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As we usual for our kickoff post, we’ll look at the past year and what might be coming.
In 2021, we described the trajectory as early stage collapse. 2022 ushered in the hegemony-breaking spectacle of the US getting the war it wanted in Ukraine, only to find it had badly misjudged its opponent. Shock and awe sanctions1 expected to prostrate Russia and lead to Putin’s ouster, instead produced a mere economic stumble and remarkably quick recovery. Russia muddled along with its Plan A after the US and UK scuppered negotiations until Putin ordered a partial mobilization after embarrassing pullbacks in Kherson and Kharkiv. Again despite it being documented in July 2022 that Russia was greatly outproducing the West (see The Return of Industrial Warfare) in terms of materiel and, starting in October, pummeling Ukraine with frequent, large scale missile strikes, the US and NATO believed their PR that Russia was backwards and incompetent and therefore sure to lose.
2023 bought even more Western hubris: the (at least US-endorsed) Nord Stream pipeline blowups, the US continuing to escalate with China even though war games consistently show the US losing badly, the US ineffectively muscling so-called Global South members to denounce Russia as they instead pulled together to expand BRICS, and recently, the misguided “peace summit” at Jeddah, which per Seymour Hersh, US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan planned as “The grand alliance of the free world meeting in a victory celebration after the humiliating defeat of the hated foe …” Oopsie.
This ongoing geopolitical realignment features other flare-ups, such as a brewing conflict in Niger, a coup in Gabon, and a simmering revolt in Pakistan due to the jailing of former prime minister Imran Khan (reversed by its Supreme Court but don’t count the US done with its efforts to keep him out of office).
These power (and resource) struggles come as governments and institutions, world-wide, collectively fail to take remotely adequate measures to the combat the existential threat of climate change. Measures so far range from token to hopium. Satyajit Das, in a recent eight-part series of extremely well documented posts, described how most green energy plans assume a 25% reduction in energy use with no foundation in fact. Instead of serious measures like curbing our energy-hogging military and demanding sacrifices from the top via prohibitions on private jets, we have the Biden Administration fiddling as the US burns through pathetic schemes like mandating more energy efficient ceiling fans.
And we have the continuing failure to address Covid effectively as the WHO warns of a spike in the Northern Hemisphere, just as children return to school, and a new vaccine-and-prior-infection evasive variant is on the loose. Yet officialdom has not retreated from its now-clearly-not-working-very-well vax-fixated approach, is still not promoting improving ventilation, and recommends masks only after surges are well underway, including ineffective surgical masks. The officialdom is also ignoring the growing evidence of high health and human costs of repeated Covid infection, including vascular damage, cognitive impairment, and Long Covid, and has yet to get religion about funding research into treatments.
Domestic politics in the US and most advanced economies similarly show increased conflict diverting energy and attention away from severe and worsening problems. Rising inequality and deteriorating social and economic conditions means those below the high end of the food chain find it harder and harder just to get by. Life expectancy at birth in the US has fallen to below not only that of China but even Thailand, whose GDP per capita is only 56% of that of China. The US has decaying infrastructure, rising homelessness, falling educational attainment levels, and critically, a lack of trust in institutions, which is fatal to creating agreement about what the underlying problems are and how to tackle them. And it’s not as if many organizations deserve respect as rentierism, bribery and other forms of corruption regularly get a free pass among the well off, while taking $20 from a cashier’s drawer lands you in jail.
But in the US, this bad situation is made worse by what look like efforts to foment a civil war….and bizarrely, by coastal elites who depend on people they mainly hate for food, power, water, and other essentials, and on the police and military who may not side with them sufficiently if those officially armed forces had to choose.
Nobody should be surprised at the rise of Trump. If he did not exist, another swaggering right-wing figure would fill the void. That’s what happens when elites lose sight of their responsibility to provide for adequate and better yet rising living standards for most and at least make a show of sharing in collective pain. It wasn’t that long ago that the sons of aristocrats and rich Americans were expected to serve in wartime.
But those in charge are determined to brook no challenges to their misrule. They reflexively double down and keep the incompetent and malicious in place, and seem to believe crafting more syrupy fables will appease the mob. We can see how successful the US and NATO have been in making Russia, which ought to be a pariah for its invasion of Ukraine, instead not just a tight ally of China but the leading voice for the new multipolar order. By contrast, the US ruling class should consider itself lucky in its enemies at home. Imagine if Trump stood for anything more than his ego and were capable of executing plans?
We often go back to when this blog started, in 2006. The Global Financial Crisis exposed the high cost of misguided regulation and weak oversight, which was the result of over 30 years institutional and normative hollowing out in response to neoliberal policies. But the crisis also revealed how after a short period of debate over tough measures like nationalizing Citigroup, orthodox opinion quickly rallied around the Obama Administration scheme: restoring the status quo ante as much as possible. (As Obama said in a meeting with bankers: “I stand between you and the pitchforks.”) It turned out that the seeming weakness of the formal authority of the state, hid the power of what Gramsci called hegemony, the ability of civil society institutions like the press, schools, industry groups, and religious organizations to stand as a bulwark behind government. Hence our quip that the Obama Administration thought that every problem could be solved by better PR was far more prescient than we ever imagined.
We now see political fights increasingly about control over Gramsci’s hegemony: more and more concerted efforts to restrict social media and enforce discipline over the mainstream press, via downgrades in Google searches, the launch of the EU Digital Services Act, which bars big platforms from disseminating undefined misinformation and hate speech, the censorship campaigns documented in the Twitter Files, deplatforming and demonetizing accounts, cancelling individuals, and recently, massive fines for Americans who dare write for prohibited publications. And as those are not working very well, we see the efforts to defend the established power structure moving into political repression, ranging from proposals in Germany to outlaw the right wing party AfD to schemes to deny Trump ballot access should he become the Republican party nominee.
We’ve been puzzling since the Greek bailout crisis of 2015 about the operational capability, or more accurately, the lack thereof, of Western businesses and governments. It seemed they were incapable of even properly defining how big and complex key problems were. And that deficiency became a virtue as the public did not want to hear (or was assumed not to want to hear) what it would really take to address serious challenges (most of all breaking rice bowls of many of the rich). We didn’t recognize some of the early signs, such as European governments repeatedly adopting “kick the can” remedies to recurring bank crises, or the Fed realizing its super low interest rate policy had failed, but not having an easy way out.
Mind you, if the officialdom was unwilling to manage its way out of financial paper bags, it should not be a surprise to see it punting a whole series of crises-in-the-making, particularly the mother of them all, climate change. The pervasiveness of incompetence and corruption at the top in the West has led to more and more commentators discussing the rot and what might come next.
But what are we to do, if we’ve taken stock of this bad situation?
Many of you come here, some every day, to try to get a better handle on what is really happening across a broad and sometimes quickly moving front of events, not only out of hunger for information, but a hunger for understanding. As the officialdom no longer bothers presenting consistent claims over time, or sticks doggedly to the stupidest spin, like the Russian public is ready to overthrow Putin, yessiree, and doggedly refuses to advocate even low-cost, low-effort policies like Corsi-Rosenthal boxes, those paying attention realize we have been left to fend for ourselves.
As readers have often said, reading Naked Capitalism is like getting next month’s news today. We pride ourselves on our long-standing record of being early and accurate, but we don’t do this alone. This community is ever more important. Naked Capitalism’s globe- and expertise-spanning commentariat shares information and debates issues intensively, from predatory lenders to promising treatments to solar economics to difficult bureaucracies to expat havens to recipes. And thanks to your invaluable information collecting, screening, aggregation and sometimes course-correcting and last but not least, faithful financial support, we keep adding new beats, covering new terrain, despite having what amounts to 2 full time writer equivalents. If you value this informational heavy lifting, please go straight to the Tip Jar and give generously.
Naked Capitalism has long straddled a position few occupy, providing both hot takes and near think tank-level analysis. A few of many recent examples: Nick Corbishley on the surprise first round results in the Argentine election and El Pais telling unwelcome truths about Ukraine; Conor Gallagher algo-driven wage and price fixing, on California’s war on the homeless, and on the wobbly state of major European economies; KLG on key medical papers and on scientism; Lambert on official Covid denialism even as case counts rise and important deep dives, such CDC’s HICPAC and on the Durham report. Michael Hudson has regularly given us first dibs on his articles and transcribed interviews. Contributors Satyajit Das and albrt made regular, important contributions, Das via his afore-mentioned series on energy destinies. Yours truly has attempted to correct the overhyped prospects for a Global South/BRICS new currency (which none other that Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov confirmed at the August BRICS conference) and has been examining the decline in the executive function across the West.
We’d like to do more. We’d like to do it even better. Imagine how much trouble we could cause if we got our hands on serious money!
Please support our efforts. Give whatever you can, whether it’s $5, $50, or $5,000, via our Tip Jar. Even a small donation helps us meet our fundraising goals. If you can, please give generously, particularly on behalf of loyal readers who are under stress and aren’t able to donate as much as they’d like to.
And if you aren’t able to make a financial contribution, rest assured you can still help! More than ever, we depend on all of you to promote Naked Capitalism and bring in more readers. You can help by sending articles, Links, and Water Cooler to potentially receptive friends, family members, and colleagues, by linking to our posts on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media, talking up the site, making comments and sending cute animal photos.
In our accompanying kickoff post, we describe what your donations will fund and tell you when we’ve hit each of these monetary goals. Our first goal is $23,500 for digital infrastructure essentials. That may not sound very sexy, but this is our plumbing. When your plumbing is not working, I bet you notice! We’ve increased only a tiny bit despite addressing many items on our to do list, most important being getting a payment platform besides PayPal. So kudos to Dave, our tech guru!
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We also want to warn you: as much as we feel very guilty about it, we lack the capacity to thank donors individually. Or to put it another way, with our thin staffing, we’d have to cut way back on posting to be able to do that. We hope you forgive us for having to give top priority to continuing to generate the content you appreciate so much.
Again, we hope you’ll support our work in ways big and small. You’ve helped us build a community, and with your continued backing, we aspire to make it even better in the coming year.
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1 The sanctions were put in place on February 22, 2022, when Russia announced and launched its invasion on February 24.