moment I press buy on my phone.

We live in a world of instant gratification where we want it, and we want it now. It’s that mentality that means nobody wants to take on the task of political change, because it’s too much hard work and takes years to achieve. You can’t bring seven million people onto the streets to protest on a Saturday and expect change by Monday morning, but oddly that’s what far too many people think is possible. There are no shortcuts to ending tyranny. Even the World Wars lasted for years and left behind death, destruction, and an economic wasteland. It is indeed a tragedy that history teaches us it takes this kind of devastation for the wealth gap to equalise, as it did after World War I and the great depression that followed (The Great Compression).

If there’s one thing the rich do, it’s learn lessons from their experience of taking a hit when it comes to market crashes. They learned that the key to insulating themselves from market volatility is to grow asset wealth. Assets are the key to the exponential growth of the wealth gap. If you own assets and stocks, it’s all but impossible to suffer anything but short-term fiscal pain. For example, in 2008, after the market crash, the shareholder class took a massive hit that few in the bottom 90% could survive. However, history shows that when markets dip, recovery inevitably follows, and nobody benefits from that recovery more than asset holders.

As a result, the rich significantly increased their already obscene wealth, as their stock holdings recovered and their bricks-and-mortar assets slowly regained their value. Market crashes also have the effect of thinning the ranks of those who considered themselves ‘middle class,’ who can’t sustain the hit and are forced into fire-sale positions where their assets can be sucked up by the apex asset class at bargain-basement prices.

Image - People’s Despatch

The same happened during the COVID-19 crisis. The deaths of millions led to a wealth bonanza for those at the top of the economic food chain. Not only do their stocks recover along with physical assets, but the government starts handing out economic stimulus. As we saw, the ones with the largest begging bowls were businesses claiming they would not survive without government help. The whole reason that they were able to play the victim was because of the development of ‘just in time’ supply chains, which meant, unlike in the past, they had evolved into not holding inventory as part of yet another cost-cutting exercise. This, in turn, disrupts supply chains during economic shocks. These companies, for all their success, had little by way of resilience, so they turned to taxpayers t bail them out. The same will happen when the AI bubble bursts. It’s just a perpetual rinse-and-repeat exercise.

The US government injected $1.8 trillion into families and individuals in direct checks and expanded child tax credits. In addition, they provided businesses with $1.7 trillion in forgivable loans through programs such as the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), as well as sector-specific relief for airlines, transit systems, and restaurants. Before we continue, for context, around $5 trillion was injected into the economy when Trump returned to power. Below is a breakdown of the costs

I know numbers can get a little confusing, and nothing in the graphic above is stimulus in the same way COVID19 relief was divided. However, as you can see, the bottom line is that a significant proportion of the population receives tax cuts they simply don’t need, while the rest pay the price in what are described as offsets (CUTS to you and me). The important thing to understand here is that nearly $3.5 trillion of the bill passed was paid for through government borrowing.

In the next episode, we’ll look at the broader implications of a national debt that has now hit $39 trillion. This means that servicing the debt is costing in excess of $1 trillion EVERY year. This is all about big-picture politics, and I want to spend the next few days looking at various aspects of the US economy, the societal impact of out-of-control corruption, and the new hidden pact with Israel that will bring the US and Israel into a new kind of military alliance that will see the US and Israel joined at the hip with little oversight.

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