Let's all decide not to live within the lie. If Trump can rename cabinet positions, so can we. The Department of Homeland Security is now the Department of Domestic Warfare. After all, he told us, "The enemy is within."
Was this an emperor's new clothes moment--i.e. where the commonly held version of reality is challenged, by being shown to be artificial, i.e. the product of common agreement?
Is this why Air Force 1 turned back before setting out again? They would have heard Carney’s address and the overwhelming reaction he received with a standing ovation. Either Trump did not want to go to Davos under those circumstances or his staff thought it best not to go. It was a takedown reenforced by the flotsam and jetsam who signed up to his Peace Board, without key European support. It was a humiliating experience for him and why his vitriol is so forcibly directed at Europe, with the imposition of 100% tariffs on Canada.
The power that Trump is weilding, the reason we are all forced to take him seriously, is the momentum of 80 years of careful work by sucessive US governments to build a world order under the control of the US (buy Farrell's book!). That momentum, combined with his narcissism, is what gives the veneer of inevability, but its an illusion. Things like SWIFT, the deep integration and dependency NATO and Europe have on US support, and dominance of the US military aren't going to collapse any time soon, but they are at their peak and can only diminish going forward. Trump's cabinet are all focused on appearance and social media dominance, but these contribute nothing to keeping the machinery running. And in Minneapolis their media control is a shambles. The 1 thing they are supposedly good at is collapsing.
This is what I commented on Adam Tooze's Chartbook #431 on Davos just now:
1. Hypothesis #1: Davos would be largely irrelevant.
Question: Irrelevant or relevant to what and to whom?
Irrelevant/relevant to northern tier public policy for the coming year?
Irrelevant/relevant to parts of the planet where resources are extracted for some other period of time?
Both?
Does "Davos is largely irrelevant" mean the global capital CEO's don't make global public policy? That would mean that their replacement of consent of the governed with Project 2025, for a recent example, isn't significant public policy. We know that's not the case.
Or does it mean that Davos is just a pricey party - a dog and pony show like a political party convention, in which the decisions have already been made?
2. Hypothesis #2: Davos might potentially be a significant forum for coordinating global capital in the face of the MAGA rampage.
Question: So I am trying to envision this scenario. Jamie Dimon, Larry Fink, Ursula van der Leyden, Christine Lagarde et. al., were emailing and talking in the weeks prior to Davos and agreed on a global capital policy that would destroy the political and financial power of the MAGAns?
Why would they do that?
Does that indicate a policy disagreement in the global capital community? That would be interesting, if so. Is there disagreement about the Trump tariff debacle?
I don't square them feeling intimidated with their being able to tell Trump back off on Greenland.
It doesn't appear so - it appears that the capital people told Trump and his gang that if the GOP want further donations they had better back off on tariffs and on Greenland, now.
Why did the capitalists keep their mouths shut at Davos about climate, democracy, inequality, the EU, NATO, Ukraine, Sudan, China, where they are heavily invested?
Because they like it like that and have no complaints with the MAGA/Trump policy of destroying the regulatory apparatus?
As for tariffs - protectionism - that will be on the agenda at the next World Trade Organization (WTO) Ministerial Conference, in Cameroon, March 26-29, as will be the way the WTO makes its decisions. The WTO currently takes decisions by consensus among its 166 members.
The WTO is weak and ineffectual and may not survive.
The headshaking WTF is there is no visible connection between Davos and ICE, between Davos and people in Minnesota rebelling against ICE, between Davos and the destruction of democracy, between Davos and inequality, between Davos and the hastening destruction of Earth's ability to sustain life, a destruction manifest in floods, fires, droughts, melting ice sheets, biodiversity collapse, costs that destroy governments, all of which - all of it - is caused by capital's mining of the planet as "resources." Do Larry Fink and his toady think that Trump will soon die and it will all be over soon? Or that they really don't care?
They really don't care. They are, like Trumpkopf himself, psychopaths. They're only interested in grabbing up for themselves everything there is to grab, as quickly as possible. If it means human extinction, so be it.
Could it also be that they know. That they all know:
a) there will be no turning back from the current path, a path that inevitably leads to the destruction of Earth, and
b) having accepted that inevitability, they’ve shifted focus not to prevention, but to control?
Instead of saving the planet, they determine how to prolong what remains of it, engineering small, contained pockets of green, of habitability, reserved exclusively for those who wield power. The rest of us, and our children, become the expendable mass: the fodder required to keep those enclaves functioning, even if it costs countless lives.
This logic supports the relentless push to keep having children no matter how scarce resources become, no matter the lack of healthcare, no matter the shrinking habitable land. A sick, weakened global population is easier to enslave, penned into rigid infrastructure, tightly managed, securely controlled, pacified with carefully rationed moments of pleasure.
That’s where social media/AI comes in.
Not as it exists now, but matured, evolved into a fully immersive virtual relief system. A manufactured reality that distracts just enough to keep you compliant. Your body deteriorates. Your spirit erodes. But you’re given no real avenue to escape, resist, or even fully feel the loss. You are entertained while you are consumed.
Meanwhile, the very uninhabitability of the Earth becomes a built in failsafe against revolution. When access to food, clean water, and basic resources is restricted, survival itself becomes the full time occupation. Resistance requires energy, organization, and hope, luxuries an exhausted, starving population cannot afford.
So yes. the world will burn.
But it will be managed.
There will be designated spaces from which the burning can be watched, or ignored entirely, without being personally experienced. And the rest of us will exist outside those spaces, sustaining them, paying the cost, and disappearing quietly as the planet collapses around us.
"... a putative collective understanding that countered the alternative collective understanding that Trump wanted to impose upon the world." And / or Trump, acting on the wishes of Project 2025, V Putin, and their transnational financialist mafia, to make Capital the force to which we all kneel before. Or, to use a darker, older name: Mammon.
I think I was through Marple, years ago on the way to an Eroica ride at Bakewell. You've got the edge on charm there. Here, we have, ehm, soybeans, but also the Driftless Zone, and pretty Elizabeth, Illinois, just an 80 mile meander to the NW.
Simply wondering about a possible coincidence. Daughter lives at lock 13 in Marple. Very likely on the way to Bakewell. home is in Canada just east of Detroit - soybeans , tomatoes and corn here ( and hogs , like Illinois) Someday I hope to return to your country - when the monsters masquerading as leaders are gone
Thanks Bill. I would look forward to motoring back into Canada when I could hold my head up as a grateful and appreciative neighbor, and not a suspected supporter of mafia-type thuggery. THAT might be farther off in the future than I have time; and for that, this old Boy Scout is saddened and ashamed. I'm trying, in my small part. Tim
Trump is beginning to discipline Carney and Canada. Too many are focused on the short-term results. Trump and many Americans, definitely. The EU and Canada are signaling long-term intentions. The US is going to be in a situation like Soviet Russia, where everyone had left the party and the only one in attendance was solitary Russia.
I think it **may** go that way. He has backed down before. But also, he is a person that doesn't forget a grievance, however slight. If there is a trade war with Canada, it will be costly and painful for the US. I don't think that matters for Trump. Being perceived as weak, losing power and influence, his legacy...Perhaps. Considering all that has happened, I think the other countries have tired of being slapped around, decided to take a stand. They are changing their long game. How that pans out in the short term is uncertain.
I second your recommendation of Chwe. I discovered his work years ago and find it fascinating. I seem to recall that the book had a fascinating argument about the price of Super Bowl advertising.
thanks. Will fix. I usually read through again 5 minutes after writing to look for typos, but have been processing the unrelated news that happened in the meantime.
I get the point about ritual as shared experience, a coordination-building event. But interpreting Davos that way strikes me as way too simplistic. Davos is more and less than that. It is more in the sense that a significant swath of the global capitalist class comes to the same place at the same time and can discuss their interlocking and competing interests behind the scenes, a sort of Burning Man for the .001%. It is less insofar as it is, in its public guise, largely performative. That is, the issues and proclamations have been largely worked out in advance, and Davos is where the scripts are read. But yes, Carney disrupted this show, and, as far as I can tell, his speech was not anticipated.
But another point is, in my opinion, even larger: Greenland is greatly misunderstood as an "issue". Its importance to Trump lies partly in his perverse psychology (I will be vindicated by my conquests) and partly in a politics of domination. That is, his advisors believe that enough people want to vicariously experience the sense of domination and triumph that visual demonstrations of them will produce a sort of democratic warrant. (I speculated in one my Substacks that Palantir-ish tech accomplices of Trump may have a back door in social media accounts they can exploit to test video clips and other content on volatile disengaged voters.)
That's the positive side. The implicit significance of centering Greenland, even temporarily, is that it is so patently absurd and based on evident falsehoods that it removes any possibility of negotiation as that term is normally understood. What is there to talk about? Trump is signaling his demands are not subject to appeals to evidence, reason or even self-interest. It calls on other countries to simply debase themselves. He knows they will protest, and he will go on to some other obsession. (At least in foreign policy, his administration is ADHD.) Davos in that sense was just a backdrop. If there is a "long run" logic to this stream of senseless demands, it is that little mini-victories can be snatched here and there, and meanwhile other countries will be just worn down.
I could be wrong about the particular combination of madness and purpose I'm attributing to this outfit. It's all speculative. We'll see.
Another good piece. I too noticed the link between Carney's speech and Underground Empire (yes: get that book, it is really good).
The ritual being for the shared knowledge of the onlookers is a convincing perspective. I have to think of Ludwig WIttgenstein's analysis that language is based on *shared* experiences, and I have taken that analogously to "culture is based on shared convictions". These rituals are events that have a strong influence on that sharing.of convictions. For the audience (across the world), Carney's convictions made a hundred times the impact of Trump's. Hence: Trump now threatens Canada with 100% tariffs over doing a deal with Chine after having a done a deal with China himself.
And Trump has cemented it by immediately betraying the allies that fought with the US in Afghanistan and Iraq after the US invoked NATO article 5, by lying about their fighting. These other countries and their veterans will not be satisfied by anything but apologies. Of which Trump is incapable. So, damage done. And damage done to GOP politicians who do not apologise for Trump in his place. This betrayal is so horrid.
Having grown up during the days of the Vietnam War and lives lost on the home front battling that insane war, I am perplexed by the importance given to a bunch of elites playing performative politics in a high class mountain resort. At least the focus on Justin Trudeau and his "new love" recognized the gathering for what it was - a place to show off in front of an audience watching the parade. Admiration for the structure and composition of a speech saying what we all already know is better than admiration for a leaders socks, but not by much.
The true battles in this war against the autocracy of Trump are happening on the streets like those in Minneapolis. Lives, not ideals, are being sacrificed and are truly the stakes in this battle and it has a great chance of descending into all out war …
To pick up the theme of royal power and happy vassals vs slaves: I think we might compare Trump's speech to James I assertion of absolute power in his speech to parliament on 1609-10. The first shot across the bows in a long process of realignment. And a departure from the more pragmatic and non-confrontational approach of Elizabeth I.
Wednesday morning January 21, the Telegraph published a column by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard with this headline:
"Trump has crossed all lines: it is time to cut off his global credit card.
America has lost its credibility. The only thing that can stop the president is the bond market"
I am going to guess that Trump's Davos team was reading this by lunchtime.
Received wisdom (and Trump's own working assumption) is that the U.S. is the world's indispensable market for goods and for capital investment, so it (i.e., he) can afford to throw its weight around. There's also a corollary meme arising in the financial newspapers, that investors will have to threaten capital flight from the U.S. a little harder every next time, to fight Trump.
But I wonder. Trump is a very shortsighted guy and just maybe he couldn't imagine that the threat of capital fight, which caused him to reverse himself on tariffs earlier last year, would return, in response to more or less a geopolitical security issue. But he may have enough neurons left to realize that there's no one to bailout a U.S. gov't default, in the way that he found angels to survive his own bankruptcies.
Evidence has been increasing since last year that Trump's actions were causing US bond rates to rise. Some of that was interpreted as tariff-induced inflation. Another interpretation is capital flight. This latter is now being emphasized. Germany is floating the idea of repatriating its gold stocks in NY bank vaults. There is talk of Europe building up Euro-denominated bonds to invest in rather than US dollar bonds. China has been quietly selling off its US bonds. We will know something is amiss if the US tries to prevent capital flight by fiat, rather than market mechanisms.
As for the wealthy, let's see how Dimon handles Trump's threat to sue J P Morgan Chase. If Trump is seen to back down, that just might change some minds about bending the knee.
Power can be an illusion. I recall how the Soviet threat, still apparently great in the 1980s, suddenly collapsed. The US is certainly more militarily and economically powerful than the USSR ever was, but its weaknesses are already being exposed by China. The US cannot seriously expect to fight and win resource wars around the planet, especially when the divide-and-conquer approach starts to fail.
The United States doesn't have one super-rich capitalist class. It has at least 2, and they hate each other, and have been fighting each other for power and dominance for decades. And they have various industrial hangers on, and the US State Department vs the CIA, and so on and so forth all involved, as is no news to the author of _Underground Empire_. There is very little that they can agree on, besides "taxing the rich is bad". Thus the ritual may not have been about Trump but about who has won the battle of the super-rich, and if the side that you wrote about in _Underground Empire_ is the one that is hoisting the white flag -- "globalism is over" then I, for one, will be very glad to see it. It was very hard for me to listen to Carney, arch-globalist, embodiment of so much of what I dislike give this amazing speech in as complete a 'the leopard has changed his spots' moment as I can recall happening, well, ever. The Cognitive dissonance was astonishing -- but then perhaps that was the point. Who better to announce the surrender of the old world order to this audience?
Or you could see it positively as Carney having been forced to confront the uncomfortable truth of the risk-weaknesses of simplistic globalisation and having learned.
and anyone responsible for governing Canada has to be aware of the vast economic presence of the US - Canada is or has been to some extent an economic colony of the US - and has to start looking around for counterbalances. Pierre Trudeau in the early 1970s was looking for a third way (i.e. not the US and not the traditional colonizer, Britain), and successive governments of different parties have tried to find a method of reducing dependence on the US.
Brian Mulroney in the 1980s decided to grasp the nettle and promote free trade with the US (building on a managed market for auto production created in the 1960s). That worked more or less, with downsides that were predicted (though denied by Mulrony and other free traders) ... up to Trump's agreeing to a slightly revised NAFTA in 2018.
So Carney did not have much choice but to look in his turn for a third way, particularly when the US has fallen under the spell of a demented narcissist with a bizarre love of tariffs. Carney has been a globalizer, and an environmentalist, but has had to deal with permanent realities of Canada as well as the (one hopes) temporary madness of Trump.
Let's all decide not to live within the lie. If Trump can rename cabinet positions, so can we. The Department of Homeland Security is now the Department of Domestic Warfare. After all, he told us, "The enemy is within."
Was this an emperor's new clothes moment--i.e. where the commonly held version of reality is challenged, by being shown to be artificial, i.e. the product of common agreement?
Trumpkopf has had many, many emperor's new clothes moments throughout his entire measly existence. And he will have many more to come. Too many.
Is this why Air Force 1 turned back before setting out again? They would have heard Carney’s address and the overwhelming reaction he received with a standing ovation. Either Trump did not want to go to Davos under those circumstances or his staff thought it best not to go. It was a takedown reenforced by the flotsam and jetsam who signed up to his Peace Board, without key European support. It was a humiliating experience for him and why his vitriol is so forcibly directed at Europe, with the imposition of 100% tariffs on Canada.
I thought it was because they had to change Trumpkopf's diaper.
The power that Trump is weilding, the reason we are all forced to take him seriously, is the momentum of 80 years of careful work by sucessive US governments to build a world order under the control of the US (buy Farrell's book!). That momentum, combined with his narcissism, is what gives the veneer of inevability, but its an illusion. Things like SWIFT, the deep integration and dependency NATO and Europe have on US support, and dominance of the US military aren't going to collapse any time soon, but they are at their peak and can only diminish going forward. Trump's cabinet are all focused on appearance and social media dominance, but these contribute nothing to keeping the machinery running. And in Minneapolis their media control is a shambles. The 1 thing they are supposedly good at is collapsing.
This is what I commented on Adam Tooze's Chartbook #431 on Davos just now:
1. Hypothesis #1: Davos would be largely irrelevant.
Question: Irrelevant or relevant to what and to whom?
Irrelevant/relevant to northern tier public policy for the coming year?
Irrelevant/relevant to parts of the planet where resources are extracted for some other period of time?
Both?
Does "Davos is largely irrelevant" mean the global capital CEO's don't make global public policy? That would mean that their replacement of consent of the governed with Project 2025, for a recent example, isn't significant public policy. We know that's not the case.
Or does it mean that Davos is just a pricey party - a dog and pony show like a political party convention, in which the decisions have already been made?
2. Hypothesis #2: Davos might potentially be a significant forum for coordinating global capital in the face of the MAGA rampage.
Question: So I am trying to envision this scenario. Jamie Dimon, Larry Fink, Ursula van der Leyden, Christine Lagarde et. al., were emailing and talking in the weeks prior to Davos and agreed on a global capital policy that would destroy the political and financial power of the MAGAns?
Why would they do that?
Does that indicate a policy disagreement in the global capital community? That would be interesting, if so. Is there disagreement about the Trump tariff debacle?
I don't square them feeling intimidated with their being able to tell Trump back off on Greenland.
It doesn't appear so - it appears that the capital people told Trump and his gang that if the GOP want further donations they had better back off on tariffs and on Greenland, now.
Why did the capitalists keep their mouths shut at Davos about climate, democracy, inequality, the EU, NATO, Ukraine, Sudan, China, where they are heavily invested?
Because they like it like that and have no complaints with the MAGA/Trump policy of destroying the regulatory apparatus?
As for tariffs - protectionism - that will be on the agenda at the next World Trade Organization (WTO) Ministerial Conference, in Cameroon, March 26-29, as will be the way the WTO makes its decisions. The WTO currently takes decisions by consensus among its 166 members.
The WTO is weak and ineffectual and may not survive.
The headshaking WTF is there is no visible connection between Davos and ICE, between Davos and people in Minnesota rebelling against ICE, between Davos and the destruction of democracy, between Davos and inequality, between Davos and the hastening destruction of Earth's ability to sustain life, a destruction manifest in floods, fires, droughts, melting ice sheets, biodiversity collapse, costs that destroy governments, all of which - all of it - is caused by capital's mining of the planet as "resources." Do Larry Fink and his toady think that Trump will soon die and it will all be over soon? Or that they really don't care?
WTF, WEF?
They really don't care. They are, like Trumpkopf himself, psychopaths. They're only interested in grabbing up for themselves everything there is to grab, as quickly as possible. If it means human extinction, so be it.
Could it also be that they know. That they all know:
a) there will be no turning back from the current path, a path that inevitably leads to the destruction of Earth, and
b) having accepted that inevitability, they’ve shifted focus not to prevention, but to control?
Instead of saving the planet, they determine how to prolong what remains of it, engineering small, contained pockets of green, of habitability, reserved exclusively for those who wield power. The rest of us, and our children, become the expendable mass: the fodder required to keep those enclaves functioning, even if it costs countless lives.
This logic supports the relentless push to keep having children no matter how scarce resources become, no matter the lack of healthcare, no matter the shrinking habitable land. A sick, weakened global population is easier to enslave, penned into rigid infrastructure, tightly managed, securely controlled, pacified with carefully rationed moments of pleasure.
That’s where social media/AI comes in.
Not as it exists now, but matured, evolved into a fully immersive virtual relief system. A manufactured reality that distracts just enough to keep you compliant. Your body deteriorates. Your spirit erodes. But you’re given no real avenue to escape, resist, or even fully feel the loss. You are entertained while you are consumed.
Meanwhile, the very uninhabitability of the Earth becomes a built in failsafe against revolution. When access to food, clean water, and basic resources is restricted, survival itself becomes the full time occupation. Resistance requires energy, organization, and hope, luxuries an exhausted, starving population cannot afford.
So yes. the world will burn.
But it will be managed.
There will be designated spaces from which the burning can be watched, or ignored entirely, without being personally experienced. And the rest of us will exist outside those spaces, sustaining them, paying the cost, and disappearing quietly as the planet collapses around us.
"... a putative collective understanding that countered the alternative collective understanding that Trump wanted to impose upon the world." And / or Trump, acting on the wishes of Project 2025, V Putin, and their transnational financialist mafia, to make Capital the force to which we all kneel before. Or, to use a darker, older name: Mammon.
Tim Long, Just Up the Hill from Lock 15.
lock 15 in Marple ?
I think I was through Marple, years ago on the way to an Eroica ride at Bakewell. You've got the edge on charm there. Here, we have, ehm, soybeans, but also the Driftless Zone, and pretty Elizabeth, Illinois, just an 80 mile meander to the NW.
Lock and Dam 15 on the Mississippi, at Rock Island, Illinois :)
Simply wondering about a possible coincidence. Daughter lives at lock 13 in Marple. Very likely on the way to Bakewell. home is in Canada just east of Detroit - soybeans , tomatoes and corn here ( and hogs , like Illinois) Someday I hope to return to your country - when the monsters masquerading as leaders are gone
Thanks Bill. I would look forward to motoring back into Canada when I could hold my head up as a grateful and appreciative neighbor, and not a suspected supporter of mafia-type thuggery. THAT might be farther off in the future than I have time; and for that, this old Boy Scout is saddened and ashamed. I'm trying, in my small part. Tim
Trump is beginning to discipline Carney and Canada. Too many are focused on the short-term results. Trump and many Americans, definitely. The EU and Canada are signaling long-term intentions. The US is going to be in a situation like Soviet Russia, where everyone had left the party and the only one in attendance was solitary Russia.
https://apnews.com/article/trump-canada-carney-china-tariffs-5079e910df071b45d2b16949efb8f11a
This effort to "discipline" Canada is going to go nowhere. We are tired of this crap.
I disagree with Henry that this isn't a victory for Europe. Davos was pivotal. The Europeans cannot unsee what they saw. The game is up.
I think it **may** go that way. He has backed down before. But also, he is a person that doesn't forget a grievance, however slight. If there is a trade war with Canada, it will be costly and painful for the US. I don't think that matters for Trump. Being perceived as weak, losing power and influence, his legacy...Perhaps. Considering all that has happened, I think the other countries have tired of being slapped around, decided to take a stand. They are changing their long game. How that pans out in the short term is uncertain.
I second your recommendation of Chwe. I discovered his work years ago and find it fascinating. I seem to recall that the book had a fascinating argument about the price of Super Bowl advertising.
"This is why Kearney’s speech was so remarkably efficacious" Type for Carney?
thanks. Will fix. I usually read through again 5 minutes after writing to look for typos, but have been processing the unrelated news that happened in the meantime.
I get it. Hey, I just managed to misspell the word "typo", and I only had three words to add!
Thus proving that the tactic of "flooding the zone" works!
I get the point about ritual as shared experience, a coordination-building event. But interpreting Davos that way strikes me as way too simplistic. Davos is more and less than that. It is more in the sense that a significant swath of the global capitalist class comes to the same place at the same time and can discuss their interlocking and competing interests behind the scenes, a sort of Burning Man for the .001%. It is less insofar as it is, in its public guise, largely performative. That is, the issues and proclamations have been largely worked out in advance, and Davos is where the scripts are read. But yes, Carney disrupted this show, and, as far as I can tell, his speech was not anticipated.
But another point is, in my opinion, even larger: Greenland is greatly misunderstood as an "issue". Its importance to Trump lies partly in his perverse psychology (I will be vindicated by my conquests) and partly in a politics of domination. That is, his advisors believe that enough people want to vicariously experience the sense of domination and triumph that visual demonstrations of them will produce a sort of democratic warrant. (I speculated in one my Substacks that Palantir-ish tech accomplices of Trump may have a back door in social media accounts they can exploit to test video clips and other content on volatile disengaged voters.)
That's the positive side. The implicit significance of centering Greenland, even temporarily, is that it is so patently absurd and based on evident falsehoods that it removes any possibility of negotiation as that term is normally understood. What is there to talk about? Trump is signaling his demands are not subject to appeals to evidence, reason or even self-interest. It calls on other countries to simply debase themselves. He knows they will protest, and he will go on to some other obsession. (At least in foreign policy, his administration is ADHD.) Davos in that sense was just a backdrop. If there is a "long run" logic to this stream of senseless demands, it is that little mini-victories can be snatched here and there, and meanwhile other countries will be just worn down.
I could be wrong about the particular combination of madness and purpose I'm attributing to this outfit. It's all speculative. We'll see.
Another good piece. I too noticed the link between Carney's speech and Underground Empire (yes: get that book, it is really good).
The ritual being for the shared knowledge of the onlookers is a convincing perspective. I have to think of Ludwig WIttgenstein's analysis that language is based on *shared* experiences, and I have taken that analogously to "culture is based on shared convictions". These rituals are events that have a strong influence on that sharing.of convictions. For the audience (across the world), Carney's convictions made a hundred times the impact of Trump's. Hence: Trump now threatens Canada with 100% tariffs over doing a deal with Chine after having a done a deal with China himself.
And Trump has cemented it by immediately betraying the allies that fought with the US in Afghanistan and Iraq after the US invoked NATO article 5, by lying about their fighting. These other countries and their veterans will not be satisfied by anything but apologies. Of which Trump is incapable. So, damage done. And damage done to GOP politicians who do not apologise for Trump in his place. This betrayal is so horrid.
PS. Typo: Kearney -> Carney
Having grown up during the days of the Vietnam War and lives lost on the home front battling that insane war, I am perplexed by the importance given to a bunch of elites playing performative politics in a high class mountain resort. At least the focus on Justin Trudeau and his "new love" recognized the gathering for what it was - a place to show off in front of an audience watching the parade. Admiration for the structure and composition of a speech saying what we all already know is better than admiration for a leaders socks, but not by much.
The true battles in this war against the autocracy of Trump are happening on the streets like those in Minneapolis. Lives, not ideals, are being sacrificed and are truly the stakes in this battle and it has a great chance of descending into all out war …
To pick up the theme of royal power and happy vassals vs slaves: I think we might compare Trump's speech to James I assertion of absolute power in his speech to parliament on 1609-10. The first shot across the bows in a long process of realignment. And a departure from the more pragmatic and non-confrontational approach of Elizabeth I.
Wednesday morning January 21, the Telegraph published a column by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard with this headline:
"Trump has crossed all lines: it is time to cut off his global credit card.
America has lost its credibility. The only thing that can stop the president is the bond market"
I am going to guess that Trump's Davos team was reading this by lunchtime.
Received wisdom (and Trump's own working assumption) is that the U.S. is the world's indispensable market for goods and for capital investment, so it (i.e., he) can afford to throw its weight around. There's also a corollary meme arising in the financial newspapers, that investors will have to threaten capital flight from the U.S. a little harder every next time, to fight Trump.
But I wonder. Trump is a very shortsighted guy and just maybe he couldn't imagine that the threat of capital fight, which caused him to reverse himself on tariffs earlier last year, would return, in response to more or less a geopolitical security issue. But he may have enough neurons left to realize that there's no one to bailout a U.S. gov't default, in the way that he found angels to survive his own bankruptcies.
Evidence has been increasing since last year that Trump's actions were causing US bond rates to rise. Some of that was interpreted as tariff-induced inflation. Another interpretation is capital flight. This latter is now being emphasized. Germany is floating the idea of repatriating its gold stocks in NY bank vaults. There is talk of Europe building up Euro-denominated bonds to invest in rather than US dollar bonds. China has been quietly selling off its US bonds. We will know something is amiss if the US tries to prevent capital flight by fiat, rather than market mechanisms.
As for the wealthy, let's see how Dimon handles Trump's threat to sue J P Morgan Chase. If Trump is seen to back down, that just might change some minds about bending the knee.
Power can be an illusion. I recall how the Soviet threat, still apparently great in the 1980s, suddenly collapsed. The US is certainly more militarily and economically powerful than the USSR ever was, but its weaknesses are already being exposed by China. The US cannot seriously expect to fight and win resource wars around the planet, especially when the divide-and-conquer approach starts to fail.
I don't think he does any of his own thinking anymore. The reversals come from people who know how to handle him, after they pull him aside.
Trumpkopf really is a simpleton. Add dementia to that and, well, you know the rest.
Have you heard of Irish Alzheimer’s?
It’s where they forget everything except the grudges
Really insightful - thank you.
The United States doesn't have one super-rich capitalist class. It has at least 2, and they hate each other, and have been fighting each other for power and dominance for decades. And they have various industrial hangers on, and the US State Department vs the CIA, and so on and so forth all involved, as is no news to the author of _Underground Empire_. There is very little that they can agree on, besides "taxing the rich is bad". Thus the ritual may not have been about Trump but about who has won the battle of the super-rich, and if the side that you wrote about in _Underground Empire_ is the one that is hoisting the white flag -- "globalism is over" then I, for one, will be very glad to see it. It was very hard for me to listen to Carney, arch-globalist, embodiment of so much of what I dislike give this amazing speech in as complete a 'the leopard has changed his spots' moment as I can recall happening, well, ever. The Cognitive dissonance was astonishing -- but then perhaps that was the point. Who better to announce the surrender of the old world order to this audience?
Or you could see it positively as Carney having been forced to confront the uncomfortable truth of the risk-weaknesses of simplistic globalisation and having learned.
and anyone responsible for governing Canada has to be aware of the vast economic presence of the US - Canada is or has been to some extent an economic colony of the US - and has to start looking around for counterbalances. Pierre Trudeau in the early 1970s was looking for a third way (i.e. not the US and not the traditional colonizer, Britain), and successive governments of different parties have tried to find a method of reducing dependence on the US.
Brian Mulroney in the 1980s decided to grasp the nettle and promote free trade with the US (building on a managed market for auto production created in the 1960s). That worked more or less, with downsides that were predicted (though denied by Mulrony and other free traders) ... up to Trump's agreeing to a slightly revised NAFTA in 2018.
So Carney did not have much choice but to look in his turn for a third way, particularly when the US has fallen under the spell of a demented narcissist with a bizarre love of tariffs. Carney has been a globalizer, and an environmentalist, but has had to deal with permanent realities of Canada as well as the (one hopes) temporary madness of Trump.
Yes, it could. I'm not up for that much optimism, but I would be delighted to be wrong about this.