• Nationwide, first-year enrollment has dropped 16 percent at four-year colleges, and 23 percent at community colleges. Enrollment has risen at for-profit colleges, which have a weak overall record. “This is an unmitigated disaster,” Susan Dynarski, an economist, said.
"We have it on highest authority - the Federal Reserve itself - that it may never permit free markets again. Federal Reserve Vice Chair for Supervision Randal Quarles: "The Treasury market is now so large that the U.S. central bank may have to continue to be involved to keep it functioning properly."
Next we come to the president of the Federal Reserve’s San Francisco outpost - Mary Daly by name: "I am not willing to trade millions of jobs for people who need a ladder rung up in order to keep the stock market from going up for a few who have those holdings." That is, Ms. Daly tacitly concedes that the institution for which she toils accounts heavily for the stock market’s ludicrous outperformance.
The Federal Reserve was originally fashioned to be the “lender of last resort.” Yet that designation is presently a cruel and mocking jest. It has passed from lender of last resort to stockjobber. Long have we known it. Now they admit it.
“Free Markets”: We will hear no more gabble about the stock market being a mirror of the economy. We will hear no more gabble about the stock market “discounting the future.” Indeed... we will hear no more gabble about free markets. Only traces, scraps, vestiges remain. Reduce it to its essentials, and the message is this: The Federal Reserve can never turn back. Massive intervention is here to stay, world without end. It is as permanent as stone, as permanent as the stain on a politician’s honor.
One Intervention Leads To Another: The central trouble with intervention is that one intervention invites another, invites another, invites another. Intervention puts out one fire only to start a second. Another intervention douses the second and a third erupts somewhere else. The firemen are on permanent duty. Let us cling to our fiery theme…
The wildfires presently raging in California are largely the result of poor forest management. Under sound management, authorities initiate controlled burns to clear out the deadwood and underbrush that feed a blaze. If a natural fire erupts, there is less combustible material to spread the trouble… and the fire is easier to barricade. But the state of California has neglected to clear away the deadwood. And so otherwise manageable fires have become hellish infernos that fanned out in horrific contagion.
The Fed’s Poor Forest Management: The Federal Reserve is the state of California. It will not allow controlled burns. Through its interventions it lets rotting and dying businesses and industries pile up - deadwood. The rotten timber accumulates and accumulates in the economy. The forest becomes too big to fail. When a fire does ignite - as in 2008 - the entire forest is soon a riot of flames.
The Federal Reserve would not allow a small fire... so it got a near conflagration… which required greater intervention yet to contain. Scroll the calendar forward to 2020. The pestilence ignited the greatest economic fire since the Great Depression. Or rather... authorities allowed the pestilence to ignite the greatest economic fire since the Great Depression.
Two Options: Once again the crisis presented the Federal Reserve two options. The first was to let the fire complete the job the 2008 burning began. The second was intervention on a vastly mightier scale. Explains Lance Roberts of Real Investment Advice: "Allow capitalism to take root by allowing corporations to fail and restructure after spending a decade leveraging themselves to [the] hilt, buying back shares and massively increasing the wealth of their executives while compressing the wages of workers. Or… Bail out the “bad actors” once again to forestall the “clearing process” that would rebalance the economy and allow for higher levels of future organic economic growth."
The Federal Reserve selected option two of course. That is, it chose intervention on a supergargantuan scale. Was it necessary under the nightmare circumstances? Perhaps it was. Yet condemns the United States economy to a lost decade of stagnation… and drowsiness.
Debt Is a Drag: As we have explained before: Each intervention piles up additional debt within the system. The system sags and groans under the added burden. Progress slows as inefficient enterprises absorb capital - capital that could have flowed into worthier hands.
As summarized by Wikipedia, a central bank exists to: (1) protect the money stock instead of saving individual institutions; (2) rescue solvent institutions only; (3) let insolvent institutions default… The Federal Reserve fails on all counts — 1,2,3.
The weak and inefficient know they will not succumb to the flames. The authorities will have the hoses on them if needed. They survive. But thrive?
A Titanic Burglary of the Future: Plunging into debt introduces a sort of hand-to-mouth living. It diverts cash flow to the service of existing debt - often unproductive debt. And so investment in the future never makes it past the present. It is a titanic burglary of the future, a grand heist.
Explains Daily Reckoning contributor Charles Hugh Smith: "Debt has one primary dynamic: Borrowing money to consume something in the present brings forward consumption and income. If we choose to consume now, we have less income to save for future consumption or investments. If we sacrifice consumption today, we have more money in the future for consumption or investing. Those who brought their consumption forward can no longer add to present consumption, as their future income is already spoken for."
Fifty years ago, $1 of debt may have yielded an additional dollar of economic growth, real or otherwise. Perhaps even more. That is of course because the national debt burden was vastly lighter. Each dollar borrowed since 2008 has yielded under $1 of growth. It is perhaps 40 cents by some estimates we have encountered. It is a dismal calculus.
Deficits, Deficits, Deficits: Meantime, this year’s budget deficit will likely near $4 trillion - the largest in history. Goldman Sachs estimates a $6 trillion combined deficit over the next two years alone. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (do not laugh!) projects publicly held debt will eclipse its post-WWII record by 2023.
Debt service is already rising faster than any other federal shell-out. Prior to this crisis the Congressional Budget Office had already projected debt service would scale $915 billion by 2028 - nearly 25% of the entire budget. The Lord only knows the ultimate figure. But it will likely be far higher absent a drastic reversal of economic fortune.
How will the government afford to pay for anything else? And so our shoulders stoop and our head lowers, forlorn. Yet we cling to hope, as a drowning man clings to a life ring - or as a drunkard clings to his bottle. But the nation’s debt is not a crisis, argue the spenders. That is because “we owe it to ourselves.” But one scalawag takes them at their word. “Note to self,” he writes: “Pay up.”
“While drifting through the cosmos, a magnificent interstellar dust cloud became sculpted by stellar winds and radiation to assume a recognizable shape. Fittingly named the Horsehead Nebula, it is embedded in the vast and complex Orion Nebula (M42). A potentially rewarding but difficult object to view personally with a small telescope, the above gorgeously detailed image was recently taken in infrared light by the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope in honor of the 23rd anniversary of Hubble's launch.
The dark molecular cloud, roughly 1,500 light years distant, is cataloged as Barnard 33 and is seen above primarily because it is backlit by the nearby massive star Sigma Orionis. The Horsehead Nebula will slowly shift its apparent shape over the next few million years and will eventually be destroyed by the high energy starlight.”
“It would be hard to find two writers more different than Eudora Welty and Edward Abbey. Welty was a Pulitzer Prize-winning author of stories and novels who lived all her life in Jackson, Mississippi, in the house in which she was born, the beloved spinster aunt of American letters. Abbey was a hard-drinking, butt-kicking nature writer and conservationist best known for his books on the American Southwest. Both writers are favorites of mine. Both were great champions of place. I always wondered what it would have been like if they got together. As far as I know, that never happened. But let’s imagine a conversation. I have taken extracts from Welty’s essay “Some Notes on River Country” (1944) and from Abbey’s essay “The Great American Desert (1977) and interleaved them. “This little chain of lost towns between Vicksburg and Natchez.” “This desert, all deserts, any deserts.” “On the shady stream banks hang lady’s eardrops, fruits and flowers dangling pale jade. The passionflower puts its tendrils where it can, its strange flowers of lilac rays with their little white towers shining out, or its fruit, the maypop, hanging.” “Oily growths like the poison ivy – oh yes, indeed – that flourish in sinister profusion on the dank walls above the quicksand down those corridors of gloom and labyrinthine monotony that men call canyons.” “All creepers with trumpets and panicles of scarlet and yellow cling to the treetops. There is a vine that grows to great heights, with heart-shaped leaves as big and soft as summer hats.”
“Everything in the desert either stings, stabs, stinks, or sticks. You will find the flora here as venomous, hooked, barbed, thorny, prickly, needled, saw-toothed, hairy, stickered, mean, bitter, sharp, wiry and fierce as the animals.” “Too pretty for any harsh fate, with its great mossy trees and old camellias.”
“Something about the desert inclines all living things to harshness and acerbity.” “The clatter of hoofs and the bellow of boats have gone. The Old Natchez Trace has sunk out of use. The river has gone away and left the landings. But life does not forsake any place.” “In the Sonoran Desert, Phoenix will get you if the sun, snakes, bugs, and arthropods don’t. In the Mojave Desert, it’s Las Vegas. Up north in the Great Basin Desert, your heart will break, seeing the strip mines open up and the power plants rise…” “The Negro Baptist church, weathered black with a snow-white door, has red hens in the yard. The old galleried stores are boarded up. The missing houses were burned – they were empty, and the little row of Negro inhabitants have carried them off for firewood.” “…the highway builders, land developers, weapons testers, power producers, clear cutters, oil drillers, dam beavers, subdividers.” “Eventually you see people, of course. Women have little errands, and the old men play checkers at a table in the front of the one open store. And the people’s faces are good.” “Californicating.” “To go there, you start west from Port Gibson. Postmen would arrive here blowing their horns like Gabriel, after riding three hundred wilderness miles from Tennessee.” “Why go into the desert? Really, why do it? That sun, roaring at you all day long. The fetid, tepid, vapid little water holes full of cannibal beetles, spotted toads, horsehair worms, liver flukes. Why go there?” “I have felt many times there is a sense of place as powerful as if it were visible and walking and could touch me. A place that ever was lived in is like a fire that never goes out. Sometimes it gives out glory, sometimes its little light must be sought out to be seen.” “Why the desert, when you could be camping by a stream of pure Rocky Mountain spring water. We have centipedes, millipedes, tarantulas, black widows, brown recluses, Gila monsters, the deadly poisonous coral snakes, and the giant hairy desert scorpions. Plus an immense variety of near-infinite number of ants, midges, gnats, bloodsucking flies, and blood-guzzling mosquitoes.” “Much beauty has gone, many little things of life. To light up the night there are no mansions, no celebrations. Wild birds fly now at the level where people on boat deck once were strolling and talking.” “In the American Southwest, only the wilderness is worth saving.” “There is a sense of place there, to keep life from being extinguished, like a cup of the hands to hold a flame.” “A friend and I took a walk up beyond Coconino County, Arizona. I found an arrow sign, pointed to the north. Nothing of any unusual interest that I could see – only the familiar sun-blasted sandstone, a few scrubby clumps of blackbush and prickly pear, a few acres of nothing where only a lizard could graze. I studied the scene with care. But there was nothing out there. Nothing at all. Nothing but the desert. Nothing but the silent world.” “Perhaps it is the sense of place that gives us the belief that passionate things, in some essence, endure.” “In my case, it was love at first sight. The kind of love that makes a man selfish, possessive, irritable…” “New life will be built upon these things.” “…an unrequited and excessive love.” “It is this.” “That’s why.”
“Greenred Productions meditation music with binaural beats (brainwave music) can work as sleep music, studying music, relaxing music and many more. Relaxation music can also be used as Spa music and Massage music. Here you can find powerful self-help hypnosis including healing music, Zen music and yoga music. Some sessions are produced for your inner transformation: to overcome fear, elevate your mood and energy levels, and lose weight faster. Meditation music recordings also include reiki music, Zen meditation music and deep trance hypnosis sessions.
We compose instrumental and electronic music that is specially designed to enhance brain function and concentration, spa and massage therapy, and healing music therapy. For this reason, we use binaural beats. There are many types of beats for different daily meditation purposes: Delta Waves – Sleep Music/NREM sleep, Alpha Waves are neural oscillations, Theta Waves (cortical theta rhythm and Hippocampal theta rhythm). Beta waves associated with muscle contractions in isotonic movements, Gamma waves can help to release serotonin, endorphin and dopamine, so it works as happiness music for depression treatment.”
Turn it on. Go about your business. It works. As simple as that.
“If the sun is shining, stand in it- yes, yes, yes. Happy times are great, but happy times pass- they have to- because time passes. The pursuit of happiness is more elusive; it is life-long, and it is not goal-centered. What you are pursuing is meaning- a meaningful life… There are times when it will go so wrong that you will be barely alive, and times when you realize that being barely alive, on your own terms, is better than living a bloated half-life on someone else’s terms.”
SAN MARTIN, ARGENTINA – "Over the weekend, the World Health Organization threw a petard into the Lockdown/No Lockdown debate: "WHO Warns Against COVID-19 Lockdowns." "WHO envoy Dr. David Nabarro said such restrictive measures should only be treated as a last resort, the British magazine the Spectator reported in a video interview. “The only time we believe a lockdown is justified is to buy you time to reorganize, regroup, rebalance your resources, protect your health workers who are exhausted, but by and large, we’d rather not do it.”
Nabarro said tight restrictions cause significant harm, particularly on the global economy. “Lockdowns just have one consequence that you must never, ever belittle, and that is making poor people an awful lot poorer,” he said. “Look what’s happened to smallholder farmers all over the world. Look what’s happening to poverty levels. It seems that we may well have a doubling of world poverty by next year. We may well have at least a doubling of child malnutrition.” Hungry children? Millions of them?
Trillions’ worth of real output are at stake… trillions’ worth of phony stimulus… and millions – maybe billions – of lives. But America’s president looked at the news and saw only his own reflection: “The World Health Organization just admitted that I was right,” he tweeted. And America’s most important “newspaper of record,” The New York Times, could only think of a political angle: "Trump Overstates W.H.O.’s Position on Lockdowns."
Grim Outlook: Meanwhile, much of the world – with quack experts in the drivers’ seats – heads for a crack-up. In the UK, GDP is said to be running about 10% below last year… In the U.S., in GDP alone, it looks like the lockdowns will take about $1 trillion out peoples’ pockets. But the losses are not distributed evenly. If the Federal Reserve pushes up a billionaire’s wealth by just 10%… 99 million other people could actually get poorer. But the headlines would still tell us we were all getting richer – on average. At the top, even millions of dollars – up or down – don’t make much difference. But at the very bottom – where the World Bank says there are some 700 million people living on less than $2 per day – an economic slowdown can mark the frontier between life and death.
The “experts” say to lock the doors… stay at home… cover up… and stay away. But it wasn’t the medical experts who brought us longer lives; it was the plumbers, the farmers, and the builders. It was the entrepreneurs, tinkers, and business builders, not the public health professionals.
Improved living standards raised life expectancies all around the world. This from professors Maryaline Catillon and David M. Cutler, both of Harvard, and Thomas E. Getzen of Temple University: "Growth in life expectancy during the last two centuries has been attributed to environmental change, productivity growth, improved nutrition, and better hygiene, rather than to advances in medical care."
Keep the plumbers and bakers at home and living standards fall… So, it is reasonable to expect, as the WHO implies, that when the economy goes down, life expectancies will decline, too. And we can guess what happens next: For every year of life saved for the rich geezers by shutting down the economy… there may be hundreds of years lost by the poor all over the world.
Lockdown Again: On Monday, we got word that our province here in Argentina – Salta – has gone back into panic mode. There are new cases of the coronavirus in the city; the roads in the region have been closed. From Europe, word comes that Ireland has banned home visits… France has imposed a curfew in its major cities… and London has closed bars and restaurants.
A waste of time? Worse? A dear reader, Rich B., comments: "Last week, I looked up COVID-19 deaths, as reported by the Johns Hopkins University COVID-19 website. It turns out that Sweden – a country that did NOT lock down its businesses and schools – has suffered 575 COVID-19 deaths per million residents. But Sweden’s surviving residents are enjoying the lifestyle that Americans were enjoying a year ago. Lockdown-USA, on the other hand, has suffered 600 deaths per million, high unemployment, and a miserable lifestyle, i.e. alive, but not really living."
So who says that lockdowns save lives? Nonsense. Further, Sweden isn’t worried about if/when a vaccine will appear, because its populace is now mostly immune. While other Europeans are now being assaulted by a second wave of the plague, Swedes remain largely unaffected
War Footing: Within two weeks of President Trump announcing his State of Emergency back in mid-March, it was clear that there was no emergency at all. From the initial numbers coming from Italy, we saw that the killer was no mass-murderer. Instead, he was like a nursing home psychopath, singling out the weakest, the oldest, and the sickest. The first data told us that an old person – over the age of 80 – was about 1,000 times more likely to die from the coronavirus than a person under the age of 20.
The prudent approach would have been to bring in a few good detectives; let them figure out how to keep old people and the virus away from each other. Instead, the feds declared war, with almost the whole economy put on a war footing!
Martial Law: Now, seven months and $4 trillion down the drain… the data hasn’t changed much. A lot of people get the virus. But few are harmed by it. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), if you are aged between 20 and 49, there’s no point in worrying about it. Only 0.02% of the people in that age group who get it will die from it.
Even from there up to the age of 70, it shouldn’t be a big worry. If you get the disease, you have only a 0.5% chance of dying – that’s one in 200. Over 70, the odds get worse. The old-timers should stay away from it. But even for them, nearly 19 out of 20 who get the disease come out okay.
But the sword wavers had their blood up. It suited their vanity… their careers… their lust for power and glory. They saw that by frightening the public with a health scare, they could get away with almost anything. In a matter of days, they had much of the country under martial law. And their field marshal, Anthony Fauci, after sitting in his lonely National Institutes of Health (NIH) barracks polishing his boots for the last 52 years, was now on the cover of magazines… and on TV, at the right-hand side of the Commander-in-Chief himself.
Political Issue: Then, of course, state governors began grandstanding… and the whole spectacle soon became a sordid political issue. The Democrats were determined to show that Trump was cruel and incompetent, even though he had mostly gone along with the experts’ crackpot advice. The Republicans were afraid to contradict the experts… and couldn’t come up with an alternative anyway. And the result was yet another god-awful debacle, a health crisis made worse by the feds, the media, politics… and the experts themselves.
At least the World Health Organization seems to be coming to its senses."
“You are put in school to be trained to become exactly what they want you to be: not them, anything but them. They live on a golden island and have the key to the only bridge. Your parents are not millionaires, so it doesn’t matter how intelligent you are, you aren’t invited to their party. That’s the great shame. The idiots have the gold, and the poor die to give it to them. So you better start to laugh, because this world is one big joke written by the few, at the expense of the masses. Look around you, that feeling your life isn’t going anywhere? That’s the feeling that makes you part of the masses.”
"If you are making less than $3,000 a month, you have plenty of company, because about half of the country is in the exact same boat. The Social Security Administration just released new wage statistics for 2019, and they are pretty startling. To me, the most alarming thing in the entire report is the fact that the median yearly wage was just $34,248.45 last year. In other words, half of all American workers made less than $34,248.45 in 2019, and half of all American workers made more than $34,248.45. That isn’t a whole lot of money. In fact, when you divide $34,248.45 by 12 you get just $2,854.05. Needless to say, it is not easy to survive in America today on just $2,854.05 a month, and this may help to explain why we have been seeing so many people fall out of the middle class in recent years.
And of course all of the figures that I am sharing with you in this article are just for 2019. This year, we have seen more than 63 million Americans file new claims for unemployment benefits as the U.S. economy has imploded during this pandemic, and so the final wage numbers for 2020 could be quite a bit worse than the numbers for 2019 were. Please keep that in mind as you go through the rest of this video.
Once upon a time in America, a single income could easily support a middle class household in most cases, but those days are long gone. The cost of living has been rising far faster than our paychecks have, and as a result many Americans have been working themselves to the bone just to survive financially from month to month. To give you an idea of just how bad things have gotten, I would like to share with you some key numbers from the report that the Social Security Administration just released:
• 32.26 percent of American workers made less than $20,000 last year.
• 44.79 percent of American workers made less than $30,000 last year.
• 56.46 percent of American workers made less than $40,000 last year.
• 65.91 percent of American workers made less than $50,000 last year.
Today, the poverty level for a household of five in the United States is $30,680. That means that close to half of all workers in this country do not even make enough to get a family of five above the poverty level.
Wow.
There are tens of millions of Americans that are referred to as “the working poor” because they are living in poverty even though they are employed and are working extremely hard. Many of you that are reading this article know exactly what I am talking about. Some of you are working way more than 40 hours a week, and yet there never seems to be enough money at the end of the month.
Sadly, the truth is that our system has evolved in a manner that makes it almost impossible for most Americans to ever build up much wealth. If you are making the median monthly wage of just $2,854.05, there simply is not going to be much left over after all of the bills are paid. First of all, you are going to need some place to live. In the middle of the country you may be able to find something habitable for under $1,000 a month, but in most of our major metropolitan areas that simply is not going to be realistic.
Secondly, you are going to need to pay your utility bills. If you can keep the combined cost of your power, water, phone, television and Internet bills to about $250 a month, you are doing quite well.
Thirdly, you will need a vehicle in order to get around, and these days it is hard to buy or lease a vehicle for less than $300 a month. In addition, you will also need insurance, and that will set you back even more.
Fourthly, you will need health insurance. If you are young and single, maybe you can find a plan for just a few hundred dollars a month, but most Americans pay far more.
Fifthly, you will probably want to eat, and that will cost you several hundred dollars a month as well.
At this point almost all of your money is already gone, and there are so many expenses that I haven’t even mentioned yet. And of course you never even started with $2,854.05 in the first place, because all sorts of taxes were taken out of your paycheck before you even got it.
Are you starting to understand why so many families in America are deeply, deeply struggling today?
We have an economy that works for those at the very top of the food chain, but pretty much everyone else is desperately trying to stay afloat. And now we have entered an economic downturn during which tens of millions of Americans have lost their jobs. According to John Williams of shadowstats.com, if honest numbers were being used the real unemployment rate in the U.S. would be 26.9 percent right now, and that would rival the worst levels that we witnessed during the Great Depression of the 1930s."
"At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. O! had I the ability, and could reach the nation's ear, I would, today, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced. "
"The general consensus regarding the future of the American Empire is that it is headed for demise like all empires. The rapidly declining quality of the ruling elite in general and the political class in particular is the biggest sign. Then there is the changing demographics, which will reach a point where the human capital of the empire can no longer support empire. Then there is the life cycle of all empires. This one, while short lived, seems to be in the late phase of that cycle.
Most people focus on the question of when the empire will collapse, as that provides the most thrilling scenarios. The truth is though, empires collapse in slow motion, rather than in a bang. It is like a fall down a long flight of stairs, in which the empire hits some long landings where it seems to right itself for a period. Then it is another tumble down the stairs until it hits another landing. It is only in the fullness of time that the decline and fall of the empire looks like the familiar arc.
A different question worth pondering is what will the decline and fall look like for the average person living in the empire? For the people living in the provinces, it will look like the past, in that Europe and Asia will simply gain their independence. France may become a vassal of Germany or Russia, but that is just the same condition with a different management team at the top. Europe will get poorer and more violent, but that will mostly be due to massive migration from Africa.
In North America, we have some hints as to what post-empire America will look like for the typical person. This post on American Greatness goes into the third world nature of large swaths of current year America. California now looks more like Sinaloa Mexico than the old America of the young empire. There are nice modern parts for sure, but there are backward primitive parts, as well. Just like the Roman Empire, it is the infrastructure that is the leading edge of decline.
Empires that can no longer maintain their borders tend to attract large peasant classes, because long after the empire’s peak, it remains a better place to be poor than outside the empire. America lost control of its borders a generation ago, so something like fifty million people have relocated to America. There may be that many more operating inside the country illegally. The fact that no one knows or cares about the illegal population is one of those signs of collapse.
Another vision for post-empire America, is post-empire Spain. One of the interesting aspects of that period is how power devolved to local power centers. The Visigothic Kingdom ruled over what is now Spain. They were central Europeans who had moved west from the Danube Valley, first under the protection of the Western Roman Empire, but then by conquest after the fall of Rome. The kingdom maintained independence for about three centuries.
The thing is though, the kingdom was a polite fiction in many ways as the Gothic rulers had limited control of their territory. They were dependent on those local power centers that evolved in the late Roman empire. The emerging Catholic Church was one power center, but so were local ruling elites located in cities like Seville and Toledo. This is the root of antisemitism, by the way. Jews were powerful players in Gothic politics, a rival to the Church for influence over the secular authorities.
That’s probably the future of North America. The federal government will carry on long after it can exert control over the whole of the country. We see that today with the inability of the political class to do the obvious with the tech oligarchs. Today, global enterprise, finance and technology are outside the scope of government authority and often the whip hand in the relationship. We’re seeing states and cities in open revolt now, refusing to abide by federal laws.
One question no one in power thinks about is whether or not these new oligarchs can survive without the national government. The oligarchs that emerged from the Soviet empire were rooted in practical things like oil and gas. American oligarchs have power over abstract concepts that exist only because the state protects them. Both finance and technology are able to siphon off the wealth of the middle-class, because the middle-class supports the state, which protects this racket.
Put another way, Bolshevism made the Soviet empire artificially poorer, as it compelled inefficiency in the economy. It also proved to be a costly form of rule. Collapse freed the economy of the empire, allowing the new oligarchs to emerge. Liberal democracy makes the empire artificially richer, as it relies upon financial legerdemain to pull forward the proceeds of labor and capital. The cost of rule is subsidized by the social capital it consumes to perpetuate itself.
Is it possible for local power centers to emerge in North America, when the regions no longer have an identity of their own? Is it possible for local rule, when the local elites are just as inept and corrupt as the national elites? It is hard to imagine California lasting very long as an independent state. Its ruling class is clownish and stupid, a collection of petulant children. How hard would it be for the drug cartels to push them aside and turn the state into another narco-state?
The Soviet system rewarded cleverness and intrigue but it was founded on force, so there was always a role for those willing to act. The American system rewards guile, but increasingly has no role for assertiveness and force. It is why America has become so bad at waging war. It is possible that we now lack the required lions to push aside the foxes, even when the foxes die. It means a long period of chaos in which a new generation of lions can emerge to seize control."
"The surging virus: The autumn wave of the coronavirus has reached a dangerous new stage. The number of new daily cases has risen almost 50 percent in the U.S. over the past month. The situation is even worse in Europe. For the first time since late March, the per capita number of newcases in Europe exceeds the number in the U.S.:
“The virus is everywhere in France,” the French president, Emmanuel Macron, said yesterday, while imposing a nighttime curfew in major cities. The onset of cooler weather, which is driving more people indoors, seems to be playing a big role. And many people seem to have grown tired of pandemic restrictions, leading politicians - in both Europe and the U.S. - to lift restrictions prematurely.
In late June, as The Times’s Mark Landler writes from Europe, residents in Prague held a dinner party stretching across the Charles Bridge to celebrate what they called - wrongly - the end of the outbreak. Italy and Spain welcomed summer tourists. But the pandemic hasn’t gone away. While treatments are getting better, many people are still dying - including almost 6,000 in India over the past week, 5,000 in the U.S., 1,700 in Iran, 850 in Spain and about 600 in both Britain and France. A widely available vaccine is still months away, even if the current research trials go well.
Amid all of this bad news, it’s worth keeping in mind that some countries continue to fight the virus successfully. The per capita rate of new cases in Canada is less than half as high as it is in the U.S. In Australia and much of Africa and Asia, the rate remains near zero. In many places where case counts are rising, political leaders are reluctant to impose new lockdowns, because the public is tired of them. But that creates something of a Catch-22: The most reliable way to reverse big outbreaks of this virus has been through strict crackdowns.
In the U.S.: The virus is spreading in every region, with the highest case counts in the South and Midwest, as you can see in these charts."
In other developments:
• After a huge aid expansion kept millions of people out of poverty this spring, the help is largely exhausted, and poverty in the U.S. has returned to levels higher than before the pandemic.
• Nick Saban, the head football coach at Alabama, tested positive. Two other colleges in his conference, Florida and L.S.U., postponed their next game after more than 20 Florida players contracted the virus.
• In the early days of the pandemic, President Trump assured Americans that the virus was nothing to be concerned about. Behind the scenes, his economic advisers were telling wealthy donors otherwise, a Times investigation found.
