Tag Archives: US Economy

Get Ready For An Economic Wake-Up Call This Holiday Season

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By Brandon Smith

Source: Alt-Market.com

If we are to measure the concept of “economic recovery” in real terms, then we would have to look at the fundamentals (not stock markets) and whether or not they’re improving. Unfortunately, not all economic data is presented to the public honestly. Very often it is mired and obscured in a fog of disinformation and false standards.

I would point out, though, that there is relatively accurate information out there in certain areas of the global economy, and it tells us our economic structure is destabilizing. Beyond that, even the rigged numbers are moving into negative territory. But what does all this mean for the holiday retail season, one of the mainstream’s favorite gauges of US financial health? And, if 2019’s holiday profits sink, what does this tell us is going to happen in 2020?

First, let’s start with what we know…

Since we live in a “globalized” economy where everything is supposedly “interdependent”, it helps to examine international export numbers. The US doesn’t manufacture and export much of anything anymore beyond agricultural products, but global markets do expect us to consume the goods of other nations. A decline in exports indicates a failing global economy, but in particular a failing US consumer economy.

The obvious example would be China, which has seen plunging export data at least the past three months, though many will argue that this is merely due to tariffs and the trade war. However, it’s not just China that is showing signs of collapse.

South Korea, another major manufacturing and export hub in Asia (5th largest in the world) has seen declining exports for 11 consecutive months. South Korean shipping is crumbling in November and the media is blaming the trade war, as some SK companies would be “hit indirectly” because they sell intermediate goods to China are are linked to US companies in China. But this makes little sense. Tariffs are highly targeted to specific companies and specific goods, and so far the US has not directed major tariff attention at South Korea beyond the auto market.  Also, the new KORUS deal between Trump and SK is different only cosmetically to original trade agreements, yet, South Korean exports continue to fall.

The same situation can be seen in Japan, with Japanese exports witnessing a 9.2% year-over-year drop in October, the largest decline in 3 years. Japan has seen three consecutive months of declines in exports.

And what about Europe? While Germany, the manufacturing powerhouse of the EU, finally saw a jump in exports to the US this past month, overall the European Union has seen consistently poor export performance for the past year, and Germany itself is hovering on the edge of recession with 0.1% official GDP growth. Many economist already consider Germany to be in recession, as official GDP numbers are constantly manipulated by governments to the upside.

But let’s not forget about the US. Remember how Trump promised that the trade war would result in a renaissance for US manufacturing and that millions of industrial jobs would be returning to our shores? Well, as I’ve warned consistently for the past couple years, there is NO WAY corporations will be bringing manufacturing jobs and factories back to the US without ample incentives. Trump already gave companies tax cuts without demanding anything in return, and the cost/benefit ratio of building new factories and paying American workers top dollar versus keeping existing factories in Asia and dealing with 10%-25% tariffs just doesn’t add up to a new US rust belt renaissance.

While manufacturing jobs have increased, US manufacturing activity has declined.  Meaning, there simply isn’t enough demand for the goods being produced.  US manufacturing ISM index just sank this month and has been sinking for the past four month into negative territory. While US PMI manufacturing data jumped this month, it is still well below the 10 year average and is also very low compared to past holiday seasons, which almost always see a spike in manufacturing.  US manufacturing remains at a historic low of 11% of US GDP and production output has decline steadily since January of this year.

The question is, will the vast decline in global manufacturing translate to a crash in consumer demand?  We know that US credit dependency has skyrocketed in the past few years, but will more debt result in more profits for retailers?  This is highly unlikely, as US retail sales growth, for example, has been in decline at the same time that consumer debt has been rising.  Why?  Credit delinquencies have been relatively stable (so far) this year, so my theory is that people in the US are paying off previous debts by taking on new debt. They are kicking the can on their insolvency.

We have seen this kind of destructive credit death cycle before – Right before the crash of 2008.

So what does all this mean? And why is the media portraying the trade war with China as the cause of the global export and shipping crisis when clearly most of the world is not directly or even indirectly tied to the tariffs?

As noted above, the narrative that is being pushed is that we live in an “interdependent” and globalized world, and that nations cannot function economically without cooperation. The trade war, I believe, is a smokescreen designed by the globalist establishment to do two things specifically:

1) It is being created to hide a crash in the greater economy. Notice that almost no one in the mainstream is talking about a collapse in global production and multiple fundamentals due to DEMAND; instead they constantly talk about the trade war and exports. The trade war is becoming the scapegoat for the implosion of the market bubble engineered by globalists and central banks through a decade of stimulus measures.

The collapse of the economic bubble is being caused in part by massive debt and a lack of consumer demand due to lack of consumer savings and cash flow. The trade war has little to do with it, and I suspect we would be seeing sharp declines in the US economy in particular even without the trade war.

2) The trade war creates a false dichotomy in which many Americans will be lured into blaming China and other nations for their economic ills, and China and the rest of the world will be lured into blaming America. It also reasserts the globalist propaganda argument that when nations and economies “go rogue”, they hurt everyone; therefore, more global controls and centralization will have to be established in order to prevent nationalism from harming the rest of the world.

And what does this all have to do with the Christmas shopping season? Like the end of last year, I think we are in for another ugly holiday retail event – Perhaps far worse than before. All the manufacturing and export data indicates that this will be the case. If so, then the mainstream narrative of recovery, long perpetuated as fact by the media and the Federal Reserve for the past several years, will finally die.

The only thing that might elevate holiday numbers would be increased price inflation in goods, but I predict that even inflation misrepresented as “profits” will not save Christmas stats this year.  Some skeptics of the ongoing crash will argue that Black Friday numbers this year were the best since 2013, therefore the holiday season will be a good one.  These people don’t know their economic history.  In most cases, holiday seasons that start off with a high traffic Black Friday end with poor overall sales data, including 2013.  This is because consumers that are cash strapped are more likely to buy early during Black Friday sales and spend far less over the rest of the season.

In the mind of the average American consumer, holiday retail sales are a primary indicator of the health of the economy. A dramatic crash in Christmas retail will end the delusion of a stable US system and cause the public to start asking questions. Economics is 50% math and 50% psychology. The math in the US economy says we are in the middle of a crash. The psychological orientation of the public has been on the opposite end of spectrum, but is now slowly moving to meet with reality. When the psychological delusion ends, the game is over. And, for the globalists a new game begins.

Order out of chaos is their motto for a reason…

The global “reset” as they sometimes refer to it, has already been triggered. Going into 2020, the question is will the fantasy fall completely away to reveal the grotesque economic swamp our foundation has been built on top of? Or, will the delusion drag on for at least one more year? Given the current data, I suspect the party is over. But it is difficult to predict how the public will react to a financial crash. Sometimes people have no choice but to acknowledge the danger in front of them, but sometimes they simply bury their heads in the sand deeper and hope that by dragging out the inevitable the inevitable will become forgettable.

America’s Debt Dependence Makes It An Easy Economic Target

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By Brandon Smith

Source: Alt-Market.com

There is a classic denial tactic that many people use when confronted with negative facts about a subject they have a personal attachment to; I would call it “deferral denial” — or a psychological postponing of reality.

For example, point out the fundamentals on the U.S. economy such as the fact that unemployment is not below 4% as official numbers suggest, but actually closer to 20% when you factor in U-6 measurements including the record 96 million people not counted because they have run out of unemployment benefits. Or point out that true consumer inflation in the U.S. is not around 3% as the Federal Reserve and the Bureau of Labor Statistics claims, but closer to 10% according to the way CPI used to be calculated before the government started rigging the numbers.  For a large part of the public including a lot of economic analysts, there is perhaps a momentary acceptance of the danger, but then an immediate deferral — “Well, maybe things will get worse down the road, 10 or 20 years from now, but it’s not that bad today…”

This is cognitive dissonance at its finest. The economy is in steep decline now, but the mind in denial says “it could be worse,” and this is how you get entire populations caught completely off guard by a financial crash. They could have easily seen the signs, but they desperately wanted to believe that all bad things happen in some illusory future, not today.

There is also another denial tactic I see often in the world of politics and economics, which is what I call “paying it backward.” This is what people do when they have a biased attachment to a person or institution and refuse to see the terrible implications of their actions. For example, when we point out that someone like Donald Trump makes destructive decisions, such as the continued support of Israel and Saudi Arabia in Syria and Yemen, or the reinstatement of funding for the White Helmets in Syria who are tied to ISIS, Trump supporters will often say “Well what about Obama?”

This is a game of shifting accountability. Is one person worse than the other? Possibly. I say give it time and make notes. However, the negative decisions of one politician we don’t like do not diminish the negative decisions of another politician we might like. They should BOTH be held accountable.

The same goes for countries and economies. When an analyst points out that U.S. debt is at historic highs and is utterly unsustainable, people in denial will say “but what about China or Europe?” One does not negate the other and, of course, there are differences that make the situation in the U.S. far more tenuous.

Primarily I am talking about America’s endless dependency on the world reserve status of the U.S. dollar and, beyond that, the steady expansion of debt at low interest rates for the past decade.

The Federal Reserve, once the No. 1 buyer of U.S. debt, has essentially declared it is cutting off support and has begun dumping assets from its balance sheet. The only assets the Fed seems to be maintaining are Mortgage Backed Securities (MBS). All others are being cut, including Treasuries. The American economy is inexorably attached to the idea of our Treasury debt as a safe investment, with our national debt spiking above $21 trillion and many trillions more owed to entitlement programs depending on how you calculate the expenditures, there is a vital need for steady foreign investment in U.S. debt.

But what happens when investment in U.S. debt becomes politically unsavory? Consider the current escalation of the trade war; Many pro-dollar talking heads and cheerleaders have argued in the past that no nation has the guts to dump dollar denominated assets and risk the wrath of American “economic might.” But, already we have seen Russia dump half its U.S. Treasury holdings in a single month and the trade war has only just begun.

Is Russia’s action a sign of things to come? Will other nations like China follow the same strategy? We will have to wait and see, but I believe this is the inevitable outcome of the trade war if it drags on for the rest of the year.

America’s dependent nature, feeding off of foreign investment to support its debts, is a disaster waiting to happen. The concept of economic “recovery” is laughable until this issue is addressed.  And, entering into a trade war while ignoring this blaring weakness is foolish, to say the least.

Beyond the issue of government (taxpayer) debt, let’s not forget about American corporations and consumers. U.S. corporate debt as a percentage of gross domestic product is at historic highs not seen since the housing bubble of 2008 or the dot-com bubble of 2001. There is a distinct difference, though, that makes today’s bubble far more insidious. After years of near-zero interest rates, corporations have become addicted to cheap debt. So much so that they have been borrowing nonstop to support their own stock prices through stock buyback manipulation. But now the Fed is raising interest rates and has committed to expanded hikes in the future.

So, what will corporations do as the cheap debt dries up? Thus far, they are spending the majority of their Trump tax cut still trying to artificially prop up stock process. When this money runs out (and I believe it will much faster than the mainstream thinks), the existing debt of these companies will cost much more to finance, and future borrowing at the same pace will become impossible. This is a threat that is developing now, not in some far-off future.

Eventually, corporations will have to make deep spending cuts rather than borrow. This means mass layoffs, store closures and potential cuts to pensions. And, of course, no more stock buybacks, meaning a market crash will ensue.

What about the U.S. consumer? U.S. consumer debt is set to reach new highs by the end of the year; around $4 trillion by official estimates.  While discussion continues about the alleged “labor shortage” in the U.S., one thing is clear — the jobs that do exist do NOT pay wages that keep up with true inflation. When we see spikes in retail sales in the U.S. and this is applauded as economy recovery, very few mainstream analysts point out that higher retail sales are merely tracking higher inflation.

That is to say, consumers are spending more money on less stuff. Again, this is unsustainable, which is why consumer debt is exploding. Dependency on credit cards and loans is being used by the public to offset much higher costs. But as the Fed raises interest rates, this too will end. Higher Fed rates translate to higher credit rates as well as higher mortgage rates (indirectly). With higher interest payments comes a large drop in overall spending.

As you can see, there are at least two forces at work here that will end all talk of U.S. recovery and which undermine any notion of economic strength — the first is the trade war, which I believe is a massive distraction designed to draw attention away from the actions of international banks and central banks. The second is the Federal Reserve, which has addicted the country to cheap fiat and is now flushing the drugs. We cannot delude ourselves into thinking that this trend will remain slow or that it will not develop into a crash in the near term. We also cannot simply deflect to other countries like China or those in Europe as if their problems are somehow worse and therefore ours are not a concern.

The fact that the health of the US economy is inexorably reliant on the continued foreign demand for the dollar and Treasury debt means any reduction of the dollar’s world reserve status or petro-status, or any decline in treasury purchases, will directly affect the carefully crafted image of America as a stable system.  Without a sudden and aggressive resurgence of domestic production and innovation America has no safety net in the event that our debt addiction is used against us.

The argument that the central bank can jump in at any time to monetize that debt and reduce the danger is also delusional.  This assumes first and foremost that the Fed WANTS to reduce the danger.  I believe they want the danger to increase, not decrease.  Debt monetization also has the added bonus of causing even more inflation as foreign investors dump their dollar denominated assets back into the US.  Monetization is a poison, not a cure.

The crisis is here, now. Seeing and accepting it allows us to prepare accordingly. Denying it as inconsequential sets people up as victims of their own bias and ignorance.

What’s Wrong with the Economy: 9 Toxic Dynamics

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By Charles Hugh Smith

Source: Of Two Minds

These nine dynamics are mutually reinforcing.

Beneath the surface signals of an eternally rising stock market and expanding GDP, we all sense something is deeply, systemically wrong with the U.S. economy. These nine structural dynamics generate secondary dynamics, all of which are toxic to social mobility, sustainable prosperity, accountability and democracy:

1. The financialization of the economy, which transformed services, credit, risk and labor into commodities that could be traded globally. Financialization generates enormously asymmetric returns: those with access to low-cost credit, global markets and expertise in finance collect the lion’s share of gains in income and wealth.

2. The technological transformation of the economy, which has placed a substantial scarcity premium on specific tech/managerial/communication skills and devalued ordinary labor and capital. As a result, the majority of gains in wealth and income flow to those with the scarce skills and forms of capital, leaving little for ordinary labor and capital.

3. The end of cheap fossil fuels. The fracking boom/bubble has obscured the long-term secular trend: the depletion of cheap-to-access and process oil. As many analysts have observed (Nate Hagens, Gail Tverberg, Richard Heinberg, Chris Martenson et al.), the global economy only grows if energy and credit are both cheap.

4. Globalization, which transformed the developing world into the environmental dumping ground of the wealthy nations and enabled the owners of capital to offshore waste and labor.

5. The destructive consequences of “growth at any cost” are piling up. “Growth” is the one constant of all existing political-economic systems, and none of the current Modes of Production (i.e. the structures that organize production, consumption, the economy and society) recognize that “growth” is not sustainable.

The first two dynamics drive three other dynamics that have hollowed out the productive economy:

6. The dominance of debt-funded speculation as the means of “getting ahead” as opposed to producing products and services of intrinsic value that serve the core needs of communities.

7. The economy’s gains in income and wealth are concentrated in the very top of the wealth-power pyramid: the top 5%–entrepreneurs, professionals and technocrats, etc., and within this class, most of the gains go to the top 1/10th of 1% –the existing owners of wealth, and financiers/speculators with access to cheap credit.

The net result is the bottom 95% have few opportunities to “get ahead” outside of gambling in the asset bubbles du jour: the stock and housing market. While the average middle class household may be able to borrow enough to speculate in the housing bubble, two factors limit the odds of success for ordinary investors/gamblers:

A. The gains in housing are concentrated in specific markets; outside these hot markets, gains are modest.

B. Asset bubbles eventually pop, leaving those still owning the assets with losses. The risks are thus intrinsic and high. The average investor/gambler lacks the experience needed to recognize the bubble has stopped expanding and exit the market before ll the other speculators rush for the narrowing exit.

8. The devaluation of ordinary labor and capital means the bottom 60% of the economy that lacks the requisite skills with a scarcity premium in the Emerging Economy have lost easy access to the ladder of social mobility.

9. The concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the self-serving few corrupts the economy and democracy. The U.S. economy is dominated by insider and elite rackets, skims, scams and cartels/quasi-monopolies, all of which corrupt the economy by creating perverse incentives for exploitation and gaming the system to benefit the few at the expense of the many.

This corruption in service of maximizing private/personal gains at the expense of the system itself also corrupts the mechanisms of governance, which are now little more than cloaking devices that protect insiders and elites from scrutiny and consequences.

The 20% above the bottom 60% may appear to have some access to social/economic mobility, but this is largely an artifact of the bubble economy since 2009. Once the bubble deflates, the illusion of social mobility for the “middle class” between the bottom 60% and the upper 20% vanishes.

The “upper middle class” between the bottom 80% and the top 5% is being squeezed by the over-production of elites, i.e. the over-abundance of those with college degrees and the relative scarcity of secure jobs within the top 5%. As a result, credential inflation is rampant, with Masters Degrees replacing Bachelors Degrees as the default for a white-collar job, and PhDs replacing Masters diplomas as the new default for positions that lack security and upward mobility.

In other words, the number of people who qualify for and desire a slot in the elite class (top 5%) far exceeds the number of slots available. As Peter Turchin has explained, this competition generates social disorder at the top of economic heap as the top 20% fight over the few positions open in the top 5%. The disgruntled, frustrated losers far outnumber the relatively few winners.

These nine dynamics are mutually reinforcing, meaning that each dynamic strengthens one or more of the others, reinforcing each other so the sum of the nine is far more powerful than a mere addition might suggest.

The New Aristocracy (the top 9.9%) (The Atlantic)

 

America is Disneyland

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By Chris Kanthan

Source: Activist Post

Disneyland is the Happiest Place on Earth! Millions of families visit the theme park every year to enjoy the magical place of rides, spectacular shows and cheerful cartoon figures. Everything is clean, perfect and joyful. Unless … you realize that Cinderella might actually be homeless. That’s right, 10% of Disneyland’s employees are actually homeless, many more are on food stamps, and 75% struggle to make ends meet.

Does this ring familiar? Think of America. Behind the façade of being the greatest country on Earth with the largest GDP and the wealthiest billionaires, there are tens of millions of Americans who are left behind just like Disney’s employees.

This neo-feudalistic model isn’t isolated to Disney or Walmart, it’s systemic. For example, the bus driver at Apple – which has $280 billion in cash – is forced to sleep in a van because he can’t afford the Silicon Valley rent; Facebook’s cafeteria workers live in a garage; and thousands of American Airlines’ employees are forced to depend on food stamps.

America is being eaten alive by corporate greed; and Disneyland has been taken over by Scrooge.

Let’s look at some Disney Inc. statistics.

Total profit per year: $9 billion

Total employees: 200,000

Notice that the profit reflects what’s left after all the expenses, including the salaries, have been paid. So, in a utopian world, the Disney management will do the math ($9 billion / 200,000 = $45,000) and send a check for $45K to every employee, Mickey included. That kind of profit-sharing would really make Disneyland the happiest place on Earth. Does that happen? No way!

Does Cinderella get a check for perhaps $20K, $10K, $5K or even $1K? Nope, nope, nope, nope. Cinderella gets nada, zero, zilch. She should be content with the $12/hour salary and must smile happily for the kids.

In Disneyland, Cinderella never gets to meet her prince.

Disney’s CEO gets paid $46 million a year, which translates to $23,000 an hour. Imagine Disney’s CEO coming to work on Jan 2nd. He wishes a few people “happy new year,” orders coffee, sits on his desk, makes a few phone calls … and he has already made more money than what Ariel would make during the rest of the year.

Of course, the CEO should get paid more, but does he deserve a salary that’s equivalent to 2,000 Disney employees? If the CEO doesn’t show up for work for a day, Disneyland will continue running. If 2,000 employees take a day off, the park would be shut down.

In the 1960s, the CEO-to-worker salary ratio was 25. Today it’s often 600 or more, sometimes even more than 1000 (for example, at Walmart). Much of the executive compensation comes in the form of stock options and bonuses based on stock performance. In a rational and unrigged world, the CEOs would increase their revenues and profits to get bonuses. Not anymore.

Now, the CEOs simply use a no-brainer solution to boost the stock prices – it’s called stock buybacks or share repurchases. This involves a firm using corporate profits (or even borrowed money) to buy its own stocks. BTW, this used to be illegal until the 1980s.

Since 2007, US corporations have spent trillions of dollars on stock buybacks. In 2018 alone, they will spend $800 billion on this financial engineering tool (which has also led to a massive stock market bubble). They won’t use the billions to hire Americans, boost wages or innovate new products. Instead, the CEOs will buy yachts and tell you that Chinese or Mexicans stole your jobs.

Do the low-wage employees of Disneyland get any shares or stock options? A silly question, indeed.

Thus we have a situation where American employers ruthlessly exploit American workers. This isn’t a good model for a country. China and Mexico don’t make us poor; predatory capitalism does.

Paying good wages to hardworking employees is not socialism or communism. Henry Ford understood this when he more than doubled the wages of his workers in 1914.

However, hundred years later, maximizing profit has become a fundamentalist dogma. You can imagine a conversation among the factory-farming executives:

Guy #1: Why the heck are these chickens roaming out in the farms? We would save so much money if we lock them up in cages.

Guy #2: Brilliant idea! Let’s lock up five chickens in a cage. We will save more. More is always better.

Guy #3: I really don’t understand why we feed them expensive salads and healthy stuff. Let’s feed them cheap GMO corn and GMO soy from my friends at Monsanto.

Guy #4: Experts tell me that if we give them caffeine and anti-depressants, the chickens will stay awake longer, eat more, and get fatter.

Guy #5: And when they get sick, load them up with antibiotics and steroids.

Guy #5: These stupid chickens are also so small. Let’s drug them with some growth hormones. I am getting a lot of pressure from the private equity funds about profits per chicken.

Apart from being inhumane and psychopathic, this system forgets or ignores the fact that we have to eat these chickens. Sick chicken = sick people. Call it Karma or “revenge of the chickens.”

Similarly, poor workers = poor country. And you can imagine a similar conversation among corporate executives regarding workers – “cut their wages and benefits”, “make them work overtime”, “hire part-time employees rather than full-time” and so on.

You can’t grow the economy if American workers don’t get paid enough, especially by profitable multi-billion dollar corporations. 2/3rd of our GDP is based on consumer spending. It’s no wonder that in the last ten years, the US economy cumulatively grew only by a dismal 35%. Compare that to China, which grew by an astounding 200% during that same period.

And it’s not a coincidence that China’s average wages have more than doubled in the same period:

The solution for low wages primarily lies in the hands of corporate elites. Labor unions are almost non-existent in the private sector these days; and the government doesn’t have much control over corporate America – in fact, corporations control the U.S. political system. Free market doesn’t have to translate to cancerous greed and extreme exploitation. Free market also means that corporations are free to share their profits with their employees. Finally, free market can and must also incorporate patriotism, responsibility to the society and strategies for sustainable prosperity.

 

Chris Kanthan is the author of a new book, Deconstructing the Syrian War. Chris lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, has traveled to 35 countries, and writes about world affairs, politics, economy and health. His other book is Deconstructing Monsanto. Follow him on Twitter: @GMOChannel

 

 

The End of Empire

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The brutality abroad is matched by a growing brutality at home.

By Chris Hedges

Source: CommonDreams

The American empire is coming to an end. The U.S. economy is being drained by wars in the Middle East and vast military expansion around the globe. It is burdened by growing deficits, along with the devastating effects of deindustrialization and global trade agreements. Our democracy has been captured and destroyed by corporations that steadily demand more tax cuts, more deregulation and impunity from prosecution for massive acts of financial fraud, all the while looting trillions from the U.S. treasury in the form of bailouts. The nation has lost the power and respect needed to induce allies in Europe, Latin America, Asia and Africa to do its bidding. Add to this the mounting destruction caused by climate change and you have a recipe for an emerging dystopia. Overseeing this descent at the highest levels of the federal and state governments is a motley collection of imbeciles, con artists, thieves, opportunists and warmongering generals. And to be clear, I am speaking about Democrats, too.

The empire will limp along, steadily losing influence until the dollar is dropped as the world’s reserve currency, plunging the United States into a crippling depression and instantly forcing a massive contraction of its military machine.

Short of a sudden and widespread popular revolt, which does not seem likely, the death spiral appears unstoppable, meaning the United States as we know it will no longer exist within a decade or, at most, two. The global vacuum we leave behind will be filled by China, already establishing itself as an economic and military juggernaut, or perhaps there will be a multipolar world carved up among Russia, China, India, Brazil, Turkey, South Africa and a few other states. Or maybe the void will be filled, as the historian Alfred W. McCoy writes in his book “In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of US Global Power,” by “a coalition of transnational corporations, multilateral military forces like NATO, and an international financial leadership self-selected at Davos and Bilderberg” that will “forge a supranational nexus to supersede any nation or empire.”

Under every measurement, from financial growth and infrastructure investment to advanced technology, including supercomputers, space weaponry and cyberwarfare, we are being rapidly overtaken by the Chinese. “In April 2015 the U.S. Department of Agriculture suggested that the American economy would grow by nearly 50 percent over the next 15 years, while China’s would triple and come close to surpassing America’s in 2030,” McCoy noted. China became the world’s second largest economy in 2010, the same year it became the world’s leading manufacturing nation, pushing aside a United States that had dominated the world’s manufacturing for a century. The Department of Defense issued a sober report titled “At Our Own Peril: DoD Risk Assessment in a Post-Primacy World.” It found that the U.S. military “no longer enjoys an unassailable position versus state competitors,” and “it no longer can … automatically generate consistent and sustained local military superiority at range.” McCoy predicts the collapse will come by 2030.

Empires in decay embrace an almost willful suicide. Blinded by their hubris and unable to face the reality of their diminishing power, they retreat into a fantasy world where hard and unpleasant facts no longer intrude. They replace diplomacy, multilateralism and politics with unilateral threats and the blunt instrument of war.

This collective self-delusion saw the United States make the greatest strategic blunder in its history, one that sounded the death knell of the empire—the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq. The architects of the war in the George W. Bush White House, and the array of useful idiots in the press and academia who were cheerleaders for it, knew very little about the countries being invaded, were stunningly naive about the effects of industrial warfare and were blindsided by the ferocious blowback. They stated, and probably believed, that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, although they had no valid evidence to support this claim. They insisted that democracy would be implanted in Baghdad and spread across the Middle East. They assured the public that U.S. troops would be greeted by grateful Iraqis and Afghans as liberators. They promised that oil revenues would cover the cost of reconstruction. They insisted that the bold and quick military strike—“shock and awe”—would restore American hegemony in the region and dominance in the world. It did the opposite. As Zbigniew Brzezinski noted, this “unilateral war of choice against Iraq precipitated a widespread delegitimation of U.S. foreign policy.”

Historians of empire call these military fiascos, a feature of all late empires, examples of “micro-militarism.” The Athenians engaged in micro-militarism when during the Peloponnesian War (431-404 B.C.) they invaded Sicily, suffering the loss of 200 ships and thousands of soldiers and triggering revolts throughout the empire. Britain did so in 1956 when it attacked Egypt in a dispute over the nationalization of the Suez Canal and then quickly had to withdraw in humiliation, empowering a string of Arab nationalist leaders such as Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser and dooming British rule over the nation’s few remaining colonies. Neither of these empires recovered.

“While rising empires are often judicious, even rational in their application of armed force for conquest and control of overseas dominions, fading empires are inclined to ill-considered displays of power, dreaming of bold military masterstrokes that would somehow recoup lost prestige and power,” McCoy writes. “Often irrational even from an imperial point of view, these micromilitary operations can yield hemorrhaging expenditures or humiliating defeats that only accelerate the process already under way.”

Empires need more than force to dominate other nations. They need a mystique. This mystique—a mask for imperial plunder, repression and exploitation—seduces some native elites, who become willing to do the bidding of the imperial power or at least remain passive. And it provides a patina of civility and even nobility to justify to those at home the costs in blood and money needed to maintain empire. The parliamentary system of government that Britain replicated in appearance in the colonies, and the introduction of British sports such as polo, cricket and horse racing, along with elaborately uniformed viceroys and the pageantry of royalty, were buttressed by what the colonialists said was the invincibility of their navy and army. England was able to hold its empire together from 1815 to 1914 before being forced into a steady retreat. America’s high-blown rhetoric about democracy, liberty and equality, along with basketball, baseball and Hollywood, as well as our own deification of the military, entranced and cowed much of the globe in the wake of World War II. Behind the scenes, of course, the CIA used its bag of dirty tricks to orchestrate coups, fix elections and carry out assassinations, black propaganda campaigns, bribery, blackmail, intimidation and torture. But none of this works anymore.

The loss of the mystique is crippling. It makes it hard to find pliant surrogates to administer the empire, as we have seen in Iraq and Afghanistan. The photographs of physical abuse and sexual humiliation imposed on Arab prisoners at Abu Ghraib inflamed the Muslim world and fed al-Qaida and later Islamic State with new recruits. The assassination of Osama bin Laden and a host of other jihadist leaders, including the U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaki, openly mocked the concept of the rule of law. The hundreds of thousands of dead and millions of refugees fleeing our debacles in the Middle East, along with the near-constant threat from militarized aerial drones, exposed us as state terrorists. We have exercised in the Middle East the U.S. military’s penchant for widespread atrocities, indiscriminate violence, lies and blundering miscalculations, actions that led to our defeat in Vietnam.

The brutality abroad is matched by a growing brutality at home. Militarized police gun down mostly unarmed, poor people of color and fill a system of penitentiaries and jails that hold a staggering 25 percent of the world’s prisoners although Americans represent only 5 percent of global population. Many of our cities are in ruins. Our public transportation system is a shambles. Our educational system is in steep decline and being privatized. Opioid addiction, suicide, mass shootings, depression and morbid obesity plague a population that has fallen into profound despair. The deep disillusionment and anger that led to Donald Trump’s election—a reaction to the corporate coup d’état and the poverty afflicting at least half of the country—have destroyed the myth of a functioning democracy. Presidential tweets and rhetoric celebrate hate, racism and bigotry and taunt the weak and the vulnerable. The president in an address before the United Nations threatened to obliterate another nation in an act of genocide. We are worldwide objects of ridicule and hatred. The foreboding for the future is expressed in the rash of dystopian films, motion pictures that no longer perpetuate American virtue and exceptionalism or the myth of human progress.

“The demise of the United States as the preeminent global power could come far more quickly than anyone imagines,” McCoy writes. “Despite the aura of omnipotence empires often project, most are surprisingly fragile, lacking the inherent strength of even a modest nation-state. Indeed, a glance at their history should remind us that the greatest of them are susceptible to collapse from diverse causes, with fiscal pressures usually a prime factor. For the better part of two centuries, the security and prosperity of the homeland has been the main objective for most stable states, making foreign or imperial adventures an expendable option, usually allocated no more than 5 percent of the domestic budget. Without the financing that arises almost organically inside a sovereign nation, empires are famously predatory in their relentless hunt for plunder or profit—witness the Atlantic slave trade, Belgium’s rubber lust in the Congo, British India’s opium commerce, the Third Reich’s rape of Europe, or the Soviet exploitation of Eastern Europe.”

When revenues shrink or collapse, McCoy points out, “empires become brittle.”

“So delicate is their ecology of power that, when things start to go truly wrong, empires regularly unravel with unholy speed: just a year for Portugal, two years for the Soviet Union, eight years for France, eleven years for the Ottomans, seventeen for Great Britain, and, in all likelihood, just twenty-seven years for the United States, counting from the crucial year 2003 [when the U.S. invaded Iraq],” he writes.

Many of the estimated 69 empires that have existed throughout history lacked competent leadership in their decline, having ceded power to monstrosities such as the Roman emperors Caligula and Nero. In the United States, the reins of authority may be in the grasp of the first in a line of depraved demagogues.

“For the majority of Americans, the 2020s will likely be remembered as a demoralizing decade of rising prices, stagnant wages, and fading international competitiveness,” McCoy writes. The loss of the dollar as the global reserve currency will see the U.S. unable to pay for its huge deficits by selling Treasury bonds, which will be drastically devalued at that point. There will be a massive rise in the cost of imports. Unemployment will explode. Domestic clashes over what McCoy calls “insubstantial issues” will fuel a dangerous hypernationalism that could morph into an American fascism.

A discredited elite, suspicious and even paranoid in an age of decline, will see enemies everywhere. The array of instruments created for global dominance—wholesale surveillance, the evisceration of civil liberties, sophisticated torture techniques, militarized police, the massive prison system, the thousands of militarized drones and satellites—will be employed in the homeland. The empire will collapse and the nation will consume itself within our lifetimes if we do not wrest power from those who rule the corporate state.

The War Conspiracy – Oligarchical Collectivism

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s_500_wakeup-world_com_0_The-Conspiracy-Of-War-Power-Profit-Propaganda-and-Imperialism

By Ethan Indigo Smith

Source: OpEdNews.com

“Since armies are legal, we feel that war is acceptable; in general, nobody feels that war is criminal or that accepting it is criminal attitude. In fact, we have been brainwashed. War and the large military establishments are the greatest sources of violence in the world. Whether their purpose is defensive or offensive, these vast powerful organizations exist solely to kill human beings. We should all be horrified, but we are too confused.” (source)

Power, Profit, Propaganda and Imperialism

With all the wisdom and knowledge we have access to, I simply cannot believe that the governments of the world are once again positioning our armed forces in a war stance. I cannot believe that individuals are allowing it, and even pushing for it, and volunteering to take part in its violent uselessness. It’s as if there has been a breakout of some terrible disease that wrings out moral essences, removes our impetus for self-preservation and instills a self-destructive hatred of one’s fellow man. There is no sound logic to war, unless there is something more we are not being told”

The fog of war makes obtaining the facts stupendously difficult. Although most prefer to believe government propaganda is a thing of the past, history shows us that it is an inherent part of any wartime society, obscuring facts and motivations in favor of those who initiate — and benefit from — war. Known euphemistically as ‘public relations’, it is the manufacturing of consent to suit a particular agenda, and along with its ‘proper’ use comes the ability to control the thinking of masses (both their focus and beliefs) and mold the collective mind.

However, the more we know about history and the causes and effects of wars in the past, the less we need to know about the wars of the present. Indeed the more we know of the nature of war, the more likely we are to reach accurate conclusions of our current situation, making contextual hypotheses based on what we do know, without having to filter through what we’re (nonsensically) being told.

“Now, according to U.S. foreign policy in Syria, we want to fight ISIS while also fighting Assad in Syria” even though ISIS is fighting against Assad in Syria, and the Russians are helping Syria fight ISIS” so we may have to fight Russia to stop them from fighting with Syria against ISIS. If that sounds insane to you, that’s because it is.” ~ Investigative Journalist Ben Swann

So what’s the rationale?

War is a Racket

US Marine Corps Major General, Smedley Butler, eventually concluded that “war is a racket” in which individuals are used like fodder for institutions. Dear Smedley died the most decorated US Marine in history, and one might merely read his concise 4-chapter book, “War Is A Racket”, to understand the reality of war: it’s an act of institutions against individuals.

“War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives” It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes” In World War 1, a mere handful garnered the profits of the conflict” [and] at least 21,000 new millionaires and billionaires were made.” ~ Smedley D. Butler, War Is a Racket

Written from an insider perspective, it reads like it might have been written five years ago rather than fifty. We are living in a world today that is very much like the world of Smedley Butler, in that not much has changed, not much has been learned, and we’re still doing the same thing — and, inexplicably, expecting a different outcome.

War does not bring peace. As the saying goes, “Fighting for peace is like f**king for virginity. “ War never serves any individual or group, except a powerful elite few — the oligarchs who perpetuate and manipulate tribal, feudal, nationalistic and fascist war-mongering the world over, generating trillion dollar profits from death and destruction, while touting their own patriotism, and encouraging your support.

One of the best ways to gain and maintain power and support for war is to keep the people in constant fear — in fear of wars, of outsiders, and more recently, of “terrorism”. Maintaining a culture of war-minded fear keeps a society in a prolonged stress-response, the kind biologically linked to the threat of death in the wild, enabling those at the top of the oligarchical pile to easily direct the thinking of — and therefore to shape — the society they control. As a result, we consent to a bulk of our taxes being spent on funding the endless military-industrial-complex, instead of creating Nirvana for ourselves. Believing we are under constant threat of the unseen, we have become willing and dedicated contributors to the financial and political objectives of the monstrous war industry, marketed to us under the guise of our own security and protection.

This motive becomes clearer when we consider that the United States Of America is actually a foreign corporation operating out of Washington DC.

The facts are, the United States has been at war for 222 years out of the last 239 years. (That’s 93% of the time!) Since the Declaration of Independence was written in 1776, the U.S. has actually been at peace (albeit planning for further wars) for a total of only 21 years. Not one U.S. president actually qualifies as a solely peacetime president, and the only time the United States lasted five years without going to war was between 1935 and 1940, during the period of the Great Depression — from which economic recovery was led by the war-industry.

More recently, if we look objectively at the history of the Presidents of the United States since the end of the Second World War, we see that each administration — Truman, Kennedy, Eisenhower, Nixon, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Dubya, and now Obama — created a presidential Doctrine directly pertaining to war, either directly inciting conflict or inviting US involvement in it. Since U.S. involvement in World War II began in 1940, most of the world’s military operations have been initiated by the U.S., and U.S. Military spending today exceeds the rest of the world’s military spending combined, making the US war machine the single most profitable industry in the world. For the period 2010-14, the United States was the world’s biggest exporter of major arms, accounting for 31 percent of global shares, delivering weapons to at least 94 different recipients — many we are told are “hostile to US interests.” [source] In the fiscal year 2015, US military spending is projected to account for 54 percent of all discretionary federal spending — over $598 billion — exceeding the combined budgets for science, environment, housing, health, veterans affairs, education and transportation. [source] The U.S. defense industry employs a staggering 3.5 million Americans — or 1 in every 45 people employed in American [source] — while the private companies supporting the military generate in excess of $300 billion in revenue per year.

The U.S. economy is now so dependent on war, there is no incentive for the U.S. Government to strive for peace — it just isn’t profitable.

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With the U.S. economy and military operations so intrinsically linked, the American people have over time come to accept its war culture as normal, believing the increasingly ludicrous propaganda that tells us the U.S. is subject to threats from far weaker military nations and is nobly “fighting for peace” — an oxymoron of the highest order. As a result, the U.S. government has never been compelled by its People to create peace. The very notion of peace — and I don’t mean winning wars, I mean real peace — is so foreign to the people of the United States because we, as a nation, have never really experienced peace, nor have our leaders (despite their rhetoric) ever envisioned peace, much less planned for it or made it the focus of Presidential Doctrine.

The culture of war we live in today is no accident but the result of implicit cultural design — the very definition of conspiracy.

Conspiracy (noun): a secret plan by a group to do something unlawful or harmful.

Patriotism or Imperialism?

War is built on a narrative of “us” versus “them”, creating the perception of threat and inhumanity in those we are told are our enemies. With governments, corporate military machines and media working together, achieving that perception in any population is the easy part — quelling those who are opposed to war is more difficult.

To achieve this, the very idea of patriotism has been confounded and confused with elitism, imperialism and oligarchical collectivism. By definition, true patriots question information to educate themselves and share it with others, in order that we might progress beyond the status quo. Patriots are forward thinking, they observe and question actuality, and prioritize what is right over personal concerns. They are able to embrace change, including ceasing participation, and are willing to implement beneficial change through their actions. But they do not drive change for its own sake, or their own selfish ends, only when change is necessary to make a right or cancel a wrong. In this way, thetrue patriot poses a distinct threat to the status quo. They do not fear repercussions of their speech; they are unafraid to speak the truth so that others may benefit.

So, within and without their own ranks, institutions seek to isolate and disempower true patriotism by distorting and confusing its meaning, and eliminating the notion altogether by instilling nationalistic ‘you’re either for us or against us’ thinking — which is simply elitism dressed up in patriots clothing. As a result, the true patriot is absent from our mainstream narrative. Government and media institutions have attempted to delete the notion of true patriots and transform our understanding of ‘patriotism’ into flag-waving idiocy, war-minded zealotry, and hyper-nationlistic elitist imperialism. And they have done this so completely, in fact, that people identify materialistic oligarchs like Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton as patriots. In actuality, most politicians around the world are oligarchical collectivists, steering their societies toward imperialist goals — such as war, environmental desecration for corporate benefit and diminished individual freedoms, benefitting only those at the top of the social pyramid, not the society on the whole.

So, before serving your country, first learn who your government is serving.

Oligarchical Collectivism

What is oligarchical collectivism? The term was coined by George Orwell in his seminal book 1984. More precisely, the term is from ‘the book within the book’, entitled “The Theory and Practice to Oligarchical Collectivism”, which is heavily referenced through the narrative of 1984. Some researchers have suggested the only reason Orwell wrote 1984 at all was to enable writing the book within the book.

In it, the fictional world of 1984 is described and it is very much like the actual world of today, where endless war is waged not as a matter of winning, but as a matter of maintaining a steady war economy — a war society through which profits are garnered from the institutions of war and controls over individuals justified. It depicts a world where the states are eternally shifting sides, and eternally at war, and where citizens are constantly under threat of terrorist attack, by nobody knows who, much like we have today with the War On “Terror” — an abstract emotional response against which war can never be won.

Beyond that aspect, the fictional society of 1984 is very much like the reality of today in that everyone is watched and monitored, and pertinent information is restricted, controlled and manipulated to prop up the system.

1984 provides a stark view of a burgeoning culture of totalitarianism that is as important as a work of fiction as it is as a reflection of modern fact. Each aspect of the Five Freedoms of The First Amendment were infringed and removed. Freedom of speech was so restricted that not only was there one source of news — operated by the official governing body — there was also a whole arm of government dedicated to slowly and steadily eliminating and altering language deemed detrimental to the state. Today sharing information on institutional activity that harms individuals is already punishable, whistleblowers are treated as treasonists not patriots, and the sharing of ideas that challenge the status quo is becoming more heavily censored. Japan’s censorship of globally critical information relating to Fukushima, the United States’ constant surveillance of its own people, and the UK’s attempt to prohibit ‘esoteric’ information are all prime examples.

The Conspiracy Of War

The inference of 1984, the underlying lesson in Butler’s War Is A Racket, and the lessons we can learn from reality (both today and in history) is that wars are a matter of instituting control. War is waged on “them” to control “us”. And it is enacted as an unwritten policy, shrouded in secrecy, where the methods and true motives of government are routinely concealed from the People.

“The conscious intelligent manipulation of the organized opinions and habits of the masses is an important element in a democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested largely by men we have never heard of. In almost every act of our lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires that control the public mind.” ~ Edward Bernays, considered “the Father of Propaganda”.

Several elements of the war-machine State work in unison. Government priorities change from regulating industry and protecting individuals, to regulating individuals and protecting industry. The release of technology to the public is limited. The society is set up (through economic and other mechanisms) to literally keep people busy securing resources rather than considering the system they are living in, and the impact of that system on the planet, ourselves and each other. The media works to instill and reinforce the ideals, beliefs and official narrative of government. The monetary system is privately owned. The education system prepares children to join the ranks of the working class. Other cultures and ways of thinking are demonized. And the passing on of ancient knowledge and wisdom, history and spirituality, is suppressed.

“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken.” ~ Carl Sagan

What 1984 Can Teach Us About 2015

In the fictional world of 1984, oligarchies war against each other as a matter of routine. It is a world of shifting sides, of terrorism enacted by shadowy entities and populations under mass restriction of information, freedom, movement, natural resources and, importantly, technology — technology that would remove the need to fight over resources. It all sounds very familiar.

Whenever there is a surge of change and awakening in a society, those who profit the most from the status quo institute war and the threat of war, as a tried and tested way to maintain control. And today, the endless (unwinnable) War On Terror and numerous false flag attacks have proven to be effective (albeit transparent) ways to drive both corporate profits and tighter legislative controls, literally taking control of the collective consciousness of humanity.

One of the main ways that those in power control the consciousness of the people, and absorb patriotic opposition to war into the background of public awareness, is to create thought systems that appropriate war. An example offered by George Orwell in 1984 was the use of ‘Big Brother’ by the controlling Inner Party, the human image of “news” presented to the masses via the widely viewed Telescreen. Big Brother does not reflect the patriotic spirit of brotherhood, nor the potential or even the reality of the world, rather it provides an ‘official’ narrative for the actions of the controlling Party which appropriates and misrepresents the concept of brotherhood into a ‘brand name’ of the Telescreen — a psychology of collectivism, not brotherhood, which is a big difference indeed. Today, via the wonder of Television, institutions transfer and confuse words and ideas in the same manner, deliberately confusing themselves, their policies and their products with patriotic ideas, words and ideals. The ‘Patriot Act’ is the perfect example of the modern era.

“If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” ~ George Orwell

One of the biggest lessons of 1984, and part of every war that has been — and sometimes the main inducing factor — is the creation of a certain bond within the nation that enables the oligarchical collectivism to continue. The “us” and “them” atmosphere of war creates an nationalistic togetherness within the “us”, bonding a society to its controllers and their goals, and causing that society not only to accept a war as “necessary” but to accept a constant state of hindered development, where resources are diverted to war, and just keeping our nostrils above water takes up most of our energy, time and concentration.

But more than a warning, 1984 and ‘the book within the book’ are an instruction manual for individuals bonded by the oligarchy. It shows us in detail that war is a function of individuals versus institutions, and that no matter what the beginning philosophy — be it capitalism or communism, or most any other structure — war ultimately ends up leading to oligarchical collectivism. War is more than simply influencing political ideas and seeking nationalistic gains, or whatever the stated reason, it is designed to further the goals of elitists, entrenching the corporate-military-industrial complex at the top, where they are, harvesting profit and power off of the rest of us.

“We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me.” ~ George Orwell, 1984

Final Thoughts

The war world we are seeing today is the result of text book oligarchical collectivism; the same formulation of authority used by empires and emperors for millennia before us, playing out in a rapidly degrading economic, political and environmental setting. It bears little difference to those societies that have risen and duly fallen before us. The only difference now is that there are “new and improved” modes and destructive war, resources and media/propaganda technologies being used to enforce the rule of the oligarchy. There are new tools and new names, the ‘order’ is packaged in a new sleek design with new bells and whistles, but at its core, it is the same system that sacrifices the lives and livelihoods of individuals to benefit those the system is biased toward.

Those institutions at the top of the pyramid and the “authorities” behind them claim act for the betterment of mankind, and yet, they always seem to get the better of mankind. In a community that is led by the wealthy for the wealthy, this continuation of the status quo comes at the direct cost of individuals and their basic rights to freedom, peace, and unimpeded access to the planet’s natural resources — all of which are treated as commodities. We are led to believe our personal freedoms and livelihood depend on adhering to the status quo, without which the rights and richness of our natural world cannot be accessed. In truth, the opposite is true.

“All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that” just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing.” ~ 1984

It is true: the war-minded imperialists of today know what they are doing, and arguably do it more effectively than most other empires in history. But in working to break their instilled culture of perpetual war, our strength lies in the lessons of history. Exploitative institutional mechanics can be dismantled and bettered, and individuals can ascend institutional walls. Just as people are capable of creating institutions, people are capable of halting institutions as well. Institutions after all, no matter how powerful or exploitative, are only human structures — a social machinery that relies on our consent and agreement. And as history has proven, when controlling empires push a population too far, they will inevitably fall.

If we educate ourselves and others of the inner workings of our society and, as C.G. Jung put it, “make the darkness conscious”, we can rise above the restraints of misinformation and disinformation, lies, deceit, and propaganda that creates benefit for some, and create a world of mutually agreed peace, which values living breathing beings over life-less institutions. In a world where war is the design of powerful conspirators, peace is the coming revolution.

 

Is the US Economy Heading for Recession?

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economic-collapse

By Jack Rasmus

Source: Global Research

This past week the U.S. government announced the country’s economy rose in the January-March 2016 at a mere 0.5 percent annual growth rate. Since the U.S., unlike other countries, estimates its GDP based on annual rates, that means for the first quarter 2016 the U.S. economy grew by barely 0.1 percent over the previous quarter in late 2015.

Growth this slow indicates the US economy may have “slipped into ‘stall speed’, that is, growth so weak that the economy loses enough momentum and slides into recession”, according to economists at JPMorgan Chase.

Has the U.S. economy therefore come to a halt the past three months? If so, what are the consequences for a global economy already progressively slowing? What will an apparently stagnating US economy mean for Japan, already experiencing its fifth recession since 2008? For Europe, stuck in a long term chronic stagnation? And for emerging market economies, struggling with collapsing commodity prices and currencies, rising unemployment, and long term capital flight trends? Once heralded as the only bright spot in the global economy, the US economy now appears to have joined the slowing global trend.

Some Interesting Trends

Last quarter’s 0.5 percent U.S. GDP may indicate the nation’s economy is even weaker than it appears. The economy of the United States’ recent 0.5 percent growth rate is the latest in a steady declining U.S. GDP growth trend over the past year. In the previous fourth quarter 2015, the US economy grew 1.4 percent, which was down from the preceding quarter’s growth of 2 percent and before that 3.9 percent. So the U.S. economy appears to be slowing rapidly over the past year.

Over an even longer period of more than eight years, since the previous peak growth in late 2007, the U.S. economy has grown by a cumulative total of only 10.1 percent. That’s a paltry annual growth of only 1.2 percent a year on average for the past 8+ years.

But even those figures are overestimated. In 2013, the U.S. redefined the way it estimated GDP, adding categories like R&D expenses and other intangibles that artificially boosted U.S. GDP estimates simply by redefining it. That “economic growth by redefinition” raised GDP by around 0.3 percent annually, and in dollar terms by roughly US$500 billion annually. So the real U.S. GDP may be actually growing by less than 1 percent on average per year since 2007; and during the most recent quarter, January-March 2016, the economy may not have grown at all, but may have stagnated, collapse, and come to a halt.

Behind the Wizard’s Curtain

The media and press like to define recessions as two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth. Actually, U.S. economists tasked with declaring when a recession has begun or has ended don’t rely totally on GDP estimates, which are notoriously inaccurate and have become increasingly so, given U.S. and other governments’ penchant for changing how they define GDP.

Redefining GDP to boost the appearance of growth is not just a problem in the US in recent years. For example, there are few independent research sources that think China is growing at its officially announced 6.8 percent GDP rate. To note but a couple, both Capital Economics and Lombard Street research estimate that China’s GDP is growing at only around 4-4.5 percent based on close examination of other indicators like electricity usage, power generation, local transport volumes, and so forth. In recent years India officially nearly doubled its GDP overnight by redefining it. So did Nigeria. India bank researchers, whom this writer has talked to, say they have a rule of thumb: take the official government GDP rate and half it and that’s probably close to India’s actual GDP. In Europe, a number of economies, including Britain, which have been desperate to raise their GDP in recent years, now include drug smuggling and prostitution services in their estimates of GDP. How they come up with such estimates and the pricing of such services is, of course, interesting.

Not satisfied with the media-press definition of a recession as two consecutive quarters of negative GDP, US economists at the National Bureau of Economic Research, who are tasked with declaring the beginning and end of a recession, look at various economic indicators — like industrial production, retail sales, exports-import trends, and other sources. A recession may occur in just one quarter; or may require more than two.

Looking at these other indicators for this past January-March 2016 period, the US economy appears even more likely headed for a recession and sooner rather than later.

US industrial production (manufacturing, mining and utilities) declined at an annual rate of -2.2 percent this past quarter, after having declined -3.3 percent the preceding quarter. Industrial production has fallen six of the last seven months. US industrial capacity is now at its lowest point since 2010.

Business investment is another trouble spot. Investment in business structures fell by -10.7 percent and investment in new equipment by -8.6 percent, the latter the biggest drop since the 2007-09 recession. Business inventories rose barely, by the smallest amount in two years, continuing a slowing trend of the past nine months.

And what about consumption, which constitutes about two thirds of the total US economy? US consumer spending has been growing at an average monthly rate of only 0.1 percent. Retail sales, the largest element of consumer spending, has fallen every month on average during the quarter. After having sustained retail sales in previous years, auto sales, a large component of retail sales, declined for the second consecutive quarter during the January-March period. The outlook for U.S. consumer spending recovery is also not too bright. A recent Gallup poll reported that 60 percent of those interviewed indicated the U.S. economy was “getting worse.” Reflecting the poor demand for consumer goods, U.S. consumer prices now hover on the brink of deflation, falling at an average monthly rate of -0.1 percent for the quarter.

Exports are declining, residential housing construction recently plummeted. In other words, not many of the economic indicators that comprise GDP show a promising picture. GDP should probably be even lower than the recently reported 0.5 percent annual and 0.1 percent quarter to quarter growth rates. The U.S. economy has obviously “stalled.” But it’s not the first time. In fact, it’s the fifth time it has since the official end of the last recession in June 2009.

What’s a Relapse?

The performance of the US economy this past January-March, a trend that appears is continuing into April, represents what this writer has called an ‘economic relapse’. A relapse is a collapse of economic growth for a single quarter, to near zero or even negative growth.

The U.S. economy has experienced now five such single quarter relapses since the 2007-09 recession was officially declared over. The economy collapsed to 0.1 percent in early 2011, to 0.2 percent in late 2012, declined again by -2.2 percent in 2014 and collapsed to 0.2 percent in 2015.

Relapses are the consequence of “epic” recessions such as occurred in 2007-09, which are typically characterized by short, shallow recoveries that slip repeatedly into periodic bouts of renewed stagnation. They are the result of near total reliance on central bank monetary policies that are designed to boost stock, bond and other financial markets — and thus the incomes of rich investors — but which fail to generate a sustained real economic recovery. Fiscal policies designed to stimulate consumption and good paying jobs are rejected. That almost perfectly describes U.S. economic policy the past eight years.

Politicians Wearing Rose-Colored Glasses

Despite the facts, U.S. government politicians and Federal Reserve bank officials continue to run around declaring that the U.S. economy is performing well. They like to cite the 200,000 jobs allegedly created in recent months. But a closer examination shows the jobs being created are part time, temp, contract, low paid, no benefit service jobs. Jobs that generate no overall wage increase for the economy and no real income gains for working people.

Young workers 30 years old or less are especially hard hit by this “‘well performing US economy.” A recent study by the Center for American Progress, for example, showed that 30 year old workers earn today the same pay, adjusted for inflation, that 30 year olds earned back in 1984.

Despite all that, President Obama continues to tour the country complaining that he doesn’t get enough credit for bringing the US back from the worst recession since the 1930s depression. He should tell that to the millions of millennial young workers, with low paid crappy service jobs, with no medical insurance, having to live at home with relatives because they can’t afford to rent an apartment, loaded with debt and with no prospects for meaningful change on the horizon. No wonder they’re rallying around Bernie Sanders, who continues to capture 85 percent of their votes in the presidential primaries. Obama (and Hillary) will have a hard time convincing them “all is well” — and an even harder time getting them to vote Democrat in the coming election in November.

 

Jack Rasmus is author of the recent, 2016 book “Systemic Fragility in the Global Economy,” by Clarity Press, soon translated into a Chinese edition, and the forthcoming June 2016 book, “Looting Greece: The Emerging New

The Mad Violence of Casino Capitalism

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AmericanRoulette

By Henry Giroux

Source: Counterpunch

American society is morally bankrupt and politically broken, and its vision of the future appears utterly dystopian. As the United States descends into the dark abyss of an updated form of totalitarianism, the unimaginable has become imaginable in that it has become possible not only to foresee the death of the essential principles of constitutional democracy, but also the birth of what Hannah Arendt once called the horror of dark times. The politics of terror, a culture of fear, and the spectacle of violence dominate America’s cultural apparatuses and legitimate the ongoing militarization of public life and American society.

Unchecked corporate power and a massive commodification, infantilization, and depoliticization of the polity have become the totalitarian benchmarks defining American society. In part, this is due to the emergence of a brutal modern-day capitalism, or what some might call neoliberalism. This form of neoliberal capitalism is a particularly savage, cruel, and exploitative regime of oppression in which not only are the social contract, civil liberties and the commons under siege, but also the very notion of the political, if not the planet itself. The dystopian moment facing the United States, if not most of the globe, can be summed up in Fred Jameson’s contention “that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.” He goes on to say that “We can now revise that and witness the attempt to imagine capitalism by way of imagining the end of the world.”1

One way of understanding Jameson’s comment is through the ideological and affective spaces in which the neoliberal subject is produced and market-driven ideologies are normalized. Capitalism has made a virtue out of self-interest and the pursuit of material wealth and in doing so has created a culture of shattered dreams and a landscape filled with “Broken highways, bankrupt cities, collapsing bridges, failed schools, the unemployed, the underpaid and the uninsured: all suggest a collective failure of will. These shortcomings are so endemic that we no longer know how to talk about what is wrong, much less set about repairing it.”[i]

Yet, there is a growing recognition that casino capitalism is driven by a kind of mad violence and form of self-sabotage and that if it does not come to an end what we will experience in all probability is the destruction of human life and the planet itself. Certainly, more recent scientific reports on the threat of ecological disaster from researchers at the University of Washington, NASA, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reinforce this dystopian possibility.2 The undermining of public trust and public values has now given way to a market-driven discourse that produces a society that has lost any sense of democratic vision and social purpose and in doing so resorts to state terrorism, the criminalization of social problems, and culture of cruelty. Institutions that were once defined to protect and enhance human life now function largely to punish and maim.

As Michael Yates points out throughout this book, capitalism is devoid of any sense of social responsibility and is driven by an unchecked desire to accumulate capital at all costs. As power becomes global and politics remains local, ruling elites no longer make political concessions to workers or any other group that they either exploit or consider disposable.

Security and crisis have become the new passwords for imposing a culture of fear and for imposing what Giorgio Agamben has called a permanent state of exception and a technology of government repression.[ii] A constant appeal to a state of crisis becomes the new normal for arming the police, curtailing civil liberties, expanding the punishing state, criminalizing everyday behavior, and supressing dissent. Fear now drives the major narratives that define the United States and give rise to dominant forms of power free from any sense of moral and political conviction, if not accountability.

In the midst of this dystopian nightmare, there is the deepening abyss of inequality, one that not only separates the rich from the poor, but also increasingly relegates the middle and working classes to the ranks of the precariat. Concentrations of wealth and income generate power for the financial elite and unchecked misery for most people, a fear/insecurity industry, and a growing number of social pathologies.

Michael Yates in The Great Inequality provides a road map for both understanding the registers that produce inequality as well as the magnitude of the problems it poses across a range of commanding spheres extending from health care and the political realm to the environment and education. At the same time, he exposes the myths that buttress the ideology of inequality. These include an unchecked belief in boundless economic growth, the notion that inequality is chosen freely by individuals in the market place, and the assumption that consumption is the road to happiness. Unlike a range of recent books on inequality, Yates goes beyond exposing the mechanisms that drive inequality and the panoply of commanding institutions that support it. He also provides a number of strategies that challenge the deep concentrations of wealth and power while delivering a number of formative proposals that are crucial for nurturing a radical imagination and the social movements necessary to struggle for a society that no longer equates capitalism with democracy.

As Yates makes clear throughout this book, money now engulfs everything in this new age of disposability. Moreover, when coupled with a weakening of movements to counter the generated power of capitalists, the result has been a startling increase in the influence of predatory capitalism, along with inequities in wealth, income, power, and opportunity. Such power breeds more than anti-democratic tendencies, it also imposes constraints, rules, and prohibitions on the 99 percent whose choices are increasingly limited to merely trying to survive. Capitalists are no longer willing to compromise and have expanded their use of power to dominate economic, political, and social life. For Yates, it is all the more crucial to understand how power works under the reign of global capitalism in order to grasp the magnitude of inequality, the myriad of factors that produce it, and what might be done to change it.

Accompanying the rise of a savage form of capitalism and the ever-expanding security state is the emergence of new technologies and spaces of control. One consequence is that labor power is increasing produced by machines and robotic technologies which serve to create “a large pool of more or less unemployed people.” Moreover, as new technologies produce massive pools of unused labor, it also is being used as a repressive tool for collecting “unlimited biometric and genetic information of all of its citizens.”[iii]

The ongoing attack on the working class is matched by new measures of repression and surveillance. This new weaponized face of capitalism is particularly ominous given the rise of the punishing state and the transformation of the United States from a democracy in progress to a fully developed authoritarian society.   Every act of protest is now tainted, labeled by the government and mainstream media as either treasonous or viewed as a potential act of terrorism. For example, animal rights activists are put on the terrorist list. Whistleblowers such as Edward Snowden are painted as traitors. Members of the Black Lives Matter movement are put under surveillance,[iv] all electronic communication is now subject to government spying, and academics who criticize government policy are denied tenure or worse.

Under neoliberalism, public space is increasingly converted into private space undermining those sphere necessary for developing a viable sense of social responsibility, while also serving to transform citizenship into mostly an act of consumption. Under such circumstances, the notion of crisis is used both to legitimate a system of economic terrorism as well as to accentuate an increasing process of depoliticization. Within this fog of market induced paralysis, language is subject to the laws of capitalism, reduced to a commodity, and subject to the “tyranny of the moment….emaciated, impoverished, vulgarized and squeezed out of the meanings it was resumed to carry.”[v]

As the latest stage of predatory capitalism, neoliberalism is part of a broader economic and political project of restoring class power and consolidating the rapid concentration of capital, particularly financial capital.[vi] As a political project it includes “the deregulation of finance, privatization of public services, elimination and curtailment of social welfare programs, open attacks on unions, and routine violations of labor laws.”[vii] As an ideology, it casts all dimensions of life in terms of market rationality, construes profit making as the arbiter and essence of democracy, consuming as the only operable form of citizenship, and upholds the irrational belief that the market can both solve all problems and serve as a model for structuring all social relations. As a mode of governance, it produces identities, subjects, and ways of life driven by a survival-of-the fittest-ethic, grounded in the idea of the free, possessive individual, and committed to the right of ruling groups and institutions to exercise power removed from matters of ethics and social costs. As a policy and political project, it is wedded to the privatization of public services, the dismantling of the connection of private issues and public problems, the selling off of state functions, liberalization of trade in goods and capital investment, the eradication of government regulation of financial institutions and corporations, the destruction of the welfare state and unions, and the endless marketization and commodification of society.

Nothing engenders the wrath of conservatives more than the existence of the government providing a universal safety net, especially one that works, such as either Medicare or Social Security. As Yates points out, government is viewed by capitalists as an institution that gets in the way of capital. One result is a weakening of social programs and provisions. As Paul Krugman observes regarding the ongoing conservative attacks on Medicare, “The real reason conservatives want to do away with Medicare has always been political: It’s the very idea of the government providing a universal safety net that they hate, and they hate it even more when such programs are successful.”[viii] In opposition to Krugman and other liberal economists, Michael Yates argues rightly in this book that the issue is not simply preserving Medicare but eliminating the predatory system that disavows equality of wealth, power, opportunity, and health care for everyone.

Neoliberalism has put an enormous effort into creating a commanding cultural apparatus and public pedagogy in which individuals can only view themselves as consumers, embrace freedom as the right to participate in the market, and supplant issues of social responsibility for an unchecked embrace of individualism and the belief that all social relation be judged according to how they further one’s individual needs and self-interests. Matters of mutual caring, respect, and compassion for the other have given way to the limiting orbits of privatization and unrestrained self-interest, just as it is has become increasingly difficult to translate private troubles into larger social, economic, and political considerations. One consequence is that it has become more difficult for people to debate and question neoliberal hegemony and the widespread misery it produces for young people, the poor, middle class, workers, and other segments of society– now considered disposable under neoliberal regimes which are governed by a survival-of-the fittest ethos, largely imposed by the ruling economic and political elite. Unable to make their voices heard and lacking any viable representation in the process makes clear the degree to which the American public, in particular, are suffering under a democratic deficit producing a profound dissatisfaction that does not always translate into an understanding of how neoliberal capitalism has destroyed democracy or what it might mean to understand and challenge its diverse apparatuses of persuasion and power. Clearly, the surge of popularity behind the presidential candidacy of a buffoon such as Donald Trump testifies to both a deep seated desire for change and the forms it can take when emotion replaces reason and any viable analysis of capitalism and its effects seem to be absent from a popular sensibility.

What Michael Yates makes clear in this incisive book on inequality is that democratic values, commitments, integrity, and struggles are under assault from a wide range of sites in an age of intensified violence and disposability. Throughout the book he weaves a set of narratives and critiques in which he lays bare the anti-democratic tendencies that are on display in a growing age of lawlessness and disposability. He not only makes clear that inequality is not good for the economy, social bonds, the environment, politics, and democracy, Yates also argues that capitalism in the current historical moment is marked by an age that thrives on racism, xenophobia, the purported existence of an alleged culture of criminality, and a massive system of inequality that affects all aspects of society. Worth repeating is that at the center of this book, unlike so many others tackling inequality, is an attempt to map a number of modalities that give shape and purpose to widespread disparities in wealth and income, including the underlying forces behind inequality, how it works to secure class power, how it undermines almost every viable foundation needed for a sustainable democracy, and what it might mean to develop a plan of action to produce the radical imagination and corresponding modes of agency and practice that can think and act outside of the reformist politics of capitalism.

Unlike so many other economists such as Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz who address the issue of inequality, Yates refuses the argument that the system is simply out of whack and can be fixed. Nor does he believe that capitalism can be described only in terms of economic structures. Capitalism is both a symbolic pathological economy that produces particular dispositions, values, and identities as well as oppressive institutional apparatuses and economic structures. Yates goes even further arguing that capitalism is not only about authoritarian ideologies and structures, it is also about the crisis of ideas, agency, and the failure of people to react to the suffering of others and to the conditions of their own oppression. Neoliberal capitalism has no language for human suffering, moral evaluation, and social responsibility. Instead, it creates a survival-of-the fittest ethos buttressed by a discourse that is morally insensitive, sadistic, cannibalistic, and displays a hatred of those whose labor cannot be exploited, do not buy into the consumerist ethic, or are considered other by virtue of their race, class, and ethnicity. Neoliberalism is the discourse of shadow games, committed to highlighting corporate power and making invisible the suffering of others, all the while leaving those considered disposable in the dark to fend for themselves.

Yates makes visible not only the economic constraints that bear down on the poor and disposable in the neoliberal age of precarity, he also narrates the voices, conditions, hardships and suffering workers have to endure in a variety of occupations ranging from automobile workers and cruise ship workers to those who work in restaurants and as harvester on farms. He provides a number of invaluable statistics that chart the injuries of class and race under capitalism but rather than tell a story with only statistics and mind boggling data, he also provides stories that give flesh to the statistics that mark a new historical conjuncture and a wide range of hardships that render work for most people hell and produce what has been called the hidden injuries of class. Much of what he writes is informed by a decade long research trip across the United States in which he attempted to see first-hand what the effects of capitalism have been on peoples’ lives, the environment, work, unions, and other crucial spheres that inform everyday life. His keen eye is particularly riveting as he describes his teaming up with Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers in the 1970s and his growing disappointment with a union that increasingly betrayed its own principles.

For Yates, the capitalist system is corrupt, malicious, and needs to be replaced. Capitalism leaves no room for the language of justice, the social, or, for that matter, democracy itself. In fact, one of its major attributes is to hide its effects of power, racial injustice, militarized state violence, domestic terrorism, and new forms of disposability, especially regarding those marginalized by class and race. The grotesque inequalities produced by capitalism are too powerful, deeply rooted in the social and economic fabric, and unamenable to liberal reforms.  Class disparities constitute a machinery of social death, a kind of zombie-like machine that drains life out of most of the population poisoning both existing and future generations.

The politics of disposability has gone mainstream as more and more individuals and groups are now considered surplus and vulnerable, consigned to zones of abandonment, surveillance, and incarceration. At one level, the expansive politics of disposability can be seen in the rising numbers of homeless, the growing army of debt-ridden students, the increasingly harsh treatment of immigrants, the racism that fuels the school-to-prison pipeline, and the growing attack on public servants. On another level, the politics of disposability has produced a culture of lawlessness and cruelty evident by the increasing rollback of voting rights, the war waged against women’s reproductive rights, laws that discriminate against gays, the rise of the surveillance state, and the growing militarization of local police forces. Yates argues convincingly that there is a desperate need for a new language for politics, solidarity, shared responsibilities, and democracy itself. Yates sees in the now largely departed Occupy Movement an example of a movement that used a new discourse and set of slogans to highlight inequality, make class inequities visible, and to showcase the workings of power in the hands of the financial elite. For Yates, Occupy provided a strategy that can be and is being emulated by a number of groups, especially those emerging in the black community in opposition to police violence. Such a strategy begins by asking what a real democracy looks like and how does it compare to the current society in which we live. One precondition for individual and social agency is that the horizons for change must transcend the parameters of the existing society, and the future must be configured in such a way as to not mimic the present.

What is remarkable about The Great Inequality is that Yates does not simply provide a critique of capitalism in its old and new forms, he also provides a discourse of possibility developed around a number of suggested policies and practices designed to not reform capitalism but to abolish it. This is a book that follows in the manner of Dr. Martin Luther King’s call to break the silence. In it Yates functions as a moral witness in reporting on the hardships and suffering produced by grotesque forms of inequality. As such, he reveals the dark threats that capitalism in its ruthlessly updated versions poses to the planet. Yet, his narrative is never far from either hope or a sense that there is a larger public for whom his testimony matters and that such a public is capable of collective resistance. The Great Inequality also serves to enliven the ethical imagination, and speak out for those populations now considered outcast and voiceless. Yates provides a furious reading of inequality and the larger structure of capitalism. In doing so he exhibits a keen and incisive intellect along with a welcomed sense of righteous fury.

Notes.

[i] Tony Judt, Ill Fares the Land, (New York, N.Y.: The Penguin Press, 2010), p. 12.

[ii] Giorgio Agamben, “The Security State and a theory of destituent power,” Philosophers for Change, (February 25, 2014). Online:

The security state and a theory of destituent power

[iii] Ibid., Agamben, “The Security State and a theory of destituent power,”

[iv] George Joseph, “Exclusive: feds regularly monitored black lives matter since ferguson,” Intercept (July 24, 2015). Online: https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/07/24/documents-show-department-homeland-security-monitoring-black-lives-matter-since-ferguson/; Deirdre Fulton, “Exposed: Big Brother Targets Black Lives:Government spying can be an ‘effective way to chill protest movements,’ warns Center for Constitutional Rights,” CommonDreams (July 24, 2015). Online: http://www.commondreams.org/news/2015/07/24/exposed-big-brother-targets-black-lives

[v] Zygmunt Bauman and Leonidas Donskis, Moral Blindness: The loss of Sensitivity in Liquid Modernity, (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2013), p. 46.

[vi] I have taken up the issue of neoliberalism extensively in Henry A. Giroux, Against the Terror of Neoliberalism (Boulder: Paradigm, 2008) . See also, David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); Manfred B. Steger and Ravi K. Roy, Neoliberalism: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); Gerad Dumenil and Dominique Levy, The Crisis of Neoliberalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011). Henry A. Giroux, Twilight of the Social (Boulder: Paradigm, 2013); Henry A. Giroux, and in Against the Violence of Organized Forgetting: Beyond America’s Disimagination Machine (San Francisco: City Lights, 2014);

Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (Cambridge: Zone Books 2015).

[vii] Michael D. Yates, “Occupy Wall Street and the Significance of Political Slogans,” Counterpunch, (February 27, 2013). Online:http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/02/27/occupy-wall-street-and-the-significance-of-political-slogans/

[viii] Paul Krugman, “Zombies Against Medicare,” New York Times (July 27, 2015). Online: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/27/opinion/zombies-against-medicare.html?_r=0

This essay is excerpted from the introduction to The Great Inequality by Michael D. Yates.

Henry A. Giroux currently holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural Studies Department and a Distinguished Visiting Professorship at Ryerson University. His most recent books are America’s Education Deficit and the War on Youth (Monthly Review Press, 2013) and Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education (Haymarket Press, 2014). His web site is www.henryagiroux.com.